Happy Pesach!

[rachelblewis]

Hi Friends,

So...Passover starts tonight! Happy Pesach! Anyone keeping Passover? Any good recipes, or fun snack ideas for those of us who cannot eat leavened food for a week?

-R

[ritty]

I have a problem with the whole pesach food rules. i get the basic premise: we're fleeing egypt, the bread doesn't have time to rise when it bakes in the sun, thus we get matzah. what I don't get is the leap of logic that then says because of this, I can't have a coke this week because it has corn syrup. A) there was no corn in biblical-era egypt. B) it's in syrup form. it didn't rise.

Therefore, I just like to go with the spirit of passover, rather than following within the letter of the law. I try to only eat flat foods this week. Sandwiches - no. Burritos - yes. Eggs and biscuits - no. Eggs and pancakes - yes. Also, syrups are fine. Cheez doodles - no. Potato chips - yes. Sausage links - no. Bacon - yes. You get the idea!

[TommyP]

Bacon? Yes?

[rachelblewis]

I have a problem with the whole pesach food rules. i get the basic premise: we're fleeing egypt, the bread doesn't have time to rise when it bakes in the sun, thus we get matzah. what I don't get is the leap of logic that then says because of this, I can't have a coke this week because it has corn syrup. A) there was no corn in biblical-era egypt. B) it's in syrup form. it didn't rise.

Therefore, I just like to go with the spirit of passover, rather than following within the letter of the law. I try to only eat flat foods this week. Sandwiches - no. Burritos - yes. Eggs and biscuits - no. Eggs and pancakes - yes. Also, syrups are fine. Cheez doodles - no. Potato chips - yes. Sausage links - no. Bacon - yes. You get the idea!

Interesting. I stick to the basics. No bread, pasta, cookies, cakes, chips, pancakes, flour tortillas....

I still eat rice, sometimes...because my family sometimes said it was ok...we don't do the corn syrup thang either...I mean, you have to draw the line somewhere. It is about the spirit, not the exact rules, isn't that how we jews roll (or matah, this week)? Wow, that was a horrible joke...

-R

[Chip]

Oh man, there is nothing like Passover bacon!

When I used to work for the Jewish Federation down in Houston, they'd send us the weekly Jewish newspaper, which included ads from a grocery store that served a variety of kosher foods. Some of the ads included nice pictures of the tasty food. My favorite picture for the ad was a thick, juicy cheeseburger. Kinda makes you wonder how kosher they really are...

-Chip

[Ozone]

http://www.chrismukkah.com/media/images/merry_mazel_tov/matzoh_man.jpg

[Aaroneous]

happy pesach indeed, my fellow tribe members.

this year i discovered (thanks, as always, to the internet) that spiders are never kosher. fyi.

[rene]

Was it bad if I went to Fogo de Chao for lunch on Monday? I'm not that religious so I dunno.

[Annie Z]

happy pesach indeed, my fellow tribe members.

this year i discovered (thanks, as always, to the internet) that spiders are never kosher. fyi.

Can you please explain why spiders are not kosher? I re-registered with CIN just so I could ask that.

Happy Pesach, all.

[Aaroneous]

Of course!

Here's what I found out from:http://www.torahscience.org/natsci/bee.html (http://www.torahscience.org/natsci/bee.html%29)

The Torah Science Foundation explains to us:

The Torah portion of Shemini include the laws for distinguishing between kosher and non-kosher animals. The honeybee is not kosher, so Jews cannot eat it, but honey is (1). This is a very special situation because, usually, “that which comes from a non-kosher animal is itself not kosher” (2). Thus, in most cases, a product from a kosher animal is also kosher (the milk of a cow) whereas a product from a non-kosher animal is not (milk from a pig). In the case of the spider, which the wagon driver was advised not to resemble, neither the animal nor the spider silk used to build the spider web are kosher.

Why is honey, made by a non-kosher insect, kosher whereas spider silk is not? The answer, of course, is that Jewish law codified by our sages many centuries ago, dictates that observant Jews can eat honey but not honeybees, spiders or spider silk. What is remarkable is that the nature of honey production by the honeybee and spider silk by the spider, which have only been understood in detail in the last century, is fully consistent with Jewish law.

Honeybees make honey by foraging nectar from flowers (itself kosher like any plant product) and storing it in their bodies in a special stomach, called the honey sac. Bees have a second stomach in which they digest the food that they consume. If a bee gets hungry while flying, it transfers some nectar from the honey sac to its stomach and uses the nectar as food. When the honey sac is full, the bee returns to the hive and bee workers take away the nectar with their tongues and pass it around, letting some of the water in the nectar evaporate in the process, and then the nectar is deposited in a hive cell, where it is stored. We thus see that the nectar never becomes part of the bee’s metabolism.

Spider silk, on the other hand, is a complex mixture of proteins made by the spider. Proteins are encoded by the DNA of each organism and are very specific to each species. For example, the major protein in spider silk is called sericin and has attracted a great deal of attention in the last few years. Spider silk is a remarkable material that can stretch 4-6 times its length without breaking, and has a huge potential for the manufacturing of many products. In contrast to silk worms, however, spiders cannot be farmed because they eat each other when grown in the same environment. Recently the gene for sericin has been cloned and transferred to goats with the goal of getting the goat to make sericin together with its milk (Of course such genetically engineered goat milk containing significant amounts of sericin would no longer be kosher).

The building blocks of proteins are chemicals called amino-acids. If an animal eats a protein that originates from another animal or a plant, it disassembles those proteins into its amino-acid components and then it makes its own, specific proteins.

We learn from Jewish law that a kosher fish that eats non-kosher food remains kosher, whereas a non-kosher fish that eats kosher food remains non-kosher. We can thus infer that the specific proteins of kosher and non-kosher animals might play a role in the physical manifestation of the spiritual properties that make an animal kosher or non-kosher.

The scientific understanding of protein synthesis and the fine details of honey making were not available when our sages determined that honey is kosher, they did with Ruach Hakodesh, divine inspiration. The realization that scientific knowledge about honey and spider silk making is fully consistent with Jewish law provides us with a refined understanding of the wisdom of our sages. Moreover, understanding of the scientific basis of Jewish law can give us a better insight of its guiding principles.

Here's another site that hits it more on the nose (so to speak):
http://www.jewfaq.org/kashrut.htm

it explains:

<strong>Of the "winged swarming things" (winged insects), a few are specifically permitted (Lev. 11:22), but the Sages are no longer certain which ones they are, so all have been forbidden. ... Rodents, reptiles, amphibians, and insects (except as mentioned above) are all forbidden. Lev. 11:29-30, 42-43. </strong>


and finally, i just did a little of my own Tanakh research, and i found, in Leviticus 11.42:

<strong>"You shall not eat, among all things that swarm upon the earth, anything that crawls on its belly, or anything that walks on fours, or anything that has many legs; for they are an abomination."</strong>

that kind of says it, eh?

k, i'll stop now.

p.s. come see RAGTIME. Opens this weekend. I play a big kosher jew.

streeeetch

[katewrath]

I can't have a coke this week because it has corn syrup. A) there was no corn in biblical-era egypt. B) it's in syrup form. it didn't rise.

Dude, you're missing out on the best Coke there is! Kosher Coke is made with sugar cane. Sweet, sweet sugar cane!

Maybe Chicago doesn't get the Kosher love from Coca-Cola, but in L.A., the stores are crammed with the stuff, in anticipation of the holiday. Maybe because it's a simple matter of importing some from Mexico, where all the Coke is made with sugar cane.

(Rambling aside: I don't drink a lot of soda, so for a long time, I assumed high fructose corn syrup was the same as sugar cane. Then my husband went nuts and did a summer-long soda tasting. And man, you can really tell the difference. For one thing, sugar cane is crazy delicious, but so emphatically sweet that you can only drink so much of it, and then you just don't want any more. HFCS, on the other hand, always leaves a weird dry taste in my mouth, requiring that I drink more soda. COINCIDENCE? I think NOT! And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go make a yarmulke out of tin foil.)

[Scol]

If Charlton Heston was Moses, should Bruce Willis play Jesus? I'd bet he'd be a real wise-ass.

[kenziecondon]

i had the hugest most amazing macaroon of my life in nyc on friday.

[Aaroneous]

err, um... was it a "big-mac"-aroon?


sorry.


(no really. i'm really sorry.)