KOSHER ICE CREAM FROM KOSHER COWS

Long ago when I was a yeshiva-bochur we ate all types of ice cream without regard to its kashrut. After all, what could be treife about pure frozen cream flavored with pure vanilla? And so it was for nearly all the orthodox Jews in Chicago. We hung out at our favorite ice cream parlor, Lockwood Castle, and on any given Saturday night there were more yarmulkes in the place than there were crosses.

But then one day, some busybody decided to check into the bona fide kashrut of ice cream. He found, to our dismay, that everyday ice cream contained non-kosher additives, especially those that kept the ice cream creamy and fresh.

Ice cream is treife! Lockwood Castle’s business plummeted. The boys rent their garments and wore sackcloth and ashes. The more philosophical among them mused, “That’s what happens when you ask too many questions.”

Our grief, thanks be to God, lasted only a little while. The outrage was so enormous that it reached the throne of America’s premier kashrut authority. In no time, a number of purveyors were marketing kosher ice cream, presumably because the cows were all Chasidim from Brooklyn.

Now, that was all right if you were satisfied eating supermarket ice cream at home. But, when will there be a place to indulge in sodas and sundaes like the good old days at Lockwood Castle? Fortuitously, the outcry was again heard in Heaven, and in months, just such a chain of kosher ice cream parlors opened.

Not too long thereafter, I jubilantly announced to my chasidic friend, “Did you know that Brewster’s is now kosher?”

“Kosher? Really? But is it cholov Yisroel?” “I don’t know,” I answered. “What about the syrups and toppings and whipped cream? Cholov Yisroel? Under Chasidic supervision?” “I don’t know.” “And what about the scoopers? Are you sure they’ve touched only kosher food?” “I don’t know,” I said, imagining what pork-flavored ice cream would taste like. “ . . . and? . . . and?” he sputtered. “I don’t know,” I sighed.

“I guess I’ll just have to bring some kosher ice cream and eat it with my own bowl and spoon.”

“Why not have just a glass of water, to be especially sure?” I asked.

“Water? Is that kosher? What about all the treife bacteria?”

I just don’t know . . .

RECIPES FOR PARADIGM SHIFT IN POKER GRUB


FOR “SAUCE CHALLENGE”

CUCUMBER-DILL SAUCE

2 cups mayo
2-3 “pickling” cucumbers, unpeeled
1-2 medium sweet onion(s) (Vidaila preferred)
4 or more whole sprigs of dill, finely chopped OR 2 tablespoons dry dill
salt and pepper to taste

Coarse-grate cucumbers and onions over clean kitchen towel (one that you’ll never use again). You might lose a knuckle, but I prefer a manual-grater, because food processor makes it too mushy. Squeeze out excess liquid, the more the better. Mix together all ingredients. Especially good as sauce for baked or poached salmon.



FOR TASTE-TESTING COMPETITION

CHOPPED (DON’T CALL ME PATÉ!) LIVER

1-2 pounds chicken liver
4-6 hard-boiled eggs
2 large onions coarsely chopped and sautéed until soft and golden in liberal amount
of flavor-neutral (I use peanut) oil, water, oil or schmaltz and gribenes (chicken skin cracklings – a lesson for another time)

Lightly (kosher) salt and broil livers. Rinse in cool water. (This is kashrut requirement.) Finish Livers by sautéing them together for a few minutes and onions. Grind all ingredients together with medium-coarse blade I prefer hand grinder like bubbe’s, or electric. To my taste, food processor makes it too mushy. Add water, oil and/or schmaltz. Mix to clay-like consistency.

Garnish with chopped onion, grated boiled egg, crostini, onion-pepper marmalade, toasted pita, bagel chips, or challah



FOR COMPETITIVE “POP A TAGAMET”

CHOLENT ALA SUVALK

½ to ¾ cup of assorted beans (mixture of navy, pinto, lima, kidney, and/or great northern) and ¾ cup barley
Sizable chunks of short ribs, brisket, and/or chuck (Optional: For vegetarian, sauté onions)
Handfuls of coarse chopped onions
Chunks of potato, peeled
Lots of fresh chopped garlic (Don’t you dare use that stuff in the jar!)
Salt, pepper, paprika (more than you think you need).

Sorry, you’re gonna have to start this early in the morning if you want it to be proper consistency for that evening. Layer bottom of crock-pot with chopped onions and garlic. Add meat. Season. More onions and garlic. Add barley and beans. Season again. More onions and garlic. Add potato chunks. Season again. Sprinkle liberally with paprika. Cover with boiling water. Cover with heavy lid and cook on high, forever. Do not serve to Presbyterians. Or, as my tactless step-great-uncle would say, “Anybody care for a Tums?”

OPTIONAL: JAKOI ("CANNON BALL")

2-3 eggs, beaten
Mixture of matzo meal, cornflake crumbs, oatmeal, Grape Nuts
Sautéed chopped onion and garlic
Salt, pepper, paprika
Water or chicken stock

Blend all ingredients thoroughly, adding enough water or chicken stock to make mixture drop-from-spoon consistency. Heap mounds of mixture atop potatoes and sprinkle liberally with paprika. Cover crock-pot and cook as above.



FOR BEST “I-CAN-BE MORE-GOYISH-THAN-YOU” CHALLENGE

AUTHENTIC WHITE CASTLE SLIDER/SLYDER (DIFFERENCE OF OPINION)

1-1½ pound(s) ground chuck
1 medium onion, finely diced
8 small dinner rolls, the softer the better

Grease bottom of 12”-fry pan with Pam or a light coating of oil. Form beef into eight thin, preferably square patties. Poke five holes in each patty. Place 1 teaspoon of onion for each patty on medium-heat pan. Top with hamburger, then with bottom of roll. Place top of roll on pan. Steam-fry by covering pan. When patty is lightish brown, take off pan and assemble. Dress with condiments, but the fewer the better.

ALTERNATIVE: BOURBON-SOUSED BRISKET SLIDER
(FOR 10-POUND BRISKET; ADAPT ACCORDINGLY)

Large, preferably whole, brisket (first-cut tends to come out too dry.)
2 cups cheap bourbon (save the Maker’s Mark for a bris)
1 cup soy sauce
1½ cups water
½ cup freshly-squeezed lemon juice
2 cups brown sugar (light or dark)
loads of chopped fresh garlic

Combine all ingredients and whiz in blender, food processor, or immersion blender (preferred). Marinate brisket (I use trash bag) overnight. Roast at 375 degrees, 20 minutes per pound, covered. Slice thinly and substitute for patty in slider recipe.

ALTERNATIVE: (VEGAN AND/OR HYPER-KOSHER) ONION-PEPPER MARMALADE SLIDER

2 medium/large onions
2 red bell peppers, cored, roasted under broiler or flame until black, and peeled. Roasting is optional, but if not, skins will show up in marmalade, ech.
Eighth to quarter-cup olive oil (EVOO, for Rachael Ray fans)
cup Marsala or sweet Sherry (optional)
¼ cup light brown sugar
salt, to taste

Slice onions and peppers thinly. Sauté over medium heat in olive oil until very soft. Add Marsala/Sherry. Raise heat to high. Stir until it reduces by half. Lower heat. Add brown sugar and blend together until glazed. Lightly salt – tends to bring out flavor. Prepare buns as slider and schmeer with marmalade. If you must, choose your condiment(s).

A PARADIGM SHIFT IN POKER SNACKING

I have never played a game of poker . . . er . . .uh . . . unless you count the one time at Camp Ramah, summer of ’63, when a couple of sharpies conned me into a game of strip poker . . . and I wound up running to-and-from the next cabin clad only in my tzitzis.

My boys, Scott, Joey, and Ben, however, are world-class pokeristim. I have yet to compute the stakes, but Scott, my eldest, nearly doubled the size of his house, Joey just bought a very gemutlich one, and Ben, the runt of my litter, has a two-bedroom apartment in New York. I rest my case

As every Jewish event has its own cuisine, poker played by former Yeshiva-bochorim needs to assert its own culinary identity. Devising a menu for young, upscale guys is no easy task, because they always grouse about the absence of quality and diversity of poker-night snacks: No more Buffalo wing dripping pepper sauce . . . too plebian and messy. No more nachos cracking under the burden of salsa . . . too trite. No more guacamole-residue to grease the cards and chips . . . too gauche.

And they’re right. You really can’t do anything exciting to jazz up poker food, unless you hire Wolfgang Puck to replace “Five-Card Louie.” And anyway, the Austrian’s pizza is too prissy.

Thus, I say change the concept, if you cannot change the cuisine:

Serve nothing during each hand except maybe soft drinks. Once the spirited competition of each hand of poker has concluded, let the competition really begin.

Fill shot glasses with a splash of costly or cheap vodka, from Belvedere to Smirnoff. Only the “dealer” knows which is which. For the rest, it is a blind tasting.

After a l’chayyim, down go the shots, one by one. The players rate the quality or try to figure out which is which. (I can always tell Grey Goose, uh-huh.) Four shots each? Be sure to choose a designated drive.

A few hands later, do the same with cheap-versus-classy beer: Bud? Old Milwaukee? Theillier La Bavaisienne? Mestansky Pivovar Havlickuv Brod Lev Lion Pale Double Bock? OK, OK, so I got their names off a website. (http://beergeek.stores.yahoo.net/index.html)

The host is in charge of making or procuring the varieties, so everyone can enjoy the nuances. Or s/he might assign the others to help with the task. After all, everybody has his/her own concept of tuna salad. The possibilities are infinite. Enlist a domestic partner, or as we used to say, “wife,” to do (some of) the procurement.

After the next hand, try the same kind of tasting with tuna salad, chopped liver, Kiddush wine, lox, scotch, cookies, those iddy-biddy gefilte fish balls, cheeses, sauces, meatballs – anything you can spear with a toothpick or in a shot-glass. Never serve anything that has “roll-up” or “crudités” in its name. Rate each round, guess who made it, or just fress. Give prizes to winners – perhaps six-packs of Theillier La Bavaisienne.

Or, I’ll give you something really off the wall: Get a slab of ahi tuna. Cut it into ¾ inch cubes. Flash fry, preferably rare. Put a dab of cocktail sauce in a shot-glass, then the tuna, then a dash of vodka. Down it. A tuna shooter. One of my special favorites: The slider. A teeny hamburger steamed inside a gooey bun. Why not try the same with a couple slices of brisket, corned beef or salami? You can read the definitive saga of the slider at http://www.99w.com/evilsam/ff/whitecastle.html.

As the evening progresses, the players will become pleasantly sated. They have had tastes from a bountiful table bearing all kinds of interesting food and drink. With each ensuing hand, kings start looking more like jacks. Cards become secondary to competitive fressing, and no one will ever again complain about his/her domestic partner coming home smelling of cigars.

It’s just like Henry Herbert Knibbs always said: And far behind the fading trail, the lights and lures of town. So we played the bitter game nor asked for praise or pity. (All right. I got that off a website, too}

FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND THE ARAB MINDSET MAKES THIS A STUPID WAR

My dad was a Colonel in the National Guard. One day in 1965, he told his high- strutting, hup-two, ROTC son to find a way to stay out of Vietnam. It was, he said, going to be a “stupid war.” Why? Among other reasons, he said, “Because we don’t understand the enemy.”

I was bred by patriotic parents to believe that the people who govern us are ipso facto smarter and more discerning than we. That axiom was rent asunder by the time I became an antiwar protestor. The Vietnam War, it turned out, was not merely immoral and ill-conceived, but it was stupid. It was conducted by stupid men. We, the everyday hoi polli, turned out to be smarter than they were.

Johnson and McNamara, to their feigned surprise, discovered only after each foray that it had been a boondoggle, only to try the same thing over again. They had no idea of the Southeast Asians’ weltanschauung, their mores, motivations, and culture. Most of all, they had no idea of how many of the oppressed yearned for America-style democracy, so, we fought to impose it on them.

Now fast-forward to Iraq: Is the war immoral? At first, that was a tough call. But, when every other justification turned out to be phony, some of the hoi polli were snookered into believing that we would liberate Iraq and ramp it up to become an American-style democracy. By that point, the rest of us regular folk figured out that we were diving happy-hooligan into another stupid war, because, as Daddy said, “we don’t understand the enemy.” The President, et al, simply didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, that the mindset of the man-in-the-street Arab would not cotton to the idea of becoming an American-style democracy.

Of course, they didn’t. That should have been obvious when our men and women marched triumphantly into Baghdad to an anemic throng of 35 Iraqis, none of them bearing flowers. Likewise at the toppling of Saddam’s statue . . . all of them sent over from central casting.
No surprise. Many of us, yawned, “So, what else is new?” It was neither the first nor the last un-surprise that us regular folk knew would happen, while the stupid men in national leadership had yet to figure it out.

Despite all the ballyhooed bluster on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the mission will never be accomplished, nor will the civil war end. Why? Because the men above us refuse to understand that the mindset of Iraqis, Iranians, Palestinians, et al, unlike American-style democracy, is rule or be ruled, destroy or be destroyed. The notion of “peace” is not nearly the same as that of an American-style democracy. We came to them bearing and then trying to impose, faux-democracy on them. Instead, the vacuum we have created is filled with civil war and the only issue upon which the warring faction agree: “Yankee go home!”

This is the lesson: Heretofore oppressed people do not automatically default to democracy. It is not axiomatic that freedom will, by its very nature, step in to fill the gap created when subjugated people become free. Perhaps that’s why George Washington called America a “great experiment.” Perhaps that is also why the newly-liberated Israelites yearned to return to the oppression of Egypt rather than face the challenges of the wilderness. Another “great experiment” nearly gone sour.

Call it jingoism, narcissism, or nearsightedness, it is just old-fashioned stupidity, and we hoi polli had it all figured out, while the dopes above failed or refused to understand it.
Are they smarter than we are? I think not. We laugh when we recall that story of the natives showing up with baskets as their colonial rulers announced that they would be given their freedom. Now there is no reason to laugh, only to be sobered.

You were right, Daddy. It is a stupid war.

A BACHELOR AND HIS SANITARY NAPKINS

Once upon a time, decades ago, my grandparents owned a little grocery store in the old Jewish neighborhood in Chicago. My grandmother and mother ran the store, rolling herring and pickle barrels out onto the sidewalk at 5:00 AM in the frigid pre-dawn darkness.

But, my grandfather was a man of leisure. He came down to the store at 9:00, dressed in the flashy suit of a mafia don, complete with diamond pinky ring, checked yesterday’s receipts and disappeared, purportedly to go “to market.” Decades later, my mother disclosed that he always had a woman on the side. But that was back then when wives suffered silently through their husbands’ peccadilloes. So, my grandfather caroused like a tycoon, trying to hide that he was just another little storekeeper.

My grandfather benefited the store in only one way: He was a marketer par excellence. When Cross and Blackwell came out with a new flavor of jelly, he’d offer housewives tastes of it, something that no other immigrant grocer would have considered.

When the rumor spread that mayonnaise was a dairy product, housewives resisted for fear of mixing milk with meat. To combat the false report, my grandfather asked the Chasidic rebbe across the street to declare that mayonnaise was pareve. Then, he proceeded to tape copies of the official document to every lamppost in a mile radius.

My grandfather’s only near-mistake was trying to market women’s sanitary napkins. But, the idea of purchasing them at Abe Goldsmith’s grocery was beyond propriety.

For months, the crates of sanitary napkins remained untouched. Then one day, Louie Zaidman, a middle-aged bachelor, bought a package. A month passed, and Louie bought another. By now, the yentas were whispering to each other, “What was the ‘feigeleh’ doing with women’s private-ware?”

Finally, my grandfather got up the courage to ask.

“Goldsmith,” he answered, “there’s only one use for those shmattes. Every time I polish my Buick, they leave a wonderful shine. Now go tell your patrons that if Abe Goldsmith can sell sanitary napkins to a bachelor, he can sell them to a balaboste who wants to wax her floor.”