The 10 most delicious things I made from cookbooks during the pandemic: Part I

At Cooks Without Borders, The Great Confinement has been a time for (among other things) deep dives into cookbooks — focusing mostly on volumes published within the last year, but also on cookbooks from a few years back that we hadn’t yet had a chance to explore.

The riches we’ve found in the pages of the best of them has been absolutely exhilarating, opening up entire new worlds to us.

Here are the first 5 of my 10 favorite dishes from the dozens of cookbook recipes I’ve tested and tasted over the last six months. What they have in common — besides their cravability factor — is that they are all really fun to cook.

Chicken Musakhan from Sami Tamimi’s ‘Falastin’

Traditionally during olive-oil pressing season to celebrate the freshly-pressed oil and served with pebble-textured taboon bread, the Palestinian dish known as Chicken Musakhan is now a year-round favorite in the Levant. “It’s a dish to eat with your hands and with your friends,” writes Sami Tamimi in Falastin,” 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.” To make it, toss a whole quartered bird with plenty of cumin and sumac and other spices, then roast it and layer it on crisped pieces of torn pita with a lot of long-cooked, sumac-and-cumin-loaded sliced red onions, fried pine nuts and parsley. Spoon over with the roasting juices from the chicken, drizzle on more olive oil, dust with more sumac, and invite everyone to tear in. The dish is stunningly good.

Why we love cooking it: It’s liberating to use all those spices with such abandon.

We reviewed Falastin, which Tamimi wrote with Tara Wigley, in July.

Anjali Pathak’s Charred Baby Eggplants

These melty-soft baby eggplants with a coconutty, spicy filling come from Anjali Pathak’s 2015 book, The Indian Family Kitchen: Classic Dishes for a New Generation. Sizzled fresh curry leaves make it really special. We spotlighted this dish — finished with dabs of yogurt — in an an August story about eggplants.

Why we love cooking it: The topping is really fun to make, beginning with cooking the mustard seeds in oil till they jump out of the pan, and using the curry leaves (which freeze really well, so if you get your hands on some, buy extra).

Yangzhou Fried Rice from Fuchsia Dunlop’s ‘Every Grain of Rice’

Enticing, satisfying and fun to make, this Yangzhou Fried Rice from Dunlop’s superb 2012 book Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking is a dish is a highly craveable classic — one that I’d be happy to eat every week.

Why we love cooking it: Mastery! It’s an ideal recipe to use if you want to learn fried rice technique, as it’s the best (and least fussy) method we’ve found so far. After you try it once, there’s lots of room for ingredient improvisation. A seasoned wok is required.

Our review of the book is coming soon.

‘Jubilee’ Pickled Shrimp from Toni Tipton-Martin’s award-winning book

The pickled shrimp from Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking has been a point of joy for us several times during the pandemic, including last weekend, when a friend requested its presence at a socially distanced Labor Day picnic. It’s shown above before being pickled overnight. We reviewed the book in June 2020.

Why we love cooking it: The technique for pickling seafood in vinegar has its roots in Spanish escabeche. A recipe Tipton-Martin found in Savannah, Georgia inspired this one. Once you’ve made it once, you can play with the herbs and spices: This I upped the pickling spice a bit and added a bit more tarragon. Or even run with the basic escabeche idea and use what it’s taught us to pickled fin fish (snapper would be great) or scallops.

Rose, Cumin and Apricot Sablés from Camille Fourmont’s ‘La Buvette’

Crushed rosebuds and cumin bring a beautifully fragrant and savory aspect to Camille Fourmont’s spin on the classic French sablé cookie; dried apricots add a delightful chewy high note. Though Fourmont credits pastry superstar Pierre Hermé with having dreamt up the flavor combo, it is she who put them together in a sablé. Super buttery and tender, they are exquisite. We reviewed the book they’re from, La Buvette: Recipes and Wine Notes from Paris, in August.

Why we love cooking it: Playing with dried flower buds is a treat, and it’s always fun to slice and bake dough that’s been chilling in a log in the fridge.

RECIPE: Rose, Cumin and Apricot Sablés

RECIPE: ‘Jubilee’ Pickled Shrimp

RECIPE: Yangzhou Fried Rice

RECIPE: Anjali Pathak’s Charred Baby Eggplants

RECIPE: Chicken Musakhan

Food-lit revival: Cookbooks are suddenly the coolest, most relevant things in the universe

A few of our favorite cookbooks, old and new, with the Cooks Without Borders kitchen wall of cookbooks in the background

[EDITOR’S NOTE: A slightly different version of this story was originally published at The Brenner Report.]

Six months ago, if you had asked me to assess how important cookbooks are in our culture, I would have slotted them somewhere between skee-ball and beetle fighting. I had been lamenting the fact that millennials and gen-Zers are more likely to click on a Food Wishes video in order to learn chicken-roasting skills or hummus technique than they are to reach for Judy Rodgers or Sami Tamimi. Cookbooks just seemed hopelessly old fart, boringly low-tech, increasingly irrelevant — never mind that many of the best recipes and techniques have always lived in them, and continue to be expressed in their pages.

Complicating things was the fact that what with all those free recipes on the internet and all, publishers were under pressure more than ever before to publish titles they felt sure would take off — and that wasn’t always great for quality. About five years ago I was told by my agent (of twenty years) that all the cookbook deals were going to cute young bloggers with powerful Instagram followings, so the odds of my publishing anything new were slim (even though I had six published books under my belt). I bought a few of the popular bloggy books and tried to cook from them. Generally speaking, the recipes didn’t work and the food sucked. Also young people tend to gravitate toward chefs, and chef recipes are often ridiculous in terms of what they demand of the cook. No wonder young people didn’t take cookbooks seriously.

A noodle salad from Andrea Nguyen’s excellent Vietnamese Food Any Day. Its publisher, Ten Speed Press, consistently publishes worthwhile books from the best authors.

Still, there continued to be a few excellent editors publishing great titles filled with cookable, inspired recipes — by authors like Toni Tipton-Martin and Samin Nosrat and Andrea Nguyen and Yotam Ottolenghi (and many more). In the best cases, the authors take recipe testing seriously and their recipes work. Or at least the dishes are exciting and recipe errors are fixable.

Shining a light on those exceptional cookbooks (and fixing those booboos for our cooking readers) is something we spend a lot of time doing at Cooks Without Borders. But because it is so hard to get young people interested in cookbooks (again, for reasons that are easy to understand), it has felt like a somewhat weird and probably futile pursuit, and one worried about the future of cookbooks.

COVID-19 has changed all that. Now, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, it feels like cookbooks are everything, and everywhere. After a drawn-out, near-death experience, they are suddenly the coolest, most relevant things in the universe.

Of course it is because we all now have to cook; restaurant culture has been sucked out of our lives with the force that an airline meal gets pulled off the tray table and disappears into the wild blue when a there’s a puncture in the plane. Now, after decades of gleefully forgetting how to scramble an egg, cooking is the thing that saves us from hunger. But as those of us who have been practicing the craft for any length of time know, it can do so much more. And it is that so much more that cookbooks invite us to enjoy. Which is why the cookbook — or more properly cookbook appreciation — is enjoying a renaissance.

Two weeks ago Vittles — a cool and forward-looking cooperative food newsletter out of England via Substack — published a beautiful essay, “The live-changing magic of cookbooks,” by Gemma Croffie. In her debut as a food writer, the “writer, mum and foodie based in Kent” ties together the terror of living as a Black person during the time of Covid with losing herself — and finding herself — through cooking and cookbooks.

One of the books Croffie admires immensely is Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking by Toni Tipton-Martin (which we reviewed in June 2020):

I am in awe of Ms Tipton-Martin’s scholarship; I learn something new on almost every page. Recipes shouting my name range from gingerbread waffles and cream to salmon croquettes to curried meat pies. There is such promise in cookbooks yet to be used, a palpable excitement to see if they live up to expectation. 

Wrapping things up, Croffie answering the question of why she loves cookbooks so much.

Anti-blackness is all too real in this time and fighting racism is life-draining. Very little sparks joy in my life, but some cookbooks ignite such a big spark that they practically light a bonfire. Black joy is fleeting; I’ll take mine where I can.

Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee, discussed in Gemma Croffie’s essay, was reviewed on Cooks Without Borders in June 2020.

At the opposite end of the nuance spectrum, cookbook worship is splashed across the pages of “People” magazine. “I am a cookbook fanatic and collector!” proclaimed Drew Barrymore yesterday. “Chefs are my heroes. I must read 3 cookbooks a week...cover to cover!"

There’s a Substack newsletter, Stained Page News, devoted to cookbooks. Its author, Paula Forbes — a cookbook critic who has reviewed for Eater, Food 52 and Epicurious and Lucky Peach — is turning out missives on warp speed at the moment, as we are heading into the fall cookbook publishing season. To paying subscribers she has been sending every weekday (it’ll last two weeks) covering every upcoming books genre by genre. (Forbes offers a free weekly version as well.)

What enticing titles do publishers have in store for us this autumn — besides four witch-related cookbooks, five books with “flavor” in the title (Flavorbomb, The Flavor Equation, Chasing Flavor, Flavor for All, and — of course — Ottolenghi Flavor) and eight pie books?

Mely Martinez’s The Mexican Home Kitchen is one of the fall season’s highly anticipated new titles.

It’s actually an exciting crop. I’m keen to cook from, eat from and read (among others):

• Marcus Samuelsson’s The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food

• Alex Guarnaschelli’s Cook With Me: 150 Recipes for the Home Cook

• Maneet Chauhan and Jody Eddy’s Chaat: Recipes from the Kitchens, Markets and Railways of India

• Mely Martinez’s The Mexican Home Kitchen (I love Martinez’ blog, Mexico in My Kitchen. Her recipes reflect the way people cook at home in Mexico.)

• Nuit Regular’s Kiin: Recipes and Stories from Northern Thailand

• Jason Wang’s Xi’an Famous Foods: The Cuisine of Western China, from New York’s Favorite Noodle Shop

• Nancy Silverton’s Chi Spacca: A New Approach to American Cooking

• Donna Lennard’s Il Bucco: Stories and Recipes

• Wilson Tang’s The Nom Wah Cookbook: Recipes from 100 Years at New York City’s Iconic Dim Sum Restaurant (because dumplings!)

• Hawa Hassan’s In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean

• Jonathan Waxman’s The Barbuto Cookbook: California-Italian Cooking from the Beloved West Village Restaurant

We’ll be reviewing as many of them as we can manage here at Cooks Without Borders — where by the way, and not unrelated, we just launched a new column of mini-reviews: “Cookbooks We Love.” (Here are the first three installments.)

Find our collected cookbook reviews here.

🐞

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

Cookbooks We Love: Camille Fourmont’s ‘La Buvette’ lets you live (and eat!) the vibe of Paris' 11th

La Buvette: Recipes & Wine Notes from Paris, by Camille Fourmont and Kate Leahy, 2020, Ten Speed Press, $24.99

Backgrounder: Camille Fourmont opened her cave à manger (wine bar with snacks), La Buvette, in 2013 in a dull stretch of what was rapidly becoming a hot Paris neighborhood, the 11th arrondissement. It was an instant hit: called “hyper-fashionable” by the New York Times and named Wine Bar of the Year in 2014 by Le Fooding. A buvette is a refreshment stand, and La Buvette is tiny; Le Fooding calls it “about the size of a sardine tin.” It’s a good metaphor, as there’s no kitchen — just a fridge, a wooden cutting board and a portable burner. What Fourmont serves (she’s cook, sommelier, bartender, etc.) is smart little bites put together from great ingredients, including some that come from cans, like her famous gros haricots blancs au zeste de citron — gigante beans with lemon zest.

Why we love it: La Buvette is a modest book of small ambition, great charm and a sweet foreword by co-author Kate Leahy. Fourmont, who describes herself as an “untrained cook,” shares stories that make you feel part of the intimate little scene and recipes that come from what’s obviously her great palate. Most of them are perfect for “apéro” — France’s version of happy hour, which involves an apéritif or glass of wine and a little bite to go with it. Many are super easy to put together, really more ideas than recipes — like those beans, which “people come from all over the planet to eat,” as her headnote explains.

La Buvette’s ‘Famous’ Gros Haricots Blancs au Zeste de Citron made using dried gigante beans in the Cooks Without Borders kitchen.

The dish was born early on when Fourmont opened a can of giant white judión beans imported from Spain and seasoned them with olive oil, Maldon salt and bergamot zest. “The key to this very simple dish,” she writes, “is the fresh citrus grated on top, which brightens the flavor of the beans.” She changes citrus according to the season, “from bergamot to mandarin to lemon or citron,” and sometimes decorates the beans with a few edible flowers, such as chive or garlic blossoms.

It’s not so easy to find plain canned giant white beans stateside (most I find are swimming in tomato sauce), but if you can put your hands on dried gigantes, you can cook them up. Then, following Fourmont’s instructions, put them on a plate, drizzle them with your best olive oil “until the beans look shiny, add a good pinch of salt and grate zest directly over the top to finsh.” That is literally it for the recipe. I have made gigante beans a bunch of different ways, and as simple as this one is, it is my hands-down favorite.

Besides the dishes she serves at La Buvette — which include pickles, flavored butters, things to do with cheese and some simple charcuterie — there are also “Anytime Recipes” Fourmont puts together at home. They’re the kind of “imprecise recipes that allow freedom to add more of a favorite ingredient or to be flexible with what you do have on hand.” In other words, perfect for cooking from a pandemic pantry. There are things to do with sardines (serve them with flavored butter and halved seared-till-caramelized lemons), unusual salads (like green bean, white peach and fresh almond), a “really buttery” simplified croque monsieur and an anchovy, egg yolk and hazelnut pasta that’s a riff on carbonara. We haven’t made these yet, but have our eye on that croque monsieur.

You’ve gotta try this: Another chapter, “Le Goûter,” offers treats for afternoon snack, which in France usually means something sweet. It’s here we found Fourmont’s recipe for Rose, Cumin and Apricot Sablés. Tender, buttery and savory from the cumin — with a lovely sandy texture and a beautiful whisper of dried rose petal (sounds like a wine description!) — they’re one of the best cookies ever to come out of our kitchen.

Rose, Cumin and Apricot Sablés from Camille Fourmont’s ‘La Buvette’ cookbook

From the “At La Buvette” chapter, we got a kick out of making cured magret — duck breasts — which is so much easier and quicker than you’d think. Besides the duck breasts, only salt and pepper are involved, and they’re ready in two or three weeks. Just bury the breasts in salt, leave in fridge 12 hours, wipe them off, add pepper, loosely wrap them in a kitchen towel and let them cure tucked away in the fridge till firm and dry to the touch. Slice and serve: The result is pretty stunning.

Slices of Cured Magret

I couldn’t resist trying a “classic chocolate mousse,” which Fourmont and Leahy adapted from Trish Desein’s Je Veux du Chocolat! It was very good and easy to achieve, but much denser than what I think of as a classic mousse. In fact it was so dense and rich none of the three of us could eat more than half a serving — which felt like a miracle, considering we enjoyed it so.

I was torn about whether to offer the recipe, as it’s so dense and intense (definitely for serious chocolate lovers), and in the end decided to skip it. We’d happily reconsider, though, if there is interest — do let us know.

Still wanna cook: Rillettes! Our favorite sandwiches in France, filled with the potted pork spread known as rillettes, and accented with cornichons, have become harder and harder to find there in the last 10 years. (According to Fourmont’s headnote butchers at Rungis, the wholesale market outside of Paris, pack into a cafe called Le Saint Hubert to eat sandwichs rillettes at 4 or 5 a.m.) Fourmont’s recipe, adapted from Terrines by Le Repaire de Cartouche’s Rodolphe Paquin, looks approachable and easy. If it’s as good as it looks, we’ll be slathering baguettes with it sooner rather than later.

RECIPE: Rose, Cumin and Apricot Sablés

RECIPE: Cured Magret

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

Classic cookbook review reprised: ‘Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine’

EDITOR’S NOTE: We reviewed this book shortly after it was published, on February 28, 2016. We have come back to it again and again since then; it has very much shaped up to be a classic. Here’s our 2016 review.

"Everything you need to know to be a great Italian cook." That's the subtitle of Lidia Bastianich's Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine. Hard to resist, right? 

Here's the short review: Bastianich's book is a new classic – something you'll want on your shelf as a reference, a manual and (perhaps to a lesser degree) a source of inspiration. Want to hear more? Read on.

The book is particularly strong on technique, and on offering thoughtful variations on basic recipes, like ragù alla Bolognese. And it's comprehensive: I found every classic recipe I sought, including saltimbocca. The recipes work, and they're generally delicious – as wonderful as they look in the photos.

You may know Lidia Bastianich from her PBS show, Lidia's Italy, or from one of her New York restaurants, Felidia, or Esca, Becco or Del Posto (which she co-owns with her son Joseph Bastianich and Mario Batali).  She's also one of the forces behind the Eataly empire.

If you're an American home cook who has been in the game a long while, Lidia's Mastering may remind you of another classic: Marcella Hazan's The Classic Italian Cookbook, or her the Essentials of Italian Cooking (The Classic Italian Cookbook and More Classic Italian Cookbook together in one volume). 

Both are encyclopedic works that take a no-nonsense approach. Both do without photography, relying instead on black-and-white drawings as illustration. I have to admit I'm a wee bit disappointed in the antipasti offerings in Lidia's Mastering, just as I've always been with Hazan's book. I do want to make Bastianich's chicken liver crostini sometime soon, though, and once summer rolls around, I'll definitely turn to her zucchini blossoms filled with fresh ricotta perfumed with lemon zest (doesn't that sound good?).

I've tested six recipes from the book, and loved five of them.

One of my favorites is rabbit in gremolata. A few weeks before I made it, I'd noticed some nice-looking frozen rabbits at Whole Foods, so I picked one up. I had no idea what I'd do with it, so I was happy to find, when this cookbook landed in my mailbox at work, not one but three recipes for rabbit. Besides the gremolata, there's also rabbit with sage and rabbit stew with mushrooms and pine nuts (both sound delicious, too). 

View fullsize

It's easy to put together: Brown the rabbit, braise the legs in white wine and lemon juice, then add the rest of the rabbit plus some potatoes, cook some more, add parsley and serve. I had one small issue with the recipe: not quite enough liquid; I added half a cup of chicken broth about halfway through the cooking.

Friends came to dinner that night, and we all loved it. My friend Habib loved it so much he bought the book the very next day. 

Want to try it? Here's the recipe:

Dinner started with a salad, then we had Bastianich's spaghetti alla carbonara as a middle course. No foolin' around when I'm testing recipes: You must come hungry!

Spaghetti carbonara, the pasta coated in a silky sauce of eggs, bacon and cheese, is a great dish to make at home, because when made right, it's so wonderful, and it's so often botched in restaurants. (Dudes – there is no cream in carbonara!) You want the egg yolks to cook just slightly, and very evenly; you don't want to end up with spaghetti and scrambled eggs. Bastianich has a good way to achieve a wonderful, silky sauce: she has you whisk a little hot water into the egg yolks, which ensures even, slight cooking. Her technique is easy, and the recipe – which includes sliced scallions (unconventional!) – turned out perfect. It's killer comfort food.

I haven't yet tried any of Bastianich's appetizers, but there are quite a few wonderful-sounding salads, like one with dandelion greens, almond vinaigrette and ricotta salata (I'll definitely be making that soon – maybe even tonight!). Roasted beets with beet greens, apples and goat cheese sounds nice; I love the idea of using the beet greens. A shrimp and mixed bean salad sounds wonderful, and so does lobster salad with fresh tomatoes – something to make us wish for summer.

I didn't, alas, love the one I wound up making: radicchio salad with orange, radishes and oil-cured black olives. It struck me as so perfect for a wintry day. 

View fullsize

It was OK, but the radicchio was unrelenting; there was just too much of it.

But that was the only dish I didn't flip for. I loved that Bastianich offers three versions of Bolognese sauce – including one with milk (I'll try that next!) – plus an Italian-American meat sauce. I went for one she called, simply, meat sauce Bolognese (sugo alla Bolognese). It calls for half pork and half beef and two to three hours of simmering time – "the longer you cook it," she writes, "the better it will become."

I cooked mine about two hours and twenty minutes, and it was superb. This, too, I served with spaghetti. Not the same night! This one I made for Wylie and his friend Michael, who's half-Italian. Michael gave it the stamp of approval.

Feeling like I had hit the basics pretty well, I thought I'd stop there and write the review.

But then I thought I should try cooking something that really required technique. I've made fresh pasta a jillion times; while it's labor-intensive, there's nothing tricky about it. But what about gnocchi? I attempted potato gnocchi once or twice a hundred years ago, but definitely didn't master it. If Bastianich could teach me to make great gnocchi, that would be something. 

My friend Shaun was coming over for dinner. She loves to cook, so I thought she'd enjoy helping me make them. We had a great time: The dough – basically boiled potatoes you put through a ricer then combine with eggs and flour – came together quickly and beautifully. We rolled it into half-inch ropes, cut them into half-inch pieces, rolled them over the tines of a fork (though we also tried using a little wooden gnocchi paddle I had in my drawer – we liked the fork better). They were beautiful, as you can see. They seemed to be perfect! How exciting! And then how disappointing when they nearly dissolved in the boiling water. I dropped them into butter-sage sauce. Great flavor, but they were soft as mush. 

 Hm. What was the problem?

Aha. It was sort of my fault, and sort of the book's fault. The recipe called for six large Idaho or russet potatoes, "about 2 1/4 pounds." I had six, but I hadn't weighed them – my bad. The proportion was way off: I had far too much potato for the amount of flour called for, three cups.

A few nights later, I rolled up my sleeves and attempted the gnocchi again: This time going by the potatoes' weight rather than the number of potatoes. Six large russets weighed a whopping five pounds! That was the problem. I used 2 1/4 pounds, as Bastianich called for – which was a little less than three large russets. (And these were the smallest ones I could find, not whoppers by any stretch!). Once again, the dough came together beautifully, but this time, they held together. 

View fullsize

In fact, they were wonderful, light yet firm. Tossed in the butter and sage sauce with plenty of grated parm, oh, man — that's comfort food. It involved some work, for sure, but rolling out those puppies was soothing, even therapeutic. Definitely fun to make with a friend. Or a child learning to cook.

RECIPE: Rabbit in Gremolata

RECIPE: Spaghetti alla Carbonara

RECIPE: Meat Sauce Bolognese

RECIPE: Potato Gnocchi with Butter and Sage Sauce

Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and Tanya Bastianich Manuali, Knopf, $40.

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

How a big handful of herbs can save us all from the pandemic cooking blues

Five months into The Great Confinement, it is, by all reports, getting difficult for a lot of people to manage the whole cooking thing. Probably it is the most difficult for parents of school-age kids. After bravely home-schooling all spring till summer vacation — while keeping everyone fed — there was, in all likelihood no summer vacation, just more feeding and caretaking, and looking forward to school starting, for a bit of relief. But lots of folks, as it turns out, will need to continue home-schooling, or supervising — in any case, continuing to faithfully put three meals a day on the table.

The thought of people with those kinds of pressures making sourdough bread, or figuring out dumplings, or learning to make pasta — all those aspirational pandemic projects — is just Fantasy Land. They need simple, and quick. And so do lots of other folks.

But that doesn’t have to mean boring or bland. Our latest trick, when we need to pull something together pronto but still want to feel just a wee bit transported (get me outta here!!) is to grab a big handful of herbs from our kitchen windowsill garden and garnish the hell out whatever simple food we’re about to wolf down.

In the beginning, I was doing it unconsciously. I put tons of herbs on top of a green gazpacho.

And on a super-simple potato salad.

And then I saw the trick underlined, boldly, in José Andrés’ latest book, Vegetables Unleashed — in which he actually named a recipe Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs.

Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs

Now these are all super-simple dishes, things you don’t even need a recipe for. The next time I made tomato-burrata salad, which I make like 9,000 times every summer, instead of strewing a few leaves of basil on top as usual, I let loose with all kinds of herbs — parsley, dill, basil, tarragon and mint. So much life in that little plate, so much vitality! I have to tell you, it was life-changing: I will not be going back to plain old basil if I have all those other players around. (Reason number 577 for growing pots of herbs!).

All this strewing of herbs made me wonder why I was doing in, and what its roots are — and I wound up writing a story about it.

You can do it to something as simple as hummus from the grocery store. Or avocado toast. The possibilities are endless — and the emotional uplift a real pandemic-changer.

RECIPE: Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs

RECIPE: Herb-Happy Potato Salad

RECIPE: The Greenest Gazpacho

Cookbooks We Love: Shanghai and its Jiangnan region shine in 'Land of Fish and Rice'

Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China, by Fuchsia Dunlop, photographs by Yuki Sugiura, 2016, W.W. Norton & Company, $35

Backgrounder: The British, Cambridge-educated cookbook author Fuchsia Dunlop was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Central China; she has four James Beard Awards. Land of Fish and Rice — which won the Andre Simon Food Book of the Year Award — is her fifth book; in 2019 she published a sixth, The Food of Sichuan. Land of Fish and Rice explores China’s Lower Yangtze (Jiangnan) region, of which Shanghai is the gateway. It’s a region “known for delicacy and balance,” Dunlop writes in the introduction. This is the book we look in first when we happen upon beautiful bunches of tong hao – chrysanthemum leaves – or giant bunches of flowering chives in a Chinese supermarket and wonder how to show them to their best advantage.

Why We Love It: There’s an easy elegance to Dunlop’s writing and cooking, an aesthetic we find super-appealing; Yuki Sugiura’s lovely photos capture it all perfectly. We happen to love the quiet charms of the cooking of Shanghai and the Jiangnan region, and Dunlop is a trustworthy guide who tells engaging stories of her experiences in the region along the way. Her recipes are easy to follow, they work, they showcase great ingredients and Dunlop has a wonderful way of teaching a bit of useful technique in each recipe. Cook a few, and you can’t help but feel you’re just that much farther along in learning. And you’ll certainly have eaten very well.

Slivered Pork with Flowering Chives from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Fish and Rice

You’ve Gotta Try This: Dunlop’s recipe for Slivered Pork with Flowering Chives is simple and homey, somehow almost poetic. It uses very little meat — just four ounces. After prepping, which is minimal, it comes together in about five minutes; with rice it’s perfect for a light, laid-back supper.

Stir-Fried Shrimp with Dragon Well Tea is the thing to make when you find yourself with fabulous fresh shrimp. You cloak them very lightly in a mixture of potato starch, water and Shaoxing wine, then pre-fry them at a not-sizzling-hot temperature so they come out tender and silky, and then they’re cooked briefly with the tea and its leaves. Though the particular tea, Dragon Well (Long Jing), is one of the most prized in China, you can actually purchase it easily from from my favorite tea outfit, Upton Tea Imports. But any Chinese green tea will do.

Looking for cocktail nibbles? If you love radishes as much as we do, you’ll enjoy these sweet-and-sour babies — which get smashed and salted as if they were cucumbers, then bathed in Chinkiang vinegar with a little superfine sugar and sesame oil. They are delightful with cocktails.

Still wanna cook: So many things! Clear-simmered lion’s head meatballs. Hangzhou spiced soy-sauce duck. Scalded tofu slivers — an essential dish of the Yangzhou tea breakfast — with dried shrimp, ginger and Sichuan preserved vegetable. Shanghai fried rice with salt pork and green bok choy. Yangzhou slivered radish buns, plump with pork belly and spring onions.

Social perk: Dunlop’s Instagram feed — @fuchsiadunlop — mixes Eastern and Western bites. It’s one of our faves.

RECIPE: Slivered Pork with Flowering Chives

RECIPE: Stir-Fried Shrimp with Dragon Well Tea

RECIPE: Sweet-and-Sour Radishes

Cookbooks We Love: José Andrés' 'Vegetables Unleashed' is a summer cooking bonanza, with great ideas for all seasons

NOTE: This is the first in a new and ongoing series of mini-reviews of cookbooks both new and old.

Vegetables Unleashed: A Cookbook, by José Andrés and Matt Goulding; photography by Peter Frank Edwards, Ecco, 2019, $39.99

Backgrounder: This is the third cookbook from superhero chef José Andrés, founder and chairman of World Central Kitchen and co-founder of ThinkFoodGroup, which owns and operates some of the best and most forward-looking restaurants in the United States. The book is not strictly vegan or vegetarian (recipes might include a garnish of bonito flakes or optional anchovies, for instance), but it is certainly vegetable-driven and completely vegetable-centric.

Sangria made with watermelon, peaches, cherries, blackberries, basil, thyme, rosé and brandy.

Why we love it: It’s filled with delicious, expansive ideas that are so inspired you can’t wait to try them, elucidated with fun, colorful photo-driven graphics. Often the concepts extend the reach of a familiar technique.

For instance, Andrés provides a framework for building a sangria from a variety of fruits, wines and spirits. Put one pound of chopped fruit in a pitcher with 2 to 4 tablespoons sugar, any herbs, spices or citrus you’d like and macerate that in the fridge for 1 to 4 hours. Pour in a bottle of wine plus a few ounces of an optional accent spirit. Pour in to large glasses filled with “massive amounts of ice” and garnish with citrus peel and/or herbs.

I riffed on it using the seasonal fruits at hand — watermelon, peaches, blackberries, cherries, rosé, basil, thyme and brandy — it was delicious. (And gorgeous.) As Andrés suggested, I served the fruit leftover on the bottom on ice as a boozy-fruity dessert.

You’ve gotta try this: A bunch of our favorite recipes and ideas in the book happen to feature summer produce that’s now in its peak.

Zap whole ears of corn, husks and all, in the microwave and the kernels come out perfectly sweet and tender, ready to be slathered with one of four topping/sprinkle combos. We went crazy for one inspired by elotes and another with miso-butter and a combo of Japanese seasonings.

Elote Loco (aka Crazy Corn): This is one of the most delicious things we made from José Andrés’ Vegetables Unleashed

Another microwave trick (and more slathering!) is used for a dish Andrés calls Dancing Eggplant. Japanese eggplants get zapped till tender, sliced open, slathered with a sweet, salty, umami-happy glaze inspired by the Japanese eggplant dish nasu dengaku, then topped with bonito flakes (katsuobushi). The bonito flakes, light as air and activited by the eggplants’ heat, dance around on top. Although we had to tweak the technique a bit, the dish is insanely rich, savory and delicious — something I’ll be excited to make often.

Dancing Eggplant from Vegetables Unleashed

It’s not all microwave tricks; another favorite is Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs — which you don’t even really need a recipe for. Cut zucchini into 1/2-inch-thick planks, brush or toss with olive oil and salt, grilled on both sides till lightly charred, sprinkle liberally with za’atar (the Mediterranean herb mixture) and top with a big handful of herbs — dill, thyme, basil, mint, parsley, tarragon, and/or fennel fronds in any combination.

A few little complaints: Not everything works so beautifully. A recipe for zucchini fritters gave us a batter that was too runny for the fritters to hold together; smashed cucumbers were inedibly salty and oily. A recipe that promised perfect cacio e pepe in the microwave was a giant flop that left us with a pile of crunchy pasta and a blob of melted cheese.

Normally with so many busts (along with a few recipes that were just duds), I wouldn’t recommend buying a book. But honestly, there is so much of value in these pages — and the ideas and approaches are so inspiring — that I’m very happy to own it, and would probably buy it as a gift for certain vegetable-loving friends. There are still a bunch of recipes I want to try, such as a riff on steak tartare made from tomatoes (the dish was born at El Bullí) and a luscious-looking cauliflower with béchamel that will be delicious when the weather cools down.

RECIPE: Corn on the Cob with Elote Slather

RECIPE: Miso Butter Corn

RECIPE: Dancing Eggplant

RECIPE: Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs

Support the people of Beirut: Make a donation, and then make some hummus and eat pita and send love

The devastation in in Lebanon is just unspeakable after the explosion on Tuesday — with a horrific loss of life, so many injured, so much destruction. It is also a terrible blow to a beautiful people who have been suffering from corruption and economic difficulty for ages.

The people there need our help. Our friends in Beirut tell us that a donation to the Lebanese Red Cross is the most effective — that organization is doing great work on the ground. Here is a link:

And after you donate, please think about the people there.

One way to do that is to honor their beautiful, delicious culture. Make some hummus — either the super-easy cheater kind from a can, or the overnight soak-then-cook-dried-chickpeas kind.

Maybe this weekend, you’ll bake some pita bread, or you could grill kafta, Lebanese lamb skewers.

If you have any friends who are Lebanese, call them; they are probably hurting and need emotional support, even if they are far away from Lebanon.

Our friend Josephine sent this photo of her neighborhood, half a mile from the blast. She and her family had just left 30 minutes before it happened.

For us, it’s hard to know what to do — other than donate. And talk. And then cook.

RECIPE: Amazing Cheater Hummus

RECIPE: Ultimate Hummus

RECIPE: Pita Bread

RECIPE: Kafta (Lebanese Lamb Skewers)

For 'Top Chef' judge Nilou Motamed, the Iranian herb platter sabzi khordan is a way of life

Ever since the pandemic cooped us up back in March, beautiful, generous flurries of fresh, soft, fragrant herbs have felt like an antidote to everything awful. My kitchen windowsill has become a garden; next to the pots, lemongrass sprouts and flourishes in a vase. When I can make it to my favorite Middle Eastern grocery, I come back with armfuls of dill and tarragon; at the Asian supermarket, I bring back ridiculous volumes of shiso, Thai basil, mint. Because I’ve developed an acute fear of running out, I just installed an LED-powered hydroponic AeroGarden outfitted with dill, spearmint, thyme, parsley and two kinds of basil. 

Toss a handful of fresh herbs on the plainest dish — potato salad, hummus, grilled zucchini — and it instantly becomes gorgeous, alluring, uplifting and even life-affirming. 

Nilou Motamed on the stoop of her brownstone in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn | photo by Peter Jon Lindberg

So why not just eat herbs? That’s the idea behind sabzi khordan, the platter of herbs and accouterments that anchors every Iranian table. “It’s essential to any meal we have, always” says Nilou Motamed. Like just about everyone I know who cooks, the former editor-in-chief of Food & Wine, current “Top Chef” judge, global food and travel guru and co-founder of Story Collective has been planting herbs profusely. 

“Our entire fire escape is an herb garden,” she says, “something we’ve never done before.” 

Nilou also shows up early to line up for herbs from Lani’s Farm at her local farmer’s market in Brooklyn; she describes them as phenomenal. “Our farmers market has gotten really competitive, and she has cilantro I’m trying to sprout, with incredible, deep, almost anise flavor. It has a purple stem.” 

Nilou, who was born in Iran, grew up eating Persian food at home even after she moved with her family to New York when she was 13. Because of that, fresh herbs have always played an outsized, aromatic role in her life. (I’m calling her Nilou because I’ve known her more than 25 years, and referring to her by her last name just feels too weird.)

Herbs from Nilou Motamed’s fire-escape garden | photo by Nilou Motamed

She fondly remembers spending time back in Iran at her father’s family house in an orchard (“bagh” in Farsi) in the town of Hamedan, amid groves of sour cherry, apricot, plum, almond and walnut trees. They’d lay down a Persian carpet outside under a big shade tree and picnic on kababs made from a just-slaughtered lamb. 

“Coming from the mountains, there were these qanat that run through all the countryside — mini mini mini streams — and all these herbs, the mints and watercresses would grow there,” says Nilou. “We’d pick the herbs and put our bottles of Coca-Cola in the ice cold water and drink it with the kabab. There’s something about herbs that makes you feel like you’re connected to your environment.” 

Maybe that’s why herbs are speaking to us so sweetly just now — we need them to connect to the natural world. 

They’re celebrated lushly on the sabzi khordan platter, which generally includes tarragon, dill, parsley, mint, cilantro and reyhan (a family of basils that includes Thai basil), along with scallions, radishes and/or Persian cucumbers, feta cheese, and sometimes walnuts, is there to nibble on throughout any Iranian meal — including kabab, of course.

“On Friday, every family does kabab,” says Nilou. “It’s very basic; we don’t use a ton of spices. It’s beautiful grilled meat, very plain rice, the meat basted in butter and saffron, a great cut char-grilled on aromatic wood, and then with the sabzhi khordan, you can do whatever you want to create the flavors.”

But serve it with freshly baked nan-e barbari (Persian flatbread), and sabzi khordan can also be a meal in itself. 

I know what you’re thinking: Where are we going to get nan-e barbari, especially during a pandemic? 

“I cheat and make it with pizza dough,” says Nilou. “If you use a pizza stone, it’s amazing, and it’s so easy to make.” Five minutes to pull and stretch the dough onto the pizza stone or baking sheet, press in some grooves, brush with a yogurt wash and sprinkle on nigella and/or sesame seeds, then 20 to 25 minutes in the oven and you’ve got barbari.

We tested her recipe using a couple different brands, including Trader Joe’s, and it turned out stunningly well. 

Nan-e Barbari made from store-bought pizza dough. Really!

Once you’re at the table — with your splendid sabzi khordan and your golden, crisp barbari bread — the idea is to create the perfect bite for yourself or a tablemate. There’s even a word for that bite: 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.”

Treat yourself to one sabzi khordan fest, and you may find yourself hooked. The herb habit is truly addictive; if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself scattering herbs over all kinds of dishes with abandon. Untreated, you may even turn into someone like Nilou, who will “literally buy bushels of herbs, and spend way too much time stemming and freezing. If you dry everything really well, and freeze them in Tupperware containers, they stay fresh. I’m like my own Jolly Green Giant.”

Go ahead. Treat yourself. Live a little. I’m pretty sure that even if the fix is fleeting, it’ll make you feel better.

Would you like a window on Nilou’s Persian cooking adventures? Follow her on Instagram @niloumotamed.

RECIPE: Sabzi Khordan (Persian Herb Platter)

RECIPE: Nan-e Barbari (Persian Flatbread)

Forget the queso: Time to move beyond Tex-Mex and explore the joys of Texas Mexican comida casera

Nostalgia, as a story last week in The New York Times explained, can serve as “a kind of emotional pacifier, helping us to become accustomed to a new reality that is jarring, stressful and traumatic.” And so it’s not surprising that, during these incredibly disturbing times, we reach for the kinds of nostalgic foods that soothe us — mac and cheese, pasta with ragù bolognese, spaghetti and meatballs, cheese enchiladas.

But children outgrow their transitional objects, the blankies and bunnies that soothed them as babies. And so I would submit that maybe, just maybe, it’s time for people to give up queso — the gooey comfort dip that, let’s face it, folks, is made from Velveeta.

An attempt to chase down the history of a dish I grew up eating, Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken, led me last week to a very interesting writer, chef and filmmaker, Adán Medrano. Medrano has written and spoken extensively about the roots of Mexican cooking in Texas, which, to be sure, did not involve process cheese (the actual industry term).

Adán Medrano at a cooking demo in Moscow in 2019 | photo courtesy of Adán Medrano

In 2014, Medrano, a San Antonio native who was the founder of the San Antonio CineFestival (the first and longest-running Latinx film festival in the U.S.) and now lives in Houston, dove into those roots in a book called Truly Texas Mexican: A Native Culinary Heritage in Recipes (Texas Tech University Press).

“‘Texas Mexican’ is the cuisine that has evolved over centuries in the region immediately north and south of the lower Rio Grande,” he wrote in the introduction. “It is deeply rooted in the indigenous cultures of what are now northeastern Mexico and central and south Texas, the region where my extended family and all my Mexican American friends live.”

What it is not is Tex-Mex.

Although I’ve long been aware that much of what passes as Mexican cooking in the United States bears little relation to what you eat if you travel in Mexico, I suppose I’d always assumed that Tex-Mex was also the result of some kind of evolution — that early on it must have looked and tasted more like what Mexican-Americans might cook at home, what Medrano refers to as “comida casera.”

In fact, as Medrano wrote, the first Tex-Mex restaurant — named, in a remarkable display of hubris, The Original Mexican Restaurant — was created by an Anglo for Anglos. Specifically, the owner was Otis M. Farnsworth, an entrepreneur visiting San Antonio from Chicago. Furthermore, to make way for the rise of Anglo-driven Tex-Mex, the businesses of a “celebrated group of Mexican, Texas Indian businesswomen” were systematically destroyed, as Medrano tells it, and the women were harassed. Though today we know the name of the man who opened that first Tex-Mex dining room, the names of the women who fed the community before him, cooking out of open-air diners in the downtown market square, have been forgotten. We only know them as “The Chili Queens.” How easy to dismiss and even ridicule.

As Rachel Wharton pointed out in an excellent New York Times profile of Medrano last year: “Today Farnsworth’s restaurant might be called out for cultural appropriation, or what Mr. Medrano calls ‘cultural poaching.’ And Mr. Medrano does get angry at the lack of respect for his culture, the many ways in which Mexican-Americans have been wronged throughout history.”

At the time Wharton interviewed Medrano, in advance of the in advance of the publication of his second book, Don’t Count the Tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking, Medrano expressed the view that Tex-Mex is a cuisine that should be respected and celebrated. “It’s just that Tex-Mex standards like queso and combo fajitas piled high with chicken and shrimp don’t speak of home to those whose Texas roots go back some 12,000 years,” she paraphrased him as saying.

So much has happened in the last year that I couldn’t help but wonder whether Medrano still holds that same hospitable view of Tex-Mex.

Though he’s busy in post-production of a 90-minute documentary, “Truly Texas Mexican,” that follows up on his first book, he was happy to illuminate his views on the phone with a Q + A. (scroll halfway down the story linked to find it). The documentary’s log line: “Texas chefs, artists and activists dig up the 15,000-year-old indigenous roots of today’s Texas Mexican food. A delicious combination plate of archaeology, politics and feminism, it definitely ain’t tex-mex!” He’s hoping to have it finished by the end of this month.

In any case it should, I think, be of concern to the proponents of Tex-Mex that the genre was born of a cultural sin.

How to atone? We can start by paying attention to comida casera. Often it’s what indigenous Mexican people are, as the name describes, cooking at home. But sometimes it’s also on the menu at your local mom and pop’s, if you skip down past the queso and combo plates and explore the guisados and the caldos.

And find a way to see Medrano’s documentary when it’s released. (It’ll definitely be announced in the Brenner Report.)

Last night I cooked a delicious dish, Camarón con Fideos de Calabacita — Shrimp and Squash Noodles, from Medrano’s newest book.

The basic ingredients, as the chef writes in the headnote, "are all native to the Texas Mexican region: tomato, tatuma squash, onion, chie, salt and Texas Gulf Shrimp.” He suggests substituting zucchini for the tatuma; the two are very similar.

Oh, one more thing — about that chicken dish that led me to chef Medrano. I spent my whole life calling it The Chicken that Killed Grandpa. Going forward, I’ll be referring to it as it was called when my mom found the recipe for it in the New York Times Magazine circa 1970: Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken. My family’s re-naming of it dishonors not only Grandpa, but also he dish’s author, Ms. de la Garza — whoever she was.

One day, I hope to find out. Until then, here is her chicken — which seems, according to everything I’ve read, to be a pretty clear example of Texas Mexican comida casera.

Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken

RECIPE: Camarón con Fideos de Calabacita

RECIPE: Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken

Summer vacation in your backyard: 7 dishes that can make this weekend feel like a delicious Mediterranean getaway

We have heard that there are people who get to go on actual vacations (wow, what a thought!). We see some of them frolicking on sunny beaches; others revel in leisurely strolls up high-altitude meadows dotted with flowers with stunning views in the background. Yes! We know this is true because we see it on Instagram. Unless maybe some of it is fake.

In any case, the rest of us are stuck at home, and so we cook as a form of escape. The thing is, it works pretty well!

Whether or not you have a backyard and the ability to grill, or you’re just relying on your trusty stove, you’ll find something delicious among these 7 treats that can bring a bit of summer vacation to your little piece of permanent paradise this weekend.

1. Grilled Artichokes with Aïoli

Don’t have a grill? They’re great boiled, as well.

2. Classic Gazpacho Sevillano

The most refreshing way to celebrate tomato season. Prefer green gazpacho? We’ve got the Greenest.

3. Grilled Butterflied Leg of Lamb

It’s simple, and it’s fabulous. Throw some vertically halved zucchinis on the grill next to them for a summery accompaniment.

4. French Lentil Salad

Super-easy to put together, this is wonderful warm, room-temp or even a bit chilled.

5. Deviled Duck Legs

These may roast for nearly two hours, but prep time is 10 minutes, max. Payoff is huge.

6. Kafta — Lebanese Lamb Skewers

Serve them on pita with hummus (O.G. or cheater) and a lovely parsley and onion salad.

7. A Showstopper Stone-Fruit Tart with Thyme

To spotlight all that great summer fruit! Want something easier and more casual? You’ll love this peach (or nectarine) and berry crisp.

RECIPE: Grilled Artichokes with Aïoli

RECIPE: Gazpacho Sevillano

RECIPE: Grilled Butterflied Leg of Lamb

RECIPE: French Lentil Salad

RECIPE: Kafta (Lebanese Lamb Skewers)

RECIPE: Deviled Duck Legs

RECIPE: Stone-Fruit Tart with Thyme

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.

Favorite dish of summer 2020 so far: Andrea Nguyen’s tangy, fresh, umami-ful Vietnamese rice noodle salad bowl

Cutting to the chase here: This Vietnamese rice noodle salad — from Andrea Nguyen’s new(ish) book Vietnamese Every Day — is probably the most craveable single new (to me) recipe I’ve discovered in four months of daily cooking through the pandemic. That would be my favorite dish in something like 120 days of cooking. Or at least the one dish I know I’ll come back to again and again. It’s the kind of dish you’re excited to add to your life, the kind of dish you think about and crave. The kind of dish you wake up certain days and you simply have to have.

At its base, it’s pretty basic. Put salad greens in a bowl with cilantro and mint, and maybe a handful of bean sprouts and/or some shaved cucumber. Add a layer of cold rice noodles. Then the star of the dish — grilled skewers of meat, chicken or shrimp. Tuck in some pickled daikon and carrot, scatter on toasted peanuts or cashews plus more cilantro and mint, and serve with nuoc cham, the Vietnamese dipping sauce, to toss with as dressing.

It’s cool and salad-y, with a tangy, spicy umami zap of the nuoc cham. It’s fragrant with herbs, and fresh, and cool — perfect for summer. The hot skewer lands atop cold salad and rice noodles, all those herbs and pickle, and it all gets tossed with that delicious, tangy nuoc cham sauce, plus a pickly, nutty crunch — what could be better?

We came upon the rice noodle salad recipe because Wylie was in process of preparing a Crispy Lemongrass Salmon, from the same book. Nguyen writes that while salmon is not native to Vietnam, once her family tasted it in America, they adopted it as if it were. She makes a paste with lemongrass, brown sugar, shallot, Madras-style curry powder, and fish sauce, coats salmon fillets in it, then broils them. In the headnote, she suggests serving the salmon either with rice or on top of the rice noodle salad. Wylie jumped into action, pulled together the rice noodle salad — and we were all gobsmacked.

A week later, I was craving it again, so I tried it with the pork skewers offered in Nguyen’s recipe (and which are shown on the cover of the book!).

I enjoyed putting together the marinade (garlic, shallot, five-spice powder, sugar, molasses, fish sauce, soy sauce and canola oil), and making grillable skewers out of pork shoulder — a cut I’d always thought had to be cooked long, low and slow. I couldn’t get boneless pork shoulder, but it was easy to cut bones out of a small picnic roast (a.k.a. pork butt), and slice the meat across the grain into quarter-inch-thick strips. Marinated and grilled on a cast-iron stove-top grill, the pork skewers were superb: tender, charry, flavorful, just delicious. No doubt they’d be even better grilled over charcoal.

It also seemed obvious that, as Nguyen suggests, the bowl would be fabulous topped with all kinds of alternative things. Shrimp — either marinated and grilled or poached and chilled. Chicken, with this same marinade. Beef (though I’m not usually craving beef with my salad). That’s why we’re calling our adapted version Rice Noodle Salad Bowl with XYZ Skewers.

To go vegan, you can marinate and then grill tofu and vegetables, and use that in place of the skewers.

If you’re starting from scratch, getting all the ingredients together takes some work, for sure. But you can make the key elements in advance and keep them on hand, so it comes together either in a jiff or with just a little effort, depending on the protein.

Nuoc cham base is worth keeping in the fridge (for up to two weeks); add lime and fresh chiles just before serving. Pickled daikon and carrot can be kept on hand in the fridge as well (we used a Japanese salady-pickle called Namasu, from Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, since it’s so similar to the one offered in Nguyen’s book), and rice noodles boil up quick and easy. That means if you keep greens, cilantro, mint and either cucumber or bean sprouts on hand (along with roasted peanuts or cashews), and a sudden craving strikes — which it will, if you’re anything like me — you just have to think about the protein.

A super-easy alternative to Nguyen’s lemongrass salmon is fillets of Koji-Marinated Salmon. (It’s easy as long as you have shio koji (the recipe for that is included in the salmon recipe). That piece of fish — which is five minutes broiler-to-table once it has marinated a day or three in the shio koji — is awesome on that bowl. So what if it’s Japanese and the noodles are Vietnamese? It works, and it’s delicious. But honestly, any simple grilled fish or seafood would do.

OK, maybe you’re ready to get to it. Just think of the dish as a way to riff. Try it once as suggested with pork, if you’re so inclined. And then embrace it as a fabulous vehicle for whatever you feel like.

[RECIPE: Rice Noodle Salad Bowl with XYZ Skewers]

Celebrate tomato season with salmorejo (a cousin of gazpacho) or tomato-burrata salad

We like to eat pretty simply and lightly at home during summer — that is, when it’s just Thierry and me. When Wylie’s here, he’s happiest making something complicated and involved, with as many ingredients as possible, especially well marbled proteins — and bonus points for flambéing, searing in cast-iron on maximum heat so the smoke alarm goes off or finishing a sauce with a fat knob of butter.

While tomatoes are bursting with flavor, I’d be happy eating nothing more than tomato salad with crusty bread three nights a week — especially if it can be the burrata variation of a classic Caprese, just sliced heirloom tomatoes, burrata, basil, olive oil, salt and pepper.

I’m embarrassed to write about the salad, as it’s so obvious and doesn’t require a recipe. But it feels disingenuous to assemble a dish so frequently and never mention it once in years of publishing — especially as there are young cooks and beginning cooks who may be less familiar with it.

You probably already knew how to make it (maybe you have your own version). To me what elevates it is using great olive oil, the freshest and fruitiest you can find, and my favorite finishing salt, Maldon (love those large, fragile flakes). When burrata’s not to be had, good ricotta can be nice in its place, and of course mozzarella goes back to the classic, if you’re feeling more nostalgic.

Here’s an actual recipe for the burrata version, just for the record (or if you want to forward it to your 19-year old nephew who’s learning to cook):

Classic Gazpacho Sevillano also shows up constantly on our summertime table; it’s one of my favorite dishes of all time. But until recently, I had never made salmorejo, its close cousin from nearby Córdoba (though I mentioned it in a 2003 Los Angeles Times story that won me a James Beard Award). Both Córdoba and Sevilla are in Spain’s southern region of Andalusia, a hot region where cold soups refresh in the summer.

Salmorejo is a cold, smooth, creamy cold soup whose basic ingredients are fewer than gazpacho’s: just tomatoes, bread (quite a lot of it), garlic, oil and salt. Vinegar is commonly included, though it is not necessarily traditional. The traditional — and still ubiquitous — garnish duo is chopped hard-boiled egg and serrano ham.

At a reader’s request I pulled out my blender and my history books and began salmorejo R & D. (Yes, we love cooking to order: If there’s something you’d like us to cover, let us know!)

Claudia Roden tells us in her marvelous, encyclopedic 2011 book The Food of Spain something I hadn’t known when I wrote that long-ago gazpacho story: that Seville was the province where tomatoes were first grown in Spain, and that gazpacho was the meal that farm works made when they worked the vegetable fields. They actually carried with them a dornillo, the large wooden mortar and pestle used to pound the ingredients and made the gazpacho on the spot.

Roden describes salmorejo as “a thick, dense, creamy version of gazpacho made with more bread,” one that you find at all the flamenco festivals and other festive occasions, served with a glass of wine, as well as at “every bar and tavern in Córdoba, topped with chopped hard-boiled egg and bits of jamón serrano.”

In fact, there is quite a lot of bread in salmorejo. If gazpacho is like a liquid salad, salmorejo is like a liquid sandwich — though it eats like a refreshing cold soup. “Some recipes have as much bread as tomatoes,” writes Roden. Needless to say, Keto adherents need not apply.

Another Spanish cooking expert, Anya von Bremzen, calls salmorejo in her 2005 book The New Spanish Table “Andalucia’s other tomato and bread masterpiece.” She describes it as “a cream with a texture that falls somewhere between a dip and a soup,” and points out that besides being a soup, it’s also wonderful as an accompaniment for crudités or “a pile of poached shrimp.” She also likes to serve it in shot glasses as a tapa, topped with a poached or grilled shrimp on a skewer. (Note to self: do that!)

South of Córdoba in Antequera, a town about 30 miles north of the Mediterranean coast, a cousin of salmorejo called porra is garnished with bits of tuna. And of course you can garnish salmorejo with a wide variety of things — von Bremzen suggests small poached shrimp, diced cooked potatoes and/or chopped tomatoes and onions, or those small chunks of canned tuna.

Von Bremzen and Roden both offer recipes that look excellent, and that I’ll definitely get around to trying theirs. (Curiously, I didn’t find one among the 1,080 recipes in Simone and Inés Ortega’s 1080 Recipes. Originally published in 1972 by Simone Ortega, 1080 recetas de cocina, as it’s called in Spain, is known as the Bible of cooking for Spanish home cooks.)

This batch, made with a combo of yellow and red tomatoes, turned out more orange than red.

Instead I went with Spanish-American chef José Andrés, who published a brilliantly simple version in Food & Wine in 2017 (it’s always safe to side with a superhero!).

For his recipe, toss tomatoes, crustless rustic white bread, sherry vinegar, garlic, salt and water in the blender, give it a good, long, thorough blitz so it’s very smooth, stream in some olive oil as the motor’s running, then serve, garnished with torn slices of serrano ham, a swirl of olive oil and chopped hard-boiled egg. I was surprised at how little vinegar Andés calls for — just a teaspoon for 2 1/2 pounds of tomatoes — but it was perfect.

Got tomatoes? Here’s the recipe:

Once you try it as is, you might want to riff on it, adding more or less bread, vinegar and salt to taste, and of course playing with garnishes.

All the recipes I found called for chilling the soup before eating, but I don’t imagine those farm workers who invented it brought coolers, and I couldn’t wait; besides, things tend to be more flavorful when they’re room temperature.

In, any case, it was deliciously refreshing straight from the blender jar.

Happy tomato season!

[RECIPE: Salmorejo]

[RECIPE: Tomato and Burrata Salad]

One of our 5 (five!) fabulous potato salads is sure to make your Fourth phenomenal

Our ‘Best Potato Salad Ever’

My family has put me on a potato salad time-out.

That’s because I’ve made so much potato salad during The Great Confinement that we’ve each gained about 9,000 pounds. OK, I’m kidding — but it’s surprising we haven’t, considering the carbo count these past few months.

In more normal times, I try to avoid potatoes in favor of lower-carb vegetables — and when I eat them, they’re a rare treat (like sweets for some people). But in confinement, I’ve given myself license to eat them at will. After all, they’re so delicious. And comforting. And affordable. And available. You get my drift. If ever we deserved to indulge in a potato fancy, it’s now!

Plus, it’s great to have potato in the fridge. We have to cook every night, and it goes with most everything. It’s great with a work-at-home lunch. And it can even be a dazzling little stand-in for boiled potatoes in a main-course niçoise salad.

It’s been so omnipresent in our kitchen these months that one day we’ll probably describe something that’s everywhere as “ubiquitous as potato salad in a pandemic.”

Herb-Happy Potato Salad

Potato salad is an ideal vehicle for a garden’s-worth of herbs, as in the Herb-Happy Potato above. With its vinaigrette dressing, this is the sole vegan entry in our bunch; it’s also gluten-free.

An old-fashioned one, such as Toni Tipton-Martin’s from her Jubilee cookbook, can take you all the way back to childhood. (Both are super-quick and easy to make.)

I love the Jubilee one because it’s rich in hard-boiled eggs, whose yolks blend lusciously into the mayo-based dressing, there’s a hint of sweet pickle relish and a nice celery crunch. If you’re going all-American classic with your July 4 menu, this is the one for you.

On the other hand, if you want to play it a little more exotic, consider a Japanese potato salad — we have two to choose from. One is from Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking (which we recently reviewed); the other is the one chef Justin Holt serves at his Dallas ramen hot-spot, Salaryman. (And that one sports a prize on top: halved ajitama marinated eggs — like the ones you find garnishing bowls of ramen.)

Each serving of Salaryman Potato salad is topped with half an ajitmama marinated egg.

Oh, man — I’m getting a starch high just revisiting them in my brain!

Finally, there is the one that predates the other four on Cooks Without Borders — the one we named Best Potato Salad Ever before we knew there’d be such heavy competition.

That’s Wylie holding a batch of it, before he and Thierry put me on potato salad time-out.

What makes it so good? It gets a luxurious richness from soft-boiled eggs, delightful tang from cornichons and shallots and lift from an array of herbs, all in the form of a New-Wave Gribiche.

I think any one of the fiHve would be a welcome guest at your picnic or party tomorrow. You can make them ahead, or not. Oh, and by the way, they’re all easy-going — in case you want to swap potato types, or swap shallots for scallions, and so forth. Whichever you choose, enjoy. I’ll be jealous.

Happy Fourth!

[RECIPE: Herb-Happy Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Jubilee Country-Style Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Salaryman Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Sonoko Sakai’s Potato Salada]

[RECIPE: Best Potato Salad Ever]

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]