Lemony aubergine soup

Cooking aubergines on a gas top is one of those thing you can't believe you've never done before. It's well easy, and a great way to cook them that avoid using a load of oil. You stick them over a naked gas flame, rotate occasionally and after about fifteen minutes you've some beautifully soft and giving aubergines ready for baba ganoush, or in this case soup. This Ottolenghi recipe (from his first book) is extremely simple. All you need is:

• plenty of aubergine
• some cream
• some stock
• lots of lemon
• a bit of basil

Cook half your aubos as I have described. When soft allow to cool and peel off their skins. Chop roughly.

Meantime, fry the other half of your aubergines, cubed, in some olive oil. When they are soft combine all the aubergines and top up with some stock. Cook this for thirty minutes. When it seems done season, squeeze loads of lemon juice in, top off with a lick of cream (off the boil so it doesn't curdle) and chuck on a few basil leaves.

Very easy. Also very tasty, though the soup has a delicate appeal that wasn't immediately evident. It was consumed alongside the green pancakes of wonder, and such was our delight in them that the soup was over-shadowed. However, once reassessed after a few more spoons it was judged positively. It's quite light and simple - there is just the one vegetable in it - but the mix of smoke from the grill, sharpness from the lemon and richness from the cream was just the ticket with a bit of toasted pitta.

Green pancakes with lime butter

First things first - this is an absolute winner. It's the perfect thing for a weekend brunch or lunch, or in our case a rainy Sunday's film club. Airy, light, spiced pancakes with a pleasingly raw and green taste and a sharp lime and chilli butter. Wondrous. You can find the full version from the Guardian here. Don't be put off by the long list of ingredients - most of them are regular household things that you may have around the house, and you can easily bodge a few bits.

• butter, lime zest and juice, salt and pepper, chilli flakes, raw garlic for the butter
• self-raising flour
• eggs
• baking powder
• spinach, green chilli, spring onions
• milk, egg, butter
• ground cumin

Make the butter by creaming all of the ingredients needed together. Use common sense as to amounts but  aim for a punchy and strong tasting result with lots of lime. It should look a bit like this...

The correct amounts for the pancakes can be found in the Guardian link. I think you could put even slightly more spinach in the mix. Fresh green chillies give an amazing edge to things and should not be missed, and the egg whites are essential in making a fluffy pancake.

Fry with keenness, speed and vigour. Top with the butter and enjoy. We had these with aubergine soup (to be blogged soon) but you could have with poached eggs, salads, hummus or whatever else.

This is one of the best Ottolenghi recopies I've ever tasted. Don't delay

Beans with sorrel and gammon

This is a variant of Ottolenghi's butter bean and sorrel salad. Sorrel is not in too many places but it did crop up on Ridley Road market so I bagged some quick sharp. It turned out being more of a stew than a a salad and was pretty heavily modified with the inclusion of some green chillies and a mix of bean rather than just butter beans.

• spring onions
• lots of garlic
• a few mild fresh chillies
• beans
• sorrel
• feta

Start by frying the garlic, spring onions and chilli in olive oil.

After five minutes add beans of some sort. Right at the end add the sorrel - be warned it discolours quickly and vigorously to a disagreeable pond-green. You can either choose to have it more or less raw and retain its nice colour and texture or accept that it's going to melt in to the background as slime. Here is more what the dish is supposed to look like. Crumble your feta over it at the end and add some salt and pepper.

Beans and pork go together well - it's a natural marriage recognised by all right-headed people around the world. These beans would obviously be great as a salad or side dish but if you add some sort of pork they will do as a full meal. We had it with gammon, but some meaty sausages would be very nice. Sorrel has an extremely unusual sharp-sour taste which dissipates with cooking. It is a pleasantly astringent foil to something a bit blander like the beans, and a leaf I would definitely use again.

Poached baby vegetables with caper mayonnaise

Apologies crew but I broke my arm and have been out of action for a week or so. Straight back to the thick of it, though, with another Ottolenghi from Plenty. I'll say straight up that this one isn't as good as some of the other crackers, but it might be worth a look if this kind of thing tickles your fancy. Check the original recipe.

• baby vetables - fennel, carrot, leek, asparagus etc
• one egg, vegetable and olive oil, lemon, white wine vinegar, Dijon mustard for the mayonnaise
• white wine, olive oil and bay leaves for the poaching liquor

Baby vegetables are something that may well set you back a bit normally. I was lucky to get a load of them cheap from Ridley Road and I supplemented them with a few adult vegetables in the form of carrots and courgettes.

First up make your mayonnaise. Use your normal method: I'm a self-confessed failure in this area, for some reason mine is often thin and fails to coagulate. The key here is for it to be very lemony and to chuck some capers in at the end. Regardless of the overall success of the dish the mayo is amazing, and should be used in other circumstance.

Next fix up your veg - Otto suggests poaching them in a mixture of white wine and olive oil. This is a nice idea but kind of wasteful. All the oil he calls for also makes things greasy when combined with the oil of the veg. I think some stock with lemon and bay and gestures of oil and wine is ok. Poach until done but with a slight crunch.

Serve with your preferred starch - grain/potato/bread with the veg, a dollop of mayo and a little ladle of stock. This responds well to some black pepper.
 

that's lunch sorted

A slight faff this one. It doesn't quite have the attractive simplicity of some other Ottolenghi dishes, what with the poaching and mayonnaising processes. It is, though, rather pretty, and might be a nice dinner party dish for an elegant starter. As I said, the lemon tinged mayo is a wonder and would be sublime with a lump of fish or some courgette burgers.

Baked eggs with sage and chilli butter

OK baked eggs are a classic through loads of the world - from a Pakistani spiced version with tomatoes to the Turkish classic menemen, a chickpeas and feta based iteration and the North African staple shakshouka (also popular in Israel apparently, courtesy of the Tunisian Jews). You could easily do a nice UK themed one with leeks and bacon. This, wonder of wonders, is Ottolenghi's version with sage and chilli with a sauce whose taste and savour far exceeds the sum of its parts. It's flippin amazing.

You can peep the original recipe here but the basics are:

• two eggs each
• greens - rocket, spinach, tender leeks
• yoghurt mix (with a little raw garlic)
• butter mix (with chilli flakes and sage)

Pre-heat the oven to a medium heat.

Sweat down your greens in a pan until they are soft. Add them to an oven dish and crack the eggs between the vegetal bolsters. Stick in the oven.

Mix your yoghurt with a little crushed raw garlic. Make the spiced butter - melt in a pan with the sage and chilli flakes and let it cook for a minute or two so the butter solids start to brown slightly and move towards a state of hazelnut aroma, and the sage crisps.

When the eggs are looking done remove and plate up. I found it tricky getting to a point where the yolks were still liquid but the white was set. You may have more luck.

Combinate however you like with the yoghurt and a generous portion of the spiced butter and serve with absorbent Turkish bread.

Oh my days, sheer brunch based heaven. Don't hold back on the butter, it just doesn't make sense to do so. This should be served with some nice coffee (hazelnut?) and some fruit juice. One might even accessorise with some additional greens to balance the various fats and round out the meal. Whatever happens you are in for a treat. (The spiced butter would be great tipped over a fried egg sandwich if you can't be bothered to go the whole hog).

Yoghurt pie and grain salad

What I like about Ottolenghi is that he suggests things I’d never make myself without prompting in a million years. Anyone can dream up a few salads or roast veg tarts and the like, but mixing yoghurt with chopped herbs and nuts, thickening it with flour and baking it is a combo that would not have cropped up in my head any time soon. Obviously I have inherent cultural bias and all the rest but just saying...

As ever the ingredients were tinkered with as I’m mean and don’t like buying things when other things I have can do the job. Check the official recipe.

The nature of the beast is this: fry some onion or shallot, toast a few nuts, chop lots of herbs and mix with rich (‘Greek’) yoghurt to form a thick paste. Season. Thicken this with flour and encase with vine-leaves slathered in melted butter and olive oil in an oven-proof dish. Sprinkle with breadcrumbs and bake for forty minutes.

Pine nuts can be a bit dear and I found the walnuts I had worked fine. I also used normal flour instead of rice with no obvious adverse effects.

I’ve gotta say I was initially wobbling on the fence a bit with this one – not outright horrid or anything you understand but not a straight-off head nodding success. But having some of it later and cooler after a trip to the pictures it started to make more sense. Rather than a hot pie this is much nicer as a room temperature slice of contrasting but complimentary flavours and textures – the leathery, briney vine leaves, the modest crunch of nut and crumb, the herbs in their giving yoghurt matrix, the butter sheen of fat that coats the thing. In fact, looking back at the recipe Otto specifies leaving it for ten minutes to cool – something I totally missed - eek!

If I made this again I’d serve it more as a mezze component and add garlic to the onion/shallot stage.

We had the pie with roast toms and grain salad – all you do is chuck in small amounts of every grain in the cupboard according to cooking time and then flavour when cool. We had puy lentils, rice, bulgar and orzo pasta with chopped preserved lemons and olive oil. Delicious.

Okra with coconut rice

Plenty keeps on giving. Okra with coconut rice looked just the part for the grizzly weather and early dark. It's a fairly simple recipe - you make a sambal paste and fry it, add cooked okra and serve with coconut rice. That's it.

For the sambal - plenty of red shallots, fresh red chilli (I used the long Indian ones that are available pretty widely) salt and a touch of garlic enter the magimix for a spin. The cook is also instructed to add 'dried red chilli' which I found a bit of a vague description, chillies varying so hugely as they do. In the end I went for what seemed like a sensible amount and added a couple of small hot ones and a large long Mexican type one I had in store. Once blitzed the paste is fried.

It slowly browns as the shallots cook and begins to smell very savoury. After ten minutes tamarind water (just sticky tamarind from a block soaked in boiling water) and sugar are added and that's the paste done.

Meantime, make the coconut rice. This is just basmati rice cooked with coconut, ginger slices and lime leaves. When the rice is cooking cook the okra for a minute or two until just done but not slimy. Ottolenghi suggests using small Egyptian okra and I followed his suggestion by getting a frozen pack which had already been trimmed. To make the food go a bit further I added squash here too which worked well and provided variety. When everything is nearly ready combine and that's it! Put fried shallots, lime, chopped coriander and (my suggestion) nam pla on the table to spruce things up.

It's a cracker. Be liberal with the extra bits at the end as it needs that extra poke in the bottom to really shine.

Vegetable puree and aubergine

Where has all the corn gone?, that's what I want to know. A few weeks ago the stallholders of Ridley Road were shouting at me to buy six ears for a pound and now I can't find anything in my usually reliable spots. The season's over I suppose. I don't think I used its abundance as well as I might. This altered my plans slightly to cook sweetcorn polenta with aubergine, another ace looking combination of flavours from Plenty. Instead of the six ears of corn specified I used two I already had and made up the rest of the vegetable bulk with potato and butternut squash. Unless you are baking most recipes can take more than a little fiddle...

For the vegetable puree the squash, potato and sweertcorn were all boiled in salted water until tender. They made a trip to the magimix and a chunk of feta, olive oil and salt and pepper all followed. I think any combination of sweetish vegetables would work well here and a little salty feta primes the resulting gloop well.

The sauce is very easy - no onions to sweat and no fancy flavours. Fry the aubergine in plenty of oil, add tomato puree, wine (given a lack of wine some white wine vinegar stood in well for me), a tin of tomatos and herbs (dried thyme and oregano for me) over a period of forty-five minutes or so whilst stewing gently the whole time.

For something on the side we had spinach (adult naturally, tastes better than the boring baby stuff) with chickpeas and the reliable combo of cumin, chilli flakes and smoked paprika.

I would recommend frying some breadcrumbs to tip over the top of the glorious mush for some textural contrast. I seem to be become a bit of a fan-boy but I've got to say that Mr Ottolegnhi delivered again on this dish. Granted it does look and feel like baby food but it's deeply warming for a night of late autumn and the sweet-sharp taste of the silken, vinegar stewed aubergine prevents it from being actually infantile.

Not a bad likeness, huh?

Eggplant

Ribollita and pesto

Man, I can't stop cooking from Plenty! I can't remember the last cookbook from which I not only wanted  in a vague sense to cook but actually did get around to making this many recipes. This time it's his take on ribollita, proper peasant fare, with some pesto. There must be 1,001 recipies for this.

Onion and vegetables go into the pot to soften in olive oil. The herbs are then added and everything cooked gently for a short while.

Five minutes before serving chickpeas go into the soup. Meanwhile into the magimix go basil, parmesan, olive oil, salt and pepper for the pesto. No nuts around but that's not a problem I feel.

Ottolenghi suggests baking the bread until crisp and then putting into the soup which seems a bit silly to me - why go to the trouble of drying it out to put it in a load of liquid? So instead I fry some long chunks of Turkish bread in olive oil and butter. Everyone gets one on top of their soup.

Delightful stuff - heartening-healthy rather than worthy-healthy in taste. I like the inclusion of fennel here but in truth you could put almost anything in the soup.

Ultimate winter vegetables

I am gradually coming around to the idea of fruit in savoury food. This ultimate winter vegetables (and couscous) contains apricots and has a distinctly sweet taste. It's another Ottolenghi effort from Plenty and is fantastic. Recipe here.

After a quick spice reload I got to business. The basic idea is roasting lots of sweet wintery vegetables with some aromatic spices before adding a little stock to give a plate of tasty, moist and warming food. Soft too, easy on the gnashers.

Using my shiny new Scanpan roasting dish (whose 'surface technology is based on the principle of using ceramic tiles on the space shuttle, which prevent the shuttle from burning up during re-entry into the earth's atmosphere...The MOHS scale measures hardness of gemstones. Diamonds come in with a perfect 10. SCANPAN CLASSIC is a 9.5.' apparently. Sweet) parsnips, carrots, shallots and the spices are put together and roasted for fifteen minutes.

Squash or pumpkin is then added and the whole lot give another thirty-five minutes or so. Dried apricots, chickpeas and liquid (chickpea juice or water) are then added and warmed for a final fifteen minutes. The result is quite delicious - the roasting softens rather than crisps the vegetables and the combination of spices makes the food sweet and fragrant. The squash and parsnips in particular must have a very high sugar content. Ottolenghi suggests eating with couscous and preserved lemons but we had with some leftover rice and I feel bulgar would fit the bill well here also. Finish with some olive oil, chopped herbs and a sprinkle of pul biber (the Turkish chilli flakes) and it's done!

Hmm, spice-shelf seems to be becoming dangerously overloaded...

Multi vegetable paella

A dish to capitalise on the last warm days, now seemingly, sadly, past. It's a tasty and straight-forward Ottolenghi recipe from his book Plenty.

 

This dish is jam-packed with veg which sits in a rice mix with the signature Spanish flavours of sherry and smoked paprika.

The generous nature of the meal means it can accommodate most vegetables. I think the inclusion of fennel was excellent.

The black olives are good here. The cherry toms are just allowed to be cooked by the heat of the rice.

Some chorizo was hanging around in the kitchen and the rampant carnivores dining couldn't resist frying a bit to put on top. It was very nice and I think wedges of lemon also make an excellent addition to a fresh and light flavoured dish such as this. They temper the starch of the rice.

The sherry gives a good broad taste to it though I don't think it would miss the suggested saffron terribly.

Apologies for the lack of incisive commentary here: this recipe does what it says on the tin and tastes how it should.