Color and Food Friday

I had made this tallit I think before I had a blog. you will have to forgive the photo the colors aren't reading quite right. The main body of the tallit is a deep turquoise. The magenta is far less strident.

This tallit is made out of silk noil which was chosen by Judith, My client because she loved how noil really took in the dyes. Silk noil may take dye like a champ but it is made out of short fibered silk which means that it isn't as long wearing as some other silks, (Although it is much LONGER wearing than China silk whose fibers break if you look at it too long. China silk is a type of very thin silk often used for inexpensive linings or in the 90s was washed to raise the nap and sold as inexpensive shirts that broke if you left them in your closet for too long.)

Anyway, this noil tallit has begun to go the way of all noils and has suffered a bit of breakage. Judith wondered if I should mend this tallit with neutral colored silk. (None of the silks used in the tallit are still in my fabric stash anymore)

I thought that silk dyed in colors that go with the tallit will work better.

I hope to add enough layers of color that the silk will resemble what it look like while it is still wet with fabric dye.

It's Friday and a challah baking day.

The challot are mostly filled with a bit of cranberry orange jam that a dinner guest brought as a house gift.

My guest is also a Boston girl and knows how essential the flavor of cranberries is.

Today I discovered the perfect tool for sprinkling a bit of cocoa over a jam filling. I am feeling terribly clever.

Today's chicken was made with...

After cooking it looks like this.

I made a vaguely Middle Eastern rice with Hawaij and added diced dried apricots and carrots.

The rice will be fully cooked by dinnertime.

The birds in the trees across the street are making me so happy.

Shabbat Shalom to all!

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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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