This is what we call cucumber season. It’s that sultry time of year when everyone is on vacation and the only thing that’s happening is cucumbers are ripening on the vine. This year we’re having an unusually exciting cucumber season, with the largest social protests in decades, but at least in some regards, it’s cucumber season nonetheless — our little green friends are overflowing from their market stalls and are cheap and abundant for pickling.

Pickles are somewhat of a religion over here. They’re ubiquitous — as the author Nathan Zach put it, they’re served more as a matter of course than as actual food. They’re also incredibly easy to make.

I remember the first time I made pickles. Or, I should say, tried to make pickles. I dumped the cucumbers into a wide plastic container, which enabled them to float as opposed to staying mostly submerged, and a white mold developed on top. I wound up throwing the whole batch out. In retrospect, they probably were fine — a bit of white mold is a natural part of the pickling process, and my only real mistake was not keeping the pickles properly submerged.

A basic brine is quite simple — you add enough salt to your water so that an egg floats in it, as my former roommate Naifeh taught me. That comes out to 1 tablespoon salt per cup of water, and it will give you distinctly salty pickles. You also could use a little less — 3/4 tablespoons salt per cup of water, in order to get distinctly unsalty pickles. I prefer mine on the salty side.

As for seasonings, they’re relatively constant — garlic, bay leaves, hot pepper and sometimes vinegar. In the stores, you’ll find pickles marked as vinegar pickles or salt pickles, the main difference being that the former have some vinegar added to the salt brine. I like vinegar in my pickles — much like I like vinegar in my salad.

Another interesting pickle suggestion I encountered comes from chef Hussam Abbas, of El Barbour, who recommends sticking some fresh grape leaves in with your cucumbers. This is how cured grape leaves are made. I’ve seen some sources that say this makes your cucumbers pickles crunchier, though I’m not sure I could tell the difference. (Update: It’s apparently the tannins in the leaves that make the difference.)

Cucumbers here are small and (hopefully) flavorful — that’s how consumers like them. They range between 4 and 6 inches long (10 to 15 centimeters), so I can cram 10-12 of them — about half a kilo/1 pound — into a coffee jar. That’s just the right quantity for us — the perfect amount to finish in a week. I leave it on the counter like a cookie jar, and 2 days later, we have fresh pickles, perfect for munching. I’ve been known to snack on a pickle before my morning coffee. Because, well, they’re good.

What’s your favorite kinds of pickles or pickling seasonings?

The cucumbers a day after they went into the jar, and after four days in the jar.

For half a kilo of cucumber pickles (1 pound):

• 10-12 small cucumbers (500 grams/1 pound)
• grape leaves — optional

The brine:

• 2 cups water
• 2 tablespoons salt

The spices:

• 1 teaspoon vinegar (I like wine vinegar)
• 2-3 garlic cloves
• 3-4 bay leaves
• 5-6 peppercorns
• a small chunk of fresh hot pepper (about 1 centimeter long)

Prep time: 5 minutes. Total time: 2-4 days

Mix the water and the salt. The salt should fully dissolve at room temperature.

Arrange the cucumbers upright in a clean jar with a lid. The only criterion for the jar is that it should enable you to keep your cucumbers upright and submerged once the liquid is added. If you’re using grape leaves, put them in the jar, too. Note: If the jar has a metal lid, the salt will corrode it over time (after a year plus).

Fit the seasonings in around the cucumbers — the garlic cloves, the bay leaves, the peppercorns and the hot pepper piece. Pour the vinegar into the jar. Top off with the salt water — use as much as you need in order to cover all the cucumbers. Close the jar, but not so tightly that gas can’t escape.

Let sit for 2-4 days until the cucumbers taste like pickles. They will shrink slightly as they cure. Don’t refrigerate; the heat helps them along. You don’t even need to keep the pickles out of the sun. In this summer heat, my pickles are ready after 2 days, but people generally leave them a bit longer.

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 serve and the flavor haunted me.

I’d been planning to make my own version for a while but never got around to it, until one day I decided to toss some rosewater into a regular green, leafy salad. Potentially weird, right? But it worked — in fact, the floral fragrance complemented every ingredient. No weird clashes.

And I just happened to have this orange kuri squash sitting on the counter. That beast cost me a pretty penny — 15 shekels or so — so I wasn’t letting it go to waste. In general, you can see squash trends at the markets around here — I don’t recall seeing these summer (nee winter) squashes to this extent last year, but this year, not only is the market full of them, many of the organic CSAs are including them in their baskets, too. Most likely the work of seed suppliers.

The one complication with this dressing is that rosewater can vary in strength. When using a bottle of standard industrial rosewater, I needed 3 tablespoons to get the aroma I wanted, but when I used the homemade rosewater I bought in Morocco, I needed only 1 tablespoon, and (surprise, surprise) the taste was better, too — less artificial and more reminiscent of a garden.

If you’re not sure how strong your rosewater is, it’s always safest to start with less and add more, until the salad takes on a fragrant essence.

For a big bowl of salad — serves several as an appetizer, or 1 as a meal (if you’re me):

• 150 grams orange squash (about 1 1/2 cups — about a quarter of the squash I bought)
• brown sugar for roasting the squash
• 250 grams greens (I used a mix of romaine, arugula, purslane and very delicate Turkish spinach — that’s what’s fresh and in season)
• 100 grams mild, white, unsalty cheese (about 1 cup; I used tsfatit, as always)
• 60 grams cucumbers (2 small ones)
• 1/2 small onion, sliced thinly
• 1/4 cup roasted pumpkin seeds (optional)

For the dressing:

• 1 tablespoon lemon
• 1 tablespoon good rosewater, 3 tablespoons industrial stuff, or somewhere in between
• 1 teaspoon brown sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup olive oil

Prep time: 5 minutes. Cook time: 20 minutes.

Heat the oven to its highest setting — mine gets up to 290 degrees Celsius on broil. Cut the squash into manageable cubes of about 5 centimeters (2 inches) square, arrange peel-side down on a baking tray and put a small amount of brown sugar — about 1/4 teaspoon — onto each piece of squash. If the seeds look nice, you can rinse them and arrange them on the tray alongside the squash.

Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the squash is soft enough you’d want to eat it. The seeds may need more time to become properly crispy — as much as 30 or 40 minutes.

Meanwhile, rinse all the greens. Remove tough stems and chop into bite-sized pieces. Slice the cucumber and cheese into small cubes, and slice the onion into slivers.

Make the dressing by mixing the rosewater, lemon, sugar and salt. (I like adding the olive oil separately later; it won’t mix with these liquids, anyway.)

Once the squash is baked, slice two or three pieces into little cubes, so that you have 1 1/2 cups (the peel didn’t bother me).

Toss all the salad ingredients with the dressing and the olive oil.

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 make for a recipe per se.

Here’s how I eat apricots, for example: Rinse fruit, break them in half, and eat.

That’s it.

That’s not really a recipe, now, is it?

Same for cherries. Cherries, like apricots, can be excellent when cooked or baked, but I just can’t seem to keep them around long enough to do so. We eat them too quickly.

And tomatoes — you can do lots of things with tomatoes, but mostly I slice them into rings, drizzle them with olive oil and coarse salt, and eat them. It’s simple, it’s quick, and it’s probably the best way to appreciate the fresh tang of a recently-picked tomato.

OK, so maybe those examples seem pretty obvious to you. Everyone eats apricots, cherries and tomatoes that way, you say.

So here’s another one — okra. This is peak okra season, and the markets have piles of the local variety — tiny little tips, as opposed to their elongated Indian cousins. You’ll usually find them cooked in stews.

But I like them barely cooked, and served topped with a bit of kosher salt, edamame-style.

And why not? Why not serve okra — or any fresh vegetable, for that matter — like edamame, so you can enjoy the unadulterated flavor of every individual piece? Why don’t we see this more often?

Okra is labor-intensive, since every individual piece needs to have its stem removed. It’s also notoriously gummy, but there are a handful of methods to cut down on the gooeyness. One such method is frying the okra pieces, a method I learned from a former roommate. Recently, my friend Irene introduced me to another method — briefly parboiling the okra in water and citric acid. In theory, that would be the first step of a recipe with, say, other ingredients, but I found the bright-green okra sitting in the strainer to be irresistible on its own, and no ingredient I could think of would have enhanced it.

So that’s how we ate it.

Since this is a recipe blog, after all, I’ll tell you exactly how it was done. Even if you don’t need a recipe for something this simple. Sometimes it’s good to remember that the KISS principle applies to cooking, too.

For however much okra you care to prepare:

• fresh okra (I had half a kilo)
• citric acid, lemon juice or vinegar
• a nice coarse sea salt for sprinkling

Prep time: 10 minutes.

Rinse the okra, and trim off the stems — but don’t cut off so much so that the hollow inside is exposed (see the photos above).

Bring water to boil in a pot on the stove (say, 1 to 1.5 liters of water). Add a heaping teaspoon or two of citric acid. If you don’t have citric acid, you can use another form of acid, such as vinegar or lemon juice. Once the water is boiling, dump in the okra and bring to a boil again. Let boil with the okra for about 30 seconds.

Dump the okra into a strainer, and serve with a sprinkling of coarse salt. Eat immediately.

It's that time of year again, and hopefully you're ready for Passover. Well, it doesn't really matter, because Passover starts tonight whether you like it or not. Hopefully you like it. If you're like me, you've been eagerly anticipating Passover food for weeks now.

Either way, hopefully some of my Passover recipes can make your holiday just a bit brighter. And I'll be posting a few more as the holiday progresses. Here are both holiday recipes, as well as everyday recipes that just happen to fit the spirit of the holiday:

Seder plate classics:

• My mother's charoset recipe, in traditional Turkish style
• Cranberry charoset, a new-world inspired version
• Homemade horseradish, for when the store bought stuff isn't hot enough

Family staples:

• Sweet Turkish bimuelos, my favorite Passover food and a recipe that has received much interest in the past few years
• Mina de espinaka, a Sephardic spinach-cheese pie and another family staple

Modern twists:

• Matzo ball soup with Middle Eastern spices
• Matzo balls in Persian fruit soup
• Mushroom bechamel croquettes

Desserts:

• Chocolate Passover biscotti, which you won't be able to stop eating
• Chocolate covered caramelized matzo, which you also won't be able to stop eating

Of course, then there all all the other, non-holiday specific recipes that just happen to be kosher for Passover. Everything free of chametz (grains, namely wheat, barley, oatmeal, rye and amaranth) appears in my Sephardi Passover recipes list, while everything free of both chametz and kitniyot (legumes, rice and corn) appears in my Ashkenazi Passover recipes. (Let me know if I've mislabled anything.)

If that's not enough, here are some Passover posts by others that I enjoyed:

• Miriam examines seder customs, particularly Yemenite customs, and ponders what the holiday means to her
• Cara rethinks the seder plate
• Sarah blogs in Judeo-Spanish a.k.a. Ladino (love this blog!) and presents a Sephardic matzo ball recipe and a haroset nearly identical to my own
• A friend of my friend Ben recounts their seder in Malawi

Hag sameach!

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?

This recipe comes from David Lebovitz, who clearly has a different audience than I do — he advises people to use a plain cracker if they can’t get matzo. My readers, or so I presume, will be up to their ears in the damn stuff, and are looking for easy ways to make it irresistible.

And that’s the other part of this recipe’s charm: It really is irresistible. I’m embarrassed to say how much of it I ate last year, and how quickly it vanished.

I’d say that I halved the recipe in order to moderate my consumption, but really I did it because my oven must be smaller than David’s and four sheets won’t fit in there together.

For two sheets of matzo:

• 2 matzo sheets
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 cup demarara sugar
• 1/4 t vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup dark chocolate
• large-grained sea salt

Cook time: 20 minutes

Heat your oven to 175 Celsius (350 Fahrenheit). Line a baking pan with tinfoil, and then line the tinfoil with matzo (breaking it to fill the pan).

Heat the butter and sugar in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Add the vanilla and spread over the matzo with a spatula.

Pop into the oven for 15 minutes so that the sugar melts and caramelizes. Keep an eye on it to make sure it’s not burning.

Take out of the oven, lay the chocolate on top — they should soften and start melting — and spread to cover with a spatula. Sprinkle very lightly with sea salt.

Cool and eat.

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 red, but then they went back for more. And more. In fact, they ate it all.

Horseradish looks like an innocuous, mild-mannered root, and it’s been showing up in increasing quantities at the markets over the past month. But that innocence vanishes once you grind it up — exposure to air is what brings out the vengeance. Homemade ground horseradish is much more spicy than the shaved strips that some people serve at their seders, probably because of the extra surface area.

I’ve read recommendations to blend it outside, or at least in a well-ventilated space. And once it’s ground, part of the challenge is removing the lid from the blender in such a way that you won’t be too blinded by tears to keep on working.

For some of us, though, the powerful fumes are a benefit, not a problem. The high point of my husband’s family’s seder is the horseradish-eating contest. I still haven’t figured out how you win, but I think it has something to do with whoever turns the reddest. After I’d ground up the horseradish, my lovely husband wanted nothing more than to stick in his nose into the blender and inhale. Once he recovered, he promptly called his siblings and informed them that he’d won the contest by default.

My husband aside, normal people who want to prepare horseradish are advised to peel and chop it while submerged in water, which controls exposure to air. I used a small 150-gram root, which is enough if you expect your guests to treat it as a condiment and not a side dish.

I then ground the pieces in the blender, without water. (Given that the last things in my blender were garlic and skhug, I wonder how my next milkshake will come out?) I then let it sit (covered) for 10 minutes, to give it extra air exposure.

Adding water to the horseradish halts the heat development, while vinegar stabilizes the flavor. I added 3-4 tablespoons of water and a tablespoon of vinegar, and blended again, until the horseradish was pulpy.

If spicy is not your thing, add the water and vinegar to the blender immediately, instead of waiting. That should tone things down. You could also dilute your horseradish with some cooked beet.

Horseradish (a small bowl’s worth)

• ±150-200 grams horseradish root
• 3-4 tablespoons water
• 1 tablespoon vinegar

Prep time: 10 minutes

Chop and peel the horseradish while submerged in water. For a spicy horseradish, drain the water and grind in the blender, let sit for 10 minutes, and then blend in the 3-4 tablespoons water and vinegar. For a milder horseradish, blend straightaway with the water and vinegar.

Optional: Add cooked beets for color or a milder flavor.

For more on horseradish: A New York Times reporter grows it, grinds it and cries.

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 little mesh bags. Garlic is not supposed to be clean and white, people. When it’s fresh it’s covered in a lovely purple peel, which dries to an earthy brown.

So we flock to the shook for the crates and crates of baladi garlic — the Arabic adjective slapped on anything that’s local, loved and maybe even unique to the region. We look for the largest bulbs, since they shrink as they dry. Vendors hang fat, unelegant braids outside their stands — nothing like the tidy, compact plaits you’ll find in Italy, for instance. Here, the garlic stems are thick and heavy, but let’s make this clear — when you’re paying 5 shekels a kilo for garlic, the leaves will be removed only after the garlic is weighed. If you don’t want the weight of the leaves included in the price, you’ll be paying 20 shekels a kilo, not 5.

I now have 40 garlic stalks piled on my kitchen floor, warding off vampires and hopefully enough to last me a year. Most of it will be trimmed and kept in the fridge — last year I had some fungus issues with garlic that was left hanging from the wall — but a few of the heads are being pickled. My pickled garlic is mild, sweet and snackable. If you’ve ever had the desire to eat an entire head of garlic in one sitting, this is the way to go.

For about a cup of garlic cloves:

• 100 grams garlic (2 heads)
• 2 tablespoons wine vinegar
• 2 teaspoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup water

Prep: 10 minutes Total: 4 days

Peel the garlic. If you’re using fresh garlic, the cloves will be covered in several layers of thick skins. You can choose to leave them intact, in which case the layers will give your pickled garlic the texture of pickled onions.

Mix the marinade — the water, the vinegar, the sugar and the salt. Add the garlic cloves and bring to a boil for 15 seconds. This will leave you with garlic that’s a little spicy and a little crunchy. If you boil it longer, say, a minute, it will be less sharp and more soft.

Cool and refrigerate for 3-4 days. The garlic mellows out with time and absorbs more of the vinegar.

Serve as nibble food, like olives.

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 it’d been sitting for half an hour or so, I tasted it to see whether the vegetables were absorbing the flavors. The fennel was bright and crisp, with a sharp zing of pepper. I tasted another piece. And another. After all, there are worse things than binging on fresh fennel, and I still had time to make more for dinner.

In my enthusiasm, I must have inhaled some of the liquid. Wowza. Let’s just say that it absorbed the hot pepper well.

So, in short, if you find yourself unable to stop munching on these crispy fennel pieces, just be careful not to inhale any hot pepper.

For four servings (unless you eat it all before it makes it to the table):

• 1 medium fennel head
• 1 carrot
• juice of 1 lemon
• 1 small hot pepper
• 1 teaspoon salt

Prep time: 5 minutes. Total time: 30 minutes.

Chop up the fennel and carrot. Cut the hot pepper into rings — about 1 centimeter worth will give you nice heat, the entire pepper will make the salad quite spicy. Mix everything together. Let sit for at least 30 minutes before eating, mixing it a few times to make sure the vegetables are marinating.

The salad is also good after sitting in the fridge for a day.

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 local food. They don’t grow here. As an Israeli food blogger, I feel like my recipes shouldn’t depend on them.

Enter the hibiscus. Bright red hibiscus flowers — well, actually, the calyx surrounding the fruit, which resembles a flower in itself — are often dried and used to make tea. They’re also candied. Sweet, tangy and red, they, too make an impressive addition to many dishes, and they’re sold at many (though not all) dried fruit stands.

Bright-red hibiscus tea is practically the national drink in neighboring Egypt, which grows it. Here, it’s nowhere near as ubiquitous but it’s still quite common. Why not use it as the local version of the craisin?

Then my intentions met reality. There’s little documentation about edible hibiscus plants in Hebrew, so I walked around the Levinsky spice market and asked where the vendors got their supply. Thailand. Thailand. And, Thailand.

But it’s grown in Egypt, surely it can be grown here, don’t they import from Egypt, too? I asked in protest. All the vendors could tell me was that they didn’t know of other places that exported candied hibiscus. These guys tend to know their merchandise well.

So that’s the story. Hibiscus is indeed grown in this region, but most of what you’ll find in our markets apparently is imported. You could call it local in spirit, though not in practice. In any case, it’s no less local than cranberries.

So what about appearances? The first time I made this dish, I put everything into a pan and stir-fried. It tasted great, but everything turned brown, which is a pity when starting with such striking ingredients — creamy white cauliflower and ruby red hibiscus. The next version took appearances into account, because if you can do so without damaging the flavor, why not?

For about four servings, or more as a mezze:

• 1 cauliflower head (500 to 600 grams)
• 2 tablespoons date honey
• 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 10 candied hibiscus flowers, and more for decoration (optional)

Prep time: 5 minutes. Cook time: 5 minutes.

Cut the cauliflower into small florets. Steam until just soft using your method of choice — I put the cauliflower into a glass bowl with a lid, and microwave for 3 minutes.

Mix the date honey, the balsamic vinegar and the salt and heat in a saucepan for a minute or two. It will reduce slightly. (Lazy chefs: Don’t heat, just mix).

Finely chop the candied hibiscus flowers. Mix with the cauliflower. Drizzle the dressing on top just before serving, and garnish with an extra flower or two if desired.

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 because they were ugly and misshapen. Well, once you cook them and chop them, you can’t tell.

For 4 big servings (or more smaller ones):

1 kilo beets
1 small onion
1/2 cup lemon juice, or more to taste
1 teaspoon salt (or to taste)
1/4 cup chopped parsley
olive oil for drizzling
1/2 cup labneh or yogurt, or more to taste

Cook the beets — either pierce them and microwave them in a covered glass dish until soft, about 15 minutes, or wrap in tinfoil and roast in the oven on high heat, also for 15-20 minutes. I used the microwave because I figured it was more efficient.

Peel the beets — the peel should come off easily — and chop into chunks. Slice the onion, and toss with the beets along with the lemon juice, salt, parsley and olive oil.

Serve alongside healthy scoops of labneh or yogurt.