Don't Sweat the Aubergine

skin, and put the peppers into a bowl. Cut them up, scraping out the pips (a somewhat fiddly and messy business) and keeping the liquid, which you may want to strain into your stew or even salad dressing.
    The skin of grilled peppers burns before the flesh has done much cooking. For a softer, sweeter pepper, try baking. Put the peppers on to a lightly oiled (to prevent sticking) baking tray in a gas mark 6/200°C oven for about 40 minutes, turning once; they’re ready when the skin is loose and charred in places. Cut the peppers as above.
    I use these baked peppers in ratatouilles and other stews. Of course, they don’t need any more cooking; so if you’re putting them into a stew, add them at the end, just to warm through. If you’re using unskinned pepper slices in a stew, you don’t need to treat them as you do onions, softening them in oil first (though you will end up with slivers of shed skin in the concoction). You soften onions, and garlic, to remove some of their harshness; but peppers are milder at heart, and cook quite happily in liquid.
RATATOUILLE
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HOW TO MAKE IT
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    For 4
    1 large aubergine
    3 red peppers
    2 onions
    3 courgettes
    400g tin tomatoes, or 6 medium-sized fresh ones, skinned and chopped
    2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
    Olive oil
    This is an inauthentic recipe, but it honours in part the principle of ratatouille: that the ingredients be cooked apart, then combined. 1
    Cut the aubergines into fork-size chunks, and put them in a roasting pan. Toss them (with your hands, if you like) with enough olive oil to give them a good coating, and with salt. Put the peppers, whole, in the pan alongside them. Bake at gas mark 6/200°C, turning the aubergines after 20 minutes. Cook for about 40 minutes in total, or until the aubergines are tender and the peppers have blackened skin (leave the peppers in the oven for longer, if they need it). Skin and deseed the peppers when they’re cool enough to handle, retaining their juice.
    Peel the onions, cut them in half, and slice them thinly. Soften them in olive oil over a gentle heat for 20 minutes, or until golden and sweet. Cut up the courgettes as you like, turn up the heat a little, and throw them into the pan, stirring them until soft ( see here ). (In the first edition of this book, I advised roasting the courgettes with the aubergines. I now think that they have a more vivid flavour when fried.)
    Make a simple tomato sauce with the garlic and tomatoes and a little more oil ( see here ), and simmer until thick.
    Combine all the ingredients, including the juice from the peppers, and warm through. Check the seasoning. Serve hot, warm, at room temperature, or cold. I like the middle two options best.
    A ratatouille is even better with herbs: thyme, basil, bay and parsley are all good complements.
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WHY YOU DO IT
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    1 • A late merger . It’s a vegetable stew: why don’t you just cook all the ingredients together? Because they’d turn into a vegetable mush, that’s why.
    You’d fry the aubergines first, because they take longest to soften. After stirring them around for a bit in a pan from which they’d sucked all the oil, you’d add the onions and the garlic; then the peppers; then the courgettes; then the tomatoes. These vegetables will overcook and break up.
    There isn’t a short cut (apart from leaving out the sweating of the aubergines, and giving them a hassle-free bake). The ingredients of a ratatouille should retain their distinctive characters, but in the context of a binding of tomato and garlic. Combining the ingredients only for a brief warm-through, and letting them cool together, allows them as long to get to know each other (Fergus Henderson’s phrase) as they need.
Potatoes
    The general rule, as we have seen, is that if you value nutrition above culinary aesthetics you should cook vegetables quickly, in as little water as possible. But the advantages of boiling potatoes – whether slowly, to eat as they are, or rapidly, before roasting – are worth the loss of a few nutrients, in my opinion.
BOILED POTATOES
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HOW TO DO IT
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    Peel and cut the potatoes into pieces of the size you want. Put them in cold, lightly salted water in a saucepan, and turn the heat under the pan to low/medium. 1 When the water reaches simmering point, regulate the heat under the pan to retain a gentle simmer until the potatoes are tender.
    Scrape new potatoes to get rid of as much skin, or as many surface blemishes, as you like. 2 Cook