Adventures in Mama-Land

Do you have a stack of old, clean cotton hankies? Do you have an old t-shirt you can stand to cut up? If so, you have an INFINITE supply of no-sew homemade masks that are simple to put on and take off!!! Here in Israel, it is literally illegal to go out without wearing a mask.  It doesn’t have to be a super-duper high-tech N95 respirator / filter mask.  Any old shmatta will do.  And that’s where this hankie mask comes in. Do homemade masks work? First of all, this mask has absolutely ZERO antiviral or antibacterial properties.  It just stops us from being human together, and helps me feel like part of the zeitgeist. Seriously, though, wearing a cloth face covering (a term that freely admits that these aren’t really doing all the jobs of masks!) does a number of things (I had to look into this a little, and this NPR article was helpful…): protects other people in case you’re already infectious but don’t know it blocks SOME droplet transmission from others (don’t to...

My neighbour is out of town!  Why does that make me so very, VERY happy???  Because she said we could help ourselves to her tomatoes. Here they are, with some of our own homegrown peppers, hot and mild, basil, and a homegrown bay leaf (garlic is Ontario-grown, but not my own): Forgive my ugly, scarred dutch oven.  It’s perfect for everything from candymaking to bread-baking, so it’s gone all the way to 550 degrees and back, pretty much unscathed except for its pristine beauty. Going… Going…   Gone… and into the blender with some creamy stuff! Meanwhile… eggs, salt, all-purpose flour (about 6 cups of flour and 4 eggs – no water)…     Equals… and eventually…    Mmmmm….!!! Aren’t simple suppers the awesomest ever???  True story:  I was tasting the sauce and mentioned to YM, “oh, wow… THIS is an awesome sauce.”  YM:  “you said awesomesauce !”  Yes, I did.  If ever a sauce was, this is.  Or...

(dropping the G because by no means could this be considered ~real~ farming!) One weekend last spring, I planted kale with my sister Sara… and then left it.  We ate some, but not much.  Having survived the winter due to exceedingly mild temperatures, this spring, it started shooting upwards… and I left it.  And left it.  It grew tall; gigantic.  And it flowered – understated little yellow flowers that attracted a gorgeous multitude of butterflies, wasps, bees, and other pollinators who are smarter than we are so they can see through the lack of over-the-top beauty in a kale plant. And then… well, there is a reason things are said to have “gone to seed” when they get bedraggled and faded-looking.  As the flowers dropped off and the seed pods grew, the plants started looking TERRIBLE.  And I left them, watching the pods elongate and finally, turn brown and crispy as the plants gave up the ghost.  On Friday, before Shabbos, because they were (wron...

We seem to be having an on-top-of-things week around here for a change.  (um, ignore the fact that the kids in the pictures below are wearing pj’s please…!) Since I have already read them the parsha overview and both kids did parsha copywork (yay!) about Aharon’s sprouting branch, we followed up with this super-easy craft project today.  In the parsha, the leaders of all the shevatim (tribes) bring a stick which is left in the Kodesh Hakodashim overnight.  All the staffs are unchanged except Aharon’s, which – in the morning – is sprouting buds, flowers and almonds.  And I thought, “we have all those things… even almonds!!!” So here they are:  sticks.  I wrote “Aharon” on one side of each kid’s stick in Hebrew and “Levi” on the other side.  I cut out leaves from a folded piece of green construction paper, and let the kids make tissue paper buds and flowers (buds = wadded up into a tight ball; flowers = loosely pinched at the base).  Finally, we...

A few thoughts mulled over a late-night bowl of cereal… One time, maybe about ten years ago, my brother and I were squatting at my parents’ house for the evening – I think my parents were away camping and I was staying there with the little kids who would later become the big kids, mostly because my parents had cable.and a VCR, both things I did not have at the time.  I think we also walked to the shul-that-would-become-our-shul over Shabbos, which I only remember because YM left the water running in the bathroom sink and we returned from shul to find thousands of dollars of water damage – eek. But anyway, Eli and I were sitting around and a commercial came on TV that showed a woman relaxing at the end of her long day with a bowl of Special K.  And it said, “not just for breakfast.”  And he and I looked at each other and pretty much simultaneously said, “people eat cereal for breakfast ???”  For both of us, cereal was always more of a comfort food than a wake-up f...

Most people, when they’re getting excited about Pesach, probably don’t think about all the beautiful COMPOST it creates.  And they certainly don’t think about all the WORMS they’re feeding over the Yom Tov. But think about it – you’re eating basically vegetables, for eight days, along with thousands and thousands (well, maybe it just seemed like it) of eggshells.  Peel, peel, peel… crack, crack, crack – and every peel and every shell is making my garden happier and healthier than it would be otherwise. I got so mad two years ago when I saw somebody tossing Pesach eggshells into the city compost bin.  My standard line is, “we already pay taxes; do we have to give them our compost , too???!?”  The (somewhat rabidly-made) point being, it’s perfectly good stuff.  And the worms (a few pictured at right) are the very best kind of Pesach guests – the ones that stay on afterwards and help you with your gardening all year round. In other, less delightful, more rot-ful...

First up:  eggs.  Other than a stack of blintz leaves, which I’m going to slice into lokshen, I’m not doing anything with eggs tonight, but since every single dessert calls for a million separated eggs (we don’t eat gebrochts, so there’s no matzah meal around here), I always do them ahead of time.  Now, they’re all lined up, waiting, in the fridge – each baggie neatly labelled according to its contents (ie 6W for 6 whites, though honestly, if you can’t tell whether it’s yolks or whites, you shouldn’t be eating it!).  I normally just plop the yolks into the baggies and they congeal somewhat, so I decided to mix in a bit of sugar (you can also use salt), which is a tip for freezing egg yolks.  These are not being frozen, but I’m hoping it will help a little.     But I’d say the evening’s unqualified success is… CHEESE!  Not hard cheese; I’ve given up on making that, and just went and bought some today.  But here are batches of homemade ri...

Here’s the score so far, cheese-wise: 1 mediocre "quick" mozzarella (too tough, not salty enough) – one point for the cheese 1 surreal batch of pink cheese curds – another point for the cheese 1 decent-tasting fresh cheddar wrapped in parchment paper, aging in the “potato room” downstairs – results of this match remain to be determined on sampling in 3 months’ time. 1 batch of “nozzarella”… overheated, turned into ricotta – score one more for the cheese. 1 nice, tasty fresh mozzarella waiting in the fridge! – yay, one point for me… at last! Highlights of the skirmish so far: FRESH HOMEMADE CHEDDAR Impromptu cheese press for the homemade cheddar (no colouring this time, and I made it out of 2L of special organic milk).  Two 2-lb weights, plus a 2-lb can of tomato sauce… probably not enough, but it seems to have done the trick.       Wrapping the cheddar and storing in highly sophisticated moisture-controlled basement “cheese cave.” I am supposed to flip ...