One of my favorite foods to eat on Pesach (Passover) is matza brei (that’s bri with a long i as in sky or apple pie). Here is the basic, basic recipe:
Ingredients
1 piece of square matza (can be regular, whole wheat or any other kind)
1 egg
1 or two pats of butter
Equipment
1 bowl
1 fork
1 frying pan
Take the egg. Crack it into the bowl. Stir. Crack matza into pieces, large or small matza pieces (your choice). Let matza soak (this is sort of like French toast, except unleavened). Put a pat of butter in the frying pan. Heat butter until it bubbles. Add egg-matza mixture. Cook a minute, stir, flip and cook the other side. Use the other pat of butter if necessary. When the egg is cooked but not too much, slide the matza brei unto a plate. Enjoy. Eat with a glass of orange juice, a cup of tea or coffee or plain water if you like.
Variations of Matza Brei
As my friend Larry reminded me when I posted my matza brei photo with short recipe on Google+, there are multiple varieties to this egg-y treat. I decided a fun addition to this post would be to list as many variations as I could think here; feel free to add your own in the comments.
Plain– plain is more or less as I posted it. Good if you are in a rush or you really do prefer plain. I like plain.
Salty – salty would be adding salt and maybe pepper, too.
Savory – I looked up savory, and it seemed to be defined by adding rosemary or thyme. I will include in this options like parsley, dill, scallions, onions, mushrooms and garlic. Of course, you might combine savory with salty as in herbs with salt and pepper.
Sweet – sugar is a common way to make sweet. You could do cinnamon sugar or add raisins. You could eat the cooked matza brei with jam (I would go for this one, as I like the sweet fruit kind).
Spicy – I’m adding another section to include cumin, coriander, turmeric, salsa, hot pepper or other spicy treats.
Note: not all observant Jews eat matza brei on Pesach. Some Jews do not eat grebrokhts, that is, matza dipped in a wet substance. My family tradition is to eat plenty of matza brei.
What do you prefer: plain, salty, savory or sweet? Or spicy or something else all together? Creamy? How would you prepare this dish?
I participate in an online Facebook group called One Watercolor a Day, based on the book by Veronica Lawlor. There are many exercises in the book, and every few weeks I do an exercise and share it in the group. Recently, I’ve been sharing the watercolor exercises on this Sketching Out blog as well. The most recent exercise was Do a Study of Nature, and it was fun to sit outside and paint:
This particular painting is a sage leaves watercolor: I took a look at my sage plant that has come back year after year and did a little painting study. I once tried to plant more sage in the back of my yard, and those sage plants unfortunately died. This sage plant, however, that is close to my kitchen back door, has managed to re-emerge after many a winter. Happy that today was such a nice day, so I had an excuse to sit outside and paint in between cleaning my house for Passover.
I find sketching from nature a great way to learn – you really need to observe to come up with a little watercolor painting quickly. I did two others before I decided to limit my color palette and limit my subject to the sage leaves.
It has been a while since I’ve participated in a Nature Notes, one of my favorite online memes run by my friend Michelle over at Rambling Woods. Here is a cardinal shot I had in my stash but never got a chance to share until now:
Do you cook with sage? Do you have it in your yard? Have you ever painted outside?
Baby dolls, barbie doll, American Girl doll watercolor painting on paper by Leora Wenger, March 2014
This watercolor of baby dolls, a barbie doll and an American Girl doll was painted in response to a One Watercolor a Day challenge to paint some children’s toys. I gathered some of my daughter’s dolls in a basket, sketched a simple drawing, then they sat for a few weeks as Purim came, was a busy, fun time, and went. I finally had the time to do the painting (don’t believe the part about one watercolor a day – once a week is great, once a month feels like how it needs to be right now). It was fun to watercolor baby dolls, but I’m not sure how much time I will have to do more watercolor painting for a while.
Now it is “sandwich time” – a totally made up term by myself, meaning the time between Purim and Pesach (Passover) in which observant Jews get their homes ready for Pesach. I call it sandwich in that not only are we squeezed at this time to figure out how to get ready, we also aim to get rid of anything resembling a sandwich, such as cookies, crackers, cereals, pasta, pretzels and plenty of other other starchy items. You know all those gluten-filled items you own? We probably can’t own them on Pesach. One of the nice features is if we have unopened non-perishable goods, we can donate them to a local food pantry. I even learned I can donate my unopened box of chickenless nuggets to Elijah’s food kitchen in New Brunswick. Not sure if I will make it there for one box, but I love the idea of someone else using the food.
Do you do anything special at this time of year: clean your house, start your garden, get ready for a holiday or prepare for a trip? What were your favorite toys as a child?
Beets, watercolor and ink pen on paper by Leora Wenger, January 2014
Beets and early spring: do you associate the two? In any case, I’ll teach you how to make fermented beets. You only need two food ingredients: a bunch of beets and some salt. We won’t be cooking the beets, although I did find recipes that cooked the beets before fermenting. Cooking might make it easier to digest, but it also might kill off some of the nutrients. And I like the crunch of raw beets. You will also need a sharp knife, a cutting board, a glass jar (a mason jar is fine), a small baby food jar, a piece of thin cloth and a rubber band.
Ingredients
3 or 4 beets
2 tsp. sea salt
water
Wash the beets as best you can and cut off the ends (the part with the leaves and the part that looks like a tail). Cut each beet in half once and slice as thin as you can. Place the beets in a glass jar with a wide top. Add sea salt. Add enough water to cover the beets. Place a small jar on top of the beets to push them down into the brine. The beets need to be submerged in water. Cover the jar with a thin cloth and hold the cloth in place with a rubber band. Wait about two weeks. Fermented beets! In the heat of the summer, you may only have to wait two days instead of two weeks. If you are fermenting for the first time, you should check it every few days to see how the flavor changes. Really, you should do that whenever you ferment, but in reality you might just move on to other things. If you feel your beets are done fermenting, store them in the refrigerator.
You can even drink the liquid – I believe it is called beet kvass. I mix mine with a bit of seltzer.
I worked on this tall house illustration back in December, and I’m presenting it to you today with a little secret. Shh, it’s not quite official and may be going slowly, but this house illustration and the house illustration I posted in late December will be part of a new “mural” painting that will appear on my leoraw.com home page. I came up with the idea about two years ago to redo my home page completely and give it a “Highland Park, NJ” look – to me, that meant the old houses of Highland Park. And some trees. An old-fashioned suburban look perhaps. I started working on the actual “mural” or banner earlier this week – it needs a third house, so that is on the list to be done.
My next step will be either cloud or tree illustrations – which should it be? Clouds or trees, anyone?
Nuts, Raisins and Sunflower Seeds, watercolor and ink pen by Leora Wenger, 2014
I painted this scene of nuts, raisins and sunflowers seeds for the food exercise in One Watercolor a Day. I’m not convinced of the scale I chose – perhaps since I made the nuts as big as I did, the sunflower seeds should be bit bigger? But no point to criticizing one’s own work – here it is for you to view. In the Facebook group for One Watercolor a Day, someone painted a lobster. It was quite a painting – lively and colorful. As I keep kosher, I would not have considered lobster for a food study, but that’s the sort of range one gets with these exercises. I also did a watercolor food study of beets – perhaps I will post that one closer to Pesach (Passover) and tell you how to make fermented beets, one of my favorite foods.
My son bought a new printer, an Epson XP-310 (or I bought it for him). I used the scanner for this painting, and I was quite pleased with the results – no more excess gray. I may buy a standalone scanner so I will have a larger scanner (the Epson XP-310 is quite small). When I do, it most probably will be an Epson.
The next watercolor exercise I plan to try is to paint some toys. I have a doll in mind to add to my still life. What other toys should I add? We still do have plenty of toys in this house, even if my children are no longer little.
Layered landscape scene, watercolor by Leora Wenger 2014
Haven’t had much time to blog – I was working today (on a Sunday!) and helping my daughter with a school project (about Chana Szenesh), and all of a sudden, it was 5 pm. I started preparing dinner, and now that a few things are warming up I decided it would be a nice time to post the above landscape watercolor, one that is an exercise from One Watercolor a Day.
Thank you to Naomi Firestone-Teeter of the Jewish Book Council for hosting the February Jewish Book Carnival and including my review of Rabbi Lau’s book.
Holocaust books can range from only brushes the surface to difficult to read to powerfully upsetting. There was one book I read in part and never finished because I found it so upsetting. In that book, everyone Jewish died (each a gruesome, slow death) – the narrator himself was a prisoner in the camp but not Jewish. Then there are books that seem to suggest if only we all were nice, such horrible things would not happen (except only nice people read those books – mostly drivel to me).
Out of the Depths: The Story of a Child of Buchenwald Who Returned Home at Last by Israel Meir Lau we get an autobiography with hope, perspective, respect for many different kinds of people and a story of a boy who loses his parents and much of his family but succeeds, succeeds in his own life and in touching many others. Rabbi Lau is imprisoned in Buchenwald as a young boy – most children his age are killed right away, but his brother, a Russian man and others manage to help him survive. At one point he is getting food to his brother Naphtali, because he is in the non-Jewish part of the camp where there are more rations, and his brother is among the Jews who get little. Because of his brother and his brother’s promise to his father, the two make it to pre-State of Israel Palestine and are reunited with an uncle and a half brother.
One cautionary remark about this book: in some ways it is divided into two parts. My 11th grade son had to read this book for school last year. He found the first part, where little Lulek (Rabbi Lau’s childhood nickname) survives the Holocaust, to be quite interesting. The rest of the book he found more difficult to read. Indeed, we follow Rabbi Lau around the planet where he visits the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Brooklyn, Fidel Castro in Cuba, King Hussein of Jordan and Pope John Paul II. As the narrative tends to jump around a bit, it is not always easy to move with it, but I found much of what he had to say of interest. For example, I did not know he was so close to Prime Minister Rabin. Sometimes he gives his divrei Torah (words of Torah) in detail, and you wonder if the person to whom he is speaking understands what he is saying.
This division of the book reminds me of the last book I finished: An American Bride in Kabul by Phyllis Chesler. Like Lau’s book, much of the exciting tale happens in the first part of the book, and the rest of the book is explanatory narrative and less dramatic parts of her life, like conversations with her ex-husband forty years later. My apologies to Phyllis Chesler for not writing a full review right now (that’s the problem with taking out brand new library books – you can’t keep renewing them). A jewel of Chesler’s book is a short history of the Jews of Afghanistan. Another remark that relates the story of Phyllis Chesler with that of Rabbi Lau: although she says she comes from an Orthodox Jewish family, it is clear she had very little Jewish education. In contrast, Rabbi Lau came from a long line of rabbis, and his brothers and uncle made sure he got a strong Jewish education in Israel. He also was clearly a gifted student – he jumped from first to fifth grade in one year. Would she have had such a strong attachment to an Muslim Afghan man if she had a stronger education and heritage? Who knows.
One of the most revealing parts of Out of the Depths were the early years in Israel when no one talked about the Holocaust, not survivors or native Israelis. There was some kind of shame attached; indeed, children were taught the Jews went like sheep. In retrospect, one can argue with this statement, but it helps to understand how Holocaust survivors were not given the opportunity in those years to work through the grief, the anger, and all the other feelings. When Eichmann came to trial in 1962, finally, the dialogue about the Holocaust began.
There was one character in the book for whom I felt bad and didn’t really get Rabbi Lau’s reaction to him: the Yiddish poet Itzik Manger. Rabbi Lau comes to visit Manger as he lies ill; Manger compared himself to Noah and how he got drunk after the flood. Rabbi Lau’s comment to the reader is “Although I understand Itzik Manger, I choose to identify with those who suffered immensely during the war but who opted to lead their lives in a vastly different mode.” I am not convinced he really does understand Itzik Manger. This is not to say one should tolerate alcoholism, but underneath that choice to drink alcohol was clearly a lot of depression and grief. I can accept how one can be in such a state having lost one’s whole world. Rabbi Lau claims he understands, but I didn’t really feel that. Perhaps with the right kind of professional understanding and help, Itzik Manger could have had some more healing in his life.
On the other hand, I was in awe of his conversations with the Pope, Fidel Castro and King Hussein. For example, Fidel Castro asks Rabbi Lau a thought provoking question:
Here in Cuba, a child of eight growing up without parents, and especially without knowing the language, will turn into a juvenile deliquent…But you came to Israel barefoot and penniless, and today you are like the Jews’ pope…How did a boy from the streets, who started out with nothing, get chosen to be the senior religious representative of the country?
And then Rabbi Lau, after initially surprised by the question, talks about his heritage of a long line of rabbis, and how his father left a spoken last will and testament with his older brother to take care of his younger brother, and how his uncle took care of him when he finally arrived. He spoke of his teachers in yeshiva and of his tutelage under his father-in-law, Rabbi Frankl. He felt even though he lost his parents, in many ways they stayed with him.
I was impressed with Rabbi Lau’s own self reflection – he was able to note that separations are painfully difficult for him, because of his early separations from his mother and his brother (he was reunited with his brother). He said even a simple goodbye party when leaving a position did not feel good to him.
If you like autobiographies, this is well-worth reading. If you would like to read about a Holocaust survivor’s story, this one is more upbeat than many others. I also learned a bit about the role of the chief rabbi in Israel. The book certainly gave us a rabbi who is a well-rounded person and able to connect to many.
Fanciful Fish, watercolor by Leora Wenger 2014
Another day, another watercolor: inspired by the Day #5 exercise in One Watercolor a Day, I drew a fanciful fish using a drawing from a Dover book filled with art nouveau drawings. Then I drew it again on watercolor paper, put on some masking fluid, and painted in some color. All as I fancied – I made up the colors and some of the pattern as I went along.
Here is a detail of the fanciful fish watercolor that I posted last week on Google+:
I decided a good way to use Google+ is when I am having a busy day, but I need a creative break, I quickly post a detail from a painting that I later plan for a whole post on my blog. I also sometimes post photos on Google+.
I am up late writing this post (people who know me well know I am usually an early to bed, early to rise type) because I am waiting for my son to come home from a trip. He went to visit my other son at college. He said he had a great time. He missed the first train he planned to take (a good experience in travel not always going perfectly), and my husband is out now picking him up.
I did a watercolor landscape last week that I based loosely on the photograph at the bottom of this Meron post. I also have lots of photos of robins – they seem to have invaded my neighbor’s backyard (and the gutters of my roof as well). So maybe a post on robins tomorrow – we will see. Thank you for visiting!
Red Admiral Butterfly on a Leaf, watercolor painting by Leora Wenger, 2014
Last year I went in search of birds and I found red admiral butterflies. This year I’ve photographed plenty of birds as I’ve been good about filling the bird feeder, but it has been sparse on butterflies. One of the advantages of art is you can re-create what you like in a watercolor.
This watercolor is inspired by an exercise in the book One Watercolor a Day by Veronica Lawlor in which you are supposed to paint a design, such as a butterfly, using masking fluid. After drawing your design in pencil on watercolor paper, you paint the masking fluid on the white paper first, then let it draw. Once it is draw (takes about fifteen minutes), you can paint on top of it and around it. When your paint dries, you can then carefully peel off the masking fluid (I used an eraser). You will now see the bright white of the paper. That’s the best way to get white in a watercolor painting: let the paper show through. I used masking fluid where you see veins of the leaves, white dots on the butterfly, and also for the orange areas. I painted in the orange after I peeled off the masking fluid.
I may try this exercise again with a different sort of design. Maybe I’ll look one up in a book – a castle might kind of interesting for example, or a dragon. Someone did a simple paintbrush with a variety of colors and got beautiful results. I originally thought of painting a bird, but it didn’t seem to lend itself well to a masking fluid project. I want something with different parts and pieces that can be separated with the white lines I create with the masking fluid.
Thank you to Michelle of Rambling Woods who helped me identify those red admiral butterflies last May. If you want to see what else I’ve been inspired to paint from nature, here is a red cardinal watercolor painting.
On a completely different note than a red admiral butterfly watercolor painting, here is a photograph of my daughter and my husband at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (I’m posting this so she can use it for a project in school, where the teacher said they can only use photos from Google Images (?!x!?)):
My favorite part of the Metropolitan Museum is the American Wing. If you have been there, what is your favorite part? Do you have a favorite in another art museum?
