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.

The month Nisan begins tonight and with it, so many associations. Last year, I wrote about the practice of refraining from eating Matzah from Rosh Hodesh Nisan (i.e. tonight) until Passover. Most people make, if any, the association of dreaded Pesach cleaning and preparation. I’ll be writing some about that in a few days or next week, God willing, but for now, let’s stick to things connected specifically to Rosh Hodesh Nisan.

One association fewer people make is that Birkat haIlanot, the blessing over blooming trees, is typically said in the month of Nisan:

I’ve heard a lot of us Hazon-niks refer to Michael Pollan as Reb Pollan. Yet, as far as I know, he’s never spoken publicly in a Jewish context.
Until Tuesday night, that is. Pollan appeared on a panel in Berkeley, just blocks from his home. He was invited not only for the food guru that he is, but as a regular customer of Saul’s Deli, the only Jewish deli in Berkeley.
Saul’s is perhaps the only Jewish deli in the country to serve grass-fed meat (at least according to its owners Karen Adelman and Peter Levitt.) Adelman and Levitt talked about how hard it can be to please the old-timers who don’t necessarily care about where their meat comes from, and trying to change with the times. This being the Bay Area, kashrut hardly figured into the conversation, not surprising, since Saul’s isn’t kosher.
The event was going to be held at the deli itself, but had to be moved to the JCC to accomodate the overflow crowd. You can read more about the conversation here.

Edible wild plants have been an essential part of the local diet here in the Galilee going back to the stone age hunters and gatherers.  I have learned from neighbors in the nearby Bedouin villages which plants are good to eat, where to find them, and how to prepare them.  One of the staples, which is considered a seasonal delicacy, is wild chicory – known in Arabic as elet, and in Hebrew as olesh.  It can be found around the edges of fields – a low-growing starburst of scalloped leaves.  And it is considered to be extremely healthy – good for “cleaning the blood”, as my Bedouin friends have explained.

Going out and gathering is not as commonly practiced in the traditional Arab cultures of the Galilee as it once was – yet the taste for elet remains.  Now enterprising farmers have started to cultivate elet and other edible wild plants, and sell them in the local Arab green grocers.

Here’s a colorful seasonal alternative to traditional potato latkes:

Take your favorite latke recipe and substitute an equal amount of shredded parsnips and carrots for the potatoes (if you want them to be even more colorful, you can also add shredded zucchini, if you don’t mind that zucchini isn’t seasonal this time of year for most of us). The result is a lighter, more flavorful latke, and the parsnips and carrots make for a sweeter, more complex flavor than traditional potato latkes. Not to mention you can pretend you’re eating healthier because you’re eating veggie latkes instead of all those carbs (just forget about the whole fried in oil part). Chag sameach!

It all started with an excessive amount of cabbage.  One of my housemates wanted to make a pretty and delicious green and purple cabbage salad for a dinner party she was attending.   “Why are your cabbages so big in this country?  In South Africa we have little cabbages!”  True, even after making her salad a few times we still had a lot of cabbage left over.

Then I got cabbage in my CSA share – two heads of it.  “How do you feel about sauerkraut?”  I suggested, thinking about my own German heritage.  “Or kimchi?” was her suggestion.  Now we started getting excited. She pulled out her Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving, which was a rather comprehensive collection of pickles (although no kimchi).  So several kimchi recipes were consulted online and we got to work.

The Delicious Pie, Sans First Slice

On Sunday night as my mother and I stood outside and began the slow, sad process of dismantling our Sukkah, I started to think about autumn and more specifically, why it ranks as my favorite time of the year. The end of the fall holidays always hit me hard, perhaps even harder than the thought of returning to my daily routine. And yet there I was, shivering in my pajamas and thanking Hashem Almighty that it was fall in New York.

Considering my deep loathing of the snow and my firm belief that the winter should be spent hibernating (with only rare breaks for hot chocolate and cookies), I’m always surprised by my love of its seasonal predecessor. But then I remember that the fall is the start of a brand new year for us Jews. Everything is open before us, and we haven’t had much chance to mess up yet. My favorite flavors come into the Farmers’ Markets: apples, butternut squash, fresh figs, and best of all, pumpkins. And for me, the fall comes with a wonderful combination of those two notions.

Since the next day was Columbus Day (or as I like to call it, the most arbitrary day off of the year), my mother, two of my

After 70 years of publication, Conde Nast is ceasing publication of Gourmet magazine, while maintaining its support of Bon Appetit magazine.  As with many (most?) corporate decisions, it was a precipitous one, announced to its staff on Monday just as the November issue was off the presses.

As an immigrant to this country, I learned about the cultural rituals of my new country through the Girls Scouts manual– obtained from my small, neighborhood library, another American treasure– and later on, the pages of the food magazines.  The National Geographic was too arcane for me, but Bon Appetit broadened my cultural horizons past my family’s tenement apartment in New York’s Chinatown.  It showed me what people really do eat in their own homes and how to prepare their dishes.  It gave me a cultural passport, even before I could afford to travel on my own salary.

Q: What do you do when you have so many home grown zucchini your friends won’t answer the door when you try to share your harvest?

A: Find a car with an open window.

The triumph and the tragedy of the summer growing season is the sheer fecundity of gardens and farms. How to partake of fruits and vegetables at their peak without relying on the same old recipes?

Lois M. Burrows and Laura G. Myers offer a mouth-watering solution with their book, Too Many Tomatoes . . . Squash, Beans, and other Good Things; a Cookbook for When Your Garden Explodes.

Date Honey from the Galilee

Here in the Galilee, a modest but auspicious ease in the heat is rousing us out of our summer torpor.  That and the impending preparations for Rosh Hashana – with the questions that are on everyone’s lips: who is eating where and preparing what?

Our holiday table, like most, will be graced with a plate of sliced apples, and a bowl of honey to dip them in – to remind our tongues and the pleasure centers of our brains how sweet life can and hopefully will be in the coming year. This year, however, the honey we’ll be dipping into will have a darker hue and more complex flavor than usual.

The research I’ve been doing on the origins and history of the seven species of the Land of Israel (wheat, barley, vines, figs, pomegranates, olives and honey) has changed the way I understand this last and sweetest of the seven.

Nogah Reuveni, one of the pioneering scholars of Israel’s biblical agricultural landscape, astutely observed that, of all the seven species, there is only one which is not a plant or plant product (guess which).  While today, we think of honey as what comes out of a beehive, in ancient times, it referred to any sweet syrup made out of boiled-down fruit.

Photo courtesy of Nina Barnett

My love affair with kale actually began in the winter when, desperate for a fresh vegetable I began searching for something in season.  When we began to thaw out admittedly my head was turned by the fresh younger spring vegetables, and I nearly forgot about the deep green leafy goodness I had been putting in my winter soups until one week my CSA box said “one pound baby kale.”

Um, how interesting. What does one do with baby kale? I asked the all-knowing conduit of helpful hints, recipes and if nothing else good suggestions – Google.  The search results mostly suggested I put it into salads but then came recipes for braised baby kale – which basically sounded like tossing the little guys in some olive oil then baking them.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m a member of the Tuv Ha’aretz at the JCC on the Palisades in beautiful Tenafly, New Jersey. Our farm has been hit by the weather pretty hard this year: from the tomato blight to the torrential spring/early summer rains to the above tornado, not much has been growing. What we have gotten is amazing: local, tasty organic produce.  It’s a tension: we all want to support local farmers and preserve agricultural land in this corner of New Jersey. But we haven’t been getting as much as we expected and we’ve been getting a lot of summer squash.

Yesterday, we received a letter from our CSA coordinators that explained what had happened this summer and sharing the comments of many of our members. I am proud at how many people feel a stake in our farm and the fate of our farmers. Through weekly updates from Ted and Annemarie Stephens, and trips to visit the farm, we’ve built a connection to the people growing our food. We may be disappointed, but this summer has been financially devastating to the Stephens. Our CSA shares make a real difference. I also give our coordinators a lot of of credit both for being honest with us about how this summer has not always met up with our expectations and for reiterating their commitment to keeping this CSA going next year. I know I will be signing up again, and I hope many others do as well.

Read on after the jump for the letter!

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: Those of us who live in the San Francisco Bay Area tend to be a bit Bay Area-centric. We think we live in the best place in the country, if not the world. This especially applies to the foodies among us; my husband and I often remark over a simple dinner made with the freshest organic produce at how lucky we are to have access to such delicious, high quality food, all year-round.

And, of course, when it comes to food, I took it for granted that we are the headquarters of the new food movement: Alice Waters and Michael Pollan both live here, after all, and didn’t Hazon move its food conference to the Bay Area because it is the epicenter of all that is happening in food?

I thought so, until two weeks ago. That’s when my husband and I set out on a road trip vacation, through the Pacific Northwest. I’ll admit that as an almost-native Californian (I moved to the Golden State at age one-and-a-half) I had never visited my northern neighbors until recently.