A going-away party for Lynne

Our good friend Lynne is leaving the tropical paradise of Cincinnati for Florida, so Jack and Shari threw her a going-away pot-luck party. Lots of tasty food: baked ham and turkey, delicious eggplant from Kathy (soy-sauce, ginger marinade), a great Salat Olivier (Russian chicken salad) from Steve, yummy butternut squash (I never found out whose), three other salads, plus lots of stuff I've unfortunately forgotten. For dessert a splendidly moist carrot cake from Chuck.


We brought an experiment, something, of course, you're never supposed to do. I wanted to try to create a Piña Colada tiramisù, a sort of we're-just-back-from-the-Caribbean-&-you're-going-to-Florida theme, and mostly because I had all these frozen ladyfingers. I found a recipe online for a coconut and pineapple filling, which I'll never use again because it did not set up. I did an emergency rescue by adding some gelatin dissolved in rum, to turn it into a Bavarian. I would have added the rum in any case, but now my ethnicities were all screwed up: an Italo-Caribbean-Bavarian co-production. But now it solidified quite nicely and besides, with enough rum, who cares?

Since it was also the first night of Hanukkah, I made our challah menorah. (Why Hanukkah but challah, you ask? Tradition!) I read years ago in Gourmet that Zabar's was selling challah menorahs, and though I've still never seen one of theirs, I decided to create one. Basically a two-tiered challah with nine balls of dough for the candles. Not as high, but in some ways even more impressive, is to make three braids of three strands each, join them together, but fan out the ends for the candles. Looks rather harp-like (or hydra-like if you’re of a morbid frame of mind, and you know you are).
Below are some pictures of how to do a challah braid if you've never done one. The clue is to think "middle." So take the right-most strand and bring it over to the middle. Then left to the middle, then right, then left. I usually leave the starting knot only loosely pinched, because you can often tighten up the look after you've made the complete braid.

And the finished product. Taa-daa!