One bane of being an Ashkenazi Jew is all the food allergies that seem to run rampant through my bloodlines. As many others of Eastern European descent, I’m highly lactose intolerant, and I have recently been diagnosed with non-Celiac gluten sensitivity (in fact, it is supposed that many people with IBS actually have some type of undiagnosed gluten intolerance/sensitivity). [I fondly refer to myself as a lactard/glutentard.]
Living with food allergies can make things difficult, especially when it comes to Shabbat. Of course I love eating Shabbat meals at the homes of my friends, but it’s always quite a dilemma for me. If they don’t already know the ins and outs of my dietary restrictions, do I tell them?
Being dairy-free isn’t too much of a problem (usually), since most of my friends serve meat for Shabbat meals, and most Jews are used to cooking parve (neither meat nor dairy) items. It’s the gluten-free restrictions that are the buzz-kill.
“This is the bread of affliction”, my father would drone every Passover as he opened the familiar blue square box. “Matzah is tasteless and dry, not meant to be enjoyed. Eating it should remind you of the sufferings of our people.” As he went on and on and on with his yearly lecture on the harshness of slavery and unleavened bread I sat there slathering on salted butter, devouring sheet after sheet of crispy goodness. Although bland and stomach binding, this so-called ‘bread of affliction’ was a welcome change to the squishy, faintly chemical smelling Wonder loaves my mother bought the rest of the year. Despite the family mandate that matzah eating required a certain degree of complaining to make it religiously significant, my appreciation for the magical combination of flour, water, and fire was born.
Where I grew up in the Midwest during the 1970’s there were only two kinds of matzah available. Manishewitz and Streit’s. Both perfectly square and almost identical in taste, matzah was matzah; or so I thought. It was not until decades later at a community Seder that I discovered that matzah could be round, organic or made from non-white flour.
I don’t watch a lot of Food Network. I like cooking, but I really don’t watch much TV anymore, and when I do, I want to see people fighting and then making out, not stirring things. The point is, I don’t watch the Food Network, but I once saw about 15 minutes of Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee and it pretty much made me lose all hope in humanity. She was all, “Buy a cake! Spread insane amounts of icing on it! Your kids will love it!” I’m sorry, but do we need a show to tell us that? No, we don’t.
I hosted a St. Patrick’s Day dinner party last week. We drank a lot of beer, but I still have plenty left that I’d like to use up before Passover (Michelle, I accept your cupboard cleaning challenge). There are many wonderful uses for beer (like Guinness Braised London Broil), but my current favorite is beer bread. Not only is it the easiest bread you will ever make, it’s so delicious no one will believe you didn’t spend more than 2 minutes dumping the ingredients together and throwing it in the oven.
Thanks to Danielle Selber for sharing her thoughts about her experiences volunteering with Birthright Israel NEXT’s Harvest to Harvest campaign!
I love to cook. If you’re looking for me, you can usually find me in the kitchen, stirring away at homemade tomato sauce or a big pot of soup, adding ingredients that don’t quite match just for the thrill of it. I often serve Shabbat dinner for twenty, and I really like chopping all those onions. I bake cookies for my Hebrew school students regularly (to the chagrin of their parents), and my boss has nicknamed me “Kugels Lebowski” for my uncanny ability to make a festive kugel for any random occasion. For my last birthday, I received six cookbooks.
As Passover rapidly approaches, cleaning and preparing for the holiday is a topic that comes up more and more. It seems like a huge undertaking and most people dread Passover cleaning– me included. But this year, I’m a little excited. I’ve divided my cleaning into two parts, my kitchen and the rest of my apartment.
I’ve decided to make my Passover cleaning into a more traditional spring cleaning. And what better way to welcome springtime than with a fresh and clean apartment?
As for the kitchen, it’s always quite a project. I started last night with a play from my college roommate’s playbook. I took a box and placed it on the center of my kitchen floor and started throwing all of my chametz into it. I filled the box pretty quickly, now I know why she put the box out about a month before Passover. There were a lot of staples (beans, pasta and rice) in the box, but there were also some hidden treasures in the back of my cabinets that I had completely forgotten about.
Here in Portland we’re fortunate to have a year-round farmer’s market, and I’m always on the lookout for interesting, tasty, off-the-beaten-path things to make for Pesach. I love serving fresh asparagus at my seder, but it’s not in season yet, so I was looking for an alternative. Our local mushroom purveyor, Springwater Farm, offers a great variety of mushrooms, but they also sell other wild/foragable foods, including fiddlehead ferns and bags of stinging nettles. Here’s a link to some fiddlehead fern recipes.
The fiddleheads can be served in lieu of asparagus; just blanch them in boiling water and saute in garlic with a little salt.
Thank you to Uri Laio for sharing this story and recipe (cross-posted on his blog Old Growth Yiddishkeit). Uri is an ADAMAH alumnus and is currently finishing his first year at UC Hastings Law School in San Francisco.
When my Grandfather, alav hashalom, was nearing the end of his long and fruitful life, I had the opportunity to make dinner for him once (which was uncommon because during that time my mother used to cook dinner for all of us mostly every night). He requested borscht, a dish that I was altogether unfamiliar with, but which was an essential part of the Eastern European Jewish food tradition my Grandfather had grown up with. In my good intention to fulfill his request, I opened a jar of canned borscht (Ingredients: Water, Beets, Sugar, Salt, Citric Acid.) and served it with sour cream, and love.
Flash forward to 2010.
It is apropos that the Whole Grains Council has declared quinoa as the March Grain of the Month, as we begin Passover on the night of March 29th. Quinoa, a rockstar of a grain in its own right with tons of nutritional value, made its debut as a Passover friendly grain just a few years ago, forever changing the way many people cook for the holiday.
According to the laws of Passover, chometz (barley, rye, oats, wheat, and spelt [BROWS to many who attended Jewish day school]) and their derivatives are forbidden. An Ashekanazic rabbinic tradition developed where kitniyot, legumes, rice and other similar products that are processed similar to chometz, look like chometz when ground into flour, or may have even just a bit of chometz in them, were also outlawed for Passover (many Sephardic Jews eat kitniyot).
As luck would have it, the law of kitniyot applies only to items that the rabbis were aware of at the time this tradition developed. This means that, you guessed it, quinoa is allowed on Passover! No longer were the Jewish people restricted to endless variations of potato dishes.
Enter, quinoa.
(Cross-posted at Mixed Multitudes)
When Passover approaches, it seems like everyone in the Jewish community goes a little bit (or more than a little bit) crazy. You start hearing about people going through every page of every book in their house, trying to eliminate miniscule crumbs. Kosher stores are clogged with families inspecting the new Passover friendly products, and elaborate Passover recipes are getting passed around, each of which seems to call for potato starch, and 7 egg yolks.
If you don’t have an endless supply of time and money to buy and cook for Passover, then let me give you my foolproof Passover food tip:
Chill out, and go as simple as possible.
Cholent, for hundreds of years the traditional Sabbath-day meal for observant Jews in many countries, is a food for which there is no standard recipe; its ingredients are as diverse as the places where Jews have lived. A slow-cooked stew containing meat, vegetables, potatoes, beans and spices, it is one of the quintessential Jewish comfort foods and a dish that many look forward to from Sabbath to Sabbath.
Yeshiva University students will hold a “Cholent Cook-off” in Weissberg Commons on its Wilf Campus in Washington Heights, on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 2:45PM. Fifteen teams of four students at Yeshiva College, the men’s undergraduate school, will prepare their dishes the night before beginning at 10:30PM. The next afternoon, a panel of discriminating palates will crown the winner.
I love that there are so many Jewish holidays throughout the year. And the best part about holidays is that every holiday has specific food associated with it. And as you can see, on this blog or in general, whenever a holiday approaches the talk about food increases. For holidays we plan ahead, cook or bake and we eat as a community, which unfortunately is not always part of our daily lives anymore. Some holidays require a lot of preparation and can be scary for people that do not spend a lot of time in the kitchen or just don’t enjoy cooking. But Purim should not be one of those holidays. The traditional food for Purim is cookies, more specifically Hamantashen!
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:
My boyfriend is Brazilian. To look at him you’d probably think he was Middle Eastern, with his dark complexion. He speaks with an American accent that is very South Florida, but none-the-less he was born in Brazil.
Last week for no particular reason I wanted to surprise him with a Brazilian inspired meal. However, most Brazilian cuisine involves meat or fish – two things my boyfriend is loath to eat. (We do occasionally eat humanly raised grass-fed local sustainable meat, but he finds seafood appalling.) Feijoada, considered the national dish of Brazil consists of black beans slow cooked with various parts of the pig. Since my boyfriend loves meatless rice and beans, so I decided to get creative.
On the Internet I researched various feijoada recipes, which mostly relied on lots of salt and pork and very little other flavoring unless you count the beef bits. But how could I keep things kosher and compete with recipes that look like a butcher shop in a pot? There were a lot of vegetarian black bean recipes online, but this needed to be more than just rice and beans, I needed to make this complex and interesting to call it feijoada. So I explored the Internet for some more tastes of Brazil.
