sarah in nyc

My mother learned how to cook  from the women in the Jewish community in Halifax, Nova Scotia. While there were many excellent cooks in that generation of  immigrant and first generation women, not just in Halifax  but throughout North America, those Haligonian women elevated plattering and plating food to a high art form. The combination of great Lithuanian Jewish cookery and English influenced  (fine china, silver and napery) serving modes made for delicious and elegant meals. My mother learned that every meat dish needed to be garnished by pillows of parsley sprigs and then punctuated by a bouquet of radish roses. My dear friend, S, born and raised in Halifax has invited us for Thanksgiving. She has entrusted me with the task of radish roses. It’s a bit of a joke between us. We both get how entirely silly this nearly lost skill is. And yet we  both love this wink to the lost world of elegant entertaining. By tomorrow, my radishes will be nicely blo...

Yesterday I spent most of the day in Princeton. I’m being considered for a parochet /ark curtain commission. My buddy eve was kind enough to let me stay at her beautiful home and chauffeur me around town so I didn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn.   After meeting with the parochet committee members I had lots to think about on the train ride home. I may be using materials that I don’t normally use to make the piece truly durable and work for the space. After I got home I had an initial meeting with Kyra to design her tallit for her bat-mitzvah. I always  love a kid with a definite opinion. Kyra knows what she wants.  She wants her tallit dead simple  out of heavy white silk charmeuse but with pink corners. No! She does not want an atara.   If she were any less clear about what she wanted I would encourage her to have a bit more going on on her tallit.   Today I began painting the silk for the pinot. this was thee first pass. It w...

The news from Israel was especially distressing this week. I knew one of the men who was murdered. He went to the same Jewish day school that I attended. His younger brother was in my class. The images of the bloodied tallitot and t’fillin were interspersed in my head with images of him playing basketball with his classmates. Shabbat comes very week. The regularity of those rituals is often healing.  My synagogue has a monthly Friday where they match guests to hosts.  Tonight we are hosting a dear friend who we have known for ages. We are also hosting a family we have never met before. They have two teenaged boys which I assume means two giant appetites.   I decided to make curried chicken. I pretended that I was an Indian grandma and mixed up my own curry powder.  I decided that my curry powder would consist of lots of turmeric plus flavors that I love. So this curry includes, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom,coriander, cumin, black pepper , cayenne and smoked papri...

These photos were taken during my youngest son’s week day bar mitzvah.   My father had died just six month before. I was going to morning minyan every day to say kaddish.  For my first moth of saying kaddish I overlapped with my husband who was saying kaddish for his mother. A few weeks after my father died a middle aged couple came to shul with their adult, pregnant daughter. The couple’s son had been killed in Iraq. just a few months before. When the couple came to visit their daughter all three came to shul together to say kaddish. As the months and weeks went on, each time the trio came to shul, the daughter was more and more pregnant. Most of us at Morning minyan is mourning a loss. Some of those losses are for elderly parents, and while sad are understandable. Some of those who came every morning were grieving truly tragic losses. My father died sooner than he ought to but he had lived a fairly long life.   The day of my son’s bar mitzvah. I was sad th...

My parents used to create Shabbat dinner in bulk food units.One week they would make a vat of barley with mushrooms. Another week they would make a brace of chickens. Yet another week would be challah week and they would make a dozen or so challot. One of those food units was our favorite, kasha. Each Friday they would pull out that week’s meal from the freezer. I associate kasha so completely with my father that I rarely make it. For a while my father alternated making kasha with varnishkes, or bowtie noodles and noodle free. He noticed that the kasha made with varnishkes always got finished. After that, out kasha always came with bow ties.   Kasha making is not difficult. you can make it like my father used to and just follow the recipe on the Wolff’s kasha box. Like all peasanty recipes it is flexible. This time I forgot to add sautéed onions and mushrooms. We will live without them. Before I serve the kasha I will pour out some of the chicken juices from the warmi...

Most tallitot begin with taking the first cut into  a piece of silk. This one is no exception. I had to do the usual cut and pull a thread to help me cut a straight line along 72 inches of slippery silk. Either I have gotten better at this, or this heavy weight silk just makes the job easier but after 72 inches I wasn’t a bit cranky. My eyes didn’t even ache.   Today I began the first layer of dyeing.   The color will be far less spectacular once the silk dries. The speckles are caused by large grains of salt. You can buy a teeny jar from the silk dye company marked “silk salt” but any large grained salt will do just fine. The larger the grain the more pronounced the design.   I have used everything from regular table salt to large sugar crystals or even uncooked rice. They all work.   I find that layers of thin dyes built up create a visually exciting surface with real depth of color. I hate colors right out of the jar. I hate looking at...

A few years ago I bought several volumes of this excellent twelve volume sewing course be Isabel De Nyse Conover. I have been on the lookout for the missing volumes  since I made my purchase. I had found individual volumes priced at what I had paid for the 8 volumes that I owned.  I really wanted the other volumes. Luckily the entire set ( missing the first 5o pages of the first volume) appeared on eBay. I was a successful bidder. I am delighted to own the missing volumes.   While I was reading Lesson 5 a piece of paper fluttered out from between the pages. It was a 1920’s advertisement for patterns. I am delighted that the ad includes the cutting diagrams for the patterns. One feature of flapper dresses was pleats or gathers over the hips.The skirt was cut wide over the hips, a slit  was cut and the additional width was gathered or pleated into the body of the dress. This book is based on the incredibly simple concept.   I am thinki...

The wedding is over. The gift was delivered. The bride, who truly would have looked beautiful wearing a burlap sack was spectacular in her dress. The groom was so deeply happy. I am NOT going to talk about the desperate crazed rush on Friday getting my mother ad her saintly caregiver to the hotel. I am NOT going to talk about how difficult it was for my sister to do the drive from Boston when every car between Boston and New York seem to have decided that driving south on Route 95 was just the thing to do at that moment. I AM going to talk about how crazy happy it makes me to see that my children understand how important it is to dance at a wedding with all of your body and all of your soul. I am also going to say how wonderful it is to see the deep tie between my children and their cousins. There were some deep splits between my mother and some of her siblings. There were parts of the family that we did not see for decades. Seeing the children and grandchildren of the wa...