A Labor Day Adventure

On Mother's Day we had eaten a spectacular meal at Angela's restaurant in Boro Park.

We decided to end the last gasp of summer with another meal there. Angela's is a kosher Uzbeki meat restaurant.

The decor, despite this chandelier, is very simple. The food, mostly skewered meats is great. The menu is mostly in Russian. The waitress, reminds me of Gilda Radner doing a bit as a waitress in an Uzbeki restaurant. While the restaurant is physically in New York City once you walk in, you are in an Uzbeki restaurant. Just go with the flow. Most of what you expect in a restaurant just does not apply here. If you want fancy service, go elsewhere.

Gilda will tell you what you need to eat. You can refuse some of the offerings, but basically Gilda is in charge.

We ordered one house salad, not pictured and one pickled salad.

The pickled cherry tomatoes were particularly adored by my family . The restaurant pickles their own vegetables.

You can spot a bit of the plastic table cloth over the brocade cloth. Yes, there is heavy gold fringe at the edge of the table cloth.

You get your food as it gets cooked. First the bread comes hot from the kitchen.Gilda will tell you to order it. Listen to Gilda.

Your meat is cooked on a grill by the front door. Each item arrives as it is cooked.

We got chicken hearts and beef hearts. This is the beef heart. It's chewy and delicious.

We got sweetbreads, and beef.

We also got lamb.

You can see Gilda in the background. She is probably making salad. We watched Uzbeki news as we ate. An important politician died. We watched the funeral procession with crowds tossing flowers at the cars in the procession. We also saw various memorial banquets and the Uzbeki dignitaries who took part. Perhaps they ate a meal as good as ours was.

Gilda told us that we should also order chicken . We did not. We were beyond full even without the chicken. We ate our fill of little grilled bits of meat.

We drove our daughter back to her home in the Bronx. The bossy direction lady on Google Maps got us to the Brooklyn Bridge,

up the East Side,

and up to the Bronx.

We then drove south back to Manhattan,

along the Hudson River

As we pulled off the highway, I realized we had completely circumnavigated the island.

You can see a bit of the sunset in the car's rear view mirror.

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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