In this week’s parsha Be-Har (“on the mountain”) we are given the agricultural law of Shemita, a Sabbath for the land. “Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard and gather the yield. But in the seventh year the land shall have a Sabbath of complete rest.” (Lev. 25:2-4). In lieu of working the land, we are told to eat what the land produces without effort, and give freely of the bounty to all who are hungry.

Parsha Be-Har also gives us the jubilee – a complete release of all land ownership and release of all slaves every fifty years. (Lev. 25:8-10). “Seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years… and you shall hallow the fiftieth year…You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants.” (Lev. 25:8-10).

It’s no coincidence that we are given Shemittah and jubilee during this holy time of counting the Omer.

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One of the strategies I use to make it through the eight long, flat, matzah-days of Passover is to fantasize about the challah I’m going to start baking as soon as the holiday is over.

I’ve made challah often enough in the past that even when I don’t bake for a while, I still have a strong sense-memory of what to do. But the week after Pesach—my first time back to baking challah in six months!—there was definitely an extra tingle in my fingertips when I plunged my hands into the warm, thick dough. I had to take a few extra breaths of the nutty-malty smell right at that moment when I add the sponge to the rest of the ingredients…It’s the smell of the anti-Pesach, the aroma of pure chametz, the yeast busy doing its magic, raising the roofs of a hundred (a thousand?) tiny bubbles in a bit of flour and water, sitting under the hot lights on my kitchen counter.

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Thanks to Alyssa Finn for this guest post. Alyssa is getting her Masters degree in Clinical Nutrition at NYU and is a Hazon volunteer on the New York Jewish Environmental Bike Ride Exec.

Yesterday, I came home after a long bike ride in the New York sunshine. On my plate for the evening was a pile of reading in preparation for my chemistry exam the next day. I stared at the pile of books and papers. I looked longingly at my kitchen, the primary source of my procrastination.

Then I remembered: horseradish!

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Several months ago, The Jew & The Carrot featured the recipe for my mom’s amazing chocolate cake - the one that my brother and I begged for every birthday - mostly for the thrill of eating sweet, homemade frosting directly off the beaters.

Then yesterday, a reader sent me the following email:

“Long ago you posted a recipe for your mom’s chocolate cake. Finally I got around to making it for Shabbat dinner this past week. Since I’m really into my new camera and having lots of fun taking food pics, I thought I’d share the image. I used real roses and borage [to decorate it] too. Everyone loved the cake-the recipe is a keeper.” - Emily

With Mother’s Day coming up on Sunday, I figured now is the perfect time to share this delicious cake once again.  Happy Mother’s Day Mom! Recipes and another photo below the jump.

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(Photo by Shir Feinstein-Feit)

It seems a long time since I wrote about seeding onions…and indeed, the past two months on the farm have been a bit of a blur. But we planted the onions over chol ha-moed pesach, with much fanfare and mixed emotions (I’ll explain), and so I felt it would be good to give you all an update. (If you missed the last post, I am the Farm Manager at Adamah, a Jewish farming fellowship program in Connecticut. The sadeh is our 3.5 acre field where we grow our vegetables.)

The sadeh looks beautiful. Right now there are beds of onions (cippolini, red, scallions, leeks, walla walla…), with their thin, oniony stalks the size of blades of grass standing pertly up from the soil; beds of beets, red and golden; and several beds of brassicas, the family of hearty green-purple vegetables that includes broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards and kohlrabi. Only a small percentage of the field has been planted, and the evenly spaced rows of green and red and purple are beautiful against a background of tilled brown earth. The field looks serene, and betrays nothing of the work it took to get it looking that way.

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Counting the Homer

Last year, I posted about the connection between beer, civilization and the Jewish people’s journey from Egypt to Sinai during the period of the omer.

This year, just as the counting of the omer began, I came across this article, which is a survey of contemporary authors concerning which beers they would pair with their novels! Some authors picked beers that matched the characteristics of their writing (”dark, with biting overtones,” etc.). Others chose more figuratively. For example, Michael Chabon responded, “The proper pairing with The Yiddish Policemen’s Union would of course be a nice cold bottle of Bruner Adler lager, brewed right in the Federal District of Sitka by Shoymer Brewing, Inc.”

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I just came across the most amazing story of the Ba’al Shem Tov (the charismatic founder of Chasidic judaism), which has been retold at a special festive meal at the end of Pesach for over 250 years!

The basic story is that the Ba’al Shem Tov is repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to sail to the land of Israel. Along the way, he is stranded on an island, attacked by pirates, and invents both the alphabet and matzah ball soup. OK, so I’m extrapolating a little bit with that last part, but even so, I would easily pay $10 to see Johnny Depp in this story at the local cinemaplex.

What’s most interesting to me as a Jewish food blogger is that this story, as shared by a poster on jewschool, is always accompanied by a meal featuring 31 matzah balls. Maybe it should be included as an addition to the Baskin (Robbins) haggadah?

Speaking of Jews and 31 flavors, today is Ben & Jerry’s annual free ice cream cone day! Ironically, even though these two boys met in gym class in Merrick, (pretty close to my congregation), there’s barely any scoop shops left on all of Long Island. I wonder if I would be attacked by pirates if I attempted an hour-long pilgrimage to the closest scoop shop…

How does a farmer celebrate Passover? For California-based farmer Emily Freed, the seders offered the chance to celebrate both the Exodus from Mitzrayim and also the first glorious tastes of spring. Check out her beautiful photo journal below the jump.

Freed’s journey from began with her transportation of chametz to a friend’s house around the corner - by bicycle of course!

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Yes, folks, it’s serious. So serious that the Bay Area’s matzo shortage has made front page news. The woman behind me at Berkeley Bowl this morning was forced to buy a box of Sun-Dried Tomato Matzo. Who even knew they made such a thing? She said that since it wasn’t for seder, it was fine to use the rest of the week. Whatever. Call me a purist. I never got used to the idea of sun-dried tomato bagels, either. Just the idea of flavored matzo (besides chocolate-covered, mind you) gave me the willies, even though it might not be half bad. When I was buying my five-pounder two or so weeks ago, the guy behind me said “That’s a lot of crackers.” But after our family seder and traditional post-seder matzo brei brunch, I think I’ll have just enough to last me through the week. Phew.

Thanks to Yigal Deutscher for this guest post.

We have just begun the Sefirat HaOmer, counting off the direct correlation between Pesach & Shavuot, two celebrations separated by a string 50 days long. These are two moments in time, interwoven, yet at polar opposites. On Day 1, we have left bread behind, as Chametz. On Day 50, we are elevating bread as an offering in the Holy Temple, a sacrifice unique to the day of Shavuot. A serious transformation has just taken place.

The link between our starting point and our destination goal is food, bread in particular. This corridor of time marks the counting of grain ripening…from the start of the barley harvest to the start of the wheat harvest.

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Ladies and gentlemen, Passover is nearly upon us. The blog posts will likely slow down around here over the next couple of days as we put away the computer and pick up our forks (ahem, I mean haggadot).

In the meantime, you can continue to get your fill by checking out the amazing set of Passover links below. CHAG SAMEACH from The Jew & The Carrot!

Baking and Books tempts us with a truly decadent Fallen Chocolate Souffle Cake (see above photo). When you’ve got melted chocolate, sugar, and orange zest - who needs flour?

The Kitchn featured a little Q&A with me where I confess my love of hard boiled eggs and make a pitch for more spinach and singing at the seder.

Meanwhile, The Kitchn knocked out a couple of knock out Passover posts - one on beautiful seder plates, a second on Kosher for Passover foods everyone should eat (corn syrup free Coke!), and the Sephardic response to Easter eggs: Huevos Hamindos.

Jewish Living Magazine shares a recipe for Lemon Mousse pie that combines the flavors of cream cheese, ricotta, and lemon juice with a brown sugar crust.

Peeling a Pomegranate offers a great way to spice up your seder - pick a theme!

The New York Times asserts that you no longer have to be Jewish to love Kosher wine. Why? Because it no longer tastes gross! That said, if you are Jewish, now would be a good time to pick up a bottle for your seder…

Four years ago I stood at my stove for more than three hours and turned my kitchen into a Russian shvitz as I boiled every metal utensil, every pot, and every serving piece in both my milchig and fleishig sets. Explaining the ins and outs of Passover cleaning to friends and families who don’t keep kosher—and even understanding it myself—is an ongoing challenge. But this time around, I didn’t question the cleaning: I simply felt elated.

No doubt all that steam, the sweat pouring out of me, was cleansing. But beyond that. I was different. My dishes were still my dishes, a tad cleaner than usual, but I had changed. I’d been turned upside down, dunked head first, and what used to be on top and super-important was repositioned, minimized, shifted to the bottom of consciousness or dissolved altogether. I had a level of clarity and focus on the holiday that I often don’t. Usually I’m crazy about all the things I have to do before Pesach and end up not doing half of them. I come into the holiday frazzled.

Strangely, that year I did more, cleaned more, but I was not filled up with anxiety and to-do lists. I must have had those lists; why would that year have been different from all other years? But I wasn’t consumed by the process. I did the kashering, and everything else fell into place: the thousand details, the logistics of the switchover, chametzdik kitchen to pesachdik kitchen, the menu-making, the buying of Pesach food and selling of chametz, the emptying out of cupboards immediately followed by the loading up.

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Thanks to Hazon’s own Barbara Lerman-Golomb for her environmental reflections and meditations on Passover!

Passover is a natural time to take an “environmental inventory” of the chametz in our world and to be mindful of the simple lives our ancestors led in the desert in their pursuit of freedom. Chametz is the Hebrew term for any of the five basic biblical grains which traditionally observant Jews remove from their homes. These include wheat, rye, oats, barley, and spelt—that have been mixed with water and allowed to ferment. Eastern European Jews also consider chametz to include a variety of beans, peas, rice, corn, peanuts, and other foods which could be ground and made into flour or bread.

When our ancestors were dwelling in the desert, they had no choice but to live simply. In our day, simplicity has come to mean conservation, not using more than you need, and not being wasteful. Jewish law prohibits wasteful consumption. When we waste resources, we are violating the law of bal tashchit—Do not destroy. (Deuteronomy 20: 19-20).

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This past weekend, our synagogue hosted a “Pesach University”: A community-wide day of Passover workshops, on everything from the anthropological roots of the seder, to how to “green” your Pesach.

But the true highlight of the event was a live Passover cooking demonstration by none other than Ellie Krieger - an adjunct professor in the New York University Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health, and star of the Food Network’s hit show, Healthy Appetite with Ellie Krieger. (She also happens to be the sister of one of our Tuv Ha’aretz CSA’s core group members, and a genuinely warm and funny person to boot.)

In honor of the occasion, Ellie chose to focus on two themes of the seder: dipping, and the tension between bitter and sweet in the story, and the food that accompanies it. Ellie made two delicious recipes, adapted from her new cookbook The Food You Crave: Luscious Recipes for a Healthy Life, which she has graciously allowed me to share, after the jump: Read more »