Ah, summer. Time to dice a chilled cucumber and a couple of tomatoes, toss them in a bowl with a bunch of chopped herbs and spring onions, then drizzle pomegranate-infused oil and lemon over the lot.
This year, you’ll not only be preparing an Arab salad – or an Israeli salad, or just a Jerusalem salad, depending on your darned politics – fit for the scalding days of the season, you’ll also be prepping for the arrival of celebrity chef Yotam Ottolenghi on his long-postponed New Zealand tour.
Now’s the time to put in a little practice ahead of what promise to be engrossing presentations in Auckland and Wellington. Part of which will have to do with what the 54-year-old London-based restaurateur hails as “the great mumble jumble of food” that we call Middle Eastern cuisine, and the scores of spiced variations therein.
Ottolenghi arrives on a plane this month, but for many locals, he first came to the country on the printed page more than a decade ago. Of the dozen or so books he has written or co-authored, Jerusalem, a monster publishing hit at the time in this country and still a perennial seller, is the work with which his name is most immediately associated.
In addition to being has always read like a dreamy memoir. That’s hardly surprising given that Jerusalem happens to be the troubled, beautiful, luscious city of Ottolenghi’s birth and upbringing. Or so I suggest during what for him is a late-night Zoom call from his adopted English city of the past few decades.
