Hand work of various kinds and Food Friday

This seems to have turned into the summer of hand work. Because the ends of an atara frame the face they often have a bit of extra embellishment going on. My client mentioned that he wanted silvery blue. Like me, my client grew up surrounded by Jewish ritual art. Couched metallic cord was a big part of how Jewish ritual objects were decorated.

I chose to go for a free-form sort of a look. I wanted an old technique to look contemporary. There is something oddly soothing about doing this work. What you see here isn't quite finished but it is well on its way.

The materials used to create this work are pretty simple, metallic cord, sewing thread, and a needle.

I have also been working away on a sweater for one of my great nieces.

So far I have made a front and a back and have done a bit of one sleeve. It's a pretty acrylic yarn because babies get messy, it's their job. Wool is nicer but it isn't fair to expect parents of a baby to deal with laundering it.

And yes, it's Friday. We invited friends who moved apartments this week.

It was a challah baking week and fortunately, it was just warm and not hot and muggy. My youngest braided these challot.

The chicken is vaguely reminiscent of the takeaway rotisserie chicken my late mother in law adored . Every chicken she served in her home in Queens came from Mauzone. For my husband, this tastes like love itself.

I made this with

sweet paprika, hot paprika, smoked paprika, black pepper, cayenne, sumac, and turmeric. I juiced a lime over the chicken before cooking.

Our grain tonight is

I suppose you could either call it a baked pilaf if you were feeling generous or "random odds and ends from the pantry" if you were not. It is rice, barley lentils and the end of a box of bow tie noodles cooked in last week's chicken juice and some gochujang paste.

For the vegetable portion of our meal, we are eating a wilted kale salad with additions.

I am probably serving the salad as a first course. it makes for a relaxed meal.

Dessert tonight is fresh lychee and fresh figs.

Shabbat Shalom!

Comments

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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