Cafe Liz

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 [...]

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 [...]

This pudding could have been ice cream. In fact, if it hadn’t been for an issue with my ice cream maker, it would have been ice cream. The two desserts are more similar than they may seem at first — take flavored cream and freeze it, and you have ice cream. Add a gelling agent, and you have pudding. The recipe is essentially my basic chocolate coconut sorbet. One time, I tried to make it when the ice cream maker [...]

It’s been a rough year for tomatoes. In fact, it’s been a rough year for basic foodstuffs in general. The extreme summer heat decimated produce and pushed down cows’ milk production, while droughts in Russia sent wheat prices soaring. Despite the fact that produce crops in general were destroyed by the extreme July-August heat — hothouses were hitting 70 degrees Celsius — for some reason, tomatoes became the symbol of the crisis. It seems that people here just can’t live [...]

When we were served these sour pink balls as part of a tray of roasted vegetables, no one could guess what they were. That color — like no vegetable we’d ever seen. Was it a very small, pale beet? Dyed baby potatoes? We had to ask the waiter. Maybe the mystery is part of the excitement, because most of the people with us at Hamitbach Shel Rama that night agreed that those pickled, roasted radishes were one of the highlights [...]