Here are two tasty bites from the foodie blogosphere. B’tai Avon.

Separation of Church and Toast? Not for Food for Life, a company that makes a line of products called Ezekiel 4:9 - organic, sprouted, whole grain, kosher certified bread and cereals. (All labels come with passages of text for no extra charge.) Last week, Jewcy interviewed the makers of these biblical foodstuffs, which New York Magazine deemed “righteously tasty.” Read the interview here.

Crying over Spilled Eco-Milk. Picture a glass milk bottle. Now picture a plastic milk jug. Finally, picture a bottle of laundry detergent. That is kind of what the “new milk jug” design - the one adopted by Wal-Mart and Costco, and that are designed to pack and ship easily, while saving money and fuel. Turns out, like many new “eco-products” (e.g. compostable plastic, environmentally friendly dish soap), the new design unfortunately does not quite work as well as the original. While there are some immediate converts, The New York Times reported that the jugs supposedly “spill everywhere” and are “very hard for kids to pour.” Read the article here.

One of Hazon’s staff members had a baby last week (our first baby Hazonik!), which left us wondering, what do you get for a Jewish foodie baby?  We thought this “Eat, Bless, & Be Satisfied” onesie from our Cafe Press account was just right.  Get one for the foodie baby in your life here.

And below the jump: aprons, t-shirts, tote bags, note cards and more!

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Mollie Katzen is the Jewish patron saint of vegetarian cooking. She wrote, hand lettered and illustrated The Moosewood Cookbook in 1977, and has gone on to write nine other cookbooks, including two for children, and a revised edition of the original Moosewood Cookbook. Mollie has over 6 million books in print, has been inducted in the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame, and is a charter member of the Harvard School of Public Health Nutrition Roundtable. If you’ve ever had a vegetarian Shabbat lunch, chances are you ate at least one of Mollie’s creations, and at my house we’ve been known to make entire meals using only Mollie’s cookbooks. Her recipes are filling, nutritious, easy, and invariably scrumptious.

The New Moosewood is a staple in any vegetarian kitchen, and Mollie’s latest book, The Vegetable Dishes I Can’t Live Without is an instant classic. Buy her books at your local independent bookstore, and visit her website, molliekatzen.com for recipes, resources, and Mollie news.  Mollie spoke with The Jew & The Carrot about buying organic, eating meat, cooking simpler, and okra.

Below the jump: The full interview, and a chance to win a copy of The New Moosewood Cookbook! Read more »

Around these parts, Jcarrot readers already know that “Jewish food” means more than rugelach and matzoh balls. Now, you have a chance to strut your Jewish culinary prowess at the 92nd Street Y’s cooking challenge: Mega Bites. The Y is sponsoring a Jewish recipe contest, which will be taste-tested by a highly esteemed panel of judges including Gael Green, Mick Colameco, Arthur Schwartz (our favorite Brooklyn foodie!), Rozanne Gold, and Marc Murhpy.

All recipes need to be kosher-style, take less than an hour to make, and blur the lines between tradition and innovation. The winning recipe will appear on the 92Y Tribeca Cafe menu for one month - and the lucky winner will receive a round-trip ticket for two on Jet Blue!

Check out contest rules here.

Related post:
Is This Food Jewish?

At 7 PM tonight I picked up the very first bunch of veggie-goodies from my very first CSA share- with Heaven’s Harvest farm in New Braintree, MA. As we don’t have a Tuv Ha’aretz CSA in the Boston area, we have launched a campaign to ensure members of the Jewish community, beginning with those involved with the Moishe House Boston: Kavod Jewish Social Justice House, to join one of the many already existing CSAs in the area.

I had been anticipating it all week, wondering what freshly harvested items would be provided for me, a roommate and a nearby friend, who are all going in on the CSA share together.

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Thanks to Hannah Lee for this guest post.

There are cities with a holy stature (like Jerusalem), and there are cities with cultural eminence (like New York) - but my family just came home from a vacation to a place that holds my nomination for Paradise on Earth: Berkeley, California.

I already knew that Berkeley residents are required to collect their food waste for composting (with weekly pick-ups), but to see it operation, with ordinary citizens scraping their plates (and all food-related paper) into their home-sized composting bins was truly inspiring.

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The NY Times Dining Section reported today about the havoc that summer camp food can wreak on kids’ health. Tara Parker-Pope wrote:

“[My 9-year old daughter’s] camp is typical of those around the country: days packed with archery, swimming and adventure climbing; menus packed with soft drinks, burgers, chicken nuggets and, once a week, cheese fries… ‘Camp food is terrible,’ said Susan B. Roberts, director of the energy metabolism laboratory at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. ‘The problem is that they are doing what is easiest — the lowest common denominator for what kids like, and on top of that usually it has to be not something that goes bad and is no work to prepare.’”

Meanwhile, although they will likely continue to offer grilled cheese and potato chips this summer, it seems that BBYO is not settling for the lowest common denominator when it comes to the meat served at their summer camps. The Jewish youth organization put out a statement urging camp partners to avoid using Agriprocessors products.

Read BBYO’s statement below:

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An article in the food section of today’s San Francisco Chronicle features Nigel Walker, the farmer of Eatwell Farm.  Walker is “our” farmer at Tuv Ha’Aretz in Berkeley.  (San Francisco’s Tuv Ha’Aretz’s farm, Capay Valley, is also mentioned.)

While the article talks about how CSAs are becoming more and more popular, one of the more notable points indicated that many consumers are not ready to give up certain non-local fruits and vegetables:

While the true CSA model means only getting what is coming straight from the farm or neighboring farms, [home organic delivery services like] Farm Fresh to You also offer the additional option of receiving bananas from Mexico and apples from Washington.”People are drawn to CSAs for different reasons. Some are on the local-sustainable bandwagon,” says Moyra Barsotti of Farm Fresh to You. “There’s also the facet that finds it convenient.”Barsotti points to a survey of her customers that asked what was most important to them: Whether food was local, sustainable or organic. They answered local. Yet in a separate section asking what their favorite fruit and vegetable was, bananas were the top pick.

Interested to find out more about organic delivery services?  Click here.

Is it just me, or is the foodie world going a little treif crazy recently? Don’t get me wrong, I’m decidedly not the most kosher keeping consumer on the planet. (Aside from being a vegetarian and therefore avoiding a lot of the major “no-nos,” I’m generally content to eat most unhekhshered products and eat out at non-kosher restaurants.)

But somehow, I feel like everywhere I turn lately, non-kosher foods are screaming at me - particularly bacon, as pork-anything has become trendy, and more recently lobster. Witness a few recent examples below.

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Long time readers of The Jew & The Carrot might remember Margaret Hathaway and Karl Schatz as the couple who left their urban apartment in Brooklyn and traveled 40,000 miles around the country in search of a new lifestyle as goat farmers. (Margaret wrote a book about their experience called The Year of the Goat).

These days, Karl and Margaret live on a farm outside of Portland with their two children, Charlotte and Beatrice, and their dairy goats.  And I had the opportunity to write about their lives and how they merge their sustainable lifestyle and Jewish tradition for Jewish Living Magazine (think an eco-friendly, Martha Stewart Living with a Jewish twist!)

Read an excerpt of the article below the jump. Read more »

Underage workers, desperation, and extortion oh my…

Children at the plant. The Jerusalem Post reported: “‘The position of the OU has been that the only thing they are interested in is how the animal is slaughtered and whether there are imperfections in the meat,’ [Avram] Lyon said. ‘Postville is a poster child of failure of that kind of approach to kashrut. It’s proof you can’t separate one part of Jewish law from other parts of Jewish law.’ The fact that there were 18 children picked up in the recent raid was reason enough to respond, he said.” Read the story. (hat tip, Failed Messiah)

Agriprocessors turns to hiring homeless people. The JTA reported: “In an effort to restore lagging production at its Iowa plant, the country’s largest kosher meat producer has been hiring workers from homeless shelters in Texas to replace employees detained in a massive federal immigration raid last month.” Crime rates in the beleaguered Midwestern town have risen as a result. Read the story.

Extortion at Agriprocessors. From The Iowa Independent: “A former supervisor at the Postville meatpacking plant raided by federal agents last month has fled the country, Iowa Independent has learned. The supervisor, Hasom Amara, sometimes required workers to buy illicitly registered cars as a condition of work, three former workers have told the Iowa Independent.” Read the story.

I don’t mean join a CSA. I actually mean, hire someone to do it for you. In San Francisco, that someone is a business called MyFarm, whose employees will come over, design a garden in your backyard, and then do maintainence for it on weekly visits. You can read about it here.

I have to admit I am torn by this idea. By growing a garden in your own yard, of course you are much more connected to your food. But by paying others to maintain it for you, you introduce yet another middle-person.

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Last week, Adamah dropped off our first-ever Tuv Ha’Aretz share to Temple Israel Center in White Plains, New York. It felt somewhat historic (bashert? destined?) to finally bring together the young Jewish farmers at Adamah with Hazon’s Jewish Community-Supported Agriculture program. One of the highlights of the day was driving down to the city in Adamah’s new truck, which runs on used vegetable oil and is emblazoned with the icon above and the beautiful words, “Young Jewish Farmers: Changing the World One Pickle at a Time.”

We’re looking for sources of used vegetable oil to power the truck! If you have connections to restaurants who could donate used grease in Westchester, Duchess or Putnam Counties, please be in touch! Check out more photos of the truck, below.

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Yesterday, I had brunch at my friend’s apartment. It was a steamy Sunday morning - the kind where it could rain any second and your hair (or at least my hair) becomes simultaneously flat, frizzy, and full of weirdly-placed curls. French toast and eggs seemed too heavy for such a morning. But luckily, at some point in the last couple of months, my friend drank the raw foodism Kool Aid - and so had a lovely spread of light, heat-free vegetable dishes including one she called “mock eggs Florentine” (thick-cut tomatoes, sea salt and guacamole), fresh orange juice and a cucumber, lemon, and lime-aid and “strawberries and cream” (soaked cashews whipped in a food processor with agave syrup and vanilla).

During our meal, I felt virtuous and close to the Rambam’s advice: “In summer, one should eat cold foods without excessive amounts of spices…” (Mishna Torah). But as tasty and cooling as our breakfast was, my body is not accustomed to such carb and dairy-less fare. So while my friend felt totally satiated, by about 2pm it was still hot and I had a screaming headache. In an attempt to regain culinary balance after my morning of detoxing, I baked a chocolate buttermilk cake - decadent, sweet, and hot from a steaming oven. As they say, everything in moderation - even vegetables.

Recipe after the jump.

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