As we get closer to our whole house renovation - which will be happening this calendar year, thank God - I’m allowing myself to start designing the new iterations of rooms. Mostly I’m doing it for fun, but there is a practical element to it, too: if we know what furniture we want to use post-renovation, we can sell or donate the rest when we move out and won’t have to pay to store it.

My friend Heather wrote a post a few months ago about the pressures of decorating a “grown-up” home, and I know exactly what she means because we’ve been telling ourselves since we moved into our house that it wouldn’t be our grown-up home until after the renovation. Buying the house was the investment to start; everything else could be put off.

This is pretty far down the list of Things That Make Me a Bad Jew, but it’s on there somewhere: I don’t really like kugel.

Sweet kugel, that is. Made with either sour cream, cream cheese, cottage cheese, or ricotta - usually a combination of at least two of them - and raisins, it’s a quintessential Ashkenazi baked noodle dish studded with raisins and seasoned with sugar and cinnamon. (Here’s a classic recipe and here’s another topped with Frosted Flakes.)

Savory kugel, though? Sign me up!