This brunch looks complicated, but it’s actually quite quick and simple to pull together: You pack the kadaif noodles into bowls and stick them in the toaster, toss the asparagus (or vegetable of choice) into a pan to grill, and let the eggs boil for a minute or two in the meanwhile. Then you assemble it. That’s all.

As a bonus, it tastes good and looks nice — the nest comes out crunchy and buttery, and soaks up the liquid egg yolk. And fresh vegetables are (almost) always welcome.

I’m not listing precise quantities, because you’ll want to decide how many eggs you want to eat, how many nests you want to make to hold them, and how much vegetables you want to accompany it all. Plus, precision is not key here.

Kadaif bird’s nest bowls

1 package of kadaif noodles
1 bowl about 12 centimeters in diameter
tin foil
butter (or olive oil)

Line the bowl with tin foil. This is your mold. Pack the tin foil-lined bowl with kadaif noodles, leaving a well in the center — you want it to have a nest/bowl shape, and each nest should fit one or two poached eggs. Top the kadaif with slivers of butter (or olive oil, if you want this to be non-dairy), carefully remove the foil and kadaif from the bowl, and put the foil/kadaif in your toaster oven for 10-15 minutes, until the noodles are browned. Keep an eye on it to make sure they don’t burn.

Poached eggs

Egg(s), as many as you wish to make. Fresh is better
Vinegar

Heat water in a pot, with a splash of vinegar. The water should be hot, but not boiling — around 75 degrees Celsius or 160 Fahrenheit. Crack an egg into a bowl, and gently pour into the hot water. You’ll see tendrils curling off the egg, but most of the whites should stay close to the yolk. Let the egg cook for a minute or two, until the whites are set, and then fish the egg out of the pot with a slotted spoon. Sit it in a bowl until you’re ready to use it. Repeat with the rest of the eggs

Grilled asparagus

A handful of fresh asparagus, or another seasonal vegetable of your choice (I also used brussels sprouts; you could use green beans, too)
Olive oil
Coarse sea salt

Heat a grill pan (or regular frying pan, if you don’t have one). Break the asparagus in half and throw it and the other vegetables into the pan. All the vegetables should be in contact with the pan. Flip the vegetables once or twice, and remove once they’re bright green and lightly softened.

To assemble:

Put a bird’s nest on a plate and gently remove the foil from underneath. Slip a poached egg or two into the nest. Arrange some vegetables alongside. Drizzle them with olive oil. Sprinkle the salt on top of the vegetables and the eggs.

A note on poaching eggs:
There are a million and two methods for poaching eggs, each claiming to give you a perfect result without sending thin shards of egg whites all over your pot. I’ve found that the method that works best for me is keeping the water at less than boiling, and not trying to create a whirlpool in the pot (which supposedly keeps the whites in a compact ball). The egg settles at the bottom of the pot and comes out relatively flat, as opposed to round and restaurant-perfect, but the end result looks fine in my opinion. Serious Eats has more detailed instructions on this method.

Another way of doing it, which I imagine would give you a rounder poached egg, is wrapping it all in plastic wrap. I prefer not to heat my food in plastic, but if that doesn’t bother you, Not Quite Nigella offers instructions using that method.

Trendy western baked goods meet traditional local flavors in these rose-scented cupcakes – a delicate whiff of rose gives these cupcakes a dreamy, Middle Eastern flavor where you least expect it. Rose and pistachio, a combo frequently found in baklava, mesh seamlessly with the buttery crumb, and create an elegant dessert that’s food-coloring free.

One of my biggest impediments to baking, aside from the sweltering heat, has been my lack of a stand mixer — many recipes call for beating the batter on X speed for Y number of minutes. But lo and behold, you can bake to good results even without this expensive appliance. It’s just a matter of doing things the old-fashioned way, before people had electric mixers — by hand.

Sure, it’s tiring, but it’s absolutely feasible, and I did it. My cupcakes were lovely, too — light and fluffy and full of air. Given my lack of stand mixer, I’ve found this to be the next best option — no other household appliance I own is up to the task.

That said, an important part in making these cupcakes come out as good as possible is technique. It’s not enough to mix the ingredients together, dump the batter into cupcake tins and bake until done — you need to let the ingredients warm up to room temperature before you begin, you need to beat the butter and sugar for the stated number of minutes until light and fluffy, you need to bake at the right temperature (and not at a higher one), and you need to let the cupcakes cool outside the cupcake tins once they’re cool enough to handle (otherwise, they’ll get soggy from condensation/steam). You also need to wait until the cupcakes are cool to frost them — otherwise, steam will be trapped under the icing and they’ll get soggy. These are all integral parts of the recipe.

These cupcakes use rose essence, not rosewater. There’s a huge difference — rose essence is much more concentrated. While rosewater is much more readily available, these ingredients are not interchangeable — if you were to use rosewater instead, you’d have to use a full cup in order to taste the rose flavor, and that quantity would more than alter the batter’s texture.

So thus, rose essence. I bought mine from the spice shop where I buy my coffee, Atlas/David’s at Levinsky 49, and it came in a tiny 8 milliliter vial. I used half of it to make these cupcakes, and a few drops to flavor the icing.

I topped my cupcakes with a buttercream frosting. While this kind of frosting is too sweet and heavy for many people, particularly non-Americans, I tried to use a non-overwhelming quantity of sugar, and I also put very little frosting on each cupcake — just enough to cover the tops. If buttercream is not to your tastes, feel free to use an alternative; I’m open to suggestions, since I haven’t found something else that goes well with these cupcakes.

The decorations on these cupcakes are completely natural — pistachios make for a natural source of green sprinkles, and tea-grade rosebuds are a surprising, elegant touch. No food coloring needed.

As I’ve mentioned, I have a totally insane oven. In order to get it at 175 degrees Celsius, I set it at about 60 or 70 Celsius, and then opened the door occasionally when it started approaching 200. (Leaving a thermometer in your oven is quite useful, since while yours is probably not as crazy far off as mine, it may not be accurate, either.)

As a base for my recipe, I started with the vanilla cupcakes from More from Magnolia and altered the flavoring, the flour and the liquids (OK, most everything). While I may have changed a lot ingredient-wise, the book’s instructions were quite useful. In general, the book has some great basic baking guidelines.

For 12 dome-topped cupcakes, or 18 flat cupcakes:

1/2 cup butter (100 grams)
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon rose essence
1 tablespoon baking powder (one packet)
1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup yogurt or buttermilk
3/4 cup milk

For icing (optional):

1/2 cup butter
1 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla, or 1/2 teaspoon rose essence

For decoration (optional):

dried tea-grade rosebuds, or dried rose petals
pistachios, shelled and ground

To make the cupcakes:

First, start with room-temperature ingredients. If your oven needs preheating, preheat it to 175 degrees Celsius (350 Fahrenheit).

Beat the butter until soft, smooth and creamy. Slowly add the sugar, and then beat until white and fluffy — about three minutes (or more, if your hand gets tired and you need to take breaks). Beat in eggs and incorporate thoroughly, until the batter is glossy and yellow.

Now start adding the liquids (rosewater, yogurt and milk) and the dry items (flour and baking powder). Add gradually, alternating dry and wet, and mix only until incorporated. The acidity from the rosewater may curdle the milk, but that’s OK.

Scoop into cupcake-paper lined tins. I put a little less than 1/4 cup in each paper. Filling nearly to the top will give you a domed cupcake; filling only 2/3 will give you a flat cupcake.

Bake at 175 degrees Celsius (350 Fahrenheit) for about 20 minutes, until the cupcakes are baked through — a toothpick inserted into the center should come out dry.

Once the cupcakes are barely cool enough to touch (about 15 minutes), remove them from the tins. Then, leave them to cool entirely.

To make the frosting:

Let the butter warm up to room temperature. Beat until soft and creamy. Slowly mix in the powdered sugar, and beat until light and fluffy — about three minutes. Add the flavoring of your choice — rose essence or vanilla.

To dress the cupcakes:

Grind the pistachios (I used a coffee grinder). Once your cupcakes are cool, apply the icing with a knife. Top each cupcake with a dusting of ground pistachio and a rosebud.

Once there were none. Now, cupcake boutiques are popping up on nearly every major street in Tel Aviv, like mushrooms after the rain (or, if you will, cupcakes at a child’s birthday party).

It all began not long ago, in late 2008, when this blog was still in its infancy. Around that time, I met with a friend of a friend, Ofer Yeger, who was looking to import the American cupcake fad to Israel, and wanted advice on setting up a website.

Ofer launched her virtual bakery in 2009, nearly simultaneously with two other online cupcake stores. In a matter of weeks, Israel went from having no cupcake stores to having three. Ofer’s since moved on — her site is now a fashion blog — but one of the others, I Love Cupcakes, launched a physical store at Ben Yehuda 114 this February. It was followed by Viola’s Cupcakes at Dizengoff 154 in March, and then Red Velvet at Ibn Gvirol 9 in May. Meanwhile, Nadine Cupcakes has had a booth at the Tel Aviv Farmer’s Market on Fridays for a while now. (Note: All the photos in this post are from Viola’s.)

All this begs a few obvious questions: Will cupcakes really catch on here? And, is there enough demand for all these new cupcake shops? Many of the people behind them are either immigrants from English-speaking countries or encountered cupcakes while visiting the United States, and for them, cupcakes have positive associations that go beyond little frosted cakes. To what degree will they become part of the culinary landscape? Many people here aren’t sure what differentiates them from muffins. I haven’t seen other, established bakeries offering them — a sign of greater success — although I’ve heard that some indeed have jumped on the bandwagon.

So far, the cupcakes (and their bakers) have won themselves a decent amount of press — they’re new and unusual, and they photograph well. That’s also probably why people are excited to see them at parties — they’ve shown up at a few events I’ve attended in the past few months, and everyone is always thrilled.

My take on the cupcake scene

While only time will give concrete answers to these questions, I figured the best way to go about my research was, well, eating some cupcakes. After consuming at least half a dozen of them, here are my findings.

To me, the biggest value comes from being able to sit in a pleasant streetside cafe, especially when I can get a cupcake-and-cappuccino for less than 20 shekels. That price is beyond reasonable; in general, when I go out with friends, I look for a pleasant place to sit and frequently order a coffee-pastry combo. While I haven’t seen any Magnolia-style lines around the corner, the shops all had a good number of people sitting at the tables when I stopped by.

Obviously, the quality of the various cupcakes varies from place to place, ranging from merely average to Magnolia-esque fabulous. All the places offer a variety of flavors, and while I haven’t tried them all, the best cupcake I’ve had to date was the vanilla cupcake at Red Velvet.

I’m not entirely sure how my perception jibes with the hopes of the cupcake shop entrepreneurs. While they clearly understand that a pleasant atmosphere is important, given that all the stores invested in design, many told the press that they hope to develop a healthy take-out business. While people have been buying them for the novelty factor, in my opinion the prices are too high — 12 to 15 shekels per cupcake — to merit making them a regular purchase. I’ll happily pay that much to sit in a cafe, mind you, but to eat a cupcake at home? Not so much. As to whether other consumers disagree with me on this point, we’ll see.

Next post in the works: My very own cupcake recipe.

Cupcake shops in Tel Aviv

• Red Velvet, Ibn Gvirol 9
• Viola’s Cupcakes at Dizengoff 154
• I Love Cupcakes, Ben Yehuda 114
• Nadine Cupcakes, at the Farmer’s Market in the Tel Aviv port on Fridays
• TLV Cupcakes Co., orders online only

You can find those with physical locations on my Google map.

Press in Hebrew:

• Walla on Ofer’s cupcake business, April 2009
• City Mouse on Ofer’s cupcake business, April 2009
• City Mouse on I Love Cupcakes, February 2010
• Walla! on Viola, I Love Cupcakes, March 2010
• Blogger Bits of Magic on the cupcake scene, May 2010
• City Mouse on Red Velvet, June 2010

Press in English:

• Haaretz in English on the cupcake scene, May 2009
• NYT on cupcakes in the Middle East

Update: Too pretty to eat

I encountered these cupcakes and cakes at the Thursday night artists market at the newly opened Tachana complex. To my dismay, they were made out of plaster. They’re made by Shimrita, on the assumption that everyone has a cake stand or two sitting around empty. They kind of remind me of Wayne Thiebaud’s painting.

On another note, the complex itself, built out of Jaffa’s 100-year-old train station, is beautifully done. However, everything there is ridiculously expensive, aside from Cafe Greg.

Limonana is the quintessential drink of the Israeli summer. Simple and ubiquitous, there’s nothing more refreshing than freshly squeezed lemons and ground sprigs of mint, whether served on ice or blended into a smoothie.

In the summer, limonada becomes my social drink of choice — the drink that captures the spirit of the moment, a pleasant afternoon nestled into a chair in a lively streetside cafe. In the winter, I order a cappuccino; in the spring and early summer, I make that iced coffee; and once even milk is too heavy for the oppressive summer heat, I get limonana. Big, green and frothy, and very cold, please.

The name limonana is simply a combination of the word for lemonade, limonada, and the word for spearmint, nana, one of the country’s favorite herbs. It can be prepared as a drink, or as a smoothie, in which case all the ingredients are blended together.

The recipe contains a lot of fresh lemon juice, as well as a lot of mint, which gives it a strong flavor and a bright color.

You’ll want to adjust the sugar to your tastes: 4 tablespoons (i.e. 1/4 cup) will give you a mildly sweet drink, and 6 tablespoons will give you a drink that’s sweet but not cloying, something like the sweetness you’ll get in restaurants. 2 tablespoons comes out barely sweet. I prefer 4 tablespoons, but if you like things really sweet, you might even want to add more than 6 tablespoons.

For 4 cups (one liter) of ice limonana:

2 heaping cups of ice
1 cup fresh lemon juice (from about 4 large lemons)
1/2 cup spearmint leaves (from about 40 stalks), plus a few more to garnish
4-6 tablespoons sugar (or to taste; see note above)

Juice the lemons, and remove the mint leaves from the stalks. Dump all ingredients in a blender, and blend until smooth.

Serve garnished with mint.

Note: While you can find a limonana pretty much anywhere, I had a great limonana smoothie — limonana garus — at Etnachta, on Dizengoff 190. There, most everyone is sipping bright green limonanas in the summer.

It’d been a while since we dared to enter the Carmel Market on a late Friday afternoon. At that hour the shook is packed, so crowded you can barely move. The first sign it was late in the day (as if we needed one) was when I went to my greens guy and asked for a head of lettuce. He gave me four. Four heads of fluffy, curly lettuce. They filled an entire grocery bag. I guess he likes me as much as I like him.

As Eitan wilted in the heat, we cut a quick retreat down a side alley, coincidentally (or not) passing one of the far-east specialty stands. Among the many things that require cooking and the sundry strange gourds was a pile of green papayas — green, crunchy, watery papayas, which get chilled and grated into refreshing, Thai salads. I snatched one.

After all, a papaya salad is a great way to cool off in the summer. It’s light food, with a bit of heat — from hot peppers, of course; the salad itself is cold.

The recipe is more or less one I learned at a cooking course in Thailand, where you can find these salads whipped up by street vendors. There, the ingredients are pounded together with a wooden mortar and pestle, which bruises the ingredients to combine the flavors; it doesn’t smash them entirely. I made this in my stone mortar and pestle, because that’s what I have; if you don’t have a mortar and pestle, you could bruise the ingredients by mashing them with another hard object (say, a coffee cup); just don’t break your bowl.

All the ingredients are readily available in Israel, with the exception of limes, which appear in the markets only occasionally. (There happens to be one guy selling them at the Carmel Market at the moment; as usual, I stocked up. As to why limes are so hard to find in a country that specializes in citrus, I have no idea.)

Also: Here’s my map of Thai foods at the Carmel Market as well as my description of the shops.

For two servings:

1 garlic clove
1 small hot red pepper (optional)
4 Thai green beans (or 12 regular ones, about 40-50 grams)
1 tomato (about 100 grams)
1 teaspoon demarara sugar (or palm sugar, for the Thai original)
2 tablespoons lemon or lime juice (one lemon/lime)
1 tablespoon fish sauce — optional — or use salt — also optional, in my opinion
100 grams julienned green papaya (about half a small papaya)
1 tablespoon roasted chopped peanuts

Lightly chop and then crush the garlic clove and hot pepper in the mortar and pestle.

Chop the green beans into 1-inch (2-3 centimeter) strips, add to the mortar and pestle, and pound until broken.

Slice the tomato into thin wedges. Add to the mortar and pestle along with the sugar, lemon juice and optional salt/fish sauce. Pound to combine.

Julienne the papaya with a julienne peeler, food processor or knife. Add to the mortar and pestle and pound to mix.

Serve with crushed/chopped peanuts.

As you may (or may not) have noticed, I’ve been a bit MIA, due to a three-week vacation, including a week in Rome. Our time in Italy began with a mediocre 4-euro cappuccino at a tourist-trap restaurant next to our hotel, and ended with us chugging wine next to the airport security scanners at 10 a.m. There was plenty of pizza, pasta and more in between.

Since a guide to one of the world’s culinary capitols is way beyond the scope of a post (and my knowledge), I’ll settle for my impressions of the city, a few things we enjoyed and a bunch of photos.

First off, in general, the trip confirmed what I already knew — food in Israel is excellent. I had high expectations, but I wasn’t blown away by the food in Italy — the stuff at home stands up to the competition. The coffee is just as good — perhaps because Israel learned from the experts, as the coffee here is Italian-style — and the gelato here also measures up for the same reason (some people disagree with me on this one, I know). The cheeses are undoubtedly better — unlike Italy, Israel isn’t exactly a powerhouse when it comes to aged cheeses — and if you eat pork, well, it’s also surely better in Italy, for obvious reasons. But Israeli markets have a wider variety of fruits and vegetables than what I saw in Rome, and they’re also way cheaper here — for instance, tomatoes are five times more expensive in Italy than they are during Israel’s peak season, which probably makes your pomodoro sauce pretty expensive.

As for the restaurants, I can’t say whether you’re just as likely to find a good meal stepping into a random Israeli restaurant as you would be in Italy — I haven’t tried nearly enough restaurants in Italy to say, and when I go to a restaurant in Israel, it’s far from random.

Our best meal was actually at a kosher dairy restaurant, Nonna Betta (Via del Portico d’Ottavia 17). While vegetarians won’t have trouble finding things to eat at your average restaurant, the selection felt somewhat limited and repetitive, and many of the local specialties (think carbonara) contain pork.

Nonna Betta, which recently won a mention in the New York Times, sits on a street lined with kosher restaurants, behind Rome’s largest synagogue and Jewish museum (Via Catalana — Largo 16 Ottobre, open for tours and services) in the former ghetto. I had stuffed zucchini flowers — fiori de zucca — which were filled with mozzarella and anchovies, and then battered and fried, along with an excellent artichoke-bechamel lasagna that was too large for me to finish. (There it is in the photo, along with Eitan, assuming the typical pose of many a food blogger’s spouse during the photographing of the meal.)

Our friendly Egyptian waiter convinced Eitan to order the carciofi alla giudia — “Jewish-style” artichoke. The artichokes are deep-fried, which admittedly doesn’t sound too good, but the inside was soft and the outer leaves were crispy like chips. In short, we enjoyed it.

We also had pleasant meals at a few other places we stumbled across, including Armando (Piazza Le Tiburtino 5) and several places selling pizza by the weight, including Magnum (Corso V. Emanuelle II 260) and Acqua Farina E … (Plaza Risorgamento 18) conveniently situated across from the Vatican.

Beyond that, about half our meals were actually from grocery stores — packaged salads, antipasti from the deli and large, fresh mozzarella balls. Fresh Italian mozzarella is soft and creamy, and should be enjoyed as much as possible.

For me, it wouldn’t be a trip abroad if it didn’t include a trip to a market or two, so we stopped by the famed Campo de Fiore market (above photo), which is picturesque and touristy, as well as the more businesslike morning market in Piazza de Testaccio.

Among the things you won’t see in Israel are lots of seasonal zucchini flowers (above, at Campo de Fiore), bags of freshly salt-cured capers (you’ll find caper plants growing out of the walls of the antiquities) and bunches of fresh chicory — it appears on all the menus, and the shoots are smaller and more delicate looking than the wild chicory sold in Israel over the winter months.

Colorful mokas for sale at Campo de Fiore:

Here’s the Testaccio market, which is under a roof:

I took this photo after the guy started closing up his stand for the day — the pile of pots and pans had been twice as high:

At the Testaccio market, we were pleased to find wine being sold from the barrel (they fill plastic bottles for you) as well as a huge selection of cheese shops (and butchers) mixed in with the vegetable stands. We stumbled upon a cafe next door, Li Elena, and had excellent 90-cent cappuccinos (apparently, that’s what it’s supposed to cost outside the touristy areas).

Nearby is the reputable Volpetti deli (Via Marmorata 47), with a large selection of cheeses, meats and prepared foods. We stopped to admire the animal-shaped cheeses (top photo).

We also paid repeated visits to various branches of Castroni (Via Nazionale 71, Via Ottaviano 55 and others), a gourmet food shop with a massive range of vinegars, olive oils and sauces, not to mention liquors, pasta, a dozen types of licorice and a cafe with seating. Aside from buying obscene amounts of licorice (for Eitan) and really expensive balsamic vinegar, we sat down for a nice cup of coffee, too.

Not that all we did was eat — we did tons of sightseeing and walking, to absorb the atmosphere. (In the photo: An ominous sky over San Pietro. Below: Me looking at art at the Vatican, while the art looks back at me.)

So to close, a few final notes:

• An Australian couple at our hotel told us how they paid 11 euros for two cappuccinos across from the Vatican. Well, duh. You’ll have better luck at restaurants that cater to locals as opposed to those that cater to tourists, and that’s probably true anywhere in the developed world. The trick is to move away from tourist attractions — sometimes by only a block — and find places with a local clientele. As for our 4-euro cappuccino, it came from a place near the train station — a hot spot for hotels. The espresso was burnt and the milk was bubbly.
• Watch your wallet. That’s what everyone says, from the tour books to the signs in the metro stations. We didn’t have any trouble, but we did see a kid running off with a wallet that clearly wasn’t his.
• They say that Rome is hectic and full of bad drivers, but I guess it really depends on your point of reference. I found it to be quite calm.
• Wandering around outside the Colosseum, we saw at least three brides shooting their wedding photos, and a camera crew filming a documentary starring a guy named Richard.
• Eitan seemed to think you could take liquids onto the flight, since this isn’t the United States. You can’t. We saw a woman toss a full bottle of lemoncello at the security check. Fortunately, all we were carrying was two single-serving bottles of white wine. The security agent found it quite funny when we told him we’d drink them instead of throwing them out, maybe because it was 10 a.m. Anyway, things became a lot more fun from that point onward.
• There’s penis-shaped pasta everywhere in this city. I guess that’s because people tourists buy it (I saw a few doing so). There they are, colored by squid ink:

A flower shop on a street:

More on Rome: David Lebovitz visits markets and explores the city.

Much like we westerners like Japanese food, but alter it to suit our tastes, Japanese people like western food, but often with a Japanese twist. At the Uomo subway station in Tokyo, there's a little bakery full of western-style breads (OK, there are actually tons of such bakeries), where you take a tray and neatly fill it with pastries from the display (with tongs, of course). Here it is that we discovered green bread -- green tea flavored, to be precise, with ribbons of sweet azuki bean filling. And it was excellent.

In Japan, green tea and sweet beans are popular flavors for many things, but for some reason, it hasn't caught on anywhere else I've ever been. This means if you want these flavors, you'll have to make it yourself.

It so happened that I had a surplus of sweet azuki beans (well, I made mochi and cooked way too much azuki filling), so I decided to try to recreate this bready Japanese wonder.

I started with a few different brioche recipes, and while I originally had been planning to go all out and pack in the butter, when push came to shove, I couldn't bring myself to use more than 3/4 cup.

The result was pleasantly sweet, silky soft, and while the green tea wasn't overly prominent, the beans went very well.

This quantity of dough works well when split into two 4-by-8 inch loaves (or several smaller buns) -- after the bread was done rising and baking, each pan was about 80% full.

For two smallish loaves:

3 cups flour
2 teaspoons yeast
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons sugar
3 eggs
2 tablespoons matcha green tea powder
150 grams butter

1 cup cooked azuki bean filling (1/2 cup azuki beans, soaked for 24 hours, then cooked until soft with 1/4 cup sugar and a pinch of salt, and lightly mashed)

First, mix together about half a cup of flour, the milk, the sugar and the yeast. Let sit to proof -- you want it to get all bubbly.

Then, work in the rest of the flour, the matcha powder and the eggs. Slowly incorporate the butter -- the batter will wind up being much wetter and stickier than your standard bread dough.

Leave the dough to rise, until it doubles in size.

Punch down the dough, and knead/mix it again. Now you'll want to shape the rolls, and add the azuki beans. It might be easier if the dough is cold.

Roll out the dough into a flat rectangle (or two), top with beans, and roll up. Give the roll a twist for added interest. Let the loaves rise until they're a good size (for an hour or so, but it depends on your room temperature).

Bake at 180 degrees Celsius (325 degrees Fahrenheit) for about 30-45 minutes, or until the bread sounds hollow when tapped.

MORE ON BRIOCHE:

• Delicious Days makes saffron brioche
• Brioche by Dorie Greenspan
• "Rich Man's Brioche" with two cups (!!!) of butter
• A photo step-by-step guide to brioche making

“If you show me how to make a cheesecake, I’ll show you how to make a Spanish yogurt cake,” my friend Arturo said. After his first Shavuot in Israel, he’d developed cheesecake envy. And how could I refuse an offer like that?

So first we made a cheesecake. I prepared the most basic cheesecake possible, with only light cream cheese, sugar, lemon and eggs, and we popped it into his itty, bitty toaster oven for an hour at 150 degrees Celsius. Out came the most perfect cheesecake I’ve ever seen — glossy and creamy on top, no brown spots and no cracks.

Inspired by the success, I decided to make one at home the following day. As I plopped my cake into the oven, I threw in a thermometer too, on a whim. After a few minutes at 150, the thermometer read 200. I turned down the oven to 130, and the thermometer shot up to 250. Needless to say, I was astounded — and let the cake finish baking with the oven off entirely.

Now, let’s go back to the Spanish cake. One of the things that makes it charming is that it contains very basic ingredients, in very straightforward ratios — in fact, the ingredients are all measured out in the disposable cup the yogurt came in. Another thing that makes it charming is that this is a recipe that Arturo’s grandmother’s grandmother made — meaning, Spanish grandmothers have been making this in one form or another for two centuries. Apparently the recipe developed in times of war, due to a lack of food, and hence the simplicity.

While the cake is leavened by yeast, unlike bread, you don’t need to knead it. Basically, the first rise occurs in the oven, and it’s what gives the cake its crumb. Since the yeast doesn’t have time to multiply like it does with bread, you add a lot more of it.

And what to do if your oven, like mine, tends to charge into turbo mode without asking you? Lower the temperature as much as possible, and cover the cake with tinfoil, to keep it from burning or getting too crusty.

For an 8×4 inch (20×10 centimeter) loaf:

3 eggs
1 container of yogurt (200 grams)
3 yogurt containers’ worth of flour (a.k.a. 2 1/4 cups)
2 yogurt containers’ worth of sugar (a.k.a. 1 1/2 cups)
1 yogurt container worth of oil (a.k.a. 3/4 cup)
peel and juice of half a lemon
one package of yeast (2 1/2 teaspoons)

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius (that is, if your oven isn’t insane like mine).

Crack the eggs into a bowl and beat until fluffy. Mix in the rest of the ingredients, until you get a smooth batter.

Oil your pan, and fill it with the batter. If your oven is extra hot, loosely cover the pan with tinfoil.
Stick the cake into the oven for 45 minutes to an hour, or until a knife inserted into the center comes out dry.

Grandma says you can check on the cake only after 45 minutes have passed. Before that, it could deflate.

A decidedly local green has started poking through the mass of exotic mushrooms, Thai eggplants and other cultivated specialties at the Carmel Market -- shoots of mulukhiya, a Middle Eastern specialty somewhat strangely known as Jews' mallow. In some markets around Israel, especially those catering to a more mixed Arab-Jewish population, it's quite common -- at the Ramle market, you can get cultivated mulukhiya even when it's out of season, as fellow blogger Sarah told me -- but in Tel Aviv it's a good deal less common.

Mulukhiya, also written mloukhieh, is the Arabic name, which is also used in Hebrew; some sources say the name comes from the similarly written Arabic root for "royal." It's a member of the jute family, corchorus, a word that means, somewhat less elegantly, "mucose."

Uncooked mulukhiya has a smell that somewhat reminds me of asparagus; the cooked stew has gumbo-like properties that will please people who like okra in all its gooeyness. While obviously the number of ways to prepare mulukhiya varies along with the number of cultures (households? cooks?) who call the dish their own, but one traditional, fairly common means of preparation calls for plucking the leaves from the long, spindly stems and quickly boiling them into a viscous stew, flavored with fried garlic. This is the Egyptian method, and can also be found in Israel, as I confirmed with some of the friendly market sellers.

I picked up a bunch from the stand behind the juice-seller on Yihyeh Street (parallel to the main Carmel strip), who also offered me a few fresh chickpeas and tiny sour plums to try. I picked up about 400 grams at 10 shekels a kilo, which isn't bad, although you only use the leaves, not the stems (which make up the bulk of the weight). Since then, I've noticed mulukhiya being sold at some of the greens stands inside the main Carmel strip, too.

Since making my mulukhiya into a stew would have been too obvious, I decided to incorporate it into a filling for ravioli, mixed with sweet potatoes. After all, why not?

Here's a big pile of the stuff at one of the market stands: (Note to self: A camera phone is not up to the job.)

And here are a few (wilted) leaves photographed at home:

As I've explained in earlier posts, I have a pasta maker, which makes the job much easier, but in theory you could make stuffed pasta by hand.

Also, this recipe easily converts between vegan, parve (non-vegan) and dairy, depending whether you want to use egg in the pasta, and cheese in the filling. I used both. For a richer pasta, you could also use up to 3 eggs, and not use water.

For 4-6 servings:

For the pasta dough:
250 grams semolina flour
125 grams white flour
125 grams whole wheat flour
1 egg (if you don't use egg, add 60 grams water)
140 grams water

Mix into a stiff dough. Knead for a few minutes until elastic, and then let sit for at least an hour. This makes it easier to work with. Roll out into thin sheets (I used setting #5 on my Atlas machine -- 1.6 mm, a.k.a. 1/16" ).

For the filling:
300 grams sweet potato (about 3 cups)
100 grams mulukhiya leaves (from about 300-400 grams of stalks)
40 grams (4 tablespoons) salty cheese -- I used jibneh, Arab sheep cheese; you could also use ricotta, or drop it altogether and add salt
2 garlic cloves
olive oil

Peel and chop the sweet potatoes; boil until soft in a big pot. Drain the potatoes; keep the boiling water and set both parts aside.

Remove the mulukhiya leaves from the stems, and chop the leaves. In the pot, heat the leaves with a bit of the sweet potato water (about equal volumes water and leaves), bring to a boil and shut the flame. Pour the green stew into a bowl.

Crush the garlic. In the same pot, heat a tablespoon or two of olive oil and fry the garlic until golden. Pour into the bowl with the mulukhiya.

Combine the mulukhiya (about 6 tablespoons worth) with the sweet potatoes, and mash together. Grate in the cheese. This is your ravioli filling.

Fill the strips of pasta with the filling. I used the ravioli attachment on my pasta machine; you could also do this by hand.

Pour the sweet potato cooking water back into the pot; bring to a boil and cook the ravioli for a minute or two, until the pasta is chewy. Toss with olive oil to serve.

For more on mulukhiya:

Read up on Sarah's blog and at Syrian Foodie.

They say that people either love licorice or hate it, and the licorice battleground happens to fall right through the middle of our household. Since fennel has what I would describe as a licorice flavor, I’ve never been a big fan. But this recipe, which I’m blatantly, um, borrowing from renowned Israeli chef Rafael Cohen, made me love fennel — at least, so long as its caramelized in butter and sugar.

The preparation is quite easy — basically, you’re steaming the fennel, sliced open and lying in a pool of butter and sugar, until its soft, and the underside has turned a caramelized brown. It’s also perfect for spring, because what better way to enjoy the season than to sink your teeth into a juicy green vegetable?

I should probably mention that I found huge, beautiful organic fennel roots at the Tel Aviv Farmer’s Market at the port, which is now being institutionalized with its very own building there.

This works with leek, too.

For two servings:

1 large fennel root
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup water
butter for frying (±1-2 tablespoons)
6-7 saffron threads (this was in the original recipe, but in my opinion, it’s optional)

Slice the fennel in half, rinse out any dirt and place the halves cut-side down in a big pot, along with the other ingredients. Heat on a low flame until the fennel is soft, about 40 minutes. If the water boils off, add a bit more, so the fennel (and caramel) won’t burn.