File under the good news heading: According to this article in Crains New York Business (I read it online - as in standing on line for my take out lunch. It beat reading about Jenna Bush’s wedding…), New York City is one of the largest players in the burgeoning green restaurant industry. According to Boston-based non-profit Green Restaurant Association, 25% of all American restaurants that it has certified as “green” are in NYC! The article also mentions the specific efforts of Tavern on the Green, who are nervous about not being up to sustainable-snuff when ownership of the site reverts to the Parks & Rec dept., and New York’s first certified organic restaurant, Gusto Grilled Organics. Now New Yorkers can have their cake and eat it, too.

Reminder: Tomorrow night’s Food, Faith & Farming panel in New York is a must-attend event for Jewish foodies and food lovers of all stripes. If you haven’t purchased your tickets yet - now is the time!

Join Gastronomica for a panel discussion on the role of faith in farming. Farmers Zaid Kurdieh and Anna Stevenson, and writer Leah Koenig join Gastronomica’s Editor-in-Chief Darra Goldstein to explore the concept of taking care of the land through farming as seen from both the Islamic (tayyib) and Jewish (eco-kosher) perspectives. This panel is part of The Gastronomica Forum - quarterly events featuring important articles from the journal as a platform for engaging in deeper conversations about food and culture.

When: Tuesday, May 13 - 6:30pm
Where: New York City’s Astor Center for Wine and Food Experiences
Cost: $20 - ticket price includes a taste of Middle Eastern foods and farm-fresh products.

Purchase tickets here.

Question of the day: What do you eat to prepare yourself for Bicycle Fetish Day?!

The City Reliquary presents: A Street fair for your bicycle! Show off your ride and revel in the beauty of all types, styles, and genres of specialized, customized, and personalized bicycles.

CONTESTS throughout the day: Best in Show, Best Vintage, Best Hand-made, Best Chopper, Best Small Wheel (includes foldable bikes), Wheelies, BMX tricks, Track bike tricks, Heaviest Bike, Ugliest Bike, and more. Games, Rides, Bike Beautification Station, Merch tables and more! Plus: Live performances, cheap beer, and burgers and hot dogs (both carnivorous and herbivorous).

4th Annual Bicycle Fetish Day - Brooklyn
Saturday, May 10, 2008 12:00noon - 6:00 PM
More info here.

I am beyond mortified. I think I missed out on my chance to join a CSA this year.

For three years, I ran Hazon’s Jewish CSA program, Tuv Ha’Aretz. During that time, CSA-related thoughts (vegetables yes, but also spreadsheets and volunteer coordination, and organizing Shabbat potlucks, and donating leftover produce to soup kitchens, etc.) dominated vast swaths of my brain, crowding out other important information like friends’ birthdays and the need to wash my bath tub.

I would complain regularly - even daily at certain times of the year - about people who could not get their act together in time to register for a CSA. Outwardly I was compassionate, of course, but inside I had no sympathy for those people who would send me frantic emails the night before vegetable pick ups started asking, “Is it too late to sign up?” What did they think this was, Fresh Direct?

After all that experience, you’d think I’d be a pro at signing *myself* up for a CSA. The first gal to send in her check, right?

Ehh..well…no. Read more »

(Photo by Shir Feinstein-Feit)

It seems a long time since I wrote about seeding onions…and indeed, the past two months on the farm have been a bit of a blur. But we planted the onions over chol ha-moed pesach, with much fanfare and mixed emotions (I’ll explain), and so I felt it would be good to give you all an update. (If you missed the last post, I am the Farm Manager at Adamah, a Jewish farming fellowship program in Connecticut. The sadeh is our 3.5 acre field where we grow our vegetables.)

The sadeh looks beautiful. Right now there are beds of onions (cippolini, red, scallions, leeks, walla walla…), with their thin, oniony stalks the size of blades of grass standing pertly up from the soil; beds of beets, red and golden; and several beds of brassicas, the family of hearty green-purple vegetables that includes broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards and kohlrabi. Only a small percentage of the field has been planted, and the evenly spaced rows of green and red and purple are beautiful against a background of tilled brown earth. The field looks serene, and betrays nothing of the work it took to get it looking that way.

Read more »

Last month, right before Passover, David Elcott ripped up his lawn. This White Plains-based author/lecturer was out to prove - to himself as much as others - that you do not need years of experience to grow your own food. All you need is a desire to eat great food and a piece of fertile ground - like your lawn (or nearby community garden for city dwellers). Partnering with the COEJL blog, To Till & To Tend, we’re excited to bring you David’s first hand accounts, frustrations, and victories from the “front lines” of his lawn farm.

Operation Lawn Farm: Part 1

I was going crazy today. Tech problems with my printer took hours. Nothing accomplished. A lousy conference call committee meeting. Exhausted. At five in the evening, I took the world into grip and, like Superman, ripped off my work clothes, put on my dirty sweats and headed out to the farm.

Read more »

Yesterday’s Dining Section featured a fascinating article about saving endangered species, by serving them for dinner.  The marketplace is a powerful conservation tool, the article argues - if it’s being sold in the market, it’s not extinct.

One of the most interesting parts of the article was the accompanying interactive map that broke the country down into regions, by species (i.e. food).  New York City falls into the Clambake Nation (not the Whitefish Nation?).  Personally, I bioregionally identify a bit further north and west in the Maple Syrup Nation…

Click here (or on the map above) to find out about your region.

Jewish foodies and food lovers of all stripes - this is a must-attend event.

Join Gastronomica for a panel discussion exploring the concept of taking care of the land through farming as seen from both the Islamic (tayyib) and Jewish (eco-kosher) perspectives. Farmers Zaid Kurdieh and Anna Stevenson, and writer Leah Koenig join Gastronomica’s Editor-in-Chief Darra Goldstein for a discussion on the role of faith in farming as part of the Gastronomica Forum* series.

When: Tuesday, May 13 - 6:30pm
Where: New York City’s Astor Center for Wine and Food Experiences
Cost: $20 - ticket price includes a taste of Middle Eastern foods and farm-fresh products.

Purchase tickets here.

*The Gastronomica Forum, launched by Darra Goldstein, Founder and Editor-In-Chief of Gastronomica, are quarterly events featuring important articles from the journal as a platform for engaging in deeper conversations about food and culture.

Thanks to Yigal Deutscher for this guest post.

We have just begun the Sefirat HaOmer, counting off the direct correlation between Pesach & Shavuot, two celebrations separated by a string 50 days long. These are two moments in time, interwoven, yet at polar opposites. On Day 1, we have left bread behind, as Chametz. On Day 50, we are elevating bread as an offering in the Holy Temple, a sacrifice unique to the day of Shavuot. A serious transformation has just taken place.

The link between our starting point and our destination goal is food, bread in particular. This corridor of time marks the counting of grain ripening…from the start of the barley harvest to the start of the wheat harvest.

Read more »

Thanks to Hazon’s own Barbara Lerman-Golomb for her environmental reflections and meditations on Passover!

Passover is a natural time to take an “environmental inventory” of the chametz in our world and to be mindful of the simple lives our ancestors led in the desert in their pursuit of freedom. Chametz is the Hebrew term for any of the five basic biblical grains which traditionally observant Jews remove from their homes. These include wheat, rye, oats, barley, and spelt—that have been mixed with water and allowed to ferment. Eastern European Jews also consider chametz to include a variety of beans, peas, rice, corn, peanuts, and other foods which could be ground and made into flour or bread.

When our ancestors were dwelling in the desert, they had no choice but to live simply. In our day, simplicity has come to mean conservation, not using more than you need, and not being wasteful. Jewish law prohibits wasteful consumption. When we waste resources, we are violating the law of bal tashchit—Do not destroy. (Deuteronomy 20: 19-20).

Read more »

Spring can be a tough time for the seasonal chef. The winter vegetables are long gone (not that you could stomach another acorn squash if you found one in the back of the pantry). Meanwhile, summer’s show-off vegetables – sweet corn, ripe tomatoes and juicy cucumbers - are nothing more than little, hopeful seedlings.

But Dan Barber, chef of Blue Hill restaurant in New York City and Creative Director of Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, doesn’t have time to lament over the lack of local greens. He’s got hungry customers to feed – so he focuses on maximizing the few flavors that are available at his back door.

Barber particularly swoons over ramps – an early-arriving member of the onion family that, with their neon pink stems, resemble a scallion’s punk rock older sister. “They’re the first sign of spring, and they’re so fleeting,” he told The Jew & The Carrot. I like to see them on every dish.”

More and a recipe for Chicken Liver Mousse with Spring Herbs below the jump. Read more »

A few weeks ago, I wondered if biofuels were actually the green mitzvah they were touted to be — an ethical alternative to greenhouse gas-belching fossil fuels — or if they were a mitzvah ha’ba b’aveirah, a “mitzvah” coming out of a sin, the sin of unchecked environmental havoc due to biofuels’ “non-toxic” by-products.

The new waves of global food riots, though, have made me much more concerned, and much more wary of entrenching myself in the pro-biofuel camp.

The 2007 “tortilla riots” in Mexico, where some 75,000 Mexicans protested the rising cost of tortillas in Mexico City, followed an astronomical increase in the price of corn — some 400% in a three month span. The cause for the price hike lay north of the border, farmers planting “industrial corn” to be processed into ethanol, replacing the lower-priced food staple relied upon by millions of Mexicans.

Cooking oil is also turning into the world’s “other” oil problem. In Mumbai, India, residents are forced “to ration every drop” of cooking oil, with the price of palm oil having risen 70 percent in the past year. One store in Chongqing, China saw three people killed in a stampede when it offered a “limited promotion” on cooking oil. Half of the increase in worldwide demand for vegetable oils, the New York Times says, is because of biofuel demand.
Read more »

Passover falls the third week of April. While summer’s harvest is still months away, the first shoots and sprouts are beginning to poke their heads out of the soil. Your seder is the perfect place to celebrate this new emerging life - both on the seder plate, and during your meal.

Still planning what to serve? The Jew & The Carrot’s Passover menu will add healthy and sustainable flair - and the best tastes of springtime - to your seder table.  (This meal happens to be vegetarian, but aside from the lasagna, everything can easily be made parve - so feel free to substitute your favorite chicken, fish or brisket - recipe!)

On the Menu:
Vegetarian Matzah Ball Soup - or -
Borscht with Cabbage
Israeli Salad
Sauteed Fiddleheads with Garlic
Roasted New Potatoes with Rosemary
Almond Quinoa Salad - or -
Quinoa with Beets and Fresh Orange
Matzah Lasagna
Chocolate Dipped Macaroons

Find the recipes here.

It’s the week before Passover and the foodie blogosphere is ready. Like hand-grated horseradish, fluffy meringues and caramel-coated “matzah crack” ready.

The most exciting news (for us anyway!) is The Daily Green’s sustainable Passover story, which features tips from The Jew & The Carrot’s Healthy Sustainable Passover Resources. Check out their (gorgeous) feature here.

Below the jump, we’ve rounded up a number of other great Passover stories, ideas, and recipes from the Jewish food blogosphere. The creativity coming out of these bloggers minds and kitchens is truly inspiring - feel free to share more resources below.Also keep your eyes peeled for a chance to win Arthur Schwartz’s new cookbook Jewish Home Cooking - early next week.

Read more »