sarah in nyc

Recently my husband and I watched some videos from when the kids were little. For the next several days my husband kept musing about how adorable the kids were when they were small and how much he missed that time in their lives.   As I watched those videos while I did see how sweet the kids were, what I also remembered was how completely exhausting that time was. Watching those videos I was reminded about how difficult it was to balance the disparate needs of three kids of two genders with an eight year age span.   Not that there weren’t pleasure from their early childhoods, there were, and lots of them. But living with adults is pretty wonderful.I feel it every day, but some days more than others.   Our dryer is on the fritz.We are now waiting for parts. it has been several days without the dryer. Today I have been doing laundry in the machines in the basement. That activity has taken most of my day. My older son has baked the challah and made meatballs an...

I am still figuring out some aspects of Charlie’s atara. The design calls for sprigs of wheat. If I lived in a perfect world there would be a place nearby that sold high quality embroidery threads. When I first moved to this neighborhood in the early 1980’s I would have had several choices of places to buy embroidery thread all within easy walking distance. Many many factors have combines to make a nice selection of embroidery threads an impossibility not only in the neighborhood, but even the notions stores in the garment district have pallid selections.   I have been working on solving this problem on a back burner of my brain for the past week or so. I suppose that I could order threads from a specialty store online and wait until they shipped my order to me. I also have to figure out how I will be creating those stalks of wheat. I wanted to get my hands working on the problem.   I had a gift to deliver further up on Broadway while I was walking home I figured out...

This morning as I began to mix up the spices for my chicken I decided to pretend that I was a Grandma who came from somewhere in the Middle East. A couple of summers ago my sister took me to an Iraqi restaurant in Lowell, MA and I understood in my mouth the connection between the food of India and the food of the Middle East. So, perhaps I wasn’t exactly a grandma from Iraq but I was playing with that blend of flavors. So there was lots of turmeric, cinnamon, black pepper and sumac and cumin mixed together. There may have been some other spices in the bowl but I can’t for sure swear to what I added to the bowl.   I massaged the spices into the chicken, and a few hours later we ended up with this. Two beautiful fragrant chickens. They are now cut up and sitting in the fridge waiting to be warmed up for dinner. I also made potatoes. the fruit and vegetable pushcart guys are selling beautiful tomatoes so I bought some and roughly chopped them up, and added them to the po...

I am making an atara neckband and pinot   for this beloved old wool tallit.    I am giving my client three possible choices. This is a soft wool with a Lurex stripe. This is a smooth faced wool broadcloth. And finally there is a silk tussah. Each have nice qualities. It will be interesting to see which one my client chooses.   I suppose if I were more of an artiste   I would just tell my client what he needed and be done with it. Charlie, my client is a thoughtful man who makes deliberate choices. Earlier this week I removed the tzitzit. Someone, I assume a child had added a really tight knot to one of the tzitzit. That is what happens when you go to shul with a child. I have occasionally come across tallitot where the tzitzit have been tied into crazy arrays of knots. Little kids can get bored at services and there is something quite compelling about playing with tzitzit. I wasn’t sure if I could actually undo the knot. It took s...

During the Boston part of my mother’s Shiva, my cousin Sid mentioned that he had a challah cover that my mother had embroidered for his family. He said that he had used that challah cover throughout his childhood and even had taken it from his mother’s house and had used it as an adult. Sid talked about how much he loved the challah cover and how much he wanted me to have it.   A little while after Shiva, Sid's daughter, Emily brought me the challah cover.   This is the challah cover. The design itself is entirely standard. One used to be able to buy a linen rectangle with this design printed in blue.   A few weeks ago I had Shabbat lunch  at my friend Anne’s.  Anne’s mother who was a few years older than my mother had embroidered exactly the same design. Anne’s mother did all of the embroidery in a soft grey. The letters were filled in with satin stitch  and Anne’s mother who was an accomplished seamstress lined her challah cover with a p...

For the past couple of weeks I have been trying to integrate the stuff from my mother’s house into our own stuff filled apartment.   So here is a little landscape of things from my parents and things we had . There are two more plates that need to be up on the wall below the square silver platter. I have some themes that I am working on developing here. I know, it’s still not clear to anyone not living inside my head, but by the time I am done it won’t look  like an antique shop run by a crazy person.   For those of you looking for a Food Friday entry, tonight’s dinner was tag teamed by me and my older son. he made the challah. I made chicken with sumac smoked paprika and crushed tomatoes,and flanken ribs with mustard and maple syrup.   Week after week I will make a meal Friday night in my usual “Let’s see what’s hanging around in the fridge and what mood am I in.” method of meal planning and the next morning the Wall Street Journal food article will ...

A couple of days ago my friend Sue mentioned that her Yiddish speaking grandmother used to used the expression “ lokshen mit kaese” as the equivalent of hunky dory, to describe a situation as being easy . Sue’s grandmother’s expression also refers to the dish I am so fond of making. As I type this I realize that”easy as pie” might be a nicer food equivalent of the expression but it is I think missing the sense of people being at peace and getting along that the Yiddish expression implies.   I was thinking about this because I was planning a dinner to serve to beloved relatives who were in from  out of town. I particularly wanted to serve the lokshen mit kaese made with home made noodles, so my relatives could understand with each mouthful how happy I was to see them. A while back I was reading in a fancy bread cookbook that you need to make bread with a dough cloth on the kneading surface. After thinking about it a bit I realized that all I really needed was a tea tow...

I haven’t been posting all that much because I have been wading through the boxes and boxes of STUFF from my mother’s apartment. My mother was a big record keeper. She noted every penny spent and on what. My parents kept folders on every piece of artwork they purchased. Here you see the tags from most of the Persian carpets they purchased. To save space, I have been pulling photos out of albums and putting them into shoe boxes by decade. My father had assembled folders of photos that had never made it into albums. This was one of the photos I had found.   Our family with their friend Rifka, just before she and her husband moved to New York. I am about three in this photo. Here is a photo of my Aunt Dina, and her husband, Uncle Nathan in their home in Rutherford, NJ. Nathan was like the prankster character you find in classic folk tales. Kids adored him. Adults were often exasperated by him. Dina helped to support my mother’s family when they fell on hard times d...

This is the challah cover that my parents used for most of my time growing up. I believe they purchased it in 1955 during their trip to Israel. The embroidery is done by hand by a skilled embroiderer. The text in the center reads,   Shabbat Kodesh   /Holy Sabbath. This piece was probably not embroidered by the designer. This challah cover is like many of the challah covers produced at the time, produced by hand in some sort of a workshop setting. I always loved how the wheat looked casually strewn around the text and yet formed itself into a satisfyingly formal  composition.  ( Clearly I didn’t have that sort of a vocabulary as a child, but I did have those thoughts.) Those sort of hand work- workshops don’t really exist anymore in Israel. During the time that this piece was produced, Israel was working it’s way from being a third world economy to being a second world economy. Today, the Israeli economy is simply too strong  for these sorts of workshops to...

 A few weeks ago I got an email from a friend of a friend. His tallit needed repairs. The ribbon used for the atara had gotten grotty. The pinot were in sad shape. Some of the edges of the tallit had frayed. Would I be able to repair the tallit? Of course I would. But I also let the writer know that it might cost him less to just replace the tallit. He replied that that tallit was full of meaning to him and he would prefer to keep the tallit. I suggested a low cost option of ordering the ribbon from a tallit supply house and just having the local dry cleaning establishment replace the ribbon both on the atara and the pinot.  I also mentioned that I could design a new atara and pinot along with repairing the worn spots on the tallit. Charlie asked to see photos of my work. Much to my surprise, Charlie decided to work with  me rather than just going with a simple repair. As I suspected,the tallit was purchased for Charlie's wedding and he was commit...