Everyday, Elevated

Hello, hello. I’m Rita, a home cook from Los Angeles, and Saturday Table is a newsletter in which I share recipes that will elevate the everyday. Think straightforward meals that are impressive enough to serve at a dinner party, but simple enough to make any night of the week.

I love food — both eating it and cooking it. What I don’t love is spending hours in the kitchen. That’s why my recipes center around low-effort, high-reward dishes. They’re generally unfussy, don’t require a culinary degree or professional kitchen experience to execute, and – most importantly – are crowd-pleasers. Because fresh, vibrant, delicious food is my favorite way to elevate every day and make any night feel like a weekend.

Pull up a seat. Can I pour you some wine?

I’m not a trained chef. I learned through osmosis — watching my mom, dad, grandmas, and aunts thoughtfully and lovingly put together meals in their home kitchens day after day. They’d ask me to help, showing me how to stuff dolma or make potato salad or baste a ham with champagne (Grandma’s specialty), and slowly but surely I learned how to cook with the same intention and care, too.

There are also my fairy godmothers, of course, whom I adoringly and devotedly watched on TV and who played no small part in teaching me to feel comfortable in the kitchen: Ina, Martha, Giada, Sandra, Rachel.

As such, I might not know the most chef-y, technically impressive, Michelin star-worthy way to sear a filet of salmon, but I do know how to make impressively delicious salmon at home. And how to explain it in a way that makes sense rather than makes you feel like you need a dictionary and another degree to cook dinner.

I try to make my food feel approachable and attainable but still elegant, and I aim to talk about it in the same way. I hope that reading my newsletter feels like pulling up a stool at your best friend’s counter, watching her stir a pot while you pour yourself another glass of wine and both of you ramble on and on about all things life and food.

California Home Cooking

My recipes are very much inspired by the place I grew up in and still call home: California. The birthplace of farm-to-table cuisine but also a melting pot of rich, delicious cultures and food.

Some might draw on my Syrian-Armenian roots and the foods and flavors that I grew up enjoying (Aleppo pepper, za’atar, and tahini show up a lot), while others might be influenced by the taco stand we can’t stop going to, or the Korean place my best friend took me to for lunch, or the Vietnamese spot with the best noodle bowls, or our favorite little French joint

There’s also a heavy Mediterranean influence, both because there are a lot of similarities between some types of Armenian and Mediterranean food (I grew up eating hummus, tabbouleh, kebabs, stuffed grape leaves, etc.) and because I genuinely love all the food the Mediterranean has to offer. It’s where we go when we travel and when I travel, I eat. And when I eat something good… well, I just have to recreate it.

All in all, I call it California Home Cooking. Seasonally-focused, locally-sourced, globally-inspired. It’s not driven by trends but instead by taste, with an eye on creating aesthetically pleasing food that will make your taste buds sing.

Come On In

Paid subscribers will receive a recipe in their inbox every single Sunday. Unpaid subscribers will receive a recipe once a month.

I also send out monthly roundups of all my Instagram recipes that didn’t make it to the newsletter (Recipes You Should Know), as well as all the things I’m currently loving, both food-related and not (The Monthly Edition).

I hope you’ll join me, and I hope you love it.