Making something out of nothing
NO RECIPE cooking is the best
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 my Mediterranean recipes with a twist.
Cafe Mazahar is the name of one of my latest cookbooks, and my travelling popup.
Subscribe for free and get one free recipe every month. Or support my work of researching the med and developing recipes with a paid subscription: for the price of 1 coffee or small bottle of olive oil per month you help me to do this work. You’ll get one modern Mediterranean recipe every week and full acces to my archive and acces to comments. Yalla let’s go to this week’s recipe….
POV: there is nothing in the fridge but an empty stomach. Not any inch of me feels like going to the supermarkt. It’s raining. The perfect moment to make something out of nothing. That’s where delicious simplicity comes into play. Play! Love that word. Cooking is definitely some kind of playing around with ingredients, using our imagination.
Flashback to my favorite cooking show when i was younger: the epic BBC Ready Steady Cook with Ainsley Harriot as the ever optimistic chef making miracles with guests with very few ingredients, in no more than 20 min. In an absolute ugly decorum that pains the eyes now. At the time, i loved it. Well maybe not the decorum that much.
Now back to this little ditty that’s so stupidly easy and yet so flavourful. Sometimes you just have to let ingredients speak for themselves! Often they have a lot to say.
Here’s what i found in my fridge:
Half a green organic pumpkin
one red onion
few green onions
garlic bulb
a tub of Greek yoghurt
rosemary salt
A waning flatbread
I roasted the pumpkin for max flavour, scooped out the flesh.
I mashed the pumpkin roughly, added some of the yoghurt and rosemary salt and a pinch of coriander and cumin powder (optional).
Sliced the onion finely, the green onions roughly and chopped up a decent amount of garlic. I stir fried all of this in olive oil until golden.
Half of it went into the puree and half of it on top, i spooned over a thick dollop of extra yoghurt. I fried the flatbread (cut into stripes) and topped it off with the bread.
Looking at it with Middle Eastern eyes it could be a Pumpkin moutabal or Pumpkin fatteh with the crispy bread on top.
Maybe a soft egg on top like i did after this picture, or a plate of grilled chicken next to it and all is good.
Do you want more of these NO RECIPE ideas? Let me know in comments!
this was a little newsletter free for all, next week will be back to normal again.
