When life gives you parsley ...

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I don't know why parsley keeps on growing in the boxes on my deck, despite temperatures that have dipped into the 30s overnight. But it's a nice, fresh addition to ingredients I buy for home-cooked meals.

Last week, I made a tabbouleh salad with flat-leaf parsley. On Monday, I made a frittata with lots of flat-leaf and curly parsley. This is what you'll need:

• About two cups or more of chopped parsley.
• Five eggs or the equivalent in egg whites.
• Extra-virgin olive oil.
• Salt, allspice and cumin to taste.

I mixed the chopped parsley and raw eggs with a little low-fat milk, and seasoned them with salt, allspice and cumin. I poured the mixture into a 10-inch, non-stick pan that I had heated up over medium heat with enough olive oil to coat the bottom.

When the bottom was set, I put the pan under the broiler for about 10 minutes, but I would suggest you watch it until the top sets. My frittata was runny, so next time I would cook it longer on the stove before moving it to the oven. 

I also added chunks of Swiss cheese to the egg mixture and, after I poured it into the pan, I put about 10 sun-dried tomatoes on top. I might make it without these additions next time or just use some cheese to give the frittata a little creaminess. 

My mother used to make small parsley or ground-meat omelets, fried in oil, to eat in pocket bread (each omelet contained about two tablespoons of egg mixture). 

In the summer, a sandwich of the small meat omelet, called egge (pronounced edge-eh), tasted especially good with a fat slice of Jersey beefsteak tomato.

At Ima Restaurant in Teaneck

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Ima is the Hebrew word for mother, but the food served at the kosher Teaneck restaurant pales in comparison to the dishes turned out by my Sephardic Jewish mother, who was born in Aleppo, Syria.


The cook at this restaurant is the daughter of the woman who opened the original Ima in Israel, featuring recipes from the family kitchen in Mosul, Iraq. Iraq and Syria share a border, but, judging from the food I ate at Teaneck's Ima, not the spices that set Grace Sasson's food apart.

This is also a kosher restaurant, which means it's expensive. I can understand why dishes with kosher meat are more expensive than non-kosher meat dishes at other restaurants. But why are dishes without meat so expensive?

I wanted to try one of Ima's signature items -- kibbeh -- which is a fried bulgur-wheat casing containing vegetables, but only the meat version was available Sunday evening. Instead, I ordered a red pepper stuffed with rice ($6), a bowl of tomato soup with white beans ($6) and an Israeli salad of chopped tomatoes and cucumbers that serves two ($8). Hummus was listed at $9.

The food was good, but bland. I couldn't taste any cumin, allspice or tamarind sauce, just three of the ways my mother seasoned her home-cooked dishes.

The restaurant is simply decorated and seats about 20. During my visit Sunday evening, I saw at least three, large Israeli families with noisy children eating there. 

After I ordered, I received a small bowl of pickled vegetables and a single, doughy, partially burned pocket bread. I asked for a second bread during my meal. I drank water, because there was no seltzer.

Ima is about a mile from my home, and I was hoping it was a place where I could experience the flavors of my mother's kitchen, but I'll have to continue driving to Paterson for the real thing.

Ima Restaurant, 445 Cedar Lane, Teaneck; 201-357-5789. 
Closed Friday at 4 p.m. during the summer, and all day Saturday.
 

Spicing up our breakfast

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"That was a great breakfast," my 12-year-old son said as he got up from the table today after polishing off two pocket-bread halves stuffed with organic greens, hummus and fava beans. (Photo: Hummus at Maxim Restaurant in Haifa, Israel.)

My breakfast sandwiches also held greens and hummus, but I added a fat Moroccan sardine and a slice or two of plum tomato sprinkled with the thyme-based mixture called za'atar. We both ate some taboule salad, the last from the container I bought at Costco in Hackensack. Everything else but the greens came from Fattal's Bakery (and market) in Paterson.

This breakfast was fragrant with Middle eastern spices -- cumin, coarse Aleppo red pepper, allspice -- and lemon, garlic and extra-virgin olive oil in the hummus with tahini I made from a can (Lebano Verde brand).

As we ate, we discussed how my son's bean, bean and bread sandwich made such a great vegetarian meal and how I would be happy giving up meat as long as I could eat sardines and other seafood. After I finished, I put another half of Fattal's Syrian bread into the toaster to warm and assembled a hummus and fava bean sandwich. Absolutely wonderful.

Fattal's Bakery, 975 Main St.; (973) 742-7125;

Paterson; open seven days.

Shopping, cooking and tasting notes

Have you seen these Stop & Shop TV commercials where a woman learns to make pizza at home to save money and invites friends over for dinner? I don't want to learn how to make pizza, but I was interested in mention of  $4.88 for 5 pounds of clementines with a store card -- the lowest price I've seen.

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I visit Stop & Shop about once a month to look over its Nature's Promise offerings that are found throughout the store. These are naturally raised or grown items such as poultry, meat, eggs, milk, organic lemonade and so forth. Yesterday, I went to the Teaneck store for the clementines and to pick up a few things I needed to serve the delightful Syrian meat sandwiches called arayes, which we've enjoyed at Aleppo Restaurant in Paterson. (My spelling of arayes is just a guess.)

The box of clementines looked to be identical to those from Spain, but this one was from Morocco. Still, you can't beat the price (reduced from $7.99) and they turned out to be sweet, though harder to peel than their Spanish counterparts. I weighed the box and fruit  in the store and they totaled 5.32 pounds.

For the arayes, I needed parsley (99 cents for a big bunch, most of which will go to waste) and some Nature's Promise ground beef to add to the naturally raised ground lamb I bought the day before at Whole Foods in Paramus. I also picked up Nature's Promise large brown eggs ($2.99 a dozen) and organic, low-fat milk ($3.69).

Chuck, one of my loyal readers, advised me to use a lot of chopped parsley for the arayes meat, which totaled about a pound and a quarter. I also seasoned the lamb-beef mixture with salt, sumac, allspice, cumin and Aleppo red pepper, and added finely chopped onion and red pepper before hand mixing it.

I split two medium-size pocket breads from Fattal's Bakery in Paterson, spreading and pressing the meat as thinly as possible into each of the four halves. I put them under the broiler until the meat was firm and sizzling, then reunited the halves and cut each sandwich into four quarters. (I made lamb burgers with the rest of the meat and put them into the freezer.)

They were yummy and tasted pretty close to what we've had in restaurants. I served the arayes last night with lamb sausage from Fattal's, yellow rice, canned fava beans with my added tahini sauce and salad.

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This morning, I fried one Nature's Promise large brown egg -- sunny side up -- in extra-virgin olive oil, seasoning it with a little salt and a generous pinch of Aleppo red pepper. I toasted one large and one small roll, and ate the egg with this and that -- a slice of Swiss cheese, some tuna-red salmon-sardine salad, wild lox, kimchi and seasoned tofu. Life is good. We've been eating only egg whites for far too long.

We forgot to eat the stuffing

It took a cleaver and a mallet to cut through the bones of our 13-pound heritage turkey yesterday, but we managed to finish most of the half  that we roasted with white sweet potatoes, yams and dried apricots. With only one drumstick, though, I ended up eating the white meat, which was juicy and flavorful.

I seasoned the bird with salt, cinnamon, allspice, cumin and Aleppo red pepper. I put the apricots in right away and they burned, so next time they'll go in with the boiled potatoes after an hour or so. And the sausage-apple stuffing, which I bought at Abma's Farm, was on a rack below the big enamelware pot with the turkey, and I completely forgot about it until we finished our meal.

We started the meal with lobster bisque from Costco after I found a container of it in the freezer. It was a delicious meal, with a few glasses of new beaujolais wine, and my wife and son didn't have room for the pumpkin pie. I had a few slices of Spanish fig cake, cheese and almonds a few hours later.

See earlier post: "Our half-turkey Thanksgiving"