Oven Bake

This is a gorgeous dish, sumptuous and rich, a perfect accompaniment to grilled lamb or to steak. I have served it as a vegetable main dish with brown basmati rice too. By rights, cream and eggplant should never meet, but here they seem to work splendidly.

I make the most of cooking just for myself, with a supper of intense frugality that might not appeal to others. A favorite is a bowl of white rice seasoned with Vietnamese fish sauce and masses of mint and cilantro, eaten from my most fragile and precious bowl. A humble meal of consummate purity. A baked eggplant may not sound like an indulgence, but its luxury and richness lie in its texture rather than its price. A simple supper that feels more expensive than it actually is. Some soft Middle Eastern bread would be good here.

You could probably use any finely ground dried chile for this, but I like the mixed ground seasoning known as nanami togarashi. Togarashi is simply the Japanese term for red chile, but this one is blended with orange peel, sesame seeds, and ginger. It has a slight grittiness that works well with the silky softness of the eggplant. You can find it in any Japanese market. Get the yellow miso, by the way, not the darker and substantially saltier one. Small eggplants are best for this, available from Chinese and Asian markets.

Eggplant and tomato are excellent bedfellows; the sweet sharpness of the tomato adding much in the way of succulence to the bland flesh of the eggplant. Garlic and olive oil are almost certain to come along for the ride. What follows is a recipe I use over and again as a relatively quick supper, occasionally introducing mozzarella instead of Parmesan, and sometimes adding basil with the tomatoes.

The smoky, parchment-hued cream moutabal is one of my desert-island dishes. Few recipes can produce anything as soft and sensuous as grilled eggplant, mashed to a pulp, and seasoned with lemon and sesame paste. The lemon is essential, working an ancient magic when involved with anything charred and smoky. Many lightly bake their eggplant for this, but without a good charring they lack the mysterious, smoky back notes that I consider as much a part of the ingredients as the eggplant itself.

A sort of lazy guy’s ratatouille this, but better, I think, for its freshness and clean taste. I keep the chiles large here, which is partly why I have suggested using the milder varieties but, as always, it’s up to you. This works hot as an accompaniment to so many main dishes—roast lamb comes to mind—but as a warm salad too, and indeed, piled on hot toasted ciabatta as a weekday supper.

The slim eggplant varieties, often with a lavender blush, that are to be found in Middle Eastern and Indian markets are especially suitable for grilling, since they cook quickly and evenly. I rarely salt these little chaps. Black onion seed (nigella sativa) is the seed of the nigella flower and is common to southwest Asia. It is best known as the black seeds used to decorate Indian naan bread and resembles black sesame seeds.

Cheese is the savior of chard, as a crisp crust, a seasoning for soup, a luscious sauce, bringing out its qualities while introducing a note of luxury. Often, the bolder the cheese the more interesting the result, so a well-matured British cheese is a wise choice for something like a shallow chard tart. As a sort of double whammy, I add cheese to the pastry as well as the filling.

Once the snowdrops are out and the buds on the trees start breaking, I have usually had enough of mashed, roasted, and baked roots and am gasping for the fresh greens of spring. As the root season draws to a close, I find a dish of parsnips and celery root, thinly sliced and slowly baked, makes a pleasant enough change. Sweet and yielding, this is both an accompaniment and a vegetable dish in its own right. I have used the quantities below as a main dish for two before now.

Heads of celery, braised in good chicken stock, are a reminder of the elegant days of hotel dining rooms and railway dining cars. A flashback to times before chefs were ever talked about, let alone “celebrities,” and the head waiter rather than the kitchen ruled the roost. Braised celery is what I want to eat with roast turkey and the trimmings.

When making a sauce to blanket a dish of boiled celery ribs, I like to harness the mineral quality by using the celery’s cooking water in with the milk. It deepens the flavor and, together with parsley, establishes the vegetable’s earthy flavor. Celery blanched in deep water, smothered with a duvet of slightly bland and salty sauce, and given a crust of breadcrumbs and cheese is certainly worth eating. I have suggested making a crust for the celery and its sauce with Parmesan and breadcrumbs, but there is much success to be had with Berkswell, the sheep’s milk cheese from the Midlands. Despite being a rather different cheese from Parmesan, it has a similar fruitiness.

I enjoy making a bit of a fuss about cheese sauce. The difference between a carelessly put together sauce and one made with care and love is astounding. Taking the trouble to flavor the milk with bay, clove, and onion, allowing the sauce to come together slowly to give its ingredients time to get know one another, and enriching it with a little cream will result in a sauce of twice the standing of one seasoned only with speed and sloppiness. There is much humble satisfaction in a simple dish, carefully made.

All of the brassica family have an affinity with cream and cheese, yet it is those grown for their heads rather than their leaves that seem to get the comfort of dairy produce. Cauliflower and broccoli have long been served under a blanket of cheese and cream, but less so cabbage and the leafier greens. The reason, I have always assumed, is that the cabbage would be overcooked by the time the sauce has formed a crust in the hot oven. In practice, the “white” cabbages that sit on supermarket shelves like rock-hard footballs can be put to good use in a gratin. Their leaves and stalks are juicy when blanched in boiling water and the thicker leaves hold up very well under a sharp cheese sauce, flecked with nutmeg and hot white pepper. I mostly use a cabbage gratin as a friend for a piece of boiled ham or bacon, especially one that has been simmered in apple juice with juniper berries and onion, but sometimes we eat it as it comes, as a TV dinner, like cauliflower cheese. My suggestion of Cornish Yarg is only because I have used it here to good effect. Any briskly flavored cheese is suitable.

One of the gifts of the nouvelle cuisine movement was the puréed vegetable. At its worst, a sad puddle of unidentifiable beige gunk; at its most successful, a moreish pool of intensely flavored, silk-textured essence. Sprouts, which marry so happily with cream, tend to look like baby food when given this treatment, so I keep them coarsely chopped instead of whizzed to a pulp. I am exceptionally fond of this little side dish.

Any blue cheese will melt into the sauce for these sprouts, but I have been using a lot of Stichelton recently, a relatively new, gratifyingly buttery cheese made from unpasteurized milk. A main course with rice or plainly cooked pasta, and a particularly satisfying side dish for boiled ham.

Late spring, 2007. Six small beets, round as golf balls and not much bigger, arrive in a thick brown paper bag, its edges sewn together with string. The air of moist Riverford soil and sweet roots wafts up as the bag is torn open, but the day is leaden with damp and cold and I have rarely felt less like eating a beet salad. Supper is going to be meatballs: fat, crumbly patties of ground lamb with garlic, dill, and parsley. It crosses my mind that a handful of grated beets might sweeten the ground meat and lighten the texture. What we end up eating on the coldest spring day for years is plump rounds of sweet and spicy meat, crunchy with cracked wheat and crimson with the vivid flesh of finely grated beets. The inclusion of the roots has broken up the solid lump of ground meat and married well with the garlic and clean-tasting herbs. We dip the sizzling patties into a slush of shredded cucumber, yogurt, and mint, given a snap of piquancy (to balance the beets) with a spoonful of capers.

There is no joy in undercooked asparagus. Neither, curiously, is there much flavor. It must be soft and juicy, otherwise it loses much of its magic. Baking the spears in an aluminum foil parcel in the oven will suit those who don’t like messing around with boiling water and steam, and keeps the asparagus surprisingly succulent.

Banh mi sandwiches are a Vietnamese street food. Instead of the typical pork and mayonnaise, this version features baked tofu, an anchovy-miso dressing, and cucumber pickles. A key element of banh mi sandwiches is fresh bread—day-old bread is too dry. The best bread to use is a thin-crust white flour baguette that won’t overwhelm the sandwich fillings. Try making these sandwiches for a July picnic.

This rustic dish makes a wonderful cold-weather meal when paired with a green salad. Instead of the usual white top made of potatoes, this shepherd’s pie gets a toasted orange hue from winter squash, a common ingredient in Greek and Italian cuisine. You can substitute pumpkin, red kuri squash, or kabocha squash for the butternut. Gremolata, a fresh Italian condiment of parsley, lemon zest, and garlic, adds a bright citrus note.