Kosher cooking demo and dinner
Palm Beach Daily News
December 21, 2012
Spice and Spirit: The Complete Kosher Jewish Cookbook 
Shainy Edelman leads a cooking demonstration, recipe tasting and dinner for the Jewish Women's Circle Thursday at The Chesterfield. |
Kosher cooking demo and dinner — The Jewish Women’s Circle enjoyed a cooking presentation, sampling of recipes and dinner Thursday with Chef Shainy Edelman at The Chesterfield hotel.
“I want to show people how fabulous healthy Jewish food is,” she said. “It doesn’t compromise on palatability and really enjoying the meal,” said Edelman, a friend of Rebbetzin Hindel Levitinat the Chabad of Northern Palm Beach Island.
Her menu of onion crescents, salmon skewers, creamy broccoli and nut medley, wild mushroom quinoa and fresh fruit focused on taste and presentation. “The onion crescents are something my siblings came up with as a take on a recipe my mom had in her cookbook,” Edelman said.
Edelman, the seventh of 12 children growing up in Brooklyn, said her mother, Esther Blau, wrote the cookbook on the dining room table. The award-winning Spice and Spirit cookbook features 500-plus recipes and cooking centered around Jewish life: traditions, food, Shabbat and holidays.
When it was published in 1977 with the encouragement of Lubavitcher Rebbe, it was the “first authentic and proper resource for kosher cooking,” Edelman said Dubbed “the big Purple One" cookbook, it contained “trusted foods that our grandparents and great-grandparents prepared back in the shtetel."
Since then, it’s been updated for a new generation of young mothers. “The women wanted to bring a more modern twist on the traditional by including new recipes like cauliflower kugel instead of the typically traditional potato or noodle kugel,” she said.
Credited in the book were Cyrel Deitsch and Cherna Light, on the editorial board, and a rabbinical board that counseled on the kosher laws and observances section. For more information, see spiceandspirit.com.