A trope in food writing is to remind the reader what season we’re in (perhaps they’d forgotten) and therefore why this recipe is the very best thing they need to be eating right now.

I’m going to share a very nice soup with you, which happens to have a soupçon of seasonality to it, but it would be just as nice eaten during a July heatwave in Dubai and you have my blessing to do that. And any seasonality swaggering should be tempered by a reminder that half of the ingredients in it were flown in from different climates and are all available year-round.

I put it together by first looking at the gnarly pumpkin in my kitchen, then looking in my fridge at the end of a chipotle paste jar (no mould!), a lone jalapeño, half a chorizo and some wilting coriander. Most midweek meal preps begin with this ‘is it about to die?’ triage.

I’d like to emphasise the extraordinary simplicity of this dish as much as the delicious outcome. As an investment proposal it would be a horse to back: time and money invested = low; return = high. This formula is one reason why fridge raid dinners appeal so much to me.

To make it I put the following things in a pot and roasted them at 200c until soft and starting to caramelise.

• Pumpkin (any squash is fine)

• 2 red peppers

• An onion

• 6 cloves of garlic (it doesn’t have to be 6, just put lots in)

• Salt

• Paprika

• Cumin

• Cinnamon

• Oregano

• Chipotle chilli flakes

• Coated in cooking oil and all mixed up.

When it was done (test the pumpkin with a knife stab) I poured in enough water to cover the veg and then whizzed it with a hand blender. No blender? Broth would also be good

It needed fish sauce for salt and depth, so a dash of that went in together with a big spoonful of chipotle paste. It now tasted great – make sure you taste it for seasoning. And add water if it needs it.

I then cut the chorizo into cubes and quickly fried them for a garnish.

I also sliced the jalapeño with some red onion, squeezed lime juice over them and let them sit in the juice while I was cooking. This became the garnish with a handful of the coriander. I dropped on some blobs of yoghurt mainly because the colour palette needed it.

In short, vegan cooking makes me a better cook.

I made a dinner for some vegan friends this weekend. I love the challenge this poses (I do, honestly). It’s more an opportunity than a restriction. It urges me to think more purposefully about how I delight the palate without meat or cheese; how I work with texture and layer-up bold flavours. In short, vegan cooking makes me a better cook.

The idea for this aubergine curry is long-evolved over years of making sure I had a veggie option at my parties. Aubergines work beautifully when roasted halved and supine, their exposed flesh browning with a topping of aromatics and glistening oil.

The cashew sauce is an unashamed borrowing from watching vids of the head chef at Bibi make Lahore chicken in cashew. In that moment, I knew the cashew would be the perfect puddle for my standard issue aubergines to perch on.

I made this aubergine dish as part of a bigger vegan curry featured here.

Recipe

This is a recipe for four people, assuming you have some carbs and sides.

Ingredients:

2 aubergines

100g cashew nuts

1 small onion

4 cloves of garlic

A thumb sized piece of ginger

2 limes

Whole spices:

• 1 tsp cumin seeds

• 1 tsp coriander seeds

• 1 tsp fennel seeds

• 1 tsp peppercorns

• 1/2 cinnamon stick

• 5 or so cardamom pods

• A few curry leaves

Powdered spices:

• Garam masala

• 1 tsp dried fenugreek leaves

• 1 tsp chili flakes

• 1 tsp turmeric

Oil for cooking – follow your instinct on quantity

2 tsp salt

The method:

Make the spice mix:

• Put the whole spices into a dry hot pan and toast until aromas fill the room – watch for burning.

• Remove from the heat and transfer to a pestle and mortar or spice grinder. Pound annd grind. Add the fenugreek, chilli flakes and garam masala.

Prep the aubergines:

• Slice the aubergines in half from top to bottom.

• Slash the exposed faces and salt the aubergine flesh.

• Heat a pan, add oil and press the aubergines face down into the oil.

• Fry until the aubergines are golden brown. There should be a few burnt edges starting to show.

Heat the oven to 180

Marinate the aubergines:

• In a baking dish, tip the spice mix, oil, squeeze in one lime and mix together.

• Place the aubergines face down in the marinade.

• When they have soaked up as as much of the marinade as they can, flip them over so they’re face up.

• Put in the oven for 30 mins or until soft and melting in texture and nicely browned on top. If they don’t have enough oil they can cook slowly. In which case, add some water to the bottom of the pan, put foil over the top and they should soften in 10-15 mins further.

Make the cashew sauce:

• In a pan with a puddle of oil, sauté sliced onion, garlic and grated ginger. Before it browns add the cashews and a glass of water.

• Add a dash of chili powder, the turmeric and a teaspoon of salt.

• Once the pan has come to the boil remove from the heat, transfer the mixture to a blender and pulse until smooth.

• Reheat the cashew sauce in a pan before serving. If it’s too thick, loosen with a little water. You’re looking for it to be the texture of yoghurt. Taste for seasoning. You might want to throw in some butter or coconut oil at this point.

• Squeeze in the second lime.

Assemble:

• Once the aubergines are out of the oven, slice them lengthways to make thick strips.

• Transfer your cashew sauce to a serving dish.

• Strew the aubergine strips over the sauce.

• Garnish with coriander.

I think about the word aubergine a lot. From the western fringes of Europe to Russia and India, we make similar noises when we want to say aubergine: berenjena, baklazhan, brinjal, badenjan. This kind of mutation I find curiously satisfying. Perhaps it’s a linguistic form of fractals – our minds seeking the natural patterns amid the chaos. If this musing has some scientific backing somewhere, fab, but for now I’m satisfied with it just being a casual musing.

With no scholarly rigour I also like to theorise about why certain food names stay within their language families, while others make it to the big time and migrate out of their native origins, like aubergine, soy, apricots or ketchup. 

Our pace of migration increased quickly and we started brandishing aubergines before anyone had time to think up a native term for them.

To explore those words that never achieve cross-continental status, let’s turn to the ancient art of baking pulped wheat: bread/brod/bröd/brood in Anglo-Saxon; chleb and its cousins across the Slavic languages; pain/pan/pane in the Romance languages; pide/pitta in the Eastern Mediterranean. Milk, cheese, and meat, as other examples of primordial pantry basics, also get the same treatment. If cheese begins with an F in your country, you know it’s going to be good; if it begins with a K, melt it, or stick it in a sandwich. 

Bread, water, cheese and their ilk are so attached to our civilisation that our languages had a noise for them before migration began really hotting up (yes, that’s a precise historical term). But over the last millennium our pace of migration increased quickly and we started brandishing aubergines before anyone had time to think up a native term for them. So confused were some of us at the pace of change that in our bamboozled haste we called them eggplants – clearly a placeholder name with no intention that it would catch on.

Food etymology – a fascinating science in isolation – tells a story that is yet more fascinating. There’s the historical one of Arabs settling in Europe; of Crusades and spice trades; of explorers leaving the docks of Seville and returning with spuds, peppers, tomatoes and ciggies; of the Germans bringing the humble meat patty to America’s shores; of viral content trends that make gochujang and miso household staples overnight. 

Invasions and conflicts throughout history, we can assume, were almost exclusively tragic, miserable affairs. But among all the chaos and heartache there’s always a reassuring glimmer of humanity: the sharing of customs, language and food signal moments of brotherhood, connection and generosity. Trade in all its forms is an admission of trust, and in these extreme moments we want to find trust more than ever. 

Conflict and invasion changed the profile of global gastronomy. For resourceful migrants and refugees, their food is so often the way they become accepted in their new country; sharing their culinary novelty is a common way to make a living and so trade integrates their culture and eventual trust. 

What stuck with me even more than the stodgy blini, was that I’d seen food become the medium to offer trust and security when you want it the most. 

Russia was at its peak of Yeltsin-era disarray when I first visited the country in the 90s as a teenager on an exchange. Russia’s infrastructure and way of life was in so many respects still Soviet, but plunged into an uncontrolled market economy where crime, corruption and vice proliferated unchecked. There was an unsettled air to life there. But no matter how intimidating the outside world was to this cosseted boy from Reading, I found so much comfort in the Russians’ generosity around the dining table. Sharing food was their way of bonding across a language barrier. And it was wonderful food. 

That trip was the stage for so many gastronomic firsts. It triggered my love for the most comforting of foods: pelmeni. My first taste of kefir was a shock to the palate for a lad expecting a bedtime yoghurt. And I’d never tried pickled fish for breakfast or chicken offal cooked saignant. It taught me to be more open minded about food, because pickiness would’ve insulted my hosts. I went back to England and explored Russian cuisine – I’ve bought kefir ever since and still cook chicken livers pink to this day. What stuck with me even more than the stodgy blini, was that I’d seen food become the medium to offer trust and security when you want it the most. 

When the Germans brought the hamburger to the US, they gave the whole world a new word. It gave birth to today’s patty-based lexicon, where the likes of veggie, smash, or chicken burger have disowned themselves from their heritage – they aren’t recognisably from Hamburg neither in name nor substance. Today across the US, the burger is the standard bearer of American cuisine, proudly upheld in a greasy fist as their own, and for a country built on migration, who cares to claim otherwise?

As soon as a community claims a dish as its own, it’s protected and argued over with as much zeal as its own language. 

The way culinary traditions spread and permeate our cultures imitates how we treat language too. Every Central Asian country has its own take on baked, spiced rice and their names – plov, pilaf, pilav, pilau – morph along with the dishes. The story of baked rice dishes beginning with P is a familiar tale of one culture’s idea being good, then another culture adopting it, adapting it, and making it their own. 

As soon as a community claims a dish as its own, it’s protected and argued over with as much zeal as its own language. Our nation is at war with itself over the length of the O in scone as much as we are over the sequencing of its jam-and-clotted-cream cargo. The AOP designations for French wines, cheeses and other local delights are protectionist manoeuvres taken no less seriously than the Académie Française’s attempts to shield the French language from inevitable human willfulness.

To the untrained eye, Southwest France’s cassoulet doesn’t look dissimilar to the fabada of Asturias. Sure, one includes confit duck, the other morcilla, but both dishes are guarded as part of their people’s heritage – cassoulet with some pretty bolshy rhetoric. Where a dish is an emblem of local pride, its recipe is treated as sacred, and validated as sacred because it’s presented as some grandmother’s recipe, and who’s going to tell a dear old grandmother there’s a better way to make their dish?

Plov becomes pilaf then before you know it some maverick has put saffron in it and claimed it as their own.

To a community wanting to protect either its language or its cuisine, there is a right way and a wrong way. A ragú might well taste better with added ketchup; a sentence is understood whether we say less aubergines or fewer aubergines – but to corrupt either bothers the owners of that dish as it does their language. 

Anyone who’s observed both language and gastronomy will know the prescriptivist mindset is a losing battle. Plov becomes pilaf then before you know it some maverick has put saffron in it and claimed it as their own. Like language, food is a reflection of its consumers; they will use both as they please, organically making it their own for their sub-communities. Education, traditions, grammarians and recipes will do what they can to prevent their inevitable evolution, but evolution happens regardless. 

I’ve seen online cooks talking about their recipes being The Only Way with implied aggression. Instead of making me want to cook it, my impulse is to do something antagonistically wayward and, dare I say, better. Where you have a dominant culture – say, American, French, Italian – this rhetoric is more likely to alienate outsiders than conjure admiration for their culture; where a community is more vulnerable our instincts are to be more respectful to their heritage. Like anything in language, our perception and onward action is down to who’s delivering the message and how. Recipe protection is not much more than semantics: if you want to put mild cheddar in your cacio e pepe, call it cheesy pepper pasta instead and everyone’s happy. 

For all this talk of both food and language being owned by the people for the people – not by the rule makers – there is a universal grammar to cooking. Boiling point and caramelisation point are no less of a certainty nation-to-nation than a sentence needing a verb. France’s mirepoix and Italy’s soffritto when transposed to China become garlic, ginger and spring onion. There’s a lexicon of techniques to be learnt from one generation to the next. The techniques and ingredients remain the constant, it’s a privilege to have them passed down – what we do with them and what we call them are up for grabs, there to define us at a point in time. Rather than being a total petty aubergine, I want my food to signify generosity. 

Some aubergine recipes:

Caponata shakshuka

Thai aubergines on cashew sauce

I am a born glutton. This poses challenges when I want to extend this jolly life for as long as possible, so I can, among other joys, have more time to eat with abandon. Time has only proved itself to be the friend of this committed glutton. By age ten I thought there was nothing better than prawn wontons. At age 21 I was living in Aix-en-Provence, spending money I didn’t have in its delightful market. Back then, I knew all the glorious cheeses I was gorging my way through was a privilege – something only luck and the passage of time have made possible. By the time my 30s ended, I’d eaten a calf's brain, learnt that hot butter was the solution to most things, stunned a live lobster, tried puffin sashimi, and swamped my kitchen with gallons of fat from a roast goose.

Every year has offered up yet another gastronomic landmark and it only makes me want to discover more. But it comes with problems, which calls for an unwelcome reference to physics: in the way that an object’s mass holds it back from ever reaching the speed of light, so my passion for saucisson will hold me back from living long enough to enjoy more saucisson come 2080. Let’s call this glutton inertia. Like many tedious bores, I took up running once I could no longer trust my metabolism to disguise the saucisson habit. I ran so I could eat without guilt.

‘Salad has forced me to explore the palate more consciously than hot food. I can’t rely on bones, collagen and warm fat to deliver flavour.’

Summer salad season is here, a thorn in the side of this butter junkie. It reminds me I should at some point put down my hogget and tuck into some rocket. For the record, I do love a salad. I love the hit of bitter freshness to the palate. It makes me feel good about myself – this doesn’t need documenting, because it’s the salad’s raison d’être. But for the adventurous eaters it feels limiting too. There are some lovely salads, but somehow I don’t think many of us dedicated gastronauts would choose salad for our last supper.

Salad has taught me a lot of life lessons. I’ve approached it like a problem to be played with: how do I not feel like I’m compromising when I eat a salad? How do I make it an event or satisfy my need for richness? Cold food doesn’t impart flavour in the same way hot does. Salad has forced me to explore the palate more consciously than hot food. I can’t rely on bones, collagen and warm fat to deliver flavour. 

Salad works best not when it soothes but when it excites the palate. Starting with bitter leaves as the base, the challenge is then, how might you bring balance? Not even the most committed negroni and black coffee drinkers will want a mouthful of undressed chicory. In this radicchio caesar I took on exactly that challenge, suspecting the anchovy, parmesan, roast tomatoes, capers and sherry vinegar would each pull the palate in the direction of savoury, sweet and sour. 

‘Maillard is powerful in a salad – it turns it into a robust meal.’

This radicchio recipe reveals the magic of charring a lettuce or cabbage face down. For the food nerds: the maillard effect happens when proteins and sugars heat up and bond, forming a delicious brown crust. It’s different from caramelisation, which is sugars bonding with sugars. It’s why we brown the meat and the mirepoix before we make a stew. It’s why we don’t overcrowd the pan when searing: the surface has to go safely over 150° for it to work and evaporation stops that. At one point in my learning, I got so obsessed with maillard that I tried to do it with everything I was eating, ruining a perfectly good cheese in the process. 

Maillard is powerful in a salad – it turns it into a robust meal. If you sauté some chorizo or pancetta, you’ve maillarded your salad. Char a sprout? Maillarded. Roasted a cauliflower, toasted a pine nut or crouton? Maillarded. I must stop trying to make maillard a verb.

Salads come into their own in how they delight with continuously changing flavours, textures and colours. Comfort food staples like spag bol or chicken soup cower in the light of a salad that takes you on a journey of discovery, from bitter leaf to sweet tomato, to earthy asparagus, to a pungent goat’s cheese, to a crumbling walnut. While a curry delivers a (nonetheless delicious) uniform flavour, no mouthful of salad is identical. In fact I’ve taken to serving a salad with most curries I make. Asian salads and their zippy freshness offer the perfect complement to a rich curry or crispy duck. 

There’s a formula to my salads. I look for heft from a sturdy vegetable like potato, beans or asparagus to complement the dainty lettuce. I lean on anchovies, pancetta, cheese or olives to for the saline foil to the bitter leaves and hit of savoury. And I always add a nut to a salad for textural character. 

Here are a few ways I’ve been exploring salads. Comment if you’d like me to write a recipe – I’ll make this a feature of my posts if there’s interest. 

Skate wing, blood orange and fennel. 

Tomato tonnato

Cauliflower and blue cheese salad

Burmese peanut noodle salad

Sri Lankan kumquat kachumber

Salat Olivye

Levantine salad grazing board

Radicchio caesar, Italian style

Mango and Bombay mix salad

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I have an ageing cauli in my fridge. Most of my midweek dinners start with this fill-in-the-blanks decaying vegetable scenario. It’s been that way for as long as I learnt to cook. Letting it waste would be a failure, a slight to my resourcefulness and a sign that my compulsive food shopping is beyond control. I must cook this wizened cauliflower.

But then the other complex part of my psyche speaks up: it must be special. It must taste like something otherworldly that I’d pay good money for in a restaurant – or at least warmer than a Deliveroo. Ever since I taught myself to cook, I’ve held myself to the standard of restaurant food as a motivator, which is an inconvenient habit when midweek dinners come around.

Watch the video

As luck would have it, I bought a Picos blue that same day while I was perving on the cheese counter in my local bakery. Picos blue is probably one of the finest cheeses ever invented. With more flavour than a Fourme d’Ambert and more texture than a Roquefort, it can outclass any blue I’ve tasted in France and comfortably rub shoulders with the revered Stilton. 

So with this pungent Picos I imagined a bolder cauliflower cheese. But piggy-backing off today’s craze for whipping feta, this figment then became a tumble of roasted cauli on a puddle of whipped Picos. That would’ve been enough of a statement for most normal people. Except then I got reading Niki Segnit’s second edition of the Flavour Thesaurus (generously donated by Bloomsbury Press) to research what other flavour dimensions I could pack into this cauliflower. She recommends allspice, so I roasted my cauli in that and ground pepper. The ensemble smelt lovely in the oven.

The problem is, I then got engrossed in the book’s cauliflower chapter and saw a paragraph about how great it is with pomegranate and other deeply flavoured fruit. With a quick glance at some plums in my fruit bowl, my heart was now certain they would add the perfect complement to that salty cheese and bitter vegetable. Roasting plums in something sweet will intensify their flavour and soften them to a texture that works with the walnuts (yes, I’ve decided, in this moment, that walnuts need to be added – I’ve never gone wrong adding a walnut to cheese).

So I roasted the plums in a slug of Port, envisioning a little Christmas cheeseboard party in one mouthful.

The end result was all of the above tossed together with pearl barley, parsley, pomegranate seeds and a dash of sherry vinegar. It was an assault on the palate, and all those nuts and seeds made it a highly interactive chewing experience. It had its flaws.

If I were to improve it, I would swap plums for figs, forget the pomegranate and rely on walnuts as the sole source of crunch. With these changes, I’m convinced of its potential as an amuse bouche or small salad.

And if one day you contemplate making Buffalo wings, a Picos dip would be a bold way to affirm your position in society. 

Recommended method

Roast in one tray:

• Cauliflower florets tossed in ground allspice, pepper, salt and olive oil.

• Give it half an hour at 180.

Roast in another pan:

• Figs tossed in port.

• Give them 20 minutes with 10 mins resting time, so they conveniently finish at the same time as the cauli.

Throw in the blender:

• Picos (or a blue cheese of your choice)

• Yoghurt to loosen – just judge the texture as it blends. 

Boil:

• Pearl barley for 30 mins+ until the grains have a bouncy, firm texture. 

Chop raw:

• Parsley

• Walnuts

Assemble:

• Toss together the pearl barley, roasted cauliflower, parsley, walnuts.

• Tumble the figs over so they retain their shape. 

• Drizzle over the blue cheese sauce and then the port juices. 

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My faith in humanity has been restored in the most unlikely of places: TikTok. Social media is a social armpit, but in the cooking communities of TikTok I’ve found almost zero negativity; only an endearing interest in good eating from supportive people. I am shocked and delighted. I’ve found my people. 

My debuting on TikTok was no more planned than my friend buying me a tripod and me thinking: what the hell? And this is a curious choice, but I went there to be anonymous. My friends and family weren’t on TikTok so I could afford to get things wrong while I learnt the craft of cooking for an audience. 

Every week I make a few videos of things I’m cooking at home. They range from the more haphazard fridge-raids and cooking challenges with mouldy veg, to a dish I purposefully shopped for at the butcher, fishmonger or Asian supermarket. My page is the monstrous product of a compulsive food-shopping habit and a hunger to never taste the same thing twice.

The dinners I film are deliberately non-conformist. I’ve scrolled enough cooking content to know that the internet doesn’t need another video of some dude from London making a carbonara autentica. But this off-beat appetite isn’t for the camera – it’s my life – I just happen to be filming. It channels my belief that life should always be made more interesting with some creativity. I care very little for the cause of the carbonara authenticity police. If I want to make it a ramenara (patent pending), I will, and my life will be all the better for not following someone else’s made-up rules. 

Recipe authenticity always crosses my mind. When I started filming, I worried a little about perceptions of cultural appropriation or representing a beloved dish badly. My quest is to celebrate everything that’s wonderful about cuisines across the world, and from the comments, I’ve been reassured that people love to see their culture under the spotlight. They make suggestions for Afghan mantu or Yemeni mandi, which is exactly the two-way exchange I want to encourage. 

The experience has taught me about all things gastro that resonate with audiences. Likes, favourites, comments and shares are enough to tell us what the general public wants to see or to cook for themselves. So here are three of my observations based on audience engagement.

1. People like raw food

The top three most liked vids have featured raw beef, raw fish or raw eggs. I suspect at play here is a fascination with risk-taking and seeing others put their health on the line for a delicious dinner. In the most cosseted way, I like to assume the role of stunt-eater, in restaurants or at home picking the riskier things because it makes life more exciting. For some this builds the confidence to try making their own ceviche or tartare. Perhaps in the audience we’re witnessing a morbid curiosity with uncooked flesh, or maybe this is about us craving an unadulterated freshness in our jaded palates. Raw food must, I’m sure, summon our inner caveman somehow.

2. More Asian food, please

Eleven of the twenty most popular dinners have Asian influences. That could easily be because I cook a lot of Asian food, and I look forward to a data scientist pointing out the flaws in my methodology. But I also cook a lot of Italian, French, Spanish, Russian and Mexican food too. Oodles of you love noodles, with ramen and phô outstripping other broths for popularity, and the raw fish I fashioned in a Russian style never hit the heady heights of sushi. I wonder if politics is entering the room here. 

Asian food is cool at the moment, and rightfully so: it’s been cool ever since I tasted wontons as an eight year old. I have too much to say on the topic so I’ll expound on that on a rainy day. 

3. People like eggs

If a video features an oozing egg yolk, you can guarantee it will come before the chicken in a ranking of content engagement. This needs no more analysis.

4. Scransplaining is a thing

As a man, the moments we feel mansplained at are far rarer and less aggravating than what women suffer, but they happen nonetheless. The way I experience it is more entertaining, rather than the saddening ways it’s delivered elsewhere. Men – and it’s exclusively men – advise me to improve my knife skills, what the actual recipe is, what gadget I should be using, what the authentic pronunciation is despite not being Italian nor correct. It’s only the chaps who mock me when I make a mess, or correct me on things I may have a qualification in. It’s rare occasions like this that I experience the world women live in. Lads, you can chill – I’m just making myself something to eat. 

This does not erode my otherwise newfound faith in humanity I’ve learnt from TikTok, but reaffirms it, in all its pettiness. This scransplainer trend is reflective of a far greater gripe for me: food prescriptivism. The idea that there is a right and wrong way of doing things pervades the entirety of the cooking industry. The general public is conditioned to follow authority figures – in our case cooks who push their recipe as dogma – and it irked me as a new cook at university as it still does today. Being the subordinate inhibits true mastery of the kitchen. And no doubt I will soon write a recipe for you, but you have my blessing to not follow it, or set it ablaze in an ill-judged Calvados deglaze – even better.

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Sri Lankan pigeon video

When I see a game bird in the butcher, it’s a done deal, I have to buy it. Even if I don’t have a plan for it, I’ll put the bird in the freezer until I do.

One of my latest obsessions is Sri Lankan spicing. I found some curry leaves in Chinatown to indulge this, forming part of the curry powder. It’s delicious and I recommend trying it.

Okra attracts widespread criticism for its sliminess. I too have fallen foul of a slimy okra. The way to deal with this is to keep it dry and cook it to make it even drier. These okra fries are delicious way of dealing with that.

This was a lovely dinner.

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