Hooray! Or maybe not.

Unsurprisingly, drama abounds - with Bush likely to veto the bill and sustainable agriculture supporters torn over whether to support the flawed bill as is, or back the veto. Tom Philpott over at Grist wrote a very solid overview of the situation. Print it out for your Shabbat (or weekend) table, and decide how you feel.

Related Posts
Apple vs. Snackcake - a funny and informative video on the Farm Bill.
Farm Bill Hits the Floor
Michael Pollan on the Farm Bill

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.

If America is the proverbial “melting pot,” then Israel is a close second - at least when it comes to Jewish food and Mediterranean cuisines. In her book The Foods of Israel Today (Knopf), culinary goddess, Joan Nathan, explores the multiple culinary landscapes - European, Russian, Moroccan, Syrian, Italian and American to name a few - that converge and overlap across Israel’s homes, restaurants, and cafes.

Today, in celebration of Yom Ha’Atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day), we’re raffling off a copy of The Foods of Israel Today so you can bring all the tastes of Israel into your home. To enter the raffle, tell us your favorite Israeli food experience - either an inspiring or interesting meal you ate in Israel, or delicious Israeli food you ate somewhere else… (deadline to enter: Sunday, May 11).

More and a recipe below the jump.

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Yesterday, I came home after a long bike ride in the New York sunshine. On my plate for the evening was a pile of reading in preparation for my chemistry exam the next day. I stared at the pile of books and papers. I looked longingly at my kitchen, the primary source of my procrastination.

Then I remembered: horseradish!

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Can anyone hear fava beans and not think of Anthony Hopkins?

“I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice chianti.” (The movie is Silence of the Lambs, in case you missed it, and the infamous line was said by Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter.)

But references to cannibalism aside, our Tuv Ha’Aretz has started here in Berkeley, and we’ve got more fava beans than we know what to do with. Which, when you get down to it, really isn’t that many at all. (more…)

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. (more…)

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.

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(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.

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View the full image here.
For more about the schecting, click here.

Save the date: This year’s Food Conference is happening December 25-28 in Monterey, California. Registration opening SOON - check Hazon’s website for more details.

The Jew & The Carrot blogger, Tzimmes Maker, told me that a guy she knew in college wanted to start an organization called J-PETA: Jewish People for the Eating of Tasty Animals.  Well, Hannah and Phillip Schein would definitely identify as “J-PETA” members, but not in quite the same way as the carnivorous college kid.

Last week, The Forward profiled the Scheins, a kosher-keeping couple that was responsible for taking undercover videos of Agriprocessors‘ slaughter houses on behalf of the PETA.  Ever wondered how PETA and other animal-rights organizations get their hands on all that incriminating footage? Check out the article below the jump:

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