Blog salad

 During the fall holiday season my time to actually do stuff is pretty much chopped up into odd shaped bits.

I baked a bread.

This is actually far less impressive than it looks. For some reason my Instagram feed has been filled with short videos of  loaves of bread that are coated with flour or cocoa and then scored before baking. I have a medical scalpel that I use for bread scoring ( as opposed to the ones I use as seam rippers). You can use a straight blade razor.

Just scoring a bread before baking is pretty...coating the loaf just makes it extra fancy.

Since you asked this is a basic white flour bread dough with what was left of a container of fine bulger wheat.

One of the great things about the High Holidays is that I get to see tallitot I had made in the past worn long after I had made them. One  real joy was  this year was seeing Todd and Ale's linen tallitot again.

Todd and Ale are vegan and they wanted their tallitot made out of a plant fiber textile. 

After consulting with my wise sewing buddies I settled on using linen. One of my concerns about using linen is that it wrinkles badly.

One way to keep it from wrinkling is to wash and dry it multiple times. I no longer remember how many times I washed the linen used in these tallitot but it was at least four. I was a bit anxious that despite all of the laundering the tallitot would look like old laundry when they were used. I was struck at how good the tallitot looked during the holidays. 

The napkin below is an off-cut from linen curtains I had made for my youngest. Right now when I pull the napkin from the dryer it needs serious ironing before use. 

I assume that in a few more washes it will relax into something that can be used without being ironed.

I am catching up on other bits of my life...like Costco shopping. Today I decanted the 25lb bag of flour that I had purchased into more manageable gallon bags. 

Decanting the flour into the galloon bags was a household task my youngest detested. I think of him every time I I do it ( it really isn't that bad). 

One of the advantages of doing the made pre-holiday cooking that I do is that today I just pulled a Zip-Lok bag of tzimmis out of the freezer for Shabbat dinner. It feels so luxurious to be able to have the time to meet with a new client on a Friday afternoon.

Some elderly vegetables now have new life as tonight's soup.

Despite looking like the stuff one cleans out of an industrial dishwasher this mushroom, dill watercress and barley soup is pretty tasty.

The leaves in the park are starting to turn.

Shabbat Shalom! and Chag Sameach!