My life in an Arab-Israeli Kitchen, Part 21

Since I didn't actually have to work in the kitchen this last weekend, I suppose this is a good week to catch up on some things I meant to post on, but never got around to.  (That was a lot of misused prepositions.  Oh well.)

Ready for some random and unrelated stories?  (It's okay, in this kitchen, random is the norm.)

One of the joys of the kitchen is our gas stove.  And by "joys", I really mean "terrors."  Those of us who work there regularly have more or less figured out decent methods to light the stove without getting hair singed off various body parts, but others are not always so adept.

Oh.  I should specify.  These gas burners have no pilot lights or automatic lighters built into them.  No. The only way to light them is to turn them on fully and add a lighted match (by whatever method you deem safest).  And for some of these burners, "fully on" means flames a foot or two high.  It's not for the faint of heart.

Ok, really, it's not that bad.  Though I admit, sometimes some less experienced help with various things in the kitchen...and I cringe when I see them trying to figure out a way to light the stove.  It's a bit nerve-wracking.

Anyway, the real fun of lighting the burners is found in the matches:

I'm not quite sure WHY, but for some reason someone always seems to find that the best place for used matches is BACK IN THE BOX.  I mean, I suppose it's logical.  One thinks to oneself, "Hmm...I have a small stick that was recently on fire.  What to do with it?  Ahh!  I know, I'll put it in this flammable box with other small sticks that can easily start on fire!  That way, if it's still secretly smoldering, I'll know, because the whole small box will go up in flames!  And if it is really fully extinguished, I'll be sure to grab it next time I go looking for an unlit match.  It will ensure that I have to spend a few extra moments searching for a usable match, thus perfectly contributing to the general inefficiency of the kitchen."

Okay, I admit, it doesn't really seem logical to me either, but it is one more thing to laugh at. :)

In addition to the working burner in our stove area (only about half of them actually work, of course) we have this small grill.  It's a perfectly good grill, and is shown here being used for tortillas on a day when I had fewer people and more time.  It's just funny in that it's about 1/4-1/3 of the size of ONE of the grills we have at camp...and I'm pretty sure it's never been thoroughly cleaned in its life.  Any crewboys want to volunteer to come help in my kitchen here?  I could sure use you.

One of the fun things about Israel is all the different fruits and vegetables that are readily available here.  Two of the fruits below you will all no doubt easily recognize.  Yes, those are apples (probably golden apples) and oranges.  Any guesses on what the other fruit is?  :)  It LOOKS like an orange, but it's quite different.

One thing that I both love and hate about working in the kitchen here is...well...how to say it...the randomness of the ingredients and situations that you'll have to work with.  While I can make requests for items, I have very little control or knowledge of what will be available week to week.  Necessity is indeed the mother of invention...but it can also be the mother of the little children called "Stress" and "Panic."

Still, after the day is over and Stress and Panic have been dealt with and are off in a corner behaving, it can be kind of fun to look back on what necessity has lead to.

One week we were out of flour.  And white sugar.  It wasn't an insurmountable problem, but it was limiting.  Especially for breakfast.  But also for dinner - because I do try to make the students feel at home and happy, and that generally includes some sort of dessert.

At any rate, the lack of flour made me decide (don't ask me to explain the reasoning...just trust me that there was some) to experiment with making ricotta cheese.  It turns out it's pretty simple - and tasty - and much cheaper and better than buying ricotta (at least in Israel), and I've done it a couple times since.  It requires:

Milk (which comes in a box here) and pot and a stove,

 Warm the milk and add acid, in this case vinegar:

 Here you see the curds beginning to form.

Drain it gently, and here's the end result:

 (If you want a more specific recipe, many can be found on the web.  Most of them are pretty similar.)

It was a fun experiment - the scientist in me approved.  And the kitchen is always good for encouraging such creativity.

Of course, my lack of control in the kitchen can also lead to some fun finds.  Like this year we apparently started getting some pork products from Beit Jala.  (No, our kitchen is not kosher.)  How fun to open the freezer and find bacon and ham!  While the bacon is not quite like bacon back home, it's still bacon!  And this bacon made these baked beans for our Easter BBQ a little more special and home-like:

 And this "star sausage" is close enough to pepperoni for us pizza-hut-missing Americans:

It's the little things like that: discovering new ways of making food and the appreciation of people that miss American food, that make work in the kitchen fun and worth it.

My life in an Arab-Israeli Kitchen, Parts 4-20 (A week in the Kitchen)

Recently, our main Arab cook, Sliman, was in the hospital for nearly a week.  He's better now, but suddenly, for a week, there was no cook for lunch and dinner, and with three short-term groups around, more people to feed than ever.  Todd (the breakfast cook) and I (the Sunday cook) filled in, each averaging about 1.5 meals per day.

With all that extra time in the kitchen, of course I have more eclectic pictures and stories to tell.

For starters, our kitchen is on the third floor.  Which means, of course, that there needs to be some way of transporting massive amounts of food to the third floor.  Thus, we have our food elevator.  I think "elevator" may sound fancier than it is.  Maybe...electronic dumb waiter?  At any rate, the picture is looking down its cables to where Yahya is loading it with fresh fruits.

On Saturday, of the week in question, it so happened that we got a meat delivery.  And I was the only one on campus (well, more or less).  So I had the joy of having the delivery men (who knew about as much English as I know Arabic) bring the meat to the area, figure out which buttons to press to raise the meat, unload it at the top, and send it back down for a total of 3 loads.  Phew!  Fortunately, help arrived just as I was finishing, so I had help packaging the meat (which came fresh, in a large bag, in a large box) and putting away the various veggies and frozen fries that came too.

Some days we had between 100-150 people for one meal.  Compared to camp that's not a ton...but at camp we have a much more efficient kitchen and a lot more help.  At any rate, 150 people can consume MASSIVE amounts of salad.  I would say that over 50% of my time in the kitchen was spent cutting various vegetables and making salads.

At one point we more or less ran out of lettuce, which called for some creativity in making salads.  Fortunately, we did have a lot of purple cabbage which, when mixed with some chickpeas and tomatoes and a few other odds and ends, did make a pretty good salad.  It's also quite pretty.  Especially when some of the leaves begin to die - then a whole spectrum of color becomes visible in them.  It's really quite beautiful.

 Of course, not everyone was on campus ever day.  Quite a few bus lunches had to be made as well.  Here Bonnie joyously works on more egg salad.

And for some reason which I can't quite fathom, every bus lunch MUST include carrots.  Apparently, it's not a real lunch without carrots.  Fortunately, we already had other people scheduled to make the bus lunches, so I didn't need to cut millions of carrots in addition to making meals. :)

Lots of people means lots of dishes, so extra help was assigned (from our limited staff) to make sure things ran smoothly.   Here Emily buses dishes while more students drop of their plates.

 One night I was in there late, working on getting things ready for breakfast in the morning.  At some point I looked down and found this:

Yes, that is a relatively large spider and part of it's web.  It was quite docile and easily removed...but I have no idea how it got there.  Not the most pleasant surprise to discover.

For one meal I made lasagna...and discovered that we have the MOST AMAZING LASAGNA PASTA EVER!  For one layer in one pan all you need is two sheets.  And the corners are already rounded!  How amazing is that?!

While cooking every day was a bit exhausting, it was, in other ways, a nice change of pace from Sundays.  Sundays I cook every meal and am pretty much by myself in the kitchen all day.  This week, I only  had 1-2 meals a day, and generally had help, or other people around working on bus lunches, etc.  It was less lonely.

We also hired a new kitchen helper: Hamse.  He's very friendly and likes to play loud Arab music in the kitchen and dance and sing along.  He also likes to try to tell us all things...and apparently doesn't understand that we don't speak Arabic.  I mostly look at him and smile and shrug helplessly.  Even a few of the students helping this summer who have had some Arabic have trouble communicating clearly with him.  Oh well, the kitchen has never been so tidy since he started working, so that's nice.

All the kitchen time also gave me the chance to experiment with a couple things.  We had some nice eggplant which I thought I should use for the salads.  So I tried my hand at making babaganoush.  Here's the eggplants roasting over an open flame:

I think it turned out pretty well.  I don't have a whole lot of experience with it and how it should taste, but I had Tamer, another Arab helper, try it.  He said it was good, and he should know.  Success. :)

For another experiment I tried to use up some cream that was about to go bad and made truffles. :)

Finally, we all got a break from the kitchen.  We escaped campus and Cameron took us to a sushi place where we happily ate food that we had not prepared and celebrated Sliman's return to the kitchen. :)