Question of the day: What do you eat to prepare yourself for Bicycle Fetish Day?!

The City Reliquary presents: A Street fair for your bicycle! Show off your ride and revel in the beauty of all types, styles, and genres of specialized, customized, and personalized bicycles.

CONTESTS throughout the day: Best in Show, Best Vintage, Best Hand-made, Best Chopper, Best Small Wheel (includes foldable bikes), Wheelies, BMX tricks, Track bike tricks, Heaviest Bike, Ugliest Bike, and more. Games, Rides, Bike Beautification Station, Merch tables and more! Plus: Live performances, cheap beer, and burgers and hot dogs (both carnivorous and herbivorous).

4th Annual Bicycle Fetish Day - Brooklyn
Saturday, May 10, 2008 12:00noon - 6:00 PM
More info here.

Jewish foodies and food lovers of all stripes - this is a must-attend event.

Join Gastronomica for a panel discussion exploring the concept of taking care of the land through farming as seen from both the Islamic (tayyib) and Jewish (eco-kosher) perspectives. Farmers Zaid Kurdieh and Anna Stevenson, and writer Leah Koenig join Gastronomica’s Editor-in-Chief Darra Goldstein for a discussion on the role of faith in farming as part of the Gastronomica Forum* series.

When: Tuesday, May 13 - 6:30pm
Where: New York City’s Astor Center for Wine and Food Experiences
Cost: $20 - ticket price includes a taste of Middle Eastern foods and farm-fresh products.

Purchase tickets here.

*The Gastronomica Forum, launched by Darra Goldstein, Founder and Editor-In-Chief of Gastronomica, are quarterly events featuring important articles from the journal as a platform for engaging in deeper conversations about food and culture.

Sorry for the last minute notice, RSVP at the Facebook page. 

We’re proud to announce this week’s super special event: on Wednesday, 4/9 EATING LIBERALLY welcomes SCOTT STRINGER, the Manhattan Borough President, to discuss “Go Green East Harlem,” a grassroots guide to wholesome home cooking.

To improve public health in East Harlem, Stringer’s office has created a cookbook with recipes contributed by community groups & local restaurants that offer ideas for affordable, accessible, healthy eats.

This FREE event hosted by Eating Liberally will feature snacks, Q&A, guest speakers & a live–and lively–cooking demonstration featuring the Borough President himself.

Lynn Fredericks from Family Cook Productions.
& Author of Cooking Time Is Family Time
will join the conversation.

EATING LIBERALLY with SCOTT STRINGER
& “Go Green East Harlem”
Wed, April 9th - 6-8pm
The Tank @ C:U - 279 Church St
www.eatingliberally.org

This will be a great conference with lots of workshops, networking opportunities, and entertainment! I’ll be showcasing songs from my new CD ‘Eat Like A Rainbow’ (more about that in my next post). Lots of luminaries will be there, including some of our own readers! The 2008 program will focus on strengthening the resolve of children to eat nutritious, fresh foods by:

* connecting holistic food and nutrition messaging in our classrooms, cafeterias, after-school programs, homes, and neighborhoods;

* fostering relationships among school children and their communities that focus on food, cooking, and gardening;

* exploring the nuts and bolts of cross sector (i.e. health, education, foodservice, and agriculture) public and private collaborations; and

* promoting federal, state and local policies that strengthen economic and cultural bonds between local farms and schools, support the development of school gardens, and provide adequate funding for healthy, delicious school lunches for all students.

Read more »

Like Thanksgiving and just about every Jewish holiday (aside from Yom Kippur of course), the Super Bowl this Sunday offers a major opportunity to join together in thanks and celebration stuff your face. And with nachos and beer dominating the typical menu, it’s not the most stomach-friendly fare. Roz Cummins over at Grist came up with a plan for healthier and more sustainable TV-watching foods. Her suggestion: take a traditional Superbowl comfort food (sausage ravioli) and make it vegan.

While I’m certainly an advocate of vegetarian dining and a big fan of Grist, I thought Roz’s suggestion fell slightly short of “Super Bowl Snack Nirvana.” It’s still really heavy, pretty much void of vegetables, and relies on lots of processed foods. Wouldn’t a better solution be vegetarian sub sandwiches piled high with veggies, hummus, and artisanal cheese? Or - if you want something warm and savory - how about spicy two-bean chili with cilantro garlic yogurt? Or guacamole with home made pita chips (okay, it’s not the most seasonal food ever, but it’s better than a corn dog). However you chose to celebrate the “chag of football,” make sure you don’t leave healthy food on the sidelines.

This Super Bowl Sunday, try this recipe for spicy two bean chili from Bon Appetit, and this one for cilantro garlic yogurt sauce from Gourmet. B’tai Avon!

I’ve already posted once today, so sorry for double-dipping, but this is worth posting ASAP:

From the JTS press release:

Dr. David Kraemer, the author of Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages [and 2006 Hazon Food Conference Keynote Speaker], will discuss “Jewish Eating and Jewish Identity” at The Jewish Theological Seminary’s Henry N. Rapaport Memorial Lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, February 4, 2008. The event will take place at JTS, 3080 Broadway (at 122nd Street), New York City.

Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages is the first book ever to explore the history of Jewish eating practices from the Bible to the present, and the first to interpret Jewish eating practices throughout the ages as keys to understanding current Jewish identities.

The Potrero Hill Community Center in San Francisco is still ringing with the laughter, song, and meditative silence of 160 young adults who came together from across the Bay Area last night in an unprecedented Tu B’shvat gathering. It was really a blast!

We packed into the Community beyond its capacity (the event beyond sold-out), we drank wine from the four worlds (local, organic, kosher wine from Santa Cruz, CA) and we ate a bounty of fruits from the four directions (literally from all around the world). Even in this room packed wall to wall with tables and chairs, Josh Miller who co-lead the Seder, got everyone on their feet dancing to Tzadik Katimar.

Read more »

Just a little event notice:

Jewish Values and Environmental Responsibility: Israel’s Environmental Movement
With Dr. Eilon Schwartz, Executive Director of the
Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership in Israel.

Wednesday, January 23, 7:30pm at a private residence on the Upper West Side (RSVP for address).

The Heschel Center is one of Israel’s institutions helping create “agriculture which grows healthy food for all citizens while enhancing land and water quality.” Full info below the fold or RSVP here.

Read more »

Last Sunday Hazon hosted our annual BIG board meeting.  The board itself meets four times a year, but January’s meeting is the only time when the staff is invited and everyone is in the same place.  It’s kind of a big deal around here.

As with every business meeting these days, serving food is essential - Michael Pollan writes in In Defense of Food, “It is apparently considered gauche at a business meeting or conference if a spread of bagels, muffins, pastries and soft drinks is not provided at frequent intervals.” 

What Pollan doesn’t say is that, of all the aspects of a given meeting, food is probably the thing that attendees grumble about most.  Maybe the bagels were too hard, the muffins too sticky, and would it have killed them to have herbal tea with the coffee?  In the end, it seems getting the food “right” is almost as important as the meeting agenda. 

Unfortunately, finding the right food when your organization is committed to health, sustainability and inclusive Jewish community is not particularly straight forward. 

Read more »

(x-posted at Lilith) 

Last week I had the good fortune of attending a completely packed lecture at the 92nd Street Y called, “Hedonistic, Healthy, and Green: Can We Have it All?” Featuring Michael Pollan (of The Omnivores Dilemma fame), Dan Barber (Head Chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns), and moderated by Joan Dye Gussow (This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader), it was the kind of event that sustainable foodies like me drool over. These are our movie stars, the people we choose when asked, “which famous person would you most want to take to dinner?”

The event itself was pretty straightforward: glowing introductions, 10-15 minutes from both speakers (Pollan on his new book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and Barber on the fate of Boris, an over-the-hill - ahem - pig, that after much consideration by Barber’s team at Stone Barns, was turned into 500 pounds of the most delicious sausages he’d ever tasted and shared (20% of Boris’ sausages were donated to a local food bank), followed by questions from Gussow and then from the audience.

The real meat of the evening was not in the format of the event, but in the meeting of these amazing minds. For Pollan, Barber, and Gussow, this is life: travelling, speaking (often about the same thing), and answering questions. But for the audience, watching the exchange between these sustainable food “rebbes” felt like watching your grandmother make her favorite recipe. It looked so simple and obvious, and you left feeling full and nourished and inspired to try it yourself.

Read more »

Join Hazon for our 6th annual Tu B’shvat seder at the JCC in Manhattan.  Learn, be inspired, eat a delicious dinner and a seder of organic fruits and nuts, and drink four cups of wine as we celebrate the holiday of the trees.  Examine how food connects us to Jewish tradition, to the Earth, to other people, and to ourselves.

Tuesday January, 22
7:00pm
$30 (includes dinner and wine)
The JCC in Manhattan 334 Amsterdam Avenue @ 76th Street
Register here or call 646-505-5708

Planning your own Tu B’shevat seder?  Check out The Jew & The Carrot’s Healthy and Sustainable Tu B’shevat Resources.

Last Sunday, I attended Kosher Fest, the yearly gathering of kosher food and beverage purveyors and other food professionals (held in New York City, naturally). Kosher Fest is no informal synagogue social – it’s a two-day mega event that features the newest, best, and flashiest in kosher food. Page 11 of the 84-page Kosher Fest program guide displays some “impressive facts” including the dollar value of kosher produced goods in the US - $10,500,000,000. In other words, if you make kosher food you’re either at Kosher Fest, or you’re missing out.

Precisely because it’s the “see and be seen” event of the Jewish food year, Kosher Fest serves as an annual barometer of the kosher industry – its health, its growth, and its trends. More interestingly, as I ambled down the aisles of shiny displays, I began to notice how the state of kosher food uncannily mirrors the state of today’s Jewish community.

Read more »

Way back in April, I attended and sang in Northampton, MA, at one of the many ‘Step it Up’ rallies going on across the country, and across the world, to bring attention to the realities of climate change. The sound system was powered by veggie oil from my van’s engine running through an inverter, and a good time was had by all. You can see my van, the ‘Veggie Voyager’, near the top right of the photo. Ironically, the weather was perfect! Here is a broadcast from WAMC radio that sums up the event pretty nicely.

Click here to listen!
This past weekend, another series of Step it Up rallies were called across the country - hundreds in all. I played at the rally in Kingston, NY, organized by the teachers and students of Kingston High School. This time though, the weather was cold and wet - making it harder to think about global warming! Activists of all stripes were there, and the mood was festive. Congressman Maurice Hinchey came to support the event, and he spoke after the music. Check out ‘Step it Up’ to see how you might get involved next time!

Hat tip to Jewschooler and NY Ride alumnus Josh Frankel:

After the tremendous success of its first beit medrash, Uri L’tzedek, the organization dedicated to engaging the Orthodox community in social justice, is back for more. “Ethical Kashrut, Workers’ Rights, the Kosher Meat Industry” is the title for this week’s program, and the word on the street is that Rubashkin’s should take cover. Monday night, 7:30 - 9:00 PM, at the Mount Sinai Jewish Center, 135 Bennet Ave, in NYC.

For more information, check out Uri L’tzedek’s new facebook group.