For centuries, Sephardic women have been baking a bread called the the Siete Cielos in honor of Shavuot. In Ladino Siete Cielos means the seven heavens. This refers to a teaching about how the seven celestial spheres opened up when G-d gave the Torah on Mount Sinai. Ladino is a blend of Hebrew and Spanish which was the language of the Jews of Turkey, Greece, and parts of Morroco.

Here’s a picture.
I discovered this Challah from Nicholas Stavroulakis’s wonderful “cookbook of the Jews of Greece.” He drew a lovely picture and offered instructions which I attempted to copy.
The orb at the center which is roughly the size of a smallish Challah represents Mount Sinai . Around it are seven rings–made from ropes of dough–to represent the seven heavens (sheva rakiyim in Hebrew). On top of them are small dough sculptures representing Miriams well, the 10 Commandments, an open Torah scroll, a dove ( a symbol of the Jewish people) and Moses’ copper serpent (nachas nehoset).

This is what it looked like when I took it out of the oven.

Tinted Eggs
Believe it or not coloring eggs is a Jewish custom, though our color scheme doesn’t include pink, lilac or lime green. Lag B’Omer is the 33rd day of the Omer count between Passover and Shavuot. On L’ag B’Omer the fatal plague infecting Rabbi Akiva’s students ended. L’ag B’Omer is also the yahrzeit or anniversary of the death of Rabbi Akiva’s greatest student Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. This day is a holiday day because after his death, Rabbi Shimon’s soul rose toexquisitely sublime levels of holiness.
The midrash says that Rabbi Shimon’s righteousness sustained his whole generation to the point that a rainbow never appeared in the sky for all the years he lived.
The Torah tells us that a rainbow is a reminder of G-d’s promise not to destroy the world. When a rainbow appears, it is a sign that G-d needs to recall that promise because mankind hasn’t been behaving properly. But while Rabbi Shimon was alive, G-d never needed a reminder.
After his death, Jews tinted the shells of hard boiled eggs, the traditional mourner’s food, in colors to remember this. Their rainbow was relatively limited—the Jews used onion skins and tea grounds as their dye and the eggs were various shades of reddish brown.
Some Jews abandoned this custom because of its resemblance to Easter eggs. Easter has bad associations for Jews because so many pogroms and anti-Semitic attacks took place during this holiday. If your family doesn’t already follow this custom, you may want to think twice before adopting it.My Rabbi isn’t so sure that it is a good idea. But if you’re curious about how to dye eggs naturally, here’s how.
Tinted eggs.
Hard boil eggs in the usual way. Put plenty of onion skins—red and brown and tea grounds into the cooking water. Eggs will take on a reddish-brown tint.

While Ashkenazim spent the night after Pesach packing up the Pesach dishes, Morrocan Jews have a party called Mimouna. They have been doing this for centuries though no one is really sure why. Unlike most holidays, Mimouna doesn’t appear in any books of Jewish law and it’s celebrated only by Jews of Morroccans and North African ancestry–Syrians don’t do Mimouna; neither do Litvaks or Hungarians.
Scholars point out that since the day coincides with the Yarhrzeit of Maimon, the father of Moses the Son of Maimon (Moses Maimonedes or the Rambam) the feast honors his death–and passage to the next world. (the day of death is a “birthday” of sorts as the soul moves on to another level in it’s journey) The word Mimouna even sounds like a contraction of hiloula and Maimon.
There are others who say that Mimouna comes from Emuna which means faith and that the day is a celebration of faith. In fact the entire Pesach holiday which commemorates the Jewish people’s giant leap of faith following the unseen G-d into the desert without packing sandwiches is the consumate holiday of faith. The mystics say that faith energy is in the air at Pesach time and that if we plug in we can recharge our faith battery for the entire year so maybe Mimouna connects to that.
In old Morrocco the Arabs visited their Jewish neighbors bringing gifts of sourdough starter. Because sourdough, which was the premodern and more natural form of yeast is hametz incarnate the Jews discard theirs before Pesach .This gift helped them start their post Pesach baking. In the traditional blessing is “tirbachu u’tis’adu”, Morrocan or Judeo-Arabic meaning be

blessed and have a good luck,” .
The first dish the Jews would make was a leavened pancake called Mufleta. Mufleta is flatbread, similar in taste and texture to Indian chappati. It is very tasty, especially when topped with honey or slathered with a honey butter mixture and not at all complicated to make once you get the hang of it.
Mufleta—enough for 12 pancakes.
3 and ½ cups of flour
½ tablespoon yeast
½ tablespoon salt
½ tablespoon sugar
1/3 cup of vegetable oil (approximately)
1 and ½ cups lukewarm water
1. Dissolve yeast in water. Add sugar. Combine flour and salt. Mix in flour gradually and knead until you’ve got a soft batter.
2.Pour about a tablespoon of oil on top of the batter so that it is covered by a thin film of oil. It should look shiny
3.Cover the dough with a kitchen towel and let it rest for an hour
4. Cut the dough into 12 pieces. Each piece should be about the size of a medium sized apple.
5. Let the dough balls rest for 10 minutes
6. Create an oiled work surface. You can pour a thin film of oil on top (about a tablespoon)directly onto a granite countertop or a marble cutting board. Using the palms of your hands work the ball into a thin pancake (it may break in places—that doesn’t really matter
7. Heat up a tablespoon of oil in a frying pan. Slide the first pancake into the hot pan.
8. Cook until it starts to brown on one side and the flip the pancake over (it should take about a minute to brown)
9.The layer the next pancake on top.
10. Flip the pancake tower over so that the new pancake is touching the surface of the frying pan. When it browns flip over and layer a new pancake on top. Flip until brown and then layer a new pancake. Keep on doing this until your dough balls are finished. In the end you will have created a tower of mufletot, one on top of the other.
If you can , get two people on the job. One person can stretch the dough into pancakes. The other can supervise the cooking and flipping. In a pinch one person can do the entire job.
Separate the pancakes—they should come apart easily and serve right away with silan, melted butter, melted butter mixed with honey or jam. Though the tradition is to have them with something sweet they can work well with a savory dip too.

It is centuries old custom to serve stuffed cabbage on Purim. Cabbage was of course a staple food in Eastern Europe, abundant and easy to store. The connection to Purim? Gematriya again, the ancient art of  letter number equation. Cruv which means cabbage has the same letters and numerical value as Baruch which means blessed and is adjective used to describe the Megilla’s hero in the Shoshanat Yaacov poem which we recite after the reading of the Megilla.Stuffed cabbage is another concealed food–the meat is hiding under a cabbage blanket and that fits into the hidden theme of the holiday. Esther concealing her identity, G-d concealing Himself as it were–the name of G-d is conspicuously excluded from the Megila and all the miracles are natural ones–no pyrotechnics ala the splitting of the sea at Purim.

Stuffed cabbages also resemble Torah scrolls–especially when you serve them two at a time. At Purim the Jewish people reaffirmed their allegiance to the Torah. 

Here’s a recipe for Stuffed cabbage, sweet, Galicianer or Polish style,this time.
Ingredients
1 savoy cabbage (no stuffed cabbages can’t be red!)
Five small onions.
I can sauerkraut (optional)
1 lb (or 500 grams) chopped meat. I mixed turkey and beef
One cup tomato juice
½ c brown sugar
⅛-¼ tsp of black pepper
Juice of 1 fresh lemon
2 eggs
½ cup white rice
Stuffing Preparation
1. Sauté one small onion.until soft and brown.
2. Add rice to sauté and mix together for a minute. (this is just an initiall sauté; the rice will cook later on when it’s stuffed inside the cabbage rolls)
3. In a separate bowl combine chopped meat with ¼ cup tomato juice, (or ¼ cup water plus 1 and ½ tbsp. tomato paste) two eggs and salt and pepper to taste.
4. Add fried onion and rice to meat mixture. Note : in this recipe you don’t precook the meat. It cooks later with the cabbage.
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Cabbage
1. Boil two inches (about 4 cups) of water on the bottom of a large pot (Dutch oven)
2. Insert your cabbage. It can take 10-15 minutes for the cabbage to soften enough that the leaves can be pried loose.
3. Remove cabbage from steaming water.
4. Delicately separate the leaves one at a time.
Tips: You’ll probably be able to get two or three loose at one time and then you’ll return the cabbage to the steaming water to soften some more. This takes patience.
The leaves must be pliable enough to fold and roll.
The art of cabbage stuffing
1. Once you can separate a few outer leaves from the cabbage (small tears don’t matter but try to leave them intact) take a paring knife and thin the vein at the center of the cabbage (a big fat vein will make rolling impossible) taking care not to tear the cabbage leaf.
2. Place a tablespoon of filling at the center of your leaf. (if your leaves are small use less filling.).
3. Roll up the cabbage and press it on both sides to make sure the filling is secure inside. If there’s a small rip on the side, the cabbage will still survive, but try to avoid major leaks.
Cooking
1. Line the bottom of a large pot or Dutch oven with quartered onions and sauerkraut. (It’s yummy to throw in a few beef bones and a piece of flanken,)
2. Layer the cabbages on top of the sauerkraut and onions.
3. Continue layering until you’re done.
4. Pour a cup of tomato juice, a half cup of brown sugar, the juice of a lemon and between 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoons of black pepper (add pepper to taste) .
Add 250 grams of tomato paste and 250 grams of water along with more brown sugar and pepper to taste and a handful of raisins.

 

For years, a neighbors always sent us a plate of chickpeas for Purim . None of us understood  the gift. Why chickpeas? I never bought chickpeas, not even in cans.

Weren’t the only people who ate chickpeas were Italians, vegetarians or people who were having Shalom Zachor–a Friday night party celebrating the birth of a son at which chickpeas are served.

I just didn’t get it. I assumed that my friends were crazy for chickpeas and they wanted to share their passion with us, until just recently. Call me a slow learner, but when I first learned that Esther ate a vegetarian diet at Ahashverosh’s palace I didn’t make the link to chickpeas, until now.

Recently, I figured out the  reason for my friend’s gift. There is an ancient custom to eat them along with other legumes and seeds on Purim (called in Hebrew zaronim) to recall the fact that Esther ate them in Ahasherosh’s palace. The food wasn’t kosher, so what was there to eat–legumes, seeds and grains.  All around, Esther  didn’t have an easy life. Her marriage to Mordechai ended when she submitted herself to Ahashverosh to save the Jewish nation. And as to nachas from the kids –some scholars say that Darius, the Persian King who permitted the rebuilding of the Holy Temple was her son but Darius wasn’t a good Yiddishe boy.

Yet there is no record of Esther complaining. I suppose there were some perks to being a queen, nice clothes, a driver, a maid but being married to a drunken bum is a pretty heavy deal. And yet Esther accepted her situation and rose to the challenge and because of her the Jewish people still lives.

Consider that when you much your chickpeas

Chickpeas in a classical Jewish style aka Arbis or Nahit

Sort through the chickpeas to remove stones and dirt

Soak them for 10 hours in cold water

Drain the water and boil them for two hours. 

Then add salt and pepper to taste and eat

You can also toss them into green salad or puree them into humous

Happy Purim

Hungarian Purim: Kindl
No kindl, has nothing to do with the eponymous ereader . Kindl is an almost forgotten Hungarian Jewish pastry that deserves to be remembered. Kindl is made of pastry stretched so thin you’re hardly meant to notice it . Inside is a tantalizingly sweet and tangy mixture of walnut chunks, raisins, lemon juice, sugar and jam.
In my online meanderings I learned that Hungarian non Jews make a similar pastry but theirs is called “teszta.” Food historian Gil Marks says the name kindl comes from the Yiddish word “kind” which means child . According to Marks these cakes represent Haman’s large family. Haman had ten sons, and he gave each of them a long and almost unpronounceable Persian name. Remember that breath stopping moment during the Megilla reading when all ten names are read in one breath?
Though in the end, the wicked sons were hung together with their father, some of Haman’s grandchildren converted to Judaism and became Torah scholars in the holy city of Bnai Brak. In Israel today, there are children of ex Nazis who have made the same switch . Isn’t that one awesome statement about human potential and our freedom to make choices.
But back to kindl. My mother was a great kindl baker. Her Mishloach Manot (Purim gift baskets) invariably contained the pastry but she ‘cheated.” She bought kindl dough from a Chassidic manufacturer who made the stuff . All she had to do was to roll it out and fill it.
My grocery doesn’t stock kindl dough and flakey pastry isn’t a good substitute. But kindl dough isn’t that hard to make . With my sturdy standing mixer to help, I was able to put together a very close approximation of my mother’s dough in under 10 minutes flat.
One nice thing about kindl is that you can make the dough ahead of time and refrigerate it. The dough will keep in the fridge for up to five days or in the freezer for much longer.

Kindl
Dough recipe adapted from Tzippora Kreisman’s “Delights of the Jewish Kitchen”
3 and ½ cups of flour
1 and ¼ teaspoons of instant yeast
Juice of one lemon
1 egg plus one egg yolk
1 cup (200 gm) margarine or butter softened
2 ½ tablespoons of sugar
Dissolve the yeast in the juice. Add eggs. Using the paddle attachment of a standing mixer add the margarine, sugar and flour.
Mix together on a low setting until the dough forms a ball.
Cover the ball of dough with plastic wrap and refrigerate it for at least two hours (you can leave it there for up to three days. If you’re going to be leaving it for longer, then freeze)
Filling
11 oz or one and ½ cups of walnuts (300 grams of walnuts)
½ cup of raisins
Sugar to taste . (around 1/3 cup is probably just about right)
Juice of one lemon (don’t use bottle lemon juice)
Combine all of the above in food processor using the blade attachment. Pulse briefly just enough so that the ingredients bind together and create a lumpy mixture not a smooth paste. (think cottage cheese rather than cream cheese)
½ cup apricot jam
Preparation
Divide the dough ball into two equal parts—these will be your kindls.
On a well floured surface roll out the dough until it’s as thin are you can stretch it without tearing. You want to create two or three long rectangles. (approximately 12 to 14 inches long and 4 to 5 inches wide)
(It will feel like a rolled pie crust)
Smear apricot jam and over that smear the walnut filling. Roll up jelly roll style
Brush with an egg yolk
Prick several times with a fork
Bake in a preheated oven at 350 F or 180 C for ½ hour or until brown.
The kindl will keep for up to several weeks without refrigeration. You can freeze it.

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When I was a kid lekvar was something one bought in a store. A single company Simon Fisher, manufactured the stuff . I believe that they are still at it, but sadly they don’t sell their product in my neighborhood.
In English lekvar is known as prune butter. Set aside any crude quips, and know that lekvar is heavenly, Unlike a lot of other jams it manages to be sticky and sweet in a subtle earthy way. And it’s a perfect foil to hamentaschen dough, the old fashioned yeasty kind or even the glorified sugar cookies that are the modern day standard. When I was growing up, lekvar was the number one choice for hamentaschen fillings, . It was closely followed by mohn or poppy seed which appeals to homologically inclined mystics especially since, Mohn the Yiddish name for poppy seeds sounds like Homohn, which is the correct Hebrew pronunciation of the Purim villains name. I don’t know the origins of the rapperish Hay-man came from. Homohnn is also double entredre. It can also mean “the manna” which is called Mon in Hebrew.
Cookbook author Marcie Goldman divides the world up into two kinds of people, , the poppy seed folks and the lekvar people Unlike Mohn, lekvar doesn’t have a mystical overlay. Frankly, I can’t see any other reason for it’s use other than availability . Plums grow abundantly in Eastern Europe –and like many other East European staples we’ve adopted it into our tradition
For years, I resisted making lekvar because I thought it was complicated but I recently discovered that if you use pitted prunes and an immersion blender you can make up a batch in almost no time.
Lekvar
In a small sauce pan cook together one cup of pitted prunes with one cup of water and 1/3 cup of sugar, Keep the flame low so the water doesn’t boil out and stir from time to time.
When the prunes are very soft (after about twenty minutes) puree everything together. I used an immersion blender. And there you have it—DIY lekvar. Enough for a dozen large hamentaschen or 20 small ones.