I’ve been obsessed with the food of London-based Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi since Karina introduced me to his second cookbook, Plenty, several years back. We actually made a couple of recipes from Plenty at that fateful New Years Eve party you may recall from my post on beef stroganoff. Since then, I have acquired the complete Ottolenghi collection, being two cookbooks, and love them so much that I am willing to stick out the gruelling conversion from grams to cups - which I do without a scale - and which always makes baking a little bit more of a thrill-seeking event.
While falling for the two hardcovers, I was not blind to the fact that Ottolenghi's notoriety pre-dates the written word and originated with his café in Notting Hill, which quickly turned into four cafés speckling sprawling London. And so, when my sister and I went to London in April to visit our brother who had recently moved from Shanghai, all three of us knew that the trip was in no small part also a pilgrimage.
In anticipation of our voyage, my sister graciously plotted the Ottolenghi cafés on the communal google map. And as it is when it is written in the stars, our brother lives but a skip from the café in Islington.
My first morning in London, before my sister arrived, my brother dropped me at the café as a parent would a child at daycare. Neither of us were sure if he would be picking me up at the end of the day but, after a sublime breakfast where I could not choose and so ordered both, to my surprise I left. I think getting the double-chocolate chip cookies for the road made leaving the café bearable.
Islington was only the beginning. A couple of days later, after exploring Portobello Road, my sister and I "found ourselves" at the Notting Hill café where we savoured a selection of earthy salads teeming with nuts, grains, greens and roots. Here's a mediocre at best photo of that meal which I promise was not taken with the blog in mind.
And but a few days later we transported an Ottolenghi picnic to Hampton Court, the Tudor castle, where we sat on a bench in a 700 year-old courtyard and ate the dregs of what we weak-willed women hadn’t already eaten on the 25 minute train ride out of town immediately following breakfast.
It may sound like all we did in London and its peripheries was eat Ottolenghi, but we actually diversified quite a lot. We compared the dolphin-friendly tuna sandwich at “Pret-a-Manger” with that at “Eat”, Cornish pasty with pot pie and overwhelmed ourselves so with our lunch options that it sometimes felt that the weight of the world was on our shoulders.
We were so prolific in fact that at first it didn’t even occur to me to post on Ottolenghi. But when my family came over for Mother’s Day lunch, for which I had prepared a table full of Ottolenghi salads, I finally saw what had been before my eyes all along.
Let me walk you through these salads in just enough detail to leave you intrigued. We had (1) squash with cardamom and tahini-yogurt dressing, (2) pearl barley with allspice, pomegranate and dill, (3) a quinoa, fava beans and avocado salad, (4) a lentil, celeriac and hazelnut salad, (5) a salad of cabbage, kohlrabi, sour cherries and dill and (6) mixed green beans with a tahini sauce.
I feel a bit funny posting recipes from Ottolenghi’s cookbooks and so out of respect for the artist, genius and entrepreneur I won’t. But when you become desperate - and you will - you know where to find me, the cookbooks and the cafés.
