Craft: transforming traditional crafts

The other day I came across Maya Marom's cooking blog, Bezakalim, and her photos are gorgeous. They capture those small, satisfying moments that, when added up, make cooking such a soothing activity: The vibrant purple stain left on a worn wooden chopping block after cutting a red onion, ripples of sweetened condensed milk being poured over rich vanilla ice cream, the dry ingredients in a bowl before they're mixed, creating a patchwork landscape of peaks and valleys. The blog is written in Hebrew, which I can't read, so in order to find out more about it, I wrote to Maya. She wrote back:

"Bazek" means "dough" in Hebrew, and "alim" means "violent." This is an intentional misspelling of a bazekalim which means "puff pastry." A kind of a word-play to show off my no-fuss recipe policy.

The blog is directed at people who can't cook, or don't like to cook. I take step-by-step pictures of everything, and test each recipe a lot of times to make sure it is completely foolproof. I also designed and built the blog from scratch (I am a web-designer by day).

I am from Israel, and have been running the blog for three years now. Last year, I was contacted by the editor of Yediot Ahronot (Israel's leading daily newspaper) and was offered to write a weekly food column, which is now published every Wednesday in the lifestyle section.

Although I feel the pictures pretty much speak for themselves, if you would like a little help decoding the Hebrew recipes, you may use the Google Translate function. it is far from perfect, and the page has left-to-right issues, but better than total gibberish :)