In a recent post, I mentioned a homemade granola recipe that I found on Aviva Allen’s website. She recently published a kosher organic cookbook with simple yet delicious recipes. She personally invented all of the recipes, and are made with wholesome, organic foods and grains. Something that is very useful which she added are little icons next to each recipe indicating if it is a vegan, gluten free, or passover friendly recipe. After Pesach, I plan on doing a full review of this cookbook, but in the meantime here is a sweet potato kugel that I made last night which is very good.
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The final three hours of Pesach preparations are approaching… and I actually have some down time now to blog! I am happy to say that it’s been a group effort amongst my family members to get to this point in time. Between the shopping, shlepping boxes from our basement with Pesach dishes upstairs to our kitchen, preparing our kitchen, to cooking, and to preparing all the necessary items for the Seders, I feel lucky to have time now to post about my cooking preparations.
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Despite the crazy weather which the North East is experiencing today, I am having a number of friends over for shabbos this week and was up late cooking last night. I made an array of different dishes, in addition to my friends offering to make a few dishes as well and helping me out in the process. I remembered that my friend’s mother had a good blend whole wheat/white flour challah recipe, so I decided to make it as well. It’s been some time since I’ve made it last, so I felt I was up for the challenge. Read more »
Following the holiday of Purim, I can be pretty sure that many people have a large volume of the following items in their house: candy, chocolate, and a variety of baked treats. I think that the mitzvah (Torah commandment) of sending Mishloach Manot (sending of portions” which often include wine and pastries; alternately, sweets, snacks, or any foodstuff qualifies) is a beautiful one which emphasizes building community and spreading sweet, warm feelings to one’s friends and family.
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I am staying in my community for Shabbos and since I am eating at friends for the meals, I offered my hosts to make something. I made the following two dishes last night – feel free to try them yourself and I’d greatly encourage feedback!
The Ultimate Chocolate Cake from The Kosher Palette
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When I did my weekly grocery shopping earlier this week, I was faced with an interesting dilemma: should I buy strawberries (which two pints were being sold for $5- which the price I bought them for in the summer!), even though they aren’t in season in New York and they were imported from Mexico, or not? I had to stop and think about what I wanted to do – I really love strawberries and summer fruit, yet at the same time I have been trying to purchase some of my produce based on their seasonality. Though I came close to calling my friend for moral support, I chose not to buy them. So I reverted to buying pears. At least they were grown in America (even though they could have been grown in a place which is further away than Mexico is from NY – but I am not going to stress over this too much!) and generally always in season since they store well, as apples do.
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As I was commuting to work this cold, wintry New York morning, I was reminded of a warm and yummy Shabbos dish that has been in my family for years. I am referring to fricassee. There are many variations of this dish, and I don’t even know where my grandmother got this particular recipe since it seems to be very unique compared to the ones I just found online. My mother and my aunt have both replicated and slightly altered the recipe and have thus continued the family tradition of making it as an appetizer for Friday night Shabbos dinner.
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While I was studying my business degree in undergrad, I had a fascinating marketing project which my friend and I really enjoyed doing. My teacher inherited several old issues of different magazines, dating back to the 1950’s-1970’s. The assignment was to pick a theme in the magazine and analyze its presence and development throughout the issues. One of the magazines offered was Family Circle, which was the one we chose for this assignment.
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In a recent article entitled “Kosher Food Becoming Chosen Food of the Unchosen People”, kosher food is now being marketed by kosher food companies (this article focused on Manischewitz in particular) to the mass public, the 98% of the world’s population which is not Jewish. The reasoning behind this is that given the current drive in our society towards eating purer, cleaner food, many consumers are looking for kosher foods and something positive, even though they don’t keep kosher.”
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A friend of my sent me an article written in the Washington Post about Google with the subject, “we should all be as lucky.” It talks about the amazingly top quality café (notice how they chose not to use the word cafeteria instead) which Google offers its employees. Did I mention that it’s free? For all three meals every day? And how by noon menus are distributed electronically for all the 11 cafes on its campus? Furthermore, I am happy to say that “Google supports local farming, organic produce, hormone-free meats and healthful eating.” Don’t you wish you could work there?
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I went to California last week for vacation with a friend and had some interesting food experiences which were quite thought-provoking. In California, there is a chain of coffee shops called Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, and in most of them their coffees and baked goods are kosher, in addition to being delicious. My friend and I made it a top priority to support this special establishment daily during our trip (and on a day we missed, we were religious to double-up the following day). Unfortunately, there aren’t any stores on the east coast (yet!), so we felt we had to optimize on making these visits while on the west coast.
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Overall, my food preferences and likings are pretty simple. My family never had a cupboard with an array of various spices and seasonings – just the basics: salt, black pepper (which wasn’t used frequently since my family doesn’t like spicy food), garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, cinnamon, and some interesting beef seasoning to be added to the weekly Shabbos cholent once in a while. This may be just a family thing, or a cultural trend, how Ashkenazic Jews don’t necessarily have an inspired pallet for an assortment of seasoning.
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Continuing on my previous post about “Olive Tree and Honey”, author Gil Marks raises the question: If there isn’t an original Jewish food, then what makes food Jewish? He answered it with essentially one word: tradition. Despite our dispersion over all four corners of the earth, we have still somewhat maintained our unity through, especially, food!
The example in question here is the development of kosher cuisine around Jewish Law. This can be seen easily through the creation of a popular Shabbat dish called cholent. According to Jewish law, one cannot cook on Shabbat. However, it is customary to serve a hot dish for Shabbat lunch. Thus this stew-like dish that cooks over a low flame put up before Shabbat was invented in many different Jewish communities.
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I received the cookbook, Olive Trees and Honey: A Treasury of Vegetarian Recipes from Jewish Communities Around the World by Gil Marks as a birthday gift this year, and it is a really fascinating book of Jewish history in addition to the compilation of recipes.
Marks mentions how our culinary habits were transformed due to the geographic areas in which we lived throughout the past 2000 years of exile, based on the different demographics of the countries in which we lived. Since they continued to change, as a result we don’t have one particularly distinct kind of Jewish cooking; rather we have a “mosaic” of cuisines from differing Jewish communities, each with their own history and customs. The largest ones are the Ashkenazic and Sefardic communities. The largest community of Ashkenazic Jews is that of the ancestors of the American Jewish community and the one most Americans relate with as “Jewish food.”
On the contrary, the Sefardic community, interestingly, were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire after the Spanish Expulsion in 1492 and there they grew into a large Jewish community. Today, there is a very large Sefardic community in Israel. However, Jewish cooking now depicts a blend of Jewish cultures throughout the world.
To me, these ideas depict the beauty of Jewish history and continuity. It takes something like food to show how rich are our culture and customs. Furthermore, it’s amazing to think that we are still making foods that our ancestors made hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. We have a strong dedication to customs, for if not, why then would we still be making latkes and sufganiyot on this lovely holiday of Chanukah? Although we may have altered some recipes to add a healthier twist on them, overall we have a wealth of diverse, wholesome and remarkable recipes.
I’ll talk about more of my findings from this cookbook next week, but until then – has anyone made any of the recipes they enjoyed from this cookbook that they would like to share with me? Feel free to email me!
