Cafe Liz

Pasta with fresh peas and pistachios

Legume season is on us with a vengeance, and prices are rapidly plummeting — a kilo of peas may have cost upwards of 20 shekels a month ago, if you could even find them, and now they’re closer to 10. Fava beans are 6.

How could a person resist fresh sweet peas, especially given how sweet they are? And they’re a bright, springtime green. Eitan suggested feeding them to children as candy.

They’re certainly fodder for adults as well, if a little more labor intensive than frozen peas. But they taste so much better. Certainly better than dried peas. And canned. *Shudder*

This pasta dish is a springtime green, too, due to not only the peas but some lovely pink and green pistachios, and a light hint of fresh herbs. Only minimal cooking involved. Continue reading Pasta with fresh peas and pistachios…

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 greens that happen to be in season right now. They can be found in abundance in parks, Arab markets and possibly even your yard. Mallow is called halamit in Hebrew, but is known more popularly by its Arabic name, hubezah. The mallow plant gave its name to the marshmallow, and also the color mauve -- mauve is the French name for the plant, whose flowers happen to be, well, mauve. Continue reading Pasta sauce with mallow and sheep cheese...

Ravioli with Jerusalem artichoke and roasted garlic

It’s not really an artichoke, but we call it that anyway — Jerusalem artichoke, or sunchoke, is a root vegetable that happens to have an artichoke-like taste. It doesn’t have any real connection to Jerusalem, either, for that matter; it’s actually native to the United States.

Despite its deceptively being a foreigner, Jerusalem artichoke is quite common in markets here. As a tubor, it’s easier to prepare than artichoke, in my opinion — just skin it and cook, as opposed to the laborious artichoke, which hides its meat inside layers upon layers of thorny greens and thistle (smart). Continue reading Ravioli with Jerusalem artichoke and roasted garlic…

Noodles with doodles

These swirly, patterned ribbons would look quite nice hung on my wall. Were they not made of pasta dough, that is.

Back story: We are now the proud new owners of a pasta maker. I know everyone says you can make perfectly good pasta by hand, too, but frankly, there's no comparison. We've never been able to roll our pasta thin enough. Plus, the machine is extremely useful when it comes to kneading.

Once you have a machine to do your rolling, kneading and cutting, the options are pretty endless. I whipped up a few different kinds of dough, including a fuchsia-colored beet dough and some whole wheat. These made for some excellent combinations.

Getting the scribbled pattern effect that I achieved is quite easy -- easier than making tidy stripes. Basically, I made thin spaghetti out of the beet dough, let it dry a bit, and then pressed it randomly into the neutral-colored whole wheat dough. Voila, instant art, with a major wow! factor. Continue reading Noodles with doodles...

Blue cheese lasagna with figs and zucchini

Now that it’s getting cooler, lasagna is a great dish to serve guests: It’s a meal, in that it needs no side dishes, and most people enjoy it. After all, it’s rich and cheesy, so how couldn’t you?

I’ve been making lasagna with a blue-cheese bechemel sauce, not tomato sauce. I got the initial recipe from the Barilla Web site, and tweaked it over the years. This year, I decided to add figs, in the name of the holiday. Figs and blue cheese are a great combination, one my cheese guy has been pushing all through fig season in order to boost blue cheese sales (it worked). Continue reading Blue cheese lasagna with figs and zucchini…

Fresh pasta with asparagus, seared eggplant and basil

The weather is beautiful, and the asparagus stalks at the market are looking like the fresh, young shoots that they are. Simply beautiful. I could take a bunch of asparagus and put it in a vase in my living room, but then I'd have a vaseful of asparagus in my living room. But you get the idea.

In any case, asparagus this nice demands to be accompanied by other fine ingredients. When I decided I wanted to eat it with pasta, I knew the pasta had to be something interesting, preferably freshly made. So I made my own whole-wheat pasta. I wound up tossing it with the asparagus, seared miniature eggplants, Romano cheese, fresh basil and olive oil -- nothing too complicated, just fresh, simple ingredients, which make for a wonderful, fresh-tasting dish. Continue reading Fresh pasta with asparagus, seared eggplant and basil...

Tomato sauce with spinach, wine and pine nuts

This is a simple tomato-based pasta sauce with wine, spinach and pine nuts. We tend to have open bottles of wine around, since we never finish them. One word of caution regarding the tomatoes: Since the sauce is based on them, they need to be ripe and sweet; otherwise the sauce will be lacking. Fortunately, tomatoes are just starting to come into season. Continue reading Tomato sauce with spinach, wine and pine nuts…

Garlic greens paste with romano and walnuts

On the advice of friends, we are now the proud owners of eight massive heads of garlic, stems still attached. Apparently this is garlic season, so now is the time to stock up for the year. There are several reasons to do so, our friends told us — the garlic that we usually buy, which comes neatly packed in little plastic nets, is grown in China and processed with chemicals. Now, I couldn’t confirm that, but it turns out that China produces 77 percent of the world’s garlic supply, so the claim is entirely plausible. We’re also big proponents of buying local.

You can currently buy fresh garlic heads at the Carmel Market — we saw the heads alone selling for 20 shekels a kilo, while the ones with the stems attached, which our friends recommended, were going for 8 shekels a kilo in the Gaza shook section. There, we found a huge, smelly pile of garlic, with robust bulbs attached to several-foot-long stems and somewhat decaying leaves.We bought 8, for 22 shekels.

Most people who buy garlic this way leave the plants to dry (the garlic heads shrink in the process) and then braid the stems. Now, while it’s quite pretty to have a garlic braid hanging in your kitchen (and supposedly good luck to boot), that seemed like an awful waste to me — why not cook the greens instead? Continue reading Garlic greens paste with romano and walnuts…

Confetti pasta with nuts, raisins and parsley

This oil-based pasta sauce is sweet and salty from the raisins and olive tapenade, and contains everything from onions and garlic to nuts and a big handful of parsley. I think I once had something similar at a fancy restaurant. Plus, it’s an easy dish to make for potluck dinners. Continue reading Confetti pasta with nuts, raisins and parsley…

Cherry tomatoes and arugula in balsamic cream sauce

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. Continue reading Cherry tomatoes and arugula in balsamic cream sauce…