Jayne Cohen, author of the stunningly gorgeous new cookbook Jewish Holiday Cooking (witness above) is officially a new poster-woman for The Jew & The Carrot. A talented and creative chef and food writer, Cohen loves traditional Jewish dishes as much as she loves improvising with them, and has a weakness for the farmers’ market to boot. Welcome home, Jayne! She spoke with The Jew & The Carrot about her passion for fresh vegetables, the benefits of occasionally going pot-luck, “foodie poets,” and why real Jewish foods deserve real butter.

Below the jump: The full interview, Jayne’s recipe for blintzes, and a chance to win a copy of Jewish Holiday Cooking.

Win Jayne Cohen’s Jewish Holiday Cooking! Tell us below what your favorite Jewish foodie holiday is (and why) and be entered in a raffle to win. (One answer per reader will be counted - please leave your comments by Sunday, June 8.) Want to double your chances? Check out another chance to win at Jayne’s website JewishHolidayCooking.com.

What was your inspiration behind writing Jewish Holiday Cooking?

When I first began writing about food many years ago, I didn’t write about Jewish cuisine. There was a stereotyped perception of Jewish aesthetics: “beauty” was equated with assimilation, or with other ethnic groups and Jewish food was marginalized. Maybe you “did not have to be Jewish” to love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye, but you certainly did to love matzoh brie. Still, I loved these foods at home with a private passion.

Then too, growing up in heavily Jewish New York in the sixties, I saw focusing on my ethnic identity as divisive. Ironically, it was through involvement in the civil rights movement that I eventually came to appreciate my roots: not only were other minority cultures beautiful, but so was mine. Then, when my grandmother died and we had to make the seder meal without her, my family had no idea how to make many of her Ashkenazi recipes. So much of Jewish cuisine is bubbe cuisine, grandmother cuisine. But what happens, I wondered then, when the grandmothers die and there are no new generations who know how to prepare these foods?

Still, cooking Jewish food shouldn’t mean trotting out culinary dinosaurs for the holidays. So I began to experiment and improvise a lot with Jewish recipes. By the time I began writing my first cookbook, The Gefilte Variations I was concerned with creating new Jewish food memories for my daughter, because Jewish cuisine is not only our link to the past- it’s also a bridge to the future.

When that book came out, I learned from many readers that they were cooking Jewish foods mostly on the holidays. And since Jewish holidays are about not just food, but celebrating with family and friends, I wanted to provide much more information than I had previously for holiday celebrations: stories, history, traditions, how-to’s. I wanted this information to be accessible to those at all levels of observance, from Orthodox to Reconstructionist and Reformed, interfaith to secular. Jewish Holiday Cooking, I hoped, would be the go-to book for the wide tent that is contemporary Judaism-and for those simply intrigued by our beautiful food.

For people who are new to cooking – or new to Jewish food – preparing for a holiday can be intimidating. Do you have any encouragement or tips for the novice Jewish cook?

Above all, making a Jewish holiday meal is about folding people into the warm embrace of your family. So making everyone feel welcome, savoring the food leisurely and joyously–these are the most important recipes for magical holiday memories. Even chicken put through Woody Allen’s “deflavorizer” won’t taste half-bad at a happy table; the sweetness of laughter will endure long after the honey cake. Oh, and some wonderful wine helps too!

When planning the menu, remember that the holidays are rooted in the rhythms of the seasons. Relying on fresh, local foods not only speaks to Jewish concerns for balance and the order of the universe, but also makes it simpler to create something special: peak season produce requires a lot less potchkehing than processed foods to taste spectacular.

Since many Jewish holiday foods may be richer and more complex, pair them with lighter and less labor-intensive choices. Don’t serve a broccoli kugel alongside a potato one-offer steamed broccoli or roasted asparagus instead. It’s always a good idea to prepare some foods ahead, but especially helpful for novice cooks. However, I often find that when foods are readied in advance, the vibrant notes of aromatics, herbs, and spices flatten out. Perk up these dishes with an infusion of bright flavors just before serving: a fresh shower of the herbs you’ve cooked with, a squeeze of lemon.

Pot-luck holiday meals are a wonderful way to encourage guests’ participation. Think beyond potluck break-the-fasts to potluck Hanukkahs, when everyone brings a different kind of latke, homemade applesauce, or other accompaniment. How about a chametz-fest, before or after Passover? And if a guest asks what to bring to your holiday meal, suggest dessert-unless you’ve already prepared it in advance, chances are, you’ll be using the oven for something else.

What is your favorite Jewish foodie holiday? Is there one holiday where you really shine, or that you particularly love preparing for?

Jewish holidays are a foodie’s delight because each one has a unique taste. So each holiday has its special charms for the foodie in me—the collision of summer and fall at the Greenmarket, providing quick-growing vegetables, golden squashes, and new fruit for Rosh Hashanah; the homey comfort of latkes in dreary December; the combination of lush dairy with summery fruits and tender green vegetables on Shavuot.

But if I were to choose just one food holiday favorite, it would be Passover. First, there is early spring and all it promises: physically and psychologically in us, and also in the world around us. I love tart tastes of early spring that freshen up our winter-weary bodies. Young arugula and watercress salad atop a Jewish Chicken Milanese (crusted with matzoh meal). Rhubarb with raspberries in a compote, in a tsimmes, or combined with blood oranges to sauce a fish. I love the creative challenge of Passover, coming up with solutions in technique or ingredients to make up for the foods that are not permitted. It’s stimulating the way form and content constraints can be for writers and visual artists. Instead of poor quality kosher-for Passover vanilla extract, for instance, I’ve used lavender or rosemary, ground with sugar.

And lastly, the foods of Passover are not only the most symbolic-used to tell the story of the Exodus-but the Haggadah encourages you to add to the seder with food metaphors of your own. Foodie poets? What cook could resist?

There seems to be a lot of focus these days on “lightening up” traditional Jewish cooking. Are there any dishes where you think it’s actually better to not skimp and go all out?

Today many Jewish holiday foods are celebration foods, not ones we eat every day. When I serve them, I round out the meal with fresh salads, seasonal vegetables and fruits-balance is key here. I also trim off meat fat and thoroughly skim soups and gravies. I use meltingly tender cubes of eggplant instead of gobs of butter to moisten kasha varnishkes and reduced carrot juice to make Rosh Hashanah carrots more carroty and sugary without added sweetening.

But I always use real butter, cream cheese, and mayonnaise, not light versions. Holiday puddings and blintzes-meant, like Wallis Simpson, to be rich-call for whole milk. And if I go to the trouble of preparing my grandmother’s fruit soup or potato-onion kreplach, pot-sticker-style (using wonton wrappers), I want to flatter them with the best complements: real sour cream or strained whole milk yogurt.

I personally find that reduced-fat or other ersatz ingredients either taste strange or contain too many weird, unwholesome additives. To me, hydrogenated fats, preservatives, and so on, move us further from the natural rhythms of the universe that mark the holidays. I’d rather eat the real stuff, but in smaller portions or less frequently. But I should also add that neither my family nor I have any health restrictions, and I very well might make different choices if we did.

Does your family have any Shavuot food traditions?

When I was a child, on Shavuot-and many of the warm, summery nights that followed-we always went all out with lavish dairy dishes, the culinary Hall-of-Famers of the Ashkenazi and Sephardi kitchens. Pots of sour cream stood at either end of the table. Fragrant, local strawberries-my grandmother would spread fresh corn-rye bread thickly with sweet butter and layer it with rows of sliced strawberries dusted with sugar or add the berries to a cold fruit soup.

Ever since I learned how simple it is to make a blintz from scratch, I roll them around first-of-the-year strawberries and rhubarb. Or I’ll use wonton wrappers to make potato or cheese kreplach or sour cherry varenikes. We’ll have fish or maybe a Sephardi-style fritada of zucchini, spinach, or sorrel. Loads of new vegetables from the Union Square Greenmarket: sugar snaps or garden peas, young lettuces sprinkled with fresh dill.

I’m usually not much for dessert, but on Shavuot, I love the milky sweetness of rice pudding: Turkish, Bene-Israel (Indian), or old-fashioned dairy restaurant-style. Or a sumptuous cheesecake-rich noodle pudding with summer plums and nectarines.

Tsedakah is at the heart of very Jewish holiday, and there is a metaphoric food tradition we observe, based on the Book of Ruth, read on Shavuot. Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi survived on gleanings–the biblical practice of leaving a portion of one’s harvested fields for the poor to gather-when they arrived penniless in Bethlehem. So it’s a time for us to donate “gleanings” from wallet and home to charity.

Basic but Beautiful Blintzes
Recipe from Jewish Home Cooking

1 to 1 1/4 cups milk, preferably whole
3 large eggs
3/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
Additional unsalted butter or ghee for frying

Mix 1 cup of the milk, the eggs, flour, salt and butter in a blender (or with a hand blender) until smooth. Let the batter rest for at least 30 minutes or up to 2 hours at room temperature. (If batter is refrigerated, it should rest for at least 2 hours or up to 12 hours).

Stir the batter well - it should have the consistency of light cream.

Heat a very lightly buttered 6-7 inch skillet or crepe pan over moderately high heat until sizzling. Pour about 2 tablespoons of batter into the pan and immediately tilt the pan from side to side to distribute the batter evenly.

Cook just until the top of the blintz is slightly dry and edges start to curl. The bottom should be pale gold, not brown. Do not cook the other side. Loosen the blintz with a spatula and turn it out onto wax paper, fried side up. Repeat until all batter is used up.

Blintz leaves may be prepared ahead. Let them cool to room temperature, keep them separated by wax paper, then wrap well with foil. Refrigerate for up to 3 days. Bring them to room temperature before filling to prepare tearing.

Filling the blintz

Spread 1 heaping tablespoon of your favorite filling* across the middle of the cooked side of each blintz. Fold in the sides, then fold the bottom of the blintz over the filling, and roll up jelly roll fashion, pulling the top over tightly. You should have a neat package. Place filled blintzes seam side down, so they don’t open up.

Cooking the filled blintzes

Heat butter in a heavy skillet over medium heat until sizzling. Add the blintzes seam side down, without crowding the pan. Cook, turning once, until golden brown on both sides, 2-3 minutes. Adjust the heat, if necessary, to make sure the butter doesn’t scorch.

Top finished blintzes with your favorite berry preserves.

*Cheese Blintzes Filling

About 1 pound farmer cheese
1/3 cup cottage cheese, preferably dry-curd
2 1/2 ounces cream cheese, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
About 3 tablespoons sugar
2 large egg yolks

Use a fork to mash the farmer cheese well. Add the cream cheese and vanilla and blend thoroughly. Add the cottage cheese and sugar and mash until smooth. Beat in the egg yolks, cover, and chill before filling the blintzes.

Matzo Ball Soup photo credit, Jayne Cohen
Blintz photo credit: Curd Nerds