Cafe Liz

Restaurant review: Lunch at Bat Shlomo’s Schwartzman dairy

Every so often, us city dwellers get a craving for a little bit of country, and go scouring the countryside for a place that meets our bucolic idyll.

One such place is the Schwartzman family dairy on Moshav Bat Shlomo, a few kilometers north of Zichron Yaakov. The dairy sits in an 100-year-old stone house on South Bat Shlomo’s only street (one street!). You walk beneath the canopy of trees and enter an unassuming yard full of bric-a-brac, clay pots, Hebron glass and a chicken coop. There you’ll find a small store, and a little seating area for the “restaurant.” Massive clusters of garlic hang everywhere.

As soon as we entered the store, we were bombarded with little slivers of cheese — taste the sfatit, taste the aged goat cheese, here’s a scoop of labaneh and one of yogurt. After all, you’re probably there for the cheese, because this is a dairy, after all, and cheese is the main thing on the restaurant menu. Continue reading Restaurant review: Lunch at Bat Shlomo’s Schwartzman dairy…

Orna & Ella’s sweet potato pancakes

I guess I lack holiday spirit. It’s Hanukkah, but I haven’t been able to get in the mood for grease. After making six types of latkes last year, and frying them in more than enough oil to keep a hanukkiyah burning for eight days, I went a different route this year — potato pancakes that don’t have much in common with the Hanukkah staple, beyond the name.

These sweet potato pancakes are the signature dish of Orna & Ella, a fabulous establishment on Sheinken that has been producing creative, quality dishes since 1992. This recipe can be found all over the Web in Hebrew, and is also featured in their cookbook.

Basically, it’s mashed-up sweet potatoes mixed with flour and fried in butter. There are no eggs, so it’s the butter that helps the pancakes brown and solidify somewhat, although they’ll always be soft and creamy in the center. Continue reading Orna & Ella’s sweet potato pancakes…

Yemenite zhug

Here I am, making zhug, even though I’ve never really been a big fan. Not liking something has never kept me from trying to make it myself.

Plus, I find something intrinsically interesting about making condiments. Things like mustard and mayonnaise, they’re usually considered ingredients in their own right, something you get ready-made. But that doesn’t mean you need to take them as a given; they, too, can be made.

Zhug (סחוג), also written skhug or schug, is a Yemenite condiment, one you usually find topping falafel or hummus, or smeared in sandwiches. None of these are things I regularly eat, but I’m loving my zhug as a red-hot, super quick seasoning for orange soups. Continue reading Yemenite zhug…

Noodles with doodles

These swirly, patterned ribbons would look quite nice hung on my wall. Were they not made of pasta dough, that is.

Back story: We are now the proud new owners of a pasta maker. I know everyone says you can make perfectly good pasta by hand, too, but frankly, there's no comparison. We've never been able to roll our pasta thin enough. Plus, the machine is extremely useful when it comes to kneading.

Once you have a machine to do your rolling, kneading and cutting, the options are pretty endless. I whipped up a few different kinds of dough, including a fuchsia-colored beet dough and some whole wheat. These made for some excellent combinations.

Getting the scribbled pattern effect that I achieved is quite easy -- easier than making tidy stripes. Basically, I made thin spaghetti out of the beet dough, let it dry a bit, and then pressed it randomly into the neutral-colored whole wheat dough. Voila, instant art, with a major wow! factor. Continue reading Noodles with doodles...