Our little Tel Aviv household has a new addition — our first child, baby Danny, born nearly two weeks ago. He won’t be eating any of my cooking just yet, at least not directly. Now in theory you could expect me to disappear offline for a few weeks, if not several months, but I actually have a whole bunch of new posts I wrote before he was born. So it might be a bit irregular, but I hope to be posting some new content anyway. After all, the seasonal fruits and vegetables really are lovely at this time of year.

The streets surrounding the Damascus gate are one of my favorite places for food shopping in Jerusalem. The markets teem with people, and competition is fierce. Unlike the markets in Tel Aviv, you won’t find any exotic imports or the latest agricultural trends — no French bread or purple potatoes here — but you will find lots of classic Arab staples, done well.

After all, when you have half a dozen coffee roasters in such close proximity to one another, and such high turnover, is it any wonder that Izhiman will sell you beans still warm from being roasted?

When you notice, he’ll smile in pride.

Many of the roasters, including Izhiman, sell the same bean roasted both lightly and darkly. Going price is about 5 shekels per 100 grams. If you want, you can get your beans ground or premixed with cardamom. Izhiman also has dozens of kinds of essential oils in little 30-milliliter jars, all selling for 10 shekels. I don’t want to think about how much they’d cost in Tel Aviv.

The main streets in the area — both inside the Old City walls and immediately surrounding the bus depo outside — are vibrant and crowded. If you’re visiting Jerusalem, this spot is easily accessible thanks to the new light rail — enter the city via the central bus station, walk or take the rail to Mahane Yehuda to see what’s in season there, and then get back on the rail for another 5 minutes (or walk 15-20 minutes) to the Muslim Quarter to compare. (Don’t get me started on the light rail’s astoundingly bad ticketing system. Let’s just say you’ll probably miss at least one train because there’s a line at the ticket machine. And there’s no day pass. And, oh, while the signs state that you can use your Rav Kav national bus pass, apparently mine contains Tel Aviv money, which is somehow different from Jerusalem money and therefore can’t be used. Anyway.)

But back to the Muslim quarter. (In the photo: The Damascus Gate from inside the Old City.) This is the place to find out what uber-local vegetables are in season. You can shop at the vegetable stores along the bus depo, right next to the light rail tracks, where they have an excellent selection. Or you can buy from the little old ladies sitting in the street and selling greens out of plastic bags — though you’ll have to conduct your business in Arabic, or use sign language.

In the winter you’ll find all forms of leafy greens, things like wild spinach and Jerusalem sage (no resemblance to common sage). Theoretically you should also find wild beet and chicory, though no one was selling these greens when I was there in mid-February.

Now, in late spring, there’s a whole new range of treasures — the first bags of charred fresh wheat — freekeh — along with little green plums (aras or arasiyeh in Arabic), fresh chickpeas in their pods, fuzzy green almonds, grape leaves and more. And of course there are all the usual vegetables, such as tomatoes, onions and potatoes. Check out the massive cabbages (the huge leaves are better for stuffing) and the delicate miniature eggplants and zucchini (also, better for stuffing). (In the photo: Carts of plums and chickpeas outside the gate last year. Vendors seem to have been moved out of that plaza this year.)

What’s all this talk about stuffing? The lazy may be lucky enough to find their vegetables being sold pre-hollowed, tidily packaged in little bags — all you have to do is add filling. (In February, these vegetables included carrots and potatoes.) Don’t worry, we won’t tell the neighbors you didn’t do it yourself.

This is also the place to find wooden molds for ma’amoul cookies (usually 10 shekels each), and grill pans for making flatbreads at home (50-60 shekels, depending on the size, not including the power cord). Why those same grill pans cost three times the price at the larger Mahane Yehuda market, I don’t know.

Just don’t trip over the flocks of tourists outside the Austrian Hospice. (A beautiful place inside, but — how can I say this? — I’m just not that into their coffee or cakes. In the photo at right: The view from the roof.) Or those photographing the stations of the cross.

Also on offer — vegetable corers (choose the ones whose blades don’t twist), enameled coffee pots (finjan in Hebrew) for making coffee on the stovetop, juicers of varying quality and lots and lots of little teacups with golden accents.

And, of course, lots of little stores selling sweets like baklava and basbusa, as well as the spice shops drawing passersby with massive, carefully shaped pyramids of powdered zaatar. (How does this work? We asked. Apparently they leave the spice pyramids on display for about three days, then package that zaatar up to sell and build a new pyramid.) Those dried yellow petals marked as saffron? That’s actually safflower, and it should be priced accordingly. Those white, chalky-looking balls? Dried cheese.

While you’re at it, keep your eyes open for jibneh — the name just means cheese in Arabic — an unaged, firm, white sheep cheese generally sold in rectangular blocks, inside bags with some liquid. At 25 shekels a kilo, even the government price-regulated cheeses can’t compete. The little store right inside Herod’s gate should have some.

All this walking made you hungry? When the weather is nice, you’ll find lots of street vendors out selling falafel, including oversized balls stuffed with onion and sumac. (In the photo: Schoolgirls buying fruit.) When it’s cold — remember, we hibernate when there’s any sign of rain/the temperature drops below 20 degrees Celsius — you can still find a handful of restaurants selling grilled meats, falafel or hummus along the main shopping thoroughfares.

And then there’s this guy, along the ascent to Herod’s gate (named Uncle Mustache; he also sells mustache-shaped falafel):

Because nothing says love better than heart-shaped falafel.

View Food shopping in the Muslim quarter in a larger map

It’s been a pleasant, sunny and slightly chilly spring, but spring nonetheless. And as the seasons change, the market is offering the first springtime and summer fruits — namely, stone fruits. That includes loquats, a few too-solid peaches and nectarines, and green almonds.

Yes, green almonds — generally grown for the pit, more familiar as a nut, at this time of year you can still eat the green outer fruit itself. The flesh is tart and quite hard, while the young almond inside is translucent and glassy. But nature isn’t static, and that’ll all change within a few weeks — by then, the almonds at the market will contain soft white nuts, while the outer green shells won’t be good for much anymore.

So for those who like almonds for their fruit, not just for the nuts themselves, now is your very brief time. When in doubt, you can ask the seller whether the green part is still edible, or whether the almond inside is mature.

Due to their strong sourness and hard texture, I like green almonds best in savory dishes such as salads — a few thinly sliced green almonds make a great addition to a chopped Israeli salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and fresh herbs, seasoned with a good dose of lemon juice.

Or in this pasta salad, for instance, as a tart counterpoint to fresh herbs, enhanced by a dressing of lemon and young garlic. The textures are varied, from the hard crunch of the almonds — both the fresh green ones and the roasted nuts — to the soft fluffiness of the red lettuce leaves and the chewy swirl of long noodles. And if we’re talking spring, you might as well use fresh garlic, too — have you bought your 10 kilos to last you through the year?

This dish was inspired by a photo of a rather Asian-looking pasta salad that I had no hopes of preparing at home, due to my lack of fresh Asian ingredients. Instead, I wound up with this Mediterranean/Middle Eastern mix, since those are the kind of things I have in my kitchen. After all, I wouldn’t go a week without buying parsley.

For 1 pack pasta (500 grams/1 pound; I prefer whole-wheat pasta):

Dressing:

• 3 fresh garlic cloves (or 2 older ones. If you don’t know whether your garlic is fresh, it probably isn’t.)
• 6 tablespoons lemon juice (from 1.5 to 2 lemons)
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1 teaspoon salt (or more; adjust to taste)

Toppings:

• 1 1/2 cup thinly sliced fresh green almond fruits (±16-20 almonds)
• 1 1/2 cup chopped cucumber (4 little Israeli ones)
• 1 cup roasted sliced almonds (i.e. your standard nuts)
• 1 cup chopped fresh parsley
• 1 cup chopped green onion, preferably the less-spicy green stalks
• ±12 red lettuce leaves, torn into bite-sized pieces (1/2 a small head)

Prep time: 10 minutes. Cook time: 10 minutes.

Prepare the pasta according to the package directions. Let cool, ideally to room temperature.

Prepare the dressing: Blend everything together in a blender, or crush the garlic and then mix with the other ingredients. Mix with the pasta.

Toss the pasta with the topping ingredients. A note on toasting almonds: Put them in a dry frying pan on a high flame, stirring constantly until they start to turn golden. Then, remove from the pan immediately so they don’t burn.

As with any pasta salad that contains long noodles and chunky ingredients, the toppings have a tendency to sink to the bottom. Make sure to scoop them out as you serve this dish. The lettuce looks lovely arranged on top of every bowl.

Stuffed grape leaves are labor intensive, which is part of their charm. Or something. They’re lovely to eat, but let’s be honest — making (and serving) them is a declaration that you’ve invested a heckuva lot of time in that meal. That’s part of what makes them such a centerpiece for some cultures — what better way to show off to the neighbors and guests? — but it also can make them a bit impractical.

Still, they’re nice to eat and enjoy every once so often, and as with any food, making them gives you the ultimate freedom to determine what goes inside. And there’s no better excuse than springtime, when fresh leaves are just starting to hit the markets. They’re so pretty, sitting there in bright green piles. Much more enticing than the pickled leaves sold year-round (even if the taste is ultimately the same).

Stuffed grape leaves often contain a bit of ground beef mixed in with the rice, so I added lentils to mimic the effect of the meat. The lentils created a slightly unorthodox texture, and you could just use extra rice instead, although the lentils offer nutrition advantages as well — the rice/lentil combo creates whole protein. Next time I’ll probably use caviar lentils, which are smaller than regular lentils.

I was in the mood for thin, delicate grape leaves, shaped more like slender cigarettes than fat dumplings, so I put a small amount of filling into each one — maybe half a tablespoon — and spread it into a thin, four-centimeter line. Obviously, the less you put into each grape leaf, the more leaves you’ll need and the longer it’ll take to stuff them all. It took me about 40 minutes to fill 75 leaves, but you could also make fatter bundles and finish in half the time (and with half the leaves).

For about 75 stuffed grape leaves:

• 250 grams fresh grape leaves (about 75-80)
• 1 cup rice
• 1/2 cup lentils (or you could use another 1/2 cup rice instead)
• 1/4 cup oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1/2 cup chopped dried apricots
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh mint
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon salt
• zest of 1 lemon
• juice of 1.5 lemons, divided (6 tablespoons all told)

Prep time: 50 minutes. Cook time: 90 minutes.

Let your lentils start soaking in advance, if you have the time. Alternately, put them in water as you start preparing the other components.

Rinse the grape leaves and put in a pot to boil for about 10 minutes so that
they soften. If you’re using pickled grape leaves, rinsing them is enough.

Put the onion and oil in a pot, and fry until the onion is translucent. Add the rice, herbs and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, and mix until the herbs soften and lose some volume. Add the apricots, spices, lemon zest, and salt. Drain the lentils and add them, too.

Now, fill the grape leaves: Place a leaf vein-side up, with the stem facing you. Remove any stem. Put about half a tablespoon of filling at the base of the leaf, and arrange into a horizontal line. Fold the base end of the leaf over the filling, tuck in the sides and roll into a tube. You can find a picture tutorial on my post on cheese-filled grape leaves.

Repeat with all the leaves and all the stuffing, setting aside 5-10 imperfect leaves to line the bottom of the pot.

Place the leftover leaves in the bottom of the pot, and then densely arrange the stuffed grape leaves in layers. Try to have each layer going in a different direction — if the bundles are arranged horizontally on the bottom layer, they should be arranged vertically on the next layer up. This helps them keep their form as they cook.

Pour the remaining 4 tablespoons of lemon juice into the pot. Place a glass plate firmly on top of the bundled leaves to keep them in place, and top the pot with boiling water that comes up about 1 centimeter past the leaves.

Put on a low flame, bring to a boil and simmer for about 1.5 hours.

Bimuelos are a highly personal affair for anyone who makes them.

One February afternoon last year, I walked into the Pensos’ borekas shop at the Levinsky Street spice market. “By the way, do you make bimuelos for Passover?” I asked Moshe Penso as he took filo dough out of the freezer.

They did, of course.

Bimuelos are a Turkish Passover staple, and I’ve been eating them all my life. It’s my favorite holiday food, and maybe just one of my favorite foods all together. Our version consists of fluffy, soft balls of matzo meal and egg, saturated with honey and sugar and doused in heavy cream.

This Passover specialty came over from Turkey at the start of the last century with my great-grandmother Rose Behar. Rose was a girl of 14 when she left Constantinople, shortly after her mother died. One of the few things she brought on that long trip was her mother’s bimuelo pan. The pan, which has seven indentations for forming round dumplings, continues to serve my mother to this day, coming out of the cupboard once a year.

Growing up, I didn’t know anyone else who made bimuelos for Passover. Nowadays, as Jewish communities disperse around the world and move far from their roots, that seems like a common issue — ever since I wrote about my family’s bimuelo recipe three years ago, that post has been one of my more popular, drawing dozens of personal accounts of a variety of family recipes.

Now, even, after asking around, I still don’t know anyone who makes them quite like we do — ultimately, the word bimuelo simply means a fried ball of dough, and there are many variations. Moshe Penso invited me back to his shop later to speak with his wife Jenny, who is responsible for the Passover cooking. Her version of bimuelos produces soft, savory clouds with crispy exteriors, and are quite possibly more similar to what many other Turkish families make. A coworker of mine also makes something similar, too.

But the whole love affair — and believe me, once you hear what people go through to find the special pan, you’ll realize what a love affair it is — is highly personal. None of us would ever think of deviating from the family recipe. As my coworker said, one year her sister made bimuelos with milk instead of water, and she couldn’t eat it. Tradition reigns supreme, even if every family has its own tradition.

Jenny Penso makes her bimuelos with cheese except if she wants them to accompany a meat dish, in which case she leaves out the dairy products. While she fries hers into patties in a regular frying pan, other variations call for using an indented pan like mine in order to make dumplings. Alternately, you could omit the cheese (or not) and make the dish sweet by drizzling the finished bimuelos with a syrup of boiled sugar, water and lemon juice — also, more similar to my family’s recipe, though still not the same.

Note: If you’re looking for a bimuelo pan, sources and suggestions are listed on my original bimuelo post.

For about 10 savory cheese bimuelos:

• 2 sheets of matzo
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup grated or chopped mozzarella
• 1/4 cup cottage cheese
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• oil for frying

Break the matzo into chunks and submerge in water in a bowl. Allow the matzo to fully absorb the water, and then squeeze out any remaining liquid.

Mix the mushy matzo with the egg, cheeses and salt. Heat a frying pan with some oil, and drop 2-3 tablespoons of batter at a time into the pan. Once the patties brown on one side, flip to cook on the other side.

These are best served fresh.

It's that time of year again, and hopefully you're ready for Passover. Well, it doesn't really matter, because Passover starts tonight whether you like it or not. Hopefully you like it. If you're like me, you've been eagerly anticipating Passover food for weeks now. I haven't gotten around to trying out new recipes before the holiday, though, so this is my round-up from last year, with a few additions.

Either way, hopefully some of my Passover recipes can make your holiday just a bit brighter. And I'll be posting a few more as the holiday progresses. Here are both holiday recipes, as well as everyday recipes that just happen to fit the spirit of the holiday:

Seder plate classics:

• My mother's charoset recipe, in traditional Turkish style
• Cranberry charoset, a new-world inspired version
• Homemade horseradish, for when the store bought stuff isn't hot enough

Family staples:

• Sweet Turkish bimuelos, my favorite Passover food and a recipe that has received much interest in the past few years
• Mina de espinaka, a Sephardic spinach-cheese pie and another family staple

Modern twists:

• Matzo ball soup with Middle Eastern spices
• Matzo balls in Persian fruit soup
• Mushroom bechamel croquettes

Desserts:

• Chocolate Passover biscotti, which you won't be able to stop eating
• Chocolate covered caramelized matzo, which you also won't be able to stop eating

Post-Passover (it's never too early to plan):

• Moroccan mufletas

Of course, then there all all the other, non-holiday specific recipes that just happen to be kosher for Passover. Everything free of chametz (grains, namely wheat, barley, oatmeal, rye and amaranth) appears in my Sephardi Passover recipe list (or see it in chronological blog format), while everything free of both chametz and kitniyot (legumes, rice and corn) appears in my Ashkenazi Passover recipe list (also in blog format). (Let me know if I've mislabled anything.)

Lots of Passover recipe roundups by others:

• Mimi on Israeli Kitchen
  
• Martha Stewart (I particularly like the matzo granola idea, though I haven't tried it)
• Some creative ideas on What Jew Wanna Eat
• Tons and tons of stuff on Kosher Blogger

If that's not enough, here are some Passover posts by others that I enjoyed:

• Faye Levy on Yemenite-fusion matzo balls
• Miriam examines seder customs, particularly Yemenite customs, and ponders what the holiday means to her
• Cara rethinks the seder plate
• Sarah blogs in Judeo-Spanish a.k.a. Ladino (love this blog!) and presents a Sephardic matzo ball recipe and a haroset nearly identical to my own
• A friend of my friend Ben recounts their seder in Malawi

Hag sameach!

This hot soup segues between seasons, combining the warm comfort needed for winter’s swan song with the bright zest of tomatoes and basil. Is it spring yet? Technically yes, although all the winter colds and flus are yet to receive the memo, and we still have some rain in the forecast. So best eat your soup now, before it’s too warm.

This soup cooks a bit more quickly if you’ve presoaked your barely. If you haven’t, you might as well put it in water when you start prepping your vegetables. It’ll speed things up slightly.

For four nice servings:

• oil for frying
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• about 10 button mushrooms (nearly a full plastic basket), chopped
• 3 stalks celery, chopped, and leaves removed
• about 8 ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped (±1 kilo; alternately use an 800-gram can of whole or chunked tomatoes)
• 1/2 cup barley, preferably presoaked
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1/3 c basil leaves (4 big stalks’ worth)

Prep time: 10 minutes. Cook time: about 30 minutes, depending on your barley.

Add some oil to your cooking pot and heat on a medium flame. Put the onions in the pot to soften, and then add the mushrooms and celery. Once all the vegetables are slightly soft, add the tomatoes, barely (without the soaking liquid) and salt.

Top with 1.5 liters of water and let simmer until the barely is soft. This will take about 30-40 minutes if your barley hasn’t been presoaked, and less if it has. Once the soup is cooked, stir in the chopped basil leaves and serve.

Sometimes us city folk want a little bit of country. It’s not like the countryside is all that far away, but given how long it takes us to plan a trip out of the city, you’d think this were a trip abroad.

Even for a strong incentive such as good food — it took us more than a year to get organized and attend the Mateh Yehuda regional food festival. In other words, we missed last year’s festival, but this year, after a few weeks of collective planning, we pulled ourselves together, picked six sites and organized a day visiting the home cooks, dairies and boutique wineries of the Jerusalem hills.

Calling it a food festival is a bit of a misnomer, even if that’s what it calls itself. While it does include a few organized events, the bulk of the “festival” is a pamphlet by the regional authority listing contact information for dozens of small food establishments. Many are actually individuals who offer home hospitality, hosting traditional ethnic meals in citrus-tree lined yards in the area’s various small towns.

Many of the towns in the area are not particularly well-off — many of the residents of the Ela valley villages, for example, are long-time immigrants from countries around the Middle East, such as Morocco and Iraq, who have been living there since they immigrated 50 years ago. The homes are not luxurious — but the flip side is that most everyone has plenty of land for fruit trees, goats and an expansive yard for hosting visitors. Furthermore, many of the towns are not the most accessible: While no more than a 45-minute drive from Tel Aviv and 30 minutes from Jerusalem, many are connected to the outside world by only 3 to 4 buses a day. You really need a car to get around here.

Our first stop was the Dagan bakery (050-637-4732) in the town of Tarum, on the Judea plain. There, on an olive-tree lined residential street amid beautiful green hills, Shulie Dagan bakes and sells Yemenite breads out of a home basement (top photo, right). The bakery was not well marked, and we entered hesitantly — we were the only visitors there. Shulie greeted us warmly with tastes of her flatbreads — puffy pitas and bubbly lahoh — alongside airy, lemony hilbeh and salty green, clove-infused skhug.

Shulie’s lahoh are different from those you’d find in Tel Aviv’s Yemenite quarter — they’re much heavier and thicker. She makes them this way because she believes paying customers should get their money’s worth, she said. As lahoh after perfect lahoh came out of her spotless aluminum pans, she explained her secrets — she doesn’t use teflon, she wipes her pans with a bit of margarine to prevent sticking, and she adds a porridge of precooked flour and water to her batter to give it nice bubbles, she said.

Indeed — look at those beautiful bubbles forming as the lahoh cooks.

She admitted that she wasn’t that interested in participating in the festival, and said the organizers pushed her to do so; anyway, most of her business is selling breads to establishments in neighboring communities, not necessarily drop-in customers like us. But that didn’t stop her from pushing us to taste treat after treat and inviting us back to learn her lahoh making process from start to finish.

After our lovely time with Shulie, we headed south toward the sunny, shadeless Ela valley, making a quick pit stop at the Beit Jamal monastery near Beit Shemesh. The monastery, set amid scenic forests and hills, is not actually part of the festival. Its resident nuns and monks sell their own olive oil, honey and intricately detailed ceramics.

Further south is the village of Luzit and the Mozalis dairy (054-479-1356). The small farm, run by the Buie family, sells goat and sheep cheeses, produced from the milk of animals raised in a bucolic dream. The family also offers cheese-making workshops. The children of Americans originally from Mississipi, the Buie sisters grew up in Dimona and speak perfect English. (For more: A profile about the Buie family and their farm.)

When we arrived, Naomi Buie was cooking for the sabbath. The kitchen was full of home-baked breads for sale and fresh vegetables, including wild asparagus picked from the grazing fields — beautiful green shoots with a sweeter, more lemony flavor than their cultivated cousins. Naomi’s sister Bathsheva was leading visitors through the green, shadeless hillsides, where two other sisters tended the flocks.

Bathsheva explained that she milks the animals by hand — 30 animals a day, which takes an hour or an hour and a half, and gives her about 25 liters of milk. She adjusts her milking based on how much cheese she thinks she’ll be selling. The dairy products are all seasonal — the goats are milked for 8 months out of the year, the sheep for 2 months, and there’s no milk at all during peak summer, despite demand.

The resulting cheeses — we tried a soft goat tsfatit, a lightly salty sheep Bulgarian cheese and a labaneh-style spread — are rich and creamy, with only a hint of the flavors that characterize goat and sheep cheese. A lemon pie made from sheep milk was equally rich and creamy, with no hint of sheep flavor.

The cheeses are sold exclusively out of the family’s home, and given the natural production process, it’s no wonder that demand is high — half the cheese varieties were sold out when we arrived. (Example price: 25 shekels for a block of tsfatit.)

Ben and Bathsheva discuss vegetable farming; Sarah photographs a goat.

Lunch was at the neighboring village of Agur, with Sarah’s relative Osnat (050-751-0561 or 02-991-2868). Osnat hosts groups for traditional Kurdish cooking. She was swamped when we arrived — groups of people filled half a dozen tables arranged in her yard and living room, and they kept coming. We got a small table under a lemon tree.

The first dish was kubbeh in a tomato-based broth full of vegetables (photo, top left), including kardi (arum), a traditional, foraged green that is poisonous unless cooked properly (for hours, with lots of lemon to neutralize the poison). I thought I could taste a slight tingling from the arum, but Sarah said that after such a long cooking time, it didn’t have much flavor left and was there mostly in the name of tradition. (For more: Sarah’s story about Osnat and kardi.)

Alongside large pitchers of lemon-verbena infused lemonade, Osnat also served us a lovely mix of little stuffed vegetables — cabbage, squash and onion — which had a rich caramel flavor because the stuffed onions were arranged at the bottom of the pot. In case it’s not entirely clear — all this food is incredibly labor intensive, since each bite-sized kubbeh or stuffed vegetable is individually prepared by hand. (At left in the photo above — not the most photogenic, but good.)

Osnat didn’t have time to talk with us, but Sarah explained that her foods contained more paprika than most Kurdish cooking because her family was from the village of Homs (in northern Iraq, not Syria), which is close to the Turkish border.

Afterward, we wandered through her yard, photographing things like these old scales-cum-garden ornaments:

Just outside the village is the Agur winery (054-475-9672), which also had a steady flow of people. The winery, which produces 30,000 bottles of wine a year, does not grow all its own grapes, but it gets them exclusively from vineyards in the Judean hills. For those with fine enough palates, these wines are a chance to experience the terroir; for the rest of us, they’re simply good tasting wines.

The winery staff was offering tastings of three different wines — a white, the Blanca 2010 (one of my favorites from the 2011 wine expo), and two reds made from precisely the same blend of grapes, the Kesem 2010 and the Special Reserve 2009. Bottles sell for between 70 and 130 shekels.

I loved the rustic decor inside. I’m sure the mid-afternoon sun contributed to the effect:

Outside, people drank wine near the processing facilities.

Our final stop for the day was supposed to be the Tzuk dairy (054-523-9117), which sells a lovely range of goat cheeses including a soft charcoal-coated cheese and an excellent camembert. But — if I haven’t already hinted this — the festival isn’t the most organized, and despite being listed as open, the dairy shop was closed when we arrived. The only souls on the premises were lots of goats and their two caretakers — and a decent number of visitors like us. (For more: Sarah reviews dairies in the area, including Tzuk.)

The Tzuk dairy, and a wild asparagus shoot growing in a nearby field.

After a few calls to the owners, one of the goat caretakers let all the visitors into the closed shop and told us to take the cheeses out of the fridge to taste them. We’d come all that way, so we wanted to buy cheeses too — the farm has a long, deeply pitted access road, partially blocked with several fallen trees — but for some reason, the owners said that wasn’t possible. We’d have to be content with tasting — for free.

A slightly strange end to a lovely day.

Lavender in the fields next to the Tzuk goat farm.

Visiting businesses participating in the Mateh Yehuda festival:

The festival is for the full month of March, and while most of the businesses probably accept guests year round, some — such as the people offering home hospitality — are probably better set up to do so during the festival. Most businesses are open on weekends, particularly Friday mornings and early afternoons.

The festival coordinators are offering an organized tour of several participating establishments on every Friday this month (departing from Beit Shemesh, 02-990-0903 to book). Alternately if you have a car, you can pick things that interest you from the festival pamphlet, or follow our itinerary marked on the map below. CALL EACH ESTABLISHMENT IN ADVANCE TO CONFIRM — even if the booklet gives the impression that this is a business with set operating hours. Many of the places are in private homes, and are generally hard to find without specific directions from the owners.

For more information on events and participants: Visit the festival’s Facebook page and click the image to download the brochure (Hebrew only). The brochure contains a list of participating establishments as well as information on organized tours and events. The same information is also available on the festival’s website.

View Mateh Yehuda food festival in a larger map

I had unfinished business with this rice. I was heating the last leftover serving in the microwave when my glass plate shattered into a thousand shards — why does this always happen when I’m reheating rice? I had to dump the whole thing into the trash.

I was actually more upset to lose the rice than the plate. I’d been looking forward to eating that rice. This is a simple concoction, but its rich and savory flavor makes a good base for a meal. Golden from fried onions and flecked with green from nettles, this is a seasonal dish — this is the time of year for fresh leafy greens. You can eat it alone, or serve it alongside some freshly cooked Turkish spinach (the intrepid can forage that, too), topped with toasted almonds and perhaps a little yogurt. A few slivers of fresh white cheese, or maybe some tomato, rounds out the meal.

So I needed to make more rice, in order to have that last serving. But here’s the catch — nettles can’t be bought at any supermarket, which is both their upside and their downside. Finding some after work in the evening means tramping through untended yards, trying to spot a nettle patch in the dark.

But I did it anyway — I found myself a little nettle patch, and filled a bag with fresh green leaves. My hands tingled from the little stings, but no worry, that passes quickly. The neighbors would probably thank me for pruning their weeds, had they noticed.

I like that nettles have a mild, alkaline flavor, but for those who aren’t into foraging, you could use spinach instead. And note the timing in this recipe — this is how you get perfect rice without actually being able to see into the pot. I’m using a cast-iron pot, for instance.

For more on foraging: What’s in our backyards, and wild plants in the markets.

For about 3 cups of cooked rice:

• 1 medium-sized onion, or half a large onion
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 1/2 cup long-grained rice such as Persian rice
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh greens, preferably nettle, but spinach also works
• Optional serving suggestions: Turkish spinach, slivered almonds, yogurt, a young white cheese such as tsfatit, bulgarian or mozzarella, and/or fresh tomato.

Prep time: 5 minutes. Cook time: 10 minutes.

Cut the onion into long strips, and cut the strips in half. In a pot with the lid, slowly heat the onions in the oil on medium heat until the onions become translucent.

Rinse the rice, and add to the pot along with the salt. Stir so that the rice is mixed with the onions and is coated with the oil.

Add 2 1/4 cups water to the pot as well as the fresh greens, and mix into the rice (most of the greens will float, but that’s fine).

Put the lid on the pot. Once you see a bit of steam escaping from around the lid, put the pot on your stove’s lowest flame, and let cook for 10 minutes. Then, shut the flame and leave the lid on the pot for another 5-10 minutes. Remove the lid and fluff the rice. If the rice still looks slightly damp, let it sit uncovered so that the moisture can steam off.

Serving suggestion: Serve alongside freshly cooked Turkish spinach (’tis the season), top with almonds (toast them in a dry pan on medium-high heat, stirring, until they brown slightly) or eat alongside yogurt. If you like, you can finely chop some fresh spinach and mix it into your yogurt. You also could serve with some slivers of tomato or a white cheese on the side.

This is a classic little salad, one of the basics you’ll often find served at falafel stands and lunchtime restaurants. It’s a pleasant, simple creation with a sharp, fiery tang from lemon juice and raw garlic, along with a slight bitterness from the lemon peels.

You can make it by grating up some whole carrots, or, say, using the carrot cores left over from my stuffed carrot recipe. As a bonus, if you happen to use brightly colored carrots, then you’ll get a salad with a riot of color, which I guarantee you’ll never see at your neighborhood falafel shop.

These colored carrots can be purchased at the various farmer’s markets as well as at a few shops in Jaffa (and sometimes Ramle).

My version uses so-called Chinese lemons — those miniature fruits also known as limequats — which have particularly thin skins that lack the bitterness of their pithier, full-sized cousins.

For about two cups’ worth:

• 2 cups finely chopped carrot
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• 2 mini lemons (“Chinese lemons” in Hebrew, also known as limequats in English), finely chopped, seeds removed (alternately: 1 tablespoon lemon juice plus 2 tablespoons lemon pulp and zest)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/4 cup parsley, chopped

Prep time: 5 minutes.

Mix together all the ingredients. Let sit for about 15 minutes so the flavors can blend.

Regarding the lemon: Chinese lemons are sweet enough that you can use them whole, but larger, traditional lemons have a bitter pith. After squeezing them for juice, you’ll want to remove some of the zesty yellow outside with a vegetable peeler (it’s OK if you get some of the white pith) and chop up that along with the pulpy inside to get the 2 tablespoons called for in the recipe.