sarah in nyc

  The Rosh haShanah meals are followed by ironing season. This is just part of what I got through yesterday. I still have a large tablecloth and about a dozen napkins left to iron.  This is what our table looked like on the first night of the holiday. The inside of our holiday challot looked like this. To be honest, not every slice looked quite this cute. Dinner this shabbat is more of what I cooked for the holiday but I will be making some gazpacho we we also ingest some vegetable matter. Yesterday I brought in some boots to be repaired. This was on the wall of the shoe repair place which is actually around the corner from the address in the calendar above. I loved the term "Dead Storage for Automobiles". It took me a minute but I figured out that dead storage for cars is the opposite of live parking. I guess in 1940 it was economically viable to own a car and store it in a long term garage and just take it out occasionally. This is the building that used to house Santini St...

 Just before Passover, I washed my bedroom curtains. I noticed that the lace curtain, the one that Victorians would call the glass curtain because it is the one next to the glass window had developed holes. These curtains had begun life as my living room curtains about thirty years ago. My husband kept saying that since they are made out of lace they ought to have holes in them. I think that he really wanted me to avoid unnecessary work. The holes were beyond what I could tolerate. While my old curtains were the height of late 80s early 90s interior design style finding such curtains or even such yardage wasn't easy in 2025 where minimalism is prized. Eventually a bit of internet searching turned up some yardage that would work well enough. The fabric arrived a few days ago and now, we have a new pair of glass curtains in place and unfiltered morning light won't make my husband miserable. They even look OK at night. Actual time to cut, sew and put up these curtains? probably le...

 This post is mostly about food. It is about the food I have been making for Rosh Hashanah and the food I have been making for us to eat until then. Earlier in the week I baked bagels. That was a simple mid-week bake. I only used half the dough for bagels. The rest was pulled pulled out of the oven in the form of a cute heart shaped loaf. Yesterday was challah baking day. My husband discovered apple butter this summer and suggested that it would make a yummy and appropriate Rosh Hashanah  stuffing for our challot.  I remembered that I had actually filled challot with apple butter a couple of years ago and it was a bit too wet. so I microwaved some apple butter with tapioca starch (and probably some spices-- I was working too quickly to account for every ingredient in the challah ) to thicken it up. Above is the thickened apple butter and below you see it in use before being rolled up. How many challot did I make? I have no idea. I made several of them small. Three will en...

When I finished typing this post I realized that it actually has a theme---stuff that looks like a disaster while in process and then looks good when completed.  Many of the projects I work on spend much of their time under my hands looking like kind of a mess. There is a large number of small tasks that need to get completed each in the proper order ( or at least what feels like the proper order to me). While that process of  many small tasks is going on  things can look like they may not have a good end. Then, there is a moment when the project goes from looking like DIY gone bad to something quite terrific. This week two pieces made that transformation within hours of one another.  Arianna's tallit --now looks like a tallit. It is complete with the fringes and corner pieced from Grandpa's tallit. I still have to sew on the atara and make the eyelets. I am happy for every inch of the many yards of of machine embroidery that went into this piece. From a distance thi...

 We ate the last of the challot I had made before Rosh haShanah last night during our break-fast. The filled challot were a hit. Tonight is Shabbat and yet more challot needed to be baked. I decided to make more of the filled challot. The filling is a mix of apple butter, date spread, and pomegranate molasses. The flavor is both dark and bright. I think I had seen this method of creating a filled braided-looking loaf on one of those junky food YouTube channels. I rolled dough into a rough rectangle Then I added a line of filling with a spoon. Then I made cuts around the dough. You fold the top flap down over the filling and then alternate pulling the strips over the dough first from the right side and then from the left until y.ou run out of strips.. You can see that I turned up the bottom flap before I finished braiding. This is the loaf before baking. I got a little fancy with this loaf and twisted the dough before placing it over the filling. Here it is baked with a sprinkle of...

 We seem to be transitioning from Zoom dinners to having people actually eat at our table. Several of our usual Friday night gang are off enjoying the holiday weekend. Each week, I remember that our buddy Mike can't join us because he is no longer alive. Every Friday I expect his call just before dinner is to start asking me to resend the Zoom link. We won't be getting those calls anymore. Two of our usual gang are joining us in person. I am so happy. Yesterday during a long chat with a friend she mentioned that she felt that her circle of friends has shrunk during the pandemic. I completely understand what she meant. The social restrictions of the pandemic mean that the lovely encounters one usually has with your wider circle of friends are just gone. You can't visit for a few minutes at kiddush over a plate full of food and catch up with the person whose child was in Hebrew School with yours ten years ago or chat with the sweet elementary school kids who used to sit on my...