sarah in nyc

 Well, since you asked, our seders were lovely. The first night was just family and the second night we had both friends and family. Yes, I did get a whole lot of pleasure from seeing the people we love eat the food I had made for them. It was a relief to get all of the food packaged and out the door in time. Although I did forget to send along kugel to one of the households we were feeding. The lemon cakes baked in muffin tins was a hit. It always makes me feel good to hear a first bite be deemed so good that it elicits a string of curses from the eater. This cake has never failed me and is always especially good with a dollop of very tart lemon custard. Most Passover cakes are filled with nuts. Ground nuts make an excellent alternative to flour and it doesn't have the gunky heavy taste of matza meal. Unfortunately, my youngest is tree nut allergic. The meringues ( flavored with fresh lemon peel dark chocolate and chunks of dried apricot) I had made were nearly all gone after the ...

 Passover is all about using an ancient text, the Haggadah to connect to both long-ago history and to our own family history. For me, Passover also has another ancient text. This is my mother's notebook full of Passover recipes. When I was a kid the cover was intact. This notebook came out with the Passover dishes each year. I looked through it the other day and I see that my mother started this collection of recipes in Halifax when she was newlywed. My mother learned very quickly that, unlike my mother's mother, the ladies of Halifax were excellent cooks. My mother asked these excellent cooks to share their recipes. I never met Mrs. Pascal but I have intimate knowledge of her Passover sponge cake.  There are recipes that don't think anyone makes anymore. My father sometimes made chremslach but he always made them dairy and with sweet wine. My mother made this wine cake year after year. I do not. I think that this cake tastes vaguely like sweat socks. My mother adored this ...

 בְּכָל־דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת־עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם In each and every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he left Egypt One of the ways that we fulfill this mitzvah of seeing ourselves as if we left Egypt is to read the Haggadah. We also fulfill this mitzvah by retelling the stories of other times of difficulty. The Holocaust survivor father of classmates of mine would tell the story of his own surviving years in various concentration camps. This year I am remembering the terror and chaos of last Pesach. Getting regular food was hard enough. Getting Pesach food- just the basic stuff like meat and matza meal,  was even harder. In the days leading up to the holiday, last year friends frantically shared information about who was selling what and who was willing to deliver to our neighborhood.  I remember filling out online order forms at various suburban kosher markets whose websites promised delivery to our neighborhoo...

 Our Pesach adventures have begun.  Saturday night I got the stove kashered. Normally I get the kitchen switched into Passover move in one fell swoop. This year, it was a two part adventure. Sunday we had planned to celebrate two important family events, our daughter and son-in-law's anniversary and our youngest's birthday. Izzy's the fabulous Kosher Brooklyn barbeque joint opened an outpost few blocks from our house. They had catered our daughter's wedding so eating their food seemed a fitting way to mark their day. Our daughter showed up at our apartment early to help me with the great Pesach switch. The rest of the celebrants joined us outside the restaurant. We placed our order and waited for our food. It was a spectacularly beautiful day. I realized that I usually miss these perfect spring days because they tend to occur while I am prepping for Passover. Our food was finally ready, we walked to central park and decided to eat on a rock outcropping so we could eat t...

 In preparation for Pesach, our old kitchen curtain was taken down, hand washed and is now hanging to dry in our back bathroom. Our new curtain arrangement is made out of an old linen tablecloth with drawn thread work and a large wear hole that I had mended a few years back. The linen in this cloth feels particularly unrefined and is a greyish white. I am sure that there is a name for this quality of linen.  I know that some of my readers will have a name for this type of linen. The centerpiece of this particular curtain arrangement is the "My hearth is my pride" cabinet curtain that first showed up on this blog as a schmatta mystery. The valance is made up of the self valance of the "My hearth is my pride" curtain and two 1950s embroidered placemats. The motifs on the placemats don't match but they are similar work in similar colors from the same era.    This particular curtain sits on the fence right between charming and weird. Perhaps it is exactly the right ...