Pumpkin stew
I made this pumpkin stew because I had a block of pumpkin sitting in my fridge for close to a week, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I bought it out of habit, since all winter long I’d been making pumpkin soup — nearly a batch a …
Spiced noodle rice
This is the kind of dish you could find served as a side at the various Middle-Eastern style “workers’ restaurants” — the places that serve home cooking for the office crowd. I learned the recipe from my roommate Naifeh in Haifa. We would eat it alongside stews, and sometimes just …
Vegetable salad with buttermilk and dates
This is kind of like an Israeli salad bathed in buttermilk. I was inspired by all the creamy salads we had in Hungary, except there they use sour cream, and I prefer buttermilk. And fresh vegetables. The effect is creamy but light.
Creamy fruit dessert with loquats, strawberries and cream cheese
Spring fruits make great desserts, and I’m not just talking fruit salad. Have you ever noticed how fruit salads tend to contain mostly fruits you don’t like as much? Anyway, this isn’t a fruit salad. It’s strawberries and loquats topped with an aromatic vanilla sour cream. The sour cream topping …
Toasts with loquats, cheese and basil
Quick to put together and fun to eat, these toasts take advantage of the onset of loquat season. I picked up a whole bucket of loquats at the Carmel Market for about 3 shekels a kilo this weekend. Admittedly, they were somewhat bruised looking, hence the price, but that means …
Happy Independence Day!
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 …
Savory roasted loquats and plums
I’m always sad to see the various fruits fade out of season, to return only in a year. Fortunately, others are always arriving in their stead. At the neighborhood greengrocer today, as I was mourning the present passing of the citrus fruits, soon to be followed by strawberries, I was …
Five days in Budapest: Foods and places we liked
We just spent a wonderful five days wandering Budapest, city of beautiful architecture and fabulous cakes. I have particularly happy memories of one particular chocolate cream cake coated in marzipan (in the top photo), from a small cafe near our hotel. Here are some of the things we enjoyed eating …
Passion fruit coconut sorbet
Passion fruit is downright weird — it’s ripe once the peel begins to wrinkle, at which point you slice it open to find it filled with yellow goo. Not the kind of texture you’d usually associate with fruit. That said, it’s a fabulous ingredient for cooking — full of intense, …
Green tea ice cream
This was another one of our favorite foods in Japan, even if one particular ice cream cone dripped and left green stains on my favorite skirt. I prepared it almost the same way I made another kind of tea ice cream — the Thai tea ice cream recipe I posted …