Welcome back.

To you, and to me.

So happy to see you here, my refreshed newsletter home, where I’ll be visiting you weekly with dispatches from my life and kitchen. Although you are always welcome to remain an unpaid subscriber (you’ll receive an email once a month), if you upgrade to a paid subscription (thank you for supporting this small business!) you’ll get access to a monthly original recipe just for subscribers; exclusive upcoming news about new books/projects, travel and eating suggestions for Israel and beyond, and more treats.

At the end of last year I returned home after three-month tour in support of the Shabbat cookbook to a startlingly new and very difficult reality. Now, nearly ten months into navigating dark and challenging times in these parts, I am finding solace in work, fine-tuning my kitchen systems (with the help of an amazing new right-hand woman—more on that another time), and working on recipes for an exciting upcoming project (to be announced here first).  

Although cooking flows from my fingers like a constant electrical current, writing has been at the heart of my expression ever since I was a kid. Lately, I’ve found myself turning to it more and more.

Back in the fourth grade I published a “newspaper” for my classmates, punched out on our family’s pearlized grey Smith Corona typewriter, Xeroxed (that means copied, for the kids in the room) in the office at school, stapled, and handed out to my classmates (but consumed, I suspect, only by my parents? They were far too kind to admit it).

More than 40 years later I still find myself at the keyboard, whether crating recipes and texts for my cookbooks, sharing life with you on Instagram, or preparing remarks for the talks I regularly give in Israel and abroad.

It never occurred to me when I moved here close to a decade ago where I would find my life at this point. I’m a “late bloomer” by all accounts. I started working in food at around 30, and since the age of 42 I’ve written or co-written five New York Times best-sellers (including Shabbat, thanks to many of you!); wrote my first two solo cookbooks, married, moved 6,000 miles across the world, and became an almost-instant grandmother of two (single-to-savta for the win!)

I am a true believer in the keep-it-moving approach to life, and it has helped me steer the course– especially during challenging times.

And we are in those times right now. The dark cloud of war hangs over Israel, one with many emotional storms and tragedy for all the players in this conflict, on all sides. And so I invite you in this abnormal era to join me here for a slice of daily life, of my routine in Tel Aviv, tasty morsels (experiential, emotional, written, edible) hopefully leaving you with something to chew on, so to speak. 

I may focus on a neighborhood restaurant near and dear to me (perhaps I will recreate a dish from said restaurant); sometimes you may find tips from inside my beloved Carmel Market. And other times it could be a family story–past or present– I was lucky enough to convert from memory to page.

Words like mine are not meant to gloss over the pain of others; trust me, I see and feel it all, more than you know. But I am still walking the streets of Tel Aviv, cooking for my family, working on my Next Big Thing, and inhabiting the shuk like it’s my second home. 

So I hope you’ll want to come along for this journey, one I view as a partnership with you, my readers, my cooks, my friends, the reason I get to do what I do.

If there’s something you would like to see or hear from me, please let me know here. In the meantime, yours truly,

Xoxo

Adeena