So, this year marked my first Thanksgiving as a newly wed in New York.  After all the amazing simcha of engagement parties, auf rufs (we had two), the wedding, and sheva brachot celebrations over the last month, a very small {quiet} Thanksgiving dinner with our downstairs neighbors seemed like a good way to detox.  Maybe there’d be a little Boggle, maybe a little football watching, and perhaps some crafting and good beer drinking.  But fuss?  That was definitely not on the menu.

My husband, Yosh, was psyched to make his first turkey - a Wise Organic Pastures (kosher, organic, free-range) 14 pounder stuffed with sage and oranges.  I was in charge of sweet potatoes, biscuits, a citrus, avocado, and raddish salad, and seasonal dessert of some kind.  Simple enough except, as a milchigtarian, I am used to having butter, milk, and cream as my building blocks.

I turned to my cookbooks looking for parve inspiration, and was delighted to find this amazing recipe for vegan caramel apple spice cupcakes in the pinnacle of all vegan cookbooks (thus far), Veganomicon.  Moist (very moist!), incredibly sweet, and studded with chunks of caramelized apple, they were the perfect end to a relaxing Brooklyn Thanksgiving.  I doubt that author, Isa Chandra Moskowitz, intended for the recipes in her vegan treasure trove to accompany kosher meat meals, but I was certainly thankful to find them.

Check out the recipe below the jump…

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Guest Post by Lizzi Jill Honeyrose Heydemann

eli’s note: I just posted about PresenTense’s online debates, the first of which is on the eternal Jewish food question: latke or hamentaschen.  Here is one person’s take on the matter.

The Debate that Really Matters

I arrive 45 minutes early, and the line is already out the front door, around the block and halfway down the street.  This seems highly irregular.  I’m at the University of Chicago, after all, a place whose general agoraphobia is captured by mottoes like, “The U of C: Where fun comes to die,” and “That’s all well and good in practice, but what about in theory?”   It is fricken’ cold outside on this November 25th eve, and pretty close to finals.  What Hillel event could possibly attract such a wide and diverse audience– undergrads, business, law and medical students, Jews and non-Jews, community folk and random locals– and have them waiting out in the cold for an hour before the event?

More below the jump!

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Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving…  I’m over it already.  How about a little Hanukkah versus Purim?

PresenTense Magazine—a collaboration of people working together from all over the world to explore Jewish creativity—is taking a step forward technologically with the launching of its online debates (which will be about issues covered in the magazine).  At the same time, with its upcoming issue, PT is grounding itself in the most basic of subjects: food.

So, the first online PT Debate is, of course: the latke or the hamentaschen?

Visit the PresenTense Debates site to add your comments, and subscribe or order their Food Issue in mid-January here.

And of course, happy Thanksgiving!

(x-posted at Jewcy)

Watching Chef Sandy Stollar cook is kind of like having front row seats at the Daytona 500. Born in Queens to a Colombian-Argentinean Jewish family, Stollar embodies all the fast-paced energy of a native New Yorker, and all the credentials to make it in the big city.

Unlike most (ahem, all?) kosher chefs, Stollar trained at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) and shined her knives at some of the best non-kosher restaurants in New York City (the Russian Tea Room, Osteria del Circo, etc.) More recently, she started her own private chef business called The Kosher Tomato, which caters to Jewish individuals and families across New York and New Jersey. She also teaches cooking classes at the Center for Kosher Culinary Arts in Brooklyn – a school which houses the first accredited kosher culinary training program in America.

Stollar, who was recently featured in the “Heeb 100,” is undoubtedly one to watch in the coming years. Below, she shares which foods she misses most from her pre-kashrut days, her thoughts on why kosher cuisine has such a sketchy reputation, and her favorite ways to make a nice piece of chicken.

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Right after the raid on Agriprocessors, there was a large public outcry about the immigrant workers who were not only facing prosecution, but also left without any income source and struggling to make rent in the sleepy town of Postville, Iowa.

According to Ben Harris at the JTA, hard times have hit the rest of the Agriprocessors community, including the Rabbis who worked for the company as shochtim (kosher slaughterers), their families, and the network of Jewish services (a synagogue, kosher market, etc.) that sprang up over the last decade to support the growing number of observant Jews in town.  According to Jeff Abbas, a local Postville radio worker, the majority of Agirprocessors’ rabbis haven’t been paid for 10 weeks.

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I was sorting through the mail this morning and an unusually thick envelope caught my eye. As a doctor’s family, we receive all kinds of mail from drug companies and hospitals, but this one was from the Corn Refiners Association. You may recall Leah’s rant in September about the corn syrup marketing campaign. Well, the corn syrup manufacturers have gotten together and sent every single member of the American Academy of Pediatrics a slick guide to high fructose goodness called “Changing the Conversation about High Fructose Corn Syrup.” It includes “The Top Published Myths,” an FAQ, and cute ads, with quotes about the safety of HFCS from medical journals, all sent straight to your kids’ doctor.

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LIFE Magazine has teamed up with Google to bring their incomparable treasure trove of archived photographs to the public (a totally brilliant venture).  The collection includes iconic historical snapshots, as well as lost moments in American history, like the ones below….

This first photo from 1948 features a model wearing “shoulder wings made out of turkey feathers” made by “bride Barbara O. Ehrhart” - that’s right, a turkey bride.  Having just gotten married a few weeks ago, and having just traveled to Alaska on my honeymoon (where animal skins, feathers, and fur are the primary clothing material), this photo holds particular relevance for me.

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t turn up much on who Barbara O. Ehrhart was - but Life does have another great shot of the turkey bride herself:

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Text and recipes: Nina Budabin-McQuown
Text and below-jump photos: Leah Koenig

Ah, Thanksgiving.  All across the country, families are gearing up to tuck into nearly identical plates of turkey (or a vegetarian alternative), mashed potatoes, green beans, and creamy yam casserole dotted with little white marshmallows.  But in this era of local-foods awareness, should all Thanksgiving dinner tables really look and taste the same from sea to shining sea?

The Jew & The Carrot set out to find out what a truly local holiday meal looks like, in three diverse parts of the country: New York, Florida, and California’s Bay Area.  We found that New York’s Thanksgiving dinner plate looked the most iconic and familiar, since it is geographically closest to the holiday’s colonial beginnings.  But we got the biggest thrill out of introducing new fruits like figs, grapes - and even avocados! - into a holiday meal that is second only to Passover in its insistence on standard repertoire fare.

Below the jump: find a delicious collection of recipes and ideas for three very different, very local Thanksgiving dinners.  And if you’re daring enough to stray from the delicious same old, same old - we’d love to hear how it turns out!

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 I admit it I love Thanksgiving.  Not that I really need an excuse to cook a big meal for family and friends but I love the idea of this food-centric secular holiday.  I also particularly love the challenge of bringing local farm-fresh seasonal foods to the table.  In years past I’ve roamed the farmers’ markets in advance to plot and plan my holiday menu.  I’ve ordered a turkey knowing it would come from a local farm and was humanely raised.  Without too much difficulty, I was able to prepare local and fresh feasts – in New York City.

But this year has presented an interesting challenge to cooking local – namely preparing a “traditional” Thanksgiving for my parents who live out in the country.   (And by “traditional” they mean Norman Rockwell turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, pumpkin pie with nary a vegetable save the green beans drowning in cream of mushroom soup covered in French fried onions.)  My folks live in a rural part of middle America surrounded by family farms, so I didn’t think it would be too hard to get some good local poultry.  How wrong was I!
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I always describe Bamba as “Israel’s Cheetos, with peanut butter instead of cheese.”  I can’t translate the line at the top of this Bamba package–help?–but it does refer to the States and the election.  An aleph and vav have been added to the name of the product, turning it from Bamba into Obamba.  Just thought I’d share.

(Can someone in Israel tell me if this is for real, and if they’re available in multiple flavors?)shabbat shalom

In today’s j. weekly, the Jewish weekly of Northern California, the upcoming Hazon Food Conference is the cover story. Co-chair of the conference, Zelig Golden, tends his backyard garden in Oakland in the cover photo. While the article focuses mainly on the conference, reporter Stacey Palevsky does an excellent job working Tuv Ha’Aretz and Adamah into the story too. Thank you Stacey!

The folks over at Jewlicious have posted an awesome Israeli rap video that shows how Jewish rap differs culturally from its LA or NYC-based counterparts. Instead of bouncing low-riders or tons of bling, the video revolves around food - namely the preparation of the classic sephardic tomato and egg dish, shakshouka. The song does have some MTV-esque elements (bikini-clad dancers and an occasional English expletive) that might make this video slightly NSFW, but the skills on display (both musical and culinary) by the artist BooSkills definitely make this single worth a look.

Thanksgiving can be a tough time for a vegetarian.  Sure there are a million delicious side acts to choose from, but the star of the show - that juicy, golden-brown turkey, straight out of Norman Rockwell’s fantasy - is strictly off limits.  But that’s no reason for meat eaters to have all of the fun.

I’m absolutely terrified at the thought of consuming a Tofurkey, and think its a bit of a cop-out to try to replicate and entire turkey for one’s vegetarian Thanksgiving table.  I’m also a bit scared to think that someone out there dreamed up the bacon-wrapped Turbaconducken. (It’s probably delicious - but come on people!)  Instead, here’s a delicious recipe for apricot-glazed tempeh & onions that will keep any vegetarian happy at the Thanksgiving table.

Below the jump: The recipe and a bonus Thanksgiving surprise! Keep your eyes peeled next week for more Thanksgiving recipes.

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I’ve always believed that keeping kosher was not just a way of creating Jewish identity, but also a way to create a society attuned to the earth. After years of wondering why some animals are kosher and others are not, I found an ecological explanation for these rules (see section VI). I’m sharing it with the hope of getting some feedback.

I. Why do we keep kosher? I want to open up this question by taking a look back to parshat Noach. Usually when we think of the Noah story, we think about how Noah’s family was given permission to eat animals (read more about this on neohasid.org and on jcarrot. ) But parshat Noach is also the first place where we (that is, all humanity) are given laws restricting how and what we eat.[1]

Even though the laws about keeping kosher, kashrut, may seem like the most specifically Jewish of practices, they have their origins in this “Noachide covenant”, where the first restrictions on eating are described. Those restrictions are to not eat a limb from a living animal and to not eat the blood of an animal. Both are the basis of many kashrut rules.

The Noah story is also the first time the distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘unclean’ animals is mentioned (Noah is told to bring seven of the pure (tahor) animals, which are the ones we call kosher.) So even the least universal aspect of kashrut, the “cloven hoof and cud-chewing mouth” requirement, has its roots in one of the Torah’s most universal stories.

That’s a good jumping off point for searching out the universal meaning of these culturally-specific, arguably parochial laws. Read more »