Purim: Signs of Spring??

After the past sunny weekend adventures, I began to get excited about long walks with no mittens. trading in my tights and salt encrusted insulated winter shoes for anything else and sitting outside with a cheese plate and The New Yorker. Looking out the window, there is still no doubt in my mind that the spring I long for is still weeks away. Regardless, signs of spring poke out tiny antennae, very very tiny.



Purim is not a holiday I have fond feelings for. Kids, noise, costumes and shul. Enough said. Last year on Purim, R and I were in Israel where Purim is like Carnival. Costumed people flooding the streets and hamantashen available and on display at cafes and bakeries all over the country. Purim to me means Passover on the way which means spring. A bit of an indirect and circuitous path to spring- but one none the less.

Yesterday, my Ema and I took to the task of baking up holiday treats. To make things more interesting, Ema thought it would be fun to bake tiny little hamantashen, bite sized.







The crisp, buttery dough recipe came from Joan Nathan's Jewish Cooking in America. I added lemon zest and vanilla. The age old Prune vs. Poppy (moon) filling was had. I favor the former, my mother the latter. Seeing as we had no prunes or prune paste from the Kosher bakery, I improvised a fig paste filling using a Lebanese fig jam and adding to it oranges, orange zest and tangerine juice. The results are pictured below and were consumed to rave reviews.