One of the strategies I use to make it through the eight long, flat, matzah-days of Passover is to fantasize about the challah I’m going to start baking as soon as the holiday is over.

I’ve made challah often enough in the past that even when I don’t bake for a while, I still have a strong sense-memory of what to do. But the week after Pesach—my first time back to baking challah in six months!—there was definitely an extra tingle in my fingertips when I plunged my hands into the warm, thick dough. I had to take a few extra breaths of the nutty-malty smell right at that moment when I add the sponge to the rest of the ingredients…It’s the smell of the anti-Pesach, the aroma of pure chametz, the yeast busy doing its magic, raising the roofs of a hundred (a thousand?) tiny bubbles in a bit of flour and water, sitting under the hot lights on my kitchen counter.

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Welcome back to the land of bread! I had a realization on Sunday night, around 6:30 (i.e. T-minus 2 hours to carb consumption, when I was locked in a state of restless self-pity) that Passover would be a perfect time to try a cleanse. After the original spirit and kavannah (intention) of the seder wore off, you could at least still congratulate yourself for detoxing. Perhaps - but I digress.

Two days after Passover, however, is definitely a great time to wipe off the final matzah crumbs and get your finger back on the pulse of what else that’s going on in the world of food. Check out these tasty ideas from around the blogosphere. B’tai Avon!

Sacred Foods. Aleph: The Alliance for Jewish Renewal published a compendium of resources to help Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious leaders educate about sustainable food and eating and make responsible food purchasing decisions in their congregations. The resource guide was created as part of Aleph’s Sacred Foods project. Find them here.

Carbon Side Dish. The New York Times reported this weekend on the strange-but-true phenomenon that it is not only possible but actually cost-effective to catch a fish in Norway, ship it to China to be processed into filets, and then shipped back to Norway for sale. oof - somehow, I’m not feeling all that hungry. Read it here.

Still Veggie After All These Years. Lilith Magazine talked with vegetarian guru, Mollie Katzen about the 30th anniversary of The New Moosewood Cookbook. (Unfortunately, the full story isn’t online, but you can purchase a copy the mag here.)

Drink Your (Raw) Milk. Harpers jumped on the raw milk bandwagon with a fabulous article on unpasturized dairy, its naysayers, and the converts who claim straight from the udder is the only way to go. Check it out here.

Sticker Shock. Grist offers a clear, concise analysis of the complicated issue of rising food costs. Read about it here.

Thanks to Yigal Deutscher for this guest post.

We have just begun the Sefirat HaOmer, counting off the direct correlation between Pesach & Shavuot, two celebrations separated by a string 50 days long. These are two moments in time, interwoven, yet at polar opposites. On Day 1, we have left bread behind, as Chametz. On Day 50, we are elevating bread as an offering in the Holy Temple, a sacrifice unique to the day of Shavuot. A serious transformation has just taken place.

The link between our starting point and our destination goal is food, bread in particular. This corridor of time marks the counting of grain ripening…from the start of the barley harvest to the start of the wheat harvest.

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After months of the largest religious party’s membership waffling on participation in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s coaltion - on issues as divisive as partitioning Jerusalem and a ceasefire with Hamas - Olmert might find his coalition collapsing over an unexpected blindside: matzah.

As the Forward reports, a landmark ruling by the Israeli court system abrogated a law illegalizing the sale of leavened bread during Pesach (NY Times article from 2001 on the chametz police here). The ruling cited that restuarants and stores are private property and thus not violating any “public display” of bread.

But further, the judge ruled that “Hametz prohibitions as they are outlined in the Halacha,” are not relevant. The secular law only prevents the display of goods that look like bread, such as “bread, rolls and pitas.”

Needless to say, the ultra-Orthodox are pissed. Read more »

One of my Jewish friends has recently submitted for public embarassment her life journey with food. Specifically, bread. Complete with great bread porn photos, her opening statement on her new blog, Second Dinner, eloquently opens:

I bake. A lot. This means that I inundate my roommates, friends, family, and co-workers with carb-heavy goods on a regular basis. Most are delighted, but several people have very valid misgivings, or wish that so much bounty was a little less available to them.

Like many Americans, I have a complicated relationship with food…However, the majority of my complicated relationship with food comes from negotiating other people’s complicated relationships with food. I have many friends who struggle with their weight, with cravings, with implanted complexes or insatiable desires. One brave and hilarious soul is merrily blogging about her weight-loss adventures, and spontaneously volunteered to link to this blog despite its food focus. My friends are big and small, actors and non-actors, generally hung up about their looks or not, and the food issues cross those lines in surprising ways, and don’t always crop up where I would expect.

Read the rest of her opening post here.

(x-posted at All Voices)

The AP reported this week that inmates in Vermont prisons are suing the Vermont Prison System for cruel and unusual punishment: disgusting dinner food.

Instead of the processed meat and cheese-heavy dinners served throughout most of America’s prison system, the worst offenders in Vermont (particularly those inmates with a history of disruptive and dangerous behavior at meal times) are served Nutraloaf: a mixture of cubed whole wheat bread, nondairy cheese, raw carrots, spinach, raisins, beans, vegetable oil, tomato paste, powdered milk and dehydrated potato flakes.

The prison system argues that the “square meal” is nutritionally complete. More importantly, because it can be served without utensils or trays, it doubles as an effective tool for behavior control. Speaking about Nutraloaf, Vermont Corrections Commissioner Rob Hofmann said:

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Tonight, a few friends are coming over for a pizza-making party - it seemed like an apporpriate activity for a random mid-winter night.  Meanwhile, last night was Purim katan (the mini-Purim celebration that occurs a month before regular Purim - and only on leap years when the month of Adar rolls around twice).

Something about the convergence of these two events must have released the crazy bug in me - because, as I was scanning cookbooks for a good dough recipe and shopping for ingredients (a combination of wilted broccoli rabe, toasted pine nuts, roasted garlic, red sauce, mozzarella and parmesan), a BRILLIANT IDEA hit me: pizzatashen!  Pizza dough, pizza ingredients, hamentashen shape - there really couldn’t be a more obvious culinary partnership.

I recognize that hamentashen - those little jam-filled, tri-cornered pastries, fall pretty squarely in the sweet category - cherry, poppyseed, ginger marmalade if you’re feeling bold.  Until the possibility of pizzatashen crossed my mind, I’d don’t think I’d ever used “savory” and “hamentashen” in the same sentence.  But once the initial kitsch factor wears off, this new cousin of the calzone seems long overdue.  If you’re feeling a little freaked out about the whole idea, check out this photo of another pizza-inspired pastry.  

And if you have other recipes/traditions for savory hamentashen - please share!  Check out the recipe for herbed pizza dough below the jump.

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(Hat tip to Jewschool .)

I believe in dinner plate feng shui.  There comes a time, right before dinner, when I take a few moments to select just the right plate or bowl on which to nestle the food I’ve made.**  (Since many of the dishes in my cupboard hail from Goodwill and/or roommates’ collections, I have any number of styles and patterns to choose from.)  

Now the folks at the decidedly non Jewish company, “Feed on the Word,” have added a whole different component into the mix of choices: Scripture Tableware.  As Danya at Jewschool wrote:

“…Several of the themed collections (at least “Praise,” “Psalms,” “Patriotic” and a few of the serving dishes) are comprised of all Old Testament pasukim, so maybe this could be a nice way to differentiate between milk and meat dishes.”

Here are the verses found on the “Praise” collection:

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