Cafe Liz

This is a stuffed vegetable for the summer, cool and refreshing. The season’s best produce meld into a light green salad of melon, mint and wheat bulgur, while the baked squash shells add another layer of flavor and turn the salad into finger food.

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 [...]

I envisioned this as a massive stuffed grape leaf — OK, more like 30 leaves, to be precise. The grape leaves encase a loaf of seasoned rice, giving you the flavor of stuffed grape leaves but saving most of the time it would take to stuff each leaf individually. Obviously, it’s not a replacement for individual stuffed leaves, but this grape leaf pie tastes good in its own right, and I have no problem going through, say, half of it [...]

The winter rains bring with them an explosion of green growth, much of which filters its way into our markets -- well, some of them, at least. For whatever reason -- wealth? -- many of the wild greens do not play a role in most people's diets. And it's a pity, because native plants are an excellent way to embrace the land, eating local at its best. However, you can still find them. A few of them may be in [...]

Here in the Levant we like to stuff things. It’s a habit picked up by all the places that used to be part of the Ottoman empire and its neighbors. Because rice is never so good as when it’s cooked packed inside a vegetable, and picks up its flavors and aroma during cooking. Since stuffing isn’t limited only to peppers, which are born hollow and ready to be stuffed, there are special tools to help with the job. Previously I [...]

Why restrict your grape leaf stuffing to rice alone? Rice or other grains are traditionally the base for many a stuffed grape leaf, perhaps because they swell up during cooking to make the leaf dumpling round, fat and firm. But that’s no reason not to expand into more unusual territory. Cheese, for instance. I got the initial idea for this recipe — if you could call two ingredients a recipe — from a restaurant in Bat Shlomo, which serves cold [...]

Nothing like a cold, rainy day to make me want to turn on the oven and whip up a massive tray of stuffed vegetables of all shapes and sizes. It takes about an hour to bake, and you’ll find me here, huddled next to the oven door the entire time. You can stuff way more than just peppers — I started with six peppers, then moved on to two zucchini and four tomatoes. You could give onions the same treatment; [...]