From Yotam Ottolenghi: Whenever I walk into a bookshop I find myself in the cookery section within seconds; it's an urge I can't control. On a recent visit to a secondhand bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, the capital of bookshops, I came across a real treasure, Classic Turkish Cookery by Ghillie Başan, published in 1995. This book offers a fantastic introduction to one of the world's most accomplished cuisines and it is packed full of recipes you just know you must try. It is there that I came across this unusual savory cake originating from the Turkish part of Cyprus. It makes a substantial snack or a light starter. Serve with Burnt Eggplant with Tahini.
Serve this on toasted pita wedges or over raw vegetable leaves, such as endive.
You can spread the sauce on tortillas, roast chicken or meats in it, use it to dress a jicama-orange salad…you get the gist. This sauce is meant to be hot, but if you use only one can of the chipotles in adobo and the full amount of the jam, it’s fairly calm.
Excellent hot or at room temperature. Reheats well.
This is a lovely, light vegetarian supper. The preparation is simple because, quite frankly, the meatiness of the mushrooms against the cool, delicate greens and the mellowness of good cheese cannot be bested.
I have made cauliflower every which way: I’ve blanched it, sautéed, boiled it, mashed it, deep-fried it, and eaten it raw. Until I read about it on eGullet.org, though, I never knew I could roast it. This recipe really brings out the richness of the cauliflower and matches it perfectly with the robustness of the spices. I use my fennel rub along with a few other spices. If you have sea salt, it works really well with this recipe. The cauliflower tends to shrink when roasted, so one head of cauliflower is about right for 2 servings.
Over my girls’ coop, a sign reads: team quiche. That’s because each of my three original hens would lay an egg a day, and three eggs are exactly what my favorite recipe calls for. Quiche is easy to make, great to share, and keeps well in the fridge. It tastes just as good heated up in the oven the next day. You can customize it, adding whatever you prefer. If your add-ins include breakfast meats such as bacon or sausage, make sure they’re precooked before mixing them with the other ingredients.
One of my cousins was married to a Kashmiri gentleman, and for the period when he was working at the United Nations in New York he had brought along a manservant. My cousin let me have him once a week to cook and clean. His repertoire was limited—he could only cook dishes he had learned from my cousin, such as this simple Kashmiri staple, which we loved. Soon he was making it week after week, and it remains one of our favorites. In Kashmir, collard-type greens and rice are eaten as commonly as beans and rice in Central America, the season for them lasting from spring (when the greens are tender) until the snows start to fall in early winter (when the greens get coarser).
This sauce, without the mint, holds for 2 days in the fridge, but should be used at room temperature. The mint goes in at the last moment to keep its bright green color and fresh taste.
I adore the deceptive plainness of gingerbread. It is definitively unfancy, and yet the flavor is so rich, and its deep-toned tang so subtle. Here the tang is a little more emphatic, as sour cream and licorice-evocative Guinness give heady lift, but still this is — for all the treacly sugar and pungent spices — gentle and cozy-making, though almost alarmingly addictive.