I learned about these local edible blossoms just a few days ago here, and the very day after reading about them, saw a tree next to my house that looked like the picture shared. I was pretty positive the first time I walked by the trees after reading about them that these were redbud blossoms, but to be sure, we picked some to bring in and compare.
Photo by Bob Gress – the blossoms above are mostly closed and just beginning to bloom
Sure enough, it was a match, and I’m delighted to have another wild edible to add to my list of local foragable foods! The tree is beautiful, and now that I know what it looks like, see that they’re in bloom all over my city.
How can you recognize these lovely edible blossoms? The tree is usually less than twenty feet tall, with young trees having a smooth, gray bark. More mature trees have a reddish-brown bark with flattened scaly plates. The flowers are a beautiful pinkish color, and the central petal (called a standard) is flanked by two more petals (called wings). Below them are two more petals called keels. (Tell your kids all about this when you’re picking them and you’re learning about science and botany!) The leaves of the tree are like a heart shape. (More details here.)
Since we have so many dogs locally, I don’t do much foraging of things that grow on the ground for obvious reasons. Seeing the abundance of these blossoms growing on trees so close by has got my frugal juices flowing! I’ve scoured the internet for ideas on how to use them, and seen some yummy sounding ideas. Use them in muffins, pancakes, for dessert with yogurt and berries, sprinkled into salad, pickled, or made into jam!
Redbud blossoms have an almost nutty flavor; they more closed they are, the more tart they are; the open blossoms have a sweet flavor that is very pleasant. I wasn’t surprised to learn that they are high in vitamin C, because the tart flavor makes one think in that direction.
The young pods of this tree are also supposedly edible, but since they come out after the flowers, I haven’t yet had a chance to taste them. I often wondered when I saw these pods if they were edible, but didn’t know what the tree was called. Now that I know what the tree looks like, I plan to experiment by using the pods in stir fries in place of snow peas.
Today I did my vegetable shopping for Pesach. The store was very crowded and I was exhausted when I came home. But I’ll never fail to be anything but enthusiastic about this store’s delivery service- the more I buy, the happier it makes me to know that someone else is bringing it into my house instead of me.
I took the picture below so you can see the amount of vegetables a family our size buys for Pesach, and why I’m happy not to have to bring it up a flight of stairs. 🙂 (You’ll probably need to double click it to see it up close to realize how much is there since the boxes contain so much of it – my kids saw the picture and all said, ‘that doesn’t look like so much!) To be clear: this is not what bulk shopping looks like for us – that would be way, way more!
Here’s what I got, from the top left, clockwise to the right. My receipt is in kg, so if you mentally want to convert the numbers I list, a kilogram is 2.2 pounds.
first box, top left – three 10 kg bags of carrots (last week we blew through one of these in 2.5 days)
box to the right of carrots (fruit box)- 16 kg oranges
two kg strawberries
3 kg melon
1 kg apples
(next box to the right – green leafy vegetables) – 4 huge heads of romaine lettuce
3 bunches of fresh parsley
1 bunch of fresh mint
(to the right slightly down) – 2 large sacks of potatoes (can’t remember how many kg is in each one – I think 18 or 20) – I actually have three sacks but started putting things away before I took the picture and didn’t want to drag it back out
(to left of potatoes) 10 kg cucumbers
4.5 kg beets
250 grams fresh garlic
200 grams horseradish root
(next box to left) -5.5 kg kohlrabi
2.5 kg fennel
7 kg cauliflower
3.5 kg green cabbage
2.5 kg red cabbage
(bags to the left) 8 kg onions
12 kg red and orange peppers (also another bag in a different box)
15 kg tomatoes
1.5 kg radishes
(center right) 12 kg avocados
If you’re wondering about prices, everything was between 2 – 4 shekels a kilo, except for the avocado (5.99), apple (6.99), strawberries (9.99) and horseradish (31.99 kg). I get what is seasonal and most affordable; that’s why I can’t prepare my menu until I go shopping and see what I ended up buying!
I also have a box of turnips and some zucchini left from last week’s shopping (which are only left because no one snacks on them, unlike almost everything else). Since we watched Hungry for Change last week, dd17 and ds13 are eating only/mostly raw (dd17 0nly, ds13 mostly) and you should see how we’re burning through the vegetables! Also when the weather gets warm, we eat more fresh salads with our meals instead of cooked vegetables that are part of a soup or dish. It’s a good thing, but it’s not cheap to drastically up your vegetable intake for a family our size. On Friday afternoon I spent almost 300 shekels on vegetables – it was four boxes full – and on Sunday afternoon almost everything was gone. Usually that amount can last for a week. The amount in the picture would usually be enough for two weeks, but for Pesach we use a lot more fresh produce. As it is, I’ll have to be a bit restrictive of the kids because they love fresh produce and would be happy to snack their way through most of what I got (even raw kohlrabi – they really like it!)
I didn’t get as much fruit as I would have liked, but I was spending so much for Pesach that I felt I needed to be more careful in this area. I’ve spent half of our monthly allotted food budget so far just for this coming week, plus there are a number of expenses due to not having any Pesach supplies (dishes, pots, silverware, etc) here. To be fair, I also got more grape juice, extra virgin olive oil and palm oil than I need for the week or even the month, since they’re on sale now. This is something I always try to do, be sure I have money available to buy staple items when they are on sale. (You can see in the background of the above picture a couple of boxes with some of those other miscellaneous things – a sink insert and electric hot water pot are on top, some disposable dishes and non perishable food items are underneath.)
For the first time ever, we kashered three pots that we use during the year as well as our silverware, and though it was a lot of work to get the bottoms of the pots spotless, it was nice that I didn’t have to buy these things! We also kashered a stainless steel salad bowl and a couple of serving utensils. An additional benefit of kashering these things is that it minimizes the storage space I’ll need for Pesach items for the rest of the year – I’ll just go back to using them during the year.
Now I need to go back out and do some more shopping for the things I couldn’t get this morning – I ran out of energy after the three stores I went to (the vegetables were just one stop). So I’m going to rest for a short bit and then go spend more money. 🙂
I realized early on this week that all the kids had the flu (funnily enough, ds18 called home and he has it, too!), though I didn’t feel like mentioning it to anyone in person because I didn’t feel like answering the inevitable question: “You didn’t give them a flu shot?” Because if I was asked that, I would have felt it necessary to explain that the underlying assumptions about the effectiveness of the flu shot are false, along with a host of other points that I didn’t feel like getting into about vaccines concerns. And sure enough, the first person I mentioned the flu to exlaimed, “What, you didn’t give them a flu injection? I take it every year and I never get the flu!”
I really dislike that the seasonal flu is now on its way to being considered life threatening, along with everything else that we have vaccinations for. Sure enough, this same woman told me about how many people die every year from the flu – as I said, I know when starting even a casual conversation about a topic like this how ready you have to be to intelligently counter the ‘facts’ that people have heard.
Anyway, let me not get onto the flu vaccine issue! The flu isn’t fun but it’s really just a super bad cold, and if you can find ways to move through it faster or more easily, that’s a good thing! Everyone around here has been sleeping lots and drinking plenty of fluids (chicken broth and tea). My go-to remedy for any sickness is high doses of sodium ascorbate dissolved in juice, but not all of our kids like taking it like this.
I realized tonight that my brain was on automatic, and I needed to pause and think about other remedies I might have on hand that would be helpful for the kids. Here’s what I thought of:
– Aconite – this is a homeopathic remedy ideally given at the onset of the flu, which I didn’t do because I wasn’t thinking along these lines. The early dosage would be 3 pellets of 30 c each; I’m thinking three daily doses along for treating it at this point would be good. Homeopathics aren’t my first line of defense because it’s not the area I feel most competent with (and I don’t know what happened to most of my remedies when we moved), but I do have aconite on hand so this is a good option even though we didn’t catch it early.
– Most people are deficient in vitamin D, especially in the winter when the sun isn’t out as often and doesn’t shine as intensely. Did you ever think about why it’s so common to get sick in the winter and not the summer? Our vitamin D levels have a lot to do with that! One of the main immune system functions of vitamin D is to help trigger production of a substance called cathelicidin. Cathelicidin is a naturally produced antibiotic that is able to be made only in the presence of high vitamin D levels in the bloodstream.
The littles have been having cod liver oil a few times a week, but the rest of us haven’t been very consistent with it after my initial efforts. That’s a good option for vitamin D, but I have high quality vitamin D3 in my cabinet, and this has been shown to be very effective in fighting the flu. (I researched this back when there was the H1NI/swine flu hysteria going around – here’s one article if you’re interested.) 3000 – 5000 IU of vitamin D3 seem to be recommended just to maintain adequate vitamin D levels; today I gave everyone 10,000 IU right now to fight the flu (this includes all the kids from age 9 and up – the littles are getting just 5000 IU).
Olive leaf tincture- I made a good sized batch of this back in November. So I pulled it out and put it to use! Rather than make everyone aware I was giving them a dose of it, I made a big batch of regular tea (which everyone requests as soon as they wake up from their extended naps), and added a couple of spoonfuls of the tincture to the large container. The heat will cause the alcohol to evaporate, and the flavor is hardly noticeable because it’s so diluted.
Also, yesterday my first batch of home-cured olives were finished! These were from the olives that I picked on an outing with ds5 and ds2. I thought I’d share instructions for this process once we tasted them, but I’m not fully satisfied with the end results – they’re okay but still have a hint of bitterness underneath. However, as I was eating some today, I was thinking that the effective component in olive leaves is oleuropein, which is bitter. And the reason that you spend three weeks curing the olives is to remove the oleuropein. So maybe our health is benefiting by eating olives that still have some bitterness remaining in them!!
A couple of kids had ear pains in addition to other symptoms, and I fortunately had a batch of what I call my ‘ear oil’ already prepared! Very simply, this is minced garlic that has steeped in olive oil to pull out the healing properties. Strain, and put a few drops into the ear that has pain.
Another child had red and irritated eyes yesterday – I usually use the homeopathic euphrasia for something like this, but as I said above, most of my remedies disappeared when we moved. So I did a bit of googling to see what I had in the house that would be useful, and learned that an eyewash made of fennel seeds or raspberry leaves would be helpful to bathe his eye.
It’s nice to be able to deal with this at home – everyone is feeling kind of yucky, but it’s so valuable to have something in my home arsenal to help my family.
What are your favourite home remedies for the flu, or even just a cold? Have you tried any of the things I mentioned, and if so, how effective were they for you?
Today my diligent dd15 went to school in spite of my strong recommendation she stay home another day until she was fully over the flu. She insisted she felt fine and needed to get back to school, so that she wouldn’t miss too much material.
But the weather today shifted from warm and balmy to cold and rainy, and she came home definitely sick. Tonight dh suggested that she do a steam head bath, something I had prepared for him a while back when he had a head cold.
This is a simple but effective remedy that will help clear head and nasal stuffiness, as well as chest tightness. You boil a pot of water, then pour it into a large bowl. Add a few drops of essential oil to the mixture – tonight dh used eucalyptus oil, but tree tea oil or anything else with camphor-like qualities would also be good. These help clear the sinuses out, and can be found in most health food stores.
[There’s a lot of hype around the quality of different essential oils, and though I happen to use the ones that many people claim are the best (Young Living – because I was able to barter 60 pounds of spelt for a few bottles of these oils before moving!), I personally have some skepticism about that claim. I think for this kind of steam treatment, most oils that you find in the store will be helpful.]
After adding several drops of essential oils to the bowl of boiling water, lean over the bowl and drape a towel over your head to hold in the steam. When I do this, I try to breathe with my mouth open to let the vapors into my lungs (I do this when I have tightness in my chest that makes it hard to breathe). If you feel it’s getting too hot, lift the towel very briefly for a couple of seconds or totally emerge from the towel. I try to do this for as long as there’s still steam remaining but it really depends on how you’re feeling – when you’ve had enough, then stop.
When you finish, either pat your face dry or rinse your face with cool water (to close your pores). Also, have a couple of cups of water to replace any fluids you may have lost during the steam inhalation. There will usually be a noticeable improvement in how you’re feeling!
About a year and a half ago, I contacted the community organization Mesila, to discuss the possibility of volunteering with them. I had a great conversation with the head of the program,a program that is geared towards helping people get out of debt and learn to live within their means. We were both very positive about my intended involvement – but their training for volunteer counselors was delayed. And by the time they contacted me to ask me to actively get involved, I had to tell them that I was busy with my plans to move to Israel and just couldn’t do it.
Recently Mesila sponsored a community-wide lecture in Baltimore, in which three prominent rabbis of the community spoke. I began watching this with ds13, but for some reason my computer stalled after the first rabbi, Rabbi Hopfer (who is a jewel of a person), spoke. I found his message so encouraging and validating – it was great to hear him telling the community how against the Torah way of life debt is, that having limits and learning to live within your means are actually positive values…You might say this is logical and obvious, but we live in times that are so focused on everyone having as much materially as they can, even if they don’t have the money for it, and sometimes the obvious isn’t so obvious.
I plan to try to listen to the rest of it another time, but like what I read about the rest of the evening. I especially appreciated that Rabbi Hauer recommended the book The Millionaire Next Door, a book that I’ve read several times and found to be helpful because it gives you a sense of how people really get rich – and it’s not by trying to look like they have more than they do! I found this book helpful for myself as a frugal person, because it encouraged me that I was on the right path and affirmed for me that living rich is being frugal.
Since I saw that the gist of the comments of the evening were written up, in addition to the online posting of the video of the event, I wanted to link it for others who might be interested. Here it is.
If you watched this presentation or read through the basic overview, I’d love to hear your feedback! What did you find to be the most important messages? What did you agree or disagree with most?
Several weeks I was at a social event, where I saw someone who recently made a wedding for her oldest child. I had heard via my husband via her husband that they had kept it small, so I took the opportunity to ask what having a small wedding entailed. (Hearing from people who have made simple and truly affordable weddings about how they did it is very interesting to me.)
She told me that they only invited 120 people, which I thought was impressive since it’s not easy to whittle down a guest list to that amount. But then she added, “And the other side had 300 guests”, which shifted my perception of the wedding somewhat – 420 guests for a formal dinner didn’t seem very small to me!
A couple of the other women there who were listening to this exchange were quick to fill me in, apparently thinking how obviously clueless I was to what was normal and appropriate. They told me that a small wedding is 300 – 400 people for the meal, and one told me her cousin recently had 2500 guests! (I had to ask how much that wedding cost – 4 million shekels, she said. But at least it was a wealthy family that could afford it.)
I shared my concern that lavish weddings have become the norm in the Orthodox world, so much that we don’t even see the lavishness of the standard wedding as unusual. We’ve lost a communal sense of what simplicity looks like when it comes to a wedding, and we also seem to be communally oblivious to the fat that paying for these fancy weddings is way above the means of the average family.
I thought that was a reasonable thing to say, but don’t worry, there were people there to once again set me straight. “What do you mean? Just the extended family from one side will be 200 people!” I suggested, maybe we need to consider inviting people according to the budget we have to work with, and that might mean reconsidering if every single family member has to be invited to the wedding meal. Maybe if it were normal to just invite the immediate nuclear family, rather than every cousin, aunt, uncle, and person who married in somewhere along the line, then it wouldn’t be considered so unthinkable to not invite all these people. Shouldn’t we be thinking about how to make a wedding within our actual ability to pay for it?
One woman shrugged and said, “So what, so you borrow the money and pay back 1000 shekels every month for two years.” With a family of ten children, that would mean spending twenty years of life with our extra income paying for ten evenings that last a total of 40 – 50 hours. To me that seems wildly disproportionate – the life energy that goes into earning that kind of money is significant. I was feeling such a total disconnect between what I was saying and the responses I was hearing.
Then I realized that I’m looking at the wedding situation as something that I’ll need to deal with in the foreseeable future, as the parent paying the bill, while they (as parents of much younger children) were looking at it as someone who had the bill paid for them. It’s pretty easy to justify spending someone else’s money. But then again, when I speak with people closer to my age group, there seems to be a fatalist attitude that this is the reality, and there’s nothing you can do.
I have to tell you, the entire discussion left me very discouraged. I really thought that a good percentage of people intellectually were able to see the unsustainability of expecting parents of average means to make lavish formal weddings. I understand the difficulty in keeping things simple when there are two different families who need to come to an agreement about this, who may have very different ideas about what kind of wedding their children will have. When you’re making a bris, bar mitzva, kiddush, etc, you’re the sole arbiter of how much you spend on these family milestones. For us, all of these events have been celebrated with much joy but always spending within our means. I realize that I can’t assume it will always be like this. But I thought there were many others who at least wished they could stay within their means. Now I’m no longer so sure about that.
This conversation came shortly after a talk with a friend whose oldest child just got engaged. She was sharing with me the pressure they’re feeling to buy the groom the mandatory gifts, particularly since the other side is financially much more comfortable and has already sent their daughter jewelry that they are trembling about how to reciprocate for. They’ve been working hard for the past few years to get out of credit card debt and live within their actual financial means (using lots of money saving tips I’ve shared here on my blog), and facing the expenses of a wedding (and pre-wedding) are very daunting.
If you don’t know about the insanity of the standards for the mandatory gifts that need to be given to the bride and groom prior to and at the wedding, I don’t think I should enlighten you. You’re just better off not knowing. Because it’s disturbing. Really disturbing. Sometimes I wonder if the central point of getting married is getting somewhat lost in all the materialistic expectation around an engagement/marriage – I thought when I got engaged to my husband that he was the treasure (and the years have shown I was more right than I could have guessed).
When I got home later that evening, I was reflecting on the conversation with these women, and had a sudden realization about a big contributing factor for the disparity in our views. I’ve written loads here about different things I’ve done to live within our means; it’s not a secret that I feel strongly that being responsible means living with what we have and not what I wished we had!
To me, debt is something to avoid and with the exception of a mortgage, have managed to live with the money we actually have our entire married life. Sometimes people make assumptions about the amount of money we must have been making to do this (way over our actual income); I think people would rather think we were really lucky rather than recognize we consistently were willing to make hard choices. Living within our means hasn’t always easy – sometimes we did without, sometimes we had to wait a while until we saved up the money for it. We’ve had to be very clear with ourselves about the difference between wants and needs, though we’ve often marveled at how many of our wants have been provided for.
It occurred to me that if you see debt as a normal tool for everyday living, my position really does seem ridiculous. Why should you deny yourself something as nice as everyone else, if you can borrow the money and pay it back later? If you’ve spent your life living this way when it comes to groceries and clothes, then a wedding is just the next logical step. If debt is normal, then it shifts your entire view of spending.
So what’s the answer to this issue? It’s a lot bigger than me, that’s for sure! And I don’t know what I’ll do when faced with this decision – there’s tremendous social pressures on everyone when making a wedding. I think we live in a world where so many of our decisions are made because we’re worried about what others think of us. If we were able to put that aside and be honest about who we are and what our resources were, instead of pretending to have what we don’t have to impress people who don’t really care that much about us, then the idea of making a simple wedding wouldn’t be such a hard sell.
Did you have a simple wedding? In what ways were you able to cut costs? Do you think that spending less compromised the overall enjoyment you had at your wedding or not?
>>Sorry to open a can of worms (and feel free to ignore the question if it’s too complicated)– what is the organic situation in Israel? My friends in Jerusalem subscribe to an organic CSA for weekly produce delivery, do you have any options like that up north?<<
And from someone else a few days ago:
>> Is organic produce available and how expensive is it? We shop here at Trader Joe’s where the organic produce is relatively reasonable.
We get our natural household products without the sulfates, parabens, phalates, etc. from places like Whole Foods. Are such products available over there? Are they exorbitantly priced?
I am wondering if dairy products are healthier over there. (Does the Israeli government allow bovine growth hormone to be used?) My kids don’t drink milk (only rice milk) b/c of the toxicity. Can you get raw milk there any easier than over here?
In general, from my research over the past year and a half on all health fronts, it seems that our wonderful U.S. government is literally the worst in the world when it comes to protecting the health of its citizens. Whether it’s the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry, or the cancer industry, healthful information is deliberately hidden from the public, while any and all toxic substances are allowed to pass, as long as it will be profitable for them. I know that the Israelis in government are no saints but the question is, are they any better than the U.S.? I hear they are trying to get a law passed now over here to somehow shut down all health related websites so that we will no longer have any way of accessing info on health.<<
Organics – as I’ve written before, my budget unfortunately doesn’t have room for the extra cost of organics. In the past I’ve bought them when I could find them at a comparable price (eg salvage/discount stores). The only vegetables that we eat that I’m sure are organic are the things I harvest myself from local vegetation/fruit trees. So I haven’t yet found a local source because I haven’t looked.
However, I have seen notices of people posting about organic produce in various communities, and am sure this isn’t something that is difficult to do, as long as you have the budget for it.
Natural health products – I’m not sure what you use in the US. I use baking soda and vinegar for just about everything, and don’t buy any ‘green’ products. I found a place here where I was able to buy a 50 lb sack of baking soda, which was great since the teeny tiny containers they sell here are something like 40x the bulk price. I’ve been making my own laundry detergent for quite a while, but since all of the necessary ingredients aren’t available for purchase locally, have been buying the regular detergent and sometimes I add baking soda for an added boost. We use baking soda for toothbrushing and deodorant (works better than anything else I’ve ever tried!) and use regular shampoo without artificial colors added. There are health stores where overpriced ‘green’ products are sold, just like in the US – pretty much anything you would want here, I think you can find. There seems to be a lot of interest in the alternative health realm; to me it seems like more interest and openness than the US.
Raw milk – someone told me about raw cow milk, but it seems much easier to find raw goat milk. (Which is pretty understandable, being that this country is so tiny and cows take up much more space than goats.) I’ve been in touch with a couple of people about this and found sources about a 40 minute drive away, but not having a car makes this very difficult to arrange, particularly since those raising goats are usually living in areas with irregular bus transportation. It’s not realistic for us to take a bus to get the milk, due to cost and difficulty in bringing home an adequate amount for our family. The other option is renting a car for the day to get the milk, which also makes the cost shoot up (not to mention gas that costs $8 a gallon!). So we’ve pretty much cut out dairy, and the answer to how healthy the regular milk sold in the store is, I don’t know.
So basically these are lots of questions I’d also like more details on but don’t know the answers to. 🙂 However, I’m sure some of my readers do, so please share relevant details, suggestions, and contact information for people in the comments!
This week I did a biggish shopping trip – nothing major compared to my big stock-ups in the US, but I got a nice amount of staples for this month. Since I spent a little over 500 shekels, this trip comprised about 1/4 of our monthly food budget (which is 2000 shekels), and people have asked me for more specifics of what I buy and how much I pay, I’m sharing the details of my receipt here.
This is the store that I get the bulk of my vegetables, grains, and beans from. I was delighted when in December they began offering home delivery, since it was physically very exhausting for me to bring home even enough food for a week for our family by bus. Then I switched to calling a taxi to bring my order home, but I still had to pack up the groceries (cashiers here don’t bag your groceries unless you’re paying for home delivery), load them in the taxi, unload them at home, and carry them up a flight of steps to our apartment. I’m not complaining, just explaining why it was a real physical effort to go shopping in the past at this store, particularly for the quantities we need. But now for just 15 shekels, I can have my order packed up and brought into my house! While I used to go every week and would consciously think about the weight of every item I wanted to buy, knowing the physical effort involved, now I can make a big order once or twice a month and not have to deal with it – I LOVE this!
Here’s what I bought:
red lentils (8.99 shekels kg x 3.94 kg) – 35.42
dried chickpeas (9.99 shekels kg x 3.065 kg) – 30.62
buckwheat (12.99 shekels kg x 2.475 kg) – 32.15
quinoa (18.99 shekels kg x 1.100 kg) – 20.89
black eyed peas (10 shekels kg x 2.085) – 20.85
split peas (11.99 shekels kg x 4.85 kg) – 58.15
rice (6.99 shekels kg x 5.165) – 36.10
brown lentils ( 7.99 shekels kg x 3.125 kg) – 24.97
granny smith apples (4.99 shekels kg x .460) – 2.30 (this was snack for ds2 who was with me, plus some to share with his siblings when they got home)
fennel (4.99 shekels kg x 1.080 kg) – 5.39
2 large heads lettuce (2.99 each) – 5.98
cucumbers (3.99 shekels kg x 1.015 kg) – 4.05
tomatoes (1.99 shekels kg x 3.140 kg) – 6.25
3 – 1 kg containers of prepared hummus (9.99 ea) – 29.97
6 – 580 gram cans tomato paste (4.99 ea) – 29.94
2 – 540 gram cans sliced olives (7.99 ea) – 15.98
1 – kg sugar – 4.99
1 – 150 gram container powdered ginger – 6.99
My intent for this trip was to get enough staples to last through the end of the month; this was 77 pounds of grains/legumes and I think that will be enough. The grains are purchased from the bulk bins; there’s someone who works there, and I tell her how many kilograms I want of each item, she bags and prices everything for each customer. That’s why the grain/legume amounts aren’t in standard bag sizes of 500 grams or 1 kg. This is cheaper than buying the prepacked bags of these same items, usually about 20 – 25% cheaper. Someone last week said about a 6 shekel item, ‘Oh, it’s only 2 shekels less like that”, and I explained that paying 4 shekels a kilo instead of six was a savings of 30%! Small sums add up, though people often get stuck on the tiny amounts saved instead of looking at the overall picture of how much is saved in a month when you buy everything at discounted prices.
This time, I bought a couple of the more expensive grains that I’ve been avoiding for cost reasons until now: buckwheat and quinoa. By the way, I find it very funny that in Hebrew, it’s called kee-no-ah, based on the English spelling (instead of the proper pronunciation, keen-wa), so I have to consciously say the word incorrectly even though it’s an English word! I added these grains in because I wanted some more variety; meals were feeling too repetitive to me. I didn’t get a lot of them, just enough for to add a little something different to the menu. I had oats and barley at home.
As far as the vegetables, these are intended to last for a couple of weeks until my next trip, not through the end of the month. However, this trip isn’t representative of my typical buying habits since I usually don’t buy vegetables unless they’re under 3.99 kg (except for avocados), and really try to stay closer to 1.99 shekels a kilo. But I realized I haven’t been eating many fresh veggies, since the inexpensive root veggies that I’m buying at this season aren’t appealing when eaten raw. And then I end up not having such a good breakfast (I try to have protein and vegetables for breakfast) since I want to make something quick, and instead end up eating grains for breakfast and throughout the day. So call it a pregnancy splurge if you like, but the option is eating bread with hummus for breakfast, or what ends up happening more often is I don’t eat breakfast until lunchtime.
When I shop at the other supermarket I go to, I stick with the loss leaders on vegetables, usually limited to 1.99 kg (.25 cents lb). At this place, I get what is the best buy. I was really suprised that tomatoes were so cheap- why should tomatoes be only .25 cents a pound in the winter? They’re local, too. The heads of lettuce were huge and looked beautiful, which is typical of greens in this season. This produce is supplementing what I already had at home: carrots, onions, potatoes, kohlrabi, mushrooms, garlic, peppers, green and red cabbage, clementines, and grapefruits. So I have a decent variety of vegetables to use.
I buy prepared hummus rather than make my own, even though I have a really good recipe, it’s not hard, and would save me money, because I don’t have an immersion blender or food processor to make it with. So I buy it at the best price I can find it, and use this for the kids’ sandwiches for school every day, as well as for a spread on Shabbos. I bought the sliced olives with the intent to add it to the sandwiches sometimes, but saw that once I opened the can of olives, they all got snacked away, so I probably won’t do that often!
For those who may be wondering, no, we aren’t vegetarian. This shopping trip also supplemented the chickens, giblets, and liver that we bought last week (that order was also around 1/4 of our monthly budget). We usually have a meat meal daily, for lunch; I use the chicken that we buy as an ingredient in a dish, which extends it significantly over serving each person his own piece of chicken (which I do on Shabbos). We also buy about 7 trays of eggs every couple of weeks (a tray is 2.5 dozen), so that works out to about 32 – 35 dozen eggs a month (we used to buy 60 dozen a month).
Dairy has become a real splurge here. Last week dh picked up some milk and high fat yogurts for me to have for breakfast (because I seem to be reacting with indigestion to everything I eat, similar to what I usually feel in the ninth month of pregnancy, and I’m trying to figure out what proteins won’t trigger it). But dairy products are expensive here. For example, a liter of milk is about 5 shekels ($5.70 gallon). Cottage cheese, and cheese spreads are sold in these little containers that are about a cup big, enough for one person, but are over 5 shekels each ($1.40 per cup), single serving yogurts are cheaper at 1.50 – 4 shekel each. The organic cottage cheese and sour cream I used to use as a staple, as well as the shredded cheese I regularly cooked with is definitely a thing of the past!
Though prices aren’t low, I feel we still eat well. It’s true that we have more beans and grains, and hardly any nuts, no raw milk or pastured eggs, but we still have plenty to eat! My monthly budget is lower than it was in the US, and despite the higher prices here on every single category of food except produce, we’re managing just fine. We were sent what we needed in the US to stick with our budget, and the same One who took care of us there continues to send us what we need here in Israel!
We catered the entire bar mitzva weekend ourselves – this meant cooking for three meals, plus the kiddush. Friday night we had 25 people, for the kiddush there were around 200 (lots of kids!), for the main bar mitzva meal we had about 80, and for shalosh seudos (the third Sabbath meal), we had under 25.
This was definitely more work than hiring someone but: 1) in Karmiel there are no caterers so arranging catering from another city would have been complicated, and 2) we catered the kiddush for our last bar mitzva 5.5 years ago because it was a very busy time in our lives, and were extremely disappointed with the quantity, setup, and service.
I’ll backtrack for a minute and share with you that scenario – ten minutes before everyone entered the social hall, I came in and was horrified – a couple of other adults who saw it were also shocked – there had been just one table set up for men and women in the entire hall. Never, ever were receptions were set up in this way, and they had sent enough food for just one table! I had to ask that everything be rearranged at the last minute (the people who came down early immediately told the catering staff how it was supposed to be and started moving table around).
The young man who had been left in charge was very belligerent and unhelpful (the caterer had three events that weekend and wasn’t there), insisting it was all done just as it should have been. I had to have my kids run home with a baby stroller and bring back lots of food that I had for our main meal after the kiddush – kugels, salad, and big bags of cherries – to compensate for the caterer bringing enough for only half of the number we had paid for. I told the person in charge that I realized a mistake had been made, and asked him to put out the stuff we brought so the tables wouldn’t look empty. The worker was very upset at us – I think he was new to the job and insecure about it, and he didn’t want this to reflect badly on him – and though we thanked him repeatedly for his work and told him mistakes happen, we knew it wasn’t his fault – it was very, very stressful and unpleasant.
After the kiddush we took back whatever was left – the things we brought in addition to a small amount of cake and kugel the caterer had provided (which we ended up throwing away in a dumpster because it was so dry and unappetizing). When I spoke to the caterer after Shabbos, I was told that his worker claimed there was plenty of food (yes, because I brought so much!) and the proof was that there was food left over that I took home. I explained that I took back the food I had brought since I needed it for our meal following the kiddush, and there was only a small pan of the other things left that wasn’t what we had brought that I took back, but the clear implication was that I was lying. So no apology, no compensation – just accusations at me.
This was really upsetting to me because I was being treated like a manipulative liar, when I had been extremely reasonable about the entire situation, and really thought that there had been a mistake and the caterer would be embarrassed about this huge bungle. When I delegate something like this, I accept that if I’m not doing it, it’s going to be however it is – and as long as it falls into the range of acceptable, I don’t nitpick and I don’t micromanage – I trust whoever’s in charge to take care of things. He was more concerned about covering his ego and wouldn’t admit anything had been done wrong. The irony is that my husband had no idea of all that was going on behind the scenes of the setup – there was no time to tell him – and thanked the caterer publicly earlier that morning when he spoke, for the amazing kiddush that was so much nicer than we had expected! So our kiddush ended up being a feather in the cap for the caterer, and only a handful of people who saw things at the beginning knew that it was because I had worked hard in a very short amount of time to salvage what would have been a disaster.
I had people who told me right away that morning they’d back up what they saw if necessary when I spoke to the caterer (it was really bad), and could have made a big deal about this and insist on having part of the money paid refunded, but I just wanted to wash my hands of having to deal with the entire situation; we had paid in cash in advance so there was no leverage, and we would have had to fight for it. So in short, we paid a lot of money for the privilege of having all of it ‘taken care of for us’.
I wanted something different this time! By cooking and baking everything ourselves, it allowed us to have a variety and abundance of foods that we would have had to pay a lot to have had. Also, most caterers here seem to have the same basic menu, which is a lot of carbs that are all the same color (beige/brown/white), and I like when food on the table is visually appealing.
We did the baking for the kiddush the week before, mostly, and froze the cakes.The cooking was done entirely from Weds. evening through Friday morning. It may sound like a marathon but it really wasn’t – dd15 kept saying she felt like there should be more to do than there was.
For the bar mitzva kiddush (reception), we were told the norm here is cakes, drinks, fish (eg pickled herring), yerushalmi kugel, and sometimes crackers, dips, fruits and vegetables. Initially I considered this, but didn’t really like the idea since it made things more complicated with set up and clean up. I also feel like people are going home to a full Shabbos lunch, and I don’t need to provide a full meal for all of them before that. So I decided that I didn’t have to do that just because everyone else did, and would instead have just cakes and drinks.
(Below, ds4 helping spread filling for a the layer cake.)
Bar mitzva kiddush:
chocolate layer cake
6 layer strawberry cake
orange marmalade layer cake
oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
chocolate dipped shortbread cookies
chocolate chip loaf
chocolate chip pie
lemon pound cake
checkerboard cake
raspberry squares
fudge crinkles
chocolate cake
carrot cake
coconut snowballs
chocolate balls
marble cake
cinnamon blondies
peanut butter balls
A couple of people sent over yummy treats to put out, fancy looking concoctions that added a nice look to the dessert platters we put out, but I don’t know what they’re called. We took everything over to the hall before Shabbos, and set up for the kiddush late Friday night, including arranging all the platters. This was done by dd15, dd17, ds18, two 19 yo male guests, one 18yo female guest, dd11, and me. They all did a great job making the platters look fabulous. We covered the platters and put them on the tables, and the next morning we just had to uncover them when we got back from morning services. Very low pressure.
I heard yesterday from three different people how nice the kiddush was, and how impressive the many kinds of cake were – each of them had been told about it by several other people! That was very nice to hear, but we all felt good about how it went even before this – the tables looked nice and we had plenty for everyone.
200 challah rolls waiting to be baked
Bar mitzva meal:
First course –
homemade challah rolls
guacamole
hummus
Mediteranean chickpea salad
tomato onion salad
sweet carrot salad
coleslaw
cucumber salad
cauliflower salad
sweet-sour pepper salad with sesame seeds, almonds, craisins
savory carrot salad
Main course –
cholent (bean barley stew)
chicken
yerushalmi kugel (made by a friend)
sweet noodle kugel (made by a friend)
potato kugel
kishke (baked stuffing)
Dessert –
choice of lemon or strawberry pudding layer cake
We had the main meal in the same place as the kiddush, so we had to clear up from the kiddush before we could set up for the meal. When we got there from morning services, we had an hour before the kiddush began, and I used that time to begin cutting up the kugels and warming them up. A couple who came from Efrat for the bar mitzva came in to the kitchen to help, and cut up all the chicken, which was a big job.
After the kiddush, ds18 and three nineteen year old guests moved all the tables and chairs into place for the meal. Initially I had planned to set up the food buffet style, but realized that though it sounded easier, it would end up much more chaotic. So I decided to serve family style, which is what I do at home – I don’t like plating meals since I prefer for people to take the amount they want, of what they want.
Some younger guests who were around offered to help set the tables (their families were there for the kiddush and stayed for the meal) – I had so much help that I had to work hard to keep up with them all! While the tables were being set up, I was preparing dishes of salad for each table, so that they could be put on the table before everyone sat down to eat.
For the main course, I put out the kugels on the platters while everyone was still eating the first course – I could have asked someone to come in and help, but particularly my older girls and our 18yo guest had done so much that I really didn’t want to ask them to do more. They’re also entitled to enjoy the simcha! This was a big change from the hectic help of before the meal, when I had at least eight girls between the ages of 6 – 12 who kept coming in and asking for things to do, in addition to the help of the older girls. I kind of enjoyed the quiet; it wasn’t pressured at all. While I was setting up these platters, the older girls came in to the kitchen and began taking platters out to the tables.
Once I sat down to enjoy the main course, I didn’t get back up again. I let other people clear the serving platters and bring out individual plates of pudding cake, while I chatted with dear friends who came from Raanana. I stayed there chatting for a couple of hours, and didn’t do anymore food prep until it was time for shalosh seudos.
At that point, we rearranged the tables and chairs – again! – and set up for an informal shalosh seudos – rather than individual place settings, I set up buffet style – a pile of plates, napkins, cups, a basket of challah rolls, and then large serving bowls of salads and platters of kugel (planned leftovers from the main lunch meal). People began eating whenever they got there.
Then there was the final cleanup after Shabbos. All in all, it was a lot of work, but it didn’t feel tense or overwhelming at any time. And we were able to spend a lot less while getting a lot more.
How much did all of this cost? Dh took out 1200 shekels from the ATM and that went towards food and miscellaneous bar mitzva costs that came up (in addition to using some of our regular food budget money) but I don’t have any idea how it breaks down – honestly, it seems to me like it was too much. With all that was going on, we didn’t track the specific breakdown like we usually did. We spent an additional 400 shekels on paper goods. And the hall rental was 1100 shekels.
When figuring the total spent, I’m not taking into account that we have enough leftover chicken for another three or four Shabbosim, or any other leftovers that we’ll use at a different time (eg papergoods). Without working out the actual cost of what we used only for the bar mitva itself, we spent a total of 2700 shekels for the hall rental and catering for the entire weekend – at today’s exchange rate, this is equivalent to $715.
Considering that for our last bar mitzva over five years ago, we spent $1200 on catering for just the kiddush itself (and I already said how woefully inadequate the caterer’s provisions and set up were), we’re quite pleased that we were able to have the kind of event that we wanted without any compromises, while staying within a frugal budget!
Today has been a busy day from the minute I woke up!
My mom was scheduled to arrive at 5:30 am today, but we don’t have any way to get to the airport that early. The trains run through the night, but buses don’t, and from our city, we have to take a bus to connect with the train. So dd17 went to Haifa last night, spent the evening with friends, and got up super early to take the train to the airport in Tel Aviv.
My mom arrived at 6 am, and at 7:45, just after ds12 and I were commenting that she and dd17 must already be on the train to come home, I got a call from her – dd didn’t show up. This was a little concerning since dd is super responsible, and I knew she planned to take a train that would get her in by 6 am. This call coincided with the littles needing to leave to school and my husband needing to leave to a job interview, so there was a bit too much going on for a very overtired me (I woke up so tired that I told myself I’d take a nap as soon as the littles went to school – but I didn’t) for me to feel relaxed while I was trying to figure out what to do. After my first frantic thoughts of ‘oh, no’, I suggested to my mom that she wait another 45 minutes and then if dd wasn’t there, I’d come get her (about a three hour trip in each direction).
Fortunately it wasn’t long before we got a call that they met each other in the airport – there was a mix up about where we had said the meeting place would be, and though they were both there for over two hours by that point, dd had been sticking to the agreed on meeting place and my mom was walking around, so they kept missing each other. A little frustrating but the main thing is they found each other!
Back at home, dd15 and I were planning to use the day to do the bulk of the cooking for the bar mitzva this Shabbos. We prepared a number of salads, chicken, and desserts; though there are more things left for tomorrow morning than I had planned (I only wanted to bake challah then), it’s not overwhelming. Dd17 made a few more beautiful layer cakes after I listed what we were baking last week, and dd15 made a couple of large pudding layer cakes for lunch dessert (one strawberry, one lemon).
Ds12 went with dh to get a suit in Haifa last week, and he was so happy with the place he raved about it to his older brother. So they agreed it would be a good place to go for ds18 to freshen up his wardrobe, plus ds18 wanted to buy some things for ds12. Ds18 came directly from Jerusalem to Haifa, and ds13 took the bus there to meet him; they spent the whole day there together.
I went down to the hall we’re renting for the weekend to get the keys and got into a conversation with a man in his eighties who works there. He told me how Orthodox Jewish women are oppressed, and how women are treated better in the secular world – this was spurred by his question about why we were renting the hall, and when I said a bar mitzva, he said to the other person working there, a foreign worker who wasn’t sure a bar mitzva was for a boy or girl,”it’s for a boy’, they don’t care about the girls”.) I don’t mind talks like these, as long as people are reasonable. After about twenty minutes I told him I had to get home before my mom arrived from the airport, and invited him to join us at the bar mitzva reception on Shabbos morning. Very nice man – before I left he told me how unusual it is for someone ‘secular’ like him to be able to openly speak to someone ‘religious’ like me. He’s right, and that’s a shame that we allow ourselves to build walls between ourselves and others who have different lifestyles than us – we’re all just people trying to live life as best as we can.
My mom and dd17 finally got home at noon (we were originally expecting them by 10 am), and of course my mom immediately unpacked all the stuff she had brought for us. She really spent a lot of time looking for things she knew we needed, and I appreciated all of her time and effort. It’s not easy to shop for someone else, particularly for things that involve personal taste. (My mom and I have different styles, as do I and my girls!) She didn’t hit the bullseye entirely but she did really well, and even if she hadn’t, I would still appreciate the enormous amount of time she spent going to different places to get things she thought I would need.
Ds13 came home from his day with ds18 a little before dinner time, and my mom gave him a couple of cards and gifts from friends in the US that they asked her to deliver. He told me it was the best day he could think of and listed all the things that made it so nice! I didn’t tell him that his day was going to be getting even better later that evening, when he got a huge surprise for his bar mitzva. (I’ll post about this in detail when I have time to upload the video of when he saw his surprise.)
This morning, dd15 said that we should have made 2 ‘to do’ lists; one for us, and for to give out jobs to people who keep calling to ask what they can do to help! That’s something I really appreciate about living in Israel – people truly want to help in some way and be involved. In the last couple of days I’ve had a few people ask me what they could cook or bake for me, and today got three more requests to help. These aren’t necessarily all coming from people I know well – I don’t know many people here well – but from people I’ve gotten to know on a casual basis (three of ds4 and ds5’s teachers have all repeatedly offered to help). I had things pretty much organized by this point, though dd15 pointed out that I could have asked them to make dips, since I only have a couple of those so far. And those who asked before I had it all cooked/baked myself are definitely helping out – two of the three kugels we’re serving for the lunch meal are being prepared by other people.
Just three weeks ago, I was feeling so ‘blah’ about this bar mitzva, feeling alone and lonely, and now I’m in such a different headspace. I’m so warmly appreciative about every one of our guests coming from outside of Karmiel to spend Shabbos with us, and look forward to seeing many more people at the reception.
For the meal following the reception, despite out efforts to keep things small, our count has gone from 50 to 70 (this happens very easily since for a Shabbos meal you’re inviting entire families rather than couples – we had to really limit this since it could get huge so quickly) , so dh had to go out today to buy more groceries. It’s still pretty small though, relatively.
Thankfully, our plans seem to be moving along nicely even though I don’t feel like I’m especially busy – I mentally predicted I’d be running at top speed to get everything done in time these last couple of days. I know that tomorrow there will probably be a good number of little details that fall below my radar that may not get done until it’s too late to do anything about them, and I’ve mentally told myself it’s okay. Better to be a pleasant and calm person than to stress about having every single detail exactly as I want, if it looks like those details aren’t happening as I would like. It’s so easy to lose sight of why you’re doing all of this, and get tense and irritable with those you love the most – I don’t want that to be me.
