Crazy for knishes

January 19, 2015 by 3 Comments

Ask any Jew of European origin to describe “Jewish soul food” and you’ll likely get one of several answers. For many people, it would be chicken soup (preferably with matzo balls), also known as “Jewish penicillin.” For some it might be sweet and sour stuffed cabbage, or roast brisket.

But for many, including author Laura Silver, the quintessential Jewish soul food is the knish (rhymes with “dish,” with both the “k” and the “n” voiced).

I can’t disagree. I have wonderful memories of my Philadelphia grandmother’s meat knishes: flaky, melt-in-your mouth pastry wrapped around onion-scented chopped beef and liver. They were heavenly.

A hand-held meal

The knish is the gustatory cognate of many hand-held, savory pastries, including the Cornish pasty, the Italian calzone, the Mexican empanada, the Middle Eastern bourekas and the Indian samosa.

Like those other pastries, knishes were popular with the working classes because they were inexpensive and filling. In the early- to mid-1900s, New York was full of pushcarts and storefronts that sold them.

Knishes also figure prominently in my memories of my other grandparents, who lived in Brooklyn.

They lived in the Brighton Beach area, about a half-mile from the ocean. It was always an adventure to visit them, especially in the summer, because we could walk to the beach and boardwalk.

I was amazed to find beach vendors hawking not only ice cream and sodas but also hot knishes. The ones they sold on the beach were  filled with mashed potatoes and onions and deep fried – kind of like a McDonald’s apple pie made with potatoes. We never bought them – who wanted a hot pastry on the blazingly hot beach?

Memories of Mrs. Stahl’s

But when we walked home it was a different story. At the corner of Brighton Beach Avenue and Coney Island Avenue, we’d pass by Mrs. Stahl’s Knishes. Mrs. Stahl didn’t sell meat knishes, but she sold just about every other kind: potato, kasha (buckwheat), cabbage, spinach, mushroom apple, cherry, cheese, cherry-cheese.

We’d always buy a bagful of knishes and take them back to Grandma and Grandpa’s for a hearty snack.

Turns out Mrs. Stahl’s, a neighborhood staple since 1935, was Laura Silver’s favorite knishery too. She would go there when visiting her Brighton Beach-dwelling grandma. After her grandmother died, eating a hot Mrs. Stahl’s kasha knish was a way for her to rekindle fond memories.

And then in 2005, Silver was heartbroken to discover that Mrs. Stahl’s had morphed into a Subway. After 70 years, the Brighton Beach landmark was gone.

Gabila’s, the primary source of the square Coney Island-style (fried) potato knish, was also gone (though you can still buy their goods wholesale or online), as were many of the knish bakeries in Mahattan’s Lower East Side.

Silver set out to do some research on her favorite food. The result is her book, Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food.

Silver seeks out the descendants of the great knish dynasties of yore and meets Toby Engleberg of San Francisco, and Sara Spatz of New York, granddaughterss of Fannie Stahl (the Mrs. Stahl) who give her the original potato knish recipe, reprinted below.

She also traces the development of the delicacy back to Eastern Europe. In the process she discovers that some of her own ancestors lived in the Polish town of Knyszyn (pronounced “Nish”), which may or may not have been responsible for the derivation of the word “knish.”

Silver’s book includes a list of 18 places throughout the country where you can still buy a good knish.

A dough so thin it’s transparent

The key to making good knishes is creating a very elastic dough that you can roll out so thin you can just about see through it. Then you oil the pastry as you roll it around the filling; the result will be a very flaky, crispy crust.

My grandmother sliced the log of filled dough with the edge of her hand, which not only separated the individual pastries, it also sealed the cut edge.

If you have a free afternoon and feel adventurous, try your hand at recreating Mrs. Stahl’s potato knishes. Then invite a dozen friends over to get ’em while they’re hot.

 

Gaga for Grapefruit

January 12, 2015 by 1 Comment

Today’s piece is by Neil Steinberg who writes a blog called Every Goddamn Day for the Chicago Sun Times. He writes literally every goddamn day, I don’t know how he does it! A Chicago friend kept forwarding me his pieces because she knew I’d like them and I finally subscribed to the blog myself. I love his writing, and I love what he has to say about one of my favorite fruits. It’s a long piece but well worth reading! Neil says he eats only raw grapefruit, but I thought I’d give you a recipe for a grapefruit-poppyseed cake, a new take on the traditional lemon.

There is nothing interesting to say about grapefruit.

Regular readers will recognize that admission as an earthquake, coming from me.

Because I believe that there is something interesting to say about everything.

But grapefruit has thwarted me.

If the subject were oranges, well, that would be another matter. Oranges would be easy. Books have been written about oranges.

At least one book, a good one, Oranges, by the great John McPhee.

Or limes. My God, limes, just the British naval aspect alone could fill a week’s worth of posts: Grog. Limeys. Scurvy.

Not to forget key lime pie.

There is no grapefruit pie.

Even lemons. How did troublesome cars ever get called “lemons?” I’d love to find out.

But grapefruits….They’re big. And heavy.  And ……. delicious.

Grapefruit, straight up, for breakfast

I eat a grapefruit almost every day for breakfast. One entire grapefruit — no halving and segmenting—too messy and time consuming. No sugar or sweetening or demure half maraschino cherry—defeats the purpose.

One orb, peeled, like an orange, eaten in segments, the separation of which can be a true challenge, tearing away all that white coating, but worth it, when you pop the first segment, feeling the sweet, nourishing grapefruit goodness coursing through my system, jump-starting my brain.

Most of my days begin with a grapefruit—220 breakfasts in 2014, by my count, and I would have eaten grapefruit even more often, but sometimes there are none in the house, sometimes I do get sick of them – “grapefruited out” is how I put it – or just feel like an English muffin or a bowl of Wheat Chex instead. But if I do, usually I regret not sticking with the grapefruit. Cereal leaves you hungry; a grapefruit sticks with you.

And it should be red grapefruit; in my mind, and perhaps even in reality, red grapefruit tastes sweet; and also tends to come from Texas, where the red variety began as a mutation in 1929.

Must be the citric acid, which is in all citrus, of course, or the lycopene, which accounts for the pinkish yellow of grapefruit and it thought to reduce the risk of atherosclerosis and heart disease.

I suppose I could work up a nostalgic post on eating grapefruit. My grandmother every year would send a case of grapefruits up from Florida in the winter, a great luxury, because how were we supposed to get them otherwise?

Or there was the time, at the Royal Cafe in London, when we all ordered grapefruits baked in kirsch, because really, how often do you get the chance? Any my mother, having never seen a salt cellar before, and thinking it was sugar, dosed salt all over the warm delicacy.

But I want to do better than that. I suppose I could troll pop culture. Yoko Ono titled a book of random musings Grapefruit, but to find out why I’d have to read it, and I’m not willing to go that far.

An unforgettable movie scene

Better to find refuge in the cinema. No great movie scene collection used to be complete without Jimmy Cagney mashing a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face in “The Public Enemy.” But given our times, that moment has lost its whimsy.

One problem with finding lore on grapefruits is they’re a recent development. Oranges go back thousands of years, in China. But what appears to have been grapefruit, referred to as “forbidden fruit” by the British, a nod to the Garden of Eden, were noticed in the Caribbean around 1700.

“It thus appears reasonable to assume that the name ‘grapefruit’ originated in Jamaica, and has been used since 1814,” Walton B. Sinclair writes in his 667-page The Grapefruit: Its Composition, Physiology and Products.

By 1830 grapefruit were in Florida, which leads the production in the U.S., which leads the world.

According to Citrus: A History, by Pierre Laszlo, the variety of names for grapefruit include pomello, the British term (the 12-volume 1978 Oxford English Dictionary has no entry for “grapefruit,” but tucks the word in a list of derivatives under “grape,” identifying it as a U.S. term, so chosen, I found elsewhere, because the fruit bunch in the trees like giant grapes).

Laszlo continues with shaddock, then pamplemousse, which is French. He doesn’t mention it, but German for grapefruit is …. ready? … grapefruit. Kind of a lack of imagination on their part but then, with grapefruit, that’s par for the course.

Orange is a color. Lemon is a color. Grapefruit is a … well … grapefruit. Its only creative use as an adjective is “Grapefruit League,” baseball farm teams in Florida and Arizona, where grapefruits are grown.

While looking at oranges, some of McPhee’s gaze fell upon grapefruit, and, unlike me, he has no problem unearthing grapefruit-related wonders.

“Citrus does not come true from seed,” he writes. “If you plant an orange seed, a grapefruit might spring up. if you plant a seed of that grapefruit, you might get a bitter lemon.”  Thus the trees can be grafted together, to dramatic effect.

“A single citrus tree can be turned into a carnival,” he continues, “with lemons, limes, grapefruit, tangerines, kumquats, and oranges all ripening on its branches at the same time.”

Yowza. I didn’t know that. And neither did you. But now we both do.

Hunter S. Thompson’s fave

The only writer beside myself I know of who loves grapefruit was – not to compare us in any other fashion – Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is rich with the softball-sized fruit.

His Samoan attorney orders from room service, along with the club sandwiches, shrimp cocktails and rum, nine grapefruits.

“’Vitamin C,” he explains. “We’ll need all we can get.

In the novel, grapefruits are practically a leitmotif: they’re chopped apart with razor sharp knives; they’re moved out into the trunk with the luggage; they become Thompson’s only source of sustenance at one point: “I’d eaten nothing but grapefruit for about twenty hours and my head was adrift from its moorings.”

He carries grapefruit in his satchel, pulling one out on an airplane and slicing it apart with a hunting knife, which makes a stewardess nervous.

“I noticed her watching me closely, so I tried to smile,” he writes, explaining: “I never go anywhere without grapefruit…It’s hard to get a really good one – unless you’re rich.”

A grapefruit is key in one of the oddest sequences in the book, early on, when Thompson hurls one into the bathtub where his attorney is having some kind of drug-induced psychic breakdown while listening to Jefferson Airplane at full volume.

“I let the song build while I sorted through the pile of fat ripe grapefruit next to the basin. The biggest one of the lot weighed almost two pounds. I got a good Vida Blue fastball grip on the f***er and just as ‘White Rabbit’ peaked I lashed it into the tub like a cannonball.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought of that. Because grapefruit are huge, we store them in the second-hand refrigerator in the basement, and I’ll tramp down to get one for breakfast. Walking back up the stairs, that phrase, “a good Vida Blue fastball grip”  – Blue was a hotshot lefty for the Oakland A’s in the early 1970s – pops frequently into mind, and I’ll happily bounce the grapefruit on my open palm, sometimes even arrange my fingers around it as if I were about to fire it across the plate, and smile, thinking: grapefruit.

A poetic tribute

Well, I guess we’ve dug up enough on the subject. Maybe something of interest after all. As I was wrapping up, I bumped into Craig Arnold’s lovely little poem, “Meditation on a Grapefruit,” that sums up the breakfast process far better than I ever could.

This perfect paean appeared in Poetry in October, 2009. As a tribute, it turned out, not just to the fruit, but to the poet himself. The previous spring, while exploring Kuchinoerabu-jima, a miniscule Japanese island, he had fallen into a volcano and died.

Which is a long way from grapefruit. But that’s the marvelous thing about grapefruit: one will take you a long way. Or at least until lunchtime.

Remembering my father with a recipe for Vegetarian Philly Cheesesteak

January 5, 2015 by 4 Comments

This piece was written by my sister, Sue Holliday, for her blog, Memory Smoothie: random memoir-type stories she is writing for her two sons.

I’ve been thinking about my dad as his birthday approaches, and thought there could be no better tribute than this one, which she wrote three years ago; my dad would have been 93 this year. In addition to being a testament to the love he had for my mother, this letter provides an interesting look a day in the life of a U.S. sailor as he waited to be released from duty after World War II.

It wasn’t easy to relate this to food! My dad was not a cook, but he was comfortable in the kitchen. Every Saturday night was my mother’s “night off” from cooking and he would make dinner. It was almost always hot dogs or steak sandwiches – occasionally chicken pot pies, all meals we kids really looked forward to!

There’s no trick to making hot dogs, and the chicken pot pies were always frozen, not homemade (who even heard of such a thing in the 1950s and 1960s?) So I offer an interesting recipe for a vegetarian version of a Philly cheesesteak as a good way to honor my father’s memory, both because of our steak sandwich dinners and because he was born and bred in Philadelphia and lived there until his mid-50s. It’s quite tasty, and if you can find original Philadelphia Amoroso’s hoagie rolls, it’ll be almost as good as the meat version.

My father, Harold Naidoff, would’ve been 90 years old today, January 11.

When he moved into a new house after he remarried in 1998, he sent a box of old photos to me to be shared among his children. Several of the albums had belonged to my mother before she married, but others are from his early married life and our childhoods, plus some from trips my parents had taken together. Many of the old photos on this blog are from that box.

Stashed among the photo albums were two files of the letters he had written my mother when he was in the Navy, serving as a coppersmith on a repair ship during, and after, World War II. My mother appears to have kept them all, in chronological order.

I hadn’t read any before now.

Some may think that sharing these letters with family and friends betrays my father’s trust. I like to think that he would not be embarrassed by his feelings for his wife expressed in the letters. And while he could have tossed them as he did so much other stuff when he moved, I think he included the letters with the photos because he wanted them to survive.

A letter from China in 1946

Here is one, transcribed from my father’s hand.

[Aboard the U.S.S. Kermit Roosevelt]

Tsingtao, China

12 Jan. 1946

My Dearest Darling Wife,

I love you; the first thought of you that is always in my mind. I love you; a phrase that has become the theme of my life.

Today was wonderful, tiring, joyous, irritating, and beautiful. How can it be all these at one time; well I shall try to explain.

The morning began as usual, and then a wonderful thing came to pass; the ship received about 50 bags of mail, all packages. The entire morning was devoid of work, and devoted entirely to opening boxes, fondling the contents, nibbling on candy and cake, and having a great time indeed. I received 3 packages from home, 2 of yours, and one from Mom, and everything arrived in very good shape. Now our cupboard is full again. With our own packages, and those of the fellows who have already left, the food locker is again crammed full with various delicacies, and we shall be eating supper in the shop until it is exhausted. You had perfect timing on your birthday gift box, it arrived only a day late, excellent considering the situation. Not only for its contents, but for the way it was presented made it even more enjoyable. Thank you my Dearest. The brushes are very good and I have already used the hair brush. The clothes brush will find plenty of service, but I am afraid the hand brush will be a little neglected. Do you mind very much? The bottle of brandy, most heartily appreciated, will be saved until I learn that I am definitely on draft for home, then it will [be] consumed with a happy heart; the right mood for a good liquor.

The morning passed easily and happy, but then it began. No sooner had work begun in the afternoon when it all began. Dan is sick with a cold and took the afternoon off, on the Q.T. of course, and I took over his job. Then some Marines came in for a rush order for some stovepipe and I had to get them started on that job. I made them do their own work or else they would not get it. They worked. Then George came over and told me to come right over to the Jason so I could pick up my Jap rifle, so I dropped my work, and off I went. Rushed right back, and tried to regain lost ground. First over to the Marines who were having a little difficulty, then back to my own work. One of my strikers was given a job of painting the bulkheads and bitching like hell, making things miserable for me. Then more work to be done in a hurry, and by the time the afternoon was half over I was thouroughly irritated and disgusted. Was I glad when it came time to knock off work. I was never so glad to see a day end, and was more tired than I have been for a long time. One thing I did accomplish was to check my gun at the armory and get one of the carpenters to make me a box so I can mail it home. Guns can now be mailed, so it will save me the task of carrying it. The gun is in poor condition, but that can be remedied when I have it home.

I lay down for awhile and had just fallen asleep when Dan woke me for supper down in the shop. Our meal consisted of delicious fried eggs, bread and butter, coffee, and canned cherries for dessert. Not bad for the shop. Now I have just come from the shower, and I am much relaxed and at ease as I write to my sweetheart.

Tomorrow is holiday routine and early liberty. I am going ashore to take pictures. That fellow Hirsh had a package and among its contents was a camera with 16 rolls of film. Before he left, he gave us permission to open his boxes and only return items of value. Dan was appointed custodian by Hirsh before he left. The camera shall be returned, but we are going to use up the film, and send a letter of explanation to Hirsh.

I hope it is a nice day as it will probably be my last liberty.

Now the day is almost at an end, and whatever difficulties there may have been, it certainly was a most beautiful day, full of memories and love.

Your husband,

Harold

Pretzel and Rolo New Year Noshes for Procrastinators

December 28, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Today’s guest writer is Jennifer Blackledge, who used to work with my husband in the professional recruiting section of Ford Motor Company. They’ve stayed in touch since leaving the company. Jen is also a poet and the mother of two teenaged girls. Today she gives us an easy, stress-free way to prepare yummy holiday snacks.

I’ve always been a worrier and a procrastinator, which is a stressful combination.  As a kid, I remember taking the plethora of pre-feminist print and TV ads to heart. They implied poor planning and/or surprises would expose one as a less-than-competent hostess:

“Oh no, drop-in guests? But I have no tasty snacks on hand!”

“Surprise! My husband’s boss is coming to dinner in two hours, and he forgot to tell me.”

“Timmy just told me at bedtime that he needs to take treats to school tomorrow.”

An obsession with easy recipes

Combine the worry and procrastination with a slight tendency toward hoarding, and it explains my obsession with recipes that use things I can keep ready in my pantry or freezer. I snap to attention when I see the promise of something delicious and socially acceptable made from only a cake mix , a can of peaches, and a 12-ounce soda.

You could look at this as either a) resourcefulness, b) a cavalier disregard of fresh and nutritious cooking, or c) arrested culinary development , circa 1976.  (See“Circus Peanut Jell-O, in Feed the Spirit from May 26 for a clear example of this.)

Best of all, these are usually recipes even a toddler can make. If you’ve got kids of any age, a penchant for last-minute living, an irrational hatred of the grocery store, or severe holiday burnout, I present to you the ultimate treat for endless social obligations. Salty, sweet, endlessly variable, delicious, and homemade (if only in the sense that a)you can’t purchase the final product in a store, and b) you look like you actually tried a little instead of putting Oreos on a special plate, of course)…I give you pretzel/Rolo combos!

Feed the spirit by taking it easy

I’d love to be known for some special recipe like cranberry walnut cookies or homemade fudge, but at this stage in my life (come to think of it, probably my whole life), this is what works for me. Feeding the spirit is sometimes about taking it easy on yourself and watching “Modern Family” reruns instead of Rudolph while you unwrap a million Rolos with your kids. (This is where kids really come in handy – they like these so much that they will offer to make them, and I can just volunteer to unwrap Rolos while watching TV).

Did I mention you don’t even have to search for your ridiculously specific Tupperware cupcake transporter or special thermal casserole-carrying dish to take these somewhere? All you need are some cute paper plates and a big Zip-loc bag.

A procrastinator’s Yuletide wishes

My final Yuletide wishes for you:

  • May this recipe save you a trip to the supermarket on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve.
  • May this recipe prevent a midnight run to 7-11 for eggs or butter while simultaneously crying and cursing your family’s inability to write things on the giant centrally located calendar.
  • May this recipe keep your kids occupied for at least an hour of the two weeks of “boredom” they’ve anticipated since September.

You’re welcome!

(The photo with the recipe is “Reindeer Noses” by Julia Pfaff Daley via Flickr Creative Commons.)

Skorpor (Swedish biscotti) for Christmas

December 22, 2014 by 4 Comments

Today’s blog is by Mary Hooper Nelson, a freelance writer and former newspaper reporter, who lives with her husband, Bryce Nelson, in Kinsley, Kansas, not far from the old Nelson family stamping grounds.

Swedes, and Swedish-Americans, are great coffee drinkers.

They love to sit around the kitchen table quaffing cups of java “strong enough to jump out of the cup,” talking, gossiping, maybe telling a “Swede” joke or two.

My husband, Bryce Nelson, his brother, Gary, grew up in Pawnee County, Kansas, which was settled by Swedish immigrants in the late 19th century. The newcomers farmed, had large families and were staunch Lutherans.

Christmastime lasted for weeks

Christmas, of course, was the most festive religious and social holiday on the calendar, but Christmastime was more than December 25. Christmastime began in mid-December and wound up around New Year’s Day or the Feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6, providing ample opportunity for folks to visit and sit around the table in the kitchen with its steamed-up windows – because it was warm inside, especially if mom, grandma and the aunts were cooking, and cold outside.

And ample opportunity to drink coffee.

Of course, you’d want something to dunk in your coffee. A favorite dunker was skorpor, Swedish for toast. They’re also called rusks.

My sister-in-law, Lou Nelson, says scorpor is kind of like a Swedish biscotti. Below is her recipe.

In place of grape nuts, you could substitute a teaspoon of grated orange rind, which is called for in recipes for korppu, the Finnish equivalent of skorpor.

Skorpor beats herring and lutefisk

In days gone by, when Swedish-Americans had closer emotional ties to the old country, they liked to have pickled herring and lutefisk at Christmas. (Editor’s note: lutefisk is a Scandinavian dish prepared by soaking dried cod in lye to tenderize it, then skinning, boning, and boiling the fish to a gelatinous consistency.) Lutefisk is more commonly a Norwegian dish (and butt of many jokes), but the Swedes seem to like it too.

At least the elder generation did.

Gary and Bryce made themselves scarce when their elders started dishing out the lutefisk and pickled herring.

Some member of the family always went to Lindsborg, a Swedish settlement in central Kansas, and brought back pickled herring, recalls Gary.

“I remember how awful it smelled. I wouldn’t try it but the aunts and uncles and Grandma Nelson loved it.”

In Lou’s family, her English great-grandmother made a dessert called Christmas pudding.

“It had golden and regular raisins, candied fruit, and nuts and was made with beef suet, flour, sugar and lots of spices,” she said. “I remember Granny putting it in the old-fashioned metal coffee cans and tying the lids on with string, and then they were cooked in a boiling water bath. She made a sauce with butter, sugar and spices to go on it.

“It was one of those things, kinda like fruitcake, you either liked or didn’t. As we grew up and got married, we secretly hoped the new family members wouldn’t like it so there’d be more for us.

“After Granny was gone, my grandmother made it, then my mother until they could no longer get the suet. Gary and I loved it.”

Enjoy the skorpor, and Merry Christmas.

Eat like a caveman? No thanks!

December 15, 2014 by Leave a Comment

“Paleo” diets are all the rage. The premise is that humans evolved in the Paleolithic age, between 2.5 million and 10,000 years ago. Agriculture and animal husbandry were unknown.

By eating only foods available to hunter-gatherers of that era, the theory goes, we’ll be feeding our bodies the way they evolved to be fed.

To which I say “rubbish.” I think the actual caveman diet was much more along the lines of the one advocated by my friend Marshall, who liked to say he’d eat anything that wouldn’t eat him first.

“Cave Women Don’t Get Fat”

One of the latest paleo pushers is Esther Blum, a self-described holistic nutritionist, who wrote a book called Cavewomen Don’t Get Fat: The Paleo Chic Diet for Rapid Results.

It may be the first gal-centered paleo diet book, because, as Blum points out, most of the others are very male dominated. Kudos to her for that.

The paleo diet is similar to the Adkins and South Beach diets–no grains, but lots of protein, fruits and vegetables.

The disdain for grain is what grinds me the most. Anyone who has read the Clan of the Cave Bear books knows that among the things the hunter-gatherers gathered were wild grains, though they were undoubtedly a much smaller part of their diet than of ours.

Which is not to say these paleo diets have no merit. Eschewing sugar, additives and highly processed foods can only be a good thing.

Blum, who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nutrition, developed her approach in the early 1990s, after hearing Loren Cordain, author of The Paleo Diet. She decided to give up grain herself. While she follows the paleo diet, her husband does not.

Respect what your body wants

Probably the most sensible thing Blum says on the subject is this: “Understanding what works for you is very important. You have to respect what your body wants.”

I can’t disagree, but that advice works both ways. The latest diet trends may not be what your body wants and needs.

A few years ago, my daughter was convinced that the aches and pains in my aging body resulted from the aspartame in the diet sodas I drank and the low-cal yogurt I ate. Partly to humor her and partly because it was worth a try, I gave up all artificial sweeteners for several weeks. My aching joints didn’t notice at all.

Several years ago my husband and I followed the South Beach Diet for a few weeks. We scrupulously avoided all carbs: no sugar, no bread, not even any fruit or starchy veggies at the beginning. We lost a little weight but it didn’t seem worth the effort of obsessing about every morsel we ingested–not to mention the time we had to spend making carb-free everything.

One advantage of weaning yourself away from sugars and starches is that you’ll crave them less.

Can anything be “too sweet”?

As a child, I could never understand adults who said, “That’s too sweet for me.” How could anything possibly be too sweet?

Well, once you cut out sweeteners for a few weeks and then start eating them again, you’ll find you need much less to be satisfied–and that indeed, some foods can be too sweet!

As for eating like a caveman, check out this excellent article from Scientific American that does a good job of analyzing paleo diets.

For one thing, says author Ferris Jabr, no one knows exactly what cavemen ate, and the foods they hunted and gathered would have varied significantly according to where they lived. Moreover, nearly everything we eat today, from meat to vegetables, is very different from what would have been available in the Paleolithic era.

The idea that humans have not evolved since caveman days is nonsense too, he says. One notable change is the relatively recent mutation of a gene that gives most humans the ability to digest the lactose in dairy products.

Some of the recipes in The Paleo Chic Diet sound worth trying, like this one for blueberry pancakes. Just don’t try to tell me the cavemen had almond flour!

Latkes for Chanukah

December 8, 2014 by 1 Comment

 

The eight-day festival of Chanukah starts Tuesday evening. It’s customary to eat foods fried in oil, to commemorate the miracle of one-day supply of oil that burned for eight days at the re-dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem after the victory of the Jews over the Greek Syrians. A common Chanukah treat is latkes–fried pancakes. They can be made with almost anything edible, but the most common latkes are made with potato and onion.

And a quick note on spellings: There are a couple of common spellings of this holiday’s name as various groups have tried to render the Hebrew sounds in English letters. Elsewhere in ReadTheSpirit magazine you’ll find “Hanukkah” used. Same word; same holiday; and now you know that both are correct.

Here with a wonderful story about latkes is guest writer Sheri Terebelo Schiff, a leader in human relations and multicultural and interfaith relations in the Detroit area. She is active with the American Jewish Committee, WISDOM and Jewish Historical Society, and serves on the boards of many Jewish agencies and organizations.  She was a co-convener of the Race Relations & Diversity Task Force, which under her leadership the group received the Closing the Gap Award from New Detroit.

My family loves my potato latkes.

Every Chanukah I’d have everyone over for dinner–my parents of blessed memory, my brother and his family, friends–and make about a hundred latkes with sour cream, applesauce, bagels and lox, veggies, fruit and donuts to remind us of sufganiyot, the Israeli delicacy of fried dough.

Everyone loved the latke feast–except me. I smelled of latkes and frying oil. The odor permeated my clothing, my skin, my hair and the whole house. It took days to get rid of that potato-and-oil smell. As much as I washed and scrubbed my body and hair, it took days to smell clean. The smell was in the carpeting, the upholstery, even in the dog’s coat.  I just hated it.

Inspiration!

One year I had an inspiration. I could make the latkes outside and instead of smelling up me and my house, I could smell up the neighborhood!

I had an electric frying pan and electric outlets outside. I had a winter down jacket that I hated and didn’t care if it smelled, and I could put all exposed parts of my body under a hat and gloves. My neighborhood was not very Jewish and I thought no one would know what I was up to.

On a snowy Sunday, my family gathered. Everything else was out on the table. My husband and children thought my plan was the result of a stroke. Everyone questioned my sanity. I thought, no more latke-smelling house.

I grated my potatoes, added the rest of the ingredients and moved outside. First problem: the cement front porch was not level. I tried putting the pan on an outside porch end table. I tried putting it directly on the cement. The oil was deep on one end and non-existent on the other end. I shored up the deep end with a dish towel and started heating the oil. Icicles dripped into the fry pan from the roof of the house and splattered. I burned the top of my hand. I discovered one cannot make potato latkes with gloves.

The frying started. The potato latke smell enveloped the night air. My neighborhood started to smell like frying oil and potatoes.

Joggers like my block, a through street that gets plowed early and frequently.

Two joggers came through and I heard one say they could smell the latkes frying. Another jogger came by after the first batch went inside to my family, and made a similar remark.

Feeding the neighborhood

I brought another batch of latkes in to my family, and when I returned, there were strangers on my porch. They wanted latkes! I’d never met them or seen these people before. They announced they lived three blocks from me, asked for a plate and some applesauce, and ate. They each took a latke in each gloved hand for the road. I spooned another batch into the electric fry pan, walked down my front walk to the street and was overwhelmed and overcome by the smell of oil and potatoes.  My neighborhood smelled like latkes!

I made about 100 latkes that evening. I usually flash-freeze some for a later date, but I ended up giving a few dozen away. Since the smell was in the air, people I knew and people I didn’t know stopped in front of my house, attracted by the smell of latkes. My kids came outside and I chased them back in to put on their coats. My husband visited with a guy from down the block.  There were no leftover potato latkes for us. When the last latke was fried, I unplugged the fry pan, emptied the leftover oil into a jar and deposited it into a garbage bag for the trash collection later in the week.

I took my oil-splattered down jacket and the kids’ jackets downstairs and threw them into the dryer with eight scented dryer sheets(one for each day of Chanukah). We lit Chanukah candles, gave the kids presents, cleaned up, visited and said our good nights. I was thrilled. My house did not smell like oil and latkes. However next morning our neighborhood still did. And it would for a couple days.

Every year since then I’ve made latkes on the front porch. By the third year, it became common knowledge and people started coming by. Some joggers, some friends, some neighbors, some strangers. One hundred latkes became two hundred. The kids grew up, my parents aged and passed away. I still make latkes and people still jog and drive by. And my neighborhood still smells like potato latkes for a couple of days every year.