Archive for the 'Women' Category
Nutrition for the Jewish Community
Thanks to Chana Rubin, RD for this guest post. Chana is a registered dietitian who lives in Israel with her family. She’s the author of the new book Food for the Soul: Traditional Jewish Wisdom for Healthy Eating
I have lived in many different Jewish communities in the U.S. and in Israel and have seen the same patterns in most of them. Obesity and the sedentary lifestyle of our communities mimic that of the community at large, with added issues of kashrut, culture, Shabbat and holidays.
Preventative nutrition and nutrition education have always been my interest. It seems to me that it is easier and more cost effective to prevent illness before it happens rather than treat it after the fact. And there are many diseases – Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, osteoporosis, to name a few, that are certainly preventable.
Many books address general nutrition, but none of them address the Jewish community in particular. Food for the Soul – Traditional Jewish Wisdom for Healthy Eating does just that. The nutrition information is universal, but tailored to our specific needs and our own food culture.
More and a recipe for Surprise Cupcakes after the jump
3 Comments »Happy Early Mother’s Day (Chocolate Cake)
Several months ago, The Jew & The Carrot featured the recipe for my mom’s amazing chocolate cake - the one that my brother and I begged for every birthday - mostly for the thrill of eating sweet, homemade frosting directly off the beaters.
Then yesterday, a reader sent me the following email:
“Long ago you posted a recipe for your mom’s chocolate cake. Finally I got around to making it for Shabbat dinner this past week. Since I’m really into my new camera and having lots of fun taking food pics, I thought I’d share the image. I used real roses and borage [to decorate it] too. Everyone loved the cake-the recipe is a keeper.” - Emily
With Mother’s Day coming up on Sunday, I figured now is the perfect time to share this delicious cake once again. Happy Mother’s Day Mom! Recipes and another photo below the jump.
Digest This: Tuesday Food News
Welcome back to the land of bread! I had a realization on Sunday night, around 6:30 (i.e. T-minus 2 hours to carb consumption, when I was locked in a state of restless self-pity) that Passover would be a perfect time to try a cleanse. After the original spirit and kavannah (intention) of the seder wore off, you could at least still congratulate yourself for detoxing. Perhaps - but I digress.
Two days after Passover, however, is definitely a great time to wipe off the final matzah crumbs and get your finger back on the pulse of what else that’s going on in the world of food. Check out these tasty ideas from around the blogosphere. B’tai Avon!
Sacred Foods. Aleph: The Alliance for Jewish Renewal published a compendium of resources to help Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious leaders educate about sustainable food and eating and make responsible food purchasing decisions in their congregations. The resource guide was created as part of Aleph’s Sacred Foods project. Find them here.
Carbon Side Dish. The New York Times reported this weekend on the strange-but-true phenomenon that it is not only possible but actually cost-effective to catch a fish in Norway, ship it to China to be processed into filets, and then shipped back to Norway for sale. oof - somehow, I’m not feeling all that hungry. Read it here.
Still Veggie After All These Years. Lilith Magazine talked with vegetarian guru, Mollie Katzen about the 30th anniversary of The New Moosewood Cookbook
Drink Your (Raw) Milk. Harpers jumped on the raw milk bandwagon with a fabulous article on unpasturized dairy, its naysayers, and the converts who claim straight from the udder is the only way to go. Check it out here.
Sticker Shock. Grist offers a clear, concise analysis of the complicated issue of rising food costs. Read about it here.
Should Bill Clinton Start Baking?
x-posted at Lilith
Amy Ephron at The Huffington Post has a theory: “In order to be First Lady you have to have a cookie recipe.” Ephron’s tone is (of course) tongue-in-cheek as she describes Martha Washington’s “jumbles,” (a pretzel/biscuit hybrid) Jackie Kennedy’s peanut brittle, and Nancy Reagan’s coconut macaroons. Still, she brings up several serious questions.
If Hillary Clinton gets elected President, what sort of “cookies” would Bill be required to make? In other words, how would a woman’s presidency change the traditional roles of first spouse? And, more importantly, how would it change the presidency itself?
What sort of expectations of traditional “feminine/motherly” conduct would be foisted on Clinton in the White House? How would she balance her necessary role as Commander-in-Chief with these expectations (or would she)? Would she be pressured - like former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was - to serve a literal “steaming pot of tea and [homemade] cookies” to diplomats?
The answers to these questions remain to be seen - but if Tuesday’s primary in Pennsylvania has anything to do with it, Bill had better start perfecting his baking technique.
Golda Meir’s Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe here
Hillary Clinton’s Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe here.
Hip Kosher: Interview with Ronnie Fein (Win a Copy)
Is it just me, or is kosher cooking having itself a little bit of a renaissance? Over the last year, a slew of cookbooks have been published (like this one
Fein, who is the founder of the Ronnie Fein School of Creative Cooking in Stamford, CT spoke to The Jew & The Carrot about what hip kosher really means, Jewish food’s chameleon tendencies, and the many virtues of an ear of corn.
Read her interview below and, while you’re at it, WIN a copy of Hip Kosher! Answer the following question and be entered in a drawing to win: If you were a vegetable, what you’d be and why? (I promise this will make more sense when you read the interview.)
And congrats to Judi for being the randomly-selected winner in our last raffle for Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking.
The Passover Shvitz
Four years ago I stood at my stove for more than three hours and turned my kitchen into a Russian shvitz as I boiled every metal utensil, every pot, and every serving piece in both my milchig and fleishig sets. Explaining the ins and outs of Passover cleaning to friends and families who don’t keep kosher—and even understanding it myself—is an ongoing challenge. But this time around, I didn’t question the cleaning: I simply felt elated.
No doubt all that steam, the sweat pouring out of me, was cleansing. But beyond that. I was different. My dishes were still my dishes, a tad cleaner than usual, but I had changed. I’d been turned upside down, dunked head first, and what used to be on top and super-important was repositioned, minimized, shifted to the bottom of consciousness or dissolved altogether. I had a level of clarity and focus on the holiday that I often don’t. Usually I’m crazy about all the things I have to do before Pesach and end up not doing half of them. I come into the holiday frazzled.
Strangely, that year I did more, cleaned more, but I was not filled up with anxiety and to-do lists. I must have had those lists; why would that year have been different from all other years? But I wasn’t consumed by the process. I did the kashering, and everything else fell into place: the thousand details, the logistics of the switchover, chametzdik kitchen to pesachdik kitchen, the menu-making, the buying of Pesach food and selling of chametz, the emptying out of cupboards immediately followed by the loading up.
Healthy, Delicious Passover Recipes, from celebrity chef and nutritionist Ellie Krieger
This past weekend, our synagogue hosted a “Pesach University”: A community-wide day of Passover workshops, on everything from the anthropological roots of the seder, to how to “green” your Pesach.
But the true highlight of the event was a live Passover cooking demonstration by none other than Ellie Krieger - an adjunct professor in the New York University Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health, and star of the Food Network’s hit show, Healthy Appetite with Ellie Krieger. (She also happens to be the sister of one of our Tuv Ha’aretz CSA’s core group members, and a genuinely warm and funny person to boot.)
In honor of the occasion, Ellie chose to focus on two themes of the seder: dipping, and the tension between bitter and sweet in the story, and the food that accompanies it. Ellie made two delicious recipes, adapted from her new cookbook The Food You Crave: Luscious Recipes for a Healthy Life
Read it & Eat: Review of Cooking Jewish
Books, Cookbooks, Cooking, Family & Kids, Food Writing, Jewish Culture, Kosher, Meat, Photography, Recipes, Shabbos Meals, Women
I’ve only had my copy of Cooking Jewish: 532 Great Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family
As the title might suggest, this book is a family affair. Author Judy Bart Kancigor beautifully describes how the book came into existence, stemming from a desire to pass on her family’s food traditions. As a result, almost every recipe has a story, which can be a bit overwhelming at times, but ultimately brings the recipes to life. It’s not just a cookbook; you feel invited in, as though you’re taking part in the Rabinowitz family tradition by making this food. And the pictures are great – a time-capsule of American Jewish life opened to reveal many embarrassing hairstyles and equally embarrassing bar mitzvah pictures.
More and recipes for banana bread and sesame crusted chicken below the jump.
Rosie the Riveter, Meet Shira the Farmer
Hat tip to ZT at Jewschool for this story, a friend of the family Shira Kamm starts her own farm, joining the ranks of so many other women starting farms. Check this article in the Philly Inquirer about Kamm’s endeavor below the fold, and check the photo essay. Somebody invite this woman to the Food Conference!
Macaroons and Cheese(cake)
Are Passover snacks the new bees? Chametz-free noshes seem to be disappearing everywhere without a trace. First, TamTams disappear from the shelves, and now, the NYTimes reports about a historic New York social club that recently lost its source for the perfect macaroon.
It seems that the bakery which supplied the Century club with macaroons for over half a century has gone out of business, and this article describes the remarkable search by its members for a suitable replacement. I have to say, even as someone who disdainfully associates macaroons with those awful, sticky, cloying, calorie-laden chunks that come in the vacuum-sealed can, I can’t help but admire the passion and discernment by which Century Club members are conducting their search. Here’s how they lovingly describe the perfect macaroon:
“They had just the right amount of texture. They weren’t too crispy. They weren’t too gooey. You know, they didn’t flake or break. They kind of pulled apart. I would say they sort of had a nice elasticity. They displayed a particular combination of crustiness and tensile strength.”
Mmmm…tensile strength. Good luck with that. So much for Macaroons. The cheese(cake) half of this post is after the jump… Read more »
Aunt Toni’s Energy Bar
Thanks to Elena Sigman for this guest post.
My Tante Toni (may her memory be a sweet blessing) made a dish for Purim, called noun, which I haven’t seen since the 70s. It was my favorite treat at her house: a plate of sweet, sticky pieces of noun cut in the shape of diamonds about one-and-a-half inches long. I guessed it was made of honey and chopped nuts and dates, but I was never sure of the recipe. It was dark brown and chewy and even though it was super-sweet it was also somehow tangy. The plate was passed around the table at the end of our Purim seudah, and it was quickly finished. The batches were never big.
Tante Toni had blue eyes that were two different colors because one was hers and the other was glass. The glass eye was bluer and bigger and her real eye was smaller and more hazel. At home in the evening, she wore a hairnet in order to preserve her coiffure from erev Shabbos, after she came home from the beauty parlor, until the next Friday morning when she’d get her hair done again. She was a smart, compact woman, barely taller than my child self, but she walked with a spine so straight no runway model could match it. She never tried to make chit chat with me. When I was a kid I would occasionally sleep over at her apartment on Friday night. After dinner she read the B’nai Brith Messenger cover to cover in her high-backed chair, and I read my book (Agatha Christie mysteries one year, Pearl S. Buck novels the next) on the couch until the Shabbos clock clicked off the light.
Queen Esther the Vegetarian?
In this week’s Jerusalem Post, Dr. Richard Schwartz writes:
“Queen Esther, the heroine of the Purim story, was a vegetarian while she lived in the palace of King Achashverosh. She was thus able to avoid violating the kosher dietary laws while keeping her Jewish identity secret.”
Well, sort of. As a vegetarian and a woman, I find Dr. Schwartz’s line of logic tempting. Hooray! Queen Esther, the sassy savior of the Jewish people, loved tofu! But he has the midrash backwards.
There are actually conflicting opinions about what Esther chose to eat and refuse in the palace (one commentator suggests that she was actually served pork!). But the midrash that stuck is that she ate beans and legumes. If this was the case, then Queen Esther avoided meat so as to not violate the kosher laws in her non-Jewish surroundings. Her intention would not have been to eschew all flesh, as Dr. Schwartz suggests, just the non-kosher kind.
Even if she wasn’t a card-carrying PETA member, Queen Esther’s diaspora diet gives us a glimpse into the strength of her character. She maintained her sense of self, even within a palace that was undoubtedly filled with temptations. The lesson to take away is not that all Jews should be vegetarians (though many could benefit from eating less meat!), but that defending one’s core values is the deepest form of heroism.
In honor of Queen Esther, here’s a recipe for Persian Stuffed Peppers by Chef Gil Marks, author of a mind-bogglingly comprehensive book of vegetarian Jewish recipes, Olive Trees and Honey.
Yid.Dish: Banana Bundt Cake
I initially posted this recipe as a comment on the giant falafel bundt, because the same week that they posted, I had made a real bundt cake of my very own. I shared this cake with a couple of people who I work with, including Hazon’s Executive Director, Nigel Savage, who insisted that this lowly banana cake get its very own post and photo.
Nigel actually tried the cake when we were on our way from Manhattan to Long Island to a Jewish wedding. In retrospect, I suppose I see how silly I was to bring provisions for an hour-long car ride on the way to a Jewish simcha, but hey, there can never be too much food! And six hungry Jews in a car in NY traffic - what did I know? I’ve never been to Long Island - things could have gotten ugly.
I didn’t think there was a Jewish connection to my banana cake, but when doing a bit of research on the Wikipedia I found this:
“The Bundt pan (a registered trademark) was created in 1950 by H. David Dalquist, founder of Nordic Ware, at the request of members of the Hadassah Society’s chapter in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They were interested in a pan that could be used to make bundkuchen (sometimes called kugelhopf or Gugelhupf), a popular German and Austrian coffee cake. The old-world pans, made of delicate ceramic or heavy cast iron, were difficult to use. He modified some existing Scandinavian pan designs by introducing folds in the outer edge, and fashioned the pan out of aluminum.”
So that you never have to risk being hungry on the way to your next simcha, here’s the recipe for banana cake.
Natalie Portman in “Spicy” New Movie
New Yorkers visiting a certain patch of real estate in the East 20s known affectionately as Curry Hill know the secrets of kosher vegetarian Indian food - in fact, you can hardly throw a dosa without hitting Madras Mahal, Chennai Garden, or another Indian restaurant serving hecshered, meat-free fare.
Now, Israeli-born, vegetarian actress Natalie Portman will star in Mira Nair’s new movie, “Kosher Vegetarian” - exploring the interfaith romance between a Gujarati guy (actor, Ifran Khan) and Jewish girl (Portman).
Like Nair’s last movie (The Namesake), the love between these two characters will undoubtedly be fraught with disapproving parents and inter-cultural conflict. But at very least, the couple will know where to eat.
