Cafe Liz

Spot the impostor: It’s not a plant, it’s a cake. It only looks like a plant. (OK, a fake plant. But still.) I got this recipe from my mom, who’s been playing it for laughs since I was a child. This is my second year making it myself (for a different crowd each time, of course), and it gets a good response, even once the “dirt” cover is broken and people start digging into the cake. There’s just something about [...]

This cheesecake has a fabulous, tangy flavor, thanks to the passion fruit, orange and lemon. It also almost ended in complete and total disaster due to my impatience. It’s been quite a while since I’ve made a cheesecake — about 51 weeks, right around last year’s Shavuot, to be precise — and I kind of forgot the importance of letting the cheesecake take its dear sweet time to cool down. In my haste, I removed the baking ring a few [...]

This recipe made half a dozen grown Spanish men swoon. It’s another recipe I learned from my time in Madrid, in Sra. Pilar’s kitchen. Summer was at its peak, the days were regularly 40 degrees Celsius, and she’d keep a big, glass bowl of cool gazpacho in the fridge. We’d put a few ladles in a bowl and eat it on the oilcloth-covered table, with a handful of crunchy mini-breadsticks. Simple food. The key to good gazpacho is in the [...]

Now is the season to pick grape leaves. Not that I have access to a grapevine; but plenty of other people do, it seems. One of them apparently dumped a pile of fresh leaves next to the scales at some stall buried deep in the Carmel market this past weekend. Now, stuffed grape leaves take a lot of time to prepare, and I didn’t really think I’d have that much time this week, but what can I say? I was [...]

These waffles are light and fruity, probably because they contain nearly half a kilo of fruit. This is a good way to take advantage of Spring’s bounty with a decadent breakfast. I’m still going through my bucket of loquats, which are sweet and ripe. Peaches are definitely coming into season, because two weeks in a row we’ve come home from the market with little specimens that turned out to be sweet and juicy. I blended the two fruits together to [...]

The weather is beautiful, and the asparagus stalks at the market are looking like the fresh, young shoots that they are. Simply beautiful. I could take a bunch of asparagus and put it in a vase in my living room, but then I'd have a vaseful of asparagus in my living room. But you get the idea. In any case, asparagus this nice demands to be accompanied by other fine ingredients. When I decided I wanted to eat it with [...]

It’s well past kumquat season here, but I’ve been saving a few lonely specimens in my fridge for a rainy sunny day. The problem is that unlike fine wine, fresh fruit doesn’t always cooperate when you try to “save” it. As far as these kumquats and I were concerned, the time was now or never. I’d been planning to turn the winter’s last kumquats into a citrusy glaze to serve atop golden brown potatoes, and that’s just what I did. [...]