A Refreshing Naivete

Hats off to Kate Burton for continuing to focus her efforts, even after being kidnapped by terrorists, on working to improve the Palestinian lot. On the cynical side, I’m scratching my head (now that the hat’s doffed) for her thinking that having her parents over was even remotely a good idea, or that trying to convince ideological fanatics of the concepts of peace was an attainable goal. Cute. Kind of like trying to teach a budgie maths.

Seriously, though, Kate is pointing up something that Israel’s Peace Now and the late Faisal Hussieni thought was a goal: do things simply, directly and peacefully to bring the Palestinian people, not their evil terrorist progeny, to a place where peace has meaning. It’s a task for the ages, but without the forerunners of the spring of wisdom in the form of naive workers like Kate, it will never come to pass.

I only pray that Kate will be alive to see the fruits of her labor.

Copyright © 2005-2006 DaShlom. All Rights Reserved. Contact the author at dashlom (at) gmail dot com for reprinting and republishing or site linking requests.

SSDY (Same Stuff, Different Year) — Almost

First off, a happy and productive new year to all. This is year two of the blog, and, owing to feedback and posting interests, I’ve split my ‘Pulse’ blog into three:

  • The Pulse, discussions regarding politics and personal life,
  • HaDofeq, Middle Eastern-related political and personal posts, and
  • The Ping, technical and technological posts

I’ll be doing political, social and personal commentaries on this blog. So, without further delay, let’s start the New Year off with a list of things recently realized:

To the left is a graph of the US national debt (up-to-date).

The chart to the right is a drilldown of the national debt for the year 2000, the year the Bush administration stole into office.

I have a cure for any despondency this entry may have caused you: talk to your neighbors, co-workers and friends about the issues. Don’t let this administration turn away yet another fiasco into more looting opportunities. Refute, respond and admonish people spreading falsehoods. And most of all, don’t give up; the mid-term elections are coming, and many current “peoples’ representatives” in Washington are going to need to file change-of-address forms before the year is out.

This is a year of action, and of change. Don’t lose hope.

An important footnote: I’m honored to be able to provide an occasional cartoon commentary as drawn by the incomparable Richard Bartholomew, whose rendition of the NSA appears in this blog. He has a web site with additional cartoons, and a blog.

Hannukah Applesauce

Backstory

Went to the supermarket to get applesauce for my strange yet lovely levivot (latkes), but they didn’t have any cans or jars that didn’t have sugar or corn syrup or some other gluch built into them.

Hannukah time is apple harvest time, so finding good apples is easy both in Israel and America. Finding a recipe was also fairly easy, but none were quite up to what my taste buds were fantasizing. So, I made this up.

Ingredients

  • 8 Macintosh apples (big, juicy apples of any type can work)
  • 10 Red Delicious apples (substitute with green apples for a tarter flavor)
  • 3T ground cinnamon
  • 1T ground cardamom

Preparation

  1. Take a large (8Q tall soup or stew pot). Pour in about 5C water and toss in the ground spices.
  2. Wash, peel and core all the apples, then cut each slice in half. Toss them into the pot. If the apples are organic, you can reserve the peels and toss them in as well.
  3. Place the pot on the stove and bring everything to a boil under a tight lid.
  4. After 10 minutes at boil, stir, recover and reduce to a simmer.
  5. Give it a good 20-30 minutes. The apple slices on top should be very, very soft when you’re done.
  6. Remove from heat. With a slotted spoon, feed the apples into a food processor with the fixed blade attached. Frappe until it’s just lumpy. Repeat until you’ve gotten all the apple pieces.
  7. If you put in the peels, they should be at the bottom with all the juice. Put the peels and some (not more than 1/2C) of the juice, then frappe until it’s ground to sludge. Mix that with the applesauce.
  8. Drink the remaining liquids: a very spicy mulled apple juice!
  9. Refrigerate and serve cold.

Yield: 2Q applesauce

Timing

Prep time: 10 minutes: Elapsed time: 40 minutes.

Hannukah Latkes a la Cajun

Backstory

I have a problem. It’s part of the dark underbelly of my personality. It’s about distrust, about creativity in the face of tradition. It’s about, as my kids say, “daddy food.”

Hannukah has fried food: sufganiot, levivot(latkes), and just about anything else that’s oily and can contribute to heartburn.

When I was a kid, I remember the grating box and the endless pile of peeled potatoes, and wielding our family’s double-bladed chopper and matching wooden bowl (whose concavity matched the arc of the blades… I miss that one!) to chop the onions. We kept a kosher household, so using the wooden bowl meant the entire kit and kaboodle should have been fleishik, but for some reason my mom gave this little transgression a pass in favor of well-chopped onions.

When we were done we’d sit down to devour crispy patties of finely shredded potatoes, crunchy and oily, with gobs of sour cream or a soothing coating of applesauce from a glass jar.

This is not my mother’s latkes. I wanted to lighten the batter, and make it a little more interesting. So… I’ve come up with a puff-“Daddy” version of the dish. Think beniet. Think wierd. Think tasty!

See my applesauce recipe for another important piece of this holiday meal.

Ingredients

  • 6C (12-14 small-to-medium) frapped, peeled baking potatoes
  • 1 finlely chopped medium yellow onion
  • 9 eggs, well beaten
  • 1C white flour
  • 1-1/4C whole wheat flour
  • 1-1/2t salt
  • 2T baking powder
  • Canola oil sufficient to deep-fry (1-1/4Q for a deep, 12″ cast-iron skillet)

Preparation

  1. Using a sifter, add the flours, salt and baking powder into a dry mixing bowl (5Q)
  2. Peel the potatoes; I very strongly recommend organic ones! Pop the peeled potatoes into a 5Q mixing bowl filled with water to keep them from going brown, red, or whatever color they would otherwise morph into.
  3. Toss the potatoes into a food processor with both the grating blade and the frappe blade engaged. Engage.
  4. Put a large, heavy skillet (cast iron is best for heat dissipation) up on the stove and pour in about 2/3Q canola oil. Yes, heat it!
  5. I hand-chop the onion, but I guess one could frap the onion. Add it to the potatoes.
  6. Beat the eggs well in a separate dish.
  7. Dump the potatoes and onions into the dry ingredients and mix until everything is nice and coated.
  8. Add the beaten eggs and still everything around some more.At this point, it should look like an especially lumpy pancake batter. Don’t worry about small chunks of potatoes or onions. Just make sure everthing is well mixed. Don’t overmix.
  9. Test the oil. When it’s hot enough for things to froth quickly, take a spoon and ladle in about 1/4C batter at a time into the skillet. Make sure the spoon is really close to the oil to prevent excessive spatter. Once you’ve got the levivot in, wait about a minute, then roll them over. If you wait too long you’ll see a ‘hernia’ of raw dough boiling up at the surface of the uncooked side. Looks funny, but not a problem.
  10. Give it about three minutes once rolled over, then another two after you roll it back.
  11. Dump them into a bowl lined with cloth or paper towels.
  12. Important: After each batch, use a strainer spoon to pick up all the little puff balls (droplets of batter and got fried separately). This will keep them from burning and making later batter batches bitter. Broadly.

Serves 8-10 people (2 families).

Timing:

Prep time: 15 minutes Elapsed time: About 1 hour

Cream of Broccoli Soup

Backstory

I had all these ingredients and a soup sounded just peachy. I don’t usually splash around in the “cream of…” puddle, but I _did_ have this quart of half-and-half, so I mixed it in.

Sadness. Tragedy. Lactose intolerance.

So I froze most of it and brought it to work. A co-worker liked it so I gave her the whole 5-quart batch. It was gone in three days and no, they don’t have kids. (I hope they didn’t feed it to the dogs!)

So here it is. A solid, great for leftovers kind of soup. That I can’t eat. 🙁

Ingredients

  • 4 heads and stems broccoli
  • 3 large onions
  • 6 cloves garlic
  • 1/6C olive oil
  • 6 carrots
  • 4 baking or 8 yukon gold potatoes
  • 4 cups cooked elbow noodles
  • 3/4 to a whole leftover chicken, cooked however you liked it
  • Water
  • Paprika, pepper, salt, chili powder

Preparation

  1. Roughly chop onions, potatoes, brocholli and carrots and peel the brocholli stems and chop them too, and then toss everything into about 3Q water
  2. Mince garlic and add oil and spices. (I use only a drop of salt to help cook the veggies — about 1t.)
  3. Debone and skin the chicken and add it all in. Scrape off as much of the fat as possible, or, if you want it, skimp on the olive oil.
  4. When things soften up (about 45 minutes), bring down to a simmer and add 1/2Q of heavy cream or half-and-half. Let that rumble for about an hour. (No, I don’t think Silk(tm) will work the same way.)
  5. Pull out as much of the brocolli as you can, along with liquids to make about 1Q. Frappe it in your favorite bladed appliance, then pour it all back in. If you want it thicker, hunt for potatoes. Thinner, go for just liquids and some bigger chunks.)
  6. Add the cooked noodles and return it all to simmer for 30-45 minutes.

Yield: ~5 quarts

Timing

Prep time: 20 minutes Elapsed time: ~2 hours