sarah in nyc

There are many glorious things about being a guest instead of a host of Thanksgiving. We ate a pretty spectacular meal yesterday at my dear friend’s home. We came home to a clean house. What we don’t have is left overs. My youngest is home from college and is starved for meat. I decided to satisfy this need ( Although I assume that yesterday’s consumption of vast amounts of brisket and turkey put something of a dent in his meat debt.) Tonight’s dinner features a veritable Pu-Pu platter of beef. We have it in sliced London broil form with a smoky ,vinegary home made barbecue sauce. We also have ribs. There are also some kofta which are not pictured.  I assume that after dinner there might be a couple of scraps of meat left, but then again, perhaps not. The Thanksgiving flavors of pumpkin and maple syrup and cranberry for me are as much part of the fall season as leaves turning color. My daughter is particularly fond of pumpkin. The Pilgrims used to serve the pies a...

Sandy had asked me to put together a recipe for the sour dough corn bread. So, here it is more or less. This gloppy stuff is my starter. It began life as a loose  bread dough yesterday. I didn’t measure, but I think I may have started with about two cups of water, a teaspoon of yeast, a table spoon of salt and one of brown sugar. Most of it got turned into yesterday’s excellent fennel loaf.   The remainder has been sitting in a small plastic bowl covered by a plastic shower cap in my fridge.You can see that I have added an assortment of grains to this starter. I can’t remember for sure but I think there is wheat germ and bran in there. I then took out a lump of the starter to begin my next loaf. Most of the rest of the starter went back into the fridge after I added a bit more flour and water to the bowl. I then got to work on the new loaf of bread.  I added another tablespoon of brown sugar to starter in the bowl. And then I added a tablespoon of salt. ...

I am feeling a bit of uncharacteristic challah anxiety today. Tonight we are invited to a friend’s house. One of the other guests is my friend Alan, a serious cook. Alan has been playing, (actually that’s the wrong word, when it comes to food Alan doesn’t play, he works seriously and analytically at food) at making sour dough challah. Alan’s challot are great.They are very different than my challot and they are fabulous. I have been playing with my rough approximation of sour dough. My version of sour dough is basically letting a loose wet dough hang out for a few days in the fridge and then using that as the leavening agent instead of dry yeast.   I have enjoyed doing it. It has been a nice lazy way to bake. Each time I want to bake bread I take a slobbery plop of the stuff and use it to start my dough. I thought I had the magic touch, until today.   These are my challot before baking. They haven’t risen all that much.  I am feeling challah anxiety. ...

  Today, my head has been full of the deaths of two young people who both died far too young. Yesterday, Ezra Schwartz, 18 was murdered in Israel. I don’t know Ezra but he comes out of a world that I am deeply familiar with. This June he graduated the same Jewish day school that I attended. It’s a small school. It’s small enough that you know kids several years younger and older than you are. I probably went to school with the parents of Ezra’s grieving classmates. Ezra, like my son chose to do a gap year in Israel. Those gap year programs are transformative. Usually your child comes home transformed, matured.   Ezra unfortunately was killed by someone who found his existence on the planet and more specifically in Israel, to be unbearable. When I was in college I worked at the Lemberg Day Care center at Brandeis.At Lemberg we spent lots of time teaching our kids how to solve conflicts. We taught them how to explain how their feelings were hurt and how to work out...

I usually take my camera with me when I go out. Sunday, I had gone to the movies with a friend and then I walked back from 72nd street. Is I walked north I just loved the golden late afternoon light. I made several stops as I walked north on Broadway and the sky turned rosy. I know one doesn’t normally think of the intersection of Broadway and 96th street as a place filled with lyrical gorgeous light, but sometimes it is. Looking south as I turned into to my block I loved the crescent moon over Broadway. This morning as I was working out I was distracted by the beautiful light and had to take a break from aerobics to take these photos. It had been grey and nasty when I had been out earlier and the sun had begun to come out.  I have always been in love with sunlight bouncing off of clouds. I also love the layering of the not meant for public view backs of the buildings on the east side of West End Avenue  with the fancy facades from the west side of ...

What you see here is a knit pencil skirt with a paisley print. it looks completely simple, a no brainer. The fabric for this skirt came in a Fabric Mart mystery bundle. It was a 3/4 yard length of a print that was bright in two areas of the fabric and faded to dark. There wasn’t enough yardage for a dress. I had some fabrics that I could possibly marry to this one to create a dress. the other complicating factor what the placement of the lighter areas of the print.   I kept the fabric near my sewing machine ad every once in a while would take it out, look at it, wrap the fabric around my body and realize that I still hadn’t figured out what to do. Finally, last week the light bulb went off in my head. If I cut the skirt with the lightest areas front and center (and also at the center back) I could end up with a skirt that didn’t look like it was made by a blind seamstress. The skirt came together quickly after the months of mulling. The solution seems obvious. mayb...

I grew up in a family where food was used to express love. My husband grew up in a family where his mother was an anxious and mostly terrible cook.  My brother in law famously  tells that he didn’t know food was supposed to taste good until he left home. My husband didn’t find out about salad dressing until he left for college. I found eating at my mother in law’s table to be a highly anxiety provoking experience. We would be called to the table for a meal  I would sit down. Whoops! the table wasn’t set. I would attempt to set the table. I would locate the paper plates and the broken straw paper plate holders (this was after all a company meal!). My mother in law would be yelling at everyone to sit down and I would try to locate enough silverware to set the table.   We would sit down. Whoops! We had to clear the stacks of newspapers off of the chairs so people could sit at the table. Perhaps we had to go into a bed room to find a chair and bring that to the tab...

Tonight’s challah started out looking like this. It began with the wet, loose bread dough I had put into the fridge a few days ago. I had already made at least one big loaf out of a large chunk of this sloppy looking mixture on Wednesday. I guess this is more or less sour dough. It smells fermented. This photograph actually shows the most photogenic part of the mass/mess that had been hanging out in a stainless steel bowl on the bottom shelf of my fridge. I made essentially the same challah dough I usually make. The texture felt different than my usual commercially yeast risen dough. It felt a bit more fragile and less robust. I thought I had about a 50% chance of the dough actually rising and was willing to take the risk. The dough did rise, but it took longer than usual. I made a test roll for me to taste. It’s a more delicate bread than the usual. I would do this again.   My friend Alan Divak has been doing lots of sour dough challah baking in the past several ...