Pesach Excess
Cleaning a Rug for Passover
While my house gets turned upside-down in advance of Passover (and no, I won’t tell you where I’m “holding”), I’ve gathered yet more thoughts about Pesach.
Cleaning a Rug for Passover
While my house gets turned upside-down in advance of Passover (and no, I won’t tell you where I’m “holding”), I’ve gathered yet more thoughts about Pesach.
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| chicken casserole |
I am enjoying Mimi’s challenge of cooking with whatever she has in the house. As food manager of a large family I have had to learn to keep well-stocked, but when I run low I try not to run across the street. We shop at a large grocery every three weeks or so, the shuk for produce once a week, and daily at the makolet (corner store) for bread and milk . I’ve talked with my husband about buying produce once in two weeks, but he fears we don’t have enough room.
Read more on Creative Cooking Using Leftovers: Chicken Casserole…
Who could imagine that a rude storekeeper would attract such attention in our little country, never admired for its warm customer service?
According to financial magazine Globes, a woman came with her autistic child into a pizza store for a lesson in practical living, giving him a 20-shekel bill and instructing him to buy a slice of pizza and a can of tomato juice. The store owner helped another customer instead, despite the boy having stated his order three times. Finally the owner told the boy’s mother, “This isn’t a school.” The mother put the story into an email decrying the owner’s rudeness toward children with special needs and included his name and address. Thanks to the internet (she only sent it to fifty of her closest friends), the email spread far and wide and the pizza store owner was harassed. Mothers came into the store, dropped off a copy of the email, and left. Garbage was thrown. 25,000 members joined a Facebook group advocating a boycott of the store.
The Globes reporter was the first party to ask owner Shraga Gross for his version of the story. According to Gross, three mothers came in with their autistic children for this life lesson. The mothers did not coordinate with the store, and chose a time when it was full of customers. Gross claims that the boy did not utter a word, but he did tell the boy’s mother, “This is not a school.” He admits that he may have been impatient but objects to the personalized campaign against him.
Whichever version is correct, Gross didn’t commit a crime. I’ve been ignored and treated badly by storekeepers and I’m not even autistic. It seems to me that learning that not everyone will go out of their way to be kind to people, whether or not they have special needs, is an important life lesson.
Hat tip: Commenter Keren
For another example of Israeli customer service see Benji’s post here.
Update: I don’t condone rude behavior. However, the mother was out of line in publicizing the storekeeper’s name because of one isolated incident. It’s not like the store has a policy that discriminates against autistic children. If she would have e-mailed the story without mentioning the name I would support her 100%.
Read more on Updated: Lessons for Life: Rude Pizzeria Owner Lambasted on Internet…
I figure the dress in this picture would fit in well in Bnei Brak:
But the advertisement appeared on the front page of Haaretz’s Gallery section.
Without sticking out your behind,
Without pulling in your stomach,
Without dressing short,
Without dressing tight,
Without a pushup, without stiletto [heels], without giggling, without winking, without veiled looks, without appearing hungry, without hiding intelligence.SEXY (Seksit)
Without operating instructions.
The copy is over the top, but it seems that religious women aren’t the only ones having a hard time finding clothes. Anyway that outfit sure beats these.
Religious junior and senior high schools start Sukkot vacation from Erev Yom Kippur. This year that means two extra days of vacation, today and Sunday. Sukkot vacation for the younger ones lasts ten days.
That means my 12- and 14-year-olds are busy cooking for Shabbat. The 14-year-old is baking “Chanukah Gelt Double Fudge Cake None Better,” from Marcy Goldman’s Jewish Holiday Cakes. It calls for flat soda. We happen to have two unopened bottles of RC from Pesach, but we’d have to make a lot of cake to use it up. (Please don’t tell anyone I allowed this.) We are making it in a flat pan, with no layers and no frosting. Frosting around here is only for birthdays.
My son A, 12, is making burgul (what Americans called bulgur wheat), potatoes, chicken with vegetables, mayonnaise, and potato kugel. Some family members object if unadulterated potatoes do not appear on the table. A said that he like the feel of raw chicken, bless him. I have challah and soup from Erev Yom Kippur. And the sukkah is being built by my husband and various helpers, slowly but surely.
My sister-in-law invited us for the first day of Sukkot. I offered to bring challah and stuffed cabbage but we can’t find cabbage and the stores are unlikely to be restocked on Sunday. That happens sometimes in a Jewish country. . .
My daughter and I just examined the RC supply. We found *four* bottles of the stuff, because I had bought a six-pack on sale. Until my daughter saw the bottles she didn’t realize what they were (bilingual vocabulary issue). She belongs to an “anti-Coke” club in school; I hope she won’t be expelled. She is also complaining that the RC is not really flat, but I think the recipe will come out fine. My teenage guests for Shabbat chol hamoed should be able to finish off the rest of the RC.
My mother z”l used to buy Coke on two occasions: For Pesach (along with chocolate), because she believed that people needed something sweet to make up for chametz deprivation; and for offering workers who came to the house. Now that I think about it, she kept a few bottles in the basement for that purpose. I guess she didn’t worry about it getting flat.
Original post:
Whenever I visit I look for Zemira. She’ll get my kids a drink of water, but my four-year-old will never use that store’s bathroom again. Zemira knows that the cheaper melons outside the store are not heter mechira but are grown in the arava, just like the Otzar Haaretz melons. More on that in a separate post, bli neder.
Next I met David, an agronomist who came to assist Roni with a tripsim problem. Roni asked if I knew what tripsim were and I said they were tiny insects. He said they were not insects, but mosquitoes, or lice. I said that lice are insects and they agreed that tripsim (thrips) are also insects. I guess these guys are entomologically challenged, like my son’s former ganenet. David diagnosed the problem as high temperature during transport.
Read more on What’s My Line? Another Visit to the Shmitah Store…
What I’ve been up to this week:
Read more on A visit with Abbi, and the bug in the challah dough…
Yiska visited a mall in Modiin with her young baby. Here is her story:
I was at the mall this morning with my 3-week-old daughter. While modestly nursing her, a security guard approached me and told me I shouldn’t nurse in public, and that there is a changing room which I should use, “so everyone will feel more comfortable.” I nodded and said OK, and just left it at that.
An hour later, in a different spot, the same thing happened. This time it was one of the cleaning men. I told him I was perfectly comfortable where I was.
It seems to me they were told by the management to ask women not to nurse in public.It’s pretty ridiculous. It’s fine for women to walk around half naked, but feeding your child modestly is unacceptable.
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I haven’t heard from the management yet, so I’m not sure that this is the mall’s policy, it just sounded like it.
In January I heard a lecture on breastfeeding rights in Israel, by a lawyer who had researched the subject. She said that unlike in most US states, no Israeli law protects breastfeeding mothers. Assuming the mall is privately owned, the management is within its rights to ask a mother to leave the premises.
The lawyer stressed that in order to be effective, laws should not relate to issues of obscenity or sex discrimination. In Ohio, a breastfeeding mother sued Wal-Mart for sex discrimination and lost. The judge ruled that there was no sex discrimination because if a man were breastfeeding, he would also be asked to leave:
My mother always advised buying identical pairs of socks. That way you still have matching pairs even after you lose a few. Sock manufacturers have figured this out, obviously, because they sell socks in packages containing different colors and designs.
My husband says I need to spell out the meaning of the above sentence. I mean that the manufacturers want you to throw away the second half of the pair when one sock is lost.
I bought a pack of three pairs this week. But as you can see from the picture, the socks were not as identical as I had thought. I haven’t seen left and right socks since toe socks.
When I took out the last pair of socks to photograph, I realized that the package actually contained 4 L socks and 2 R socks. So should I try to return them? I can’t imagine how I would explain this problem to the store. In a country where large numbers of plumbers don’t seem to know what H and C stand for, what would an underwear store worker have to say about the difference between L and R?
I remember my mother taking me from store to store trying to find a pair of shoes that fit. My own daughter is fairly easy to shop for, but we must have gone into fifteen stores over two days to find sandals for her rapidly enlarging feet. In most of the stores, she wouldn’t consider even a single pair. And of the ones she tried, none were comfortable.
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