Sukkot is probably my favorite Jewish holiday because we get to build a temporary structure, a sukkah, to live in—and decorate!—for a week. (More about why we do that here.) Traditionally, Jews adorn their Sukkot with posters of the ushpizin, the seven biblical “guests” who we invite to join us on each night of the festival. Not surprisingly, the ushpizin are all men: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph and David; the most revered dudes in the Torah. No ladies—until now.

Rather than invite seven biblical men to my sukkah, I decided I’d invite the Jewish female comedians and characters I’ve been most into this year, and throw together some posters to honor them.

I think the temporary/pop-up nature of Sukkot lends itself to a pop-culture influence, where the guests you welcome one year might not be the same ones you welcome the next. Last year I honored the cast of Girls. This year I’ve been pretty obsessed with Broad City, and continued to cultivate my enduring love for Lena Dunham, Sarah Silverman and others.

So without further ado, here are my ‘Ushpizienne: Class of 5775’: Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, Abbi Jacobson, Jenny Slate, Ilana Glazer, Sarah Silverman, and Yael Stone.

Don’t forget to ‘hack into booth city’:

And—why not—the cast of Girls, from last Sukkot:

Download large versions of all images for your sukkah (or permanent four-walled residence) here.

Ari Perlow is an antipodean Jewess who is obsessed with vegan analogues and digital media. She co-hosts the podcast Yeah Nah But and tweets at @ari_perlow.

The post Decorate Your Sukkah With Your Favorite Jewish Comediennes appeared first on Jewcy.

So here’s where one would normally point out a serious flaw in a classic Jewish recipe. The thing is I can’t; stuffed cabbage is magical. And like most modern day magic, there’s a precise science behind it: Everything is improved when stuffed with meat.

Want the proof behind my hypothesis?

Picture yourself after a long bad day where everything is just horrible. Now picture yourself eating a gigantic steak at the end of it. And just like that, your day has improved.

The same logic works with a cabbage. By itself, a cabbage is kind of meh, stuff it with meat and it makes your day.

There’s a reason this dish has been favorite since it was called holishkes. Stuffed cabbage has been happily devoured by Jews since the 14th century. According to Sharon Lebewohl and Rena Bulkin, authors of The Second Avenue Deli Cookbook, the dish was first introduced to the Jewish and gentile peasants in Russia by the Tartars. While each Eastern European and Middle Eastern community has its own twist, Jews lean toward the sweeter sauce.

At some point between the 14th century and the 21st, it became a specialty food served on Sukkot. As Sukkot is also known as the harvest holiday, the filled cabbage was meant to symbolize a bountiful harvest “stuffed” with plenty of delicious things to eat. Sukkot may be over, but stuffed cabbage has thankfully become a winter staple, allowing it to represent good times, as well as good food.

So you must be asking yourself what’s the “but”? Why am I reinventing the wheel if it rolls just fine?

There are many reasons to love your Bubbe but one of them is that they are just about the only people with enough patience to actually make stuffed cabbage. While stuffed cabbage makes your day, it also takes an entire day to make it. That’s where this recipe comes in handy. It’s stacked up like lasagna, and simple, like any staple kugel recipe. Like your favorite kugel it’s a cinch to make and a crowd favorite.

This recipe has that great taste that you love from your Bubbe’s, but let’s you spend more time with the Bubbe you love.

Not Your Bubbe’s Stuffed Cabbage
Serves 5-7

Ingredients:

2 lbs. green cabbage

Meat Filling:
1 lb. chopped beef
1 cup long grain rice, cooked
1 small yellow onion, diced
2 medium eggs
1 tsp. ginger
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper

Sauce:
1 (28 oz) can crushed tomatoes
1 1/4 cups cranberry juice
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
3/4 cup craisins
1 tbsp. ginger
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsps. Black pepper

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Rip the leaves off your cabbage—do your best to keep them as whole as possible. If you accidently rip them to pieces it’s ok; it just won’t look as pretty.

3. Mix the meat filling ingredients together in a large bowl.

4. Combine the sauces ingredients in a different large bowl.

5. Spray a large round baking dish with to prevent sticking.

6. Evenly cover the bottom of the baking dish with cabbage leaves. You want to have about 2-3 layers of leaves on top of each other.

7. Cover the leaves with half of your meat filling.

8. Ladle a third of your sauce onto the meat filling.

9. Repeat the last few stages, as if you are making lasagna.

10. Your final layer should be the last of your sauce.

11. Cover the stuffed cabbage kugel with tin foil and bake for an hour.

12. Remove the foil and bake for another half an hour. Baste the top leaves with sauce every 10 minutes in order to prevent them from burning.

13. Serve with a sharp knife and spoon in order to scoop up all the layers.

Also try:

Not Your Bubbe’s Squash Pie

Not Your Bubbe’s Kasha Mac and Cheese

Not Your Bubbe’s Honey Chiffon Cake

The post Not Your Bubbe’s Recipe: Stuffed Cabbage Kugel appeared first on Jewcy.

After Yom Kippur ended this year, my family began to prepare for Sukkot. We took the sukkah out, set up the frame, and then carefully put on the top and covered it with leaves. We then hung up construction paper fruit and two bunches of plastic grapes. Between two of the poles, my mother tied a piece of string, and then, one by one, hung up Rosh Hashanah cards.

Together, we then set up the tables and chairs, placed a plant near a rear pole and a basket of apples near another. Finally, just before sukkot started, we set the table with a tray of black and white cookies, a plate of cupcakes, two bowls of fruit, and bottles of seltzer and wine. All of this was on the same table.

The sukkah we so meticulously set up and decorated is my grandmother’s tabletop sukkah, which my family curates each year. I say curate because it will always be my grandmother’s sukkah, and anything we place in it was not in the original design, but honors her artistic vision.

When my grandmother, an artist and rabbi’s wife, came up with the idea for the sukkah, she had a florist create the frame. The frame consists of four green wooden rods that serve as poles and a green wooden rectangle, which sits on top of the four poles. In the center of the rectangle is mesh wiring. The sukkah’s design reflects that of a traditional sukkah, only on a much smaller scale.

I never celebrated Sukkot with my grandmother so I never had the chance to see how she set up and decorated her sukkah. My Aunt tells me that it sat prominently on the table and that my grandmother adorned it with evergreens and hung miniature squash from the wire. Since my grandparents lived in an apartment in Chicago, it was this small sukkah that was the Cohen family sukkah.

A few years before she passed away, my grandmother gave us the sukkah. Sitting proudly on our dining room table, the Cohen sukkah was decorated to match our backyard sukkah. Construction paper apples, oranges, and bananas were hung with string from the wire, just as plastic fruit hung from the top of our sukkah. We turned to my dollhouse for a table that would mirror the patio table from our backyard, and then sat the family that lived in the dollhouse around the table.

This lasted for several years, until the dollhouse contents and residents were misplaced when my mother moved into an apartment in Manhattan. Last year, a sukkah remodeling was needed, and we took the task very seriously. My mom went to a dollhouse store and purchased the equivalent of a backyard bench and chairs, a small table with plates and cups, and a mini basket of apples. We still had the construction paper fruit, and bunches of plastic grapes that had once hung in our backyard sukkah.

But then last week, as we started setting up the tabletop sukkah, we realized that the new furniture was not enough. The structure felt incomplete. To make it into my grandmother’s sukkah again, we had to do more. More dollhouse items—a floor plant, a full table set, and food and beverages—made it feel warm, but we needed more of a sense of family tradition. We settled upon our longtime suburban ritual of hanging Rosh Hashanah cards from the top of our backyard sukkah.

My mom took a card we had recently received from a family friend, and from it made a dozen mini cards. Then, we made the first major change to the sukkah frame since it sat in my grandmother’s apartment in Chicago. We added cloth walls, a significant addition to the structure and a pretty emotional renovation.

All together the furniture, construction paper and plastic fruit, food, cards, and cloth walls make this year’s sukkah one that we would very much like to sit in, were it full size. More important, it’s a structure that honors my grandmother. How the sukkah is decorated may have changed, but its meaning remains the same—it’s the Cohen family sukkah, and we’re very proud of it.

The post Remembering My Grandmother Each Year on Sukkot appeared first on Jewcy.

Sukkot is a shelter-centered holiday. Everyone remembers sitting in their little temporary structure, freezing their ass off, wondering just how many courses they have to stay for until it’s kosher to return to central heat. In honor of those timeless memories, we proudly present our top 10 songs about shelter.

1) Bob Dylan—”Shelter from the Storm”

2) Rolling Stones—”Gimme Shelter”

3) Madness—”Our House”

4) Simon and Garfunkel—”Homeward Bound”

5) Love—”A House is Not a Motel” 

http://youtu.be/urU2PmucP0o

6) Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—”Our House”

7) The Animals—”The House of the Rising Sun”

8) Blur—”Country House”

9) Al Stewart—”Bedsitter Images”

10) The xx—”Shelter”

(Image by Rachel, via Flickr)

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After the ingathering from your threshing floor and your vat, you shall hold the Feast of booth for seven days. You shall rejoice in your festival, with your son and daughter, your make and female slave, the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless and the widow in your communities. You shall hold a festival for the Lord your God seven days in the place that the Lord will choose; for the Lord your God will bless all your crops and all your undertakings and you shall have nothing but joy.”

Nothing but joy, people! We’re supposed to rejoice with all of these random people, everyone from the highest to the lowest members of our community, and we’re supposed to have nothing but joy. (For more on this commandment, see Rabbi Rosen’s blog). Normally the commandments to feel a certain way annoy me, but I surrender to sukkot. On sukkot I laugh and sing zmirot and hang out with old and new friends. Nothing but joy is a tall order, but if there’s anything worth aspiring to, it’s that, right? Here’s wishing you and your families nothing but joy, through sukkot and well into the New Year.

The post Nothing But Joy appeared first on Jewcy.

Anyway. SukkahSoul is, apparently, all the rage this year. I have to admit, that’s pretty nice-looking Sukkah. (Maybe not quite as awesome as last year’s Sukkot Shake, or the Grease-inspired Sukkah Building, but eh. We do what we can.) Last year, Sukkahless, I grabbed some friends, and we slapped together tiny Sukkot with kosher graham crackers, lemon icing with etrog liquer, and rosemary branches for the roof. Sure, half the fun was probably the number of “etrogitos” we put away while indulging my inner-children, but hey. Whatever. There are ton of resources for building your own sukkah, but I like this one, only for the mention at the end of Jewcy jack-o-lanterns, which I am a big fan of.

There are all sorts of sukkah-building kits like this, of course, or like this, too.

Here sister is doin’ it herself, and here is an interesting piece from Project Chana about using empty ushpizin chairs in support of domestic violence victims, and on that sort of note about helping women out, there is, apparently, a proposed boycott this year of a particular Sukkah-dealer’s goods, as he is not forking over a get for his wife, though they did obtain a civil divorce almost a decade ago, so groups are calling for a boycott of his sukkot for his recalcitrance. And, speaking of boycotts, the Jerusalem Post is reporting today about a potential educators’ strike after Sukkot.

Of course, there are a variety of things to do with your etrog post-Sukkot, ranging from the green-thumbed, to the recycled mitzvot to the delicious. As a side note, I have never seen an etrog this big in my life. Look at it! (Sorry about the lame music.)

Does anyone have any perhaps unusual or outside-the-box Sukkot traditions they want to share with the rest of the class? Hmm?

The post A Little Sukkot Round Up appeared first on Jewcy.

Everyone has a favorite martini—well at least Oprah does, so why can’t we?  Many of today’s trendy martini recipes call for lemon vodka. Luckily, Sukkot’s unusual custom of sniffing a citrus fruit (etrog) lends itself perfectly to a holiday-inspired cocktail—the Sukkotini.  With a splash of pomegranate juice and a hit of etrog vodka or liqueur, the Sukkotini features the best flavors of fall, and Jewish tradition. Serve this drink under the stars in your beautiful backyard sukkah (or, if you live in Brooklyn like I do), in the sukkah your friend threw up in the shared cement courtyard outside his building.

Sukkotini

Tip: You can make your own etrog vodka (see Etrog Moonshine below), and enjoy your martini sometime around Chanukah.  If you need your cocktail NOW, buy some pre-made etrog liquor here.

Ingredients

4 oz Etrog Moonshine (or etrog liqueur)
1 oz fresh lemon juice
½ oz fresh pomegranate juice
2 oz simple syrup

Directions

Shake all ingredients well with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass.  Garnish with a twisted etrog peel and serve.

Etrog “Moonshine” (Adapted slightly from Food.com)

Ingredients

3 Etrogim
3 cups vodka
1 ½ cups confectioners sugar

Directions

Scrub your etrogim to remove all the pesticide residue—and the germs from where everyone held and sniffed it during the holiday. Peel the etrogim, avoiding the bitter white “pith.” Put the peel in a 1-quart bottle with 2 cups vodka and close for a week.

Later, discard the peels. Add 1½ cups confectioners sugar and shake until dissolved. Add 1 more cup vodka and shake until clear. Close jar and store in a cool, dark place for at least 6 weeks.

(Image: Shutterstock)

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Let’s put that sad Saturday of food deprivation behind us and move on: We’ve got tents to put up.

Sukkot, which begins on Thursday, is both a historical and agricultural festival and you’re supposed to eat a lot of stuff stuffed with other stuff to symbolize a bountiful harvest. Here are some great-sounding “stuffed” recipes I’ve rounded up that highlight late summer/early fall seasonal fare:

Pumpkin Soup Served in Individual Roasted Pumpkins

Stuffed Bell Peppers

Apple, Currant, and Caraway Stuffed Chicken Breasts

Lebanese Stuffed Zucchini

Stuffed Tomatoes with Grilled Corn Salad

Goat Cheese-Stuffed Baked Apples

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