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.

I got an intriguing email from another member of my synagogue this week. He knew I had organized bringing a sustainable meat co-op to the shul, but was wondering what I knew about bulk dry goods in our area. Married to a vegetarian, he cooked a lot of legumes and grains, but found it hard to find them in larger packages (more than say 1-2 pounds for legumes or 10 pounds for grains). Also, prices for these staples have been rising. He floated the idea that there might be interest in the synagogue in buying these items in large quantities (say, 100 pounds at a time) from a bulk supplier, both to bring down cost and to reduce packaging. It also might provide all of us with more variety, since the risk of trying a new product would be spread among the group, and encourage us all to eat more sustainably by reducing our meat and dairy consumption.

My dad has strong memories of his mother’s chicken soup: the aroma, the flavor, and the chicken feet at the bottom of the bowl. He especially liked biting into the pads of the feet, which were nice and chewy.

Like many ethnic cuisines that evolve at least in part out of deprivation, Jewish food has long mined the more interesting parts of the animal (think tongue). But though the tip-to-tail movement has made offal, bone marrow and pork belly trendy, I don’t know any Jewish cooks these days that serve chicken feet in their soup. I set out to dip a toe into the world of off-cuts by buying a bag of beef bones at the Noe Valley Farmer’s Market in San Francisco.

Farmer Freed’s Super Easy Cake With Fruit On Top

Mmmmmmmmm

Around this time of year, my kitchen is overflowing with bowls of local apples from my friend’s farms.  On Rosh Hashana, Farmer Leon brought over a few honey crisps which as the name implies are crisp, delicious, and spicy sweet.  I saved a few of these special gems for a break fast cake.  While I was making the cake, my friend Heidi called and said she was making the cake too and her break fast version was featuring peaches and blueberries.  The recipe below can be made with any type of seasonal fruit and as the name says, the cake is super easy to whip up and very delicious.

“I grew up in a family that emphasized food and used it as an organizing principal for family gatherings – which is probably not unfamiliar to The Jew & The Carrot’s readers,” says anti-food-waste activist Jonathan Bloom.

As a freelance writer for the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, Bloom wrote about food and travel. (“My travel articles were about going somewhere else to eat,” he jokes.) Like many Americans, Bloom became increasingly attuned to environmental issues and, he says, “My interests in food and the environment came together for me in 2005, when I volunteered at D.C. Central Kitchen, an organization that rescues food that would otherwise go to waste, and trains homeless people to be chefs using that food.

“Half a loaf,” they say, “is better than none.”  But it’s hard for me to cheer when I have half a challah left after Shabbat, doomed to sit on the counter, uneaten until it’s inedible, or tossed into the back of a freezer and forgotten until the pre-Passover clean up and then burned with the chametz.

We’ve been trying especially hard, recently, not to waste food – but when it comes to leftover challah, the challenge is twofold: For one thing, there are four people in my family and 15 slices in the average bakery loaf; you do the math. For another, halakha (Jewish law) requires that two full, un-sliced loaves appear at both the Friday night meal and again on Saturday as a reminder of the double portion of manna that fell from heaven before Shabbat when the Israelites were wandering in the desert. A lovely tradition – but it means the bread left over from supper can’t just be used up at the next day’s lunch.

That’s just one of the many reasons I bake my own challah: I can shape each loaf to the exact size I’ll actually need on a given Shabbat, depending on whether we’re expecting guests. And when I’m too tired/hot/lazy/cranky to bake, I now buy small challah rolls at the bakery, rather than full braids. Yeah, the little round breads look kind of lonely on the big challah board, but honestly, one slice of challah is really enough for each of us.

But even those anti-waste measures aren’t fail-safe – and there are many folks, I know, for whom it just isn’t Shabbos dinner without large, glossy loaves poking their noses out from under a silken challah cover. For all of us, then, I’ve been thinking about delicious ways to use up leftover challah.

Philadelphia – May, 1986. I’m walking down my college’s main thoroughfare, having just finished the very final final exam of my senior year. It’s late afternoon, and as I head toward my off-campus apartment, I come upon a street vendor selling shiny, green Granny Smith apples. I hand the man a quarter, and wipe the fruit on my pant leg. As I take my first bite, taut apple skin gives way to crunchy flesh and a delightfully fresh sweet-sour tang.

“THIS,” I tell the vendor, “is an apple that makes a person glad to be alive.”

I have eaten thousands of Granny Smith apples since then, and while few have been as life-affirming as the one I ate that May afternoon 23 years ago, many have been quite wonderful. Others have been crunchy-enough and sufficiently tasty. But every once in a while, I bite in to an apple and give it the same grade I got on that last exam: a disappointing C-minus.

And so it was, recently, when I ripped open a plastic bag of Granny Smiths I had bought at the Stop & Shop, pulled out an apple and washed it carefully (I’m a grown-up now) and bit in.

Fresh, local green beans should be here any day, now – but when they aren’t available, I rely on the frozen ones from Trader Joe’s. I like that TJ’s haricots verts are less waterlogged than many other brands of frozen green bean, and I appreciate the way each bean seems to have been individually frozen (rather than being suspended in a rectangular ice block), so that I can grab and cook just a handful or two at a time, knowing that the rest of the package won’t end up going to waste.

That last part is key, because my family is on a mission to cut down on wasted food —  not only for economic reasons, or even just because I hate it that an estimated 25% of the produce purchased in this country ends up in the garbage, but also because, from a religious point of view, it seems absurd for us to bother with separate forks and spoons for meat and dairy, but flout what Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch called “the first prohibition of creation” – namely “bal tashchit” (literally, don’t destroy) – the commandment against wasting.

Each year the Washington Post holds a diorama contest utilizing the colorful marshmallow treat Peeps.  We were inspired by the creativity that can be found in the Post’s Peeps Shows and remembering how each year there always seems to be that extra box of matzah at the end of Passover no one knows what to do with.  So, the Jew and the Carrot wants to help you use up the rest of your matzah – with a diorama contest of our own!

Yosh and I got a worm composter for our wedding – it’s true, we are just that dorky!  For the last week or so (yes, we got married in November, but the composter arrived in mid-February, and I finally got around to getting the worms last week), I’ve been the proud mom of a brood of about 1,000 wriggling, very hungry worms.

They live in the Worm Factory, pictured above (p.s. definitely not our kitchen), and  I couldn’t be more excited.  Yosh on the other hand, is a bit more squeamish about the whole thing, though I can’t blame him.  He suffered through a bit of worm trauma when his last roommate neglected to properly feed worms, and the bin quickly self destructed.

But aside from the nachas I feel over the little munchies - which was a definitely surprise – I was certainly not counting on our compost bin bringing up halachic (Jewish law) questions.  Then Passover entered the horizon.

Now that Purim has passed (unless you live in Yerushalaim or another walled city and celebrate Shushan Purim),the countdown begins. There is a full lunar month between Purim (the 14th of Adar) and Pesach (the 14th of Nissan). Which really isn’t very much time at all, especially when you’ve just been inundated with major chametz! Prior to Pesach, a Jewish home must be free of chametz. So, ideally that means you get rid of all your chametz. Uh-oh. Couldn’t resist that humungous tub of pretzels that was on sale at Costco the week before Pesach? Rest assured, the Rabbis have you covered. You can “sell” your chametz to a non-Jew for the duration of the holiday, keep it in a cabinet labeled “off limits” and “buy it back” when the holiday is over. I realize that sounds extraordinarily strange, but it saves you from say, having to toss a whole bunch of cookies. (Click here to learn more about selling your chametz-on line!)

On Monday I was in attendance at the 3rd  annual Royal Wines gala event, “The Kosher Food & Wine Experience”. This year’s event was in the NY Metropolitan Pavilion, located on 125 West 18th Street between 6th and 7th Ave in Manhattan.

The event attracts people from all walks of life and all branches of Judaism are represented. The cost of entry is $100.00, but many industry people get complimentary tickets, including me. There were kosher wines from all over the world. I was especially struck by the quality of the wines from Spain.

Chanukah gelt always seems like a good idea at the beginning of December, but these days, the chocolate just doesn’t seem worth fighting with the foil to eat. Similar to Rhea Yablon Kennedy’s experience, we wanted to find another way to use up our leftovers. When my roomies came back from a trip to Ohio they were inspired to make Buckeyes – the unofficial candy of the state of Ohio. Buckeyes are a tree nut and the candies do resemble the naturally occurring buckeye. Rachel, who hails from Cincinnati, referenced the Isaac M. Wise Temple Sisterhood cookbook for recipes. Not 1, but 2 recipes can be found (pages 113 and 114 for those of you who have the 2001 edition of the cookbook).  The Hazon office sure enjoyed these tasty treats…Buckeyes are basically peanut butter balls dipped in chocolate.