Rachana Rimal is demonstrating how she chopped vegetables in Nepal, before she came to the US. The grey-haired grandmother gently lowers herself and her pink sari to the spotless kitchen floor and wedges a handmade iron contraption called a chulesi under her crossed legs. She takes a cauliflower floret and uses both hands to push it with impressive deftness across a bare curved blade sticking up from the base. “When I came here, I had to learn how to use those,” she says, gesturing at a nearby cutting board and chef’s knife, which in comparison seem almost like a children’s cooking set.
Cooking has always been a vital part of Rimal’s life, and it’s evident she finds both joy and pride in it. Growing up in Kathmandu in a house with 45 members of her extended family, the kitchen was always bustling, and she’d trail her mother learning recipes that had been in her family for ages. Now, decades later and half a world away, she is teaching a small group of students in her suburban New Jersey home some of those very recipes.
Rimal is an instructor with the League of Kitchens, which organizes intimate, immersive workshops led by highly skilled immigrant home cooks in their own New York City–area kitchens (and, since COVID, online). Through the hands-on preparation of classic dishes using traditional techniques, each class is a deep dive into the foodways of a specific culture, guided by hosts keen to share their expertise and stories. Some six thousand students have taken classes in the decade since it began, but now the cooking school is opening its kitchens to the world via its debut cookbook, The League of Kitchens Cookbook: Brilliant Tips, Secret Methods Favorite Family Recipes from Around the World.
Lisa Kyung Gross founded the company in 2014, a decade after she had first found herself in need of a grandmother. She had been raised very close to both of her own, one an immigrant from Hungary and the other from Korea. But living on her own as an adult, she yearned for something no cookbook or online recipe could quite teach her: exceptional home cooking with the care, skill, and time-tested detail that only a grandmother could provide.
“I tried to teach myself, but nothing tasted as good as when my grandmother made it,” she recalls. “I realized that there are small details and nuances and tips and tricks often left out of written recipes and those are the difference between something being good and something being exceptional. So I had this fantasy of finding another grandmother who I could cook with and learn from in her home kitchen.”
Gross wrote the book alongside the 14 instructors—all grandmothers who have been cooking recipes passed down in their families for generations, hailing from Mexico, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ukraine, Greece, Afghanistan, India, Argentina, Japan, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, India, and Nepal. This treasure trove of global recipes—rich with cultural context and specific, practical culinary detail—stands it apart from other cookbooks and includes personal stories, family traditions, and secret tips.
Tips like, as Rimal shows us, the oil should be boiling when you add jimbu, an aromatic dried grass with a shallot-like flavor commonly found in Nepalese dishes, but cooling when you add turmeric so it doesn’t blacken and turn bitter; how a Nutribullet can be an excellent modern hack to speed up chopping and mixing; and which brand of Nepalese spices she buys at her favorite Patel Brothers location, in Jackson Heights, Queens.
We cook with the heavy handmade wrought-iron pots she lugged over from Nepal when she arrived alone in New York in 2006; later she shows us a photo of her large, beaming family gathered in her home last month to celebrate Dashain, Nepal’s biggest festival, symbolizing the triumph of good over evil. And she shares how hospitality in her country means that anyone can drop by anytime for a meal—and how sad she finds the cold disconnectedness and lack of generosity in the US, even among neighbors. “I love welcoming people into my home and cooking for them,” she says, smiling. “I believe that God is in each of you and inviting you into my home is a chance to serve God.”
As Gross convincingly lays out in the book, homes, not restaurants, are where you’ll find the most astounding food of any given cuisine. “In most parts of the world, the real cooking of a place is just so multilayered or labor-intensive or uses so many spices—or is considered too humble or plain or common—that it’s just not practical for a restaurant to serve it,” she writes. “If you’re looking for a very full expression of a cuisine, you need to have it in someone’s home or learn how to make it yourself.”
Gross’s favorite recipes include zarchoba with thukahm, Afghan eggs fried in ghee with garlic and turmeric (the book’s easiest and fastest recipe, she makes it multiple times a week herself); Mexican rib-eye steak tacos with red and green salsa and guacamole (the meal Gross’s daughter has requested for her birthday for the last three years); and lubiyeh, Lebanese green beans stewed with tomatoes and a cool 18 cloves of garlic and eaten with petals of raw white onions. “The raw onion adds this fresh, crunchy, bright contrast to this very silky, smooth, savory, soft stewed green beans,” Gross explains. “You might order lubiyeh in a restaurant, but if you don’t eat it with the raw onion on the side, it’s not the full experience.”
Now 10 years on, Gross is just starting to turn up the heat on the project. She reels off a list of cuisines she’d like to add to the program (Korean, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Brazilian, Ecuadorean, Trinidadian, among them), and although this cookbook covers everyday meals, she envisions a future book with feasts and special-occasion meals—and maybe someday, a TV show.
And at a time when the subject of immigration has become a political lightning rod, Gross believes both the book and the workshop experience help humanize immigrants and bring alive places that often feel abstract. “Even though New York City is the most diverse place on earth, the interactions between immigrants and non-immigrants or even between immigrants of different groups are frequently service based—the bodega person, the dry cleaner, the waiter at the restaurant,” she observes. “Part of the idea of the League of Kitchens was to create this opportunity for meaningful cross-cultural connection, learning, and exchange, a space where the immigrant becomes the expert, the host. We’re so much about celebrating the incredible contributions that immigrants make to our culture.”
Zarchoba With Thukahm
Makes 2 eggs
“Grandmas, they all know this recipe, but the young ones, they don’t know.” —Instructor Nawida Saidhosin
This is probably the recipe in this book that I make the most often. I always have the ingredients on hand, and it’s just about as easy as frying an egg, but so much more interesting and satisfying—and the red-orange color is gorgeous.
In the part of the world where Nawida is from, it’s very common to add just a pinch of turmeric to eggs. The flavor blooms and softens as it sizzles in the ghee, losing its bitterness. Likewise, frying the garlic in the ghee until it’s lightly golden and then removing it lends a subtle garlic perfume; neither the turmeric nor the garlic is overpowering in any way.
This recipe is the way Nawida makes these eggs for her family—she takes the garlic chips out before she serves it. (The chips are also delicious—either to eat right there or with the eggs.) When she makes it for herself, she often makes this fast dish even faster: She just roughly chops the garlic and fries it in the pan at the same time she’s cooking the eggs, making sure it doesn’t burn, then serves the eggs with the chopped garlic. Sometimes she makes them over-easy, and sometimes she does them sunny-side up, but both ways she’ll spoon the hot turmeric-garlic ghee onto the eggs as they cook.
Nawida also says this dish is considered very warming in her culture—as in it’s good in the winter
and especially good for children as a cold-weather breakfast. My kids also love it and often request it. This recipe is for two eggs, but you can multiply it as needed—just use a larger pan to cook the eggs.
- 1/2 ounce (15 g) garlic (about 4 medium cloves)
- 2 tablespoons ghee
- 1/8 teaspoon turmeric
- 2 large eggs
- Diamond Crystal kosher salt, for sprinkling
- Warm or soft bread, like lavash or pita, for serving
- Prepare the garlic: Peel the 1/2 ounce (15 g) garlic (about 4 medium cloves) and cut the cloves into slices about 1/16 inch (0.2 cm) thick—thin but not paper thin.
- Fry the garlic: Heat the 2 tablespoons ghee in an 8-inch (20 cm) nonstick skillet over medium to medium-low heat so that the oil begins to shimmer. (Low may even be high enough to keep
the oil very hot in a skillet this small.) - Add the garlic and fry it, stirring constantly, until it’s lightly golden and begins to crisp, about 4 minutes. Watch carefully to make sure it doesn’t burn, lowering the heat as necessary. Turn off the heat and remove the garlic with a slotted spoon. Stir in the 1/8 teaspoon turmeric.
- Fry the eggs: Put the pan with the turmeric-garlic oil over medium-low heat. When the oil is hot and begins to shimmer, crack the 2 large eggs into the pan. The eggs should immediately puff and redden around the edges. Use a spatula or spoon to flip some of the hot oil on the top of the eggs as they cook, then gently flip them after about 30 seconds, or when they are beginning to brown on the bottom but the yolk is still raw on top. (If the yolks break, it’s fine—many cooks
break them up on purpose to cook all the yolk.) - Cook the eggs for about 30 seconds more, again using the spatula to flip some of the hot oil onto the top of the eggs.
- If you want still-runny yolks, let them cook for just 20 seconds more—they will be reddish-
brown on all sides but still not fully cooked all the way through. You can press the yolks a little
with your fingertip to tell their doneness, too. (If your eggs didn’t immediately puff, your pan
wasn’t hot enough, and the whites might take a little longer to cook.) - You can also use the spatula to break up some or all of the yolk a little at this point, or just let them cook a little longer until the yolk has hardened to your liking.
- Serve and eat the eggs: When all the eggs are done, remove them to a plate or bowl, pour the
hot ghee from the pan over the top, and serve them hot or warm with a little bowl of salt for
sprinkling and warm or soft bread, like lavash or pita.
Ejjeh Bi Koussa
Serves 4
“It’s a very fast and easy meal, and you can enjoy it at any time of the day. This is the best.” —Instructor Jeanette Chawki
Ejjeh is a kind of Middle Eastern country omelet or scramble that can be made with many types of fillings. This version is my favorite kind of recipe—something fast and simple, cheap to make, but also delicious and interesting. Instead of just sauteing the zucchini, Jeanette grates the squash (she prefers to use cousa or gray squash, but zucchini works great, too) and then she salts it and squeezes out all the liquid, which intensifies the flavor of the squash and prevents the eggs from getting too watery. She seasons the eggs with roasted cumin powder, and then at the very end, she adds raw grated garlic, both of which add an incredible amount of savory flavor.
But what really makes this special, and makes it a meal, is how she serves the ejjeh: with mint-sprinkled labneh, warm pita, and wedges of tomato. That combo—the hot, garlicky zucchini eggs with the cold creamy yogurt and the little bit of mint, all scooped up in pieces of warm pita, with a taste of juicy tomato in between bites—is just so satisfying.
- 1 1/2 pounds (680 g) zucchini or gray squash, preferably small (about 4 small)
- 2 teaspoons plus 1/2 teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt, divided
- 1/4 pound (115 g) yellow onion (about 1/2 medium)
- 4 large eggs
- 1/4 ounce (7 g) garlic (about 2 medium cloves)
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- 1/2 teaspoon roasted cumin powder (page 23)
- Freshly ground black pepper
- 2 cups (475 ml) labneh or plain whole milk
- Greek yogurt
- 1/2 teaspoon dried mint
- 2 large tomatoes on the vine
- Pita, for serving
- Prepare the ingredients: Trim the bottom of the 1 1/2 pounds (680 g) zucchini or gray squash (about 4 small). Leave the stem ends so you can use them as a handle when you get close to the end of the squash. Grate them on the large holes of a grater into a bowl. Use your hands to mix the shreds well with 2 teaspoons of the Diamond Crystal kosher salt. Put the salted squash in a strainer over the bowl and knead and squeeze the squash with your hands to get out as much of the liquid as you can, about 2 minutes. You should have about 2 cups. Let the strainer sit over the bowl and continue to drain while you prepare the rest of the ingredients. (You can keep the liquid and add it to vegetable soup, if you like, or discard it.)
- Peel the 1/4 pound (115 g) yellow onion (about 1/2 medium) and cut it into small pieces about 1/8 inch (0.3 cm) wide. You should have about 1 cup. Set it aside.
- Beat the 4 large eggs with the remaining 1/2 teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt in a
small bowl. - Peel the 1/4 ounce (7 g) garlic (about 2 medium cloves) and grate it over the fine holes of a box
grater. You should end up with 1/2 tablespoon. - Cook the ejjeh: Put the 3 tablespoons olive oil in a 12-inch (30 cm) frying pan or skillet, preferably nonstick, with deep sides, and turn the heat to medium. Add the chopped onion and cook, stirring constantly at first so that it cooks evenly, for 4 to 5 minutes, until soft and translucent.
- Give the squash another squeeze to get out any remaining water, and then use your hands to sprinkle the shreds over the onions. Stir the squash and onion in the pan for about 45 seconds, then turn the heat to low and cover the pan. Cook, checking and stirring occasionally to make sure the squash doesn’t stick, for about 10 minutes, until nearly all the liquid has bubbled away and the oil starts to bubble up around the edges of the squash. (Some liquid is fine.) Stir in the 1/2 teaspoon roasted cumin powder.
- Turn the heat to medium-high and then, working quickly, stir in the beaten and salted eggs, using a fork or spatula to gently stir them into the squash and onion mixture so that it’s all mixed together. Immediately reduce the heat to low, give the pan a shake to make sure the egg and squash mixture is evenly distributed in the pan, and then cover the pot with the lid set slightly ajar to let out a little steam.
- After 2 to 3 minutes, or when the bottom of the eggs are a little set but the top is still jiggly, use
the spatula to scramble it all together. - Sprinkle the grated garlic across the top of the eggs. Put the lid back on the pan, again slightly
ajar, and turn the heat as low as it will go. Let it cook for another 30 seconds, then dust the top
with freshly ground black pepper. - Turn off the heat, then use your spatula to scramble it all again and move the eggs and squash from the pan to a serving platter or large plate.
- Prepare the accompaniments: Put the 2 cups (475 ml) labneh or Greek yogurt in a small serving bowl and stir until smooth. Dust the top with 1/2 teaspoon dried mint, crumbling it between your fingers as you do.
- Slice the tomato into wedges and put them on a small serving plate. Sprinkle the wedges with a little bit of freshly ground black pepper.
- Warm the pita bread.
- To serve and eat the egg scramble: Put the yogurt, tomatoes, and pita bread on the table
with the scrambled eggs, or even right on the serving platter with the eggs. - Each person should take a serving of eggs, along with some yogurt or labneh, and a few wedges of tomato. Ideally, you put a little yogurt and dried mint on a piece of pita, then top it with a bite of egg. In between bites, you take a bite of juicy tomato.
