Cafe Liz

This is a simple tomato-based pasta sauce with wine, spinach and pine nuts. We tend to have open bottles of wine around, since we never finish them. One word of caution regarding the tomatoes: Since the sauce is based on them, they need to be ripe and sweet; otherwise the sauce will be lacking. Fortunately, tomatoes are just starting to come into season.

When I discovered the Thai House‘s recipe for pad thai, I felt like I was discovering the dish anew — with a sauce of only soy sauce and sugar, this recipe was amazingly simple, produced way better results than any other pad thai I had ever made in the past, and tasted great. In fact, the pad thai I was making at home was so good that I didn’t even bother to order the dish on my first few days [...]

On the advice of friends, we are now the proud owners of eight massive heads of garlic, stems still attached. Apparently this is garlic season, so now is the time to stock up for the year. There are several reasons to do so, our friends told us — the garlic that we usually buy, which comes neatly packed in little plastic nets, is grown in China and processed with chemicals. Now, I couldn’t confirm that, but it turns out that [...]

There are lots of gorgeous recipes for potstickers online. The problem? Most are filled with pork, or shrimp, or a combination thereof. There’ll be none of that here. I was inspired to make these dumplings after viewing some beautiful potsticker photos, and was inspired to create some fillings based on the wonderful assortment of vegetables in our fridge. More of my vegan recipes. I filled half with a mushroom-ginger filling, and the other half with a garlicky mix of greens [...]

In honor of St. Patrick’s day, apparently there’s been a debate raging about soda bread. The conclusion is that once you start adding things beyond flour, buttermilk and baking soda, it’s not traditionally Irish. Well, that’s fine with me. I added zaatar and sun-dried tomatoes to mine, and I make no claims of Irish authenticity. This is the Levant, after all. Soda bread has a major advantage — it’s quick and easy. I wanted bread for breakfast, and this took [...]

This beet salad was inspired by a very enjoyable dish we had at Mitbahon, a cute little restaurant behind the Carmel Market. I do believe our friends call it “the best-tasting beets ever.” Needless to say, I liked it enough to try to make something similar at home. The Mitbahon version was seasoned with bay leaves and allspice, but for some reason, allspice is one of the few spices I don’t actually have, so I went with cloves and peppercorns [...]

I learned how to make majadera from Naifeh, one of my roommates when I lived in Haifa. Majadera is a relatively simple dish — it has very few ingredients, which happen to combine to make a whole protein. Majadera is prepared in stages — first you fry the onions until they’re nearly burnt. This is what gives the dish its flavor. Then you cook the lentils until they’re soft. Finally, you add the rice, which absorbs the rest of the [...]

A while ago, while we were eating out at a restaurant that shall remain unnamed, we ordered a soup that was listed on the menu as carrot soup with ginger, cilantro, coconut and peanuts. What we got was carrots pureed with instant soup powder, topped with a token peanut and a cilantro leaf. This was disappointing not only because we’d paid 30-plus shekels for a bowl of baby food, but also because the combination of ingredients promised by the menu [...]