The phyllo sheets create flaky layers. Peggy Cormary/photo; Lisa Cherkasky/food styling, for The Washington Post Suzy Karadsheh and her family love pizza, and her husband used to be the one who always made it at home. And when he does, “he goes all out,” the cookbook author tells me in a Zoom conversation from her home in Atlanta.
“He takes his time, and everything is from scratch.” Then one day Karadsheh was scrounging around looking for the makings of a meal when she spied some leftover phyllo sheets, and inspiration struck. Wouldn’t pizza – or “pizza,” as she calls it in her latest book – be so much faster if she threw together a phyllo crust with a few simple toppings? You know the answer: “Pizza my way takes about 15 minutes.
” The recipe is emblematic of her approach in “The Mediterranean Dish: Simply Dinner,” in which Karadsheh helps make the prospect of cooking less daunting. The first and perhaps most important step, she says, is to redefine dinner itself. “Anything can be dinner,” she writes in the introduction.
“Salad is dinner. Mezze is dinner. Beans and pantry staples are dinner.
” The more expansive the definition, the easier it is on any given night to imagine cooking – or maybe just assembling – something that fits the bill, whether it’s a weeknight family meal or a get-together with friends. And that can help anyone live up to the core tenets of the Mediterranean cuisines that Karadsheh, as an immigrant from Egypt, has ch.
