I had one of the worst days of my life today (definitely top ten, possibly top five) but things didn’t get really bad until I was midway through throwing together a ratatouille. I think it’s a testament to my recipe that basically forgetting the dish on a stove on high heat for a good twenty minutes while I panicked to the point of tears and probably aged a decade did not ruin the dish. In fact, though I was still a complete emotional wreck later in the afternoon, I was an emotional wreck with really good ratatouille for lunch. And if you’re going to be a bawling bundle of stress, you might as well be full of yummy CSA veggies.
I started making the ratatouille because I didn’t want any of our veggies to go to waste, but as far as I’m concerned the best thing about the dish is that it’s really filling, and makes an amazing alternative main course for vegetarians when everyone else is eating meat. I used to do the catering at the University of Iowa Hillel, and many a Shabbat there was chicken for meat eaters, ratatouille for the vegetarians, and nary a complaint. For anyone who worries about what to make for a vegetarian Shabbat meal, this recipe is for you.
Recipe after the break!
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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.
Last Valentine’s Day, my husband and I fell in love - with duck schmaltz. And duck gribenes. And potatoes fried in—well, perhaps I’d better start at the beginning.
For Valentine’s Day, I decided to try making duck for the first time, using a recipe by Mark Bittman that promised to handle the most challenging aspect of cooking duck: dealing with the fat. Cutting the duck into pieces exposed much of the surface fat, allowing me to remove it and set it aside, free to cook the duck in splatter-free bliss. Until I read the following line in the recipe:
“What’s different in this procedure is that you will also have a cup or more of trimmed duck fat. If you’d like to render it - it’s great for cooking - cut it into pieces and cook it slowly in a skillet until all the fat has liquefied and the bits of skin have become crisp. Drain and eat the crispy bits, and refrigerate the fat; it will keep for weeks.”
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Little known fact: I was actually on the Food Network once. The show was an Al Roker on the Road special about food clubs, and I was featured in a segment about a group called Girl Friday in Iowa City. Unfortunately, the episode aired on the first night of Pesach in 2004, so I’ve never seen it.
We made a bunch of great recipes the night they filmed us, and one of them has become a standard in my kitchen. It’s really easy, gorgeous, and very tasty. The recipe comes from Thisbe Nissen, who co-wrote The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook, and is generally awesome. While we were boiling the beets she kept encouraging someone to use the water to dye her hair purple. Also, I’m pretty sure she got me to say on camera that beets are really sexy.
Anyway, this salad is perfect for brunch or Shabbat lunch. Adding the cheese at the end saves it from turning pink, but if you’re not bothered by fuschia cheese you can add it whenever you want.
Recipe after the jump! Read more »
For those of you wondering what will be on the menu at the 3rd annual Hazon Food Conference in Asilomar in December, as the person leading the volunteer food committee, I can tell you this: there will be food at the food conference. And it will be good. Beyond that, it’s hard to say, since we’re still working out the details of the menu.
However, I did want to raise “the meat issue,” because it’s what been occupying my thoughts a lot lately. When the conference’s volunteer Executive Committee met earlier this month for a planning retreat at the conference site, most everyone agreed that we should serve meat at the conference in order to show that it’s possible to get kosher, sustainably-raised meat. Except it seems that it isn’t - at least not in California. Shipping it from the East Coast is prohibitively expensive and not a very sustainable practice. But right now, it does not really exist here on the Left Coast.
With six months lead time (the Food Conference is Dec 25-28, 2008), we are hoping to find a way to make it all work out. How this will happen, I’m not sure. But I’m relieved to have two competent people who volunteered to take this on with me because this non-kosher keeping, non-meat eater has been thinking about meat way too much for her liking lately. Read more »
I am a little embarrassed to admit that The Jew & The Carrot went the entire summer last year without sharing a recipe for gazpacho. Of course gazpacho - a cold soup which has its roots in Southern Spain - does not obviously belong in the “Jewish food” category. Still, as Tamar rightly pointed out, when summer rolls around, the last thing you want is a pot of cholent steaming up the kitchen. Or at least, as someone who lives sans air conditioning, I don’t want no stinking pot of cholent.
In these moments of mid-summer heat, Gazpacho boldly comes to the rescue, offering a flavor-packed soup without the shvitzing. It also begs you to head to the farmers’ market (or your backyard) and buy the ripest heirloom tomatoes (like the ones I found above) and crispest bell peppers and cucumbers possible.
Shame on us for neglecting to share the wonders of summer gazpacho with you last year - we hope you accept the recipe below along with our deepest and most sincere apologies.
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Thanks to Anthony Silverbrow for this guest post. Silverbrow lives in England and maintains the blog Silverbrow on Food.
Earlier this year, Leah asserted that Great Britain could claim “foodie superiority” over the US thanks to the work of Jamie, Hugh and Gordon. But while television shows are good indicators of the cultural zeitgeist, what interests me is the quality of food and in particular, the quality of kosher food.And it’s there that I believe we in the UK are the laggards. Read more »
On a sunny and pleasant spring afternoon, while my husband and I were sowing greens and transplanting heads of lettuce, a local reporter showed up at our farm. He was a young man, working for a suburban newspaper and researching an article about the rising cost of fuel and its effects on the small enclaves of agriculture still left in our area of Northern Virginia. His main question: How are rising fuel prices affecting our farm business?
We both paused in thought and struggled to come up with a clear answer.
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The JTA reported that one of the kosher restaurants in Beijing shechted (kosher slaughtered) 7 1/2 tons of beef and 9 tons of chicken in preparation for the kosher Olympics. They also plan to fly in five rabbinical supervisors specifically for the event.
Jokes about Jewish grandmothers being over-prepared aside, just how many Jews can possibly be going to the Olympics?
Last week, walking down my very urban street in Brooklyn, I was stopped short by some bright purple-black splotches that covered a small portion of the sidewalk. They were totally grody (and a little bit scary) - but oddly familiar. I looked up and there was the culprit of the mess - a mulberry bush! An overgrown, concrete-surrounded version of the mulberry bushes that I used to frequent in my backyard in suburban Chicago.
I’d walked past this bush countless times over the last year, but never noticed the bonafide fruit-bearing plant in my neighborhood. I was psyched. I picked off a couple of the dark berries, ignoring the odd looks from passersby and relished in my moment of urban gleaning.
What if my experience could be duplicated many times over, in cities across the country? According to Fallen Fruit a collaborative art project in California, it can and should.
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When a big news story - like say, the Agriprocessors raid - breaks, there’s an immediate storm of “you heard it here first” reports, and “you heard it hear differently, no really!” follow up reports and interviews, as well as a hail storm of commentary from urgent bloggers who mine new story angles, chomp noisily on old ones, and introduce both fact and hearsay into the mix. It’s an urgent, emotion-driven process that wipes away other news headlines, and shouts for readers’ undivided attention.
And then. There’s a pause. A lull like the last few kernels of popcorn smacking against the pot lid, but mostly settling into stillness. Other stories begin to trickle back into public consciousness (”Speaking of underage workers, did you hear about those Chinese gymnasts?”). Activists worry that people have stopped caring. But they haven’t - they are just catching their breath and digesting everything they have read and heard.
It seems that the most recent Agriprocessors story, which started in mid-May after the raid, is beginning to enter its post-pause phase. During this time, articles begin to move beyond the shocking, breaking-news headlines and dig a little deeper into the story’s nuances. These articles are more reflective, and they begin to point to the longer-lasting impact that a story might have on public consciousness. Today’s article in the New York Times, which focuses on the stories of underage immigrants who worked for Agriprocessors, is a good example of a post-pause article - one of others that will undoubtedly begin to surface now that the dust (or maybe feathers?) has cleared.
Read it here or below the jump.
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During the two years that I was a vegan in college, I tried to convince myself that I enjoyed soy milk. I actually liked almond milk and even oat milk, but since I couldn’t afford them on a regular basis, soy was my reluctant liquid-of-choice for cereal eating and cookie dipping.
Now that I am firmly back in the land of dairy - organic, hormone-free, grass fed, and so very delicious- my stomach recoils a bit at the sight of a carton of Silk (which, by the way, is owned by milk behemoth, Dean Foods). I’ve got nothing against the stuff, in theory - I just think it tastes like sweetened Play-Doh.
What I do have something against, is the question recently asked over at Slate: Which is better for the environment, soy milk or cow’s milk?
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When I have people over for Shabbat dinner during the winter I always make some kind of kugel as a side dish. But in the summer, nobody wants a warm kugel, so I have to come up with a nice rotation of cold salads that don’t bore me to death.
This one I got from my ex’s mom. She didn’t like that I was dating her son, but she really didn’t like that I had never cooked with black eyed peas, so she taught me this recipe, and it pleases guests long after I split with her little boy.
Recipe after the jump. Read more »
Thanks to Holly Rossi for this guest post, which talks about the trend of American churches growing food on their property. (Maybe Hazon should hook these churches up with our Tuv Ha’Aretz CSA program?) Holly is a freelance writer and the Health editor at Beliefnet.
A nice Jewish girl walks into a sprawling evangelical mega church in the heart of Idaho and asks, “Where do you grow your organic vegetables?” Within minutes, she’s being whisked away on a golf cart to a patch behind the massive church: “Welcome to the Garden o’ Feedin’!”
No, this isn’t a pitch for a Twilight Zone remake on the Planet Green TV network. It’s a scene I actually experienced at the Vineyard Church of Boise, a church that grew over 20,000 pounds of organic produce on a 1/3-acre plot last year. On assignment for Search magazine, I was looking to explore the newly fertile connection between evangelical Christians and the environmental movement. What I found inspired me to imagine the world we could live in if every house of worship in America took a stab at growing food on its little piece of God’s green earth.
Read an excerpt from the article below.
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The JTA reported that an interfaith coalition is planning to demonstrate in Postville this Sunday, July 27. Participating Jewish organizations include The Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Jewish Labor Committee, and The Workmen’s Circle. Similar to the Darfur rally in Washington DC, which made waves of a couple years ago, participants will drive and bus in from across the region and country to Postville (with transportation funds supported by Mazon) for the rally. JCUA’s Executive Director, Jane Ramsy said:
There are two targets here. One is a message to the government for comprehensive immigration reform on the one hand, and secondly to Agriprocessors for the permanent implementation of livable wages, health care benefits and worker safety.”
Read the article here.
