A Warm Fall Food Friday and a completed challah cover

It has been unseasonably warm. Yesterday and today have been the kind of days that lure you outdoors. It is November and some people are wearing shorts

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Yesterday, the call of outside took me to the local thrift store. I picked up a card of wide embroidered ricrac. often I think about my work while I am doing other tasks, like laundry or working out. My mother used to use ironing and vacuuming for her serious thinking time.

Today while out getting more stuff for Shabbat dinner I was charmed by the copper cornice on my building against the blue sky.

I love that the Blum brothers who designed my building took the time to even embellish the underside of the cornice. A beautiful touch that is probably ignored most of the time.

While doing task driven thinking time I realized that the ricrac would be perfect on one of the red challah covers I had begun a few days ago. Actually, perfect ignores an important intermediate step. The ricrac was predominantly orange with green, blue and yellow embroidery. It would be perfect, but with a fix.

I block printed in orange and blue on more of the red linen.

The red and orange would clash no more. I cut the long strips of block printed linen to be border strips. The ricrac covers the seam and embellishes the ribbon bound edge.

This is the last Shabbat of the fall that starts at a reasonable time, starting next week we enter the rush to Shabbat.

My son made chicken for tonight. I made butternut squash, which is now whipped and spiced into something quite lush.

I also made a non-dairy maple custard to eat with last week's pumpkin ice cream.

Shabbat Shalom!

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וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for giving life to all. I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

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sarah in nyc

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