sarah in nyc

Maybe it’s because I grew up in New England. But fall calls for apple tarts. My mother never ever made a pie crust. She decided that they were too difficult to make. All of the pies she ever made were made with frozen Orenoko farms pie crust. Those crusts are uniformly salty and not very tasty. One of the first cook books I owned was the Moosewood Cookbook. It has a really good pie crust recipe. It’s one of the first thing I learned how to make. In my early days of cooking there were lots of quiches and pies that got made. I soon realized that pie crusts could be flavored to match the fillings. The experts often say that lard makes for a flaky crust. Since lard won’t be making an appearance in my kitchen I often use butter in my pie crusts. My father in law once gave me a cookbook he found in the garbage. It was mostly a bad cookbook. It did however, have a great recipe for an oil pie crust that you whip up in the food processor. I have been making tart and pie crust u...

We often refer to my youngest as “ The Buttless Wonder”.  Back in the day when he had to wear a uniform for school he was too skinny for Old Navy slim pants and had to wear suspenders. I ended up having to make his school pants because it was just too hard to find pants that were slim enough to fit him. Ten years later, my youngest is a whole lot taller but still really skinny. Recently he has fallen in love with wearing really skinny flashy pants.   My son has a skinny friend who gave him a pair of Beetlejuice black and white striped jeans that she had grown tired of. My son’s skinny friend is , as she ought to be , built like a girl, and is not a buttless wonder. The pants were baggy in the butt and were falling down. I offered to alter the pats. This is a skill that is far out of my usual wheelhouse.   I removed the waistband at the side seams and at the back seam and took the pants in at each of those three points.   I then had to make the waistba...

The post holiday joy of working complete weeks is sinking in. Two of the three matzah covers are now complete. I gilded the gilded lily by adding loops of sea foam green ribbon to represent sea foam. Does this matzah cover have the required three layers? Indeed it does. The orange silk organza and the magenta cotton lawn are just to give the user delight.   And it’s partner in crime… Did you notice the cute gold wave stitch top stitching? Again three pockets large enough for three pieces of hand made matzah. And a bonus photo of a church about a mile down Broadway. I have never been inside but the windows are so pretty at night.

And DONE!!!!

My neighborhood was built mostly between 1880 and 1929.  There was basically nearly no building from the stock market crash of 1929 until the 1980’s. There is relatively little Art Deco architecture in the neighborhood, not to say that there is none. On a recent ( that is, this morning) walk I found these examples. This botanical fantasy is from the entryway of a public school. The building across the street from the school uses similar yellow brick and more restrained neo-Egyptian motifs. The two buildings make good neighbors. Just at the corner, you have this. I love that all of the elements are intact. I think that the building escaped renovation because the address was less than fashionable for many decades. The porthole theme continues in the first floor windows that I was too thoughtless to photograph.

Well, the last stretch of Sukkot begins tonight. As much as I love cooking, I have been dragging my feet all day. Never the less, I have two chickens in the oven  ( with smoked paprika, black pepper and onions), the challah dough is on it’s first rise and my noodle dough is resting. During the week though I made some progress on the matza covers. I realized yesterday that making matza covers during sukkot has a bit of a Christmas in July  sort of a feel.  I have three in progress. I had taken this photo before I sewed the elements together for a blog post I didn’t have time to write. I suppose that if I were a different sort of a girl, even making batches as small as three matza covers I could manage to make them look more or less identical. I am not that girl though. So the results each have their own personalities. This one is ready to line and assemble. I have run short of water fabric so have added some turquoise wool. The outer border is periwinkle colored silk...

One of the fun benefits of having a blog is keeping track of the stats. No, I’m not the NSA, but I’m able to see what countries my readers are from.  Usually most of my readers are from the US and Canada. Because I have sewing buddies that I know through some internet sewing discussion groups who live all over the world, when I see that I have a reader from New Zealand or from England I can guess who it is ( Hi Anne! Hi Sandy!) Sometimes though, a post takes on a life of it’s own.  This post seems to have struck a nerve in the sewing world and it has been reposted in a variety of places including on a Swedish sewing board. That post seems to have created interest in both Romania and the Ukraine. I now have a steady stream of readers who come from the land of my ancestors. My mother’s family comes from either side of the border, my grandfather’s family from what is now Kosogorka, but was known in those days as Frampol, in the Podolia province of the Ukraine, just outside of ...