<\/p>\n
Cholent was <\/strong><\/span>the vehicle for my return to cooking. In the 1970s I took a Chinese cooking class at the Pearl of the Orient. But no cooking classes since. My rabbi\u2019s son hosted a Zoom class on cholent last month.<\/p>\n There were about 50 people at the Zoom meeting. (It\u2019s a big synagogue.) I tried to hide; I muted; I didn\u2019t scream, “I\u2019m a novice!\u201d I dumped beans, barley, kishke, flankn<\/em>, potatoes and onions into my slow cooker. The instructor, Jared, said the Crock Pot was invented by an Orthodox Jew to slow-cook cholent on shabbat. (Lookin’ that up . . . Yep, the Crock Pot was invented by one Irving Nachumsohn for cholent cooking.)<\/p>\n Most Jews — and everybody else —\u00a0 don\u2019t know what cholent is. It\u2019s mostly an Ortho thing. Cholent is a stew you slowly cook for 12 hours or more, so as not to light a fire on shabbat.<\/p>\n My cholent cooked too long. My stuff came out like a big cow pie. No definition to it. The meat melded into the beans. Just one massive turd.<\/p>\n I had <\/span>people coming over for dinner and was going to serve it! My wife, Alice, who\u2019s a good cook, turned the cow pies into sliders. She served cholent sliders, without buns, as an appetizer. I didn\u2019t apologize, or say to my guests: \u201cThis is my first time!\u201d (Cooks should never apologize. Neither should musicians.)<\/p>\n My friends<\/strong><\/span> liked it. Alice added extra pepper and salt, and some soy sauce. And luckily I had picked out the plastic\u00a0 kishke casing prior. I didn’t realize the kishke was wrapped in plastic when I sliced it and dumped it in the stew. The next day I ate huevos<\/em> cholent — a fried egg on top of a cholent slider. That was good, too. Alice came up with that.<\/p>\n Need cholent?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cholent was the vehicle for my return to cooking. In the 1970s I took a Chinese cooking class at the Pearl of the Orient. But no cooking classes since. My rabbi\u2019s son hosted a Zoom class on cholent last month. There were about 50 people at the Zoom meeting. (It\u2019s a big synagogue.) I tried […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shul-talk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28399"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28494,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28399\/revisions\/28494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}