Jachnun is one of those dishes that everyone in Israel loves but few actually make themselves. These rolled sticks of dough are a Yemenite Jewish food. The dish is one of many slow-cooked Jewish foods invented to be prepared a day in advance and baked all night long, so that …
In a nondescript junction in neighboring Givatayim sits a legend of a shop known as Oved’s sabich. Oved rose to fame not due to the quality of his sabich — fried eggplant — but due to his playful use of the Hebrew language. If someone asks, “Have you been to …
Does Israel have a beer culture? Well, kind of. A young one. One that’s perhaps largely imported. What it does have now is a beer expo. To be precise, Israel has had one beer expo to date — yesterday was the day for professionals, and today it’s open to the …
You can buy your pine nuts for 120 to 250 shekels a kilo. Or you can pick them off the ground in a public park or your backyard. OK, maybe that’s a little flippant. It’s quite a lot of work to find them yourself, let alone to find enough to …
Green wheat is one of the oldest methods of eating grains known to mankind. It’s been grown and prepared in this region for thousands of years. It was used in biblical offerings. Before there was rice, there was green wheat. In fact, unlike rice, green wheat is grown and processed …
It’s that time of year — the first autumn rains, which mean the olives are ripe. Admittedly, I haven’t seen more than five minutes of rain in Tel Aviv so far, but it’s been on and off the weather forecast for a few weeks now. I’ve heard rumors that in …
When we were served these sour pink balls as part of a tray of roasted vegetables, no one could guess what they were. That color — like no vegetable we’d ever seen. Was it a very small, pale beet? Dyed baby potatoes? We had to ask the waiter. Maybe the …
I’m not sure I cracked the secret of the secret tahini, but my not-so-secret version is good nonetheless. A few days ago, we were at a vegetarian restaurant called Mezze for the first time. The restaurant isn’t new; how it is that it took us so long to visit a …
Yom Kippur is upon us in a few more hours, with its 25-hour fast. The hardest thing about fasting is knowing that you can’t eat. That’s when everything starts to sound appealing. Well, nearly everything. There are still some things I wouldn’t want to eat even if I’d been fasting …
I recently took a trip to Ramle with my friend Ben of Savor Israel. Admittedly it was my first time, even though Ramle is quite easily accessible from Tel Aviv — 15 minutes on the train and you’re there. And by there, I mean about a 2-minute walk from the …
