Weekly recap

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.

The continuing adventures of Hummus-Man

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…

Ithaca's Chef at Home

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 :)