Cafe Liz

This soup was a hit at our Thanksgiving dinner in Jerusalem. It’s a good way to prepare pumpkin left over from Halloween or Thanksgiving, but then again, it’s also a good excuse just to go out and buy pumpkin.

I started pickling olives quite by chance, when a friend at work brought in his surplus crop, and I found myself with half a kilo of bright green Syrian Souri olives. The results were amazing. Sadly, I think this has turned me into an olive snob, because I can’t eat the soggy things that show up alongside cafe sandwiches anymore.

OK, I admit that I consider any recipe that involves ketchup to be cheating, but the results here are so good, that you could say the ends justify the means. This recipe for sweet and sour tempeh takes its sauce from a recipe I learned in Thailand (yes, it turns out that Thai cooks use ketchup), while tempeh is a fermented soybean product from Indonesia with a rich, almost meaty (or mushroomy) taste. It’s a nice alternative to tofu, and [...]

Here’s another simple dish — pan-fried green beans with soy sauce and sesame seeds. I used super-fresh green beans we’d bought earlier that day at the market, and seared them on high heat so they’d be slightly blistered on the outside but still crispy and bright green (when they’re so fresh, you don’t want to overcook them).

This is my favorite kind of Thai curry. Luckily, it’s not too complicated — most of the taste comes from the basil-rich green curry paste. You can think of it as a kind of Thai pesto — in Thailand they pound the spices together by hand, but here you can just buy the curry paste ready-made, in a jar. And since I’m no longer in Thailand, I had to adapt the dish to the vegetables available locally (bottom right photo).

This recipe is inspired by the ali oli potato tapas they serve in Spain. I made this potato salad to bring to a party, and the real reason I chose this dish is that it’s completely homemade (and looks it), but takes only 10-15 minutes to make. I used about 1 kilo of potatoes (unpeeled), 1/2 cup mayonnaise (would have used more, but I ran out), 3 fat garlic cloves, a splash of white wine vinegar (say, a teaspoon or [...]

Tonight I made sushi. More California than Japan, I filled half the rolls with cucumber, avocado, and two kinds of chives. The other half were filled with cucumber, chives and torn oyster mushrooms doused with mirin and soy sauce, and this combination turned out to be quite good. In fact, the marinated mushrooms provided enough flavor that these rolls didn’t have to be dipped in soy sauce afterward — just like in Japan!