How to Choose a Shabbat Menu

Shabbat is the religious celebration that occurs in traditional Jewish households on Friday evening, the day before the Sabbath is observed. The menu at these events is important if you want to observe a traditional Shabbat. The term kosher is the English word for food prepared according to Jewish law. These steps will help you make sure you have an appropriate Shabbat menu planned for your family.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Create a set of appropriate Shabbat menus in advance. You can work up the menu for 4 weeks at a time and then rotate through them to save planning time.
2. Consider the amount of time you'll have during the upcoming week to cook. Some recipes--such as roasted asparagus--are kosher and require very little in the way of preparation times, while other dishes for Shabbat may take much longer to prepare. Know your schedule and how much energy you are likely to have and plan accordingly.
3. Select kosher foods. Animals must be slaughtered in a certain way to be considered kosher, and pork in any form is not acceptable. Some recipes, such as challah bread and gefilte fish, are kosher because they are traditional Jewish fare. Other recipes can be modified to meet religious needs, but they are not written this way, so make sure that you read through each dish you plan to cook to guarantee compliance with religious dictates.
4. Purchase all of the ingredients during your weekly grocery run. Since Shabbat is a religious celebration in which you should enjoy your family's company, making sure that you have the appropriate ingredients on hand before Friday arrives will make your life easier.

Tips & Warnings

• Consider purchasing a kosher cookbook so that you will not need to worry about a recipe's acceptability as part of your Shabbat meal.
• In grocery stores, foods that are kosher often are labeled as such. The label may say "kosher" outright, or it may indicate the acceptability of the food according to a symbol recognizable to people in the Jewish community.
• Acceptable forms of meat--when slaughtered according to kashrut law--are deer, beef, goat and sheep. Fish, except catfish, is also acceptable but must be prepared in certain ways. Acceptable birds include chicken, turkey, duck and goose.
• Bake kosher birds like chicken and duck, prepare with a vegetable from a plant not more than three years old and some homemade bread, and you form the basis of a simple Kosher meal.