What are you making for Passover? A la muestra!, my legacy Passover recipe collection, long out of circulation (just like me), is back this year in a beautiful new edition that makes me smile, with revised commentary, larger fonts and photos, some adjustments to the menus and recipes, new serving suggestions, some interactivity with the blog, and my usual meticulous instructions that are written to ensure your results are not only delicious, but true to the authentic techniques, flavors and textures of classic Sephardic cooking from Rhodes. That’s a real revision! Continue reading
Category Archives: Recipes
Legacy Passover recipes from Rhodes. (The book is back)
Filed under Holidays (fiestas judias), Recipes
Purim Lanu, Pesah a la Manu! (Purim’s over; Pesah is around the corner)
When it’s cold, gray and pouring rain outdoors, it’s a treat to be indoors pouring over a cookbook full of warm inspiration from sunnier places. Lately I’ve been doing just that in a tiny rural town in Galicia, where I’ve been on an extended visit since last summer, wrestling my ancestors and reacclimating, after fifteen years in the Mediterranean, to an Atlantic climate. Sunny Portugal may be a stone’s throw from my doorstep, but winter here has felt more like the Orkneys (right now it feels like Siberia) – minus a crackling fire, or good scotch, to keep me warm.
For that, I’ve got Jennifer Abadi’s new cookbook, Too Good to Passover: Sephardic & Judeo-Arabic Seder Menus and Memories from Africa, Asia, and Europe, and so far, it’s doing a fine job.
A good idea is only as good as your ability to get it done, so I was pleased to see this book finished at last after nine years in the making. At more than 670 pages, it was a huge undertaking, and worth the long wait. Abadi, author of A Fistful of Lentils: Syrian-Jewish Recipes from Grandma Fritzie’s Kitchen, was relentless in her pursuit of Passover memoirs, family traditions, and recipes from communities of the non-Ashkenazic world – many of them not often heard from, or even about, or now only extant in exile. What began as a simple inquiry into different Passover traditions (Abadi’s original idea was to build a framework for recipes she teaches in her cooking classes), became a commitment to honor the communities and families that shaped them.
Filed under Customs, History, Holidays (fiestas judias), Recipes
A Sephardic American Cookbook To Sink Your Teeth Into
Whenever Sephardic food is mentioned, our thoughts typically go straight to baked goods. This is where Linda Capeloto Sendowski has focused her first cookbook, Sephardic Baking from Nona and More Favorites.
Linda Sendowski grew up in Seattle in the 1950’s, luxuriating in the tastes and aromas of her mother’s and grandmother’s traditional Sephardic kitchens. Her own baking reflects that environment in the best possible way; the book invites you to experience Sephardic baking as warm and welcoming comfort food, a beautiful, rustic treat for all the senses.
The majority are classics from Çanakkale and Rhodes, with a few Sephardic and Ashkenazi selections from other continents, and others of her own invention. Everything comes together through Sendowski’s filter and the sure hand she inherited from her mother, whose memory and bendichas manos she lovingly honored by making this book. Continue reading
Filed under Other Reading, Recipes
Recipe for a sweet & abundant New Year
The article I’d planned on posting next is so grisly, I just can’t post it now. Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, begins tomorrow, and with it a very beautiful season of renewal. So I’ve set the article aside, but not without sharing that with each grisly discovery or insight I have into history, the more deeply I appreciate being able to celebrate my holidays, eat my foods and just be my authentic self. This is something I truly wish for all people. Αll. The world would be a sweeter place.
On Rosh Hashana we wish for a sweet new year. The theme is traditionally emphasized by eating honey, whereas beans, often in the form of black eyed peas, are consumed to encourage abundance and prosperity. Eating beans for prosperity is a Sephardic New Year tradition, though we’re not alone; on December 31st Italians eat lentils for the same reason, and modern Spaniards eat twelve grapes at the stroke of midnight. Continue reading
Filed under Holidays (fiestas judias), Recipes
SEPHARDIC FOOD 