The Zeitgeist

        

Scrambled Matza Brei, Shmura Matza whole (hopefully and preferably). The Streit’s factory on Rivington Street and four small cups for the four cups.

Tips for a Happy Passover

Passover begins Monday evening and with that the eight day gastrointestinal endurance contest with matza and matza-related products. Matza is called “the bread of affliction,” I think no so much as a metaphor for the oppression endured by the ancient Israelites (what’s an ‘Israelite’ anyway? A slimmer Jew before the invention of Eastern European Jewish cooking?) than for the calcifying and immobilizing effect that matza has on so many of us.

There are some foods I only eat this time of year. To combat the aforementioned matza, I consume copious amounts of dried fruit such as apricots and prunes. There are my two favorite Passover breakfasts – Matza Brei (scrambled, loose – don’t talk to me about pancakes…) and one that must surely have originated in the shtetl – boiled potato and hard boiled egg in water, mashed together. At no other time of the year would I remotely consider such a concoction, yet, at Passover I relish and look forward to it. Oh, and Macaroons. Honey nut, preferably.

In the matza area, I’ve become a convert to Streit’s Whole Wheat. It’s got lots of snap, wheat taste and most importantly, fiber and bran. Streit’s also has spelt matza which has a smooth taste, I’m a Streit’s purist owing to the effect New York City water has on the taste of their matza, much as city water has beneficial effects on bagels and pizza dough. For the Seder, Israeli shmurah hand-made round matza. Why? Less expensive than Brooklyn-baked shmurah and most importantly – the Israelis manage to shrink-wrap these round matzot and ship them 6,000 miles without breaking most of them, whereas the Brooklyn variety are tossed into flimsy boxes and then jostled in trucks by Samsonite Luggage commercial gorillas and then arrive at your Seder with two pieces intact out of a four pound box. Oh, and the Israeli variety costs less generally despite the long journey and you get to help Israel.

Some Seder suggestions – The Four Cups: Most folks break out their fine crystal goblets fit for Henry VIII at Windsor Castle. They look great on the table but when filled with wine, most Seder participants find themselves staring at eight or more daunting ounces, so many people just take a few sips instead of fulfilling the obligation to drink a full cup. Others actually chug the whole thing and end up seriously buzzed way before the second cup comes around. The religious requirement is actually in the area of three to 3.5 ounces. To make the Seder ritual of The Four Cups more meaningful and achievable our family procured a nice set of hand painted ceramic four ounce wine cups that we use for the Seder. This way, people aren’t intimidated or prematurely inebriated and most everyone actually drinks four cups.

Drinking at the Seder is essential to both make the occasion joyous and to make spending many hours with your extended family more palatable. Because the story of Passover goes from slavery to freedom I generally start the first cup with a very dry wine, (also low residual sugar helps retard early intoxication) a semi-dry for the second cup, semi-sweet for the third cup and sweet wine for the fourth and final cup when we delight in our liberation from slavery. Get good wines, treat yourself and your guests. Everything is better with better wines. Would you buy an anorexic brisket? In The Five Towns go down and see Moshe Fink or Fay at Chateau de Vin (www.OnlyKosherWine.com ) on Central Avenue in Cedarhurst. All they do is kosher wine. Moshe has an encyclopedic knowledge of every grape ever pressed into sacramental service and he’ll let you taste just about anything before you buy it.

Some other Seder tips – Because of Daylight Savings Time, most Seders will start pretty late (after sundown). Crankiness can be mitigated mightily by urging one’s guests to have a snack or light meal at 5:30 or 6:00 so they don’t arrive famished and so the Seder meal is not mimicking a post-Ramadan break fast or frat house food fight. Also, inject humor. I love tossing jokes in between segments of the Haggadah. The holiday ought not be dour or dull. Google “Passover Jokes” and print some out. A good place to go is www.Bangitout.com, they’re got a lot of funny stuff. If most of your guests don’t understand Hebrew, do the Seder mostly in English. More important that the evening have meaning than be viewed as mumbo-jumbo or voodoo incantations. Very best wishes for a Sweet and Happy Passover!

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The Zeitgeist

               

Ah, Spring Daffodils! And the weather will break 60 finally on Sunday! One of my favorite movies, “Dr. Zhivago,” and the Route of the Dashing Dan, the LIRR.

Morphing Into Daffodils and Slogging Through the LIRR

The weather people are forecasting temperatures finally, finally hitting the low 60’s on Sunday and staying that way at least through mid-week. Can’t come a moment too soon as I’m scheduled to attend my first Mets home game on Monday evening and there’s nothing quite as uncomfortable as watching baseball as though it were November football – that is, in the freezing cold. Also, as I wrote last week, my tulips are is desperate need of solar radiation. Thankfully, as you read this, the daffodils are in bloom throughout the neighborhood.

The Mets, I’m happy (and relieved) to say have acquitted themselves somewhat respectably in their first week of play on the road against some very good competition, so its not an embarrassment of any kind for people hither and yon to be publicly informed of my Monday evening plans. As long as they play .500 ball or better, all will be good with the world.

The other night Channel 13 aired Dr. Zhivago, the classic, epic 60’s  film starring Omar Sharif along with the luminous Julie Christie and Geraldine Chaplin and directed by David Lean. My favorite scene in the movie is when the Zhivagos are snowed-in at Verikeno and we see a slow dissolve through the window of ice crystals morphing into bright yellow daffodils as Winter turns to Spring. Amazing cinematography for its time. This time of year reminds me of that cinematic moment as I’m highly partial to flowers of any and every kind.

One of the reasons I so enjoy living here in the suburbs is because of  our bucolic surroundings (except for January through March) and I’m one of those people with no hankering for Manhattan, finding it dirty, claustrophobia-educing, cramped, crowded and expensive. I’m also hardly enamored of the Long Island Rail Road, which I try to avoid.

So, unfortunately, on Monday afternoon I had some meetings in Midtown and Midtown means the LIRR as parking there is something like $200 an hour. Newsday recently reported what we all probably already intuitively know: A recent study by the Citizens Budget Commission of the nation’s Top 10 commuter railroads rates the LIRR as one of the most inefficient commuter railroads in the country.  Quoting Newsday: “The LIRR pays 57 cents for each mile that a passenger travels, the highest of all the railroads included in the study and well above the 37-cent average. The LIRR also ranked ninth worst out of 10 in cost per active vehicle, and eighth in cost per mile of service. It was seventh in cost per passenger trip and sixth in cost per hour of service.”

Now, the LIRR is blaming some of this on “unfunded pension liabilities” that the MTA inherited from the formerly independent LIRR back in 1965! The railroad is saying that very soon there will be more people drawing pension benefits than actually working!

The bane of virtually every governmental institution in the New York area (and much of the country) are pension mandates and lifetime benefit entitlements after as little as 20 years on the job in an era when people (thankfully) live into their 90s. Many of these pension schemes were devised when the average life expectancy was 67, so the actuaries who concocted these plans thought only a few people would live long enough to seriously collect on them. As we’re seeing, this is unsustainable from a financial standpoint. The solution will bedevil and encumber us for years to come.

There are other quality issues plaguing the LIRR as well, such as why on an 8:08 p.m. Babylon Branch train from Penn Station there were no seats available and tons of people were jammed-in standing with an off-peak roundtrip ticket price of $14.50? (I often use the Lynbrook Station because there’s a train every 20 minutes in the evening, as opposed to the one train every two hours on the Far Rockaway branch and because said Lynbrook bound train generally makes the trip in under 35 minutes without changing in Jamaica).

Commuters know of the LIRR’s manifest shortcoming far more than I and deserve medals for bravery above and beyond the call of family duty for slogging into Manhattan on a daily basis on this unnerving of conveyances. Listen-up wives and kids – show some love and appreciation for all the guys scrambling to catch the pre-8:00 a.m. express – it’s an amazing sacrifice made to give you all an idyllic life in the country that they basically see only on weekends.

As for me, I live my live within a few square miles of The Five Towns and am grateful for it each and every day.

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The Zeitgeist

        

Time for Spring cleaning in the garden. Tulips just like the ones in bloom in Manhattan but not on Long Island. Lovebirds and the late Elizabeth Taylor, Of Blessed Memory.

Sure Signs of Spring

Monday morning my gardener showed up for the first time since November. They came in force – practically a battalion of probable illegals (I am not checking for Green Cards in my pajamas) brandishing rakes, hoes, pikes and blowers in a determined effort to turn over the soil in my South 40 and prepare it for the floral cornucopia to come. Thanks to what seemed like 20 weeks of a polar ice cap on the lawn this winter, my grass is in particularly forlorn condition, so Ralph and his crew threw down a mealstrom of fertilizer, plant food and anti-crabgrass concoctions to jolt my grass back to life when and if we finally break 50 degrees again.

The last 10 days of unseasonably cold weather (thank God it’s April already!) have done a stunting job on my couple of hundred pink tulips. They’re partly up but have been going nowhere for more than a week. I am gravely concerned that all this late cold will literally nip the tulips in their buds and make for a poor blooming. I’ve already seen this with the daffodils on many an area lawn, which characteristically should have been in bloom by now.

Living and working in The Five Towns, I don’t get into Manhattan as much as I used to (I’m sure many a commuter would like to make that statement). On Sunday I met some friends in town for dinner on the Upper East Side and got to stroll down a bunch of the side streets. In Manhattan the tulips are already in bloom. This is I’m sure due to it’s being warmer in The City than the ‘burbs but also no doubt due to the profusion of four-legged fertilizer in the form of man’s best friends augmenting nature in the small flower beds surrounding city trees. There is also a high probability that Masters of the Universe in 10021-land would not stand for nature impeding the arrival of their Spring tulips while we mere mortals here on Long Island will just have to wear down our collective prayer rugs hoping for the survival of our flowers.

Another sure sign of Spring are the birds. Cardinals and Orioles, (no, I’m not talking about baseball – more about that later) and sparrows. There are two sparrow lovebirds who’ve been perched on my sunroom roof now for a couple of weeks, sitting and chirping side by side. I’m sure they’re planning where in my leaders and gutters they’d like to build a nest but for now the singing is delightful. Some of you may know that I’ve been divorced now for about a year so the lovebirds are bittersweet for me as I’d sure like to have someone to chirp with on the porch myself. Internet dating and set-ups have borne no fruit of any value these past 12 months, so if you know of a good match, Spring is always a good time for a man’s fancy to turn to love. 

Now, to baseball – by the time you read this the Yankees will have played their home opener in The Bronx’s new $7.5 billion (really $1.8 billion, but what’s a few billion here and there?) Yankee Stadium – home of the $11 beer and South Bronx vistas. The Mets started their season on the road. Some Little Leagues have already begun. The beginning of baseball augers sultry nights and languid Summer days at the ballpark which pleases me no end. Unlike most Americans, baseball, not football, is my favorite sport. I probably watch 80 or more games and also play in at least two softball games a week. New York Magazine has a great article this week called “Mets Moneyball” (get it on their website, NYMag.com) which concurs with my assessment of Carlos Beltran being the nexus of Met bad luck (see last week’s Zeitgeist column) and also lays out how the new Met management is going to turn things around – in time.

Lastly, for many Five Towns residents another sure harbinger of Spring is the arrival of Passover food sections at area supermarkets. Gourmet Glatt Emporium has added about 30 percent more space to their store which has enabled them to offer perhaps 90 different kinds of matza complimented by an equal variety of dried fruit with which to unclog the effects of the aforementioned matza. I’ve also never seen as large a selection of kosher for Passover frozen pizzas and ice cream – just what everyone needs to keep their waistline slim and trim. For sure Cedarhurst will see an uptick in parking meter and parking ticket revenues thanks to an expanded Gourmet Glatt.

Mom and Liz Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor passed away last week and my mother was none too happy about it. Not that my mom is some star-struck movie fan, quite the contrary. The key here for mom was that Taylor was just two years older than she is and even more to the point, in her youth, my mother looked a whole lot like Liz.

Mom in her 20s was the paradigm of the sophisticated “Sweet Smell of Success” 1959-look and had the same jet black hair and build as Liz. She also was (and still is for her age) very pretty and got a lot of attention (as did Liz) as a result. In the 60s my mom also had the Jackie-O look down cold. Mom identified with Liz even though she was a one-man woman in contrast to Liz’s eight husbands. Liz also cared mightily about Israel and used her influence and celebrity for Israel’s benefit. Although an eccentric (what Hollywood star isn’t?) Taylor was a charitable person who did a lot of good in her life while at the same time setting the screen ablaze with her talent and charisma. She’ll be missed by more than just mom.

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