February is arguably the dreariest month of the year, and at this point my family and friends in the United States and Europe are paralyzed with winter fatigue. While winters here in the Galilee are generally mild, this past month we’ve been treated to several snowstorms and in recent days I’ve even had to pull … Read More »
mallow
A Fresh Look at Some Local Foods
I was flipping through some photographs I’d taken recently, and found these three images, all which show interesting ways that indigenous local foods are processed in Galilee Palestinian society. This is a photograph of luf (arum palaestinum), which was collected this winter during the season it grows wild in the area around Nazareth. I took … Read More »
Spot the Spinach
If mallow is flamboyant, then wild spinach is coy. Can you spot the shiny, diamond-shaped leaves in the crowd? This has been a bumper year for wild spinach and I have been gathering it in large sacks. In my kitchen, these tender, iron-rich leaves generally are used to make a filling for a filo-dough pastry. But … Read More »
Stand!
There have been several books that have profoundly influenced the way I see the Galilee landscape. One is the Hebrew Bible, and the second is Jarred Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”. Diamond explains how the confluence of topography, climate and indigenous fauna and flora in the Fertile Crescent gave rise to the transition of hunting … Read More »
Wild to Cultivated to Wild
What a great pleasure it is to have a hakura, or kitchen garden, next to the house – particularly when its yields peak in mid-winter. Yesterday I stripped the hakura of just about all of the swiss chard to make a crispy filo-layered pie. Washing and trimming the fleshy leaves, I realized how viscerally I … Read More »