My parents gave me a cookbook for my birthday called “Simply in Season“, by Mary Beth Lind and Cathhleen Hockman-Wert, published by the Mennonite Central Committee. It’s a beautiful and thoughtful book that offers recipes in four sections, appropriate to the seasons; the recipes often have several variations and pretty good instructions (although I am a fan of editorialized recipes, and these are a little more terse, it’s probably for the best). They also include paragraphs on nearly every page about food, sustainable agriculture, world agricultural economy, hunger, and cooking. After a while I glossed over the bucolic “when I was a kid we did a lot of canning” entries because they seemed almost too good to be true, though now and then someone’s story will get to me, and I’ll tear up at the hugeness of this topic, the immense ability for food to heal, connect, bring life.
The Lord Almighty showers Hanukah miracles in all sorts of ways. Culinary masterpieces feed clean-burning transportation for a rabbi with his heart and soul in the right places.
The miracle of the (veggie) oil
Remnants of Vietnamese dinners power a rabbi’s car
…The 33-year-old Conservative rabbi and congregant at Berkeley’s Congregation Netivot Shalom indeed drives a diesel car. But for the past year, he has not spent dollar one at a gas station. In fact, for many months he hasn’t spent any money on fuel at all. And that’s because he runs his hulking, two-ton Mercedes on the vegetable oil left on the bottom of the wok at one of Oakland’s finest Vietnamese restaurants. And they’re all too happy to let him cart off the grease for free.
Continuing on my previous post about “Olive Tree and Honey”, author Gil Marks raises the question: If there isn’t an original Jewish food, then what makes food Jewish? He answered it with essentially one word: tradition. Despite our dispersion over all four corners of the earth, we have still somewhat maintained our unity through, especially, food!
The example in question here is the development of kosher cuisine around Jewish Law. This can be seen easily through the creation of a popular Shabbat dish called cholent. According to Jewish law, one cannot cook on Shabbat. However, it is customary to serve a hot dish for Shabbat lunch. Thus this stew-like dish that cooks over a low flame put up before Shabbat was invented in many different Jewish communities.
My friend has a new baby, whom I just met last week. He is bright eyed and beautiful and incredibly – astronomically – tall. His dad, said friend, is 6’7”, his mom is 6’, so it makes sense that at 6 weeks the kid is bursting out of 6 month old clothing. I’m a single girl in her 30s, and they’re not the kind of couple to throw a bris or a baptism, so the only way to actually meet the big boy was to insert myself into their domestic routine: I brought food.
It’s the middle of December, I brewed up a pot of bigos, a stew unheard of in these parts, but a warming winter staple in the Midwestern environs from which I hail. It was such a pleasure to feed a new mom and a beaming dad: pouring a hearty meal, lovingly prepared in my own kitchen, into the pots and dishes of my dear friend’s home.
At Hazon’s food conference two weeks ago I was shocked when I tasted the latkes. They were delicate, lacy, not greasy, flecked with tiny bits of green, and utterly heavenly. I had never tasted a latke made for more than 20 people that was worth eating, and this preparation was for 150 people.
It took some sleuthing to figure out the recipe. First I cornered the very busy chef of Isabella Freedman, insisting on seeing the machine he used to grate the potatoes so finely. He showed me his industrial-sized Robot Coupe, and I realized the grater holes were about 3 mm wide rather than the usual 5 or 6 mm wide in a standard Cuisinart. That was my first problem. How to grate my potatoes so finely?
This morning my mom and I were drinking coffee, talking about food. She has followed my interest in local and sustainable food, and often writes to me to tell me about something new she’s just learned, or the local food organizations doing good things in Vancouver. I love it! She used to do a lot of cooking and planning kiddush for our synagogue, and was telling me about the fruit platters she used to make.
“I used to make a big platter — watermelon, honeydew, cantaloupe, and pineapple — sliced thinly and fanned out, and then tuck “bunchlets” of red and green grapes all over the platter, and strawberries. It looked really nice.
This Sunday, Julia Moskin’s article in the New York Times’ special section, 2006: The Year in Food, really stuck it to the chefs. In “Food for the People, Whipped Up by the People,” she writes:
“It was the year the people took back the food. Expertise was out: the Food Network edged aside chefs like Mario Batali to make room for home-cooking queens like Paula Deen, Sandra Lee and Rachael Ray. The most popular new food magazines and cookbooks were collections of recipes from real home cooks (or those who pretended to be), often stamped with the irresistible words “home-style,” “country” and “everyday.””
Just finished touring my non-religious Holiday concert, ‘The 12 Days Of Recess’, in my vegetable oil-powered van, The Veggie Voyager. For the concert’s title song (which lampoons consumer frenzy), the kids sing and make all kinds of silly movements and sounds to go along with each ridiculous gift: 12 Hummers humming, 11 hyperspace things, 10 frogs a-leaping, 9 ladies who can’t sing, 8 maids a-cleaning, 7 swans a-sinking, 6 pizzas flying, 5 moldy things, 4 calling cards, 3 french poodles, 2 ninja turtle gloves, and the Partridge Family CD.
Play ’12 Days Of Recess’ MP3 (end of song 1:35)
Aptly named NYU nutritionist, Marion Nestle, declares 2006 to be the “year everyone discovered that food is about politics and people can do something about it.”
Big Food was Big News:
- Food safety and E. coli highlighted an industrialized food system in crisis.
- Nutrition in schools was a political issue, with Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger joining hands to keep sugar sodas and junk food out of the cafeteria.
- Omnivore’s Dilemma became a best seller. Fast Food Nation became a film.
- Chicago banned foie gras. Whole Foods stopped selling live lobsters. PETA no longer look like fringe freaks.
Shoppers looking for “better food” are turning to trusted “seals, standards, and symbols” of quality such as kosher certification, according to a study by the Food Marketing Institute, the supermarket lobby, and food giant ConAgra.
Fully 95 percent of food shoppers say they consider these marks in the supermarket. Other trusted symbols include organic, whole grains, heart-healthy and natural.
For many, Kosher is the New Organic
The Kosher trend is also gaining momentum as more people come to understand the quality connection associated with the Kosher seal – which certifies both high-quality ingredients and processes that meet strict Kosher standards. More than one in 10 Americans in the “What’s In Store” survey recognized the Kosher quality seal as something they would consider when making quality food-purchasing decisions.
I want to be up front that I am not a vegetarian. Nor am I Glatt kosher. That being said, I admire vegetarians and those with stricter kashrut than I, because it takes dedication to not look deeply and longingly at, say, New York pepperoni pizza and not wonder why the Lord Almighty made it a no-no.
But a great many friends of mine have found it incredible easier to be kosher if they are vegetarian — and found it a better application of kiddush Hashem than simply separating between meat and dairy. So here’s to them:
The cranberry bogs of New England are flooding in warmer weather and soon Canada will overtake the US in production of cold weather goodies, according to the brilliant food writer, 
