Cooking for 50 every week? Chabad wives are up to the task

Miriam Ferris’ groceries cost about $300 a week — not including the fish and chicken she buys from the kosher butcher. The list includes such items as “20 lbs. of potatoes,” “2 bags of string beans” and “3 cases of eggs.”

And believe it or not, this isn’t her Passover shopping. Though if you attend a normal Shabbat dinner at her house, you might think you are there for a Passover seder.

Three tables are set together end-to-end. Close to 30 people are crammed into a room. Plates and plates of hot food are served to grateful guests, some of whom who dropped in without even a moment’s notice.

And you thought preparing for a Passover seder was difficult. Try doing this every week.

The wife of Berkeley’s Chabad rabbi feeds a husband and 10 children three times a day. On Shabbat she feeds between 20 and 50 guests for the Friday night and Saturday afternoon meal.

Now imagine this: It is Thursday night and you know you have a bunch of guests coming over tomorrow night for dinner. You don’t know their names, their ages or their eating preferences. Maybe some will be vegetarians. Maybe some of your guests will hate eggplant. Or be allergic to peanuts. You don’t even know how many will show up. It could be 20 people. It could be 50. But you have to be ready when your loving spouse rolls in the door.

Enough to give you a nervous breakdown? Have a sudden desire to consult the MSDS to find out the lowest published toxic dose of Valium? Now imagine doing this every week.

Welcome to the life of a Chabad rebbetzin (rabbi’s wife) who feeds the hungry Jewish masses week after week — not just at Passover.

Sitting in her whistle-clean kitchen in the swank Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco, Leah Potash doesn’t seem to be showing the strain. Scents of brownies baking waft through the air. The bespectacled 26-year-old mother of four sips tea and smiles as she reflects on her work.

“People are always asking me how I do it. I guess it really is a lot,” she says. “For the amount that I enjoy it, it doesn’t seem as much to me as it seems to other people. When you love something, it doesn’t feel as if you are carrying the burden the whole time.”

But the petite rebbetzin and rabbi’s daughter sure has plenty to carry. She buys flour in 50-pound bags and it lasts her three weeks. A 10-pound bag of sugar may last a couple of months. But a 20-pound bag of potatoes will only last a week. She has kosher chickens shipped up monthly from Los Angeles by the case.

Ferris also never knows how many people she is feeding until they walk in the door. How does she do it?

“You gotta roll with the punches,” says Ferris. “And you just have to cook.”

Her secret (besides hard work)? “I follow the science of freezerology,” she says with a laugh.

The rebbetzin always has prepared food in the freezer that can be taken out and defrosted if need be. She keeps kosher deli meats in the freezer, and canned foods — such as gefilte fish — that can be opened and served in a pinch.

And in 24 years of serving as the rebbetzin of the Chabad House in Berkeley, only once did she have to break into the cholent — the traditional food eaten on Shabbat afternoon — on a Friday night.

Cooking for such a crowd in a domestic — as opposed to professional — kitchen does pose some challenges. In fact, Potash has been known to wash some of her larger pots in the bathtub because they won’t fit in the kitchen sink.

And of course there have been some snafus. Like the time when Ferris burned a casserole. Her solution? She cut off the burned portion and called it “Smoked Romanian Surprise.” No one was the wiser.

Potash has known some snafus of her own. Like the time she and her husband, Rabbi Gedalia Potash, found that the freezer storing the ice cream for their Shavuot ice cream party had been left ajar and the ice cream melted to soup. “We just poured it into the cones and gave it to the kids in bowls,” she says. “What could we do?”

Another time, Potash and her husband were up to the wee hours of the night in their apartment dwelling “banging pots and pans” in preparation for Passover. The next day the two were given a talking-to by their neighbors about the noise they had made.

Right after Passover the two brought over some home-baked challah and a bottle of wine. “We thought that would go over better than matzah,” Gedalia Potash jokes. “The challahs that Leah makes are so delicious it makes people turn religious overnight.”

Sharing the warmth of Jewish life is part and parcel of the Chabad way of life — in particular for rabbis and their wives who choose to spend their lives as emissaries. Their door is always open, and they really mean it when they say you are invited for Shabbat dinner.

Feeding dozens of hungry Jews week after week has become “second nature,” says Ferris. “It’s not such a big deal to me.”

“We chose this lifestyle,” Potash said. “We love it.”

Says Rabbi Yosef Levin of Chabad of Greater South Bay, “You are always invited. So when you call us to come for a Shabbat dinner, all you are doing is firming up the date.”

Miriam Ferris’ Potato Kugel

8 eggs
2 onions
15-18 potatoes
1/2 cup cooking oil
1 Tbs. sugar
salt and pepper to taste
Crack eggs in a large bowl. Grate onions and mix with eggs. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Heat oven to 400 degrees. Put oil in a baking pan and put in the oven. Grate potatoes (do not do this beforehand or the potatoes will turn gray). Take pan out of oven and add potatoes and egg mixture to the pan. It should sizzle, so be careful. Mix together. Sprinkle with sugar.
Bake at 450 degrees for 40-50 minutes. “It should be brown on top and sizzling all over the place,” Ferris says.

Miriam Ferris’ Roasted Vegetables

Amounts? “I always eyeball it”
Any combination of the following vegetables:
beets
baby carrots
zucchini
parsnips
turnips
olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
Slice all the vegetables and put them in a heavy baking pan. Add olive oil, pepper and salt to taste. Cook it in the oven on a “pretty high temperature” (400-425 degrees). Stir it after 15 minutes and then let it cook for another 15 minutes more.

Leah Potash’s Sweet Kugel

1 16 oz. bag of wide egg noodles
1 can crushed pineapple
1 cup sugar
2 tsp. vinegar
8 eggs
Boil and drain noodles. Rinse with cold water. Crack eggs in a large bowl. Mix all ingredients together.
Put everything into a 9”x13” greased pan and bake at 350 degrees for an hour.

Leah Potash’s Strawberry Mango Salad

Salad:
1 Romaine lettuce head
1 pint of strawberries, quartered
1 mango, diced

Dressing:
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup sugar