Don't Sweat the Aubergine

and with plenty of sauce, which the grains will soak up. Tomatoes often play a part, as does harissa, a fiery paste that you can buy in tubes or tins, or that you can make yourself ( see here ); add it to the stew, or moisten it with the cooking liquid and put it on the table, so that guests can add it as they like to their plates.
    Bake vegetables such as aubergines ( see here ), courgettes ( see here ), peppers ( see here ) and onions ( see here ), and stir them when cooked into the couscous. Accompany this mixture with a tomato sauce ( see here ), in which toasted spices – for each 400g can of tomatoes, a teaspoon in total of cumin and coriander seeds, warmed in a dry pan until giving off a toasted aroma, then ground in a mortar or herb mill – have been added to the garlic and oil base. Serve hot or cold.
    Try couscous with root vegetables: baked chunks of sweet potato and onion; turnip and/or celeriac, braised in a covered pan in a couple of centimetres of stock (or water) with, for each 450g vegetables, a tablespoon of olive oil and a teaspoon in total of caraway seeds (toasted and ground first, if you like), turmeric and cayenne. Leave enough of this braising liquid to moisten the couscous.
    For a couscous salad for 4: finely chop half a red onion, and soak it in (boiling or cold) water for an hour ( see here ). Squeeze it dry in paper towels. Dry-fry a small packet of pine nuts in a small pan (careful, they burn easily). Chop a handful of parsley. Grate the zest from half a lemon. Mix all these with 250g couscous, with salt to taste, and a little more extra virgin olive oil, if you like. If the salad needs more sharpening, use a little lemon juice.
HARISSA
    This recipe is adapted slightly from Tom Stobart’s in
The Cook’s Encyclopaedia
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HOW TO MAKE IT
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    Soak 30g dried red chillies in hot water for an hour. Finely chop a clove of garlic. In a dry pan, heat 1 tsp caraway seeds, with 1/2 tsp each of cumin and coriander seeds, until lightly toasted; whizz them, with the garlic, in a mill or grinder. Scoop this mixture into a bowl. Drain the chillies, and whizz them too, until thoroughly ground up – you may need to do it in batches. Mix the chillies thoroughly with the spices and garlic, and a little salt, adding some olive oil to make a paste. You can keep the harissa in a clean, covered jar in the fridge, provided that it is protected from the air with a layer of olive oil; it should stay fresh for two to three months. Half of each of these ingredients, though, will produce plenty of harissa to be going on with.
    An alternative, milder recipe includes a red pepper, baked, skinned ( see here ) and whizzed with the other ingredients, with the quantity of chillies reduced according to taste. Even a baked pepper, though, has a high liquid content, and will produce quite a thin-textured sauce.



 
    APPEARANCES AREN’T EVERYTHING . That useful lesson is worth bearing in mind when we buy and cook vegetables; or, if we haven’t learned it already, perhaps it’s a lesson that buying and cooking vegetables can teach us. The supermarkets and some chefs take advantage of our willingness to believe otherwise
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    Of course, fresh vegetables and fruit should have such qualities as firmness and sharp colouring. But those qualities do not guarantee good flavour. The perfectly formed, brightly packaged veg and fruit you find in the supermarket are so often less interesting to taste than the comparatively unprepossessing specimens in the local greengrocer.
    Supermarket produce may lose flavour as a result of the amount of refrigeration it undergoes. Certainly, at home, you’ll find that there are several items that keep better at room temperature or slightly below than they do in the chilly surroundings of your fridge: among them are aubergines, cucumbers, peppers, potatoes and tomatoes.
    Dull, olive-green broccoli looks unappetizing on the plate, and has probably spent too long in the pan. But following the advice of chefs on how to preserve bright colours may sacrifice flavours and nutrients. Chefs’ recipe books usually tell you to use plenty of boiling water for green vegetables, which you then ‘refresh’ in ice-cold water, to fix the colour; you heat them up again before serving. In my experience, vegetables treated in this way are dull to eat; and they lose more nutrients than they would if cooked in only a little water. Even three-star chefs value taste less than they do the seduction of their