Cafe Liz

The winter rains bring with them an explosion of green growth, much of which filters its way into our markets -- well, some of them, at least. For whatever reason -- wealth? -- many of the wild greens do not play a role in most people's diets. And it's a pity, because native plants are an excellent way to embrace the land, eating local at its best. However, you can still find them. A few of them may be in [...]

It doesn't sound like the most unusual dish -- tomato sauce with greens and cheese, pretty standard, right? Well, it is and it isn't. My greens happened to be mallow and wild beet, and my cheese was a traditional Arab sheep cheese known as "jibneh," which, quite creatively, means "cheese" in Arabic. Ingredients you wouldn't usually find in pasta sauce, yet it's the basic mix of greens and cheese. It works. Wild beet and mallow are among the many wild [...]

These swirly, patterned ribbons would look quite nice hung on my wall. Were they not made of pasta dough, that is. Back story: We are now the proud new owners of a pasta maker. I know everyone says you can make perfectly good pasta by hand, too, but frankly, there's no comparison. We've never been able to roll our pasta thin enough. Plus, the machine is extremely useful when it comes to kneading. Once you have a machine to do [...]

This beet salad was inspired by a very enjoyable dish we had at Mitbahon, a cute little restaurant behind the Carmel Market. I do believe our friends call it “the best-tasting beets ever.” Needless to say, I liked it enough to try to make something similar at home. The Mitbahon version was seasoned with bay leaves and allspice, but for some reason, allspice is one of the few spices I don’t actually have, so I went with cloves and peppercorns [...]

Some people think unusually colored vegetables are, well, weird. My purple potatoes got mixed reactions at work tonight — ranging from excitement to politely (yet poorly) veiled disgust. I, for one, like colorful food, especially if all that color is natural. And this vegetable medley mixes all your basic Crayola colors. What’s more cool than that?

The beet is a nature-made, all-in-one salad: Its big, red-veined leaves provide the leafy base, the roots make for nice, solid chunks and the stems are like a thin, red celery. Once you have your beet, everything else is just decoration.