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Our Recipes have recently been featured in Mishpacha magazine, She’ah Tova Magazine, and on line at  Aish.com, Living Jewish,  The Jewish Woman and most recently on The Joy of Kosher.com

In the Joy of Kosher Kitchen

with The Complete Asian

Kosher Cookbook

Written by Tamar Genger on December 19th, 2010 

Shifrah Devorah Witt and Zipporah Malka Heller are the mother and daughter team that coauthored The Complete Asian Kosher Cookbook.  As they grew in religous observance and began following the laws of kashrut they were not willing to give up the chinese food and asian dishes they love.  The inspiration for this cookbook was born.

1  How do you explain the Jewish people’s love affair with Asian food?

Shifrah Devorah-You know the joke. The Jewish man and the Chinese man are talking and the Chinese man says, “My culture has been around for 2,000 years.” And the Jewish man says, “Well my culture has been around for 3,000 years.” And the Chinese man looks at the Jewish man and asks him, “So what did you guys eat for the first thousand years?” This joke describes my love affair with Asian cooking. My earliest memories of eating are in dark Chinese restaurants with my parents. I don’t know if that explains the Jewish love affair but it certainly explains ours.

2 When were you introduced to Asian cooking and what made you decide to write a cookbook?

Zipporah Malka– I’ve wanted to write an Asian cookbook for years but never got to it. After my grandson was born, I got this idea of streamlining our cooking and collected my favorite Asian recipes in binders, and this was how the idea was born. Plus there was nothing like this for the kosher cook.

Shifrah Devorah– I have been eating Chinese food for as long as I can remember. My mother loves to tell the story of her standing in the kitchen three weeks after my birth making Beef and Broccoli. I always thought she was a little crazy when she told me that story but when my son was three weeks old, I distinctly remember myself in the kitchen making Indonesian Chicken Wings, pg. 76, so I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

As for why write a cookbook, we felt like there were so many people who could use this book. At first it was just about organizing our lives and recipes, but after a while we realized this was something the Jewish world was really lacking. People come up to us all the time now and thank us for this book. They say they were waiting for something like this to come out forever.

3 What was it like working as mother and daughter in making this dream a reality?

Zipporah Malka-We learned a lot about our differences, our similarities, and ourselves. We learned what special talents each had. I’m a planner and researcher and SHIFRAH DEVORAH is a fast make-it- happen kind of person. Plus she’s been giving me advice on how to adjust my seasonings since she was ten years old.

Shifrah Devorah-It was very special and very real. We have very different skills and talents that thank G-d compliment each other. We are both strong woman so there was a lot of energy in the kitchen, and we used it to perfect each dish to the best of both of our abilities. I’m a gustatorian, and my mother is a visionary, a wonderful combination to create our book.

4 Where did you learn these recipes?

Zipporah Malka-Some of the recipes are my mother’s and some have been collected from various sources and friends over the years. Some were new creations based on what we loved and needed.

Shifrah Devorah-Many of the recipes are from the power of memory. We remembered eating certain dishes, the place, the people at the table, the conversation, the food, and then we went into the kitchen to recreate those recipes. We consulted our index cards, recipes we’d been working on for years, and some recipes like the Sukiyaki, Thai Fish Cakes, Chicken Satay, and Indian Curry were simply a matter of closing our eyes and remembering the first time we tasted those foods and then “patchkeying” in the kitchen until we got the flavors to translate from our memories to the table.

5 What advice do you have for the busy home cook?

Zipporah Malka-Be organized. Be prepared. Read the recipe through before you shop for the week so you have everything on hand. Take advantage of seasonal produce, like broccoli, Asian long beans, fresh litchis, and bok choy. Have everything chopped and measured before you try to start cooking. You want to sit down to a hot meal. Remember, Asian food is usually cooked quickly and everything should be crisp and hot.

Shifrah Devorah-Take it easy! Don’t make yourself crazy trying to get each dish perfect. Cooking is a sensory experience. It’s intuitive. So be gentle with yourself and allow yourself to experiment in the kitchen. If you don’t get something right, try it again. Don’t try new recipes when you are in a hurry or have important guests coming over. Choose recipes that don’t have too many steps. If you are busy, choose a few dishes to make, it does not have to be a six-course meal. Be realistic with your time and how much of it you really want to appropriate to the kitchen. My personal policy is restaurant quality food in as little time as possible. That’s one of the reasons we wrote the book. I had a six-month-old baby at home and didn’t want to sacrifice my love of amazing food because my life had just gotten a whole lot busier. The book was created in part for women like us who were busy but still wanted the meals they created to taste like they’d been in the kitchen for hours, when really it was only minutes.

6 Your cookbook is a grand tour through Asia, with stops in China, Japan, Thailand, India and more.  What is your favorite country’s cuisine and why?

Zipporah Malka– I love all of them. Creating the cookbook was especially gratifying because Shifrah Devorah was able to recreate Thai dishes such as Pad Thai, Thai fish cakes as well as Thai Iced Tea. I really missed them. So I guess I’d have to say Thai Fish Cakes.

Shifrah Devorah– I also love all of the cuisines we feature in the book. Favortie? How about my top favorites? Chinese, Thai, Japanese, and Filipino, if I have to choose. I’ll go with Chinese. I love the diversity of flavors and cooking methods in Chinese cooking. I also have to admit I love, love, love Chinese Noodles that we featured in the book.

7 Have you ever been to cooking school or had any formal culinary training?

Zipporah Malka-I took a Chinese Cooking class in the 70’s at the YMCA where I was working. But I am basically self-taught plus I’ve eaten more Chinese food in amazing restaurants then you can imagine and been cooking Chinese since I was eighteen.

Shifrah Devorah-I’d like to say I was trained by the best chefs of San Francisco and then continued my training in a local Jerusalem culinary institute. But translated into reality that means as a kid I used to love to watch the chefs in Chinese restaurants in San Francisco’s Chinatown. In the old days, bathrooms in restaurants were through the kitchen so I would purposely walk slower than necessary to glimpse what ever I could that was flying in the woks on the burners. I spent the next 10 years watching cooking shows on TV and fortified my training when I moved to Jerusalem in my mid-twenties at a local Asian restaurant by watching the chefs there.

8 What is your favorite recipe and why?

Zipporah Malka– I’d have to say the Thai Fish Cakes and Dipping Sauce and of course the Pad Thai. My mom’s is the Sweet and Sour Chicken.

Shifrah Devorah– It’s a toss up between Chicken Satay with Peanut Sauce and the Shanghai Chow Mein. Why? Nostalgia, of course. I created those dishes based on my memory from childhood but then in the process of re-creating them was blessed with new memories that now surrounds them. I love watching my little son trying to use chopsticks to eat his noodles.

9 Is there any ingredient that you have not been able to find with a kosher symbol?

Zipporah Malka– There is one ingredient and it is salted black beans. Impossible to make at home.

10  What was your most memorable cooking moment?

Zipporah Malka-When Shifrah Devorah prepared an entire CHINESE Shabbos for my ninety-year-old mother. She said if she could look forward to more meals like this she’d make it to 100.

Shifrah Devorah-There are lots and lots but one of the best was the night we were testing the Pot Stickers pg.16. I had intended to make a whole meal with the Pot Stickers to be served as an appetizer. After the first batch was ready, we had to sample them, which led from one pot sticker to another until the whole batch was gone. The rest of the meal was postponed till the next night because we were too full to keep eating.

Jewish Woman

	1 Comment Two Women, One Kitchen, One Vision Our Journey to Keeping Kosher by Shifra Devorah Witt   To tell the truth, keeping kosherwas the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around. Shabbatmade sense to me. It was about creating sacred space. Dressing modestly felt like the most powerful feminist statement I could make that my body was a private thing and by covering it appropriately I was in control of the way I was viewed. I felt empowered when I put on a skirt and a shirt that had a high neckline. It felt like an act of respecting myself. Keeping kosher just seemed erroneousBut keeping kosher just seemed erroneous. Growing up I had once been told that the kosher laws no longer applied because the USDA now made sure that cleanliness was observed in all of their slaughtering facilities. The information, I know now, had nothing to do with why we should keep kosher but at the time it made sense. I just didn’t get the point. I’ll never forget the day I took my first step toward really keeping kosher. My mom and myself had already begun to keep Shabbat and dress modestly but I, just fifteen at the time, was still refusing to get on board with the kosher thing. Genius that she is, my mom didn’t try to force me. She knew better than to give a teenager something to rebel against. We had an agreement; in the house we would keep kosher, out of the house I could do what I wanted. And then the day came, I asked my mom for money to go to a non-kosher restaurant, and she quietly turned to me and said, “You can eat wherever you want, but I am not paying for you to eat non-kosher food.” We had never discussed it before. In a moment everything shifted. I didn’t put up a fight, I must have been in shock, “Oh, o.k. ” I said and that was that. I got on board. I don’t know what switched inside of my head, but something changed inside of me. It wasn’t easy at first. I was so used to being able to buy food anywhere and more than that I really loved food. My fondest childhood memories were of my mom taking me for dim sum in San Francisco’s Chinatown. When I thought about the switch to keeping kosher that was one of the biggest issues. I loved good Asian food. I was raised on it. By age two I could eat with chopsticks by myself. By ten I was inventing Chinese recipes and making dinner for the family. But it wasn’t just the food I didn’t want to let go off, it was the times we used to shareBut it wasn’t just the food I didn’t want to let go off, it was the times we used to share, the memories we were so busy making in all of those Asian restaurants. I wasn’t ready for that part of my life to be over. On top of that I was a teenager living in Northern California where there was not only no kosher Chinese, there were very few kosher restaurants at all. At first I missed it. It wasn’t only the taste it was the nostalgia I had around the restaurants, around my favorite Chinese dishes. It was the memories my family had made at each little restaurant we used to frequent. But luckily new memories started to form. For starters, there were the six hour drives to LA where we used to stock up on kosher meat and dairy products. Keeping kosher changed everything about our lives in those years. I once had a craving for real Chinese food so bad that I insisted on jumping in the car and heading to LA just for dinner. My mom nixed the idea, but oh how I tried to convince her. We had to find another solution. So we started to create Asian masterpieces in our little northern California kitchen. My mother became a whiz at tofu, while I focused on the noodle dishes. Time passed and our life together shifted again. This time we found ourselves inJerusalem where there were lots of kosher Asian restaurants and for the time being we were happy. I got married, taught my husband about sushi, and one restaurant even served dim sum. We thought we were in the clear. But then the winds changed again and ThankG‑d I found myself with a beautiful baby boy with radar. Any restaurant, didn’t matter which one, the moment the food arrived at the table he started to cry. Me, a first time mother so embarrassed that people were spending their money to have a relaxing dinner with my baby crying in their ears, found it too stressful to go out to eat any more, even for Chinese. So my mother, brilliant as always, got an idea. We would start our own Café; it would be in the backyard, only seat our family, and we could cook as much kosher Asian food as possible. Taking her new self-appointed position as Café owner seriously she started on a menu and soon after that the first phase of our own real Asian cookbook was underway. Honestly I don’t know why we didn’t think of it sooner. We had eaten so much incredible Asian food through the years and cooked so much at this point we were pros. We started with the Chinese section of the book which lent itself to the Japanese, then I remembered how much I had loved Thai food as girl. Each recipe was attached to a memory, each memory created in joyWe started experimenting with recipes. Each recipe reminded me of the restaurant I had first eaten it in. I remembered, Beef Chow Fun from the time my mom took me out to lunch on my fifteenth birthday in Marin. I remembered chicken and beef Satay from a little place we used to stop at on the way home from Sonoma. Each recipe was attached to a memory, each memory created in joy. I realized that the recipes for me weren’t only about my love for Asian food they were about revisiting special times in my life. I still cherish the memories we formed together growing up but now we are making new memories. Together we have created our own Asian Kosher Cookbook, as two women trying to share one kitchen, and one vision. Like my son, who in a way inspired the project, when he started to ask for To-fu at meal time. Or the time I put our newest test batch of Pad Thai on the table and before we could sit down to try it he, at 13 months old, had his little hand in the middle of the plate and a second later before I could reach him stuffed a hand full of rice noodles into his mouth. All those years ago when we started keeping kosher one of the things that made it such a challenge was thinking I had to give up the foods I loved the most. What I didn’t realize was that I could take them with me. Living Jewish

The Complete Asian Kosher Cookbook

By: Miriam Metzinger

Keeping kosher doesn’t mean giving up favorite dishes, but innovating and transforming international recipes into exotic kosher creations. Shifra Devorah Witt and Zipporah Malka Heller, a mother-daughter cooking and writing team, put this principle into practice when they wrote The Complete Asian Kosher Cookbook.

This compact, elegant volume is a well-need improvement on the traditional bulky Asian cookbooks busy with detailed instructions and light on readily available ingredients or helpful photographs. The Kosher Asian Cookbook cuts through the verbiage and contains easy, clear instructions on how to prepare popular dishes from China, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Southeast Asia and India. Beautiful, full-color photographs guide the reader through familiar recipes in which non-kosher ingredients are replaced with beef, chicken, tofu and vegetarian versions.

Shifra Devorah and Tzipporah Malkah Heller’s love of Asian food has been a family tradition. Tzipporah Malka’s mother, known to all in Tzfat as “Bubby Heller” was famous in her native Petosky Michigan for her Sweet and Sour Chicken. Asian food was often a fast, fresh and easy dinner choice when Tzipporah Malka was working and raising her daughter, Shifra Devorah who invented the Chinese baked chicken recipe when she was only ten years old. Menachem Mendel, Shifra Devorah’s two year old son, enjoyed Pad Thai and sushi among his first foods and has already mastered the art of eating with chopsticks.

This is the second book written, by Shifra Devorah who is an instructor with an MFA in creative writing and is author of Inside Secrets to the Craft of Writing.” Putting together a cookbook is a unique experience from writing other books, not only because the kitchen is the venue for inspiration and many of the first “drafts” are edible, but also because “You define the creative process in measuring cups…you build something and take it apart so someone else can create it.”

The book is intended for novice and expert cooks alike; “You can make something and feel you are in a restaurant.” It answers the question ‘What do I make for Shabbos? What do I make for Yom Tov,” said Tzipporah Malkah.  “It fits into our value system. It’s healthy. It’s easy.”

The Complete Kosher Asian Cookbook is published by Targum Press and will be available in bookstores in the coming weeks. It can be ordered at www.asiankoshercookbook.com

To read the article from the journal go to:livingjewish.net/human…/the-complete-asian-kosher-cookbook/