The New York Times’ Minimalist Chef, Mark Bittman, wants you to eat less meat. Or, rather, he wants to help you eat less meat:

“Let’s suppose you’ve decided to eat less meat, or are considering it. And let’s ignore your reasons for doing so. They may be economic, ethical, altruistic, nutritional or even irrational. The arguments for eating less meat are myriad and well-publicized, but at the moment they’re irrelevant, because what I want to address here is (almost) purely pragmatic: How do you do it?”

In theory, Jewish tradition is way ahead of the “eat less meat” curve - traditionally enjoying meat dishes for Shabbat and holidays only. In a post last year, for example, The OU’s head mashgiach, Seth Mandel said, “You have to understand, the Torah did not envision us to eat as much meat as we do. Rambam in the Mishneh Torah says that Jews should eat meat at most two times a week.” As Mandel’s quote suggests, what happens in practice is vastly different than the Rambam’s ideal - as highlighted in a Shavuot lunch I went to this week where the hosts served meat-filled soup, two platters of brisket, fried sole, and beef-stuffed cabbage leaves. The idea of Shavuot as the “dairy holiday” flew out the window at that meal!

Can Bittman - whose suggestions include “Forget the protein thing” and “buy more vegetables and learn how to cook them” get us closer to the meat in moderation ideal? Find out here.

This Shavuot I baked, with the assistance of my son Max, a siete cieli (“Seven Heavens”) challah. It’s become a regular tradition in our family, along with cutting roizelekh (”roses”) from origami paper, to bake this Mt. Sinai-shaped round challah adorned with various symbols of Torah and revelation - the 2 tablets of the covenant, a ladder, a fish, a bird, and a hamsa.

Max made the fish that you can see in the picture. There’s an excellent, illustrated description of how to construct the “seven heavens” challah in the cookbook by Rabbi Robert Sternberg, The Sephardic Kitchen, though I don’t use his recipe for challah. Rather, I use my favorite whole wheat challah recipe from Marcy Goldman’s Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking. By the way, this is a fantastic cookbook. I have yet to bake a recipe from it that I haven’t liked. The whole wheat challah recipe follows below the break. I have also adapted this Shavuot hallah to celebrate the end of the term with my Wheaton College First Year Seminar “Rituals of Dinner” students, adding other, more contemporary dough symbols, i.e., a mortarboard hat and diploma. Read more »

Every kid remembers a time when their parents urged them to “Eat your vegetables.” But what about “Eat your ice cream or you’re not leaving the table?”

Vegetable ice cream. I know it’s a radical concept, but I proved recently to my dinner guests that this unexpected combination of fresh spring peas and sweet cream actually tastes amazing together. I am a huge fan of green pea soup, puree, anything to do with peas. As a child, I would sneak a handful of frozen peas while my mom was making dinner, and I still love popping them in my mouth whenever I’m cooking with them. If you are lucky enough to have fresh peas, then by all means, use them, but frozen peas will definitely do the job here.

As usual, I turned to my trusty ice cream cookbook, David Liebovitz’s Perfect Scoop, for inspiration (remember the indulgent rice gelato I tried during Purim?). From there, I let my improvisation run wild. This ice cream screams spring, and with a fresh burst of mint, you will be sure to impress your friends and family. They may even demand second helpings of their veggies!

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As some of you might remember, I am one of the “blintz experts” competing in next Tuesday’s BLINTZKRIEG: Music and Blintzes. Competition is fierce for the battle of the blintz portion of the evening, let me tell you. (My worthy competitors are the wonderful Sandy Stollar of The Kosher Tomato Personal Chef Service, and the equally wonderful Linda Lantos, also a chef and culinary education instructor with the Children’s Aid Society.)  So, I need your help.

I want to make a blintz that really wows the crowd - sweet cheese is fine, but I want something that will take people’s blintz expectations to the next level. So far I’ve concocted two ideas for fillings - one a sweet mascarpone cheese mixed with strawberries and orange zest. The other goes the savory route, mixing garlicky pesto with silken tofu.

The problem is, as of 10:00pm next Tuesday - I’m going to be swirling blintz for a LOT of hungry people - people who will vote whether or not my blintzes taste better than the rest. I just don’t think I can deal with toggling back and forth between two fillings, nor do I want eaters to come away feeling like my blintz palette is muddled by competing flavors.

So, friends - I need you to vote. Tell me, which blintz filling would most excite your taste buds - sweet strawberry, or savory pesto? I’m in your hands.

To help you decide, check out the photos of the two choices below. And if you’re around NYC next Tuesday night, come check out the blintzes and the music at Blintzkrieg.

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The shuk in Tel Aviv that so many travelers love — the idyllic market which people see as representative of the simpler way vegetables and other foodstuffs were once sold — is actually the source of so much frustration for me. Aside from the problem that all of the produce is fully conventional, I spend most of my time there yelling at vendors, being bumped (and bumping back) and trying my best not to be cheated.

While my blood pressure rises and I suffer the consequences of a thick American accent, I wax nostalgic about the farmers markets I frequented in Providence, Rhode Island, before I moved to Tel Aviv. Now those are markets. The vendors are usually the farmers themselves or their workers (or the people they hire to sell their stuff), and people are nice to you. They even smile. In fact, rather than the dog eat dog milieu of the shuk, the farmers market represents an eating community where people all respect each other for their role in this chain, from the grower to the cook to the consumer, etc. In so many ways I saw the shuk as a symbol of Israel, with all its frustrations, and the farmers market a symbol of my beloved America, in all its splendor, and in comparing the two I observed just how irreconcilable they were.

Then, on behalf of the Jewish harvest festival, Shavuot, Tel Aviv had to go ahead and start a Slow Food inspired farmers market…and further confound my already uncertain identity issues around food in Israel.

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Thanks to Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster for this guest post.  Rabbi Kahn-Troster is Director of Education and Outreach for Rabbis for Human Rights North America.

Growing up, Shavuot for me meant lasagna - a delicious, cheesy creation that my mother would make for the one Jewish holiday on which we did not eat meat. (Actually, I was an adult before I realized that non-kosher lasagna was made with meat). I loved the lasagna, and Shavuot wasn’t bad either. Special food, staying up late the first night with my friends- Shavuot was a hit, and I didn’t think about it more than that.

One synagogue I went to hosted a “bikkurim (first fruits) procession:” they had people bring in baskets of produce and leave them on the bimah. I’d never seen a community mark Shavuot through any way but through a Tikkun Leyl Shavuot (staying up all night to study) and by eating blintzes, and I didn’t really know what to make of it. It seemed a little pagan.

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Thanks to Rebecca Bloomfield for this guest post. Rebecca is an alumni of the Adamah program and a garden teacher at The Edible Schoolyard, a program of the Chez Panisse Foundation and founded by Alice Waters.

The highlight of my week this week involved watching two of my students fight. Dodging the carefully-cultivated garden beds, one student ran after another. I hurdled over the strawberry patch to intercept the pursuer and was met by a stern pout that melted into a grin with the words, “she stole my snow peas.” I heard giggling and crunching behind me as the winded friend approached us both, handing us the peas. We snacked and returned to harvesting.

The Edible Schoolyard, in Berkeley, CA, is a force of healing and transformation for middle school students. As children turn soil, plant seeds, harvest produce, and build compost piles, they deepen their connection to food. As the garden transforms, so do the students. It is a space for things to change from that which is to that which can be: seed to sprout, compost to fertile soil, flower to fruit. Like the Mishkan that the Jews were commanded to build during the Exodus, the garden is a sacred space where a divine presence dwells. School gardens the nation over provide space for children to learn that they have choices when it comes to their food, their bodies, and their environment: things do not have to be the way they currently are.

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Jayne Cohen, author of the stunningly gorgeous new cookbook Jewish Holiday Cooking (witness above) is officially a new poster-woman for The Jew & The Carrot. A talented and creative chef and food writer, Cohen loves traditional Jewish dishes as much as she loves improvising with them, and has a weakness for the farmers’ market to boot. Welcome home, Jayne! She spoke with The Jew & The Carrot about her passion for fresh vegetables, the benefits of occasionally going pot-luck, “foodie poets,” and why real Jewish foods deserve real butter.

Below the jump: The full interview, Jayne’s recipe for blintzes, and a chance to win a copy of Jewish Holiday Cooking.

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Gastronomically speaking, trying to follow Passover is a tough gig. The seder meals are all flashy and filled with symbolic food meaning - how can another holiday compete? But each year, a month and change after the first bite of matzoh ball soup, Shavuot must try.

Here to help, The Jew & The Carrot offers a Healthy Sustainable Shavuot Menu - one that highlights the fresh flavors of the spring season and the dairy-inspired fare traditionally eaten for the holiday. With recipes for English pea risotto, wild salmon in brown butter, and lemony ricotta cheesecake, Shavuot might just have a fighting chance of culinary bragging rights this year.What do you like to make for Shavuot?

World leaders attending the UN Food Summit in Italy will be met with modest meal choices come lunchtime. Well, sort of.

According British paper, Times Online, officials at the Food and Agriculture Organization are keen on avoiding claims of hypocrisy for serving lobster and foie gras while discussing global starvation. Said one official, “At the last summit in 2002 we did not give enough thought to the menu and were open - unfairly, in our view - to the charge of hypocrisy.”

As someone who has planned many events for a Jewish environmental non-profit, I know how challenging it can be to model an organization’s values at its events. Somehow, even with the most careful planning, there’s always an overlooked detail - disposable cups where there could be real glass, kosher food but not Chalav Yisroel dairy, or garbage cans where there could be a compost bin. So I sympathize with the FAO organizers who probably spent so much time planning the Summit sessions that they forgot how much every meal is a micro-session in itself. Then I looked at the menu.

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I found this in my inbox today - a little note from Kosher Today (the kosher industry’s spokes-organization) that indicates exactly how little they care about anything except whether “its good for the Jews.” Be forewarned, gentle readers - if you have a sensitive stomach or any sort of soul, the following passage will leave you feeling queasy.

Kosher Community Looks Beyond Agriprocessors Raid

“New York…For most retailers around the country, the recent raid at the Postville Agriprocessors plant is about supply and price, but otherwise they do not see any repercussions for the industry as a whole. For the most part, retailers say the supply has been virtually uninterrupted and prices have stayed the same. Agri products are featured in many ads in advance of the holiday of Shavuos (June 9-10) and most retailers say that they have not seen any change in consumer habits as a result of the federal raid in Postville. There is no evidence of any boycott of Agri products whatsoever, they say.

Mendy Bauman of Glatt Mart in Flatbush told Jewish journalists that virtually none of his customers even bothered to ask which of his meats were from Agri. Sources in Postville say that Agri has been adding laborers and stepping up production with every passing day.

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Okay, so you signed up for a CSA - (lucky you!) After weeks or even months of patient waiting for the earth to “yield its produce,” all of a sudden your kitchen is flooded with a flurry of real. live. vegetables. From now until the end of the season, you will be blessed with the opportunity to eat delicious green things, without even really having to think about it. However, some weeks it is difficult to eat all of those green things before they turn brown.  I know this from experience - last summer, an early delivery of beets sat in my fridge, unloved all summer until my roommate quietly threw them out on my behalf.

To help you maximize your vegetables and avoid the guilt of throwing away soggy, wilted compost, The Jew & The Carrot offers a list of Top 10 Must Haves for the CSA Kitchen - Stir, chop, freeze, puree, and store your way to a waste-free CSA summer.

Last Friday, Yosh and I attended a sushi-making Shabbat dinner. Wine was blessed and followed by small cups warm sake. Then, after we’d washed and blessed the challah, my friends and I rolled up our sleeves, rolled out the bamboo mats, and rolled up some amazing (if not technically perfect) sushi. Did it feel like a traditional Friday night dinner? Not entirely - but what better way to greet the Sabbath queen than with a plate of freshly made sushi and soy sauce?

Find out how to make your own sushi here. But first, check out the tasty photos (taken by the talented Rik) from our dinner, below the jump!

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So, we started planting in the sadeh (Adamah’s field) almost two months ago. Onions were first, tiny green shoots so thin you could barely see them against the soil, but a whole bed of the tiny starts had an unmistakable green haze of growth. Next were beets and chard, with tiny red-green leaves. Then spinach, with matchstick-sized pointy green shoots, and cucumbers, planted before their true leaves are out, with only two smooth oval cotoledons unfolded like tiny clamshells against the ground.

We know that these baby plants will eventually turn into vegetables… but when they are so small, it’s easy to forget.

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