Plain Food

Being a Gemini, I have a kind of ADD approach to life. I flit from thing to thing, having dozens of interests and am never quite able to decide my perfect focus. I love to act and sing. I love to write (duh). I enjoy researching my family history and I like to cook. I am enamored of the computer and of the virtual world and take pride in my prowess at manipulating Google to give me the goods. So, you'll never know what you're going to get from me here on my blog, and the truth is, I don't know, either.

So, I came here this morning, filled with ideas about what I want to write and just COULDN'T decide. I drew mental lots and chose the topic of plain food as a good start.

Yes, I'm a foodie. But I'm not a foodie who is interested in trying new and unusual recipes. I like plain food that is true to its earliest ancestor. For example, reading a recipe about lamb with apricots in phyllo dough leaves me completely cold, and maybe even a bit nauseated. I'd much rather read and follow a recipe for Craig Claiborne's Southern Fried Chicken. THAT, my friends, is mouth-watering. To me.

His recipe is mostly chicken, white flour, salt and pepper, and some Tabasco sauce. But it's out of this world. Try to gussy it up and you'll have missed the point. It's perfect. I can't bear to think or hear of people tampering with a recipe as good as that.

Southern food is a great example of the kind of food I like best: unfussy, not cluttered up with unusual ingredients in an attempt to excite the palate: it doesn't NEED anything else. Believe me, my palate is never bored with a humble piece of that Southern Fried chicken. I'm drooling all over my keyboard as I write this.

But since I'm of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, and I have taken an interest in family research, I have melded these two interests in the form of recreating authentic recipes for Ashkenazi food. This is the kind of food that weighs you down and makes you groan. It's filled with salt and cholesterol. But hey! We only live once. I definitely don't want to have lived without enjoying my favorite foods.

I have to leave for work soon, but I wanted to give an example of a simple recipe my mother once described to me. This recipe is for Bub Tzimmes. Lithuanian Jews, such as my mother, don't generally use much sugar in their cuisine, so this recipe is kind of an anomaly. Otherwise, you can see where this recipe would have been popular for the plainness of its ingredients, for its simplicity and for its cost effectiveness. It's also a stick-to-the ribs kind of dish and probably kept a lot of Litvaks warm in those dreadful Eastern European winters. When I finally reveal the ingredients, you are going to have a bit of a shock and may be dubious that this is a dish worth trying, but I have to say it's absolutely scrumptious.

Ready? The ingredients are dried lima beans--cooked until slightly mushy, chicken fat (schmaltz), salt, pepper, and a bit of sugar. That's all. It's unctuous. It's sublime. But you will have to try it to find out. Believe me, this is authentic, plain food at its absolute best. If you're a foodie, I dare you to try it and swoon with pleasure.

My First Blog

So many friends have asked me, "When are you going to make a blog," that I finally bit the bullet. Having started a blog, I now feel that I have joined the 21st century. Here I am World, at last.

I decided to call my blog, "Judean Rose," because I live in Judea, and because my first name, Varda, means "rose" in Hebrew. Actually, it means "red rose." Sometimes the name is translated as the English flower known as a "pink," which makes sense, since the root of the word in another incarnation: Varod, means the color pink.

I was named after my paternal maternal great grandmother Rose Paul. Her Yiddish name was Raizel, which translates as, you guessed it, "rose."

In the modern world, Yiddish names are not as popular as they once were. Ashkenazi Jews have a custom of naming children after deceased relatives, and some take some leeway here. If they don't like the name as it stands, they may fiddle with it and come up with something a bit different; more to their taste. A lot of people will substitute the name "Shoshana" for the Yiddish name Raizel, but I actually have no idea why this should be so, since the meaning of the name Shoshana is "lily!"

Varda is much closer in meaning to the original Yiddish. Still, Varda has become a bit old fashioned and many would choose the more modern Vered, or perhaps, Vardit. I even had a teacher who had the name Vardina. I think her parents must have invented that name as a combination of Varda and Dina.

At any rate, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, to paraphrase Shakespeare's famous verse, which should more properly read:
"that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet;"

At any rate, that takes care of the "rose" part of this blog. As to the Judea, well, many people call my neck of the woods, "The West Bank." But that's not a very accurate label. The term refers to the west bank of Jordan. Even the most left of left-wingers would no longer call the area in which I live, Jordan. Perhaps "disputed territories," or, "over the green line," would suit the purposes of liberals, but for me, this is just politics.

Hear me loud and clear: I am not a Zionist, but just a Jew who wants to live in the Biblical Land of Israel, A/K/A, the Holy Land, or Eretz HaKodesh, or Eretz Yisrael. Whether or not the land on which I live will ever be legally considered a part of the State of Israel doesn't change what I call this area. I call it Judea, because that's what it was called in the bible.

At any rate, I love this land with all my heart. It's my favorite part of Israel, with the exception of Jerusalem. I love the terrain, the weather, the flora and fauna. I love the clean air, and the people who live here. I could wax poetic for days about the landscape, and now that I have a blog, I may just do that at a later date. For now, it's enough to say that we have the best weather in Israel: dry with cool nights--not humid and sticky like the coastal plains. Even in midsummer, we mostly have a lovely breeze at night to refresh us from the hot daytime sun.