A Food Friday Blog Salad

First an apology to all of you who used to subscribe to my blog and were used to getting an email when a new post appeared. Blogger has discontinued that service. There are other ways to have people sign up to subscribe but I haven't been able to figure out any of those services. If you are willing to help me figure out how to do this-please be in touch---I will be so grateful.

The High Holiday season is both synagogue and cooking seasons. I took a break yesterday and ran away to see the current exhibits at FIT.

The upstairs gallery had an exhibit of Balenciaga and Dior. After seeing the exhibit I can tell you that I am on Team Balenciaga---the photos that follow are all of his work.

The piecing on the bodice of this dress is just so incredibly beautifully done. I am not going to get too technical here but you might want to pay attention to how each of the stripes march up. For those of you with more advanced dressmaking knowledge just take a look at how those three inset vees don't have a center seam but are sculpted on the dress form.

Apparently Balenciaga used to make his dresses shorter in the front and fuller and longer in the back so when the wearer walked the back filled up with air. His dresses took up space but weighed very little.

My mother owned a couple of knock -offs of this purple mohair coat.

I was tempted to take this red ribbed wool coat home.

The downstairs gallery was an exhibit about shoes. I'm not sure why I didn't like the exhibit more...but I took some photos and will share them below.

I loved the open construction of these 1940s wedgies.

The shoes from the early part of the 20th century were designed to be both pretty and somewhat comfortable.

I guess what bugged me is seeing how so many of the shoes of the past several decades were designed to inflict pain on the wearer.

Seeing so many of these shoes together made me think about the mean spiritedness of the shoe designers.

If you love shoes by all means visit.

A set of our turquoise pillowcases have just been demoted to the rag-bag. I made a replacement set out of turquoise and white shirting last night.

I added turquoise grosgrain ribbon to cover the seams. These pillowcases won't change the world but the silky smooth cotton shirting will feel lovely against our sleeping faces.

Today I was back to cooking. I was suffering from Jewish Hostess Syndrome as I was setting up for the Yom Kippur break-fast. In my defense I wasn't sure exactly how many people were showing up. Rather than just allowing the left overs to molder in the back of the fridge only to be thrown away in a week, much of the left over crudité platters have made another appearance in tonight's dinner---but in different forms.

This is a lasagna adjacent dish made with finely sliced crudité vegetables and the pesto I had made but forgot to serve ---the cream cheeses from the break-fast have been turned into a creamy sauce. We will find out tonight if this experiment worked. It smells delicious.

More crudité vegetables are now in a fennel salad.

I oven friend batata strips in olive oil and lemon juice. They look a little ugly but are addictive.

There is still a big green salad to make---and a nap to be taken before our guests arrive tonight.

Shabbat Shalom!

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today. Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things. When we were at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

sarah in nyc

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