How to Cook Jewish Foods With Children
Cooking Jewish food with children is a wonderful way to teach them about their own heritage or to expose any kids to the foods and traditions of a different culture. The fun of cooking---and eating---these foods can be enhanced by weaving in little explanations of the significance of each dish. Holiday meals offer a multitude of choices for delicious, easy-to-prepare foods. Some of these holidays include the Jewish New Year, Hanukkah, Passover, Purim and the Sabbath. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
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Let children prepare for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, by dipping apple slices in honey to represent hopes for a sweet new year. Then extend that tradition into the baking of a honey cake. These cakes are usually extremely sweet and require no icing. Even the youngest child can participate in mixing together all the ingredients; older children might enjoy slicing and serving the honey cake, topping each slice with a dollop of whipped cream.
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Tell children to learn the story of Hanukkah, the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days as the Maccabees reclaimed the Temple in Jerusalem. To celebrate that victory of religious freedom, it is traditional to cook potato pancakes, called latkes, in oil. Even younger children can help peel potatoes; however, reserve the job of slicing or chopping the potatoes before they are grated for older kids. Using a food processor to grate the potatoes makes that process go faster. After that point, any age child can participate in mixing up the potato pancake batter. As an adult fries up the pancakes in oil, kids can spoon out the applesauce often served as an accompaniment. See source below for a potato pancake recipe.
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Make charoset together. The Passover story, how Jews escaped from slavery under the Pharaoh of Egypt, is a dramatic one, and the holiday offers many opportunities for kids to participate in the cooking that takes place in preparation for the holiday. Children particularly enjoy preparing and eating the charoset, a mixture intended to symbolize the mortar used by the Jews as they slaved for the Pharaoh. Simply provide kids with thin unpeeled apple slices; they can use a butter knife to chop these into tiny pieces. The apple pieces are then mixed with finely chopped walnuts, cinnamon, a little sugar, and wine or grape juice. Participants at the Passover seder will eat the charoset with matzoh, a cracker-like bread representative of the unleavened bread the Jews took with them when they left Egypt in their great hurry.
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Teach children how to make filled cookies called Hamantashen. Children traditionally get the chance to boo the villain when the Purim story is told. When the evil Haman decided he would kill the Jews, Queen Esther, under great peril, found a way to help stop him. When celebrating Purim, children enjoy eating the cookie called Hamantashen, or Haman's hat. Kids can get involved in preparing these cookies every step along the way, from mixing up the dough, to preparing the filling, and to "stuffing" the Hamantashen. They particularly enjoy folding the dough into three-cornered hat shapes. Adults should, of course, remove the hot Hamantashen from the cookie sheets and transfer them to baking racks to cool just enough so kids can snatch them up. Baking extra Hamantashen to pack into baskets and deliver to older people is a custom in some communities. See source below in Resources for a simple recipe.
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Enjoy bread baking for the Jewish Sabbath with the creation of the challah, a braided egg bread. Children can certainly participate in the mixing together of all the ingredients. Because it involves using yeast, kids enjoy watching to see how the dough "grows." They also have fun braiding the loaves, particularly if an adult creates a large bread and they are given dough to make their own smaller versions, which they also eat themselves at the Sabbath meal. See recipe for challah below.
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Tips & Warnings
Give children the opportunity to repeat, by themselves, all the stories they learn that accompany the cooking of these foods. As they grow older, let them do as much of the cooking on their own as they are able.
