On Tuesday February 4, 2014, I made a dish from Jerusalem with my friend Valerie, who is nurse in San Francisco. Valerie and I met when we were 10 at jewish sleep away camp and have been friends for close to 2 decades now! It’s really nice to have an old friend around in the bay area:)

So we made conchiglie with yogurt, peas & chile from Jerusalem by Yotam Ottoleghi and Sami Tamimi pg. 111. This recipe is nice compared to other recipes in this book in that it has fewer ingredients and they are a bit easier to source.

All of the ingredients for conchiglie with yogurt, peas & chile

One tip though if you buy frozen peas – this should be a no brainer but of course I bought all of my ingredients right before cooking and didn’t take the time to do this – let your peas thaw before you start cooking. As a graduate student I’m a bit lacking on the cooking supplies side, so I also do not have a food processor. No fear, my handy immersion blender did the trick! If you are going to buy one appliance – I highly recommend the immersion blender. They don’t take up a lot of space and have many handy attachments and can pretty much replace a blender or a food processor in your life. I imagine a blender would also work fine for this recipe. I used 0% Fage greek yogurt here and it worked out well.

blending together the greek yogurt and peas for the sauce with my handy immersion blender

This recipe is nice because it is rich and creamy but doesn’t leave you feeling heavy  – the greek yogurt is creamy but light and is filled with protein and calcium so is actually good for you. I also learned that I really need to buy or acquire a larger pot! Making 500g of pasta at once is tricky! I couldn’t find anything labeled conchiglie at Safeway, so I used Barilla big shells. They were large though and I had to cook the pasta in two batches. I also could not find Turkish chile so I just used regular red pepper flakes, and I used less feta because 8 oz seemed like a ton of feta for me! The sauteed pine nuts and chile really made the dish for me. It was really great to get that extra flavor and crunch. In the future I would probably use 1-2 cloves of garlic instead of 4, and I might add spinach or more peas to give it a bit higher vegetable to sauce ratio. My picture of course did not come out as lovely as in the book, but we enjoyed it nonetheless :) The recipe saved well and gave me several lunches throughout the week!