Kosher Cuisine Show #1 Moroccan Shabbat

This is the original script for the show. Some of the non-essential text may have been edited out of the final version that aired on Community Radio due to time constraints. In this edition, some of the Hebrew language has been retyped below in non-patriarchal terms. The original broadcasts of these radio shows were in 2015 and 2016. The intro and end fade Hava Nagila music and some other bits have been removed from this edition so the file fits within Bandcamps size limits. Thanks for listening!

First Segment

Hava Nagila Music Intro [35 seconds then fade…]

Hello, everyone! This is Leah Kiser and you’re listening to Kosher Cuisine from Ahavah Ariel Sacred Arts. This is a show about food safety, international kosher recipes and amazing music from areas around the world. I’ll even throw in a little Sabbath meal liturgy – so be warned, I might sing a bit at the end of the show. I also want to let you know that I will be posting transcripts including all the recipes and food safety tips online. Stay tuned to the end of the show to learn how to find it.

So let’s get started. I may be wrong, but I believe this show is scheduled to air sometime the week after Community Radio’s Amazing Race Kickoff event on Saturday, Sept 19th. If that is the case, then when you hear this, Rosh HaShanah, the New Year Celebration, will be over. The day of fasting and atonement, Yom Kippur, is Wednesday of this week, and five days later begins the holiday of Sukkot. Sukkot is a harvest festival, which conveniently occurs in September or October every year about the same time that here in America we are also harvesting some great fall crops – including pumpkins. So we’re going to start off with a great pumpkin soup recipe from Morocco – and Moroccan food and music will be the theme of today’s show. This set of recipes today is going to be meat meal, which means under the rules of kashrut, there can be no dairy products used.

If you’re curious, people who keep a kosher kitchen have at least two sets of dishes, silverware, cutting boards, utensils, and pots and pans – a meat set and a dairy set. This prevents cross contamination between meat and dairy meals. Some people also keep a parve set – which means vegan in kosher parlance. At the very least, it is important for food safety reasons to have several cutting boards – one for meat, one for dairy, and one for vegetables and fruit. You should also use separate knives, or at least wash the cutting boards and knives you do have between preparing the different types of food. Cross contamination is THE leading cause of food poisoning.

OK. Now, this pumpkin recipe originates in Marrakech, and there are dozens and dozens of variations on it. The one I have chosen for you is fairly simple. This recipe serves four, but it easily doubles or even triples. I have served 16 before using this recipe.

First we’re going to measure out our seasonings into some small bowls or cups, even paper cups. You can also get a package of those neat 2oz plastic condiment containers that restaurants use. Those are just about the perfect size. The reasoning for measuring out your seasonings is twofold – one, it is a food safety issue. As you know from having to clean the grease off your hood range, not to mention the kitchen walls and cabinets, steam rising up from cooking food has grease, water, and even small particles of food in it. If you hold your salt, pepper, and spice shakers over the pots and pans, steam is going to rise up and enter the containers. Then, of course, you pop the lid back on and put it in the cabinet in your nice warm kitchen. You have just given bacteria two things they really love and need to grow: moisture and warmth.

In Kosher cooking, the rule is the same, but for a different reason. As I mentioned earlier, in the rules of kashrut it is not permitted to mix meat and dairy in a meal. So what happens when you hold your salt, pepper, and spice shakers over a steaming pot with meat in it? Grease and particles of meat get into the containers. Then, later, what happens when you use those same seasonings for a dairy meal? Congratulations, you must made your meal treif – which means it is forbidden to eat. So in kosher cooking, or at least for safety’s sake, please measure your seasonings into small bowls, cups or containers and don’t hold the shakers over your hot pots and pans.

You will need to measure out:
1 minced garlic clove
1 tablespoon of chopped cilantro
1 tablespoon of chopped parsley
1 teaspoon of paprika
1 teaspoon of salt
½ teaspoon of pepper
1 tablespoon of lemon juice
½ stick of margarine – I prefer Earth Balance
1 tablespoon of Olive Oil, divided in half. So two small cups, each with 1 ½ teaspoons of olive oil.

Set those aside, and wash your vegetable ingredients with a soapy solution. It is important not to skip the washing step for food safety reasons. Namely, the conditions under which most farm workers labor are generally unsanitary, to put it mildly. There are whole articles about that online, so I won’t belabor the point. Even if you got your veggies and fruits out of your own garden, you still need to wash them. There are critters and birds in your garden, and guess what they do outdoors? Trust me, you want to wash your produce. And think about the grocery store where you probably bought your ingredients…who all handled those vegetables before you did? You probably don’t want to know.

So wash up your next ingredients:
Carrots – you will need 1 ½ cups of diced carrots, so 4-6 medium to large carrots should do it. Alternately, you can buy a small bag of julienne carrots.

Parsnips – you will also need 1 ½ cups of diced parsnips. Four-ish medium or large ones ought to be fine.

And, of course, pumpkin. You will need about 2 cups of pumpkin, which can be diced into small pieces if you have fresh pumpkin, or you can substitute a similar amount of canned pumpkin, even pureed pumpkin. Don’t worry if the amount isn’t exact – traditional cooking isn’t really about measuring things anyway.

You will also need one medium or large onion. Peel the outer layer off the onion and dice up the rest. Be sure and dice all your vegetables on a clean parve cutting board and use a clean parve knife.

And finally, you will need about 4 cups of broth. You can use chicken broth or vegetable broth. You can use a quart of water boiled with bouillon, or if you have none of these you can just use water. If that is the case, I would measure out a half teaspoon of ground sage and a half teaspoon of ground thyme to make the water taste a little like broth.

Now that your ingredients are all measured out, diced up and ready just like you see on a cooking show, put half the olive oil in a pot and sauté the diced onions until they are soft, about 3 minutes or so. Add the carrots and parsnips, cover the pot and let it simmer on low heat for about five minutes. Simmering means the food is just barely boiling, so keep an eye on the temperature. Then add the pumpkin and simmer another five minutes. Finally, add the broth or water and the salt and pepper and the lemon juice. Cover the pot and simmer for about 40 minutes or until you are sure all the veggies are tender.

Meanwhile, mix the topping for the soup. Take the remaining half of the olive oil and warm it in a small pan. Add the garlic and the parsley and the cilantro, and give it a quick sauté for just one or two minutes. Stir in the paprika and set it aside. This will be a small amount of garnish topping for your bowls of soup.

When the soup is ready, if you have an immersion blender or even a regular blender (that is parve if you used water or veggie broth, or designated for meat dishes if you used chicken broth), you can puree the soup - but it is not necessary to do so. I promise you, when the Moors and the Jews fled Andalusia and settled in Morocco 500 years ago, they weren’t lugging their immersion blenders across the Mediterranean. You can use a plain old potato masher if you like, or you can leave the soup as a chunky stew. You will get an interesting experience of biting into different flavors that way – the parsnips are a bit peppery and have a little kick. Either way, you can put the soup on low and keep it warm until the rest of the meal is ready to be served. Divide into bowls, and spoon a bit of the topping onto each bowl. And voila, you have a tasty savory soup.

So that is the FIRST course of this week’s shabbat meal – Moroccan pumpkin soup. And now I’d like to play a little Moroccan music for you before we get to the next course. This is a track from the Moroccan BellyDance CD by Chalf Hassan – his first name is spelled c-h-a-l-f, and he is a famous Moroccan musician. We are going to hear track 5 which is called Solo Darbuka. A darbuka is traditional north African drum shaped like a goblet. Listen – I think you’ll like this track.

Play track [45 second preview]


Segment 2

Welcome back to Kosher Cuisine! The second course of our Moroccan Shabbat meal this week is from a cookbook called Fresh Moroccan by Nada Saleh – s-a-l-e-h. This is a great little salad that will transition nicely to the main course. It is called simply Grated Carrot and Orange Salad. This recipe also serves 4-5 people and can be doubled or tripled easily.

First let’s measure out our seasonings. We need:
1 generous tablespoon of honey – and by generous, I mean blob it over. Don’t be chintzy with it.
3 tablespoons of lemon juice
3 tablespoons of orange juice
½ teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons of pine nuts
1 tablespoon of mint leaves, to garnish

Now, the recipe in the book calls for 1 tablespoon ground or grated almonds, but I generally substitute ¼ cup of slivered almonds, because they are easy to find. If you want ground almond meal, however, I believe they have some at Good Foods Co-op.

You will also need to prepare 1 pound of julienne carrots – so wash the carrots and then slice them julienne style on a parve cutting board and with a clean parve knife. They make a little hand-held doohickey that slices vegetables julienne style. But honestly, it’s a lot easier to just buy a small bag of julienne carrots at the store. If you can find organic ones, even better. And that goes for all the fruits and vegetables you buy. It is not required, but it is preferable. The herbicides and pesticides used on today’s fruits and vegetables have been shown to be toxic – they scramble your hormones and mess with your metabolism, and that’s when they’re not just outright poisonous. The farm workers who spray them on the crops have to cover themselves from head to toe in protective gear – and that’s on good farms. On bad ones, the laborers are just exposed to the chemicals and made sick over time to the exposure. Being shipped to a store doesn’t magically change the nature of the chemicals. So if you can, buy organic fruits and veggies. And if you can’t, be sure you wash the fruits and vegetables thoroughly with soapy water to remove as much chemical residue as you can. Also, remember unwashed fruits and veggies have bacteria – so even if you’re not concerned about toxins on your food, don’t skip the washing step. Food poisoning isn’t fun, either.

Next, wash and peel 2 oranges and divide them into their sections. Alternately, you can buy a large can of mandarin oranges. Get ones packed in water or juice, not corn syrup. Don’t even get me started on corn syrup. It’s garbage. Don’t eat it. If you use fresh oranges, save the peels – you will need some for the main dish. Freeze the rest.

The last ingredient you will need is 1 tablespoon of orange flower water. You can often find orange water, rose water and other flavored waters at ethnic grocery stores. But there is an alternative – you can make a cup of herbal tea at home and use it in place of bottled fruit waters. There are all sorts of fruity herbal teas out there – I generally buy Celestial Seasonings, but any brand will do. Any orange or tangerine based herbal tea will work fine, though I would avoid the heavily spiced flavors. The spicy chai types can work, it will just taste a little different. Whether you have bottled orange water or a cup of herbal tea, reserve the remainder of the tea for later – you will need it in the main dish, too.

Now we’re ready to prepare the salad. Put the honey in a bowl, and mix in the flower water or tea, the lemon juice, and the orange juice. Add the almonds, salt, carrots and oranges. In a small pan, heat the olive oil and sauté the pine nuts until they are golden, just a minute or two. Then add them to the salad. Chill until time to serve, and garnish with the mint leaves.

So now that we have the second course in this week’s Shabbat meal, let’s hear some more Moroccan music. This track is from a CD called “Under the Moroccan Sky” and is part of the Festival of World Sacred Music series. This CD is Volume III and features music from Fez, Morocco. Fez used to be the capital of Morocco, but is now just a regional administrative center. Nonetheless, the rich tradition of music continued. This song is track 6 on the CD, called “Siniya” by a band called Nass El Ghiwane based in Casablanca. Their music is in the Sufi style and tends to focus on social injustice. Listen:

Play track [45 second preview]

Segment 3

Welcome back to Kosher Cuisine! The main course for this week’s Shabbat meal is a lamb tagine. A tagine is just a primitive version of a crock pot or dutch oven, so don’t panic. It’s easy to make. This recipe, from the same Fresh Moroccan cookbook as the salad course, serves four.

So, measure out your seasonings. You will need:
1 tablespoon of olive oil plus a separate 1 teaspoon
¼ cup of slivered almonds
1 ½ teaspoons of ground ginger
30 coriander seeds, mashed with a mortar and pestle – or about 2 teaspoons of ground coriander
¼ teaspoon ground saffron, about a pinch, or you can substitute ground turmeric. Saffron is pretty expensive.
¼ teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon or and a cinnamon stick, or substitute a separate teaspoon of cinnamon.
1 tablespoon of honey
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 tablespoon sesame seeds – which you can get at just about any grocery store these days
½ cup of chopped cilantro
1 tablespoon of orange flower water, or of the fruity herbal tea you made previously for the salad.

Next, on a clean parve or meat cutting board and a clean knife, prepare:
1 medium diced onion
12 dried plums, diced – or you can substitute a washed apple, cored and diced
4 dried apricots, diced – these are pretty easy to find at grocery stores. You can substitute ¼ of raisins if you don’t have apricots.

You will need 2 slices of orange rind – if you used fresh oranges for the salad, you should have plenty of the peel left over. If you didn’t, you can either add some of the mandarin orange slices to the dish, or measure out 1 teaspoon of ground orange peel. Lemon zest will work in a pinch. As a last resort you can just splash in some more of the orange or tangerine herbal tea, a couple of ounces. It won’t hurt anything.

Finally you will need 1 pound of boneless lamb. Locally you can get boneless lamb at Sam’s Club and at Cosco, and sometimes boneless or bone-in at Kroger, as well as several ethnic grocery stores around town. Generally the lamb comes in 2 or 3 pound packages. Since we only need half that amount, cut the roast in two and put one half in a freezer bag. It doesn’t have to be exactly 2 pounds for each part, anywhere between two and three pounds per half will be fine. Next, prepare a bath of salty water – about 1 tablespoon salt per quart of water. Then immerse the lamb roast in the salted water for two or three minutes, then rinse under running water to wash off any remaining blood or residue. Now, a kosher lamb roast is taken from the front part of the lamb, and what you are likely to find locally is a leg of lamb roast taken from the back part of the lamb. Unless your kitchen is in fact strictly kosher, I wouldn’t worry about it. If you want a kosher lamb roast, there are several good sources online – but they are very pricey. One is Kol foods – www.k-o-l-foods.com. All of their products are kosher and pasture raised – very high quality.

Now let’s talk about washing and immersing food for a minute. American kitchens tend to not have a food prep sink. Most American kitchens have only one sink – the one used for dirty dishes. It is neither safe nor kosher to prepare food in the same sink that dirty dishes sit around in. It is preferable to buy at least 2 plastic tubs, say, one red, and one green. You guessed it – one meat and one parve or vegan. It is unusual to have to wash cheeses, but just in case, you can use a blue one for diary items and for fruits and vegetables that you intend to serve with a dairy meal. Wash your food items in the designated tub and rinse under running water. Be sure and keep the tubs clean – wash them separately after food is prepared. Even soapy water that has had blood, germs, and toxins in it is still yucky and you don’t want bacteria growing in the tubs. Don’t bleach plastic because plastic is porous. If you need an extra boost to your soap, use vinegar instead.

In meat recipes, the salty water is to draw out any remaining blood that could remain in the meat. In kashrut eating blood is not permitted. Of course, it is not physically possible to remove every single bit of blood without ruining the meat, but the idea is get that last bit off that probably oozed out in the package. In orthodox kosher kitchens an additional step of salting the meat again and draining the meat on an inclined board is performed, but we’re not going to get that complicated. Next, we’re going to dice the lamb into approximately one inch squares on a clean meat cutting board using a clean meat knife.

Finally, prepare a generous cup of boiling water.

The recipe now calls for you to sauté the diced lamb and the onion in the tablespoon of olive oil until browned, then go through a convoluted serious of steps simmering for an hour or so, adding the next few ingredients, then simmer again for a while, and add the next few ingredients, and so on. I confess - I never do that. I usually just throw the ingredients into the crock pot, put it on high until the liquid is boiling, and then turn it down to low and let it simmer for at least 2 more hours. That’s it. Sometimes I simmer everything in a very deep skillet on the stove, using basically the same method – bring it to a boil, cover and simmer on low heat until the liquid is mostly gone and what is left is moist delicious mess.

But if you really want to follow the recipe, do this: To the browned lamb and onion add the ginger, coriander, saffron or turmeric, pepper, the teaspoon of turmeric, the salt and the cinnamon. Add the hot water and bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low and simmer for an hour. Next, add the dried plums, the orange rind and the ground cinnamon, bring it to a boil again, and then reduce the heat and simmer for another 20 minutes. Then, add the honey, the teaspoon of olive oil, the apricots, the nutmeg, the flower water or herbal tea, and the cilantro. Bring back to a boil and let bubble for about 10 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat and let stand for at least 5 minutes to allow the flavors to mellow. Phew. That’s exhausting just reading it.

While all this boiling is going on, or if you’re like me and are a bit lazy then while the crock pot is doing its thing, you can prepare some whole grain brown rice, some couscous, or mashed sweet potatoes to go underneath the finished lamb. I personally am gluten intolerant, so we go for the rice or the sweet potatoes. If you want to jazz it up even further, make coconut rice, which is very easy. Add a can of coconut milk to the rice as well as the water per the package directions, and about 2 tablespoons of minced lemon grass and a cinnamon stick. If you don’t have a stick, measure out 1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon. If you don’t have lemon grass, you can substitute minced lemon balm which grows locally, or just measure out a tablespoon of lemon juice if all else fails. Be sure and use a clean cutting board and knife to mince your herbs.

Whichever option you choose - rice, sweet potatoes, or couscous - serve it hot and top with the lamb mixture. You’re going to love it.

For our next music selection, I am going back to the Moroccan BellyDance CD by Chalf Hassan, and playing track 10 for you. It is a guitar piece in the traditional style with just a hint of Spanish influence thrown in. In 1912 Morocco was divided into 2 protectorates, one French and the other Spanish. French control lasted until Morocco gained its independence in 1956. The title of this song employs a bit of French – it is called “Oud Improvisation.” An “oud” is a stringed instrument, like a lute or mandolin – and a guitar is often used as well.

Play Track [45 second preview]

Segment 4

And that is our Moroccan Shabbat meal for this week. Shabbat, or the Sabbath, is the 7th day of the week. It begins Friday night about 20 minutes before sundown and continues until Saturday night about one hour past nightfall. In addition to the fabulous meal, which is always served with some sort of bread, there is a Sabbath evening liturgy. The bread in most homes you have probably heard of – it is a rich egg bread called Challah made by the Ashkenaz. Sephardi meals traditionally have flatbread instead – if you’ve ever had Naan in an Indian restaurant, it’s like that. If you can’t find Naan or traditional middle eastern flatbread, you can serve pita instead. It’s thinner and not as moist, but it’s ok. Did you know that traditionally, a middle eastern or north African meal is not served with plates and utensils like an American sit down dinner at the table? They pile the food on big platters, and everybody sits around it on rugs and uses the flatbread to scoop up the food and eat it by hand. Messy, but awesome.

Of course, we don’t do that at home. We have a more European or American type meal, in the Ashkenaz style. So for this meal we need some challah or some flatbread and a kosher wine. There are at least two places in town where you can regularly and reliably get challah – Fresh Market and Trader Joe’s. You can get sweet kosher wine at just about any liquor store in town – the most well known brands are Magen David or Manichevitz. This stuff tastes a bit like children’s cough syrup – it is very, very sweet. There are other brands available that run the gamut from quite dry to mildly sweet, but they cost more. Most are imported. You can also serve kosher grape juice instead of wine. Either is acceptable.

So, the first thing that happens on Friday evening is the lady or the daughters of the house sing a song to welcome angels to the home for Shabbat. There is a tradition that two angels come to your home after the time of evening prayers on Friday, an angel of blessings and an angel of judgment. If they find the candles lit, the table set, the food prepared and the house in order, the angel of blessing pronounces the coming week to be a good one and the next Shabbat as good as this one, and the angel of judgment is forced to say “amein” – so be it. But, if the house is in disarray, the candles are not lit, the table is not set and the food is not ready, then the angel of judgment pronounces the next week a bad one and that the next Shabbat should be just like this one, then the angel of blessing is forced to say “amein” – so be it.

It is often customary at this point for the husband or sons to sing a song to their mother based on proverbs Chapter 31, a woman of valor. Here is a recording of that song from a CD called “Celebrate Shabbat” with various artists. The song is called “Eshet Chayil” by Nomi, an artist with a beautiful voice. This is a modern version, but if you listen to the guitar work in it, you can hear its Mediterranean heritage.

Play track [45 second preview]

There are other songs sung as well, and then, when all the food is ready and everything is set to go, comes the candlelighting. Two candles are lit. The lady or daughters of the house then cover their eyes, and say:

Baruch atah El Shaddai, eloheinu Ruach ha-olam, asher kidshanu b’mitzvotov, vitzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat. Blessed are you, the Eternal Divine, sovereign of the universe, who sanctifies us with commandments, and has commanded us to kindle the light of Shabbat.

Now, there is no actual commandment for people at home to light candles in the Torah – instead the Priestly attendants are commanded to fill the Menorah in the Temple with oil in the evening and light it. However, it was decided by the sages to keep the concept of lighting the Temple lights alive at home by lighting lamps, or rather in our modern day, candles, instead as a memorial and a reminder. So we – meaning the people of Israel – were commanded to light lights for Shabbat, we just do it at home now.

So once the blessing is recited, they uncover their eyes. The meal is usually served shortly thereafter. There are two blessing that must be said before the meal is eaten. The first is the blessing over wine (or grape juice) which is sung followed with a blessing for Shabbat.

Baruch atah El Shaddai, Eloheinu Ruach ha-olam, borai p’ri hagafen. Blessed are you, the Eternal Divine, sovereign of the universe, who made the fruit of the vine.

And the rest of the song goes like this…

L’Chaim! To Life! Is the final toast before everyone takes a sip of their wine.

At this point it is the custom to wash your hands and recite a blessing for hand-washing. There is no commandment, again, in the Torah to wash hands before eating bread. However, the Priestly attendants were commanded to wash their hands and feet upon entering the Temple complex and performing the prayers service there. Of course, back then they wore sandals and considering what all livestock was walking through the streets back then washing their feet was definitely a good idea. Just sayin’. These days, we just wash our hands, as a symbolic remembrance of the Temple services.

Next comes the blessing for bread – and by extension, the whole meal.

Baruch atah El Shaddai, eloheinu Ruach ha-olam ha motzi lechem min ha’aretz. Amein. Blessed are you, the Eternal Divine, who brings forth bread from the earth.

And now, enjoy your Moroccan Shabbat meal!

Next week, we’ll talk a bit about the sukkot liturgy and enjoy some awesome recipes and music and learn some more about food safety, too. This is Leah Kiser, bidding you a Shabbat shalom – a peaceful Sabbath, this week and every week. Thank you for listening to Kosher Cuisine from Ahavah Ariel Sacred Arts.

Hava Nagila until time runs out then fade… That’s all this week! Stay tuned for next week’s show on Indian Jewish Cuisine!