Join me Tuesday, June 28 from 4-5:15pm ET for my next virtual cooking class. Cooks of all skill levels are welcome and our menu is vegetarian-friendly. $40 per Zoomer.
We’ll be making three summer sides so you’ll have recipes you feel confident about going into BBQ season. (I’m looking at you July 4.) Each salad is a riot of colors, flavors and textures. They are each stand alone, knock-it-out-of-the-park sides, but they also complement each other perfectly. This means you will be praised if you make just one of them and will be worshipped if you make all three. Here is our menu…
Orzo Salad with Charred Broccoli, Cranberries and Toasted Walnuts
Corn Salad with Tomato, Cucumber and Basil
Peach and Burrata Salad with Spicy Arugula and Pickled Shallots
The Orzo Salad has all of the flavors of your typical broccoli salad but elevated. First of all, raw broccoli is…meh. It’s good but I’d choose roasted broccoli 10/10 times. We’re giving ours a little char and then we’re adding pasta to the party because who doesn’t love pasta?
Nothing says summer like a corn salad. After toasting corn on the stovetop (or you could use a grill if you have one), we’ll take it off the cobb and toss it in a bright vinaigrette. Then we’ll bulk it out with cherry tomatoes and cucumber and give it extra oomph with fresh basil. There are endless directions you can take this corn salad including the Mexican-ish vibe above with cilantro, lime and tajin.
Finally, we’ll make a peach and burrata salad to introduce a little sweetness into the menu. I think of any salad that includes fruit as a “gateway salad” – salads that entice even those so called “salad haters” out there. I love this salad with any stone fruit, so feel free to swap in cherries, plums, nectarines or a mix of all. Fruit + milky burrata = perfection.
Register for the class here. I will approve your registration, and send you an invoice and more information about the class including a grocery list, our recipes and answers to common questions. If you can’t make it live, the recording will be made available to all registrants after the class.
My next Zoom cooking class will be Wednesday, June 15 from 4-5pm ET. Cooks of all skill levels are welcome and our menu is vegetarian-friendly (though this time not vegan). $40 per Zoomer.
The class will be short and sweet but leave you with a delicious dinner to enjoy with family or friends that night *and* an extra meal to stick in your freezer for the coming weeks/months.
*MENU*
Now or Later Turkey (or Lentil) Meatballs
Roasted Tomato and Corn Pasta with Arugula and Ricotta
Pasta and meatballs…. what’s not to love?
This is one of those menus that I find myself making on repeat. It comes together quickly, tastes as good room temperature (or cold from the fridge) as it does hot, is enjoyed by toddlers and adults alike, and leaves me with plenty of lunchbox leftovers and even a second meal in the freezer.
The Roasted Tomato and Corn Pasta with Arugula and Ricotta is summer in a bowl. It is made with the pasta:veg ratio I love, which is about 50:50. That way it serves double duty as the meal’s “salad.” You can toss the noodles with the ricotta so they are all equally coated with the milky cheese or leave it like I do with big, billowy pockets. The dish is so hearty that I oftentimes serve it as dinner all on its own.
But I want to make meatballs with you, so let’s do that! In my opinion, meatballs are an essential recipe that everyone should have memorized. If you have a basic template (which I of course will be giving you) you can make endless variations to suit your tastes. The turkey (or lentil) meatballs we’re making are a basic Italian-style ball flavored with garlic, more ricotta, salty parmesan cheese and tomato paste. We’ll prepare some to serve with the pasta and freeze leftovers in your favorite jarred sauce. In my opinion, meatball recipes should always be doubled. It’s far less than twice the work, they freeze like a dream and it feels so good knowing you have them on hand when you could use the short cut later on.
Register for the class here. I will approve your registration, and send you an invoice and more information about the class including a grocery list, our recipes and answers to common questions. If you can’t make it live, the recording will be made available to all registrants after the class. If you miss this entirely or catch this post after the fact, send me a message directly and I’ll get everything to you.
GUYS! Everyone! I am so excited to officially invite you to my very first Zoom cooking class. The class will be this Sunday, May 22 from 4-5:30pm ET at a cost of $40 per household. Cooks of all skill level are welcome. Here is our menu…
Jalisco Express
Tangy Roasted Salmon and/or Tofu
Spring Caprese
Citrus Farro Salad with Toasted Walnuts and Olives
Citrus Olive Oil Cake
Our menu will celebrate the official transition into spring. To me, that transition happens once temperatures remain above 60 degrees and real spring produce shows up at the farmers markets, not when the calendar tells us its spring in March. We are just getting there here in the North East.
All dishes (even our cocktail!) include bright, verdant flavors – think lots of citrus, green vegetables and fresh herbs. We’ll start with a Jalisco Express – a tequila cocktail that’s the tiniest bit spicy from the addition of a jalapeno, and fresh from cucumber and basil. It’s just as yummy made virgin with soda water for those who don’t want to imbibe. We’ll make Tangy Glazed Salmon (and/or tofu) with orange, Dijon mustard and honey and discuss the many directions you can take it by switching up your glaze ingredients. To serve alongside of that, we’ll prepare my Spring Caprese, a mix of perfectly blanched spring vegetables layered with top-quality mozzarella, basil and mint; and a flavorful farro salad tossed with lemon-shallot vinaigrette, crunchy toasted walnuts and salty olives. And don’t forget about dessert! We’ll whip up a very forgiving citrus olive oil cake that gets better as it sits. You will be enjoying the fruits of our labor for days to come.
Cook along with me and enjoy the meal with family or friends or pack it up and enjoy it for lunch throughout the week. Register for the class here and I will invoice you via Venmo or Quickbooks. Once paid, I will approve your registration and send you more information about the class including a grocery list, our recipes and answers to what I anticipate to be common questions.
This is something I have wanted to do *forever* and hope I will see you there. Thank you so much for your support!
We are in the no man’s land of seasonal cooking in the northeast. I am totally over traditional winter fare and root vegetables but there is nothing green and local in sight. This leaves me with two options: fake it out and settle for supermarket asparagus and the like from California or Mexico, or turn to more flavor-forward, globally-inspired cuisine like this Smoky Tomato and Chickpea Shakshuka.
What is Shakshuka?
Apparently, the literal translation of Shakshuka is “all mixed up.” Don’t you love that? It is a popular Israeli breakfast with North African origins that traditionally consists of eggs baked in a tomato-y, peppery, oniony sauce. It’s deliciousness explains why it has spawned endless variations, including those with Mexican, Italian and Indian influences. While I would be psyched to have this for breakfast, I most often enjoy Shakshuka for dinner.
About this Recipe
The saucy base for my Smoky Tomato and Chickpea Shakshuka is actually an offshoot of these slow-roasted tomatoes from my Winter Caprese. I use my oven set low, a casserole dish and plenty of olive oil to gently stew a mixture of canned tomatoes, chickpeas, bell peppers, garlic and olives spiced up with red pepper flakes and smoked paprika. This recipe takes time (2 hours + a few minutes to bake the eggs) but almost no effort or baby sitting. It is rich, intensely flavorful and vegetable and protein-packed.
Even without the eggs, the stewed ingredients are a perfect side or entree all on their own. But this can’t be Shakshuka without them. So right before dinner, I bump up my oven temp, nestle in a few raw eggs and crumble over some feta cheese. In just a few minutes in the hot oven, the eggs gently poach in the liquid, absorbing all of the mix’s vibrant flavor. The sweet spot is when the egg whites are just set but the yolks are still runny. That way the yolks impart their own magic back into the sauce.
Make It Yours
Serve this Shakshuka over Israeli couscous, fregola, rice or a whole grain like farro, or scoop it up into warm naan, pita or your favorite bread.
Sometimes I serve this with big dollops of whole milk Greek yogurt as well.
As mentioned above, feel free to leave out the eggs if you are vegan. The vegetable-chickpea mixture is a complete meal on its own.
Add in another good slow roasting vegetable like summer squash or zucchini at the start, or fold baby spinach into the cooked vegetable-chickpea mixture before nestling in the eggs.
You could swap the chickpeas for a white bean like cannellini or butter beans.
Leave out the olives if you aren’t as obsessed with them as I am!
I hope you take this dish and make it yours. If you do, report back here and post a photo on Instagram tagging me @whatweeat.nyc. I love to see your creations!
xoxo
SMOKY TOMATO AND CHICKPEA SHAKSHUKA
Ingredients
1 32-oz can whole peeled tomatoes, drained and torn apart (seeds discarded)
1 16-oz can chickpeas, drained
8 garlic cloves, smashed and skin removed
2 bell peppers (orange, yellow) cut into strips
1/2 c evoo
1.5 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp kosher salt
Pinch red pepper flakes (or more to taste)
Handful castelvetrano olives, pitted and roughly chopped
6-8 eggs
2-4 oz crumbled feta
Kosher salt and freshly cracked black pep
Red wine vinegar or sherry vinegar (really any hit of acid – lemon or lime juice would also be nice)
For serving: couscous, rice or other grain or pita and fresh cilantro/mint/basil
Method
Preheat the your oven to 300 degrees. Place the drained and torn tomatoes, drained chickpeas, bell peppers, and smashed garlic in the bottom of a roasting dish that will fit them all very snugly. Top with 1/2 cup evoo (they should be swimming a bit), 1.5 tsp smoked paprika, 1 tsp kosher salt and as much red pepper flakes as you like. (I only used a small pinch in the hopes my littles would enjoy this…no luck so should have added more!).
Roast for one hour, remove from oven, gently stir and add in the castelvetrano olives. Return to the oven for a second hour. (FYI, stop right here and enjoy this with flatbreads for scooping or over a grain if you’d prefer to keep this meal vegan.)
Bump up the oven heat to 425.
Make 6-8 little nests in the roasted vegetable mix using the back of a spoon and crack 6-8 eggs into the wholes. Crumble the feta here and there around them. Bake for 8-12 minutes, just until the whites are set. Check every minute or so after 8 minutes because they can go from pretty raw looking to totally cooked through quickly. You are looking for your yolks to remain jammy.
To finish, sprinkle over a hit of acid (red wine or sherry vinegar or lemon or lime juice), top the eggs with a little Maldon salt and freshly cracked pepper. Serve over something like Israeli couscous, fregola, rice, or any whole grain or with warmed pita or naan. Offer a bunch of fresh herbs like cilantro, mint and/or basil alongside. Enjoy!
Every Friday afternoon, Kristina, Rian, Charlotte, Emily and I gather round my table for lunch. Although most of us cook with one another at least once a week (and we have an incessant group text going round the clock), it’s the only time all five of us get together. More importantly, it’s the only time we get together to break bread. As much as this group loves to cook, it loves to eat even more.
This is usually how to unfolds. All five of us have been looking for inspiration for the coming week’s menu throughout the week – mostly from our own home-cooking but also from restaurants, blogs, cookbooks, magazines, talking with other chef friends, etc. Rian and I have put the finishing touches on what we’ll be cooking the following week early Friday morning. I choose a meal or meal component I’m most excited about that I feel needs a little extra explaining and decide, That’s for lunch today!
The hardest part of our lunches is the moment right before we sit down to eat. Everyone is so excited to dig in but we know we have to capture it first. ANNOYING!
I send a shopping list to Charlotte and Emily (who are usually working on blog posts, updating our Mail Chimp account, chipping away at our granola project, etc.) so they can pick up needed groceries on the way over. They get here early and I get to work. While I know and love these girls, I always feel the slightest bit nervous about making them an extraordinary meal. These are chefs I need to impress after all. In the next 45 minutes or so, Charlotte and Emily set the table, light some candles (always), and my platters generously piled high with next week’s offerings begin to hit the table.
Kristina and Rian buzz us from downstairs at 2:30pm. Kristina is coming from cooking in Red Hook and Rian from perfecting our menus in Williamsburg. Like clockwork, Charlotte, Emily and I giggle as we hear them oooh and aaah about the smells wafting from my second floor apartment in Park Slope down to the entryway. They’re like a tornado when they come in the door – bags here, shoes there, coats here – mid conversation as if they haven’t seen each other in years (they live together) and loud.
“What’s for lunch?” They yell in unison.
Good eaters here:)
After I explain what I prepared and the initial five-minute silence with exception of groans of pleasure (Ri), the next two hours unfold with us sharing stories from our past week, discussing the next week’s menus, and touch basing about other things on the docket. If you know this group, my main job here is redirecting everyone back. Tangents are frequent.
We talk about what ended up being our favorite menus to cook, what went well, and what didn’t. Those granola bars we were so excited to make that ended up just being granola because they wouldn’t stick together, those homemade veggie burgers that ended up being hummus because we didn’t like their consistency, that last minute swap we made because the butcher was out of chicken (what?!).
By the last hour we shift gears to the next week. What ingredients we’re highlighting because there at their peak and how to pick them at the market. How a finished dish should look. A new technique that we all need to talk through. Sometimes we’ll even hit my kitchen together for a demo (more food to eat for this ever-hungry crew). By the time the last plate is cleaned, we’re on the same page and, as crazy as it sounds to a normal person, excited to get back into our clients’ kitchens the next week.
Finished Dish for a Client: Typical avo:greens ratio here. Who doesn’t love avo?!
These lunches together are sacred. This sharing is what makes us all better cooks. We get to learn from one another’s successes and occasional failures. Our passion for cooking is amplified by being around one another. Enthusiasm (no short supply here) is contagious after all. We want you to know, there’s a seat at my table for you too.
Finished Dish for a Client: Roasted Sweet Potato and Avocado with Tahini Yogurt on our menus last week. This is a super hard time of year to be inspired in the kitchen. Magazines and blogs are talking about asparagus, peas and other amazing spring veggies but we won’t really see any of that in the markets for weeks in New York. Until then? Root veggies.
Going forward, we’ll be sending out (and posting on our blog if we’re too longwinded) a newsletter with highlights of this weekly tradition. We know you’re busy so this will have to be the next best thing to actually being here. If you’d like to sign up to receive the newsletter, please leave your name and email address in the comments section below or send us a note on our Contact Page.
For our clients, maybe you’re content enjoying our food, but we want you to be able to see “behind the scenes” if you want to. You have some very happy people cooking for you. A happy cook makes better food. We appreciate every opportunity you give us to provide for you. You’re the reason our company exists! For anyone else, maybe you’re curious about the private chef business or how chefs eat. We want you at our table too.
Finished Dish for a Client: Roasted Chicken Salad with Grapes, Walnuts and Lemon Zest
So read these newsletters if you want to get to know us better, want to learn or want to our draw from our enthusiasm and passion about cooking. And while the newsletter is just a symbolic seat, a real place will be set for you whenever you can join us. I mean that. The very best thing about food is the way it brings people together. With just a little more stock added to the soup, or an extra platter of bread and cheese added to the meal, there is always enough for more.
So pull up a chair. We’re so excited to have you!
Always with love, xo Laura
p.s. Please leave us a reply with your email and first name if you’d like to be added to our Newsletter mailing list, or feel free to send it confidentially via email by selecting that little letter icon to the right.
KIPPERED SALMON, ROASTED FINGERLING POTATO AND DILL SALAD
We enjoyed this for lunch this week and it will make an appearance on a few of our clients menus soon. This is more of a recipe template than a stick-to-it-exactly recipe. For instance, Kristina found some amazing Jerusalem artichokes at the Union Square Farmers Market so a few of those were added into the potato mix to roast as well. You could use roasted salmon instead of kippered (aka hot-smoked salmon), or sub in smoked trout or even oil-packed tuna. This dish is delicious finished with dollops of 2% or whole plain Greek yogurt seasoned simply with salt and pepper. And you can bump up the protein content even more by adding halved hard-boiled eggs to the mix.
Ingredients
1 lb fingerling potatoes (and Jerusalem artichokes if you have them!)
8 oz kippered salmon (aka hot-smoked salmon or smoked trout)
A few tablespoons of dill (parsley and or basil would be delicious too)
1 few tablespoons of scallions or chives
Lemon zest and juice to taste
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
Optional add-ins: Sliced hard-boiled eggs, dollops of plain 2% or whole Greek yogurt mixed with freshly cracked black pepper and salt to taste (I’d leave this out if opt for tuna), a few handfuls of arugula or other greens, sliced raw radish, toasted walnuts, sliced avocado…get creative!
Method:
Preheat oven to 425. Halve fingerling potatoes (and Jerusalem artichokes) lengthwise. On a sheet pan, toss the potatoes with several tablespoons of olive oil and season with salt and pepper to taste. Roast for about 30 minutes, tossing halfway through until well browned and crisp. Allow to cool on the sheet pan for at least 5 minutes to help the potatoes stay crispy.
While potatoes are roasting, gently flake the kippered salmon into large chunks. Roughly chop or tear dill (and/or other herbs) and thinly slice scallions or chives.
To assemble salad: Layer the roasted vegetables, flaked salmon and herbs on a platter. If you are adding in eggs or salad greens, layer those in as well. Finish the dish with lemon zest, a generous squirt of lemon juice, a judicious drizzle of olive oil and dollops of the seasoned Greek yogurt if you’re using it. Enjoy alone or with grilled bread. This dish would also pair nicely with blanched greens beans simply tossed with lemon-dijon vinaigrette.
