What I'm Reading, Late October 2025
Preliminary Thoughts On My Coffee Table Tower
*Sabzi: Vibrant Vegetarian Recipes, by Yasmin Khan
The author of Zaitoun, The Saffron Tales, and Ripe Figs, Yasmin Khan produces beautiful cookbooks, with sumptuous photos and illustrations that actually add meaning, unlike much food photography. In her latest, named for the Persian word for herbs, Khan pulls together recipes from the Middle East, Mediterranean, and South Asia for breakfasts, salads, mezzes, soups, mains, and desserts.
The breakfast chapter is the weak link here—truly, no one needs to be told anymore how to make avocado toast, or how to top toast with ricotta, figs, and honey. The granola is a completely standard recipe with no interesting tweaks, and even your grandma probably knows by now how to make overnight oats.
Move along, then, to the salads—which will grab you from the opening recipe, mixing roasted broccoli and radishes with lentils in a curried tahini sauce, all topped with dates. A pilaf with roasted cauliflower, sumac, dried cherries, and a yogurt sauce offers a good introduction to freekeh. Spicy tomatoes with walnuts and pomegranates seems misnamed—with just a touch of pomegranate molasses and mild chile flakes—but still brings in big flavors with walnuts, mint, and sumac.
Mezze recipes include roasted carrots over a swirl of hummus-like lentil-tahini puree, topped with a basil-parsley paste; Punjabi spiced vegetable medley; and a dip of labneh topped with persimmon flavored with harissa. Main courses include smoky chickpeas with orzo; eggplant fesenjan; mung bean, spinach, and tomato dal; lentil and mushroom ragu; and eggplant and lentil tahchin (a layered rice cake).
Like the breakfast chapter, desserts offer less of interest overall, but include an intriguing dark chocolate and dried lime tart.
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*Sesame: Global Recipes & Stories of an Ancient Seed, by Rachel Simons
If you’ve ever found yourself with a large, barely used jar of tahini on the shelf, then open Sesame. Written by the owner of Seed + Mill, a small shop focused on tahini and halva in New York’s Chelsea Market, Sesame offers up a solid, if not especially unusual, variety of recipes for seasonings, breakfasts, dips, crackers, salads, vegetables, main dishes, and sweets.
Why “not especially unusual”? Well, start with smoothies and granola, or move on to roasted potatoes and carrot salad, mushrooms on toast, sesame noodles, and benne wafers—and truly, has it become illegal to publish a cookbook without a focaccia recipe? But the granola recipe includes the interesting touch of espresso, the potatoes get served with muhammara spiked with tahini, and the salad coats carrot ribbons in a dressing with ground sesame seeds, sesame oil, dashi powder, and mirin.
Look out for recipe issues; though this may be an anomaly, the pear and pistachio breakfast loaf with sesame streusel caught my eye for the streusel’s lack of sesame in either the ingredient list or the instructions.
*The Simple Dinner Edit: Simplify your cooking with 80+ fast, low-cost dinner ideas, by Nicole Maguire
Looking for fresh ideas to get dinner on the table, without breaking the bank? And do you love chicken? The Simple Dinner Edit provides a decent selection of recipes to get you started, though without much new in the way of ideas for saving money.
A page of supposed tips on saving money offers little more than advice to take inventory of your pantry and make a grocery list. Batch-cooking, prepping produce as soon as you bring it into the kitchen, and understanding how to store produce to make it last also get a nod. She does provide useful tips on using leftovers or making extras to use later, plus how to freeze leftovers.
Based in Sydney, Maguire shows the influence of some prominent cuisines in Australia, with dishes such as Hainanese chicken, coconut dal, braised sticky soy pork belly, barbecue brisket, Panang coconut and peanut beef curry, and chicken laksa. Other recipes include nachos, quesadillas, roasted pumpkin soup, spanakopita pie, sesame chicken, peanut butter pork and noodles, teriyaki chicken bowl, spring roll salad with sticky pork and noodles, and tuna bowl (with canned tuna) with miso dressing. The book offers chapters on stovetop and oven dishes, pasta, rice and noodles, salads, long-cooking meals, and “fun”—recipes intended to share with a crowd (though most serve only four people) and be eaten with your hands.
One warning: If you don’t prefer poultry, don’t get this book—the index lists 31 recipes under chicken, out of about 80 total.
*I haven’t tested any recipes in this book.
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