I’m in the minority as far as Jews go in that I’m blonde.  There are increasing number of blonde Jews but we’re still few and far between.  I was president of my Jewish sorority in college so my picture was smack in the middle of our composite photo.  Not only was I  front and center but I stuck out like a sore thumb as one of three or four blondes out of over 100 women on the  composite.  In any case, I’ve always embraced being blonde so when I was deciding what to bake recently blondies came to mind immediately.  I am a huge fan of chewy brownies but there’s something about blondies that make them even better than brownies, at least in my opinion.

I located a recipe on one of my favorite cooking blogs and after reading the recipe I realized what makes blondies so fantastic (beyond the hair color connection, of course): brown sugar!  Blondies are chewy and have a bit of a molasses flavor since they made using only brown sugar and no white sugar.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with blondies, they are sort of like a chocolate chip cookie in a bar form – but so much better.  There are a few reasons that blondies will be my quick and easy dessert of choice moving forward: they are versitile, easy to make without fancy kitchen electrics, and keep well in an airtight container for a few days.

As far as versitility goes, the recipe I used called for semi-sweet chocolate chips but I had a bag of Heath Toffee Bits that I wanted to use up so I did a bit of a swap.  Here are some of my other ideas for blondie add-ins: dried cherries or cranberries with white chocolate chips, semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate chips with walnuts, semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate chips andcrystalized ginger, and the list goes on…

Thanks so much to Rachel Bergstein for this great cross-post from the Green Profit.  Since her summer camp counselor explained in detail to a 14-year-old Rachel how the dairy industry ravages the environment, she has been awkwardly obsessed with sustainable food.  Today, Rachel and dairy are in a complicated relationship, based on a simultaneous love of cheese and concern for sustainability and environmental justice.  Rachel is a 2009 graduate of the University of Maryland, a New Israel Fund 2009 Social Justice Fellow, and a contributor to Green Prophet.

Photos courtesy of Jamie R. Liu

Noah Dan has not forgotten the tastes of his childhood.  He remembers eating brara, the fruits and vegetables bursting with incredible flavor but too “ugly” to package for sale in the cities, on Kibbutz Givat Brenner, where he was born and raised.  He also remembers eating creamy, homemade gelato in Trieste, Italy where he spent summers with his Italian grandparents.

Now a resident of the Washington DC area, Noah is the founder and CEO of Pitango Gelato.  Pitango, whose namesake is a variety of cherry that grows wild in Israel, recently opened two new shops in Washington, DC and Reston, Virginia after a successful first run in Baltimore, Maryland.  In his attempt to reproduce the gelato of his childhood, Noah has found a way to build a business that is sustainable, conscientious, and produces a very high-end product without the use of chemicals or artificial additives.

There is a cheesecake sitting in my (boyfriend’s) refrigerator right now. At some point late last week I got it in my head that with Shavuot just around the corner I should make a cheesecake. Since I’m doing a time-share with my boyfriend’s kitchen, permission had to be granted by the relevant roommates, which was how I found myself late last night remembering how much I disliked baking.

But I’m terribly sentimental about food and of course my cheesecake comes with a story…

It’s just about that time of year again: the cream cheese is starting to thaw, the cheesecake recipes are dusted off, and the dairy, it is a’flowin. Welcome to Shavuout preparation!

Shavuot is technically the end of the counting of the Omer, and is the traditional high holiday which celebrates G-d’s gift of the Ten Commandments. Shavuot is derived from the word for week and has a number of other intrinsic meanings as well. It is a very happy and joyous celebration, as it marks the most sacred gift to the Jewish people, that which continues to affect the daily lives of so many, that which is the basis of basically all Western civilization codes of morality. As we are educated by the Torah, so we educate ourselves for Shavuot. One tradition is to stay up all night long and learn the night of Shavuot… some mark the break of daylight by reading the 10 Commandments and then running into the ocean for an early morning dip for fun (well, at least in beautiful Santa Barbara!).

Originally published on My Jewish Learning

Blintzes are most often described in relation to other foods. They are “like pancakes” but thinner, “like Russian blini” except without the yeast, or “like crepes,” just folded a little differently. Still, blintzes are a delicacy all their own. Originally from the Ukraine, fillings like cheese, potato, and kasha were folded inside the blintz wrappers (or bletlach, “leaves” in Yiddish) and fried until golden brown. In The World of Jewish Cooking, Rabbi Gil Marks writes that, “As with other filled foods, blintzes provided a great way of transforming leftovers into a special dish or stretching scarce resources.”

When it comes to reasons for eating dairy on Shavuot, you have a variety to choose from. Here’s one that I like: on this day that commemorates receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai, we remember that the text should lie “like honey and milk” under the tongue (according to the Song of Songs). Why focus on this one? It gives me an excuse to make flan.

This dessert, which is known in Francophile circles as crème caramel, is both milky and sweet as honey. Here’s a recipe and a how-to for the tricky caramel part. This version adds the depth of coffee flavor and the bright note of raspberry sauce (the photo includes a dollop of goji berry sauce, too). Enjoy, and have a wonderful Shavuot!

You are invited to apply for a highly subsidized five-day Tour of Israel (November 15-19, 2009), from the unique perspective of: food! Brought to you by Hazon and the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership, this tour will not be a culinary Tour of Israeli gastronomy (though there will amazing eating). Instead, this one-of-a-kind mission will highlight developments in Israel towards more sustainable food production and consumption, including:

Now that Pesach has come and gone and we are back into the swing of eating leavened things again I though I would share a great spring recipe with you.   I think I’ve mentioned before that my dad has always been the cook in my family – and fortunately he’s very talented at it.  One of my favorite “Dad meals” is a risotto he makes with fresh peas and parmesan cheese (and sometimes mushrooms as well).  Because of this recipe I have become a lover of risotto.

In my family if you helped cook the meal you didn’t have to clean up (this is especially relevant to Shabbat dinner) so I would always volunteer to help my dad cook.   Thinking back, this is probably one of the reasons I got interested in cooking.  On nights when he made risotto my job was to stir the risotto and add more liquid when necessary.  At the time it seemed like quite a tedious process but I now feel fortunate to have been given that job since the stirring and adding the right amount of liquid at the right time is the key to perfecting risotto.  Risotto is really incredible because it starts out as rice (Arborio rice to be exact) and through a specific (yet fairly simple) method of cooking it becomes very creamy and delicious.

Risotto is great as a main course or as a side for fish or meat.  I happened to get a beautiful bunch of asparagus in my CSA box so I decided to add it to some risotto, however, the other great thing about risotto is that it’s quite versitile.  Feel free to add other veggies, meats, fish, etc.  As usual please share your favorite risotto recipes!

One more thing… this recipe contains milk and meat.  I personally wouldn’t recommend leaving out the milk ingredients since they’re key to the richness so I would recommend substituting vegetable broth (or pareve chicken flavoring) for the chicken broth.

And now for the recipe…

Until last year, my mother did the bulk of the Passover preparations in our family, which of course included tons of cooking before and during the holiday. We keep a kosher kitchen, and in the basement my family has boxes and boxes of pots, pans, dishes and kitchen utensils only for use on Passover. There are two full sets of everything, so we can make both meat and dairy meals, and my mother had a system that involved dots of various colors of nail polish to delineate the milk and meat dishes (pink for meat, silver for dairy).

Unfortunately, nail polish chips off, especially after years of use, and the system seems to have been less scientific than we previously thought. As my sister and I forged through the first few days of Passover without my mother we found a puzzling array of kitchen supplies marked in a variety of perplexing ways. Some pots were marked with both pink and silver dots. Spoons and serving utensils sometimes sported a P written in permanent marker. Does this mean that it was pareve, or simply that it was set aside for Pesach? Some containers and pots had been marked with Ms, but that can imply either milk or meat. Many things gave no hints to their gender whatsoever. Cooking felt like a giant guessing game as we reached into boxes of supplies and hoped to find something that we recognized as definitively meat, dairy or pareve.

So we only have a few days left of Pesach… and I happen to be quite happy about this!  It’s not that I don’t understand Pesach or why we don’t eat leavened things – I do.  I actually think the story of Pesach reminds us, as Jews, of some important lessons.  The reminder that I find to be most poignant is that we cannot consider ourselves free as long as others are oppressed.

Sorry for the digression – now back to food… I know some people find cooking during Pesach to be a fun challenge but I find it inconvenient.  As a vegetarian I rely (probably too much) on foods which are not considered “Kosher l’Pesach”, i.e. pasta, rice, bread, soy items, etc, so during Pesach I end up eating lots of matzoh pizza.  For anyone not familiar with matzoh pizza it is a basic combination of matzoh, tomato sauce and cheese which is then toasted (do not microwave because your matzoh pizza will be soggy).  I suppose one could come up with many variations to the aforementioned matzoh pizza recipe (please feel free to share your favorite) but no matter what it’s still matzoh pizza and is not even close to real pizza.

As you can infer from the previous paragraphs my brainstorming of what my boyfriend and I were going to eat during Pesach was a bit of a depressing process for me, however; there was one beacon of hope!  Early last week a friend emailed me for my matzoh crunch recipe.  I had made it last year and brought it to my office (filled with mostly Jews) and this friend like it so much that she went home that night and made it for her boyfriend.  He liked it so much that he requested it again this year!  I don’t know how but I until I received her email I had totally forgotten about the matzoh crunch.

Well, let me rephrase that…we’ve been forced into eating them since for past few months they’ve arrived on our doorstep every Wednesday evening. We try very very hard not to waste the leafy green veggies in our CSA for a few reasons though neither my boyfriend nor I would purchase them voluntarily. Many of the reasons are common sense: we paid for them so throwing them away would be like throwing dollar bills into the trash (or compost?), we feel bad throwing away food because we are fortunate to have abundance while many go hungry, the local organic produce we receive weekly is higher in nutrients and therefore better for us but is also better for the world as a whole. I guess one could say that oftentimes we feel like we’re doing a mitzvah by eating these leafy greens. However, there’s something else that my boyfriend does a good job of reminding us: since we wouldn’t usually buy many of the items in our CSA it provides us with the opportunity to broaden our eating horizons. Sometimes this is what keeps us going when we’d rather be eating something within our taste buds’ comfort zone.

There has been a lot of press recently about HR 875, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, which is being touted as the response to recent outbreaks of food-borne illnesses and the general amount of contamination and crud that is entering our food supply via industrialized farming.  (You can read the complete text of the bill, and track its progress through Congress, here)

There are rumors flying that the bill will outlaw organic farming, which is not true, but there is a real concern that the provisions in the bill will make it even harder for small producers to comply with food safety regulations (and it is already getting difficult–just ask Joel Salatin).

I promise I will have more recipes from my CSA in the next few days (here’s a hint: collard greens) but today I want to take a break from the veggies to share something really outstanding!  Last weekend my boyfriend and I had one of his old friends over for a bit of a feast, here is the menu: Maui ribs (for the boys – I’m a vegetarian), fork-mashed potatoes, kale, braised fennel… and of course dessert.

My boyfriend and I had been to a french restaurant the night prior and shared chocolate mousse for dessert.  It was good but a bit heavy and dense for my taste.  The next day I started thinking about what to make for dessert and lacked inspiration so I asked him what he wanted me to make.  He clearly didn’t get his filling of mousse the night before and asked me to make more!  I had never made mousse before so I set out to find a good recipe.  I looked through many cookbooks but ended up looking to the chef who is a master of all things comfort food – Tyler Florence, though I did adapt his recipe slightly.  Tyler’s recipes never steer you wrong.  In fact, if you’re ever looking for some outstanding mac and cheese his is fantastic.

Ok, back to the mousse… it turned out to be quite simple and absolutely delicious.  My boyfriend and his friend agreed that it was restaurant-quality!  The best part is that if you have extra and cover it tightly with plastic wrap it will last in the fridge for a few days.  Since you can make this ahead of time it would be perfect for a dairy Shabbat lunch for those of you who don’t cook on Shabbat.  As a side note, the reason you want to keep it covered is that it will take on flavors of other things in the fridge – same reason you always want butter covered.  Now for the recipe…