Baketastic

Maybe it's escapism from the dour economy, or a sign of a lagging social life, but I can't get myself out of the kitchen. Pork cutlets with thyme, apples and cream, roasted carrots with olive oil, thyme, and celtic sea salt, chicken stew with tomatoes, white beans and gremolata, whole wheat bread, squash with coconut and ginger...I just want to sink my hands into soft piles of flour and dazzle my tongue with spices.

Tonight after dinner I found myself back in the kitchen baking coconut macaroons with bittersweet chocolate and vegan oatmeal breakfast bars with dried cranberries and raw sunflower seeds. Everything is vegan these days, because my naturopath diagnosed my mystery finger as rheumatic and took me off dairy. I don't think the diet is permanent, but it hasn't been nearly as difficult as I thought it might be. I just use soy and almond milks for baking and cooking (soy cream worked wonders in the pork dish, above) and search around for vegan recipes on the internet. I try not to long for cheese, though it seems like every delicious recipe in the March Gourmet uses Parmesan or Gruyere--two of my absolute favorite tastes in the world. Somehow, despite vegan websites' arguments to the contrary, I just don't believe that nutritional yeast is a satisfying substitute for aged Italian Parmesan, with all of its rich, salty crumbles and crags. But despite the occasional pang of cheese envy, I'm a pretty happy omnivorous "vegan." It's a healthy way to eat, and it encourages experimentation. For instance, tonight's oatmeal bars have raw crunchy almond butter instead of butter or oil.

One troubling thing I have noticed, however, while perusing vegan cookbooks and websites, is the amount of additives and weird food science that real vegans consume on a daily basis. Plant-based milks, margarines, fake meats, egg substitute--all of these "food" products are made up of huge lists of ingredients with scientific prefixes and suffixes. I understand the moral--and certainly the dietary--arguments for veganism, but it seems a little odd to be replacing whole, natural foods with items that have to be made in a factory laboratory. I've decided that while organic almond or soy milk is a quasi necessity in the kitchen--to enrich homemade bread, dilute the morning coffee, make a creamy dish--margarine definitely is not. Neither is egg substitute (I use real eggs, but one could just as easily use ground flax seeds) or vegan cheese (it looks and tastes like a Kraft single; first, I will have to get desperate for a grilled cheese sandwich). There's just no need to be putting that crap into my body--I have a rheumatic finger because there are already toxins in my joints. Why add more?

But I didn't mean to lampoon vegan ingredients. I meant to express my surprise pleasure in exploring a whole new food world. I'm having especial fun with vegan-izing baked goods, as I was getting bored with my scrambled eggs or apple and almond butter breakfasts. And while I look forward to renewing my relationship with ricotta and sharp cheddar, I know I'm going to eat well dairy-free for the foreseeable future. I just hope the naturopath doesn't cut out wheat next. Then I might cry.

(Hopefully) Delicious Vegan Oatmeal Breakfast Bars

3 C raw oats
1/2 C whole wheat flour
1/4 C ground flaxseed OR ground almonds
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
a couple pinches of ground ginger
1 tsp vanilla extract (optional)
6 Tb brown sugar (or honey, if you like)
1 C apple juice
1/2 C raw almond butter (or mashed avocados, bananas, apple sauce, peanut butter, etc.)
additions: dried cranberries and raw sunflower seeds (or chocolate chunks, other dried fruit, nuts, coconut)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease a square pan. Mix dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Add wet ingredients, stir well. (It will be pretty sticky.) Press into pan and bake for 30 minutes. Transfer pan to rack and cool completely before slicing.

On the Pleasures of Chocolate

Hot, melty dark chocolate stuffed into the center of hot, doughy bread, straight from the oven. Culinary heaven; so good I can't write a complete sentence about it. You must try this.

Sometimes I bake bread with a bar of dark chocolate tucked inside the raw dough, waiting to melt, stain and enrich the loaf. Other times--like today at lunch--I nestle two squares of chocolate into a steaming slice of fresh bread for dessert. Once in a while I make a chocolate panino, lightly broiling the chocolate sandwich for five minutes a side, until the toast is golden and the chocolate rich and runny.

Because I bake whole wheat bread and use dark chocolate, the effects are tremendously earthy, a bit bitter and sweet. The paninos are best with airy white ciabatta, though I still prefer the dark chocolate filling. And if you're feeling especially decadent, I'm sure brioche and challah are glorious companions to chocolate.

There are endless, more interesting variations on the chocolate sandwich. Try a thin layer of berry jam or marmalade. Drizzle the bread with almond or hazelnut oil; blend or trade milk, white, and dark chocolates. Dip the sandwich in egg and fry it in butter, dusting the end product with confectioners sugar. I haven't done any of these things (yet), but I encourage experimentation.

Just be sure to eat some vegetables first.

DIY Butchery

I did something new and relatively disgusting today: I cut a whole chicken into pieces.

I know you're thinking: So what? Any douche-bag with a sharp knife can sever a carcass. But you are wrong. Cutting a chicken is a dicey and messy enterprise for the uninitiated. Fat sprays, bones crack and pierce your fingers, and the innards fall with a wet and disturbing thunk onto the formica countertop. I even pulled the heart out with my fingers.

I watched the Gourmet.com video on chicken dismemberment, but video instruction did not save me from wrestling with the chicken, sawing on bones with my best chef's knife while diluted blood trickled in little rivulets across the counter and the slippery skin beckoned, siron-like, to my cat, who kept jumping onto the counter to nibble at discarded fat. You try waging battle with a cat while neatly separating joint bones from muscle. It was supremely distracting and besides which, she is now lightly coated in grease and no doubt laying on the bed.

It was disgusting, and yet satisfying. Now I have this gloriously crispy, deep red paprika roasted chicken and roasted green beans with cashews and garlic for dinner, and a rich golden stock simmering ever so slightly on the stove. Somehow all of this food will taste better because I communed with the carcass in a new and intimate way. I held its heart in my hands and understood just a little more that my dinner once walked and squawked, and that I am thankful to be eating it.
(I'm sure the chicken would tell a different story.)

Dramaturkey

I'm getting bored of the popular and scholarly debates about the levels of anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice. I'm just not sure what can be gleaned from them; I certainly haven't come across anything revelatory in my research. It's obvious from a textual standpoint that the play utilizes and expresses contemporary anti-Semitic beliefs. Shylock's a Jew and he ultimately acts with cruelty (even the most sympathetic stage portrayal of Shylock will fail to justify the moment when he stands in the courtroom, knife in hand, to carve Antonio's heart out--though I suppose we understand the metaphor: haven't Antonio and the Merry Gentiles escaped with Jessica?). And then the play is chock full of anti-Semitic references: is the "pound of flesh" representative of the blood libel charge of ritual murder, or of circumcision? Shylock is a usurer; he keeps kosher; he does not like to mix socially with Gentiles (but why should he? They spit on him and call him names!). Shylock hates Antonio because the latter aids delinquent borrowers, thus depriving Shylock of the monetary interest on which his business depends. So we have: money-lending Jew, isolationist, wary of Christians and contemptuous of their habits, obsessed with lucre, and ultimately vengeful. Add the potentially typological construct of the play (angry God Old Testament soundly appropriated by the new and improved New Testament mercy), and we have ourselves a pogrom in a book.

Based on this evidence, it seems silly to protest that the play is not anti-Semitic. This is like saying that Shakespeare is not fanatically obsessed with the dichotomies light/dark, white/black, fair/foul, English/black or that all Shakespearean super-villains are not invariably other, and that this other is not invariably associated with darkness. Or, if that analogy does not work for you, ignoring the anti-Semitism in Merchant is like letting Romeo and Juliet survive the crypt. Adding a Spielbergian twist to plays whose meanings reside in devastating loss (and human pettiness) is as horrible as watching the last hour of AI. Not everyone's stories end happily: therein lie the lessons.

So what lessons can we take from a production of Merchant? Surely not that the Portia form of mercy is superior to the Shylock form of revenge? Surely not that Jews are all scurrilous?

Perhaps the best lesson for today's audience is that people become as ugly as your hatred for them. Was this Shakespeare's intent? Probably not...he was a savvy businessman (by historical accounts, anyway) and knew that a bad Jew would sell tickets. But to pretend in a post-Holocaustal world that Jews are inherently good because of the historical evil done to them--or to infer that somehow having been irreparably damaged, Jewish reprisal is sanctified--is to fall into the Shylock trap.

There are serious problems with this interpretation, the first one being that Shylock's verbal pleas--and indeed his early attempt at kindness, by offering Antonio a ridiculous bond--fall on deaf ears, much the way that his later violence does. Shylock can do NOTHING in this play to win, and that is a poor lesson for Jews and others, that Jews occupy a perpetually subsidiary role in the Gentile world. The choice for Jews cannot be to shut up and convert or shove out, though that was certainly the case in Shakespeare's England. And that is, of course, anti-Semitic.

So, I have effectively resolved nothing. But I remain unhappy with the literature of apology and blame that surrounds this play. And I'm exhausted, so I'll just have to spend some more time deciding how on earth I am going to write a succinct and accessible dramaturgical note both analyzing the play's literary complexities and offering (as the director asked) a Jewish perspective.

Dramaturkey indeed!

Rabbi Aryeh Hirschfield

Requiescat in pace.

read my lips, briefly

No tax cuts, Obama! The country is not in trouble because citizens pay too much in taxes. The country's in trouble because, among myriad reasons, most tax revenue is allocated to the military and other government spending programs that do not benefit the majority of civilians. And a $1,000 kicker check is not going to help T and I do much of anything, except pay one month's rent. Which we do already. $1,000 will not help a child go to college. $1,000 won't even pay for a trip to the emergency room for a sprained ankle. And any $1,000 we get is going straight into our joint savings account for the house that is becoming an increasingly fantastical life goal.

This is a time to be brave, Mr. President-Elect. You have a MAJORITY in Congress. You won the popular vote. I appreciate and generally applaud the way you embrace discourse and compromise, but there's no value right now in compromising with Republicans over tax cuts for big businesses or in doling out more cash to the Wall Street firms that seem to have a hole in their bucket.

I don't know how to fix the economy, okay? But I do know that pandering to the people, institutions, and methods of the last 20 years is a mistake, because it is precisely these agents and policies that have led us to this really pretty awful period in US history.

The World is a Stage? Fire the Actors!

If I was President-Elect Obama and I was inclined to paranoia (which I suspect he is not), I would think that a world conspiracy of gargantuan proportions was afoot to discredit my campaign of change and ensure the ineffectiveness of my first days in office.

Israel's current invasion of Gaza, the world financial crisis, America's dismal position within the financial crisis, Russian aggression in eastern Europe, genocide in the Congo. To say nothing of the domestic problems here in the US: public and college education, health care, impending lay-offs, home foreclosures, energy and waste. My god, how could I forget: our own Vietnam on two fronts, Iraq and Afghanistan. Add to that the war-in-waiting in Pakistan and our future president has waded into a military-domestic-environmental-diplomatic quagmire so thick it should come with a safety sign.

From the sideline perspective of an insignificant peon, these problems are frustrating, and at one time possibly preventable. (I don't ascribe to the lame "it's just human nature" argument. This argument is broad and valid enough to win any discussion of human foibles without actually thinking about the causes and effects of human behavior, or about humanity's capacity to transcend personal interest for the greater good.)
a. There's the credit crisis: I won't pretend to have great knowledge of finances, but come on people! Cut up your credit cards. Spend within your means. Stop being greedy. Stop putting crooks in positions of financial power. Stop putting people with personal investments in particular firms or industries into the SEC and the presidential administration. Cap corporate expense accounts and bonuses (and make the people who evade these caps pay a hefty fine). Require successful Wall Street firms to donate a specific percentage of their earnings to public welfare programs (and make the firms that evade this levy pay a hefty fine). Prosecute white collar criminals, starting with Dick Cheney and Henry Paulson. On a meta level, restructure the way money works in America so that people who work their asses off (and those who physically cannot) have access to housing and health care and food. The fact that "middle class" was defined during the campaign as households with annual incomes of $200,000 is ridiculous. If people in that salary range are truly having problems accessing basic needs--well, obviously capitalism has its limitations and it's time to implement some alternative governmental strategies for making wealth work.
b. Gaza. I don't even know what to say. I'm in an ambivalent position, because I care for both Israel and the Palestinians. But common sense tells me that invading Gaza, bombing and gunning down civilians (and this is what Israel is doing, so don't hem and haw about retaliation for Hamas rocket fire) is not the best way to broker peace. If peace is even possible, then those two peoples are going to have to shut up, lock up their weapons, and get along. Enough fighting over a desert strip of land and religious viewpoints that are not all that different when you read the Koran and the Old Testamant. Enough fighting over who is the most historically oppressed minority in the Middle East. And, quite frankly, enough of the U.S. supporting Israel every time it chooses to act violently. This conflict is so retarded on an elemental level, so based upon emotional justifications for violence, that neither Hamas nor Israel garner much sympathy from me. The people I do care about are the Israelis and the Palestinians who are getting hurt and dying because of two nations' inability to share. Why isn't the U.S. protecting them? Nations are concepts. People are empirical realities.
c. The Congo and everything else. We can't save the world, and neither can Obama. But we can become a nation that acts upon its supposed ideals of peace and liberty for all. If our nation made sure that all Americans had access to basic needs, including education and safety, and that we did not allow monetary and governmental and military corruption to occur un-penalized within America, then we would be a much more formidable foe on the world stage. If we stopped invading other countries and hurting their inhabitants, and if we stopped supporting other countries that do the same, we would actually have the moral and diplomatic authority to tell genocidal tyrants and other leaders that the U.S. has officially withdrawn all political and monetary support, and maybe that withdrawal would mean something. Also, all the money we pull out of supporting American wars and other aggressive countries like Pakistan and Israel could go to humanitarian and justifiable military efforts in the Sudan, Congo, and elsewhere.

But common sense is the new naivete. And humanitarianism is for those of us who don't get politics.