sarah in nyc

  Tonight we are eating vaguely Indian chicken. I cooked chicken on a bed of shredded onions and cut up dates. We had the dates left over from Passover's Charoset. I topped the chicken with lots of curry powder.   I added some cider vinegar to the pan because it tasted a bit bland. after the chicken was cooked I pulled the chicken out of the pan and set it aside. Then I poured off all of the chicken juices. I put the chicken juice into the fridge and then tossed the fat after it had risen to the top of the container.  I don’t cook with chicken fat. I know it’s thrifty and yummy, but I’m just not old world enough to do that.   I then reduced the chicken juice along with the wine that  was left over from last Friday night, a nice Italian red. I made spicy stewed eggplant. a bean salad,   and taboule. I also made meringues and cooked spiced pears and figs in a custard.   Shabbat Shalom!!!

I was ready to begin work on Mimi's tallit. I ordered the blue silk we had chosen.  A few days later I got an email from the supplier. They were out of stock and wouldn’t get more of the silk for at least a month.   I needed the silk. It was past time to get to work. I  Looked for the right shade of blue charmeuse on line and found it for $30/yard.  That’s awfully steep. I found a color that was the right tone, but almost-not quite the right color…it was lavender, rather than blue. I also found just the right color, but it was the end of the bolt, and the yardage was short.   My selection of fabric felt very Goldilocks…nothing was just right. I asked Mimi to come by , to see if we could hammer out a solution together. We looked at the fabrics and then both of us , at the same moment, came up with the idea of using all three colors.   We both thought that long irregular triangles of the three very close colors would look beautiful. I then m...

Last night, I was thinking many thoughts about Arona. I was especially thinking about the time we spent together designing her tallit.  The process took place over a few years. The first part took place just before Arona married Lou. She wanted a new atara for her old but beloved eyelet tallit. She had made that tallit in the early 1970's. By the time I began to work on the tallit,  while it was filled with memories and meaning, it was also fairly grotty. A few years later, Arona and Lou travelled to Central America. There, Arona purchased a really beautiful high quality length of eyelet. Arona was ready for me to turn that length of eyelet into a tallit for her. We looked at many texts together. On a hunch, I suggested  the following prayer. It is often taught to very young children. My God the soul that you have given within me is pure You created it You wrought it You have inflated it within me and You watch over it within me and You in t...

I don't know exactly when I met Arona, but I have known her since 1982, when I first moved to New York. Often men are decribed as  being " a man's man " Arona was the feminine equivalanent. She was deeply feminine and an incredibly thoughtful and loyal friend  to many women in cour community. Arona married fairly late in life. She married the intensely sweet, Lou. I have worked with Arona a few times over the years, I made her atara and then I re- made her tallit. You can read about my work with Arona, here, http://sewnewyork.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-on-therapistss-tallit.html , and here http://sewnewyork.blogspot.com/2010/04/revisiting-old-work.html Arona died yesterday. She had been very private about her illness. She had asked me a few years ago not to say a word about her illness and I didn't say a word, not even to my husband. People who wear tallitot, are buried in their tallitot.  I assume that Arona will be buried in ...

Passover was wonderful, but getting back to year-round food is pretty wonderful. I still have not found my dairy dish drainer, so if you know where I hid it away,  let me know.   Tonight we are eating some of the beef I had made for Seder.  Yes, I did put it right into the freezer after the meal, so that made today far easier.   I baked our first post-Passover Challot.   I made  a lemony mayonnaise to go with   Yes, the mayo is crazy yellow. It helps when you add mustard powder and turmeric.   I also made cole-slaw with rice vinegar and sesame oil. It’s so simple but is always better than the sum of it’s parts.   I will add these later. Our guest is bringing dessert.

Yesterday, my friend posted about this company tzitzit belts  on Facebook. At first I thought that the idea was sort of interesting, but the more I looked at the product, and the more I thought about it, the crankier it made me. The point of this product is to give the wearer an easy way to wear tzitzit.  They are made in versions for kids and versions for women and men. At first glance it seems like it might be a cool way to do the mitzvah of tzitzit. But then, you need to look a bit more closely. Tzitzit need to be attached to a four cornered garment. This belt is technically a four cornered garment. The tzitzit need to be attached a finger's width from the corner.  You can see that the corners are in the back of this belt and the tzitzit hang from the garment with no relationship to the corners. Tzitzit need to be part of the garment and not pinned  or attached to the garment in a temporary way. The four 'buttons' on this belt are s...

When my daughter was in 8th or 9th grade I bought her a little cashmere blend cropped sweater in grey. She loved that sweater. So, when the neck wore out a few years ago, I crocheted over the  ripped neckline in a soft angora blend marled gray wool. My daughter finally admitted that she had worn that sweater to death of the past nearly ten years.  She asked me to keep an eye out for a replacement sweater. I remembered that I had a crew necked merino wool sweater similar to this one http://www.woolovers.us/cashmere-merino/womens/cashmere-ladies-crew-neck.aspx?cse=shoppingusa . The wool was lovely, but the shape was not very flattering. I decided to turn the unflattering sweater into my daughter's new shrug. It isn't hard to do this transformation. I  didn’t take photos as I worked, so my drawings will have to do. I cut the sweater on the dotted lines.  First I cut the sweater  East-West  at a point that made sense to me. Then I cut open the fro...

Sometimes I consult with people making a special piece for a special occasion, a child or a grand child’s bar mitzvah or wedding.  people making something for someone they love can afford to spend wonderful obsessive time on a piece. The time is a way of imbuing the piece with some of the love felt for the person who will receive  the piece. When I do work for a client, to a certain extent I work with the meter running . yes I could do lots of hand work, but either my client needs to be made out of money, or I need to be willing to earn pennies per hour.   Sometimes though, that line is a bit fuzzy. I have been commissioned to make this challah cover for Eli and Rachel.  as I work, it’s hard for me not to think about Beth, Eli’s late mother. I liked Beth a whole lot.  Her illness was so long and so hard. It is just so sad that she won’t get to see her  wonderful children get married.   So I’m hand embroidering a border around some of the le...

  Passover is over, the regular dishes are all in use and the Passover dishes and pots are all put away ( Many thanks to my family for working with me to make it all happen. ) .  The horseradish root has begun sprouting in earnest.  Mostly, I’m happy living in the city without a yard.  Allergy season usually has me delighted to not have to deal with all of that additional vegetation,and pollen,  but this sprouting root has given me garden lust. I would love to plant this ugly root and eat  the resulting roots next Passover.  I have been munching on some of the delightfully bitter leaves. I actually have begun work on my next sewing project.  I was asked to make a challah cover for Eli and Rachel.  I met Eli when he was two. His parents were members of our community when I moved here. My husband was a college friend of Eli's mom, Beth. Beth died about ten years ago, a month after her daughter’s bat mitzvah after a long hard fight with ...

Very few photos of me exist from my childhood. I am the third child in my family. Like many families, there are a huge number of photos of the first born, somewhat fewer of the second born, and by the time the third kid comes around, the whole wonder of childhood is not quite as astounding.   My husband and I displayed photos from our childhood at our wedding, partially because of our eleven year age difference. Juxtaposing a photo of me  on my first day of kindergarten with one of my husband studying for his SAT’s seemed very amusing to us.   My parents ( unlike me) were terribly tidy people. After the wedding, they inadvertently tossed the manila envelope filled with my childhood photographs.   I once mentioned this loss to my friend Esther Hautzig who was a Holocaust survivor.  Poor Esther was so completely horrified about the loss of images of my childhood that I felt sorry that I had told her.   Esther then told me the heartbreaking st...

I know that in most homes,  Matza Brei is scrambled eggs with a sheet of matza, a sort of Passover  French toast. This is not what I grew up thinking Matza Brei was.  My father loved to cook.  He would often re think a dish, often something he had heard about and never tasted and create his own take on what that dish ought to taste like. When I was in high school he came up with something he called Eggplant Parmesan.  It was good, it was made with eggplant, but I don’t think anyone else would confuse it with Eggplant Parmesan. Sometimes these experiments were less than wonderful.  My father called many of his sweet bread experiments babka.  They were all sweet doorstops. You could  have used a slice to incapacitate a mugger. His Chicken Fricassee did not resemble any I have seen in a cook book, but was one of my favorite meals growing up. (It was a sweet and sour   tomato based chicken stew made with wings gizzards and necks.) But ...

I’m at least starting to think about sewing again after my Passover cooking frenzy.   I was in the garment district looking for African wax printed fabrics. I wasn’t able to find what I was looking for, but one of the stores had a stack of large rolls of elastic. The shopkeeper  noticed me looking at the elastic and offered to sell it to me for $5 per roll.   I know a good deal when I see one. They are from top to bottom, 1 inch wide elastic lace trim, 2 rolls of 1.5 inch flat black elastic and one of the blue and white sport elastic.   I’m not sure what I’m going to use the sport elastic for. I will have to make LOTS of pairs of boxers to use it up. I think I will be making many elastic waisted skirts.   It’s always good to have lots of basic notions around. I hate buying elastic by the yard and tend to buy it as I did today, in rolls that vendors want to get rid of.   When I asked the shopkeeper why he was selling for such a lo...

Friday, I engaged in what I think of as Olympic cooking.  I made a carrot  potato kugel, cooked the quinoa, shredded and sliced the horseradish for the Seder table made a few batches of Passover puffs and I concocted a pie. No, I don’t have photos of the pie. You do have to trust me on this one. it was beautiful and it was delicious. I made a nut crust in the food processor using left over ground almonds and pecans whipped together with a bit of matza meal sugar, salt and a bit of water. I think there was about a cup of nuts, a table spoon of the matza meal, a scant tablespoon of sugar , a smidge of salt and a tablespoon or two of water. I pressed the mixture into the bottom of a spring form pan and had the mixture go up an inch or two up the sides of the pan. I baked the crust. Then I made a lemon curd. I love lemon curd, but it is often dairy. I sort of followed  a recipe for lemon filling from Leah Leonard's, Jewish Cookery. Most lemon curd is too sweet for my ta...

The To do list feels simultaneously shorter and longer.  I made this batch of meringues.  In case you were wondering, not a good idea to beat egg whites in aluminum. I made a nut crust and a lemon curd that need to be topped by berries and an apricot glaze. I’m proud of the nut crust because I entirely made it up. I grated the marror. in our family we use horseradish. It’s way easier to grate the horseradish  with a food processor. I hand grated it the year I was pregnant with my second. I wore a snorkel and screamed my way through.  This year, the roots were not quite as pungent.  That is, I didn’t have to scream and shut my eyes as I worked. I made my mother’s  no flour chocolate torte. I added too many nuts so it’s a bit crumbly but will still taste good. I have the sneaking suspicion that Manhattanites are doing far less Passover cooking from scratch.  The Passover sections of our neighborhood markets are filled with prepared goods but...

Every Jewish cookbook has a recipe for Passover puffs or muffins.  The method of making these muffins is awfully like making cream puffs with two exceptions. The flour is replaced with matza meal or a mix of matza and cake meal and the fat in the recipe is oil rather than butter. The result is a nice alternative to eating matza, but it is a bit heavy and often an unfortunate grey color. This year I have made cream puffs several times using the method laid out by Michael Ruhlman in his excellent cookbook, Ratio. I kept thinking that the Passover puffs might be improved if I just followed rhulman’s recipe but substituted  cake meal for the flour. My hunch was right. Clearly these are for dairy meals only and they are quite delicious. The three puffs pictured above were all that was left after last night’s batch were devoured . Good Passover Puffs 8 oz eggs 1 stick butter 1/2 tsp salt 1 Tbs sugar scant cup matza cake meal 4 eggs Pre heat oven to 425. Bring th...

A few people have asked me for the recipe for this cake.  I had posted a condensed version on Facebook but here it is with the full directions. Often Passover cakes have the unfortunate taste of matza meal. I decided that I needed to choose cakes that contained as little matza meal as possible. this cake comes from Leah Leonard's post war classic, Jewish cookery. My mother came into  her marriage with no experience cooking or baking. She bought or perhaps was given this cookbook early on in her marriage when she really didn’t understand how to cook.  Many years ago, my mother my mother gave me the Leonard cookbook and told me that it was a terrible cookbook. It isn’t.  My mother was just an inexperienced cook who grew up in the home of a terrible cook. Lemon Nut Cake 9 eggs separated 1 large lemon 9 T sugar 1C finely ground almonds 2T matza cake meal pre heat oven to 325 .Peel and chop ( or shred with scissors) rind lemon zest.  Juice lemon. ...

Yes. I have been busy. Here are the four packages of chicken and one of chicken juice in my freezer. I want to thank my friend Alan for making me think about how to recreate the sense of pesto for a meat meal. Actually thinking about this chicken I’m reminded of an old Jewish story about a poor man who eats an amazing dish at the house of a wealthy man. he described the dish in detail to his wife…let’s say for this telling that it’s pesto. he describes how it is made with basil and it’s so fragrant, and pine nuts, garlic and parmesan cheese…it’s simply incredible. the man obsesses about the dish until his poor wife renents and makes it for him. She can’t find basil in the market, so she uses parsley, pine nuts  are too pricy so she substitutes walnuts, she’s making the dish for a meat meal so the cheese has to be left out..and her husband hated garlic…so she grinds in a lemon to mimic that pungent cheese taste…in the story the husband eats the simpler meal and says…”Eh, what’s t...