Thanks so much to Justin Goldstein for sharing with us his post from Jewschool. Justin is a rabbinical student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University and a regular contributor at Jewschool.com. He lives with his wife in Los Angeles and is active and interested in issues of food and economic justice, is an at-home amateur organic vegetarian chef, a farmer’s market enthusiast and a vocal advocate and all-around cheerleader for the work which Hazon does in the world.
For many American Jews, the Passover seder is an intimate and annual Jewish experience that is possibly the only time of year they will have such an experience. Not just Jews, but even many non-Jews in America enjoy participating in a Passover seder. There is something unique about the Passover seder which forces us to contemplate our role and status in society, our historical memory and our diet. Whether one observes the laws of dietary restrictions for the full 7 or 8 days of the festival, or if one simply partakes in the unique cuisine, one cannot help but reflect on our typical diets in the face of the temporary changes.
In our contemporary society we have the freedom to visit supermarkets and specialized stores and purchase food from around the world irrelevant of the season or distance. And yet, at the Passover seder, we are forced to recall what it means to hastily prepare simple loaves transported on back. We recognize, in a certain regard, between the stark difference of experiencing food in servitude and experiencing food in freedom. And while we have the freedom to buy and eat what we want, for a series of reasons we in the 21st century have less freedom and awareness in choosing or understanding how our food is produced and what type of story our food has from farm to table.
I don’t watch a lot of Food Network. I like cooking, but I really don’t watch much TV anymore, and when I do, I want to see people fighting and then making out, not stirring things. The point is, I don’t watch the Food Network, but I once saw about 15 minutes of Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee and it pretty much made me lose all hope in humanity. She was all, “Buy a cake! Spread insane amounts of icing on it! Your kids will love it!” I’m sorry, but do we need a show to tell us that? No, we don’t.
Check out this new special Ride Edition Podcast! If you haven’t heard, Hazon is allocating funds raised from the Bay Area Ride a bit differently than past rides. It’s pretty exciting and really putting the power in the hands (or cycles) of Ride participants, who will get to decide where to allocate the funds they raise.
Also, if you didn’t hear about last year’s NY Ride engagement story, Marc tells us what he was thinking the day he proposed on the Ride.
Check it all out by clicking here!
Bobbi Rubinstein is a publicist, journalist and green activist. She’s chair of the Valley Beth Shalom Green Team and co-founder of Netiya: The Los Angeles Jewish Coalition on Food and Environmental Justice Issues
Tonight at 7pm Pacific Time, Angelenos will ask a fifth question: Why on this night are millions of people going hungry?
With 1 in every 8 Angelenos experiencing food insecurity and 1 in 10 Angelenos using a food bank in 2009, Los Angeles is now known as the “hunger capital” of the United States.
Out here in Northern California during the winter months, Meyer Lemons are dripping off the trees like perfect golden globes. You can recognize a Meyer Lemon tree from far away because their coloring is such a strong and deep shade of yellow and the smell of their blossoms is pungent and plentiful. Currently, my house is overflowing with bowls of Meyer Lemons from various friend’s trees and I can’t bear to let these delicies go to waste so I am always looking for new Meyer Lemon recipes.
I hosted a St. Patrick’s Day dinner party last week. We drank a lot of beer, but I still have plenty left that I’d like to use up before Passover (Michelle, I accept your cupboard cleaning challenge). There are many wonderful uses for beer (like Guinness Braised London Broil), but my current favorite is beer bread. Not only is it the easiest bread you will ever make, it’s so delicious no one will believe you didn’t spend more than 2 minutes dumping the ingredients together and throwing it in the oven.
Thanks to Rabbi Eliav Bock, Director of Ramah Outdoor Adventure (Ramah Outdoors) for sharing these thoughts related to Passover, his community in Colorado and the work of the Jewish Food Movement. Read on for his Ten Plagues Facing Our Modern Way of Eating and Relating to Food and the complimentary Dayenu that you can adapt for your own seders…
It is the month of Nissan and spring is in the air. If I was living on a farm here in Colorado, I would be plowing the fields, spreading manure, and getting ready to plant our first spring vegetables. Sadly I do not live in such close proximity with the land. Instead, I live in a house in Metro Denver and would not be able to fit a tractor through the door that leads to my back yard.
No, this time of year is a time when many of us living urban lives do not even stop and appreciate the effort that farmers throughout the country and throughout the northern hemisphere are making to ensure that we in America have delicious food to eat. (In a future post, I will write about the farmer with whom we are contracting to bring fresh local food to camp. She did spend last week preparing her fields. But more on that in a week or two. . . .)
Passover is not the most glorious time to be vegetarian or vegan. This guide provides helpful tips for making Passover as painless as possible. The bulk of it focuses on following Sephardic guidelines, which allow some foods that Ashkenazi Jews don’t eat on Passover. If you’re an Ashkenazi Jew who refuses to adhere to Sephardic guidelines, skip to the last section for tips that everyone can enjoy.
Deciding Whether to Eat Kitniyot on Passover
I am an Ashkenazi Jew, and until my first Passover as a vegetarian at age 16, I followed the Ashkenazi tradition of avoiding kitniyot (including rice, corn, beans, lentils, peas, string beans, and seeds) on Passover. When I went vegetarian, I reasoned that kitniyot were a key source of protein and I’d be better off following Sephardic guidelines, which permit kitniyot. I wasn’t particularly observant, and frankly, I didn’t care about the Ashkenazi-Sephardic divide.
As the years went by, I realized that my willingness to eat kitniyot despite being Ashkenazi wasn’t so far-fetched. In 1989, a ruling by the Israeli Conservative movement said that all Israelis could eat kitniyot on Passover “without fear of transgressing any prohibition.” In 1997, Rabbi David Golinkin (representing the Rabbinical Assembly of Israel) issued a ruling supporting the elimination of the Ashkenazi custom of avoiding kitniyot on Passover. Several years ago, Rabbi David Bar-Hayim of Jerusalem formally lifted a ban on kitniyot in Israel. While there isn’t unanimity in Israel, the Forward reported a year ago, “According to some experts on changes in religious law, we are witnessing the beginning of the end for the ban on kitniyot in Israel.”
As Passover rapidly approaches, cleaning and preparing for the holiday is a topic that comes up more and more. It seems like a huge undertaking and most people dread Passover cleaning– me included. But this year, I’m a little excited. I’ve divided my cleaning into two parts, my kitchen and the rest of my apartment.
I’ve decided to make my Passover cleaning into a more traditional spring cleaning. And what better way to welcome springtime than with a fresh and clean apartment?
As for the kitchen, it’s always quite a project. I started last night with a play from my college roommate’s playbook. I took a box and placed it on the center of my kitchen floor and started throwing all of my chametz into it. I filled the box pretty quickly, now I know why she put the box out about a month before Passover. There were a lot of staples (beans, pasta and rice) in the box, but there were also some hidden treasures in the back of my cabinets that I had completely forgotten about.
Here in Portland we’re fortunate to have a year-round farmer’s market, and I’m always on the lookout for interesting, tasty, off-the-beaten-path things to make for Pesach. I love serving fresh asparagus at my seder, but it’s not in season yet, so I was looking for an alternative. Our local mushroom purveyor, Springwater Farm, offers a great variety of mushrooms, but they also sell other wild/foragable foods, including fiddlehead ferns and bags of stinging nettles. Here’s a link to some fiddlehead fern recipes.
The fiddleheads can be served in lieu of asparagus; just blanch them in boiling water and saute in garlic with a little salt.
Thank you to Uri Laio for sharing this story and recipe (cross-posted on his blog Old Growth Yiddishkeit). Uri is an ADAMAH alumnus and is currently finishing his first year at UC Hastings Law School in San Francisco.
When my Grandfather, alav hashalom, was nearing the end of his long and fruitful life, I had the opportunity to make dinner for him once (which was uncommon because during that time my mother used to cook dinner for all of us mostly every night). He requested borscht, a dish that I was altogether unfamiliar with, but which was an essential part of the Eastern European Jewish food tradition my Grandfather had grown up with. In my good intention to fulfill his request, I opened a jar of canned borscht (Ingredients: Water, Beets, Sugar, Salt, Citric Acid.) and served it with sour cream, and love.
Flash forward to 2010.
It is apropos that the Whole Grains Council has declared quinoa as the March Grain of the Month, as we begin Passover on the night of March 29th. Quinoa, a rockstar of a grain in its own right with tons of nutritional value, made its debut as a Passover friendly grain just a few years ago, forever changing the way many people cook for the holiday.
According to the laws of Passover, chometz (barley, rye, oats, wheat, and spelt [BROWS to many who attended Jewish day school]) and their derivatives are forbidden. An Ashekanazic rabbinic tradition developed where kitniyot, legumes, rice and other similar products that are processed similar to chometz, look like chometz when ground into flour, or may have even just a bit of chometz in them, were also outlawed for Passover (many Sephardic Jews eat kitniyot).
As luck would have it, the law of kitniyot applies only to items that the rabbis were aware of at the time this tradition developed. This means that, you guessed it, quinoa is allowed on Passover! No longer were the Jewish people restricted to endless variations of potato dishes.
Enter, quinoa.
Cross-posted to heebnvegan
In December, Sarah Gross attended a workshop called “Bringing a Great Idea to Scale” at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn. When prompted to write down a few things she cared about most, Gross wrote “chocolate” and “helping animals.” She recalls, “The next morning as I walked my own rescued pitbull, Mocha, after a breakfast of chocolate (of course), my inspiration hit. ‘Rescue Chocolate,’ I muttered to myself over and over; the ideas were flying in and my fingers began to freeze as I wrote away on my iPhone. Mocha wondered why I wasn’t throwing the ball so well this morning. Anyway, the company took off from there!”
Rescue Chocolate donates 100 percent of its net profits to animal rescue groups, and all its packaging educates chocolate lovers about various issues related to the companion animal overpopulation crisis. All of its products are vegan and kosher/pareve. The company sells (or will sell) chocolate under such catchy names as Bow Wow Bon Bons, Peanut Butter Pit Bull, Pick Me! Pepper, The Fix, Foster-riffic Peppermint, Forever Mocha, and even “Don’t Passover Me” Bark.
The month Nisan begins tonight and with it, so many associations. Last year, I wrote about the practice of refraining from eating Matzah from Rosh Hodesh Nisan (i.e. tonight) until Passover. Most people make, if any, the association of dreaded Pesach cleaning and preparation. I’ll be writing some about that in a few days or next week, God willing, but for now, let’s stick to things connected specifically to Rosh Hodesh Nisan.
One association fewer people make is that Birkat haIlanot, the blessing over blooming trees, is typically said in the month of Nisan:
