The bounty of fish indigenous to the Mediterranean, coupled with worldwide imports to Israel, gives those of us here an almost unprecedented number of choices for fish to cook. To help sort out which is which, I have compiled a list of fish that can be found in Israel.

It is a shame that fish cookery for most people comes down to salmon, tuna, and gefilte, with the occasional overbaked-in-oil tilapia (musht). The wide range of choices – fresh and frozen – available here can really broaden your repertoire and palette.

To add to the confusion. not all fish have the same names. My method for determining the correlation between Hebrew and English was to determine the scientific name of the species, then use several resources to determine the exact Hebrew name for that species, or, in case of conflicting information, I used a consensus. (more…)

There are some things that just taste better when you’re feeling bad. It’s a personal thing, and for me, it changes depending on how badly I’m feeling. Carbs is the obvious stand-out winner in the comfort food category, probably because it helps absorb whatever’s upsetting you, but not all of us like the heavy feeling that pasta gives you.

For me, tomato soup has always been my go-to comfort food. Open a can, pour the contents of the can, plus a can’s worth of milk into a small pot, bring to a boil. Simple, straightforward, satisfying. Now that I’m not fourteen anymore, I don’t have to rely on a prepared can of soup concentrate to soothe my turgid, er… soul, but taking a couple of hours to make a whole pot of soup while feeling lousy isn’t always practical. Enter the egg.

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Meat in Israel is a long-standing source of frustration for new olim, especially those from North America. It’s as if cows in America are somehow built with different parts, and trying to find the right piece of meat for your recipe becomes more confusing than it should be. Couple that with the now-permitted hindquarter meats, and you more than double the number of cuts available that people may never have seen or heard of before. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, they number the meat like you’re in kindergarten, making you feel that much more stupid.

Enough is enough. I present my definitive guide to buying meat in Israel.

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I’m not a fresh tomato lover. Unless it’s summer and unless the tomatoes are so red they’ve earned the right to be called ‘tomato’. Luckily, the cherry tomatoes I had in the refrigerator were both. So today’s lunch salad was

• Cherry tomatoes, cut in half
• Parsley, rinsed and snipped
• Red onion, sliced
• Zfatit cheese, crumbled
• Walnuts, broken
• Olive Oil, drizzled
• Red wine vinegar, splashed

Proportions? Feh, eyeball it.

Sorry there’s no picture.. I finished it before I finished the post.

Machane Yehuda is the pulse of culinary Jerusalem. I’m sure you’ve read that before if you’ve been reading my blog posts. Surrounding the two streets of the market itself are a number of stores that range from health food ingredients to kitchen utensils.

I was wandering through Machane Yehuda with some family late last night – late for the market, where only a few of the restaurants and shops remained open – and as I was leaving I spotted a row of ingredients on a shelf through the open door of a shop located just outside the market on Agrippas. Asian ingredients. Lots of them.

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