newyorkavore

I’ve been really into The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden lately. Most of the recipes are pretty straightforward, so I just do a once-over and have at it. I usually add a little more spice than she calls for and sometimes make other slight variations, but that’s just the Does Not Follow Directions part of me that can’t help but stray.

I’ve been working on perfecting my hummus technique, and two major game changers have come along as of late. Firstly, I made the switch from canned chickpeas to overnight-soaked dried ones. And secondly, have been using a superpowered VitaMix Blender, which makes it so creamy and light. My results are getting to be better than what you can buy at the store, though not yet Mimi’s caliber, admittedly. All in good time.

As I suspected, grating carrots by hand is a joke compared to zipping them through the grating blade of a food processor. Prepping cucumbers for yogurt salad was also super easy with the slicing blade. The one thing you do have to do by hand is the tabouleh — if you blitz the parsley and mint in a machine, it’ll come out too fine and watery.

It seems like a lot of work, and I guess it is, but if you do it all at once, you have a week’s worth of flavorful healthy salads you can serve with meat or fish, as an easy lunch or dinner, on a plate or straight out of the fridge as a midnight snack. 

Life at the beach is conducive to cooking for three reasons:

1.) Food just seems to taste better after a long salty day,

2.) There’s not much else to do when the sun goes down, and

3.) There’s no good way for me to get to a restaurant.

And while I may not have all my fancy gadgets here, I can still make it happen. Handmaking hummus with a potato masher as opposed to my Cuisinart made me feel a bit like a pilgrim from like the 1920s, albeit a hummus-eating pilgrim. Bonus pilgrim points because I soaked the chickpeas overnight instead of popping open a can. I also made heirloom cherry tomato tabouleh by soaking bulghur and chopping up herbs grown at home (yet more P-points). I grated the carrots for the Moroccan Carrot Salad by hand which took about 300 times longer than it would’ve had I zipped them through a food processor, but I got a good workout and the results were so sweet that I really can’t complain.