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.

This has been the summer of the zucchini. With my Tuv Ha’aretz CSA deeply affected both by the Northeast tomato blight and the heavy early season rains, most of what we have gotten this summer has been some form of zucchini or summer squash. It’s light and delicious, but it has been hard to come up with new and exciting ways to cook it. I’ve made several batches of chocolate chip zucchini bread. I cooked up an enormous batch of Tamar Fox’s delicious ratatouille and used it as a very filling pasta sauce. We’ve had zucchini kugel and squash soup and squash salad (including a less than successful Israeli squash salad with olives), and a very yummy Tuscan squash torte from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian. An experiment with summer squash latkes taught me the important lesson that for everything but zucchini bread, salting the vegetable and draining the water off will create a much better and crisper result (a lesson I learned too late to save my soggy latkes).

An August garden is pregnant with expectations.

The garden I share with my friends, Karen and Kate, has a tomato jungle. The three plants have over run three concentric layers of “cages.” They’re now trying to colonize the carrots.

Unrelenting weeks of sun and heat have battered our 10 by 14 foot plot in Karen’s backyard. LA’s water rationing has taken its toll as well. No matter. The tomatoes seem to ripen from pearl green to bloody red as you watch.

Thanks to everyone who commented, and congratulations to Hilla (proud member of Hazon’s Forest Hills CSA), whose recipe for carrot top pesto won her a copy of Farmer John’s cookbook! Check back this Thursday for The Jew and the Carrot’s next contest.

So you’ve just opened your CSA box to an unfamiliar sight—a strange-looking bulb with long leaves sprouting every which way. After asking Google, your hippie aunt, two of your neighbors and a guy in line with you at Trader Joe’s, you finally figure out that the mystery plant is called kohlrabi. Great… now what do you do with the giant bag of it in your fridge?

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Plastic tables at the farmer’s market are straining under their bounty, colors are popping from veggies of every stripe and new garlic is out of the ground, drying on racks and tarps and hanging in braids in barns around the country, the smell of fresh heads mixing with the with last year’s pungent hay.

Israeli sellers laugh, not scream to sell produce

The opening of a new open- air food market is far from headline news in Israel. Nearly every city in the country has a daily or weekly market, where shouting crowds and whistles are heard from miles away. “But this isn’t an ordinary market” affirms co-founder Michal Ansky, “this is Israel’s first real farmer’s market.”

Having just celebrated its one year anniversary, the farmer’s market, located in Tel Aviv’s new port, is officially recognized as an Earth Market-only the third of its kind in the world. Established by two female journalists and culinary experts- Shir Halpern and Michal Ansky- this market enables the public to bypass the ‘middleman’, and directly purchase food from producers. As a result of this direct interaction, the public can associate names, faces, and stories with their fresh food (a bit more interesting than bar codes and price tags, not to mention tastier). According to Slow Food, the market’s sponsor, this special relationship enables the public to become somewhat actively involved in the food production process, transforming them from merely anonymous consumers to ‘co-producers’.