We are all Living in the Diaspora

I have been making good use of the jars of wonderful African marinades that my son in law gave me for my birthday. What I keep tasting in those delicious marinades is the flavors of Indian cooking as introduced to Africa by the Indian folks sent to Africa to administer the British colonies in Africa. I taste both longing for homeland as well as the excitement of trying new flavors in each and every mouthful.

Today's marinade contained this.

It went into meatballs.

The meatballs we made with lots of chopped parsley and onions that were nuked with olive oil and vaguely Indian spices (turmeric, cumin and coriander) and minced cabbage.

Here are the meatballs before being cooked you can see the pale yellow marinade.

These African marinades keep reminding me how much of my own cooking is about both memory (both my own personal memories as well as historical memory ---if that makes sense) and novelty.

We are eating the meatballs with rice ( cooked with some spices given to me by my daughter--a teaspoon of a coriander cumin mix and a black cardamom pod.) Yes there will be vegetable matter in this meal.

Yesterday I went to the garment district to get some wool swatches for a tallit I will be making this summer.

Finding thin white wool without the addition of Lycra isn't easy but I did find five samples to send along to my client.

My head was turned by these beautiful Liberty prints

and by these incredible Italian cottons.

Like Jimmy Carter said, I lusted in my heart. The beautiful cotton prints all stayed at B+J Fabrics.

There are things that I lust after for a long, long time. One of the items on that lust list is a turn of the century treadle sewing machine. Such a machine been on my list for at least twenty years. Our apartment is crowded and I really don't NEED a treadle machine.

However, the other day, a neighbor posted that she was looking to give away a 1906 singer treadle machine.

This gorgeous machine is now mine.

My husband is now using it as a desk. It is much prettier than the little flat-pack computer desk he had been using.

The treadle belt is broken but the belts are fairly easy to find. Installation seems to be pretty straightforward as well. The wheel turns as smoothly as butter. I think that when I am ready to tackle this project it will be an easy one.

This image for those who want to look up the model number.

I have one last topic for this post.

My friend Chris brought me his wedding tallit hoping that I could repair it.

The tallit is hand painted silk. The gold lines are gutta-- a waxy substance that you use to corral color in one place when you paint silk. The silk the artist chose to use is China silk. China silk quickly becomes brittle . The silk on this tallit is breaking.( I hate China silk with the same deep hate that I detest liver. China silk cracks and shreds if you look at it cross-eyed.)

I backed it with fuse-able interfacing to help support the silk. I'm hand stitching all of the broken bits of silk hoping that I can give this tallit a few more years of use.

The gold gutta is peeling off and seems to be pulling some of the colors with it.

My friend Chris loves his wife and this is his wedding tallit. So I am mending all of the busted bits.

I'm couching gold yarn over the cracked gutta. Machine stitching would destroy this tallit so this is all hand work. There will be many podcasts listened to as I work on this tallit.

Sorry! one last topic-- we accompanied our son to the airport when he went back to Israel. We

were rewarded with a beautiful sunset

that we watched from the windows of the AirTrain.

Yes, he did get home safely.

Shabbat Shalom! If you are here in the neighborhood, stay dry.

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for giving life to all. I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

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...

sarah in nyc

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