Melia Marden’s Euro Star

Image courtesy of Abrams

Just as the arrival of warmer months heralds shifts in our wardrobes, so too does it affect what’s on our plates. When the temperature rises I certainly tend to cook less, and differently—that usually means absolutely no recipes that require excessive laboring over a hot stove, or, for that matter, much effort at all. And there is much that fits that low-fi warm weather culinary approach in Modern Mediterranean (Abrams), the excellent new cookbook by Melia Marden, chef at New York’s The Smile. Marden’s formula has always been simple and stellar: the freshest ingredients available thrown together in an easy-breezy fashion with Mediterranean influences a plenty. In the book that translates to recipes like a tomato water and caper berry martini, seared fennel wedges that get a touch of sweet brightness from fresh squeezed orange juice and zest, penne with sugar snap peas and ricotta, a pounded chicken paillard with Kalamata olives, capers and lemon, a cleverly concevived-of pomegranate, thyme and goat cheese pizza and an intensely flavorful beet and watermelon radish salad with creamy mozzarella that I fell in love with upon tasting at last weekend’s Food Book Fair party. With instructions straightforward enough for even the most novice kitchen dwellers to heed, and a slew of inventive recipe ideas (Never thought grapes would work in roasted potatoes? Think again.), Modern Mediterranean has as much easy, offbeat grace as Marden herself. FIORELLA V.

Image courtesy of Abrams