Homemade
I Made Wine in a Week. You Can Too!
Making wine at home in Israel is easy and rewarding – especially this year. A super simple guide to making wine in a week for first-timers.
Read MoreRecipe: Pesto Like None Other!
Pesto Pesto Pesto!!! Who loves pesto? When most people make it, it involves buying multiple plastic-wrapped bunches of basil, parsley and/or cilantro. Why? Because that’s how you make pesto! Unless you’re a city farmer 🙂 ince I grew wary of the scary amounts of plastic packaging involved in making a small bowl of pesto, I…
Read MoreHow to Brew Your Own Apple Vinegar
Making your own apple vinegar is a very satisfying city farming project because: It makes magical use of waste scraps of fruit – rather than throwing them away It produces a useful, expensive-to-buy product that is great for food flavoring, home remedies and for cleaning (See my recipe for homemade citrus-infused all-purpose cleanser) Since this…
Read MoreMaking and Lighting Olive Oil with Kids
In honor of Chanukah, I just ran a hands-on olive picking and pressing workshop for the family’s of the Community Garden of Arnona, a neighborhood in southern Jerusalem. The first step was to pick the olives off the branches that I brought in. Then we had to crush the olives. Then we pressed the crushed…
Read MoreAdventures in Olive Picking and Pressing
Recently, here in Israel we were blessed with the first rains of the winter. You know what that means, right? It’s Olive Picking Season! Over the past two weeks, I spent five mornings picking olives and pressing olive oil in a picturesque ancient olive grove on a hillside right outside my hometown of Beit Shemesh.…
Read MoreHow I Made Homegrown Crushed Tomatoes – And Will I Ever Do it Again?
We eat a lot of tomatoes in our family but very few of them fresh. Usually they take the form of canned crushed tomatoes or tomato paste (and, of course, ketchup). Tomatoes are so easy to grow but I never grew many of them because processing them myself seemed so daunting. Last week I was…
Read MoreHomemade Fruit Leather: You MUST try this!
If you only try one food preservation project this year – this is the one! It’s ridiculously simple, requires no special equipment and you will be amazed by the scrumptious results! Homemade Fruit Leather Recipe Ingredients: 1 kg of summer fruits – eg. plums, peaches, mango, nectarines. A mix is best. Add a bit of…
Read MoreRecipe: Bloomah’s Zucchini Lasagna
My two youngest kids and I wait for the big zucchinis to grow and then save them for this recipe, which we make once a week during the summer.We prefer it to “real” lasagna! It’s also perfect for people eating gluten free or low carb. Ingredients: 1 liter marinara sauce (we make it at home…
Read MoreAustralian Homemade Toffees: The Taste of My Childhood
My daughter has an end-of-year party today and the teachers asked the girls to bring “refreshments” AKA mounds of candy and junk. However, instead of schlepping me to the sweet store, my daughter begged me to make homemade toffees and I was happy to do so. Not because they have zero chemicals, colorings and additives.…
Read MoreWhy did it take me 4 months to make a single challah?
Because we grew, harvested, threshed, winnowed, ground, sifted, kneaded and baked it, all here in our apartment in Ramat Beit Shemesh. The challah had a perfect smooth texture with a fresh nutty flavor – L’Kavod Shabbos Kodesh!
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