Pre Shabbat odds and ends

Tomorrow I am giving a d'var Torah about the vestments of the High Priest. If you are around, stop by.

I have cooked Shabbat dinner but I will skip the description this week.

This week I have rediscovered the value of complaining well. I had called Verizon to check on when they planned to actually fix our phone. When I was told April 26, after I hit the roof, I realized that not giving phone service from January 25 to April 26 might actually be a legal problem for Verizon. I called the fabulous people at 311. They connected me to the New York State utilities board. The lovely woman I spoke to was appropriately outraged. Two days later, my phone was reconnected.

Our internet has been intermittent (at best). yes, this too has been provided ( if you can call it that) by Verizon. After a looong talk with a rep at Verizon I have been upgraded to the "Escalations" office. It's like old fashioned customer service. I have a case number and responsive people to take care of me.

I might be rejoining the universe soon.

While I was waiting I mended my late mother-in-law's tablecloth.

Ida owned lots of these printed cotton cloths from the 1940's and 50's. The prints are charming, not exactly beautiful but I am really fond of them.

Ida rarely used these on tables when she served meals when I knew her. The dining room table was covered with layers of plastic tablecloths by the time I met her. These cotton cloths covered ratty beach chairs, stacks of boxes or other things she wanted to hide.

I like layering these quirky cloths on my larger tablecloths. The often incongruous pairings amuse me.

There is something so comforting about the act of mending something several decades older than I am. My mother loved a beautiful table cloth. A nice piece of napery just gave her great joy. My mother's initial reaction to Ida's cloths was to sniff at them because they were made of lowly cotton and not linen.

Eventually, after eating many meals at my table my mother told me that she too found certain nostalgic charm in these not exactly beautiful cloths.

Shabbat Shalom!

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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!!!

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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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