Cuisine a la Junk

I ticked one item off the bucket list recently:  I had my first corndog.  If they existed in America when I lived there, I’d never heard of them, which is unlikely.  So I’m guessing they were invented sometime thereafter.  I had heard them disparaged in the mass media as a junk-food abomination.  But anything coated in cornbread has to be worthy of consideration, I told myself.

Then they unexpectedly appeared on the grocery store shelf.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  A local hotdog manufacturer has started to make them.  I can’t imagine what they were thinking.  American food doesn’t do well here, except among Americans.  Israelis tend to like their meat loaded with cumin and other spices until there is no meat-flavor discernable.  Needless to say, I brought the precious item home and tried it right away.  It did not disappoint.  I cannot say the same thing for the next junky thing I tried.

I saw the package in the store freezer:  potatoes with pizza sauce in a crispy coating.  For some reason, at the time it sounded irresistible.  I don’t know why, I must have been suffering from sunstroke.  Anyway, I tried them, too.  It’s hard to explain exactly what they are.  It’s sort of what you’d get if you squashed a Tater Tot down into a triangle shape.  So far, so good.  But when you see something promising “pizza sauce” you think, tomato, oregano, garlic.  Maybe some more herbs like basil if you’re lucky.  There was a tomato presence, but there was nothing saucy about it.  Worse, there was no trace of oregano or any other flavor associated with pizza.

It’s not that it was bad.  It wasn’t.  It was just so bland in its ho-hummishness that I can’t understand how it made it to the manufacturing stage.  A lack of pizzazz should be the kiss of death for any junk creation.  In any case, I have learned my lesson.  From now on I will stay away from processed convenience stuff, no matter how delectable and tempting it looks, and concentrate on food that doesn’t come in wrappers.  That is, except for corndogs.

Downton Blues

One of the more annoying aspects of Israeli life is the television system – and here I use the word loosely.  Nothing could be less systematic.  A program could start, say, at 20:45 for the first four episodes and then you tune in for episode 5 at the appointed time only to find that it started half an hour earlier.  Annoying.

I thought things would get better with the advent of cable, but I forgot where I was living.  The cable company, also being Israeli, is no more reliable than broadcast television.  I give you for your consideration the example of “Revenge.”  After showing 18 throat-clutchingly delicious episodes, some of them multiple times, it suddenly disappeared from our airwaves without a word of explanation.  Where are the last four?  Annoying.

But the real annoyance was one I cannot blame on the cable company:  I missed the entire third series of “Downton Abbey.”  How this happened is still not entirely clear to me.  It’s not as if I wasn’t looking out for it.  The problem stems from the fact that it is shown on Israeli Channel 1, the taxpayer-supported channel that is so mind-numbingly boring that most of the time it shows stuff on a par with the close-up of a thumb.  But after the first of the year I diligently checked the listings in the Jerusalem Post every week to see if the new series was starting.  Nothing.  Then, sometime around April, I learned from an oft-hand comment in the same newspaper that the series had run.  I had missed the whole thing!  Really annoying.

I sulked about this for a long time.   Who was responsible for the false listings, the Jerusalem Post or Channel 1?  More importantly, who could I sue?  I have a sneaking suspicion that the Hebrew newspapers got it right, so was the Post just incompetent or was there an anti-English conspiracy?  Ultimately, I went ahead and ordered the DVD from Britain.  Of course, I already knew the highlights of the season, thanks to spoilers that come directly – and unasked – to my computer from NBC News.  Still, now that I’m all caught up with the doings of the Crawley family and their hangers-on, I feel I can rest easy.  One less annoyance.