‘Tis the Season: A Kemach Torah Passover Digest

First things first: The 2012 Passover Guide is proving to be enormously popular, at least by the standards of a niche blog like this one. The hit count on March 30th, the day it was published, was more than three times the previous record hit count for a single day. Thanks to everyone who shared it through Facebook, Google+ and word of mouth, and please keep spreading the word!* Please treat the comments section of this post as the new suggestion box for additions to the 2013 Guide.

Now that we’re in the final week of preparations, I thought it would be a good time to present some relevant posts you might have missed last year.

1. Who Knows Three? An explanation, a bit on the technical side, of why we have three matzot on the modern seder plate.
2. A Question of Seasonality. Addressing the oddity of charoset, which is usually made with apples even though they’re a fall crop and Passover is a spring holiday. Read the comments section.
3. The Curious Case of Matzah Ashirah. How egg matzah is highly problematic for reasons that make no sense.
4. Carrot “consommé” (vegan). Not necessarily a Passover recipe, but if you read the Guide (just follow the first link in this article) you’ll see that that’s exactly the point.

So much for old business. Now, how about that Passover-hekhshered ice cream? No? And you don’t have a dedicated ice cream maker for Passover? No problem.

Shavua tov!

* I don’t make money off of this blog or anything. I just want to make Passover better.

Sunmukimchi, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bacteria

I don’t think we ever ate turnips when I was growing up, and as a result I never formed a taste model for them; they always strike me as potatoes that aren’t quite potatoey enough. (Potatoes were slow to catch on after their introduction to the Old World, but supplanted turnips as the dominant root vegetable in much of Eastern Europe after a series of crop failures in the 18th century.) I use turnips when a recipe calls for them, but don’t recall ever having been struck by the sudden hankering for that slightly sharp, moderately starchy experience. So, when we received half a pound of turnips early in our CSA adventures, I had to set about looking for good ideas.

As luck would have it, good ideas were already upon me, hidden in a book I’d purchased years ago yet had barely ever used. Linda Ziedrich’s The Joy of Pickling had entertained me with anecdotes, literary snippets about pickles and interesting flavor ideas, but I’d never followed any of its instructions except to experiment, while I was in college, with pickled garlic cloves.

Blueberry Lime Preserves

I’ve been delinquent with regard to CSA-related posts lately, and all non-parasha posts for that matter. My main excuse reason is that I’ve been working on the high ropes course at a day camp, which means real physical labor each weekday, which in turn means I’m just tired a lot of the time. I am in decent shape—much better after five weeks doing this sort of thing—but I am not 18 years old anymore, and my body does not spring back from a day of running around in 100 degree weather as it once might have done. Time to start addressing my backlog of posts-to-be.

The CSA has dumped spadefuls of blueberries on us since it started, and we’ve struggled to keep up. We don’t eat blueberries out of hand very often, and while Terri makes a killer blueberry buckle, it’s something of an operation and requires an annoying degree of cleanup. (Turning the oven on in this weather isn’t much of an enticement either.) We put some of them in pancakes, but we rarely have a sit-down breakfast together more than once a week—something I’d love to change—and there are only so many pancakes one person can eat on a Sunday. We needed something to do with these berries that would either use them up before they rotted, or somehow preserve them for later.

Eat all the parts of the things!

A little under two years ago I passed through the Union Square Greenmarket to pick up some groceries, and finding that the season was right, bought a stalk of Brussels sprouts. (I enjoy buying sprouts on the stem, both because they are often—though not always—fresher and more flavorful than loose sprouts, and because an intact Brussels sprout plant is one of the silliest-looking organisms I’ve ever seen.) After making the purchase, I took my enormous shopping bag over to another vendor, who remarked, “Those look like great sprouts. You’re going to eat the leaves too, right?”

It’s the most bountiful time of the year

Well, dear readers, today was an exhausting and exciting day. We’ve been keeping this quiet and up to now have only told a few close friends and relatives, but I am pleased to announce that my wife and I have welcomed a wonderful new addition into our family.

What? No, it’s not a baby. A lot of you know us personally—don’t you think you’d have noticed if Terri were nine months pregnant? We bought a CSA share. Sheesh.

CSA, short for Community-Supported Agriculture, is a business model developed to support small-scale, local farming operations. (That picture of a farm you’ve been carrying around in your head since grade school? It barely exists in the United States. Most American farms are enormous, highly mechanized operations that grow only two or three crops. The major intent behind CSA is to preserve, and encourage the growth of, the other kind of farm.) Rather than grow produce and then try to sell it, CSA-reliant farmers sell shares of their produce well before the harvest begins. They then distribute the fruits (and vegetables) of their labors to investors as the various crops reach maturity. Here’s how it looks from a consumer’s perspective: You throw money at a local farm in March, and then from June through, say, November, that farm returns the favor by giving you all sorts of great veggies on a weekly or biweekly basis.

Aside from the obvious pay-now-collect-later aspect, there are a few notable differences between being a CSA member and buying all of your produce at a supermarket:

A question of seasonality

Seasonality is a big deal in the modern foodie world.* We’re told that all crops taste better when eaten in their season rather than grown year-round in greenhouses, and my experience supports this idea. We’re also told that until the advent of industrial agriculture and rapid international shipping, everyone ate seasonal food exclusively, all the time, but there’s one dish served this time of year that gives me pause. Turn to the entry on “charoset” in Gil Marks’s Encyclopedia of Jewish Food and you’ll find ten recipes for sweet, symbolic fruit mortar from ten different Jewish ethnic subgroups, all of which originate within the Northern Hemisphere and half of which call for fresh apples. (The one from Surinam uses dried apples.)

Say it with me: Apples are a fall crop.

I don’t have any insights to offer this time, only confusion. How have so many Jewish cultures come to use this fruit on the wrong side of the calendar? Are all of these recipes recent innovations inspired by the availability of Chilean produce? Did Jews from Georgia, Ashkenaz, Italy and Afghanistan—for Bob’s sake, apples are native to Afghanistan—collectively decide that a mealy, well-past-the-expiration-date apple was just the thing to remind them of their ancestral bricklaying duties?

This calls for some investigation. After Pesach is over.

* Call this a quibble, but I really dislike the word “foodie.” In my mind it means something along the lines of “a person who read an article in Saveur about wine pairing and now feels empowered to snicker at whatever you’re serving with dinner.” But it’s the word of the times, and until “gourmand” comes back into style I guess I’m stuck with it.