Long before “green Shabbat” referred to stacking biodegradable dishes on the synagogue kiddush table, “Corned beef and Cabbage” became my family’s green Shabbat.

When 6th grade ended and my best friend, Shauna Ritchie, returned to Ireland with her family, I was devastated. The summer passed and middle school started. Life continued, but not without the distinct sense that something important was missing.

Mid-March arrived, and with Purim over and Pesach still in the future, my mother decided she needed an occasion in the interim to bring our family together. In honor of Shauna, my mom declared the arrival of “Corned Beef and Cabbage” Shabbat - a celebration which, not-coincidentally, coincided with the week of St. Patrick’s Day.

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Thanks to Rhea Kennedy of the You are Delicious blog, for this guest post and two delicious recipes. 

As yet another plate of lamb careened toward the table, the scene at my boyfriend’s aunt and uncle’s Shanghainese house started to feel very familiar.  I’d already discovered that latke-like potato cakes are a staple street food in Shanghai.  Now, as my boyfriend’s aunt’s chopsticks moved from serving plate to individual bowls, clunking down pieces of meat in front of the people she’d decided should eat them, I realized that eating Chinese food on Christmas is not the only thing that bonds Jewish folks with our friends in the Far East.

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Following the lead of such projects as Yale Sustainable Food Project and inspired in no small measure by the popularity of such books as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, sustainable food has become an increasingly hot topic at college campuses around the country. Over this past summer and semester I have been involved in a collaborative project with two biology professors, Betsey Dyer and Deborah Cato, and over 30 First Year Seminar students to educate ourselves and the broader Wheaton College community about food and sustainability.

We concluded our semester earlier this month with a sustainable banquet using food which we ourselves harvested, got from local farmers’ markets, supplemented with Wise kosher organic chickens, and cooked - inspired by the “perfect meal” at the end of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, which was the required summer reading for all first year Wheaton students. The students from my seminar, “The Rituals of Dinner,” having studied dinner rituals ranging from Plato’s Symposium to the Passover Seder, the meals in Genesis, Leviticus, and the Gospel of Luke to Babette’s Feast and Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, designed the ceremony for our sustainable harvest banquet. For me personally, it was a way in which my Jewish foodie and environmentalist commitments moved me into increasingly broader circles of connection with other people and with nature. The whole project was an intensely Jewish experience for me, even though I was doing it primarily in a non-Jewish context. The project itself was featured in the Winter 2008 edition of our alumnae/i magazine, the Wheaton Quarterly and you can read the full text of the article after the jump here: Read more »

Below is the full text of Friday night’s keynote at The Hazon Food Conference.  The keynote was given by Nati Passow, co-founder of The Jewish Farm School.  It’s a long post, but definitely worth the read - even if you have to print it out (on recycled paper of course!) and take it home.

(Nati’s on the right, next to Simcha Schwartz.  Photo by Sabrina Malach.)

Hazon Food Conference
December 6-9, 2007
Keynote Address: Nati Passow 

Thank you Nigel. Shabbat Shalom and Chanukah Sameach. It is a great honor to be here with you all tonight. Nigel suggested that I begin by sharing my story with you, my connection and relationship to food, which I think is a great way to begin this talk, because one of the things I like most about food is that sitting down to a meal is a great excuse to spend time with friends and listen to each other’s stories. So here is a little bit of mine.

Seven years ago I took a Sabbatical. I left university for the year and traveled in Israel. I studied in yeshiva, toured the country and then settled into an apartment in Jerusalem. After having little success finding a job, I decided to enjoy my sabbatical for what it was time to just be present. This was when I discovered good coffee, which for any honorable coffee drinker is a moment you never forget. An older friend of mine sat me down and said that if I was going to drink coffee everyday, I should make it good. Buy whole beans, grind them myself and brew something delicious.

The coffee was my gateway drug to the world of slow food.

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The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery ended this past Sunday and I’ll share some highlights that I think will particularly interest our readers.

• “Ecotarian/Ecotarianism” - What do we call ourselves? “Ecotarian” was proposed as a catchall term for most perspectives basically against industrial food, but which vary in emphasis: locavore, vegetarian, sustainable, organic, committed to humane conditions and slaughter of animals for meat - i.e., that diverse group that is us. But is it precise and universally understood enough let’s say to become a meal option on a plane flight, asked Jessica Lee, who proposed the term?
• “Conscientious Production” - another pair of speakers attempted to categorize eco-friendly values as “conscientious production” (in contrast to conspicuous consumption).

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Joan Nathan knows Jewish food.  Author of culinary tomes like Jewish Cooking in America, Joan Nathan’s Jewish Holiday Cookbook, and The Jewish Holiday Baker, she sets the standard for elegant, timeless Jewish cooking (and not just shmaltzy Ashkenazi fare either - she is currently researching for a new book on Jewish cuisine in France). 

Ms. Nathan recently delved head first into the “new Jewish food movement.”  In an article she wrote for the New York Times called, “Of Church and Steak: Farming for the Soul,” she explored the work organizations, farmers, and companies are doing across the country that ties together food, faith, and farming.  (Hazon - and this very blog - enjoyed healthy shoutouts in the article.)

The Jew & The Carrot sat down with Ms. Nathan the week before Rosh Hashanah - just before the start of the “high season” of high holiday cooking frenzy.  She shared her take on traditional Jewish cooking, new conversations about food and Jewish community, and her most important tip for hosting a successful Rosh Hashanah meal.      

LK: Your recent New York Times article, “Of Church and Steak,” showed how many organizations and individuals connect faith, food, and farming.  What was the most interesting discovery you made about Jewish food while working on that article?

JN:  I think the most surprising thing to me was finding out about Orthodox Jews’ interest in sustainability.  I expected it more from other populations in the Jewish community, but I discovered many Orthodox people are interested too.  I also heard a lot about the idea of Jewish stewardship, which I hadn’t heard before.  I’m not sure [it’s a mainstream conversation in the Jewish community], but it’s there.

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Like many foodies, I imagine, I’m always experimenting in the kitchen. Chocolate and tea are favorite exploratory ingredients, but with Rosh Hashanah just around the corner lately I’ve had apples and honey on the brain. So yesterday afternoon I decided to take a break from schoolwork by playing around with my recipe for Honey-Vanilla Challah. A few hours later I had a woven round loaf of Apple-Honey Challah sitting on the kitchen counter. This was the ‘test loaf’ that, if delectable, would make a return appearance at Rosh Hashanah dinner. Shown above sliced and covered in blueberry-peach butter, I’m happy to report that this challah was a scrumptious combination of three Rosh Hashanah symbols: apples, honey and round challah goodness. An encore is definitely in order.

Shabbat challot are usually baked into braids made with three, four or six strands of dough, and according to Gil Marks the resulting spiral symbolizes the ascent to heaven. But on Rosh Hashanah challah is shaped into round loaves of bread whose circular form represents the continuity of life. Other festival shapes include crowns (symbolizing God’s place as ruler of the universe), ladders (recalling Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28:10), keys (symbolizing the gates of heaven) and on Yom Kippur, a bird shape (symbolizing the forgiveness of sins and that one’s prayers soar to heaven.) I’ve included instructions for making round loaves of challah, woven loaves and the traditional braid here. If the kitchen spirit moves you, I say go with it!

  When I last left you, I had just placed approximately 4 1/2 pounds of chicken into a large zip-lock bag to marinade in some lovely pomegranate juice with a cinnamon stick….This marinating went on for 2 days (I kid you not).  Each day I would turn the bag to make sure that the chicken pieces were evenly absorbing the wonderful pomegranate flavor. I took a couple of sniffs to make sure that the chicken still smelled fresh, which I assure you it did, in fact the only thing I smelled was the pomegranate juice infused with fragrant cinnamon (the trick is to make sure that the chicken is super fresh when you buy it – check that the expiration date is a long way off, but more importantly check that it doesn’t have that funky old chicken smell …)

On Friday morning I took the bag out of the fridge and placed the contents of the bag - chicken, marinade, and all into a baking pan. I covered the birds and placed them into my (newly sort of repaired) oven preheated to 350 degrees. The chicken baked in the oven for approximately 1 hour undisturbed. When I pulled the chicken out of the oven the meat was moist and plump.

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Cross-posted to the Kosher Blog
For many of you, having guests at a shabbat meal means often juggling various dietary restrictions preferences that guests may bring to the table. Michael Pollan makes the interesting point that the French consider it improper to impose your diet onto your host, and yet how many of you can recall meals in which you were left with virtually nothing to eat as a result of your kashrut/vege- pesce- ovo- lacto- tarianism/ or any possible allergies. Peter Berley’s The Flexitarian Table may hopefully solve at least some of the issues. Read more »

In preparation for Rosh Hashanah I have been thinking about what I always seem to be thinking about …. namely food. This year I will be preparing meals for a yet to be determined number of family and friends (quite a feat in my tiny only semi-functional kitchen with a mini stove that has not worked properly in 2 years and burners that seem to go on strike every few weeks). As this New Year approaches, I’ve been mulling over the significance and symbolism of food in our tradition. For much of our collective history, Jews were an agricultural people, maintaining the delicate balance of give and take with the earth. They nurtured the land that sustained them and directly reaped the benefits of their labor. Even if you yourself were not a farmer, you likely knew your neighbor who was. Nothing was taken for granted, the rainfall, the fertility of the soil, the well preserved seeds passed down from generation to generation, the livestock, the fruit trees, and the grain - it was all very real to the Jews who came together to celebrate their feast days. Simply put, food was holy.

Needless to say, today our relationship with food is very different. We are much farther removed from our food sources. Even when we try to support local agriculture, we are not dependent upon it. We are part of a thriving global economy that makes almost anything available to us at anytime (at a price of course). So if there is a hailstorm in northern New York, or Pennsylvania, or New Jersey, and crops are decimated - most New Yorkers would not even notice. We have been conditioned to associate food with hermetically sealed plastic packaging instead of the soil, plants, and aimals that are the true sources of our sustenance (which is why I believe that so many people who do eat meat are sqeemish about witnessing an animal being slaughtered ala hazon’s schitah debate - or even making the mental association that their “cutlet” in all of its skinless boneless glory was once a living breathing bird)

What I have decided to do this Rosh Hashanah is to focus on the local and seasonal bounty and blend in the traditional foods symbolic of the goodness, sweetness, and fruitfulness we hope to be blessed with in the year to come. Read more »

Over the last couple of days, I’ve watched with interest the growing debate around whether or not Hazon should schect a goat (or two) at the Hazon Food Conference. Last night, however, I was faced with my own “meaty” challenge: whether or not to eat it.

I have been a vegetarian for the last eight years and was vegan for two. Over that time, I have never particularly craved meat aside from an occasional urge for a corned beef sandwich from this amazing deli near my parents’ house in Chicago. (Even then, I’m not sure if it was the meat itself I craved, or the comforting memory of my mom coming home with a warm corned beef bundle wrapped in hefty white paper.)

Last night, however, was a different story. I found myself tagging along to dinner at a kosher Bukharian restaurant on 108th street, also known as “Bukharian Broadway, in Rego Park, Queens. (To read more about Bukharian Jews and their culinary delights, read Julia Moskin’s great article in the NY Times Dining & Wine section.)

Up until last night, I had certainly never had Bukharian food and to be honest - I barely knew that this sub-group of Central Asian Jews even existed. So I didn’t realize right away what my friend meant when he said to me, “you might want to have a snack on the way.” Turns out, he was referring to the menu which was filled with chicken and lamb kebabs, lamb samsi (like an Indian samosa), sweet breads, and special pulled noodles…with spicy lamb.

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There have been some very interesting issues raised about kashrut in recent months on The Jew & The Carrot, particularly regarding the compatibility of traditional kashrut with the ethical, ecological, gastronomical, and cultural sensibilities of many of our readers and and contributors. And of course, there are the reports about the the blatant abuses of some of the kosher meat processors. However, while the kosher dietary rules (which I personally observe) are an important source and means of expression for Jewish values about food, they are not the only ones. There are also many rituals connected with the table and the seasons that have also shaped how we think about and eat our food.

Reading books at the dinner table is something most of us Jews take for granted, based on our experiences of the haggadot scripting our Passover seders, Tu bishvat haggadot for Tu Bishvat seders, benchers for birkat ha-mazon and zemirot after Shabbat and holiday meals. Read more »

Over the last few years I’ve noticed this strange phenomenon about going away on vacation - as soon as I get back, it feels like I never left.  No matter how relaxing the trip was, or how far out of my normal context I travelled, my life seems all too ready to greet me at baggage claim and fill me in on all the things I missed while I was away. Sometimes, though - if I’m lucky, the storm of emails and to do lists subsides long enough for me to briefly recall a memory of my former self, happy and on vacation. 

This most recent trip to San Francisco and Portland was especially lovely, filled with old friends, and new discoveries (especially the Shanghai Tunnels which, despite living in Oregon for two years, were a complete surprise).

One highlight, which came near the end of our trip, was a soggy hike up Lateral Falls just outside of Portland.  Actually, the highlight was not the falls themselves (there were two and they were both gorgeous), but the native flora that lined and dotted our path.  Everywhere I turned, I saw - food!  Redwood trunks split open to reveal crumbly, red velvet cake insides.  Intertwining vines formed a delicate lattice pie crust.  Water-smoothed birch branches twisted into the shank of a Pesach lamb bone. 

“You’re clearly in the right profession,” my friend Tyson said after about my tenth food reference on the trail.

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Last night I threw a dinner party. Not a Shabbat meal, which I’ve grown happily accustom to attending or occasionally hosting on Friday nights. I picked a random Monday, invited some friends over, asked the friends to bring spicy red wine and caramel ice cream, baked and prepped most of Sunday afternoon, and came home from work to finish cooking, set out plates, and answer the door as my guests arrived.

There is a Hasidic folktale that says rebbes should be burried in a coffin made from the wood of their dining table. The connection is that one’s hospitality at the table will carry them into the World to Come. I think there is a lot of wisdom in this idea - hosting, afterall, is both a vulnerable and enjoyable experience, and I think we reveal much more about our true selves through inviting people into our homes, than we do in most other social contexts.

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