Good morning. Yotam Ottolenghi brought us a smart new recipe this week for a giant couscous cake with roasted pepper sauce (above). What’s great about it is, you can use that amazing sauce on anything you like. You could spoon it on pan-fried tofu, Yotam wrote, or pair it with leftover meatballs. You could eat it with eggs in the morning, or with a cheese sandwich at lunch.
What I’d like to do with it? Make pizza, no-recipe recipe style, topping the dough with the roasted pepper sauce along with some sliced onions, black olives and a handful of shredded mozzarella. Maybe smoked mozzarella, to accentuate the punch of the sauce? Maybe both? Can’t lose.
If you’re not up for making that sauce and pizza dough for dinner tonight, take a look at Ali Slagle’s recipe for crisp gnocchi with brussels sprouts and brown butter, which comes together quickly with store-bought gnocchi. It would be an ace thing to make and eat in advance of Melissa Clark’s new recipe for a maple-pecan galette with fresh ginger, a kind of deconstructed pie.
But don’t knock actual pie. My daughter and I collaborated on one recently, a school-night version of Melissa’s double apple pie in which I tried a new technique with the dough, putting the flour in an aluminum mixing bowl in the freezer for a half-hour before using a box grater to cut delicate little shavings of frozen butter into it. This technique resulted in the flakiest pie dough I’ve maybe ever made. Next up, this weekend, tourtière.
