I have a new love. Fortunately, my husband approves, because it’s vegetarian and he can eat it, too.

I’ve been eating my way through the Persian restaurants neighboring the Levinsky market. While the market was originally founded by Balkan immigrants, it now has a strong Persian presence. Among the many bags of beans, grains and dried fruit at the market’s stores, you’ll find plenty of signs in Persian sticking out from among delicacies like jujubes, large dried garlic flakes and dried Persian lemons. If you venture inside and ask the right questions, you can also find industrial quantities of Basmati rice, saffron and roasted chickpea flour.

This makes it the most natural of places to seek out a good Persian meal, and indeed, there are three lunchtime restaurants within spitting distance on Nahalat Binyamin — Salimi, Nebayev and Shimshiri. All are kosher and operate from about noon to 5 P.M. on weekdays, and all offer classics such as ghormeh sabzi (a herb-filled stew with kidney beans), gondi (chicken-chickpea dumplings in a clear yellow chicken broth) and grilled meat in saffron, with heaping plates of fresh herbs on the side. At all, you’ll pay 30 to 40 shekels per meal, depending how much you order.

Salimi, at Nahalat Binyamin 80, is by far the best-known of the bunch. It also has the most limited selection — just sabzi, gondi and grilled meats. There’s also no written menu. I particularly liked the gondi, in its rich chicken broth.

Nebayev, at Nahalat Binyamin 78, is larger than its neighbor Salimi, and offers at least half a dozen Persian stews and several kinds of rice. It’s also the only one of the three to have an orderly menu with descriptions and prices. I particularly liked the beef stewed in fruit and the yellow rice speckled with mini-raisins (which I tried to recreate — see recipe below). Lunch is 42 shekels for a meat dish, a rice dish and free helpings of salads. If you ask nicely, they’ll give you a bowl of sauce and vegetables from one of the other meat dishes, too (read: these vegetable dishes are obviously not meat-free).

Shimshiri, at Nahalat Binyamin 99, is by far the most vegetarian-friendly of the crew, and was able to offer us meat-free sabzi, beet stew with rice and the most amazing stuffed peppers I’ve ever had (remember the love I mentioned?). It has some form of printed menu, but no prices. The dishes we ordered ranged between 30 and 35 shekels each, and chopped salad is on the house.

View Persian restaurants in the Levinski market in a larger map

So, you can guess where this is heading. Shimshiri’s stuffed peppers are to die for, and I was determined to make my own. And, come to think of it, Nebayev’s raisin rice was quite good, too — so why not attempt to combine the two?

The following recipe draws on the flavors in Shimshiri’s sauce, and takes some of the seasonings from Nebayev’s rice and mixes them with what I tasted in the original stuffed pepper fillings.

These quantities make twice as much rice as you’ll need to fill the peppers. As you can see, I served the extra rice alongside them. (You could also choose to double the number of stuffed peppers.)

These miniature raisins (possibly also known as currants — thanks, Molly) are less than half the size of regular raisins, and can be found at most local stores and markets selling dried fruits. Due to their delicate size, they pair better with the rice grains than regular raisins. If you can’t find them, you could just take regular raisins and chop them roughly.

For six stuffed peppers plus another two cups of cooked rice:

For the rice:
2 cups Persian rice
1/4 cup oil
1 onion
6 garlic cloves
1 teaspoon whole cumin seeds
3/4 cups miniature raisins
1/4 cup dried apricots, chopped finely
2 teaspoons chopped fresh mint (or 1/2 teaspoon dried mint)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons turmeric

For the stuffed peppers:
6 small or medium-sized peppers

For the sauce:
1 onion
2 garlic cloves
small amount of oil (±1 tablespoon)
3-4 dried apricots
1 tablespoon raisins
1/2 cup pomegranate syrup
2 teaspoons tamarind paste
1/4 teaspoon salt or to taste

First, start the rice: We’re making it Persian style, which means immersing it in lots of water (at least 4 cups) in a pot, bringing to a boil and simmering for 8-10 minutes. At this point, the rice should be mostly but not fully cooked. Dump the mostly-cooked rice into a strainer to remove the remaining water, and let drain.

Chop the onions, garlic and apricots. Put 1/4 cup oil into a pot — the same pot, if you like — and add the onions. Let them brown on a low flame. Once the onions are soft and golden, add the garlic and the cumin. The cumin seeds may start popping out of the pot as they toast in the oil, so beware.

Turn off the heat, add the raisins, apricots, mint, salt and turmeric to the pot, and mix the rice back in. Mix until the seasonings are well-incorporated into the rice.

Meanwhile, make the sauce: Chop the onions, garlic and apricots. Add a small amount of oil to a pot large enough to fit the six peppers, and on a low flame, brown the onions for the sauce. Once the onions are golden, add the garlic and brown as well. Add the remaining sauce ingredients along with a bit of water — about 1/4 cup, or as much as you want to get the consistency you desire. Turn off the heat until you’re ready to add the peppers.

Now, stuff the peppers: Cut the tops off the peppers and remove the seeds from inside (you can keep the tops to put back on the peppers, for the sake of presentation). Spoon rice into the peppers until they are mostly full — the rice won’t gain much more volume, since it’s nearly cooked — but don’t pack too tightly. Arrange the peppers with the cut sides pointing up in the pot, and spoon a few teaspoons of gravy onto the top of each pepper (you can now stick the pepper tops back on them, if you want). Cover the pot, turn the flame back on and bring to a simmer. Cook until the peppers are soft.

To finish the rice: Add 2-3 tablespoons of water to the pot with the rice, cover and cook on a low flame for a few more minutes, until the rice is fully cooked.

Serve the peppers alongside the extra rice and sauce.

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 this recipe, I had in mind a flavor palate more akin to barbecue sauce than your standard tahini with parsley, ubiquitous at every falafel stand and hummus restaurant.

I generally try to stick with ingredients available locally, but I admit that chipotle may be hard to find here — mine was purchased during a visit to the U.S. But smoky chipotle peppers seem to be slowly creeping their way onto restaurant menus, particularly in sauces served alongside hamburgers — the next ingredient trend, if you will — so they must be getting it somewhere.

I haven’t actually tried looking for it here, but I’d start at a store with lots of imports like Eden Teva Market. If that fails you, you can always find it online.

That, and for once, my readers in the U.S. shouldn’t have a problem finding ingredients (OK, aside from the raw tahini, but still).

As you’re making this recipe, you’ll see some great kitchen chemistry in action, a trick that my friend Irit loves when making her own tahini for her restaurant. As you add water to the raw tahini, which is thick and tan, it will become increasingly whiter and liquid, but once you add the lemon it will “sieze up” as if you added gelatin (it may take a few minutes for the full effect to set in). I can’t say I understand the science behind it, but like many other aspects of kitchen chemistry, it makes for great food.

Note: If you’re using the thick dregs of tahini from the bottom of the jar, it will throw off the quantities since it is more concentrated than regular raw tahini.

For two cups’ worth:

1 cup tahini
1 medium onion
3/4 cup water
1/4 cup lemon juice (2-3 lemons)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon chipotle powder (warning: the dip will be a bit spicy!)
1 garlic clove
1/4 teaspoon cumin

Blend all the ingredients except for the lemon in a blender or food processor until smooth. Add the lemon last, and blend until incorporated.

Serve as a dip alongside the food of your choice, such as vegetable sticks or crackers.

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 lentil soup. Maybe it sounded simple. Maybe I just happened to have bought lentils. I don’t think the recipe actually called for orange lentils, but that’s what I used. I’ve never been good at following recipes to the word, in any case.

Since then, I’ve learned that lentil soup is pretty easy to make, with or without a recipe. So are many other things. Particularly things involving vegetables or legumes. In fact, I generally can’t be bothered to look up a recipe, since at this point I pretty much know what I need to put into the pot in order to create the result I desire.

So why do I publish recipes? Well, many people like them. The accompanying photos are inspirational. And somewhere, kitchen beginners like the one I was 10 years ago may just use them to learn to cook.

This recipe makes an awful lot of soup — between 8 and 16 servings, depending how thick you like your soup (I like mine watery). The small amount of whole-grain rice means that it contains complete proteins, and the rice also adds a pleasant chewiness, especially if you water down the soup.

This volume of water will give you a fine soup the day you make it, but once it cools, it will thicken considerably. On the following days, I usually dilute it by at least half, and add extra salt.

On another note: One of my favorite foods to eat the afternoon before Yom Kippur begins is majadera. A small amount leaves you full for hours. I bet this soup would be very filling, too, if you don’t dilute it.

For about 3 liters of lentil soup:

• 2 onions
• 2 carrots
• 6 garlic cloves
• 4 tomatoes
• 2 cups orange lentils
• 1/2 cup whole-grain brown rice
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon cumin
• 4-6 bay leaves
• 1 cup chopped fresh parsley

Prep time: 10 minutes. Cook time: 30 minutes to 1 hour.

Chop the carrots and onions, and put into a large pot or pressure cooker on a medium flame. Stir as the vegetables begin to brown (you really don’t need oil at this point).

Meanwhile, rinse the lentils and rice (always a good habit — mine tend to contain dirt). Add to the pot.

Chop the garlic and tomatoes, and add into the pot. (That’s right, I don’t fry my garlic in advance.) Add 7 cups of water, along with the salt, cumin, black pepper and bay leaves. (Note: Don’t add the parsley yet!)

Cover the pot, and let simmer for an hour. (You might need to add extra water midway; I use a pressure cooker, which prevents any water from boiling off.) If you’re using a pressure cooker, then seal it, and let it simmer pressurized on a low flame for 20 minutes.

When the lentils and rice are fully cooked, stir in the chopped parsley. (This way, it maintains its color and freshness.)

If left to sit for more than several hours, the soup will gel up. Before eating, add boiling water until the soup reaches the desired consistency. (I dilute my soup at least 1:1, if not more.)

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 moon. Thus they hadn’t known the exact date more than a day in advance, and we hadn’t planned around it.

But there’s a certain charm in seeing this bustling city stop entirely.

The day had started off with omens of things to come. I love taking the group taxis — moniot sherut — to and from Nazareth, because they are by far the quickest, easiest way to travel. But there were none — apparently because all the drivers are Muslim. So we caught a group taxi to Afula instead, and from there a bus to the outskirts of Nazareth. On the 10-minute walk into the city center, we passed a few open bakeries, many more closed ones, and a handful of elderly men clutching Muslim prayer beads.

We headed up the hill, past one of my favorite greengrocers (closed) and then the Church of the Annunciation (the Catholic one — the Eastern Orthodox have their own a few blocks away). We passed under the gate into Nazareth’s market, which is usually bustling with people, kitchenware and delicacies. Complete silence. Filtered daylight reflected off closed metal shop doors and pavement tiles. If it weren’t for the smell of freshly ground coffee creeping out from behind a few storefronts, you wouldn’t even have known this was a market.

We found Jida and her husband as we passed by Tishreen restaurant (recommended), a block from Mary’s Well. Making our way up Nazareth’s winding main road, we passed through the handful of Christian-owned shops that were open. Reused soda bottles full of brining pickles and olives, four kinds of freekeh, carefully crafted cookies. And lucky me, a greengrocer, where I scooped up some kare’ah (or are’ah, or kara’a) bottle squash and some tiny, tart cucumbers no thicker than my thumb. (Why can’t they sell cucumbers like this in Tel Aviv?)

Continuing up the road, we made our way to Jida’s house just as her family was eating lunch. Her mother Teres had made three platters of vegetables stuffed with spiced meat and rice, a show of expertise reflecting hours of painstaking labor — bottle squash, miniature eggplants and lemony grape leaves no thicker than my pinkie. A hole smaller than a marble was the only sign the squash and eggplant had been expertly hollowed out.

For Eitan there were deep-fried sambusak — deep fried bundles of yeasted dough, cheese and zaatar crafted like miniature croissants. For dessert there were cookies the neighbors made for Jida’s brother’s wedding, including rosewater-scented ghraibeh and ring-shaped date cookies, an Easter specialty (but not only) due to their resemblance to Jesus’ crown of thorns. Nazareth’s Muslim residents have adopted these cookies for Ramadan, Jida’s sister commented. And finally, coffee with cardamom, with the cardamom added after the coffee was prepared, as opposed to some premade blend.

Traditional Arab cooks have very specific ways of preparing every dish, as Jida pointed out. You won’t see a lot of variation or experimentation. Nazareth food in particular tends to be not very spicy, and like Jida’s mother, most cooks there spice their food with cinnamon, nutmeg and pepper.

According to some Jewish traditions, bottle squash are one of the symbols on the Rosh Hashanah table: Kara’a, sh’ikara’a roa gzar dinenu, may our evil sentences be torn up. They’re also a favorite for stuffing in Arab communities in northern Israel. This is their season; aside from the markets in Nazareth, you can also find them in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda and Damascus Gate markets, and at a few stands in the Carmel Market, among others.

Jida and her family prefer slightly larger squash and eggplant for stuffing, about the length of your hand. The bottle squash need to have their bitter peel removed, but don’t peel too deeply and remove too much squash, Jida’s sister noted. Her family hollows out the squash from a hole in the base, since they like to leave the fleshy neck intact; other people remove the neck and hollow out the squash from the top. They fill their squash with a mixture of rice and cooked ground beef, and cook them in a broth of blended, strained tomatoes. The straining removes skin and seeds, and makes the gravy very smooth, but I chose to skip this and leave my gravy thicker, as Jida suggested. I also added the squash innards back into the gravy.

Recipe based on Teres’ stuffed squash; I came up with the measurements.

For 1 kilo of stuffed squash:

• 1 kilo bottle squash (about 5, the length of your hand; alternately, use another kind of summer squash)
• 1 cup rice
• 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/8 teaspoon black pepper
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon salt + 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 big, ripe tomatoes (400 grams)
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice

Prep time: 1.5 hours. Cook time: 1 hour.

Gently peel the squash, trying to remove only the bitter outer skin. Don’t cut too deep — you’ll see that the squash get paler inside the deeper you peel. Remove the stem, too.

Hollow out the squash with a zucchini corer: Pierce the squash at the base, where the flower bud used to be, and carefully scoop out the inside (don’t pierce through the sides). Once I remove the first cylinder of squash from the center, I find it easiest to work with a scooping motion, inserting the corer at a sharp angle and scraping from the top down the sides.

Let the rice soak for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, blend the tomato into a pulp. Blend the insides removed from the squash in with the tomato.

Drain the rice, and mix with the spices, 1/2 teaspoon salt and olive oil. Fill the squash until they’re about 2/3 full, within 2-3 centimeters of the top (you can see how full they are if you look inside them while holding them up to the light — you can see the shadow of your finger outside the squash so long as it’s above the level of the rice, which is opaque). I found it useful to use the coring tool to scoop the rice into the squash, since it is the same size as the hole.

Arrange the squash in a pot, pour the tomato pulp on top, add the lemon juice and the final 1 teaspoon of salt, and cover with water until about 1 centimeter of squash is above the water. Bring to a boil and simmer for an hour.

More:

• Abbie’s lovely post on kareh’ah and a quicker recipe for the squash.

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.

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 a housewife.

But she fed us her signature dish without fail, preparing a pot of tangy, salty, soft rice every time the grandchildren came over. She usually burned the bottom.

It was a simple concoction — rice cooked in tomato paste and chicken broth. A version of Spanish rice, my mom called it, though I never saw anything like it in Spain. I would hunt for the gooey lumps of undissolved tomato, while the adults would vie for the crunchy burnt layer stuck to the pot.

Grandma Bea wasn’t the original grandmother behind the rice — before her was her mother Rose, who made it for my mother. And Rose likely learned the dish from her mother in Constantinople (now Istanbul — grandma loved to sing that song, and I’ve heard it more times than you can imagine). My mother made it too, but it wasn’t the same, probably because she couldn’t bring herself to use the same generous helping of salt.

But that was then. Grandma slowly stopped cooking altogether, I moved away, and there were more exotic dishes to try. I hadn’t had grandma’s rice in more than a decade.

And then on June 5, suddenly, unexpectedly, she passed away.

Sure, she was 87, and she’d been battling cancer for the better part of a decade. But she was lively and vivacious, attending shows with her friends and bringing her Tupperware to the 5 p.m. happy-hour dinner special. She loved eating, especially dessert, and she wanted you to eat an extra-big slice of cake. She went out, she drove, she lived independently. She was savvy and assertive. Shopping was a game, and she was a champion athlete, proudly presenting us with her spoils. (“But it looks great on you! It was $100 at Neiman Marcus and I got it for $10!”) She showered us with gifts, whether we wanted them or not. (“What do you mean you don’t want it? It’s Waterford and I found it on clearance!”) She adopted new technologies, learning to use a computer and signing her e-mails “Thoroughly Modern Grandma.”

She defied statistics year after year, and we thought she would live forever. She seemed to know otherwise. In her house, she’d left behind a refrigerator full of cookies. As if she had been expecting us.

Back from the funeral, I thought about her rice. When my cousins and I were children, it had played a central role in our lives. As adults, she’d taught us all how to make it; her rice pot was one of the top items on my cousins’ inheritance request list. Yet no one seemed to be able to find the precise recipe.

But it wasn’t hard, was it? I had vague memories of a can of tomato paste dropped into sizzling oil. Lots of tomato paste. I think I recalled the size of the can …

And lo and behold, it came out just the way I remembered it. I even burned the bottom.

(A family photo taken at the time of Bea’s middle school graduation, with her parents Rose and Jack, and her little sister Sally. At right, just a few years later, Rose, Bea, my mother and me. I can’t say I remember that photo being taken.)

The secret to proper grandma’s rice is that it contains more tomato paste and salt than you’d consider reasonable, and more liquid than you’d usually use while cooking rice. All that water makes the tomato paste float, leaving your rice with a glossy orange coating on top by the time it’s cooked — my favorite part. The original recipe used two cups of rice, a can of chicken broth and an equal volume of water. If you substitute the broth back in, use unsalted broth or adjust the quantity of salt accordingly.

For two cups of rice:

• 100 grams (4 oz) tomato paste
• 2 tablespoons oil
• 1 cup rice
• 2 cups water
• 1.5 teaspoons salt

Cook time: 20 minutes.

(Note: A 2.5-liter pot is fine, but if you double the recipe, you’ll need a larger pot, say, 6 liters. This isn’t as obvious a statement as it sounds. The surface area of the pot matters: If the rice is too deep, it will be overly soft on top and drier on the bottom, and the bottom will burn more than you want it to.)

Heat the oil in a pot and add the tomato paste. Stir the tomato paste in the oil and let it cook for a few minutes, until the oil is orange and the tomato paste starts browning on the bottom of the pot. Stir in the salt.

Add the rice and water, and put a lid on the pot. Bring to a boil and then let simmer on a very low flame for about 15 minutes, or until all the liquid is absorbed. It will take a bit longer than a usual rice recipe, because it contains more liquid.

When the rice is done, it will have a glossy, soft layer of tomato paste on top.

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 American cousins, at somewhere between a tennis ball and a baseball, and this visible difference enables us to argue that they are therefore better — ours are sweeter and nuttier, of course.

I read a beautiful ode to our so-called chestnut squash, which described it as a unique Israeli variety, but other sources aren’t so romantic, referring to them merely as American imports.

But unique hybrid or not, for us, the fruits of our fields will always taste better.

(For more: An account of a local CSA’s squash crop, an an explanation as to why they’re grown in summer; and an introduction to acorn squash in Hebrew.)

These quantities are for Israeli-sized acorn squash. If you’re using American squash, you might need twice as much filling (or half the number of squash).

For eight squash halves:

• 4 chestnut squashes
• 2 teaspoons brown sugar
• 1/2 cup black wild rice
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/2 cup walnuts
• 1 tablespoon parsley
• 1 tablespoon chives
• salt to taste — about 1/2 teaspoon

Prep time: 10 minutes. Cook time: 1 hour.

Preheat the oven or broiler to its maximum heat setting.

Put the wild rice in a pot with 1 cup water, cover, and simmer on a low flame for 1 hour.

Meanwhile, chop the squashes in half, slicing from the stem end to the tip. Clean out the seeds.

Put 1/4 teaspoon of brown sugar and 1/4 teaspoon water into each half, and place in the oven, cut side up. Let bake until soft, about 20 minutes. Remove from the oven once done.

Chop the walnuts, and finely chop the herbs. When the rice is done cooking, mix with the olive oil, the walnuts, the herbs and the salt.

Fill each squash half with the rice — I fit about two tablespoons into each one. Serve.

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!