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.
Chermoula