“Rabbi Shimon taught: ‘…Three who dine at a table and exchange words of Torah are considered as having eaten at God’s table…’”  (Pirke Avot 3:4)  I suppose a discussion of religion is considered verboten almost everywhere by certain people, but not in Jewish culture.  Then again, we like to talk politics in public, too!  But in the days of the Mishna, of course the conversation was only with the other people at the table.  After all, there was no e-mail, no phones…  and no text messages!  I remember, when cell phones were first becoming popular, my friend railing against people who would answer calls during dinner.  I agreed with her, but felt there should be some wiggle-room:  what if your friend is calling to say she’ll be late?  What if he needs directions to the restaurant?  Also, why should it bother me at the next table?  I understand if it is the person you’re dining with, but the “noise” argument makes no sense, since you wouldn’t be bothered by the people at the next table having a normal conversation.  Nowadays, we’re all used to this and most of us are pretty polite about it (music on the subway is a different story entirely, but I’ll restrain myself for now.)  Text messages, though around for years, have recently become more of a problem according to the NYT Dining section.

This is the first in a new series of reviews of food-related apps for the iPhone that can help you find local, organic and kosher food at local markets, restaurants and on your travels. We’ll be reviewing a range of apps, many of them free, but we start with a look at a paid program: Kosher, by RustyBrick, which currently costs $4.99 from Apple’s iTunes app store.

Kosher’s interface is cleanly designed. Essentially, it’s a front-end viewer for a database hosted on Shamash.org, which has listings of restaurants, groceries, butchers, kosher food stores and even caterers. The database also contains reviews that visitors to these establishments have submitted. But the app also has a host of iPhone specific features and goodies that make it a compelling purchase for any iPhone user who keeps kosher or has friends who do.

I did it!

And it only took two weeks, four trips to the hardware store, five different configurations, one temper tantrum, two phone calls to my carpenter-savvy father, three trips to my local bike shop (LBS) and looking at the photos of other exercise bike grain mills online about three hundred times.

It’s been a fun day of sawing, drilling and screwing. I managed to get the bicycle sprocket firmly attached to the flywheel of the grinder, with the right sized screws so it can still fit through the bars where the bike wheel used to go.

What do farmers do in the winter? Projects!

Since I’ve found myself with a little downtime, I’ve embarked on a really fun project: mechanizing our Country Living Grain Mill with an exercise bike. The grain mill on its own is fantastic — nothing like baking with freshly ground flour. But it’s quite a bit of work, once the novelty wears off. So the thought of using my thighs, which are substantially bigger than my forearms, to turn the flywheel is exciting indeed.

Oh readers!  What an exciting time for a Yenta!  My first Shmethicist column got a shout out in The Forward.  And readers’ questions are pouring in.

So I thought I’d start with the spiciest query . . . and I don’t mean the one about habaneros versus jalapeños.

There’s no food without water, and some people love to talk about how the destruction of our watersheds will lead us all to perdition before our teeth even fall out. It’s the kind of doom-saying that makes a lot of folks want to crawl under a rock instead of thinking about change.  But saving enormous amounts of water is actually pretty easy and, to a large degree, can be accomplished with a time investment instead of a monetary one. In the spirit of the new year, here are some tips and resources on how to change your kitchen for the better (world-wise and wallet-wise).

Start with your Sink.

To repair the world, you can start by repairing your sink.  Fixing leaking faucets can save 20 gallons of water a day. Just spend a couple of bucks and a few minutes screwing on an aerator and watch your water bill go down. If you need one, you can also get a water filtration system for your tap instead of drinking bottled water, which uses lots of water in production and pollutes the world with plastic. Finally, unlike quails and manna, water still falls from the sky – so you can harvest rainwater for your garden using a rain barrel. The Florida Extension teaches you how to build one here.

Or, you could get fancy.

Bikes. Waffles. Calls to worship. What could be more tailor-made for Hazon than that? Did I mention the factory farm chickens attached to the back of this baffling, waffling vehicle? The shotgun and machete attachments?

I just came across this strange short film today, and while I’m not sure what to make of its deadpan, tongue-in-cheek commentary on the state of the world’s food systems, violent religious conflicts and our over-reliance on technology, all I know is that it made me laugh, and it made me want waffles.

And that’s good enough for me.

The Boston Herald announced that Fenway Park is installing a kosher hot dog vending machine:

The home of the Fenway Frank, which claims to sell more hot dogs than any other ballpark in the country, is adding a new option for Jewish fans who adhere to strict kosher dietary laws. A new automated “Hot Nosh” vending machine, to be located in the big concourse under the bleachers, will cook and dispense all-beef, glatt kosher hot dogs in under a minute.

That’s cool at the ballpark, but how about in a Jewish day school?

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

When I was a kid, my parents gave me weird food for lunch and packed it in weird ways. God bless them, they sent me off into the world with chunks of tempeh, entire raw portabellas, dark whole-grain bread with thick pieces of cheese inside. These treats were invariably wrapped in waxed paper, which my mother had deemed better for you than plastic baggies or packaging from a factory. As soon as I was old enough to notice this was different from the other kids’ cold cut sandwiches in neat Ziploc bags and individually-wrapped string cheeses, I became mortified.

Around the same time, I started attending Hebrew school in the evenings – something I approached mostly with dedication, although I occasionally dragged my feet about going. After all, it wasn’t the Christian kids’ religion class (which we all just referred to as Religion) that got them out of school early once a week. To me, those who went to Religion sat in the soft cloak of normalcy—and I didn’t.

Fast forward a few years.  I now follow Jewish tradition with pleasure and am a zealous whole foods foodie. Although eating and religious study practices may be hard to take for an image-conscious little kid, I now understand eating whole foods, keeping kosher, saying brachot and other thoughtful ways of approaching food are central to my life.  Indeed, I’d argue that observing these traditions – in combination – is rather revolutionary.

For three months I’ve been enjoying my new kitchen in deeply gratifying ways. It transformed my Thanksgiving experience (referred to as “The Super Bowl of cooking”) due to my increased refrigerator, freezer, countertop, cooktop and oven capacities. The new island configuration without the previous wall completely transforms my interactions with my children, family and guests.

I still bake challah every week, but now I have more refrigerator space for the dough to rise Thursday night. I tried baking the loaves in my new steam oven last week and they were extra moist. Next week I’ll try using the oven’s thermometer probe on the challah. Confessions of a kitchen geek. The kitchen was always the hub, but now it is open and accessible, and I reside in it with tremendous gratitude.

Today’s Harold McGee article on heat in the NYTimes provided me with a new level of validation.

No, it’s not a joke:

The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe.

Does this give anyone else the sense of peace and hope for the world that it gave me?

The wonderful Tuv Ha’Aretz Community-Supported Agriculture group at the JCC Houston came up with this Top-10 list of must have items in order to maximize the produce from your CSA share.  Turns out, the list is pretty handy for any Jewish food enthusiast (or even the occasional ”reluctant” foodie).

Didn’t think an ice cube tray was a fundamental part of using your CSA share?  Think again!

Check out the full list here.  And if you have any helpful kitchen doo-dads that you think should be on the list, leave a comment below! 

Last week, my coworker Judith came into the office, excited about a seasonal food discovery she’d made.  “I was trying to figure out what to do with all the potatoes I got in my CSA,” she said.  “And I realized - December’s not that far away and potatoes store well…no wonder latkes are a traditional Chanukah food!”

Judith’s epiphany links her back to the kitchens of our collective Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors, who made food from inexpensive, readily-available ingredients.  What better way to have a delicious, filling meal, than to fry up a bunch of winter root veggies like potatoes?

And, I thought with a swell of “it all makes sense!” elation, what better to top them with than a sauce made of the only fruit that stores as well as potatoes in the winter - apples! Remembering the Hebrew connection put me in even more in a tizzy.  (One of the first things that every Hebrew school student learns is that tapuach means apple and tapuach adamah means “apple of the earth” - potato.)

It was high time, I thought, to make some applesauce.  (Recipe below the jump…)