Cafe Liz

Every so often, us city dwellers get a craving for a little bit of country, and go scouring the countryside for a place that meets our bucolic idyll. One such place is the Schwartzman family dairy on Moshav Bat Shlomo, a few kilometers north of Zichron Yaakov. The dairy sits in an 100-year-old stone house on South Bat Shlomo’s only street (one street!). You walk beneath the canopy of trees and enter an unassuming yard full of bric-a-brac, clay pots, [...]

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 [...]

This version of a caprese salad takes a trip around the Mediterranean: The classic Italian mozzarella and tomatoes, plus Middle Eastern seasonings — fried onions, sumac and cumin. I used cherry tomatoes (plum cherry tomatoes, to be precise), which tend to be sweeter than regular tomatoes, and thus work very well when tomatoes are the centerpiece of the dish. Sumac is a burgundy-colored spice with a light tangy flavor. Obviously, this spice is not the same plant as poison sumac [...]

We are blessed by a wealth of fresh, young cheeses as well as healthy herbs, so I threw all of the above together, along with my home-pickled capers, to make a quick salad. I happen to have Thai basil and pineapple sage growing quite robustly on my patio. These herbs have different flavors than their more standard counterparts (basil and sage), which you’re more likely to find around here, but any combination of fresh herbs that suits your fancy would [...]

This mild-flavored dish plays with colors — white asparagus, purple potatoes. OK, maybe for some of you white asparagus isn’t such an oddity, but around here it is. In fact, it’s just beginning to make its presence felt in the market, as I described in a newspaper article.

This cheesecake has a fabulous, tangy flavor, thanks to the passion fruit, orange and lemon. It also almost ended in complete and total disaster due to my impatience. It’s been quite a while since I’ve made a cheesecake — about 51 weeks, right around last year’s Shavuot, to be precise — and I kind of forgot the importance of letting the cheesecake take its dear sweet time to cool down. In my haste, I removed the baking ring a few [...]

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.

This is another family recipe that simply means Passover to me. My mother learned this recipe from her Turkish grandmother and aunts growing up in Brooklyn. Apparently the word mina means pie in Judeo-Spanish (commonly known as Ladino), and the proper name for this recipe is actually mina de espinaka — spinach pie. My family seems to have shortened the name to mina, since we don’t really make any other kinds of traditional Turkish pies. Believe it or not, my [...]

On the advice of friends, we are now the proud owners of eight massive heads of garlic, stems still attached. Apparently this is garlic season, so now is the time to stock up for the year. There are several reasons to do so, our friends told us — the garlic that we usually buy, which comes neatly packed in little plastic nets, is grown in China and processed with chemicals. Now, I couldn’t confirm that, but it turns out that [...]

Simple to prepare, and good for guests.