In honor of Rosh Hashanah, I decided not to share with you my mother's recipe for chicken with apples.
Believe me, it's much better than sharing the recipe with you, because it's not tasty.
And it's not that my mother doesn't know how to cook, as she is much better at other things like gardening, history of the Land of Israel and extorting confessions.
When I was a child, I had some vague expectation that one day I would come home from school, and that there would be Harima waiting for me on the table.
I didn't know what a Harima was, but I thought the universe and my mom owed me one.
It is important to say that at that time she was almost solely responsible for eradicating crime in the northern district of Israel, and also during her time, recipes in cookbooks looked like this: take X, put mayonnaise on it, Arabic.
It should also be said in her defense that my grandmother, her mother, who at the time used to drain swamps here and beat mosquitoes, would only serve us corn schnitzel and saucy pizza.
My mother refused to bring these into the house for health reasons and filled the freezer with something that looked like sole, smelled like sole and was as edible as sole.
The package said it was beef, but I think it was a sole.
People had a strange perception of health in the 1980s.
My mother has one recipe for chicken: chicken with apples.
She must have made it sometime, someone told her it was really tasty, and it stayed.
Thank you, unknown man!
This recipe is everything that gives Ashkenazi food a bad name - it's soft and sweet, and you can serve it both as a main dish and as a dessert, I don't think anyone will notice.
A few years ago, on Rosh Hashanah, I decided to do something and bring her a cookbook as a gift.
She said "thank you very much" and put it back in the bag.
After the holiday meal, after the dishes were cleared from the table, the dishwasher was running and the floor was washed, I read her some dishes that I thought were easy and successful.
About the eggplants in tahina she said "I don't like tahina".
About the sweet potatoes in coconut milk she said "sounds strange to me".
About the stuffed animals she said "Sounds like messing around to me".
About one recipe she said it sounded interesting to her.
This was a recipe for Apple Cider Chicken.
I was the first and last female soldier in armor school that the shakshuka and couscous didn't look weird (red water and yellow water respectively - shouldn't it look that way?), and I came out fine overall, I have the normal amount of each organ.
It certainly puts in a different perspective the nutritional hysteria that other parents around me are in today, who insist on offering their children all kinds of weird things like unsprayed vegetables or things that don't consist of 70 percent phosphorus.
My mom does make excellent kneidelach, my dear.
But that's because the recipe for kneidelach includes matzah flour, eggs and sour cream.
Every Passover and Rosh Hashanah (don't ask me why, it's just like that) she stands in the kitchen, rolls hundreds of balls and complains.
On the few occasions when I plucked up the courage to suggest that this year she wouldn't make kneidelach, she matter-of-factly explained to me that she couldn't not make it "because the cousin/nephew/sister-in-law would be very disappointed".
Because I was there when it happened, I know to say that "they will be very disappointed" means that last time my mom asked them if it tasted good - and they said yes.
According to the same rules, we have holiday dinners for 40 participants twice a year, for which my mother cooks all the hits: chopped liver with blood, gefilte with sweat and chicken soup with tears.
Bets are traditionally made between the siblings - not if mom will lose it, but when mom will lose it.
Every year I suggest that she let me cook some, or order catering, and then she yells at me to get out of her kitchen.
I don't know why they say the secular have no tradition.
My mother made me believe that I could do anything, that if I only wanted to, I could be an astronaut, prime minister or write nonsense in the newspaper.
I wish I had this recipe to share with you.
May we have a sweet year like chicken in apples.
were we wrong
We will fix it!
If you found an error in the article, we would appreciate it if you shared it with us