Huge mazal tov to Rabbi Eliav Bock, author of this guest post and Director of Ramah Outdoor Adventure, on the birth of his son last week!
Today is the first of periodic blog posts about food at Ramah Outdoor Adventure. Because the food we eat at camp will play such an integral part in supporting the overall mission of the camp, I thought it appropriate to focus some of the blog posts leading up to camp on the use of food.
For those who missed the announcement the other day, The First Lady, Michelle Obama, launched the “Let’s Move” campaign. She has correctly singled out childhood obesity as a major epidemic facing America. Her campaign aims to get kids off the couch, away from video games, and eating more wholesome food. For anyone who has been aware of the growing food movement in America these past few years, nothing that she said yesterday is too surprising. It is an indisputable fact that as a society, our children today are less healthy than they were a generation ago. Anywhere from 25%-30% of American children are overweight. As Mrs. Obama pointed out, today’s children are the first generation whose life expectancy is shorter than that of their parents.
I’m stuffed. Not from my Thanksgiving dinner with friends and family in the US – although everything on the table was delicious – but from five days of intellectual, spiritual, and gastronomical nourishment while participating in Hazon and Heschel’s first Israel Sustainable Food Tour. From November 15th though 19th, twenty-seven foodies and I explored Israel from the perspective of sustainable food. We met with farmers, chefs, community gardeners, a permaculture expert, a food scientist, volunteers at an innovative soup kitchen, the founder of a food co-op, an expert on food insecurity in Israel, and many other passionate people who shared their experiences working on sustainable food issues throughout the country.
Calling all New Yorkers! If you’re around on Sunday, December 13th at 2pm, join me at this fun Jewish food event!
CULTURE IN THE CUCINA
How Rome’s Jews are Cooking up the Past and Future
While Jews have lived in Italy since the 2nd century BCE and are credited with popularizing staple ingredients like eggplant, fennel and pumpkin, the notion of an “Italian Jewish cuisine” is difficult to define. Still, a handful of traditional dishes – like Carciofi alla Guidia (deep fried artichokes) and Pizza Ebraica (a fruit cake-like dessert) – have managed to endure over time.
Food writer, Leah Koenig, will discuss how certain traditional recipes have attained iconic status in Italy’s oldest and largest Jewish center, Rome. She will also explore how today’s urban Jews relate to their culinary heritage. New York’s Jews have their bagels, knish and egg creams. What dishes do Italians turn to when they need a nosh, and how do these foods connect them to their past and their future? *Bonus! Italian Jewish Chanukah recipes and tips on where to find Jewish Italian food in NYC.
EVENT DETAILS and more photos of Rome’s delicious food culture below the jump…
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.
Bagels. They’re delicious with butter and jam, as a vehicle for an egg sandwich, topped with cream cheese and lox, or filled with tuna or hummus. I love a good, fresh bagel for breakfast or lunch, so when traveling, I’m sure to check out the best options.
You are invited to apply (by June 15!) for a highly subsidized five-day Tour of Israel (November 15-19, 2009), from the unique perspective of: food!
This is the first in a new series of reviews of food-related apps for the iPhone that can help you find local, organic and kosher food at local markets, restaurants and on your travels. We’ll be reviewing a range of apps, many of them free, but we start with a look at a paid program: Kosher, by RustyBrick, which currently costs $4.99 from Apple’s iTunes app store.
Kosher’s interface is cleanly designed. Essentially, it’s a front-end viewer for a database hosted on Shamash.org, which has listings of restaurants, groceries, butchers, kosher food stores and even caterers. The database also contains reviews that visitors to these establishments have submitted. But the app also has a host of iPhone specific features and goodies that make it a compelling purchase for any iPhone user who keeps kosher or has friends who do.
Many thanks to Julie Wolk for this guest post. Julie is co-founder of Wilderness Torah, a Bay Area organization using earth-based Jewish spirituality to help individuals deepen their connection to Community, Earth, Spirit and Self through celebratory land-based festivals (like Sukkot on the Farm, Pesach in the Desert and Shavuot on the Mountain), rituals, rites of passage, and experiential Judaism in the wilderness and agricultural contexts that are at the roots of our tradition.
I’ve just returned transformed after five days in the California desert with sixty fellow Pesach journeyers. The whole experience was so totally outrageous that it felt completely natural. Who would have thought that getting back to the land, connecting in community, praying and creating ritual, and taking time for ourselves could be such a transformative experience? Well, we did have an idea I guess…
Buffet lines, questionable vegetarian options, overly sweet danish and endless cups of coffee…
You know what I’m talking about folks- the closest things grownups have to school cafeterias and the reason why we often come home from meetings and seminars with worse stomach aches than those brought on by hours of gaping at Power Point presentations alone…Conference Food!
I’ve broken down my many conference food experiences into three major categories. Let me know about your experiences and check out this amazing journalism conference I’m running on Sunday, May 3rd in NYC (where the food will be, I think, quite delicious)..!
Everything comes together at this time of year. We meaningfully commemorate the Exodus, dutifully begin to count the Omer and then the darkness of Yom HaShaoh slaps us in the face. And after that, this year, the next day is Earth Day. Given the state of the economy and the recent warning by the EPA that carbon dioxide emissions endanger human health, my family and I were tired of abstraction. I wanted to look these holidays in the eye, here and now. This is the story of how a Pesach in the desert inspired us to plant an indoor organic vegetable garden in our NYC apartment.
Hey there. My name’s Michelle, and I’ll be your Ukrainian Jew for the next six months. Born and raised in New York, I never spoke a word of Russian or ate a bite of borsht, until I suddenly found myself living in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine three months after graduating from college.
I work for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a nonprofit organization that engages in Jewish rescue, relief, and renewal all over the world, but especially in the former Soviet Union. I personally am directing a volunteer initiative for eastern Ukraine called Do Good, Ukraine! In the six months that I’ve been living in Dnepropetrovsk, I’ve become conversant in Russian, active in the Jewish community, and pretty knowledgeable about traditional Ukrainian and Russian foods, both Jewish and secular.
The Hazon food conference was my first trip out to California, and boy did I fall in love. After a few days hiking in Big Sur, where sheer cliffs dropped down hundreds of feet to the blue ocean, foam rising rhythmically around small mountains of eroded rock, stretching as far as we could see, I drove North to San Francisco to visit friends. These particular friends had made the move from New York a year before, and they accepted me and my travel buddy on their futon with only a few days notice. At the very least, I owed them breakfast, and in honor of my new surroundings, I tried a new dish.
Our baked eggs that day were made from what was available at the Ferry Plaza farmer’s market. Baked eggs make a very easy, and pretty impressive main course for brunch. They’re versatile as far as seasonality, since eggs, cheese and cream are year-round commodities, and the casserole on the bottom of the dish can change depending on the veggies currently in season. In December in San Francisco, our eggs included mustard greens, spring onions, shitake mushrooms and canned tomatoes preserved with garlic and a few leaves of basil. When I returned to New York in early January, I made my next batch with potatoes sauteed with garlic, onions, lots of ginger, kale, more preserved tomatoes and a few flax seeds sprinkled in for good measure.
Several years ago, Rabbi Deborah Prinz and her husband Rabbi Mark Hurvitz were traveling in Bayonne, France. While glancing at a placard in one of the museums they were visiting, Rabbi Prinz was shocked to read that Jews had brought the fabrication of chocolate to France in the 17th century. As she would come to realize, Jews played a vital role in of early production and distribution of chocolate in Europe. Even as far back as Christopher Columbus whom some have speculated might have been Jewish and some of his crew may have been converso. If true, then it would have been Jews who brought cacao to Europe.
The New York Times Dining Section today published a jeremiad of vegan traveler, Wayne Pacelle, who lamented the lack of vegan options at airports. I was once a vegan too, so I can sympathize with the feeling of being hungry, and surrounded by untouchable flesh and dairy-filled foods. But as I read through the article, I was underwhelmed by his argument – and by his anecdote about the mean security guards who tried to take away the peanut butter stashed in his bag.
