Meals for friends and family at chef and food TV host Eden Grinshpan’s home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn are ongoing affairs. They often start at her kitchen island where guests snack on the dishes she’s prepared in advance as she finishes others still simmering on the stove. Once ready, dishes migrate — often in the pots and pans where they were cooked — to her six-person table. “We want people to feel like they’re in their own home — and they don’t need to be too careful. If they spill everything, all over the place, I’m almost like ‘great, you’re home,’” she says.

The food on her table is always inspired by the Middle East, particularly the flavors of Israel. Growing up in Toronto with an Israeli father, who arranged regular family trips to Israel, Eden says she only knew of a fraction of the country’s broad culinary canon until she was an adult. At home, there was her dad’s chopped salad, which accompanied bagels and smoked fish at Sunday brunch and her safta, or grandmother’s, smoky baba ganoush made with charred whole eggplants. When she visited Israel, she returned to the same boureka bakeries, smoothie shops, and kebab dens looking for her annual fix of familiar flavors. “When you go to a place and you start really young, you just want to eat the things you grew up eating,” she says.  

That changed when she lived with a cousin in Israel after she finished culinary school. Time spent working in a restaurant’s pastry kitchen and eating around the country left its mark. She was introduced to dishes like sabich, a popular sandwich inspired by Iraqi Shabbat traditions and jachnun, a rolled and rich bread prepared in Israel by Jewish-Yemeni cooks. The time allowed her to “learn about different cuisines within Israeli cuisine,” Eden says.

The light and fresh menu for summer-time she shared with us celebrates several of those flavors. The watermelon and Bulgarian cheese salad recalls visits to the beach in Israel where the sweet fruit is paired with creamy Bulgarian cheese. “When you eat it together, it’s such a special experience,” Eden says. “I love to recreate that at home the best I can.”

Meanwhile, the matbucha, a dip of red peppers and tomatoes with Moroccan roots, takes a page from a restaurant Eden went to often as a child where the table was covered with as many as 25 small mezzetim, the Hebrew term for mezze plates. Matbucha was the one Eden kept returning to, its bright acidity cutting through the richness of a meal. She also shared with us a sea bass with chermoula, a sauce made with toasted spices, that’s loaded with garlic and fresh parsley and asparagus topped with herbs and preserved lemon.

Eden's cookbook, Eating Out Loud is now available online and in stores. We agreed, this menu is perfect for a summer Shabbat — one we hope you will bring into your home this season.