Jewish in a Gentile World

I don't think I'll be able to post any new recipes this year. I am recovering from massive cancer surgery in February. I survived, and I'm getting better, but I'm still very limited. It will be all I can do to get ready for Passover this year and experimenting with new recipes probably won't be possible. Although actually I'm thinking about trying a Matzah Granola experiment... but I'm not there yet. Instead, while I was working on healing in a rehabilitation center, I updated the PDF of all of my vegetarian and vegan Passover recipes. I added all of the new recipes since the 2021 update. I also reorganized the PDF into sections more like a real cookbook. I hope you enjoy this... Thinking Outside the Matzah Box 2026

Gumbo is a New Orleans Creole soup/stew. Traditionally it's made with sausage and shrimp, neither of which are kosher for Passover or anything else! But it can be made without any meat. It's also made with what Creole cuisine calls the "Holy Trinity," peppers, celery and onion, but if that sounds too Christian for you, just think of it as "Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh!," the trifold repetition of the Hebrew word "Holy" that occurs in standard Jewish prayer. This is not a quick recipe, but it's worth the time! Like my other last-minute recipes this year, this is vegan, gluten-free and non-gebrochts and uses mostly ingredients that are readily available without any special Passover certification, although there are three that may be tricky at this late date if you don't already have them: potato starch, paprika and vegetable broth. Ingredients   1 cup quinoa 2/3 cup extra virgin olive oil 1 cup potato starch 2 bell peppers, diced 2 large celery sta...

I love roasted vegetables. They're a great appetizer, especially when drizzled with balsamic vinegar. But if you mix them with quinoa and crumble some feta cheese over the top, you have the protein needed to make it a proper meal! Like my other last-minute recipes this year, this uses mostly ingredients that are readily available without any special Passover certification. This recipe is gluten free and non-gebrochts. It can be made vegan by skipping the optional feta cheese but I like the flavor that feta brings to the meal. The feta is just crumbled on top at the end, so if you are serving both vegans and non-vegans, you can simply hold the feta aside and let people add it if they want. Ingredients 1 cup quinoa (measured before cooking) vegetables sliced lengthwise into strips such as: zucchini or other small squash (yellow squash, baby eggplant) 1 bell pepper(red, yellow, orange or green) asparagus, with bottoms cut off carrots, peeled 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil 1 or 2 clove...

I'm getting a very late start on recipes this year, but I have three of them coming ASAP, all vegan made with quinoa and using mostly ingredients that are readily available. Today's entry is Quinoa Tabbouleh. Tabbouleh (pronounced tuh-BOO-lee and spelled in a variety of ways) is a popular traditional Mediterranean salad, found throughout the Middle East (including Israel) with variations in Greece and Armenia. The primary ingredients are parsley and bulgur wheat (oops). Obviously, bulgur wheat is not for Passover by anybody's standards! But I tried making it with quinoa instead of bulgur wheat and it worked nicely, a good side dish or lunch option. And other than the quinoa, the traditional ingredients are just fresh herbs and vegetables, lemon juice and salt, all of which are readily available for Passover. This recipe is gluten free and non-gebrochts. It is also vegan. The quinoa gives it plenty of protein, so it can be used as a vegan main course but it's really bett...

I've seen in the news a lot lately that Israel is talking about requiring haredi (right wing religious Jews) to serve in the military just like everybody else. Their exemption from the military has been a sore point for secular Jews in Israel, who are the overwhelming majority of the population. The haredi, meanwhile ...

Yes, I know, this is a very last minute recipe, but it's a nice side dish and all of the ingredients are easy to find! This a traditional Greek side dish. It takes some time to make it but it's easy to make and is totally worth it. And it's vegan and gluten-free, so it should work for everybody! Unless, of course, you're allergic to garlic, and yes, I know someone with that allergy. Tragic... Ingredients 2.5 pounds potatoes (preferably yellow potatoes or Yukon Gold) 1.5 cups water 1/2 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil 1/3 cup lemon juice 5 cloves garlic, pressed 2 tsp. Kosher Salt handful of parsley, finely chopped Kashrut Notes Fresh produce is not a problem for Passover, which covers the potatoes, garlic, parsley and lemon juice if you're squeezing your own. If you don't want to squeeze your own lemon juice, Realemon brand is kosher for Passover without any need for special certification. Extra Virgin Olive Oil is kosher for Passover without any special certification...

Just like Bubbie used to make! Because, well, this is probably the recipe Bubbie used, based on the recipe from Leah Leonard's 1949 book, Jewish Cookery. Potato kugel is commonly available as a mix -- Manischewitz's mix even provides an aluminum pan to cook it in! (https://manischewitz.com/products/potato-kugel-mix/) -- and it's fine. A little salty for my taste without much texture but it's a good, easy side dish. If you want to put in a little more time (not really that much more), you can make your own! Most of the ingredients are things you would already have for Passover or can easily get. This is basically the ingredients for latkes, but baked instead of deep fried! This is more of a side dish than a main course, because it doesn't have much protein. This recipe is not vegan (includes eggs) but can easily be made gluten-free by substituting potato starch for matzah meal, and actually, I like it that way! Ingredients 2 pounds of potatoes (I used yellow potatoes...

I had heard about that viral feta and tomato Tik Tok recipe, but I never got around to trying it. I thought it might make a good recipe for Passover with such simple ingredients and technique: a block of feta, a carton of cherry tomatoes, some garlic, some olive oil, a little black pepper, all things I have around the house at Passover. But I missed one of the ingredients: pasta! Not really, a Passover-friendly ingredient! I figured the pasta was just a side dish so I substituted matzah farfel.  But when I put it all together, I realized that the feta and tomato was just supposed to be a sauce, and the pasta was the heart of the recipe. Oops. Back to the old drawing board... I tried it again, this time substituting some zucchini, sliced and quartered, and some chopped nuts for extra protein. I used chopped hazlenuts because that's what I had around the house, and I really liked the way that flavor went with the flavor of the feta.  This recipe requires very little effort ...

I recently came across some recipes for icebox cakes made by dipping matzah into coffee instead of using cookies or whatever. When I mentioned it to a friend, she said it sounded like Tiramisu. So I looked into recipes for Tiramisu and... well, that wasn't going to work because you're never going to find Mascarpone certified for Passover and even heavy cream or whipped cream can be hard to find. But I put together something that had a similar texture and tried it out. I left it in the fridge for two hours and it was OK. Then I left it in the fridge overnight and in the morning, it was YUMMY! Since it's vaguely based on Tiramisu, I'm calling it Tiramatzu. The fun thing about recipes like this is, it doesn't require any baking! You just assemble it and put it in the fridge! This is why these things used to be called icebox cakes (an icebox is an old fashioned refrigerator). This recipe doesn't take much effort to make, but it does take a lot of elapsed time, betwe...

A friend of mine in college said that Kosher for Passover certification was nonsense. She knew this because her grandfather owned a little corner store and the day before Passover a rabbi would just come in and put stamps on things that said it was Kosher for Passover. Actually, this is not as much nonsense as it sounds like. Milk and eggs do not require any special certification (for Passover or year-round), but for Passover, they need to be purchased before the holiday. But it doesn't matter when you pay the money, it matters when the product was on the shelf and out of the animal and out of the processor's hands. When you buy milk and eggs in the store, you have no way of knowing when they got on the shelf. Unless a trustworthy source like a rabbi comes in before Passover and marks the things that were there at that time! So milk and eggs are easy to get for Passover and are a great source of protein for vegetarians (obviously not vegans). The only problem is, you have to ge...

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...

I love Chile Relleno, a Mexican dish of Poblano peppers stuffed with cheese and batter fried. Poblano is a mildly spicy pepper, about halfway between the more familiar jalapeno peppers (2000 - 8000 on the Scoville scale of the "heat" of chili peppers) and plain old bell peppers (0 Scoville heat units). Poblano scores about 1000 - 2000 on the Scoville scale, enough of a bite to be noticeable but really quite mild and wonderfully flavorful.  Of course, batter frying is a bit tricky for Passover and in any case, I've never had much success batter frying vegetables at any time of year. But I saw some recipes for Chile Relleno Casserole that mostly didn't have any batter -- a plus for Passover! -- and no deep frying needed! I experimented with various recipes until I got something I like. It's a dirty job eating all those Poblanos but I'm willing to make that sacrifice for my vegetarian Passover recipes... This recipe is gluten-free and non-gebrokts (does not conta...

I found a recipe online called Amish Shipwreck Casserole. It was a hearty meal, easy to make, just two problems: beef and rice. Rice is traditionally avoided at Passover, and of course meat is not vegetarian! But when I substituted quinoa for the beef and rice, it was a very good meal! And so easy to make, the ingredients are mostly vegetables, readily available for Passover! It's also vegan and gluten-free. And it passed an early taste-test at the home of my longtime Passover tester Rachel and her family! Thanks again, Rachel! This recipe is basically just a bunch of common vegetables, cut up and layered, and baked for a very long time. That's the main difficulty of this recipe: it bakes for two hours! So don't expect to make this for dinner after you get home from work at 7PM! But on a work-at-home day, you could easily cut up and layer the vegetables in a pan in the morning, leave it in the fridge until you're ready, and stick it in the oven two hours before you want...

It's traditional to eat dairy foods on the Jewish holiday of Shavu'ot . There are a variety of theories about the reason for this but none of them seems to be definitive. Cheesecake is a particularly popular choice for Shavu'ot, but I was never a big fan of cheesecake. Until...  Years ago, I found a recipe that was supposed to be a healthier cheesecake. It didn't particularly taste like cheesecake to me, but it tasted GOOD! It tasted more like a lemon pie to me, so I added more lemon juice to emphasize that flavor. A\nd it's so easy to make, with a small number of readily available ingredients! Ingredients 2 cups plain Greek yogurt (real 8 oz cups, not the 5 oz single serving "cups" they sell in stores) 2/3 cup sugar (OK, it's not ENTIRELY healthy) pinch of salt 2 eggs 2 tsp lemon juice 1 Tbsp corn starch or potato starch (I usually have potato starch leftover from Passover at this time) 1 pie crust (I like to use Keebler's graham cracker crust, wh...

I think I would like spaghetti squash better if we just called it stringy squash. It does make nice strings, tasty with a crunch. but it's not really a good substitute for spaghetti in recipes. When I found recipes that stuffed the squash instead of just pulling out the strings, ah... that was a much more successful Passover option! And yes, spaghetti squash is kosher for Passover; don't let the name fool you! I've put together three different stuffed spaghetti squash recipes for Passover: a vegan one stuffed with nuts and vegetables, a dairy one based on a Broccoli, Penne and Ricotta recipe that I have made year-round for a long time, and another dairy one based on a gluten-free "Mac and Cheese" stuffed squash recipe. The squash cooks the same way for all of them; only the filling changes. I used spaghetti squash that were about 4 pounds each for these recipes. Depending on the size of your squash and the size of your appetite, this makes 4 - 6 servings. These re...

 Am I too late to be introducing this trendy food choice? It's a great breakfast, full of healthy fats that keep you satisfied all day along with many nutrients and more potassium than bananas! And like all fresh fruits (yes, avocado is a fruit), avocado is kosher for Passover. Toast, of course, is not, but you can easily spread the avocado on half a slice of matzah, and in fact it's easier to spread and eat that way than with a piece of toasted bread. And this is so easy to make that it hardly even counts as a recipe. But as a vegetarian I have to be mindful: where's the protein? Fortunately, avocado is one of the few fruits that has a significant amount of protein: 3 or 4 grams of complete protein per avocado! But, always watching my protein, I added some chopped nuts to the mash. If you're not a nut eater, you could put a fried egg on top, a common topping for avocado toast. This recipe makes two servings, which I know is a very small amount but you don't want to...

It seems to be a common notion, perpetuated by movies like Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments  and Disney's Prince of Egypt , that Moses grew up as a high-level member of Pharaoh's household with no idea that he was a Hebrew. But does that notion fit in with what it says in the Bible, or what Jewish tradition teaches about Moses? This week's Torah portion is Shemot, the beginning of the book of Exodus, so it's a good time to examine this question. We actually know very little about Moses' childhood from the Bible. Pharaoh had ordered all male children to be thrown into the Nile River at birth (Ex. 1:22). While that order was in effect, a boy was born to a man of the tribe of Levi and his wife, also of that tribe (Ex. 2:1-2). The parents are later identified (Num. 26:59) as Amram an Yocheved (that "ch" is pronounced like a throat-clearing noise). Yocheved could not bear to throw her beautiful new son to his death, so she hid him away for three mont...

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...