"Mom bought those cookies that we love!” my younger brother howled at me as I entered home back from school. “How do you know?” I asked “it’s not passover yet” “I saw mom take them out of the shopping bag” he answered. My taste buds responded immediately and demanded immediate satisfaction. “Where is mom?” I asked, trying to avoid drooling.
"So you really know how to cook?” asked Jezebel (an invented name) when we sat in the early hours of the morning in a small restaurant in Paris after a long, alcohol-filled night. I vaguely remembered that we spoke about food and cooking in the evening. I guess the alcohol in my blood made me feel at least like Gordon Ramsay because I answered “yes, I’m a great cook” trying to impress Jezebel.
"I will cook for Passover Seder” I told mom a couple of weeks before the holiday. “You don’t have to make anything.” “How would you cook? You know the problem.” “Don’t worry, I’ll cook at your house.” “And what about shopping, where would you buy the ingredients?” mom kept asking,
Ben and I clicked from day one. We met at high school. He was one of the kids that came from all over the country to the boarding school. On weekends he would go to his parents’ home in another city. After quite a few attempts at persuasion and pleas, my parents agreed to let me go to Ben’s for a weekend. “Do you eat matzo balls at shabbat dinner?”
Purim in one of my favorites holidays. It wasn’t always like this. One of my most memorable childhood traumas is connected to Purim. It wasn’t the costumes, I actually loved to dress up, and I loved the costumes parade. The Purim gragger was one of my favorite toys, and not just on Purim. What scared me was a conversation mom had with our neighbor.
One of my most vivid memory from my childhood kitchen is the huge number of pots and pans cooking simultaneously on the stove. In a kitchen of nearly 80 square feet, that also had a dining table, in any given moment there were at least 3-4 dishes cooking, and usually one or two were baked in the oven.
I love eggplants! Until a few years ago you couldn’t hear me say this sentence because of the simple reason that I didn’t eat eggplants, at all. “Eggplants in tahini is just like eating tahini, you won’t even taste them,” my better half would say “so why eat eggplants?” I’d answer “I’ll eat tahini.”