My family are not big jam eaters. We’ve got assorted jars of various home-made kumquat and quince jams that friends have given us over the past year or so in the back of the fridge. Still, when the fruit on our little old apple tree is showing the first blush of red – before it turns mealy and gets attacked by bugs – I can’t resist cooking up a batch of apple butter and handing it out. Just the smell of simmering apples and spices sends me back to my early childhood in Minnesota and the giant apple tree in our backyard that had seven different varieties grafted on to it. My Mom would spend hours each fall stirring big pots of applesauce and apple butter to put up for the winter.

Apple butter is one of the easiest jams to make, because the apple skins contain pectin, the thickening agent in almost all jams and jellies. But there’s no exact recipe. Here’s the technique, more or less:

Core enough apples to fill a large pot around halfway, chop them finely (in the food processor is fine) and throw them in the pot. Add sugar: Most recipes call for equal weights of fruit and sugar, but I prefer less. Even to the unripe apples from my tree, which are fairly tart, I added around ¾ their weight in sugar. At least some of the sugar should be dark brown sugar.

Add some water (to cover the bottom of the pot, especially if the apples aren’t overly juicy) and spices. Whole spices are best, but ground ones will do. If you have a large tea ball or one of those cheesecloth bouquet garni bags, you can put the spices in this. If not, you can do what I do, and carefully pick them out at the end. I threw in a few sticks of cinnamon, cloves, allspice, cardamom, star anise and fresh ginger. The cinnamon and cloves are standard, the rest is optional, according to your taste. If the apples are quite sweet, you can add some lemon juice.

Bring to a boil and lower to a brisk simmer. Cook, stirring occasionally, at least an hour or so, until the apple butter is smooth, thick and brown. If you’re using quite firm or thick-skinned apples, as mine were, you can either strain or puree it near the end, and cook it down a bit more.

Scoop into sterilized jars and seal well.   

One custom I have always liked about Purim (aside from the drunken revelry, of course) is Mishloach Manot, those fun Jewish goodie-bags that people give to each other during this festive holiday.  It’s like Trick-Or-Treating in reverse:  the candy, wine, cookies, etc come to you -no need to go banging on any strangers’ doors.

Surfing Google, I came across a myriad of articles about what one should include in their Mishloach Manot baskets, including a rather heated discussion over “themed Mishloach Manot” on Hashkafah.com.  All these ideas got me thinking like a cunning marketer, and it occurred to me that there is an untapped market for “niche” Mishloach Manot.

So here are a few categories of potential Mishloach Manot ideas targeted to the interests of specific populations to help get this venture started.  (NOTE:  all items included result from intensive focus groups with members of each target audience.)

Feel free to use some of the items listed in your own Mishloach Manot baskets, and add your own suggestions in the comments!

1.  Altercockers (or “Geriatrics”)

One word:  prunes.

2.  College Students

Ramen Noodles (Gefen and Tradition sells kosher, Oriental Style versions)

Red Bull and/or Starbucks Frappuccino bottles

Organic cannabis

Prune-flavored condoms (to make them remember to call their grandparents — see previous category)

3.  Environmentalists

Compact fluorescent bulbs (someone actually posed the idea of “marzipan candy in the shape of compact fluorescent bulbs” in the Hashkafah.com forum linked above).

Worms for their compost bins

Sustainably-made Hamentaschen or other treats (see this post)

4. Israelis

Hummus-filled Hamentaschen

Noisemakers…err, then again, they probably are loud enough without them

5.  Non-Jews

Matzah (just tell them “Purim” is another word for “Passover”)

Might as well throw a Menorah in there, as well

A few plastic Easter eggs to show Jews can be supportive of their holidays, too

Open up your kitchen cupboard, grab a handful of common herbs, fruits and vegetables and voila, your own unregulated pharmacy. On Friday, Tamar Lieb shared her knowledge of the medicinal uses of common plants in the workshop “Kitchen Wisdom for Common Ailments.” To use herbs as medicine, you can do everything from eating them to dissolving them in water, honey, sugar, or oil to extract beneficial properties from fresh and raw plants. I’ve included her long list of beneficial herbs and their properties here (it’s even alphabetized!)

To use waters for your herbal preparation, you can make an infusion (pouring boiling water over delicate things like flowers or leaves) a decoction (boiling harder things like bark or certain dried roots), or use steam. The smell of a plant is its volatile oils escaping, so when you’re making tea, Lieb suggested, keep it covered while it steeps. In a steam bath, made by pouring boiling water over your more delicate herbs (think the pizza spices – oregano, rosemary, basil, thyme – for a cold) and then placing your face, under a towel and over the bowl while you breath in the oily, aromatic steam.

Making herbal honeys, oils and vinegars takes somewhat longer, but its results last longer too, and make beautiful gifts, particularly if you use whole, fresh herbs in clear bottles. Try to use raw honey, which has its own beneficial properties, and apple cider vinegar, which contains probiotics. For each of these media, you’ll place the herb in the solvent and let it sit in a warm place for a couple of weeks, taking it out and shaking it around every day to ensure that more of the surface area of the herb comes into contact with the solvent. When making herbal honeys with dried herbs, Lieb suggests, use them in their powdered form, and mix them into a paste, but be sure to keep the paste slightly wetter than you think you may eventually want it. The powdered herbs will absorb liquid from the honey over the life of your spread.

In making medicines from fresh herbs, sugar is used like salt, to draw the moisture out of plants and create syrup. To make onion syrup, which is good for colds (and surprisingly delicious) layer thin slices of onion with sugar (or honey) and muddle at each layer. Over several hours, the sugar will draw the moisture out of the onion. When you have a sufficient amount of syrup for your purposes, remove the chunks of raw onion and eat your syrup or mix it with water or tea. The taste of onion is much less intense in this form.

Last but not least, the revelation greeted with the most enthusiasm by conferencegoers was Tamar’s ginger peeling method, as seen below (with the back of a spoon). Apparently it is helpful in getting around all of those little knobs.

Tamar’s List of Herbs and their Uses:

Blueberries: Rich in flavonoids and antioxidants; treats varicose veins, hemmerhoids, capillary fragility, and is a gentle remedy for children’s diarrhea.

Cardamom: Eases stomach pain and indigestion, warming stimulant, stops intestinal spasms, treats gas and bloating.

Cayenne: improves poor circulation and weak or irregular heartbeats, colds and flus, indigestion and sluggish bowels. Cayenne and ginger mixed with oil work as a massage oil for aching or painful joints. Cayenne dissolved in25ml of lemon juice and diluted with water and honey make a gargle for sore throats.

Celery: Seeds treat rheumatic conditions and gout. Support kidneys and acidify the body, treat arthritis, detoxify the body, improve circulation to muscles and joints, treats cystitis through mild diuretic and significant antiseptic action. Infuse in tea or mix celery and carrot juice once a day to cleanse.

Cinnamon: A warming stimulant for circulation and to clear congestion, 1/8 teaspoon of cinnamon can triple the body’s efficiency of insulin use. Digestive aid, powerful antiseptic, antiviral, astringent, helps stop bleedinging, good for poor digestion, colds and the flu.

Fennel: The volatile oil is antispasmodic, relieves gas and acts as an antacid, relieves bloating, settles stomach pains stimulates the appetite, is safe for children and can help with teething and stomach colic as an infusion or syrup. Nursing mothers can drink 2-4 cups of fennel tea a day to increase breast milk production, a wash of warm fennel tea can treat conjunctivitis or other eye inflammations.

Garlic: anitbiotic, expectorant, increases sweating, anticoagulant, anti-thrombotic, lowers blood pressure and cholesterol, reduces blood sugar, expels worms and parasites, antiseptic. Use it in cooking or make an infused oil for salads and topically for antiseptic or antinflammatory action. A cottonball soaked in garlic oil can treat earaches due to infection, garlic syrup can stop a cold or cough from gaining hold.

Ginger: Improves digestion and helps the body move out waste, reduces nausea, good for pregnant women suffering from motion-sickness, decreases flatulence and bloating, anti-inflammatory, soothes coughs, good for circulation, respiratory illness. Use a ginger/sage honey for flu or indigestion.

Horseradish: Sinus congestion and headcolds, rich in minerals and vitamins (including vitamin C). A warming antiseptic for asthma, congestion, lung infections. Increases gastric secretions and appetite.  Promotes sweating, helful during a fever, combine with thyme to treat headcolds.

Lavender: Mild sedative for treating headache, nervouseness and insomnia, digestive remedy, in a compress or cold tea wash it treats burns, open sores or infections. Allow to dry between applications.

Oats: Mild anti-depressant, raises energy levels, increases nursing mother’s milk, eases constipation, relieves itching associated with eczema. Fill a mesh bag with oats and toss in a bath under a hot, running tap, relax in the bath for 5-10 minutes.

Onion: diuretic, antibiotic, anti-inflammatory,  pain numbing. Beneficial to circulation, expels mucous and congestion. Helpful with colds, coughs and flus. Like garlic, onion offsets tendencies to angina, asteriosclerosis and heart attacks. Warmed juice can be placed as a muff over the painful ear to draw out the infection.

Oregano and Marjoram: Calming and soothing, can be used for nervousness and irritability and insomnia due to tension and anxiety. They are excellent in tea, alone or in combination. These herbs also have antispasmodic properties and can be used for digestive and muscular spasms.

Parsley: High in iron, beta carotene and chlorophyll. Enhances immunity and helps infections, the primary herb for bladder and kidney function and is a safe and effective diuretic, particularly its seeds. It has beentraditionally used to dry up nursing mother’s breast milk and is effective as a poultis for mastitis and swollen, enlarged breasts. Make a tea, a vinegar or simply use in cooking.

Peppermint: Stimulating to the mind, a great antispasmodic, good for cramps and spasms, good for nausea and motion or mornign sickness, stomach aches and soreness or itchiness of eczema as an infusion.

Potato or Carrot (grated): drawing agents, when used topically. Carrot treats inflammation of swollen glands, potato draws to treat chalazions or styes of the eye in conjunction with other treatment.

Pumpkin seeds: One 1/4 cup a day maintains prostate health and is a good zinc suppliment, treats prostate enlargement.

Sage: Used to dry up a nursing mother’s milk, as an antibacterial mouthwash, antiviral, antibacterial, antifungal. Taken internally, it fights infections, dries up secretions of all kinds, including persperation and saliva.

Tea Bags: Useful astringent, treats skin eruptions and allergic reactions or inflammations, treats hemorrhoids.

Thyme: Good astringent, antiseptic, treats upper respiratory infections, allays coughs and bronchitis, use as tea, facial steam or herbal vinegar.

Do you love farmers?  Enough to look at them on your wall all year round?

If so, then check out the beautiful calendar for 2009 that Great Performances (a locally-focused catering company in NYC) published.  It features local farmers from Columbia County – truly some gorgeous shots – and all profits will go to farm-to-table education for urban children.

Buy one for yourself or a friend, here, and celebrate local produce throughout 2009!

As a kid, anything edible held my attention. Sukkahs, charged with dappled light and dedicated to the harvest, seemed to combine all of my interests into one sacred space. I’ll never forget the excitement I felt, standing alone in the autumn-smelling sukkah, under a ceiling hung with fresh, growing foods; and I’ll never forget my disappointment, year after year, at the sight of apples, squash and blue corn wizening and rotting on their strings.

Now that I’m a full grown canner, it occurs to me that the sukkah, with it’s commandments for good air circulation, more shade than light, and it’s tradition of hanging edibles, is a perfect place to preserve for the cold months. After all, turning sukkot decorations into food is already a tradition—Etrogs make it into wine or brandy after the celebration’s over.

Below, you can find some tips and recipes for celebrating God’s gift of food and shelter through the year.

Preserve your Herbs

If you live in a relatively dry climate, Sukkot comes at the perfect time to dry herbs. Bunches of marjoram, oregano, tarragon, rosemary, sage, dill, coriander, lavender, hyssop, yarrow or mint (among others) are available at your local farmers market, garden or roadside, and can be strung up in small bunches in dark parts of the sukkah to start drying. Herbs take a couple of weeks to dry, so if you take your sukkah down immediately after the holiday, you’ll want to move your bunches to a dry dark place inside the permanent house. Of course, in order to be kosher, a sukkah has to let the rain in, so if you’ll have high humidity or precipitation during sukkot in your area, I wouldn’t try this one.

Some dried-herb enthusiasts suggest suspending your herbs in a brown paper bag around each bunch. Light discolors herbs, to the brown bag does double duty absorbing moisture and keeping out the sun. If you’re a proponent of the brown-bag-method, take some markers and paper cut-outs to those bags and they can still add to the atmosphere.

Once your herbs are dried out, you can remove the leaves and store them for use all year. I make my friends save up baby-food jars and I recycle them as herb-storage containers. Dried herbs make fabulous gifts, too, either for culinary use or in satchels for the odiferous quality they bring to a sock drawer. Finally, another little-used method for preserving herbs is in jellies. Mint jelly is famous as an accompaniment of lamb, and I adore a good hot-pepper jelly on cream cheese. This recipe for sage and cider jelly, from my canning hero Catherine Plagemann, is particularly autumnal.

Sage Jelly with Cider

From Fine Preserving

Make an infusion of 4 T dried or 8 T chopped fresh sage leaves and one cup of boiling water, simmered together for about ten minutes, uncovered. Strain through a cloth strainer for about ½ cup sage infusion.

Add to this:
3 ½ cups granulated sugar (I sometimes reduce the sugar in her recipes)
1 cup fresh cider
¼ cup lemon juice

As it comes to a boil, add:
½ bottle Certo (extra points for anyone who can come up with a non-Kraft product to substitute for liquid pectin)

Stir well again as it comes to a boil and boil for about one minute. Pour immediately into clean jelly glasses (five ounce canning jars), process and serve with roast meats or cheeses.

Eat your Veggies

Squash have thicker skin than your average lavender plant, and even edible ones come in an astounding array of colors and shapes. They’ll work better as utility-decorations for those of us raising our sukkahs in temperate climates.

Pick some aesthetically and culinarily pleasing winter squash varieties to decorate your sukkah this year. Kabocha – also known as ambercup – squash are a vivid orange, and delicata’s got festive stripes. Not only delicious fresh baked, sautéed and in soups, winter squash is easily preserved either ready to heat or in butter form.

To preserve winter squash, cut it open to remove seeds and stringy fiber. You can bake the seeds, spread out on a baking sheet and salted, in the oven at 425 for an hour and enjoy them like popcorn. To freeze squash, you must cook it first (freezing raw squash ruins it). Boil pieces of squash in as little water as possible until soft, or, alternately, steam in a pressure cooker. You can also bake a large squash whole, with the seeds, in your oven. This will take a couple hours, and then you’ll have to cut it open, remove the seeds and mash it. You’ll have a wonderful base for recipes like Leah’s delicata soup, or squash pie, or one of my favorite Sephardic treats, frittatas de calabeza. You’ll want to package and freeze the squash immediately after it’s prepared, working in small batches to as not to overwhelm your freezer with hot squash that it has to cool down.

If you’ll be drying in your sukkah, the American pioneer’s method for preserving winter squash makes a wonderful decoration. Pioneers liked to dry their pumpkins by slicing the squash into rings, removing pith and seeds and peeling each ring. The rings should be thin, so use a sharp knife and a smaller squash. Hang these orange, yellow and gold rings out of the direct sunshine until dry. Imagine a series of pumpkin circles lighting up your sukkah, destined to reconstitute in winter soups. These methods come courtesy of the Encyclopedia of Country Living, a fabulous resource for all things planted, tended, harvested and preserved.

If you’ll be keening for some of that October sweetness later in the year, try this squash butter recipe from Smitten Kitchen.com to spread on bread or eat with yogurt for a little autumn on those winter mornings:

Squash Butter

Adapted from AllRecipes

Approx. 3 1/2 cups of pureed winter squash
3/4 cup apple juice or cider
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 1/3 cups brown sugar
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Juice of half a lemon

Combine pumpkin, apple juice, spices, and sugar in a large saucepan; stir well. Bring mixture to a boil. Reduce heat, and simmer for 30 minutes or until thickened. Stir frequently. Adjust spices to taste. Stir in lemon juice, or more to taste.

Once cool, pumpkin butter can be kept in an airtight container in the fridge for months.

To preserve:
Spoon hot pumpkin mixture into hot jars, filling to within 1/4 inch from top. Remove air bubbles; wipe jar rims. Cover at once with metal lids, and screw on bands. Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

Not only will these methods make your decorations serve dual functions (a help for small budgets in rough times), they’ll also reduce the amount of space in your house dedicated to storing boxes of tinsel. Write in with your own ideas for how to make your Sukkot bounty last all year.

Photo taken by Jennie at Straight from the Farm.

Yom Kippur stirs my strongest Jewish food memory – it’s strange, but true. Since I was in the single digits I can remember walking to Ne’ila services with my mother and father, carrying a bag filled with two essential components of our holiday inside. One was a three-pound sack of apples, the then ubiquitous McIntosh variety. The other was six or so tiny butter sandwiches on my mother’s anise bread.

The bread was a high, oblong loaf shining from egg glaze and redolent of liquorice, which I despised as a child. On our walk, I would watch the plastic sack of break-fast food thumping against my father’s trousered leg, a reminder that holy space of Yom Kippur was about to close over us and leave us to our good intentions and the rest of the year. I couldn’t understand why they liked it so much, that sweet, seeded bread. (Now, of course, I know better.)

When we got to synagogue, one of my parents would stow the bag under a pile of coats, ostensibly to keep from bothering others who couldn’t even look at food so far into the fast, but also to keep me from repeating my generosity of one year, when I gave out our sandwiches to a bunch of teenagers whom I wanted to like me. After the final service we’d walk home, chewing, still feeling elevated by the specialness of the evening until we’d shed our fancy clothes and sat down to bagels for dinner all together.

Every year I tried the bread. Every year I rejected it and my family would pronounce, “more for us!” with a shrug. Yet when I got to college my freshman year, I could still taste that strong anise flavor all the way from Wisconsin. It was September, my nose told me – the time for the particular smell of that bread in my life. In a sense, nostalgia changed my taste buds for ever. I called up my mother and begged her to send a loaf. She did, and I sat on the grass outside the Madison Hillel after Ne’ila, pulling off hunks of it with my friends. We even had apples bought from the farmers market days before – way better than the old supermarket Macs.

Now that I’m a venerable twenty-five, I’ve inherited some traditions and also changed some, in a daughter’s way. I haven’t touched the anise bread, which to my adult tongue is unbeatable as it is. The apples I’ve messed with a little. I go to a pick-your-own apple orchard every year now, and bring back a bushel of Macouns, Libertys and Cortlands to make apple butter from. A fruit butter is different from a jam or jelly in that it’s made with whole fruits cooked to a thick paste and then strained or milled until they reach a satiny consistency. My apple butter goes on top of my cow butter which goes on top of my anise bread. All three go with me to services, carefully concealed, to carry me through sweetly into the new years of my adulthood.

The recipe for the anise bread can be found in Edda Servi Machlin’s wonderful cookbook, “The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, Vol. 1” which has been a go-to at dinner time in my house for as long as I can remember. It is both a cook book and a memoir, and is an entertaining read as well as a wonderful resource. My mother calls the recipe, which Machlin names “Il Bollo,” a “very easy yeast bread.” Click on the link for that recipe. The apple butter recipe is my variation on the classic Joy of Cooking fruit butter, but with a lot more kick to it, and is below:

Apple Butter

Wash eight to ten apples, remove stems and quarter. Don’t worry about skin, cores or aesthetics, as you’ll mill these apples later.
Add the apples to a large pot and cook them slowly on medium heat in a liquid solution of:
1 cup water
1 cup apple cider
1 1/4 cups cider vinegar
If I have no cider, I use half and half water and cider vinegar.

While the fruit is cooking, put another large pot of water on to boil. In this pot, sterilize half a dozen pint-sized mason jars by boiling them for at least fifteen minutes. I use recycled ones from sauerkraut, salsa, peanut butter, mayo, etc., which sometimes come in jars with mouths that fit mason/ball jar seals and bands. Bands can be reused but seals must be bought new. Don’t empty out the water from your jar sterilizing, you’ll need it to seal the full jars later.

When the fruit is thoroughly boiled, force it through a fine strainer (for this task I’ve used everything from a potato masher and a sieve to a hand-cranked food mill, which is a lot easier on the arms and the kitchen floor.)

Now comes the fun part:
To each cup of pulp that you’re left with after milling, add:
1/3 of a cup of sugar (this is really to taste, I often use less)
4 teaspoons cinnamon
aprx. 8 to 10 whole cloves, or 1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon whole all spice
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon grated lemon/orange zest
3 tablespoons lemon juice

Optional: 1 teaspoon dried orange peel/dried rose hips, which look lovely floating in the finished jars

Cook the butter over low heat, stirring constantly, until the sugar is dissolved. Then turn the heat up and cook while stirring frequently until the butter sheets from the spoon. Pour into sterilized jars. I add one cinnamon stick to each jar to keep the flavor developing over the months, and seal. Place the filled, tightly closed jars back in your boiling water bath and process them for fifteen minutes at a hard boil. Pull them out to cool (canning tongs are a great help, though not a necessity, in this) and enjoy them for months to come.

A few months ago I wrote some tips on appropriate and helpful ways to bring food to someone who’s ill or grieving.  At the time, my mother (that’s her in the picture, with me at our dining room table in happier times) was in treatment for terminal cancer, and though we were grateful to have an amazing community providing food for us during such a difficult time, I often found myself guiltily throwing out some leftovers that had gotten shoved to the back of the fridge to make room for new offerings.  I suggested that people try to bring smaller portions.

Then, on September 9th, my mother passed away, and what had been a slight excess of food transformed into a mountain of baked goods, stacks of trays from kosher restaurants, and Tupperware as far as the eye could see.  From the very first day of shiva we were completely overwhelmed with food, and the same women who were coordinating people to bring us meals were having to sort through the fridge and toss or freeze the obscene amount of casseroles, cakes and random snacks that people were bringing when they came to visit with us.

One of the rules of sitting shiva is that the mourners should not prepare their own food, so we had expected to have meals for the week made and prepared by others, but we were not prepared for the sheer quantity of what we ended up with.  Among other things, we ended the week with an ant problem in our kitchen because there was so much food sitting out all the time.

Over all, I found shiva to be a difficult but incredibly healing week, and it was wonderful to have so many people showing us their support in so many ways.  Still, it frustrates me to see so much food go to waste, and some of the craziness that resulted from having other people run my kitchen for a week was no fun at all.  So, here’s some new tips and thoughts on bringing food to a shiva house.

Tips after the jump!

Call ahead
Typically meals are arranged for a family sitting shiva, so if you want to contribute, it’s best to find out who’s coordinating the meals, and ask when you could sign up to bring something instead of just showing up with something at random.  Unplanned dishes are the ones that tend to end up in the compost heap first.

Plan (farther) ahead
It was a pretty huge shock to go from having so much food we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, to being all on our own as soon as shiva was over.  No one really did this, but it would have been so nice to have someone offer to bring us a meal a week after shiva ended, or even two weeks later.  This could have significantly cut down on the waste, too.

Be aware of kitchen etiquette
If you’re going to be bringing food or helping out at a shiva house, try to be respectful of the kitchen you’re dealing with, and if you don’t know, please ask.  At one point during the week my sister walked into our kitchen to find that someone had taken a sharpie to our Dairy drainer and carefully labeled it ‘MEAT.’  A few days later I noticed that the bin we usually use to store potatoes contained a 9×13 pan, some measuring cups, some silverware, a paring knife, and a sauce pan.  Though we only left the house once the entire week, no one who was involved in dealing with the kitchen ever came to us to ask where something belonged, or if something was meat or dairy.  When the shiva was over, the amount of reorganizing we had to do was really epic.

Consider a healthy treat
If you really want to bring something unsolicited, consider something homemade and healthy.  By far the majority of the food that we received was some variety of baked goods.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love cake, and I love bagels, but at a certain point it was just out of control, and in the end, many cakes were tossed half-eaten.  Some people opted to bring more unusual and healthier offerings, and those tended to get gobbled up because we were feeling a little overwhelmed by how much sugar we were all consuming.  When a friend brought over homemade guacamole before Shabbat, it went quickly. We loved the fancy cappuccino torte and the vegan mango cheesecake was delicious, but every once in a while I just wanted a carrot.

Share a food memory
If someone from the family indicates that they want to talk, consider sharing a food-related memory.  I know how uncomfortable people get at shiva houses.  It is sad, and can be awkward to try to express sympathy without resorting to clichés.  But food can be a great vehicle to beginning a conversation about the deceased.  I was so touched by the number of people who mentioned wonderful Shabbat and holiday meals they had with my mother.  People told us about being new in town, and how my mother invited them to eat with our family.  They remembered specific dishes she was famous for, and told us about times she brought food to them when they needed support.  Those conversations were incredibly meaningful and always so nice to hear; a great improvement over “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Losing my mother was harder than anything I could have imagined, but already I feel like I’ve learned so much from this loss.  I wish I didn’t know this stuff, but I hope now I can be more helpful and supportive to my friends when they’re in need.

My sisters and I put together a cookbook for our mother on Mother’s Day.  You can buy our cookbook, Vixens in the Kitchen at Tastebook.com.  For every copy we sell, Tastebook donates $10 to breast cancer research.

Did you ever wish that you could create an energy bar with just the right nutritional ingredients, that tasted great, and was (mostly) kosher and organic? How about if the company that made them gave a percentage of their profits to a local foodbank? How about if the company was a mother and son who started out in the kitchen of their synagogue? 

Check out this great story in the NYTimes, and head over to youbars.com if you feel like creating (and naming!) your very own Powerbar.   

Valentines Day is coming up this Thursday – and while it’s not a Jewish holiday per se, it’s as good a day as any to remind the people in your life that you think they’re pretty freaking awesome.  To help you express your loving sentiments – the sustainable way – The Jew & The Carrot offers our newest resource list:

Kosher Sustainable C.H.O.C.O.L.A.T.E

All of the chocolate bars included on the list are kosher-cerfitied and some combination of organic, fair trade, cane-sugar sweetened, and vegan.  (sweet!)  If you want to put that chocolate bar to even better use, check out Chef Laura Frankel’s amazing recipe for chocolate mousse.  And if you’re looking for something a little bit more risque, the company Green Knickers is offering a Valentine’s day special: a bar of chocolate from Divine with every pair of organic cotton, fair trade boxers or briefs you purchase.  (I can’t find anything on Divine’s kashrut status, but this was too cute not to include.  Thanks to Grist for the hat tip.)

And – as thanks to our wonderful readers, The Jew & The Carrot teamed up with Thou Shall Snack to offer a special Chanukah gift to you - the chance to win a free gift basket filled with delicious and healthy goodies from Thou Shall Snack.

Click here and enter by December 5th for your chance to win.