Food Friday and Blog Salad

For the past few days the old fashioned melody of יה ריבון עלם ועלמיא has been my constant companion as an ear-worm. I have been looking for the melody that we sang at our table when i was little on YouTube.

I have found this version which is lovely but not what I have been hearing in my ear.

This melody is an old one as well but not the one I was thinking of.

Well, I just spent too much time looking for the lovely slow and meditative melody of my childhood. If I keep looking right now then i won't be able to complete this post. If you find a link to it , let me know

Moving on to the blog salad portion of this post...

I loved how the reflection of the windows across Columbus Avenue made this not very interesting building look much more compelling.

The police in the local precinct needed something done on the exterior of their building, so they got the firemen next door to take care of it with their hook and ladder.

My fried Sue asked a question on Facebook about the napkins that we use with little fuss ( not my mom's beautiful embroidered napkins but the ones that we use every day)

So to answer Sue. These are the napkins currently getting the most usage in my napkin drawer in their un-ironed state. All of them have had a previous life in a different form

So from left to right, two napkins that had previously been our duvet cover. Now they are two layer napkins with the plain blue on one side and the striped on the other. They look quite a bit spiffier ironed but are a delight to use. Then the waffle woven dark blue cotton that had a previous life as a tablecloth. Lastly the black and white seersucker check that had spent many years as our shower curtain. I cut away the grotty bits and made dozens of Covid masks and now a large batch of napkins out of the nice parts. I may have finally used up the last of the shower curtain.

As for Shabbat dinner-- one of our guests is bringing a salad. She makes a glorious salad. We are having meatballs

They are flavored sort of like my parents used to flavor their meatballs...ketchup is a major conveyor of flavor. Sometimes the homey and familiar is what one needs.

We are also having a quinoa salad.

Toasting the quinoa in the oven after boiling it is a game changer.

Shabbat Shalom!

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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...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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