sarah in nyc

One normally does not think of cooking as an upper body strengthening activity, but this morning it certainly was. After I did my weights work out. I put up the challah dough.  I don’t use a bread machine.  You need to position your body  so all of your weight flows from  your feet to your hips through your arms to knead the dough.  I usually do the first kneading until I have a slight burn in my upper arms.  Here is that dough all smooth and ready to rise. Then I got to work on the noodle dough. I used semolina flour.  The had kneading is hard. The dough is much stiffer than the challah dough. Again I knead the dough until it is as smooth as the proverbial baby’s tushie.   The semolina flour makes kneading the challah feel like it’s no work at all.   By time time I’m done with  kneading the noodles  I feel like Wonder Woman. I left the ball of dough to rest underneath a bowl, let the challah dough do it’s rise and ...

My mother’s family was famed for it’s singing.  My mother’s great grandfather lived in a town in Podolia, in the Ukraine called Frampol.  Apparently, Zalman Paysakh used to sing in his sleep. He had quite a sweet voice, and I guess there wasn't all that much in the way of nightlife in Frampol. So people used to gather outside of Zalman Paysakh’s window to hear him sing in his sleep. My grandfather inherited his father’s sweet voice. Singing z’mirot,   the Shabbat table songs was an important part of my mother’s family life. Z’mirot   were an important part of my own Shabbat experience growing up.  Some of the melodies we used were relatively new. Some of the Chassidic melodies were set to marches or to waltzes, others were more Middle Eastern in flavor. Every Friday night we began singing z’mirot   with Kol Mikadesh sh’viii  All who sanctify the seventh day.   the melody wasn't exactly a melody, more a very old world chan...

Last night, the phone rang at about 4:00 a.m. It was our door-man, telling me very slowly that the super was on his way to our apartment.   I greatly admire our doorman for figuring out that one speak really slowly and clearly to people when you call them at 4:00 a.m. Apparently, a pipe on the 8th floor had burst. It was raining heavily in the closet in my kids’ room.   Last night this closet was completely full.  My husband had the brains to empty the closet.  I did not have that level of cognition. All I wanted to do was lie down. Let that be a lesson to you, don’t ask me to do any complicated problem solving in the middle of the night   My husband completely emptied the closet as my boys slept. Today I have been doing laundry. My kids’ hamper lives in that closet. The sleeping bags live in that closet. All of our luggage and tote bags lives there too. .   This is the floor of my kids’ room. It looked worse earlier today.   ...

When my mother was young she used to embroider. She used to embroider challah covers. It used to be possible to buy embroidery designs printed on linen, like the one pictured above, in Jewish book stores. The design is a standard one. You have all of the symbols for Shabbat, candles, challah, wine cup and decanter. the text reads “ In honor of Shabbat and Holidays”. If I remember correctly, my mother started this challah cover while she was in college and living with her older sister in Brooklyn.  I guess life got in the way of finishing this challah cover and it got put away.  My mother taught my older sister how to embroider when she was about 12. My sister  started out working from kits and then progressed to do some really elaborate work. At some point during her embroidery career she put some work into this challah cover. The Passover when I was 7, my mother gave me a Jewish embroidery set as an afikoman present. The kit came with a challah cover and a matza ...

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. My family, including my mother and sister went out to Brooklyn to join family there. Unfortunately I had a bad cold. I stayed home and dozed on the couch while watching Netflix and blowing my nose. My big take-away from the experience is that I think Celebrity Rehab must be written for the addicted. I have never seen  a show that assumes that the viewer has zero memory of what took place five minutes ago. I am probably one of the only people in America who didn’t overeat yesterday. Given that I’m not particularly fond of turkey skipping a day of it is fine in my book. It would have been nice though to spend time with extended family. But like every week, Thursday is followed by Friday and I needed to put together Shabbat dinner.  I’m slightly less sick so my cooking is not endangering my family. I made meatballs with lots of ground up veggies.  I also made this kale salad out of shredded kale, roasted clementine sections dried cranberries a...

I know I tend to make clothing quickly. Recently though I have rediscovered a cut of dress that I used to wear in my early 20’s.   The wedge shaped dresses of the early 1980’s were made for my body. While I am a whole lot heavier than I was in those days, my body is more or less the same shape. I have noticed both on other sewing blogs as well as on the fashion blogs that those simple dress shapes have returned.  Last year I had gone to an exhibit at FIT about Japanese fashion and those simple shapes popularized by the Japanese designers in the early 1980’s suddenly looked both fresh and grown up.   I also realize that while I crave screaming bright colors in the summer, the colder months have me craving grey. Grey! It’s so cheerful! It’s my cold weather happy color. Much of my colder weather wardrobe has been worn to death. It was time to make cold weather clothing.   This space dyed knit, made out of a mystery fiber, was my first experiment in a wed...

Today I got a thoughtful reply from My Rabbi. Sorry that it has taken me a little time to think this through. I agree with you that this really is most ugly, and enraging. I mean, the Jews for Jesus who make this for themselves ... what can you do? This is the least of the things we would argue with them about. But to give this to practicing Jews is surely meant to deceive and to weasel their ways into the normative Jewish community. Halakhically, we tend mostly to focus on the tzitzit themselves, and less the garment to which they are attached. So it is the tzitzit strings -- not the garment that bears them -- that must be from wool spun specifically for the purpose of tzitzit, and tied by someone themselves commanded to follow this mitzvah (male or female, even according  to  the Shulhan Arukh). Arguably, if you removed all the decorative pinot and the atara, and removed the tzitzit that are there now, and threw all those things away or burned them, I think you could ...