Hope for a “new day” for Iran’s women by cooking these dishes for Nowruz, the festival marking the start of spring

Fresh Herb Kuku, from a recipe in ‘Food of Life’ by Najmieh Batmanglij

By Leslie Brenner

How delightful to be turning to spring, which begins Monday. Celebrated by people in and from Iran, Nowruz — a two-week festival with Zorastrian roots, marking the season’s return — begins on the vernal equinox. Nowruz (also spelled Norooz), which means “new day,” is also celebrated by people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and other cultures in the region.

Traditionally, it’s a time of feasting and rejoicing. This year, however, is bound to be a difficult one in Iran, due to the severe repression of and violence against women and the resulting protests. One can only imagine the battered population there wishing for a true new day.

Here, stateside, Iranian families will be cooking traditional foods or enjoying them in restaurants. Persian eateries in Los Angeles are offering solace to Iranians living there; L.A. holds the largest Iranian population outside of Tehran. Should you choose to cook to mark the holiday — whether you’re Iranian or cooking in solidarity with the women of Iran — we’re here to help.

There’s a wonderful primer about the Nowruz festival in Food of Life, Najmieh Batmanglij’s encyclopedic book subtitled “Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies.”

In every household, Batmanglij explains, a special cover is spread on a carpet or table — the sofreh-ye haft-sinn, or “seven dishes” setting. Each dish served begins with the Persian letter sinn, and they represent, respectively, rebirth, health, happiness, prosperity, joy, patience and beauty. Now that’s a lot to celebrate!

“The traditional menu for the Nowruz gathering on the day of the equinox usually includes fish and noodles,” Batmanglij writes. “It is believed they bring good luck, fertility and prosperity in the year that lies ahead.”

Batmanglij’s Menu:

• Noodle Soup (osh-e reshteh or ash-e-reshteh). Noodles, she writes, “represent the Gordian knots of life. Eating them symbolically unravels life’s knotty problems in the coming year.”

• Rice with Fresh Herbs and Fish (Sabzi polow ba mahi). Herb rice represents rebirth and fish represents Anahita, an angel of water and fertility.

• Herb Kuku. The eggs and loads of fresh herbs in this frittata-like dish represent fertility and rebirth.

• Sabzi Khordan with Bread. Iran’s ubiquitous herb platter with cheese and nan-e barbari (flatbread) represents prosperity.

• Wheat Sprout Pudding. For fertility and rebirth.

• Sprout Cookies. Prosperity and fertility.

• Seven Desserts. Representing nourishment, light, love, sweetness and prosperity.

Three great dishes to make

Sabzi Khordan — an Iranian herb platter — is a must at Nowruz celebrations (and every other Persian meal!).

Sabzi Khordan with Cheese and Nan-e Barbari

We’re leading off with the herb platter known as sabzi khordan, as it’s such an essential part of the Iranian table – not just during festivals, but every other day, as well. “It’s essential to any meal we have, always,” says Nilou Motamed. The food-world celeb — a permanent judge for Netfix’s “Iron Chef” revival and my editor long ago at Travel + Leisure — is a native of Iran.

Putting together the platter itself requires no cooking, just collecting, washing, trimming and assembling herbs, scallions, cukes and radishes, and sourcing the best feta you can find (Bulgarian, if possible). Toasted walnuts are optional. Nibble all of it to your heart’s delight before, during, and in-between everything else.

With it you’ll want the flatbread known as nan-e barbari. Making one is easier than you might think, thanks to a hack Nilou gave us when I interviewed her a few years ago for a story about sabzi khordan: Her mom uses frozen pizza dough. It’s super fun and easy to make. Flatbread in hand, you can create the perfect bite — what Nilou calls a loghme. “You put some feta cheese in the bread, and then whatever your perfect complement of herbs is — whether you’re a dill or a tarragon person, or you like both, maybe the little tail of a scallion.”

RECIPE: Sabzi Khordan and Nan-e Barbari

New Year’s Bean Soup (Ash-e-Reshteh)

This vegetarian bean soup, chock full of herbs and other greens, stars those long soup noodles (known as “reshteh”) that will untangle life’s problems You can make them by hand; Naomi Duguid gives instructions for doing so in her gorgeous book, Taste of Persia, from which our recipe is adapted. You can also buy them in Middle Eastern groceries carrying Iranian ingredients, buy them online, or substitute dried linguine — which many recipes, including Duguid’s suggest. Another Iranian ingredient, kashk — a fermented milk product made from whey — may also be found in Middle Eastern groceries; it’s optional in Duguid’s version, and the soup is delicious even without it.

We featured the recipe a few years ago in a short piece about Persian New Year’s bean soup.

RECIPE: ‘Taste of Persia’ Ash-e-Reshteh (New Year’s Bean Soup)

Fresh Herb Kuku

Finally, there’s the glorious frittata-like egg-and-herb kuku (shown at the top of the story). To make it, season beaten eggs with turmeric and advieh — a fragrant mix of ground dried rose petals, cinnamon, cumin and cardamom. (Cooking Iranian food is always a delightful to the senses.) Add a ton of finely of herbs (parsley, cilantro, dill and fenugreek) and lettuce, plus garlic, scallion, chopped walnuts and sautéed chopped onion. Pour the batter into a skillet in which you’ve heated oil, butter or ghee, cook it slowly until it has set in the center, then finish it quickly under the broiler. Top it with caramelized barberries.

RECIPE: Najmieh Batmanglij’s Fresh Herb Kuku

Here’s hoping for that true new day.

Why my desert-isle cookbook author would probably be Claudia Roden

Medley of Spring Vegetables from Claudia Roden’s ‘The Food of Spain’

By Leslie Brenner

[Women have a history of writing the best cookbooks. That’s why throughout March — Women’s History Month — we’ll be featuring cookbooks by our favorite female authors.]

If I had to choose just one cookbook author and live with only that author’s books for the rest of my life, it might well be Claudia Roden. Somehow, after decades of cooking, I haven’t paid nearly enough attention to the widely lauded, highly accomplished, deeply interesting 87-year-old author of 20 cookbooks. Foolish, foolish me!

I own four Roden titles, and I’ve cooked from them all, always with excellent results. I’ve called upon her books frequently for research; they’ve informed my approach to baba ganoush and helped me develop a recipe for pita bread. But somehow I have rarely just relaxed and cooked from Roden’s books, and never fully recognized how much I love them. It’s a little like one of those old-fashioned romantic comedies where the young, handsome, gallivanting star suddenly sees that the love of his life has been right there under his nose the whole time: the girl next door. Only I’m not young, handsome or a gadabout, and Claudia Roden is definitely not the girl next door.

Born in Cairo, Egypt to Jewish-Syrian parents and now based in London, Roden has made a brilliant career of studying and writing about the foods of the Middle East and Mediterranean. Her 2011 title, The Food of Spain — a 609-page magnum opus — won first prize for International Cookbooks by the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Her 1968 book, The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, was updated 32 years later, then inducted in 2010 in the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame. In 1997, The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York won the James Beard Award for Cookbook of the Year.

Ab Ghooshte Fasl (Iranian Bean Soup) from Claudia Roden’s ‘The New Book of Middle Eastern Food’

I love Roden’s aesthetic, she’s a great cook and a captivating food historian. Just about any other author I might choose to focus on for the rest of my life would have depth of knowledge in one or two, or maybe three food cultures. Roden has taken deep dives into so many. In one book alone — The New Book of Middle Eastern Food — she covers Albanian, Algerian, Armenian, Bedouin, Egyptian, Greek, Iranian, Tunisian, Turkish, Syrian, etc. etc., the work of more than two decades. She spent five intensive years researching Spanish cooking for the aforementioned magnum opus. Arabesque focuses on Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon.

As if that weren’t enough, 16 months ago she published Claudia Roden’s Mediterranean: Treasured Recipes from a Lifetime of Travel. And you know what? If you think the world already had enough Mediterranean cookbooks, it didn’t — Roden’s is one of the most quietly captivating ever published.

In the Introduction, Roden writes that after her children left home thirty-five years earlier, she embarked on a solo trip all around the Mediterranean inspired by a childhood memory of visiting Alexandria. Traveling alone was “strange and suspect” in those days, but it allowed her to meet people everywhere. “My interest was in home cooking and regional food,” she writes. “I was invited into homes where people still cooked as their parents and grandparents did.”

After so many decades, the Mediterranean — and all that she has encountered in her travels — continues to inspire her. Working on this particular book, she explains,

“has kept me happy, thinking of people and places, magic moments, and glorious food. It might be cold and raining outside, but in my kitchen and at my desk in London I am smiling under an azure sky. The smell of garlic sizzling with crushed coriander seeds takes me back to the Egypt of my childhood. The aroma of saffron and orange zest mingled with aniseeed and garlic triggers memories of the French Riviera.”

How beautiful is that?

I only started cooking from that last book a month ago; there are enticing recipes on nearly every page. The first dish I made was so wonderful, I made it again two weeks later: chicken thighs baked saucily with green olives, boiled lemons and lots of garlic. To accompany it Roden offers (practically in an aside), the most brilliant method for making couscous I’ve ever found — you pour salted warm water over the grains, stir them, let them swell for 10 minutes, then add olive oil and rub the couscous between your hands to “aerate the grains” and break up lumps. Cover it with foil and bake it for 10 or 15 minutes. The result is nearly as perfect as the traditional way, when you painstakingly moisten, rub, and steam the grains two or three times. I promise recipes soon, accompanying a review of the book.

Till then, please treat yourself to these Roden recipes:

Tender veg for early spring

If you can’t wait for spring, try this Medley of Spring Vegetables, inspired by the traditional Spanish soup menestra de primavera, from The Food of Spain. I made it last night, and I’d make it again next week.

RECIPE: Claudia Roden’s Medley of Spring Vegetables

Soup for a chilly late-winter day

On a cold day (there are surely still a few to come this season), simmer a pot of Ab Ghooshte Fasl — Iranian Bean Soup. The recipe is adapted from The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.

RECIPE: Ab Ghooshte Fasl (Iranian Bean Soup)

Savory snack for anytime

Cod Fritters from Claudia Roden’s ‘The Food of Spain’

Finally, these tender, fabulous Buñuelos de Bacalao — Cod Fritters — are made with fresh fish rather than salt cod. That means no soaking the fish, so you don’t have to think about them a day in advance.

RECIPE: Buñuelos de Bacalao (Cod Fritters)

I’ve only just scratched the surface in discovering all this cookbook giant has to offer. Hopefully I still have a long cooking life ahead of me because Roden’s thousands and thousands of pages promise infinite deliciousness.

BUY Claudia Roden’s books at Amazon

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Cookbooks We Love: Reem Kassis' 'The Arabesque Table' offers irresistible spins on Levantine tradition

By Leslie Brenner

The Arabesque Table: Contemporary Recipes from the Arab World by Reem Kassis; photographs by Dan Perez; 2021, Phaidon, $39.95.

Backgrounder

Born and raised in Jerusalem, Reem Kassis — who now lives in Pennsylvania, and lived in four other countries in between — is a former McKinsey consultant with two undergraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from Wharton and an MSc in social psychology from the London School of Economics. Following the birth of her first of two daughters, she stepped back from her 10-year career and decided to follow her “real passion” — cooking, food and food history. Her first cookbook, The Palestinian Table (2017), wove recipes from her family together with Palestinian culture and history. It won the British Guild of Food Writers First Book Award and was nominated for a James Beard Award.

Kassis’ aim with The Arabesque Table, as she explains in its introduction, was to write about and express in recipes “the evolving and cross-cultural Arab table.”

Why we love it

Kassis has created a fabulously rich collection of recipes and stories that manage to do three things at once. First, they ground us in the culinary traditions of the Arab world — particularly the Fertile Crescent (a.k.a. the Levant or the Middle East). Second, they paint an evocative picture of her Jerusalem childhood through food and her family traditions. And third, they give us a delicious collection of recipes that have her own very personal stamp.

Relatively new to the world of food-writing and professional cookery as Kassis may be, she has a great palate and a wonderful creative instincts. Her recipes respect and pay tribute to the flavors, ingredients and vibe of the Levant, but she’s not afraid to take liberties and risks — often to delightful effect. Many of these dishes will become permanent fixtures in my repertoire. Impressive!

For instance: a magnificent mega-mezza

Not a traditional dish, this roasted eggplant salad on a cushion of tahini is Kassis’ invention — combining elements of mutabal (roasted eggplant dip with tahini) and bitinjan al rahib (“monk’s eggplant” — roasted eggplant with fresh vegetables). As a result, it’s kind of like everything you want in a mezze assortment but all on one plate. The eggplant salad part, which has a gorgeous zing from just the right amount of pomegrante molasses, has pops of salty-meaty umami flavor from sliced green olives; walnuts add complexity and a bit of crunch. The tahini sauce is a creamy, rich foil. Swipe a piece of warm pita through it and you’re transported to everywhere you ever wanted to visit in the Levant.

RECIPE: ‘Arabesque Table’ Eggplant Salad on Tahini

And an elegant main you can make in a flash

I love this dish of shrimp sautéed with artichoke hearts, turmeric and garlic, enriched with a splash of half-and-half and brightened with slices of fresh lemon — with the salty undertone of preserved lemon. And once you have the shrimps peeled and deveined, it comes together nearly as quickly as you can read that sentence. (Seriously, you can have it to the table in 15 minutes.) In fact, I’ve made it twice in two weeks.

RECIPE: Reem Kassis’ Artichoke Shrimp with Turmeric and Preserved Lemon

This goes great with that

If you’re a fan of fresh fava beans, but don’t enjoy spending the time peeling every single one, you’ll be glad to know that the bags of frozen ones (already peeled!) you can buy in well stocked Middle Eastern groceries are nearly as good. Or maybe you already knew. In any case, Kassis reminds us — and offers her original take on a Levantine classic. In the traditional version, made with fresh favas, the skins are left on, and the beans are chopped then cooked in “a generous amount of oil” to the point of very soft, then flavored with garlic and coriander.

Kassis prefers them bright green and free of skins — and having tasted favas in their skins, I agree. She most often makes this using frozen favas, and again: agreed. The dish is easy, delicious and I’ve already made it thrice.

RECIPE: Fava Beans with Garlic, Cilantro and Lime

Gotta try this!

Every comprehensive Middle-Eastern cookbook offers instructions on making labneh (or labaneh), the thick, creamy fresh yogurt-cheese that’s ubiquitous in the region. But somehow I’d never tried it till Kassis sung its praises. You don’t need a recipe; just stir together a quart of full-fat yogurt (regular, not Greek) with a teaspoon (or a little more) of salt, pour it into a cheesecloth-lined sieve set over a bowl, and let it drain overnight. In the morning, you have labneh. Add honey or jam, scoop it up with toasted bread, and you have breakfast. Or wait till noon, drizzle it with olive oil and sumac and call it lunch. More to come on that in a future story, but try it now; it’s delicious — definitely greater than the sum of its simple parts.

But wait — give us some pickles

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this very simple and quick pickle set-up. The brine — just vinegar, curry powder, turmeric, ground fenugreek, salt and water — makes delicious cauliflower and carrot pickles you can enjoy in a couple hours. They get even better as they sit, and you can also throw in cabbage, green beans, turnips or other veg. Keep one or two jars, give another as a gift.

RECIPE: Turmeric and Fenugreek Quick Pickles

A very minor suggestion

I tested a total of 7 recipes from The Arabesque Table. For the most part, they worked great, and tasted great. Out of those there’s only one I’ll probably not make again, not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because it more labor-intensive than its result warranted. And only one had a significant problem I had to fix in our adaptation (the tahini sauce for the eggplant dip was liquid when directions were followed closely, rather than spreadable).

But I do have a general note: If you purchase the book (and you should if you love these flavors!), be sure to taste the dishes at key points and adjust the seasoning. That’s an instruction that was left of out all the recipes, as far as I can see, and obviously it’s always super important.

Still Wanna Make

So many things! Fire-Roasted Eggplant and Tomato Mutabal. Spiced Kebabs with Preserved Lemon Dill Yogurt. Seafood Stew with Preserved Lemon, Apricots and Olives. Mustard Greens with Labaneh (now that I know how to make lebaneh!). Sujuk — Spicy Cured Sausage. Makmoora — which is a chicken pot pie spun from a 10th-century recipe. Chicken breasts stuffed with pistachios, radish greens and sumac. Lemon Rosemary Semolina Cake.

Thank you, Ms. Kassis, for what promises to be some delicious future adventures.

Make hummus, not war: In the face of unspeakable destruction in Gaza, show solidarity through cooking

By Leslie Brenner

The humanitarian catastrophe that is devastating Gaza — which began with Israeli police preventing Palestinians from gathering near one of East Jerusalem’s ancient city gates during the holy month of Ramadan — is tragic, outrageous, and needs to stop.

For an American of Jewish descent who deplores the actions of Israel’s far-right-wing government, the feelings of shame, outrage and powerlessness can be overwhelming.

What can we do from thousands of miles away, besides plead for a cease-fire? We can support the civilians of Gaza by thinking about them as people. By learning about them, and trying to understand Palestinians and their plight.

Even before the current waves of bombs and rockets, the territory was suffering mightily: According to a United Nations report published last year, it has the “world’s highest unemployment rate,” with more than half its population living below the poverty line. Now more than 200 people there have been killed, including at least 61 children.

As a cook, it’s hard not to think immediately about Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, who wrote their incredible cookbook Jerusalem together and published it a decade ago. And about Tamimi and Tara Wigley, who published Falastin last year, celebrating the cooking of Palestine. (Ottolenghi wrote the foreword, explaining that with Falastin, Tamimi and Wigley “picked up the baton where it was left after Jerusalem.”)

Though saying so feels woefully inadequate for the moment, peace begins with understanding. If you don’t know anything about Palestinians, get your hands on the book. Plan a dinner of Chicken Musakhan, Palestine’s national dish. Read about the people, their culture of tahini, the way they make bread. Watch Tara Wigley talking with Cooks Without Borders about her experiences traveling and researching in Palestine for the book.

Meanwhile, make hummus — now, or tonight. Brilliant in its simplicity, it’s a dip enjoyed by Palestinians and Israelis alike. (And don’t forget that there are legions of Israelis who are against what their government is doing, just as legions of Americans deplored anti-human American policies like permanently separating families coming across our borders.) You can use dried chick peas, for the Ultimate Hummus, or use canned ones for a pretty great Cheater Version. Make your own pita bread (khobz in Arabic), or pick some up at Trader Joe’s.

Protest on a plate. Empathy, in a dip.

RECIPE: Ultimate Hummus

RECIPE: Amazing Cheater Hummus

RECIPE: ‘Falastin’ Chicken Musakhan

RECIPE: Half Whole-Wheat Pita Bread

Rose petals, saffron and tender lamb meatballs: Now that's a chicken soup!

This is the fourth story in our series, Around the World in Chicken Soup.

The Great Confinement has been for me, as much as anything, a year of cooking. My time in the kitchen — chopping, simmering, marinating, braising, baking, slicing, stirring, researching dishes, poring over recipes — has kept me sane, kept me focused, provided escape, resulted in joy and kept my family well fed. We are extremely lucky that we can afford to eat and that we have access to food — facts that have not escaped my consciousness for a single moment, and for which I’m continually grateful.

During these 11 months, if there’s one dish that took me out of myself and away from that narrow physical and mental place that the pandemic has wedged us into, it would be the Persian chicken soup with chickpea-and-lamb meatballs called abgusht-e morgh ba kufteh-ye nokhodchi.

The obvious and immediate miracle of the dish is its incredible flavor and aromas: the perfume of saffron, the gorgeousness of mint leaves and rose petals strewn on top, the tender lusciousness of the lamb meatballs, the soothing comfort of the rich and aromatic chicken broth. I still have a hard time conceiving that we ate something so delicious, so unusual, in our own home. Honestly, it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve eaten ever, anywhere.

But equally (if not even more) transporting was the experience of cooking this soup. The afternoon I spent discovering its mysteries was one of the most pleasurable I’ve spent all year long.

Consider the premise: You stuff a whole chicken with rice, spices and dried rose petals. (Rose petals!) Wrap it in cheesecloth, submerge it in a broth scented with cardamom, rosewater, saffron and more, and simmer it gently for an hour and a half. Remove the chicken and debone it. Then drop in meatballs you’ve made from ground lamb, aromatic spices, onion and chickpea flour. Chickpeas go in the broth as well, along with the chicken meat and stuffing, and all that wonderful stuff cooks some more. 

Your home now smells heavenly, and for a grand finale, here comes a whopper of a flourish: Chopped mint or cilantro, plus garlic and more dried rose petals. You’ll pass that in a bowl around the table for everyone to add on top just before eating. 

The meatballs are spectacular. The scents of rose and saffron and cardamom and cumin and herbs are intoxicating. The garnish sends it into a transcendent dimension. 

After I made the soup and recovered from my saffron-and-rose-petal high, I wanted to learn more about the recipe, so I called Najmieh Batmanglij — the Washington, D.C.-based author of Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies, in which I found it. The 1986 cookbook is widely considered to be the definitive tome of the genre; Yotam Ottolenghi called Batmanglij “The goddess of Iranian cooking.” 

She and her husband fled Iran in 1979 during the revolution, relocating to Vence, in the south of France, where she wrote her first cookbook, Ma Cuisine d’Iran. Recently Batmanglij spent three years researching her latest book, Cooking in Iran, published in 2019. “I traveled all over Iran,” she said, “and I noticed they love meatballs.” 

Persian chicken soup with chickpea-and-lamb meatballs — abgusht-e morgh ba kufteh-ye nokhodchi. The Iranian dish is served with sabzi khordan, the fresh herb platter ubiquitous on Iranian tables.

Talking with the author was nearly as much fun as making the soup. I knew from her headnote that it’s traditionally served by Jews in Kashan and Hamedan for sabbath dinner (those two cities are south and southeast respectively from Tehran), that it should be served with “saffron flavored rice, pickles and a platter of herbs,” and that it was inspired by one Professor Abbas Amanat, who had gotten the recipe from his mother. Batmanglij told me that Professor Amanat teaches history at Yale University. 

She also revealed that she brought a couple of her own thoughtful touches to the dish — among them, deboning the chicken.  “Traditionally,” she told me, “they use the whole chicken, and when they serve it, the whole thing is in the soup. Wrapping it in the cheesecloth, that’s my French background.”

Diluting the saffron in rose water rather than plain water was her innovation as well, inspired by a technique she’d seen in a medieval Persian cookbook. The two ingredients together do something truly magical.

I made a couple of slight modifications of my own, including adding an option to use canned chick peas rather than soaking overnight and pre-cooking dried ones. More significantly, I also suggest passing of the rose-petal-and-herb garnish at the table. Batmanglij’s recipe calls for stirring it all before in serving it. 

Nan-e-barbari — Persian Bread. We fashioned ours from store-bought pizza dough.

Of course the author’s way is culturally correct. A soup like this, Batmanglij told me, is usually eaten “by people from humble backgrounds. They put the garnish on top, and they put the pot in the middle of the table, with plenty of bread. Serving individual things means more labor.” 

While at our house, we skipped the saffron-flavored rice accompaniment, I did serve the soup with nan-e-barbari, Persian flatbread, and a sabzi khordan, the fresh herb platter Batmanglij suggested, and which is ubiquitous on Iranian tables. (Here’s a hack for making home-made nan-e-barbari from store-bought pizza dough, courtesy of Nilou Motamed, former editor of Food & Wine.)

The herbs of the sabzi khordan brought beautiful freshness to each bite.

Obviously, building this marvelous soup is a project, something to take slowly and enjoy, not something to be rushed through on a busy weeknight. But should you find yourself wondering how to fill a long and lazy Sunday or Saturday afternoon, I can’t think of a more delicious undertaking.

RECIPE: Persian Chicken Soup with Chickpea and Lamb Meatballs

RECIPE: Sabzi Khordan

RECIPE: Nan-e-Barbari (Persian Flatbread)

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What to make this weekend: Baked kofta with eggplant and tomato from Sami Tamimi's 'Falastin'

Autumn is my favorite time of year to cook. The kitchen feels cozy (even if it’s still hot outside, as it is here in North Texas), and the ingredients speak to my soul.

It feels like the perfect time — while tomatoes are still happening — to make these baked kofta from Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley’s recent book, Falastin.

Each kofta is a meltingly tender, intensely flavorful package made by stacking ingredients: a slice of roasted eggplant; a kofta patty made from lamb, beef, onion, garlic, tomato, herbs and spices; a slice of tomato, some rustic tomato sauce.

The aroma as they roast is intoxicating.

Garnished with fresh herbs and toasted pine nuts, it’s a dish that’s at once homey and sophisticated, comfortingly familiar yet gorgeously spiced.

Served with rice, couscous, roasted potatoes or a root-vegetable purée, it makes a smashing fall dinner.

If by some miracle every kofta is not gobbled up, they reheat brilliantly.

RECIPE: ‘Falastin’ Baked Kofta

Exuberantly delicious and beautifully told, 'Falastin' is one of those life-changing cookbooks

My cookbook shelves are lined with hundreds of earnest volumes filled with culturally faithful recipes for legions of traditional dishes. Usually the recipes work and the dishes are correct, often they’re pretty good, occasionally they’re very good. But rarely, when cooked as written, are they so delicious that they make me want to cry.

Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley’s Falastin: a Cookbook, which Ten Speed Press published last month, is bursting with recipes from Palastine that do just that.

Because it’s described in the headnote as “the hugely popular national dish of Palestine,” I stuck a Post-It on the page with Chicken Musakhan on my first pass through the book, as a reminder to cook it soon. But it looked so simple, like there was nothing to it — just some cut-up chicken rubbed with spices and roasted, served on flat bread with cooked onions (how great could that be?) — so I kept passing it by.

Until one evening I didn’t.

It was gobsmackingly, soul-stirringly fabulous. The chicken, a whole quartered bird, gets tossed with a lot of cumin and sumac, plus cinnamon, allspice, olive oil, salt and pepper, then roasted. Once out of the oven, it gets layered on crisped pieces of torn flatbread with a lot of long-cooked, sumac-and-cumin-loaded sliced red onions, fried pine nuts, plenty of parsley and spooned over with the roasting juices from the chicken. More olive oil gets drizzled on, and more sumac. It’s a stunning, fragrant centerpiece. Before serving it, you pull apart the chicken pieces with your fingers into two or three piece each. Put it in the middle of the table, and have everyone dive in, pulling the chicken apart with fingers, grabbing some soaky, juicy, crispy bread and sumac-ky onions, and groaning with pleasure, and diving back in.

When can we have this again??!!

I went back and reread the headnote. The dish was traditionally made during olive-oil pressing season to celebrate the freshly-pressed oil, but now it’s enjoyed year-round. “Growing up, Sami ate it once a week,” goes the headnote. “It’s a dish to eat with your hands and with your friends, served from one pot or plate, for everyone to then tear at some of the bread and spoon on the chicken and topping for themselves.”

Traditionally, taboon bread is used in the dish. Baked on pebbles in a conical oven, the bread has a pock-marked surface that are great for catching the juices. But the recipe calls for any Arabic flatbread (we used pita from a local Lebanese bakery that I’d stashed in the freezer), or naan.

I can see why Tamimi’s mom, Na’ama, made it once a week: It’s fun and easy to make, probably no more than an hour from start to finish, and a great crowd-pleaser. I’ll be buying sumac futures this week: A full three tablespoons of the spice (a powerful anti-oxidant) go into the dish.

If you’re not familiar with Tamimi, some context may be helpful. Chances are you do know of Yotam Ottolenghi and his cookbooks. Tamimi is head chef for and a founding partner in Ottolenghi’s namesake London restaurant empire. He co-authored Ottolenghi’s first cookbook (Ottolenghi: the Cookbook, 2008). Together the two — led by Ottolenghi — created a style of produce-forward, Levant-accented, slouchy-chic improvisational cooking. In other words, what they did powerfully influenced the way so many of us cook now, and the way food looks on blogs and on Instagram — seductively dissheveled, vegetable happy and casually strewn with tons of herbs.

The two chefs went on to co-author Jerusalem: a Cookbook (2012). Both had grown up in Jerusalem in the 70s and 80s — Ottolenghi, who is Israeli and Italian, in the Jewish west part of the city and Tamimi, who is Palestinian, in the Muslim east. They didn’t know each other back home; they met in London, where they were both living in the 1990s. To the Jerusalem project, each brought his delicious perspective, and they wove together a gorgeous, deep, inspired, cookable portrait of their hometown. The book didn’t shy away from politics, but its explorations managed to unify rather than divide.

With Falastin, Tamimi explores the cooking of his beloved Palestine. “There is no letter ‘P’ in the Arabic language,” begins the introduction, so ‘Falastin’ is, on the one hand, simply the way ‘Falastinians’ refer to themselves.’”

Of course there is an “on the other hand” — and that’s the substance of the book, which Tamimi co-authored with Tara Wigley, a cook and writer who also co-authored Ottolenghi’s most recent book, Ottolengi Simple, and who is an integral part of the Ottolenghi family.

Cilantro-crusted roasted cod with tahini sauce

Beautifully photographed by Jenny Zarins, it’s a wonderful read that conveys so much about the culture that you might feel you’ve been there, and fallen in love with its people. A visit to the apartment-house kitchen of the “yogurt-making ladies of Bethlehem” gives richness to a recipe for balls of labneh (thickened yogurt) marinated in olive oil then rolled in dried herbs or spices. A trip to the Jerusalem shop where Kamel Hashlamon produces tahini that’s “somewhere between a paste and a liquid and truly good enough to drink” makes us understand what separates great tahini from all the bitter crap we get stateside (Humera sesame seeds from Ethiopia, bespoke millstone made by a master Syrian stonemason, cold-pressing at 140 degrees).

The authors, refusing to tip-toe around the politics, address head-on the difficult questions that arise as they tour us around. For instance, it becomes clear that because Kamel sells to a largely Israeli (but also Palestinian) market, some feel he has “sold out.” When Kamel justifies his position by saying “We are all living in the result of the game,” Tamimi doesn’t let him off easy. In the end, though, the last image of his “small stunning shop,” with its irresistible product, is of Israelis and Palestinians standing “side by side at the counter, looking through the glass, debating little more than which halva to buy.” Complicated, uneasy, but what what a privilege it is to be let in on it in a cookbook.

From a culinary point of view, Falastin is also a rare gift: a cookbook filled with exuberantly delicious recipes, each with the special flair of a super-gifted chef, but without the ridiculous, long lists of obscure ingredients and sub-recipes that you needed to start preparing three days ago. These are approachable, thoughtfully crafted and apparently carefully tested recipes that are easy to follow, simple enough to execute and clearly designed to work for a moderately capable home cook.

If the aesthetic driver of the Ottolenghi books is herbs, with Falastin it is spices — lots of spices, aromatic, dreamy and unapologetic. Flavors in all the dishes are dialed way up. (One touch I really appreciate: Tamimi and Wigley never leave us guessing about how much salt to use — they always specify, and it’s always right on or close.)

Back to my bookshelves and all those earnest volumes. Among all the serious Middle Eastern, Levantine, Mediterranean and North African cookbooks, I hadn’t been able to find an appealing recipe for ful medames — the traditional fava bean dish that’s mostly closely associated with Egypt. There were recipes, sure, but none found any joy in the dish — which is, after all, really just doctored canned fava beans.

Tamimi has a wonderful way of elevating the ordinary. His version of ful starts by ridding the beans of their canned taste — by draining, rinsing, then simmering them in water, a five minute process that makes all the difference. Once they’re drained again, cumin is invited to the party, along with the lemon, garlic and chile. A delightful salad of red onion, sumac and parsley goes on top, along with tomato; avocado adds cool and creamy depth. Soft boiled egg, which is optional, adds another dimension.

Finally, the ful medames I dreamed of — so good I will make sure to keep canned favas stocked, so I can whip it up on a regular basis. (This is what I mean by life-changing.)

Not surprisingly, there’s a little overlap with the dishes in Jerusalem: It would be odd for this book not to include hummus, for instance, or tahini sauce. But the books complement each other really well: While Jerusalem gave us Maqluba, a one-pot layered dish of eggplant, chicken thighs and rice inverted onto a plate to serve, Falastin gives us Maqlubet el Foul el Akdhar — Upside-Down Spiced Rice with Lamb and Fava Beans. (Will be making that soon as I can source some Iranian dried limes!)

And while Jerusalem proposes Kofta B’siniya (seared lamb-and-beef patties in tahini sauce), Falastin offers Kofta Bil Batinjan — Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato. Another major crowd-pleaser!

Kofta Bil Batinjan — Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato

For the three of us, this was a fabulous dinner two nights running — the leftovers were every bit as delectable.

There are so many recipes I still have marked to try. Preserved Stuffed Eggplants; Cauliflower and Cumin Fritters with Mint Yogurt; Shatta (an exciting looking red or green chile sauce); Na’ama’s Buttermilk Fattoush; Roasted Eggplant with Tamarind and Cilantro; a zucchini, garlic and yogurt dip called M’tawaneh; Buttery Rice with Toasted Vermicelli; Eggplant, Chickpea and Tomato Bake (Musaq’a); Pomegranate-Cooked Lentils and Eggplants; Lemon Chicken with Za’atar.

There are baked treats that look incredible, too: Sweet Tahini Rolls, and the triangular spinach pies called Fatayer Sabanekh; Warbat — filo triangles filled with cream cheese and pistachio and doused in rose syrup, and definitely a Chocolate and Qahwa Flour-Free Torte, flavored with lots of cardamom and espresso (Qahwa is coffee in Arabic).

I love this book. I’m happy to think of its treasure-filled pages, and it gives me hope for the future — in more ways than one.

RECIPE: Chicken Musakhan

RECIPE: Cilantro-Crusted Roasted Cod

RECIPE: Ful Medames

RECIPE: Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato

Falastin: a Cookbook, by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley, Ten Speed Press, $35.

Cool as a cuke: Four cucumber-happy salads to refresh you through a hot and heavy summer

Blimey, we all need a chill pill! In the absence of an effective one, we’ve been turning to the coolest of vegetables, the cucumber.

The Oxford Companion to Food tells us that the cucumber is “one of the oldest cultivated vegetables,” that it has been grown for some 4,000 years, that it may have originated in South India and that Christopher Columbus introduced it to Haiti in 1494. Jessica B. Harris points out, however, in The Africa Cookbook, that the some scholars feel that the cucumber may have come from Central Africa.

But wait — isn’t “one of the oldest cultivated vegetables” technically a fruit?

“It is a fruit,” says my friend Tim Simmonds, a Dallas botanist — and so are squashes, both summer and winter, including pumpkins. “Same big happy family.”

The curcurbit family, that is: the vine-y plant group that also includes watermelons, chayotes, gourds, cassabananas (a.k.a. melocotón) and the kiwano (a.k.a. African horned cucumber or jelly melon).

Given the cucumber’s origin story, it’s not surprising that it is popular in India — especially in the form of raita.

The cooling cucumber salad accompanies just about any kind of Indian meal, of course. But I’ve been known to enjoy a bowl of it on its own for a soothing lunch (particularly in a pandemic!).

Ours features grated cucumber, toasted cumin and a touch of lemon juice.

A Cucumber Sunomono was literally the first recipe we test-drove for our recent review of Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, since the cucumber salad is a frequent starter of Japanese meals. This one, which weaves wakame seaweed in with the cukes, sports a jaunty grated-ginger garnish. We fell in love, not surprisingly. Maybe you will, too (let us know in a comment!).

Cucumbers also make appearances in Sakai’s recipe for Potato Salada and Dallas chef Justin Holt’s Salaryman Potato Salad.

But we’re not counting those in our four, so wait, there’s more!

This pretty Cucumber, Radish and Feta Salad came together as we riffed on a Levantine dish called khiar bel na’na, starring thin-sliced cukes, dried mint and orange-blossom water. We added radishes, scallions, feta and fresh mint (which layers beautifully with the dried). Lately it has become a house favorite.

And finally, this Scandanavian Cucumber-Dill Salad — which is wonderful with poached salmon, Cold Poached Arctic Char or even Swedish meatballs.

A happy development, at least in my neck of the woods, is that organic Persian cucumbers have become more readily available, even during the pandemic. They have lovely texture (as long as they’re nice and fresh), they’re less watery than English cukes but more flavorful than most hothouse cukes, and they don’t require peeling — a win win win. Though sizes for all kinds vary, generally speaking you can figure two Persian cucumbers for one medium English cucumber, or three for a large English cuke.

As you’ll see from the above recipes, many cultures salt cucumbers and let them sit to draw out the water and ensure great texture; sometimes gentle squeezing is called for as well. Hope you enjoy these refreshing treats.

Stay cool. Think cuke. Wear a mask. Stay healthy.

[RECIPE: Cucumber Raita]

[RECIPE: Cucumber Sunomono]

[RECIPE: Cucumber, Radish & Feta Salad]

[RECIPE: Cucumber-Dill Salad]

Anissa Helou's 'Feast' delivers delicious inspiration from around the Islamic world

Life can get in the way, during normal times, of plumbing the depths of the cookbooks on our shelves or coffee tables.

The Great Confinement of 2020 has changed all that: So many of us are seeking deeply immersive cooking projects to delight us, distract us and give us strength. The most far-reaching of them can also transport us somewhere far away from the confines of our kitchens.

Coming up on its two-year publication anniversary, Annisa Helou’s Feast: Food of the Islamic World has been my nearly constant companion since about a month before quarantine locked us in. Within its 530 pages there are so many beguiling flavors to discover, so much culture to soak in and so much to learn that honestly, I don’t feel cooped up at all.

The book, which won the James Beard Foundation Award last year for best International Cookbook, takes us on a journey around the Muslim world in more than 300 recipes — from Helou’s native Lebanon to Senegal to the west, Turkey to the north, Tanzania to the south and Indonesia to the east, with stops in Morocco, Egypt, India, Iran, Xinjiang and much more along the way. The sweep and scope and depth of the project is just incredible; it’s an awesome achievement.

Author of many other acclaimed cookbooks, including Modern Mezze, Mediterranean Street Food, Savory Baking from the Mediterranean and Lebanese Cuisine, Helou is a gifted cultural guide who tells a great story. (I’ve been following her on Instagram for years; it’s always lovely to see what she’s cooking and eating as she travels around the world.)

Lebanese fatayer, spinach-filled pastries

The most unexpected story in Feast tells of her quest to taste a roasted camel hump, which begins when she’s invited to take part in a feast in the United Arab Emirates in which a roasted hump would be the centerpiece. It doesn’t work out for her as hoped: Separated from the main part of the feast with the other women, Helou is disappointed to be served some “positively nasty” camel meat rather than the hump, which is reserved for the men. The story ends a couple years later, with Helou purchasing her own baby camel in Dubai, having it slaughtered, massaging it with saffron, rose water and the Arabian spice mixture b’zar (cumin, coriander, cardamom, ginger, turmeric, etc.) and roasting it herself.

“The hump looked gorgeous as it came out of the oven,” she writes, “crisp and golden. Both the fat and meat were scrumptious — the baby camel must have been milk-fed. The meat was pale and tender and the fat very soft . . . . Apparently, people also eat the fat from the hump raw. I will have to try that next time around.” She then proceeds to offer advice for buying your own hump to roast, along with instructions to follow her recipe for Baby Goat Roast, subbing the camel hump for the baby goat.

Most of the stories and recipes are, fortunately for those of us who actually want to cook from the book, much more accessible than camel hump.

Among the dishes I’ve made (so far) and loved were a Chicken Tagine with Olives and Preserved Lemons; a classic Tabbouleh, Kafta (lamb skewers) that I served as Helou suggested with a beautiful Onion and Parsley Salad; savory, spinach-filled pastries called Fatayer; the Turkish salted yogurt drink Ayran, an Indian Mango Lassi and Syrian/Lebanese Rice Pudding. A year ago I bought a rakweh (Turkish coffee pot) and started making Turkish coffee according to the slapdash instructions on the coffee package. Helou’s primer on brewing qahwa (bringing water to a boil, stirring in coffee and sugar, reducing heat, simmering till it foams up, removing from heat and repeating once or twice till no more foam happens), takes it to another level. What a gift!

The Chicken Tagine recipe, which called for four poussin or Cornish hens rather than a generic chicken, required a bit of adjustment. I found Cornish hens, but they weighed nearly two pounds each, and eight pounds would have been far too much for the six to eight people the recipe was meant to serve. I punted and used a chicken instead, cutting it into four (two whole legs and two airline breasts, with wings attached).

Ayran (right), a Turkish salty yogurt drink, and Indian Mango Lassi

The dish was wonderful, and from it I learned so much about Moroccan tagines — the interesting thing about which, writes Helou, “is that instead of browning the meat at the beginning as with most other stews, the browning is done at the end after the meat has cooked and the cooking liquid has evaporated to leave only a silky sauce.”

That silky sauce happens thanks to a lot of finely grated onion and spices that melt over the course of the cooking time into a savory blanket.

I’d had no idea that there were four different types of Moroccan tagines depending on the seasonings used. Nor that many Moroccan home cooks cook the tagine in a regular pot, then transfer it to the beautiful ceramic tagine dish that gives the stew its name to serve at the table. “It is mostly street food vendors and rural folk who cook their tagines in earthenwear tagines,” she writes.

I found myself craving the dish again a few nights ago, when I stared into my (emptying) pantry and spotted a jar each of green Castelvetrano and black Kalamata olives — perfect for the dish. This time I cut the chicken into smaller pieces (leg, thigh, breasts cut in two with wing still attached to one half): even nicer.

Kudos for Helou’s pita bread recipe, which leads off the book. Not that I was able to test it word-for-word: in the time of corona scarcity, I didn’t have and couldn’t get the right kind of yeast. (The book calls for instant yeast everywhere yeast is called for, it seems; I only had active dry yeast.) But Helou’s method — more useful than others I found as I searched far and wide — did serve as seriously useful inspiration when I was developing my own recipe for half-whole-wheat, half-white pita bread.

It’s that kind of authoritativeness that has had me reaching for Helou’s book again and again as I develop any kind of recipe with roots or inspiration in the Muslim world.

Anissa Helou’s Onion and Parsley Salad needed no tweaks.

There’s a caveat, though. As often as not, the recipes need tweaks, at best, or a lot of guesswork at worst. For a Hyderabadi Dumpukht Biryani, Helou has you marinate a princely amount of boneless lamb shoulder in a lot of yogurt, along with tenderizing green papaya (smart!) and spices. Are we meant to discard the yogurt when the meat goes into the pot? Who knows? Lots more yogurt goes in, so maybe not? If that’s the case, what a waste. I split the difference, shaking the yogurt marinade off most of the lamb pieces, but wound up with an epic fail anyway: There was way too much liquid, resulting in a drab and sodden mush, rather than the elegant, discreet rice grains that distinguish a well made biryani. I wound up picking the expensive lamb bits out of the inedible dish and making them into a soup the next day.

I came to understand pretty early on that rather than a book to precisely follow recipes from, Feast is a book to be inspired by, to learn from and to be guided by. So that even after the biryani fiasco, when Wylie decided to take on a kafta research project — finding and developing the best possible iteration of the Lebanese ground lamb skewers — I handed him Helou’s book. In the headnote for her recipe, she recalls going to the butcher shop in Beirut with her mother, who would carefully watch the butcher chop the meat for her kafta in order to make certain he used the right cuts (shoulder or leg). That inspired Wylie, after a decent version he had made with packaged pre-ground lamb from someone else’s recipe, to use hers, grinding his own meat from a leg of lamb. It was spectacular.

And when we plated the kafta with fabulous hummus, handmade pita and Helou’s Onion and Parsley salad, it transported us a million miles away from home.

There are so many more recipes and techniques I plan to explore in the book: Turkish meat boreks; scallion pancakes from China; a Saudi eggplant fatteh that’s said to be the Prophet Muhammad’s favorite dish; the Lord of Stuffed Vegetables; Moroccan meatballs with rice, harira and couscous with seven vegetables; Persian tadigh; a crab curry from Indonesia. I’ll soon be making up batches of her harissa and garam masala for my pantry.

And I’m eager to try out many of her desserts, once I can get the right ingredients. For now, here’s her Syrian/Lebanese Rice Pudding:

Helou even has a couple of recipes involving fresh, green almonds, answering a question I asked in a story last fall when they were in season.

To be sure, Feast is probably more a book for seasoned, confident cooks and armchair culinary travelers than for beginners who need to faithfully follow instructions. As for me, I’d buy it again in a heartbeat. And for friends who are ambitious, intrepid culinary adventurers, I will offer it as a gift.

Feast: Food of the Islamic World, by Anissa Helou, Ecco, 530 pages, $60

RECIPE: Chicken Tagine with Olives and Preserved Lemon

RECIPE: Kafta (Lebanese Lamb Skewers)

RECIPE: Anissa Helou’s Onion and Parsley Salad

RECIPE: Syrian/Lebanese Rice Pudding

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.

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

Freshly baked pita bread can happen in your very own oven

There’s nothing like pita bread straight from the oven to scoop up just-made hummus or baba ganoush, swish into a lentil soup, or to wrap around left-overs — drizzled with tahini and hot sauce and brightened with fresh herbs.  

It’s not difficult to make pita — or khobz in Arabic — even if you’re not a seasoned baker. And it’s super fun. There’s an incredible reward at the end, when you look into the oven and see those bad boys magically puff up into bready balloons. You can actually watch them inflate!

It’s a lovely, soul-sustaining project to cheer up a day when you’re stuck at home for, ahem, whatever reason. Fresh-baked pita freezes brilliantly, so you can save some for later — or zip some up in a plastic bag and freeze it for an at-risk friend or relative who can’t leave home for groceries. (They’ll be perfect with the soup you made for them!)

During the pita baking process, there is a lot of resting and rising and waiting between steps — perfect moments for whipping up that hummus or baba ganoush, or chopping the vegetables for soup.

We are big consumers of pita at our house, largely thanks to my own personal baba ganoush and hummus addiction. The pitas are usually store-bought, and much to Thierry and Wylie’s chagrin, I usually come home with the whole wheat ones — which honestly are usually more like chewing on particle board than eating bread. In any case, we really consider them vehicles for the dips.

Best is when I can make it up north to my favorite Lebanese bakery and buy the freshly made ones, still warm in their plastic bags. There I usually buy both white ones and whole wheat. The white ones are gloriously puffy, fluffy and delightful; the whole wheat pitas — while undeniably better than the mass-produced ones — are, I have to admit, on the punitive side.

Because pitas are so ubiquitous through the Levant, I kept imagining that they couldn’t be all that hard to make, and learning how was getting higher and higher on my bucket list. Mine could split the difference between white and whole wheat and go fifty-fifty. The pita of my dreams! Surely it was attainable.

A couple months ago, I took the pita plunge — reading everything reliable I could find and starting to play with recipes.

Many of the recipes that looked serious enough for me to want to try them required a stand mixer, which I don’t own. (I never wanted to develop recipes that require one because I don’t feel a stand mixer should be a required piece of kitchen equipment.) Very few of the promising recipes I found called for more than a token amount of whole wheat flour.

Looked as though I’d have to develop my own. To do that I began swapping out whole wheat flour for half of the all-purpose flour in a couple of different recipes, sometimes adding extra water to compensate. Claudia Roden’s method in The New Book of Middle Eastern Food almost got me there, but the dough didn’t rise quite as much as I wanted it to.

Finally, I turned to Anissa Helou’s award-winning Feast: Food of the Islamic World, hopeful about Helou’s method because she has written such wonderful baking books (I love Sweet Middle East and have Savory Baking from the Mediterranean on my wish-list). Also, because pita bread (khobz) is literally the very first recipe in Helou’s 500-plus-page tome, I knew she must take her khobz very, very seriously.

Helou’s recipe calls for instant (fast-acting) yeast, and I wanted to use active dry yeast. (This may be a TMI situation, but active dry yeast keeps for a long time, and I wanted to develop a recipe that could be made without dashing to the supermarket; if you keep active dry yeast, flour, olive oil and salt on hand — which is so easy to do — you’ve got the makings for pita.) So I had to veer from her first few steps, and also had to find the right flour to water ratio.

But I was able to keep the heart of Helou’s method, the part that gets us from shaggy ball of dough to rolled-out discs ready to go into the oven. From Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook’s book Zahav, I borrowed the excellent idea of baking the breads on inverted baking sheets preheated in the very hot oven.

Watching the pitas puff inside the oven is the first payoff.

None of the recipes I consulted warned of what can happen if you let the baked pita breads cool completely before storing leftover breads: They can get stiff and crackly, not what you want. I added Roden’s suggestion to put them in a plastic bag as they come out of the oven, keeping them soft and pliable.

I hope you dive in and give this pita project a go; the process of kneading and rolling and waiting for the dough to rise is so wonderfully tactile, giving such a lovely rhythm to a day spent at home.

And the first payoff — that gasp of delight when you peer inside the oven and see the pita breads poofing up like balloons — is so much fun. The second payoff? That’s when you pull the first one apart and taste it — and marvel that it actually came out of your very own oven. Quick — get the baba ganoush!

OK, OK, enough lallygagging — to the recipe!

RECIPE: Pita Bread

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

Ring in the new year with soulful Persian soups starring The Black Eyed Peas

If you live in the American South, you know that black-eyed peas bring good luck for New Year’s. Hence the tradition, down where we live, of eating “Texas caviar” — sort of a cold bean salad starring the world’s cutest legume, along with chopped tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapeños, onions and such, dressed in vinaigrette.

And yet the chill of January is when we crave hot, soul-sustaining, legume-happy soups.

At Cooks Without Borders lately we’ve been in the throes of a Middle-Eastern obsession, which largely consists of poring through a few enticing cookbooks on our shelves that we hadn’t yet explored, and madly, impulsively, intrepidly cooking from them.

Two are titles by Claudia Roden, the award-winning Cairo-born, London-residing author: The New Book of Middle-Eastern Food (first published in 1968, and revised in 2000) and Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, & Lebanon (2006).

Taste of Persia, Naomi Duguid’s culinary romp through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran and Kurdistan had been beckoning to us from the shelf since it was published three years ago, begging to be cooked from. We’d also been itching to explore Salma Hage’s monumental tome, The Lebanese Kitchen (2012), Uri Scheft’s Breaking Breads: A New World of Israeli Baking (2016) and Anissa Helou’s charming book of desserts, Sweet Middle East (2015).

A few years back (following a years-long Yotam Ottolenghi crush) we fell head-over-heels in love with Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking, by Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook (and we wrote about it here and here).

Batoursh, a Syrian dish that layers lamb cooked with onion and pine nuts with eggplant and yogurt, from Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.

These days, Lebanese and other Middle-Eastern flavors have been front-of-mind again. Wylie, who is now on The Cooks Without Borders R&D and Development Team (lol), graduated from Occidental College in May, and we’re thrilled to have him at home as he’s job-hunting, having earned a degree in Diplomacy and World Affairs. His girlfriend, Nathalie (who also graduated this spring from Oxy, in Psychology), is staying with her parents in Qatar, as she applies to grad school. It turns out Wylie has the cooking gene, not to mention a passion for it, and that passion is perhaps not coincidentally (as Nathalie’s mom is Lebanese and her father is Syrian) expressing itself in a craving for babaganouj and warm pita bread and spice-laden lamb dishes and baklava, and an irrepressible urge to learn how to cook all of it.

So we’ll have plenty of delicious recipes coming to Cooks Without Borders in the near future, from all over the Middle East — a region whose culinary borders are rather more porous than its political ones.

But for now, we celebrate New Year’s — the Julian calendar’s New Year’s, that is. And that brings us back to soups that feature black-eyed peas. We turned up two of them last week, both Persian, both easy to make and both outstanding.

Ash-e-reshteh, a beans-and-greens soup that celebrates the Persian New Year. Naomi Duguid’s version, from Taste of Persia, features black-eyed peas.

The first, from Taste of Persia, traditionally celebrates Persian New Year, Nou-Roz, which is commemorated not in the dead of winter, but (more poetically) on the spring equinox. It’s called “New Year’s Bean Soup” in the book; the subtitle Duguid supplies, ash-e-reshteh, is the name it goes by in Iran.

As the soup is bursting with fresh herbs and greens along with all those soulful legumes and spices and the noodles that give it the reshteh part of its name, it seems to us perfect for the moment. That it happens to be plant-based is a big bonus: It is vegetarian as is, and vegan if you do without the optional yogurt garnish.

The toppings don’t stop at yogurt, though: There are also fried onions, mint oil and saffron water.

We also found a number of other versions of the soup that we can’t wait to try, such as one from Samin Nosrat published in The New York Times last spring. Another, published in 2012 in Saveur is care of Anissa Helou. They all build on greens and beans in varying combos, with piles of different fragrant herbs (fresh mint, dill, cilantro, parsley) going into to each, they all sounds positively dreamy.

More on that later, no doubt. For now, we are enjoying Duguid’s take. Here’s the recipe we adapted:

The second soup, Ab Ghooshte Fasl (Iranian Bean and Vegetable Soup), is one we adapted from a recipe in Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.

Ab Ghooshte Fasl (Iranian Bean and Vegetable Soup) is adapted from Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.

Roden calls for either starting with either lamb or beef as a base; we chose lamb. The only real prep involved is slicing an onion, chopping some parsley, dicing an eggplant and a couple of bell peppers and cutting a few potatoes in half, but the delicious effect is outsized: This one’s going straight into our repertoire.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do; here’s the recipe:

With that, we’d like to say happy New Year from our family at Cooks Without Borders to yours. Thank you for reading, thank you for engaging with us, thank you for returning after we disappeared and came back; we greatly appreciate it and look forward to serving you and feeding you many dishes, stories and photos that we hope will inspire you in the coming year. We wish you a healthy, peaceful, love-filled and delicious 2020!

Summer's most glorious make-ahead dessert: Cardamom-scented milk custard with apricot gel and crushed pistachio

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My friend Greg Stinson is one of the best cooks I know. Part of it is his impeccable taste. He also has a finely tuned instinct for what flavors will shimmer brightest right now, this second, this season. And he knows what flavors will sing together.

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And so when he was shopping for a dinner whose dessert would be cool, soft cups of cardamom-scented milk custard (that much he knew) and he happened on some blushingly beautiful ripe apricots, Greg's instinct kicked in and he took the custard idea from good to great. He'd capture that wonderful fresh apricot flavor in a gel on top of the custard, one that would be soft enough to ooze saucily into the cool, lightly sweet, exotically perfumed pudding. He divined just the right garnish, too: crushed toasted pistachios. 

How lucky am I to have Greg as a friend? Lucky indeed! That dessert was the captivating finish to dinner at the home of Greg and his husband Tim Simmonds a couple weeks ago.  It began with flatbreads (handmade by Greg) topped with juicy slices of sun-warmed tomatoes from Tim's garden. Next came beautifully spiced chicken kebabs, saffron rice (with a nice bit of crunchy tadig on the bottom!) and a lovely salad of chick peas, okra, tomatoes, eggplant and onion. It was all wonderful. 

And then those custards: so cool, lightly sweet, creamy and rich (but not too), just amazing with the vibrant apricot saucy gel that tasted like a sun-drenched orchard. On top of it, they were gorgeous in their green glasses on Greg and Tim's table.

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I know what you're thinking. Yes, if you're lucky you can still find apricots in the market. The dessert, which channels the flavors of Turkey or Tunisia with its cardamom scent, pistachio crunch and apricot exclamation point, is ideal for making head – perfect for a laid-back late summer dinner party. 

It took Greg a couple of tries to nail the dessert, and not surprisingly he didn't measure things or write down what he did. "But Greg!" I protested, "this could be a smashing Cooks Without Borders dessert!" He walked me through what he did and the approximate amounts he used. I took a couple stabs at home and the recipe is now ready for you:

The custard – and eggless one – is easy to make, and sets up quickly in the fridge. Pour it into pretty heat-proof cups or ramekins. Then quarter the apricots – no need to peel them – and cook them down with a little sugar and fizzy prosecco till they're soft and translucent. A spin in the food processor and a trip through a fine sieve and you've got your gel to pour over the custards. Let them chill till after dinner, then top them with toasted crushed pistachios and serve. 

What can we say but three cheers for Greg?! 

Did someone say 'butterflied leg of lamb'? Fire up the grill for a dreamy Mediterranean dinner

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Border-free cooks, this may be the perfect summer dinner – especially if you're in the mood for Mediterranean flavors. Grilled butterflied leg of lamb, with asparagus spears thrown over the coals at the same time. A couple of fabulous salads to start, from the James Beard Award-winning cookbook Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking. A gorgeous tart to make the most of sweet-and-ripe summer stone fruit. 

It's ideal for laid-back entertaining (eat outside!) as nearly everything can be done ahead. 

Friends were coming over last night, and I knew we'd want to relax and hang out, maybe have some nibbles before dinner and a glass or three of rosé before I lighted the charcoal on my old-fashioned Weber. A butterflied leg of lamb on the grill sounded about the right speed; I've been craving summer's char. 

Flipping through Zahav, I happened upon a couple of salads that spoke to me.

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The first was quinoa, pea and mint tabbouleh. Irresistible, right? So smart of chef Michael Solomonov (who wrote the book with Steven Cook) to swap quinoa for the traditional bulgur wheat, and toss in peas to play with the mint. No need to use fresh peas when frozen ones (so stress-free) do just fine. 

The dish was as wonderful as I'd hoped – and then some.  I'm going to make it again, pronto. The recipe serves 4 to 6, but next time I'll probably double it so I have some left over for the next day. So good! I can't wait for you to try it and tell me what you think.

I served that as a first course before the lamb, but first we had nibbles: some marinated gigante beans I found at the olive bar at Whole Foods (speared with toothpicks – crazy, right?); spicy pickled okra (also from the olive bar); roasted salted cashews; and Castelvetrano olives (my faves).

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But the star nibble was charred eggplant salad from the Zahav cookbook. To make it, you char halved eggplants on a grill or stovetop grill – I used the cast-iron grill that fits right on my stovetop – cut-side down, until the flesh is "like pudding" in texture. It took a long time – about 45 minutes. Alternatively, you can do it under a broiler (cut-side up). Scoop out the flesh (discarding the charred exterior), and use a spoon to beat it to creaminess with minced raw garlic and olive oil; then you stir in salt. The recipe called for topping it with half a cup of chopped fresh parsley, but that turned out to be too much; I cut it down to a quarter cup, stirring half of it into the salad and using the rest as garnish on top – just right.

It was pretty delicious – the proportions were otherwise perfect – and I served it with triangles of whole-wheat pita bread toasted in the oven. I felt it would be even better with a zing of acid, so I squeeze in half a lemon, and it went from delicious to dreamy. 

If you own the cookbook, you might notice that the photo with the eggplant salad recipe is more reddish in color than mine turned out, flecked with something that looks like small bits of roasted red pepper or tomato. Hmmm. Very intriguing. There is a variation offered: adding a cup of tehina sauce turns the salad into baba ganoush (eager to try!). But no other variation is mentioned. It seems like a recipe ripe for improvisation. 

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The timing on this dinner is very easy, as you can made the eggplant salad, tabbouleh and dessert in advance, letting the lamb bask lazily in its marinade (olive oil, red wine vinegar, crushed garlic, chopped mint and cilantro, salt and pepper). Rather than keeping the lamb tied up after it's bones have been removed, you unroll it so it's flattish – that way it absorbs more marinade, cooks more quickly and gets more charred surface. The marinade, meanwhile, is one you can play with, depending on the flavors you want – maybe rosemary and/or thyme instead of mint and cilantro, or more or less garlic, maybe Aleppo pepper or cayenne rather than black pepper. You get the idea. You can marinate it for a couple of hours, or overnight.

Once you're ready to grill and the coals are hot, wipe the marinade off the meat (be sure to bring the meat to room temp for about an hour first) and spread the lamb flat on the grill. Toss some asparagus spears in a little olive oil and salt and throw them on the grill next to the lamb after the lamb has been on there two or three minutes. Keep the grill covered to prevent flare-ups, and flip the meat after 6 or 8 minutes. You'll want to keep an eye on, as it the cooking time can range from 12 to about 22 minutes total depending on how hot the coals are, the size of the cut and how done you like it. If you're going for medium-rare, aim for an internal temperature of about 130. But don't worry if it goes past that – even if it's done to medium it's really good. 

Got it? Here's the recipe:

Once it's done, be sure to let it rest for at least 10 minutes, so it's as juicy and tender as can be. Go ahead and serve the tabbouleh as a first course (or whatever you've dreamed up – the tabbouleh is also really good with the lamb!). By the time you're done, the lamb will have rested long enough. Slice it (across the grain), laying the slices on a platter and pouring over them any juices that have collected on the plate as it rested.  Oh, man – you are in for a treat! Serve it with the asparagus. If you're tired of asparagus, you could just as well have done zucchinis quartered lengthwise on the grill – that would be great with it, too.

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Stone fruit tart with thyme

"We should have started with this!" That's usually Thierry's refrain come dessert-time; he has a sweet tooth. I was really, really happy with the way this tart – which starred nectarines, black plums and apricots – turned out.

OK. I'm not going to go on and on about the tart; instead I'll tell you more about it in a separate post. For now, here's the recipe:

Hummus fans rejoice: Introducing an amazing, easy cheater version

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I lied: I told you this post would be more about gribiche. But we need to interrupt our gribiche coverage to bring you breaking news on the hummus front: Cooks Without Borders has figured out how to make pretty amazing hummus from canned chick peas. 

No joke! 

If you're among those who caught hummus fever as chef Michael Solomonov's recipe for Israeli hummus tore up the internets last fall, or fell in love with Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi's recipe in their brilliant cookbook Jerusalem (the excellent cooking blog Food 52 featured it a few years ago), you know how earth-shattering this is.

For those who are just catching up with it, here is the hummus situation in a garbanzo shell: Since time immemorial, creating hummus as smooth and fluffy as what you get in a great Lebanese, Israeli or other middle-Eastern restaurant involved soaking chick peas (aka garbanzo beans) overnight, simmering them for an hour and a half or two hours and removing their skins (can you imagine?!) before puréeing them. Sheesh! The brilliance of Ottolenghi's technique (which he apparently didn't invent, and which Solomonov also uses) is that it uses baking soda during the cooking process to soften the chick peas' skins so they don't need to be removed. 

Home cooks, meanwhile, who want to make a quick, easy hummus that's always at least as good as what you buy in a plastic tub at the supermarket, could simply purée chick peas in the food processor or blender with some garlic, lemon juice, tahini and salt, maybe a little olive oil. A hummus like that is fine, but never killer. It never has that amazing texture and deep flavor that a great one has.

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I've been playing for the last few weeks with hummus made the Ottolenghi/Solomonov way, and I'll post about it when I'm ready to draw some conclusions. (There's more hummus to be made and tasted first!) But as I play, I can't help but wonder: Can we use this baking soda trick to radically improve the super-quick and easy version from canned garbanzos?

Yes, we can!

All you do is rinse the canned beans, simmer them for just five minutes in water and a little baking soda, and toss 'em in the food processor with some tahini sauce you've made while the garbanzos simmered. I found it pretty incredible that the skins could be softened enough to make a difference in just five minutes, but there you go. 

Was our cheater version as smooth as hummus made using dried-and-soaked garbanzos you simmer for an hour with baking soda? Well, if not, it was certainly close. It had been a week since I made a more involved one, but Thierry couldn't tell the difference: The cheater hummus was light, fluffy and soft, maybe more velvety than satiny. The flavor was very good, if not as extraordinary as the more involved way. It was terrific enough so that I'll certainly do it again if I'm pressed for time and want hummus. 

Want to try?

OK, toss whole garlic cloves (you can leave their skins on) in the food processor with salt and lemon juice. Purée briefly to chop the garlic, and let the mixture steep 10 minutes while you boil the garbanzos. Strain the solids from the lemon-garlic-salt juice, then put the juice back in the processor. Add tahini, pulse, then slowly pour in ice water through the tube as the motor runs. 

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That gives you very light, lovely tahini sauce. Now add the garbanzos plus a little cumin (if you like that flavor), purée a couple minutes till very smooth, plate and garnish with olive oil and paprika – and more, if you like. I usually keep it simple, but you can get creative with parsley, whole garbanzo beans and such. 

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Yippeee! Who says cheaters never prosper?

I think I can improve it still further flavor-wise (I'm going to play with adding more tahini, for instance). Once I have the very best version possible of the cheater hummus and the more involved hummus, we'll do a side-by-side taste-test. 

Meanwhile, I wanted to give you this recipe right away as it is very acceptable – way better than the stuff you'd buy in a tub.

Very good indeed with pita toasted or heated in the oven, and crudités. Who says cheaters never prosper?