Howard Rosenberg
12-18-2005, 8:43 PM
Mark, it sounds like you've got an interesting background.
I hadn't realized Franco had seized power in the twenties.
I'd assumed Spanish Fascism was a European 1930's thing.
Lots of Canadians voluntarily fought on the side of the Loyalists during their Civil War.
As for food, my two brothers and I were major boneheads.
We didn't realize how good we had it - we'd complain mercilessly because we wanted the whitebread stuff advertised on TV.
My mother would try different things on us until she found something we'd like. Then she'd make it over and over and over and over and over again.....
Her extraordinarily light kreplach?
We loved them.
But they were tons of work.
Her compromise?
She started making them bigger and bigger and bigger.
We asked her to stop with the kreplach the night we each got ONE that hung over the edges of a dinner plate....
More like a krep, now that I think about it.
Undaunted, my mother continued to refine her processes.
Eventually she became the Miles Davis of Jewish food.
Most of her experiments used chicken as the underlying harmonic structure.
Her most famous experiment?
Chicken soup. With rice.
Followed by.....
Chicken. With rice.
Eventually she got so good at this she could get everything to be the same colour.
Her next level of refinement involved having EVERYTHING exhibit exactly the same texture too.
Aside from all the jokes, I miss her food.
The other day I was explaining to my kids the hierarchy of trades in Eastern Europe.
How you could tell the relative affluence of a family by their trade.
Cabinet makers were near the top.
Why?
The price of entry - the tools and whatever meager machines they had were expensive.
Toward the bottom were the tailors.
Low price of entry - scissors, needles and thread.
My kids were pretty freaked out at being apprenticed at the age of nine.
All the best.
Howard
I hadn't realized Franco had seized power in the twenties.
I'd assumed Spanish Fascism was a European 1930's thing.
Lots of Canadians voluntarily fought on the side of the Loyalists during their Civil War.
As for food, my two brothers and I were major boneheads.
We didn't realize how good we had it - we'd complain mercilessly because we wanted the whitebread stuff advertised on TV.
My mother would try different things on us until she found something we'd like. Then she'd make it over and over and over and over and over again.....
Her extraordinarily light kreplach?
We loved them.
But they were tons of work.
Her compromise?
She started making them bigger and bigger and bigger.
We asked her to stop with the kreplach the night we each got ONE that hung over the edges of a dinner plate....
More like a krep, now that I think about it.
Undaunted, my mother continued to refine her processes.
Eventually she became the Miles Davis of Jewish food.
Most of her experiments used chicken as the underlying harmonic structure.
Her most famous experiment?
Chicken soup. With rice.
Followed by.....
Chicken. With rice.
Eventually she got so good at this she could get everything to be the same colour.
Her next level of refinement involved having EVERYTHING exhibit exactly the same texture too.
Aside from all the jokes, I miss her food.
The other day I was explaining to my kids the hierarchy of trades in Eastern Europe.
How you could tell the relative affluence of a family by their trade.
Cabinet makers were near the top.
Why?
The price of entry - the tools and whatever meager machines they had were expensive.
Toward the bottom were the tailors.
Low price of entry - scissors, needles and thread.
My kids were pretty freaked out at being apprenticed at the age of nine.
All the best.
Howard