Another week of this and that

I  just reread my last post and realized that one of the reasons that I was kind of down is that my husband was sick with the sort of nasty dragged out sick that I usually get. He wisely decided to sleep in the kids' room which meant that amazingly, I didn't get sick. He was prescribed antibiotics and is much better now.

Tuesday I went to Bushwick to attend the funeral of a former staff person of our building. Although much of the short walk from the  subway to the funeral home was industrial there were also a fair number of beautiful small-scale row houses from the late 1800s. I love that this one has the original stoop and cornice. 

Across the street was an abandoned gas station.

Delek is the Hebrew word for gas. I share my amusement with you.

I just put this week's chicken in the oven to warm up, no photos, forgive me. We are also eating my husband's favorite.

I suppose that most people would call this a cauliflower puree.  We call this dish blobbo-taters because it reminds my husband of the powdered instant mashed potatoes that he adored as a kid. The cauliflower was boiled with a few cardamom pods in the water. I added salt, pepper, olive oil and a teaspoon of tapioca starch to the food processor and process until smooth. The tapioca starch cooks enough in the hot cauliflower to give the mixture a silky mouthfeel.

We don't have guest this week so a simple meal will do us just fine. I did pull a block of honey cake from the freezer because Pesach looms just over the horizon.

A tree on Broadway has caught a balloon bouquet. I suppose that the owner of the bouquet might be sad to have lost it but I enjoy looking at it as I work out.

The building across from my kitchen window is getting it's masonry repaired but for the moment I am enjoying the process of the scaffolding going up.

The other day we found a manilla envelope outside our door. One of our upstairs neighbors is a print maker.  This print was inside the envelope.

I don't know what you see when you look at this image. A cat watching a construction worker?

For me, this image evokes the darkest COVID times. Our building was surrounded by scaffolding and the scaffolding was surrounded in protective netting. We were all confined to the indoors and the construction workers were restoring the cornice of our building. The work took two years. For my neighbor who lives on the top floor the noise and the intrusion was constant. For us on the sixth floor there was lots of noise but it wasn't quite as awful.

 The simplicity the spareness and the oblique bit of storytelling in the image reminds me of the time my sister was in Poland on business. At one point her hosts suggested that they go visit the best bakery in Poland. They pulled off the highway at the exit marked Oświęcim. They stopped the car at the bakery and went in.

My sister was introduced as the honored American guest. The bakery staff filled up a box with beautiful pastry for my sister. My sister being the honored American guest asked the bakery owners some questions jus to make conversation. "So, how long have you been in business?" The bakery opened in 1939.  The owners and my sister smiled at one another. My sister wondered in her head what the bakery workers might have seen during the war years with the bakery so close to Auschwitz. The bakery owners asked my sister if she wanted to see the ovens.  My sister at first thought that they meant the crematoria at Auschwitz but then realized that they meant the bakery ovens. My sister the honored American guest replied yes.  So soon a photo was taken in front of the bakery oven. With my sister's Polish hosts, the bakery staff and my sister all smiling and my sister holding a giant box of the best pastries in Poland. You might think that it was just a photo of people smiling in a bakery, which it was, and wasn't.

Wishing all of you a Shabbat Shalom.