Schnitzel Gimel

Schnitzel Aleph is the type of schnitzel your mom makes for Shabbat dinner. It's homemade, made with love, and tastes better than anything you've ever had.

Schnitzel bet, while not schnitzel aleph, is nothing to take for granted. Schnitzel bet is the frozen type that one can heat up in their oven or microwave. While schnitzel bet is processed and not made with the same type of love as schnitzel aleph, there is certainly nothing wrong with a good schnitzel bet.

However, today we aren't here to talk about schnitzel aleph or bet, but rather schnitzel gimel.

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First of all, just to be clear, schnitzel gimel is a made up term. Schnitzel aleph and bet are terms Israeli's use to describe different types of schnitzel, but nobody, except for me, at least to my knowledge, says schnitzel gimel.

Last week, I decided to go to Tel Aviv for a day to participate in a workout run by Tzevet Lohamim, a group of former lone soldiers who run army style workouts for future IDF soldiers. These trainers put on these intense few hour workouts for people like me to get a sense of what being in the army will be like, and the different types of things we should expect.

Throughout the few hours, we ran, crawled, did push ups, squats, sit-ups, burpees, and a bunch of other intense and unique exercises. These workouts, while still intense, are not your ordinary workouts. We aren't doing standard exercises and nor should we expect that. We should expect to do whatever our trainer tells us to do, no matter how wacky or hard.

And, speaking of wacky, this is where schnitzel gimel comes into play.

Before I get into schnitzel gimel, let's first talk about what makes a good schnitzel. The cutlet of chicken needs to be covered, from top to bottom, in bread crumbs. A spotty coating is both not appeasing and not as tasty. The more the cutlet is covered in bread crumbs, the better.

At a certain point in the workout, we did a circuit of push-ups, squats, sit-ups, and sprints...with a twist called "schnitzel." Whenever our trainer yelled "מים," we had to run into the water, get soaked from head to toe in water, and then roll in the sand and become covered like a schnitzel. We had to get sand on our entire body and face, and if he didn't see a sufficient amount of sand on us, he would simply ask us to roll around more.

By the end, we were all schnitzels. Tired, hungry, and schnitzel gimels.

*I am in the red running into the water and becoming a schnitzel