Muchentuchen

Outsmarting telecomm

2010-06-18T21:06:00.002-04:00

To all who do not know yet - Uri, Or and I are coming to Israel!!!

Are we returning home and ending our American adventure or is this just a visit?

The frustrating answer is that we don't know. While in Israel I'll look for a job both in Israel and in the US and we'll see what happens.

The one question that we're avoiding is what will happen when (note: not if) companies want me to come in to interview. We'll deal with that when we have too.

Meanwhile, I was worried about how companies could reach me via phone to my cellphone in Israel. The key word here being WAS. Here is what I did:

Preliminary steps:

(a) Get a Google voice account

(b) Set up a Jajah account

Then, to out-smart international calling:

(1) Enter your Google voice number as one of your phone numbers in Jajah.

(2) Find the Jajah Direct number of the international number you want people to reach you at.

(3) Go to your Google voice account and enter the number you got in step 2

(4) This step is vital: In the "call" tab in you Google voice account turn call screening off and select to display your Google voice number in your incoming caller ID.

Voila! Now when someone calls your Google voice number, Google voice calls your Jajah direct number and Jajah connects the caller to your international cell phone!

After I got it to work, I was so proud of myself! I felt I had to let someone at Google know, but then I thought that if I did that, they would somehow find a way to block it. So, if anyone that works at Google is reading this, SHHH!

Internet ponderings

2010-06-16T08:58:00.003-04:00

Luck would have it that right when I log in to write a new post about web related stuff, Google comes out with its new Blogger template design tool and let's me change how Muchentuchen looks. The tool, btw, is really cool: It gives the user a whole bunch of options and is very easy to use. So what do you think?

Another side note: I wonder how many of the posts I've written over the last two years have started with "so" or "anyway". I'm sitting here wanting to get to the point of what I wanted to share, and those are the only two ways I can think of starting. Anyway... :)

Post graduation, I've been re thinking my aversion to facebook. Yes, the apps that were so prevalent when facebook got to Israel (hot potatoes, IQ quizzes etc) are still annoying, but with your friends all around the world, it is such an easy way to "keep in touch". SO now I make a point to log on to facebook at least once a day to see what's what.

The quotation marks in the paragraph above are because that now that I've started using facebook again, I've noticed that more than it allows you to stay in touch with people, it allows you to keep tabs on them. I see what's going on with my friends/ acquaintances, but I don't always comment about whatever it is they are doing, and when I do, those friends don't always reply. Bottom line is that rarely can I say that I'm engaged in a conversation with my friends in a conversation about their lives.

Another facebook inspired thought is on the dilution facebook has caused to the greeting "happy birthday". It used to be that you had to make an effort to remember your friends' birth-dates and then make another effort to connect with them on that day to with them a happy birthday. Now via facebook that whole process has become much easier, so much so that people send birthday greeting to people that they only marginally know. As someone who has always believed that birthdays should be celebrated (because everyone deserves a special day of their own and not everyone can have a notional holiday) I'm a bit aggravated by this whole thing, and yet a few days ago I too sent a Happy Birthday message to someone who I might of only talked to twice at most in my two years at JGSM.

I've also been giving a lot of thought lately to my internet personality, that is - if someone were to Google search me and only see me as I put myself out there on the web (via LinkedIn, facebook, this blog, etc.) what would they think of me? More importantly, if that person was a recruiter or a hiring manager at a company I want to work for, would they perceive me as the insightful marketer/ strategic thinker I think I am.

To that end, one of the things I'm doing is maintaining my LinkIn profile and being active in the groups I'm in there. This requires me to stay even more informed with what is going on in the industries I'm interested in. So my Google-Reader is working overtime (and here's an interesting piece about why sharing matters), and I am spending a whole lot of time just on reading what other people are saying about stuff. The problem is that all that staying informed takes up so much time, that I don't find the time to do things like write here!

What to do? What to do?

Back and pie

2010-05-20T00:49:00.003-04:00

Without real ability to take maternity from school, and since I initially didn’t get around to posting updates, I decided to take an official maternity leave from blogging.

Now Or is 3.5 months old, so I guess it’s time.

What has been happening with our lives since my last post? Well... not much:

• We did a ton of cooking and baking. Highlights include 2 Cook’s illustrated recipes: tomato pesto and super chewy brownies (recipes to come) and Uri’s become a pro at cooking fish in a variety of ways.

• I finished my MBA. That is, I’m done with all my classes/ assignments/ finals. I still have two tiny things left… commencement (i.e. graduation ceremony) and finding a job (minor detail).

• And, of course, we had the cutest baby in the world!

Today is special not just because of this come-back post. It’s also Shavuot, which means it’s the anniversary of Uri and I first meeting. More precisely – it’s our 10 year anniversary. We aren’t doing much in the way of celebrating (we’re waiting for my parents to come next week and babysit, and then we’ll do something romantic, like go to an action flick with a bunch of friends). But we are going to try to have a nice dinner in the shape of a Quiche Lorraine with a nice salad on the side. The recipe is from a book I got last year called “Ratio”, about the ratios of baking. It includes 2 ratios: The first for the crust and the second for the custard that goes inside.

Crust - 3 parts flour: 2 parts fat: 1 part water

This is fairly simple:

1. In a mixer you mix 300 gr (or 12 oz) flour a pinch of salt and some sugar and any other spices you want to flavor your crust – I used half regular flour and half whole wheat.

2. Pulse in 200 gr (8 oz = 2 sticks) of cold butter cut into cubes.

3. Pulse in liquid – start with a couple of table spoons and add as needed until a dough is formed. This could be substituted wholly or partly with 1 egg or yogurt/ buttermilk/ sour cream

4. Form into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap and cool in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Then roll the dough out, fit inside your tart/ pie pan and stick in the freezer. Pre-bake (aka “blind bake” for 10-12 minutes in a 180C (375F) oven . Take out and cool

Custard - 2 part liquid: 1 part egg

1. Sauté whatever filling you want in the quiche – in my case, a fried some bacon, and used part of the fat from the bacon to sauté 3 large leeks. I also toasted some pecans in the oven. Let everything cool.

2. With a hand blender blend 1 cup cream, 2 cups milk and 6 eggs.

3. Place the filling into the pre-baked crust, pour the custard mixture in. The book suggests doing this in two stages, ie – filling, custard, filling custard reblending the custard in-between. I doubt this actually makes a difference.

4. Bake at 170C (325F) for 1 hour (the book says it can take up to 2 hours) until the custard almost sets, which means it’s still wiggly in the center of the quiche.

After the fact –Or chose this night to have a hard time falling asleep and it took us about an hour to put her to bed. By that time we weren’t really in the mood for calmly sitting down for a meal … the quiche was still good… but the celebration not so much.

No news is good news

2010-02-03T16:11:00.002-05:00

To start with the things you’re probably wondering about:

1. I am still pregnant, and have yet to go into labor.

2. My mom is here with us. She is doing well, and we are all doing fine, mostly looking at my stomach and trying to guilt the baby into coming out.

3. Given (2) and the fact that temperatures here have been ranging from -2C to -21C, the house has never been cleaner.

On to less frustrating things – I think I found my perfect carrot cake recipe. Despite the fact that I love carrot cake, and that I’ve made plenty of carrot cakes from plenty of recipes, until now I didn’t find a recipe that made me think I can stop searching for a new one. Some of them were really good – but still… But this one… I really don’t think I have a reason to try another recipe again (note: I didn’t right “ever again”, because that would be way to final).

The recipe is from Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking from my home to yours”. The original is a three layer cake with cream cheese frosting. With only 2 cake pans and no really need to consume large amounts of sweetened cream cheese, I made my cake in a rectangular Pyrex pan and planned to put just a bit of frosting, but once the cake was done and I tasted a little bit, I decided that the frosting is purely optional. Oh… one last thing, because of (2) above I changed the spices in the recipe just a bit. The original had 2 teaspoons of cinnamon and nothing else, my version you’ll find below.

So here it is – the recipe:

My perfect carrot cake

Ingredients

2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking power

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground cardomon

½ teaspoon ground English pepper

¼ teaspoon ground cloves

¾ teaspoons salt

3 cups grated carrots (about 9 US sized carrots)

½ cup coarsely chopped pecans

1 cup shredded coconut

1 cup moist raisins

2 cups sugar

1 cup oil

4 large eggs

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 325F

2. Wisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and spices

3. In a stand mixer, preferably fitted with a paddle attachment, beat the sugar and oil together on medium speed until smooth. Add the eggs, one at a time and continue to beat until the batter is even smoother. Reduce the speed to low and add the flour mixture, mixing only until the dry ingredients disappear. Gently mix in the chunky ingredients.

4. Pour the batter into a large pan and bake for 50 minutes, rotating the pan at the half way point. The cake is ready when a thin knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

Bon Appetit

2010-01-23T00:10:00.003-05:00

Finally, the last of 3… I know that last time I promised shots of the process, and used that as an excuse to why I wasn't posting the Danish recipe. I was all set up to take those pictures too. But then I realized that I had actually already done the complicated part of the recipe (not really complicated, more complicated to explain). Not that it really matters; you can see the entire thing online…

Wait, let me start at the beginning. I started watching “Baking with Julia” on PBS on Saturday mornings. Once of the PBS channels we have has a great run of cooking shows on the weekend. Julia Child is just one of many. When I saw it the first time, it was more because it amused me to be watching a Julia Child show. As I watched I imagined my mom watching it when it originally aired in the 80s.

Last week there was a fantastic show about Danish pastries (you can see it here). The woman who was baking with Julia, Beatrice Ojakangas, looked super-professional, a true baker (for example, one tell-tale sign of a baker vs. a cook is that a baker knows that when you need to pulse something is a mixer, it means that you need to have it on in short bursts, and not just let it go on the “pulse” setting for a minute. The latter is something I saw Emril do...).

Back to the Danish – there were two very impressive things that convinced me to go ahead and try the recipe. The first is that the dough looked really manageable, and didn’t require any folding of butter anywhere. The second, even more impressive is that woman made pastry cream in the microwave!

So I went ahead and made it. It was Uri’s birthday morning breakfast. I think he’s very happy I gave it a try.

So without further ado, here is the recipe:

Danish Pastry Dough

Ingredients

¼ cup warm water

1 pack (1/4 oz) active yeast

½ cup milk

1 large egg

¼ cup sugar

1 tsp salt

2.5 cups flour

2 sticks (226 grams) butter

Instructions

1. Wisk water, yeast, milk, egg, sugar and salt in a medium sized bowl

2. In a food processor fitted with a steal blade, pulse flour and butter 8-10 times. Pieces of butter should be a bit bigger than they would be if you were making shortbread

3. Gently fold flour and butter into liquid mixture to make a rough dough. Cover with plastic wrap. Refrigerate 8-24 hours.

4. Dust work surface with flour, and roll out the dough, fold sides inward to make a rectangle of fairly consistent moistness (initially outside might be drier than center).

5. Roll dough out to a long rectangle. Fold in and envelop fold (left 1/3 to center, and then right 1/3 on top). Roll out lengthwise, and fold again. Repeat another 2 times, for a total of 3 rolls and folds. Wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 30 minutes.

6. Roll out again , cut in to equal squares, fill and let sit for 30 minutes. Brush with egg white and bake in an oven, preheated to 400 F about 10 minutes

Super easy microwave Crème Patisser

Ingredients

1 cup cream/ half & half/ milk*

1.5 tbsp cornstarch

2-3 tablespoons sugar

1 egg yolk

1 tsp vanilla extract

Instructions

1. In a microwave safe bowl, whisk cream, cornstarch and sugar

2. Microwave for a total of 3 minutes, stopping to re-whisk every minute. The first 2 minutes the mixture will still be very liquid, but after the third it will become thick and creamy.

3. In a separate bowl, whisk together egg yolk and vanilla. Pour 3-4 tbsp of the cream mixture into the egg, stirring vigorously and bringing the temperature of the egg mixture up (this is called tempering). Fold all of egg mixture to the rest of the cream mixture.

*If you use milk, up the cornstarch to 2 tablespoons, and you might need to also add an additional minute in the microwave.

Miscellaneous

2010-01-18T09:31:00.009-05:00

I’ve been putting off posting the last of my 3 promised baking posts because in a few days I’ll be making another batch and I plan to try to take some pictures of the process (since a picture is worth a thousand words and all). In the meantime, nothing too exciting is going on, but still we’ve had some post-worthy happenings (sort of).

Still on the food front – Uri’s been making lots of yummy stuff.

For example – he made some super-delicious risotto with green beans and edamame and equally good panko encrusted mahi-mahi fillet. It was our first time eating/ making this fish, but since it was really good and not very expensive, I think it won’t be our last. As for the risotto, I think I’ve never eaten risotto as good as Uri’s in any restaurant I’ve been in.

On the baby front – We’ve now accumulated lots and lots of baby stuff (baby still not here).

The latest is our super cool stroller (picture to right).

Inspired by the stroller, a brand called B.O.B Revolution, we decided to call the super huge teddy bear you see in the stroller Bob.

Bob has been modeling baby stuff for us for a while. Here he is trying out the car seat:

The only unfortunate thing about Bob is that because he is so big, a lot of the baby stuff doesn’t fit him – but it’s ok, he has friends who help him. Like here, where Tiger is helping him model the cute Bundle Me hat that we got to keep the baby’s head warm when we take her outside:

The bread maker in our house

2010-01-15T22:54:00.004-05:00

Recently the question of “what counts as food” has been on our minds. It started with an interview Michael Pollan gave on The Daily Show. Pollan is the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma as well as In Defense of Food and Food Rules. His basic thesis is that most of what Americans eat isn’t real food, but actually food like substance, mostly corn based and with an unreasonable shelf life. As such, he promotes people moving away from mass produced foods to sustainably grown produce and meat. All this isn’t new, but it just brought the topic top of mind again.

It was top of mind for Uri when he was looking at for bread crumbs. To his surprise, all the breadcrumbs he found included corn syrup as one of the top 3 products. With that, I decided to start making bread from scratch – something I’ve been promising myself for a while now.

To ease myself into the whole thing, I decided to start with the famed “No Knead Bread”, or more precisely, Cook’s Illustrated version of it – “Almost No-Knead Bread”.

One final anecdote before the full recipe. The bread itself is baked in a Dutch oven (ie a large heavy pot with a lid). It calls for pre-heating the pot in the oven at 500 F. Before doing so, the thought crossed my mind – will this China made plastic handle survive 500 degrees Fahrenheit? Luckily, Uri stepped into the kitchen at that moment – so I asked him, and he assured me that it will.

20 minutes into the preheat process the smell of burned plastic filled the house, followed by a "pop” sound. So, baker beware - take the knob off before starting!

Almost no-knead bread

Makes 1 large round loaf. Published January 1, 2008. From Cook's Illustrated.

An enameled cast-iron Dutch oven with a tight-fitting lid yields best results, but the recipe also works in a regular cast-iron Dutch oven or heavy stockpot. Use a mild-flavored lager, such as Budweiser (mild non-alcoholic lager also works). The bread is best eaten the day it is baked but can be wrapped in aluminum foil and stored in a cool, dry place for up to 2 days.

INGREDIENTS

3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (15 ounces), plus additional for dusting work surface

1/4 teaspoon instant or rapid-rise yeast

1 1/2 teaspoons table salt

3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons water (7 ounces), at room temperature

1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons mild-flavored lager (3 ounces)

1 tablespoon white vinegar

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Whisk flour, yeast, and salt in large bowl. Add water, beer, and vinegar. Using rubber spatula, fold mixture, scraping up dry flour from bottom of bowl until shaggy ball forms. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 8 to 18 hours.

2. Lay 12- by 18-inch sheet of parchment paper inside 10-inch skillet and spray with nonstick cooking spray. Transfer dough to lightly floured work surface and knead 10 to 15 times. Shape dough into ball by pulling edges into middle. Transfer dough, seam-side down, to parchment-lined skillet and spray surface of dough with nonstick cooking spray. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature until dough has doubled in size and does not readily spring back when poked with finger, about 2 hours.

3. About 30 minutes before baking, adjust oven rack to lowest position, place 6- to 8-quart heavy-bottomed Dutch oven (with lid) on rack, and heat oven to 500 degrees. Lightly flour top of dough and, using razor blade or sharp knife, make one 6-inch-long, 1/2-inch-deep slit along top of dough. Carefully remove pot from oven and remove lid. Pick up dough by lifting parchment overhang and lower into pot (let any excess parchment hang over pot edge). Cover pot and place in oven. Reduce oven temperature to 425 degrees and bake covered for 30 minutes. Remove lid and continue to bake until loaf is deep brown and instant-read thermometer inserted into center registers 210 degrees, 20 to 30 minutes longer. Carefully remove bread from pot; transfer to wire rack and cool to room temperature, about 2 hours.

New book, new cookies

2010-01-13T09:02:00.003-05:00

You would think that with this much time on my hands, I would post more… there are two problems with that

a) With nothing to do, I don’t have anything interesting to write about

b) Doing next to nothing is sucking all the brainpower I have, leaving me a mindless, muse-less zombie.

During the past week, I've gone back to baking a lot, so here is the first of at least 3 baking posts:

At the same time Bella and Nuss bought Uri his amazing chef’s hat, they bought me Shemo’s new baking book. When I opened the book I immediately looked to the “thank you" section, expecting to find my mom’s name in there, since she buys so much things from his bakery I assumed she had a substantial part in making the book a reality. Unfortunately, he did not recognize her contribution. Some people are just so ungrateful…

It took me a while to get around to actually baking something from it. I suppose that if we were in Israel, I would have made something within a week, one of the more decadent cakes or a cheesecake. But I (very sadly) don’t have my baking utensils here and his cheesecake recipes are based on soft cheeses, so the book had to wait on the shelf for a while. However, during our most recent trip to NYC, we stopped at an Israeli grocer, and a bought a pack of date paste, specifically with the thought of making those swirly date filled cookies that you probably all know from your mom, aunt or grandma. I had a very simple recipe for those types of cookies, but I decided to give Shemo’s book a glance too. He has a recipe for Ma’amul cookies, which he fills in the same way (like a roulade). The recipe looked interesting, and I have time to spare – so why not!

To cut an already long story just a bit short – Best date filled cookies ever!

The combination of regular flour and semolina flour gives an awesome texture that’s both moist and crumbly and the flavor is fantastic. I made a bunch of date filled ones, and then a few with Nutella, and a few with orange marmalade. The date ones were irresistible, the Nutella dried up in the oven, so the cookies came out very dry and crisp so if you opt to do that, you need to be conscious of putting a thick slap of filling, otherwise the flavor is lost. The marmalade worked ok – a lot spilled out (though it might have been because I went overboard with the filling) and the cookies where very moist (still good, but different). Note on the semolina for the one or two American bakers that might be reading this – the flour I’m referring to is a middle-eastern flour, that is made from a different king of wheat than regular flour and has a coarser texture. This is not the same as the Italian semolina used for pasta. In the US you can find this type of semolina is Israeli and in Arab grocery stores. If you can’t find it, the best substitute is probably white corn meal.

“Easy” Ma’amul

Ingredients

¾ cup (180 ml) water

½ cup (120 ml) oil

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp rose water extract (I omitted this)

500 gr (3 ½ cups + 1 tbsp) flour

240 gr (1 ½ cups) semolina (see note above)

10 gr baking powder

300 gr soft butter

Instructions

1. Put water, oil, vanilla and rose water in a bowl of a standing mixer. Add all dry ingredients and butter. Knead on low about 5 minutes, until soft dough is formed.

2. Wrap dough in plastic wrap and let sit in refrigerator for at least an hour (since I made this in batches, the last batch of dough sat in the fridge for 3 days)

3. Preheat oven to 170 C

4. Separate dough into 3 parts. Start with one part: roll it out into a rectangle, about 30 cm in length and ½ cm thick. Spread filling of your choice, and roll into a roulade. (After the first batch came out too thick to my liking, cut each rectangle in half length-wise, and rolled tight cookies.)

5. Cut the roulade into cookies 1.5 – 3 cm thick, place on parchment lined baking sheet and bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes until golden brown.

6. Let cool, and dust with powdered sugar.

7. Repeat with rest of dough.

Will snow all week

2010-01-03T10:54:00.003-05:00

I know I already put up a post today (and I encourage everyone to scroll down and look at it, because it includes a really good recipe for deep dish pizza dough), however, I had to share with you what's going on outside our front door:

Get our geek on

2010-01-03T07:52:00.004-05:00

A couple of night ago we had the geekest night-in I could imagine – pizza and board games. The only saving grace was that it was really good home-made pizza and a very cool board game (though the latter probably makes the whole thing even geeker…)

Following through on the end of my last blog, I made deep dish pizza. The recipe (below), yet again is from Cook’s Illustrated, and once again, it was delicious! So delicious in fact that the notion of taking a picture of the pizza once it was ready completely escaped my mind. Even Uri liked it – and he never admits to liking pizza!

Not wanting to die alone, we invited Yariv to dine with us and he brought along a friend of his, Adam. We were planning to play Settler’s of Catan and Adam brought his set which is 3D (!). I will risk exposing my geeky side and say that the set, though a bit let convenient to play than the regular game is super-cool. Not cool enough to warrant the 300-some dollars that it costs, but still very cool.

Since Uri won the game – he did remember to take a picture of the board game:

Deep Dish Pizza

Makes one 14-inch pizza, serving 4 to 6.

Prepare the topping while the dough is rising so it will be ready at the same time the dough is ready. Baking the pizza in a deep-dish pan on a hot pizza stone or quarry tiles will help produce a crisp, well-browned bottom crust. Otherwise, a heavy rimless cookie sheet (do not use an insulated cookie sheet) will work almost as well. If you've only got a rimmed cookie sheet, turn it upside down and bake the pizza on the flat rimless side. The amount of oil used to grease the pan may seem excessive, but in addition to preventing sticking, the oil helps the crust brown nicely.

INGREDIENTS

1 medium baking potato (about 9 ounces), peeled and quartered

1 1/2 teaspoons rapid-rise yeast

3 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 cup water (warm, 105 to 115 degrees)

6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil , plus more for oiling bowl

1 3/4 teaspoons table salt

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Bring 1 quart water and potato to boil in a small saucepan over medium-high heat; cook until tender, 10 to 15 minutes. Drain and cool until potato can be handled comfortably; press through fine disk on potato ricer or grate through large holes on box grater. Measure 1 1/3 cups lightly packed potato; discard remaining potato.

2. Adjust one oven rack to highest position, other rack to lowest position; heat oven to 200 degrees. Once temperature reaches 200 degrees, maintain heat 10 minutes, then turn off heat.

3. In bowl of standing mixer or in workbowl of food processor fitted with steel blade, mix or pulse yeast, 1/2 cup flour, and 1/2 cup warm water until combined. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside until bubbly, about 20 minutes. Add 2 tablespoons olive oil, remaining 1/2 cup water, 3 cups flour, salt, and potato. If using mixer, fit with paddle attachment and mix on low speed until dough comes together. Switch to dough hook attachment and increase speed to medium; continue kneading until dough comes together and is slightly tacky, about 5 minutes. If using food processor, process until dough comes together in a ball, about 40 seconds. Dough should be slightly sticky. Transfer dough to lightly oiled medium bowl, turn to coat with oil and cover tightly with plastic wrap. Place in warm oven until dough is soft and spongy and doubled in size, 30 to 35 minutes.

4. Oil bottom of 14-inch deep-dish pizza pan with remaining 4 tablespoons olive oil. Remove dough from oven; turn onto clean, dry work surface and pat into 12-inch round. Transfer round to pan, cover with plastic wrap, and let rest until dough no longer resists shaping, about 10 minutes.

5. Line low oven rack with unglazed baking tiles or place pizza stone or rimless cookie sheet on rack and heat oven to 425 degrees. Uncover dough and pull up into edges and up sides of pan to form 1-inch-high lip. Cover with plastic wrap; let rise in warm draft-free spot until double in size, about 30 minutes. Uncover dough and prick generously with fork. Bake on preheated tiles, stone, or cookie sheet until dry and lightly browned, about 15 minutes. Add desired toppings; bake on tiles, stone, or cookie sheet until cheese melts, 10 to 15 minutes. Move pizza to top rack and bake until cheese is spotty golden brown, about 5 minutes longer. Let cool 5 minutes, then, holding pizza pan at angle with one hand, use wide spatula to slide pizza from pan to cutting board. Cut into wedges and serve.

My notes:

1. I proffed the dough outside the oven (I was baking eggplants to go on the pizza in the oven)

2. We don't have a pizza stone, so I didn't use one.

3. I used a 12 inch iron skillet as the deep dish, without preheating it and put enough oil in the pan only to coat the bottom (i didn't measure, but I'm sure it's less than 4 tablespoons) it came out perfect as far as a crunchy crust.

4. My one disappointment was that despite the fact that I created a pie shell before putting the dough in the oven (i.e. raised sides), while baking those sides fell back down and the pizza was much more like a pan pizza than a Chicago style deep dish pizza which is what I imagined it would be.

Ironic Cookies

2009-12-30T15:23:00.004-05:00

I’m really getting into this whole “doing nothing” thing. So far I’ve seen A LOT of TV, played some mindless games on the Play Station, did a bit of reading and some organizing of things around the house.
I should also get back to baking, and do something with yeast maybe… In the meantime, while I was organizing things I found a whole bunch of M&Ms that were leftover from a game that was played during my baby-shower. I decided to put them into cookies, and looked for a recipe that would work well. Inspired by Baking Bites, I thought that a chocolate cookie might work better (or at least be tastier) than a regular chocolate chip cookies. I found a good recipe for triple chocolate cookies in Cook’s Illustrated which resulted in what I called “Ironic Cookies”: The batter itself is way chocolaty and indulgent, but then, instead of good quality chocolate chips, you have the M&Ms. It’s a weird combination, but when the cookie is hot it works well since you have the crunch of the M&M shell, and then the chocolate inside is completely melted.

THICK AND CHEWY TRIPLE-CHOCOLATE COOKIES

INGREDIENTS

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (10 ounces)
1/2 cup Dutch-processed cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon table salt
16 ounces semisweet chocolate , chopped
12 ounces semisweet chocolate chips (about 2 cups)
4 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons instant coffee or espresso powder
10 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 1/4 sticks), softened
1 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar (10 1/2 ounces)
1/2 cup granulated sugar (3 1/2 ounces)

INSTRUCTIONS
1. Sift together flour, cocoa, baking powder, and salt in medium bowl; set aside.

2. Melt chocolate in medium heatproof bowl set over pan of almost-simmering water, stirring once or twice, until smooth; remove from heat. Beat eggs and vanilla lightly with fork, sprinkle coffee powder over to dissolve, and set aside.

3. In bowl of standing mixer fitted with paddle attachment, beat butter at medium speed until smooth and creamy, about 5 seconds. Beat in sugars until combined, about 45 seconds; mixture will look granular. Reduce speed to low and gradually beat in egg mixture until incorporated, about 45 seconds. Add melted chocolate and chips in steady stream and beat until combined, about 40 seconds. Scrape bottom and sides of bowl with rubber spatula. With mixer at low speed, add dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Do not overbeat. Cover with plastic wrap and let stand at room temperature until consistency is scoopable and fudgelike, about 30 minutes.

4. Meanwhile, adjust oven racks to the upper-middle and lower-middle positions and heat oven to 350 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Leaving about 1 ½ inches between each ball, scoop dough onto parchment-lined cookie sheets with 1¾-inch ice cream scoop.

5. Bake, reversing position of the baking sheets halfway through baking (from top to bottom and front to back), until edges of cookies have just begun to set but centers are still very soft, about 10 minutes. Cool cookies on sheets about 10 minutes, slide parchment with cookies onto wire racks, and cool to room temperature. Cover one baking sheet with new piece of parchment paper. Scoop remaining dough onto parchment-lined sheet, bake, and cool as directed. Remove cooled cookies from parchment with wide metal spatula and serve.

Free Time

2009-12-26T10:17:00.002-05:00

Amazingly enough... I have lots and lots of free time now.

Trying to avoid using it all flipping channels on the TV, I decided to try to delve into the TED database and see/hear some interesting talks.

I'll try to avoid posting all the interesting ones, and maybe just post a list of the ones I liked the most. However, I do want to share this one. I think both the artists and the scientists among you will like it, and I'll say right now that there's a punch line at the end, so it's worth sticking around for the entire 13 minutes.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T08:15:00.001-05:00

It hard to convey just how much Christmas has been all around us for the last couple of weeks. The closest thing I can think of is the amount of Passover hype you get in Israel. In fact, it dawned on me during Hanukah that the dissonance I’m feeling from all the Christmas hype (conveniently referred to as “The Holiday Season” to be non denominational) is probably how Arabs in Israel feel before and during Passover.

The main problem with the analogy is that unlike Christmas, Passover doesn’t have its own unique colors, scents and flavors, so the hype around Passover blunt but limited. Christmas hype is not: Not only do commercials refer to “Holiday Sales”, but also all the merchandise is suddenly either green or red, and every chain store offers things that are cinnamon and/or eggnog scented or flavored.

Another difference is the extent to which people embrace holiday symbols. Starting about two weeks ago you could already see women with tree broaches and ornament earrings. Can you really imagine anybody walking around with a necklace with a silver matza as a pendent? Maybe it’s because Christmas is a happier holiday (celebrating someone’s birthday is nicer than celebrating exile and a 40 year hiking trip) or maybe it’s because the Jewish people are just naturally more cynical (see “Shit Happens” for a comprehensive comparison of world religions).

But, just as in Thanksgiving (and during black Friday) we decided to embrace the culture around us. The problem was we were unclear as to what Jews in the US do at Christmas. A short quantitative study which included both focus groups and one-on-one interviews led us to the conclusion that Jewish tradition is to order Chinese take-out.

So that’s what we did last night. We had some friends over, ordered too much Chinese food (i.e. We’ll be eating Chinese on Christmas day, not just Christmas Eve) and enjoyed the night. We were also planning on watching Bill Maher’s Religolous (did someone say cynical?), but since one of the guests already saw it, we ended up watching someone else. Overall a fun night. A tradition we can likely embrace.

Happy Birthday Jesus!

Happy Festival of Lights

2009-12-23T22:52:00.003-05:00

Since we didn't really celebrate Hanukkah, we took the time in NYC to note the celebration of the festival of lights:

To follow up on yesterday's promise, here's some pictures from our adventures in the city:

And finally - some pictures of us, just in case you've forgotten what we look like :)

The longest post ever

2009-12-23T02:30:00.002-05:00

Being Big Apple veterans, we decided that this time we want to explore a different side of the city – the outer boroughs. The idea was prompted by an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservation where Tony visited restaurants outside of Manhattan. It all looked very yummy, like a more sophisticated and less greasy episode of Diners Drive Ins and Dives. The decision was then solidified by the fact that being in Manhattan means that we never spend enough time with our friend Boaz who lives in Queens and by the fact that our friend Eitan just moved into an apartment in Brooklyn. And last but not least – the last nail in the Manhattan coffin (or the last planet to align, for those of you who want to go with the more positive metaphor) is that we weren’t able to stay with marc and Wolly in their apartment in Manhattan, and had to opt for cheaper accommodations.

We found those accommodations on a website called AirBnB.com. The site connects between people willing to rent out their apartments or rooms in their apartment for short term stays with those looking for such accommodation. All in all pretty cool – the place was very reminiscent of what you would picture an apartment in Florentine to look like. Though staying in a stranger’s room, without them really clearing it out for you is a bit bizarre. In hind sight, we might be getting a little old for that kind of stuff, but in the whole “one last hurrah” thing, this is certainly the last time I’ll be willing to take on an adventure like that in order to save a few bucks.

I chose an apartment that was 20 minutes walk from Eitan’s place, which he told us is in a very nice part of Brooklyn. But as in every big city, 20 minutes can make a big difference. Apparently, Williamsburg Brooklyn is divided between north (nice, rich newly renovated apartments, with a lot of artists hanging out in cafés) and south (a little dingy, older apartments with a lot of ultra-orthodox Jews walking the streets). After 2 nights staying in the apartment we were in, I think I found the perfect analogy: that picking the apartment we did was like randomly picking a place to stay in Neve Tzedek in Tel-Aviv, without knowing if you’ll get one of the new rich houses or a an old man’s dump.

Living in Brooklyn meant we had whole new subway experiences – one highlight was riding on the 7, which runs above ground from Brooklyn to Queens. During the ride we got a glimpse of an entire lot (I don’t know what it actually was, maybe warehouses) that was full of super cool graffiti. It was like being in the 80s.

As far as what we actually did – well, it wasn’t all in the boroughs, and most of it wasn’t very touristy:

We went to a taping of The Daily Show (you can see the episode here)

We walked around midtown to see the festival of lights in Rockefeller Plaza and the area. This is a bit touristy, but still very pretty. The only thing that took away from our enjoyment was the fact that it was FREEZING!!! Seriously – by the time we got back home I had frost bite on my legs and taking a warm shower actually hurt!

We also spent an entire day with Eitan & Racheli in New Jersey at the IKEA and at an awful outlet mall that had so many Israelis, it was scary. This included a young couple I spotted in the Tommy Hifiger store, that had an amusing conversation about the fact that since there were handbags on sale there for $10, they would buy 10, so as to resell them in Israel.

As always, the biggest part of our trip was the food – the list is long, so you might want to take a brake:

1. Momofuku – a cool novo-Asian place, headed by a Korean chef that now has about 3 restaurants across town. We ate lunch at Momofuku Ssam, the most casual of the bunch. It was delicious. Asian flavors, but with a lot of originality and some non-Asian ingredients. The pork buns there are very well know, but we also really enjoyed the apple kimchi salad and the rice cake entrée (the combination of the two was fantastic).

2. L’Ecole – a restaurant run by students of the French Culinary Institute. Our money would have probably been better spent elsewhere, despite Eitan’s 15% discount.

3. Sachis Arepas – This is a place I found on Yelp, and I was pretty excited since I had heard of arepas a few times in the past few months, but I had no idea what good arepas tasted like. They are corn-flour based bread that are stuffed with various things (sort of like pita bread). The corn flour used is very fine, so they don’t have the rough texture that’s usually associated with corn. The restaurant fulfilled every expectation I had. It was absolutely delicious – very simple, and not very expensive, but flavorful and just yummy.

4. Sea – This is a night-club like Thai restaurant that has an atmosphere that was way too cool for us, but food that was really good and fairly priced. The fairly priced part was especially nice, because we ordered a large variety of small dishes and could really enjoy all kinds of dishes without thinking too much about it.

5. Temple Canteen – this was the place we (well, I) chose to go to from Bourdain’s show. It’s an Indian Restaurant located in the basement floor of a Hindu temple. Of course the signs caused us to walk around the block once before finally asking someone were the place is. I thought it might be a screening process or a ritual that outsiders had to do (sort of like in Buddhism one must circle mountains to become more divine). This was a surreal experience, partly because the place was virtually empty. The food was good; though I think the dosa, which I was most looking forward to, wasn’t fresh (otherwise I don’t know how to explain that it wasn’t crispy). Everything was super spicy, but good enough to be worth the heartburn.

6. Jefferson Diner – Lucky thing Uri’s cell phone fell out of his coat pocket at the IKEA. And equally lucky that we were stuck for a whole hour in the 2 miles between Mott and the entrance to the Holland Tunnel driving back to IKEA to get the cell phone before heading back to Ithaca. If it weren’t for these two things, we would have been half way to Ithaca by diner time. But since both those things did happen, we were only about an hour away from Jersey, close enough to a diner that appeared on Diners Drive-ins and Dives to detour a bit from the highway to try another place. From the outside the place looks like a million other diners (so much so that Uri and I spent several hours arguing whether we had been there before or not – I was right, we weren't). Just like many other diners, Jefferson has a super long, all over the place menu that doesn't seem too promising. BUT (notice, it’s a big but) the food was really good: Uri had a hamburger that was very juicy, while I ordered the mousaka (see it being made here) that was good in itself, but was also served with fantastic salad (I ate the salad and took the mousaka home).

And that’s it – from there we were on our way home…

Tomorrow: This post will be updated with pictures. Now I'm going to sleep.

One Last Hurrah

2009-12-21T10:30:00.003-05:00

The semester finally ended (Yey! Only one more to go!). A few weeks from now, nothing will be the same, so we decided we want to take a final vacation that’s “just us two”.

Business before pleasure – we headed from Ithaca to the Boston area to visit people down in Cranberry Land. Why make a 6.5 hour drive to say hello? Well, when looking for a job offer, it’s always good to remind people who you are, how great you were and how perfect it would be if you worked at a company full time. And it’s always easier to communicate all of those personally than via email. This is not to say that I told anybody that I came especially for that. That would seem pathetic, or at least really desperate. (It’s still TBD whether I am that desperate).

Small side-note here on the fact that the 6.5 hour drive was actually an 8 hour drive due to stormy weather conditions. And at this point in time I’d like to say that Uri is an awesome driver.

A few tales from our time in New England:

We were there all of two nights, so we stayed over at a friend’s house in Tiverton, RI. This friend, who I met over the summer, recently bought a terrific house on the shore. It was pretty amazing waking up every morning, with the sun raising and boats going back and forth in the harbor. It was like a scene from some movie.

Food wise it was a great success: The first night we had diner in Providence, RI at a place recommended on yelp called East Side Pocket. We’ll second the recommendation – very good dolmas (stuffed grape leaves), good falafel very nice atmosphere. The owner, who seemed to be Lebanese (they were Christian Arabs) recognized our Hebrew, and spoke with us a bit in Hebrew (BeTeavon and all that). Providence is really scoring high with us on the foodie scale. If anything comes through with the cranberry folk, it might just be a serious contender for a living option.

Lunch the following day was bought at a little sandwich place in the heart of cranberry land that we discovered during the summer.

The next diner was in Boston, with our friends Ashley and Dan who have a passion for food very similar to our own (Check out the link in Dan's name, it's the blog he's writing about his experiences in culinary school). We trusted them to make the decision as to where to go, and they did not disappoint. They did say though that it was a bit stressful having that weight on their shoulders. Anyway, we went to a restaurant in Chinatown that was likely one of the most authentic that I’ve been to in the US. It’s called the Gourmet Dumpling House, though they make much more than just dumplings. Some of the dishes really had that “China Flavor” that is everywhere in China. Since Dan is very adventurous with food, and Uri never says no to food, we ordered some pretty strange stuff, including fried intestines (the most Chinese tasting dish) and a spicy fish stew for which a whole live fish was fished out of a fish tank that was near us. We had dessert at a place called Finale.

Lunch the following day was in Providence too, through technically it was on the “on the way to New York City” leg of the trip. We went to a place called Louis’ Restaurant, which Uri saw on one of his favorite food shows – Diner’s Drive-ins and Dives (you can see a the clip from the show here). It was ok, nothing more nothing less. The place certainly has a lot of character, and I could see how some locals might make it their local hang-out, just because the people seem nice and the food is American-comfort food )i.e. lots of tomatoes sauce and cheese), but the food itself is nothing to write home about, so I won’t.

Tomorrow – Part 2 of our vacation – NYC like we’ve never seen it before.

Brrr

2009-12-11T07:49:00.001-05:00

I’m sitting at a local café called Mate Factor. Interesting group of people that I haven’t completely made my mind up about. I’m here supposedly studying for my final final. Subject: Macroeconomics and International trade.

I don’t know if it’s the subject matter, the pregnancy, the hour or what but it seems I’ve completely lost my ability to concentrate on studying for more than 30 minutes. It’s a good thing there is no free-wi-fi here, otherwise I wouldn’t have studied at all. As it is, I’m just getting around to writing a post.

Events from the past week:

(1) Winter has finally arrived. It started with a snowstorm the night between Monday and Tuesday. We woke up on Tuesday to a totally white Ithaca. However the snow melted pretty quickly because Tuesday wasn’t actually that cold. Then today, the cold arrived.

It’s amazing how I managed to forget just how cold it can actually get here. I guess it’s sort of like how women forget how painful labor was.

(2) Sunday a few friends at school through me a baby shower. It was actually a pretty big event, as showers go apparently – about 30 girls in all. It was really fun, getting everyone together, getting gifts… I didn’t realize before hand, but apparently part of the whole shower tradition is that is thrown by friends of the mother to be in honor of the woman, so she is not expected to do anything of it. In fact, it is often thrown as a surprise party. That “don’t be involved” part was a bit strange for me. I have a hard time with people doing that type of stuff for me without me helping at all. I finally convinced the organizers to let Uri make muffins, and, unknown to them, I helped him out. (pictures will be uploaded at a later time)

Events for next week:

We’re heading out of Ithaca for the week. First we’ll head to Boston, mainly so that I could have a chance to meet with some people at Ocean Spray (if any of you have forgotten, I am looking for a job for post-graduation). Then we’ll head down to NYC to visit friends, eat in some good restaurants and just generally be in a city with more than 1 high-raise.

After that we’ll head back to Ithaca and we’ll be here pretty much the entire time. I hope I’ll be able to bring myself to leave the house when in get cold.

Thanksgiving, belated

2009-12-05T00:16:00.003-05:00

Procrastinating as usual, I put off writing a post during Thanksgiving day. I told myself that I might as well let the whole weekend pass and then put something up that covers the whole 3 days. Sure enough, I not only let the entire weekend pass, but also the entire week that followed.

Some of you might remember last year’s Thanksgiving post. It was already snowing outside and we attempted to host a Thanksgiving dinner. Uri made a beautiful big bird, as well as a ton of other food. We invited people over, but in the end almost no one came. It turned out that “Thanksgiving Dinner” is actually Thanksgiving lunch, and that if you invite people over for 6 pm, they’ll all cancel because that’s just about the time they pass out due to the enormous amounts of food they ate.

This year we decided, in the spirit of the holiday, to see how the natives do it. We accepted an invitation extended by some friends. Uri still made the bird (again it came out beautiful and delicious – thank you Alton Brown). Tamar made a cranberry coffee cake with rosemary strusel, a variation on a blueberry coffee cake from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking from my home to yours (recipe at the end).

It was a very nice and international meal. The hosts were the only Americans. Guests included: 3 Cambodians, 3 French people , 3 Japanese people and 3 Israelis.

Why 3 you ask? Well… because Eitan was here! Last time Eitan was here, Uri and him got a little crazy in the kitchen. This time, they got a little crazy in the living-room, spending a ridiculous amount of time playing with the Playstation. By the end even Uri admitted that it was a bit like being 16 and having a sleepover. All in all it was a very fun weekend.

Now, a week later, I'm done with classes, I have one final and a few papers and then - that's it! The semester will be done, and I'll be free to nest (and blog).

Last but not least - as promised, the recipe for the coffee cake

Cranberry crumb cake

Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From my home to yours

For the crumbs:

5 tbsp unsalted butter at room temp

1/4 cup sugar

1/3 cup light brown sugar (packed)

1/3 cup all purpose flour

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1 tsp chopped rosemary (my addition)

For the cake:

3 tps cranberry sauce (originall:1 pint (2 cups) blueberries (preferably fresh, or frozen, not thawed))

2 cups plus 2 tsp all purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

1/8 tsp freshly ground nutmeg

2/3 cup sugar

grated zest of 1/2 lemon or 1/4 orange

3/4 stick (6 tbsp) unsalted butter at room temp

2 large eggs, at room temp

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 cup buttermilk

preheat oven to 350. butter an 8-inch square pan and put it on a baking sheet.to make the crumbs: put all the ingredients except the nuts in a food processor and pulse, then add nuts and pulse again just until the mixture forms clumps and curds and holds together when pressed. piece of plastic wrap against the surface. refrigerate until needed. (covered well the crumb mix can be refrigerated for up to 3 days.)

to make the cake: whisk together the remaining 2 cups flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg.

working in the bowl of a stand mixer or in another large bowl, rub the sugar and zest together with your fingertips until the sugar is moist and aromatic ( I didn’t do this). add the butter and, with the paddle or whisk attachment, or with a hand mixer, beat the sugar with the butter at medium speed until light, about 3 minutes. add the eggs one by one, beating for about 1 minute after each addition, then beat in the vanilla extract. don’t be concerned if the batter looks curdled — it will soon smooth out. reduce the mixer speed to low and add the flour mixture and the buttermilk alternately, the flour in 3 parts and the buttermilk in 2 (begin and end with the dry ingredients.) you will have a thick, creamy batter. If using berries: with a rubber spatula, gently stir in the berries.

scrape the batter into the buttered pan and smooth the top gently with the spatula. Dollop cranberry sauce on batter and, using a sharp knife of toothpick, make swirls in batter. pull the crumb mix from the fridge and, with your fingertips, break it into pieces. there’s no need to try to get even pieces — these are crumbs, they’re supposed to be lumpy and bumpy and every shape and size. scatter the crumbs over the batter, pressing them down ever so slightly.

bake for 55 to 65 minutes, or until the crumbs are golden and a thin knife inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. transfer the cake to a rack and cool just until it is warm or until it reaches room temperature.

General Sillines

2009-11-21T23:00:00.005-05:00

If you’ve been missing Uri’s shenanigans, here’s a taste of Uri in top form:

Note his infamous “Blue Steel” (right) as well as the less appreciate “Magnum” (bottom, left). The hat was a gift from our friends Yuval and Bella (Thank you Nusses). They also sent us Shemo’s new book. I hope I’ll have some pictures to show that soon ;)

Also, I’ve uploaded here our current go-to pick me up:

A Reece’s Moose that I picked up at the drug store. For those of you who remember our mascot from China, Moose, you know that we have an affinity to these animals, specifically when they are plush, stuffed and shorter than 12 inches. So here it is – prepared to be marginally amused:

Ode to My Dad

2009-11-16T20:20:00.003-05:00

Strange, but true – one of the strongest memories I have of my childhood is of my dad eating breakfast. He would take 2 different yogurt flavors, and pour one into the other, creating a pretty collage. Then he would pour in cereal and mix it all up with his spoon, but his spoon motions were up and down instead of round, figure 8 motions that most people make while mixing.

I wonder why I remember it with such detail. Maybe it’s because they were so constant and so often, it was almost ritualistic.

A few days back, for whatever reason, I recalled my dad’s ritual when it was actually relevant – in the morning when I took my yogurt. I love how evoking such a memory can make a simple breakfast to much more than it actually was.

Every pot has its cover

2009-11-09T01:06:00.002-05:00

Dear friends and family
Usually I let my wife use this form of communication, but I decided to give it a try.
For the first time in A couple of years I have a routine for each day of the week. I know exactly what I'll do and when I'll do it. It is an unusual feeling for me, though it is going to be short lived experience with the baby and all :-)Most of you know that this year I started teaching. All together it's going pretty well. The fact that I don't have to prepare them for a test at the end of the school is a blessing in that it gives me a lot of freedom to teach almost any relevant material that I find interesting. The flip side is that some students don't have any motivation to study since not all of them are curious enough. But overall, those who are interested make it worth while.

The were also two other things I was thinking of sharing with you: First of all. I saw the new Cohen Brothers movie. It is the most Jewish and the most weird movie I have ever seen. I cannot recommend it, although, if any of you are going to see it, I can say that it is a very unique experience. Please let me know what you thought. The second thing goes to a well known fact about me - that I love to cook In big quantities. Despite the fact that over the years it has been somewhat exaggerated, it is mostly true. The nice thing is that now that I'm cooking for others on a regular basis, I have the perfect excuse with cooking for other people. That gave me another excuse to do something else I love to do: I bought a new big pot. I haven't used it yet, but I am excited to try (it also has other uses as well).
This is the end of my experiment,and I hope you enjoyed it
uri

What would you do?

2009-11-01T08:16:00.011-05:00

My Consumer Behavior class has become in and of itself an experiment in consumer behavior. About a week and a half ago the most interesting experiment took place: The professor came into class and announced that given that he thinks the majority of our final project proposals are weak and boring, he is giving us another option for a final project which involves analysis rather than research. In his mind, this second alternative better plays to our strengths as MBA students. The problem was this: that same day was the first of two possible dates to submit the first part of the original project. Moreover, in giving the new, easier alternative, he also changed the criteria for the grading of the original project: before that project’s grade was divided between 3 “mini projects”, now, the entire grade rests on the final paper submitted.
So what do you think? Put yourself in the following situation and tell me what you would have done: Your team decided to submit the first paper on that day. During the past week each of you worked 5-8 hours on researching and writing the paper. When you come to class you find out that (a) you now have an easier option, (b) the work that you did do (that you now the professor prejudges as is poor) will not count towards your grade and (c) there is part of the class that did not do that work yet and given the new option might not have to do it.

If you are an MBA student in the US, I’m sure that it’s clear to you that the answer is 3. I’ve actually seen this happen on several occasions – something related to a project is changed in a manner that makes the project easier for everyone, and those that already put in work get pissed off, completely ignoring the fact that they can benefit from the change as well.
My initial reaction was to raise a question as to the general emotion of social solidarity among my classmates. If everyone were to choose the new option those who had already handed in the first paper in the original project had a sunk cost while other didn’t. That difference was so outrageous to those who did the work that they were willing to give up the benefit of the new option, thereby putting everyone at a disadvantage.
But there is another interesting question in this scenario, even if you don’t consider the relationship between the individual and the group – the fact that to the people who had done the initial work, the sunk cost seemed so much greater than the benefit they might get from switching to the new option. On this topic, I actually found somewhat related research done by On Amir and Dan Ariely, published in the Journal of Marketing Research (Feb 2007). Their research showed that when a rule based decision mechanism is triggered a person is more likely to make an illogical decision rather than break the rule.
The researched focused on money as a cue for triggering such rule based decision mechanism, and actually showed that effort (in their study, a longer drive) does not trigger it. However, I think that this study still is relevant here. My working theory right now is that for American MBA students, there is a rule of fairness which dictates that hard work should be rewarded while slacking off is should be punished. The events in class triggered that rule and made them irrationally prefer continuing with the original project rather than choose the second option, forsaking their own benefit from switching and completely disregarding the implication to others.
It’s a working theory, still not worded perfectly, and I still this that last part (disregarding the implication to others) is a cultural thing has to do with social solidarity. I wonder what Ariely and Amir (both Israeli Professors at American MBA programs) would think.

PS - when putting in links for this blog, I noticed that this month's JMR has an article written by 2 of my professors, one of them the professor of the aforementioned CB class.

Oh - and another think, the link to Dan Ariely is a to the TED website. he has 2 talks there, both very interesting, neither very long.

Dinner Delight

2009-10-28T19:53:00.003-04:00

I have exciting news to report to you live:

I just found mold on some rolls Uri bought a week and a half ago!

Isn't that great?!? Bread that's actually natural enough that bacteria found it attractive!

Not that I actually ate it.. I'm going to stick with my fabulous 45 calories a slice Pepperidge Farm Light (Extra fiber is my fav). But it's exciting to know that real bread is available, especially in roll form, any rolls we bought thus far have lasted over a month with no mold in sight.

Weird Science

2009-10-26T22:04:00.000-04:00

Baked good for the weekend: Apple cake from various apples I still had that I bought at the Ithaca Apple harvest Festival using the recipe for the apple cake in Sheshet.

Pregnancy observation for the weekend: My belly button has become huge – as in its opened up like a big cavern. Super strange!

Other strange pregnancy matters: I find that an increasing number of people are asking me “how are you feeling” with a somewhat over sympathetic voice. As though there is something more than “fine” that you can say to a person you hardly know that you are quickly passing in the hallway. Actually it takes me longer than the whole interaction to process that their referencing the pregnancy.

In general, I’ve been finding that my life hasn’t really changed. At least not in the usual ways – I’m eating less, exercising more, sleeping the same (well, maybe a little more). The hectic life at school doesn’t let me focus on the pregnancy too much – for good and bad. Thus, the fact that my body is physically changing is really weird and detached from anything else in my life.

When you pause to think about it, the fact that I’m growing a life in me is super bizarre. I mean, what else have I ever grown in my life? I’ve successfully killed 2 gold fish, and over a dozen plants. And, just so you don’t misunderstand me: It’s not that I’m complaining that I’m inept for this pregnancy. It’s just an observation that I’ve never had any urge or interest in growing anything, but here I am so fascinated with the growing life inside of me. Indeed, it our modern society we’re so disconnected from the origin of anything. All manufacturing starts out in a land far far away. So it’s surprising that something that happens so frequently as childbirth is still, in part, done in a manner that’s so un-facilitated.

Weird Jello

2009-10-24T00:01:00.003-04:00

Just so you know that I haven’t broken my baking promise in the few weeks I haven’t blogged:

This is my mom’s recipe for roses, but instead of meringue with vanilla pudding mix, it’s homemade chocolate creme anglais (aka fancy pudding). I would have actually liked it o be exactly like my mom’s roses, but the two times I tried making the filing, the meringue completely fell as soon as I put in the pudding mix. I assume it’s something in the Jello mix, but I don’t know what it is. If anyone has a clue, please tell me. Anyway, the result of trying to make meringue twice was a whole lot of egg yolks, so that sort of lent itself to making pudding as a filling.

Here’s the recipe for the dough – in terms only Israelis can understand:
1 small package self rising flour
200 g butter
1 unit sour cream (or Eshel)
Combine all the ingredients in a food processor using the metal blade. Form into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap and let sit in refrigerator overnight.
I’ve actually been having some rather deep thought s lately about American culture, cultural relativism and social solidarity, but I’ll leave those for other days. Meanwhile, and interesting take on consumerism and relative wealth , for those of you willing to spare 16 minutes.

I'm not fat

2009-09-25T21:49:00.002-04:00

It’s not that I was purposefully trying not to mention it. Well… maybe I was. But I was afraid that maybe I’d forgotten to tell someone, and that this would be the first place someone would read about it. But now, first of all it’s physically evident (sort of), and moreover, it’s just the context of more and more stories. So if I did forget to tell someone, I’m sorry but you should know that I’m not fat, I’m pregnant; 23 weeks pregnant, to be exact.

That is the reason that I’ve taken a ridiculous amount of courses this semester, which is the reason that I’m completely overloaded with schoolwork. And that is the reason that I’ve neglected to write for quite some time.

So what’s up? Uri is in Israel. I think he’s having lots of fun… that’s what he says. It actually sounds like it’s one of his better trips to Israel. I’m trying to franticly make up for spending a weekend in NYC (ie, not doing enough schoolwork during the weekend). I’m also trying to constantly remind myself to dedicate time to finding a job. And the pregnancy? I sort of feel like I’m neglecting it.. I mean, I think I’m OK, sort of like women that have already had children are. But I imagine that most first timers dedicate a lot more time to reading up on things. Oh well… My latest pregnancy story is that last night I went to the supermarket at around midnight to by some antacid, because I had run out and I felt as though I wanted to rip my throat out. Good thing too, because I had a lot of other things I needed to buy (milk, bread), and I’d been putting off getting those… HA.

Soft and Chewy Brownies

2009-09-06T11:01:00.005-04:00

For a while now (over a year), I’ve been signed up to be one of America’s Test Kitchen Recipe testers. This means that they send me recipes to make and then I need to fill out a survey on how the process and the end result were. In all this time I think I only made 2 recipes (and it might even be only one). Last week I got a recipe for brownies. Given my new pledge to bake once a week I saw an opportunity. You see – this is what I’m in business school for, to learn to recognize opportunities!

Since it’s a test recipe, I can’t give a link for it, so here it is in full:

Soft and Chewy Brownies

Our goal was to create a soft, delicious, homemade brownie with chocolaty flavor and chewy texture.

Makes twenty-four 2-inch brownies

Note: For the chewiest texture, it is important to let the brownies cool thoroughly before cutting. If baking the brownies in a glass baking dish, to prevent them from over-cooking remove them from the pan after they have cooled for 10 minutes. While any high-quality chocolate can be used in this recipe, our preferred brand of bittersweet chocolate is Callebaut Intense Dark Chocolate, L-60-40NV and our preferred brand of unsweetened chocolate is Scharffen Berger.

1/3 cup Dutch process cocoa
1 1/2 teaspoons instant espresso or coffee powder (optional)
½ cup plus 2 tablespoons boiling water
3 ounces unsweetened chocolate, very finely chopped (see note)
½ cup vegetable oil
2 large eggs
3 large egg yolks
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 ½ cups (17 ½ ounces) sugar
1 3/4 cups (8 ¾ ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon table salt
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, cut into ½-inch pieces

1. Adjust oven rack to lowest position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Cut 18-inch length foil and fold lengthwise to 8-inch width. Fit foil into length of 13- by 9-inch baking pan, pushing it into corners and up sides of pan; allow excess to overhang pan edges. Cut 14-inch length foil and fit into width of pan in the same manner, perpendicular to the first sheet (if using extra-wide foil, fold second sheet lengthwise to 12-inch width). Spray foil-lined pan with nonstick cooking spray.

2. Whisk cocoa, espresso powder (if using), and boiling water together in large bowl until smooth. Add unsweetened chocolate to mixture and whisk until chocolate is melted. Whisk in oil. (Mixture may look curdled.) Add eggs, egg yolks, and vanilla and continue to whisk until smooth and homogenous. Whisk in sugar until fully incorporated. Add flour and salt and mix with a rubber spatula until combined. Fold in bittersweet chocolate pieces.

3. Scrape batter into prepared pan and bake until toothpick inserted halfway between edge and center comes out with just few moist crumbs attached, 30 to 35 minutes. Transfer pan to wire rack and cool for 1 ½ hours.

4. Using foil overhang, lift brownies from pan. Return brownies to wire rack and let cool completely, about 1 hour. Cut into 2-inch squares and serve.

They ask not to change the recipe, so despite really wanting to substitute some of the sugar with brown sugar, I made the recipe as is. There was one thing that I had to change – I added some white chocolate pieces as well. Also, I didn’t use the ultra-expensive brands they recommend. For the unsweetened chocolate I used Baker’s chocolate, and for the dark chocolate I mixed between Baker’s semi-sweet and Hershey’s new Fine Dark chocolate. I know the latter sounds kind of strange – me using Hershey?!? I mean, in Israel I refused to by Elite, and here I am baking with Hershey’s. But they’ve actually come out now with a series of fine chocolates that are actually pretty good and are very reasonably priced, so they might just become my go-to chocolate.

The cake is out of the oven. It baked 40 minutes. I tasted an edge and it was super chocolaty. It’s a rather adult brownie, because it’s not overly sweet, like a dark chocolate version of a kid dessert. Below are pictures, they aren’t that good, I’ll probably be able to take better pictures after they cool down and I cut them, but I could wait to upload this post.

BTW – the pics were taken using our new Sony Cyber Shot. It’s the same camera Uri used to take pictures in Mexico. While both Uri and the camera made it back safely, the USB cable that connects the camera to the computer did not. And since Sony has to be so different, its USB cable is unique only to its camera’s and so costs $20 to replace. So, marking a year in the USA and the deepening our assimilation, I went on eBay and placed a bid for a cable (there is cost $4). The cable arrived last week, and what do you know – it actually works!

Weekly recap

2009-09-05T09:08:00.003-04:00

Back to school it is – And back to not finding time for the little things. So now I’m back to recapping a whole week’s worth of events.

Friday I actually made my goal of baking one a week. I made another Dorie Greenspan recipe. This time it was biscotti. I opted for “tropical biscotti” changing her recipe a bit to by swapping the almond essence with Tahitian vanilla and the almonds with a blend of dried fruit, coconut and pistachio. The recipe lends itself to American biscotti, which are cut rather thick and not the slender fine biscotti that I made before. It was fine by me, because the thick biscotti are much easier to make. In the picture, I completed the tropical thing by making some chai Thai tea. I frothed the milk with my handy Bodum frother :).

On Saturday we attended the Israeli Student’s Association’s annual start of year BBQ. It was a nice event, a lot of good food, a lot of new people. Most importantly though we held elections for officers and so I am no longer the president. Woohoo!

After that – school officially started, and I quickly realized that the real problem with taking as many courses as I’m taking is the amount of reading that I have to do during the week, complicated by the fact that I don’t have too much time to do the reading during the week because I’m in class. Here are the courses I’m taking: Consumer Behavior, Services Marketing, Macroeconomics, Cases in Business Strategy, Financial Statement Analysis and Managerial Spreadsheet Modeling. I got tiered just writing all that down.

Uri had a busy week too. He did a lot of prep work for Saturday’s BBQ, and as usual took charge of all the actual BBQ-ing for everyone while we were there. Then on Tuesday we invited people for dinner which was planned as a pot-luck, but ended up being Uri cooking for everyone, last but in no way least, he was hired to cater an event for 80 people. The event is today (Saturday) but since it’s in the synagogue, it has to be kosher, so Uri had to finish cooking by Friday night. He worked all of Thursday and Friday (well his version of “all of Thursday”, meaning he started at 1 pm and worked until 10 pm). The end result was a huge amount of food, hopefully enough (I really don’t know what enough food for 80 Americans looks like). I’ll report back with the client’s feedback next time.

Not naked on my first day of school

2009-08-28T15:45:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was the first day of school. In some way, it’s nice to be back. I had two classes that seemed to be very interesting – Consumer Behavior and Integrated Marketing Communication, and a third class – Financial statement Analysis, that wasn’t as scary as I was afraid it would be. So all together, it was a very good day. The real test will be the end of next week, seeing how I deal with a whole week’s worth of classes. I really packed my schedule this semester, and right now it seems like it’s going to be alright, because the classes seem interesting, but we’ll see if that’s true or not next week. This was what my Outlook looks like so far:

It was also nice to see everyone, and hear how people spent their summer. It was a bit weird not having the 2nd years there, and alternatively having all the 1st years there, a whole bunch of unfamiliar faces that suddenly “took over” the school.

More updates soon,

Me.

PS – for those of you who aren’t food buffs, the picture from the last blog is the pasta leaves that we hung to dry in our kitchen. Since I haven’t complained about our house in a while, I’ll remind everyone that we have pipes throughout the house (for fire safety reasons). They add that final touch on the house feeling like a bunker. So an added perk to our pasta making was that we were finally able to put them to good use.

Last days of summer vacation

2009-08-24T09:14:00.003-04:00

Without school, life in Ithaca has been pretty boring. I love it. School starts Thursday and so I looked forward in the public folder in the school’s event’s calendar – wow, it’s really full. I almost forgot how fast paced things are. So I’m enjoying every second of these last slow-paced days. Whenever the subject of school and my second year came during the summer, I said that I feel that this year I have thing much more in perspective, and that I think I’ll be able to priorities better, I’ll be calmer about things etc. But looking at all the events that start as soon as we get back, I remembered it’s easier said than done.

In the last few days we did do quite a bit of cooking. We invited some new Israeli neighbors for dinner on Monday and made home-made pasta. We finally made a pasta that I’ve been wanting to make ever since Uri’s cousin Talya came back from a trip to Italy. She told us of this little place where they ate pasta that the dough itself was packed with ground black pepper. Doesn’t that sound good? Whenever I thought of making it, I could really envision the dish, which is something that never happened o me with something that isn’t a dessert. In my mind it was the fresh pasta with a really light and fresh tomato sauce, one without many flavors, so that the flavor of the pepper from the pasta would come through. What a perfect summer dish, since tomato is a summer fruit! Well… not in Ithaca… despite the fact that it’s summer it’s impossible to get really good tomatoes, so I used canned whole tomatoes which a puréed and then put through a sieve. Side note: I put the residue that didn’t go through the sieve in cheese puffs (buyakos, page 66, The blue Sheshet ). The end result wasn’t exactly what I had in mind – we put the pasta in the sauce, and it drank the sauce up super quickly. Next time (I hope there is a next time) I’m going to ladle the sauce either over or under the pasta in each dish.

I don’t remember what happened Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, but Saturday was a very eventful day. Cornell had something called the “Dump and Run”. It’s basically a huge yard sale of things people left in their on-campus housing units. Most of it is junk, since most of it belongs to undergrads. Adding to the junk effect is the fact they really put anything in the sale – thinks like half used cleaning supplies, or Mardi Gras beads (I’m pretty sure the latter is the leader in the junk category, though I’m equally sure that there are people who actually buy them). Anyway, it’s become a really popular event which means a huge line to get in. I came first thing in the morning, and still stood an hour in line. Was it worth it? Well you judge – I bought 3 really good winter coats (a new one costs $250 and up), 2 cute winter hats, a sweatshirt and a kitchen rug for, all for a total of $32. Later in the day Uri and I made dolmas (stuffed grape vine leaves). When I said “Uri and I” it’s because ewe both rolled them, Uri is the one that actually made the rice blend to go in, so he should get the real credit for how delicious they came out. It’s not hard to get dolmas here, but all of them are from the lemony – loose rice variety and not the sweeter, gooey-er variety that I like. I think my favorite are the ones that are sold in the Iraqi counter in Dizingoff center’s farmers market), Uri’s didn’t come out as sweet as these, which is probably better because they’re gooeyness is probably 50% attributed to the amount of oil she puts in them, but they did come out great – just the right amount of sweet that makes you savor each bite, but doesn’t make you feel like you’ve gotten to the dessert course. Oh – as I typed that last sentence I remembered another really good dolma, and since I already mentioned Talya in this post, I’ll also mention that Talya’s mother in law (aka Ido’s mother) also makes really good, sweet and gooey dolmas (also sweeter and gooey-er than ours).

Yesterday, we went to dinner at Dafna’s house. Not that we need a reason to get together, but the excuse was that our friend Amit, who will be spending this semester big the Big Apple came up to Ithaca for a week. I made another desert from Dorie’s book – chocolate mini-bundt cake. They didn’t come out that good. I mean, they were fine, but nothing to write home about, and since half didn’t come out of the pan properly, nothing to send a picture home about either. Dafna and the majority of the people she invited for dinner are vegetarian. So the dinner was a vegetarian meal. Since I was the one that planned and prepared most of Tuesday’s dinner, it was vegetarian as well. This means that Uri ate 2 non-meat dinners in one week! I think this is the universe’s way of balancing out the atrocity that was our diet during the road trip.

As for today – both Uri and I have back-to school things we need to get done. So that’s what we’ll do. For me, it’s mainly bureaucracy stuff, but Uri actually has to study up since he’s starting to teach next week. It’s his first time really sitting down and “cramming” since before he graduated – so he’s a bit out of practice. Wish him back, and I’ll report later if it helped or not.

Wednesdays with Dorie

2009-08-20T14:29:00.002-04:00

Have you ever had one of those days where you don’t really feel the need or have the desire to leave the house? I had one of those yesterday. I know that TV and movies usually associate that with being depressed. Trust me, that was not the case. It was more that having been out of the house for so long, it was just nice to stay indoors. Also, I just really had no reason to leave. Around 4 pm that reason finally came. I had to go out to buy heavy cream. Everybody is starting to come back to town before school starts, and Dani (who goes to the business school with me) and Yael (formarly his girlfriend and currently his wife) came back from Colorado, where Dani did his internship. So we had them over for dinner. It was nice seeing them again and catching up.

The dinner itself was great – Uri made roast beef from a sirloin roast that he marinated a bit in olive oil and mustard. As a side we had corn on the cob, a big green salad and some garlicky oven fries. To the cooks out there, especially those who are married to people who love fries, I recommend this recipe (You can find it, with pictures here). They came out really great, despite the fact that mid-way in making them the garlic press broke. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with the fries, I think it has more to do with Eitan using it garlic press as a lobster hammer a while ago.

Small note: The recipe in the link is a bit different from the original (did someone say scared of copyright?).

1. The original recipe called for 6 cloves of garlic, not 8,

2. You can use vegetable oil, it really does not have to be olive oil.

3. Originally it was 2 tbsp of cornstarch, not 3

For dessert, Uri said he wanted something chocolaty. I was feeling a bit more decadent then a simple chocolate cake, so I made a “Tart Noir” from Baking by Dorie Greenspan, or simply put a made a chocolate tart with a chocolate base.

Making chocolate pie dough is something that I’ve done may times, and so I’ve had enough experience to develop the opinion that the extra effort of chilling the raw dough and then rolling it out rather then quickly pushing it to the corners of the tart pan does actually give you superior results in the texture of the dough in the finished pie. Despite this, I decided to follow Dorie’s recipe to the letter, and go with the shortcut. My reasoning? Well Dorie has a huge following; there are dozens of food bloggers who make her recipe on a weekly basis. Here for instance, you’ll find a post about the week they made her chocolate cream pie (not the same as the one I made, though the pie dough is the same). So I wanted to see – maybe there was something in her recipe that would change my mind. The tart came out very good (and pretty), though I put a bit too much salt in the dough (oops). As for the dough itself – Dorie did not make me a believer. The dough was crumbly instead of flakey, and was much thicker than it would have been had I rolled it out. I will say though that it took me under 30 minutes of actually prep time from start to finish (pie dough and filling)– so at least there’s that.

Recipe?

The dough you have in the link (here it is again), the filling is as follows:

8 ounces of good chocolate

250 ml of heavy cream

4 tbsp of butter

Chop the chocolate, heat the cream, pour half of the hot cream over the chocolate, stir until all melted, and then pour the other half. Stir in the butter a bit at a time, stir until smooth and lovely. Pour in the chilled pie shell, refrigerate. Take out 30 minutes before serving.

Is it really new to you that we’re a bit weird?

2009-08-19T11:45:00.004-04:00

For our last day in Toronto we did a bit of sightseeing in downtown Toronto, mainly in the ”Old York” part of town. It was a more pleasant day, so we were in a better mood for sightseeing, which means I should have had more pictures to share, but unfortunately I left the camera’s memory card in my laptop. But you could always search Google Images, or Picasa or Flikr for someone else’s pictures. I especially recommend looking for a picture of the Hockey Hall of Fame, which ironically is located in a very ornate heavy set building.

We also, of course, went to the St. Lawrance Food Market were we tried a Canadian type of ham called Peameal Bacon. For lunch, since we were trying to complete the diversity/ multi-cultural Toronto thing, we went to an Ethiopian restaurant - the Ethiopian House, that was very good.

After that it was home sweet home – well sort off, we started the drive back home, crossing the border at Niagara Falls. We decided not to stop, since we had been there 3 years ago, though it was neat to see the bridge where we stood that time, on the US side, from the Canadian side.

By dinner time we were in the Rochester area. Since we needed to eat, and also do some shopping to re-stock the refrigerator, we decided to stop at Wegmans. But not just any Wegmans, THE Wegmans, the Wegmans in Pittsford aka Super Wegmans . Yes I know – this sounds silly, we made a pilgrimage to Wegmans. It is kind of silly, but we thought it was funny, and as long as we can amuse ourselves with such trivial things, I think we’re in a good place.

Anyway, if you refuse to take part in the silliness you can skip this paragraph, because I do have to talk about how impressive this store is. It's not just that it’s bigger and has more variety than the one in Ithaca, because that’s not really that impressive. What really got us was the size of the “Market Café”, which among other things, includes a sit down bar where they prepare food a la carte. They also have a tea room and a fine dining restaurant next door. Crazy. Ah... Wegmans, what would we do without you?

BTW – in the pictures, note Uri looking super cool with his new hat.

It's a small world after all

2009-08-18T09:03:00.009-04:00

Toronto – it seems like a great city, probably worth more than a day and a half… maybe we’ll come back some day... maybe. Yesterday was an incredibly hot day, so we didn’t do that much. We attempted to walk the city a bit, walking around an area known as Cabbagetown.

Cabbagetown factoids:

1. It has the largest continuous area of preserved Victorian housing in North America

2. It got its name because it’s original dwellers were Irish and they grew cabbage in their backyards (from this you understand that one of the historic features is that all the houses actually have backyards)

3. Nowadays even the small houses sell for over a million dollars.

4. Parking is free except from midnight to 7am.

We started our tour by eating lunch at an Indian restaurant that claims to be South Indian and Sri Lankan. In was very good, Uri actually says it’s one of the best he’s ever eaten. Then we headed out walking through the hood. We actually cut the tour a little short because the heat was pretty unbearable, or at least, it just didn’t make the touring all that fun. Just as we were about to give out, we saw a little truck go by, ringing a bell – no it was not an ice-cream truck, it was a guy offering knife sharpening services. I was very amused, and so was a little old lady that was walking just behind us. The truck struck a conversation between us and when she found out we were tourists, she offered us to take us to “a little hidden corner near by”. She was the one who told us the origin of the name and about the gardens (though Uri thought of the Irish thing himself). I actually thought she would show us a hidden garden, but that wasn’t the case. Oh well… anyway, she was very nice, and the street she showed us (that was marked on the lonely plant tour we were using) was cute as well. It turns out that she spent 13 years in Ithaca, teaching in Cornell (is everybody hearing the music to Disney’s “It’s a small world” now?).

After meeting her we decided to do the smart thing and go indoors, we went to see a movie. Sorry Toronto, the AC calls. Oh – and no criticisms from museum goers, we weren’t in the mood (we hardly ever are). We saw Julie and Julia, which I whole heartedly recommend everyone see when it comes out on DVD. We had to wait about an hour for the movie to begin, so we walked around the mall. Uri bought himself a hat in H&M, so there’s a chance he might become a hat person now. Also, I noticed two interesting shops:

Yes! It’s Fox and the Super-Pharm from Israel. I had actually seen the Super-Pharm all over Toronto, and didn’t know if it was the same one as in Israel, but since we had time to kill, I went in and saw that their private label brand is called Life – so it is the same chain! I know Fox is originally Israeli, but I suspect that the Super-Pharm is originally Canadian, since that explains much better why the logo has an S in it. Do you think that the fact that I’m excited about this means I miss Israel? Or does it mean that I’m becoming one of those strange Americans that loves all things Israel without any judgment? Can we chalk it up to me being interested in brands, and just say it’s a professional interest?

Oh – apropos Israel, you remember I mentioned Anthony Bourdain here a few of times? I recently subscribed to his blog. I read a post yesterday about Thailand, and thought it might be nice to add a comment about the papaya salad guy in the night market in Chiang Mai. When the other comments, I saw that there were two people (both clearly American by their name) that recommended he go to Israel. They were doing it in a rather annoying way, complaining that he had gone to other Middle Eastern countries but not Israel. But they are so right – it’s been my one thought since the very first No Reservations I saw (which was on Egypt). So I used the opportunity to explain why he should come to Israel. It came out as a little manifesto, since apparently I can’t write anything short, you can read it here (comment 34). I hope someone actually reads those things. It would be so cool if Uri and I could take him to Israel!

Oh Canada

2009-08-16T23:07:00.012-04:00

We’ve been in Canada for a day and a half now. And it seems like most of the time we’ve been driving. To our surprise (or not) it is noticeably different from the US, mainly in that we really feel that there are less people. Also, there’s a lot less billboards on the highways, there are less major highways and chian-type fast food are further apart. The last undoubtedly has to do with the fact that we spent most of our time in “the country”, areas where the biggest town has a population of 5,500, but still, in the US there’s a McDonalds even in towns of 300, or at least it seems that way.

Yesterday after crossing the border, we just drove to get as close as possible to our next destination – Manitoulin Island, the world’s largest sweet-water island. The drive was actually quite beautiful, afterwards I actually read somewhere that the stretch of road heading towards the island is considered to be one of the most beautiful in Ontario. Had I known that, maybe I would have taken pictures, as it was I assumed the same landscape would continue. Sorry.

Today we did some hiking on the island, namely the “Cup and Saucer Trail” (I still can’t figure out why that’s the trail’s name). It was a lot of fun, and confronted us both with our slight 9and very sane) fear of heights.

It turns out that to get off the island in the direction we wanted to go, there is a ferry that runs only 4 times a day and takes 1.75 hours, that pretty much set the rest of our schedule for the day too. The cruise was nice as well, I say cruise because that’s the only way that I can rationalize the ridiculous amount of money that we had to spend on it. It’s pretty crazy how big these bodies of water are. There was about 30 minutes during the cruise where we could not see land on any side.

After getting off the ferry, we continued on. I say we all the time, but I do want to give credit to Uri who did all the driving today. I emphasize this now because, as I said, no major highways, not much happening on the sides of the road – it was a pretty boring drive. Again, given the ferry schedule, we decide to skip hiking in the Bruce Peninsula – though if any of you are planning a trip to Canada any time soon, it is supposed to be very beautiful. We headed straight for Toronto. Once again, we booked a room through Hotwire, providing us a great deal, though this time we’re not as centrally located (upside: we get to save on parking too). I think Toronto, like Chicago, will mainly have culinary highlights with a theme of celebrating the city’s ethnic diversity. We already started tonight with a fantastic dinner at a Persian restaurant. Mmmm.

Michigan is long

2009-08-15T10:22:00.004-04:00

To counter yesterday’s long post, and also since it’s the Sabbath and you’re not supposed to be reading anyway, today’s post will be very short.

The day was marked by us making our way through the Lower Michigan Peninsula. On the way, we stopped to hike in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. This park, like Warren Dunes and others on the shores of Lake Michigan has many sand dunes, but since we already hiked up a sand dune, we opted for a more forest type trail called the alligator trail. It was a nice hike; we saw so many types of mushrooms, that at a certain point I felt like we might find the village the Smurfs live in.

I feel obligated to mention food now… so I’ll note that it’s cherry season in Michigan. Since we were driving on state highways (which are actually pretty small roads) and country roads (even smaller roads) we saw a lot of farm stands selling cherries and peaches. I couldn’t resist the urge to by some cherries, and they are some of the best cherries I’ve ever tasted. They helped me considerably in resisting the urge to stop at stands offering cherry pie. Every time we passed such a stand I took a couple of cherries, and we drove on. They also provided a nice pastime while we were on the hike since, if you didn’t read this in-between the lines, the most interesting thing there were mushrooms (which can, I guess be very interesting, but we’re too good for that). After we took a small break to eat some cherries we had a little pit-spitting contest. Guess who one? Yes – despite the laws of classical mechanics, which state (if I remember correctly) that Uri should have won due to his height advantage – I won!

Anyway, at the very end of the day we did cross from the Lower Michigan Peninsula to the Upper Peninsula, and now we are right at the border, though still in the US. So today we will be crossing, and tomorrow’s post will be from Canada [I’m preparing you, since I’m sure everything, including my writing will be very different ;)]. Here is the plan for the rest of the trip:

View Larger Map

Back to Eastern Standard Time

2009-08-14T10:49:00.007-04:00

So I missed a day – what can I say, old habits die hard. Now you’ll just have to endure reading about two days in a row.

On Wednesday we decide to go all-out tourist. I put my baseball cap on, Uri took his backpack and we went out to see the sites on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. We started by going up to the observatory on the 94th floor of the John Hancock Building. Being tourists, we paid the $15 admissions pass to the observatory instead of going up to the lounge/ bar on the 96th floor and paying $5 for a bottle of water. In hindsight it was probably the right choice, since the fee included an audio tour narrated by David Schwimmer of the sights seen through the windows and a bit of Chicago history. This was good since we were too lazy/ cheap to buy a good Chicago guidebook.

After that we started walking down the famous street. While the buildings were impressive, Uri and I both agreed that NYC is much more impressive. We thing part of it is that the streets of New York are more crowded, the buildings are closer and the street itself is narrower so you feel more closed in, smaller as compared to the large impressive city. Sort of like the logic behind the way cathedrals were built in the Middle Ages. Anyway, the Magnificent Mile doesn’t have that.

The buildings themselves are nice, Chicago has a lot of art-deco architecture, and I really like that aesthetic, but at the end of the day, they are sky-rises, and the ground level of most of them are just fancy stores that you can see in most large cities in the US. So, as uncultured as it might seem, other than the observatory the biggest highlight for us was probably the Lego store.

It was only on the next day that we actually reached the end of the Magnificent Mile - Millennium Park, home of the famous Chicago land mark “the silver bean”. What a great park! The bean itself is really nice; a smart idea the weird shape allows you to see a reflection of the Chicago skyline and the sky. What’s funny is that to see that reflection, you actually have to walk to “the other side” of the bean, as in - make your way around it from where you first see it as you enter the park. But most of the tourist just stop either at “the front” of the bean, or underneath it, since there you can see a neat 4 way refection of yourself. We also go to hear the Chicago Symphony rehearsing in the park’s amphitheater (designed by Frank Gary). They apparently were paying Beethoven’s 9th (that’s what the guy in one of the visitor’s information stands said). Despite the fact that neither of us are classical music buffs, we both really enjoyed it, and sat and listened for a while. When we finally left we agreed that combination of the fantastic acoustics with the effect of seeing a live performance (including the conductors very passionate and somewhat animated movements) greatly contributed to our enjoyment, it pulled us into the piece, which is something that hearing it on the radio was never able to do.

After that we hit the road again – back to Michigan for the next leg of the trip.

What?!? No food stories?!? Well – of course not, I was just saving them to the end so that you’ll keep on reading. So for “brunch” on Wednesday (more just on our way to the Hancock Canter) we saw a cute cupcake shop, more like cupcake boutique, and Uri had a cupcake. He went with the flavor of the day – chocolate with soft caramel center, though I really would have wanted him to take one of the weirder cupcakes like the maple bacon – a corn cupcake with bacon bits and a maple-cream cheese frosting. For lunch we went to the Frontera Grill, a restaurant owned by Rick Bayless who some of you might have seen if you watch either food network or Top Chef. I don’t want to say too much about it, since it wasn’t that good, maybe I just didn’t spend enough time reading the menu and then ordered wrong, but what I got was very different from what I was expecting. Oh well... you win some, you lose some. For dinner we went to a pizza place called Burt’s Place. This is the same place we drove to on Monday and discovered was closed. What a quirky experience: To start with the good – the pizza was great, and the atmosphere was fantastic (or maybe the other way around). So what was bad? Well – since the place has such weird hours, we decided it’s probably best to make reservations, so we called in the morning but got that strange sort of ringing like there’s something wrong with the line. We forgot about it for a while, but when we got back to the hotel at 5 pm we tried again. Burt answered the phone and as he took my reservation he asked what pizzas we’ll want. Huh? Apparently, to make a reservation you have to order in advance and then when you get there the pizzas are ready. I asked to call back, since some friends were joining us, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t ordering something that they wouldn’t eat. It took me about 45 minutes to do this, and so by the time I called back that busy/ off the hook signal was back. Oh boy… what to do? Should we give up and just go for one of those “The original pie! #1 pizza in Chicago!” places? But I wanted to try Burt’s pizza! And I did call! If he takes the phone off the hook, why didn’t he tell me that I have to call back before 5:30? What we finally decide to do was try to get there earlier than we had told him, and hope that he would be sympathetic. When we got there, we were greeted by his wife Sharon, I say greeted as though she was super nice, but actually it took her time to come around, we told her the story and she went to check with Burt. Then when she came back I emphasized a little more that we had come 15 minutes early, and that we were ready to order and just wait for our friends to come and the pizza to be ready. I think with that she understood that we do have respect for their craft or something, and so we became ok. The pizza was indeed great. At the end of the night we actually got into a whole discussion with her, and then with Burt. Turns out she’s Jewish, and very pro-Israel, so who knows, maybe there will be a Burt’s place in Israel sometime in the future.

The next day was our last day in Chicago – so food wise it was the hardest. This city has so much to offer, and unlike NYC, it’s not like we’ll be back soon. What to do? Ever since that elk hot-dog, Uri wanted to go back to Hot Doug’s, but there are other hot dogs that are supposed to be good too…. Decisions, decisions. This is what ended up happening: we went for a hot dog at Wiener Circle, which is a neighborhood called Lincoln Park (since it’s located near Lincoln Park). Small digression here – really nice neighborhood, finally we saw how people who live in the city actually live, and we like it. When we parked the car we saw that there was a Five Guys there too. Since most of you don’t share Uri’s infatuation with US politics: I will explain that when Matt Lauer interviewed Obama in the White House, the two of them went for lunch at Five Guys (hey didn’t fly to Chicago, it’s a chain that started in Virginia), which Obama said was one of his favorite burger joints. So after the hotdog, we went there for cheeseburger. I do actually see why Obama likes the place.

What then, well I said that while I really liked Burt’s pizza, I don’t really know to compare it to a classic Chicago pie, and that I feel that maybe I should taste one of the really famous Chicago pizzas, so I called a Lou Malnati’s I found in the GPS and ordered a small pie. Now I know that Burt’s was hands down better. And that’s it. We were on the highway again, headed towards northern Michigan. On the way we stopped for pie at a place I read about in the Lonely Planet guide – Crane’s Pie Pantry Restaurant. The book had actually taken us to the wrong place, and we had to backtrack a bit. Initially I thought it wouldn’t be worth it, but it sort of was the pie was good (though I think my apple pie is better) but the place was really charming, a nice place to take a few minutes to rest. Today we’ll go hiking in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park, and then we’ll cross the border to Canada.

Until then, have a great weekend and good night. Oh… and happy birthday mom!

Speechless.. I have no speech

2009-08-12T08:45:00.006-04:00

I think today I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves... there are a ton, so I’m only putting up collages, but I do encourage people who are either architecture fans or food fans to look at the expanded version with captions here (architects) and here (foodies).

We started the day with going to Oak Park, to see the home and studio of Frank Lloyd Wright. Unfortunately taking pictures of the interior is not allowed, but it was very impressive. I do have to say we were a little disappointed with our tour guide, who assumed everyone in the group knew everything there is to know about Wright and so neglected to out a little color and context into his talking points. Many of Wright’s neighbors hired him to build their houses so we also tool a tour of the neighborhood, so those are the pictures that we do have (again – they are here).

For lunch we went to a place that was both personally recommended to us, and that we saw on several food shows called Hot Doug’s, a very unique hot dog place. We got there at 3:30 pm, 30 minutes before closing, and there was a line out the door and around the corner. I stood in line, while Uri walked over to the next corner to get us tamales from a cart we saw, since we were very hungry and felt that we needed something to tied us over (also, meet stuffed tamale was on my list of things to try). The thing with Doug’s is he takes hot dogs really seriously and treats them with respect. So he has really good basic dogs, but also gourmet dogs (with fancy extras) and also dogs from unique meats.

So here is what we ordered: The regular Chicago Dog with everything (which means relish, tomatoes, mustard and a pickle), a corn dog, a tequila chicken dog with mango salsa and asiago cheese, and an elk meat hot dog with some sauce I don’t remember and a some cheese I don’t remember but was really good. From all of the above the elk was the best and the chicken probably was worst, but the place is awesome and it was worth waiting in line (I think we ended up waiting something like 20 minutes).

Then we went back to the hotel, and at 7 left again for another unique dining experience. We had made reservation at Moto Restaurant which specializes in making creative dishes that toy with the diner’s perception, using molecular gastronomy to do so. So things that look like a dish you know to be sweet but are spicy or food made to look like non-food. It’s really indescribable; you can see a collage below, or the full pictures here.

Just to be clear - it's not only that everything looked amazing, as far as taste dishes ranged from really good to absolutely amazing. Another special thing about this place is that there is a set menu (you can choose between a 10 course and a 20 course meal), so the pace is set by the chef. We were there for almost 3 hours! I don’t think I’ve ever sat at a meal so long without someone telling me of the exodus from Egypt.

International Sandwich Day

2009-08-11T09:57:00.006-04:00

Yesterday seemed to have a theme to it – at least for Uri. We started the morning in Ann Arbor.

As usual, I woke up much earlier than Uri, and so went to a Starbucks across the street to use the internet to do things like tell you guys what we’ve been up to and plan the day, including things like book a hotel for our next destination – Chicago! (more on that later).

When Uri got up and ate “breakfast” – leftovers from the dish I ordered at Al Ameer- grilled pita stuffed with ground meet, tomatoes and pine-nuts (Sandwich #1: Middle East). I was ready for a mid-morning snack, we went back to the same place we ate dinner to have something, mainly because we knew we could get internet there and in other places we’ve been having problems due to some technical difficulties. Since we’ve been there twice, I will mention it by name – it’s a place call Zingerman’s. It’s very famous in Ann Arbor, and very good, it’s basically a deli – lots of bread, very good cheese section, and lot’s of salads and traditional deli meats. Special just because it’s rare to find places that everything they do do, they do well.

Uri was using the internet, and I was looking through the menu that I found by complete chance, and I noticed that they make their own corned-beef. From that point, I knew what Uri was having for lunch. I ordered to go a sandwich for Urii, and some gazpacho I had been eyeing since the night before for me, and off we went to cross the lower Michigan peninsula.

The trip was supposed to take something like 5 hours, we did have a pit stop planned along the way at the 4 hour mark. Geeky remark of the post: The pit stop was in Michigan, which follows EST, so the GPS told us we would be there at 3 pm, when we looked at when we would get to Chicago, it also said 3 pm, since Chicago is CST. Anyway, we stopped in a rest area for lunch (Sandwich #2: Jewish American) and then continued on driving. The road took us through Kalamazoo, and we toyed with the idea of stopping and asking people if they know where we can find a kazoo, but we ended up just driving on, . Stopping at a park called Warren Dunes National Park off the shores of Lake Michigan. I got a recommendation to go there from a friend, and thought there were hiking options, it turned out it’s mainly a beach, but we still had a good time, we did hike up a sand dunes and in the forests despite there not being the usual extremely regulated trails.

It was a fun, much needed break from driving. On the road again, this time destination: Chicago. Our plan was to get to the hotel, take a shower and then go for pizza.

As I alluded to before, I had booked the hotel the same day on a site called Hotwire.com. Wow! What a deal we got, judging by the location and décor, we probably saved something like $100 a night on the room. It’s a funny room though – it’s probably the smallest room we’ve ever stayed in, but also the most fashionably decorated.

Then it was off to pizza – I love deep dish pizza so I was really looking forward to it. I will digress again to say that our list of recommended places to eat in Chicago includes over 10 places. The #1 pizza, it turned out, was in the suburbs – so, we drove to the suburbs. And guess what?!? It was closed! Not as in shut down, but as it not open Mondays and Tuesdays. So we started calling other places on the list – the next 2 were also closed on Mondays, so the next option was a place called Al’s Italian Beef that specializes in beef sandwiches that are dipped “au ju” aka in the juices of the beef (Sandwich #3: Italian American). We went to the original, on Taylor street and it was pretty good, not as greasy as I thought and very tasty. More tomorrow… good night!

My new favorite town - Detroit

2009-08-10T09:08:00.013-04:00

After Buffalo, we headed out on the road again – thinking that we would rather drive a little today and a little the next day rather than a lot the next day.

The only problem was that we realized only a little too late (meaning I had already passed out and was sleep-talking) that it was a Saturday night and we were driving along the very touristic shores of Lake Erie = even the crappiest hotel was charging over $100 for a room.

Eventually we say an exit sign with 2 motels of unrecognizable names, that weren’t even in the GPS. We stopped and were successful - we found a room for $60 after tax!

Why am I going into this amount of detail? Because as Uri and I were getting out of the car and into the room, we both had the exact same thought “this looks like the motels that people get murdered in on CSI”. For me, the feeling was enhanced by the Circle K across the street, because as some of you might know “strange things are afoot at the Circle K”.

The next morning we headed out towards Detroit.

Our destination was a Lebanese restaurant called Al Ameer that we saw on the same episode of No Reservations I had mentioned yesterday. It looked so good on TV – just like back home. And they even had fried Kebbie (aka Koobe)!

Driving to the restaurant was a bit like driving through an

American version of Daliat El-Carmel and we were a little scared, it was pretty obvious that we should not wear our “I [heart] Israel” shirts. But we were prepared – Uri had not shaved for

a couple of days, and we told ourselves that we would only speak in English, and I would do the ordering. The place itself was pretty surreal. Probably one of the last places in the US to still have a smoking section, decorated with plastic flowers, pictures of Jerusalem (as Uri said “there’s a picture of my house behind you” and Cedars of the Lebanon (we wondered if that meant they welcome Golani soldiers). What can I tell you? It was everything I expected and more. I mean, I could see myself making the 7 hour drive just to come to this restaurant… especially considering that it will likely be another year before I make it back to Israel!

Another highlight was a supermarket across the street from the restaurant. We knew we would go in as soon as we that the English sign was also translated to Arabic. If the restaurant met my expectations – this place defiantly exceeded them. Not only did I find semolina like the one we have in Israel (btw – I bought 6 lbs), not only did Uri find sumac and za’atar, there were also fruits and vegetables there at reasonable prices – like cucumbers “balaadi” as the sign said, for $0.77!

Since even we feel wired going all the way to an out of the way city for one restaurant - we also went to the Henry Ford Museum (actually I had made a note to go to the museum before we knew about the restaurant, but if it wasn’t for the restaurant, we probably would have skipped Detroit). It was really cool – it’s a huge complex that actually has 3 giant museums. We got there an hour before closing – so we chose the museum with the most artifacts in it – it was fantastic. Obviously there were a lot of cars – lots of cars! from wagons from the 18th century to one or two “cars of the future”, which I thought wouldn’t be very interesting, but it was very cool. It turns out they are all in running condition too! There were also other things like the chair Lincoln was shot in (from the Ford theater), and an original copy of the 13th amendment. Also all kinds of chairs from different periods, and a sad exhibit about pop culture in the 20th century which contained things I actually played with like a Speak-and-Spell (that’s why it was sad – I’m now old enough that parts of my life can be artifacts in a museum). Here you'll find a link to the pictures, there's just too many of them to post. But since we seem to be consentrating on food - here are two cool ones - George Washington's mess kit and his field bed:

Oh - and us in a real Modal T:

From there we continued to Ann Arbor, home of Michigan University. A really nice town, but nothing to write home about.

More tomorrow…

Road Trip

2009-08-08T13:01:00.008-04:00

This post was started Tuesday, August 4th, continued and finished Saturday, August 8th. Published as soon as we had internet access.

So a quick recap on the 2 and some weeks since my last post: I finally finished my presentation, and gave it. It went fantastically well. Then Uri came back, and it was a Saturday when we headed back to Ithaca, stopping in Boston for dim sum with a few friends, and then taking a slower, scenic route through historic Concord, Sturbridge (that was oddly almost sold out) and Albany. Once in Ithaca, it was time to relax, sort of.

For the past week, we’ve been relaxing, and cleaning and getting all sorts of loose ends tied. Yariv, a friend from Israel, moved to town. He’ll be here for the next 5 years. So, good people that we are, we’ve been helping him “adjust”. It started Sunday when he came over and I made pancakes, then we helped him take stuff Uri’s been collecting for him for the past couple of months (blankets, pillows, tableware, kitchenware etc.), and then we took him to Wegmans. Granted, he probably could have done the latter himself, but the abundance can be overwhelming, so I think we helped out.

Monday was supposed to be the only nice day of the week (as it turned out, the rest of the week was pretty good too) , so we went hiking in Watkins Glen (Yariv took a break from adjusting and came along). The park is supposedly the most beautiful of all the local parks/ gorges. “Supposedly” not because it wasn’t beautiful, but because I haven’t been to all of them to judge the truthfulness of that statement. As I said, it was indeed beautiful, the gorge itself is quite deep and the rock formation is very beautiful, all the trees are green and there are waterfalls everywhere. Part of the fun of Watkins Glen is that there are several places you can walk behind waterfalls.

After wards we headed back home. We found a little Italian bakery that makes cannoli – a surprisingly good find considering Watkins Glen is famous mostly for the gorge and car racing. Also, since I had told one of our Israeli friends who sent me a blueberry muffins recipe, that if we find a fruit stand on the road, I’ll buy blueberries and make the muffins the focus of the trip back was looking for stands. There actually weren’t as many as I thought there would be and those we did find were very small and not that attractive. I was about to give up when 10 minutes from Ithaca I was still blueberry-less but then we saw a sign for a u-pick farm. That means it’s a farm that lets you pick the fruit/ vegetables yourself. Like the wild and crazy guys that we are – we were spontaneous and stopped to pick fruit. They actually didn’t have blueberries to pick, those they only sold, but we did pick raspberries. I think we probably ate more than we collected into the container (lucky thing too, because about 2 days later they all were moldy).

Good thing for that fruit too – since it turned out there were no batteries in the camera, the only leftovers I have from the day are the pictures of the raspberry pan-cake and the blueberry muffins I made.

Now, almost a week later, Yariv is starting to settle in, and we headed out on our long talked about road trip. I know I didn’t talk about it here, but since my internship ended (and even a bit before) everytime someone has asked me “what are you going to do now?” I ‘ve been saying that we’re planning a road trip. Here is the general route:

View Larger Map

Now I‘m writing from the road, we already passed through Buffalo. We stopped there for dinner at a place we saw on Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations (BTW – it’s our new favorite show). Bourdain talked about this place’s Roast beef sandwich, which was indeed good, but I thought the best part was actually the German Potato Salad. The Goulash was pretty good too. Now we’re on the road again, heading towards Detroit. Initially I thought we would drive through Canada, but we’re taking the longer route staying in the USA. Taking border control into consideration, it would probably take the same amount of time, plus apparently we don’t have Ontario in the GPS.

More pictures of food and tales of hiking tomorrow, good night.

Taking a break

2009-07-18T18:49:00.000-04:00

I’m taking a break from working on my final presentation and my deliverables for my summer internship. The presentation, given to the CEO, the domestic and international COOs and other senior management is on Wednesday (Ay-Caramba!). Hopefully everything will be OK. Needless to say, I’m working all weekend, though I wish I had better self-discipline. I noticed I tend to take an awful lot of breaks, some longer than they should be.

Other than that I don’t have anything particularly interesting to say. Uri is doing fine. He and my cousin spent two days now at an all-inclusive resort in Cancun. I think that’s probably the best thing he could’ve done on a vacation that he’s taking without me, since I would have gone CRAZY there.

OK – the truth is there is something I’ve been thinking about writing for a while. It’s a bit weird, so those of you who want to keep having a positive perception of me, and not really know how bizarre I am, please stop reading. This is something that I would never talk about with anyone, but I think about at least once a day, so this is another one of those cases where I’m really using the blog as an outlet.

Here it is – In the place that I work the women’s restroom is the very standard looking stall bathroom, it’s a little drab, but nothing too bad. There are 3 regular stall and one handicapped stall that’s both wider and deeper. The stall doors are those metallic looking blue-green color that is really reminiscing of a hospital. I think it was in my first week that I noticed that between the first stall and the wall there is a really big gap that when you walk out the door you can completely see what’s inside. Moreover, since the handicapped stall is longer than the rest of the stalls, and the paint on the stalls is that metallic blue green, if you stand and wash your hands, and look into the mirror, you can completely see everything that’s happening inside the third stall (the one next to the handicapped stall) reflecting in the wall that joint to that third stall and the handicapped stall. No need to say that ever since then I do indeed have a stall preference.

That’s all from me (for now). Back to work I go.

Silly things on TV

2009-07-12T10:51:00.004-04:00

So quick update on our lives:

The weekend in California was super great.

I apologize to anyone out there with small children but my niece is the cutest two year old in the world.

The last week at work has been very hectic. As I come closer to the end of my internship (2 weeks now). So it’s really good that Uri is in Mexico. You can check out how he’s doing on Facebook, He has 2 albums there – one from Mexico City, and the other from the Aztec pyramids (I think it’s Aztec). A couple of days ago the left Mexico City for Puerto Escondido and last I heard, they were in San Cristobal.

This weekend, my first one completely alone, I went up to Boston and had really good dim sum in Boston’s Chinatown. I wasn’t expecting this, but the dims sum at China Pearl was better than any dim sum I’ve had in New York, both in terms of taste, and in the variety. I also went to the harbor to see the tall ships that are showing there now. Unfortunately, none of them were sailing, so it wasn’t that impressive – oh well.

Another change in my life is that the room I’m staying in at the B&B is slowly being fixed up. When I got back from California the “living room” had a desk and a TV in it. So – confections of a TV-holic here, the TV is open most of the time. What can I say, it’s not that I necessarily watch TV all the time, but I like having the voices in the background. Would I be more productive if it wasn’t on? Probably. I would defiantly read more books – but it’s only the first week, so give me a break! But since it is constantly on, I’ve managed to catch, either through “coming soon” commercials or in actuality, some really strange TV shows.

One is “Dance Your Ass Off” – a reality TV competition that combines “So you thing you can dance?” with “The biggest loser”.

The second is “Drop Dead Diva” – a show about a model that dies and comes back as a workaholic, overweight lawyer.

It’s right up there with a show that Uri caught a while back while flipping through channels named “My big fat red-neck wedding”, a reality show hosted by Tom Arnold, that follows red neck couples as they put together their hideous weddings.

Things to do in California when you're bored

2009-07-04T13:22:00.001-04:00

I'm not really in a writing mood, but frankly I don't really have anything better to do. I was about to write “... but truthfully...” but I've been making an effort not to use the phrase “truthfully” or “to tell you the truth” because then it raises the question – is everything else I've been saying not the truth?

Uri and I said our goodbyes yesterday. I flew off to California to visit my brother and his family including my mom who is visiting them from Israel.

Uri when down to Mexico. He's meeting my cousin in Mexico City, and they'll travel around for the next few weeks. I would really like to tell you how he's doing, but I haven't heard from him. (Small complaint there, not too bitchy – right?)

Here in California it's nice and sunny. I know it's lame that I'm talking about the weather, but just like when it was snowing and the weather became became such a large part of our lives, the fact that it's constantly raining in Cranberry Land, despite the fact that it's July has became a huge part of my life. It's really depressing, like I'm not getting any photosynthesis or something. Though I guess I shouldn't complain, I did miss winter in Israel, so now I'm getting the Israeli winter in Cranberry Land.

OK, writing with no muse is really annoying, so I'm stopping now.

After many days

2009-07-03T18:04:00.002-04:00

Written on a bus, June 21st 2009, typed on an airplane July 3rd, 2009

This week we decided to forgo one of us making the 6.5 hour car drive between Ithaca and Cranberry Land, and opt for both of us making a 4-5 bus ride to meet in NYC.

We stayed at Wolly & Marc's who have been featured on this blog this before. However since that time the two seriously upgraded their host-ability, moving from a cute yet small apartment to a 2 bedroom castle in the sky. Well, it's a 2 bedroom apartment on the 3rd floor above an Italian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, but it could not be cooler.

I love New York. I think that even had I spent the entire weekend inside, I would still be happy just knowing that the city was out there.

Needless to say, we didn't stay inside the whole weekend. We went to a cool Asian-fusion place that was nice though over priced (the prices seemed reasonable, but the dishes were super small). Of course, we also went for dim-sum because I can't be in the city without eating a steamed pork bun. We also went food shopping and cooked a really nice meal for ourselves and for our hosts . Pictures to come when I get them from Marc.

Sunday there was an event in Central Park called Tel-Aviv Beach comes to NYC (or something like that). Having finished dim sum with Wolly, Marc and Dani & Gil and with nothing better to do before saying goodbye, we all decided to check it out. It was quite a walk from the park entrance to where it was, and on the way we saw a group of people in a pro-Palestinian march (More on this later). Between the walk, the march, and the humidity we started developing some sense of anticipation. BUT when we got there, it was a little ridiculous sand box. We stayed all of 5 minutes and then turned around and walked back to the apartment.

A note on the pro-Palestinian march, as promised: A strange little thing – about 10 people, mostly white American women, and maybe 2 people who looked like they might be of actual Palestinian decent. They were walking around the park, a distinct scent of pot following them shouting “Free Palestine” and “Long Live Palestine”. A bit simplistic, but you really can't blame them for that. My main “beef' with them was the lack of creativity. I would be very surprised to find out that they actually made the news somewhere. And I say – if your trigger is a Tel Aviv beach party, why not counter with a Gaza Beach scene featuring corpses and a few homeless people?Someone, I won't say who, suggested that they also could have dug a tunnel from that beach to the edge of the park.

Now I'm on the bus back to Boston. I'm on the infamous “China Bus” that goes between the China-towns of the two cities. This bus ride has given me a few tidbits to write about too. The first was the throwback to the rabid capitalism of China that I had right from the first minute I stepped in China-town. First, a China Bus woman standing close to where I got off the cab made me pay for my ticket to Boston in order to get an explanation as to where the Boston bus station is. Then, on the bus, the driver made a woman pay the full ticket price for her baby, because the baby was taking up a seat. Then, finally, on the way to Boston, the driver stopped at a Burger King that the bus company had cut a deal with. Since most of the people on the bus did actually order something the pit-stop took longer than planned. This made the driver mad, and he proceeded to threaten to leave, making one BK employee ran out to make sure that the bus does not leave before everyone gets their flood.

Another little bus inspired story has to do with bus etiquette. Across the isle from me is the only foursome sit on the bus (the kind with a table in the middle). Lucky enough, they are all friendly type people and so they keep talking. And the thing is, that I'm having a very hard time not listening in. So I know that 2 of them are french, one grew up in Israel and then the 4th guy just sort of seems like a dush . He keeps asking annoying questions, and making stupid remarks to try to up play the fact that he lived in Paris. One example is that he said something along the lines of “Let me see if I remember this” and then proceeded to recite all the lines of t RER with their letters and destination stations What's really annoying is that I keep having the urge to butt into the conversation. Initially I held myself back, misanthropically not wanting to talk to 4 random people that I won't ever meet again (especially not the dush). The thing is that beyond the Israeli thing, they kept talking about food! And the french people keep getting stuck on words, which then becomes a guessing game – but I know exactly what she wants to say! Things like she kept saying “sous vide” trying to explain that something is in vacuum or she couldn't remember the name “Grand Mariner” when the Israeli girl referred to a crepe she ate that was lit up.

I finally broke when the dush was trying to remember the name of a very sweet bread he liked. After a few rounds of them trying to guess, I just said “brioche, he means brioche!”

Why do today what you can leave for the day after tomorrow?

2009-06-10T18:28:00.002-04:00

Today it really sunk in that at some-point the shit will hit the fan, and that I’d have to work overtime, staying at work past the official 4:45 “summer hours” end-time to complete my projects.

It was expected, especially since I spent the first couple of weeks without a defined project goal. So basically my already on-the-short-side 10 week internship, became a de-facto 7.5 week internship. I actually contemplated extending the internship by a week, but then I remembered all the things I want to do during my time off, and x-nayed that thought. I would much rather work long days than give up being able to travel (no, we haven’t decided where we’ll travel, but we won’t stay in Ithaca the entire time).

The hard part will be giving myself daily deadlines. Because I’m good with deadline, I like making them, or rather I hate being in a situation where I didn’t make them, things like – coming to a meeting unprepared. I can’t stand it. I guess it’s the perfectionist side of me – I like things to be done right. You could also say it’s my ego, not willing to look bad. Anyway – just as an example, today I was in the office until around 5:40, because I have an early meeting tomorrow, and I wanted to bring a completed version of a manufacturing process flow chart I’m putting together. So there I was, aligning all the little boxes, making sure all the arrows are in place and look good, and finally standing in my cube, like a kid in an art class, folding and sticking the 6 pages that this thing spans together, making sure that the lines fit together just right. The problem is not everything has such a concrete deadline. I mean ultimately everything has the deadline of my final presentation (btw – already scheduled, with most of the senior management invited, eek!). But I won’t be able to do everything last minute, and I don’t want to either. I made myself a nice little gaunt chart; detailing different “mini-projects” together make my 2 big projects. You, know I worked backwards, looking at how much time certain things will take, to see how much time I have for other things. You would thing that would be enough. It really should be shouldn’t it? I think having it there on the wall just doesn’t stress me out enough. Maybe I’ll start trying making a daily list. My problem with those is that I tend to make them unrealistically long, and then when I don’t do everything that’s on it, I let myself off saying “well, it was unrealistically long anyway”.

On a completely different note – I have a friend coming to visit me today! J is (or was) a second year at my school. We met right at the beginning of the year, and had a good vibe going with each other. She will soon be moving to the Mid-West where she got her full time job, but for now, is living with her folks on the Cape. She’s coming to the B&B for dinner, and I’m really excited, it’s like a small triumph that I’m managing to have a normal life here that’s more than just work-gym-TV-bed. :)

PS - that smily reminded me of a bit I watched this morning on Lior Shline's late night show: look at Israel is sms-ing :)

Weekend update

2009-06-09T18:50:00.002-04:00

Ok – so writing quickly to get a post in. I really thought that I would be better about posting here in Cranberry land, but it’s almost like I’m worse. The thing is I don’t feel like I have anything to write.

Anyway, it’s morning, and I’m having a cup of tea, waiting for my ride to work, heels at my side. My job is finally starting to be more intense, though I have a feeling that it’s going to go from 0 to 240. But, it is what it is, at least it will keep me awake without having to have a drink of Cranergy at lunch.

Uri was here for the weekend, which was great for 3 reasons (I’ll let you guys decide the order of importance):

1. I didn’t have to make the drive to Ithaca

2. I could unpack for two weeks, rather than unpacking, and 5 days later putting everything back it, de-facto living out of a suit case

3. With him not working on Fridays, he could head out Thursday at noon, and head back only on Monday/ Tuesday, and we could actually see each other for longer, because when I drive to Ithaca, it ends up that I’m there for around 36 hours.

Actually, he’s still here. He is supposed to head out today, but yesterday as we were, at the last minute of course, reserving a rental for the next two weeks, we discovered that my license has been expired since my birthday in February. Though, any police officer that would stop me would probably think it’s been expired since April (for those who don’t remember, my birthday is Feb 4th, read in the American way – April 2nd)!! We’ll see what happens with that – my parents are supposed to have my new license somewhere, hopefully a printed out color scan and a puppy dog look while telling that story will enable us to get a car.

Well – I ended not getting around to posting in the morning, it’s evening now. We did manage to rent a car, and Uri should be in Ithaca soon.

Uri’s time here was real fun. We spend a good chunk of it just plain relaxing, but also went down to “The Cape” (Cape Cod) where we ate ice cream at a place celebrating its 75th anniversary this year and saw some really expensive looking houses. Side note on ice cream in the US, I have yet to find ice cream as flavorful as Iceberg (or even Vanillia), we analyzed it this weekend and reached the conclusion that when ice cream is based on 42% cream, every flavor is mostly going to taste like cream, unless it has artificial berry flavor. BTW – I will not order berry ice cream anywhere in this country ever again.

In other weekend news - the Innkeeper at the B&B is away on vacation, so I was in charge of making breakfast for the guests. I made scones on day, and blueberry pancakes the next. I also made crispy oatmeal cookies with pecans and dates AND graham crackers, though the last ones didn’t really work out. We also cooked a big meal two of the other guests here yesterday. It was really great and fun. OK – now I’ll stop, otherwise I won’t post.

How are you guys out there doing?

On the road again

2009-06-01T22:49:00.002-04:00

Driving back down to Cranberry Land I thought about the fact that once again I didn’t blog for the majority of the week. But really – there was nothing to blog about. Quite literally, nothing to write home about.

While driving I thought about different amusing things from the road trip that I could write about. Like a comment Uri made about a common road hazard sign that tells drivers the in the next X miles there might be deer*. The question that is – how do they let the deer know that they can only cross in the next X miles?

Another random road-trip thought was that, again, I find myself a knowledge gap about the little things in life. Here specifically – how much could I go over the posted speed limit without getting a ticket? And yes mom, I never ever go above the speed limit at all but, in theory, if I were to drive the speed of traffic, I would drive at least 75 in a 65 mph highway, and that’s in the right lane – the left lane in going 80 at least. In Israeli I feel OK with the 10% rule, and when I’m going over that, and risking a ticket I know it. But here? I tried asking someone at work and got the standard “no liability” answer: “Technically they could give you a ticket for even going once mph over”. Well, gee – thanks! I’m aware that of what they technically do, but what I’m asking is what they actually do!

When I started off writing I thought I would also write about work adjustment stuff, but as it turns out I’m too tired and I’m falling asleep. So have a good night everybody! I’ll be back tomorrow!

* While writing that pargaraph, I thought I would stick in a picture of that type of sign, but then when I looked for a picture I found that website, it was too funny to not put up.

Notes for My Doctoral Thesis 3 and other stuff

2009-05-26T23:32:00.004-04:00

The past week (and weekend) have been somewhat interesting, though nothing out of the ordinary happened. True, it was my first week on the job – but with a very slow start, it wasn’t very exciting. I had some enthusiasm at having my very first cubical, mainly motivated by imagining myself as a character in Dilbert. Yes - I am a corporate slave. As a further sign of my enslavement, I actually went to work in heels 4 out of 5 days. The latter part wasn’t that bad actually… well, most of the time I sit in my cube anyway (then I take the shoes off – it’s my little mutiny).
A highlight for the past week is another insight I had into American culture. I realized that Americans are socialized to always notice the people around them. More specifically, to notice the physical presence of others. This is why they keep going around saying “sorry” all the time, because they are always aware that they are intruding another person’s physical space. To elaborate on this point for those who have not spent more than a week here - they say "I'm sorry" and "Excuse me" ALL the time. Just as an example - today at the office, I was entering a large space through a corridor, and as I was coming in, another woman was making the corner to come out. We ended up passing each other with roughly 10 cm between us, and she said "Excuse me", to which I immediately responded "I'm sorry", and actually thought to myself "What exactly am I excusing you for?!?" Anyway back to the point, what happens is that a lot of things here have the underlying assumption that you will notice the other people around you – like a line starting really far away from the counter, or the (in)famous 4-way stop. Please note that noticing physical presence doesn’t translate into cultural sensitivity – they don’t notice if they are being loud and obnoxious – as long as it’s done at a safe distance, it’s fine.
On a different subject, I also will make a small comment to the fact that about 3/4 of the way from Ithaca to Boston on Sunday night, I the thought ran through my mind that in a couple of weeks 6.5 hours won't seem that bad to me, and I'll likely be able to make it without stopping along the way. As I drove the country roads, and the highways that run through the countryside, I thought several time about the fact that there are a lot songs that make more sense in this context of endless highway and endless plains (or mountains, or whatever), like classic "road songs" - about driving and the like, that just feel more right when you are driving on and on and on.
Oh – and one last, more informative thing: I’m going to be spending the entire 10 weeks (minus a few weekends) at the B&B. After spending one day driving to Boston to look at apartments, and the second driving to Providence to look at apartments, I came to the conclusion that it would be a colossal waste of time to spend 2 hours each day in the car rather than doing something (anything) more fun and/or productive. Considering the apartments I saw in the area, and the fact that I knew I would not want to stay the weekend in them (i.e. considering how much it would cost to go somewhere else in the weekend), it just made sense staying at the B&B.

First day in a cubical

2009-05-19T07:13:00.003-04:00

Yes! I have my own cubical... my very first one. Let us toast to this, and to further cubicles to come!

I'll be short, since I don't have that much time (that is why I technically missed a day). The first day was nice. My boss seems very nice. He was really friendly, though he did leave me to fend for myself for lunch. I was very proud of myself when I actually did approach someone in the cafeteria and asked to sit with them at the table. He (my boss) has been working at Ocean Spray for 36 years!

Anyway, the day started off with a short orientation, then I sat with my boss and we, in a very general manner, went over what I'll be doing, during which he gave me a big stack of papers that I have to get acquainted with. Then I had lunch and started reading all the papers. This morning we are supposed to talk about more specific things that I'll be going (my goals and objectives).

Another tid-bit is that for some reason my name in the Outlook system there is Tamir. I sent out a request to change it, but meanwhile one of the assistants has started booking meeting for me with people, and keeps calling me Tamir in the email she sends out. I wrote her a not on it, but I guess she's just cutting and pasting the original mistake.

Meanwhile Uri drove around the area and posted "room wanted" flyers in 3 local synagogues. It's an idea the innkeeper at the B&B we're staying in had. Didn't seem like a bad one.

After work, Uri came to pick me up and we drove to Boston to look for a place for me to live. We found one thing that looks reasonable, though it isn't really ideal - it's a bit more than I wanted to pay, and I'm still not completely convinced that I want to make the trip everyday.

Other the house hunting we ate at a really nice (and cheap!) Japanese restaurant that mainly serves noodles. and then I drove back down here, missing the exit I needed and taking us (in the dark) through some of the towns in the area instead of on the Highway.

What a day!

Yours,

Tamir

PS - wrote this directly in blogger, so forgive any spelling mistakes that it didn't catch.

Finally… she blogs!

2009-05-17T18:26:00.005-04:00

Yes, it’s been a long time, no, I don’t have an excuse. I started writing something at least two times, and was then distracted by something and then was too tired. I really do promise that I’ll try to get back to the writing everyday thing. Otherwise the little mundane things are missed, and I like writing about the mundane.

So, start with a clean slate, I’ll have this post be a little longer and include everything that’s happened recently either before or after the last post and that

I didn’t get around to writing about yet.

First to pop in my mind is a cool local event called the “Friends of the Library” booksale. It’s a really cool bi-annual event in which everyone can by books from a local organization that throughout the year local organizations (including Cornell) and individuals donate books to. When they open up for sale, there are over 250,000 books. The way it works is that 2 times a week they open for 3 weekends, and from week to week books cost less and less. We went on the first week, when books were still “expensive” at $1.5 to $4.5. Initially we went “just to see”, and we had to stand in line 20 minutes to get in, needless to say, we did not walk out empty handed – we bought 15 books (for a total of just over $60).

Another big thing is that Uri got a teaching job with the conservative synagogue downtown. Starting September, he’ll be teaching history to the 6th and 7th graders twice a week. It has t’s pro and cons – the big pro is that Uri gets to teach, as in – to do something that is actually relevant to what he wants to do with the rest of his life (when he grows up :)), the bummer is that it’s younger kids then is ideal, and that it’s on Sundays and also the (almost no) money he’ll be making. But I (and he) think that he’ll have fun and that it will be interesting. In the meantime he got a set of books that he needs to study so he can teach the kids what they are supposed to learn. I thought it was kind of amusing, and the first question that popped to my mind was what will the Rabbi say if Uri teaches something that is not in the narrative the books are written by. It’s kind’ a like the Zionist version of creationism vs. evolution I guess.

The next huge thing is that I finished my first year of the MBA program

! It ended quite strangely actually – I had the presentation for my Brand Immersion Project, which I worked on (with my team) the entire semester, working for one of the larger CPG companies. I think the results we got were decent enough but it wasn’t a woohoo moment since the presentation itself was one of the worst presentations I had ever given. I don’t know what happened to me, and I won’t waste time or space going in to it, but it did put a bit of a slump to the whole “finishing the year” thing. One the flip side, the presentation for my BRI project with the Italian restaurant went quite well. Also - I got my first A in one of the core course (not an A-, an actual A) and I got asked to TA the core marketing course next year - so good for me (lol).

To celebrate finishing the year, and having 3 days without much to do I baked like a mad-woman (I do need to admit that I did have stuff to do, but I just let then go, as I was in dire need of having a few days with nothing to do). I can say without a doubt now

that Dorie Greenspan is my new baking goddess. I really recommend everyone buy “Baking: From my home to yours”. Here is what I made from it: Chocolate Chunkers (adding cranberries on top of the raisins), Peanut Butter Oatmeal Chocolate Chips (substituting the oatmeal with rolled rye flakes and rolled wheat berry flakes and substituting raisins for most of the chocolate chips), Coffee-Cheesecake Brownie and the Ricotta and Polenta Cake (using yogurt instead of half the ricotta and pears tossed in thyme and rosemary instead of the figs).

I love that book. And I love baking! I missed it so much, it was really fun. I decided I really will try to bake one thing once a week next year. Try is the operative word here. Remember, I also said a while back that I’ll try to blog everyday and that I’ll try to go to the gym more often.

Last but not least – I’m staring my internship tomorrow. How nerve-wrecking for me! So yesterday (Saturday) Uri and I left Ithaca… oh I suddenly remembered one more thing that happened, before I get to the internship thing: Uri rented out a plot of land near our house ($12 for the year) and planted peppers, tomatoes and basil! He turned the land on Friday, bruising his hands in the process, and then planted everything on Saturday before we left. It’s co-owned by him and our friend Dafna who planted everything with him.

So back to internship - We drove to Boston (a 6 hour drive) stopping at an outlet on the way to get me some business casual clothes to have for work. We got to the city at 10:30 pm and went to dinner with Ya’ar and Shimrit who also served as our very gracious hosts. Today in the afternoon we drove down to cranberry land, where Ocean Spray is putting me up in a really cute B&B until I find a more permanent place to live for the summer.

Tomorrow I’ll head off to work, and Uri is tasked with trying to find me a place to live. I’ll (try) t

o write again tomorrow to tell you how everything went.

The continuing adventures of Hummus-Man

2009-05-11T10:18:00.003-04:00

So it took me more than a couple of days to write again… so what? You can blame Uri – because he should have written about the catering event, or at least told me what to write. As it was, he didn’t say that much about it. It was an event at the conservative synagogue downtown, there were 100 attendees and Uri, basically, opened a Hummus restaurant (Hummusiya) for them. He made falafel, hum

mus, tahinni, vegetable salad, cabbage salad (two kinds/ two colors) and taboule. I’m probably forgetting something – but you get the gist. Can you imagine the amount of food he made? Just making the list was crazy – 20 cucumbers (!) and it was those huge mega-cucumbers they have here in the US, 30 tomatoes, 10 heads of cabbage. Uri said that there was just the right amount of food – some things got completely finished, and in some there was some left – which, in Uri’s words, is what you want in a catering event since otherwise people feel like you ran out of something or that there wasn’t enough. I can see a certain bunch of you nodding your heads right now, but it is true. My bosses at Iceberg always said that too, that in food service it’s important that people always feel like there is abundance. Everyone thought it was a very successful event, or so the Rabbi told Uri. But he did work very, very hard. He spent at least 10 hours on his feet, and when he came back ho

me I was here with my teammates working on the Brand Immersion project (meaning he couldn’t really relax and veg out on the couch). Anyway, to end this story – he ended up going to bed at 10:30 which is odd enough for Uri, but even more bizarre when you consider that with all the work I had to do for the project I went to bed at 1:00 am.

Jump ahead about a week, (skipping over some stuff that I’ll try to get to tomorrow, but writing about something that just happened) yesterday we had a BBQ here with our Israeli friends. Most of the people where neighbors that live here in Hasbrouck, there was our friend Dafna and the B-school Israelis. It was lots of fun, Uri bought a grill and we made some things (I, having time, made desserts) and people brought stuff. It was actually quite a windy day, so everybody sat inside which made it very cozy (lucky thing we have the new couch). I had two afterthought to the whole thing – one was that I remembered the awesome grill that we left back home. I wonder how it’s doing, and whether it’s bringing joy and happiness to the person who is taking care of it. The other was that it’s quite sad that 5 of these people won’t be here next year. Just when we’re starting to know each other, and really establish a stronger relationship, it’s stopping. Hopefully new people will come, and we’ll be quicker “make contact”, but still…

On a role - Spring on the Slope

2009-05-01T23:57:00.006-04:00

Continuing catching up on things that happened during the 2 weeks I didn’t blog – It’s Spring!

I don’t things I have words to describe what happened here about a week and a half ago – one day, literally in one day everything started blooming. The two trees r

ight in front of our door where suddenly full of green buds. Now those buds are white flowers… well – look bellow:

On other news, today was Slope Day. I don’t want to go too much into this, you can just click the link. However, I would like to use this opportunity to bring up something that has been a mystery to me (us) for quite some time. I just don’t get this thing with American drinking for the sake of getting drunk. Uri keeps saying that it’s because the legal drinking age is so old, but still… in my mind that’s a lame excuse.

Now is as good a time as ever

2009-04-30T20:16:00.001-04:00

I am sitting by myself in a fairly small room in Sage Hall. The building is almost empty. Thursday is the day we the infamous “Sage Socials” and people tend to leave the building half drunk in order to go out to finish the job.

Today we had the last Social for the semester, so they brought back the good food (this whole semester, Socials have been mainly chips and salsa since the university is trying to cut back on budget). There were crab cakes, and shrimp, and cheese that was labeled “imported”. Since it was the last one A LOT of people came. Now at least half of the school is in something called “Johnson Follies”. I decided not to go to the Follies, and actually didn’t stay long at the Social because I am working on my final project for the Marketing Immersion. I decided to work through our data using SPSS, so that I wouldn’t have to do anything tonight or tomorrow and I’d be free to help Uri with his huge catering event (more on that tomorrow or on Sunday or Monday) - Incredibly enough I actually found something that looks like it’s worthwhile. However, being here alone, the only thing I could really do in my little cathartic moment was change my Facebook status to “Tamar decided that she is SPSS queen”. Now I’m sitting here waiting for Uri to come pick me up, and then I remembered you guys!

But as luck would have it, Uri is supposed to be here in around 5 minutes. It leaves me time to tell you just a small tidbit of something that happened while I wasn’t blogging – John Cleese was here! Apparently he comes to Cornell quite often. Uri and I (along with some other friends) went to see him lecture. It was quite funny and thoughtful. He said some things that really made me think – specifically about the relationship between creativity and stress. Also about how when people do what they truly want to be doing, life seems to align in a manner that circles come together. More on those if I ever get back to having enough time to philosophize. That’s it.

Good use of time

2009-04-25T09:37:00.002-04:00

Wow, I haven’t written in a long time! I’m actually impressed by how long I did keep up with writing everyday… because let’s face it - we all knew it wouldn’t last. ;)

The problem with not writing everyday is that a lot of things happen, and then I don’t know whether to write about the things I didn’t write about, or the things that are happening now. The thing I most want to tell about is that we got a new couch. This isn’t very new - I think it happened around 2 weeks ago. Uri found it on Craig’s List, and I went to see it. He then brought it we the help of our friend Dani. I love it. It’s so comfortable! It’s wide enough that I can fall asleep in front of the TV and not feel like I fell asleep on the couch. It’s actually so big that we had to get rid of the coffee table, which is now standing sideways between the bed and the wall in the spare bedroom upstairs.

To pepper in something from today – I spend about an hour now trying to figure out how to use a panoramic photo stitching tool called Autopano that was once recommended to me by Lior. Needless to say, I was not successful, and after a while I just decided to cut it off since I do have multiple things to do. I love you guys, but still…

Uri Speaks

2009-04-10T00:13:00.003-04:00

From the desk of Uri Hadar:

We celebrated Passover with some friends here at our apartment complex. It was quite fun but I tend to take a little bit too much responsibility for other people’s happiness. Anyway, the food was good. We had a bizarre "Hagada" it was nothing like we are used to. It was at shorter version, with explanations for the English speakers, and they were not very good. And they didn't have all the songs, but we had a good time.

Now to elaborate a bit more… The Hagada wasn’t just different from the usual one.. The “translation” was liberal… pun intended. For the 4 sons, it had the answers as quotes from various modern philosophers and statesmen, and somewhere, I don’t remember the context, there was a section about nuclear proliferation.

As usual, we couldn’t hold back on making food. Despite the fact that it was supposed to be pot-luck (i.e. everyone makes one dish) we made: Chicken Soup with Matzo-ball (Knaidalach) – he actually made 3 kinds of matzo-ball: classic, with sumach and with paprika, Chicken wings with caramelized onions, Onion pickles, Apple Chutney (both went well with a lamb entrée someone made), Horseradish (Uri made from scratch), Haroset (which only after everyone got there we realized we did not have enough so I quickly made it, literally in 5 minutes, and was surprisingly good), and, last but not least – Krembo for dessert. Yum.

When pigs fly

2009-04-07T23:28:00.002-04:00

I have a lot to tell, and no time to tell it, but I did have to let you in on one thing:

IT SNOWED TODAY!!!

You can check it out live at this link on the"Quad Cam" . Engineering Quad is right across from my school.

Apple shmapple

2009-04-03T15:24:00.005-04:00

Yes yes... I haven't written in a while - but I had no time!!! Why don't you bug Uri about writing? So what if he's up at all hours of the night and you actually get to talk to him.

This week, um... these two weeks have been so busy - the only decent word that comes to mind is "silly".

This past week my marketing class and I went on a field trip. We visited companies, and heard interesting things that will be rel event to our jobs in the future: What does a production line look like and what implications do production capabilities have on a Brand Manager's role? What can PR do for a product launch? What are the steps taken to launch a new product? and on and on. These are all things we learned in class, but it was interesting to see them in action, and hear practitioners speak about them based on recent experience.

It was interesting, but very tiring. I would go on about it, but I'm too tired...

Maybe tomorrow.

The trip ended yesterday, but I stayed on in the city for another day since I had my interview with Peeled Snacks. i think it went well, I really never know about these things... One thing I really liked was that they all (or most) wore jeans and sensible shoes. They also gave me a bunch of packs to try.. they are really good! I think I really like this company, they have a very well defined positioning statement/ point of differentiation that I think is very smart. We'll see what happens.

I am now resting for a bit at Marc & Wolly's (new and awesome) apartment, and it about 30 minutes, I'll head out again to Penn Station, where I'll take the train to Philly and meet up with Shai. He's driving in from DC. We'll hang out for a few hours and then I'll head back. It's kinda crazy, but it would be silly for us to be so close, and with time on our hands and not make the effort to see each other. With that, I will finish, because I have to get ready.

I just got this in the mail, someone from my class put this together. It is not representative of the educational portion of the trip:

Back to school

2009-03-23T17:28:00.001-04:00

School started again, and surprise, surprise, it’s overwhelming! A ton of work, a ton of reading, spending hours at school, hardly seeing Uri…Yey! I’m so having pasta tonight! I thought I might need comfort food tonight, since I’ll be in school tonight in meetings until 7pm, and then when I get back home I will still have multiple tasks (reading article for one class, solving a case and creating a slide deck for another…), and now I can completely see myself with a bowl of pasts at hand with some of the béchamel sauce Uri made last week.

I’ve wanted to share with you guys something and I haven’t found the time for it. This really goes back to this blogs claim to be the adventure of 2 Israelis in the land of plenty.

One of the more popular toilet paper brands in the US is “Charmin”. I highly recommend watching the commercial below. You will probably find yourself asking “Who are the marketing idiots that thought that cartoon bears are cute enough to make people oblivious of the fact that the commercial is discussing toilet paper being stuck to your butt when you wipe it”.

Anyway, they have several grades of paper. We started out buying the cheapest one, which was perfectly fine. Then recently bought the Ultra Soft. Immediately we both noted that it was very strange. In a way that might be hard to imagine, it’s actually too think and too soft. This country is crazy! Excess excess!

Skillet baking 2

2009-03-21T00:28:00.005-04:00

I had this long post I wanted to write about a funny thing that happened to me today that can be summarized by saying that I was interviews for a Georgian TV show. But I am way to tiered to go into it.

We just came back from dinner at our friend D's house. Her parents are here visiting from Israel. so her mom made us dinner that was absolutely great. Highlights included thini she made with orange juice (I'm guessing instead of the lemon, but maybe in addition to) and stuffed grape leaves. Yum.

We brought dessert. As part of Spring break (woohoo!) I actually had time to bake. I made two things:

1. Something recently called in the blogosphere "World Peace Cookies" - a very chocolaty cookie that was actually quite good. I put in about twice the amount of chocolate chips (it was 5 ounces, but came out to 2/3 cup). Also, I didn't freeze them for as long as it says - I was in a rush, so I just scooped some out on

a pan, and stuck it in the freezer for 20 minutes.

2. Once again using our new skillet, I made an upside down apple cake. I adapted the recipe from a, American Test Kitchen recipe for upside down pineapple cake. I started off sauteing apples in brown sugar, then took out the apples, reduced the sugar with the apple juices to a caramel, and meanwhile made a fairly simple batter:

1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (7 1/2 ounces)

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon table salt

1/4 teaspoon cardamon powde

8 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 stick), softened but still cool

3/4 cup granulated sugar (5 1/4 ounces)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 large eggs at room temperature

1 egg white at room temperature

1/3 cup whole milk at room temperature.

Then, put the apples back in the caramel, the batter on the apples and, in the skillet - stuck it in the oven for 40 minutes.

Hibby Jibbies

2009-03-20T00:20:00.004-04:00

Today we received in the mail a package from Amazon. It was a cast iron skillet we ordered at the beginning of the week, using a gift card we got for our birthdays – so thank you to all the contributors, it is the perfect gift. This isn’t any skillet, it is actually THE skillet recommended by America’s test kitchen (making it a certified skillet, I guess).

Promptly, we used it to make corn bread. When I actually came to make the bread – after being in the gym for an hour and going to school for a meeting with one of my professors, I was so hungry I didn’t really think too much – I took a recipe intended to be made in a pan and made it as though it was a similar recipe that is intended to actually be made in a skillet. It still came out tasty, but a little flat since the skillet recipe calls for both baking soda & powder while the pan recipe calls for baking powder only.

To make it a square lunch, we had it with some fresh vegetables and some leftover Bolognese, which here sort of stood in for chili. Yum.

Now the title of this post actually relates to the other thing I wanted to share with you. It actually could not be further away from food. I will warn you that it’s a bit gross so proceed at your own risk. The events described below happened before lunchtime, but for obvious reasons I am writing them only after discussing lunch.

So it was a very nice day today, very sunny and all. I walked out of the house to go to the gym, and saw a little earth warm on the path. I smiled to myself and thought “oh, look at that, spring is here”. I continued walking down the hill towards the gym. For context I will add at this stage that ever since my little fall in December, I gotten back to my habit from when I was a teenager of walking with my eyes looking at the ground. So as I walk I keep seeing more and more of these squirmy things, some alive, most dead, some squirming only with half a body. It sent shivers up my spine, at first I just took larger steps to avoid stepping on them, but then there were more and more, at one point I found myself running on tip toe thinking to myself that if I can’t avoid stepping on them, at least I’ll do it quickly and not look. I can only imagine the grossed out look that was on my face. When I got to the gym I felt like I had to wipe my shoes. Yuck.

Amusing stuff from Boston

2009-03-18T20:30:00.003-04:00

This is something we found in Boston, and I found really amusing, but forgot to mention it:

We didn't buy anything - just because something is funny, doesn't mean that its any good. Not that it's bad, but it just didn't seem that special beyond the name.

That logic worked in Boston, but sort of stopped on Monday at the supermarket when I wanted to buy basketball shaped pasta.

Sping Break - WooHoo!

2009-03-16T23:47:00.004-04:00

Today brings another late not post. Though it’s not because I’ve spent all day working, but just the opposite – I’ve spent all day doing mostly nothing, and so I didn’t even think of it.

Uri and I spent most of today together, and I just tagged along with his normal Monday routine, interrupting where possible. We went to Wal-Mart and bought a huge box that is our new kitchen extension (fits nicely into the nook in the wall in front of our front door. When I say huge, I mean it – I could easily fit inside, and have enough wiggle room to read a book.

Then we went to Wegmans to buy groceries for home and for Kavita. I did our shopping and Uri did hers, and despite the fact that it was totally separate, he still forgot multiple things he had to buy. He claims it was because of me… and initially I thought that was an unfair claim, but if you look at it scientifically, I was the only variable… so what can you say?

It was really one of those moments where you wish you were living in a stupid sitcom. Because then, instead of getting upset at the fact that you have to drive downtown again, you could give a goofy look, and the “live” studio audience would laugh, and all will be right with the world. But that didn’t happen, he went down to Wegmans again and I meanwhile cleaned the refrigerator (it’s sick that this is my idea of fun things to do during Spring Break).

Then I went to the gym (for almost 2 hours!), came back, had a friendly conversation with our neighbor (imagine that, I was at home at an hour where sane people are actually out and about), made a salad, Uri and I each heated up leftovers and had dinner all before 9 pm. Amazing.

Oh – two comments about other things that happened today:

1. I returned a wine glass to Bon Ton. I had bought a set of 4 glasses, and when I got home one was broken. It took me a week but I returned it, and picked up another identical set. Exactly identical – because here too, one was broken. Needless to say in both times the broken glass was the last of the 4 that I unwrapped. Well, I was really fed up with wrapping and unwrapping wine glasses, so I decided I would put my foot down, and demand they let me exchange just the one glass. It took me two weeks to get around to it, but this morning I called them. I was really expecting a fight – but nothing, it was so obvious to them that they would exchange the one glass. Hmm... I love it when the customer is always right.

2. I had written a while back to a very cool company named Peeled Snacks. Today I got an email from their head of marketing/ HR/ Blogger, it was pretty funny in the tone that it was written in – so I thought I'd share. Just to put it in context – their emails for some reason get sent to my junk mail, or never even make it there:

Subject: Peeling Tamar

Hi Tamar,

I'm not sure if you received my last email, but I'm interested in talking with you and learning more about your current goals and seeing if there's a fit. I assume that you're currently in Ithaca, so a phone conversation would probably be the best thing, unless you expect to be in New York City soon. Please let me know of your availability this week and we'll work something out. And if this email is lost to the Internet, well that's really too bad. All the best from New York City,

Ian Kelleher, Peeled Snacks HR guy and then some

Read the Peeled Skinny, Peeled Snacks' Blog! http://www.peeledsnacks.com/blog 646-290-5313 ian@peeledsnacks.com

12 hours in a cah

2009-03-15T10:31:00.004-04:00

We took a vacation from Ithaca, and I took a short vacation for blogging – though you know I missed you… right? J

We headed out on a road trip to Boston… 6 hours – wow! I’ll say right away, cheers to Uri for braving the road there and back.

So – I’ll mention weekend highlights in bullet points:

Saw a cranberry bog – very cool
Uri went to Pandemonium, while I walked around and took pictures of Cambridge
I slept until 10 am (Spring break woohoo!)
Ate at some nice places:
Petit Robert Bistro – that was surprisingly reasonably prices (mid to high range)
Punjabi Dhaba - great Indian food, best Palak Paneer we ever ate and a name that’s really fun to say.
Christina's Ice Cream - Locally made Ice cream in all kinds of interesting flavors (I has the strangest ones with Ginger - very yummy, and azuki beans - kinda neutral and went well with the ginger), Uri had maple walnut and malted vanilla
Cheesecake Factory - this was our lunch pit-stop on the way to Boston. Not bad at all actually, though the decor is horrendous. I thought that maybe it was intentional - they wanted the place to look cheesy.
Found a store called Restaurant Depot, and convinced them to let us shop there, since Uri has is a caterer - saw huge containers of canned foods. sauces and spices, bought a case of Italian EV olive oil (12 liters) for less than $80.

Notice that getting a sofa is not on that list – yes, we looked for one, we drove out to IKEA and walked around the whole store. That store is amazing is that no matter what, once you walk in the door you are compelled to walk the whole store, making no shortcuts. And when you walk the whole store, needless to say you always find little things you want. Marketing genius. However, despite their whole “you put it together”/ brown box philosophy, the only couch that we liked and was in our price range was not boxed at all. It was just the whole coach, as is, with some cardboard at both sides and a lot of saran wrap around it. We looked into buying a roof rack, with no luck. So we just left it there… oh well. We’ll try keeping an eye on Craig’s list and hope for the best.

Happy Birthday Omri & Michal!

2009-03-12T02:13:00.003-04:00

So technically today is tomorrow, and so if you really want to be picky about it- then yes, I missed a day. But we all know it doesn't count.

Today was a very exciting day. I had my marketing mid-term (I haven't a clue how i did, so don't ask) and my team and I completed our last assignment before Spring Break. To mark the day, and prove that there is a god, it was also a very beautiful day*. I actually walked outside with only a 3/4 sleeve shirt as a top. In order to do this, I had to leave my heavy coat at Sage, so naturally the day progressed such that I found myself, same shirt on with an additional cardigan, running from the mall entrance to the car while snow flakes are falling from the sky.

Now I'm talking a break from packing (not that I needed a break, but I felt bad not writing). Packing? YES! We are going to Boston. ROAD TRIP! I'm really looking forward to it. We will be in Boston for a couple of days, and then head down to NYC for a couple more. The only odd thing is that the thing I am most excited about is that THE thing I am MOST excited about is the prospect of us coming back with a new sofa. Hmmm...

* I once observed that Fridays in Israel are usually beautiful sunny days, and thought to myself that if anything were to convince me that there is a god and that he is jewish, it would probably be that. But it doesn't.

really really short

2009-03-10T23:20:00.003-04:00

Another short one since it's 11:20 pm and I'm half way through studying for a mid-term I have tomorrow at 8:25 am.

Lesson of the day: Don't make grand statements, because you're only setting yourself up for failure. Didn't go to the gym, ant the hour some break between classes was spent doing basically nothing (well, talking to people, but nothing meaningful). Also, did not make it to the gym.

Went with our semi-vegetarian house guests to Moosewood for dinner. Nothing to write home about so I won't. The only thing I will say is that the old saying was once again proven true - the higher they climb, the harder they fall. It's likely I would have enjoyed it more if I didn't have such high expectations.

9 pm blues

2009-03-09T20:53:00.004-04:00

It's actually 8:52 now, but by the time I finish writing it will likely be 9. I'm writing this in blogger - its spell check is even worse than Word's.

I am still at Sage working on my weekly case for a course called "Consulting Focus", that trains us in the art of consulting. I will reserve my vicious comment on that for another time, but I here-by give rein to my dad to add a comment.

This is the reason that I didn't get around to writing before. I will likely not be able to finish the write up today, and will have to continue tomorrow morning, along with another small assignment due to the same course. Classes tomorrow start at 10:10 am, then I have an hour of break and then this class from 1:30 to 4 pm. Only after that will I get around to studying for my marketing mid-term on Wednesday. I announce now for all to here (maybe then it will come true): In that hour break I will work on my internship search!

Other random info:

1. I still have not had dinner.

2. We have house guest starting today and until Thursday. We thought we could get then an extra bed, but we can't because the cots Cornell used to offer have flees in them.

3. I went to the gym today - Yey!

9:03 pm

Keeping true to my word

2009-03-08T09:51:00.001-04:00

For all of you who aren’t super spellers, I will let you in on the fact that in every post I have multiple words misspelled. I write in word, which has a spellchecker - it even catches when I write it’s instead of its or then instead of than, but it doesn’t catch everything. I will admit that I don’t read the entire post after I finish it. I justify it by saying that in that way the post is really a stream of consciousness and that I don’t have a chance to delete and edit what I thought to write down. That is true, but also, by the time I finish writing, I just want to upload it already. As they say here “Done and done!”
The reason I know I make spelling mistakes is that for each post there is at least one person that writes me back and informs me of the spelling mistakes. Sometimes I do go back and change them, if it’s really something where the word was just misspelled in the simplest way. But if it’s more that I misspoke or made up a phrase or something like that, I just leave it. The blog is written in my voice and sometimes that voice isn’t perfect.
In response to yesterday’s blog somebody commented that I wrote I was “tiered” (should be tired), initially I went to change it, but then I thought about the fact that in a way (that is grammatically wrong) I could describe myself as tiered (as having layers upon layers of assignments and responsibilities on my shoulders) and then it even fits in as part of the excuse I use not to go to the gym. So I left it in.
One last thing before I end (I did say that if I write everyday these blogs won’t be so long). Last night the clock moved forward here and it’s causing me frustration right now. You see I pride myself on getting up early. Not only is it part of who I am, it’s also my justification for going to bed early. Since it’s the weekend I let myself sleep in and got up at 7:30 am. But by the time I was downstairs (where both the computer clock and the clock on the DVR change automatically) it was already 8:35. So now I have all these things that I always do Sunday morning, that I’m already late in doing. :)

petitio principii

2009-03-07T16:19:00.001-05:00

I have a very vivid memory of my mom, sitting in the kitchen of the house that we lived in in Maryland (11703 Greenlane Dr.), writing a letter to her mom. She’s sitting at the kitchen table – a heavy round wooden table, the room is lit in neon lights, the floor is a laminate blue and off-white checkered floor and she’s writing a letter on a special kind of paper that you would fold into three and it itself would become the envelope. I remember it was blue. When I picture it in my head I even think of my mom’s hand writing, and how it’s always so round and neat and the line always straight, despite the fact that the paper was blank.

The reason I remember this so distinctly is because this was something that would happen every day. Every single day my mom would right to her mom and tell her what happened to us that day.

I recalled this whole thing last week and thought to myself that I should start doing the same thing. Not writing an actual letter but blogging every day. This was I could let you guys (my captive following) in on the small details, rather than not blogging about the big things, or writing huge ginormous blogs because I need to explain context etc. There are other things I promised myself I’d do (like spend 30 min a day at the gym, since I’m getting pretty ginormous too). Well, needless to say that neither happened. I’ve been finding really good excuses for the gym part, and then using that as an excuse for the blogging part. But since now I’m sitting at Sage and not going to the gym (I’m really tiered and my legs hurt) I thought at least I would blog. Maybe if I start doing this every day, I’ll actually go to the gym everyday too.

Meaningful conversation - who would of thought?

2009-02-19T20:41:00.001-05:00

I had planned to write an angst filled post. I was majorly and very un-productively frustrated, so I started writing. I didn’t get around to finishing it. And then a couple of days went by and something a lot more interesting and a lot less depressing came up. I figured it would make a much better post.

The context for this is a team project I’m doing with 3 classmates that involves extensive market research concerning immigrants to Canada. In thinking about questions to ask for our survey, I had suggested the question “How do you define your identity?” (or something along those lines). One team member who is black said she doesn’t think it’s a good question because people wouldn’t necessarily reply with a cultural identification and gave herself as an example. She would not think of saying “I’m black, I’m American, I’m a woman”, but would most likely give character traits. My initial reply was to say that if that was the answer someone would give, it would certainly tell us something about his cultural identity as an immigrant. She at that time insisted we phrase the question as “What is your cultural identity?”. At the time I didn’t see the point of continuing the discussion about it and standing my ground (though I will when we actually come to the final version of the questionnaire), but back to the point – even when we had finished up, I was still pondering her response and how it was completely opposite of what I expected it to be. Obviously some of my surprise was due to stigmas that I have about American-educated-black-women (I wonder now if that is the right order to describe this group) but part of it was because she is part of both the Women’s Management Council and the Black Students’ Association.

So today I talked with her about it. It was really interesting. I had wondered if it’s an effect of growing up in a multi-cultural society, or maybe just the opposite. I don’t think we really got down to the bottom of it (it was after all a Sage Social), but part of what she said I really related to: She said that it had always really bothered her to be automatically associated with the “African American” group. As though she had to be friends with them despite not really having anything in common with them. And added that while she is for the general cause, on a personal level of interaction, it was something she chose not to do. She also said that on those same lines she didn’t like the term “African American” because it forced her into a cultural connection that she didn’t really have (neither she, her parents or her grandparents have ever been to Africa), and it’s not as though white people recognize themselves as Irish American or German American.

Read the fine print => Listen to what is said quickly

2009-02-01T11:06:00.002-05:00

One of the freaky differences between Israel and the USA are the commercials for pharmaceuticals. Israel has its share of commercials for over the counter drugs (Head ache medication, strep throat drops, etc.). In the US there are also commercials for prescription only drugs. But one of the reasons these drugs are prescription only, is because they have a lot of side effects. It turns out that drug companies have to say those side effects during the commercial. This makes for some very, very strange text. I think my favorite is a recent anti-psoriases drug that in some cases can cause death. Here, for your pleasure is the text:

Man voiceover: I hate psoriases

Woman voiceover: Love Clearer skin

Man voiceover: Forget the embarrassment

Woman voiceover: And the flaking

Man voiceover: Humira can help clear you moderate to severe psoriases. In one clinical trial for psoriases 7 out of 10 patients taking Humira saw 75% skin clearness and 6 out of 10 patients had clear or almost clear skin16 weeks.

Woman2 voiceover: Humira can lower your body’s ability to fight infections. Some people have had serious infections including tuberculosis and infections that spread throughout the body. Some of these serious infections have been fatal, so tell your doctor right away if you’ve had tuberculosis or hepatitis B, if you are prone to infection or if you get an infection. Do not start Humira if you have an infection such as an open sore or flu. Certain type of cancer – non- melanoma skin and lymphoma, and blood disorders, nervous system disorders, serious allergic reactions and new or worsening heart failure have occurred.

Woman voiceover: Hate covering up?

Man voiceover: Love seeing a difference!

Woman voiceover: Talk to your doctor about psoriasis treatment options. Ask whether Humira may be right for you. Today!

You can check it out for yourself here. You’ll also find there multiple testimonials about the drug (the one I randomly selected wasn’t very positive to say the least).

Liar, Liar (your pants are on fire, but I'm not going to tell you)

2009-01-29T14:51:00.003-05:00

The line between lying and not telling the truth is blurry anywhere you go around the world. But it seems that so many people here don't tell you the truth, that I can't help feeling as though they are all a bunch of liars.

One example is the weight issue - this is something that I contemplated before coming her: So there are a lot of "large" people here. And I often think: Do they not feel socially uncomfortable with it? And initially I answered my self: "Well, since it's so common, it's sort of a norm, and people don't judge it so harshly. But the truth is that fat people are used for comedic purposes in plenty of TV shows and movies. And why would people find it funny if it was so acceptable?

Here is another example: At the beginning of the year, a Professor gave a lecture ad the price tag was still hanging from her shirt. I'm sure I wasn't the only one to see it, but nobody (including the 2 sessions she had taught before mine bothered to go up and tell her). Obviously no-one (as far as I know) only mocked her. But inside? So why not tell her? Is it better to let her go on like that, and have other people think bad things of her?

Here is another example: It turns out, that my hat leaves a little red line across my forehead when I wear it for too long. The other day I came to school, as I entered (after taking off my hat) I met a classmate. We talked for 5-10 minutes. She did not say a thing. Why not say something? Why not allow me to do some damage control? Why allow me to look like a bit of a clown before other people too? Maybe having a red line across your forehead isn't seen in such a negative way here? Yea right - That's why comic writers are able to get a laugh when they have a character walking around with grill marks or drool marks somewhere on their heads.

Here is another example: Uri cooked for someone. Before, he sat down and suggested the menu, then proceeded to cook exactly what was agreed upon. The feedback he got: There was too much meat, we eat more tofu. So why OK the menu? Why not say - Don't cook 2 kinds of poultry, and cook some tofu instead?

This is the sound of me letting off steam. :)

Mornings in Ithaca

2009-01-25T09:53:00.003-05:00

Ithaca's Chef at Home

2009-01-19T00:50:00.002-05:00

To those of you who haven’t seen it, Uri has his own website now: http://www.ithacaschefathome.blogspot.com

So now that he's a professional - we decided to invest in some equipment (it's deductable - no?)

Thus we present: The Knife

Here presented in it's natural form (ie, in the midst of Uri cooking), the Shun Onion is the latest addition to our house. Its Kligon-like nature is a homage to Uri's fondness of Sci-Fi and my slight Trekkie tendencies. Uri claims it's the most comfortable knife he has. Personally, I can't cut with it. I guess it really a knife for pros.

Oh - and the real reason we got it was Uri's 30th birthday :)

Turkey Perfection

2008-11-28T17:24:00.008-05:00

Yey – aren’t the posts where this blog turns into a food-blog fun?
Our conquest of American culture began last week when Uri went to play football at the Johnson School’s annual Turkey Bowl (ie football game before Thanksgiving). That attempt was semi-successful. His team won, but he got a ball thrown in his face, ending up with lips so huge Angelina Jolie would be jealous.
Our second attempt was on a more level playing ground: yesterday was Thanksgiving, and we made Thanksgiving dinner. Here is the menu:
Roasted Turkey, Stuffing, Cranberry sauce, Green Beans with Beacon, Brussels sprouts with cheese sauce, Coleslaw with jicama, Onion tart-tatin, Savoy Cabbage with Worcestershire sauce, Boiled butternut squash with parmesan pangrattato, Sweet-potato mash, Pumpkin oatmeal bread with Squash and pecan butter. As for dessert: Butter pecan cookies and my tried and true pumpkin-cheese cake.

Everything was really good, but the turkey was incredible. It looked fantastic (the picture really doesn’t do it justice). Just like in the movies – beautifully browned, and needless to say very tasty.

We wrapped up the holiday with the one thing that is more American than apple pie: Shopping. For a few years now the Friday after Thanksgiving has been referred to as “Black Friday”. All the stores have really massive sales, and people line up waiting for the stores to open their doors. Uri, letting his inner anthropologist shine through, volunteered to stay up and go to Wal-Mart to buy us a microwave for $25. Just to be clear – he didn’t stay up that long after his normal bed-time :)

Last a few thoughts on the holiday:
1. It took us some time to process that since is not a Jewish holiday, the holiday starts on the day of the holiday, and not the night before. We kept expecting Thanksgiving Dinner to be the night before, but why would it be?
2. It turns out that in most American homes, Thanksgiving Dinner isn’t dinner at all but rather lunch. Most dinners start around 1pm and then last all day long.
3. We had a realization that Thanksgiving is the American Passover.
   a. It’s a holiday that passes on the mythology of how the American people came to this holy land and why they deserve to be here.
   b. It’s a time where everyone gathers with their extended family
   c. It’s a day spent eating.

No Words Needed

2008-11-19T08:26:00.002-05:00

Random thought about snow

2008-11-17T15:48:00.002-05:00

As most of you know, it has already snowed here a couple of times. It was a short, and melted quickly to be followed by a sunny day. Well – today it started snowing for real. That is today, it snowed on me this morning, the kind of snow that makes your coat turn white. It’s supposed to snow all day, and continue snowing the rest of the week.

And now to my point: I always wondered how come during group settings on TV shows some people were wearing T-shirts and some heavy sweaters. I kept thinking – don’t they have people that get paid to look for problems with continuity?

Well – now I have my answer. I am currently wearing an undershirt and a heavy wool sweater, across from me there is a girl with a thin long sleeved blouse, and behind me there is a guy in a short sleeved T-shirt.

Now that I finished writing this down, and I have no way of cleverly ending, I realize that this will probably be one of the stupider posts. Hey – it’s just a random thought; I’m not claiming it’s too deep. You rather I not write at all?!?! At least it’s short!

The little engine that could

2008-11-06T23:22:00.005-05:00

So... a comment on the recent elections - I'll try to keep it short.
After months and months of tracking the elections through "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" (and in the last few months "spying on the enemy" and watching Fox News), the Big Day finally arrived.
From my perspective, the day could have just gone by - naturally, it effects me, and I try to keep up with the news... but let's not kid ourselves - if I have any time to spare watching TV or reading the paper, I would rather watch "HEROES" or read the marketplace section of the WSJ.
But for all the Americans, and for Uri, it was a very engaging experience. We ended up going to see the results with a group of married couples from the school. It was a very interesting experience. Especially after it was clear Obama won. I think the sentence that resonated with me the most was "I can feel proud to be an American again".
I can certainly understand why this is - not only is Obama someone that you can be proud to call you leader, but also I think Americans can be proud that their country has finally overcome this societal hurdle.
On the flip side - there were also tears shed. I found myself thinking whether I could get so excited about elections in Israel and reached the conclusion that probably not. Uri said it's because I'm too cynical - and in a historic moment, I would probably find some joke to crack. He's probably right.

Some things we never got around to telling

2008-10-26T09:51:00.004-04:00

A friend recently wrote us a nice, long email (hint hint, nudge, nudge). At the end, she asked us all kinds of questions as to what's going on with us, and it made me realize that there are a few basic things that we haven't wrote about yet - we meant to, but then too many other things started happening and we either wrote about them, or didn't have time to write. So here is my answer to her, published, because I thought it would be interesting to everyone.

Hey!
It was so great hearing from you. Everyone keeps asking us how we're doing, and not telling us what's going on back home. So it is really great to hear what's going on there and feel that we're still "in the mix".
Here all is well. I recently started my 2nd quarter, which means 3 new courses. It seems that this semester will be a bit harder. Not only are the courses harder, but we also have a lot of other things going on. Most importantly, we have to really intensify our job search. After this quarter ends, we have a break for winter (more on that later) and then when we come back interviews start for internships. So that means that we need to start figuring out which companies we want to interview with and start reaching out to them so that we actually do get invited to interviews.
Also, we have all these things going on with clubs we have - bringing in lecturers, going to events . Last but not least, I'm also involved in something called "Big Red Incubator" (BRI for short). This is a school run program that gives us the chance to do real life consulting. I will consulting for an Italian Restaurant in the area. It seems really cool, but will also be pretty time-consuming.
At the point that I'm in now, it seems like the end of the quarter is really far away, just because there is so much that will happen, but the truth is that it's not far away at all, it will just be really intense. The quarter ends mid-December. And, in answer to your question, we will both be coming home for a visit. I'm really looking forward to it.
It will also be nice to get out of the cold for a couple of weeks. Autumn has started here, which means that it's as cold here now as it is in winter in Israel. You would think I'm exaggerating, but I'm really not - yesterday I wore one of my heaviest sweaters from home.
What else did you want to know?
What do we see from the windows? Well that's probably the 2nd most depressing part of this apartment: from the front window we see the stairs to the upstairs apartment, and from the back windows we see the fence of the golf course and then trees. It's part of the reason the apartment doesn't get much light. Hopefully it will also keep the cold away during winter. However - after those trees and that stair case, Ithaca has amazing views. Here are some pics that Uri and I took last week:

What are we eating? Well - we're certainly eating more meat and less vegetables, but not that much more/ less. The meat (and fish) is much cheaper and tastier than back home, and the vegetables are much more expensive. In vegetables/ fruits there are a lot of things that we have here that we don't have at home - like a million varieties of apples and pears and all kinds of veggies. There aren't a lot of things that you can't find here, but it might be really expensive (like peppers) or really not tasty (like mango). I think probably the biggest change in our diet is that we're eating a lot more sandwiches, because that is the most common thing you can find here, and more often then not, the only thing you'll find on the menu.
You also asked about our neighbours - but I think I'll leave that to the next post. Apparently there are people who think that I write too much...

Love,
Me

More Pictures! Yey again!

2008-10-11T22:27:00.004-04:00

This time around, a few more words. It's been a busy two weeks or so. Uri came back, and then Lior came, and now my mom and aunt are here.
I tried my hardest to do as much work as I could while Uri was in Israel, and just before he came back I hit a low point when it seemed like despite my hard work, I was getting as much (or as little) done as everyone else. Well, in the last week I discovered that it wasn't so. I did, somehow, magically, manage to be ahead of the game. This let me go hiking with Uri and Lior, and go shopping with my mom and my aunt. Yey! for me. Now, the pessimist in me has to say that I'll see if I'm, ahead of the game or not when I actually get my grades back for the finals I have this week... but the fact is that I did feel I can take the time off. Let me tell you - it was fantastic! Now I'm back to studying hard - 3 finals in 3 days is a lot. after that, Uri and I will head to The City for a few days, and then I'll be back for the 2nd half of the semester.
What about Uri you ask? Well, he should have his new computer in a few days, so he'll once again be able to write. In the meantime I will say that he is really enjoying his new PS3.

Pictures! Yey!

2008-10-11T09:25:00.004-04:00

Lior visited us last weekend. It was a great weekend of gaming, cooking, eating, hiking, coffee drinking and picture taking. Here are the results, straight from Lior's Flicker.

PS - Lior, who for the sake of the following statement, is a coffee expert said that while on the east coast, it's worth coming to Ithaca just for the coffee

Blogging isn't easy

2008-10-04T08:48:00.003-04:00

Not to complain - but... this thing isn't easy.
Without going to into the time thing again, it's hard to describe life and share my true thoughts without:
a) Being afraid I'll offending people
b) Feeling like I might be over-sharing
I think (b) is pretty easy to understand, but I will say a few words on (a). It's not that I think offending thoughts, it's just that in my head everyone is always potentially over sensitive. You never know what will offend someone, especially when your in a place that is culturally different. And while I don't feel alien to the culture here, there are small idiosyncrasies that make me unsure of what is the right way of behaving. This obviously goes both ways.

BTW - new addition to the "Foodies of Ithaca Unite" section of the blog.

Merry Christmas and...

2008-09-29T12:20:00.003-04:00

Comments for someone elses future doctoral thesis

2008-09-21T07:18:00.003-04:00

So apparently, one of the upsides of paying so much to go to school is that he school has enough money to pay a lot to the Professors. I’m studying accounting from the guy who literally wrote the book on accounting. So, strangely enough, I’m actually enjoying accounting. Let us not confuse enjoyment with complete understanding, but still…
So here is a little bit of accounting info: It turns out (Prof. Libby uses this expression a lot) that while a company accounting for its assets, has to report the cost price of the factories, machines, land, natural resources etc. that it uses for the running of its operations. It also has to account for their depreciated value. That means that it has to make an estimate of how long it will be able to use whatever it is and then divide the cost by that estimated number of years, and each year take that sum off of the book value.
So, when I got sick of doing accounting exercises, my mind started wandering, and sadly this is what it wandered to: How many years of useful life do oil companies estimated for their oil wells? Has this changed over the years, and if so, how has it changed over the last few years during the debate on the diminishing crude oil reserves? Have companies re-estimated? If so, have they changes the estimation to be higher or lower?
Professor Libby, despite his great accounting wisdom, didn’t know the answer but did acknowledge that was an interesting question. He also added that, from an accounting perspective, it’s interesting to note that companies who own natural resources might at times change estimates from a resource depleting itself to suddenly having value again. An example is natural gas. In the last few years, gas prices have risen enough and technology has advanced enough that it makes economic sense to go back to a field that previously was shut down, and drill again. This in some way has to be reflected in the books, despite the fact that the book value of the natural resources has already reached zero.

Comments for my future doctoral thesis (2)

2008-09-16T20:48:00.001-04:00

The upside of Uri not being here is that I can focus my non-study time on writing and not on Uri. At the risk of being kicked out of the MBA program, I want to share with you another observation I recently had.
To put it in context, and let you in on a bit of or semi-social life, last Saturday Uri and I participated in a school tradition called Johnson Night Out. This is a school organized event in which School Faculty and 2nd year students host 1st and 2nd year students for pot-luck dinners. Pot-luck is the American expression that means, everybody brings a dish for everyone to share. We were assigned to go to Prof. Charlotte Rosen’s house and invited with us was one 2nd year student and 2 other 1st years.
We got into a conversation about “the job market”. I won’t go how we got to it, but I at one point said that I think it’s sad that the world has come to a point where an MBA is so (over)appreciated, and a PhD is so under appreciated. How do I put this delicately? I guess I could call it a faux-pas.
Everybody was shocked at my statement and proceeded to state that there are a lot of vital skills taught in an MBA program that a PhD does not necessarily have. Now, let me say what should have been obvious to everyone there – I am in an MBA program. Therefore I am very grateful at the business world’s faith in such program to determine success in management position. And I do believe that this will help me reach my short and long term career goals. However, I am also able to step aside and look at this system with a bit of criticism in order to say that more than anything else the MBA program is a long screening process. It’s about getting into a club and being “one of the gang”. Most jobs, at least the high-profile ones, have some sort of training in order to purchase the main skills needed for the job. And these are jobs that a person who is smart and has good deductive skills can do, at a starting level, without much experience. I do not doubt that an MBA does a good job in training for this. I just wonder when did it become so that a PhD (and it doesn’t matter in what) isn’t an indicator for these things?
So back to the main point, I was really surprised at the fact that this was such a faux pas. Is it an American thing? Is it an MBA thing? I don’t know the answer. Hence the title of the post.

How time flys by

2008-09-14T08:30:00.000-04:00

For all of you who might have been worried – I am alive.
Some of you have commented that it has been a long time since last I wrote. My only defense is to say that time has lost all meaning where I am, so I haven't really been aware of exactly how much time has gone by.
I guess it's safe to say that my life is pretty crazy. This week I woke up in a panic. It was 6:20 am, which meant that I had over slept by 20 minutes. I know that to some of you are saying to yourselves “I get up before 6, what's her problem?” Well, for one thing – the reason I was oversleeping was that I want to sleep after 1 am. But that aside, the point I'm trying to get at is how worried I was by the fact that I'm starting the day so “late”. There are so many things happening, so many things I have to do, so many things I want to do, that it can get over-whelming. As it turns out (this is an expression professors use a lot – it turns out it's the intellectual “like” or “ya' know”) this is what is hard in business school. The formal teaching is what it is, and everybody here is smart enough to understand and do well, given enough time. The question is: What is enough time for you? If you are average (for the school) you might be able to do your school work and a few of the other basic things that go towards career building. If your above average, you'll be able to do more extra-curricular.
I assume that I need to explain the phrase “things that go towards career building”. Not only because it's vague, but because it is key to understanding the trickiness of time management in business school. The thing is that in today's market – and by this I am not referring to the economic state, but to the fact that there is a high supply of MBA students, it is hard to get a job. So starting from day one, the MBA program teaches you skills and coordinates events that go towards finding a job. This might mean having a course in Leadership, teaching us how to present ourselves in social events and where to put our name-tags or holding “corporate briefings” - an event in which a slew of people who work in a certain company come to campus, tell us about the company and then interact with us during a small cocktail party (=”networking event”). At the last we get to use the skills that we developed at all the “Sage Socials” and basically try to make the best impression we can, so that come interview time, we might have some advantage over our peers. I'm going to continue on the last example, because it is the best one, as it is the most intangible.
So... “Corporate briefing”, how much time does it require? The company will talk for 45 minutes, but you really really really don't want to be late, so it's marked on the calendar as 50. After that, there is the social, and that's really your chance to make any sort of impression, so you can't miss it or leave early – so that's another 45 minutes. All done? NO! There were at least 20 people in the briefing, how will anyone remember you over them? You need to find a way to continue the relationship: Write them a thank you note, write an e-mail asking to continue the conversation. (I'm cynical about this now, but it if it's a company you think you want to work in, these things are also important in order to make sure that the company is a good fit for you). So how much time does e-mailing require? More than you would think. The email you send is your digital footprint. You do not want any mistakes in it, so you spent quite a bit of time writing and proofing it. Because my natural tendency is to be more informal than formal (part of the deal of being Israeli), I also have someone else proof my emails. So there go another 45 minutes – and we're up to more than 2 hours allocated to career building. And that's just one company's briefing - there are multiple companies and there are more types of events. And they all have that deceiving quality that, unexplained, they might seem like fun. It's not that they are not fun, it's that their main purpose, and the reason you participate, is not necessarily the fun. I will however make the disclaimer that there are clubs and events that are purely for fun (As this is the USA, these things usually involve beer drinking).
The bottom line is that each student has to decide how much time he or she wants to spend doing each type of thing. Nobody is meant to do everything, but no one will tell you which is more important.

It's good to invest in Dragons

2008-08-30T10:52:00.000-04:00

Hello friends and family! This is Uri writing. Yes, this is not a mistake. I am using a voice recognition software that is called dragon.
It allows me to talk to the computer and the computer is supposed to understand what I'm talking and write it down. So far it's 70% accurate.
It's really fun to use. It gives me a whole new medium to communicate with you, but this way of communicating is new to me so please be patient. This post is not going to be as amusing as my wife posts I don't have the years of experience she has as a cynic and razor-sharp writer.

So what's going on with me? It's hard to tell, I have made good friends here and I like the city, but I still haven't found exactly what I am going to do here, and it's not easy to be in a state of uncertainty. But there are a couple of possibilities:

1) to be a private chef - that means to cook for families and to fill up their refrigerator with food for the whole week. I hope to have between three to five families every week. This idea seems to be the most realistic one, but it needs a lot of work and marketing
2) to be a teacher or substitute teacher. to teach in New York you have to have a diploma from New York State and that could be tricky but I am going to check it out
3) to be a cook in a restaurant, there are plenty of good restaurants in Ithaca area, but I am not sure that I have the experience to start as a cook and I'm not sure I want to start in lower capacity

These are pretty much my options here work-wise. But I have lots of other things to do here, for example I am working with the head of the diversity office on a project that is supposed to expose the student in the business school to other cultures. She offered me this project after she heard of my Masters Degree in conflict resolution and mediation. We had a sit down for two hours. It was really fun, she's a very nice person. It was fun using my intellect and experience and I got some good feedback from her and now where are working on this project together. So you can see I'm trying to keep myself busy.

So how was this post? It was really a good experience for me to write on my own. I am going to give this post to Tamar to check for any big mistakes but it's going to stay pretty much as I wrote it so you can see how the program works.

Hugs and kisses to anyone that I usually give hugs and kisses to and a manly handshake to the rest of you.

I will sign out with my usual (~`face uri

The pressure is on

2008-08-30T02:04:00.001-04:00

Some of might read the title of this post and think they will find an entry explaining why I haven't written in more than a week and about how intensive school has been since classes began last Monday.
You would, of course, be mistaken.
I am actually referring to the pressure I am putting on Uri by posting this blog to go ahead and post the next blog himself. Now I explain: We finally bought a desktop, and then finally the university let us have a second IP address so we could connect that computer to the Internet, and then finally installed the voice-to-text software we bought before coming here. (I sort of took the whole point out of the word "finally" there, didn't I?) So, as it turns out, Uri can write in English. There are a little mistakes here and there, but as some of you bother to comment, I make a few mistakes too - don't I?
So just to clarify - Uri is perfectly capable of blogging now, and if he doesn't do it, it's because he doesn't care about any of you readers ;)

I reserve a short comment for myself - we'll go for a subtitle:
You'll understand only when you get here
Today, after a mildly useless strategic leadership course that lasted 4 hours I had a true Ivy league experience. I went to the basement floor of Cornell's undergrad library to see a one of 5 copies of the Gettysburg Address. That's the one that starts with "Four score and seven years ago" and ends with "government by the people, for the people". Then I sat down to write my first marketing case in one of the rooms of the Graduate Library. The Grad Library is in Uris Hall (though we've been calling it Uri's Hall), a building planned by William H Miller. I thought that was a bit more significant, but after writing the name, I googled it and came up with mostly nothing - I'll go back to the library and see what they have there. The point is that it's this beautiful old looking buildings, that includes a clock tower with bells. Did I already mention that they occasionally play concerts on those bells?
I sit in this beautiful room that overlooks the lake, and has so much atmosphere in it makes it seem like time goes by more slowly. This last part is very important because school has been very intensive since classes started last Monday, that is the reason I haven't blogged in more than a week.

Comments for my future doctoral thesis

2008-08-18T22:17:00.000-04:00

I'll start with explaining the title - I have no intention of doing a doctorate at this point in my life. However, I can't really turn off my sociologist view of the world. The interactions of my class and the things said in my classroom are enough to be the base of not just one, but several theses. I started writing a document i named "After thoughts", but I thought it would be much more interesting to share those thoughts with you.

I had a class today called "Foundations in Leadership" in which we were presented a story about a guy named Chad. Chad, an office-supplies salesman, was approached by Jerry who said he would buy a large quantity of office supplies if he were given a Rolex watch. The story gets a bit more complex, with Chad's BF, his Banker, his Boss and the Boss' secretary as additional characters. The assignment was to create a hierarchy of the characters, ranking them according to their morality (or lack there of). I, like many of the international students, had Jerry as least moral. Most of the Americans had Chad as least moral.
In this libertarian country, founded by a group of Protestants, it's all about choice and personal responsibility. Chad was the least moral because he made a conscious choice to bribe Jerry.

Ready, Set, Network!

2008-08-17T08:11:00.000-04:00

It's a good thing I added that "or tomorrow" at the end of my promise. I actually meant it as a joke, but here we are - and it's tomorrow. So I'll get to the point (because I actually still have school related things to do - more on that later on).
The first week has been very hectic. Some of the sessions we have are about getting to know the resources Cornell offers us. Some are about leadership (next week is going to be all about that). Most of the sessions we've been having are about what career path we want to take after we graduate and how we go about achieving that. Unfortunately the last part is still rather vague and taken out of a coffee table book. Points that are stressed are:

Be authentic
Know what you want
Work hard at making and keeping contacts
Remember to write the contacts you meet Thank You notes
Make sure the Thank You notes/emails are spelled correctly.

This are all valid, of course - and, good student that I am, I've already written my first Thank You email (I hope I spelled everything correctly) but I sort of want to get the fluffy stuff over with and get to actually learning the skills that will get me the job. So far, all references to that have been in one of two ways: Either by say something like "Fit is really important to recruiters... Obviously having the skills is important to, but you'll all have that...". Or by remarks like "Once the Core (ie the classes that teach core skills) starts, you'll have absolutely no time".
Tiny sidetrack to stress how much they have been saying that second part: On the second or third day, while the MBA students where in a session about Ethics, the school had a session for the spouses to speak with them both about what they will be going through, and what the school offers them. Uri's report was that all they talked about was how busy we (this is "we, the students", not "we, Uri and I") will be and that they should get used to not seeing us much. I think it was on the next day that we got our TV (Sony HD 32 inch that we found on sale). At this point I'll refer back to the beginning, when I said that I still have school relate stuff to do, I doubt that I will have anytime in the near future when I won't have school related stuff to do.
Back to the story - the last type of sessions that were on our schedule we "Networking Socials". What does this mean? It means that there are specific times the school put in our itinerary for the week in which the whole class, 270 people, stand in the school's Atrium with the goal of meeting each other. After a whole week of this I can honestly say that I can not think of a more tiring and useless way of meeting people. It feels a bit like speed dating on crack (not that I've tried either one). [They also told us to manage our online presence, so this I write this whole paragraph rather hesitantly]. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make, is that the first 5 people you approach you can have a nice conversation with, but by the time you get to 6 your capacity to remember everything she/he tells you (and you always talk about the same thing - where they are from, what they did, what they want to do) is starting to dwindle. And since the "Networking Social" is scheduled until 5pm, and you still have an hour to go, you continue to the 7th person, and then 8, 9, 10... Maybe I should be writing "I" and not "you". I'm sure there are some of you out there (Mom, Shai...) that do have the capacity for this type of thing. But I'm pretty sure it's not just me who doesn't. Just so the recruiters that will be reading this in 6 months don't think I have no social skills, I will say that I have met some terrific people. I few of them I've actually met during a"Networking Social", but most of them I met either during or after breakout sessions, where we were in smaller groups and had a recent common experience to talk about. Oh - and it really helped that we didn't have the specific goal of meeting people. I will end this section by saying that the hardest part of networking (again, when it is done for the sake of networking) is ending the conversation. Off the bat, you would think that the hard part is starting the conversation - but it's really not, because everyone has the same goal: to network, so anyone you start talking to will happily talk to you. However ending the conversation is really hard. Once you finish hearing where they are from, what they previously did and what they want to do in the future and tell them the same about you, that should pretty much be it. You are in a room with at least 268 other people all talking at the same time, so the chances of finding a common subject to talk about and going into a more deep conversation in which you'll really get to know the person are pretty slim. Add to that the fact that both of you are looking around at the other 268 people and are thinking "I still have to meet all these people" (The Dean said so). The Save is usually one of you saying "I'm going to get a drink" or "I have to go to the restroom". So - I have to go to the restroom.

The Moment of Truth

2008-08-16T08:27:00.000-04:00

So school Started this week. Officially, it still hasn't. We are in "Orientation". Which basically means we're learning stuff, but not being graded on it.
I actually don't have time to write now. I spent the 30 minutes I had this morning putting up the pic of Uri below, adding the link to Lior's pics and trying to figure out how I transfer the school's public calender in Outlook Exchange to my Private calender in my Outlook Desktop so I could then go ahead and sync that with my Google Calendar.
Don't worry - I wrote all that out just to say that I know it's ridiculous, and a bit of a time waster, but that's modern times for you.
Anyway, I decided to post this anyway as a sort of vow that I will blog today! or tomorrow ;).
I'm off now - "morning session of "Career Self Assessment".

The Wedding

2008-08-11T06:47:00.000-04:00

So the weekend is over, we said goodbye to our friends, and now it really begins.
Well, sort of - I'm on a bus on the way to Ithaca while Uri is still in NYC with our friends. Tomorrow they are going to 6 Flags - Great adventure, home of the Kinda Ka. Of all the things I'm missing out on, I think this is the one I'm most jealous of.
This weekend was all about Marc and Wolly's wedding. It was probably the biggest wedding I've been to, not in terms of the amount of people (no one can compete with Israelis there), but it terms of production.
The wedding began on Thursday with the rehearsal dinner that took place in the basement floor of a cool place called The Smith.
The wedding itself was Friday night. We both got dressed up. For Uri this meant wearing a suit for the first time. I think that I can objectively say that the suit suited him well, but I'll add a picture so you can judge for yourselves.

The venue was Tribeca Rooftop and it was amazing. When we got there it was still light out, but as the cocktail hour(s) went on the sun set and all the while we had an awe inspiring view of the Hudson and the Brooklyn skyline. The food was fabulous (and plentiful). Opening cocktail included, a cheese bar (with an amazing aged cheddar), a cold seafood bar, a sushi bar, a martini bar and an alcohol bar. Even the peanuts at the bar were great. Afterward there was a buffet that featured an amazing Chilean Sea-bass (I'm pretty sure it was marinated in milk) and pork-chops (I think) which I didn't try, but I'm told were really good too.
There was a fantastic three tier wedding cake and assorted tarts and truffles for dessert. Marc and Wolly will have to forgive me that I'm not describing every little thing in detail, but if I do this post will never end. If you really want to know, your can check out their blog Gromzilla & I, maybe they will have it there. Add for those of you that want the story in picture's you can check out Lior's Flickr page (besides the batteries in our camera ran out, we were too lazy to bring in to all these events - it didn't really go with the suit).
Anyway, back to the important stuff - the ceremony way beautiful mainly because of the beautiful vows Marc wrote for Wolly and the funny (yet still touching) vows Wolly wrote for Marc. The ceremony was presided by a reform (woman) Rabbi who reminded me of a character in a movie, but I still can't place my finger on exactly who. Her part of the ceremony was a bit strange to me, since she kept going back and forth between speaking in English and blessing/singing in Hebrew. There is a certain sacredness that comes from the fact that to American Jews, Hebrew is the language of the holy texts, and not an everyday language. In Israel we understand every word said by itself. Thus a single word might start a random line of thought or a line can be played with, its meaning changed (like Yehuda Amichai did in El Male Rachamim). Here it was different, Hafrada Bein Kodesh Le'Chol.
Of course there was also speeches, dancing, and the obligatory video montage AND also something called a Mazinka. I would appreciate any information any of you have on this thing. Apparently, the Mazinka in a Jewish-American tradition that celebrates the wedding of the last child. The proud parents (who now don't have to worry about who the kids are going to bring home) sit with floral writhes on their head while their family and friends dance around them. Strange but true.
I will say again that it was THE wedding. I know that Americans have different standard than Israelis, and if we continue to live here, we'll probably be invited to other impressive weddings, but I doubt any will match this one. It's all in the details, and Wolly and Marc (I assume especially Marc) paid a lot of attention to a lot of details - from the "save the date" magnets, to the decor, to the suits they wore, and the outfits they changed into after the ceremony, all the way to the Bagelworks muffins that waited for the guests when we exited the venue.
Oh - and on Saturday there was brunch at a Dim Sum place in Chinatown called Golden Unicorn.
I'm getting tiered of writing, I can only imagine how the two of you who really got all the way here are tiered of reading, so in bullets - things we did in the city, in between the wedding events, while saying goodbye to our friends (mainly food related):
- Friday: Went to Houston's to eat the grilled chicken salad. Uri claims it's worth the $16. I'm not sure I agree, but it is very good. Conclusion: Don't trust Eitan's uncle when he calls something a "diner".
- Saturday: Went jogging in Central Park: I'm really proud of myself, I kept up with Uri and Eitan (who didn't even brake a sweat) as we ran through the park a whole hour.
- Saturday: Went with all the friends (sans grooms) to Hill Country. Cool BBQ place meant for menly-men.

Now, as I said in the beginning, I'm on the bus to Ithaca. It started raining before, but now it stopped. The driver keeps stopping by the side of the road (literally, on the side of the road, not in rest-stops) to go to the toilet. Hopefully I'll be home in an hour.

Ithaca is Gorges!

2008-08-08T11:11:00.000-04:00

This will be short:
While I was finalizing the bureaucracies of us buying and registering our 2006 Honda Civic (Whoo-hoo! We got a car!), Uri took our house-guests hiking in the Ithaca area. During their first day, they went kayaking in Cayuga Lake, which gets all the way to the bottom of Ithaca. They didn't take the camera, so I have no pics of that.
On the second day, they did 2 hikes, one a bit north of the city, and one a bit to the south. After they came back, we walked around campus and went up to the 5th floor of Cornell's Art Museum for a scenic view of downtown and the lake.
Uri didn't divulge any information about the hikes, so I have nothing to write, but enjoy the pictures. Everything you see is less than an hour's drive from our house.

Eitan's Happy Meal

2008-08-08T10:12:00.000-04:00

The blog hasn't been updated for the last few days because we simply had no time. Our friends from Israel - Yuval, Bella and Eitan came up to visit. They are here (in the USA) for the event of the century - Marc & Wolly's wedding, and while in the area, decided to see where we live.
Since Eitan, like us, loves to cook, Uri guessed that he would love to have the opportunity to go shopping at Wegmans and cook a meal.
It was a bit scary to see Eitan loose at Wegmans. Eyes wide open, his radar immediately found the most expensive items they had on sale, then the finger went out, pointing: "I'll have some of those please".
Anyway, what came out was a fantastic meal, that probably should have been 3 separate meals:
Appetizer:
Seared Fresh Scallops with Fresh Salsa (tomatoes, fresh sweet corn, red onion, cilantro, apricot) in a Baked Corn Tortilla Cone
Main:
Surf & Turf: Lobster and Steak
Sides:
6 Mushrooms, Sauteed
Baked Potato Duet: White & Purple Oven Baked Potatoes
Sauteed Red Swiss Chard
Green Salad: Dandelion Greens (this are terrific, the have a strong, horseradish flavor), Lettuce and Cucumber with a Honey-Mustard Vinaigrette)

No dessert needed!

Enjoy the pics!

Saturday is Sunday in the USA

2008-08-04T23:02:00.000-04:00

In between all the shopping, we did other important things like open a bank account and get mobile phones. I mention the two together because they are the begging and (hopefully) the end of a lesson we learned about credit that made us think that maybe the by-line of this blog should have been "The adventures of two Israelis trying to establish credit in the land of plenty". While in the bank, I discussed with the manager getting a credit card. This was after he told us that we would each receive a debit card. Uri, confused, said "If we have the debit card, I don't understand why we need a credit card too".
I replied that we need to start establishing credit. He nodded, but when we were back in the car, he said to me, "I still don't really get it".
From the bank we headed to Verizon, the preferred mobile phone company in the Ithaca area (they have the best reception). After looking around, we wanted to buy numbers and phones. Not as easy as you might think. It turns out that to do that, they run a credit check on you, and if you don't have credit (meaning: you've proved that your an honest person, meaning: that you have money, meaning: that you pay your credit card bills on time) they don't sell you a phone without a very hefty deposit. Seriously? Yes! So... Lesson learned.
Paris Hilton once again popped into my mind - Obviously, Paris does not need to buy using credit. So I wonder - Does she buy things using a credit card instead of a debit card simply to establish credit history? If not, then did she too have to put a deposit down when she got her mobile phone?

And now for something completely different:
To get used to the fact that the week here starts on Monday and ends on Sunday, we had the other MBA Israelis over for Sabbath Tchulent for lunch on Sunday (Uri insists, so I’m adding: Chamin).
It was excellent. US adjustments were made: There was Kogel instead of Kishke, and no Shmaltz was used, but it hit the spot anyway. The day was even a bit gloomy, just to get the atmosphere going. For dessert I made rustic tarts with pastry cream and fresh summer fruit (4 (!) different kinds of berries). Just to make clear - "rustic" because I have no electrical kitchen gear or a rolling pin, so the pastry crust was rather rough looking.
Kogel:
2.5 cups of flour
1 cup oil
1 large onion, sauteed
1 egg
¼ teaspoon mustard powder
Salt and pepper, to taste

Mix all the ingredients together and pot in a cooking bag, place in the stew pot.

It's a food slideshow this time. You can click on the little speech bubble icon to see my comment on each picture.

Canned Cornucopia

2008-08-03T06:28:00.000-04:00

So the question still remains: How do you make a house a home?
The answer is: by filling it with stuff.
Yes, yes... you also need to fill it with love, and friendship and good-times, (and the sent of the Tchullent cooking downstairs in the oven isn't bad toward the wanted "homey" affect). All that is true and nice. But you also need stuff.
Stuff that you can call your own, stuff that makes you feel your house is different from the house to your left (or the one on your right), stuff that helps you relax when you come in after a long day. For those of you shaking their heads right now, asking - "Why can't they relax with a good book?" I will answer: (1) a book is also stuff (2) it would be nice to have a shelf to put that book with after your done reading.
After that forward, I will now explain that our first week of Ithaca was mainly spent buying things. Let me tell you - For a small town, this place sure has a lot of malls! There are 2 mall complexes, one on each side of town, each actually consisting of around three separate malls. So as far as everything for the home type stores: there is a K-Mart, a Wal-Mart, a Target, a Sears (though a small one), Lowe's, Home Depot. For supermarkets: a Wegmans (I hyper-linked that one because it's the nicest, with huge fresh meat and seafood counters, lots of local fruits and veggies and fresh bagels made around the clock), 2 Tops and a P&C. In the supermarket department there's also something called Aldie. We went there after being tipped off that it's the cheapest supermarket. We went in expecting a warehouse, and accordingly, warehouse prices. Instead it turned out to be a rather small supermarket with imitation everything. You know the type: That everything is generic, but made to be reminiscent of the real thing. So "I can't believe it's not butter" will still be yellow, but will be called: Butter-flavored vegetable spread that is reminiscent of butter". And some things might have named similar to the original, like "Hola" a red bottle labeled "Carmel flavored fizzy soft drink". Anyway that place was really depressing and Uri and I decided that without the need to feed 5 children, the price difference did not justify the depressing atmosphere there.
Wow look at that - I wrote all this, and still have not gotten to what I initially wanted to say... can you handle more? If you can - read on, if you need a break:

Anyway, we spent the first 3 days just going between stores buying thing. From essentials like toilet paper, to must haves like lamps for the living room (I already mentioned it's low and dark - right?) to personal touches like shelves for the kitchen with baskets for the potato and onions. I have to tell you that I have a new respect for Paris Hilton. It is not easy to do so much shopping. After about three hours, your eyes start to water from the neon lights, your head start to sway a little, and your most intelligent thoughts are (read in cookie-monster voice): "Oh! Look at all the pretty colors" and "Ah! This pillow so soft and nice".
One of the most amazing things about shopping in the United States concerns grocery shopping. I can not begin to describe the extent of which everything is pre-packaged. The supermarkets are just rows and rows of cans and jars and finding basic items (ie dried beans, tomato paste without flavorings) is really hard. This of course, versus the Israeli supermarkets where there is a "canned goods" section. Also, walking around the supermarket, we keep saying to yourselves "What will they think of next?" (Or, when in a more cynical mood, "How lazy can these people be?"). They have taken the "take the same thing, make a tiny change, and sell it as something new" concept to an unbelievable level. For example: Garbage bags: at first it was just a bag, then there was the whole string thing, now there is also bags the have flaps, so tying the bag will be easier. Or, a special plastic cooking bag (very different from a regular cooking bag, because it has a different name) that one puts inside the slow cooker before using it so as to avoid the need to clean the slow cooker after using it. Amazing.
Friday, we decided not to go shopping at all. Saturday we tried to have an alternative shopping experience. We started the day by driving north to Trumansburg to check out a garage sale. I will quote Uri who defined it as: "People trying to sell junk they bought at other people's garage sale and then found out they have no-where to put it". We were younger by at least 40 years from anyone else we saw. These included two gentlemen that had an oxygen device hooked to their belt. This experience made it clear that in this post-Craig's List era, garage sales are really for those who don't know that the Internet is on computers now. From there we headed to the Ithaca Farmer's Market which was a bit disappointing on the practical side. I don't know why we expected it to be cheaper than buying at the supermarket. But I'll cut the story short by simply saying that it wasn't. Around a third of the stands sell prepared food, which makes the market a nice place to get lunch (though, again, not a cheap lunch), but since we did need to by fruits and veggies, we headed afterward to Wegmans to do our shopping.
To end on a high note: On the way from the garage sale to the market, Uri spotted a guy BBQ grilling in a parking lot. The size of his grill, the amount of chicken he had inside and the fact that he was almost alone were signs that this was not a family-weekend BBQ. We pulled into the parking lot, and it turns out that this guy, for a couple of years now, has been selling BBQ ribs and "Cornell Chickens" every weekend. We bought a chicken, which Uri had for dinner - Delicious! The guy said that the NY Times just interviewed him, and that he will be featured sometime soon, so when that comes around, I'll send the link.

What makes a house a home?

2008-07-31T18:29:00.000-04:00

Well here it is - the much anticipated post on our new house.
We live in one of two on-campus housing communities, called Hasbrouck Apartments. I'm not 100% sure, how you pronounce it, but thus far I've been saying Hass-brook, and no one has corrected me, so let's just stay with that.
The housing community consists of around 40 townhouses (or as they are called in Hebrew - "train houses"), set up in a semi-circle. There are cement paths leading from the road to each of the individual houses, and grass all around. Right now there are a lot of little plastic cart toys all around, I guess once the school year starts, and people will come back from vacation there will be a lot of kids playing around. Just above the complex, there is a golf course, and since we're at the edge of the complex, we can actually see it from our living room window. Since Ithaca is in the middle of no-where, and we're at the edge of Ithaca, the "life in the country factor" is very strong. When night time comes, you can see all the stars in the sky. During the day, there are wild animals of all kinds. Needless to say, there are squirrels and raccoons, but also deer and bunny-rabbits. Two days ago Uri when on his first jog almost stepped on a bunny and also saw a beaver.
The house itself in nice. It will take some work to make it a home. I think our apartment in Tel-Aviv was just so nice, it's hard to compete. The main difference is that while there are ceilings were relatively high, here they are relatively low. If you compare the two, and figure in Uri's size, it makes this apartment seem kind of small. The top of Uri's head is about 10 cm from the ceiling.
Slowly but surely, it will come around. I started with the bathroom, since from all the rooms, it got me down the most. My bourgeois-self kicked in and gave the solution: Nothing can't be fixed with a little bit of money. I bought a match set of towels, bath rug and shower curtain with the thought that if I put beautiful thing in there, it will take my eyes off of the things I hate. Guess what? It worked!
There is of course the kitchen. This was mainly taken care of by Uri's lucky find on Craig's List. We bought almost everything anyone could need in a kitchen Yesterday we already cooked ourselves dinner, and I even made a sort of cake. I had no recipe, but all I wanted to do was make some sort of cake-like dough and stick lots of fresh blueberries in it. The oven is a little strange. It's gas. We'll have to see how that works.

That's all for now. Next time: We're shopping 'till we're dropping!

I just flew in to Ithaca - and, boy are, my arms tired!

2008-07-30T07:15:00.000-04:00

Highlights of our flight:

747-400 filled with 2 groups of teenagers: one group American, on the way back from summer camp in Israel, the second Israeli, on the way to the US for summer camp
Bad weather in NY caused a backup of landings at JFK. 41 planes waiting in the air.
Ours didn't have enough fuel to wait that long in the air, so we flew to Hartford CT, to re-fuel at Bradley Airport.
Notice: the word International is not in the airports name. ie - we were not allowed to get off the plane.
It started to rain in Hartford. Apparently, you don't fuel airplanes during lightning storms. We waited for the storm to pass.
Remember those kids? Instead of dimming the lights (Israel time was around 2300), the crew decided to give them fruit juice.
We made it out of the terminal at JFK at around 8 pm local time, and headed for the car rental agency, only to discover a line about 10 people long. We got the car just before 11 pm.

We started driving, Ithaca bound. We new we had no intentions to make it all the way, but at least get started, and find a motel on the way. A bit before the Poconos we felt like there was no more driving in us. We headed into a town, and there it was: a "Whole Foods" parking lot just before us, and the motel nowhere in sight. Can you guess what we did?

Yes - we slept in the car.

It really wasn't that bad. I mean, because of the problems at Budget, they gave us an SUV, so there was plenty of room. And we had pillows and a blanket that Uri carried on board from home (in a vacuum sealed bag, the sized reduced by like 50%, very cool).
The sun woke us up at 5:30 am. Or, more precisely, it woke Tamar up at 4:00 am, and she managed to go back to sleep, but my the time 5:00 rolled around, there was no more of that. She started to move the car in the lot, to see when the supermarket opens, Uri woke up and we hit the road.

We ate breakfast at a cute diner, got our first taste of the US when, together, we couldn't finish one order of pancakes, and continued. We made it into Ithaca at around 10 am.
More about that next time.

Starting our blog

2008-07-18T18:17:00.000-04:00

Moving to a different country and all, we decided to enter the blogasphere to facilitate making the world a little smaller, thus bridging the span of the Atlantic Ocean just a bit.

The first order of the day was finding a name for the blog. Among the finalists were:

As American as apple pie
The j-files (a reference to our j visa status, not to our religion)

and:

The Princess Diaries

However, once the current name came up, there was really no more arguing. For those of you not following stupid movies coming out of Hollywood these days, it's a reference to Adam Sandler's new movie "You Don't Mess with the Zohan". It was, of course, Uri's idea. Tamar sited all the reasons it might bot be a good idea, but - again - there was no arguing. Hopefully when the time comes to name our kids, Uri will be less enthusiastic choosing such silly names.

As we said, this is where you'll be able to read all about what's up with us.
Without committing to anything, we hope we'll be able to tell you all about:

food we're cooking
resaurants we eat in
TV we watch
games we play
places we visit
people we meet
the exotic nature of the North American culture