sarah in nyc

Today as I was out doing my last minute end of the holiday shopping I saw several women wearing great Easter hats and several little girls wearing beautiful frock coats.  Winter in New York usually ends before Easter, so wearing beautiful straw hats and pastel spring coats makes perfect sense.  Amazon.com Widgets I grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts. Spring usually needs an additional three weeks before it arrives.  For several years my sisters and I took Sunday morning piano lessons from the patient Mrs. Zack.  Mrs. Zack lived near the top of Mount Wollaston in the Merrymount section of Quincy.  Her house was next to an undeveloped tract of land. I have vivid memories of an Easter morning with a full on blizzard. As my sisters had their turns having their lessons with Mrs. Zack I watched family after family all decked out in their Easter best walking to church.  It was a vision seeing...

Well I had thought that all of the food I had bought would last through the holiday, but I was wrong. I had to buy three more dozen eggs which will bring out 2013 total to 12 dozen eggs. I also went to two of the local Kosher stores.  I noticed frozen Kosher for  Passover pizza. As I walked home, I thought about how  one could make a kosher for Passover pizza crust.  By the time I got home I figured it out and got to work.   I beat two eggs with a mixer added about a cup of matza meal, some olive oil and some salt. I let the mixture sit for a bit so the grains of mazta could swell a bit, and then patted the mixture into the bottom of the spring form pan. After the crust had baked for a few minutes I added the sauce and the toppings.   I made this simple pizza for my younger son. My older son and I shared a chopped kale and pickled salmon pizza. my youngest said that while it wasn’t as good as a regular NYC pizza, it wasn’t gross and was a nice cha...

This photo of my family was taken this past Thanksgiving. I am not in the picture because I was home sick. my cousin David took the photo. I’m including this photo because I’m thinking about how we care for family members.  I have been talking to various home care agencies in Boston trying to find the best match for my mother. I just got off the phone with an agency. One of my sisters told me that several members of her community used the agency. Their rates were low. They were really low. Their workers make a shade over $6 per hour. I know that one could say that the care worker is  sleeping for part of that time, but still. Taking care of an old person is hard work. Being around a person who is not of full mental or physical soundness is exhausting. taking care of such a person takes real skill.   I asked the agency about how much time off their full time 24 hour workers get. I was told “ Oh they aren’t like you or me,  they don’t need much time off.”...

This morning I shredding and sliced out horseradish for the maror. The giant root got reduced to just three sandwich bags of maror.  I don’t think it’s that hot a root. I wasn’t screaming while the food processor was doing it’s stuff. I was yelling while I was transferring the processed root from the processor into the bags.   My kids and my husband think that I’m slightly daft to make radish roses, but there is something irrationally important about making the table as nice as my mother did for so many years.  During all of the hours I have been spending getting ready for Passover I have thought often about the many hours I spent as a kid working with my parents getting their home and table ready for this holiday over the years.  The work feels like a long conversation with both my mother and my father that started when I was teeny.   This is how to make a soup taste rich. This is how to get a higher yield from your egg whites. This is how to slice me...

First of all, a bit of birthday follow up.  My son wanted a birthday tiara to wear  during his celebration. Living as we do, up stairs from a .99 store, fulfilling that request was easy.   I finished decorating the cake. One thing I have always been fairly strict about as a mom is not buying sugar heavy breakfast cereals.  I am always willing to buy a box of the junky cereal of their choice for their birthday. My youngest is born on March 17. He usually requests Lucky Charms.  He may have actually reached the point where he finds them gross. The box was done by breakfast on the 18th. My son’s friends ate the cereal with their cake.   I’m also further along on the journey towards Passover. One batch of meat is done. Here it is sliced and frozen and ready to warm up for the second night of seder.  This is the reduction of pan juices that I will serve over the meat.   This is what is currently cooking in my oven, the meat ...

This is the cake we serve for the first night of seder. It’s a flourless chocolate nut cake.  You are supposed to be impressed by how tall the cake is. Soon I will take it out of the pan, wrap it up and put it in the freezer.   My son made a potato kugel for dinner, actually it was supposed to be mashed potatoes but I told him to leave too much of the cooking water in the pot. So with the addition of a bit of matza meal and some eggs it’s a kugel. Because the fat we used in the kugel is olive oil rather than chicken fat and the potatoes were boiled rather than  grated raw it’s  very white and reminds me of what I used to think of as Goyish potatoes  when I was a little kid.  Jewish potatoes were usually grey and chunky and cooked with lots of chicken fat. Goyish potatoes were white and cooked in butter and were very smooth. Both were good, but not at all the same thing.   I also added a vinegar brine to the chicken I had pulled out of the sou...

Wednesday night the three kids and I joined forces and switched the house from during the year to Passover mode. Having all three working with me meant that the job got done without too much pain.   By Thursday morning I had made my first for the season batch of matza brei, done in my father’s custardy version ( and according to my kids the only version worth eating).   you can see how to make some yourself here. My father's matza brei Yesterday I had also made the chicken soup in the ancestral giant lobster pot. late last night I asked my youngest to help strain the soup. It’s a giant messy hard job. But we now have four gallons of beautiful soup in the freezer. I went to Costco and got some of what we needed for Passover. At least our shelves are lo longer empty. One tray of eggs has already been used up. I also made the Charoset. It took  not quite two hours to chop the various nuts and fruits down to charoset. But there it is in the fr...

  This photo was taken of my mother this past Thanksgiving at my cousin’s home in Brooklyn. Today we had the dreaded family meeting at the rehab where my mother is recuperating from her stroke.   While my mother has made many strides since her stroke on March 1, they don’t anticipate that she will ever be able to live without 24 hour care.  I had come to the same conclusion, but hearing it from the professionals has made me profoundly sad. Wen I was four, my  mother’s father died.  Right after the shiva, my grandmother moved in with us. She and I shared a room.  About  nine months later, my grandmother had a severe stroke. My parents were my grandmother’s primary caregivers. This is a road my mother knows well as a caregiver. Now, she is the one being cared for.   When my sisters and I  recall those years we remember how completely stressed both of our parents were.  My sisters and I are quite a bit older than our pare...

I suppose that if I had actually given a bit more thought to it I wouldn’t have given birth to a son whose birthday so often falls just before Passover.   What I really ought to be doing tonight is Passover cleaning. Instead I baked a cake for my youngest.  Some of his friends are coming by tomorrow afternoon.  I assume that a group of adolescents will polish off the cake.   What did I bake for my delightful but inconveniently born son?  The cake itself is a “quick plain cake”  from the settlement cookbook. Given my son’s very un-exotic taste in food the vanilla butter cake with a hint of orange flavor is just right.   The cake is filled with vanilla custard ice cream I made tonight. The frosting is a cooked butter cream that actually tastes delicious.     The frosting is green because my son was born on St. Patrick's day.  The cake is covered in plastic wrap because I pulled the cake out of the freezer to take the ...

Would I have thought that I would accept a commission to do a t-shirt quilt.   But I did. I started just before my mother got sick and I’m plugging away at it.  I suppose that one of the reasons I agreed to do it is that the person who asked me to do it is a complete sweetheart and asked me really really nicely. She has also given me the instruction that I ought to have fun doing it. I’m constructing it out of three different shirtings   One of the things that I do like about working on this project is that I’m getting to know a bit about the life of the woman whose t-shirts these are. I have never met her, but we have traveled at the edges of similar circles. She attended the camp I worked at while in college, has been on programs started by of staffed by friends of mine. It’s a nice thing to work on  much to my shock.   The quilt will be constructed out of three strips (20 inches x 72 inches) each with t-shirts collaged using a wide zig zag sti...

This blog post reflects the state of my mind at the moment. Between my anxiety about my mother’s condition ( How much better will she get in rehab? Will she be able to live on her own after they let kick her out of rehab?) And my anxiety about getting ready for Passover after having missed a week of work time, my mind jumps from  topic to topic. If you find the concept of a jumble of ideas disconnected from one another in one blog to distressing, come back another day. I won’t take it personally. My husband often finds the workings of my brain slightly disconcerting, and I know that he loves me. I need to use up the flour and grans before Passover, so I made a batch of bagels. I ground up kamut and soft wheat into the dough as well as some oats. as I mixed the dough I realized the close affinity between porridge and bread dough. This did make excellent bagels. Anxiety is also a good time to guild the lily. I often find it difficult to actually creative when my head is fill...

My son’s school is having an auction this Friday night. I’m not going but I’m contributing items for the “Class basket”. My contribution is three scarves.   This boa is made out of four layers of Indian printed  “sari silk”.  Sari silk is not exactly silk, and is more likely a poly rayon mix.  To make the scarf I layered  four 2 yard lengths of the fabric, and stitched down the middle. I then cut strips to the stitching line on the diagonal so they would not fray. This infinity scarf is made out of metallic and silk organza. The fabric came off the bolt flat. After I sewed up the circle, I wet the silk. when the fabric is wet it crinkles up like crazy.  I love how it falls somewhere between a scarf and jewelry. I own several of these scarves and wear them a ton. They are just to thing to toss over boring clothes and look as if you made an effort to get dressed. This last scarf /shawl photographs the least impressively but too the most amount...

My mother’s stroke could have been far worse. It seems to have hit in an interesting language processing piece of her brain. As of tonight, she is in rehab. I hope that the speech therapists will do good work with my mother.  Clearly, this is the sanitized version of the week with most of the excitement and drama left out.  If you want to know more details you can email me and I will fill you in.   I’m glad to be home with my husband and kids. Waiting for me as I walked in the door was Shabbat dinner cooked by my older son. He had baked the challah earlier in the week. My oldest came for dinner as well. It was a wonderful welcome home.   I had ordered two sewing books before I left and they were both here when I came home. This was one of the books. It’s quite a good book with well drawn diagrams for making the garments. The book was written in 1971, on the early side  for this sort of a book. Most of the  hippie clothing books were writ...