Turkey Challahs

Happy Thanksgiving! Today’s turkey challah tutorial is a guest post by my cousin Ita. Besides for being a baker in her community, Ita teaches girls and women to play Jewish music on piano using her easy and fun method. You can find free tutorials and sheet music on her blog at www.playjewishmusic.com.
Whether you’ve never played a note in your life or you’ve been playing for years, learning to play Jewish music on piano should be fun!

Eggplant Salad

This is deeeeelicious! My husband raves about this salad.

In Israel, it's all about the salads. Not like lettuce salads, though. They are more like small bowls of random salads and dips, like cooked beets and peppers and tomatoes. My neighbor's main dish Friday night is her eggplant dips. She spends hours making different dips made from eggplants/chatzilim, and the punch line is that she doesn't even like eggplant! She makes them for her husband and boys, bless her.

Shepherd's Pie

**I wrote this post at the end of last winter and I am only posting it now! I wanted to write a post so badly about the pivotal role of rain in this country and how exciting the first rain fall is and I had such a difficult time doing it! And then I remembered this post and how I had already wrote about the rain! So here is my thoughts on rain and Shepard's pie from the end-of-the-winter perspective. 

The difficult thing about living in Israel is needing to listen to everyone from the US bemoan their terrible, freezing weather, while you are sitting outside in the strong, beautiful, Ramat Beit Shemsh sun watching your children play on their riding toys and color with chalk. It’s really an exercise of patience, but I’m slowly getting used to it.