Pasta shells with yogurt sauce, peas, and chile

When Andrew and I were in Turkey over the summer, we tried a traditional dish called manti, which consists of a ravioli-like dumplings filled with meat and topped with yogurt and spices. I loved it - the yogurt sauce was creamy and tangy and paired well with the dumplings. Yogurt and pasta may seem like an odd combination at first, but it is commonly found in certain Middle Eastern cuisines, and it's not that far off from the yogurt rice eaten in India.

This recipe came from Jerusalem - it's not the same dish I tried in Turkey, but it's in the same family. Here, the sauce includes yogurt, feta cheese, and pureed peas. The pasta is tossed with more peas and basil, and topped with pine nuts that have been cooked in a spicy chile oil. The pine nuts and chile oil really make this dish - the nuts add texture and the chile add another dimension of flavor. The chile oil is very spicy though, so cut down on the chile flakes if you are sensitive to heat!

A note on the Jerusalem cookbook - this book is by Yotam Ottolenghi, the author of Plenty. You may remember me talking about how much I love Plenty, and Jerusalem is just as good (although fyi - it's not vegetarian). I love the big flavors and creative combinations of ingredients in Ottolenghi's recipes and his cookbooks are always a good source of inspiration. I definitely highly recommend this one.

Socca with lamb-eggplant sauce

I mentioned recently that I received a copy of Bean by Bean for Christmas. This book has been on my wish list for a while and I was really excited to get it - I cook with beans a lot and am always looking for new recipe ideas. When I was flipping through the book and tagging recipes to try, I came across a recipe for socca (chickpea flour flatbread). It made me remember that I still had chickpea flour in the pantry and that I should make socca more often (I've only made it once before). The recipe in Bean by Bean was different than the one I used before so I decided to try it. This crust recipe is really phenomenal - the socca is deliciously crisp on the outside and tender in the middle. Don't try to cut down on the amount of oil - you need it to get those addictively crispy edges. The lamb-eggplant sauce is meaty and savory and goes very well with the chickpea flavor of the crust. If you're looking for interesting variations on traditional pizza, give this one a try! I'd love to hear other topping ideas that you come up with as well.

Zucchini fritters

I've been keeping a bit of news from you - I start a new job on Monday! My time off (aka "funemployment") is officially coming to an end. I'm ready for it though - the job is in public health, which is a field I have been wanting to enter for a while, and I'm really excited about it. Anyway, I bring this up because even though I sometimes wonder if I have too many cookbooks, I still bought myself two more to celebrate getting the job offer. One of these was Claudia Roden's The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. Ever since our trip to Turkey, I've been very interested in exploring the food of the Middle East, particularly the mezes.

The first recipe I decided to try was for Turkish zucchini fritters. Shredded zucchini and onion are mixed with herbs and feta cheese to make the batter, and then the fritters are pan fried. These fritters have a thin crisp crust, but are very soft and melty on the inside, due to the cheese. I especially love the addition of mint to the batter. For those of you looking for new ways to use up a bumper crop of zucchini, give this a try!

Sweet potato, kale, and black bean enchiladas

As a kid, enchiladas were my favorite thing to order when my family went out for Mexican food. For some reason though, I hadn't ever cooked enchiladas myself until recently. I guess I usually make tacos or burritos when I have a Mexican craving, and I never really thought about making enchiladas instead. But I was doing a freezer cleanout recently, and found a package of corn tortillas that needed to be used. I had also been wanting to experiment with making chile sauces, and enchiladas seemed like the perfect way to kill two birds with one stone. It took a couple tries for me to come up with a good chile sauce recipe, and I am thrilled with the final result that I am sharing with you here. It has a nice deep chile pepper flavor that is tempered by tomatoes, and it isn't too spicy. It worked really well with the sweet potato, kale, and mashed black bean filling that I used (spring is almost upon us, but until spring vegetables arrive, I'm perfectly happy eating kale and sweet potatoes!). I'm really glad I made a batch of 16 enchiladas for dinner - Andrew and I have been really enjoying the leftovers and I don't think they're going to last very long...

In other news, I finally created a Facebook page for my blog so that I can stop spamming my whole friend list with blog updates. You can "like" the page here if you are interested in following via Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/4SeasonsOfFood.

p.s. I know it's St. Patrick's Day, and enchiladas are really not Irish. Sorry. They do pair well with beer though!

Is there a dish that you love eating at restaurants but have never tried making at home?