Jewish in a Gentile World

Jewish Apple Cake is a popular sweet cake with a dense batter filled with chunks of apple. It's not actually a Jewish recipe; I'm not really sure where it originally came from or why it came to be known as Jewish. The usual recipe does have one advantage for Jewish cooking, though: it uses no dairy ingredients, which means that it can be eaten with a meat meal. Kosher dietary laws prohibit eating meat and dairy together (“You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” Exodus 23:19, 34:26; Deuteronomy 14:21), and most cake recipes have dairy ingredients so they can't be eaten after a meat dinner. But Jewish Apple Cake is made without milk or butter, a perfect desert after a meat meal! It uses apple juice and vegetable oil where most cakes use milk and butter. It's also vegetarian, but it's not vegan because it is made with eggs. I thought I would share this recipe today because apples are a traditional Jewish food for Rosh Hashanah and the following weeks leading up...

 As I write this, Rosh Hashanah is just a few days away. Back in April, I was concerned because I didn't get a chance to clean my office before Passover . Would the quarantine be lifted before Passover ended, leaving me with an office full of chametz (food we are not permitted to own during Passover) that I couldn't use? More than five months later, my office still has not reopened, and there is no end in sight. They're talking about reopening in November, but they also talked about reopening after Memorial Day. And Labor Day. The real concern right now is: what do we do about the High Holidays? Most Jews today hardly ever go to synagogue , but when they do, it's for the High Holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur . A synagogue that usually would have no problem social distancing is in a different situation for these three (or two) days: synagogues are packed, often with the usual prayer area expanded into a social hall behind it with folding chairs. Synagogues that ha...