Cafe Liz

There’s a little restaurant in the Yemenite quarter with a wide-ranging menu with flagship dishes from at least four ethnicities — including jachnun, kubbeh, couscous and hummus — and it excels at all. How could this be? Generally, when I walk into a restaurant that offers both, say, pad thai and sushi (or worse — schnitzel and sushi), I get a little suspicious about ordering either one. You’ll find lots of so-called “Asian” restaurants around here that basically make a [...]

Lentil soup may have been one of the first things I learned to cook. No, this wasn’t even that long ago — I haven’t been cooking my entire life. It was back in college, when I didn’t really know what I was doing in the kitchen and I definitely needed a recipe for everything I made. My roommate had a copy of the Moosewood Cookbook, that vegetarian bible with its illustrated recipes. I’m not sure what drew me to the [...]

Fresh chickpeas and fresh green wheat — pale green springtime in solid form, infused in a soup of fresh tomatoes. How could you go wrong? These were my finds from the markets of Jerusalem, where unshelled chickpeas are out in abundance. Crispy and fresh tasting, at this stage they’re more similar in taste to fresh peas than they are to their dried cousins; moister and sweeter, they’re also much better than the dried version, if you ask me. In Morocco, [...]

This soup says spring — delicate in flavor and appearance, with a lovely mix of the season’s latest offerings. With fresh fava beans, fennel and leek, their sweetness enhanced by fresh basil, this is a light soup for these days of intermittent rain and warmth.

I guess you could call this winter. It’s been raining on and off for days. Drops pitter-patter on my windows. The streets are perpetually wet. The sky is gray. My patio planters are soaked through. The once-dusty ground is full of fresh green growth. Well, we take what we can get, because this is the best excuse we’ll be getting to enjoy heavier foods, such as hot, thick soups. Even if on these chilly days (and nights) that send us [...]

It’s easy being green if you taste this good: Bright-green hamousta meets green wheat in a gentle twist on a local favorite. Hamousta is a Jewish-Kurdish soup generally served with kubbeh, which are stuffed dumplings. While kubbeh are fabulous, they’re also quite time-consuming to make, and in any case, I wanted to let this greens-rich soup shine in its own right. So to make the soup a little more filling, I added a handful of freekeh, or smoked green wheat. [...]

I had a particular Persian meatball dish in mind when I made this — meatballs stewed in a broth of dried fruit. Fruit plays a central role in savory cooking in Persian cuisine. While dried fruit is more commonly associated with another holiday, Tu Bishvat, Passover also happens to fall in the spring, and thus fruit is still appropriate. In this dish, it gives Ashkenazi matzo balls an unusual twist. The matzo balls provide firm texture in place of meatballs, [...]

It’s a simple black bean soup, but with a citrus tang — from oranges, kumquats or both. I first encountered a similar recipe about 10 years ago, and while I’ve long since forgotten which cookbook it was in, the mix of flavors has etched itself a place in my mind. Most such recipes call for orange juice, but I see no reason not to throw in the whole fruit — the zest goes in during the cooking stage, then I [...]

Coconut cream makes lentil stew a little bit less good for you, but a lot better tasting. However, I sprouted my lentils, which makes them a little bit better for you — I figure it fully counterbalances the coconut. Anyway, I’m not seriously concerned about a bit of extra fat. Coconut milk gives this otherwise simple lentil stew a creamy, even sweet taste, and certainly makes it more fun to eat.