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Sunday, December 09, 2012

Chappy Chanukah
Posted by Jill | 1:34 PM




Lewis Black had it right; that great untold deprivation that is the Jewish December. Oh sure, retailers have elevated a relatively minor Jewish festival into some kind of separate-but-equal Christmas in order to bring in some of that fabled Jewish money. But no matter how hard some intrepid souls try to turn dreidel into a hip bar sport:



...it's still, as Lewis Black says, just a top. I mean, when was the last time you decided to spend a fun evening at a Jewish pub? And what would you drink there, Manischewitz instead of Smithwicks? Slivovitz? Nothing says Fun Times quite like plum brandy, right? I mean seriously...these are people who for thousands of years have differentiated themselves from those shikker goyin to the point of writing a song about it, you think now we're going to start opening pubs so young hipsters can play competitive dreidel? I hardly think so.

I've been feeling very Jewish this last week. It's not that I've suddenly found religion. It's more that I work in a very diverse workplace, and for our annual holiday potluck this year, we've been instructed to bring in a dish representing our heritage. I like this potluck, it's sort of like being able to cook for a party without having to clean up. So it's a time when I like to actually cook, since I usually get home so late that cooking is out of the question during the week. Usually the potluck means lots of wonderful Indian, Chinese and Italian food, and until now I always brought my Famous Secret Chili, from a recipe given me by -- you guessed it -- a Jewish guy. It's got ground beef, sweet Italian sausage, three kinds of beans, and the secret ingredient -- barbecue sauce. It's always a big hit. But this year I'm determined to do the heritage thing.

The problem is that almost every food from my "culture" is disgusting.

Now when you think Chanukah, you think latkes. How can you go wrong with fried potatoes and onions? Well, you're going to be up at 4 AM frying them, and then they're going to sit around for about five hours until lunchtime, because I don't have access at work to an oven. So scratch the latkes. What about brisket? Brisket is traditional at Chanukah, and very easy to make. Well, I nearly had a coronary after seeing the price tag on enough brisket for perhaps 40 people to have a taste. So scratch the brisket.

So what do you really have, when almost everything else is some shade of brownish-gray. We Jews seem to be famous for pallid food: Gefilte fish. Chopped liver. Kashe varnishkes. Cholent. (Yeah, I know, but that was the site with the best photos. Go figure.) Even when we HAVE food with some color, it tends to be something like borscht. I'm not even going to describe what THAT looks like, other than if you've ever watched a vampire get staked on True Blood, well, yeah, it's kind of like that.

But no -- no crispy samosas or lemon jasmine rice or chicken curry or chana masala or potstickers come out of MY culture. No wonder we tend to be neurotic and depressed. Look at what my people have eaten over the centuries!

So in an effort to try and find something that people would eat, I started perusing web sites, where most of the Jewish recipes are on web sites NOT run by Jews, for some reason. I had thought of a noodle kugel, but I remember when I was a kid, the cognitive dissonance of "noodle" and "sweet" just didn't work for me. So I asked a few selected people, including my Unofficial Office Son, who happens to be an Indian Muslim, and even HE said it sounded strange. One of my sister's friends suggested I go Sephardic on their asses, which opened the door to far more appetizing stuff than the gray foods of the Ashkenazim.

Finally I decided on a carrot tzimmes and karnatzlach, which is something I'd never heard of until now. I knew about carrot tzimmes, and since it's essentially a honey-glazed carrot-sweet potato dish with raisins, I figured it would be pretty, seasonal, and loaded with beta-carotene to boot. Plus, I like to say "tzimmes." Tzimmes is traditionally a Rosh Hashanah dish because it's about a sweet New Year, but since I'm nonreligious and don't live according to the lunar calendar, it fits just fine. Or whatever. The karnatzlach is Roumanian; it's essentially ground meat and garlic rolled into long sausages. The key there is to not make them look like something else that's long and brown, and that's what the parsley and shredded carrot garnish is going to be for.

So long around Tuesday, after a hard day's work, you'll find me in the kitchen, wondering why the hell I offered to do this.

To all of my M.O.T.'s, Happy Chanukah to you, and eat a latke for me.

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Thursday, November 22, 2012

Today we give thanks for the ability to laugh at stupidity
Posted by Jill | 9:04 AM
It's funny how certain things have become holiday traditions. Yesterday I was at the archetype of New Jersey malls, Paramus Park, blowing my flex account money on three new pairs of glasses. My prescription has changed since 2007, which was the last time I had a new prescription, and I've been having some trouble with night driving, so I decided it was time to spring for new glasses.

When I was in North Carolina last month, I somehow managed to lose what I called my Nerdy McNerdlingtons, which were these wonderful thick-black-rimmed sunglasses. So I went to Lenscrafters hoping to not just replace them, but to replace my twisty-kid-frame computer glasses with something nerdy as well.

I was greeted at the door by the store's "frame stylist" (yes, there really is such a position at Lenscrafters), who sported a tag with the inevitable name "Giancarlo". Giancarlo was maybe twenty-five at the most, and I assured him that I was about to become his worst nightmare customer of the day, because I was looking for nerd glasses, and they had to be the RIGHT nerd glasses. Well, Giancarlo looked at me and saw just a fat, middle-aged lady, and proceeded to show me frames more suitable to Jewish Grandmother In Boca circa 1972, so I sent Giancarlo on his way and went in search of Just The Right Frames That Would Not Cost Me An Arm And A Leg.

I've never understood the appeal of designer labels. I've never understood why anyone would want a Louis Vuitton handbag, which to me is just an ugly plastic thing. To me, the $79.95 eyeglass frame looks no different from the $249.95 frame with the peel-off sticker that says "Ralph Lauren Polo" and the little gold polo player on the side of the frames. Ralph Lauren is very adept at creating a kind of faux-nostalgic American classic look, but when he looks in the mirror, what looks back at him is still Ralph Lifshitz from the Bronx whose parents came from Pinsk. And he has about as much to do with those eyeglass frames as does Hesh Liebowitz the Optician from Grand Street.

Anyway, after a half-hour of trying to explain to Giancarlo who Nate Silver and Rachel Maddow were as avatars of the kind of Cool Nerd look I was after (he had never heard of either of them, which made me weep for our nation's future), I finally sselected two nerdy frames for my prescription sunglasses and computer glasses, and some functional black-wire-rims for my night driving glasses. Then I was passed along to Patrick the Sales Writer, who regaled me about his experience last year with an electric turkey fryer, and Anthony the Optician, who shared the story of how annoyed he gets as group texts (heh), which is sort of like having all your Facebook friends and all THEIR Facebook friends and then all of THEIR Facebook friends text-reply to you all at once.

So by the time I left to kill an hour and a half in Paramus Park Mall, a smallish mall by contemporary standards, but like most malls filled with stores where there is absolutely nothing a sane person would want to buy, Patrick and Anthony were like my new BFFs and the $700 that I'd spent on three pair of glasses had absolutely nothing to do with it, I'm sure. An hour and a half later, after looking at some hideous clothes at Chico's (what has happened to them, anyway), saying a prayer of thanks to the Goddess that I do not have a young female child who wanted clothing from a store called "Juicy", which looks like an emporium for underaged street hookers, and browsing the rather lame bookstore, I went back for another half hour of stimulating conversation about coffee and text messages with my new BFFs Patrick and Anthony, before I was finally released to go home around 6:30 PM, went home, watched TV, went to sleep and didn't get up until this morning, after Maggie (who is back to her old bad self) had howled at me for two straight hours.

But anyway, holiday traditions... Remember holiday traditions? This is a post about holiday traditions.

Today is Thanksgiving -- the carbo-loading that takes place before the shopping marathon to come. For all that there are far too many retailers so hungry to squeeze every last dollar out of the public that they're depriving their employees of one of the only two actual holidays on the retail calendar and opening today, it's a quiet respite between the workday and the torture to come. It's a torture that consists not just of shopping for tchotchkes for people who don't need more tchotchkes, but also of a relentless barrage of Christmas music and TV specials, each more nauseating than the one before. There's plenty of time for that tomorrow. But today, we're celebrating the most important of all the holiday traditions -- more important than the turkey, the football, the pumpkin pie.

Yes, friends, it's time for the annual playing of "Alice's Restaurant." I kind of like this version from the 1990s:



... but if you prefer the original, it's here:



Have a great day, everyone!

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Saturday, March 17, 2012

Happy St. Patrick's Day
Posted by Jill | 3:37 PM


Or, for the snarky among you:





Wow! Everyone IS Irish on St. Patrick's Day!

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Friday, December 31, 2010

Good Riddance.
Posted by Jill | 7:52 PM



2010 sucked. Not sorry at all to see it go. In fact, I won't even stay awake.

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Saturday, December 12, 2009

And the stores didn't even decorate to remind me.
Posted by Jill | 11:30 AM
Shit. It's Day 8 of Zappadan already and I missed it.

(via Bustednuckles)

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Trying to make the world a better place for Lewis Black, who says that Hanukkah sucks
Posted by Jill | 8:39 AM
When a flash mob and a singer who sounds like Weird AL Yankovic can't make Hanukkah cool, I'm not sure there's any hope:




Well, maybe there is, except that it took Tom Lehrer to do it, decades ago:



I'm sure Digby will like that one.

But I've seen this PSA on TV and I can't for the life of me figure out what CBS was thinking:



Of course maybe this is a glimpse of the future, where health care will be something you give as a gift.

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Friday, December 11, 2009

If poker, why not MLD?
Posted by Jill | 9:10 PM
As if it weren't bad enough that ballroom dancing is now an Olympic "sport", there's a push towards including poker in the Olympics. Yes, I'm talkin' poker -- that game played by guys in John Deere hats on ESPN, a spectator sport that to me is right up there with golf (pre-Tiger Woods scandals), Punkin Chunkin and Tractor Pull in the realm of Why The Hell Would Anyone Waste Their Time Watching This-ness.

But if poker can be mentioned in the context of the Olympics, then I think a game which epitomizes the joys of his holiday season ought to be considered as well.

I'm talking about Major League Dreidel. If you watched the Lewis Black Christmas Special on (for some reason) The History Channel, you saw MLD in action. But it's for real, and it's going on at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn this weekend, Saturday night at 7 PM:

This year's third annual MLD competition will take place Saturday at Knitting Factory in Brooklyn with 124 contestants vying for the longest spin on the new specially designed game board that Pavony calls "the Spinagogue."

"Not only did we reinvent the dreidel for tournament play, but we also now have a game board so you can practice at home," said Pavony, who calls himself the knishioner of MLD. "It also comes with a dreidel baseball game and skee-ball game."

The Spinagogue ($39.95), like No Limit Texas Dreidel ($19.95), is available on Rivlin Roberts' Modern Tribe site, along with a slew of other Hanukkah-related items, including a holiday album by Gods of Fire, an MLD-related band that will perform at Saturday's event.

"What we're trying to do is renew these traditions and make them more recognized and relevant," said Pavony, who hopes to introduce his game to Hebrew schools in the future. "But we're also about fun and competitions. As we say, 'no gelt, no glory.' "

OK, it's not the sort of thing that'll make you as badass as, say, joining the Israeli army, but you have to admit that there's a certain Jewish gonzo about the idea of Major League Dreidel -- a concept that sets the old joke about the world's thinnest book being one about Great Jewish Athletes on its ear, Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg notwithstanding.

So why not take Chanukah, which starts tomorrow night, away of the forced festivity that comes when you take a minor festival characterized by lighting some birthday candles, frying up some potato pancakes and eating cheap chocolates wrapped in foil that will cut your fingers every time, and set it up against the 800-pound gorilla that is Christmas (or, if you prefer, Yule, Now With Added Jesus). I'm not knocking latkes by any means; I enjoy a patty of crisp fried potatoes, onions and matzo meal as much as the next person. But when you think of all these people in mixed marriages talking about how they're going to "raise the children with both, and let them decide", what do YOU think they're going to pick? The hype-filled ubiquitous thing that involves unlimited presents brought by a creepy old childless fat man who comes down your chimney and doesn't even ask you to get in the car, cookies and candy and a big turkey dinner.....or eight presents, latkes, a little bag of cheap chocolate, and a top.

Lewis Black explains just why Chanukah is so lame when you're a kid:




So whether you think it's possible for anyone to take the little tiny top that is called dreidel and make it cool, you can't knock the purveyors of Major League Dreidel for trying:



Well, then, maybe you can.

(Note to the humorless: I am allowed to post this under the It's Ok To Knock Your Own Team rule.)

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