Sara In Akko

Don't let the pictures, or my husband's commentary, fool you. This was either the most ingenious use of DIY resourcefulness or a total fast food impostor recipe abomination. I lean towards best at-home lunch ever!

Although I live in a city bursting full of kosher schwarma shops that line the main street, there are precious few places that sell falafel.  Why is that you ask? I honestly have no idea.

If you live somewhere with a great discrepancy between available schwarma to falafel or just want to know the easiest way to make your own (healthier) falafel and also fix up your pita like a genuine street food experience in your home, this tutorial is for you.


 Super Amazing Falafel DIY Impostor Recipe

Step 1). The easiest way to get genuine falafel is to purchase a ready made powder which you can purchase here or if you're adventuresome you could grind your own chickpeas (garbanzo beans) and mix in spices like these found here. Both options will produce falafel and it all depends on your personal preference. Although I have ready mix waiting in my home (usually due to the family Etsy shop) I like doing things the long and tedious way (grinding beans and adding fresh spice).

Step 2). If you happen to keep a deep fryer around the house, you can toss in the tiny balls of mush chickpea mix till browned. If you are like me and terrified by the thought of cooking with vats of oil, it's time for the oven. This is where my husband and I disagree because I find no reason falafel needs to be a burning hot ball of grease whereas he absolutely believes this is exactly what falafel should be.


Step 3). Cut your pita in half, throw it in the over for just a minute to help it open up a bit if it is giving you trouble.

Step 4). Cut up your essential pita stuffers. At a genuine falafel street vendor you'd find a wide variety of salads and pickles but luckily I enjoy a simple palate of pickles, onions, Yemeni spice and humous (oddly enough, also ground chickpeas... there is a bit of redundancy in available ingredients throughout the Middle East).  


If it's fresh and a vegetable it also belongs in a pita. Middle Eastern fast food is not really as detrimental to your health as the American variety (minus the flaming balls of fried grease).


This is some serious humous. In Hebrew it's just called "spicey" and is found at our local grocer.

Viola! Everything a genuine falafel should be; a mix of texture, extreme spice and stomach soothing fresh veggies. Not too healthy but not a heart attack in a bun. I highly recommend giving this a try at home.

The winter chill has caught up with us here meaning mommy is sick. And with our daytime care providers also out of commission, everyone is stuck at home with whatever sick-mommy can dream up as appropriate time-occupying activities. Although we haven't got a TV, we have laptops and YouTube and lots of cartoons that have never been seen by the likes of my kids before.

The 4 year old is familiar with the story of Aladdin so I figured I could give in and let her watch this one Disney-ized cartoon without scarring her for life. We skipped over some of the more fiery "Cave of Wonders" parts but somewhere towards the end of the movie I must have passed out only to be awoken by a very concerned child screaming.

"Mommy! Mommy! This is wrong! Look! Isn't this all wrong?"


Ah yes, we'd arrived at the scene where Jaffar has become an evil sorcerer and Jasmine his helplessly bound prisoner. The costume our heroine now dons is straight-up Princess Leih, but crafted by Disney so slightly more sexually explicit (cause she's a cartoon and that makes it OK).

I shook myself from my fevered stupor I began to think of the ensuing discussion. I figured it could be brief and PG but include some of the following points:

1). Jaffar is behaving very badly
2). It is never OK to force someone to do something they don't want to
3). Our bodies are just for us
4). Forcing a princess to be your sex-slave is wrong etc...

"No Mommy! Look at her hair. It's all wrong! That's not her dress! It's WRONG!"

Wait, we're concerned about a ponytail and a red version of her usual harem costume? Jasmine the sex-slave hasn't phased you? Don't you even care that this princess is in chains and in imminent danger?

Oh, alright then. 

In all honesty, I was slightly relieved that the world was still this simple. Evil exists in inconsistency and bad is just bad. By her estimation, Jaffar had not grown in his scoundrely evilness from the beginning of the movie to this point. Jaffar just had greater control over Jasmine and her ponytail now, and that's wrong.

Does this make my child insensitive to another's plight? I am sure it does not.

She responds appropriately to babies crying, her brother's playtime injuries and even sick mommy passed out on the couch. She is concerned when she feels story book characters are in danger and when Brobee is about to eat food off the floor. Women in chains kneeling before evil men is just slightly out of her frame of reference, the whole situation is wrong and she doesn't have the spectrum of evil to help her decide which is worse, not yet at least.

I suppose the outrage a grown adult feels over a cartoon depicting something reminiscent of the final enslavement of women is just not the appropriate response of a four year old. At least not this one. And you know what? I'm glad. She has a lifetime to fight misconceptions and discrimination, unfair treatment and objectification. Today she is allowed to be pissed about the inconsistency a couple of animators tried to perpetrate against her otherwise enjoyable cartoon.

The above Demotivational poster was found during a quick web search titles "Jasmine sex slave."

It seems there are plenty of results of pissed off people who also think that Jasmine, the sex-slave, is wrong. Or maybe they're just concerned about her hairdo?

I typically take steps to keep my personal blogging fairly light hearted and without much intrigue but was tempted today by something larger than a contest. But rather a really on point question raised by said contest. A Tallit up for grabs was posted recently by a blog I've enjoyed reading for some time here.

So I began to think about my own interest in Tallitot. For starters I grew up in an egalitarian community where women did not wear a Tallit, but as I grew the environment began to change rapidly. Although just five years prior my sister was not given a Tallit, by my Bat Mitzvah it was not a question of whether or not a girl would wear a Tallit but which Tallit she would wear.

The options were not plentiful, you could choose between a very plain blue striped pattern or a more elaborate blue striped pattern. All wool, all with machine embroidered Atara and all miniature versions of a full grown man's Tallit, sized to accommodate the petite stature of a girl about to become a tiny woman.

As I had demanded a dark navy blue invitation with the skyline of Jerusalem in a 3 hour negotiation stand-still with my mother, it was my natural choice that I would choose the blue Tallit with the elaborate Jerusalem skyline to match. I was told repeatedly for years to come that this was a pretty "Butch" Tallit for a young lady.

I didn't care.

I loved wearing my Tallit. I loved draping it around my body. I loved being a fully-fledged adult and member of the community and I took this responsibility with all the maturity I could muster. Wearing a Tallit gave me a sense of religious purpose, stepping into my own space to commune with my Maker.

But I do not wear my Tallit anymore. I have become a more observant Jew, as observant as I imagined myself to be as a tween. I am a Jewish wife and mother and woman in Israel and all of these labels give me new limitations and horizons in my development. My chosen community is millions of miles away from the community in which I was born and I can't see myself walking around on Shabbat in a Tallit with all the men of my small city. I can't say that I would care to. As a modern religious woman I've found that can take that sense of my own space with me at all times, I don't need this props and staging.

I could go back and forth on the debate; is it forbidden, no. Does that make it appropriate, perhaps? Can a woman even wear a Tallit? Well, can't she?

I feel very fortunate to have lived to see a point in religious renewal where well educated and well grounded women are able to ask important questions. Questions that are not in defiance of tradition saying boldly that men and women are no different (believe me, we're different) but rather questions that force us to think like our sages. When our world has changed so drastically, are we not at a different point in our religious needs. The Torah is unchanging and society cannot be a measure of how to observe the laws of our Torah but there are questions that simply aren't answered by assuming a woman is not obligated and therefore may... or may not... or should not.

I don't feel that I would ever be comfortable in the community I was raised in. Their observances are now so foreign to me that I am often at a loss of words when I return for brief visits.

Instead of answering important modern Halakhic questions based in law and religious discourse, I often find that the purveyors of religious knowledge are limited in scope and are unable to adequately answer the basics of Religious Law. Instead there is an odd mixture of fear and myth about rituals they have deemed unnecessary such as Kashrut, Taharat Mishpacha and a host of other fundamental issues. This doesn't mean I resent other Jews who choose to live a different path than I choose for myself and my family but rather I am saddened that the outright prevalence of deeming my practices archaic.

I don't flinch at a woman in a Tallit and Kippa who is called Rabbi, but I feel a kindred purpose with those wearing a Tichel or beanie and are as well versed in living Judaism and Halakha as any man who never questioned whether or not he would wear a Tallit.

I hope that somehow my coming from this particular community widens their tolerance and love of other Jews as well as my own Ahavat Yisrael.

I guess I've arrived at a point where I can say a Jew is a Jew is a Jew.

Thanks to A Mother in Israel for the soul search.

I'd love to hear your comments if you've got them.

Not so long ago my life was not comprised of a husband, children, family business or blog.

At one point I lived in a large house in the city that housed a collection of eco-do-gooders. Conscious communists of the French variety (born into commune life, not self-declared), bicycle messengers, and the other city-dweller sorts of earthy young adults who drove bio-diesel burners or never drove at all. We had the kind of transient roommates that are best described as couch surfers who seemed to drift effortlessly through life without a mailing address.

Everyone held stable-ish jobs for 20-somethings. One was even the head of a large corporation's programing department. His paycheck certainly wasn't the reason he lived in a communal house.

Some of these roommates and transients belonged to the local bike gang. Not quite Hell's Angels. The gang's activities included rehabbing bicycles to become load bearing and be sent to Developing Nations, creating environmental awareness through the city with their rides that closed down major thoroughfares, creating found-art of everything and anything and....

Dumpster Diving... for food. Also known as Dumpster Dining.


Our home often hosted large dinners of coworkers from an environmental watch group that could reach up to 20+ people on any given weeknight. Rent plus utilities and normal groceries rarely accommodate feeding that many others in your home regularly. I won't describe the incredible amount of food large grocery networks are forced by law or policy to throw away daily or the steps they take to ensure that their food isn't accessible once tossed to the dumpster, but you can imagine that every item that does not sell from your local Whole Foods will eventually end up in their dumpsters out back.

If that food is fortunate, and willing hands are fortunate enough to reach it in time the food may end up on someone's plate as a perfectly good meal. This photo of the found food is taken from an interview with a few college-freegans in MN who seem to express the same sort of attitude as my former roommates.

I never ate a veggie gone bad, there was nothing on anyone's plate that had turned or soured. This was nourishment with intrinsic value both nutritionally and monetarily to our huge dinner tables. In fact, you'd be surprised at the way organic produce looks when finally given the heave ho from the aisles; wrapped, labeled, dated, edible. Most grocers even dispose of their expired items in a re-user friendly way quite naturally as each section takes care of their own clean-up, they bag and separate food items by department.

My life is long since removed from these re-purposed dinner tables. Here in Akko, there are not any alternative bike gangs running around screaming for the environment, or groups of youths jumping into dumpsters to rescue high quality organic produce that has sat for it's one day in the sun. There are no locks on our dumpsters to keep these alt-kids out.

But Akko is a terribly poor city. Our citizens are on average old and many live well under the poverty line even on government assistance. Many elderly collect bottles and cans from the receptacles for the tiny refund they can receive in the supermarkets. There are also quite a few salvagers who look for scrap out of the 40 year old electronics that are thrown to the curb. Although there are assistance organizations that take second-hand clothing for redistribution it is often most common for clothes to be left folded neatly in large bags and placed next to the dumpsters so someone in need might take these items quietly in the night without the shame of visiting an aid organization.

My home is directly behind the supermarket which, for comparisons, is roughly the size of a large American 7-11 with just 4 aisles. Our market opens at 7AM and by 8AM all of the cleaning of the produce aisle and the shipments for the new day have taken place. The old produce, often visibly rotten (high heat and high humidity are not the friends of such products) is brought out to the dumpster. By 8AM when I walk my daughter to preschool the entire back end of the market is covered with elderly waiting for this food to be disposed of so that they can toss it into their market carts to be taken home.

Today was the first day my 4 year old gave any serious notice to this matter. Although she is generally a very thoughtful and caring child she has learned from well intentioned adults that something unclean is labeled "foo dirty."

And so she began with her questioning, "Mama, isn't that a bad man? He is playing in the garbage. Foo. That's not nice."

My heart breaks a little every time I see someone's grandmother digging through our trash or someone's grandfather jumping in after the spoiled tomatoes but I had no idea how to explain in a Jewish and civilly responsible way to my child what she was witnessing.

Jewish law goes very far to explain that you are obligated to provide charity to others in need, even when you yourself are in need. Throughout Israel you will even notice that people do not throw out bread, it is left in the open for the poor to take. And overall, that while you are to provide for others in need, you must grant people their self respect which sometimes means allowing them to do what is necessary to survive. Slipping someone a few bucks to go into the market and buy food might seem like a reasonable action to the untrained bystander, but that very action might take away the person's dignity in accepting charity.

And so today I have to prepare myself for a talk with a four year old about the facts of life, that people in her city do go hungry and that people who look like her grandparents often wait for food to be thrown in a dumpster so they can feed their families. I know that this is true of other major cities, even in the lucrative suburbs of my youth, but here our poverty is apparent and should be confronted head on. Even if that means starting with my own children.

This is a short documentary called Meet the Freegans
Britain has become serious about reducing food waste in the home, great for conservation ideas

Actually... it's here.

We're building towards soemthing big to help kids in the city of Akko. We're saving money on the annual dinner budget and taking it to the Web! Join us, pass it on and most importantly...

Spread the Love; Ahavat Yisrael!

Everyone knows that the best way to prepare for the worst is just that, plan for the worst.

Here in Akko, during the Second Lebanon War, many of the residents were left stranded in their homes for days and days and days on end. All normal life ceased. Stores were open sporadically, basic food staples were scarce and tensions ran extremely high as air raid sirens blared daily for hours on without much respite from this tense situation. For school children who had planned on a least a uneventful summer break, the war's toll was much more costly than the lost hours of childhood vacation.

During this war, as was true also during Operation Cast Lead, the citizens left in ther bomb shelters in fear of their lives were greatly aided by those who in the face of danger served their communities to the best of their abilities.

This great compassion and ability to serve others is a quality widely recognized in the many Hesder students across the nation. They learn, they serve, they are community leaders. We owe them a great deal for their dedication to Am Yisrael.

Israel's Civil Defense has recognized this natural resource and has created their own emergency plan for the "next case of all-out war, natural disasters, large IDF operations, and similar national emergencies." - Arutz Sheva

Nobody likes thinking of what the next crisis, disaster, operation or war will look like, what terrible form it will take or its toll on our citizens. The best way to save lives in a time of crisis is to be prepared.

Here's the original report.

Although I knew of government actions to protect the relatively scarse supply of Zaatar in Israel (mostly the Galilee) ...

Did you know that wild Zaatar is being picked to near extinction? That illegal picking of the plant used as a dried spice and a healthful tea are punishable offenses? That Za'atar is so rare outside of Israel that Jordan and other Arab nations have created a substitute for *Za'atar made mostly of salt, parsley, and sesame?

Yes, Yes and Yes.
I see Za'atar from my home window and often can spot groups of women gathering it fresh from the fields. The price of actual Za'atar outside of Israel (and not a remix of Za'atar like flavors) can fetch a pretty penny.

True connoisseurs of Middle Eastern cuisine know the difference and the growers who deal in this plant can sell out their crops for years in advance to companies supplying what many consider the most basic of Israeli seasonings. Cheeses, breads, hummus, salads, veggies, pizzas and more all seem to be laden with Za'atar. I doubt there are very many Israelis who go a full day without encountering this aromatic mixture in some form or another.

How does this create world peace? How about a trade?

Normalized relations between nations and we'll start forking over this precious commodity.

See the second half of this article

*Za'atar itself is an actual plant -Hyssop from the bible- but has come to mean a more general combination of seasonings throughout the Middle East where it is either in short spply or unabtainable.