Where to Find Good Levant Food Recipes

April 20, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Environment, Food 

food blog recipes
I spend a lot of my time thinking about the environment and the things we can do to tread lighter on this planet. Home cooking is a big favorite of mine, because any items you can buy in bulk or without packaging like fruits and vegetables for instance, the lighter you tread on this earth. The health benefits are enormous. Processed and packaged foods are full of preservatives and chemicals to extend shelf life, and manufactured flavors to enhance taste. Keeping it real, by that I mean home cooking, the environment and your body will thank you.

If you know something about Israelis, one of the first things that will come to mind is their food. Israelis, unlike Jews you might meet in America, do not necessarily eat potato kugal or gefilte fish. In fact the first time I tried these things were not in the kitchens of native Israelis, but Americans who’d immigrated to Israel. The palate of the average Israeli is diverse. The question is if you love to cook where do you find good blog food recipes? With so many blogs out there, the choices are enormous.

My personal website Green Prophet provides a Middle Eastern inspired food recipes every week thanks to Miriam, and if you like fusion and the Israeli style of cooking another favorite cooking and food blog that I personally love is Food Bridge. It focuses on Israel as part of the Levant, and not separate from it.

On Food Bridge Sarah Melamed pens an incredibly local and current food blog on food from the land of Israel and beyond. She goes way beyond any type of Jewish stereotype you might find, embracing local cultures and traditions from nearby Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority. She writes about what foods are in season, where to get them, and pictures them so wonderfully that you might even be inspired to start a food blog yourself. The blog is great for Americans, because as an American Sarah is one of the few I know who lets her past go and really celebrates the food diversity in the Levant region, without politics, without religion. Give her blog a taste.

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No pink slime in our burgers, please

April 10, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Food 

Pink slime (image from KSDK TV, Saint Louis)

Kosher food is often equated with being healthier. While I’ve taken comfort in this conjecture, it’s not really true. Kosher food can be filled with just as many preservatives and unhealthy processed mysteries as non-kosher food. And as scandals over the past years at kosher meat plants in the U.S. have proven, slaughter according to Jewish law can be fraught with corruption and less than sanitary practices.

But an article in this week’s Ynet (and reported earlier on the Green Prophet blog) indicates that in at least one area, kosher most definitely trumps treife: at McDonald’s in Israel.

McDonald’s – as well as other fast food chains – came under fire when celebrity chef Jamie Oliver exposed the fact that the Golden Arches was using something called “boneless lean beef trimmings” in their burgers. Oliver referred to it derisively as “pink slime” on an episode of his TV show (here’s the video).

These trimmings apparently consist of what’s left of the meat after all the choice cuts of beef are taken. They’re then run through a centrifuge and treated with ammonium hydroxide (an ingredient used in household cleaning agents) in order to kill off bacteria such as E. coli.

That makes the slime safe for human consumption…at least in the U.S. Boneless lean beef trimmings are banned for people in the U.K., and are used for dog and chicken food instead.

Sounds absolutely yummy.

The good news is that McDonald’s in Israel have never used the pink slime in their burgers, since boneless lean beef trimmings could potentially include parts of the cow that are not OK from a kashrut perspective. That applies to both kosher and non-kosher certified McDonald’s – both import their beef from the same plants in South America via the Israeli Of Tov company.

Kind of makes you proud to be an Israeli fast foodie.

All this doesn’t give McDonald’s a pass on the detrimental-to-your-health scale: 100% beef or not, the calories, fat and sugar in a McDonald’s meal are definitely not as happy as Hamburglar might have wooed us into complacency when we were younger and hooked on Saturday morning cartoons. Want more convincing: just watch Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me and you’ll be a budding vegan in under 90 minutes.

McDonald’s has since announced that it is no longer using pink slime in its burgers in the U.S.

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Not kosher for chicken soup – Pesach or otherwise

April 5, 2012 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Food 

Vetara’s Bio Groentebouillon soup mix not kosher for chicken soup?

My wife Jody makes the greatest chicken soup. I’m not getting paid to say that, nor getting any other domestic perks. It’s just downright awesome. It’s more like a stew, with whole turkey necks (that actually makes it “turkey soup” but don’t tell the kids), tons of vegetables, barley and some secret spices. There are also a couple of tablespoons of organic vegetable soup mix.

Jody has been making the soup for years, but as Passover has come chametz’ing its way in, Jody wanted to check the label of our soup mix at the store, to see if it was kosher for Pesach, before buying a new jar. As she ran through the ingredients, she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks.

One of the ingredients…was milk.

The ramifications, if true, were devastating. It would mean that we would have been mixing milk and meat, eating treife chicken soup…for nearly 18 years (since we moved to Israel). With such a serious sin, why not just move on to the next level and drip some pig fat into our soup?

Jody put down the jar of soup mix, finished her shopping and quickly returned home where she pulled out her nearly depleted jar of pre-Pesach mix. There was no milk listed. It must have been some sort of change in the product. Jody breathed a sigh of relief. No baby goats would need to be sacrificed at the Temple this year.

Still, it didn’t make sense. Why would there be milk in a vegetable soup mix? The manufacturer – a Dutch company – had written “Controlled Vegetarian” all over the package, although that was for the old jar.

There’s probably an all parve replacement, hopefully just as organic. We’ll check after the holiday. In the meantime, if you are a consumer of Vetara’s Bio Groentebouillon soup mix and you use it in your fleishedik soup, and you keep kosher, consider yourself warned.

A happy – and kosher – Passover!

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Israel’s chocolate wars

February 22, 2012 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Blogging, Food, General, Israeliness, Life, Social Justice 

Having lived here a long time, I’ve gotten used to prices for certain consumer goods having no connection to reality – like the cost of automobiles, gas, deodorant, and imported Post Cranberry Almond Crunch cereal. Other aspects of living here make up for it, like paying arnona and dealing with our cell phone providers.

However, I was all for the cottage cheese revolution last summer which found the populace fed up with the price gouging of our big conglomerates. And thanks to that initiative, some of the prices of our cheese and milk products have indeed been lowered by companies like Strauss and Tnuva.

However, one Israeli who lives in the US wasn’t satisfied. He happened to be in a grocery store in New Jersey and saw a display of Israeli Pesek Zman chocolate bars (made by Strauss) being sold for 69 cents, about a third of what the hard-working Israeli chocolate lover pays for it here.

He posted a photo for his Facebook friends, and presto, the chocolate Watergate was flowing.

The news snowballed and the media, apparently unaware that we’re under an Iranian threat, reported that other chocolate bars manufactured by flagship Elite company (also owned surprisingly enough by Strauss) are also being sold at similarly low prices abroad.

Strauss said in a statement that it cannot control the price that retailers place on their products, and said it believed that the prices were lower in Jewish communities in the United States in advance of Purim.

Nonetheless, after sensational headlines and much chocolate binging, it’s been decided that a month-long boycott of Strauss and Elite chocolate bars is set to begin on March 1, just as we’re entering the chocolate-intensive week of Purim.

We’ve endured hardships before, from milk and egg shortages during the War of Independence to the more recent hummus shortage, which admittedly did cause some of us to crack. However a month without chocolate bars is tearing the Zionist dream at its fabric. We can only sacrifice so much.

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Breakfast freedom

February 12, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: education, Food, General, health, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Science 

The other day, I was at a fave Jerusalem coffee stop in San Simon, Cafe Agnon, named for S.Y. (pronounded Shay) Agnon Street, the street upon which it’s situated, and more relevant, the author S.Y. Agnon, who actually lived in my neighborhood once up on a time. I had just dropped off my kids and husband, and was on my way to a work meeting, but wanted a quick cuppa and something to eat as I’d missed breakfast.

Cafe Agnon has plenty of enticing looking breakfast snacks, including borekas, croissants, strudel-y things, but, sigh, I know better than to go there and eat one of those, as they’re just fattening and not all that filling. So instead, I chose a carob energy bar from a selection of homemade bars, smiling ruefully at the woman who was next in line and had also ordered a coffee and chosen the healthy bar option.

I commented to her, “Ein ta’am.” Meaning, there’s no point in eating one of the more fattening choices, because it’s just a slippery slope to eating more than one and losing the diet battle. We both laughed and said, together, “Yesh ta’am.” Meaning, well, of course those pastries have taste, utilizing the other translation of ta’am, which is taste.

I walked away, smiling, having had one of those good Hebrew moments, which is so gratifying. And then, I read great news from Tel Aviv University, about eating fattening foods for breakfast:

Seems that dessert, “as part of a balanced 600-calorie breakfast that also includes proteins and carbohydrates,” can help dieters lose more weight.

The key is to indulge in the morning, when the body’s metabolism is at its most active and we are better able to work off the extra calories throughout the day, say Prof. Daniela Jakubowicz, Dr. Julio Wainstein and Dr. Mona Boaz of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Diabetes Unit at Wolfson Medical Center, and Prof. Oren Froy of Hebrew University Jerusalem.

Attempting to avoid sweets entirely can create a psychological addiction to these same foods in the long-term, explains Prof. Jakubowicz. Adding dessert items to breakfast can control cravings throughout the rest of the day. Over the course of a 32 week-long study, detailed in the journal Steroids, participants who added dessert to their breakfast — cookies, cake, or chocolate — lost an average of 40 lbs. more than a group that avoided such foods. What’s more, they kept off the pounds longer.

Like that, right? I’ll be nibbling on some delectable ma’afe (pastry) with my next coffee. Feel free to join me.

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