sarah in nyc

 A bunch of years ago, perhaps it was fifteen or twenty years ago my sister admired a challah cover in my stash and I gave it to her. It looked like this when it was new. The challah cover was made out of a mix of fabrics, a Chinese brocade, a cross-dyed silk shantung and I painted the text onto olive green linen. Cross dyed silk shantung is just visual magic. Unfortunately, silk shantung has a life-span. Eventually, the warp threads fail and the fabric begins to shred. My sister loves the challah cover and mailed it to me hoping that I could repair it. I knew I had to replace the golden-green shantung. I rummaged through my stash of upholstery fabrics hoping that I would have something in the right color and weight. I found a few things that were the right weight but not the right color. I then pulled out this. My friend Arleen had dropped off a couple of yards of this Scalamandre fabric when she was downsizing. She had covered her dining room chairs in this gorgeous fabric. ...

 I spent a chunk of this week preparing the food that we (and our cohort in their various homes) will be eating after the fast of Yom Kippur ends. I made the food, that for me, tastes exactly like the love that a mother has for her very small and beloved child. I made Temi Saivetz's sweet dairy kugel known in our family as Cholesterol Death Kugel. It is exactly the right comforting nourishing food with which to end the fast. Because I really love the people I cam cooking for, I went the extra step and also made the noodles for the kugel. The semolina and eggs come together quickly in a food processor. The hard part is rolling out the dough. You stretch and pull a tiny bit of dough thinner and thinner. it takes a certain amount of physical strength and a certain amount of patience.   As I rolled out small lumps of dough into long smooth sheets of noodle I thought about intentionality. During Rosh HaShanah I used my grandmother's machzor/High Holiday prayerbook. My grandmo...

 I just stumbled on this wonderful movie yesterday. You can watch it on Amazon Prime. It's joyful and funny, despite being a Holocaust documentary. It's also about the healing that comes with preparing food for people you love and the power of friendship. I could not help but remember my dear friend Herta and her beloved husband Lester watching this film. I could not help but think of all of the meals they so lovingly prepared both for their family and their community. Just watch this. You can thank me later. If you have trouble connecting to the clip above, this is the  link to the Oma and Bella trailer For my sewing buddies, I have become obsessed with this series of sewing videos. They are completely mesmerizing. The cutting-out techniques are amazing. I am particularly blown away by how body parts are used instead of tape measures. The presenter used body parts to measure in her sure fashion and then shows the measurement on a tape measure.  For example, the distance ...

 Yesterday,  I blew shofar three times.  I was one of the shofar blowers during our synagogue's live-streamed service. I hadn't stepped into our synagogue since Purim. As I got dressed to go to synagogue I thought about who I wanted to bring with me in my attire. I wanted to evoke my dear friend S. so I wore a  silk skirt she had handed down to me a couple of years ago. Our families go way back and I wanted to connect to both of our families. I pinned a brooch that had belonged to my mother to my fitted jacket. It was a little chilly to go out without an additional layer so I wrapped myself in the beautiful wool challis shawl Mrs. Grossman had given my sister ( my sister is horribly allergic to wool). I also needed to choose a pair of gloves to wear. I have many pairs of gloves. It was clear that I needed to choose from the beautiful collection that Penny hand sent me   of her late mother, Ruthie's gloves .  I can't listen to the Haftarah from the sec...

 Well, I did my last shofar practicing today in anticipation of Sunday. Services will be a hybrid this year of IRL and Zoom. If you tune into Ansche Chesed's services I will be the last shofar blower of the day. I will not be masked during shofar blowing but my shofar will be.  I am so looking forward to the great shofar blasts on Broadway at 4:00pm. There will be shofar blowers all the way from 65th Street all the way up to 166th Street.  One of the other synagogues participating in the great blast suggested that participants to the long-form shofar blowing of thirty blasts so that people who were not able to hear shofar will have fulfilled the mitzvah fully. That is what you will hear from me at 100th Street. There was more cooking to be done for tonight. I thought about how so often during the holidays we turn to the flavors of the land of Israel.  Our chicken is flavored with pomegranate molasses and mustard. The quart of tzimmes and cabbage will be side dishes f...

 While our tzimmes cooked I steamed the leaves off of two cabbages. I stored the unfurled leaves overnight in the fridge. I probably ought to have been more careful in how I stacked the leaves to put them away but many of them were broken when I went to make the cabbage rolls. The cabbage leaves are filled with chopped beef, rice for the starch, and much to the chagrin of my dear friend Ann, raisins. Ann's Polish Catholic grandma also used raisins in her stuffed cabbage. Ann is completely baffled by the idea of sweet meat. Frankly, I think that it is Eastern European by way of the Ottoman Empire. The raisins showed up in my mother's cabbage so they show up in mine I am a stickler for not too sweet in my stuffed cabbage. In my experience, most commercial stuffed cabbage is far too sweet. I creat the balance of sweet and sour with brown sugar, crushed tomatoes and sour salt.  Yes, the meat itself is spiced, although if you put a gun to my head right now I'm not sure that I wo...

 There is so much that is simply depressing about the prospect of observing Rosh HaShanah mostly by way of a computer screen. I have been thinking about ways to make this holiday less depressing for me and for my family. Last week I hit on the idea of cooking the foods that I normally do for Rosh HaShanah and it the amounts that I normally cook. I thought that it would be pretty wonderful if our usual Zoom Shabbat cohort not only joined us virtually but also was eating the same foods that we were. I made a batch of small round challot on Friday.  They are all safely squirreled away in a freezer. . Today I decided to tackle the tzimmes. I had assembled most of the meat and the vegetables when I realized that it might be a nice idea to actually check the recipe my mother gave me over the phone about thirty years ago. I had jotted it down in the flyleaf of The Settlement Cookbook. This cookbook was my mother-in-law's. I don't think she ever used it. I had loved my mother's cop...

 Covid-19 has upended the world. Most things that until March we took for granted are worse. I don't have to go into a litany of how and how many aspects of our lives have been altered because of Covid-19. If you are smart enough to read this, you already know. However, there is a really wonderful thing taking place on the second day of Rosh HaShanah on the Upper Westside that would not be taking place if not for Covid-19. Our rabbi, Jeremy Kalmanofsky has organized Shofarot on Broadway. Sunday afternoon at 4:00pm at nearly every intersection from 65th street up to 116th street someone will be blowing shofar. Yesterday I received the list of who would be blowing shofar at which corner. Just reading the list with participants from many of the neighborhood synagogues was enough to make me teary. Come out to Broadway to hear us all or just listen from your window. My youngest and I have been assigned the intersection of Broadway and 100th street. Open your window at 4:00 to hear us al...

 I'm not going to write about the September 11th elephant in the room right now. I can get through the crisis of COVID -19 raging around us right now by not focusing too much on September 11. There is a limit of how much pain a heart can hold at one moment and I have to save my emotional energy to get through the Jewish Holidays. This post is about small lovely things. I mailed a baby gift to our niece in California and some gifts for the older sibs. On the way home from the post office I passed a bee getting nectar from these blue flowers in a tree pit. I could crop my photos so this scene looks completely bucolic, but I have chosen not to. One of the side effects of Covid-19 is that the tree pits which are normally tended by the buildings closest to them have been allowed to run wild. I kind of like the verdant chaos. The Catholic Church on the corner of 96th Street always has a few blowsy roses blooming. Next door to the church is a plant shop. They have put out fall plants. The...