Here in Israel, the school year began a week ago. Schools here are on a healthy kick, with new government regulations banning sugary, fatty foods from the country’s schools and preschools. Yet packed lunches aren’t fully under government control – while the school makes recommendations, parents still make the final …
Once so often we rent a car and leave the city. The festival of Shavuot a month ago was one of those times. We headed up north into the Galilee, one of my favorite places to visit. There, we spent a day in Beit Lehem Haglilit (literally Bethlehem of the …
Desiccated donkey dung. How’s that for a description of food? Does it make you want to taste it? Eat it? I have to say, when I first heard that description – in reference to the truffles that grow in sands around the Middle East, including Israel’s Negev desert, it caught …
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say this is the most difficult recipe I’ve ever written about. I have tested it literally 50 times over the course of three years, and my family has eaten hundreds of mediocre flatbreads as I attempted to crack the secret to perfect, bubbly lahoh …
Many, many years ago, after buying Himalayan salt or Atlantic sea salt or something of the type, I wondered aloud whether you could buy salt harvested from our very own Dead Sea. Why import when you have a product that is local and plentiful, and hopefully high quality, too? My …
Kubbeh got a brief blast of attention when a pop-up kubbeh restaurant briefly appeared in New York City last month. Reading about it from afar, I was pleased that kubbeh was getting some much-deserved focus — kubbeh is quite popular in Israel, but nearly entirely unknown in the United States. …
It’s vacation month. Daycares are on break, Yeshivas are on break, we’re on break — the end of my husband’s paternity leave, to be precise. I’m already back at work, actually.* But with this scorching summer heat, all we really want to do most days is sit out our vacation …
Sometimes us city folk want a little bit of country. It’s not like the countryside is all that far away, but given how long it takes us to plan a trip out of the city, you’d think this were a trip abroad. Even for a strong incentive such as good …
New varieties of carrots started showing up here over the past several years, with the advent of farmers markets. Purple, red, yellow, white, you now can find them in upscale locations like the Tel Aviv Port. But actually, purple carrots aren’t new to Israel, and they’re certainly not the reserve …
There’s a little restaurant in the Yemenite quarter with a wide-ranging menu with flagship dishes from at least four ethnicities — including jachnun, kubbeh, couscous and hummus — and it excels at all. How could this be? Generally, when I walk into a restaurant that offers both, say, pad thai …
