Livin' La Vida Loca...

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So lest you think I've been idle all this time-here are some pictures from my trip in Istanbul.

I've been partying,














mingling with some wild creatures,















and burning the house down in my spare time!

In short-it's been wild! :P I'm off to South Africa in a few hours. A more serious post to follow at some point...

Turkisms galore...

I haven't managed to blog as much as I wanted-I've been trying to get in as much quality time as possible in Turkey. My time is divided between seeing the people I've missed and soaking up the beauty of Istanbul. So for now I decided to give here a list of the quintessentially Turkish experiences I can't get enough of. First and foremost is obviously the Bosphorous. :)

Then there's my absolute favorite in Istanbul winters-the roasted chestnuts:

and while we're on the subject of street vendors-there's a ridiculous amount of hazelnuts in Istanbul and the government has been trying to promote them like crazy. Booths like the one below have become commonplace in the last few years. Not sure why, I guess there's a surplus? They are so yummy, send them to Israel!!!!

When you're keeping kosher outside of Israel, you resort to eating a lot of salads in restaurants. Foreigners who have come to Istanbul with me can't quite get over the elaborate presentation of even the simplest dishes here:

Back at home the tea pot is the queen of the kitchen, perpetually seated its prime location on top of the stove:

and best of all-the juiciest lemons are here!! Just to put things in perspective-we used the whole bowl below on Friday and I was even sent out to buy more!

Wherever I go I can't seem to get away from food, can I??

Berrrale On The Go

That's right, I've left the homeland for a little get away. Well, not SO little actually. I am currently in Turkey visiting my family and friends and a week from now I plan to be in South Africa! Yay!!! I've wanted to visit Cape Town for many years now and finally I had a wonderful opportunity that I couldn't pass up on. I plan to be there for a few weeks and I am bursting with excitement! (or as we say in Turkish: "My insides don't fit my insides"!)

Of course, me being me, I already have a few baking projects lined up in both countries. Should be fun :)

Say what you will, it is always difficult for me to leave Israel. I feel like a little part of me gets left behind. However frustrated I get with it, it's still my home and I feel a tremendous connection to it. In fact, I feel horrible leaving it at such a bad time, what with all the rockets falling. I love how when there is a war or disturbance going on, Israelis who are travelling abroad flock back to it. We live in a huge pressure cooker, but it's our pressure cooker dammit and we will get in there!

My flight from Tel Aviv was quite uneventful. Unless of course you count the cab driver breaking the handle on my very heavy suitcase... Of course in true Israeli fashion he claimed that I had broken it-never mind that before he touched it, it was working just fine. It was not fun schlepping a 24 kg. suitcase up 2 flights of stairs, I'll tell you that much. Poor little me.

Then there was the security guy at the airport who ran my backpack through the machine twice because apparently mezuzot are a great security risk! Yes, I was asked whether it was indeed mezuzot they saw on their screen after which they let me go. Not quite sure what to make of that.

The other thing I always get a kick out of when I fly abroad is that I get to go to the VIP lounge, courtesy of my old company and their great deals... It gives me so much pleasure to still benefit from these little perks! This is what it looks like:

On the flight itself I really enjoyed the take off and landing cause we were flying at night and I love to watch the city with its flickering lights from the window. It's one of those beautiful sights you just can't capture on camera.

But by far the most amusing part of the trip was my conversation with a Turkish police officer at passport control, it is so bizarre I have to write it out:

Her: So, how does it feel to be married to a foreigner (I'm guessing she didn't notice the name change after the divorce)?

Me: I don't know, I haven't been married to a non foreigner so I can't compare (I really said that!).

Her: Oh, so you're saying there's compatibility (??? don't you love how people pretend to listen to you while they're busy making up their own theories?).

Me: I'd say that as long as they're decent, it doesn't matter where they are from.

Her: Aaaah.

And with that I got my stamp of approval to get into Turkey.

Stay tuned...

Walking The Land

I spent 22 years of my life in a big city, never knowing how much I adored hiking. It didn't help that I lived in a country blessed with an abundance of beauty, excursions in nature was just not high on the list of things to do in Istanbul. I guess because there was so much to be done in the city that it was not a necessity to wander away? It took me coming to tiny little Israel to find out just how much I loved being outdoors. Things may have changed since I left, but I still don't think that Turks have an appreciation of the land like Israelis do. In fact, I find Turks fail to appreciate and properly utilize many of their country's resources, but that's a subject for another post...

These days I try to go on a hike at any opportunity I get. It's such an exhilirating feeling to walk in nature, a real treat for the senses. I have trouble deciding which one I love more sometimes, hiking or baking. All I know is that I refused to give up on either of them last week even though I was feeling a little under the weather, thus ending up spending the last 4 days all couped up in bed. 2 hours of sleep a night cause I was all stuffed up. Hey I have to earn that idiot badge somehow, right?

I joined a group of Anglos to hike in one of the most beautiful spots around Jerusalem called Wadi Qelt. The flowers were in bloom and we had a short, but very pleasurable walk. Here is a picture of the wadi from a distance:

It was after the rains so there was quite a lot of water in the wadi and the random pools along the way:

At some point we came across a mother and baby goat, with some in our group claiming the baby had just been born:

Afterwards we saw a few more goats coming towards us:

And before we knew it we were surrounded by a whole herd passing us by on our right and left.




We came ridiculously close to them as evidenced by this picture:

I was half expecting one of them to turn around and grab my camera to prevent me from intruding on their privacy! Thankfully we managed to move on and we then saw something that made my heart skip a beat:

Yes!!!! That's right!!! It's the adorable, wonderful, one and only-turtle!!!! Or tortoise if you want to be precise. Of course I had to stop and talk to the cute creature and make sure he was ok (he was). I would have taken him home but it's illegal in Israel to keep turtles as pets. Apparently their place is in the wild. So I took millions of pictures instead. :) To be honest, I could have stopped hiking at that point. I had gotten all I wanted (and more!) from my day out. But alas, that was not to be. We had a little more ground to cover:

Just so you can see how clear the water was:


No travel post is complete without a cultural touch-here's someone in our group who decided to make Turkish coffee during one of our 5 minute breaks. I myself am not a fan and would never dream of shlepping a burner for coffee alone, but I admire the people who do. Kudos for making it (almost) the proper way!

A Year In The Life Of Berrrale

Wow. I cannot believe so much time has elapsed since the last PWT (Professional Women's Theater) women's talent competition. At the time I was not exactly in a happy place, but somehow still managed to get out a good performance. It was the first time in my life singing in front of an audience and I must say it was really nerve wrecking. I actually dug around a bit and found a copy of one of my recordings from the semi-finals. I had a sore throat and kept gulping through the recording, but it's not too horrible. At the expense of completely embarrassing myself, here it is: Adio Querida. It is a typically melodramatic ballad in Ladino-the singer is a woman who is pained and heartbroken by her lover. I can't say the lyrics applied to me, but I did identify with the melancholy of the song back then. My other song was in Hebrew, titled "Life Is So Beautiful" so I thought they balanced each other out. I didn't end up making it to the finals, both because of my stage presence (or lack thereof!) and the fact that I don't actually write songs of my own-which was one of the most important criteria-but it was a really uplifting experience for me to even participate. Well, a year has elapsed and they are having a new season, so if you happen to be in Jerusalem and want to check it out-just read the details on their flyer and enjoy the talent.

It's All In The Filling

Oh bad lighting, how I detest thee!

I was told by a few people recently that the entries on my blog have not been juicy enough, where's the gossip they say. The truth of the matter is that cooking and baking really is what has been occupying most of my time lately. With work out of the way, I have even more time than before to go and pick the best and freshest ingredients, choose the recipes from my "culinary experiments" file (I kid you not, the list exists, sorted by categories like sweet/savory, cheesecakes, cookies, meat etc. which once made receive a "grade") and jump into my kitchen to make them. Such came together the cooking/baking night last week-except there were 2 of us.

We picked out our menu based on 2 criteria-we wanted to make it dairy and preferably dishes that are best served immediately. I will spare you the recipes this time since we pretty much followed already existing ones from other blogs, but here are the pictures.

the mushroom soup in the making

handmade regular and whole wheat ravioli dough resting

a ricotta cheese filling went in the regular dough

and a butternut squash and sweet potato filling in the whole wheat

and of course, to top it off, hot chocolate cake with its own chocolate sauce at the bottom

We had a great time and the food was very yummy indeed if I may say so myself. Well at least Shugi seemed to be enjoying himself:

The next entry will have nothing to do with food I promise (I think)!

Why, an apple pie of course!

and not just any apple pie, the best one I have ever tasted in my life!!!!!! Creamy and scrumptious, I could eat the whole thing on my own. It's actually in a bit of an identity crisis. Is it a pie? Is it a tart? Is it a crumble? Well, it's a bit of all.

1) The crust belongs to a tart (my absolute favorite tart dough):

Sweet Tart Dough

from Dorie Greenspan’s amazing book “Baking: From My Home to Yours”

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar

1/4 tsp salt 1 stick plus 1 tbsp (9 tbsp) unsalted butter, chilled and cubed

1 large egg yolk (and now you know where the egg white for those macarons came from!)

Pulse flour, sugar and salt in a food processor. Add butter and pulse a couple of times. Stir in the yolk and pulse again until the dough forms clumps and curds. Turn the dough out onto a work surface and very lightly and sparingly, knead just to incorporate dry ingredients.

Butter a 9-inch tart pan. Press the dough evenly over the bottom and up the sides of the pan. Preheat the oven to 375 F (190C) degrees. Freeze crust at least 30 minutes before baking, this will enable you to bake without weights. Butter the shiny side of a piece of aluminum foil and press it, buttered side down, on the dough. Bake for 25 minutes. Remove the foil and let cool.

2) The filling is that of a pie, adapted from a great blog -the only changes I made were to use 4 apples and 1 cup of Tofutti cream cheese instead of the mascarpone and sour cream;

3) and finally the top is a made up oatmeal crumble whose ingredients I happened to have on hand and, you guessed it, was trying use up. I would recommend using the streusel in the link above, I am sure it comes out just as yummy if not more.

You may have noticed the use of Tofutti cream cheese in the last recipes. I've found it to be a great parve (non dairy) alternative for yogurt, sour cream etc. It is quite tasty when baked, with none of the after taste I usually associate with soy/tofu based products. In fact, I've even made excellent parve "cheesecake"s with it. Soy protein has a way of holding batter together, which I discovered when I baked vegan brownies once. I wonder if the cheesecake would work with egg beaters-then it may be possible to make a vegan cheesecake too! That sounds a little like kosher shrimps, doesn't it? Have a great day...