Avi Rubel is the North American Director of Masa Israel Journey, the umbrella organization for immersion programs in Israel for young adults (18-30). When not sending people to Israel, Avi can be found making cheese, bread, kombucha or fermenting or pickling all kinds of goodies in his Brooklyn apartment and recording his adventures on his food blog, Make Cheese Not War. In the weeks after the Hazon Food Conference, he shared some of his thoughts about his experience with Hazon in California.

Click below to read his posts:

• Preserved Lemons from Joan Nathan
• The Food Conference

I’m sure that like me, many of you cannot get Hanukah cooking and baking out of your minds!  I will be making potato leek latkes, homemade apple sauce and some chewy ginger cookies tonight.  As you can tell, I’m in full holiday mode!  Anyway, if you are looking for a break from the holiday food maddness I have a great recipe for you!

My birthday was about a month and a half ago.  As much as I enjoy eating out I really wanted to cook my birthday dinner at home with my boyfriend this year.  We decided our main course would be homemade pizza – something neither of us had ever made.  I had heard it was very easy to make but having never made any type of yeast-based bread, I was a bit nervous!

I looked into a few recipes and ended up using one based on a recipe from one of my favorite food bloggers.  I will say that this recipe didn’t make quite enough dough for me.  I think next time I will try this recipe.  The most fun thing about making your own pizza is that you can put anything you want on it (and it can be as healthy or unhealthy as you’d like)!  We were especially proud of our pizzas since the vast majority of the ingredients were local and organic.  I hope you enjoy making your own pizza.  Feel free to leave comments with your favorite topping combination!

The Delicious Pie, Sans First Slice

On Sunday night as my mother and I stood outside and began the slow, sad process of dismantling our Sukkah, I started to think about autumn and more specifically, why it ranks as my favorite time of the year. The end of the fall holidays always hit me hard, perhaps even harder than the thought of returning to my daily routine. And yet there I was, shivering in my pajamas and thanking Hashem Almighty that it was fall in New York.

Considering my deep loathing of the snow and my firm belief that the winter should be spent hibernating (with only rare breaks for hot chocolate and cookies), I’m always surprised by my love of its seasonal predecessor. But then I remember that the fall is the start of a brand new year for us Jews. Everything is open before us, and we haven’t had much chance to mess up yet. My favorite flavors come into the Farmers’ Markets: apples, butternut squash, fresh figs, and best of all, pumpkins. And for me, the fall comes with a wonderful combination of those two notions.

Since the next day was Columbus Day (or as I like to call it, the most arbitrary day off of the year), my mother, two of my

If my summer were a cookbook, it would be called What to Expect When You’re Expecting— Expecting Company, That Is, and It’s a Heat Wave.

Yes, welcome to life in the global warming oven.  We are on at least heat wave #3 of the summer here in usually temperate Portland, and I’ve had a potluck to attend or guests to host for all of them.  And while the hot weather makes me want to eat ice cream three meals a day, I know I really shouldn’t.

Especially not when “eating” means “bringing to a potluck where it will sit out in the sun.”

So what has been on the menu?  Lots, and I figured I’d share it in case you can’t stand the heat but still need to be in the kitchen.

I know we are in the season of fasts for many Jews but here is a simple (yet a bit time consuming) recipe that tastes great!  We have been getting quite a bit of zucchini in our CSA box.  I even made a healthier version of this (the one without the pineapple) zucchini bread using this recipe.  If you’d like the modified version please post in the comments section and I will get back to you.

Now, I do like zucchini but when it is cooked and mushy it grosses me out a little bit (I have some food texture issues which involve a real dislike of baked/mushy fruits and vegetables).  So, in this reciped I added the veggies at almost the very end of cooking.  If you’d like them cooked a bit more you can add them earlier.

As I mentioned in a previous post, risotto has been a long-time family meal and holds a special place in my heart.  One of the reasons I love risotto is that it is so versatile.  I know many people are intimidated by risotto but this is totally unfounded.  The trick to good risotto is making sure there is always enough liquid in the pan.  You never want the risotto to be so dry that it sticks to the bottom of the pan.  So really the trick might just be attentiveness.

Like my previous risotto post, this recipe isn’t Kosher the way I made it.  However, it is very easy to make it Kosher.  You can use vegetable broth or some sort of chicken-flavored boullion for the depth of flavor that chicken broth gives you.  I would not eliminate the dairy in this recipe.  You just can’t have good risotto without parmesan cheese.  I hope you enjoy this summer risotto!

Bustling with tall, lean, small, and stout people hovering about the baked goods, the cider, last year’s apples or this year’s first peaches, the NYC farmers market on Columbus Avenue at 79^th – 77^th street, displayed its early summer harvest – especially greens, berries, shelling peas and young onions. The children placed the fresh organic milk into the cloth bag that hung over my shoulder. The sun danced friskily with the cool breeze, and we grabbed onto our hats as we headed arms around arms to the cheese stand. It felt so right, so connected, so sustainable.

Then, my son remembered a camp bus conversation. Tenuously, he asked, “Do you make your cheese with rennet?”

Fresh, local green beans should be here any day, now – but when they aren’t available, I rely on the frozen ones from Trader Joe’s. I like that TJ’s haricots verts are less waterlogged than many other brands of frozen green bean, and I appreciate the way each bean seems to have been individually frozen (rather than being suspended in a rectangular ice block), so that I can grab and cook just a handful or two at a time, knowing that the rest of the package won’t end up going to waste.

That last part is key, because my family is on a mission to cut down on wasted food —  not only for economic reasons, or even just because I hate it that an estimated 25% of the produce purchased in this country ends up in the garbage, but also because, from a religious point of view, it seems absurd for us to bother with separate forks and spoons for meat and dairy, but flout what Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch called “the first prohibition of creation” – namely “bal tashchit” (literally, don’t destroy) – the commandment against wasting.

First, let me apologize for the poor quality of the picture!  It doesn’t do justice to the tart or the camera’s abilities… better luck next time!  Now onto to the food itself…

I’ve always been a huge fan of onions – red, white, yellow, green – I don’t discriminate.  I like them raw and cooked, on bagels with cream cheese, on pizza, in salad, etc.   I find that most things I cook begin with my gorgeous Sur Le Table sautee pan (Hannukah present from my Dad), some olive oil, chopped garlic, and of course, some onion.   They just seem to add necessary flavor to everything.  Now I know there are people who hate onions and while I can respect that, I just can’t understand it.  However, as my friends and family will tell you, I have some weird issues with food textures that many cannot understand.  Fortunately my little sister has many of the same issues so I have an ally.  Let me also add, if you do not like onions, this recipe isn’t for you… but it’s really really good.

There is a cheesecake sitting in my (boyfriend’s) refrigerator right now. At some point late last week I got it in my head that with Shavuot just around the corner I should make a cheesecake. Since I’m doing a time-share with my boyfriend’s kitchen, permission had to be granted by the relevant roommates, which was how I found myself late last night remembering how much I disliked baking.

But I’m terribly sentimental about food and of course my cheesecake comes with a story…

Months ago I had an idea for a themed Shabbat dinner: I would invite all of my friends from Commonwealth countries, and have a Queen’s Shabbat. I could serve Commonwealth inspired foods, and it would be a fun night to hang out with friends from all over the world. Since I host Shabbat meals all the time, the idea didn’t seem particularly daunting, but I never seemed to get around to setting a date and sending out an invitation.

Right before Pesach I met with Rabbi Yoni Sherizen, who runs the Jewish chaplaincy programs in the UK. Jewish chaplains (usually a married couple) are sent to live in a college town or on a university campus in order to help provide Jewish services to students at the local university. It’s a lot like Chabad, but without the rebbe, and it’s especially important in the UK, where there have been crazy amounts of anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Yoni and his wife Dalia were incredibly helpful to me when I was at Oxford in 2004, and I was concerned about how dire Yoni told me the situation was in so many British universities. Plus, the falling economy has meant a lot of funders have had to cut back, and some universities are in danger of losing their Jewish chaplains.

Thanks to Avi Rubel for this great guest post cross-posted from his site Zen and the Art of Cheese-Making.  Avi makes home-made cheese and bread in Brooklyn, NY. When not performing culinary experiments in his kitchen, Avi spends a lot of time managing MASA Israel Journey’s North American operation which takes him around the country and world getting more Jewish young adults to spend quality time in Israel.

I’ve become a home cheesemaker!

I’d been running my mouth for the past few years about how I’d like to have a goat farm one day where I would milk my goats and make my own cheese. But, I live in Brooklyn NY. It would be hard to fit a goat here in my little NY apartment. Alas, I decided a few months ago that at least I could learn how to make cheese while I’m here in NY. I bought a home cheesemaking guide book and have begun a great adventure making a new cheese every weekend.

So far, I’ve made some tasty farmer’s cheese, a great mozarella (see below), a nice ricotta, a curd-y cottage cheese, the best yogurt I’ve ever had, and finally went for some hard cheese and made what looks to be a fine Cheddar which is aging on my counter as I type.

Now that Pesach has come and gone and we are back into the swing of eating leavened things again I though I would share a great spring recipe with you.   I think I’ve mentioned before that my dad has always been the cook in my family – and fortunately he’s very talented at it.  One of my favorite “Dad meals” is a risotto he makes with fresh peas and parmesan cheese (and sometimes mushrooms as well).  Because of this recipe I have become a lover of risotto.

In my family if you helped cook the meal you didn’t have to clean up (this is especially relevant to Shabbat dinner) so I would always volunteer to help my dad cook.   Thinking back, this is probably one of the reasons I got interested in cooking.  On nights when he made risotto my job was to stir the risotto and add more liquid when necessary.  At the time it seemed like quite a tedious process but I now feel fortunate to have been given that job since the stirring and adding the right amount of liquid at the right time is the key to perfecting risotto.  Risotto is really incredible because it starts out as rice (Arborio rice to be exact) and through a specific (yet fairly simple) method of cooking it becomes very creamy and delicious.

Risotto is great as a main course or as a side for fish or meat.  I happened to get a beautiful bunch of asparagus in my CSA box so I decided to add it to some risotto, however, the other great thing about risotto is that it’s quite versitile.  Feel free to add other veggies, meats, fish, etc.  As usual please share your favorite risotto recipes!

One more thing… this recipe contains milk and meat.  I personally wouldn’t recommend leaving out the milk ingredients since they’re key to the richness so I would recommend substituting vegetable broth (or pareve chicken flavoring) for the chicken broth.

And now for the recipe…

Thanks to Ken Ovitz for this guest post. Ken holds multiple degrees and certificates in culinary arts and food preparation from The New School University, The Institute of Culinary Education, and the State of New York. He is an expert on Jewish cuisine and religious feasts, and has written numerous articles for the Jewish Voice Newspaper and contributed scholarly papers on the history of Jewish cuisine, the Seder, and kosher rules at a variety of conferences.

For a true gastronomical adventure in Israel, one only needs to drive a mere 10 minutes from Ben Gurion airport in Lod to Moshav Nechalim, which is home to the esteemed Eretz Zavat Chalav dairy owned and operated by Mr. Moshe Markovitz. Built on love and passion for quality cheese, Markovitz created the Israeli El Dorado of sheep cheese production.

“Eretz Zavat Chalav” (A Land flowing with Milk) references the quote from the bible when G-d described the land of Israel as one that is “flowing with milk and honey.” Markovitz doesn’t believe that the bible was referring to cow’s milk since cows did not inhabit the land of Israel in any large numbers during that time period.