Banana Bread Nostalgia

For comfort food, there's nothing better than banana bread. Why it's called bread when it's clearly cake, I don't know. Maybe because it's eaten unfrosted, like zucchini bread and pumpkin bread. But of this I'm sure: when fall is on the horizon, it's time to bake a batch.

Of course, Israel has it's culinary delights, like humus with zaatar (an herb mixture whose main component is hyssop) and olive oil. Anything with zaatar and olive oil. Warm pita. Halla with raisins. With Rosh Hashana almost upon us, most people here probably dream of honey cake. Not me, I find it usually too dry. And let me add that I cannot swallow much of the Eastern food so common here – coriander tastes like rot and cumin smells like sweaty socks.

Different people have different tastes, that's part of the diversity of humanity. I know this well. When I've shared banana bread with my coworkers it has met with mixed reviews. Some found it good enough, but others thought it inedible. I admit I was taken aback. It's a wonderful cake – bananas, butter, walnuts – what's not to like? It could be an American taste.

There is something about the fall that makes me long for home and the gorgeous leaves and fresh apple cider. So when the summer heat has passed and a stiff breeze whips through the house as it does today, I comfort myself with a little baking. The aroma fills the house and a mug of raspberry tea is ready and waiting. There, the oven just dinged!

The House of Wine

A few years ago the kibbutz decided to open a restaurant/café/wine store called, prosaically, The House of Wine. It is located in a sturdy building that looks like an airplane hanger but was actually a cold storage room used by the kitchen. Why it was located in the middle of the dairy with the cows milling around it is a mystery to this day. But they have long since moved to their new dairy somewhere vaguely in the direction of the Kingdom of Jordan, leaving a nice chunk of land for building houses and a chunky building for the café.

The House of Wine is pleasantly decorated and landscaped with a few tables on the decking and some more on the lawn. Inside is a store that sells domestic and imported wine as well as the harder stuff. The food is acceptable, if not exactly inspiring, and it's a nice place to sit and scarf down a bucket of beer after a hard day's shopping. It's also a reasonable place to hold parties, wedding receptions and anything else that requires celebration.

As luck would have it, my house was built right next to The House of Wine. Convenient, you say? Yes, there's that. But when festivities are going on the noise can be invasive. The problem, of course, is entirely because of loud-speakers, the bane of civilization. I remember once hearing someone opine that the curse of modern civilization is unwanted music, and I have never heard a truer word spoken.

Tuesday evening there was a polite knock at the door. A woman told me there would be a wedding reception and apologized in advance for any noisy inconvenience. She then gave me a complementary bottle of Leffe Belgian beer as compensation. It was a nice gesture, much appreciated. It was also my first experience of Leffe, which is quite tasty. As it turned out, given the hemorrhage-inducing volume as the evening wore on, it would have taken a six-pack, no, two to make amends. But what I really don't understand is why you would have that raucous cacophony at your event when you could have a string quartet?

Space, the final frontier

When you immigrate to Israel, especially if you're coming from America, you have to come to grips with the lack of space. Walking down even not-so-crowded Jerusalem streets with people bumping and pressing up against me used to send me screaming for the nearest gin and tonic. I like strangers to keep their distance. It's an alien concept in Israel.

Living quarters are also tiny, even more so on a kibbutz. In the real world you are free to buy the biggest house you can afford. But here on Fantasy Island, somewhere in some dossier there is an actual document that dictates to how many square meters you are entitled according to your age. If you're 30 years old asking to build an extension so your 4 children will have a room to sleep in, you will feel like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel.

When you reach my exalted age, you are entitled to 90 square meters, although you can add another 30 or 40 in the form of a second story if you pay for it yourself. I don't quibble with this. The kibbutz has a finite amount of land and hundreds of people to house and does the best it can with the resources it has. By the time you get your permanent house, leaving behind the flat that was the size of a walk-in closet, 90 meters feels quite spacious. Until, that is, you try to fit furniture into it.

How does one cope? By keeping everything as uncluttered as possible and furniture to the barest minimum. This has the advantage of also being cheaper. There is one thing about finally getting into the permanent house that is both comforting and alarming: you never have to move again.

In praise of wisteria

I first fell in love with wisteria when I was five years old. My family went to visit a friend of my grandmother in Wilmington, North Carolina. The house was a gracious, red brick building with a large veranda covered, I mean covered, with wisteria. I thought it was the most beautiful stuff I had ever seen. It was the first plant I knew I wanted for the new house and had three of them planted to climb up the pergola.

Foliage abundant and chaotic, mauve flower clusters hanging down like bunches of grapes, it is hardy even in this semi-arid climate. The only problem is, it's not the best climber in the world. It sends out long shoots, runners, which can wind around a support or around each other. But they seem to need lots of encouragement before they will cooperate.

Unlike every other house on the kibbutz, my pergola does not have a roof. The plan was for the wisteria to grow and cover it with leaves and flowers forming a canopy. The runners, however, have a habit of hanging down between the beams and not staying on top where they belong. Every day I am out there with my magav – that’s a squeegee on a broom handle for you non-Israelis – pushing them back up, but it's like pushing an overcooked noodle. Then comes a gust of wind, and I'm back where I started. Two and a half years later, the pergola is maybe one quarter covered.

Still, it is the most beautiful stuff I have ever seen. I love to stand at the kitchen window and just gaze at it. I often think back to that first time in North Carolina. I found out much later that the rest of my family hated the wisteria. To me, it's magical.

Rococo Revival

I went to sleep one night and woke up in an alternate universe. How do I know? Because I walked into the furniture store of the kibbutz next door and was instantly transported to the Versailles stock room of the Bourbon kings of France. Or rather, to the prop room for the movie version.

Styles change, this I know. Minimalism and its bare-boned cousins wouldn't last forever, I know this, too. But I was not prepared for a 180-degree, turn-fashion-on-its-head about face of a sea change. (Those of you who spend your time counting mixed metaphors, this last sentence is for you.) The shop was packed to the rafters with rococo gilt mirrors, baroque painting reproductions and gilded settees. It was the sort of stuff King Fahd would have thought was over the top.

All I wanted was a mirror for my Mediterranean farmhouse. I should not have been so surprised. I had noticed that women's fashions had become frillier and that jewelry had gotten big, ornate and expensive. Interior design was the next logical step. But I was not prepared for Rococo Revival.

On my way out of the store I spotted a meter-and-a-half tall Technicolor statue of Bacchus, bunch of grapes in one hand, flagon of wine in the other. I paused for a moment and considered. In the garden by the bamboo? Nah.

Lavender Blue, Lavender Green

I wish I had a green thumb. I love to see vegetation thrive and grow, but a horticulturist I am not. I don't like digging in dirt and I really, really don't like insects. But when you have a house, unless you pave the surrounding area, sooner or later you have to deal with the garden.

Lavender was a reasonable choice, I thought, for a low-maintenance garden. At least, that's what the BBC gardening gurus have said repeatedly, and so I had it planted all around the house. Such a lovely fragrance! What I did not know was that in this climate those little, bitty plants grow into huge bushes that quite literally take over the environment, to the point of threatening the neighbors.

I guess I should have been pruning them. Pruning is something I simply hate to do – it seems so cruel. So I apologize to the plants before I snip them which, of course, makes me feel like a complete idiot. When I was a child I was thrilled to have successfully sprouted two pussy willow sprigs which I planted in the backyard. Then I wouldn't let anybody prune them so instead of nice, manageable bushes they grew into great big trees. My father would look at them and shake his head as if to say "Why did I listen to that child?"

So I'm going to have to face up it and cut the lavender way back. I'm dreading it. On the plus side, maybe I can use the cut bits to make lavender essence. How hard can that be?

Chewy centers are the best

This week we, the laboratory staff, took advantage of a production break-for-maintenance and attended a seminar on chocolate. This is the stuff of my dreams. Milk, dark or white, I love it all. I've known people who don't, and I just cannot wrap my mind around it. Who could take that lovely, heavenly confection into their mouths and say, yuk, that tastes terrible? Something must be very, very wrong.

We heard a bit about the history of chocolate, its origins in Central America and how it was mixed with chili and drunk bitter, and how the Spanish brought it to Europe where they started to improve the recipe. This brings me to one of the great geniuses in human history whose name is unfortunately unknown to us: the guy who first thought to add milk and sugar. It's a seminal moment in human history. Life would never be the same again.

Then we got to dig in and pour chocolate into molds, add toasted coconut and nuts and decorate our creations to the highest artistic standards. Lord, it was fun. Mostly. Here is where I ran into trouble. We were presented with a bowl of goo and told to roll gobs of it in our hands to make truffles. I did one. My hands were covered with melty chocolate – and I couldn't stand it. I had to run immediately and wash it off.

I don't know when this happened to me. I never used to be the type who was afraid get my hands dirty. When I worked in the kibbutz kitchen and had to mix several tons of ground beef with my hands, I never had a problem. I just dug in. But now I cannot bear to have anything on them, not even yummy chocolate. Maybe this comes from working in a lab where clean hands can save your life. Or maybe I've just taken to heart all those admonitions that the best way to prevent illnesses like colds and flu is to wash your hands frequently. Whatever. Who said people don't change?