I love that there are so many Jewish holidays throughout the year. And the best part about holidays is that every holiday has specific food associated with it. And as you can see, on this blog or in general, whenever a holiday approaches the talk about food increases. For holidays we plan ahead, cook or bake and we eat as a community, which unfortunately is not always part of our daily lives anymore. Some holidays require a lot of preparation and can be scary for people that do not spend a lot of time in the kitchen or just don’t enjoy cooking. But Purim should not be one of those holidays. The traditional food for Purim is cookies, more specifically Hamantashen!
It’s that time again. With Purim around the corner, many people have been thinking about Hamentashen. I had some friends over last night to make tasty triangular treats. Our savory ‘tashen were inspired by this blog and Leah Koenig (see the archived post here) though mine were rosemary dough with sweet-potato goat cheese filling. My brother made home-made poppyseed filling like I did last year (see that archived post here).
Our friend Nancy Wolfson-Moche also sent along this link to her blog for her “pouch pastry recipe.” Thanks, Nancy, for sharing this photo of your delish hamentashen.
Thanks so much to Rachel Kriger for this terrific meditation on the month of Adar. Rachel was raised on organic food and in Jewish dayschool. After college, in the Adamah fellowship, she was able to merge her love of small scale farming and Judaism, and she became the farm manager for the following year. The Calendar Garden at Kayam farm at Pearlstone, is a place to cultivate plants and their connection to seasons, Jewish wisdom and body awareness. Please feel free to join this Rosh Chodesh group in the garden each month.
If you’re reading the Jew And The Carrot, it’s highly likely that you’re interested in food and sustainability. So, when you’re making your mishloach manot you’re probably thinking about the health and quality of the food you’re giving your friends and making efforts to minimize waste as well. You may even be making hamantashen from scratch with homemade local jam canned from last spring’s berry harvest. (Kol HaKavod to Lisa Fine-decidedly impressive!)
This post is the first in a new series, Edible Crafts. I will be exploring edible crafts and food as art throughout the year. Not only can food be made to look beautiful just as it can be made to taste delicious, but there are many ways to incorporate crafting into making food.
For a treat this year, I decided to try baking hamentashen with local, homemade jams that I made last summer. Using fruits from Berkshires farms and farm stands, I made four varieties: peach, pear, blackberry, and blueberry. I filled the hamentashen with blackberry, peach, and pear jams. The blackberry and peach ones are nice alternatives to raspberry and apricot flavored ones. The pear brings on an autumnal flavor. Try any fruit-flavored jam you like, as long as it has a thick consistency.
Purim is a pretty strange holiday. The text we read, Megillat Esther, isn’t a typical biblical book; it makes no mention of the big guy upstairs. Its heroine, a nice Jewish girl bunking with her uncle, ends up in the arms of the non-Jewish king (oh gosh!), and exchanges certain things, namely her wedding vows, in order to save her people. The story ends with the Jews going out on a revenge spree, killing thousands. And how do we celebrate this event every year? By dressing up in costumes, making lots of noise, gorging on delicacies and getting drunk out of our minds ad d’lo yada. Pretty strange in comparison to, let’s say, Yom Kippur, where we don’t eat or drink, instead spending the day in deep and contemplative prayer. What’s even stranger is that we’re taught that Purim is an even “higher” holiday than Yom Kippur. In fact, the rabbis teach that during the Messianic Era, Purim will be the only festival that we observe.
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.)
Even as an adult I get a thrill out of receiving mishloach manot. The moment when I return home and view my doorstep with lots of little packages is exhilarating. I like to see who they are from and what’s inside. I like to taste a few things and then panic when I’ve realized that I’ve forgotten someone. But I’ve also become more environmentally and socially conscious as I’ve aged and realized that there are obstacles cluttering the way to my total mishloach manot happiness buzz. I think to myself, why is there so much in each package? How are we going to consume it all before Passover which arrives in a month? Look at all the wrappers and plastic and candy and junk.
Over the past few years I’ve seen people do so some pretty original and creative things that appeal to my innate mishloach manot excitement and were eco-friendly too. One time I received a package that came in a small tera cotta pot with goodies and a package of seeds. Another time someone filled a reusable cup with treats and I used the cup
I love the Purim season as much as the next Jew, but there is always one thing missing from my Purim hype: Hamantashen. It isn’t that I don’t like hamantashen. On the contrary, I love hamantashen so much, I eat them all year round! This video is my (short) personal quest to find out if I’m the only one…
+ Ha (Hebrew definite article) = Hamohntaschen (Haman’s Pockets) or Purim poppy seed pocket pastries
Now, I LOVE poppyseed filling Hamantashen. And seeds are a traditional food for Purim because Esther is supposed to have eaten nuts and seeds during her fast. But I don’t love all of those ingredients you find when you use a can of poppyseed filing, nor do many of my friends. So, what’s a girl to do? Clearly the answer is, make my own! So I did.
“Oh, there’s no blue cheese in it. We just call it blue cheese,” the diner waiter informed my mother with a perfectly straight face. It’s been a running joke in my family ever since.
Purim offers the opportunity to contemplate costumes in many form – including disguised food, which vegetarians may encounter more than others. As an omnivore, I prefer the straight-up veggie offerings: beans, nuts, legumes, and oh, vegetables, perhaps. However, to feed my vegetarian partner, the fake sausages and other meat substitutes find their way onto my grocery list with regularity. Why this compulsion for fake meat products? It could be to add some variety to a vegetarian diet. (But, think of all the meat eaters who eat only chicken all the time. Where is the variety in that?) It could be the belief that someone who doesn’t eat meat will miss it, and must therefore want these poor substitutes.
My father’s all-purpose costume for Halloween and Purim turned him into a five-foot-eight sunflower, a three part transformation that made an American Jew into an American seed into a symbol of Jewish passing in ancient Persia.
Essentially, he would put on a green turtleneck and his green courduroy pants, dot his face with my mother’s eyebrow pencil and strap on the piece-de-resistance, a coronet of petals cut from yellow construction paper and tied with a ribbon. Thus attired, he and five to eight additional Budabin McQuowns (there were really a lot of kids in my family) would venture off to synagogue for the annual Purim party. I can’t remember everyone else’s costumes, but I was mostly Hamman, my brother Nick was mostly Vashti, and my brother Mike was mostly Esther, or sometimes King Ahasuerus (when given the opportunity to cross-dress, my family never demures). My mother came at least once as “Barefoot and Pregnant” which was both a quick costume and a clever nod to the swarm she had in tow.
This video, in honor of Hazon’s Party here in New York with the 92Y Tribeca is pretty cute. But what really caught my eye was just how much food played into it. Food can always be code for identity, but here I found the rapid fire use of mayo (not Jewish), rugelach and bagels and Manashevitz (need I even say, Jewish?), pork (not Jewish) and then the big finale of mayo = shmaltz a pretty funny way of coding the main character’s Jewiness. There are multiple “inappropriate” uses of Jewish foods which mark this little snippet as a Jewish parody of the original. What the original story is here is lost on me and my cultural cluelessness…
Our good friend Chris P. Carrot (a.k.a. Michael Croland of Heeb n’ Vegan) had a fabulous Purim, shaking his grogger. Did anyone else celebrate in a food-themed costume?
