View original post.
Approx. 3 1/2 cups of pureed winter squash
3/4 cup apple juice or cider
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 1/3 cups brown sugar
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Juice of half a lemon
Combine pumpkin, apple juice, spices, and sugar in a large saucepan; stir well. Bring mixture to a boil. Reduce heat, and simmer for 30 minutes or until thickened. Stir frequently. Adjust spices to taste. Stir in lemon juice, or more to taste.
Once cool, pumpkin butter can be kept in an airtight container in the fridge for months.
To preserve:
Spoon hot pumpkin mixture into hot jars, filling to within 1/4 inch from top. Remove air bubbles; wipe jar rims. Cover at once with metal lids, and screw on bands. Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.
Not only will these methods make your decorations serve dual functions (a help for small budgets in rough times), they’ll also reduce the amount of space in your house dedicated to storing boxes of tinsel. Write in with your own ideas for how to make your Sukkot bounty last all year.
Adapted from AllRecipes
Photo credit: Fat Free Vegan
As it turns out, Hazon is not alone in slaughtering animals in a public way to help people get a sense of where their meat comes from - and where it might come from if meat production was signficantly more humane and responsible.
An New York Times article today by Julia Moskin, “Chef’s New Goal: Looking Dinner in the Eye, features British chef Jaime Oliver (as well as American chefs Dan Barber, Tamara Murphy and others), going to great lengths to educate themselves - and their customers - about the meat industry. Moskin writes:
LAST Friday, in front of 4 million television viewers and a studio audience, the chef Jamie Oliver killed a chicken. Having recently obtained a United Kingdom slaughterman’s license, Mr. Oliver staged a “gala dinner,” in fact a kind of avian snuff film, to awaken British consumers to the high costs of cheap chicken.
“A chicken is a living thing, an animal with a life cycle, and we shouldn’t expect it will cost less than a pint of beer in a pub,” he said Monday in an interview.
Read more »
As a staff attorney for the Center for Food Safety, I was appalled that the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved cloned animals for use in our food today. I have to ask, “who does our federal government protect? How can they allow this into the food system without facts showing it is safe and without any labeling or public disclosure requirements?” As a Jew, it makes me ask other questions: “Will this be allowed in kosher milk? Kosher meat? What do our rabbis think? What about the eco-kosher movement?”
FDA Approves Cloned Animals for Our Food
Today’s FDA decision was a long-awaited regulatory assessment of cloned animals, proclaiming that food from cloned animals are just as safe as food from naturally raised animals. (See FDA on Cloning) And while the FDA did not address whether cloned milk and meat is kosher, they did decide today that it is safe for Americans to eat.
The FDA made this decision in the worst way possible. FDA based its decision on an incomplete and flawed review that relies on studies supplied by cloning companies that want to force this cloning technology on American consumers. Biotechnology companies such as ViaGen provided FDA with the “science” in this case. There are no peer reviewed studies showing that this stuff is safe for us to eat.
Read more »
We’re all familiar with the saying, “you are what you eat.” But two recent articles got me thinking that perhaps this old adage would be better stated, “you are what you think you eat.”
The first is a unnecessarily hateful article called “Extreme Eating” by Joel Stein in this week’s Time magazine. Stein decides to stick it to the “luddite” locavores, by making a meal strictly with ingredients grown 3,000 miles from his Los Angeles home and purchased at Whole Foods. (He must mistakenly believe that locavores revere Whole Foods as some sort of local food Mecca.) Stein writes:
“I want the world to come to me, to see it shrink so small it fits on my plate. I want Maine lobster in broth flavored with Spanish saffron. I want Alaskan salmon, truffles from Europe, a bottle of Beaujolais, a damn pineapple. And I want them much more than I want that carrot you grew in your garden. Because I know you’re going to talk to me for 20 minutes about your carrot.”
I’m not about to fight to the death for locavores or stop supplementing my CSA share with the occasional avocado or grapefruit. And as I’ve said before, there’s bound to be some backlash against sustainable food this year. But Stein’s “distavore” meal is little more than a petulant and obvious attack on a movement that has caused a lot of people to consider more carefully the impact of their food choices.
In his article, Stein likens his meal to one fit for a “European king.” Well, he’s right. European kings were known for cutting off people’s heads to get what they wanted, and in a sense, that’s exactly what his meal (ahem, publicity stunt) accomplished. Read more »
View Original Post
For Chicken
32 oz pomegranate juice (not from concentrate)
2-pounds chicken thighs
2 cinnamon sticks
Trim excess fat off of thighs and put in a large ziplock bag (or use seitan). Pour in pomegranate juice to cover and add to cinnamon sticks. Close bag and store in fridge overnight, turning bag once or twice during marinating time. Place contents of bag (including marinade) into a baking pan and cover. Bake for 1 hour at 350 degrees.
For Seitan Alternative
Two packages seitan
2 cups flour
1/2 cup corn meal
herbs and spices (whatever you like!)
salt and pepper
Cut the seitan into thin slices and pat dry. Mix together flour, cornmeal, herbs, and salt/pepper in a bowl. Dredge the seitan in the flour mixture and pan fry with a little oil, flipping them until they are golden and crispy on both sides.
For Sauce
2 onions, cut into small dice
2 cups toasted pistachios ground into fine powder + 1/2 cup whole pistachios for garnish
2-3 tablespoons of tomato paste
4 cups pomegranate juice
2 tablespoons honey
1/4-12 cup of roughly chopped mint.
Sauté onions in olive oil until they become slightly caramelized. Add the toasted ground pistachios and let them cook with the onions until they became fragrant. Add the tomato paste and stir to incorporate.
Pour in the pomegranate juice and honey - and let it simmer a bit to thicken. (If the sauce is thin adding some additional tomato paste or more ground pistachios is a good option for thickening. If the sauce gets to thick you can add some water or stock).
To Combine
Pour sauce over chicken or seitan. If using chicken put it back into the oven - uncovered - to brown for 10 minutes or so. Put chicken or seitan on platter and garnish with whole pistachios, mint, and - if desired - pomegranate seeds.
Just a thought, but could the new food credo of “Eat food not too much, mostly plants,” be a threat to the Kashrut industry as we know it?
I just finished watching a promotional video from the OU. Targeted to the food industry, this video demonstrates the process by which a product receives certification. Using a fictional cake made by Drakes (of Seinfeld lore), the OU rabbi shows how, early in the process the ingredient list of the new cake is sent to the OU to ensure that all ingredients are kosher. Some of the ingredients are found to be problematic, the red sprinkles on top and the emulsifiers that in the words of Rabbi Moshe Elefant “make ingredients mix when they normally can’t.”
According to Rebbe Michael Pollan, food is defined as something your grandmother would recognize. I would bet a big bunch of kale that your grandmother didn’t use emulsifiers to make sure her cake was delicious.
Read more »
(x-posted at Lilith)
Last week I had the good fortune of attending a completely packed lecture at the 92nd Street Y called, “Hedonistic, Healthy, and Green: Can We Have it All?” Featuring Michael Pollan (of The Omnivores Dilemma fame), Dan Barber (Head Chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns), and moderated by Joan Dye Gussow (This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader), it was the kind of event that sustainable foodies like me drool over. These are our movie stars, the people we choose when asked, “which famous person would you most want to take to dinner?”
The event itself was pretty straightforward: glowing introductions, 10-15 minutes from both speakers (Pollan on his new book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
and Barber on the fate of Boris, an over-the-hill - ahem - pig, that after much consideration by Barber’s team at Stone Barns, was turned into 500 pounds of the most delicious sausages he’d ever tasted and shared (20% of Boris’ sausages were donated to a local food bank), followed by questions from Gussow and then from the audience.
The real meat of the evening was not in the format of the event, but in the meeting of these amazing minds. For Pollan, Barber, and Gussow, this is life: travelling, speaking (often about the same thing), and answering questions. But for the audience, watching the exchange between these sustainable food “rebbes” felt like watching your grandmother make her favorite recipe. It looked so simple and obvious, and you left feeling full and nourished and inspired to try it yourself.
Read more »
It’s winter in Vancouver — wet wet winter. Yet after just finishing a plateful of jerusalem artichokes, harvested this afternoon from my mom’s vegetable garden, sauteed with garlic from Stephen Gallagher (the amazing farmer who’s working with the Tuv Ha’Aretz site at Har El in North Vancouver) — I realized this isn’t the first meal I’ve had this winter where the food was fresh-picked.
Read more »
Throw it all off. Flee the restrictions. Leave it all behind — bacon is tasty. Or so says the pseudonym “Sarah” in Time Out New York’s article No religion, who purports to be an Orthodox-raised day school teacher in Manhattan.
So one Saturday morning, I went to the Botanical Gardens with my sister who doesn’t keep Shabbes. It was a beautiful day in May. And I remember thinking, Wow, Saturday is another whole day! You don’t only have to go to shul or sleep late and stay at home—you can do other stuff! And that was a huge epiphany. I went to California that summer. And that summer, I had a nonkosher steak taco on the side of the highway.
That was different—I was very nervous, and I ordered very nervously. And I sat at this picnic table on the side of the highway, and the guy to my right was eating a steak taco, and the guy to my left was eating the same thing, and I thought, I am a person. I am a regular human being. I am no longer a “Jew.” And it was so liberating.
Read more »
I still remember the first time my suburban food-bubble was burst, when I realized the implications of fruit sold according to season. I was in Israel, and became completely dumbfounded when I couldn’t find the strawberries…”whaddya mean you don’t sell them in the winter?!?”
Of course, as my sister recently reminded me, even junk food lovers know the comforting seasonal rhythms of Cadbury Creme eggs in late winter (they’re only sold from Jan 1-Easter Sunday), Peeps in the spring, and, of course, Mallomars in the late fall.
Ah, Mallomars…If Proust had grown up in New York, he would have traded in his madeleine for a Mallomar. Respectable journalists have sung its praises to the heavens, this perfect confection, only available during the dark, baseball-less months of November through March, so delicate is its thin outer layer of chocolate, that it can’t survive the trip from factory to store in the heat of spring or summer. And what could be more Jewish than a cookie that comes eighteen to a box, 70% of which are consumed by New Yorkers?
The only cookie that comes close is its Israeli cousin, the Krembo. Similar in construction and seasonal availability, writers also wax rhapsodic about krembo season. Plus, according to its wikipedia entry: Read more »
I’m pleased to announce the winners from our most recent raffles on The Jew & The Carrot (drum roll please….)
Sharon Lebewohl won a framed print of Karl Schatz’s gorgeous photo and Joshua Lichtman will receive a copy of Sandor Katz’s book, Wild Fermentation. Thanks to everyone who purchased a raffle ticket and left comments about their favorite fermented foods! The Jew & The Carrot will offer many more chances to win healthy and sustainable goodies in 2008 - check back soon!
This week and next, PBS is airing a 3-part series called “The Jewish Americans,” covering everything from the country’s earliest Jewish settlers to the experience of being Jewish in contemporary America.
Chef and Rabbi Gil Marks (author of The James Beard award-winning Olive Trees and Honey
) is featured on a segment that addresses the question “what makes food Jewish?” Unfortunately, it was cut from the final series ( he’s in good company - portions of Tony Kushner, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Mandy Patinkin’s segments and are also listed among the outtakes.) But all footage (including Rabbi Marks) is available online for your viewing pleasure here.
Check PBS’s broadcast schedule to find out when The Jewish Americans is playing in your area.
SEDER: NYC
Tuesday, January 22, 7:00 pm
Join Hazon for our 6th annual Tu B’Shevat seder. Learn, be inspired, eat a delicious dinner and organic fruits and nuts, and drink four cups of wine as we celebrate the holiday of the trees. Examine how food connects us to Jewish tradition, to the Earth, to other people, and to ourselves. With special guest teacher Dr. Eilon Schwartz of the Heschel Center in Israel.
The seder sells out every year - so register today! Cost is $30. Registration required: www.jccmanhattan.org or 646 505 5708
Questions? Leah Koenig | 212 644 2332 | leah@hazon.org
SEDER: BAY AREA
Tuesday, January 22, 7:00pm
New Year. New Vision. Emerge from your winter sleep and start a new cycle as we celebrate Tu Bishvat, the Jewish New Year for the Trees. Join Tuv Ha’Aretz Berkeley, Eco-Jews By The Bay, Congregation Emanu-El and a host of other great organizations as they reinterpret this mystical ritual and raise consciousness with an eco-friendly, eco-kosher seder.
Cost is $10 advance and $12 at the door. Register here.
Questions? Jeff Levy jeff.levy@aegonusa.com | Adina Allen at adina.allen@gmail.com
OTHER SEDERS?
If you know of other great Tu Bishvat happenings across the country, share the details below. And if you’re planning your own seder and need ideas, check out The Jew & The Carrot’s Healthy and Sustainable Tu B’shevat Resources.
Not too long ago, I posted here asking what Michael Pollan would do in a given situation. Today’s Chronicle asks the same question. It’s the lead article in the food section, complete with *huge* photos of Pollan and his son Isaac cooking, and then eating, lunch.
Among the interesting tidbits: that his next article is about orchid sex, and that he’s a little bit tired of talking about food.
