We’ve recently gotten involved with a new supper club based up in Bellingham, and the group had our first real dinner on Saturday (not counting the initial planning event). Our theme was Persian food, and it was so successful we might have to do a Persian II sometime.

There were two versions of kuku (a Persian frittata), one herb-walnut and one pistachio, yogurt salad, and little bites of cucumber with cheese and walnuts. There was a beef-artichoke stew, three kinds of rice pilaf (one with lima beans and two with lamb), grilled chicken kebabs, and almond tart with pomegranate whipped cream. My husband made kebab b’il karaz (spicy lamb meatballs in sour cherry sauce – perhaps more Turkish than Persian, but very much appropriate flavors), and I made badenjan borani, my favorite fried eggplant dish covered in garlic-mint yogurt sauce. There was plenty of wine, and everything was wonderful. And beautiful! I wished that I had brought my good DSLR instead of trying to capture the dishes with my phone camera.

We’re very excited about the future of this supper club. Can’t wait for the next one! What should the theme be?

Another dinner inspired by my culinary hero David Tanis and his book Heart of the Artichoke. In the past I haven’t much gone for prunes in savory dishes (I was traumatized by a pork-prune empanada at an impressionable age), but since David was pushing it I finally decided it was time to give it another try. This lamb shank tagine converted us, completely.

We still had all four shanks from the lamb we bought from Martiny Suffolks last summer, and I wanted to be sure we ate them while the weather was still good for braising. My biggest error in the past with lamb shank has been not cooking it long enough, so I started early in the day to make sure it reached the fall-off-the-bone stage. The dish starts (as most tagines do) with onion cooked in butter, then adds garlic, fresh ginger, powdered ginger, coriander seed, cumin seed, saffron, and rather a lot of cayenne. Lamb shanks, prunes and sultanas nestle into the flavorings with a topping of chicken broth and tomato puree, then braise gently in the oven for over two hours. A final handful of prunes go in near the end, before taking the lid off the pot and simmering it at higher heat for a few minutes.

The house smelled incredible. The tagine was both savory and sweet, with a cayenne kick that was never quite too much. The lamb collapsed with a mere touch of a knife. The prunes melted into the gravy, giving it an incredible silken mouthfeel. To go with it, I cooked couscous with chicken broth, sauteed chard and spinach, and made a platter of borani: pan-fried eggplant slices topped with yogurt-garlic sauce. We licked our plates.

Taking every leftover container out of the fridge and dumping it into a soup pot isn’t always a safe technique (or a good idea), but in this case it turned out to be the right thing. We had a few braised short ribs left, and I wanted to stretch them out into a full meal. I had a few other things to use up, and I decided that soup would be perfect, with a slight middle-eastern slant to it.

I started the soup with a bit of onion and garlic sizzled in olive oil, then added a sprinkle of ground cumin and hot paprika. Half a preserved lemon went in, roughly chopped. I thawed a container of broth made from 7-spice roast chicken, so it had a bit of sweet cinnamon flavor to it, and added it to the pot, then stirred in short grain rice and let it simmer.

When the rice was almost done, I added the cut-up short ribs and their juices (including braised leeks), some roasted bell peppers left over from tacos, and some cooked asparagus and roasted fingerling potatoes. A random assortment of stuff, maybe, but it pulled together beautifully in the spiced broth, with the rice as the unifying theme. Delicious, warming, and cheap.

It was hard to know what to eat after getting home from Duckfest. We’d eaten so much good food, I found myself wanting meals relatively light on carbs but not too depressingly healthy. I didn’t want to give us whiplash, after all.

This was a dinner that really hit the spot. Jon made up his favorite recipe for kofte kebabs with a mix of beef and lamb, but turned it into meatloaf instead of individual burgers or kebabs. I roasted a panful of cauliflower florets tossed with olive oil, cumin seed and mustard seed, and stirred up some yogurt with fresh garlic, dried mint, salt and pepper.

It was the perfect combination of comforting, spicy and virtuous.

More dumplings! This was a class on Lebanese home cooking, with a focus on festive dishes for the holidays. Nahla Gholam, one of the owners of the fabulous store Mediterranean Specialties in Bellingham, demonstrated three recipes: sheesh barak, beet salad and roasted seven-spice chicken.

Sheesh barak, lamb dumplings in yogurt soup, is a very old and traditional dish. It incorporates some of my favorite flavors in the whole world, so there was basically no chance I wouldn’t like it. Making the dumplings was a little tricky, but Nahla insisted it was almost impossible to mess them up (ha!). The dough was just flour and water and very stretchy, which helped us recover from our mistakes.

The filling, or hashwee, was ground lamb, onions and pine nuts with seven-spice powder. To make the dumplings, we patted out little rounds of dough, added more filling than seemed possible, pinched the dough into a half moon around the filling, then brought in the edges to make little tortellini shapes.

The dumplings get baked until just crispy, then simmered in a rich broth of goat milk yogurt with rice. At the end there’s a hefty addition of butter, mint and garlic.

The end result was a bowlful highly resistant to glamourous food photography, but really delicious.

While everything else was going on, Nahla had several large beets wrapped in foil roasting in the oven. She skinned and sliced them, dressed them with sherry vinegar and olive oil, and presented them on baby salad greens with pomegranate seeds. The combination of beets and pomegranate is so good, I can’t believe I haven’t tried it before.

And then, a batch of small chickens roasted for an hour and a half. They were rubbed with Moroccan seven-spice powder before roasting, then dressed with pounded garlic and lemon and given five more minutes in the oven. The chicken was amazing – so tender it was falling apart, aromatic, garlicky and lemony.

Dessert was a little birdsnest of shredded phyllo, baked in the oven and topped with a spoonful of creamy bread sauce, a handful of pistachios and a drizzle of syrup. We got a lot of clean plates back after this one.

The food from this class was just the sort of thing I like: tasty, straightforward, comforting, and just difficult enough to give a sense of accomplishment and festivity. And the leftovers were amazing.

We’ve been in Paris for a week now and are almost due to come home. We’ve eaten many good things (macarons, croissants, terrines, fromage blanc, braised rabbit, et cetera et cetera) but interestingly enough it’s been the falafel sandwiches that have really made an impact.

Just a few blocks from our apartment, on the Rue des Rosiers in the Jewish quarter, is a collection of competing falafel shops. They also serve schawarma, merguez sausages and other sandwiches to go, but falafel is really the star attraction here.

L’As du Fallafel is the granddaddy of the falafel shops, and the one that gets all the attention in guidebooks. As promised, there was a fairly long line, plus a falafel hawker out front doing everything but actually grabbing people off the street and shoving them into line. I had heard, though, that another place was actually better, so we resisted the hawker and eased our way through the crowds to the other side of the street.

Mi-Va-Mi was the place we ended up going to. I can’t say if their sandwiches were better than L’As, but I honestly can’t see how they could be improved upon. They do falafel with ALL the fixings.

We told the guy to make ours with everything. This included pickled red cabbage, green cabbage, roasted eggplant, cucumber, tomatoes, hummus, yogurt sauce, and hot sauce. He composed each sandwich carefully, layering in the vegetables with the falafel spheres, then pouring the yogurt over the top. He looked at us as he was building them and asked, “You want spicy sauce?” and we nodded enthusiastically. He poured a good ladleful of what looked like harissa over the top.

By the end, the pitas were so full they were like soup bowls, and were served with forks. Carefully taking ours wrapped in wax paper and napkins, we found an unoccupied bit of curb down the next street and dug in. After eating about half the filling out, we were able to set the forks down and begin eating our sandwiches the normal way.

And the falafel! It was fresh, very crisp on the outside and soft inside, and bright green. The vegetables were wonderful on their own, and with the hot sauce and hummus it created a divine combination of flavors. We scarfed our lunch sitting in the gutter, surrounded by dozens of other people doing the exact same thing – some propped up in doorways, others sitting cross-legged on the curb. The “spicy sauce” was very spicy, and our mouths tingled for a long time afterwards.

The best falafel in the world? It could very well be.

More from Paris once we’re home and un-jetlagged!

At long last, we finally made it down to one of Joule’s Urban Barbecue days. Given how much we love Joule, it was just a matter of time.

Joule’s owner-chefs, Seif and Rachel, began this series last summer, where every Sunday they’re open from noon until 8 pm, with live music and a different food theme. Normally the food here is a fun riff on Korean cuisine with French influences, but the Urban BBQ gives them a chance to play with all sorts of different menus. Last week the theme was “New England Crab Boil,” which didn’t really appeal to us, but last night the theme was Tunisia. We made a special effort to be in town for this one.

The mood is casual, with a self-serve drinks counter, a limited menu and silverware in little beach pails on the tables. We stopped in shortly before five, and the place was packed full of happy Wallingford residents and soccer fans.

We started with an order of mechouia, which was described as a Tunisian caponata. The summery vegetable mixture was piled onto two thin crostini with a large green salad on the side. It made a great starter: fresh and bright tasting but very light.

Since the plates at Joule are fairly small, we ordered three more things: the leg of lamb, couscous with roasted cauliflower, and a turnover filled with ground beef and an egg, called a brik. The brik was really the star of the evening, being crispy on the outside and filled with soft, spiced beef that oozed chile-flavored juices, enhanced with barely-set egg yolk. I think I need to learn how to make it at home. Anyone have a recipe?

The lamb was nicely done, quite rare, and served with a small pile of preserved lemon chutney and some spiced yogurt.

The couscous and cauliflower was very good, and excellent with the lamb. It came with dukkah, which is usually a mixture of chopped hazelnuts, herbs and spices. Since I’m allergic to hazelnuts, the chefs very kindly made a fresh dukkah for me with sliced almonds instead.

The wines on the counter were mostly French and very food-friendly, and I appreciated being able to just take a small amount instead of committing to an entire glass. We had the perfect amount of food, too. Desserts looked interesting, especially the Sno-Cones, but we decided to get home to a quart of ripe strawberries that needed attention. Maybe we’ll just have to make it down to another Urban BBQ.

For the last six months or so there has been a recipe (a clipping from Bon Appetit or some such publication) stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. I guess I somehow thought that if it was out in plain sight I would actually make it – sort of a triumph of optimism over experience. Turns out that staring at something every day doesn’t necessarily inspire you to do something about it…

I did make it, finally, for a middle-eastern themed dinner party we gave recently. Sort of a miracle, really. The recipe was for muhammara, a Syrian puree of roasted red peppers, walnuts and pomegranate molasses, and it seemed so completely up my alley that I can’t believe how long I waited to try it. I’m usually such a sucker for anything with pomegranate molasses. As it turned out, though, I decided not to use the clipping, which called for jarred peppers and panko crumbs. I went with a recipe from Cooking with Amy instead, just tweaking it slightly. Like many dips, this is a very forgiving recipe, so you could adjust it however you wanted.

By the way, this is how I usually roast peppers. I know you get a better flavor by holding them over an open flame and blistering them black, but it’s simpler and more hands-off to cut them in half and put them in a hot oven until the skin blisters. It loses a little of the juice, but you get a more even application of heat. Then it’s easy to rub the skin off.

The only real issue I had making the muhammara was that I was rapidly running out of olive oil (we were using it in everything), so I went a little sparing on it, leading to a dip a bit thicker in texture than I would have liked. Also, I used two red peppers and one orange, which looked beautiful at the market but produced a slightly drab-colored blend – all red is definitely the way to go.

For our dinner party I put this dip out with a bowl of blue corn chips, some toasted pita wedges and a bowl of semolina crackers from the Breadfarm. The slightly sweet, crispy crackers were the winner with the muhammara. Thin baguette slices would also be lovely, I think.

I also found a great-sounding idea in Greg Malouf’s book on Lebanese and Syrian cooking, Saha - it calls for stirring together muhammara and labneh (yogurt cheese). I’ll have to make myself a note to try that sometime, I might get around to it in the next year…

Muhammara

• 3 red bell peppers
• 1 cup walnuts
• 1/2 cup breadcrumbs
• 1 Tbsp pomegranate molasses
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp cumin
• hefty pinch red chile flakes, or a fresh hot red chile, chopped
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/3 cup olive oil

Roast the peppers and peel them, saving the juices. Lightly toast the walnuts in a skillet and let them cool.

Combine everything but the oil in a food processor. Once it’s blended to a paste, keep the motor running and add the oil in a thin stream. Scrape into a bowl and serve.

When I decided to make two new recipes for dinner out of a brand new Malouf & Malouf  cookbook (Saha), I figured there was a chance it might be a complete flop, but at least it would look pretty. Fortunately for me, it was pretty and tasty: shrimp with ouzo and garlic, and a salad of watercress, red onion, radish and fried strips of pita bread. It was good enough to make again; a little tweaking is in order for next time, of course.

The most exciting part was cutting a pita bread into thin strips and frying it in olive oil and butter until golden and crispy. That was really, really fun. The resulting croutons were almost like buttery potato chips.

Rubbing sumac and lemon juice into sliced onions was rather fun, too, although I might leave the onions out next time (or just use a lot less). They were rather overpowering – Greg Malouf always seems to start his recipes with “one small red onion” and it’s always too much for me (you’d think I’d learn). The watercress and sliced radishes were simply tossed in with the seasoned onions, and that was it for the salad. Easy.

The shrimp part was also simple: I peeled a bowlful of large shrimp and sauteed them quickly with garlic and olive oil. Before they had finished cooking, I poured in a little white wine and a small glass of ouzo and let the shrimp simmer in the liquid until almost dry (the original recipe calls for arak, which our local State liquor store did not have, shockingly enough).

The shrimp and the salad mounded on plates together was really pretty, and the flavors were lovely. It would have been great with some chilled ouzo, but we had a nice floral white wine that went splendidly as well. So far so good for this cookbook!

This has been a great season for cabbage. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten as much cabbage as I have this winter. This is partly due to an influx of wonderful new recipes, but also just an increased appreciation for the flavor of properly cooked cabbage. Plus, it’s way cheap.

The latest installment of “cabbage — it’s what’s for dinner” takes the form of a bulgur pilaf. I love bulgur, for its chewiness, nuttiness, and most importantly, easy-to-cookness. This pilaf accents the sweet earthy flavors of bulgur and cabbage with sumac, allspice, green onion and pine nuts. The sumac provides a cool sour note that makes this a little different than your (meaning my) usual workaday bulgur pilaf. And freshly ground allspice just makes your kitchen smell wonderful.

I made a full recipe of this, which seems to have made enough pilaf for a small army (fortunately the leftovers are excellent with a fried egg). I served it with a salmon fillet coated with a cumin and chile spice rub and seared briefly in olive oil. We also followed the recipe’s suggestion and mixed up some garlic yogurt, which was lovely with both the fish and the pilaf.

Bulgur Pilaf with Cabbage and Sumac

adapted from Moro East by Sam and Sam Clark (original recipe was in metric, this is more or less how I interpreted it)

• 1 ½ cups coarse bulgur
• 1/2 stick butter
• one bunch green onions, cut into half inch lengths
• 1/2 tsp ground allspice
• large handful pine nuts
• half of one cabbage, shredded
• 1 ½ cups chicken broth
• 1 Tbsp sumac powder
• 1 bunch parsley, chopped

Rinse the bulgur in cold water and drain. Melt the butter in a large pot, add the green onions, pine nuts and allspice and cook for five minutes or so.

Put in the cabbage and saute until it wilts and cooks down. Add the bulgur, then the chicken broth. Bring to a boil, put the lid on and simmer furiously for five minutes (I added a little extra water at this point, since it seemed a bit dry). Turn down the heat to medium low and simmer another five minutes. Stir in the sumac and parsley, then pop the lid back on, turn off the heat and let it rest at least five minutes.

Mix up some garlic yogurt: plop a cup or so plain whole fat yogurt into a bowl, press a clove of garlic into it, and stir well.

Serve with the yogurt, plus some fish, or lamb, or sausage, or a fried egg, or…