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Sisterhood Kallah 2025 a Huge Success!

09/05/2025 08:43:57 AM

Sep5

By Betsy Abramson

This year’s Sisterhood Kallah was the best attended in recent years and possibly ever, thanks to the star power of our featured speaker, Erin Gleeson, the New York Times bestselling cookbook author and artist behind the lifestyle brand The Forest Feast. Our team of over 40 Sisterhood members served as program planners, cooks, set-up team, table captains, and welcome, registration, and book-signing assistants.

Kallah co-chairs Betsy Abramson and Jackie Judd planned a program about creativity that would appeal to women of all ages and help strengthen our community. Given Temple’s incredibly busy calendar, they landed on a Monday evening, May 5, for the program and were absolutely delighted when Erin graciously accepted their invitation to participate.

The Kallah team decided to go “Forest Feast” all the way. They worked with Erin to select recipes from each of Erin’s five cookbooks, set the serving tables with Erin’s unique, colorful tablecloths, and gathered serving dishes of various shapes, sizes, and colors to emulate Erin’s distinctive aesthetic. 

Many trips to Costco and Woodman’s later, three teams of cooks (plus the home cooks who prepared the desserts) put together an amazing spread of many of Erin’s signature recipes. Upon seeing the finished results, Erin commented, “I’ve never seen so much of my food in one place!” Well, it wasn’t there for long as the 110+ guests, ranging in age from 5 (Winnie Prosnit) to 101 (Ginny Graf) quickly devoured the beautiful, healthy, and delectable food.

And then the main event occurred: veteran national journalist (and TBE Sisterhood member) Jackie Judd put her professional skills to work. Following a pre-meeting with Erin and hours of research, Jackie skillfully interviewed Erin in an engaging and conversational style, providing all present with the opportunity to get to know Erin better—from her beginnings as a food photographer in New York City to her life in a cabin in the woods of northern California. The latter inspired Erin to create the Forest Feast blog, which led to her first book, which led to five more, including her latest, The Watercolor Feast, which provides encouragement and step-by-step instructions for painting fresh fruit,  vegetables and flowers. We learned about Erin’s childhood, early interest in art and vegetarianism, how she balances her life as a wife and mother of three with her insatiable need to create, how she believes anyone and everyone can create art. She even shared how you can replace Rosh Hashanah brisket with a baked squash, thereby updating tradition with a plant-based, yet still sliceable, main dish. Clearly Erin is succeeding in her mission to inspire people to gather and feel creative through art, food and community.

In closing, Erin shared that she thinks The Forest Feast run is at its end and she is exploring where her creativity takes her next. We at Temple Beth El will have a front-row seat to where that may be. In the meantime, the dozens and dozens of cookbooks Erin signed at Kallah’s closing are finding good homes in TBE Sisterhood members’ homes and her veggie-centric, simple recipes are making their way onto Temple Beth El and our home tables. 

Jackie and Betsy were thrilled with the community’s response to Kallah 2025 and are hopeful that the gracious and talented Erin Gleeson enjoyed sharing her story with us as much as we all loved learning about her—and that she will continue to share her talents with us all. We look forward with great anticipation to Sisterhood Watercolor Night with Erin at TBE on October 29, an opportunity for you to unleash your inner artist. Learn more and register now! 

September 5, 2025 12 Elul 5785