After the apocalypse ( or after the day that felt like the apocalypse)

THIS was the view from my window this morning as opposed to the terrifying orange of two days ago. Air quality isn't perfect yet, so I have spent the day indoors. My tiny adventure out of the house yesterday left me with a terrible headache.

It's Friday, so that means a cookign and baking day. It was a challah baking week. Before I shaped the challot I reminded my husband of his religious obligation to bug me and remind me to take challah.

The book my husband bought me with ALL of the rules of taking challah spends a great deal of time going through how big a piece of dough must be taken from the main dough to qualify as a כזית, the size of an olive. I just lop off a piece that is the size of a really big olive and don't get into the madness of people who never saw an olive determining that a כזית could possibly be the size of a baseball or a watermelon.

I know that common practice is to wrap the dough bit in foil and toss it into the oven while the actual challah bakes. I like watching that dough lump burn. Sue me...the mitzvah is done. I promise that this particular rant is done as well.

I decided to add a filling to this batch of challah. We own far too much cocoa so the filling is a mix of cocoa, raspberry jam and apricot jam and a bit of water to make it spreadable.

It has taken me until recently to realize that you can yank dough that is a wonky rectangle into a a perfect rectangle as you roll up a filling inside. Yes! you are the boss of the dough!

Here are the loaves braided and waiting to rise.

A few hours later, they looked like this.

Unlike the last batch of challah, these aren't overbaked.

Sunday, I had made a batch of whities (meringues to the rest of the universe) for my friend who is in need of them. The whitie making left me with three egg yolks. Those yolks are now a batch of noodles.

After I cooked and drained the noodles I made a sort of fake sesame noodle sauce with almond butter, gochujang a bit of honey and cider vinegar. I also added some carrot and cucumber for a bit of crunch. It isn't the identical flavor to cold sesame noodles but for a sauce that took about a minute to make....good enough for government work.

I also made chicken.

What is in my little lavender bowl? The cumin and cardamom mix my daughter gave me, some amba powder, soup hawaij and a couple of shakes of cayenne pepper. A while back I couldn't get enough of smoked paprika and sumac. This is my amba powder moment. I think that the flavor profile of this chicken lives in the geographic region somewhere between India and Iraq.

I have been working away on mending/reinforcing my friend's wedding tallit.

I have two big projects starting soon and until they begin it has been oddly restful to do all of the hand stitching to repair, and reinforce this tallit.

I still hate China silk ( that doesn't just mean that it comes from China but it is a type of really thin silk).

I am nearing the end of this phase of the project and can soon move on the the parts that I can do by machine.

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

Search This Blog