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!

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for giving life to all. I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

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...

sarah in nyc

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