Cafe Liz

These green beans have no one dominant flavor. Rather, everything blends together — sherry, garlic, basil and Romano cheese. It simply tastes good. The beans have a special, wrinkly texture from being fried — not pan-fried, but really fried, in lots of oil. I was inspired by this recipe for Chinese-style green beans on Rasa Malaysia. Anyway, nothing Chinese here — freshly grated Romano cheese, which we bought on our last trip to Italy; a few spoonfuls of sherry from [...]

This is somewhat of a classic dish in these parts, and super-simple: Fresh tomatoes meet an interestingly shaped baladi eggplant, and all of the above are in season right now. You’ll find a version of this eggplant salad just about everywhere here, sometimes served cold, sometimes spicy, and frequently made with tomato paste instead of fresh tomatoes. You can find it at luncheon cafes, served with pita, alongside falafel, or, my favorite, with rice. (OK, my real favorite is homemade, [...]

This recipe really gives it all away at once — cherry coconut sorbet with amaretto. That’s what’s in it: cherries, coconut and amaretto. Oh, and a bit of sugar. It’s really that simple. I’ve been eying the beautiful cherries at the market for the past several weeks now. They’re not exactly the cheapest fruit, but fortunately the price has been coming down to 20-25 shekels a kilo, and I usually make the splurge. It’s well worth it, because the cherries [...]

The combination of sprouted lentils and herb-infused oil produces a dish with a rich, nutty taste. I was inspired by a very similar dish we had at a brunch in Zichron Yaakov.

This version of a caprese salad takes a trip around the Mediterranean: The classic Italian mozzarella and tomatoes, plus Middle Eastern seasonings — fried onions, sumac and cumin. I used cherry tomatoes (plum cherry tomatoes, to be precise), which tend to be sweeter than regular tomatoes, and thus work very well when tomatoes are the centerpiece of the dish. Sumac is a burgundy-colored spice with a light tangy flavor. Obviously, this spice is not the same plant as poison sumac [...]