When Zahra tells Alex the ingredients for her recipe, she needs to say how much or how many (the quantity) of each ingredient to use - couscous, cabbage, onion …

Nouns like cabbage, onion and vegetables can be counted: one cabbage and two onions, seven different vegetables . We call these countable nouns . Countable nouns have a singular and plural form.

We can use numbers in front of countable nouns.

Nouns like couscous can't be counted - we can't say "two couscous". These nouns are uncountable nouns . Uncountable nouns only have one form. Other examples of uncountable nouns are: water, air, milk, coffee, oil.
When we want to say how much of an uncountable noun, we need we use words like cup, litre, tablespoon, glass .