Recently I had the chance to speak with Noah Alper, founder of the eponymous Noah’s Bagels. Noah, who sold Noah’s Bagels in 1999, has been in the food business since the 1970s, when he started Bread and Circus, the East Coast natural food chain (bought by Whole Foods in 1992). He’s kept kosher since the early 1990s, and at one point Noah’s Bagels was the largest kosher retailer in the country. (For those on the prowl, there’s still one kosher Noah’s Bagels, in Seattle.) Nowadays, he’s committed to preaching the gospel of socially responsible business practices, and to that end he’s come out with a book called Business Mensch that aims to connect Jewish principles to good business practices and convince business leaders that community values are good for their bottom line.
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.
My dad has strong memories of his mother’s chicken soup: the aroma, the flavor, and the chicken feet at the bottom of the bowl. He especially liked biting into the pads of the feet, which were nice and chewy.
Like many ethnic cuisines that evolve at least in part out of deprivation, Jewish food has long mined the more interesting parts of the animal (think tongue). But though the tip-to-tail movement has made offal, bone marrow and pork belly trendy, I don’t know any Jewish cooks these days that serve chicken feet in their soup. I set out to dip a toe into the world of off-cuts by buying a bag of beef bones at the Noe Valley Farmer’s Market in San Francisco.
I keep my kosher salt in an Israeli style pottery canister with a spring locked lid. It was a mishloach manos from my synagogue one Purim. I always feel like a kitchen alchemist when I reach for it.
Recently I was lunching with a business colleague in a casual Beverly Hills restaurant whose menu made a smug reference to its use of imported fleur de sel. My colleague said she’d been given some as a gift and it tasted wonderful.
The discussion rattled some of my assumptions about this elemental ingredient. Is hand-harvested French sea salt at $1.42 an ounce the best choice for the savvy gourmet in the kitchen? Or is it lunacy, when coarse kosher salt costs me 6 cents an ounce?
Oh dear readers, the Shmethicist has been AWOL for a while. But now I’m back and better than ever (not unlike that pea soup that was even more delicious when we reheated the leftovers!).
Dear Shmethicist,
I am currently feeding a family of four (two adults, two toddlers) on a very small food budget ($150 a week). A couple of years ago, my husband and I were able to buy all organic dairy and produce, and free range meats and eggs. Now, it is a rarity. Our costs are so tight, that even at $150 a week, we only cook nice dinners on Shabbat.
We have noticed a difference in how we feel and would absolutely love to do this again. We do not have our own yard in which to garden, which I would love to do someday. There are several farms near here, but they are not open to the public (instead, they drive their goods to the farmers markets in the large city, which is over an hour away and which we cannot afford to drive to regularly, at $20 gas for the trip and $10 parking for the day).
Tahina, the thick, brownish-gray paste of ground sesame seeds, is one of the latest foods to turn “gourmet” – at least in Israel. If supermarkets once sold only one brand of tahina, today it comes in squeeze bottles and glass jars with fancy labels; brands with Arabic on their labels proclaiming their “authenticity” vie with the all-Hebrew labels of the standard brand. (As far as I know, however, Melo Hatene is the only place to actually offer tahina tasting — the ultimate sign of a gourmet food.)
What could be more dear to an ecologically minded keeper of kashrut in summer than a marshmallow? In San Francisco, a panel of tasters at the local daily voted the kosher brand as their top pick. Tell us in comments where to find kosher ‘mallows in your area! Has anyone tried to make one at home?
Now that my Tuv Ha’Aretz (Hazon CSA) has started this year, I’m starting to get into a pleasant routine of planning meals around my weekly bounty (and my boyfriend’s kitchen). The last two weeks we have seen beautiful fresh spring greens perfect for fun and interesting salads that I’ve dressed with (in various combinations) grated raw beets, honey and almond oil, crushed raw cashews, whole grain mustard and balsamic vinegar.
We’ve enjoyed the meals, and fortuitously there always seems to be enough salad left over for a hearty lunch the next day. Each time I carefully put the salad in a container to take to work with me – and each time I promptly leave it on the kitchen counter. A practice that leaves me both without a lunch that day and a wilted salad back at my boyfriend’s place.
Getting beyond my feelings of guilt that I’ve wasted otherwise very good food, it did get me thinking. Is it more economical to buy a salad out than packing my own?
Rte. 44 is a two-lane rural road more or less in the center of Israel. Coming from Ramla, right before the community of Karme Yosef, sits a square building faced in limestone set back from the road. A modest sign identifies it as Melo Hatene. (The name loosely translates as The Overflowing Cornucopia.) I had passed the building more than once, but had not really given more than a moment’s thought to what this structure – too classy to be a packing shed – was doing in the middle of an agricultural field. It was my sister, stopping to explore while on a bike ride, who discovered what was inside and brought us there.
In the daily inundation of political scandal, violence, government infighting and general economic and social mayhem that we Israelis can’t seem to live without (judging by our consumption of news media), a proposed new tax on fruits and vegetables has garnered little public outcry.
Until now, fruits and vegetables have been exempt from the 16.5% value-added tax (v.a.t.) placed on nearly every other consumer item. But foods like tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and eggplant had been considered basic daily necessities, like bread and milk (both of which are still price-controlled).
This optimistic article points to an issue felt acutely in “inner cities” around the country: a lack of fresh produce being sold at market. This problem was controversially or famously addressed in my city by the New York City Green Cart initiative but this certainly hasn’t solved it and plenty of other cities have the same issues (NYC isn’t even mentioned in the article, though LA, Newark and Detroit are, and the article is mainly about Chicago.) Could it be that looking to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s as examples, however, are more detrimental than good? As big a supporter of organics as I am, I think encouraging people to eat “conventional” produce would be a big boon over Mickey-D’s and would be a lot cheaper and easier than the “greenest” route. Even frozen produce makes a nice, healthy, easy and inexpensive meal most of the time.
You are invited to apply for a highly subsidized five-day Tour of Israel (November 15-19, 2009), from the unique perspective of: food! Brought to you by Hazon and the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership, this tour will not be a culinary Tour of Israeli gastronomy (though there will amazing eating). Instead, this one-of-a-kind mission will highlight developments in Israel towards more sustainable food production and consumption, including:
Just a strange little pick me up for all you Jew and the Carrot readers out there. This Huffington Post story about a “bull” wandering into an Irish supermarket demonstrates irony just delightfully, yes? My favorite part is how they keep referring to it as a bull though it is, at best, about six months old and totally freaked out. Well, enjoy.
Three weeks ago, the lamb stand I work for got a new product. Eugene, the usually tactiturn farmer (except on his blog), was telling everyone who’d listen that lamb belly was the new pork belly; Frank Bruni or Mark Bittman, or some big shot at the New York Times, had said so. Good news for us. We were selling lamb bacon.
