sarah in nyc

 Usually I end my Friday posts with some music videos. Today I start my post with one. My parents used to sing this song often on long car trips. my earliest childhood was filled with many car trips to visit my ailing grandparents. I am not exactly sure why this has been my earworm for the past while but I decide to look it up. The melody is an old russian military march, the words רְשׁוּת הַדִּבּוּר לֶחָבֵר פָּרַבֶּלוּם רְשׁוּת הַדִּבּוּר לֶחָבֵר תַּת-מִקְלָע בְּעַד אַחִים טְבוּחִים בַּגֶּטוֹ, שֶׁלֹּא הִגִּיעוּ לִגְבוּלָהּ – נִתֵּן – רְשׁוּת הַדִּבּוּר... בְּעַד סְפינַת גּוֹלִים נוֹדֶדֶת שֶׁלֹּא הִגִּיעָה לְאַרְצָהּ – נִתֵּן – רְשׁוּת הַדִּבּוּר... A rough translation is  It's time to give the floor to our friend  Parabellum the right to speak to our friend the sub machine gun on behalf of our brothers slaughtered in the ghettos that didn't get to arrive at our borders on behalf of the ship bobbing on the ocean that hasn't been allowed to dock on it's shores The song w...

When I was growing up my father used to speak in awe of old world cooks who were able to bake cakes without a recipe. That method of cookery was known in Yiddish as shit arayn, or put it in. Aside from the grade school amusement my sisters and I had at the word shit so close to cake like my father I have always been intrigued by the idea that a cake could be created without carefully following a recipe. A few summers ago I found an old cookbook in an antique mall that gave a series of proportions for cake making. it made me realize that the  shit arayn  method was indeed possible. I have been attempting such cakes for a couple of years now. The disadvantage of such a cake is that the results of these wild and wooly methods are not always completely predictable. I call my efforts at these no recipe cakes, fake cakes. A dear friend is coming for dinner. Her birthday was yesterday. I had thought I would make a citrusy cake to hono...

I suppose that if I had actually given a bit more thought to it I wouldn’t have given birth to a son whose birthday so often falls just before Passover.   What I really ought to be doing tonight is Passover cleaning. Instead I baked a cake for my youngest.  Some of his friends are coming by tomorrow afternoon.  I assume that a group of adolescents will polish off the cake.   What did I bake for my delightful but inconveniently born son?  The cake itself is a “quick plain cake”  from the settlement cookbook. Given my son’s very un-exotic taste in food the vanilla butter cake with a hint of orange flavor is just right.   The cake is filled with vanilla custard ice cream I made tonight. The frosting is a cooked butter cream that actually tastes delicious.     The frosting is green because my son was born on St. Patrick's day.  The cake is covered in plastic wrap because I pulled the cake out of the freezer to take the ...