Transference

I asked the greengrocer how much longer artichoke season was, and he said,
“Another week or two. Well, longer, but they won’t be as tasty as these.”

I knew it. I knew it, the moment the words came out of his mouth, that “these” was actually the referent to, “the artichokes I had in three weeks ago.” I knew that.
It’s just that I wanted it to still be yummy artichoke season so badly that I chose to believe him.

Sucka. Transference makes fools of us all in the end.

Art and Context

This is a very interesting piece in the Washington Post about a lot of things, including paying attention, what it’s like to encounter a masterpiece without a didactic label on the wall or enthusiastic blurbs on the dust jacket, and the importance of tipping street musicians.

Late Medieval Musing of the Day

My friend Bear Bergman has brought my attention to a rather interesting poem by Qalonymos ben Qalonymos - a Hebrew writer and translator living in Spain, ca. 1322. I offer no commentary of my own, but rather leave that job to you.

Translation by (I think) Tova Rosen:
Our Father in Heaven!
You who did miracles to our fathers by fire and water;
you who turned [the furnace] in Ur of the Chaldees [cold] to stop it from burning [Abraham];
you who turned Dinah in her mother’s womb [into a girl];
you who turned the rod [of Moses] into a serpent in front of tens of thousands;
you who turned [Moses’] pure arm into a [leper’s] white arm;
you who turned the Red Sea into land, and the sea floor into solid and dried-up earth;
you who turned the rock into a lake, the cliff into a fountain
- if only you would turn me from male to female!
If only I were worthy of this grace of yours,
I could have now been the lady of the house, exempt from military service!
Why cry and be bitter if my Father in Heaven so decreed and crippled me with this immutable, irremovable defect?
Worrying about the impossible is [indeed] an incurable pain for which no empty consolation will help.
I keep telling myself, “I shall bear and suffer until I die.”
But since I have learned from oral tradition that
“one should bless [God] for the good as well as for the bad,”
I bless Him meekly, with a faint voice:
Blessed art Thou who did not make me a woman!

Happy Easter

To all my Christian folk. And continued moadim l’simcha/hag sameach to my fellow Landsmen. Happy spring to the rest of y’all!

Also:

Kosher for Pesach Bamba. Usually I think that stuff is nasty, but the fact that it’s junk food that I can eat now suddenly makes it so much more attractive.

Though, I must say, a lot more is closed this week than I remember from the last couple of years. It took a bit more effort than I wanted to figure out where I was having lunch yesterday.

Still, no complaints. This is the Pesach good life and I know it.

3 Reasons Why J’lem Has Spoiled Me (Pesach Edition)

There are reasons that I really miss, and am ready to return for a dose of, my home country/culture, but the gastronomics and logistics of living a religious Jewish life are not on that list.

*Yes, I eat kitniyot. Here’s some, but not all, of why. But even the kitniyot is labelled, “Kosher for Pesach for those who eat kitniyot.” I mean, come on. That’s easy living.

Tastes

Like a lot of Yidden today, I’m tearing through my kitchen in a hot streak. I have the great fortune of not being responsible for any early Pesach cooking, so it’s just about cleaning, wiping, re-arranging, kashering (boiling certain utensils so that they’re kosher for Pesach), laying down tin foil everywhere until the place looks like we’re playing UFOs or Andy Warhol’s Factory. I’ve gotten a bit of a start on the cleaning generally, so I just have to worry about the floors and carpet later.

Anyway, I just found the envelope of recipes I’ve been carting around with me for years, and managed to ditch a bunch of the magazine clippings and pages ripped out of some old synagogue Sisterhood cookbook that I for some reason felt compelled to have–those recipes that start, “take one box Tam-Tams and one envelope Lipton’s Onion Soup Mix….” (shudder). Thanks to the Internet, I can now rest assured that, in the event that I do need to make a kugel in the style of a 1950’s housewife bent on convenience, I can still find instructions on how to do so.

In the category of “things I can’t let go” include recipes for the incredible chocolate chip cookies invented by my childhood babysitter, three different recipes for mandelbrot, my mother’s gazpacho recipe and the vegetarian version of her chicken soup, kugel, challah, hamentaschen, latkes, baker’s clay dough, lentil soup, vegan brisket (aka my doctored version of my mother’s best friend’s recipe–thanks, Janet!) and a bunch of vegetarian Persian recipes gacked from Iranian friends I lived with in college.

I’m sure that I could find a mandelbrot recipe online, but there are some things that simply can’t be substituted with instructions from the vox populi. Particularly when the versions I have are carefully written out by hand on little recipe index cards. Nothing baked from some online recipe could ever taste like the care packages I got after I went away to college.

Hag Kasher v’Sameach, everyone! May this be a season for joy.