But in the interests of full disclosure, I love gingerbread. I’m probably one of about 11 Jewish guys in the world who have this affliction. Always have, and there’s no genetic or social explanation for it. That’s why I bought the gift in the first place, and figured on some cold winter day I’d make some exceptionally high calorie treats and feel even more guilty about not exercising. Today was the day.

The instructions were not all that hard: Add the contents of the box to water, an egg and oil, and mix on high. Success was far from guaranteed. Because men should not bake, and even something as simple as “mix together four ingredients and pour into this cup” is subject to interpretation.

There are dry measures and liquid measures. So “1/4 cup” means one thing for flour or sugar and something entirely different for cooking oil or water. This is stupid. We don’t have different yardsticks for measuring 2x4s and plastic sheeting; a foot is a foot no matter what the ruler’s subject. Fourteen seconds in and my gingerbread was in danger of having more grease than a cubic yard of Dunkin’ Donuts munchkins. Or less. I’m not sure.

Electric mixers are evil little toys. They have an uncanny ability to batter-splatter in places that weren’t even painted when the house was built.

Icing has quantum mechanical properties that cannot be explained without 10-dimensional higher mathematics. It will never land where it should, and any attempt to spread it causes your recently de-ovened cake to suffer surface tension damage.

This is why men will not bake. It’s too complex. There are duplicate sets of rules, measurements and physical laws. It’s like clothes shopping with the added risk of burning the house down. I’m hanging up my blender.

In addition to baking them the right way, a bagel must be cut and schmeared properly as well. As evenly across the radial axis as you can get, so the halves hold up in the toaster or under the weight of what your Aunt Ruth piles on top. If you’re going for a to-go bagel, then cutting the torus in half is also acceptable, especially if it creates the potential for melting butter to hit your dress shirt and tie on the way to work. But just when I thought I’d mastered the art of bagel topography, along comes a sculptor and master of food surfaces to redefine the art of breaking bread.

[ad#Google Adsense]

My favorite breakfast in the world is the morning buffet spread in an Israeli hotel. I’m not particular about which hotel; they’re almost all universally good and plentiful and full of foods far outside the typical breakfast field. Sure, you can get cereal and eggs and pancakes, but why not start your day with Yemenite delights like yachnoon (philo dough rolled with sugar and other goodies, baked into a rare earth density of goodness) topped with a bit of schoog (oil based hot pepper sauce). It defines “hot and sweet” – all of the tastes of good Italian sausage, with the added benefit of opening your sinuses for the day.

My personal favorite is the fresh and dried fruit selection: oranges from Yafo (check your oranges in the supermarket; they’re as likely from Yafo as they are from Florida) and dates that resided on a palm tree bordering the Negev desert not too long before ending up on your plate. The difference between the dates you buy in a US market and the dates in Israel is like the difference between sushi-grade tuna in New York and a flash-frozen halibut in Iowa. Eat at the source, people, it’s always better. Add in a bit of local cheese (especially the somewhat mysterious “Safed cheese”, which I believe to be a colloquial name for a mozzarella variety), and something from the assortment of breads and pastries (there cannot be a Jewish themed breakfast without danish; it’s in the Talmud) and you’re full, content and ready to wash it down with coffee so thick it’s chewable.

Pictures from the road as this week’s travel takes me to Tel Aviv (with a chocolate infused stop in Zurich).

[ad#Google Adsense]

Sometime in 1988, my wonderful, svelte wife and I decided to join Weight Watchers to undo some of the good food, progressive eating and general loafing that occupied the two weeks of our life between our wedding and returning from our honeymoon. Add to that the general stress-induced eating leading up to the wedding, and the job-induced stress of working at small companies that led to more eating, and I was well on my well to being built for comfort, not speed. It was early summer in Boston, everyone was thinking about bathing suits and vacations at the Cape, and I was fighting to take off weight.

I did the usual tricks: got weighed with fewer items of clothing (watch, wallet, shoes, keys) each week in an effort to scratch off another quarter-pound. At some point, though, my natural proclivity for Fig Newtons out-weighed, literally, my interest in Weight Watchers.

The coup de grosse was an exploration of why we snack: we want texture, we want flavor, we want to alleviate boredom in our taste buds. The example given was that if you crave Peanut M&Ms, you may want crunchy textures and sweet tastes, and could get the same effect from a serving of figs, counting as a fruit serving rather than a sugar overload.

Editorial comment, October 10: Bill Cosby video of “chocolate cake for breakfast” removed because YouTube removed it. Perhaps Cosby’s people don’t realize that 90% of the Millennial generation has no idea who he is, why he might have been funny, or why they should care? I’m not even going to post the link to the MP3 downloads of this bit; if you care, search for it, but I’m not going to send traffic his way if they’re going to search out every little clip that might possibly introduce the Cos to another generation.

My quote: “So when I eat a sleeve of Fig Newtons, it’s a fruit, a bread and some optional calories?” This was not met with enthusiasm, or even quiet acceptance, by our group leader. It got me a glare, probably because it was not the first time I’d suggested using “bread” as baked goods substitute, much like Bill Cosby’s justification for serving his kids cake for breakfast.

I’m not sure if it was the implication that I’d only eat Fig Newtons by the entire half-box (one sleeve is a natural portion divider in my opinion; if they wanted you to eat a box in quarters they’d package it as such), or suggesting that various servings could be combined into something obviously not diet-oriented, but that was my last Weight Watchers meeting.

Since then I’ve been watching my weight. Increase.

[ad#Google Adsense]

It’s days like those that make me drive from somewhere within the 856 or 609 area codes to Ponzio’s Diner in Cherry Hill, NJ. Ponzio’s has been a favorite of my wife’s family for nearly its entire 45-year history, and for good reason: amazing bread, huge portions and a bakery case that reduces grown men to wimpering three year olds who want that Elmo cupcake.

Ponzio’s bread basket is a “one of each” cornucopia of baked goodness: onion bread, cheese bread, cinammon bread, and some whole grain stuff that you can leave for your little sister. Go for calories. Get a dozen cheese breads to go while you’re thinking of it. On the right is my personal favorite, only half listed on the menu: Ravioli with Ponzio’s hot sausage. Yes, that hunk of meat protecting the ravioli is a sausage patty with all of the right seasonings (heavy on the fennel) and the right heft to round out a comfort meal. You have to ask for the ravioli, but the hot sausage is available with an all-day set of breakfast foods.

My father swears by the almond horns (singly or by the to-go box), and Ponzio’s has black and white cookies with an explanation: a thin sponge cake with bi-modal icing. They even win on transparency in the bakery case.

[ad#Google Adsense]

We hosted two Israeli teenagers as part of the Diller Teen Fellow program between our North Jersey federation and our sister program in Rish L’Zion, Israel. They were articulate, funny, techno-savvy and they didn’t laugh at my pidgin Hebrew. My command of food-oriented Hebrew and the morning operatives (coffee, ice, good morning, where are you?) was sufficient until I offered to email some pictures to their parents.

One of the girls spelled out her parents’ email login then directed me to type a shtruedel. I gave her the look normally reserved for my attempts at this modernized ancient langauge (reality check here: last time I was in Israel I had to ask for toilet paper, and could neither remember the word nor describe it, until I forced a Yiddish-Hebrew couplet and asked for mapiot tuchess, essentially, “butt napkins”. It worked, but you should have seen the look). Shtruedel is what my Yiddish-speaking grandparents ate on Sunday afternoons after the obligatory trip to the bakery. It’s not on my keyboard.

Until the air-drawing, repetition and thinking in metaphors clicked: shtruedel is the @ sign. Looks like a strudel in cross-section. I had to double-check Wikipedia on this, just to be sure I wasn’t injected food-related context where none was warranted. Sure enough, the proper Hebrew word for “commerical at” is krukit, which translates to…

Strudel.

I believe this is another one of those Internet generation gap social vignettes, but not one born from students who have never seen a hand-written receipt with a quantity, a “commercial at” sign followed by a price. Nor is it a derivative of pronouncing email addresses in a post-bang addressing Internet. I really think that the current crop of teenagers don’t get the notion that you are “at” your email. Your address is an identifier and a place name; it’s not necessary for you to be at that named place. When first reading email on the Princeton University VAXen in the mid-80s, you had to be physically in the same building, usually on the other end of a nicely soldered RS-232 cable. The @ was less commercial and more existential: You were at that machine, not at a service, but really at a compute node. Today, whether it’s shtrudel, snail, round a, fancy a, or monkey, it’s merely a token that helps us break a network location into pronouncable parts. Why not put a colloquial pronunciation on it? Especially if it’s food-related, as it improves the probability that I know the word.

Long before Jerry Seinfeld made the black & white cookie central to a plot, I’ve been a mass consumer of these uniquely New York desserts. The perfect black and white cookie is about the diameter of your open hand, has a sponge cake like base that is soft (never crunchy, unless the cookie has been in the damaged goods bin for a month), and has a layer of vanilla fondant icing that covers the entire cookie, with the chocolate half iced on top of the vanilla icing base. There’s probably some haute cuisine reason for this, other than the chocolate icing having more opacity than the vanilla, but the experience of two icings at the same time defines the B&W cookie thrill.

European friends are quick to point out that while black & whites aren’t exclusively a right-coast treat; they appear in German bakeries as “Amerikaners.” I think they should concede the point; these are good old US of A food culture. Coloquially they’re known as “half moon” cookies, in parts of upstate New York (upstate here refers to anything north of, say, White Plains). I tend not to think of them as “Jewish cuisine”, although they’re much more likely to be found in Jewish style bakeries.

Searching for wireless access and a caffeine boost before a customer event not too long ago, I popped into a Starbucks in TriBeCa, treating myself to iced coffee and the literal check-out lane candy: Starbucks branded black & white cookies. They’re undersized (if they were summer flounder, the state of NJ would require them to be thrown back until they reached maturity), but sold in packages of two I can get the daily engineering recommended intake of sugar in one serving. But here’s the horrifying part: the chocolate and vanilla icing do not overlap. They are carefully, precisely, almost mechanically lined up, a perfect demarcation line down the center of the cookie. While it’s nice to see black & whites gaining traction on the west coast (of the Hudson river and parts further west, like Ohio) thanks to Starbucks, I feel like the entire experience is somehow lessened. If I want machine-layered icing, I’ll eat a Ring Ding (or three). Black and white cookies are home-made, they reside in big glass display cases, peering out like neatly stacked waxing (or waning) moons. Some things are not meant to be mass produced, even if they are mass consumed.

[ad#Google Adsense]