Zucchini and friends: late summer’s greatest plate-mates

By Leslie Brenner

Nature has a remarkable ability to create harmony on a plate. That’s why if you stick with what’s emphatically in season, it’s hard to go wrong.

This time of year, zucchini, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, okra and corn are bountiful in American markets and gardens, and they’re incredibly easygoing. Throw them together in nearly any combination in pan or on grill, their flavors start singing, and everybody wins.

You might think of zucchini as their bandleader. Cartoonishly prolific in late summer, the affable summer squash plays well with everyone. So do tomato, its umami-packed pal, and peppers, whether sweet or hot. They’re all Meso-American in origin, as is corn. Zucchini is a cultivar of Cucurbito pepo, which gardeners have been growing in parts of what’s now Texas and all over Mexico for 8,000 to 10,000 years.

Okra is in peak season as well. Not a native to the Americas, its appearance here was diasporic; it was grown by in the Carolinas by enslaved African people. Today, stateside, it’s mostly grown in Florida and Texas.

Eggplant is also an immigrant to America, having traveled here — and to the Mediterranean — from Asia. Botanically it’s a cousin to tomatoes and peppers, all being nightshades.

So, how to throw them together deliciously?

Try a shrimp sauté with zucchini, tomato and corn, like the one shown above. It shows best with wild shrimp from the Gulf, which the Meso-Americans would also have enjoyed. Our recipe includes serrano chiles, crisply grilled okra and lots of cilantro, but it’s endlessly riffable. Recently I skipped the okra, swapped the serranos for sweet, mild red bell pepper, and used fresh basil in place of cilantro — giving it a Cal-Italian vibe.

Shrimp sauté with zucchini, corn, red bell pepper and basil

RECIPE: Shrimp Sauté with Texas Veg

Whether you’re doing a shrimp sauté (chicken works great too) with this group of veg, or just throwing the vegetable pals together in a pan, herbs and spices can add pizzazz and depth. Besides cilantro and basil, thyme, parsley, marjoram, oregano work great with these guys.

Oregano is front-and-center in one of my all-time favorite dishes by Yotam Ottolenghi, Stuffed Zucchini with Pine Nut Salsa. Cherry tomatoes and lemon zest add bright exclamation points. Enriched with egg and rounded out with breadcrumbs, it makes a fine main course, as well as a spectacular accompaniment to grilled lamb or chicken. The dish may have been born across the pond, but it’s very much at home on either side of it.

RECIPE: Ottolengi’s Stuffed Zucchini with Pine Nut Salsa

Zucchini and friends, Mediterranean-style

What if eggplant is one of the friends? Think Mediterranean, and reach for a roasted ratatouille.

Why roasted? Disenchanted with watery, soggy renditions of the French favorite, I thought maybe sending the eggplant, peppers, zucchini and garlic into the oven for a spell would deepen their flavors and keep them more distinct.

It did indeed, and now I’d never make ratatouille any other way.

It’s a delightful dish for summer-into-fall.

RECIPE: Roasted Ratatouille

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Here are more zucchini recipes we think you’ll enjoy:

RECIPE: Melted Zucchini with Pine Nuts and Basil

RECIPE: Raw Zucchini Salad with Green Olives, Mint and Pecorino

RECIPE: Barry’s Insanely Delicious Zucchini Fritters

RECIPE: Camarón con Fideos de Calabacitas

RECIPE: Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs

RECIPE: Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken

RECIPE: Warm Summer Salad without Borders

RECIPE: Chicken and Lamb Couscous

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Paris Summer Food Games: An artichoke vinaigrette puts France at your fingertips

By Leslie Brenner

[Editor’s note: This is one in a series of articles about dishes suited to watching and celebrating the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics.]

The French aren’t famous for eating with their fingers, but their approach to artichokes is a notable exception. Pull a leave off, dip the base in sauce (if the sauce is served on the side), scrape the base with your teeth and eat — that’s as French as it is American.

And because artichauts à la vinaigrette can be made ahead, chilled and then eaten cold (with your fingers!), they’re perfect for so many summer endeavors, from picnics and potlucks to having friends for drinks and apps, to snacking in front of the TV during the Paris Summer Olympics.

Our recipe has you pour the vinaigrette over the artichokes while they’re warm, but you could just as easily chill the boiled artichokes unadorned, and serve the vinaigrette separately, for dipping.

Need a quick primer on how to trim them for cooking? Find it in this article. And here’s the recipe:

RECIPE: Artichokes Vinaigrette

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READ: “Leeks ravigote, trending in France, belongs on your TV table this Olympic summer”

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Tangy, umami-ful and infinitely riffable, this cabbage salad (vegan or not!) hits all the right notes

By Leslie Brenner

Cabbage, as the New York Times proclaimed in a story in March, has become the “darling of the culinary world.” At restaurants around the country, you can find it charred, sauced, braised, stuffed with ’nduja, set on taleggio fondue, drizzled with tahini, basted with kelp butter, filled with smoked fish.

To me, a head of cabbage in the fridge — whether Napa, or red or standard green — is a cruciferous insurance policy that’s particularly valuable in the summer. Unlike ephemeral lettuce, which wilts if you look at it sideways, cabbage is always there for you, cooking not required.

Cabbage salads are wonderful for so many reasons. To begin with, they’re substantial enough to be a standalone lunch. They also take well to getting dressed up — and they hold their dressing really well without sogging out.

Of course you could make a perfectly serviceable cole slaw, but why not live a little, and really take that cabbage to town?

Recently my family has flipped over a cabbage salad dreamt up by my son Wylie. The idea at the heart of it is a tangy dressing based on lime juice and miso, with sesame oil, a little heat from gochujang and plenty of shredded fresh ginger. Toss that with a lot of shredded cabbage — of any kind (Napa, green cabbage, red cabbage), along with with sliced celery, red bell pepper and fresh herbs, whether cilantro or Italian parsley, plus scallions or red onion.

We usually include some kind of protein — usually tuna, tofu or chicken — and enjoy it as lunch-in-a-bowl. Or skip the protein, and call it a side dish.

It’s infinitely adaptable! Feel like finishing it with sesame seeds? That adds pizzazz. Or maybe you want a little more crunch: Go for chopped toasted cashews. You can’t go wrong.

Looking for something fresh to bring to a picnic or potluck? This travels well, and its gorgeous colors make it the life of the party.

Red Napa cabbage

Designing the salad

Your choice of cabbage determines the texture, look and crunch. If you’d like it green with lovely texture, use Napa cabbage. Regular green cabbage, a little sturdier, offers more crunch. You might use a combo of Napa and red cabbage. Or entirely red cabbage — that works, too. One day I found some gorgeous organic red Napa cabbage — it was brilliant in this.

Wylie’s Convertible Salad, made with Napa cabbage, red cabbage and tuna, finished with nigella seeds and toasted sesame seeds

Protein-wise, there are many ways to go. The first time Wylie made the salad, he included a can of flaked tuna. Salmon would work too — whether it’s leftover from dinner, or you open a can. Or sardines!

As its inspiration was California-style Chinese chicken salad, it’s particularly appealing with shredded chicken. Harbor a head of cabbage in your crisper, and whenever you find yourself with leftover rotisserie chicken — or any leftover cooked chicken — you’ve got a great match.

Lately I’m loving it with tofu, as I often want a satisfying vegan lunch. Pressed tofu — also a great thing to keep in the fridge — is super nice in it, cut into strips. For a different mood, extra-firm tofu adds nice softness, and those little pillows pick up the dressing so nicely.

The salad, made with extra-firm tofu, red cabbage and scallions, and finished with cashews

Ready, set, slice

Yes, there’s quite a bit of slicing involved. Look at it as a great opportunity to practice your knife skills. Or maybe you have a mandoline? Grab that cabbage and slice away — you’ll be through it in a flash (watch your fingers!).

RECIPE: Wylie’s Convertible Cabbage Salad

May many of your salad days be cabbage days.

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Greatest vegetable rehabilitation ever: Brussels sprouts' 23-year rise to culinary power

By Leslie Brenner

[Updated Dec. 22, 2022]

“Brussels sprouts are never going to win any popularity contests.”

That was the dire prediction, printed in The Los Angeles Times in 1999, of its then-Food Editor, Russ Parsons. If you happen to be a Gen Zer, it may shock you to learn that Brussels sprouts were not always the most glamorous members of the vegetable kingdom. Parsons continued:

“They’re the weak member of the vegetable pack, the one everyone likes to pick on. Brussels sprouts are weird-looking, like miniature cabbages. Maybe that’s why they’re usually shoved away in some dark corner of the produce market. Unlike broccoli, which is also weird-looking but seems to be in your face every time you turn around, they’ll never gain acceptance merely through familiarity.”

Two decades later, Brussels sprouts — those ping-pong-ball-sized upstarts of the Brassica oleracea family — are the darlings of, well, just about every omnivore in America. They’re so popular and menu-ubiquitous that no one under a certain age would probably even wonder whether they were ever not a thing.

What’s the explanation for the once lowly vegetable’s meteoric rise?

Most brassica-watchers would point to David Chang, the chef who founded the Momofuku empire that began in New York City in 2004 with the opening of the first Momofuku Noodle Bar. On its menu were Brussels sprouts that Chang pan-roasted with bacon then tossed with puréed kimchi. “Every single table ordered them,” he told GQ magazine in 2009. “It was ridiculous.”

“Cook the shit out of them; just don’t turn them to charcoal.”

He also told the magazine the secret to making them not just palatable, but crave-able: “Cook the shit out of them; just don’t turn them to charcoal.”

Brussels sprouts also made a splash, in a different form, a few years later at his second place, Momofuku Saam Bar. There they were fried and tossed with pickled Thai and Korean chiles, fish sauce, garlic and mint, and topped with fried Rice Krispies. Recipes for both were included in Chang and Peter Meehan’s Momofuku: A Cookbook, published in 2009.

Three years later, Brussels sprouts’ rise to culinary glory was achieved; in fact, it looked like a revolution. “Brussels sprouts’ transformation from maligned cafeteria gross-out fare to foodie luminary is complete,” is the way a Slate article by L.V. Anderson put it in 2012. “Trendy New York restaurants gussy them up with pig fat and sell them by the tiny $8 plateful; David Chang’s Brussels sprouts at New York’s Momofuku were so popular he had to take them off the menu for his cooks’ well-being.”

I remember the moment well: I had moved from Los Angeles, where we’d been enjoying Brussels sprouts for years, to Dallas, where they were just then hitting every restaurant in town — usually roasted with a dose of sugar and a good deal of bacon.

Though Chang certainly did more than anyone to popularize the B-sprout, by no means was he the first to fall in love with them.

From Brussels and Burgundy to Birds Eye and bistros: a quickie B-sprout history

According to the late British cookbook author and food historian Jane Grigson, who wrote more than anything else I could turn up about the history of Brussels sprouts, the vegetable’s past is somewhat mysterious. “It seems they were being grown around Brussels in the Middle Ages; market regulations of 1213 mention them,” she wrote in Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book, published in 1978. She continued:

“They were ordered for two wedding feasts of the Burgundian court at Lille in the 15th century . . . . Then silence. They do not seem to have caught on in Burgundy . . . Nor did they appear in French and English gardens until the end of the 18th century.”

Across the pond in America, Thomas Jefferson planted them in his garden at Monticello in 1812.

In the intervening century and a half, not much to report. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s in Southern California, Brussels sprouts made frequent appearances on our dinner table, having been pulled from a Birds Eye box in the freezer and boiled whole. Most people I knew did not enjoy them; I was an outlier, who loved their little tiny-cabbage-ness.

My husband Thierry tells me they were not so reviled and stigmatized when he was a child in France. Perhaps they were treated with more care there. A spin through Julia Child’s 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, offers no fewer than eight recipes: braised in butter; braised with chestnuts; browned with cheese; chopped, with cream; creamed; custard mold; and gratinéed with cheese sauce. Volume II, published nine years later, didn’t include a single B-sprout recipe.

They certainly were popular in England. “The great success of Brussels sprouts in this country has been in modern times,” wrote Grigson. “We serve them now with beef, game, poultry, and especially with the Christmas turkey, when they are often embellished with chestnuts. She went on to offer nine ways to cook them.

Could they have been a thing early on at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, which opened in Berkeley, California, in 1971? They make no appearance in the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, published in 1982 (the Washington Post, incidentally, has called it one of the earliest restaurant cookbooks). There is, however, a fabulous recipe in the book that followed eight years later — Chez Panisse Cooking. In fact it’s the recipe that made me fall hard for the vegetable: Brussels Sprouts Leaves Cooked with Bacon and Mirepoix. Yes, bacon!

Brussels Sprouts Cooked with Bacon and Mirepoix, prepared from a recipe in ‘Chez Panisse Cooking’

That recipe has been a fixture on my Thanksgiving table every year since.

The bacon in the light and elegant Chez Panisse dish comes in the form of pancetta, which gets diced and sweated with the mirepoix (diced carrot, onion and celery) before adding Brussels sprouts leaves which get sort of steamed; a hit of white wine vinegar at the end gives beautiful balance.

A pre-Chang boost

Russ Parsons — the California cook who doubted their popularity potential — was actually an influential Brussels sprouts cheerleader a few years before Momofuku’s Chang started charring them and umamifying the bejeezus out of them. Parsons gave his legions of L.A. readers a full chemical explanation for why the hapless veg fell into such disrepute: People overcooked them, producing hydrogen sulfide — a sulfurous stink, and they turned a sickly color thanks to a transformation of their chlorophyll. “To get around it,” he suggested, “try treating Brussels sprouts with the respect they deserve. It takes a little more care in preparation and a little more attention to detail, but the payoff will be amazing. . . . "

Following instructions on how to prep and steam or blanch them, he added:

“What you do with them after that is up to you, of course. They’re delicious simply dressed with olive oil and a little chopped garlic. But they also are assertive enough to hold their own in the company of more emphatic flavors. I really like to pair Brussels sprouts with smoky things like bacon. And when you’re using bacon, it’s usually a good idea to add something sharp, like vinegar, to cut the fat.

Look at it as making a he-man out of a scorned vegetable. Call it the Brussels sprout make-over.”

Bacon and acid: That’s the Momofuku B-sprout blueprint right there. The fact that Chang pushed everything so far — the char, the bacon, the exuberant flavors of chiles and fish sauce — made his two dishes prime for borrowing by chefs all around the country. And there you have it: the cementing of Brussels Sprouts primacy.

Ottolenghi: a bit late to the sprout

Surprisingly, London’s superstar vegetable-loving chef and world-dominating cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi was somewhat late to the Brussels sprout game, which is odd considering the brassica’s longtime popularity in Britain. There’s not a single B-sprout recipe in Ottolenghi’s first, second or third books (published in 2008, 2010 and 2012). Finally, in Plenty More (2014), he offers instructions for Brussels Sprouts Risotto; Brussels Sprouts with Caramelized Garlic and Lemon Peel; and Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Pomelo and Star Anise.

I went wild for the Brussels Sprouts with Browned Butter and Black Garlic in his 2018 book Ottolenghi Simple, largely thanks to the black garlic’s serious umami and the creamy earthiness of tahini, all balanced by zingy lemon and herbs. So have our readers: Our adaptation was Cooks Without Borders’ fourth-most clicked on recipe in the last year.

Insalata di Cavotelli (Brussels sprouts salad) prepared from a recipe in the new cookbook from Via Carota

Now trending: B-sprouts salads

This season, Brussels sprouts are trending raw: They’re featured in two of this fall’s most exciting new cookbooks. The first, shown above, is from Via Carota — the new volume from Jody Williams and Rita Sodi’s beloved New York City restaurant, which is Cooks Without Borders first-ever Cookbook of the Year. Tossed with Via Carota’s signature dressing, plus julienned apple, pomegranate seeds and crumbly aged cheese, it’s spectacular.

The second is from Tanya Holland’s California Soul, in which the star of “Tanya’s Kitchen Table” on the Oprah Winfrey Network presents a recipe for Shaved Brussels Sprouts Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing. (I know, right?!) It’s one of our Best New Cookbooks of 2022.

And finally, here is a super-easy roasted number studded with pancetta. No thin-slicing or leaf removal necessary!

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Eight excellent eggplant expressions: These recipes coax the purple polyglots into off-the-charts deliciousness

Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato from ‘Falastin’ by Sami Tamimi

By Leslie Brenner

No one ever craves eggplant. (Do they?!) And yet eggplant — or aubergine, as it’s more mellifluously called on the east side of the pond — is an integral part of so many enticing dishes. Here are eight recipes that push those big, shiny lunks into the realm of the irresistible.

‘Falastin’ Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato

I fell in love with this recipe when I reviewed Falastin — Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley’s wonderful 2020 cookbook featuring the foods and flavors of Palastine. Because the dish requires a fat slice of ripe tomato on top of each lamb-and-beef patty, it’s the perfect time of year to make it: that moment when tomatoes are still in high season and eggplants are starting to beckon. Where’s our star player? A substantial slice of meltingly roasted eggplant sits under each meat patty. Spiced tomato sauce goes on top, the whole thing is baked to lusciousness and topped with herbs and toasted pine nuts.

I made it again a few nights ago, and it was so good I nearly fainted.

RECIPE: ‘Falastin’ Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato

A Magnificent Moussaka

If I had to choose only one way to eggplant for the rest of my days, it might well be this moussaka. Again, the eggplant consorts with lamb, tomato and spices — but in moussaka’s case it’s pulled together with rich, cheesy béchamel and a layer of potatoes. Our recipe, we venture to suggest, is hard to beat, which is why we call it Moussaka for the Ages.

RECIPE: Moussaka for the Ages

Bring on the Baba Ganoush

Late-summer-into-fall is the perfect time to throw whole eggplants onto the coals of a Weber grill or (almost as good) in your broiler. After their almost unimaginable transformation to smoky, velvety unctuousness, stir in tahini whisked to fluffiness with lemon juice and season with garlic. Then swipe a warm pita bread through one of the world’s most spectacular dips.

RECIPE: Baba Ganoush

Unreasonably Good Roasted Ratatouille

Traditional ratatouilles can be good (ish). Roast the vegetables to concentrate flavors and preserve textures, and it becomes outstanding. Now is prime season for all the relevant ingredients: Zucchini, bell peppers, tomato, and, you know, eggplant.

RECIPE: Roasted Ratatouille

Anjali Pathak’s Charred Baby Eggplants

Cute little purple-and-white-striped fairy tale eggplants (shown below) are ideal for these outrageously good Charred Baby Eggplants from Anjali Pathak’s The Indian Family Kitchen. The eggplants are melty-soft and the coconutty, spicy topping — with dabs of yogurt and delicate curry leaves — turns them into something super special. Find the curry leaves in a well stocked Indian grocery or supermarket, if you’re lucky enough to have one handy.

Fairytale eggplants can sometimes be found in farmers markets or Indian groceries.

Recipe: Anjali Pathak’s Charred Baby Eggplants

Zap ‘Em and Make ‘Em Dance!

Fairy tale or other baby eggplants are also perfect for the chef José Andrés’ crazy-delicious, umami-forward Dancing Eggplant, but everyday globe eggplants work great for this as well. Zap them in the microwave or grill them, slather them with a Japanese-inspired sauce and top with bonito flakes that seem to dance for an uncannily good snack or starter. We adapted it from Andrés’ 2019 book Vegetables Unleashed.

RECIPE: José Andrés’ Dancing Eggplant

Tangy Eggplant Salad with a Creamy, Rich Tahini Swirl

This glorious dish from Reem Kassis’ The Arabesque Table would surely take top prize at a mezze potluck, if such a thing exists. Pomegranate molasses is responsible for the zing.

RECIPE: ‘Arabesque Table’ Eggplant Salad with Tahini

A Dreamy Eggplant-Lentil Situation from Ottolenghi

Eighth (but by no means least!) is this fabulous vegetarian main course from one of our favorite cookbooks, Ottolenghi Simple. Pretty little green lentils from France share the spotlight in the dish with melty, roasty eggplant and charred cherry tomatoes. Tangy yogurt adds cool creaminess, and fresh oregano makes it interesting. Perfect weeknight dinner material heading into the fall.

RECIPE: Ottolenghi’s Puy Lentils & Eggplant

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For the best (and easiest!) ratatouille, capture the fabulous flavor of late summer by roasting those vegetables

By Leslie Brenner

Ratatouille — the famous French stew of zucchini, eggplant, peppers and tomatoes — always sounds so much better than it winds up tasting. It took an actual trip to France for me to discover how to make one that’s actually pretty fabulous.

One evening on my recent sojourn there, I needed to make dinner for my French in-laws, whose gastronomic leanings present a challenge. Belle-mère and beau-père, my parents-in-law, require old-fashioned food (yes, French —what else is there?), while belle-soeur, my sister-in-law, is vegan. My husband Thierry and I? We just want something good.

Thierry had the answer: ratatouille.

Visions of courgettes and aubergines (so much more beguiling than zucchini and eggplants!) danced in my head, which I lost for a moment, conjuring next an image of a gorgeous dish of perfectly cooked late-summer deep greens and reds and golds.

And then a panic-pause as reality set in: Come to think of it, I’d never had a ratatouille I’ve loved — including, but not limited to the ones produced in my own kitchen. Liked OK, yes. Loved, certainly not. The result, achieved on the stovetop and not terribly fun to make, is usually kind of watery, tomatoey and monotonous, with pillows of eggplant that skew either spongy or sodden.

Not seeing an alternative, and after all, it was late summer, I committed to the project and headed to the supermarché — actually, a lovely supermarché bio (organic) that had sprung up in the four years since I’d last visited the small seaside town, not far from Bordeaux. In any case, I’d buy some good crusty bread to sop it up; some great cheese post-ratatouille would probably be the highlight of the meal.

Necessity, I’d forgotten to remember, is the belle-mère of invention. And my belle-mère’s kitchen is not terribly well appointed. Therefore, failing to find a skillet large enough for ratatouille for five, I turned on the oven. I’d roast the eggplant, which might actually be an upgrade from cooking in a pan. (It was!) While I was at it, I’d roast a red bell pepper, and half of the zucchini, thereby saving room in the skillet. Why did I not roast all the zucchini? Because the oven was too tiny. (Go ahead and mentally insert that forehead-slap emoji.)

Onto the stove’s electric heat went the medium skillet, then a glug of olive oil, into which I pressed, once it was hot, the remaining zucchini. I seared those rounds nice and golden-brown, so they’d maybe keep their integrity and some texture (they did!), then set them aside. Next I sweated diced onion, adding garlic, which I’d minced with a paring knife sharp as a spoon. Ding! The eggplant was roasted. (No, I didn’t use a timer, but felt this story could use a sound effect.) A fork poked into the thick rounds found little resistance, so out it came — and hey, turned out the red bell pepper and those darling courgettes were done, too. While the onion softened, I cubed the soft eggplant (not a problem with the spoon-knife!), peeled and cut up the pepper.

Now the pressure was on: The table was set, the entrées (first courses in France) were in place. I don’t even remember what the entrée was, so focused was I on the plat. Maybe the starter was saucisson, a crowd favorite for all but my belle-soeur. The clock was ticking perilously close to 8:00. I felt grateful that my 95-year-old parents-in-law were an ocean apart from the early-bird proclivities of America’s seniors.

Into the pan went the aubergine, along with the courgettes (roasted and pan-seared) and peppers for a brief hot mingle together, and then a couple cut-up tomatoes. I tasted and seasoned, and wow — that ratatouille was pretty damn good! I sent it to the table decorated with torn basil.

The verdict? They loved it.

You might be saying, of course they said they loved it. They’re your family-in-law. But it was ratatouille: It’s never that good.

It was very good. Nicer than any I’d probably ever had, with better texture and deeper flavor: Late summer concentrated in a luscious, light, saucy, tasty, vegan, traditional French dish.

Ten days later, I was back home, and Thierry — who remained in France for a bit — texted me that he wanted the recipe. (Thierry, who doesn’t even cook!) I wrote him out a recipe. He cooked it. He loved it again, and texted photos — also something he never does with food.

Craving it suddenly (how weird!), I made it again — at home, in my own kitchen, with sharp knives and full-size oven, and weights and measures for recipe building. Also a practical tweak or two, such as all the zucchini gets roasted, along with the garlic. The resulting method is simplicity itself. Everything roasts for the same length of time, and altogether it’s quicker, easier and less fussy than the traditional way. And yes, more delicious.

Traditionalists may scoff. To them I say: dudes. Try this. A hundred euros says you’ll never go back.

RECIPE: Roasted Ratatouille

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

By Leslie Brenner

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

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

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

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

RECIPE: Vegan Spring Beauty Soup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RECIPE: Perfect Creamed Spinach

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Chinese-American culinary culture finds delicious, multi-generational expression at The Woks of Life

By Leslie Brenner

[Updated Dec. 27, 2022.]

I was shopping at our local 99 Ranch Market last week with my son’s girlfriend, Nathalie, and somewhere in the giant freezer case, arrayed attractively next to the frozen fish balls, Nathalie spotted frozen tofu.

“Frozen tofu?” she wondered.

Not something I was familiar with! Frozen tofu? Why would tofu be sold frozen? Was frozen tofu a thing? Item no. 4,727 of things to look into!

The answer to the question floated — unbidden — into my email inbox on Tuesday. Subject line: “How to Make Frozen Tofu (and Why You Should!).”

Sender: The Woks of Life.

In case you’re not familiar with the 8-year-old website run by the delightful Leung family, it is a wealth of rich information, culinary inspiration, first-rate recipes and wonderful stories about Chinese and Chinese-American cooking and culture. Want to know how to buy a wok, season it, wash it or easily prevent food from sticking to it? Dive into its Complete Wok Guide. Wondering about the difference between light soy sauce and dark? Check its guide to Chinese Sauces, Wines, Vinegars and Oils. Need to know the difference between gai lan and choy sum? Check its compendium of Chinese vegetables.

All four members of the New Jersey-based family — Bill (father/husband), Judy (mother/wife), Sarah (elder daughter) and Kaitlin (younger daughter) — contribute recipes and stories. Sarah, a 30-year-old Vassar graduate, founded the site in 2013, with the support of her parents and sister.

The Leung family behind The Woks of Life (from left): Bill, Judy, Kaitlin and Sarah / Photo by Sarah Yeoman, courtesy of The Woks of Life

“We began to get the idea for The Woks of Life, when my family — once together every night for dinner while we were growing up — found ourselves living across two time zones,” Sarah says. That was in 2011, when her father Bill (born and raised in upstate New York to immigrant Cantonese parents) and mother Judy (a native of Shanghai who immigrated to the U.S. when she was 16), were relocated to Beijing for work. (They have since moved back to New Jersey.)

“We realized that though we, the younger generation, loved to cook, we didn’t know how to make many of the traditional Chinese dishes my parents had made for us growing up,” Sarah explains.

Two years later, when Kaitlin was in college at the University of Pennsylvania and Sarah, who had recently graduated from Vassar in Media Studies, was dividing her time between New Jersey and Beijing, the site was launched. Says Sarah: “The blog became the place to record those recipes for ourselves, and — as it turns out — many others who also didn’t know how to make their childhood favorites.”

Part of The Woks of Life’s charm is that it’s so personal. Bill, who cooked in his youth at his family’s Chinese restaurant where his father was chef, recently shared a photo of his 101-year-old grandmother putting up preserves in a story about making pickled mustard greens (haam choy). Kaitlin might write about making home-made chili oil, the hot condiment of the moment. Sarah not only writes stories and recipes, but handles the business side and makes the beautiful photos. Judy, who’s fluent in three Chinese dialects, in addition to English, might send an email, seemingly out of the blue, about frozen tofu — linking to a story from which you’ll learn that freezing changes its texture, making it hold up better in soups and hot pots.

I’ve cooked quite a few of the recipes on the site, always with very good results. Some are Cantonese or Sichuanese as might be cooked in China, while others are Chinese-American, reflective of the rich and Chinese-American restaurant culture Bill grew up in. I love that there’s a section of “Chinese Take-Out” recipes.

Egg Drop Soup is a good example. It’s something you can whip up on short notice with few ingredients on hand. I tried the version in The Woks of Life Top 25 Recipes e-cookbook you get when you sign up for their newsletter; I skipped the optional yellow food coloring — a nod to Chinese-American popular restaurant culture. The version on the website calls instead for turmeric, which sounds like a better idea. Both teach a useful mini-lesson: Decent (or better, home-made) chicken broth, a pinch of white pepper and a splash of sesame oil equals a legit-tasting Chinese soup base.

My favorite recipe so far is The Woks of Life’s Turnip Cake — Lo Bak Go. The steamed-then-usually-pan-fried treat, a dim-sum favorite, is made not with turnip, but with lo bak — which Bill, though unsure, believes is the same as daikon. (All the other recipes I’ve seen call for daikon.) I’d looked far and wide for a workable recipe, and even tried (in despearation!) developing my own, before finding this one, which is superb. We have adapted it with very slight changes, most notably cooking the filling ingredients a bit less than the original calls for.

Bill writes that most Chinese restaurants “skimp on the filling ingredients,” namely shiitakes, Chinese sausage and dried shrimp, as well as the lo bak. “Most of what you get is rice flour and starch.” He’s right. We love the fact that you can now make one at home that’s even better than what we get in our favorite local dim-sum place.

The dish is traditional for Lunar New Year, as the word for daikon is a homophone for "good fortune" in the Hokkien language spoken in Fujian province — so keep it in mind for the holiday next month.

I also tried The Woks of Life’s Basic Stir-Fried Bok Choy Recipe, which turned out very well. I skipped the optional MSG; next time I’ll add a little more salt and stir-fry a minute or two longer. It’s definitely super-useful as a basic blueprint for stir-frying bok choy and similar greens.

I love the fact that Bill first encountered char siu — Chinese barbecue pork — at the Catskills Holiday Inn where his father was chef when he was a kid. His recipe is one of the best I’ve found — mostly because the marinade (Shaoxing wine, soy sauce, hoisin, molasses and spices) is so good. Also because Bill has you roast the marinated pork shoulder slabs on a rack in a roasting pan with water under the rack, to make clean-up easier. (That marinade would otherwise drip down and burn, as I can attest having tried other recipes that don’t suggest the water trick.) Min char siu (pictured above) doesn’t look as rosy-red as what you find in most American Chinese restaurants, because I skipped the red food coloring.

Juliet, our Cooks Without Borders designer and partner, has cooked The Woks of Life Stir-Fried Mustard Greens and Pork Larb, and loved both. (Yes, there are also recipes from other Asian countries besides China on the site.)

Juliet and I have both bookmarked The Woks of Life, and plan to continue visiting it — and cooking from it — often.

In the meantime, we’re excited to announce that in preparation for Lunar New Year, which will usher in The Year of the Ox beginning February 12, we’ll be featuring Sarah Leung in a live video Q&A on Thursday, January 28 from 5 to 6 p.m. Central Time. Registration for the event is available to Cooks Without Borders Premium Members.

We’ll also be spotlighting Chinese cooking this month. If that sounds enticing, bookmark Cooks Without Borders Latest Stories and sign up for our free newsletter (if you haven’t already, to receive our stories and recipes directly to your inbox). And watch this space!

RECIPE: The Woks of Life Turnip Cake

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

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

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

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

What to do with them?

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

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

Here’s a master recipe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RECIPE: Sunday Souper Soup

RECIPE: Maneet Chauhan’s Saag Paneer

RECIPE: Wylie’s Greens

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

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

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

OK, maybe in our dreams.

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

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

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

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

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

Vegetables for giardiniera mixed with pickling brine

A couple hours later, you have giardiniera.

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

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

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

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

RECIPE: Alex Guarnaschelli’s Giardiniera

Fridge-clearing and fabulously flavorful, Sunday Souper Soup will set you up deliciously for the week

When a nation of restaurant-goers turns (almost overnight!) into a society of captive home cooks, the stresses caused by fridge management can be monumental.

Keeping everyone in comfort food is easy: There’s pasta and cheese for that. Rice concoctions galore. Potatoes are a no-brainer in any form. Pizza is a track-pad click away.

Still, you diligently keep the fridge stocked with healthy fresh things: broccoli and kale, carrots and cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, salad greens and herbs.

So that by Sunday, the crisper drawer is stuffed with stuff that’s not so crisp, and you’re left beating yourself up about waste. Meanwhile, what are you going to put on the dinner table in the coming week?

If besides all that stuff you can rustle up a few basic staples, I’ve got great news for you: You can turn those hapless refrigerator victims into a Sunday super-soup that’s so incredibly flavorful that no one would ever suspect you of anything so nefarious as using up tired greens. It’ll solve the coming week’s lunch question and provide a dinner or two — all while saving money and helping you dodge a food-waste bullet.

It gets even better: You can pack the soup with an arsenal of life-affirming, enchantingly aromatic spices and herbs that turn the whole project into an anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, flavonoid-rich powerhouse. It is vegan and gluten-free, and therefore sends you into the coming week feeling vital and positive. That gigantic pan of bacon-enriched mac-and-cheese you devoured on Thursday, washed down with three glasses of wine? It is vitamin water under the comfort-food bridge. Today is a new day.

The essential staples you’ll need: onions, carrots and celery (diced together they make what the French call mirepoix); lentils; a can of tomatoes; olive or other oil; salt and pepper. These, plus water, form the base of the soup. And if you follow our master recipe, that’s all you really need for a delicious one. The basic outline is sweat the mirepoix in oil, add lentils, tomatoes, water, salt and pepper, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer till it’s soup — under an hour.

Our master recipe — which we first wrote about pre-Covid, in a story back in January — explains how to incorporate all those vegetables crying for rescue from the fridge: everything from root vegetables (turnips, parsnips, celery root, beets) to Brassicaceae (broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and whatnot) to fresh legumes (string beans, peas and such) to leafy greens. The veg can be raw or cooked, so that small dish of roasted cauliflower with Punjabi spices left over from Friday dinner can find a new life in a lush (and zero waste!) soup, and the lonely cupful of sautéed greens from four days ago may gain delicious new purpose.

And you’ll want to spice it up: turmeric, coriander seed and cumin seeds are great places to start; ginger and garlic are your aromatic allies; fresh and dried chiles are always welcome; nigella seeds and flax seeds add nutritional heft; so do mushrooms, dried or fresh. Herbs — fresh and dried — are superb additions.

Again, our January story gives a lot of the health background and zero-waste benefits. Give it a read first if you’re interested in making the soup as powerfully healthful as possible. Otherwise, I invite you to explore the recipe.

And then take a deep dive into that crisper drawer and make soup!

MASTER RECIPE: Sunday Souper Soup

Okra, now at peak season, may be the most meaningful and expressive vegetable for this singular American moment

Last September, Leah Penniman, a food sovereignty activist and author of Farming While Black, gave a talk at Harvard Divinity School on “African Diasporic Wisdom for Farming and Food Justice.” In it, she reportedly told the story of her great, great grandmother. About to be kidnapped from her home in West Africa, she made a “really audacious and courageous decision” to gather the seeds of okra and other crops and braid them into her hair.

“They knew that wherever they were going,” Penniman explained, “they believed there would be a future of tilling and reaping on the soil, and there would be some seed we all needed to inherit. That’s what our grandmothers did for us.”

In so many ways, okra is the vegetable for the moment.

A person’s reaction to it — and relationship to it — speaks volumes about their identity.

“Okra is the food of my ancestors, who were pulled from their homes in Africa,” writes Kayla Stewart in an essay recently published on Medium. “It was grown by those enslaved along the Carolinas, and devoured by them in Louisiana. Okra is a constant in my familial story — one that includes deep memories and gaping holes of history.”

Ask a white person about okra, and you’ll likely get something a good deal less deep — maybe “I like it, as long as it’s not slimy.”

Because it is so important in Black American cooking, and also shows up in cuisines from around the world, it’s hard to think of an ingredient that’s more ideally suited as a place for Americans of all cultures to meet — especially anyone who strives for deeper understanding of Black foodways.

“People tend either to love or hate okra, which originated in Africa and spread to Arabia, Europe, the Caribbean, Brazil, India, and the United States,” wrote chef Marcus Samuelsson in his 2007 cookbook Discovery of a Continent: Foods, Flavors, and Inspirations from Africa. “I happen to love it and think it adds great texture and color to meals, but I do remember being a little put off by its slimy texture the first time I had it. Once you get over that, it’s easy to like.”

With that, he offers a simple and delicious recipe for a quick Spicy Okra sauté, with tomatoes, red onions, chiles, garlic and peanuts.

Marcus Samuelsson’s Spicy Okra, from his 2007 cookbook ‘Discovery of a Continent: Foods, Flavors, and Inspirations from Africa’

As its peak season is late summer and early fall, it’s a great time of year to celebrate okra — which continues growing until the first frost. (In case you’re wondering, Texas is the top okra-producing state in the U.S., followed by Georgia, California and Florida.)

This time of year I love to char it on the stovetop grill, toss it in something spicy and serve it as a nibble with cocktails. You don’t really need a recipe for that — just cut each okra in half lengthways, toss them in a little olive oil and salt, and grill them, cut-side down first, till they’re a little charred. Add something spicy — maybe sambal oelek, the Indonesian chile paste, or lightly spicy Aleppo pepper — toss, and serve. Sumac would be great, too.

Okra dishes, of course, are found throughout Africa. “The mucilaginous pod is the continent’s culinary totem,” wrote Jessica B. Harris in her seminal 1998 book, The Africa Cookbook:Tastes of a Continent. “From the bamia of Egypt to the soupikandia of Senegal, passing by the various sauces gombos and more, this pod is used in virtual continent-wide totality. It is native to Africa, and its origins are trumpeted by its names in a number of languages throughout the world. The American okra comes from the twi of Ghana, while the French opt for gombo, which harks back to the Bantu languages of the southern segment of the continent.”

Shrimp gumbo with smoked andouille sausage and okra, served with rice

So yes — it also gives gumbo, Louisiana’s iconic dish — its name.

In Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, Toni Tipton-Martin points out that “Ochra” Gumbo was Recipe Number 44 in What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, published in 1881 by Abby Fisher. “Her formula,” writes Tipton-Martin, “which involved boiling a beef shank to create a savory and alluring broth, survived through the ages, the recipe variously being called okra stew, okra soup and okra gumbo.” She reproduces Mrs. Fisher’s recipe, which is short and sweet:

“Get a beef shank, have it cracked and put to boil in one gallon of water. Boil to half a gallon, then strain and put back on fire. Cut ochra in small pieces and put in soup; don’t put in any ends of ochra. Season with salt and pepper while cooking. Stir it occasionally to keep it from burning. To be sent to the table with dry boiled rice.”

During the first part of okra’s long season, in early pandemic, I found okra, shrimp and andouille sausage at the supermarket all at the same time, and happened to have a package of dried shrimp in my larder, so I improvised a gumbo. It was deliciously soothing — both to make and to eat. I made it again, and again, tweaking until it was just where I wanted it.

Try our recipe as is, or tweak away: Gumbo is ideally suited to improvisation.

Many gumbos get their body from okra; others from roux or filé powder (Native American sassafras powder). This one gets its body from a roux cooked long and slow to a beautiful coffee-with-a-touch-of-milk color, and the okra — which I roast first, to pull out the stickiness — gets added at the end. I serve filé, along with Louisiana hot sauce, at the table.

And finally, one of our favorite ways to celebrate okra is pickling it. We usually find okra pickles a bit sweet for our taste, but a recipe in Sweet Home Cafe Cookbook, the 2018 volume featuring recipes from the restaurant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. is perfectly marvelous.

The okra pods stay crunchy and snappy, and the pickles — brined with turmeric, garlic, coriander and Thai chiles — are delightfully spicy and bright.

RECIPE: Marcus Samuelsson’s Spicy Okra

RECIPE: Charred Okra with a Little Spice

RECIPE: Shrimp, Andouille Sausage and Okra Gumbo

RECIPE: Sweet Home Café’s Spicy Pickled Okra

Six ways to celebrate summer tomatoes

By Leslie Brenner

Ripe and bursting with flavor, tomatoes do not want to be fussed with. That’s why some of the most delicious things you can do with them don’t require a recipe.

• Slice them, arrange them on a plate, strew Maldon salt on them, grind black pepper generously, drizzle your best olive oil and serve with crusty bread.

• Want to get fancier? Add dollops of fresh ricotta, or slices of mozzarella, or pull apart a ball or two of burrata and arrange it on top. From there you can add torn basil, a flurry of mixed fresh herbs, or a big handful of baby arugula. If you go the arugula route, a drizzle of really good balsamic wouldn’t be a bad idea.

• Peel, seed and dice ripe tomatoes, put them in a bowl with a good dollop of great olive oil, salt, pepper and lots of torn basil, let it sit an hour or so, then use to toss with pasta. Grated parm or cubed mozzarella optional.

• BLT. This is the best time all year to eat the iconic sandwich. That slab of gorgeous red tomato with all its juices mingles meaningfully with the mayo on perfect toast, hopefully one of those sourdoughs your friend or partner has been perfecting, or good whole-wheat. Cool crunch of iceberg, chewy-crisp, salty-smoky warm bacon: This is sandwich nirvana. To get one made with the proper care and love, you’ll probably have to make it yourself. Eat it alone and enjoy every bite.

• Make a simple, beautiful, easy tomato tart: Roll out thawed frozen puff pastry, poke holes in it with a fork, cover with slices of tomato (lay them first on paper towels, salt them and let them sit a few minutes to get rid of moisture), salt, pepper, thyme leaves and crumbled goat cheese. Bake 25 minutes at 400. Slice and eat. This one gets a recipe.

• I’m not saying you should do this, but one of my mom’s favorite things to eat was juicy slices of tomato on white bread slathered with mayo. Call it a poor man’s BLT. Other times she would hold a large ripe tomato in her hand, take a bite, sprinkle the rest of it with salt and eat it like that, out of hand. This, she told me, was how she liked to eat tomatoes when she was a kid and she picked them, warm and ripe and bursting with flavor, from her victory garden at home in New Jersey during World War II.

Tomatoes à la Provençale, from a Julia Child recipe

• Invite them to the South of France — by way of Tomatoes à la Provençale. Make a filling of bread crumbs, herbs, chopped shallots, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper and stuff that into half-tomatoes you’ve emptied of seeds and juice. Roast 10 or 15 minutes at 400 and eat. Here’s Julia Child’s recipe, which I’ve been making my whole life.

• Blitz up a batch of Gazpacho Sevillano. Maybe you tried this in May, hoping to usher in summer, but the tomatoes weren’t quite in the mood yet. Now they are. Three pounds of tomatoes, a cuke, a red bell pepper, torn-up day old bread, Sherry vinegar, a couple or three garlic cloves put through a press, a pinch of red pepper, more salt than you think: Into the blender they go, and whirr away. Drizzle in some olive oil while the motor’s running. Some people let it chill in the fridge so the “flavors meld”; I usually can’t wait and just eat it like that, garnished with another drizzle of olive plus diced veg, especially avocado.

• Try a less common cold Spanish soup, Salmorejo, which is Córdoba’s version of gazpacho, garnished traditionally with chopped hard-boiled egg and Serrano ham. Our recipe is adapted from one by superchef José Andrés.

Palestinian Chopped Salad (Salata Arabieh), from ‘Falastin’ by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley

• When the tomatoes get ripe, the smart go chopping. Ripe tomatoes are fabulous in the chopped salad that’s ubiquitous on Levantine tables, including Palestinian ones. Cucumbers, bell peppers (red in this case), scallions, parsley, mint and serrano or jalapeño chiles, garlic and lemon join the fun. Our recipe is adapted from Falastin, by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley.

RECIPE: Palestinian Chopped Salad

RECIPE: Salmorejo

RECIPE: Gazpacho Sevillano

RECIPE: Tomatoes à la Provençale

RECIPE: Tomato Tart with Goat Cheese and Thyme

RECIPE: Tomato and Burrata Salad

Tomato love fest: our favorite ways to celebrate ripe beauties at the late-summer height of their season

By Leslie Brenner

Summer Produce Special Part III: Tomatoes

Ripe and bursting with flavor, tomatoes do not want to be fussed with. That’s why some of the most delicious things you can do with them don’t require a recipe.

• Slice them, arrange them on a plate, strew Maldon salt on them, grind black pepper generously, drizzle your best olive oil and serve with crusty bread.

• Want to get fancier? Add dollops of fresh ricotta, or slices of mozzarella, or pull apart a ball or two of burrata and arrange it on top. From there you can add torn basil, a flurry of mixed fresh herbs, or a big handful of baby arugula. If you go the arugula route, a drizzle of really good balsamic wouldn’t be a bad idea.

• Peel, seed and dice ripe tomatoes, put them in a bowl with a good dollop of great olive oil, salt, pepper and lots of torn basil, let it sit an hour or so, then use to toss with pasta. Grated parm or cubed mozzarella optional.

• BLT. This is the best time all year to eat the iconic sandwich. That slab of gorgeous red tomato with all its juices mingles meaningfully with the mayo on perfect toast, hopefully one of those sourdoughs your friend or partner has been perfecting, or good whole-wheat. Cool crunch of iceberg, chewy-crisp, salty-smoky warm bacon: This is sandwich nirvana. To get one made with the proper care and love, you’ll probably have to make it yourself. Eat it alone and enjoy every bite.

• Make a simple, beautiful, easy tomato tart: Roll out thawed frozen puff pastry, poke holes in it with a fork, cover with slices of tomato (lay them first on paper towels, salt them and let them sit a few minutes to get rid of moisture), salt, pepper, thyme leaves and crumbled goat cheese. Bake 25 minutes at 400. Slice and eat. This one gets a recipe.

• I’m not saying you should do this, but one of my mom’s favorite things to eat was juicy slices of tomato on white bread slathered with mayo. Call it a poor man’s BLT. Other times she would hold a large ripe tomato in her hand, take a bite, sprinkle the rest of it with salt and eat it like that, out of hand. This, she told me, was how she liked to eat tomatoes when she was a kid and she picked them, warm and ripe and bursting with flavor, from her victory garden at home in New Jersey during World War II.

Tomatoes à la Provençale, from a Julia Child recipe

• Invite them to the South of France — by way of Tomatoes à la Provençale. Make a filling of bread crumbs, herbs, chopped shallots, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper and stuff that into half-tomatoes you’ve emptied of seeds and juice. Roast 10 or 15 minutes at 400 and eat. Here’s Julia Child’s recipe, which I’ve been making my whole life.

• Blitz up a batch of Gazpacho Sevillano. Maybe you tried this in May, hoping to usher in summer, but the tomatoes weren’t quite in the mood yet. Now they are. Three pounds of tomatoes, a cuke, a red bell pepper, torn-up day old bread, Sherry vinegar, a couple or three garlic cloves put through a press, a pinch of red pepper, more salt than you think: Into the blender they go, and whirr away. Drizzle in some olive oil while the motor’s running. Some people let it chill in the fridge so the “flavors meld”; I usually can’t wait and just eat it like that, garnished with another drizzle of olive plus diced veg, especially avocado.

• Try a less common cold Spanish soup, Salmorejo, which is Córdoba’s version of gazpacho, garnished traditionally with chopped hard-boiled egg and Serrano ham. Our recipe is adapted from one by superchef José Andrés.

Palestinian Chopped Salad (Salata Arabieh), from ‘Falastin’ by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley

• When the tomatoes get ripe, the smart go chopping. Ripe tomatoes are fabulous in the chopped salad that’s ubiquitous on Levantine tables, including Palestinian ones. Cucumbers, bell peppers (red in this case), scallions, parsley, mint and serrano or jalapeño chiles, garlic and lemon join the fun. Our recipe is adapted from Falastin, by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley.

RECIPE: Palestinian Chopped Salad

RECIPE: Salmorejo

RECIPE: Gazpacho Sevillano

RECIPE: Tomatoes à la Provençale

RECIPE: Tomato Tart with Goat Cheese and Thyme

RECIPE: Tomato and Burrata Salad

Zucchini coming out of your ears? These 8 stupendous dishes will make you wish you had 5 more pounds

Summer Produce Special, Part II: Zucchini

We feel your zucchini abundance-state here at Cooks Without Borders, where we’ve been grating, shaving, slicing, dicing, salting, draining, sautéing, roasting, steaming and sashimi-ing zucchini round the clock to help you make the most of the season’s inevitable bumper crop.

• One dish — Stuffed Zucchini with Pine Nut Salsa — is so outstanding it shook the two courgette-fatigued fellows with whom I shelter out of their summer-squash stupor.

“Amazing,” said the older one. “I would eat this again tomorrow!” (We did.)

“Wow,” said the younger. “Whose recipe is this?” Ottolenghi’s, I replied — from his 2018 cookbook Ottolenghi Simple. “He is a genius,” proclaimed the younger zucchini critic.

I had been skating on thin ice with the vegetable when this show-stopper saved us. It was maybe only day 3 of zucchini trials, but junior and elder had already hit the zucchini wall. They are weak, after all, and lack summer squash stamina.

I had set my sights, this particular evening, on two possible Ottolenghi recipes. The exhausted eating panel chose the Stuffed Zucchini, pictured above. Excellent call: Its filling is rich with Parmesan and egg, bright with height-of-season heirloom cherry tomatoes, plumped with bread crumbs and set with a golden-brown crust inside a perfectly roasted shell that maintained integrity but melted at fork’s touch. On top of that, a deeply herbal salsa — at once dusky (oregano) and bright (thanks to lemon) — made meaty and crunchy with toasted pine nuts.

Do try it; I think you’ll love it. It’s so delicious, you can let it stand proudly as centerpiece main dish, even probably for dyed-in-the-wool carnivores. (But oh, yes, it would also be great with lamb. Or chicken.)

Once your swooning subsides, consider the possibilities for your next zucchini triumph. For you know there will be more zucchini!

Here are other faves:

• Raw Zucchini Salad with Green Olives, Mint and Pecorino. I first learned the joys of raw zucchini in the early 00’s from Russ Parsons, the L.A. Times’ longtime columnist (“The California Cook”), who taught us that salting thin-sliced or shaved raw zucchini and letting it sit a few minutes turns it delightfully silky and slippery, seeming almost to cook the flesh while keeping it firm.

For years I had a Parsons salad in my arsenal and pulled it out often. Slice zucchinis in half vertically, then cut them into thin half-moons. Toss with salt in a colander and let sit for 15 or 20 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and dress with minced garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, freshly ground black pepper or red pepper flakes and fresh herbs — mint is especially nice, but you can do any combo of mint, dill, parsley or basil. The Ottolenghi recipe makes me think oregano would be smashing as well.

Raw Zucchini Salad with Green Olives, Mint and Pecorino from A16 Food + Wine

Nate Appleman and Shelly Lindgren took the salting-raw-zucchini technique to delicious heights in a recipe published in their 2008 cookbook, A16 Food + Wine, named for their beloved Southern Italian spot in San Francisco. Their salad marries ribbons of zucchini carpaccio with a brilliant trio of complementary flavors. I’d never have thought of green olives and mint together, but the combination sings — especially with the bright, pure flavor of Castelvetrano olives (green Cerignolas would be great, too). Earthy pecorino smooths it out and pulls it together.

• We’ve been thinking about Barry’s Insanely Delicious Zucchini Fritters since test-driving the recipes in José Andrés’ Vegetables Unleashed led us to a zucchini fritter recipe that didn’t quite do it for us (the batter was thin and the fritters ran all over the pan). Barry’s Insanely Delicious are little flavor-bombs, soft and packed with herbs (dill, mint and parsley) on the inside, crisp on the outside and warm, served with a cool and tangy yogurt sauce. Pop one in your mouth and it’s hard to stop there. They’re brilliant bites for your next Zoom Happy Hour, if that’s still a thing.

Barry’s Insanely Delicious Zucchini Fritters

• Speaking of José Andrés, another zucchini recipe in that cookbook turned out to be one of our favorites ever: Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs. It’s as simple and wonderful as it sounds and looks, with a sprinkle of za’atar — the Levantine herb and spice mix — to keep things zippy.

Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs from José Andrés’ ‘Vegetables Unleashed’

• If you like zucchini noodles, you will love Camarón con Fideos de Calabacitas, from Adán Medrano’s Don’t Count the Tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking.

Camarón con Fideos de Calabacita (Shrimp with Zucchini Ribbons) from Anán Medrano’s ‘Count the Tortillas’

• Another dish that probably has roots in the Texas Mexican cooking known as comida casera, Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken is an easy, delicious pseudo-braise that makes luscious use of abundant zucchini (and any other summer squash that needs a home), along with corn, tomatoes, onions, cilantro and serrano chile. It has been one of my favorite late-summer dishes since I was a kid growing up far from Texas, in Southern California. (It’s a pseudo-braise because you don’t actually add liquid; the juices that end up braising all come from the vegetables.)

Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken (the chicken formerly known as The Chicken that Killed Grandpa)

• A super-flexible dish we call Warm Summer Salad Without Borders is another late summer stunner — and a great way to feature as much zucchini as you want to throw at it, along with grilled corn, tomatoes and — if you like — grilled okra. It makes a lovely light dinner when it’s still blazing hot, or a warm pick-me-up for when you’re a little sad the season is on the way out.

And hey — I sometimes toss some grilled okra on top of Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken, too. The Warm Summer Salad is kind of like a vegetarian salad version of that dish.

Warm Summer Salad Without Borders

• Last but certainly not least — as it’s one of my favorite things in the world to cook and to eat — a Chicken and Lamb Couscous will usher summer into fall, pulling a pound or two of zucchinis in its wake. As the season changes, keep it in mind. We offer an easy version that uses canned garbanzos and five-minute couscous grains and slower OG version that has you soak dried chickpeas overnight and steam and fluff the couscous grains two or three times. Both are tucked into the same recipe, as you might want to combine them (dried chickpeas + quick couscous grains, for instance). On our to-do list: Creating or turning up a stellar harissa recipe.

Chicken and Lamb Couscous (with . . . zucchini!)

RECIPE: Stuffed Zucchini with Pine Nut Salsa

RECIPE: Raw Zucchini Salad with Green Olives, Mint and Pecorino

RECIPE: Barry’s Insanely Delicious Zucchini Fritters

RECIPE: Camarón con Fideos de Calabacitas

RECIPE: Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs

RECIPE: Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken

RECIPE: Warm Summer Salad without Borders

RECIPE: Chicken and Lamb Couscous

Summer Produce Special Part I: Our eggplant extravaganza channels India, Japan and the Levant

It’s the most delicious time of year to be a vegetable-lover — don’t you agree? We’ve got wonderful recipes to help you make the most of summer produce, whether it comes from your insanely productive garden, the farm stand, that large haul of zucchini your neighbor gifted you, or the supermarket. This first in a series of stories is our Summer Produce Special — a bumper crop of our best recipes featuring the vegetables of the moment. Today that would be . . . eggplant!

Got eggplants?

• If you have the gorgeous baby kind featured in the photo above, and if you can get fresh curry leaves, you can make the outrageously good Charred Baby Eggplants from Anjali Pathak’s The Indian Family Kitchen. (We’re working on a mini-review of the book, coming soon!) This is one of the best things we’ve eaten all year. And it has been a long year. The eggplants are melty-soft and the coconutty, spicy topping — with dabs of yogurt and delicate curry leaves — turns the into something super special.

• Make ‘em dance! Those babies are also perfect for the chef José Andrés’ crazy-delicious, umami-forward Dancing Eggplant. Nuke or grill them, slather them with a Japanese-inspired sauce and top with bonito flakes that seem to dance.

• Throw any eggplants, large or small, in the bottom of your grill (or your broiler) and make the best Baba Ganoush imaginable.

• Baba-ed out? Make a lively Charred Eggplant Salad, zingy with lemon.

• Medium-sized eggplants are perfect for a fabulous Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato, from Sami Tamimi’s new Falastin cookbook. Each kafta (lamb patty) crowns a stack of tomato and eggplant, so best if the eggplants aren’t too fat.

Next up in our Summer Produce Special series: Zucchini. Watch this space: It’s coming to Cooks Without Borders soon!

RECIPE: Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato

RECIPE: Charred Eggplant Salad

RECIPE: Baba Ganoush

RECIPE: Dancing Eggplant

RECIPE: Anjali Pathak’s Charred Baby Eggplants

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.

How to make the most of asparagus: Dress it up with a glamorous new-wave gribiche

If asparagus might be destined for your Easter or Passover table, I can’t think of a more spectacular way to serve it than dressing it with a new-wave gribiche. Based on the classic French gribiche, which is an herbal, shalloty mayonnaise, this fresher version was inspired by a 2015 cookbook from one of my favorite restaurants in L.A. In Gjelina: Cooking from Venice, California, chef Travis Lett dressed some gorgeous fat asparagus with a sort of deconstructed gribiche and grated bottarga. Fantastic.

A few nights ago it struck me that this kind of new-wave gribiche is not only a glorious way to feature asparagus, but also to honor the egg — as eggs have become so precious these days. The recipe calls for just two of them, really spotlighting their gorgeousness when cooked just three minutes.

It’s also a great way to spotlight beautiful soft herbs — dill, chives, chervil, parsley, tarragon (whatever you’ve got).

Want to know more about gribiche? We took a deep dive into it a few seasons back.

This new-wave take on it is also wonderful served with simple fish preps, boiled shrimp or roasted vegetables, or stirred into a bowl of boiled-then-sliced red potatoes. Find more ideas here.

Here’s the asparagus recipe.

Wishing you all a wonderful Passover or Easter. Stay safe and healthy, everyone.