She turns up the heat and the eggplant cooks like that—
wrapped in foil, sandwiched between two pans. When it’s
unwrapped, Admony scoops the insides into a blender with lemon
juice, garlic confit, raw tahini, honey, salt, and pepper. Needless to
say, the resulting baba ghanouj is big on flavor, just the way
Admony likes it.
When she plates it, she spreads it on toasted bread and tops it
with a citrus herb salad with oranges, lemons, mint, scallions, and
parsley. Despite the visual appeal, Admony shrugs it off.
“I put a lot more effort on the taste than on the presentation;
it’s not as important to me,” she says.
So ignore the fact that her shakshouka—a traditional dish of
eggs cooked in a tomato– red pepper sauce—is vividly red with
flecks of dark green from Swiss chard, and focus on the big, bold
flavors.
“I used to pass my sauces through a food mill,” she says as we
dig in with toasted pita brushed with zaatar. “Fuck that! Some
food is too labor-intensive.”
I ask if I can substitute a different tomato sauce to cook the
eggs, maybe something with fewer ingredients.
“You can do anything,” she says. “Just don’t call it
shakshouka.”
For the finale, Admony coats olives in flour, egg, and panko
bread crumbs and deep-fries them. She serves them in a bowl with
labneh cheese and a harissa oil, made simply by blending harissa
with canola oil. The bowl is a sea of white with a ring of fiery red