THE FUSE

Soomaliya is all about Somalian cuisine, and is full of recipes for new-to-me dishes that I can’t wait to try. But there are also a surprising amount of extremely familiar dishes in the book that are prepared using unexpected techniques and surprising ingredients. Take, for instance, the pasta with meat sauce. It’s delightfully simple and extremely flavorful, but the biggest selling point for me was the addition of a peeled and chopped potato. I would have thought that adding big hunks of potato to a pasta dish would make it too heavy, a textural redundancy, but instead it’s a wonderful enhancement. I may never make meat sauce without a potato ever again.