Purim in Crimea – Simferopol Jewish Community Thanks Kosher.com for Holiday Supplies

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Kosher.com donated Purim food and supplies to the Bais Menachem School in Crimea.

Last month, Kosher.com donated mishloach manot supplies for Purim gifts to the Bais Menachem Jewish School of Simferopol, Crimea in the Former Soviet Union. Leah Lipszyc, the school’s administrator, wrote us a beautiful thank you note and sent us photos. Here’s some of what she had to say and some pics from Purim in Simferopol:

You can’t imagine how thrilled we were to get the four big boxes of Purim supplies from you! Even the bochur [young man] who was helping us kept saying how nice the shalach manos was, and that he didn’t get such nice shalach manos when he was a kid!

Thank you again for your generosity!  You really made the day for the kids in Bais Menachem Jewish School of Simferopol and others in our community!

Send a Purim Gift Basket to Your Loved Ones in Israel

This year surprise your loved ones in Israel with a delicious Purim gift basket from Kosher.com
Let’s face it, Purim rocks!!! Purim is the most fun and festive Jewish holiday, chock full of costumes, prizes, and—most important of all—treats!  To help you celebrate Mordecai and Esther’s miraculous triumph over the evil Haman (you can read our take in the Kosher.com Purim Guide: Purim—Esther, Mordecai and the whole megilah), Kosher.com now offers Purim gift basket delivery to Israel.

Choose from six different Purim gift baskets, each offering a generous mix of festive bounty. Indulge their sweet side with a basket filled with fresh baked cookies, chocolates, and hamentashen. For the more health-conscious crowd, send them a gift basket filled with baked granola cookies, dried fruit, and tea.

Order today to be sure your Purim gift basket gets there in time! And don’t forget to send our free Purim e-card to your friends and family, you could win a $100 shopping spree on Kosher.com!

Memories of Purim Costumes Past

Costume Envy

Ahh, those wonderful childhood Purim memories … the hamentashen, the mishloach manot, the noisemakers we made back in nursery school out of old milk cartons filled with dry beans.

And then there are the costumes … Well, this is where my memories stop being so wonderful.

When it comes to the costumes, everyone else can reminisce fondly about Purims past, while I can only look back in utter horror and embarrassment.  As others wax nostalgic as they flip through old photo albums and grin and chuckle at the appearance of their younger selves dressed up in celebratory disguise, I have contemplated burning all visual evidence of my youthful celebration of Purim.

It is the photo of the 5 year-old me dressed up as a queen—I think I was supposed to be Vashti … but then again I could have been Esther that year—that is the hardest for me to look at. I can still hear the guffaws and snickers of the older kids as we kindergartners paraded through the school’s classrooms singing songs, twirling our groggers and showing off our costumes. “Who’s she supposed to be?” they wondered aloud to themselves, “Sleeping Beauty?!”

To be honest, it was hard to blame them for thinking that that was who I was dressed up as. You see, I was wearing a tinfoil-covered paper crown and a nightgown. Worse yet, the nightgown was topped with my mother’s housecoat, worn over my shoulders with one button fastened to keep this pretend royal cape from falling off.

Even before the advent of the kinds of professional-looking costumes kids wear today (the kind they order online from any one of the many fancy Purim cum Halloween costume websites that abound), there were Jewish kids whose parents were already trying to take Purim to the next level. How I envied my best friend, who was one year dressed like a real clown and the next like a blossoming tulip. Where, I wondered, did her mother (who I knew did not sew them herself) find such complex costumes made out of high quality, colorful satin? How did she manage to get a flower headdress whose petals miraculously never floppily wilted?

I finally had to come to terms with the fact that my mom was just not that creative—or competitive—when it came to Purim costumes. “Why do you need to be a tulip?” she asked? “I don’t remember any tulips in the Purim story. But Queen Esther, now that’s a classic that will never go out of style,” she tried to assure me. “And besides, you look gorgeous in my housecoat.”

So, the upshot of all this is that today, as a mother myself, I never limit my children’s Purim costume options to the story’s characters. But at the same time, I am not inclined to buy them commercially produced ones. It was only once I grew up that I realized that there was a method to my mother’s Purim costume madness, namely that she was ahead of her time in promoting the concept behind the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra our kids know so well today.  Thus, my sons have used cardboard boxes, scraps of material and arts supplies we had laying around the house to turn themselves into LEGO bricks and iPods on the 14^th of Adar.

As for the other aspects of the holiday? Let’s just say that, luckily for my children, I have had a complicated relationship only with what we wear on Purim, and never with what we eat.  It doesn’t matter whether hamentashen are homemade or store bought, large or small, prune or chocolate-chip filled. We happily and hungrily eat them all.

Back to Purim Central on Kosher.com

Revenge of the Hamentashen

Hamentashen vs. Latkes: It’s On … Again!

On Chanukah, latkes threw down the gauntlet. Now, with Purim 2010 almost here (this year Purim starts on  Saturday night, February 27th), it’s payback time. And this time, it’s pastry.

So here they are; the 8 reasons why hamentashen are better than latkes:

1. Baking hamentashen fill the air with the scent of sweet perfume. Latkes, not so much.
2. Hamentashen are portable.
3. Hamentashen: 144 calories, 4.5 grams of fat. Latkes: 200 calories, 11 grams of fat. Latkes=thar she blows!
4. Decadently rich, hand-dipped chocolate latkes? I don’t think so!
5. I wouldn’t call latkes fat, but when they sit around the house, they really sit around the house. (Not to mention your stomach.)
6. Hamentashen keep you regular!
7. Hamentashen … baked, not fried.
8. Three words … fruit filling, baby!

Back to Purim Central on Kosher.com

Purim Around the Web

Hava narisha … Esther, Mordecai … Purim’s Here!

This year Purim falls on Sunday, February 28, 2010 (the fun really begins on Saturday night).

The Story of Purim

The Web is a like a limitless well of Purim information, but for the basics check out the Purim pages at Wikipedia, Holidays.net,  Chabad, Judaism 101, Jewish Virtual Library, and My Jewish Learning.

This printable Purim guide from Chabad offers a run down on Purim traditions and mistvot. The Jewish Reconstructionist Federation tackles some tough  Purim questions in their Purim FAQs.

Kids’ Purim Activities

Stuck for a costume for you or the kids? Sarah Zeldman shows you how to make 9 easy and inexpensive, no-sew Purim costumes.

Learn to make an animal mask with Babaganewz’s Purim Mask Craft or sing along with High School Megillah. And who can pass up Jewpardy the Purim Edition!

Need an easy Purim art project? Check out the coloring pages at Aish.com and TorahTots.com coloring pages. Or surf to Holidays.net’s Purim Craft Project page for a variety of fun activities.

Misloach Manot and Purim Treats

Holidays.net has a primer on creative Purim baskets to help you take your mishloach manot to the next level. (Of course, you can also send  Purim baskets and gift platters at Kosher.com!)

For hamentashen recipes and tips, check out Aish.com’s hamentashen page or Kosher.com’s collection of hamentashen recipes.

To help you get your fill of food and drink this Purim, check out these recipes from Jamie Geller guaranteed to put some spirit into your Purim celebrations.

Back to Purim Central on Kosher.com

Do It Yourself Purim Cooking

Purim is all about being creative. Though it’s easy to buy candy and bakery hamantashen, go the extra mile by making unexpected treats your friends will relish.

Remember, just because you want to present mishloach manot gifts with a homemade touch, spending hours in the kitchen isn’t necessary.

Here are simple, no-fuss ideas to get you started. We hope you’ll enjoy them and take the opportunity to make this Purim extra special.

Go Homemade:

The trick of going homemade is to make food that is effortless to prepare in bulk.

Who doesn’t love Israeli salads and dip?  Use a food processor to efficiently make big batches of Israeli salads and spreads such as hummus, babaganoosh, flavored tehina, or Turkish salad.  Just divide the portions into small containers and present with a bag of pita.

Granola is one of the easiest things to make, especially if you prepare it in your, preferably pareve, slow cooker (it actually bakes more evenly in the crock pot than it does in the oven).  Assemble the ingredients and before you know it the granola will be done.  Divide the granola into plastic bags and present it with a small container of yogurt and a single serving-size carton of orange juice with best wishes for a happy Purim breakfast.  (For a cute container, look for the plastic straw cereal bowls at Wal-mart or Target).

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DIY:

If you don’t like to cook but you have friends who do, honor their passion by giving them ingredients and a recipe for a simple ethnic meal they can prepare themselves.  This is a wonderful way to be creative without messing up your kitchen.

For an Italian-inspired dinner, arrange a bag of imported pasta, a bouquet of fresh basil, a handful of vine-ripened tomatoes, a jar of fresh sea salt, a small bottle of olive oil, and parmesan cheese, along with a recipe to make pasta with fresh tomato sauce.  Present the items in a pasta strainer.

If a Mediterranean-inspired gift is more your speed, arrange a can of chickpeas, a jar of sesame paste, a head of garlic, two lemons, a small shaker of cumin, and a bag of pita, along with a recipe for hummus.  You can present these items in a small ceramic bowl.

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Mix it Up:

When you still want to make something from your kitchen but you don’t want to turn on your oven, prepare dry mixes for pancakes, cookies, soup and hot cocoa.  A trick to enhance the beauty of your gift is to layer the ingredients in a glass jar, resembling sand art.  Canning jars from your supermarket or glass jars from condiments like apple sauce, pasta sauce or pickles are ideal.

You can coordinate this all by presenting store-bought items with the mixes.  Offer pancake mix with a bottle of maple syrup and a bag of dried fruit.  Include a loaf of French bread or box of crackers with the soup mix.  For the hot cocoa, you can include cookies and a mug.

The links below are to recipes that can get you jump started:

Maple-Oat Granola with Dried Cranberries

Blueberry Pecan Pancake Mix

Classic Hot Chocolate Mix

Old Fashioned Oatmeal Cookie Mix

Speedy Alphabet Soup Mix

Felisa Billet is a journalist whose commentaries on food and lifestyles have been featured in regional and national publications including USA Today, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and My Midwest Magazine. Check out her interactive kosher cooking dialogue at usa.kosher.com