sarah in nyc

  This beautiful child is now an adult and we are celebrating her birthday as a family during Shabbat dinner. She will be celebrating with her friends on her actual birthday.  The main dish for tonight is: Chicken cooked with which is the fabulous hot spice mixture that one encounters in Ethiopian restaurants. I cooked the chicken at a low-ish temp to give the spices more time to seep into the chicken. The berbere was a gift from one of my sisters. There is a bland rice warming in the oven and I am making a big salad. One birthday treat is this... crispy and salty smoked meat. No, I will not be indulging. We are having three different desserts each one was about making cooking compromises as I went along. Not pictured is a cranberry sorbet. I had planned for this citrus-flavored cake, here shown in one skinny layer, intended  to be filled with an orange custard made with a base of Israeli instant vanilla pudding. I had assumed that orange juice could stand-in for the milk...

 Back in the day I sometimes used to leave money in my coat pockets. It always seemed like I had received a gift after putting my hand in a coat or jacket I hadn't worn for a season or two and finding a dollar or two or even a twenty-dollar bill folded in the pocket. Over the past several days, twice  I experienced the same delight in finding something I had forgotten about. Last Friday night during our Zoom dinner with our kids I mused at how much I was craving cranberries and how sad I was that they had not yet appeared at Costco.  Some people hate cranberries. Some people just eat enough cranberries to fulfill their Thanksgiving requirement. I adore cranberries. I would even love them if they weren't such a terrific color. Every year I buy as many of the two-pound bags at Costco as my house can hold and stash them away in either my freezer or the freezer in my building's basement so I can eat them for as much of the year as I can. Friday night after we ate  I real...

 Today is Friday and I'm not cooking today. Actually only a tiny bit of cooking. I am making a butternut squash as I type this.  Why am I not cooking? I am feeling a bit under the weather. I got my flu shot last week. Often after I get my flu shot I get a mild and deconstructed form of the flu. Last night I had the cold in the bones feeling one often gets when you have the flu. Last night I went to bed under a down quilt, a pile of wool blankets, a shearling coat, and a shearling hat all worn over a pair of leggings and a big cashmere sweater. Yes, I was still chilly, and no, it wasn't that cold out. After breakfast, I was finally warm enough to take off my shearling hat. I am feeling better but this was a spectacularly unproductive day. So I leave you with a couple of random thoughts. The local restaurants have been creating dining sheds for the cooler weather. This beautiful shed was put up by the excellent Indian restaurant a block south of our apartment. The masses of fake...

Our dear friends who live in one of the northern suburbs invited us for dinner on Sunday. We love our friends. We would love to visit with them even if Ira didn't smoke and cure his own brisket. But the brisket made over a period of a few weeks with several complicated steps is just a tiny indication of how gracious Pattie and Ira are to us. The stars all kind of aligned on Sunday. My client who had commissioned the baby quilt lived about twenty minutes away from Pattie and Iraso it made sense to hand over the quilt at Pattie's house. Pattie is a serious quilter and has quilted since she was in her late teens. She is really good and I was looking forward to showing the baby quilt to my accomplished friend. We took the train northward. As the train moved northward my eye was attracted to the industrial. My client showed up. We had met at least once on Zoom and have emailed one another frequently during the process of making the quilt.  Over these months I have felt like I have g...

 Every single article on aging, on avoiding dementia talks about the value of problem-solving and learning new skills in keeping one young. Today I took my last stitches on the baby quilt. Every bit of it was a challenge and in the very best way. My client was worried that using so many different fabrics would create a visual cacophony. The strong horizontals of the shelves and the railroad tracks and the recurring use of red keep the composition coherent. I had assumed that I would quilt ( that is, attach the layers of the quilt together) by machine. The bulk of the quilt was too much for my sewing machine. I realized that I had to go traditional and quilt this by hand. I stitched meandering lines in two different blues, lavender red, and green. it took me a little while to get into the rhythm of the work. Some quilters use the act of quilting to impose a grid over the design. I did not. I thought about the baby that would be using this quilt and how he would be so close to the su...

 When I was growing up often Saturday night or Sunday night supper would be declared as being זה וזה, this and that by my mother. Unlike our usual meals, where we all sat together at ate the same meal cooked by my parents, you just poked around in the fridge and assembled a meal for yourself out of whatever appealed to you. This post is the blog equivalent of זה וזה. Yesterday early in the morning I picked up my husband from his cataract surgery downtown. ( Yes, it all went really well.) A few hours later I went for my own annual physical on the Upper East Side. While I waited for the bus on West 86th Street I admired some excellent shadows. Walking to my doctor's office I passed this pretty little house. There are several wooden houses tucked in among the apartment buildings and brownstones of the East 80s and 90s. I am never not delighted when I come across one. This morning the hallway by our bedrooms looked like this. A lovely start to my day. I had cooked so much foo...

 A long long time ago...two years ago almost to the day, I did a favor for Tanta Marcia. Her dining room chairs needed to be recovered and the wood needed a bit of TLC. Marcia and I shopped together at  www.fabricguru.com . I admit that I was bossy about which fabrics Marcia should choose. There were a whole lot of different elements in the room that needed to get pulled together visually with the fabric choice. I selected a few that I thought w.ould work and Marcia chose this one.  I am not usually quite so bossy but I knew that I was right. After the fabric arrived I got to work recovering all of the chairs and waxing all of the wood. Tanta Marcia and her husband Fred were grateful. We decided that taking us out to dinner would be my payment. Life and then the pandemic got in the way. Tuesday was the big night. We arrived at Marcia and Fred's building and were taken with them on the Access-a-Ride van as their guests.  This is the website of the restaurant  Che...

 The season seems to call for slightly sweet and mellow tasting food. I cooked a meal that flavorwise is adjacent to Pumpkin Spice but is instead a vaguely Middle Eastern cousin to that flavor profile. My daughter had given me a bunch of goodies from her favorite gourmet market as a birthday gift. Included in that wonderful gift was a bottle of fig vinegar. I cooked this week's chicken thighs in the fig vinegar and cut up what was left of a bag of dried figs.  I see looking at this photo that I also added some ras-al hanout and black pepper. The result is this. I can't tell you what it actually tastes like. I didn't sneak a taste. It does smell wonderful though. A beautiful soup is cooking away in the slow cooker. It is made out of chicken wings and lots of root vegetables. It does look a little like the stuff that gets left in the trap of a commercial dishwasher. By the time we sit down to eat the soup it will be delicious although it may only be slightly prettier. While ...