sarah in nyc

  The Rosh haShanah meals are followed by ironing season. This is just part of what I got through yesterday. I still have a large tablecloth and about a dozen napkins left to iron.  This is what our table looked like on the first night of the holiday. The inside of our holiday challot looked like this. To be honest, not every slice looked quite this cute. Dinner this shabbat is more of what I cooked for the holiday but I will be making some gazpacho we we also ingest some vegetable matter. Yesterday I brought in some boots to be repaired. This was on the wall of the shoe repair place which is actually around the corner from the address in the calendar above. I loved the term "Dead Storage for Automobiles". It took me a minute but I figured out that dead storage for cars is the opposite of live parking. I guess in 1940 it was economically viable to own a car and store it in a long term garage and just take it out occasionally. This is the building that used to house Santini St...

  For me, the foods for Rosh Hashanah are not about the novel and the creative but about recreating the memories of my childhood.  Despite my being more adventurous with the spicing than my mother ever was, ( High praise from my mother was "Mild and delicious".) both dishes struck exactly the right notes for me. I made chicken in my last minute neurotic worry that there wasn't enough food, (We will be eating tzimmes long past the Tishrei holidays and stuffed cabbage through Sukkot.) The chicken was a surprise hit of the table. It was flavored with fresh lime juice, coffee hawaij, dried lime powder and I stuffed some medjool dates into the chicken cavity. After the chicken was cooked I de-glazed the pan with lemon juice and water and poured the results over the chicken when I served it.  It's a more Middle Eastern take on the deep dark flavors of  Eastern European tzimmes and cabbage. You can buy this brand of coffee hawaij online. You can add the spice mix to coffee...

a year filled with blessings.  

    I have been practicing my shofar blowing out of my grandmother's machzor. I run through all the shofar blasts twice each time I practice. I begin with the lighter colored shofar, because it is harder to blow. Then I do a second round with the dark shofar. Oddly enough,my grandmother's machzor,  (High Holiday prayer book) is Nusach S'fard , that is the version of the liturgy that is used by Chassidim. My grandmother as a rule detested the practices of Chassidim and prefered the dryer Lithuanian influenced practices.  To put this in a Christian context, the practices of the Chassidim are more congruent to that of Holy Roller evangelicals and my grandmother was more comfortable in the Jewish equivalent of Congregationalist practice. Nusach S'fard adds all sorts of intentional prayers for people to say before they start any part of the service. Last night I discovered no less than three different intentional prayers for the shofar blower to recite before they bl...

 Tonight is a special night. Tonight all five of us will be sitting at our Shabbat table. Our older son is home from Amarillo for the weekend. It feels really wonderful to have all of us together. Our younger son asked me if i could make him a cross body bag to hold his phone, epi-pen and wallet. I had tried last week but the physics of construction completely overwhelmed me and I just couldn't figure it out. Yesterday I sat down to try again and this time I was able to come up with what I described to my son as a first draft for the bag to hold his essentials as he goes out and about. The bag is made out of denim and is topstitched with orange thread that showed up in stash from a friend's dead mother or grandmother. The front pocket has room to hold a standard men's well stuffed  bifold wallet.  There is ample room for both a large phone and an Epi-pen in the main pocket.. The next iteration of the bag will be made in fabric that my son chooses and may be lined or made ...

  This weekend our summer came to an end and we now turn towards the New Year. I have been practicing shofar. You can hear me on the second day of the holiday if you come to my synagogue. (I will be doing the big shofar blowing before Musaph.) Thursday I walked into my local pharmacy to ask if I could get the new COVID vaccine. I didn't need an appointment and the pharmacist suggested that I also take the second half of  the shingles vaccine and my flu shot at the same time.  I think we were both worried about the future availability of vaccines in this country. Three vaccines at one time is a whole lot for one body to absorb. Luckily I didn't have all that much to do, so I could spend my weekend doing very little except feeling crummy. So yesterday, after several days off line, so to speak, I was ready to start the rest of getting ready for the High Holidays. My husband and I did another pre-holiday adventure to Bingo, the kosher version of Costco. As soon as we parked t...