The House of Yael

Torah, tea, and everything in between — the parsha, the home, the health, the news, and my own life running through all of it. Like gossip with your smartest friend, minus the part where she’s polite about it. Pull up a chair. The tea’s hot.

The Balaboosa Files

Welcome to The Balaboosa Files.

A balaboosa is the woman who makes a house run — and makes it look easy, even when it isn’t. So that’s what you’ll find here: the home, the table, and the holidays, on a real budget and a real timeline.

This page covers three things:

  • Nest — decor, organizing, and making a space feel like yours, including the new place I’m moving into and setting up from scratch
  • Table — recipes that actually get made on a Tuesday, plus the holiday spreads, with a Yom Tov Edition for every chag
  • Buy Jewish, Buy Israeli — where I’m actually shopping. Products, makers, and brands worth supporting, folded right into the home content instead of sitting off on its own

Each post starts with what’s actually going on — “the house needs to look festive for Hanukkah and I have forty dollars and two hours” — and ends with exactly how to pull it off.

  • The Balaboosa Files: What Stays, What Goes

    The Balaboosa Files: What Stays, What Goes

    It comes as no surprise that I have purchased a home back in MA, and will be moving the last week of September. What I did not share was that the home is coming fully furnished. That’s right, someone with an amazing gift of design and taste has decided to move, of all places, Florida,…

  • The Only Things Coming With Me Are a Coffee Table, a Jellyfish Lamp, and Not the Person I Used to Be

    The Only Things Coming With Me Are a Coffee Table, a Jellyfish Lamp, and Not the Person I Used to Be

    Here’s the whole inventory of what I actually need to bring to Massachusetts: my personal stuff, a coffee table, and a lamp shaped like a jellyfish that I have no logical defense for and will not be apologizing for either. The house comes fully furnished. The sellers are leaving everything except linens and personal photos,…

Welcome to The House of Yael

Welcome to The House of Yael.

Told to you straight, like gossip with your smartest friend — the one who actually read the whole thing and has no interest in being polite about it.

Every room in this house is open. The parsha, brought down off the shelf. The kitchen, where Shabbat gets made (and occasionally burned). The workouts, the soul work, the money conversation nobody in our community wants to have, and a growing list of Jewish businesses actually worth your money. And once I’m unpacked, a morning news brief for the Jewish world, so you don’t need seventeen tabs open to know what happened overnight.

Running through all of it is my own life: a Jewish woman in her fifties trading Florida for a new house in Massachusetts and rebuilding pretty much everything, out loud.

I’m Yael. I’ve got strong opinions and the background to back them.

Pull up a chair. The tea’s hot, and we’ve got a lot to talk about.

Recent posts