I spent most of the day yesterday on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  Not literally.  I was reading Jane Ziegelman’s new book, 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement.  I wanted to know what they ate in the days before Crisco, Cool Whip, corn syrup, and Cocoa Puffs. 

Besides the foods we commonly eat today, New Yorkers in the 1800’s ate buffalo, bear, venison, moose, mutton, otter, swan, grouse, and dozens of other species, both domestic and wild.  Organ meats included sweetbreads, hearts, livers, and kidneys.  Fish dealers offered eel, 15 types of bass, 6 types of flounder, and 17 types of perch.  Produce included purslane (I’m sure there is some growing in your backyard), salsify (a root vegetable), borage, burdock, beach plum, black currants, mulberries, nanny berries, black gumberries, and whortleberries.  Note the extraordinary variety in comparison to today’s offerings.

Breakfast often consisted of mutton chops, fish steaks, and porridge.  Oysters, whether raw or cooked, were abundant and extremely popular at all meals.  Herring was prepared in a myriad of ways, such as with sour cream and mayonnaise, pickled, fried in butter, smoked, rolled, stuffed with pickles, or as “chopped herring” salad.  I know this salad well because I used to help my Grandma Rosie make it. 

Grandma Rosie was born July 31, 1910, the fourth child in her family, and the first to be born in America.  Yesterday would have been her 100^th birthday.  Here’s her recipe:  Soak 12 pickled herrings overnight, drain, remove the skin and bones, and chop fine.  Add 2 cups cooked potatoes, 1 cup apples, and 2 hard-boiled eggs, all chopped.  Mince 2 medium onions, and add to salad.  Add 1 tablespoon each of oil and white vinegar, and salt and pepper to taste.  The book also called for 1 cup of beets and some capers, but I never saw Grandma Rosie put capers or beets in her “chopped herring.” 

Signature dishes on New York’s Lower East Side included hash, soups, and pies.  Pie was so popular that immigrants called Americans “pie-eaters.”  Mince pie, oyster pie, apple pie, pumpkin pie, chicken pie, and “sweetbreads in pastry” were among the choices.  Leftover beef, mutton, pork and fish was frequently made into “hash,” and boardinghouse dwellers were called “hash-eaters.”  Soups were made from bones, root vegetables, turnips, potatoes, cabbage, and dried beans.  I learned an old Yiddish proverb:  “Poor people cook with a lot of water.”  In contrast, the American government chose from among pork and beans, beef hash, corned beef with cabbage and potatoes, pot roast, boiled mutton, and mince pie to feed to newly arrived immigrants at Ellis Island. 

Smoked salmon is now considered a delicacy, but a century ago it was a food of necessity.  Without refrigeration, food was kept fresh and edible with four agents: heat, smoke, salt and acid.  Meats, fish and fowl were smoked, salted, or pickled.  Fruits and vegetables were pickled, jarred, or dried.  Corned beef, so named because of the large “corns” of salt used in its preparation, also belongs to the large family of preserved meats and fish. 

Here’s a recipe for turning cucumbers into dill pickles.  It’s very similar to the recipe Grandma Rosie gave me.  Pack 30 kirby cucumbers of approximately the same size into 1 large or 2 small jars, alternating the layers of cucumber with layers of dill (20 sprigs total).  Boil ½ cup kosher salt in 2 quarts water, and turn off the heat.  Add 2 tablespoons white vinegar, 4 cloves garlic, 1 dried red pepper, ¼ teaspoon mustard seed, 2 coin-sized slices of fresh horseradish, and 1 teaspoon of mixed pickling spice to the boiled liquid and pour over the cucumbers.  If necessary, add more salt water to completely immerse them.  Cover and keep in a cool place for a week.  If you like the cucumbers green, try one after 5 days. 

New York was famous for a squishy and gummy white bread called the “New York split loaf.”  In contrast, German immigrants made less expensive whole-grain rye and pumpernickel breads with dense, chewy textures and a sour, mildly nutty flavor.  These latter ones were the breads my family bought to slather with real or vegetarian chopped liver, depending on who was coming to visit.  Here’s Grandma Rosie’s recipe for vegetarian chopped liver:  Saute 3 chopped, medium onions in 3 tablespoons of oil until soft and golden.  Mash the contents of 1 large can of drained sweet peas, and add to the onions.  Add 1 ½ cups chopped walnuts and 2 chopped, hard-boiled eggs.  Chop by hand to desired consistency.  Season with salt and a generous amount of freshly ground black pepper.

As Grandma Rosie said often, “Hearty appetite!”

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.

Beer Bread

Ingredients:

2 cups white whole wheat flour
2 Tbsp sugar (1 Tbsp extra if you like it sweeter)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp + pinch salt
12 ounces of beer (Sierra Nevada is great)

Directions:

1. Sift (or whisk) together dry ingredients. Add beer and stir with a wooden spoon until just combined (dough will be a bit sticky).
2. Transfer dough into greased 8-inch loaf pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes until the bread is hollow when you tap the bottom and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Check out my food blog for more recipes.

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’ve decided to turn this box of chametz into a challenge. Before Passover starts, I’m going to try and use as much of this food as possible. Additionally, I am not going to buy anymore chametz, which adds to the difficulty because I finished my last slice of bread today. The good news is that there is a lot of food in the box for me to work with.

To complete this challenge I am going to get creative with my recipes. This is the perfect opportunity for me to try new things. Some of the items I know how to prepare in different ways, for example, I am making sesame noodles for dinner tonight. It is going to be harder to use up some of the other items. For instance, the only way I know how to cook rice is to boil it. I usually serve rice with a main dishes but the rice itself is nothing special.

10 days and counting; let the cooking begin!

Sesame Noodles:
1 lbs of thin spaghetti
4 tablespoon creamy peanut butter
6 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoon vegetable oil
3 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
Cayenne pepper (to taste)
3 tablespoons sesame seeds
2 scallions, chopped

Bring a pot of water to a boil and cook pasta.

Put the peanut butter, soy sauce, vegetable oil, sesame oil and cayenne pepper in a small bowl and whisk together, until peanut better is mixed in.

In a large bowl mix the sauce mixture with the cooked pasta.  Garnish with sesame seeds and scallions.

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.

I really like his idea (though am too swamped right now to take this on as a new project!) and it has tickled my thinking. What are other ways that synagogues and organized Jewish communities can help their members eat more cheaply and more sustainably? What about swaps of packaged goods you think you might not use (I’ll trade you a can of beans for some dried seaweed)? Or communal potlucks made up of Shabbat leftovers? I thought I would throw this one open to the Jew and Carrot community: what possibilities are there?

Photo credit: The Sierra Club’s blog “The Green Life.”

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.

I admit this was a conservative step: no head cheese for me yet. But I had a modest goal. I often cook soup and rice dishes that call for stock, and I’d gotten annoyed by how expensive the store-bought varieties are—four dollars at my local market for four measly cups. My cooking is mostly vegetarian, but on the couple of occasions that I’ve served chicken, I boiled up the bones with carrots and onion and got large pots of the most delicious soup base I’ve ever tasted. (Once, a friend roasted a turkey and gave me the carcass. I was thrilled.) I was looking for a cheap shortcut to homemade stock that would make use of what might otherwise be discarded and wouldn’t require me to either buy a whole chicken or clean out the produce section of my corner market. I contemplated making vegetable stock, which is what I normally buy, but the recipes I’ve seen call for pre-roasting a great variety of vegetables in order to get a full flavor, and it seemed like a lot of trouble and expense. So on a beautiful Saturday at my local farmer’s market, I asked the butcher (of grass-fed and pastured meats) if he had any leftover bones.

I wasn’t expecting him to charge me for them. Bones seemed like the kind of thing that should be a freebie. But in the conscientious foodie heaven that is a San Francisco farmer’s market, I suppose I wasn’t the first with this idea, and the butcher is certainly entitled to charge for his products. I paid a little over three bucks for a pound of beef bones.

A quick roast and three hours of stovetop bubbling later, that three bucks yielded me at least three times what I would get from a container of store-bought stock. Though it didn’t have the heavenly delicate flavor of my homemade chicken stock (which may have to do with my reluctance to let the broth reduce too much, though I hate to see all that goodness boil away), it made a flavorful base and over the course of a week made its way into a stew, tomatillo salsa, a Turkish spinach and dill dish and Indian eggplant bharta. I finished it off in a catch-all, empty-out-the-fridge vegetable soup.

Though I’ll probably play around with the recipe, my beef stock experiment gave me exactly what I was looking for: a cheap, easily-prepared kitchen staple made from just a few ingredients. And if I get tired of stock, I can try what the butcher recommended: roast the bones and spread the marrow on toast.

Here is the stock recipe I used, adapted from Donna Hay’s cookbook, New Food Fast:

[First, a couple of caveats: the original recipe calls for six pounds of bones in 10 liters of water (don’t even ask me to convert). I didn’t measure the water and only used one pound of bones because I’m cheap. I’ve similarly skimped on chicken broth and it has turned out wonderfully, but you might want to experiment with more bones for a richer flavor. Also, almost every stock recipe I’ve seen calls for celery, which I refuse to buy because I detest it and the leftovers rot in my fridge.]  Okay, onward:

1 pound beef bones
1 ½ cups dry red wine
1 onion, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
8 black peppercorns
4 stalks parsley
2 bay leaves

Preheat oven to 400. Put the bones in a baking dish and brush them with oil, then roast for 30 minutes. Then add the onions and carrots to the dish and continue to bake for another half hour. Take the bones and vegetables out of the oven and transfer them to the largest pot you own. Fill the pot with water almost to the top (leaving room for it to bubble), and bring it to a simmer. Then add the wine, peppercorns, parsley and bay leaves and keep the pot at a low simmer for three hours. During this time, you can alternately cover and uncover the pot to control how much the stock reduces. (I left it covered for about half of the time). The more it reduces, the more concentrated the flavor will be, but you will have less to show for it in the end. Check occasionally to see if any scum has accumulated at the surface of the stock, and if so, skim it off with a spoon. When it’s done cooking, strain and allow stock to cool. Lasts several days in the fridge (that’s the official line, but I used it for a full week), and freezes excellently.

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.

Directions:

Cream one stick of butter with one cup of sugar.

Add one egg.

Mix in 1 tablespoon vanilla.

Combine one cup of flour with one teaspoon baking powder.

Add dry ingredients to the wet ingredients alternating with ¼ cup of milk.

Put mixture into pie dish.

Spread ¼ cup (or more) of applesauce with rubber spatula on to the top of cake.

Slice up 2-3 apples (or berries, peaches, pears, etc.) and place on top of the cake in a circular design.

Sprinkle top of fruit and cake with ¼ cup cinnamon/sugar.

Bake at 350 for 40 mins.

“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.

“Volunteering there opened my eyes to the amount of food that isn’t used in this country, and I was kind of surprised by the high quality of stuff that would have been thrown out if the food rescue groups weren’t using it.”

His interest in the issue grew, and in January 2007, the now-32-year-old Bloom, who currently lives in Durham, NC, with his wife and baby, launched his website, WastedFood.com.

“I saw food waste as a topic that didn’t receive the attention I thought it deserves, and a topic where I could do good by writing about it – and I wanted to write a book about it. The blog was conceived both as a way to raise awareness of the topic and also as a way to help me get a book deal.”

It has succeeded on both counts: Bloom’s book American Wasteland will be published next fall by Da Capo Press, and the website receives more than 5,000 hits a month from viewers interested in its mix of news, suggestions and humor. With everything from reports on college cafeterias’ efforts to go “trayless” (since most students can carry more than they can eat, food piled on trays ends up being wasted in staggering amounts) to recipes, environmental news, product launches and (to raise awareness of the good food that is thrown out merely because it isn’t ready for its close up) pictures of the wackiest-looking vegetables in Great Britain, WastedFood.com manages to encourage virtue without coming off as preachy or judgmental.

I recently spoke with Bloom about why we Americans (and American Jews) waste so much food, and how we can make small changes that will have a huge impact on the amount of food available to feed the hungry, and on the global warming that is exacerbated by food waste.

What is the most important thing individuals can do to cut down on waste?

I tell people that the way they can most impact food waste in their life is by thinking about it – thinking about what you’re buying and what you’re eating, and what is going to waste. The #1 way to do that is to plan your meals and then to make a detailed grocery list and actually stick to that list. Serve sensible portions at home, knowing that people can always take more if they want. Save leftovers after a meal and then actually eat the leftovers. A lot of people end up just delaying the waste. They put something in the fridge and feel virtuous that night, but if a week later you’re just throwing it out you’ve just delayed the waste. If you know you don’t like leftovers, then don’t cook as much.

What would you like to see the government do to cut down on the amount of food we waste as a country?

I’d like to see the USDA get involved, again, in matching up farmers and gleaners and helping promote farm food recovery. There was actually a gleaning coordinator under the Clinton administration, but that position was eliminated in 2001 when the Bush administration took over. Even though it would have fit in with the Bush administration’s rhetoric because it’s something that can be faith-based – they didn’t go for it. There’s just this ingrained idea in Washington you don’t do what your predecessor did even if it’s in line with your values.

What is the “inconvenient truth” about waste – i.e., what should we be doing that no one wants to do?

The so-called inconvenient truth is that in addition to wasting money and creating a generation of Americans who don’t value food, we are contributing to global warming by throwing out food. By sending food to landfills we’re essentially creating methane, a greenhouse gas that is more than 20 times more harmful than CO2.

Are there any waste issues that are actually created as negative consequences of positive lifestyle changes – sustainable eating culture, locavore-ism, etc. – and if so, how does one weigh the tradeoffs?

Well, the downside of fresh, unprocessed food is that it’s perishable. When you go to the supermarket or farmers market, the produce is really attractive, and it’s easy to buy too much. I’m someone who enjoys eating so I’m not trying to be the food Grinch. If you go to the farmers market, enjoy that experience and buy interesting, new things. Just don’t go overboard on quantities.

Are there particular problems of waste in the Jewish community, and if so, what can we do to minimize those issues?

Food is a large part of our culture, and when you throw a big party, be it a birthday or a bar mitzvah, you want to please your guests. There’s a “good provider syndrome” (hat tip to William Rathje, founder of the Garbage Project, for the term) where you have to be sure you have more than enough, and at any catered events – not just Jewish ones – the amount of food and waste can get out of hand. I think we can do a better job of enjoying food and celebrating food as part of our culture while at the same time not being so profligate. If you can donate uneaten food to a soup kitchen after the event, that’s great. But because there are legal issues with donating food that has been out on a buffet table, I would urge people to work with your caterer in advance, to tell them that you don’t want the buffet to still be full at the end of the event. We have to start asking ourselves, why is it normal to expect have a full choice of all the food items – all still in abundance – if you show up five minutes before the event ends?  If we can start asking those questions, then hopefully we’ll see the beginning of a cultural shift.

“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.

Of course, there’s always French toast (and if you think it’s good plain, just try slicing the bread only half as thick as you normally do, making a sandwich of two slices with a nice spackling of Nutella, and then dipping THAT into the milk-and-egg mixture before placing it in the frying pan. There IS a God!)

But when brunch company comes, whoever’s stuck alone in the kitchen flipping the French toast misses all the best jokes and juiciest gossip, so on those Sunday mornings, I like to do a savory bread strata instead. My latest favorite is an adaptation of a recipe that recently ran in House Beautiful. Check out the recipe recipe here. I use 2 cups of sliced mushrooms and 2 cups of minced baby spinach leaves, both sautéed with the caramelized onions, for the vegetable component, along with 5-7 ounces (depending on package size) of crumbled soft goat cheese.

If there’s just a slice or two of challah left, strata’s not an option – but that’s okay, too, if you sandwich creatively. Because of its eggy texture and sweet-ish flavor, challah’s not right for every sandwich, but try it with brie and apricot preserves, or roast turkey with pumpkin butter (which is not butter at all, but fruit spread, and is pareve). Or, do what I did for breakfast this morning: just toast the challah and spread thinly with goat’s milk butter (available at health-food and gourmet stores and absolutely marvelous). With a drizzle of the rich, dark buckwheat honey I get from Andrew at the greenmarket in New York’s Union Square… well, it’s like manna from heaven.

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.

Mushy. Well, not mushy, exactly, but certainly not taut-skinned or crunchy-fleshed (which, I suppose, is what I get for buying a bag of apples flown in from God-knows-where in July when I could be enjoying local nectarines and strawberries.) But mushy-ish, in any case, which raised the issue of what to do with the rest of bag.

Throwing the remaining apples out was simply not an option; it’s a shame, not to mention a breach of Jewish law, to waste food just because it isn’t up to gourmet standards. And while I suppose I could have soldiered on and just eaten an apple a day (to keep the HMO away), I believe, more and more these days, that eating food without enjoying it is almost as wasteful as throwing it in the garbage can. And so, I looked for ways to use the apples in dishes where their lack of tartness would be less noticeable and their lack of crunch unimportant.

First up: an apple-cheddar omelet. I peeled one of the Granny Smith apples and diced it fine (the pieces need to be small so that they heat through and soften a bit inside the omelet without having to cook it so long that the eggs toughen up), mixed in a hefty handful of grated cheddar cheese and melted some butter in my frying pan, added two well-beaten eggs and the filling. A few minutes later, I had a dish worthy of a chic brunch eaterie.

The next day, with only one egg in the fridge, I put some apples and cheese into a honey-wheat tortilla and heated it in a dry pan. Ya vez! A quesadilla’s second cousin twice removed. And it was tasty, too – but at the rate I was going, it’d take me a week of lunches and a year’s cholesterol-allotment of cheese to make my way through the rest of the apples, and I was eager to be done with them.

Pie? Too Thanksgiving-y for the sunny July weather we earned with this year’s awful, rainy June. And an apple sorbet made with bland apples surely would not have been worth the time or trouble.

And then I remembered about my sister’s apple kugel, a recipe that has circulated in her husband’s extended family for years. It’s easy, it’s always well-received, and fortuitously, my sister told me when I asked for the recipe that it really only works well with Granny Smiths.

In minutes, I mixed the batter up with a fork, (the pinch of salt is my addition; I like the more balanced flavor it creates), added the six peeled, cored and sliced apples and stuck the pan in the oven. An hour later, the kugel was ready, and when I served it – warm on Friday night and at room temperature on Shabbat day – everyone at the table asked for more.

And my fruit bin? Emptied of the disappointing apples, there’s now room for the kind of summer peaches that make a person glad to be alive.

Apple Kugel:

Preheat oven to 350.

Peel, core and slice 6 Granny Smith apples.

In a large bowl, mix together:

4 large eggs

1 Cup flour

1 Cup sugar

½ Cup canola oil

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. vanilla extract

pinch of salt

Mix the apples into the batter. Transfer to a 9 x13” baking dish and bake for about 1 hour, until kugel is set.  Serve warm or at room temperature.

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.

I was glad, therefore, to see that the frozen green beans I found in the back of my freezer last night were indeed still green; no freezer burn. And while they’d probably last a few months more (though not forever, for as Mark Bittman pointed out in a recent New York Times column on freezers, “Freezing is not… suspended animation” ), I was eager to use the frozen veggies up ASAP and say a final goodbye to the winter that seemed to last right through spring of 2009.

But use them in what?

The TJ green beans are better than most frozen, but still not bursting with snappy fresh flavor, so I usually like to use them in a multi-flavored side dish or interesting salad. Rummaging around in the fridge last night I found some feta cheese I figured I’d better use up, so I crumbled it while I steamed the green beans and toasted a handful of the chopped walnuts I always keep Ziploc’ed in the freezer. Tossed all that together and drizzled on some walnut oil and fresh lemon juice. Sprinkled on a little dried oregano (oh, maybe 1/8 of a teaspoon) and just the tiniest little pinch of ground cinnamon.

Yup, cinnamon.

For a journalism assignment back in college (“Write About Someone With an Interesting Job”) I interviewed my friend Seth’s mother, the late food writer Elizabeth Rozin. Rozin’s Flavor Principle Cookbook and her subsequent Ethnic Cuisine show home cooks how to use specific combinations of spices and seasonings to create various ethnic flavors – very valuable knowledge for a cook to have, especially when you’re trying to improvise with whatever raw ingredients happen to be lying around. Looking at my plate of green beans and feta last night, I recalled learning from Rozin, all those years ago, that oregano, lemon and cinnamon are a classic combination in Greek cuisine – which sounded just about perfect with the feta.

And perfect it was – if technically inaccurate; I remembered only this morning that Rozin also included dill as an important component of the Greek flavor combo, and that tomatoes are often in the mix, as well. Okay, so next time I’ll try adding some dill and/or tomatoes. But in the meantime, this dish was a delicious way to use up food that might  otherwise have gone to waste.