Skip to main content

A completed tallit, and Food Friday–Costco edition

100_1112Last night, Zoe came by with her father to pick up her tallit. before my client shows up, I always worry about the finished piece.  I know that I like it, but will my client? did I do a good job understanding what they really wanted? Zoe walked in and began saying “Oh my God!” over and over again.  It was clear. she was really , really pleased as was her father. we tied the tzitzit/ritual fringes using the more lovely half hitch knot rather than the more ordinary simple wrap. I prefer the half hitch method because when you wear the tallit, that spiral of knots adds another dimension to your experience of tzitzit. After we tied the tzitzit, Zoe them put on her tallit with the blessings and of course, sh’hechiyanu.

I had gone to Costco earlier in the week. My daughter was going to Israel and the one thing my son wanted was a bag of dried blueberries.  Tonight’s dinner is entirely Costo made. The chicken is stuffed with chestnuts ( a bag of shelled with an Israeli label but grown in China) the fresh cherries my daughter didn’t get to before se left, onions and dried cherries. I based the chickens with a mixture of mustard, olive oil and maple syrup. It all feels appropriately winter flavored . I’m sure that my friend Alan will have a better idea of the culinary influences that I’m drawing from here. there is probably a name for this combination which is not Chicken Costco.

I’m serving a salad of dark greens with grapefruit sections ( Yes, the grapefruit is also from Costco). I still haven’t decided on the starch.

I’m making a blackberry sorbet to finish off the meal.
100_1114

Comments

  1. wow the tallit is beautiful. Do you sell them online as well?

    ReplyDelete

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

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!!!

 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...

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 ...