Why is This Night Different from All Other Nights?

10 ways Thanksgiving dinner might be a little different in a kosher home:

1. No planning 3 months or even 1 month ahead of time.  Compared to 8 days of Passover, Turkey Day’s a snap!
2. People “wash” for the meal.
3. Have to figure out creamy mashed potatoes, creamed spinach and pie and ice cream without any dairy.
4. Guests are confused when dinner starts before sundown.
5. “What, no challah!?!”
6. Your company may stay through Shabbat.
7. Grace is sung in Hebrew after the meal.
8. Host and hostess go to bed dreaming  of ways to turn leftovers into Shabbat dinner.
9. Don’t need an excuse to skip Black Friday shopping—gotta’ get ready for Shabbat.
10. “Those are pilgrims, honey, not rabbis.”

We want to know how your Thanksgiving is different. Leave us your comments below.

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10 Tips for Your First Thanksgiving & 3 Foolproof Recipes

1. Lists, lists and more lists: menu, shopping list, invites, RSVPs and emergency cooking guru numbers
2. Invest in good equipment—a sturdy roasting pan for even cooking, rack with handles for easy turkey removal, meat thermometer, carving knife , etc. Even an oven thermometer can help make sure your turkey is ready on time.
3. If you’re using a frozen turkey you must allow adequate time to defrost it—you cannot cook a frozen turkey through on Thanksgiving Day!
4. Make sure your turkey fits in its pan and the pan fits in the your oven. People sometimes by a big bird and a big pan for a big crowd only to realize that their city apartment oven or older model oven is too small to hold their turkey.
5. Everything doesn’t have to be homemade-buy some pre-made products to round out your meal—and take guests up on offers to bring something, whether it’s a pie or sodas.
6. Stuffing doesn’t have to be stuffed into the cavity of your turkey. A lot of cooks make “dressing” baked in the oven.  That way your turkey cooks faster and you don’t have to worry about undercooked stuffing. If you have vegetarians coming, make a vegetarian dressing you can serve to all your Thanksgiving guests.
7. Timing is everything—­so that all food is hot and ready at the same time, plan recipes accordingly and have lots of covered ovenproof serving dishes available to keep foods warm.
8. Have plenty of creative hors d’oeuvres on hand to keep guests happy until turkey time. They don’t have to be Thanksgiving themed or even autumnal—try guac/salsa and chips, hummus and pita crisps, sausage bites, etc.
9. Keep drinks cold—if your fridge is full of food, consider a cooler with ice or keeping drinks in a cold garage or, depending where you live, even outside.
10. Keep the day for essentials like cooking and celebrating with your guests—clean the house, etc. on the day before.

Bonus: 3 Foolproof Beginner Recipes for Thanksgiving

	Roasted Turkey
	Cranberry Relish
	Roasted Sweet Vegetables in Spicy Cinnamon Cider

Kosherfest 2009 Social Media Highlights

Flickr - 43 photos

Twitter - Hundreds of Tweets!

Yeshiva World News- PHOTOS: Thousands Attend KosherFest 2009 (including a number of shots of Kosher.com and our monster size kosher shopping cart!)

The Jewish Week - JInsider: 21st Century Kosher (Part 2)

Vos Iz Neias -

• Photos Highlighting The Best and Brightest
• 4000 at Opening Day of Kosherfest
• Pic of Kosher.com booth

JTA covers the event live (YouTube) - Breaking down the buzz over kosher food

The Cool Jew (includes videos) - TheCoolJew.com at Kosher Fest

Chowhound - 2009 Kosherfest Winners

The Gourmet Retailer - Kosherfest to Showcase Upscale Kosher Products

Slashfood - Innovative Nosh at Kosher Fest 2009

KosherToday - Kosher News from Around the World

The Jewish Journal - U.S. appetite for Israeli food grows

The Paramus Post - 21st Annual Kosherfest 2009

And a few great articles by Jamie Geller:

• Kosherfest: I came, I saw, I ate!
• Kosherfest: 5 New Finds
• Kosherfest: The Best of the Best

Have you seen other articles about Kosherfest that you enjoyed reading? We would love for you to add to the list below!

It’s Official: Kosher Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

Well, better than sliced challah, anyway :)Recent information gathered from Mintel’s Global New Products Database for the year indicated that kosher foods are the leading the pack for new product launches!

What’s really interesting is that the growth isn’t entirely from the religious market.

From the study:

“Kosher is the most frequently used claim on food and drink products launched this year, according to Mintel, which suggests that the growing interest may be more to do with food safety than religion…not so much because of religion, but because consumers of various backgrounds trust kosher foods to be safer and clearly marked as to ingredient content”.

Other groups that are finding kosher appealing are vegetarians, lactose intolerant, and those that fear mad cow disease (from beef). This is the second straight year that Mintel has kosher ranked #1, and estimates the 2007 kosher market at $12.5 billion. All products in the US market that “happen to be kosher” stand at an astounding $500 billion.

Source

Free Shipping on Kosher Meat and Poultry for the Holidays

Kosher.com is offering free shipping on all meat orders through Oct 31. This is a great way to feed your family for the High Holidays. Order from our growing selection of exciting new cuts and types of kosher meat, including dry-aged beef, bison, and more traditional roasts and briskets.

Please note:
We can supply many different supervisions by request.  We carry meats and poultry from a range of sources with a variety of supervisions. If you have a particular supervision request or wish to avoid a particular source indicate your preference in the “Special Instructions” field during checkout.

You can see a list of our many possible supervisions and sources here: http://usa.kosher.com/help/faq.html#25

Have a happy New Year!

–
Brian Cooper
Dir of Ecommerce
Kosher.com

Top 7 Videos Celebrating Kosher Food!

(Last chance to eat challah for a while )
With the Passover season rapidly approaching, the kosher world is thinking about food and preparation. Have a look at some of our favorite kosher videos online!

His first visit to a kosher McDonald’s

This kid just wants you to eat your kosher!

MATZA FACTORY!

Crank that Kosher Boy!

Feed Me Bubbe!

This guy insists that his food be kosher, no exceptions!

And one more just for fun: Whasssup? SHALOM!

Click here for a bonus cartoon straight from kosher.com!

Oy! to the world

America’s cultural and ethnic confusion is continuing - and it behooves the kosher consumer to be careful.

A popular restaurant and musical night spot in Virginia Beach, more than 30 years old, is called The Jewish Mother. Performers over the years have included Richie Havens, Dave Mason, Leon Russell, Dave Mathews, Hootie & The Blow Fish, and Bruce Hornsby.  It serves a Jewish-style (but decidedly unkosher) menu. A local southern Virgina jazz combo, Big Wide Grin, has just held a CD release performance at The Jewish Mother for its new Christmas album, Big Wide Holiday Grin.

Balducci’s, the gourmet delicatessen and grocery store in Greenwich Village, New York, was recently caught red-faced by a blogger who photographed a sign in the store advertising “Delicious for Chanukah” Boneless Spiral Ham. The tempest in a trafe pan spread through the mainstream media, and Balducci’s was caught quite unprepared to explain its hamhanded treatment of the holidays.

For truly kosher meat, better stick with Kosher.com.

Zabar’s maven Klein helped push Jewish food to gourmet heights

It may not offer only kosher fare, but Zabar’s delicatessen in New York City’s Upper West Side played a significant role in recent decades in lifting the image of traditional Jewish food from the ordinary to the gourmet.

The reason we’re thinking about this now is because of the recent death of Murray Klein (z”l), a part-owner of Zabar’s, and the man most visible to the public in that store, now a New York institution.

In the days following his December 6 death at 84, the praise for Klein came pouring in from foodies worldwide.

Zabar’s was in part responsible for creating the notion that Jewish foods can also be gourmet, the trade newsletter Kosher Today said.

“That one little Yiddishe store had an effect on the way people ate all over America, and it was really because of him,” Steven Fass, an importer, told the New York Times.

Klein was born in a Jewish town in the Soviet Union near the Romanian border. His parents and five siblings all died in Nazi concentration camps, and he ended up in a Soviet labor camp. Klein spent time in a displaced persons camp in Italy before making it to the United States. He even worked in Europe for the Irgun, a Jewish guerrilla movement that helped smuggle arms to pre-state Palestine.

He joined Zabar’s as a stockman and worked with - and occasionally against - the Zabar family for the next 40 years, winding up as a co-owner of the store when he retired in 1994.

So, now, when you see upper-scale gourmet kosher restaurants such as Levana in New York or A Cow Jumped Over The Moon in Beverly Hills, as well as the gourmet kosher items here on Kosher.com, you can thank Murray Klein and the mavens at Zabar’s.

Kosher in Annapolis? We hope so

Annapolis may be known, at some future date, as the City of Peace - if the international conference currently under way there results in any significant progress in the Israeli-Palestinian problem. But it is never going to be known as the City of Kosher. In fact, a recent article by the Associated Press makes the point that Annapolis is better known as the City of Crab Cakes and Oysters than any kind of a source of kosher food.

“I have no idea what they’re going to eat,” Rabbi Ari J. Goldstein of Temple Beth Shalom, a Reform synagogue in Arnold, Md., told the AP. “They can either buy their stuff at Trader Joe’s and borrow someone’s kitchen … or they can just go vegetarian, which is what they’re probably going to do.” The proprietors of Chick and Ruth’s Delly (they can’t even seem to spell it correctly) concede they are “kosher-style” only (We note, of course, that “kosher style” is not a term generally permitted in advertising or promotional material, as it can be misleading.).

The story, surprisingly, offers no answer as to how the various delegations - both Israeli and Arab - are going to satisfy culinary and dietary needs. It quotes a White House chef talking about kashrut at the White House, but that famous residence is more than an hour from Annapolis.

The US Naval Academy has a lovely Jewish chapel for its small cadre of Jewish midshipmen (about 120 out of more than 4,000), faculty members, and community members who attend services at the Commodore Uriah P. Levy Center and Jewish Chapel. The Academy’s Jewish chaplain, Cmdr. Irv Elson, once told me that the Jewish middies who want to keep kosher at the Academy’s dining rooms, usually eat vegetarian food .

So, other than calling Kosher.com, what will the delegates do?

Battery recycling yields kosher product

The box that your kosher noodles or favorite breakfast cereals come in may contain an ingredient that once was in a lead-acid battery, but now is a kosher product.

It may not sound appetizing, but one company’s recycling of lead-acid batteries - an environmentally helpful process that primarily yields lead,  also yields sodium sulfate - a salt commonly used in the manufacturing of starch. Doe Run Company’s Buick Resource Recycling Division also takes the extra step of getting that salt product certified kosher.

Lou Magdits, Doe Run’s director of raw materials, says none of the sodium sulfate the company produces is contained in food, but it is used in making an industrial, corn-based starch that goes into papermaking or cardboard production. Doe Run sought the kosher certification because the paper packaging may come into contact with food at a later time. Chicago Rabbinical Council certifies the salt-creation process and raw materials.

Doe Run’s sodium sulfate is also used in the manufacturing of other products such as glass, powdered laundry detergent and carpet freshening products. The company processes more than 13.5 million lead-acid batteries annually. Battery recycling yields approximately 1,200 tons of sodium sulfate a month.