Cafe Liz

Now that it’s getting cooler, lasagna is a great dish to serve guests: It’s a meal, in that it needs no side dishes, and most people enjoy it. After all, it’s rich and cheesy, so how couldn’t you? I’ve been making lasagna with a blue-cheese bechemel sauce, not tomato sauce. I got the initial recipe from the Barilla Web site, and tweaked it over the years. This year, I decided to add figs, in the name of the holiday. Figs [...]

Rosh Hashanah starts this Friday, and I’m hosting. Festive holiday meal! And I get to cook it all! Yay! (Well, aside from the dishes my guests are bringing.) My excitement could easily lead to way too much food, if I weren’t limited by a combination of time and resources. Needless to say, I’ve been spending the week dreaming about what I’m going to make. And, doing trial runs of potential desserts. In all honesty, jello isn’t my favorite dessert — [...]

Yes, really. I could just call it rice ice cream, but then you’d think I’m weird. If you think about it, rice ice cream is pretty much just cold rice pudding — the cooked rice takes on a chewier texture, and the dairy-based pudding forms a soft, creamy ice cream. After all, rice pudding contains all the ingredients you’d put into a basic vanilla ice cream, plus rice. I can’t take credit for this idea on my own.We encountered it [...]

Summertime means figs, and you can’t eat just one. That’s because you can’t buy just one. In fact, you can’t really buy less than a one-kilo bucket at a time. Well, there are worse plights in life. Figs are quite an attractive fruit, and can dress up any dish. I’ve been mixing them with all kinds of savory things, since I find them too sweet to eat on their own. My cheese guy got me to buy some Roquefort last [...]