Cafe Liz

This recipe made half a dozen grown Spanish men swoon. It’s another recipe I learned from my time in Madrid, in Sra. Pilar’s kitchen. Summer was at its peak, the days were regularly 40 degrees Celsius, and she’d keep a big, glass bowl of cool gazpacho in the fridge. We’d put a few ladles in a bowl and eat it on the oilcloth-covered table, with a handful of crunchy mini-breadsticks. Simple food. The key to good gazpacho is in the [...]

Sorry Maneschevitz, but I see no reason to make matzo balls from a mix — they’re pretty simple to make from scratch. I also think that the whole search for the perfect matzo ball recipe is a bit overrated. Matzo (matzah) balls are basically matzo meal mixed with egg, and everything else is simply a matter of taste. Maybe I’m saying this because I haven’t tried the world’s best matzo ball yet, but until that time comes, I’m happy with [...]

A while ago, while we were eating out at a restaurant that shall remain unnamed, we ordered a soup that was listed on the menu as carrot soup with ginger, cilantro, coconut and peanuts. What we got was carrots pureed with instant soup powder, topped with a token peanut and a cilantro leaf. This was disappointing not only because we’d paid 30-plus shekels for a bowl of baby food, but also because the combination of ingredients promised by the menu [...]

I was inspired to buy sweet dried peppers after reading up about chili. Mind you, these particular recipes happened to be packed with meat, so I wasn’t going to make them anytime soon, but the peppers in and of themselves seemed like a good idea. So they sat on our kitchen table for a while, and I’ve been randomly adding them to things. Such as today’s pumpkin soup. This is a very simple, mild soup with very few ingredients, and [...]

I wasn’t going to post another soup, since they all kind of look the same, but this one came out really well. The cinnamon adds a nice touch, and all that spinach adds good flavor. In any case, I think it’s great to show what you can do without soup mix or premade broth — it’d be nice if certain restaurants were to catch on that you really don’t need these things in proper cooking.

I’m back from my visit to the United States, back to the land of good, cheap vegetables. The first thing I did on the morning after we landed was to visit our neighborhood vegetable shop, the Ibn Gvirol Shook, where they had indeed noticed our absence (it’s nice to be missed, no?). In any case, I came home with an armful of fresh vegetables, for about half of what it would have cost me at that lovely grocery store on [...]

This dish truly takes advantage of the colorful vegetables I’m preparing for my purple vegetable week, with my lovely purple cauliflower: a white cauliflower cream soup, spotted with roasted purple florets.

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.

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.

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.