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!

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.

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.

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 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.

I am now at a point where, while I watch my weight, I detest “diet food.”  If I have to eat less of richer food to maintain a healthy weight, then I will do so, because life is too short to waste eating low-fat sugar free crap.

That said, when I first started roasting my own chickens, making my own stock, and generally using as much of each chicken as I could find means to do, I became intensely interested in the cult of schmaltz (chicken-fat, for the uninitiated.)  I discovered that I could toss and roast firm leafy greens (hello, kale!  Hello, chard!) in the shimmering golden pan drippings from the resting chicken, and those two tablespoons of otherwise wasted leftovers made green vegetables so heavenly delicious that even my herbiphobic husband would eat them.

How exciting that schmaltz is making a comeback!

I now will regularly trim wads of fat off the edges of my chickens, render it, and pour it off into a container to be frozen for future use.

I arrived at my present general dismissiveness of diet food some time after I became inspired to ‘do it myself’ in my own kitchen.  (As I discovered, it’s hard to replace the fattiest or sugariest parts of a recipe and still wind up with something satisfying.)  Julia Child, as you might imagine, played a huge part in my personal food revolution; it was watching her show and reading about her that made me realize something critical: that the recipes in her books weren’t designed to be outlandishly rich.  This was how people *ate* as a matter of course in the 50s in France, and probably in general before food- and diet-science got out of control.

What is the point of food if it isn’t satisfying?  I will admit that I’ve been struggling with my weight recently, and spending time feeling deprived.  Just recently, I decided that I am simply no longer going to waste calories eating food that I don’t enjoy.  Life is too short… but I’ve already said that.  I may wind up eating less, but I will wind up more satisfied.

This article about Julie and Julia, Julia Child and what it might really mean to be a woman who loves food without reservation, got me thinking down this path.  I don’t hold out a lot of hope for being a food lover with complete abandon; I’ve regarded food as an adversary for too long to ever truly leave that mindset behind.  But it’s meaningful to me to be closer to Julia’s end of the spectrum than I was when I started out 5 years ago trying to put together meals with a modicum of flavor that I wouldn’t feel guilty eating.

Eff that, that’s what I have to say about feeling guilty about eating.  It’s an affront to all of humanity both to eat more than one needs to, and also to feel guilty about nutrition.  I am also a strong proponent of slow food, and to that end believe that less processing is healthier for the food, for the eaters, and for the environment.  De-fatting and de-sugaring certainly qualify as processing.

In a world where so many people go hungry, don’t I – as a person, a woman and a Jew? – have a responsibility to approach food in a healthy way?* And not just in a “health food” (as in turkey bacon?) kind of way.  So much of what we consider culturally Jewish cooking is founded on principles designed to squeeze out every ounce of flavor and nutrition from food sources animal and vegetable alike, and to make delicious and truly satisfying food in a physical and emotional sense.  (There’s a reason that “comfort foods” of all cultures are the richest ones.)

Shouldn’t we all be eating food, and not processed food products?  And I mean all of us, from the richest breakfast-bar-buying demographic to the poorest literally starving population on the planet.  I didn’t start this post intending to soapbox about sustainability, but the same principle that encourages me to explore economy for not entirely economic reasons – say, to stretch a single chicken to its absolute limit, and my vegetables to main dishes, scraps for stock and trimmings for compost – to me suggests that the entire human population could be getting a lot more nutrition out of raw foods than we are getting from high fructose corn syrup and bleached white flour.

This entry is my committment to eat foods I love, and love the foods I’m eating.  It’s a committment to avoiding waste and leaving more for others.  And yes, it’s a committment to whole foods, which includes fat, glorious fat, an important dietary component and biological requirement.

If it’s going to be struggle to find a balance between enjoying whole foods and not enjoying them *too much* then that is a burden I am willing to bear.

*Hazon thinks so – they host the Hazon Food Conference every year, which Wikipedia tells me is “an annual meeting of farmers, culinary experts, global citizens, business, community and Jewish leaders to focus on contemporary food issues and exchange ideas on improving health and sustainability in communities throughout the world.”

Fat Camp – by Daniella Cheslow > Tablet Magazine – A New Read on Jewish Life
Celebrating “Julie & Julia”

I can’t commit to cooking the whole book. I simply will not be tossing a live lobster into a pot of boiling water, for any number of reasons, some of which predated my arrival in Judaism.  (It’s tempting to think that Judaism is dramatically changing the way I live my life in EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, but I had a pretty strong set of principles even beforehand.  I wouldn’t cook a live animal then, and I won’t now.)   I will very likely NOT be mastering the art of French cooking in the meticulous and complete way that Julie Powell did.

That’s okay, because that was her journey, and this is mine.  Lucky for me that this is a by-design imperfect one, because I have a penchant for being discouraged by the prospect of imperfection.  Having assumed at the outset that I will simply not be able to achieve perfection allows me to operate with seemingly boundless freedom (except for the limitations provided by kashrut, from whence all imperfections AND limitations come.)  Perfection is impossible, therefore I cannot fail; failure is impossible, so I am compelled to experience the journey fully.  (How perfectly this meshes with the last post, on mindfulness and its impact on experience.)

I am also not a perfect expert on anything – not on kashrut, not on Judaism, not on food, cooking or France.  What I have going for me is room for improvement.  When I think about the things I read, the people I find most interesting are the ones who admit, when necessary, that they have no idea what they’re doing.  I find, like them, that I may start a job completely bewildered and come out with my head pointing up, and this is the first step.  I will not only get my bearings, but learn something in the process, so help me.

No one likes a know-it-all anyway.  What I don’t know, I’ll figure out, and you’ll learn it with me.  What I don’t learn, perhaps you will teach me.  At some point, I’ll have exhausted Mastering the Art of French Cooking, though that should take a while.  At that point, what you and I together don’t know, the library, the Internet, other people and the world at large will teach us.

We each can commit only to being the best person we can be, each day.  My hope, and my goal, is that each day is my best day.  I’m lucky that since perfection is unattainable, I will always have a goal.