Results tagged pasta from David Lebovitz

Moro’s Noodle Pudding

vermicelli-like pasta moro pudding

I’ve had all three cookbooks from Moro in London stacked up in my apartment for about a year, and haven’t made anything from them. They’re very personal cookbooks, the recipes and photos invoking a time and place, with the food arcing between Moorish cooking and the foods of North Africa, along with the Middle East, nodding toward sustainability. I keep picking them up, leafing through them and looking at the lush, yet unfussy photos of food, but never tried any of the recipes.

orange flower water frying noodles

Their most recent book, Moro East, was the result of their growing their own food in their “allotment”; a place on the outskirts of London where 81 people tended their own gardens and foraged for foods. The book begins with the sad warning that by the time readers pick up the book, the bulldozers will have plowed the century-old gardens under to make way for the upcoming Olympics, in order to create a pathway between two stadiums.

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Israeli Couscous with Butternut Squash & Preserved Lemons

Israeli Couscous

When I started this site, I had forums, where people could chat and post messages. Before we took it down (because my brain was about to implode), one of the burning questions on there was this: Is couscous pasta?

My contention was that it wasn’t, since it wasn’t a ‘paste’ (or as the French would say, un pâte), which is what I believe—in my limited intelligence—that pasta is.

On the other hand, perhaps it is pasta, because couscous is flour mixed with water, then rolled until little granules form. Theoretically, then, it is a paste before it’s broken down into little bits. Which makes me wonder if kig ha farz is pasta, too? (Although back then, no one would have know what that was, so it wouldn’t have bolstered my argument.)

flat leaf parsley

Then, to make matters even more complicated, there’s Israeli couscous, whose springy, chewy texture wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if someone called it pasta.

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Sweet Potato Gnocchi: The Good, the Not-Too-Bad, and the Sorta Ugly

tray  of gnocchi

I thought I’d better get this one out of the way right off the bat, at the start of the year. This recipe was languishing on my kitchen counter, resisting publication until I could resist no more. (And if you saw my kitchen counter, you’d know a piece of paper takes up about 25% of it, so I’m especially eager to get it out of the way.) I wasn’t sure if it was up to snuff since I can’t claim exactly 100% success, although the end result was pretty darned good.

But Carol warned me I’d better write it up, and I’m a bit scared of her after what she did to that pig’s head. Although truth be told, she can blame any failures on Tom or Grant. Here, it’s just me, myself, and moi.

Plus I needed the counter space.

'taters

1. The Good

I’ve been meaning to mix up a batch of gnocchi for a while, since I don’t think there’s any better way to fight off the chill of winter than a big bowl of carbohydrates swimming in melted butter.

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