There is something very festive about the kind of food where you have a lot of different dishes on the table and you construct your own meal with them. It's fun and it suggests a casualness which is totally at odds with the fact that in order to make such a meal you've got a whole lot of different ingredients and methods and timings to bring together. And the more I read veggie cookbooks, the more often I come across this way of doing things.
I do completely love these types of meals and preparing them can be fun if you have someone or ones to help you or if you are very organised (which I am). But I don't have enough of these dishes at my fingertips to be able to figure out what will work with what taste-wise and what will work together in terms of what you're actually doing in the kitchen at any one time. I tend to rely on a handful of tried and trusted recipes that I know I can put on the table at more or less the same time.
And then there are those recipe books where they just tell you all the things you need that go together! This week, Ottolenghi's divine falafel, made with soaked but not precooked chickpeas which I couldn't see working at all. But they were so good, and the graininess of the blitzed chickpeas was lovely, quite different from the smooth mush of precooked ones. And to go with it - homemade pitas, a salad of coriander and tomatoes and cucumber, hummus (just because we had it in the fridge), tahini sauce and a spicy herby mixture called zhoug.
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| How good does that look? |
You can find the complete menu from week eighteen here.
Claire Watts and her family are cooking vegetarian for a year. You can find out why - and why 'cooking vegetarian' doesn't always necessarily mean 'eating vegetarian' here.
Claire Watts writes and edits books for children.
She's currently working on making something beautiful with fairy tales.
Find out about her Snippets project and how you can help on her Patreon page.
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