Tetzaveh / תצוה : SHMOT (EXODUS) Exodus 27:20-30:10 (link to the text on Sepharia)
To make a veggies and cream cheese Choshen, choose a variety of veggies you like. Because I was making it for this web site, I tried to stick with the colors of the actual jewels represented, though I could not figure out how to get a blue vegetable. Fruits would have been easier (though I don’t think blueberries are actually blue), but I was in a veggie mood.
So I chose a base of matza, and bought (or already had):
- cream cheese (it was multicolored cloth, so you could use hummus, sliced cheese, guacamole… whatever you want)
- multicolored carrots (more bang for your buck if you need several colors)
- mixed tiny tomatoes
- a red onion
- a green onion
- a few leaves of basil
- one black olive
- one red bell pepper (though a mini one would have been better).
- 4 O-shaped pieces of cereal (if you have a variety pack of mini peppers, I would just use rings of the yellow pepper instead)
I cut the matzo in quarters as that made the proportions right for what I was doing.
Spread your topping (cream cheese in my case), add toppings that roughly approximate the colors in the chart.
Add whatever you are using as “rings” on the corners.
Learn, eat, and bench! Yum!