Skip to main content

Keeping Warm

Manhattan apartments are usually so overheated that I wear sleeveless dress all winter long.When I’m home I will wear a cotton or silk cardigan and only put on wool when I am leaving the house.

 

It’s really chilly out today and our boiler wasn’t working. It was so chilly in the house that I even wore warm clothing in the house.

SAM_3491

 

I’m wearing a wool skirt I had made last winter  out of fabric I had developed a mad crush on. I am wearing a long sleeved shirt and a wool sweater.  I feel very nostalgic for my formative years in New England during the oil embargo where one wore a minimum of three layers  indoors.

Perhaps it was  the indoor temperature of my youth. or perhaps it was that my son was talking about tuna noodle pea casserole as it if was some wonderful exotic dish… But I made one after not having made one since  perhaps the winter I was 18.

SAM_3486

I did make this iconic dish not with canned mushroom soup but with a from scratch white sauce and dried shitake mushrooms. I no longer own a deep dish casserole dish. Both of the ones I had owned broke before my oldest was out of diapers. I have not missed the lack of a casserole dish in the intervening 24 years..until today. I decided to make due with a Pyrex 9 x13 pan  known in  my childhood as a kugel pan.

 

I also baked some pita.Here is a before shot.

SAM_3487

 

This is the after.

SAM_3490

 

The cold weather activities were not limited to cooking and dressing.

SAM_3489

 

This is being made for someone I love on #50 needles.

 

I feel a little guilty doing extra curricular craft activities when there is work that is coming due.

 

I had a delicious meeting last night with kid # 3 of a family. I had made a tallit for each of his older siblings. I’m touched that the family came back to work with me again.

 

As a third child myself I loved working with him. He is keenly aware of budget and is completely ready to drop an idea if it seems overly extravagant.  When I pose two choices to him “ I can do this a more complicated way or a simpler way’  he always chooses the simpler way. He is also a completely out of the box thinker. The tallit in some ways is the most challenging one intellectually that I have ever worked on. It’s full of deep ideas and wonderfully abstract concepts. I’m sure you will see the progress here.

 

And alas, my trusty camera is dying.  I can only take photos in selfie mode. A new camera is on order.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

  וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים   You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for  giving life to all.  I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of  Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or  the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...
2 comments
Read more

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...
1 comment
Read more

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

 I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night.  I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1)  אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יָאֵר יְהֹ...
8 comments
Read more