Food Friday and tying up the loose ends of my week

This was my view as I began my workout this morning.

It is mornings like this that make you understand why Hopper painted the way he did. It wasn't just that he was lonely and depressed and was married to a difficult woman, he was also just painting what he saw.

It's Friday so there is lots to cook, but I also have lots of work to get done. I have been working away on Linda's tallit.

Linda is celebrating a birthday of significance. she sent out lengths of ribbons to friends and to family and asked them to write greetings to her on the ribbons. My job is to turn the ribbons into a tallit.

Linda is a math teacher and is precise and gives excellent directions. unfortunately, not all of the people who love Linda share these qualities. I am at the point of working on this tallit where I have to make the wonky -not look wonky.

I had to add an extra bit of ribbon to the panels, because what what looked equal on paper did not work out that way in real life.

I added a row of gold embroidery to the second ribbon to keep it visually interesting and not look like the error that I was fixing.

I have been weaving ribbons to edge the atara and to serve as the corner pieces.

This is oddly satisfying work.

The fact that I had dropped a bunch of walnuts on the kitchen floor meant that I had to rinse them off. I used THAT error as an opportunity to make some candied walnuts. They are delicious and addictive. I put them away so I would not eat them all.

I made fruited pumpernickel bread for the two pot lucks we will be attending this weekend.

We are eating chicken in two varieties. The chicken legs were rubbed with jerk spices.

The chicken thighs were made vaguely Indian with turmeric, mustard powder, cinnamon, allspice and dates.

I also added a few more layers of color onto Hannah's tallit.

And as a final Shabbat bonus, a bit of beautiful masonry by night.

Shabbat Shalom!

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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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