There are some things that just taste better when you’re feeling bad. It’s a personal thing, and for me, it changes depending on how badly I’m feeling. Carbs is the obvious stand-out winner in the comfort food category, probably because it helps absorb whatever’s upsetting you, but not all of us like the heavy feeling that pasta gives you.

For me, tomato soup has always been my go-to comfort food. Open a can, pour the contents of the can, plus a can’s worth of milk into a small pot, bring to a boil. Simple, straightforward, satisfying. Now that I’m not fourteen anymore, I don’t have to rely on a prepared can of soup concentrate to soothe my turgid, er… soul, but taking a couple of hours to make a whole pot of soup while feeling lousy isn’t always practical. Enter the egg.

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Meat in Israel is a long-standing source of frustration for new olim, especially those from North America. It’s as if cows in America are somehow built with different parts, and trying to find the right piece of meat for your recipe becomes more confusing than it should be. Couple that with the now-permitted hindquarter meats, and you more than double the number of cuts available that people may never have seen or heard of before. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, they number the meat like you’re in kindergarten, making you feel that much more stupid.

Enough is enough. I present my definitive guide to buying meat in Israel.

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Here’s a handy chart for cooking times of common and not so common beans and legumes.
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I’m not a fresh tomato lover. Unless it’s summer and unless the tomatoes are so red they’ve earned the right to be called ‘tomato’. Luckily, the cherry tomatoes I had in the refrigerator were both. So today’s lunch salad was

• Cherry tomatoes, cut in half
• Parsley, rinsed and snipped
• Red onion, sliced
• Zfatit cheese, crumbled
• Walnuts, broken
• Olive Oil, drizzled
• Red wine vinegar, splashed

Proportions? Feh, eyeball it.

Sorry there’s no picture.. I finished it before I finished the post.

Humans, in our arrogance, have devised numerous ways of taking a fruit or vegetable and dissecting, dissolving or distorting it from its natural state to make it into something, well, delicious. I’m not knocking the natural state of produce that Hashem blessed us with, but sometimes, we don’t want to have to do all that chewing.

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