Yotam it's lovely to meet you and talk
to you about your new book Simple
Thank you, Will.
it's not quite as simple as being simple
is it, because there is a key,
there are different types of simple
cooking. I wondered if you could sort
of go through and explain them?
Yeah, so we tried to figure out, when we put
the recipes together, what does the word
simple mean for different people? And we
broke it down to both kinds of cooks,
like what kind of cook you are
and the location. So we have this kind
of simple way of looking at it
through the letters
S-I-M-P-L-E. So, S is short on time
something you can put together in
half an hour when come home from work.
Ingredients 10 or less. M is make-ahead
so all those kind of recipes that you
can prepare in advance put to one side
and come back last minute and create the
most incredible dinner party out of
nothing. Pantry - which are the sort of
recipes that you cook from what you've
got in your cupboards mostly or
the bottom of the fridge. Lazy are those
recipes mostly that you prepare you put
on the stovetop or in the oven and they
basically cook themselves, you know stews
soups, those things. And the last one is the E which
stands for 'easier than you think'. And
those are the dishes that you thought
you wouldn't touch because they seemed
'chef-y' or complicated you know like
making ice cream or pizza and all things
that have French names in there words
like confit, but in actual
fact they're not as
complicated as they sound. So some of the
recipes in this book will have a few of
those letters on them and so you know
that they satisfy some of
those categories and some of them have
all of them. A few of
them have all of them but all the
recipes have at least one or more of
those little icons so when you flick
through the book you go oh that has the
M so I can make that ahead of time and
then when it's time to eat I've got
everything ready and I just put it
together in a few minutes. I'm intrigued
by pantry because I'm the kind of person
who comes home late and often has to
rustle up something from what's in the
cupboard, what's in the house, which I
enjoy. But I have a few staple
things that I'll do so I'm looking for
new inspiration. So is there a recipe in
the book that you would recommend to me?
Yeah, so I write in the book, you
know, my pantry is not necessarily yours.
So you know I'm opening myself up
for criticism by saying oh pantry, well
your pantry obviously has got you know
120 things but I tried to kind of narrow
it down to what some people or most
people have in their pantry and if not
they could actually stock it up. But it's
not a long list of things it's a
relatively short list of pantry
ingredients. And the things that come
out of your pantry are normally the stuff
that comes out of tins and packages
right so things like rice, pasta,
bulgur wheat, couscous, tins of
tomatoes or chickpeas. And maybe things
that are in the freezer you know frozen
peas or corn or whatever.
And so those are the things that are
for in the pantry and I've used
the very nifty bookmarks to suggest a
few options. So obviously pasta which is
what we all do when we need to cook
something quickly when you come back
home from work or from any other
occasion. The first one is the
pappardelle with rose harissa, black
olives and capers. So you don't have to
use pappardelle you can use as far as
I'm concerned any kind of pasta. I like
pappardelle because it's nice and wide. And
it's got harissa, tomatoes, olives and
capers, basically. And it's got a really
nice richness because of you know olives
the briny and the saltiness of
the olives but also harissa paste and if
you buy a really good harissa paste
I like Belazu, which is
not too spicy but has got all those
depths of flavor with spices and chilies
and then you get a dinner
within you know 25 minutes. And I
spoon a big dollop of yogurt on top
of it which doesn't sound very Italian
but since this pasta is really North
African it makes complete sense.
And there's your dinner. Sounds very good.
It sounds like a relation of
Puttanesca, there's a couple of similar
ingredients. Yes there are, because I
mean Sicily and the southern Italy are
so close to North African there's always
been this exchange between the
continents through southern Europe
and the islands in southern Italy so
definitely that's what it is. So it's a
kind of a southern Italian northern
African hybrid. I'm sold.
And then there's other pasta dishes
which are maybe a bit more
child-friendly because they don't have
that spice element. So there's this
fettuccine with cherry tomatoes and
rice, I love rice, and the way I
do rice recently is bake it. So you take
a bunch of aromatics, things like mint or
or lemon skins or garlic and put them
in the oven with rice and a bit of stock
or water and seal the pan with foil
and stick it there for you know a good
25 minutes half hour and you get a
really steamy rice because it's got all that
surface and so all that steam comes off
that surface, yeah
it takes maybe half an hour to cook but
actually you don't do much you just
stick it there and you've got you know
the main staple for a dinner. I'm always
a fan of sticking stuff in the oven and
forgetting about it and then
just producing genius. And it's also very
difficult to overcook. So rice like that
if you give it another five or ten
minutes, you're absolutely fine.
Well there is plenty for me to get my
teeth into with Simple. I'm gonna go and
invest in some rose harissa right now.
Rose harissa is what you want in your
cupboard. Exactly, it's my new pantry
ingredient. Thank you so much for talking to us
about it. Thank you, Will.