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Homemade Soft Pretzels

Saturday 31 Mar 2012 | 3 Comments
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Homemade Soft Pretzels

By: Danya Weiner The Jewish holiday of Passover (the one where you can’t eat bread) is near, and I’m craving carbs now more than ever. I’m already addicted to carbs, so take them away from me for a week and I go into overload two weeks ahead of time. Unfortunately I am aware of the empty calories related to this love of mine, and therefore I try to be careful to precisely determine if the carbs I’m eating are worth it. Pretzels in all forms are considered worth it. In the past few weeks I’ve come across several recipes for homemade pretzels that looked enticing. I’ve never tried making pretzels at home for a valid reason-I was once shooting a cookbook with a chef who told me that “real” pretzels are boiled in water mixed with a small amount of sodium hydroxide (the stuff I use to unclog my sink). The recipes I’d been looking at recently didn’t include the toxic stuff, so I gave it a second thought and made my first batch of pretzels. I can’t say that the first... 
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Gingit's Chopped Liver and Some Herring

Tuesday 4 Oct 2011 | 1 Comment
Filed under: Holidays, Salads, Side Dishes Tags: , ,
herring

By: Deanna Linder Growing up in the states, to be defined as Jewish, you had to fulfill certain criteria. As in all places and religions, there were different levels of observing and in our community it goes as follows; there are the orthodox, who generally stick to their own, there are the conservatives who send their kids to Jewish school, go to synagogue on the high holidays and sometimes on Fridays and there are the reform who go to synagogue only the high holidays. Then there are those who call themselves Jewish, and practice their Judaism only through food- having dinner on the holidays and visiting the Jewish deli. I grew up somewhere in between the last three categories. I went to Jewish school, but only to synagogue on high holidays (if that), and ate a lot at the Jewish deli. For this high holy day, Yom Kippur, I decided to share with our readers some very “Jewish” food. Chopped liver is one of those foods which took me some time to like. I may have tasted it a few times... 
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Polenta

Sunday 7 Aug 2011 | 3 Comments
Filed under: Entrees, Main course, Side Dishes Tags: , ,
Baked Polenta

By: Danya Weiner When it comes to food, there are those things that I have always had an aversion to, things that I recently discovered that I am not a fan of, and those things that I never liked and have recently realized I like. I never quite understood the deal with polenta- a sort of rich, creamy, tasteless corn porridge (or so I thought). Recently, polenta made from fresh corn has become the hottest trend in the Tel Aviv restaurant scene, and every respectable chef has the stuff on their menu. The fresh made version, which differs from the classic store bought kind, is very different from the tasteless porridge I had thought it was and is usually served with heavy cream and a good amount of parmesan. A recent outing to the Tel Aviv hotspot North Abraxas gave me the inspiration to make polenta at home to try to understand this recent craze. I found a way to combine the fresh polenta taste, using the store-bought classic kind: I stopped by the local organic farmers market and picked... 
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Farmers Market Summer Meal

Sunday 10 Jul 2011 | 12 Comments
Filed under: Main course, Salads, Side Dishes Tags: , , , , ,
foccacia and salad

This week’s post is a guest post by Shir Halpern, food writer and founder of the Tel Aviv Farmers Market. One evening at an event in the Farmers Market, Danya and Deanna invited me to do a guest post on their blog, and I immediately said “Yes”! I met Danya some years ago while working at the Israeli culinary magazine, “Al Hashulchan”. I was cooking and she was photographing, and we found many common passions for food, styling, design, dishes, knives (cooking of course) and food magazines. Any chance I get to have the food I make photographed professionally I jump at; it brings out the visual, creative side in me and allows me to “play with the food”- to think not only about the flavors of the food but also the colors, texture and feeling. Doing this with Danya and Deanna is about as good as it gets- it was an honor for me to cook and for them to do their thing. Even better was that when I got to the studio, they had just finished shooting the cinnamon pull apart bread- and... 
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An Anchovy Phase

Wednesday 5 Jan 2011 | No Comments
Filed under: Entrees, Main course, Side Dishes Tags: , ,
Pan con Tomate with Anchovies

By: Danya Weiner Recently I’ve been in an anchovy phase. Every so often I get into a different phase of some ingredient that I just want to use in everything I cook. I had a preserved lemon phase- where I put preserved lemons in every meatball, sandwich, and pasta I prepared. I had a harissa phase, a parmesan phase, a lemon zest phase, and even a sage phase. Now I’m all about anchovies. Unfortunate for me, my husband hates anchovies. His hate for anchovies developed long before I could introduce him to the real quality-type of anchovies, and now he’s completely uninterested in tasting them. At home I can’t even try to cook with anchovies; the second I put them into pasta sauce, he knows they are there. So the blog was a perfect opportunity for me to create recipes with anchovies and enjoy them with Deanna (who is also a huge fan). My anchovy phase began while I was doing photography for a company called “Ristretto”, which imports (to Israel) high quality ingredients from Italy... 
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  • Food photography and food styling is what we do for a living. Day in and day out we work for a variety of clients, creating images made to order. This blog gives us the opportunity to work for ourselves, something that truly exhibits our work, through photos and stories.

    A love for aesthetics and passion for food… that’s what makes Matkonation.

    Enjoy, Danya (photography) and Deanna (styling)

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