Exclusively for JWA, Paola Gavin shares the perfect autumn recipe for sweet pumpkin coils from her cookbook, Hazana: Jewish Vegetarian Cooking.

In this recipe, I’ve mixed espresso into a dairy Ricotta Fritter recipe to blend the caffeine sometimes needed for the all-night studying with the traditional Shavuot practice of eating a lot of dairy.

Chatting with Marilynn and Sheila, it struck me how often the word “nurture” and “nourish” came up in our conversation. The Brass Sisters certainly recognize the importance of nurturing others, through food, compassion, and acquired wisdom. I myself felt nourished—by the delicious cake they served me and by their warm, funny stories.

I offer a nutritious, delicious dinner recipe to stave off the Passover madness. It is easily made parve, so you can have it with your meat or dairy meals. It works great for large or small seder gatherings, and with vegetarians and meat-eaters alike. Kuku is an Iranian/Persian egg dish that I would describe as frittata-like.

Celebrating Purim involves listening to the reading of the scroll of Esther and donating to charity. It also, crucially, involves eating hamentaschen. These recipes, inspired by my favorite fillings as a child, are a combination of sweet and savory, cutting the often overly-sweet jam and chocolate fillings with a little bit more depth of flavor.

In honor of a vital, but less well-known, woman taking charge, I’ll be teaching you how to make a dairy dessert. Specifically, a warm and delicious coffee cake to share with your friends and family.

Stuffed foods are traditional for Sukkot, and represent a time of plenty. This immediately made me want to tackle a stuffed pepper situation. Stuffed peppers are great because it allows you to basically put together all your favorite vegetables in unusually fancy packaging.

It’s been a tough year, and 5777 perhaps didn’t bring with it all the promise and renewal we thought it would. I hope that, in this new year, we all have opportunities for positive change and growth. May we also have the strength and opportunity to create change in the world at large.

JWA’s food writer, Lisa Yelsey, has been cooking and writing for JWA for almost a year! In celebration of her delicious recipes, her dog, Cassie, and teaching us how to bake and watch TV, we asked Lisa how she got her start in food writing, how to update a traditional recipe for modern palates, and what she does when a recipe isn’t turning out quite right.

I am not that into hot weather but love taking the summer as a time to hike without having to worry about ice, leave the house without having to strategically layer, and wear Tevas.

Summer is a great time to eat a lot of light, cooler meals. Here is a recipe that incorporates roasted vegetables and a tahini-based dressing.

At the Jewish Women’s Archive we believe that good food and good stories will always bring us together. When both the food and the stories are provided by a culinary Jewish superstar like Joan Nathan, forming these kinds of connections is easy.

I have been a vegetarian for about seven years now, and one of the only foods I regret giving up is good matzoh ball soup. My mom has made it for holidays my whole life, and I miss it. Nothing’s better than eating matzoh ball soup, loaded with chicken and vegetables, and sitting with your family during the holidays.

Recently, instead of lying on the floor feeling impending doom, I’ve been trying to do positive things, one of which is baking challah. Here’s a recipe that has cheered me up, and I hope will cheer you, too––or at least give you something to do while you watch the horrible/amazing new CW drama Riverdale and wonder when Betty and Veronica will get together.

Many American Jews are surprised to discover that donuts—specifically, jelly donuts—are a traditional Hanukkah food. Eating donuts at Hanukkah dates back several centuries in Europe, and is associated with the holiday for the same reason latkes are—foods fried in oil are symbolic of the Hanukkah miracle of a small amount of oil lasting for eight days. Jelly donuts, or sufganiyot, as they’re called in Hebrew, are known today as an Israeli treat (the Labor Federation in then-Palestine declared them the “official” food of Hanukkah in the 1920s), and Americans have happily adopted the custom. Below, JWA food writer Lisa Yelsey shares her own recipe for sufganiyot:

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope that you are able to enjoy the holiday, but if Thanksgiving is a stressful holiday for you, I hope you are at least able to enjoy some good food. In pursuit of that goal––I present Sweet and Savory Challah Pull-Apart Rolls!