sarah in nyc

The other day I got a call from a very nice woman who tried to schedule an appointment with me. She is not someone who celebrates the Jewish holidays. I explained that i wasn't able to meet with her until after the High Holiday season is over because during three of the four weeks this month I am preparing for  the equivalent three Thanksgiving dinners on three consecutive evenings. I didn't tell her that this week we have the equivalent of one of those dinners eaten much to early and much too quickly followed by another about 27 hours later. All the food for all the meals needs to be stored in my apartment sized fridge. Amazon.com Widgets Much of tonight's eaten much too fast  before the fast dinner is more of the food I had prepared for Rosh Ha Shanah, beef, stuffed cabbage and chicken.We will also eat some vegetable matter and some dessert. Yesterday I began the ritual of the cholesterol death Kugel. My mother got this recipe from her friend Temi. There are many r...

During the golden age of Yiddish theater one of the posters advertising the production of a Shakespeare play in Yiddish proclaimed that this production of Hamlet or Macbeth was Amazon.com Widgets Fartayched und fabessered   that is translated and improved. That term  Fartayched und fabessered is often used as the Yiddish equivalent more or less of gilding the lily. All of this is a round about way of saying that the kittle I had made last year has now been tailored to fit the intended wearer. My boys' special ed teachers used to describe the things they were terrible at as "developing skills". My men's wear tailoring is a foreign language to me. I took in the side seams of the kittle and added two long waist darts at the sides.  One of my sewing buddies on one of my sewing discussion groups is a custom shirt maker. She has often spoken about darting men's shirts. I placed the darts fairly close to the side seams so they wouldn't show from t...

This was a powerful Rosh Ha Shanah for me. Like every year I went down to the Hudson River  to do Tashlich along with my family and what felt like the rest of the Jewish world that resides in the neighborhood. Every year it is a profound act. Each year I run into people who I have not seen for a long time. Often there are fellow parents from my children's various preschools.  Hugs and kisses are exchanged and we catch up on one another's lives.  This year, as I embraced people from nearly every corner of my life in New York I was distracted by the spectacular light .  Earlier during our time by the river the light glowed golden.  As the conversations grew longer the light kept changing  and the sky kept changing. We kept stopping our catching up to admire the sky. Of course, because it was Yom Tov, I didn't take photos but these photos from other moments will have to suffice despite their being completely insufficient  to sho...

As the hours near the beginning of Rosh HaShanah I have been working away at getting the house ready. Amazon.com Widgets I  made an apple tart yesterday as I worked I was remembering years part getting ready for the Holiday.  Years ago as I was learning how to cook I  was into specialized tools. Lately, not so much. This is how I core apples. This works easier than an apple corer or a melon baller. There are meringues for dessert along with the apple tart. I made up lemon cookies to use up the egg yolks. They are very lemony. As I was putting together  the challah for the next several days I thought about how often bread is used as a metaphor in Judaism.  Bread is both the staff of life as well as being something of a symbol for sin. Tomorrow, many of us will be taking bits of bread, symbols of sin and tossing them into bodies of water. I will be seeing many of you along the Hudson tomorrow afternoon doing one of the sweetest ...

Over the last few days I have been working on altering the kittle. So far I have taken in the side seams. This had ended up being a much trickier job than I had anticipated. I don't know it it is my new and not fabulous sewing machine but the layers of fabric kept shifting and bunching on the underside of the fabric. To calm myself, I began listening to recordings of High Holiday music.  The work began to go much more smoothly. As I worked and sang along  with the recordings i recalled the email that the owner of the kittle had sent me hoping that every stitch be a prayer.  I am a little too much a Litvak to really think of every stitch as actually being a prayer, yet I know from long experience that listening to liturgical music as I work helps keep me calm and focused.  I still need to trim the seam allowances so they look presentable. After much deliberation about how to shorten the sleeves, I finally decided to bite the bullet and undo the complicated cu...

One of the High Holiday culinary standards in this household is tzimmis. I know that lots of perfectly lovely Jewish households will call sliced carrots cooked with a bit of honey and perhaps a bit of ginger tzimmis. Other homes will call a mix of carrots, sweet potatoes and white potatoes tzimmis. Amazon.com Widgets In the culinary tradition my parents cobbled together for us tzimmis a a long cooked stew made with carrots, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, parsnip, lima beans, prunes and big cubes of beef. yes there are lots of spices in there and it is sweet with brown sugar and sour (in my mother's house with lemon juice, and in mine with sour salt). My daughter's intended has many fine qualities. He is however, allergic to white potatoes.  My daughter reminded me after Shabbat dinner that I needed to take that into account in this year's tzimmis making. I decided to take on the potato replacement challenge.  I thought that I would use a large amount of parsn...

Tonight our table is as full as it can be without being extended. Aside from my daughter and her intended who don't exactly count as guests and really reside in the family column, we have one of my husband's buddies who goes as far back as Hebrew High School, a woman who was part of my pre-kid cohort of  women professionals  who worked in the Jewish non profits in the neighborhood, and one of my sewing buddies who is in town. all in all, a great table full of people we all love. So in their honor, we have Chicken made with clementines, pomegranate molasses, mustard and spices (I no longer remember exactly which spices I added).  My son carved the chickens and we nibbled on the bits left on the cutting board. This is good chicken. My son made a baked pilaf and I didn't take a photo. I roasted some vegetables. I think they look especially beautiful in the orange bowl my sister gave me a few years ago.  I faked another cake. This time it is a blackberry ...