March 7, 2010 | 8:07 am

Saving LA, or The Front Yard Artichoke [RECIPE}

Posted by Rob Eshman

A front-yard artichoke

Over the weekend, I was mulling my second list—Nine Ways To Make LA an Ultimate Food City—as well as the comments it provoked, and it occurred to me that by making LA a better food city, we will make it a better city in general.  Cleaner, more prosperous, more just, more accessible, more fun, with healthier, smarter children to boot. Just by focusing on something too many of us see as indulgent—the quality of our food—we can effect great and much-needed changes throughout our whole society. 

Consider this thread: I want to eat plenty of fresh artichokes.  Three years ago I ripped out the front lawn that came with our Venice house, and planted it with artichokes.  I get two crops each year.  Last summer I estimated my artichoke harvest at 130 pounds. Today, looking out my window, I see the plants are ready to bud out.  The goat manure they’ve gobbled—another post on another day—has thickened their ribs and sent their spear-shaped leaves out four fee in each directions. The buds themselves are sweet as Cynar, as delicious raw as cooked.  Here’s the benefit to the city: my food-centric landscaping uses less water—but produces food with the water it does use.  It attracts bees, especially when I let some of the buds blossom, and my front lawn is studded with bursts of blue choke thistle.  I share the harvest with neighbors, many of whom I’ve met as they stop to admire the stretch of farm interrupting the street’s lawn lawn lawn scape. In sum: we eat better, our home looks better, our neighborhood feels closer, and we put less strain on the environment. A better city through better food.

Years ago in an essay, author/eater Jim Harrison called for the betterment of America’s restaurants.  He wanted America to be more like France, where even truck stops served memorable meals. “We’re not necessarily talking the fate of nations here….” he wrote. But maybe we are.  Maybe how we eat has more to do with our city’s and our nations’ fate than we know.  We do know that it directly determines our body’s fate, so why not that of our body politic?  Improve our food, improve our city.  Better food, a better country.  There’s a Green Party, why not a Food Party?  Better yet, a Slow Food Party? Just think about it, a party platform that comes with recipes…

Roasted Artichoke Buds

By the end of the artichoke season, I have bags full of the smaller artichoke buds, and I needed to find a way to clan, cook and serve them quickly, while they were still fresh, but without a lot of hassle.  This is that way.  Eating them is a messy, finger intensive process, the same as picking through Dungeness crab hearts on Fisherman’s Wharf or Chesapeake Bay crabs down by the Potomac in Washington DC.  But um, kosher.  I pick off the smaller buds—though this works for even larger ones—and leave them to soak in salted water for an hour. The earwigs that inevitably crawl out go straight to the chickens.  After a careful rinse,  they are ready to use.

Artichoke Buds
Olive Oil
Fresh Thyme
Fresh Bay leaves
Garlic, crushed
Splash of white wine
Salt and Pepper

Preheat oven to 500 degrees. In a large roasting pan or tray, toss ingredients together in a proportion that makes sense.  You want to flavor without overpowering, and you want enough oil to shine up each choke.  Cover and place in oven until soft, about 40 minutes.  Remove cover and finish roasting, stirring occasionally, until the edges are brown and crisp, about 20 minutes.

Serve hot, warm or cold.  You eat this by picking off the inedible parts and sucking up the soft meaty ones.

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March 5, 2010 | 9:08 am

Friday the Rabbi Eats Tofu [RECIPE & SLIDESHOW]

Posted by Rob Eshman

Santa Monica Kosher's Sabzi Polo

In his “Off the Pulpit” e-mail column today, Rabbi David Wolpe declares his long-time vegetarianism.  Rabbi Wolpe is one of the leading rabbis in the country—an accomplished author and speaker who leads one of the major Conservative congregation in the west, Sinai Temple.  In the past we’ve run stories on hos he single-handedly, using his considerable rhetorical gifts, swayed his congregation to give up their gas hogs for Priuses, or donate to help Israel, or any number of other worthy causes.  But has he ever tried to ween them off animal flesh?  Not that I know of. Sinai Temple is a big, meaty shul.  About a third of the congregants are Persian Jews, and I suspect there’s not lot of veggies in the lot. A Persian meal may be tricked out with a thousand pilafs and adorned with bowls of fruits and nuts and haystacks of fresh herbs, but the heart of the exercise is meat: stews, kebab and, as the community has grown wealthier and more Americanized, hunks of roasts.  This is a people who loves their meat.  They would follow their beloved rabbi anywhere—he has proven that—but even he knows how far to lead.

That has to be challenging, because not eating animals is very much part of his heart and soul.  As he writes:

I have not eaten chicken or meat for decades.  I readily acknowledge that Judaism does not ask this of me.  Kashrut is not vegetarianism.  But kashrut is a reminder of Judaism’s concern with animal suffering.

The Talmud tells the story of a frightened calf on its way to slaughter breaking free to hide under the robes of Rabbi Judah Hanasi, one of the greatest of the Talmudic Rabbis.  Rabbi Judah Hanasi pushes the calf away declaring, “Go — for this purpose you were created.”  This insensitivity was punished, the Talmud relates, and the rabbi later repented. (B.M. 85a)

Tza’ar Ba’alei chayim, acknowledging and preventing the suffering of living creatures, is an important Jewish principle.  Nature may be “red in tooth and claw,” but we are both part of nature and commanded to rise above it.  For human beings, instinct is the beginning of the story, not its culmination. To make those in our power suffer, whether people or animals, is to darken our own souls.

Many biblical heroes are shepherds; animals too must rest on the Sabbath (Ex. 20:20) and the bible legislates many other protections for animals.  We are the custodians of creation.  Our first responsibility is to be kind.

To attend a Persian feast (let along an Ashkenazi steak-and-chicken fest) is to see the fruits of factory farming laid out in abundance.  As much joy as the rabbi takes in celebrating with his congregants, he has to wince at the buffet.  At a benefit for the Shoah Foundation last year, we sat next to each other. The food was well above average—pumpkin ravioli in sage cream sauce, rare lamb chops—but the rabbi told the server he wouldn’t be eating.  He nursed a glass of red wine all night—“My kind of meal,” I said.

Many years ago I ate with him at his favorite restaurant, Real Food Daily on La Cienega.  My sense is the rabbi isn’t just veggie, he leans vegan.  He plunged into whatever was on offer, but I was less enthralled. With its tempeh burgers and Tofu Reubens, Real Food always struck me as faking real food.  If I go vegan, give me an honest sabzi polo, not a substitute deli dish.  Anyway, the rabbi was happy.

But does eating meat somehow lower us, does it, as the rabbi says, “darken our own souls?”  I’m not convinced.  As Barbara Kingsolver writes:

“I find myself fundamentally aligned with a vegetarian position in every way except one: however selectively, I eat meat. I’m unimpressed by arguments that condemn animal harvest while ignoring, wholesale, the animal killing that underwrites vegetal foods. Unaccountable deaths by pesticide and habitat removal—the beetles and bunnies that die collaterally for our bread and veggie burgers—are lives plumb wasted….

…“We raise these creatures for a reason.” *What, to kill them? It seems that sensitivity and compassion to animals is lacking in this comment.

“To envision a vegan version of civilization, start by erasing from all time the Three Little Pigs, the boy who cried wolf, Charlotte’s Web, the golden calf, Tess of the d’Urbervilles…

“Recently while I was cooking eggs, my kids sat at the kitchen table entertaining me with readings from a magazine profile of a famous, rather young vegan movie star….What a life’s work for that poor gal: traipsing about the farm in her strappy heels, weaving among the cow flops, bending gracefully to pick up eggs and stick them in an incubator where they would maddeningly hatch, and grow bent on laying more eggs. It’s dirty work, trying to save an endless chain of uneaten lives. Realisticially, my kids observed, she’d hire somebody.”

“My animals all had a good life, with death as its natural end. It’s not without thought and gratitude that I slaughter my own animals, it is a hard thing to do. It’s taken me time to be able to eat my own lambs that I had played with.”

Rabbi Wolpe points out that, “Many biblical heroes are shepherds,” but of course those shepherds raised animals for food and ate the animals they raised.  Meat suffuses the Bible—raising it, cooking it, sacrificing it.  It strikes me that the Torah at least accepts and more likely promotes killing animals as part and parcel of a holy life.

That leaves the major question of how: how do we treat animals, kill them, and eat them?  That is where holiness enters the equation—that is where we have the opportunity to raise ourselves beyond our “animal nature.”

But, still, the rabbi needs to eat, and eat well.  So below is a recipe for Sabzi Polo, an herby Persian pilaf fluffed with herbs and studded with the fresh fava beans that are in the farmers markets these days.  The picture and slide shows shows Santa Monica Kosher Market’s sabzi, as well as its shishlik grill which fills the parking lot each Sunday and sends plumes of agonizingly fine smelling smoke (to me, not Rabbi wolpe) down Santa Monica Blvd.

Shabbat Shalom.

Sabzi Polo

6 cups water
4 cups uncooked long-grain white rice
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup water
1 bunch fresh dill, chopped
1 bunch fresh parsley, chopped
1 bunch fresh cilantro, chopped
3 cups fresh fava beans
1 T. ground turmeric
1/2 c. shelled pistachio nuts
salt and fresh grown pepper to taste

Directions

In a large saucepan bring water to a boil and 1 t. salt to boil. Pour rice into boiling water. Boil until rice rises to the surface of the water. Drain rice and return it to the saucepan. Stir in the oil and water. Mix in the dill, parsley, cilantro, fava beans,  salt and pepper.

Cook the rice over medium heat for 5 minutes.

Reduce heat to the lowest setting. Cover and simmer for 40 to 45 minutes.

Turn out onto platter and decorate with tumeric and shelled pistachio nuts.

Find more photos like this on EveryJew.com

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March 2, 2010 | 10:00 pm

Nine Ways to Make LA the “Ultimate Food City”

Posted by Rob Eshman

Touchy touchy.  Last week in Foodaism I dared suggest that Saveur magazine may have been overhyping things by declaring Los Angeles “The Ultimate Food City.” To read the bawling, angry, acting-out reactions to my post you’d think I called for every Yelper to be sent to bed without his Kogi.  So this week I’ll do what any good child psychologist would have suggested I do first: use positive language. 

To reiterate my basic point: LA has wonderful food.  It has bountiful ethnic restaurants and markets, some very good high end places, and an impressive web of farmer’s markets.  Saveur got all that right. But LA is not yet the ultimate food city; it is not even a great food city.  That was the thrust of my criticism. I didn’t mean to insult those who just discovered Koreatown, where I’ve been working and eating for the past 16 years, back when there were more bad Fillipino places there than good Korean ones (Who else remembers the Jitney Café?).  And who knew that Palms has such a loyal fan base. You’d almost think it was, I don’t know, Venice.

Yes, I love that I can—as I did not long ago—stop on the way to work at the Argentine café Grand Casino for a yerba mate and a cornetto, continue onto Koreatown where at lunch a Korean chef will show a Latino busboy how to make my Japanese sushi roll, then pop into the Tar Pit on the way home for a meeting and drink a glorious concoction of bay leaf infused vodka, oloroso sherry and flamed orange rind, grab a cupcake for the kids at Famous Cupcake, then have dinner at Ado, where the chef/owner is in the kitchen and the maitre d’ owner would hold his hand on a light bulb if you told him it was too bright. That is a good food day, in a very good food city. (Not average though—usually I make my own mate, grab an avocado sandwich from Sunny and Charles at Trimana, and make dinner for the family at home).

But here, on the positive side, are the Nine Ways to Make LA a Great Food City.  Read to the end, then add Number 10:

1. Open a Massive, Throbbing, Heart-Stopping, Hunger-Stirring Big-Ass Perpetual Farmers Market.

Think Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers Market,  but indoors in a landmark centrally-located building, open 7 days a week. Think Les Halles of the 19th century, updated to the 21st. This would be the jewel in LA’s food crown—a showcase for the finest locally-grown ingredients, a ready market to encourage new growers and artisan food makers, a place for chefs and diners to mingle, a spur for new food and food education.  Yes we have Grand Central and the Farmers Market on 3rd and Fairfax, and maybe these could morph into that, but they aren’t there yet.

2. Triple the number of Food AND PROVISION trucks

Those food trucks descending like fine smelling SWAT wagons into Venice and Holywood and Mid-Wilshire prove that in a city that makes it hard to get to food, there is an abundant market for food that gets to you.  Build on that success. Bring back the bakery and vegetable and seltzer trucks that used to cruise LA—one of my happiest childhood memories is of the Helms Bakery truck that regularly honked its horn in front of my Encino house, bringing the Mad Men-era housewives and us kids out for bread and a glazed donut.  The Japanese man who sold vegetables out of the back of his truck soon followed.  Besides making sure good food permeates the city’s long stretches of mediocrity, a new food truck flotilla would create impromptu neighborhood meeting places.

3. Free up zoning and licensing to mix food businesses and residential areas, and F the NIMBYs.

When I dared dis Palms in my last post, what I meant was that between Pico and Venice boulevards to the south and north and between Lincoln and National (to be kind) on the west and east, there is NOTHING TO EAT.  Nowhere to stop.  If you want to walk from your house for a cup of good coffee, you will walk for a mile.  True, at the scale of fully tanked-up car LA’s food is spread out before you like Babbette’s Feast, but driving from course to course does not a great food city make.  The key is to integrate high quality corner stores, cafes, restaurants and bars into neighborhoods.  Make good food a part of the block, not a distant destination.  Of course when proprietors try to do that, neighbors load on so many conditional users the bottom line won’t pan out.

4. Loosen after hours regulations and encourage more late dining out

A lot of great dining happens after 10, in Madrid, in Bangkok, in Buenos Airies. This town closes up too early. What about keeping the lights on the Venice Boardwalk on warm nights, and turning it into a strolling promenade like the Zattere in the real Venice?  Let people linger, eat late, enjoy.

5. Improve public transportation

To be a great food city you need to have diners who can get around to eat it, explore it, stay late enjoying it.  Many commenters pointed out the fact that LA’s miserable public transportation system makes that difficult, but that, they say, is the problem with LA, not LA’s food.  To which I say, quoting Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive, “I don’t care.”  Doesn’t matter whose fault it is, it is an irrefutable damper on LA’s ability to be a great food city.

6. Encourage City and Suburban Agriculture

The more stuff we grow, the stronger our ties to good fresh ingredients and the chefs who turn them into good food.  Turn lawns into artichoke plots, empty lots into tomato fields, sideyards into chicken coops—a pygmy milk goat or two on every block!  Make it easy and legal to sell the excess at neighborhood farm stands.

7. Invest in Yummier Schools

I believe that children are our future. No, really.  The more money and time we put into programs like Alice Waters Edible Schoolyards, the more the next generation won’t settle for calling LA the ultimate food city, yet.

8. Zone for More Outdoor Cafés, Especially on the Coast

As I said, we have the best weather and the fewest outdoor cafes; some of the nicest beaches and the worst coastal dining.  Let’s convince the county and the powers that be that there is revenue in smart restaurant growth along the beaches.

9. Make the Supermarkets Part of the Solution

Jim Murez, who runs the Friday Venice Farmers Market,  rightly points out that LA food revolves around the car and the supermarket.  When you consider the quality of the supermarkets, you understand a lot about how far we have to go to improve people’s understanding of how good food can be. But that’s where we are, and that’s where we need to start. So here’s the plan: encourage the supermarkets to carry more local food and produce; to hold more nutrition, cooking and gardening demos, to use some of their hardscaping for demo gardens, to work with local chefs to promote better eating and cooking.

That’s my list of 9.  What’s your #10?

12 Comments — Leave your comment

March 1, 2010 | 11:30 am

Norman Lear Finds God

Posted by Rob Eshman

Norman Lear

Has Norman Lear found God?  I don’t mean, has the television pioneer become religious, I mean: maybe the guy has really uncovered Who and What God is.

I read his blog on Huffington Post and kept hearing a little voice saying, “Yeah, yeah,” and then realized that little voice was my own, and it was talking out loud.  Lear’s God is the God of a Great Peach, of a Good Cigar, the God that provides pleasure and beauty where mere sustenance would suffice:

Still, ever since my early twenties when I smoked my first good cigar, I have felt that if there was no other reason to believe in God, Havana leaf would suffice. I’ve had similar epiphanies while biting into a ripe peach, a just-ready piece of Crenshaw melon or a great ear of corn.

I’ve sensed God’s presence while sitting in the back of a dark theater where a comedy was playing, watching an audience of a thousand strangers coming forward as one, rising in their seats and then falling back, as people do when they are laughing from the belly. I’ve fallen in love with a total stranger, several aisles and many rows away, just at the sound of his or her distinct laugh. And I’ve experienced God’s presence—Him, Her, It, nobody’s been there and come back to describe God to me—in the faces of my wife, my children, and my grandchildren, and every time throughout my working life when I’ve gone to bed with a second act problem and awakened in the morning with the solution.

That God is the God of this blog.  It suffices for 95 percent of what life throws your way. As Lear said, let others deem it shallow, unscholarly, non-theological:

I love writing this because I think that this subject—the “What’s it all about, Alfie” question—is the best conversation going. Just plain folks, unfortunately, can’t get into it, because the rabbis, the priests, the ministers, mullahs and the reverends—the professionals—have a corner on the subject. The authority of their stained-glass rhetoric can be, and is often intended to be, intimidating to those of us who either lack a depth of knowledge in scripture or know scripture but choose to come to God in their own way and in their own language. And so, the sectarian rivalry and sanctimonious bickering about moral superiority and spiritual infallibility that occurs among the professionals often assumes a greater importance than the religious experience itself.

I know, they can be intimidating, the professionals.  To speak of God in a peach, in a smile— those are the ideas of a luftmensch, a wispy-minded man, they will say.  Tow hich I say, yes, I am a luftmensch, but a serious luftmensch, a luftmensch who has given his luftmensch-ness a lot of thought, who has devoted an entire blog to this luftmensch of an idea, a blog with recipes.

And to find in the course of my web surfing a like-minded soul—a like minded soul in the brain and body of such a brilliant, profound and accomplished man—not bad.

In this arena I am a groper (an Unaffiliated Groper, since I have not joined a congregation) incrementally feeling my way toward greater understanding. And I am on Nature’s timeline where a century may be less than a blink. On that scale, as a mere 87-year- old, my search is in the early fetal stage so forgive me my lack of certainty as I seek meaning in life.

As my compact with our Maker develops, I believe it unique to me. I believe all our compacts with that entity are totally unique. No two alike. Take three hundred or three thousand people, sitting knee to knee in the same pews, praying together week after week, year after year, from the same sacred text, and I submit that no two congregants are having the same inner experience. But we are all nurtured by the same things in nature and our capacities for awe and wonder.

I like the metaphor of the thousand-mile river. It passes through time zones and climate changes occur along its path. Responding to the changing climate, the trees, shrubbery and vegetation along the riverbank changes also. But it is the same water responsible for nourishing every bit of growth. There are spiritual waters, call it the River of Reverence, that nourishes all of us who grope for understanding on a journey that will last all our lives and beyond.
There should be a Church for people like us.

There’s not just a church, Norman, there’s a whole religion:  Foodaism.  Welcome.  And have a bite.

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February 21, 2010 | 10:09 pm

10 Reasons Saveur Magazine Is Wrong

Posted by Rob Eshman

Saveur's Miss March-- L.A.

Saveur magazine’s March issue is devoted to Los Angeles.  But is it a little too devoted?

The best food journalism—like the best journalism—  describes its subjects fully, both the positives and negatives.  This package, written by some of our finest food writers, is edited to within a hairs breadth of puffery.  Eating in Saveur’s LA is such a never ending garden of unmitigated delight, you’d think you were in, I don’t know, New York.

What did the editors leave out?

Among the good stuff, not much. Between Jonathan Gold’s pitch perfect concise essay summing up every variety of culinary experience to be had here, to Sandra Tsing Loh’s brief, intense ,memoir of a booze soaked gastronomic wake at the Oyster Bar, to Patrick Kuh’s rehash of the gin joints of old, to David Sax’s endlessly publicized ode to LA’s delis—it was all good. If you’ve been eating LA for a while and follow the food here, there was little new.  But if your idea of LA cuisine is the sprout salad in Annie Hall, you will be schooled.

The problem is not what the editors included, it’s what they left out.  LA, it turns out, has some improving to do.  It is not a great food city.  It is an almost-very good one.  Here are the ten things missing from LA food, and from the current issue of Saveur:

1. Restaurants close too early.

This is a big problem. It’s hard to be a great food city when half the time you’re hungry, the restaurants are closed. Outside of Koreatown and a few other spots, LA refuses to shake its Midwestern Protestant roots.  Starving at 2 am? Go to 7-11.

2. Much of LA is a food desert.

There are few food neighborhoods or food blocks or food streets, where you can walk from a great grocery to a great bar to a nice cafe to a butcher shop to a bakery—you get it. What there are disparate atomized food locations, and you’ll need a car, gas, time and a GPS linked to Jonathan Gold’s Visa card to find them. You can drive Olympic Blvd. from Crenshaw to Santa Monica and not be tempted to stop once.  Try to find anything delicious in Palms. The Westside, where much of LA’s money lives, is particularly parched. I don’t remember any entries in Saveur’s issue from Pacific Palisades or Montana Ave. Do people eat there?  In Paris, New York, Bangkok—- even Tel Aviv—good food and drink beckons around every corner. Here it’s always a drive away.

3.    Angelenos eat to live. They don’t live to eat.

The unit of currency here is the deal, not the meal. Long lunches, long dinner, for that matter, are a rarity. Have lunch in the nicest spots and you’ll see barely a filled wine glass, much less a wine bottle.  Outside the American South, the seriousness of a food culture is inversely proportional to the gallons of ice tea served at lunch.  LA, whose movies and TV shows sell sexiness and cool, is not a sensuous city.  It is a city of grasping, sweating, ambitious Blackberry addicts; millworkers with laptops.  There is great food to be had in LA—no denying that—if only we’d give ourselves time to enjoy it. 

4. Supermarkets and cars ganged up to strangle LA’s food culture.  It is still trying to breathe.

These are the culprits, the twin hands on our food throat. Instead of walking to a great corner bakery, we drive to a mediocre bakery section in a supermarket.  The development of the entrepreneurial, much less artisanal, specialty food store was undercut by the Ralphs and Vons and Whole Foods.  When we are accustomed to second best in our own pantries, we settle for it in our restaurants as well.  (But I don’t include Trader Joes in this indictment.  TJs is another LA gift to food, which I think Saveur left out…)

5. The coffee culture is below average.

Again, you can drive to La Mill or Intelligentsia—neither of which are as welcoming and rejuvenating as Profeta—but one sign of a great food city is a plethora of great cafes. And they’re not called Starbucks.

6. Driving makes for a mediocre bar scene.

Don’t drink and drive + poor public transportation = let’s just have a glass of wine and stay home and watch Mad Men.

7. There are far too few outdoor dining options.

LA should be the “ultimate” sidewalk cafe city.  Instead silly laws and heavy traffic have combined to keep our outdoor areas safe from people enjoying them.  Tellingly, one of the most mediocre meals you can eat in LA is at a place called The Sidewalk Cafe.

8. We have the best beaches and the best weather, and some of the worst beachside dining in the world.

Think Tel Aviv.  The wide beaches lined with cafes and restaurants open from morning until 3 am.  Chairs and tables right down to the water. Servers in bare feet running out beers, hookah pipes, hummus, grilled fish and fresh chips and huge slabs of icy watermelon layered with feta cheese, the music mixing with the sound of crashing waves.  And LA?  We have Perry’s. And Gladstones 4 Crap.  Shame on us.

9. No one comes to LA for the food. 

The sign of the ultimate food city: people go there for the food. What makes our famous restaurants famous is not their food, but the people who eat it.  Take Pizzeria Mozza.  It is a near perfect recreation of a Roman pizzeria. But no sane diner will ever crave it as they would a Roman pizzeria. Because it’s not the ideal. It’s the idea of the ideal. On the other hand, you get to watch James L. Brooks eat.  So there’s that.  There are some wonderful places to eat in LA—Campanile, Mozza, Spago’s, all the places Saveur describes—but no one talks about them with the sense of yearning for their favorite cafe in Paris or trattoria in Venice or street food stall in Singapore.  The food is at the end of the day replaceable.  The scene is one of a kind.  If that’s your thing.

10. The fresh, local food scene has not permeated beyond the precious.

In great food cities, even a mom and pop cafe will have market fresh food, local wine, regional specialties.  Here few places behind the most precious ones have that approach.  Fresh and local isn’t ubiquitous—another mark of a far from great food city. 

But…. in Saveur’s defense:  We do have potential. And Langers.

29 Comments — Leave your comment

February 18, 2010 | 4:10 pm

International cooking and local mingling with Birthright Israel Next [RECIPE]

Posted by Jay Firestone

A moment of confusion.

In my family, women have historically dominated the kitchens.  My grandmother is an extraordinary baker.  My mother is a wiz at Shabbas meals. My oldest sister is the most phenomenal pastry chef I have ever encountered.  And my other sister is a serious force on the grill.

But just as the women in my family assert their culinary expertise, a real man should also know how to cook.

On average, I’d say I exercise said acts of manhood about 3-4 times per week, preparing a variety of meals that range from roast chicken to turkey tacos to teriyaki salmon.

That’s why I jumped at the opportunity to enhance my testosterone this past Tuesday at Birthright Israel Next’s latest cooking class at Sur La Table: ‘International Jewish Cuisine.’ 

The group of about 25 arrived at the Farmer’s Market kitchen supply store at around 6:30 for a little wine and challah.  Sur la Table’s Chef, Martin Gilligan discussed the recipes and safety rules, while adding a few humorous tidbits in a valiant effort to break the initial awkwardness of the room (As soon as we started cooking, everyone seemed to warm up). 

After a brief demonstration of the Chinese classic, orange chicken – kosher style, the crowd dispersed into each of the menu stations.

Morocco: Fish Tagine with Peppers and Olives.
China: Mandarin Chicken with Rice Sticks and Orange Segments
India: Vegetarian Potato Samosas with Mango Chutney
Greece: Date and Walnut Phyllo Rolls with Greek Yogurt and Honey
Israel: Classic Israeli Schnitzel
Turkey: Lamb Stew with Turkish Flavors
Iran: Basmati Rice with Pistachios and Dill
Russia: White Russian Sorbet

Somehow, I found myself gravitating towards the alcoholic white Russian sorbet dessert (It was a long day, I needed to take the edge off). 

Due to the limited time we had in class, we skipped a few steps, but the final product was still dripping with flavor.  I quickly got an ice cream headache…maybe it was a hangover – I don’t know for sure.

When it was time to eat each international dish, the group gathered around table, as a feeling of achievement graced the room.  This is what world peace must feel like.

The end result: about 25 overly satisfied Jews and wealth of worldly leftovers.

Here’s a recipe that I worked on, courtesy of the Sur la Table cooking classes:

White Russian Sorbet

Yield: Serves 4

Ingredients

1 3/4 cups water
1/2 cup sugar
3 1/2 teaspoons instant espresso powder
1 tablespoon dark corn syrup
1/2 cup whipping cream
1/4 cup vodka
1/4 cup Kahlúa or other coffee liqueur
Coffee beans

Preparation

Stir water and sugar in heavy medium sauce pan over medium heat until sugar dissolves.  Increase heat and bring to boil. Remove from heat. Add espresso powder and stir to dissolve.  Pour into medium bowl.  Mix in corn syrup, then whipping cream, vodka and Kahlúa.  Refrigerate mixture until cold, about 2 hours.

Transfer sorbet mixture to ice cream maker; process according to manufacturer’s instructions.  Transfer sorbet to container; cover and freeze until firm, about 2 hours. (Can be made 2 days ahead.)

Freeze 4 coffee cups for 30 minutes. Scoop sorbet into frozen cups.  Garnish with coffee beans and serve immediately.

Photo courtesy of Birthright Israel Next Los Angeles

FYI: Birthright Israel Next offers an awesome dose of Jewish culture mixed with hip programming.  I’ll be at a few of their upcoming events.  Visit their website for the full schedule.

Friday February 19: Shabbat Poetry SLAM
Saturday February 20: Sweatin’ to the Oldies with Richard Simmons
Saturday: February 27: Queen Esther’s Old School Skate Party

4 Comments — Leave your comment

February 17, 2010 | 3:01 pm

Be Vewy Vewy Quiet

Posted by Rob Eshman

The ever elusive kosher organic beef

We are wild, we are violent, we devour, defile, despise and destroy: that is man, unplugged.

There’s a theory that religion developed to tame the beast.  By channelling mans natural impulses into positive forces that build and sustain society, religion keeps every human group from devolving into a scene from Spartacus, and I don’t mean the Dalton Trumbo one, I mean the soft-porn one on Starz.  Those who hold to this theory of religion always bring up sex. Instead of completely suppressing a sex drive that, left to its own devices, would impregnate every orifice from a bike lock to the Grand Canyon, religion directs our compulsion for pleasure and procreation into marriage.  Most religions don’t say, “Don’t do it,” they say, “Do it, but this way.” 

The same with food. This is the most common rational explanation for the otherwise inexplicable Jewish dietary laws, or kashrut.  Why are pigs forbidden but pesticides permitted? If kosher were about health and science, anything that could make us sick, from pork to pesticides, would be outlawed. Why is it forbidden to eat a cow together with its milk, but permitted to eat a chicken with its egg?  Why is it okay to kill and eat a giraffe, but forbidden to eat an almost insensate barnacle?  If kashrut were about compassion, wouldn’t these laws be consistent, or flipped?

The most common answer is that kosher rules are not about science or compassion, but about putting a fence around our appetites, instructing us that we can’t just eat whatever we want whenever we want, there are rules. Our desires know no bounds, our appetites are bottomless. Kashrut puts a fence around our natural gluttony.  And the rules, like food, come from God.  So kashrut is a way to reinforce God’s presence in every detail of our life, even in breakfast. It’s not about the importance of specific rules, but about the idea of rules, rules in general.

This is an explanation that makes sense, because it removes the need for rationality or consistency from a system that exhibits little. Kosher teaches that you can’t have it all.

It also removes the idea that kosher is more compassionate, which isn’t true.  Maybe it’s more compassionate than the way some non Jews used to eat or still do, but it’s also far less compassionate than the way other cultures used to eat, and still do.  It is far more compassionate to eat a clam than a cow. Period.  Those who follow kashrut can allow themselves to feel good about many things—maijntaing a tradition, doing what they think God or their grandparents want them to, following ancient text to the letter, if not always to the spirit.  But they can’t make the claim to being kind and gentle simply becuase they’re kosher.  That is a whole other endeavor, and one that has been noticeably, egregiously missing from the commercial kashrut industry for years.  See Agriprocessors.  See any kosher butcher.  I grew up believing that kosher slaughter was somehow more compassionate than a stun bolt to the forehead, but in a factory farm environment, this is likely untrue.  In any case, once you decide to kill an animal, compassion becomes an extremely relative term.

( I spent the weekend with my sister, a veterinarian, and after batting the idea of “humane meat” back and forth, we decided—admittedly over three scotches—that the most compassionate butcher who ever existed was Elmer Fudd.  Remember his M.O. in the Bugs Bunny cartoons?  He would sneak up behind an animal with his shotgun—“Be vewwy vewwy quiet”—then KABOOM, blow it away before it even knew what was coming.  Talk about humane slaughter.  One instant you’re contentedly munching away in the meadow, the next instant you’re meat.)

So, the answer is, kosher can lead the way to compassion, but kosher alone isn’t enough.  You have to consciously infuse kashrut with compassion.  The folks behind Wise Organic meat are trying to see if there’s a market for that.  They just started shipping their kosher, organic, “humane” beef to Los Angeles.  A few days ago, tipped by Tori Avey, I went to Doheny Meats and found it in the freezer section.  It’s about $10 per pound, and only available in shoulder steaks and stew cuts.

According to the company’s web site, the beef is raised on grass pastures on small family farms in the Adirondacks.  I haven’t read any on-the-spot reporting on this, or on the actual slaughter, so for now, take it all on faith.

I bought three packages, defrosted it in the fridge overnight, then made a steak dinner.  The beef, which I tasted,  was less flaccid than regular kosher beef, with a denser texture: chewy, but in a good, flavor-revealing way.  More importantly, it’s a step in the right direction, to kashrut…and beyond.

[RECIPE] Italian Dandelion

I made these to go with the steak and baked potato.  For me, they were the highlight.  My garden is full of chard and Italian dandelion this winter—I cut it and thanks to loads of fresh goat poop, it reappears weeks later.  So we eat this a lot.

1 bunch greens (kale, dandelion, chard, etc)
2 cloves garlic
1/4 c. olive oil
2 anchovies
1/4 t. red pepper flakes
salt and pepper

In a large pot boil greens until cooked.  Drain. Chop. 

In a skillet heat oil, add anchovies and saute until dissolved, add garlic and red pepper, stil a minute, then add greens, salt and pepper and stir until blended.  Serve warm, cold or room temperature.

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