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.

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.

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.

I keep my kosher salt in an Israeli style pottery canister with a spring locked lid. It was a mishloach manos from my synagogue one Purim. I always feel like a kitchen alchemist when I reach for it.

Recently I was lunching with a business colleague in a casual Beverly Hills restaurant whose menu made a smug reference to its use of imported fleur de sel. My colleague said she’d been given some as a gift and it tasted wonderful.

The discussion rattled some of my assumptions about this elemental ingredient.  Is hand-harvested French sea salt at $1.42 an ounce the best choice for the savvy gourmet in the kitchen? Or is it lunacy, when coarse kosher salt costs me 6 cents an ounce?

Like many other people, this summer has been full of summer squash!  It almost seems to be falling from the sky.  I have made zucchini bread (and muffins), I also made these zucchini fritters (really just a summer latke).  I just got some more zucchini and yellow squash in my CSA box and I really have no idea what to do with it.  To be honest, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I opened the box yesterday and saw more summer squash!  Our CSA gives us the ability to check online a few days prior to delivery to see what we’re going to get.  So usually by the time we get our box I feel inspired to cook with the ingredients.  I was out of town earlier this week so I didn’t have a chance to look at what was coming.  My boyfriend pulled the unwelcome squashes out of the box and asked what my plans were for them.  I told him I didn’t know and to put them away for now.  We then gave each other a look of “more summer squash?  You can’t be serious.”  As a side note, while out of town for business I had dinner with my family who was vacationing at the beach in Southern California.  My dad made zucchini stuffed with his amazing mushroom risotto (you’ve heard my talk about my dad and his risotto).  He got the zucchinis from a friend who grows them in her garden and was desperate to get rid of them.  These were literally the largest zucchinis I’d ever seen

If my summer were a cookbook, it would be called What to Expect When You’re Expecting— Expecting Company, That Is, and It’s a Heat Wave.

Yes, welcome to life in the global warming oven.  We are on at least heat wave #3 of the summer here in usually temperate Portland, and I’ve had a potluck to attend or guests to host for all of them.  And while the hot weather makes me want to eat ice cream three meals a day, I know I really shouldn’t.

Especially not when “eating” means “bringing to a potluck where it will sit out in the sun.”

So what has been on the menu?  Lots, and I figured I’d share it in case you can’t stand the heat but still need to be in the kitchen.

(Originally published on My Jewish Learning)

I grew up eating my mother’s American tabbouleh–starchy, lemon-doused bulgur salad. This was the 1980s, when many American Jews were incorporating “Israeli-style” foods into their culinary repertoire. But while my mom’s tabbouleh was delicious, I later discovered that it hardly resembled the authentic version, which features a higher ratio of painstakingly chopped fresh parsley and tomatoes to grains of bulgur.

Tabbouleh, which comes from the Arabic word tabil (”to spice”), is not actually an Israeli or Jewish dish, per se.

Tahina, the thick, brownish-gray paste of ground sesame seeds, is one of the latest foods to turn “gourmet” – at least in Israel. If supermarkets once sold only one brand of tahina, today it comes in squeeze bottles and glass jars with fancy labels; brands with Arabic on their labels proclaiming their “authenticity” vie with the all-Hebrew labels of the standard brand. (As far as I know, however, Melo Hatene is the only place to actually offer tahina tasting — the ultimate sign of a gourmet food.)

Living close to San Mateo, CA, the artichoke producing capital of the US, I am lucky. For months, the delicious, complicated, decadent vegetables have appeared faithfully at my nearby farmer’s market. I usually steam them and eat the leaves plain, or possibly dipped in butter-garlic sauce. Or, if my fiance mixes up a dipping sauce of mayo and mustard, I may dip a few in there. But mostly I just eat them plain, enjoying the complex green vegetable taste.

Then I read Out of the Kitchen Adventures of a Food Writer by Jeannette Ferrary.

I have become a huge fan of beets as of late.  It wasn’t that I hated them before, they just weren’t one of my favorite foods.  I think you know by now how this story continues but I will share anyway…  We started getting beets in our CSA box and I had no idea what to do with them.  I did some research online and found a plethora of ways to make beets!

Usually I just steam them, cut them up, mix them with some fresh lettuce and goat cheese and call it a day.  However, a came across some recipes online for pickled beets so I decided to try a variation of these recipes.  After all, I am a huge fan of traditional pickles as well as other pickled veggies.  Check out Happy Girl Kitchen Co.  if you’re at the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmers Market during the summer.  They also make an amazing lavender lemonade!

Speaking of the farmer’s market, I stopped by on a Tuesday at during my lunch and saw some gorgeous beets.  They were each about the size of a softball!  Though I didn’t really need the beets I bought a bunch.  After all, they were huge, cheap, local, organic and both the boyfriend and I really like them.  You will notice that these beets in particular have a gorgeous color.

The recipe I’m going to share with you is basic and can and should be tried with variations.  I will say that I loved the beets just as they were.  I decided to use white wine vinegar as opposed to a stronger vinegar (like cider) so I wouldn’t  quite qualify my beets as pickled, but they were very tasty.  They are a perfect addition to a salad but I enjoyed them by themselves!

I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.  Please share your variations or any other beet recipes you love.  You can count on the fact that I will try your recipes since I love beets so much!

x-posted from My Jewish Learning

Like many Jewish travelers, I have a tendency to seek out the Jewish connections in any city I visit. Stumbling across a generations-old deli, say, or a stone building etched with a Star of David from its former life as a synagogue, helps me feel at home when I am abroad. For Jews spending time in Rome, no trip is complete without a trek to the Roman Ghetto and a taste of Carciofi alla Giudia, literally “Jewish Style Artichokes.”

Known for their delicate chrysanthemum shape and crispy, salt-kissed taste, fried artichokes are a popular dish in restaurants across Italy’s largest city. Their history however, stems back to 16th century, when Roman Jews were confined to an overcrowded, impoverished ghetto. Deep fried artichokes might seem like a delicacy now, but according to Matthew Goodman who authored, Jewish Food: The World at Table, “food [in the ghetto] was scarce [and] frying was the cheapest and easiest option of food preparations.”

More and recipe, below the jump…

Legend would have it, two years ago the ADAMAH, Jewish Environmental Fellowship at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, had an overabundance of cucumbers.  One of the Fellows, Zelig Golden (also the co-chair of this conference) was unhappy with simply composting the unused vegetables and began making pickles from the extra veggies.  Pickling is really about preserving – extending the harvest and gaining additional nutritional value of eating fermented food (lactobacillus is good for you).  Today ADAMAH Fellows sell their preserved products such as kimchi, sauerkraut and of course their pickles in local grocery stores and at the local CSA.  (More about ADAMAH here)

Slush. Snow. Wind. Cold. It’s been that kind of weekend around here in Brooklyn and – so I’ve heard – in pretty much the rest of the country. Aside from a brief foray outside en route to the gym, and two neighborhood Chanukah parties this evening (including one in my building, to which I didn’t even have to put on a coat!), I spent the entire day in the living room, staring at the gray day out my window and at my gray computer screen while I worked on some writing deadlines. Pretty dreary.

The only thing Yosh and I had stacked in our favor on a day like today was breakfast: cardamom scented oatmeal and organic coffee made in our new pot which, glory of glories, has a timer on it (hello, brewed coffee on Shabbat!). It turns out a warm, hearty, and very affordable, breakfast can really warm up an otherwise gloomy day. It also makes you want to take a nap, which doesn’t help much with the deadlines, but what can you do?

What do you eat on cold, gray winter days?

Recipe below the jump…

This past weekend, I saw my first snowfall of the year. The plump flakes reminded me of the short, crisp days to come, of walks where a bright red berry or a still-green blade of grass will surprise me.  As winter days wink by, flanked by longer and longer intervals of darkness, I’ll be more and more on the lookout for sparks of color and light.

The snowfall also got me looking forward to Hanukah, and thinking about finding a few mirrors to multiply the candle flames. Because if a set of singing sparks is lovely, why not bolster the chorus with two or three more?

I’ll also be looking for sparks for the table as the farmer’s market offerings in my area lean toward turnips and potatoes. I recently experimented my way to a salad that I think will offer a nice, bright compliment to beloved, oil-soaked latkes, roasted root vegetables, and other wintery dishes. It brings together several winter sparks. The base is the vibrant green of kale, which splashes its emerald leaves across the cold fields of the Mid-atlantic this time of year, which is studded with orange sections and glistening pomegranate seeds—imported sparks from warmer climes. (Of course, if you live in California or Florida, this scenario is a little different!)

Recipe after the jump…