Sasha Perry reports from the Food Conference for JTA – see her story below:

(If you have a good internet connection, when the video is playing you can click on the arrow in the bottom right corner and switch to ‘watch in high quality.’)

Thanks, Sasha, for telling so many of the stories of the Hazon Food Conference! Have your own memory you want to share? Leave your comments below.

I looooooove popcorn. But I hate the smell of microwave popcorn, especially how it sticks to my hands for days after I actually pop it. But I don’t have a good pot for popping on the stove, and I don’t want a gadget that only pops popcorn and serves no other function. What’s a girl to do?!

Apartment Therapy to the rescue!

It was just my birthday, so if anyone wants to send me a popcorn-related birthday present, I receive mail — and Hazon will be happy to accept donations to help support “The Jew & The Carrot,” your favorite blog — at the following address: 45 West 36th Street, 8th Floor, NYC 10018.

Over at Mixed Multitudes we’ve been running a Jewish food tournament based on March Madness for the past few weeks, and we’re down to the final four. Right now it’s latkes vs. brisket, and early next week we’ll see Challah vs. lox and bagels before the championship matchup. I’m so excited!

I encourage you to head over and vote for your favorite, but Jeremy, who’s running the tourney, wants to make it very clear that we’re voting on which is the most Jewish food, not the food we like best. Since you can get latkes at any diner, to me they don’t scream Jew, but hey, vote however you like. Cast your ballot!

According to the New York Times, the Obamas’ personal chef who “happens to have a particular interest in healthy food and local food,” is moving to Washington.

Mr. Kass’s appointment signals changes at the White House that should please chefs like Alice Waters, who have lobbied the Obamas to set an example for the rest of the country by emphasizing food that is healthy, local and sustainable. It further suggests that a vegetable garden on the White House grounds, another of Ms. Waters’ dreams, could be on the horizon.

Reports released this week disclosed that many foods made with high fructose corn syrup are contaminated with mercury, and that the FDA has known about this since 2005. Testing on supermarket foods with HFCS found detectable levels of mercury in nearly a third of products with HFCS.

Meanwhile, the Corn Refiners Association stands by its assertion that corn syrup is safe. And yes, the FDA did recently give the corn industry permission to refer to corn syrup as a “natural ingredient.”

From friends and neighbors of mine, right here in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn - Cookin’.

Please note – I’ve rated these clips PG-13 for language…consider yourself warned!

Liz Alpern, publisher of New Voices magazine and Challah baker extraordinaire tells us a bit about Cookin’:

The local food movement has been all about buying seasonal food from nearby farmers. Now, thanks to the Web, it is expanding to include far-away farmers too.

Click here for the whole story.

Is there a contradiction here?

Umami is so hot right now. Barbara Kingsolver talked about it in her food movement tome “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”, NPR covered it, it’s been scientifically proven, and now it’s basis of a new Kikkoman advertising campaign, one that tells folks they can add umami to any dish to make it dazzling.

So what is umami? It’s glutamate, a non-essential amino acid that breaks down proteins in food. It also has the effect of exciting the neurotransmitters in human brains. When it’s bound to other amino acids, as in whole foods like tomatoes, asparagus, cheeses and meats, it has no adverse effects and makes life better from the tongue on down. When it’s free-floating though, as it is when used as an additive in the form of Monosodium glutamate and it’s many incarnations, in any savory processed food, and, unfortunately, in some delicious by-products like brewer’s yeast, that old neurotransmitter stimulation gets out of control. In up to 25 percent of the population (depending on your source, of course), MSG can cause side effects from over-stimulation of neurotransmitters. The side effects include a range of neurological and cardiac responses from the mild and incident-specific to the life-inhibiting and permanent, depending on the person doing the eating and the amount that they consume. (This article has a list, though I can’t vouch for or against their sources)

One of my favorite things about Hazon’s Food Conference is that it inspires people to do something more after they leave. That “something” can be any number of things, from composting, to joining a CSA, to vowing to cook more meals at home.

While I am already a CSA-belonging, farmer’s market-shopping, frequent cooking, recycling, composting, herb-growing kind of person, I was curious to see what effect the conference would have on my husband.

He is an enthusiastic omnivore, to be sure, and is completely supportive of all my efforts to live more sustainably. He mostly came to the conference to support his executive committee member wife, and to see for himself what this Hazon thing was all about.

I had my hopes, though, which I didn’t exactly keep a secret. My husband has been an on and off home-brewer for years. In the past year, he and his friend Michael have taken it up together, starting what they call “East Bay Lovin’” in Michael and his wife’s San Francisco apartment (why it’s called East Bay Lovin’ and is brewed in San Francisco is a story for another day). My hope was that he would attend the sourdough workshop at the conference, and come home equally interested in this other kind of fermentation.

While there is certainly a kosher meat crisis on our hands and many families are struggling to feed their families meat, it was still disconcerting to read the January 20th KosherToday report, especially the section titled “Agriprocessors Limps Back to Life.”   

According to the weekly kosher news report written and distributed by Menachem Lubinsky of Lubicom Industries, there are rumors that “the bankrupt Agriprocessors will soon begin the kosher slaughter of turkeys and that it is only a matter of time that the plant will also resume the shechita (kosher slaughter) of calves.” 

Rabbi Julian Sinclair didn’t lose a minute at the Hazon Food Conference in December. Not only did he speak on Rav Kook’s vision of kashrut and vegetarianism, mediate the latke hammentashen debate and lead a Food for Thought discussion group on bensching after meals, he also participated in the turkey schechting on the day before the conference began, where 18 turkeys were slaughtered for Friday night dinner.

It may have passed under the radar for those who missed the Hazon Food Conference, but Hekhsher Tzedek, the ethical certification seal for the kosher food industry, has now evolved into Magen Tzedek. The name change serves a number of purposes. Aside from easing arguments over spelling, dropping the term hekhsher would better enable the seal to be applied to products that aren’t food.  The main motivation behind the name change however, is to allow the seal to coexist with other rabbinic kosher seals. Orthodox supervision organizations such as the OU were none to happy at the thought of a rival Conservative hekhsher telling them that their meat was kosher. In the meantime, it seemed like the founder of Hekhsher Tzedek, Rabbi Morris Allen, was spending half of his time explaining that the new seal was not intended to be a rival kashrut certification but an ethical seal. Thankfully, after discussions with the OU the parties have agreed on a new name. You can read more about Magen Tzedek in the official press release, or in this article from the JTA.

The Hazon food conference was my first trip out to California, and boy did I fall in love. After a few days hiking in Big Sur, where sheer cliffs dropped down hundreds of feet to the blue ocean, foam rising rhythmically around small mountains of eroded rock, stretching as far as we could see, I drove North to San Francisco to visit friends. These particular friends had made the move from New York a year before, and they accepted me and my travel buddy on their futon with only a few days notice. At the very least, I owed them breakfast, and in honor of my new surroundings, I tried a new dish.

Our baked eggs that day were made from what was available at the Ferry Plaza farmer’s market. Baked eggs make a very easy, and pretty impressive main course for brunch. They’re versatile as far as seasonality, since eggs, cheese and cream are year-round commodities, and the casserole on the bottom of the dish can change depending on the veggies currently in season. In December in San Francisco, our eggs included mustard greens, spring onions, shitake mushrooms and canned tomatoes preserved with garlic and a few leaves of basil. When I returned to New York in early January, I made my next batch with potatoes sauteed with garlic, onions, lots of ginger, kale, more preserved tomatoes and a few flax seeds sprinkled in for good measure.

According to Raymond Sokolov’s book, Why We Eat What We Eat, “Before Columbus, there were no apples in the Americas. Settlers brought seeds and grafts, hoping to recreate their old way of life.”  Any American who has ever given a teacher an apple (or seen a movie where such an exchange occurred), uttered the words, “an apple a day…” or traversed the produce section of a grocery store or farmers’ market knows that those early settlers succeeded, big time.  It’s a good thing too, because, as the apple wove its way into American life and culture, delicious things occurred – like the apple crisp.

Homemade apple crisps arguably rank among the humblest desserts on the planet, containing nothing more than fruit, fat, sugar, and flour. I like that in a sweet.  With a crisp, there is no need for the bells and whistles of a layered trifle.  They don’t require batter to be scooped evenly onto baking sheets like a cookie and, unlike making crème brulee, there’s definitely no blow torch necessary. It is undoubtedly the crisp’s heimish (Yiddish for “homey” or “comfortable”) nature that makes it a Shabbat dinner favorite, served either as a dessert or during the meal as an alternative to kugel.

That said, because of their simplicity, people sometimes classify crisps as a bit boring – like the cousin you invite over to eat out of obligation, rather than his or her sparkling wit and dinner conversation.  But gussied up with just a touch of crystallized ginger and a scoop of freshly whipped cream, the apple crisp holds its own at any table.

Find more photos and my recipe for Apple and Pear Crisp below the jump…