Cafe Liz

This might just be the most expensive cheesecake I’ll ever make. You see, I had my oven fixed in order to make it. OK, that’s not precise. It implies that my oven wasn’t working. In fact, my oven had been working a bit too well.

The week-long Passover holiday can often end with a fizzle, but Moroccan Jews know how to let it go out with a bang — with music, drums and sequins, and lots of sweets and leavened pastries, of course. That’s Mimuna, the holiday our newspapers love to cover and our politicians love to attend. My first Mimuna was at the home of my friend Renee’s grandmother, in Kiryat Gat. A small, hunched woman with a twinkle in her eye, she’d raised [...]

It can make a grown man cry. There’s nothing like a good, homemade horseradish to give you the kind of kick you can’t find in store-bought jars, probably because the manufacturers fear sending their customers running in the other direction. But if you ask me, the entire point of horseradish is that it’s spicy — incredibly, unbelievably spicy. My homemade horseradish was a huge hit at last year’s seder with friends. The first bite made them curse, scream and turn [...]

It’s the first day of December, the weather is balmy, and it’s also the first night of Hanukkah. The winter festival of lights came as somewhat of a surprise this year — I knew it was approaching, and I saw the growing quantities of jelly donuts at all the bakeries, but for some reason I never internalized that Hanukkah was approaching. Possibly because it still feels like summer. In fact, if it weren’t starting to get dark by 4:15 p.m., [...]

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

These biscotti have a tendency to vanish. Biscotti are twice-baked cookies, once into a loaf, and the second time after being sliced, and until crunchy. Something about the denseness means they don’t lose much — if anything — from being made with matzo meal instead of flour, and thus kosher for Passover. I got the recipe from my mother, who explained to me that she never bakes the full batch at once, because however much you bake, it immediately disappears. [...]

I had a particular Persian meatball dish in mind when I made this — meatballs stewed in a broth of dried fruit. Fruit plays a central role in savory cooking in Persian cuisine. While dried fruit is more commonly associated with another holiday, Tu Bishvat, Passover also happens to fall in the spring, and thus fruit is still appropriate. In this dish, it gives Ashkenazi matzo balls an unusual twist. The matzo balls provide firm texture in place of meatballs, [...]

This is a play on a classic charoset — a Sephardi-style nut/date spread with a decidedly new-world twist. Cranberries are a new-world fruit, so it’s highly unlikely that they started appearing in any traditional Jewish cuisine too many centuries ago. But hey, it’s been 500 years since Columbus sailed the ocean blue and the world is increasingly globalized, so there’s no reason not to give our holiday “mortar” an extra cranberry tang. Beyond the cranberries, there are the pears and [...]