Food Friday---Pesach looms

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 thing for our second Passover in isolation.

Once again our challah is braided glazed white bread. Last week's version was probably the challah my husband has liked the most in a long time...and he is a man who hasn't found challah that he doesn't like.

For the past few days, we have been eating down our chametz and have been eating lots of odd meals.

Tonight we will be having meatloaf and vegetable matter that is still to be determined.

We plan to change the house over for Passover this weekend. It will be a harder task without the muscle power provided by our kids.

Shabbat Shalom

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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...

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...

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 ...

sarah in nyc

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