sarah in nyc

My husband's birthday is tomorrow. As usual, he is not exactly looking forward to it. We decided to sweeten the day by inviting people he really likes to dinner. Some of them are relatives, others are friends. Amazon.com Widgets I made this dinner with my husband's likes and dislikes very much in mind.   My husband likes meat. I made lots of it. I also made some vaguely Middle Eastern rice with apricots. The salad is not pictured because it is not yet made. But these are the brussel sprouts. My husband's favorite salad dressing is the Italian dressing from the dollar store. Because it is my husband's birthday, the dressing will appear at the table. There are also desserts. There is another iteration of the Mario Batali chocolate biscotti, with dried apricots, candied ginger. whole almonds and big chunks of dark chocolate. There is another made up cake this one a Meyer Lemon and coconut cake enriched with Meyer lemon syrup.  ...

This has been a busy week. Monday I made a tea for one of the people who hosted my son during his years in Israel. I don't think that our guest got that the table setting was an oddball homage to my mother and her elegant hostessing style. This dishes and the linens were a mix of things that had belonged to my mother and stuff that ended up in our house.I think everything played together nicely. I think if my mother had seen my table on Monday she first would have been a little put out by the mix of dishes and linens and then she might have decided that it looked a little crazy, but OK.   Tuesday a dear friend was in town. She was my mentor at my earliest jobs here in New York. I think that we haven't seen one another in 15 years. My poor friend hasn't experienced a New York winter in a long time. I met her near where she was staying. As I walked east on 73rd street I was completely puzzled by this white terracotta mid block building. It stuck out like the prov...

My niece messaged me a week or so ago. she was going to be in town and wanted to join us with her brother. it was perfect, the last day of saying kaddish for my mother and it seemed perfect to have most of my mother's grandchildren seated around the table.  Amazon.com Widgets The meal then began to grow. I invited my beloved cousin who until recently was from the side of the family we didn't talk to.  I also invited my dear friend who represents the Halifax part of my mother's life. Unlike our diner breakfast where a seemingly endless number of tables and chairs can be added to accommodate the number of people we want to have at our table, our dining room and our table are very unforgiving. We can seat twelve and no more. I was not able to invite my mother's near-grandchildren, her sister's grandchildren who she treated very much like grandchildren.  In planning this meal I realize that much of it is food my mother would have hated.  My son cooked up a...

Today was my last day of saying kaddish for my mother. Today is the last morning for a long time that I will see dawn breaking over Broadway. Amazon.com Widgets There was a group of us who had all experienced loss within a couple of weeks of one another. Over the past year I joined with people who were just ahead of me in feeling the trauma of their loss. As the year went on, others joined the roster of mourners.  As people's years of mourning drew to an end the group we were together, shifted and rearranged itself.  After shaharit was over, we all went out for breakfast together. There were a lot of us. Someone joked that it could have been a seder. I was very aware as I ate breakfast with my friends, my community, how we all drag one another through the shoals of grief. When I was saying Kaddish for my father I often thought of him during the service. This go around I realized that I had fewer thoughts of my mother during services. This go around I have been c...

 I have been crazy busy for the past several days, and despite that, I am still behind on nearly everything I need to do. I am working away on the vintage lace tallit. I was feeling a little nervous about some of the aspects of the tallit so I decided to fake myself out by working on the pinot- the corner pieces. My client had brought me two quite spectacular doilies to use for the pinot. there are however four corners on a tallit. My client had shown me how on a tallit made out of other family linens, the monogram was used for one of the pinot. One of the things that fascinated me about this old linen piece is that the lace was really high quality work. The monograms, although meaningful to my client are actually not such nice work. There is a story in that mismatch of handwork. I don't know for sure what it is. I suspect that the fancy linens were handed down to a less fancy family. Here is one of the doilies stitched to the gold backing. I created a composition ...

 Today is Martin Luther King Day. We marked the day at shaharit in a variety of ways, we didn't recite Tachanun, we changed some melodies to mark the day. At the end of services we read some selections from king's " I Have a Dream" speech.Two of the people sitting in the room had attended the March on Washington and had heard those moving words in person in 1963. Last night i recalled how several weeks before Dr. King was assassinated I was present in the same room with him/ That year, he was the key note speaker at the Rabbinical Assembly convention. I remember him sitting at the dais in the dining room at dinner that night. I was deemed too little to stay up late to hear his talk later that evening. I do remember how excited my parents were both in anticipation of his talk that evening and then the next day talking about his talk to their community of rabbis. I was touched on my walk home to see that two buildings across 98th street from one another had mad...

This morning my walk to shul was accompanied by a sky that looked like it came out of a Tintoretto painting. On the way home  the sky was even more dramatic, and looked like it was generated by a computer. Today is a Friday of a weird week. My son's friend has been staying with us.  His friend was jetlagged. If you had come to my apartment at any point during the last week, at any moment of the day or night, you would have found at least one person asleep and at least one person awake.As I type this two people are sleeping.  Regardless of funky sleep patterns, Shabbat still begins today, so the cooking commenced right after breakfast.  This is what went into our chickens this week. One orange, three Meyer lemons and a pomegranate. Not pictured are the fennel seeds and the black pepper. This seems like exactly the right thing to eat in the middle of January. I baked some rice, rye and quinoa in the oven next to the chickens.  ...