Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi. By Yotam Ottolenghi. Published by Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2011.
At a dinner party recently the hostess created a wonderful dish of roasted eggplant, cream and pomegranate seeds. She might have been smitten with Ottolenghi’s vibrantly decorated “Eggplant with Buttermilk Sauce”, pictured sumptuously as halves of the roasted plant, dressed with generous dollops of buttermilk and Greek yogurt, and generously sprinkled with fresh thyme leaves and plump pomegranate seeds. Its simple elegance was a real treat.
In vegetarian cooking, or any sort really, there is this idea that combining vegetables with grains, pulses, nuts and/or sauces makes a uniquely flavored dish something really special. In fact, all cultures are proud of such signature dishes and chefs or restaurateurs offer the very best of these combinations as exotic treats. With a new twist, a fresh approach, the dish evolves, the dish becomes trendy. Some writers advocate the fashionable vegetable, some the deftly worked technique, some the presence of certain equipment, pans or the like. In any case, just this side of homespun comfort food, the dish satisfies even the most expectant food-taster/adventurer.
Wandering through the pages of Plenty, I glance at each image bursting with the promise from a recipe title. I’m dazzled by the portrayal of carefully placed ingredients, staged by a photographer and food stylist to approximate a mouth-watering version of the recipe it illustrates. I pause, looking for that certain sign of fabulous, that this dish is “it!”, this dish is going to be scrumptious… even if I, who have no cooking talent at all, attempt to create it in my kitchen. Ottolenghi’s Plenty is full of choice recipes.
The photos are all the evidence I need. I can sense an agreement between the recipe, the ingredients and Ottolenghi, and when the photographer captured it right, his passion is contagious. And so it is with “Mixed Beans with Many Spices and Lovage”. It’s pictured as a duo of brilliant reds and greens combined with lots of shine, probably from the 3 T of oil to go with more than 4 cups of beans, 1 onion, lots of spice, canned tomatoes and 2 T tomato paste. How elegant! and yet how simple. And “Quesadilla”, whose prep denies the usual queso spilling out of a fried tortilla. Imagine the aromas, as your host hands you a warm, dry tortilla with layers of flavor inside from black beans slathered as paste under sour cream under onions, tomatoes, cilantro, and finally a sprinkling of cheddar, folded over to bake on a grill. “Mee Goreng”, recognizably Asian, a travel memory laced with tofu, smoky fried noodles and dark brown sauce and lots of green beans and cabbage; while the salad, “Watercress, Pistachio and Orange Blossom”, sits invitingly strewn about a plate in heaps, with nuts like jewels on a carpet of leaves. There are many, many more!
See Plenty for many bountiful dinner party ideas and excuses to give love at your table.
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