In California, it works. (We planted late in a mild winter.)
That means just in time for outdoor Shabbes dinners, we have the basic ingredient for coleslaw.
But with this gem-like vegetable sitting on my kitchen counter, I couldn’t bear the thought of traditional coleslaw: cabbage shreds drowned in mayonnaise and sugar. I decided to celebrate the color. The following recipe is adapted from several sources.
I am pretty excited this morning, because today’s the day that the grounds manager from a small local college is coming over to spend a few hours helping me salvage a row of overgrown, antique quince bushes and convert a small corner of my yard into an edible garden. I expect that we’ll be working pretty hard, so before he gets here I need to eat breakfast, and that’s what we’ll be discussing today.
This article is crossposted to Intermountain Jewish News and was written by Chris Leppek. Photo by Shari Valenta
If you listen carefully, you might hear new and curious sounds emanating from the Denver Jewish community.
Such as a rake drawing its tines through freshly turned earth.
Or a hoe chucking its way through clods and weeds.
Or the hushed plinks of water drops falling from hoses to dirt.
Or, perhaps, even the barely perceptible whisper of a young plant springing forth from a seed in search of sunlight.
Gardens and small farms are appearing in the city in all sorts of unlikely places, including Jewish places — in the shadow of a synagogue, on newly-acquired land that might one day become a Jewish high school, on an empty lot amidst the hustle-bustle of downtown itself.
A long-time reader of The Jew and the Carrot, it’s easy for me to see the importance and power of conversations within the Jewish community regarding eating, nutrition, food politics, and sustainability. However, the Jewish imperative for justice does not allow us to stop at environmental or personal levels. Rather, we have to continue our pursuit of justice to ensure that everyone has access to fresh, seasonal produce, healthy food options, and the skills to prepare healthy meals. The Nourishing Kitchen of New York City is an organization working to do just that for the East Harlem community.
Maybe I’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth a few too many times, but over the past couple of years, I’ve tried more and more to go (and grow) local.’I feel like I’m doing a little something to help the planet, it hasn’t hurt my wallet as much as I feared, and it just tastes better.’We’ve been frequenting the neighborhood Farmer’s Market for much of our produce and I’ve even gotten to know some of the people who grow some of the food we eat.’I've found that our cherry tomatoes taste a lot more like cherries than the tasteless red circles that sit in cruel, so ft plastic cages at the supermarket.’Our fingerling potatoes and yams still smell of the earth and the yolks in our cage-free, farm-raised eggs are so bright you need to bring sunglasses to breakfast.
This morning my daughter and I stopped by our neighborhood butcher to buy something to grill tomorrow. Arriving only 10 minutes before closing, we were absolutely astonished to discover that just a few packages of chicken remained, along with some knockwurst and hamburgers. Not a single steak, roast, chop or rib.
It seems odd, but we celebrate Memorial Day by eating meat. Its a meat lovers holiday. Is this a good thing? Despite the U.S. dietary guidelines, which recommend eating less red and processed meat, I think eating meat is a fine thing.
Dr. Renata Micha, of the Harvard School of Public Health, would probably agree. She published the results of a very interesting experiment in this month’s journal, Circulation. Dr. Michas team contacted the authors of 20 previously published studies about the effects of eating meat (evaluating a total of 1 million adults in 10 countries on 4 continents), and asked them to go back and separate the results of their raw data into processed (smoked, cured or salted) and unprocessed meat. All the meat contained similar amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol. The researchers found that eating the equivalent of one hot dog, or 2 slices of deli meat, per day was associated with a 42% increase in the risk of heart disease, and a 19% increase in the risk of diabetes. But eating twice as much unprocessed red meat was associated with neither.
This past September I started “Your Health is on Your Plate” [http://yourhealthisonyourplate.com] to help prevent diabetes and obesity by teaching folks how to tell the difference between real food and manufactured calories.At “Your Health is on Your Plate,”I encourage readers to restore traditional methods of food selection andpreparation. I focus on health, sustainability, and resource conservation.
Cross-posted on Food Foreverthe AJWS food justice blog.
Food aid, nutrition, AIDSit’s all connected. Ruth Messinger’s recent piece on Change.org and Huffington Post poses a response to this week’s New York Times article that paints a stark picture for the future of Uganda and the global fight against AIDS. Despite the incredible achievements of U.S. foreign aid in combating the AIDS epidemic, advocates and health providers are worried that the U.S. is giving this fight a cold shoulder. Messinger calls upon leaders to take a good hard look at the consequences of privileging cost effective interventions for malaria over expensive treatment for HIV/AIDS. Rather than addressing health problems in isolation, what we need, of course, is a holistic approach to strengthening health systems, aid distribution and food sovereignty all at once. Policy-wise, supporting the Foreign Assistance Revitalization and Accountability Act (S. 1524) to promote global development, good governance and a reduction of poverty and hunger is critical.
Check out this Cleveland Jewish News article about the new community garden just starting out at Beth El Congregation in Akron. Ellen Botnick and her friends were, in part, inspired by their connection to Hazon on the Israel Food Tour that we cosponsored with Heschel last Novemeber. As Ellen says “Food connects us to the earth, to each other, and to something much larger than ourselves. We are building community through this garden.”
These days, it seems everyone is talking about “going green.” Never has such a simple sounding term had so much meaning. For nonprofit overnight Jewish camps, their staff and lay leaders, this means changing old habits, teaching campers about how and why to make changes, and ensuring a vibrant future for their camps.
Many camps have begun to implement green practices, taking action to decrease their carbon footprint, and impart a positive environmental message to their campers. Steps have included forgoing paper, plastic, and Styrofoam in favor of using reusable tableware and reducing non-biodegradable waste, using solar power for heating, providing campers and staff with environmentally friendly water bottles, changing light bulbs to reduce carbon emissions, and more! Several camps have also planted gardens and are teaching their campers about healthy cooking and organics.
The other day my boyfriend and I were enjoying a Sunday walk in Brooklyn when we ran into his friend Ana, her partner and their adorable new baby. Among the introductions and pleasantries she mentioned that she was distributing her film FRESH. “Here, tell me what you think of it,” she said handing me a copy, knowing I was a food writer.
So, one night a while later my boyfriend and I tucked into the sofa and watched FRESH, the new film by Ana Sofia Joanes. As someone who has seen Food Inc and has read a lot of Michael Pollan, the material was not new to me, however I found the material’s presentation (forgive the pun) fresh. I had found Food Inc to be a good film, but heavy on the propaganda. I felt that FRESH got its message across in a far more even-handed way. The film invoked a pretty good discussion, and I was happy to see on their website they had some additional educational materials and even a call for recipes. But you don’t have to be a Jew and the Carrot writer or have chance encounters with the director to see this film. If you live in the New York area there will be a screening this Tuesday.
Q: What do you do when you have so many home grown zucchini your friends won’t answer the door when you try to share your harvest?
A: Find a car with an open window.
The triumph and the tragedy of the summer growing season is the sheer fecundity of gardens and farms. How to partake of fruits and vegetables at their peak without relying on the same old recipes?
Lois M. Burrows and Laura G. Myers offer a mouth-watering solution with their book, Too Many Tomatoes . . . Squash, Beans, and other Good Things; a Cookbook for When Your Garden Explodes.
Locavores in Los Angeles should take note of a class, California Native Seasonings and Condiments offered by the Theodore Payne Foundation from 2 to 3:30 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 29.
Taught by Connie Vadheim, an adjunct professor of biology at California State University at Dominguez Hills, the class will be a discussion of native plants that can be used to flavor and enhance your food. Recipes will be provided.
The class costs $20 for foundation members and $30 for nonmembers. It will be held at the Payne Foundation, 10459 Tuxford St., Sun Valley, CA 91352. For information, call (818) 768-1802.
Dan Barber’s recent editorial ”You Say Tomato, I say Agricultural Disaster” in last Sunday’s the New York Times reminds us that even when we try to opt out of the agribusiness system, we’re still part of the eco-system. In our efforts in the Northeast to grow our own tomatoes, it looks like we home gardeners may have inadvertently contributed to the tomato blight plaguing our local CSA’s and other small farms. I had really been looking forward to the tomato harvest, but instead I’m reminded sharply how sharing the harvest especially this year is sharing the risk. How are others dealing with the tomato blight crisis?
Cheese, Cooking, Dairy/Vegetarian, Gardening, Recipes, Seasonality, Side Dishes, Vegetables, Vegetarian
