About Yotam Ottolenghi: Yotam Ottolenghi is a British-based chef, cookery writer and restaurant owner.
For me, the end of childhood came when the number of candles on my birthday cake no longer reflected my age, around 19 or 20. From then on, each candle came to represent an entire decade.
How can something that's 95% water be so divisive? Alone among vegetables, the poor, innocent stick of celery elicits the most vicious attacks.
It is more than twenty years since we left the city. This is a serious chunk of time, longer than the years we spent living there. Yet we still think of Jerusalem as our home. Not home in the sense of the place that you conduct your daily life or con...
Breakfast is always the best time for something juicy, sweet and fresh - it just feels like the right way to open the day. There's no right way, though, when it comes to choosing the fruit.
Good asparagus needs minimal treatment and is best eaten with few other ingredients.
Custard is controversial: what makes it a custard, how best to cook it and, crucially, is it to be eaten or put in a pie and thrown?
I used to have a very unmediated experience of food but, because of the recipe testing, I've lost that now. I can't switch it off even when I'm on holiday.
Sea spaghetti looks like dark fettuccine and has a similar texture - you can get it in health food stores or online.
The natural sweetness of leeks, with their soft, oniony aroma, makes them the perfect winter comfort food.
When I was a kid, there was always food to be had on the street in Jerusalem, but anything above a falafel stand was mediocre or worse.
I always preferred my father's pasta the next day, when he'd put it in a hot oven with heaps of extra cheese. It would emerge slightly burned and very crisp on top.
Fusion food as a concept is kind of trying to quite consciously fuse things that are sometimes quite contradictory, sometimes quite far apart, to see if they'd work.
If the first bite is with the eye and the second with the nose, some people will never take that third, actual bite if the food in question smells too fishy, fermented or cheesy.
I like to talk about food, ingredients, and how to adapt recipes. It's a dialogue.
The combination of lentils with rice or bulgur is the absolute height of Levantine comfort food. I could eat it every day.
The smells of slow cooking spread around the house and impart a unique warmth matched only by the flavour of the food.
One man's trash is another man's treasure, and the by-product from one food can be perfect for making another.
A food processor, or even one of those small bowls that fit on a stick blender, is a real treasure. No, that's not an overstatement.
Food can bring people together in a way nothing else could.
Stereotypical vegetarian food looks gray and brown.
