Cafe Liz

Yes, really. I could just call it rice ice cream, but then you’d think I’m weird. If you think about it, rice ice cream is pretty much just cold rice pudding — the cooked rice takes on a chewier texture, and the dairy-based pudding forms a soft, creamy ice cream. After all, rice pudding contains all the ingredients you’d put into a basic vanilla ice cream, plus rice. I can’t take credit for this idea on my own.We encountered it [...]

Now is the season to pick grape leaves. Not that I have access to a grapevine; but plenty of other people do, it seems. One of them apparently dumped a pile of fresh leaves next to the scales at some stall buried deep in the Carmel market this past weekend. Now, stuffed grape leaves take a lot of time to prepare, and I didn’t really think I’d have that much time this week, but what can I say? I was [...]

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 [...]

I’m always sad to see the various fruits fade out of season, to return only in a year. Fortunately, others are always arriving in their stead. At the neighborhood greengrocer today, as I was mourning the present passing of the citrus fruits, soon to be followed by strawberries, I was pleased to see that plums and loquats were ready to fill the gap. Well, not really. All fruits have their own special place, at the very least in my heart [...]

I learned how to make majadera from Naifeh, one of my roommates when I lived in Haifa. Majadera is a relatively simple dish — it has very few ingredients, which happen to combine to make a whole protein. Majadera is prepared in stages — first you fry the onions until they’re nearly burnt. This is what gives the dish its flavor. Then you cook the lentils until they’re soft. Finally, you add the rice, which absorbs the rest of the [...]

When we were in Japan, one of the things we ate on a daily basis was mochi -- the squishy, sticky, gooey sweetened rice snack, generally filled with azuki beans. That was one of the things that we missed, since you can't get it anywhere in Israel, so lo and behold, what did we bring back from our last trip to the U.S.? Mochi from Chinatown. Anyway, lucky for us, I've since learned that mochi is pretty easy to make. [...]

Poor me, I have three ripe mangoes that need to be eaten very soon. What am I going to do?