It was practically perfect in every way.
The preparation time was about 5 seconds.
I had a banana and a handful of Jr. Mints.
I see your eyebrows shooting up. “This is nutrition?”
But wait. Hang on with me here, we are going Talmudic.
We say a blessing before eating anything. And one generic blessing won’t do. This of course is very Jewish. One must complicate all things. :-)The blessings all begin with the same phrase: Baruch ata Adonai, Elohenu Melech ha Olam , which means, Blessed are you Lord our God, King of the Universe…..then for different food groups the ending of the blessing changes.
Generally speaking they go like this:
Boray pri ha gafen
(who creates the fruit of the vine). . . for wine
Boray minay mizonot
(who creates species of nourishment). . . for grains, (oats and the like)
Ha motzi lechem min ha eretz
(who brings forth bread from the earth). .. for bread
Boray pri ha etz
(who creates the fruit of the tree) . . . for tree grown fruit
Boray pri ha adama
(who creates the fruit of the ground). . . for produce that grew from the earth
Shehakol nehiye b’divaro
(through whose word everything came to be). . . for everything else.
So here’s the story on bananas. They LOOK like they grow on trees, but really it’s not a real tree it’s more like a bush. So instead of saying the blessing for fruit, for a banana, you say the blessing for “fruit of the ground”. The same blessing one would say for say, beans, broccoli, lettuce, beets, squash or potatoes.
You know, vegetables.
So the way I look at it, Jewishly speaking, a banana is a vegetable.
(Oh this is SO Talmudic!)
Then you have the Jr. Mints. Which technically, you would say “Shehakol…”
In the Everything Else category. But the main flavor is mint, which is an herb…
Still with me? So by my tortured logic, in my twisted little mind, what I had for dinner was vegetable with herbs. Very healthy. Whaddaya think?
By using this kind of reasoning, I THINK this is how Adam and Eve got into so much trouble. (The woman that YOU gave me… told me to eat…..and since YOU gave her to me, I figured YOU gave her good judgment, so I listened to her.)
It’s never a good idea to try to pass the buck to the Almighty. . .
(Don’t ask a Rabbi about my Jr. Mint argument, he would shoot it down in a New York minute!)