Cross-posted to heebnvegan
This week The Jewish Star reported that some haredi rabbis in Israel (as well as some of their American counterparts) have deemed various types of fish treif because they possess a parasitic worm called anisakis. The article quoted a bulletin from “Chevra Mehadrun, the Kashrus Advocacy of Rockland,” as advising that “wild salmon, hake, flounder, sol[e], halibut, sea bass, red perch, scrod, pollock, cod and butter fish are no longer considered kosher.” It must be noted that many mainstream Orthodox authorities, including the Orthodox Union, do not take this position.
Although this new classification does not yet have a huge following, one must imagine that lox and various other common foods would cease to be staples in kosher cuisine. If a large number of kosher consumers adhered to the new standard, fish consumption among kosher-keeping Jews would likely decrease substantially. At this time, there is no reason to suspect that this will be the case. Considering that fish feel pain and suffer in much the same way that other vertebrate animals do, though, one can still hope that more and more people see that fish are friends, not food!
Cross-posted to heebnvegan
Within 24 hours of the earthquake in Haiti, I had a knee-jerk reaction and made a donation to the
American Red Cross. Shortly afterward, I learned of
American Jewish World Service’s disaster relief efforts and figured that my next donation would probably go to them. There are many groups doing great work in Haiti, and when it comes to giving tzedakah, there is no wrong answer here. Still, there’s a way to help Haitian earthquake victims by doing what I excel at: eating vegan baked goods!
Vegan cooking icon Isa Chandra Moskowitz has spearheaded efforts to organize vegan bake sales to benefit Haiti in more than two dozen cities across North America. She has noted on her blog that bake sales sometimes take months to put together, but these were organized in a matter of weeks (or less). “We may not have George Clooney (hey, George! Go vegan!) but we do have chutzpah,” she wrote last week.
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.
I never give a one-word response if someone asks whether I keep kosher. After saying “yes,” I usually add qualifiers, such as “I’m vegan, so I keep kosher by default.” Although I do keep kosher in my own way, the extent of my kashrut might not meet the expectations of the person asking the question. I grew up eating meatball pizza, shrimp cocktail, and pork fried rice, so keeping kosher was never a claim I could make early in life. In recent years as I’ve seriously explored the connections between Judaism and veganism, it has been a claim I like to make.
As I’ve noted before, being vegetarian makes it easier to keep kosher:
You don’t have to worry about whether you’re eating meat that’s certified kosher (and whether that certification meets Jewish ideals) if you’re not eating meat. You don’t have to worry about mixing meat and dairy products if you’re avoiding one or both of those categories altogether. As one vegetarian rabbi explained in a 2005 Jewish Ledger article, “We have one set of dishes (plus Passover dishes) and never have to worry about the status of leftovers in the fridge or whether a guest will mix the utensils or food items. … By not eating meat, I am much more certain to never violate, even accidentally, the Biblical and rabbinic prohibitions concerning non-kosher meat.”
Thanks so much to Lailah Robertson for this great guest post about her experience and the Hazon Food Conference. Lailah is a San Francisco freelance writer who writes the blog In My Box about her CSA box and all the delicious vegetarian, gluten-free things she makes with it. This post is NOT intended to endorse any particular diet or agenda, e.g. to say that being vegan (abstaining from all animal products) is the only way to live, or that vegetarians are hypocrites. It merely hopes to be an exploration of one of the least considered aspects of our food chain.
Nigel Savage, founder of Hazon, asked us two questions during his keynote speech last night at the Hazon Food Conference. It felt like the beginning of one of those Jewish parables, the ones where the wise rabbi asks or tells us something that means more than it seems on the surface, where you ponder on the teaching and the world opens up in a new way.
“Stand up if you eat meat, but you wouldn’t if you had to kill it yourself,” Nigel called out. A number of people in the packed hall rose from their seats. I applauded them for their self-awareness and honesty, while of course maintaining a certain degree of vegetarian smugness.
Then he asked us another question. “Stand up if you are vegetarian, but would eat meat if you killed it yourself.” This time fewer people stood up, but it was still a significant number.
Then Nigel told us the story of the goat.
Thanks to Debs Gardner for this great guest post. Debs maintains the food blog, Seattle Local Food.
It was Friday morning at the Hazon conference, and we were already deep in weighty conversations about social justice and corporate food production. We’d watched The Garden, a documentary about Latin American immigrant farmers protesting destruction of a gorgeous 14-acre garden they’d built in industrial South Central Los Angeles. I’d participated in a media panel, discussing misleading marketing, the role of blogging in media, and the challenges writers face. Like needing a salad after too much kugel, it was time for something at least a little lighter. So, I went to hear one of my favorite experts on Jewish food tell stories and make nosh.
Joan Nathan was on stage, multitasking. Busily adjusting the top of a food processor, she was demonstrating how to prepare two different dishes, while overseeing an assistant chopping vegetables and simultaneously talking into a microphone, held by another assistant, about the history of Jewish foods in France.
Photos by Phil Mansfield
Every once in a while I feel sorry for myself because my kids won’t eat my lovingly prepared meals; for comfort, I seek out one of my fellow mom’s, specifically those with teen-agers. Invariably they look at me with a withering ‘well let me get you the violins and a stiff drink fast, your poor thing’ stare, reminding me that I am a mere amateur at kitchen rejection. When I hear their tales of trying to feed their teens, my load somehow seems lighter, more manageable. Snarky, picky, and sometimes downright nasty, it is no easy task to manage teens at the table.
Enter Rozanne Gold and her new book, Eat Fresh Food: Awesome Recipes for Teen Chefs. I sat down with the author and discovered that the book’s appeal to teens is as organic as its recipes. Gold recently adopted a teen-ager and for the past few years they have been coming together as a family, in and out of the kitchen. Her daughter was one of five teen chefs engaged to prepare and test each recipe. Their collective industry and obvious enjoyment is evidenced throughout the book with hands-on pictures depicting their efforts.
I’m sure that like me, many of you cannot get Hanukah cooking and baking out of your minds! I will be making potato leek latkes, homemade apple sauce and some chewy ginger cookies tonight. As you can tell, I’m in full holiday mode! Anyway, if you are looking for a break from the holiday food maddness I have a great recipe for you!
My birthday was about a month and a half ago. As much as I enjoy eating out I really wanted to cook my birthday dinner at home with my boyfriend this year. We decided our main course would be homemade pizza – something neither of us had ever made. I had heard it was very easy to make but having never made any type of yeast-based bread, I was a bit nervous!
I looked into a few recipes and ended up using one based on a recipe from one of my favorite food bloggers. I will say that this recipe didn’t make quite enough dough for me. I think next time I will try this recipe. The most fun thing about making your own pizza is that you can put anything you want on it (and it can be as healthy or unhealthy as you’d like)! We were especially proud of our pizzas since the vast majority of the ingredients were local and organic. I hope you enjoy making your own pizza. Feel free to leave comments with your favorite topping combination!
It’s sort of funny when two worlds collide unexpectedly, especially when one comes to the aid of the other. Take for example my recent search for the perfect milk alternative. I don’t dislike good ol’ cow’s milk, nor am I allergic to it. But as an observant Jew, I often find myself at odds with the fridge staple, usually after I’ve just enjoyed a delicious turkey sandwich. I am what some would call a Fleish-a-phobe: I rarely eat meat if I can avoid it out of dread for the five hours and one minute to follow, when I will be barred from my favorite treats: ice-cream, chocolate, cheese, milk-based pie, the list goes on.
And so I’ve spent some time searching for that perfect alternative, that wondrous, dairy-free concoction that will replace milk in my cookie recipe and help me whip up the perfect pareve pumpkin pie. Recently, my best friend and I (with both health and Halacha in mind) unofficially took it upon ourselves to taste-test every non-milk available to us, from various brands of soymilk to the less orthodox (and rarely Kosher) hemp milk, with varying results.
If you didn’t catch Jonathan Safran Foer’s wonderful piece “Against Meat” in last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine Food Issue, it’s well worth reading. He writes how his Holocaust survivor grandmother’s “obsession with food” formed his own vegetarianism, and how his Jewish values and experiences informed his and his wife’s decision to raise their children vegetarian. But Safran Foer also points out his way to vegetarianism was not a straight path. He very nicely captures the ambivalence of those of us who lean towards vegetarianism, but still eat meat, as well as what appears to be a kind of ethical inconsistency in our enjoyment of the taste of meat. As he bluntly puts it,
I got an intriguing email from another member of my synagogue this week. He knew I had organized bringing a sustainable meat co-op to the shul, but was wondering what I knew about bulk dry goods in our area. Married to a vegetarian, he cooked a lot of legumes and grains, but found it hard to find them in larger packages (more than say 1-2 pounds for legumes or 10 pounds for grains). Also, prices for these staples have been rising. He floated the idea that there might be interest in the synagogue in buying these items in large quantities (say, 100 pounds at a time) from a bulk supplier, both to bring down cost and to reduce packaging. It also might provide all of us with more variety, since the risk of trying a new product would be spread among the group, and encourage us all to eat more sustainably by reducing our meat and dairy consumption.
(Originally published on Mother Nature Network)
During my two-year stint as a vegan in college, I often joked that while 90 percent of dining hall food was off-limits, at least I could always find a drink. (Clearly, I had never heard of the bacon martini.) But on a recent vacation to America’s wine capitol, Napa Valley, I stumbled upon an unappetizing fact: All along, I just might have been drinking fish guts.*
“It comes from the bladder of a sturgeon,” said Peter Hoffmann. We were standing in a newly built shed in his fig tree-adorned backyard, sampling wines from his organic and biodynamic label, Aum Cellars — straight from the barrel. Needless to say, I felt pretty cool about that. In between swirls and sips, Hoffmann explained fining — the process of introducing a tiny amount of protein into wine to attract any loose particles (tiny bits of grape skin or stems, naturally occurring yeasts, etc.) and help them settle to the bottom of the barrel. Fining, he said, helps to smooth out a wine, ultimately giving it a silkier, more consistent mouth feel. “It’s the equivalent of driving a Mercedes instead of a pickup truck,” Hoffmann said.
If my summer were a cookbook, it would be called What to Expect When You’re Expecting— Expecting Company, That Is, and It’s a Heat Wave.
Yes, welcome to life in the global warming oven. We are on at least heat wave #3 of the summer here in usually temperate Portland, and I’ve had a potluck to attend or guests to host for all of them. And while the hot weather makes me want to eat ice cream three meals a day, I know I really shouldn’t.
Especially not when “eating” means “bringing to a potluck where it will sit out in the sun.”
So what has been on the menu? Lots, and I figured I’d share it in case you can’t stand the heat but still need to be in the kitchen.
