What I do on Friday when I don't have to cook

Our friend Michelle invited us for dinner. I didn't have to get up early and so didn't get out of bed until 10:00 am !!!!. I am usually out of bed by 5:40 am so I really loved the luxury of sleeping late.

We have two couches in our living room. I had covered one with a mix of red upholstery fabrics. Our green couch has boxed cushions and is a bit more complicated to do nicely. I had covered two of the cushions in a reasonable manner. The third was a mess. we hare having guests spending several days next week so I too advantage of today and made a new cushion cover for the center pillow. The boxing strip fabric comes from P+S, downtown. The beautiful chenille comes from http://www.fabricguru.com/. Clearly not an exact match, but it all works together. When I get braver I will tackle the back cushions of the couch.

The hardest part was getting the cover on the cushion. It makes my hands feel old and sore.

I also discovered why my serger has been wonky for all of these months. I totally mis-threaded it. I take back any mean thoughts that I have been harboring about my serger. The serger was fine. This was a case of operator error.

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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...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

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A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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