As much as I love the Torah, Yeshua, and the like, every once in a while I get the cooking bug. I’m nowhere near an Iron Chef, mind you… I doubt I’d even last ten seconds in Hell’s Kitchen! However, watching the Gordon Ramsey shows and Food Network has rubbed off on me a bit, and every once in a while, I get an itch to get creative with food. (And believe me, with my skill set, that’s a whole lot better than if I were messing around with the best anti aging products.)

A couple weeks ago, my wife went on a women’s retreat and I had to cook up something Saturday night for my father and I. Normally, I just buy a couple steaks, slap a barbeque rub on them and cook them up in some margarine and chopped fresh garlic, but this time I wanted to experiment and make something special.

In the course of experimenting, I created something I like to call the Garden Steak. Here’s my recipe:

Craig’s Garden Steak Recipe

What You’ll Need:

• 1-2 lbs. top sirloin steak, trimmed and koshered

• 1/2 clove of fresh garlic, chopped
• 1 bell red pepper
• 1 red hot pepper
• 2 red Roma tomatoes
• 2-3 fresh limes
• 1 bottle McCormick Grill Mates Barbecue Rub
• 1 tsp. extra virgin olive oil
• cast iron skillet, large
• glass bowl, large
• meat mallet
• food grater
• tinfoil or plastic wrap

First you need to prep the meat. That includes trimming any excess fat and koshering the meat properly. (One reason I love top sirloin is that it’s already a very lean cut of meat.) Once that’s done, take a meat mallet to the steaks on both sides, to open the meat up a bit; a fork could be used in a pinch.

Place the steaks at the bottom of a large glass bowl; do not let them overlap.

Now take that red hot jalapeno pepper and roll it vigorously in your hands for at least a minute. Then slice into medallions, quarter those, and sprinkle over the top of your steaks in the bowl.

Now go for the red bell pepper, which has a lot of sweetness to it, but not too much. Cut off the top and bottom and cut the rest into 1/2-inch to 1-inch pepper strips. Then take those strips and cut them down into squares. Toss this over the steaks as well.

Next, chop up your fresh clove of garlic and sprinkle liberally over the top of the steaks.

Now, get those nice red Roma tomatoes out and slice them carefully and cleanly into 1/2-inch thick medallions. Place carefully over the top of everything that’s sitting on top of the steaks by now, so that everything is covered with Roma tomato medallions.

Finally, cut your first lime in half and squeeze out the lime juice on top of everything in the bowl; then use a food grater to grate some lime zest over the top of that.

Cover the bowl with tinfoil or plastic wrap, and refrigerate for a minimum of three hours, to let the steaks marinate. You have time now; watch a movie with your spouse, help out by doing some laundry. Devote some time to prayer. Whatever works best for you. Just don’t snack.

Once the steak has properly marinated, start prepping the stove. If you have an electric stove, place your cast-iron skillet on the pad of your choice, or if it’s a gas stove, over a burner. Either way, set to a low heat (about 3 would be right) and put a very small amount of extra virgin olive oil in the skillet, to season it. (Not much oil! A teaspoon is the most… the less you use, the better!) Use a spatula to spread the oil around the bottom of the skillet, just enough to season it.

Here comes the tricky part…

Remove the bowl containing your steaks from the fridge; remove the tinfoil or plastic wrap; and slowly slide your steaks into the now-warm skillet, so that the meat touches the skillet and all those veggies stay on top of them. Don’t waste any of the peppers, garlic or tomatoes… transfer it all into the skillet.

Let it simmer on that same low heat, cooking slowly. Soon great smells will fill the air.

Once the bottom is nicely browned, carefully flip your steaks and this time you can let the veggies – especially the tomatoes – hit the skillet and even cook between your steaks and the skillet. Keep the veggies moving so that they don’t sit in place and burn.

Once the second side is nicely browned, do the second flip and sprinkle the McCormick steak rub on the steaks, to taste. I prefer a generous dose, since it’s a rub; but don’t overload on it because these veggies will do most of the work for you.

Once the rub is on one side, half your second lime and squeeze out more lime juice on top of the steak rub on your steaks. If you want to, use the grater and add some more lime zest, too.

Final flip of the steak… add the McCormick rub, lime juice and lime spice to the other side of the steak and let the steak finish to the degree of “doneness” you prefer. (I usually like medium-well.) If you like your steak especially well-done, you can flip the steak a couple more times, but usually cooking both sides twice does the trick for me.

Final secret: once the steaks are done to taste, move them onto your plate… then spoon some of those nicely grilled, slightly carmelized peppers, garlic and tomatoes on top of your steak, as it makes a very good, natural from the skillet steak sauce… which is why it’s called a Garden Steak!

Bon appetit and shalom!

When I started putting everything on my flash drive last summer, I thought I was protecting myself from my PC hard drive crashing again.

Unfortunately, flash drives can crash, too; now I have both my PC’s hard drive and my flash drive, plus my latest acquisition, a portable external computer hard drive that looks like a big iPod with no screen. It’s way faster than my flash drive and stores an impressive 250GB!

Hopefully that means, if I sync everything up once a week, that I’ll never have a catastrophic loss of data again, without having some way to get it back! That’s important for an aspiring Messianic rabbi or minister!

I wish education had been this convenient back when I was getting my degree. My wife is due to finish her undergrad soon, and an online degree is the way she made it work for herself; the learning process is more flexible and no one has to live in smelly dorms with a bunch of budding blackout alcoholics.

But the latest university to enter the online universities fray is Western Governor’s University. They have teachers programs, health field degrees, a business program and information technology degrees, all available online. The best part is, WGU is a nonprofit university, which means it’s often more affordable than other programs out there. And in an economy like this, that just makes worlds of sense.

More importantly, WGU is fully accredited, meaning the degree you earn has some backbone to it out there in the work world. With over 14,000 students from all 50 states, WGU is definitely a viable option for those seeking to retrain for the 21st century job market.

And considering the direction the economy’s going, that’s not a bad thing at all.

And now back to our regularly-scheduled Torah talks…

Well, I’m finally losing weight and it didn’t require an appetite suppressant to accomplish it. Instead, I’m simply starting to reduce my calories to about 1000 to 1200 a day.

It was hard at first; I’d been massively overeating. Like, 3000 calories a day or thereabouts. So it took a couple days for the diet to take hold.

But it’s producing results. In my first week, without extra exercise (which isn’t necessarily good, because you’ll need more food if you exercise a lot), I’ve lost about four pounds. You can lose anywhere from a half-pound to a full pound per day.

The trick is to get a lot of 100-calorie snacks and some Progresso soups that are about 200 calories for a full can. I typically eat twice in the morning… a piece of fruit and a 100-calorie granola bar, spaced out by a couple hours … and then have the soup as lunch. Then, and here’s the real help for me, a 100-calorie popcorn in the afternoon.

No pop, no juice; just sparking water like H2O, or maybe a 25-calorie VitaminWater that contains no artificial sweetners. (Cuz those are poison.) Then in the evening, I have a normal, but sensibly portioned meal of about 500 calories. And if I get hungry before I hit the sack, I can do a piece of fruit for about 50-100 calories, or another granola bar or popcorn of 100-calorie size.

It’s working. I’m already below 250! In a couple months, I hope to be below 225 and closing in on 200. My goal is to get below 180 by spring and then up my calories to a more generous 1500-1800 per day as a “maintenance mode” approach.

Hopefully, my high blood pressure, cholesterol and such will go away with the extra weight and I won’t be out of breath after carrying around the Torah scroll on Shabbat anymore.

OK, you may need some weight loss pills if you eat this too often, but here’s my beef stew recipe, which is full of flavor and goodness and is exactly the way I make it for myself, secrets and all.

Here’s what you’ll need:

Craig’s Satisfying Beef Stew

• 5 lbs. of beef chuck roast (or round roast), koshered
• 1/4-lb. stick of real sweet cream butter
• 1 full 8 oz. jar of Better Than Bullion Beef Base
• 1 pint heavy cream
• 3 bundles of green onions
• 2 large white onions
• 1 leek
• 3-4 whole cloves of garlic
• 2 lbs. baby red potatoes
• 2 lbs. yukon gold potatoes
• 3 lbs. russet potatoes
• 3 large red peppers
• 2 small red jalapeno peppers
• 4 lbs. Roma tomatoes
• 2 lbs. greenhouse/hydroponic tomatoes
• 1-2 bags of really good, fresh green celery
• 1 package of aromatic cooking herbs and spices (rosemary, basil and sage)
• 1-2 tbsp. paprika
• 3 1-lb. bags of Alberto extra-wide egg noodles

Okay, here’s how to make it.

First, get a huge soup kettle… the largest one you can find because we’re cooking large. Fill it only about half-way with water. Get it on the stove and start heating it up… but only just above simmer. Put the entire jar of Better Than Bullion in there and stir occasionally so it doesn’t clump up and burn to the bottom of the kettle.

At the same time, ready a cast-iron skillet, also very large… large enough to hold your five pounds or so of beef. Again, put it on a low heat.

Toss the stick of butter into the skillet to get it melting. Then start chopping the aromatic spices. I’m not talking dried stuff; I’m talking the fresh, green, leafy stuff you can find in the produce section. Chop ‘em up, preferably by hand, and toss ‘em in the melting butter.

Now get to work on chopping up the other aromatics; the green onions, white onions, leek and garlic. Get them all in the butter as soon as you can. The good smells are on the way.

Now start cubing your beef. Make sure to trim most of the fat away… personally, I like my beef lean; some people may prefer to keep a little fat in to help flavor the soup, but with my recipe, you don’t need to.

As you cut it down, toss the cubes in the skillet and get it to browning in that butter among all those aromatics. You won’t need to marinade this beef, because the butter and aromatics will do that for you. Once you’ve cubed all the beef, keep an eye on it and keep mixing and turning the beef so nothing burns. Remember, a SLOW simmer… this isn’t a race.

Oh, and with those green onions, chop them up most of the way up the green stalks… those are your scallions, and they add tons of flavor. Don’t do that as much with the leek, though.

Once your skillet is full, now it’s time to turn your attention to the kettle again. Time to start on the celery, which should go in first. Cut off the leafy parts on top, as well as the thick white base. Toss those parts and chop the rest of the celery up as you like. I prefer my celery smaller, so I cut it up pretty good.

Now get to work on the potatoes, which take a long time to cook right, also. I wash them all thoroughly, but I prefer to keep the skin on the Yukon Gold and the Baby Reds. Dice ‘em to your preferred size and get them in the water with that celery. Don’t forget to stir the beef on occasion.

With the Russets, remove the skin and dig out the root-pits and then dice ‘em up. Add ‘em into the kettle now, too.

Next up are the peppers. On the red peppers, I prefer to remove the white core and the green stem. Then I slice them up into nice squares. With the red jalapenos, I cut the tops off, cut in half and slice ‘em into somewhat narrow ribbons. Put the peppers in the kettle with the potatoes and celery.

On to the tomatoes. I like to deal with the hydroponic/greenhouse tomatoes first, because they’re bigger but trickier to cube. Messier, too. Then cube up the lovely Roma tomatoes, which are so much firmer and nicer. Get it all in the kettle.

By now your kitchen should smell good enough to eat! And the beef and aromatics should be ready, fully browned.

The first tricky part is to drain off the excess butter and fat. Then move all the aromatics and beef into the kettle. Get it all cooking together now. Bring up the heat on the kettle a bit, to just below boiling. If you’re in a hurry, you can cut some time off by putting it on a slow boil, but you’ll need to stir more often because you have something like twenty pounds of food in there and it’ll start burning to the bottom if you get careless cooking it on a higher heat or open flame.

Last step for now is to add in that pint of heavy cream and stir one more time. If you’re into rabbinic kosher, you can leave the heavy cream out… but it really makes the broth so if you’re like me and only concerned with clean and unclean, use the cream! Oh, and if you’re into rabbinic kosher, you can substitute Extra Virgin Olive Oil for the butter when browning the meat, also.

Then put the cover on the kettle and let it slow cook. If you’re cooking at a slow boil, you might have it ready in about two to three hours. At a nicer, leisurely pace, just below boiling, we’re talking about letting it simmer for more like five or six hours. Make sense?

Stir the contents about every 20-30 minutes. A bit more often if you’re cooking at a higher heat.

A couple hours in, go ahead and add in the paprika powder to your own personal taste preferences. I use a bit more than some people, but I like a little kick to my stew.

At the same time, add in all those lovely noodles. They’ll help soak up the extra broth and keep it from being a soup. And there will be plenty of flavor cooked into the potatoes and noodles. If it’s Passover season, substitute matza balls or matza-meal noodles instead.

Let it cook at least another hour… minimum of three hours cooking time total, even at a slow boil. Then start tasting the broth and the trying a potato cube or celery slice. When they’re nice and firm, but no longer crunchy, you’re pretty much ready to start serving. I like my potatoes and celery a little softer, but definitely keep cooking until all the crunch is gone, because nothing ruins a good stew like half-cooked potatoes or celery. I hate “raw spots” in my veggies!

This should be enough to serve at least 20-30 people, or to make many, many meals. Anything you’re not going to eat in the first couple days should be stored in Glad bowls and frozen… it’s still great even weeks later, once you thaw it and reheat on the stove. Don’t microwave if you can avoid it.

And that’s it! It’ll be the best, richest stew you’ve ever had. Mazel tov!

NOTE: I hate carrots, and that’s why there are none in this recipe. With all the peppers, you shouldn’t miss them. However, if you can’t live without carrots, go ahead and add in about a pound of them, sliced or cubed… but don’t blame me if you don’t like how the stew tastes after adding them. Yuck!

You know, even believers need to shop for things every now and again, and we like saving money as much as anyone. One of the things I can’t stand is buying something and then finding out some other place had the same item on sale for less than what I spent. It’s frustrating, and it’s not being a good steward of one’s resources.

That’s why I like checking out places like Buy.com. They’ve got everything from soup to nuts and most stuff in between as well. And there are always specials; boy, are there specials! There are weekly sales, daily deals and more. It’s become a habit for me to just visit Buy.com any time I’m about to make a purchase, just to measure what kind of deal I’m getting.

Take the Apple iPod Touch for instance. That’s the next MP3 player I want to own. I like it better than what I’m currently using because of the touchscreen interface, which is way less annoying that those spin-wheel controls on my current generic MP3 player.

Of course, I’ll want the 32GB version unless a larger-capacity unit becomes available between now and the time I buy. Because it’s all about storage for me; I have a lot of CDs, and what’s the point if I can’t get as many of them onto one player as possible? If I can’t I may as well stick with my current 6GB unit, right?

Buy.com is a great place to get one, too! First, they usually offer free shipping and handling, which is a terrific perk; you can’t find that on eBay very often (just as an example.) There’s not a lot of difference in pricing on an item like this, but with Buy.com you at least know you’re getting a new unit, not someone’s used one like on eBay.

Plus, the customer service and quality guarantee is solid. When looking for a place to buy online… it’s hard to beat Buy.com.

Former journalist turned megachurch pastor and Christian apologist Lee Strobel is the star and main driving force behind The Case for Faith, a video documentary companion piece to his book of the same title. While the subtitle for this video is “A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity,” the case as laid out in this video is paper-thin and lacking in real substance. In fact, sad as it is to say, commercials for Vegas vacations offer more specifics.

The movie is very roughly divided up into three main acts. The first act features a lot of nice photography of people from around the world, while Strobel drones on endlessly about the “need for a connection with the divine” that exists “within us all.” There’s nothing new or particularly convincing about this act, as it is the sort of standard PowerPoint presentation that might move some people to tears if on display at a Sunday morning worship service, among a community of like-minded believers, but contains little content that would influence the mind of a skeptic.

The second act focuses on the early career of evangelist Charles Templeton, who started his career around the same time as Billy Graham, but who experienced doubt and ultimately fell away from a life of faith and declared himself an agnostic. This is a very tricky portion of the documentary, due to how it’s constructed.

Strobel intersperses segments of an interview with Templeton conducted before his death in 2001, when Templeton was struggling with Alzheimer’s disease, complications of which ultimately took his life. Strobel’s interview segments with Templeton feature the former evangelist explaining why he stopped believing in God, but then cuts to Strobel explaining how he “defended the faith” to Templeton. While Strobel never directly claims to have influenced Templeton back to a life of faith, one is left with the impression that may have happened, an incredibly self-aggrandizing claim.

However, there is no evidence that the Alzheimer’s-stricken Templeton ever did retreat from his agnosticism late in life, even though he was able to talk about his former spiritual beliefs quite cogently.

Worse, however, is that this second act, also, is lacking in depth of content; for someone who is supposedly one of Christianity’s top apologists, there is a surprising lack of apologetics on display in this video; in fact, little of what he offers in answer to these “toughest objections” is unique or presented in a new way, and most of what he does offer goes beyond the simple homilies one might find in a “daily devotional” book of prayer.

The third act is perhaps the most convincing, and redeeming, act of the documentary. It focuses on the individual story of a husband and wife whose daughter was tragically killed in a driveway accident. The pain of their loss is clear and understandable in a way that Strobel’s over-simplified homilies of faith just are not.

The accident happened one winter, when his wife and son were preparing to leave to go to the store; his daughter was initially going to stay at home with her dad, but changed her mind and rushed out the door to join her mom and brother. The mother was backing up in the driveway, the daughter slipped on the snow and ice and she ended up beneath the car, dying almost instantly.

Such a mind-numbing loss would destroy many marriages. Guilt, recrimination and bitterness would be natural and understandable reactions. The testimony of how this family relied on their faith in God to overcome the emotional fallout of such an accident is emotional and moving. Their claim that is was a reliance on divine power that helped them overcome this tragedy may not convince everyone that God is real, but it is a far more convincing exhibit than any of Strobel’s simplistic devotional thoughts throughout the rest of the film.

Even those hard-pressed to be moved by any “evidence” in the movie will still find this family’s story moving and evocative. Strobel wisely backs off during this third act and reduces his own on-screen time, since the testimony of this family easily speaks for itself.

In the end, “The Case for Faith” presents and overwhelmingly weak case for, well, faith. The first two-thirds of the film are largely emotional and somewhat manipulative, and in the case of Charles Templeton’s final disposition toward faith, potentially misleading. They are definitely portions of your life you can never get back.

However, the final third of the film is, at minimum, watchable if not exactly convincing when it comes to answering logical doubts and questions about faith in Christianity. Over the years, many fine books of Christian apologetics have been written, many of them arguing persuasively for an evidential basis for faith in the God of the Bible; however, Strobel’s “The Case for Faith” is not among those more scholarly works. While his work may draw applause from a sympathetic audience at one of his megachurch homes, it is simply far too lacking in research, evidence and depth to influence most skeptics of faith.

Works like “Evidence That Demands a Verdict” by Josh McDowell, “Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity” by J.P. Moreland, “Hard Questions, Real Answers” by William Lane Craig, and “The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics” by Norman L. Geisler are all works that would provide a more intellectually-satisfying defense of Christian faith than anything Strobel offers here; sure, these books and authors are older and less trendy, but sometimes that’s not such a bad thing.