OPEN ATTITUDE ABOUT COMMON INGREDIENTS GETS YOU TORTIZZAS

At first glance, you might not think that Jacques Pépin and Haile Thomas have all that much in common.

He, of course, is one of the best-known chefs in the world, an 84-year-old Frenchman whose books (including classic encyclopedias of technique) and public TV series (including with Julia Child) have made him a true culinary icon. She is the 19-year-old daughter of Jamaican immigrants who last year wrote her first cookbook, “Living Lively,” focused on healthy, plant-based recipes.

But take a closer look and you see some similarities. Like Pépin, Thomas is truly a teacher at heart. At the tender age of 12, she founded a nonprofit, Happy, dedicated to empowering kids through, among other things, cooking and nutrition camps. Her mission started in 2009, when her father was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, and she and her family “completely reversed” it by creating “lasting healthy lifestyle and eating habits,” as she writes.

And like Pépin, she displays a refreshingly open attitude toward food, free of purism and dogma. If you didn’t realize this was a signature Pépin quality, you might not have been following his career closely enough. As much as I love — and have learned from — his book “La Technique” and “La Methode,” for example, it’s his shortcut tips and recipes that I have used the most, particularly from his shows “Fast Food My Way” and “More Fast Food My Way” and their companion books. They’re some of the least pretentious cookbooks I’ve ever read.

Last spring, Pépin released a series of videos showing the types of things he makes off the cuff with common ingredients he has around the house. One of those was for a “pizza” made with f lour tortillas. The first time I saw Pépin turn a f lour tortilla into something like this was in 2008, when he made a pear tart with the tortilla subbing for pastry. It’s basically f lour and water, he said — why not?

Thomas has a pizza treatment in “Living Lively” that reminded me of Pépin’s. She goes a little further, spreading mashed sweet potato between two tortillas, topping them with a barbecue sauce and vegetables, and roasting until the tortilla crisps up on the bottom. It’s like a quesadilla-meets-pizza, but also a little like neither. I was a little skeptical the first time I made it, but it was so simple and tasted so good that any doubts disappeared.

Best of all, I started thinking of all the ways I might switch it up. Thomas gave me more than a recipe; she taught me something new, just like Pépin does virtually every time I watch him in action.