I love reading a cookbook where the author writes openly about how she actually prepares different dishes. That was at Cook, Eat, Repeat: Ingredients, Recipes and Stories by Nigella Lawson, who gave me a review copy. In this book, the chapters are not divided by breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or by season or food category. Instead, the chapters are themed, introduced by a written explanation that includes how Lawson handles ingredients, how she cooks for herself or for guests, and how she uses leftovers, for example. The topics may seem arbitrary, but the writing provides more information than recipes alone ever could. And every recipe contains more than one top note. Before the ingredient list and instructions are a page or two about how the dish came about, how it can be modified for different seasons or occasions, and sometimes thoughts meander about similar dishes. Meandering is not a point of criticism here. I thoroughly enjoyed the foray into variations and executions. The first chapter is A for anchovies and I loved the description of how to enjoy anchovies on bread. She carefully explains the amount and temperature of butter as the ideal base for anchovies on bread, before describing a version she had in Milan that came with slices of roasted peppers. Then she talks about crostini with mozzarella, burrata or stracciatella topped with an anchovy fillet. At the end of this introduction to the chapter, and before I even finished reading the recipes, I was looking for anchovies to order. In the Pleasure chapter, she wholeheartedly supports the pursuit of pleasure in food and suggests that guilty pleasure has no place in the world of food, as there should be no guilt in culinary pleasure. The recipes here include a crab mac ‘n’ cheese, a fried chicken sandwich, and Creme Caramel for One that I want to try. The book was completed during the pandemic, so the chapter Much Depends on Dinner took on new meaning as dinner parties have become difficult or inadvisable depending on the current state of affairs. Here you will find chicken dishes, lasagna and roasted vegetables. I was inspired to try the Beetroot Chickpea Dip recipe in this chapter. In his intro, there is a discussion of dips being offered more as complicated appetizers, including an aside about a cilantro and jalapeno green salsa and the scorched onion and eggplant dip featured earlier in the book. This inspired me to whip up a chip and dip Friday with eggplant dip and toasted salsa. And later in this chapter, I had to try the vegan lemon polenta cake that I topped with blueberry sauce. However, the dish I want to tell you more about is the hash browns with apricot harissa. The Harissa appears a few times in the book. It is used on a sheet chicken dish with sweet potatoes and again with roasted cauliflower and spinach. The introduction to the cauliflower recipe mentions that you can use harissa on hash browns, with specific instructions on how to do that, and that’s exactly what I did.
I had local potatoes and peppers from Boggy Creek Farm, so the time was right for this dish. Both were cut into large pieces. The potatoes were brushed with olive oil and some harissa before being spread on a baking sheet. A few tablespoons of water were added before the pan went into a hot oven. After about 20 minutes I added the pepper pieces and stirred the mixture to distribute the harissa and oil. The mixture was roasted for an additional 20 minutes, until the potatoes were crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and the peppers were browned. For the harissa, I used the dried peppers I had on hand, which were pasillas and anchos that day. They were gutted and seeded and rehydrated in boiling water. Coriander, cumin and cardamom seeds were roasted. The soaked chilies, spices, some garlic, dried apricots, turmeric, smoked paprika, olive oil, apple cider vinegar and salt were all placed in a food processor and mashed. I left out the ginger that was part of the ingredient list.
Luckily this made enough harissa for a few uses and I have a jar in the freezer. The sweetness of the apricots plays well with the bitterness of the dried chillies. It was fantastic with roast potatoes and peppers and I can’t wait to try it with cauliflower and/or chicken. Or I stroll around a bit myself and try it with fish or fried mushrooms. However, that may not happen until after I’ve tried all of these anchovy on bread options.
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