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2010, Page 2

Simple mezze salad: Eggplant dip with thyme and parsley

It doesn’t get much easier than this. You roast an eggplant, mix it with mayo, and season with chopped herbs. Then you eat it. This is pretty much a Middle Eastern babaganush with a Western twist. The mayonnaise makes it creamier than usual, and the thyme adds an unusual flavor …

Lentil salad with cranberries and thyme

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 …

Simple mezze: Tahini with roasted pepper and herbs

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 …

Turkish-style bulgur with tomatoes and peppers

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 …

For Yom Kippur: Here’s some motivation to fast

Yom Kippur is upon us in a few more hours, with its 25-hour fast. The hardest thing about fasting is knowing that you can’t eat. That’s when everything starts to sound appealing. Well, nearly everything. There are still some things I wouldn’t want to eat even if I’d been fasting …

Ramle, for food and history

I recently took a trip to Ramle with my friend Ben of Savor Israel. Admittedly it was my first time, even though Ramle is quite easily accessible from Tel Aviv — 15 minutes on the train and you’re there. And by there, I mean about a 2-minute walk from the …

Banana oatmeal muffins

What’s driving me to bake in the middle of this infernal summer? Maybe it’s heatstroke. Or maybe it’s the surplus of overripe fruit in the house. And it just might have something to do with the cute new cupcake wrappers I ordered off eBay. I had three mushy bananas sitting …

Levinsky street market — a blast from the past

The Levinsky Street market always makes me stop. I pass through nearly every day on my way to work, and regularly restock on coffee beans at David’s spice shop and spices at Pereg (no more than 80 grams at a time — that’s what fits into my jars). I get …

Indo-Chinese stir-fried noodles

Chinese by Indians. A simple yet strange concept, I was introduced to this cuisine when my friend Iris returned from a year in India. It was one of her favorite things to eat there. It came to into existence thanks to Chinese who migrated to India, and adopted their native …