Feeling Wonderful - and a little bit icky

Tonight, I gave blood. It was the first time that I was able to donate since we made Aliyah, making this a pretty momentous day- and a girl can face only so much rejection, so I am glad it finally happened. I felt like it was a good way to end Yom HaShoah - helping preserve life on a day that memorializes so much loss. It was pretty amazing to see all the people who turned out to donate, literally giving a little bit of themselves for an unknown someone else. I was very glad to be a part of that.


Now, life is finally getting back to normal after Pesach, at least for a minute. I am back to baking and back to work. Last week functioned as a bit of a bridge between the chofesh and the real world. I tried a few baking things, just as an experiment. One such attempt was to make graham crackers. It sounds like a silly thing to make, but they are not readily available here at the store. Petit beurres (tea biscuits) can be a reasonable substitute in some recipes, but they do not have the same flavor. So I decided to make my own, mostly because I had another recipe that required them. They were delicious! Such an elevation of the humble boxed cracker!

One of our Shabbat guests, Adina, (who BTW is a friend of Shanie's who had been here before, thus making us miss Shanie very much! Lola could not understand why she didn't come here with her friends Rivky and Adina, and really didn't know why she would go to school in America!) said,"You make your own graham crackers?!...Of course you make your own graham crackers," understanding something deep and primal about me - I don't like taking help, not even from a box of cookies. And homemade is (almost) always better than bought, and books are (almost) always better than the movie.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled baking...

Dvora