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.

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

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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

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