שמש שקעה, שקעה מעבר ים ימי החול חלפו, חלפו ואינם וכוכבים שם במרום יברכו שבת-שלום

First order of business:

A photo of Madeline's pinot---complete with many little cotton threads from the cotton batiste thaty I haven't fully cleaned up.

Yes, I have to go to work with some masking tape to pick away all of the white threads. I'm still figuring out how to edge the pinot. The wheels are turning although the actual solution is not yet quite figured out.

I haven't baked challah in about two months.

When I started this batch I wondered if I would still remember what to do. I did remember. About half of these challot are stuffed with apple butter and apple friendly spices. The other half are not because I ran out of patience.

We are eating one of the chickens that I had made before Passover. Our dining room is still piled high with STUFF because of the flood last week in our maid's room. We have been running a dehumidifier. I have occasionally turned it off for half a day but then we get the basement smell again, so back on it goes.

Some buildings in my neighborhood have spectacular stained glass windows in their lobbies. You walk in and see a showy bit of wonderful stained glass. Our building has a modest stained glass window that is located in a little hallway off the lobby where our mailboxes are.

This window isn't there to impress visitors but just to give the residents a tiny bit of pleasure. The window looks into a courtyard that doesn't get very much light. Yesterday the sunlight hit the window just right as I went to get the mail. I have never seen the window look prettier.

I had a doctor's appointment on the East Side.

I saw a particularly nice example of early fire escape iron work. Often this style is either badly damaged or so thickly covered in dozens of layers of enamel paint that you can't really see the pretty lace-like design.

Shabbat Shalom to all of you.

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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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