Articles

Chicken Fricassee with Turkey meatballs. Photos by Morgan Lieberman Celebrated close together, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are known as the High Holy Days, but each offers its own special food customs. Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sundown Sept. 13, celebrates the Jewish New Year. It is a joyous occasion enlivened with a variety of delicious foods, symbolizing a bountiful year to follow. Many traditional dishes include honey and apples to assure…

Smoked salmon and cream cheese panini. Photos by Morgan Lieberman  Spending a lovely summer back home in the Los Angeles area, Morgan Lieberman was doing what she enjoys most: using her camera to shoot photos. From time to time during those warm days, she found her way into my kitchen — and my heart — shooting photos of food for the Journal and its monthly magazine, TRIBE. When she returned…

(Above) Tuna Salad Sandwich Photos by Morgan Lieberman. Food preparation and styling by Judy Zeidler If you have children in school, you know that making a lunch that pleases both you and your kids is not an easy assignment. Think of it as the school-lunch challenge. To help, get them involved with planning a meal, because they’re more likely to eat it if they were part of packing it. My daughter-in-law, Amy Zeidler, remembers when…

Peach Salad. Photos by Morgan Lieberman Food preparation and styling by Judy Zeidler When I think of baby boomers, I begin to realize how instrumental they are in the way people eat today. They have made us more aware of nutrition, healthful food and time-saving recipes. They are setting a trend of eating more organic foods and demanding products that support healthful eating and living. They are becoming much more…

Nationwide, there are all sorts of activities to celebrate Father’s Day, different ways to honor the hard work of dads and their contribution to society. For our family, it is usually a fun party focused on enjoying each other’s company — and a special meal.  When our kids were growing up we lived on a ranch in Topanga Canyon, and we celebrated Father’s Day by having a picnic and a…

Stuffed Eggplant Rolls. Photos by Dan Kacvinski The holiday of Shavuot marks the receiving of the Ten Commandments by Moses, but it’s also a kind of Jewish Thanksgiving, when farm bounty and grains — “first fruits” — were brought to the temple. These often included wheat, barley, grapes, figs and dates. In modern times, Shavuot is a holiday that inspires the preparation of many delicious and traditional recipes that usually…

Mother’s Day is the traditional celebration honoring all the mothers in the family, as well as motherhood, maternal bonds and the influence of mothers in society. To celebrate this special day — which is May 10 this year — I decided to ask members of our family to submit a dish they would like to share for a potluck extravaganza. We will have great-grandmothers, grandmothers and mothers represented at this…

Rocky Road Clusters. Photos by Daniel Kacvinski This year, I gathered together all of the Passover dessert recipes I have made, dating back to our first seder in 1950 — more than 125. This was in anticipation of compiling them into my new project, a Passover dessert cookbook. I thought it would be fun to share some of my favorites in advance of the book’s publication, with a focus on some…

We began receiving e-mails and telephone calls in early January from family members and friends asking to be included in one of our annual Passover seders. We usually plan a month or two in advance, but this was unusual — although it did make us so happy to think that everyone is looking forward to sharing our seders. We can seat about 25 in our dining room, and this year…

What makes the holiday of Purim so special for our family is more than the heroic story of Queen Esther. These days, our celebration wouldn’t be complete without a holiday meal that starts with all the grandchildren and great-grandchildren dressed up in costume to re-create the Purim story and making mayhem, using groggers —noise-makers — from our collection that are part of the table decor. The menu itself is much less chaotic….