Sweet Recipes for a Sweet New Year!

Rebbetzin Rachel's [Sweet] Recipes...

In line with a “Sweeten All the Judgments” theme for all my Rosh Hashanah cooking I start the meal with a slightly honeyed version of standard dips for challah. Using the traditional round challah with raisins, “what goes around comes around…” we turn the feast into a prayer form asking, begging Hashem with every bite to please make it a sweet year for the whole world.


Sweet Techina

Mix 1 C sesame paste with ½ C water add 3 T honey, 2T lemon juice, ½ t ground cumin, ¼ t salt. Mix thorougly adding water if needed to get a smooth sour cream like consistency.






Sweet Guacamole
It almost sounds oxymoronic to have sweet guacamole, but try this it really works!
Scoop out the pulp of 3 ripe avocados, add 2 T lemon juice & 2 T honey & a pinch of salt.
That’s the base for each dip. Now you can get playful by adding chopped dates, or apricots, red grapes, nectarines etc., limited only by your imagination. This year I’ll probably add pomegranate seeds because we have a bumper crop of that jewel - like seven species specialty of Israel on our trees.
The chunks of fruit will make it bumpy and lumpy, like the spicy standard guacamole eaten with corn chips while cheering for a favorite football team, like my favorites the Denver Broncos. They lost the super bowl several times but never gave up! Their fans painted the streets of the “Mile High City” bright orange. They came back again and again until they won.

As Shlomo Hamelech says in Proverbs “Seven times the righteous fall and still get up.”
Let me know which combo is your winner.

Last leg of our teaching tour!

This will be the last blog post from our amazing month-long teaching tour. Last post I left off in Vancouver. It was our first time visiting this beautiful city surrounded by water everywhere and majestic mountains. After our wonderful program with Chabad we were invited back the next night to the home of Rabbi and Rebbetzin Bitton for dinner. During that visit he shared how he had been a good friend and learning partner of Rabbi Gavriel Holzberg who was murdered along with his pregnant wife Rivki in Mumbai India 4 years ago. His center had recently dedicated a sefer Torah to their memory. He told how the shock had reverberated throughout the world of Chabad, especially the young shlichim around the globe and how it took a long time to integrate the events. Last week I wrote of my great esteem for the work Chabad does all over the world, sometimes at great cost - but this evening raised my esteem to a whole new level.

We left Vancouver for Chicago and the next day drove to South Bend, Indiana with my sister and brother-in-laws. Their daughter, (our niece) lives there with her husband and baby daughter. We did a full shabbaton with Carlebach davening, communal meals, divrei Torah, classes, discussions and singing. Saturday night we were invited to an impromptu music jam and played late into the night. Sunday morning I spoke and played music at a brunch, where the topic was once again The Mystical Power of Music. All in all everyone was very receptive and welcoming, a perfect way to end our teaching on this tour.

Next stop - home and a new year!!! May we all be blessed with the best one yet.