Woman claims Papa John’s served at what she thought was kosher event (Washington Jewish Week)

You’d think after the bogus Ridgewell’s fiasco, people in DC would realize: without honest-to-goodness kosher supervision, you can’t assure kosher food.

Though this is no fault of the caterers, they should do themselves a favor and just add a disclaimer to all their contracts: Without payment of the religious certification fee to provide full rabbinic supervision of our catering facility, we cannot guarantee the kashrut of any food served at this event.

In the words of Walter Sobchak — has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only person around here who gives a crap about the rules?

Mark it treyf, dude.

(And happy second anniversary to the Kosher Blog!)

Most Jews are aware of the custom to eat fried foods on Chanukah, in commemoration of the miracle of the oil related in the Talmud (Shabbat 21b). Far fewer are familiar with the custom of eating dairy products, especially cheese, which is mentioned in the Shulchan Aruch (O”H 670). According to the RaMa (R. Moses Isserles, c. 1525-1572), the cheese eaten on Chanukah recalls the milk that the heroine Judith served to a Greek general (presumably during the Hasmonean revolt) in order to make him sleepy and give her the opportunity to put him to death. Those who have read the apocryphal book of Judith might find this curious, since, although the book does relate the assassination of a general by the heroine, it makes no mention of dairy products and has no obvious connection to Chanukah. The story takes place during the reign of Nebuchadrezzar, over 400 years before the Hasmonean revolt, and Judith lulls the enemy general to sleep with wine, not milk, before decapitating him.
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During our visit to LA, we made many casual visits to some popular kosher spots. Our most frequent destination was The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Imagine a chain as pervasive as Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks are on the East Coast, but every location fully kosher (at least in LA and Orange Counties).

These busy coffee shops feature a wide variety of KSA-certified coffees, teas, and blended drinks, as well as KoLA-certified pastries, cakes, salads, bagels, and sandwiches. All drinks are made to order and the rest of their offerings are great quality — we’ve tried and enjoyed their muffins, scones, bagels, and mozzarella-tomato-basil sandwiches. In all honesty, if I weren’t tied down to Boston already, I’d move to LA just for the Coffee Bean.
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Effective this February, OU-certified Cappiello cheese products will be available for purchase directly from Cappiello on their website. An excerpt from the message we received:

Unfortunately, at this time, many of you are now unable to purchase our products from your local markets. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you, especially during this holiday season. We would like you to know Cappiello Dairy has been working diligently to rectify this situation, as it is our Number 1 goal to ensure that you, our customer, always have access to the products you know and love.

Effective 2/1/06, Cappiello products will be available for purchase via our website, www.cappiello.com. On this site you will be able to choose from our entire specialty mozzarella cheese line as well as our dairy mozzarella. These products will be shipped directly from our manufacturing facility in Schenectady, New York to your selected address within 48 hours of your order. All Shipping and Handling costs will be included in the listed pricing.

As you know, the shelf life of our specialty lines run between 6 months to 1 year, if properly refrigerated, and are Kosher-Dairy. As an internet customer you will also be notified of all new products and given the ability to purchase them in an advance period.

Overall, our epicurean strategy during October’s trip to LA was to focus on the kinds of shops and restaurants we didn’t have back home, and in that spirit we twice visited Delice Bakery on Pico Boulevard. First, we were hankering for an mid-afternoon snack to tide us over until dinner. It was a challenge to decide between all the perfect-looking cakes, petites-fours, tarts, cookies, and pastries (both dairy and pareve varieties available) but we settled on a miniature pareve fruit tart — as delicious as it was visually striking.

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Despite how it may seem, I am not obsessed with insect infestation. Nevertheless, I thought I’d bring to your attention R’ Gil Student’s recent post on the Star-K certified lettuce hullabaloo.

A new organization has recently been created for wine enthusiasts and the wine industry to join together in order to network, socialize, and learn about Kosher wine. The Kosher Wine Society — www.kosherwinesociety.com — features scheduled tastings, meetings, early-released bottles exclusively for members and a wide variety of other membership perks.

According to their press release:

Created by Aaron Ritter, the Kosher Wine Society reflects the growing kosher wine industry. In recent years there has been an explosion of kosher wineries and higher quality bottles. “I saw this as an opportunity to get involved in something I felt passionately about and I wanted to share my enthusiasm with other like-minded people,” said Ritter.

The annual membership fee of $35 will grant members access to exclusive events, along with speaking engagements, education classes, special sale prices at select stores, special reserve bottles, and more. Other rates are available for joint memberships, and for wine industry professionals.

Their next event will take place on January 17th in New York City, featuring Lenny Recanati, owner of Recanati Wines, and his winemaker Lewis Pasco.

See their website for more details.

Judging by the type of conversation that’s developed over issues surrounding kosher cheese, I figure we all need a little more background on the subject. In the past, I’ve suggested reading The Gevinat Akum Prohibition by Rabbi Chaim Jachter, but I have a hard time remembering the details. Perhaps you do too. So I’ve summarized the rabbinic opinions on why we can’t eat cheese made without Jewish involvement in a handy chart.

With our chart, we now know that the Rambam, Maggid Mishneh, and Rama all conclude that even if the real reason for the prohibition (whatever it is) no longer exists, the prohibition still applies — davar sheb’minyan tzarich minyan acheir l’hatiro (Beitza 5a).

Okay, we can’t eat unkosher cheese. But what makes a cheese kosher? I had a hard time putting this into a chart, so, first, here’s the major dispute:

1. The Rama says that a Jew simply needs to monitor cheesemaking, in parallel with our understanding of chalav akum (milk).
2. The Shach says that a Jew must participate in the cheesemaking, in parallel with our understanding of pat akum (bread).

The Shach, however, has an interesting proof. The mishnah on chalav akum (that his opponent relies on to be lenient) states fully that non-Jewish milk is prohibited if a Jew does not watch the milking. The mishnah on gevinat akum, however, states only that non-Jewish cheese is prohibited — no mention of whether if it’s watched or not.

A slam dunk, right? Well, there are significant supporters on both sides.

In the end, R. Zushe Blech, author of Kosher Food Production, concludes that the generally accepted practice is to follow the Shach.

Here’s a scan of Shalom Beijing’s new menu.

Cover	Appetizers, Soup, Veal	Specials, Poultry
Beef, Fish, Rice and Noodles	Sushi Bar	Lunch Specials, Vegetarian

This just came across the wire:

Grand Opening
Shalom Beijing (previously Shalom Hunan)
92 Harvard St, Brookline (617-731-9778)

What: They will have a special grand opening with various foods and new menu!

When: This Sunday, December 18, between 12-1

For more information, call:
Jack at 731-9778 or 731-9760 (at the restaurant)
Stanley Rabinowitz 734-2255

For the last several weeks, when I haven’t been cooking or posting to the blog, I’ve quietly been working on a new layout for the site, and tonight, it’s finally ready. I not only wanted to give the site a more refined look, but also provide standards-compliant HTML and a better cross-browser experience.

This redesign also includes the migration of the site from the “b2evolution” blogging engine to WordPress, which, so far, has been much easier to configure and extend.

If you encounter any strange behavior, I would greatly appreciate a short comment to this post explaining what happened, so that I might fix any lingering problems. Thanks!

When we last spoke, I had rinsed off my Texas ribs (defrosted from a previous Specialty Provisions order), coated them with the spice rub, and left them to marinate overnight. Tonight, I ground my lapsang souchong tea leaves into a powder and got the oven tiles ready. Assembled my simple smoking apparatus as such…

…and cooked them per recipe instructions. After the initial high-heat smoking, I only needed fifty minutes of 250-degree slow cooking until my ribs were the perfect combination of tender and toothsome. A quick broil for five minutes on each side and they were done…

Meaty slices of heaven. A thin, crisp coating surrounding juicy beef — it wasn’t long before half the ribs were just bare bones.

Drooling aside, I did find that the lapsang tea smoke really over-powered the flavor of the marinade. (Luckily, I had six different kinds of barbecue sauce in the fridge for enhancement.) I’ll definitely cut back next time, but overall this beats Dougie’s any day!

The latest issue of Cook’s Illustrated includes a recipe for oven-smoked ribs, so, with a rack of Texas ribs in my freezer, I’ve decided to test if their technique is general-purpose enough to work with beef instead of pork.

The dry/wet spice rub was simple enough, but I had a bit of a snag finding the lapsang souchong tea leaves required for the oven-smoking process. Cook’s insists that Twining’s version of the tea is “widely available in supermarkets,” but both our largest (Shaw’s in Allston) and our fruitiest (Whole Foods in Brighton) didn’t have any to speak of.

Thankfully, it dawned on me that Peet’s Coffee and Tea sells (KSA-certified kosher) tea! A quick phone call confirmed they carry this odd variety, and a short drive and seven dollars later, I had a cannister of the stuff in hand. I’m not sure why anyone would want to drink tea that smells like burning tires, but it’ll sure make my ribs nice and smokey.

Stay tuned.

Let me just get it out there — I hate my crockpot. In college, I had a lovely stainless steel number made by Rival. It had two simple settings — low and high. “Low” would predictably cook a cholent between Friday afternoon and Saturday lunch; no thinking required.

The slow-cooker we own now is an impressive six quarts, but Hamilton Beach, in its infinite wisdom, has added a third setting to its models — Keep Warm — which has thrown off the delicate balance of my Shabbat cuisine. “Keep Warm” is not hot enough to cook anything; put raw meat in and hours later, still tough and inedible. And “Low”? Well, it’s just too hot to leave on for umpteen hours until Shabbat lunch: the water boils off and the meat gets hard and crusty.

Has anyone cracked the code of the three-setting crock pot? Any tips for Shabbat cholent, corned beef, chili, etc.?

A lot’s been going on in the Boston kosher scene lately, so here’s a rundown. I can’t guarantee the authenticity of any of this information, but it’s exciting nonetheless.

Shalom Hunan changes ownership this week. The “new” restaurant will be called “Beijing”-something, will have a new menu, new staff, and new chef.

Handler Brothers of Newton Centre appears to have closed. Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, its doors were shut to the bewilderment of area turkey buyers.

In that very shopping area, the owners of Gordon & Alperin and Bodavi Bakery will be opening a pizza shop — perhaps in the abandoned Handler Brothers spot? — to extend their Commonwealth Avenue kosher empire to three stores.

The new Ta’am China “steakhouse” that was previously reported seems to have been downgraded to “Ta’am China 2,” a Chinese restaurant that may have an expanded menu with Asian-inspired steaks and sushi. It may also be just another Chinese restaurant, conveniently located in a western suburb. In any case, I drove down Oak Street a few weeks ago to scope out the scene and found a closed-down Chinese restaurant that may be TC2’s new home:

Feel free to share any more restaurant hearsay in the comments.

Yet another beneficial side-effect of keeping kosher was reported in the LA Times today — lesser exposure to the ebola virus.

Researchers working in Gabon and Congo have identified three species of fruit bat as the long-sought reservoirs of … the Ebola virus.

The team tested more than 1,000 bats and other animals before tracing the virus to fruit bats, which are commonly eaten by people in Central Africa, according to a report in today’s issue of the journal Nature.

…

Dr. Sanford Kuvin, head of tropical infectious diseases at Israel’s Hebrew University, said the study provided strong evidence of Ebola’s presence in bats and should prompt people in the region to “avoid contact with the creatures at all costs.”

In honor of this week’s parsha, here is a recipe for curried red lentil soup. We made it last year, and it was quite tasty (although I admit that we didn’t use these precise proportions for the seasoning). The recipe appeared in the Food section of the Boston Globe on February 2, 2004.

Curried red-lentil soup
(Serves 4)

1 1/2 cups red lentils
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 Spanish onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1-inch piece fresh ginger, finely chopped
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon curry powder
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 teaspoon red chili powder
2 tablespoons cold water
1 can (14 ounces) diced tomatoes, drained
4 cups water
Salt, to taste
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro or parsley
2 scallions, finely chopped

1. Remove any stones from the lentils.

2. In a large casserole, heat the oil and cook the onion over medium heat for 10 minutes, stirring often, or until it softens. Add the garlic and ginger, and stir for one more minute.

3. Meanwhile, in a small bowl, combine the cumin, coriander, curry powder, turmeric, and red chili powder. Gradually stir in the 2 tablespoons of water and mix well. Add the spice mixture to the onion and cook, stirring, 1-2 minutes.

4. Add the tomatoes, lentils, and 4 cups of water. Bring the soup to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, or until it becomes a chunky puree.

5. Add salt and ladle soup into bowls. Sprinkle with cilantro or parsley and scallions. Serve.

Variation: Reduce water by half and serve over rice.