sarah in nyc

My family has a long tradition of giving gag afikoman presents.Over the years, many of them have been similar in spirit to altered books but predated the alternate book movement by at least 30 years. Some of the gag afikoman presents have been quite elaborate. This year, we gave this altered candle to my mother. My father, looked remarkably like Pope John Paul II.  My father  could have been hired by the Vatican to wave at the crowds when the Pope wasn’t feeling up to it, and I don’t think the adoring crowds would have noticed that they were being blessed by a Brooklyn born rabbi, rather than by the pontiff himself. Prayer Candle Company is owned by smart people ( relatives of mine). There is a campaign in the Catholic Church to beatify John Paul II. I found this candle in the Spanish food section of a supermarket and knew that it would make a great afikoman present. My husband brilliantly rewrote the prayers in the candles and replaced all of the crosses on the candles wit...

With lots of help from my husband and my youngest, all of the Passover dishes are now back in their various hiding places.  When you live in an apartment, Passover dish storage is not the simple matter of boxes in an attic, basement or garage. rather it takes some real cleverness to hide all of the Passover stuff away. By the time we were done, the really good neighborhood pizza place, was closed so we settled for mediocre bagels instead. In thinking about tonight’s Shabbat dinner, I thought that it would be nice to have some fish after all of the met we were eating during Passover. I started the challah and was happy to be back kneading a nice gluten-ey bread dough. The challah is now doing it’s second rise and I will bake it soon. Making the challah today, a weird thing happened. As a cook who cooks kosher, I always break eggs into a cup one by one, before adding them to anything, to be sure that they don't have any blood spots. In 40 or so years of cooking, I don't thin...

Those of us who sew will often call errors “design opportunities”. Yesterday, was a design opportunity day. I have been working on Linda’s tallit for a while. Mostly I have been working on the stripes. Linda was coming by yesterday with the pinot, corner pieces, and the atara, neckband that she is receiving from her rabbinical school. I thought that it would be nice if Linda could see her tallit assembled. I had already measured out the fabric for the tallit ad serged the raw edges. The stripes were being inserted, rather than being appliqued. So I had to cut off the equivalent of the width of the stripes from the fabric I was using for the body of the tallit. That accomplished, I was about to cut the remaining fabric in half and then sew those strips to the other side of the stripes. Well, I was fairly sleep deprived, and cut the remaining fabric going the wrong way. Linda was showing up in 15 minutes. The fabric is from the early ‘90’s and is no longer being manufactured. I had b...

A quick Passover wrap up for those of you waiting desperately to find out what I cooked this year. The cooking is why I haven’t been posting that often over the past week or so. I made a vat of chicken soup and then did the massive job of squeezing out all of the vegetables and then straining out all of the fat. It’s a big and physical job. My mother reminded me that she and my father once left me home to squeeze out a soup while they went to a wedding. I was in college, in my late teens. They called me from the wedding to see how I was doing, and I was in tears, squeezing out all of that soup was just too much for me. I guess by now I have built up enough upper body strength so I didn’t cry. So other things I cooked/baked for the Seders includes, matza-balls, meringues, chicken baked with leeks, Quinoa, roasted fingerling potatoes, roasted asparagus, flourless chocolate nut cake salmon gefilte fish and charoset, both chopped by hand. I also made food for the lunches I was s...

Yesterday, a box arrived at my door amid all of the insanity of Passover prep. My usual way with packages is to rip them open as soon as they arrive. I finally opened the box several hours later and found the most amazing gift inside. Someone sent us this fabulous and ugly royal wedding mug. Prince William, Kate and Diana As you can see, Kate and William are in good company on my breakfront. I love that William is next to his mother in thimble form. We seem to have amassed a fairly large collection of royal memorabilia over the years. No, we don’t especially care about the monarchy. Our collection got its start because of a foolish mistake my father made when he was 18 that caused long tailed consequences.  Most, but not all of our royal collection  We had stopped actually purchasing royal stuff several years ago. Since then, our collection has been enriched with some of the sillier members of our collection, like the Diana thimble or the Queen Mum plate, the Queen Mum...

 Passover meat dishes. My parents bought these dishes in the spring of 1954. They were oldfashioned when they bought them.   My mismatched passover dairy dishes. mostly Arcroc with the cheerful gerbera plates. from the .99 store.  As of 11:00 pm tonight, I had sucessfully completed switching my kichen over to Passover mode.  My husband and my youngest helped move the dishes from their various hiding places around the apartment. There were tons of tasks that came first, but I'm too tired to even remember what they were. It's been a long couple of days. Tomorrow, I start cooking, beginning with the soup.

Yes, I have been cleaning the kitchen. I have also been running around trying to locate  and buy all of the food that I need in my pantry for Passover. However, my living room curtains had suffered enough in the sun. I realized that if I washed them again they would fall apart. Company is coming, time to freshen up the house. My living room faces West. It gets tons of sun. I could either spend a fortune on lined drapes that will rot in the sun after a couple of years or go quick and dirty. Not surprisingly, I have gone the quick and dirty route. For about the last fifteen years I have used saris as curtains.  Saris made out of polyester are perfect for curtains because they resist sun rot pretty well. I usually get a mix of red and yellow saris, they match the walls and the furniture. I get the saris in Jackson Heights, in Queens. Some years red and yellow are the colors in the sari stores, other years they are not. I had bought this red sari a couple of years ago in ...

We were invited to a friend's house for Shabbat dinner and I just had to make challa. I do however, want to alert you to two terrific cookbooks. The first, is the book pictured at the left. I have seen lots of books of this type, a mix of history and recipes. Both the history and the recipes are meticulously researched. Apparently one of the residents of 97 Orchard Street used to wake up early on Fridays and bake 20 challas to give away to the needy. I was inspired by her example. This week, I gave three extra challas to the women who helped me pull together a celebration for my building last Sunday.This was partially an act of graciousness, and also so I wouldn't have to worry about what to do with the other half of the challa during Passover. Wendy, my downstairs neighbor lent me this treasure of a cookbook. It was published in 1899. the recipes seem to come from both housewives as well as the fanciest chefs in America. Some of the recipes are homely, like the bread soup...

Yesterday was our 25th wedding anniversary.My husband is of the “food is fuel’ school of thought. perhaps it is because his mother was such an awful cook. Clearly, I don’t approach food the same way. I suppose that if I did, I would be thin, like my husband. We tend not to eat out a whole lot, and we rarely eat at fancy restaurants. My husband, much to my frustration is sometimes taken to really top notch restaurants by his clients, and as he readily admits, the experience is often wasted on him. he is really gracious about trying to describe what he as been served. Sometimes though it is a bit like hearing a color blind person describe a rainbow. For several years in a row, my husband would ask me what I wanted to do for my birthday, and I would tell him that I wanted to go to a really fancy restaurant. It took a few years, but he finally figured out that even though it was not something he particularly wanted to do, it would make me very happy.Since then we have had a few culinary ...

Friday , S asked me to meet her at her dressmaker’s with the wedding sash. I was invisioning a visit to the dry cleaner near her house. S gave me an address on 71st Street I went. I was humbled by what I saw. This was a workshop of highly skilled, mostly Russian women who really get garment construction. They had taken S’s off the rack dress and had done a small alteration for modesty that didn’t look like a pathetic attempt to be covered up but just made the whole dress better.   I was a little nervous by what they might say about the sash. As I sat there with the sash in my back pack each flaw loomed big in my head. Instead, Iris pinned the sash on the dress looked at it hard with her critical eye and declared it a good [piece of work. That’s high praise from a woman who knows her stuff.   I don’t get my clothing altered. Ready to wear ( when I used to wear it) always fit well enough.  Women like S who are shorter than the average always need a good alteration...

Late night TV is filled with ads promising to help inventors. This photo shows a Jewish ritual object that I invented about fifteen years ago. Shabbat ends with a short ceremony, called havdalah , speration.  During havdalah we smell sweet spices to ease our transition from the holiness of Shabbat to work- a –day life. My invention was transferring the text of the havdalah onto a bag filled with sweet spices. When you hold the bag when you recite the prayer the spices get released into the air. This morning I got an email asking if I had any havdalah bags available to be picked up this afternoon.. I didn’t. I did have an order for another bag so I made both together. I made one bag extra, which is still unembellished, but will be ready with just a few moments of needle play.