Today is Israel’s Independence Day. Like all Jewish holidays, it starts in the evening, which means it makes an excellent opportunity for fireworks. We celebrated with a picnic on our roof. For whatever reason, every municipality has its own display or two, and since Gush Dan is so crowded with …
I was looking for a fresh way to prepare a springtime bunch of asparagus I picked up at the market — something light that would let the flavor of the asparagus dominate. This simple salad incorporates fresh herbs, another great springtime ingredient. I used a few leaves of sage and …
This is a very simple roasted pepper recipe I learned while I was living in Madrid, from my landlady/host Sra. Pilar in her high-ceilinged apartment in the upscale neighborhood of Salamanca. That was quite possibly the most I’ve ever paid to rent a room, but I guess it was worth …
Tabouleh is parsley salad worth its weight in gold. Each individual ingredient needs personal, painstaking preparation. Cutting the vegetables is an art form. This is another dish I learned during my time in Haifa, from my roommate Naifeh. We would have tabouleh days, and the girls would sit around together, …
This beet salad was inspired by a very enjoyable dish we had at Mitbahon, a cute little restaurant behind the Carmel Market. I do believe our friends call it “the best-tasting beets ever.” Needless to say, I liked it enough to try to make something similar at home. The Mitbahon …
This dish, with the cucumbers, carrots and wakame, resembles something I once had at a Japanese restaurant, but the green papaya is my own addition. I happened to have one sitting around, since I’ve been aspiring to make a spicy Thai papaya salad pretty much since we returned from Thailand. …
I’m back from my visit to the United States, back to the land of good, cheap vegetables. The first thing I did on the morning after we landed was to visit our neighborhood vegetable shop, the Ibn Gvirol Shook, where they had indeed noticed our absence (it’s nice to be …
Since we eat a lot of salads, and since I purchased many purple vegetables, I’ve been making many salads with purple vegetables. Most don’t really merit their own posts, since they’re not all that complicated, and what you see is what you get. However, they are awfully pretty, so I’m …
The beet is a nature-made, all-in-one salad: Its big, red-veined leaves provide the leafy base, the roots make for nice, solid chunks and the stems are like a thin, red celery. Once you have your beet, everything else is just decoration.
Purple food week continues: This is the sister dish to yesterday’s post. Another simple, easy-to-make salad, this time with tomatoes and red-hot — or should I say purple-hot — pepper from the ornamental pepper plant outside our kitchen window.
