Hello all, New York Times Food reporter Julia Moskin here filling in for the vacationing Melissa Clark this week. (Next week will bring Tejal Rao to the dance floor, and then Melissa will be back.)
Ramadan begins tonight in the United States, a holy month of fasting for Muslims that culminates with Eid al-Fitr on April 21. The cook and writer Ifrah F. Ahmed brings us four new recipes that draw on her roots in Somalia: beef sambuus (above), a cousin to the samosa, with basbaas cagaar, a bright cilantro-jalapeño sauce; rooti farmaajo, a sweet, cheese-stuffed honeycomb bread; and soor iyo dalac bilaash, rich cornmeal topped with a savory tomato sauce.
These recipes, she writes, are ideal for suhoor, the morning meal, and for iftar, the sunset meal for breaking the fast. Popular New York Times Cooking recipes for iftar have always included lentils, like Yasmin Fahr’s Persian adasi, Iraqi lentil soup with meatballs, and the stunning centerpiece that is rqaq w adas: lentils and noodles, cooked together and garnished with pomegranate seeds, leafy herbs, fried onions and triangles of pita. In recent years, cauliflower shawarma with spicy tahini has often gone head-to-head as a favorite with chicken shawarma in our comments.
Many people stock up on dates to break the fast. Where I live, the halal markets have piles of boxed deglet noors, medjools and zahidis. I love how the flavors vary from rich molasses to honey and cognac, with the succulence of prunes and the burnt-sugar edge of caramel.
If you buy too many, sticky toffee pudding is always a delicious way to use them up; or cook them into this roast chicken dinner from the writer Yvonne Maffei. The buttered almonds, herbs, date slivers and couscous are a heady combination.
This week also brings a clutch of new dinners based on canned beans, a forever friend to last-minute cooks. First, a pasta e fagioli-inspired dish, for which Alexa Weibel smartly roasts white beans and caramelizes tomatoes, adding depth of flavor and texture; then, a skillet of white beans that Sarah DiGregorio simmers in the Buffalo wing flavors of butter, hot sauce and blue cheese; and, finally, a one-pan dinner of chicken, chickpeas and spinach from Yossi Arefi that needs just five main ingredients and has almost no chopping. I’m trying that tomorrow night.
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I will see you here next week, and Sam Sifton will be back on Friday — we’re more than halfway there!
