Cafe Liz

I’ve been going through massive quantities of vegetable sticks and dip, particularly since Hanukkah, after eating my weight in donuts during the first few days of the holiday. I think I was starting to feel a little deep-fried myself, actually. Fortunately fresh, crispy peppers and carrots are the perfect antidote, and that probably holds for most holiday excesses. A rich-tasting dip makes the crunchy vegetables seem a bit more decadent, and here the base is tahini. In coming up with [...]

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 [...]

The night before I was scheduled to visit her in Nazareth, my friend Jida called me. “I have bad news,” she said. “Tomorrow is Eid. Everything is going to be closed.” She added, “I know how much you like the market.” Well, I do like Nazareth’s market, but I was ultimately going to see friends. The date of Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that ends Ramadan, is determined in the most traditional way — based on the sighting of the new [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Grandma’s rice is the only dish I remember my Grandma Bea ever making. She wasn’t cooking much by the time I was born, and as it was, she never learned to make the labor-intensive burekas, bulemas and boyos of her mother’s generation. That wasn’t her era. While her aunts gathered to spend their days making filo dough together, she went to college despite her father’s wishes and headed off to work as a school secretary. She wasn’t made to be [...]

No people, this isn’t a winter vegetable, at least not in Israel. Indeed, its vibrant yellow flesh sings of summer. And what better way to serve a summer vegetable than stuffed with fresh herbs? These little acorn squash — known as chestnut squash in Hebrew — are not among the usual offerings in Israel’s markets. I found them in the Carmel Market peeking out from the back rows of Carmela’s stand, among the spinach and celery. They’re smaller than their [...]