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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An Unexpected Shabbat at home
We had plans, and they got cancelled.
That means that I had to bake challah.
I was thinking as I began putting together the challah dough how so much of the early stages of baking challah looks less than appealing.
It's pretty similar to my sewing while it is in progress. At some stages, it is just an ugly mess. as my British pals would say, "It looks a dogs dinner".
But with enough time and labor,
it takes shape and eventually
you end up with something beautiful.
Our boys are joining us tonight. We will be eating chicken wings made with
Pomegranate molasses, mustard and liquid smoke.
It's the perfect mix of tart, sweet acidic and smoky.
Yesterday I purchased three bottles of the pomegranate molasses at Barzini's a local packed to the gills gourmet grocery store. The store carried food and condiments from all over the world. Of course I loved it.
And sadly, unlike the news in the local news blog that I liked to, that said that the store wasn't closing--it is closing.
Everything was 40% off.
This is most of what I brought home.
When I went to check out, the owners kept asking me if I was Persian. They thought that I looked Persian, but once they saw that I bought three bottles of pomegranate molasses and three big bags of Iranian herb mix and a package of barberries they were convinced that I MUST be Persian. Finally, they were convinced that my family came from eastern Europe but they liked that I liked Persian ingredients.
I am roasting some potato wedges in the oven as I type. They are coated with....
let me see if I remember, smoked paprika, black pepper, cayenne and dill. Olive oil and lemon juice finish the potatoes off.
I still have to figure out the vegetable portion of our meal and a small dessert.
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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