I have the greatest job in the world. I have said it before in my book Jewish Cooking for All Seasons (John Wiley and Sons) and I’ll say it again. I am a chef. I get to make delicious things for people to eat all day long. Chocolate is my playground, great olive oils are my toys and the best produce is mine for the taking. I get to do this all day long and I get paid for it! I am a chef-with a twist. I am the new Executive Chef for Wolfgang Puck Catering at the Spertus Institute in Chicago.
I can’t wait to get into the new building next month with my brand new kitchens, all gleaming shiny and bright. I can’t wait to show the Jewish Community, that after 10 years of cooking kosher in my former restaurants (Shallots, Shallots NY and Shallots Bistro) that I have many tricks still up my sleeve. But, there is a catch.
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Walking down the streets of Brooklyn, you will inevitably run into some cobwebs - not the kind actually made by spiders (that’s asking a little much for our concrete jungle). Instead, you’ll find manufactured, cotton candy-like cobwebs that people drape on their bushes and pile on their stoops (along with winking pumpkins and smirking cardboard witches) for Halloween. Before too long, those pumpkins will be replaced by plastic Santas and reindeer dotted with little, white lights.
What does all this have to do with The Jew & The Carrot? It means the holidays (the “high” version) are over and the holiday (Chanukah) is not that far away. Don’t stress - Chanukah isn’t about gifts anyway - it’s about the lights and miracles and delicious fried foods. But, if you’re looking for 1. a great gift 2. that will benefit a great cause 3. and help you stay on track with all the Jewish holidays, look no further.
The Jewish Farm School has created an absolutely gorgeous 5768-5769 Jewish Farms Calendar that pairs food and farm photography with a 16-month (Sept 07-Dec 08) calendar.
The Jewish Farms Calendar features:
• All Jewish holidays
• Intimate photographs of freshly harvested produce and livestock that Jewish hands helped to cultivate (see attached preview)
• Dates for special Jewish food events (e.g. The Hazon Food Conference)
• Jewish/agricultural quotations
• 100% post-consumer recycled paper
How to purchase the calendar
The calendar is $18 dollars ($14 if you purchase 10 or more) and proceeds benefit the educational programs of the Jewish Farm School and Hazon. Each purchased calendar makes a huge difference! To purchase a calendar, email Robert Friedman or visit The Jewish Farm School’s website.
Leonard Felson, you’re our hero. Thank you for writing such a beautiful, thorough article about Hazon’s food work for The Jerusalem Report.
Print the full text here.
The Jerusalem Report
October 15, 2007
By: Leonard Felson
Tuv Ha’Aretz brings together 3,000 years of kashrut, food tradition and the environment.
Winter squash, broccoli, fall lettuce, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and cabbage - all the fall crops are being harvested or about to be these days at Garden of Eve, an organic farm at the eastern end of Long Island. The farm is also part of a new movement that links synagogues and Jewish community centers with a growing number of organic farms across the country.
In what’s believed to be the first project of its kind, Hazon, a New York-based Jewish environmental group, has shepherded the creation of 10 such partnerships in the United States and Israel this year, with plans for up to 18 next year and more in the years ahead Community Supported Agriculture partnerships, or CSAs, have been around for decades to encourage consumers to support local farms. Members or “shareholders” pay a fee at the start of a growing season to meet a farm’s operating expenses; in return, members receive a portion of the farm’s produce each week, throughout the season.
Hazon sponsors annual bike rides from Jerusalem to Eilat each May in order to publicize its mission: to build and create a healthy, sustainable Jewish community by sponsoring cutting-edge educational initiatives, according to Hazon officials. Three years ago, it broached the idea of sponsoring a Jewish CSA as another way of achieving this.
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Today’s JTA published “On the Green Scene: Magazines, Chickens, and one Sinful Goat” - with a shoutout to Hazon’s Food Conference.
Meanwhile, also at the JTA: a Jewish Businessman in Russia is giving Starbucks a run for its money (while Starbucks threatens to sue)
Chow reports that Jerry Seinfeld’s wife’s new book: Deceptively Delicious shares her tricks for getting veggie-hating kids to eat more green. (Great idea, but will they really fall for spinach puree in the brownies?)
In the aptly titled, “O My God,” Ethicurean offers another example of the organic movement being taken over by big business: organic bottled water. (wtf?!)
No, this isn’t a photo of the living quarters of undocumented Latin@ workers crammed into the 
basement of a Postville meat processing plant — but the temporary residence of “over 100 Bochurim [Rabbi Moshe Rubaskin has been hosting] in his home for the month of Tishrai.”
The plant, of course, is referring to the Rubashkins’ Agriprocessors slaughterhouse and packaging plant, the largest kosher beef producer in the U.S., which received 250 noncompliance citations for food safety from the USDA in 2006, the source of two Class I recalls in the past 9 months, as compared to 34 recalls in all of 2006 for the entire beef, poultry and egg industry.
And the man: Rabbi Moshe Rubashkin, convicted criminal and probable felon, who spent the Chagim celebrating with hundreds of community members and politicians, despite a recent indictment by a federal grand jury for toxic waste dumping at the site of his former Montex
textile plant in Allentown, PA.
A local paper, the Morning Call, has more on the nature of the crime(s) of Rabbi Moshe Rubashkin, who is the brother of Agriprocessors’ president Sholom Rubaskin, and Moshe’s son Sholom Rubaskin– illegally storing hazardous waste on the site of their former textile plant, lying about it, followed by several fires (of unknown but suspicious origin) started at the plant, and over $400,000 in unpaid taxes. The city of Allentown is now left with the pleasant task of making redevelopment decisions for this 5 acre property contaminated by toxic waste dumping and burning, located next to Good Sheperd Rehabilitation hospital and residential areas.
By Sept 17th, the father-son duo were free Read more »
Thanks to Hazon’s friend, Lindsey Paige Savoie, for this guest post.
I eat meat. When I first said those three little words to Sabrina, her response was, ‘whoa.’ She didn’t gasp because I eat meat. She could hear the fear in my voice when I said it. Why should I be ashamed to eat meat?
I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska – land of cows. We ate meat daily. Friday night was especially noteworthy as we gathered at my grandparents for the rarest of all meats. I don’t mean hard to find. I mean purple, raw, rare. Now I know why my dad preferred the end cuts.
Summer camp and youth group conventions opened my eyes to new ideas including the notion of becoming a vegetarian. I went through a teenage phase (as my parents called it) of not eating meat or fish. After a few years, I slowly and at times secretly went back to eating meat.
Years later, I still struggle with how, when and where to eat meat. Due to my work in Jewish environmental education and my petsitting business, eating meat is a challenge both socially and mentally. How do I preach environmental values and eat a hamburger? How do I care for animals on a daily basis and then prepare a different type of animal for dinner?
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Will the goat shechting event happen at Hazon’s Food Conference this December? Signs point to yes, pending the logistics get worked out. In the meantime, the idea has stirred up a significant amount of debate and - it seems - inspired artwork. Graphic artist, Mat Tonti, created an ”alternative” Food Conference postcard (below). Quite an interesting contrast/foil to the original postcard, which you can see below Mat’s rendition.
To find out more about the Hazon Food Conference, Dec 6-9, click here.
(For the record - despite the Hazon logo that graces Mat’s postcard, Hazon was not involved in its creation.)
Today’s New York Times reported:
As Israel’s Jews start a new year, the country finds itself in the middle of a fierce religious dispute about the sanctity of fruits and vegetables.”
Indeed.
As Yigal’s article mentioned, the ancient, Torah-mandated practice of shmita leaves the contemporary land of Israel, its farmers - and also its eaters - in a peculiar bind. The problem is, unsuprisingly, religious. Israel’s chief rabbinate condones the loophole practice of heter mechira, or growing food on Israeli soil if it is temporarily sold to non-Jews. Still, it allows rabbis of local cities to decide for themselves whether heter mechira will rule, which opens the “two Jews, three opinions” floodgates.
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As promised, here is the article about our Eatwell experience. Kudos to Adam Edell, Jon Rosenfield and Zelig Golden for putting it all together.
Thanks to Tuv Ha’Aretz farmer and founder of the Shorashim:Roots program at Chava v’Adam farm in Modi’in, Israel, Yigal Deutscher, for this insider look at the shemita year).
22 days have passed from the moment we celebrated the New Year with the blowing of the shofar until yesterday, when, after hours of dancing, drinking, and singing, we rolled the Sefer Torah back to her beginning and read the story of creation.
This stretch of time has been a stretch out of time, a microcosm of creation itself, mirroring the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the 22 building blocks that God used in creating the world we live in.
Yesterday, we stepped back into time, into the Hebrew year 5767, the seventh year of the seven year cycles that guide the flow of time in the land of Israel. This year itself is an extended dimension out of time, one Shabbat stretching from now until next Rosh Hashana. We are already 22 days into Shemita but only now will we come face to face with this moment.
We cannot make this transition alone. We can only begin our year if the land begins with us. Our awakening, reemerging into the normal flow of time, is hand in hand with the earth itself. We have been in a cocoon, nursing from spiritual banks of forgotten reservoirs. The soil of Israel has been in a cocoon herself, deep in sleep after 5 months of hot sun and barren skies.
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An article about the Berkeley chapter of Tuv Ha’Aretz’ Shabbaton at Eatwell Farm will be posted here in a few days, but in the meantime, I wanted to post a photo that sums up a great deal about our experience.
In short, we had an awesome time. It was really wonderful to camp in the very orchards that have been supplying our delicious plums, and meet the chickens who have been feeding us the most delicious eggs we’ve ever eaten.
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You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops…It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.
Although these words by the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, former Major League Baseball commissioner and poet describe perfectly how I feel this week as a disgusted Mets fan, they could also, like the scroll of Kohelet, describe the bittersweet reality of Sukkot. We celebrate the harvest, even as the falling leaves remind us that soon winter will be here. Of course, the sukkah is the most obvious symbol of impermanence connected with this fall holiday. But the etrog offers its own lessons as well.
My most vivid Jewish memory as a child was kiddush in our synagogue sukkah. Our elderly rabbi would show us his etrog, and implore us to marvel at its luxuriant, citrusy ripeness. Then he took a dry, brown oval out of his pocket, which he revealed was last year’s model. Then he produced a third etrog - this one from five years earlier - a dark caramel brown sphere. Finally, he displayed an etrog from twenty years ago - a pitch-black, shriveled hunk. As he dexterously held all four between his fingers, it was like catching a glimpse of eternity: Each etrog would soon become the next one, and so on down the line - and there between his wrinkled fingers lie our fate as well. Pretty heady stuff for a nine year old to fathom.
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I’m new to all this yontif stuff. I’m not used to planning out several days of meals in advance. I don’t own a blech (shouldn’t it be called a yum?) and so my oven needs to be turned off by the start of the chag. It’s kind of a thrill - a challenge to see if I can make enough sustainable, culinary goodness - things that will taste as good cold and room temperature as they would warm - to last throughout Saturday lunch (plus or minus a few meals at friends’ apartments).
So yes, it’s a thrill, but also a pain in the tush because I had to work the last two days and I’m seriously underprepared and it’s 11:00am and I’m blogging instead of shopping for ingredients. phew.
On the menu for the holiday and Shabbat:
- Vegetable soup (which will stay blessedly warm in my boyfriend’s lovely crockpot)
- Chips with apple salsa
- Delicata squash with cranberry chutney
- Pesto roasted potatoes
- Quinoa salad with lime juice, slice almonds, shredded carrots, and cilantro
- Madhur Jaffrey’s Bengali-style green beans
- 2 quiche (caramlized onion and broccoli rabe)
- Pear crisp with chai ice cream (store bought)
Here we go (wish me luck!)
The following is an excerpt from an article, “Be Fruitful and Save Seeds,” by Hazon friend, Rachel Kriger, which originally appeared in Tikkun Magazine [Sept./Oct. 2007].
Welcome to the beginning of the end of the growing season. This is the time of year where your weekly share of produce will be most abundant. Since the hard frost has not hit yet, we still have the summer crops and the beginning of the fall crops. This time of year is great for freezing, canning, pickling and seed saving.
What is seed saving? It is the process of extracting seeds from the best selection of our favorite, most resilient crops so that we can plant new seeds in the spring. This is what people did before seed catalogues and garden stores and supermarkets. When we lived off the land, we had to ensure that we would have crops every year.
Every vegetable crop has its own inner survival instincts; and as its growing season ends, each plant produces seeds to ensure its life in future generations. Agrarian humans have developed the knowledge to know how to extract the seeds, cure them and store them. They have even understood how to select for tolerance against pests or weather conditions, or simply for what tastes the bests and has good looks.
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