sarah in nyc

 This has been a week of celebrating. My husband had a birthday.  My wise son-in-law has named his birthday celebrations so they are now a festival. My daughter has done the same so inspired by them, we have been celebrating Pop-fest. There was the family trek to Boro Park for lots of skewered meat. Last night we celebrated with old friends of my husband's who very nearly share birthdays with him. I baked a small heart shaped chocolate cake from the Settlement Cookbook. I made half of the recipe and added a whole lot more flavor in terms of spices (cinnamon, allspice and black pepper) . I topped the bake cake with some Israeli instant vanilla pudding made with much less liquid than asked for on the directions and rum and orange flower water for additional flavor. I shaved chocolate over the vanilla pudding and then edged the top of the cake with a cut up Kit Kat bar. Sorry, no photos and it was as my late friend Shawna used to say, "Not,bad ". Especially since the cake ca...

 Today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. This year the liberation comes just as the hostages in Gaza are being released drip by drip. It's an anxious time of high emotions. At my synagogue, like so many other across the globe, this prayer is sing during services as a prayer of  hope for the liberation of  the hostages. אַחֵינוּ כָּל בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל הַנְּתוּנִים בַּצָּרָה וּבַשִּׁבְיָה הָעוֹמְדִים בֵּין בַּיָּם וּבֵין בַּיַּבָּשָׁה הַמָּקוֹם יְרַחֵם עֲלֵיהֶם וְיוֹצִיאֵם מִצָּרָה לִרְוָחָה וּמֵאֲפֵלָה לְאוֹרָה וּמִשִּׁעְבּוּד לִגְאֻלָּה הָשָׁתָא בַּעֲגָלָא וּבִזְמַן קָרִיב Our brothers, the entire house of Israel Who are in a place of trouble or captivity Those that stand between the sea and dry land May God have mercy on them And take them from trouble to ease from darkness to light from slavery to freedom Soon and speedily When I hear this sung in synagogue I am usually too choked up to sing.By the time we get to the line about being between the s...

 One day, when  was walking my daughter the mile  home from preschool she turned to me and asked me, "Mama, what does, 'ishbyish robyro' mean?" I was confused. I had never heard of the word robyro. I asked her to use it in a sentence  and she began to sing... Like many parents who children mispronounce things as little ones there are some favorites of those childhood malaprops. And some of them just become the right way to express something.  Each stripes in Miles' tallit is built up ish by ish, robyro. These three ribbons a wide and a narrow in two shades of blue and the blue and gold military braidgot stacked and stitched, row by row . Below you see a wedgewood blue diamond embroidered over the navy blue center bit of the military braid and two navy blue sets of scallops on either side. I then added a stitch in a bronze metallic super fine thread to stitch down the darker and narrower ribbon. The stark lines of the military braid gets broken up by the machine ...

 Times are complicated these days. I have had to put myself on a news diet to avoid being completely stressed out. So in that vein, I just wanted to share some things, some small and others not so small that have been giving me joy these days. I bought an immersion blender a few months ago. (No, not this one) I know I am late to the game but I am a late adopter of appliances.  For the past long while, my usual breakfast has been fruit and nuts. Sometimes I cook them in the microwave and other times I would grind them up in my food processor. I used to call the mixture a fruit roughy as opposed to a smoothie.  I then realized that if I were marketing my breakfast I should call it a fruit porridge. These days my fruit porridge is made up of cranberries, a tiny clementine or apple and almonds and chia seeds and depending on my mood either fresh ginger or a few shakes of cinnamon.  The immersion blender makes quick work of the task and cleaning just the business end of t...

 While I have been working on Miles' tallit I have been trying to work out elements of Nini's tallit in my head at the same time. Nini's tallit will be evoking Nova Scotia. I have been stitching away  at the fog. I have been adding some stitching with silver metallic thread  to get  that sense of fog. One side of the tallit is nearly done and the other half is about halfway there. But often when I work on one part of a piece I am problem solving about the next bit of work that I need to tackle. That next bit of work is how to create the trees. These beautiful photos are nini's and she sent them to me so I could understand what exactly she was thinking of in the Nova Scotia landscape. My first memory of Nova Scotia was being driven from the airport to Halifax when I was five. Pine trees were part of my life in Massachusetts but the tall spindly looming pine trees that lined those roads were something else entirely. I have been thinking about how to create those trees ...

 Miles' tallit is made up of ribbons that I have combined in various ways and embroidered. Since the tallit will be visible, on what we typically think of in sewing, as both the wrong side and the right side it needs to look good  however you look at it. What this means is that every time I stitch down a ribbon (or an assemblage of ribbons) I need to think about what the underside of my stitching will look like. One of my dining room chairs is standing in for my dressmaking form. I have arranged the tallit so you see all of the stripes from both sides of the tallit. This is the tallit the way it might be worn. There is more work that needs to get done.  But I am really happy with the direction in which this is gong. This has begun to reach the point where it has begun looking like a tallit.

I am slowly moving out of the land of sick. it has been a long slog. my husband has been wandering on and out of feeling poorly . We had planned on doing a delayed chanukah celebration with our kids Saturday night but our daughter has the flu...so this may take a while. It snowed earlier in the week.  I had to go to 125th Street THREE times this week to apply for my state non-driver's identification.  I am not going to bore you with the reason that this simple task too three trips. There are some wonderful old commercial buildings along the street, including this one. I would have taken more photos but it was just too cold to stop to take pictures. So this lovely 1898 building will have to suffice.  In 1900, this Budweiser beer garden was diagonally across the street from where I live. This is what is there today.  This was a challah baking week. I topped the challot with poppy seeds while you weren't looking. Tonight's chicken has been flavored with limoo, dried lim...