Skip to main content

Blog salad

 Often a quality of light will compel me to take a photo. Sometimes the subject itself isn't all that special,


like the morning light shining off of my baking pans, or the same morning rays on the brick wall across from my kitchen window.

Sometimes the appeal is more obvious, like the afternoon golden light reflecting off of the cornice of my building.



Right after I took these pictures I ran into a young neighbor and encouraged him to look up. I don't know if he appreciated what I was seeing or was just indulging me.


The right light can make even the most mundane building look beautiful




Even this bit of 1950's city housing gets a glow up in the late afternoon light.


Sometimes it is a bit of color in an unexpected pace that pulls my eye.

 This leaf was resting on the service gate of my building. My building's garbage is stored on the other side of this gate.



For those of you who don't reside inside of my head, I am switching topics. 

I purchase a 25 lb bags of flour about once a month or so. I usually decant the flour into gallon sized bags so it is usable. There are times when either I don't have the storage space in my big plastic (keep pests out) bins or I just haven't had the time to get to the task that we leave the bag of flour in our front hallway.

My husband started adding gloves, slippers a hat, and occasionally a head to the bag of flour. We began calling these not yet decanted bags of flour as Floury--- our new favorite child.
An early manifestation of Floury with a stuffed shopping bag head and paper eyes.


Here is Floury, hatted but headless.

 We are easily amused.

Still on the topic of flour, decanting the flour is a bit of a messy job, mostly because I didn't own an appropriate scoop. I had been using an oversized tea cup for the job but the lip of the cup was to fat to work well. I am generally not a fan of single use kitchen tools. However I did a bit of a cost/benefit analysis and decided that it did make sense to get a serious scoop to help with the monthly job of decanting the flour.

The scoop is huge. It takes up quite a bit of space and it improves my life.

Now, for another topic shift. My great niece and nephew came to visit this past Sunday. My great-niece loves sparkly clothing. Fabric Mart was selling wonderful sparkly fabric that I believe is manufactured for gymnastics uniforms for two dollars a yard. I bought a bunch assuming that it would appeal to some of my various young relatives. 

I showed the fabric
to my great niece to see if I should go ahead and make her a dress out of it. She was delighted. Her little brother asked me to make him a pair of pants. I traced off a pair of his pants to make a pattern. We discussed design choices ("NO POCKETS!") I cut the fabric and put together the pants.


I still need to create the waistband  (elastic) and add elastic to the ankles.

My great niece didn't have an extra dress with her---she is past the age of needing to travel always with a spare set of clothes, so I took measurements.  I look forward to these kids wearing this clothes.

And now for the last topic of the day.



This girl, now a woman celebrates a birthday today.













On her first birthday






























Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...