Three Tipsy Butchers

Three Russian guys run the fresh-meat section of my neighborhood supermarket. Avi is the senior. He is a tall, slow-moving man with tired brown eyes and a heavy grey moustache.  Reuven, short, dark, and restless, wears a kippa and is an expert on the kashrut followed by all our ethnic groups. Sometimes I see him [...]

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Turkey Tajine

I have an aversion to beef. Don’t know why. I’ll cook it for family sometimes, but when I cook meat, it’s usually chicken or turkey. Red meat of turkey was my choice for this Shabbat night, stewed in my handy-dandy tajine and served with a garlicky, deep-yellow turmeric rice.

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Tomato Madness

Tomatoes are still cheap now. Firm Italian plum tomatoes, squat Romas, cherry tomatoes both red, yellow and green…take yer pick. I’ve made plenty of pasta sauce to keep handy; oven-dried a bunch too. But the piles of tomatoes in the markets are so tempting… So I decided to slow-roast some red cherry tomatoes at about [...]

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Walk Around the Neighborhood

On a ten-minute walk around the neighborhood today, I counted 23 medicinal or culinary plants. Some were cultivated and some were wild. One, a huge old eucalyptus, is an historic landmark. Others, like the citrus fruit and many varieties of hibiscus, are so common around here that nobody notices them.  Most of our native wild [...]

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Onion Bread

Some boules I made back when the clay saucer was newer.

I’m among those bakers who like a long pre-ferment with little yeast. The long interval allows the flour  to develop its unique, sweet flavors, making a loaf that tastes of bread, not of yeast.  So – start this batch the night before.
Ingredients:
3-5 cups sifted flour [...]

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No outdoor oven? Try this.

How to Get a Brick-Oven Effect with a Clay Flowerpot Saucer
It would be nice to have an outdoor bread oven. A simple taboun would do (follow the link to a neat video). But that’s not feasible for apartment-dwelling me. I read that people line their ovens with tiles to give their bread that artisanal crust [...]

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Sourdough Oatmeal Bread

There is more sourdough information on the Net than you can shake a stick at, so I will only post my recipe below. If you want to learn more about sourdough, please visit one of the sites listed here.  Meantime, doesn’t the bread look good? It’s Sourdough Oatmeal Bread, just a little tangy, and substantial [...]

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Gat

I had meant to post about things needing lots of photos, but there seems to be a problem with uploading media tonight. Meantime, I offer this poem. A word of explanation: gat means an ancient winepress.
Highway 6 slid away under our wheels and
Night dropped down.
We drove on to Beit Shemesh;
Ahead a storm gathered.
Fat drops [...]

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Just Your Basic Polenta

Time got away with me this evening. It was about 8:00 o’clock and I deep into writing something when I hear a plaintive voice coming from the sofa:
“Mommy, can you make dinner?”
Boiing. I leaped up, ashamed to be doing my own thing while the family starved. Then I noticed that I was pretty hungry myself. [...]

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How characteristic…

Glimpsed on the street near home, a sign hung on a car’s rear window:
“Don’t stick so close to me, O Pest!”
If you’re close enough to read it, you’re driving too close.
(al tetsamed elai, ya kartsia!)

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