Galilee Seasonality

What to Expect from the Heavens

Abbie Rosner — Sat, 11 May 2013 10:48:29 +0000

In the broadest of strokes, there are basically two seasons in the Galilee, a brief verdant winter that melds into a vast spring- summer-autumn stretch of dry heat. Yet at the cusp between the two – as those who have lived here throughout time have come to understand, one never knows what to expect from the heavens.

This year is no exception. A little over a week ago we lit our woodstove and snuggled under duvets as storm clouds darkened the sky. Then, having shed jeans and sweaters for shorts and flip-flops, I hung the hammock out on the back porch, sure that the rains were behind us. Settling into the new routine of walks postponed to the late afternoon, the last of the ripe loquats and mulberries sweetened the depressing prospect of life in a blast furnace for the months to come. And yet…this morning, just as I hung out the laundry, the wind picked up and for a brief minute, fat drops of rain fell in blotches on the damp fabric.

The harvest holiday of Shavuoth is now just around the corner – official herald that the wheat season has reached its climax. Even these last smatterings of showers probably won’t wreak havoc on the harvest. And in perfect accord, I marvel to watch mechanical combines shear fields of grain so tall, dense and golden, it seems almost plausible that the water miraculously walked upon was actually a sea of wheat.

***

My days are busy, tying up so many details before a much-anticipated trip to the US – for family visits and to give a talk at the 92Y Tribeca. For those who plan to be in the New York area on June 3^rd at 3:00, I warmly invite you to attend. Engagements in Arizona are also in the works… So if you happened to read my book and felt short-changed because there were no photos, this is a chance to catch a glimpse of the world I have delved into, in living color.

Even as I gear up for the intensity of the coming weeks, the anticipation of long afternoons relaxing in my hammock is a reminder that summer offers its joys as well.

A Preview of Pomegranates to Come

Making Hay

Abbie Rosner — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 18:42:14 +0000

When I first started researching for my book, I had a conversation with a very distinguished food historian. As I enthused about the marvels of wheat, she warned me that people who begin to immerse themselves in the history of grain tend to bore everyone around them, as inevitably, no-one finds the subject as fascinating as they do. How right she was.

Bear with me. I am simply enthralled by the shaggy green-gold grain, thick on the fields and hills around my home. It is the purest expression of this land in its prime, at the height of spring.

Over the past few weeks, the wheat harvest has been unfolding, as it has year after year for millennia. Yet unlike in the past, the vast majority of the wheat grown in this part of the Galilee is destined to become animal feed.

Fields of tender green wheat have already been cut for making silage during the Passover holiday. And now, in other fields, wheat shorn by a combine and deposited in long strips lies drying in the sun. Why is that wheat cut now, I asked Ron, the former dairyman, and left out for days on end? To make hay, he answered. It must dry before being collected into bales. Nutritious and easy to store and keep over time, wheat for cows offers many of the same advantages as it does for humans.

The danger, Ron went on, is rain. If the drying grain gets soaked, fermentation and rot can set in, ruining the entire crop. The gathering gray clouds suddenly seemed more ominous. This, I realized, is the unspoken imperative of why one should make hay while the sun shines.

Green Anew

Abbie Rosner — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 09:28:24 +0000

How does one mark the arrival of spring when the entire winter is full of flowers? With more flowers for one thing, and the late-night fragrance of citrus blossoms teasing into my bedroom window. But there are other reminders that, over the thousands of years when survival for the people living in the Galilee was linked to agriculture, the advent of spring had more compelling developments.

In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond explains how the Mediterranean climate in the Fertile Crescent, in whose gracious curve the Galilee is set, created the conditions for the development of its indigenous plants. Adapting for survival in the short, unreliably rainy winters and long, reliably hot, dry summers, these plants invested their energies into producing robust seeds encased in durable coverings that would protect them for as long as necessary until a sufficient rainfall called them into action. The prehistoric hunters and gatherers of the area learned to pluck the nutritious kernels that were hidden in ears of grain, starting a millennia-long process of cultivation with ramifications far beyond this blog-scope.

Spring is the time when the seeds of many of these indigenous plants come into their own. In the fields, the grains of wheat are fully developed, yet still green and soft – ready to be harvested to produce farike. And the almond trees, whose blossoms settled like snowflakes just a few weeks ago, are showing their tender, fuzzy green seeds, which can be eaten whole, sour and refreshing.

In the months to come, the grains and the almonds will dry and harden, to re-enter the cycle in whatever form is their destiny. But for now, we can savor their vibrant, green potential – encapsulating the miracle of rebirth in yet another spring.

Please accept my warmest wishes for a wonderful Passover, Easter and/or Spring.

Winter in Eden

Abbie Rosner — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 07:37:34 +0000

In my last post, I talked about the “hakura” – the Arabic term for a kitchen garden next to the home, which was once traditional in rural Arab villages in the Galilee (and is, like so many other such traditions, becoming a thing of the past).

Now I’d like to report on our own hakura, here on this first day of March. For many of you reading this, harvesting broccoli and lettuce at this time of year may seem anachronistic. But then who would think of winter as being the most agriculturally fruitful time? But when precipitation is rain and not snow, and every drop is a gift, and when the dark skies give way to brilliant sun-soaked days that draw up the growth from the rich, heavy earth like a magnet, then vegetables grow, even in the winter.

Growing on rainwater only

These days, in addition to lettuce and broccoli, we are stepping out the back door to bring in fresh radishes, green onions and chard leaves. Soon there will be potatoes and maybe even some artichokes. The carrots are taking their sweet time.

These days, my biggest dilemma is whether to eat from the hakura or to go out and forage.

****

I will be coming to the US at the end of May and will give a presentation on Tracing the Local Foods of the Galilee to the Sources at the 92^nd Street Y Tribeca in New York City on June 3^rd. If you can think of an audience that would enjoy such a presentation (with beautiful slides), why don’t you let me know?

The Hakura

Abbie Rosner — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 15:41:22 +0000

I recently received a telephone call from a man named Adel, from the nearby Bedouin village of Ayedat. He is in the final stages of submitting his master’s thesis and needed help with editing the English abstract. I frequently edit English texts on you-name-the-topic, but when he told me the subject of his thesis, I was especially pleased to help.

Adel had researched and written about the changing role of the hakura in Bedouin society in Northern Israel. A hakura is a kind of kitchen garden that is kept next to the house. In Arab farming communities, maintaining a hakura was once very common. According to Adel, however, only when the Bedouins here in the north gave up their nomadic ways and settled into villages did they take up the practice of keeping a hakura.

The thesis described what plants and trees were commonly found in the hakura and how they were used. He explained that no self-respecting hakura was without an olive and fig tree, and the religious significance of those trees related to references in the Koran.

His research concluded that the hakura is a dying practice – that the young generation of Bedouins is quite content to buy their vegetables in the produce store. The younger women he interviewed told him that they were too busy to work in a hakura. I asked him if he felt that that answer really reflected the entire picture.

Look at my hands, he said, holding them out in front of me. They were rough and etched with black lines. The women teachers at my school always comment on my hands – do you think they want to ruin their fingernails working in the dirt?

Abu Malek told me that, in the old times, after a man plowed the ground for the hakura, all the rest of the work – planting, weeding, harvesting – was done by women. How understandable that women today prefer to pay a few shekels over this backbreaking work.

The hakura may soon be a thing of the past, but Adel told me that one of the projects he plans to initiate is to circulate a questionnaire in Arab schools, asking children to interview their parents and grandparents about their experience with these home gardens. At least another generation will maintain the hakura in their living memories.

*****

My book, Breaking Bread in Galilee, was reviewed in the current (Winter) issue of Lilith magazine. You can read it here:

http://galileecuisine.co.il/data/images/LILWi12_final_BreakingBread.pdf

What You See

Abbie Rosner — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 09:39:36 +0000

A few days ago, Balkees and I spent the day with a journalist from Israel’s top food magazine, as she prepared an article about the edible wild plants that are now in season. We started the morning in the village that Balkees grew up in, tromping through the lush greenery in the vast field behind her uncle’s house. The oats he’d planted were just starting to show up green, the space between rows of lemon trees was planted with fava beans, and thriving in peaceful coexistence with these cultivated crops was a profusion of edible wild plants – chicory, mallow, wild spinach, luf. This is paradise, Balkees stated.

The generosity of this season always strikes me as something sacred – the earth puts forth such a bounty of what can sustain us – simply there for the taking. No sweat off the brow. In fact, in the phrase from Genesis that is usually translated as “your food shall be the grasses of the field”, the actual word in Hebrew “essev” – basically means not “grasses”, but weeds –simply what grows.

A few weeks ago, just at the end of the olive season, Ron and I joined our friend Tzvika to check out a neglected stretch of olive orchard to see if it was worth the effort of a last minute harvest. Between the rows of trees grew the most healthy, huge-leaved mallow, spinach and chicory that I’d ever seen. I was thrilled, planning my return the following day with my bag and kitchen knife. Yet the next day, as Ron and Tzvika were picking their olives, the owner of the trees arrived with his herbicide sprayer and systematically decimated the “weeds”. That’s how farmers keep their area clean, Ron explained to me.

I have a neighbor who is never home and I am grateful for the benign neglect he shows to his yard, where I happily forage. The other day I was picking wild spinach and another neighbor walked by, bringing her little brother home from nursery school. What are you doing, he asked me. I’m picking wild spinach I told him. I’ll take it home and cook it. He pondered that for a minute. That’s gross, he said, and walked off.

Forgetting the Bulgar

Abbie Rosner — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 08:44:40 +0000

Learning Arabic is confoundingly difficult. I have learned languages in my life – Spanish, French and Hebrew – but Arabic is something completely different. I have never invested so much time and effort, with such meager results, as in my study of Arabic.

The rules of grammar, the vocabulary, the accent – each of them stubbornly elude my grasp. The other students in my Arabic class, all native Israeli Jews, don’t seem to be progressing any faster, albeit having the advantage of a Semitic mother tongue. The Tower of Babel comes to mind again and again.

The bright side of Arabic class is the homework – which provides a very good reason to visit my friend Abu Malek in Kfar Manda. Abu Malek is a retired high school language teacher, and over the years he has patiently worked through my lessons with me, spicing them up with proverbs and tales.

Today we sat on the rooftop porch in the warm winter sun and crafted sentences from my list of vocabulary words – under, over, inside, outside, this far and no more. Just as we finished our last sentence, Um Malek brought up a tray with lunch – a platter of bright green tabouleh.

I love the way tabouleh is made here, with its overwhelming emphasis on fresh parsley. Um Malek doesn’t speak Hebrew or English, and I asked Abu Malek to explain to her that in the States, tabouleh is made with more bulgar than parsley. Here, I told her, there is so much green that the bulgar is barely perceptible. She burst into laughter, and explained that she’d forgotten to add the bulgar.

And we all laughed together because each of us has forgotten the bulgar at some point, and more than once. On that rooftop this afternoon, we modestly scaled our own Tower of Babel , celebrating what we have in common over what separates us, reaching out to each other through friendship, laughter and a meal lovingly prepared and shared.

***

Two auspicious developments regarding my book ”Breaking Bread in Galilee”:

1. A review recently appeared in the Jewish Review of Books, putting me in very distinguished company:

http://www.jewishreviewofbooks.com

2. The legendary Kitchen Arts and Letters bookstore in New York City just re-ordered copies of my book. I am so pleased.

A Time to Pick Olives

Abbie Rosner — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 10:00:20 +0000

Once again the olive harvest. I like to speculate that not an autumn has passed since they were first cultivated, back in obscure pre-history, that people haven’t gathered olives here in this place that I live. Taking part in this ritual makes me feel like the tiniest link in a very long chain.

But the analogy goes further, or wider. A few days ago I joined my friend Balkees’ family as they harvested their olive grove in the village of Kfar Reine, outside Nazareth. About ten men and women – Balkees’ brothers, sisters and sisters-in-law were at work when I got there mid-afternoon. They pulled tarps from under one tree to another and we circled the branches, pulling down their olives till they rained down onto the canvas. The children ran from tree to tree, collecting olives in buckets, climbing in the branches, and sifting out leaves in an improvised sieve – the screen of an electric fan. Everyone chatted, joked and laughed, all in Arabic, and I understood only a small fraction.

But that didn’t matter. The conversation accompanied my work like the most pleasant background music while I focused on the olives – black, green and purple, fleshy and lean, plump and wrinkled, intact and bruised. I heard the muezzin calling and the children shouting. I felt the heat of the sun ease as the day wore on and the shadows of the trees grew longer. I sipped a small glass of thick, black, cardamom-scented coffee, then returned to the olives.

But most of all, I felt a part of something larger – like I was woven into the fabric of village life that still endures in the Galilee. Where the community depends on the contribution of each person’s hands, and rewards that effort not only with a year’s supply of olive oil, but with a sense of place, value, belonging and accomplishment.

How few are the opportunities in our modern lives to experience this. I think my sister, who just pounded miles of pavement on behalf of the Obama campaign, knows the feeling well.

An ingenious sifter

Paradox with a P

Abbie Rosner — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:56:41 +0000

It seems like one of the paradoxes of adult life is how to interject variety into a healthy but potentially boring routine. I was thinking about this just this morning as I prepared, yet again, the same breakfast I have been eating for years – yogurt, a few tablespoons of raw rolled oats, some chopped almonds and fresh fruit. The first three ingredients are a constant, but the choice of fruit shifts with the seasons, preventing monotony from ever setting in.

Every season has its charms, but I particularly enjoy this segment of the year during which the summer peaches segue into late summer pomegranates, which are followed by burnt-orange persimmons. Of course the “P” sequence doesn’t play out so neatly, and like now, when baskets of persimmons are filling the greengrocer’s shelves, there is a lovely overlap.

We have two pomegranate bushes in our yard – one variety that ripens early in the season, with intensely sweet, ruby red seeds, and a second, late bloomer, that yields pale pink fruit that is almost too tart. When we built an addition onto our house over a decade ago, this bush was bulldozed flat, then miraculously came back to life, and I believe its fruit has special properties. Now at the end of October, I’m sharing its yields with the insects who have already bored holes into its thick skin – cutting away the good parts and mixing the sour jewels with chunks of chopped persimmon for an exceptionally chewy, complex and sublime meal.

Hosting a group of Americans on a culinary tour last week, we had a chance to taste fresh pomegranates, which two of the six participants acknowledged that they’d never eaten before. And I realized that having not one, but two pomegranate bushes in my own yard is anything but routine.

The Yoreh

Abbie Rosner — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 11:57:53 +0000

While family and friends in North America are already in sweaters, here in the Galilee the temperatures are still in the 30′s (high 80′s F). It’s not that we don’t sense the passing of season – the evenings are significantly cooler, and fat, billowy clouds have started to reappear in the sky after months of absence. But summer still has us in its grip.

Wiping the sweat off my face yet again, I’m reminded of being 9 months pregnant. Hot and waiting. But now, it’s the first rain of the season that spells relief. After months of clear skies, there have been the briefest of drizzles over the past week – fat drops that evaporate before they can darken the pavement – but not the drenching downpour that marks the beginning of the rainy season.

This first rain of the year – called the “yoreh” in Hebrew – is mentioned in Deuteronomy 11:14. To paraphrase God, he/she promises that, for those who agree to wholeheartedly serve him/her, he/she will: “grant the rain for your land in season, the early rain and the late.” The “early rain” is the “yoreh”.

Back when those words were written, the importance of a timely yoreh was existential. Farming in these unique topographic and climatic conditions was – and is – quite possible, but its success hangs in large part on the timing of the rains, from the yoreh on through the last rains of spring.

Our fates are no longer determined by the clouds, but life here today feels no less tenuous.