Roasted Red Pepper Sauce

TVB Pearl, one of two free English language TV stations in Hong Kong, airs a lot of cooking and lifestyle shows, which are easy watching/listening when you're doing other things. Recently, one cooking show featured a chef making muhammara and I was intrigued.

She used this Syrian red pepper sauce as a garnish for a lamb and pita bread main course. It took me a while to decide how I could use it in a vegetarian way, but it went very nicely with roasted sweet potatoes, stir-fried choi sum and couscous.

To make the muhammara, you need to roast or grill the red peppers first, and apparently you can cook them directly on a gas stove burner. I was a bit nervous that the peppers might go up in flames, but they did just fine (though also leaked juices a bit). 

For my version of the dip, I left out the bread crumbs and pomegranate molasses because I didn't have any. I used Chinese sesame sauce instead of tahini and hot sauce instead of red pepper flakes. Still, the result was very tasty and flavorful, and also worked really well on rice noodles with shredded cucumber.