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 …
Does Israel have a beer culture? Well, kind of. A young one. One that’s perhaps largely imported. What it does have now is a beer expo. To be precise, Israel has had one beer expo to date — yesterday was the day for professionals, and today it’s open to the …
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 …
You know how sometimes you’re planning to make just a simple pasta dinner and then you wind up spending three hours in the kitchen? No? Well maybe it’s just me. All I wanted was to fill my carb craving. A nice homemade pasta, with a simple olive-oil based sauce with …
You can buy your pine nuts for 120 to 250 shekels a kilo. Or you can pick them off the ground in a public park or your backyard. OK, maybe that’s a little flippant. It’s quite a lot of work to find them yourself, let alone to find enough to …
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 …
It’s the first day of December, the weather is balmy, and it’s also the first night of Hanukkah. The winter festival of lights came as somewhat of a surprise this year — I knew it was approaching, and I saw the growing quantities of jelly donuts at all the bakeries, …
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, …
