On Saturday, chasing the high of bread for dinner, I set out to cook Alexa Weibel’s vegetarian mushroom shawarma pitas and invited a couple of friends over to join me. The recipe requires very little shopping; I picked up a couple packs of portobellos and asked one guest to pick up a head of red cabbage, as my store was out. Everything else — the red onion, olive oil, cumin, coriander, paprika, yogurt, turmeric, cilantro — I had on hand. Or so I thought.
Pita, Tanya. You forgot to get the pita.
Out came the flour and sugar and yeast, and I got to work on David Tanis’s recipe for homemade pita. My friends watched with glee as I churned out puffed cushions of bread from the oven, stacking them high in a dish towel to keep them warm. Then we slathered them in Lex’s turmeric-tinged yogurt, piled on the spiced mushrooms and onions, folded them over and dug in.
I’m not sure what came over us, but we could not put those wraps down. By the end of our first helping, we looked like various iterations of the Joker, with the exuberantly amber sauce smeared from cheek to chin.
Vegetarian Mushroom Shawarma Pitas
Wraps are great for when you can’t set down your food. And with a truly great wrap, you won’t want to.
For the mushroom-averse shawarma lovers, there’s Melissa Clark’s cauliflower shawarma with spicy tahini, which employs a strategy similar to Lex’s: Generously season the vegetables with warming, savory spices; roast them on a sheet pan; whisk together a simple sauce; warm your pitas; tell your dining companion they’ve got a little harissa-spiked tahini on the corner of their mouth.
Sue Li’s crunchy veggie wraps with kabocha squash is the kind of portable, packable recipe that can brighten up the often drab desk lunch. And if you can’t find kabocha, don’t sweat it: Readers have successfully swapped butternut squash or sweet potato in its place.
A lettuce wrap might be slightly less structurally sound, but no less delicious, and no less of a wrap in my eyes. Hetty Lui McKinnon’s tofu larb, teeming with chiles and herbs and topped with crispy fried shallots, eats best out of leafy cups of butter lettuce.
Kay Chun’s roasted vegetable burrito is a wrap, undoubtedly. But is a taco? Probably not, though I’d argue that Kristina Felix’s mushroom quesabirria tacos, sealed at their edges by molten Monterey Jack or Muenster, aren’t too far off. “Some cheese may ooze out and caramelize,” reads Step 6. “This is good.” Yes, it is.
There may be no time of day that calls out for a wrap as loudly as the morning. Yewande Komolafe’s rolex, a vegetable omelet rolled up in a chapati, is the answer. The filling is simple, a mixture of eggs, onion, tomato, chile and cabbage. But, like the street vendors in Uganda who churn them out, you can use whatever vegetables you have on hand.
You could buy some chapati, certainly. But if, like me, you forget to do so, you can make them with just three ingredients and this recipe.
