A Time Before Tabbouleh by Bittman

I had been cooking for only a few years when, in 1972, a friend gave me “A Book of Middle Eastern Food,” by a woman named Claudia Roden. In my cooking life, there was no more important influence than that book. . .

We started with lentils with noodles and caramelized onions. I remembered the first time I made this dish and how thrilled I was at the combination of legume and pasta (not rice!) and the sweetness of the nearly burned onions. We moved on to a slow-roasted shoulder of lamb, cooked with couscous and dates, a delicious combination of sweet and savory whose aroma is almost unbelievably enticing. And we finished with what she calls knafeh à la crème, a beautiful pie of kadayif (essentially shredded phyllo, which goes under a variety of similar-sounding names) filled with a cream thickened with rice flour and scented with orange-flower water, a dish that is as exotic now as Roden’s first round of recipes was to me 40 years ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/magazine/a-time-before-tabbouleh.html?hpw