Gazoz
Filed under: Art, Business, Food, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Pop Culture
The drink and the album
The beverage in question was “gazoz”, which is really a retro drink these days, made of seltzer and various flavored syrups. It was gone for many years from the Israeli kitchen and restaurant menu, although home carbonation systems — and then just store-bought bottles of seltzer/soda water — carried on the tradition. But the last few years have brought gazoz back to the beverage list, and it’s a happy thing. Sure, you can have your limonana and iced coffees on a hot day, but the simplicity of soda water with a spritz of lemon, peach, pineapple, passionfruit, etc. syrup is easily refreshing too. And, clearly, quite cheap if a local restaurant is willing to offer free refills.
Interestingly, I always thought that the word gazoz was based on one of the European languages for gas, or carbonation. But a little Googling brought me to this Forward article, whose author found that the Turkish “Gazöz” means fizzy lemonade. “The Turks must have borrowed this word, along with the soft drink it designated, from the Italians — and since Palestine was under Turkish control until 1917, it is highly likely that Turkish rather than Italian was the immediate source of Hebrew gazoz. French, it almost certainly wasn’t.”
And like many popular Israeli terms, the word gazoz was popular for a while, so much so that a classic Israeli rock band borrowed the term; Gazoz was only around from 1978-1979 and released just two albums, including the now classic: http://www.dailymotion.com/videox9pfc7.”
Buffalo Birthdays
Buffalo Steak House
Buffalo Steak House is the kind of restaurant you go to for a special occasion or when relatives have flown into town (and are treating). With a menu almost entirely given over, as its name implies, to various cuts of beef (with the occasional chicken dish thrown in for those trying to keep their red meat intake down), it was the perfect place to celebrate the Blum family’s collective birthdays.
This is birthday season around our house – Amir and Jody in August, Merav and me in September. With Buffalo’s prices ($20-$30 a plate), we opted to pool our gastronomic resources.
For at least one of our family members, it was also the first time eating steak. Nearly 17-year-old Merav only jumped out of a prolonged vegetarian lifestyle a year ago. Twelve-year-old Aviv had some steak background, but not a lot – it was not that far in the past that he didn’t get more adventurous than chicken stars and burgers.
On the advice of our English-speaking waiter (who immediately pegged us as non-native born – do we look that American still after 16 years in the country?), the relative newbies went for the Entrecote. Amir – whose steak experience is more extensive – chose a very rare filet. I broke the steak chain and ordered three spicy and entirely delicious sausages cooked in a batter of beer, honey and mustard with fried onions on top.
Jody – who’s on a diet that eschews meat in the evening – ordered a salad, which was quite good in a non-carnivorous way.
The sweet potato chips with a mustard dipping sauce made for an excellent appetizer.
I can in good conscious recommend Buffalo; it’s certainly as tasty as the Meat and Wine Company in Herzeliya – and a lot closer for Jerusalemites like us. The bill for the five of us topped $150 with tip. For a once a year shared celebration, we can eat that.
Socialized sandwiches
Filed under: Business, Food, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, health
I have a lot that I could say and write about socialized medicine, but I’ll just tell this one story. I was waiting to see my doctor the other morning, a very popular doctor, I should add, given that we all waited about two hours each to see her. That’s because like all clinic doctors, she has an appointment scheduled every ten minutes, but gives at least fifteen to twenty minutes to each patient. Which is great when you’re finally in her office and speaking to her, but completely aggravating when you’re out in the hallway.
In any case, I spent my waiting time reading the entire newspaper, something I don’t usually get to do; chatting with other waitees, including someone who wanted to hire me for my writing skills; and returning phone calls. In the back of my mind, I figured that I would grab a sandwich from the woman who has a little stand just around the corner (1st floor, Maccabi building, Agrippas Street, Jerusalem) from my doctor’s office. When I had been waiting over an hour, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer and ambled over to her stand to see what she had to offer.
As luck would have it, she’d just run out of fresh rolls. And in typical Israeli style, she noted that she only makes sandwiches from the freshest ingredients (this is why Starbucks never made it here), and would therefore have to pop down to the Machane Yehuda market just down the street to pick up some more rolls. But she couldn’t do that without someone to man the counter, and keep an eye on the espresso machine, soft drinks and croissants still available.
Well, I certainly had the time, given that I was #288 and #278 had just entered the doctor’s office. Plus, it was too chancy to leave the building and grab something to eat, and, I knew from past experience that she makes a good sandwich. And so, sandwich lady I became for a brief 20 minutes, as she ran out for fresh rolls and quickly returned. Nothing actually happened during that time, but we all exchanged smiling glances at the situations that an elongated wait can offer.
And the sandwich was worth it.
Bizarre buds
Filed under: Business, Food, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life
Like any good Israeli, I tend to do a run of errands on Friday mornings, hitting the supermarket for last minute weekend purchases, the bakery for challot, kadeh — incredibly tasty semicircles of dough filled with feta cheese — babka and any other necessary treats, the weekend newspapers and, depending on the time of year, flowers. I say time of year because I’m a serious fan of Israel’s winter flowers which are more wild in nature, but not so much in the spring and summer, when the pickings are much slimmer.
But yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to find a much wider array of flowers being sold by the teenager outside SuperDeal — Friday flowers are often sold by enterprising teenage boys outside supermarkets, gas stations, and more often than not, on random sidewalks and sides of highways. He sold me these bizarre-looking buds, and told me the name, which I promptly forgot, being laden down with packages and reminders of what I had to buy next.
The orange-y ones look like round orange peppers to me, but may be a completely different variety. The pale green ones have the look of nothing I’ve ever seen before, as these delicate-looking feathery bulbs that are sort of ugly yet compelling in their otherness. The question is, does anyone know what they’re called? I’d really rather not wait until next Friday.
Please chime in with answers!
Thumping the watermelon
It’s not a great summer for fruit in Israel; prices are high as a result of the extreme heat we’re experiencing this summer, and the Farmers’ Association reported that the main fruits affected by the heat wave are peaches, plums, grapes, nectarines, and watermelons. A shortage of these fruits is likely, they say, and moreover, their quality isn’t great. The peaches turn rotten within seconds, the nectarines aren’t as sweet as usual and the watermelons aren’t worth the trouble.
When we cut open a “personal watermelon” yesterday afternoon, besides being full of seeds — horrors! — it just wasn’t any good. Which led to a discussion of how the watermelon had been chosen.
“Did you ask for help?” I asked my husband, Daniel, who handled the food shopping this week. He looked back at me in disdain, as if he would need help for such a task.
At that point, my brother-in-law chimed in with his watermelon-picking story of the previous week. He was choosing a watermelon, which in his case meant looking over the selection and sticking one in his cart. Meanwhile, another customer, an older Israeli gentleman, was busy thumping all the watermelons in the case, clearly checking for that hollow sound that lets you know the watermelon is ripe and ready for eating. When he saw that Ira was picking without checking, he was astounded by the carelessness of his act.
“What, you’re not gonna check to see if it’s ready?” he asked Ira. Knowing Ira, he probably smiled and shrugged. Maybe he smirked. So the older man thumped it, nodded and handed it back to Ira.
The moral of the story? I’m thinking that regular watermelons are probably better this season than the engineered kind. As for our dud, I ate some with feta cheese, which saved it a bit. As for the rest, I’m going to try a granita, which is never a bad thing during this kind of weather.
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