Last week, my small apartment turned into a synagogue.

At 7:00 a.m. every morning, twelve to eighteen men wrapped in white tallitot stood in the living room,  facing a narrow cupboard with a Torah scroll inside. They came in quickly and made almost no noise unless the service called for the reader to repeat prayers aloud. At Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer,  Husband’s voice rose over the others. For my mother-in-law, whose travail I have written about here before, had returned her soul to G-d at last. Our neighbors came morning and afternoon for Husband to say Kaddish for her during the shiva week.

Naturally, it was hard for Husband to swallow food in the beginning. But the first thing a Jewish mourner does upon returning from the burial is eat a small ritual meal. Round foods, traditionally lentils and hard-boiled eggs, to symbolize the circle of life, and bread. This meal should a gift from a neighbor or friend, reaffirming community ties. It’s a poignant meal, a step away from death, a step towards continuing life. My good friend Hannah Katsman of A Mother in Israel brought us this meal.

I cooked up a big pot of – what else? – chicken soup. I had told every one that offered that I would handle the week’s cooking – no need to bring anything. It was just Husband, the Little One, and me. Michelle of Baroness Tapuzina brought some nosh to have handy for visitors anyway. It did come in handy. Soon enough, I realized that I should have accepted the offers of meals that well-meaning neighbors pressed on me.

It’s not that I didn’t have time. Simply, the atmosphere in the house wasn’t conducive to anything as creative and free as cooking (or blogging). Visitors came in and out all day and late into the evening. I was uncomfortable making cooking noises and smells in the kitchen while the men were concentrating on prayers in the living room. Everything seemed like a huge effort.

I did cook, though. Comforting, familiar dishes like mashed potatoes and meatballs, simple dishes like creamy scrambled eggs and toast. And always, that pot of chicken soup, full of colorful vegetables and made with a whole chicken each time. But it took more out of me to cook than it ever had before. It was just not the right time to be cooking. I regretted not having bowed to custom and taken up the offers of ready-to-eat food more and more.

What food would I have liked?

• Soups, all kinds.
• Stew.
• Cookies to offer out-of-town visitors.
• Drinks, because even if we don’t offer a meal, many visitors arrive thirsty.
• A platter of sandwiches, or a loaf of bread and several kinds of cheese, or sliced meat.
• Finger vegetables, already washed and prepped.
• Food packed in individual servings to freeze or eat right away, as needed.
• A box of fresh bourekas or samusak – any kind of filled, savory pastry.
• It would have been really cool if someone had ordered pizza for us.

Simple food that doesn’t require the household to make decisions or think too much. When you’re grieving, the mind doesn’t want to engage with layers of flavors or subtle hints of anything, anyway.

In many communities, someone takes it on to organize a  food roster for the mourner’s shiva week. This is an excellent idea. To it, I’ll add: cook the food you know best; don’t cook to impress, but to comfort.

Another tip for shiva visitors, not related to food: stay only 15 minutes, unless you’re a very close friend and are certain that the mourners would rather you stayed. Wait till after mealtimes to visit. When several visitors dropped by at around noon and stayed for over an hour, I started wondering if I was supposed to pull lunch together for them.

The shiva week finished just before Shabbat, with the afternoon service. The Sephardic custom of putting out all kinds of small snacks, each requiring a different blessing, seems to have caught on in the general community. The intention is to lend the merit of the blessings to the soul of the one who died. So I put a variety of dried fruit and nuts, cookies and drinks on the table – with a bottle of whiskey for those who like to say a l’chaim. It was well done; the guys pretty much cleaned up everything.

And that was the end of food during shiva. It was a relief to turn to normal cooking for Shabbat. What did I fix for Shabbat? Well, arroz con pollo. Picadillo. Salads. Roast chicken with potatoes and carrots. Simple things.

And one more pot of chicken soup.

“This is a practical guide to growing a sustainable, green blog. But with practical tips on how to write for search engine optimization, how to make money and how to embrace “co-optition” it is a practical hands-on guide for any emerging blogger.”

I’m proud to say that I wrote the chapter on Judaism and the ecology.

Here’s the link showing you how to purchase this book. Oh, and recommendation? I personally found the information in Barefoot Bloggers hugely useful in writing Israeli Kitchen.

Click here to visit Barefoot Bloggers.

The wine was good, but dinner’s over and there’s just a little left in the bottle.  What can you do with it?

Keep it. Even a little wine does magic things to your cooking.

1. Make your own wine vinegar. It’s easy. You’ll need a clean glass jar and a bottle of commercial vinegar with the “mother of vinegar” – wisps of original vinegar-making material in it. Organic vinegars work best.

• Pour the bottle of vinegar into your jar. Add any leftover wine to it. You can mix wines if you want, but the vinegar does taste better if you keep separate jars for white and red.
• Cover the jar with cheesecloth or a paper towel. Secure it with a rubber band.
• Store at room temperature, away from any open bottles of wine. You don’t want vinegar bacteria getting into your drink.
• Stir once daily and start tasting after a week. Some vinegar will evaporate, so keep adding leftover wine.
  Don’t be startled if a new “mother” starts forming at the bottom of the jar. This is a sign of good health. Once it’s firm, you can pick it out of the jar with tongs and give it away, compost it, or use it to start a fresh supply of vinegar.
• Start using the vinegar when it’s gotten sour enough to suit you.

2. Blend up a wine vinaigrette. Leftover white wine makes an elegant, fresh-tasting salad dressing or sauce for fish, chicken, or vegetables.  You’ll need:

1/3 cup white wine
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice (from 2 to 3 lemons)
1 teaspoon honey – if the wine is dry. If using a sweet wine, omit the honey.
1/4 teaspoon  salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
3/4 cup olive oil

• Blend the wine, lemon juice, honey, salt, and pepper in a bowl. Still blending (either with a fork, whisk, or the blender), add the oil, slowly.
• Mix again just before serving.
  

That’s it. The vinaigrette will keep up to a week refrigerated.

3. Poach pears in wine. This dessert makes a welcome light ending to a rich meal. Use red or rosé wine. Follow this link for the recipe.

4. Marinate beef, chicken, fish, or tofu in wine. Use your judgment; red wine for red meat, white or rosé for chicken, white for fish or tofu. Keep in mind how the color of the wine will affect the look of the finished dish: will you mind if your chicken looks purple?

A simple marinade:

1 cup leftover wine, 2 tablespoons olive oil, 1 thinly-sliced onion, 1 crushed garlic clove, 1 tablespoon soy sauce, ½ teaspoon ground or freshly-grated ginger, a strip of orange peel as long as your forefinger, 1 bay leaf.

• Lay the raw meat (or fish, or tofu) in the marinade. Refrigerate immediately till you’re ready to cook the dish. Note: Meat, chicken, and tofu may be marinated ½-hour to overnight in the fridge. Fish will “cook” and fall apart if left longer than ½-hour in the marinade.
• Turn the ingredients over half-way into the marinating time so that they will absorb the flavors evenly.
• Remove the marinaded ingredient from the liquid. Now grill, sauté, or roast your dish.
• Don’t throw the marinade liquid out either.  You can cook it down in a saucepan till it’s thick and spoon it over the finished dish for yet more flavor.

5. Use leftover wine as part of the liquid in tomato sauce or gravy. The perceptible “winey” flavor will cook out, but the sauce will take on a richness and depth that wasn’t there before. On the other hand, if you stir the wine in just a few minutes before you intend to serve, the the sauce will have a delicious winey top note to harmonize with the deeper, rich notes of cooked vegetables.

6. Freeze your leftover wine.Use sealable bags to store your leftover wine, even quarter-cupfuls, in the freezer. You can then break off however much you think you’ll need, as you need it.

Use up or freeze your leftover wine within a day if it’s been left out, or a week if it’s been re-corked and kept in the fridge. Wine that’s old and tastes unpleasant is only fit to be poured down the drain.

I love the taste of roast-lamb gravy enriched with a last-minute dollop of red wine. My grandmother, who studied the art of sauces at the Cordon Bleu (back in the 1950s), used to make roast lamb with wine gravy – and when I cook it like she did, vivid memories of summertime dinners at Grandma and Grandpa’s house come back to me.

Photo of Lemon Verbena by Miriam Kresh

Leda Meredith is the the author of The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Local Eating on a Budget. She’s also my good friend. Leda gave us an excellent post on food preservation last year when I was moving house. Now I’m excited to present her ideas on growing herbs in places you might never have considered. Leda, take it away…

When asked, “If I could grow just one edible, what would you recommend?” my first response is always, “Herbs.” They tolerate a wide range of conditions, many are perennials that will come back year after year even in containers, and while a lot of people don’t have enough space to grow the bulk of their food, fresh herbs can enliven their meals daily. As an added plus almost every herb, including those we usually think of as culinary, has excellent medicinal properties.

I’ve grown herbs in window boxes, indoors, on the back steps of my apartment, in hanging baskets attached to a chain-link fence, and even in cracks in pavement.

Growing Herbs in Containers

Almost every herb can be grown in a container provided that it has a depth of at least six inches and—this is important!—drainage holes. It is essential that the plant’s roots do not sit in mud, and the only way to ensure that is to provide a way for excess water to drain out of the container. Use a potting mix rather than topsoil or garden soil. Potting mixes include ingredients such as perlite, which are additional insurance for good drainage.

I’ve made containers out of almost everything, including old vegetable cans that I punched holes in the bottom of!

Where to Grow Herbs

The first consideration is to make sure you plant your herbs (or place their container) in a location that matches the light requirements of the plants. Some herbs such as oregano, lavender, and rosemary thrive in full sun. Others, including chervil, lemon balm, and cilantro prefer part sun or even part shade. Miriam reminds me that in climates that are dry, as well as hot in the summer, even herbs that are usually described as needing full sun might prefer a little shade. Information on the light requirements of individual herbs can be found online.

Windowsills and paved-over areas are obvious candidates for container herbs, but there are other options. I have some potted thyme and cilantro that I grow in pots I’ve hung on a chain-link fence, for example.

Photo by Leda Meredith

Low-growing herbs such as thyme tend to have shallower root systems than larger, upright herbs. These can be grown in the spaces between stepping-stones or pavement. Put a little good potting mix into the space and keep your plants well watered for the first two weeks to give them a chance to start growing new roots (the shallow soil will dry out quicker than in other growing situations.

Photo by Leda Meredith

In addition to hanging containers from fences and handrails, there are many innovative containers available for vertical gardening. The simplest of these looks like those shoe racks that are made to hang in a closet, the ones with lots of pouches on a flat piece of fabric. And in fact, you can use one of the ones made for shoes. Hang the whole arrangement flat against a wall. Cut some small holes in the bottom of each pouch for drainage, fill with potting mix, and plant an herb in each pouch.

If you have no outdoor space at all, some herbs can be successfully grown indoors. I’ve had the best luck with parsley, chives, cayenne and other chile peppers, and cilantro. Indoor herbs require much more light than they do when grown outdoors. If you don’t have a window that can provide at least six hours of direct sunlight, opt for plant lights. There’s no need to buy the expensive ones marketed as being specifically for plants: a cheap fluorescent light works just as well (incandescent light bulbs, however, do not). Make sure that the light is no further than eight inches from the tops of your plants. To make your life easier, you can put the light on a timer (set it to be on for at least ten hours).

I wish you much success with your delicious, aromatic, homegrown herbs…wherever you decide to grow them!

Leda’s book is available at Amazon.com. She blogs about her food adventures at www.ledameredith.com.

The Chocolate Lady doesn’t post often, but her Pesach Survival Guide is wonderful. If you like humorous, useful foody prose laced with Yiddishisms – go there, gentle reader, go there.

Well…if you know me a little, you know I love garlic, a lot.  I’m just glad my tradition accepts garlic on Passover. Reader Jasmine, commenting on my recent garlic-love post, sent a link to an article discussing the hazards in garlic imported from China. This sent me off on a search for up-to-date information, which I wrote about for the Green Prophet blog.

When you go out shopping and reach for a package of those nice white bulbs, give a thought to what I wrote in this post.

Just to spoil it for you, the moral of the story is: buy local!

At About.com: a converter.

Also from About.com: a quick reference of cooking equivalents

A very simple one from CalculateMe.com. The home page also has links to many other kinds of conversions.

And  Online Conversion, one  I’m fond of because you can “convert anything to anything” on it (it’s on my blogroll too).

Hope some of these come in handy.