Burroingroingjoing

Here is a very simple, very filling middle-eastern-ish meatless stew that you can eat warm or cold with other middle-eastern-ish stuff. A great filler for pittas, a great starting point for variations.

You’ll need minimum 2 hours from start to table.  The ingredients you need for 4-6 diners are:

• 1 large aubergine (eggplant).
• 2 tins of best quality tomatoes, chopped or just peeled.
• 2 tins of best quality chickpeas.
• 2 medium/large strong onions.
• A handful of dried mint.
• A teaspoonful of dried cumin seeds.
• Salt, black pepper, olive oil.

I make this much even for two because it keeps in the fridge and is better next day.

I emphasize quality chickpeas – big, tender, fresh-tasting. Poor chickpeas taste like dust. For anything in a tin, I buy Napolina if it exists.

The utensils you need are:

• A big heavy saucepan.
• A colander.
• A wooden spatula.
• A large strainer is handy, but you can reuse the colander.
• A chopping board.
• A Very Sharp Kitchen Knife.
• A hob.

For kitchen beginners, a wooden spatula is a simple paddle-like utensil for stirring and tossing, like this:

A wooden spatula

A colander is basin with holes in for draining water out of food: it looks like this:

A colander

First there’s a prep stage that you should take care of an hour or more before you cook.

• Cut the aubergine into circular slices about half-an-inch thick, then cube the slices and put the lot in the colander.
• Sprinkle salt generously over the aubergine cubes and mix it through with your fingers.
• Leave the aubergine to sweat in the salt for an hour or more and do something else.

Next the cooking.

When you come back you’ll see that the aubergine is perspiring, has shrunk a little and the flesh is yellower. That’s right.

• Wash it thoroughly under cold water in the colander, mixing it again, and then squeeze it and press it down to get surplus water out. The point of putting the aubergine through all this sweating and wetting and pressure is to stop it from soaking up oil like a sponge when you cook it.
• Chop the onions fairly fine.
• Cover the bottom of your saucepan generously with olive oil and put it on high heat on the hob.
• When the oil is hot, put in the cumin seeds and give them a brief stir till you get the smell.
• Then put in the onions and the mint and stir fry until the onions are soft.
• Add the cubed aubergine and continue stir frying, hot, until the aubergine cubes are also soft and near to mushing.
• If you notice while stir frying that it’s getting dry and likely burn then put in a little more oil.
• Multi-task while while you’re stir frying by opening the tins of tomatoes and chickpeas and rinse the chickpeas under cold water in the colander or strainer.
• Add the chickpeas and stir the whole lot together.
• Lastly add the tomatoes, season with salt and black pepper and stir it all again. If you’re using whole tomatoes then run your knife through them just after putting them in.
• You’ve now got a lot of thick stew in the saucepan. Keep it on high heat and keep stirring until its all really hot and the tomato sauce is bubbling.
• Go down to low heat and simmer without a cover for 15-20 mins or until the the juice is getting sticky. Stir occasionally to stop the bottom burning.
• Turn off the heat and leave the open saucepan to cool for half-and-hour or as long as you like. The stew will reduce some more by evaporation.

Serve in a communal bowl.

At last, the BBC has found its new Prof. David Bellamy. It’s Prof. Mary Beard! See for yourself in Meet the Romans with Mary Beard in iPlayer 

If you buy bottles of fancy salad dressing, you end up with a cupboard full of ancient bottles of fancy salad dressing, partially consumed.

You can’t buy tastier salad dressing than you can make for yourself in seconds. Keep a stock of good quality ingredients and mix on demand.

For all multi-ingredient dressings, combine the ingredients in your salad dressing bottle, seal it firmly, e.g. with your thumb over the stopper, and shake vigorously until the liquids have emulsified (blended together).

• Olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

3 parts olive oil to 1 part balsamic vinegar. Good for green salads, especially including basil.

• Olive oil and fresh lemon juice.

3 parts olive oil to 1 part lemon juice. Use multiples of 1/2 a lemon squeezed and olive oil accordingly. Good for bean salads, cous-cous or bulgar wheat salads.

• Olive oil, red wine vinegar, smooth Dijon mustard and garlic.

3 parts olive oil to 1 part vinegar, 1/2 a teaspoon mustard and 1/2 a teaspoon finely chopped garlic. Gorgeous for potato salads.

• Olive oil, just olive oil.

Hard to beat for a salad that majors on tomatoes, e.g. Greek.

• Balsamic vinegar, just balsamic vinegar.

Say you’re serving a green-leaf salad on the side with main dish that’s already oily, such as pasta. No need to oil the salad as well. Just sprinkle balsamic vinegar and toss. This tastes better.

“Sell before Damien Hirst bubble bursts, expert warns fans.”  This dire advice I just stumbled on from Tuesday’s Independent – 3 days late to act upon it! – and it clicked into zeitgeistly place with the rising chorus of new Gold Standard partisans

What does the exchange value of art consist in? Confidence, just confidence, of course. Just like money. And confidence ain’t what it used to be. Our confidence in confidence has taken a real beating and now the Radical Repentalist’s hour is at hand. We must go back to before it all went wrong; back to when “money” and “art” had to represent something that is rare and hard-won.

Last night’s Lent Talk on BBC Radio 4 was an arresting radio moment. The speaker was Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford, who was there to elucidate the the philosophy of the individual within Islam.

I couldn’t help wondering if somebody had thought Prof. Ramadan especially apt for this spot because his surname might be Christian-wise translated as “Lent”.

To the outlook of someone that Prof. Ramadan would describe as a “secular humanist”, like myself, what he had to say was unimpeachably admirable, leaving aside the question of whether the values it advanced are God-given. It was also informative if the secular humanist, like me, has devoted no effort at all to Contemporary Islamic Studies

But what arrested me quite as much as the moral merits of the speech was the character of its delivery – and perhaps of the speaker. We heard someone teaching what he faithfully believes to be the thinking of God, as attained to by the labours of scholarship and philosophy; doing so in a manner devoid of vanity, animosity, ingratiation or frivolity, without haste, hestitation or dramaturgy.

There is no shortage of voices equally worth hearing in the media, including religious ones. But this is a voice of a bygone kind. It is unlike the media voices that Christianity has evolved, or those of our leaders, our public intellectuals and commentators. It is a pre-media voice, unadapted to the prime imperative of entertainment value, formed and cooled in the antique presumption that moral thoughtfulness is human nature and a social duty.

As you know, you eat it with bread.

Try eating it in pasta. When you’ve drained the pasta and are ready to give it your usual toss in olive oil, give it a bit less olive oil and a few dollops of the tapenade. Mix it through until the pasta is uniformly darkened. If the tapenade is cold, mix in a saucepan with some heat under it – briskly, so it doesn’t stick.

This pasta nero looks novel and surprisingly attractive – especially lingini – and, obviously, it is delicious. This is a winner for a simple dish in which you want the pasta to the fore rather than some dominating sauce, e.g. with some meaty sauteed mushrooms, black pepper and Parmesan.

The UK’s winter of 2009-10 was the coldest for 31 years. 2010-11 was the the coldest ever. So what’s happened to global warming?, you might ask, if you’re not a weather scientist or a physicist.

Last night’s BBC 2′s Horizon instalment, ‘Global Weirding’, has a good stab at explaining this and the spate of freak weather events that that have loaded 21st century news.

Global warming hasn’t stopped, stalled or gone into reverse as far any anybody can tell. Whether it is a man-made phenomenon or just part of the grand natural scheme or things, or a combination of both, needn’t detain us just now.

Heat is energy, the energy that drives the the complex dynamic system that is the global weather. When more heat gets pumped into the system, sure, it warms up on the whole. The average temperature rises and if this goes on long enough, we’ll cook.

But getting warmer means the system gets more energetic. It’s behaviour gets less stable, more turbulent, more prone to cook up highs and lows, and higher highs and lower lows. Given enough juice, it may break out out of any recognisable or predictable pattern, and what you’ve got is chaos.

That’s not going to happen to the weather. This planet’s capacity to stabilize has seen off vastly greater violence in its history than anything impending now. But the first dramatic effect of global warming that all us can expect to feel first-hand is not relentlessly rising temperatures: it’s how the weather gets less normal; how the weather gets weird.

Catch it on the IPlayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01f893x/Horizon_20112012_Global_Weirding/

What would life be without tapenade? Do you buy it at Sainsbury or Waitrose for something like £2.50 – £3.00 per 200g pot?

There’s no need. You can make your own in 5 minutes – and I mean 5 minutes – to a higher standard of deliciousness, for a fraction of the price, and when they ask where you got it say you Made It Yourself. No cooking is involved. None of the quantities are critical. If it doesn’t look or taste just right immediately, you can adjust it till it does. Tapenade is dead easy.

Canonical Provencal tapenade is made with olives, capers, anchovies and olive oil, but variations flourish. The essential base is simply olives mashed or blended with olive oil.

The anchovies are a prime candidate to vary out, because as many people as love them can’t stand them and they’ll spoil it your vegetarian friends or family.

Here’s one of my vegetarian-friendly spins. I buy large jars of bog-standard pitted black olives in brine purely for the purpose of making tapenade, such as Tesco’s own brand 935g, or Crespo 907g at Sainsbury’s. One of those will make two batches of tapenade sufficient for 4-6 diners.

The ingredients you need are, roughly:

• 200-220g pitted black olives drained ( 1/2 a big jar or 1 small jar)
• 2 good-sized cloves of garlic
• A heaped teaspoonful of capers
• A small handful of pine nuts
• A large handful of fresh basil
• 2 tablespoons of good olive oil

Don’t rinse the olives, just in case you are wondering. The salt from them and the capers is your seasoning.

The utensils you need are:

• A small saucepan
• A VSKK (Very Sharp Kitchen Knife)
• A chopping board
• A hand blender

Some of you chaps may be ashamed to ask what a hand blender is. Steer your browser to Amazon and stick ‘hand blender’ in the search-bar.

Utensils you will not require include:

• A pestle and mortar
• A food processor

Chop the garlic finely. Chop the basil. Put the lot in the saucepan, mix it up, then mash it to pulp with the hand blender, using a tamping action. No need pulverize it to total homogeneity. Rough is good.

Spoon the paste into a nice little ceramic vessel and let it meld for a an hour or so at room temperature before serving with your bread. It will keep for another day in the fridge before it starts to dry out, but if you are counting on any leftover, then leave it over first, because they’ll eat as much of this stuff as you serve.

Let me know what you come up with.