Roast Vegetables

One experience in the horribly long gap between the end of my first marriage and the beginning of my second still caresses me like a sledgehammer with mixed emotions of perpetual joy and cringing embarrassment.  I had driven a couple of hundred miles to visit the the young widow of a school friend, and she welcomed me into a candle-lit room where she invited me to sit with her on the floor. We ate, with our fingers, the succulent sweet peppers she had slow roasted for my arrival.  However many times I go back to that happy experience, I cannot for the life of me ever understand why I didn’t join the dots and realise there was more on offer that evening than roasted peppers, but I didn’t. 

But what did hit me was learning that you can take something as simple as a sweet pepper, stick it in the oven and it will sweat enough oil to roast itself to perfection soft and tender, oily and sensuous, little burnt bits for variety of texture. The combination of flavours fresh and carbonised and with a glistening sheen to catch the candlelight.  

Nonetheless, we stayed friends for a few years after that, a few years which still hold memories of other moments of utter stupidity on my part that curl my toes every time I think of them  – moments that were no doubt sent by fate in its pathetic attempt to teach me to open my eyes and ears to the subtler and less prosaic communications of my fellow humans.

But the concept of roasting vegetables very simply has stayed.  And improved.  This isn’t a recipe, it’s a culinary invitation.  Slices of apple, courgette, sticks of carrot, roughly cut sweet peppers, nuts and raisins, sweet potatoes, broccoli florets, Stick them on a grid or a  baking tray, or in a shallow roasting dish if they are the kind to sweat oil, and you can experiment with basting them or not basting them with oil or butter, adding salt before or after cooking, slicing them thicker or thinner, covering them with aluminium foil or not at different parts of the process.  These things all make a difference to the outcome, but here is the secret . . . the thing is this . . . Every variant is not only edible but delicious.

Tomatoes

One of those foods (like the fresh peas and asparagus from my fathers vegetable patch, and the shrimps eaten with my grubby five year old fingers from a brown paper bag and peeled by hand) which never seems to taste quite so full of flavour as they once did.

Sometimes they have Dutch vine tomatoes in the supermarket and you can pick them up and sniff them and almost fool yourself into believing that you have caught that dusty smell; nothing like their flavour and nothing like anything else. But they don’t taste the same. Or maybe they do, and it’s me that has changed. 

I remember thinking that a raw tomato, like sliced cucumber, was the perfect excuse for salt and pepper.  At one time I would keep tomatoes in the fruit bowl and it was an exercise in self discipline to resist picking one up to eat like an apple. 

Fill your mouth. The tomato is the only food other than meat (actually fat) that fills your mouth. You can taste it simultaneously in your cheeks and your tongue and the back of your mouth. Try it. Try it with other foods too for comparison.  Now tell me, you have lived all this time on this planet and you never experienced that before? 

There was a real Italian restaurant in Almaty called Pomodoro (they speak Russian in Almaty and pomodoro/помидор/tomato is almost same word in Italian and Russian) and here in Muscat the “Italian” restaurant in the Intercontinental Hotel is actually called “Tomato” – sic! (is it just familiarity that breeds contempt for my own language or is it really true that English is so Saxo-prosaic?) At least my father used to call them “love apples” in simultaneous homage both to romantic love and to the French “pomme d’amour”

If your tomatroes are the rich soft red kind that actually have flavour when raw, then eat them in your fingers with salt and pepper, or if you can resist them long enough, put them on brown bread and butter. If they are the kind misleadingly labelled “salad tomatoes” in the UK (which means they are selected for appearance rather than flavour) then sharpen your knife until it has a razor edge.  Cut them. (Gotta love that sharp knife blade-on-tomato feel) and fry them in butter.  Salt, pepper, eat.  Then be grateful that you share a planet with the fruit that inspired the whole of modern Italy to do what it does so well.  ( . . . and basil but that’s another story)

Spinach and Palak Paneer

One of the joys of living in Oman is the availability of fresh spinach. A bunch of fresh green baby leaves labelled “Palak” in my local Indian hypermarket and displayed in a long sloping bank with countless varieties of other fresh green herbs costs less than a small bottle of drinking water and less than a fifth of what I used to pay in the UK ten years ago.

It’s not always so easy.  There is another supermarket here where the “herbs” are not labelled, and there is something else that looks identical but isn’t.  Cook it and it remains tough and tasteless.  I have no idea what it is.  I asked the woman next to me once.  I had confidence in her because she was choosing her bunches with enormous care – dismissing and rejecting most with a down-your-nose kind of a sneer. She looked at me with similar disdain, and confirmed that it was palak. I bought it and it wasn’t. Or maybe it was, and she was sneering at the whole show. Anyway, I haven’t bought it there again.

Here is my recipe for how to cook spinach.  

Ingredients:  Spinach, salt, pepper, butter.  Time 5 minutes.

Wash it in cold water.  Lift it out of the water in your fingers. Put it whole into a big stainless steel pan.  It is still wet.  Add no more water.  Put it on high heat and cover.  It steams itself.  This is why you put it in whole so there are voids for the steam to percolate. When it is a rich dark shining heap, take it out put it on a chopping board and chop it up into a slush.  Add salt pepper and butter and eat it.

Unfortunately Popeye’s superfood has now been debunked from its alleged place as the richest source of all things good.  But it is still full of all the stuff a body needs out of greenery, and for me more tasty than the rest.  You can keep your spring cabbage and brussels sprouts which were the staple vitamin foods we had as kids.  I can happily eat spinach just as I have described without any other accompaniment.

Sometimes, of course, I am distracted by other events, until the smell of burning reminds me of my forgotten task, but unlike burnt tomatoes or burnt toast, burnt spinach, so far as it can be scraped off the bottom of the pan, can be happily rescued by pouring on some cold olive oil and a sprinkling of salt.

The Indians cook something called palak paneer.  Despite the lime green photos in the sanitised western recipe pages, the real thing looks like rather sloppy dark khaki cowshit and tastes like heaven.  The other ingredient of palak paneer is of course paneer.  Indians will always translate paneer for the benefit of English speakers as “cottage cheese”.  

Indians cook like gods, but they don’t know a thing about cheese.  They don’t know that the English have been forced by a centuries-old love affair with European food (while steadfastly  mistrusting the Europeans) to learn about Roquefort, Brie, Camembert, Port Salut, Edam, Gruyere, Emmental, Bresse Bleu, Queso Manchego, and we have wonderful cheeses of our own from hard plain red and yellow cheeses to the soft while flaky ones, blue cheeses, cottage and cream cheeses and lovely sweet coloured modern ones with combined fruit and berries.  The English may be terribly bad at language and terribly bad at cooking but one thing we can do is learn the name of a new cheese.  Dear Indians please don’t patronise us by calling paneer ‘cottage cheese’ it isnt and we can learn foreign languages one word at a time.

If you don’t know it, paneer is a staple of the Indian “veg” kitchen.  It tastes of not much and it has a slightly leathery texture which is rather like overdone scrambled eggs in a cheap hotel and the one thing you can say about it is that it is not like any other cheese that you have tasted and no more like cottage cheese than chalk.

I have never seen it served as Europeans serve cheese, only ever in a sauce, served hot. You can find paneer in any number of sublime sloppy sauces in bain marie trays in Indian lunch buffets of every colour of the culinary rainbow, from fluorescent acid yellow, through sunburst red/orange to cow-pat khaki.  Most of these recipes are delicious.  

Because of its blandness paneer is the perfect foil for those varied sauces which have all the luscious dive-in-and-swim-around sensuality of Indian food as found anywhere other than in Indian restaurants in the UK

I have eaten a lot of palak paneer and whenever it is on the menu I will be eating it again.  I have never cooked it myself, because I would rather have the real thing in any buffet on any street corner in Muscat or Mumbai.

Eggs

I have to love Elizabeth David for all sorts of coming of age reasons and just the title of her book “An Omelette and a Glass of Wine” fills my consciousness every time I cook an egg. That book title is almost a poem because it carries far more meaning than the words say. At once it is an ode to simplicity and good ingredients, a reminder to the British that the French know everything about how to do the stuff that really matters in life (food and sex) better than we do, and even a moment of tension – hold on a minute aren’t eggs breakfast and wine dinner – how can you even mention them in the same breath?

I have a logical digital iterative mind not a bounding, analogue leaping one. A plodder not a runner. I can plod pretty quick (I recall the computer was once defined as a fast idiot) but there is that distinction. This differentiation has come to me more than a few times in life when a companion has explained something to me her way (yes almost always “her”) and I needed some clarification before processing that data. In these circumstances, I have frequently been frustrated when I received nothing but a repetition of the same explanation and inevitably the logical gap was still there, unsatisfied. This used to confuse/annoy me – why couldn’t she just answer my question? But the boiled egg recipe below is my resolution to this situation and my little Nirvana. 

How to boil an egg

My mother explained to me: “You put the eggs in fast boiling water, bring it back to the boil and set the timer for four minutes. Turn the gas down so the water is simmering and when the timer rings, finish what you are doing and take the eggs out.”

“Hold on … how much time do you have available to finish what you are doing?”

“Just whatever it is that you are doing, you finish it, and then the eggs will be ready. It’s best if you take them out in the same order you put them in.”

Goodness knows how long that conversation went on at the time and how upset we each got at our difficulty of communication, but it has reverberated in my mind a thousand times since that moment. And it works. Yes of course I have tried rationalising it. Set the timer for 4 minutes and 20 seconds they are underdone, set it for 4:25 and they are hard as rubber. But finish what you are doing and they are perfect every time. Solid white, runny yolk. Mmm.

Here is the physics so far as I can rationalise it. You want the egg to cook from the outside in, not evenly all the way through This means you want to catch the outside with as much heat as quickly as possible before the inside warms up, so use a bigger pan than you think you need. This means that there is more water per egg and putting the cool egg in the hot water doesn’t take the temperature down too much. Use a pan with a glass lid so you can see the exact moment when it comes back to the boil without letting the heat out, and you will be able to see that the simmering water is still simmering and hasn’t gone to sleep. To stop the egg cracking when you put it in the water, knock a little hole in the blunt end. I use the end of a sharp knife and make like a woodpecker but there are probably better ways to do this. 

The timing, I can’t rationalise and now I don’t want to. Some things are meant to be intangible. 

Footnote – my father used to insist that after eating boiled eggs you had to push the spoon through the bottom of the egg to let the fairies out of the space between the bottom of the egg and the eggcup. I used to wonder why the silly fairies had got trapped in the same little place every day and whether the violence of the spoon crashing through the egg wouldn’t create a bigger risk of injury than simply turning the shell out. My mother objected to the practice because it damaged the ends of the spoons. But we still did it.

Other ways to cook eggs.

Don’t think too much about where eggs come from. How can humans be so weird as to eat the sterile food supplies of failed bird embryos? The Filipinos eat fertilised eggs which seems disgusting to me, but if you think in the abstract, our culture is even weirder.

Anyway it doesn’t matter. Close your mind to that prejudice and however you cook it, the egg is sublime.

Fry it – use lots of fat, bacon fat if you have bacon or otherwise butter. You need lots because the trick is to flip the smoking hot fat from the puddle at the bottom of the tipped pan up into the air to hit the thin layer of white which lies over the yolk from above, and make it go pink. Again you have to hit the white with the heat before the yolk solidifies and hitting it from above with smoking hot fat is the way to do it here. If anyone can tell me how you can stop the eggs sliding down a non-stick pan into the puddle you are trying to flip from, then I would love to know.

Poach it – I always think this is the purest form of egg but actually the difference between a poached egg and a boiled egg is the tiny bit of barely melted butter which stopped it sticking to the cup. I never worked out how to poach eggs loose in boiling water and have always used a poaching pan (aluminium) or some strange little silicone boats I found in the kitchen drawer.

Scramble it – Ingredients: eggs, butter – more than you think you should use – salt, pepper. NO MILK. Whoever had that silly idea?

Melt the butter in a smallish non stick pan. 

Break the eggs into a bowl – this was because when we were kids you never knew if one of the eggs was old so you would sniff them after breaking them and before they mixed with the rest, now I do it so I have a chance to pick out any bits of shell.

The yolks should be broken but the mixture is not to be whisked.

When the butter is melted put the eggs in over a medium flame and stir them around with a wooden or plastic spoon. Scrambled eggs unlike omelettes are cooked fairly slowly and do not contain air.

I have a dim memory from youth of a conversation over breakfast at a family gathering that scrambled eggs continue to cook after you have turned them out from the pan and onto the plate. Actually I don’t think this is really true but they certainly continue to cook in the moments after they appear perfect over the flame and before you have turned them out. This means you have to exercise an act of faith and experience in taking them off the heat just before they are perfect.

The ideal texture for scrambled eggs is soft folds of solidified fabric on a softer but not quite liquid medium. The fact that the hard bits are cohesive but actually very light and tender and not at all rubbery and the soft bits are shiny and slimy and a bit liquid but not at all liquid is the main mystery of scrambled egg and the reason why I might get angry if I call you to breakfast and you don’t show up. NOW! The other reason I might get angry is if you serve me something which you call a scrambled egg and it contains milk or air bubbles.

Omelette

Except for the filling, the ingredients of an omelette are exactly the same as for scrambled egg. The difference is that an omelette is cooked faster, in a wide pan and the eggs are rather more whisked.

Prepare the filling first because the omelette itself will take all your time when it’s in the pan. Select any one or two only from the following list: tomatoes, mushrooms, bits of bacon, labaneh, pesto, herbs, any kind of cheese. The first three should be fried in butter in a separate pan, in time to be added to the omelette.

Allow two and a half or three eggs per person. Whisk the eggs salt and pepper with a fork in the bowl. They say you should get lots of air into the eggs but I don’t think it makes that much difference. You are definitely NOT looking for anything stiff and foamy. Use a biggish non stick pan. Melt the butter just enough to coat the pan, less than you use for scrambled eggs, and then heat it to smoking hot. Turn the heat down to a bit more than medium and pour the eggs in.

Then push the egg around as it solidifies. You are trying to get the underside folded and solid, and the top still liquid when you add ingredients. By the time you have turned it over on itself, the underside should just be beginning to brown. Slip it onto the warm plate immediately. 

Consume with a glass of wine.

Aubergines

I didn’t discover aubergines until after I left home. My mother had a grave mistrust of any foreign food except “curry” which was created by adding raisins and curry powder into her standard brown stew.  India at least was part of the British Empire. Aubergines are also Indian originally, but I guess if she even knew tthey existed she would have classified them as European and thus Communist or (worse) Catholic. At that time, the only European food allowed in our house other than cheese and wine was a small bottle of acid-yellow olive oil bought from the pharmacy and kept for some purpose associated with ears I think.

Aubergines kindled an instant love in me from their first discovery when I was an undergraduate student in Cardiff.  We had hitchhiked to Oxford to get out of the city and we chanced upon some of my ex school friends on a street corner.  My girlfriend (later to be my wife), who was in a different league of cosmopolitan culture from me, paid our dues for free lodging by making a ratatouille in their kitchen while we listened to Joan Armatrading.  It included aubergines. The flavour, and even more the texture, of that lovely glistening pulpy flesh injected itself directly and permanently into a special place in my soul.

I have spent a long time trying to recreate that experience and have wasted a lot of effort layering Aubergines in salt to dispel some alleged bitter taste that I never experienced.  I have however thrown away some horrid over-salted experiments which occurred despite my best efforts to wash away the brine.  More effort again was wasted in squeezing them like sponges in an attempt to make them direr and firmer which I read somewhere to be a good idea.  So far as I can see these things make no positive difference.

The Russians put stewed aubergines in glass jars with tomatoes.  These never stayed very long in my fridge, and the Kazakhs included them in salacious chicken casseroles served by the ladleful and sold by weight at the local streetcorner supermarket in Almaty.  What better incentive to learn a foreign language than having to ask those smiling matrons for half a kilo of that stuff? 

Since coming to Arabia I have discovered the real way to treat aubergines with respect.  Burn them on an open flame. They steam themselves inside their skins which is part of the intention.  But even better – realise that you are burning them because want them to taste burnt.  So slit the skins before you put them on the flame to let out some of that steam.  Keep them on the flame 20 minutes or more until they look like charred ruins.  This burnt flavour recalls campfire nights in the star pierced desert and is the essence of baba ganoush.  

Baba Ganoush  – translating as “spoilt old man” –  is what we would call a dip, you get it on a tray with other pulpy things in small bowls or dishes together with salads salted pickles and flat breads. Now I should mention that some references call the recipe below Moutabbal because as they say Baba Ganoushwill be mixed with other ingredients and only Moutabbal has tahini. I don’t know, all I know is those burn aubergines are really something special.

At its best, it is a burnt aubergine pulp, sharpened with lemon and raw garlic, and beautifully light. Only a grounding of not-too-much tahini stops it floating away. Food good enough to dive into. 

Ingredients

4 aubergines/eggplants – medium sized ones about 130mm long. 

2 or 3 lemons 

Herbs – parsley and cumin appear in different recipes.  The chopped parsley is as much for the pretty green flecks as for the flavour. 

Tahini  – different recipes use different amounts.  I think almost all recipes recommend too much.  The best baba ganoush is light and this makes it heavy.  The best baba ganoush tastes of burnt aubergines and this dilutes the flavour – you get the message?  Start with a level tablespoonful per aubergine and add more to taste.  Don’t overdo it.

Garlic – two cloves more or less per aubergine. 

Olive oil – optional as an ingredient in different recipes, and here in Oman there is always a dollop of oil served in hummus, but never in baba ganoush, on the other hand baba ganoush is almost always served together with hummus.  So you can experiment in using it as a lubricant if you have overdone the tahini. 

Salt to taste. 

Method – three quarters of an hour total

Wash and slit the aubergines lengthwise about 15mm deep, five or six times around the circumference. Burn them for at least 20 minutes on an open flame.  You can use a barbecue if you have one, but a gas hob works fine.  Not a grill.  You can put a metal grid on your gas hob because they don’t balance very well without.  Turn them now and again.

While they are burning, squeeze the lemons for their juice and chop the garlic and the herbs finely.

When the aubergines are cool enough to touch, cut them open, and scoop the flesh out with a spoon.  They will be steamed as well as burnt.  They don’t need any more cooking than you have given them already.  You want everything except the black skin itself which you have to pick out with your fingers.

Mix everything except the oil together using a wooden spoon in a bowl until you have a light slimy pulp.  Don’t liquidise.  You want some unevenness of texture.

Adjust quantities of tahini as described above.  You just need to add enough so the thing isn’t too light and fluffy. You can always add more; you cant take it out!

Now at this point, I will have already eaten about a quarter of what I have made, so I put half of what is left in a small bowl, cover with cling film and put in the fridge, then I eat the rest while the kitchen still smells of delicious herby bonfire.  

You can garnish with olives and oil and more fresh herbs.