Last week, I happened to spot this item in our Israeli kids’ magazine. Don’t worry, I’ll translate it down below.   Wallah? Amazing fact of the week In all kinds of places all over the world, they sell a food called “Israeli couscous,” which actually has no connection with couscous. It’s actually just פתיתים / petitim, which are indeed an Israeli invention from the 1950s. And we say to the world: Wait ‘till you discover the amazing thing we call Bissli Grill (BBQ flavour)! Of course, it’s not quite true that there’s NO connection with couscous. Both couscous and Israeli couscous (petitim, which just means “flakes”) are made from semolina flour and water. It’s just a matter of what you do with it from that point. The production process for “real” couscous involves adding water to the semolina flour, rolling it around (traditionally with your fingers, but these days, by machine), then run it through a sieve to get pieces of the right size. It ends...

Pareve shortbread???? Vegan shortbread? Shortbread that showcases the unique, lovely, and delicate flavours of the Land of Israel? And hey, while we're dreaming, a fast, easy shortbread that comes together in a few fuss-free minutes? Have I got a recipe for you! This Lemon, Rosemary, and Olive Oil Shortbread recipe from Cookie and Kate combines just a few simple and unlikely ingredients, and the result is a great big sophisticated thumbs up.   Let me say right up front that while I love lemon desserts, I am not a massive olive oil fan, and naturally shy away from using it in desserts, except for this amazing Pesach olive oil mousse , which I make, in which the chocolate almost totally masks any olive-oily flavour.   So if you're not an olive oil fan

One of the basic baking ingredients that’s particularly tough to come by in Israel is corn syrup.  And some Fridays, it seems like every single recipe I want to try – whether it’s pecan pie (or the pecan bars I made today!), peanut brittle , or something else – relies on a generous quantity of the stuff.  Corn syrup in a recipe isn’t just for flavour, so as most people have found, you usually can’t just substitute something else, like honey, maple syrup, or straight sugar.  Corn syrup does some kind of magic that I can’t explain and helps things thicken up and set, especially in candy making.  (If you know, feel free to explain it to me in the comments!) But there is one thing you can substitute:  INVERT SUGAR. Invert sugar is a sugar-water syrup that’s been boiled to 236°F (114°C) and then cooled off slightly.  At that temperature, the sugar turns… well, magical.  Again, explain it to me in the comments.  But essentially – it turns into cor...

What kind of flavours are you craving this winter???? Winter is still here in Israel, and if you're like me, you may be desperate for warm, flavourful recipes that are a little out of the ordinary.  That's the case with tonight's super-easy pressure cooker chicken dinner. This recipe is unusual for this site.  Why? Well, first of all, I don't even remember if I've ever posted any meat recipes here.  Certainly, there aren't many.  But winter time is meat time as far as I'm concerned. Second of all, because it calls for a pressure cooker, which is a big and cluttery piece of kitchen equipment, and in general, I prefer to go low-tech and skip the gadgetry. But I like my pressure cooker enough to have brought it with us when we made aliyah and it's growing on me every single year.  A couple of weeks ago, I decided to crowdsource my supper-making decision.  I had a bunch of chicken, I  had enough time, so I asked my foodies group on Facebook whether ...

Chilly weather?  Dough refusing to rise?? I feel your pain. It feels absolutely insane to be kvetching about the cold here in Israel, but the fact is, it DOES get cold here.  Not as cold as some places, but because of that, many homes don’t have central heating and you have to rely on patchy warming from air conditioners and inefficient space heaters.  Besides which, houses are built out of concrete, which not only holds onto cold, but it also feels damp—often because it is. So the cold can be very intense here.  And that can make bread very, very grumpy. Over the last few weeks as things chilled, I’ve noticed that breads are not so happy rising with the frigid air, especially when things dip down below 20 (Celsius).  After a few attempts to steam dough (setting it in a covered bowl set into another bowl or basin filled with hottish water), which led to a scare at one point when the water turned out to be too hot, I was ready to try something else....

I don't know what I did right, and I certainly don't want to ask too many questions for fear of jinxing it, but the truth is... shhh... my family LOVES beans. And that has made refried beans (or, as the people who invented them call them, frijoles refritos ) one of our go-to favourites for after-school eating, especially in chilly weather, that both warms them up and tides them over until suppertime. The truth is that refritos are sometimes good enough to make converts even of devout non bean lovers.  Try it and see, even if other bean recipes haven’t gone over as well.  The long cooking time gives the beans a magical “powdery” texture that isn’t really beany at all (at least, in our opinion here!). These refried beans are basically a one-ingredient, one-pan recipe.   I strongly recommend a

Is there anything better than the taste of lime in the summertime?  If you've read many of my posts here, you'll know I'm obsessed with lime flavoured anything, especially after a few years here in Israel with NO LIMES (waah!). Now that they're readily available and seasonal, I make sure to take advantage, gorging on amazing fresh Israeli limes before they're gone for the rest of the year. (We do freeze some juice as cubes to use in sauces, salads, etc.) I know what you're thinking, though.  It's NOT summertime.  By now, mid-October, we're well into fall.  But here where we live, temperatures are still in the 30s (celsius, I guess mid to high 80s F?) and we haven't really had our first good rain.  So it's still summer in my mind, though to be honest, I often forget what season it is. In any case, the air conditioning is still running -- and that's what really counts. And when it's hot outside, there seriously is nothing like l...

Need a little something to bring an ordinary weekday over to the sunny side? Here’s a way to elevate rice from a humble side dish to a glorious main course for one person, perfect for weekday lunch or light supper?  I don't usually talk about cooking for one, for the obvious reason that I live with several other people.  But when the kids are off at school all day, sometimes I want to invest a few minutes into making something truly delicious that’s just for me. There aren't many foods as simple and comforting as rice, and though this fried rice dish has a number of steps, it's simple enough to prepare in the background while I’m working, and the end result is flavourful and incredibly comforting.  There are two possible variations -- "Indian" and "Chinese" (I'm using quotation marks because I don't want to pretend that these are authentic flavours...) that are equally simple to prepare. This is why I love working from home – I can’t ...

Cream cheese can be a hit or miss affair here in Israel.  Sure, some brands are okay for eating, but where the native product fails is usually when it comes to baked goods that call for genuine cream cheese, as I discovered at Shavuos a couple of years ago.  It's too thin, too gummy, too shiny, whatever.  It's just... WRONG. In case you’re wondering, sour cream is called “krem gevina shamenet,” and as you can see, there are lots of flavour choices… …but none of them are anything I’d want to bake into a cheesecake. But then this year, I found out I could make my own.  And not only does it taste great, it works perfectly in recipes! I won't bother calling it a RECIPE, because it's too easy to be a recipe!  It only works if you're in Israel, simply because you can’t get Israeli dairy products here.  Then again, if you're outside of Israel, you can probably just buy Philly.  The truth is, you can buy Philly here in a lot of places as well, as...

I wanted something different for dessert this Shabbos and for whatever reason, my mind went to the stash of Kool Aid that's been sitting in the cupboard here for over a year.  And the only flavour of Kool Aid that counts, as far as I'm concerned, is Strawberry. Feel free to make these with any colour you want! Anyway, an image of these swirly cookies swirled into my mind and I knew exactly how I was going to make them. All I needed was a decent sugar-cookie recipe that didn't rely overly much on butter.  I've used a couple of pareve sugar cookie recipes in the past, including this one from Couldn't be Parve , which uses margarine, and these ones which use shortening.  But here in Israel, I don't like the taste of the margarine, there are no "healthier" margarines available, and shortening simply doesn't exist.  My substitute has become coconut oil, or (sometimes) half and half margarine and coconut oil.  So I started looking around for r...

How do you feel about coleslaw??? I’ll be honest – I’ve always hated it.  I just found it bland and uninspiring.  Of course, I was used to the KFC style of coleslaw, which is essentially pureed or finely chopped-up cabbage with a ton of mayonnaise.  Just not much to get excited about there. This one’s from Popeye’s, not KFC, but I’m sure you get the idea: One more complicating factor in our coleslaw lives was this:  one of our kids hates mayonnaise with a passion.  Cannot stand to be

Here in Israel, we miss lots of the familiar tastes of the seasons, but mostly, we get by.  We adapt and learn to enjoy new flavours, like the way Naomi Rivka will stash a few fresh dates in the freezer for a couple of hours and then take them out and mash them into “sorbet.”  Or like chummus – NOT! One of the things I love in the sukkah, besides a cool breeze (since there’s no hope for that where we are) is real apple cider.  We drink it, but it’s also a crucial ingredient in my Yom Tov Squash Soup.  Or at least it WAS, before we moved to Israel. There really is no substitute for cider.  If you’re from the Northeast or some other fall-colours, cool-weather kind of place, hopefully you’ll agree.  They sell alcoholic cider in the liquor stores here, but it’s more like bubbly-sweet apple juice than anything I would call cider.  Apple juice is kids’ stuff, but cider has sass – it’s all grown up.  It’s sweet but spicy; spunkier than apple juice...

If you didn’t know any better – like I didn’t when we first came here – you’d probably assume, with good reason, that both of these tins contained condensed milk: But that’s where you’d be wrong.  Sure, at least at first glance, the Hebrew text is exactly the same: חלב מרוכז וממותק / chalav merukaz umemutak / concentrated sweetened milk.  But the English is different, and therein lies the key difference between the two – the one on the right is FAKE. Here are the ingredients of the real thing (on the left): Milk (55%), sugar (45%).  That’s it.  Pure and simple. Now, here are the ingredients

Sick of pareve desserts for yom tov?  Ready for something a little less ho-hum?  I love my classic Second Helpings cookbook honey cake to death and look forward to it almost all year (it has a cup of sugar, 1 1/4 cups of honey, and a cup of coffee – what’s NOT to love????).  But sometimes… you just want something creamy.  Usually, my grandmother’s Neapolitan Cake fits the bill very, very nicely, and I totally recommend it if you haven’t tried it already. Usually, a few of our Rosh Hashanah meals are dairy, because especially when it’s bumped right up against Shabbos like it is this year, it’s just TOO MUCH MEAT.  The fact that we can have dairy desserts is a totally wonderful bonus.  While there are a couple of specialized ingredients in this dish (kadaif noodles – see below; rose water) but beyond that, this super-special Israeli dairy dessert is also super-easy to throw together. Here’s a dessert that was new to me before we came to Israel which...

I wasn’t a big meat cook in Canada.  We ate a lot of chicken, but I was kind of shy about beef.  Still, I managed to make some acceptable roasts from time to time – meat that was tender enough and tasty enough that we could enjoy it together on special occasions. All that changed when we moved to Israel, where all the meat cuts are different from what I was used to and nothing, it seemed, was tender and tasty except the most expensive bits, like steak (which always seems to turn out tough when we make it at home, but we don’t mind because it’s delicious). But some of the English speakers here were chatting on our WhatsApp group last week about roasting beef, and it made me really want to try it again –even after having been burned numerous times.  So on Thursday evening, we bought a nice little #6 roast, which according to this indispensible meat chart is called Fillet Medumeh (פילה מדומה), petit tender, or foreshank.  The page's owner, Marc Gottlieb, says i...

Here’s something you don’t see all the time on today’s ultra-slick cooking blogs.  A confession:  sometimes, things don’t work out as planned. For Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) this year, I decided to make one of those fabulous checkerboard cakes I’ve seen all over the Internet.  Sure, they sell special cake pans to make them, but that’s just kitsch, right? Special pans:  Who needs ‘em, amIright? Anyway, all the pans do is let you mix and match the bits and pieces a little more easily.  Surely, I can do that on my own, at home, with nothing more than my own ingenuity? Nope. You can’t really see from this picture how wonky and falling-aparty these cakes really were.  But don’t take my word for it… you can see the whole thing coming together (and/or falling apart) in this delightful real-life video

One of the things I missed most when I started keep kosher was JELLO.  Ooey, gooey, jiggly jello.  Mmm, mmm, good.  And totally, totally not kosher. A few years later, I discovered a REAL and delicious brand of kosher gelatin, which we used to buy often enough in Toronto to keep me happy. However, here in Israel, there’s no such thing, just the insipid brands of kosher jello, which are based on vegetable gel and don’t – in my limited experience – set up properly to a shiny crystal-clear texture. So I’ve started playing with real gelatin since we’ve been here, because it’s cheap and plentifully available – and, as I think I’ve commented before, mysteriously pareve.  There are two kinds; the red package is meat-source and the blue is fish-source.  From bad experience in Toronto, I’ve found that fish gelatin gives a weird tangy taste to everything you use it in.  This would probably be fine in a citrus-themed dessert (as shown on the box), but defini...

You know that feeling?  When you’re expecting something really, really good in the mail?  Like a tasty treasure-trove of Starbucks instant coffee from your sister Canada?  Because there IS no Starbucks in Israel, only Aroma, which isn’t nearly as good?  (okay, only Aroma, and Greg, and Roladin and Maafah Na’aman, and a million other chains, which is fantastic, but they are NOT Starbucks) And everywhere you turn… (and by the way, Starbucks is NOT not here because of antisemitic or anti-Israel or anti-Zionist anything ) Even nestled in the weeds… Hiding in the neighbourhood olive trees… And twisted into the branches of even weirder trees…

Here it is:  The bean snob’s guide to delicious quick-cook, no-soak beans. Do you love beans?  Or do you just put up with them? For years, in Canada, we were hooked on canned beans.  We put up with them, even enjoyed them, if they were seasoned heavily enough. Blah.  Never again. Here in Israel, I’ve become a beany snob.  (nothing delicious can come out of here…) Canned beans may be easy, but they are also mushy and worse than flavourless – they’re tin -flavoured.  Here, canned beans practically don’t exist, so we don’t have any choice.  And the great news is that from-scratch beans are tastier, too.  By which I mean they taste like something .  As opposed to a tin can.

When you love baking as much as I do, you become an evangelist. After we moved to Israel, and our whole lives were topsy-turvy, the only time I felt like things were at all “normal” were when I was making bread.  Those breads were rudimentary at first – hey, we didn’t even have an oven.  But they kept me grounded.  I was so ecstatic when all our possessions arrived, including my gorgeous cast iron loaf pans, plastic dough bucket , and other beloved bakeware, accumulated over the years.  It was time to get my hands floury and really start baking again. I love how centered and grounded baking makes me feel, but can’t help wondering why other people seem to think it’s hard, or complicated, or just not something they have space for in their lives.  We all have time and space to make bread.  Sure, it takes a while, but very little of that is active prep time.  A bread that takes 36 hours from start to finish may have less than ten minutes of actual st...