Not everyone suffers from this problem, but I personally have leftover holiday candy. Mine is a half bag of Sunspire chocolate drops, which I bought as dreidel game “gelt.” It turns out you don’t need an entire 10-ounce bag of M&M wannabes to play a good game of dreidel, and being one of the only women on the planet who does not require frequent intake of chocolate (some kind of hormonal imbalance, I’m sure), I had these things sitting around for the past two weeks.
I did notice them sitting there and I did think about snacking on them. Somehow, though, I couldn’t get into the idea of crunching down on the sugary candy shells and the room temperature chocolate inside.
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The joy of Diaspora is the variety of experience it brings into our tradition. Almost any kind of food has analogues in every tributary of Jewish heritage and candy is no exception. We’ve sifted through the internet and our cookbook collections to bring you Jewish candy recipes from Eastern Europe, South Asia and the Mediterranean, including, of course, the sticky and celebrated halvah, in its classic sesame rendition and with a serendipitous autumnal twist.
Raw Halvah
(From Arrowhead Mills)
1/2 cup Sesame Seeds (ground)
2 tablespoons Sesame Seeds (whole)
3 tablespoons Raw honey
1/4 cup Sesame Tahini (use the driest part of the jar)
1/8 teaspoon Almond extract
Grind 1/2 cup seeds in a blender. Mix ground seeds, whole seeds, tahini, honey and extract in a bowl all together until thoroughly blended. Roll into small balls or into a long roll and refrigerate.
More after the jump…
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Okay, okay - so Halloween isn’t exactly a “Jewish holiday.” But considering that the dominant theme on October 31st is chocolate (witches and goblins decidedly take a back seat to Snickers Bars and M&Ms), it seems like a perfectly good time to celebrate Jewish and Israeli chocolate makers. Over the last few years, the chocolate industry has grown significantly in Israel, with many new boutique chocolate stores and manufacturers popping up around the country. And in America, Jews continue to contribute to the industry, creating some of the world’s most renowned chocolate.
Below the jump, we’ve compiled a list of some of today’s most innovative Jewish chocolate makers - folks like Chuck Siegel, the official chocolate maker for Google, who started his company in the kitchen of the San Francisco JCC - and Netanya’s Choconoy, an Israeli company with a special mission.
Read below for the whole list…
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I’m somewhat surprised, but I’m really looking forward to Halloween. Let me state up front what I don’t like. The candy is excessive. I still have a large bag hidden on a shelf in the back of the pantry of LAST YEAR’s candy that my kids lost interest in long before all the good stuff was gone. I also don’t love the gore and the death. I’m not a big fan of scary stuff in general and it seems to get gloomier each year. I also don’t love the idea that kids demand candy, it is bad enough when they do it at the supermarket check out there should be no need to encourage them.
This being said, I am excited nonetheless. And despite all my misgivings, without the candy, this holiday would be not have the same draw.
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It’s a Jewish food blog, so, nu, here’s a little good old-fashioned Borscht belt humor:
Q: What are the two things Jews know?
A: Suffering, and where to find good Chinese food.
Okay, so maybe “good” shouldn’t be used to modify Borscht belt humor. I’ve known that joke for 20 years, and who knows how old it was when I first heard it. It must be further past the expiry date than that container of organic non-fat sour cream you’ve got pushed way back in the corner of your fridge.
So here’s an always-fresh corollary:
Q: What are the two things Jewish women love?
A: Eating and giving advice.
Thus is born a new The Jew & The Carrot feature, “The Shmethicist” - a moral nosh on ethical eating. Readers are hereby invited to send in your ethical food quandaries to shmethicist@jcarrot.org. Because why should Randy Cohen have all the fun?
Since you didn’t know I existed until just now, I’ve taken the shmethically questionable route of making up our first reader query, just so I had something to answer.
Below the jump: The Shmethicist’s take on Halloween candy…
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