Up a flight of thirty or so stairs on Emek Refaim is La Boca, a Latin-inpired restaurant in Jerusalem. With its comfortable, high-backed leather chairs and deep brown tables, the restaurant held the promise of a good meal. And it delivered, mostly.
There are a surfeit of cookbooks on the shelves, everything from pretty books that rattle off lists of ingredients whose duplication in the styled photos is next to impossible, to classic tomes that assume a complete apprenticeship to a master chef and years of professional experience.
I own both kinds.
Having cookbooks is a way to explore worldwide cuisine without leaving your reading chair. It mixes the exotic with the familiar and ignites the imagination. Cookbooks, for me, are a way to kick-start my creativity. I process kosher substitution in my head to see whether milk can be reasonably substituted or whether just plain water will do, or if veal or turkey can stand in for pork. It’s well past the point where I flip past a recipe simply because it’s not intrinsically kosher; anything can be kosherized. (more…)
Now that's a leek!
Winter leeks in Israel are in season in Israel in January, but generally available all year long. They are available as organic produce as well.
My wife found one of these monsters yesterday in Machane Yehuda, where I haven’t had a chance to go in nearly a month. Looking at the same old vegetables in my local grocery is a little depressing, but when these started showing up, I started thinking about how many different ways I could play with them. (more…)
Over the years I’ve had several different kitchen scales. The first one I remember was a cheap spring-driven one that almost never got used. It sat on the shelf with the glasses, and sometimes we used it to weigh letters (like emails on paper; you remember those).
My current kitchen scale is a fairly inexpensive electronic scale. But it does an amazing job of making sure that I’m giving you recipes that are easily replicated and scalable. It’s usually only the small stuff (1/4 tsp. black pepper, etc.) that I resort to volumetric measurements. (If you have trouble with amounts when you have to multiply by 20, let me know.) (more…)
There are three stages to knife sharpening: honing, or steeling, stone sharpening, and professional grinding.
Honing, or steeling, is the act of realigning the edge of your blade. Your knife blade comes into contact with objects and surfaces stronger than itself all the time: counter (!), bone, stones/pits, and so on. This bends the edge of your blade, making it dull. Honing your blade on a steel helps readjust the bent-over parts of your blade so the edge is straight. It’s a good idea to hone your knife before working with it, especially if you keep it in a drawer (which you really shouldn’t anyway), and every 15-30 minutes of continuous use depending on what you’re using it for.
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