sarah in nyc

 Today has been a rush of a variety of tasks. I made a roast. This is a shoulder roast.  I coated it in a variety of spices and cooked it until it smelled done. I added boiling water to the pan drippings and then added other goodies ( fresh thyme, dried mushroom and good old Manishewitz wine that is a must for charoset and kind of useless as drinking wine). I carefully scraped up all of the dried up good stuff and turned the mixture into a gravy that will be served with the meat. We are a bit container shy during Passover and there was a bit too much gravy to fit in the one container we had left , so I boiled red potatoes in water to which I added that last bit of gravy, the dried mushrooms and the thyme stems.  Covid had meant that not very many people visited so I had allowed bits of our couch to get shabby. I had been meaning to replace the cover on the center cushion on our couch for the last long time. I pulled down a few of my upholstery fabrics and made a new cushi...

 This week has been a whirlwind of hard work. My excellent shopping adventure ( which included the purchase of this fabulous play set) was followed by a day of really hard work. Yesterday I strained and squeezed out the soup. I took this photo after the net bags of chicken bones had been removed from the pot but before I had done the hard work of squeezing every bit of flavor out of the vegetables and bones. The bones and vegetables were reduced to this sad and ugly mess.  I have no photos of the 16 quarts of beautiful clear soup. This was probably the beast soup I have ever made. Having  18lbs. of bones to 24 quarts of water makes for a really rich soup. Today I  got the stuff I needed to make charoset. I made both a no-nut version and a many nuts version. Yes, I used the food processor.  Both versions are delicious and should improve after marinating in the fridge for a week. If you want to know what I put into the charoset, just ask. Chickens got cooked after...

 Some of my lovely readers have been asking me how the kiddush went on Shabbat. The little lunch for 150 or so that my friend Sara and I cooked was lovely. Several people commented on our excellent choice of caterer only to find out that we had made all of it  (with the exception of the challah rolls). I also want to shout out to the excellent maintenance staff of our synagogue. They are a crew of burly macho men who can set out a platter of  food for a crowd  in a truly elegant way. The sides of salmon were placed diagonally on  square white platters and were lovingly decorated with slices of cucumber, lemon wedges and sprigs of dill. Each dish was thoughtfully presented. Even my exacting mother would have been impressed. My mother taught me that even unappetizing food is improved if presented nicely but delicious food is raised to even better heights with nice presentation. The men outdid themselves. Right after Shabbat ended I began cleaning my kitchen. Sunda...

I have ended up backing into making a couple of decisions that are actually pretty bonkers. My husband and another woman from our synagogue have been organizing Torah reading for the past nearly year and a half. On Simchat Torah they were honored as חתן תורה and כלת בראשית. (I am not translating the Hebrew because it requires too much explaining for not enough payoff for the sake of this post---if you really want to know, ask and I will explain) These are old fashioned lovely honors and you usually repay that honor by sponsoring a kiddush---the snack/lunch after services. For lots of reasons of scheduling the only Shabbat that made sense to do this kiddush was this week. I am planning to change my house over for Passover this Sunday and the marathon cooking for Passover begins as soon as the house is switched over. I had also committed to baking cookies for 50 for an event in my building this past Monday. I should have cleaning and organizing my kitchen this past week ---inste...

 When I had last posted about E's tallit it was edged with  this beautiful striped silk shantung. I had done a technically impeccable job, even the join looked really pretty.  It was beautiful, but alas entirely wrong. The red pulled focus from the rest of the tallit. The binding was too thick and stiff. I ended up unpicking the whole pretty binding---that is pretty but not right for this project, and instead bound the edges of the tallit with  the vintage ribbon you see in the photo above. You can see the ribbon in place but not yet pressed. I sewed on the corner pieces and the atara. I needed to make the eyelets for the corner pieces.  I used my trusty cuticle scissors to make a pilot hole for the eyelet. I then stitched about ten or so stitches from the outside of the hole into the center going counter clockwise. Then I stitched buttonhole stitches going clockwise over the initial set of straight stitches.. I used four different thread colors to stitch the ey...