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On the Chocolate Trail in Belize’s Jungle
Mark and I happily signed on for three distinct rainforest chocolate experiences within a 15 mile radius of our home base, the romantic Cotton Tree eco-lodge which is nestled among Mayan villages near the Caribbean in the Toledo District of Belize. Not only did Belize envelop us in an exotic rainforest experience, our tourism contributed
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A Chocolate Cake for October’s Tricks: Devil’s Food
Heading into October and its culmination in Halloween, I find myself hankering for Devil’s Food Cake, despite its initially derogatory name. Supposedly in 1690 Pilgrims traveled to Plymouth Rock via Amsterdam. They stayed in a house near the city’s biggest chocolate houses and called that chocolate “the Devil’s food.” Later, a chocolate cake, perhaps simply
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How About Some Mindful Chocolate Tasting?
These days comforting chocolate seems more necessary than usual. You could just grab a bunch and stuff yourself to help (maybe?) you feel better. Of course, you could add the chocolate in to your cookies, cakes, and ice creams. Or, you could taste chocolate with a mindfulness that focuses your attention solely on the chocolate,
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Mothers and Survival by Chocolate
On the Chocolate Trail, I found amazing stories of mothers and chocolate from World War II. Immigrant Lisa Hoffman reminisced about how her mother insured she had the skills, including chocolate making, to survive. “I carried inside of me all of the lessons my mother had worked so hard to get for me. I could make
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Chocolate Exhibit Hits the New York Times
I heard from Florence Fabricant at the New York Times that she would be including the “Semi{te} Sweet: On Jews and Chocolate” exhibit in her “Front Burner” column a couple of weeks prior to publication date. I rushed a few photos to her team. The fact checker followed up. And, voila! This item appeared on November
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Announcing Second Edition: On the Chocolate Trail
Media attention, popular culture, audience questions, growing consumer awareness, and changes in the chocolate world sparked the new material in this second edition of On the Chocolate Trail. I am happy to offer up a totally new chapter, “Gods in My Chocolate,” which explores twenty-first-century controversies about deities formed from chocolate. While chocolate generally
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That Time Jews Smuggled Chocolate to France — and a Recipe for Basque Chocolate Cake
Published July 13, 2016 at The Forward I happened into a chocolate shop, L’Atelier du Chocolat de Bayonne in Paris in 2006 with my husband. As we were tasting and browsing, I randomly picked up a company brochure. In my high school French, I slowly deciphered this astonishing statement: À Bayonne l’origine de la fabrication
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Bat Mitzvah Wants Fair Trade Israeli Chocolate
There may be many chocolate themed Bar and Bat Mitzvah parties. However, only one Bat Mitzvah girl has actually challenged the global Israeli food company Strauss Group. The Strauss Group includes the iconic, red packaged Elite brand chocolate. Ashira Abramowitz, daughter of Reform Rabbi, Susan Silverman and her husband, Yossi Abramowitz, petitioned the company to
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Chocolate Expo
Mark and I had a great time at the recent Chocolate Expo in the Meadowlands and look forward to participating in several more. It was a pleasure to be able to speak three times: about Heritage Chocolate and early chocolate making; about Holiday Chocolate particularly around Chanukah and Christmas customs; and, about Chocolate Travel, mostly
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Minding Our Chocolate
How does chocolate help you? For me a piece of chocolate here and there smooths transitions from one project to another, one task to the next. At a congregational visit after the Senior Rabbi blessed the Associate on her last Shabbat, someone said, “we need chocolate for our stress at her departure.” At other stops
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Anschluss Launches Bartons Passover Favorites 77 Years Ago
Bartons Chocolate Pops. Bartons Almond Kisses. Do you long for these and other iconic Passover favorites made by Bartons Chocolate? They exist because of the March 12, 1938 Nazi accession of Austria (Anschluss) when Stephen Klein fled Vienna for his life. A Nazi competitor had seized Klein’s chocolate company. He hurriedly left his two children
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Chocolate Signals
The Trappistine nun appeared to levitate as she welcomed us at the factory door with urgent questions about how to market chocolate for Father’s Day, about aspects of kosher certification and about increasing their Chanukah sales. Sister Christa-Maria, in her Bavarian tinged English, broke the Benedictine prohibition against speaking to give us a tour of
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Can’t Live Without Chocolate?
It seems a given that many of us depend on chocolate. Everywhere I speak about On the Chocolate Trail (Jewish Lights), people confess: “I can’t live without it.” And they want reassurance that the popular headlines about chocolate’s health advantages are true. Whether my body temperature slowly melts a mouthful, or, I am chomping
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Smiley Chocolate
We hit the mother lode. This chocolate factory came to us from Columbia, unlike the others we were fortunate to trek to in Belgium, England, France, Israel, Mexico, Spain, and Switzerland. To be precise to the David Zwirner gallery near the High Line in Chelsea. Oscar Murillo’s performance art installation, A Mercantile Novel, mashes up
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Saluting Military Chocolate
Memorial Day recalls the tangible and serious sacrifices made by members of the US military. Chocolate has played a part in that here, as well as in Israel and Britain. When I came across these stories as I was researching On the Chocolate Trail, I was surprised at how important chocolate was for both
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Think Chocolate in Preparation for Passover’s Discussions and Eating
Several publications picked up my pieces about chocolate and Passover recently — Huffington Post, Jewish Journal and Jewish Telegraphic Agency — and I share them here, along with A Haggadah for a Socially Responsible Chocolate Seder and related rabbinic texts from responsa literature: A Haggadah for a Socially Responsible Chocolate Seder (free download!) This Haggadah
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