Cafe Liz

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 lists it as “cucumber salad,” so I almost turned it down — who needs to go to a restaurant for that? Fortunately I didn’t, because it’s the best salad they [...]

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 they stand on their own, and it’s not clear that combining or cooking them would improve them. So I eat them as they come, with minimal seasoning. But this doesn’t [...]

This chocolate-covered caramelized matzo is so good that I initially thought of publishing it as a way to finish up matzo after Passover — as in, matzo worth eating even when you don’t have to. But why save the good stuff for last? Why not start the holiday out right?

It can make a grown man cry. There’s nothing like a good, homemade horseradish to give you the kind of kick you can’t find in store-bought jars, probably because the manufacturers fear sending their customers running in the other direction. But if you ask me, the entire point of horseradish is that it’s spicy — incredibly, unbelievably spicy. My homemade horseradish was a huge hit at last year’s seder with friends. The first bite made them curse, scream and turn [...]

Did you know garlic has a season? Well, you do if you frequent the country’s markets, where massive stalks of purple-green garlic are out in all their glory. ‘Tis the season for garlic, the time to stock up for an entire year. China is the world’s largest garlic producer, with 77% of global production, and you can get Chinese garlic year round. The heads are small and white, invariably the same size, and come in neat stacks of four inside [...]

This salad almost killed me. It’s a lovely mix of two spring vegetables — fennel and carrot. It gets its zest from fresh lemon juice, and a bite from hot pepper. It’s somewhere between a salad and a pickle — it sits long enough to absorb the flavors, but unlike most of the fennel salads often served with mezzes around here, it’s still incredibly crisp. I whipped up this salad in the mid-afternoon, intending to have it with dinner. After [...]

This recipe is about an attempt to eat local, and it’s also a bit about appearances. See, here in Israel we have lots of dried fruit. Some of it is imported, and some isn’t. Some is imported from near, and some travels a long way. Cranberries from the United States, for instance. Cranberries are a perfect addition to many, many dishes — they’re sweet and tangy, and they add a bright flash of color. But they are absolutely not a [...]

This is what borscht might look like if it were a Mediterranean dish. Instead of swimming in a bowl of hot broth, these bright red beets are marinating in lemon juice and topped with fresh parsley, with a bit of olive oil to add flavor. And the sour cream? Fresh labneh, or maybe yogurt. Beets aren’t especially cheap at the moment, but I had a craving (yes, it happens) and I managed to find a bunch being sold for half-off [...]