Cooking For 50 Between The Sirens

Ess Ess Mein Kindt: An Inaugural Offering by Gavriella Zahtz

This week I’ll be cooking the Shabbat Seudah for 50 miluim family members: spouses, children and caretakers who are holding the country while their I’ll-be-your-forever-person is off saving the world.

It is helpful that I am now a certified bomb shelter time management specialist. When the sirens stop, I’ll print out my online certificate of completion. In the meantime, the other night I used my miklat time, and the post siren/shelter downtime necessary to bring one’s heart rate back to normal, to make a menu and itemized shopping list.

I’ve been cooking for the past several weeks for the families of reservists who are serving in the streets of Gaza or the skies above Iran. I’ll walk you through how I organize a regular Shabbat:

My basic template for the Shabbat meal looks like this:

• Challah

• Salatin (little dips and salads) 5-10

• Fish

• Soup

• Main protein

• Secondary protein

• 2 starchy sides

• Vegetables

• Dessert

First I start filling in titles or thoughts of a dish. I look for various balances: different colors and textures and sauces. I have done most of my cooking under a tight budget, so I will splurge on one dish but then balance that with other dishes that may be more time-intensive but lower in cost (think any stuffed vegetable).

Last week, my working menu to feed 50 reservist family members looked like this:

🍞 Challah

• 3 batches of traditional Chabad challah (approx. 18 loaves)

🥣 Dips and Salatim (Salads)

• Tahini dip

• Garlic confit

• Schug (with cilantro)

• Egg salad

• Chickpea salad

• Cabbage salad

• Cucumber salad

• Sesame noodle salad

🍲 Soup

• Yemenite chicken soup (with onions, potatoes, pumpkin, garlic, spices, and chicken parts)

• Hilbe

🍗 Main Proteins

• Sephardi stuffed cabbage (meat & rice filling)

• Chicken stir-fry with vegetables

• Chicken cracklings dish

🍚 Starchy Sides

• Rice

• Roasted potato wedges

🥕 Vegetable Side

• Roasted carrots

🍪 Desserts

• Chocolate chip cookies

• Babka

• Biscotti

To make this and then package meals to serve 50 people — to be delivered precariously packed between the car seats and delivered to ten different exhausted families in between sirens and interceptions — takes a lot of ingredients.

For this we need Am Yisrael.

First there’s the cost of the ingredients. To give you some idea of the scope here, just this one meal requires:

• 9 kg flour

• 17 kg of chicken

• 3 dozen eggs

• 30 kg of potatoes

• 67 shekels worth of fresh herbs

When I started this project, I would just add those items to my own grocery list. Now that it’s clear the need is enormous (I have a request list at any one time for over 70 families wanting home-cooked meals, and we’re not reaching a fraction of them yet!) and this will be a longer-term need (months not days), I had to reach out for help.

So last week I posted in one of my favorite Anglo-Israeli chats “The Walkers.” This is a mix of interesting and educated expats age 55+ from English-speaking countries (UK, US, Australia, South Africa, Canada, etc.) who now live part- or full-time in North Netanya. The group walks Shabbat afternoons on our beautiful tayelet (miles of paved promenade above our beaches). In between, it’s just a genuinely supportive and positive group of women.

So I told them I was cooking and asked if anyone wanted to sponsor ingredients. Within minutes, I had received enough Zelles and Venmos to cover 50 meals. This is Israel.

Then another friend from our synagogue — who’d owned what I heard was a fantastic Vietnamese restaurant here (because she is a Vietnamese Jew if you’re wondering) — messaged me that she’d love to help shop and cook.

Along with hundreds of other sleep-deprived Israelis, we descended on Osher Ad. The shelves were all full. Consider this for a moment: the airspace above Israel is closed. There aren’t lines of freighters at the Haifa port delivering produce under fire. The tiny country is isolated and surrounded by generally hostile neighbors and hundreds of ballistic missiles a night. But the founders of the modern state of Israel knew that this was the matzav of the Jewish nation and prepared us accordingly to become as fully independent a nation as possible.

Produce grown on our land, packaged in our plants, delivered in our trucks to feed our people, protected above by planes flown by Jewish sons and daughters under a dome — ‘David’s Sling’ and ‘Arrow’ — designed by Jewish scientists, who are miraculously guided by the Commander of All Skirmishes, who loves and protects us.

Tomorrow we will be cooking at my apartment. I will likely have the opportunity to show my volunteer guests our bomb shelter upgrades. And when the sirens stop, we’ll walk back upstairs and talk about fashion or missile alert warning systems or Torah. Then on Friday, another volunteer will come pick up the boxes and distribute them to families so we can give them a hug on a plate for Shabbat. He’s coming at two o’clock so he can report back to his base by four.

This is Israel. A country of Jewish mothers with WhatsApp accounts and serious thoughts on the best way to chop a cucumber.

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Gavriella’s Garlic Potato Wedges:

These are a huge hit with kids and parents alike — you want them crispy and not burned!

Ingredients:

One head garlic

4 large white potatoes scrubbed clean, skin left on

One tablespoon Dijon mustard

1/4 cup olive oil

Kosher or sea salt to taste

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375

2. Cut the end off the head of garlic leaving the skin intact. Spread the cut part of the garlic head with 1/2 teaspoon of olive oil. Wrap in aluminum foil and bake until soft (about half an hour.)

3. Squeeze the garlic head so that the now soft garlic goes into a small mixing bowl. Add mustard to mix. Drizzle in olive oil while mixing with a whisk to make a light emulsion.

4. Cut potatoes into 6 wedges each. First cut the potatoes in half length wise to create two wide and flat sides. Then image a point in the middle and cut 3 diagonals into the point. You will be left with 6 edges of nearly equal size.

5. Mix potatoes with dressing. Place on a shallow baking sheet in a single layer (important). Sprinkle with kosher or sea salt.

6. Bake for 45 minutes on a top rack, rotating every wedge at least once to ensure even cooking.

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Gavriella Zahtz’s career recently underwent a major shift. By her early fifties, she had founded multiple startups, including her first venture-funded publishing company at age 30.

During the last decade, she becamed a national expert in value-based healthcare. After surviving 10 years in a wheelchair and being left to die in a nursing home basement, Zahtz became a recognized international keynote speaker.

After the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023 and the subsequent silence of humanitarian organizations around the world, she pivoted to a new “job” in which she has drawn on her skills to help Israel and the Jewish people. She started by helping with shipments of urgent medical supplies into Israel. By November of 2023, she’d organized a 2-week mission to Israel with former Ambassador Michael Oren that resulted in tractor donations to decimated farms in the South of Israel.

In July of 2024, she realized a lifelong dream, bought a one-way ticket, and became a resident of Israel. Now she writes and speaks about Israel and the Jewish people as well as running volunteer activities for families of reservists in her new home of Netanya.

Zahtz has founded and directed dozens of health-related companies and initiatives during her career. She serves as an expert on the topic for media and industry, advises on designing for health outcomes, and has won numerous awards including: Top 100 in Health Info Technology, Top 100 International Influencers in Health Online, Healthcare IT News' #HIT100, and Top 50 Most Influential Health Leaders.

Her public health education campaigns have also been nationally recognized, including being awarded the most influential public education campaign by the National Mental Health Association. She has been featured by the International Business Times, CNN and The Today Show. Zahtz has spoken from international stages including Crowe Health Summit, the Martin Luther King International Beloved Summit and Centro Comunitario Beth El, Panama City. As a survivor of late-stage cancer and domestic violence, she personally shares her stories of how to survive and thrive despite the most challenging of circumstances, showing a way forward to young women everywhere.

She can be reached @gailzahtz on most major social media platforms.

She publishes Dear Chevra on Substack and blogs for the Times of Israel.

Social Contact: Dear Chevra https://open.substack.com/pub/healthbz

Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gailzahtz/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/gailzahtz

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gailzahtz/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gzahtz X www.twitter.com/gailzahtz

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Five tiny delights:

1. Swimming off the Mediterranean coast of my beloved Netanya;

2. Dancing alone in my kitchen;

3. Walking the kikar (town square) and looking at beautiful Israelis and their families;

4. Getting fresh Israeli produce at the open air shuk;

5. Enjoying a fresh Israeli cucumber with nothing but kosher salt and a squeeze of lemon juice.

Five tiny Jewish delights:

1. Shabbat!! It’s not the Jews who keep Shabbat. It is Shabbat that keeps us;

2. The aroma of Shabbat challah baking in my oven;

3. WhatsApp messages showing us the daily miracles of our time;

4. Seeing my 4-year old grandson with his yarmulke and tzit tzit;

5. Looking around the shul kiddush and seeing people of every possible race, walk of life, and birth country coming together.

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