This time of year for Jews is a special one. At least, for this Jewish Gastronaut. To me, regardless of how early or late in September/October they occur (Jewish holidays follow the lunar calendar), the high holidays signify a transition from summer into fall. I have memories of shopping for outfits to wear to synagogue, seeking the right skirt, fighting with tights and ‘hose (never liked wearing them), determining which shoes to wear and whether it’s cool enough to wear a suit jacket, determining how dressed up I had to get for dinner at my grandmother’s. I still do most of this clothing ritual. As much as I like the idea of “new clothes, new year”, I haven’t bought a new “holiday outfit” for years. It’s occurred to me to determine how much a new outfit would cost and donate that money, but I’m sort of tapped out right now. Instead of new clothes I got “new hair” and “new glasses” and “new contact lenses”. If only I had “new benefits” to go with the new prescription eye wear.

I still go to synagogue, though not with my parents and more because I want to than feeling obligated to. I try to get into the spiritual aspect as much as I can while praying in a large gym with hundreds of others and what seems like nearly every Jew I know.  During Rosh Hashana (literally “head of the year”) I stay offline for two days and chill out as I reflect. The daily routine changes to make the days seem different. I don’t answer my cell phone. I think about people I’ve wronged, forgive those who have wronged me, reflect on how I can be a better person. I essentially repeat this at Yom Kippur (more on that next week).

Just this weekend I was thinking about how personality conflicts don’t necessarily indicate bad people. We as humans have egos, and pride. We’re often lazy. We’re self centered. Acknowledging this is written into the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services. Often it’s best to accept people for who they are, assessing them on the sum of their parts. I believe in the good of people – which sometimes feels naive and too trusting – and this time of year is the time to be conscious of who we are and who we want to be. Fall is generally a transition time anyhow (back to school, new season etc.).

I know that nothing will change permanently, but the reflection is something. The act of stopping and thinking. There’s something in the customs of asking for forgiveness for the upcoming year and for casting away our sins, represented by bread (a good use for the bread that’s been hiding in the back of the freezer). These customs move me even though much of it seems antiquated.

Ever notice that bread and bread-like products play such prominent role in religious customs? I strongly suspect that at least one person has written an entire book on the subject.

Of course there are food customs.

For Rosh Hashana we eat foods symbolic of a sweet new year, the most basic being apples dipped in honey on which we say a blessing – though some Jews and more observant ones say blessings over everything they eat. Sweet challah and honey cake are customary. On the second day we eat a “new fruit”, a fruit that has recently come into season but that we have not yet had the opportunity to eat. We then say the shehechiyanu blessing. It translates to “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has kept us alive, and sustained us, and enabled us to reach this moment.” I find that moving.

• More information on Rosh Hashana food customs can be found here, here, and here.

Challah dipped in honey is a tasty tradition. On the advice of a friend I picked up some cinnamon honey on Saturday while at the Brick Works farmer’s market and look forward to drizzling some of it on my challah.

I have memories of family dinners and in past years I’ve found myself with impromptu lunch and dinner invitations to eat with friends’ families. Jews like to feed each other and often make so much food that they need people to come over and help them eat it. This could partly explain why I don’t like showing up to parties without something edible for sharing. I look forward to dinner tonight with family, dinner tomorrow evening with friends, lunch on Friday with friends and whatever impromptu meals come up between today and Friday evening.

Recipe round up

I generally like to seek out and stumble upon recipes that are accommodating to vegans, vegetarians, celiacs and those with other dietary needs. You could do this work (ie. Googling) but I’ve done it for you. I haven’t tried any of these recipes but encourage you to do so and report back.

• Elana’s Pantry’s “honey cake” is gluten free and uses agave rather than honey. It’s not vegan because it contains eggs, but I bet you could do the flax-water trick to make it both vegan and gluten free. I’m not a fan of agave (what’s available to most of us is similar to high fructose corn syrup) and generally don’t condone it but I’d say that it’s innocuous if used in baking once in awhile. My sister is a fan of Elena’s Pantry and uses her recipe for gluten free baking mix/flour alternative.
• Gluten-free Chocolate Almond Honey Cake
• Gluten-free challah.
• Another gluten-free challah.
• Check out Gluten-Free Bay’s Rosh Hashana Recipe Roundup 2007. It includes mock matzoh balls.
• Vegan Recipes for Rosh Hashanah (includes challah, kugel, tzimmes and more).
• Raw mock “gefilte fish”.
• Neither vegan nor gluten free, this honey cake recipe was recommended to me by the same person who recommended the cinnamon honey. She’s made it numerous times. I like the idea of using coffee and whiskey. I’m thinking about baking in muffin tins for the office.
• Meghan’s Rosh Hashana Recipe Round Up, posted on Monday. You know it’ll be healthy and tasty! P.S. Go see Meghan at the Vegetarian Food Fair at Harbourfront this weekend. She’ll have a booth and is doing a demo on Saturday at noon.

On that note, to those of you celebrating Rosh Hashana, Happy New year! Make it a healthy, sweet one.

More holiday posts to come.

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• Mixed Review: Manischewitz’s Honey Cake (seriouseats.com)
• Joan Nathan on Rosh Hashana Cooking (dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Workers Clean Notes from Western Wall (israelnationalnews.com)
• Susan Weissman: Will Honey Sweeten My Jewish New Year With Food Allergies? (3 Alternatives to Traditional Honey Cake) (huffingtonpost.com)

• Healthy cooking for Passover? All it takes is tweaking [JTA]

• Mazon’s (USA) Childhood Nutrition Seders. [via JTA> Jewish Public Affairs> MAZON US]. I’d like to see an initiative like this locally

• Good to the last plague [Washington Jewish Week] Until last year I’d never seen this haggadah. I think it’s an American thing (?).

• The Ultimate Passover Guide for Vegetarians and Vegans [The Jew and the Carrot]

• Recipes: Gluten-Free Matzo Balls [Gluten-Free Bay] It’s from 2007, but my friend Lisa shared it & I wanted to pass it on.

• Kosher wine, beyond sweet red [Chicago Tribune]

• Gefilte fish: baked, not boiled [Toronto Star]  …With a little history lesson on gefilte fish in there.

• Although it’s not food related: Passover Quotes, Greetings, And Passages For Passover 2010 [Huffington Post]

More to follow, no doubt.

Wishing my Jewish friends a happy and meaningful pesach. I leave you with the new acoustic version of the smash YouTube hit, “20 Things to Do With Matzah.” starring William Levin and Michelle Citrin.
(Thanks to Esther K. for the video.)

Tips for an Eco Friendly Purim

On Purim we give one another gifts of food and distribute money to the poor, celebrating with communal fasting and feasting. Here are some tips courtesy of Svivat Yisrael for a joyous and green Purim.

1. Trash the Baskets – Package your Mishloach Manot (festive Purim gift) in useful, reusable containers such as storage containers, glasses, mugs and pasta drainers for year-round usability.

2. Sustainable Stuffing – Instead of padding out your package with shredded cellophane or colored paper, use banana chips, sunflower seeds or popcorn.

3. Naturally Sweet – Replace the packaged and processed candy and chocolates with fresh and dried fruit, unsweetened fruit juices and other healthy products.

4. Bag It – Follow the fashion trend and give your gifts in eco-friendly cloth bags that your friends can reuse for shopping.

5. Recycle – Making a costume from cardboard boxes, kitchen roll tubes etc. needn’t be old-fashioned.  You could become an ipod, cellphone or XBox!

6. Share the Spoils – Purim is over and you find yourself overloaded with unwanted food gifts?   Bring (unopened) food items to a local charitable organization to distribute to needy families.

Also check out The Jew and the Carrot’s Purim Round Up.

[I began this post at 5pm, had to abandon it unfinished at 6:47 to get my butt to seder that was to begin at 7 but didn't begin until 8, and finished after.]

[April 9, 3:10pm: Edited to make it a bit shorter.]

I apologize in advance for the length, because I generally don’t have the patience to read anything that’s this long.

Occasionally I read something that makes me smack my head with disbelief, as in, “I can’t believe he/she wrote that.” I wasn’t going to post about this. I wasn’t going to comment on Corey Mintz’s  article in last Saturday’s Toronto Star about an unconventional passover seder. I first noticed it in Taste T.O.’s weekly Saturday feature In the Papers (April 4). I starred the Taste T.O. post in Google Reader, unsure if I wanted to read about it again, post about it, or go there in general. It seemed like an article I had to bookmark. So, I thought “Mintz, you ass.” and moved on. I wasn’t going to address it here.

Sometimes I begin comments in response to blog posts and find that that they’ve become opinion pieces or diatribes.  Well, that sort of lead me to this post, except that I wasn’t commenting to a blog post.

Another fact about me (one was revealed on Monday): I briefly worked in radio a couple of years ago. While between careers around 2003 (?),  and then on a casual part time basis through 2008, I worked for Rogers Broadcasting, which owns Jack FM, CHFI, 680 News and The Fan 590 in Toronto. One of the first people I met there was  Maurie, who had been a producer on Jack FM’s morning show until the station went to a DJ-free format.

Maurie is my Facebook network. and today he posted audio of an interview that he did with Dave Trafford at CFRB 1010 earlier today, an interview which he was recruited to do in response to Corey’s article.  A lot of Jews listen to Newstalk. I grew up listening to CFRB in the car when Andy Barrie was still on air there (now I listen to him every morning on CBC). The interview is not on CFRB’s website nor do I know if it will be.  Maurie posted it as a video link. It may or may not be accessible to you. It may or may not be copyright infringement.

The interview with Maurie and CFRB’s Jessica Baker was good. Their messaging was basically, “The seder is mostly about family, we enjoy the family time and the festival meal, we don’t have the patience to read through the whole book beginning to end, we count the pages until the part that says we eat and then we’re done.” Pretty consistent with my experience and that of most people I know. One friend’s family reenacts the plagues with masks and toys, which I think is awesome, and tomorrow I’ll be at a seder hosted by two friends, one of whom is a rabbi, and I’ve been informed that there will be lots of discussion going late into the night. Lots of wine too.

So, Corey’s article…

I began a response to Maurie’s video post and the most recent draft looked like this:

Trafford missed the point a little bit. Yes, Mintz was slagging traditions but it went beyond that. He mocked the holiday. He made fun of the food customs, the story and the traditions. Furthermore, he created a new menu that aligned unkosher food with the story. He takes the concept of slavery and turns it into pork belly on sauerkraut. The poached egg over cornbread completely misses the point and is wrong on so many levels.

There’s no way that he wasn’t aware that he’d be pissing off readers, alienating his own. It was tasteless (pardon the pun). I wasn’t offended but thought he came off as an ass. Passover is one time, I find, that even non-kosher Jews try to step it up [be kosher for the week].

Instead I praised the interview, said that the interviewer missed the point and told him that he’d inspired a blog post.

Blog readers, I don’t think I need to point out what’s wrong with pork belly. That’s obvious. As stated, the cornbread is wrong for many reasons: He directs cooking it in pork or bacon fat.  Corn is considered kitniot, forbidden on passover.

As expected, the article drew ire from members of the Jewish community. Here I put on my “media analyst” hat that I haven’t worn in a while  (still fits, and I’m not donning it for a 6am work time) and report on the tone of the feedback:

• 24 comments online. 19 negative, three positive, three neutral. I’d chart it if it was for work.
• Of the negative: Many said that the newspaper should be ashamed of themselves. Some threatened newspaper subscription cancellation (congratulations, Mintz). Some called him “pathetic” and “insensitive”. One called him a “self-hating Jew”. My opinion: Self-hating, no. Flippant? Yes. Insensitive? Yes, but unintentionally, which is why I referred to him as an “ass” in the opening paragraph.
• The Letters to the Editor in the print edition, as published online today, reflect pretty much the same. I wasn’t monitoring it over the week, but there’s a whole lot of offense expressed.

A sampling of the letters with my commentary, Toronto Sun style:

Mr. Mintz is enslaved by crassness and disrespect. He is trapped in the same arrogance as the “puffed up bread.” He doesn’t stop to think about how many people feel sadness from his insensitive, post-cultural ramblings.

I like that one and agree somewhat. It was crass and they were “insensitive post-cultural ramblings”.

Just because I don’t think much of traditions doesn’t mean I should belittle those that do. It may not have been your intention, Corey, but the article is a bit offensive to those that care…

I agree, and intention is always important to me.

Is it necessary to offend those who do care about tradition?

Truly pathetic that you have to go to such lengths to offend those who take their traditions seriously and find real meaning in them.

I wouldn’t say “pathetic”, but otherwise yes. He had to know that he’d risk offending people but I don’t think that he wanted to offend. I’d say that he didn’t intend to offend but knew it would happen.

I doubt the Star would publish pork chop recipes for the Islamic festival of Eid.

I’m not so sure.

Chag sameach to everyone, including Mr. Grintz – I mean Mintz.

Well done. Try singing “You’re a mean one, Corey Mintz”. It works.

And finally one of the positive comments:

The Globe also printed non-kosher passover recipes (udon noodles, shrimp). So for those of you who said they were switching papers…do your homework. I prefer this take on it because at least Corey points out that it is not kosher, and states his reasoning for it. I interpreted this as fitting in with a trend of marketing religion to a younger generation by making it “untraditional” and “cool”.

A good point. I agree with the words and interpretation of this comment but that doesn’t make Mintz right.

This is the Globe and Mail article to which the writer refers.   They backpedalled by claiming in a “correction” that only the first soup listed in that article was intended for the seder menu (I’m somewhat skeptical).

I’ve always taken issue with people who say “I’m Jewish“. You are or you’re not. You’re observant/practicing (to varying degree) or you’re not. Secular? Cultural? Whatever. All labels. I don’t believe in labels. What matters is how you feel and how you behave. Mintz seems to be flaunting the “ish”. This would be perfectly acceptable in a personal blog but in a newspaper (one with higher circulation than the National Post, and possibly the Globe and Mail though I could be wrong) it isn’t right. I wish I could respect him for being so honest but my feeling is that he intended to give the finger to his community, and that’s just not right. If he considered his audience, he decided to write the piece anyway. It was a ballsy move.

So, sorry Corey but while I dig your fridge contents with your homemade pickles and Spiderman and generally like how you write,  you, my friend, were a douchebag. While I appreciate what you were trying to do from a culinary/food enthusiast perspective, I’m mildly creeped out (but not offended, and wouldn’t be cancelling my subscription if I had one). Maybe 4 cups of wine will mellow you out.

At the risk of sounding as flippant as Corey (this IS my personal blog and not a newspaper): You can repent for it on Yom Kippur.  Ugh, I feel dirty and inappropriate saying that. Instead of deleting that I’ll just say this: Please don’t do that again. Thanks.

• Teaching kids to be restaurant critics. [Toronto Star]

• Showing that people voice their opinion with their wallet: Tropicana Line’s Sales Plunge 20% Post-Rebranding [Advertising age] Coke, New Coke, Coke Classic.

• Why What You Drink May Put On More Pounds Than What You Eat [City News]

• The Kitchn answers, What’s the Difference Between Soy, Rice and Almond Milk? I’d add the following facts:

Soy milk curdles in hot beverages, thus not ideal for coffee.
-Most brands of rice milk are made with sunflower oil, so read ingredients if that concerns you. As I mentioned recently, my preferred brand of rice milk is Ryza. It’s made from brown rice and doesn’t contain oil.
-Not all brands of hemp milk are the same so if you try one and don’t like it try another.

[Generally when chosing between almond, soy, rice or hemp I go for what's on sale within my preferences and always the "plain" or "original" flavour. I won't drink Silk brand. IMO, when Starbucks switched to Silk their beverages started to taste bad. Too bad, since I used to like their chai lattes with soy. I tried unsweetened soy milk once and hated it.  I'd like to make my own almond milk some time. Nut milks are easy to make.]

• Cooking with wine vs. drinking it: Best bottle not always best for the pot [Toronto Star]

• Changes in America’s Soft Drink Consumption Habits [Fooducate]

• TRENDS: American Drinking Habits [The Nibble]

• Caul Fat [The Kitchn]  I don’t know why this fascinated me. I think it’s the look of it and its use. One thing I took away from that item: If you don’t eat pig product you might be eating it anyway if the caul fat from pig is used to make the meat of another animal.

• A guide to which sauces go best with which noodles [Chow]

• A quick way to slice cherry tomatoes. Brilliant. [Saveur]

• On a fun note: What kind of foodie are you? (And before you share this on Facebook ask yourself: Do I really need to post another quiz?) [Time Out New York]

Your Score: 66. Sorry to break it to you, but you’re a Bona Fide Foodie Elitist. Looks like your love of fancy foods has given you a bit of a tude, hasn’t it? Go sit in the corner with your shad roe.

WTF is “shad roe”? Yes, I’ll look it up.

• On Passover: Considering Child Slavery on Cocoa Farms [The Jew and the Carrot]

• Meghan, this one’s for you: Spring Cleansing? [The Jew and the Carrot]

• Matza 101: Eggrolls, Tacos, Anyone? [kosher.com] My mom makes matzah lasagna.

• Final passover note: Every year the UJA of Greater Toronto takes financial donations for their Passover Food Drive for the Jews of Cuba. Check it out.

Have a great weekend!

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• Tropicana’s poor redesign kills sales (kottke.org)

• Frito Lay Canada recalls pistachios [The Globe and Mail] – More on that in Thursday’s links.

• Plant Inspection Sheds Light On Pistachio Scare. [NPR]

• 13 Pistachio Tidbits. [Fooducate]

• Smoked salmon recalled over concerns about Listeria. [The Globe and Mail]

• Polyphenols could lead to allergen-free peanut butter: Study [Food Navigator]

• Lack Of Sleep Linked To Diabetes. [City News]

• Megan on cranberries. Now I’m thinking twice about buying dried cranberries, not that I have an issue with sugar. [Making Love in the Kitchen]

• Charcuterie: Will it stay or will it go? [The Globe and Mail]

• Reporting on a trend towards cooking that dispenses with recipes and relies on improvisation. [Wall Street Journal] This is the way I do most of my cooking. There’s some great information in that article.

• Passover Recipes from the New York Times.

Always on top of these things, Bob at Slashfood (never one to be remiss either) informs us that today (for the next hour and twenty minutes) is National Grape Popsicle Day. I know, you’re all cursing me for not telling you sooner. Run out to your local late night convenience store/grocer now for your grape Popsicle.

I did a little search and discovered some other upcoming food-themed “holidays”:

• Tomorrow (May 28) is National Hamburger Day (also Kite Flying Day – let’s go fly a kite up to the highest height).
• Friday (May 30) is National Mint Julep Day.
• Saturday (May 31) is National Macaroon Day (funny, I always thought that coincided with passover) and also Speak In Complete Sentences Day ’cause you know, people don’t always speak in.

I’m not making these up. Someone might be, but it’s not me. They’re online, on multiple websites, therefore they are true. After all, everything you read on the internet is true.

>More on Grape Popsicle Day.<

I think I’ve scooped Bob. Sorry, Bob. Of course any “National” holiday likely only applies to the United States and I’m Canadian. We don’t need these silly holidays anyway, although Rocky Road Ice Cream Day (June 2), Peanut Butter Cookie Day (June 12), and National Onion Rings Day (June 22) make me want to eat like an American. The U.S. should be the final Canadian province. Yes, the entire U.S. Run by the Canadian government.

One more link that I came across in my bookmarks: A Japanese video that demonstrates how to make bread in a rice cooker.