The Yenta is still recovering from our Miami seder (next year in Savannah!) and not one but BOTH Widespread Panic shows this week, but I must share my recipe for Maztah Lasagna in case anyone wants to try it for Shabbos dinner.

Now, I know folks have been probably been slapping unleavened squares in a baking pan with tomato sauce ever since the fall of Rome, but I’d never made this dish before because it sounded … soggy. But when you have children to feed (not mention a husband who keeps trying to convince you that tortillas are kosher for Passover because they’re flat), you’re willing to try anything. So, after looking at a few recipes online, I came up with my own ideas about how to keep matzah lasagna from turning into mush.

Disclaimer: I come up with my own cooking ideas fairly often, but regular readers know that I rarely share them, because mostly, they’re gross. Please consider my humble assertion that this KICKED ASS.

Yo, Yenta!’s Matzah Lasagna

You will need:

8 squares of matzah

Tomato sauce (I used a jar of the store-bought stuff to save time – Barrilla’s Roasted Garlic – but being a bad Jew, I didn’t check to see if it was kosher for Passover)

A small can of tomato paste

Olive oil

A pinch of brown sugar

Half a chopped white onion

Handful each of chopped mushrooms, olives and capers (if you don’t like any of ’em, leave it out)

A bag of baby spinach

Cottage cheese

Feta cheese

A bag of shredded mozzarella or Italian blended cheese

1 egg

Italian spices

Salt to taste

Sauce:

Heat up a saucepan on medium with a couple of generous pours of olive oil. Throw in the onions, mushrooms, olives and capers and brown ’em up. Add the jar of sauce and let bubble a little; add tomato paste until smooth. Sprinkle in a little brown sugar; it really ties in the flavors. Turn to low. It’s gonna be a little thicker than you’re used to, but that’s what we want. Trust me.

Filling:

Dump about 3/4 of the container of cottage cheese and half the container of feta into a bowl with the egg and spices. Mix until creamy – I used a whisk, but a handheld mixer would work even better.

Assembly:

Now, unlike regular lasagna, in which noodles absorb water and should be a juicy, bubbly mess when done right, matzah lasagna should be as dry as possible before it goes in the oven so that the matzah doesn’t turn to soup. Every other recipe called for rinsing the matzah to soften it; I thought this sounded like squish waiting to happen, and I recommend skipping it.

Spread a little sauce on the bottom of the pan and place two dry matzah squares side by side. Spread on a few tablespoons of cheese filling, not too much, but cover your corners. Add a layer of spinach, which will give up plenty of liquid to soften everything up. Shprinkle generously with shredded cheese. Dollop on a little more sauce to cover it all.

Repeat previous steps two more times. It will be tall. Push gently into the confines of the baking dish with one last layer of matzah. Then it’s more sauce and another cheese shower. Cover tightly with tinfoil and bake at 350 for 40-45 minutes. Let cool before serving!

Options:

Add some soy crumbles sizzled in olive oil to the sauce to “beef” it up a little. Also, sliced zucchini or eggplant seared in olive oil can be substituted for any of the layers … mmmm…..

I prepared this at 1 o’clock in the morning (damn insomnia) and let it sit in the fridge overnight to bake the next day, which may have contributed to the superdeliciousness of it all. I hope yours turns out just as well.

This blog is FOUR years old today, and you know, WOW. I’ve definitely come a long way from two-sentence posts about Demi Moore and Ashton Kutchner, but I’m still no Jewschool.

My dear Pepe Pringos has sprung a Birthday WordPress Upgrade surprise on the Yenta, which is a little bit like buying someone a car who can’t drive. After Pesach has passed over, I will take some technovitamins and rev this baby up! Everyone knows that four year-olds have unlimited energy (just ask Little Yenta Girl – if you can catch her!)

In the meantime, happy chametz-searching, peeps!

So this morning I emailed Connect Savannah writer Robin Wright Gunn (who tells me she’s launching her own blog any minute now – go, girl!) to compliment her on her latest column about the ironic choice of Ray Bradbury’s eerily prescient Fahrenheit 451 as one of only 16 books chosen by the NEA for the community-wide library reading program The Big Read.

Specifically, I called her the “shizznit,” not because I’m dope like that, but because I have found that when I write “sh*t” in work-related emails there is a corporate censorship gnome that kicks it back to me.

And Robin – always on top of her journalism and wordsmithing, bless her heart – writes back that when she Googled “shizznit,” she assumed that coming from me, it was Yiddish. And was a bit dismayed to find out it’s actually attributed to Snoop Dogg.

I feel damn honored to be the conduit through which the mamaloshen and street talk flow, yo.

There’s this pervasive myth among our own tribe and the world at large that Jews don’t drink. And if they do, but they don’t become alcoholics. And if they’re alcoholics, they keep it really, really quiet – because everyone knows Jews don’t drink.

It’s total nonsense, of course: Anyone who’s ever attended a ZBT fraternity party or a Purim festival in Savannah knows that not only do Jews drink, they can slam beer bongs to put the Irish to shame. And what about drugs? Half the Jewish kids I knew in college had serious cocaine problems. One friend who I’ve since lost track of had such significant meth issues that he sought out drugs while on a weekend furlough from Beit T’Shuvah – a Jewish rehab center. And you over there popping the Percoset like gum balls – hello? This farkokte idea that Jews are too smart to be addicts, or that we don’t have the alcoholism gene (which some of us may not, but there hasn’t been a gene discovered for food, drug, gambling and other substance abuse, has there?) has got to stop.

The JACS program (Jewish Alcoholics, Chemically Dependent Persons and Significant Others) has done an outstanding job of bringing the reality of Jewish addiction to light and providing recovery support since 1980, but there’s still this extra-thick layer of shame and guilt, especially for Jewish women.

JACS has recently published Jewish Sisters In Sobriety, a collection of personal stories and resources that is the first of its kind – a way to validate Jewish women in recovery as well as provide information for those who haven’t taken the first step. (Speaking of steps, part of the challenge for Jews seeking solace in traditional 12-step programs is that so many AA, Al-Anon, NA and other meetings are held in churches – an issue addressed in the book.)

These women’s stories pierced my heart – the child of Holocaust survivors re-creating the misery of her childhood through drug use, the mother snorting coke on the subway in front of her husband and son, the abandoned daughter seeking out relationships with alcoholics – and reading about such suffering experienced by the women and caused to their families only proves how necessary these stories be shared.

Could a woman you know benefit from Jewish Sisters In Sobriety? Buy it for her here.

With all the talk about vaginas lately, I’ve been wondering about the ubiquity of the term “douchebag.” It seems that it’s currently the favored perjorative to describe a person with negative qualties, “specifically arrogance and malice,” according to Wikipedia; a gentler, less-censorable version of “a**hole,” if you will. I’ve finally gotten used to hearing men who are not in prison call each other “bitch,” but could there be something vaguely sexist about speaking in a derogatory way about a tool used to wash the sacred vajayjay?

What I find interesting about this is that most of the people I hear using “douchebag” on a regular basis have no idea what a douchebag actually is – they know that it’s vaguely associated with cleansing the lady parts, but no one I interviewed had actually ever seen one with his/her own eyes (if shouting across a crowded bar “Hey, douchebag, do you even know what a douchebag even is?” can be construed as an interview.)

I dimly remember a yellow balloony thing with a hose attached that lived under the sink in my mother’s bathroom in my very early years, but it could have been part of the 70s plumbing. Certainly all of us of a certain age recall those Massengill commericials featuring a woman frolicking through a field of flowers touting relief from that “not so fresh feeling,” but I’m pretty sure that modern product doesn’t contain an actual BAG. And while you can still buy disposable douches, it is fairly impossible to buy a douchebag (although it’s easy to find out what only douchebags buy.)

And who douches, anyway? Research shows that women who douche run a higher risk of vaginal irritation and infection, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists suggest women steer clear of the practice altogether – relegating douching to the category of things women thought were good for them but later proved otherwise, such as foot-binding, Phen-Fen and Dr. Phil.

So I guess in that context, “douchebag” makes perfect feminist sense.

And “prostate catheter” really doesn’t have the same ring.

Thanks to dear reader Kelly for sending along this vid from Australian guerrilla filmmaker John Safran (he cops to being blatant rip-off of Michael Moore) who’s one funny – and brave – Jew. His covert interview with the Ku Klux Klan is not so much enlightening (the Grand Dragon confirms that the KKK is indeed a “discriminatory organization” and its members are “rascists and bigots”) but it is pretty hilarious.

The Yenta’s inspired to wage a similar attempt at a certain private men’s club in historic Savannah – which doesn’t allow women or Jews. Not that I’d ever want to be a member; I’d just like to fart on their leather chairs.

Here’s a little something to choke on: America loves Jews.

WTF? you say. No way – Everyone hates us; always have and always will. Purim. Passover. Chanukah. Read the Torah, shmendrick. The only people who don’t are just trying to bring on Armageddon.

But here’s the Yenta to tell you it’s not true! Even if we don’t count the titanic rise (and plateau?) of Jewish hipsterism, there’s still some weird things going on the world that your bubbe wouldn’t believe:

We’ve already discussed China’s recent (and wildly misinformed) fascination with all things Jewish. The Jews of France have stopped leaving in droves since their kinda-maybe Jewish president took office (also known as “The Sarkozy Effect.”) Even POLAND – the the very capital of modern Jew-hating – is having an enormous revival of Jewish culture in spite of the fact that hardly any Jews live there (we don’t need to go into why that is, do we?)

Here’s the real kicker: In a 2006 Gallup poll, a sample of folks in the U.S. were asked to rate how they perceived various religious groups, ranging from positive to negative. Not only did 58% feel positively about Jews, but 37% were neutral! Imagine that – 37% had absolutely no opinion whatsoever about Jews! This is in the era of Madonna, airstrikes and Borat and still we’re rated above Methodists? (In case you’re curious, Scientology was viewed most negatively, and this was before Tom Cruise’s creepy video hit the interwebs.)

The poll was published as part of World Jewish Digest article called “Taking ‘Yes’ For an Answer” by Mark Penn and Kinney Zalesne, authors of the MICROTRENDS: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes, and apparently, “Pro-Semitism” is a damn strong microtrend, one that might actually bring disenfranchised Jews back into the fold:

The idea that non-Jews are drawn to Jewish living, independent of outreach efforts on anyone’s part, suggests that there may be yet another way that Judaism can be successfully impressed upon Jews. Such an approach goes beyond exposure to Judaism as a “birthright,” in which young people are exposed to the joys of Jewish belonging. And it goes beyond its opposite – call it “birth responsibility” – in which young people are instructed about their obligations to the community. Instead, the premise is that regardless of your background, Judaism is a system of living and learning so rich that once you engage it, you will want to dive in deeper and deeper.

Hmm, so ultimately, this acceptance in the world at large means we might have to accept ourselves – and be accountable to heritage, history and the ethics of our ancestors. Giving up our victimhood means we’ll have to work harder at being Jewish – especially since non-Jews are getter better at it than we are.

But don’t worry, it’ll take China ages to catch up.

*Yarmulke tip to Reb Belzer, who reminds us that co-author Kinney Zalesne, the sister of a Mickve Israel member, will be one of the speakers during the congregation’s fabulous 275th anniversary celebrations July 11-13 in Savannah. I can’t wait!

I’ve become rather obsessed with the new MacBook Air. It just looks so slim and lovely compared to my four year-old Powerbook G4, which takes 20 minutes to load iTunes and now reminds me of the chubby little girl dressed like a bee in that Blind Melon video. But then I think how similar its dimensions are to a J. Crew catalog or similar piece of junk mail and I figure if I had one, I’d end up throwing it out in a PMS fit of violent tidiness. And I’m not being neurotic (about this, anyway), ’cause it actually happened.

Poor Stephen Levy’s wife – how long will it take before she’s no longer the neatnik who got fed up with her husband’s piles of newspapers and tossed his computer?

Anyhoo, maybe my adoration of the MacBook Air has more to do with the lovely ditty attached to its TV commericial, sung by Israeli-French sprite Yael Naim.

Isn’t she just lovely?

Jack Black, such a shanda! You’ve probably made your mother cry on many occasions (especially for the cinematic turd Nacho Libre) but how do you think she felt when she saw the following quote from in the New York Post?

Part of the bar mitzvah is that you become a man supposedly at 13 years old. And as I was a man, I decided never to go to synagogue again.

So I guess we should assume you let your buddy Steve-O perform the bris on your son instead of a mohel.