POMEGRANATE
I spent two hours last night writing and re-writing this post.
Writer’s block — it happens more often than we care to admit. Usually, I can defeat it by just sitting down, shifting into “writing mode” and typing out whatever story comes to mind. Last night, however, that was not working. I wanted to tell you guys a funny story that started with a friend setting off a smoke alarm at midnight while cooking chicken and ended with me bragging about how I’m my father (the homebuilder)’s most handy child.
When I lived in Jerusalem (OH MY GOD YOU LIVED IN JERUSALEM YOU NEVER TALK ABOUT IT), I was invited to a friend’s for Shabbat lunch and was tasked with making a side dish. I decided to explore my horizons and make something I’d never made before, and for some reason settled on mashed butternut squash with feta and pomegranate seeds.
Which like, sounded delicious.
But boy was it a mess.
So I'm a little afraid of my kitchen.
"Rina, you write a food blog, what the fuck?"
I know, I know! I should have full kitchen confidence, wielding knives with Benihana flamboyance and blowtorching shit all over the place.
But I'm a little afraid of my kitchen.
And the reason I'm a little afraid of my kitchen is because my oven is old, small and makes a clicking noise every once in a while. It's not not the title character from Alien.
As I sit at my desk on this blustery afternoon, my mind naturally turns to what I'm going to eat for dinner. Do I want to spend a couple hours at the grocery store, stirring and measuring and roasting after a long day?
Fuck no. I want a bowl the size of my head filled with guacamole. With some crunchy things to dip thrown in for balance. A reasonable request, I would say.
I've been binge-reading a column on The Cut called "I Think About This a Lot"and it is brilliant. BRILLIANT. Each article is about a meme or shared cultural experience that the author, well, thinks about a lot. There's one about Baby Jessica, one about Kanye West saying that George Bush doesn't care about black people, and so on. But the article in which I truly see myself is: "I Think About the Gossip Girl Murder Confession a Lot."
Inspiration is a funny thing. It comes and goes as it pleases, and like lightening it rarely strikes the same spot twice, so you have to make an extra effort to grab it while you can. The nice part about having a partner in crime is that inspiration rarely runs dry. Rina and I are constantly bouncing ideas off each other, swapping dream recipes, nostalgic eats and complimenting each other's ideas with embellishments and corrections.
It isn't technically winter yet, but I'm already starting to feel the wintery blues. What a quaint way of putting it, as if I'm a little sad that it's cold and dark but with the right blanket and mug of hot cocoa everything will be fine.
What I really mean is, now that I see the sun without a window in front of me for maybe two minutes a day, my mood has gone south. Way south, with the birds. Maybe my mood is in Florida, with the geese and octogenarians. I hope it has a good time down there, and that it will come back soon.
Tis’ that time of year where cookies unabashedly take center stage. Halloween gets candy, July 4th gets cookouts, Passover gets matzah and December holidays get cookies. Of course, for us, December means Hanukkah, which means lots and lots of things fried in oil. And stuffed to the gills with halva and vanilla bean custard. But that’s just us.