Unfortunately, nail polish chips off, especially after years of use, and the system seems to have been less scientific than we previously thought. As my sister and I forged through the first few days of Passover without my mother we found a puzzling array of kitchen supplies marked in a variety of perplexing ways. Some pots were marked with both pink and silver dots. Spoons and serving utensils sometimes sported a P written in permanent marker. Does this mean that it was pareve, or simply that it was set aside for Pesach? Some containers and pots had been marked with Ms, but that can imply either milk or meat. Many things gave no hints to their gender whatsoever. Cooking felt like a giant guessing game as we reached into boxes of supplies and hoped to find something that we recognized as definitively meat, dairy or pareve.

All this got me wondering about how we mark our kitchens and what’s in them. Do you use those handy (but ugly) stickers you can buy at Judaica stores? Do you have handwritten or homemade labels? Do you buy things in two or three different colors in order to make it obvious if something is one gender or another? Do you just know what’s what and never bothered to mark things at all? Do you worry about other people mixing things up?

Oy! I may make everything pareve from now until the end of the holiday, just to be on the safe side.

(Cross-posted on Mixed Multitudes)

Pick out your favorite fruits, nuts, dried fruit, and even kosher for Passover marshmallows. I used bananas, dried apricots, walnuts, and almonds. You can find chocolate fondue recipes here and here. Get creative, invite family and friends to join you, and eat some homemade dessert for Pesach!

Every year, I host a seder that can only be described as unorthodox in every sense of the term.  The guests are usually folks who might not otherwise observe the holiday, and I’m happy to gather them into my home to pray, eat, sing, and think about what freedom means and what we ought to do to make more of it in the world.

I’m so happy to gather them that in the days leading up to seder, I start freaking out about what we’re running short of because I’ve invited so many guests.  Thus comes the last minute run for cutlery, dishes, glassware . . . every year it’s something different. The panic, however, remains the same.

As an environmentalist, I don’t want to use anything disposable.  And as an iconoclast, I’ve never much cared if my cutlery, dishes, or glassware match.  No one has ever mistaken me for Martha Stewart, nor mistaken my hand-painted plastic seder plate (strategically placed to cover the most indelible blemishes on my perpetually wine-stained table cloth) for hers (personally, if I have to go Stewart, I’d rather be lumped in with Jon than with Martha).

The most motley collection of items I put out for seder are my napkins, which I’ve acquired at various yard sales and Goodwill stores over the years.  Color, fabric, size . . . there is no consistency.  Until this year.

Because I just became the proud owner of a new sewing machine!  Motel and Tzeitel were not any more excited about their new addition than I am about mine.  Although as a tailor, Motel was probably better positioned to use his.

Given my limited sewing skills, my first project focused on the auto-embroidery feature, which I used to inscribe hostess-with-the-mostess messaging on the napkins.  There’s something meditative about these sort of crafty projects, and it was really nice to take some time in the holiday-prep madness to do something creative, pro-recycling, and focused on the essence of hospitality.

Now all I have to do is sit back and wait for someone to spill some matzah ball soup.

Which reminds me, do I have enough soup spoons this year?

What’s a matzah diorama?  A diorama is a partially three-dimensional model of a landscape typically showing historical events, nature scenes or cityscapes.  Scenes taken from movies and/or literature are also a really great way to go.  Of course we want your creativity to run wild, but please make the characters in your diorama out of matzah and your scene shouldn’t be much bigger than a shoebox.  Bonus points will be given to use of sustainable materials.

Send us at least three pictures of your stellar matzah creation to contest@jcarrot.org by Wednesday, April 22.  In your email please include the title of your work, a description of the scene and tell us the materials you used in your art.  And don’t forget to include information about who you are!  We will publish the photos on the blog and prizes will be awarded will be awarded for the best pieces.

And in case you need a little inspiration, a musical performance by Michelle Citrin and William Levin

This post is the first in a new series, Edible Crafts. I will be exploring edible crafts and food as art throughout the year. Not only can food be made to look beautiful just as it can be made to taste delicious, but there are many ways to incorporate crafting into making food.

For a treat this year, I decided to try baking hamentashen with local, homemade jams that I made last summer. Using fruits from Berkshires farms and farm stands, I made four varieties: peach, pear, blackberry, and blueberry. I filled the hamentashen with blackberry, peach, and pear jams. The blackberry and peach ones are nice alternatives to raspberry and apricot flavored ones. The pear brings on an autumnal flavor. Try any fruit-flavored jam you like, as long as it has a thick consistency.

I used this hamentashen recipe, substituting rice milk for cow’s milk, half of the flour with whole wheat, and half of the sugar with raw sugar. You can also find recipes here and here.

After the baking was complete, I prepared a recycled shalach manot bag by covering a used one with recycled paper from magazines and wrapping paper. Since part of the mitzvah of giving these gifts is to include at least two different types of food, I included a jar of jam and some organic tea with the hamentaschen. Along with some scones or toast, the receiver has a lovely snack or meal ready to eat.

Purim Sameach!

One custom I have always liked about Purim (aside from the drunken revelry, of course) is Mishloach Manot, those fun Jewish goodie-bags that people give to each other during this festive holiday.  It’s like Trick-Or-Treating in reverse:  the candy, wine, cookies, etc come to you -no need to go banging on any strangers’ doors.

Surfing Google, I came across a myriad of articles about what one should include in their Mishloach Manot baskets, including a rather heated discussion over “themed Mishloach Manot” on Hashkafah.com.  All these ideas got me thinking like a cunning marketer, and it occurred to me that there is an untapped market for “niche” Mishloach Manot.

So here are a few categories of potential Mishloach Manot ideas targeted to the interests of specific populations to help get this venture started.  (NOTE:  all items included result from intensive focus groups with members of each target audience.)

Feel free to use some of the items listed in your own Mishloach Manot baskets, and add your own suggestions in the comments!

1.  Altercockers (or “Geriatrics”)

One word:  prunes.

2.  College Students

Ramen Noodles (Gefen and Tradition sells kosher, Oriental Style versions)

Red Bull and/or Starbucks Frappuccino bottles

Organic cannabis

Prune-flavored condoms (to make them remember to call their grandparents — see previous category)

3.  Environmentalists

Compact fluorescent bulbs (someone actually posed the idea of “marzipan candy in the shape of compact fluorescent bulbs” in the Hashkafah.com forum linked above).

Worms for their compost bins

Sustainably-made Hamentaschen or other treats (see this post)

4. Israelis

Hummus-filled Hamentaschen

Noisemakers…err, then again, they probably are loud enough without them

5.  Non-Jews

Matzah (just tell them “Purim” is another word for “Passover”)

Might as well throw a Menorah in there, as well

A few plastic Easter eggs to show Jews can be supportive of their holidays, too

While I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that Hanukkah is here again (time really flew since last year’s latke fry), I do have an assortment of gift, party, and tzedakah ideas in mind for this year’s Festival of Lights.  Here are eight suggestions—one for each night.

DIY, Together: Partner up with a friend or two to make something simple and delicious like organic pickles, applesauce, jam, chutney, trail mix, or granola.  Recipes abound online, and you can package your gifts in reusable glass jars.

Another Spin: Not of the dreidel, but of the DIY meme.  Try your hand at homemade chocolate gelt or Hanukkah-themed chocolate lollipops.  There are lots of molds to choose from online, and it’s as easy as melting some sustainable, organic, vegan chocolate chips.

Can Can, Can You: Host a Hanukkah party and ask everyone to bring one or two cans of food to donate to your local food bank.

A Matter of Taste: Host a Hanukkah “tasting” potluck party.  Ask everyone to email you the recipe for the dish they’re bringing.  Input all of the recipes from the party into a shared, online recipe book on a site such as epicurious or all recipes, and send the link to your guests after the party.

Hard to Shop For: We all have someone in our life who has it all.  How about “giving them” something like this MercyCorps Agricultural Mercy Kit.  $40 supports a program that provides training, seeds and farming tools to help impoverished families set up and maintain gardens.  There are also a number of Israeli charitable organizations focused on feeding those who are hungry in the Holy Land.

Share the Love: Support local family farms by joining a CSA.  This can be a great gift to yourself and your family, or even to give to a friend or relative—just make sure they’re cool with the weekly or bi-weekly pickup.

A Tisket, a Tasket: Fill reusable baskets or tote bags with fun food products from environmentally and socially-conscious companies such as Peaceworks, a company that promotes peace in regions of conflict.  You could easily fill a basket with natural, kosher, vegetarian pestos and tapenades, fruit and nut bars, and cooking sauces from Peaceworks alone.  Best of all, with their products on the shelves of 15,000 stores across the United States (not to mention available online), they won’t be hard to come by.

Let Someone Else Schlep: If you simply haven’t got the time to shop this Hanukkah, let Nagaya do the work.  Green Prophet tipped me off to this great little company, which offers gift baskets filled with gourmet organic fare produced by small Israeli businesses.  There’s also Vegan Divine, which offers eco-friendly Hanukkah gift baskets filled with natural, vegan, organic gourmet munchies.

[Image by Lisa Brown, from Lemony Snicket's The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming]

There’s a joke that all fun secular holidays have “Jewish” equivalents.  Halloween has Purim, Christmas has Chanukah, etc.  But Chanukah, in all its fried deliciousness, does not offer an opportunity to bake the mother of architectural sweets: The Gingerbread House.  Now, the Jewish harvest holiday of Sukkot has stepped in to fill this wide gap in the Jewish culinary calendar with The Gingerbread Sukkah.

Boston resident Julia Greenstein (daughter of renowned baker, George Greenstein)  makes gingerbread sukkahs every year with her family.  These miniature “dwelling structures” are as temporary as their real-sized cousins – if only because they are irresistible to eat!  Find out how she does it, and how you can build your own cookie sukkah below.

How long has your family been building gingerbread sukkahs, and where does the tradition come from?

We have been doing it for about 6 years. My dad owned a kosher-style bakery when I was growing up and he made gingerbread houses at the bakery. When I saw the idea in The Jewish Holiday Cookbook by Gloria Kaufer Greene, I decided to give it a try.

What are your primary construction tools?

Our hands. The walls and the roof are all made from gingerbread and then it is decorated with candy fruits and other candy

Where does the edible sukkah live during the holiday?

We have always brought it to a community pot luck Succah lunch that is held by the Newton Centre Minyan and it is on display with the desserts until it is demolished by the kids!

Any advice for people who want to make their own gingerbread sukkah?

Get the cookbook above and be brave! It takes some patience to glue the structure together with the icing.

As a kid, anything edible held my attention. Sukkahs, charged with dappled light and dedicated to the harvest, seemed to combine all of my interests into one sacred space. I’ll never forget the excitement I felt, standing alone in the autumn-smelling sukkah, under a ceiling hung with fresh, growing foods; and I’ll never forget my disappointment, year after year, at the sight of apples, squash and blue corn wizening and rotting on their strings.

Now that I’m a full grown canner, it occurs to me that the sukkah, with it’s commandments for good air circulation, more shade than light, and it’s tradition of hanging edibles, is a perfect place to preserve for the cold months. After all, turning sukkot decorations into food is already a tradition—Etrogs make it into wine or brandy after the celebration’s over.

Below, you can find some tips and recipes for celebrating God’s gift of food and shelter through the year.

Preserve your Herbs

If you live in a relatively dry climate, Sukkot comes at the perfect time to dry herbs. Bunches of marjoram, oregano, tarragon, rosemary, sage, dill, coriander, lavender, hyssop, yarrow or mint (among others) are available at your local farmers market, garden or roadside, and can be strung up in small bunches in dark parts of the sukkah to start drying. Herbs take a couple of weeks to dry, so if you take your sukkah down immediately after the holiday, you’ll want to move your bunches to a dry dark place inside the permanent house. Of course, in order to be kosher, a sukkah has to let the rain in, so if you’ll have high humidity or precipitation during sukkot in your area, I wouldn’t try this one.

Some dried-herb enthusiasts suggest suspending your herbs in a brown paper bag around each bunch. Light discolors herbs, to the brown bag does double duty absorbing moisture and keeping out the sun. If you’re a proponent of the brown-bag-method, take some markers and paper cut-outs to those bags and they can still add to the atmosphere.

Once your herbs are dried out, you can remove the leaves and store them for use all year. I make my friends save up baby-food jars and I recycle them as herb-storage containers. Dried herbs make fabulous gifts, too, either for culinary use or in satchels for the odiferous quality they bring to a sock drawer. Finally, another little-used method for preserving herbs is in jellies. Mint jelly is famous as an accompaniment of lamb, and I adore a good hot-pepper jelly on cream cheese. This recipe for sage and cider jelly, from my canning hero Catherine Plagemann, is particularly autumnal.

Sage Jelly with Cider

From Fine Preserving

Make an infusion of 4 T dried or 8 T chopped fresh sage leaves and one cup of boiling water, simmered together for about ten minutes, uncovered. Strain through a cloth strainer for about ½ cup sage infusion.

Add to this:
3 ½ cups granulated sugar (I sometimes reduce the sugar in her recipes)
1 cup fresh cider
¼ cup lemon juice

As it comes to a boil, add:
½ bottle Certo (extra points for anyone who can come up with a non-Kraft product to substitute for liquid pectin)

Stir well again as it comes to a boil and boil for about one minute. Pour immediately into clean jelly glasses (five ounce canning jars), process and serve with roast meats or cheeses.

Eat your Veggies

Squash have thicker skin than your average lavender plant, and even edible ones come in an astounding array of colors and shapes. They’ll work better as utility-decorations for those of us raising our sukkahs in temperate climates.

Pick some aesthetically and culinarily pleasing winter squash varieties to decorate your sukkah this year. Kabocha – also known as ambercup – squash are a vivid orange, and delicata’s got festive stripes. Not only delicious fresh baked, sautéed and in soups, winter squash is easily preserved either ready to heat or in butter form.

To preserve winter squash, cut it open to remove seeds and stringy fiber. You can bake the seeds, spread out on a baking sheet and salted, in the oven at 425 for an hour and enjoy them like popcorn. To freeze squash, you must cook it first (freezing raw squash ruins it). Boil pieces of squash in as little water as possible until soft, or, alternately, steam in a pressure cooker. You can also bake a large squash whole, with the seeds, in your oven. This will take a couple hours, and then you’ll have to cut it open, remove the seeds and mash it. You’ll have a wonderful base for recipes like Leah’s delicata soup, or squash pie, or one of my favorite Sephardic treats, frittatas de calabeza. You’ll want to package and freeze the squash immediately after it’s prepared, working in small batches to as not to overwhelm your freezer with hot squash that it has to cool down.

If you’ll be drying in your sukkah, the American pioneer’s method for preserving winter squash makes a wonderful decoration. Pioneers liked to dry their pumpkins by slicing the squash into rings, removing pith and seeds and peeling each ring. The rings should be thin, so use a sharp knife and a smaller squash. Hang these orange, yellow and gold rings out of the direct sunshine until dry. Imagine a series of pumpkin circles lighting up your sukkah, destined to reconstitute in winter soups. These methods come courtesy of the Encyclopedia of Country Living, a fabulous resource for all things planted, tended, harvested and preserved.

If you’ll be keening for some of that October sweetness later in the year, try this squash butter recipe from Smitten Kitchen.com to spread on bread or eat with yogurt for a little autumn on those winter mornings:

Squash Butter

Adapted from AllRecipes

Approx. 3 1/2 cups of pureed winter squash
3/4 cup apple juice or cider
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 1/3 cups brown sugar
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Juice of half a lemon

Combine pumpkin, apple juice, spices, and sugar in a large saucepan; stir well. Bring mixture to a boil. Reduce heat, and simmer for 30 minutes or until thickened. Stir frequently. Adjust spices to taste. Stir in lemon juice, or more to taste.

Once cool, pumpkin butter can be kept in an airtight container in the fridge for months.

To preserve:
Spoon hot pumpkin mixture into hot jars, filling to within 1/4 inch from top. Remove air bubbles; wipe jar rims. Cover at once with metal lids, and screw on bands. Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

Not only will these methods make your decorations serve dual functions (a help for small budgets in rough times), they’ll also reduce the amount of space in your house dedicated to storing boxes of tinsel. Write in with your own ideas for how to make your Sukkot bounty last all year.

Photo taken by Jennie at Straight from the Farm.

New Yorkers crammed into the street at today’s eighth annual NYC International Pickle Day like so many Kirby cukes in a barrel. Pickle-makers from Essex Street to South Korea came to sample and sell their wares to an eager audience of thousands.

Where was I last year on pickle day? you might be wondering, but in fact, you were probably here, on Orchard Street, biting into one of Guss’ famous three-quarter sours with it’s crisp, salty bite that’s more refreshing than a gulp of Gatorade. According to the folks at Guss’, the festival has been packed every year since the New York Food Museum began sponsoring it in 2001.

“People come to me and ask, is this like vlasik?” said Nick Horman, of Horman’s Best Pickles, proving that most people’s pickle memories come off the shelf, not out of the barrel. Guss’ is the only surviving pickle company left from the early 20^th century, when New York City experienced a pickle renaissance, complete with a “Pickle District” all its own. But New Yorkers proved today that they’d rather have the real thing. Fifty-foot lines wound around every booth as people waited for a taste of hot dills, preserved beets or pickled ginger.

So how does a homely, warty, common thing like a pickle draw a crowd like this eight years running? “The heritage piece is very important” said Rick Field, of Rick’s Picks, “There’s pickles in every culture…people remember pickles from their mom, their grandma.” Rick himself got started pickling in the kitchen with his mom and dad, and his story is a common one. Bob McClure used his great-grandmother’s spicy dill recipe to start McClure’s Pickles with his brother, Joe. Nick Horman is a third-generation pickle-man, who started retailing on his own in 2003. For another slant on heritage, the folks at Adamah talked about Tikkun Olam and healing the world through sustainable agriculture while serving up samples of green beans and kimchee to a long line of suitors.

Picklemakers love to talk about the broad appeal of their product. “They’re very democratic,” said Rick Field, while standing next to a hand-painted, “Rick’s Picks for Obama” sign. His point was made for him by the vast display of cultures among both the products and the attendees. The pickle purveyors hawked everything from kosher dills to kimchee to pickle truffles, a chocolate-dipped parzipan and pickle confection made by Roni-Sue’s Chocolates for the festival every year.

Heritage and diversity were on the tip of every pickle-maker’s tongue, and perhaps that’s why the Food Museum has made pickles such a focus in its exhibits and programming since the museum started up in 1997. The museum has a “pickle wing”, and even provides pickle recipes on its website. Heritage and diversity are two of the watchwords of the sustainable agriculture movement too, and pickling goes even further in it’s parallels for all of sustainable ag. Pickles are about the preserving the past, they’re about saving for the future, they’re about great taste and seasonal food for a year-round world. They’re about community, and if today’s crammed fest was any indication, the community is all about them.