sarah in nyc

I was asked to do a recipe for gravlax. I checked out the retail cost for this delicacy on the Zabar’s website. If you buy this ready made it will set you back $60/lb.  It’s easy enough to find good salmon for less than $15/lb. Gravlax is so easy to make I would be comfortable asking a grade school child who had never cooked before  to make it (but not to slice the fish).   This is how to do it. You need equal amounts of sugar and salt. I like using brown sugar, but if you haven’t any in your pantry use white. How much to use??? Enough to thickly coat the fish. Traditionally, gravlax is made as two sides of fish that are sandwiched together with the salt/sugar mix in between. You can certainly make just one fish side at a time. I cut the fat ends off of two matched filets of salmon. Mix the salt and sugar. You can if you wish add some gin to the mixture and turn the salt and sugar into a thick paste. You can also add a few juniper berries if you can ...

Perhaps because my parents started their married life in Halifax, NS where kosher take out just didn’t exist, they assumed that all food needed to be prepared at home. Their next move was to Quincy, MA which was just off the beaten path for Jewish life in Boston.   I would think that even in the early 1960’s you could go to Harvard Street in Brookline and assemble a pretty decent Shabbat meal without having to resort to turning on your stove. But my parents used to have to plan their acquisition of kosher meat in advance. They used to place a giant order at American Kosher on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan and bring home several large  cardboard cartons of chicken and meat all wrapped up in white butcher paper and marked with it’s contents.   The thought of wandering to the store on Friday  to figure out what you wanted to eat for Shabbat was completely foreign to my parents.   Most people who grew up in New York assume that pretty decent Jewish prepar...

Getting ready for a day where we abstain from food requires a whole lot of food prep. Yesterday I got ready to make Cholesterol Death Kugel. (If you need to make it right now you can find the recipe if you click on the word Kugel on the tags on the right) The kugel is made with dairy. If you can’t eat dairy take your lactaid pills before you eat it. There are no substitutions in this case. I decided to make the noodles from scratch. here is my dough resting under glass. Will any of our guests actually notice that they are eating noodles that worked my upper body to it’s limit? Probably not. They may notice that the kugel tastes like love, and that may in fact be enough. I have used the kugel pan to weigh down the gravlax which is brining away on the bottom of the fridge. Before Neila I will slice the fish into paper thin slices. I assume that I will be slicing the fish with a very tiny brain so I have already sliced up most of the other vegetables. I don’t want to slice up my...

I begin this post with the great wall of Challah. I had thought that the batch I had made before Rosh HaShanah would last through Yom Kippur but I was mistaken. Now, I hope that this batch will take us through the beginning of Sukkot. The previous batch with the addition of apple butter was OK. Unfortunately the texture was changed from a nice muscular bread  dough to something rather cake like. This was not what I go or in my challah. This is an experiment that I will not repeat. When I had gone to our local market to buy a shehechiyanu / a new fruit for the holiday the pickings were really slim. Part of it was that we eat a fairly diverse bunch of fruits in our regular diet. I also think that last year our local market went nuts with weird fruit and mostly it didn’t get purchased. The one  item in the market that looked like something we had never eaten was a squash that looked something like this squash . It was not quite a yard long. We kept it in a vase on the di...

On the first day of Rosh HaShanah a friend mentioned that last Rosh Hashanah she was weeping throughout the service because a dear friend was dying. The weeping reminded her of something her late father used to say about "The old lady who cries all through the High Holiday services." Amazon.com Widgets My friend said" I think I have become that lady." She wasn't feeling as devastated this year, but she was feeling sad, remembering her loss from last year and also thinking about our mutual friend whose father is now actively dying. My conversation with my friend, but more than that just living through this season brings back the memories of hard high holiday seasons. The hardest of all was the year our friends child in a perfect storm of a genetic flaw and a fall was in the middle of what felt like a real life episode of the medical mystery show House. House always had the same dramatic arc during the hour long show. Usually at about the 42 minute...

  Open the gates of  the heavens to our prayers with mercy the gates of mercy  the gates of prayer  the gates of penitence the gates of the time of desire the gates of the time of asking the gates of healing the gates of holiness the gates of thanksgiving the gates of Torah the gate of a good life the gates of redemption the gates of greatness  the gates of children and grandchildren the gates of long life.... Amazon.com Widgets

When I was I fifth grade there was a new girl in my class. She had come from Israel with her family,and  we were classmates for three school years. We became very close during that time. We were both younger than most of our classmates. We did lots of talking during those years. Our school day started with morning services in the beautiful chapel. We of course sat behind the curtain in the women’s section often we sat next to one another. Both of us were really interested in davening with kavanah , (with focused intentionality) and figuring out how we could make that happen. Sitting behind the mechitza often causes women to kind of opt out of the experience. On Shabbatot  I was used to sitting in a synagogue with mixed seating. Although my home synagogue was not yet egalitarian I was brought up with the sense that davening with seriousness was expected of me. Most of the girls behind the mechitza with us, though certainly not all of the girls  used davening time t...

  Yesterday, or was it the day before yesterday, with the help of my son I steamed two cabbages  to remove the leaves for making stuffed cabbage. The hardest part for me about making stuffed cabbage is getting those blasted leaves off of the cabbage.  I know from reading old Jewish cook books that stuffed cabbage was traditionally served on Purim as a symbol of how Esther had to hid her real identity in order to marry the king. My mother never served stuffed cabbage on Purim and only made it for the High Holidays. I see the appropriate symbolism more in the making of the cabbage, you need to strip down all of those outer layers to get at the core of the truth. Regardless of the appropriateness of stuffed cabbage at Rosh HaShanah either for reasons of meaning or for the realities of the season ( It has been sweltering out and perhaps Eastern European wintertime food is not the best choice)when I discussed the menu for this holiday season with my son and cooking...

for our trip to Cincinnati was not just to catch beautiful sunrises from the parking lot of the  Adath Israel parking lot. The reason we went was that the Skirball Museum at HUC in Cincinnati accepted the  spectacular stained glass windows that were created for Temple Beth El in Quincy by my father with artist David Holleman. Temple Beth El was reduced to a pile of rubble earlier this summer. many of the treasures in the synagogue have found new homes both communal homes and private homes. The windows though are massive and it was difficult to find them a home. Until just a couple of weeks ago I saw the destruction of the synagogue, the thought of a wrecking ball smashing that beautiful jewel box into smithereens as a personal loss. So many of the conversations about the development of each element of making the synagogue beautiful took place in our house on Presidents Lane. The model for the bima lived in our basement for decades. I remember Mr. Holleman bringing...