I’m not sure I have ever burst out laughing reading a cookbook. I’ve been charmed and often delighted, sometimes enthralled, occasionally bowled over.
But sitting at my kitchen table, reading “Hello, Home Cooking: Do-Able Dishes for Every Day” (Clarkson Potter), by Hisham (Ham) El-Waylly, a just-arrived book that I was looking forward to cooking from, I found myself having a good giggle.
El-Waylly was telling a story about a ridiculous TV show put on by the World Wrestling Federation (as it was called at the time), which he watched as a boy in Doha, Qatar. It’s a crazy tale that involves an unskilled fighter tossed around badly by the brute who defeats him.
The boy decides to try one of the weak wrestler’s moves using a 25-pound sack of rice his mother keeps in their kitchen. That would be his landing pad and her Toyota trunk, which he opened, his springboard. He didn’t break his neck, but his mother was more worried about the rice than about him. “To the surprise of no one,” he writes, “she sided with the bag of rice.”
There are more funny stories here and some poignant ones too. El-Waylly was 19 when he moved on his own from Qatar to the United States. His Bolivian mother arrived for a visit when he’d been here a year. She became quite ill and died suddenly less than two weeks later. He carried a notebook of her handwritten recipes from place to place, not opening it — it was too emotionally painful— until the pandemic, when he was at home. He calls it his mom’s “Madonna notebook” because the pop star, blond at the moment, is on the cover, wearing red lingerie and holding a mic. When he misses his mom, he writes, “I still often flip through the book, instead of looking at photos. The kitchen is where she and I spent our best times.”
In his own collection of recipes, El-Waylly, whose father is Egyptian, draws on many cuisines, partly because Doha was a multicultural center in the 1990s, he told Taste podcast.
There were 30 nationalities represented at his school. “In any given week,” he said on the podcast, “I’d be at a Lebanese friend’s house eating kibbeh or shish barak, at a Filipino friend’s house having lumpia and pancit, at a Somali friend’s house having sugo. And it wasn’t just home cooking — there was incredible street food. The best shawarma I’ve ever had in my life is still there. There was great Turkish food, great Iranian food, and strong restaurant communities serving the communities from Nepal, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.”
In his book, he makes what he calls bodega chilaquiles by spooning charred tomato salsa, an egg, avocado, and other garnishes right into small open bags of crunchy chips. Blueberry muffins are knock-offs of the Costco muffins he used to buy in a tray of 24 when he first arrived in the US and a woman in his building drove him to the store.
His mom’s cheese empanadas are here, as is cheesy rice, a dish always present at an uncle’s churrascos (backyard barbecues) in Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia.
El-Waylly’s chicken and rice is based on a Qatari specialty called Machboos, something like biryani. This was the meal his mother made for family celebrations. It’s typically simmered with lamb, but here he uses whole chicken legs, browned and cooked on a bed of rice with spices. A mixture of almonds, pistachios, and raisins warmed in butter top the dish, which you eat with your hands, along with a spicy tomato condiment. It’s out-of-this-world good.
“Lazy hummus” came about when El-Waylly decided it wasn’t worth dragging his commercial Robot Coupe out of the closet to puree chickpeas. He simmers canned chickpeas with baking soda, which eliminates the canned taste and renders them mashable. He whisks them by hand with lemon, tahini, olive oil, garlic, and an ice cube, “a classic Middle Eastern technique to give your dips some fluff,” he writes. A food processor will make the hummus silky and smooth. Garnish with lots of olive oil, hot paprika, and flaky salt. If you’ve ever wanted to try making hummus, this is the one. You’ll never buy it again.
The chef and his wife, Sohla El-Waylly, also a chef, are widely admired. Sohla, a video star, is the author of “Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook” (2020), which has cover blurbs from Samin Nosrat, Padma Lakshmi, and Yotam Ottolenghi. She and Ham, who live in the East Village in New York City, have a YouTube channel with about 50,000 followers.
Ham El-Waylly is a partner and head chef at Strange Delight, a Louisiana-style seafood restaurant in Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Fort Greene neighborhood. He trained at the Culinary Institute of America and worked at WD-50 with chef Wylie Dufresne, whose cutting-edge cuisine won a James Beard award.
Last week, in her “Hot Dish with Sohla” newsletter, Sohla wrote that her husband is very private, so writing a cookbook and then having to publicize it is difficult: “Ham, who put things into this book he has never said out loud to anyone except the people closest to him, and who had to be gently reminded by me that a published cookbook is not a diary, and that strangers would be reading it.”
The graphics are loud, which is to say busy fonts and busy photos. There’s no attempt to make the food look sleeker than it is coming right off the stove. Thumbnail photos appear at the beginning of each chapter to show every dish, and there are photos of the El-Wayllys with their baby wandering around New York.
In her newsletter, she describes him as someone who would rather be working quietly “in a very clean kitchen.”
To say the least. “I am the kind of person who can’t start eating until the kitchen is clean,” he writes. I’m with you, Ham.
Some other tips from his book: Before you start cooking, read the recipe and pull out all ingredients, and make sure the dishwasher and sink are empty. Put a bowl for food scraps on the counter so you move around the kitchen less. Chop and cut first, clean the cutting board, wash vessels as you use them, wipe up spills, don’t watch something cook.
One of his many brilliant lines comes next: “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.”
This is how the pros cook. Listen to Ham.
Sheryl Julian can be reached at sheryl.julian@globe.com.