In a new article for the Jewish Daily Forward, I visit a family camp at the Pearlstone Center. Check it out:
Pearlstone Does Farm-to-Table Family Style
Tag Archives: jewish food
Sepharaeli Charoset
Photo by Flickr user Yucca2k6, used under Creative Common license.
For a Passover seder last week, I was charged with bringing the charoset. I decided to make a batch in the Sephardi style with Israeli influences to compliment the traditional Ashkenazi version I’ve made and eaten since I was a kid.
Charoset is one of the symbolic foods on the seder plate. Whatever your ethnic take on it, it represents the mortar that enslaved Israelites slathered on bricks under the Egyptian sun.
My Middle Eastern melange of dried fruits, nuts, orange zest, and spices received about 100 times as many comments as the familiar Old World mixture of apples and nuts. It also drew an emphatic email request for the recipe, comparing the sweet paste to a certain highly addictive drug. Here is what I wrote up–stat–for the fellow seder guest.
So, just in time for Easter, I figured I would post it here. We still have a few days of Passover left (it ends at sundown on Tuesday, April 2) and it’s never too early to plan your fix for next year. (Recipe after the jump) Continue reading
Filed under Jewish community
Latke-Hamentasch Debate coming up
Four speakers. Two Jewish foods. One magical night.
D.C.-area Jews, foodies, and lovers of hilarious arguments, this one’s for you. Experience the Latke-Hamentasch Debate and nosh on “research materials” Wednesday, February 13 at 7 p.m. at Adas Israel (Cleveland Park Metro – Red Line). There will be ASL interpretation!
Click to enlarge the flier and read more.
Filed under DC, Events, Jewish community
A great week for Freex
Videofreex stand in the garden at Maple Tree Farm, with the author’s father standing second from left. Special thanks to Jon Nealon for providing this photo.
The Jew and the Carrot recently published a piece I wrote about my father and food, “The Unlikely Beginnings of a Jewish Cook“. Overall, this has been a great week for the Videofreex. In addition to my piece, in the past seven days news and conversations have appeared in the Woodstock Times and Muff’s Modules and More. Not bad for a small group that made their last tape more than 30 years ago. Perhaps best of all, yesterday the upcoming documentary Here Come the Videofreex hit full funding.
Filed under History, Other arts
New food writing: Challah
My Jewish Learning recently published my article/recipe “Taking Challah: A mitzvah that sets the braided bread apart.” Check it out. For more on that topic, be sure to read the charming “Ask the Expert” column.
Photo by Rhea
Filed under Jewish community
Goat cheese and greens
Spoon Bread and Strawberry Wine*. From Okra to Greens**. Many great pieces of theatre or poetry start with two random foods. My latest recipe for MyJewishLearning.com tries a little of that melding. The dish combines pungent, earthy goat cheese with spicy greens. And though it’s dinner, not literature, it does come with a couple of stories. Read all about it.
*A 1994 book of “recipes and reminiscences” by Norma Jean Darden and Carole Darden, which I saw off Broadway as a young’un.
** A work of drama/poetry by Ntozake Shange that is lesser known than For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, but worth checking out.
Filed under Jewish community
Jewish goat cheese
From December 9 to 12, I attended the Hazon Food Conference – East Coast at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut. Here is a piece I wrote for The Jew and the Carrot about one “culturally” enlightening session. Photo by moi.
Can Cheese Be Jewish?
“Goats are the Jews of the animal kingdom,” Aitan Mizrahi told a group at the Hazon Food Conference on Friday morning. The workshop participants, gathered in the warm, cream-scented air of a small industrial kitchen at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, immediately picked up on the tongue-in-cheek theme: They wander, they are intelligent, and they are stiff-necked, they said. And, Mizrahi pointed out, “They enjoy to be in a minyan and they also enjoy to go off on their own and shmooze.”
So the gentle and friendly milk-producers make a perfect fit for Freedman, an eco-conscious retreat space in the Berkshires.
Filed under Jewish community
Rhea Kennedy Morgenstern, writer 