Over the last few years I’ve noticed this strange phenomenon about going away on vacation - as soon as I get back, it feels like I never left.  No matter how relaxing the trip was, or how far out of my normal context I travelled, my life seems all too ready to greet me at baggage claim and fill me in on all the things I missed while I was away. Sometimes, though - if I’m lucky, the storm of emails and to do lists subsides long enough for me to briefly recall a memory of my former self, happy and on vacation. 

This most recent trip to San Francisco and Portland was especially lovely, filled with old friends, and new discoveries (especially the Shanghai Tunnels which, despite living in Oregon for two years, were a complete surprise).

One highlight, which came near the end of our trip, was a soggy hike up Lateral Falls just outside of Portland.  Actually, the highlight was not the falls themselves (there were two and they were both gorgeous), but the native flora that lined and dotted our path.  Everywhere I turned, I saw - food!  Redwood trunks split open to reveal crumbly, red velvet cake insides.  Intertwining vines formed a delicate lattice pie crust.  Water-smoothed birch branches twisted into the shank of a Pesach lamb bone. 

“You’re clearly in the right profession,” my friend Tyson said after about my tenth food reference on the trail.

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This is from Jeff Yoskowitz, one of the Adamah Fellows (see previous Adamah posts). We are blessed to live in a community that includes Jews, vegetables and animals — and we are learning that the cycles of life and death are sometimes surprising, always awe-inspiring.PLEASE NOTE: This post contains graphic description and images of animal slaughter.

Today one of Aitan’s goats died (Aitan is a part-staff member of Adamah who also has a pasture down the road). The kid was a female named D’vash, which means honey in Hebrew. Apparently she was eating out of the grain feeder and somehow had her head get caught on fencing and her neck snapped. Aitan and I suspect that one of the other kids playfully pushed her as happens a lot, and her poor positioning trapped her neck and led to her death.

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As reported by KosherToday and Ynet, the city council of Netanya, Israel, has banned the sale of pork, despite the likelihood that the law will be overturned by the High Court of Justice as against Israel’s equivelent of the Bill of Rights. Allegedly, 70 stores support 2,000 families with non-kosher products including pig products.

Fifty-percent of the city council are religious or traditional, although only 3 of 25 council members opposed the bill. Reports Ynet, “Up until now, the residents remained silent on the subject, but the opening of a new pork-selling supermarket in the city center [see photo] sparked protests by haredim, who chained themselves to the supermarket’s doors on Sunday.” [emphasis added]

Meanwhile, Netanya Mayor Miriam Fierberg is urging the Knesset to pass a bill to prohibit the sale of pork products in Israel.

(X-posted to Jewschool.)

Have you ever wondered how to make grape jelly?  Even if you haven’t - check out this great video by The Jew and the Carrot reader, Becki Kasoff from Texas.  The video, which is posted on her blog, “In My Backyard,” features her son Josh making Mustang Grape jelly, start to finish. 

Becki writes, “Every time we look at our harvest for the year, we must say, Borei Pri Hagafen!”

Thanks Becki, for sharing this example of how your family celebrates cooking, food, and Jewish tradition.  The Jew and the Carrot readers are invited to share their family food traditions, recipes, and videos at tips@jcarrot.org.

It’s that time of year – the zucchini time of year. Recall Forest Gump: Zucchini pancakes, zucchini tarts, fried zucchini, sautéed zucchini, baked zucchini, zucchini frittatas….

Thing is, after so much zucchini, it still sometimes seems that there aren’t enough things to do with it. I crave it all winter long, and then wham! four weeks of zucchini madness. I have a few zucchini posts coming up in the next few days, with some of my favorite zucchini recipes, and I’d love it if you’d share yours too! To start things off, though, a few thoughts about harvesting, and the exodus from Egypt.

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Chairman Peterson and the Ag Committee passed a Farm Bill at 10 PM last night, after 2.5 days of discussion.

The Farm Bill, which included significant new money for specialty crops (fruits and vegetables) and made some of the necessary changes to the food stamp program, did not contain meaningful reform in the Commodity title. While much of the press,  Speaker Pelosi & Majority Leader Hoyer seem to have drunk Chairman Peterson’s Kool-Aid about commodity reform, the total savings from the minor payment limitations only amounts to $50 million a year, a drop in the bucket compared with the $226 billion total spending in the House Committee bill.

Here’s how other healthy food priorities fared:

•    Community Food Projects: CFP was included in the mark at $30 million in annual discretionary funds (need to be fought for every year) and no amendment was offered to change the funding to mandatory (funds that are included in the Farm Bill and don’t need to be appropriated each year) because of lack of new mandatory funds in the Committee.

•    Geographic Preference/Local Procurement: An amendment, offered by Steve Kagen (D-WI) and Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), to  allow schools to use Geographic Preference to request local foods for all child nutrition programs covered by the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act and the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 was adopted by the Committee on a voice vote.
•    Healthy Food Enterprise Development (HFED): An amendment, offered by Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), to include a local preference for loans and loan guarantees under the Rural Development Business and Industry Loan Program, was adopted by the Committee on a voice vote. Read more »

Rabbi Ben Bag-Bag used to say of the Torah: “Turn it and turn it again, for everything is in it. Pore over it, and wax gray and old over it. Stir not from it for you can have no better rule than it” - Pirke Avot 14:25, Sayings of Our Fathers. 

Whether we stir or not, though it definitely helps to stir, compost happens.  We are all witness to the irrefutable process of decay in varying degrees of time, as benign as the gradual whither of a solitary banana left in the fruit bowl too long (alright already you know who you are: you cannot continue to ignore that mealy brown banana in your kitchen any longer…it’s bordering on neglect now…time to make a decision…turn brown ‘nanas into ‘nanabread!), or perhaps more tragically, the swift demise of those raspberries that hosted a mold convention—several different molds—within a day of being washed and refrigerated (I have a strict policy of having no “wounded soldiers” by eating any berries I buy on the way home).

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I haven’t had a bite of meat in almost 20 years. I didn’t set out to become a vegetarian, but in college, it was just so easy to be one. I lived with one, and very slowly, I stopped eating it. I remember once I opened the freezer and saw a package of turkey breasts I had bought months ago. At that point, I already hadn’t eaten meat in several months or more. I knew I wouldn’t cook them, and threw them out. That was that, though I did begin eating fish a few years later. So I’ve now been a pescatarian for about 15 years. But lately, I’ve been having second thoughts.

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In the recent Hazon e-newsletter from earlier this week, Nigel Savage refers to Isaiah’s prophecy read in the Haftarah this coming Shabbat:

Every head is ailing
Every heart is sick…
Your land is a waste,
Your cities burnt down…
The yield of your soil is consumed by strangers…

For me all of this hits home as a prophecy for modern times, but the final verse in that section is particularly useful, as I spend my days working on increasing access to local food for the most vulnerable communities through Farm Bill legislation.

Fortunately, a very important amendment to allow school food service directors to use Geographic Preference in their bidding in order to request local foods, was unanimously accepted by the Agriculture committee at 12:15 AM last night!

However, we are still working to secure mandatory (meaning it doesn’t need to be fought for each year in an appropriations bill) funding for the Community Food Projects competitive grant program, an important incubator for projects linking small, sustainable farms with communities that need improved access to healthy, affordable local foods.

• The House Agriculture Committee has been debating and adding amendments to its draft Farm Bill since Tuesday and will be continuing throughout the day and maybe tomorrow. You can view the Committee’s (surprisingly interesting) debate and voting on the Farm Bill at: http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings/audio.html
• Please contact your Member of Congress and let them know that their support for the Farm Bill should be contingent on it being a bill that promotes healthy food and communities.

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by Michael Croland, Heeb’n'Vegan

Last week, video footage from an undercover investigation of Local Pride, a kosher slaughterhouse in Nebraska, was released by PETA. The footage shows that cows had their ears mutilated to remove ID tags and their throats ripped into with a hook—all while they were still conscious. Veterinarian Dr. Holly Cheever commented, “This method of slaughter as depicted on this tape is brutal and should be amended to provide a humane end for these animals.”

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In less than three weeks we will celebrate our son Shlomo’s Bar Mitzva, G-d willing. Those of you who have had the privilege of meeting him know that underneath the black hat, fringes and payos (sidecurls) he is one cool kid – into farming, animals (he raised the first flock of laying hens for Isabella Freedman/ADAMAH), woodworking, sustainable building and even a bit of WalMart and corporate America bashing once he gets going! Read more »

It’s U-Pick time! This weekend I had the great pleasure of going berry-picking — blueberries and cherries — and I am feeling overwhelmed and in awe of the shefa, abundance, of the earth’s produce.

It’s true, I’m working on a farm this summer, and I have my fill abundance right here. We’re just starting to reap the most amazing gifts from the Sadeh: basil, tomatoes, cabbages, kale, collards, swiss chard, beets, daikons, cucumbers, zucchini, summer squash — and today, for the first time, garlic!

And on Shabbat last week we had several dishes that were made mostly or entirely from food that we had grown, or made from our animal products. Tzatziki from our cucumbers, garlic scapes and yogurt we made from our goat milk (if anyone has any ideas for local replacements to lemon juice, let me know!) A zucchini-carrot caserole with eggs from our chickens, and our own squash and onions. My favorite creation is a garlic scape pesto: finely chopped garlic scapes, olive oil, kosher salt and red chili flakes makes a tasty sauce for just about anything.

But this didn’t keep me from going out this weekend to pursue even more of the season’s delights: FRUIT.

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Back in 2000, I was fortunate enough to take part in a “Jewish heritage” tour of China. I came home with some amazing memories, including shabbat dinner and davening with a local minyan in Bejing, and a tour of the Jewish neighborhood in Shanghai where thousands of Jews successfully fled Nazi persecution. Six straight weeks practicing with a Chinese language tape in my car allowed me to successfully navigate the streets of China (or at least ask, “where’s the bathroom?” or “is there pork in this?” at least five times a day). But my proudest moment came when I was able to walk into a store in Shanghai and order a package of my new favorite tea (a sweet concoction called ba-bou-chai - “8 treasures tea”) without uttering a word in English.

I had quite a different cultural experience when I entered a brand-new coffee shop in the Forbidden City and ordered a Venti non-fat caramel latte. Yes, Starbucks (or *$ for short) had managed to outdo the parodies of its own ubiquity by opening a branch in the most culturally innappropriate spot in all of Asia. I shouldn’t have been surprised - American culture had infiltrated urban China to such a shocking extent that an alien plunked down in Tienanmen square would have assumed from the sheer number of KFC awnings that Colonel Sanders was China’s “Great Leader,” and not Chairman Mao. But the juxtaposition of American consumerism and ancient/communist Chinese culture was too great to wrap my head around without a serious infusion of caffeine. Read more »

Every now and then I’m struck by the sheer awesomeness that is the Internet. What once would have taken at least twenty minutes of searching through library card indexes (not to mention driving to the library and maybe even a paper cut) now requires no more than a few seconds of our time. From the average annual rainfall of the Amazon rain forest (9 feet per year, in case you’re wondering) to how to make firecrackers (the carrot kind, not the exploding kind) - it’s all right there, at our fingertips. This is all quite impressive if you stop to think about it, but it wasn’t until last Friday that I realized just how many things the internet can make possible, because it was then that a crazy notion sprung into my head. You see, the 2007 Jewish Environmental Bike Ride is just around the corner and I wanted to fundraise for it - but how could I do so when I wouldn’t be attending the actual event?

I decided to email the folks over at Hyperion Books, Chronicle Books & Ten Speed Press with an idea. If I held a fundraising raffle on my blog, would they donate cookbooks for the prizes? To my surprise, they said yes, generously donating more than 50 books between them. And it is that glorious news that I bring to all you book lovers out there, not to mention those of you who just plain love Hazon and want to take part in a fun online event.

From now until September 3rd I will be fundraising for the Jewish Environmental Bike Ride on my site, Baking and Books, where a donation of only $5 enters you into a raffle with an inspiring collection of cookbooks as prizes. As of this moment there are 56 prizes, most of which are being sent to my tiny apartment until winners are picked on the last day of the ride. So please, donate now! Enter the raffle and ensure that, come September, my home won’t have been completely overrun by cookbooks. (Ok, so it already is overrun thanks to my personal book collection, but you don’t want things to get any worse do you? Do you??)

Click here to find out more about the raffle, and also, take a gander at the prizes so far…

Itemized list of prizes:

• “Nigella Express” by Nigella Lawson - 10 copies available
• “The Vegetable Dishes I Can’t Live Without” by Mollie Katzen - 10 copies available
• “Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook” by Jaime Oliver - 10 copies available
• “Roast Chicken and Other Stories” by Simon Hopkinson - 10 copies available
• “Secrets of a Jewish Baker” by George Greenstein - 2 copies available
• “The Perfect Scoop” by David Lebovitz - 2 copies available
• “A Passion for Ice Cream” by Emily Luchetti - 2 copies available
• “Tartine” by Elisabeth Prueitt - 2 copies available
• “Cupcake Deck” by Elinor Klivans - 2 copies available
• “Classic Stars Desserts” by Emily Luchetti - 2 copies available
• “Best Bake Sale Ever Cookbook” by Barbara Grunes - 2 copies available
• “Southern Cakes” by Nancie McDermott - 2 copies available