Our foreign travels-2

We landed in Israel at about 1:00am local time. At this point our internal clocks were completely confused. We picked up our rental car and drove north to our son's kibbutz.One thing that has radically improced in israel since our last visit is the highway system. getting to the kibbutz was easy. Getting in at 4:00am was less than easy.

The kibbutz has an electric gate. To get in, one calls the family you are visiting on a cell phone and then they call a code into the gate. it's a longer distance version of buzzing someone into your apartment. Unfortunately, we didn't have a cell phone. We drove to a gas station several miles. Israel used to have a pretty terrible phone system. Cellphones have been universally adopted. We begged the gas station attendant to let us borrow his cellphone. He did and we made our call.

We were let into the kibbutz, got into the house we are renting and crashed. We woke up in the early afternoon and went to visit a dear friend of my husbands for dinner.The dive on the hilly twisting roas was spectacular with the setting sun turining the hills shades of pink and orange. Hedva lives in a little hilltop community just north of Karmiel. Before dinner we climbed the spiral staircase to see the view. From Hedva's roof one can see the full width of the country, from the Kinneret all the way to Haifa. It isn't all that far. israwel is a pretty small country.

Hedva's house is simply beautiful. Each corner of the house is filled with visual surprises, arched windows that frame astounding views, old pre 1948 fruit crates that decorate the kitchen walls, Middle Eastern art deco furniture.Hedva's house is cozy and inviting.We had a wonderful and simple dinner with Hedva and her family and then drove back to the kibbutz. We would be seeing our son foe the first time since October the next day.

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Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

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A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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