DELICIOUS SIMPLICITY
Easy recipes for busy people
Yotam Ottolenghi is synonymous with bold, fresh and exciting flavours.
But while the recipes in his acclaimed cookbooks like Plenty (2011), Jerusalem (2012) and Sweet (2017) are definitely delicious, few home cooks would describe them as “easy.”
With Ottolenghi Simple (Appetite by Random House, 2018), the Israeli-British chef, restaurateur and food writer proves that pared-back doesn’t mean sacrifice: “Ottolenghi Simple is not a contradiction in terms!”
Easy, of course, is relative. What seems perfectly feasible to one home cook could appear insurmountable to another.
Adding to the variability, Ottolenghi says, is that nobody is just one type of cook.
What we gravitate toward on a weeknight is likely hugely different from a meal we would attempt on a Saturday night. Simple cooking doesn’t fall into a single category.
He says book collaborator Tara Wigley devised the acronym SIMPLE to signal the kind of easy that each of the 130 recipes represents.
His cauliflower, pomegranate and pistachio salad, for example, is ideal if you’re short on time (S: less than half an hour), looking for something to make ahead (M) or want to save yourself a trip to the store (I: 10 ingredients or fewer).
“There are many books that have the title easy or simple or this number of ingredients or this amount of time.
“But actually I think that it’s much more psychological. It’s much more about how insecure you are in a certain subject and how much pressure you put on yourself to cook things that you’re maybe not so familiar with,” says Ottolenghi.
“In this particular book I just felt that yes, they’re recipes and you can say that they ’re easy or not. But in a sense, it’s not just about that. It’s about what people bring with them to the kitchen.”