This blog, which served up my food writing for four years, will now serve as an archive. Feel free to troll this site for vegetarian, Jewish, and sustainable recipes. Search by ingredient, the name of a dish, or random key word.

For my current musings, check out rheakennedy.com.

Photo by the author.

My latest recipe for MyJewishLearning.com combines pungent, earthy goat cheese with spicy greens. The dish comes with a story, of course, that reveals another melding. Read all about it.

Are you interested in becoming a professional chef? There are numerous quality culinary arts programs to choose from, including programs which focus on healthy cooking. Besides cooking techniques, many of the programs also teach the business aspects of the profession. Training at a prestigious culinary school increases your chances of succeeding in the traditional food service industry.

The nation’s top culinary schools include Le Cordon Bleu, The Culinary Institute of America, and the College of Culinary Arts at Johnson & Wales University.

While those schools focus more on gourmet European cooking techniques, several institutions have made their mark with alternative food preparation from both inside and outside the U.S. Most emphasize healthful, healing, or animal product-free cooking. Here are a few schools offering this kind of culinary education.

Living Light Culinary Arts Institute

This institute provides a 35-day “Gourmet Raw Food Chef Training” program which includes the science behind preparing raw and vegan foods. Students learn to make tasty and nutritious organic raw food. Living Light Culinary Arts Institute offers an Associate Chef series. The school is located in Ft. Bragg, California.

Natural Gourmet Institute For Health & Culinary Arts

This school is located in New York City and provides a chef training program. The classes offered deal with holistic and vegetarian cooking, and many focus on ethnic specialties. Students learn the basic cooking techniques for a wide variety of health-supportive foods. Students become familiar with numerous approaches to diet and nutrition and gain an understanding of the criteria for quality food selection.

The School of Natural Cookery

The school’s motto, “Where Culinary Art Meets Healing Whole Food,” should give you an idea of what this school is all about. Students learn plant-based cooking skills and much more. In this unique program, students learn to cook without recipes and with whatever ingredients are available. The school, which is located in Boulder, Colorado, offers two different programs: one for the professional chef and one for the home cook.

Natural Kitchen Cooking School

A unique Chef Training program offered at the Natural Kitchen Cooking School teaches nutritional approaches to food preparation. The program is designed to show students how food can support a radiant level of health and wellness. The program covers the various important aspects of vegetarian natural foods cooking. The school has campuses in Mercerville and in Haddonfield, New Jersey as well as one in New York City.

The Natural Epicurean Academy of Culinary Arts.

This school offers a 900-hour, plant-based, professional chef training program. Students learn theory and practice in the disciplines of vegetarian, macrobiotic, vegan, raw and living foods, and ayurvedic cooking. The program also requires students to get some hands-on experience outside of the classroom through an externship. The school is located in Austin, Texas.

The vegetarian and vegan culinary field is a growing sector within the culinary arts industry as the demand for vegetarian and vegan dishes continues to grow. There are a growing number of opportunities for professional chefs trained to cook healthy dishes. Now is a great time to go back to school and get the skills needed to make yourself more marketable. You should certainly spend some time researching culinary arts programs (as well as financial aid options) to find one that’s right for you.

Brian Jenkins is an expert on a number of different career fields, including careers in culinary arts. Brian has been writing for BrainTrack.com since 2008.

Can Cheese Be Jewish?

“Goats are the Jews of the animal kingdom,” Aitan Mizrahi told a group at the Hazon Food Conference on Friday morning. The workshop participants, gathered in the warm, cream-scented air of a small industrial kitchen at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, immediately picked up on the tongue-in-cheek theme: They wander, they are intelligent, and they are stiff-necked, they said. And, Mizrahi pointed out, “They enjoy to be in a minyan and they also enjoy to go off on their own and shmooze.”

So the gentle and friendly milk-producers make a perfect fit for Freedman, an eco-conscious retreat space in the Berkshires.

Read more on The Jew and the Carrot.

In response to a city council vote to ban toys from Happy Meals, an op-ed in the San Francisco Examiner in early November argued that it’s no biggie. The piece came from Karen Wells, vice president of nutrition and menu strategy for McDonald’s USA. She argues that the boxed meals–consisting mostly of processed foods with fairly high fat, sodium, and sugar content–are a treat, not a threat.

I’m glad that someone views our fast food nation this way. As I noted in another post, Americans spend just 27 minutes a day preparing food, according to Michael Pollan’s research. He writes that this amounts to half the time we spent in the 1960s. By one count, McDonald’s has sold more than 20 billion of these meals since it first introduced the concept in 1979, averaging more than 640 million per year.

Even if families do not receive most of their entrées from a server in a visor, neither is it likely that they pull made-from-scratch meals piping hot from the oven. I suspect this is true even in the Jewish community, where food plays a central role in every holiday and everyday traditions.

So what do we do about this? Short of a small-plate coup, or everyone becoming a food blogger in love with cooking and writing about it, how do we make this op-ed claim true? Luckily, there are people out there who regularly put healthy, sustainable meals on their tables.

If you are reading this blog, you probably know a few of these people yourself. But, you may wonder, how do they do it?

I decided to email a few of these erstwhile cooks who have become adept at wrangling the time, skill, and energy to cook for themselves, their spouses, and their children—all with wholesome ingredients. It turns out that a simple combination of passion, prioritizing, and/or planning do the trick.

The psychology of dedication

Leah Koenig, former editor of The Jew and the Carrot, had a basic theory: “I truly believe that we make time for the things that we love,” she responded, “and for me, that wisdom absolutely applies to cooking.” Koenig has both worked from home and gone off to a daytime office job. Regardless of the work situation, she’s always found time to welcome the smell of fresh-baked pizza or pumpkin bread to the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her husband.

The same idea was true for Gabe Popkin, who lives with three roommates in a house just outside Washington, D.C. The occupants of Gabe’s house often cook separately but sit down together, or invite a hungry roommate to join a prepared meal. Every week or two, they have a more planned house dinner.

“I don’t feel as though I carve out time for cooking at home,” Gabe wrote. “In fact, I would say that nothing is more important to me than eating well, and that has always meant eating home-cooked food.”

Lighting a fire

Some wannabe at-home chefs do not yet have the passion for laboring in the kitchen. First tip to light a fire, from my research and experience: Turn off the cooking shows, log out of epicurious.com, and start spending time with a real, live cook.

Because I cannot invite you all into my one-bedroom apartment, I will offer the next best thing: Logistical tips.

Esther James, who lives with her husband in a house on the Jersey shore, offers this wisdom about priorities and pragmatism: “Making a home-cooked lunch in the morning trumps putting on makeup before going to work. I justify it by reminding myself that I can brush my hair in the bathroom at work… but I can’t make lunch there,” she explained.

“I generally try to make meals with core ingredients that I can reuse and change throughout the week,” explained Cara Berman. Flexible ingredients I recommend are brown rice, cooked black beans, and steamed or sautéed greens. Matched with a few additional ingredients, each can become a variety of quick meals.

The part of the prep that does take time—say, slicing veggies for a salad—Cara considers a chance to catch up with her hubby.

For Gabe, buying fresh ingredients and cooking and eating at home blends into his social life. So he doesn’t have to choose between spending time with friends and making food at home—it’s all the same.

Leah fits in time during off hours. She’ll take out frozen pizza dough to thaw before she goes to work, or bake in the evening.

Ideas like this can lessen anxiety and embolden new cooks.

The chag (holiday) connection

For Jewish home cooks, holidays mean added motivation and lessons in making it work. Maybe a pinch of stress finds its way in there, too. As someone who stayed up until the wee hours folding spanakopita and tossing quinoa salad for a pre-fast Yom Kippur meal this year, I can relate.

“Most of our big events are the major Jewish holidays,” Cara said of herself and her husband. They regularly invite friends and family for Chanukkah latkes, Yom Kippur break-fast, and the biggest hosting challenge of all: Passover. (“I like when life is hectic,” Cara admitted.)

Natasha Rosenstock, who lives in Potomac, Maryland, finds that the need to plan ahead for her Shomer Shabbat household of herself, her husband, and a toddler packs a nice bonus. “This cooking obligation gives us great leftovers for the rest of the weekend and maybe even Monday–prime time when it is easy to fall back on ordering greasy pizza or Chinese food,” Natasha wrote.

One more word of advice on working it all out, from Esther: “A plan in place helps inspire creativity–it doesn’t inhibit it.”

Overcoming the “oy” factor

All of the above is not to say that these cooks have all the answers.

Natasha used to log her most hectic hour of the week right before Shabbat, because she would get home from the office with no time to spare. She would end the night too exhausted to even eat dinner.

While Cara feels she and her husband save money by cooking from scratch at home, Gabe estimates that his love for local and sustainable foods keeps his grocery bill relatively high.

I do end up grabbing take-out now and then, and often opt to meet a friend at a restaurant instead of at my place over a home-cooked meal. But I also make time for preparing my own food. How could I resist? I can make it the way I like it, and prepare as much or as little of it as I want. The concept of hosting people or prepping a dish for a potluck, which I do most often for Jewish holidays, serves as great motivation.

I still believe that home-cooked meals are rare. But I can report that home cooks exist, and that they have plenty of advice for anyone trying to fit in more kitchen time. Now there’s a reason to be happy.

Further reading:
San Fran OKs law requiring healthier kids’ meals

Cooking Shabbos Dinner After the Clocks Fall Back

Scratch That: How cost-effective is it to make homemade pantry staples?

Radical homemaking – politics, ecology, and domestic arts

Note: This is a more detailed version of another post that I contributed to The Jew and the Carrot. So for even further further reading, check out that one!

Photo: A cooking pot displays an old-fashioned design to match the erstwhile notion of preparing meals at home. Photo from viZZZual.com, via Creative Commons.

Obesity and disease are more evident now than ever before; the numbers are rising as the days go by, and health is no longer something we can take for granted. Unless we take steps to preserve it and nurture it from childhood, we risk falling prey to illness and poor health as we grow older. We all know that the key to holistic health and wellbeing are diet and exercise – watch what you eat and work out five days a week. However, we fail to encourage our children to adopt this way of life, and because of this, we fail at providing them with a healthy life.

While many parents are guilty of feeding their kids junk food that’s filled with sugar, salt, fats, and preservatives because it’s easily and readily available and doesn’t take too much effort, schools too are responsible for feeding this unhealthy practice. They sell junk food, sugary and salty snacks, and sodas at their cafeterias and through their vending machines. And they don’t stress or encourage healthy food choices for students. According to a study conducted by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an organization that launched the Healthy School Lunches campaign, menus in most school lunch programs are high in saturated fat and cholesterol and low in fiber, vitamins, legumes, whole grains, and fruits and vegetables.

While some schools are coming around and offering more in the way of salads, vegetables, fruits, wholegrain bread and low glycemic carbs, others are not in a hurry to change the menu of pizzas, fries, candy bars and sodas that are a staple in their cafeterias and vending machines. There are two reasons for this – one is that the manufacturers of processed and junk food push to have their products sold in and around schools because kids are their biggest and most lucrative customers; and the other is some schools feel that it’s just too much trouble and costs too much to change their ways and focus on providing healthy meals every single day.

The problem with unhealthy meal choices for children is that besides promoting obesity and disease in adulthood, it dulls their ability to learn and concentrate when in school. A child who eats sugary cereals and breads made of white flour for breakfast is bound to feel lethargic and sleepy in class. Besides this, they crave food even though they’re not really hungry, and this makes them overeat at lunch time. When lunch consists of pizzas and soda, the vicious cycle continues. They lose out on nutrition and don’t have the energy required to stay focused in class and perform on the field.

So what would bring about a change in the state of our schools? The key here is awareness – as more and more parents become aware of the need for change, they must push their child’s school to effect a positive change. Sure they could pack lunch for their child, but what’s to prevent him/her from indulging in junk food at school? Schools can take advantage of various programs like the one run by the PCRM which works with school districts across the country, organizes meetings and presentations, and helps with meal planning and recipe ideas.

It is initiatives such as these that are responsible for the change in some schools – according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 30 percent of states now ban schools from offering junk food in vending machines; only 25 percent of schools still sell unhealthy baked goods; 73 of schools offer salads on the lunch menu; and 46 percent of schools offer water as opposed to soda.

With increased awareness and more support from district administrative boards, it is possible to provide healthier and more wholesome food options in schools.

That’s a little how I’ve felt as my family members planned out Thanksgiving menu. We have agreed on a wholesome meal, I think, with all sorts of stuff we can buy at the farmers market. (Wee! The farmers market!)

I thought I would share a little of that fun with the blogosphere. Here is what we plan to cook and eat.

For your added enjoyment, this menu is laced with a link scavenger hunt and even a recipe built in. All that’s left is the anticipation.

Snacking before the meal

Smoky black bean dip
Walnuts and raisins

First course

Squash soup

Salad with nuts, seeds, and all manner of veggie goodness

The main deal

Turkey

Wild rice stuffing with cranberries

Teriyaki salmon (see recipe below)

Sides

Steamed brussels sprouts

Cauliflower and carrots with miso tahini dressing

Sweet potato tsimmes or yams with kosher marshmallows

Sauteed kale with dried currents and pine nuts

Dessert

Crustless pumpkin pie

Baked apples with almonds and raisins

Coconut or soy ice cream

…and, because we really are all grownups, perhaps we could pair this all with some wine?

Bon appétit!

R e c i p e !

Teriyaki Salmon

Serves 2-4

2 8-oz. salmon fillets

1 batch “tasty sauce”

Tasty Sauce

Makes about ¾ cup

½ cup tamari or to taste

2 Tbs. water

1 Tbs. sesame oil, or to taste

1 clove garlic, minced

2 tsp. ginger, grated

1 tsp. honey (optional)

To prepare the sauce: Combine ingredients in a jar with a tight-fitting lid, screw on lid, and shake vigorously. Taste. Add a little of this or that as needed.

If using as a sauce for vegetables, you may want to thicken it. You can do this by whisking 1-2 tsp. corn starch or arrowroot powder with about 1 Tbs. water, then adding the mixture to the sauce and simmering until thickened.

To prepare the fish, spray a baking pan that can take the broiler with oil. Place fillets in the pan and brush with a few tablespoons of sauce. Broil for about 4 minutes. Watch carefully to avoid burning the top. Turn the fillets, brush with more sauce, and broil for another 4 minutes.

Remove from oven and brush with additional sauce, if desired. You may make a kind of gravy with the extra sauce: Combine 1 tsp. corn starch mixed with 1 Tbs. water. Stir this into the sauce, then heat to a boil and simmer for 1 minute. Serve alongside the salmon or pour over rice or veggies.

In August, a group of Gallaudet University alumni, staff members, and supporters traveled to Port-au-Prince to work with deaf and hard of hearing survivors of the earthquake. I traveled with them, as a reporter for the university. During the week-long effort, from August 5 to 12, the group helped to address problems facing deaf people and their families in a tent community in Port-au-Prince, and made connections with others who wanted to forge a better future for people with disabilities in Haiti.

The organizations represented included Friends of Deaf Haiti and Partners in Excellence-Haiti. I had the privilege of traveling with them through my job at Gallaudet University. I wrote a four-part series called Through unity, we find strength. The title is an English translation of the Haitian motto “L’union fait la force.”

…thus begins a post I wrote for DeafEcho.com, a new site for writing by and for deaf people. This post includes pictures from my trip to Haiti and links to the series I wrote. Check it out.

The title of this post is one of the delicacies I ate last Friday at the Center for Green Urbanism in far northeast D.C. The title is also the one and only bit of this post focused on food.

I ate these chunks of goodness at the opening of ReCREATE, an art exhibit using materials saved from landfills and recycling plants. And then I wrote about it — the art, that is. Read my article about this mix of funky, salty, and sweet creations on the Washington City Paper Arts Desk blog.