Ruti Abusch-Magder, a scholar-in-residence at the University of Chicago Hillel is doing outreach based around food and gender (sometimes together, sometimes not) and has set up a blog to promote and record what she’s up to.  The blog is pretty new so there isn’t much there, but she does have a post and a poll about the annual Latke/Hamentaschen debate which was started at UofC, and some interesting things to say about the origins of Israeli breakfast.  Head over to Challah Maven, vote for your favorite (latkes or hamentaschen) and stay tuned for more interesting discussions.

Growing up, one of my favorite foods was my mom’s Shepherd’s Pie.  It was a great comfort food, perfect for a blustery fall day, or a Shabbat dinner in February.  I loved Shepherd’s Pie so much that when I went milchigetarian my mom took mercy on me and made up a vegetarian version of her traditional recipe.  The veggie version is fantastic, and has satiated many a carnivore in its time.  An added bonus for both of these recipes: they’re completely kosher for Passover, too.  Sherpherd’s Pie is a great dish to serve on the sixth day of Passover when everyone is sick at the mere sight of matzah.

This week I was really craving Shepherd’s Pie, but over the years I’ve found that I despise making mashed potatoes.  My mom used to use some instant mashed potatoes, but I couldn’t see myself buying instant anything, and anyway, I was kind of in the mood for sweet potatoes, too.  My solution was to come up with a re-imagined version of Shepherd’s Pie.  Instead of mashed potatoes, I used a combination of sweet potatoes and Yukon gold potatoes, cubed and roasted.  Between layers of the roasted potatoes I had a nice thick layer of vegetarian ratatouille with fake ground beef.  Yum!

All three recipes below the jump!

(Cross posted at Mixed Multitudes)

Came across this awesome article about a Swiss choclatier named Blaise Poyet who has created a new chocolate inspired by John Calvin to honor Calvin’s 500th birthday:

He acknowledges the difficulty of representing theological ideas in taste, “But the key thing for Calvin is the glory of God, his excellence, his perfection. So we chose a chocolate that we chocolatiers find rare and flawless…” The Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches actually approached Poyet: one must hope they are satisfied:

“The first layer is based on a classic smooth and runny praline mix but we have “reformed” it by using crunchy caramelised hazelnuts, and salt from the Swiss Alps to make the praline slightly savoury.
The second layer uses a “chocolate Grand Cru from Bolivia”, made from 68 percent cocoa paste, to represent Calvin’s theology of the glory and perfection of God….”

Calvin’s hellfire beliefs are not, alas, represented by burnt bits, but “we have used a caramel made from Swiss cream that that slightly softens the chocolate to represent in a discreet way this love for one’s neighbour” Finally, a taste of lemon verbena, a perennial, represents Calvin’s ability to sow, to plant and to make things grow.

How completely awesome. It got us thinking at the MJL offices about how we’d represent various Jewish leaders in dessert format. Here’s what we’ve got so far:
Theodore Herzl–Lemon Meringue Pie
Because meringue seems to defy logic and gravity to become a sweet and wonderful thing. Also, you have to labor long and hard over it.

Some Jewish businesses and advertisements in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn were recently defaced. You might expect that they were defaced by anti-Semites, or maybe that the shops sold clothes deemed immodest by the Hasidic population of Williamsburg. But in fact, as Vos Iz Neias reported, the problem was food related:

The motivation behind the incidents is spiritual. Ads featuring highly detailed images of tantalizing food—and businesses hawking an unnecessarily wide variety of food, such a the now-shuttered Sub on Wheels once parked along a Williamsburg street—are seen as excessive and indulgent by austerity-minded activists, who are alarmed by what they see as an intrusion of secular, pleasure-oriented values into their community.

In two recent incidents, an enormous building-side banner advertising Grill on Lee, a new gourmet restaurant in the neighborhood’s heart, was sliced halfway, and a Satmar butcher shop with large photographs of dish-laden tables in its windows had those photos cut out.

The issue here is that some businesses are “hawking an unnecessarily wide variety of food” which is apparently a symptom of a larger problem: the “intrusion of secular, pleasure-oriented values into [the Williamsburg] community.”
I want to first say that my gut reaction here is just to write all of this off as completely ridiculous and move on. In fact, I’m already on the record with what accounts to a snort and an eye roll.

But I’d like to give this issue a little more attention.

(Cross posted on Mixed Multitudes)

Wednesday is Simchat Torah, which generally means dancing around with the Torah, watching little kids wave some flags they made in Sunday school, and lots of drinking.  Simchat Torah is second only to Purim in its association with alcohol.  I don’t think there’s any halakhic obligation to drink this week, the way there is on Purim, but if you walk into any synagogue on Tuesday night, you’re likely to see a bottle of schnapps or two (or six).  Now I like Schnapps, but I also enjoy mixed drinks, and thought I’d share some nice Jewish cocktail and shot recipes to help enliven your Simchat Torah celebrations.  Chag Sameach!

(Cross-posted at Mixed Multitudes)

I love sukkot, but one of the things that has always frustrated me about my favorite holiday is how wasteful and totally un-green it usually is.  Here’s a holiday where we’re commanded to live outside, to experience the outdoors in a personal and spiritual way, and we celebrate it with pounds of paper plates, plastic utensils and tablecloths, and even food decorations that basically amount to wasted food.

I would think that during sukkot we’d all be making an extra effort to be environmentally friendly, to leave a small footprint and all that, but in reality, I rarely see that happening.

I have some tips and ideas for those who want to try to re-green their sukkot, but I have to add the sad personal disclaimer that I won’t be able to employ most of these strategies myself this year.  Because of other things that have been going on in my life I haven’t been able to commit myself to making these changes right now.  I’m even ::cringe:: flying home for the first part of the holiday, which means that I’m feeling extreme guilt about my favorite Jewish holiday (and also buying a TerraPass to try assuage some of that guilt) and all of the carbon emissions I’ll be causing for my celebrations.  But for next year, here are some of my plans:
Tips after the jump!

A few months ago I wrote some tips on appropriate and helpful ways to bring food to someone who’s ill or grieving.  At the time, my mother (that’s her in the picture, with me at our dining room table in happier times) was in treatment for terminal cancer, and though we were grateful to have an amazing community providing food for us during such a difficult time, I often found myself guiltily throwing out some leftovers that had gotten shoved to the back of the fridge to make room for new offerings.  I suggested that people try to bring smaller portions.

Then, on September 9th, my mother passed away, and what had been a slight excess of food transformed into a mountain of baked goods, stacks of trays from kosher restaurants, and Tupperware as far as the eye could see.  From the very first day of shiva we were completely overwhelmed with food, and the same women who were coordinating people to bring us meals were having to sort through the fridge and toss or freeze the obscene amount of casseroles, cakes and random snacks that people were bringing when they came to visit with us.

One of the rules of sitting shiva is that the mourners should not prepare their own food, so we had expected to have meals for the week made and prepared by others, but we were not prepared for the sheer quantity of what we ended up with.  Among other things, we ended the week with an ant problem in our kitchen because there was so much food sitting out all the time.

Over all, I found shiva to be a difficult but incredibly healing week, and it was wonderful to have so many people showing us their support in so many ways.  Still, it frustrates me to see so much food go to waste, and some of the craziness that resulted from having other people run my kitchen for a week was no fun at all.  So, here’s some new tips and thoughts on bringing food to a shiva house.

Tips after the jump!

For many of us, apples and honey are an integral part of a Rosh HaShana celebration. But finding the right ‘apples and honey’ for your table is not always as simple as it sounds. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to dress up the tradition: from beautiful and funky honey pots, to a variety of honey options that go beyond the bear.

When it comes to honey pots, you can go with something traditional and very jew-y:

OR…….

It’s Sunday morning at 9:30 and my family has already been up for hours which, yes, I find somewhat disturbing, and means, among other things, that this might be a good time to make a real breakfast, instead of just to-each-his-own bowls of cereal or a quick French toast. We sometimes get in the mood for fancier breakfast fare, but I’ve become a bit of a zealot about not letting leftover challah go to waste, and I definitely want something sweet. Behold, Crème Brulee French Toast! It’s an incredibly easy recipe (no blowtorch required) that’s delicious and delightful.

Recipe (plus another recipe for particularly awesome bran muffins), after the jump!

Since the raid on the Agriprocessors plant on May 12th, bashing the kosher meat giant has become something of a sport. Everyone from the New York Times to failed messiah to yours truly has taken a few shots (some cheap, some well-deserved) at the Rubashkin family and the business they run out of Postville, Iowa.

I’ve never been big fans of the Rubashkin family. In fact, I called for a boycott of their meat in January, months before Uri L’Tzedek was on the case. But I’m getting a little frustrated with the way the scandal is being dealt with by liberal-minded people like me.

More, after the jump.

I had one of the worst days of my life today (definitely top ten, possibly top five) but things didn’t get really bad until I was midway through throwing together a ratatouille. I think it’s a testament to my recipe that basically forgetting the dish on a stove on high heat for a good twenty minutes while I panicked to the point of tears and probably aged a decade did not ruin the dish. In fact, though I was still a complete emotional wreck later in the afternoon, I was an emotional wreck with really good ratatouille for lunch. And if you’re going to be a bawling bundle of stress, you might as well be full of yummy CSA veggies.

I started making the ratatouille because I didn’t want any of our veggies to go to waste, but as far as I’m concerned the best thing about the dish is that it’s really filling, and makes an amazing alternative main course for vegetarians when everyone else is eating meat. I used to do the catering at the University of Iowa Hillel, and many a Shabbat there was chicken for meat eaters, ratatouille for the vegetarians, and nary a complaint. For anyone who worries about what to make for a vegetarian Shabbat meal, this recipe is for you.

Recipe after the break!

Little known fact: I was actually on the Food Network once. The show was an Al Roker on the Road special about food clubs, and I was featured in a segment about a group called Girl Friday in Iowa City. Unfortunately, the episode aired on the first night of Pesach in 2004, so I’ve never seen it.

We made a bunch of great recipes the night they filmed us, and one of them has become a standard in my kitchen. It’s really easy, gorgeous, and very tasty. The recipe comes from Thisbe Nissen, who co-wrote The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook, and is generally awesome. While we were boiling the beets she kept encouraging someone to use the water to dye her hair purple. Also, I’m pretty sure she got me to say on camera that beets are really sexy.

Anyway, this salad is perfect for brunch or Shabbat lunch. Adding the cheese at the end saves it from turning pink, but if you’re not bothered by fuschia cheese you can add it whenever you want.

Recipe after the jump!

When I have people over for Shabbat dinner during the winter I always make some kind of kugel as a side dish. But in the summer, nobody wants a warm kugel, so I have to come up with a nice rotation of cold salads that don’t bore me to death.

This one I got from my ex’s mom. She didn’t like that I was dating her son, but she really didn’t like that I had never cooked with black eyed peas, so she taught me this recipe, and it pleases guests long after I split with her little boy.

Recipe after the jump.

Coffee has been a staple of my diet since I was 14, and as much as possible I like to buy certified fair trade and organic coffee. Yes, it’s usually pricier, but I’m willing to pay a little more to invest in something I really believe in.

A friend recently turned me on to a coffee that’s not only organic, kosher and free trade, but it’s grown by a cooperative of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Uganda. The co-op is called Mirembe Kawomera, which means Delicious Peace in Luganda. You can buy the coffee off their website, for $10.50 for 12 oz. which comes out to almost ten cents less per ounce than some blends at Starbucks. And if you can arrange a big order for your community (20 lbs or more), prices go down even further, to $8.00 for 12 oz. Coffee that saves me money, is free trade, organic, kosher, and part of a project that promotes peace and interfaith initiatives? The only way it could get any better would be if it found me a boyfriend and cleaned the cat litter.