Cafe Liz

This soup says spring — delicate in flavor and appearance, with a lovely mix of the season’s latest offerings. With fresh fava beans, fennel and leek, their sweetness enhanced by fresh basil, this is a light soup for these days of intermittent rain and warmth.

Summertime means figs, and you can’t eat just one. That’s because you can’t buy just one. In fact, you can’t really buy less than a one-kilo bucket at a time. Well, there are worse plights in life. Figs are quite an attractive fruit, and can dress up any dish. I’ve been mixing them with all kinds of savory things, since I find them too sweet to eat on their own. My cheese guy got me to buy some Roquefort last [...]

I have a slight mango obsession. I’ve been stockpiling them. Every week I go to the market, I feel an urge to buy more — regardless of how many are left in our fridge. I must have had about 20 at some point last week. I’m just so excited that they’re both in season and affordable. So, I’ve been forced (oh, the pain) to find creative ways to go through them. A mango a day keeps the doctor away, no? [...]

These green beans have no one dominant flavor. Rather, everything blends together — sherry, garlic, basil and Romano cheese. It simply tastes good. The beans have a special, wrinkly texture from being fried — not pan-fried, but really fried, in lots of oil. I was inspired by this recipe for Chinese-style green beans on Rasa Malaysia. Anyway, nothing Chinese here — freshly grated Romano cheese, which we bought on our last trip to Italy; a few spoonfuls of sherry from [...]

The weather is beautiful, and the asparagus stalks at the market are looking like the fresh, young shoots that they are. Simply beautiful. I could take a bunch of asparagus and put it in a vase in my living room, but then I'd have a vaseful of asparagus in my living room. But you get the idea. In any case, asparagus this nice demands to be accompanied by other fine ingredients. When I decided I wanted to eat it with [...]

It’s well past kumquat season here, but I’ve been saving a few lonely specimens in my fridge for a rainy sunny day. The problem is that unlike fine wine, fresh fruit doesn’t always cooperate when you try to “save” it. As far as these kumquats and I were concerned, the time was now or never. I’d been planning to turn the winter’s last kumquats into a citrusy glaze to serve atop golden brown potatoes, and that’s just what I did. [...]

Quick to put together and fun to eat, these toasts take advantage of the onset of loquat season. I picked up a whole bucket of loquats at the Carmel Market for about 3 shekels a kilo this weekend. Admittedly, they were somewhat bruised looking, hence the price, but that means they’re super-ripe and sweet. Anyway, they actually go very well with cheese and basil.

I’m back from my visit to the United States, back to the land of good, cheap vegetables. The first thing I did on the morning after we landed was to visit our neighborhood vegetable shop, the Ibn Gvirol Shook, where they had indeed noticed our absence (it’s nice to be missed, no?). In any case, I came home with an armful of fresh vegetables, for about half of what it would have cost me at that lovely grocery store on [...]

This is my favorite kind of Thai curry. Luckily, it’s not too complicated — most of the taste comes from the basil-rich green curry paste. You can think of it as a kind of Thai pesto — in Thailand they pound the spices together by hand, but here you can just buy the curry paste ready-made, in a jar. And since I’m no longer in Thailand, I had to adapt the dish to the vegetables available locally (bottom right photo).