Don't Sweat the Aubergine

with garlic and drained tomatoes (soften a couple of finely chopped cloves of garlic in olive oil; add the drained, chopped tomatoes and cook them, with chopped dried chilli if you like, until they thicken). Then cook the pasta in this soup, and serve as above.



 
    THE BEST EGGS I have ever eaten came from a Normandy farm, now in disuse, next to the place where we spend our holidays. The chickens would roam about the neighbourhood, and would lay eggs that were glorious reflections of their liberated lifestyles: vividly yellow, rich and creamy
.
    After eating such eggs, you cannot help but make the connection between paler, feebler battery offerings and the sad lives of the animals that produce them. Free range or, even better, organic eggs may be a good deal more expensive; but, if you calculate the cost in ratio to nutritional value, they are still among the cheapest foodstuffs on the market.
    The proteins in eggs toughen, as they do in meat, if cooked for too long or with excessive vigour. When you’re boiling, poaching, scrambling or frying eggs, do it gently.
    There is a school of thought that eggs benefit from being kept in a cool place, or even at room temperature. However, Harold McGee (
McGee on Food and Cooking
) warns that the salmonella bacterium enjoys the warmth, and that eggs deteriorate four times faster at room temperature than they do in the fridge. The Food Standards Agency also advises refrigeration. Try to remember to take eggs out of the fridge an hour before boiling them, especially if you don’t want their shells to shatter as they hit hot water.
    This book includes three recipes – for mayonnaise ( see here ), for chocolate mousse ( see here ), and for lemon mousse ( see here ) – that involve raw eggs. According to the most recent (March 2004) survey by the Food Standards Agency, one in 290 boxes of eggs on sale in the UK may be contaminated with salmonella. You don’t have to worry about that when you cook eggs, because salmonella is destroyed by heat; but a raw contaminated egg will poison you. So the question you have to ask yourself, when making mayonnaise or mousse, is: do you feel lucky?
    Free range and organic eggs are just as likely to be contaminated as battery ones, apparently. Nevertheless, reputable UK farms carry out regular checks on their poultry, poultry houses and feed to ensure that they are salmonella-free.
BOILED EGGS
    I’m sorry: you probably know how to boil an egg. I just have a few pieces of advice, if you won’t feel too patronized.
    Bring the water to the boil, then turn the heat on your hob right down before lowering in the egg or eggs. You’re less likely to crack the shells if the water is at a gentle simmer (as you are if you’ve taken the eggs out of the fridge some time beforehand), and the eggs will benefit from slow cooking. Keep the heat at a level below simmering or boiling point; just let it show a few rising bubbles.
    It’s impossible to give reliable timings. I’d say that, cooked at this very gentle rate, a medium egg will be soft boiled, with a runny yolk, at 5 minutes; after 7 minutes, the yolk will be part-squidgy, part runny (that’s how I like it); at 10–12 minutes, it will be hard-boiled, but still moist. After that, it starts to get dry and powdery. If you’re hard-boiling eggs, put them into cold water for a while when they’re ready; otherwise, their residual heat will carry on cooking them, and they will develop an unappetizing grey-greenish layer around their yolks.
POACHED EGGS
----
HOW TO MAKE THEM
----
    Four is usually the most you can poach at once. Crack them into separate cups. 1 Bring a frying pan or broad saucepan of water – you need only an egg’s depth – to the boil, 2 turn down to a simmer, and gently slip the eggs into the water. 3 Maintain a low heat under the pan, as when boiling eggs (see above). Cook for 3 to 4 minutes, and lift out with a draining spoon.
    I used to put them to dry on paper towels, but found it hard to prise them cleanly from the soggy paper. So now I put them for a few seconds on to a wooden board, before lifting them on to plates.
----
WHY YOU DO IT
----
    1 • Cracking it . Cracking eggs is one of many simple kitchen skills at which I’m incompetent. I don’t trust myself to do it efficiently above simmering water. This two-stage operation is far less stressful.
    2 • Cooking in water . Purists turn up their noses at egg-poaching pans. A poached egg, they insist, is cooked in