Not what I had expected

Well, I had thought that this would be a pleasant post talking about how I am slowly regaining my energy and working away on the tallit and how happy I am to spend time with our out of town friends who have come on their annual visit.

But our fridge gasped and took its last breath. Yes, it is a fairly new fridge. Yes, it was completely overhauled the day Passover began this past spring.

We ordered this fridge from Sears.

Our choices are dictated by the space we have and the width of our doors. We made a choice. We ordered on the phone with many assurances that the fridge was to be delivered today. We were to expect a call last night narrowing the delivery window down from twelve hours to two hours.

We didn't get the call last night. I called Sears this morning. We didn't receive the call because the fridge isn't scheduled for delivery until Monday. Really???? I didn't know that when Sears accepts my money that also makes me psychic so that I can intuit that the fridge is not currently in the warehouse and won't be delivered until Monday. Or, that I could magically see that despite the fact that the Sears person I spoke to kept talking to me about Friday delivery what they had really put on the order form was Monday delivery.

My food is stored seven flights down in the basement fridge. meal planning is ...a challenge.

If I had lived in my building in 1911 when it was new and mechanical refrigeration was not available in apartments, I would have owned an icebox and there would have been a metal box jutting out of the bottom of my kitchen window to keep things cool.

It's 2018. The super of our building has been gracious enough to let us use a fridge in the basement. It's seven flights down. meals or even snacks take a great deal of pre-planning.

We did have a lovely dinner with our out of town friends last night.

We ate beneath this fabulous chandelier which on its own was pretty terrific but both the food and the company were spectacular.

Our challah is on its second rise. Chicken is cooking away. Things are annoying but they really could be worse.

Chicken - sort of a Thai -New-England mash-up. If you don't like it, don't eat it.

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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