Friday Night in Nahariya

My daughter, Orli, arrived in Nahariya, on Friday afternoon, having taken a similar combination of bus and train that I took the day before.   She should have been traveling a little bit lighter, since on my two previous trips to her school, I’d taken a small suitcase and a large one.   She still had two large back packs and a bag and complained bitterly about their weight and the walk from the train station and how I has nothing in the apartment to eat.

When I explained that I planned to go shopping with her, I was informed that she was tired and hungry and that I needed to go on my own and go now.

Fortunately, the supermarket is about a block away and is large and well-stocked.  Unfortunately,  we’ve learned over the past year that my daughter has developed a severe reaction to gluten, as well as being somewhere between allergic and sensitive to lactose.  She’s also very picky.

To add an additional complicating factor, not only do I have to scan labels, looking for gluten free and lactose free in Hebrew, I also have to try and figure out the internal logic of an Israeli supermarket.  I know that in the United States, for example, if I can find cookies, crackers will be nearby.  If I get to the peanut butter, I’m not going to be far from the jelly.

I don’t expect to find the herring next to the pudding or the tofu in cardboard boxes, rather than the see-through plastic top.  Finding gluten free crackers, gluten free rice cakes or corn cakes, or the correct choice of the 18 different varieties of soy milk (why can’t she just learn to drink her coffee black), was a little bit of a challenge.  Ok, it was an extraordinarily frustrating challenge.  But fortunately, even shopping trips eventually come to an end and I was able to find most of what she wanted.

Once home, and after she’d gotten a little food, I started working on dinner.  Cooking is a little bit of a challenge.  In the kitchen, I have a 4-burner gas range on the countertop with an electric starter for each burner, a small oven, that looks like an oversized toaster oven, and a microwave.  There is also a refrigerator and a small dishwasher. There are only three outlets for five appliances, meaning I have to rotate what gets plugged in.

I thought it was prudent to keep the refrigerator working, and being able to start the burners also seemed to be a good idea, so I alternated the third spot between the oven and microwave and ignored the dishwasher.

For dinner, we had roasted salmon with some salt, pepper, zaatar, and onion, pan fried potatoes with onions and garlic, and a chopped salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and red onions. It was a relaxing Shabbat dinner after a stressful trip to the store.