I'd been muttering that as it got dark earlier I could cook a bit more. I enjoy cooking, when I get round to it, and the convention in our house is that within reasonable limits, whoever cooks gets to choose the menu. So I wouldn't insist on doing anything that the Systems Administrator hated, or was allergic to, but I can choose to go vegetarian, an option that doesn't come naturally to the SA. The SA was quite happy to have an occasional break from peeling potatoes and chopping onions, so tonight I'm doing Moroccan vegetable stew.
Despite the fact that I own at least one book about Moroccan cookery, plus several by Claudia Roden who includes Morocco in her surveys of Mediterranean and Jewish cookery, I'm doing an Essex version, taken from the little recipe book the new cafe people at work have put out. It sounded nice, and didn't demand any Arab spices that Tesco and Waitrose still don't sell, and that I would have had to go to a specialist supplier in the Tottenham Court Road for. I bought the book to encourage the cafe people in their first week, and because the samples of food on display looked and smelt jolly good, and the small tasters I've been given so far have been delicious.
A dish like this is so simple to make, chop away and before you know it your supper is ready! said the book. There is a lot of chopping. Two medium sized onions, two garlic cloves (I used more, they were rather small), two carrots (I used three to finish up a bag in the fridge), an aubergine, two peppers, two sweet potatoes. OK, I have never been on a cookery course (I don't count cooking lessons at school) and I don't chop as fast as a trained chef, but it took me getting on for half an hour to prep that lot, including scrubbing the sweet potatoes. The book said to fry the onions and garlic. I immediately deviated from the book since I'm of the school of thought that says fried garlic can easily turn bitter, so I kept the garlic back to add later. Then the book said to stir in the spices, so I did that, still sans garlic.
Then I had to add the vegetables to the onions, which were supposed to be in a medium sized saucepan. Fortunately having looked at the pile of ingredients I'd used the largest of our three Aga saucepans. The chopped vegetables, which had overflowed two Denby soup bowls, filled the pan so that several lumps of carrot and sweet potato shot out over the hot plate when I tried to stir. I added the garlic, and after a couple of minutes the mound of vegetables began to pack down, which was just as well, since I still had to fit a tin of chickpeas in somehow.
The next instruction in the book was to add the spices. That was confusing, since I'd already done it. I checked in case my eye had slipped down the page and I'd made a mistake the first time, but no, the instruction to add the spices was given twice. In this recipe I don't suppose it matters when you add them, but it goes to show the hazards of self-publishing. The photos in the little book are stylish, very River Cafe Cookbook, a mixture of food portraits, black and white photos of diners in the existing restaurant and the owners chalking the menu up on a board or pulling dishes from the oven, and scenic shots of the picturesque River Stour and surrounding countryside. However, the book could have done with an editor, a Jill Norman to their Elizabeth David, who could spot when stages were left out or repeated.
I'd begun to have my suspicions when I noticed that two of the bread recipes didn't include a second proving stage. I'm not very good at yeast cookery, but after mixing, kneading, and proving, when you knock the air out of the dough and shape it into loaves, I thought you generally left for a second proving, even if only half an hour, for the finished shapes to rise before cooking them. The book omits a second proving stage, and says to bake the bread until it has risen. Maybe it does rise in the oven. I asked the cafe owner, diffidently, and he wriggled and said that he generally gave it a bit of time to rise again before cooking it, but he didn't look happy.
They aren't alone if their book has one or two mistakes. I've noticed in Amazon reviews that when cookery books that have gathered lots of five star reviews (maybe for the nice pictures from people who haven't tried cooking from them much?) pick up some two and three star reviews as well, one of the common complaints is that some of the method don't make sense, or that items from the list of ingredients then never feature anywhere in the recipe. Celebrity chefs are generally the worse offenders, while food scholars like Jane Grigson and Claudia Roden are generally OK on that score. (Delia's Hungarian meatballs were a sad disappointment, but that wasn't because they didn't come out as meatballs, merely because they were disgusting.)
I have just added the chopped tomatoes (three, not four, because that's what we had that needed eating up) and the tinned chickpeas. We are going to have it with couscous. I adore couscous, while the SA is not so keen, but like I said, whoever cooks gets to choose the menu.
Addendum Tesco are just as unhelpful. The cooking instructions on the couscous packet gave the ratio by volume of water to couscous without saying what volume or weight of dried couscous to use per head, and the calorific content of an 88g serving of cooked couscous without the dried weight equivalent. I had to have a quick look in Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian to estimate how much I should cook, since I don't do couscous often and didn't know the answer offhand. Failing that, if I'd followed the rule for rice that half a glass is enough for the two of us I'd have been about right. If I were a novice cook and didn't have a library to refer to in a hurry I'd have been stuck. No wonder people end up going for a takeaway.
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