The Jewish Museum of Maryland is planning a traveling exhibit, tentatively titled “Chosen Food: Cuisine, Culture and American Jewish Identity.” The exhibit will be accompanied by a catalog and an exhibit-related website, all of which will look at a huge range of questions about Jews and food, including the type of issues that JCarrot and Hazon are interested in.
The museum curator has created a food poll on the museum’s website as part of her research for this exhibit, and I encourage you all to help out by clicking here and taking the short survey.
Are you looking to live the land? Dine on organic food that you grow yourself?
Bake in a thermal mass oven? Build durable mud buildings? Recycle EVERYTHING??
Want to do all of this in ISRAEL?
ECO-ISRAEL, based on the Hava & Adam eco-educational farm between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israel, offers English-speaking Jewish young adults, ages 18-30, a 5 month professional apprenticeship and coursework in permaculture and sustainable living. Upon completion of the program, participants will receive an internationally recognized certificate in Permaculture Design.
There is a deep yearning within me and within so many souls to reconnect with the very fabric of creation. We hear the call and many of us are taking steps to move closer to her. We see this in the Jewish back-to-the-land movement, manifest in a growing number of Jewish farm education projects, in the New Jewish Food Movement fueled by Hazon, and in the blossoming of a Jewish consciousness seeking to rediscover the ancient earth-based roots of our tradition. With the world moving through a period of deep economic transformation and environmental uncertainty, now is the time for us to respond to this yearning.
The 14th of Nisan 5769 (Wednesday April 8th, 2009) is a profoundly auspicious moment to heed this call. Sunrise on the 14th of Nisan is Birkhat HaChama, the Blessing of the Sun, the once-in-a-generation opportunity to celebrate the birthday of the sun and the birthday of all of creation. As the Babylonian Talmud instructs, each person who witnesses the sun “in its season” – meaning when the sun arrives at the place where it was at the beginning of creation – shall bless Hashem, “Blessed is the Maker of Creation.” (Babylon Talmud, Berakhot 59b). Birkat HaChama is not simply a rare moment to celebrate creation, however. It is the deepest moment of renewal, rebirth, and new beginning for our generation.
JFEN includes resources and curricula about food and Jewish tradition for students, families, and adults, plus training for educators. JFEN is for every arena of Jewish education, from day schools, synagogue schools, and Hebrew high schools to Jewish community centers, summer camps, home schooling, and more.
Join before Passover, and save $100 with the discount code: “passover”
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’sPeeps 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!
One of the central themes of Purim is the acknowledgment that the order the we treasure in our lives is as precarious a blessing as any we can imagine. The entire holiday features numerous inversions of that order – from the myriad role revearsals in the Book of Esther to the costumes and hidden identities that feature in the story and in our celebrations. These role reversals and moments of revelatory chaos remind us that the universe is not completely under our control – a message even more crucial in our day when we have attempted to subdue the very forces of nature to fulfill our every whim.
Here, then, is a fun and unique way to embrace the topsy-turvy world of Purim through our tastebuds!
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.)
Thanks to Hanniel Levenson for this guest post. Hanniel is the Environmental Rabbinic Intern at The Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs. Hanniel majored in Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and was awarded a Master of Science degree in environmental policy at Bard College. A self-described post-denominational Jew, Hanniel sees a strong connection between the environment and Judaism and plans to pursue this avenue in his Rabbinical studies at The Academy for Jewish Religion. He is also a painter, a competitive gymnast, who has competed on the national level, as well as a recently Registered Yoga Teacher.
The Federation for Jewish Men’s Clubs (FJMC), one of the main pillars of Conservative Judaism, under the direction of its Executive Director, Rabbi Charles Simon, has taken the initiative to realize Conservative Judaism’s denominational- wide commitment to create a sustainable future. And it begins in the synagogue.
Jewish tradition is filled with environmentally conscious laws, stories, and leaders. Couple this with strong social action and you have Shomrei Ha’aretz – “Stewards of the Land.”
And it only took two weeks, four trips to the hardware store, five different configurations, one temper tantrum, two phone calls to my carpenter-savvy father, three trips to my local bike shop (LBS) and looking at the photos of other exercise bike grain mills online about three hundred times.
It’s been a fun day of sawing, drilling and screwing. I managed to get the bicycle sprocket firmly attached to the flywheel of the grinder, with the right sized screws so it can still fit through the bars where the bike wheel used to go.
Since I’ve found myself with a little downtime, I’ve embarked on a really fun project: mechanizing our Country Living Grain Mill with an exercise bike. The grain mill on its own is fantastic — nothing like baking with freshly ground flour. But it’s quite a bit of work, once the novelty wears off. So the thought of using my thighs, which are substantially bigger than my forearms, to turn the flywheel is exciting indeed.
Open up your kitchen cupboard, grab a handful of common herbs, fruits and vegetables and voila, your own unregulated pharmacy. On Friday, Tamar Lieb shared her knowledge of the medicinal uses of common plants in the workshop “Kitchen Wisdom for Common Ailments.” To use herbs as medicine, you can do everything from eating them to dissolving them in water, honey, sugar, or oil to extract beneficial properties from fresh and raw plants. I’ve included her long list of beneficial herbs and their properties here (it’s even alphabetized!)
To use waters for your herbal preparation, you can make an infusion (pouring boiling water over delicate things like flowers or leaves) a decoction (boiling harder things like bark or certain dried roots), or use steam. The smell of a plant is its volatile oils escaping, so when you’re making tea, Lieb suggested, keep it covered while it steeps. In a steam bath, made by pouring boiling water over your more delicate herbs (think the pizza spices – oregano, rosemary, basil, thyme – for a cold) and then placing your face, under a towel and over the bowl while you breath in the oily, aromatic steam.
My mom’s been cleaning out her house in the Bronx, where I and a prodigious collection of cooking and gardening books were both raised, each growing ever bigger, each likely to get spattered with sticky substances during cooking experiments, each dog-eared and brittle-paged…alright, I suppose I have over-reached my analogy. Anyhow, my mom and I have discovered a highly compatible interest not only in both cooking and growing (though she prefers flowers while I don’t grow what I can’t eat) but also in collecting enormous piles of books. Fittingly, I have become the repository of old books on gardening, disturbingly dated books on ethnic cuisine (one “African” cookbook actually contains a picture of the white, British author in a pith helmet) and other entertaining relics.
One acid-stained but otherwise unruffled paperback that came into my hands a few weeks ago seemed too hilarious a premise to pass up. The After-Dinner Gardening Book is a 1970s how-to guide for growing tropical plants from the pits and seeds of imported fruits. It seemed to me, little locavore whose gall rises on the Metro North in Jersey whenever the endless fields of invasive phragmites stretch along the railroad tracks, like an appalling idea. Grow papayas in my apartment? Why, when I can instead watch my scraggly sage plants get eaten up by tiny gray things that appear to live on the evolutionary edge between worm and mold? Why mess around with sprouting lychee nuts, when I can escort a baby walnut tree from my friend’s farm in Wisconsin, get patted down and have all my bags unpacked accordingly (walnut tree = terrorist) and my hair gel taken away from me, only to watch the poor thing languish in the greasy Brooklyn air? Apparently, burger king fumes do not a walnut tree inspire.
is a 1970s how-to guide for growing tropical plants from the pits and seeds of imported fruits. It seemed to me, little locavore whose gall rises on the Metro North in Jersey whenever the endless fields of invasive 
