sarah in nyc

Shabbat starts soon so images will have to suffice this week. Amazon.com Widgets

There are some things I just don't understand. Amazon.com Widgets Why did the Saudi Arabian bug extermination company attempt to post a comment on my blog that is just a link to their company? Aside from the fact that I don't have all that many Saudi Arabian readers, there seems to be no shaichus,  or connection between my blog and bug extermination in desert conditions. Why do so many Russian bots click on this blog? I can't imagine that it is all that useful for them.  As I look through my stats each day I am constantly surprised by the many varieties of kink that choose to link here. I assume that folks looking for odd-ball porn are really disappointed when they click here. When I read instructions about how to make a sourdough starter, my brain immediately goes to sleep. There are just too many steps, too much tossing parts of it out and doing weird things to the parts you keep. But if I leave a little bit of bread dough in a mixing bowl, add some water, ...

Back in the early 1980's, I used to buy my fish at a tiny fish store on 96th street. The store was unlovely but the fish was wonderful. After several years they moved to the corner of Amsterdam and 98th Street, right around the corner from my apartment.  During the 1980's and early 1990's, the playground across the street was not a place where you really wanted to bring your small children. Crack vials littered the ground. At night it was a place where hookers hung out. I was grateful to have a great fish store acting as a bulwark against the less lovely parts of the neighborhood. The fish store was a great one. It was a place where you could buy great fish if your wallet was feeling a bit thin as well as fish to buy if you were feeling extravagant. The fish was fresh.  One of my favorite things about buying there was that the fish cutters could cut fish to within a 1/10th of a lb of your request. It didn't matter if you were selecting a thick fish or a thin one, t...

It has been unseasonably warm. Yesterday and today have been the kind of days that lure you outdoors. It is November and some people are wearing shorts Amazon.com Widgets Yesterday, the call of outside took me to the local thrift store. I picked up a card of wide embroidered ricrac. often I think about my work while I am doing other tasks, like laundry or working out. My mother used to use ironing and vacuuming for her serious thinking time. Today while out getting more stuff for Shabbat dinner I was charmed by the copper cornice on my building against the blue sky.  I love that the Blum brothers who designed my building took the time to even embellish the underside of the cornice. A beautiful touch that is probably ignored most of the time. While doing task driven thinking time I realized that the ricrac would be perfect on one of the red challah covers I had begun a few days ago. Actually, perfect ignores an important intermediate step. The ric...

The time has come to start another batch of challah covers.  I started yesterday and Amazon.com Widgets continued working today. Three of them have  Most of this  liturgical poem calligraphed onto them. the poem was written as an introduction to one of the Shabbat morning prayers but has migrated and is often sung as an after Shabbat dinner table song. Here is one setting of the poem. it's lovely, but not the melody was thinking of as I carefully painted each word. The chorus of the poem, my soul thirsts for the living God  is a quote from Psalms. Each verse is packed with references to Biblical quotes that rhyme internally. Everly verse ends with the word chai,  lives. This another lovely setting, but also not the one I was singing as I painted. The text shimmers on the silk. It isn't visible at every angle or in every light. The meaning of the text is a little obscure as well. I like how the way I painted the text...

One of the great wonders of the internet is Google Books. It is possible to download for free a huge number of books and publications.  An even larger number of books and publications is available for pay but I figured that I may as well read up as many of the free books that interest me before I start shelling out money to feed my serious reading addiction. Through Google Books, I have had the opportunity to read  about a year's worth of the journal American Shoemaker , I pored over many issues of   The Garment Worker  where articles were written in English, Yiddish, and Italian.  I am particularly fond of The Dry Goods Review.  My latest old publication love is The American Hebrew. I began my reading in the fall issues of 1920 and have gotten up to the early summer of 1921. It has been quite exciting and often deeply stressful reading. WWI had ended just a few years before. While a great deal of Europe was devastated in the post-war...

It finally feels like fall. My daughter is celebrating her birthday with us tonight.  Her actual birthday is in a few days but she will be far away on a well-deserved vacation. My older son made much of the meal. I was charged with making dessert. My daughter adores pumpkin. So tonight's meal includes Pumpkin non-dairy ice cream studded with spicy candied walnuts. These nuts are dangerous. They seem to fly into my mouth when I am not paying attention. I also made pumpkin pie with a nut crust in a rectangular pan. I began making pie in a rectangular pan because for some reason my husband much prefers to eat pie in this shape rather than the traditional round pie with triangular slices. It turns out that rectangular pie is now a thing in the world of food blogging. It is known as hand pie. You can call it anything you like. The pie on its own was not that beautiful. This issue needed to be addressed. I made a vanilla custard...