One of the real gifts of spending this year in Israel is that I can swim every day, thanks to the combination of a small pool in our building (one of the reasons we chose it) and being on leave.  Most mornings, our youngest son swims with me.  Swimming with him is more physically challenging (he loves to race and beats me every time), splashier, much more fun, and somewhat less introspective than it is on my own.  Today though, he stayed in bed with a cold and I was on my own, to swim and to think.  As I swam, I tried to think through an article I am working on about immigrant health and, perhaps inspired by news of the recent Climate March in NYC, I kept remembering an image from South India that has stayed in my mind for many years.   It is of a man at work by the side of a dusty road in the heart of the town where we lived.  He was sitting on a mat, at work fixing an umbrella, with a stack of broken umbrellas on his left and a stack of functional looking umbrellas on his right.  In South India, it is worthwhile to fix umbrellas instead of just throwing them out when they break, and clearly was this man's livelihood.  I think that one of the reasons the image has stayed with me so long is that I saw it shortly before leaving India to return to the United States and to my medical training.  I was struck then and am still struck today by how little is wasted in India and by how badly we do in the United States at valuing not only the material objects we often throw out rather than fix, but also in valuing the energy, industriousness, and creativity of the immigrants we grudgingly admit to our country.  It is not just the umbrellas that I remember, but the man who made a living repairing them.  What could he do with what we waste every day?  

Thinking about the ways in which in this coming new year, we need to waste less not only of material goods

and planetary green space, but of human potential, I thought it would be an interesting challenge to come up with a use for a food I have always intensely disliked, a sort of culinary version of the need to value all of creation.  And, voila, I have actually found a Rosh HaShanah recipe for cauliflower that the boys and I like -- kind of the cauliflower equivalent of junk food.  I hope you will enjoy it with the kavanah with which it is intended, (with apologies to those of you who like cauliflower already to whom this will make no sense).
http://www.joyofkosher.com/recipes/rosemary-roasted-cauliflower/