LilaTovCocktail: holidays

Showing posts with label holidays. Show all posts

Easter / Passover Mashups, Part II: Barbie buys matzah

4/15/09

As I wrote in Easter / Passover Mashups, Part I: Passover Peep Panoramas, I've always liked the hands-on craftiness of coloring Easter eggs, and although I don't celebrate Easter, I have been known to put out on my seder table a plate of hard boiled eggs bearing brightly-colored eggs shells.

So naturally I'm a fan of other mashups of seasonal Jewish and Christian cultural vocabularies, like the DIY Tiny Matzah box for Barbie which Hatam Soferet posted on Jewschool.

She writes:

To make your own box of Barbie matzah you will need:
corrugated cardboard
ruler
scissors
glue
tape
pencil
this scan of a box of matzah (print it at 300dpi)
Measure, mark, and cut four pieces of corrugated cardboard 30mm*27mm. Tape them together in a bundle. These are your matzot (hahaha, insert matzah/cardboard joke of choice here).

For the complete directions, you must visit her post.

Hatam Soferet, aka Jen Taylor Friedman by the way, is the creative mind behind Tefillin Barbie. A sofer, she's the first woman known to have written a sefer Torah.

Take a look at her project and what she has to say about being a female sofer. It's all on her website:

"Tefillin Barbie generated an extraordinary amount of feedback. She featured on Jewschool and Jewlicious, on BoingBoing, in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, on Ritualwell, Lilith magazine (Winter '06-'07 issue), New Voices, the London Jewish Chronicle, The Jewish Advocate, the Philadelphia Jewish Voice, the New Jersey Jewish News, the Forward, the Jewish Week..."

Easter / Passover Mashups, Part I: Passover Peep Panoramas

4/14/09

A Very Peeps Passover by Nycole Klein and Chris Patton, placed 32nd in the Washington Post's 3rd Annual Peep Show. "Our Peeps have sat down to a traditional Passover Seder, complete with the requisite Passover Haggada (prayer book), Seder plate, candles, matzo and lots of wine. As an added bonus, the Afikomen is hidden somewhere in the room!" says Klein.

've always liked the hands-on craftiness of coloring Easter eggs, and although I don't celebrate Easter, I have been known to put out on my seder table a plate of hard boiled eggs bearing brightly-colored eggs shells.

So naturally I'm a fan of other mashups of seasonal Jewish and Christian cultural vocabularies, like the above panorama of a Pesach dinner attended by Peeps®. (Gives the expression "my peeps" a whole new meaning, doesn't it?)

Peeps®, if you don't know, are bizarre little marshmallow candies traditionally shaped like little yellow chicks and popular at Easter.

According to Wikipedia, theyare made from marshmallow, sugar, gelatin, and carnauba wax, but they have a distinctly unfoodlike texture. In 1999, scientists at Emory University performed experiments on batches of Peeps® to see if they really are indestructable: "They claimed that the eyes of the confectionery 'wouldn't dissolve in anything.'"

Their apparent indestructability and their excessive cuteness challenges people to desecrate them, and so many bricoleurs have tried their hands at making Peeps® dioramas that newspapers now hold annual contests. (These are not to be confused with "Peep Offs," where contestants compete to choke down the greatest number of stale Peeps.)

Writing on Jewschool,feygele called our attention to flickr user stylecouncil1's wonderful Peeps for Passover, a series of photos of the ten plagues as performed by Peeps®.

Chag Sameach Pesach!

This morning's Birkat Hahama (blessing of the sun)

4/8/09

Birkat Hahama is a rarely talked-about (and rarely occurring) blessing that gives thanks for the creation of the world. It occurs every 28 years when, the Talmud says, the sun reaches the same spot in the firmament as when it was created.

In Cleveland, at 6:30 a.m. this morning, Kol HaLev held a The Blessing of the Sun on the grounds of the Mandel Jewish Community Center. I couldn't go, but I hope someone posts photos soon.

In Israel this morning, 50,000 people took part in Birkat Hahama at Jerusalem's Western Wall.

Facebook Haggadah

4/3/09

How long until Haggadah parodies outnumber serious ones?

My all-time favorite is still Michael Rubiner's Two Minute Haggadah (subtitle: A Passover Service for the Impatient).

But this Facebook Haggadah is good too. Here are some screen shots:

Chocolate hamantaschen & other 21st century marvels

3/9/09

(A modified version of this post appeared in the Cleveland Jewish News, 03/06/09)

For Jews of a certain age, hamantaschen – three-cornered cups of dry cookie dough traditionally filled with dollops of dense, sticky poppy, prune or apricot – are what madeleines were to French novelist Marcel Proust: reminders of temps perdu.

I've always suspected that real pleasure found in hamantaschen was more nostalgic than culinary. For many Jews, hamantaschen remind us of a time when the Jewish community was more tightly knit, geographically, children grew up with nearby or live-in bubbes who baked traditional foods for every Jewish holiday.

Because the truth is this: there are some truly terrible hamantaschen out there. Dirt-dry, with filling that's too thick to chew. My own dear Grandma Gussie made a dirt-dry poppy hamantaschen that had to be washed down with a quart of milk.

Today, Jewish children expect holiday sweets to be, well, sweet. Super sweet. And filled with chocolate.

And so Jewish bakeries, preschool classes and hip grandmas started turning out hamantaschen filled with chocolate chips, marshmallow fluff or pieces of candy bars. A check of online cooking blogs and recipe archives will yield dozens of hamantaschen recipes so sweet they'll make grown-ups' teeth ache just think about them.

The recipe below is adapted from several found online. Sure, chocolate hamantaschen don't look like you'd expect a hamataschen to look, but they still provide an opportunity to talk to kids about Haman, Esther, and the rest of the Purim gang.

Chocolate Hamantaschen Dough

3/4 C unsalted butter or pareve shortening
3/4 C sugar
2 large eggs
1 t vanilla
2-1/2 C flour
1 t baking powder
pinch salt
1/4 C cocoa powder

In large bowl of an electric mixer, cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time and vanilla. Add flour, baking powder, salt and cocoa powder and mix until a ball of dough forms.

Divide the dough and shape into two logs. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for a minimum of 1 hour.

Once the dough has chilled, roll out one section about 1/4” thick on a well-floured workspace. Use a cutter to cut approximately 3” circles.

Place approximately 1 t of a filling of your choice in the center of each section. Bring three sides of the dough together to make a triangle. Pinch the three corners together and place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet.

Place in a preheated 350° oven for 9-12 minutes, until the bottom turns golden.

Easy fillings for chocolate hamantaschen

Reese’s Mini Peanut Butter Cups
Hershey’s Kisses
Nutella spread
Marshmallow fluff (I confess I've never tried this)
Chips from the baking aisle: caramel, peanut butter, and white or dark chocolate
Slightly crushed M&Ms or Junior Mints

I overheard kids talking about using crushed Pez for filling (they're kosher, you know), but surely they were only kidding -- right?

Gobble, gobble, gobble ...

11/27/08

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving -- let the battles begin!

11/26/08

Are you expecting a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving?

Or did you wake up this morning and wonder how you're going to get through Thanksgiving Day without causing -- or getting dragged into -- a family feud?

Even amiable families can devolve into bickering under the right combination of stressors, many of which happen to come into play at Thanksgiving:

Flying on the days there are most likely to be overcrowding, weather delays, and grumpy people
Making well and in large quantities food which you normally never cook
Timing the simultaneous arrival at the table of food and guests, despite TV football schedules

Bloat-inducing overeating (as a desperate substitute for intimacy. Or just for fun)
Competing for attention with your siblings although you're all in your 40s
Enduring other people's ill-behaved children OR
Enduring the criticism of your children by relatives who wouldn't know good parenting practices if they smacked them on the head (note: these last two are not mutually exclusive)

Fear not. Advice and encouragement for making it through family holidays is easy to find on the 'net. Here are some of the better ones:

CNN's "How to survive Thanksgiving with family" advises people not to try to avoid difficult topics like the economy or a job loss.
The holidays are far from ideal, especially with anxieties about the economy this year, said Dr. Herb Rappaport, a psychologist who wrote the book, "The Family Gathering Disasters."
"If someone lost a job, there has been a death in the family, or someone is in the military serving abroad, you can't turn your holiday into a fantasy," he said. "People should try to be realistic and stay on target with what this holiday is about. I don't think people need perfection or the anxiety associated with perfection. What people want is genuine experience."
On ParentCenter.com's Momformation, Betsy Shaw writes in "How to survive your family this Thanksgiving"" that while all the advice about cooking is fine,
What I want to know is how to get through a three hour meal with the inlaws and outlaws, as well as your immediate/extended family ~~without fighting with your father and making your mother cry~~ with your sanity intact.
Shaw surveys some online advice and adds a bit of her own:
"If I could add something to the list, it would be this: Don’t bring up past transgressions, such as reminding your older brother, in front of his wife and kids, how he used to hold you down, sit on you, and fart. Not a good idea
RealSimple.com has a cornucopia of Thanksgiving advice and wisdom on handling everything from the dueling egos of Thanksgiving chefs and the right way to store leftovers to preventing family feuds. Some good ones:
If your family is really, truly a nightmare, the serious advice at Healthline.com maybe what you need. Dysfunctional Family Thanksgiving - Tips for Survival reminds you to:
- Make sure you have all of your prescriptions filled for whatever - especially things like migraine headaches. You need to be armed and medicated to get through this.
- Form alliances with family members who genuinely love, respect you and have a good sense of humor.
- Take daily walks with your allies and decompress about dysfunctional behaviors that are getting under your skin.
- Remove children from the toxic environment frequently and play ball or tag with them.
- Discharge negative energy with physical activity and laughter.
- Try not to keep score - you only have a few days to endure.
Frankly, if you have to do all that to survive a few days with your family -- and I'm sure some people do -- wouldn't it be kinder to yourself just to treat yourself a family-free Thanksgiving? In comparison, Thanksgiving dinner in a homeless shelter might be more relaxing.
The Wiki-how website, in additional to practical how-tos like How To Clean Your Toothbrush, also has advice for life's more intangible problems. Although much of it requires time to lay some groundwork with difficult relatives, some of How to Deal With Difficult Relatives could be useful at Thanksgiving.

This articles emphasizes the importance of setting and respecting boundaries over dodging and avoiding conflict:

If you have relatives who fail to respect your boundaries and behave as if the purpose of the relationship is for you to bend over backwards to satisfy all of their needs, you certainly aren’t alone. What you need to do is define boundaries which you consider to be bottom lines that should not be crossed, ones that make you feel violated when they are.
Two important points to take away from this article: First, you can love your relatives without sharing values, having the same lifestyle or even being particularly close. Second, you may have to physically remove yourself from unresolvable conflict with a relative (aka "If all else fails, run!"). Most people won't need to do that during the course of a family meal, but it's worth remembering that you can.