Limmud

Yesterday I had a chance to talk about my favorite subject, food, of course, at Limmud FSU www.limmudfsuusa.com. Surprisingly, about twenty people showed up, although, I was expecting a much smaller number given the caliber of the presenters at the event. I was really happy to see so many young people eager to listen.

So for those of you who missed it, here are some interesting food history facts worth knowing:

Seven Products of the Land of Israel from the Torah:
“Wheat and barley, and vines and fig-trees and pomegranates; olive-trees and honey” (Devarim 8:8)

Up until the beginning of the last century olive oil constituted 20%-30% of the daily caloric intake of the inhabitants of Israel.

The Jews in Alsace specialized in breeding fat geese whose livers they chopped and made into a paste (chopped liver) and out of which Jean-Pierre Close, the chef of one of Loius XIV’s commanders in 17th century developed ‘pate de fois gras.’

The art of making Stuffed Cabbage was developed for the dish to be served on Simchat Torah as the rolled cabbage reminds us of the Torah scrolls.

The earliest recipe for gefilte fish (stuffed pike) appeared in a manuscript written in Germany in 1350.

My Daughter's Bithday Shabbat

For the last cooking assignment I’ve decided to make something that would be vegetarian and would remind me of the several places our people live in thought the world. I took the recipe from the “Olive Trees & Honey” book (p.74) and it is under the name of “Moroccan Eggplant Relish”. Did I tell you that the book lists every dish’s name is the language most commonly used for it? So this one is apparently in Arabic-French mixture “Zeilouk d’Aubergines”. However it reminded me of a rather traditional salad the Tat Jews of Caucasian region of Caspian Sea made so often. These days one can try a number of variations of it in Israel. The taste would probably vary depending on the origin of the chef making it. Israelis made cooking with eggplant into an art in itself. I, usually, am not so fond of it (I would never eat babaganoush), but sometimes I like it and my view of it reflected the outcome of the dish, which turned out more like vegetable relish than an eggplant one.

Making it was fun for multiple reasons. First – I was making it for my daughter, whom I haven’t seen for 10 months and who is keeping to her vegetarian diet and her sustainability goals for all this time. How interesting that our readings in this class have finally brought me to the same subjects. When I mentioned to her that there exist theories that G-d originally wanted the humankind to be vegetarians, she acted as if the idea was so natural to her that she could not understand why I was surprised.
Second – over the last couple of years I have become (dare I say) friends with another vegetarian girl in her late teens ready for college and much better writer than me. We often discuss our food intake differences and now I wonder how young people brought up here in the free world have different views than us, their parents. Yet they are our continuation. Because of both of these amazing girls I’ve actually become more interested in the subjects like eco-kashrut and vegetarian kashrut. I have to publicly thank them for it.
Back to the recipe though:
2 Medium-large eggplants (peeled)
1 tablespoon kosher salt
¾ cup olive oil
2 onions, finely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, minced
2 green bell peppers, seeded, deribbed and coarsely chopped
1 ¾ pounds plum tomatoes, skinned and chopped
3 tablespoons tomato paste
2 teaspoons paprika
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Ground black pepper
1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
¼ cup fresh cilantro or parsley (I used a mix of both)

The eggplants need to be cut crosswise, then lengthwise, the diced and left in a colander under some salt for about an hour until they “sweat”. After that, rinse them under the cold water and pat dry several times until they are dry completely.
In a large saucepan fry the eggplant in heated olive oil in 3 to 4 batches until golden and get them off to paper towel to drain.
In the same pan fry the onion, garlic, peppers and sauté until softened 5 to 10 min. add the tomatoes, paste and spices and bring to a boil.
Return the eggplant to the pan and simmer over medium heat for about 20 min stirring occasionally. Stir in the vinegar and cilantro.

Mine turned out a little too hot for some taste, but that’s how we liked it on the shores of the Caspian Sea :-). It was a real vegetarian Shabbat, my daughter’s 19th birthday. I didn’t miss the meat one bit.

Cholent

Our new assignment was to cook something that we’ve never cooked before and talk about this practice in relation to the immigrants’ experiences in the States.

This was very interesting for me for a number of reasons:

First, believe it or not, I have never made a cholent. My kitchen is very small and I have always been reluctant to buy a slow cooker for fear that I have no space for it anyway. So my Shabbos lunch would always mean a blech, hot kitchen and tons of questions on the laws of reheating: yad soledet bo and the like. Nightmare all in all. But, I just got a brand new KitchenAid slow cooker for my birthday from my niece and nephew-in-law!!! Yey for the best family! I would have never bought it myself. I had to try it.

Second, I am an immigrant and the abundance of kosher food here in Brooklyn is so remarkable to me that I do feel a little like the people Hasia Diner is talking about in her book “Hungering for America”. When my family started to observe kashrut a couple of years before we emigrated, the only place to buy kosher meat was the main synagogue. And that meat did not even resemble the lamb shanks I had for the cholent. And here comes another mix. My family is Ashkenazi, but my husband was born in Derbent, a small town on the Caspian Sea near Baku (Azerbaijan, presently a separate country), where quite a few remnants of Ashkenazi families settles among Tat (Gorsky or Caucasian Jews, that trace their wanderings to the times of the exile after the First Temple Destruction), so we have quite a bit of Sephardi-like preferences in our food. Therefore, the recipe may sound weird a little, but here it goes. I took:

2 lamb shanks
½ cup dried white beans
¼ cup barley
1 turnip
1 carrot
1 potato
2 onions
½ zucchini
kosher salt
black pepper
olive oil
3 cloves of garlic
A bit of herbes de provence
A dash of cumin
1 bay leaf
A dash of dried basil
About half a cup dry red wine
About half a cup tomato paste

Firstly, I put the beans to soak before I went to work Friday morning. When I came home, I put the olive oil in a skillet and browned the shanks on the high heat. Then added the onion, sautéed a bit, added garlic and cut up vegetables and cooked just for a bit with wine, maybe 3 to 4 minutes. Since I was very short on time before Shabbos (cholent needs to be at least 30% done before the start of Shabbos), I had to rush, otherwise I probably would have taken the time to remove the shanks and deal with vegetables separately.
Then I put everything together in the slow cooker, added some water and put it on high for about 50 minutes, which gave me enough time, then set it on low and …..

Voila – Cholent!

For my first try it actually turned out quite tasty, I did not even have to salt or pepper it more

Miriam’s Kitchen – Sweet & Sour Cabbage.

Well, cooking is not new to me. I have at least 3 shelves lined with cookbooks, kosher and not. But blogging about it – this is definitely the first.

The idea was actually in the air bouncing off between me and my “run-away” living all the way across the country for almost 9 months now. Maybe this will be more than just class entries, but another way of connecting us.

In any case, I am almost done with this amazing book. It reminds me so much of my own grandmother, whom I, of course, took for granted. She was the best cook I knew, that’s for sure.

So for my first assignment – to make some Jewish dish I have never made before and blog about it, I decided to make something we don’t really like much in my family and took a sweet and sour cabbage recipe.

Here’s the list of stuff I needed:
1 red cabbage (about 5 lb)
½ cup margarine or olive oil
Salt & Pepper
½ Teaspoon nutmeg
3 Tablespoons white vinegar
3 Tablespoons brown sugar
½ cup white raisins
½ cup dried currants
2 cups peels & diced apples

Well, the first thing I have to tell you is that I never go exactly by the recipe. So this time was no different. First, I could not find kosher dried currants (of course!). Never mind – I used a bit of fresh cranberries. I buy these in large quantities. They usually show up in our stores right after Sukkoth and I throw the bags in the freezer to use all year round. My baby (meaning my almost 19 year-old) likes to eat them straight from the bag – no sugar added.
Next I decided I don’t want to use so much sugar. So I used a little less.
Next I thought why not add a bit of chopped mixed nuts that were left over after the strawberry cake that I made for my birthday the same day? So in the nuts went.
Lastly, I poured a little red wine.

The only pain in this recipe for a kosher person is to check/clean the cabbage. I hate buying pre-shredded cabbage. It is usually too thick and dry. So like my rebetzin taught me, I cut the cabbage into chunks, spread the leaves, wash it, and put it into a huge bowl of very salty water for a while. Then I carefully pick the cabbage up and wash it again under running water.

And then I shred it very thin.
Cabbage goes into the heated oil (I don’t like margarine) with salt, pepper & nutmeg.
After a minute I added everything else and in 5 minutes or so turned the heat down. The cabbage then simmered for about an hour.

Surprisingly enough it turned out pretty good. Even my mom said so :-)