Passover is four weeks away, so tonight my mother and I started putting together our menu. I'll be making gefilte fish, as I always do, plus my vegetarian matzoh balls and a Middle Eastern-inflected salad of butter lettuce with grapefruit and avocado. We'll have classic Ashkenazi charoset, of course...

ACCOUNTABILITY NOW!...

Hi there! Kara here. Just a simple girl who grew up in a Southern Baptist/ evangelical/ Methodist home south of Chicago. Then converted to Judaism through a well-known conservative synagogue in Los Angeles. I never bought that whole Holy Trinity theory. But that’s another story… My first Purim w...

Last night I ate dinner at one of Seattle’s newest restaurants. After the meal ended, it came time to make one last decision.  To dessert, or not to dessert? Now, I know this is hardly an original thought. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that nearly every diner in almost every restaur...

As usual, I am posting a holiday roundup just a day or two before the holiday. Oy, I am such a procrastinator. Hopefully this will still come in handy for some of you. I notice I'm getting a huge number of hits for "gluten-free hamentaschen" / hamentashen, hamantashen, etc. So I thought I'd make it ...

Purim, which begins at sunset this Monday, is another one of those Jewish holidays that too often gets reduced to comic relief, a low-rent costume party. But it's really a rousing celebration of sheer survival, the kind of celebration everybody could use right now, and there are three reasons why ev...

While watching myself on Hell's Kitchen tonight, I suspect I will cringe (at my hips etc.) and likely decide yet again that I need to stop eating wagon loads of ice cream at 9:30 every night, which leads to indigestion by 10:30. I will probably eat healthfully for the next 24 hours and then break do...

I just don't get it -- why take the chance? What's wrong with paying some pimply adolescent $6/hour to serve ice cream? You have to look at his ugly face, that's what. Still, I want the record to show that I am anti-robotic ice cream server. These Kuka industrial robots were programmed by 26 student...

Back in my stoner days (whaddya mean “back”, skwire, you ain’t kidding anyone!), my buddy Paul and i would sneak behind my parents’ garage to get high, inevitably followed by the family dog Bo, who enjoyed getting a faceful of exhaled dank. No lie: you could see the dog’...

Sweet.   Irish Whiskey Creme Kisses.   Another Post Punk KitchenVegan Cookie Book tester. The second Vegan Cookie book tester of the day -  I made both of these to take to a fancy vegan dinner party last weekend.   It was Indian themed and fabulous. Espresso Fudge Brownies Grilling . I live in a...