Cafe Liz

I’m not sure I cracked the secret of the secret tahini, but my not-so-secret version is good nonetheless. A few days ago, we were at a vegetarian restaurant called Mezze for the first time. The restaurant isn’t new; how it is that it took us so long to visit a vegetarian restaurant in Tel Aviv, I do not know. But nonetheless, we enjoyed ourselves. Mezze prides itself in its tahini, which is normally not my favorite food. But the menu [...]

My friend Kazue is visiting from Japan, and her favorite food here just happens to be hummus. So I whipped up a batch or three. Hummus is quite possibly one of the simplest things to make, full of rich, creamy flavor — so long as you use fresh chickpeas. That canned stuff with the weird metallic aftertaste just isn’t as good. This requires a bit of advance planning, and a lot of passive cooking time. The chickpeas soak overnight, and [...]

It’s getting a little too hot to eat warm food. Fortunately, these sesame-coated noodles are cold and refreshing. This preparation is vaguely Japanese-inspired, due to the wakame and soy sauce, but with a local twist of tahini. To the best of my knowledge, you can’t readily find tahini in Japan, because if you can, I’m not sure why our friends there asked us to bring a kilo of it with us when we came to visit.