sarah in nyc

Today I was ironing. in addition to the tablecloths shirts and dresses that are part of my weekly ironing, this week I had a batch of doily's to iron. The sainted woman who cleans my house artistically covers various tables and dressers with some of the many bits of old linens in my collection. She changes them as they get dusty. I dutifully wash and iron them so she can put out a new fresh batch. Most of these come from from my friend Vivian. All of these pieces are small. None is bigger than about 8 inches across.   The round eyelet doily probably came from Mary, Uncle Irving's long time girlfriend. She and the rest of her family were heavy smokers. Nearly every piece I inherited from her has at least one cigarette burn  The eyelet design on the doily below isn't all that interesting but the quality of the work is pretty spectacular. I don't know if you can see the teeny French knots at the center of each quadrant. I think this is a bread tray liner. Ama...

After a month of feeling draggy, sort of edge of sick but not sick enough to just say in bed I finally went to the doctor. I am sick . Amazon.com Widgets The super strength Sudafed has me all sped up which is fun after weeks of feeling like a pile of dirty laundry. But I am still sick enough to be all loopy in the head. It's an interesting combination fast and stupid and probably a good thing that I am not driving. Hopefully the super strength antibiotics will do their thing. My doctor is on the second floor of an East Side building and I just loved the view from the steps.

It's hot out. Amazon.com Widgets I made chicken using some of the Tsere I had bought a couple of years ago. Tsere is an African mixture of hot peppers and peanuts that packs a punch. It gets hot in Africa,they know how to make food for this weather. It will be perfect for tonight. While the chicken was roasting I roasted some tomatoes that will go into tonight's salad. Since you asked nicely I will tell you that I sprinkled them with Zaatar. Tonight's dessert is Creamsicle flavored parev ice cream.Here is a pot with a hefty tablespoon of flour, but I could have used corn or potato starch instead, a cup of sugar and the grated rind of an orange. I cut the orange  and then used my fancy orange juicing tool to get out every bit of juice. yes, i squeezed the orange right over the pot. Who needs to was extra dishes? I added some commercial orange juice and some water  and a bit of olive oil, and set the pot to simmer. When the mixture came to ...

While much of my father-in-law's best work was marginalia, doodles quickly done on the margins of the newspaper or on the backs of envelopes or in his children's discarded marble notebooks we also have a collection of sketchbooks. Amazon.com Widgets In preparing for the visit of  Rob and Gaetan from the Lost Art Salon , my husband has been bringing some of those sketchbooks home. As I was going through one of the sketchbooks I found this image. My father-in-law didn't date this sketch, but other sketches in this book include a series done of my oldest as a just born baby still in the hospital, so this helps to date this drawing to 1988. The resemblance to our youngest who wasn't yet ( as the old women of my Hospital Hill neighborhood would say) " Not even a twinkle in his  other's eye", is striking and at first glance kind of spooky. Before you start playing the meaningful chords on an organ in your head, you need to remember a few t...

I feel crummy. But Shabbat is tonight. My lousy sons have jobs and are not around to wait on me hand and foot and cook Shabbat dinner. So I needed to cook for tonight. Amazon.com Widgets I had made a big bread dough yesterday and only baked half of it. Today was a challah baking week. I suppose I could be fancy and say that I used a starter to bake this weeks challah. The truth is, It was half a batch of yesterday's dough. I pretended that that lump of dough was yeast and just added all of my usual challah ingredients to it. I did have a moment of "what if it doesn't rise" panic and added about 1/4 of a tsp of yeast to the bowl of dough. It was probably not necessary. I thought that a loose dough, that is with not all of the flour in it would rise better, so I let the mixture just hang out for about 30 minute. I came back to see this. Lots of bubbles are a good sign at this stage. My old lump of bread dough was doing it's job as a...

My late father-in-law Morris was an artist. I think that in his younger years he had hopes of becoming a big name artist. He was an art teacher in the New York City public school system, and by the time he retired he was an art supervisor in Queens helping to create and develop art curricula across his school district. During his long life (he lived to be not quite 98) my father-in-law produced a large body of work.  When my husband was given the monumental job of closing up his parents' house in Queens, my husband gathered up all of his father's paintings and drawings stashed all through the house and stored them in a storage locker in Long Island City. A couple of years ago I found a link to  Lost Art Salon , which collects, displays and sells the art of accomplished mid-20th century artists who nevertheless never achieved fame. It seemed to me like it might be a good home for some of my late father-in-law's work. When we went to San Francisco this pa...

Today I was asked to fix a Torah mantle.  If you only looked at the top of the mantle you would think that it looked like it was in good shape.  The bottom inch or so was completely looked chewed up.The velvet had worn away. In fact, the last couple of inches at one of the sides was completely gone. The mantle was made out of a shade of plum velvet that was popular during the late 1980's and would be difficult if not impossible to match. I thought that I could construct a ribbon to cover all of the ugly bits. I began by stitching two rows of plum velvet ribbon to the navy blue grosgrain.using a bronze metallic thread. it was a good beginning but not quite enough. I then noticed the embroidered border of grapes at the top of the mantle. So I painted a row of grapes in the center of the ribbon. It took a while. I sewed the ribbon onto the mantle and patched up some of the really grotty bits on the inside of the mantle. I noticed that th...