sarah in nyc

 First order of business: A photo of Madeline's pinot---complete with many little cotton threads from the cotton batiste thaty I haven't fully cleaned up. Yes, I have to go to work with some masking tape to pick away all of the white threads. I'm still figuring out how to edge the pinot. The wheels are turning although the actual solution is not yet quite figured out. I haven't baked challah in about two months. When I started this batch I wondered if I would still remember what to do. I did remember. About half of these challot are stuffed with apple butter and apple friendly spices. The other half are not because I ran out of patience. We are eating one of the chickens that I had made before Passover. Our dining room is still  piled high with STUFF because of the flood last week in our maid's room. We have been running a dehumidifier. I have occasionally turned it off for half a day but then we get the basement smell again, so back on it goes. Some buildings in my...

 We switched our house back to Chametz-mode last Saturday night, so today is our first post-Pesach challah. It felt wonderful getting back to the really pleasurable job of kneading challah. Today, my Facebook feed was filled with photos of Schlissel challot.  A Schlissel challah is a custom to bake challah in the shape of a key to help open the gates of heaven on the Shabbat after Pesach. Or more properly, it is a Slavic Easter bread tradition to bake a loaf of bread in the shape of St. Peter's key. Just as I don't put a conifer in my house at Chanukah time to say, symbolize the wooden posts installed at the rededication of the Temple I don't bake such an iconographically Christian challah. So sorry folks, no Schlissel challah here.  I made a batch of two stranded challot. I made eight small challot rather than four big ones because it is just the two of us eating. Here is a visual on how to make two stranded challot. Roll out one strand of dough. I had rolled the dough i...

 I had made these mushroom and tomato focaccias yesterday. Two of us had eaten half of one of them for lunch. The big one was intact. Our older son called and said that he was in the neighborhood. My husband suggested a socially distant supper in Riverside Park. I packed up the rest of the focaccia, cut up a watermelon, and packed up dishes and silverware to take with us. Our younger son would join us when he was done with work. We started out supper in the playground where my kids and I had spent a huge amount of time when they were little. As the day turned to dusk, we were asked to leave and the gate to the playground was locked.We walked up to Riverside Drive and saw our youngest ready to join us. We continued our dinner by a bench on Riverside Drive. you can see that our older son who no longer lives with us is more than six feet away. The bugs had come out, and as usual, found my husband delicious. If you look just past the street lamp you will see a large branch downed by la...

This is a challah baking week, and it is still winter so Shabbat starts on the early side.  Shabbat starts at 5:21 this week. It isn't as much of a mad rush as it was during the weeks when Shabbat began around 4:00, but still, if we expect to eat tonight the tasks all need to be completed in the right order. I got the challah dough going before I finished drinking my morning coffee and began kneading after my breakfast. Breakfast was, as it is most mornings fruit and almonds run through the food processor. I used to call this roughy, as opposed to a smoothy. Recently I have decided to re-brand my breakfast and call it fruit porridge. I have the feeling that if I were to market this it would sell better with the new name. Either way, an orange, some fresh cranberries, a handful of almonds and a package of vitamin C powder are what got me going in the morning along with a big cup of coffee. Once I got the challah kneaded and rising in the big aluminum b...

At the end of January local news was filled with this  tragic story  A young mother died when she fell carrying her child in a stroller down a flight of subway steps. Of course, it brought me back to my own years managing travel in the city with one two or three small children. When my own kids were little, with minimal exceptions there were no elevators on the subway. If it were at all possible I walked. I would set out either north or south, usually along Broadway with my child strapped into a stroller and a backpack filled with diapers, wipes, changes of clothing, snacks and blankets either looped on the stroller handles or on my back. In those days I walked miles every day. The backpack also usually contained some sort of a baby carrier because there are times a baby gets fussy and needs to be held and there just aren't enough arms to manage both baby and all of the stuff one needs when out with a baby. There are times when you need to venture out of t...