sarah in nyc

This was not such a heavy cooking week. The challah was baked last week and a guest is bringing the vegetable matter. I decided to make the meatballs extra fancy by making them with caramelized onions. Who would have thought that something so simple could have such a hauntingly complex flavor. Like lots of the foods that I make, the secret ingredient is time. Here are the meatballs in their completed state. I will probably make some sort of a sauce to put over the meatballs when they heat up in the oven. It will probably be some sort of a sweet, savory vinegary smoky variety, that is some form of home made barbeque sauce.   I also made potatoes with lemon and baby spinach.   I am pretending that this is a Greek recipe. For all I know it might be, but I made it based on what was in the fridge. I am currently cooking up the mix for what will be tonight’s ice cream, apples, ginger and mixed berries sweetened with maple.   As I have mentioned previou...

Today was a special morning at Morning Minyan. It was Evan’s weekday bar-mitzvah. Evan is having a big bar- mitzvah this Shabbat, but today Evan put on t’fillin for the first time and had his first aliya. I know Evan from the time he was about four. He’s one of those kids with a sparkle in their eyes who is always on the prowl for a small adventure in the midst of the mundane. He has always been a particular favorite of mine.   This morning Evan and his parents sat in the row in front of me. As Michah, Evan’s father helped Evan put on his t’fillin for the first time,I was struck by the power of that moment. Fathers hold their son’s heads to help them put the head part of the t’fillin on. Then they take their son’s arm in theirs as they wrap their boy’s arm in the leather straps. The new t’fillin are stiff and inflexible. The bar-mitzvah boy usually has a skinny arm, and like Evan, the first time or two the t’fillin just fall down. The father has to take his son’s arm in h...

Although my head has been filled with thoughts of bricks  during the past couple of weeks I have also been working on Charlie’s tallit.   I had cut squares of white wool to the proper size. I knew that the letters needed to closely circle the eyelet  for the tzitzit. Charlie had mentioned that he wanted the lettering close in to the eyelet. I marked the spot for each eyelet by dipping  the back of a pen into a stamp pad and then painting the letters around that marked dot.   I did the diamond stitching around each of the pinot and then sewed each corner piece to the tallit using  gold metallic thread. Normally I make the hole for the eyelet by cutting into the hole with an X-acto knife.  I chose not to this time because the lettering was so close to the hole that there was no margin for error. X-acto knives have been known to slip.     I remembered that one traditional way to make the hole in an eyelet is to use an awl or a ...

Back in the days when I had  full time jobs I always managed to have jobs that were made of of radically different roles.  I had one job that required completely different clothing for different part of my day. There were days when I played on the floor with kids, and would get completely covered in paint and then I would have to  go change in the bathroom and get ready to attend a black tie dinner. I had always assumed that grown up people had jobs where they could play essentially the same role all day. Today my list of tasks included things that may never had all been done by one person in one day.  I led services this morning I will be leading kinot ( liturgical poems of loss and sorrow) on Sunday, Tisha B’av and needed to practice, so I was singing poetry from the time of the First Crusade I made chicken ( so far this sounds like a typical Friday for lots of people) I lay bricks ( My building is redoing the front courtyard. We are now up to setting up...

I have known Y since before she was born. I met Y’s parents before they had gotten married. Last year I had made a tallit for her. Y’s mother mentioned to me a few weeks ago that Y wanted to learn how to sew.I asked what her goals were, making clothing? making something else?   Y’s mother didn’t think that her daughter wanted to make clothing but she did want her daughter to learn how to use her new sewing machine.     They came by this afternoon with the Hello Kitty sewing machine. It’s a machine made by Janome and is better than you might think with Hello Kitty on the machine. We took the machine out of the box. I had Y thread and re thread the machine several times until it was an easy task for her to do.   I got out a scrap of fabric and showed Y how sharp the needle was and asked her to sew a seam. I showed her how to line up the edge of the fabric with the edge of the sewing machine and how you use that alignment to sew a straight seam. Y se...

This has been an emotionally complicated week. Last Friday my sister sent me an email telling me that Temple Beth El in Quincy was being knocked to the ground. When my father agreed to serve as Rabbi in Quincy the synagogue was not yet built. Those first High Holidays in 1957, services were held in the Jewish Community  Center just down the street in Merrymount.  services were held in an L-shaped room so only half of the congregation could see services being led.   Apparently a Chinese restaurant shared a wall with the back of the JCC and  the aroma of Chinese food cooking made Neila, the final service of Yom Kippur excruciating for the worshipers in the back rows.   From 1958 until the early 1960’s the sanctuary was a plain mustard colored cement block box with mustard colored drapes and linoleum floors. This would not do for my father. My father had, during his time in Halifax worked on beautifying that synagogue and helped the congregation acqu...

I suppose if I were a smarter business woman I wouldn’t have chosen to do teeny chain stitching around each of the letters on Charlie’s atara . But ultimately I worry more about getting the piece to look right than about dollars and cents.   I used the sewing machine to do the borders on the atara, a black diamond stitch and then the whole piece is edged with gold blanket stitching. My design had called for sprays of wheat. I used a mix of threads, copper metallic, the black and gold metallic I had used on the letters and an ivory sewing thread to make the wheat stalks.   I had thought that each grain of wheat could be formed by a single chain stitch. The idea worked fine in my head but in real life I just couldn’t get those grains to look right. I slept on the problem and came up with a different solution.   I did not do a whole lot of hand embroidery as a kid.  My older sister was pretty serious about embroidery when she was in her teens. She s...

  My nephew turned 22 a few weeks ago. He often cooks for his family when he is home and for himself while he is at college. I decided to give him 22 recipes as his gift. Every couple of days I post one or more recipes on his Facebook wall. I have been giving  recipes that I make  all the time by feel rather than by following a recipe.   My last recipe for him ( Recipe #14)was breaded fish. I mentioned in the text of the recipe that I had learned how to bread fish from my father in our yellow kitchen in Quincy.   Last night my oldest sister and I were talking bout the recipes that I have been giving my nephew. My sister had been suggesting that I look up some recipes on Epicurious. I explained that what I wanted to give were recipes that were deeply ingrained in me, not nifty new and unfamiliar things but the sorts of meals that I might make when time was at a premium.   My sister then talked about making kasha. My father made kasha often...

Grouse #1 Today I baked The Great Wall of Pita. This meant that the oven was baking away at 425 for a big chunk of the day. Grouse #2 Our dryer was on the fritz  for over a week and finally got fixed on Thursday. Today our washing machine stopped working mid load. Grouse #3 My sister did the lions share ( more than a lion’s share-- a lion pride’s share) of clearing out my mother’s apartment. We were left with a large amount of art that needs to be sold. I told my sister that I would take care of it.   Sunday evening it all arrived at my house. I felt so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it that I was sort of immobilized by it yesterday and got basically nothing done all day. Today I hid some of it away , and will hide more away this evening, so at least the dining room table is clear.   (If any of you have any connections to art dealers who deal with Jewish and Israeli art, let me know) OK. That’s enough grousing for the moment.  I do want to ...

the last time I posted about Charlie’s tallit my big decision was which fabric to use for the atara. I ended up choosing the wool broadcloth. My next step was painting the letters onto the wool. I began with by painting the lettering with a flat tipped brush with black and then I outlined the letters with gold paint. I was planning to embroider around the letters. I wasn’t sure if I would machine embroider or work by hand.  Each have certain advantages. Machine embroidery is faster, but fiddlier. What I end up doing is essentially using the sewing machine as a paint brush.  While it is doable with a whole verse full of lettering one needs to be in the right mood to approach the task.   I was going through a mild case of food poisoning from a restaurant meal and frankly my ability to focus was not at it’s best. I decided to hand embroider around the letters. It would take longer but worked with how my brain was working.   Before I could start though, I ...