Cafe Liz

This pasta is made for the Israeli summer. There are some things I eat only at this time of year. Sfatit cheese, for instance. Smooth, mild and cool, I certainly could buy it year-round but it’s the type of thing I want to eat when it’s too hot to cook, and on market days when I couldn’t imagine making (or eating) a bean stew, I find myself drawn to my favorite cheese stand. And purslane. It’s a summer herb. You [...]

This salad almost killed me. It’s a lovely mix of two spring vegetables — fennel and carrot. It gets its zest from fresh lemon juice, and a bite from hot pepper. It’s somewhere between a salad and a pickle — it sits long enough to absorb the flavors, but unlike most of the fennel salads often served with mezzes around here, it’s still incredibly crisp. I whipped up this salad in the mid-afternoon, intending to have it with dinner. After [...]

If I’m stuffing foraged mallow leaves, I might as well stuff them with foraged nettle. I acquired both my mallow and my nettle through the not-so-socially-acceptable (or should I say hippie trendy?) method of picking them from the city’s streets. Both have a long culinary history, but most people aren’t aware of it. Mallow has long been a staple for the region’s poor, and many people here know it as the plant that helped Jerusalemites survive the siege in the [...]

It’s easy being green if you taste this good: Bright-green hamousta meets green wheat in a gentle twist on a local favorite. Hamousta is a Jewish-Kurdish soup generally served with kubbeh, which are stuffed dumplings. While kubbeh are fabulous, they’re also quite time-consuming to make, and in any case, I wanted to let this greens-rich soup shine in its own right. So to make the soup a little more filling, I added a handful of freekeh, or smoked green wheat. [...]

Limonana is the quintessential drink of the Israeli summer. Simple and ubiquitous, there’s nothing more refreshing than freshly squeezed lemons and ground sprigs of mint, whether served on ice or blended into a smoothie. In the summer, limonada becomes my social drink of choice — the drink that captures the spirit of the moment, a pleasant afternoon nestled into a chair in a lively streetside cafe. In the winter, I order a cappuccino; in the spring and early summer, I [...]

People, believe it or not, I've found a use for kiddush wine. For those who have never had it, it's a traditionally sweet wine to represent the sweetness of blessings, but there's just so much sweetness a person can handle until terms like cloying and sickly come to mind. But add some spices and fruit, and heat it up, and it's actually quite nice. There you have it, mulled wine, no sugar added. Good for the cold weather, too. A [...]

It’s officially hot. Hot as in I don’t want to do anything that involves moving, all I want to do is sit in front of the fan. Fortunately, a light, refreshing summer drink can do much to make the heat more tolerable. Especially if that drink is prepped, sitting in the fridge, just waiting for you to drink it. I currently have three such drinks in the fridge. All are easy to prepare, and best chilled — meaning you make [...]

It seems there’s quite a demand for a loquat sorbet recipe. I’ve actually been planning to make one for a while, but a request from a reader in Malta (echoed by others in Israel) told me that now’s the time — after all, the season’s almost over. So, as the weather becomes warmer, what better way to serve our last loquats than frozen into a smooth sorbet with mint and lemon?

Strangely enough, I guess you could consider cranberry an exotic fruit around here — the climate is way too warm to grow cranberry bushes. This means I made this granita out of cranberry juice, which is readily available.