13 minute read
The Nosher
Jessica Seinfeld Shows Us How To Be Vegan (At Least Some Of The Time)
By Rachel Ringler
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the NOSHER(food)
In her latest cookbook, "Vegan, at Times: 120+ Recipes for Every Day or Every So Often," Jessica Seinfeld shares meat-, egg- and dairy-free recipes she has developed for herself and her family, including Easy Green Hummus (inset). (Gallery Books)
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Jessica Seinfeld’s parents were true children of the ’60s. They did yoga before it was cool and served their three daughters brown rice, tofu and wholesome cereal purchased in their local food co-p in Burlington, Vermont.
The young Jessica, embarrassed by their focus on healthy eating, “always wanted regular cereal that you could buy on the shelves of typical supermarkets.” These days Seinfeld, 50 — the wife of comedian Jerry, of course, and a mother of three — is known for being a devotee of healthy food. Her first cookbook, 2007’s “Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food,” which included strategies for sneaking pureed veggies into meals, was a bestseller.
Since then, Seinfeld has devoted much of her time to thinking about getting families to eat healthfully. In addition to running Good+Foundation, a NYC-based non-profit that aims to dismantle multi-generational poverty, she’s authored four additional cookbooks. Each one tackles a different foodrelated problem and provides solutions. With her latest, “Vegan, at Times: 120+ Recipes for Every Day or Every So Often,” she shares meat, egg- and dairy-free recipes she has developed for herself and her family.
And yet, Seinfeld insists you don’t have to be vegan to enjoy her recipes. Eating vegan meals doesn’t mean you have to swear off a good steak or a piece of fish forever — Seinfeld herself certainly hasn’t.
“My entire life, I have been having bagels and lox every Sunday,” Seinfeld said. “When I married Jerry, we continued that tradition and my kids rely on it.”
These days, Seinfeld’s dream bagel order is a toasted everything flagel (flat bagel) with scallion cream cheese, tomato, red onion — hold the lox. Her husband, Seinfeld said, enjoys his plain bagel topped with veggie cream cheese, Zabar’s doublesmoked lox, tomato and red onion with a big sour pickle on the side.
In other words, being vegan “at times” means you don’t have to give anything up. As Seinfeld writes in the book’s introduction: “It’s time to eat, enjoy and live your life without fear of judgment.”
Veganism, and even “part-time” veganism, like Seinfeld’s, is on the rise. While 9.7 million Americans identified themselves as vegan in a 2019 survey by Ipsos Retail Performance — a number that held steady from 2012 — Gallup found in 2020 that nearly a quarter of Americans reported eating less meat that year than they had previously. (Just this past weekend the news broke that New York City Mayor Eric Adams — an avowed vegan who credits his plantbased diet with curing his diabetes — was spotted ordering fish at restaurants.)
Like all of Seinfeld’s previous cookbooks, “Vegan, at Times,” which was published last November, is a
New York Times bestseller. (Gallery Books)
According to a January, 2022 story from Insider, in 2020, the plant-based foods market was worth $29.4 billion and could grow to $162 billion in 2030. That’s not because more people are becoming vegans; instead, “non-vegans are helping fuel the plant-based boom by trying to cut down on their meat, fish, and dairy intake.”
Seinfeld serves traditional foods for Shabbat and Jewish holidays: brisket, kugel and homemade, braided challahs coated with an egg wash for a beautiful finish. “I am not willing to give up on that flavor or that color,” she said.
Aside from Sunday mornings and Jewish holidays, though, Seinfeld is mostly vegan. She writes that when she was in her 40s, she began to notice a connection between what she ate and how she felt. “I realized that what I ate could either drain me or invigorate me,” she writes.
Once she considered how veganism is good for the planet and good for animals, Seinfeld was all in — well, mostly in.
But Seinfeld didn’t immediately get on a soap box. Instead, she slowly experimented with recipes. The first vegan recipe that her family unanimously approved, which is in the new cookbook, was her egg- and butter-free banana bread. She baked it, left it on the countertop in the kitchen, and returned not long afterwards to find just a few remaining crumbs. The kids didn’t know that they had just devoured one of mom’s vegan creations.
“It’s through desserts that I got my children on board,” said Seinfeld, adding that they came to realize “vegan food does not have to taste like kale and spinach.”
Other desserts in the book include a chocolate sheet cake, made with ripe banana and olive oil and iced with a combination of coconut oil and cocoa powder. There’s also a carrot cake with unsweetened applesauce and sweetened coconut and frosted with a vegan cream cheese which she happily would make for her non-vegan friends.
The recipes are meant not only to be delicious, but easy-to-make (like her Easy Green Hummus) and affordable. “I keep perspective on how hard many people struggle in this country to afford – especially right now with inflation — groceries and dinner,” she said. “The ingredients are all accessible because we [Seinfeld and her coauthor, Sara Quessenberry] shopped at typical grocery stores. We did not go to fancy gourmet shops.”
Seinfeld is a fan of the vegetableforward cuisine coming out of Isra-
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Hummus In Space? Joint Israeli-Nasa Project Aims To Help Astronauts Grow Chickpeas In Zero Gravity
By Rachel Ringler
A photo of the chickpea greenhouse heading to space. (Avivlabs) (JTA) — Like most Israelis, Yonatan Winetraub loves hummus, and its protein-packed main ingredient: the chickpea.
But unlike most, Winetraub also has the ability to send chickpeas into space.
Winetraub, 35, is one of the three founders of SpaceIL, an Israeli nonprofit best known for attempting to land a spaceship on the moon — the Beresheet vessel, named after the Hebrew word for the first book of the Bible, crash landed on the moon’s surface on April 11, 2019.
Undaunted, Winetraub is teaming up with NASA for a more specialized mission.
Until recently, astronauts have mainly eaten packaged, dehydrated food. As it plans missions to go deeper into space, NASA has been exploring fresh food production that requires minimal resources and results in minimal waste.
While the U.S. governmental organization has succeeded in growing lettuce, cabbage, and kale in space, under a program named “Veggie,” it has never tried to grow chickpeas. Winetraub floated adding chickpeas to the program for several reasons: They are a superfood, packed with iron, phosphorus and folic acid, in addition to protein. They are easy to grow, and they mature quickly.
On Feb. 19, Winetraub and a team of scientists and engineers from Israel and Stanford University will send up a sealed miniature greenhouse on a NASA cargo shuttle. After a day of travel, the shuttle will reach the International Space Station (ISS), located 300 miles above the Earth. The greenhouse, the size of a quart container of milk, will be delivered to the American side of the ISS.
Inside the white metal box will be 28 chickpea seeds from Israel that Winetraub and his team will attempt to germinate and grow — remotely, using special software — in an environment free of gravity and natural light. The plants in the greenhouse will be grown for one month and then will be refrigerated until they are brought down to Earth in June.
To inspire the next generation of space enthusiasts, Winetraub has enlisted a cohort of young scientists on earth to help him with his experiment. Middle and high school students in 1,000 classrooms across Israel will grow chickpeas in boxes they have constructed. This key control group will compare the processes of growing chickpeas with gravity versus those grown in space without it.
Some of the high school students from the Yeruham Science Center
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985-951-2501 631 N. Causeway Blvd.,, Mandeville Facing East Causeway Approach 985-893-0593 125 E. 21st Ave In Historic Downtown Covington in southern Israel have an extra important and complex assignment: remotely managing the plants’ growth in space with wavelengths of light, one of the tools in an emerging field of science called synthetic biology.
Controlling the chickpeas’ growth is key, said Winetraub.
“You can’t let plants grow wild because they could run out of water or oxygen,” said Winetraub.
His team is also curious to see how the roots will grow. On earth, thanks to gravity, plant roots know to grow down. In space, where there is little or no gravity, will the roots grow down or up? Will they grow in circles? And of obvious importance: once grown, how will the chickpeas taste?
Several international companies have played roles in the experiment. In addition to helping to fund the project, Strauss Group Ltd., the Israeli food and beverage company known for co-owning the popular Sabra hummus brand, selected the specific strain of chickpeas, known as Zehavit, being used in the greenhouse. They selected the strain because it is a relatively small seed that grows quickly and survives in a range of temperatures.
Strauss Group Ltd., the Israeli food and beverage company known for its Sabra hummus brand, selected a specific strain of chickpeas to be used in the experiment. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Since the seeds are not growing in soil either on earth or on the space station, Winetraub and his team asked the Haifa Group, a company that produces plant-specific fertilizers, to create a nutrient-filled gel in which the chickpea roots will grow. In that gel, Winetraub’s team
See HUMMUS on Page 19
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SEINFELD
Continued from Page 17 el. “Tel Aviv is one of my favorite cities in the whole world,” she said. “I love Israeli food and I love that America is responding to it.” When at home on the Upper West Side in New York City — the family also has a home in the Hamptons — Seinfeld said they love to dine at Israeli chef Eyal Shani’s restaurants, Miznon and HaSalon.
Like all of Seinfeld’s previous cookbooks, “Vegan, at Times,” which was published last November, is a New York Times bestseller. And, Jerry’s response, according to Seinfeld, has been enthusiastic, too: He is “blown away by the book’s success and people’s response to it,” she said.
But let’s get to the opinions of the people who really matter. Just how exactly do those “‘60s cats” — how Seinfeld describes her parents — feel about their daughter’s latest food foray?
“My mom is obsessed with the book,” she said. “She sends me photos three or four times a week of dishes she is making. Her friends are cooking from the book, too.”
HUMMUS
Continued from Page 18 installed a miniature camera to watch the roots of the seeds and see what direction they take. The lessons learned could have an earthly impact, too — as our climate continues to change, farmers will need to find ways to grow more with less and with greater efficiency, he said.
“The challenge,” said Winetraub, “is not just how to grow as many chickpeas as possible, but how to control the way they are grown — so that we maximize our limited resources. The more we learn to grow food with fewer resources, the more prepared we will be for the challenges that await us on earth as well.”
For inspiration while planning the experiment, Winetraub reached out to Ariel Rosenthal and Orly Peli-Bronshtein, two of the authors of the 2019 book, “On the Hummus Route: A Journey Between Cities, People and Dreams,” because they see the chickpea, a food eaten by young and old and beloved across nations, as a metaphor for peace. (The treatise on the food whose origins are often debated was acclaimed by many — but even though it was a collaboration between Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and Egyptians, it sparked the usual controversy over cultural appropriation. One Palestinian chef who contributed said it “normalizes the occupation.”)
“Hummus,” said Rosenthal, “is a perfect food. It will make the moon a better place. Imagine,” he continued, “if Eve [in the garden of Eden] had eaten a chickpea instead of an apple.”
In addition to the 28 chickpea seeds, the team has installed a microchip inside the small greenhouse with a microchip filled with personal artifacts representing the people who worked on the project. Winetraub included family photos and photos of hummus. He also added Rosenthal’s recipe for the hummus he makes and sells at his Tel Aviv restaurant Hakosem.
If all goes according to plan, could astronauts feasibly make hummus in space with their germinated chickpeas? Winetraub is hopeful the answer is yes.
“We are working on it!” he said.
Re-ElectGlynn Pichon COUNCILMANAT-LARGE
As your Councilman-at-Large I’ve been committed to serving you! I enjoy public service, and if re-elected I will continue to work tirelessly with city administration, my fellow council members, and the public to develop long term plans that address the issues facing us, like public safety, flood protection, and strengthening our economy. I will continue to support ordinances and budgets that encourage responsible growth and defend and preserve our strong culture of faith, family, and community. I have great confidence in our citizens and with your support, we can ensure that Slidell continues to lead the Northshore as the flagship location to work, live, and raise a family for many years to come.
6 Purim Cookies That Aren’t Hamantaschen
By Rachel Myerson
Experience has taught me that for every tender, generously filled hamantaschen is a dry, bland one. I feel like I’m rolling the dice every time I bite into one of these ubiquitous Purim cookies.
Luckily for me, there’s a bounty of alternative Purim cookies hailing from Jewish communities from around the world — Iraq, France, and Turkey, to name a few. Some are delicate and buttery, some are crisp and flaky. Some are perfumed with cardamom, and others with orange blossom water.
Whether you’re a hamantaschen devotee or not, join me and dip your hand into the global cookie jar this Purim.
1. Hadgi Badah
These Iraqi cookies are similar to macaroons, kept moist with ground blanched almonds (and often pistachios, too) and scented with cardamom. Slivered or whole almonds or pistachios are pressed on top of the cookie before baking. Gil Marks’ recipe in Encyclopedia of Jewish Food calls to moisten your hands with rose water or orange blossom water before rolling the cookie dough into balls for a subtle floral addition.
See PURIM COOKIES on Page 26
