The notion of a Jewish Farmer still raises eyebrows across much of the tribe. (Let’s face it, “My son the farmer” does not currently have the same nachas potential as “My son the doctor”). But the idea of Jewish farming in America, which is currently being embraced by organizations like The Jewish Farm School and Adamah, has deep roots.
The Federation of Jewish Farmers, founded in 1909, brought together 13 existing associations of Jewish farmers under one umbrella. According to the American Jewish Archives:
In its first year, the organization held an agricultural fair during the week-long fall harvest holiday of Sukkot. In later years, the annual conventions offered farmers an opportunity to exhibit their products, and they continued to take place during Sukkot. The federation also gave Jewish farmers more purchasing power, starting a bureau to give liberal credit to farmers who needed more help, and offering good prices on seeds and farming implements to those who needed them.
American Jews celebrating the agricultural connections to Sukkot back in the days of the Model T? That’s something to celebrate, even after the holiday.
(hat tip to Eric Schulmiller)
Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it. - Mishna Avot 5:22 A beautiful idea for the Torah, but one also worth considering when it comes to composting! (This is a Jewish food blog, after all…) 
Have a joyous and sweet Simchat Torah! Love, The Jew & The Carrot
The holidays have been a lot of fun coming together, making new friends, eating, not eating, eating in a temporary shelter and somewhere in all the midst of that, one really terrific brunch after my sister’s wedding. But I have to say, except for that brunch, I haven’t been doing too much cooking. And frankly I’ve missed it.
But the with the temperature dropping outside and a recent inspirational walk through a farmer’s market, I got creative trying out a new dish for a pot-luck lunch in a sukkah I attended this weekend. After a bit of debate, we named the dish an Autumn Cholent because I tried to incorporate the flavors of the fall into one easy-to-serve dish. And although it was tasty, I’m sure there is a lot of room to improve. So I’m looking for suggestions.
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(Cross posted on Mixed Multitudes)
Wednesday is Simchat Torah, which generally means dancing around with the Torah, watching little kids wave some flags they made in Sunday school, and lots of drinking. Simchat Torah is second only to Purim in its association with alcohol. I don’t think there’s any halakhic obligation to drink this week, the way there is on Purim, but if you walk into any synagogue on Tuesday night, you’re likely to see a bottle of schnapps or two (or six). Now I like Schnapps, but I also enjoy mixed drinks, and thought I’d share some nice Jewish cocktail and shot recipes to help enliven your Simchat Torah celebrations. Chag Sameach!
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Thanks to David Elcott for this guest post, in conjunction with COEJL’s blog, To Till & To Tend. David boldly ripped up his lawn last spring to make room for a small farm in his suburban front yard. This is his third and final post of the season, where he takes stock in the experience. For the back story, check out his first and second post.
Who would have imagined that from June until the middle of October, we would only be eating vegetables from our own garden: multi-colored summer squash souflee and barbecued okra, leeks and parsnips and carrots in a cabbage soup, eggplants in abundance, stuffed Napa cabbage, baby spinach and enough spicy greens and snap peas to feed an army, a cherry tomato tartine in gold, red, yellow and orange, a banquet of roasted fingerling potatoes, beans that never stopped giving, all flavored with garden herbs.
I prepared cold sweet cucumber soups with the added tartness of rhubarb and ate beets for the first time as part of a root vegetable medley. We decorated our salads with nasturtium and zucchini flowers. And corn, corn, corn – much of which never made it to the kitchen but eaten fresh off the stalk. A time for rejoicing indeed!
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Thank you to Daniel Bowman Simon for this guest post. Daniel is the founder of TheWhoFarm - a non-partisan initiative to inspire the 44th President to plant an organic farm on the grounds of the White House. Michael Pollan may have made the idea popular in his article, Farmer in Chief, last week, but The Who Farm is one of two organizations that has been pushing for a White House Organic Farm throughout the last exciting months of the election.
When Rosh Hashana rolled around last year, it was beyond my imagination that I’d spend Rosh Hashana this year in Albuquerque, New Mexico. But The White House Organic Farm Project, aka TheWhoFarm, brought me there.
A local resident named Wade Patterson had heard TheWhoFarm was coming to town. He emailed me a very spirited note, respectfully requesting that we join the Carnuel Road Parade in downtown Albuquerque, organized by Harwood Arts Center, where Wade works. We’d never been in a parade, the Harwood Arts Center is involved in some quite compelling urban renewal projects that involve community gardens, and the request had obviously come from Wade’s heart - so there was really no way, or no reason, to decline the request.
When Wade and I spoke on the phone in advance of our arrival, he mentioned that he’d like to have us over for dinner, but that he’d have to ask his wife first. And then he emailed again to invite me to a Rosh Hashana dinner. He explained that his wife was Jewish, but that he was not Jewish, and that there would be other non-Jews there. A sort of ecumenical New Year’s. Without even knowing I was Jewish, he’d invited me to a his Rosh Hashana table! In New Mexico! How often does that happen?
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Rabbi Julian Sinclair is an author, educator, and economist. He is also the co-founder and Director of Education for Jewish Climate Initiative, a Jerusalem based NGO that is articulating and mobilizing a Jewish response to climate change. Before starting JCI, Julian worked as an economist advising the UK Government and for a British political think tank. Meanwhile, he authored the book Lets Schmooze: Jewish Words Today and is working on completing a Phd in the mystical thought of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. Phew!
Sinclair lives in Jerusalem and has been featured on NPR and interviewed for the New York Times by our own Leah Koenig. Hazon is delighted to invite Rabbi Sinclair as a presenter at this year’s Hazon Food Conference, December 25-28, 2008.
Get a sneak peek at what Julian has to say below the jump. And find out more/ register for Hazon’s Food Conference, here!
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There’s a joke that all fun secular holidays have “Jewish” equivalents. Halloween has Purim, Christmas has Chanukah, etc. But Chanukah, in all its fried deliciousness, does not offer an opportunity to bake the mother of architectural sweets: The Gingerbread House. Now, the Jewish harvest holiday of Sukkot has stepped in to fill this wide gap in the Jewish culinary calendar with The Gingerbread Sukkah.
Boston resident Julia Greenstein (daughter of renowned baker, George Greenstein) makes gingerbread sukkahs every year with her family. These miniature “dwelling structures” are as temporary as their real-sized cousins - if only because they are irresistible to eat! Find out how she does it, and how you can build your own cookie sukkah below.
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What do halva, shakshuka, and attayif (cheese filled pancakes eaten by Muslims on Ramadan) have in common? They are all Israeli foods featured in The New Book of Israeli Food: A Culinary Journey. Nextbook recently sat down over dinner with author, Janna Gur, who is the founder and editor of Israel’s leading food and wine magazine, Al Hashulchan Gastronomic Monthly. Listen to a podcast of what she has to say here.
Purchase Janna’s book, filled with delicious recipes and stunning food photography, here
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As a teacher of Judaism, I am often at a loss to explain one of the most beautiful and yet most pagan Jewish rituals: the celebration of Sukkot with the four species (arba minim) of the lulav and etrog.
Sukkot is both a harvest festival and a creation festival, and these two aspects come together in the moment of the procession around the synagogue with the bounty of the earth. It’s a joyous moment befitting of Sukkot’s title of z’man simchateinu, the time of our happiness.
We read in Vayrika (Leviticus) 23:40: “And you shall take for yourselves on the first day [of Sukkot], the fruit of the beautiful tree, tightly bound branches of date palms, the branch of the braided tree, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days.” This has come to be understood as the four species used in the lulav: the fruit of the beautiful tree is a citron or etrog (a type of citrus fruit), together with palm leaves, three myrtle springs (the braided tree or hadass), and two willow branches (arvei nachal). During both the hallel service and the hoshanot processions, we wave the arba minim in celebration of God’s goodness.
But it does look a little strange. Growing up in a suburb with very few Jews, I always wondered what the neighbours thought we were doing schlepping tree branches and citrus fruit across town.
Tips to reuse your lulav and etrog below…
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We’ve extended your chance to win two bottles of amazing kosher wine from Covenant Wines! Read The Jew & The Carrot’s interview with winemaker, Jeff Morgan, and find out how to win his wine here.
Thanks to Kate McQuown Budabin for this guest post; Kate is a professional story teller specializing in Jewish-themed story times for young children. She lives in New York City (and, full disclosure, is our editorial intern’s mom).
One day when I was twelve, I toasted a slice of bread over the gas flame on a pancake turner, buttered it, spooned on a layer of cinnamon sugar to melt into it, went to heaven while I gobbled it down, and returned to earth to make another … and another… and another…until the loaf was gone. Fifty years later, I can still taste that gritty richness.
My whole life I’ve been an appreciative and melodramatic eater. When I was 26, I nibbled my way through a tureen of 40 mussels after a hearty lunch. At 29 and pregnant, my regular lunch involved two sandwiches, a bag of carrot sticks, an apple, an orange, a bran muffin or a couple of oatmeal raisin cookies with extra bran, and a little box of raisins—I knew I needed lots of iron! Cooking was an act of love, and eating was an act of pleasure. Not eating felt like denying myself love – not moderation, but deprivation. I feel similarly about eating food that’s just adequate – why waste a meal? And I refuse to eat anything that actually tastes bad to me, whatever the supposed health benefits.
Then, at 40, after two years of intense thought and preparation, I went to the mikveh, where I became a Jew moments before our children. Soon after, I began carting boxes of pots and bags of silverware to the keilim mikveh, part of making my kitchen kosher. I bought different sponges for washing meat and dairy dishes. “blue for moo, and red for dead,” my husband George quipped.
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As a kid, anything edible held my attention. Sukkahs, charged with dappled light and dedicated to the harvest, seemed to combine all of my interests into one sacred space. I’ll never forget the excitement I felt, standing alone in the autumn-smelling sukkah, under a ceiling hung with fresh, growing foods; and I’ll never forget my disappointment, year after year, at the sight of apples, squash and blue corn wizening and rotting on their strings.
Now that I’m a full grown canner, it occurs to me that the sukkah, with it’s commandments for good air circulation, more shade than light, and it’s tradition of hanging edibles, is a perfect place to preserve for the cold months. After all, turning sukkot decorations into food is already a tradition—Etrogs make it into wine or brandy after the celebration’s over.
Below, you can find some tips and recipes for celebrating God’s gift of food and shelter through the year.
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Thanks to Rachel Saks for this guest post. Rachel is a personal chef and Master’s candidate at NYU for Nutrition and Dietetics.
The harvest holiday of Sukkot does not have a mascot food like Chanukah and Purim; the closest it comes is the tradition to eat stuffed vegetables. We know why we make latkes and hamentaschen, but why do we stuff vegetables (and everything else) on Sukkot?
The most traditional reason given for stuffing foods is that the stuffing symbolizes the bounty of the harvest; yet for most of us, this is not the time of year in which the harvest is most bountiful. Many of the foods that are harvested at this time of year, such as apples, grapes, and potatoes are actually foods that can be eaten during the long winter ahead and do not bring about the same youthful, unrestrained joy as do sweet corn and juicy peaches in July and August.
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