sarah in nyc

I hadn't counted on spectacular weather when we booked our trip.   We spent a chunk of our day at the Texas State House. It is a great building put up with lots of thought to detail.  7 Amazon.com Widgets

I can't say that I know a whole lot of stars in Hollywood, although Claire Danes was one of my kids when I ran an afterschool program in the West Village in the early 1980's. I can say with confidence that lots of the stars of the much smaller Jewish intellectual world are people that are part of my circle. If your synagogue invited someone to be a scholar in residence in the past few years, there is a better than even chance that it is someone I know. Amazon.com Widgets One of those stars, Rabbi Neil Gillman died this Friday. Rabbi Gillman taught one of my sisters and many of my friends. At his funeral yesterday, so many of his eulogists spoke about Rabbi Gillman's genius at asking the right question. I was the beneficiary of one of those Rabbi Gillman questions. Many years ago at one of the first couple of craft shows when  I showed my work Rabbi Gillman began looking carefully at my challah covers and matza covers. After several minutes he...

My daughter commented that the turkey my son made looked like it came out of a supermarket circular.  It was truly delicious. Cutting our pies into small and tiny servings was a good idea. By the time dessert was served none of us wanted very much anyway.   The turkey carcass has been transformed into tonight's soup. I made a new batch of challah but the rest of the meal will be made up of the left-overs filling our fridge. The meal made me feel all warm and fuzzy about our family and our home. The living room was empty at the end of the evening but filled earlier in the day. This morning we all woke up late. Clearly, the apple pie cocktail my future son in law mixed up was stronger than any of us had realized. It did go down easily though. The sun shone brightly on the trees in the median strip on Broadway. My son got ready for a bike ride with the rest of the guys in the family. My son's way with clothes always delights ...

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.  I had hoped to do all of my food shopping at one store to just simplify my life. I soon realized that while the local kosher supermarket was a good source for the turkey, it was not a good place to buy anything else for the meal. Thinking through the rest of my shopping list I thought that perhaps with the newly lowered prices at Whole Foods I could get the rest of the supplies for the meal there. Amazon.com Widgets Alas, I was wrong. The prices were so high that I walked out not with a giant filled grocery cart but three items.  I had to end up doing what I didn't want to do and do my shopping at several different vendors. Finally, everything is in my house and is ready to cook. Since I grew up not too far from the cranberry bogs. I adore cranberry and it appears in several forms during the meal.There is a can of jellied sauce to please my husband and future son-in-law. As a nod to my favorite from childhood, I made cranberry relish. ...

Because problem-solving is about seeing that there is more than one way to do something, My mother was the sort of hostess who spent lots of dinner in the kitchen getting the next course prepped while the guests were enjoying their meal. She would sit for bits of the dinner but for much of it, she was absent from the table, busy clearing the remnants of the previous course, plattering the next adding radish roses or parsley sprigs to the main course, putting the tea up to boil or adding last minutes garnishes to the dessert platters. I try to be a more relaxed hostess than my mother. Usually, dinner is served in two courses, the main course, and dessert.  There is something nice about the languid pace of a multi-course meal. My dishwasher though, can't keep pace with a really elaborate meal. Another problem I have I have in serving a meal is managing the various food issues of my diners. My son and I love charred tomatoes. My husband detests them. My ...

We are heading into exciting times for my family. My oldest is getting married this spring. Each of my sisters is expecting a grandchild this winter. I will soon be a great-aunt. In anticipating these births I have been assembling gifts for each of these anticipated arrivals. Fabric Mart , as it does so often, helped me out by putting delicious fabrics on sale. I purchased pre-cut lengths of flannel, as well as turquoise medallion print, I could not resist because the print name was my daughter's first name and was even spelled the same way we spell her name. When the fabrics arrived I was delighted. Often the flannel available for home sewers is "boardy". It feels like a fuzzy sheet of cardboard. Boardy flannel is not something one wants near a baby's skin. The flannel that arrived was thick and incredibly soft. I decided to make receiving blankets. They get tons of use from swaddling a newborn to serving as a clean surface when you put your baby down on t...

I'm not sure if this falls into the category of one good deed begets another, but my friend Esther invited me to a wonderful lecture about Tiffany's work in synagogues last week. you can read all  about the lecture here.  But at the end of the evening, the organizers gave out tickets to this weekend's decorative art show. My husband and I went today. Usually at craft shows it is not polite to take photos and certainly not without permission. This show was different, it was sort of expected that one would take photos. I did ask permission from every vendor before I started taking photos.  These teapot themed sculptures in porcelain were technically amazing. They weren't exactly beautiful but they were fun to look at.  My husband liked these animated pictures more than I did. Like the teapots, a giant technical challenge but also like the teapots, slightly silly.  I loved the strut-work on this table. These topography tables in glass an...