Tag Archives: recipes

Loaves and enchiladas

Challah cooling after baking

Challah made by experienced and novice conference participants, December 2015. Photo by Rhea.

Last Friday, I joined a crowd of around 500 for MLK Shabbat at Sixth and I Synagogue. The service brought together members of Jewish community and the Turner Memorial AME Church. On Sunday and Monday, many celebrated the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the fight for civil rights at church and interfaith services.

These events remind me how a yearning for social justice can bind communities of faith, as well as the centrality of the sabbath.

Leading up to that weekend, I was honored to publish a piece about challah, the bread central to Jewish Shabbat tables:

A Thoughtful Loaf From ‘Yeast of Eden’

Earlier in the week, the Forward also posted a story featuring a recipe by local cookbook author and healthy eating guru Natasha Rosenstock Nadel:

Vegan Enchilada Casserole

I’ll end with a plug for another event. If you live in DC, check out Why Ethics?: Blacks, Jews and the Crisis of Political Solidarity in an Age of Terror tomorrow.

Happy eating, and may 2016 bring us closer together.

 

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Filed under Blog, Conferences, Jewish community

Morning Bread

Morning breadIn the previous post, I shared some of my experience cooking for 40+ acrobats. Though the menu board in the dining room listed details of only our lunches and dinners, the breakfasts were also documentation-worthy. Part of what made them legendary (at least in my mind) was the bread.

Let me set the scene: The four of us cooks would stumble into the kitchen by 6:15 a.m. to set up a breakfast rotation of housemade chai and granola, a hash with whatever grass-fed meat the monkeys (aka acrobats) hadn’t gobbled up the night before, potato hashbrowns, oatmeal, and/or kitcheree. Coffee, hot water for tea, and hot chocolate, too.

One mainstay of these breakfasts was Chef Josh‘s overnight bread, which is an easy and delicious project for cooks at any level. As the name suggests, you start this bread the night before. Instead of the usual routine of letting the bread dough rise for about an hour a couple of times before baking, this one rises slowly over six or eight hours. (If you’re interested in the technical why and wherefore, the key is the high volume of salt. It slows the yeast’s activity).

Here’s a recipe for the bread, scaled down to make one large or two small loaves (recipe after the jump). Continue reading

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Snow Day Salsa

Returning to my food writing roots, I offer you this recipe.

Snow Day SalsaSnow Day Salsa

You may find yourself at home on a snowy day, with work canceled and your tummy hankering for a warming breakfast of huevos rancheros. I know it’s a plausible situation, because it happened to me today. Here’s the salsa I came up with, using what I had around the house (because when this happens to you, living in D.C. may have thinned your skin just a tad, and you may shudder at the thought of venturing to the store in four inches of snow).

Makes about 2 cups Continue reading

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Sepharaeli Charoset

Photo by Flickr user Yucca2k6, used under Creative Common license.

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

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How I survived eating in for an entire month

A sign at a D.C. Metro station tells me what to do. By Rhea.

A sign at a D.C. Metro station tells me what to do. By Rhea.

…that’s the title of my final post in a series at The Jew and the Carrot. It sounds dramatic, but to be honest I wasn’t crawling to the finish line. Yes, it surprised me, too! This post includes a few locavore-friendly micro recipes, a look at sustainable food campaigns and apps, and a whole bunch of gratitude.

Check out “How I survived eating in for an entire month” for the whole story.

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