These days our produce guy is all about tomatoes — big and small, ribbed, smooth, or pointy, red, yellow, green, or pearl — and at the rate I’m going, I am bound to turn into one very soon. I’ve been making tomato salads and sandwiches like they’re going out of style, I’ve been making tomato tarts and tomato tarragon bread soup, and I’ve been mixing batches of gazpacho.

(My two stand-by tomato tarts are the tomato tart tatin and the tomato mustard tart respectively featured in my first and second cookbooks. Get yourself a copy of Chocolate & Zucchini and of The French Market Cookbook today!)

Another one of my top uses for this tomato bounty is shakshuka, a preparation that can be found in slightly different incarnations across North Africa and the Middle East. My first encounter with it was in Janna Gur’s excellent Book of New Israeli Food, which I told you about here and here, and I have since become acquainted with the Tunisian version as well.

A not-so-distant cousin of Provence’s ratatouille, Corsica’s pebronata, and the Basque piperade, shakshuka is most commonly a dish of tomatoes stewed with onions, bell peppers, and chili peppers. This forms a thickish sauce, in which eggs are cooked — either scrambled or (my preference) undisturbed so they’re halfway between poached and sunny side up.

It is a simple, family-style dish that is quickly assembled, and highly flexible.

You can:
– add other vegetables, especially zucchini or eggplant that you’ll cook in the sauce; artichoke hearts, drained from a jar; and diced potatoes, which you should boil beforehand,
– substitute quality canned tuna or merguez (spicy beef sausages) for the eggs,
– garnish the dish with black olives and parsley or cilantro, as I like to do, or serve it plain,
– serve the sauce with lamb skewers or other grilled meats (just not pork, for cultural consistency),
– freeze the sauce for later use: think how thrilling it will be to eat shakshuka in November!

Some recipes call for roasting the bell peppers first, which is good if you find them hard to digest, but I don’t think anyone wants to fire up the oven more than strictly necessary when it’s hot out. Others suggest you peel the tomatoes, but it seems unnecessarily fussy to me.

If your spice rack boasts a Moroccan spice mix, such as ras el hanout, now would be a good time to use it, in place of the separate spices (cumin, caraway, paprika, turmeric, and cinnamon) I’ve included. And if you don’t have a mix, and you don’t have all the spices listed either, don’t worry about it too much and just use what you have.

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This easy recipe for doenjang glazed eggplant is a wonderful first foray into Korean cooking.

For years now I’ve been contemplating Korean cuisine with equal parts excitement and trepidation. I’ve been going out to Korean restaurants, noting how vibrant the flavors and how nuanced the preparations, but I haven’t done very much at home.

Regular batches of homemade kimchi, yes, and kimchi fried rice, but that’s about it — until I received a review copy of Judy Joo’s Korean Food Made Simple.

Judy Joo is a Korean-American chef with a few restaurants and television shows to her name, and this is her first book, in which she shares 100+ recipes for Korean classics, plus a few East-meets-West creations.

It is the most un-intimidating book of Korean cooking I’ve seen in a while. The section on Korean staples alone is worth memorizing, and the recipes all feel very approachable. I look forward to tackling the noodles with black bean sauce (jjajangmyun), the roasted pork belly lettuce wraps (bossam), and the caramel doenjang ice cream, to name just a few.

But as a lover of all things eggplant, the first recipe I did try was for doenjang glazed aubergines, a Korean take on the Japanese classic nasu dengaku.

Instead of using miso paste, this recipe calls for the Korean equivalent, doenjang, a fermented soybean paste that is dark brown, richly flavored, and coarser than your average miso. (You should be able to find it at your local Asian market, and you can substitute red miso if that’s easier to find.)

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I will own up to it right then and there: I am an inveterate collector of pasta. Guilty as charged.

In fine food shops and Italian markets, I love to study the different shapes and imagine which will lend themselves to smooth sauces or chunky ones. I love their names (rooster’s crests, radiators, little ears, thimbles), the traditional packaging, and the fact that, for just a few euros, I can treat myself to a package of something novel — not to mention the promise of an easy meal.

Before I had children, I had to rein in my purchases, as my kitchen cabinets overflowed faster that Maxence and I actually ate pasta. But with two young boys who would eat it at every meal if I let them — their dream breakfast is cold leftover pasta, a recessive trait for sure — I am free to buy whatever I please, knowing I will easily find a use for it.

And I recently fell hard for a package of lumaconi, those large snail-shaped pasta sold in big bulging packages that scream “Buy me, I’m special!”

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After years of whizzing all of my soups to liquid velvet, I have recently and suddenly become a chunky soup convert.

This change of preference happened overnight, and I don’t know what prompted it, but ever since the beginning of the fall and the first batches of the season, I can’t think of a more desirable soup format than cubes, coins, and ribbons of vegetables intermingling in a broth. There’s chew and slurp, and the combination of the two provides a greater satisfaction than one or the other.

A few things to keep in mind when preparing that type of soup: first, the vegetables need to be cut into even sizes and shapes, so they’ll form a coherent ensemble in the bowl. This is of less concern when you’re preparing a mixed soup, but here you have to imagine that the pieces you add in will essentially remain the same when cooked, so you want smaller than bite-sized morsels.

I can’t think of a more desirable soup format than cubes, coins, and ribbons of vegetables intermingling in a broth. There’s chew and slurp, and the combination of the two provides a greater satisfaction than one or the other.

Second, you’ll get best results if the ingredient mix you use includes one that’ll give body to the soup, and by that I mean enough starch that the broth has substance, rather than feel watery. A small amount of floury potatoes or split peas works well.

Third, if you find yourself in a position to add a sprinkle of fresh herbs — leaves or blossoms — at the surface of the bowls, the soup will light up and love you for it. Nuts are a fine topping, too, and if you happen to have a colossal supply of walnuts, you may agree that they’re very much a one-nut-fits-all for autumn soups.

My current favorite version, which I’ve been making weekly for the past month, is this chunky pumpkin soup: it involves pumpkin (now that’s a surprise), shallots, potatoes, and the greens from Swiss chard or a bunch of young turnips.

Here are the tricks that make it, in my humble opinion, really really good: one, I use a mix of floury and waxy potatoes, so the former thicken the soup while the latter provide little cubes of potato flesh to bite into. And two, when the soup is cooked, I lace it with a good spoonful of harissa, the North African purée of hot chilies and garlic, and this gives it a one-two punch of warmth and spiciness.

Like all soup recipes, this one may be configured to fit your preference and the ambiant mood in your vegetable drawer: just last week, I included the stem of a head of broccoli leftover from making a broccoli salad (please tell me you don’t throw these out), and two weeks before that, I’d added white radishes, finely sliced to the point of transparency, and scattered at the surface like rice paper confetti.

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If you’re celebrating Thankgiving this Thursday and are still trying to decide what to make, this soup could be a good, easy option. I can also suggest the following recipes:
~ Carrot and rosemary mini-scones,
~ Mâche salad with endives and beets,
~ Sunchoke soup with bacon,
~ Brussels sprouts with onions and squash seeds,
~ Saffron-roasted cauliflower,
~ Swiss chard gratin with vegan bechamel,
~ Gratin dauphinois (potato gratin),
~ Carrot and ginger quickie pickle,
~ Banana pecan cake with maple glaze,
~ Quince and almond cake,
~ Brown butter spiced crisp.

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