Israel Eats

Stories, photos, and recipes from Israel’s culinary scene—a fusion of flavors from around the world. After years of travels elsewhere, photographer Steven Rothfeld visited Israel for the first time, spending several months exploring the small country’s vibrant food scene. The locals guided him from one great restaurant to another, and to growers and producers of fine foods as well. This book is a delicious compilation of stories and reflections, recipes, and stunning photographs of Israel’s food culture today. From north to south, Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, chefs and food growers have branched out from a vast array of cultural influences and historic traditions to create fresh, contemporary fusions and flavors. Rothfeld’s friend Nancy Silverton, a winner of the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Chef Award, contributes ten dishes inspired by the delicious fusion styles that have become a hallmark of the Israeli culinary community. “Learn about the cultural traditions underlying dishes like spiced lamb kabobs grilled on cinnamon sticks, beet puree with tahini and date syrup, a kumquat marmalade Rothfeld first tasted at an inn in the Golan Heights, and inventive variations on Israeli staples like cauliflower and eggplant.”—St. Helena Star

Contains over 300 kosher recipes from all over Israel, including chremslach, spanakopita, artichoke soup with lemon and saffron, Tunisian hot chile sauce, and hummus.

Discover a playful new take on Middle Eastern cuisine with more than 100 fresh, flavorful recipes. “Finally! Eden Grinshpan is letting us in on her secrets of her healthful and deliriously delicious cooking. Giant flavors, pops of color everywhere and dishes you’ll crave forever. It’s the Eden way!”—Bobby Flay NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR BY DELISH AND LIBRARY JOURNAL Eden Grinshpan’s accessible cooking is full of bright tastes and textures that reflect her Israeli heritage and laid-back but thoughtful style. In Eating Out Loud, Eden introduces readers to a whirlwind of exciting flavors, mixing and matching simple, traditional ingredients in new ways: roasted whole heads of broccoli topped with herbaceous yogurt and crunchy, spice-infused dukkah; a toasted pita salad full of juicy summer peaches, tomatoes, and a bevy of fresh herbs; and babka that becomes pull-apart morning buns, layered with chocolate and tahini and sticky with a salted sugar glaze, to name a few. For anyone who loves a big, boisterous spirit both on the plate and around the table, Eating Out Loud is the perfect guide to the kind of meal—full of family and friends eating with their hands, double-dipping, and letting loose—that you never want to end.

Simple meals inspired by Israeli street food, by the authors of the best-selling James Beard Book of the Year, Zahav.

This volume explores cuisine in Israel, including the country's food culture history, important dishes, current food issues, and more. The evolution of Israeli food has been dependent on three major variables: the geography and climate of Israel, its ethnic mix and ethnic history (including religious influences, non-Jewish communities, and heavy immigration from around the world), and technical innovation that has enabled Israel to become a leader in agricultural technology. This book provides a comprehensive picture of Israeli food culture in the twenty-first century, examined on the basis of the various influences that created this particular culture. Such influences include the lengthy food history that can be traced to prehistory, including data from the Bible and Koran and archaeological evidence; as well as contemporary food practices that have emerged as a mix of influences from different ethnic groups. Modern Israeli food practices are the result of the sway of European, Middle Eastern, and other cultures, creating a cuisine that is marked by its blends. Main topics are accompanied by easy-to-follow recipes. The book serves as an introduction to daily life in Israel as well as the evolution of food practices in a relatively new country.

An ordinary Gazan’s “devastating contemporary war journal” that chronicles his fear, sadness, and boredom during Israel’s 2014 invasion of Gaza (Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient) The Drone Eats with Me is an unforgettable rendering of everyday civilian life shattered by the realities of twenty-first-century warfare. Israel’s 2014 invasion of Gaza lasted 51 days, killed 2,145 Palestinians (578 of them children), injured over 11,000 people, and demolished more than 17,000 homes. Atef Abu Saif, a young father and novelist, puts an indelibly human face on these statistics, providing a rare window into the texture of a community and the realities of a conflict that is too often obscured by politics.

Drawing on ethnography conducted in Israel since the late 1990s, Food and Power considers how power is produced, reproduced, negotiated, and subverted in the contemporary Israeli culinary sphere. Nir Avieli explores issues such as the definition of Israeli cuisine, the ownership of hummus, the privatization of communal Kibbutz dining rooms, and food at a military prison for Palestinian detainees to show how cooking and eating create ambivalence concerning questions of strength and weakness and how power and victimization are mixed into a sense of self-justification that maintains internal cohesion among Israeli Jews.

The Apostle Paul’s negative statements about the law have deafened the ears of many to the grace that Moses proclaims in Deuteronomy. Most Christians have a dim view of this book, which they consider to be primarily a book of laws. However, when we read or hear it read orally without prejudice, we discover that rather than casting Moses as a legislator, he appears as Israel’s first pastor, whose congregation has gathered before him to hear him preach his final sermons. Accordingly, Deuteronomy represents prophetic preaching at its finest, as Moses seeks to inspire the people of God to a life of faith and godliness in response to God’s repeated demonstrations of grace. Deuteronomy is a dead book for many, because we have not recognized this gospel; we have heard only law. The essays in this collection arise from a larger project driven by a passion to recover for Christians the life-giving message of the Hebrew Scriptures in general, and to open their ears to God’s amazing grace in Deuteronomy in particular. The wide-ranging “meditations” in this volume do not all focus equally on the topic of God’s grace, but this theme undergirds them all.

Capturing the essence of life in great civilizations of the past, each volume in the