Israel: Visiting Graves, and Digging Your Own

This is Israel: Yesterday I was on a "nature trail," which, without doubt, is an Israeli euphemism for X-treme Sports. In Philadelphia, there was a nature trail that swept around a few meadows and groves of trees and dovetailed into a new housing development that had chopped away the rest of the forest. Here in the Golan, the phrase "nature trail" indicates a trail of barely-there rocks, the plurality of which are equal to or smaller than the width of your foot, jutting out of a cliff.

About an hour and a half in, without warning (and, certainly, without any semblance of sanity) the narrow trail of rocks which we've been precariously balancing ourselves upon gives out, replaced by a handful of metal rungs plopped into the side of the rock bed. Horizontal surfaces as we know them cease to exist, and there's a 20-foot drop into a steam that's 25 feet deep.

It's extreme, alright. But it’s also that particularly Israeli brand of springing total insanity upon you without warning, a reminder that for every anxiety-filled border crossing there's a mountain with a view that will knock the fear of God into you, and for every bomb around the corner, there's also a tiny 3000-year-old synagogue with immaculate stone buttresses around the next corner.

This afternoon we visited Tsfat. It was supposed to be a 30-minute drive, but we kept passing graves. There's a weird code to Israeli gravesites: many tzaddikim, or righteous people, are buried outside of cemeteries—in their own mini-graveyards, or in the middle of nature trails, or just on the side of the road. (One hopes that those ever-lovin' nature trails were not the cause of most of these tzaddikim being buried there, but since the stories about tzaddikim always seem to involve granting miracles, impossible journeys, and staring death right in the face, you have to allow for the possibility that, sometimes, death will not just stare idly back at them.) Some of the graves have domes over them, which indicates their more-exalted-than-normal status. Others, for a similar reason, are painted a turquoise shade of sea blue. I don't know if either or both of those things intimate something specific, or whether there’s a general hierarchy, but these are the things I’ve learned here in a very short time.

That, and that gravesites sometimes make the best concert venues.

Vegetarians and Passover

If you're a Jewish vegetarian, Passover can be really a really trying time, health-wise. All of a sudden, you've got a lot fewer sources of protein, both from wheat products and, for those Ashkenazic vegetarians in the audience, beans and legumes.

From KatiBlack, one of the followers on MJL's Twitter feed, I got a link for VegCooking.com's vegan and vegetarian Passover recipes. A lot of us are going to need this in the next few weeks -- not just those vegans and vegetarians among us, but also anyone who gets sick of matzo brei and brisket after about 2 meals, and then realizes that we have seven and a half days left of Passover.

In some ways, the above link is really great. There's traditional food, some modern twists, and a bit of variety. But VegCooking's Passover reads like a menu consisting entirely of side orders, not meant to fill up anyone whose stomach is bigger than their fist -- and it falls way short in the health arena. (The site, made by PETA, really should take itself more seriously, especially with an advertising budget as big as theirs.) VegCooking also doesn't talk about what to do instead of a shankbone on the seder plate. Fortunately, however, we've got a solution for you.

VegCooking's failings made me wonder what alternatives were out there. Recipezaar has some cool recipes -- especially half-sour pickles -- but you can tell it's not a site made by people who know about kosher cooking. For one thing, it has a bunch of stuff that isn't universally kosher for Passover, and nowhere does it warn that, for instance, no Ashkenazic Jew would ever eat lentils on Passover.

If you are Sephardic, however, you've got to check out VegKitchen.com. I've never done Passover this way, but the recipes look amazing, and a bunch of my Sephardic Facebook friends swear by her.

One of the best resources (and with some great writing) are the brief-but-thorough entries on The Chocolate Lady's blog, which goes through an encyclopedic list of vegetables and other foods, and includes some bonus recipes. (Plantains! Plantain chips! Now this is a Passover to dream about.)

Back to nutrition, though. "It's all about almonds, walnuts, and pumpkin seeds," says Sarah Chandler, a practicing vegan and the webmaster of JewSchool. Pumpkin seeds especially -- they have amazing stores of iron and protein. (Here's a complete chart, just in case you're wondering.) But vegetables are also a good source of protein -- "Even one cup of broccoli has a good deal of protein in it," notes Chandler.

Other good, solid bets for Passover food include:

• Plantains! Plantains look like bananas, although they sometimes look spoiled or bruised. They're not! That's just how plantains grow. Take it as a warning not to eat them raw -- they're starchy and thick, and they taste like biting into thick dough. Fried, however, they're bloody amazing. You can make them sweet (cinnamon, nutmeg) or savory (salt, pepper, paprika) and it's like two entirely different foods. You know that amazing smell that always hits you walking past Latin American restaurants? A lot of that comes from plantains.
  
  
• Wheatgrass! OK, I'm not a big wheatgrass fan. It's not actually made of wheat (it's not exactly grass, either, though the similarity is disturbing), and therefore, it's 100% kosher for Passover.
  
  
• Quinoa! is a great underused food, not just for Passover (and not just for vegetarians) but for pretty much everyone, all the time. It feels like couscous, tastes like whatever you spice it with (it's really good at absorbing flavor) -- but it's actually a tuber, a distant cousin of the potato. (It's also loaded with vitamins and protein.) It comes from South America, so no ancient rabbis ever thought to outlaw it. Today, there's a big question among observant Jews about whether or not quinoa's allowed on Passover, but Rabbi Avrohom Blumenkrantz, who basically wrote the rulebook on Passover food, says that it's impossible to forbid it outright -- and that many people have a custom of not eating quinoa just because it's so weird, but for vegetarians and anyone else who's conscious of their health, you not only can eat it, but you should eat it.

My personal favorite technique for Passover is to make normal food. Uh, whut? Pretend it's not Passover -- just cook without wheat or grain. A really good tomato soup (basil! leeks!) is an awesome meal that's totally kosher for Passover as long as you don't remind yourself; MJL's beet and potato frittata was made to be a light and fluffy post-Yom Kippur fast meal, but light & fluffy is exactly on the menu for someone who's just made it through two seders.

And, if you needed a reason to go vegetarian, this supplies it: In the midst of my complaining about VegCooking, I found a tiny link that sent me to a tiny 3-minute documentary that shows the horrors that went on at Rubashkin's. I know it's old -- but I'd never actually seen the footage before, of a kashrut inspector cutting open a cow and then someone right behind him yanking out the cow's trachea. And now I think I'm more freaked than ever.

Birkat Hachamah: The Untold Dangers and Sinister Pratfalls

On Tuesday, April 8, we celebrate Birkat Hahama, the Blessing over the Sun. It's observed once every 28 years, when the sun reaches the exact location that it did when it was created.

Jews actually also recite a Blessing over the Moon, too. This occurs at night, of course, and it happens once every month -- and, for that reason, is not nearly as interesting and obscure and cool-sounding.

There might be another reason that we only celebrate Birkat Hahama once a generation, however. Check out the beginning of this article, wherein one rabbi is arrested by brave Policeman Foley -- in Tompkins Square Park, one of New York's punk-rock meccas, no less! -- and another, that tricky Rabbi Klein, flees the scene.

Candy gets covered

The open mic last night was insanely, smashably hit. The place was packed, both with performers and audience -- and we even had an open mic virgin come up at the end and ask if he could perform a song, which is how you know you're being inspiring. Danny Raphael, who's usually an M.C. of the highest order, was like "there's no mic? I don't mind" and blasted into an a capella set, over the course of which I didn't even miss the music. And then these wacky un-yeshiva boys came with their guitars and made a little soundtrack of their own. Yeah -- it was a good night. And I could actually eat the food, since it was kosher (and vegan!), which is always a nice change.

And I got an amazing note from Adam Luckwaldt, significant beau of last month's feature, who's wringing his own inner muse by the neck and making a comic a day. He'd read Candy in Action, listened to the soundtrack, and covered one of the songs (the one by Postal, Odin Smith, and me -- literally turned it into a comic.

Yay art. Yay collaboration. And yay -- continually -- Maurice Sendak.

Make my heart sing.

Q: What does it take to make me burst into tears at work?

A: The trailer for Where the Wild Things Are.

I could be critical. I could start second-guessing what the rest of the movie is going to be like, and whether the Wild Things will have the same voices that they did in my head as a child (they won't) or that I give them when I read out loud to my daughter (probably not). Somewhere in my head right now, I'm thinking about it from the perspective of Maurice Sendak, and whether he would have expected the film version to be anything like his book (no) and whether he would be happy anyway (I really, really believe yes).

But at this very moment in time, I don't care. I just want to run out of here and not stop till I get to the ocean.

Open Mic - A Cry for Help

After much confusion and venue-switching, tomorrow night's Open Mic is safe -- we're doing it at Sacred Chow in the West Village, right near Washington Square Park. Free, of course, and the best kosher sangrias in New York City (and otherworldly food, too). And the estimable Danny Raphael as a feature, just in from London...tomorrow at 7:30. Please, spread the word.