I really love it when my boyfriend gets excited about a meal.  He stops, breathes in. “Oh,” he says quietly, “oh, wow” a little louder.  That usually makes me pause.  “Oh this is amazing,” his eyes go wide and a smile begins to play across his face, “I can’t believe how good this is.”  Sometimes he reaches across the table to include me in the moment, sometimes he revels in his experience alone.

We had one of those moments last night.  Earlier in the day, I had been bored at work so I checked out Facebook and noticed an invitation to several restaurants with a focus on sustainable food that were donating a portion of their proceeds that night to the Brooklyn Food Conference.  Since I was planning on being in the neighborhood of one of these restaurants, I decided to check it out – boyfriend in tow.

Thanks so much to Deb Arnold for this terrific guest post.  Deb is a serious foodie living in Seattle, much to her own disbelief. She has previously lived and cooked in New York, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Deb is a business communications consultant serving global clients, a sometimes writer, an avid traveler, and an unrepentant choir geek. She is also a proud partner at the award-winning Kavana Jewish Cooperative, one of the best things about living in Seattle.

Frankly, I was a little nervous.

I’d come to rely on Walter. He was my supplier, my guy, my dealer, you might even say. Whatever Walter says is fresh, I buy. Whatever Walter puts in my packages for Pesach, I take. Whatever special price he offers, I smile.

One can develop a very deep relationship with one’s fishmonger (way) out here in the Pacific Northwest. Especially if you’re me.

If there’s one thing I love, it’s being a regular, especially if there’s food involved. I even became a regular once at a lunch counter in the Boqueria market in Barcelona (ask Sharon). Two years later, the guy still remembered what I like to drink while I’m waiting for a seat (cava, if you must know).

So when I called to place my gefilte fish order and was told Walter was out for two days, my heart sank. He was the only (half) Jew in the place. Despite reassurances that anyone there could do the job (“we all have knives, lady”) and the shocking news that this was not exactly a novelty item (“we can add you to our list of gefilte fish orders”), I stood firm. I would wait until Walter got back on Tuesday morning and pick up my fish then. “Now I want you to write on my order,” I instructed in my best New York wise guy , “if it’s not Walter, it’s not Passover!” I said I’d be in at 9am.

Photo by Ivan Soto

I don’t typically cook a lot of meat.  During my dinner parties I’ll sometimes have one meat dish, while everything else will be vegetarian friendly.  Dating a vegetarian has also sharply curtailed my meat consumption.  So in the menu planning for my “traditional” Passover Seder my co-host insisted on brisket.  I agreed, but only if it was conscientious meat (the fish I put into my gefilte fish were all on the “good” fish list).  To him this meant kosher, to me this meant sustainable so we started searching for kosher sustainable brisket.

This was a bit more challenging than we expected.  I had heard about Kol Foods the organization that provides kosher sustainable meat.  The problem we faced was that we only wanted one brisket and they sell their product in much larger quantities.  Of course we thought about asking around to see if we couldn’t find someone who might want to share a box, but because it was rather last minute (the meat order deadline was that day) it didn’t seem likely.  So a little Internet searching later we came across some organic kosher brisket that could be delivered in most parts of Manhattan.  That seemed like the logical compromise so we ended up with two three-pound chunks of meat, a coupon for our next order and a complimentary oven mitt.

Red meat in moderation is okay, but you probably shouldn’t chow down on steak every day. That’s what conventional dietary wisdom says. Now, a National Cancer Institute study suggests, the distinction between moderation and daily intake has become a matter of life and death.

In the study, published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 545,653 people ages 50 to 71 were asked about their eating habits and then tracked over the next 10 years. During that time, a little over 70,000 died.

Okay, so we all know there are these lists of the do’s and don’ts over Passover.  But like so much in Judaism, there are multiple rules that can be completely contradictory to one another – just ask someone of Sephardic background what counts as chametz then ask someone with an Ashekanazi upbringing.

This matters a great deal to me this year because a friend and I are planning to host a Seder together and he says he wants a “traditional” meal.  I’m excited about cooking a full Passover Seder, except I don’t really know what “traditional” means. (an orange on the seder plate?)  I didn’t grow up Jewish and so often I hear that you are expected to follow your family customs at Passover – especially in determining what counts as kitniot. But my family is Christian and they typically eat ham (and among other things, butter shaped like a lamb) for Easter – so that is not going to be a very helpful guideline for me now.

I admit I’m a Top Chef junkie, so when season 5 ended, I found myself going through a bit of withdrawal. While the Food Network doesn’t really do it for me, I decided to tune in to The Chopping Block, a newer show on NBC that features two teams going head-to-head, trying to run successful restaurants in New York City.

It’s not worth describing how the competition works, or details about the show, but I will say that it’s nowhere nearly as entertaining as Top Chef. Nevertheless, after being pretty bored with the pilot, I tuned in this week to see the second episode, to see if it picks up.

It didn’t. However, I was proud to see that for the first time on one of these shows, some food awareness actually played a role.

Mark Bittman’s recent call to eat more sustainable fish included the instruction to eat more herring, a fish that is near and dear to Ashkenazic cuisine. What would kiddush in synagogue be without plates of this tasty, flavorful fish? Well, maybe herring is a little too flavorful–while I love herring, I find that many younger Jews find it too strong or fishy tasting. For those whose taste buds were raised on bland farmer salmon or other milder fish, herring seems to only be on the menu if you eat it at a trendy Scandanavian restaurant.

But there is hope for the herring-skeptic. I first had this delicious herring salad in London, at the Shabbat table of a cousin from South Africa. In my family, while we eat it all year, it has become an important part of our Yom Kippur break-fast. The sweetness of the pineapple and the acid in the mayonnaise are a wonderful balance to the full-flavored herring. The matjes herring is wonderfully delicate, and is a good introduction to herring for those who are used to tart, briny fish pieces from a jar.

Check out the recipe after the jump!

Mark Bittman’s Saturday Article in the New York Times exposed fish farms as rife with unbalanced feed to food ratios, environmentally degrading practices and negative effects on biodiversity (not to mention palate diversity). He also says that farmed fish tastes bad. I guess it turns out that CAFOs and Fish Farms have more in common than a penchant for scandalous kashrut practices.

When dark chocolate finally crossed over into the mainstream,  I’m sure I wasn’t the only foody to rejoice at its recent widespread availability (heck, even Hersheys & Mars have dark versions of most of their candy bars now).

Well, it seems that salt is about to become this year’s dark chocolate. As early as 2006, salted caramel seemed to be taking the dessert world by storm. But when I walked into my local Starbucks this week and ordered up a Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate, I knew that salt had reached the big leagues. How was it, you ask? It was 500 calories-worth of swooning, Homer-Simpson-like moaning, beverage ecstacy. Salt + chocolate = GOOD.

In a beautiful bit of Jew/Carrot synchronicity, I read in this weeks’s Torah portion the story of Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt when she turned back to witness the destruction of her hometown of Sodom.  Still buzzing from the hot chocolate, I did a little digging (salt-mining?) into the significance of salt in Jewish tradition.

We are a people of the book as much as we are a people of the fork, and no one – no one – in our generation was more gifted with words than David Foster Wallace, who died (of apparent suicide) this past Friday. Here, in memoriam, is a link to his beautiful, compassionate, soul-searching article on man’s relationship with food, “Consider the Lobster,” which gave rise to a same-titled collection of essays that are all worth reading.

My grandpa, who I call “Papa,” turned 98 on Sunday. While I go to New York every few months to visit him, I haven’t especially timed it around his birthday before. Given that he almost died in November, he made it clear months ago that if he should still be here, he wanted me there to help him celebrate his birthday.

At first, he said, no party. But there are a few people who knew, and asked if they could come, and the next thing you know, we’re having a small party. So what to serve? Papa, who is pretty-much housebound these days, picked the restaurant. He said we’d pass around the menu, everyone would order what they’d want, and we’d order in. The restaurant he picked was Mama Mexico, a very good (non-kosher) Mexican restaurant not far from his apartment.

He had a few bottles of wine lying around, and I ordered a cake. But when I first arrived on Thursday, Hillary, his wonderful care-giver from Trinidad, told me that he had made a funny request. For hors d’oeuvres, he wanted shrimp cocktail.

Thanks to Amy B. Trubek for this guest post. Trubek is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont. She’s also the author of The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir.

Have you ever gone to a delicatessen, ordered smoked fish with cream cheese, a bagel and horseradish, and ended up disappointed, as though somehow the taste was not right – the horseradish too mild, the fish too salty? If so, where did your idea of something “tasting good” come from?

Somehow you developed an expectation or standard, perhaps from an inherited food memory of the tastes of Eastern Europe or from contemporary socio-economic definitions of what is “good” (i.e. better to be more expensive or imported). Really, the particularity of the fish, the method of smoking, and the preparation of the horseradish that create either a taste of happiness or disappointment, can be described as Eastern European terroir.

So, we were on a conference call the other day. When I say “we,” I mean those of us who have the gargantuan task of menu-planning for Hazon’s 2008 Food Conference.

I am chairing this committee, along with Sue Carson, one of the co-chairs of the conference.  On this call, one person casually suggested a lox and bagels brunch. Lox and bagels were served last year at the conference. No surprise, as lox and bagels are often a staple at Jewish events.

But we most likely will have a lox-less conference.

Gasp. How could we take lox off the menu? Isn’t having a conference celebrating Jewish food without bagels and lox like holding a Japanese cultural celebration without sushi?

Exactly.

It’s sad to say, but both of these are cultural practices that need to be reconsidered.

Last Friday, Yosh and I attended a sushi-making Shabbat dinner. Wine was blessed and followed by small cups warm sake. Then, after we’d washed and blessed the challah, my friends and I rolled up our sleeves, rolled out the bamboo mats, and rolled up some amazing (if not technically perfect) sushi. Did it feel like a traditional Friday night dinner? Not entirely – but what better way to greet the Sabbath queen than with a plate of freshly made sushi and soy sauce?

Find out how to make your own sushi here. But first, check out the tasty photos (taken by the talented Rik) from our dinner, below the jump!