On Passover there are at leat 13 ways of looking at matzah; Matzah Pizza, matzah lasagne (meat and dairy version), matzah farfel stuffing, matzah brittle, brussell sprouts with garlic matzah crumbs, matzah layer cake, chocolate covered matzah, matzah ball soup, matzah meal chicken nuggets, matzah brei, matzah rolls….. And now, maple pecan matzah “granola”. This one is for my kids- who are already tiring of cream cheese and jam on matzah for breakfast, and vowed to never take a simple bowl of sweet crunchy morning cereal for granted.
Maple Pecan Matzah Granola
1/4 c. butter
1/2 c. maple syrup
Out here in Northern California during the winter months, Meyer Lemons are dripping off the trees like perfect golden globes. You can recognize a Meyer Lemon tree from far away because their coloring is such a strong and deep shade of yellow and the smell of their blossoms is pungent and plentiful. Currently, my house is overflowing with bowls of Meyer Lemons from various friend’s trees and I can’t bear to let these delicies go to waste so I am always looking for new Meyer Lemon recipes.
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.
Kol Foods sent around these cooking tips for how to be sure to make the most of your grass-fed, ethically raised meat. The most important? Avoid overcooking. Click here to go to their page and learn more about how to best prepare your meat.
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.
Here in Portland we’re fortunate to have a year-round farmer’s market, and I’m always on the lookout for interesting, tasty, off-the-beaten-path things to make for Pesach. I love serving fresh asparagus at my seder, but it’s not in season yet, so I was looking for an alternative. Our local mushroom purveyor, Springwater Farm, offers a great variety of mushrooms, but they also sell other wild/foragable foods, including fiddlehead ferns and bags of stinging nettles. Here’s a link to some fiddlehead fern recipes.
The fiddleheads can be served in lieu of asparagus; just blanch them in boiling water and saute in garlic with a little salt.
Thank you to Uri Laio for sharing this story and recipe (cross-posted on his blog Old Growth Yiddishkeit). Uri is an ADAMAH alumnus and is currently finishing his first year at UC Hastings Law School in San Francisco.
When my Grandfather, alav hashalom, was nearing the end of his long and fruitful life, I had the opportunity to make dinner for him once (which was uncommon because during that time my mother used to cook dinner for all of us mostly every night). He requested borscht, a dish that I was altogether unfamiliar with, but which was an essential part of the Eastern European Jewish food tradition my Grandfather had grown up with. In my good intention to fulfill his request, I opened a jar of canned borscht (Ingredients: Water, Beets, Sugar, Salt, Citric Acid.) and served it with sour cream, and love.
Flash forward to 2010.
It is apropos that the Whole Grains Council has declared quinoa as the March Grain of the Month, as we begin Passover on the night of March 29th. Quinoa, a rockstar of a grain in its own right with tons of nutritional value, made its debut as a Passover friendly grain just a few years ago, forever changing the way many people cook for the holiday.
According to the laws of Passover, chometz (barley, rye, oats, wheat, and spelt [BROWS to many who attended Jewish day school]) and their derivatives are forbidden. An Ashekanazic rabbinic tradition developed where kitniyot, legumes, rice and other similar products that are processed similar to chometz, look like chometz when ground into flour, or may have even just a bit of chometz in them, were also outlawed for Passover (many Sephardic Jews eat kitniyot).
As luck would have it, the law of kitniyot applies only to items that the rabbis were aware of at the time this tradition developed. This means that, you guessed it, quinoa is allowed on Passover! No longer were the Jewish people restricted to endless variations of potato dishes.
Enter, quinoa.
It’s that time again. With Purim around the corner, many people have been thinking about Hamentashen. I had some friends over last night to make tasty triangular treats. Our savory ‘tashen were inspired by this blog and Leah Koenig (see the archived post here) though mine were rosemary dough with sweet-potato goat cheese filling. My brother made home-made poppyseed filling like I did last year (see that archived post here).
Our friend Nancy Wolfson-Moche also sent along this link to her blog for her “pouch pastry recipe.” Thanks, Nancy, for sharing this photo of your delish hamentashen.
Avi Rubel is the North American Director of Masa Israel Journey, the umbrella organization for immersion programs in Israel for young adults (18-30). When not sending people to Israel, Avi can be found making cheese, bread, kombucha or fermenting or pickling all kinds of goodies in his Brooklyn apartment and recording his adventures on his food blog, Make Cheese Not War. In the weeks after the Hazon Food Conference, he shared some of his thoughts about his experience with Hazon in California.
Click below to read his posts:
I am lucky enough to live in Eugene, Oregon. I’ve got it pretty good here – great weather, great outdoors, great Jewish community, great abundance of local organic food. But Chinese food? Not so much here in Eugene.
As a Bay Area transplant, I crave Chinese food. I often feel like I literally NEED it. After months searching for something that would quench my Chinese food tastebuds – and realizing that to keep my version of kosher (which is eco-kosher: less about what is and what is not treyf and more about eating only meat that is ideally organic and pasture-raised – and if not, is absolutely free-range, never given hormones or antibiotics, and was humanely slaughtered) – I came to the conclusion that I’d have to make it myself. For both taste and my personal kashrut reasons. Which is some kind of a life lesson right there, I’m sure.
I stumbled upon a recipe for Cashew Chicken from the inimitable Martha Stewart and decided to give it a whirl – and my own flair. And to tell the truth, it is delicious and happily graces our Friday night Shabbat table pretty often.
My boyfriend is Brazilian. To look at him you’d probably think he was Middle Eastern, with his dark complexion. He speaks with an American accent that is very South Florida, but none-the-less he was born in Brazil.
Last week for no particular reason I wanted to surprise him with a Brazilian inspired meal. However, most Brazilian cuisine involves meat or fish – two things my boyfriend is loath to eat. (We do occasionally eat humanly raised grass-fed local sustainable meat, but he finds seafood appalling.) Feijoada, considered the national dish of Brazil consists of black beans slow cooked with various parts of the pig. Since my boyfriend loves meatless rice and beans, so I decided to get creative.
On the Internet I researched various feijoada recipes, which mostly relied on lots of salt and pork and very little other flavoring unless you count the beef bits. But how could I keep things kosher and compete with recipes that look like a butcher shop in a pot? There were a lot of vegetarian black bean recipes online, but this needed to be more than just rice and beans, I needed to make this complex and interesting to call it feijoada. So I explored the Internet for some more tastes of Brazil.
People love to cook for intimate gatherings, but they also have a fascination with mass-producing food. I, for one, am guilty of an obsession with the Food Network show Unwrapped and immediately join the line for any tour of a cheese-, chocolate-, or bourbon-making operation. I’ll also tune into any show that gives chefs a ridiculously short amount of time to cook for an outrageous number of people—preferably with some kind of added challenge, like making dinner for a cruise ship filled half with gluten-sensitive diners and half with people who subsist entirely on whole wheat bread… while the boat heads directly for a storm on the high seas.
Originally published at My Jewish Learning.
Over the last decade, seders for Tu Bishvat have spiked in popularity. This growth is largely due to the contemporary Jewish community’s interest in “greening” ritual and holidays. Every year, the number of organizations turning to Tu Bishvat to inject some sustainability-awareness into their annual programming grows, as does the collection of environmentally-inspired haggadot for Tu Bishvat available online. (Like this one from My Jewish Learning, this one from Hillel, and this one from Hazon.)
The downside is that some people shy away from celebrating the holiday precisely because it feels too “hippie” or eco-spiritual. But while the Tu Bishvat seder, which was originally developed as a mystical celebration by kabbalists in 16th century Safed, provides a helpful structure for celebrating Tu Bishvat, there are no official rules for the holiday. The lack of halakhic requirements means that seders can be tailored to meet their hosts’ personalities–even if they happen to prefer fine china over bicompostable dishware.
