Hamantashen!

Last night marked the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Purim so my girlfriend and I prepared the traditional Purim pastry Hamantashen! Or Hamantashes, Homentaschen or Hamentashes - as with other words that come to English from Hebrew/Yiddish we don't agree about how to spell it. Nor do we seem to know exactly what the symbolism of these triangular treats are but before we get into that you need to know the story behind Purim, the story of Ester. And what better way to tell it than with legos:

As you can see, Haman is the bad guy and Hamantashen looks like it has something to do with him. We thought that Hamantashen meant "Haman's Hat" and they were triangular because of his 3-corner hat - but careful lexical analysis of this pastry turns up no references to any hat but possibly to Haman's pockets or ears. So we're eating his hat, pockets or ears... yum!

We followed a recipe from The Great Hadassah Cookbook which we found at JewishAppleSeed.org for the dough (so chosen because it looked the least bland). For filling we used apple-butter and strawberry, apricot and peach preserves. We picked up the peach preserves at the Cobblestone Farm Winery Cherry Festival last summer on our trip out to Niagara falls - this made the best tasting Hamantashen. The apple-butter was from Medford Farms which is also local to New York - this made the best looking Hamantashen (though we have no idea why).

18 neatly arranged hat/ear/pocket pastries.

The finished product!