"Why don’t you finish your plate?” asked Batia reproachfully, “Don’t you like it?” She added in a heavy Hungarian accent. “I love it Batia, but I’m full,” I answered. “Eat up, you always must finish your plate”.
One of the first apartments that I lived in when I was a student was in a neighborhood filled with brick and mortar stores.
There are these days when I’m staring at the refrigerator, thinking what to make for dinner. I look at the ingredients and they don’t really go with the chicken breast my better half defrosted in the morning. “What would you like to for dinner?”
"What do you want to eat?” I asked my young son. “Can you make that thing that we always eat at grandma Rachelle’s?” “What dish?” I answered “I’m not sure I know what you mean.” “That meat we always eat with mom and grandma in the square”.
"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?”
"Everybody likes wings” my better half answered when I asked her what should we make for a BBQ. I knew that for her a BBQ with no wings is like a vegetarian meal for a carnivore. For someone like me, who thinks that wings are nice but not really a meal, this generalization seemed a bit exaggerated. “30? 40? How many?”
"Look what I bought for you” said my better half as she came back from another day of shopping and placed the bag on the table. We moved to the US with bare minimum equipment, and shopping was our main pastime in the first few months. When we packed before moving, we divided most of our stuff between family and friends