I’ll be frank: there isn’t an Ottolenghi book I don’t love, but Simple Too promises to become the most cherished from a shelf of already treasured titles. He and his co-author Verena Lochmuller have created a book that is packed with flavours and imbued with heart, to be read at leisure and cooked from in haste! "Everyone’s constraints are different, and they change depending on the day." he writes in the introduction. "Sometimes it’s time — you have thirty minutes, twenty even — and that’s it. Sometimes it’s confidence — you’re tired of making the same five things but you’re not sure what else you can pull off. Sometimes it’s decision-making — you’re standing in front of a supermarket shelf crowded with all the ingredients in the world and you just can’t decide…So here’s the deal: whatever your particular barriers to cooking are — time, confidence, decision paralysis, or the general noise that distracts and numbs — we’ve put together a collection of dishes whose sole purpose is to bring you into the kitchen with a promise that simple solutions are within reach, both technically and mentally." This is exactly the book I and so many others need: it’s food with full-on Ottolenghi impact, made manageable for the everyday kitchen.
Yes, you will need to get cupboards stocked after a quick bout of judicious shopping, but eking the most out of versatile ingredients that you might at first not consider to have everyday appeal is just one of the valuable lessons of this beautiful book, designed by the wonderful Caz Hildebrand who is responsible for every one of my books, too. I feel a bit flustered trying to decide which recipes to highlight, as I feel it’s the overall balance and range of the book that marks it out as special. Still, with no disrespect to the ones I leave out, these are the dishes that I need to tell you about now: Cheesy Egg Polenta Bake; Herby Soda Bread with Za’atar; Baked Camembert with ‘Nduja Honey; Crushed Crisp Omelette; Ginger and Spring Onion Aubergines; Persian Pea and Potato Stew; Traybake Chicken Caesar Salad; Roast Chicken and Cabbage with Soy Butter; Slow-Roasted Lamb with Grapes; Chicken Meatballs with Pistachio and Spinach; Butternut ‘Parmigiana’; Braised Halloumi with Tomatoes and Beans; Green Baked Risotto with Mozzarella; Curried Butter Lentils; Casarecce Pasta with Chickpeas and Clams; Baked Garlic Rice; Cabbage and Carrot Slaw with Tahini, Peanuts and Soy; Butterhead Lettuce with Pine Nut Vinaigrette; Brown Sugar Cake with Brown Sugar Cream, to be eaten, I rather think, with Sumac Roasted Strawberries; Double Chocolate Shortbreads; Flourless Orange and Ricotta Polenta Cake; and Semifreddo with ‘cranko’, cranko being breadcrumbs made with croissants!
Oh dear, that was meant to be a shortlist, but I just couldn’t stop myself. I hope you can see why. Anyway, I leave you now with the happy news that the recipe I am sharing with you today is the gorgeous, one-pan Breakfast Potatoes.
Extracted from Ottolenghi Simple Too by Yotam Ottolenghi and Verena Lochmuller. (Ebury Press, £30).
All photography by Jonathan Lovekin.
