Like many foodies, I imagine, I’m always experimenting in the kitchen. Chocolate and tea are favorite exploratory ingredients, but with Rosh Hashanah just around the corner lately I’ve had apples and honey on the brain. So yesterday afternoon I decided to take a break from schoolwork by playing around with my recipe for Honey-Vanilla Challah. A few hours later I had a woven round loaf of Apple-Honey Challah sitting on the kitchen counter. This was the ‘test loaf’ that, if delectable, would make a return appearance at Rosh Hashanah dinner. Shown above sliced and covered in blueberry-peach butter, I’m happy to report that this challah was a scrumptious combination of three Rosh Hashanah symbols: apples, honey and round challah goodness. An encore is definitely in order.

Shabbat challot are usually baked into braids made with three, four or six strands of dough, and according to Gil Marks the resulting spiral symbolizes the ascent to heaven. But on Rosh Hashanah challah is shaped into round loaves of bread whose circular form represents the continuity of life. Other festival shapes include crowns (symbolizing God’s place as ruler of the universe), ladders (recalling Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28:10), keys (symbolizing the gates of heaven) and on Yom Kippur, a bird shape (symbolizing the forgiveness of sins and that one’s prayers soar to heaven.) I’ve included instructions for making round loaves of challah, woven loaves and the traditional braid here. If the kitchen spirit moves you, I say go with it!

Ask the average American to name a Jewish bread and there’s a 50% chance they’ll say bagels. But what is it that has made bagels a poster-child for Jewish baking? There is more than one answer to this question, the most popular attributing the creation of bagels to a Jewish baker living in 1683 Vienna. According to folklore, this unnamed man invented the bagel as a tribute to King John III Sobieski of Poland, who had saved the city from Turkish invaders with a daring cavalry charge. This story has led some to believe that bagels were originally U shaped like stirrups. However, other historians dispute this claim, arguing that the Yiddish word ‘beygal’ has been traced to 17th century Crackow, Poland. It is here that an official document of ‘Jewish Community Regulations’ - dated to 1610 - listed ‘beygals’ among the approved gifts for women in childbirth or midwives. These beygals were circular like our modern bagels, and the shape was thought to symbolize the eternal cycle of life, with no beginning and no end. Whatever their origin, what we do know for certain is that bagels were brought to North America by Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in the late 1800’s where they quickly gained popularity in New York City. Yet the bagel appreciation that is so much a part of American culture today didn’t begin to take shape until the 1950’s, when Lender’s began selling them to supermarkets. Hard to believe America’s love affair with bagels & cream cheese is only fifty odd years old, but there it is!

Click here to learn how to make bagels in your own home - it’s surprisingly easy! (Also don’t forget about the Baking and Books raffle - only 8 days are left!)

The other day it occurred to me that my relationship with food is an ever changing one. The foods that delighted me as a child have lost some of their mystic in my adult years. Lollipops are nothing more than a sticky mess waiting to happen, while bags of Chips Ahoy cookies have lost their luster in the wake of homemade coconut biscotti or beignets. Looking back I realize these changes began when I moved into my first apartment and, faced with an barren kitchen and an empty stomach, began my love affair with cooking and baking. Little by little pre-packaged foods became a thing of the past, and I happily hovered in this state of from-scratch-eating until this past May, when I began working at Hazon. Since that momentous first day in Hazon’s office - not to mention our Cleanse experience - my relationship with food has changed once again. I still cook and bake, but I’ve also become a vegetarian by default - by which I mean that I still love my steaks and relish a good burger, but will only eat ethically raised/slaughtered meat, which is woefully difficult to come by in today’s commercial market. Our produce is organic now too, as is our milk, and the resulting rise in our weekly grocery bill made me marvel at how all the discounts you get with a ‘grocery store card’ are for cheap, processed food.

In a recent interview with chef and author Rick Bayless I had the opportunity to explore this developing relationship with sustainable, seasonal foods. When I wasn’t admiring his awareness of the environment, and our relationship to it through food, I was imagining the delectable dishes that must grace the tables of his restaurants as a result. He gave me much food for thought, sharing his views about farming while discussing his Frontera Farmer’s Foundation: Read more »

Every now and then I’m struck by the sheer awesomeness that is the Internet. What once would have taken at least twenty minutes of searching through library card indexes (not to mention driving to the library and maybe even a paper cut) now requires no more than a few seconds of our time. From the average annual rainfall of the Amazon rain forest (9 feet per year, in case you’re wondering) to how to make firecrackers (the carrot kind, not the exploding kind) - it’s all right there, at our fingertips. This is all quite impressive if you stop to think about it, but it wasn’t until last Friday that I realized just how many things the internet can make possible, because it was then that a crazy notion sprung into my head. You see, the 2007 Jewish Environmental Bike Ride is just around the corner and I wanted to fundraise for it - but how could I do so when I wouldn’t be attending the actual event?

I decided to email the folks over at Hyperion Books, Chronicle Books & Ten Speed Press with an idea. If I held a fundraising raffle on my blog, would they donate cookbooks for the prizes? To my surprise, they said yes, generously donating more than 50 books between them. And it is that glorious news that I bring to all you book lovers out there, not to mention those of you who just plain love Hazon and want to take part in a fun online event.

From now until September 3rd I will be fundraising for the Jewish Environmental Bike Ride on my site, Baking and Books, where a donation of only $5 enters you into a raffle with an inspiring collection of cookbooks as prizes. As of this moment there are 56 prizes, most of which are being sent to my tiny apartment until winners are picked on the last day of the ride. So please, donate now! Enter the raffle and ensure that, come September, my home won’t have been completely overrun by cookbooks. (Ok, so it already is overrun thanks to my personal book collection, but you don’t want things to get any worse do you? Do you??)

Click here to find out more about the raffle, and also, take a gander at the prizes so far…

Itemized list of prizes:

• “Nigella Express” by Nigella Lawson - 10 copies available
• “The Vegetable Dishes I Can’t Live Without” by Mollie Katzen - 10 copies available
• “Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook” by Jaime Oliver - 10 copies available
• “Roast Chicken and Other Stories” by Simon Hopkinson - 10 copies available
• “Secrets of a Jewish Baker” by George Greenstein - 2 copies available
• “The Perfect Scoop” by David Lebovitz - 2 copies available
• “A Passion for Ice Cream” by Emily Luchetti - 2 copies available
• “Tartine” by Elisabeth Prueitt - 2 copies available
• “Cupcake Deck” by Elinor Klivans - 2 copies available
• “Classic Stars Desserts” by Emily Luchetti - 2 copies available
• “Best Bake Sale Ever Cookbook” by Barbara Grunes - 2 copies available
• “Southern Cakes” by Nancie McDermott - 2 copies available

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog posting to bring you this brief announcement: “The Jew and the Carrot” has been nominated for two Bloggers Choice Awards! If you have a moment and are so inclined, please vote for us in the “Best Food Blog” category and the “Best Religion Blog.” You can do so by clicking on the Bloggers Choice images in the sidebar, or by clicking on the links below:

* The Jew & The Carrot totally rocks! I’m voting for them in the Best Food Blog category. Click.
* The Jew & The Carrot is the best! I’m voting for them in the Best Religion Blog category. Clickity click.

Thank you for your support! And now, back to our regularly scheduled posting…

Frequent readers of ‘The Jew and the Carrot’ know that Hazon’s staff recently returned from a Cleanse on Fire Island with author Halé Sofia Schatz. It was, to say the least, a unique experience. Below is an excerpt from my post about it on Baking and Books :

… Now, I realize that when I say “food cleanse” you likely have no idea what I’m talking about and I know this because that was precisely my reaction when, two weeks ago, my boss told me that I would be organizing the entire event. A cleanse, you say? What could that mean? Bathing in fruit juices? Avocado face masks? I hadn’t a clue. But it turns out that a “food cleanse” - at least, one run by Halé Sofia Schatz - is all about eating healthfully and cleansing our bodies of the “toxins” we ingest every day. Sugar, caffeine, refined flour, chocolate, dairy - Halé believes that all these foods are not only difficult to digest but also put toxic substances into our systems…

… On June 14th the Cleanse experience officially began when I headed out to Fire Island with several heroic staff members. Our mission: to haul five days worth of organic produce to the beach house we’d be living in (no cars are allowed on Fire Island so this was done by hand-pulled wagon) and to kasher the kitchen. Phyllis Bieri, whose house we were using, wrote a fascinating post about the kashering process, as did my co-worker Leah Koenig, so I won’t go into that here, but suffice it to say that by evening we were knackered. Not only had we transported an incredible amount of food and thoroughly done over a kitchen, but we had done so while remaining faithful to our pre-Cleanse diets. This was a feat, especially when you consider how we passed Rachel’s Bakery on each trip to and from the boat dock. Behold the awesome power of peer pressure, by which I mean that, had I been making these trips alone, I would have been seriously tempted to duck into Rachel’s for a bite of contraband cookie. (Ok, I was tempted anyways, but I didn’t do it. Which is what matters. Ahem.)

Read the rest of this post by clicking here…

You know you’re addicted to blogging when, despite spending much time on your own site, you jump at the opportunity to also blog on someone else’s. That is my story, and this first post on JCarrot is an introduction of sorts - which is another way of saying that Leah asked me to write a little about myself and my mind promptly went blank. Ahem.

My name is Ariela and I’ve been writing about food on my blog, Baking and Books, since September ‘06. For me, food has been a tremendous means of exploration. I’ve learned about my family’s history by speaking with my grandmother and researching dishes she grew up with in Mexico City, and about other cultures as I’ve delved into their recipes and the stories behind them. I have a Masters degree in Jewish Studies from Columbia University and am currently a graduate student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, so it should come as no surprise that Jewish cuisine is a particular fascination of mine. From honey-vanilla challah to Transylvanian Pongyolas Alma to making pita in the desert, food has transformed the way I look at Judaism and Jewish culture. I hope you will join me on that journey as I share new recipes and bits of culinary history here on JCarrot.org. I’m thrilled to be joining Hazon’s community and look forward to learning more about you in the comments!