Enjoy: New veg with dash

Introduction

We left Morocco when I was eight, nearly nine. There were humiliations and excruciating moments, such as the time, a few days into my first week at an English school, when a blond, pink-faced child came to me holding out a pair of white cotton socks. I had come to school in little French sandals, straight from Le Printemps, white and open-toed with sweet fringed details. ‘My Mummy says you can have these if you’re too poor to buy socks.’ I swear these were the first words of English I learned. ‘Poor?’ I wanted to shout. ‘Poor? We had servants and a villa and a life you couldn’t even dream of.’ I defiantly came to school without socks on for the rest of the summer.

But what could I do about the food? Lunchtime after lunchtime was spent on the stage in front of the whole school because I could not swallow the revolting rice pudding, the lumpy semolina, the nauseating banana custard – to this day I cannot bear to be in the same room as a cooked banana. I cried till the rice pudding ran watery and cold, and was eventually released when the bell rang for class again. I learned to hide food in pockets and handkerchiefs like the most compulsive anorexic.

Home, thank God, was a different story. My mother, who had never needed to cook before, took to the kitchen with some reluctance but great skill. And though she was now a working mother of three, with a big job in Knightsbridge, she brought the cooking of French, only-just-post-colonial Casablanca with her, consulting the few relatives who had made this unlikely migration, sometimes even those in Paris, Washington and Montreal. And it took some doing, finding fennel and pumpkin, artichokes and salsify, celeriac and fresh petits pois, in Richmond-upon-Thames circa 1966.

She made gratins and soufflés, tarts and crêpes (these always in big piles, which she counted out in batches often and froze, to thaw over a pan of boiling water when the time came). And for festivals and special occasions, there were day-long preparations of couscous with its seven vegetables, bstilla with poussins, tagines with prunes, onions and almonds, kfita and pastelles, cumin-braised vegetables, and salads of all kinds. My parents were not rich but they had no concept of frugality or economy – not when it came to food (or gorgeous clothes, or much else really).

And nowhere more grandly and magnificently than when they entertained. I recently read an article by a well-known American author in which she questioned the motives for going to great lengths when entertaining. Was it to impress, she wondered, and what did that say? To my parents, this would be an outrageous and incomprehensible line of thought. Very clearly it is to please, to delight, to give – and yes, to do one’s best not just to give but to give as much as one is capable of giving.

Our housewarming party (I was eleven by then) was a grand affair and my parents worked at it for days, perhaps weeks. The best solid-silver French cutlery is being used, and the tablecloth, with its garlands of multicoloured sweet peas, exquisitely embroidered for my mother’s trousseau by my Great-aunt Phoebe, is laid out, all crisply starched. It is a rarity, the work delightfully and impossibly fine. There are flowers everywhere, crystal glasses as delicate as can be for us children to ‘make sing’. There are great silver filigree platters, designed with the entertainment of large numbers in mind. There are numerous apéritifs and canapés, which I have had a hand in assembling. It goes on and on. Someone, an English relative, says it is a lovely spread. Spread? The word jars terribly. My heart sinks a little. Is that how you describe it? I ask myself. This is a banquet and a feast, celebration and ceremony. I look at the guests rather piteously and can’t hear the word even now without a slight shudder of horror and disappointment. The word buffet, with its emphasis on the first syllable like shoeshine, has the same effect. I didn’t plan a career in food – in fact a part of me is still waiting to go back to my first love, psychology. But the culinary legacy of my childhood had a very long arm and I am still driven to communicate the unique skills and attitudes that were handed down to me. I’ve done this in various ways over the last twenty years. I ran a vegetarian catering business for eight years, which of course meant organising and cooking for party after party. I treated each one as if it were my very own celebration, my very own feast. I worked till I dropped. When I became food director of the vegetarian restaurant group Cranks, I tried to imbue the food there with a different aesthetic, a new finesse, and then I put it all into my books, hoping again to reach a receptive audience. Now I teach hands-on cookery classes from my home, which overlooks the green hills of northern New South Wales, and I feel in my element. There is a conviviality and bonhomie in the classes that I couldn’t have predicted, and an amazing warmth that brings all sorts of different people together and makes cooking the lively, communal activity it’s supposed to be. There is a spirit of co-operation and creativity that everyone loves and responds to. Sometimes people laugh so much they have tears running down their faces. It’s just amazing. So you can understand why I frequently teach corporate groups on a ‘team-building’ exercise, why supper groups have formed as a result of the classes, and why people leave feeling a little less afraid of the kitchen than they were before. At the end of every class we all sit down together at my long table and eat the fruits of our labour – yet another feast!

I’m now in the fortunate and unusual position of writing a book across two continents. I am familiar with the shops and ingredients of both, so I feel as if I’ve become a sort of go-between, introducing to each the good foods of the other, and making adjustments where necessary. For instance, Turkish bread as it is produced in Australia is delicious – the dough pillowy and light, the crust soft and studded with sesame seeds, a fantastically versatile product. It is available in the UK in areas with sizeable Greek communities but not as readily as in Australia, so I suggest ciabatta as an alternative – that is, until someone picks up the baton and starts to make it in the UK on the same scale as they do in Australia. Asian ingredients are, of course, very easy to get in Australia and I now take them completely for granted. I know they aren’t always so easy to find in the UK, so I suggest substituting brown sugar for palm sugar, if necessary, or cinnamon for cassia bark. And, of course, there are everyday ingredients available on both continents that simply have different names – aubergines/eggplants, for example. In the recipes, the Australian terminology follows the English in brackets.

How I Shop

Like everyone who enjoys cooking and eating, I love using fresh produce. I like to know where it has been grown and even who has grown it. It awakens my palate and my enthusiasm for cooking every time.

I haven’t specified organic ingredients at every turn in the recipes in this book but I want to say it now, loudly and clearly: organic is best. The Chinese talk of Chi in food – life itself – and this is what I look for when I buy organic food. I simply feel that it has more life in it. It has been grown without the use of chemicals, in ways that aren’t harmful to the environment, and some recent studies have shown that it is likely to contain more nutrients than non-organic food.

By contrast, the food that appears perfect in supermarkets can seem dead. This isn’t surprising – it’s often been picked when underripe, to withstand a long journey, sometimes from the other side of the world, then kept in specially modified storage to extend its shelf life and pumped full of ethylene gas to force the ripening process. Some produce, including apples, pears and citrus fruit, is waxed to enhance its appearance. Then it is overchilled and often overpackaged. It’s no wonder it can feel pretty alien.

I know it isn’t always possible to buy organic but in both the UK and Australia it is easy to join an organic box scheme and, for a reasonable sum, receive a good selection of whatever happens to be abundant that week. Then there is the amazing growth in farmers’ markets, as more and more of us reclaim a vital connection to the food we eat. The produce sold at farmers’ markets is not necessarily organic but it will have been grown locally and picked when it is properly ripe and therefore at its peak of flavour. We’re back to the question of Chi. And to the possibility that we don’t have to rely solely on supermarkets any more, which is good news.

It’s an interesting irony how well farmers’ markets do in the city, wherever you are in the world. The further we go from Nature, the more we need to seek it out and enjoy it. This is not just a question of being ‘worthy’. There is the all-important taste factor. For example, I love my eggs to look and feel as if they’ve come from a hen (or a duck for that matter), not from a factory, date-stamped and coded, individually washed and unnaturally clean, buffed to within an inch of their life. The difference in taste between an organic egg and a battery-farmed one is so striking that if you have the choice, there is no choice. In organic eggs, the white is generous and firm rather than weak and watery; the yolk is bright, fresh and creamy, not floury and dry; the smell is clean and without the fishiness I’d come to associate with eggs. Organic eggs are the bee’s knees.

I may turn my nose up at many shop-bought things these days, but at a farmers’ market I’ll give everything a go, knowing it’s been made by someone who frankly wouldn’t bother unless they cared. Really, really cared.

How I Cook

There are a few tricks to good cooking and they come with practice. I’d like to discuss them at the beginning of this book so that you can remember them as you go on. Of course, you might know them like the back of your hand already; you might have been born to them or you might just have a deep, intuitive sense of what is right. You just know when something is done: you look with your eyes and smell with your nose, touch with your fingers and listen with your ears. You enjoy eating – the biggest key – and you have the ability to translate the experience of your taste buds into the actual practice of cooking: the adjustment of heat, the addition of spices, the marriage of ingredients, the all-important timing-all the things that kitchen-bound generations understood instinctively.

We live in a society of buzzwords and glossy pictures, which fail to capture the heart of real food. We’ve had at least a decade of al dente this and that, of vegetables waved over a naked flame in the name of speed and modernity or to make them more photogenic. We’ve had a glut of ‘assembly food’, of recipes that barely seem to require our active presence and involvement in the kitchen, and we are in danger of forgetting some fundamentals.

In the recipes in this book, I’ll often ask for the food to be very well browned, properly caramelised, allowed to simmer at length. I will practically beg you to cook your vegetables till they are very soft (which never means soggy), aware that for a long time you have been instructed only to steam them so that they retain that apparently desirable crunch. This may be appropriate for a quickly thrown-together stir-fry but it’s not right for a tagine or a braise, a casserole or a roast. Neither is it suitable for pulses, which should be so soft that they dissolve when pressed with the tongue against the palate. There is no speeding this up, except by using a pressure cooker. No chickpea, lentil, or any other pulse for that matter should have even the slightest toughness to it. If you are told otherwise, it’s wrong and it won’t taste good. End of story.

Don’t try to apply the rules of Asian cooking to the food of the Middle East, and vice versa. They are very, very different. To give you one example, it’s no good treating an aubergine in a Middle Eastern recipe as if it were a carrot in an Asian one. The former needs a copious quantity of hot oil, the latter will work in only a little. One needs to be very soft and browned, the other should have bite. Don’t eat a piece of aubergine that looks insipid and half raw. You won’t enjoy it so, whatever you do, don’t cook it that way.

Slow cooking, the lynchpin of so much Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food, draws out layers of flavour, a depth of taste that you simply will not get by searing things in a hot pan for a minute or so. And get over the fear of oil. In some of these recipes you will have to use oil liberally, but remember that good-quality olive and macadamia oils are fantastically good for you.

Ditto salt. People have often watched me cook in a class, then reproduced the dish exactly so that it looked identical to mine, yet still it lacked roundness. Whenever I probe, I discover fear of salt at the root of this. Of course you don’t have to go overboard, but salt brings flavours together in a way that hits the spot. Paradoxically, you may find that you need to eat less when your food is perfectly seasoned th n when it’s bland. I sometimes find myself chasing after taste, hoping the next mouthful will reveal all. But it doesn’t work like that.

Cooking and eating are about sustenance, pleasure, delight and joie de vivre. They are about good-quality ingredients, so fresh you can still feel the pulse of life in them. They are about feeding the people you love. It makes sense that you should want your cooking to be as good as possible, that you continually seek inspiration.

Everyone enjoys eating good food and everyone can learn to enjoy cooking it. Do go to people who know their own food well. Try out as many ethnic restaurants as you can, go to hands-on cookery classes, get stuck in, practise, and above all enjoy.

My Basic Recipes

Chermoula

This pungent classic Moroccan sauce, conceived with grilled fish in mind, is fantastic with charred vegetables, with pilafs and couscous, on grilled bread with wilted spinach and a poached egg, or instead of pesto in a Moorish take on bruschetta, with properly charred aubergines the perfect accompaniment. Do taste as you go along when adding the lemon juice. In England I’ve used 2 whole lemons, small and somewhat devoid of juice, for this. In Australia, it must be said, as little as half an enormous Meyer lemon will do.

a large bunch of coriander, tough stalks removed, roughly chopped

a large bunch of parsley, tough stalks removed, roughly chopped

6 large garlic cloves, very finely chopped

2 tablespoons ground cumin

1 tablespoon sweet paprika

1 teaspoon harissa

1 small bird’s eye chilli, finely chopped

juice of ½–2 lemons, to taste

350ml extra virgin olive oil

sea salt

Mix all the ingredients together using a fork, so that the oil and spices make a paste loosened by the lemon juice and rough with herbs and garlic. Or pound the chopped ingredients briefly in a pestle and mortar and then stir in the remaining ingredients.

Pesto

If you are making this with rocket, you might like to replace the pine nuts with almonds or pecan nuts.

30g pine nuts

4 garlic cloves, very finely chopped

a bunch of very fresh basil or rocket (about 60g trimmed weight)

2 pinches of sea salt

a pinch of freshly ground black pepper

120ml extra virgin olive oil

40g Parmesan cheese, freshly grated

Grind the pine nuts in a food processor to a mixture of fine and coarser grits, then add the garlic. Blitz for a moment and add the basil and salt and pepper, blitzing again as you slowly pour in the olive oil to make a thick, well-flavoured pesto. Add the cheese and whiz together for a few seconds. Either use immediately or transfer to a jar, pour a protective layer of olive oil on top and seal. The pesto will keep like this in the fridge for up to a month. Use on roasted vegetables, bruschetta, in risotto and, of course, with pasta.

Harissa

Having gone through the ignominious task of making harissa with dried chillies – think surgical gloves and hour-long removal of seeds – and, worse, having imposed the torture on willing course participants, I now only ever make my harissa with fresh chillies. Quick, easy, versatile, it can be kept in the fridge to add to dressings (a basic vinaigrette is transformed by it), to stir into tagines for a final kick, to serve with couscous and roasted or charred vegetables, with poached eggs or any other type of egg for that matter, or even on its own with warm pita, olive oil and dukka.

7 large, bright-red, very fresh chillies

2 tablespoons olive oil

3–4 plump garlic cloves, roughly chopped

1 teaspoon coriander seeds

1 teaspoon caraway seeds

1 teaspoon dried mint

1 scant teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon sea salt

Slit the chillies in half and remove the seeds and pith, then chop finely. Put the olive oil, garlic, coriander and caraway seeds, mint, cumin and salt in a pestle and mortar or a food processor with a herb chopping attachment and either grind to a paste or pulse several times. Briefly pound or process with the chopped chilli. Sealed in an airtight container, the harissa will keep in the fridge for at least 2 weeks.

Dukka

Traditionally dukka is served as a dip for warm pita or broken-up fried tortillas that have first been dipped briefly in olive oil. You could also add it to roasted or grilled vegetables, warm wilted spinach or a mustardy, garlicky cauliflower salad. It’s become as essential as salt and pepper on my table.

250g sesame seeds

125g coriander seeds

60g hazelnuts

60g ground cumin

sea salt

Roast the seeds, nuts and cumin separately by placing them in a dry frying pan over a low heat for a minute or two, until they are lightly browned and their aromas are released; don’t let them become too dark. Pound them together in a pestle and mortar until finely crushed but not pulverised; it should be a dry mixture rather than a paste. Season with salt to taste, then store in an airtight container until required.

Ras-al-hanout

Ras-al-hanout is a North African spice mix – traditionally the ‘grocer’s mix’ or literally ‘top of the shop’. It is a pot-luck concoction, put together for you by the merchant himself, and can contain as many as 40 different herbs and spices, hailing from the four corners of the world. It demonstrates the sensibility behind Moroccan cooking – the intricate and surprising mix of sweet and savoury, the colours, scents and aromas – and it is always applied with a delicate hand. My father often praised Moroccan cooking for its roundness of flavour. Though hot peppers are used, they rarely dominate. And I often find that, in my own cooking, I use practically immeasurable bits of this and that till I’ve obtained a taste that refers to its components in only the subtlest of ways.

3–4cm chunk of fresh ginger

8 small, tight dried rosebuds (available from Middle Eastern and Asian food shops)

5 cloves

½ small cinnamon stick

½ teaspoon ground cumin

½ teaspoon sweet paprika

4cm piece of fresh red chilli, deseeded and very finely chopped

⅛ red pepper, chopped

Preheat the oven to 150°C/Gas Mark 2. Peel the ginger, pare it very thinly with a sharp knife and then dry it in the oven for 20–25 minutes. Put it in a pestle and mortar with the rosebuds, spices, chilli and red pepper and pound them together to make a smooth, fragrant paste. Add to dressing or tagines.

Tomato and Olive Salsa

4 small, very red, ripe, sweet tomatoes, finely chopped

80g pitted green olives (lemon-stuffed ones are great for this), finely chopped

a small handful of parsley, very finely chopped

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 small piece of preserved lemon, thinly sliced (optional)

juice of ½ lemon

1 shallot (golden shallot) or a small piece of red onion, very finely chopped

Simply mix all the ingredients together.

Red Curry Paste

Red curry paste is the one most commonly used in Thai cooking, not merely for curries but for other dishes too. It’s worth making twice the quantity, as it keeps in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 weeks.

2 teaspoons coriander seeds

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

1 teaspoon white peppercorns