scheherazade casserole

moosewood cookbook (1974)

Hello.

I’m still not feeling great, but I must feel better than I did in the first half of April. Not only was I not cooking, but between March 30 and April 18th, I didn’t watch one movie. Not in the theater, not even at home. When I’m sick, I have no attention span. It’s all Gatorade, Triscuits, and reality TV. I eventually broke my movie fast by watching something gentle and meandering, A Traveler’s Needs, Hong Sang-Soo’s latest collaboration with Isabelle Huppert. If you subscribe to MUBI, watch it. Huppert plays a woefully inexperienced, alcoholic French teacher traipsing around Korea, doling out phrases in exchange for cash and a place to crash. Only an actress as deadpan as Huppert could make this septuagenarian manic pixie dream girl believable and empathetic.

I figured if I was going to cook something and write about it here, I should go back to the hippie ur-text, the cookbook that all other health food cookbooks are stacked up against, Moosewood Cookbook. How did Mollie Katzen’s self-published book of recipes from an obscure Ithaca, New York restaurant become the most influential vegetarian cookbook of all time? That will have to be a story for another day, because while I have slightly more energy than I did a couple of weeks ago, I haven’t yet recovered my “deep research” energy.

the cover of my 2014 edition. I’d love to get my hands on an OG 70s edition.

I decided to make Scheherazade Casserole on Katzen’s recommendation. She says “this is one of my favorite recipes, and I strongly recommend it.” A little vague, but ok! Scheherazade is, of course, the mythical storyteller and narrator of One Thousand and One Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern folklore colloquially known as Arabian Nights in English. Perhaps these stories were in the zeitgeist due to Pasolini’s Arabian Nights film adaptation, which came out the same year as Moosewood. I doubt Katzen picked the name for any specific reason other than it sounded “exotic.” The base of the casserole is bulgur, which is used in North African and Middle Eastern cooking. The rest of the ingredients—red bell pepper, dried basil, cumin, feta—hint at Mediterranean flavors without being ethnically specific.

I cooked this pretty much as written, but I made one major substitution, switching out the soaked, dry soybeans (where can you even get dried soybeans?) for silken tofu. The instructions say to soak the soybeans for four hours and then throw them in the blender with a cup of cold water. The result is supposed to look like pancake batter. A block of silken tofu, blended with just a little water (less than 1/4 cup) achieves the same result.

Also, has bulgur changed in the past fifty years? Because (and I remember this from a previous bulgur Moosewood recipe fail) cooking bulgur the Moosewood way doesn’t work. Katzen instructs us to pour boiling water over the raw bulgur and just let it soak for 15 minutes. When I did this, the bulgur was still raw and crunchy, barely cooked at all. The directions on the bag of bulgur say to cook the bulgur in boiling water for 10 minutes and then let it stand for another 5. This is the way. The bulgur is cooked through, soft, and ready to throw in a giant casserole dish. You mix the cooked grains and sauteed veggies with the tofu batter, sprinkle with parsley and A LOT of feta, and bake it for 45 minutes.

I guess the tofu batter is meant to amp up the heartiness and make this into a “complete” protein. Katzen claims that “the texture is deeply satisfying, and the seasonings are bold.” The texture was fine if a little runny. The seasonings were absolutely not bold. But it is a comforting dish in its own way, and versatile. One night I added a fried egg. Another night, some Rancho Gordo Rio Zape beans. I even air fried some chicken strips for John. Much like Scheherazade herself, the casserole so randomly named after her can tell many stories.

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Quick this-and-that:

The only other recipe I made last week was an earnest attempt to celebrate the beginning of asparagus season. I would usually make a cream of asparagus soup, but I wanted something a little lighter, so I tried J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Asparagus and Tarragon Velouté from Serious Eats. Not only does this have tarragon, it also has a lot of fennel, so I felt the asparagus flavor gets lost amongst these other extremely vegetal tastes. Not great. Hopefully this week I’ll redeem myself by making a very simple Madhur Jaffrey asparagus dish. Stay tuned.

And I’m back to going to the movie theater. I don’t think Sinners is a perfect film. Ryan Coogler has a tendency to use both dialogue and visual images at the same time to explain the same thing. A character will reference another character and there will be a cut to that character, as if the audience wouldn’t know who they were talking about if we didn’t see them. This is a minor nitpick (and probably the result of studio notes rather than Coogler underestimating the intelligence of the audience), because Sinners is super fun, full of ideas, and already a huge hit. You’ve probably seen it my now, but if you haven’t, go to the nearest IMAX before Marvel starts hogging them this coming weekend.

Even though Carson Lund’s Eephus is about “America’s Pastime” it’s closer in style to European or Asian art cinema than it is to typical American indie fare. I heard somebody compare it to Goodbye Dragon Inn, and I understand why, though there’s much less cruising. It’s a lovely film, and even if you don’t care about baseball, you’ll get something out of it. It didn’t hit me emotionally in the way it has others, but I appreciated the craft and the specificity of the world.

Craft and world-building aren’t things I would associate with Drop, a dumb Blumhouse Meghan Fahey vehicle that will be totally forgotten by the end of the year. Fahey plays a single mom on a blind date at a fancy restaurant. She gets an airdrop from an anonymous source showing footage of an assassin in her house about to kill her poor son and sister. Her family will only be saved if Fahey murders her clueless date. A fun premise, but it ends up being more irritating than suspenseful.

I can deal with most horror violence, but realistic violence is a lot harder for me. Staring at burned and severed limbs, guts spilling out everywhere, I momentarily regretted going to see Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare, a recreation of Mendoza’s time serving as a Navy SEAL in Iraq in 2006. I absolutely loved Garland’s last war movie, Civil War, which was about the futility and falseness of war journalism. If journalists and filmmakers can’t capture war truthfully, Garland and Mendoza certainly believe that the stories should be told by the soldiers, the people who were actually there. And I have no doubt that this is faithful to Mendoza’s memories of Ramadi. It accomplishes what it set out to do, and so in that sense it’s a success. But it’s really tough to watch.

I needed a little palate cleanser, so I turned on Joseph Sargant’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, now streaming on the Criterion Channel. A lot of you have probably already seen this. I knew it was going to be a good action-thriller and a great 1970s New York time capsule, but I didn’t expect it to be so funny. Walter Matthau’s face exudes poisonous disdain, and yet he’s just so damn likable. His interactions with transit authority second banana Jerry Stiller and would be subway terrorist Robert Shaw are hilarious.

This morning, I went back to the theater to watch David Cronenberg’s latest, The Shrouds. Vincent Cassel plays a widower who has developed technology to be able to watch his wife’s body decompose in her grave, and he’s started a company, GraveTech, making this technology available for anyone who wants to grieve in this very specific, very Cronenbergian way. But then hackers encrypt the technology and destroy the graves, putting Cassel’s business and grieving process in jeopardy. It gets a whole lot weirder and funnier. I might even like it more than Crimes of the Future.