Shakshouka - שקשוקה

I just wrote this recipe out for Pauli, , and figured I would share...

1 small-medium onion
3-ish cloves of garlic
1 red bell pepper (or half red, half orange)
1-2 small-medium tomatoes
1 – 1 1/2 cups marinara type sauce – cheap spaghetti sauce is perfect
1-2 teaspoons lemon juice (the secret ingredient)
3-4 eggs

Sauté onion, garlic, and bell pepper in olive oil on med-low heat until soft and almost caramelized, add tomato and cook a little more. Add spaghetti sauce and stir to combine, simmer. Stir in lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste, then crack eggs over top. There is a very specific technique for doing this – you have to crack the egg open very slowly so that the white comes out like a long snotty string; you can spread it around a little bit, then you gently set the yolk down in the middle. Do not break the yolk! I don’t know why you can’t just plop the egg in there but you can’t - it makes a difference. Cover with a lid (or tin foil) turn off the heat, and let cook until the eggs are just barely set.

Serve it in the fry-pan with warm pita and hummus – this is an absolute must! I’ve found that the best way to heat the pita is just to put it in a dry pan on med-high heat for a few minutes on each side. It won’t dry out this way like in an oven. It's also really good with some krov adom - it's a mix of thinly sliced red cabbage and mayo that’s been refrigerated for a few days until it’s nice and soft.

Here are a few variations I’ve tried with great success:

• Italian Shakshouka: Add a healthy splash of red wine and some Italian herbs along with the sauce.
• Frat House Shakshouka: Add a half cup+ of beer and some chili paste when you add the sauce.
• Moroccan Shakshoukah – Chop all of the veggies into larger pieces, and rather than sautéing them, simmer the living cripes out of them in the sauce with some water, a bunch of paprika, and a half cup of olive oil. This is how my roommate makes it. I think it would be bomb with smoked paprika.

I’ve also heard that it’s really good garnished with zatar seasoning if you can find it. I think fresh cilantro or green onions would be good too.

When you are done with breakfast, you must immediately go to the beach and drink lager for 3-4 hours in ether a speedo or your underpants (designer briefs only).

Alarms

We experienced our first alarm today while sitting in Ulpan. Spoiler Alert (so my mum doesn't have a heart attack) - It was a drill. We didn't know about it because the internet has been down.

Israel has an advance warning system for rocket fire - radar detects the missiles and a siren is activated automatically, giving you a between 30 seconds to a few minutes to get into the bomb shelter or secure room. We all have secure rooms in our dorms, and we know about about the sirens, so when it went off today, we were like "Huh, that's cool, there's the siren - for real!"

Then I looked up at the teacher's face. Her expression immediately went blank and she starts telling us "Go! Go!" It wasn't a mad scramble dash to the shelter, but this was not like the calm and orderly fire drills we had in grade school. This was more of a "Don't fuck around because impact will be about 30 seconds from now so get your ass up those stairs" kinda scene. Luckily, our instructor, Ruti, called her husband from the shelter and found out that there was, in fact, a drill today.

Quotes of the day, both courtesy of Ruti:

"Every summer, they say there will be war, but who wants to fight in this heat?!?!"

"Yeah, there was bombing in Haifa, couple of years ago, but it's not so bad at the Technion. All the bombs fall down in Bat Galim. It's safe up here." ...umm, you mean Bat Galim, the neighborhood where the medical school is located and where most of us are moving next month? Cool.

Here's a video, shot in Bat Galim in 2006.

Food for thought:

This year, the IDF the six ships of a "peace" flotilla with the stated purpose of breaking the Gaza security blocade. In 2009, 566 rockets were fired into Israel by Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihadists, the PFLP, and others. When you turned on the TV, which did you hear about?

The little differences...

I know that this has been covered by others before, but it really is the little things that get you. for instance, here, on campus, you can buy beer out of the vending machine:

You can also buy hard alcohol from the market in the dorm building and cigarettes from any of the hundreds of vending machines scattered around campus. Bus drivers give change but cashiers pitch a fit if they have to. Everything is negotiable - even cell phone contracts.

Also, underpants. Every single store in Israel sells underpants. Every. Single. Store. The campus bookstore, the housewares store, the supermarket, the mini-mart, everywhere.

Bankers Hours: Hours: Sun, Tues, Wed, Fri- 8:30-13:15 - Mon, Thurs- 8:30-13:00, 16:00-18:30. Really? Where do you need to be for three hours in the middle of the day on Mondays and Thursdays?

You will hear all about all of the bureaucracy in Israel, but you never fully realize the extent until you've tried to get into a nightclub. First off, they don't even open up the lines until almost 1am. Four lines, two tickets, 25 shekels, and fourty minutes later... and that's in the VIP line(s).

It's amazing what you can cook on a hotplate!

For Shabbat dinner, we had garlic-spice chicken, carmelized onion and pepper couscous, salad with white balsamic vinaigrette, and mystery pomegranate drink (which may or may not actually be beer - we're not sure). The guys brought over watermelon and chocolate cookies for dessert.

After dinner, we enjoyed a rousing game of Egyptian Rat Screw - which shall henceforth be known as Israeli Cat Screw (no rats in Israel, but the cats outnumber humans at least 47:1). Only minor injuries were sustained.

Laundry

After the last o-chem final, after the MCAT, after the essays, the follow up essays, and the interviews, there is one last hurdle for students at the Technion: the laundry system.

They seem to have put some of the better minds on campus behind this endeavor. Better minds than mine. It's actually a pretty clever system - if you happen to be a savant with a lot of time on your hands. There is a website that you can go to and view all of the facilities on campus, their usage, and cycle times left. On this website you can reserve a machine, choose soap options, and pay. This site is entirely in hebrew.

You also have the option of bumbling on over there, laundry in tow, and pray that a kind aerospace engineer will take pity on you as you mash your dummard fingers against the on-site computer keyboard (the keyboard is just a decoy - use the touchscreen) and just program your laundry for you.

I am pretty sure that since we three med-students, pooling all of out brain cells together, could not manage to make underpants clean, we're getting kicked out of school tomorrow.

View from the dorm

Today's accomplishments

Bank - Super easy to set up an account in Israel. They had all the forms, including US tax forms ready to go - in Hebrew and English. There are no bank fees for students and we can pick up our cards in a week

Bookstore - Israel doesn't "do" 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper, so we bought new notebooks etc. Graph paper is big here. Woot.

Interwebs - Signed up and hooked up. YAY! My roomie and I both cried we were so happy.

Air Conditioning - I can't believe we went a day and a half without it. There was some kind of doohickey on the wall but it didn't seem to do anything. When the dorm coordinator came by with the new roommate, she couldn't believe we were living like this. I believe the word she used was "stupid". We hastily got some batteries for the AC remote control and we've had it set at arctic ever since. Tonight I put on a sweater - it was awesome!

We celebrated our productive day with Shawarma!