I posted over on my personal blog about a new produce program from one of San Diego’s leading major produce vendors.
I’m so excited, I’m sharing it everywhere!
Specialty Produce: Farmers’ Market Bag program (http://cherylkatz.org/2010/04/18/new-csa-option-specialty-produce/)
We hosted our annual expansive and welcoming seder yesterday – a day early due to some scheduling difficulties. It’s the first large gathering I’ve tried to host that involved plated service for almost 15 (including the kids.) It’s also the first time I prepared nearly everything that was served, a departure from previous pot-luck, family-style seders.
In keeping with the traditional symbols of Passover, I planned a menu of lamb shanks braised in homemade lamb stock and red wine, braised romaine lettuce, maple brandy carrots, matzo ball soup (stock AND dumplings hand made, of course!) and a mushroom and green onion kugel for the vegetarians.
The challenge of doing this all not only non-dairy but without chametz (prohibited grains) was, truthfully, much diminished by the culinary education I’ve received up to this point. This is not to discount the number of tasks completed nor the accomplishment of completing everything well and timing it all effectively; only merely to appreciate how much I’ve learned in a relatively short time. (I prep things, such as chopping vegetables, much more quickly now as well.)
I’m most proud of the vegetarian entrée because it was an exercise in creative thinking within the constraints of the non-dairy, non-chametz. To make the kugel, which consists of making a custard to soak the matzo and binding it all together by baking, normally I’d use milk and eggs. In this case I’ve learned that a custard can be any liquid bound with eggs, and so I substituted soy milk. I know, soy is kitniyot, or foods that can be confused with the actually prohibited chametz. I’m personally not so concerned about avoiding soy products, and vegetarians gotta eat, too.
Every year I’m reminded about how much I love the idea of tradition, both as part of a rich ethnic and cultural history but also for tradition’s own sake. I made an Egyptian date-raisin charoset (fruit-mortar, intended to remind us of the mortar the Hebrews used in slavery to build the structures in Egypt) but also made sure that we had the traditional Ashkenazi apples-and-nuts version on hand. It wouldn’t exactly be Passover without them.
We always have a symbolic bone on our seder plate, but this year I knew for sure that it was actually a lamb /shank/ bone – because it came out of the lamb cuts I prepared for the meal. This is my first Pesach as a Jew, my first as a cook with training, and so the richness of the symbolism combined with the seasonal freshness of all of the traditional foods have really heightened my experience of this spring harvest festival.
And I appreciate the freedom that I have to choose to be Jewish, the educational opportunity I always have at my disposal, and I will continue to work and pray for freedom for everyone who still is not free from all types of bonds.
Chag Pesach same’ach!
And do not for a moment let my extended withdrawal from writing here indicate that the Jew and Julia project hasn’t been at every moment present in my heart.
It means only that, good gravy, my life got busy and complicated lately.
This road trip vacation from which the Katzen not-so-recently returned (in November) was an adventure in many ways, not least of which was culinary, but it certainly didn’t find me in a kitchen cooking… at all. (Since then I’ve started culinary school, and find myself cooking more hours a day than I typically sleep in a shot.)
So my Jew and Julia challenge to take ye olde regular recipes and turn them kosher turned to a possibly even harder challenge: how to eat in restaurants for two weeks while remaining at least kosher-style. (I had and generally have no delusions that simply because I am vegetarian in restaurants, that I am achieving perfect kashrut observance, but conditions being what they were, I did my best.)
And the conclusion at which I arrived was a disappointing one, and a challenging one. One that I don’t typically talk about very much, if at all, because it is discouraging.
Keeping kosher is really, unbelievably hard. Not in the rote observance of a specific list of rules, but because of the nitty in the gritty. Because you can’t see melted animal fat, chicken/veal/beef stock, et cetera, and it may very well be in the pan where your vegetarian dish was cooked. Because you don’t control all points of preparation when you are ordering in a restaurant (hence the “best effort” clause above.) It’s also hard for me personally, having been raised with no dietary restrictions other than preference-driven ones, because I know what most foods taste like. I know and vividly remember the flavor of a cheeseburger, and to this day I still like it. Finally, it’s hard because my spouse does not keep kosher, and because he is my daughter’s parent, too, I don’t overrule his choices when what Sami eats is up to him.
These are all points I’ve addressed in some form or other before, but the hardest part of it all is that my marriage was essentially based on food love up until the day I decided to start observing kashrut. It is hard to sit across the table from the person you love most, and refuse to try the awesome dish he just ordered because of religious observance. I miss about our relationship the expression of love through flavor. It was a thing we shared that we really don’t share as much any more.
While on vacation, I got into a conversation with a relative over breakfast, flowering from her query, “How kosher is your kitchen?” Good question. And here is where it’s time to come clean, so to speak, not that I’ve been hiding anything; I merely realize that I haven’t been very specific. My dishes are all glass, easily kashered by washing. My cookware is stainless (easily kashered), except the occasional enameled cast iron pot (not kasherable) and cast iron fry pans (kasherable, but I have separate pans for meat vs. dairy, just on principle and apart from kashrut.) We have a santitzing dishwasher, and I rationalize that this lets me get away with a lot. I do not do a great job of separating cookware, have an only loosely segregated refrigerator, and I do not put my foot down and prohibit the storage of treif in my fridge (though I don’t cook it in my house – Ben reheats in the microwave from time to time.)
In short, on a scale from 0 to glatt kosher, I might rank a 2. A 2 which represents a tremendous quantity of compromise and struggle and some marital jigsaw-puzzling, and I believe this is not to be discounted.
I also do not address this topic in effort to assuage my guilt, since I feel negligible guilt. I’m trying in general to do “the right things,” but I cannot let my home life fall apart. Should it require abandoning kashrut observance entirely to keep the rest of our lives in peaceful order, I would do it.
To be honest, I try and fail at a great many other mitzvot (commandments) as well. I drive on Shabbat, to shul at the very least. I try but often forget not to use my computer, though I do curb my impulse-texting, Tweeting and blogging. I do pretty successfully avoid writing with pen on paper. I turn the lights on and off with careless abandon. Sometimes I am late with the Shabbat candles.
Yup, I’m a “bad Jew,” Except that in this process of self examination, I’m learning that while I am failing to fulfill a great many mitzvot, I am mindful of what I should be doing and it is in my mind to always be moving in that positive direction. I also can’t write off the mitzvot that I /do/ fulfill with minimal fanfare. So while I am out of town and eating in a restaurant, I don’t needle myself with grief because there may be traces of meat matter in my cheese. I have to appreciate what the obligations of kashrut make me mindful of, even if I find myself negotiating them against the balance of my life. And I have to appreciate that there are a great many ways of building Jewish identity and expressing Judaism that don’t relate to food, and I can’t overlook them simply because, when you look at it squarely, I am in fact obsessed with food.
The blog continues because I think it’s a good challenge to see what is possible in French cuisine with the constraints of kashrut. But the blog also continues because I see totally unforseen value in the question of how to be a Jew without relying on food to do so.
I had to post from out of nowhere when I read this Mental Floss post about Irma Rombauer andThe Joy of Cooking. I tend to think of this book as a useful but outdated spring from which American culinary interest flowed. I didn’t know that Rombauer was a first-generation American, nor that she was admittedly inexperienced in culinary arts, nor really anything about the circumstances under which it was published. Let it suffice to say that I never particularly cared to find out.
Well, it turns out that Irma Rombauer was another remarkable and unique woman, bringing her abilities and perspective to the hungry American masses in the right way and at the right time. A persistent believer in her product, well acquainted with her target market, with a witty style and enough peripheral info on cocktails and entertaining to keep the book of cuisine afloat.
And to think that Americans are too stupid to cook. Imagine that. Like we did in the Great Depression, and like people always do when things are lean, people are reaching for cookbooks to squeeze something better from their time and their kitchens. It goes without saying, since Ruhlman said it for me, that nothing is “too hard” for us to do, if we think smart about it. I’m always a little gobsmacked when I think about how little many people are engaged with the food they consume. If saving a few pennies gets people critically involved in their diet again, that can only be a good thing.
If you ever happen to glance over at my Tweets column, then you’re not entirely in the dark about our recent road trip vacation. My little family packed into a rented car and drove all the way up the West coast to Seattle, then flew home on Tuesday.
I’ll be back on the ball with new cooking and new posts after Shabbat, but I wanted to send up the smoke signals that… I’m back! And I have some new posts brewing.
Shabbat shalom!
I took a second stab at Potage Parmentier with just a tad more adherence to the “recipe.”
I put “recipe” in quotes because the instructions allow for some adding and re-jiggering of ingredients and amounts. In this case, I dropped the leeks and substituted yellow onions, as one of the offered options, and added some grated carrots.
No bacon salt this time.
The soup was thinner this time, for reasons I’ve been unable to discern. But it did have a mellower, rounder flavor thanks to the leek omission, and the carrots added a warm sweetness. If I’d been thinking, I might have thrown in some cinnamon and ginger, but sadly, I wasn’t.
Knock on wood, this oniony soup business seems to be keeping my immune system propped up. Sami’s into her second week home from school with a very runny nose, intermittent cough and far too much energy. I’m usually the first and hardest hit when it comes to sickness, but maybe good food, regular exercise and a little good old fashioned luck of the draw are keeping me going.
Must remember this for future cold & flu seasons.
[Leek or Onion and Potato Soup]
I’m now at serious risk of becoming ‘The Bacon Blog.”
In any case, with my entire family housebound due to various coughs, sneezes and sniffles, and with li’l me fighting off all these germs, I thought some oniony soup might be just the thing today. Onions have that sort of pungency that, whether effective or not, just convinces me that it’s fighting infection and fortifying me from within.
The recipe calls for a pound of potatoes and a pound of leeks and/or yellow onions. Potatoes: check. Leeks: I had about 2/3 lb, so added a small yellow onion, sliced thin, to round it out. I picked this recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking from memory because I assumed it would contain bacon. (Potatoes + onion + bacon = what I recall as a pretty unbeatable flavor combination.) I was wrong! No bacon, not even any cream or milk; the entire recipe is pareve.
The recipe really is quite straightforward; slice potatoes and leeks/onions, simmer in a 4 qt pot with 2 qt of water and a tablespoon of salt, remove and mill/puree. Voilà.
But I just couldn’t let it be, not with the sampler pack of Bacon Salt
staring me down. I took a half cup of the onions and cooked them in a tablespoon of oil for about a minute, then added a tablespoon of Hickory flavored Bacon Salt
.
Even frying in oil, this stuff does not smell like bacon.
Nonetheless, I let that cook for a few minutes, then went ahead and added the potatoes, the balance of the leeks and onions, and the two quarts of water and proceeded to simmer as directed.
The resulting puree wound up just a shade off the not-quite-white it would otherwise have been. I guess the bright red of the Bacon Salt counteracted the green to a nearly neutral. And I must share that with the addition of bacon salt, the soup did come out smelling and tasting as if, somewhere in the process, real bacon matter had been introduced.
I solicited a second opinion from my husband Ben, who concurred; I trust his baconometer better than my own as he makes no bones about consuming whatsoever animal substance he sees fit, and so can compare to recent bacon experiences.
Not quite what the recipe intended, but it’s good, and it’s vegetarian and kosher, potato-ey and onion-y; a bracing soup for a weakling day. Two thumbs up from the Katz clan.
With a month to go, time is getting short to share my big news of the hour:
I’m going to culinary school!
I’ll be attending a great program in San Diego with a reputation for well-trained, employable chefs; it’s geared toward people like me who have a degree, have had a career and are looking for specific training in culinary arts, not a general education experience, and so the program is short and intensive. I’ll be done with the program and my externship in early July.
Of course, most people I have talked to about this have asked me how I plan to approach my education from the kashrut standpoint. And this I answer with a sigh, because the answer is not perfect, but as with so many things I have weighed my options, chosen what I consider the best plan for the long term, and must be happy with my decision.
According to my program, I am not required to eat anything. However, I will be required to prepare all of the same assignments that every student must complete. This will more than likely result in cooking treif, or non-kosher preparation techniques.
It was a tough decision, but here is a summary of the decision process.
1) The nearest kosher culinary school is in Brooklyn (the Center for Kosher Culinary Arts) but I am rooted here in San Diego for the forseeable future.
2) I want to one day have a job in the food industry, and should our family livelihood ever come to depend on my skills as a chef, I want to be able to do anything that may be asked of me in any job situation. I’m sure this gets into a very gray area in relation to kashrut, but should the choices be my family suffering from lack of income or cooking non-kosher food outside my home, I would without hesitation choose the latter. (Without duress, I plan to build a career that does not bring me to compromise my personal ethics, kosher or otherwise.)
3) What I do at school, I do not have to do at home. That really was the bottom line for me. I don’t control what happens outside my home. I’m paying good money for an education and I plan to make the most of it. But I do control my choices in home and in public, and I absolutely control what is cooked at home. My education will change my skill set, but it will not force me to change my personal ethics.
So with the decision made, the start date a mere month away, I couldn’t be more excited! I can’t wait to become a knife-skills ninja, slicing precious minutes off my meal preparation at home! I can’t wait to know so much more about foods, much of which knowledge I hope to apply to the Jew and Julia project.
I can’t help but feel, having spent so much time in the past several months reading and thinking about Julia Child, that I’m walking in her very large and formidable footsteps. She forged her path by cooking at home, getting education, and then striving to do something meaningful and satisfying with her education, as well as simply thoroughly enjoying great food. I don’t know yet what I will find in my future, but that doesn’t sound like a terrible direction to move in.
My fires are fueled, and I’m looking forward to my new adventure!
I’ve spent some time recently with my many tomes on Jewish food… all of which contain snippets of history but none of which tell me what I want to know.
I can find a page or two sketching out the history of Jews in France between approximately 800 and 1300 CE, for example, but no trace of what foods came in or went out with them.
I have on my to-do list a more thorough research project into the history of Jews in France, but this fall has been a whirlwind and I haven’t made a serious attempt at undertaking that yet. I’m armed with a few directions in which I want to start my search, and I promise to report back when I have something of interest to share.
Thanks to Amazon, friendly neighbourhood everywhere market, I now have Bacon Salt in my personal arsenal.
I’m sad to report that a taste from the jar offers a flavor shockingly similar to Bac-Os, which is disappointing to say the least. But I am willing to give it a real shot, in a recipe, in heat, over the stove.
Now that it’s sitting on my counter, I don’t know how I feel about Bacon Salt. On one hand, it really is vegetarian, kosher, etc. On the other hand, is it just an easy way around the dreaded bacon prohibition?
I will give it a fair shake. I have my doubts that it will adequately impart that irreplacable bacon flavor. Perhaps it will require immersion in schmaltz to be effective… that is an appealing idea.
...she twote.
