Not about the elephant in the room

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.

There is something so cheerful about the peppers and the berries.

Broadway had big socially un-distanced groupings of pigeons.

Right now I envy the pigeons. I look at the pigeons and think about life before the pandemic when friends would gather in groups to talk and to chat. Some day, I will get to do that again.

Another nice thing:

I am allergic to sesame. I have been able to be fine with not eating sesame candies ( the sort that only seemed to live in Jewish homes) I can live without techina . It can be inconvenient to not be able to eat hummus but I can manage. I can even live without halvah. The one real loss for me has been the lack of za'atar.

My son had mentioned that he had a jar of Passover Za'atar made without sesame. I went searching on the manufacturer's website but alas non -sesame za'atar isn't available the rest of the year. A google search did yield this

Our youngest has been allergic to sesame for years and had never eaten one of the great taste experiences of life, pita za'atar.

I made some.

He loved it and mentioned that he thought that the za'atar would probably taste delicious on chicken. We had making chicken with za'atar only when our youngest was away. Tonight we are eating chicken made with za'atar( and lemon and a smashed tomato)

I'm glad that my youngest can enjoy the deliciousness that is chicken with za'atar. I am looking forward to eating it again after nearly two years.

Yet another nice thing:

I am still getting my head around doing the High Holidays without the hustle and bustle and joy of 1100 people in one space. I am missing doing the holidays without walking to and from synagogue and seeing so many other people walking to and from their own synagogues. I am also so missing the crush of people who normally sit around our table for so many of the holiday meals.

I decided to make holiday challot for the people who are part of our Friday night Zoom Shabbat.

I hope to make stuffed cabbage next week for our cohort. That way, even though we are all sitting at our own tables, we can at least all be eating some of the same food as we join together for Rosh Ha Shanah.

I made two small challot for us for tonight.

The challah and the cabbage won't change the world or do anything about Covid-19 but it does make me feel a little bit better, even on September 11.

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...

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...

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 ...

sarah in nyc

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