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health

Loving your veggies can lighten the seder

Faye Levy doesn\’t look like anyone who\’s ever had a problem with her weight. The prolific cookbook author stands at 4-foot-10, and weighs about 100 pounds.

But somewhere in the mid-1980s, just as she was working on \”Chocolate Sensations\” and \”Dessert Sensations,\” she realized that testing those recipes, on top of six years at cooking school in Paris — and following every enticing smell into street markets and cafes — had added a lot of weight to her tiny frame.

Semper Fiber

Too-frequent weigh-ins can sabotage any diet efforts, because a woman\’s weight is a mysterious, jumpy, undependable thing that does not follow any known laws of nature. Over-weighing would lead to stress. Stress would slow down my metabolism, which was already prone to sleeping in late.

Nonverbal Baby Talk a Sign of the Times

Rather than waiting for her son to express himself verbally, Rabbi Debra Orenstein, like many Southland parents, decided to enhance Emmet\’s language skills by taking baby sign-language classes. Teaching sign-language to preverbal hearing babies is one of the fastest-growing parenting trends in North America.

Pantry Gets a New Home to Help Hungry

SOVA\’s clients include the elderly, low-wage earners, the recently or long-time unemployed, and those suffering from serious illness or coping with physical or mental disabilities. SOVA provides them and their family members with a monthly allotment of healthy foods — including fruits, vegetables and high protein items — that last about four days, with more available for those who are homeless or in crisis.

You Are What You Eat

I am a vegetarian. I know there was a big controversy brewing over kosher meat, but I\’m not sure what the Jewish position

on vegetarianism is. I suppose as long as the vegetables are pulled from the ground in a quick and humane manner, no one can object too strenuously to it. I know God created animals, but I can\’t imagine He\’d be offended if I didn\’t eat them. I\’d hate to think of God pouting in His room saying, between sobs, \”I worked so hard on that lamb and Nemetz doesn\’t even touch it!\”

Is Tomato Sauce a Vegetable?

\”You shall not eat anything abhorrent,\” the Torah (Deuteronomy 14:3) tells us. And while the Torah is referring to camels, rabbits, badgers and pigs, I would today include foods that that are high in fat and sugar and low in nutritional value. Foods that have been injected with hormones and antibiotics or treated with pesticides. Foods with a shelf life longer than the average life span.

A Pass-SOVA Tradition

Helping the needy is what SOVA (Hebrew for \”eat and be satisfied\”) has been doing since 1983, when Santa Monica deli owner Hy Altman and wife, Zucky, created the nonprofit organization.

Mother Knows Best

My mother is 85. But she doesn\’t look a day over 70. She takes no prescription drugs, no hormones; her memory is razor sharp.

In the Soup

My parents visited a year ago while I recuperated from lung cancer surgery and they developed a division of labor.My father would do odd jobs around the house. My mother would feed me.
This was a good plan in theory, but in reality, it had loopholes. My father\’s tasks were well-defined: fix a fence, change a light bulb. But my mother struggled. What is it exactly her middle-aged daughter with upper-middle-class tastes liked to eat? The fact is that both of us had long since stopped cooking most of our meals, taking our nourishment from restaurants and take-out. Nevertheless, there persisted in her the belief that when a child is sick, only homemade foods will do. Familiar, nourishing, Jewish foods.

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Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.