For Naomi Ross, her kitchen is her canvas.
She believes in inspired kosher cooking, infusing meaning into the everyday kitchen experience. A cooking instructor for the past eighteen years, Naomi has taught all ages and stages, developing innovative culinary curriculums, courses, and workshops for camps, schools, and community organizations. Naomi writes articles and web content connecting the fun of good cooking with Jewish inspiration. She is a regular contributor to Fleishigs magazine, Binah magazine, OU Jewish Action, and Kosher.com.” Her first cookbook, The Giving Table (Menucha Publishers), came out in the spring of 2023.
Photo Courtesy of: Dov Lenchevsky
We first met Naomi at De Gustibus Cooking School in New York City this past spring when she was promoting her first cookbook. I sat next to her older sister, who had just flown in from Israel to attend the launch. She beamed with immense pride as her sister took center stage at one of the most prestigious cooking schools in the world. Naomi has since become an ambassador for Prairie Street Co. and a friend. The conversation that follows is an abbreviation from our deep, intimate, heartfelt Zoom call we had on food, family, and faith.
Kendra: As we were plotting out the themes for the magazine, we noted that the August issue really needed to focus on the start of the high-holiday season: looking ahead to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, tips and hacks, menus and lists. And then I remembered an Instagram post you shared about getting organized for entertaining, I was like “let's ask Naomi how she prepares for the holiday season.”
Naomi Ross: There's so much! These holidays are a mix because you have the cooking piece that is intertwined with the meaning of the holiday a lot. And I don't believe it to be the right approach to separate the two.
Photo Courtesy of: Naomi Ross & Menucha Publishers
Kendra: Can you paint the picture of what Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur look like in your home?
Naomi Ross: There are dishes that are special for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that people only make for this season. The Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kipper menus are special to me because they open up the year to be pregnant with symbolism and meaning. The Talmud talks about symbolic foods that are nice to be eaten on Rosh Hashanah, it's an interesting tradition that we have. The Talmud says basically, you should eat this food because it sounds like this, and you should eat this food because it sounds like this—it’s suggestive with good omens.
For Rosh Hashanah I have a little more flexibility with the menu and dishes, but there are definitely some family recipes that need to make the table. I do a lot of entertaining in general, but certainly for the holidays, there's always family around the table—grandparents, aunts, uncles, you know, and sometimes friends that we will invite over—but it differs from meal to meal, just like it differs from year to year.
In terms of entertaining, nothing stays the same in people's lives, right? That's a universal concept that as we go through different stages of life what works for us and our families at one stage of life doesn't necessarily work for us at different stages of life.
And our entertaining styles change and our needs change in terms of what we're looking to gain from our holiday meals. So, I try to keep that in mind also.
Kendra: There are a lot of holidays in the beginning of the new year. How do you balance the cooking and entertaining with the celebrating and observing?
Naomi Ross: There’s a lot for somebody who cooks for and observes the holidays. There's a lot of food, there's a lot of meals, there's a lot of preparation involved—it becomes almost like a cooking marathon. I think for people who are used to cooking moderately it can be stressful, and it can be just demanding to organize all of the meals and the cooking needs.
So first and foremost, I’m thinking what can I do in advance? What can I freeze? What can I get a head start on to cut down on my own stress and make the experience more enjoyable for myself and my family?
I tell people all the time to make their menus and make them early so they can game plan. Double and triple recipes, cook in batches. This is quantity cooking—it’s a different kind of cooking. For example, in my book The Giving Table, I have “My Family’s Favorite Challah” recipe (page 306), which yields eight medium loaves. Now, not to scare you, but again, I had a lot of people coming through my doors last year I think I made a total of 48 Challahs to get through the month.
Ultimately, we should enjoy the process. Rosh Hashanah establishes where God fits in our lives for the coming year—it is a very introspective holiday. We should enjoy the hosting and the meals that we make and not feel like, ugh, it was such a hassle.
Photo Courtesy of: Baila Gluck
Kendra: What if I’m not a baker?
Naomi Ross: Not everybody has to bake so much. People are happy to buy their bakery items. I'm not judging, and I'm not telling anybody to work harder than they have to. You want to organize yourself and prioritize the dishes that are important to you. If you don't care baking, then go buy some challah. But if your brisket is really important to you because it's your grandmother's recipe and you want it on the table, well then focus on that and make that in advance and make two or three. It's not unusual for someone to come to my house at the beginning of September and see like six pans of brisket lined up because I want to batch cook and put it away.
Kendra: And what about Yom Kippur? I understand that is a different approach from Rosh Hashanah alltogether.
Naomi Ross: Yom Kippur is a fasting holiday, so not actually about food, however, Jews love to eat, so we make it about food! We can’t get away from being food-centric. We worry about what we’re going to eat before the fast and what we’re going to break the fast with.
That is a more untouchable menu for me because if people are fasting and I'm feeding people to prepare them for a fast, then yes, I want it to be festive, but more than anything, I want it to be something that will help them fast.
Fasting is a hard thing to do. I don't want serve anything too salty; I don't want to serve anything that's hard to digest.
You're going be standing in synagogue for a whole day and you want to be able to concentrate. You don't want to be bloated, and you don't want to be thirsty.
So, if I find what works, we stay with that. I've been making variations of my “Apricot-Citrus Chicken” (page 100) for years. It's very simple, but it's a nice fresh apricot sauce that you can make either with dried or fresh apricots, it digests well, it goes nicely over mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes are very filling, and you don't have to over salt them. And, as my mother used to say: “you want a stick-to-your-ribs meal.”
I usually will serve just like a matza ball soup or something. But the traditional food to serve before Yom Kippur, even though I don't actually do it, is kreplah. It’s a meat-filled dumpling and there's meaning in that tradition also because it's like, you know, a hidden decree.
Photo Courtesy of: Adobe Stock
Naomi Ross: When my kids were little, I wanted them to be very involved and I was looking for things to keep them busy and get them excited about the holiday. Each year I would pick out a project to do with them or, really, I would appoint someone else to do the project so I could cook.
One year I had my husband pick up discs and tea light holders from a craft store. The kids then superglued the candle holders to the discs, painted them, and wrote peoples name on them. These were then set at the table as place settings that were actually personalized honey dishes! That served two purposes, especially with little kids: no more double dipping in the honey and now people can choose their own variety of specialty honey as something to taste new.
Kendra: What a great and sweet idea!
Naomi Ross: It should be a sweet new year, right?
Kendra: As the cook and entertainer, how do you keep the dishes you prepare exciting for you? Well, exciting without being overwhelming.
Naomi Ross: The essence of the Rosh Hashanah meals is newness. I like to try and incorporate that into my meals. There’s a concept of having a new fruit and we make a blessing for new things on the second night. What I try to do specifically for Rosh Hashanah, I like to try to incorporate the symbolic foods that are mentioned in the Talmud into the menu.
I wrote a piece for a kosher magazine about 10 years ago, on doing all small plates, or tapas, that incorporate the different symbolic foods. I would do a whole spread. And I still do this. I change it up a bit, but instead of doing one appetizer or a soup course on the first night of Rosh Hashanah, what my family does is we have a large first course of lots of little tapas with the different symbolic foods.
Photo Courtesy of: Naomi Ross and Menucha Publishers
Kendra: Oh I would give anything to be a guest at your table, Naomi! Any final words of wisdom to both new and veteran hosts?
Naomi Ross: There's no sin in picking simple dishes. But strategy, some kind of organization is helpful. And I think the other thing is the balance between being ambitious and wanting things to look beautiful. We started our conversation with know what your goal is. The goal is to enjoy. It's about enjoying the holiday; to celebrate the holiday. Rosh Hashanah specifically is a show of optimism. It's a show of positivity that, you know, here you have what could be a very solemn and even maybe a somber day, but that's not, that's not the Jewish way to approach the holiday. We're singing, we're happy, we're positive and we are engendering optimism with the use of this kind of accustom of saying, I don't know what's going to come in the coming year, but it's going to be a sweet year. And I have faith that God's going to make it a good year for us.
Featured Photo Courtesy of: Baila Gluck