Tapenade

I have to agree with most of what Maher wrote here, especially his detailed explanation of the distinction between the dried herb zaatar and the ready-made mixture that one buys in shops and supermarkets. Unfortunately, at least here in Israel, some manufacturers do include parsley in order to increase the bulk very inexpensively: I can't say I have seen chick-pea flour yet, but I'll keep my eyes open now! Maher is definitely right to say that the best stuff is what is collected from the hillsides and sold by the side of the road. But here, zaatar is a protected plant and so it is difficult to come by in this way. Incidentally, we just tried a new use for zaatar at home the other day: I suggested that my other half mix a little zaatar to the flour coating in which we deep-fried a batch of red mullet (barbounia) fillets. It was a great success, although I think we could have added a little more zaatar. We've also done this in the past with fresh thyme, oregano and chives mixed into the flour (or matza mea, which is even better).

First of all, I don't know who says that Yaffo has the best food in the Middle East, except perhaps for some particularly chauvinistic Yaffo residents -- and I've lived in Israel (including Yaffo) for 28 years now. There are certainly some good restaurants in Yaffo, but I wouldn't say they are any better than a lot of other restaurants in Israel (as for the rest of the Middle East, I only have experience of food in Egypt and Jordan, and a little bit of south Lebanon). I've certainly encountered pre-packaged zaatar that includes citric acid, presumably to add sourness to the sumac (although not very often); but I've never seen pre-packaged zaatar that includes parsley. Typically, stuff you buy at the supermarket includes the zaatar itself (technically, it's hyssop in English), sesame seeds, sumac and a little olive oil. At one foodie heaven where I sometimes shop in Ra'anana, they also sell bulk zaatar with added garlic. However, it's also worth pointing out that there is (usually) a difference between pre-packaged supermarket zaatar and the stuff you buy in market stalls, which tends to be the pure herb. In Amman, for example, I bought a biggish bag of zaatar that was pure dried hyssop with no additives. As far as sumac is concerned, I've bought it in bulk at the supermarket, and it is the real thing without additives (the only additive that wouldn't change the colour significantly is parika, but it would change the taste noticeably).

Well, the fish-and-chip place that Swisskaese referred to in her post, which is in West Hampstead, uses pure vegetable oil and a matza meal coating on the fish, and it was among the best deep fried fish I've ever eaten, to say nothing of the huge portions of fish (halibut for me, haddock for her). The truth is that we wouldn't eat fish fried in beef fat anyway, since we both keep kosher, but I don't recall from my pre-kosher days that the fried fish I had in many a chippy around England -- and some of them were definitely using animal fat rather than oil -- was as good as what we had in this place.

I've made several fruit salads with kiwi: two favorites are fresh strawberries, halved or quartered (depending on size) and sliced kiwi, to which you can also add some sliced carambola (starfruit); and a salad of fresh melon chunks or balls, kiwi as above, fresh figs cut into eighths, fresh mango and fresh nectarine; preferably with some liqueur on top and a few mint leaves. I've also had wonderful fresh kiwi and pineapple juice at juice bars here. Although both fruits are fairly tart, they mix really well.

What Swisskaese didn't write is that while I was sick as a dog and eating plain rice, she ate up all the beautiful green asparagus, right in front of me, with the sadistic look of pleasure on her face. And this was after I'd been planning a surprise birthday dinner that I was too ill to even think about making.

That's more or less what I do, except that I do eat halal meat, at least if I'm in a Muslim country. After all, Islam borrowed a great deal of its laws and customs from Judaism. a very good plan ... many people who are Jewish eat only fish and/or dairy items outside their homes .. they are sometimes referred to as "Metrodox" ... they just don't eat meat out ... I am married to one ... my friend, Binyamin Cohen, explains it here ←

I think this business of only drinking kosher wine, to say nothing of only cooking with it, is absurd, and is based on rules that originate much later than the main laws of kashrut and are not found in the Torah. I've kept kosher for most of my adult life, but nothing will stop me from drinking wines of whatever provenance, irrespective of whether they were made and supervised by suitably religious Jews. The risk that I'm going to be forcibly baptised, or otherwise transmogrified into a Christian, as a result of drinking wine otherwised used for the sacrament, or that I am going to marry a non-Jewish women because I've been drinking the wrong wine, is infinitesimal to zero. What is even more ridiculous is that I can drink beer, whiskey, vodka, sliwowitz or tequila with, and made by, non-Jews without the slightest ostensible risk or breach of what some other Jews think is an essential law: it's only wine that is restricted. By the way, I know plenty of other people who keep kosher but also think the kosher wine business is humbug. Apparently, paranoia is no longer a deciding factor in oenological taste. David Having had a kosher kitchen for some 38+ years, I agree .. catfish is never kosher but many fish are fine .. that said, while I like Daniel Rogov's idea about poaching in wine ... however, please know that the wines must be kosher ... and as for kosher? there are many variations on what constitutes kosher ... some more and some less stringent ... ←

And even by Michelle's usual standards, it was totally scrumptious The taste of the herbs and garlic was more pronounced than usual, and I could have sworn that I smelled the oregano growing on the hillside and heard the kids bleating in the dark.

Right, but you're begging the question aren't you? The first amendment does not apply only to journalists, it applies to all US citizens. I'm not a legal expert, so if you could point me to some case law showing that FA applies unequally to different groups of US citizens, I'll promptly eat crow. I was under the impression that it applies to everyone equally. ← We're going to deleted because this has nothing to do with the thread, but the first amendment has different applications for different groups. It covers freedom of religion. But it doesn't mean anyone can start a one-person religion and claim such a religion should enjoy some of the same constitutional guarantees afforded to "established" religions - such as priest/penitent confidentiality. Same as freedom of the press. The journalist must work for a "recognized" form of the media to enjoy certain privileges ie cameras in courtroom, revelation of sources - all of the "slippery slope" stuff. Bottom line, yes virtually every amendment affords certain rights to certain groups: women's sufferage, civil and voting rights, duly elected office holders etc, etc. We are a country of individual equals, but some professions enjoy privileges others do not. And the list of professions is long - doctors, clergy, lawyers, journalists, elected officials etc. But of course with those privileges comes additional responsibilities. To keep this somewhat on topic. A restaurant has the right to refuse anyone from taking photos, but they do not have the right to seize such photos (if taken) unless they can prove harm, slander, liable, copyright infringement etc. As far as posting such pictures on a public forum or a personnal internet blog - stay tuned, that determination will be made in the near future. ← The definition of a journalist is someone who works as one. It is not a profession that requires professional qualifications or recognition in the same way as a lawyer or accountant has to pass exams and be acknowledged by a professional association. Actually, it's rather like being a chef: you're a chef if you make food that's good enough to attract people to your restaurant, not because someone else says so; and you're a journalist if your writing (or broadcasting) is good enough to get you published or broadcast. The White House press office, or whoever, can choose to grant or deny you a press pass based on who you're working for and even how long you've been working for them; but a court would judge whether or not you're entitled to keep your sources confidential according to the factual issues of whether you really work as a journalist or not. I once had my press card cancelled by the Israel Government Press Office, because of completely improper and illegal pressure put on them by my previous employers, AP, but I carried on working as a journalist, and if I had been forced to claim the privileges of a journalist in court, the court would have backed me completely. A restaurant doesn't have the right to seize your photographs in any circumstances, and if it tries to do so by force, then you're entitled to file a criminal complaint for assault and battery, or worse, and to sue for damages. A court can seize your photographs; the police could probably do so if they are considered evidence of a crime; and national security authorities could do so if they were evidence of some national security threat (of course, since the Patriot Act, all these conditions have been eased in favour of the authorities). As for DC Foodie, I say again that he should have stood his ground against the attorney's threats, which were nothing more than intimidation, and published the photos on his log. If they were an accurate representation of the food he was served, there is absolutely nothing Carol G could have done about them. And I hope that her despicable behaviour makes clients go somewhere else, however good the branzino. David

I'd have to disagree with most of what Jackal says: I think he is drawing an over-broad analogy with our common world, that of high-tech business. The whole law of copyright, and design rights which are a derivative of copyright, has to be understood in context. It was created in order to prevent someone from plagiarism and passing off another person's original work as his own. But there is what is called a 'fair use doctrine,' which means that one has a right to quote reasonably (which also means that one has to attribute the quotation) from another person's original work even while the copyright is still extant. If tomorrow I write an article quoting from a play written yesterday, or a political speech, and I do not pretend that it's my own creative work, then there is no breach. Were that not the case, it would not be possible to carry our academic or business research (and, Jackal, in our world, it wouldn't be possible to quote analysts' resports or similar material in our business plans!). It is usually the case that in writing a book, one requests permission to quote extensive passages from other works, and somewhere in the foreword says "passages from Sophocles' 'Antigone' appear by courtesy of the author's estate," or whatever. A plating arrangement could certainly be covered by design right, if the plating arrangement itself were the creative work in question, say in a competition for the most beautiful or original plating of food. Even then, the design right would at most protect the creator from having some other chef, or food designer from having the design copied by another chef or food designer, not from having it captured and even published by a photographer, whether a professional press photographer or an amateur. The same principle of design right would apply to the dish itself: if you create a dish, you have a reasonable right for it not to be copied exactly by a competitor, but you don't have a right to prevent a food reviewer, or even a member of the public, writing "last night at X's restaurant, I ate a dish of venison that my taste buds deduce had been sauted in a light olive oil with chanterelles and shallots before being flambed in calvados and then topped with a light sprinking of grated truffles" (I'm making this up, I haven't considered whether it might be a good dish to make). What is more important in our real-life context is that the chef has an enforceable right not to have someone steal his knowhow in order to compete with him. For example, if I lose my mind and go to work for Gordon Ramsey as a sous-chef, and systematically learn his recipes in order to open my own restaurant and make his dishes as if they were my own, he would have every right to sue me, and he'd probably make mincemeat of me in the courts. However, if I worked for him, learned from him, and then went off to my own restaurant in which I market myself as a former Ramsey underling whose original works have been influenced by Ramsey's genius, he would be stupid to even attempt to sue me. Besides, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. There is also what is called an issue of public interest. If you are the first chef in the world, say, to discover to make a perfectly edible dish out of pebbles from a stream, most courts would apply the public interest argument and say that you can't prevent other chefs, or cooks at home, from finding their own way to cook pebbles, especially if there's a shortage of other raw materials. You certainly could apply for a patent for the proprietary process of softening and cooking them, and might well get it granted, but the patent would probably only cover your process and you could probably only demand royalties from other people who were doing it commercially. Basically, intellectual property rights aren't open-ended: you can patent a particular gene sequence, but that doesn't cover other gene sequences. You can have your original creation "to be or not to be ..." covered by copyright, but you can't prevent other people from quoting you; and you can't use copyright to prevent parody, such as "to pee or not to pee ..." That is not quite right. Although the photograph is the photographers copyright, if it includes substantially a copyrighted work or a design right work then it may be a derivative work (like a translation), and cannot be published without the original IPR owners permission. This occurs, for example, where a picture includes most of an advertising hoarding; in principle (an in practice for most TV and film work) you must get release from the advertiser. I think that (at least in the UK) a plating arrangement would be covered by design right , unless the chef has applied for a Registered Design. If he has served more than 50 similar plates then it no longer counts as artisitc copyright (70+ years from death of the author) but industrial copyright (25 years from first publication) Unless the customer has comissioned the work explicitly, the IPR remains with the chef, even though the customer has purchased the work, just as purchasing a CD or a book does not transfer the copyright Maybe we should sell edible tags with the copyright © or design right (DR) logo for chefs to add to the food at the pass... ←

Well, I am not a lawyer (probably to the relief of my friends), but I have been a journalist on and off for the last 25 years, and I have had other reasons to learn something about the laws of defamation and of privacy. Admittedly, there is some difference between these laws in the USA on the one hand, and the UK (where I grew up) and Israel (where I live) on the other, but it isn't a huge difference. Everyone, as a general rule, is entitled to have his privacy protected from the public eye. So, if Carol Greenwood had, hypothetically, been photographed by DC Foodie having sex in her home, or smoking a joint there, or whatever, she would be completely entitled to seek a cease and desist order, and to sue to damages, because this is her private life. She could even try to get a seek and desist order if, say, Foodie had photographed her private kitchen, and revealed that she is a slob who leaves rotting vegetables in the sink, because even though this might reflect on her public reputation, she could legitimately claim that this is no proof that she is also messy and unhygeinic in running her restaurant. A jury might, of course, disagree. However, a restaurant is by definition a public place and it is in the public interest to know whether it is clean and whether the food lives up to the reputation that the owner is trying to foster. It isn't Carol G's private home, there is no explicit or implicit contract term that says its clients may not take photographs, it is not a classified military or government installation (or a court in session, which usually bans photography); and the only legitimate reason I can think of for asking clients not to take photographs is that the flash disturbs other diners. Not only that, but a restaurateur is almost by definition a public figure who seeks public attention in order to publicise her or his business, and the law in general says that the public has a legitimate, although not disproportionate, interest in the affairs of public figures. That's certainly the case in Israeli statute law. What about the law of defamation, whether libel or slander? Yes, everyone is entitled to have his good name protected, which is why there is a law of defamation. But he or she is not entitled to have misdeeds hushed up by this law, which is why it's always a good defence if you have published the truth. If Foodie published undoctored photographs that are a fair representation of what was served in the restaurant, or even the dirty dishes in the kitchen, or whatever, that is the truth, and it's a sufficient defence. If, of course, the photos were manipulated to make them look worse than what was really there, or even if they're tendentious -- say, taken from an angle that misrepresents what was really there -- then that is no defence against a libel action. Foodie is just as much entitled to take and publish photographs as if he were a journalist, but of course he's also bound by the same rules of fair play. There's one last point. I don't know if this is the case in the USA, but in England, it's a tort to threaten someone with a lawsuit simply in order to intimidate him. In other words, if Foodie tells Carol G to get stuffed, which is most certainly what I think he should do, and she backs down after having already sent this intimidating letter by means of her attorney, then Foodie would be entitled to sue her for trying to intimidate her. And it would completely serve her right.

I don't know why Michelle was so insistent that I write about our (my) bar in the course of this blog, since it's actually a much more appropriate subject for Purim than for Hannukah: Jewish tradition is very strongly opposed to drunkenness, but on Purim you're actually obliged to get drunk. However, for the sake of maintain peaceful relations at home, I'm giving in to her The truth is that this is probably not so impressive by the standards of people in other countries, but Israelis are not exactly the world's biggest, or most sophisticated, consumers of fine alcohol (the Russian immigrants drink lots of vodka, but that's another story), so I suppose that by local standards, this collection is very impressive. Please don't imagine that I'm some kind of alcoholic But I had the good fortune to grow up with two European parents who both liked and appreciated good wine and spirits, and who believed that knowing how to hold and enjoy my booze was an essential part of my education. So from the age of about four or five, they would usually give me a glass of wine mixed with water or soda water with dinner, just like parents in Italy and France do: more often than not, it was Egri Bikaver, or "Bulls' Blood," a delicious and powerful red from Hungary, which I still love. For anyone who doesn't know the story behind the name, the Ottoman army was so humiliatingly defeated by the Magyars at Eger that their commander said that the Hungarians must have been drinking bulls' blood, and the name has stuck ever since. Anyway, over the many years since my parents first corrupted me I learned to appreciate sherry, vermouth, liqueurs, gin and tonic and all sorts of other elixirs. The only one for which I never developed a taste was whiskey, which was odd, considering that my parents would always have a dram or three before dinner. In fact, I really disliked the stuff for years. Then I got married (not to Michelle), and my ex-wife somehow got me to develop a taste for whiskey. The trick, I think, was that she liked whiskeys such as Chivas Regal, JW Black Label and the Famous Grouse, which were all smoother than the ones my father liked (and bought at duty-free on his many business trips); not only that, but she drank them neat, whereas at home, the taste was mangled by ice and soda. She also got me to like Glenfiddich, which I now regard as "beginners' single malt," but which was something of a revelation at the time. So, together with a much more detailed education in single malt whiskey that I subsequently received from a Scottish friend who is a proud descendant of Robert Burns, I learned to love the stuff, and now I have one of the best collections in Israel (one of my colleagues in the start-up has another great collection). It's got a pretty good selection of everything from the smoothest lowlands and Speysides to some pretty peaty Islays, such as Laphroaig (that's the one trying to dominate all the others on the shelf) and Lagavulin. The only Islay I really don't like is Ardbeg, and there are a few from other parts of Scotland that don't appeal to me much, but I have managed to avoid adding those to the collection by accident. Don't imagine, by the way, that I pay Israeli prices for these (about $90-100 for a 75cl bottle of single malt), or even at shops in London: I always buy them at duty-free (and Ben-Gurion airport is significantly cheaper than Heathrow, so that's another reason for all you readers to come and visit!). Michelle has also been a major contributor to the collection, to say nothing of the drinking of it: over the last few years, she has usually travelled rather more than me, so she has brought back some rather nice bottles, such as 20-year-old vintage port from Lisbon and Jellinek slivovitz from Prague. Of course, she comes from another boozing family: her great-grandfather Felix was famous in his hometown of Emmerich in north-west Germany for riding his horse into a bar after already having visited several others for a few rounds of beer and schnapps Slainthe!

On our way to the buffalo farm at Bitzaron, we also went to visit another place we had hoped to get to last week, Kibbutz Nahshon, situated a couple of miles south of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem motorway where it starts to climb up the hills towards the capital. Right next to the motorway turnoff is the Trappist monastery of Latrun, which is known for its wines as well as for the fact that the monks are bound by a vow of silence. By the way, one of the carved stones at the entrance to the monastery attests to the origin of the place name Latrun: it's a corruption of 'Le Toron,' Norman French for 'The Tower:' there was a Crusader fort there during the Middle Ages, because of its strategic location on what was the Jerusalem highway even in those days. And in 1948, one of the bloodiest battles of Israel's War of Independence was also fought there: it's commemorated by a memorial to the fallen of the armoured corps (although it was mainly an infantry battle). The Trappist monastery There's actually a food-related joke about this monastery. The rules of the monastery (allegedly) allow one monk to get up and make a short personal statement to the other monks during Christmas lunch; and each year, the privilege passes to another monk. So one year, Father Giovanni gets up and says "I think our beloved cook is putting too much pepper in the food." He sits down, and the silence resumes until the following year, when Father Patrick gets up and says "I completely disagree with Father Giovanni: the food here is delicious." Another year passes, and Father Manuel's turn to speak arrives. "I quit: I can't stand this constant bickering." I hope, of course, that none of our eGulleteers will be so foolish as to follow the example of the Trappists Anyway, on to Nahshon. The whole of the Nahshon winery, by contrast with the rather grander Flam only a few miles away, is in a slightly shabby prefab building in the middle of the kibbutz: the fermentation tanks are hidden away behind the building, as is the shop where they sell both the wines and also a range of cheese produced by the kibbutz dairies. Swisskaese and I, and our friend Jonathan, a professor at a university in Georgia (the Jimmy Carter one, not the Joseph Stalin one), were greeted by a young man who introduced himself as Shlomi and immediately offered us some wines to taste. The first one, to our surprise, was labelled 'Pushkin.' Pushkin Red, 2004 vintage Why Pushkin, I wondered? The answer was simple: it was basically a marketing gimmick to attract the many wine lovers among the million-odd Israelis who were born in Russia and immigrated either around 1973 or, mainly, since 1989. The wine was a bit rough and had too much heavy tannin for my taste, but Shlomi explained that it sold very well. In fact, he said, they had had a visit from the deputy mayor of Moscow a while before, and when he saw the label (and tasted some), he immediately grabbed a caseful to take home. The medium-priced Cabernet Sauvignon-Merlot that I tried was much smoother, and definitely a wine I would want to take home. However, there were a couple of surprises. One was these: Nahshon, it turns out, is one of the biggest manufacturers of the 'bag in a box.' I can't recall seeing these more than half a dozen times in Israeli shops and supermarkets, but the kibbutz sells 50 million of them every year to Australian wine producers, and about 20 million more to other countries. The other surprise was this: For those of you who can't read Hebrew (all of you?), it's Nahshon's own port. Actually, it isn't the first Israeli port I've tasted: last year, I was invited to a private tasting by the owner of the art auction company from which I've bought several pictures over the last few years, and it turned out to be of wines he had made himself. Michael's port was not bad at all for a first attempt, and I'd definitely go back for more in a year or two. I can't say I was quite as positively impressed by the Nahshon version: made from the local Argaman grape, which is best for the sweet red wines I had hoped never to see again in Israel, and from the Latrun monastery's brandy (which I've tasted and rather like), this port was still very syrupy and lacking in complexity. Shlomi actually agreed with me, pointing out that it was their first try, and said he hoped that next year's version would be significantly better. Like Flam, the Nahshon winery's output isn't kosher. Why not, I asked: after all, some potential customers won't buy non-kosher wine. The reason was very simple: although Nahshon has been producing wine -- all from its own vineyards, incidentally, since 1998 -- its output is still only around 20,000 bottles a year, and they simply can't afford the salary of the kashrut supervisor they would have to keep on staff. Oh, and Shlomo himself: he turned out to be a refugee from Israel's burgeoning high-tech sector who couldn't take the constant stress and decided to become an oenologist, so he worked for other winemakers to learn the business, and ended up working for the kibbutz. Now he's no doubt earning a lot less, but he certainly looked as if he was having fun!

Actually, this is one of the interesting anomalies of Jewish law. The ostrich is generally regarded as not being kosher, because it will eat anything you give it, including small animals (or, as someone once told me, "even iron bars"). What makes birds kosher or not is the question of their diet: if they live on prey, such as eagles, hawks, owls or seagulls, then they are not kosher. However, ducks do naturally eat fish and insects, and they are kosher. Go figure

This Friday morning, we headed back to the area near Ashdod where we were last week, but this time in order to visit the source of real Israeli Mozarella. Yes, folks, we have our own buffalo herd! One of the Treister family's 500 buffalos Irit Treister and her husband first brought buffalo from Italy to their moshav, Bitzaron, near Ashdod, some eight years ago, and have since then expanded the herd to 500 head. Unlike milk cows, which have a normal oestrus cycle rather like humans and can give birth at any time of the year, buffalo are essentially wild animals and only go into heat twice a year: the result is that although every buffalo that has calved recently produces an average of 15 litres a day, the 500 animals only produce a total of about 1,000 litres per day. Despite the relatively low output, however, the results are outstanding. In the farm's shop, where we talked to Irit, she had a selection of both cream cheese with and without added herbs, and hard cheeses such as a buffalo Tsfatit with sesame and zaatar; and we also tried out the cream (40% fat) and yogurt (4% fat). The Boursin was, if anything, even better than the brand-name original; and everything else we tasted was so rich and creamy that we just didn't want to leave. I've never been that crazy about the taste of cream, but this buffalo cream was wonderful, and we only decided not to buy some because we're pretending to watch our weight. We did get Tsfatit, Mozarella and yogurt, though, and you can see the first two of these on out Shabbat breakfast table The tasting table at the buffalo farm: the Tsfatit with sesame and zaatar is on the far left; the Boursin is on the far right, closer to the camera The truth is, however, that buffalo milk and its products are healthier than cow milk: the milk is much lower in cholesterol, but considerably higher in vitamins A, B and E, as well as sodium. Incidentally, we're not the only ones who think this buffalo cheese is terrific: Haaretz recently published a survey of the best cheese in Israel, and the buffalo Mozarella was rated fourth out of the twenty best cheese in the country. Irit would love to export some of her production, but she would have to move the entire facility, including buffalo sheds, milking parlour (which uses the same computerised equipment as all the other dairy herds in the country), and production line, to near-sterile conditions, in order to satisfy the FDA. By the way, we were hoping that we could get a couple of eggs from the ostriches that the Treisters keep on their farm, for a super-deluxe omelette. This, unfortunately, was the ostriches' response:

This is an expanded and edited version of a message from earlier on in the series: Once upon a time, when I first came to Israel, pretty well the only wine one could find in the shops was made by Carmel Mizrahi, a big cooperative owned by the grape growers around the country, and the choice was basically between rather sour, mangy Carmel Hock, and a generic red whose name I've thankfully forgotten. I don't mean that the wine was really bad -- certainly, compared to Gianaclis, the only local label in Egypt, it was heavenly -- but after having grown up from age five or so drinking wine at home, I was pretty disappointed. A few years later, in 1980, I made aliyah, or actually moved here, and by then the situation had improved somewhat. Carmel was selling a few varietal wines, mainly Semillon Blanc and Sauvignon Blance among the whites, Carignan, Cabernet Sauvignon and Petite Syrah among the reds, and it was even starting to sell some premium wines branded with the Rothschild name, which was actually fair enough, since Baron Edmond de Rothschild had basically started off the wine industry in this country in the late 19th century. The fact was that the Israel premium wines still tasted like Ribena compared to the real Mouton-Rothschilds from France, but we were happy. Most Israelis knew almost nothing about drinking wine, because traditionally they didn't drink much more than a few sips of the syrupy red glop that was used for making blessings on Shabbat and holidays; and from what I could see, most Jews in other countries weren't much more sophisticated. Ever tried Palwin or Manischewitz? I was once given a free mini-bottle of wine with dinner at a kosher restaurant on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and I almost became diabetic on the spot. Fast-forward to 2005, and we could be living in a completely different country, never mind a different decade. Israel is dotted not just with serious competitors to Carmel, such as Barkan and Segal and the very good Golan (yes, in the Golan Heights), but also with dozens and dozens of boutique wineries. For more detail, you can read Daniel Rogov's 78 best Israeli wines of 2005. They're not just in the north, where the terroir (more about this subject in a future episode) and the cold winters of the Golan and Galilee are ideal for growing wine grapes (as well as apples, pears, blackcurrants, cherries, plums, olives and much more besides): in the same way as Israeli farmers only a few miles north of Eilat, in the middle of the desert, have learned to grow massive crops of cauliflower and farm herds of cattle that produce the best chocolate milk in the world (yes, straight from the udder ), they are also growing terrific wine grapes, mainly Merlot, in the middle of the Negev desert a bit further north. We would have liked to get to several more wineries during the course of this week's blogging, but in the event we've had to make do with two boutiques, one already well established and famous, the other still making its way. Typical Israeli wine-growing country, in the Jerusalem foothills The Flam winery is at the bottom of the Jerusalem foothills, a few minutes south of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem motorway: it's set back from the road among olive groves, in an ochre-stuccoed building that could have been lifted straight from Provence or Tuscany, apart from its modern architecture. Golan Flam, one of the two brothers who runs the place, was born in Stellenbosch, South Africa, while his father Yisrael, who was the wine-maker of Carmel, was studying there, and wine has flowed in his veins ever since: he did his first degree at the Hebrew University's agriculture faculty in Rehovot, went on to a second degree in oenology at the University of Piacenza in Italy, carried on learning on the job at Greve in Chianti (poor chap), worked for a couple of years at Hardy's in South Australia, and went on from there. Golan and Gilad founded the winery at 1998 at Moshav Ginaton, a few miles from Ben-Gurion airport: then, like now, they bought their grapes mainly from farmers in the villages of Kerem Ben-Zimra and Dishon in the central Galilee; they also buy from farmers at Karmei Yosef and other vineyards in the plain west of Jerusalem. Golan showed us around the production line, where the grapes are fermented in large stainless steel vats at controlled temperatures of about 16 Celsius: they're also brought down to the winery in refrigerated lorries in order to ensure that they start fermentation in optimal conditions. Then downstairs to the cellar, where the wine lies in new oak barrels -- a mixture of French and Italian oak -- for 15 to 18 months. Golan says he prefers to avoid older barrels, because the aromas they add to the wine detract from the fruitiness that he wants to accentuate. In the case of the Chardonnay, he says, he prefers it completely unoaked. Golan Flam in the cellar, with lots of delicious wine waiting for us to try Back upstairs again to the tasting. I'm going to cheat at this point: Rogov, who reviewed a number of Flam wines only 12 months ago Rogov on Flam wines, has far more educated taste buds than mine, and specialises in all the flowery metaphors for the fruits and herbs that characterise wine, whereas my literary talents go in other directions. Flam Classico, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot Some of Flam's current offerings: the labels are designed by a top Italian graphic designer, using archeological and artistic motifs from Israel more to come

Once upon a time, when I first came to Israel, pretty well the only wine one could find in the shops was made by Carmel Mizrahi, a big cooperative owned by the grape growers around the country, and the choice was basically between rather sour, mangy Carmel Hock, and a generic red whose name I've thankfully forgotten. I don't mean that the wine was really bad -- certainly, compared to Gianaclis, the only local label in Egypt, it was heavenly -- but after having grown up from age five or so drinking wine at home, I was pretty disappointed. A few years later, in 1980, I made aliyah, or actually moved here, and by then the situation had improved somewhat. Carmel was selling a few varietal wines, mainly Semillon Blanc and Sauvignon Blance among the whites, Carignan, Cabernet Sauvignon and Petite Syrah among the reds, and it was even starting to sell some premium wines branded with the Rothschild name, which was actually fair enough, since Baron Edmond de Rothschild had basically started off the wine industry in this country in the late 19th century. The fact was that the Israel premium wines still tasted like Ribena compared to the real Mouton-Rothschilds from France, but we were happy. Most Israelis knew almost nothing about drinking wine, because traditionally they didn't drink much more than a few sips of the syrupy red glop that was used for making blessings on Shabbat and holidays; and from what I could see, most Jews in other countries weren't much more sophisticated. Ever tried Palwin or Manischewitz? I was once given a free mini-bottle of wine with dinner at a kosher restaurant on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and I almost became diabetic on the spot. Fast-forward to 2005, and we could be living in a completely different country, never mind a different decade. Israel is dotted not just with serious competitors to Carmel, such as Barkan and Segal and the very good Golan (yes, in the Golan Heights), but also with dozens and dozens of boutique wineries. For more detail, you can read Daniel Rogov's 78 best Israeli wines of 2005. They're not just in the north, where the terroir (more about this subject in a future episode) and the cold winters of the Golan and Galilee are ideal for growing wine grapes (as well as apples, pears, blackcurrants, cherries, plums, olives and much more besides): in the same way as Israeli farmers only a few miles north of Eilat, in the middle of the desert, have learned to grow massive crops of cauliflower and farm herds of cattle that produce the best chocolate milk in the world (yes, straight from the udder ), they are also growing terrific wine grapes, mainly Merlot, in the middle of the Negev desert a bit further north. We would have liked to get to several more wineries during the course of this week's blogging, but in the event we've had to make do with two boutiques, one already well established and famous, the other still making its way. The Flam winery is at the bottom of the Jerusalem foothills, a few minutes south of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem motorway: it's set back from the road among olive groves, in an ochre-stuccoed building that could have been lifted straight from Provence or Tuscany, apart from its modern architecture. Golan Flam, one of the two brothers who runs the place, was born in Stellenbosch, South Africa, while his father Yisrael, who was the wine-maker of Carmel, was studying there, and wine has flowed in his veins ever since: he did his first degree at the Hebrew University's agriculture faculty in Rehovot, went on to a second degree in oenology at the University of Piacenza in Italy, carried on learning on the job at Greve in Chianti (poor chap), worked for a couple of years at Hardy's in South Australia, and went on from there. Golan and Gilad founded the winery at 1998 at Moshav Ginaton, a few miles from Ben-Gurion airport: then, like now, they bought their grapes mainly from farmers in the villages of Kerem Ben-Zimra and Dishon in the central Galilee; they also buy from farmers at Karmei Yosef and other vineyards in the plain west of Jerusalem. Golan showed us around the production line, where the grapes are fermented in large stainless steel vats at controlled temperatures of about 16 Celsius: they're also brought down to the winery in refrigerated lorries in order to ensure that they start fermentation in optimal conditions. Then downstairs to the cellar, where the wine lies in new oak barrels -- a mixture of French and Italian oak -- for 15 to 18 months. Golan says he prefers to avoid older barrels, because the aromas they add to the wine detract from the fruitiness that he wants to accentuate. In the case of the Chardonnay, he says, he prefers it completely unoaked. Back upstairs again to the tasting. I'm going to cheat at this point: Rogov, who reviewed a number of Flam wines only 12 months ago Rogov on Flam wines, has far more educated taste buds than mine, and specialises in all the flowery metaphors for the fruits and herbs that characterise wine, whereas my literary talents go in other directions. more to come

For anyone who hasn't experienced it, Israeli salad (which we sometimes call Arab salad, just to confuse you) is made of fresh cucumber, tomato and onion, chopped as finely as possible and dressed with nothing more than olive oil, lots of lemon juice and parley to taste. You have to use small cucumbers, not the foot-long monsters that are common in Europe, because their taste is more concentrated. I first encountered Israeli salad when I was a kibbutz volunteer in 1972 and have eaten it on and off ever since, mainly together with felafel in pita. Simple though it is, it's tasty and healthy, and a real treat when it's made well.

And now we're going to have to live on a health farm for the next three months. But it'll have been worth it: Michelle's latkes were absolutely delicious. Even though the potato and leek pie didn't turn out looking the way we expected, it too was delicious. Of course, now we're going to have more friends clamouring for return invitations

we retail lamb chops for CDN$48/kilo... so you're still ahead of the game. Can't the government do something about the lamb prices? ← I think you missed the significance of what Michelle wrote about Arik Sharon owning one of the biggest herds of sheep in the country. The government is doing something about the price of lamb: it's ensuring, using all sorts of specious regulations, that there is almost no competition from imported lamb. The result is that Arik and his friends make lots of money from selling to a captive market.

The Tunisian tea and all the others at this shop, and most of the spices, come from the village of Beit Lehem Haglili in the north of Israel, or as one would say in English, Bethlehem of the Galilee. What? you may ask. Surely Bethlehem is a few miles south of Jerusalem. Well, yes, one of them is: Beit Lehem Yehuda, or Bethlehem of Judea, to define it properly. But this is where the New Testament story of Jesus' birth gets things mixed up: Jesus, whose family lived in Nazareth, was almost certainly born in the Bethlehem that's just a few miles away. The New Testament story puts his birth in the other Bethlehem, a few days trip by donkey, let alone on foot, and definitely not a trip for a very pregnant woman during a cold winter, because it lends credence to the Gospel accounts of the descent of Jesus from King David, who really did come from the Bethlehem south of Jerusalem. The other thing, which you can't see in the photo of the table with all the different teas, is that the one closest to the camera is labelled "Viagra Tea." No, it doesn't contain crushed little blue pills; and in spite of Israeli skill in agriculture, we haven't actually engineered a plant that synthesises viagra. It contains cinnamon bark and dried leaves of qat, which is the only legal narcotic drug in Israel. But the Israeli government is strongly anti-drug, and even pays lots of money for mainly idiotic anti-drug advertising all over the place. So how come qat is legal? Well, it's the high of choice in Yemen, where a lot of Jews used to live; and there are so many Yemenite Jews in Israel who still like to chew the stuff, not just for the mild high but also because it's a social institution, that no government has ever dared to ban it. The closest they came was about a year ago, after an extract of qat packaged as pills was marketed all over the Tel Aviv area for young people who had heard about its aphrodisiac effects: a few users had serious adverse reactions to the pills, called 'Hagigat,' a play on words meaning 'celebration,' and one even died, and within a few days, the Health Ministry banned them. So now, we're back to the natural version. Unfortunately, 'Hameshek' doesn't say how much you're supposed to drink in order to get the advertised effect of "getting the blood flowing."

Chocolate with chocolate whipped milk?! I don't remember that at all. I really have to arrange a visit now. I never ate krembos either. But the kids devour them. It always used to make me laugh seeing the kids on their way home from school, each one with a dot of "krem" on the tip of his nose -- the telltale sign of having just finished a krembo. I'm amazed at everything you've written about Tiv Ta'am and all the luscious photos, particularly those cheeses. (I remember when the only thing you could get was "gveena tsehuba" -- yellow cheese, it was all encompassing.) I'm a former Yerushalmit, and, as you can imagine, we never saw that kinda stuff! Although maybe now they do. (By way of explanation, Jerusalem is a lot more strict on religious issues than lawless, heathen Tel Aviv and its environs. Lovely blog! ← When I moved to Israel 26 years ago, most supermarkets carried one kind of cottage cheese (which in my opinion is still the best cottage cheese anywhere in the world), one kind of low-fat white cheese, and perhaps three kinds of packaged yellow cheese. All, of course, from what used to be the national dairy product monopoly, Tnuva ("milk churn"). Since then, Tnuva's monopoly has gradually been broken by companies such as Strauss and Yotvata, and a whole host of boutique cheese and yogurt makers. We've been up to a tiny village in the north of the country, Klil, which is almost impossible to find, and where there are a couple of boutique dairies that make incredible goat cheeses, including camemberts that rival anything I've bought from France. As for the religious issue, the truth is that most of these producers make sure to keep kosher, so you can find their products in Jerusalem too. To the extent that the selection is more limited, it's only because Jerusalem is much less prosperous than Tel Aviv and its surrounding towns in the coastal plain.

Gifted Gourmet's quick translation for the reader for the term "bashert": Part of Speech: noun Etymology: Yiddish for "fate, destiny" Definition: One's predestined soul mate ... One's spouse.... An individual who is a good fit or good match. It should only happen to you, dear readers of Michelle and David's blog! Metsuyon! (excellent!) ← Personally, I hate the word 'beshert.' Its etymology is actually from the German verb scheren, meaning "cut" or "tailored." So does "beshert" really mean "made from whole cloth"? There's a Hebrew expression I like far more, and which is more appropriate, besides: "the chosen of one's heart."

← Some of the exhibitors at the Bnei Darom olive oil festival Shemeneto was one of about eight olive oil manufacturers taking part in the olive festival at Bnei Darom. They're all from the same area, which is basically on the coastal plain south-west of Jerusalem, and olives don't actually grow there: the main olive-growing areas are in the north and in the Jerusalem hills, where the combination of limestone rocks under shallow topsoil and cold winters is optimal for olive trees. But most of the villages in this area between Jerusalem and Ashdod live on agriculture or its by-products, and olive oil is one of the most important. As I mentioned yesterday in explaining the history of Hanukkah, olive oil plays a very significant part in the festival itself. But historically, it's also one of the most important products of the country: olives and oil have been produced since the mists of time, and when the Bible mentions oil, often in the context of the sacrifices that were offered in the Temple, it always means locally-produced olive oil. Large areas of agricultural land are devoted to growing olives, and there is fierce competition between the growers and also the olive-press owners for who produces the best. On top of all the culinary uses, I've encountered a lot of Palestinians who use it therapeutically: when they have muscular pains or even arthritis, they massage the area with olive oil. Yossi Sberro explaining the secrets of olive oil to visitors at his stand at the Bnei Darom olive festival Yossi Sberro, the owner of Shemeneto, who sells oil made from the local Syrian and Barnea varieties and also the Manzanillo and Pikval varieties that originates in Spain, explained to us that freshly-pressed oil changes character over time. For the first three months, it's "agressive and herby," to use his words, and then gradually becomes milder until it reaches its best at about one year; after this, it can still be used for about another year, as long as it's kept in cool and dark conditions. The olive press at Bnei Darom Bnei Darom itself has a highly sophisticated olive pressing plant, which the locals proudly showed visitors to the festival while we were there. Plastic bins containing about 300kgs of olives are first dumped into the hopper of a cleaning machine, which strips off the leaves and twigs and washes any dirt or dust off the olives. From there, another short conveyor crops each batch of olives into a mill, where two vertically-mounted granite wheels each weighing more than one ton crush the olives. The next step is that the pulp, still including all the stones, goes through another machine (they're all Italian-manufactured, of course ), which separates out the oil, not by pressing, as is traditional, but through the insolubility of oil in water. The last part of the process takes the olive pulp after all the oil has been removed and presses into into a solid mass, called gefet in Hebrew, which can be used to feed cattle; in Talmudic times, some 1800 years ago, it was used as fuel for cooking and heating homes. "You want how many hundreds of crates of our oil?" An exhibitor from Kibbutz Yavne indulging in the favourite Israeli sport of talking on the mobile phone The whole festival day was pretty well organised: apart from the different producers selling their oil, canned olives, spreads and the rest, the host village showed us a very professionally made video about the production process, and of course gave us a chance to browse in the shop next door. The shop at Bnei Darom: olive products in every shape and form We were actually pretty restrained in what we bought during this little trip: about three cans of different kinds of olives from the Bnei Darom shop, and a couple of bottles of oil from Yossi, including one that is still less than three months old, so the oil hasn't yet become clear. I can't wait to taste it.

What Swisskaese didn't say is that the cheeses shown in our photos are only about one-third of the hard cheeses sold at this place (as opposed to the soft white cheese that you spread on bread). The other two-thirds are imported from Holland, France, Switzerland, Denmark and even Russia -- that's because the Tiv Taam chain is patronised mainly by Russian immigrants, and its huge stock is very much tailored to their tasts. So apart from God knows how many cheese, they also have different makes and types of sour cream, buttermilk, fermented milk and so on that are an important part of the Russian culinary tradition. Then there are dozens of salamis and sausages, nearly all made of pork (very few Russian immigrants, even the ones who are completely Jewish as opposed to partly so, keep kosher), and scores of types of dried, marinaded, smoked and processed fish. When I brought a friend, a very refined English lady in her 70s, for her first visit to Tiv Taam outside Netanya about three years ago, she was amazed at the selection, and then told me that one of the types of dried fish was exactly what relatives in Russia used to send to her father when she was a young girl in London before World War II. And that story brought up an amazing coincidence, which is that she's the aunt of an old school friend of mine from 35-odd years ago. By the way, she also has gastronomic relevance, because she is the most amazing cook, with a cook-book collection even bigger than ours, and the foie gras she made for me once still buzzes on my taste buds. Tiv Taam is also interesting from another point of view. Nearly all the supermarkets in Israel carry only kosher food (which of course can include food manufactured anywhere as long as some suitable rabbi certifies that it doesn't include forbidden ingredients such as pork or shellfish); and this restricts the selection somewhat. On top of that, the country's customs regulations used to be fixed to protect local food manufacturers from competing imports. But Israel now enjoys free trade, and Tiv Taam doesn't care what is or isn't kosher. The result is that it carries everything from Moldovan wines to Vietnamese noodles to Russian jams and fruit nectars, in staggering variety. I don't think I've seen such a great variety of food products under one roof anywhere, and I've shopped in quite a few countries.