Flat Bread for Passover

4 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp. salt
3 T. butter
2 egg yolks
2 T. olive oil
1 cup milk - this was hard to mix and I ended up adding more milk to make the dough workable.

Sift together flour and salt.  Cut the butter into the flour.  In another bowl, beat the egg yolks, adding in the oil slowly and then add milk.  Pour into flour and mix with fork until it forms a ball away from the sides of the bowl.  Knead to shape into a soft ball.

Use about a third of a cup of dough at time.  Roll it as thin as you can without it breaking.  Transfer to an ungreased baking sheet.  Bake at 400 degrees about 8-12 minutes until puffed or very lightly browned.

We had this spread with peanut butter and thought it was really good, but then we rarely have bread so it was quite a treat for us.

Hanukkah Study

Part of our homeschooling this year involves studying Jewish religious holidays and traditions and how they compare/relate to Christian holidays.  This month we talked about Hanukkah.

 

Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights or Feast of Dedication, remembers the rededication of the Holy Temple after the revolt by the Maccabeans.  The law required a light to burn in the temple all night but there was only enough purified oil to burn for one night.  Miraculously, the oil burned for eight straight nights.  It took seven days to make a new supply of purified oil.

 

In memory of how important the oil was, traditional foods for Hanukkah are fried in oil.  We made potato latkes for our celebration.

 

 

Here are four large potatoes shredded.  We didn't have any Russet potatoes on hand so we used red potatoes. 

 

 

Squeeze as much water out of the potatoes as possible.

 

 

Discard the water but add back in the potato starch that separates from the water.  Add a medium sized grated onion, three beaten eggs, 1-1/2 tsp salt, two tbsp. of flour and mix well.

 

 

Form the mixture into balls the size of a large egg.  Place in hot oil and flatten with a spatula.  Fry about four minutes, or until nicely browned and crispy, on each side.  Remove and drain.  You can keep them in a 250 degree oven, on a draining rack, until ready to serve or eat them as they get done. 

 

 

Check out the nice crispy, crunchy edges.

 

 

Serve the latkes with sour cream and apple sauce.  The outsides are nicely browned and the middles are soft like mashed potatoes.  Here the latkes are being served with a jelly filled doughnut, another traditional oil fried treat for Hanukkah.  The jelly filled doughnuts are called sufganiyah in Israel and are popular around Hanukkah.

Yom Kippur or Day of Atonement

 

We lit, and burned all day, a white candle to symbolize purity and light, the cleansing presence of the Holy Spirit with our hearts and minds.

Rosh Hashanah - Feast of Trumpets

The purpose of the Feast of Trumpets is to celebrate the Jewish New Year, God's Royalty, Day of Judgement, Remembrance and the birthday of the world.

 

 

Spark pretended to blow the shofar (trumpet), we talked about times the trumpet was blown in the bible and that the trumpet will blow when Jesus returns for the second time. 

 

 

Our shofar was made from paper.  We shaped the large brown sheets that came in our Rainbow Resource order into the shape of the shofar.  Then Spark and I covered it with paper mache.  Once it dried it looked a lot like a ram's horn so we didn't paint it except for the divot in the end and the mouth piece to give it the illusion of being hollow and really capable of sound.  We had other activities planned but time got away from us.  Instead of stressing and rushing around to try to get them in we just went with this. 

 

 

 We did make a delicious Rosh Hashanah meal.  It was honey orange chicken, velvet noodle pudding, and glazed carrots.  We were also planning on having the glazed apple cake but it was all gone before Monday and that was okay because this was a very sweet meal.  It was purposely sweet because it is to signify having a sweet new year so no sour foods are to be eaten.  The best dish was the velvet noodle pudding, the kids are already asking when we are going to be making it again.  We had also hope to try our hand at challah bread but, again, it didn't get done. 

 

We learned a lot, we didn't know anything about this celebration before, and now Rosh Hashanah isn't just a day that comes preprinted on the calendar.