Corny

When you move half-way around the world, you know there are going to be things you need to give up.  At first, the reality of your new life fills your world and you do not really have any time to think about them.  Over time they occasionally slip into your subconscious, and eventually conscious thought.  Given long enough, and even the smallest things you left behind will have a way of popping into your head when you least expect it.

Over the last few weeks Jason and I have come to realize that there are a select few things that we miss from "the old country".   Reasonably priced shoes.  Fresh broccoli that does not cost a month's salary.  Customer service.  You know.  Little things.  For the most part they are very little things that, in the grand scheme of things, are really not particularly important, but once in a while you think about them and realize that they are, in fact, just not available over here.

It dawned on both of us that the one thing both of us missed most (I mean, outside of friends and family) is corn on the cob.

You can get frozen corn kernels here that, once re-hydrated and heated up are a pretty close facsimile to the taste of reasonably okay corn.  You can get canned stuff that canned stuff that might as well be sludge is yellow water.  You can even buy what, to the untrained eye looks like very expensive plasic, play-food corn on the cob- mostly husked and wrapped in Styrofoam and plastic wrap.  The first is our standard form of corn.   The second is an option if it happens to be on sale and going into something cooked like shepherds pie or onto pizza.  The last option was something that we we had not yet brought ourselves to try.

Recently we mentioned that it was something we missed to someone, he mentioned having it regularly.  He buys option C from above and that it was pretty good.  So today while I was grocery shopping I noticed it on sale for a reasonably good price (7 shekel a kilo!) and bought a package of 5 ears.  I picked the nicest looking plastic pod of the bunch and went on my merry way.

We made it for dinner tonight.  I looked mostly like corn on the cob.  It even smelled vaguely of yellow!  You ate it like corn on the cob- pretending to be an old style typewriter.  But when push came to shove it was just a uber-starchy, mostly-tasteless, yellow edible stick (Channah has named it corn on a stick and she has no idea what a cob is).

I really, really missed Simson's corn (hamayvin ya'avin)