If you don't want to hear the whole story and just want a quick answer, jump down to HERE (after opening the full text because the link doesn't work in the preview!) . Trope Trainer was a fantastic piece of software to help you learn to read Torah with its traditional cantillation (music), commonly known as Trope (sometimes spelled Trop and sometimes pronounced "trup" to rhyme with "pup"). This software was extremely popular, giving you a wide variety of ways to see and hear things and providing a calendar of Torah readings. It was a miraculous piece of work, replacing the cassette tapes that bar mitzvah students in my time used to learn their Torah portion. For the young folks reading this: cassette tapes are what people used to record and listen to their own music before YouTube, MP3 or even CDs. So why do I keep referring to this great software in the past tense? Well, Trope Trainer was the work of one man: Thomas Buchler. He wrote the code himself, wi
Late last year, my friend and best taste-teste Rachel offered me some dairy-noodle kugel made by a woman at her synagogue. It was wonderful, and I needed to learn how to make it myself! Once I had made it a few times, got it the way I wanted it, I wondered if it could be made for Passover, replacing the noodles with matzah farfel (basically matzah broken up like bread crumbs). IT WORKED! And it's ridiculously easy! The main problem at this point is finding Passover certified yogurt. I used Greek yogurt in the noodle version (in place of the sour cream in the recipes I was working with), but I've never seen Greek yogurt certified for Passover in a regular grocery store. In the past, I've seen regular Dannon yogurt certified for Passover but I haven't seen it this year and it looks like it won't be available. There may be other Passover certified yogurts available (particularly in grocery stores catering to the kosher consumer), or you can fall back on the original s