Thanks to Aaron Kagan for this guest post. Aaron maintains the blog Tea and Food.
Last January I interviewed my first cousin once-removed about his experience surviving the Holocaust as a child in a Siberian labor camp. At one point he mentioned a “sour leaf” that his family used to make a soup called schav. Soon after, while visiting the Culinary Institute of America in Sonoma, I surreptitiously pinched a leaf of French sorrel from the herb garden, feeling strangely drawn to that particular plant above the others.
The moment it hit my tongue, the sharp tang of the oxalic acid triggered some vast, dormant cultural memory which I could not yet place. Still, I felt transformed by it. It wasn’t until months later, while researching an article for the Forward, that I discovered the connection in schav, the cold, Russian soup with many variations but one common theme: sorrel. It was then that the words of my cousin came floating back into my mind. I now knew what that sour leaf was, and I knew that I had to use it to make some schav.
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The Hekhsher Tzedek, a proposed certification for foods that are both kosher (in the traditional sense of the word) and also ethically produced - has been making waves in the American Jewish community for the last year and a half. Meanwhile, a similar project has already taken on mainstream status in Israel.
The Christian Science Monitor recently published an article about Bemaaglei Tzedek (Circles of Justice) - a non-profit organization that created a “Social Seal,” which is awarded to restaurants that prepare and serve food in an ethical way (focusing mostly on workers’ rights like ensuring health insurance, and overtime to restaurant employees). According to the CSM:
[The social seal is] catching on, with dozens of new restaurants contacting Bemaaglei Tzedek every week to inquire about it. In Jerusalem, where awareness of the seal is strongest, nearly one-third of all restaurants have a social seal today, according to Banner.
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Every so often, Hazon gets an inspiring email from someone who did something really cool. Nadya Strizhevskaya from LA sent us one of those emails. In it she wrote:
Last Friday night, a group of my friends gathered in my apartment in Los Angeles for a Shabbat dinner that was different from all other Friday nights. A week before, all the guests had received an invitation with detailed instructions on what they should bring and where they should shop. Some were asked to bake their own challah, others to make their own cheese, another to churn out homemade pasta. All of the fruits and vegetables had to come from our local farmer’s market and the wines had to be produced no farther than the Baron Herzog winery in Oxnard, CA… We also discussed a number of Talmudic passages on vegetarianism and communal responsibility, which we pulled from Hazon’s Food For Thought source book. This was our first attempt at a sustainable, local Friday night dinner.
Emails like Nadya’s really make our day. But instead of just feeling giddy in the office, we asked Nadya to pull together everything she and her friends did into a Green Your Shabbat Table resource page so we could spread the joy. She did. Check out her ideas here, and host a sustainable Shabbat of your own. And if you have tips from your own dinners, please share them below.
Yesterday, I made two loaves of challah. It felt like a funny activity for a Sunday, I’ll admit. (I usually make challah in a flurried rush on Friday afternoon.) But I’d had a culinary brain flash the other day, that I felt compelled to try out: apple cider challah.
The idea was originally inspired by a beautiful loaf of apple honey challah my friend Ariela over at Baking and Books made last year. Lying in bed a few Sunday mornings ago, still heavy with dreams and sleep, I’d suddenly remembered that beautiful loaf of bread Ariela had made, which twisted the flavors of Rosh Hashanah into braided loaves. My thoughts then drifted to another favorite fall treat, apple cider - the one drink that manages to capture all of the sweet, spicy secrets of autumn.
Despite not being fully awake yet, my brain somehow managed to fuse these two thoughts together Sesame Street style: Cider………Challah Cider….Challah. Cider.Challah. Eureka! All of a sudden, I could hardly imagine a world without apple cider challah. (According to Google, only one other person has thought of it before.) So yesterday, I set about making my dream bread into a reality. It was such a treat to knead the loaves and let them rise on the counter without the pressure of the setting sun at my back. And as I bit into a warm slice, spread with a dollop of amber-colored apricot jam, I felt (almost) okay with the fact that fall is just around the corner.
Question to the Jewish text-perts out there: If you make challah that is not meant for Shabbat, do you still need to remove some of the dough as the Challah offering?
Find the recipe below the jump.
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Last Thursday, the Forward revealed a new twist in the Agriprocessors’ story - or rather, the same old story, closer to home.
It turns out that the largest kosher meat packing plant in America, the one whose Iowa-based plant was raided by immigration officials back in May, has faced similar struggles with undocumented immigrant workers at their Brookly-based warehouse. Article author, Nathaniel Popper, writes:
“The company has been locked in legal battles for the past three years over its immigrant workers, who wanted to unionize the warehouse [in Brooklyn] because of what they described as mistreatment… The brown-brick meat market in Brooklyn also houses two other kosher meat distributors, Eastern Meats and International Glatt Kosher Meats. Both of these companies have a unionized work force that has health care benefits, paid sick time and a starting salary above the minimum wage. “Every job has its downside,” said Dave Young, regional organizing director for United Food and Commercial Workers. “But for the most part, International is a decent place to work. The workers have been there for years. It doesn’t have to be like it is at Agri.”
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Can you feel it? Love is in the air! It’s Tu B’av!
At shabbat dinner tonight, my parents (who just celebrated their 42nd wedding anniversary this week) shared the story of how my mother won my father’s heart by bringing him home-made latkes every week - schlepping them on the subway from East Flatbush, Brooklyn to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, then a few hours’ bus ride to his Army base at Fort Dix, New Jersey.
After my mom & dad shared their story, my wife recalled how when we were first dating, a mysterious delivery person showed up at her door when she was home sick from work. She kept trying to send him away, since she hadn’t ordered anything, but thankfully he was very persistant, and finally she let him in. He handed her the package that I had ordered and had sent via courier to her apartment in Brooklyn: her favorite bubble tea from Saints Alp [sic] Teahouse in Chinatown, which she had laughingly watched me struggle to keep down on one of our first dates. It not only cheered her up; it was a foundational moment in our relationship.
So, nu, what’s the foodiest thing you’ve ever done for love?
Mark Bittman’s Bitten blog on the NY Times website recently published a post about “Farmers’ Market Fast Food” - farmers’ markets that invite neighborhood chefs to sell their creations alongside the fruit, vegetable, and sundry other local food vendors.
The post got me thinking about my favorite kind of fast food at the farmers’ market: just-purchased bread, cheese, tomato, and cucumber, cobbled together into a makeshift sandwich and eaten on a bench while watching the other shoppers peruse the vegetables and fresh flowers. (Anyone who has ever visited the shuk in Israel knows this type of sandwich experience intimately.)
Unless there is a water fountain in plain sight of the farm stand, I never wash the vegetables I buy for these local fast food sandwiches before eating them. I’ve always figured, what harm can it really do? I want the sandwich now, and besides, the vegetables are organic. But more recently, I’ve started bringing my anti-washing etiquette home with me. My sandy CSA organic greens definitely get a dunk under the faucet. But that glistening bell pepper might go straight from bag to bowl without as much as a rinse. Same goes with cucumbers, tomatoes, and anything without visible dirt on it. It’s got me wondering: has organic produce made us lazy?
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What happens when a group of Jewish CSA members ask a non-Jewish farmer to change her farming practices to accommodate their kashrut needs? In the case of the Tuv Ha’Aretz CSA in Chicago, very good things.
Like many organic family farmers, Vicki Westerhoff at Genesis Growers in Illinois, allowed her rooster and hens to enjoy “free range” of the farm’s chicken coop, side-by-side. The chickens seemed fairly content about the whole situation, but this practice resulted in a higher level of fertilized blood spots in their eggs - a no-no for kosher keepers. This put the CSA coordinators in a tricky position. On the one hand, this is their first season working with Vicki, and they did not want to do anything to jeopardize their farmer/member partnership. On the other hand, the kosher-keeping members of their CSA had to throw out all eggs that contained fertilized spots, which could potentially deter them from purchasing an egg share the following season.
I spoke with Chicago Tuv Ha’Aretz coordinator, Cara Gutstein, about how her CSA worked with their farmer to find a creative solution to the challenge, and strengthened their relationship for the future.
Read the interview below the jump…
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Thank you to the 120 people who have already filled out The Jew & The Carrot reader survey! We are having a lot of fun getting to know you better, and really appreciate your taking the time to share your thoughts and feedback with us.
If you haven’t yet had a chance to fill out the survey, please do! First time visitors and dedicated readers - your opinion matters to us. As thanks, if you complete the survey by the end of tomorrow (Friday, August 15th), we will enter you into a raffle to win a copy of Hip Kosher
by Ronnie Fein.
TAKE THE SURVEY HERE
Thanks to Mia Rut for this guest post.
A few years ago I decided to convert to Judaism. Of course you might be curious about the why, but that is a much longer story that will take a long time to tell. For now, I will say that I’ve been learning a lot about the Jewish community through food. And as someone who took this journey without a partner (I didn’t choose Judaism for an impending marriage) I was quick to realize that becoming part of a community was quite a challenge.
That was where the food came in. I like to think of myself as an amateur chef with credentials like having once lived in France and currently belonging to a CSA, but truth be told is that I really like to cook - an apparently good trait to have within the Jewish community. And since I don’t have the immediate familial connection for the big Jewish foodie holidays like Pesach and Shabbat, I found myself assembling my own Jewish family around a table to share in good food and Jewish learning.
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The news about Agriprocessors is spreading both within and beyond the Jewish community, reaching sites as nearby as a Jewish educators’ conference in Vermont, and as far away as acclaimed political publications like The Nation and The Huffington Post. Check it out:
The CAJE Conference, a Jewish educators’ conference, which is largely focused this year on the connections between Judaism and ecology (to the collective sound of thousands of die-hard Jewish environmentalists slapping their foreheads and muttering, “finally!”) reportedly decided to not serve any Agriprocessors’ meat during the conference. The JTA’s Fundermentalist blogger author, Jacob Berkman, quote conference organizers as saying Agriprocessors’ products are “just not in the spirit of CAJE.” Berkman also quoted Hazon’s own, Nigel Savage, who commented, “We want to shift the axis of what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century so that it necessarily means to be involved in the larger issues that concern us.” Read it here. (hat tip: Arieh Liebowitz)
The Nation, known for its no-nonsense, lefty political commentary, included a brief mention of the Agriprocessors scandal in their most recent edition. The Jew & The Carrot and I got a nice little shout-out in the article, along with a tally of how many times the Jewish Press has covered the Agriprocessors’ story over the last three months, since the raid. (For the record: 11 articles in the NY Times, 12 in The Forward, 14 in The Jewish Week, and a whopping 25 in the JTA.) Read it here.
More “Agriprocessors, elsewhere” coverage below
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Since the raid on the Agriprocessors plant on May 12th, bashing the kosher meat giant has become something of a sport. Everyone from the New York Times to failed messiah to yours truly has taken a few shots (some cheap, some well-deserved) at the Rubashkin family and the business they run out of Postville, Iowa.
I’ve never been big fans of the Rubashkin family. In fact, I called for a boycott of their meat in January, months before Uri L’Tzedek was on the case. But I’m getting a little frustrated with the way the scandal is being dealt with by liberal-minded people like me.
More, after the jump.
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New York Times book critic Janet Maslin recently picked Adam Gollner’s new book, The Fruit 
Hunters (Scribner: 2008), as a top summer read—and it’s easy to see why. Gollner writes mellifluously about his extraordinary (writ extraterrestrial) experiences traveling the world in search of fruits and the wacky people who devote their lives to this quest.
In the Seychelles, Gollner—or perhaps Adam is his best suited moniker—manages to get his hands on the uncannily female-looking coco-de-mer, or ‘lady fruit,’ whose “innards are translucent, almost like a silicon gel implant but with a softer, shaky-pudding texture” with “a mild citruslike quality, refreshing and sweet with earthy, spunky notes…like coconut flesh, only sexier.”
He then visits the jungles of Borneo to taste the intensely odoriferous “nutty, almondlike,” and “fully constructed dessert” of fresh durians, where the “juicy white cubes of flesh fuse a custard’s richness with a cakelike powderiness… topped with “vanilla-spruce frosting”—a far cry from the false gas leak alarm-spawning durians he got in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where they tasted of “undercooked peanut butter-mint omelets in body-odor sauce.” In Hawaii he tempts us with his description of the dusky brown chicos tasting of “maple syrup pudding,” and a host of other Neverland varietals such as bignays, gourkas, sapotes, mombins, langsats.
Over fruit smoothies one recent morning in Montreal, I met with Adam to discuss his new book and the sweet allure of the infinite world of fertilized flowers.
Below the jump: Win a copy of Adam Gollner’s The Fruit Hunters!
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As the price of food continues to increase, the value (in real dollars) of food stamps is decreasing– Democrats in Congress are working to pass additional increases to the minimum food stamp benefit in the next few months. But how are these benefits calculated?
Originally, they were based on what is known as the Thrifty Food Plan, what is considered the minimum cost of a reasonably healthy diet. But the food stamp benefit is not recalculated each year. Rather, it is updated based on inflation, and the Thrifty Food Plan is then periodically updated so that it fits the current (maximum) food stamp benefit and resembles the current food preferences of Americans as closely as possible. How do they do this, one might ask?
Well, my advisor and primary author of the US Food Policy blog, Parke Wilde, and two awesome student colleagues at Tufts have put together a Thrifty Food Plan Calculator so anyone can figure out how much a healthy meal costs in their own way– to figure out the ideal mix of foods for health and taste given a food stamp budget. The actual Thrifty Food Plan was last updated in 2006 and the calculator uses the same information economists and nutritionists at USDA had to create the 2006 TFP. You can see if you would have chosen the same combination of foods as they did.
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