Goat with the Wind Dairy

Goat with the Wind Dairy (2)

As you drive on the rocky and uneven road down to the Goat with the Wind (Halav im HaRuach) organic dairy, a solar-powered goat farm near the village of Yodfat in the Galilee region, you are taken back in time. I felt like I was in Biblical times, a shepherdess walking to visit my friends up the hill who sell amazing cheeses. The air was clean and fresh, and the view was breathtakingly beautiful which made me forget about all the stresses and normal day-to-day life.

Goat with the Wind Gate

Lunch with a View (1)

Amnon and Dalia, who studied cheesemaking in Italy, have made everything beautiful: the stone buildings, the restaurant kitchen, the treehouse-like dining rooms; even the barn for the goats has beautiful hand-painted doors that I wanted to take off their hinges and take home with me.

Content Goats with the Wind

Goats with the Wind

The goats look so happy and are so well taken care of that it makes you want to try the goat’s milk, cheeses and yogurt even more.

Goat with the Wind Dairy

Mr BT and our friends Cassia and Massimo stopped here for their dairy lunch. As we entered the restaurant, we were seated in our own little balcony that overlooked the area.

Goat with the Wind Dairy (1)

The table was decorated with Indian fabrics and we sat on small wicker stools. I loved the wooden plates and decorative place settings with the fragrant lavender.

Goat with the Wind Ricotta

Goat with the Wind Labane

They bring out a selection of all of their cheeses which are all delicious, but the real stars of the show are their ricotta, which is some of the best I have ever had in Israel, their labane, and their yogurt.

Goat with the Wind Eggplant Salad

Goat with the Wind Salad

And we all loved their salads, which were perfectly seasoned and showcased our fantastic vegetables here in Israel. The thing I loved was that not all of the salads had tomatoes in them because I am allergic to raw tomato. The lunch is all you can eat, so you can stuff yourself silly.

Goat with the Wind Dessert

The meal closed with this adorable presentation of a chocolate brownie and a nut tart.

Happy Goat with the Wind

I highly recommend a visit to the farm, and if you want to take some ricotta back home with you, make sure you pre-order it when you book a table. The farm welcomes volunteers to work on the farm who will perform tasks such as cleaning, gardening, feeding the animals, milking the goats, decorating or carpentry work.

Oh, and if you happen to need to use the loo, then don’t worry. It is in an outhouse, but with a real toilet and a sink to wash up. In fact, it is a rather beautiful outhouse.

By the way, Halav im HaRuach is pun on the Hebrew translation of the film title “Gone with the Wind”: Halaf im HaRuach.

Ein Kamonim Goat Farm

Ein_Kamonim_Goat_Farm

Amiram and Drora Obrutsky started the Ein Camonim goat farm in 1979. They took the name Ein Camonim from Ephraim Kishon’s book The Fox in the Chicken-Coop, which is about an aging Knesset member who is told to take time off after he collapses during a speech and finds himself in a backward Israeli village far from civilization.

Ein_Kamonim_White_Alpine_Goat

Amiram Avrutzki got into the dairy business “by accident” when a friend asked him if he could look after a herd of goats because he was short of space. Drora, who didn’t want to waste the goats’ milk, started to make cheese from it. At first, she made the cheese in her kitchen and then she studied the art of cheese-making abroad.

Ein_Kamonim_Black_Alpine_Goat

Amiram started researching the different breeds of goats in other countries: he discovered a breed of Alpine goat that produces 1,000 litres of milk a year as opposed to  the 140 litres produced by the goats native to Israel. After dealing with a lot of bureaucratic red tape, Amiram was given permission to import Alpine goats from France, and he is now an expert who exchanges information with other goat breeders around the world.

Ein_Kamonim_Old_Scale

Ein Kamonim was one of the first dairies in Israel to make boutique cheeses directly on the farm.

Ein_Kamonim_Cheese

They produce about thirty different kinds of cheese, which are all made from the milk of their herd. All the milk is whole and pasteurized and all the ingredients are natural without preservatives or food coloring.

Ein_Kamonim_Cheese (1)

You can buy all of their cheeses and delicious goat’s yogurt in the dairy shop.

Ein_Kamonim_Fig_Walnut_Jam

Don’t leave without bringing home a jar of their delicious fig and walnut jam, which goes well on top of most of their cheeses or slathered on buttered bread.

Ein_Kamonim_Restaurant_Al_Fresco

The best way to try all of their cheeses on offer is to dine al fresco at their beautiful restaurant

Ein_Kamonim_Cheese_Platter

and enjoy their “all-you-can-eat” cheese platter,

Ein_Kamonim_Salad_Labane_Lunch

which comes with a variety of salads, olives,

Ein_Kamonim_Salad_Bread_Lunch (1)

and a lovely basket of fresh whole grain rolls. It also includes a carafe of wine, water and homemade lemonade.

Ein Kamonim Goat Farm and Restaurant
Acre-Safed Highway 85, between Hanania Intersection & Nahal Amud
Ein Camonim
Phone: 057-942-8691

A Moroccan Fantasy in Israel

I have been talking for the last several years about driving up to the north for the day and going to the Moroccan Fantasy (פנטזיה מרוקאית) store in Hatzor Haglilit to find a tagine. I have always joked that I must of have been Moroccan in a past life because I love Moroccan architecture and design, food and music.

Morocco Fantasy Store

Finally, Mr BT and I went there a few Fridays ago and when we first drove through the industrial zone and entered the parking area of the store, the front of the store didn’t look like anything special.

Tagines

But then we looked to our right and gasped in delight at the sea of tagines,

Tables_Sinks

tiled tables and sinks,

Planters

and beautiful planters.

Moroccan_Fantasy_Inside

The moment I walked in the store, I knew I was home. It fulfilled all our expectations and more.

Moroccan_Painted_Screens

The first place I gravitated to was the back of the store where they had beautiful hand-painted

Moroccan_HandHammered_Doors

hand-hammered,

Moroccan_Doors

and my personal favorite, hand-carved doors which I could picture as the entrance to our master bedroom.

Moroccan_Lamps

Moroccan_More_Lamps

The other thing that caught my eye were the beautiful light fixtures.

Tagines_Vases_Pots

But after coming back down to earth, I focused on the real reason I came to the store, which was to buy a tagine that I could cook with. They have beautiful decorative tagines for serving, but you cannot use them for cooking.

Tagines (1)

When buying a tagine for cooking or serving, make sure they have a label on them that says “sans plomb”, which means “without lead”. And of course, always make sure you buy from a reputable dealer.

Fire_Base_for_Tagine

If you want to cook with a tagine in the traditional way, you can buy a stand for it and cook using wood or charcoal. I decided to forgo this for now, but will buy one in the future.

Tagine

I came home with a rustic tagine perfect for making one of Paula Wolfert’s lovely recipes. But, I will be going back to buy doors, tiles, lamps….. Mr. BT’s bank manager had better watch out!

Moroccan Fantasy
Industrial Zone
Hatzor HaGlilit
Open: Sunday-Thursday 0800 – 1600
Friday 0800 – 1430
Telephone: 04-6800744 or 050-2766965

Spring Fair of Homemade Wines at Soreq Winery

This post is from last year. This year’s festival will be on Friday, 29 April from 1000 – 1600. Don’ t miss it.

Soreq Winery, one of the first boutique wineries in Israel, is situated between the Ayalon and Soreq valleys, in a region where wine was produced as early as 3,000 years ago. The Shacham family founded the Soreq winery in 1994. Nir Shaham is the vintner and his parents, Heli and Yossi, are the proprietors. They now produce 10,000 bottles a year from a 30-year-old vineyard as well as a younger vineyard planted on the nearby slopes of the Judean Hills. The winery produces wine from Merlot, Grenache, Petit Verdoux, and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes.

Shortly after opening their winery, Nir Shaham, gave courses on winemaking which developed into the Soreq School of Winemaking. This school is attended by amateurs and professionals who are interested in winemaking at home or for those whose dream is to open a boutique winery, which is becoming more and more fashionable in Israel. For the past several years, Soreq winery has organized a homemade wine fair in the spring that showcases their current and past students. Some of their well-known offspring are Avidan, Mond, Nachshon, and Kadesh Barnea wineries.

This year’s fair featured about 40 winemakers, most of whom made only red wines, such as Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Shiraz, but there were a few brave souls that make white wines, dessert wines, and even one winemaker who made a decent rosé. One thing most of the home wineries have in common is that their products are not “technically” kosher, a process that costs more money than most of them can justify when the output is still small. Nevertheless, some of them produce wine that in practical terms is kosher, since they are religiously observant or traditional themselves and follow the rules of kashrut.

The enthusiasm of the winemakers was infectious and it made you want to try their wines that they have worked so hard on. Gytot Winery is a good example: Malkiel and Dina Hadari have been making wine for the past three years after Dina gave the Soreq Winery course as birthday present to her wine-loving husband. She told him, “You love drinking wine and talk about it all of the time, why don’t you try making it yourself.” They now have six oak barrels and all of the equipment they need to produce several thousand bottles of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon.

This was my first time at the fair and I must say that I was quite impressed with the wines on offer, most of which I would buy and happily serve to guests at dinner. Actually, the real difficulty was deciding which were the best so that I could buy some without breaking the bank, even though the average price was about 70NIS (20USD) a bottle.

And if you are worried about drinking too much on an empty stomach, there were also beautiful vegetarian tapas for sale from Maya Ben Tzvi, a caterer who specializes in healthy vegetarian gourmet dishes.

Some of the tapas were grilled portobello mushrooms with a dollop of tomato confit, topped with a miniature potato pancake, stuffed zucchini and eggplant, and bruschetta with various toppings, such as poached pears and Roquefort cheese. They were delicious.

And to close your meal, you could try a delicious and not too sweet Delicate Passionfruit liqueur from the Fishbein family farm at Ein Irron in the north of the country.

Next year, I hope there will be an even bigger selection of wines, especially including whites and rosés; but I better have a hearty breakfast first.

Soreq Winery Homemade Wine Fair
Entrance fee: 55NIS
Moshav Tal Shachar
08-9450844

Chocolate Workshop at Sarina Chocolates

Sarina_Sign

Mr BT was away for Valentine’s Day, so as a consolation, he sent me to a chocolate workshop at Sarina Chocolates in Ein Vered, one of my favorite villages, which is mere a hop, skip, and a jump from my house. I was already familiar with Sarina’s chocolates because they sold their chocolates for Pesach at my office. Sarina’s chocolates are divine and come in all sorts of interesting flavours, such as anise and honey, passion fruit, rosemary, and chili-orange to name a few.

The Association for Americans and Canadians in Israel (AACI) in Netanya organised this event, and apart from the pleasure of the event itself, I must say I had a lot of fun meeting new people originally from South Africa, England, USA, and Norway.

Limor Druker

The chocolatier behind Sarina Chocolates is Limor Drucker, whose parents were Syrian, is originally from Zaire, now know as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but has lived in Israel since she was 18 years old. When she and her husband moved to Germany for several years due to a temporary relocation for her husband’s business, she taught English, but because of her love of cooking, she started giving cooking workshops to expats. She had a lot of requests to offer a chocolate-related course, which eventually led her to only focusing only on chocolate. She enjoyed it so much that she had an idea to start offering chocolate-making courses when she returned to Israel; so while living in Germany she decided to take professional chocolate-making courses in Belgium at Barry-Callebaut and at Valharona in France. She also apprenticed for two chocolatiers in the USA.

Chocolate Workshop

Limor began the course by explaining where chocolate comes from and showing a short film explaining the process from bean to bar. She then asked us if cocoa could be grown in Israel and we all said no because we don’t have a tropical climate, let alone enough rainfall here, like they do in places like South America, Africa, South East Asia, and the South Pacific where most of the world’s cocoa comes from. She said she had a surprise for us and asked us to join her outside.

Young Cacao Tree

Lo and behold in the small acclimatised greenhouse were six young Theobroma (which means ‘Food of the Gods’) cacao trees that here husband found at a local nursery. When the agricultural ministry found out she had cacao trees, they decided to give her a grant to build the greenhouse to be used for educational purposes for children and for her chocolate courses. She said that she doesn’t expect the trees to give off any fruit, but if they do, it would be an added bonus. However, six plants will never produce enough fruit to make enough chocolate to warrant buying the equipment to dry, roast and process the beans into cocoa.

New Leaves

What I found interesting about these trees is that the bronze coloured leaves are not dying leaves, but they are new leaves on the tree that eventually turn green. These trees grow to 4–8 m or 15–26 ft tall, so they will have to be trimmed in order to keep them in the greenhouse, but this should only make them stronger. The flowers of the tree grown from the tree trunk and older branches, not the leaf stems. They are pollinated by tiny flies, not bees. I guess that is why we have never seen cocoa honey; too bad.

Tempering Machine

Before making chocolate, we did a tasting of dark, milk, and white chocolate, which as most of us know is not chocolate at all, but is made only from cocoa butter. She also explained how to temper chocolate, which is a process by which you melt the chocolate to around 46C (115F), cool it to below 28C (84F), and then bring it back up to 31C (89F).

Making Chocolate Casings

Chocolate that has been tempered is smooth, with a shiny finish and snaps when you break off a piece. Limor offers a chocolate tempering course that I would like to take some time.

Scraping Off Excess Chocolate

Chocolate Shells

Limor then showed us how to make chocolates by filling a mould with chocolate, scraping off the excess, letting it sit for a couple of minutes, and then pouring out the excess chocolate until only the outside shell is left; she then filled the shells with a chocolate and limoncello mixture.

Getting Ready to Make Truffles

We then put on hats and aprons and started making truffles. She showed us how to make ganache with dark chocolate and cream, and then brought out trays that she had pre-prepared.

Making Truffles

She gave us bowls of toasted coconut, ground nuts, icing sugar and coffee mixture, and beautiful dark cocoa to roll our truffles in.

My Truffles

I probably would have brought home more chocolates if Mr BT was with me, but I didn’t want to overdo it.

Maybe I Should Have Made More

Here is a plate of goodies that someone brought home to the entire family.

I really had a lot of fun making chocolates and meeting new interesting people. Can’t wait to do it again sometime.

Shiva, Matza Balls, and the Morpurgo Family

Ghetto Entrance Bologna

A few months after my husband met his business partner, Silvano, who is originally from Venice, he told him about my family connection to Italy. Silvano’s eyes got big and he said, I think your wife and I might be related. After checking with his mother and an aunt, sure enough we are related by marriage.

Shift to six years later, and Silvano came and ate with Mr BT and me during the shiva of my mother-in-law. Silvano and I started talking about Italian Jewish holiday dishes and got to the subject of Pesach and matza balls. I told him that my family made unusual matza balls,  and I haven’t met a lot of people who are familiar with them. So, he asked how we made them. I explained we make them with whole matza and add nutmeg….. he looked at me and said very casually, “What is so special about those?! Those are the Morpugo matza balls and I haven’t met anyone else who makes them that way.” We both laughed and I paused for a minute. “Wait a minute.”, I said, “we are related on my paternal grandfather’s side of the family, but this recipe comes from my paternal grandmother’s side!”

He called me a few days later to say that he called one of his Morpugo aunts to tell her the story and she said, “Who needs a DNA test, the matching matza ball recipes confirm we are family!”

Italian Vacation

Italian Reds

It is hard to believe that Mr BT and I were in Italy almost two months ago. We had planned a beautiful two week vacation, but sadly we had to leave five days into the trip due to my mother-in-law taking a turn for the worse.

Italian Savories

As I took the photos in Bologna of the beautiful food market and food shops, I was so looking forward to the numerous posts I planned for the blog. However, when I looked back at pictures this past week, I realized our hearts weren’t really in it. Mr BT and I were constantly worried: had we made the right decision to listen to the doctor and go ahead with the trip, wouldn’t your mother love walking through the streets with us, wouldn’t your Dad have loved this fish restaurant, wouldn’t my Dad love this museum…..

Cafe in Ferrara

When I called the owners of the farmhouse in Le Marche to tell them we had to cancel our stay, they said, “We are sorry, but don’t worry, we aren’t going anywhere, come stay with us next spring.” And that is exactly what we are going to do, go back and do it all over again.

Organic Farmers Market in Tel Aviv

Organic farming is nothing new in Israel, but given the fact that several Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms have popped up over the last several years and regular supermarkets are pushing organic products, not to mention the Eden Teva supermarket chain, you would think that Israel has just been introduced to the organic way of life.

It is quite the contrary. In 1958, a group of people of various backgrounds decided to create a moshav based on a vegetarian, vegan, and organic lifestyle and ideology. The founders of Amirim were among the pioneers of the vegetarian movement in Israel. The Israel Bio-Organic Agricultural Association (Tuv Hassadeh) was founded in the late 1970s by an 84-year-old farmer, Mario Levy, from Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu in the north of the country. It was quite difficult in the beginning to convince Israeli farmers to forego the use of pesticides, but now there are over 500 farmers who are members of the association and produce 13% of farm products in Israel.

Organic products and produce could always be found in the various health food stores in Tel Aviv, but now there is a dedicated famers market at HaTahana (The Train Station), the beautifully renovated Ottoman-period train station on the Tel Aviv-Yafo border. The Tel Aviv municipality and the Israel Bio-Organic Agricultural Association opened the farmers market as a joint project.

Every Friday, approximately 40 stalls with food growers and manufacturers, all certified members of the association, sell products such as cakes, dairy products, eggs, and of course beautiful seasonal fruits and vegetables.

The vendors at Shuk HaCarmel are always finding clever, but generally noisy, ways to advertise their products to the crowd of shoppers. The organic farmers market, by contrast, was relaxed, peaceful and unpushy.

At Orbanic, the attractive vendors smile and proudly talk about their produce, with passion in their eyes, and visible pleasure, the results of their hard work. Like on the face of Or Glicksman, who gives you a big beautiful smile when he describes his organic vegetables from his father’s farm on Kibbutz Gal-On in the southern part of the country.

And the cute guy from the Negev who was selling his sweet and juicy little mangoes and perfectly round cherry tomatoes.

There are vendors selling organic large-leafed purslane, from imported seedlings from France that are acclimated in hothouses at Kardesh Barnea in the Negev, and large shoots of lemongrass, waiting for a Vietnamese stir fry.

You can even take home the much sought after Aba Gil’s organic hummous, quiches, and brown rice pilaf. Their quiches are egg, wheat and dairy free.

And you can also take home romaine lettuce seedlings, which I bought for my garden along with 1 kg of spelt flour, 3 desert mangoes, a yellow and green striped pumpkin, olives marinated in red wine and herbs, and pickled baby eggplants.

Mario Levy must be smiling on his cloud as he looks down and sees how even in the big city, the movement that he helped start has achieved so much popularity.

Orbanic Farmers Market
HaTahana
2 Yehezkel Kaufmann Street
Tel Aviv
Open: Fridays, 0800-1500

Best Ice Cream Shops in Israel (Part 2) – Vaniglia and Shaked

Vaniglia Gelateria

Brothers Nitzan and Itay Rogozinski opened their first branch of the Vaniglia ice cream boutique in 2001 at Basel Square in Tel Aviv. Anything that goes into the ice cream is made on the premises, from cheesecake to poppy seed cake. They use pistachio paste from Sicily, truffle oil from Umbria, orange flower petals from Turkey, camomile flowers from Egypt, tonka beans from Guinea and vanilla from Madagascar; to mention but a few.

Vaniglia in a Cup

Vaniglia offers a nice selection of sorbets with a very high percentage of fruit (over 70%). The dairy ice creams are delicious too, and they are also producing a new line of 100% organic ice creams made with rice milk or soy milk, and a line that is sugar-free.

I visited the new Hod HaSharon branch that is located in a cute little “house” that was built for the ice cream shop. It might look small from the outside, but this branch offers a good selection, such as the following highly recommended flavors:

  • Yogurt with orange flower water, Sicilian pistachios and apricot compote
  • Yogurt with honey and pine nuts
  • Plum sorbet
  • Valharona chocolate with an infusion of cocoa beans and chocolate crunch
  • Sicilian pistachio
  • Coconut
  • Mango sorbet
  • Blackberry sorbet
  • Oh, just try them all!!!

Vaniglia has several locations:

22a Eshtori Hafarchi Street (off Basel Street)
Tel Aviv

98 Ibn Gvirol Street
Tel Aviv

HaTachana
Tel Aviv

18 Derech Ramatayim
Hod HaSharon

Shaked Gelateria

Shaked Gelateria (pronounced Sha-Ked) was originally started as a pizzeria in the leafy town of Ramat Gan, just next to Tel Aviv, then turned into a cafe, and eventually branched out into homemade ice creams. Today, Shaked also has a branch in the entertainment zone of the old Tel Aviv Port, which is also a cafe, even though it is better known for its ice cream (something which obviously appeals to the patrons of the toy shop strategically located next door).

Shaked in a Cup

Shaked offers some interesting flavors of ice cream, such Kremschnitt, sabra (prickly pear) sorbet, olive oil and za’aatar (hyssop), tehina and humous. They also produced a special for the World Cup, which is no longer available: beer ice cream with sunflower seeds! Unfortunately, they didn’t have some of these flavors on offer when I visited the Tel Aviv Port location, but I do recommend the following:

  • Frutti di Bosco (Forest Fruits)
  • Chocolate sorbet
  • Cheesecake
  • Mango
  • Limoncello

Shaked Gelateria has two locations:

Hangar 7, Tel Aviv Port
Tel Aviv

40 Aluf David
Ramat Gan