Swirling Thoughts #34 – got milk? (in a bag?)

Don’t cry over spilt milk
Surely this expression originated in Israel where milk is served out of a plastic bag.

Lunches
Is fruit salad, yogurt and bread considered lunch? Wait a minute. I live in country where lachmanya im choco (roll with chocolate spread) is considered a meal. Growing up I remember eating a significant amount of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It was probably a fill-in lunch for when there was no baloney or turkey or when my mom was just tired of making anything fancier. Like tuna. Just like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are an American staple – except for in my house (I paid asher 10 shekels to take a peanut butter and chocolate chip sandwich to school this week; Barbara took one look at a jelly only sandwich – I didn’t dare taint it with peanut butter – and had a full blown fit) – lachmania im choco is a standard Israeli lunch. Can somebody please inform my children that we are now Israeli and should be eating the standard Israeli lunch? Our lunch grid/spreadsheet broke down after just one week. Seems everyone who said they’d eat cream cheese has a different bread preference. One wants white pita, one whole wheat pita. One wants rye bread (called ‘dark bread’) but Gd help you if you send it on diet rye bread (purchased accidentally, called ‘light dark bread’). So we’re down to noodles, semboosak, pancakes and fishstics. Except that they ate all the semboosak last week (it takes me a while to prepare semboosak from scratch – no Mazor Dough in Efrat!). The other night I was too tired to cook and did the unthinkable – I allowed them to eat noodles AND fishsticks for dinner. Are you keeping up? There’s only one choice left. And today there was a pancake disaster. I am half asleep as I prepare pancakes at 6:45 in the morning. So I must not have mixed the batter well. It seems there were bursting pockets of flour in some of the pancakes at lunch time. It’s 10 minutes past midnight. I just checked the freezer for fishsticks. Fish rings. Fish nuggets. Fish schnitzel. Any breaded fish product! I’ve got klum (nothing). The only fish item at all is a frozen gefilte fish for Shabbos. An aside: they sell Gefilte Fish from the US for something like 42 Shekels but I opted for the (cheaper) Israeli brand – trying to acquire Israeli tastes at every turn. There were two choices – Hungarian Style and Yerushalmi Style. No one in ShupaShuk could really tell me the difference although I think it has something to do with sweetness. I gambled on Hungarian. Stay tuned for the results. In any case, tomorrow’s lunch will be fruit salad, actimel (drinkable yogurt) and bread. It could be worse. It could be lachmanya im choco.