Cook This: 3 recipes from Tahini Baby, including rosemary-honey halloumi fries

National Post

25-04-2025

Our cookbook of the week is Tahini Baby by chef and television host Eden Grinshpan with Rachel Holtzman.
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Eden Grinshpan takes a fluid approach to veg-forward food. The recipes in her second cookbook, Tahini Baby (Penguin Canada, 2025), 'just so happen to be vegetarian' — with a lowercase 'v.' From dips and breads to breakfasts and 'boss veg,' it's about filling your table with more bounty, colour and variety — not putting yourself in a box.
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'It's lowercase because there are no strict rules about any of this. It's about inspiring people to make more veg, eat more veg, add more veg to your life. And that's what makes it fun for me because it's exactly what we're doing in our house,' says Grinshpan, a chef, author and television host who divides her time between her hometown of Toronto and New York City.
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'Once you start playing around with these simple techniques and bold flavourings, sauces or spices — like some dukkah or tzatziki — all these different things are impactful tricks that can take a humble broccoli, a cabbage or whatever to a place where people are like, 'I've never had something like this.' It's very approachable in that regard, but I think it's about showing people those examples.'
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Grinshpan found inspiration for Tahini Baby in feedback about her 2020 cookbook debut, Eating Out Loud. Much of it centred around the book's vibrant vegetarian dishes. (Case in point: cracked freekeh with pomegranate, walnuts and mint, and roasted cauliflower with date-parsley gremolata.) As someone who cooks and eats mainly Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisines, the wealth of dishes based on seasonal produce, grains and legumes made plant-forward cooking easy.
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Over time, Grinshpan, her husband, Ido Nivron, and their daughters, Ayv, eight, and Romi, who will be four in June, naturally started having mostly vegetable-centric meals. Their way of eating spilled over into Grinshpan's online platform, Eden Eats, and ultimately helped shape Tahini Baby's more than 100 Mediterranean- and Middle Eastern-inspired recipes (each with a photograph by Chris Bernabeo).
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'It wasn't anything we forced,' says Grinshpan. 'It's one of those things, too, where you cook food for your friends and family and want to feel good after you do it. You want the food to be enticing and exciting. And then, instead of feeling like you need to take a nap after, you get up and want to move around and dance, and you feel energetic.'
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Tahini Baby is a vegetarian book, but Grinshpan isn't a vegetarian. For her, this way of eating is less about labels and more about enlivening your table. Whether you eat meat every night, once a week, occasionally or not at all, Grinshpan features dips, vegetable dishes and salads to amp it up.
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The tahini in the book's title is a nod to the flavours and cuisines Grinshpan grew up with in Toronto and during her summers in Israel. 'Tahini is such a great example of a lot of the cuisines I pull inspiration from. It's the backbone of them. You find them in so many different uses, and it's a great source of calcium, an excellent source of protein, vitamin B, iron, anti-inflammatory. When you eat a vegetarian or mostly veg lifestyle, you want to make sure you're getting everything that you can — and you do — from all of these (whole foods).'