Rabbi Rebecca Joseph is a conservative rabbi, a cultural anthropologist, and a Tuv Ha’Aretz member! Her blog, The Parve Baker is filled with delicious recipes and (equally delicious) words of Torah.

Like a lot of other people at Hazon’s third annual food conference, I found myself shopping at the Farmers’ Market on Sunday morning. I hadn’t really planned to do this, but when someone asked me to meet there – I can’t even remember for what – I had difficulty resisting the urge to pick up a few things. Alright, quite a few things. Chocolate, coffee, maple syrup, red cabbages, onions, garlic, kiwis, and Granny Smith apples. All organic and sold by or fairly sourced directly from the producers. In other words, perfectly virtuous foods.

Then there were the cookies. When I picked up two bags of faux-cream filled chocolate sandwiches at the table of overstock from the conference kitchen, the volunteer on the other side glanced over at me suspiciously. I explained that I’m a baker and would use them for pie crust sometime soon. That didn’t lead to further conversation, so I placed my donation in the honor box and moved on.

Rabbi Rebecca Joseph is a conservative rabbi, a cultural anthropologist, and a Tuv Ha’Aretz member! Her blog, The Parve Baker is filled with delicious recipes and (equally delicious) words of Torah. This is her third installment of “Unboxed” – posts that demystify seasonal produce. See her first post on rhubarb and her second post on leeks.

The economy is surely suffering, but this season’s nuts are in at my local farmers’ market and I couldn’t be happier. Did I really spend twenty minutes poring over just one grower’s almonds today? Absolutely, but we were mostly talking. About almonds, of course.

Along with some of my other favorite culinary nuts like macadamias and cashews, almonds are not true nuts at all, but the edible seeds of stone fruits. They have more in

Rabbi Rebecca Joseph is a conservative rabbi, a cultural anthropologist, and a Tuv Ha’Aretz member! Her blog, The Parve Baker is filled with delicious recipes and (equally delicious) words of Torah. This is her second installment of “Unboxed” – posts that demystify summer’s most seasonal produce.  See her first post on rhubarb.

There is something very special about the first pick-up of the Tuv HaAretz CSA season. Having invested in a farmer’s harvest-to-come in the cold dark of winter and then waited patiently through the spring, the initial sight of tables piled high with the first produce of the season is a delight in the midst of the densely built environment. No wonder our ancestors were enjoined to bring offerings of first fruits to the Temple in gratitude for the blessing of the earth’s bounty!

At Congregation Ansche Chesed in New York City last week, new and returning Tuv HaAretz members gathered shares of vegetables, fruit, flowers, and eggs from Eve and Chris Kaplan-Walbrecht’s Garden of Eve farm. Early summer greens prevailed. Red lettuce, mesclun, and arugula went into bags and boxes of all shapes and sizes along with elegant asparagus spears, bunches of red radishes, and a single stalk of rhubarb each. Then there were the leeks. Sturdy and humble in appearance, these gangly onion and garlic cousins fit awkwardly among the leafy beauties.

Rabbi Rebecca Joseph is a conservative rabbi, a cultural anthropologist, and a Tuv Ha’Aretz member! Her blog, The Parve Baker is filled with delicious recipes and (equally delicious) words of Torah. Over the summer, she will spearhead The Jew & The Carrot’s “Unboxed” segment – periodic posts that aim to demystify summer’s most seasonal produce.

A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting my cousin who lives year-round in a largely rural, but fast-developing part of Bucks County in southeastern Pennsylvania. Beth is a great cook and friendly with several local farmers. We stopped by Jim and Kathy Lyons’ Blue Moon Acres for organic micro-greens and spent a morning in the lavender fields at Carousel Farm with another organic grower, Niko Christou. At None Such Farm Market, which sells produce grown across the road and on other nearby farms, we acquired asparagus and rhubarb, the true harbingers of harvests-to-come in the Northeast.