I'm afraid I haven't got into quinoa. For a number of reasons. One, it seems tricky to cook, two, it's expensive, and then there are those allegations about its appropriation by middle-class white folk depleting the supplies of a staple food in its less white, less middle-class country of origin. So my experiments with alternatives to rice and couscous and pasta have led me in a different direction. First to barley, which I love in this risotto, and now to the fantastically-named freekah. Who else to turn to for a recipe to showcase the wonder of this relatively little-known ancient grain but Yotam Ottolenghi? He's got a new cookbook just out - Plenty More - but this is from the original Plenty. All the usual Ottolenghi suspects are there - fresh herbs, onions, yoghurt, spices, garlic... coming together in a creation that's cool and sweet, warm and nutty and just wonderful. It's a great side dish to serve with meat (roast lamb would be great), or as part of a vegetarian spread, or just to eat in a bowl on its own, like a risotto or fried rice... but a little left-of-centre. With a name like freekah, how could it be anything but?
The most-eaten vegetable in the world, according to a question on a trivia quiz I answered incorrectly on the weekend, is... the onion (I guessed potato). When you think about it, it makes sense. They're cheap, plentiful, available year-round and lend an amazing depth of flavour to so many different foods. They taste great caramelised, pickled, roasted, fried or raw, in soups and stir-fries, curries and casseroles, tacos and pastas and... tarts. Not sweet tarts, though onions themselves are wonderfully sweet. Which is why they're so perfect in the savoury kind. There's the traditional French onion tart of course, but in that the flavour of the onion is diluted with cream as well as cheese, and the rich, buttery pastry, built up around the sides of the dish as well as forming its base is, quite literally, a bit too much of a good thing. This simple, pizza-style Provençal tart is more my speed - a single layer of thin, flaky pastry (that you don't have to blind-bake), slathered with sweet golden onion and sprinkled with a salty punch of anchovies and olives. It's the kind of meal that works just as well in summer as a light lunch outside with a glass of white wine (though this is more the life of characters in French movies I've seen than my own) as it does in winter when you need something warm and comforting (that you can eat sitting on the couch under a blanket with the heater on - more familiar to me, especially right now). Onions! Of course.
