Rainbow cake

Last week, in honor of Parshat Noach, I baked a rainbow cake.  My friend Heather (you remember the one with the corrupting influence?) introduced me to the idea from this blog.  She made the cake when we visited them last summer for a birthday celebration for her daughter and Peach (who were born three days [...]

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Kosher Cooking Carnival #46

Mimi of Israeli Kitchen hosts this month’s Kosher Cooking Carnival.  My jam tart recipe is included, along with other mouth-watering dainties and kosher food commentary.  Check it out!

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Knitting revolution

Caution: The following post may be esoteric and tedious to non-knitters. When I first learned to knit, I acquired skills slowly.  First knitting, then purling.  Then casting on (in the inelastic knitting-into-the-same-stitch mode) and binding off.  I never learned seaming or picking up stitches, or anything more complicated than simple cables. Then I set it [...]

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The Goldstone Report

I don’t know what it’s been like in the rest of the world for the past few weeks, but it seems like every day here in Israel there is talk about the Goldstone Report, a 575-page report submitted to the UN Council for Human Rights by a committee headed by Richard Goldstone, a South African [...]

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What a tart!

I was once a barmaid in Cambridge, UK.  Sitting around, enjoying our complimentary beverages at the end of a night, the bar staff would occasionally discuss some of the looser-moraled patrons after they’d had cleared out for the night, using the expression that is the title of this post. But it’s also what I say [...]

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Fall foliage

One of the things I knew I would miss when we made aliyah was the incomparable fall foliage in New England.  Israel in the spring is stunning, but it’s nothing like the sensory blast one gets from the yellow birches, red maples, and green and brown oaks of the northeastern US. But today, I was [...]

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Who does motzi?

In Newton, Massachusetts, where the Cap’n and I adopted most of our practice and traditions for keeping Judaism modern Orthodox-style, we observed that in about half of the families we knew, the lady of the house said the blessing over the challah on Shabbat (“motzi”).  Kiddush was nearly always said by the male head of [...]

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Vegetarianism and veganism

Jews are picky about their food.  And it’s not because we don’t like food, but because the Torah instructs us regarding what foods we can and cannot eat, and with which other foods.  As a by-product, it makes it difficult for Jews who observe dietary laws to socialize with non-Jews, and makes traveling to exotic [...]

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Book Review: E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News

Amidst all my heavy-weight non-fiction of the last few months, a friend shoved a copy of E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News into my hands.  Its sparse prose, Newfoundland dialect, and total immersion into rural Canadian fishing culture was a welcome escape from religious extremism, assimilation, and worldwide (and soon to be universe-wide) hatred of [...]

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A human Ponzi scheme

The Israeli government seems determined to free terrorists from prison.  Sometimes it’s to boost Abbas’s sagging image among his own people.  Sometimes it’s as a “confidence-building” measure to coax the Palestinian Arabs to the negotiating table.  And sometimes, as of late, it’s to negotiate the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit. First, 20 Palestinian Arab women [...]

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Leaving home and the ushpizin

This year in our sukkah, the Crunch family had a discussion each night at dinner about who the ushpiz (Biblical guest) for that day.  The first night, we talked about Avraham, his order from Hashem to leave his family and journey to a new land, perhaps never to see his family again.  He obeyed this [...]

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Book Review: Daniel Gordis’s Does the World Need the Jews?

The davening on Yom Kippur is so intense and so lengthy that is has been my habit when going to services to take with me a book or two of interesting and challenging Jewish content for those times when I need a break.  About ten years ago, the book I took with me was Daniel [...]

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Obama, Prince of Peace

On Friday, the Cap’n came into the kitchen where I was preparing my last festive meals for the 5770 holiday season and said, “They’ve announced the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.”  Then he fell silent. “Nu?” I asked, taking my French apple pie out of the oven.  “Who’d they give it to?” “The [...]

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E. Annie Proulx’s knitting joke

I knit, and I like jokes.  Here’s a good one from E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News which I finished recently: “I can tell you about the time buddy was ripping along down the Trans-Canada knitting about as fast as the truck was going when this Mountie spies him.  Starts to chase after him, doing [...]

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TV dogs

The Cap’n is allergic to dogs.  They make him sneeze and they make him wheeze.  He’s not particularly fond of their dumb, affectionate ways.  And he finds dog ownership, with its need for constant cleaning up (you know what kind I mean) inexplicably masochistic. So perhaps you can understand my confusion.   The Cap’n and I [...]

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Neighborhood noise

Our neighborhood is not a quiet one.  In addition to the Muslims blasting their prayers from nearby villages at all hours (including 4 AM), we have midnight territorial disputes between cats; several neighbors who play the drums (including one whose drum kit is in his room which faces my daughters’ room across the street); a [...]

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