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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/32088/full/32088/kosher-food-bland-not-for-this-daly-city-caterer/ <br /><br /> <b>Kosher food bland? Not for this Daly City caterer</b> <br /> Friday, April 6, 2007 | by <p>joe eskenazi </p> <br /><br /><p>It is delicacies like spotted dick, toad-in-the-hole and fried Mars bars that have given British cuisine its reputation as a cuisine only slightly more palatable than fasting. <br /><br /> And, as shocking as it may be to nostalgic j. readers, dishes such as kreplach, borscht and minced liver glistening with schmaltz have earned kosher gastronomic fare a near-Britannic standing in many consumers’ eyes. <br /><br /> But kosher food doesn’t have to be “flavorless, overcooked and dry,” says Daly City kosher caterer Tanya Nunes, the latest addition to a small but growing coterie of Bay Area kosher caterers. <br /><br /> Nunes’ path from growing up in an Azorian Portuguese Catholic family in Walnut Creek to catering strictly kosher events at Orthodox synagogues is as distinctive as her chicken with leek-Dijon mustard sauce. <br /><br /> Nunes, whose family ran a butcher shop for decades, got a “crash course in Judaism” — and kosher cooking— when she worked as a nanny for a large Orthodox family in Philadelphia. <br /><br /> It was a shock to “leave the lights and ovens on Fridays and Saturdays — and I had to remember to please place a bar across the thing on the refrigerator so the light wouldn’t come on.<br /><br /> “Growing up in Northern California with so many ethnic influences, I was taking the kosher thing to a level they hadn’t really seen,” Nunes said. “I’d do Mexican dairy. [The family] bought better dairy dishes because I made so many nice dairy meals.” <br /><br /> Nunes eventually left the family for culinary school, then landed her first job at the prestigious Le Bec-Fin restaurant in Philadelphia under a master chef with a temper hotter than a jalapeno. Working under the exacting (but calm) supervision of the Vaad Hakashrus of Northern California is now a relative vacation. <br /><br /> Even though Nunes is not Jewish, she’s now an old hand at kosher. She was shocked during a recent shopping expedition at a supermarket chain (that will remain nameless) that the kosher for Passover section was next to the store bakery. <br /><br /> She met her supervisor, Rabbi Ben-Tzion Welton, when she catered his son’s bar mitzvah. She doesn’t hold it against him that he nixed her tray of 200 parve brownies. <br /><br /> “It was OU parve, but this one particular factory also produced dairy mixes,” she recalled. <br /><br /> “I said, ‘What will people eat for dessert?’ He said ‘Don’t worry. That’s the way it goes sometimes.’” <br /><br /> For more information see Nunes’ Web site, <a href="http://www.cheftanya.com">www.cheftanya.com</a>.</p> <p> </p>

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