sarah in nyc

 If any of you are on Facebook you may have noticed the Ten-Day Artists' Challenge. Where someone nominates you and then you post a piece of your artwork every day for ten days with no commentary and each day you nominate another artist to post their work. I am usually terrible at this sort of a thing. I have failed to send out each and every chain letter than has been sent my way since the first one I got from Robin Schwartz in elementary school. I may have hung in for part of an email recipe challenge from a dozen or so years ago but got exhausted by it very quickly ( actually as I type this I remember that I didn't get any recipes from that one). Despite not fulfilling any of the chain letters that have come my way neither dire fate nor great riches have come my way by way of the chain letters---But I have been doing the Ten-Day Artists Challenge. I have been posting older pieces. I will post the images here, and because I can ( this is my blog and I make the rules) I will c...

  It is official. The Passover races have begun. I have started this year, as I do every year with the annual stripping of the wax off of my kitchen floor. One of my sisters reminded me that her late father-in-law, the Jewish scholar, used to tell her every year that you don't eat off the floor during Passover. Although this task isn't a halachic requirement, for me it jump-starts my getting ready for the holiday. We are changing the dishes on Saturday night but we need to hunt and gather food for the holiday. Today's adventure was to Moishe's Supermarket on Avenue M in Brooklyn. Usually, I make the annual Brooklyn pilgrimage with my neighbor. ( I actually may go with ner next week as well) Today I went with my husband.  Shopping at a typical Manhattan supermarket is something of a shock for those of you who live in the suburbs. Our local supermarkets are small and crowded. Moishe's is always something of a culture shock for me because it is so much more packed with...

  We have been at a funny moment in the move towards springtime. The sky is sunny and bright. Dusk begins later and later but it has been really really cold. I have spent all week and I mean, all week removing the layer of lavender cotton from the embroidered wings. All week I have been ruing my decision to mark out the design lines for the tallit stripes in this way. I have been using a mix of tools, a big needle, a crochet hook a pair of tweezers, and now a pair of needle-nosed pliers to pick out all of the lavender sheeting. For much of the week, the wing looked like it was attacked by a cat. My legs have looked like this for much of the week. Knots of threads have migrated all through the apartment. I have been thinking, as I pick pick pick out all of the sheeting about the many many folk tales where the hero or heroine has a giant task to complete. I also thought about how if I had this task to complete twenty or thirty years ago I would have gone too fast and wrecked my work....

 First a review of last week's Shabbat dinner-- also known as FleishFest. It was delicious and festive.  I admit that I made an insane amount of meat. Despite sending all of my kids home with meat there were several days this week when my husband and I ate meat for both lunch and dinner to make a dent in the leftovers. We still have a bag of frozen pigs-in-blankets in the freezer if you have a craving for some--they are yours. This has been a week of life cycle events. I attended (virtually) the wedding of a cousin in Israel. There is something so profound about seeing faces of people I love on people a generation or two or three younger. We virtually attended the shiva of the father of a synagogue friend and last night and this morning I attended funeral services for the father of one of our doormen. Mass this morning was in this   beautiful church that manages to make you feel both enveloped as well as giving you the sense of the infinite at the same time. The core...

 Tonight is a big night at our house. We are celebrating the birthday of our youngest and our older son returns from Arizona for the weekend. All six of us will be around the table. There was a request for...meat-- fleish. It has been so long since we were all together. There is something so truly festive about planning and cooking and serving this meal of many meats. I made beef with a spiced coffee rub. I still need to slice it up and make a sauce to cover the meat and keep it from drying out while it warms up for Shabbat. My youngest requested spicy chicken wings. The wings are covered with a mix of Korean gochujang, maple syrup, vinegar, and coffee. I would have preferred to use molasses but I used up the last of our jar and Passover is soon...so the maple syrup will have to do. I love the mix of Korean, New England, and Southern flavors all in one dish. Unlike my usual Shabbat dinner, there are some purchased delicacies including beef kreplach and an insane amount of pastrami....

 If you had asked me last week or even yesterday if I would be making hamentaschen for Purim I would have told you that I would not.There are just the two of us at home.  While we are going to services tonight we participated in the communal Mishloach Manot, so of course, it wasn't necessary.  But I woke up this morning like a woman possessed.  This recipe has been on the front of my fridge since before the pandemic. I believe that I did make this recipe for yeast dough hamentaschen. It may have come from my schoolmate Rena Gopin's mother---but then again perhaps not. I don't know if it has been the parade of photographs of gross triangular-filled pastries that are NOT hamentaschen, covered with rainbow sprinkles, filled with Nutella, or speculoos or chocolate hummus---but I woke up this morning like a woman possessed, determined to make hamentaschen. So I followed the recipe above making almost no substitutions. it is a lovely, lovely dough. I made a poppy and fruit...

 This Shabbat is something of a placeholder. Sunday is my mother's Yahrzeit. Next Shabbat will be one of multiple celebrations, that of a visit by our older son and the birthday of our younger son. So a simple meal is in order this week. Once again, I made red chicken, chicken covered in red spices. For those of you who can't decode the mix of powders, it is a mix of smoked paprika, hot paprika, cayenne pepper, sumac, and black pepper.  this particular spice mixture always reminds my husband of the rotisserie chicken his mother used to pick up at a local kosher store in Queens. After a while, my mother-in-law stopped cooking chicken and served only the rotisserie chicken. For my husband chicken spiced this way sparks all of the warm fuzzy feelings, other people (like me) have for home-cooked foods of their childhood. I will be blanching a head of broccoli and our carb will be provided by the stuffed challot I pulled out of the freezer. I have also been adding another layer of ...