First of all, can I just say how awesome it is to have clean water again? We weren’t even affected all that much by it here, in the two and a half days the incident lasted–we boiled water to drink, and bleached our dishes after washing. It just feels awfully nice to have it back.

Having said that… spring is here, and things are springing out of the ground. New business ventures mainly. Saturday night I was at the swinging little opener for Artisan’s Asylum, a Union Square collaborative supporting “creative people who like crafting things (as defined in the vaguest possible way)”. The “swinging” is literal in this case–Asylum wardens Gui and Jenn are blues dance instructors. I’m not really up on the social hacking scene in Boston (there was a contingent from Sprout), but I know it will be glad for another space like this. It should more than make up for its small size with the unbridled creative ambition of its backers, many of whom are my former classmates.

Another thing I stumbled onto recently was a sign for West Medford Open Studios, an annual showcase of local art that would be really cool to see if I wasn’t going out of town this weekend. Mother’s Day weekend here seems to be prime time for cultural events–there’s a performance of the Wellesley Symphony that also sounded pretty cool (as for me, I have a consult with mom’s tattoo artist in Albany).

On top of all that, there’s a new deli opening soon, just down the street from us. My standards for deli are decently high, so it remains to be seen whether that will bring more of my business to the strip. A good deli would go a long way toward rounding out our eating options–down the street we’ve got Ebisuya market, and a decent Korean restaurant.

Speaking of which, stomachs are rumbling here. Time to make us some pizza.

A while ago, around the time my membership to BJ’s Wholesale Club expired–I could write a whole other blog entry about that place probably–Ginneh and I were having some problems with unused food going bad in the fridge, and grocery bills that belied the number of times we ended up resorting to ordering in.

A simple principle was proposed: to avoid buying most of our supplies more than a week or so in advance of when we specifically planned to use them. It was a back-to-basics directive, and it worked, when we found ourselves shopping at all. As you can imagine my sickness really threw a wrench in the works; so did Ginneh’s rehearsals for Forum. And, more recently, one or both of us has often been going through a short spell of the Mopes, the Broods or the Idunwannas. Not to any extent I’d label as clinically worrisome, though it interferes with meal planning and execution.

But this weekend I glimpsed the possibilities once more in a bout of personal initiative. I’d had my fill of delivery of late. Even Kabab Corner was beginning to seem mundane, and that was a problem. So I made a quick trip to Ebisuya and picked up some fresh ingredients and some things for the freezer. What I bought cost only $15, and has served as the nucleus to a whole string of stir-fry meals.

Usually, it’s something slightly more monolithic that kicks me out of a funk and reinvigorates my kitchen activities. Right now I’m inspired to think small: curry noodles and spiced-meat-and-noodle dishes based (very) loosely on Szechuan Dan Dan.

What I like about these is the interchangeability of parts; on some level I know it’s a technological analogy that is unfriendly to nuanced, authentic food preparation; but realistically, how often does my cooking achieve that level of sophistication anyway.

Today, after some confusion about the order of preparation and the requisite cookware, I repeated Sunday’s stir-fry, self-served with a choice of protein. I made sliced tofu and shaved beef on the side, using an identical dusting of pepper, garlic, salt and cinnamon and fried in peanut oil. I stir-fried the noodles and scallions together in chili oil. Roommates’ reaction was good–I was really concerned the crispy coating of spices would be overwhelming. Doing it this way, preparation time was lengthy, but doing the dish without redundancy (like Sunday when it was just pork), it was fast and gratifying.

I think these are the metrics I need to start applying to my cooking repertoire in the coming months. Fast, gratifying, and to a slightly lesser extent easy to clean.

This is mostly for mom and sis, who I thought would get a kick out of it now that we’re linked on Facebook. But it’s for the non-Jewish netizens too, and I’ll be coming back later hopefully with a play-by-play explanation to both sides. The diverting item in question can be found here; it’s basically a retelling of the Passover story and some of the ceremonial elements of the Seder.

It is the season for marathons, light beers and little-known ethno-religious distinctions. And in this house of Jews, none of whom really keep kosher in the first place, there’s an amusing debate over the merits of seasonal yellow-label Coca-Cola. I somewhat prefer it, and I know several people who make a big deal of it. Others, Ivy for instance, seem to think it’s disgusting and that Coke is best left as-is.

Coke has a pretty long and interesting manufacturing history of its own, which I will resist the temptation to delve into. The relevant thing is, it’s one of the most widely consumed soft drinks on the face of the earth. Part of their strategy to maximize market capitalization is franchising. All coke is made by the same base formula, but regional bottlers control the sweetening of the beverage and the addition of any special flavorings (e.g. vanilla, lime, etc).

What we think of as “standard” coke is the basic formula sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, the non-diet sweetener of choice in the United States. It’s kinda sharp, it’s been claimed to be less healthy than other sweeteners… whatever. It’s dirt cheap so it’s what we use. Yuppies tend to prefer things sweetened with more traditional, wholesome-seeming ingredients like honey, sugarcane and agave.

And as it happens, in large markets like Stop’n'Shop, for a matter of weeks each year you can find such a coke. It looks exactly like an ordinary bottle in all ways but one: it sports a yellow cap marked with Hebrew letters that spell out “Kosher l’Pasach”. This coke is sweetened with pure cane sugar.

The short explanation is that Jews of the Ashkenazi heritage, which is dominant in the US and central Europe, are forbidden to consume corn during the Passover holiday. A full explanation is beyond me, but I’ll give it a go.

Passover is the ancient celebration of the deliverance of the Israelite tribes from Egypt, where they were among the groups enslaved by the Pharaohs to build their great monuments. To achieve this, God besieged the land with ten plagues, each more dreadful than the last. The name Passover (Pasach) refers to a sign, painted in lamb’s blood on the doors of Israelite homes on the eve of the tenth and final plague. The Angel of Death would pass over these homes, slaying the firstborn of all other homes in order to break the will of the Egyptians. When this was done, the Israelites fled Africa.

Jewish tradition is heavily oriented around food, and it seems reasonable to assume that they loved good cuisine as much as their descendants do today. But during their flight, they abandoned the delicacies of Egypt. This had less to do with moral revulsion than simply the lack of time–time for bread to rise, time for beer and wine to ferment.

The primary commandment of the Passover holiday is thus a symbolic ban on the possession or use of chametz, “leavening”. In all Jewish traditions, this is interpreted to include yeast and sourdough breads, as well as beer and grain alcohols, Egypt being a center of brewing knowledge in biblical times. Such products are viewed as decadent as well as out of keeping with the holiday. The actual process for defining chametz is complicated however, and so different groups within Judaism have evolved different proscriptions for Passover.

Of the three largest ethnic groups–Ashkenazim, descended from the immense pre-WWII Jewish populations of France, Germany, Hungary, Poland and other central-European nations; Sephardim, who emigrated to Spain and Portugal in the first millennium AD and flourished there under Muslim rule; and Mizrahim, hailing from the Middle East and central Asia–Ashkenazi tradition is the most specific and most stringent in determining what counts as chametz. It extends the traditional “five grains” (oats, wheat, spelt, barley and rye) prohibition to include new-world grains and legumes (kitniyot) that can be confused for or contaminated with chametz. That includes rice and corn.

Furthermore, it states that these forbidden starches can only be used to one end, the production of commemorative Matzo (unleavened bread); whereas Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews are only prohibited from baking and fermenting these items, and are still permitted to cook with them in a variety of ways. The net effect is that keeping Kosher during the holiday is drastically less feasible in the United States than it would be in many parts of the world. The prohibition on chametz means that many common sides and starches and the majority of vegetarian staples are right out; so, too, are most soft drinks and alcoholic beverages. Keeping kosher for Passover nearly becomes a form of fasting.

But, you can still have your rum and coke.

Specifically, by the brand history of Grey Goose. If you also had your head in the sand, it was made by a beverage hack from Long Island, out of thin air about ten years ago.

It’s not so much that the brand is young, or even that it’s not particularly French (it’s made in Cognac as much for symbolic purposes as anything). It’s that it really does taste that good. And I fancy myself something of a budding critic. So either I’m hopeless, or the contours of alimentary reality are not quite what I believed them to be. *le sigh*