Serial:

However I'm on the Upper Left Coast; I suspect that I would prefer real NY or Chicago hotdogs to either. One thing I really have missed since moving to the Pacific NorthWet is decent Jewish Deli, and decent hot dogs and a. Living in LA and Houston spoiled me. Not that there aren't a few - there are a grand total of three decent Jewish delis in the whole greater Portland Area. Caroma, I'll bet there are three decent Jewish delis in walking distance of where you live.

fanny was British for goolie

My sister was over from the UK and she found it very very amusing when re-runs of The Nanny came on and the credits sequence song got to "where was she to go, what we she to do, she was out on her fanneeeeeeeee!" -- she speculates that this is why the show never made it on to UK TV.

[Australians cooking] pizza with egg. What sort of egg is this?

Everyone was assuming that this was an egg which had been pre-fried or boiled or whatever but in my experience, it's just a fresh egg broken over the top of the pizza before it goes into the oven. It gets baked along with all the other ingredients.

And wouldn't pizza be kosher until you put the pepperonis and sausage on it? (Asks the skisha.)

Well, if the cheese is from a 'kosher' animal (like a cow or a goat) and the flour was cleaned¹ properly, and if a certain amount of dough was prepared, 'challa' was taken out of the total amount, and the vegetables also had - grr, I don't have enough of that vocabulary thing - been, um, tithed?

What I'm trying to say is that the pepperonis/sausages could make a kosher pizza into a not-kosher one, but their lack is still not enough for a pizza to be kosher.

I hope I didn't vague this and confuse you more instead of answering.

it's just a fresh egg broken over the top of the pizza before it goes into the oven. It gets baked along with all the other ingredients.

When my mom bakes bread, she gently 'coats' the dough with an uncooked egg, and it improves the look of the bread. There's also a food (we call it 'shakshuka', I have no idea what other names it may have) which is pretty much a spiced tomato sauce into which you can break an egg, while it's being cooked and nearly ready, and the egg gets cooked with it. I have no idea if this has anything to do with the (egg & pizza-ed) topic of conversation.

Also, John! You married man you! I wasn't online in time to tell you this, but I was very happy for you last Thursday.

¹ There should be a different word than 'cleaned' there, maybe 'picked', but I have no idea how to translate the Hebrew into the proper English, sorry.

There should be a different word than 'cleaned' there, maybe 'picked'

"Winnowed," separating the wheat from the chaff? Or just "sifted" through a sieve for impurities?

Thanks, Nou - 'sifted' may be the word I'm looking for (and it involves a sieve with very small holes, like a rough fabric more than an actual sieve - the opposite of my brain, really).

"Winnowed," separating the wheat from the chaff? Or just "sifted" through a sieve for impurities?

Sifted is what she means, I think, if she means what I think she does.

and the vegetables also had - grr, I don't have enough of that vocabulary thing - been, um, tithed?

"Tithed" works. I think there's a different word I've heard used for when it's fields rather than money, but I can't remember it.

Thanks, Hil.

The hivemind is the best dictionary ever - all I have to do is think of the wrong word, and I immediately get the right one, spelled correctly and with grammatical explanations.

Sifting flour is the world's biggest pain in my mind. I was a cooking counselor at a Jewish summer camp one summer, mostly helping 5- and 6-year-olds make cookies. We only had this little tiny sifter, and were making about 100 cookies a day (or 5 or 6 cakes, the days we made cakes.) At first, we had the kids sift it, but that took way too long, so I ended up sifting flour during just about every break period. (Teaching kids to check eggs was fun, though. They didn't seem to get that they could move the bowl, so instead of moving the bowl around to look at it from all sides, they'd hold it in the air and twist their necks around to try to look at it. So cute.)

Sifting flour is the world's biggest pain in my mind.

I totally agree. I try to have a large amount done at a time, so that I always have sifted flour ready-to-use when I need it, and I put both my hands and the sifter inside a plastic baggie (again, see: vocabulary, lack of) so that it'll cause as little mess as possible, and it's still one of the most annoying things to do. I have friends who avoid using flour unless somebody else (the husband, mostly) volunteers to do the sifting, they hate doing it so much. But doing it every break period is especially cruel.

instead of moving the bowl around to look at it from all sides, they'd hold it in the air and twist their necks around to try to look at it. So cute.

So cute. It's like, often when kids who sit near a table get the wrong thing (a kid gets something that was meant to go to another kid), they get up and change their places instead of just trade. Moving themselves is the first option, or something like that.

Yeah. Of course, we got into some problems when kids would ask why eggs would have spots. There were kids from lots of different backgrounds, and they were just five years old, and I could never come up with a good answer to that question. I think the answer we finally decided on was "Only some eggs can become chickens, and we're only allowed to use the ones that can't. If it has a spot, that means it could become a chicken." Which would then lead to, "Well, why can only some eggs become chickens?" If these were my (hypothetical) kids, I'd have no problem answering those kinds of things, but I was never too sure how to answer other people's kids.