This refreshingly minty Levantine-style salad is missing a key ingredient — that's why we call it 'fattoush-ish'

What — no toasted pita?! That’s why we call this minty, sumac-y salad ‘fattoush-ish.’

Fans of fattoush — the bread and herb salad that’s popular through the Levant year-round — are divided about how toasted pita, a key ingredient, should play in the bowl. Traditionalists like the pita soaked in the salad’s lemon, olive oil and sumac dressing so it’s soft, like the soaky bread in a traditional Tuscan bread salad. Modernists add shards of well-toasted pita at the last second, for a crisp crunch.

Traditionally eaten at iftar, the evening meal that breaks the fast during every night during Ramadan, fattoush is delightfully light and refreshing. It’s a salad to riff on. Some cooks insist it must include purslane, the tangy salad herb that grows like a weed in the Mediterranean. (Stateside, you can often find purslane in Middle-Eastern or Mexican groceries.) Some versions of fattoush include green bell pepper; others don’t. Occasionally you see radishes. You can use scallions or onions, cherry tomatoes or regular ones, romaine or arugula, or both. Some versions go light on sumac, a bright-flavored, lemony spice; others play it up big. (Our recipe takes the middle sumac path.)

If you’re not already familiar with fattoush, it’s a great time to get to know it. Once you’re in possession of a jar of dried sumac and some dried mint (we favor spearmint), you might even be able to pull it together with ingredients on hand.

Craving fattoush’s minty, sumac-y, scallion-y flavors, I had everything but pita. (One of the challenges of The Great Confinement is not having all the ingredients required for culturally correct renditions of dishes.) I went ahead with the fattoush program anyway — and way glad I did.

Leave out the pita bread, as our recipe does, and suddenly you’ve got a delightful salad that satisfies anyone avoiding carbs: It’s gluten-free and paleo-friendly. It’s also just the thing to counterbalance all that heavy comfort food many of us find ourselves indulging in more often than usual. (Start dinner with fattoush-ish, and that giant plate of lasagna doesn’t count!)

Or go ahead and add some pita: One piece, split in half and each saucer-shape crisply toasted, makes it legit. Break the two toasted sides into bite-sized pieces before adding to the salad. Traditionalists, please double the dressing and toss the pita shards in half of it a few minutes before you’ll serve the salad. Modernists, add the shards at the very last minute.

Here’s the recipe:

RECIPE: Fattoush-ish

Hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Use what you know, what's sitting in your crisper (and your imagination!) to make an Iced Green Disco Soup

This coming Saturday (as we mentioned in a recent story), April 25 is World Disco Soup Day, organized by Slow Food Youth Network. To help with the goal of ending food waste (and having fun doing it!), we’d like to offer a way to think about those green vegetable odds and ends in your crisper in a new way. It’s easy to round up wilted greens and tired carrots, throw in some lentils or beans and turn them into a delicious hot soup.

But what about making them into something fresh and cool? Something that speaks of spring or summer and spotlights everything green? A delightful cold green soup!

To help you achieve that with whatever you happen to have that needs to be used in your fridge, let’s think about the world’s classic cold soups and what makes them work.

There’s vichyssoise, France’s purée of leeks and potato. The potato and leek combo can be a vehicle to which you can add leafy greens or lots of herbs. Add watercress (another classic) and you get a gorgeous, emerald-green cold watercress soup. You could also add a arugula or parsley or mint or basil — or any combo that sounds good to you.

There’s tarator, Bulgarian yogurt soup — a purée of cucumbers, walnuts, garlic, dill, olive oil and a lot of yogurt. (I make that all the time in the summer.) The cukes and yogurt (the same combo you find in cucumber raita) are a classic vehicle, and the walnuts add depth, richness and body.

Once it’s tomato season again, you can make gazpacho sevillano-style disco soups.

Of course there’s gazpach sevillano, the most famous, but it’s not tomato season — and we’re going for the green. There’s white gazpacho, too, which gets body and richness from almonds, brightness from green grapes and a lovely bite from garlic.

Once of my favorite soups is the Green Gazpacho in Yotam Ottolenghi’s vegetarian cookbook, Plenty. Though it has much in common with tarator (Ottolenghi says it’s loosely based on it), the chef throws in a lot (6 cups!) of raw baby spinach, a cup of basil leaves, sherry vinegar (as in gazpacho) and peppers. So it’s hard to think of it as a disco soup — unless you have a garden that’s producing tons of spinach. But it does help give us a blueprint: You might have some spinach, and/or other greens you want to throw in raw. (You don’t need 6 cups to make it delicious.)

So think about what you have, and how it might behave like in ingredient in a classic soup.

Then dive into your fridge. We’re going to make a green soup today, so everything has to be green, or white, or something in between. (You’ll find another use for those beets and that leftover half a can of tomatoes. If you can’t think of something, drop us a note in a comment and we’ll help!)

• You want something for body: either nuts (raw or toasted), or potatoes (which you’ll boil before puréeing), a little rice (hopefully cooked and leftover), or even stale bread. I had raw walnuts in the freezer; I’d toast them in the oven (5 minutes at 350). If you’re using stale bread, soak it briefly in water.

• Grab anything green thing that you either enjoy eating raw (herbs or salad greens on their way out, scallions). I had a lot of parsley stems: They have great flavor and gorgeous color (and lots of super-healthy phytochemicals). I didn’t have carrot tops, but those are also delicious raw (or briefly cooked). Really! I also had a few sugar snap peas: I love them raw, but they leave Thierry and Wylie cold. I could sneak them in.

• What do you have that’s green that’s starting to look a little sad and that normally benefits from cooking? That might be broccoli, rapini, green beans, kale, etc. I had odds and ends from a farm box that were looking wilty — two baby bok choys, a little broccoli, a few green beans. And a bunch of radishes had lovely greens still attached. Those are good quickly cooked.

Rescued from the crisper drawer. If I hadn’t made Iced Green Disco Soup, who knows what fate they’d have suffered?

• If you have a few tablespoons of yogurt and a few cloves of garlic, your soup can resemble Ottolenghi’s Green Gazpacho. You’ll also want olive oil and vinegar, for gazpacho-like brightness and dimension.

With that, we’re ready to roll: Anything that needs cooking, you’ll simmer in water or vegetable broth (our master recipe tells you how to make vegetable broth from peelings and things you might throw away). Then you’ll throw in any greens that you’d rather not eat raw — like radish or turnip greens — for a quick blanch. That’ll get puréed.

Separately, you’ll purée all the other stuff — raw greens, cucumbers, green bell pepper, herbs, nuts, yogurt, olive oil, vinegar, salt and anything spicy you might want (serrano chile, white pepper).

Then stir the two together. Serve in small bowls, with a couple cubes of ice, another drizzle of olive oil, and any lovely fresh herbs you might like to feature whole (the last-minute add-ins are totally optional). Do a little dance: Your Iced Green Disco Soup will make a huge splash!

Here’s a master recipe that’ll offer more help, with all kinds of options built in:

If you stare into your fridge and need some advice or help, please don’t hesitate to ask in a comment — I’ll do my best to jump in quickly!

Happy dancing. Keep it green.

April 25 is Slow Food Youth Network's World Disco Soup Day: Let us help you build a rockin' soup!

Four years ago, Slow Food Youth Network founded an annual international event — World Disco Soup Day. On that day each year, parties are thrown in which food waste is turned into a disco soup. The goal is to end food waste, raise awareness around zero waste, feed people and celebrate when you do save food.

This year’s event is coming right up: Saturday, April 25.

It’s easy to celebrate saving food when what you create from food scraps is delicious. Which it can always be — and we’re here to help show you how to make it so.

As part of the event, SFYN are asking participants to upload recipes from their elders that make delicious use of food scraps. I was about to do that, but when I was asked to start uploading ingredients and quantities, I realized it wasn’t going to work: This isn’t the approach we take when we cook this way. Instead, we peer into the fridge and think about how we’re going to use that cup of leftover black beans and those two boiled potatoes, those three celery stalks that are about to wilt and the cupful of arugula that’s too limp for a salad.

More often than not, we make a soup. And from now on, I’ll think of it as a disco soup! (Thank you, SFYN!).

We kicked off New Year’s in January by proclaiming 2020 The Year of the Soup, and gave a master recipe for making a Sunday Super Soup from stuff in the pantry and leftovers in the fridge. Here’s the story (which walks through how to change your relationship with food scraps), and here’s a more formalized version of the master recipe:

I’m hoping SFYN’s young members find the master soup recipe useful. (I’m a member of regular Slow Food USA, the Dallas Fort Worth chapter.)

If you’re not accustomed to cooking this way, now is a great time to start! You can be super mindful of not throwing out usable food scraps this week. Save everything. I use a dedicated zipper bag for odds and ends trimmed from carrots and onions, stray herbs, etc.

And we will help you strategize! If you find yourself with a cupful of white beans, some celery and half an onion, for instance, we’ll tell you how to turn that into a salad that makes a lovely lunch — or your own disco soup for next Saturday!

Just let us know in a comment at the end of this story. (PLEASE comment — we are eager to hear from you and engage!) We’ll suggest ideas — and everyone else can jump in an we can toss them back and forth.

In the meantime, we’re going to be thinking about ideas for cold disco soup, in case the weather is fine whether you might be on Saturday. Green gazpacho!

Sound good? Save scraps! Please share this story, with the hashtags #worlddiscosoupday #wdsd20 #Re_generation #fillbelliesnotbins #slowfoodyouthnetwork #sfyn

Plan for a big ol’ disco soup on Saturday, April 25. And stay safe.

Got romaine leaves? Turn them into tabbouleh- or tuna-cannellini salad-filled dream boats

It was a classic cooking-in-place moment: As I scrounged around in the fridge, even more mindful than usual of eating or cooking with every last veg before it wilted, I found a bag of romaine hearts that wasn’t nearly full enough to make a salad for the three of us.

The tender leaves still looked lovely, though — why not use them to scoop up something delicious?

More scrounging, and I found half a bunch of mint, two stray scallions and the better part of a bunch of Italian parsley: all things I didn’t have plans for in the next 48 hours and should be used. Got it — tabbouleh!

I knew I had bulgur (I do keep a well-stocked pantry) and a lemon, but there was just one hitch: no tomato. I did have some grape tomatoes, though — not the most flavorful things in the world, but the rest of the tabbouleh ingredients could lift them up.

Especially as I’d been playing with Annisa Helou’s tabbouleh recipe in her gorgeous, award-winning cookbook Feast: Food of the Islamic World. Her tabblouleh gets glorious depth from a Lebanese 7-Spice Mixture (sabe bharat) and cinnamon. (Don’t fret if you can’t manage the 7-Spice: Helou offers ground allspice as a sub.) If you do want to make the 7-Spice Mixture, here’s the recipe, which will fill your life with beguiling aromas, so it’s worth making just for that.

Into a salad bowl went chopped parsley, mint and those grape tomatoes (which I diced smaller than I would have an actual tomato), a little bulgur soaked briefly in boiling water and well drained, the spices, the juice of a lemon, a glug of good olive oil, salt and freshly ground black pepper. Tossed well, and onto a platter with those tender romaine leaves: voilà our excellent lunch on the fly!

After that I was thinking: This probably wouldn’t be the last time, during The Great Confinement, that we’d be faced with stray romaine leaves. Normally I’d tear them up and add them to other lettuces for a green salad, but salad greens these days aren’t necessarily a given. What else could romaine leaves be filled with?

Bingo: tuna and cannellini salad, which happens to be one of my pantry cooking favorites.

Here’s the recipe, which calls for either a can of cannellinis or dried cannellinis:

Stay safe, healthy and well fed, everyone.

RECIPE: Lebanese 7-Spice Mixture

RECIPE: Classic Tabbouleh

RECIPE: Tuna and Cannellini Bean Salad

How a bag of frozen peas got me through the zombie apocalypse and made it feel like spring

One frigid January a few years back, when I was in process of reviewing a big-deal chef’s new restaurant, I asked my server about the “garden English peas” in a menu description of a fish dish. No way anyone’s garden was producing English peas that time of year, I thought. The dutiful server headed to the kitchen and came back with Chef’s answer — the name of some local farm that was supposedly growing the peas for him. Mm-hm.

Not long after the review ran, the restaurant’s sous chef sent me a note: Those peas? They were frozen. The sous-chef was sure of this, he wrote, because Chef had sent him out to the supermarket to buy bags of frozen peas that afternoon.

My new BFF (sorry, Teach!)

Not that I’d been fooled. In the best of times, frozen peas are a savvy cook’s secret ally, so I’d figured that fish dish’s poetic menu flourish had been an icy deception.

Even in the best of times I keep a bag or two of frozen peas on hand. And now this crazy season, when gorgeous springtime produce is only the stuff of dreams, a bag of frozen peas has become my new best friend.

Use it to make a ridiculously easy minted pea soup that tastes as lovely as if you had shelled a bushel’s worth. It’s achieved by sweating butter lettuce in melted butter, adding frozen peas and water, simmering a bit and blitzing with a blender.

Defrosted frozen peas play a starring role in one of my favorite dishes in recent cookbook-publishing years: Chef Michael Solomonov’s quinoa, pea and mint tabbouleh from Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking. Again, it’s a super-easy recipe that makes great use of ingredients that haven’t been hard to procure during the COVID-19 crisis.

And finally, my current favorite happy-hour bite: a creamy dip whipped up in a flash from frozen peas and ricotta, scented with mint and lemon zest. I like to swirl in a little extra ricotta at the end, but not all the way, so a swipe of a crouton gets a contrasty bite. It’s lovely with a glass of crisp white wine.

It’s just the kind of little luxury that could make you forget — if only for a moment — about the zombie apocalypse and imagine it’s a normal, delightful, optimistic spring.

RECIPE: Ridiculously Easy Minted Pea Soup

RECIPE: Quinoa, Pea and Mint Tabbouleh

RECIPE: Pea-Ricotta Dip

When life gives you masa harina, make tortillas — and tacos, and tortilla chips

You’re craving pasta — but whoosh! All the boxes have flown off the shelves. Next you crave chocolate treats, so you bake — chocolate chip cookies, brownies, Brazilian chocolate cake. You run out of flour, and there’s no more to be had at the store (whoosh!). Eggs are nowhere to be found (whoosh!).

But there’s one fabulous comfort ingredient that doesn’t seem to be out of reach — yet, anyway: masa harina, the corn flour made from limewater-soaked dried corn kernels that is also known as maseca. Just mix it with warm water, give it a stir, and it instantly becomes a dough that you can turn into tortillas. Or sopes.

For me, it has come in handy half a dozen times in the last couple of weeks.

We craved huevos rancheros, but lacked corn tortillas. Out came the tortilla press; in ten minutes we had tortillas — which I fried, topped with fried egg, smothered in salsa ranchera. Craving satisfied.

Leftover roast chicken, chopped onion, cilantro and salsa verde suggested a taco lunch; masa harina to the rescue.

And at our sheltering-in-place happy hour a few evenings ago, three perfectly ripe avocados begged to become guacamole. We thought we had everything we needed: cilantro, white onion, half a tomato, two limes, salt and a single, solitary serrano chile. However — and this could have been a deal-breaker — no tortilla chips for dipping.

Maseca saved us once again! We mixed up some masa, flattened it in the press, laid the discs on the griddle, then into the tortilla basket those golden babies went. I cut them into sixths, heated a pan of oil and started deep-frying: something I hadn’t done in ages. Sea salt ground to super-fine in a mortar was the finishing touch, and wow — our happiest happy hour to date.

I’ve used every supermarket brand of masa harina, and all have worked fine. But recently I fell in love with the organic masa harina produced by Bob’s Red Mill. A wee bit coarser than the supermarket brands, it produces tortillas with a little more texture, and lovely deep corn flavor.

Whatever masa harina you use, you’re going to be happy. Make chips. Make tortillas. Make tacos.

When I’m feeling a little more ambitious, I’ll try making tortillas without using the press (to aid those of you who don’t have one). And soon we’ll do a sopes story. Meanwhile, tortilla presses, which during normal times you can pick up at your local Mexican supermarket, are easy to buy online.

There’s never been a time when handmade tortillas are more appealing or useful. Wrap any kind of stewy-saucy leftover in one, or serve them with a batch of chicken chile verde. Boil up a pot of pinto beans. (or open a can), add some grated jack and cilantro and you’ve got vegetarian taco event. Put out salsa, cilantro and diced onion, along with leftover chicken, beef, pork or lamb, and you’ve got a taco party.

Oh, and don’t forget the Taquería Carrots.

Need a lift? Throw together a batch of these spicy, zingy (addictive!) taquería carrots

UPDATED: August 2, 2020

First came the cravings for comfort carbs: mac and cheese (or any pasta smothered in sauce); warm chocolate chip cookies; sourdough bread. There’s a reason the boxes of pasta were the first edible things to disappear off the shelves in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

After a week or two of that, I started craving anything tangy: the lemons and limes that were so hard to get our hands on, som tum (Thai green papaya salad); dill pickles.

I also kept thinking about the zingy, hot, crunchy pickled carrots we used to love munching in L.A. taquerías. Known in Mexico as zanahorias escabeches, they are super easy to achieve with very limited resources. And four and a half long months later, they still keep hitting the spot.

If you have any carrots in your fridge — and any kind of chile peppers — you can make these in just a few minutes. The carrot slices are cooked very briefly in a half-vinegar, half-water solution with salt and aromatics; chiles and onion are added off-heat to keep the flavors fresh.

They are just the thing to make a video-chat happy hour with friends even brighter. Mix a margarita, open a beer, show off your glorious carrots, crunch away, and dream together of a bright and pickly future.

RECIPE: Taquería Carrots

Baba ganoush fever: How can burnt eggplant become a dip that’s so friggin’ brilliant and addictive?

Five years ago, an 800-year old chickpea dip suddenly became a global obsession. Now, something tells us that baba ganoush — the smoky, lemony eggplant dip that’s a mezze-table favorite all over the Levant and beyond — may be about to steal the spotlight from its foodie-star brother.

Baba ganoush’s charms can be elusive to those of us who dwell in the Americas. Unless we have Levantine roots, we may not have been exposed much (if at all) to exemplary baba — or muttabal, as it’s called in Syria. The stuff you find in supermarkets, if you do manage to find one baba ganoush among the grillions of plastic hummus tubs that have taken over the refrigerated case, tends to be pale-flavored and forgettable. Meanwhile, I’ve read recipes that suggest adding Liquid Smoke. Liquid Smoke!

I knew that the babas that turned my head over a lifetime of eating in Lebanese restaurants were the unabashedly smoky ones. But somehow, I never wondered how they got their smoke. Or what gave the best ones their wonderful creamy texture. Or how much tahini, lemon or garlic would make a baba ganoush sing.

Somewhere in the back of my semitic mind I understood that the dish was related to the eggplant “caviar” my Jewish grandma used to make. (She roasted eggplants, cutting them in half first, but never long enough to get them smoky, and there was no tahini involved after that.)

Happily — life-changingly, perhaps — it’s easy to make a brilliant one, especially if you have access to an old-fashioned charcoal grill like a Weber. You can also make a pretty outstanding one using your kitchen broiler. In case you want to cut to the chase and achieve immediate baba bliss, here’s the recipe:

The technique is simple: Poke holes all over whole eggplants, then roast them, either under your broiler or directly on coals on the Weber, turning them once, until they’re completely charred and seem to collapse.

Eggplants roasting directly atop live coals in a Weber grill

Cut them in half, scoop out the flesh — which will have taken on wonderful smokiness — place in a sieve and mash the flesh over a bowl to get rid of its bitter liquid and achieve a lovely soft texture. Separately, whisk together tahini and lemon juice till fluffy, then add the mashed eggplant, crushed garlic and salt. Spread the dip on a serving plate, drizzle on some good olive oil and scatter with chopped parsley, and you have baba ganoush heaven. Really, it’s that easy.

And it’s a fun dish to make. It’s fun charring the eggplants on the grill, and delightful when you whisk the tahini and lemon to fluffiness. It’s even fun to pull the flesh out of the charred skins with your fingers.

Once roasted, the flesh inside is meltingly tender.

More on technical details in a moment, but first a word about baba ganoush’s history.

Curiously, I was unable to turn up much background about the dip, especially anything definitive. There’s no entry for baba ganoush (or baba ganouj, or baba ghanoush, or baba ghannuge, its alternate spellings) in The Oxford Companion to Food, or in The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture that takes up probably way too much real estate in my cookbook case. Unlike the Wikipedia page for hummus, which boasts two fulsome paragraphs about origin and history and nearly 700 words about regional preparations, Wikipedia’s baba ganoush wisdom is weirdly scant, pretty much limited to a stab at its etymology. (Baba, everyone agrees, is Arabic for “father” or “daddy,” and the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that Ghannuj is “perhaps a personal name.”)

The most intriguing tidbit I turned up came from my brilliant former colleague at The Los Angeles Times (now retired from the paper), Charles Perry, who wrote in a 1997 story about eggplant and its history that “The ancestor of today's baba ghanouj was flavored with ground walnuts instead of tahini.” Beyond that, we have only found speculation about the dish’s history. (If you are an expert, please weigh in with a comment! I am attempting to contact Charlie, who published Scents & Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook in 2017 — which I just ordered — and who I’m pretty sure possesses more intelligence on the subject; will update if successful.)

I found recipes for baba ganoush in some of my favorite cookbooks — including Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food and Arabesque and Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem, and Annisa Helou’s splendid Feast: Food of the Islamic World, which won a James Beard Award in 2019. Online, J. Kenji López-Alt offers his serious take on Serious Eats; The Washington Post’s Smoke Signals columnist Jim Shahin wrote about it and gave a smoky recipe in 2018.

There are lots of recipes out there that include yogurt — which is also wonderful, but not the classic, and many recipes that simply roast the eggplant but stop well before optimum smokiness has been achieved.

Other recipes that I found to be almost perfect have some tiny little detail I felt could be improved. For instance, Serious Eats’ López-Alt calls for not pricking the eggplants, so they’ll cook more quickly and peel more easily, but he also points out unpricked eggplants will explode in your oven (yikes!). In addition, he calls for spinning the flesh in a salad spinner as a way of quickly getting rid of the bitter moisture in them after roasting, which I find cumbersome and messy. I much prefer Roden’s quick and easy solution: mashing the flesh with a fork in a strainer over a bowl; this is much faster than the slow-drain many other recipes call for, and adds no extra work as the flesh needs mashing in any case. (And not puréeing in a food processor, as some recipes recommend — you want to retain some lovely texture and not make it too smooth.)

Chasing optimal smokiness, perfect balance and the creamiest texture has kept me experimenting with recipes for a couple months in order to come up with the best method and proportions. I found that whisking the tahini with lemon juice, as in customary in some of my favorite hummus recipes, results in a baba with superior creaminess. (That idea came from a recipe in Arabesque for the variation of baba ganoush that includes yogurt.)

Yesterday, we finally put it all together — the proportions I favor, and the whisking, which left just one question to answer: Which is better, roasting the eggplant over live coals or under the kitchen broiler? And if one was better, how much better?

We put the two cooking methods to the test, by making two otherwise identical versions of baba ganoush, one using eggplant roasted on live coals (on a chilly Saturday afternoon in February!) and the other in the broiler.

Once they were ready, I spread them on their respective serving plates. Here’s how they looked before garnishing:

Baba ganoush prepared over live coals (left) and baba ganoush prepared in the broiler

The photo probably doesn’t do justice to the visual difference, but the one done over live coals looked more emulsified and somewhat deeper in color. You could tell in whisking them, the live coals version was a bit silkier; though the eggplants seemed to be cooked about as much as the ones in the broiler, the ones done in the Weber were meltier.

In terms of taste and mouthfeel, the difference was starker: The one done on the coals had much smokier flavor, and more depth. I had Thierry and Wylie blind-taste them: The one done on the coals was the clear and immediate winner.

However, they (and we) loved them both: The broiler version was absolutely delicious as well, if a bit subtler. I thought of stirring in some ground cumin, a flourish that seems popular in the version of the dish that comes from Persia. You might consider using a slightly heavier hand with garlic if you go the broiler route, or upping the tahini a wee bit. This is a great dip to play with, to tweak it until it is exactly as you like it — or just cook kind of free-form, adding tahini, lemon juice and garlic by feel rather than measuring.

Another traditional flourish is pomegranate seeds — and once autumn rolls around, the baba ganoush will certainly flow freely at my place, topped with ruby-red beauties.

Until then, I’m loving the essentialist version, and we hope you will too.

RECIPE: Baba Ganoush

How to build the beautifully spiced, mega-healthy, plant-based, cross-cultural soup that could easily change your life

It’s only a few days into the new year, but we’re tempted to proclaim 2020 The Year of the Soup. Yep, we’re thinking it’s going to be a soup-flavored year.

Here’s why. First, plant-based eating is on the rise, and soup is the ideal form for plant-based, soulful hankerings — including vegan ones.

Also, we’ll be hearing a lot about the importance of foods with anti-inflammatory properties this year, as chronic inflammation is now recognized as a major contributor to heart disease, cancer, diabetes and arthritis, and anti-inflammatory eating is widely seen as kind of a “fountain of youth.” Soup is an ideal vehicle to load up on anti-inflammatory superstar ingredients like turmeric — the #1 anti-inflammatory food, according to Michael Greger, M.D., who recently published a compelling new book, How Not To Diet. Ginger and garlic are the second and third most anti-inflammatory ingredients: also great friends of soup.

The most anti-inflammatory components of food, meanwhile, are fiber and flavones — both of which are abundant in the type of super-soup we’re about to provide a blueprint for.

Then there’s the emergence of the zero-waste movement. Making a big ol’ super soup lets you use up produce in your fridge you might have otherwise tossed (or composted) — limp celery, greens that have seen better days, carrot and onion trimmings, the stems of the broccoli from that Chinese recipe you made that called only for the florets, to name just a few. Have a little bowl of leftover sautéed spinach or roasted carrots? Into the pot they go. Make this soup once, and you’ll find yourself saving many more vegetable trimmings going forward (we keep a dedicated zipper bag for that purpose, so it’s easy).

Stuff that came out of our fridge: broccoli stems from a Chinese stir-fry that called for florets only; celery leftover from a crudité platter; a couple of forgotten halved onions, trumpet royale mushrooms from a dish we bought too many mushrooms for. The tough and woody parts of the broccoli stems will get peeled away and discarded.

January is our favorite month to fall in love with soup all over again, following all the holiday revelry — especially soups with health-sustaining properties (as we wrote about three years ago). The health benefits of onions, garlic, leeks, shallots (all members of the detoxifying allium family) and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and kale have all been well documented. And hey — they’re all awesome in soup!

Meanwhile, who couldn’t stand to lose a little weight? (It’s our resolution this New Year’s, and, ahem, every year). According to Dr. Greger’s book, if you’d like to lose weight, soup is your super food because it’s so filling, nutritious, fiber-filled and low-calorie. This type of soup is legume-based, relying on lentils, one of our favorite foods as lentils are earthy, ancient and soul-satisfying. The fact that they’re (surprisingly to those who don’t know their charms) quick-cooking is a giant bonus: It means this dish cooks in no more than about an hour. An Instant Pot would be even quicker.

Green Lentil & Baby Kale Super-Warming Detox Soup

Do you like spices? Greger’s meticulous survey of medical literature finds that cumin is a powerful appetite suppressants, and he recommends eating it every day. He also touts the truly awesome health benefits of nigella seed, outlined in this medical review, which calls it a “miracle herb.” Both happen to be wonderful in hearty vegan winter soups, as they’re traditionally eaten with lentils.

Finally, there is the flavor factor: This type of soup is so delicious, satisfying and beautifully spiced that we’d be thrilled to eat it even it it weren’t fabulous for our health and good for the planet (especially if you go for organic ingredients and minimal packaging).

Convinced? Hungry? Although we are providing a recipe with this, you really don’t need one — you just need the method — which couldn’t be easier. If you have time to chop things up and wait an hour, you have time to make it. In fact, because we can’t think of what to name it, we’ll call it Sunday Souper Soup.

How to build a Sunday Souper Soup

1. Sweat onions (and other alliuM) and aromatic vegetables

   Heat two or three tablespoons of olive oil (or grapeseed, canola or sunflower oil) in a large soup pot till shimmering, add chopped or diced onion (as much or as little as you like), carrots, celery and any other aromatics you like and have handy (leeks and turnips are nice additions). Toss in garlic (as much or little as you like, or leave it out) — smashed cloves, chopped, sliced, whatever — chopped ginger (if using) and cook another minute or so. You can also add chopped or sliced fresh mushrooms at this point; if you do, let them cook a few minutes till they start to give up their water.

2. ADd spices

   Add ground spices such as turmeric (1 to 3 teaspoons is a good range; 3 makes it pretty turmeric-heavy), cumin, coriander seed, nigella seed. For best flavor use whole seeds and grind them yourself; toasting them in a small pan first adds depth, but isn’t necessary. You can also use pre-ground spices; nigella seed is generally used whole. Don’t know how much? Try a teaspoon of each you’re using (you can always adjust up or down next time). Stir in and cook two or three minutes.

3. ADD LENTILS, water, tomato

   Use green, black, red, brown, yellow or any combination. We love green and black lentils, which keep their integrity, so always include one or both of those. Red and yellow lentils break down quickly into a soupy texture, so it’s nice to include one of those as well. But any lentils are fine. Two cups is a good place to start (that’s enough for a big pot), but the anything between one and two cups (or more) is fine. Rinse them well and toss them in, along with water (6 to 8 cups) and a can of chopped tomatoes (including the liquid). What size can? It doesn’t matter — just depends on how tomatoey you like it. During tomato season, of course, you can use fresh ones, if you like. Now’s the moment to add a bay leaf or three and/or dried mushrooms, if you’re using them (They are optional). You can pause for a cup of tea now, or take the time now to survey what else is in your fridge that you might want to add, and cut it up.

4. ADD longer-cooking VEG

   All of the vegetables in this step are optional. If you want to use harder cruciferous vegetables such as Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, rapini, broccolini and the like, you can cut them up and toss them in just after the lentils, or wait 5 or 10 minutes to toss add them. If you’re using very thick, tough broccoli steams, you might want to peel away the tough part on the outside before dicing. If you have cauliflower rice, that can be added now or closer to the end. Also add eggplant (peeled and diced), green beans, scallions, diced potato or sweet potato — anything you’d want to simmer for 20 or 25 minutes or so.

5. ASSESS LIQUID, AND ADD SALT, PEPPERS/CHILES

   Check and see how your liquid is doing, adding a cup or two (or more) of water as necessary to get the soupiness you like. You can make it pretty soupy, or keep it thicker, like a vegan chili. Add salt (I start with about two teaspoons for a big pot and adjust up from there) and some kind of chile if you like (such as Aleppo pepper, cayenne, chile powder, Espellette pepper, etc.) Taste and adjust (you’ll adjust later again, so don’t worry if it’s not perfect — just don’t over-salt).

6. ADD LEAFY GREENS, TENDER VEGETABLES AND HERBS

   What kinds of greens are cluttering up your crisper drawer — when we last made this soup, we had a quarter-head of napa cabbage, half a bag of arugula that had seen better days and a few escarole leaves we had deemed too ugly for a salad. Slice up larger greens (as we did the cabbage and escarole), and toss in things like arugula, baby spinach or baby kale whole. Other greens that would work great here are bok choy. When we make this soup and we don’t happen to have tired greens sitting around, we usually pick up a bag of baby kale, arugula or baby spinach, and dump that straight in. This would also be the time to add quick-cooking vegetables like zucchini (diced or sliced cut into half-moon slices), along with any leftover cooked vegetables, chopped up or cut into bite-sized pieces. Add chopped parsley (including stems), dill, mint, basil or whatever other fresh herbs you like at this point as well.

7. TASTE, ADJUST SEASONING, ADD WATER IF NECESSARY, STIR AND SERVE!

Sunday Souper Soup is almost ready once the greens go in.

How to use your Sunday Souper Soup, and why it may change your life

(Maybe you can suggest a better name? Tell us in a comment or shoot us an email at info@cookswithoutborders.com!).

• Make the soup on a lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon (though any day will do) and eat it all week. I’m happy to eat it once a day, either at lunch or dinner, every day for a week, but other people might get bored and want it every other day or so. Either way, it is so healthy, filling and satisfying that you’ll be much less tempted to overindulge — thereby helping with health-minded and weight-loss-minded resolutions. You may want to add some water when you reheat, as it tends to thicken over time in the fridge.

• You can freeze some of it and keep some to eat this week.

• You can add to it, with delicious results. We just heated up the last bowl of a batch, which wasn’t quite enough for the two of us. We happened to have some leftover roasted Savoy cabbage and mushrooms, so we chopped those up and tossed them in (adding a little water), and the cabbage and ‘shrooms gave the soup a completely different quality. Fantastic!

• It’s the perfect vehicle in which to use nigella seeds, turmeric, cumin, dried chile and other ingredients getting attention for their awesome health-promoting properties.

• We love serve it with harissa to stir in at the end (everyone likes a different spice level). Other hot sauces work just as well — and they all have added health kick.

In case it’s helpful, here’s the Sunday Souper Soup in master recipe form:

We’d love to hear what you think of it — and we’d love to hear from you in general! Let us know (or ask questions about it) in a comment, or shoot us an email at info@cookswithoutborders.com.

How to turn a humble celery root into a classic French salad, céleri rémoulade

Céleri rémoulade

This simple French salad – julienned celery root dressed in mustardy mayonnaise with herbs – is one of my favorite starters. And it's one of my husband Thierry's least favorites. That's because when he was growing up in France, céleri rémoulade was considered to be the worst of the worst: school cafeteria food. 

He always groans when I make it. And then he tastes it, and gobbles it up. 

Though you can use store-bought mayonnaise in this dish, making your own mayo for it transforms it into fabulous dinner-party food.

I think I've tried every possible way to make mayo – whisking it by hand, using a blender, a food processor and a mixer. Easiest and most reliable, I think, is a hand-mixer. My recipe for mayo makes about a cup, and you won't need that much for the céleri rémoulade; you can use what's left over to slather on sandwiches and make tuna salad. Or flavor it and pretend it's aioli, as so many restaurants do! 

Once that's done, prepare the celery root. Also known as celeriac, it's the ugly duckling of the vegetable world.

First, use a small, sharp paring knife to peel it. Don't worry if it seems like you're cutting too much away – you want to get rid of all the ugly hairy stuff. Then slice it into julienne matchsticks. You can do this using a sharp chef's knife by first cutting it into 1/8 inch slices, then stacking those slices up and cutting them into 1/8 inch julienne. 

The whole thing's much easier if you have a mandoline to get those first slices. (What’s the best mandoline? I love my Oxo, which is more than 15 years old; here’s a newer model. But friends swear by the much less-expensive Benriner brand.) Set it on 1/8 inch slicing, slice up the whole celery root, then make stacks and use your knife to slice into 1/8 inch julienne. If you have a hand-guard, be sure to use it. With their super-sharp blades, mandolines can be vicious!

Chop herbs and other flavorings for the sauce. Parsley, chives, tarragon and chervil are all nice in it, but even just parsley is delicious in the rémoulade. You can also chop up some capers and even cornichons, though those are optional. You'll want to give it a bracing dose of Dijon mustard, for sure. And sometimes I lighten it up with crème fraîche, though that's optional too. 

Once the sauce ingredients are combined, dress the julienned celery root with enough of the sauce to moisten it, then taste it and adjust the seasonings. Let it sit for an hour or two – or overnight – so the flavors meld and the sauce soaks into the celery root. Then serve it as a first course with a simple French dinner.

Ready to try it? Here's the recipe!