Jachnun is one of those dishes that everyone in Israel loves but few actually make themselves. These rolled sticks of dough are a Yemenite Jewish food. The dish is one of many slow-cooked Jewish foods invented to be prepared a day in advance and baked all night long, so that …
In a nondescript junction in neighboring Givatayim sits a legend of a shop known as Oved’s sabich. Oved rose to fame not due to the quality of his sabich — fried eggplant — but due to his playful use of the Hebrew language. If someone asks, “Have you been to …
This pudding could have been ice cream. In fact, if it hadn’t been for an issue with my ice cream maker, it would have been ice cream. The two desserts are more similar than they may seem at first — take flavored cream and freeze it, and you have ice …
It’s easy being green if you taste this good: Bright-green hamousta meets green wheat in a gentle twist on a local favorite. Hamousta is a Jewish-Kurdish soup generally served with kubbeh, which are stuffed dumplings. While kubbeh are fabulous, they’re also quite time-consuming to make, and in any case, I …
Green wheat is one of the oldest methods of eating grains known to mankind. It’s been grown and prepared in this region for thousands of years. It was used in biblical offerings. Before there was rice, there was green wheat. In fact, unlike rice, green wheat is grown and processed …
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 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 …
When we were served these sour pink balls as part of a tray of roasted vegetables, no one could guess what they were. That color — like no vegetable we’d ever seen. Was it a very small, pale beet? Dyed baby potatoes? We had to ask the waiter. Maybe the …
I came to the market a little too late on a recent Friday. It was all of 4 P.M., but half the stands were closed. Discarded vegetables lined the path, as greengrocers dumped unwanted produce before the weekend. Piles of lettuce leaves that came to my waist. Boxes of mushy …
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 …
