Orange soup

 Thai style pumpkin-veg soup 

We never really ate pumpkin when I was a kid (except as chunks in couscous soup) and this food just wasn't really on my cooking radar until we attended a bat mitzva this week at which pumpkin soup was served and the Little Person announced that pumpkin appears in her "Kef Le-ekhol Bari" (it's fun to eat healthy) book, and that the book suggests making it into soup.

She much enjoyed her bat-mitzva party pumpkin soup and the next day at the supermarket asked to buy ingredients to make our own pumpkin soup and when we got home she dutifully researched pumpkin soup recipes in my various cookery books and on-line, finally settling on a Thai recipe, for which fortunately we happened to have all the ingredients.

In the end Junior gobbled up about a third of the pumpkin I roasted for the soup before it could get into the soup, so I ended up adding other veggies to the recipe due to the sudden dearth of pumpkin.

Now that you know the story, please find my improvised soup recipe below, I think this is what I did, it is, as I said, slightly improvised. I'm pretty sure this would work nicely with any selection of squash veggies.

Enjoy - we did!

P.S. She says that the roasted pumpkin was a yummacious snack!

Ingredients:

1.5-2kg pumpkin (approx), chunked
1 medium-small aubergine (eggplant) - we used the stripey kind, chunked
salt
black pepper
olive oil
Thai green curry paste
1 yellow onion, chopped
1 head garlic, finely chopped or minced
1 "thumb" fresh ginger, finely chopped, minced or grated
1 parsley root, chunked
1 carrot, chunked
Generous bunch fresh coriander, finely chopped
Generous bunch fresh basil, finely chopped
Water (about a cup)
1 can coconut milk or coconut cream
(optional) 1 can chopped tomato (or a few fresh chopped tomatoes if you have)
Lemon or lime juice

1) Preheat oven to 180 C. Arrange chunked pumpkin and aubergine on a large baking tray. Sprinkle liberally with black pepper and a little salt. Drizzle with olive oil. Bake for about half an hour, or until it starts to soften.

2) In a largish pot heat about a little olive oil. Gradually mix in about a teaspoon of Thai curry paste. (This paste can be quite strong, so best to start off with a small amount, you can always add more later if it isn't firey enough for you.) Add chopped onion and saute for a few minutes until onion starts to soften.

3) Add chopped/minced garlic and ginger. Cover pot and allow to "sweat" for a few minutes, stir well, add chunked parsley root and carrot and "sweat" a few more minutes.

4) Add baked pumpkin and aubergine to the pot. Simmer with half cup-cup of water (water should just cover veggies) until all the veggies are soft.

5) Add the finely chopped coriander and basil and mix thoroughly into veggies. If you're using chopped tomatoes, add them now too.

6) Using an electric blender wand puree the soup until it reaches the desired consistency, ours came out smooth and creamy.

7) Add the coconut milk/cream and mix thoroughly.

8) Add some lemon or lime juice to taste. If the soup isn't firey enough for you, add more Thai curry paste and chilis.

9) Serve hot or cold with a side of aromatic jasmine rice.

Bake, bake, bake in the baking weather

I don't know if it's being pregnant, the hot weather outdoors or just following Junior's natural curiosity, but we seem to be experiencing a baking frenzy this summer.

On the practical side it is something I can do with the Little Person which can be done (mostly) while sitting down in the airconditioning (albeit with the oven on, so maybe it doesn't really help with the issue of being pregnant in August).

What with being due, please God, just before Rosh Hashanah and expecting assorted family over the holidays, I'm trying to stock my freezer so we'll be ready with homecooked stuff we like when I'm God Willing busy with a newborn.

On the fun side, Junior has picked out a slew of recipes she wants to try, and this is a great opportunity.

On the unexpected side, Junior has developed an interest in maths, in particular fractions, measuring and counting, so doing recipes together is a great hands on way for her to learn to put into practice what she has read in Jerry Pallotta's wonderful "Apple Fractions" book.

All in all a good plan for a very pregnant mother of a very curious and active 4 year-old.

To date we have made rhubarb loaf, plum honey cake, assorted wholewheat muffins with various fruits, saffron chestnut lamb stew, saffron rhubarb beef stew, courgette soup, a ton of hallot, turkey soup, tomato coriander soup, carrot kugel and these oatmeal fig biscuits.

So far so good.

I adapted this from a recipe a friend gave me, we are a fresh fig loving family!

Oatmeal Fig and Almond Biscuits

Ingredients:

1 cup finely chopped fresh figs(if you don't have any, you can try dried figs that have soaked for a bit in warm water so that they plump up, the taste will be different though)
2 cups wholewheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice (mace)
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
3/4 cup olive or canola oil (or a blend)
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
8 tablespoons water
2 cups quick cooking oats, preferably whole oats
1/2 cup flaked almond

1) Preheat oven to 200 C (I think this is 400 F for Americans and imperial Brits?)
2) Sift flour with baking powder, salt and spices
3) Add oats, figs and almonds
4) In a separate bowl, cream together oil with sugar.
5) Beat the eggs well, then add to sugar/oil mixture and cream together.
6) Add alternately sall amounts of the dry mixture and water to the oil/sugar mixture to make a dough.
7) Drop teaspoons of dough on to a greased biscuit sheet and bake at 200 C for 10 minutes.

A pickling caper

This is what happens when the Junior Gourmand asks a question.

The Little Person is a caper addict.

I always knew that capers grew wild in Israel (very pretty flowers).

I always knew that they could be pickled.

All said and done I've always loved eating capers. (yeah, I know, the kid has picked up some of my stranger tastes in food, like blue cheese ravioli and pink grapefruit juice)

Having never had my own garden though and being reluctant to pick wild plants, I never quite tried my hand at making my own pickled capers.

Well, guess who wants to try? So I did some research:

http://food.lizsteinberg.com/2009/06/21/do-it-yourself-capers/#more-2289

Anyone have some caper bushes in their yard that we could pick?

15 Books

OK, so I don't usually do these things because they are usually about pop stars or movies or stuff that just doesn't do it for me, but books, well, you got me there, I mean, I certainly live with enough of them.

"Don't take too long to think about it. List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you. They should be the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends. "

So, off the top of my head, here goes:

1.Watership Down, Richard Adams
2. Only Yesterday (Tmol Shilshom), S.Y.Agnon
3. Adjustment of Sights, Haim Sabbato
4.The First Circle, Alexander Sozhenitsyn
5. Night, Eli Wiesel
6. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
7. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
8. If This is a Man-The Truth, Primo Levi
9. 1984, George Orwell
10. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
11. The Little Prince, Antoine St Exupery
12. Yoni's Letters, Yonatan Netanyahu
13. Fear No Evil, Natan Sharansky
14. Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
15. My Beloved, My Friend (Dodi Vere'i), Naomi Frankel

When you hear them cuckoos hollerin'

The cuckoos in the tree by my balcony took me straight to Leah Goldberg. I've always loved her poetry and I guess this one just got right under my skin:

(my rough, lousy translation from Hebrew)

Here I will not hear the voice of the cuckoo
Here the trees will not adorn themselves in a turban of snow
But in the shade of these pines
All my childhood relived

...

Maybe only migratory birds know
When they are suspended between land and sky
This pain of having two homelands

With you I have twice been planted
With you I grew, pines
And my roots are in two landscapes

Goldberg was born in Konigsberg, East Prussia, and came to Tel Aviv as a young woman. From this poem it seems she never found any cuckoos in Israel. But then Tel Aviv was never really known for its rich flora and fauna, even in the 1930s.

Well, I knew she was wrong about the cuckoos, had known for some time. I guess she was no birder. Or perhaps with much less reforestation in her day, there really weren't so many cuckoos around. Either way, kind of weird to have one over on one of our national poetesses when it comes to knowing the Land of Israel.

Then again, the species of cuckoo in my tree doesn't actually say cuckoo.

Go figure.

Which brought me to Ahinoam Nini (Noa) and her adaptation of Goldberg's binational angst to fit the modern torn identity of so many Israelis growing up in other countries:

I remember those snow-capped mountains
And a song on F.M. 93
Oh my darlin', I have grown with you
But my roots are on both sides of the sea

Which brought me to myself.

I've called three countries home in my life and while I may think of words like affection, loyalty, pride and happiness in conjunction with the other two, only Israel gives me that bone deep, soul searing love for her landscape and language.

The other two are good places to live, countries I admire, care for, care about, but my connections to them are accidents of history, politics and economics.

When I am away from them I don't ache for them like a piece of me is missing.

They are not my destiny, spreading back through the ages, through countless generations of my ancestors, praying, yearning, dreaming, burning the memory of her nature and views into the hearts of our nation wherever we wandered.

My other two mother countries are places of nostalgia, memory, fond reminiscences of pebble beaches in autumn, red brick houses illuminated in the short, dark days of a north European winter, clapboard ranch houses full of small children at birthday parties and windswept rolling green mountains and lakes.

But still, they don't radiate home the way Israel does. Their beauty and my love for them pales beside rugged rocky hillsides covered in thistles and almond trees, olives groves and vineyards planted in terra rosa soil, rocky red, yellow, white deserts and neglected old Jerusalem stone fronted houses.

I can't swear that circumstances may, against my will, lead me to wander again.

I can't swear that there is only one place I'll ever call home.

Truth be told, I don't think I will ever truly have one place I think of as home.

Maybe it's the fate of a wandering Jewish ancestry, maybe it's just that the landscape of my life is scattered over three continents, but part of me will always feel fragmented, spread too thin, not quite completely at home in any one country, always something of a stranger wherever I am.

But given a choice, I know which one feels most like home.

I know which vistas scroll through my dreams.

Weather Channel Obsession?

Yes, I admit it, I have an obsession with rain. I can't stop writing about it, longing for it, hoping for it, and I swear I'm not this bad when we actually have enough of it (well, I can never have enough of it), but I go nuts with longing for rain when it's in short supply, and believe me, this year it is in majorly short supply.

I struggle through the dry season counting down to autumn the way Junior counts down to her birthday, dreaming, hoping. And then to be disappointed like this.

Don't get me wrong, it's great to have all those clear blue skies to go walking under, but my soul yearns for clouds, for rain, for that tantalising smell of damp earth and quite frankly I just haven't had my fill this season, and there are only a maximum of 3 months, 4 months tops, of rainy season to go.

And for the record, we don't have a weather channel in this country (nothing to report for half the year except for heat and sunshine...)

Thunder, Lightening, Oh My!

Well I know it's been a long time when I had to think twice to register that it was indeed thunder. Really.

Last weekend the meteorological powers that be promised rain.

Oh yeah, we got wind, lots of it, gales of it, violent, howling and shrieking, but bone dry all the same. A real tease.

So this Shabbat I'm thinking more of the same, and yeah, it was more of the same, just not quite as blustery, but a tease all the same. All wind and no rain.

Last night I was finally sitting down with Junior with her latest fascination, The Jabberwocky (we didn't realise she could reach the shelf until I caught her reading the book to herself, really don't think that's quite what I would have thought of as 3 year-old appropriate reading, but then it's getting hard to vet what she reads, I think we may have to cancel the daily newspaper).

Where was I? Yes, the Jabberwocky. Well, I can't remember which poem we were reading in the collection, but suddenly I heard a distant rumble, wasn't quite sure what it was.

Then there it was again, and as I looked up, sure enough a bright flash over the valley. Hmmm, I had to blink and shake myself that I wasn't hallucinating.

Real live thunder and lighting. I can hardly remember experiencing any this winter.

By this time Junior had noticed my distraction and ran off to get her brakha cards to look up the blessings for thunder and lightning. Told her the story about how when I was a kid my mother made sure I was never scared of these natural phenomena by teaching me the blessings to say.

Junior looks at me quizzically and explains matter of factly that she's never been scared of them, but it's important to say the right brakha, because that way Ima isn't scared.

Anyway, turns out this is the driest January on record in Israel. So it isn't just me feeling like I can't remember what a thunder storm is.