Skip to main content

Food Friday and remembering

 


Since you asked, this is what we are eating for Shabbat dinner, chicken cooked with Herbes de Provence and fresh lime. Our vegetable matter will be blanched asparagus. The L'chaim portion of our dinner is a super local chocolate-flavored whiskey which our older son bought for my husband as a birthday gift.

And I digress. My mother's yahrzeit comes in just a couple of weeks. The winter my mother died was an especially snowy one. Packed plowed snow aged at the side of the roads. As friends asked me how my mother was, I often likened her condition to that old packed snow at the side of the road. The packed snow melts from the top and from underneath. It used to be beautiful fluffy white snow but it was disintegrating from above and below and in the center. My mother's body and mind were failing in many ways all at the same time.


So now, whenever I see old snow melting away days or weeks after a storm


looking shrunken and diminished, I think about my mother during the last couple of years and especially the last few months of her life.

 

I  look at these pictures of snow and I am reminded of my mother. It is oddly comforting.


Shabbat Shalom

Labels:

Comments

  1. vivianzFebruary 14, 2021 at 9:41 AM

    I am glad you find comfort in the melting snow. Such a good way to make something not usually pleasant, pleasant. Can I ask the name of the chocolate whiskey? I have received an Israeli , Binyamina Chocolate Liqueur, from a friend, but would love to have another, since I don't have access to the Benyamina. I drink it very sparingly as she has died and I love it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sarah JacobsFebruary 14, 2021 at 10:03 AM

    The chocolate whiskey is made by Kings County Distillery. It isn't sweet like a liqueur. It was yummy mixed with seltzer and orange juice.
    Last year my son organized a tour of the distillery with the guys in the family for my husband's birthday. My daughter and I got facials. A good time was had by all.

    ReplyDelete

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

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...
1 comment
Read more

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...
8 comments
Read more

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 ...
2 comments
Read more