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Kosher wine is traditional for the Passover seder, so what goes into that making that bottle? To keep with tradition, those who may not keep kosher will enjoy kosher wine, but not too many people consider all that it takes to create kosher wine. It all starts with Concord grapes, which naturally have a bitter taste, so bottlers add large amounts of sugar to sweeten the wine.

And then there is the difference between kosher wine that uses boiling to purify it (Mevushal), and the newer “flash pasteurization” method which does the same thing, yet preserves the taste. However, by not boiling it, the “non-Mevushal” wine can lose it’s kosher status if handled by a non-Jew. The Mevushal is exempt from this and can be poured and enjoyed by all, regardless of religion.

Just remember that just because it’s a kosher wine doesn’t automatically make it an award winning wine. Ask around, ask friends, ask your rabbi! Now that wine producers are hastily realizing the surge in popularity of kosher wines, and creating more choices, wine stores will be more than happy to assist your purchase. L’Chaiyim!

Coca-Cola is Kosher for Passover! Why? Because each year, around passover, the company makes a special run of Coke that replaces the high-fructose corn syrup with real, delicious, pure sugar. So when the alert goes out, they make some great sales, because the recipe harkens back to a taste that is really “Classic,” not to mention: “Kosher!”

Up until the 1980’s, the formula for Coke actually used real sugar, however, the company switched to high-fructose corn syrup. And since Passover requires refraining from eating certain grains, the corn-based sweetener is usually avoided. But, the Coca-Cola company has been able to continue producing this special variety this time of year.

The yellow cap and special labeling shows that “Passover Coke” is ready for your table! Coke has done a great thing, and having a product like this has even helped in their sales, so much so that even people who do not celebrate Passover request this seasonal recipe. Enjoy your soda this Passover, and savor the flavor of Kosher Coke.

Celebrate Passover and Earth Day at the same time? Yes, you can! You can be green while enjoying all the traditions. Remember, Passover includes cleaning out the old and starting fresh. Just by ridding your home of excess, that is, allowing yourself and your environment to ‘breathe’, you have done at least one small thing to ‘improve your world’.

When we look at Passover as a celebration of being “set free”, we can apply this toward being also “set free” from things and possessions that tend to ‘clog up’ our lives. Freedom is a great feeling, but comes with a responsibility to take care of who we are, where we live, and the world we leave behind. Today, we deal with the plagues of climate issues and the such, things that really affect us all.

So enjoy Passover, but don’t pass over the chance to go the extra step and look at who you are and where you live. It’s those little things that really add up to help create a better world. Don’t take for granted what you have been given! Giving back is the perspective of living green. And don’t forget: “The less you have, the less you have to clean up!”

1: Just a reminder…

2: A Few Of My Favorite Passover Things
(Sung to the tune of “These are a few of my favorite things”)

Cleaning and cooking and so many dishes
Out with the hametz, no pasta, no knishes
Fish that’s gefillted, horseradish that stings
These are a few of our passover things.

Matzoh and karpas and chopped up haroset
Shankbones and kiddish and yiddish neuroses
Tante who kvetches and uncle who sings
These are a few of our Passover things.

Motzi and maror and trouble with Pharoahs
Famines and locusts and slaves with wheelbarrows
Matzah balls floating and eggshell that cling
These are a few of our Passover things.

When the plagues strike
When the lice bite
When we’re feeling sad
We simply remember our Passover things
And then we don’t feel so bad.

3: And if you wanted a different song in your head for all of Passover, here you go!

5: Time to get your Passover groove on!

4: Just watch and learn!

6: It’s all about your point of view
A little boy once returned home from Hebrew school and his father asked, “what did you learn today?” He answered, “The Rabbi told us how Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt.”
“How?”
The boy said “Moses was a big strong man and he beat Pharaoh up. Then while he was down, he got all the people together and ran towards the sea. When he got there, he has the Corps of Engineers build a huge pontoon bridge. Once they got on the other side, they blew up the bridge while the Egyptians were trying to cross.”
The father was shocked. “Is that what the Rabbi taught you?”
The boy replied, “No. But you’d never believe the story he DID tell us!”

7: “A brush with the law and a burning bush”

8: Cleaning for Passover means you go ALL OUT!!

During the past five years, kosher cheeses have passed beyond the basic varieties. No longer are there just a few choices, but so much more now that there has been an increase in all the kinds available. After waiting for years for kosher cheese to be on par with nonkosher kinds, consumers now have plenty to choose from. And because of the surge of competition, kosher cheese sometimes gets more attention from customers who don’t even eat kosher.

Israel and Europe export many exotic flavors of cheeses, and this has added to the growth of choices now available. It seems as if lately this ‘cheese rivalry’ has created an explosion of the kinds of quality kosher cheese. Cheese makers are adding spices and flavors to their kosher cheese, and selling cheeses to all markets, not just kosher consumers alone. This would include vegetarians and upscale restaurants, looking for quality in taste and purity in the product.

The word is getting out that kosher cheese is gaining strength as a growing trend. People are getting educated, and are willing to pay a little more in order to get a lot more. In return, they get more choices and higher quality kosher cheese that they can enjoy. Kosher certified cheese is making a real run for popularity lately and the demand is rising. And cheese makers are meeting that demand now that they have found that selling kosher really sets their product apart.

The tears that flow cannot be subsided, and children wail in despair. Who knew that such a loss would destroy the very souls of our Generation? The loss, of course, is that Tam Tams, the perennial bite-sized matzo favorite for years upon years, will not be available for this Passover season. The producer of these tasty crackers, Manischewitz, is unable to produce this delectable variety of product.

Although many fans of the zesty munchable snack are grieving, others are giving up on what it means to enjoy this crispy treat. Most are just walking around the house in a somber daze, waiting for a sign that their favorite noshable joy just might wind up on shelves in the next few weeks. The root of this loss of flavor apparently comes down to production issues in the plant that makes them in New Jersey, specifically, a state of the art, mult-million dollar, delicious Tam Tam baking oven just didn’t come online in time to meet the seasonal demands.

People are learning to cope with the loss, but it will not be easy. What legacy will this non-enjoyment leave? It is unclear what enduring hopelessness the lovers of this morsel will endure in the next few months. How some will try to replace their Tam Tams is still yet undetermined, but still dissapointment prevails for those who would give anything for just one, small, yummy bite. The Tri-State will miss you this year, Tam Tams. See you next year. Until then, why not try another one of the many matzo crackers available at Kosher.com!

(Last chance to eat challah for a while )
With the Passover season rapidly approaching, the kosher world is thinking about food and preparation. Have a look at some of our favorite kosher videos online!

His first visit to a kosher McDonald’s

This kid just wants you to eat your kosher!

MATZA FACTORY!

Crank that Kosher Boy!

Feed Me Bubbe!

This guy insists that his food be kosher, no exceptions!

And one more just for fun: Whasssup? SHALOM!

Click here for a bonus cartoon straight from kosher.com!

America’s cultural and ethnic confusion is continuing - and it behooves the kosher consumer to be careful.

A popular restaurant and musical night spot in Virginia Beach, more than 30 years old, is called The Jewish Mother. Performers over the years have included Richie Havens, Dave Mason, Leon Russell, Dave Mathews, Hootie & The Blow Fish, and Bruce Hornsby.  It serves a Jewish-style (but decidedly unkosher) menu. A local southern Virgina jazz combo, Big Wide Grin, has just held a CD release performance at The Jewish Mother for its new Christmas album, Big Wide Holiday Grin.

Balducci’s, the gourmet delicatessen and grocery store in Greenwich Village, New York, was recently caught red-faced by a blogger who photographed a sign in the store advertising “Delicious for Chanukah” Boneless Spiral Ham. The tempest in a trafe pan spread through the mainstream media, and Balducci’s was caught quite unprepared to explain its hamhanded treatment of the holidays.

For truly kosher meat, better stick with Kosher.com.

It may not offer only kosher fare, but Zabar’s delicatessen in New York City’s Upper West Side played a significant role in recent decades in lifting the image of traditional Jewish food from the ordinary to the gourmet.

The reason we’re thinking about this now is because of the recent death of Murray Klein (z”l), a part-owner of Zabar’s, and the man most visible to the public in that store, now a New York institution.

In the days following his December 6 death at 84, the praise for Klein came pouring in from foodies worldwide.

Zabar’s was in part responsible for creating the notion that Jewish foods can also be gourmet, the trade newsletter Kosher Today said.

“That one little Yiddishe store had an effect on the way people ate all over America, and it was really because of him,” Steven Fass, an importer, told the New York Times.

Klein was born in a Jewish town in the Soviet Union near the Romanian border. His parents and five siblings all died in Nazi concentration camps, and he ended up in a Soviet labor camp. Klein spent time in a displaced persons camp in Italy before making it to the United States. He even worked in Europe for the Irgun, a Jewish guerrilla movement that helped smuggle arms to pre-state Palestine.

He joined Zabar’s as a stockman and worked with - and occasionally against - the Zabar family for the next 40 years, winding up as a co-owner of the store when he retired in 1994.

So, now, when you see upper-scale gourmet kosher restaurants such as Levana in New York or A Cow Jumped Over The Moon in Beverly Hills, as well as the gourmet kosher items here on Kosher.com, you can thank Murray Klein and the mavens at Zabar’s.

Annapolis may be known, at some future date, as the City of Peace - if the international conference currently under way there results in any significant progress in the Israeli-Palestinian problem. But it is never going to be known as the City of Kosher. In fact, a recent article by the Associated Press makes the point that Annapolis is better known as the City of Crab Cakes and Oysters than any kind of a source of kosher food.

“I have no idea what they’re going to eat,” Rabbi Ari J. Goldstein of Temple Beth Shalom, a Reform synagogue in Arnold, Md., told the AP. “They can either buy their stuff at Trader Joe’s and borrow someone’s kitchen … or they can just go vegetarian, which is what they’re probably going to do.” The proprietors of Chick and Ruth’s Delly (they can’t even seem to spell it correctly) concede they are “kosher-style” only (We note, of course, that “kosher style” is not a term generally permitted in advertising or promotional material, as it can be misleading.).

The story, surprisingly, offers no answer as to how the various delegations - both Israeli and Arab - are going to satisfy culinary and dietary needs. It quotes a White House chef talking about kashrut at the White House, but that famous residence is more than an hour from Annapolis.

The US Naval Academy has a lovely Jewish chapel for its small cadre of Jewish midshipmen (about 120 out of more than 4,000), faculty members, and community members who attend services at the Commodore Uriah P. Levy Center and Jewish Chapel. The Academy’s Jewish chaplain, Cmdr. Irv Elson, once told me that the Jewish middies who want to keep kosher at the Academy’s dining rooms, usually eat vegetarian food .

So, other than calling Kosher.com, what will the delegates do?