There must be something about this time of year that affects me strangely. Looking back, I see that at the end of October, almost three years ago, I offered you a pot-pourri post entitled A Healthy Portion of Salmagundi. 51 weeks later, I proferred A Modest Helping of Gallimaufry. I find myself having to resort to the same cheap trick today. I thought the least I could do is find a different dish this time, and so I offer you an olla podrida.

In the 16th century, while Middle-French speaking cooks were cooking up a gallimaufry, which is a meat stew, a hash of various kinds of meat, Bartolomeo Scappi, the cook of Pope Pius V, was preparing a Spanish stew, usually made with chickpeas or beans, assorted meats like pork, beef, bacon, partridge, chicken, ham, and sausage, and vegetables such as carrots, leeks, cabbage, potatoes, and onions. The recipe can be found in Scappi’s Opera dell’arte del cucinare (A Work on the Art of Cooking), published in 1570. This week’s dish is called olla podrida. The literal translation of this is apparently “rotten pot”, but podrida is probably a version of the original word poderida, so it could be translated as “powerful pot”. What this post threatens to be is a similar collection of a number of stray thoughts that, after a strange last couple of days, are all that I can manage to dredge up. I apologise in advance for the lack of internal cohesion – and possibly interest – but the fact remains that some weeks this blog virtually writes itself, and other times it….doesn’t. I leave it to you to decide whether the result is rotten, or powerful. I know that I can expect from at least some readers rather less obsequiousness than the curate displayed, and a good job too, on balance.

Well, there we are. Over 300 words already (of which about 100 are copy-pasted from the post two years ago) and I still haven’t said anything. So, let’s get to it.

I’m planning to avoid talking about current affairs as far as possible, but I hope you will allow me two observations. The first is that many of the Hassan Nasrallah obituaries offered in the mainstream media beggar belief. For the Washington Post, Nasrallah was “a moral compass” (always pointing due South, presumably) and “father figure”. (Not everybody, clearly, had an idyllic childhood). The New York Times noted that he “created a state within a state that provided social services”, without drawing attention to the extent to which he was personally responsible for creating the conditions within Lebanon that made such provision necessary.

My second observation concerns another terrorist, killed in another airstrike in Lebanon on Monday. This was Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, the co-ordinator of Hamas activities in Lebanon. He was also, according to Arab media reports, the principal of the UNRWA-run Deir Yassin Secondary School in El-Buss, and, additionally, head of the UNRWA teachers’ union in Lebanon, overseeing 39,000 students in 65 schools.

You may think that UNRWA could be accused of turning a blind eye to a potential conflict of interests here. However, UN Watch highlighted early in the year his involvement with UNRWA. According to UNRWA, Abu el-Amin was suspended without pay in March for three months for violating regulations and was investigated over his political activities. I infer from this that in June he was reinstated. For my money, UNRWA ignoring the facts that UN Watch highlighted early in the year would have been less outrageous than them suspending and then reinstating him.

On Sunday morning, Bernice had to abandon the first two assaults of her planned military campaign to conquer the preparations for the Rosh Hashana-Shabbat three-day festival of eating that awaits us starting Wednesday night, in order to, first, drive me to the doctor’s surgery, then pick me up and go to the pharmacy to pick up the prescribed meds. The doctor suspected gout (as my friend and gout-sufferer had diagnosed on Shabbat), but was also not prepared to rule out an infection. After consultation with the Health Fund’s chief pharmacologist over potential contra-indications, the doctor contacted me later in the day with a different pain-killer prescription, and Bernice had to make yet another expedition to the pharmacy. In addition, of course, I was completely helpless when it came to setting up or clearing away from meals, and so everything fell on Bernice. She always says she has no patience with patients, but you probably believe her no more than I do.

By this morning, the excruciating pain had diminished to a very dull ache, so I was able to drive myself to the surgery for a bank of blood tests. By this afternoon, the results were in, and, in a brief WhatsApp exchange, the doctor was able to confirm our analysis that it is, apparently, gout and an infection. (As I wrote to him: “That’s how we read it, but it’s very good to have it confirmed by someone who knows what they’re talking about.”) All of the prescribed medication is working its magic, and I am, once again, full of praise for our excellent health system, our efficient health fund, and, best of all, our tireless family doctor, who, having asked me, yesterday, to WhatsApp him today (Monday) to let him know how I felt, ended up beating me to it and WhatsApping me as soon as he saw the results..

All of this means that I will be on antibiotics on first day Rosh Hashana, and therefore possibly prohibited from drinking wine. I still have to pluck up the courage to ask my doctor. Or perhaps, having just asked Dr Google about “antibiotics and alcohol”, I won’t ask any kitbag questions, as they are referred to in Hebrew.

Which brings us to beer. As you may know, I brew my own, buying my supplies from an establishment in downtown Jerusalem that has an excellent range of craft beers and has always provided a very good service in providing supplies for home brewing. A couple of years ago, they stopped offering a drop-in service, and instead required customers to email their order a day before they came to pick it up. This worked fine, until it didn’t. A month or so ago, I decided to brew a batch so that it would be ready to drink for the chagim. I emailed in my order, and, although I was mildly surprised not to receive an acknowledgement, I wasn’t worried. The next day, we were in central Jerusalem, and swung by the supplier to pick up the order.

When we arrived, the bar looked to be in the middle of renovations, and a rather surprised manager casually told me that they no longer supply raw materials for home-brewing. I pointed out that their website made no mention of this, and still offered the email address. He was completely unmoved by this. He told me they had stopped several months ago, and asked when I last placed an order. I told him it had been several months, and he said: “Well, there you are. That’s why we stopped the business. What did you expect?” I felt it was a little unfair to lay the failure of the business at my feet; I can’t believe that a man in his seventies drinking largely alone ever represented their core business. However, I wasn’t in the mood for what would anyway be a pointless argument, so I just left.

A couple of hours scanning the internet revealed no suppliers closer than Tel Aviv or Rishon Lezion, and, annoyingly, nowhere on the way to, or fairly close to, Zichron Yaakov. However, there were online suppliers, and it was very easy to place an order online, which duly arrived two days later. When I unpacked the order, I found all the ingredients I had ordered, plus a bag of dry malt grain which was not part of the recipe…but no yeast. Although this is a small bag with only 10 grams of yeast, it’s the yeast that works a lot of the magic. Without it, my 19 gallons of wort would basically be grain and malt cordial.

I emailed the supplier, explaining my problem, and, the following day, I received, by courier, a 10-gram bag of yeast, wrapped lovingly in a cushioned bag. I duly made my wort, sealed it in the vat, with the water-vent inserted for the air released by the yeast (which is basically the yeast breaking wind after it has consumed the sugars in the malt extract). Then comes the waiting, sometimes for just 12 hours, more often for 24-36 hours, until the bubbling starts. It then increases in frequency, from one burp every four minutes to virtually continuously, until, after a week or two, a hydrometer reading shows that the specific gravity of the wort has reduced from around 1.048 to 1.012, (1.0 is the specific gravity of water.) This means that three quarters of the sugar has been converted to alcohol, yielding a beer of about 4.5% strength, which is plenty for me.

Only this time it didn’t. I caught an occasional break of wind, but it never increased in frequency; it was always 4 or 5 minutes between each incident. I waited a week, two weeks, three weeks. Eventually today I decided to take a hydrometer reading, and discovered that the specific gravity had dropped from 1.047 to 1.013, which represents about 4% alcohol. All I can imagine is that an imperfection has developed in the hermetic seal of the plastic vat, and air has been escaping under the lid. So, I somehow have to find time to bottle the beer (a 3-hour process).

I would ideally like to do this tonight, so that the beer will be ready for me to enjoy and offer guests on Sukkot. However, it is already almost 9pm and I still haven’t finished this blog. Tomorrow we are in Zichron all day, and by the time we get home we will not really be ready for a full-scale bottling exercise. Wednesday is Erev Rosh Hashana, so I’m not even going to consider suggesting to Bernice that we bottle then.

It begins to look as though next Sunday will be B-Day. If the beer matures in the bottle fairly quickly, it will probably be drinkable by Shabbat Hol Hamoed. Nine days after that, we fly to Portugal, where I will spend a month praying that none of the bottles explodes in our absence. (As part of the bottling process, I add a mild sugar syrup to the wort, to encourage a little more conversion to alcohol in the bottle, so as to create effervescence when pouring. If the sugar syrup is not distributed evenly between the bottles, it can cause one to explode. If you have 57 bottles of beer stacked close together on a shelf, and one explodes (the technical term is a bottle bomb)…I leave the rest to your imagination. I have never had it happen, but I have had a bottle fall on the floor as I was stacking them after bottling, and even that is not a pretty sight.

On which note, I will wish you Shana Tova uMetuka – a sweet and happy new year: tova mikodmata – happier than the last one.