sarah in nyc

  This 36 inch square tablecloth is one of the Vivian treasures.   I grew up with several dresser scarves crocheted in the identical pattern. I know that needlework magazines from the 1920’s used to give directions for the same pattern in a variety of sizes. My grandmother’s friend, Mrs. Lustig made the dresser scarves and gave them to my grandmother. When my grandmother moved in with us, Mrs. Lustig’s hand work came too. We called them, Mrs. Lustig schmattas. Clearly this is not what this sort of work was called in the needlework magazines.     When my mother was here Thanksgiving she asked to see the Vivian treasures. I told her that I had a Mrs. Lustig  table cloth. My mother was really impressed.   I have made some repairs on the cloth and the sharp eyed among you will see that I have a bit more repair work to do.   I know that I will never find out Mrs. Lustig’s first name, or if she even had a first name. ( My grandmoth...

I often like doing things the old fashioned way, I don’t use a bread machine, I knead my  bread by hand. I hand knead and hand roll noodles. Most of my cooking is of the slow variety.   There are times, and the short winter Fridays are a prime example of those times when a bit of cooking technology is a life saver. Tonight's dinner has been brought to my family through both a food processor and a microwave oven.  Yes, my challah was made exactly the same way it might have 75 years ago. ( Read the passive voice here as me doing the making  there were only dishwashing elves today)   I made my older sons one of his favorite dishes, caramelized onions. This soup bowl, that is only half full is one full bag of onions. Slicing them in the food processor made the job much easier, but I must admit that I was weeping from the onion fumes. I also pureed two more onions, thee parsnips and three large carrots and a box of mushrooms that went into tonight’s two...

I have often written about  the limited diet of my youngest son.  This is basically his favorite meal.  And yes, he usually prepares it himself. This time he went a little wild and added both siracha and liquid smoke to the dish.   I have nothing more to add.

  My older son and I spent the afternoon at the New York Historical Society. We saw the excellent New York during WWII exhibit. As we walked home re realized that we would need to cook some supper. I had pulled a chicken out of the freezer before our adventure.  I bought some smoked paprika at the spice store around the corner.  My son suggested adding lemon juice to the chicken as well.   I massaged the smoked paprika into the chicken and roasted it at 435. I added lemon juice most of the way through the cooking, and kept adding more smoked paprika. I added the vegetables just before the chicken was done   My son had put up a Mark Bittman style loaf earlier in the day and we baked the bread covered in the pot until we pulled the chicken out of the oven. The we uncovered the bread. By the time the chicken had finished cooling and  setting on the stove top the bread was done.   I had taken a beautiful but very fussy bread baking book o...

This Shabbat is a real rarity. We have been invited to Shabbat dinner at the homes of friends two weeks in a row.  This is an heard of luxury.   I used this short Friday to deal with a bit more of the ironing backlog.   This white linen cloth is one of the Vivian treasures.  It’s 36 inches square. European linen is often coarser than than used in American cloths.  I might be completely wrong and the coarseness of the linen might be a matter of when the linen was produced rather than the country of origin.   I am a complete sucker for these cloths decorated with bands of crochet.  Someone spent hours crocheting up miles and miles of this  butterfly  or lily patterned ribbon. The cloth has several less than elegant joins of the crochet work.  I am quite fond of the crude joining. I love seeing the evidence of a less than perfect  craftswoman just doing the best that she can.     I had washed this cloth ...

Today was spent doing things I would have preferred not to do.   Before breakfast I cleaned the wax off of our five chanukiyot. I had to write up the minutes of  two meetings and send them out. I also had a giant stack or ironing to do. These are the table cloths I ironed today. because of the flood in our closet I have also been ironing all sorts of things one normally does not iron. All of our luggage and tote bags lived in that closet. I had to wash all of the collection of bags in the closet. The suitcases were mostly synthetic and could hang to dry. The tote bags were a different story. I have been ironing countless canvas tote bags of various sizes and shapes.  If the bags are not ironed they are horrible lumps of crumpled horrible-ness. Ironed they will be put away once the closet is dry, re plastered and re-painted. Ironing crumpled canvas is a crummy job, in case you were struck with an urge to iron all of your tote bags.   When my kids were...

was the last night of Chanukah. I realize posting these photos of our lit chanukiyot that to me they feel as intimate as portraits of each of the family members who own them.  Looking at these photos brings to mind the phrase "  Ner hashem nishmat adam."  God's candle is the soul of man. So think of these photos as the Jewish version of those family portrait cards with all of the family members wearing matching snowflake sweaters. A reflection of the lights we lit. Amazon.com Widgets

My youngest is the only one of my kids home this Shabbat. I made him this bonus challah roll out of this week’s batch of challah. For many years I used to create challah rolls with a knot. This past high holiday season I realized that a spiral is both simpler to construct  and looks far cuter. You wet the inside of the spiral so it does not unroll. Wet dough is an excellent glue.   We have been invited to a friend’s house for dinner. Our youngest has been invited to a friend of his for Shabbat dinner.  So this is a taste of future empty nest-hood.   Not having to cook means that I had time to work.   Daphi’s tallit is nearly complete. I love how the orange organza and the maroon chiffon have combined in such a delicious way. The text comes from Jonah’s prayer from inside the great whale ” In the wrapping up of my soul with God”. The text comes together only when the wearer holds the corners together. Daphi is a red head. The colors on the ta...

Until the early 1970’s a woman wearing a tallit was a rare thing indeed.  One heard that Beruria in the Talmud or Rashi’s brilliant daughters wore tallitot, but generally it was not done.   The 1970’s , which of course actually began in 1968, were an interesting confluence of  ideas re thinking our world. One piece of that re thinking was the re-emergence  of feminism after it lay dormant in the post WWII years.  That sort of re thinking of the fundamentals was also going on in various corners of the Jewish world. One of those places was Havurat  Shalom in Somerville, Massachusetts.  Havurat Shalom began as an alternative,  Hippie influenced if you like, Rabbinical school. Part of the motive for starting it was to keep young men out of the Vietnam war. The institution evolved and for a whole was less a Rabbinical school and more a community ( not a commune) that also served as a kind of laboratory for experimental Judaism.  Feminism ...

My grandfather, Yankle was a furrier. He stitched pelts into yardage that other furriers turned into fur coats. My mother always wore a fur coat as a kid. One winter she begged her parents for a cloth coat.  Her parents relented and my mother was cold. When I was growing up there were two types of fur coats. There were utilitarian warm ones and there were glamorous ones that were worn for style.  My mother had a muskrat or marmot coat that she wore the way most of us would wear a down coat today.  it was a utilitarian fur. In addition to the work-a day fur coat my mother also had a fur lined coat that she would wear to go to the symphony. I think she bought it in the late 1950’s.  The coat had bracelet sleeves that were unlined. the coat and the platter collar were lined in nutria. I always loved that coat.  My mother used to complain about the short  unlined sleeves  I thought it was just the greatest coat ever.   After my father died, a...

My oldest was born on Halloween.  My father began calling my daughter  Dalaat because of her birthday.  My daughter has a certain fondness for the name.  She is very fond of pumpkins. Earlier this week my daughter mentioned that she was disappointed by the huge array of desserts that my sister had made for Thanksgiving. Pumpkin pie was not part of that array. I asked my daughter if a pumpkin pie would induce her  to show up at Shabbat dinner this week.  she agreed to show up and I got to work on the pie. Making the pie was not completely simple though. We are eating a meat meal. This means no delicious butter in the crust and no cream for the pumpkin custard filling. Making an oil crust is easy work with the food processor. The filling is made a bit more complicated by my youngest’s food allergies. He is allergic to soy and to tree nuts.  So we can’t turn to either soy milk or the more delicious almond milk.  A local fruit stand has a wide...

and why not. When I had posted this  challah cover Kathleen asked how I get the color variation in the text. I made the next challah cover so I could illustrate how.   I had learned how to do this cool trick from Ellen Alt, my calligraphy teacher. You work with two pots of color. Choose two colors that will look good when mixed. As you paint the text, alternate the colors you did your brush in. do not clean your brush between colors. See your kindergarten teacher spin in her grave, but just keep dipping your brush and not cleaning it between colors. The colors end up blending in a cool way. You may notice that the text does not stand out as much as it usually does.  as I was leafing through Shabbat z’miroti   table songs I was drawn to this poem. Ki Eshmirah Shabbat . You can listen to the melody . It’s a great melody.   As I was calligraphing the text I remembered that I actually don’t like the words themselves all that much. You can see ...

    When I work on a piece I’m often influenced by what I’m hearing as I work. This is certainly true of my next challah cover. I had done the text and the borders on this challah cover quite some time ago. The piece looked nice but a little bleak. As I decided what music to put on  while I worked, I remembered that my sister had asked me to find a song that was deeply meaningful to her.   As I have written before, I grew up in Quincy Massachusetts. Both of my parents are American born. They  were profoundly influenced by the establishment of the State of Israel. They decided to raise their children to be Hebrew speaking. Rather than speaking to us in both Hebrew and English, they spoke to us only in Hebrew. They assumed that learning English, in the gutter, so to speak, would work as well as it did for my mother, who was brought up speaking Yiddish at home, and learned to speak English on the streets of Brooklyn.   While we didn’t have playma...