Weekend Hospitality

Today is my youngest son's birthday according to the hebrew calendar.  In his honor, we will have pizza for lunch!   There are no guests from outside of the community, so we invited our friends for shabbat meals.  In keeping with the birthday theme, we invited Ronda and her family.  Ronda is listed as questionable for dinner tonight.  She is due and looks ready to deliver at any time.  In any case, she and her family are welcome to rest and relax at our dinner table tonight. My sister lives in a community of scholars and teachers.  They work during the school year, and have the summer to recuperate.  Strangely enough, our community is mostly business professionals.  We work year round, but in the summers, many of the family find a way to leave town.  Some go to work in the States, some go to camp, and others on vacation.  We joke that the last person to leave this summer should turn out the lights.   This is relevant because our guests for tomorrow is a family sans husband.  The ma...

Three of our boys finished the school year yesterday.  Two will finish next week.  More importantly, its my wife's birthday!  What celebrations we will have!  No guests from outside of the yishuv (get used to it, its summer). Shabbat Parshat Shlach Dinner - 11 Chicken Soup Restaurant Chicken Wings with Honey Mustard Dip Merguez Sausages and Couscous Boiled Chicken w/ Ailio Curried Cabbage and Carrots Green Salad White Rice Lunch - 7 Tas Kebab Cajun Dry Rub Chicken Green Salad White Rice

My sister and her family visited with us some months back and they brought a very tasty cinnamon cake.  One of my blog readers liked it so much that they asked me to post the recipe. Yehuda's Cinnamon Cake For this recipe, you will need: 1 bunt pan two bowls 1/3 cup brown sugar 2 tsp cinnamon 1 yellow cake mix 1 package of instant vanilla pudding mix 3/4 cup vegetable oil 3/4 cup water 4 eggs 1 tsp vanilla In one bowl, mix the brown sugar and the white sugar.  In the second bowl, mix the rest of the ingredients to form a batter.   In the bunt pan, pour 1/3 of the batter.  Top with 1/3 of the sugar mix.  Add the next third of the batter and top again. Add the final third of the batter and top with the remaining sugar mix.  Bake at 350 until done.

After a wonderful family wedding last night, we get down to Shabbat.   Shavuot is over and the students have left/are leaving in droves.   We don't expect to have any of them as guests until September at the earliest.  This is your chance dear readers!  If you've always wanted to visit us, drop us a line and tell us when you want to come this summer.  We have air-conditioning!! Of course, we do have guests this Shabbat. My parents are here and a cousin, his wife and two of his adult boys are staying over.  Sadly, I am only cooking one meal.  To make matters worse, our guests are all eating out (including my parents) and my wife is working!  Dinner is the only meal that I'm cooking and its only my and five of my children. Shabbat Parshat B'haalotcha Dinner - 6 :-( Roast Chicken Rice Deep Fried French Fries (not potato chips) Zucchini

We have been to four weddings in the past two weeks.   Each wedding was special and unique.   The grooms seemed to be shocked and excited to see their brides dressed up to the nines and looking like angels.   Last night, the brides maternal grandparents were in attendance.  Both had been in Auschwitz-Birkena.   Thank God, they are in their 90's and doing great!  Seeing them at the wedding was particularly meaningful to me.  Here were two people who survived an attempt to wipe out their families, communities and religion.  What could be a more fitting statement than a family wedding to re-affirm their life.  To prove that Nazi Germany failed. The grandfather grew up in the same town as my paternal grandmother.  They spoke Yiddish and Russian.  Hebrew was not yet a conversational language.  The survivors were productive citizens of their countries.  In the 1920's and 30's, many Jews tried to be exemplars of the best that Europe and Germany had to offer.  They forsook their ow...

Its the end of the academic year for one year programs in Israel.  More specifically, its summer camp programs in the US begin in the middle of June and hence the one-year students need to get back so that they can be counselors and camp staffers.  In any case, once Shavuot is over, the mass exodus of students begins. This weekend, we were lucky to be able to end this season with a bang.  We will be hosting eight boys.  I don't know yet where they are from or where they are learning in Israel.  I know only that someone named Ruby (Rudy?) has been working on making this happen all week. Since we never know if we are actually going to have guests, we also invited a family from the commnity for lunch.  Its going to be a bit of a crowd, but that's the point! We have a full house, so the menus need to have a bit more protein.  We have been having a heat wave.  This morning was hot and muggy.  That tends to change my menu planning as far as soups and side-dishes.  I tend to make ligh...