Sour Cherry Soup

A Hungarian favorite. Not JUST for Shavuot.

By Adeena Sussman for MyJewishLearning

The tradition of eating dairy products on Shavuot has ushered in an entire menu of delicious dishes. For Hungarian Jews, Shavuot often coincided with the country's prolific sour cherry harvest.

Ask someone with Hungarian ancestry about their favorite foods, and invariably sour cherry soup is among them. "We would eat it during the summer months," said Miri Abraham, a friend of mine who used to visit her Hungarian grandmother, Emma, in Israel during summer vacations. "It was always part of a dairy meal."

Most recipes use a thickened mixture of sour cream and flour to lend the soup its signature pinkish-purple color. Sour cherries are at their peak towards the end of spring, and have a shorter season than sweet cherries. Luckily, jarred varieties (which are better than canned) are available all year, and are relatively easy to find.

Serve this soup as a sweet first course, or as a refreshing alternative to heavier desserts.

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Masgouf: Iraqi Fish

The famous fish dish eaten along the Tigris.

By Claudia Roden for MyJewishLearning
Reprinted with permission from The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York, published by Knopf.
When Jewish families in Baghdad had big parties like weddings, which usually took place in the gardens of houses, they hired specialists to come and prepare masgouf. The specialists were the boatmen (ballamchi) on the river Tigris who brought in the fish every evening and cooked it on the riverbank in Baghdad. When the boats came in at around 9:30 in the evening, the boatmen went up to people sitting in the riverside cafes to take orders and proceeded to clean and cook the fish on the bank. By the time they were ready, the men in the cafes were drunk on arak and beer. In the summer, the riverside was dotted with the flames of brushwood fires against which were silhouetted the fish roasted upright.

Among the happiest memories of Baghdad Jews are the picnic parties on the river Tigris. On hot summer nights, parties set out in the high‑prowed ballam (boats) with a supply of bread, fruit, and cold drinks, singing and playing the oud and tambourine.

The boatmen towed their catch behind by strings through the gills. They stopped upriver and started brushwood fires while they prepared the fish. They would cut the fish down the back, clean it, and rub it with salt. They hung each fish upright on four pointed stakes planted in the ground, cut side towards the fire, 14 inches (36 cm) from the fire, so that they cooked slowly while the topping of chopped onions and tomatoes was prepared with condiments and spices. When the fire burned down, the fish were put directly on the embers and covered by the juicy topping. For wedding parties in private gardens, the boatmen were hired to cook the fish in exactly the same way as they did on the riverbank.

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Green Lasagna

By Shannon Sarna for The Nosher

I grew up eating lots of very traditional Italian-American lasagna, baked ziti and anything else you could cover in homemade tomato sauce and cheese. And I loved it – I mean who doesn’t!? Garfield the cat was even one of my heroes growing up. I always appreciated his feisty-ness towards his sibling (Odie), his appreciation of napping and of course his love of lasagna.

In the past few years I have yearned for lasagnas with a little more flair, and a little less sauce. I have made a white pumpkin lasagna, and a white lasagna with spinach and pine nuts. I have included a béchamel, and left it out. I have even experimented with different kinds of cheeses.

As the greens of spring have taken over at my local farmer’s market, a lasagna recipe was once again creeping into my head. Peas, fresh herbs…something was simmering.

When I suggested a puree of spring peas with herbs basked into a creamy lasagna, my husband was less than enthusiastic. He responded to the idea saying, “Um..ok. I guess let’s see how it turns out.”

I love it when my husband has to admit he was wrong, and in the case of this lasagna, he had to concede defeat as he shoveled another bite into his mouth. And though I actually hate peas, this lasagna is absolutely out of this world, creamy and full of fresh spring flavors. It’s also perfect for a Shavuot celebration. Pair with a crisp glass of white wine and a simple mixed green salad and you have a complete meal especially appropriate for a June lunch.

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Everything New Is Old Again

By Julia Moskin for the New York Times

Artisanal gefilte fish. Slow-fermented bagels. Organic chopped liver. Sustainable schmaltz.

These aren’t punch lines to a fresh crop of Jewish jokes. They are real foods that recently arrived on New York City’s food scene. And they are proof of a sudden and strong movement among young cooks, mostly Jewish-Americans, to embrace and redeem the foods of their forebears. That’s why, at this moment in 21st-century New York, the cutting edge of cuisine is the beet-heavy, cabbage-friendly, herring-loving diet of 19th-century Jews in Eastern Europe.

“It turns out that our ancestors knew what they were doing,” said Jeffrey Yoskowitz, an owner of Gefilteria, a company that makes unorthodox versions of gefilte fish and is branching out into slow-brined pickles and strudel. “The recipes and techniques are almost gone, and we have to capture the knowledge before it’s lost.”

The wave that began with Gefilteria, the Mile End delis, Shelsky’s of Brooklyn and Kutsher’s Tribeca has suddenly crested, with three places opening in the last month. Black Seed Bagels, a brick-oven bakery from the owners of Mile End, features toppings like horseradish cream cheese, beet-cured salmon and watermelon radishes. Baz Bagel & Restaurant, a cheerful Minsk-to-Miami venture, offers bread pudding made from babka, lemon-scented blintzes and hand-rolled pumpernickel-everything bagels. And Russ & Daughters Cafe serves the store’s legendary smoked fish and herring alongside remixed classics like whitefish chowder and halvah ice cream with salted caramel.

The chefs and artisans behind these new enterprises are embracing the quickly disappearing foods of their grandparents — blintzes and babka, kasha and knishes — and jolting them back to strength with an infusion of modern culinary ideas. Those foods became punch lines in the 1970s, when the health consequences of a steady diet of meat, salt, bread and cream became apparent, and when strong, smelly foods like garlic dill pickles and herring with raw onion seemed dated, even embarrassing. “Food rejection was part of the assimilation process,” said Devra Ferst, editor of the food blog The Jew & The Carrot.

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How to Make Tahini Paste, or Sesame Seed Butter (And a Recipe for Spiced Tahini-Yogurt Dressing)

From midEATS

I am willing to bet that there is no authentic Middle Eastern kitchen that doesn’t stock tahini paste. There’s just no way to go without it, especially if you’re having a seafood meal. Tahini sauce — made from tahini paste mixed with water, lemon juice, spices, garlic and sometimes, yogurt — has become a staple even in a lot of Western homes. What can tahini dressing not get drizzled on? At least all these make the cut: salads, roasted vegetables, stuffed vegetables, rice or quinoa, falafel, shawerma, seafood (and I’m probably missing lots more). The best thing about tahini is the smooth, nutty but mild taste, followed by the fact that it pairs well with pretty much any savory food, and certain sweet ones as well (halawa, anyone?). If you can get your hands on tahini made with organic sesame seeds, it’s a quite nutritious dressing to boot!

The origin of sesame seeds (and some benefits to eating them)

Before I dive into my post on how to make homemade tahini, I’d like to share a couple of cool facts I stumbled upon when researching sesame seeds (yeah, that’s really what I like to do in my spare time):

• It’s old! Ancient 4000-year-old Babylonian records mention sesame, and it made the cut in the list of medicinal drugs kept by the ancient Egyptians (oh, and I found it pretty cool that they called it sesemt). In fact, “sesame seed is considered to be the oldest oilseed crop known to man, domesticated well over 5000 years ago” (Wikipedia).
• Sesame is native to sub-saharan Africa and India, where it is cultivated in the largest quantities to this day.
• Sesame has one of the highest oil contents of any seed. The oil is considered quite stable as long as it is expeller pressed and stored properly.

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Spring Quinoa with Pesto & Greens

A beautiful spring salad; perfect year-round.

By Elisheva Margulies for The Nosher

You might have heard rumors that there's a grain-like food that's kosher for Passover. Better than a new flavor of matzah, quinoa (pronounced keen-wha) is a seed that resembles and tastes like a grain, and can be found at your local grocery store.

While it's a relative newcomer to the American kitchen, having only been introduced to the States in the past 20 years, this ancient Andean seed has been an important food in South America for over 6000 years. A member of the goosefoot family, which is also the family of beets, swiss chard, lamb's quarters, spinach, and amaranth, quinoa is not technically a grain, but can be used as one in cooking.Year-round, quinoa is perfect for vegans, those with celiac, and anyone looking for a change from rice. It's gluten-free and contains all of the essential amino acids, making it a complete protein.

You might be wondering why quinoa is allowed on Passover, when your favorite rice and lentils are not (if you are an Ashkenazic Jew). Ashkenazic rabbis ruled that kitniyot--products made from corn, rice, millet, and legumes--are prohibited on Passover because they are too similar to grains that are already forbidden on Passover. But quinoa didn't make the kitniyot list, because it is a new world crop, and medieval Ashkenazic rabbis were not aware of its existence.

Furthermore, because quinoa grows in the high altitude of the Andes, where hametz does not grow, there is no chance of cross-contamination with the grains on the do-not-eat list. As long as quinoa is processed in a factory that does not also process grains, it's kosher for Passover and ready for your holiday table. Some approved certifications include the Half-Moon K (KOAOA), found on the Trader Joe's and Ancient Harvest brands of quinoa.

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Nutella Babka

By Shannon Sarna for The Nosher

I didn’t grow up baking or even eating babka. Coffee cake, definitely. Banana bread was a staple. But babka just wasn’t something around. When I did finally taste babka as a teenager, I was like: where have you been all my life!? Chocolatey, chewy and slightly gooey – it was a perfect Shabbat morning breakfast treat with a cup of tea or coffee.

Recently I’ve been itching to recreate babka at home. I mean, I bake challah every week – why shouldn’t I tackle babka? But, it was harder than I thought. I tried the recipe from Jerusalem. And it was great. But not quite what I was hoping to create.

And then I came across two other recipes: one from Orly Ziv’s Cook in Israel and one from a blog I came across on Instagram: Ba-Li cravings.

My recipe is really a combination of Orly’s genius idea to stuff a babka with nutella, Ba-li’s tried-and-true dough which I have updated only slightly and a technique from Jerusalem that ensures that ooey gooey babka taste and texture we all crave.

This recipe is easily pareve-erized. (Yes, you can make this nondairy.) You can either buy a nondairy hazelnut spread or you can also make your own using a recipe like this one.

It’s perfect to enjoy with a cup of tea of coffee. Or if you’re like my daughter, you will just dig right in.

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