Thanks to Dvora Meyers for this great cross-post from her blog Unorthodox Gymnastics.  Dvora is a student/writer/gymnastics addict/b-girl wannabe living in New York City and the youngest child so she craves attention.

The other night after breaking practice, I went with my fellow b-people [break dancers] to eat some dinner. We ended up at Nussbaum & Wu, a bakery that serves basic, American cuisine, or as a Korean-American bgirl called it as she headed to an Asian store- “white people food.” Perhaps the bakery also serves non-white people food, but I didn’t make it over to the Wu side of the business. On the Nussbaum end, I ordered a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese. (Chosen not because it was the Jewiest thing in the store but for reasons of thrift- I had already spent four dollars on my lunch and this meal pushed me just slightly over my five dollar food per diem. Actually, now that I think about it, cheapness is just as culturally Semitic as a bagel.)

Are you at the edge of your seat yet? I know that a carb loaded dinner after an exhausting workout is hardly noteworthy, blogworthy or even Twitter worthy. But it was actually very thrilling, at least for me. I don’t get out much.

As I ate my bagel, alternating between listening and jumping into the conversational fray and in general , I kept flashing back to similar scenes from Dvora: the College Years.

Growing up, I always understood Charoset to be symbolic of the mortar used by the Israelites enslaved by Pharaoh in their building projects. The myth of the Israelites building the pyramids, using mortar which we recall on the seder plate, seems to have made a deep impression on me because when I see Mia Rut’s Charoset something just doesn’t seem right. Her (delicious) Charoset has the wrong texture – cookies can’t possibly be Charoset! despite having the same ingredients. So, if my family’s Charoset is like mortar, is hers more like brick?

Like everyone else, I have childhood memories of Seder Pesach. (In my grandmother’s cramped apartment in St. Paul, my great-uncle Al, who led the Seder, sitting at one end of the table in the bedroom; us kids squirming up against the living room radiator two rooms away at the other.) But when I think of Pesachs past, it is my adult memories of cooking for 400-600 in the kibbutz kitchen that immediately come to mind.

My family makes Passover a week of fresh veggies, but most of my friends will be filling up on meats and sweets and thus eating more fat, salt, sugar and cholesterol than usual. Here are some tips on lowering the fat and cholesterol in your own recipes, as well as two recipes of my own for which I reduce the amount of unhealthy ingredients.

In the field of calorie and fat reduction (the work I do for Rhode Island’s Public School System) we follow a four step system to make recipes healthier. Remember it is not necessary to eliminate all of the ingredients considered harmful. Small amounts of fat, sugar, salt, and cholesterol can actually be good for your system, so we are just looking to decrease the amounts of each, not remove them completely.

*Photo by Daniel Albanese

The Jew & The Carrot is a blog about Jews, food and contemporary life. We strive to maintain a diverse and inclusive community on the blog – one which welcomes posters and readers from across the Jewish denominational spectrum and beyond, and from all walks of culinary life…Our aim is to ensure that this community is inclusive and safe, as well as being a platform for vibrant discussion.

I thought this quote from the blog’s Community Guidelines was particularly relevant in my post last week, A “Traditional” Passover Seder or How to Make Everyone Happy Around Your Table.  One of the comments on my post came from someone who identifies herself only as J. who pointed out that I had conflated the words chametz (the five grains – wheat, rye, barley, oats and spelt, according to the torah are prohibited on Passover) and kitniot (which apparently can be literally translated as “little thing-a-ma-jigs,” that are also prohibited on Passover but are not chametz and are subject to debate as to what exactly falls into this category).  I was pleased to get such a correction through the blog as it taught me something new.

However, I will disagree with J.’s point that as a convert I don’t have minhag. As I do feel that I carry with me a minhag avot (traditions or as defined by Michael Makovi in the comments specifically as “what your forefathers did”).  Although I do not have a Jewish family, I still have a loving family and traditions that I was raised with.  Traditions that I have tried to incorporate, the best that I can, into my new Jewish life – which brings me to charoset.

The task seems simple enough: compose a vegetarian Passover seder. At the risk of sounding dismissive, going the Sephardic route is relatively easy. When you have a wide variety of grains and beans at your disposal, how hard can it be to compose a healthy and (more importantly) tasty holiday meal? But putting together an Ashkenazi vegetarian seder is a test of one’s mettle. The exercise brings to mind the work of writers like George Perec, who wrote La disparition, an entire novel without the letter e. The constraint may seem arbitrary and tyrannical, but there it is, work with it.

[And we’ll leave aside question of vegan seders to the pros, way too complicated. See Cecily Marbach Oberstein’s post for some tips.]

Growing up, dried fruits were always a background food, something on the table that was never really meant to be eaten, unless you were a senior citizen. Their untouchable status might have had something to do with their reputation as an antidote for the withering effects of all that matzo on one’s gastrointestinal system. No matter how graciously they were laid out on how elegant a platter, they were often still there, all alone on a plate, long, long after the afikomen had been found. Sometimes when cleaning out the pantry we would discover something resembling a deceased mutant rodent, last year’s leftover dried fruits. Then, the California Dancing Raisins arrived, and dried fruit burst into my lifestyle as a hip purveyor of my emergent adult identity – an organic vegetarian who eschewed cultural materialism.

Eda Goldstein’s recent post about vegetables grown entirely by elementary-school children presents one way in which farming can bind a community together.

Back in the 1930s, a world that “revolved around eggs, feathers and nightly meetings of the International Workmen’s Circle, the Jewish socialist organization” thrived in Petaluma, California, a small town then home to about 5000 people. Petaluma’s “unique American Jewish community of socialist farmers” raised chickens for their eggs, which were sold all over the USA. Their members “rejected the bourgeois institutions of marriage and organized religion” or “experimented with vegetarianism and anarchist ideas, growing their hair long and living communally”. Visitors to the town were greeted by a “giant, painted chicken” at the town’s entrance.

Three weeks ago, the lamb stand I work for got a new product. Eugene, the usually tactiturn farmer (except on his blog), was telling everyone who’d listen that lamb belly was the new pork belly; Frank Bruni or Mark Bittman, or some big shot at the New York Times, had said so. Good news for us. We were selling lamb bacon.

Being vegan made me feel focused, healthy, and proactive. That is except during Passover. I was neither focused nor relaxed on this holiday because I was hungry a lot of the time. Preparation is key for those of you who are about to celebrate the coming holiday and plan not to eat any animals or animal bi-products. On a normal day as a vegan I nourished myself with bean spreads, peanut butter, and an array of soy products. These are excellent everyday foods but all of these things include kitniyot which is a category of food not consumed by most Ashkenazi Jews during Passover. It is commonly understood that the avoidance of kitniyot is a stringency we place on ourselves to better shield us from mistakenly bringing home chametz. Examples of common kitniyot items are corn, rice, peas, beans and peanuts—i.e. major sources of protein for vegans. These foods have the potential to be ground up and made into a substance resembling flour.

“SALT.  No more than 5 kg of salt per pair of hands!!!!”

In early March, the supply of salt in Ukraine decreased slightly. There was still plenty of salt ready to be mined in the east. There was no government coup or nutritional crisis. There was just some hiccup in the mining process, and for a few days the supermarkets had slightly less salt than usual. No big deal, right?

Nearly every Thursday, I stop by a tiny farmer’s market that’s only open for two hours a week. Among the sellers with goods taken from the backs of cars and trucks and set up on makeshift stands is a jolly white-haired guy named Koby. Koby’s always got a few assorted bags of vegetables – sometimes carrots, sometimes cauliflower, beets or tomatoes. For just a few shekels, I can get several kilos of the sweetest peppers or tastiest potatoes I’ve eaten in a long time, and they’re all organic. Koby is always pushing his vegetables, even when he’s about to run out: “Try these carrots! They’re something special!”

The vegetables, it turns out, are grown by elementary schoolchildren.

Before, during and after the beginning of each month (Rosh Hodesh,) we make statements and prayers related to miracles.  On Rosh Hodesh Adar and Rosh Hodesh Nisan, it is particularly easy to see why.  Each month is marked by a holiday (Purim and Pesach, respectively) celebrating and commemorating miracles.  Almost every Jewish holiday or festival falls in the middle of the month and Rosh Hodesh marks the time when you’d better start getting ready for the upcoming holiday.  If you aren’t thinking about Pesach (Passover) yet, you haven’t been reading this blog much and you have some catching up to do.  The traditional observance of Pesach involves learning a lot of rules, cleaning a tremendous amount, inviting a lot of guests and a whole lot of cooking.

But Rosh Hodesh Nisan has another function, too.  In some communities, no Matzah is to be eaten from RH Nisan onward, in order to whet our appetites for Matzah at the Seder.  In other communities, this practice begins only the day before the Seder, but it is a lot more dramatic done the first way, and I have always had some questions about it.  I think this year I’ll follow the longer practice.  Did I mention Rosh Hodesh Nisan is tonight and tomorrow?