JUST AS I LEARNED how to cook Vietnamese from a Frenchman, I made the equally perplexing decision to master Israeli cooking at a non-kosher restaurant. Or so I initially thought. But then I discovered that there actually aren’t many kosher restaurants in Tel Aviv, and those that are generally aren’t that tasty. So after researching online while in Hanoi and reading guidebooks about Israel, I found my way into the kitchen of Carmella Bistro, a charming restaurant located a few steps from the Carmel Market in southern Tel Aviv. Carmella’s cuisine, created by chef and owner Daniel Zach, was influenced by the Mediterranean region, and the restaurant itself is always featured in guidebooks as being the most romantic spot in the city.
I didn’t know much about the geography of Tel Aviv, but I knew I wanted to live within walking distance of Carmella. While in Hanoi, I’d found an apartment on Craigslist on nearby Mazeh Street and took it sight unseen, valuing convenience and location over anything else. Unlike my pristine villa in Vietnam, the apartment I landed in Tel Aviv was in dire need of repairs and a thorough scrubbing; but the bedroom was sunny and had a small balcony that overlooked the street. As a paranoid New Yorker, I frowned at the balcony door’s broken windowpanes, and whenever I complained to the landlord, he grunted and promised to fix them but never did. It was technically a three-bedroom apartment (with no living room) in one of the white Bauhaus-style buildings ubiquitous in Tel Aviv. My landlord told me I would be alone until he could find two additional subletters. I refrained from suggesting that he might find additional tenants if he actually repaired the other broken doors, television, and washing machine and repainted the mustard yellow, peeling walls. My initial hopes for home cooking were also shattered since the kitchen consisted of a refrigerator, a table, and two hot plates on a counter. But the apartment was only a ten-minute walk to the restaurant, so I was content.
Carmella occupied one of the oldest buildings in Tel Aviv. In addition to the main dining room, the restaurant had two smaller, semiprivate rooms closer to the kitchen and an outdoor terrace framed by potted plants and trees. Multicolored painted tiles and framed drawings of architectural buildings adorned the interior walls, while wall sconces and small wrought-iron balconies wrapped around the building’s exterior. I had met Shai, one of the sous-chefs, and Nimrod, one of the managers, the day before, but that meeting had basically consisted of their telling me what time to arrive. So at one p.m. on the following day, I arrived, calm and collected. I wasn’t nervous about entering a new kitchen. Now I knew the ropes and how the game was played.
After making my way into the kitchen, I spotted Shai, who introduced me to the guys: Vlady, tall and lanky, with dark eyes and a faint mustache; Hamoudi, whose chubby frame was topped by a shiny bald head; and Eli, elflike and wearing bright red clogs. Shai then ushered me into the adjoining pastry kitchen.
“Hi, I’m Lauren,” I said, shaking hands with the pastry chef, who was the only woman and who looked about my age.
“I’m Nitzan. Yay, girl power,” she said in accented English. She took me upstairs to the large storeroom pantry, where Carmella’s uniforms shared space with dried pasta, nuts, and bottles of oils and vinegars. We rifled through a shelf strewn with a mishmash of clothes, looking for a small pair of black cotton pants and a shirt. “I bring my own a lot since these are all big,” she said.
“Here’s a medium. I’ll go try it on,” I said, holding up a black short-sleeved shirt, the color perfect for disguising spills and stains.
After a quick kitchen tour, Shai pointed out where the meat, fish, and vegetables were kept. As at wd~50, the containers were clearly labeled with the name and date of the product, except I couldn’t decipher a single character of the Hebrew script. In fact, my Hebrew vocabulary was limited to “shalom,” I never had a bat mitzvah, and I hadn’t even gone to Hebrew school or belonged to a synagogue. My affection for Christmas (though without the Christ aspect) might even be greater than that for Hanukkah, and my father is an atheist after having disavowed a Presbyterian childhood. But why hadn’t I thought about this before now? In Hanoi it hadn’t mattered that I couldn’t read Vietnamese, since none of the containers was labeled and nearly everything was brought in fresh daily from the market, with very little prepared stuff carrying over to the following day.
“Get a cutting board,” said Shai. “We use the blue or yellow ones for fish, and the red for meat and green for produce.” I grabbed a blue one, thinking how smart it was to color-code cutting boards to avoid cross-contaminating them inadvertently.
As I arranged my knives, he brought over some fish. “Lokus, or grouper, for carpaccio. Do you know how to clean the fish and skin it?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, thrilled to be handling fish on my first day of work. No more mincing shallots for me!
“Okay, so it’s very easy to make a carpaccio, and you can do this with any fish. First cut the cleaned fish into little pieces, but you don’t need to be that precise. Just make sure you first cut out the bloodline since you don’t want to eat that. Then measure out one hundred grams’ worth, and put that in a small mound between two pieces of plastic. Then use this metal pounder and pound the fish, starting in the middle and working your way outward in a circular motion like a snail shell. Then just keep pounding until you have a flat circle that’s about the size of this plate,” said Shai, pointing to a medium-sized, flat white plate.
“So I should do all of the fish that’s here?” I asked.
“Yeah, we need about sixteen portions, so do all of it,” he said. “And then just leave the carpaccios in the plastic and stack them all on a plate. We finish them to order by removing the plastic and flipping them onto the plate. You’ll see later on.”
Preparing the carpaccios was easy, and I was instantly comfortable filleting and pounding the fish. After I’d finished and tidied up my station, Shai asked me to cut orange segments. “Show me,” he said, and I did. He nodded in approval. Score another point for me!
Later in the early evening, I met the other sous-chef, also named Shai. I nicknamed him Blue-Eyed Shai, while the Shai from the morning became Brown-Eyed Shai. He and Vlady showed me how to plate the appetizers when orders came in. At first I used my pocket notebook to scribble down the ingredients for the composed salads and carpaccios, but the kitchen vibe seemed laid-back, and by the end of the evening I was working in a rhythm alongside Vlady, asking for help only occasionally.
“Good work,” said Vlady, inspecting my plates and giving me a thumbs-up.
The menu at Carmella was Mediterranean/Israeli, with some added French and German influences. It was a bit of a hodgepodge but guided by a market-driven philosophy, which made sense since the Carmel Market was the biggest produce market in Tel Aviv and only steps away. The restaurant’s entrées were mostly grilled or seared meats with vegetable garnishes. It was simple, uncomplicated food with little embellishment—and I was ready for that, especially after wd~50’s complicated plating and Didier’s many garnishes and sauces at La Verticale.
A few days later, Daniel Zach joined the staff at the two rectangular tables where we ate family meal in the dining room. I hadn’t met him yet, but he knew I was there. After a summer of eating in the workers’ canteen in Hanoi, I was happy to return to an intimate and convivial family meal, one that included the entire kitchen crew plus one or two front-of-house staff from the afternoon shift. The hot line cooks prepared the entrées, usually roast chicken drumsticks or fried cutlets along with leftover rice and mashed potatoes from the lunch shift. But we also ate homemade falafel, crispy and spring green from a handful of minced parsley, and that day’s menu featured pasta Bolognese. I had even been in charge of making a salad of my choosing, using whatever ingredients we had on the station. As I was eating, I zoned out amid the Hebrew chatter, but suddenly Daniel turned to look at me from across the table and switched to English.
“Lauren, how are you doing?” he asked.
“Great. Everyone has been really helpful, explaining things to me and translating.”
“Do you speak Hebrew?”
“No, but I’d like to learn. I might try and do ulpan while I’m here.” Ulpan is an intensive Hebrew school for new arrivals to Israel. I wasn’t sure how I’d fit it into my schedule, which I’d been told would vary from week to week, but I wanted to learn a little Hebrew so I could better understand what was going on around me and feel like part of the community.
“Well, you’ve come at a good time. You’ve come between the wars,” he joked.
“That’s one way to look at it,” I said.
“But you’re Jewish, right?”
“Yes. My mom is Jewish and so I was raised Jewish.”
“And what do your parents do?”
“My father’s a lawyer and my mother teaches English as a second language.”
“So you’re a Jewish American princess, then?” he stated, looking directly into my eyes.
“No, I don’t think of myself that way,” I said, slightly offended. Although we were comfortable, I was brought up understanding the value of a dollar.
“You know, in Israel we are very direct about things. Don’t take it personally,” he said.
“Right.”
“Well, if I hear you are doing a good job, and I already have, I may start paying you,” he said.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said, and regretted the words the second they left my mouth. After all, why shouldn’t I get paid? I was doing the same work as the paid employees. The only difference was that I was an American without an Israeli work permit and at the restaurant for just a fixed period.
Over the past few months, I’d been thinking more and more about the amount of unpaid labor in professional kitchens. I suppose it’s not much different from other industries (media, fashion, and advertising, to name a few) with unpaid or very poorly paid internships. Maybe this is a business model that has to be in place for an enterprise like a restaurant to function successfully and profitably, but it also made me wonder about some of the labor practices within an industry already notorious for its hiring policies. I hadn’t encountered it, but I’d heard stories from other chef friends about restaurants that regularly employed undocumented workers and paid them lower wages under the table in an effort to control costs.
“I’ll be the one to decide that,” Daniel said in a no-nonsense tone, adding, “But you’re having a good time working here so far?”
“Yes, everything has been great,” I said.
“Good, because the most important thing is for you to be having fun,” he said.
Really? My having fun was the most important thing? I could get used to this.
“YOU MUST COME to La Champa with us. We’re so excited to meet you. Any friend of Hannah’s is going to be a friend of ours,” Kate said after I introduced myself over the phone. Hannah, an old friend and neighbor of mine, had just returned to New York after spending a year in Tel Aviv and suggested that I call her Israeli friend Kate. So I did, happy to make local friends outside of work.
“What’s La Champa?” I asked.
“It’s a great little tapas bar on Nachalat Benyamin. They specialize in cava, the Spanish sparkling wine, so everyone buys bottles and spills out into the street with their glasses of wine and it’s a really fun time. Hannah tells me that you’re a cook. We’ll have to talk shop. I’m not a professional cook or anything, but I love cooking, so do come tonight at nine. Hannah’s shown me a picture of you, so I’ll find you at the bar,” said Kate.
Indeed, when I arrived at La Champa, throngs of revelers were already leaning against cars while precariously balancing glasses in their hands. I pushed open the door and saw a narrow bar, mirror lined and with only a few bar stools, while a massive cured ham sat on full display in what seemed to me a direct mockery of kosher laws.
Kate waved to me from across the room. “Hi, Lauren! I’m so glad you could join us. This is Asher, who is my roommate, and this is Alex and Sharon. Asher and Alex are American and went to college together, and Sharon’s originally from Argentina,” she said, pointing to the guy and two girls sitting next to her.
“Hi, everybody,” I said.
“Here, let’s get you a glass. Oh, I’m so excited for you to be in Tel Aviv. We’re going to cook together all the time,” said Kate.
“Except Kate doesn’t eat anything she cooks,” said Asher, who was loquacious and dramatic, with dark eyes and a crooked smile.
“You don’t? Why not?” I asked.
“I’m vegan. But it’s a health thing, not an ethical thing. So I make Asher meat dishes all the time.” Kate certainly had the frame of a vegan, with delicate bone structure and the long, lean limbs of a prima ballerina.
“How do you know if the food you make is good?”
“By smell. Or by asking Asher to taste it.”
“And that works out?”
“Yeah, totally. You’ll have to taste my cooking soon and let me know what you think. Speaking of, do you have plans for Rosh Hashana? We’re going to have a big dinner at our house.”
“No, not yet.” I had been in Tel Aviv for only a few days, hardly enough time to sort out holiday plans. Not that I had anyone else to spend the holiday with, but I didn’t see the point of announcing that to the group.
“Well then, you’re coming to dinner at our house. We can plan the menu together!” said Kate.
“Yeah, that would be great,” I said, sipping my cava, excited to be spending the Jewish New Year with new friends. We drank our cava late into the night—the first of many such nights, I hoped.
“DO YOU KNOW how to make gnocchi?” Eli asked me at the restaurant a few days later.
“I made it in school, but that was a while ago,” I said.
He pulled out a container of potatoes from the refrigerator. “Okay, I’ll show you. Some people, they like to make it with boiled potatoes, but we make it with, how do you say, it’s like how you make dim sum…”
“Steamed potatoes?”
“Yes,” he said, and I nodded, knowing that steaming potatoes yielded lighter gnocchi than boiled potatoes because the starch content was slightly lower. “So you grate the potatoes until you have three kilos. Then add twelve hundred grams of flour, two hundred grams of Parmesan cheese, twelve egg yolks, and a handful of salt. You can use the gram scale that’s in the pastry kitchen.”
I jotted down the recipe in my pocket-sized notebook.
“Then you take the mixture and rub it between your fingers until it is like salt. And then you form the dough into logs, and make like five or six logs, and then cut with this,” he said, holding up a pastry scraper.
“Okay. Got it. If I have any questions, I’ll find you.” Secretly, I was elated that the other Carmella cooks trusted my culinary judgment. At wd~50, Tom or someone else always watched my every move. To be fair, though, I now had more culinary experience under my belt.
As I kneaded the dough, Brown-Eyed Shai came over to check on my progress. “See, every day it’s something new to do. And at the end you’ll decide to move to Tel Aviv and become a cook here.”
After I finished the gnocchi, I handed them to Yosko, one of the cooks who worked the grill station, to parboil. He inspected them and said, “For first time making gnocchi, good job.”
“Thanks,” I said, delighted. I cleaned up my station and began to help set the table for family meal.
After each family meal, the kitchen staff migrated to the terrace for about twenty minutes, smoking cigarettes and relaxing. I always joined them, savoring the calm before the dinner storm. Hamoudi looked at me and exclaimed, “You don’t smoke?”
Smoking hadn’t been a big thing among the staff in Vietnam, which surprised me at first because it was commonplace in Hanoi for men to smoke. But here, every single person except for me and Blue-Eyed Shai smoked. Even Nitzan smoked along with the boys. As the only other female in the kitchen, she was friendly to me, but we hadn’t bonded because she was often buried in the pastry kitchen. So I hung out with loud, sarcastic, macho boys.
While they were generally good cooks, they often abandoned dirty cutting boards when starting a new task or failed to clean their counter space. I now appreciated wd~50’s efficiency more than ever and how rare it was to have a chef who cooked regularly in the kitchen, like Wylie. Daniel was rarely in the kitchen, even less often than Didier. When we returned to the kitchen, I asked Eli, “How often does Daniel cook here?”
“Not much. I think I saw him here once. And he wasn’t even really cooking; he was mostly watching.”
I found this interesting, particularly after my experience with Didier Corlou. I wondered why neither chef spent much time in his own kitchen. Was it something about restaurant cooking that made chefs burn out and want to step away from the stove? As much as I was enjoying gaining restaurant experience and confidence in the kitchen, when I examined the situation I saw that it was always the younger sous-chefs who actually ran most kitchens. Daniel Zach obviously cared about running a great restaurant and was responsible for creating its menu and culinary style, but I found it increasingly disheartening that so many chef owners were more businessmen than cooks, abandoning their cooking career when they no longer had the stamina and drive to be on their feet for fourteen hours a day. I was also beginning to consider how this dynamic affected female chefs. Think about how difficult it must be to run a kitchen while pregnant! Or of the guilt that must come at seven o’clock at night when you’re feeding a restaurant full of customers but can’t be home to put dinner on the table for your children. These weren’t immediate concerns for me, but as I thought about my future, I wondered how the work–life balance plays out when you’re a top female restaurant chef. The more I saw, the less it seemed to be a real possibility.
“WE’LL GO to the market first and get all the ingredients, and then we’ll start the cooking. Well, you’ll do the cooking and we’ll watch,” said Asher.
At the last minute, Kate had acquiesced to her parents’ request and decided to spend Rosh Hashana with her family in Modi’in, a suburb forty minutes away. I was sorry to miss out on her cooking, but she assured me there would be plenty of other times to sample her food. And since I was a professional cook, Asher reasoned, I could make the dinner! Of course I would want to prepare dinner for six with less than a day’s notice! Though daunted at first, I figured I could pull out all the stops and, the way a woman cooks for a prospective boyfriend, seduce my new friends with the pleasures of the table.
“We’ll help out, we promise. Just tell us what to chop and peel. We’re good at that,” said Mati, Asher’s boyfriend.
We ambled through the Carmel Market, which was a food lover’s dream, hectic and crowded, featuring stalls filled with fragrant herbs, bright red pomegranates and blushing purple figs, creamy feta-style cheeses cut into large, milky cubes, and rows of cured olives floating in shallow pools of golden green oil. The menu was ambitious for the amount of time we’d allotted, but the boys were confident I could do it. For hors d’oeuvres, I wanted something simple and Israeli, like hummus topped with fried onions and sautéed mushrooms. I planned a salad based on Carmella’s famous herb one, capturing the spirit of the holiday by adding pomegranate seeds in lieu of toasted cashews. Alex, Asher and Kate’s friend whom I’d met at La Champa, had requested brisket, so I opted for a red wine–braised version that I’d serve with onion-rice pilaf and store-bought circular challah bread to represent the cycle of the New Year. For dessert, I planned to make an apple-honey tart, combining the two most symbolic foods of the holiday, evoking the hope for a sweet year to come.
Once we got back to Kate and Asher’s place, which was only two blocks from my own apartment, we immediately sprang into action. Ironically, having worked almost nonstop in restaurants since graduating from culinary school, I rarely found myself in a home kitchen. When you work as a restaurant chef, you’re on duty during normal mealtimes and don’t necessarily feel the urge to cook on your days off. But here in Kate and Asher’s spacious, open kitchen, without the chaos of the restaurant, I took charge. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed being in a home kitchen and was undaunted by the amount of cooking to be done over the next five hours.
“Asher and Mati, if you want to prep the vegetables for the hors d’oeuvres, that would be great and I’ll get to work butchering the meat,” I said.
Six pounds of beef covered with layers of white, bulbous fat awaited me. I began slicing off heavy clumps of fat and pitched them into the garbage. Once the brisket was completely trimmed of fat, I seasoned it generously with salt and pepper.
“That’s a lot of salt,” said Mati, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah, it looks like a lot, but it really helps add flavor. That’s why restaurant food often tastes so much better than home-cooked food. They add handfuls of salt. I’ve never made brisket, though, so I hope it works out,” I said.
“You’re a chef, so I’m sure it’s great,” said Asher.
“I’m really more of a cook than a chef,” I replied.
“Same difference, really,” said Asher.
“Not to a chef.”
When the pan began smoking, I placed two of the four slabs of meat in it. “You also don’t want to crowd the pan, since you’ll lower the temperature of the pan too much. And then the meat won’t brown properly,” I said. Wow, I thought, I actually know more than I realized about cooking.
“Okay, I guess I’ll do the soup after this. If you guys want to peel the sweet potatoes, I’ll chop some of the vegetables and get the other stuff ready after I’m done with the meat,” I said once all the meat had browned and I’d placed it in the oven.
I had planned to make a butternut squash soup, but at the last minute Asher said he had a glut of sweet potatoes. I wanted to incorporate Israeli flavors into the soup and thought immediately of a combination of feta cheese and olive oil infused with zaatar, a Middle Eastern spice mixture made from dried hyssop, sumac, thyme, and sesame seeds. Its warm and savory flavors, coupled with the dramatic dark green and white popping out against the bright orange soup, seemed appropriately festive.
I quickly assembled a mirepoix, which is a base of chopped onion, carrot, and leek to give depth and flavor to a sauce, soup, or stock, and began sautéing it in a large pot. Delicious aromas began to swirl through the air as the vegetables softened.
“Ooooh, this is so exciting!” exclaimed Asher, peering into the pot.
“I hope so! I’m a little nervous. What if it all turns out terribly? You guys would have to be fake nice about it so I wouldn’t get sad.”
“That actually would be really funny,” Asher said. “We’d be like, ‘Oh, mmm, this is so good,’ and when you ask if we want more, we’d be like, ‘Oh, no, it’s very filling.’”
“You know what we need? Wine. I always cook better with a glass of wine in my hand,” I said, chopping herbs for the salad.
We were ahead of schedule, and as I made a mental note to turn the brisket in half an hour, I realized that I’d planned and prepared this entire dinner without a single recipe. I realized I didn’t need them anymore. This was the kind of cooking I truly enjoyed: guided by touch, smell, and intuition, without the need for a gram scale or three dozen ingredients. Surely wd~50 had been an excellent first restaurant experience; it had taught me how an efficient kitchen runs and the passion and discipline required to be a great chef, in addition to honing my palate, knife skills, technical precision, and speed. But I hated that I could never teach Mati and Asher the actual recipes and dishes I had learned there. Molecular gastronomy cannot be translated to the home kitchen. Still, when I arrived in Vietnam I was very focused on measuring out every ingredient precisely, but Son and Thanh quickly dismissed these as time wasters. After all, Vietnamese cuisine isn’t about being precise; it’s about being fresh, flavorful, and fast.
Home cooking, too, follows this principle, focusing on nourishment, not wowing your audience. When you host a dinner party, you are, of course, hoping to display your culinary skills and impress others, but the ultimate point of the meal is to eat and share a meal with friends. When I’ve played the parlor game of “What meal would you want to be your last on earth?” I’ve rarely—if ever—encountered a response about seeing caviar or a truffle-and-foie-gras terrine. Instead, people want roast chicken, meat loaf, poached eggs and bacon, lobster grilled simply with drawn butter, a slice of German chocolate cake. As I prepared this meal, I found my culinary ambitions being drawn away from the restaurant and toward the simpler, comforting foods that I could prepare with others at home.
Two bottles of wine and three hours later, we sat down with our guests to the soup course.
“Oh, my God, this is so good!” said Asher. Indeed, the soup was good. Really good.
“So what are everyone’s goals for the New Year?” Asher asked as he served the salad course.
“I’d just like to make Asher happy,” Mati said without a trace of sarcasm.
“I’d like to focus on my studies and have a good school–life balance,” said Alex, who was starting a program in conflict resolution at Tel Aviv University.
“I’d like to get fit and to start dancing again,” said Asher, whose recent knee surgery had halted his professional ballet career.
I thought about Belinda and Lucy and Son and Thanh and my new friends here, all so welcoming in bringing me into their circle and breaking bread with me. “I guess I’d like to focus on surrounding myself with good, quality people. I’d like to improve my knife skills and get cooking experience for sure, but more important, I’d like to take advantage of my time here in Israel and focus on being happy.”
“Well, if this dinner counts for anything, I think you’re off to a good start,” said Asher.
“I agree completely,” I said.
The following recipes were highlights from my Rosh Hashana dinner. They are what I would call modern Israeli: familiar flavors with hints of the Mediterranean, Middle East, and beyond.
How can you start a festive meal without hummus, the ubiquitous chickpea dip found all over the Middle East? Serve with wedges of warm pita bread, crackers, or your favorite crudités.
SERVES 6 TO 8 AS AN HORS D’OEUVRE
2 (15-ounce) cans chickpeas, rinsed under cold water
4 tablespoons lemon juice
3 tablespoons water
1 garlic clove
¼ teaspoon cumin
2 teaspoons plus a pinch of kosher salt
¼ cup plus 3 tablespoons olive oil
Vegetable oil for frying (about 2 cups)
1 yellow onion
In a food processor, combine the chickpeas, lemon juice, water, tahini, garlic, cumin, and salt, and blend. With the motor running, slowly add ¼ cup olive oil and blend until smooth. Pour into a serving bowl and make a small well in the center using the back of a spoon. Add the 3 tablespoons olive oil in the well.
Heat the vegetable oil in a small to medium-sized pot over medium-high heat. You want enough oil to fill at least 1 inch of the pot. Slice the onion into ¼-inch-thick rings. Test to see if the oil is hot enough: Drop 1 onion ring into the oil; if it begins to bubble rapidly and float to the surface, the oil is hot enough. Add the remaining onion rings and fry until brown, about 8 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, remove the onion rings and let dry on a paper towel. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt. Scatter the onion rings on top of the hummus surrounding the olive oil well and serve immediately.
This bright-green-and-red salad is inspired by the herb salad with toasted cashews served at Carmella. Plus, it utilizes the best trick I learned at Carmella: deseeding pomegranates in a snap. Since herbs have a tendency to darken when cut, make sure they are completely dry after washing them (the best way to wash them is to leave them tied in bunches and let them soak in cold water for a few minutes, swirling the water occasionally to remove any dirt) before slicing. And don’t worry if you have uneven or whole leaves; that’s part of this salad’s charm.
SERVES 6
2 pomegranates
2 bunches parsley (about 6 cups’ worth of leaves)
1 bunch cilantro (about 2 cups’ worth of leaves)
½ bunch mint (about 1 to 1½ cups leaves)
4 cups baby arugula leaves
½ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Slice the pomegranates in half lengthwise. Make five to six incisions at a 20-degree angle into the base of each half. Over a bowl, place the pomegranate half seed-side down into your palm and whack the top of the fruit with a spoon. Repeat until there are no more seeds left in the fruit. Remove any yellow pith that might have fallen out along with the seeds. Place the seeds into a large salad bowl.
Cut the parsley, cilantro, and mint: Leaving the herbs tied in bunches and using a sharp knife, thinly slice the herbs starting at the top of the bunch. Once you reach mostly stems, discard the bunch. Add the herbs to the bowl.
Take the arugula and form it into a ball. Using the same single slicing motion, cut the arugula into small pieces. Add to the salad bowl along with the salt, olive oil, and lemon juice. Combine well and serve immediately.
This is a really simple soup, warming and autumnal and gently flavored with hints of the Middle East. Zaatar is a spice blend that combines dried hyssop, thyme, and sesame seeds and can be found at Middle Eastern grocery stores or other specialty stores.
SERVES 6 TO 8
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons zaatar
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 small leek, diced
5 small sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped in 1-inch cubes
6 cups water
2 cups chicken stock
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon kosher salt
¼ cup feta cheese
In a small pot, combine ¼ cup olive oil and the zaatar. Cook over medium heat until hot, but take care not to burn the zaatar. Set aside for at least 1 hour to cool and infuse.
In a large pot, heat the butter and remaining olive oil over medium-high heat. When the butter has melted, add the onion, carrot, and leek, and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the sweet potato cubes, and sauté for another minute. Add the water, stock, and bay leaf, and bring to a boil. Once the soup begins to boil, lower to a simmer and cook for 30 minutes. Check to make sure the sweet potatoes are completely soft. Add the salt to the soup.
Remove the bay leaf and puree the soup using a regular or immersion blender. If the soup is too thick, add a little water or stock until a desired consistency has been reached. Ladle the soup into individual bowls. Crumble the feta into each bowl and drizzle with the zaatar oil.
Brisket is a popular choice for the Jewish holidays, and although the meat can frequently be tough, the trick is to cook it for a really long time over a very low temperature so that the fat and collagen break down and the meat becomes fork-tender. This is great served over a bed of creamy polenta or mashed potatoes. The 5-to-6-pound brisket is the weight before the fat is trimmed off; after the fat is trimmed, the yield should be about 3 to 4 pounds of beef.
SERVES 8
1 medium to large yellow onion
4 carrots
1 leek, white part only
2 ribs celery
1 beef brisket, about 5 to 6 pounds before trimming
1 tablespoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons olive oil
6 cloves garlic
2 bay leaves
6 sprigs thyme
2 cups beef stock
Preheat the oven to 320 degrees F. Cut the onion in half vertically, then cut each half into quarters. Cut the carrots, leek, and celery into 2-inch pieces.
Trim and discard all the fat off the brisket, including the center layer of fat. Cut the brisket into three pieces. Generously season the brisket pieces with the salt and pepper on all sides. Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet over high heat. When the oil begins to smoke, place one piece of the brisket in the pan and sear on each side for about 2 minutes, or until a dark golden crust forms. Remove from the pan and keep warm. Repeat with the remaining two pieces of brisket. Add another tablespoon of olive oil to the pan, and sauté the garlic, onion, carrots, leek, celery, bay leaves, and thyme until the garlic begins to turn golden. Transfer the vegetable mixture to a Dutch oven or other heavy-bottomed baking dish. Place the beef atop the bed of vegetables.
Add ½ cup red wine to the skillet and deglaze the pan, scraping up any bits that may be stuck to the bottom. Once you have reduced the wine by half, pour over the meat. Add the remaining wine and the beef stock to the skillet, and bring to a boil. Pour over the meat and vegetables. The liquid should come halfway up to the meat but should not submerge it completely.
Bake, covered, for 4 hours, basting and turning the meat every half hour. The braising liquid should be at a gentle boil the whole time. If the liquid is boiling rapidly, lower the heat to 315 degrees F. If there is a lot of liquid remaining in the pot, cook with the lid slightly ajar for the last hour. The meat should be tender enough when done to be cut with a fork and should fall apart easily when handled with tongs. Let sit for about 10 minutes before serving.
Divide the brisket among bowls and serve with some of the vegetables and braising liquid.