Random stuff, the late December edition

Those creepy bells in the atrium at work? I got a building newsletter with more information. They are 16 specially commissioned bells cast in liquid fiberglass, reinforced with steel, and hand-finished in gold leaf. The smallest bell is four feet high, weighing 50 pounds, while the largest is eleven feet high and weighs "several hundred pounds."

The Trader Joe's in Cambridge now carries kosher ground beef. I don't think it's glatt, though (I don't remember which brand, so I haven't double-checked online).

Last week there was a guy playing carols on steel drums at Park Street. I can't hear steel drums without thinking of Sesame Street; I loved the segment with the steel drums when I was little, and wished they ran it more frequently.

My webmail provider raised the limit from 2 MB to 1 GB. Sweet.

Purim for Hannukah: hilchot Xmas! (link courtesty of Fetteredwolf)

Last night I finally got to ImprovBoston (after more than a decade of living blocks away). It's a much tinier space than I expected. I mean, I know the width of the storefront is narrow, but I assumed they had more space, perhaps on another level. None of this has anything to do with the actual performance, of course, which was funny, but not quite what I'd expected. There were two groups. The first was Ameriprov's Bargain Office Christmas Party, which turned out to be an interrupted script about a broken down bus on Xmas, and the second was Bragging to Children, which had a bunch of skits and a couple of songs (one about how we should all be Jewish, the other about cell phones). Both were funny, but I'd expected more audience interaction sort of improv (which might be the case on other nights' shows). I should got back sometime sooner than a decade from now.

A December rant: I have no problem with private people'ss displays for their holidays (whatever holidays, actually), and I can understand the retailer's drive for profit that leads to Giftmas displays without end (though the muzak versions of carols that come along with the displays bother me; I can't close my ears), though it can be annoying. However, I do not think it is appropriate for governmental bodies to have religious displays, even if they're underwritten by a non-governmental body. Hence my dismay at the big, person-height creche on Boston Common near the T station. Ick.

I've been working on a project at work that has me typing Spanish, not a language I know. But between knowing French and English, a lot of it is comprehensible. The weird part is that I'm finding Spanish terms and phrases running through my head at random times; earwormed by Spanish...

Sunday

Sunday turned out to be a lot fuller than I'd anticipated ( (game, )

( MIT museum )

( and Twelfth Night). )

I'm glad I had plenty of leftovers available for dinner; there wouldn't've been time to cook.

Notes from grocery shopping

I went to Trader Joe's first.

Not only do they now have kosher ground beef, they had some kind of kosher steak, too. I've again not remembered the brand name (David's, maybe?), but I looked up the hechsher when I got home, which turned out to be certified by Rabbi Asher Zeilingold, the Kashrut Administrator of Upper Midwest Kashrut (tenth row down on the right from this list of hechsherim). I wonder what the short name is for them, given the symbol?

On the minus side, the unsweetened dried cherries no longer have a hechsher. (And why can't I find unsweetened dried cranberries? I know they're sweetened to make them more palatable to people eating them straight, but I want to control the sweetness if I use them in cooking, especially because they're sweetened too much for my taste.)

On the plus side, I got there just as someone was stocking the organic produce section with bags of organic lemons and limes! This is the first time I've seen organic limes (Whole Wallet never does, at least when I've asked), and I was happy to get more lemons if that's what it took to get the limes. Yay!
Current plot: juice the lemons and limes. Also juice oranges and tangelos. Candy all the peel together.

And I found that they're no longer stocking the ginger tea by Yogi Tea, so I shall have to look elsewhere.

Then it was on to Whole Foods (which I still call Bread & Circus half the time; it's a much more interesting name), theoretically just for yogurt.

Of course, I had to walk through the produce section first, just to look, and there atop the other citrus were a couple of Buddha's hands, as if for decoration. I'd seen pictures before, never the real thing. Very cool. I couldn't see a price, so didn't want to risk it (given their prices), but I smelled, and they're reminiscent of etrog.

The other produce of note was in the mushroom section. There were the oyster mushrooms, slightly greyish-brown, like the ones currently in my fridge. And there was the basket of oyster mushrooms that were pink! I couldn't help staring at them for a few minutes, debating with myself whether I should get them (I resisted, in the end.).

On to the yogurts, where I was sad to find that now Liberte's plum and walnut yogurt doesn't have a hechsher anymore, either. I'd sent them an email when the fruit and grains lost their hechsher months ago (that was the absolute best), and I've sent them another one. Interestingly, it looks like they're coming out with a line of organic fruit yogurts, and those are all hechshered. (But the flavor choices are rather predictable. I want the fruit and grain ones, darnit!)

While I was there, I noticed yogurt made from water buffalo milk. How incredibly neat. Not kosher certified, alas.

I meandered through the Place of Longing otherwise known as the cheese department, then consoled myself by looking at the funky flour selection. So many interesting choices, including chickpea flour (which I got; now I have to find a recipe for chickpea flour cookies like Tabrizi's makes. Reminder to self: do NOT use this flour when making things for Z; the kid's allergic to chickpeas. In fact, better to make in a bowl that's not the usual bread dough bowl.), chickpea and fava bean flour, hazelnut flour, almond flour (which was very expensive, and the almond butter at TJ's went up in price, too; has something happened to decrease the almond supply?), teff flour, and chestnut flour (the only one that wasn't hechshered, alas). I looked at the recipes on the teff flour, and was disappointed to see that it was of the 'replace one cup of regular flour in your regular bread recipe' variety, rather than an injera recipe.

And when I was home searching for hechsher info, I stumbled across this wonderful article about the kosher meat boycott of 1902, protesting a 50% increase in kosher beef (from 12 to 18 cents per pound. I wish.). How cool. (OK, and I love the bit about how a woman responds to police pushing by slapping an officer with a piece of wet liver.)