Chanukah gelt always seems like a good idea at the beginning of December, but these days, the chocolate just doesn’t seem worth fighting with the foil to eat. Similar to Rhea Yablon Kennedy‘s experience, we wanted to find another way to use up our leftovers. When my roomies came back from a trip to Ohio they were inspired to make Buckeyes – the unofficial candy of the state of Ohio. Buckeyes are a tree nut and the candies do resemble the naturally occurring buckeye. Rachel, who hails from Cincinnati, referenced the Isaac M. Wise Temple Sisterhood cookbook for recipes. Not 1, but 2 recipes can be found (pages 113 and 114 for those of you who have the 2001 edition of the cookbook). The Hazon office sure enjoyed these tasty treats…Buckeyes are basically peanut butter balls dipped in chocolate.
Many of you were able to take home your very own copies of the Hazon Cookbook at the Food Conference. For those of you who were not able to join us, we share this compilation of favorite recipes from participants of the Food Conference, December 25-28, 2008 / 28 Kislev- 1 Tevet, 5769. A special thank you to Eli Margulies for putting this together.
Text and recipes: Nina Budabin-McQuown
Text and below-jump photos: Leah Koenig
Ah, Thanksgiving. All across the country, families are gearing up to tuck into nearly identical plates of turkey (or a vegetarian alternative), mashed potatoes, green beans, and creamy yam casserole dotted with little white marshmallows. But in this era of local-foods awareness, should all Thanksgiving dinner tables really look and taste the same from sea to shining sea?
The Jew & The Carrot set out to find out what a truly local holiday meal looks like, in three diverse parts of the country: New York, Florida, and California’s Bay Area. We found that New York’s Thanksgiving dinner plate looked the most iconic and familiar, since it is geographically closest to the holiday’s colonial beginnings. But we got the biggest thrill out of introducing new fruits like figs, grapes – and even avocados! – into a holiday meal that is second only to Passover in its insistence on standard repertoire fare.
Below the jump: find a delicious collection of recipes and ideas for three very different, very local Thanksgiving dinners. And if you’re daring enough to stray from the delicious same old, same old – we’d love to hear how it turns out!
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…
What do halva, shakshuka, and attayif (cheese filled pancakes eaten by Muslims on Ramadan) have in common? They are all Israeli foods featured in The New Book of Israeli Food: A Culinary Journey. Nextbook recently sat down over dinner with author, Janna Gur, who is the founder and editor of Israel’s leading food and wine magazine, Al Hashulchan Gastronomic Monthly. Listen to a podcast of what she has to say here.
Purchase Janna’s book, filled with delicious recipes and stunning food photography, here
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Yom Kippur stirs my strongest Jewish food memory – it’s strange, but true. Since I was in the single digits I can remember walking to Ne’ila services with my mother and father, carrying a bag filled with two essential components of our holiday inside. One was a three-pound sack of apples, the then ubiquitous McIntosh variety. The other was six or so tiny butter sandwiches on my mother’s anise bread.
The bread was a high, oblong loaf shining from egg glaze and redolent of liquorice, which I despised as a child. On our walk, I would watch the plastic sack of break-fast food thumping against my father’s trousered leg, a reminder that holy space of Yom Kippur was about to close over us and leave us to our good intentions and the rest of the year. I couldn’t understand why they liked it so much, that sweet, seeded bread. (Now, of course, I know better.)
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!
A few years ago I decided to convert to Judaism. Of course you might be curious about the why, but that is a much longer story that will take a long time to tell. For now, I will say that I’ve been learning a lot about the Jewish community through food. And as someone who took this journey without a partner (I didn’t choose Judaism for an impending marriage) I was quick to realize that becoming part of a community was quite a challenge.
That was where the food came in. I like to think of myself as an amateur chef with credentials like having once lived in France and currently belonging to a CSA, but truth be told is that I really like to cook – an apparently good trait to have within the Jewish community. And since I don’t have the immediate familial connection for the big Jewish foodie holidays like Pesach and Shabbat, I found myself assembling my own Jewish family around a table to share in good food and Jewish learning.
Thanks to Rhea Kennedy for this post. Rhea blogs over at You Are Delicious.
As a kid growing up in New York’s Hudson Valley, I learned a lot about the Iroquois, the group of Native American tribes indigenous to that area. I loved to hear about the stories, beliefs, language, and everyday practices that made up the traditional Iroquois way of life. But what fascinated me the most was, not surprisingly, their food. “They used every part of the animal,” I remember an elementary school teacher explaining to my class. “The meat, the hide or the feathers, the bones—everything!”
Now that I think of it, this was probably my first lesson in sustainable eating. And I was mesmerized. Those traditional Iroquois, as far as I was concerned, were the coolest thing ever.
More and recipes, below the jump…
As a chef, summer is my favorite time of the year. I do not enjoy the weather so much (read: I hate the heat), but I love the gorgeous, unusual fruits and vegetables in the market. This week I couldn’t wait to schlep home my bounty that included one of my summer favorites – the gooseberry.
Gooseberries are similar to currants in their tartness and texture. They come in a variety of colors ranging from bright green to dark crimson. Generally too tart to be eaten from hand, they are delicious combined with sweeter fruits and are an amazing addition to lighter wine sauces.
My recipe for Duck Confit with Gooseberry Sauce (see below the jump) is a dish I will be featuring this week at a wine degustation dinner at Puck’s at Spertus Institute. The sauce is similar to an aigredoux – sweet and sour – but with attitude. It also features one of my favorite shmaltz atlernatives: Duck Fat! Plan ahead if you are going to try this recipe, as kosher ducks are always frozen. You can also serve this sauce with chicken or fish if you use vegetable stock instead of chicken stock.
In 1979, Deborah Madison helped to found Greens, the now-iconic vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco. Almost 30 years later, Madison remains at the forefront of the sustainable food movement and is the author of several watershed cookbooks including Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (one of my food bibles!) The Greens Cookbook, and the farmers’ market inspired, Local Flavors. She also writes regularly for Culinate, which is my favorite food website – aside from The Jew & The Carrot of course!
Last week, I spoke with Deborah about the changing nature of farmers’ markets, why she decided to include meat recipes in her most recent cookbook, and her favorite place to get a sustainable meal in Santa Fe.
Below the jump: Win a copy of Deborah Madison’s cookbook, Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets, which was recently released in paperback.
The 4th of July is coming up tomorrow – the day that commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and America’s independence from Great Britain (and yes, also the time when many Americans like to chomp on burgers and look at sparkle-y things).
In honor of such a revolutionary holiday, The Jew & The Carrot would like to salute the small revolutions that happen every day in our kitchens: the first time we successfully make a matzoh ball like grandma’s, cook kale from our CSA, or teach our kids (or ourselves) how to make jam. And no tribute to kitchen revolutions would be complete without a shout out to every home chef’s trusty sidekick: the humble cookbook.
The Jew & The Carrot contributors compiled a list of our favorite “revolutionary cookbooks,” – the inspired recipe collections that in some way changed the way we cook, eat and even view ourselves. Check them out below the jump, and get inspired for a culinary revolution of your own!
Mollie Katzen is the Jewish patron saint of vegetarian cooking. She wrote, hand lettered and illustrated The Moosewood Cookbook in 1977, and has gone on to write nine other cookbooks, including two for children, and a revised edition of the original Moosewood Cookbook. Mollie has over 6 million books in print, has been inducted in the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame, and is a charter member of the Harvard School of Public Health Nutrition Roundtable. If you’ve ever had a vegetarian Shabbat lunch, chances are you ate at least one of Mollie’s creations, and at my house we’ve been known to make entire meals using only Mollie’s cookbooks. Her recipes are filling, nutritious, easy, and invariably scrumptious.
The New Moosewood is a staple in any vegetarian kitchen, and Mollie’s latest book, The Vegetable Dishes I Can’t Live Without is an instant classic. Buy her books at your local independent bookstore, and visit her website, molliekatzen.com for recipes, resources, and Mollie news. Mollie spoke with The Jew & The Carrot about buying organic, eating meat, cooking simpler, and okra.
Below the jump: The full interview, and a chance to win a copy of The New Moosewood Cookbook!
Advice, Candy, Chocolate, Cookbooks, Cooking, Dairy/Vegetarian, Dessert, Hazon, Leftovers, Nuts, Personal Story, Recipes, Sugar, Synagogues
