Cafe Liz

As Rosh Hashana approaches, the many symbols of the holiday are again appearing in the markets. There are plump pomegranates bursting with seeds, and juicy green and purple figs, one of the biblical seven species. OK, figs have actually been in season for a while now, but as the holiday approaches, they take on new meaning. I love adding them into dishes, as part of a leafy salad in place of tomatoes (I think the flavors clash) or in this [...]

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 [...]

This pasta is made for the Israeli summer. There are some things I eat only at this time of year. Sfatit cheese, for instance. Smooth, mild and cool, I certainly could buy it year-round but it’s the type of thing I want to eat when it’s too hot to cook, and on market days when I couldn’t imagine making (or eating) a bean stew, I find myself drawn to my favorite cheese stand. And purslane. It’s a summer herb. You [...]

Pasta fonduta is a little-known Italian dish, but if it were from the Levant, it might be something like this. It comes by way of my cousins, who were here for a short visit that involved lots of communal cooking. The original dish, which comes via a recipe by Jamie Oliver, calls for creme fraiche, Fontina cheese and an herb such as marjoram. These cheese products aren’t readily available here (woman at the cheese counter: “Fontina? Never heard of it. [...]

The next best thing to going to Italy and learning to make pasta from an Italian mother is having your cousins go and then teach you. (And the next best thing after that — hopefully — is learning about it on my blog.) Paul was my friend before he became my cousin — my cousin-in-law, really. I suppose I’m to blame for that, because I’m the one who introduced him to my cousin, and they haven’t separated since. Eitan calls [...]

This dish aspires to combine the symbols of the Jewish new year into a new and creative form. You have your apples and honey cradled in a creamy filling, and enclosed in fresh pasta dough. And the form even looks somewhat like a pomegranate. Ok, maybe if you squint. This recipe was inspired by one of the best pasta dishes I’ve ever had

Why restrict your grape leaf stuffing to rice alone? Rice or other grains are traditionally the base for many a stuffed grape leaf, perhaps because they swell up during cooking to make the leaf dumpling round, fat and firm. But that’s no reason not to expand into more unusual territory. Cheese, for instance. I got the initial idea for this recipe — if you could call two ingredients a recipe — from a restaurant in Bat Shlomo, which serves cold [...]

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 [...]