Cafe Liz

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 ultimately going to see friends. The date of Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that ends Ramadan, is determined in the most traditional way — based on the sighting of the new [...]

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 to spend their days making filo dough together, she went to college despite her father’s wishes and headed off to work as a school secretary. She wasn’t made to be [...]

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 similar in taste to fresh peas than they are to their dried cousins; moister and sweeter, they’re also much better than the dried version, if you ask me. In Morocco, [...]

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 the extreme July-August heat — hothouses were hitting 70 degrees Celsius — for some reason, tomatoes became the symbol of the crisis. It seems that people here just can’t live [...]

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 weeks later, in my own kitchen, I whipped up my own version of the dish as I remembered it. I fried some vegetables that seemed appropriate, cooked them with the [...]

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 as many calories. I wonder if science backs me up. In fact, one of the few things I’ve been eating as of late are Israeli salads. Some people call them [...]

Lately, I’ve been buying a big 1-kilogram carton of cherry tomatoes every week. And every week, I go through the entire thing, minus 20 little tomatoes or so. And since week-old tomatoes don’t compare to fresh ones, I’ve been accumulating little cups of wrinkling cherry tomatoes in my fridge. What to do? I turned them into a jam. While the concept of tomato jam may sound a bit strange, since most jams are made with fruit, it’s actually quite good [...]

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; [...]

If you’re like me, and you don’t see 33-degree Celsius weather as a reason not to indulge in a hot bowl of soup, this recipe is for you. It’s simple, and it doesn’t have too many seasonings. It doesn’t need to — summer’s fresh bounty adds flavor enough. One thing this soup is not is gummy. One of the excuses people have for not liking okra is the viscous sap. Fortunately, that can be done away with by frying the [...]