Pasta

My family's table has always had pasta on it, just not always the way you'd expect. That's the thing about pasta in a Lebanese kitchen: it was never something plant-based had to work around. Rishta, lentils and pasta simmered into a soup, has been a cold-night dinner in my house for as long as I can remember, no substitutions needed, that's just how it's made. Lentils and durum wheat have sat in the same pot in this part of the world for generations, long before anyone called it a diet.

When my garden's overflowing every summer, it's cherry tomatoes spaghetti sauce on repeat, fast and forgiving enough for a weeknight, using whatever's ripe on the vine. Mushroom spaghetti is the other one I make on autopilot, meaty and rich without needing meat. For a crowd, vegan pasta bake or plant-based mac and cheese without oil both deliver comfort without anyone at the table missing dairy.

That range, soup to sauce to bake, is really the point: pasta bends to whatever the week needs, and it's been doing that in this kitchen long before I started writing recipes.