Don't Sweat the Aubergine

so it’s better to cook them just before you need them, adding them to broth, or a stir-fry, as soon as they’re drained.
SIMPLE STIR-FRY
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HOW TO MAKE IT
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    For 2
    2 spring onions, tough green leaves removed, chopped, washed
    1 garlic clove, chopped
    1 tsp ginger, minced
    Large handful of pak choi or other cabbage, finely chopped
    250g cooked noodles (see above)
    1 tbsp groundnut, sunflower or vegetable oil
    1 dstsp sesame oil
    Soy sauce
    Having ignored the instructions on your noodle packet, you need also to disregard the many stir-fry recipes that tell you to heat oil to smoking point before adding your ingredients. Why would you want to eat degraded oil? Add the oil (groundnut, sunflower or a vegetable oil that can withstand high temperatures are best) to a hot pan or wok; then immediately throw in your first ingredients.
    A wok will work better than a frying pan; and a good wok, seasoned ( see here ), will work better than a bad one. Put it on a medium to high heat, wait for it to get very hot, pour in the oil, swirl it around, and immediately throw in the spring onions, garlic and ginger. Keep them moving rapidly around the pan; they probably won’t need more than 30 seconds. As soon as the onions have wilted and the garlic has started to brown, throw in the cabbage. Continue to move the vegetables around the wok energetically. When the cabbage has wilted, add the noodles. When they are warmed through, take the wok off the heat, and stir in the sesame oil and a few shakes of soy sauce. You can throw some salt into the pan at any point; but remember that oriental sauces are quite salty.
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VARIATIONS
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    As there are writers who have devoted not just one but several books to wok cookery, I cannot pretend to do justice to the subject here. I offer just a few variations on the theme above.
    Other sauces: chilli, oyster, rice wine, fish (nam pla).
    Other vegetables: what do you fancy? Cut them all into bite-sized pieces; add one vegetable at a time to the pan. After you’ve fried the garlic/spring onion/ginger base, put in first the vegetables that will take longest to cook.
    Meat: tender cuts (chicken breast, pork medallion and so on), also in small pieces. Add them to the onion/garlic/ginger mixture. Or, use pieces of leftover meat; add these to the pan later, but make sure that you warm them through.
    Seafood: shellfish, particularly prawns. Other seafood will probably break up in the pan. But you could cook it apart and serve it on a stir-fry base.
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WHY YOU DO IT
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    1 • Oil in the water . I used to think that the advice to put oil in the pasta pot was redundant – surely the oil couldn’t be effective in company with so much water? Then I found that Harold McGee (
McGee on Food and Cooking
), who has the best credentials to pronounce on such matters, recommended it, particularly for noodles. Lifting the noodles through the oil helps to separate them, he writes.
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C OUSCOUS
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    Most of the couscous we buy is pre-cooked. You can ignore the recipes that tell you to steam it above a stew for half an hour in a couscoussière (a tall, double-layered stewpot), or to improvise with a muslin-lined sieve. Ignore, too, the packet instructions, adherence to which may give you clumps of sticky grains, and try this
.
    Put the couscous – 100g is a hearty plateful for each person – in an oven dish. Boil a kettle, and carefully pour over just enough water to soak the grains – they should be damp, but not swimming. Cover the dish with foil, and put it in the oven – the temperature doesn’t matter that much, but gas mark 4/180°C works fine – for 5 minutes. Remove the dish and uncover it, to reveal a solid mass of couscous grains. Pour over a little olive oil, or add a knob of butter, and stir it through; the grains should separate. (If you have had time to leave the dish in the oven for longer, say 20 minutes, the grains may separate more readily.) Salt to taste.
    Why hot water? The grains may be advertised as pre-cooked, but they emerge resembling little pieces of grit if you soak them in cold water. The oven-heating helps them to dry out and separate when you add the oil or butter. (But if you can’t be bothered with that, try soaking the couscous in a pan, with the lid on.) You could soak the grains in hot stock.
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WHAT TO DO WITH IT
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    The classic way to serve couscous is with a meat or fish stew ( see here and here ), made with spices such as cumin and turmeric ( see here ),