Our Yachad program, "Food For Thought," continues.
Yachad (the word means "together") is a group of special needs young adults and high school volunteers who meet once a week for Jewish themed activities.
It's a National organization with local chapters, and Sarah Taub has been this chapter's director for 25 years. Once a month, for the past 12 years, Sarah has brought the group here for inter-generational programming.
Our theme for this year is "Food for Thought," where we discuss the upcoming Torah portion for the next time they will be here, and create a "recipe" based on that portion. The recipe is more like a list of ingredients, and those ingredients are not necessarily based on any foods literally mentioned in the portion. They are based on a theme or an idea found in the portion.
(This is my daughter Rachel, an excellent baker and artist. She volunteered to decorate our food for this program, an essential element in this month's recipe, as you'll see.)
December’s Torah portion was the end of the Joseph story. The theme that emerged was the quality of something being hidden. Joseph’s identity is hidden from his brothers; Joseph hides a golden cup in Benjamin’s sack.
We talked about foods that have a “hidden” quality to them. Eggrolls and sushi, for instance, are wrapped foods, hiding some ingredients within. Carrot cake and zucchini muffins are sweet, dessert-like foods that “hide” unexpected savory vegetables in the batter. The “recipe” that we came up with was “Joseph’s Many Colored Sushi Cake,” and the mandatory ingredients were rice, zucchini, carrots, coffee and sprinkles.
The chefs came up with a cupcake recipe using the first four ingredients, and Rachel and Marla decorated the cakes using sprinkles, frosting and candy to mimic the look of sushi.
Here is the finished product.
Here are some other moment from the evening:
Here is January's recipe:
And this is Breezy (the blonde on the left), one of the best dogs I know. Breezy is a therapy dog and comes to almost every Yachad program.
Can we get a little privacy please?
