Shavuot without cheese

May 20, 2010 - 5:54 PM by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Food, health, Holidays 
Award-winning cheesecake from Ben Ami

Award-winning cheesecake from Ben Ami

The just passed Jewish holiday of Shavuot is known by even the most secular Israelis as the festival on which we eat cheese. Sadly, not so any more for my 16-year-old daughter who was just diagnosed with lactose intolerance.

Merav has been getting terrible stomach aches for sometime now. Our doctor sent her to the hospital for testing in which they give patients a glass of concentrated lactose, then have them breathe into a machine every half hour.

It didn’t take long for Merav to know. The familiar pains started nearly immediately and it only took a few blows for the technician to return with the suspected but nevertheless disappointing news.

Still, to be absolutely sure it was lactose causing the stomach aches and not some other ailment (or perhaps an additional disease), the doctor told Merav to go off anything dairy for two weeks, then report back on how she felt.

The problem was that this was just before Shavuot and all those blintzes, quiches and cheese-laden casseroles beckoned. We decided she would start her test regime immediately after the holiday.

Truth be told, Shavuot dinner was relatively lactose free – we had rice, tofu and fish (our religious cheese-eating friends would be scandalized). But we couldn’t resist dessert. And so, in a last hurrah to dairy delights, we ordered a cheesecake.

But not just any cheesecake. This one, from the newly opened Ben Ami bakery and café on Jerusalem’s Emek Refaim Street (the first branch of a small family-run business from Kfar Vitkin) was rated the #1 cheesecake in the entire country by the Maariv NRG website.

At NIS 64 ($16), it was also more than we’d ever spent on dessert. But I am happy to report that it lived up to its reputation. The cheese was the consistency of whipped ice cream; the crumbly crust the polar opposite of an American graham cracker. It was unbelievably delicious.

The irony about Merav’s lactose intolerance is that, up until last summer, she was a staunch vegetarian. Now meat is welcome. It’s the lasagna that’s been excommunicated.

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The white holiday

May 26, 2009 - 2:12 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Food, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness 

dry-bonesShavuot is approaching, and what I like about this holiday in Israel is that you can celebrate it from a variety of approaches. If you’re observant, there’s the standard ‘yontif‘ handling of the holiday, which means food, prayers, something white to wear, and heading to a tikkun on Shavuot eve to learn all or part of the night.

But as one of the three pilgrimage festivals — Sukkot and Passover are the other two — Shavuot ranks up there in Israel, with all kinds of alternative and traditional festivities that appeal to even the most secular of Israeli Jews. There are the kibbutz celebrations, which include small children dressed in white, arms akimbo in order to hold baskets of recently picked fruit and vegetables to mark Shavuot’s stance as an agricultural festival. There are the usual family gatherings, as Israelis so love to do, including tables groaning with all kinds of homemade dairy fare, since this is considered to be the ‘dairy’ holiday. (See this great JTA article about alternatives to dairy on Shavuot.)

And since Israelis also love their dairy — we have more types of yogurt drinks per capita than any other country — one of the local dairy companies, Tnuva, puts out a Shavuot magazine each year, as an insert in the local newspapers, with dairy recipes from the kitchens of their employees. Nicely done, and, I have to say, it has been the source of more than one good recipe that’s come out of my kitchen.

There are also the learning celebrations, given Shavuot’s source as the holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah, and that has led to the traditional tikkun, all-night learning that takes place on the night of the holiday. In my city of Jerusalem, a city of much learning, there are hundreds of tikkunim to choose from, held at every synagogue, yeshiva, school and place of learning. But what I’ve loved in years past is to head to Tel Aviv, where the streets are full of people dressed in white heading to all-night lectures of the more alternative type. Those can include poetry readings, yoga and Torah, discussions about the place of Torah in a secular society, or, for the more party-oriented, all-night clubbing in honor of Shavuot. For that matter, since Tel Aviv is considered the white city for its collection of Bauhaus architecture, you could celebrate Shavuot by doing a midnight tour of Bauhaus structures.

I will be making cheesecake, but I won’t be heading out for some all-night (not that I ever did) learning this year. But if you’re in J-town, I did notice some great options for the Tikkun, including an Israeli singdown and a 12:30 am walk around the Old City, hosted by the Tower of David Museum.

Happy learning and eating.

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