New Year’s Menus to Help You Prepare Without Stress

While we have a very different type of New Year celebration on Rosh Hashana from the secular New Year, since it is primarily spent on prayer and reaffirming our belief in G-d as our King, however, we also celebrate, naturally, with food. Since food is an integral part of celebration for Jewish people, every holiday, be it the High Holiday of the New Year or any other in the Jewish calendar, we will have special items to commemorate it.

On Rosh Hashana, we pray for a sweet New Year and so we symbolize this by preparing foods that are sweet – honey cake is amongst the most famous of these but there are other traditions as well, including the special foods which start our year off with special blessings. There is a traditional list of these items as well as some fun ones that people have added on over the years.

Tradition calls for among other things, apples in honey, pomegranate which supposedly has 613 seeds to remind us of the 613 mitzvot which we must keep, as well as our merits being as plentiful as the pomegranate seeds and the head of a fish (or a lamb head if you are Sepharadi – my friend Paulette’s grandson Solomon delights in carrying the cooked lamb head around their table to freak out his siblings and unwary guests- yes, yes, they’ve gleefully sent me colored photos 🙂 ) and a whole bunch of other items. We also have a new fruit that hasn’t been eaten yet from the season of the New Year. I wait every year for dragonfruit which reminds me of an alien and when you cut into them they spill their red “blood” which is weirdly cool and fairly tasty or the carambola, star fruit which is also a special item mostly unavailable during the rest of the year.

Since Rosh Hashana is a two day affair, many cooks start to get nervous beforehand since you need to have four festive meals with special foods to delight the palates of your family and/or guests. Four meals is no mean feat and I have prepared a menu, using many of my recipes already on the blog to ease the harried and make the prep less stressful. Below, find meals for the holiday which we should all celebrate joyously.

For all the meals, I prepare round challas and that is a step by step instruction, except for how to make them round. There are the simplest one, tie in a knot, roll like a snail but if you want fancy ones, just Google videos with challa braiding etc. There are excellent ones out there.

Sweet Challah Recipe

Now I divided the menus up into dinner meals and lunch meals, and I made the lunch meals lighter. You can obviously mix and match and suit yourselves. I also tried to give a combo of quick and easy recipes alongside the slightly more complicated ones.

For the most part, festive meals can look gorgeous and like you slaved all day but actually are not complicated to prepare. Just know before you start, brisket and corned beef will take a good few hours in your oven. This is “passive” time since once you put the meat in the oven, you completely ignore it till it’s time to peek at it and make sure it’s properly done. There may be an additional 15 minutes here or there, take it into account.

The cakes I gave recipes for here are oil based, the cookies and rugelach are margarine based. When I prepare cookies and rugelach, I tend to double the dough and freeze the second half so it’ll be ready to roll (ha ha, literally) for the next holiday or Shabbat or whenever. Sorry, but I’m not including a honey cake recipe although I have a good one, since nobody in my family likes honey cake, I finally dropped in from my menu. C’est la vie, family trumps tradition.

Last but definitely not least, I give a first course for the first night, but the truth is, we generally skip to the soup since I have many items that I serve for the simanim or special foods and that becomes our first course (apple in honey, leek fritters, carrot tzimmes, stuffed dates, beets etc.). I will try to take a picture of the platter I present as the first course and add it to this post as an update assuming I have time before the holiday! Of course, you can add fresh salad to any and all menus, and most important, enjoy your Chag and your family/guests. Have a beautiful, sweet New Year.