Foto Friday – Tea & Herbs with Yula Zubritsky
Filed under: Art, Blogging, Food, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Profiles, Travel
Yula Zubritsky is a photographer and designer with a passion for good food and the lifestyle that goes with it. This week, despite the unseasonably hot weather, she’s come out with a series of photos “Tea & Herbs” in anticipation of the cold and rain that’s bound to happen… sometime… sooner of later.
“I love styling and photographing food best and I love this series very much,” Zubritsky says. It’s understandable. Just seeing it makes you want to curl up under a warm blanket with a steaming hot cuppa of aromatic tea…
Which is precisely the intent; the photos accompany the packaging of a new line of herbal teas soon to be launched by health food marketer Sod HaTeva.
Zubritsky has styled and photographed food for some of Israel’s leading restaurants — and their chefs. She, together with Mirabelle Gazit, culinary writer, restaurant critic and labor lawyer (but that’s another story), offer comment on the best in food and wine that Israel has to offer on their blog MiYu. It’s in Hebrew only but the photos are delightfully yummy.
Their latest posting: the glad tidings that IsraFood - the 27th International Exhibition for Food and Beverage, will take place on November 22-24 at the Tel Aviv Fairgrounds. With 19,500 visitors in 2009, the event is one of the highlights of Israel’s culinary year. And by then, the weather could change — and we might even be in the mood for a nice hot drink!
Foto Friday – A little Italy in TLV
Filed under: Art, Food, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Profiles, Travel
There is a lopsided love affair between Israelis and all things Italian. Italians think of Israel as the Holy Land. Israelis think Italy is what Israel could be were it not for the matzav — the word used to describe the roiling, boiling political-diplomatic-religio-ethno-social situation that is our constant reality. Without the matzav, your average Israeli believes, we too could focus on a life filled with beautiful objects, high-quality design, and of course, great food and wine.
Your average Israeli is, as usual, deluding and flattering himself all at once. If anything, Italy’s history is proof that a well-developed sense of aesthetics is possible to sustain, even in times of great conflict. And there’s no reason to think that, even if peace broke out tomorrow, your average Israeli would suddenly put those ass-crack jeans away and don an linen Armani suit in its stead.
Plus, despite the matzav, Israel has fine-tuned its palate over the past 20 years, with award-winning wines, gourmet coffees, excellent cheeses (especially the goat variety), and restaurants that rank four and five stars in leading international guides.
For five years now, restaurant RoniMotti has been serving up freshly made pasta and other Italian delights to the yuppie crowd working feverishly ’round the clock at Tel Aviv’s Ramat Hahayal high-tech park. Owners Roni Belfer and Motti Sofer recenty celebrated the anniversary with a series of photos celebrating their dedicated staff. The pictures are nice way to give a big public “Thank you” to their workers…
as well as pay homage to the persons, places and things that inspire them, like the mother who taught Motti how to cook…
the fresh food ingredients that are Roni’s passion…
and of course, la bella Italia itself…
…as they carve out their own little slice of Italian heaven in North Tel Aviv.
RoniMotti also recently launched an online magazine, Villagio, profiling everything from the Slow Food movement to Frank Sinatra. Hey, if it’s Italian, we Israelis love it! Salute e buon appetito!
Fridge Voyeurism From Israel
Are you an organic food addict? Or do you insist on eating food that grown locally, but pesticide-ridden, to spare food miles (or to serve an ideology?)
As food production is a major source of greenhouse gas pollution (Read: Global Warming), eating locally, and consuming less meat is one way we can do our part.
Following a worldwide trend, where people are opening up their fridge to show people what’s in their fridge (and on their palette) today I will expose myself and show you what’s in mine. It feels a bit like opening my underwear drawer to strangers, but here goes:
CONTENTS (Door on right): Bio eggs, butter, organic strawberry jam, milk, mustard, sundried tomatoes, pomegranate concentrate, goat’s milk yogurt, V8, tehina, capers, guava juice, orange juice, batteries (not for eating!), coconut juice, goat’s yogurt, and the old Canadian maple syrup (thanks Mom!).
SOURCE: There are a number of imported items here like the V8 from North America and the juice from Egypt. The jam is from the United States. Phoeey on me, but it looked so good. And the pomegranate concentrate, I think is from Turkey, while syrup is from Canada. All the milk products are produced locally and bought at Eden Teva market or local non-organic shops. Milk costs about $1.50 a liter in Israel (non-organic), the organic yogurt about $3 a bottle.
CONTENTS: (from top to bottom, left to right) organic lentil sprouts, organic goat’s cheese, chessick fruit, soft regular white cheese 5%, organic red cabbage part of a weekly CSA veggie box delivery (choose from a list of CSAs here if you live in Israel); more cheese including a Rockfort goat’s cheese, Syrian dates, spicy lettuces, cabbage, parsley, green onions, carrots, leaks, tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers, and spinach.
SOURCE: Vegetables come from an organic farm, which delivers a box of whatever’s in season, once a week. Some of the cheese is from Eden Teva market, a health food store in Bnei Brak; some cheese is from Arab supermarket on the corner nearby my house. Reducing food miles is important to me from an environmental perspective. I try to eat locally produced food, and things which are in season.
CONTENTS: It being Passover in Israel means that a lot of the bread products you might see here other times of the year have been cleaned out, eaten or burned, as per Jewish custom. Moving on, there is some sort of white fish, hamburger organic and regular, rice (stored in freezer to keep the bugs out), and a strange kind of sheep tail fat (bottom right) for making a Bukharian food known as Osh Pollo. It is wrapped like that because someone (on their request) was supposed to “smuggle” it to the US where no such sheep tail fat can be found. It stays frozen in the meantime. (As a once a week meat-eater, Osh Pollo is very yummy and highly recommended.)
SOURCE: The frozen products come from Eden Teva Market, a health food store, a regular grocery store, and the sheep tail fat, a local market. Normally you won’t find so much meat in the freezer, as I tend to buy it when I want it. I have no idea how much meat costs per kilo, because I buy it so rarely. The organic hamburger, enough to feed 4, cost about $25 for the box, times 2 what you see above.
Want to know more about fridge voyeurism? Read this post in its original form with more details at Canada’s Israel. Or a past Green Prophet post on a fridge in Jerusalem.
We’d be happy to feature your Middle East fridge on Green Prophet, if you dare. Send us some pics and describe contents and food source, so we can know a little more about you, and what you eat. Send to contact@greenprophet.com.
B-bye bourekas
Filed under: A New Reality, Environment, Food, General, Israeliness
Chef Erez Komorovsky, the founder of Israeli sourdough heaven Lehem Erez, says “there is no logical reason” for Israelis, who “live in a land of abundant olive oil, to go anywhere near trans fat, unless they are locked into a conference room for most of the day. ‘And then their situation is not all that great,’ he says.”
Komorovsky is quoted in a Haaretz article about saying b-bye to bourekas, those layers of filo dough slathered with margarine, as well as rugelach (yes, including Jerusalem’s famous Marzipan bakery in Machane Yehuda) and other popular pastries that Israelis love, yet are smothered in trans fat, read margarine, canola or soy oil.
I’m chuckling over Komorovsky’s conference room comment, since it’s simply so right on the mark, given the Israeli penchant for putting out plates of potato bourekas, chocolate wafers and sesame-studded pretzels, along with water and soda at pretty much any conference room gathering, whether it be at the Knesset or a venture capital firm boardroom. Okay, maybe Herzliya venture capitalists are sticking to fresh fruit and sparkling water these days. But every bakery slides out its trays of vegetable- and cheese-filled bourekas each day, along with cinnamon and chocolate rugelach, and people buy them by the box and bagful.
“Israelis’ affection for bourekas and manufactured pastries, along with the long work days that lead to snacks of this sort, are liable to have disastrous results. Another risk factor is the widespread use of margarine in Israel – in part due to kashrut considerations – since margarine is entirely trans fat,” according to the Haaretz article. And while “the good news for Israelis is that restaurants here are better than in the United States. Even McDonald’s in Israel stopped using trans fats as far back as 2004, and switched to canola oil,” we’re still a country that likes its trans fat in plenty of products.
I’m hooked on these concepts right now because I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent new book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life”, and contemplating finally starting my compost pile and growing some more vegetables in our garden. Don’t know whether that will actually happen. But I’ll tell you this much: No more bourekas in this house.
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