Purim Partying - Parshat Titzaveh Part II

The blood orange salad was a great accompaniment to an Asian chicken and sesame noodle Shabbat dinner at Miriam and Michael's, despite the avocados not being quite as ripe as I would have liked.



If you'd like a quick tutorial on how to cut oranges for this salad check out this link on the kitchn.



I love that the cut peels, with multicolored pieces of citrus flesh stuck to it, looked a bit like stained glass.


Purim 2010 has been a great one. I filled five dozen mini hamantashen with strawberry jam and baked them, half a dozen of which we consumed before we shared them with anyone else.


I baked a double batch and had a 75% success rate of the hamantashen keeping their shape during baking (the rest lost their shape in varying degrees but were still presentable and edible).


Sam and I got gussied up as a 1950's housewife and a fallout shelter salesmen.


I got my costume, a vintage dress, from Etsy and we picked up a jacket and tie for Sam at the Garment District (which saw an influx of Jews this week searching for Purim costume material). I picked up props from Goodwill for a total of $1.60 for both of us - an old wooden rolling pin for me and a cut scotch glass for Sam. Sam also printed out a fallout shelter brochure that many people got a kick out of.

A far cry from the days of dressing up as Queen Esther and - was that Yentl? I was so amazed back then that my brother Ben was gutsy enough to not only wear my tights to synagogue on Purim but also his batman undies. Though it certainly did make the costume.



We heard the Megillah read twice at Minyan Tehillah and as always enjoyed my father's illustrations in the Megillah and I enjoyed telling people near me: my dad drew these!

We assembled our mishloach manot - some hamantashen and little bottles of old school Cutty Sark whiskey (we have our own unopened bottle from decades ago).

After we distributed our gift bags, the collecting began. When I was younger I used to love piling all of the mishloach manot we had gotten and then breaking them all down into big bowls which I would assign specific categories to: a bowl for chocolate, one for healthy snacks, one for general candy, one for fruit. My mother recently gave me two of the silver bowls I used to use for this purpose and you better believe that I broke them out for the sorting this year.


I have to applaud a few of my friends for some clever mishloach manot:


Lila did a Do Re Mi theme with tea, jam and bread. That will probably be breakfast tomorrow morning.


Miriam did a MishloachManOCEAN with tan m&ms and Hamantahsen for a sandy beach and blue m&ms with chocolate and candy fish for the ocean. This reminded me of one my mom and I put together one year in fish bowls which we adorned with gravel jelly beans, the plastic decorative seaweed sheets used on sushi trays and gum drops with toothpicks holding up jelly fish. We also managed to put in a bottle of water and a pack of cheese dolphins (think the kosher version of cheddar fish).

Oh and that Persian Purim Feast? We went bearing our pomegranate pizza, and I was dressed as Persian kosher cookbook author Poopa Dweck. Aside from looking great, we ate great food, especially some great wings and all the chocolate desserts. Thank you Lila and co.


I came up with a great use for some of that leftover pomegranate juice from the Pizza recipe:

Pomegranate Margarita
Makes one serving, multiply as needed.

1 jigger of tequila
1 jigger of triple sec
3 jiggers of pomegranate juice
7 ice cubes

Place ice cubes in a drink shaker. Measure out the liquids, place the top on the shaker and shake. Pour into a glass through the shaker's filter to keep the ice cubes in the shaker. Enjoy cold and responsibly.

Oy my belly hurts. Happy Purim. Keep an eye out for this week's parsha post.