In the maze of gray buildings, carpentry shops, Escher-like stairways and metal scaffolding behind my office, you’ll find a little luncheon restaurant tucked away. Well, actually, you probably won’t find it. You have to know exactly where it is, and even then, you still might wind up searching for it. …
Sometimes I think that old adage about how to pick a barber should also apply to recipes. You know the story — there are two barbers in town, one with a good haircut and another with a bad one. The logic goes that you pick the one with the bad …
It’s been a pleasant, sunny and slightly chilly spring, but spring nonetheless. And as the seasons change, the market is offering the first springtime and summer fruits — namely, stone fruits. That includes loquats, a few too-solid peaches and nectarines, and green almonds. Yes, green almonds — generally grown for …
It took me years to realize that my husband liked Jerusalem kugel. Once I did, I turned it into his birthday cake. This might be because I only recently discovered the dish myself. Wandering through Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market sometime last year, I encountered — let’s be honest — unappealing …
This pasta is made for the Israeli summer. There are some things I eat only at this time of year. Sfatit cheese, for instance. Smooth, mild and cool, I certainly could buy it year-round but it’s the type of thing I want to eat when it’s too hot to cook, …
Pasta fonduta is a little-known Italian dish, but if it were from the Levant, it might be something like this. It comes by way of my cousins, who were here for a short visit that involved lots of communal cooking. The original dish, which comes via a recipe by Jamie …
The next best thing to going to Italy and learning to make pasta from an Italian mother is having your cousins go and then teach you. (And the next best thing after that — hopefully — is learning about it on my blog.) Paul was my friend before he became …
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 …
This dish aspires to combine the symbols of the Jewish new year into a new and creative form. You have your apples and honey cradled in a creamy filling, and enclosed in fresh pasta dough. And the form even looks somewhat like a pomegranate. Ok, maybe if you squint. This …
A decidedly local green has started poking through the mass of exotic mushrooms, Thai eggplants and other cultivated specialties at the Carmel Market — shoots of mulukhiya, a Middle Eastern specialty somewhat strangely known as Jews’ mallow. In some markets around Israel, especially those catering to a more mixed Arab-Jewish …
