Easiest Vinaigrette Ever!

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It’s a mystery to me why people still buy salad dressing. There are certain conveniences that make sense (dried pasta, canned beans, etc.) because they are inexpensive and good. Bottled salad dressings aren’t one of them. They are pricey and artificial tasting.  Sure it’s a time saver, but what if I said you could make a really simple one with stuff you probably already have in 60 seconds or less?! Honor your carefully washed greens and meticulously sliced veggies with a freshly made dressing. Our clients ask us all the time for our vinaigrette recipes and to tell you the truth they’re usually something we whip up without even thinking… or measuring. The real secret is in the jar.

You can make nearly any vinaigrette your heart desires with a jar (reused jam-jars are a great stand-in). The only thing you have to remember is the 2:1 ratio. Two-parts oil to one-part acid.  Measure the acid first. In this case we used a lemon but you can use any kind of vinegar (i.e. red-wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar.. etc.) or citrus you like. Then just double that amount with oil (we like extra-virgin olive oil). Suddenly we’ve transported you back to your 3rd-grade science lab when you learned about emulsification because you’ll see the separation between acid and oil clearly. This is all the measuring you need. Some may prefer a vinaigrette that’s a little less acidic; if so just add a little more than twice the amount of oil.

We ‘jazzed’ up our lemon-dijon a bit with grainy dijon because YUM and voila: the ultimate vinaigrette stand-by. It’s so sooo easy and it’s something we think everyone should have in their repertoire. See for yourself!

Other favorite combos (play with measurements of all ingredients to taste):

  • Lemon juice, dijon, minced shallot, olive oil, salt, pepper (equally good with cider vinegar, white wine vinegar, sherry vinegar, etc.)
  • Lemon juice, smashed garlic clove with or without smashed anchovy, olive oil, salt, pepper (equally good with red wine vinegar)
  • Orange juice, balsamic, honey, olive oil, salt, pepper
  • Lime juice, agave, olive oil or grapeseed oil, salt, pepper (chopped cilantro and a tiny bit of cayenne is good in here too) – great for salads with Mexican ingredients
  • Lime juice or rice vinegar, toasted sesame oil (just a little bit), soy sauce, chili paste or sriracha, grapeseed oil or water to thin and mellow flavors – great for salad with Asian ingredients

A Word on Smoothies

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Fruits and vegetables for smoothies
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day–or so they say. I tend to start each morning full of healthy resolve but find that it crumbles with each passing moment. After an entire day of running around the city cooking delicious meals for other people, dinner often turns into a free-for-all in which I succumb to every craving.

With this honest acknowledgement, I have learned that one of the most successful and simplest routines to fall into is to start each morning on the right foot, with a quick, low-maintenance and nourishing meal. My ultimate to-go meal is a smoothie.

Herbs citrus and ginger for smoothie

I love smoothies for many reasons. First and foremost, they are easy to throw together. Literally just toss the ingredients in a blender and whizz until it has reached a smooth consistency. Second, it is a great way to use anything in the fridge that may be on its way out. No discrimination against a slightly overripe banana or ugly avocado when everything ends up pulverized in the blender anyway. Texture trumps appearance. For example, avocados add creaminess to a smoothie, as does banana.

Carrot Mise en place

Most people are comfortable with fruit smoothies but are more hesitant to add vegetables to the mix. The key is to make sure that there is a good balance between some of the more strongly flavored veggies (such as kale or parsley) and the sweetness of the fruit. The addition of veggies provides an opportunity to get even more vitamins and fiber into one cup and cut down a little bit on the sugar and calories.

Fruit mise en place

When making a smoothie, the main components are as follows:

A Base – Water, milk, almond milk, coconut milk or juice, etc.

Vegetables – Spinach, kale, cucumber, beet, carrot, celery, parsley, ginger, cilantro, avocado, mint, etc. I’ve been known to throw kale stems in here but this isn’t for everyone:)

Fruit – Endless but my favorites are apples, oranges, bananas, mangos, pineapples, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, grapes, etc. Using frozen fruit is great for texture.

Additions – Protein powder, nut butter,  yogurt, dates, flax seed, chia seed, cinnamon, etc.

Yogurt milk oats chia seeds and dates

Combos can be mixed and matched from any of the above ingredients, and really the sky is the limit. If you are green smoothie/veg-fruit smoothie newbie, start with a lower veg:fruit ratio and slowly increase the ratio as your taste allows. I can’t begin to describe some of the more unusual results I have subjected my roommate Rian to sampling in the past. Laura won’t even try some of these but my tastes buds are happy. Below are a few introductory options that even the most green-smoothie-averse will enjoy. For our clients, we prepackage the italicized ingredients in ziplock baggies in the freezer and then they can simply dump them into their blenders and add in their other ingredients day-of for a quick, healthy, kid-friendly breakfast or snack option. They serve one person very generously or two kids.  I hope you enjoy them too!

With love,

Kristina

Green Smoothie for health

 

Green Machine Smoothie

Ingredients:

1 Banana

1 Cup shredded kale

1/2 Avocado

1/2 Apple

1 Tsp Chia Seeds

1 Cup Almond Milk (plus optional 1/2 cup plain Greek or regular yogurt)

 

Berry Green Smoothie

Ingredients:

1 Cup Strawberries

1 Cup Blueberries

1 Cup Spinach

1 Cup Almond Milk (plus optional 1/2 cup plain Greek or regular yogurt)

 

Green Monster Smoothie

Ingredients:

1/2 Cup Pineapple

1/2 Cup Mango

1/2 Banana

1 Cup Spinach

1 Cup Almond Milk (plus optional 1/2 cup plain Greek or regular yogurt)

 

Banana Date Smoothie (This isn’t a green smoothie but its such a big hit, I wanted to share in anyways.)

Ingredients:

1 Banana, sliced

4 Dates, chopped

1 Pinch Cinnamon

1 Cup Almond Milk (plus optional 1/2 cup plain Greek or regular yogurt)

 

Method: Tumble into a blender and blend for consistent texture. Enjoy! We prepackage the italicized ingredients in ziplock baggies in the freezer. Each recipe serves one person very generously or two kids.

Homemade Syrian Bread

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I didn’t know much about Syrian cuisine until about a month ago when we decided to host our #CookForSyria dinner. And I definitely didn’t realize how cooking and sharing their food would give me such an innate sense of community.

While the rest of the crew was rolling falafels balls, mandolining thousands of root vegetables for a slaw and grilling dozens of red peppers for muhammara, I was tasked with making one of the most important components of the menu: the pita. It was also perhaps the least exotic or hard-to-pronounce item on the menu (still trying to figure out how to pronounce mejadra), second only to hummus. Indeed, pita has become a household staple in the U.S. and you don’t need to have any knowledge of what’s happening in the Middle East to get your hands on some. It’s stocked at every grocery store and bodega nationwide.

In Syria, pita is even more common but it’s not something you just add to your grocery list. It’s most often kneaded by hand from fermented dough and baked over a fire-pit in the backyard. In our attempt at authenticity, we insisted that ours be homemade too. Even with a commercial grade oven and food processor, turning out 100+ pitas was far from easy.


With tables set and guests buzzing, I was still zipping across the kitchen with dough and flour on every surface, including myself. The perfect assembly line I’d envisioned was well out the window. Lucky for me, our guests were distracted with drinks and nibbles so this controlled chaos wasn’t on full display. It wasn’t until I finally sat down (and took a much needed breath) that I realized how extraordinary the pita I worked so hard to make really was.

My plate resembled a painting of dolloped dips and spoonfuls of slaw. My pita was the brush stroke that drew it all together. I was literally sitting, staring at my plate thinking, Wow, this dish is the ultimate symbol of chaos, harmony and humility all wrapped up in a pita. My humble pita was nothing more than a vehicle to bring flavors together, however it feels like there’s an overarching metaphor at play here too. For most of us, including those that attended our #CookForSyria dinner, it’s hard to imagine a life wrought by distress, violence and injustice, but that’s the reality that Syrian refugees and displaced citizens face almost every day. Bringing people together was not only meant to raise money and try Syrian cuisine, it was about creating a space for cultures to collide and appreciation and compassion to ruminate. When the dinner was all said and done, that was the most magic element I felt in the room and on the plate.

With Love,

Charlotte

Syrian Pita Bread Recipe (from Food & Wine with my own added instructions):

Makes about 16 pitas

Ingredients:

  • 3/4 cup warm water
  • 1 1/2 envelopes (3 3/8 teaspoons) active dry yeast
  • 6 cups bread flour
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
  • 1 1/2 cups warm milk
  • Extra-virgin olive oil, for the bowl

Method:

Set a pizza stone (or an upside-down sheet tray) on the bottom rack of the oven and preheat the oven to 500 degrees or as high as it will go.

In a bowl, combine the warm water and yeast and let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, in a food processor, pulse flour and salt until combined.

With the machine on, pour in the yeast mixture and then the warm milk and process until the dough forms a ball. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and knead it a few times. Form the dough into a ball.

Pour about ¼ tsp. oil into a large bowl and transfer the dough to the bowl and turn to coat. Tightly cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rise in a warm place until doubled in size, about 1 hour. You can also do this step ahead of time and allow the dough to rise halfway and then move it to the refrigerator to slow the rising process down up to 12 hours or overnight! An hour before it’s time to bake, take the dough out to come to room temperature and continue to rise completely.

Lightly dust a work surface with flour. Punch down the dough and cut it in half. Cut each half into 8 pieces and roll them into balls, then flatten into 6-inch rounds. Arrange the rounds on the work surface. Let rise until puffy, 25 minutes.

Using a lightly floured pizza peel, slide 4 of the rounds onto the hot pizza stone or baking sheet at a time and bake for about 5 minutes, until the pitas puff up. Each oven is different so times may vary. (With the oven we used, it only took a minute or two.) Keep an eye on the pitas and take them out the moment they puff up and barely begin to brown. Serve hot or wrap in foil to keep warm.

#CookForSyria by What We Eat

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I’m still glowing. What We Eat put on a fundraising dinner to benefit Syrian refugees via Unicef. The evening was a huge success, raising over $5,000.00 (and counting!), bringing people together to share ideas, and celebrating the vibrant food of Syria. It was a diverse crowd of friends, family and clients but there are no better unifiers than a good cause and good food.

We were inspired by the #CookForSyria campaign, which began as a super-club in England and evolved into a global movement in which everyone from top chefs to people at home raise money for the cause. It has taken the UK and Australia by storm and it looks like it will be spreading through the US by June of this year. We’re early adopters:)

It’s incredibly difficult to understand what’s happening in Syria and impossible to distill down into a paragraph or two. There are multiple wars going on within the country with too many outside, self-interested players involved (US included). I’d encourage you to read the two links below to begin to get a better idea:

What I take away above all else from reading about the situation in Syria is that there is no end in sight and nearly no hope for a happy ending ever. It makes me wish we could simply open our borders, and open our homes to as many people who are trying to flee as possible. Syrians didn’t ask for this life.

I feel lucky to have been born into a country known as the land of opportunity. I get to live in New York. I truly believe that anything is possible if I just dream big enough and work hard enough to make it happen. This feels like a given, a right. It’s not. People in Syria will never know a “normal” life. They aren’t free to pursue their dreams because they are busy with staying alive and keeping their children alive.

But our dinner wasn’t meant to be about contemplating the misery in Syria or our issues with our own country or the world. It was about recognizing how lucky we are, doing what we could to help in a small way, and about celebrating the hospitality-driven food culture of Syria. Syrian dishes are created to be shared, placed in the center of the table and enjoyed as part of a big group so that’s exactly what we did.

Here is our menu.

Kristina, Rian, Charlotte, Emily and I worked all day to make it happen. Highlights?

  • Charlotte realizing what it actually takes to make 100+ pitas from scratch. Holy ****! I cannot believe she didn’t have a mental breakdown with this uphill battle. I would have cried.

  • Kristina and Rian’s desserts, which were both recipes from their Middle Eastern grandmothers. Rian’s grandma Maro’s nazook recipe is at the end of this post. OMG make them!

  • Working up to the very last minute until our guests arrived. We planned to have some time to beautify ourselves….that didn’t happen.
If only my eyes were open!
  • Emily, our newest WWE addition fitting in seamlessly and working tirelessly. We’re so lucky to have found her!

  • The crowd. Simply the best.

We’ll have some video highlights to come but I wanted to share this moment when it was still fresh. If you feel moved, please feel free to donate here. Any contribution, no matter how small, helps.

(A special thank you to Brooklyn FoodWorks who donated the space, to my Dad for donating the amazing Lebanese wine, Ruby Young from The Party New York for the gorgeous greenery and to all who made it out to dine with us last night.)

Grandma Maro’s Nazook

Note from Rian: This recipe has been passed down from my great grandmother, Mannig Kouyoumjian, who was a surviver of the Armenian Holocaust , to my grandmother, Maro who immigrated to South Carolina from Baghdad, Iraq – to me as a present for my birthday. So, let’s just say this recipe is meaningful 🙂

Ingredients for the dough
1.5 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 sticks butter, room temperature
1 pint whipping cream
1 package yeast dissolved in 1/4 cup warm water
6 cups flour
1 tbs baking powder
1 tsp salt

Mix the sugar and 3 eggs in an electric mixer. Add in vanilla, butter and yeast and continue to mix until dissolved. In a separate bowl, sift the flour, baking powder and salt. Add flour mixture to the batter and mix with a wooden spoon, blending into a soft dough. Handle the dough as little as possible (do not knead). Cover the dough with warm blankets and set it to rise in a warm place for 3-6 hours. It won’t rise much, but should be about 1.5x its original size. Divide dough into 4.

Ingredients for the filling (Khorissgh)
2 sticks butter
2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
2 tbs cardamom

Rub your hands to blend the above ingredients to a coarse Khorissgh. Divide Khorissgh into 4.

Once dough has risen for 3-6 hours, on a well floured board, roll a section of the dough into a flat disk. Sprinkle part of the Khorissgh on the disk and gently roll the rolling pin over top for an even spread. Roll the disk into a cylinder and flatten down with a rolling pin to a thickness of no more than 1 inch. Cut diagonally into 1 inch strips and place nazook on a lightly greased cookie sheet.

Whisk 2 egg yolks and 1 tbs of water in a bowl. Brush each Nazook with egg wash and bake in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes or until golden brown.

Cool on a wire rack. Nazook is best served with Baghdadi tea.

Orange Zest Olive Oil Cake

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Olive oil cake with pistachio, orange zest and ricotta

It was a typical Friday morning. I arrived in Red Hook at around 10am, marketed for my clients** and headed to their studio with plenty of time to casually prepare lunch and clean up for the weekend. As I took my time in the kitchen, chatting with the crew who were stopping in to say hello and pour themselves some much needed coffee, one of them brought up a special request. It happened to be a team member’s birthday and the studio had a tradition of celebrating with cake. Could I throw something together? Sure! No problem.

In fact, there was a problem. After taking a brief inventory, I learned that we were out of milk and butter. Posit you this: How do you make lunch and a cake in two hours for ten+ people with no milk, or butter? Challenge accepted.

One of the most important skills of a private chef is the ability to pivot. There is no saying what obstacles could get in the way. Sometimes a recipe does not go as planned, other instances the grocery store runs out of stock of certain crucial ingredients. (I am on a first name basis with most buyers at the grocery stores I frequent) Finally, there are even times when I arrive at a clients home, only to discover that some of the ingredients I had stocked in prior weeks are now gone.

After a short panic, I enlisted the help of Laura, Rian and Charlotte via group text and true to form they didn’t let me down! Within minutes I got the enthusiastic resolution to my puzzle, make an olive oil cake! They immediately sent me a number of recipes of which I could combine and alter to my needs. Due to my aforementioned pantry issues, I ended up throwing together my own take on olive oil cake, adding in some scraped vanilla bean and orange extract that was on hand.

Mind you, I tend to hate baking. This is a skill completely different from cooking, an enjoyable task in which you can taste and alter your creation at will until you reach the desired result. Baking is a terrible game of precision in which you must measure to a T (literally) without tasting (but really who doesn’t love raw batter?) and then tuck it away in an oven for an hour to do its thing. Little wiggle room for mistake there my friends.

I threw the cake in the oven and went about my lunch duties. I pulled the cake out when the crust was browned and fretted over the cooling process, making a glaze for the first time since culinary school and praying that it would hold shape on top of the barely room temperature cake when I poured it on top. I left for the day feeling victorious that I had prevailed over all the odds stacked against me.

Imagine my shock to come back the following week to rave reviews! Apparently the olive oil cake had been a hit. I was proud but let it roll off my shoulder. Fast forward months later to the new year when it turns out that the memory of the cake had not quite faded in the minds of all others. Within days I was approached by three separate people, all lamenting that they could not find another dessert to stand up to my famous olive oil cake and could they please have the recipe? Once again, panic ensued. I had no idea what I threw together to make the dessert!

Mise en place for olive oil cake

In a pragmatic effort to solve this new mystery, we decided to make a day of recipe testing olive oil cakes to definitively document our own What We Eat signature recipe! We each got a say in different variations and set to work on baking one classic orange zest olive oil cake, one pistachio cake, and one ricotta lavender cake. Once finished, we wrapped and transported the cakes to the office for final scrutiny. (though not before we got a taste ourselves!)

When the time finally came to serve for tasting in the studio, results came back almost entirely in favor of the original version. Though all were tasty and some preferred the nuttiness and delicate profile of the pistachio cake, it seems as though it is best to stick with the original. Why mess with a good thing?

**Note from Laura: You will never miss Kristina in the supermarket. She’s the weirdo with gargantuan headphones that literally dances her way through every aisle. Not a hint of embarrassment. One of the reasons I love her.

 

Orange olive oil cake

Serves 8

1¾ cups All Purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup sugar

½ cup marmalade

Grated zest of 2 oranges

1 ¼ cups olive oil

4 large eggs, at room temperature

1 vanilla bean, scraped

Glaze

1 ½ cups confectioners’ sugar

3 tablespoons fresh orange juice, plus more if needed

 

Method

Preheat the oven to 325°F, with a rack in the middle position. Grease and flour a 9-inch round cake pan and line the bottom with parchment paper. Grease the paper.  Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt into a large bowl.  In a separate bowl, combine the sugar and orange zest and mix well with your fingertips, rubbing the mixture together until well blended. Add the oil to the sugar mixture, and beat on medium speed for 1 minute. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla and marmalade until combined. Add the dry ingredients in 3 additions, beating on low speed and scraping the sides and bottom of the bowl after each batch, until just combined.  Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes, until the top springs back when lightly pressed. Cool the cake in the pan on a rack for 15 minutes, then remove from the pan, peel off the parchment paper, and allow to cool completely on the rack.

To make the glaze:

In a medium bowl, whisk together the confectioners’ sugar and orange juice to make a thick but pourable glaze; add more orange juice if needed.  Set the cake, on the rack, over a rimmed baking sheet. Pour the glaze on top of the cake, letting it run down the sides. Let the glaze set for at least 30 minutes before slicing the cake.