Aubergine with buttermilk sauce

I love Yotam Ottolenghi’s books on cooking vegetables, Plenty and Plenty More. I always think of them like that – books on cooking vegetables, rather than as vegetarian cookbooks. I’m one of those people who struggles without having meat or fish to get my teeth into, so to speak, for a meal. I love vegetables, of course – roasted or raw, steamed, sautéed, curried or crunchy and fresh in a salad – but I always think of them as sides, and never as taking centre stage on the plate. But, there is something about Ottolenghi’s recipes that convinces me, at least for the duration of the meal, to change that attitude. Almost every vegetable dish I have cooked from Ottolenghi’s books, I’d be happy eating by itself. And that’s saying something.

The beginning

I love food. It is the reason why I can never, ever, say no to seconds; why I am always starting a diet... tomorrow; why one of my mother's most recurring admonitions as I was growing up was that my eye was bigger than my belly; and why, most recently, a case of gastro that should have been nipped in the bud by a hefty bout of antibiotics, has taken almost two weeks to leave me alone. Simply put, I love preparing food and eating it, and I rarely let anything get in the way of either.