sarah in nyc

I am benefitting from the insane amounts I had cooked for Passover. We have guests tonight and  most of dinner has been plucked from the freezer. Since you asked i pulled out a gallon bag of shoulder roast and two containers of soup. Our guests are bringing the vegetable matter segment of our meal. During my weekly call with our son in Israel we discussed a couple of different dessert options, a seven layer cake or non-dairy ice cream. My son ( my longtime cooking partner)  suggested that the ice cream might be easier. He was right HOWEVER I hadn't brought up just how much room the giant bag of almond flour was taking up in my freezer. Based on trying to free up freezer space I made a batch of almond cookies. Here they are before baking. I used less almond flour than last time because I was hoping for chewier cookies. However I got distracted and the cookies are slightly overbaked and are crispy. We will all live. The cookies are flavored with lots of grated blood orange peel ...

  I was asked during Pesach to make a tallit for someone I have known for my entire life. It is a gift and a surprise for the recipient. I was asked if I had any tallitot ready to go in my stash. When I first started doing this work my sewing skills were rudimentary. I used to buy scarf blanks, paint them and create pinot/corner pieces. I slowly stopped doing the ready-to wear tallitot and have only done custom tallitot for the past many years.  I did go through an old box (because the person who made this request is a dear, dear friend) and I found a velvet shawl that I had begun to paint. I added some more color and set all of the dyes. If you had assumed that fabric paint painted on a shawl 15 years ago and not set  is 100% permanent --you would be wrong. We had some discussion back and forth about the right verse s to use on this tallit but further digging in my stash turned up a remnant I had purchased at B+J Fabrics at some point in the 1990s.  It is silk broca...

  Yesterday my husband and I went to Brooklyn. My cousin was sitting Shiva for her younger brother. We shared memories from the distant and less distant past.  Later in the day, younger relatives arrived.  Memories from five years ago, thirty years ago, fifty and seventy years ago and more were shared throughout the day. We discussed things that were painful and things that were sweet. There were puzzling memories that only made sense now that we are adults. The Shiva reinforced the ties between the generations in our family. There was something so potent about the sharing of the stories during Shiva. I have reached the point of my life where I have a pretty clear idea of the family conditions stored in my body that will  in  ten or twenty or twenty five years will lead to my own Shiva. We will, all of us, one day cross that bridge. No, not the one to Brooklyn  but the one that leads between the world of the living and that of the dead.  Hopefully my o...

 We hosted both Sedarim surrounded by friends and family. We were so sad to find out on the first day of the holiday that my beloved cousin David died in his sleep in Israel after a long period of decline. Memories of my cousin  from my childhood when he was a glamourous grown up and I was a very little girl  have been swirling in my head since I heard the news. Every year I emerge from the cooking Olympics that have kept me in doors to discover that it is actually springtime. I could have been outside in shirtsleeves today. Last night I mended three pairs of my son's pants. Some of these pants have areas that are mostly mending threads and patches. This is the inside of the striped pants and the  archeology of the mends is on view. I liked mending the checkerboard pants with a similar pattern on a smaller scale.  My son's cellphone wears a hole in his front pocket. I tried to mend the pockets while not narrowing the pocket bag opening too much to make it not us...

 First of all, to my readers who visit for the sewing and NOT the cooking. The first Seder is tonight so the cooking frenzy will come to an end. Last Shabbat my friend Ruth asked me my recipe for the fish I had served at Kiddush the week before (that little lunch for 150 that I did with my friend Sara).  I tried to remember what I had done to the salmon. I explained to Ruth that in my frenzy to get everything done for that day I didn't exactly remember WHAT I had done. Ruth's reply made me realize that she thought that I was being coy and didn't want to share my cooking secrets. I wasn't being secretive at all...but bit by bit I remembered what I had actually done and then unspooled it for Ruth. Today has been a similar rush of many, many cooking tasks. I made a vegetarian soup that is a vehicle for matza balls ( lots of dried mushrooms soaked in hot water fresh thyme and bay leaves simmered with sautéed carrot and onion and then strained the solids all squeezed out and...