Lunch

Have I mentioned what a chore cooking and shopping has felt like since leaving Seattle?  It's incredible how accustomed I got to things being in a certain place, knowing that I could buy great meat from the farmer's market every weekend, having a handful of stores to choose from that sell local, organic produce.  As we traveled down the coast to California, our options seemed to get more and more limited, and then-- boom.  We got to Israel.  I quickly realized that buying organic was going to be a luxury, not a deal-breaker.  Where I used to make a point of knowing where our food came from, I now feel lucky if I walk out of a grocery store with produce at all.

Now, there are definitely some great places to shop (we even found a tiny natural foods market just around the corner from our house and I will do a whole post dedicated to the Mehane Yehuda market soon), but the reality is just that things are different here.  For the first couple of weeks, we basically ate out for lunch and dinner because going to the store was too overwhelming (also note that everything is labeled in Hebrew).  But, now that we have our own apartment and I feel like I am getting a better sense of what people eat here (they cannot possibly subsist on pita, hummus, and falafel alone, right?), cooking is starting to feel fun again.

I took a cooking class a few nights ago and was amazed at the simplicity of preparation and incredible depth of flavor each dish presented.  We made three different salads, and each was dressed with lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper.  Done.  So simple, but the freshness of each ingredient was really able to shine through.

This salad is one that I whipped up for lunch today and it is based on this principle of simplicity.  I actually cannot even give you a real recipe, but I imagine it would be hard to mess this one up.  Just thinly slice a few carrots and a few peeled Jerusalem artichokes (also called sunchokes and they look like this: http://home.howstuffworks.com/jerusalem-artichokes.htm).  Toss with the juice of 1/2 a lemon, a few glugs of olive oil, and a generous sprinkling of sea salt.  Finish with a handful of chopped fresh parsley and salty cheese (I used the Israeli equivalent to feta).  You will notice some purple bits in the photo and these are pickled baby eggplants (!!).  I have never seen these in the states, but seek them out if you can.  Otherwise, olives or even pickled onions would work great here.

Here's to not being a in a food rut :)