Here are three newsy bites for your Friday reading enjoyment. The first is about the ongoing meat recall crisis, the second about the (also ongoing) Agriprocessors saga, and the third about the disappearance of Tam Tam crackers. (Okay, maybe I used the word “enjoyment” a bit too soon…but certainly food for thought.)
Rotten Meat. The Meat & Poultry Business Journal reported that, “The U.S. Department of Agriculture is considering a proposal to not identify retailers where meat cited in recalls was sold except in cases of potential serious health risks to consumers.” Already, the report says, stores are required to remove recalled meat from shelves, but not obligated to alert customers about the recall. Read the full story here.
AgriProcessors fined $180,000 - The Forward reported that the controversial kosher meat company, AgriProcessors was fined over $180,000 by the state of Iowa’s Division of Labor for, “failure to provide workers with proper safety training, insufficient programs to manage blood-born pathogens and a failure to label toxic chemicals.” AgriProcessors denies many of the citations. Get the story here.
Where’s the Matzah? The New York Times City Blog reported the sad truth this week: Because of a technological glitch, Tam Tams Crackers (the beloved unleavened snack cracker) will be all but extinct this Passover season. (hat tip to Jewschool) In equally distressing news, Streit’s Matzo factory is closing down - shut out by rising rents on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where the family-owned business has churned out Matzah for the last century. Like many New York residents who can’t take the rent hike, Streit’s is moving to New Jersey. Read the Streit’s story here.
What do parsley, pickles, and charoseth have in common? They constitute the exhaustive list of Jewish foods that fit neatly into a raw food diet. The remaining arsenal of heavy, noodle-egg-and-shmaltz-filled dishes that dominate the world of traditional Jewish cuisine don’t exactly make the cut.
But now - proving that there is indeed an online community for every interest - there is a new Yahoo group for raw foodists who love Jewish food. Members will swap Jewishly-inspired recipes created through vegan and raw techniques. While I can see how borscht and hummus would be fairly straight forward to make raw, I’m having a little trouble wrapping my mind around an uncooked matzah ball…
Check out Jewish Raw Food here.
Photo credit: Judy Pokras “Raw Vegan Potato Latkes and Mock Sour Cream”
In this week’s Jerusalem Post, Dr. Richard Schwartz writes:
“Queen Esther, the heroine of the Purim story, was a vegetarian while she lived in the palace of King Achashverosh. She was thus able to avoid violating the kosher dietary laws while keeping her Jewish identity secret.”
Well, sort of. As a vegetarian and a woman, I find Dr. Schwartz’s line of logic tempting. Hooray! Queen Esther, the sassy savior of the Jewish people, loved tofu! But he has the midrash backwards.
There are actually conflicting opinions about what Esther chose to eat and refuse in the palace (one commentator suggests that she was actually served pork!). But the midrash that stuck is that she ate beans and legumes. If this was the case, then Queen Esther avoided meat so as to not violate the kosher laws in her non-Jewish surroundings. Her intention would not have been to eschew all flesh, as Dr. Schwartz suggests, just the non-kosher kind.
Even if she wasn’t a card-carrying PETA member, Queen Esther’s diaspora diet gives us a glimpse into the strength of her character. She maintained her sense of self, even within a palace that was undoubtedly filled with temptations. The lesson to take away is not that all Jews should be vegetarians (though many could benefit from eating less meat!), but that defending one’s core values is the deepest form of heroism.
In honor of Queen Esther, here’s a recipe for Persian Stuffed Peppers by Chef Gil Marks, author of a mind-bogglingly comprehensive book of vegetarian Jewish recipes, Olive Trees and Honey.
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Purim is coming! If you haven’t yet perfected your hamantaschen filling technique and are still contemplating dressing as Tickle Me Elmo on Purim night - not to worry. The Jew & The Carrot presents our favorite Purim recipes and resources from around the Jewish blogosphere.
And while you’re checking out these sites, take a peek at The Jew & The Carrot’s Healthy, Sustainable Purim Resources and our Cafe Press Gear - a beautiful line of tote bags, mugs, aprons, T-shirts, journals, note cards and more all emblazoned with a gorgeous “Eat, be Satisfied, and Bless” decal. The note cards would make a particularly sexy addition to your mishloach manot gifts.
Purim Recipes and Resources from the Jewish Blogosphere
In Mol Araan, a Jewish food blog in Yiddish and English suggests a hemp-based filling for hamantaschen, sweetened with agave, coconut milk, and cardamom.
The Parve Baker eschews making hamantaschen for Purim. Like ripe tomatoes in August and the mango tree outside her former graduate school home in Indonesia, there are simply too many to go around! Instead, she gives us a recipe for Queen Esther’s Crown - a “slightly sweet challah dough stuffed with a mixture of chopped onions, poppy seeds, salt, and oil.”
BFruitfull suggests a list of half bottles of kosher wine, that could be tucked into mishloach manot baskets.
My Jewish Learning offers a recipe for a cinnamon-spiced vegetarian bean stew for a festive Purim meal.
Tradition, shmadition, I hate poppy seed hamantaschen. I find this old-world filling to be gritty and saccharine and really just a vile affront to the taste buds. So when a friend suggested bringing a can of the corn syrup-laden stuff to my recent hamantaschen-making party, I kindly (but firmly) let her know that my home is mohn-free.
I don’t think she missed it too much. My kitchen table was strewn with interesting pots of jam (cherry-apricot from the farmers’ market, and blueberry canned last summer by the Adamah fellows), a container of raw honey, another of Nutella, and even a jar of peanut butter brought by a friend who insisted it could be great (it was).
But the highlight of the evening, without a doubt, centered around our experiments with savory hamantaschen - pockets of dough filled with an earthy mixture of sauteed mushrooms, browned onions, and a garlic and basil-infused jack cheese by the Sugar River Cheese Co. As we bit in to the warm, herb-flecked treats, it felt like something of a Jewish food revolution. Poppy seeds, watch your back.
Photos and recipe below the jump…
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Celebrate Purim with The Jew & The Carrot’s:
Healthy, Sustainable Purim Resources.
Find tips and tricks on how to:
- Bake unique and healthy, homemade hamentashen
- Throw a Persian Purim banquet
- Pamper yourself like Queen Esther
- Make unforgettable shloach manot
Click here, to get your Purim celebration on - The Jew & The Carrot style.
(cross-posted at Jewcy)
This challah recipe is spiced bread more than anything else. There’s no egg in it, which is what makes challah challah in my opinion, but we do braid it, so I call it faux-challah. The dough is pretty sweet so we added lots of salt to make it a savory loaf, but it’s just as easy to make sweet by adding cinnamon, pumpkin pie spice and raisins.
There are two sets of directions below - one from a Chabad rebbetzin, and one for those of you who might like something slightly more step-by-step.
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First there were Smucker’s Uncrustables - the prefab PB&J sandwiches that resemble mini pot-pies and fit snugly (jam and all) in the toaster. Now, Kraft has introduced frozen Bagel-fuls that come pre-shmeared with cream cheese.
Really? PB&J and bagels with cream cheese are already the definition of “on the go” foods - is there really consumer demand to shave 30 seconds off the morning routine? And wouldn’t these convenience bagels actually take more time since they have to defrost?
More than that, I find Bagel-fuls to be a serious affront to the bagel’s integrity. There was a time when the bagel - crusty, chewy, and drowning in poppy seeds - rivaled challah as the quintessential Jewish bread. And while shrink-wrapped versions (like Lender’s) have already made a mockery of our beloved carb, Bagel-fuls truly represent a new low.
Fight back against this culinary offense - whether you’re partial to plain, scallion, or Toffuti, the right to shmear is yours.
Related bagel posts on The Jew & The Carrot
The Only Bagel
What’s so Jewish About Bagels?
Does it Work for a Knish Too?
Does a Bagel Platter Make us Hypocrites?
(Hat tip to My Jewish Learning)
Mel Brooks had it right in his hit 80’s movie Spaceballs - it’s all about moichandising! Now, thanks to the folks at Cafe Press, you can support The Jew & The Carrot in style.
The beautiful “Eat, be Satisfied, and Bless” decal (designed by The Jew & The Carrot contributor, Anna Stevenson) comes on coffee mugs, aprons, journals, T-shirts, tote bags, and throw pillows. They’re great for birthday gifts, mishloach manot, or for your own stylish foodie self. Click here to find out more!
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What is it about Jews and Chinese food?This oddly-passionate obsession has inspired scholarly dissertations, cookbooks, multi-cultural festivals, and even affected international relations [this last link, btw, about Asian chefs in Israel going on an eggroll strike over the elimination of foreign worker permits, is worth a trip to Jewschool to read in its entirety]!
So when this article appeared recently in the NYTimes about the history of the fortune cookie, I immediately thought, “hmmm…what’s the Jewish connection?” The answer? The long Jewish tradition of bibliophagy (eating the written word). Find interesting examples of Jewish bibliophagy after the jump:
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I lived in Oregon for two years (the defunct hippie enclave of Eugene to be exact), so before any of you west coast readers get all up in arms over what I’m about to say, just remember I’m a sympathetic member of the tribe.
It’s just that, since moving to New York, I’ve fully realized to extent to which the east coast, and NYC in particular, sets the cultural tone for the rest of the American Jewish community. Seinfeld - New York. Woody Allen - New York. Manischewitz…okay, Cincinnati and then New Jersey, but close enough.
Considering the cultural monopoly east coast Jews have on most things Jewish, it seems to follow that the majority of successful Jewish food entrepreneurs would hail from the more neurotic side of the Mississippi. So I was utterly taken aback when Lois Leveen proved me wrong on her blog MacaroniManiac.
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I’ve already posted once today, so sorry for double-dipping, but this is worth posting ASAP:
From the JTS press release:
Dr. David Kraemer, the author of Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages [and 2006 Hazon Food Conference Keynote Speaker], will discuss “Jewish Eating and Jewish Identity” at The Jewish Theological Seminary’s Henry N. Rapaport Memorial Lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, February 4, 2008. The event will take place at JTS, 3080 Broadway (at 122nd Street), New York City.
Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages is the first book ever to explore the history of Jewish eating practices from the Bible to the present, and the first to interpret Jewish eating practices throughout the ages as keys to understanding current Jewish identities.
Thanks to Rhea Kennedy of the You are Delicious blog, for this guest post.
When I was a kid, my parents gave me weird food for lunch and packed it in weird ways. God bless them, they sent me off into the world with chunks of tempeh, entire raw portabellas, dark whole-grain bread with thick pieces of cheese inside. These treats were invariably wrapped in waxed paper, which my mother had deemed better for you than plastic baggies or packaging from a factory. As soon as I was old enough to notice this was different from the other kids’ cold cut sandwiches in neat Ziploc bags and individually-wrapped string cheeses, I became mortified.
Around the same time, I started attending Hebrew school in the evenings – something I approached mostly with dedication, although I occasionally dragged my feet about going. After all, it wasn’t the Christian kids’ religion class (which we all just referred to as Religion) that got them out of school early once a week. To me, those who went to Religion sat in the soft cloak of normalcy—and I didn’t.
Fast forward a few years. I now follow Jewish tradition with pleasure and am a zealous whole foods foodie. Although eating and religious study practices may be hard to take for an image-conscious little kid, I now understand eating whole foods, keeping kosher, saying brachot and other thoughtful ways of approaching food are central to my life. Indeed, I’d argue that observing these traditions - in combination - is rather revolutionary.
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(x-posted at Lilith)
I’ve been doing a lot of cooking lately. In comparison to the stereotypical “I use my oven as an extra shoe closet” New Yorker, I’ve always cooked a lot for this city. But since I started freelance writing two days a week last summer, and especially since the New Year when I renewed my commitment to preparing my own meals, I’ve found myself spending much more time in the kitchen.
I’ve also discovered that there’s lots of time to think when one cooks - even if NPR is playing in the background. As I’ve tinkered with various types of cookies and tried out new recipes from my favorite Chanukah present, Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook
(thanks Mom!), I’ve started to wonder, “what makes food feel Jewish?”
Yes, there are the old standbys - Chicken soup with matzah balls, fresh challah, pastrami on rye. And then there are the mysterious, and often severely unappetizing foods that you find in the “kosher food” section at the supermarket - gefilte fish, pickles, Manischewitz, and Tam Tam crackers. Honestly, I can only imagine what folks who aren’t familiar with Jewish eating must think when they see a supermarket shelf of glass jars filled with gelatinous objects suspended in a bunch of different colored murky liquids.
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