Pesach Homeschool Video/Animation Project (with free script!)

We were supposed to go to another workshop at the NFB this morning, but I promised I’d do some work for somebody, so I had to tell the kids we weren’t going to the workshop.  They weren’t all THAT crushed – we’ve done a couple already this year. But I felt so guilty that I told them at lunch that we could make our own animation instead.

I decided it should be about Pesach in some way, since we haven’t done much so far, and came up with a basic plot, based on the life of Moshe, with a list of “sets” and characters, in about two minutes.

The photography part is easy with our webcam, though unfortunately, the low webcam quality really shows in the final video.  Here’s our sophisticated video setup:

 

Naomi eagerly designed and drew three “sets” – a palace interior, Moshe’s family’s home, and a scene by the Nile River.

Here’s our willing cast of (mismatched, sigh) mentschies!

This was a particularly ambitious project because in our previous homemade animations (here and here), I’ve just whomped music right over the images and not bothered with having anybody speaking in the video.  However, now that both littles are reading, I decided it was worth trying to record a basic script.

Of course, that meant writing a script.  I actually think the one I wrote is quite terrific, especially considering it took about five minutes after we’d finished all the photography.  I’ve made the script available for download on my Limudei Kodesh Printables page here (scroll down to Pesach).  The kids didn’t entire co-operate, but luckily, I just recorded all the audio and trimming it down was a very simple matter.

The video more than compensated for how easy the audio was.  The hardest part, as always, was wrangling (my fingers seem to want to type “wrongling,” which is a FANTASTIC word!) with Windows MovieMaker, a program Download.com describes as “so easy a child could use it--an incredibly patient child born to filmmaker parents who didn't mind restarting this application every few minutes.”  I guess I AM that incredibly patient child.  Sheesh. 

Let’s just say that it took about eighteen times longer than it should have due to needing to save every THREE minutes and restart due to freezing about every EIGHT minutes.  Normally I exaggerate or just plain lie about times like these, but in this case, I believe the estimate is charitable.  But I didn’t swear once, and that’s the important thing when you’re spending four hours editing a four-minute video… right???

Anyway, I’m tired and crabby, so I’ll quit while I’m ahead.  Here’s the animation.  Enjoy!

The Library is on STRIKE?!?!!

Luckily, their online offerings are still available, so I’m taking this opportunity to recharge the Kobo and download five exciting books free – well, I don’t know if they’re all exciting, but one is sure to be a winner.  Here’s what’s going on the Kobo tonight:

Two books by my high school classmate, Cory Doctorow, one fiction, one non-fiction:

Context

and

The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

 

Plus three food books:

Love in a Dish ...and Other Culinary Delights

A collection of classic food writing from MFK Fisher, the classic food writer herself, a foodie before there ever was such a thing, from the 1930s to the 1990s.  I have trouble reading “old writing”… the formal tone, the belaboured descriptions.  It all just FEELS dusty.  But I’m definitely going to give this a real try, because everybody who is anybody in food writing references her as an influence somewhere along the line.

 

Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer

By Tim Stark; I seem to remember reading this, but it was during a period where I was reading about nothing BUT food and this book blurs together with a whole bunch of others, including It’s a Long Road to a Tomato (loved it) and The $64 Tomato, a book I am doomed never to read again because I can never remember the $!% number in the title so I sit there searching randomly for “The $73 tomato?”  “The $86 tomato?” until I give up.  How did I find it just now to put in the linkie, you wonder???  I typed “The $ Tomato” into Amazon.  Clever Amazon.com!

The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating

Another one I definitely read, years ago, that was lost in the blur of foodie books.  And now, of course, both these trends have taken off and hopefully are just about over – the trend of eating more and more locally (and writing a book about it), to the point of ridiculousness… and the trend of doing “whatever it is” for a year (and writing a book about it). 

Please note that I don’t think eating locally is ridiculous!  But I recently read a nice article about ChocoSol, a Toronto-based chocolate company, that made the very good point that there are yummy things to eat even BEYOND that 100-mile radius, and the trick is finding ways to bring them in responsibly and convincing others to enjoy them in their highest-quality form, in moderation.  ChocoSol, for instance, brings its chocolate in only once a year, by boat, from Mexico.  This offers the lowest-footprint way of bringing the chocolate to Toronto, where they process it and distribute it in various forms.  Anyway, I don’t want to rant except to say that local eating really doesn’t go far enough… while at the same time, perhaps going a bit too far.  If you know what I mean.

Ooh – last-minute addition!

Allah, Liberty & Love:  The courage to reconcile faith and freedom.

By Irshad Manji, a lesbian Muslim (plus she’s Canadian, so I should probably just toss her a handful of hyphens and have her sort out the order in which she wishes to use these adjectives), who seems to think there is no problem reconciling Islam with her sexuality and a number of other things.  Should be interesting reading, though I prefer seeing her on video than reading the books.  Just lazy, I guess. 

Anyway, grabbing all these books for the Kobo feels a little like being Mormon and building a food pantry against some kind of unspecified contingency which may never arrive. 

But having survived the garbage strike a couple of summers ago, I have little faith that this no-libraries thing will blow over quickly.  And if nobody is sitting at the front desks, there is a chance that there is nobody maintaining the website.  In which case, it’s better to check out the books now than take the chance on an epic fail further down the line.

If you homeschool, or just READ from time to time, do you have a plan to survive a library strike???

Homeschool Picture Day: Behind the Scenes

It’s always fun having pieces about homeschooling published in the paper.  They always seem to want a picture of me with my kid(s), actually DOING our little homeschooly thing.  Ha ha ha.  Like that’s really what we do.  So, of course, we have to stage it.

Here are a number of attempts to make it look like we’re actually sitting down to learn something together:

 

 

This is the picture we ultimately ended up with:

I think it’s pretty good… even though I’m pointing at our Chumash workbook while Naomi Rivka studiously “takes notes” (with a pen!) in her Latin book.  We’re both just on the verge of laughter – can you tell???

(Jamaican) Patty Time!

I don’t know if it’s the same where you are, but if you pass through any subway station in Toronto that offers more than just the basic convenience store, chances are there’s a coffee shop that offers lousy coffee and lukewarm “Jamaican patties.”  I put the phrase in quotation marks because I understand they are not truly Jamaican in origin… and also, thinking about it more this evening, I couldn’t help noticing they’re not a “patty” at all.  So they are probably a variation of a British-type “pasty” (a daff-sounding British word for “pastry”) with a slightly colonial flair.

Curiously, in case you’re still reading despite my droning on, I have always used the word “pattie” as the singular – a convention with which this Philipine pattie shop agrees wholeheartedly:

 

Anyway.

Whatever they’re called and wherever they come from, my absolute favourite meal, my default “caf food” in high school, every day or however-often I could afford it, was a single Jamaican patty, chocolate milk and two chocolate-chip cookies (I seem to recall they were sold in pairs).  The cookies were absolutely the best chocolate-chip cookies I’ve ever tasted, to this day, and my mother makes excellent ones, as do I.  And the patty… mmm… there is nothing finer while IM’ing your friends over lunch, circa 1986 (ask me how I did that if you want serious geekery!*), than green meat inside a crispy, bright-yellow crust.

* hint: to IM your friends in 1986, you must all be sitting in the same room, basically side by side.

Taking the subway a few times lately, patties have been on my mind.  Couple that with the fact that I saw a recipe for them in edibleToronto magazine a couple of months ago that didn’t look too hard (and replaces some of the shortening with coconut oil!), I thought I’d give them a try.  (When tackling a magazine recipe for the first time, I like to cross-reference with at least one “review site” recipe, just to make sure I’m on the track of delicious pattie, so I also used this very similar recipe from AllRecipes.)

Here’s the filling – very basic, ground beef, onion, curry, thyme, salt, pepper to taste.  A neat trick both recipes suggested is adding a cup of breadcrumbs and a cup of chicken soup (I doubled the recipe, which was dumb because now I have a freezer full of beef pattie filling).  You simmer them together once the meat is cooked and it thickens the filling just right.  Warning – fillings NEVER look good in pictures, but this one was delicious, trust me.

Roll out the dough – see how nice and yellow?  There’s curry powder in there, but I also added a pinch of turmeric, just for the colour.  Dollop of filling, and fold it over.  The dough was not all that co-operative, but I patched small cracks with a bit of water on my finger (careful – even a tiny bit of water made the dough too soft and floppy in places, leading to MORE breakage when I transferred it).

Coat with egg…

… bake and serve!

Sit around muttering “pearls before swine” as your children push it ungratefully around the plate or suggest that, being almost fully-grown, they know themselves far better than I do and they have the kind of hunger that is far more satisfied with a toasted pita bun with cream cheese.

       

Ignoramuses!  I mean, how could you pass up perfectly lovely green meat???

Interview with a Jewish Homeschooler: Yael Aldrich

As part of an article I wrote for the Canadian Jewish News about homeschooling, I had the pleasure recently of interviewing Yael Aldrich, a fellow homeschooler in the US. She had a LOT to say that I wasn’t able to include in my article, but she graciously gave permission for me to “publish” it as an interview on my blog.

Yael has 4 children: a 10-year-old boy, an 8-year-old boy, a 5-year-old girl and a 2-year-old son. This is her fifth year homeschooling.

Between her responses, I will interrupt your reading with intelligent-sounding questions that I didn’t actually ask at the time, because I was too busy watching the time on my phone card or fiddling around with Skype, but because Yael in her brilliance filled in everything I needed to know despite my ineptitudes.

How did you first come to homeschooling? (with apologies; this section is choppier than those that follow)

[My oldest son] went to kindergarten and other things… 3-year-old playgroup, 4-year-old playgroup, kindergarten. When we move to Tokyo, Japan, there was no Jewish day school, so we decided to homeschool. I’d wanted to try but never had the cojones, never had the opportunity in which I felt safe and comfortable.

Returning to the USA, they ended up an hour away from a Jewish community, and decided…

We do outreach already, we like homeschooling our kids, we don’t need to put them back into school.” Our rabbi said, “this is a great idea, you guys are well-prepared to do this, you understand the good parts and challenges of homeschooling. [He] gave us his blessing and said, ‘go for it.’ He’d homeschooled his own children for one year and “called it one of the greatest experiences of his life.”

The Aldriches eventually returned to the larger Jewish community where they now live.

There are five different Jewish schools, just for Orthodox children… people said, ‘Of course, you’re going to put them back in school.’  It’s not that we feel there’s no other choice, the schools are very nice, but homeschooling is the correct choice for our children’s education.  We’ve continued to homeschool and will continue for the foreseeable future.

How do you handle non-Jewish educational materials, mythology, etc?

I originally got The Well-Trained Mind [a book on classical education which promotes a literature-based approach grounded in mythology and history, much of which is rooted in Christianity and mythology].

I said [to our rabbi,] ‘I’ve read this Story of the World book [a history book by the same author as The Well-Trained Mind], I want  to use it for history, how do I approach all this Christianity stuff?’

In a regular Jewish day school, they wouldn’t touch this stuff with a ten-foot pole. He said, the greatest rabbis of generations past had this knowledge of mythology, other religions; they were very strong because they knew that, regardless of what other people did, the truth for them was the Torah.

It’s not our place to denigrate other religions, other mythology. Our emes [truth] comes out in many different ways: stories rabbis give over to us, texts from Torah , writings from different rabbis. [We can] compare and contrast, but don’t denigrate. Emes of the Torah will show itself through.

They [her children] understand that the social and moral implications were not as pleasing as what the emes of the Torah gives us. They came to that themselves.

What was your reaction to the Chinuch Roundtable article in Yated Ne’eman?

I was just surprised that every mechanech [Jewish educator] was negative about homeschooling. Not one of them had one positive thing to say about homeschooling. I was disappointed that they were as insecure as they are in the benefits of group education; their type of education. I was disappointed that they felt a need to belittle a different method of educating Jewish children.

When I read it, I thought these rabbis have never met a homeschooling family who have done it for positive reasons. They’ve met families who are homeschooling because of a negative reason, a child is being bullied, having issues with teacher, a school can’t deal with the special needs of a child. That’s one way to come into homeschooling.

A lot of people, Jewish and non-Jewish, come into homeschooling this way. Other people want to come to a place where their family is the centre of their life; they’re not running here, there, everywhere; they’re not having other people taking responsibility for their children.

These rabbis, as well meaning as they are, have never met families where the children and families are united in that goal. If they had met people like that, they would hopefully not have these antiquated ideas of what homeschooling does to children, what homeschooling does to the family structure. Only one of the rabbonim [cited in that article] had any experience with somebody homeschooling for even a remotely positive reason.

I hope that they’ll all meet homeschooling families who homeschool for positive reasons and learn that we’re doing okay.

Here, I mentioned a trend I’ve noticed, of Jewish schools “splintering” to offer a more specialized hashkafa (Jewish outlook) and serve a narrower spectrum of the community. Instead of one community-type school, as might have existed 30 years ago, there are now many smaller yeshivas, day schools and high schools that all seem to be struggling for money, recognition, teachers, students, etc.

It’s similar in many communities. [Where once there was] one big school, two big schools, now there are tons. There are schools that are trying to break away trying to start new schools in this community.

When I bring up the idea of homeschooling, they say, “No, no, we want this for the whole community.”

[If I may jump in, I think what Yael is saying here is that people WANT a very specialized hashkafa for their kids, and are willing to go to great lengths to establish a school with that hashkafa, even while they would never consider homeschooling around those values.  I agree with her, and I believe they do see it as a favour to the community that they are doing this.  But as I’ve seen, it does no favours to a community or the children involved when a school turns out not to be viable and the kids must be shuffled around and absorbed in other schools.]

It’s not that I don’t care about the education of other children, I know that my children are first in my life. I appreciate people who are going to create a school for other people’s children but, right now, educating my children is about all I can handle at this point.

What about the article’s veiled threats that homeschooled children might go “off the derech” and lose their connection to Torah and Yiddishkeit [Jewishness]?

The neshamas [souls], children, that Hashem entrusted us with… we don’t have any control over what happens to them. We don’t say they’re going to be “X”: they’re going to be Chassidic if we’re Chassidic. We can’t [even] say they’ll be frum [religious] after they grow up.

We put our energy into them, try our best to do that, and daven [pray] a lot, and we’re going to hopefully get something similar to what we’re looking for. For myself, I would love my children to be religious and be somewhat similar to me, Ovdei Hashem [servants of Hashem] in their own way, and to be menschen [good people], whether they look different from me, act different from me.

As a homeschooler, I can handle that a little more, I’m already a minority in the frum world… I think I can handle it if my children are somewhat different than me.

I don’t know that more [kids from] homeschooling families go off the derech. I prefer to think they don’t: their parents have put their best efforts into children, not just paying tuition ([Though that in itself is] actually a big thing. Parents pay a lot putting children through school).

I spend time planning their education, talking to various people rabbonim, educators, homeschooling parents. I think we put a lot into their education. I know personally my kids really do appreciate it most of the time. I think with that they will continue in the path that we have, maybe even homeschool their own children.

What’s the future of homeschooling in the frum [religious] community?

Homeschooling will certainly become more popular. Not only because of tuition; more and more parents will realize they want to take full responsibility for their children. They’re taking on the responsibility of educating their children in the full manner.

Hopefully, [rabbis such as the ones on the Yated panel] will get to know more people. They’ll realize homeschooling can be a viable alternative, more than an alternative to the regular school atmosphere.

In an ideal world, mechanchim [Jewish educators] will have a great majority of the children regardless. Most people don’t live a lifestyle in which homeschooling will be honestly possible. Most parents will need two incomes. We’re going to need those schools.

[Not only will homeschooling not threaten established schools, Yael hopes the conversation will be a healthy thing in itself.]

Mechanchim will learn from home educators how to deal with children on an individual basis. Unfortunately, in this day and age, classes are getting bigger, schools getting bigger. Learning from homeschoolers is something they should look towards.

I know I’ve learned a lot from my educator friends: learned a lot about certain teaching styles, things they think are important for my kids to learn so they’ll be fully actualized Jews.

More honest give and take will be good for everybody.

Article: Orthodox Homeschoolers Defend Their Choice

This is an article I wrote for the March 8, 2012 Live and Learn Education Supplement to the Canadian Jewish News in response to an article in Yated Ne’eman which is not available online.  You can read the rabbis’ individual responses as posted on this thread.

p.s. If you’re interested in reading more views from Yael Aldrich than I could cram into this article, click here for the full interview transcript.

(reprinted with permission, © 2012, all rights mine)

We all try to make the best choices for our kids’ education: academically, emotionally and spiritually. That’s why many of my fellow homeschoolers were shocked to open the religious weekly Yated Ne’eman a few weeks ago to fi nd eight rabbis, leading educators, speaking out against this choice.
The weekly Chinuch Roundtable began with an anonymous question from a reader hoping to withdraw her daughter from school for “a year away from the social pressures and stress.”
Responses went far beyond socialization. Rabbi Yaakov Bender of Far Rockaway, N.Y., jumped in to call homeschooling “a fad bordering on epidemic,” and each rabbi in turn seemed determined to curb the “epidemic” as forcefully as possible.
Rabbi Dovid Engel, principal of The Toronto Cheder, an Orthodox boys’ elementary school, worried that parents might talk to homeschoolers who would “defend their choices instead of giving accurate pros and cons.” Perhaps he means parents like me, who rave about how much our kids are learning and growing, and what a privilege it is to join them along the way.
I called Rabbi Engel to clarify, and he explained that while the Torah’s responsibility to educate children falls on parents, as early as the fi rst century CE, children were losing out. “Parents weren’t educated enough, or [they] were labourers who didn’t have the time that the children needed.” Rabbi Yehoshuah ben Gamla stepped in to create elementary schools that grew into today’s cheders and day schools.
Yet, Rabbi Engel said, “school is not only about academics. The most successful children… are those that do well socially.” Socialization may be possible for some children through sports leagues, Boy Scouts and other extracurricular programs, but, “in a more haredi world… in our circles, that’s not true.”
As a principal, Rabbi Engel lists four essential ingredients for any teacher: “Foremost… is to have a connection with the rebbe [teacher].” He must also teach so that each student feels he can grasp the material, be punctual and act as a role model. Though Rabbi Engel says it’s important to develop connections beyond the home, he admits that “parents are certainly all those four things.”
However, he also wrote that “parents may fancy themselves as great teachers, but in reality they’re not.”
I suspect that, like paid teachers, some teaching parents truly are great and most are pretty good. Few are lazy, yet Rabbi Nosson Scherman, general editor of Artscroll Publications, who began his career in education, wrote that parents’ “drive to learn and teach will dwindle as the weeks go by.”
For six years, I schlepped my children 45 minutes to school, every school day. Did my “drive” to drop them off at school dwindle as the weeks went by? You bet, but they never missed a day. Some homeschool days are more inspiring than others, but you don’t stop showing up, which is lucky, because the good days – a symphony concert where your toddler whispers excitedly, “That’s a French horn!” or the moment your kid “gets” the link between Ancient Persia and the Purim story – are truly great.
Yet Rabbi Shneur Aisenstark of Beth Jacob Seminary in Montreal wrote that he’d only recommend homeschooling “when there is absolutely no other alternative,” while Rabbi Bender suggested it be “left only for those who cannot function in a classroom – a handicapped or learning disabled child.” Yael Aldrich, a Maryland homeschooler helping to organize the fourth annual Torah Home Education Conference in Baltimore this May, says, “These rabbis have never met a homeschooling family who have done it for positive reasons. “They’ve met families who are homeschooling because… a child is being bullied, a school can’t deal with the special needs of a child. That’s one way to come into homeschooling. Other people want to come to a place where their family is the centre of their life.”
Homeschooling is hard work. Even those who “unschool” (where learning follows children’s interests) usually educate themselves first, then plan and implement the best education for each child. Nobody should write this process off as a fad. Rabbi Avrohom Neuberger, an educator and translator for Artscroll’s Schottenstein Talmud, offered a rare quasipositive insight, listing three modern rabbinic leaders who studied unconventionally: “I guess the gamble sometimes pays off.” Rabbi Bender, too, sees homeschooling as playing dice with our kids’ souls: “We have all seen too many korbanos [sacrifices]. Don’t gamble with your children.”
Beneath these responses is a veiled threat that children who aren’t in Torah schools could be lost to Judaism. No parent wants to gamble with her kids, but faith that the education system will keep kids religious is also a gamble. If even one school offered a guarantee that graduates would love and live Torah forever, I’d sign up my kids in a heartbeat.
Aldrich, who began educating her four children at home with the blessing of an Orthodox rabbi who used to homeschool his own kids, says, “We don’t have any control over what happens to the neshamas [souls] that HaShem entrusted us with. We don’t say… they’re going to be chassidic if we’re chassidic. “We put our energy into them, try our best to do that, and daven a lot.” She hopes her children will appreciate the effort she puts into their education, and grow into “Ovdei [servants of] HaShem in their own way… whether they look or act different from me.”
Aldrich sees the rabbis’ responses as insecurity. “I was disappointed that they felt a need to belittle a different method of educating Jewish children.” Rabbi Engel stresses that this was not the rabbis’ intention: “A lot of thought goes into our answers.”
Despite the controversy, plans for the Torah home education conference continue. Aldrich hopes homeschooling will grow, inspiring more parents “to take full responsibility for their children’s education.” Yet there’s no threat to established institutions, she says. “Most people don’t live a lifestyle in which homeschooling will be honestly possible… We’re going to need those schools.”
Just as she has learned from friends who are classroom educators, Aldrich hopes the educational world will find something to learn from homeschoolers. “More honest give and take will be good for everybody.”
For more information on the Torah Home Education Conference, click here.

p.s. If you’re interested in reading more views from Yael Aldrich than I could cram into this article, click here for the full interview transcript.

Shabbos Food

Well, it’ll do me good to overcome the torpor and fatigue – after staying up SUPER late for a phone call that never came.  :-(

This is the rare week that Ted didn’t plan our meals, so I’m doing it, badly, I guess. So here it is… Shabbos, with food:

Supper:

• Chicken Soup w/Kneidlach
• Shake n’ Bake Chicken
• Corn
• Farfel

Lunch:

• Takeout sushi
• Takeout sushi gyoza
• Hmm…. MORE… but what???

Desserts

• Thinking of made rogelach (yum!), for some reason… never made them before, but I have a chocolate filling recipe I’ve been meaning to try.
• MimicCreme (coconut/almost-based whipped topping) Jello 1-2-3 in a pie shell – fancy!

Drat – I keep remembering I haven’t written the Parsha Riddles this week… and then forgetting

The Worry Hat is DONE!

As y’all know, I have been teaching myself to crochet (here and also here).

Back story:  so there was an obscure and quickly-cancelled TV show called Firefly that was, according to YM, wonderful… and featured a guy who wears a hat… that looks like this.

 

For Purim, he ordered a crocheted version of this hat on etsy, and when it arrived, I announced, “Hey, I could make something like that SO easily!”  (here he is with an unidentified sibling trying on a weird “hybrid” loom knitting-crochet hat I made for my sister Abigail’s birthday.

 

Anyway, needless to say, he already had THAT hat, but found another hat he liked in an alternative-ish (not really) online comic strip, Questionable Content.  In which there is a cute reference to a “worry hat.”

 

This has become a thing among the young and hip, and if you google “worry hat” (here – let me do it for you!) you’ll see that it’s a very basic design which many have now copied (some better, some worse).  And I told YM that if he was at Value Village and found yarn, I’d make him one.

Well, he brought me yarn which was exactly the right baby-blue colour, but it was awful yarn – all scraggy and torn-up, falling apart, though I couldn’t see insects or anything in it.  It was also scratchy and horrid-feeling under my fingers, and when I crocheted it, it felt like I was wearing a hair shirt.  Oh, plus, it was WAY too big.  So I unwound & redid it, and unwound & redid it, and finally, on Sunday, did it perfectly… but ran out of yarn with only a single earflap done.  And yes, it was still slightly too big, so I could have unwound it AGAIN, but I was just sick of that yarn.

And then yesterday, in WalMart, I found a ball in ALMOST the right colour of what is quickly becoming my favourite acrylic:  Red Heart Soft Touch, which I have used to create several remarkably non-itchy hats (considering my forehead is so sensitive that EVERYTHING itches!).

So here it is… in almost the right baby-blue shade (I tried running it through a slightly bleachy washload to “fade” it a bit)… a very cute Worry Hat.  Excuse the model; it’ll definitely look cuter on YM.

I love the pompom!  I made a little cardboard circle thingy for the pompom and I’m very pleased with how full and symmetrical it turned out!

I know the feeling!

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Chacun à MON goût

I admit, when it comes to food, I act like a brave culinary explorer, but secretly, I’m a xenophobe.    Everybody around me knows I read labels obsessively, not only checking for expiry dates (though that is important), but also making sure there is not an unfamiliar ingredient tossed in somehow.  In restaurants, I order yummy combinations of familiar things and enjoy it all very, very much.

Yet when I was asked to cover an event this evening, a 5-course dinner for an Israeli organization called Chefs for Peace, I didn’t think twice.  First of all, people rarely think to feed the reporters (sadly, I write enthusiastically about their organizations even without the perks), and second, I was actually kind of looking forward to tasting the kind of “gourmet” food that us kosher people rarely get.  Did I say kosher?  Actually, the event was kosher AND halal.  Super-kosher.  Or at least, both kosher and alcohol free.

(they sort of compromised and had a wine table from 6-7 pm… at which point they switched to serving what my fellow Torontonians can’t seem to help calling “pop”… as in “sodee pop,” like rednecks)

So I was somewhat looking forward to the meal and figured I wouldn’t have to go far out of my comfort zone.

They started easy with lamb falafel balls… making this, coincidentally, the one time in my life I get to eat lamb two days in a row, because my mother had some shanks in the freezer which she pulled out (Pesach is coming!) and braised for us last night.  Tasted almost like a regular falafel ball… made of meat.  Yum! 

But right alongside were some nice veggies in a delicious techina (tahini) dressing and a slice of – gack – grilled eggplant.  Well, what could I do?  I figured it was the best eggplant I’d ever be presented with.  So I ate up all the veggies and then, tentatively, hesitatingly, chomped down on the eggplant.  First eggplant!  A less-than-delightful experience, but I got through it. 

And then… the next item was “Raviolo di Tuna” from a hot Israeli chef, Yossi Elad, owner of Machneyuda, which is according to several people at the event, the trendiest and most delicious dining spot in Yerushalayim (and the hardest at which to get reservations).  Anyway, who doesn’t like Ravioli, right?  Well, dumb-o me, apparently Raviolo is NOT the same as ravioli.  Apparently “Raviolo di” means “slices of Raw.”  Or “something went wrong during prep and it’s not really pasta after all.”  Anyway, it was served on a bed of… um… ‘grouper tartare.’”  Mixed with some kind of lettuce, chopped red onions, parsley and cilantro, then drizzled with lemon and honey.

And it was delicious.  No, I have never eaten raw fish before.  I don’t trust Jewish sushi places, frankly.  I am even the only Jew I know who avoids smoked salmon.  But in this case, I figured I was in good hands; culinarily, at least, the best in which I am ever likely to find myself.  So I dug in and, well, wow.  Smooth and soft; nice.  I kind of messed up the ratio of leaves to tuna and ended up with several big slices of plain tuna at the end, but ate them straight up without any noticeable revulsion.

After those two experiences, I was totally ready for the “Jerusalem Artichoke” (these days cleverly renamed “Sunchoke”) Soup, from local chef Eran Marom.  It was nice, with a big slab of flaky pastry in it.  I sprinkled it with parsley and pretended it was potato.  No problem!  (Slightly reminiscent of my mother tasting my corn fritters:  “I’m pretending I’m eating… something better than what you just cooked.”)

The next two courses were no challenge whatsoever: a Jewish Moroccan-Torontonian chef serving up Moroccan Tagine of Red Snapper (in Hebrew, farida: פרידה, which, when you type it into a search engine, brings up results for Frieda Kahlo), and “fusion” chicken cacciatore cooked by a Muslim Moroccan-Torontonian (who now owns a halal Italian restaurant).

Now, you wouldn’t think dessert would be a challenge, but first of all, it was fruits on a meringue, and I have often said that if there’s fruit in it, it’s not really dessert.  But if that wasn’t bad enough, there were two things on it that I Don’t Eat.  A groundcherry / gooseberry / physalis with its attractive husk pulled back… and a blackberry.

Now, there is something wrong with a world in which you google blackberry and this is the first image you get:

Did I say first image?  I meant, first two HUNDRED images.

Somewhere just past 200 (I lost count), you get this:

Fruit!

I seriously think they’re going to have to rename this fruit, if only so you can google it properly.

Aw, cute!

Or maybe kind of gross.

Somewhere around page 52,

I gave up.  Oooh, hey, vintage!

And tried “blackberries”.

Yay!  Just like the one I ate.  One – pop.  It was just like a raspberry, kind of.  It was kind of gone too fast, plus out of season and dipped in a coconut custard, so I didn’t really get a good fix on the flavour.

For those who are still here, reading along, and those who are keeping tally, let’s just double-check before we close off for the night.  Xenophobia eatin’ tally:

1. eggplant – check!
2. raw fish (tuna) – check!
3. raw fish #2 (grouper) – check!
4. J-choke – check!
5. blackberry – check!

That’s right… not one, not two, but FIVE brand-new culinary adventures.  And what a delightful, thought-expanding meal it was.

Though I may mock (only myself!), Chefs for Peace is a real organization, and they’re doing a couple of cooking-demo events through Hillel here in town this week, hoping to present another side of Israel besides just “war-torn” and “Gilad Shalit.”  And this side is definitely yummier!  As of just a couple of weeks ago, they have found land in an Arab village 15 minutes from Jerusalem and are hoping to set up a “co-existence” Muslim – Jewish – Christian cooking school there by the end of the year.