Modern Day Gleaning of the Fields When the Miller Family opened their farm for gleaning, 40,000 people showed up. Epicurious and the Denver Post each cover the story with a different bent.
The joy of Diaspora is the variety of experience it brings into our tradition. Almost any kind of food has analogues in every tributary of Jewish heritage and candy is no exception. We’ve sifted through the internet and our cookbook collections to bring you Jewish candy recipes from Eastern Europe, South Asia and the Mediterranean, including, of course, the sticky and celebrated halvah, in its classic sesame rendition and with a serendipitous autumnal twist.
1/2 cup Sesame Seeds (ground)
2 tablespoons Sesame Seeds (whole)
3 tablespoons Raw honey
1/4 cup Sesame Tahini (use the driest part of the jar)
1/8 teaspoon Almond extract
Grind 1/2 cup seeds in a blender. Mix ground seeds, whole seeds, tahini, honey and extract in a bowl all together until thoroughly blended. Roll into small balls or into a long roll and refrigerate.
Okay, okay - so Halloween isn’t exactly a “Jewish holiday.” But considering that the dominant theme on October 31st is chocolate (witches and goblins decidedly take a back seat to Snickers Bars and M&Ms), it seems like a perfectly good time to celebrate Jewish and Israeli chocolate makers. Over the last few years, the chocolate industry has grown significantly in Israel, with many new boutique chocolate stores and manufacturers popping up around the country. And in America, Jews continue to contribute to the industry, creating some of the world’s most renowned chocolate.
Below the jump, we’ve compiled a list of some of today’s most innovative Jewish chocolate makers - folks like Chuck Siegel, the official chocolate maker for Google, who started his company in the kitchen of the San Francisco JCC - and Netanya’s Choconoy, an Israeli company with a special mission.
Agriprocessors’ former CEO, Sholom Rubashkin, was arrested this morning in Iowa. The charge? Knowingly conspiring to harbor illegal immigrants at Agriprocessors. (Not necessarily “surprising” news, but pretty darn important.)
The arrest comes on the heels of the company being fined $10 million dollars yesterday for wage violations - mostly for illegal reductions taken out of workers’ paychecks.
Ironically, just this morning during my blissful “30 minutes with a paper copy of The New York Times” ritual on the subway, I read that, “No federal charges have been brought against senior managers and owners of Agriprocessors.”
Well there goes that.
Rubashkin will make an initial appearance in federal court for the Northern District of Iowa this afternoon. How the kosher community, and particularly the OU responds remains to be seen. Read the full story in the Iowa Independent and below the jump…
Jewish tradition loves to bless food (or rather to bless God for food). We bless bread, we bless wine - we bless snacks as well as meals. We have different blessings for fruit grown on trees vs. fruit grown in the ground and, remarkably, when we’re done eating and feeling satisfied, we bless again! But for some reason, despite all this food blessing, there is no Jewish blessing for cooking.
This fact struck me and Anna as a bit odd. The act of standing in a kitchen - coaxing raw ingredients into a nourishing meal through heat, patience and wisdom, seems pretty holy. The mere fact that the ingredients are there to cook is, in itself, no small miracle! So a couple of years ago, in conjunction with Hazon’s Beit Midrash on (what else?!) Jews, food, and contemporary life, we wrote a cooking bracha. It’s a blessing to be said just before: before turning the stove on under a pot of water, before dipping one’s hands into the flour, before the flurry of activity that, God willing, will create a delicious meal worthy of its own blessing.
Thanks to Eve Jochnowitz for this guest post - important thoughts for anyone who is considering making etrog vodka or jam! Eve maintains a blog on Yiddish language, culture and food called In Mol Araan.
For many of us, one of the countless delights of the joyous Succoth festival just ended is the windfall of a citron (ethrog, etrog, or esrik), an unusual, delicious and generally difficult-to find fruit for most of the year. The citron (citrus medica) differs from its relative the lemon (citrus limon) in that it is less acid, with a deeper, rounder, slightly bitter flavor. The citron has considerable less juice and pulp than the lemon, and a thicker, pithier rind. For many years folks have been asking for citron recipes in the days following the holiday and I have always found this to be an inspiring challenge. Esrik-scented vodka was a revelation.
This year, regrettably, I must urge you to ignore all previously proffered esrik recipes. Find out why below.
This year of the food crisis, we’ve heard a lot about world hunger in the newspaper and the blogosphere. As countries and as individuals with generally more and better access to more and better food, most of us probably feel imperative to help spread the wealth. The U.S.A., where I come from, is the largest food donor in the world, but this year, on World Food Day at the United Nations, the U.S.A. issued the world’s biggest mea culpa to the international community.
Former-President Clinton did the talking, telling the UN that he “blew it” on food. Not only did he blow it, the IMF blew it, the World Bank blew it, and the UN blew it. In the end though, that’s a lot of air, and not a lot of policy.
After the Flood, as he begins the process of replanting the earth, the Torah tells us that Noah is a farmer. In Bereishit (Genesis) 9:20, he is called ish ha’adamah, a tiller of the soil or literally a man of the earth. In the rebirth of the world after the Flood, a farmer is certainly a useful person to have around, but how does this connect with what we already know about Noah?
In the Midrash, the rabbis consider Noah to be the inventor of the plow – a farm tool which made it easier and faster to plant more and feed more people – and the initiator of effective agriculture. Considering the etymology of the name Noah is connected by the Torah to the meaning “rest” and also to the meaning “relief,” Noah brought people “relief” and “rest” by allowing them to move beyond subsistence living. Upon naming him, Noah’s father Lamech even says (5:29): “This one will provide us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.”
I’m somewhat surprised, but I’m really looking forward to Halloween. Let me state up front what I don’t like. The candy is excessive. I still have a large bag hidden on a shelf in the back of the pantry of LAST YEAR’s candy that my kids lost interest in long before all the good stuff was gone. I also don’t love the gore and the death. I’m not a big fan of scary stuff in general and it seems to get gloomier each year. I also don’t love the idea that kids demand candy, it is bad enough when they do it at the supermarket check out there should be no need to encourage them.
This being said, I am excited nonetheless. And despite all my misgivings, without the candy, this holiday would be not have the same draw.
Deciding what to eat for lunch can be a challenge - but deciding what hundreds (or thousands) of other people should eat for lunch is decidedly harder. But such is the charge for the many hospitals, schools, and other institutions across the country that feed people, en masse, on a daily basis.
In the past few years, a growing handful of institutions (e.g. Yale University and Kaiser Permanente) have attempted to bring institutional food away from Lunch Lady Land - sourcing produce from local farms, offering less junk food in favor of more fruits & veggies, increasing the number of homemade meals (vs. “heat-n-serve” foods) etc. The Jewish community has jumped on the institutional food reform bandwagon too as synagogues, day schools and JCCs across the country begin to question their dependence on Styrofoam coffee cups and greasy kosher pizza.
As a Jewish organization committed to health and sustainability, Hazon is currently in the process of creating our own Organizational Food Purchasing Guidelines. But we want to hear from you!Let us know:
1. What “green food practices” does your synagogue, JCC, day school, Hillel (etc.) currently practice? Anything is fair game, from swapping the Styrofoam for glass mugs, to ripping up a corner of the parking lot to plant an organic garden.
2. On the contrary, in what ways could your Jewish institution do a better job at bringing health and sustainability into your corner of the Jewish community?
Share your ideas below - we’ll compile them (along with others) - into a resource guide that can be shared with the larger Jewish community. Here’s to eating better, together, in 5769.
Al-Jazeerah’s English channel explores via YouTube the cuisine of Jerusalem (part 1 and part 2) and according to an excellent article by the Jerusalem Metro Blog (JMB), “…You know what? They did a great job.”
JMB explains the revealing twists of this video piece, because this isn’t just about mashed chickpeas, but (as with all things Middle East) also identity and politics. Jewish viewers might be surprised at Al-Quds University’s Dr. Ali Qleibo’s passionate rant about the appropriation of hummus by the Jewish State.
Once upon a time - not that long ago - Sundays were my favorite day to hunker down in the kitchen, tune into NPR, whip out the leftover CSA vegetables, and cook/bake a few delicious dishes with leftovers that would keep me happy all week. But not these days. These days, my Sundays are crammed full with details for my wedding, which is coming up two weeks from today.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m incredibly psyched to put together table seating charts and delegate sheva brachot, but it doesn’t leave much time or mental space for things like, say, remembering to take a batch of cookies out of the oven or stir a pot of chili before it scorches. On Sundays like these, I need much quicker recipes - ones that will taste great and sustain me as I check off the last to-dos before the big “I do.”
Hopefully I’ll get my (our!) Sundays back in the near future. Until then, here’s my recipe for the supremely fast and fool- proof, not to mention nourishing and delicious, warm barley salad with apple & feta.
There’s no food without water, and some people love to talk about how the destruction of our watersheds will lead us all to perdition before our teeth even fall out. It’s the kind of doom-saying that makes a lot of folks want to crawl under a rock instead of thinking about change. But saving enormous amounts of water is actually pretty easy and, to a large degree, can be accomplished with a time investment instead of a monetary one. In the spirit of the new year, here are some tips and resources on how to change your kitchen for the better (world-wise and wallet-wise).
Start with your Sink.
To repair the world, you can start by repairing your sink. Fixing leaking faucets can save 20 gallons of water a day. Just spend a couple of bucks and a few minutes screwing on an aerator and watch your water bill go down. If you need one, you can also get a water filtration system for your tap instead of drinking bottled water, which uses lots of water in production and pollutes the world with plastic. Finally, unlike quails and manna, water still falls from the sky - so you can harvest rainwater for your garden using a rain barrel. The Florida Extension teaches you how to build one here.
I get a little nostalgic around election season - I guess it’s hard to get over your “first time” (voting, of course). Born in 1982, I was one of those teenagers who was lucky enough to turn 18 the year of a presidential race. Of course, it happened to be the Bush/Gore, Florida, hanging chad, Jewish grandmothers accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan debacle, so maybe I wasn’t really all that lucky.
Still, I remember campus being ignited with an electric charge of excitement in the weeks before the race. Everyone talked hopefully about the candidates and the future. A slew speakers stormed campus to give ostensibly non-partisan speeches - but it was pretty clear where Gloria Steinam, Winona LaDuke (Ralph Nader’s running mate), and Saul Williams stood on the issues And signs urging voters to “vote YES on 9″ or “vote NO on 12″ plastered every square inch of wall surface in the hopes that, even if people couldn’t exactly remember what “9″ stood for, their Pavlovian response would kick in on voting day.
This year, California voters have the chance to “vote YES or NO” on animal rights. Proposition 2 - an animal rights ballot measure - would free farm animals (namely chickens, sows, and veal cattle) from the restrictive cages many of them live in now on factory farms. But not everyone thinks this is such a great idea.
It’s a Jewish food blog, so, nu, here’s a little good old-fashioned Borscht belt humor:
Q: What are the two things Jews know?
A: Suffering, and where to find good Chinese food.
Okay, so maybe “good” shouldn’t be used to modify Borscht belt humor. I’ve known that joke for 20 years, and who knows how old it was when I first heard it. It must be further past the expiry date than that container of organic non-fat sour cream you’ve got pushed way back in the corner of your fridge.
So here’s an always-fresh corollary:
Q: What are the two things Jewish women love?
A: Eating and giving advice.
Thus is born a new The Jew & The Carrot feature, “The Shmethicist” - a moral nosh on ethical eating. Readers are hereby invited to send in your ethical food quandaries to shmethicist@jcarrot.org. Because why should Randy Cohen have all the fun?
Since you didn’t know I existed until just now, I’ve taken the shmethically questionable route of making up our first reader query, just so I had something to answer.
Below the jump: The Shmethicist’s take on Halloween candy…
Agriprocessors’ former CEO, Sholom Rubashkin, was arrested this morning in Iowa. The charge? Knowingly conspiring to harbor illegal immigrants at Agriprocessors. (Not necessarily “surprising” news, but pretty darn important.)
After the Flood, as he begins the process of replanting the earth, the Torah tells us that 
I’m somewhat surprised, but I’m really looking forward to Halloween. Let me state up front what I don’t like. The candy is excessive. I still have a large bag hidden on a shelf in the back of the pantry of LAST YEAR’s candy that my kids lost interest in long before all the good stuff was gone. I also don’t love the gore and the death. I’m not a big fan of scary stuff in general and it seems to get gloomier each year. I also don’t love the idea that kids demand candy, it is bad enough when they do it at the supermarket check out there should be no need to encourage them.
