sarah in nyc

 These days I am doing everything as fast as I can.  Rosh Ha Shanah starts this weekend I have been cooking, and cooking.  This graniteware turkey roaster normally spends the entire year on a high shelf in my kitchen doing nothing more than holding up two silver plate roast platters until Thanksgiving. This week the turkey roaster was used to make stuffed cabbage (not pictured but bagged and in my freezer), two gant chickens stuffed with limoo (dried limes) and last night I cooked out tzimmis overnight in the oven on low.  If you want my mother's recipe, these are the notes that I took on how to make Tzimmis during a phone call with my mother in maybe 1990. As you look at the list of ingredients...assume more for all of them except for the brown sugar. I cooked the whole thing in the oven overnight at 250.  The pan is now washed and ready to rest until Thanksgiving. I have been working away on Sarah's tallit. Over the last couple of days I have been working on t...

  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...

 On this beautiful day fall is in the air. We are eating jerked chicken. I coated the chicken with the spice mix yesterday morning so that the heat can go down to the marrow of the bones. I have made white rice to calm our mouths. A green salad is yet to be made. I baked challah this week. Some of this batch will be eaten on Rosh HaShanah. I made two eight stranded round challot.  They actually aren't that difficult to make and the teeny bit of extra fuss is worth the fanciness in look. Yes, some of them are slightly over baked.  Some of the challot are stuffed with a mixture of  "baking dates"--- essentially a date paste and apple butter. When the bible talks about the land of Israel being the land of Milk and Honey,  the honey isn't bee honey but dates. The date paste is thick and not spreadable at room temperature. A little time in the microwave with the apple butter made it spreadable. I added some shakes of   coffee hawaij  for additional fla...

 Yesterday's stenciled strips of raw silk now look like this... These stripes are now complete with lettering and have a nice ribbon edging. The metallic ribbon is vintage and is probably older than I am---and I remember the Nixon administration well. Below is the work that I completed today. The darker bronze colored metallic braid is also vintage although I can't precisely date it.  Thank you for indulging me and looking at all of these photos. I am feeling quite pleased with myself. I have also begun embellishing the atara. The atara is made out of linen woven with Lurex . I hand embroidered the letters. They may need a dark outline to stand out a bit better against the gold. Sarah had asked for a bit of beading on the atara. There will be more. Today's visit to Whole Foods included this surprise. When my parents' friends would visit Florida they would often give us a box of coconut  patties. We loved eating them even though they weren't exactly good. They were d...

  Progress is being made on Sarah's light themed tallit. Like every other big task, creating this tallit is made up of lots of small tasks. For each text strip/stripe I need to cut the silk and edge it so it won't ravel away. Each strip is embellished in some way either before or after I paint  on the lettering. The ribbon borders for the stripes are assembled and embroidered. When I first started sewing I found metallic thread to be a bear to sew. Metallic thread tended to break or crack while I attempted to use it with my machine. I used to use a special metallic thread needle and use silicone drops on the thread to lessen breakage and cursing. I don't know if I have learned to intuit all of the intangibles that make sewing with metallic thread less of a bear, like machine speed and thread tension or if the sewing gods have simply decided that I have put in enough time at the task and have given me a pass.  Most of the time I can get through long periods of time with al...

 This morning I got a sweet email from my sister recalling how we spent the first anniversary of 9/11 together at Wave Hill, a beautiful garden in the Bronx overlooking the Hudson. She wrote the email noting that she was writing the exact moment that the first of the World Trade Center buildings was struck. I have found myself this year trying to pull away from my memories of that day. It has been a week of death. A friend from my community died. She was a joyful brilliant presence who had become like a sister to many people I hold dear.   Friday was the unveiling for my dearest friend Shawna. It was a morning of large emotions expressed quietly.  My father's Yahrzeit began Friday evening. Sunday my sons and I attended the memorial service for their beloved fifth grade teacher. My daughter had wanted to attend but she woke up with a bad cold.  Kathie Khalifa taught each of my kids. She was the sort of teacher that each child deserves to have at least once in the...