My life in an Arab-Israeli Kitchen, Part 1

I've been considering doing a series of blog posts on my experiences working in the kitchen here, because it's never dull.  And if one doesn't laugh, there will be tears instead.  So perhaps some of you would enjoy sharing in the laughter.

A few disclaimers first:
1. I make no claims that this is normal for either kitchens in Israel, or for kitchens primarily run by Arabs.
2. In no way is this meant to be discriminatory against any race or religion.  It just happens that most of the workers in our kitchen are Arab (probably at least in part because it's far from kosher), but some are Muslim, some are Christian, and at times some have been Armenian.  So it's a mix.  And they are all very nice, and the result is a kitchen that is nothing like any American kitchen I've seen.

And with that, on to week one, my first Sunday in the kitchen.  (I have some catching up to do.)
March 4, 2012
It was my first Sunday back, I was a little jet-lagged, and I don't remember much.  It think it was a fairly easy day, with most people gone most of the day.  It was fortunate because, though I had worked in the kitchen before, it had been over a year, and everything had been re-arranged.  It took even more time than usual just to find the proper ingredients.  And, as always, some of them were simply absent.  Garlic, for example, was no where to be found.


Probably the most exciting part of the day was the "Adventure of the Oven."

The kitchen has acquired a new oven recently.  The old ovens were a terror.  They would take literally hours to warm up (ok, sometimes maybe only one hour) to a reasonable temperature.  When I was there, the temperatures could be somewhat regulated.  There were knobs that allowed you to sort of choose "high," "medium," or "low," though what temperatures those corresponded to, I have no idea.  Apparently though, those regulators utterly ceased working, causing the ovens to grow ever warmer as they stayed on.  They were never great to work with, but they became nearly impossible.  It was decided that a new oven was needed.  

The old ovens are on the right in the picture.  The one on the left is the new oven, in all it's glory.  (Also pictured is Yahya, the Muslim man who helps me with dishes and odd jobs.  He doesn't speak much English and I speak basically no Arabic...but we smile and gesture and manage okay.)

This oven apparently does EVERYTHING.  It has been called "the ipad oven" and such nomenclature is fitting.  There seem to be no less that approximately 1,294,002 settings available.  When turned on, the menu below is generally the first thing you see:

 As you see, there are many choices.  Some of them I'm not sure about, but chicken, fish, and eggs are pretty clear.  My finger is on the "baked goods" button.  When that one is pressed, this next menu comes up:

So many choices!

I choose "cookies" and these settings came up to be tweaked: 

I'm honestly not quite sure what such settings do to the oven.  I suppose they affect temperature, humidity (it has the ability to cook by steam, or by regular convection, or by both), and length of the timer.  I'm just not quite sure how to set those settings to get the kind of doneness on a cookie that I want.  And I generally don't have time to experiment much.  So I've been using the more manual settings - choosing a time and temperature myself.  

These pictures are actually from a different morning when I ended up subbing for the breakfast cook (who was unwell).  I made an egg and potato breakfast casserole:

If nothing else, this new oven does heat up wonderfully quickly.  It also cooks quickly and pretty evenly.  

Tune in next time when we'll have more adventures from "My life in an Arab-Israeli Kitchen."