אַתְקִינוּ סְעוּדָתָא דִמְהֵימְנוּתָא שְׁלֵמָתָא, חֶדְוְתָא דְמַלְכָּא קַדִישָׁא. אַתְקִינוּ סְעוּדָתָא דְמַלְכָּא.

As we do our best to live through this crisis It's important to tend to both our physical health as well as our mental health.

Our Pesach food order arrives late Monday night and we switch our house over to Pesach mode on Tuesday and start the cooking Olympics. Yes, we are starting early, but not as early as we normally would ( there will be fewer mouths to feed over the course of the holiday). Never the less, our usual rhythms matter as so much of our lives has been out of order.

I baked challah with almost the last bit of our white flour. I probably could have found bakery made challah but it will do all of us good to eat our usual challah.

We can eat pancake for breakfast on Sunday.

I only baked two challot instead of our usual four.

We aren't eating meat. We are eating fish and noodles and spinach.

As I got my challah dough going I watched for the corona of blooming yeast in the bowl.

The familiar work of making the dough come together was a comfort.

I took challah

I braided the challah

Over the past few days two passages from two books I had read over and over again have been running through my head.

The first is from Esther Hautzig's The Endless Steppe which tells of Esther's experiences during the Shoah. Her family was relatively fortunate and they were deported from Vilna to Siberia.During the horrific time when Ester and her family were being transported to Siberia, Esther wrote about a neighbor woman who gave herself a full beauty treatment and put on a face full of makeup as the group was forced to sleep on the floor in a train station. Esther noted the defiant bravery of that woman insisting on taking care of her outer beauty during such insanity.

The other moment in a book that keeps running through my head these days comes from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn despite the family's abject poverty, the narrator mentions that her mother allows her to waste her morning coffee each day so she have the knowledge that there is one thing that she can afford to waste.

During this hard time we need to create comfort and small luxuries for ourselves.

My youngest sat down next to me a little while ago to ask me what I was planning to cook for Passover. He mentioned that having the familiar foods would be a comfort. I agreed. The work of preparing will keep us busy. The foods that we will eat all during Pesach will sustain us, body and soul.

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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!!!

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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