Foodaism.com

Breaking good: recipes for the High Holy Days

By the time break fast comes along, I’m broken. I’ve spent 25 hours without food or water. Much of that time I’ve been in synagogue. In the morning, I’m sure I’ll never make it, especially because God seems to wait precisely until Yom Kippur to deliver the hottest day of the year to Los Angeles. […]

Recipe: How to make harira

When you learn to make traditional Moroccan harira from Meme Suissa, you're not learning to make harira from Meme Suissa. You're learning to make harira from her mother, from her grandmother, and so on. You're learning a recipe that goes back centuries. But of course Meme uses no recipe. Her daughter Kathy Shapiro stood by […]

Koreatown Lunch

At night Koreatown is Manhattan– packed restaurants, backed up valet stands, lines out the doors to even the diviest BBqs.  By day, it's a different story.  You might be the only customer. You'll see the families behind these family-run places.  You'll see the servers plucking the stems off a haystack of sweet peas piled on […]

5 Steps to the Best Nicoise Salad

This story by Judy Zeidler about cooking for an empty nest really hit me hard.   Judy is a glass-half-full bundle of enthusiasm, and I suppose her children follow suit. Their brood departs, they adjust their recipes, move on.  I find myself not so… adjustable. Our son left for college two years ago and I […]

World of Flavor

Every two years, the Culinary Institute of America hosts its World of Flavors conference in its castle-like Napa Valley compound. Some of the planet’s best chefs show up, along with food purveyors from across the globe, and the endless meals, spread out in a massive hall lined with wine casks the size of Spanish galleons, […]

The Word of the Day Is Knaidel

How do you spell knaidel?  M-a-t-z-o-h B-a-l-l. The word that 13 year-old Arvind Mahankali from Queens, NY spelled to clinch the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee championship last night is German for a small mass of dough.  But its most common meaning in America is matzo ball. Normally the word, which is German and Yiddish, […]

Boulettes Larder: When Cool Chefs Serve Hot Food

We didn’t know anything about Boulettes Larder when we stumbled upon it in a corner of San Francisco's Ferry Building last February. That in and of itself seems to be a faux pas in food-obsessed San Francisco, if not an actual Class B Felony. The counter was filled with jars of exotic salts and spices […]

7 Rules for Perfect Hummus

When was the last time you opened a tub of hummus and swooned?  When was the last time a restaurant put a plate of hummus in front of you, and you said, “Oh my God.” Most of the hummus recipes you come across on web sites, in print, on YouTube—they’re just wrong.   Most of the […]

Israel à la Tarte Tatin

Restaurants have souls. It comes across as much in the food as in the feeling you get from being there. You don’t find it out from the advertising. Otherwise every time you ate in an Applebee’s you’d feel comfy and at home, instead of bored and dissatisfied. You don’t discover it in the marketing. Otherwise […]

Passover at Malachy's Bar

For years now I have had a pre-Passover ritual: I drink one last beer before the holiday starts.  According to Jewish law, for the entire eight days of Passover, you're forbidden from eating or drinking foods made with wheat, barley, rye, spelt or oats.  Those of you into $10,000 Pyramid would by now have guessed […]