sarah in nyc

When my kids were little and of the age when they could best deal with the frustration with a tantrum or otherwise unpleasant behavior, I hit on the concept that each child had a certain amount of bad behavior they were entitled to in a day.  There were some days when they never got close to hitting that limit. There were days that they hit that bad behavior limit late in the day. There were other days that while breakfast was still on the table their allotment had been used up. I would let them know that their bad behavior allotment for the day was used up and that they could start again tomorrow. I don't know why, but that strategy often worked. During the past two years of Covid, I have used various strategies to keep me going. I have thought often of cousins who survived the deprivation and siege of the Warsaw Ghetto. They survived. They even survived the camps. Frankly, I don't think I have the emotional fortitude or physical stamina to have survived the camps. I can thoug...

 No, I am not ill or thinking about death as anything but a distant eventuality-- but I just saw  this blog post that made me think about my future tombstone. Grandma Ida's nut cookie recipe is right on the side of her tombstone, preserved for posterity. Perhaps the recipe will even ensure that her grave will get visitors long into the future. When  Adele died, (Adele was my aunt's dear friend from high school who married a distant-ish cousin of ours) my cousin Bonnie arrived at Adele's memorial service with copies of Adele's honey cake recipe to hand out to the attendees. I thought that Bonnie's idea was brilliant. This is something that I decided that I want to have take place at my funeral --whenever it takes place.  But having a recipe on the tombstone takes that impulse to a whole new level. So if you attend my funeral, what recipe of mine do you want to be given?  What recipe would you want to see on my tombstone? I come from people who pre-plan their...

  It's another red chicken week. You too can have what I call red chicken if you mix sumac, smoked paprika, and cayenne in a bowl add some black pepper and rub it all over a chicken as if the chicken were a pampered lady in a spa. I also squeezed lemon over the chicken. And now a word about kitchen tools and utensils. In the late 19th and early 20th century, silverware manufacturers invented lots of serving implements with only one use, like olive forks, cheese knives asparagus tongs and marrow spoons. Among those specialized implements are tomato servers, a pierced not quite circle attached to a handle. It was used to serve slices of tomato and leave the juice behind. For some reason, I own three. I rarely use mine to serve tomatoes. Often they are used to serving chicken. The other week I discovered that my tomato server has another excellent use. My tomato is now my favorite way to strain lemon pips when I am squeezing fresh lemons as I did for today's chicken. And now the f...

 When I last posted I was hopeful but unsure if I would be able to finish the Atara for Liat's tallit. I began embroidering the letters on Friday and started up again right after Havdalah. I finished the last bits of embroidery on Sunday. With the embroidery completed, I had to remove the cotton that was marked with the lettering. The cotton fabric gets removed thread by thread. Tewing catalogs are filled with specialized tools for many different sorts of sewing tasks. Below is the best task for the job. As I worked I thought about all of the many folktales in many different traditions that all have the hero working away at a giant task until it is completed.  I wasn't Hercules cleaning out the Royal stables but this took patience. If I had unlimited time I would have perhaps filled in the letters with embroidery. I didn't have unlimited time. I wanted the colors to have the same chromatic shift as the tallit stripes. I decided to fill in the lettering with oil paint sticks...

 All of us who are Jewish spent much of yesterday feeling a tight belt of anxiety around our hearts as we heard the news coming out of Colleyville, TX.  My husband and I attended our own synagogue services by Zoom yesterday. We could certainly identify with fellow Jews in Colleyville watching the horrors unfold in front of them and with the people inside that Texas sanctuary.  Not long after the Tree of Life massacre we all did a drill for shooting event at our synagogue. When I was a kid, blatant antisemitism was thought of as uncouth.  I did grow up in a town with beautiful streets with covenants that would have excluded me from living in their lovely homes. Those covenants were in place until I was in middle school. There were towns in Massachusetts with similar covenants as there were all over the country. Unfortunately, hate speech, not just about Jew,s has been normalized and in some cases actively encouraged in the past several years. The first time I felt tha...

 Normally I will post about a piece as I am working away on it.  as many of you are learning Covid is a real energy suck. I could have either worked on Liat's tallit or I could have blogged about it. I was unable to do both. I could delay writing a blog post but the bat-mitzvah wasn't going to wait for me to get better. So I chose to work even in my diminished state. Covid did make lots of the tasks involved in making this tallit take much longer than normal. Case in point, the pinot or corner pieces. Under normal circumstances, they would have been completed in a day.  With Covid, the task took five days.  As of this minute, the tallit itself is completed. Some of my sewing buddies detest sewing for others and never do it. Some of them find working with a client to be an entirely unpleasant experience. As I look at this tallit I love it because I never in a million years would have envisioned the sight of the sounds at Mount Sinai to be the color spectrum. How freak...

  Like the rest of the Northeast, I woke up to the perfect first snow of the year.  It's cold enough for the snow to stay for a little bit and not just melt as soon as it hits the ground. Snow days are always a source of joy, an unexpected vacation day. But every time it snows I remember  the Sunday mornings when I was teaching Hebrew school and got the call that school was canceled because of snow. I don't think that I yelled as much and danced around the house as much when I used to listen for the radio announcer mangle the name of my school when I was a kid, Mamamodis, Manades, Mamandies. School was out and I got to go back to bed. I am feeling less ill but my husband sounds like an old dusty mummy speaking after being unwrapped. He is awaiting the probably positive result of his Covid test. Our son across town is also awaiting the results of his Covid test. I started a slow cooker soup yesterday. My husband and I ate some last night and will have more of it tonight. W...

 I did a little bit of retail therapy to get me through feeling so dragged out by Covid. I bought myself a batch of old sewing magazines. The ones above are from the late 1960s and early 1970s. I also bought some copies of Needlecraft magazine, a Maine-based magazine  that was published from the very early days of the 20th century until I think the 1930s. Forgive my tiny Covid brain but it wasn't until I looked at the photos that both the old and the newer magazine have the same title. I have several issues of this magazine which seemed to have had kind of an interesting business model. In addition to featuring ads from various advertisers, they also had their readers sell subscriptions to the magazine for all sorts of fabulous premiums. Probably a third of the ad space is taken up with ads for the various premiums you can get for selling subscriptions of the magazine. I am enough of a consumer goods nerd to take great joy in reading all of the possible premiums available to s...