Blog salad

 I delivered the Torah mantle Wednesday afternoon.

It was an emotional time both for me and for Benjy's parents. They both wondered about how I applied the beads to the surface of the mantle. They were surprised that I had hand-stitched each one into place and were delighted by the variety of beads I had used.

We spent a long time together talking about many things, family, Benjiy, the meaning of the verse chosen, grief, children, and the mantle. Our conversation swooped and looped. At various moments there were tears. 

I am just so happy that Benjy's parents are so pleased.

I have been working at a supercharged speed since switching the house over for Passover. If you are attuned to the Jewish calendar that's seven weeks.

My husband strongly suggested that I take a day off. 

Yesterday, I took something of a busman's holiday.

I made a small batch of napkins. A number of our napkins have been demoted to the schmatta pile over the past several months. Our everyday napkin drawer has been on the empty side. 

The napkins on the top of the stack with the black and white print come from fabric I had used to make decorative pillows for my daughter a few apartments ago. I no longer remember but there may have been curtains as well.

The black and white checked seersucker had been our shower curtain for several years. The bottom of the shower curtain had gotten grotty as all shower curtains do. After cutting away the nasty bits and laundering the rest, this fabric has been made into many, many masks over the pandemic. Seersucker seems to be a perfect napkin fabric. My husband and I used our new checked napkins at dinner last night. We will probably use them during the many meals over the next few days.

I have been hankering to make myself a new dress. I have been noticing that some of my basic wearable at nearly every occasion dresses have worn so thin they are nearly see-through.  I just hadn't the time to make new ones and retire the threadbare dresses...so I pulled out a grey rib knit that had been ripening in my stash and now I have a new dress.

There is a bit of elastic gathering on the neck. I added waist darts to both the front and the back for a bit of shaping.

I made a lettuced hem because they are so easy to do. ( You zigzag stitch over the raw edge as you pull the fabric through the sewing machine.) I like combining the grim grey with feminine details. If you are local you will probably see me wearing this dress often --until it gets threadbare.

Today I had to get ready both for Shabbat and for Shavuot. We are eating a chicken that I cooked and froze during the Passover cooking frenzy.  

My husband just brought me an air fryer.

The zucchini and peppers will be the stars of our green salad tonight.

For Shavuot I made this

I think I made it last year. This is a dish that probably existed in the shtetle.

It is three big sheets of homemade noodles filled with the sweet dairy filling we usually put into blintzes.

There is probably already a homey Yiddish name for this dish. I welcome your suggestions. It is so much less work to roll out three giant noodles than it is to make a batch of crepes. I measured nothing in the making of this dish. 

I do believe that there are something less than two cups of flour and three large eggs in the noodle dough. The dough was very soft and easy to roll. The filling is made with one lb of nice ricotta cheese-full fat since you asked and a one lb tub of farmer cheese. I added some sugar and salt, lots of Mexican vanilla, cinnamon, and an egg. Yes, I could have used other soft cheeses, like drained cottage cheese or sour cream or cream cheese or pot cheese and so could you. I added the flavorings until the mixture tasted like blintzes. I added a bit of olive oil and cinnamon and sugar to the top. I baked it at 350 until a knife inserted into the center came out clean. Sorry, I didn't look at my watch. 

I also got some work done on the next tallit that is due...

Shabbat Shalom! Chag Sameach to all!