Cafe Liz

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 [...]

This version of a caprese salad takes a trip around the Mediterranean: The classic Italian mozzarella and tomatoes, plus Middle Eastern seasonings — fried onions, sumac and cumin. I used cherry tomatoes (plum cherry tomatoes, to be precise), which tend to be sweeter than regular tomatoes, and thus work very well when tomatoes are the centerpiece of the dish. Sumac is a burgundy-colored spice with a light tangy flavor. Obviously, this spice is not the same plant as poison sumac [...]

This soft eggplant dish has a tangy taste from the pomegranate and balsamic vinegar, while red onions add a bit of jewel-like color. You could toss some pomegranate seeds on top as well when they're in season. On a slightly related note, look at this weird eggplant we saw at the Carmel market:

I envisioned this as a sort of hot salad. In fact, many of the ingredients are the same — tomatoes, arugula, onions, balsamic vinegar. They just happen to be in a warm cream sauce.

I guess I got a little overexcited at the shook today, because now the kitchen floor is covered with bags of vegetables that won’t fit into our fridge, including 6 kilos of potatoes for our planned latke bonanza (among many, many other things). In any case, there’s no better reason to use lots of fresh vegetables, so I scratched the surface and whipped up this onion vegetable soup.