The Vegetarian's Dilemma

Do you tell your hosts you're a vegetarian? 

Many say, you don't want them to go through any trouble and you can just eat the side dishes. I say YES, YES, PLEASE TELL!

1. (Unless you are a vegetarian or vegan purely for health reasons) isn't having someone purchase meat on your behalf half as bad as eating it?

2. What's so bad about influencing your hosts menu? If you believe in the cause, wouldn't you prefer your host serves more plant-based foods?

3. Your host wants to please you. A good host plans a meal around what she hopes her guests will enjoy. A lot of thought goes into this and if you can steer your host in the right direction, it is helpful.

Rosh Hashana Menu

Beginning with Shabbat, tomorrow night, through the second day of Rosh Hashana, on Tuesday, there are six festive meals with barely one day to cook in between.  Since I'm having guests for five of those meals, I thought I might want to plan a menu. I don't want my the two young men staying with us to get hungry over the next six days and I want to make sure we have enough FRESH foods left for our big meal on Tuesday. I've had my hands quite full with my non-cooking activities, so I'll be relying on store-bought challah and dips, and uber-simple dessert.

Thankfully, most of my shopping is done, but I'm hoping to go to the shuk (market) tomorrow for fresh salmon and vegetables.

Pesto Zucchini

Here's my provisional menu:

Friday night

• Turkey with tomato sauce, red wine, mushrooms, olives, and basil
• Challah and dips
• Rice
• Lightly roasted zucchini with pesto sauce
• Dessert: Mango

Homebrewing - Part 2: The Process, Amazing Hops, Useful links

This is the second post in our series on brewing beer at home, by special guest, award winning brewer Boaz Harel.  CLICK HERE to read Part 1: Why make your own beer?

One little piece of advice before you forge forth: Looking at all this stuff can be intimidating, and it's easy to get overwhelmed or feel like this is too complicated for you to do. It's not. Making beer is easy. Primitive stone age people did it 6000 years ago with clay pots and a bonfire, it it worked fine. The only difference now is that we've got much better equipment, and many more people to help you if you get stuck.

Using Wort Extract by Jason Pratt

In the Part 1 I discussed why you should brew your own beer at home. Now, I'm going to talk about the basic process of brewing, and try to tackle some of the common questions of new homebrewers. If you are familiar with the process (or are just impatient) you can skip to the links at the bottom of the post for more concrete instructions and resources for brewing at home. 

Let’s start with the most basic question: What does brewing involve, exactly? Well, simply put, when you brew you take the sugars and flavors from malted grain, mix it with water, boil, season to taste, cool, and ferment. See? It's simple! Now go brew!

Ok, so maybe it's not as simple as it sounds. To get the sugar out of the grain you have to rinse it out with water at specific temperatures for specific times, using the twin processes of "mashing" (soaking the grain) and "luthering" (rinsing the grain and filtering out the particles). Doing this at home means that you start with a bunch of dry grain and end up with a big pot's worth of grain-flavored sugar water, known as "wort." When you start your brewing from grain you are using "all-grain" brewing.

Argentine Family Traditions

Zeide and me drinking Mate on the back porch

Today would have been my grandfather's 81st birthday. He passed away October 19, 2011, a few days before my son was born. Pablo Hackman, my Zeide (we called him by the Yiddish word for grandfather), was born in Poland and moved to Argentina as a baby. There he married my grandmother "Lala" and they had two kids before moving the family to New York. I wanted to celebrate his birthday by reminiscing about a typical family gathering.

Our food and get-togethers were very much influenced by Argentine culture. And Argentine culture is influenced by Italian culture. We ate lots of pasta, and said "ciao," and probably did lots of other things I don't realize are more Italian that South American. I grew up in Florida, living near my grandparents and my Aunt Monica's family. We got together often to enjoy asado Argentine barbecue.

We would all meet at Lala and Zeide's house in the afternoon. We might sit outside by the pool, or inside with a soccer game on the TV. At some point, maybe in the afternoon, my grandparents would prepare mate (mah-TAY) for us to share. (I was going to make this whole post about yerba mate, but that will wait for another day.)

Quick Electrolyte Drink

It's hot outside! It is so hot that running simple errands can take a lot out of me. Do you ever feel so thirsty and exhausted, but water just isn't cutting it? When I return home from a sweaty walk, this is what I like to put in my water bottle:

• 2-3 lemon slices
• a little drizzle of agave syrup (maybe 1 teaspoon)
• TINY pinch of low-sodium salt substitute. Read the ingredients. You want something with sodium AND potassium. I use something that is half sea salt (sodium chloride) and half potassium chloride.
• ice
• water

Summer Foraging PLUS Purslane Tips and Recipes

Last week I took a very pleasant and informative "Wild Edibles Class" with experienced forager, Ronit Peskin. We walked through Gan Sacher in Jerusalem and found over a dozen edible plants - fruits, herbs, spices, medicinal plants, and more. I can't wait to tell you about everything I found and what you can do with it! Today I will discuss Purslane - the lemony, crunchy, weed of summer.

First, what did we find in Jerusalem?
Trees: Pine, fig, carob, olive, sumac, dwarf pomegranate, Judas tree/redbud, thorny Hawthorne, yucca
Bushes: capers, wild carrot/Queen Anne's lace (bird's nest), myrtle, rosemary, lavender, wild fennel, black mustard, wild oats, Roses
Low-lying Weeds: plantain (plantago lagopus), mallow, clover, purslane, prickly asparagus. prickly lettuce

Now, all about Purslane (Portulaca oleracea)

Also known as: Cat's tongue, pourpier, ma chi xian - horse tooth amaranth, verdolaga, pigweed, little hogweed, pusley, pussly, perpine, munyeroo, portulaca, garden purslain, rigla, or רגלת הגינה

Where to find it: Purslane is everywhere! In the city, in the forest... Maya commented on my Facebook Page that she used to collect purslane at her family's farm in North-West Pennsylvania. And here in central Israel, where it has been a very hot dry summer, it's still green.

How to pick: Look for bright green, thick, paddle-shaped, waxy leaves (like a jade plant), on knobby, fleshy green (or red, pink, or brown) stems, and tiny yellow flowers. Purslane generally hugs the ground and grows in a sprawling spider or web-like shape. The biggest leaves and the thinner stems are best for eating. It can be gathered without any tools, since it lacks thorns or a woody stem.

Poisonous look-alike: At some stages, purslane might be confused with poisonous spurge.

Grilling Ideas PLUS Kosher Recipes Link-Up

I recently joined the Kosher Connection. Each month we'll jointly host a "Link-up" on a different theme. Today I'd like to share some general ideas about:

• Nontraditional dishes that make the most of a tradition grill (like things you can serve on Shabbat or bring to a pot-luck)
• Tips for using non-traditional "grills" (great for cooking on vacation or in dorm-style situations)

The smoky, dry heat produced by a grill gives food some amazing flavors. Once you already have the grill set up, there's no reason to stick with simple grilled veggies and the traditional meats. You can use the grill as a flavor-boosting step in so many dishes.

By using the grill you can add an exciting summery flavor to dishes that can be taken to a friends house, to work, rewarmed for Shabbat, or eaten cold.

This Shabbat I served a crustless quiche or pashtida. The main ingredient was grilled butternut squash. The grilling (or roasting) carmelized the squash in a way that wouldn't have been possible if I baked the whole cassarole at once. Instead, the squash was soft and sweet and fully cooked by the time the egg was done. I even enjoyed this cold for breakfast yesterday!

Gluten-free 3-cheese Vegetable Lasagna

This dish is heavy on the prep, but very rewarding. My husband and I decided we liked the leftovers even better, hot or cold.

Avi watching me slice eggplant

Fried eggplant

You will need three cheeses:

• Something salty (I used Bulgarit)
• Something soft like ricotta or cottage cheese
• Something stretchy and melty like mozzerella (I used "gvina tzuba", something like Edam.)

Sabra Sorbet (Frozen Prickly Pear) PLUS How to Safely Cut Them Open

Photo by Sarah Melamed

Drive down any highway in Israel this summer and you will see spiny golden balls generously sprinkled along the tops of the cactus patches. This cactus fruit or prickly pear is called tsabar צבר in Hebrew and is the name sake of the native born Israeli - called a Sabra - prickly on the outside and sweet on the inside.

I don't have patience for Sabras. All the Israeli friends I've made in the last couple years were friendly on the outside, and any prickly people I've met still scare me. But this year I decided to get over my fear and buy my my own tsabar. Of course, I wasn't venturing into a cactus patch, I was just crossing the street to buy some de-clawed sabras. But even with the big thorns cut off, they can bite. 

Since the sabras were packaged, I was forced to buy a whole kilo. If I had only bought one or two, I probably would have been turned off by the seeds and quit, but being stuck with a whole bowl-full, I had to find something to do with them. It turns out they make a wonderful sorbet!

My First Lychee Encounter with VIDEO

Lychee "nuts", or Litchi chinensis, are technically in season, though they're still not cheap. My kids go crazy for them and I think they are really beautiful inside and out. (I'd love to do an art project with the skin/shell.) They have prickly, leathery magenta skin. It doesn't have sharp spines, so you can easily handle them. If you leave them in the fridge the skins will dry out and become more difficult to cut open, but the taste of the fruit remains sweet. The texture is in between a grape and a plum, the pulp is white and translucent. I would describe the taste as sweet and perfumy. If you cut straight through to the the seed, like you might open an avocado, the flesh easily separates from both the skin and the seed.