ingredient
Once so often you encounter a dish that’s really stellar and memorable. This eggplant was one such dish. The setting: A stormy winter night at a seaside restaurant. Low lighting. Dark decor with black leather chairs. An eye-level view of the raging Mediterranean sea, waves the height of a small …
There are soups for every season. This is a soup for winter. We are in the midst of Israeli winter at its most intense. It rained for three days straight, and oh, what rain! Some places even had a bit of snow. Fine, laugh. I know it’s not exactly winter …
This hot soup segues between seasons, combining the warm comfort needed for winter’s swan song with the bright zest of tomatoes and basil. Is it spring yet? Technically yes, although all the winter colds and flus are yet to receive the memo, and we still have some rain in the …
Lentil soup may have been one of the first things I learned to cook. No, this wasn’t even that long ago — I haven’t been cooking my entire life. It was back in college, when I didn’t really know what I was doing in the kitchen and I definitely needed …
The night before I was scheduled to visit her in Nazareth, my friend Jida called me. “I have bad news,” she said. “Tomorrow is Eid. Everything is going to be closed.” She added, “I know how much you like the market.” Well, I do like Nazareth’s market, but I was …
Grandma’s rice is the only dish I remember my Grandma Bea ever making. She wasn’t cooking much by the time I was born, and as it was, she never learned to make the labor-intensive burekas, bulemas and boyos of her mother’s generation. That wasn’t her era. While her aunts gathered …
Fresh chickpeas and fresh green wheat — pale green springtime in solid form, infused in a soup of fresh tomatoes. How could you go wrong? These were my finds from the markets of Jerusalem, where unshelled chickpeas are out in abundance. Crispy and fresh tasting, at this stage they’re more …
It’s been a rough year for tomatoes. In fact, it’s been a rough year for basic foodstuffs in general. The extreme summer heat decimated produce and pushed down cows’ milk production, while droughts in Russia sent wheat prices soaring. Despite the fact that produce crops in general were destroyed by …
On one of my trips through the Levinsky Street market, I happened to have a rather fabulous cooked wheat-bulgur dish at Niso, a Turkish restaurant. I’d never had anything like it, but I could tell that it contained fried peppers and onions, tomato or tomato paste, and some spices. Several …
There’s nothing more debilitating to a food blogger than having no appetite. And frankly, in this oppressive summer heat, not only have I not wanted to cook, I haven’t even wanted to eat. I have a theory that when your body needs less energy to warm itself, you don’t need …
