Food Friday the "Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Bloom !!" edition

Today has felt a little bit like a day out of a sitcom. I had kind of planned on having a quiet day at home to cook for Shabbat and to do some sewing and the doorbell kept ringing and friends kept dropping by--and I attended the online brit-milah of a baby born to someone I met as a toddler.

The challah got baked ( please ignore the passive voice),

the chicken got cooked in these spices.

There is also rice cooked with dried mushrooms that looks like rice cooked with dried mushrooms--use your imagination.

My friend Janet came by with some wonderful old Arab embroideries that were purchased in Israel in the late 1960s.

Janet and I are trying to come up with a way to use these embroideries in something that she will use.

The quality of the workmanship is really good. We still haven't come up with a good idea of how to incorporate these into something that Janet will use and not just keep in a drawer.

If you have any ideas please share.

One of the items that came out of Janet's bag was this.

It is a truly stunning piece of woven Kente cloth. it is just under four inches wide and is at least two yards long.

We have all seen printed versions of Kente designs

We have seen politicians wearing Kente to express solidarity.

They are actually wearing nice quality woven Kente in this photo not just the less expensive printed variety

I have never seen Kente of this quality.

The narrow strip alternates between the small and the large woven patterns. No two of the panels are identical. I could look at this piece of Kente all day and not tire of it. I know enough about fabric and weaving to know that this is something of exceptional quality. I don't know enough about Kente to be able to say much more. Do any of you know more about this weaving tradition and where this piece fits into that history?

I also did manage to squeeze in a little bit of sewing work. I am currently pulling loose threads to the back of work. It is a pesky job that I hate to do and it is necessary. My usual method has been to thread the errant thread into a needle and pull it to the back of a piece.

Below is my new favorite tool for getting that annoying job done.

A teeny crochet hook has a head small enough to fit through several layers of fabric. Catching the loose thread is easy as is pulling the thread to the back of the piece. I just regret that it took me so long to figure this out.

Another of today's tasks was figuring out how to make new High Holiday table covers for our synagogue. No, I am not doing the job but I am designing it and engineering it so it is a doable job for one of the local tailors to do in the short amount of time we have left before the holidays.

If I type quickly and clean up the kitchen quickly I may even have time for a nap before dinner.

Shabbat Shalom!

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

Search This Blog