LIZ: Tsimmes is a sweet Ashkenazi stew in which the ingredients vary depending on family origin and tradition. The dish is often eaten during the Jewish High Holidays to symbolically usher in a sweet new year. This sweet-and-savory chicken tsimmes is an easy dish with a built-in side. The juices of the chicken enhance the flavors of the carrots and prunes. It’s filling when paired with rice or kasha, and it’s colorful and complex enough to serve for the holidays.

SERVES 4

My grandpa Jake was a gifted storyteller in the spinner-of-tall-tales manner. So when he described the one time he ate ice cream as a boy—far superior to any frozen dessert you could buy in our huge suburban supermarket and so memorable he hadn't forgotten it in fifty years—I was, of course, skeptical.

After all, he also said the weather in the Old Country was better too—never that cold because it was remarkably “dry.” And we’re talking Minsk, Belarus.

photo taken by Rebecca Siegel, on March 2, 2009, CC licensing

(from Jewish Holiday Cooking: A Food Lover’s Treasury of Classics and Improvisations, by Jayne Cohen, available in print and e-book formats)

photo taken by Joshua Bousel, on September 8, 2010, CC licensing

For many people, Rosh Hashanah is the festival of apples. There are, of course, the newly ripened, crisp quarters dipped in honey to embody our wish for a sweet new year.

photo taken by Elana Amsterdam, on march 23, 2011, CC licensing

adapted from Jewish Holiday Cooking: A Food Lover's Treasury of Classics and Improvisations by Jayne Cohen (Wiley, 2008)

Yield: About 12 servings

For the Fish Balls

photo taken by Cara Faus, on September 1, 2010, CC licensing

If lox and cream cheese is Yiddish cuisine's answer to ham and eggs, isn't honey cake, lekach, its fruitcake avatar? Each is linked to a major religious holiday (honey cake at Rosh Hashanah, fruitcake at Christmas), and frequently given as gifts at those times.