– shouldn’t dominate. These kinds of flavour enhancers should help bring out the good qualities of the veg or serve to balance its harsh ones.
My hope is that you’ll start playing with vegetables on your own. Take fennel, lovely fennel. When it’s raw, it has a soft crunch and subtle anise-y sweetness. When you boil the fennel, its texture goes creamy and its sweetness really comes out to say hello. You don’t have to do anything more but sometimes it’s good fun to continue to transform the flavour, though never so much that you obscure the essence of the fennel itself. Maybe you decide to go that extra step and concentrate that sweetness by sautéing the boiled fennel, then balancing that sweetness with a little acidity – a splash of vinegar or tart citrus. If you’re feeling ambitious, you might start exploring different sides of the same vegetable, combining raw and roasted fennel.
Never neglect the simple pleasures of cooking. When recipes do require more than a dunk in boiling water, try not to look at the process as a chore. If you think about how slow-cooked onions will ultimately transform a dish, the work itself becomes exciting. Get to know the process. Many of my recipes begin the same way, with onions and perhaps garlic or carrots sweating in hot fat. Settle in at the stove while they sizzle. Stir them and watch closely as they change. As you stir, look out for the point they begin to stick to the pan ever so slightly, which happens right before browning begins. Taste them, so you can see how sweet they’re becoming. Have a good old sniff. These are the little pleasures of cooking, the gifts a cook gets in return for making dinner. And attention to these details is what makes food taste wonderful. When garlic goes toasty and golden, it unleashes umami and colours the entire dish with its warm, nutty flavour. Onions can become incredibly sweet, leaking that sweetness into stews and sauces. The way you treat onions and garlic, even though the two are not usually the starring veg, determines the character of the final dish. Browning them will make the entire dish taste hearty, more appropriate for a chilly day. Lowering the heat and keeping them free of colour makes for a lighter-tasting dish, even when it features a hefty veg like parsnips or cauliflower. Rush the process, however, and your food will lack depth. Get distracted and your garlic will burn.
I hope you’ll keep this in mind as you read my recipes. As I did in my first cookbook, I decided that instead of writing recipes that look invitingly short, I’d offer recipes full of the little details that make food great. So please don’t mistake a recipe that looks long for a recipe that’s too complex to cook.
be fussy
Once you get to cooking, you should be particular, or – to be less charitable – fussy, about the ingredients you use. That the tastier these raw ingredients are the better your food will be should go without saying. Yet while I reckon that everyone agrees that a sweet pea is more delicious than a starchy bland one, I also reckon that each cook has her own quirky preferences. I embrace mine, which is why the recipes in this book are the way they are.
I leave the skin and spindly roots on beetroot, because they’re tasty and pretty. I often blanch and peel tomatoes that I plan to cook with, sometimes even running the result through a food mill to achieve a smooth texture, without bothersome bits of seeds. I always peel the caps of portobello mushrooms, though I’m not quite sure why.
I’m particular, too, about some of the ingredients that many recipes in this book share. Here, you’ll find a rundown of these staple ingredients that reflects my quirks. I hope you’ll try things my way, but I know the way you cook is a reflection of who you are and everyone’s different. Whether you adopt my eccentricities or not, you too should embrace your inner fuss-bucket and decide what you like and what gets you grumpy.
ANCHOVIES
Anchovies are good friends to vegetables, adding salty umami but not necessarily fishy flavour. I prefer salt-packed whole anchovies to oil-packed fillets. You’ll need to fillet them yourself, but it only takes a few extra minutes. If you must use the oil-packed kind, make sure they’re top quality – I like the Ortiz brand – and that you gently wipe the oil from the fillets before you cook with them.
Soaking and filleting salt-packed anchovies
Rinse the anchovies one at a time under cold running water, rubbing them gently between your fingers to remove the salt. Put them in a small bowl and add just enough water to cover. After about a minute – if you soak them for too long, they’ll lose their umami quality – give them another quick rinse.
To fillet the anchovies, hold an anchovy under cold running water. Use your fingers to brush away the soft, loose matter near the head and at the belly. Rub the outside to remove any remaining salt or hard bits. Keeping the anchovy under the water, gently work a fingertip along the belly to start to separate the fillets. Gently pull the fillets apart – this should be easy, especially once you get the hang of it. Drape the now boneless fillet over the edge of a bowl to drain. Take the second fillet and pinch the backbone, pull it gently out, and discard it. Put the second fillet next to the first. Do the same with the rest of the anchovies.
GARLIC
In this book, I call for two types of garlic: standard garlic and spring garlic. By the time you buy standard garlic, the bulbs have hung in a warm, dry place for several weeks until the skins dry out and become papery. The process, known as ‘curing’, helps preserve the garlic. Spring garlic, however, is eaten right after it’s pulled from the earth, and has a sweeter, milder flavour. During its season, I often use spring garlic in place of standard garlic, though I add a bit more since its flavour is not as strong. The standard garlic you get at farmers’ markets is typically good and fresh. In many supermarkets, however, it often has a little bright green germ growing inside or even peeking out the tip of the cloves. If you’re fussy like me, you’ll slice garlic cloves in half lengthwise and flick this green bit out before you get to chopping or cooking. Some people say the green bit makes your food a bit bitter; I don’t find it bitter, but have seen it contribute an off-putting blue-ish colour to what I’m cooking.
HERBS
Herbs are delicate things. When you’re washing and handling them, be gentle. With herbs like basil and mint, which oxidise easily, be especially careful and always chop or tear them just before you plan to use them. Because herbs are so fragile, I’m always torn about how to provide measurements for them. I hate the idea of calling for tablespoons and cups, because thinking about someone cramming delicate herbs in a cup measure makes my bum cheeks clench. So I’ve opted for measurements that feel more natural to me: handfuls, small handfuls, and what I call five-finger pinches. Imagine a heap of mint leaves – a five-finger pinch means as much as you can grab with just the tips of all five fingers, as opposed to a typical pinch for which you’d grab with just your thumb and two fingers. Most of these measurements assume that you’ve picked the leaves from the tough stems. For parsley and coriander, however, I like to use what I call ‘delicate sprigs’, which are a few inches long and include thin, tender stems as well as leaves.
TOMATOES
I’m plenty fussy about tomatoes, whether they’re fresh or tinned. I often treat both to a little grooming before I cook with them.
Peeling fresh tomatoes
In several recipes, I call for tomatoes to be peeled. Here’s how to do it. Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Use a knife to cut a shallow ‘X’ at the bottom of each tomato. Working in batches of tomatoes of similar size, carefully plunge them in the boiling water and blanch for 20 seconds for larger tomatoes, and about 10 seconds for smaller
