I’m a stay at home mom and general Jill-of-all-trades living in San Diego, CA with my husband and preschool-age daugher, Sami.  In addition to experiments with food, I enjoy my “career” as an amateur writer/blogger, personal photography projects, music, spinning (yarn) and knitting, bicycling and running.  I’m currently in training for a marathon.

I converted to Judaism in May of 2009, and a major theme of the last two years or so in my life has been finding ways to meaningfully and continually add observances to my life.  Having been raised in a Catholic home, and a casual one at that, I wasn’t familiar with the kinds of personal limitations that come with a more stringent adherence to the laws in the Hebrew Bible (and absolutely astounded by the rabbinic laws, which are extrapolations and interpretations for the Torah for “current times” through the ages.)  As I learned, I grew and evaluated Jewish observances with an eye toward keeping them and really processing how they fit into my personal ethics.

Food has been an area of awareness for me, particularly trying to eat fresh, organic, local, ethical, etc.  So the Kosher dietary laws, while daunting, did appeal to me on an elementary level.  We are what we eat, so guidelines for eating a certain way make sense.

I stumbled upon this project in a thoroughly unoriginal way – during my frenzy of summer reading I picked up Julie and Julia and found myself admiring the challenge that Julie Powell wrote about, and literally drooling over her descriptions of recreating all of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  The only trouble was that most of what she described, I couldn’t execute because of the Kosher laws – no mixing milk and meat, no shellfish, no pork, etc.

Thus I came upon a challenge.  Could I master French cooking while also remaining Kosher?  It’s easy enough to make simple substitutions, but how would those subsitutions affect the flavor of the final dish?

That’s what I hope to discover through this project!