Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love

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Roughly chop the spring onions and add two-thirds to the spinach bowl. Add the cooked couscous, crushed coriander seeds, both cheeses, the garlic, basil, yoghurt, eggs, flour, half a teaspoon of salt and a good grind of pepper, and mix well. I tried again with Simple. It seemed to be so much more in line with my way of cooking, but with the trademark Ottolenghi flavour profiles. And yet… If you want to get ahead, make the day before and keep refrigerated, loosening it with a splash of water to serve, if needed. Jazz up this veggie version with lemon, herbs and toasted seeds. Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian Noor Murad is a Bahraini-born chef whose international work experience eventually brought her to the Ottolenghi family in 2016. She developed recipes for the books Falastin and Ottolenghi FLAVOUR, as well as for Ottolenghi's Masterclass series and other online Ottolenghi publications. Her Bahraini roots have a strong influence on her cooking, with Arabic, Persian and Indian flavours making a prominent appearance in her recipes. @noorishbynoor

Yotam Ottolenghi is the restaurateur and chef-patron of the four London-based Ottolenghi delis, as well as the NOPI and ROVI restaurants. He is the author of eight bestselling and multi-award-winning cookery books. Yotam has been a weekly columnist for the Saturday Guardian for over thirteen years and is a regular contributor to the New York Times. His championing of vegetables, as well as ingredients once seen as 'exotic', has led to what some call 'The Ottolenghi effect'. This is shorthand for the creation of a meal which is full of colour, flavour, bounty and sunshine. Yotam lives in London with his family. www.ottolenghi.co.uk @Ottolenghi In a medium bowl, whisk the mayonnaise, yoghurt, two and a half tablespoons of lemon juice, two tablespoons of oil, one teaspoon of salt and a generous grind of pepper. Add this to the potato mixture and mix well to combine. Transfer to a large serving plate, spreading it out to create a slight well in the centre. Cover and refrigerate if not serving right away. No one -- except for myself -- seems to like Brussels sprouts in my house but when I serve the Brussels Sprout and Parmesan Salad w/ Lemon Dressing no one complains! This recipe has the home cook prepare the Brussels sprouts in two ways: raw and roasted. The raw sprouts get thinly shaved, while the others are roasted whole until well-browned. Then the Brussels sprouts are mixed with thinly sliced kale leaves, sliced red onion, basil leaves, and toasted hazelnuts. It's the dressing, made from lemon juice, garlic, mustard, and Parmesan cheese that really makes the salad (my mouth waters at the thought of it!).OTK: Shelf Love is a result of that moment. Put together masterfully by Noor, it tells the story of the different crew members, of what we cook when we can’t go shopping every day – or simply don’t want to. It explores the humble ingredients lost in the depths of our kitchen cupboards. Set aside 100g of the beans in a medium bowl. Put the remaining beans, 600ml of water and one teaspoon of salt into a medium saucepan on a medium-high heat. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 15 minutes, or until the beans are nicely softened and warmed through. Keep warm on a low heat until ready to serve. Eaten warm for breakfast, this will keep you full till dinner. Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian

It’s the surest, fastest way to get all the juicy pulp and seeds – sans skin. All you need is a box grater and a wide bowl to catch the pulp and juice. You may also need a sieve if you want to drain the pulp of any juice. Place the grater upright in your bowl, gently push your ripe tomatoes against the coarser side of the grater and grate until you are left with just skin. Make sure to only go as far as you can – careful of your fingers! The riper the tomato, the easier it will be to grate. Discard the skin. To make the crispy onions, finely slice a couple of onions into thin rounds, toss with two tablespoons of cornflour, then fry in hot vegetable oil in about three batches, for four minutes per batch, or until golden. the book is a small, flexibound format
2. don’t worry, there is still at least one (but usually several) photo of every recipe
3. the book will not fit in with your other Ottolenghi books
4. because it’s not meant to. The focus of the book is cooking with what you have around, similar to Donna Hay's Off The Shelf: Cooking From the Pantry. In contrast to Donna Hay, who rarely exceeds five to seven ingredients in a recipe, the Ottolenghi team indulges in fairly long lists of ingredients. Fortunately, the cooking techniques are straightforward. For the two recipes I tried out, the steps were not challenging, based mostly on timing. I chose to saute the onion and garlic for one dish rather than adding them raw, and skipped the instruction to puree them. The techniques were mainly how fine to chop, what to mix together, and when to add ingredients to the roasting pan.

Berbere Spiced Chicken, Carrots and Chickpeas

Mix the gherkins, herbs, the remaining tablespoon of lemon juice, five tablespoons of oil, one eighth of a teaspoon of salt and a good grind of pepper. Spoon this all over the potato mixture. Mix all the toasted seeds and the chilli, and sprinkle over the top. Serve at room temperature or cold. This recipe is a Middle Eastern take on a mac’n’cheese, thanks to the addition of cumin, a herbaceous za’atar pesto and crispy fried onions. Cooking the macaroni in the milk, as we do here, bypasses the need to make a bechamel. The starches are released into the soon-to-be-cheesy sauce, making it velvety and rich without the need for the more traditional flour-butter roux. I LOVE the OTK channel on YouTube and they cook many of the dishes in the cookbook there - well worth the watch. This cookbook is heavily vegetarian but not 100% - there are maybe 10-15 meat-based recipes in here although they all give options on how to make them vegetarian. Some are pretty obvious like sub the meat for plant-based meat substitutes but some are less obvious. Transfer the mac’n’cheese to a large platter with a lip or a shallow bowl, dot all over with the pesto, and top with the crispy onions.

A friend gave me Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love for Christmas (2021). I've been thumbing through it for two months, reading through the lists of ingredients and contemplating how interesting they all seemed. This past week, I dug in and made two of the main course dishes. Both were delicious. Drizzle one-third of the lemon-maple butter over the pudding and serve warm with the extra maple butter and creme fraiche alongside. Make the garnish by putting the butter into a small frying pan on a medium-high heat. Add the almonds and cook for three minutes, stirring, until lightly coloured. Add the pine nuts and cook for another two minutes, until golden. Remove from the heat and add the chilli. While the pasta is cooking, make the pesto. Finely grate the lemon to give you one and a half teaspoons of zest. Then use a sharp knife to peel and segment the lemon and roughly chop the segments. Place in a bowl with the lemon zest and set aside. Put the za’atar, coriander, garlic, pine nuts, one eighth of a teaspoon of salt, a good grind of pepper and half the oil into a food processor and pulse a few times until you have a coarse paste. Add to the chopped lemon in the bowl and stir in the remaining oil.This is Ottolenghi, unplugged. The Ottolenghi Test Kitchen team takes you on a journey through your kitchen cupboards, creating inspired recipes using humble ingredients. With ‘Make it your own’ suggestions and swap-outs, and space to jot down your own notes, this cookbook is all about embracing rule breaking and putting your own stamp on every dish. Time and fuss-saving tips, simplified ingredient lists, and cravings-inducing photography ensure you’ll never be short of inspiration again. Make the chilli oil by putting the oil and chilli flakes into a small frying pan and placing it on a medium heat. Cook for four minutes, then add the paprika and remove from the heat. Set aside.

Our commitment to the championing of vegetables, as well as unusual ingredients has led to what some call “The Ottolenghi effect”. This is shorthand for the creation of a meal which is full of colour, flavour, bounty and sunshine. This book is all about feeding ourselves and our families with less stress and less fuss, but with all the 'wow' of an Ottolenghi meal. It's a notebook to scribble on and add to, to take its ethos and absolutely make it your own. This magnificent pudding was made with the purpose of showcasing winter lemons, their bitter flesh a great way to cut through an otherwise decadent eating experience. In a happy accident, this was tested alongside a separate dish that included a maple-butter sauce. A squeeze of lemon and a generous amount of maple butter was spooned over the pudding because, well, why not? And it suddenly dawned on us that lemon‑maple butter had been the missing component all along. Lesson learned: sometimes that which is very, very wrong can turn out to be really quite right. Be sure to remove the butter for the pudding from the fridge well in advance – it needs to be super softened at room temperature before making the base. Yotam Ottolenghi is the restaurateur and chef-patron of the four London-based Ottolenghi delis, as well as the NOPI and ROVI restaurants. His cookbooks have sold over seven million copies worldwide. Amongst several prizes, Ottolenghi Simple won the National Book Award and was selected as a best book of the year by the New York Times. Yotam is a weekly columnist for the Saturday Guardian and a regular contributor to the New York Times. His championing of vegetables, as well as ingredients once seen as "exotic," has led to what some call "the Ottolenghi effect": meals full of color, flavor, bounty, and sunshine. Yotam lives in London with his family.

Buy the book here: https://www.penguin.com.au/books/ottolenghi-test-kitchen-shelf-love-9781529109481 In a small bowl, whisk the tahini with two and a half tablespoons of water and a pinch of salt until smooth. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into the bowl of a stand mixer with the whisk attachment in place, and mix on medium speed to combine. Add the softened butter, eggs, egg yolk, vanilla seeds, brown sugar, milk and the remaining three tablespoons of maple syrup, and mix on medium speed for two minutes until combined. It will look as if it’s split a little, with some smaller cubes of butter, but that’s OK.