Cafe Liz

Grape leaves stuffed with mozzarella and sheep cheese

Why restrict your grape leaf stuffing to rice alone? Rice or other grains are traditionally the base for many a stuffed grape leaf, perhaps because they swell up during cooking to make the leaf dumpling round, fat and firm. But that’s no reason not to expand into more unusual territory. Cheese, for instance.

I got the initial idea for this recipe — if you could call two ingredients a recipe — from a restaurant in Bat Shlomo, which serves cold grape leaves wrapped around a firm labaneh. Call me immodest, but I have to say that my version is way better — there’s no cold cheese that can compare to warm, gooey mozzarella. I’d know, since I probably ate about half of my grape leaves while photographing them. Continue reading Grape leaves stuffed with mozzarella and sheep cheese …

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Pasta sauce with mallow and sheep cheese

It doesn't sound like the most unusual dish -- tomato sauce with greens and cheese, pretty standard, right? Well, it is and it isn't. My greens happened to be mallow and wild beet, and my cheese was a traditional Arab sheep cheese known as "jibneh," which, quite creatively, means "cheese" in Arabic. Ingredients you wouldn't usually find in pasta sauce, yet it's the basic mix of greens and cheese. It works. Wild beet and mallow are among the many wild [...]

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