sarah in nyc

The sign in the dress shop across the street says it. Amazon.com Widgets But the flowers in the tree pits announce that it is spring as well. On a different note, I found an old friend on the street today being sold by one of the men who sells books from folding tables  along Broadway. I had bought this book in 1974 or 5. There was a needlepoint conference taking place in Boston at one of the downtown hotels. I was at that point pretty serious about needlepoint. I think my parents may have given me permission to leave school early to go. I think it may have been around the time of my birthday so they gave me some money to buy stuff.  I bought this book. It was expensive, $25.00.  The book had an excellent history of needlepoint and even better large and well drafted instructions of how to do hundreds of different stitches. After I would finish my homework I would work on mastering stitches.  I approached the book like I do any other big ...

A dear friend had a note pad in her apartment that read " the only domestic thing about me is that I live in a house."  It is a pretty funny line. Amazon.com Widgets For most of us who grew up in the 1960's and 70's we saw the teaching of home economics in the schools as a dreadful retrograde tool to keep women out of the marketplace and tied to home. For some perverse reason I have been reading books on the teaching of what used to be called Home Science, Home Economics or Domestic Science since I was in my early teens. I was fortunate that my local library had a pretty good collection if such books in the stacks. I still don't quite understand why I was so drawn to those musty books on child rearing and home care from the earliest years of the 20th century. In my teens I loved seeing how the world depicted in those books seemed so different from my own. What I have come to learn in my reading over the years is that rather than bei...

My parents had many prized possessions, but among the objects they loved was a set of pewter plates they found in a local antique store. Amazon.com Widgets They are most probably 19th century copies of 18th century plates. The top one reads Shabbes Fish  the lower plate reads  Shabbes Kugel. Those plates hung in our kitchen in Quincy from the time my parents acquired them in the 1970's until after my mother died. Now they hang in our dining room. During Passover we ate one big meat meal after another. I wanted to have a lighter meal this Shabbat. I suggested to my husband that we eat fish tonight. He quipped that we should eat both S habbes Fish and Shabbes Kugel,   just like our plates. I rarely make kugel  but to match the plates, I did. It's a spinach and cheese kugel. It isn't cooked in a round pot like the one on the pewter plate. I know that those round kugel pots were how kugels were made in Eastern Europe but I think that both of my paren...

Rebecca and I have worked together on and off over the years I have taught her how to sew. Amazon.com Widgets Lots of kids in our community are primarily smart in,  for lack of a better term, book learning. Rebecca is a smart kid but she is at the core someone who is smart with her body. She is an athlete and a dancer and understands the world in much more of a physical way than an intellectual way. She had gone to a Jewish day school for elementary school and it left her something of an anti-theist. Rebecca was unsure if she wanted a tallit or not. We met and talked. ultimately she did want a tallit.  Choosing the fabrics for the tallit was easy, selecting the text was harder. Rebecca chose a taupe shantung for the body of the tallit and orange organza for the 'stripe". The text she chose is one I often suggest for the theistic-ally challanged. it comes from the Shabbat morning services if only our mouths were as filled with song as the sea and our tongues filled ...

The reality is, Passover was mostly pretty wonderful. Our Sedarim were both pretty great. Having family and friends celebrating with us was really wonderful. We have learned that the unbearable parts of the Haggadah are much better when read in Italian by my husband. Amazon.com Widgets There were far too many big meals, but the food was pretty excellent (if I may say so myself). As always, none of  Passover could have taken place without everyone pitching in. i am grateful to everyone who helped out this year in ways great and small.  On the creepy side of the ledger, as I was walking to synagogue on the seventh day of Passover a smiling bum flung the content of his very large bottle of beer on me. I was completely soaked in chametz.  Even if it weren't Passover it would have been a gross experience.  In addition to all of the cooking for all of the meals and doing an insane amount of laundry and ironing on the days that weren't holiday I gave the d'v...

 This cake is baking as I type this. This is my mother's handwriting. She probably scribbled it down as she got the recipe while on the telephone with Mildred Jacobs. Mildred was an outstanding cook and baker. this recipe came from her sister in law who did not use gebrochts , that is, matza broken into liquid during Passover. this cake is made out of few and simple ingredients and is stellar. Earlier today i baked a slab of salmon that will serve as our lunches during the first two days of the holiday. I roasted lots of vegetables. you see the Brussels sprouts and mushrooms that we will eat the first night of the holiday. I also roasted tomatoes, and zucchini separately to be added to salad the second night of the holiday.    Another in the simple yet delicious category is this. I suppose you could call them vegan truffles. If you did my kids would not eat them on principle. One of my kids asked me what they were as I was frantically attempting to arrange...

My last post where I wrote about using my mother's napkins stirred up quite a bit of discussion both in my e mailbox and on Facebook. I wanted to focus a little bit on old table linens and why they matter. Today, table linens are mostly fairly easy to acquire. You can buy a plastic table cloth at a party store or at a dollar store. You can buy a tablecloth inexpensively at Ikea or at Walmart. It is difficult for us to remember that not all that long ago, just a few generations ago, table linens were household wealth that was owned by women.  Those linens were expensive to produce. Women began producing and acquiring them as young girls and then built up their collections until they were married.  In accounts of household wealth the linens were accounted for along with gold, jewels livestock and real estate. After my father died, my mother gave me a stack of tablecloths and napkins with great ceremony. Over the years I have inherited cloths not just f...