Well, first things first, about 2 hours after yesterday’s post I considered deleting and halting the #kosher5779 experiment because — what was I thinking?! So, that’s where I am today, day 1.
But after a deep breath, I realized I’m legitimately interested in what this process will be like. I’m curious about what I will learn and explore along the journey, but I’m also interested to see if I will exist differently in my kitchen and experience cooking, or myself, in a new way. I’m used to having other self-imposed constraints on my diet/cooking (like when I’m plant-based), but will this be different? I just don’t know and I’m curious enough to move forward (until my next “what am I thinking” moment).
So what’s the kosher status of my kitchen right now?
- I don’t cook shellfish or pork at home. Not that I haven’t ever, but I don’t currently as of probably 8 years ago.
- I don’t cook or serve milk and meat together however we do use the same pans, utensils, plates, cutlery, etc to prepare and eat both milk and meat.
- We keep kosher for Passover, but don’t do a full chametz (bread, etc) clean out pre-passover.
- That’s it.
A few weeks ago I did a cursory google search and came up with this article on Chabad.org. While I don’t generally look to Chabad as my authority about anything, I jived with the first line in the article, “I’m beginning to consider keeping a kosher home, but the leap seems too daunting to do all at once.” The suggestion was to divide the task into 3 phases, the first of which is to only buy kosher meat and stop eating milk and meat together.
I can deal with that as a start! We don’t eat that much meat as it is, but for the meat we do buy (and eat) and eat at home, 90% is from Grow & Behold (the other 10% of meat I buy from the Forest Hills Greenmarket or from Whole Foods). I choose Grow & Behold for many reasons and honestly, until now the least of all was that it was kosher! The meat and chicken happens to be delicious, it’s a small, local, family-run company (started by people I know), they sell pasture-raised, local, humane meat and they deliver right to my apartment (more about them here, and if you want 15% off your first order use this code). But, did I say it was delicious? Because it is, and this only buying kosher meat thing isn’t going to be hard at all with a freezer already stocked with Grow & Behold meat. And since I already don’t eat milk and meat together at home: voila, phase 1 complete!
OK, I feel accomplished! Reminder, I’m going sloooooowwwww. So for today, I took out some G&B chicken to defrost in the fridge for shabbat and I’ll figure out what’s next later.
