Food: bridge between tradition and innovation

I love food. I love to bake and like to cook. I like how food makes me feel. Each of us has particular foods tied to events or emotions. Pulp-free orange juice mixed 50/50 with Sprite I drink when I'm sick. Macaroni and cheese I'll eat when I'm feeling particularly lonely. Egg mcmuffins bring me back to my childhood. Etc, etc. We all have a list.
As a people, we have a list too. Holidays demonstrate this excessively. Challah for shabbat. Latkes and sufganyiot for Channukah. Matza for Pesach. Apples and honey for Rosh HaShannah. Hamantashen for Purim. Etc, etc. Even our jokes recognize this: "Every holiday can be summed up as: they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat." Perhaps only our fasting days don't have food associated with them. Don't see too many items with "kosher for yom kippur" printed on them.
Modern Judaism has quite a challenge, how to live in a modern world and connect with an ancient one. We've been celebrating Pesach longer than the either of the two largest world religions have been around (Islam and Christian). And the matza tastes the same (just like the cardboard box it comes in).
There is something to be said for tradition, something big. But if all we have is tradition, then what do we contribute? How do we make it ours, how do we own it? Places like the liturgy or mitzvot are such volatile topics that they can be paralyzingly difficult to address or discuss. That's why I like food. I think the only fights erupted over food are food-fights.
Since it begins Monday night, Purim has been on my mind. And the representative food on Purim is Hamantashen. Confession time: I greatly dislike prune or poppy seed filling. They just don't aren't even palatable. I was making a few dozen today for the kids carnival at my synagogue tomorrow. My intent was to then make my cookies kid friendly (don't know too many kiddos who clamor for prunes). As might be obvious from previous postings, I love chocolate and therefore chose to use it. I made double-chocolate hamantashen. I used chocolate chips as the filling in some and then others got Hershey's caramel kisses. For slightly closer to traditional, I used regular dough and then grape jelly. Talk about kid-friendly. And darn tasty too. They are still served at Purim, they are still filled and folded three way to look like a hat, they are still recognizable as hamantashen, and yet...
Food is a good way to start bridging tradition with innovation.


And for those bakers interested, I also did a slightly more grown-up version. I took both the chocolate and regular doughs and kneaded them together. For the filling I used black cherry preserves and a few chocolate chips. Decadent and delicious.