Cafe Liz

It doesn’t get much easier than this. You roast an eggplant, mix it with mayo, and season with chopped herbs. Then you eat it. This is pretty much a Middle Eastern babaganush with a Western twist. The mayonnaise makes it creamier than usual, and the thyme adds an unusual flavor twist. The best way to roast an eggplant is straight on a gas burner (or on a charcoal grill). The cleanest way to roast an eggplant is wrapped in tinfoil [...]

Here in the Levant we like to stuff things. It’s a habit picked up by all the places that used to be part of the Ottoman empire and its neighbors. Because rice is never so good as when it’s cooked packed inside a vegetable, and picks up its flavors and aroma during cooking. Since stuffing isn’t limited only to peppers, which are born hollow and ready to be stuffed, there are special tools to help with the job. Previously I [...]

Tucked away in the recesses of the Carmel Market is a guy who caters to the Thai workers, selling all sorts of weird vegetable delights — bumpy gourds, eggplants smaller than olives, yucca roots, foot-long green beans and massive okra, not to mention greens that even he can’t identify. But for now, we’re going to concentrate on the okra — so-called Indian okra. Local okra tends to be small, like narrow acorns, what we know as the “baladi” kind — [...]

This is somewhat of a classic dish in these parts, and super-simple: Fresh tomatoes meet an interestingly shaped baladi eggplant, and all of the above are in season right now. You’ll find a version of this eggplant salad just about everywhere here, sometimes served cold, sometimes spicy, and frequently made with tomato paste instead of fresh tomatoes. You can find it at luncheon cafes, served with pita, alongside falafel, or, my favorite, with rice. (OK, my real favorite is homemade, [...]

This soft eggplant dish has a tangy taste from the pomegranate and balsamic vinegar, while red onions add a bit of jewel-like color. You could toss some pomegranate seeds on top as well when they're in season. On a slightly related note, look at this weird eggplant we saw at the Carmel market:

I needed an easy dish to bring to a vegan friend’s potluck dinner — something substantial, but also something that could easily be prepared in large quantities. Voila — seared lentil salad.

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 [...]

I could never really get that excited about latkes, which I’d mostly experienced as patties of fried mashed potatoes. After all, I wouldn’t eat oily, soggy potatoes on other days of the year, so what made Hanukkah any different? But this year, I decided it didn’t have to be like that. Why not make latkes with other vegetables, seasoned like I season most anything else that comes out of my kitchen? So I brainstormed a list of interesting taste combinations. [...]

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).