Priming the Pump

There are times when it is a little hard to focus on work.  Right now  I have some work on my plate, but I’m also trying to figure out how to take care of some other responsibilities in my life. Often trying to balance various needs makes me a bit unfocused.

 

For me, a good way to get my sewing mojo back is to do some prime the pump sewing. Making boxers for my youngest is a good way to prime the sewing pump and help get me back to work.

 

I made these boxers out of two of the  orange batiks that had been left for me by as yet unknown person in my lobby. I love how the two orange prints play off of one another.  The elastic comes from a giant roll that I scored for a song  a couple of years ago in the garment district.  The little medallion/join piece on the elastic comes from an Indian bedspread that has been used in a multitude of projects including several pairs of boxers and a few pillow cases.

 

The color, orange, is the color of most of my son’s boxers.  It isn’t like either one of us is so in love with orange but the weird fabrics tend to end up as boxers.

 

Now I’m ready to work on the dress I’m wearing to my niece's wedding. so the boxers have indeed primed the pump.

Something funny in my neighborhood

 

This restaurant is around the corner from my house. It’s actually pretty good.  If you know Hebrew, you will find the name of the restaurant amusing. Ozen is the Hebrew word for ear.

 

I had assumed that the name had something to do with  Zen. My friend Marcia asked the owners the meaning of the name of the restaurant.  They told her that since they planned to sell lots of seafood they decided to name the restaurant after where fish live, the ocean, or how they heard the word, ozen.

I’m glad that they are much better cooks than they are spellers. I love that the name of this restaurant gives me so much pleasure. The vegetarian pad thai is nice too.

Museum field trip - cranky edition

My husband complains that I'm too critical and too cranky and that I ought to be more open minded.  One thing that I have been critical and cranky about over the past few years is the costume exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum.

The curators and the folks that design the exhibits  don't trust the garments themselves to be able to carry an exhibit. They end up tarting up the exhibits to such an extent that it's difficult to actually look at the clothes and figure out what they might be saying, My other big complaint about the Met is that they don't know how to display the clothing well. They make it hard to actually see the clothing.

Today one of my out of town sewing buddies was in for a visit ad we decided to go to the Met to see both Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity as well as Punk. You can click through the pages

I love my friends. it is a delight to spend any time with them.

The impressionism show was a really good show of French Impressionist art presented in a thoughtful way.  The garments that were part of the exhibit were terrific. I don't know how much more difficult it could have been to look at the garments, unless they were shut in a dark closet. The vitrines were light to maximize glare.  The dresses were lit badly. I get that the light needs to be low to protect the fibers of the dresses  but white pique dresses were lit to look sickly green.

I had read a review that commented that the clothing in the paintings looked vibrant, but the actual garments looked dull.  the fault was not in the garments but in the displays.

After lunch we went back to look at the punk exhibit.  I wasn't alive in the age of Impressionism, so I can't tell you if  either the art or the clothing were typical of the times. I was however not only alive but also the right age  during the great heyday of punk.

The exhibit itself is aggressively unpleasant.  It's all flashing lights and loud music  and it's really hard to look at the clothes. The garments themselves are not actual punk clothes but rather couture imaginings of punk. So the famous Versace safety pin dress worn by Elizabeth Hurley was on display. It's a beautiful refined dress made out of elegantly constructed silk.  Is it punk? probably not.

There were clothes from last season on display. Sorry, it's two decades too new to be punk.

There was an outfit by Balmain that I found completely repellent. It was a t-shirt and jeans all ripped up. It felt very Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess to me. 

After two galleries my friends and I felt like we had to flee the exhibit. so we did.

A case for Gastronomic Judaism

I remember reading articles in Jewish journals in the 1970’s  bemoaning “Gastronomic Judaism”, where people’s only connection to Judaism was through bagels and lox.

 

While I think that only eating Jewish food does not fully create a truly Jewish life I do believe that it can tie Jews into the practice of Jewish ritual.

 

Shavuot begins tonight. Shavuot celebrates out being given the Torah.  According to a midrash, in anticipation of the giving of Torah since Jews didn’t know the laws of ritual slaughter, they ate dairy. From this comes the tradition of eating dairy on Shavuot and the birth of the blintz.

I often make blintzes on Shavuot. My other usual Shavuot meal is Cholesteral Death Kugel.  Last week I mentioned to my daughter that it would be Shavuot this week. She asked if I would be making kugel, and asked to join us for the holiday meal.

Yesterday, my sister called me to ask for the blintz recipe.  Yes, it is pesky to make, but so good. by the end of the conversation my sister had decided to make either the kugel or lokshen mit kaese because they are so much easier.by the end of the conversation, I had decided to make the blintzes.

Blintzes are a bother to make. The pancakes are the problem. You are left with lots of small bits of waiting time as the pancakes cook.

When you bake bread there is a long enough wait so you can make a dress, or go shopping or make the rest of your meal or make most of a challah cover while waiting for the bread to rise. When you make blintz pancakes, you aren’t in constant motion  which has it’s own pleasures. You have herky jerky bits of time without enough down time to actually get anything useful done. It was even hard to fit in washing my dirty dishes. Filling and frying the filled blintzes will be easy.

 

Eventually though, all the bletlakh or pancakes were done.

Why do I bother? Because my labors make my kids look forward to Shavuot. I assume that they will remember the times that I read of the giving of the Torah to them right from the bible as their Shavuot bed time story.

During the phase of life when my kids would be least connected to formal Judaism, they still want to be sure to be at my table for the holidays.

 

In addition to the blintzes I’m serving a still not made escarole salad with chopped dates, orange and pecans. I’m also making a tomato soup.  Tonight’s guest is bringing dessert.

 

And here is a bonus. This is a super budget way to make inexpensive Greek yogurt.

 

First buy

The giant 5 lb container of Indian yogurt at Costco. This will set you back around $4.  Then after you come home, dump the yogurt into a colander lined with a tea towel. Put a big bowl underneath the colander.

Here is the yogurt draining.

 

No, it’s not pee, it’s yogurt water. After several hours you will have 3 lbs. of thick Greek style yogurt.

Some of it will go into my blintzes.

 

So even my kids who claim to be atheists are looking forward to z’man matan Torateinu, the holiday that celebrates the giving of the Torah..

 

Chag Sameach

Walking to the Post Office

Every time I go to the post office I’m struck by how pretty the brown stones are on the blocks  nearby. When I went to the post office on Wednesday I remembered to take my camera.

 

 

 

 

 

Food Friday–what’s in my fridge right now edition

Last Friday  the local NPR station had Mark Bittman on as a guest. he talked about giving a dinner party. He mentioned feeling anxious about "doing a dinner party". I was thinking that he was talking about having say, twenty people over for dinner.  Well he didn't mean having twenty people over for dinner, he meant two.   I don't put any worry into a meal until I get to more than eight at the table. We usually feed between six and a dozen people on any given Friday night. If I could fit more people around the table, I would feed a bigger crowd.  Usually the number of guests at the table grows organically.

 Last Shabbat I sat next to my friend Mark. When the bar-mitzvah boy began to chant the haftarah I mentioned to Mark that it was my birth-Torah reading.  Mark said that it was the Torah reading for his bar-mitzvah.  Amazingly, Mark’s bar- mitzvah took place on the day that I was born.
I invited Mark and his wife Carole to join us for Shabbat this week. As it turns out, a few of my favorite people were also celebrating their birthdays  right around the same time. Our table is full for this birthday meal.

Nearly all of is is sitting in my fridge right now. The glass cowl of marinated vegetables is topped by a black plastic container containing babaganouj.


Next to the marinated vegetables is the guacamole that will be served with the ceviche as a first course on a bed of lettuce.

The chicken is cooling in the fridge so I can skim the fat off the pan.

I cooked the chicken with Schwarma spices. I assume that it will taste good because it smelled heavenly as it was cooking.
Our guests are bringing dessert. My friend’s son is celebrating his aufruf tomorrow.   I made some desserts for the great event.
I made these fruit and nut bon bons.

This is an old fashioned goodie that was hard to make pre-food processor and quick and easy post the age of food processor.

I used dried peaches ( I was looking for but could not find the tart California dried apricots so substituted dried peaches), figs, dates prunes and pecans. I pulsed the mixture until it was mixed formed into balls and rolled in dried unsweetened coconut.  You can use any mixture of dried fruit that makes you happy and  any tree nut  you have handy. I suppose you could also coat the outside of the fruit balls with chopped nuts or chopped chocolate or enrobe the balls with melted chocolate and let them cool. But I had chopped coconut hanging around in the pantry and used that. It’s a free country, make these balls in a way that makes you happy.

I also made a batch of cheesecake bars. They are waiting in the freezer.


I still have to make a starch for the meal. I may make taboule or I might go for rice.
My mother received the arm protectors today. She was very happy with them.  She was a little horrified that I suggested that she throw the old ones out.

Color

Back when I was a kid,  there were certain questions that adults would always ask kids to make conversation. After a while you knew that you just had to have an answer prepared for the inevitable.

 

You had an answer for the favorite topic in school question.  The what do you want to be when you grow up question had fairly limited responses if you were of the gender that did not have a penis.

 

The color question, as in, “What is your favorite color?” Seemed always to be particularly fraught. Each of my older sisters had claimed one of the better primary colors as their favorites. One chose red, the other, blue. That meant that I had to choose from among the second tier colors. I claimed green as my favorite. That also meant that I got green in lollypop and M&M distributions.

My father used to claim that black was his favorite color. As a small child I was horrified by that choice.  At that point in my life, I thought that black was the color of evil. Clearly, as a new Yorker, I got over that evil association with black. Now I think of it as my happy color.

 

Actually, my father was green blue color blind, and more color blind as he aged. So the art that he and my mother chose was usually black and white woodcuts. When it came to decorating the house the colors they kept choosing were shades of brown.

My parents cared deeply about Judaism. They cared just about as much about good interior design and fine furniture. In the mid 1960’s when they started getting serious about choosing good furniture for the house they bought high end furniture with a decorator’s discount.They made what for then was pretty brave choices in terms of color. They were early adopters of brown.

 

Some of the furniture got recovered I believe in the mid 1980’s and about ten years ago my parents recovered the big upholstered pieces again. Maybe it was because my father’s vision had deteriorated. Maybe it was because they went to the local upholsterer instead of the fancy place in Boston they had gone to before, but what they chose was aggressively insipid.

 

The first time I came home after seeing the chairs redone, the sea of bland made me dizzy.  After I got home I found a remnant of  floral upholstery fabric that pulled together the colors in the room and made the whole thing less awful to look at.

Last week while I was in the middle trying to help take care of a piece of paperwork hell for my mother, my mother came up to me and asked said that I had to stop what I was doing NOW, to help her with something important. 

What was this task that could not wait??? The arm protectors of my mother’s chairs had worn out. Could I mend them??? Actually, no. They were too far gone. I did offer to make her new ones out of a fabric that would work with what she had on her chairs now. My mother was glad that I was averting decorating crisis in her home.

I took one of the arm protectors home with me to use as a pattern. After I got home, I realized that I had just the right fabric in my stash.

This is a close up of the fabric I had to match.  Note this is a close up, from a distance of more than 12 inches this fabric looks like greenish beige.

This is what I had in my stash.

It’s just a bit bolder, but still in a similar mood.

Here is one completed arm protector. I’m not showing you the three others.  They look identical.  Today I shipped them off to my mother.

What I do know now about color that I didn’t know when I claimed green as my favorite color is that colors just don’t exist in isolation. Very much life people, their characters change depending on who they are hanging out with.

The colors in a piece need to balance one another out. A color that may read as one thing in one setting may look completely different in another.

 

I have had two pieces in my work pile. Both used similar taupey colors. Often I can make those soft non –colors sing. These two pieces just didn’t work. Instead of looking all subtle and interesting, they looked tired and dull as dishwater.

 

I ended up coming up with the same solution for both of them, partially because I had that pot of paint out and didn’t want to just toss so much of it. The solution to dull was, pink sparkles. Yup, the stuff that in other setting would be perfect for Malibu Barbie. The paint that would make most five year olf girls giddy with joy was the answer to my problems.

 

This is the center of a challah cover. Malibu Barbie pink outlining the letters saved the day.

 

Malibu Barbie  pink came through again on this wall hanging.

Mostly, you can’t even see the pink.  It’s a little like adding some sugar to a bland tomato sauce.

I’m kind of amazed that it does not look tacky.  If I had known I would be blogging about my solution, then I might have had the foresight  to take before photos.

 

I am glad that I took these two pieces ( and my mother’s chairs)out of the realm of what we in my family called “pyeckh”. Pyeckh is visually boring, what my pieces looked like before Malibu Barbie pink sparkle paint. it turns out that Pyeckh is also a name for what my father called tutu, hot water with milk, a dubious treat drunk by Eastern Europen Jews when under the weather.

 

So the Pyeckh is gone, both in my mother’s apartment as well as in these pieces.