Gadi Taub Chopping His Salad

An Israeli cookbook, missing my dad, catching up on my Israel Update

It is not exactly a state secret to those who read this Substack that I love brilliant men, be they Jewish or Jesuit educated Catholics or even the occasional atheist redhead of Scottish ancestry to name just a few, particularly those who write well. Some of you may have read my piece in Splice Today, in the beforetimes when I wrote more about sex than about Israel, called Why I’d Rather Consume Good Writing Than Porn.

What you may not also know, unless you are one of my readers from the days when I mostly wrote about calorie restriction for longevity, is that I find men making, eating, or in any way contributing to the production or distribution of salads sexy too. If a guy in a restaurant orders a salad, I check for a wedding ring. My longest term long term partner, aka MR aka The Giraffe, was and is among the greatest salad eaters of all time. Men who eat salads clearly value health and have not bought into the American silliness that salads are not masculine.

On Sundays when I am preparing my food for the week, I like to binge listen to Gadi and Mike Doran on Israel Update. Gadi also has a Hebrew podcast that I may start listening to in my bizarre efforts to learn Hebrew without paying for it (and my efforts to listen to Gadi Taub say most anything. He could read the Tel Aviv Yellow Pages, if Tel Aviv has Yellow Pages or anywhere had Yellow Pages, and I’d listen to it.)

Two weeks ago I was listening to Israel Update as I made a chili. Gadi was describing a politician and said, “I know what he is thinking even as I am chopping my salad.”

Needless to say, I spent quite a few moments contemplating Gadi Taub chopping salad.

This week I was relaxing a bit reading an Israeli cookbook called Good Food by Sina Mizrahi that I found for free on the street before I decided to get up and get to work on my cooking for the week. I just made a salad while listening to Gadi and Mike. I think I made a similar salad and posted it a few weeks ago, but this time I made it a bit different. It contains: chopped tomato, cucumber, yellow and red bell peppers, parsley and chickpeas with sea salt and fresh lemon, along with extra virgin olive oil sent to me by The Giraffe, who is also an evoo expert.

This was described, minus the chickpeas, as the basic every day salad of Israelis in my Israeli cookbook, and it combines many of my favorite things on earth. What could be more appropriate than to make it while listening to a real (hot AF) Israeli who thinks about politics while chopping his salad?

I’ve been a little sad lately… lingering sadness over my father’s death, in particular. I’m also sad that I can’t be geographically closer to my mom yet. We had such a nice time at the cat cafe yesterday, and it’s just lonely to be so far away. Our best times have been when we were living close together but not together. Close enough that she could come over for Israeli salad.

When I am sad, I cook and listen to Gadi Taub. Cooking is also a link to my father. He absolutely loved to cook, and was very good at it, though as with most everything, we had very different ways of going about it. My dad strictly followed recipes; I cook from memory and imagination. I read cookbooks cover to cover like novels for inspiration then make variations, but rarely to I follow a recipe to the letter. Only when counting calories do I measure anything. For years when I cooked for The Giraffe I both measured/weighed all the food and entered it into nutritional software, but I don’t do that much anymore. I make big batches of my salads, stews and chilis and season them as I feel like it at the time.

One of my favorite recipes as of late has been my accidental curry chili, created when I put curry powder into a chili instead of cumin. I think I will make it today with farmers’ market ground beef, black beans that I found on the free table, and some vegetables to get my cruciferous veggies in. I tend to eat soups and stews when I come home from work as an early dinner. My whole life is very early, as I have to be ready to leave for work at six am most days, so dinner at four makes perfect sense, and please don’t try to talk to me after nine.

My friend and subscriber EKB wrote a post called Food yesterday that you should read. The complications of cooking for her family are definitely complicated, and I like her thoughts on trying to cook healthy food on a budget. I’ve always been cost conscious when cooking, for as long as I can remember. I may spend a little more to get humanely raised meat at the farmers’ market and I get the best produce I can afford, but everything else is generic and often free from the free tables in the neighborhood.

I miss having tons of people to cook for. Maybe I will again soon. But for now, it’s just me, the cat, and Gadi Taub and Mike Doran, my imaginary friends on the internet.

Here is a video of Sina Mizrahi launching her cookbook that I am reading.

Good Food can be bought here. I wonder how it ended up on the free table in a neighborhood that is covered in anti-Israel graffiti. Maybe someone was afraid one of their neighbors would find them with an Israeli cookbook and attack.

May you chop and enjoy your salads in peace and good health.

This is a salad I made when The Giraffe and I were still together, in 2013. We’ve been apart longer now than the nearly decade we were together, but we are still best friends and text or talk more than probably 7 out of 10 married couples do.