A plant-forward Passover
Calgary-born chef Micah Siva celebrates modern Jewish cuisine
When Micah Siva was growing up in Calgary, her mom, Alyson Grobman, would invite over family, friends, friends' friends and anyone else who didn't have a place to go for Passover. Last year — in the small San Francisco apartment Siva shares with her husband, Joshua Siva, Buckwheat the sheepadoodle and, now, her four-month-old son, Ari — the chef and registered dietitian hosted three Passover Seders to take care of everyone.
Typically, the matriarch of the family facilitated the holiday meal, Siva says. At 32, away from home, she now does it. “I'm adopting people into my holiday table, even with the baby, and it's important for me to have people there. I'm adapting a lot of the dishes that mean so much to me and make me feel like I'm a part of my family in Calgary — and making them in a way that I want to eat them and I feel comfortable eating them.”
When her mom hosted Passover Seders for 30-plus people, she made traditional dishes from Norene Gilletz's The Pleasures of Your Food Processor. At her table, Siva serves plant-based versions of many of those dishes. She makes vegan “gefilte” cakes and “brisket,” both of which are in her third book and first cookbook, Nosh (The Collective Book Studio, 2024).
“I've turned into my own mother, essentially, is what's happened, but I made it vegetarian, which is scary,” says Siva, laughing.
Siva was born and raised in Calgary. In 2011, at 19, she moved to New York City to study plantbased cooking at the Natural Gourmet Institute (now part of the Institute of Culinary Education). After graduating, Siva set her sights on starting a company focused on fermented foods such as tempeh and pickled vegetables. With her student visa running out, she returned to Canada and got a bachelor of science in nutrition and dietetics from Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S.
Today, Siva specializes in Jewish cuisine “with a modern and plant-based twist,” which she started to pursue seriously in 2018. She and Joshua (who is her co-author on the children's counting book 1, 2, 3, Nosh with Me, The Collective Book Studio, 2023) were living in London, England, when her grandmother, Eva Epstein, died. “She's really the person who got me into cooking, and so many of my memories of her are of cooking with her.”
Unable to make it home to Calgary for the funeral, Siva found solace by making a vegan variation of her grandmother's kreplach.
“At that point, I realized the food connection that I'd been missing by not being able to experience all of the Jewish foods that I grew up with, and it was such a time of looking for community and comfort. That was a big push for me to start looking at Jewish food through a vegetarian lens — so I could continue and re-enter the world of Jewish food, essentially. Because before, growing up, I'd bring my own food to my grandmother's house or to holidays, but it was never like I was trying to take a Jewish dish and rethink it into being a vegetarian dish.”