A few weeks ago, I wondered if biofuels were actually the green mitzvah they were touted to be — an ethical alternative to greenhouse gas-belching fossil fuels — or if they were a mitzvah ha’ba b’aveirah, a “mitzvah” coming out of a sin, the sin of unchecked environmental havoc due to biofuels’ “non-toxic” by-products.

The new waves of global food riots, though, have made me much more concerned, and much more wary of entrenching myself in the pro-biofuel camp.

The 2007 “tortilla riots” in Mexico, where some 75,000 Mexicans protested the rising cost of tortillas in Mexico City, followed an astronomical increase in the price of corn — some 400% in a three month span. The cause for the price hike lay north of the border, farmers planting “industrial corn” to be processed into ethanol, replacing the lower-priced food staple relied upon by millions of Mexicans.

Cooking oil is also turning into the world’s “other” oil problem. In Mumbai, India, residents are forced “to ration every drop” of cooking oil, with the price of palm oil having risen 70 percent in the past year. One store in Chongqing, China saw three people killed in a stampede when it offered a “limited promotion” on cooking oil. Half of the increase in worldwide demand for vegetable oils, the New York Times says, is because of biofuel demand.
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Passover falls the third week of April. While summer’s harvest is still months away, the first shoots and sprouts are beginning to poke their heads out of the soil. Your seder is the perfect place to celebrate this new emerging life - both on the seder plate, and during your meal.

Still planning what to serve? The Jew & The Carrot’s Passover menu will add healthy and sustainable flair - and the best tastes of springtime - to your seder table.  (This meal happens to be vegetarian, but aside from the lasagna, everything can easily be made parve - so feel free to substitute your favorite chicken, fish or brisket - recipe!)

On the Menu:
Vegetarian Matzah Ball Soup - or -
Borscht with Cabbage
Israeli Salad
Sauteed Fiddleheads with Garlic
Roasted New Potatoes with Rosemary
Almond Quinoa Salad - or -
Quinoa with Beets and Fresh Orange
Matzah Lasagna
Chocolate Dipped Macaroons

Find the recipes here.

It’s the week before Passover and the foodie blogosphere is ready. Like hand-grated horseradish, fluffy meringues and caramel-coated “matzah crack” ready.

The most exciting news (for us anyway!) is The Daily Green’s sustainable Passover story, which features tips from The Jew & The Carrot’s Healthy Sustainable Passover Resources. Check out their (gorgeous) feature here.

Below the jump, we’ve rounded up a number of other great Passover stories, ideas, and recipes from the Jewish food blogosphere. The creativity coming out of these bloggers minds and kitchens is truly inspiring - feel free to share more resources below.Also keep your eyes peeled for a chance to win Arthur Schwartz’s new cookbook Jewish Home Cooking - early next week.

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j. Weekly, the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California, features Hazon’s own Zelig Golden and Emily Freed in its cover story about young Jewish environmentalists.

Golden is an alumni of the Adamah program and serving as co-chair for Hazon’s Food Conference in 2008. (According to the article, he also makes a mean pickle martini — okay, I confess, I was the one who told that to the reporter, after Zelig made me one at my birthday Shabbos dinner earlier this year). Freed (whom, the article says, had her first candy bar at the age of 12!) is on the executive committee of the 2008 food conference, working to obtain food from local farms. And Jon Rosenfield, who is also featured in the article, will no doubt be at the Food Conference, we just don’t know what he’ll be doing yet.

You can read the full article here.

This month is New Voices magazine’s Radio Issue. (Check below for free subscription info.) In the “Best Jewish Podcasts” article is an amazing little bubbe who’s grandson podcasts her cooking to the world…just adorable…

Bubbe, of Feed Me Bubbe

In a shining example of nerddom gone right, sweet grandson Avram hosts a brilliant and wholesome series on his bubbe’s cooking. An irregularly published video podcast, the show features the charming and hilarious Bubbe making classic Ashkenazi comfort food: kasha varnishkes, borsht, tzimmes, kugel, and the rest. The recipes are simple to follow. There is also a Yiddish word of the day, spoken in Bubbe’s Boston accent.

“If I can be everybody’s bubbe, that’s wonderful,” says Bubbe.

Whether you grew up eating handmade matzoh balls at your own bubbe’s table or you’ve only heard tales from your Ashkenazi friends, Feed Me Bubbe is a funny, charming, and surprisingly well-made video podcast that might just inspire you to cook your own shabbes meal. Or to at least call your grandma.

Subscribe to Feed Me Bubbe at www.FeedMeBubbe.com or on iTunes.

New Voices magazine is the only independent Jewish student magazine written by and for Jewish college students. Subscribe yourself or your college-aged kinderlach for free by emailing here with as many full names and addresses as you want. And like I said, it’s free.

First, a word from our sponsor: We interrupt Alix Wall’s posts about Vietnam (at least one more is still coming) to write about a more immediate concern: What is Alix going to cook for Passover?

My husband and I are hosting our family for Pesach. Maybe that isn’t a big deal for some of you, but for me, it is. I only had the seder at my house one other time, and I was so busy that I pretty much let all my family members do all the cooking. Not this year.

I am taking it very seriously this year; maybe because this is the first year that we are hosting, instead of just me. And maybe because I’m thinking of my mom now, and how flawlessly she could pull off a seder. Passover can be a difficult time of year for me; she died only a month after it. She was already very ill at her last seder, in 2002, but she managed to do a great deal of the cooking anyhow.

My uncle has let it be known that his expectations are high, now that I’m a professional chef. I don’t care about that so much. What’s dominating my thoughts these days is the memory of the pecan matzoh balls. Read more »

Sorry for the last minute notice, RSVP at the Facebook page. 

We’re proud to announce this week’s super special event: on Wednesday, 4/9 EATING LIBERALLY welcomes SCOTT STRINGER, the Manhattan Borough President, to discuss “Go Green East Harlem,” a grassroots guide to wholesome home cooking.

To improve public health in East Harlem, Stringer’s office has created a cookbook with recipes contributed by community groups & local restaurants that offer ideas for affordable, accessible, healthy eats.

This FREE event hosted by Eating Liberally will feature snacks, Q&A, guest speakers & a live–and lively–cooking demonstration featuring the Borough President himself.

Lynn Fredericks from Family Cook Productions.
& Author of Cooking Time Is Family Time
will join the conversation.

EATING LIBERALLY with SCOTT STRINGER
& “Go Green East Harlem”
Wed, April 9th - 6-8pm
The Tank @ C:U - 279 Church St
www.eatingliberally.org

I just had one of the most revelatory food experiences of my life, and I didn’t even eat a single bite. Read on if you’d like to see how the Broadway musical South Pacific might inspire your Passover Seder this year. Read more »

I’ve only had my copy of Cooking Jewish: 532 Great Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family for a few weeks, and already the book is stained and a bit worn. I think that’s a good sign.

As the title might suggest, this book is a family affair. Author Judy Bart Kancigor beautifully describes how the book came into existence, stemming from a desire to pass on her family’s food traditions. As a result, almost every recipe has a story, which can be a bit overwhelming at times, but ultimately brings the recipes to life. It’s not just a cookbook; you feel invited in, as though you’re taking part in the Rabinowitz family tradition by making this food. And the pictures are great – a time-capsule of American Jewish life opened to reveal many embarrassing hairstyles and equally embarrassing bar mitzvah pictures.

More and recipes for banana bread and sesame crusted chicken below the jump.

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Here are three not-to-miss Passover foodie events: a Slow Food Seder with Heeb Magazine, Seders in the Streets with the Shalom Center, and a matzah-making workshop at Bobolink Dairy.

Slow Food Seder. On the second night of Passover (April 20), locally-focused chefs Gayle Pirie and John Cook will prepare a special Slow Food Seder just for Heeb Magazine readers. The seder (held in San Francisco) will play upon traditional Passover dishes, and will be “kosher by slow food standards.”

Tickets are $75. Proceeds benefit the Chez Panisse Foundation and include a 4-issue subscription to Heeb. Reserve a spot soon as seating is limited.

More info and purchase tickets here.

Street Seders. The Shalom Center is calling on YOU to speak out against environmental degradation this Passover: “This year, Passover converges with Earth Day. And it does so at a time when the global climate crisis can no longer be ignored, calling for us to take bold action. Taking inspiration from “street theater,” we propose holding “street seders” during Passover to oppose the pharaohs in our own day. Find out more and plan your own seder, here.

Matzah-Making. On Sunday, April 13, Bobolink Dairy in New Jersey is hosting their annual matzah-making workshop. Kids and adults can make matzah the old-fashioned way with organically-grown winter wheat berries and rye. To make your own matzah that looks like it was “baked on a flat rock in the Sinai,” register here (it’s only $5!). And bring the whole mishpacha! Bobolink promises to make a special fuss for parties that include three or more generations.

Know about any other great Passover-food events? Let us know below.

After two months working on the pig farm and a few weeks of recuperation, I’m back to the The Jew & The Carrot blogging world, while living, cooking, eating, composting and blogging in Tel Aviv. Good to be back.

There’s an incredible magazine that I’ve been meaning to post about. It’s called Meatpaper and as its cover states, it is “your journal of meat culture.” And it really is. Meatpaper is a beautiful graphic art print magazine that documents the recent fleischgeist. It features incredible pictures and photo essays in addition to interesting, bizarre, and funny interviews and articles. Some of the issues the magazine covers are similar to ones discussed here on The Jew & The Carrot (debates about the moral consumption of meat) and others are certainly not (the importance of eating bull penis, and whether or not one should eat their spouse if deserted on an island together.)

In issue 3, there is an article on eating testicles in Tunisia, a meditation on why meat is so photogenic (and whether or not clown noses or tube socks, dressed similarly, could look as good), a photo series called “Acquaintances Holding My Plate of Meat,” and one great article called “Pork in the Promised Land,” that I may or may not have written. It’s a fun magazine and is a conversation starter and stopper. The print magazine and issue three is only available in stores, not on their website. It’s well worth it, if only for the sausage glamour shots.

There’s nothing better than eating food that you grew yourself (or that your CSA farmer grew on your behalf), right? Well, Steve Brill thinks you can do better - by foraging your dinner.

Also known as “The Wild Man,” Brill is best known for getting arrested in Central Park in the early 80’s - for eating a dandelion. (He was charged with “defacing public property”.) Outraged - Brill called every media outlet in New York, winding up on television and the front page of several city newspapers. Soon after, the Park’s Department changed their minds - and gave him a job leading foraging tours around the Central and Prospect Park. He now leads independent tours across the Northeast showing ordinary, store-buying folks the incredible amounts of edible plant life that grows, unnoticed.

Yesterday, my boyfriend and I traveled up to Stone Barns Center for Barber’s restaurant, Blue Hill. Although we spent time wandering through Stone Barns’ impressive, sprawling greenhouse and watching a staff member buzz the thick wool off a (very pregnant) sheep, we were really there to forage with the Wild Man.

More - and photos - below the jump.

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I don’t know about you all, but spring is here in Brooklyn, and I’m psyched. Walking in the park near my apartment yesterday, the trees were popping, the air smelled fresh and flowery, and it seemed like the whole neighborhood was outside soaking in the spring-ness.

It’s this combination of seasonal renewal and the giddy energy that comes with it that makes Passover one of my favorite holidays - there’s just such an optimism and joy this time of year. I also love how Passover offers a perfect opportunity to combine the wisdom of a traditional Jewish holiday with my desire to live healthily and sustainable in our world.

On that note, I’m pleased to announce the return of The Jew & The Carrot’s Healthy Sustainable Passover Resources! Find tips and tricks to shake off the winter (and the chametz), green your seder table, and celebrate the holiday in sustainable style.

One of my Jewish friends has recently submitted for public embarassment her life journey with food. Specifically, bread. Complete with great bread porn photos, her opening statement on her new blog, Second Dinner, eloquently opens:

I bake. A lot. This means that I inundate my roommates, friends, family, and co-workers with carb-heavy goods on a regular basis. Most are delighted, but several people have very valid misgivings, or wish that so much bounty was a little less available to them.

Like many Americans, I have a complicated relationship with food…However, the majority of my complicated relationship with food comes from negotiating other people’s complicated relationships with food. I have many friends who struggle with their weight, with cravings, with implanted complexes or insatiable desires. One brave and hilarious soul is merrily blogging about her weight-loss adventures, and spontaneously volunteered to link to this blog despite its food focus. My friends are big and small, actors and non-actors, generally hung up about their looks or not, and the food issues cross those lines in surprising ways, and don’t always crop up where I would expect.

Read the rest of her opening post here.