We invited the family over for dinner on Monday night to celebrate Purim. Everyone was awesome and came in costume. We had pirates, a bunny, Ali G., Pocahantas, a surfer, a lollypop lady, a monkey and a teletubby. Full set of pictures here.

Food was mushroom soup with bread, salad, lasagna (also plain pizza for young fussy eaters) and oznei haman with ice cream and a bit of golden syrup. Usually when we have people over we are still making the food when they arrive. This time we stayed up till 1:30 AM making it the night before so it just had to be heated up on the evening. The only reason it took this long was the mystery of never-ending oznei haman dough.

Made Mishloach Manot deliveries today and am off to see Gesthemane at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle.

Posted belatedly.

Ingredients:

Pastry:

• 6-7 cups of flour
• 3 sticks of margarine (approximately 300gr)
• 2 cups of sugar
• 3 yolks
• 1 whole egg
• 1/2 cup orange juice
• Rind of 1 lemon
• Juice from 1/2 a lemon
• 1 tablespoon Vanilla Sugar
• 21/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 whole egg

Filling:

• Jelly / Jam – strawberry or apricot flavor
• Ground walnuts (or almonds)
• Sugar
• Sweet red wine
• Fine bread crumbs

Preparation:

1. Mix all of the ingredients for the pastry together. I put them all in a massive bowl, mixed briefly with the dough hooks on a hand mixer and then kept going with my hands.
2. In a separate, small bowl, mix all the ingredients for the filling together. There are no exact amounts, I tried getting my mother to be specific for each of the ingredients and she said “a little.” I don’t like walnuts in general, except for ground walnuts in cakes. I couldn’t find ground walnuts here, and didn’t want to take the time to bash whole ones so I used ground almonds and it worked fine.
2. Cover your work area with a light dusting of flour and take a bit under half the dough and roll flat with a flour covered rolling pin.
3. Cut out circles. I used a cup that had an approximately 3-inch diameter at the top to make the circles. Knead the scraps of dough from around the circles back into the larger batch still in the bowl.
4. Put about a teaspoon of filling in the center of each circle. Fold the circle down on three sides to make a triangle, pinching the corners to seal it.
5. Bake on a greased cookie tray at 190 degrees between 10 and 20 minutes (varies with the oven), until they start to brown up.
6. Keep doing this until you run out of dough. While you are in the middle it will seem like the dough is multiplying because every time you separate half you still end up with more in the bowl. It does run out eventually – makes 50-60 Oznei Haman.

Posted belatedly, but useful for next year.

Purim is a Jewish holiday that you’re supposed to get dressed up for. Another custom is bringing food baskets to friends. Just because I had to be at work – didn’t mean I wasn’t going to enjoy it. So of course the rational thing to do is put a plush red teletubby head on as a silly hat and bring food baskets to work along with fuzzy antennas and assorted other props so co-workers could get into the spirit. The rest of my outfit was not as festive. Regular comfort-gear olive green cargo pants, and a black t-shirt. This being Tel Aviv in 2002 – someone thought I looked suspicious.

All of a sudden I was grabbed from behind by a police officer. At first I couldn’t see who had grabbed me and my heart raced about a mile a minute. He asked if he could search my bags and that someone had reported a suspicious looking person in military pants and a strange hat. I asked – what do you mean? Have they never heard of Purim? He said – well, you know with the situation people aren’t celebrating as much this year. He apologized and was really nice about the whole thing.

I’m female and pale, a bit tall, but not usually the first person suspected of things. Made me kinda thankful for that.

So now you know the truth. They’re not gay – they’re a terrorist cell.

I imagine this is what a terrortubby would look like. Maybe a black flag as the antenna these characters seem to require.

Republished from original post on terrortubby dot 0catch dot com [do not recommend going to the link -  lots of popups!]

My first attempt at a website looked like this…

This also happened a few days after I met my husband Kev. I had joined Radio Paradise a few days before this happened. So I tend to think of Purim as the anniversary of when we met. A photo of us from 2005 with me wearing the teletubby head when we met up with some RPeeps in NJ.