Rehovot

The top of a tangerine (sabayon) tart I made. The crust, though, is lousy. Pie/tart crust is my nemesis! But the sabayon and I get along just fine!

Omy. I dined at 1789 a dozen years ago, as a kid in high school (on one of those D.C. civics-immersion trips, eek). The parents of a friend of mine on the trip invited me, and our U.S. History / Civics teacher, who was also in town. Dinner was delicious. And there was no quiz from our teacher afterwards!

If I'm feeling particularly ambitious, I make these cookies to go with tea; I think the recipe was in the Figaro magazine a few months ago: 4 ladyfingers or 8 “petit beurre” cookies 80 grams powdered sugar 50 grams salted butter 4 small squares of dark chocolate 1 dl milk powdered cocoa or coffee Caramel: place the sugar in a pan, add 1 dl of water, bring to a boil, and cook just until the caramel turns golden. Then add the butter, remove from heat, and stir gently. Preheat the oven to 4 / 120 degrees C. Cut the ladyfingers in two, or prepare two petit beurre cookies. Spread half of the caramel on both sides, placing one square of chocolate on top. Transfer to a baking sheet and bake for 2 minutes. These, plus a big mug of Earl Grey, a blanket, and a good novel =

Yay. I look forward to the pictorial/tutorial. I have a pot of the Bourdain recipe (sans demi-glace, boo hoo) simmering, at the moment. It's been burbling a bit for the last couple of hours, and now it tastes quite good. But I'm really too lazy to strain any of it.

Papa John's cheese sticks. And, oh, hell, I love Panera/St.Louis Bread Co., in all their mass-produced carb glory. Especially the cobblestones--sweet enough to melt the enamel off your teeth.

Something with ground pistachios and honey, baked in sweet dough, and dusted with powdered sugar......My grocer insisted I try one. It was sort of like baklava's more homely cousin, but tasty, tasty, tasty.

We had our wedding lunch at U Zlaty Hrozen (At the Golden Grape), off of Starometski Namesti / Old Town Square, in Prague....Walked from the wedding in Old Town Hall, about 2 minutes away......Picked the menu out the day before the wedding....... It was: Kir royale Consomme with a poached egg yolk (we had to succumb to Czech tradition and feed each other the first spoonful, yikes, but somehow my husband and I had momentarily great coordination and didn't spill a drop) Caprese salad Some kind of chicken with great sauce and roasted potatoes Tiramisu Lots of champagne During the days before, everyone kept feasting on chodsko / Czech wedding cakes, and slivovice... We took the wedding party out to dinner at an Italian restaurant the night before......and then partied after the wedding at a pizzeria in my husband's neighborhood. Lots of beer. All of it......was fantastic.

Hey, tetsujustin, nice work! Your reviews are really well-crafted, as others have mentioned, and analytical. They make for very enjoyable reading. Is Balthazar the last one on your list, or are there more to come?

Here's a quick-and-dirty translation of the recipe linked above....'cause now I want to make it, too. Anything in brackets, I added, but the original text is pretty straightforward. If I translated something wrong (which I'm sure I did), sorry! I'm sure someone else out there has a better translation, and a sense of quantities. And knows what "matalauva" is. “This transcription is from my grandmother’s recipe. Clean the dried figs, remove the stem, and mince them in the food processor. Toast the almonds and grind them [separately from the figs] in the blender / food processor. Mix the almonds with the figs, adding dried clove (very little; 2-3 cloves for 1 kilo of figs), a bit of oats/granola ["y de matalauva"??], and a bit of cinnamon. To hold the mix together, add a bit of brandy and honey. Mix together well [i don’t think this part has to be done in the blender / processor], and make rounds or loaves, using a floured surface. Let dry a bit. The author says, “I can’t give quantities because my grandmother measured everything ‘by eye,’ as she used to say. They keep well. My grandmother Ana made them in winter-- that’s when figs and almonds were in season—and made enough loaves to last until the next year. Really, the figs and almonds can be minced/chopped with any kitchen tool.” Um, yeah, hmm. The baking part......no mention of that.

Someone told me spring starts in late February. Ore, great photos and reviews! Look forward to the rest...

Chicken with lots of cumin and onions. Not exactly inspired, but spicy!! I only get to do this while Mr. Rehovot is away....he of "Could we have less spice?" fame. LESS spice???

I started nuking sponges with a bit of soap and water. Since the first one, which emerged from the microwave with a scorch mark in the middle, I've honed the technique. But does this really get rid of the microbes? We don't have a dishwasher, so I figured this was the next best thing. Maybe I read about it somewhere....

Those are gorgeous cakes. Your friend's smile, in the last photo, says it all. How do I feel about cakes? I love that they can be simple or extravagant, but have the same fundamental form. They're sort of like hats--there are the demure ones, like tea cakes, and then there are the ostrich-and-peacock-feathered ones..........i.e., peach layer cake with toasted-coconut frosting.

All right, has anyone else fessed up to this yet? I save deli containers, cheese containers, jam jars, etc., scour 'em all out and give them another life. I can't help it! It's genetic! My mom must have a thousand of those little deli containers! Seriously, those and Ziplocs are my answer to storage. But my dream kitchen has a bunch of hanging, tiered copper baskets for storing fruit and tomatoes.......

Well, it wasn't the worst meal I've had, but someone once served (undercooked) baked sweet potatoes and (bad) ham salad at a dinner get-together I attended. In theory, the combination might be ok; in practice, it was uninspired and.....just weird.

Wow, what great-looking feasts above. We had broccoli soup (I snuck in some shredded cabbage and roasted potatoes) and leftover savory palmiers, from New Year's. Tonight, it's vegetable lasagne...tho' altering my mom's classic lasagne recipe for the first time makes me a little nervous. Will vegetable lasagne incur some kind of ancestral wrath from my Italian side?

"[The French] eat a wide variety of fresh foods, including plenty of fruits and vegetables, but not a lot at one sitting, [neuroscientist Will Clower] says. They value quality over quantity. "'People here would buy a 5-pound burrito if it cost 99 cents even if it was tasteless, but the French would never do that.'" Right. Then explain to me what all those people are doing in leQuick (wrong name, maybe, but French burger chain). Most of them don't have American accents. Granted, American mass media is probably responsible, at some level, for the appeal of such a burger chain as leQuick...but making gross generalizations about the way nations eat doesn't really explain anything new. Most of what's said in this article is pure common sense. For example, Giuliano's doctor told her to "walk everywhere," and, voila. The skinny Parisian women you see are that way because, chances are, they don't own a car. Interesting piece. Of course, being the CEO of Veuve Cliquot doesn't hurt finding the best, freshest ingredients, good wine, etc., etc. A bit harder to do that on welfare.

Great blog! Keep it up! I'm impressed that you're doing all this on a student budget (that is, student funds *and* lack of time!). I love caramel, but never make it, because all I end up with is sugar in some freakishly unnatural form. Seems like making the stuff requires the skills of an alchemist. Grrr.

Giant pot of lentil soup, for us, and latkes with a little bit of mushroom - sour-cream topping. Mushroom thing was the only Thanksgiving Leftover to make an appearance at this meal.

I'm embarrassed to admit my score.....The comment was, "Better stay in your own country!" HA! Too late! And I love asking French waiters for ketchup. Drives 'em nuts.

As a Catholic who married an atheist and is now living in Israel..... It's fascinating to watch the country welcome Hannukah..... The sufganiyot are really alluring.......tho' my teacher in the ulpan said, "Ladies! Beware!" and then drew a sufganiyah on the board. "Those have 400 calories each!" I think I'll have to go taste and see if that's really true..... Best wishes for the holidays......

Thanks, Spaghetttti. I should've thought of that. All the photos, descriptions on this thread are fantastic. Let's do Thanksgiving again.......next week! Then I'll get to try all the stuff I couldn't, last week.

I'm sure there are other posts to this tune.... People who have been friends of our family for years and years invite us over before the holidays one year, after weeks of back-and-forth scheduling between the families. Finally, the mothers (very good friends, but with different ways of doing things) pick a date. We'd been over to their house, and they to ours, for dozens of times; always, it was something homemade, casual--but always, good food. The kind of food you take time to prepare for friends. These friends insisted on having dinner at their house, even though they had alerted us that they'd be out all day shopping; my mom tried to persuade them to relax, and come to our house. They served us Olive Garden take out .............without letting us in on the secret; passed it off as home cooking. (I figured it out as I glanced into the oven and saw things in ready-made foil trays, plus a bag of Olive Garden dressing on the counter; didn't let on to my family until we got home and my parents said, hmm, there was something weird about that meal.......can't put my finger on it.) No prep dishes in the sink should have been a clue...... Then I informed my folks, in Sherlock Holmes style, what had happened. Two questions remain, for me: 1) Why on EARTH would you *want* to pass off Olive Garden as your own cooking?!?! (Ok, I was happy to go there in college, when the only other (beloved) option was the Waffle House, but.......) 2) Why would you do this to friends? Families are still good friends........We don't talk about the dinner........They think we don't know; we continue to let them think thus.... Basically, I wish they'd just said, geez, we're really busy, let's just go meet somewhere. Eurkea! Oh, yes, more aptly: it was hideous food that should have remained on the conveyor belt from whence it originated.

This was the first Thanksgiving I've attempted to do the production myself; since we're not living in the U.S., and I'm not married to an American, I enjoyed a lot of poetic license with the menu..... We had....... Turkey cutlets w/ orange sauce (had to nix the first sauce, cranberry reduction, when I screwed up the measurements and it was puckery sweet-tart) Mushroom strudel for the vegetarian Cornbread stuffing w/ sage, toasted pecans, golden raisins, celery, onion, etc. (Why are we having stuffing if we're not actually *stuffing* anything?, asked my husband.) Fresh green beans w/ rosemary, garlic, and lemon gremolata Sweet-potato and apple scallop Orange and cranberry cake No pumpkin pie! Couldn't find pumpkin, tho' I looked high and low. No mashed potatoes, either.......that would have been too much. We're still "urp"ing, as it is.......... Guests brought great Israeli wine and a bouquet of flowers the size of a Buick. Good stories, good food. Hope y'all had a great day, too.

Friday night, we had a dinner party: giant caprese salad, chicken w/ marjoram-white-wine sauce, assorted breads; guests brought great Indian and Chinese appetizers; dessert was a mixed-nut tart with cinnamon-glazed plums. I like my hyphenated food.