Archive for February, 2007
Sweet Shabbos Treats
I am staying in my community for Shabbos and since I am eating at friends for the meals, I offered my hosts to make something. I made the following two dishes last night – feel free to try them yourself and I’d greatly encourage feedback!
The Ultimate Chocolate Cake from The Kosher Palette
1 Comment »In search of the organic foods consumer
I was struck by this quote in the NYTimes write up of the Whole Foods/Wild Oats merger
One reason that Whole Foods sees Trader Joe’s as a formidable rival is because the two grocers already serve many of the same higher-income consumers — the same customers who Wal-Mart has hoped to attract by adding organic foods.
Trader Joes is primarily a prepared foods store, not an organic or natural foods store. The Street sees the organic foods customer as the desirable “higher-income consumer” – people willing to pay more for things that are beautiful and easy. In other words, to the analysts, organic buyers are only contingently healthy/environmental shoppers, not necessarily so. Organic is just a symbol, another way of saying “luxury foods” shopper.
Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder
When I did my weekly grocery shopping earlier this week, I was faced with an interesting dilemma: should I buy strawberries (which two pints were being sold for $5- which the price I bought them for in the summer!), even though they aren’t in season in New York and they were imported from Mexico, or not? I had to stop and think about what I wanted to do – I really love strawberries and summer fruit, yet at the same time I have been trying to purchase some of my produce based on their seasonality. Though I came close to calling my friend for moral support, I chose not to buy them. So I reverted to buying pears. At least they were grown in America (even though they could have been grown in a place which is further away than Mexico is from NY – but I am not going to stress over this too much!) and generally always in season since they store well, as apples do.
Breaking: Whole Foods swallows Wild Oats
Big Organic just got lots bigger.
Bloomberg reports:
Feb. 22 — Whole Foods Market Inc., the largest U.S. natural-foods grocer, plans to buy rival Wild Oats Markets Inc. for $565 million after first-quarter profit declined for the first time in five quarters.
What’s for Shabbos dinner this week?
This is the Shabbos meal I will prepare on Friday:
- Canapes of white bean spread with carmelized spring onions with a minty Meyer lemon spritzer
- Passed hors d’oeuvres: Fresh spring rolls and Smoked salmon with lemon-scented goat cheese and dill
- Creamy celery root and parsnip soup
- Salad of frisee, blood oranges, oro blanco (a fancy type of grapefruit), avocado and fennel in citrus vinaigrette
- Vegetable terrine of greens, millet and sweet potatoes, with pea shoots and crisp shiitake mushrooms on a bed of mushroom masala sauce
- Rose geranium sorbet
- Port-poached pear parfait (say that one five times fast)
And I will make this Shabbos meal for almost 40 people. Really, I will. I’m not kidding.
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Save the Donuts
My boyfriend recently received a forwarded email with the subject, ”Save the Kosher Dunkin Donuts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” (yes, with that many exclamation points). Inside was a plea - to Jews and non-Jews - to sign a petition to help a Dunkin Donuts in the DC area maintain its kosher status, despite pressures from DD’s corporate headquarters.
As I read through the email, I was utterly fascinated at the earnestness, passion, and amount of research that had gone into this cause. “Maybe it’s a joke?” I thought briefly as I read the following line:
“As a community, especially those who love donuts and egg/cheese bagels, lets all pitch-in and see if we can change the course of Dunkin Donuts direction and SAVE THE STORES IN THE WASHINGTON DC AREA.”
But the petition was real. I’m all for a community standing up against injustice, and certainly support a community’s right to eat as they see fit. But the self-indulgence and lack of irony of this entire campaign left me feeling as queasy as if I’d eaten one too many glazed cruellers. Read below for a lengthy look at the situation.
SWJF: educated, kosher, barren
As if there isn’t enough handwringing in the Jewish community over falling birthrates and, not coincidentally, educated women taking too long to marry and reproduce, along comes a reputable study that suggests transfats — the magic ingredient in parve deserts – will make women infertile.
In the study, the researchers analyzed data from 18,555 healthy women participating in the Nurses’ Health Study to see if there was any association between intake of trans fat and infertility. The participants were married and trying to get pregnant between 1991 and 1999.
A woman’s risk of infertility increased by 73 percent for every 2 percent of energy she took from trans fat instead of carbohydrates, the researchers found.
Similarly, the risk of infertility increased by 79 percent for every 2 percent of energy from trans fats instead of omega-6 polyunsaturated fats. The risk more than doubled for every 2 percent of energy from trans fat instead of monounsaturated fat.
So what’ll it be, Jack Wertheimer: should we stop getting advanced degrees or stop keeping kosher?
Or just skip desert so we can maintain our girlish figures?
Shabbos in Hawaii
I’ve been waiting out the winter on Oahu, where eating local is whole new kind of different.
Hawaii is a mutt culture — a mix of Pacific Islanders, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and military, which is to say, everyone else in the American melting pot. For most people here, local food, or the kind of food your great grandmother might recognize, means everything under the tropical sun.
If local includes anything on either side of the Pacific, does it stand for anything at all?
Yummy Shabbos Food
As I was commuting to work this cold, wintry New York morning, I was reminded of a warm and yummy Shabbos dish that has been in my family for years. I am referring to fricassee. There are many variations of this dish, and I don’t even know where my grandmother got this particular recipe since it seems to be very unique compared to the ones I just found online. My mother and my aunt have both replicated and slightly altered the recipe and have thus continued the family tradition of making it as an appetizer for Friday night Shabbos dinner.
Why Did I Choose This Life?
So yesterday we got the first real winter storm of the season. Wednesday is usually my internship day at McEnroe Organic, but I woke up to about 4 inches of snow on the ground and freezing rain falling from the sky. I knew I wouldn’t be driving, so I headed over to the greenhouse to start my morning chores. The greenhouse was covered by about 4 inches of heavy wet snow, and sagging in a few spots. After my watering was over, I grabbed a 20 ft. length of 2×4, wrapped a shirt around one end (to keep from ripping the plastic) and went to work. Little did I know that before the storm would end I would spend about 5 hours hoisting that plank above my head to dislodge the ice build-up. I did get to take breaks from the greenhouse duty to go and shovel snow fore the retreat center. All and all, I spent almost 8 hours yesterday engaged in the act of moving snow, finally skiing home from the greenhouse at about 7:30pm.
My daughter, the chef
Let’s face it – a chef is not a career most Jewish parents want their children to pursue. I heard someone say that at the Lattes to Latkes conference, and could relate all too well. When I decided last spring that it was time for me to make a career change after 15 years of being a journalist, I knew it was the right thing – for me. My husband-to-be and friends all knew it, too. The hard part was telling my dad and my 96-year-old grandpa.
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Korban neutral
It figures that my first post not having to do with chocolate would be on Valentine’s Day. Not that I’m not a romantic at heart. Just look at this great new service I signed up for, in honor of the occasion! That’s right, soon my fidelity to my wife will be earning me big bucks, as people pay me to stay faithful in order to “offset” their cheating ways.
Obviously, this site (and my post so far) is satirical in nature. But there’s a very real point behind it: how much do we really know about the now-burgeoning carbon offset industry? Thanks to Al Gore, well-meaning eco-citizens can offset their entire carbon footprint here, or even here if they’re feeling particularly Jewy. But as with anything meaningful in life, it’s not as simple as we’d like it to be.
