Eid Mubarak! Celebrating Eid al Fitr with a Muslim Meal from Zaitoun by Yasmin Khan

I have a soft spot for eating, cooking, and cookbooks. In fact, I get just as much pleasure out of pouring over recipes and indulging in the photos as I would if I were actually eating the meal. Just as with Book + Bottle as a whole business, cookbooks tell stories, open our minds, and help us travel the world through time and space. Just like one might with a good novel, I’ll take a stack of cookbooks to the couch on a Sunday morning and long past when my coffee gets cold, I’m imagining the dinner parties I’ll have and how my meals will turn out.

I also love holidays when they center around food. I grew up, and still identify, as an atheist, but one of the reasons I love holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter is because they included great food traditions in my family. While I suppose that is quite common for most Americans to make big meals on those days, I also take advantage of other holidays. St. Patrick’s, before the shop opened that day forever re-prioritizing it from an Irish Holiday to Book + Bottle’s anniversary, was a great holiday to cook for - I’ve tried my hand at corning my own beef and have turned out quite a few authentic soda breads. I put together an Eastern European and Russian feast for New Years, complete with caviar, vodka, and pelminis. I’ve struggled making latkes (there’s got to be a secret, and I’m guessing it’s patience…), and enjoyed eating the leftover matzoh ball crackers dipped in chocolate for Passover.

Yet there’s another big food holiday that arguably has the best options for cooking the most amazing meals - Eid al Fitr! Islam is the most populous religion in the world, spanning every inhabitable continent, and doing an amazing job at cooperating with the local culture to create some truly culinary delights. Eid celebrates the end of Ramadan, a solemn month marked by reflection and abstinence, with giant feats and parties. After a month of fasting from dawn until dusk, folks are SO excited to eat a big celebratory meal, and celebrate they do! Some of the most well known culinary cultures, like India, Indonesia, France, and the Middle East have large Muslim populations, so you also have pick of the litter when it comes to what type of food you could choose for your celebration!

For today’s Eid celebrations, I’ve chosen to pull a few recipes from Zaitoun, a Palenstinian cookbook by Yasmin Khan. I was a bit meated out from the giant lamb leg I cooked at Easter, so I wanted to pick a few vegetarian recipes that could help me get back in balance while still feeling celebratory. First, what I love about Zaitoun is that she mixes complex, aspirational dishes with easy yet indulgent recipes. I chose easy and indulgent, and went with her Donyana Salad and Roast Okra with Spicy Tomatoes.

The Donyana salad came together in minutes and melded indulgent, mediterranean ingredients like orange zest, almonds, and fennel into an inherently hearty and enjoyable salad. Usually, my mentality is, while I may like it, it’s not a salad without lettuce, but this one does not use lettuce, and, I’d argue, is still very much a salad! The apple and fennel bulb were sliced very thin (I’m lazy and used a mandolin) - so thin that they almost felt like very flavorful pieces of lettuce, and folded onto my fork in quite the same way. Then, these thin sheets were dressed in olive oil and citrus juice. The toppings of toasted almonds (I had sliced almonds, which worked just as well as the whole ones the recipe called for), dried cranberries (that’s what I’d had - I think I’d enjoy the suggested dried cherries even more), orange zest, and fennel fronds, gussied the salad up, gave it some sweetness and some crunch, and made it presentable to share with guests. I don’t know about you, but fennel is one of my favorite ingredients - the gentle anise scent instantly making me feel like spring! I started nibbling on this as I put together the okra.

I have to say I was surprised to see an okra recipe in Zaitoun. As a Floridian, I know of okra as a very southern ingredient and have eaten loads of pan fried okra tossed in Old Bay at restaurants across the south. As a great lover of Indian cuisine, I’ve also enjoyed that take on this unusual vegetable. But, I had no idea there was a tradition for it in the Middle East. So, in order to link Florida with Palestine, I picked this recipe too, and boy will I be using it again. First, you roast the whole okras in the oven until they start to brown. I adore any roasted vegetable and had to stop myself from picking them straight off the baking sheet I used. While those are roasting, you make a homemade tomato sauce on the stove. Loads of thinly shaved red onions help the sauce achieve a craveable sweetness, and toasted cumin and coriander seed add layers of complexity that would be hard to isolate, but somehow are ardently necessary. Then, you toss in a can of roma tomatoes and stew for a bit until it all comes together. She says about 10 minutes, which you could totally do if you were crunched for time, but I always find that sauces benefit from low, slow cooking. I’d say keep it stewing until you’re almost ready to eat, throwing the okra in to soak in the sauce for just the last 10 minutes.

The recipes were a success, different from my normal repertoire, easy and affordable to make, and they turned out really well. Most importantly, they were shared with friends and family - the Thursday night team at Book + Bottle as our own little celebration of Eid.

Both these dishes could excite your average weeknight dinner a bit, and these are also great recipes for entertaining. Both stand out as interesting, visually appealing dishes that most people will probably love. Needless to say, these and other recipes from Zaitoun have found their way into my kitchen permanently, and I hope you’ll give them a shot, too!

Recipes from Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen by Yasmin Khan, $29.95