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!

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today. Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things. When we were at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

sarah in nyc

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