A blog, mostly about my work making Jewish ritual objects, but with detours into garment making, living in New York City, cooking, and other aspects of domestic life.
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On the Passover train
There are some things that are inevitable during the process of preparing for Passover. One is that some kitchen things disappear.
This year after we switched the house I was unable to find my Melita coffee filter holders. I need to have my jolt of coffee to make it through any day. But I REALLY need my coffee on high labor days like the days before Passover. I ordered a replacement coffee filter holder from Amazon. For two days until it arrived I just dumped my usual dose of ground coffee into a large mug and then filled the mug with boiling water. Eventually, the grounds settle but cleaning a pile of damp coffee grounds is really unpleasant, not to mention the yukky sensation of straining coffee grounds through your teeth.
I was so happy when the replacement filter holder arrived.
Unfortunately, the base was broken which made using the filter holder a bit fiddly.
Luckily later in the day I found my two Passover filter holders which had been packed away in a pot. Today I got to make and drink my coffee like an actual human being.
Another inevitability of Passover prep is bodily injury. Most years I get a case of what my friend calls cooking stigmata, or burns on my forearms from lifting pots in and out of the oven. The other variety of injuries are cuts to my fingers Last year I dramatically cut into my left index finger and fingernail. This year I got a lesser cut on a different finger tip.
My big job for yesterday was slicing 16.5 lbs. of brisket.
The brisket is now all packaged up and living in my freezer. I made the beef gravy yesterday.
In our family in addition to the big seder plate in the middle of the table, each guest also has their own individual seder plate.
Yesterday I roasted the bones that will go on the individual Seder plates ( chicken necks) and the shank bone for the main Seder plate. We also roast the eggs for the main Seder plate.
Side dishes still need to be made. Desserts will wait until after Shabbat.
Lots of ironing has already been done and the stack of linens that still need to be attended to is large...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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