Currently browsing

July 2011

Cold stuffed squash with bulgur and melon salad

This is a stuffed vegetable for the summer, cool and refreshing. The season’s best produce meld into a light green salad of melon, mint and wheat bulgur, while the baked squash shells add another layer of flavor and turn the salad into finger food.

Salad with roasted squash and lemon-rosewater dressing

Rosewater adds a fresh, fragrant hint to this salad, and it turns out to be a lovely complement for roasted squash, too. Who would have known? The Moroccans, apparently. Chef Kamal Albaz at Al Maghreb makes a lovely salad of thin slivers of cucumber seasoned with rosewater. The menu simply …

Summer pasta with purslane and sfatit cheese

This pasta is made for the Israeli summer. There are some things I eat only at this time of year. Sfatit cheese, for instance. Smooth, mild and cool, I certainly could buy it year-round but it’s the type of thing I want to eat when it’s too hot to cook, …

Steamed okra, and a recipe writer’s dilemma

The fundamental premise of a recipe is that individual ingredients may be improved if you combine them in various ways. And thus the Israeli summer presents the recipe writer with a dilemma — the summer fruits and vegetables, at the peak of their season, are so full of flavor that …

What does it take to cook for an army?

I had the pleasure of joining New Orleans chefs John Besh, Alon Shaya, Jacques Leonardi and David Slater on a base in the Golan Heights last week as they prepared dinner for a battalion, as part of a Jewish Agency program between New Orleans and Rosh Ha’ayin. So what happens …