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.
Sam Kass, White House assistant chef and Food Initiative Coordinator, wore a green tie – it was appropriate since the meeting was on St. Patrick’s Day. Twenty-eight community and faith-based organizations (CFBO) from around the country, including Hazon represented by yours truly, had gathered for a one-day meeting to discuss First Lady Michelle Obama’s ambitious initiative, Let’s Move, to combat childhood obesity in one generation. Kass and Jocelyn Frye, the First Lady’s Policy Director started the day by talking about the meaningful role that faith-based organizations play in their communities. The White House is seeking a comprehensive strategy to tackle the dual problem of hunger and obesity and they see faith-based organizations as uniquely positioned to do this work by allowing children to connect body, mind and spirit. Kass spoke of the need for simple ways for people to transform their lives and to then become leaders for others to make healthy changes, too.
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.
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.
Hazon has been invited to join a group of Faith-based and Community organizations to support Michelle Obama’s recently launched Let’s Move campaign. The meeting in DC tomorrow will provide organizations with tools and information to help combat childhood obesity in their communities. Judith Belasco, Director of Food Programs, is headed to the Capitol to represent Hazon!
According to Judith, “Hazon is always looking to expand our support of healthier lifestyles as meaningfully as we can. Already North America’s largest faith-based supporter of CSA’s, we provide healthy living education through our Jewish Food Education Network (JFEN) and annual Food Conference. We look forward to engaging the Jewish community and beyond in support of Let’s Move.”
According to Joshua DuBois, White House Director of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Parnerships, “The Let’s Move campaign will combat the epidemic of childhood obesity through a comprehensive approach that builds on effective strategies, and mobilizes public and private sector resources. Let’s Move will engage every sector impacting the health of children to achieve this national goal, and will provide schools, families and communities simple tools to help kids be more active, eat better, and get healthy.”
In December, Sarah Gross attended a workshop called “Bringing a Great Idea to Scale” at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn. When prompted to write down a few things she cared about most, Gross wrote “chocolate” and “helping animals.” She recalls, “The next morning as I walked my own rescued pitbull, Mocha, after a breakfast of chocolate (of course), my inspiration hit. ‘Rescue Chocolate,’ I muttered to myself over and over; the ideas were flying in and my fingers began to freeze as I wrote away on my iPhone. Mocha wondered why I wasn’t throwing the ball so well this morning. Anyway, the company took off from there!”
Rescue Chocolate donates 100 percent of its net profits to animal rescue groups, and all its packaging educates chocolate lovers about various issues related to the companion animal overpopulation crisis. All of its products are vegan and kosher/pareve. The company sells (or will sell) chocolate under such catchy names as Bow Wow Bon Bons, Peanut Butter Pit Bull, Pick Me! Pepper, The Fix, Foster-riffic Peppermint, Forever Mocha, and even “Don’t Passover Me” Bark.
My boyfriend is really into good podcasts and came home the other night insisting that I watch this. And he was right, Dan Barber gives a charming and very insightful talk about sustainable fishing. Check it out:
The month Nisan begins tonight and with it, so many associations. Last year, I wrote about the practice of refraining from eating Matzah from Rosh Hodesh Nisan (i.e. tonight) until Passover. Most people make, if any, the association of dreaded Pesach cleaning and preparation. I’ll be writing some about that in a few days or next week, God willing, but for now, let’s stick to things connected specifically to Rosh Hodesh Nisan.
One association fewer people make is that Birkat haIlanot, the blessing over blooming trees, is typically said in the month of Nisan:
Those of you who came to the Food Conference may have gotten to hear from Woody Tasch, the founder of Slow Money.
The idea is a simple one: invest your money as if food, farms and fertility actually mattered. Get anyone who invests money (and if you have a 401k or an IRA, that’s you too) to direct just 1% of it toward small food enterprises and local food systems. Get at least that small sum of money out of the hands of Wall Street, huge banks and multinationals and use it, quite literally, as seed money. Invest in local farms, food systems, artisans, brewers, bakers, cheesemakers and so on and keep that money close to home.
Many people are using Passover as a chance to think about hunger and food security.
Just this week activists gathered in Jerusalem to protest the government’s failure to provide thousands of children who live below the poverty line with hot school lunches or ensuring ‘food security’ for all its citizens. Click here to read the whole story.
In Los Angeles, many of Hazon’s friends are involved with a Hunger Seder on March 24th. The community seder will take place at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino.
Thanks to Bobbi Rubinstein for sharing this update about the garden at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, CA. Bobbi is a publicist, journalist and green activist. She’s chair of the Valley Beth Shalom Green Team and co-founder of Netiya: The Los Angeles Jewish Coalition on Food and Environmental Justice Issues.
I am excited to share some news with the Hazon kehillah. My shul, Valley Beth Shalom, has broken ground on an urban garden called the Gan Tzedek Initiative. We’re growing food to donate to local food pantries and creating educational opportunities around Torah and environmental study. And perhaps most importantly, we’re building community across all age levels since this is a team effort among all the schools, teachers, parents, administrative staff and clergy.
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!
Thanks to Rachael Don for this guest post! Rachael is a Registered Dietitian in training and co-editor of the Jess Schwartz Jewish Community Day School’s Hazon CSA newsletter in Scottsdale, AZ. A former healthcare administrator, she holds an MBA and a Masters in Health Services Administration. When she’s not cooking organic vegetables, Rachael is caring for her three young sons and husband, David in Phoenix, AZ. She shares these thoughts with the readers of that newsletter and all of you!
Thanks so much to Rachel Kriger for this terrific meditation on the month of Adar. Rachel was raised on organic food and in Jewish dayschool. After college, in the Adamah fellowship, she was able to merge her love of small scale farming and Judaism, and she became the farm manager for the following year. The Calendar Garden at Kayam farm at Pearlstone, is a place to cultivate plants and their connection to seasons, Jewish wisdom and body awareness. Please feel free to join this Rosh Chodesh group in the garden each month.
