BOSTON – Trading a traditional classroom for the kitchen, I am spending the final semester of my master’s program in a culinary rotation. Recently, my class visited the Boston University Hillel House where Rabbi Joseph Polak spoke about kosher practices and their impact on the food industry. Rabbi Polak stressed the importance of kosher consumers in the United States. Food manufacturers, he said, make decisions based on the number of Americans, Jewish or not, who purchase kosher foods. It was an idea I had never thought about before.

/”Passover by Design”

I have always loved matzah ball soup and have, when I was still eating gluten-rich products, enjoyed its different iterations: Broth with matzah balls only, broth with succulent pieces of chicken and onion and carrot and matzah balls, matzah balls made with a smidgen of club soda, etc.

In Gershwins’ “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers debated the pronunciation of a wide array of words, including “tomatoes”: “You like to-may-toes and I like to-mah-toes…”

NEW YORK (JTA) – Passover may be the mother of all kitchen holidays, but stay cool and don’t stress. Here are some of my favorite recipes.

Last year, 99 percent of what I made for Passover were not actually Passover recipes – they were kosher for Passover, but they didn’t require any major Passover ingredient tweaks. These recipes were developed with Passover in mind and have become staples in my year-round repertoire because they were easy and got the most oohs and ahhs.