About Jewish Food

I love going to shiurim as you can tell. It’s a way of getting a dose of Ruchnius put into my day. Monday night started a series of shiurim that will last throughout the summer. I’ve come to see many programs that have been started to keep the men busy and out of trouble in the city, while their wives and family are up in the country. I think such programs are great. But yet, when I have a family I can’t imagine leaving to the country and leaving my husband back at home, I think I would rather just stay in the city.

Anyways, the shiur I went to on Monday night was by R’ Zev Cohen on the topic of Jewish Food. While I was listening to the shiur, it reminded me of different posts I had read, it gave answers to questions other bloggers have asked. So I figured I would write one post to answer all the questions and at the same time give an interesting summary of what the shiur was about.

---

Nissan is one of the first months of the Jewish calander. Pesach comes first, and the Karbon brought on Pesach was barley, which is animal food. Then 7 weeks later is Shvous and the Karbon brought then was wheat which is human food. Since by Pesach we are like animals, and then by Shvous we become like humans, after going through the 7 week process. Now this 7 week process is compared to a lady’s cycle, where at the end there is milk which symbolizes purity. That is why on Shvous we eat Milichigs. Now how did cheese cake come about? It came about because, Pesach we have matza which has no yetzer hora, while Shvous we have Lechem which symbolizes the yetzer hora. But yet Shvous we have milk which symbolizes purity. So when you have lechem with the milk it is showing that you have the yetzer hora and yet your pure. The only way this is possible is with the Torah. So once we got the Torah on Shvous then we are able to have lechem- the yetzer hora and yet have milk- be pure. So that’s where it got started to have cheese cake, it’s lechem with milk. 

---

Chanukah became a time when people buy those Jelly doughnuts, you may ask why it’s fitting for Chanukah. The reason according to R’ Shlomo Zalman Orbach is as follows. Al Hamichya is the only place that mentions the Mezbeach, in benching it doesn’t mention it, so therefore we need a mezonos. Now Al Hamichya is also the only place it mentions Peiros, and we need a tam peiros, so that’s why there is Jelly in the Jelly doughnuts. (This is based on a posuk where it says Mezbeach and Peiros, but I forgot what the posuk is).

---

Chulent is a Jewish food that is supposed to be specifically for Shabbos. R’ Cohen said he can’t handle beans in his chulent, so he has rice. He always felt guilty as though he wasn’t having chulent the right way, but then he came across a Russian custom where they have rice in their chulent - Dafina, and then he felt better about it.

My Pesach Diary 2009

My innovative little brother continues to surprise me with his great inventions. For Purim he made a container on wheels to carry the shaloch manos and now for Pesach he made his own pillow out of cloth napkins, old pillow stuffing and staples.

   

On Pesach, I was helping out by changing the glasses on the lachter and to put in new candles. Now this is a un-girly thing to say, but a really cool thing happened while I was removing the old wicks from the glasses.

I had 3 glasses in my hand with a plastic knife in the other- Mistakes 1&2. I had used the knife to successfully take out a bunch of wicks and I had just those 3 left to take out. So I used the knife and tried to take out the wick of the top glass in my hand, but it wouldn’t come out. So I tried harder…then all of a sudden I hear a cracking sound, I didn’t know what it was from. So I continued trying to remove the wick using the knife. Then I realized the middle glass I was holding in my hand had cracked. I look at my hand and I see a really cool pretty and colorful shard of glass got stuck in my skin. It was the strangest thing, I pulled it out from my hand and it didn’t hurt one bit! Plus there was not a cut or a trace of blood coming out of my finger from where I removed it. But I remembered distinctly that the glass had been in my finger, so I’m not so sure how that was possible.

Chol Hamoed – Sunday:

We were going to go to Harford Connecticut, but we ended up going to Milford Connecticut instead.

First we went to The Maritime Aquarium, we watched a sea lion feeding where 1 of the sea lion’s had a Jewish Sounding name – Layala!

I saw a Watercolor painting which made me think of Leora, so I took a picture of it:

 

There were lots of kinds of fish there, thankfully it was all indoors, because the weather was chilly. There were a few fish that stuck out.

1. Lobster: Looking at that thing, I can’t imagine how people eat it, and I’m thankful it’s not on “our menu”.
   
    
2. Star Fish: There was a touch tank where you can touch some fish. One of them was the star fish, I didn’t touch it. But I remember maybe touching one when I was younger, so I enjoyed the memory of it.
   
3. Shark: So mean looking, makes me think of a Rasha!
   
4. Turtle: for a known to be slow creature, this turtle looked really impressive. This was the biggest turtle I’ve ever seen. It also had a fierce looking face.
    
5. Jelly Fish: now this was the best part! I loved looking at the jelly fish, I’ve always pictured one looking like the candy jelly fish, but that’s  not at all how it looks!
    
   
   I found the jelly fish to be so graceful I just had to take a video of it. I started the video and then some chassidish kids came over, I feared they would start talking and it would ruin the video and cause me to have to mute the sound. But an amazing thing then happened, I got the perfect sound effect!
   




6. Flounder: one of the types of fish that I actually like eating. I like hands on interactive exhibit’s so I was happy to try to solve this one. These flounder have got truly amazing camouflage.
   
    
7. Colorful Fish tank: This one is “Ma Rabu Maasecha Hashem”. I saw this tank of fish and at first glance I just loved it, amazing what color can do. 
    
    
   
8. Penguins: I don’t think I’ve ever seen Penguins swim before, I always imagined their in the snow only. (Happy Feet was a great movie!). 
   

We went to an IMAX about the grand canyon. When we got there the place was empty, so I took some pictures of the vast big empty room. I love the theater effect to it all.

There were a bunch of Chassidish people that did come in to watch, along with other frum Jews. We waited a little while, then the “movie” started. The first image on the screen was…you’ll never guess! 2 girl’s in bikini’s in the water. I watched the boys turn their head and look away, nobody could believe what was just on the screen.

Then the film continued and it was about how the water in the Colorado river was draining out, and it showed them kayaking the river for the most of it. It was cool to see them going over the big waves and falling upside down. I’ve never seen the grand canyon before, and it was amazing to see that too. They also showed Las Vegas, another scene I’ve never seen before, and the colorful lights were truly pretty.

I love going to gift shops to look around and get a key chain or some other little thing with the name of the place on it. This time I got a charm that said the name of the aquarium, it was silver too.

While I was looking around I saw a pacifier that I thought it was really funny, it would have been perfect for one of the kids I used to babysit!

 

After the aquarium we went to the Hotel in Milford. It was a very basic hotel, not fancy. The elevator was a plain one,  no glass see through doors. There was no pool, not that I would have gone swimming. The gym only had 3 machines, a treadmill, a stationary bike, and my favorite step machine! I used the step machine for a bunch of minutes and it was really fun.

This was the first trip in a really long time that my whole family actually came! We originally got 3 rooms, and my parents were going to share a room with me and my little sister. But when we opened the room we saw there was no room for another 2 beds, so I went on my laptop, logged in and booked another room for me and my sister. (I didn’t use my own money though…it was only 10,000 points so my father used his points).

It was so much fun watching TV, every time I go to a hotel I find there are new shows that I didn’t know about. I watched the NIK channel for about 3 hours straight! There was Drake and Josh which I thought had amazing actors, wow, those kids show a lot of facial expressions and put all their Koach into it! Then there was iCarly, this one reminded me of Hannah Montana and I loved it!

There were a lot of commercials, but since I haven’t seen them before, it was fun to watch the first time! I saw this commercial for a hanging tomato planter and I thought it was really funny! I thought of Jacob Da Jew and Leora though, cause I know they plant, so perhaps they might find it useful? I also noticed that by all the commercials, everything cost 19.95, or x payments of 19.95!

Chol Hamoed – Monday:

We went to an arcade game place called Smilez. Now this was truly a fun filled day. We spent 20 dollars in tokens, getting 112 tokens to play all kinds of games. It brought back so many memories of fun games I remembered playing.

1. Bop the Alligator: I always loved playing this game, so I went to it right away and put in my token, ready to play the game. But then nothing happened, and I realized I lost my coin, that the game wasn’t working. I later realized if the light’s off then then the game won’t work! 
    
2. Catch the Light: This next game I played I remembered playing before, it was a guaranteed win, so I got a few tickets. 
   
   
   
   
3. Sky Bowling: (not sure what it’s called?), this game I’ve also played before, but I wasn’t any good at it, kept getting zeros! (The game had a longer ramp, I just cropped it for the sake of keeping the picture small looking).
   
   
   
4. Rock N’ Bowl: now this is all about luck and aiming, you have to aim your coin to go in the slot and hit the pin and you get that amount of tickets. My father tried and actually got 100 tickets that way! 
   

After we had fun playing our games we went to the machine to count our tickets and redeem our prizes!

 

Then my mother saw a game that she remembered playing and wanted to play it! So we went over to the game, my mother put in her token and nothing happened. It was one of those aiming the coin type of games, so I shook the aimer thing to see if it would go then, but it wouldn’t go. Then all of a sudden we hear noise and tickets start coming out of the machine one after another, as the aimer was shook, tickets kept spilling out. So we let a lot of tickets come out and then we counted the tickets and had over 500!

As I was feeding the tickets into the counter machine, I felt guilty, I wasn’t sure if it was okay what we just did, to get free tickets like that from a broken machine. What would you have done?

So then we got some more prizes, and everyone was happy!

Then we saw a Chassidish boy go over to the broken machine and he also realized that tickets were coming out for free, so he let it keep going too. Then his father came over and saw what happened, then when they redeemed their tickets for prizes, the father told the person behind the counter about the broken machine. But looks like she didn’t care, cause no one went over to put a sign on it, or fix it, so it kept giving tickets to whoever wanted. So then I felt less guilty, cause they knew it was broken.

When we were ready to leave I put my hand in my pocket and realized I had more coins left, so I quickly played another game and got some more tickets, but I was too lazy to go get a prize for it, so I saw a Chassidish girl and went over to her to give the tickets to. I said “You can have these” and handed her the tickets, she was stunned and her mouth was hanging open, looking at me, wondering why I just did that.

I ended up getting a bunch of prizes, my first was the blue teddy bear for 220 points and the “I love Mom” bear for 180 points- those were earned legitimately! Then I got a little picture frame in a purse shape for 270 points and a “You’re the best” bear for 180 points- those were through the “cheated tickets”. Then I got a deck of cards for 30 points that was legit.

 

Hope you had a great first day’s and enjoyed your Chol Hamoed too!

Pesach – Seder, Prep, Haggadah & Halacha

This year Pesach, I’m going miss Bedikas Chametz for the first time. I have class Tuesday night, a quiz and Homework do at that time as well, so I must go to class. My father reassures me that Bedikas Chametz is a man mitzvah because it’s a mitzvah that’s related to time. But yet, I’ve always enjoyed Bedikas Chametz, I was always the one to hide the 10 pieces of bread, make a list of where they are and watch my father look for it. It would be so much fun in the dark room where no one can talk, going around with a candle and picking up any little chametz we found and collecting the 10 pieces of bread. So I will be missing the experience this year, but hopefully the rest of Pesach will be memorable!

My favorite parts of Pesach are: 1- the Karpas- potato in salt water. 2- Leaning on a pillow, eating comfortably. 3- Lady fingers, or are they now called Fingers? 4- My grandmother’s sponge cake!

Pesach in the Blogosphere:
Note: They are separated in categories, with more than one post from quite a few bloggers.

To start off with, if you haven’t seen the Facebook Hagaddah yet, check it out!

There's also a Pesach website with lots of links including Pesach recipes.

Seder

• Lakewood Falling Down has some really interesting Pesach minhagim. One of them is to sing a Mr. Potato Head song. It happened to be my little sister asked me to draw a picture for her to color in, so I went to Coloring Book and was scrolling through the images waiting for her to tell me which one to pick. Guess what she picked? Mr. Potato head! So I tried to copy the picture there, it was no way a good imitation but I’ll put it up anyways.
  
• Hadassah’s son writes a touching guest post about his Dream Seder.
• G6’s family makes strawberry fluff for Pesach, she posts adorable pictures of her daughter when she was younger. She also shares some other Pesach rituals of Chocolate matzos and making animal noises by Chad Gadiah.
• Frum College Girl writes about macaroons being the classic Pesach nosh.
• Super Raizy shares an article of the all too common Pesach Seder.

Pesach Prep

• Something Different shares pictures of cool stuff she found while cleaning her drawer for Pesach. The “seat saver” being my favorite. She also writes about cleaning the most chamitzdik places, the keyboard.
  
• Leora shares some great Pesach recipes. I was planning on trying out the sponge cake one, but then I found out it was Gebracks.
• Ilana Davita also shares a few links to Pesach recipes.
• G6 shares a Pesach recipe of Mushroom-Onion-Farfel-Kugel, for the gebraks eaters.
• Rafi shows a Pesach ad he found encouraging Kashering your computer for Pesach.
• Elisheva posts pictures of her before and after Pesach computer cleaning.
• Michelle talks about Pesach prices and wonders why it has taken so long for some to take some action on Price regulation
• Lion of Zion talks about banning Pesach car washes to save money. He posts an index to all his Pesach posts.
• Mike In Midwood shares with us Pesach craziness, a schedule from the Mishpacha on how to prepare for Pesach each day. He also wonders why all the publicity is on the women, what about the men he asks? He also talks about how Pesach is a time that leads to finding out if people are OCD.
• NMF#7 talks about spring cleaning, and how we clean more than we have to, and why we do that.
• RickisMom talks about our attitude towards Pesach Prep, she encourages us to not see it as a burden, and be happy for the children’s sake. What she says reminds me of a video I had seen, it’s funny but sad.
  
  
  
  
  
• Leora tells us how Pesach is fun! With spilling water over the countertops, making matza brei, and having a bag of Makkot to play with. She also shares with us the Froggy Song. She shares with us a video on how to Kasher the Kitchen in 2 minutes.
  
  
  
  
  
• Hadassah shares an important message with us, to remember what Pesach is about, leaving slavery, and not to enslave ourselves with extra work.
• JacobDaJew talks about crazy things people do for Pesach and asks for your stories.
• Lakewood Falling Down shares a story from his childhood of all that went into converting from chometz to kosher L’pesach.
• J.C.A.P talks about a different kind of Pesach preparation, about Pesach being a time to let ourselves free, to free the grudges we have on people, and to forgive them.

Haggadah

• Leora tells us about a product called “My first Haggadah” for Tots.
• Ilana Davita shares some information about Pesach and tells us about her favorite Haggadah, and asks you which is your favorite.
• Jewish in the Suburbs tells over the Pesach story in a diary form.
• Hadassah posts the Ma Nishtana in lots of different languages. I love hearing the kids say it in different languages!
• Shorty notices that women aren’t mentioned in the Haggadah and shares some links to where women are mentioned.

Halachos

• Ilana Davita asks you how you understand “nifsal me’achilat kelev - not even fit to feed a dog” in regards to Pesach. She also asks what you think of Maccos Bechoros. She also writes about First born Sons and the obligations on them.
• Rafi’s daughter came home from school with homework to write some Pesach Chumras, and he shares a few he came up with.
• Shorty asks for advice on how to handle her Pesach Dilemma.
• G6 tells how Pesach is tough for everyone including her fish how not feeding it chometz over Pesach, almost killed the gold fish.

Parshas Bo

First off I would like to thank some bloggers. Stacy, Tembow, Leora, and another- you know who you are. (MM- Shh!). You all made me so happy this week. Stacy and Tembow thanks so much for your offers. Leora, your comment on Facebook was so nice, it made my day. Thank you Frayda, KT and Frum Punk too, for your comments that other time. I appreciate all your kind words.

I just came back from a Bar Mitzvah, where the boy gave a thank you speech and was thanking a lot of people, so I guess it’s contagious. But I really appreciate you all so much, you make me so happy!

This week instead of typing from “something to say”, I will tell over some Divrei Torah I learned in my Jewish classics class last semester. As I was sitting in shul, following a long with the Leining, I recognized some pesukim that my professor had brought up. It was about the Karbon Pesach. She mentioned how there are contradictions when you compare it to the other time it mentions the Karbon Pesach in the Torah. We then looked at Rashi to come up with an answer.

In Parshas Bo in Shemos and Parshas Re’eh in Devorim it talks about the Karbon Pesach. There are 3 main contradictions. One is the type of animal to be used in the Pesach offering, another is how this Karbon should be prepared, and another is how many days we should eat Matzos.

1. Rashi – Bakar (Devarim 16:2), here it says you should slaughter cattle. But in Parshas Bo, it says Sheep, so which one is it? The answer is that it’s talking about sheep as the main offering, but that they should eat cattle first to be in a state of fullness when they eat the Pesach offering.
   


2. Rashi – You Shall cook it (Devorim 16:7), here it says cook it, and in Parshas Bo it says Roast it, so which is it? The answer is that this means roasting by fire, that this too is termed cooking.
   


3. Rashi – For a six day period you shall eat matzos (Devorim 16:8), here it says 6 days, but in Bo it says 7 days, so which is it? The answer is a deep one which teaches us through a Yotzei min Haklal, that the 7th day is not an obligation to eat matzah, and therefore the 6 days aren’t either an obligation, but rather optional. The only night that is an obligation is the first night, since it says “In the evening shall you eat matzos” (in Shemos 12:18).