Blog Salad- with topic headings

Sheltering at home 

When I was little we lived in a small house surrounded by trees. there were tons of bird that hung out in the tall hedge behind out house. I remember telling my mother how beautiful i thought pigeons were with their iridescent neck feathers. My other, a Brooklyn girl at heart scoffed and said something about pigeons being kind of gross.  I have been living in Manhattan since 1982 and I have come to adopt my mother's position that pigeons are essentially rats with wings. Our dining room and kitchen and the kids' bedroom all face a narrow courtyard between our building and the one just to the north of us.

Pigeons like to hang out in the courtyard. they like to perch on the air conditioning units.  As I type this i am sitting next to an air conditioning unit. Pigeons like to hang out there cooing in my ear. i found the sound as unplasant as nails on a black board and shoo them away. i don't want the pigeons to get any ideas about nesting here.

Across the courtyard a neighbor felt differently than I do about the pigeons.

One of my neighbors had been allowing pigeons to fly in and out of his window. It was a bit like watching a neighbor adopt a rat from the alley.  The situation had rung my yuk alarm and I texted the super. The window is now shut and now a nest has been constructed on the air conditioner.

This image lives on the border of charming and gross. I will let you decide for yourself on which side of the divide it lies.

Social distancing

 I have been avoiding going outside because some people are having trouble with the concept.

These water towers are practicing good social distancing.

Cooking for Shabbat

We have enough food these days.  Getting food is more complicated than it had been pre-Covid 19 but the food supply chain is much better than it was a month ago.I had reverted to the comforts of old timey thrifty cooking. Some of those old timey thrifty cooking adventures have become beloved around here.

Candied orange peels have become a favorite snack and dessert. We save up orange peels in the freezer and then chop the peels, boil them to rid them of the bitter oils and then boil with sugar. We have been calling the candied peels garbage candy, because we have transformed garbage into candy.

This morning I woke up with a yen for  flavors that seemed new in the late 1970's.  I was thinking about chicken made with apricot jam and mustard. I didn't have apricot jam but I did have dried apricots. I heated up the apricots with water in the microwave with ginger (we had some left over from Passover).

I pureed the apricots, ginger and the left over water into a paste along with some mustard and coated the chicken with it. I cut up a fat carrot and a few skinny parsnips and added them to the pan. 

 Tonight our vegetable will be a deconstructed salad with people able to add their favorite vegetables to the greens. The sprouts are not my husband's favorite but he will have other choices.

The Department of Shameless Promotion

A couple of years before my husband met me, he wrote a novel (well, actually two, but I'm only going to talk about one of them right now). My husband had for several years been part of  Havurat Shalom, which was the epicenter of counterculture Judaism.  A huge amount of what we take for granted as normative liberal religious Judaism was born as highly revolutionary stuff in that yellow house in Somerville, Massachusetts. 

The Havurah was founded in 1968, and over the years a great deal of scholarly ink has been spilled about the place, with more articles written to mark its 50th anniversary not long ago.

My husband had written a fictionalized look at his experience at Havurat Shalom in the form of inter-related short stories. Pieces of his work got published in the late 1970s and early 80s, but the whole thing never appeared.

Encouraged by a friend, and prompted by the 50th anniversary celebration, over the past several months my husband went back to the book and re-edited it, polishing up various stylistic and other problems that he could now see in hindsight. And now 

It is out and available to purchase and to read. you can see the book here.

Shabbat Shalom!