sarah in nyc

Roz Chast is sort of a big deal in our household. We own most of the books that she has put out. Captions lines from her cartoons have made their way into our family vocabulary. We knew that we just had to go see the exhibit of her work at The Museum of the City of New York. the museum is right across the park from our apartment. It was beastly hot out so we took the bus. We spotted some cool plant life along Fifth Avenue. Amazon.com Widgets I love going to museums. But there is nothing better than going to a museum where the visitors are laughing. Roz Chast's cartoons always maker her seem like she is perhaps one of my cousins. She is a New Yorker who truly gets what it is like to live here. She must have drawn this one for my youngest.  And this one was drawn for my husband, and me. Roz's father favorite foods align pretty closely with my husband's , with the exception of ham and schav. I loved th...

I took this photo at the intersection of Broadway and 99th Street. With a bit of careful zooming my urban neighborhood looks bucolic. At the next block I included a bit of the urban landscape.  As for the euphemism. During the late 19th century instututions were called exactly what they were. There were institutions like   Jewish Home for the Feeble Minded and Crippled  or Home for the Elderly and Indigent. As the decades have rolled on the names of institutions have gotten further and further from the blunt names of yesteryear. This building is going up a block from my apartment. It's a nice name but it makes me kind of miss the more direct names of the past. Now that I am on the topic of old...here is a moment to show you my old dough/sour dough . I had made a loose bread dough early in the week. Each time I made bread this week I pulled off a lump of this sloppy mess and then used that as the basis of a new bread. before I returned the br...

As I was folding my laundry this morning, one of the garments I didn't fold was a simple dress that needed to be ironed. As I looked at the dress I realized that my reading entirely too many vintage sewing books made me categorize the dress as a "wash dress". When I first came across the term wash dress I had mistakenly thought it was a dress one wore to do laundry. As I saw the term more often I came to realize that a wash dress is one that washes easily and can be ironed simply. A dress with no tricky parts to iron in those pre-spandex days was called a wash dress. Again and again I found dress drafts for dresses and night gowns that were praised for how easy they were to iron. The blue dress in the photo above is a wash dress because once you remove the belt you can just lay it flat and iron it is under five minutes. There are other dress categories that no longer exist. Afternoon dress This is a dress that you might wear to a dressed up event in the a...

from a sewing lesson. Amazon.com Widgets At first I thought that I would just take photos of water towers as I walked home. But then as I walked up Broadway, the glimpses of the setting sun at each cross street was too compelling to continue looking at the water towers. The buildings on the east side of Broadway glowed from the setting sun. As I walked the color of the sky intensified. I stood in the middle of the crosswalk to get these shots.  Luckily no cars ran the red light as I was taking these photos.

Navah is one of the few people here in New York who knows me from childhood. She and her husband were several years younger than my parents. They were the cool grownups in my childhood memories.  I am wearing the blindingly white tights, Navah is wearing a cool peasant inspired maxi dress  Amazon.com Widgets Navah has been needle pointing tallit bags for her husband, her son and her grandchildren. I would guess that the first of the bags was in the planning stages when the above photo was taken.( This was the great hey-day of needlepoint. My own adventures in needlepoint began right around this time.  For the last several years I have been providing the lettering for Navah's tallit bags. This time after completing her bag Navah asked me to also construct the bag. While I had done lots of needlepoint from the ages of 11 to 18 or so, finishing off needlepoint was not something I had done before. I found several sites that explained how to finish the pi...

Roasted Brussels sprouts make me regret all of my decades of Brussels Sprouts hate. These are cooked in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, Herbes de Provence and lots of freshly ground black pepper. There are also some mushrooms tossed in the pan.  This ugly looking stuff in a bowl is magic in the form of sour dough. My friend Alan is serious about creating an actual sour dough. My version, is as one might expect, a little less exact. When I make a bread dough I leave part of it to hang out in the fridge as a sloppy wet dough. I have been pulling out some to do my weekday baking and adding a bit more water and flour to the bowl that stays in the fridge. It bubbles and grows and has been the leavening agent for three batches of bread this week, I have been loving the best bread baking flour ever. We purchased it in the frum market in Boro Park.I love how it is packaged in a plain brown paper bag. it has tons of gluten and creates a nice muscular dough. I did a...