Life In The Slow Cooker Lane or If You Haven’t Had Vegetarian Cholent for Shabbat Lunch You Really Don’t Know Anything About The Blissful Experience Of The Shabbat Afternoon Shloff or Bubble, Bubble, No Toil, No Trouble.

I see it’s time for my Blogger friends to start salivating about the steaks they are going to eat in protest of the violent tactics of a group of animal rights activists. Well, I don’t like aggressive actions, not if they are in aid of saving animals from inhumane treatment and slaughter and not if they are in aid of people who want to enjoy eating them or wearing them, without being harassed.

I am a vegetarian, but not one who tries to force her beliefs or views on anyone else. To prove this point, I would like to say that I am bringing up (or should I say, being brought up by) two enthusiastic young meat lovers. Their strange idea of heavenly food is R.T.’s Best Chicken Soup In The World (or so I’ve been told) and the fare served at Our Sis’s Famous Garden Barbeques.

In an attempt to accommodate their weird lust for cooked animal flesh, Bish arrived home with a new toy last week – a slow cooker. The idea was that we could stick bits of ex-birds and former mammals (or even the odd deceased aquatic vertebrate) into the cooker in the morning, just before we all left for work and schools, and these sorry creatures would be cooked ready for the girls by the time they got home from school at lunchtime, and would be steaming hot for their enjoyment (ugh!). By the time we arrived home later on, the offensive smells would be long gone.

But, wonder of wonders, the slow cooker is a friend to non-meat-eaters too! We have been having a wonderful time, experimenting with stews, soups and the likes. Those tantalizing cooking smells that habitually steal, uninvited, into our nostrils as we enter the corridor of our floor, no longer sadly disappear as we open the door to our apartment. The smells are actually coming from inside our apartment! There it is welcoming us - a pot filled with bubbling, savory scrumptiousness.

And today was no exception. This slow cooking wonder produced for us, on this Shabbat, the richest, most fragrant, most succulent, most delectable, and (of greatest importance yet) most sleep-inducing, vegetarian cholent, to ever grace Shabbat plates this side of the Jordan River.

[An admission of guilt: I wrote this before actually tasting the said cholent. The smell was driving me completely insane. I was drooling at the mouth like a dog, and I wasn’t the only one - family members could be seen periodically drifting into the kitchen, led by their noses, arms straight in front of them, eyes closed… We ended up eating about an hour before we had planned to. We just couldn’t stand it any more.

What can I say? It was all I had imagined and more. Bish said it was (the Hebrew equivalent of) divine, very appropriate for Shabbat lunch.

And now (yawn) for my shloff.]
posted by Imshin 13:18

Dirty washing
Batya Gur, a successful Israeli writer went all the way to Belgium to tell the people there that Israeli Prime Minister Arik Sharon is a bad person, and to ask them to help get rid of him. I was personally deeply offended by her action. Like him or not, Israeli Prime Minister Arik Sharon is not a cruel despot. He was democratically elected. When he is elected out of office, he will not stage a coup and take over the rule of the country by force. He will go home and someone else will be prime minister, someone who will also be democratically elected by the people. So what is Batya Gur saying exactly, to those people in far away Belgium? Is she saying that the large majority of Israeli people, who voted Prime Minister Arik Sharon into office, are also bad people? What help is she asking for? Does she want Belgium, or the EU, or maybe the UN, to invade Israel, depose Sharon and appoint a puppet leader more to her liking? And why doesn’t she see fit to stand on a soapbox in Rabin Square and say all this to us (maybe using less offensive language to make it easier for us to hear and accept)? Why Belgium? Are we, the Israeli electorate, the people who spend our hard-earned money on her books, so ignorant and primitive, in her eyes, that she sees no point in wasting her breath trying to persuade us?

Let me tell you a little secret, Batya Gur. I am not angry with suicide bombers either. They are my enemies and I will fight them however I can. Anger is irrelevant. But I am angry with you, because you, my sister, empower them and give legitimacy to their actions.
posted by Imshin 08:37

My shame
On the television, they show Spaniards going back into Madrid train stations, twenty four hours after the massacres. Many are in tears, all are somber. Life goes on, don’t we know it. They interview some women of different ages, who express their pain, their fear, their outrage, their bewilderment. I should be moved. I should feel their pain. I should cry in empathy. But I am cold. I am bitter. The loneliness of the guilty victim has made me hard.

And when I realize that, I feel the pain, and the tears come.
posted by Imshin 06:57

Why Spain? I believe it has little to do with Spain’s support of the war in Iraq, and it has a lot more to do with Palestinian Islamic terrorism than anyone in the west seems capable of realizing.

These Muslim fanatics who are striving for world domination are not interested in the modern world. For these people, Spain, or at least the southern part of it, is occupied Muslim land.

Just like Palestine.
posted by Imshin 21:05

Shabbat Shalom
posted by Imshin 15:04

Zeev Schiff in Haaretz:

Israelis can empathize with the horror and anguish experienced Thursday by residents of Madrid. The irony is that the Spanish media has for the last several years shown "understanding" for Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians in public places, on buses and in railway stations, and has even justified such attacks. But no political demand, however justified it might be, justifies such acts of mass murder.

posted by Imshin 09:03

I saw a child on the television, the other day, a girl recuperating from a terrorist attack in Jerusalem. The bus she had been riding, on her way to school, blew up. She was fatally wounded, but somehow managed to pull through and survive.

She looked just like Eldest, same age, same build, same gentle tone of voice. She said that after the blast the man next to her didn’t have any legs. He said to her, “Little girl, there has been a terrorist attack. Run away, save yourself.” She said it was like the miracle of Purim, in which we celebrate the Jewish people being saved from destruction. This was her miracle – she didn’t die.

* * * *

She looked like Eldest. She probably looked like a lot of children. I’m sure I wasn’t the only mother sitting there, watching her, and crying.

Today something horrific happened in Spain. When will people wake up? When will people understand that there can be no justification for terrorism?

Please listen. This is an epidemic. It may seem far away from you now, but it will reach you eventually, wherever you are. If you do nothing to stop it now, you are bringing it nearer. Before you know it, the little girl on the television will be speaking your language, will be someone you know.
posted by Imshin 18:53

In what is probably old fuzzy brain here's most monumental blunder to date, I made a sincere effort NOT to forget my sister's birthday. I did all the appropriate things, only to discover, to my embarrassment, that it was a MONTH EARLY! I sincerely apologize to Our Sis, and to all family members who probably momentarily thought that it was they, not I, who had got it wrong.

All this just adds to a feeling that has been increasing recently, and you've probably noticed, that I need a break.

Blogging will be suspended until further notice.
posted by Imshin 18:14

Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday to Our Sis! Happy Birthday to you!
posted by Imshin 21:17

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