my jerusalem kitchen

Leah Goldberg wrote: Perhaps only migrating birds know/ Suspended between earth and sky/The heartache of two homelands.

After posting last week, I began worrying that I have been straying from my Jerusalem-inspired cooking and settling with recipes that are simply easy to make. This is probably because Trader Joe’s is at my beck and call, the onions are pre-chopped, the lettuce is pre-washed, the peppers are roasted and peeled, and the artichokes are have been marinating for months. That’s right, I said it: although finding a job might be near impossible, cooking in America is E.A.S.Y. But like anything easy, there is nothing gained in the process.

Whatever the reason is, I’m missing Jerusalem these days–young women in casual clothing with mane’s of braided hair sipping coffee on Shatz St. at all hours of the day and night; old women chafing my heels with their shuk carts and barreling through the herds of men to get the perfect potato; men singing hymns from the “old country” and lamenting the loss of their quaint neighborhoods to wealthy Americans  who don’t even speak Hebrew. I miss my lettuce being covered in dirt and my onions looking like war casualties. Hell, I even miss that weird gelatin stuff inside my pomellos. What the hell was that anyway?

Which brings me to today’s post: chocolate, tahini and pistachio bark. Something delicious and quick with the perfect amount of Jerusalem inspiration.

What you need:

3 cups of dark chocolate morsles/chunks/chips/whateva works, folks

1/2 c raw tahini (if I did it again I’d probably try 1/2 c + 2 tblsp)

3/4 c ground pistachio (not too ground up though–you want there to be bites of pistachio in each crunch); I just put the shelled pistachios in a bag and crushed them with the back of a glass

How to do it:

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler or in the microwave. While it’s melting, spread the pistachios (reserve some for decorating at the end) on parchment paper on a baking sheet.

Once it’s melted, add the tahini and mix it in with the tip of a knife, swirling and marbling. You will have to stick the knife all the way to the bottom and bring the tahini upwards to combine it all. Pour the mixture over the nuts. Pour a few tblsp worth of tahini in a cup and then get some of it on your knife.

Swirl that into the mixture to make it look more marble-like, returning your knife to the cup until it looks how you want it to. Sprinkle the remaining nuts on top.

Place in the fridge for 2.5-3 hrs and then break it into pieces. Store in the fridge because the tahini doesn’t harden as well as the chocolate and you don’t want a melt-fest on your hands. Enjoy!