Vegetarian

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Tender spring vegetables dress up the delightful masa triangles known as tetelas

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By Leslie Brenner

Are you familar with the Mexican masa shape known as a tetela? It’s a triangular masa pocket filled with beans and/or cheese, and sometimes other ingredients. A popular treat in Oaxaca, tetelas have been showing up in Norteamericano restaurants and on cooking sites in recent years.

READ: “How to make tetelas — the tasty, triangular treats from Oaxaca that are about to become super-trendy”

Our friend (and Cooks Without Borders’ Mexican cuisine expert) Olivia Lopez offered us a dreamy tetela recipe for spring a while back, and now seems like the perfect moment to spotlight it — as the markets are filled with asparagus, fresh favas, spring onions and peas. I even picked up some green garbanzos last week at my favorite local Lebanese grocery.

Olivia’s recipe is in the seasonal-produce-forward, masa-centric style she features at her Dallas-based Molino Oloyo, and it’s a terrific recipe to create at home. Basically, bean-filled tetelas are topped with a quick sauté of those beautiful spring vegetables, then finished with dabs of requesón — fresh cheese you can find in Mexican markets; ricotta makes a fine substitute. Finish it with drizzles of salsa macha.

To make the tetelas, you’ll need first to simmer up a pot of bayo or mayocoba beans, and then fashion those into quick, vegan refried beans. You’ll also need to get your hands on some heirloom masa harina, if you don’t already have some. (We use Masienda’s masa harina, available through its website, and at many Whole Foods Markets. You can also buy it at Amazon.) Do you have a tortilla press? You’ll need that, too.

New to the world of heirloom maíz and masa harina? CHECK OUT: The Masa Movement Project

Try a simpler tetela RECIPE: Tetelas with Beans, Cheese and Salsa Verde

Because the tetelas can be held in a warm oven and the vegetables can be prepped (and salsa macha made) ahead of time, this is a lovely dish to make for a Mother’s Day brunch or other gathering — just throw the veg in the sauté pan right before serving.

Here’s the recipe:

RECIPE: Olivia Lopez’s Tetelas with Spring Vegetables

Meanwhile, if you happen live in North Texas, or you’ll be visiting Dallas later this month, you can taste Olivia’s extraordinary food: Molino Oloyo will hold one of its locally famous pop-ups from Tuesday, April 30 through Sunday, el Cinco del Mayo. Hopefully, I’ll see you there — I’ll be enjoying Olivia’s incomparable offerings at least one of the evenings, maybe more.

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A love letter to vospov kofte: How my mother and I quashed our beef and swapped it with lentils

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Vospe Kofte lede.jpg

By Varty Yahjian

[Editor’s note: We loved this essay, originally published in March, 2021. Because it celebrates a dish that’s traditionally eaten during Lent, it feels like a great time to bring it back.]

My mother and I see eye to eye on exactly three things: inappropriate humor, dangly earrings and eating with our hands. (Vehement approval!) Oh, and we both sleep in on the weekends and cancel plans before noon.

Aside from these, it’s hard to find common ground between us, and we widen that distance in the kitchen. There, we disagree about it all. She doesn’t salt food while it cooks, while I think it’s a mistake to wait till the end; I like caramelizing onions, while she thinks it's a waste of time.

We do, however, have a common food heritage, one that spans the 36 years between us: We both grew up eating food native to the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. 

Our family tree is ethnically Armenian, but for the three generations preceding me, we have had Bulgarian nationality. In the early twentieth century, my paternal great-grandparents escaped ethnic cleansing in Anatolia and settled in Sofia, Bulgaria — where my father was born, and where my parents would eventually meet in the 1970s. My mother’s great-great-grandparents left Anatolia for the same reason even earlier, sticking to the Black Sea’s coast following their voyages as refugees. 

The result of these migrations is our family’s tradition, a fabulous mix of Armenian, Bulgarian, and now with me, American sensibilities. 

Gayane (left) and Varty Yahjian, making vospov kofte / Photo courtesy of Varty Yahjian

Gayane (left) and Varty Yahjian, making vospov kofte / Photo courtesy of Varty Yahjian

As with most immigrant families, my mother is the sovereign of the stove. To her it’s an indisputable reign, making for a tumultuous dinnertime environment because over the years, I’ve relied less on her recipes as I create my own. For instance, I use stewed tomatoes and a lot of dill in our flu-season chicken soup in lieu of her usual celery and bell peppers. Like a true monarch, she loathes these types of rebellions, vexedly announcing “I’m sorry, but no, this is not how you do it!” before storming off. 

When we were all younger, my mother fed the whole family, of course. I don’t know how she did it, because after working a ten-hour workday and pulling dinner together, she had to deal with my ruthlessly picky palate.  

Until I was in middle school, I rarely ate anything that wasn’t potatoes, rice or macaroni. Mushrooms were smelly and pretended to be meat; buckwheat tasted like aluminum foil (yes, I said that exactly); and romaine lettuce, my final boss of hated foods, was unbearably bitter. 

Regardless of protest, my mom always made sure my plate left the table clean; if not, “mekhké” — it’s a shame, as she would say — because those last few bites were my good luck charms.

Thankfully my tastebuds evolved in tweendom. Perhaps it was the feeling of unsupervised freedom after being dropped off at the mall that led me towards the food court’s salmon nigiri and fried chicken with waffles. 

Or maybe my budding womanhood began to recognize how incredible it was that my mother managed to feed us every single night. I owed it to her to honor her food, especially because at this point, she was also working on the weekends. Looking back, I see that my mother’s cooking was a love-language, and I understand now why she’d get so upset when I brought back full Tupperwares of food from school.

But part of my coming around could also just be that at some point, I saw how unbelievably lame it was to be so stubborn about food. 

Photo by Varty Yahjian

Photo by Varty Yahjian

In seventh grade I started watching Food Network, and my mother took note. Encouraging my growing curiosity, she bought me a copy of Cooking Rocks!: Rachael Ray 30-Minute Meals for Kids, and in her typical compliment-and-command delivery, inscribed on the first page “To my cute Varty to cook some meals!” 

And cook some meals I did, starting with Ray’s Tomato, Basil and Cheese Baked Pasta recipe, which I’ve since memorized and still make, with some grown-up additions. My parents loved it, and I was immediately validated — a powerful feeling for anyone, and especially a Green Day-listening, greasy-haired thirteen-year-old.

In high school, armed with my new driver's license in our family's Volvo wagon, I began tearing through Los Angeles' incredible culinary jungle — thrilled by the star anise and coriander at our local pho shop and tacos de lengua in Cypress Park. 

At home, I started carefully watching my mother because those smells of toasted butter, tomato sauce, and allspice had begun to signal more than just “dinner’s ready.” They were re-introducing me to flavors of my heritage — a connection to my great-grandparents I now feel so grateful for. 

I slowly learned the basics of our household standards: pilaf with vermicelli noodles, Bulgarian meatball soup, moussaka and dolma. I mostly observed and tried not to intervene because the few times I did, I slowed my mom down and got in the way. I watched how she used her hands to scoop roughly chopped onions into a pool of olive oil with a slice of butter for taste, and then liberally season them with paprika and chubritsa, a dried herb essential to the Bulgarian kitchen. 

Fast-forward to 2021, and we’re back in the same kitchen. My mother and I don’t really cook together; typically it’s only one of us preparing dinner for the family at a time. 

Varty (left) and Gayane Yahjian / Photo courtesy of Varty Yahjian

Varty (left) and Gayane Yahjian / Photo courtesy of Varty Yahjian

Except this time we’ve decided to collaborate — on a popular Western Armenian dish, vospov kofte, lentil “meatballs.”  

Vospov in Armenian translates to “with lentil” and kofte, or “meatball,” is spelled in Turkish. Neither word necessarily explains where the dish originates from. Lest we forget, the majority of the Middle East and all of Anatolia — where my great-grandparents are from — were under Ottoman rule for centuries. Present-day Armenia and Turkey share a border, and given their history, attributing food to either one is fertile ground for an argument in the comments section.

Typically the dish is served as part of the cold mezze on Western Armenian dining tables. It’s popular during Lent, when animal products are shunned in observation of Jesus Christ’s forty days resisting the devil’s temptation. As such, Armenian Lenters have gotten pretty creative over the last two thousand years in reworking dishes to meet the orthodoxy’s expectations. Vospov kofte is one of these remixes, where beef or lamb is swapped with red lentils and bulgur to make for a lighter, all-vegan version that pleases God and mortals alike. It’s so delicious that in our family, we enjoy it year-round.  

Given our foundational cooking disagreements, the idea of my mom and I preparing these vospov koftes together is a big deal. 

We begin by bickering over which saucepan to use, a common pre-cooking ritual for us. I prefer to use a smaller pot, but my mother insists (and I’ll now admit rightfully so) that we’ll need the larger one to contain the lava-like bubbles red lentils make when they simmer into a thick paste.

After enough shuffling around one another in near-silence, the tension finally breaks as we laugh about how the measuring cup could have disappeared into thin air. 

We measure out and soak bulgur, which will get stirred into the thick lentil paste along with parsley, spices, scallions and sautéed onions, discuss the supremacy of Italian parsley over curly-leaf as we chop, and compare the ways we’ve failed at trying to cut onions without crying. We learn that neither of us is the timer-setting type, and our bulgur probably spends a bit too long soaking. Not a big deal, though.

We hand-knead everything together with great conviction, and slowly it turns into an aromatic paste, sticking to our fingers. After scraping as much of it off our palms into the bowl as we can, we set aside a little bowl of water, dip our fingers in, and start shaping the kofte into its characteristic, ovalesque shape, lengthened on the ends and slightly flattened in the middle. We arrange our koftes in a neat wreath, decorate it with more chopped parsley, and then finally face the truth: It is extremely rare to find us in the kitchen together. Why is that?

“Because you always tell me what to do for no reason,” I say with a touch of shade.

Vospov kofte / Photograph by Varty Yahjian

Vospov kofte / Photograph by Varty Yahjian

My mom pauses, and for a millisecond drops eye contact before returning with the smile of someone who’s seen me spit out celery and start fights over cilantro: “You have a great taste, and everything you make is very yummy. Let’s cook together more.” 

And because she wouldn’t be my mother without giving me a task, she hugs me and says, “Just you need to do clean-up after you cook.” 

I’ll heed her words, because she’s right: The countertop is a cacophony of utensils, parsley stems and spilled cumin. But for once, this mother and daughter are totally, deliciously, in sync. 

Varty Yahjian lives, works and cooks in La Cañada, California. This is her first story for Cooks Without Borders. 

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5 favorite chilled soups — all of them vegetarian or vegan

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Turkish cacik — chilled yogurt and cucumber soup with mint and dill

By Leslie Brenner

When the weather is sizzling hot, there’s nothing like a cold soup to refresh and restore.

Here are my five current faves. Two are vegan (the gazpachos); three are made without even turning on the stove (the gazpachos and the cacik). All are vegetarian. The borscht can also be vegan, if you leave off the sour cream stirred in at the end.

Cacik — Turkish Yogurt and Cucumber Soup

I love the traditional Turkish yogurt-and-cucumber soup known as cacik, first because it’s delicious and simple, but also because it you can make it in no time flat, by hand, without turning on the stove or even plugging anything in. Just whisk some yogurt to smoothness, add cucumber you’ve grated on a box grater, and whisk it together with chopped fresh mint and dill, a little white wine vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. Drop an ice cube in each bowl, top with more herbs (if you like) and enjoy.

Making cacik is a decidedly low-tech endeavor.

Gazpacho Sevillano

Have some gorgeous ripe tomatoes? Seville’s classic tomato gazpacho is the play. Its beautiful sherry tang makes it super refreshing.

The Greenest Gazpacho

Easy, herbal and honestly pretty dreamy, this green vegan gazpacho gets body from raw almonds or cashews.

My Mom’s Cold Beet Borscht

This is one of my favorite summer meals — my mom’s recipe. It’s lightly sweet, tangy and transporting.

Chilled Minted Pea Soup

Our Ridiculously Easy Mint Pea Soup — based on a traditional French potage Saint Germain — is normally served hot, as shown above. Leave off the crème fraîche garnish and chill it, and it’s fabulous eaten cold.

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Cookbooks We Love: Hannah Che's 'The Vegan Chinese Kitchen' is gorgeous and inspiring

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By Leslie Brenner

The Vegan Chinese Kitchen: Recipes and Modern Stories from a Thousand-Year-Old Tradition, by Hannah Che, Clarkson Potter, 2022, $35

Last year, we included Hannah Che’s The Vegan Chinese Kitchen in our Best Books of 2022 roundup, having pored through its recipes, read Che’s story, marveled at her exquisite photos (yes, she does them herself!) and tested one of the recipes. Since then, The New York Times chose the book as one of its 10 best cookbooks of the year (the Washington Post had already done the same); a few months later, the James Beard Foundation honored it with a Best Cookbook Award nomination for Vegetable-Focused Cooking.

I’ve finally had a chance to test three more of the recipes, and continue to be thoroughly impressed. The Vegan Chinese Kitchen is a thoroughly wonderful book — one that anyone seriously interested in Chinese cooking and food culture, or vegan cooking (or both) would do well to explore.

Backgrounder

Che, the Portland, Oregon-based creator of the excellent blog The Plant-Based Wok, was raised in Detroit, Michigan, by Chinese immigrant parents; she founded the blog when she was in college at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Having fallen in love with plant-based cooking, she worried that her vegan lifestyle was at odds with her Chinese culture, but in time she came to understand much of Chinese cooking is “inherently plant-based,” and in fact offered her a way to connect in a deeply meaningful way with her heritage. After graduate school (in piano) she left for China, where she studied at the only vegetarian cooking school in the country, in Guangzhou. China. There she immersed herself in zhai cai, the plant-based cuisine with centuries-old Buddhist roots that emphasizes umami-rich ingredients. She had been to China before (with her family), and has returned since; along the way she interned at a renowned tofu restaurant and taught English in Taiwan — soaking up foodways everywhere she went.

Why We Love It

The Vegan Chinese Kitchen is a beautiful book in every way, and Che is a wonderful story-teller. Even if you’re tempted to skip the intro, don’t — in the course of its six or seven pages, Che manages to convey a life-lesson about mindful cooking and the Chinese spirit that’s truly inspiring.

Following that is a useful roadmap about how to create a vegan (or really any) Chinese meal: “you serve enough rice for everyone to eat their fill, along with a spread of accompanying dishes.” The rule is to plan one dish per person, plus one extra, and “aim for a variety of textures, tastes and colors” — and cooking methods. Noodle dishes or other one-pot meals are the standalone exceptions.

If, like me, you’re attracted to cookbooks that open up cultures from within and help you better understand something deep about that culture, The Vegan Chinese Kitchen delivers.

How to Kick Off a Chinese Vegan Meal

Two recipes that Che characterizes as popular appetizers in restaurants in China caught my eye. One is Blanched Spinach with Sesame Sauce — I’ll make that soon. Another is Smashed Cucumber Salad, which Che calls “one of the most ubiquitous Chinese starter dishes.” About a decade ago, the dish was super trendy stateside. I hadn’t made it in some years, and Che’s version (a particularly good one) is a reminder of why it’s so appealing: It’s craveable, crunchy, vinegary, delicious and quick to achieve.

Let Us Cook the Salad, Shall We?

Che’s photo of Blanched Lettuce with Ginger Soy Sauce was the image that first grabbed me hard when I cracked open the book: I had to make it. (Her photo is a lot nicer than mine.)

Skeptical about cooked lettuce? Che was, until she learned that “Chinese cooks treat lettuces like any other leafy green” and tried dishes like this one.

Once you blanch the romaine leaves, the sauce comes together in a flash. Put them together, and you’ve got something simple and fabulous.

You Want This in Your Fridge

Here’s another crave-able, zingy one. Che writes in her headnote that she often makes a big batch of Napa Cabbage and Vermicelli Salad to enjoy for weekday lunches. I’ve taken her suggestion and wholeheartedly recommend it.

RECIPE: Napa Cabbage and Vermicelli Salad.

One of Che’s Personal Faves

Che’s chapters on Tofu and Tofu Skin are particularly compelling, not only for the recipes, but also for the history and discussion of the culture around it. Before living in China and learning how it’s traditionally made, Che had viewed tofu — as many Chinese people do — as an inferior food. “It’s a cheap, common food in China,” she reflects, “not as refined or exalted in tradition as it is in Japan, where tofu, brought over by monks, first entered as a temple delicacy for the samurai class.” That all turned around for her the more she dove into the culture — including her internship with a tofu master.

I swooped in on one of the humbler recipes because Che wrote in her headnote that she makes it probably three or four times a week. “The easiest way to cook tofu,” she writes in the headnote, “is to quickly blanch it, then season with salt and sesame oil and fold in a handful of finely chopped scallions or fresh herbs.” It’s a preparation known as liangban. This was very good as written, and I’ll definitely be riffing on it for years to come.

RECIPE: Hannah Che’s Fragrant Dressed Tofu

Still Wanna Make

So many dishes! Blanched Sweet Potato Greens (which Che says are available in many Asian supermarkets, though I’ve never noticed them) with Crispy Shallots. Stir-Fried Diced Choy Sum and Tofu. Stir-Fried Water Spinach with Fermented Tofu (Che calls fermented tofu “the vegan chef’s secret ingredient”). Slivered Celtuce with Sesame Oil. Stir-Fried Garlic Chives with Pressed Tofu. Clay Pot-Braised Eggplant with Basil. Stir-Fried Potato Threads with Fragrant Chiles. Soft Tofu with Black Bean Sauce. Steamed Tofu Skin with Ginger, Black Beans & Frizzled Scallions. Braised Tofu Skins in Chili Bean Sauce.

So much tofu, so little time, right?!

Oh, more more thing. Only after I my last spate of cooking from the book did I realize that many of the dishes are served room temperature or cold — which means that not only are the great for do-ahead entertaining, but also that they’re great for summer picnics and potlucks. Just in the nick of time!

Go ahead and take the recipes for a spin. If you like them as much as I do, treat yourself to the book. I think you’ll be glad you did.

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The flavor-packed, vegan, zero-waste lentil-and-greens soup that earned a hundred encores and endless spins

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By Leslie Brenner

Feel like eating vegan today? Treat yourself to a pot of an easy, surprisingly quick-to-make lentil soup. It’s deliciously multi-dimensional: underlined with warm spices, brightened with tomato, umamified with dried mushrooms, enlivened with tender greens. It’s packed with phytochemicals and health-enhancing super-foods. It’s a colorful, health-enhancing heavy-lifter for your zero-waste aspirations that will fill your kitchen with gorgeous aromas.

It cooks in about an hour. Make a pot in the morning, and if you’re working at home, you have a week’s worth of magnificent lunches. Work somewhere away? It’s quick enough to pull together when you get home.

If you keep lentils and a can of tomatoes on hand, and tend to have greens in the fridge (including that half-bag of tired arugula, or a some frozen spinach), you can put the soup together whenever you feel like it without shopping.

This is not the first time I’ve written about this soup; I dreamt it up 7 years ago and have been sustained by it and spinning on it ever since.

Start with aromatic vegetables: onion, carrot, celery and friends. Add herbs and garlic, then spices — turmeric and coriander. The base can be French green lentils or black Umbrian lentils, or both. A can of diced tomatoes plus water, and simmer for 45 or 50 minutes. Toss in greens — half a bag of baby kale, spinach or arugula, maybe some cayenne or harissa. That’s it.

Make it once, and then you can spin endlessly. Stare into your fridge before you start and see what vegetables need to be used up — raw in the drawer, or cooked leftovers. Is a turnip or a piece of daikon lurking therein? Dice it and throw it in with the carrots. Raw cauliflower or broccoli? Dice ‘em up and in they go with the tomatoes. Cooked spinach, carrots, cauliflower or what have you? Toss them in halfway through, or near the end. You are not sacrificing the soup’s integrity by cleaning out your fridge into the pot: You’re making something even more delicious.

You can play with the spices, too, depending on your mood. Sometimes I feel like pushing the soup in an Asian direction, and add ginger — fresh or ground. When I do that, I frequently throw in some red lentils for added dal-like creaminess. Maybe I’ll triple the turmeric and swap dried shiitakes for the porcini.

Anyway, you get the idea. If you’re the follow-a-recipe type, here are two — the original, and the gingery, turmeric-happy spin.

RECIPE: Gingery Lentil and Greens Soup

Are you more the let-me-loose-to-improvise kind of cook? Here’s a master recipe with endless opportunities to spin. I love to do this on Sunday, for the fridge-clean win.

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Sweet potatoes are here! Don't wait till Thanksgiving to celebrate one of earth's perfect foods

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By Leslie Brenner

There’s nothing like a sweet potato, hot from the oven, simply roasted till it’s super tender and caramelized syrup oozes out of its orangey-purple skin. Slice it open, push the ends together to reveal the gorgeous, meltingly soft flesh, and send in your spoon. What a treat, that custardy bite: It’s luscious and rich, autumnal sweet chased by an earthy, mineral tang.

How many other plant-foods can you think of that are delicious and satisfying enough to be an entire meal with no added ingredients? Beans and lentils could almost be that, but impossible to enjoy them without salt. A perfectly roasted sweet potato needs no such seasoning.

Naturally, sweet potatoes are also spectacular dressed up — as in the gratin with sage-butter and thyme I love to serve for Thanksgiving.

But I’m not waiting till the holiday to indulge in sweet potatoes: This weekend I’ll roast a few of them, dress them up (or not). and swoon. From now till my favorite food holiday, there are all kinds of ways to enjoy them.

Slather with miso butter and layer on sliced scallions and furikake (Japanese seasoning mix), for something transportingly delicious. One of my very favorite autumn dishes, it makes a dreamy (meatless) dinner, either on its own, preceded by a salad or followed by a soup, or some braised lentils, creamy white beans or soupy mayocoba beans.

Miso butter, if you’re not familiar with it, is a brilliant invention: Just combine softened unsalted butter and miso in equal amounts. (White miso is ideal, but any kind will be good.) Slit open the sweet potato, and slather it on. It’s delicious just like that, or you could grind on some black pepper. Or dress it up as in this photo (and recipe).

A sparkling autumn salad

Sweet potatoes are also marvelous in a fall salad, playing off another favorite autumn ingredient: pomegranate. The gem-like, tangy juicy seeds commune gorgeously with the creamy richness of the sweet potato; baby kale provides the perfect deep-flavored, earthy base and and toasted pecans add crunch. Again, great with just a soup to precede or follow it. (Roasted black bean!)

Slice and layer in a gratin

When Thanksgiving rolls around, I always make one of two sweet-potato gratins. The first was dreamed up by food writer Regina Schrambling, a frequent collaborator when I was Food Editor at The Los Angeles Times many years ago. Unlike those candied gratins so popular at holiday time, this one is savory — enriched with cream and butter and heightened with lots of fresh thyme.

The second savory gratin turns Regina’s version on its side — stacking the slices upright in the baking dish — and adds the classic Italian combination of brown butter and sage. It’s kind of outrageous.

RECIPE: Sweet Potato Gratin with Sage-Butter

Choose your sweet potato

Wondering what type of sweet potato to start with?

For any of these dishes (and any other I might think of), I always choose the garnet variety: Garnet sweet potatoes are exceedingly moist and sweet, not as starchy as some other varieties, and their flesh stays a saturated orange color when cooked. You’ll recognize them by their dark, purply skins. In fact, I love this variety so much I never buy any other.

Can’t commit to one of these iterations? Just go ahead and roast one plain. No recipe necessary — scrub the skin (you’ll definitely want to eat it), poke the tines of a fork in it in seven or eight places to create vents, so it doesn’t steam inside, lay it on a small baking dish or quarter-sheet pan lined with parchment and roast at 400 degrees till it’s very soft and oozing dark syrup. How long depends on the thickness of the sweet potato; a medium-sized one that’s more long and slim than fat and squat might take 45 or 50 minutes; thicker ones can take more than an hour.

Eat it piping hot, with nothing on it. Incredible how good it is, right?

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Mac and cheese: This one hits all the cheesy, creamy, breadcrumby pleasure points

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By Leslie Brenner

Here’s a mac and cheese that’s so good we couldn’t take the time to style it before diving in. Yep, it’s that creamy and cheesy and satisfying.

I developed the recipe six years ago, when I was restaurant critic for The Dallas Morning News, and the city had developed such a deep and persistent craving for mac and cheese that chefs were afraid not to offer it on their menus. Hey — I told readers. You can make this at home!

I’m craving it today, so I thought you might be needing a mac infusion as well. It’s a crusty, cheesy antidote to anything that feels unsettling in the world.

Based on supermarket macaroni (fancy imported bronze-die-cut pasta need not apply!), it’s simple to put together, and if you heat the oven while you boil the mac, you can have it on the table in less than an hour (including time to grate the cheese). You’ll be surprised at how heart-warmingly satisfying it is — perfect on a meatless Monday night (or anytime!), by itself or with a simple green salad. Highly recommend.

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To make a traditional gratin dauphinois, back away from the cheese

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By Leslie Brenner

It’s amazing how wondering about the origins and traditional expression of a famous dish can lead to descent into a rabbit hole. In this case, testing a recipe for Gratin Dauphinois — French potatoes au gratin — from a new cookbook led me to wonder, what is a gratin? Does a proper gratin always involve cheese? Never? Sometimes? Where does the word gratin come from, and could its origin be a clue to what the dish is meant to be? What kind of potato is best? How thin should it be sliced? Where does “Dauphinois” come from? Is the recipe we offered from the cookbook legit? Is there a more classic expression?

Spoiler alert: Yes — there is a more classic expression of a Gratin Dauphinois, and it is insanely (even life-changingly) delicious. While we love the one from James Oseland’s World Food: Paris, and that version is ideal for those who don’t own a mandoline and don’t have top-notch knife skills, we wanted to develop a recipe for one that’s more traditional. As it turns out, if you do have a mandoline, our classic version is quicker and simpler to achieve than Oseland’s — and even more delightfully crusty on top and creamy and luscious underneath.

Because not every cook enjoys geeking out on history as much as I do, let’s cut to the chase — the basics of the dish, what it should be and how to make it — before breaking the golden-brown crust of food history and diving into the creamy, rich past.

Warning: If you make this dish once, you’ll probably want to make it again and again, and soon. OK. You’ve been warned. Here’s the recipe.

Now I’ll give you the talk-through version, because in truth, this is not a dish you need a recipe for.

To achieve gratin dauphinois nirvana, peel and slice as thick as a coin a couple pounds of firm, not waxy yellow potatoes. Do not rinse them. Rub a gratin dish or oval baking dish with garlic and butter it, then lay down the potato slices in a rosette pattern, adding a little salt, grated nutmeg and bits of butter on top of each later. Top with a bare layer (no salt, butter or nutmeg), pour in heavy cream to come about three-quarters of the way up the potatoes, bake for an hour at 350 degrees, then add another 1/3 cup or so of cream, turn up the oven to 375 degrees, and bake till crusty golden brown on top, about another half hour.

No cheese, s’il vout plaît!

You will notice — right away, I’m guessing — that this recipe does not include cheese. For context, let’s turn to the late, great English food writer Elizabeth David, who was famous for meticulously researching traditional recipes. In her 1960 book (updated in 1977 and 1983) French Provincial Cooking, she wrote:

“Gratin dauphinois is a rich and filling regional dish from the Dauphiné. Some recipes, Escoffier’s and Austin de Croze’s among them, include cheese and eggs, making it very similar to a gratin savoyard, but other regional authorities declare that the authentic gratin dauphinois is made only with potatoes and thick fresh cream.”

Nearly every French expert I turned up takes the absolutely no cheese position; Escoffier and de Croze seem to be outliers.

David’s recipe differs slightly from mine — she has you rinse the potatoes (which she says is “most important”) and she uses pepper; she uses quite a bit more cream (both initially and in total), cooks the thing longer and at a lower temp, then cranks up the heat for the last 10 minutes, without adding additional cream. I love her assessment of how many you can serve with a gratin made with 1 pound of potatoes and a half-pint of cream:

“It is not easy to say how many people this will serve; two, or three, or four, according to their capacity, and what there is to follow.”

Finally, her instruction to cut the potatoes “no thicker than a penny” aligns perfectly with other authoritative versions, which usually specify a thickness of two to three millimeters, or about an eighth of an inch.

Origin of the word ‘gratin’

To understand the origin of gratin, I turned to Larousse Gastronomique, the encyclopedia of French cuisine. (I referred to the 2001 edition of the English translation, which was updated in 2009.)

Gratin, it tells us, is:

“The golden crust that forms on the surface of a dish when it is browned in the oven or put under the grill (broiler). Usually the top of the dish has been coated with grated cheese, breadcrumbs or eggs and breadcrumbs. Formerly, “gratin” was the crust adhering to the cooking receptacle, which was scraped off (gratté in French) and eaten as a titbit.”

Aha — so gratin means that crusty bit! The recipe that follows in Larousse includes whisked eggs, a much shorter cooking time than either my recipe or David’s. Grated cheese (Gruyère) is only mentioned at the end as a variation.

The Oxford Companion to Food backs that up with its entry for Gratin and Gratiner, the noun and the verb respectively:

“Originally, back in the 16th century or beyond, the noun referred to that part of a cooked dish which stuck to the pot or pan and had to be scraped (gratté) off it was not to be wasted. Since the 19th century the meaning has changed to the effect deliberately created by cooks when they cook a dish so that it has a crisply baked top. This is often achieved by strewing grated cheese or breadcrumbs on top, and the phrase ‘au gratin’ is often taken to mean ‘with grated cheese,’ although the gratin effect can be produced without adding anything on top; as Ayto (1993) points out, the gratin dauphinois is correctly made of sliced potatoes baked in cream with no added topping.”

Potato specifics and the crusty factor

I’m not finding much definitive info on the type of potatoes that are correct. I feel most comfortable going with Jean-François Piège, whose recipe for Notre Gratin Dauphinois in his encyclopedic 2020 cookbook Le Grand Livre de la Cuisine Français calls for “pommes de terre à chair ferme” (firm-fleshed potatoes), adding “veillez à ne pas utiliser de pommes de terre nouvelles” (be sure not to use new potatoes). (The book has not been published in an English translation.) There are more than one variety of potatoes that would fit that description; our recipe calls for widely available Yukon Golds. No cheese in Piège’s, bien sûr; besides potatoes, the only ingredients are cream, garlic, butter, nutmeg and (curiously) skim milk.

J. Kenji López-Alt does not give a recipe for gratin dauphinois in The Food Lab, nor could I find any discussion in its pages about rinsing potatoes for a gratin, pro or con. Sohla El-Waylly offers a spin-off on Serious Eats — “Classic Rich and Silky Potato Gratin” — developed following “rounds and rounds of testing.” Her complaint with traditional gratin dauphinois is that only the crusty browned top is worth eating, so her version is meant to have cheese and potato that has browned on the “bottom, sides, and top.” Even more crusty is López-Alt’s turned-on-its-side Hasselback Potato Gratin on Serious Eats, which uses quite a bit of cheese and gets maximum crusty surface. Both use Russet potatoes, not rinsed. I haven’t tried El-Waylly’s version, which is a good deal more involved and has many more ingredients than traditional ones (milk in addition to cream, plus thyme, shallots, Parmesan and Gruyère). I have tried Lòpez-Alt’s, and enjoyed it a lot.

But I’m sure I’ll make mine more often: I find it beautiful in its simplicity, much easier to prepare, not as messy or involved, more elegant, and I actually love the creamy, rich underneath part, which I find a wonderful contrast to the top crusty part. (How could you not?!) It’s a classic for a reason.

How it got its name

Gratin dauphinois is sometimes confused with pommes dauphine — mashed potatoes mixed with choux paste and butter, formed into walnut-shaped balls, and fried, causing them to puff up. (Rabbit-hole moment: Where does the word “dauphine” come from? Nope — I’m resisting going there).

Dauphinois refers to Le Dauphiné, a former region of Southeast France whose history dates back to the Romans, who called it Delphinatus Viennensis. Interesting to note that the word dauphin, which means an unseated king, derives from that. In the 11th century it became part of the Holy Roman Empire, known as Le Dauphiné. Was the dish invented then? Was it a favorite of Guiges IV, Count of Albon — the nobleman in the region whose nickname was “Dauphin”? The rabbit hole didn’t extend that far down, fortunately or unfortunately.

What we do know is that the dish comes from that region; hence the name. We also know that the Rhône Valley was part of that region — and therefore a white Rhône wine would be a magnificent thing to drink with the dish. Gratin Dauphinois with a white Châteaunef-du-Pape? I can think of worse ways to spend the holidays.

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Recipe for today: Beat the heat with zingy, cool and refreshing Gazpacho Sevillano

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Gazpacho Sevillano: cool summertime happiness in a bowl

By Leslie Brenner

Yipes! The mercury reached 112 degrees in Portland, Oregon yesterday! Let’s hope for quick relief for our friends in the Pacific Northwest.

Until the outdoor thermometer cooperates, delicious relief can be a cool bowl of Gazpacho Sevillano. Down here in hot-as-blazes Texas, it feels like this week opens gazpacho season, as our friends with gardens and farms have been gifting us with gorgeous heirloom tomatoes bursting with flavor. When a windfall like that happens faster than you can gobble up the treasures (or when finally start seeing tasty-looking tomatoes in the markets), it’s the moment to grab some cukes as well, pull out your sherry vinegar and plug in the blender.

Our recipe for the classic Spanish summer refresher is a smooth-as-silk, elegant, purist version; the headnote offers a couple of short-cuts for a quickie version that gratifies instantly and deliciously.

Pro-tip: You don’t even have to wait for it to chill in the fridge — just drop a couple of ice cubes in each bowl and enjoy right away!

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Recipe for Today: A super-light spring vegetable soup for purists — vegan or not!

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By Leslie Brenner

Memorial Day has come and gone, which means true summer is just around the corner.

Meanwhile, the delightful produce of spring — asparagus and peas, leeks and tender young carrots, and spring-happy herbs like dill — still taste so right. Before we know it they’ll be yesterday’s news, and we’ll have moved onto corn and tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant and okra.

So, quick — make this soup, which eats like a poem about springtime. You can make it vegan, as it was conceived, or swap store-bought chicken broth for the leek broth, if you want more instant gratification.

Either way, if the longest intensive cooking spree in American history has left you a few pounds over, it’s a beautiful way to eat light and pure.

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Potato salad season opens today! Here are 5 you'll love

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By Leslie Brenner

Today is the official unofficial season opener for summer’s most craveable side dish — the underdog show-stealer of every picnic or potluck. We can all pretend we can do without it, and then boom! A great potato salad blindsides us with deliciousness.

Here are five — three American, and two Japanese-style — that will round out your celebrations from now through Labor Day. (And probably beyond!)

Why Japanese-style? Because potato salad is a delicious example of yoshoku — Western dishes that migrated to Japan in the late 19th century and became truly Japanese. There’s something truly fabulous about this particular yoshuku fusion; Japanese flavors really make potatoes sing.

1. Herb-Happy Potato Salad

Herb-happy potato salad

Red potatoes, red wine vinaigrette and either shallots or scallions come together under a flurry of fresh, soft herbs with this light, quick potato salad that’s a snap to make.

2. Salaryman Potato Salad

Salaryman Potato Salad: Each portion of the Japanese potato salad gets topped with half an ajitama marinated egg

Salaryman Potato Salad: Each portion of the Japanese potato salad gets topped with half an ajitama marinated egg

Mayonnaise-based and built on russets, this cucumber-laced Japanese potato salad gets umami from HonDashi (instant dashi powder — a secret weapon of many a Japanese chef). Each portion is topped with half an ajitama, the delicious (and easy-to-make) marinated egg that often garnishes ramen. We fell in love with the salad at Salaryman, Justin Holt’s erstwhile ramen house in Dallas, and chef Holt was kind enough to share the recipe.

3. Jubilee Country-Style Potato Salad

Old-fashioned American potato salad, prepared from a recipe adapted from ‘Jubilee’ by Toni Tipton-Martin

When I came upon this recipe in Toni Tipton-Martin’s award-winning book, Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, it was so luscious it sent me into a potato-salad binge that went on for weeks. Eggy, mayonnaise-y and old-fashioned (in a good way!), it reminds me of the potato salad my mom used to make. Try not to eat the whole bowl.

4. Sonoko Sakai’s Potato Salada

Potato Salada (Japanese potato salad), prepared from a recipe in ‘Japanese Home Cooking,’ by Sonoko Sakai

For a different style of Japanese potato salad, try Sonoko Sakai’s “Potato Salada” from her award-winning book, Japanese Home Cooking. It’s dressed with homemade Japanese mayo and nerigoma (Japanese-style tahini), but sometimes we cheat and use Kewpie mayo (our favorite brand of commercial Japanese mayonnaise) and store-bought tahini. We love the carrots, green beans and cukes in this one!

5. Best Potato Salad Ever

Best Potato Salad Ever is made with a new-wave gribiche.

I cringe a little every time I see the moniker of this bad boy, which I named before discovering Toni Tipton-Martin’s, Justin Holt’s or Sonoko Sakai’s. Still, I do think Best Potato Salad Ever is worthy of at least tying for the title. The secret to its wonderfulness is New Wave Sauce Gribiche — soft-boiled eggs tossed with chopped herbs, capers, cornichons and shallots, plus Champagne vinegar, lemon juice and Dijon mustard. How could you go wrong, right?

Have an excellent, potato-salad-filled Memorial Day weekend!

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Beautiful, light, and herbal: This easy-to-customize vegan soup gracefully celebrates spring

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Cooks Without Borders’ Spring Vegan Soup

By Leslie Brenner

A couple weeks ago — shortly after spring had sprung — a recipe in the Washington Post captured my fancy. Its lede photo depicted a brothy bowl with peas and spinach, leeks and dill in varying shades of green, set off gorgeously with pink-skinned, white-fleshed potatoes. The story’s author and the recipe’s creator, Ellie Krieger, offered it up as “Proof spring is soup season, too.”

Had to have it! I made the soup that very evening, and absolutely loved it. No question I’ll make it again and again.

Still, in my mind’s test kitchen, I couldn’t help but riff. Wouldn’t it be lovely with some asparagus tips? English or snap peas still clinging to their pods? Fresh favas or field peas, if I happened upon them? Wouldn’t turnips be just as nice as potatoes — or even nicer, if it’s optimal healthy one is after, or if you could find those beautiful tiny Tokyo turnips? Sure, I’d lose that pretty pink flourish, but I could add slices of slender springtime carrots instead.

And hey, couldn’t this soup be made vegan — if I created a broth out of the castaway tops of leeks I’m forever gathering in the crisper (the WaPo recipe added to my stash), would that have sufficient flavor?

Well, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes! The very next night, that riffing went live — and the result was grand.

I call it Vegan Spring Beaty Soup partly because it’s beautiful to look at, and partly because of its healthful purity: I imagine that the more frequently you eat it, the more beautiful you become.

Even after I created our vegan version, the test kitchen lobe of my brain continued to riff. You could use just about any kind of soft herbs: chervil, tarragon, cilantro, mint. If the vegan part’s not important to you, you could swap dashi for leek broth, and maybe add a dash of white soy sauce, and lots of sliced scallions in place of the herbs.

Of course, if you want to keep it super-easy, you can use the store-bought chicken broth, as Krieger’s recipe does — do that, and it comes together in 25 minutes or less.

Ain’t that beautiful?

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Say hello to the tangy green sauce that will change your life for the brighter — and its great-uncle, chimichurri

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By Leslie Brenner

Wouldn’t life be grand if you had an easy sauce you could whip together from a few raw ingredients (no cooking involved), and that little sauce could bring dramatic — even cheffy — dazzle to the simplest of plates? 

Ah, but you do now! Cutting to the chase, and getting straight to the recipe: Tangy Green Everything Sauce.

I wanted a raw sauce that was fresh and packed with herbs — like an Argentine chimichurri or a Sicilian salmoriglio — but decidedly tangier than either of those, definitely with lots of shallots, and focused on herbs that are softer than assertive oregano. Parsley, dill and mint harmonize beautifully — and if your’e in the mood to change things up, you can layer in tarragon, chervil, cilantro or basil. Or even oregano, if that’s how you’re feeling! (I sometimes do.)

Tangy Green Everything Sauce was born. “Everything” is its middle name because it goes with nearly everything. A seared pork chop, butterflied leg of lamb, supermarket rotisserie chicken, simple grilled fish  — any and all are transformed into something vivacious and delightful when they keep company with this sauce. Keep a jar of it in the fridge, and it takes the stress away from dinner. It doesn’t matter so much what exactly you throw in the pan; just grab what looks good, cook it simply with salt and pepper, and then pass around the Tangy Green Everything Sauce. 

Crispy-Skinned Striped Bass with Tangy Green Everything Sauce

Crispy-Skinned Striped Bass with Tangy Green Everything Sauce

We could just leave it at that — but then the people who complain about recipes that are weighed down by pesky stories would have prevailed. 

Instead, let’s parse chimichurri, since it is the honored great uncle of Tangy Green Everything Sauce. What defines chimichurri exactly, what are its origins, and when did it make its way to the U.S. and into our consciousness? 

We know it’s from Argentina, that it’s a raw sauce of chopped parsley, fresh oregano, garlic, vinegar and oil. In Uruguay, where it’s also enjoyed, dried chiles make an appearance as well.

I can’t remember the first time I saw chimichurri or heard of it — and I’ve been unable to turn up much about the sauce, either among the food reference books on my shelves, or on the web. 

(Hopefully there are chimichurri scholars out there somewhere who will jump in and shine a light on it in the comments section!)

Chimichurri ingreds.JPG

I couldn’t find it indexed in Maricel E. Precilla’s Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America. There’s no entry for it in the encyclopedic Oxford Companion to Food (at least in the original 1999 edition; I just ordered the 2014 revised edition; will update if it’s there.) No mention in James Peterson’s Sauces, nor in Time-Life’s The Good Cook Sauces. Samin Nosrat doesn’t doesn’t include it in her discussion of vinegar-based sauces, or anywhere else I could find, in Salt Fat Acid Heat. J. Kenji López-Alt has a version in The Food Lab (lots of garlic, no shallots, and cilantro included with the parsley and oregano) — but not a word about what it is, where it’s from or its cultural provenance.

Isn’t this strange — such a ubiquitous sauce, yet so little coverage?

New York magazine published a chimichurri recipe back in 2009 that feels authoritative, from Francis Mallman, one of Argentina’s most famous chefs. Adapted from  his cookbook Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way (which I could have sworn I owned a copy of — can’t find it). It’s extremely garlicky; the recipe uses the whole head, garlic (no shallot), albeit blanched to take off the edge. Parsley and oregano are in there as well (not cilantro), with an olive oil to red wine vinegar ratio of two to one. But no history to go with it.

Tangy Green Sauce in jar.jpg

Joyce Goldstein gave us “The mysterious origins of chimichurri” in a San Francisco Chronicle story in 2012. “One story says it is a corruption of English words, most commonly the name Jimmy Curry or Jimmy McCurry, supposedly a meat wholesaler,” she wrote. She then cited Miguel Brascó, an “Argentine gourmet” who traced it to the failed British invasions of Argentina in 1806 and 1807, when the prisoners asked for “condiments for their food.” Another story points to Basque settlers in Argentina, also in the 19th century, who used the word tximitxurri, which loosely translates as "a mixture of several things in no particular order."

Finally, Goldstein cited a San Francisco chef, Staffan Terje, who noted that chimichurri is “practically identical” to Sicilian salmoriglio. We know there was significant immigration of Italians to Argentina in the 18th century. A Wikipedia article outlines some of the foods they brought with them, but makes no mention of salmoriglio.

The earliest mention in Anglophone print I turned up was 1998, when the New York Times’ then-restaurant critic Ruth Reichl published a “Diner’s Journal” piece about a just-opened restaurant on Ninth Avenue called Chimichurri Grill. After praising the place’s Patagonian toothfish, Reichl wrote, “But what Argentina is mostly known for is beef. It is well represented on the menu here and tastes particularly good with chimichurri sauce, a mixture of parsley, garlic, oil and vinegar that is the country's national condiment.”

That must be about the time chimichurri started to gain popularity in the U.S. 

How long did it take to really take off? Hard to say. But just two years ago, in 2019, Nation’s Restaurant News announced that “The Latin American condiment is trending in the U.S.” Over the previous four years, the trade magazine reported an 83% increase in appearances on menus nationwide.

So yeah, it’s everywhere. And it’s delicious. Would you prefer chimichurri, or its fresh-faced new relative, Tangy Green Everything Sauce?

In my world, there’s room for both — and both will be appearing on my table again and again through grilling season.

Oh, you want that recipe, too? Bravo! You’re rewarded for reading to the end.

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A love letter to vospov kofte: How my mother and I quashed our beef and swapped it with lentils

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By Varty Yahjian

My mother and I see eye to eye on exactly three things: inappropriate humor, dangly earrings and eating with our hands. (Vehement approval!) Oh, and we both sleep in on the weekends and cancel plans before noon.

Aside from these, it’s hard to find common ground between us, and we widen that distance in the kitchen. There, we disagree about it all. She doesn’t salt food while it cooks, while I think it’s a mistake to wait till the end; I like caramelizing onions, while she thinks it's a waste of time.

We do, however, have a common food heritage, one that spans the 36 years between us: We both grew up eating food native to the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. 

Our family tree is ethnically Armenian, but for the three generations preceding me, we have had Bulgarian nationality. In the early twentieth century, my paternal great-grandparents escaped ethnic cleansing in Anatolia and settled in Sofia, Bulgaria — where my father was born, and where my parents would eventually meet in the 1970s. My mother’s great-great-grandparents left Anatolia for the same reason even earlier, sticking to the Black Sea’s coast following their voyages as refugees. 

The result of these migrations is our family’s tradition, a fabulous mix of Armenian, Bulgarian, and now with me, American sensibilities. 

Gayane (left) and Varty Yahjian, making vospov kofte / Photo courtesy of Varty Yahjian

Gayane (left) and Varty Yahjian, making vospov kofte / Photo courtesy of Varty Yahjian

As with most immigrant families, my mother is the sovereign of the stove. To her it’s an indisputable reign, making for a tumultuous dinnertime environment because over the years, I’ve relied less on her recipes as I create my own. For instance, I use stewed tomatoes and a lot of dill in our flu-season chicken soup in lieu of her usual celery and bell peppers. Like a true monarch, she loathes these types of rebellions, vexedly announcing “I’m sorry, but no, this is not how you do it!” before storming off. 

When we were all younger, my mother fed the whole family, of course. I don’t know how she did it, because after working a ten-hour workday and pulling dinner together, she had to deal with my ruthlessly picky palate.  

Until I was in middle school, I rarely ate anything that wasn’t potatoes, rice or macaroni. Mushrooms were smelly and pretended to be meat; buckwheat tasted like aluminum foil (yes, I said that exactly); and romaine lettuce, my final boss of hated foods, was unbearably bitter. 

Regardless of protest, my mom always made sure my plate left the table clean; if not, “mekhké” — it’s a shame, as she would say — because those last few bites were my good luck charms.

Thankfully my tastebuds evolved in tweendom. Perhaps it was the feeling of unsupervised freedom after being dropped off at the mall that led me towards the food court’s salmon nigiri and fried chicken with waffles. 

Or maybe my budding womanhood began to recognize how incredible it was that my mother managed to feed us every single night. I owed it to her to honor her food, especially because at this point, she was also working on the weekends. Looking back, I see that my mother’s cooking was a love-language, and I understand now why she’d get so upset when I brought back full Tupperwares of food from school.

But part of my coming around could also just be that at some point, I saw how unbelievably lame it was to be so stubborn about food. 

Photo by Varty Yahjian

Photo by Varty Yahjian

In seventh grade I started watching Food Network, and my mother took note. Encouraging my growing curiosity, she bought me a copy of Cooking Rocks!: Rachael Ray 30-Minute Meals for Kids, and in her typical compliment-and-command delivery, inscribed on the first page “To my cute Varty to cook some meals!” 

And cook some meals I did, starting with Ray’s Tomato, Basil and Cheese Baked Pasta recipe, which I’ve since memorized and still make, with some grown-up additions. My parents loved it, and I was immediately validated — a powerful feeling for anyone, and especially a Green Day-listening, greasy-haired thirteen-year-old.

In high school, armed with my new driver's license in our family's Volvo wagon, I began tearing through Los Angeles' incredible culinary jungle — thrilled by the star anise and coriander at our local pho shop and tacos de lengua in Cypress Park. 

At home, I started carefully watching my mother because those smells of toasted butter, tomato sauce, and allspice had begun to signal more than just “dinner’s ready.” They were re-introducing me to flavors of my heritage — a connection to my great-grandparents I now feel so grateful for. 

I slowly learned the basics of our household standards: pilaf with vermicelli noodles, Bulgarian meatball soup, moussaka and dolma. I mostly observed and tried not to intervene because the few times I did, I slowed my mom down and got in the way. I watched how she used her hands to scoop roughly chopped onions into a pool of olive oil with a slice of butter for taste, and then liberally season them with paprika and chubritsa, a dried herb essential to the Bulgarian kitchen. 

Fast-forward to 2021, and we’re back in the same kitchen. My mother and I don’t really cook together; typically it’s only one of us preparing dinner for the family at a time. 

Varty (left) and Gayane Yahjian / Photo courtesy of Varty Yahjian

Varty (left) and Gayane Yahjian / Photo courtesy of Varty Yahjian

Except this time we’ve decided to collaborate — on a popular Western Armenian dish, vospov kofte, lentil “meatballs.”  

Vospov in Armenian translates to “with lentil” and kofte, or “meatball,” is spelled in Turkish. Neither word necessarily explains where the dish originates from. Lest we forget, the majority of the Middle East and all of Anatolia — where my great-grandparents are from — were under Ottoman rule for centuries. Present-day Armenia and Turkey share a border, and given their history, attributing food to either one is fertile ground for an argument in the comments section.

Typically the dish is served as part of the cold mezze on Western Armenian dining tables. It’s popular during Lent, when animal products are shunned in observation of Jesus Christ’s forty days resisting the devil’s temptation. As such, Armenian Lenters have gotten pretty creative over the last two thousand years in reworking dishes to meet the orthodoxy’s expectations. Vospov kofte is one of these remixes, where beef or lamb is swapped with red lentils and bulgur to make for a lighter, all-vegan version that pleases God and mortals alike. It’s so delicious that in our family, we enjoy it year-round.  

Given our foundational cooking disagreements, the idea of my mom and I preparing these vospov koftes together is a big deal. 

We begin by bickering over which saucepan to use, a common pre-cooking ritual for us. I prefer to use a smaller pot, but my mother insists (and I’ll now admit rightfully so) that we’ll need the larger one to contain the lava-like bubbles red lentils make when they simmer into a thick paste.

After enough shuffling around one another in near-silence, the tension finally breaks as we laugh about how the measuring cup could have disappeared into thin air. 

We measure out and soak bulgur, which will get stirred into the thick lentil paste along with parsley, spices, scallions and sautéed onions, discuss the supremacy of Italian parsley over curly-leaf as we chop, and compare the ways we’ve failed at trying to cut onions without crying. We learn that neither of us is the timer-setting type, and our bulgur probably spends a bit too long soaking. Not a big deal, though.

We hand-knead everything together with great conviction, and slowly it turns into an aromatic paste, sticking to our fingers. After scraping as much of it off our palms into the bowl as we can, we set aside a little bowl of water, dip our fingers in, and start shaping the kofte into its characteristic, ovalesque shape, lengthened on the ends and slightly flattened in the middle. We arrange our koftes in a neat wreath, decorate it with more chopped parsley, and then finally face the truth: It is extremely rare to find us in the kitchen together. Why is that?

“Because you always tell me what to do for no reason,” I say with a touch of shade.

Vospov kofte / Photograph by Varty Yahjian

Vospov kofte / Photograph by Varty Yahjian

My mom pauses, and for a millisecond drops eye contact before returning with the smile of someone who’s seen me spit out celery and start fights over cilantro: “You have a great taste, and everything you make is very yummy. Let’s cook together more.” 

And because she wouldn’t be my mother without giving me a task, she hugs me and says, “Just you need to do clean-up after you cook.” 

I’ll heed her words, because she’s right: The countertop is a cacophony of utensils, parsley stems and spilled cumin. But for once, this mother and daughter are totally, deliciously, in sync. 

Varty Yahjian lives, works and cooks in La Cañada, California. This is her first story for Cooks Without Borders. 

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Gloriously lush but not overly rich, this is quite simply the perfect creamed spinach recipe

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The perfect creamed spinach is made with a milk-based béchamel, not cream.

You might think that when it comes to creamed spinach, the richer the better. You’d definitely think so if you took a spin around the internet looking for recipes: They’re laden with daring amounts of heavy cream, sometimes even cream cheese. Often they’re so white from cream that the spinach nearly disappears. That’s not creamed spinach; that’s spinached cream.

I take the lighter view: I love a version that’s creamy in texture, but relatively light on the palate. I want to taste that lovely spinach more than the phat mouthfeel of heavy cream, but still want enough of a sauce to bind it deliciously together and soften the spinach’s astringency. A dash of nutmeg supplies a sweet middle note, a touch of perfume.

This recipe — which is delightfully simple — delivers maximum wonderfulness. For my money, it’s the perfect creamed spinach recipe.

It’s easy to shop for. You need one pound of baby spinach, which is one of those oversized clamshells. Part of a white onion, diced fine. Two tablespoons of butter, two tablespoons of flour, which you probably already have. A quarter teaspoon salt, and a little less freshly ground white pepper and freshly grated nutmeg.

If you have a kid learning to cook, or a pod-mate who thinks creamed spinach can only come from the kitchen of a steakhouse, have them watch; it’s actually pretty cool if you’ve never done it. Next time, you might not even need a recipe because the proportions are so simple.

Start by cooking the spinach on top of a couple inches of boiling salted water, so it doesn’t lose too much volume. Drain it well, but don’t squeeze it dry, then chop it medium-fine.

Now make a béchamel plus onion: Melt the butter, cook the onion in it till soft, sprinkle on the flour (equal to the amount of butter), stir and cook about three minutes, then slowly whisk in the milk. Cook, whisking frequently, until it’s thick and creamy. Add salt, white pepper, nutmeg, then stir in the spinach.

Now taste: It’s shocking that something that delicious can be so easy. Make this a couple times, and it’ll become second nature — something you can whip up without thinking about it to serve with any kind of chop or steak, roast chicken, simple pan-seared or roasted fish. Because it’s almost like a sauce itself, that main thing can be on the plain side — and the creamed spinach is a feather in its cap.

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Need a perfect, easy holiday side dish? Try my family's longtime favorite roasted potatoes

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The Brenner Family’s Roasted Potatoes

If you’re anything like me, you’re likely to forget something as you plan your special holiday meals, or leave one thing to the last minute to strategize.

If for you that means spuds (during this weirdest-ever pre-holiday moment!), we’ve got just the thing: my family’s roasted potatoes.

The dish couldn’t be simpler, really, and it’s not much of a recipe. Think of it as a method. I usually use Yukon Golds or similar potatoes, but I’ve also used red ones. Most often I use medium-size Yukon Golds.

Here’s what you do: Peel and quarter the the potatoes lengthwise, drop them in a baking dish with a yellow onion peeled and cut into eighths. Drizzle with a couple of glugs of olive oil, liberate the leaves from four or five thyme branches, sprinkle liberally with salt and freshly ground pepper. Pop the dish in a hot oven, stirring once or twice with a wooded spoon to make sure they don’t stick, and roast for 45 to 55 minutes, until they’re crispy-edged and golden brown. Swap in other herbs, such as rosemary or oregano, if you don’t feel like thyme, add garlic cloves if you like, or swap the onions for shallots.

That’s it. I usually keep a big jar of grey sea salt from France in the pantry; I love using it with potatoes done this way. (But any salt will do.)

The potatoes are great with all kinds of rich holiday foods — prime rib, tenderloin and other roast beefs, turkey, ham, duck, goose and so on.

Best of all, they’re easy.

Oh, if you’re wondering about the platter they’re sitting on, it was an early work by my friend the ceramist Christopher Russell. He has since become a big deal artist who shows in galleries and whose work is highly sought-after. (I’m a huger fan than ever; check out his website.)

Back to those potatoes. They’re not just handy for holidays; they’re also brilliant with roast chicken or leg of lamb. Here you go:

RECIPE: The Brenner Family’s Roasted Potatoes

Happy holidays from Cooks Without Borders to you and yours!

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All the harvest-box greens: How to make the most of kale, chard, collards and the like

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Harvest boxes of greens and herbs from La Bajada POP Farm, part of Promise of Peace Gardens, a Dallas-based nonprofit.

Harvest boxes of greens and herbs from La Bajada POP Farm, part of Promise of Peace Gardens, a Dallas-based nonprofit.

Whether it’s from your own garden, the community garden where you’ve been working a plot, the farmers market — or you’ve picked up or ordered a harvest box from a local farm — you suddenly find yourself with armfuls of greens.

I love greens any way I can get them; this time of year and through the winter, I actively crave them. I especially love mustard greens, for their wonderful spiciness, but kale, chard, collards and spinach are wonderful too — and I love to mix them up.

What to do with them?

Sure, you can drop the leaves in a salad. For that, the youngest leaves are best — especially spinach and tangy beet greens. For tougher customers, like kale, a little pre-salad-bowl massage does wonders for mature leaves. Stack them, roll up and slice into chiffonade, then give those ribbons a squeeze before you dress them.

This time of year, soup is front-of-mind. You could make an earthy, vegan, soul-sustaining, feed-you-all-week soup based on lentils, onions, carrot and celery, punctuated by spices and rounded out by all those greens — thrown in at the last minute for maximum flavor and texture.

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Here’s a master recipe.

And then there is saag paneer. Did you think the Indian braised greens-and-cheese dish was meant only to include spinach? Actually, in India saag refers to any kinds of greens, as Maneet Chauhan explains in her new cookbook, Chaat. (Read our story about it.) Her version of the classic dish includes kale and arugula along with spinach, but in her headnote she urges inclusion of any greens you’ve got.

Or you could shine a bright spotlight on the greens themselves, making a simple sauté that puts them center stage and celebrates their individual flavors.

During The Great Confinement, Wylie has fashioned himself into the greens specialist of our household. As long as chard (his favorite) is involved, it’s his mission to preside over them and add whatever else looks great. The stems, he feels, are all important. “You’re wasting if you don’t use them,” he says. “That’s not cool. They add texture and emphasize the character of each green. Especially chard.” He slices them into what looks like a small dice, and advocates sautéeing those stems with “some kind of allium,” which for him always includes shallots.

The sautéed stems also give the finished dish a confetti-on-top kind of beauty.

Last week, we purchased a harvest box from a wonderful nonprofit educational farm where we live in Dallas – Promise of Peace Gardens — and we found ourselves in possession of a wealth of gorgeous organic greens: two kinds of kale, rainbow chard and daikon greens.

Kale from our POP Gardens harvest box, with more greens in the background

Kale from our POP Gardens harvest box, with more greens in the background

I convinced Wylie to slow down enough to show me exactly how he achieves his greens greatness.

It starts with sweating shallots in olive oil, then adding garlic, then the toughest sliced stems, then the more tender stems, and then the greens — beginning with the sturdiest (kale and collards, for instance). You add them, and cook till wilted enough to make room for the next batch. Then come the more tender — chard, mustard and/or turnip. And finally the most tender – young arugula, spinach and whatnot. After that, he adds a little chicken broth (vegetable broth or water work fine, too, and keep it vegan), to loosen up the the mix and let it breathe. Finally, off-heat, a dash of vinegar.

They’re super delicious on those evenings when a pot of beans and some brown rice or roasted sweet potatoes feel like healthy luxuries. For omnivores, they’re the perfect minerally counterpoint to something like saucy pork chops, or any kind of roasted or braised meat or poultry. (Duck!)

Sautéed greens with shallots and stems in a mid-century Danish white-and-gray bowl. In the background are saucy pork chops.

There you go. If you’ve been hesitating to subscribe to a local farm-box program for fear you’d be awash in stuff you couldn’t use, you have your braising orders.

RECIPE: Sunday Souper Soup

RECIPE: Maneet Chauhan’s Saag Paneer

RECIPE: Wylie’s Greens












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Rich, luscious and packed with umami, miso-butter sweet potatoes are a spectacular autumn treat

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Roasted garnet sweet potatoes, slathered with miso butter and dressed with scallions and furikake

Roasted garnet sweet potatoes, slathered with miso butter and dressed with scallions and furikake

Miso butter is one of those magical ingredients. Creamy and luscious, rich with umami, it puts richness and incredible flavor anywhere you want it, turning the simplest foods into incredible luxuries.

It’s stunningly easy to make: Combine equal amounts of miso with softened unsalted butter. That’s it.

You can use it in a hundred different ways. Plop it on plastic film, roll in a log and chill it (as you would any compound butter), then use slices as needed to melt atop steaks or chops or steamed, braised or roasted vegetables. (Braised kale! Roasted eggplant! Roasted Brussels sprouts!) Stir it into boiled soba noodles or brown rice. Spread it on salmon fillets or chicken breasts before roasting or broiling. 

Roasted sweet potato with miso-butter, scallions and furikake.

The most delicious way to use it, as far as we’re concerned, is slathering it on a hot-from-the-oven sweet potato that’s been roasted till creamy-soft, luscious and caramelized. Three ingredients: butter, miso, sweet potato. Infinite autumnal pleasure, essential winter joy. Sure, it’s a bit indulgent, with all that butter, but it’s so good. And it’s a meal in itself. Sometimes I grind black pepper on top.

Last night, I got a little fancier, skipping the black pepper and adding sliced scallions and a sprinkle of furikake — the Japanese condiment of sesame seeds and nori flakes that has become one of my pandemic pantry essentials. A dash of shichimi togarashi (Japanese red pepper flakes in a tiny shaker bottle) added a happy high note. I didn’t realize it while it was happening, but the furikake-togarashi play was inspired by a José Andrés recipe for Miso-Butter Corn.

You don’t really need a recipe for this, but maybe you’d like one. The pleasure’s all mine. And now yours.

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Creamy, gooey and stupendously satisfying, classic mac and cheese is a meatless Monday favorite

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Classic mac and cheese

When you think of comfort food, what’s the first dish that comes to mind?

Did you say macaroni and cheese? We’re not surprised. Rich, creamy and irresistible, it’s one of the most soothing and craveable of comfort foods.

As far as we’re concerned, if you’re going to indulge in such a rich and carbo-charged situation, you deserve one that delivers on its promise — which means it’s worth stepping away from the box and taking matters into your own hands. (Yep, we know more than a few legit cooks who still revert to Kraft when the craving strikes.)

You won’t be sorry.

It’s easy to make mac and cheese that’s out of this world — one that’s lush and mellow, gloriously cheesy, outrageously creamy, with beautifully browned bread crumbs on top for texture. Piping hot and melty from the oven, it’s just the thing for this particular Meatless Monday in a nervous-making October.

Boil up some macaroni. Make a bechamel. Stir in lots of grated cheese. Season judiciously with Tabasco. Mix it all together. Top with bread crumbs and parm, dot with butter, bake. You’re just 20 minutes from sending a spoon down into that gorgeous tubular creamitude.

Gather your crew, if you have one; they’ll be eager to dive in.

Or savor it solo. Add a simple green salad (or not), maybe a glass of white wine. A few bites in, all will be right with the crazy world.

RECIPE: Classic Mac and Cheese

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Pickle-y, spicy giardiniera is the perfect prelude to pasta, pizza and other carb-loaded indulgences

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Three French canning jars filled with giardiniera, the lightly spicy Italian vegetable snack. The jars are sitting in a windowsill.

Everyone knows that if you precede something fattening with something purely vegetable, fat-free, gluten-free and crunchy, the fattening thing you eat after that doesn’t count.

Taquería carrots before chicken enchiladas, rice and beans? A zero-calorie equation.

OK, maybe in our dreams.

Still, I’m always looking for something light and refreshing to nibble before an extravagant plate of pappardelle with ragù bolognese, rich and creamy mac-and-cheese or a pizza.

Jars of giardiniera

Since I was a kid, I always loved giardiniera — the crunchy, tangy, lightly spicy pickled vegetable condiment that would make cameo appearances in neighborhood Italian restaurants, where small dishes of it would appear on red-and-white checked tableclothes as we waited for our spaghetti and meatballs or pepperoni pizza. That was my favorite way of eating cauliflower back then, and we loved the crunchy corrugated-cut carrots and celery.

In any case, I’ve been on the lookout for jars of good giardiniera at my local Italian grocery lately, and haven’t been delighted by what I’ve found. That’s why I was excited to see a recipe for it in Alex Guarnaschelli’s new book, Cook With Me.

In fact, I’ve now made five recipes from the book, and the giardinera is by far my favorite.

It starts by soaking cut-up vegetables and garlic overnight in salt water, so you need to plan that for the day before you want to start serving it. Then you simmer up a batch of brine — white wine vinegar combined with salt and spices — let it cool slightly and pour it over the soaked-and-drained vegetables.

Vegetables for giardiniera mixed with pickling brine

Vegetables for giardiniera mixed with pickling brine

A couple hours later, you have giardiniera.

Guarnaschelli’s original recipe made about 6 pints, which is great if you either give most of it away or sterilize jars for long-term storage.

I like to keep things simple, so I halved her recipe. No need to sterilize; the recipe makes 3 pint-sized jars of pickled veg. For us, that’s perfect for keeping two and giving one away.

And then I’ll make it again very soon — maybe upping the serrano chile or chile flakes a bit, or adding some pepperoncini and bay leaf to the mix.

Till then, you’ll find me happily crunching away.

RECIPE: Alex Guarnaschelli’s Giardiniera