Skip to main content

Nearly Shabbat

 It has been a busy week.


Hanoch came up from Philadelphia to tie his titzit.




Yes, he was really happy with the tallit.


He had purchased really beautiful tzitzit in Jerusalem.



He was really happy with the result.



I am still working on the atara and will ship the tallit as soon as it is completed and stitched in place and I have trimmed all of the loose threads from the tallit.







We celebrated my sister's birthday.


And tonight I made Shabbat dinner.


I soaked dried limes in boiling water


and then broke the hard shells



before stuffing them into whole chickens. The dried limes pack a flavor punch.


I know this doesn't look terribly pretty but it should taste wonderful.

I didn't take a photo of the roasted vegetables or the semolina that I made.  But I did make two pies.

I made a blackberry pie that is topped with an almond milk custard that has been flavored with rum. There is a little drizzle of pomegranate molasses to cover the less than beautiful color of the custard.


I also made a blueberry pie.



Tomorrow I am joining Shawna's husband and his family to make Shawna's Yahrzeit. I am leaving out the drama that went into the making of both of these pies. Let's just pretend that the disasters didn't take place and i will smile broadly when I serve them.


When I opened the freezer to take out two challot for Shabbat I discovered that a dinner guest from a couple of weeks ago had brought us a container of blueberry lemon sorbet!  I wish I had served it when our guest was here but it just might be the perfect thing to serve with the pie.

There is still a giant stack of dishes to wash before dinner.







I know that this isn't the most beautiful melody, but this is how we sang this text. I could listen to this family all day long.



Below is a more melodic setting for this same liturgical poem.



And something to help you get ready for the high Holidays.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

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 ...
1 comment
Read more

Two funerals and a birthday

 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...
Post a Comment
Read more

It All Feels Like Yesterday

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 ...
2 comments
Read more