Cafe Liz

You know how sometimes you’re planning to make just a simple pasta dinner and then you wind up spending three hours in the kitchen? No? Well maybe it’s just me. All I wanted was to fill my carb craving. A nice homemade pasta, with a simple olive-oil based sauce with sundried tomatoes, leek and arugula. Simple ingredients, lots of flavor, not too much work. But then I decided to make spinach pasta. And then Eitan asked that I turn the [...]

This dip won over a self-proclaimed hater of zaatar (my husband) and another self-proclaimed hater of herbs (a good friend). Zaatar is quite popular in this part of the Middle East, and is frequently sold as a dry spice mix, which also includes sesame and sumac (and sometimes salt). But this dip contains fresh zaatar, which is nothing like dry zaatar — it has more of an herbal taste, and somewhat resembles oregano. Here it serves as an interesting compliment [...]

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

What’s driving me to bake in the middle of this infernal summer? Maybe it’s heatstroke. Or maybe it’s the surplus of overripe fruit in the house. And it just might have something to do with the cute new cupcake wrappers I ordered off eBay. I had three mushy bananas sitting on the counter that needed to be dealt with. I had the idea to toss them into a muffin of some sort. Since I didn’t have a tried and trusted [...]

This brunch looks complicated, but it’s actually quite quick and simple to pull together: You pack the kadaif noodles into bowls and stick them in the toaster, toss the asparagus (or vegetable of choice) into a pan to grill, and let the eggs boil for a minute or two in the meanwhile. Then you assemble it. That’s all. As a bonus, it tastes good and looks nice — the nest comes out crunchy and buttery, and soaks up the liquid [...]

Trendy western baked goods meet traditional local flavors in these rose-scented cupcakes – a delicate whiff of rose gives these cupcakes a dreamy, Middle Eastern flavor where you least expect it. Rose and pistachio, a combo frequently found in baklava, mesh seamlessly with the buttery crumb, and create an elegant dessert that’s food-coloring free.

Once there were none. Now, cupcake boutiques are popping up on nearly every major street in Tel Aviv, like mushrooms after the rain (or, if you will, cupcakes at a child’s birthday party). It all began not long ago, in late 2008, when this blog was still in its infancy.

Much like we westerners like Japanese food, but alter it to suit our tastes, Japanese people like western food, but often with a Japanese twist. At the Uomo subway station in Tokyo, there's a little bakery full of western-style breads (OK, there are actually tons of such bakeries), where you take a tray and neatly fill it with pastries from the display (with tongs, of course). Here it is that we discovered green bread -- green tea flavored, to be [...]

“If you show me how to make a cheesecake, I’ll show you how to make a Spanish yogurt cake,” my friend Arturo said. After his first Shavuot in Israel, he’d developed cheesecake envy. And how could I refuse an offer like that?

A decidedly local green has started poking through the mass of exotic mushrooms, Thai eggplants and other cultivated specialties at the Carmel Market -- shoots of mulukhiya, a Middle Eastern specialty somewhat strangely known as Jews' mallow. In some markets around Israel, especially those catering to a more mixed Arab-Jewish population, it's quite common -- at the Ramle market, you can get cultivated mulukhiya even when it's out of season, as fellow blogger Sarah told me -- but in Tel [...]