If you know something about Israelis, one of the first things that will come to mind is their food. Israelis, unlike Jews you might meet in America, do not necessarily eat potato kugal or gefilte fish. In fact the first time I tried these things were not in the kitchens of native Israelis, but Americans who’d immigrated to Israel. The palate of the average Israeli is diverse. The question is if you love to cook where do you find good blog food recipes? With so many blogs out there, the choices are enormous.

My personal website Green Prophet provides a Middle Eastern inspired food recipes every week thanks to Miriam, and if you like fusion and the Israeli style of cooking another favorite cooking and food blog that I personally love is Food Bridge. It focuses on Israel as part of the Levant, and not separate from it.

On Food Bridge Sarah Melamed pens an incredibly local and current food blog on food from the land of Israel and beyond. She goes way beyond any type of Jewish stereotype you might find, embracing local cultures and traditions from nearby Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority. She writes about what foods are in season, where to get them, and pictures them so wonderfully that you might even be inspired to start a food blog yourself. The blog is great for Americans, because as an American Sarah is one of the few I know who lets her past go and really celebrates the food diversity in the Levant region, without politics, without religion. Give her blog a taste.

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Pink slime (image from KSDK TV, Saint Louis)

Kosher food is often equated with being healthier. While I’ve taken comfort in this conjecture, it’s not really true. Kosher food can be filled with just as many preservatives and unhealthy processed mysteries as non-kosher food. And as scandals over the past years at kosher meat plants in the U.S. have proven, slaughter according to Jewish law can be fraught with corruption and less than sanitary practices.

But an article in this week’s Ynet (and reported earlier on the Green Prophet blog) indicates that in at least one area, kosher most definitely trumps treife: at McDonald’s in Israel.

McDonald’s – as well as other fast food chains – came under fire when celebrity chef Jamie Oliver exposed the fact that the Golden Arches was using something called “boneless lean beef trimmings” in their burgers. Oliver referred to it derisively as “pink slime” on an episode of his TV show (here’s the video).

These trimmings apparently consist of what’s left of the meat after all the choice cuts of beef are taken. They’re then run through a centrifuge and treated with ammonium hydroxide (an ingredient used in household cleaning agents) in order to kill off bacteria such as E. coli.

That makes the slime safe for human consumption…at least in the U.S. Boneless lean beef trimmings are banned for people in the U.K., and are used for dog and chicken food instead.

Sounds absolutely yummy.

The good news is that McDonald’s in Israel have never used the pink slime in their burgers, since boneless lean beef trimmings could potentially include parts of the cow that are not OK from a kashrut perspective. That applies to both kosher and non-kosher certified McDonald’s – both import their beef from the same plants in South America via the Israeli Of Tov company.

Kind of makes you proud to be an Israeli fast foodie.

All this doesn’t give McDonald’s a pass on the detrimental-to-your-health scale: 100% beef or not, the calories, fat and sugar in a McDonald’s meal are definitely not as happy as Hamburglar might have wooed us into complacency when we were younger and hooked on Saturday morning cartoons. Want more convincing: just watch Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me and you’ll be a budding vegan in under 90 minutes.

McDonald’s has since announced that it is no longer using pink slime in its burgers in the U.S.

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Vetara’s Bio Groentebouillon soup mix not kosher for chicken soup?

My wife Jody makes the greatest chicken soup. I’m not getting paid to say that, nor getting any other domestic perks. It’s just downright awesome. It’s more like a stew, with whole turkey necks (that actually makes it “turkey soup” but don’t tell the kids), tons of vegetables, barley and some secret spices. There are also a couple of tablespoons of organic vegetable soup mix.

Jody has been making the soup for years, but as Passover has come chametz’ing its way in, Jody wanted to check the label of our soup mix at the store, to see if it was kosher for Pesach, before buying a new jar. As she ran through the ingredients, she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks.

One of the ingredients…was milk.

The ramifications, if true, were devastating. It would mean that we would have been mixing milk and meat, eating treife chicken soup…for nearly 18 years (since we moved to Israel). With such a serious sin, why not just move on to the next level and drip some pig fat into our soup?

Jody put down the jar of soup mix, finished her shopping and quickly returned home where she pulled out her nearly depleted jar of pre-Pesach mix. There was no milk listed. It must have been some sort of change in the product. Jody breathed a sigh of relief. No baby goats would need to be sacrificed at the Temple this year.

Still, it didn’t make sense. Why would there be milk in a vegetable soup mix? The manufacturer – a Dutch company – had written “Controlled Vegetarian” all over the package, although that was for the old jar.

There’s probably an all parve replacement, hopefully just as organic. We’ll check after the holiday. In the meantime, if you are a consumer of Vetara’s Bio Groentebouillon soup mix and you use it in your fleishedik soup, and you keep kosher, consider yourself warned.

A happy – and kosher – Passover!

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However, I was all for the cottage cheese revolution last summer which found the populace fed up with the price gouging of our big conglomerates. And thanks to that initiative, some of the prices of our cheese and milk products have indeed been lowered by companies like Strauss and Tnuva.

However, one Israeli who lives in the US wasn’t satisfied. He happened to be in a grocery store in New Jersey and saw a display of Israeli Pesek Zman chocolate bars (made by Strauss) being sold for 69 cents, about a third of what the hard-working Israeli chocolate lover pays for it here.

He posted a photo for his Facebook friends, and presto, the chocolate Watergate was flowing.

The news snowballed and the media, apparently unaware that we’re under an Iranian threat, reported that other chocolate bars manufactured by flagship Elite company (also owned surprisingly enough by Strauss) are also being sold at similarly low prices abroad.

Strauss said in a statement that it cannot control the price that retailers place on their products, and said it believed that the prices were lower in Jewish communities in the United States in advance of Purim.

Nonetheless, after sensational headlines and much chocolate binging, it’s been decided that a month-long boycott of Strauss and Elite chocolate bars is set to begin on March 1, just as we’re entering the chocolate-intensive week of Purim.

We’ve endured hardships before, from milk and egg shortages during the War of Independence to the more recent hummus shortage, which admittedly did cause some of us to crack. However a month without chocolate bars is tearing the Zionist dream at its fabric. We can only sacrifice so much.

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Cafe Agnon has plenty of enticing looking breakfast snacks, including borekas, croissants, strudel-y things, but, sigh, I know better than to go there and eat one of those, as they’re just fattening and not all that filling. So instead, I chose a carob energy bar from a selection of homemade bars, smiling ruefully at the woman who was next in line and had also ordered a coffee and chosen the healthy bar option.

I commented to her, “Ein ta’am.” Meaning, there’s no point in eating one of the more fattening choices, because it’s just a slippery slope to eating more than one and losing the diet battle. We both laughed and said, together, “Yesh ta’am.” Meaning, well, of course those pastries have taste, utilizing the other translation of ta’am, which is taste.

I walked away, smiling, having had one of those good Hebrew moments, which is so gratifying. And then, I read great news from Tel Aviv University, about eating fattening foods for breakfast:

Seems that dessert, “as part of a balanced 600-calorie breakfast that also includes proteins and carbohydrates,” can help dieters lose more weight.

The key is to indulge in the morning, when the body’s metabolism is at its most active and we are better able to work off the extra calories throughout the day, say Prof. Daniela Jakubowicz, Dr. Julio Wainstein and Dr. Mona Boaz of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Diabetes Unit at Wolfson Medical Center, and Prof. Oren Froy of Hebrew University Jerusalem.

Attempting to avoid sweets entirely can create a psychological addiction to these same foods in the long-term, explains Prof. Jakubowicz. Adding dessert items to breakfast can control cravings throughout the rest of the day. Over the course of a 32 week-long study, detailed in the journal Steroids, participants who added dessert to their breakfast — cookies, cake, or chocolate — lost an average of 40 lbs. more than a group that avoided such foods. What’s more, they kept off the pounds longer.

Like that, right? I’ll be nibbling on some delectable ma’afe (pastry) with my next coffee. Feel free to join me.

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Israel's National Water Carrier

Two items were in the news this week concerning where Israelis get their drinking water.

The first is good news: the water crisis, which we’ve been suffering through for nearly a decade (this winter appears to be a welcome exception), may be coming to an end in the next year. And by 2020 or so, we may actually have a water surplus!

Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, told the Knesset Economics Committee this week that, due to increased desalination of seawater (Israel has six desalination facilities), by 2013, 75% of Israeli households will be using desalinated water, alleviated some of the two billion cubic meters of water the country is currently missing. All this extra water will allow for the rehabilitation of Israel’s Coastal Aquifer and may lead to a restoration of safe water levels in the Sea of Galilee.

Even better: by 2030, Mekorot predicts that Israel’s agricultural irrigation – which uses more water than households – will be completely based on desalinated and brackish water.

That covers water from the tap. But Israelis also get their water from bottles – mineral, spring and filtered water – and that’s the other piece of news that surfaced this week: the coming restaurant water wars.

Strauss Water plans to offer restaurants free purified water from its Tami 4 water filter systems if they serve the water in pitchers bearing the company’s brand and – more importantly – they stop selling mineral water from Strauss’s competitors: the companies that make Mei Eden, Neviot, San Pellegrino and Sam Benedetto. Strauss sees it as a way to sell more Tami 4 machines.

Strauss will pay the restaurants a premium, given that the new arrangement will cut into the eateries’ bottom lines (mineral water sales can make up to 2% of a restaurant’s sales). The bottled water industry in Israel is valued at $270 million; 38% of that is sold in restaurants.

The restaurant industry is skeptical. The Strauss premium would have to be pretty high to make up lost revenue. And an article in Ynet points out that Strauss has only concluded one restaurant deal so far, so it seems like the road to its marketing success will be a dry one for a while, but Strauss is one of Israel’s biggest food conglomerates, so it may not go thirsty for too long.

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Ben and Jerry's Israel ad for their ice cream club

In fact, when I typed ice cream for breakfast into the search bar of Facebook, dozens of posts popped up for celebrants around the globe, from Mexico, Seattle, Louisiana and Philly to Maine, Albany and Shanghai.

According to Serious Eats, all you need to do is eat ice cream, for breakfast, and on the first Saturday in February.

We’ve always celebrated on Saturday, Shabbat in our house, which is the only day that we’re all around, fairly calm and relaxed, and have the time to enjoy the wonders of ice cream for one’s first food of the day. Usually it’s a good selection of Ben & Jerry’s, sometimes with homemade ice cream as well, thanks to my nephew Natan, the artisanal ice cream connoisseur. Toppings? Not always, but it does add to the experience.

Serious Eats also adds that “the holiday was started in the 1960s in Rochester, New York by Florence Rappaport, who let her kids eat ice cream for breakfast on the first Saturday of February to make winter more bearable for them. Now this custom is done all over the world, from Minnesota to Israel to Australia.”

Turns out, there’s an official IEICFBD blog, where you can list your own celebration — there are four in Israel, including one in my own neighborhood of Talpiot (I think that one is hosted by other neighbors of ours) and one down at Kibbutz Ketura, where given the hot weather nearly year-round and a surfeit of American-born kibbutzniks, they’ve been celebrating for some 30 years.

It comes down to the fact that you just need to celebrate sometimes, and even with the upcoming holiday of Tu B’shvat, which, lord knows, offers ample opportunity for celebration, February can be a bleak month. So, if you missed it today, go for it next week. We won’t tell.

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Pit spitting in Spain

If its organizers were not so earnest, this would definitely qualify for the world’s wackiest competitive sport: olive pit spitting. Yes, there is an association, the International Federation of Olive Pit Spitting that operates out of Spain and is promoting pit spitting to be included as an official sport at the next Olympics.

Now, Israel is getting in the game. The Givat Brenner Pickled Olive Festival has invited the pit spitting federation to come to Israel and run our first official contest. Israel21c’s Viva Sarah Press reports that event is scheduled for February 10-11, 2012 at the Givat Brenner Nurseries.

Now before you fire up the TV and play Monty Python’s “Spot the Loony” game, consider this: olive pit spitting may go back to the stone age. According to the federation, prehistoric cave paintings depicting the sport were found in the Spanish city of Cieza; the town would like the pictures to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Right…

Archaeologists speculate that the competitions moved from caves to villages and, by the time of the Greeks, were even proposed for the Olympic games (they lost to the Discus Throwing Competition). The pit spitting website also goes into great detail about how the sport was banned (Islam didn’t much care for it, so Christians needed to play clandestinely).

The rules for a pit spitting competition are remarkably detailed. Participants with false teeth are recommended to “fix them well into place…the organization will not be held responsible for any injuries.” Ditto if “a participant experiences abdominal pain caused by a massive ingestion of stones,” or if a stone hits someone on the head (that spitter will also be disqualified). And just to be sure, the rules state that there must be no sexism – men and women are invited to compete in full equality.

As for the Israeli competition, our Sabra newbies have their work cut out for them. The Guinness Book of World Records lists the number one spit projectile at 21.32 meters.

As they used to say on television: “don’t try this at home kids.”

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The Gad cheese grandfather

Carpet tiles (Photo credit: Tchochkes)

But the point of the video, says one commentator, is to recognize the metaphor of the movie. The peak in life, is not necessarily the refrigerator shelf, where it appears that everyone should be situated. But rather, the garbage pail, which may represent the margins of society or a greater mix of products, may offer more self-expression, and, more happiness.

It’s good to get the inner meaning, but you can just appreciate the clever aspects of this student project that has already been viewed more than 30,000 times.

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Haagen Dazs white almond raspberry truffle

I have to admit that I prefer Ben and Jerry’s to Häagen-Dazs. Maybe it’s the fact that Ben went to my college or that their ice cream is simply more available in Israel. But that doesn’t mean I want Häagen-Dazs to go the way of Starbucks, Burger King and Dunkin Donuts, well-known American brands that didn’t make it in the Holy Land.

Nevertheless, that appears to be what’s happening. But not for economic reasons. No, it’s more of the haredization of Israel – now Häagen-Dazs isn’t kosher enough for Israel and the State Rabbinical Authority has issued a proclamation stipulating that any store selling the ice cream with the made-up Scandinavian sounding name will lose its kashrut license.

The reason: the milk that goes into the ice cream is made by non-Jews and not supervised by the official rabbinic authorities. Never mind the fact that religious leaders have for years used milk that is not chalav Israel (that is, made by Jews) under a ruling by none other than leading Jewish legal decisor Rabbi Moshe Feinstein that, due to strict Western regulation, there is no chance that pig products will make into bovine sourced milk.

But that’s not good enough for Israel, where the rabbis have decided that, since we now live in “Eretz HaKodesh,” as Rafi Yochai of the rabbinate’s kashrut division put it, “the majority of the milk produced is supervised [here], so there’s less reason to permit these products.”

Hence the decree that all liquid milk must now be Jewish-made or supervised. Ben and Jerry’s, by the way, uses milk powder (which apparently is still OK) and so, as a result, will still be available.

Not everyone agrees with the new rules. The Orthodox Union, which for years has been the gold standard of kashrut in the U.S., and increasingly in Israel, says it will stand by Häagen-Dazs. But who will sell it? My local SuperSol isn’t going to risk alienating the large number of kosher-adherent Israelis who shop there just for a little white almond raspberry truffle.

A fight for one’s right to consume Häagen-Dazs is unlikely to ignite the masses to return to Rothschild Boulevard, the site of this summer’s social justice protests. And, with increasing rumors of an imminent attack on Iran, it’s unlikely this latest round of religious rigidity will make much of a blip on the culinary radar.

Still, I shudder to think what’s next. No more Toyota cars and trucks in Israel because their carburetors aren’t sufficiently supervised? A blockade on iPhones because the workers in the assembly plants might be eating ham and cheese sandwiches while checking the screens for glitches? A ban on seaweed for sushi because it might contain traces of shellfish (oh, wait, that already happened…

For now, it’s just Häagen-Dazs, though. When asked what the brand’s aficionados should do now, Yochai from the rabbinate replied, “Love God more than ice-cream.”

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