welcome to COOKING THE MED
You are here with me Merijn Tol, food writer, cookbook author and cook from Amsterdam, but my heart is beating for the Med. If you too love food from the Mediterranean, from east to west from Palermo to Beirut, you came to the right place! Be at home in Café Mazahar’s COOKING THE MED. I serve you Mediterranean recipes with a twist.
Cafe Mazahar is the name of one of my latest cookbooks, and my travelling popup.
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Yalla let’s go to this week’s recipe….
I was intrigued by Carla Lalli’s series here on substack on the proces of recipe writing. Having written countless recipes over the course of 20 years i often forget that it is a real process after all. And one with mistakes trial and errors and a lot of forgetfulness ( i mean how many recipes can one’s brain retain). It happens to me on a regular basis that people tell me they still make this and this recipe from one of my books or magazine and the minute they tell me which recipe it is i am blank, completely. Did i write this recipe, really? Often i still think that sounds delicious i should try it! That brings me to one or maybe the most important thing of all. Trust your own taste: your personal flavour and how much you love it will be contagious to others.
And: your own personal flavour is also the only way to stand out from the crowd. So many cooks, so many flavours!
Bringing me to this week’s recipe. I always feel close to people who cook the food i love and the food consider myself emotionally tied to. The food in the Med especially Middle Eastern and southern Europe (but the region is vast and goes beyond borders, as do people). And people who share that love. I was delighted with Georgina Hayden’s book Nisistima, that felt like a sister book to my own Café Mazahar. We even shared similar recipes while she and i did not know about each others books while writing ours.
Now i have another crush on a book that i also consider a bit like family which is Pomegranate & Artichokes by Labnoon, aka Saghar Setaregh. She migrated from Iran to Italy, and that alone says it all food wise. Her beautiful book has this longing for somewhere else, the nostalgia that is so very much intertwined with food culture and memories. The love for this region, the storytelling, the food, her photography and styling, i love it all. And of course the recipes, many of whom i know but that is the magic of it all: another version is most often like another dish. Never enough variations. From the jewelled Persian rice to a rice timbal from Naples, it’s wealth is in the details.
And coming back to recipe writing now i’m realising i’m almost always following a instinctive pattern in my recipe creation. That of associations! Last week i was writing my new column about the Mediterranean for delicious. magazine, one about gazpacho, ajo blanco & salmorejo, the Spanish cold soups. Then the sun came out (finally) and my mood got even more into refreshing soups. You can almost guess the rest. While reading and browsing in Saghar’s book i was pulled into a Iranian/Persian mood too. One of my favorite cold soups is mast-o-ghiar (also can be a dip) a cold yoghurt soup with grated cucumber, mint, garlic and rose petals, sometimes nuts. It is not even in her book, but there was another soup with yoghurt, and there my mind went spinning.
And there you go. My mind became the blender and this was the end result.
a delicious cold soup of tomato, greek yoghurt, pistachio and rose petals…… a concoction between the gazpacho and the mast-o-ghiar. Inspired by Saghar’s book and my quest and research into gazpacho.
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