Don't Sweat the Aubergine

gentle frying followed by cooking in a little liquid. The colouring in oil or butter (or both) and the long cooking sweeten the aniseed notes of the bulbs.
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HOW TO COOK IT
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    Trim off the fronds (which you can use to garnish the dish), as well as any tough layers, and cut the bulbs into halves, quarters or slices – whatever you prefer. Colour them in oil or butter (or both), preferably in a large sauté pan with a lid; or use a heavy casserole or a saucepan. About 10 minutes on each side. Pour in water or stock to about 1cm deep, bring to a simmer, and cover the pan. Cook gently until the fennel is tender – about 20 minutes to half an hour. Uncover the pan and turn up the heat to evaporate the liquid that remains. Add salt and pepper.
Garlic
    Round my way, every other shop has a stall of vegetables outside. Much of the produce, inhaling the traffic fumes for day after day until finally the proprietor gets rid of it, looks tired; but there’s usually something worth buying. If you want garlic, though, you tend to find that all of it, in these shops and elsewhere, is in a sorry state: falling apart, wrinkled, soft and sprouting. Here is one area where the supermarkets have the edge. Tesco’s garlic is consistently good.
    You can get away, just, with using inferior garlic when you fry it thoroughly and cook it for a long time, in sauces and stews. But it will be bitter in dishes that require long cooking of whole cloves (chicken with 40 cloves of garlic, see here , for example), or in preparations that depend on the pungent zing of raw garlic: aioli ( see here ), or garlic vinaigrette ( see here ), or hummus ( see here ).
    Crushed garlic is more pungent than chopped. The violence of a garlic crusher turns garlic acrid and sulphurous – its relative in the allium family, the onion, acquires similar qualities if mashed in a food processor. Halve the garlic down its length, and remove from the interior any green sprouting material, which is bitter. Chop the garlic, sprinkle it with salt, and crush it with the back of a heavy knife; or put it in a mortar and use a pestle. It will become a creamy pulp. Just a speck or two of it, dissolved in the vinegar, will flavour a vinaigrette.
    Frying softens and sweetens garlic, as it does onions. That’s why recipes often tell you to fry garlic first, before adding other ingredients to the pan; added later, it might not get access to the oil. The drawback is that it burns easily; once you’ve added the other ingredients, you have to make sure that it moves from the area of highest heat.
    Baked, garlic becomes creamy and mild. It’s less likely to overcook – you open the skins to find that the pulp has disappeared – if you put whole heads in the oven, anointed with a little olive oil and surrounded with foil. About an hour at gas mark 4/180°C should be right; but I’m afraid that you might find some garlic to be overcooked in that time, and some still to be hard. Or you can toss the garlic cloves in olive oil, scatter in a roasting pan, cover the pan with foil, and then bake – perhaps for half an hour to 45 minutes.
    The cloves steam inside the foil. Meat can overcook when treated in this way; but garlic remains more tender than it would if exposed to the radiant heat of the oven.
    The cooking time for garlic is similarly hard to predict if it is boiled or steamed. When I put a clove of garlic in the water with potatoes for mashing ( see here ), it’s usually soft when the potatoes are, but not always.
Leeks
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HOW TO COOK THEM
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    Small, slender leeks: steam them whole. Trim off the tough green bits; slice down through the middle of each leek from the top to about a third of the way down, and make another cut at right angles to the first, so that the layers fan out; wash the leeks in cold water. The reason for the cuts is that bits of grit can penetrate down through the layers. Put the leeks into a steaming basket above boiling water, and cover; cook for about 5 minutes, or until tender in their thickest parts to the point of a knife. Drain, and squeeze out excess water with the back of a wooden spoon. Then turn the leeks in butter, and season. You can also serve them lukewarm, with vinaigrette ( see here ); a lovely dish is leeks in vinaigrette with a poached egg ( see here ) and fried bacon or lardons. Season with lots of pepper.
    I’m not keen on cooking larger leeks whole. They are tough to cut through, and they have a slimy quality. Slice them, wash