Cafe Liz

Tabouleh — chopped parsley salad

Tabouleh is parsley salad worth its weight in gold. Each individual ingredient needs personal, painstaking preparation. Cutting the vegetables is an art form. This is another dish I learned during my time in Haifa, from my roommate Naifeh. We would have tabouleh days, and the girls would sit around together, methodologically chopping ingredient after ingredient.

Tabouleh, alternately spelled tabbouleh or tabbouli, is one of those dishes that everyone loves to claim. I can see why — it’s good. The Lebanese consider it one of their national dishes, Palestinians also stake a claim and I’m sure that if I were ever to have the opportunity to talk with a Syrian, they’d have something to say on the matter, too. But the lovely thing about food is that it’s not a zero-sum game — we all can own it. Naifeh comes from a Druze village in the Galilee, an Arab-speaking community with its own distinct religion that considers itself neither Arab nor Palestinian, with roots here that go back 1,000 years. Her family is full of proud career officers and Knesset members. This is her family recipe.

What makes this dish such a point of pride is the amount of work involved. You can’t cheat by using a blender — it simply won’t work. I had an ex-boyfriend who didn’t believe me, and he wound up with parsley pesto. May that serve as a warning to you all. Continue reading Tabouleh — chopped parsley salad …

5 Comments | |

Pad thai

When I discovered the Thai House‘s recipe for pad thai, I felt like I was discovering the dish anew — with a sauce of only soy sauce and sugar, this recipe was amazingly simple, produced way better results than any other pad thai I had ever made in the past, and tasted great. In fact, the pad thai I was making at home was so good that I didn’t even bother to order the dish on my first few days [...]

Continue reading ...

3 Comments | |

Sweet and sour tempeh

OK, I admit that I consider any recipe that involves ketchup to be cheating, but the results here are so good, that you could say the ends justify the means. This recipe for sweet and sour tempeh takes its sauce from a recipe I learned in Thailand (yes, it turns out that Thai cooks use ketchup), while tempeh is a fermented soybean product from Indonesia with a rich, almost meaty (or mushroomy) taste. It’s a nice alternative to tofu, and [...]

Continue reading ...

1 Comment | |