It’s that time again! Time to dust off the apple & honey plate, break out your favorite chicken or vegetable soup recipe, connect with friends and family, and take a moment (or as many moments as possible) to reflect on the past year, and look forward to the year to come.
As you prepare, The Jew & The Carrot is here to help you infuse this year’s Rosh Hashanah celebration with sustainable style. Our Healthy, Sustainable Rosh Hashanah Resources provides tips on how to:
- Add healthy, and earth-friendly touches to your Rosh Hashanah table.
- Find opportunities to connect to the natural world, even before tashlich.
- Liven up your table conversation with meaning and Jewish learning.
- Find new, earth-friendly ways to sweeten up the holiday.
Check out the Healthy, Sustainable Rosh Hashanah Resource List here.
I like Diet Coke. Okay, let’s be fair - I really like Diet Coke.
As my main source of caffeine, it was as much a part of my image in rabbinical school as the midrash books I schlepped around. When I got pregnant, the first question some of my friends asked was, “How are you going to go without Diet Coke for 9 months?” (Answer: I found an OB who let me drink it.) I can drink a 2 litre bottle at one sitting and I can tell the difference between Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi blind. It’s well…I wouldn’t quite call it an addiction, but I’m definitely hooked.
However, when my brain is not addled with the need for a rush of Aspartame, I know that drinking Diet Coke—especially in such quantities—is a problem on all kinds of levels. In a way, Diet Coke is the ultimate symbol of our food system in crisis: water dyed with color, saturated with caffeine and an artificial sweetener, poured into plastic, and trucked thousands of miles to your home.
It’s only sustainable if what you are trying to sustain is corporate profits. And then there is the carbon footprint. As Grist wrote in response to the pleas of another environmentally tormented diet pop addict (apparently I am not alone), drinking several cans of soda a day for a year is equivalent to flying round-trip from New York to Cleveland. This summer, knowing that drinking Diet Coke does not fit in well with the rest of my sustainable, environmentally friendly food values, I tried to do teshuva (repentance); I tried to give up Diet Coke.
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Although I’m a total Top Chef junkie, except for the occasional Iron Chef episode, the Food Network usually doesn’t hold my interest. But the other night, while channel surfing, I came upon a promo for an upcoming episode of Dinner Impossible. The basic premise of the show: put a celebrity chef in a very difficult situation, with an unrealistic time limit, and see if they can get the job done.
This season’s star is Michael Symon, a motorcycle-riding, tattooed Iron Chef who, I have to admit, I would put in that “sexy-ugly” category, but I digress. Anyhow, Chef Symon was shown in a kippah as a rabbi explained to him the laws of kashrut, and that he was expected to cook a Passover seder for 100 of his hungriest congregants Uh, Food Network people: We’re coming up on Rosh HaShanah, not Pesach, but never mind.
Naturally, I had to record it, while I nearly wretched my way through Sarah Palin’s speech (sorry, I digress once again).
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Yesterday, I made two loaves of challah. It felt like a funny activity for a Sunday, I’ll admit. (I usually make challah in a flurried rush on Friday afternoon.) But I’d had a culinary brain flash the other day, that I felt compelled to try out: apple cider challah.
The idea was originally inspired by a beautiful loaf of apple honey challah my friend Ariela over at Baking and Books made last year. Lying in bed a few Sunday mornings ago, still heavy with dreams and sleep, I’d suddenly remembered that beautiful loaf of bread Ariela had made, which twisted the flavors of Rosh Hashanah into braided loaves. My thoughts then drifted to another favorite fall treat, apple cider - the one drink that manages to capture all of the sweet, spicy secrets of autumn.
Despite not being fully awake yet, my brain somehow managed to fuse these two thoughts together Sesame Street style: Cider………Challah Cider….Challah. Cider.Challah. Eureka! All of a sudden, I could hardly imagine a world without apple cider challah. (According to Google, only one other person has thought of it before.) So yesterday, I set about making my dream bread into a reality. It was such a treat to knead the loaves and let them rise on the counter without the pressure of the setting sun at my back. And as I bit into a warm slice, spread with a dollop of amber-colored apricot jam, I felt (almost) okay with the fact that fall is just around the corner.
Question to the Jewish text-perts out there: If you make challah that is not meant for Shabbat, do you still need to remove some of the dough as the Challah offering?
Find the recipe below the jump.
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Can you feel it? Love is in the air! It’s Tu B’av!
At shabbat dinner tonight, my parents (who just celebrated their 42nd wedding anniversary this week) shared the story of how my mother won my father’s heart by bringing him home-made latkes every week - schlepping them on the subway from East Flatbush, Brooklyn to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, then a few hours’ bus ride to his Army base at Fort Dix, New Jersey.
After my mom & dad shared their story, my wife recalled how when we were first dating, a mysterious delivery person showed up at her door when she was home sick from work. She kept trying to send him away, since she hadn’t ordered anything, but thankfully he was very persistant, and finally she let him in. He handed her the package that I had ordered and had sent via courier to her apartment in Brooklyn: her favorite bubble tea from Saints Alp [sic] Teahouse in Chinatown, which she had laughingly watched me struggle to keep down on one of our first dates. It not only cheered her up; it was a foundational moment in our relationship.
So, nu, what’s the foodiest thing you’ve ever done for love?
Thanks to Mia Rut for this guest post.
A few years ago I decided to convert to Judaism. Of course you might be curious about the why, but that is a much longer story that will take a long time to tell. For now, I will say that I’ve been learning a lot about the Jewish community through food. And as someone who took this journey without a partner (I didn’t choose Judaism for an impending marriage) I was quick to realize that becoming part of a community was quite a challenge.
That was where the food came in. I like to think of myself as an amateur chef with credentials like having once lived in France and currently belonging to a CSA, but truth be told is that I really like to cook - an apparently good trait to have within the Jewish community. And since I don’t have the immediate familial connection for the big Jewish foodie holidays like Pesach and Shabbat, I found myself assembling my own Jewish family around a table to share in good food and Jewish learning.
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The 4th of July is coming up tomorrow - the day that commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and America’s independence from Great Britain (and yes, also the time when many Americans like to chomp on burgers and look at sparkle-y things).
In honor of such a revolutionary holiday, The Jew & The Carrot would like to salute the small revolutions that happen every day in our kitchens: the first time we successfully make a matzoh ball like grandma’s, cook kale from our CSA, or teach our kids (or ourselves) how to make jam. And no tribute to kitchen revolutions would be complete without a shout out to every home chef’s trusty sidekick: the humble cookbook.
The Jew & The Carrot contributors compiled a list of our favorite “revolutionary cookbooks,” - the inspired recipe collections that in some way changed the way we cook, eat and even view ourselves. Check them out below the jump, and get inspired for a culinary revolution of your own!
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With the 4th of July coming up, BBQ - corn and veggie dogs, yes, but also steaks, hamburgers, and chicken - is on just about everyone’s mind. But the May 12th raid on Agriprocesors kosher meat plant is likely to cloud the celebration for many kosher keeping consumers. (Take the email I got last night from a friend as an example: “My grand plan to order meat from Fresh Direct was shot, because all their meat is from Aaron’s/Rubashkin.”)
In honor of Independence Day, The Jew & The Carrot spoke with Avram Lyon, a former employee of the Jewish Labor Committee who currently works as an independent consultant for labor and Jewish communal organizations (including Hekhsher Tzedek) for his take on the situation. Lyon spoke about the current state of Postville, BBYO’s recent decision to stop serving Agriprocessor’s meat, and what the raid might mean for the kosher food industry.
Read the interview below the jump.
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This Shavuot I baked, with the assistance of my son Max, a siete cieli (“Seven Heavens”) challah. It’s become a regular tradition in our family, along with cutting roizelekh (”roses”) from origami paper, to bake this Mt. Sinai-shaped round challah adorned with various symbols of Torah and revelation - the 2 tablets of the covenant, a ladder, a fish, a bird, and a hamsa.
Max made the fish that you can see in the picture. There’s an excellent, illustrated description of how to construct the “seven heavens” challah in the cookbook by Rabbi Robert Sternberg, The Sephardic Kitchen, though I don’t use his recipe for challah. Rather, I use my favorite whole wheat challah recipe from Marcy Goldman’s Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking. By the way, this is a fantastic cookbook. I have yet to bake a recipe from it that I haven’t liked. The whole wheat challah recipe follows below the break. I have also adapted this Shavuot hallah to celebrate the end of the term with my Wheaton College First Year Seminar “Rituals of Dinner” students, adding other, more contemporary dough symbols, i.e., a mortarboard hat and diploma. Read more »
Thanks to Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster for this guest post. Rabbi Kahn-Troster is Director of Education and Outreach for Rabbis for Human Rights North America.
Growing up, Shavuot for me meant lasagna - a delicious, cheesy creation that my mother would make for the one Jewish holiday on which we did not eat meat. (Actually, I was an adult before I realized that non-kosher lasagna was made with meat). I loved the lasagna, and Shavuot wasn’t bad either. Special food, staying up late the first night with my friends- Shavuot was a hit, and I didn’t think about it more than that.
One synagogue I went to hosted a “bikkurim (first fruits) procession:” they had people bring in baskets of produce and leave them on the bimah. I’d never seen a community mark Shavuot through any way but through a Tikkun Leyl Shavuot (staying up all night to study) and by eating blintzes, and I didn’t really know what to make of it. It seemed a little pagan.
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Jayne Cohen, author of the stunningly gorgeous new cookbook Jewish Holiday Cooking (witness above) is officially a new poster-woman for The Jew & The Carrot. A talented and creative chef and food writer, Cohen loves traditional Jewish dishes as much as she loves improvising with them, and has a weakness for the farmers’ market to boot. Welcome home, Jayne! She spoke with The Jew & The Carrot about her passion for fresh vegetables, the benefits of occasionally going pot-luck, “foodie poets,” and why real Jewish foods deserve real butter.
Below the jump: The full interview, Jayne’s recipe for blintzes, and a chance to win a copy of Jewish Holiday Cooking.
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Gastronomically speaking, trying to follow Passover is a tough gig. The seder meals are all flashy and filled with symbolic food meaning - how can another holiday compete? But each year, a month and change after the first bite of matzoh ball soup, Shavuot must try.
Here to help, The Jew & The Carrot offers a Healthy Sustainable Shavuot Menu - one that highlights the fresh flavors of the spring season and the dairy-inspired fare traditionally eaten for the holiday. With recipes for English pea risotto, wild salmon in brown butter, and lemony ricotta cheesecake, Shavuot might just have a fighting chance of culinary bragging rights this year.What do you like to make for Shavuot?
So, we started planting in the sadeh (Adamah’s field) almost two months ago. Onions were first, tiny green shoots so thin you could barely see them against the soil, but a whole bed of the tiny starts had an unmistakable green haze of growth. Next were beets and chard, with tiny red-green leaves. Then spinach, with matchstick-sized pointy green shoots, and cucumbers, planted before their true leaves are out, with only two smooth oval cotoledons unfolded like tiny clamshells against the ground.
We know that these baby plants will eventually turn into vegetables… but when they are so small, it’s easy to forget.
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Yesterday I popped into one of those new organic bodegas that seem to be sprouting up around my Brooklyn neighborhood. My goal was simple: buy organic butter for a cake. But when I got to the dairy case and picked up the squat foil-wrapped package, I literally gasped out loud at the $7.65 price tag. Seven dollars. and fifty six cents!!
Now, I am all about paying a little more for organic/local food, and I did receive the memo about food prices going up, but I had not yet come face to face with the brutal reality of taking out a loan to go grocery shopping. Granted, I normally shop at the member-run Park Slope Food Coop, where my monthly labor ensures me a little financial cushion from the rough world out there.
When I got home, however, I found out that as bad as that moment in the store was for me - the organic dairy farmers have it significantly worse.
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