Smart shortcuts coax big flavour out of a speedy chickpea noodle soup

You may not know Julia Turshen personally, but read one of her recipes or, better yet, one of her cookbooks and you ll feel like you do. Turshen i...

You may not know Julia Turshen personally, but read one of her recipes - or, better yet, one of her cookbooks - and you’ll feel like you do. Turshen is one of those food writers who seems to always be saying, in one way or another, "You got this,” and you immediately believe her.

I consider myself fortunate to know her in real life. (We also enlisted her to fill in for G. Daniela Galarza on the Eat Voraciously newsletter for a few months this year.) And just in case you’re wondering, she’s one of those what-you-see-is-what-you-get people, just as unassuming in person as she is on the page. 

In fact, when I asked her to talk about just how she achieves her friendly and flexible style in her writing, she was almost too modest to answer. "I don’t really know any other way,” she told me. "It is something I think about, meeting people where they are.”

In her new book, "What Goes With What” (which made our list of the year’s best cookbooks), Turshen bases all her recipes on charts, showing that, say, any brothy soup can start with sautéing some aromatic vegetables and other flavourings in olive oil, adding liquid, adding "things that can simmer until soft” (greens, pasta, beans, meatballs and the like) and sprinkling on some toppings before ladling it out. She drew and lettered all the charts by hand, and she took all her own recipe photos, in both cases making the book so much more approachable than it might have otherwise been.

Turshen is always looking out for ways to make cooking easier, faster and more fun. "Home cooks are some of the most undervalued people, and the labour they do is so underappreciated,” she said. "We don’t have prep cooks and dishwashers.” She knows that if she - someone who writes cookbooks for a living, doesn’t have kids, has a big kitchen, financial security and time - doesn’t make homemade stock all the time, "I know other people aren’t, either.”