7 A.M., July 31. The following morning the doors of the Azura Restaurant in Tel Aviv would be closed for a month, to reopen handiest on September 2. Elran Shrefler, owner, and chef take a 30-day holiday every August. But on the morning of the final day of July, he arrives at the eating place as standard, at 5 A.M. “I’m like greens, it depends on the season,” laughs Shrefler when requested at what time he wakes up each day. Suddenly he will become serious. “They took Dad away,” he exclaims, as the arm of a crane eliminates one of the huge billboards that for the past years separated the excavations of the light rail from his restaurant on Mikveh Israel Street. The print portrait of Ezra (Azura) Shrefler – the founding father of the well-known Azura Restaurant in the Mahaneh Yehuda market in Jerusalem – swings in the air for some long mins and is then loaded onto a truck and disappears to an unknown destination.
Elran Shrefler grew up inside the kitchen of the tiny eating place that his father opened in the early Fifties. Rachel and Ezra Shrefler had nine children, 5 boys, and 4 girls, “all of them within the kitchen, however now not like me from the age of zero,” attests the youngest son, who turned born in 1981. In February 2015, Elran opened Azura in Tel Aviv. The Tel Aviv eating place additionally serves hot cooked dishes. “Locantsi” is the Turkish phrase for easy workers’ restaurants, concentrating on numerous hot dishes. In Turkey, his father’s birthplace, you could locate remarkable locants on almost each avenue corner.
In the Tel Aviv branch of Azura, as within the one in Jerusalem, aluminum pots may be visible at the kerosene burner every day: kubbeh soups; sofrito (a divine dish of sluggish-cooked beef or chook and with potatoes, which melts in your mouth); moussaka; lamb patties in eggplant; fish patties; rice with beans; numerous stuffed dishes; and other dishes inspired through the way of life of Jewish Kurdish-Turkish cuisine, which has to grow to be diagnosed with present-day Jerusalem delicacies.
Rachel Shrefler turned into born within the city of Suez, in the Turkish-Kurdish part of Iran. Ezra Shrefler became born in Diyarbakir, Turkey; and their young son returns to Urfa and Gaziantep – his father’s adolescent nation-states – on the way to order pots and knives there from the coppersmiths and ironsmiths, and in particular on the way to devour as a whole lot of the fantastic neighborhood food as viable.
How do you discover someone who loves meals with all his body and soul? According to the way his face lights up while he recollects the flavor of a dish he ate someplace for the duration of his trips. The reason for the ride may be forgotten, and the circumstances have also grown to be vague with time, but the best flavor of the food is, without delay, called up from the reminiscence cells. “I grow to be dizzy all over after I consider the chi-kofte,” says Elran dreamily, as he talks about the uncooked meat and burghul patties he tasted at some unknown road nook there in Gaziantep.
Squash salad in pomegranate concentrate
You can put together this salad for the holiday eve, and everyone who is lighting a grill on holiday itself can roast the squash on a charcoal grill and serve the salad on the holiday afternoon.
Ingredients:
1.5 kg. Tiny squashes(the smallest to be had)
1/4 cup spearmint leaves
1/4 cup cilantro leaves
1/4 cup parsley leaves
4 peeled and chopped garlic cloves
1/4 cup lemon juice
3 tbsp. Olive oil
2 tbsp. Pomegranate pay attention
half of the warm pepper finely chopped (the bottom half, that’s much less spicy)
Salt and ground black pepper to flavor
Preparation:
Preheat the oven to 200 stages Celsius. If you locate tiny squashes, halve them lengthwise; if they’re rather larger, reduce them lengthwise into four sections. Place them in a greased baking pan in a touch olive oil and region inside the oven for about five mins of grilling. Remove and permit to cool.
