heading towards the new year

 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 the atara.

The atara itself is made out of linen woven with gold threads. In some lights it looks like taupe linen and in others it looks completely gold.

I had hand embroidered the letter but the gold on gold made the lettering kind of blend in to the background.

I outline stitched around all of the letters using a soft old-gold metallic thread and a charcoal grey sewing thread.

There was enough color contrast AND shimmer using both threads.

Sarah had wanted light emanating from the text. 

I hand gold cording and added sprays of beads and sequins.

This is the entire atara laid out on my table and with the extra fiberfill backing trimmed away.

Yes, I still need to back and edge the atara.

This is what the atara will look like when on--clearly without loose gold cording and and mycamera cord.

Tomorrow night we go to Boston for a Sunday morning Brit Milah for the newest member of our clan.

I have more to say...but too much to do to type it right now.

So I give you a secular ( maybe)prayer from 1960.

The text on the atara is אל נורא עלילה, God of Awesome Deeds. It comes from a liturgical poem we recite before Neila, the last prayer service of Yom Kippur. I have been singing those words and listening to recordings of the prayer the entire time I have been working on this atara.

I am currently in love with this version by Yehoram Gaon who was quite the heartthrob when I was in my early teens. My dear buddy Rochelle was so in love with Yehoram Gaon that she taught herself colloquial  Hebrew by studying all of the liner notes of his records. Rochelle now lives in a Moshav in the south of Israel.

I love this version recorded in 1968. Apparently this is an old Jerusalem melody.

This version, despite being recorded in a concert setting, gets closest to what it actually feels like when an entire community REALLY sings a liturgical poem together.

I have posted this recording before. I listen to it every year during this season.

Shabbat Shalom!