Skip to content

Where different views on Israel and Judaism are welcome.

  • Home
  • Subscribe / donate
  • Events calendar
  • News
    • Local
    • National
    • Israel
    • World
    • עניין בחדשות
      A roundup of news in Canada and further afield, in Hebrew.
  • Opinion
    • From the JI
    • Op-Ed
  • Arts & Culture
    • Performing Arts
    • Music
    • Books
    • Visual Arts
    • TV & Film
  • Life
    • Celebrating the Holidays
    • Travel
    • The Daily Snooze
      Cartoons by Jacob Samuel
    • Mystery Photo
      Help the JI and JMABC fill in the gaps in our archives.
  • Community Links
    • Organizations, Etc.
    • Other News Sources & Blogs
    • Business Directory
  • FAQ
  • JI Chai Celebration
  • [email protected]! video

Search

Archives

"The Basketball Game" is a graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada animated short of the same name – intended for audiences aged 12 years and up. It's a poignant tale of the power of community as a means to rise above hatred and bigotry. In the end, as is recognized by the kids playing the basketball game, we're all in this together.

Recent Posts

  • New housing partnership
  • Complexities of Berlin
  • Obligation to criticize
  • Negev Dinner returns
  • Women deserve to be seen
  • Peace is breaking out
  • Summit covers tough issues
  • Jews in trench coats
  • Lives shaped by war
  • The Moaning Yoni returns
  • Caring in times of need
  • Students are learning to cook
  • Many first-time experiences
  • Community milestones … Gordon, Segal, Roadburg foundations & West
  • מקטאר לוונקובר
  • Reading expands experience
  • Controversy welcome
  • Democracy in danger
  • Resilience amid disruptions
  • Local heads CAPE crusaders
  • Engaging in guided autobiography
  • Recollecting Auschwitz
  • Local Houdini connection
  • National library opens soon
  • Regards from Israel …
  • Reluctant kids loved camp
  • An open letter to Camp BB
  • Strong connection to Israel
  • Why we need summer camp
  • Campers share their thoughts
  • Community tree of life
  • Building bridges to inclusion
  • A first step to solutions?
  • Sacre premières here
  • Opening gates of kabbalah
  • Ukraine’s complex past

Recent Tweets

Tweets by @JewishIndie
photo - Grilled salad with chicken is one of the many tempting dishes in A Taste of Passover

Add culinary flair to Pesach

0 Flares 0 Flares ×

Grilled salad with chicken is one of the many tempting dishes in A Taste of Passover.

Every now and then, there’s a new recipe book that blows you away with innovative, easy-to-make dishes combined with tantalizing photographs that render you hungry within a couple minutes of flipping through the glossy pages. A Taste of Pesach (ArtScroll, 2014), a project of Yeshiva Me’on Hatorah (in Roosevelt, N.J.), is one such book. It promises to reinvent your Passover menu and inspire you with creative culinary twists and turns during this hungry time of year.

image - A Taste of Pesach  coverMany schools and communities have tried the same technique of compiling a recipe book and selling it as a fundraiser, and that’s how this one had its genesis seven years ago. But while most of those fundraiser books have a short lifespan before they’re recycled or mislaid, A Taste of Pesach is unlikely to follow the same trajectory. For one, it’s a gorgeous book you can’t wait to page through and one you’d be proud to hand over as a gift to a newlywed child or close friend. For another, it’s chock full of irresistible culinary eye candy, with recipes that are for the most part easy, calling on ingredients that are readily available. Look through the book and you find yourself murmuring, “Hmm…. I can do this.”

The mothers who volunteered the 150-plus recipes for A Taste of Pesach are a diverse group but they all want the same things at the end of the day, write the editors in the book’s introduction. “Food that will get rave reviews, user-friendly, visually attractive recipes with accurate cooking times and yields and recipes that have broad appeal and that work. We’re just like you,” they write.

Most of the recipes don’t require a huge spirit of adventure in the kitchen, but rather call for a minor stretch in their use of different ingredients than you might typically incorporate. The sweet potato crisps salad, for example, is a lettuce-based green salad to which strips of fried sweet potato are added as a garnish just prior to serving. The image of this dish is so tempting, it makes you want to reach in and steal a piece of crisp off the topping. This is true for the majority of the recipes, each one prefaced with a photograph and categorized by chapter into appies, soups, salads, fish, poultry, meat, sides, dessert, cake and cookies, and gebrokts. The recipes are accompanied by handy tips on how to make their preparation easier and faster, or how to plate it most attractively. There are traditional old favorites like gefilte fish, chremslach and kugels, and more modern twists or reinvented dishes like unstuffed cabbage, pastrami and spinach-stuffed chicken and cashew-butter muffins.

Extra eye candy is offered in the chapter headers, which display images of seder plates reflecting different times, styles and tastes. Passover is not a time of year that usually excites Jewish taste buds, but A Taste of Pesach promises to add flair, creativity and innovation to your table – without stretching your culinary skills to their limits.

Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond, B.C. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net. This article originally appeared in Canadian Jewish News.

Print/Email
0 Flares Twitter 0 Facebook 0 Google+ 0 0 Flares ×
Format ImagePosted on March 27, 2015March 26, 2015Author Lauren KramerCategories Celebrating the HolidaysTags Passover, recipes, seder, Yeshiva Me’on Hatorah

Post navigation

Previous Previous post: A friend on our long journey
Next Next post: Chicken for Pesach midweek
Proudly powered by WordPress