It’s one of those things I thought I had sworn never to do again: prepare food for an event. But when a young couple on the kibbutz decided to get married and wanted a “kibbutz wedding,” I somehow found myself in charge of the hors d’oeuvres, (along with my sister, who “volunteered” me.)  

In the old days, a wedding meant that half the kibbutz spent the day in preparation. Our young couple was wedding in a different era: They had to pay for everything themselves; most members work in jobs outside the kibbutz (where taking a day off to work on a wedding is, for some reason, not a given); and there’s no central kitchen with all the necessary equipment, permanent staff and person in charge of procurement.

The last time I went to Melo Hatene to stock up on tahina, I ran into my friend and fellow kibbutz member, David Leishman. David was there for tahina, too: He occasionally makes tahina ice cream for Melo Hatene’s restaurant in exchange for raw tahina and other yummy things from the shop.

Intrigued by the idea of tahina ice cream, I asked David for his recipe. (David has been making wonderful homemade ice cream since before he came to Kibbutz Gezer, over 30 years ago.) What I got from David was not really a recipe, but vague amounts for a restaurant quantity. 

My family are not big jam eaters. We’ve got assorted jars of various home-made kumquat and quince jams that friends have given us over the past year or so in the back of the fridge. Still, when the fruit on our little old apple tree is showing the first blush of red – before it turns mealy and gets attacked by bugs – I can’t resist cooking up a batch of apple butter and handing it out. Just the smell of simmering apples and spices sends me back to my early childhood in Minnesota and the giant apple tree in our backyard that had seven different varieties grafted on to it. My Mom would spend hours each fall stirring big pots of applesauce and apple butter to put up for the winter.

It seems my earlier pessimism about the threatened value added tax (VAT) on fruits and vegetables was premature. For now, fruit and vegetables will remain tax-free commodities in Israel.

 Was it concern for our health or the state of Israeli agriculture that prompted this turn-around? Not exactly. The Byzantine ins and outs of coalition politics are what saved the day. The Shas religious party, a member of the governing coalition, decided to press the issue, and they refused to accept the offered compromise in which the tax would start low and gradually increase over several years. 

The plants in the photo grew from seeds out of a packet that was marked “melons” and printed with a picture of round, yellow-skinned fruit. I consider it a miracle. Not that cucumber plants sprouted forth from melon seeds. Rather, the fact that I have cucumbers in my garden. My several previous attempts to grow cucumbers had resulted in plants that yielded maybe one or two measly, pale fruits before turning brown and shriveling up. However the cucumber seeds got there, the guilty party seems to have considerately provided a fungus-resistant variety. And they’re actually pretty tasty for cucumbers, which, lets face it, are generally more crunchy than flavorful.

Tahina, the thick, brownish-gray paste of ground sesame seeds, is one of the latest foods to turn “gourmet” – at least in Israel. If supermarkets once sold only one brand of tahina, today it comes in squeeze bottles and glass jars with fancy labels; brands with Arabic on their labels proclaiming their “authenticity” vie with the all-Hebrew labels of the standard brand. (As far as I know, however, Melo Hatene is the only place to actually offer tahina tasting — the ultimate sign of a gourmet food.)

Rte. 44 is a two-lane rural road more or less in the center of Israel. Coming from Ramla, right before the community of Karme Yosef, sits a square building faced in limestone set back from the road. A modest sign identifies it as Melo Hatene. (The name loosely translates as The Overflowing Cornucopia.) I had passed the building more than once, but had not really given more than a moment’s thought to what this structure – too classy to be a packing shed – was doing in the middle of an agricultural field. It was my sister, stopping to explore while on a bike ride, who discovered what was inside and brought us there.

In the daily inundation of political scandal, violence, government infighting and general economic and social mayhem that we Israelis can’t seem to live without (judging by our consumption of news media), a proposed new tax on fruits and vegetables has garnered little public outcry. 

Until now, fruits and vegetables have been exempt from the 16.5% value-added tax (v.a.t.) placed on nearly every other consumer item. But foods like tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and eggplant had been considered basic daily necessities, like bread and milk (both of which are still price-controlled). 

Shavuot is almost here. I don’t need a calendar to tell me this; I know by the wheat combine driving up and down the fields. I admit I’m a sucker for the sight of shimmering expanses of wheat and agricultural machinery, sunflowers just starting to open and rows of sprinklers spraying jets of water into the sunset. (OK, I know the last is not exactly ecologically correct, but it invariably lifts my spirits.) In another month, the kibbutz wheat fields will be planted with the next crop, and the sunflower fields will start turning from vibrant yellow and green landscapes alive with the hum of bees to ghost fields of eerie dried-up flower heads on shriveled stalks waiting to be picked.

Recently, the food section of Ynet (Internet site of Israel’s largest daily newspaper) had a list of the 10 best hummus restaurants in Israel. I was amused, though not surprised, to see that one of our local hummus joints in Ramla — Halil — was listed. Its closest competitor, Samir, whose place sits just across the road, was not.

Coming up is a most minor of holidays, Lag B’omer. Call me a curmudgeon, but I intend to spend the evening inside with my windows shut tight. It’s not only that I’m not too hot on sing-alongs around the campfire. At least in Israel, I think it’s time to find a new way to celebrate the day.

First of all, there’s the food: burnt potatoes. On Chanuka, when we celebrate winning a battle or two in a war we ultimately lost, we eat delicious fried latkes and donuts for a whole week. On Purim, to commemorate an apocryphal victory in a far off country, we drink ourselves silly and stuff ourselves with sweets. Granted, the success we celebrate on Lag B’Omer was even shorter-lived than usual. Still, couldn’t we come up with something better than burnt potatoes? (That’s assuming you’re not taking advantage of the break in the seven-week semi-mourning period to get married, in which case the traditional food is a choice of roast chicken, fish or beef entrecote.)

Two weeks after the holiday of matza (Pesach) and a month before the holiday of milk (Shavout) comes the holiday of meat. I’m referring, of course, to Israeli Independence Day, which we celebrated last Wednesday.

As on American Independence Day, meat burned on an open grill is the traditional fare. To celebrate in true Israeli style, however, you have to get in your car and drive somewhere else to set up your grill. If you wanted a picnic bench under pine trees or nice bit of green lawn in a park, you’ll have set off early, since two-thirds of the country’s population headed for one outdoor site or another. If you started out after the parks were already full, you likely ended up crouching over a grill on a strip of grass near a roadside, your family stretched out on blankets breathing in the fumes.

The other evening, I committed a crime: I watered my asparagus patch. Emboldened by my misdeed, the next morning I watered my lettuce, onions, tomatoes, and even some inedible potted plants.

No one’s coming to arrest me, or even to slap a fine on me. In truth, it’s not exactly clear if the new Israeli law prohibiting watering applies to all gardens, to public gardens or just to lawns. It’s also not clear who will be enforcing it: The “green patrol” is famously understaffed. You can be sure that bigger criminals than me will be watering lawns in the middle of the day this summer, and one or two of them may even get a slap on the wrist.

On Ynet today (the website of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper) is an article on European rabbis who are gearing up to fight a possible new European Union ruling on meat production that would require animals to be stunned before they are killed. According to the rabbis, this requirement would effectively prevent kosher meat from being produced in Europe.

The article only appears in Hebrew (though it could be in the process of translation for the English Ynet site). I did, however, find this article on Kashrut supervisors in Tiberias who will apparently be issued lasers for zapping bugs on vegetables in the open market.