Getting ready for Passover

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 anticipation of my old curtains turning to dust. I usually use the Palu, or decorative front panel as the curtain header. This sari didn’t have a Palu.

I had also attempted to replace my kitchen shade. The results just look depressed. No, I won’t share a photo of my sad looking kitchen shade. I have been using a 1940’s table cloth that was my aunt’s as the shade. As soon as it is out of the dryer I will iron it and put it back up. I will show you the clean shade and we can all pretend that I never make a mistake.

I did make a new batch of wool pot holders. I serge 6 layers of wool together in pot holder-y shapes. My old ones are all scorched.

You may wonder what I wear as I scrub my kitchen. As per my sister’s instructions, I’m wearing the beautiful pearls that she just gave me as an early birthday present. With the big black pearls, and a black cowl top and black circle skirt ( thank you Fabric Mart Mystery bundles) I look like a Goth Barbara Billingsly.

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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!!!

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 ...

sarah in nyc

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