Ottolenghi: The Cookbook

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So: the philosophy is basically fresh food, not overly cooked but usually dressed with some combination of olive oil, lemon juice, parsley and/or cilantro, mostly served at room temperature. The authors are originally from Israel and Palestine, now in London, and it's basically a Mediterranean diet with a Middle Eastern fondness for spices. What this means for me is: tasty summer food that you can prepare in the morning while the kitchen is bearable and you can leave it to serve for dinner later. What this means for you: invite me to your BBQ, pool or Cape house. Ottolenghi’s ground-breaking classic cookbook, which captured the zeitgeist for using imaginative flavours and ingredients, is relaunched with a contemporary design. This is a hard cookbook to rate with fairness because of the delta between what can be learned as theory and what can be used in practice. Produce shows the way to bring out the best in your vegetables, by adding the umami of mushrooms, the magic of onions and garlic, the texture of nuts and seeds, and the sugar in fruit and alcohol. The Spicy Mushroom Lasagne, Dirty Rice, Radish and Cucumber Salad with Chipotle Peanuts, or Tangerine and Ancho Chile Flan can demonstrate this with ease. Danielle's sweet potato gratin - Despite the instructions not to use a pale sweet potato, I did (because I didn't read ahead before I went shopping!) and used the pale ones anyway. It was fantastic! I made it a second time with a mixture of red and pale sweet potatoes and loved it as well. A super easy dish, that looks beautiful at the table.

Ottolenghi is an award-winning chef, being awarded with the James Beard Award 'Cooking from a Professional Point of View' for Nopi in 2016, and 'International Cookbook' for Jerusalem in 2013. In 2013 he also won four other awards for Jerusalem.Roasted butternut squash with burnt eggplant and pomegranate molasses - I adored the squash (especially with all the toasted seeds and nuts), but the eggplant spread was not to my (or anyone else's) liking. I want to cook almost everything in this book - it's rare for me to want to make such a high proportion of the dishes. In Flavor, Ottolenghi, along with his test kitchen chefs Ixta Belfrage and Tara Wigley, focus on 3 Ps: process, pairing, and produce. Add in his homemade condiments (aka his secret weapons: flavor bombs), and you can find vegetable recipes for main dishes, sides, and even desserts for the most vegetable-averse out there. I'm not yet finished with the recipes I initially marked, and there are many more that I intend to add in very soon. There are a few that I've already made twice and will probably become staples. I love Ottolenghi’s previous cookbooks, but I thought he had more or less exhausted what he could do. As he says, “how many ways can there be to roast an eggplant?” But this cookbook is an evolution from his previous work. Where most of his previous recipes have been focused in Middle Eastern cuisine, this cookbooks is… not “fusion,” which to me implies a mixing of different cuisines, but rather post-national cuisine. With the help of Ixta Belfrage, Ottolenghi is now into using ingredients with big, bold flavors. Sometimes this is in context of the cuisine they come from, other times, like with the cascabel chile oil with butter beans, it’s just because that’s the big flavor they want to play with for the dish.

Yotam Ottolenghi arrived in the UK from his native Israel in 1997 and set out on a new career in food, after having completed an MA in Comparative Literature whilst working as a journalist in Tel Aviv. In London he attended The Cordon Bleu after which he worked as a pastry chef in various establishments. In 2002, Yotam and his partners set up Ottolenghi, a unique food shop offering a wide range of freshly made savory dishes, baked products and patisserie items. There are now four Ottolenghi's, as well as NOPI, a brasserie style restaurant in Soho, London. Turkey and corn meatballs with roasted pepper sauce - I thought this was adequate, but (surprisingly) my kids loved it. The roasted pepper sauce was the star... and would probably work well for other dishes... or possibly on its own as a soup. All the recipes I tried turned out great: cauliflower fritters with lime yogurt, sweet potatoes with raisins and maple citrus dressing, eggplant with fresh oregano, a salad of french beans and mangetout. Mangetout? Snow peas. This is a British cookbook so there is some celsius conversion to do, and measurement in grams but easily overcome with a kitchen scale. That said (and probably because of some of those reasons), I really enjoyed working my way through Ottolenghi. Well, put a cape on Yotam Ottolenghi, because he is a superhero for vegetarian and vegan cooks. He is doing everything he can think of to add interest and flavor to vegetables. His cookbooks are a love letter to the taste and texture of vegetables, and his latest, Flavor, is his strongest missive to date.I have been searching for great ways to eat garlic that don't involve cream and cheddar cheese--healthy ways to eat this vegetable that is widely available year round. I have had a very good summer of eating what is available in the Farmer's Market, keeping to a more vegetarian, sometimes even vegan meal plan, and the key to long term success, for me, is to have a lot of choices about how to cook the raw ingredients, especially once winter comes and the options do not include flavorful tomatoes and corn on the cob any more.