Skip to main content

A busy week

Well, it's been a while since I have posted.

I didn't post about food last Friday because my sister came for Shabbat and even brought nearly all of Shabbat dinner with her.

My sister came because our cousin got married last weekend and there were FESTIVITIES.


We took the Staten Island ferry together.





 If you look at a Jewish wedding wearing your anthropologist's hat you would say that the the point of the circle dancing is to reinforce the circles of community and family. This wedding had  an excellent band. The bride and groom have both danced with all of their hearts at many weddings of both family members and friends. We all had to repay them that mitzvah.



The band wanted to stop playing, but we sang until they started playing again. Even the waiters danced in with their platters of food.  We all danced until we just couldn't dance any more. Everyone arrived at the wedding beautifully dressed and coiffed. We all danced until our hair-dos melted and we were as soaked as if we had played too much basketball in the sun.  Photos from this excellent wedding were taken by my husband.




The wedding was a celebration of the bride and groom, of friendship, of community and of family. We are fortunate to be in the circle with this bride and groom.

This was also a week of work.

This atara is now sewn onto the tallit 



 I have to clean up stray threads and take photos of the atara not laid out on my lap but attached to the tallit.

BUT for the technical minded among you- the texts chosen by the bar-mitzvah boy have been photo-transferred onto silk. I chain-stitched along the edge of the white silk using a thread of light blue and metallic rayon yard and one thread of blue silk. I mixed the fibers for for strength and to get the right mix of colors.

The midnight blue ribbed  silk border is mitered (so fancy!) and I added rows of silver embroidery that echo the woven patterns in stripes of the tallit.



For dinner tonight we are eating


Chicken cooked with slivers of tiny peppers, the thyme my sister brought to decorate one of last Shabbat's elegant dishes, lemon and lime juice. I cut in the corn raw to warm up with the chicken it should be perfect by dinnertime. I don't know if this is exactly French or Italian in flavor but it seems like summer chicken to me.

This week's challot are slightly over baked and slightly under-glazed. I don't think anyone at the table will turn up their noses at the challah.

If you are in the neighborhood, I am giving the D'var Torah tomorrow.

Shabbat Shalom!





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

  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...
2 comments
Read more

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...
3 comments
Read more

Food friday - your grandmother's food processor

My grandmother bought my mother this wooden bowl and a chopping knife, known in Yiddish as a hock-messer, soon after my parents got married. Yes, she also got them a dairy set as well. these wooden bowls and chopping knives were a big part of food prep when I was growing up. meatloaf and meat balls were mixed in this bowl. Chopped liver was made in this bowl as well. Sundays we often made chicken salad for lunch made out of chicken left over from Shabbat chopped with vegetables and mayo. That too, was made in this bowl. When I was in college my parents got their first food processor and the chopping bowls were not used as much. Several years ago, my father asked if i would like the bowls and the hock-messers. I was happy to have them. I like the sheer physicality of chopping up a big bowl of stuff into teeny pieces. While the wooden bowls have stood up well to the years of use, the hock-messers had not. The bladed which were bolted into their handles, wobbled. The blades wouldn't ...
9 comments
Read more