L ifestyle /C ulture
Thirty Years: A Match Made by the Exponent
F OOD
KERI WHITE | JE FOOD COLUMNIST
“IT WAS BASHERT!” said
Sherri Leon, co-proprietor of
Noshes by Sherri, describing
the journey to find her husband
Michael. While a student at pharmacy
school, Leon placed a personal
ad in the Jewish Exponent.

“My roommate and I just
did it for the heck of it — we
literally said, ‘2 SJFs seeking
2 SJMs.’ We got, like, 50
replies through the P.O. box
— remember this was 30-some
years ago — we went on a ton
of dates. Michael’s letter stood
out because he was a pharma-
cist, and he loved skiing and
tennis, just like me, but it took
months to meet just because of
scheduling conflicts.”
Sometime in those two
months, Leon went to her travel
agent’s house to pick up airline
tickets and destiny loomed.

“She was a yenta so, of course,
she asked me who I was dating.

I told her about the personal
ad thing and that there was
one guy who I hadn’t met yet
but seemed really promising,”
she said. “She asked his name,
I said, ‘Michael Leon’ and she
shrieked. She ran out of the
room, popped a video into her
VCR and showed me Michael.

He was the best man at her
nephew’s wedding.”
Leon liked what she saw, so
she called her future husband,
then later went on a date to
Bennigan’s. “It was an instant connec-
tion. We talked nonstop, ended
up closing the place down; they
asked us to leave,” she said. “We
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kept talking in the parking lot,
and we are still talking!”
Michael Leon proposed
sometime later.

“We were going skiing up
to Killington. He insisted on
stopping at a hardware store
on the way. I was, like, why?
We finally got there. It was a
foggy, gray day, and Michael
raced off the lift and whizzed
down the hill. I was yelling,
‘Where are you?’ He yelled to
come down, and when I got
there he had written in blue
contractor’s tape, ‘Sherri, will
you marry me?’ That’s why
he stopped at the hardware
store. It was beautiful from
day one.”
Thirty years, three kids
and two successful pharmacy
careers later, the two launched
a food business. Michael Leon
is retired now, but Sherri Leon
still works full time behind
the pharmacy counter. The
kids help with the business
— although they are all profes-
sionals in their own right.

The business grew out of a
social media quest. A woman
was searching for Jewish apple
cake for her brother’s birthday.

She was referred to Sherri
Leon, whose apple cake was
legendary. She made the cake,
was informed that the birthday
boy, a renowned foodie and
apple cake aficionado, deemed
it the best he’d ever had, and
pretty soon a business was born.

Their motto is “Love at first
bite.” “The first time we served up
a knish to a customer, he took
a bite and said, ‘This is love!’ so
it kind of stuck,” Michael Leon
said. “Everyone wants more,
they’re addictive. Our knishes
are lighter and smaller than
the typical ones you might see
in a deli, which, to me, can
sometimes be like lead.”
Many of the recipes are
passed down from the family.

Michael’s mother, “Bubbe,”
was known for the best matzah
balls, sponge cake and all sorts
of traditional Jewish fare. His
JEWISH EXPONENT
Sherri and Michael
Leon Photos by Rebecca and
Alexis Leon
grandmother lived in Israel,
and he fondly recalls enjoying
her poppy seed cookies on
the family’s annual visits. The
cookies are now on the menu,
along with a variety of other
sweet and savory items that vary
with the season and holidays.

The couple uses local
produce whenever possible and
even picks their own at nearby
orchards and farms during
harvest time.

Noshes by Sherri is a regular
fixture at many local farmers
markets and recently joined
the Sisterly Love Food Fair, a
consortium of women-owned
food businesses that banded
together to sell their wares
collectively around the region.

The baked goods also are avail-
able to order via their website
noshesbysherri.com. The following recipe is
Bubbe’s kugel and is still kept
on a 3-by-5 card in the metal
file card box with the other
recipe cards from their mothers
and grandmothers. This one
was typed by Bubbe herself on
her manual typewriter.

BUBBE’S NOODLE KUGEL
Serves 8-10
6 eggs
1 pound thin egg noodles
8 ounces Philadelphia
cream cheese
16 ounces Breakstone
cottage cheese
16 ounces Breakstone sour
cream 1 ½ cups of sugar
¼ cup cinnamon/sugar mix
Cook the noodles and drain
them. Combine the eggs, sugar,
sour cream, cottage cheese and
cream cheese in a mixer.

Add that into the noodles
and top it with the cinnamon
sugar mix.

Bake at 350 F for 1½ hours. l
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



L ifestyle /C ulture
Hand Warmers and Hamentaschen at Chabad
P URIM
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
I WAS AMONG a group of
about 30 people who gathered
for a Megillah reading on Feb.

25 at Chabad Young Philly at
Broad and Catharine streets.

Billed as “COVID-friendly
(unfriendly to the virus!),”
the evening did indeed bear
the indelible marks of the
pandemic: masks, hand
sanitizers, individually
wrapped food and spaced
seating. We were outside on
a breezy night under a nearly
full moon. Hot cider and hand
warmers abounded, which
created jugglers of us all, as
the desire to warm oneself
conflicted with the duty to
follow along as the Megillah
was read and to grogger away
when appropriate. Soft yellow
lights lined the backyard fence.

Aside from the story of
Chanukah, the Book of Esther
might be the Jewish story with
the greatest distance between the
text and its commentaries and
the version taught to children.

Ahasuerus, in my Jewish day
school education, was nothing
more than a bumbler who
loved two Jews, and then his
Jewish subjects; Vashti’s head
was simply separated from her
crown, rather than from her
entire body; and I can’t say I
recall too much discussion of
the Jews doing a preemptive
strike on the goyim in each of
the 127 provinces.

As I watched costumed
children preparing to make
all the sanctioned noise they
could, I wondered if the last
year had registered for them in
the way that approaching the
text of Esther as an adult did
for me. Were stories about the
competence and goodwill of
the adults in charge revealed to
be for children?
The Megillah reading was
done with great speed, and
the groggering was equally
competent; rare was the
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM premature grog. We heard
about Haman, the wicked son
of Hammedatha the Agagite
himself, and we heard about
the brave and beautiful Esther.

We joined voices to read a few
verses aloud together, and sang
together when the reading
was completed. We filed out
of the backyard slowly at the
conclusion, dropping off our
Esther texts for sanitation and
pocketing hamentaschen for
the road. We were even sent on
our way with mishloach manot,
each in a bright purple box.

The whole affair was less
than 40 minutes; there was
some cleaning to be done,
and two more shifts would be
coming to hear the Megillah
read that evening.

It feels good to write “we”
when “we” refers to a group
of people who were gathered
together in person. It’s not
The Megillah is read at Chabad Young Philly on Feb. 25.
something I’ve often had the
privilege to do in the last year. It’s
a “we” with depth because it is a
“we” with roots in the real world.

For an evening, “we” could think
of ourselves as a group of people
brought together by intention,
rather than as a herd to be
immunized, a voting bloc to be
courted, camps to be unified or
a data point in a spiking graph.

The writer Gabriel Winant
posed some scary questions in
an essay last December: Has the
last year of savagely rendered
isolation and violence revealed
that we do not, as Margaret
Thatcher once said, live in a
society? Has the pandemic
hastened the decline of our
mutual sense of responsibility?
Impossible to answer. But
at Chabad that night, I saw a
group of people who answered
Photo by Jesse Bernstein
in the negative, who seemed to
say, in one voice, that “society”
might not be something one
can opt in or out of. It might
just be an ecstatic state, one that
requires lots of people to do
small things together every day,
until the feeling is as real as the
hamentaschen in your hand. l
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
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• Half Roast Chicken (Classic, Herb Lemon Garlic, or Apricot Glazed)
• Whole Roast Turkey with Savory Matzo Stuffing (Carved $15)
• Carved Roast Turkey Breast (add $2)
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28.98 Per Person (min 10)
A La carte Items
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• Tender Roast Brisket of Beef au jus
• Char Grilled Prime Rib Roast (wild mushroom sauce)
• Herb Crusted Rack of Lamb (wild mushroom sauce)
• Stuffed Apricot Glazed Cornish Hens
• Fresh 8 oz. Alaskan Salmon Filet– marinated and poached or grilled
• Tender Roast Breast of Turkey
• Gefilte Fish with Horseradish
• Chicken Soup or Harvest Vegetable Soup
• Homemade Large Matzo Balls
• Chopped Chicken Liver Mold with Matza Crackers
• Homemade Kugel- Potato & Onion, Spinach & Garlic, or Sweet
• •
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