It was the first evening of Passover and this was the second year when Passover was done by Zoom. It’s a lot easier to clean up, but that doesn’t really make up for not having a big group get together. Charley and Patsy hosted, because Patsy has a zoom account through work that can stay going for longer than hour at a time. Present for various parts of the time were their family in Belmont MA, Anne and Matt in Cambridge MA, David and Rachel from Southboro MA, Patsy’s parents in Palo Alto CA, Arlene’s brother and his wife in NJ, their son’s family in FL, Arlene’s sister & some of her family in NJ, Arlene’s aunt in Grand Island NY, and us in Newton.
I made something like Yemenite Charoset; by now I don’t feel that I need to follow a recipe particularly carefully so long as I get the general idea and can justify the spice mixture. I also made kneidlach, but started late and didn’t have much schmaltz; so I wasn’t at all sure how they would turn out without the normal intermediate refrigeration step. They held together much better than my normal ones and had a good texture; I think having a bigger proportion of egg to everything else made up for the things I expected to be problems.
Meanwhile, on my Shiny project, I found an R function “gather” that did just what I wanted for the data file; however, I’m still doing something wrong because I’m not seeing the numbers I expect.
Yesterday I tried printing a dried plant that was still standing in my garden when I turned it over a day before. It worked well enough to be worth working more on that paper, but I did not get the detail of the dried flowers that I was hoping for. I think a big problem was that the ink I used, the stamp indexing ink that works great for that purpose, is very thick and sticky and I tore up the plant in rolling the ink over it. But that doesn’t explain the lack of detail in the flowers that survived the inking.