The massive egg recall has made many of us stop and think about how many eggs we use and, for some, questioning our use of them at all. According to the New York Times, “A Hen’s Space to Roost” Sunday August 15; 97 per cent of all eggs consumed in the USA are from hens raised in battery cages, six birds to a cage allowing 67 square inches for each hen for her entire life.

Fall vegetables bring to mind the hearth, coziness, beautiful autumn colors, hearty food and interesting one dish and multi-dish menus.  We think about roasting, caramelizing, thick rich stocks, braising and sautéing when we think about the preparation of root vegetables and the other succulent vegetables which brighten up farm stands and markets all over the country at this time of the year.

I hope that all of you enjoy Fall Vegetables as much as I do. What’s fun about the change of seasons is that we are forced into creative ways to cook with the new bounty of the season. In this way, your food is never boring and you don’t get stuck eating the same foods day in and day out.

“I know it’s your day, but it’s not all about you…Why have a wedding if you’re going to be like that [serve only vegetarian options]?  Just print a bumper sticker.”

Did this article that concluded with this choice comment in today’s NY Times Sunday Styles section annoy others as much as it annoyed me?  Of course weddings should reflect one’s values, so if you’re kosher, or vegan, or vegetarian, why wouldn’t you serve kosher, vegan, or vegetarian food?  As the vegan Kathleen Mink quoted in the article said, it was  a “no brainer” to have a vegan menu at her and her husband’s wedding.  But another vegan pastry chef served meat at her wedding because she was afraid celebrity chefs like Eric Ripert and Daniel Boulud would think she and her husband “were crazy” if they didn’t serve meat. 

Cross-posted to Orange Ideal

For my first recipe post on The Jew and the Carrot, I thought I’d start off with something versatile. I sampled a version of this quinoa recipe while browsing at my local Whole Foods and then came home and made my own version. It’s great served as a cold salad or as a warm side dish and it is ideal for all of those summer picnics and pot lucks you have on your calendar. Quinoa packs up really easily and this one is so full of veggies, colors, and flavors that it’s sure to be a hit!

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.

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.

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

(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!