When my friend Sara and I got the same cookbook for Christmas, we decided to break it in together. It was our version of that new domestic trend—the cookbook club—but for our gathering with 10 collective family members, the two of us tackled three dishes each.
The cookbook was Simple by Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi, his seventh cookbook in a longline of best-sellers. Simple is a beautiful collection of recipes, meant to be (sorta) easy and often made with familiar staples taken in a Middle Eastern direction. While it has plenty of meat and seafood, it’s got some really interesting raw and cooked vegetable dishes. Trendy as ever, the images depict abundant foods diverse in color and texture piled into pottery bowls or onto platters, arranged on sprawling tables.
Sara and I each chose a protein and two additional dishes. I made harissa beef sirloin with pepper and lemon sauce, and she made turkey-zucchini meatballs with tzatziki sauce and sumac (this was actually from Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem). Both were big, flavorful dishes that served as terrific anchors for the rest of the meal.
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I also prepared the pasta dish, gigli with chickpeas and za’atar, which was nicely sharp and earthy and gave me a chance to use one of my favorite ingredients, anchovy fillets. Note: I used orecchiette instead of harder-to-find gigli pasta. Finally, I made something from the “raw veg” section, the tomatoes with sumac shallots and pine nuts, a fresh, acidic salad in which shallot slivers are doused in the citrusy spice sumac.
In addition to the turkey-zucchini meatballs, Sara made the avocado butter on toast with tomato salsa, a luscious and creamy spread atop crisp sourdough, and sweet potato mash with lime salsa. Here, the salsa, made of olive oil, basil, cilantro, lime and garlic, is applied to the mash before serving.
The meal was a huge hit, and it was so much fun to see a sudden explosion of carefully crafted dishes on the table. I liked them all, but my favorites were the beef sirloin and the sweet potatoes, two very doable dishes for anyone.
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Our impromptu cookbook club proved to be incredibly fun and inspired us to do it again. You can try it the way we did, with a smaller number of cooks, or you can do it more traditional fashion, where a group of friends take the same cookbook and each bring one dish from it to a common gathering.
Either way, it’s a great excuse to get in the kitchen and make something new.
Maggie Heyn Richardson is a regular 225 contributor. Reach her at hungryforlousiana.com.