The best kind of Hanukkah gifts are those you can make and your friends eat. In this series, we’ll present four sweet and savory ideas to spice up your holiday gift giving for everyone on your list.
While fried foods grace the Hanukkah table, perhaps no gift is more appropriate than oil. Nice olive oil, with its grassy, fruity undertones, makes an excellent present on its own. But to up the ante and personalize the offering, try your hand at infusing the oil first. The possibilities are endless, the presentation visually appealing, and the taste memorable.
Infusing oil is as simple as putting the flavors you want in a bottle along with some decent olive oil. Just let it hang out together for a week or two and you’ve got yourself a special treat worthy of finishing sauces, amping up salads, and drizzling on bread. It makes a great last minute gift because even if it’s not done infusing, you can instruct the recipient to wait to use it to let the flavors develop.
The best kind of Hanukkah gifts are those you can make and your friends eat. In this series, we’ll present four sweet and savory ideas to spice up your holiday gift giving for everyone on your list.
Every holiday season, I don an apron and crank out huge batches of truffles, granola, chocolate bark and other edible treats as gifts. Besides the fact that homemade presents are a boon for my budget, I also like that they have a special, personal touch. I try something new each year and last year’s edible DIY project took the cake (err, cookie): Homemade marshmallows and graham crackers, along with a piece of nice chocolate.
If you’re anything like me, then the mere thought of homemade marshmallows knocks your socks off. Before seeing the recipe in Karen Solomon’s “Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It”, I had only vague notions that marshmallows came from anywhere besides a plastic bag in the grocery store. But, like so many things, homemade marshmallows are a game changer.
Cook the book makes “Kosher Revolution’s” Be-All, End-All Chicken Soup. Check out the recipe. [Serious Eats]
Two Jewish brothers are heating up the kitchens at some of Brooklyn’s hottest restaurants. [Jewcy]
Microbrews for Hanukkah and some Jewish beer history. Bottoms Up! [NPR]
Despite my love for many, many of this country’s donuts, I’m just going to come out and say it: This year, for Hanukkah, I’m going to be I’m spending all my donut gelt at Brooklyn’s Dough.
My Hanukkah-season fixation with Brooklyn’s Dough bakery is due neither to the teeny corner shop’s amazing size-to-price proportions (ginormous donuts; a mere two bucks) nor to the selection of heartbreakingly good glazes (including but not limited to the “rich enough to stop time” earl grey and the simultaneously sweet and tart hot pink hibiscus). And while their yeast-donuts-only policy is exciting to me (a total yeast donut devotee), that’s not my reason, either.
On Agripas Street in Jerusalem, between the workers’ diners and the outdoor market, there is a Kurdish Cultural center. With a dwindling number of native born Kurds, each year their legacy slowly declines. Many of their descendents have naturally assimilated into Israeli culture and no longer keep the traditions of my family’s ancestors.
Sadly, the language, dress, music, folklore….the entire way of life of my ancestors is now almost exclusively confined to the pages of academic research. Food is often the last vestige of a bygone era to survive. It is what differentiates one ethnic group from another and it is also what binds them.
The miracle of Hanukkah was not, alas, brought about by a latke. The eternal flame, it seems, was kept alive not by everyone’s favorite fried Jewish food, but by olive oil. According to historians, there can be little doubt that the oil used to light the menorah 2,200 years ago was olive oil. In ancient times it was used for everything from lighting to food to cosmetics.
Today, we honor the place of oil in our history by making fried food the centerpiece of the Hanukkah feast. No one seems to be able to say exactly why fried food, as opposed to olive oil, gets the spotlight, but it’s likely because olive oil was not available in Eastern Europe, from whence comes the latke. The next best thing, which was plentiful, would have been rendered chicken or goose fat, otherwise known as schmaltz. By frying up potatoes in schmaltz, a European Jew of modest means could make a dish that commemorated the miracle of Hanukkah closely enough.
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