Cafe Liz

Most recipes for rhubarb involve turning it into mush, without taking advantage of the beautiful, red stalks’ appearance. Thai food often involves a mix of tart, lemony flavors. Hmm, I know! I’ll use the rhubarb in a stir-fry, with Thai seasonings! I was inspired to make a savory rhubarb recipe by the New York Times, which put the vegetable into an Indian-inspired curry. Meanwhile, as I was planning dinner, I had this idea of making rice noodles in a coconut [...]

It’s getting a little too hot to eat warm food. Fortunately, these sesame-coated noodles are cold and refreshing. This preparation is vaguely Japanese-inspired, due to the wakame and soy sauce, but with a local twist of tahini. To the best of my knowledge, you can’t readily find tahini in Japan, because if you can, I’m not sure why our friends there asked us to bring a kilo of it with us when we came to visit.

This is the kind of dish you could find served as a side at the various Middle-Eastern style “workers’ restaurants” — the places that serve home cooking for the office crowd. I learned the recipe from my roommate Naifeh in Haifa. We would eat it alongside stews, and sometimes just salads. I consider it a kind of easy majadera. Naifeh’s version got its flavor from the spices listed below, along with a few spoonfuls of powdered soup mix. I admit [...]

When I discovered the Thai House‘s recipe for pad thai, I felt like I was discovering the dish anew — with a sauce of only soy sauce and sugar, this recipe was amazingly simple, produced way better results than any other pad thai I had ever made in the past, and tasted great. In fact, the pad thai I was making at home was so good that I didn’t even bother to order the dish on my first few days [...]

Here’s a nice combination of stir-fried cauliflower (mine happened to be purple) with an Asian-inspired sauce. The miso adds a little more depth to this dish than just plain soy sauce.

Last week I bought an iron wok, and I decided to try it out today with Singapore-style noodles. I get a craving for them sometimes, so fortunately they’re easy to make.

This is pretty much an instant meal, and I whip it up on days when I haven’t had time to cook before work. It takes about five minutes to chop the vegetables and stick them in a plastic container, and when I want dinner, all I have to do is add water.