Cafe Liz

I guess you could call this winter. It’s been raining on and off for days. Drops pitter-patter on my windows. The streets are perpetually wet. The sky is gray. My patio planters are soaked through. The once-dusty ground is full of fresh green growth. Well, we take what we can get, because this is the best excuse we’ll be getting to enjoy heavier foods, such as hot, thick soups. Even if on these chilly days (and nights) that send us [...]

It’s the first day of December, the weather is balmy, and it’s also the first night of Hanukkah. The winter festival of lights came as somewhat of a surprise this year — I knew it was approaching, and I saw the growing quantities of jelly donuts at all the bakeries, but for some reason I never internalized that Hanukkah was approaching. Possibly because it still feels like summer. In fact, if it weren’t starting to get dark by 4:15 p.m., [...]

Summertime means figs, and you can’t eat just one. That’s because you can’t buy just one. In fact, you can’t really buy less than a one-kilo bucket at a time. Well, there are worse plights in life. Figs are quite an attractive fruit, and can dress up any dish. I’ve been mixing them with all kinds of savory things, since I find them too sweet to eat on their own. My cheese guy got me to buy some Roquefort last [...]

This mild-flavored dish plays with colors — white asparagus, purple potatoes. OK, maybe for some of you white asparagus isn’t such an oddity, but around here it is. In fact, it’s just beginning to make its presence felt in the market, as I described in a newspaper article.

It’s well past kumquat season here, but I’ve been saving a few lonely specimens in my fridge for a rainy sunny day. The problem is that unlike fine wine, fresh fruit doesn’t always cooperate when you try to “save” it. As far as these kumquats and I were concerned, the time was now or never. I’d been planning to turn the winter’s last kumquats into a citrusy glaze to serve atop golden brown potatoes, and that’s just what I did. [...]

I fondly remember my time in Madrid, which was marked by many a visit to various tapas bars, frequently for the ubiquitous patatas bravas — gently crispy potatoes in a hot tomato sauce. In fact, I liked the dish so much that I still have a bottle of salsa brava that I brought back from a trip more years ago than I’d like to admit. The brand is “Uncle William,” a subsidiary of Heinz. Authentic? I think not. Lo and [...]

Purple food week continues: Tonight I made a light salad out of vitelotte potatoes, with a gentle dressing of olive oil and lemon.

This Hanukkah, we wound up making more than 7 kilos of latkes. Indeed, the holiday isn't even over yet, but I think I've had enough fried food for oh, say, the next year. Anyway, in the course of these 7+ kilos, we quite refined our latke-making technique, and came out with some pretty good results. I've edited the recipes in the last post to reflect our fine-tuning, and I'm adding a few more here: Sweet potato latkes with Chinese spices, [...]

This is a nice, sunny yellow soup for dreary days. A roommate of mine in Haifa used to make something similar. I should note that what we call “kishu” (קישוא) here isn’t actually what the rest of the world considers zucchini — it’s a pale, light green, squash shaped like a miniature baseball bat.