Leandra Cohen

EVERYONE EATS        |        APR 1, 2021

Leandra
Cohen

FOUNDER OF (NOW CLOSED) MAN REPELLER

Leandra is a person in New York, but also in the world. She founded and ran a media brand called Man Repeller from 2010-2020. It was dedicated to celebrating self-expression through fashion.

Currently, she writes a newsletter called The Cereal Aisle.

INTERVIEW BY ROSIE ELLIS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOLLY CRANNA

LEANDRA'S NEW YORK CITY APARTMENT

Leandra has an extraordinary number of dips and sauces that she introduced us to upon entry into her beautiful Manhattan apartment. She pointed out a few of her favorites: the NuttZo, the Broma Dark Chocolate Almond Spread and the Delicious & Sons Saffron & Orange Aioli.

BREAKFAST

My kids have breakfast at 7:15am and I usually eat with them. (I’m including this context because what I eat is often their leftovers - my diet consists mainly of toddler scraps these days.) One daughter has Three Wishes or Ezekiel cereal with Forager yogurt or Good Mylk oatmilk in it every single morning. My other daughter eats Three Wishes (that grain-free cereal) dry. She is good for about three loops, so I add in oat milk and often eat it myself. We're big fans of the honey and cinnamon flavors. Recently we've also tried Foodnerd's Seereal, which I am pretty into. I will on occasion toast myself one to two slices of Base Culture grain-free bread (or really, lately, I've been eating Royo Co zaatar bread) and either lather on NuttZo almond butter or lately, Kite Hill's everything cream cheese. When we have overripe bananas, I make these muffins using them, almond flour, a little bit of baking powder, flax meal, walnuts and chocolate chips – these are great with almond butter too.

As far as caffeine, I used to have a sixteen-ounce oat milk latte with three shots of espresso from Cafe Maman every morning. When the pandemic started, I started to make my own coffee and for about seven months, I was drinking instant coffee with Coffee mate in it (look, we all have our thing, okay?). But for the past few months, I've been using La Colombe beans which I grind and put into a French press. I love this French press – mostly for how it looks. It’s the Bodum one from their collaboration with the MOMA design store. I'll put in a bit of vanilla syrup (current in fridge is from Alfred in LA) and OATLY oat milk. I basically drink a milkshake.

LUNCH

Lunch is weird. I’m usually standing up – I don’t sit down and have an intentional lunch. From 11:30 till 3 o’clock, I keep a spoon next to my fridge and I just eat leftovers. Yesterday, I must have had, over the course of four hours, ten bites of this chickpea stew that I made on Sunday night, then a container's worth of baba ghanoush. I had three slices of roasted acorn squash and two fried eggplant slices. I really, really like a dip - and keep cut vegetables in my fridge to use as dunking vehicles for whatever dips are on the current rotation. I used to make a really good lentil walnut pâté that my friend Tyler taught me how to do – it’s pretty nourishing and hardy as a combination of toasted walnuts, toasted almonds, minced raw garlic, sauteed onion and cooked ground lentils. You’re supposed to add just one tablespoon of miso, but I put in around 15 because I am nuts about miso. Lately I've been buying dips though - from this one supermarket in Brooklyn that makes hummus and babaganoush and matbucha on site or from Whole Foods. I tried a turmeric pineapple hummus a couple weeks ago. That was a journey.

We do also fry a lot of plantains. Madeline and Laura’s nanny introduced them to me - when she lived with us during the first bout of lockdown, she'd fry them almost daily and they smelled so yummy and delicious. I asked if I could try one and basically did not look back. Sometimes I put almond butter (or tomato jam!) on them too. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this, but it does do the trick for me.

DINNER

I cook dinner around 4 o’clock, and I make dinner for the whole family. Typically, it’s some version of a protein, a vegetable, and a grain. Abie doesn’t eat any dairy, gluten or sugar (he’s on a very strict food regimen for his migraines, and it seems to be working) so I have become pretty creative about making boring food a little more interesting. We don’t, for example, eat pasta, we eat lentil pasta or black bean pasta. Tonight I’m making that with a primavera sauce. I’ll sauté carrots, zucchini, broccoli, mix in some canned tomatoes, basil … and then cover the lentil pasta with it. One time, I poured this like, spinach soup from Goodstock over a box of beet spaghetti. That was weird. I would probably do it again.

My husband’s family is Syrian, and the cuisine seems pretty complicated when you're eating it because of all the spices and sweet and tangy notes, but there’s this amazing cookbook called Aromas of Aleppo, and the recipes really break down the process of cooking Syrian food. The overarching trick seems to be leaving everything on the stove, covered, forever. Tonight I'll make these tamarind koftas. Apparently, they only take 45 minutes.

I am good for about a glass of wine every night. Sometimes it's just a Ramona cooler (Meyer lemon flavor or blood orange) while I'm cooking, or a glass of something natural while I'm eating. Recently, my favorites are Costadila or Vivanterre's orange wine. I also tried a very good Italian bottle from Fongoli Maceratum last week. Am I even saying this right? It's all so good.

I haven’t existed Uptown outside of the pandemic yet, but in Soho my most frequented dinner spots were Sant Ambroeus on Lafayette and American Bar on Greenwich (it’s as if Carlyle was in Paris). I also love that natural wine spot on Broome St. and Centre, Compagnie des Vins Surnaturales. Their snacks are great – I guess everything is great when it’s drenched in butter.

DESSERT

I am a dessert person through and through. Abie was really big on ice-cream before he retired his life of joy eating and that turned me on, too. I really love cookies, chiefly those from Cafe Maman. What we eat a lot of now though, which is kind of depressing, are the Simple Mills’ grain-free mixes. Brownies, vanilla cake, banana bread – I'll often bake them in muffin tins so they're poppable on the go, you know? I'm good for 1-2 every 3 or so hours.

SPEED ROUND

Dream dinner guest?
David Foster Wallace, but I’d want him to come with Simon Doonan or Laura Brown – someone with a really explosive personality.

Go-to cookbook?
Aromas of Aleppo by Poopa Dweck.

 

Cocktail of choice?

The juice from a can of castelvetrano olives, half of a meyer lemon and tequila.

 

Cooking playlist?
“1950s French music” is what I tell Alexa to play.

Go-to grocery store?
Downtown it was Trader Joes. I love Trader Joes so much.

Weirdest eating habit?
Almond butter on plantains or miso and banana on crackers.

Favorite place to shop for kitchenwares?
Bordallo Pinheiro.

Whose routine would you love to see on Everyone Eats?
My friend Nick Morgenstern. He makes the weirdest flavors of ice-cream and he must just do the randomest, weirdest shit with his food.

Laura + Madeline’s favorite foods?
A Syrian appetizer called lachmagine. They’re dough patties with sweet meat on top of them, which we buy from Boutique Butcher in Brooklyn.

Celebrity chef crush?
Anthony Bourdain, duh.

Five items always in your kitchen:
Garlic powder, olive oil, Honeycrisp apples, almond flour and probably bananas. (I’m really disoriented by not having bananas at home.)

Caffeine of choice?
Oat milk latte if I’m out, and vanilla French press with oat milk if I’m home.

Best snack between meals?
Kit-Kat? If not, Simple Mills Sea-Salt Almond Flour Crackers with orange saffron aioli. (I go to the sauce aisle in grocery stores, and that’s where I really find myself.)

Secret food hack?
That dips are the unsung hero of daytime eating.

 

What’s the best dish you make?

My best dishes are dips ... I do a vegan, spinach artichoke dip that’s bomb-ass.

 

Recent food discovery?
There’s a brand called Coco and I love their Maple Tahini and Vegan Caesar salad dressings. They’re so delicious and they’re so thick so they don’t feel like salad dressing to me, so much as an everything dressing. I put it on roasted vegetables and I put the Maple Tahini on toast, sometimes with bananas depending on how I’m feeling.

Most overrated food trend?
Avocado toast.

Where do you most feel like The Regular?
Sant Ambroeus on Lafayette.

THIRD SCOOP

Food inquiries, recipes and cooking tips all seem to be finding their way into your social feed and your writing more and more these days. Would you ever pivot to a career in food?

No. There is such a creative purity to making food and such a satisfaction about watching someone else consume that thing that you created, and I really, really would not want to interrupt the sheer joy and lack of stakes that come with that. I don’t want this version, this form of my capacity to create, to get robbed by my self-judgment.

How did your family’s culture and religion play into the food traditions you had growing up. Have you carried those through to the next generation with Madeline and Laura?

I’m a very rebellious reaction to my parents. Madeline and Laura will have cereal for breakfast, or pancakes. When I was growing up, we ate stuffed grape leaves for breakfast. We would have black olive paste, anchovy paste and these teeny-tiny pieces of hard crostini bread. That was breakfast, next to dolmas. I distinctly remember one morning, my older brother saying, can’t we just be a regular American family, guys? I grew up eating Persian and Turkish food, because that’s where my parents are from. I’m first generation American, but I have a very Middle Eastern palette, and I think that’s partly because it makes me feel closer to home and closer to myself.

As a lifelong New Yorker, do you have any thoughts on how the city’s restaurants will bounce back after a year long pandemic? What has the energy of the new outdoor dining culture been like?

The energy has made New York City feel a lot more like Paris in a very tender way. There’s a lot of vibrancy on the streets of New York, especially those that are restaurant dense. My most idealistic conception is that restaurants come back with a bang because people are so sick of eating at home, but I say idealistic because I think that the pandemic is provoking problems that are way bigger than how you’re going to eat, and where you’re going to eat. I hope that restaurants come back with a bang, because there’s nothing like connecting with a friend over food in someone else’s house.

SIMILAR ARTICLES

NEXT ARTICLE