Ribbons on a Bashed up Pair of Jeans

My Christmas reading of Anna del Conte's tome on Northern Italian cookery has helped add a few new standards to my repertoire. One of these is such a simple way of making roast vegetables a bit more interesting and a lot more appealing to the eye than normal, and I've made it twice in the last fortnight, once more or less to her instructions, once tarted up a bit.


Her dish uses courgette, potato, aubergine and red pepper, all of them cut and sliced into neat pieces then laid in stripes on a bed of finely chopped onions, with a few blobs of passata on the onions then on the upper veg. With seasoning and a drizzle of olive oil it is quickly prepared, then left to cook - it doesn't even need the recommended occasional basting at a pinch - at 160C for 90 minutes it comes out looking colourful, smelling appetising, and giving cook and diner alike a feeling of virtue. I won't buy courgettes in winter, and had no decent spuds to hand, so my version used aubergine, red peppers, and sweet potato.


The second effort a week or more on used the same vegetables, but I couldn't leave well alone, so added a dividing strip of green chili rings, a load of garlic cloves peeled but whole, and another dividing strip of cherry toms. It worked again, but was not as satisfying as the original, simpler dish. Sometimes embellishments work, sometimes they don't. These didn't: the tomatoes - strange given the passata that's part of the original - jarred, and the chili felt out of place. The garlic, sweet and tender, fared best of the three additions. But overall it felt like I'd added ribbons to a pair of comfortably worn in jeans.


Cooking, domestic and professional, should be about trying things, making changes here and there. I dislike those interminable arguments about the one true recipe for xyz, where departure from someone's fixed idea of what's right is deemed heretical... Paella is one example where such debate seems particularly fatuous, given there are many regional and local variations, and the Valencian original began as a peasant dish where people used - and still use - what they had/have to hand. And Paella, like that roast veg idea, invites experiment. That said there are limits: I'm no fan of  'fusion' cookery, partly because it can seem false, forced, and worse, arch. So the bad boy/girl chef who uses AdC's idea and introduces coconut milk, curry spice and guavas won't get my applause. That would be like ripping big holes in the knees of those old jeans, and who'd be daft enough to do that?

Odd Companions

I am not a fan of fusion cooking. Neither the imaginary version involving a nuclear-powered stove, nor the one where a chef tries to meld cuisines from radically different cultures and geographic locations. A bit of borrowing works, but pak choi with a red wine sauce and turmeric meringues doesn't. Nor am I one to experiment too radically with new (to me) combinations. But last night one (rather timid) attempt at introducing otherwise normally unconnected ingredients worked beautifully.


Pressed for time having returned from the cinema (The Equalizer 2 - not as good as the first one, but still a pleasing romp for a wet Sunday evening) we were to have the legs left over from the previous night's roast chicken - cooked by the Dear Leader no less (may her enemies shrivel like raisins) as I had been doing macho decorating stuff all day, and absolutely delicious - with a tomato salad, and needed something vegetal as a starter.


With kohlrabi aplenty at the moment I wanted to use some of that, so peeled and sliced two (raw) with a potato peeler into see-through circles (the secret is holding it with a fork so no blood is added involuntarily); cut thin slices of goat's cheese on top; crumbled some walnuts; and added a good handful of tiny basil leaves picked fresh from the plant. Dressed with walnut oil and cider vinegar, along with sea salt, it looked fabulous - which is a good start - and the four forthright flavours worked as well together as a string quartet.


That point about how it looked is important, more so for restaurants than the home, but still helpful in getting the gastric juices flowing. It actually looked good enough to cost £7.50 on a posh eaterie's menu. The dressing was not artfully drizzled in zig-zag patterns, there was no bloody silly lavender biscuit or similar to accompany it, but nonetheless looked fit for the commercial table. It also cost maybe £1 for two servings. When we arrived at the cinema around 6pm we passed a lengthy queue at the nearby McD's, where others were getting their treat of fat, sugar and carbs for rather more than that. Each to his or her own.