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!

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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