Please note that, "Gafe," is not a word; but created to sound like a Yiddish word, where the reader could assume both daff and gaff, and yes I did it for the rhyme. So never mind the corruption, it's a freestyle poem anyway!

Like many dishes regarding of crossing a culture or religion, Gefilte fish was definitely another adventure to make the most of and in essence is a synopsis of the adventure from boyhood inquirery to actually creating the dish two days before the creation and posting of this poem.

The Jewish Museum has been nothing but nice to me and it is a great place to visit. Their main exhibit deals with life in the Jewish community that emegrated to that neighborhood and also how the neighborhood changed since them. They offer a great tour of one of the oldest Synagogues in the nation as well. They asked if I make the traditional Gefilte Fish in the skin as I planned, to donate photographs of the endeavor. I not only agreed, but actually wanted their event photographer to do the pictures, but...

I had an issue with a late arriving poaching dish, the horrible lack of time and the time required in purchasing everything; not to mention the event I was shooting for wasn't going to have a photographer. A hurricane sort of got in the way, so the communication problems were actually understandable.

Having sacrificed four days of vacation time I intended to use for writing my biography, and spending a fortune, I decided to make the most of it and take some of the Gefilte Fish, to the meeting that the Baltimore Poetry Discussion Group holds. I was actually looking on good criticism to improve the recipe I used, and what shocked that people loved it. The recipe I settled on is called, "The Dan's Grand Gefilte Fish;" from Crown's International Cookbook Series and is titled, "The Israeli Cookbook," by Molly Lyons Bar-David. (1964)

The Dan is a hotel in Israel, and the chef that made this dish is,Sander Goldstein. The author purports this to be the best as well.

For the Gefilte Fish, the meat mixture consists of ground fish and egg, with sugar, salt and white pepper added. For mine, I choose wild caught Rockfish, and trout. This is poached in a broth made my cooking the fishes bones, along with carrot and onions with added salt. In my version, I also added a small turnip and parsley.

I have more information about the recipe and photographs of making Gefilte Fish on my facebook page.

While I doubt that preparing Gefiltefish is actually a Jewish tradition outside of the short Movie that turned it into humor about family traditions, it is interesting to see. I can only embed the trailer, as the full length movie only seems to be available as a download.

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