Hussam Abbas is navigating his jeep through the fields off the main highway that cuts through Israel’s northern Carmel mountain range when he spots just what he’s after. “That’s wild asparagus over there,” he says, pointing at the nearby shrubbery. Slamming on the brakes, he jumps out of the jeep and heads toward an otherwise indistinguishable-looking bush. He proceeds to break off a branch of something vaguely resembling cultivated asparagus. “Try it,” he says after taking a bite. “You’ll recognize the taste immediately.” He pulls off another few branches and dumps them in the vehicle. The next stop on this foraging expedition is a big mound of damp earth covered by what looks to the untrained eye like a pile of overgrown weeds. Not to the discerning eye, though. For Abbas, here lie some of the key ingredients that will go into his lunchtime specialties at the nearby El Babor restaurant in Yokne’am, a city that overlooks the Jezreel Valley about 13 miles from Haifa. “Fortunately, we’ve had a bit of rain lately, so they’re sprouting once again,” he remarks. Abbas then pulls out some wild endive that will later be sautéed in olive oil and combined with sliced onion for a warm salad. The pointed green mallow leaves, also known as hubeza, will be thrown into a salad or combined with other ingredients to form fried vegetable patties. The wild fennel leaves will be used to jazz up his hearty lentil soup, and the wild asparagus will be cut into chunks and folded into omelets. The stems of the wild mustard greens will be chopped and combined with labneh to give the strained yogurt a bit of a kick. And because there’s such a bounty of mustard greens this time of year, what he can’t use now will be pickled and served in the summer. “When I was a kid, this is how we lived,” he recalls. “We’d pull out anything we could from the ground. We’d bring an empty pita from the house and just stuff it with whatever we found growing outside.”
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 15:49:25 +0000
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