Mr Pretzels

 From time to time we end up spending a short period of time in Modiin. On those rare visits we have developed a tradition of meeting up with friends at Mr. Pretzels. I was really excited when I found out that Mr. Pretzels was opening at the Grand Canyon in Haifa. 

When it finally did open, I was disappointed to discover that they had decided to open without a teudat kashrut. I was even more disappointed when we found out more details from the store. The ingredients are the same across the entire chain, making the ingredients kosher. Despite the mall being open, Mr. Pretzel was closed on Shabbat. They just didn't want to pay for the supervision. Each and every time, we would walk by, I would give them a mean look in protest. Of course it didn't make a difference to them, especially since nobody would notice. Most of the time, if we were there, we wouldn't be in that part of the mall.

Before going back to school, we found ourselves in the Grand Canyon mall. As we were already there, we decided to check out a back to school promotion. The lines were huge. We ended up going in completely the opposite direction to avoid the crowds. All of a sudden I found that we were in front of 014Mr. Pretzels. I started to give them a mean glare. My eyes slowly shifted until they landed on the sign at the front. It was a teudat kashrut. They are now kosher. I was so excited. We were not able to stop and enjoy on that trip. It is something to look forward to on a future trip to the mall.

Food Distribution - Shlomo the Forklift Operator

The local Food Gemach takes care of families that struggle to provide themselves with the basics. They operate out of the local Bnei Akiva snif. They provide weekly food basics for families in Kiryat Shmuel and Kiryat Chaim. Funding is provided by the city of Haifa. All those receiving a basket are approved by the city social worker. The size of the baskets vary based on family size. Families are supposed to pay a nominal fee for the baskets. I have learned from the few times I have done deliveries that the fee is either waved or payment is delayed. 

There are multiple steps in the preparation and distribution of the baskets.  There are various shifts over a period of two days to take all the steps to pack and deliver the baskets. Normally Shlomo volunteers for the afternoon shift after Gan. His shift involves packing items that are added to the baskets at the very end. He also takes pride in bringing the empty boxes out to the dumpster. When the country went into lockdown, his volunteering temporarily stopped. 

Peri's role with the gemach is to pick up certain food items for the main distribution centre for the Haifa area. Shlomo has been waiting to help out his Eema. However, today was the first time he had an opening in his busy schedule. 

Shlomo was very busy, learning about how the facilities work and the important job they do. He was not afraid to help pitch in. He drove the forklift to empty the garbage bins. After a hard morning work, he was given a fresh peach to cool off on a hot day. 

New recipe posts galore

I finally cleaned out my old bookmarks, documents and scraps of paper where I had recipes I liked but did not want to lose and put them all in one place.  I added more recipes this morning than I did in each of the last 2 years!  Feel free to go visit http://kosherquick.blogspot.com/ for lots of new things we have been enjoying around here.

random this and that

This morning Channah felt the baby move for the first time.  She was so excited it was awesome.


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So my (relatively) trusty laptop/tablet computer has been slowly but surely dying of old age.   First the fan went so I put it up on blocks so air could circulate through its lungs more freely.  Then the power cord went so I bought a new one and plugged it in to life support.  The optical  drive started to go- but lots of geriatrics need help with optics right?  Then the video card started to go, so I reset it often and pulled the battery on a regular basis because that seemed to help with  the symptoms.  I knew then that it was too far gone to treat the cause.  This week, the Hard drive started to wheeze.  I had actually planned on putting it onto a respirator- making boot disks and running on an external drive.

But with the dawning of the sun came the realization that it had so many diseased parts it really was more humane to euthenize it. And so, last night in one last puff of glory there was a huge thud as I tripped over the power cord and unplugged it one last time.  It had a long and productive life for its species- rarely has a laptop in captivity been known to thrive for so long under such hostile conditions.  (It was fed and watered regularly).

And thus through the natural cycles of life, a new lappy came into our home.  It is tiny as a newborn babe- actually smaller than most at only 9 inches and 3 lbs.  It has 250 gigs worth of storage space, and 2 gigs of memory.  It even runs good old windows xp in English, and has a warentee and service centres relatively local.  I also got an external dvd lightscribe (LG 20x) and a cooling pad (lets see how long this one makes it) for just under 1400 shekel (about $380 US).  

If anyone local is looking to get a new lappy of their own I *HIGHLY* recommend Ivory Computers (google for them.  They are huge and have branches in about 15 different cities).  I found them through zap.co.il and got personal recommendations from a few different geeks that I know.  

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Last night we decided to go with the old standard of Chinese for Christmas.  I made the best, low carby lemon chicken EVER.  Recipe will be on the other blog in in the next little while.

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)

We interupt your examining our pessach issues for this brief announcement

Today I had my disaster of a grocery shopping trip that supposedly every new olah has. I thought I got off easy as other than trying to figure out shmitah I have never yet broken down into tears in the grocery store. Today I got teary at the butcher counter.

I asked for 6 pieces of chicken for schnitzle. I was told to come back in a few minutes and it would be ready. Alarm bells should have been going off already as there re normally just a stack of them behind the counter and they just grab em, weigh em and package them right up, but as it was the day after pessach I did not think too much of them not having stuff ready and went and did the rest of my shopping.

I got back to find 3 whole chickens cleaned and cut, with the breast de-boned and waiting for me, and him about to start the second set of 3.

Do you have any idea how expensive 3 whole chickens cleaned and cut, with the breast de-boned are? I am soooooooooo glad I caught him before he did the "other 3". I got yelled at and a lecture from the guy with dead meat all over his hands for not ordering right (still not sure what I did wrong as it was the same thing I order fairly regularly and this time juts was totally different. It was a different guy as well and I was barely able to understand him!

Not only that he had used the more expensive chickens as he thought I had motioned to them.

over 130 shekel for 3 damn birds.

Oh well. I have 3 carcasses for soup (well actually 2 as I am making a stock right now with number 3). 6 polkas (Channah's favourite), 6 wings (no idea what I will do with those as none of us like wings) and 6 thighs ready to go for another shabbat (or two) and all with no feathers! (which really is a novelty in this country.

It was still twice what I should have paid for 3 chickens, but I am counting my blessings I got ot him before he did the other half!

Smells like Bubbie...

We were out for both meals for shbbat, and for one when I asked what I could bring she said a kugel. Ok, no problem... I have a stock of easy to make kugels that I could make...

But wait! I got a food processor for shabbat with a shredding/grating blade! I could finally attempt a potato kugel without risking my hands and my sanity by actually grating the potatoes (something I began refusing to do roughly around the time Uncle J told me that is how Vira lost her missing fingers).

We made Bubbie C's potato kugel.

Popped it in the oven, then got into the shower. When I got out the whole house smelled like Bubbie's house!

Kugel turned out awesome- but I need to ad da little more onion and salt next time. That is what happens when the directions include instructions like "add some salt and pepper". Great measurements there...

Having fun is good for you (especially when there are camels involved).

My inlaws are here so we are taking some time to do things a little more off the beaten track (at least for us). Sunday we took Channah out of school and went down to the Dead Sea area to have some fun. We found a place called Eretz Bereshit. It is basically a whole little recreation of the time of the Avot... a sort of Bedouine experience.

You go in and you meet Eliezer (Avraham's servant) who has come forward into the future to find new guests for Avraham. Would we come and visit.

To get there we need to ride the time traveling camel. Oh, and we need to dress appropriatly. So here are our time traveling camels.





We got to Avrahams time and first went to go meet a potential dinner mate. Yess, that is a baby sheep.


From there we went in to Avrahams tent where we had dried fruit and fresh water.




Then we got to help make our pita for dinner. Channah is an excellent little baker!


We moved outside to finish making and baking our pita.





We also got to enjoy some delicious sweet sage tea.



We also got to see Avraham's futuristic bar and horseless carriage.






From there we went to Mineral Beach at the Dead Sea.



Neither Channah nor I went in (both of us have too many cuts and bruises to make goign in a fun activity), but we had fun on the beach and hiding from the flies.

Our trip into Jerusalem this week.

Channah. Home from Gan, wet and ready to go.


On the bus. Raincoats are a good thing :)

Wandering Ben Yehuda

Channah's first shwarma. It was close to the size of her head and she devoured most of it. Not quite a total Israeli yet though. She had it with ketchup instead of chumous and techina!


Guess who?

Jay met us a little later. The shwarma place was packed, so instead we went to a hot dog joint where JAson god a steak in a hot dog bun. Weird but he claims to have liked it.

The sign of a day well spent

My night tochnit

So tonight I had budgeted the evening for sifting flour. Takes me an hour, a change of clothes, and time to dust all the shelves in teh living room when I am done for random flour that gets everywhere.

So I get everything all set up. New sifter. Check. Bowl underneath sifter. Check. Flour. Check. Spatula. Check. Lousy clothes. Check. Free Evening. Check.

Using my new flour sifter the whole thing was done, no mess, no fuss, under two minutes.

Now what am I going to do tonight?

Wheee- freedom!

I am pretty sure I have mentioned here before that in Israel you have to sift all your flour before you use it to make sure it is not buggy.

I am not sure if I mentioned how much I HATE sifting flour and how no matter how neat I try to keep it I always end up making a huge mess as when I shake the sifter flour seems to go EVERYWHERE if there is even the slightest breeze (and lets not mention the first time I did it where it did not occur to me not to do it directly under the ceiling fan. The next morning it looked like no one had dusted in a hundred years or so).

I had been told that there was a different sort of sifter you could buy that had a hand crank and a squeegee sort of thing that spins around to push the flour through the sifter, but no one I knew had one, and no one seemed to know where to get one (incidentally, there are also electric ones but they are really expensive and just not worth it to my mind. I might hate it, but I do not hate it multiple hundreds of shekel worth).

Yesterday while wandering a non-local hardware store (which here in Israel tend to have hardware, kitchen ware, storage stuff, and sometimes toys) Jason found one of the spinning ones! It was a bit of a splurge (basically only a few shekel more than the normal one we have, but as we already have a normal one and this was not really a "necessity" the whole cost was a splurge) but I am in HEAVEN! Sooooooooo much easier and less messy and patchkadic than the other way!

I think I will take a go at actually baking a dessert for shabbat this week to celebrate. Until now I have been a real tightwad with my flour as I knew that if I used it I would have to sift more (I generally keep about a kilo pre sifted in a container).

Also, for those wondering about our menus here I have started a 2nd location at Kosher Quick with recipies and information on our kitchen life here where eating out is an insane luxury and prepackaged food is not worth the money or the freezer space. With no family to fall back on we pretty much eat at home every night, so we are needing to find good, healthy, cheap meals that are not too boring. I just loaded it yestarday so more recipies and information will go up as I get around to it.

now taking reservations at Hotel Swirsky- book early as spots are filling up fast!!!

This coming shabbat we are having a family of 5.

No problem. We can do that. Parents in the "real" guest rooms, 2 boys on inflatables in the studio, and the little girl having a sleepover on the crib mattress (covered in sheets and blankets) on the floor in Channah's room.

Succot is going to be a little more challenging. One family of 4 and 3 seminary girls (one of whom is my cousin and I am really looking forward to having her). Ok, the men out in the succah on the inflatables. The sem girls in the "real" guest room (seems only fair as they are here 2 nights becuase for the rst of us after day one it is chol hamoed and our other guests go home). Mom and baby (our friends) in the studio. Mom on Jason's mattress which we will move into there and baby in pac and play. Girl will have a sleepover with Channah using the crib mattress.

The only fly in the ointment is that the "real" guestroom only has 2 beds and we have 3 sem girls. I posted an add on the city email list asking to borrow another inflatable or something. Otherwise we will move my matress in there, and for one night I can use Channah's bed and she and girl 2 can sleep in the succah on the crib mattress and pac and play matress with their fathers, and baby can share with his mom.

For meals we have another family of 4 joining us. This should be interesting. Inflatable beds will be collapsed and put into our room, tables will be brought out. 2 folding tables (6 people each) and a fisher price picnic table for the kids. I really hope it will all fit in the succah. We do not have nearly enough chairs. We have 10. We need to borrow a few from the family coming for yom tov to make it through. And that is assuming we bring the dining room chairs outside (though truthfully I see no reason not to).

Serving space is going to be totally non existant.

Oh, and did I neglect to remind you that the two entrances to the mirpeset are through our bedroom and through the bathtub room that leads to the laundry room that leads to the mirpeset?

I have not even thought about the menu! Thank Goodness I do not tihnk I have too many really picky eaters coming. One friend can not have legumey sort of things, but other than that I think I have free reign.

Currently thinking fairly standard chicken and whatnot for dinner, and bubbie's cabage rolls for lunch.