Mint

Souvlaki (Greek-style kebabs) is our kind of food. Marinated meat and vegetables are grilled on a skewer. The skewers can be assembled in minutes, and the flavors are light, fresh, and satisfying. You can make souvlaki with any kind of meat, but we love the flavor of marinated lamb best. Grilled peppers and onions prove to be wonderful partners here, especially when they are served in warm pita bread with a generous dollop of mint-flavored yogurt sauce.

The secret to bringing out the flavor of the zucchini without making it soggy is to cook it whole for just long enough to soften it. If you don’t have cherry tomatoes, cut regular tomatoes into chunks more or less the size of the sliced zucchini.

Exotic, easy, and healthy, too, this simple dish is just delish.

Lamb chops are always perfect for 30MM because they are quick cooking. If you are the type who only indulges in leg of lamb once a year at holidays, pick up some chops and try this one at home tonight.

Remove the seeds from only half the jalapeño pepper. The heat lives in the seeds and this dish is a balance of heat with sweet.

When I interviewed Gilles Choukroun, one of the darlings of a new generation of French chefs who are injecting playfulness into French food, he had just opened the Mini Palais, a beautiful restaurant in Paris’s newly renovated Grand Palais exhibition hall, across from Les Invalides. In addition to his nascent restaurant empire, Gilles is also the father of Generation C, which stands for “Cuisines et Culture,” a group of chefs who teach cooking to the disadvantaged in Paris. Gilles, whose father is a Jew from Algeria, experiments with the spices and flavors of North Africa to accent his French food. One of his signature desserts is this refreshing citrus-fruit soup. It makes the perfect ending to a North African meal, especially with cookies on the side.

When Elie Wiesel stopped in Bordaeux to give a speech, he asked members of the Jewish community for suggestions on where to eat. They told him to go to Jean Ramet, a marvelous thirty-seat southwestern-French restaurant. Run by a Jewish chef, it is located right down the street from the eighteenth-century Grand Théâtre. Raised in a Polish Jewish home in France, Jean doesn’t have many culinary memories from his childhood. He grew up in Vichy, where his parents, like so many other Jews returning to France after the war, had priorities other than food. But food became a career for Jean. He apprenticed at the three-star Maison Troisgros in Roanne, learning pastry skills. “Pastry-making gives you discipline; it is very important for a chef,” he told me. “You need the rules of pastry first.” In the 1970s, Jean met Tunisian-born Raymonde Chemla on a youth trip to Israel. They have now been married for more than thirty years, living mostly in Bordeaux, where they run the restaurant. On vacations, they often travel to Morocco, because they love the food of North Africa. “Moroccan food is sincere,” said Jean. “When I met Raymonde, I fell in love with North African spices, such as cinnamon, mint, and cloves.” This gratin of figs with a zabaglione sauce and a splash of orange-flower water is a dish that celebrates North African flavors and classic French techniques. It also captures the essence of the flavor of fresh fig. As the French Jewish sage Rashi so beautifully stated in his commentaries on the Bible, “Summer is the time of the gathering of the figs and the time when they dry them in the fields, and it [the dried fig] is summer.”

When Violette Corcos Abulafia Tapieri Budestchu makes this spice-scented lentil dish, its subtle flavors bring back memories of the Morocco of her childhood. Now, when her grandchildren or great-grandchildren prepare it, it smells like afternoons and evenings they spent when they were growing up, visiting her in her apartments in Jerusalem or near Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. Born in Mogador, Madame “Granny” Budestchu, a fabulous cook, is descended from Kabbalists, prominent merchants, and royal counselors to the sultans and kings of Morocco. Her recipes, traveling from country to country, like the path of the Jews, can be traced back at least to twelfth-century Spain. When she makes this dish, she grinds each spice separately with the mortar and pestle that she brought with her to Paris in the 1940s, enlivening the spices with the fresh tastes of mint and cilantro leaves.

When I ate dinner at the Home of Nathalie Berrebi, a Frenchwoman living in Geneva, she served this savory quick bread warm and sliced thin, as a first course for a dinner attended by lots of children and adults. For the main course, Nathalie prepared rouget (red mullet) with an eggplant tapenade on top, something all the children loved. The entire dinner was delicious, but I especially liked that savory bread with the unexpected flavor combination of goat cheese, apricots, and fresh mint. Now I often make this quick bread for brunch or lunch and serve it with a green salad.

Artichokes, one of my favorite vegetable, are edible thistles that were prized by the ancient Romans as food of the nobility. They have been a springtime food in the Mediterranean for thousands of years and particularly loved by Jews. Usually the French serve artichokes as a cold salad appetizer with a vinaigrette. Although I have seen this recipe in many Jewish cookbooks from North Africa, I hadn’t tasted it until Paula Wolfert cooked it for me on my PBS show, Jewish Cooking in America. It was a merveille, as my French friends would say. In the years since, I have eaten many different versions of this salad. Céline Bénitah, who lives in Annecy but came from Berkane, on the Algerian border of Morocco, said that all North African Jews who grew up in this orange- growing region have their own versions of this recipe. Hers includes saffron. Of course, this salad tastes best when fresh artichokes are used, but frozen artichoke hearts or bottoms work as well.

A fresh chutney to serve with all Indian meals, it has a shelf life of 2–3 days if stored in the refrigerator. What is not used up may be easily frozen for another day.

This hot, savory chutney is from what used to be India’s northwest frontier but now is on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. There it is made with fresh red chilies, which have beautiful color and medium heat. They are not always easy to find, so I use a mixture of red bell peppers and cayenne pepper. They are always combined with nuts, generally almonds but sometimes walnuts. This chutney may be frozen. It is like gold in the bank. Serve it with kebabs, fritters, and with a general meal.

This simple sauce is perfect for spooning over fried fish, fried chicken, grilled meats, and any kind of kebab.

In much of India, a fresh salad is present at every single meal. This kind of cucumber salad was something that my mother threw together moments before we sat down to eat. Cucumbers with tiny undeveloped seeds have the best texture, but when cucumbers are growing wildly in my garden and some that hid themselves too successfully among the leaves have grown beyond the best picking size, I pick them anyway, peel them, and scoop out their seeds. They still make good eating. (Whenever I pick a particularly large, overgrown cucumber, I can never throw it in the compost heap because I think of Inder Dutt. At the age of thirteen, he came down from a poor village in the Himalayan mountains to try to eke out a living in the plains. In Delhi, he somehow managed to get into a cousin’s household where they taught him how to do odd jobs and eventually even how to cook. He became so adept that my cousin brought him to New York as her cook. Every now and then he would come over to our apartment to help out. I could never get enough of the stories about his childhood. He had spent the snowy mountain winters without shoes, huddling in the floor above the animals to stay warm at night. In the summers, he had to go work in the fields. When he got very thirsty, he would just pick the largest cucumber he could find, snap it in two, and quench his thirst with its juicy flesh.)