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This month is New Voices magazine’s Radio Issue. (Check below for free subscription info.) In the “Best Jewish Podcasts” article is an amazing little bubbe who’s grandson podcasts her cooking to the world…just adorable…
Bubbe, of Feed Me Bubbe
In a shining example of nerddom gone right, sweet grandson Avram hosts a brilliant and wholesome series on his bubbe’s cooking. An irregularly published video podcast, the show features the charming and hilarious Bubbe making classic Ashkenazi comfort food: kasha varnishkes, borsht, tzimmes, kugel, and the rest. The recipes are simple to follow. There is also a Yiddish word of the day, spoken in Bubbe’s Boston accent.
“If I can be everybody’s bubbe, that’s wonderful,” says Bubbe.
Whether you grew up eating handmade matzoh balls at your own bubbe’s table or you’ve only heard tales from your Ashkenazi friends, Feed Me Bubbe is a funny, charming, and surprisingly well-made video podcast that might just inspire you to cook your own shabbes meal. Or to at least call your grandma.
New Voices magazine is the only independent Jewish student magazine written by and for Jewish collegestudents. Subscribe yourself or your college-aged kinderlach for free by emailing here with as many full names and addresses as you want. And like I said, it’s free.
Article Title:Podcast: Feed Me Bubbe
posted by The East Side Food Geek
In honor of Hannukah, I should put you on to my very favorite video podcast: Feed Me Bubbe. It’s a home made cooking show, where a Jewish grandmother shows you how to make all sorts of great food.
The day started out at 9:30 am with a pretty free-wheeling discussion let by Chris Brogan..
the topic – “Future Visions of Internet TV”
Dan Dubno – who’s been the tech genius behind much of what CBS has done in the past years around tech – is now out on his own. He’s running a company called Blowing Things Up. So I think Dan wanted to blow up the conversation a bit (in a good way). He got in to a bit of thing about the amount of ‘crap’ on the web and the need for ‘quality’ and ‘premium’ content.
I sat quielty for second or two – then, decided to wade in. I proclaimed that everyone in the hall would be successful in their video on the web endeavors… and that made Dan even crazyier (*grin*). Colin Decker from Yahoo jumped in and defended curation and the need to give users the tools to find the best content to meet their needs. But then, just as i was sure that I was going to have to challage Dan to a wrestling match to calm the crowd’s growing chants “fight! fight! fight!” Fred McIntyre was in the ring. He and Dan went three rounds – with Fred ending with a great big comment about Magnify and how on the web, quality is defined by its context and by pages like the ones created by Magnify.net. Whew! That was quite a melee. Fun though. Blake Lewin, who’s been at Turner for 13 years and has had 17 bosses – was smart enough to stay on the sidelines. All in all – it was a great way to start the day – and I still think that the next 5 years are so explosive in web video that we’ll be looking a back at today like it was the world before fire, or the wheel, or loin cloths. Which is to say – its early days.
Then, after toweling off, it was down to the floor to hang out with Ari and Tamar and mingle with the booth crowd. More goodness ensued. There was a steady stream of interesting folks…
Among them, celebrity chef Bayla Scher(http://feedmebubbe-2.magnify.net/). It was Bubbe from “Feed Me Bubbe.com” the most fabulous Jewish Grandma Chef on the planet. She came by – talked a lot about how amazing the web has been in connecting her to people who she feels like she’s cooking for. Really, for a Jewish Grandmother to be able to cook for the world must be a very wonderful feeling -since cooking is love. And Bubbe and her wonderful and entrepreneurial grandson Avrom Honig.
Overall, great day. Great to see friends like Mike Hudak from Blip.tv, Jesse Lawrence from IAC, Amit Shafrir from Network2, The whole gang from Feedroom (Bart, G, Matt, and Frank), Michael Smolen, the founder of DotSub, and Mike Hirshland of Polaris. I do love Boston, even if it is totally crazed with World Series Champ Fever
Article Title: The Ever-Expanding Blogosphere
Written by Ginger Haycox
It’s funny how I came upon this realization – it was through my treadmill. Okay, not literally through my treadmill, but because I was ready for my daily tread on it and had pretty much exhausted everything I wanted to listen to on my iPod. So I snapped on the TV for something to watch while spending an hour walking nowhere. News being what it is today, I decided I couldn’t walk fast enough to get away from anything they were airing and quickly switched to the next channel. As it happened, the show was Daily Café on Retirement Living TV. I didn’t even know this channel existed, I’m ashamed to say.
They were talking about keeping elderly parents or grandparents vital and active once they moved into retirement.
This day they had a wonderful grandmother cooking up something in what was obviously her own kitchen, so I just had to watch more. As it turned out, it was a podcast done by Bubbe’s grandson Avrom and featured her at home in her kitchen cooking kosher. Feed Me, Bubbe. What fun! This was followed by various celebrities who related their stories of getting their older family members active on the computer.
For most of the people past 65, just the thought of buying a new computer gives them hives. But to actually start something like a blog or to join a message board or chat room was, to quote them, way too hard to do. “Something for young people, but not them.” They had learned how to bank online and shop online – why not enter the world of blogging? Why were they intimidated by this aspect of computer use? Have we perpetuated those feelings?
So I took it upon myself to seek out some of the more adventuresome post-65-year-olds who had leaped into the fray so to speak, and was amazed at just how many there are. And how damn good they are too! No longer is blogging a world completely dominated by gossip mongers or people with axes to grind. We are now joined by people of experience. People who aren’t drawing from books to talk about what happened 50 years ago, but instead were actually there when it happened and lived it. Blogs like Welcome to Katalusis by Virginia Bergman, a wonderful site filled with warmth and insight.
To further my enjoyment of these focused blogs, they hadn’t yet become splogs. By that I mean so loaded down with ads and click-me banners that you can no longer find the blog itself right away. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that making pin money from blogs is a bad idea. But when the ads take up more of the blog space than the writing does, it’s no longer a blog; it’s mainstream media with some token commentary. I actually visited one site where the entire day’s post was a plea for readers to click on the ads there!
Then too, there are the social sites such as MySpace and Twitter which are further eroding the sense of community that blogs originally fostered. These “social media sites” look more like newspaper inserts for Wal-Mart, Sears or Kohl’s. Further, as bloggers work toward that professional blog status, we lose that whole essence of blogging that attracted us “amateurs and personal journalists” in the first place. Seeing these sites, is it any wonder the storytelling people and people with histories among us shy away from blogging?
I so welcome the day when we can expand back to that. I wish I still had a grandmother to get hooked. I know she would have embraced the whole concept and been the best blogger this side of 70.
So far, Honig and Chalutz have commissioned Honig’s adorable grandmother – Bayla Scher, who prefers to go simply byBubbe (the Yiddish word for Grandmother) – to host her own Jewish cooking show, Feed Me Bubbe.
As any good Jew knows, the best home cooking comes from your grandmother, and since most of them never write down their recipes, the only way to obtain these little treasures is to get your Bubbe to show you how to make the meals herself. Feed Me Bubbe does just that, with a “wholesome, family-oriented” show designed to entertain while teaching the joys of Jewish cooking.
Earlier today, I came across Feed Me Bubbe, a collection of podcasts on Jewish cooking. I enjoyed watching their stuff, and I’m absolutely certain that all concerned with the production mean to faithfully represent their culinary tradition. Further, when Bubbe enthuses about the flavor of her preparation, I know that she and her brood have taken great enjoyment from her cooking. I feel I’ve found a kindred spirit when I hear Bubbe talk about the joy of passing along her traditions, of seeing her way of life enjoyed, learned and appreciated by young people and their even younger children.
So far so good. But then I run into this – the food I saw Bubbe prepare did not seem traditional to me. Am I right? Does this make her wrong? What do these questions even mean?
What is the essential meaning of traditional cooking?
If one of your elders does things a certain way, if your family has done it thus for many years – how can this not be tradition? To you of course it is. And for Bubbe’s family, I am certain the question of authenticity has not been an issue.
But still, it might be the case that some such family tradition is demonstrably not representative of the broader cultural heritage from which it nominally springs. With a bit of culinary archeology, it might be possible to definitively pin down where things diverged and so on.
Is the distinction between a family tradition and the essential underlying tradition that forms the shared basis for myriad family variations important? To me it is. Does this mean that Bubbe should be enjoined from passing her traditions along? Certainly not – the more the merrier. But still – I’m troubled.
I admit, I’m grasping for the right formulation here. How about this – there’s fundamentally two kinds of information available on food traditions – Anecdotal info such as Bubbe’s (or anyone else’s recipe); and Researched info (for lack of a better term) which codifies that which one must know to properly understand the entire spectrum of individual variations. Hmm – getting pretty thick.
How ’bout an example – Feed a food-savvy man a Peking Duck and he’s had a good meal. Take that same man on a walk through China Town (for a month or so) where he can see, smell and taste 100 different Peking Ducks side by side – and you might end up with an expert on Peking Duck. The important part of the difference for this discussion is not expertise – it’s the capacity to understand the relative importance of the many individual pieces of information contained in a recipe.
And so, perhaps finally that’s what I think distinguishes tradition from practice – it is that essence of what people do – The part which is important.
In Big Night, I think Primo says the tympano has “all the most important things in the world inside”.
I must have been experiencing early onset Alzheimer’s while I was writing the last post, as I forgot to include two nifty cooking sites featuring videos of grandmas whipping up their specialties. No longer with any living grandparents, I think these recipe documentaries are fantastic ideas.
What’s Cooking Grandma? has videos of grandmas from around the world sharing their special recipes. Film your grandma and contribute!
Feed Me Bubbe is a site where one boy documents his Jewish grandmother as she oye veh’s her way around the kitchen with kosher recipes.
Article TItle: YouTube Passes Along Tradition – or “Feed Me Bubbe”
Article By: Catherine
In every culture, since the days of campfires in cave dwellings, there has been a tradition of passing along knowledge by story telling. Along with the story telling might be a demonstration on how it is done. It is years of experience passed along by elders and rich with wisdom.
I know that the master story teller in our family is my grandfather, who has farmed all his life. To this day, he still maintains a vegetable garden along the sunny side of his house. How he knows when to plant is not by what the text books, almanacs or weather forecasts say. He will tell you and show you that it is by the feel of a spade-full of dirt. He can tell when he has the bit of dug up garden soil in his hands. It is how it feels and smells. It is the warmth of the soil and how it crumbles between his fingers. And the proof of the method is a wonderful, productive vegetable garden – every year – without fail.
With today’s pace of life and family scattered across the country (and around the globe), often that story telling tradition falls by the wayside. To preserve some of that knowledge and wisdom enters YouTube:
“…These days, Bayla Scher, a grandmother from Worcester, Mass. — along with many more seniors — is making and posting videos. YouTube and similar Web sites are no longer just for the young and hip. The older and hip are joining in the fun, too. These days, Bayla Scher, a grandmother from Worcester, Mass. — along with many more seniors — is making and posting videos. YouTube and similar Web sites are no longer just for the young and hip. The older and hip are joining in the fun, too.”
Bubbe, of Feed Me Bubbe
Really, for a Jewish Grandmother to be able to cook for the world must be a very wonderful feeling -since cooking is love. And Bubbe and her wonderful and entrepreneurial grandson Avrom Honig.
