Food for thought: Tongue-tied infants (and an easy cheese souffle)

March 16, 2015 by Leave a Comment

 

I will give you a recipe eventually but first I want to  give you some food for thought.

I couldn’t resist the opportunity to use this blog as a bully pulpit to alert you to a fairly common problem in newborns that is easily diagnosed and easily fixed—but for whatever reason in our crazy medical system often isn’t. If you’re planning to have children or grandchildren or know anyone who is, this could be very useful information.

Many babies are born tongue-tied, which means something way different than awkward with words. Others have a related problem, lip tie. These ties are thin cords of tissue connecting the bottom of the tongue to the floor of the mouth or the upper or lower lip to the gum. If the ties are short  and tight or in the wrong place they can interfere with feeding. Later in life they can cause eating, speech and dental problems.

A crash course for grandma

I feel like a minor expert now because my four-month-old granddaughter was born with a tongue and a lip tie. The tongue tie was noticed in the hospital but no one felt the need to do anything about it because the baby seemed to be nursing well.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t nursing properly. She wasn’t getting enough milk. Because her anatomy forced her to work extra hard and misuse some of her facial muscles, she would get fatigued easily and fall asleep halfway through a feed. With the baby demanding less, my daughter wasn’t producing as much milk as she should have been. And since she wasn’t getting sufficient milk at each feed, the baby wanted to eat every few hours. My poor daughter was completely exhausted and at her wits’ end.

The doctors’ first thought, as usual, was to suggest bottle-feeding. In my granddaughter’s case, this wasn’t suggested until the baby was three months old, by which time she had zero interest in a bottle. She wouldn’t suck on or swallow anything that didn’t come directly from mama.

My granddaughter was born on the small side — 6 lb., 11 oz. — and both her parents are small, so no one expected her to be in the 90th percentile for weight. At first she gained slowly but surely, but at three months, she simply stopped gaining weight. Her parents knew something was wrong but had not idea what it was.

My daughter found the solution almost by accident. She had gone to a lactation consultant in her insurance network, who recommended using a “supplemental nursing system.”  This involves putting pumped breast milk or formula into a small bottle that the nursing mother clips to her top; a very thin tube leading from the bottle is taped next to the mother’s nipple, so that the baby can take in extra food while she’s nursing.

A chance meeting and a diagnosis

The only place to get the supplemental nursing system was from another lactation consultant. The second lactation consultant asked my daughter why she needed the system. After she heard my daughter’s story, and asked a few more questions, she said, “I don’t want to mix in, but this really sounds like a tongue tie to me, and it can easily be fixed.”

The next day, when she looked at my granddaughter, she could immediately see a tongue tie and a lip tie, which were preventing her from getting a good “latch” on the breast.

The lactation consultant referred my daughter to a dentist who uses a water laser to cut the ties, and three days later we were in the dentist’s office. The procedure was fast and painless.

My son-in-law was skeptical; how do you know it’s painless? he asked. They know because they also do this procedure on adults, without anesthesia; the adult patients report some minor discomfort but no pain.

My granddaughter was immediately able to get a better latch on her mom and started eating better. She quickly started to gain weight again: more than 3 ounces in a week! It doesn’t sound like much, but when you weigh only 9 pounds, every ounce counts.

Why a dentist? The lactation consultant told us dentists are at the forefront of developing effective ways to treat oral ties because they see the ongoing problems ties can cause in older children and adults. Many have trouble eating, and prefer only soft foods. Some have trouble controlling saliva. Some ENT physicians do the procedure, but most use a scalpel, which requires anesthesia, rather than the laser.

Lawrence Kotlow, a pediatric dentist in Albany, N.Y., is one of the leaders in the movement to identify and treat tongue tie.

Speech pathologists are also strong advocates for better treatment because they work with children and adults with speech impediments and swallowing disorders that can be traced to tongue ties.

Easy to diagnose

Tongue tie very easy to diagnose. I was easily able to see my granddaughter’s ties myself. And as her experience shows, the condition is easy to treat. So why isn’t it diagnosed more promptly and treated more often?

The lactation consultant told us that before 1950 or so, snipping ties was common. By then, bottle feeding was becoming increasingly popular. Bottle-fed babies with ties often  don’t have the same problems as breastfed infants, because sucking on a bottle is so much easier. It’s quite possible that with tongue-tied babies eating well on the bottle and gaining weight, the health care practitioners didn’t see any need to treat the ties. If nursing moms had a problem, physicians simply suggested switching to the bottle.

This article provides a good historical overview.The International Affiliation of Tongue-Tie Professionals’ website also has good information, particularly in the FAQ section.

Frenotomy, as the tie snip is called medically, is not taught in most medical schools, and most pediatricians pooh-pooh the idea of correcting ties in infancy, even though it’s such a simple procedure. A friend of my daughter’s, whose child has a lip tie (and speech problems), was actually told by her pediatrician not to worry, that the child would one day fall down and rip the tie. The lactation consultant told us this is a common “solution” — though of course the child might not fall down and rip the tie, or the tie might rip in the wrong place, or the ripped tie might grow back.

As I said, food for thought.

And now, in honor of anyone who prefers soft and easy-to-swallow food for whatever reason, I offer this recipe for an easy cheese souffle made with stale bread.

I usually decide to make this a few days before I actually do. I make the bread cubes first and keep them in a large bowl, tossing them occasionally until they dry out. If I have bread that’s getting stale, I often make it into bread cubes and keep them until a purpose reveals itself – this souffle, or a bread pudding, or bread stuffing. The bread cubes will keep for many weeks as long as they don’t get wet!

Enjoy Pi Day with a fabulous pecan pie

March 9, 2015 by 1 Comment

 

Every year has a Pi Day, but this year’s , which takes place next Saturday, will be a once-in-a-century happening.

Pi, of course, is the mathematical constant that describes the relationship between the circumference of a circle and its diameter. And so Pi Day occurs every year on March 14 to celebrate the first three digits of pi, 3.14.

But there’s something odd about pi, which you probably remember from your school days. It’s infinite. You can keep dividing a circle’s  circumference by the diameter and you’ll never get a final number, there will always be something left over. And the sequence never repeats. Pi has been calculated to more than a trillion digits past the decimal.

So this year, on March 15, 2015 we can add two numbers and celebrate 3/14/15. If you want to be even more precise, you can carry the calculation out further and celebrate at precisely 9:26:53 – a.m. or p.m. You’ll be forgiven if you take two seconds to mark the occasion: some argue that 9:26:54 on 3/14/15 is more the accurate time because the 11th digit of pi is 5, which would cause the 10th digit to round up to 4, rather than 3. (Though by the same logic, we should celebrate Pi Day next year, because the sixth digit, 9, should round the fifth digit up to 6.)

The first Pi Day was organized by Larry Shaw, a physicist at the San Francisco Exploratorium, in 1988. Visitors joined the museum’s staff in marching around the circular spaces and then eating fruit pies. The Exploratorium still has annual Pi Day celebrations.

Congress has even gotten into the act. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution in 2009 recognizing March 14 as Pi Day.

There’s also a Pi Approximation Day, July 22, which makes sense if you write the dates European-style, with the day first, followed by the month: 22/7 is a close fractional approximation of the value of pi.

Lots of colleges and other organizations celebrate by eating pie, throwing pies or holding contests to see who can recite the most decimal places for pi. At Princeton University they also celebrate the March 14 birthday of Albert Einstein, who worked there for 20 years. In addition to pie eating and pi recitation, there’s an Einstein look-alike contest.

Even the ancients knew that a circle is a little more than three times its width around. In the Bible book of 1 Kings (7:26), a circular pool is described as 30 cubits around and 10 cubits across.

The Greek mathematician Archimedes determined that pi was approximately 22/7. The Greek letter “pi” was first used in 1706 by Welsh mathematician William Jones. History Today has an interesting article about Jones and the development of the pi symbol.

You might want to mark this once-in-a-lifetime day by buying a commemorative tee-shirt; you can find many varieties for sale on Amazon.

Better yet, eat pie. Here’s a great recipe for a pecan pie from my sister, Sue Holliday, who makes it every Thanksgiving.

But before I sign off, I have to share an old joke.

A young lad in Appalachia is the first in his family to go to high school. When he comes back to the holler, his pappy asks him what he learned in school, and the boy says he learned geometry.

“Well say something in geometry,” says the father.

“Um, er…well, today I learned pi-r-squared,” says the boy.

“Hah!” says the father. “Shows what good all this high-falutin’ learning is! Everyone knows pie are round – cornbread are square!”

Remembering Jewish Tunisia with a sandwich

March 2, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Detroit’s only Sephardic synagogue, for Jews whose families came from North Africa and the Middle East, recently held another in a series of lectures and cooking demonstrations. This one was about the Jews of Tunisia.

Speaker Sylvie Jami Salei’s ancestors had lived in Tunis since 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain and many settled in North Africa. But the Jewish community in Tunisia is much older. Remains have been found of a synagogue built in the 3rd century CE.

An ancient community

Under the rule of the Romans and the Vandals, the Jews of Tunis increased and prospered to such a degree that church councils enacted restrictive laws against them.

When Muslims ruled Tunisia, the Jewish community enjoyed years of good treatment interspersed with periods of anti-Semitism and discrimination. The community prospered during the country’s years as a French protectorate. Many Tunisian Jews became French citizens and identified strongly with French culture.

The community was at risk during World War II. France’s Vichy government collaborated with the Nazis and drew up plans to create North African concentration camps. Although about 160 Tunisian Jews were deported to European concentration camps, and others were forced to do slave labor, the Nazi sympathizers ran out of time and the community was saved.

Rising anti-Semitism

As soon as Tunisia gained independence in 1956, the government implemented anti-Jewish measures. Anti-Semitism, both official and casual, increased when the French left for good in 1963.

Salei’s family left for Paris in 1965. She remembers that they had to buy round-trip tickets. They were not permitted to take any funds – her father’s pension was frozen –  and they were body-searched as they left to make sure they weren’t hiding any jewels or other valuables. The belongings they arranged to ship never arrived in France.

By the late 1960s, the Tunisian Jewish community had been decimated. Once as large as 100,000, the community now numbers around 1,000. Most live on the small island of Djerba; Tunis, which once had tens of thousands of Jews, now has 500, most of them elderly and frail. Lucette Lagnado recently wrote a long article about The Last of the Arab Jews in the Wall Street Journal. She points out that in the Arab world in the first half of the 20th century there were more than 850,000 Jews. Today, there are fewer than 4,500. (Visit this website for more information about Jewish refugees from Arab  lands.)

Refuge in Paris, Israel and the US

In Paris, Salei’s family of five lived in a one-bedroom apartment. They received no help from the French government.

Salei’s childhood memories are mostly happy ones, of attending concerts and movies in Arabic, English and French, all of which she learned at school.

But later she realized that she wasn’t privy to the worries her parents faced, and that life was not so idyllic for the family. She and her siblings were all born at home because her mother was afraid to go to the Muslim-run hospital. Her youngest sibling, a girl, died soon after birth because she couldn’t get the care she needed. A cousin was kidnapped and killed by Arabs.

Salei’s family left Paris for Israel and emigrated to the United States in 1973.

In 2014, Tunisia implemented a new secular constitution – the first of its kind in the Arab world – that specifically protects minorities. In January 2014, Prime Minister Mehdi Jomaa nominated a Jew, Rene Trabelsi, as minister of tourism. Djerba is a popular destination for Jewish tourists.

Today’s recipe, provided by Salei, is for a sandwich that is popular in France as well as Tunisia. When these were served at the Keter Torah event, I recalled seeing similar sandwiches at a French bakery in Jerusalem, kind of the  Middle Eastern Jewish version of a hoagie, hero or sub. The ingredients sound a little weird, but the combination makes a very tasty sandwich.

Company grows from love of life, cake and healthy eating

February 23, 2015 by 1 Comment

This story is by Vivian Henoch of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, and originally appeared in My Jewish Detroit, an online magazine.

This is a story about hope, courage, inspiration, patience and cake batter. A lot of cake batter.

It’s a story that begins in Jane Imerman’s kitchen in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, where her passion for baking and healthy food collided with the reality of cancer.

Jane always had been a firm believer that the purest foods are the healthiest. But years after her youngest son, Jonny, was diagnosed with testicular cancer at the age of 26, Jane has taken health-conscious cooking and baking to a whole new level, learning everything she could about organic food and developing her own recipes.

Jonny regained his health, turned his energies to advocacy and, in 2006, founded Imerman Angels, a worldwide cancer-support organization, based in Chicago, with the mission to provide one-on-one connections among cancer fighters, survivors and caregivers.

Finding a passion

Jonny had Angels. Jane had recipes. Jeffrey Imerman, Jane’s oldest son, had the vision to start the Imerman Cake Company: Why not market Jane’s delicious organic coffee cakes and share them with the world, then donate a portion of each sale to Imerman Angels?

A former TV anchor/reporter, Jeff was practicing law at a big firm in New York City when he had the notion to change the course of his life, leave his job, return to Detroit and partner with Jane to create Imerman Cake Company.

“I loved the excitement in New York, enjoyed working with my colleagues and the challenges of litigation, but I didn’t feel that I wanted to stay on that path for a lifetime,” says Jeff.

Describing the moment in 2010 when the idea crystallized, Jeff recalls a conversation with his brother.

“It was 2 in the morning and I was still at my desk at work, and my brother was sitting at his desk in Chicago, still working alone, launching Imerman Angels, and I said, ‘Jonny, I don’t know if I want to do this forever,’ and he said to me, ‘Jeff, find your passion. If that’s not where you are today, then look for something positive and fulfilling. Because I see people die every day – at age 7, 25, 62. You don’t know how much time you have, so make a change now, it could all be over tomorrow.’”

A dialogue with the founders

Jeff: I wrote a 50-page business plan, inspired by my brother’s fight against cancer. After he survived, we did a lot of food research and learned more about what we are putting into our bodies and how that affects our health and well-being. We learned about organic foods and the benefits of eating organic. . .

Jane: . . . and we didn’t find any organic desserts in the marketplace.

Jeff: I knew we could create something in our local community that we could be very proud of.  So we started in my mom’s home kitchen, took a cake recipe that she had made since our childhood, and we streamlined it to make it even more pure and organic.

Jane: We spent a lot of hours baking, taste-testing and tweaking the recipes, one cake at a time. As many as eight cakes a day. We spent about a year.

Jeff: Using all organic ingredients, gram by gram, we took out as much as we could to lower the sugar, cut the fat and reduce the calories to make the cake as lean as possible without sacrificing the flavor.

Jane: We took out the nuts too because of all the nut allergies. For instance, in the cinnamon cake, we now use toasted rolled oats instead of the original walnuts. We also switched to a Neufchatel cheese from a cream cheese to lower the calories.

Jeff: But we knew the one constant was quality, and the bottom line was the taste. That couldn’t change.

Learning the ropes

“We had to learn our business from the ground up,” observes Jeff. “We didn’t know the food industry. We couldn’t just rush out into the marketplace. We knew we had to be patient. And everything took longer than we anticipated.”

Getting it right, Jeff and Jane took another year or two traveling to food shows and seminars all over the country, doing demos, taking classes, learning from experts in the field. “We were surprised to find how collaborative the food industry is. We were amazed to meet people so willing to take us under their wing and offer guidance. There were people who had built up very successful companies — like Dave Zilko of Garden Fresh and Mike Marsh of Flatout Bread — who became great mentors to us.”

After three years, Imerman Cakes are on grocery shelves in high-end markets in Detroit and Chicago, in both cinnamon and chocolate chip flavors, available in a two-pound size and a mini half-pound size. The cakes are still hand-mixed, one at a time, but because they carry the USDA Organic seal, production has moved out of the Imerman household to the Achatz Handmade Pie Company, a certified organic facility which is also a local family-owned business.

“We are still in our infancy,” says Jane. “2014 was our first full calendar year of sales.”

New recipes are in the mix, new flavors and sizes are on the way. And the criteria for the ingredients remain strictly organic: free from artificial preservatives and sweeteners, high fructose corn syrup and genetically engineered ingredients. No ingredients come from crops exposed to harmful pesticides or fertilizers, and the dairy products come from animals that have not been given antibiotics or growth hormones.

Even the boxes are eco-friendly, fully recyclable with a window film that is biodegradable.

“Because our family name is on the box,” says Jeff, “The product reflects back on you, your values.

“You need to be proud of what you are providing, and we wanted to provide people with a totally positive food option: better tasting, better for the body, better for the environment, and a help in the fight against cancer. Overall, it’s an indulgence people can feel good about.”

Jane and Jeff didn’t want to provide a cake recipe, since selling them is their livelihood. But they were happy to provide a recipe for mac and cheese that Jane has made for years. Jeff says he and his siblings loved it while they were growing up. I know we published a mac and cheese recipe last August; this is another version that’s lower in fat and calories.

Cure the winter blahs with chicken soup

February 15, 2015 by Leave a Comment

In these gray and cold winter months, what could be better than a nice, hot bowl of chicken soup?

It’s guaranteed to warm you up, both physically and spiritually. It’s not for nothing that it’s called “Jewish penicillin” and that all those books full of pithy statements about positive living–and there are hundreds of them–are called Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Chicken soup really can help cure the common cold! Researchers have found that chicken soup reduces upper-respiratory inflammation, according to a study published in 2000 in the journal of the American College of Chest Physicians. Nasal inflammation is what causes stuffy head and runny nose.

The inflammation is caused by an increase in white blood cells that rush to the site of a viral infection and try, usually unsuccessfully, to kill off the virus. The Nebraska study found that fewer white blood cells were present in people who had eaten chicken soup. Another benefit: Just by being a hot liquid, chicken soup will loosen congestion and keep you hydrated.

Hold a chicken soup cook-off!

If you’re looking for a fun wintertime activity, consider a chicken soup cook-off. You can do this socially with a group of friends or co-workers–have everyone bring a different chicken soup to a potluck–or you can run a cook-off through your congregation or organization as a fundraiser.

Temple Shir Shalom in suburban Detroit recently held a Chicken Soup Cook-off as a charity benefit. They invited ordinary household cooks as well as restaurateurs and caterers to enter a  pot of their best chicken soup in one of three categories: chicken noodle soup, matzo ball soup and creative/contemporary chicken soup.

More than 500 people paid an entry fee to sample the soups and vote for a People’s Choice winner. A panel of professional foodies also named winners for each of the three categories in both a professional division and a home cooks division.

The judges rated the soups for taste, texture, flavor and overall impression.

Personally, the chicken soup I make most often is what I call “Cheater’s Chicken Soup” because it’s a free by-product when I cook chicken.

Make “Cheater’s Chicken Soup”

I often make roast chicken, using either whole or cut-up birds, for our Friday night Shabbat dinner. When the chicken comes out of the roasting pan, I pour off the “juice” and then deglaze the pan by adding a cup or so of water and swirling it around to loosen all the nice brown bits. This goes into the same container with the “juice.” If I’m not going to use it within a few days, I freeze it.

Whenever I make a whole roast chicken, I save and freeze the carcass.

When I have at least one carcass and a couple of chickens’ worth of “juice,” it’s time to make soup! I defrost the carcass and the chicken juice (scrape off any chicken fat that has risen to the surface) and put it all in a large soup pot.

I add a large, unpeeled onion cut in quarters (the onion peel helps give the soup a little color), a stalk of celery and a carrot cut in chunks, a half-dozen whole black peppercorns and a few teaspoons of dried dill (or fresh dill from my garden if it’s summertime).

I cook this covered for several hours, then cool and strain through cheesecloth, keeping the carrot chunks to serve with the soup. I add salt to taste when I reheat it. I confess I sometimes add a little powdered chicken stock if the soup tastes weak–but the result is way better than soup made entirely from powder.

I often add noodles or matzo balls before serving.

The Chicken Soup Cook-off winner!

Today’s recipe is a little more complex, but I’m sure the effort is worth it.

This recipe was the winner of the People’s Choice Award at the Temple Shir Shalom Chicken Soup Cook-off. It comes from Elwin Greenwald, who owns a wonderful take-out joint called Elwin & Co. in Berkley, Michigan.

It’s named for his grandmother. “My Bubbie Gratzielle left Poland for Sorrento. Italy, and brought her recipe with her to America!” he told the Detroit Free Press, which printed the recipe. The photo below, which appeared in the Free Press, is by Elwin Greenwald.

A love of chocolate

February 8, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Are you hoping your sweetie will recognize your relationship on February 14 with a heart-shaped box of chocolates? Or will you be the one paying a premium for a fancy box to express your love?

Among the people you can thank for this wonderful Valentine’s Day tradition of giving chocolate: Montezuma, Hernan Cortes and Richard Cadbury.

Chocolate comes from cacao, an ancient Mexican word meaning “God food.”  The Mayans brewed a spicy, bitter drink from the seeds of the cacao tree. The Aztecs lived farther north, where the cacao beans wouldn’t grow. They prized the beans above silver and gold, and used them as currency (100 beans could buy a canoe!).

Like the Mayans, the Aztecs enjoyed the drink made from cacao beans, which they called Xocolatl. The Spanish conquistadors corrupted the name of the bean to “cocoa” and the name of the Aztec drink to “chocolat.”

Cortes was probably the first European to encounter chocolate. Bernal Diaz, who accompanied him on to the court of Montezuma, wrote of the encounter:

“From time to time they served him [Montezuma] in cups of pure gold a certain drink made from cacao. It was said that it gave one power over women, but this I never saw. I did see them bring in more than fifty large pitchers of cacao with froth in it, and he drank some of it, the women serving with great reverence.”

So that explains how chocolate came to Europe, but how did it get inextricably meshed with Valentine’s Day?

The food of love

By the 1840s, Valentine’s Day had become a holiday to celebrate romantic love throughout the English-speaking world. The Victorians loved to demonstrate their love through elaborate cards and gifts.

The Cadbury company had been making chocolate in England since the 1820s. In 1854 the company received a royal warrant as manufacturers of chocolate and cocoa to Queen Victoria.

Richard Cadbury, son of the company’s founder, improved the drinking chocolate by developing a press that extracted the unpalatable cocoa butter from the whole beans. He used the cocoa butter to produce what was then called “eating chocolate” (as distinct from most chocolate, which was still consumed as a drink).

Richard Cadbury began selling his chocolates in beautiful boxes he designed himself. When February rolled around, he created heart-shaped boxes and decorated them with roses and cupids. He promoted them not only for the chocolates inside, but for the boxes that could then be used to store keepsakes. Original Victorian-era Cadbury boxes are valuable collectors’ items.

It probably wasn’t too hard a sell for Cadbury. Few of us don’t enjoy a piece of good chocolate – and there’s some science behind behind our appreciation of it. Not only is it good for your heart, because it’s rich in antioxidant polyphenals, but there are amplereasons why chocolate gives most of us an emotional boost.

Chocolate  increases the brain’s level of serotonin, the feel-good brain chemical. If you find yourself craving chocolate when you’re “down” and perking up when you eat some, you’re not just imagining the change. Serotonin contributes to many positive emotions, including increased sexual excitation, desire and responsiveness. Women may be more sensitive to the benefits of chocolate because they have more serotonin in their systems, making chocolate the perfect gift to give a gal on Valentine’s Day.

Here is a wonderful and very easy chocolate mousse recipe for Valentine’s Day or anytime. I got it from a friend soon after we were married and have been making it ever since. Be sure to use good quality chocolate chips. Top it with a dollop of real whipped cream and you have something that will make your sweetheart (of either sex) swoon!

 

Blooming almonds herald Tu B’Shevat

February 1, 2015 by Leave a Comment

February 3, as night falls, we start the minor Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shevat. “Tu” is the phonetic pronunciation of the Hebrew characters for the number 15, because this is the 15th of the month of Shevat.

Tu B’Shevat is the New Year of Trees. In Judaism there are several new years. At first this might seem odd, but consider that in our contemporary culture we have the calendar new year, the start of the new school year, and, for many business entities, the start of the fiscal year.

In the Jewish calendar there’s the calendar new year (Rosh Hashanah), there’s the first day of the first month, Nisan, because even though Rosh Hashanah is the start of the new calendar year, it actually falls on the first day of the seventh month. Don’t ask me to explain this.

The first of Elul is the new year for tithing animals. The Bible is full of descriptions of what should be sacrificed: a yearling this, or a two-year-old that. The animal becomes one year old on the first day of of the first month of Elul after its birth.

And then there’s the new year for tithing trees. In Leviticus (19:23-25), the Israelites are told not to eat fruit from a tree during its first three years. The fourth year’s fruit is for God, and after that, in the tree’s fifth year, may people eat from the tree’s bounty.

It could be difficult to keep track of when exactly every tree was planted, so Tu B’Shevat evolved as a way of reckoning a tree’s age. Trees were considered to have aged one year on Tu B’Shevat, even if they were planted just a day or two earlier.

A low-key holiday

There’s not a whole lot of ritual or celebration connected to Tu B’Shevat. Some congregations and individuals make a point of eating the seven species described as abundant in the land of Israel (Deut. 8:8): wheat, barley, grapes (vines), figs, pomegranates, olives and dates (honey).

You can make a nice pilaf using all seven species by cooking bulghur wheat and barley, mixing in chopped figs, dates and pomegranate seeds, and tossing it with a dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar (made from grapes).

The mysticism-minded kabbalists developed a Tu B’Shevat seder, which I described here last year, a celebration that is fairly popular in synagogues and religious schools.

In Israel and other countries with warm climates, children often celebrate by planting trees.

Almonds: the first trees to bloom

The date of the holiday coincides more or less with the blooming of the plentiful almond trees in Israel, the first trees to bloom there. It seems almost unfathomable to us in frozen Michigan, but in Israel, the almond trees usually flower in early- to mid-February. The Hebrew word  for almond, shaked, is related to words meaning “wakeful” or “hastening.”

The Bible has numerous references to almonds:

  • Jacob asked his sons to take almonds and other fruits of the land into Egypt as a gift to Joseph, probably because this tree was not a native of Egypt (Genesis 43:11).
  • Moses was told to make parts of the lamp for the holy ark to resemble almond blossoms, although the Hebrew word there is luz rather than shaked. Luz could mean wild almond, rather than cultivated almond; some English translations use “hazelnut” instead. Lauz is the word for almond in Arabic, a close linguistic relative of Hebrew.
  • Aaron’s rod that sprouts did so with almond blossoms (Numbers 17:8).
  • Jeremiah says (1:11) “I see a rod of an almond tree (shaked)…for I will hasten (shaked) my word to perform it;” the word is used as a symbol of promptitude.

The almond and the almond blossom inspired artists throughout the ages. The distinctive oval of the almond nut forms a halo around religious figures in paintings, stained glass windows, and other art through the Renaissance to signify spiritual energy or to serve as a protective shield. Italian artists called this halo a mandorla, the Italian word for almond.

Ancient musicians adopted the oval shape in a lute-like musical instrument called the mandora or mandola – which evolved in 18th century Italy into the mandolino (mandolin).

A healthy food choice

Almonds are a great choice for people interested in healthy eating. They have fewer calories than other nuts. They’re high in monosaturated fats and loaded with antioxidant Vitamin E, magnesium, potassium and other minerals necessary for a healthy diet. A quarter-cup of raw almonds has only 132 calories and can be a satisfying snack.

Almond milk is a good alternative for people who have a dairy allergy (or who keep kosher and want an alternative to milk to use in recipes for meat meals). Here’s a way to make your own inexpensively.

Of course today’s recipe isn’t exactly a paragron of good nutrition – but it’s very delicious.

My original recipe came from a co-worker of Dutch heritage who made these every Christmas. His recipe called for sprinkling the sliced almonds on top of the dough before baking. The problem was most of them fell off when I cut the cake into bars. Using the white chocolate glaze adds yet more sugar and fat, but it will keep the almonds in place!

You can buy almond paste in specialty grocery stores.

(The photo with the recipe is courtesy of Betty Crocker Recipes, via Flickr Creative Commons.)