The garden I share with my friends, Karen and Kate, has a tomato jungle. The three plants have over run three concentric layers of “cages.” They’re now trying to colonize the carrots. Unrelenting weeks of sun and heat have battered our 10 by 14 foot plot in Karen’s backyard. LA’s water rationing has taken its…
Fresh, local green beans should be here any day, now – but when they aren’t available, I rely on the frozen ones from Trader Joe’s. I like that TJ’s haricots verts are less waterlogged than many other brands of frozen green bean, and I appreciate the way each bean seems to have been individually frozen…
As a high school student at my Jewish Day School, I fancied myself a little rebel. Pajama pants beneath long skirts. Adidas in spite of the no-sneakers dress code. Briefly, a safety pin in one ear. (My parents loved that.) I wasn’t the only one –- with the safety pin, OK, yes, but my friends…
I grew up eating my mother’s American tabbouleh–starchy, lemon-doused bulgur salad. This was the 1980s, when many American Jews were incorporating “Israeli-style” foods into their culinary repertoire. But while my mom’s tabbouleh was delicious, I later discovered that it hardly resembled the authentic version, which features a higher ratio of painstakingly chopped fresh parsley and…
Tahina, the thick, brownish-gray paste of ground sesame seeds, is one of the latest foods to turn “gourmet” – at least in Israel. If supermarkets once sold only one brand of tahina, today it comes in squeeze bottles and glass jars with fancy labels; brands with Arabic on their labels proclaiming their “authenticity” vie with…
First, let me apologize for the poor quality of the picture! It doesn’t do justice to the tart or the camera’s abilities… better luck next time! Now onto to the food itself… I’ve always been a huge fan of onions – red, white, yellow, green – I don’t discriminate. I like them raw and cooked,…
Living close to San Mateo, CA, the artichoke producing capital of the US, I am lucky. For months, the delicious, complicated, decadent vegetables have appeared faithfully at my nearby farmer’s market. I usually steam them and eat the leaves plain, or possibly dipped in butter-garlic sauce. Or, if my fiance mixes up a dipping sauce…
I have become a huge fan of beets as of late. It wasn’t that I hated them before, they just weren’t one of my favorite foods. I think you know by now how this story continues but I will share anyway… We started getting beets in our CSA box and I had no idea what…
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