success!

Today, I finally washed the mountain of dishes in the sink that accumulated during the week-long Passover holiday. For most of the week, we had been eating leftovers brought back home from the Seder prepared by Or's grandmother. I tasted gefilte fish for the first time ever, and it reminded me of fish balls I've eaten in Taiwan, with a different consistency. The star of the leftovers was the goulash Or's grandmother made. Beef stew is one of my all-time favorite dishes, and this particular goulash was the best beef stew I have ever tasted. Ever.

I also washed out the secondhand, new-to-me slow cooker and made tonight's dinner with it. Daniel was skeptical due to its extremely low price that it would actually work. As this post's title indicates--it worked! And I'm also immensely pleased by how we obtained it. You see, after Thanksgiving last year at Kirsten and Or's, they lent us their large slow cooker to make turkey stock with the turkey carcass. I discovered how much more convenient it was to use the slow cooker for that kind of thing. Given the kids' demands and my always being tired, there were a couple of times later when I tried to duplicate stock-making with a stove pot--and failed miserably because I forgot about the simmering concoction only to be reminded by the dry acrid smell. Also, there were a few times when I prepped the night's dinner in the morning when I just woke up. And I was so glad to have a ready meal around dinnertime when I was getting too tired to want to cook much. So after I returned their slow cooker to Kirsten and Or, I started thinking that perhaps I should get a slow cooker of my own. If we were staying in Israel for longer than a year.

The thing was that I had had at least three slow cookers in the last two years, but every time I acquired a slow cooker, I have had to move--and to another country with completely different voltage. So I was a bit tired of getting all happy over my newly acquired cooking tool, only to have to give it up again in six months or so. When we learned that we'll be staying in Israel for another year, the slow cooker desire returned. During the beginning of this Passover break, Daniel and I went to the mall and found only one model, selling for 399 shekels. It seemed a fair deal, considering that everything in Israel tends to be a lot more expensive. But it wasn't exactly the model I wanted, so I decided to sleep on it.

When I got home, I remembered yad2.co.il -- one of Israel's online secondhand products website. Kind of like Craigslist and eBay, only completely in Hebrew. I had purchased a night lamp for Petra's nursery via this website, so I decided to hunt for a slow cooker with the help of Google Translate (and a lot of time spent contextualizing the Hebrew term for "slow cooker" via Google searches). There were surprisingly a lot for sale, with two dominant brands. In the end, I narrowed the possibilities to a brand new one being sold in Netanya for 100 shekels, a like-new one in Nesher for 100 shekels, and a like-new one in Ramat Gan for 50 shekels.

Long story short, the sellers in Netanya and Nesher never replied my email requests. The one in Ramat Gan had been my first choice, and a friend in Haifa had suggested that her husband could pick it up during their day-long foray to Tel Aviv, which is about 20 minutes west from Ramat Gan. Her husband ended up not being able to do so, and I basically gave up on all the possibilities since there's a chance I might not return to Israel from visiting my parents in Taiwan this summer anyway.

Still, 50 shekels was a really good deal... And suddenly it was a possibility again when Daniel and I decided, rather last-minutedly, to use the car we'd rented during Passover break to pick up Mark from Tel Aviv. We were heading south to Netanya anyway on Saturday, so what's a few more kilometers south? Mark turned out to be available, and he had an app on his smartphone that served as a GPS--and it showed the guy who's selling the slow cooker (still!) to live just 10 minutes away from where Mark waited for our car.

Done and done, and we exchanged the product and the money. The seller looked like a single guy in his late 20s or early 30s. I assume he tried out the slow cooker once or twice, then decided it was too much bother (maybe?). It looked great, albeit a little smaller than Kirsten and Or's, but big enough to have plenty of leftovers after Daniel, Declan, and I had eaten our fill of the dish I made tonight (carrots, fennel, potatoes, tomatoes - cubed and seasoned with salt, pepper, caraway seed, a dash of soy sauce and sesame oil, and cumin - in chicken broth and with a leftover turkey neck from the Seder placed on top of the whole thing).

Yay for yad2! (Which is pronounced yad-shtein...Yad means "hand" and shtein is Hebrew for "2" or second, in this case.) This is the second time I had used the website, with great satisfaction.

Hopefully this particular slow cooker* beats my track record and doesn't mean I'll have to move again for some reason in the next six months or so.

*I can't believe I wrote such a long post about a 50-shekel slow cooker. Can you tell I'm super excited and proud of how I acquired such a good deal? I like the serendipity of having something that was sitting unappreciated in an apartment near Tel Aviv to now be cooking food on a kitchen counter in Haifa. Because of that, I value it a lot more than a 399-shekel brand new multi-function slow cooker that would otherwise have been purchased from the mall.