This recipe comes to us thanks to Susan Kohen from Virginia, with a note that read: “I love apples and honey for Rosh Hashanah, but since we have so many apples this time of year, I try and get a little more creative while trying to stay healthy.”

Filling:
– However many apples you have in the fridge
– Sugar
– 1 Lemon
– Cinnamon, Nutmeg, etc.
– Vanilla extract
OPTIONAL: Any other fruit you might have can work too–raspberries, plums, peaches, etc.

Topping:
– Do you have Quaker Oats?  Not fancy oats.  Just regular Quaker Oats.
– Some sort of chopped nut
– Any bits of cereal that are left at the bottom of the bag that might be too small a portion for a full bowl of cereal
– Butter/Margarine
– Stevia packets
– Cinnamon/Nutmeg
– Salt

Step 1: Cut up all your apples into manageable slices and squeeze the lemon over them so they don’t turn brown.
Step 2: Add a healthy pour of sugar to the bowl of apples, then follow with generous shakes of cinnamon and nutmeg and a splash of vanilla.
Step 3: Mix it all together with your hands and let sit.
Step 4: Time to make your topping! In another bowl, combine big handfuls of oats, chopped nuts, and cereal.
Step 4: Add 2 packets Stevia, a dash of salt, and some healthy shakes of cinnamon and nutmeg.
Step 5: Add a hunk of butter (half or quarter of a stick at least) and squish everything together with your hands.
Step 6: Pre-heat oven to 350
Step 7: Pour apple filling into greased casserole dish or similar piece of oven-safe cookware.
Step 8: Crumble (cover) the apples with your topping until you can’t see most of the apples.  Try and apply evenly.

Bake until top is golden brown and the filling is bubbly, about 45 minutes.

Top with honey, vanilla ice cream/soy cream/lite cool whip & enjoy.

Related: Not Your Bubbe’s Rosh Hashanah Dessert: Salted-Caramel Apple Galette

(Image: Shutterstock)

The post Jewish Mothers Cooking: Healthy Rosh Hashanah Apple Cobbler appeared first on Jewcy.

Nothing like an August wedding, am I right?  Let’s get to this past weekend’s announcements.

When somebody marries a nice Jewish doctor, it’s cause for celebration.  When two nice Jewish doctors marry each other, that just seems a little greedy for all the singles out there who hope to one day get hitched to an M.D.  We hope you’re happy Dr. Robyn Jennifer Epstein and Dr. Jason Douglas Kreiner.  Both in life, and for robbing the world of one prospective spouse that can prescribe pills.

I racked my mind attempting to figure out what Jews and Cambodians have in common, but came up with nothing. Chanda Ouk and Matthew Wolf have set out to change that as the couple got married over the weekend, in a ceremony that mixed traditions from both of their cultures.  Looking up Cambodian cuisine, I’m sort of hoping they figured out a way to take the heavy fare from Wolf’s side, and mix it with the  tropical fruits, rice, noodles, drinks, dessert and various soups of Ms. Ouk’s.

Tracey Herman and Benjamin Shababo tied the knot in a spooky old mansion in Yonkers.  We looked the place up, and it looks a little on the haunted side.  Maybe the cantor who officiated should have called up one of his priest friends to cast out the evil spirits beforehand?

And finally, even though they play for Team Christianity, we’re gonna wish a big mazel to Richard Patrick Palermo and Stephen Paul Mazza.  We’d be doing a great injustice if we didn’t say mazel to Mazza.

The post Monday Mazel: Two Less Single Doctors To Marry appeared first on Jewcy.

To the dismay of many, the Don Draper way of doing things is way in the past (and not returning to your television set anytime soon).

As CEO of the Spellbound Group, Alicia Yaffe is has become quite good at marketing and brand management in the 21st century.  Meeting objectives through community cultivation and activation, Alicia picked up a lot of her business acumen by co-managing So-Cal Punk stalwarts Unwritten Law.

Her roster of clients is impressive (social media for the estates of The Doors and Janis Joplin!), and her work ethic is unquestioned.  Now all Alicia need is her own television show.

The post The Big Jewcy: Alicia Yaffe – 21st Century Marketing Wizard appeared first on Jewcy.

By now you may have heard that the death toll from the tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri has claimed at least 89 lives. (Update: New reports say over 100 lives have been lost.)

Here are a few ways you can help:

The Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City has set up a fund.

The American Red Cross is providing food, shelter and emotional support in Missouri, Minnesota and other parts of the Midwest.

To make a donation to the American Red Cross’ Disaster Relief, visit its online donation page.

You can also call 1-800-RED-CROSS or text “REDCROSS” to 90999 to make a $10 donation. Contributions may also be sent to your local Red Cross chapter or to the American Red Cross, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, D.C. 20013.

To donate to the United Way, call 417.624.0153.

The Salvation Army‘s emergency disaster services teams are helping to feed residents and first responders in Joplin; Reading, Kan.; and parts of Minnesota affected by the storms.

To donate to the The Salvation Army’s efforts, visit www.salvationarmyusa.org and click on the donation page.

You can call 1-800-SAL-ARMY and donors can text “JOPLIN” to 80888 to make a $10 donation. And you can mail a donation to Joplin Tornado Relief, The Salvation Army, 3637 Broadway, Kansas City, Mo. 64111

The post How To Help The Tornado Victims Of Joplin, Mo. appeared first on Jewcy.

Sufjan Stevens, Mirah, orchestral indie pop: if these names and phrases sound good to you, the sophomore album by Girls in Trouble, Half You, Half Me, is probably going to be your favorite album of 2011.

Listen: “Rubies” by Girls in Trouble

The post Free Girls In Trouble Song! appeared first on Jewcy.

You can do a million amazing things on your computer, so why not create your own Haggadah?   That’s what the folks behind Haggadot.com figured, and it might be one of the most brilliant ideas we’ve heard of in quite some time.

We asked founder Eileen Levinson a few questions about this great new project.

How did the idea for Haggadot.com?

I came up with the idea in 2007, when I was a grad student in design at CalArts. We were given the assignment to imagine “The Future of Publication” – in other words, to start preparing for the feared “end of print”

My design & art has always focused on collective interactions – setting prompts for group participation, storytelling & improvisation – so for me, it was a logical next step to imagine a publication of a similarly collaborative nature. And being Jewish, the Haggadah came to mind as the ultimate collaborative text.  Jews have, for years, cut and pasted Haggadot. I simply wanted a place to collect the many artifacts that have already been created and provide an outlet for new voices to be heard. Most importantly, I had hoped that young Jews who had complex senses of identity (like me) could find new meaning in the holiday by accessing so many different points of view.

Is the idea to create a Haggadah and then print it?

The idea is to collect & share diverse perspectives on Passover tradition, which can be digested in many different ways, depending on the user. For some, this means looking for a single piece of content to supplement their existing haggadah, while others scour through hundreds of entries to mix, match and print an entire new text. These past few weeks, I’ve loved checking the site each day to see the range of new stories, artwork and commentaries that have been shared.

Do you see the Passover seder including iPads in the years to come?

Sure, but it could still be many years before its widespread. Halahka aside, who wants to spill maneshewitz on a $500 piece of hardware?

Since Passover is one week a year, what do you do for the site the rest of the time?  Any plans to expand to help Jews get engaged in other holidays?

This next year is going to be really exciting and productive. Thanks to grants from Natan & Jewish New Media Innovation Fund, we will work to relaunch the site with several new features. I’m most eager to update the final PDF printout into a more polished book that users can print at home or have professionally printed and bound. We will also add commenting and more explanatory text for Jews that are newer to Passover.

We do have plans to expand the site for additional Jewish texts & holidays. I’m especially interested in events which challenge the spectrum of Jews, from tradiitonal to secular, to personalize their spiritual practice. As for the specific holiday we will tackle next, we won’t be ready to announce for several months… but I do hear a lot Jews are celebrating Festivus…

The post 21st Century Seder: Haggadot.com appeared first on Jewcy.

It seems that bread donating is starting to catch on.

Israel is getting into the act of donating their chametz (leavened food) instead of simply tossing it out or the wasteful tradition of burning it. Volunteers of the My Israel movement plan to visit homes and supermarkets across the country and try to collect all the Israeli chametz and send it, with the help of the Foreign Ministry, to tsunami-ravaged areas in Japan.

The post Israel Sending Their Bread To Japan appeared first on Jewcy.

You might say to yourself, “That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard,” but wait, because it might actually not be.  The folks behind the delicious condiment, Bacon Salt, went through the trouble of making all their stuff kosher, due to either a subversive nature, or because they know deep down that a lot of Jews really want to know what all the fuss is about.

That brings us to this:

Unless the people at Bacon Salt have switched things up, this really disgusting idea is probably kosher. According to the site, this freakish idea came about due to:

Based on this and a lot of other research, we developed our newest product, Bacon Baby Infant Formula. It ensures that your infants get the fat, proteins and complex nutrients that they need to excel at an early age, all in a savory, delicious tasting formula.

Hmm, okay.  But is it good for Pesach?  And if it is, would you ever feed this to your baby?

The post Is Baby Bacon Flavored Formula Kosher For Passover? appeared first on Jewcy.

Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service (AJWS), is fasting this week to protest cuts to the U.S.’s humanitarian aid budget being voted on in Congress.

“I’m fasting to protest the injustice of reducing food aid by 41 percent and reducing support for agricultural development,” said AJWS president Ruth Messinger. “The timing couldn’t be worse: skyrocketing food prices are currently driving tens of millions of people in the developing world into poverty. Congress’s proposed budget cuts threaten lives. Not only will less food aid get to people who rely on it, but, ironically, those who do receive this meager aid may become dependent on it, because these budget cuts also threaten programs that support local agriculture and help people produce food on their own.”

Good for Ms. Messinger for standing up for what is right, and slimming up before she has to eat nothing but matzoh for Passover.

The post Yom Kippur Comes Early For AJWS appeared first on Jewcy.

There’s that scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen’s character asks his future wife if she’s the stereotypical “New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps… red diaper” Jewish girl.

That’s actually my mother in a nutshell if you substituted the New York, Central Park West, and Brandeis University for a more West Coast setting.  The month she stopped talking to me was because I caved into trying one of the hundreds of great BBQ places near my college in Austin.  Once she was done with the silent treatment, her first words to me were “I was sitting shiva for you.”

My mother has been a vegetarian since the early 70s, and when she was unable to replicate the hearty Jewish meals my grandmother taught her to cook, she began experimenting and was part of the early wave of herbivores that took meat dishes and omitted the meat.

A few years ago for her birthday, I purchased Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.  My mother claimed that she had probably cooked everything contained in the massive book, but she’d look it over anyway.  Two weeks later, I received a phone call: it was my mother claiming she was wrong (a miracle!) and that the summer veggie burger recipe was better than her own, except that potato buns are a must, and she adds some vegan mayonnaise with a little Tabasco mixed in to top it off instead of mustard or ketchup, and a dollop of sweet salsa.  (She suggests homemade mango salsa is the best.)

Makes: 4 to 6 servings

Time: 45 minutes

1 /4cup extra virgin olive oil

1 small red onion, halved

2 cloves garlic

1 minced fresh chile (like jalapeño or Thai), or to taste, or hot red pepper flakes or cayenne

to taste

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 medium zucchini, grated (about 1 cup)

2 cups corn kernels, fresh if possible

3 /4cup cornmeal

A little all-purpose flour, if needed, for binding

1. Put 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a deep nonstick or cast-iron skillet with a lid over medium heat. Put the onion, garlic, and chile in a food processor and pulse a few times to grind almost smooth. Add the mixture to the pan with a sprinkle of salt and pepper and cook and stir.

2. Stir the zucchini into the onion mixture along with 1 /2cup of the corn and another sprinkle of salt and pepper. Put the remaining corn into a food processor and let the machine run until it becomes a thick paste. Continue to cook and stir the zucchini mixture until the vegetables release all their water and it starts to evaporate, about 5 minutes. Stir in the corn paste and the cornmeal. Remove from the heat, cover, and let rest for 10 minutes. If the mixture seems too wet, stir in a little flour to help bind it. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

3. Form 4 to 6 patties and let sit for a few minutes if you have time. (You can make the burger mixture or even shape the burgers up to several hours in advance. Just cover tightly and refrigerate, then bring everything back to room temperature before cooking.) Wipe out the pan, put in the remaining 2 tablespoons of oil, and turn the heat to medium. A minute later, add the patties. Cook until nicely browned on one side, about 5 minutes; turn carefully and cook on the other side until firm and browned.

4. Serve on plates  or on buns with the usual burger fixings. Or cool and refrigerate or freeze for later use.

(Via Mark Bittman’s site)

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