10 kitchen tips that will change the way you cook

And a recipe for Moroccan Chickpea, Squash and Apricot Stew

Hi everyone! This week’s newsletter is all about one of my favourite subjects - home cooking.

Like most people, my relationship with cooking fluctuates. I go through periods of time where I absolutely love cooking (especially for other people) and find nothing more pleasurable or soothing than the scent of vanilla and orange zest being folded into a cake batter, or the crackle of tahdig breaking over a pile of Persian rice. But there are also often stretches of time when I can’t be bothered to cook and spend far too much money on ready meals (hello M&S fish pies!), eating beans on toast, or splurging on takeaways from my local Turkish ocakbasi.

My ever changing relationship with food is one of the reasons I’ve chosen to spend less time on Instagram and more time on Substack. Ten years ago, when I first became interested in using food as a vehicle for sharing cultural stories, all I wanted to do was research, travel, cook, interview people and write about it. But the food media landscape has evolved in that time period and today largely seems to involve writers endlessly making reels of their recipes, grinning at the camera and extolling about how food is a huge source of joy to them. Now perhaps for some of them this is true... But for my relationship with cooking, it doesn’t feel authentic… so it’s really nice to share some food thoughts and recipes with you here on this platform - thanks again for subscribing!

With that preamble done, this week I’m sharing some kitchen tips. Because, in my mind, a happy and resilient life involves nourishing yourself with plenty of good quality home-cooked food. I’ve also written up a brand new recipe for a Moroccan-inspired chickpea and apricot stew, which is my favourite dish at the moment and is as healthy as it is delicious. Going forward these monthly recipes will be just for paying subscribers — so do sign up below if you want to continue getting them.

My Top Kitchen Tips

1. Fry your onions for longer then you think you need to. This is my number one tip for making the food you cook taste better! Onions impart a real depth of flavour when fried for the appropriate amount of time and most recipe books lie to you about what amount of time this is (apart from mine — honestly!). Whether you are cooking a spag bol or a shakshuka, take the time to fry your onions. The minimum is 10 minutes, the ideal is 20 minutes. Iranian and Pakistani cooking really emphasise this and our aunties and grannies would regularly fry big batches of onions to use as and when you need them. This is also a great tip if you are like me and hate the smell of fried onions in your hair, thus only wanting to go through this ordeal a few times a week. Having batches of ready fried onions in the fridge also speeds up weekday cooking immensely. Try it.

2. Store your tomatoes out of the fridge

   Tomatoes lose their flavour when chilled so ideally you should store them out of the fridge. One tip I once read from chef Sami Tamimi a few years ago is if they have been chilled, take them out of the fridge and place them in direct sunlight for a few hours before you use them. Apparently it sweetens them!

3. Store your feta cheese in brine

   Feta spoils really quickly, which is why in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean it is sold in tubs of brined water. In most supermarkets in the US or UK it is sold in plastic packets though and you’ll find that if you open one, it will likely go rancid within a few days. The solution? Keep your feta in salted water. Simply mix 2 tsp salt in 500ml/2 cups of water and stir until it dissolves. Pour this into a container and pop the block of feta in it. Stored this way it will keep for a few weeks.

4. Invest in an oven thermometer

   Most of our home ovens don’t run to the temperature of their settings, which can make recipes hard to follow. Oven thermometers are really cheap and you simply hang them inside your oven and can observe the current temperature. I bet you’ll be surprised at what yours actually runs at!

5. Also invest in microplane, small food processor and a pressure cooker

   While we are talking about stuff to buy for a kitchen, I’d take these three items over a fancy expensive knife anytime. Decent knives will definitely save you time and bring about better results but, for the average home cook, you don’t need to spend lots of money on them. Instead buy a good microplane (which I use for zesting fruit, crushing garlic and shaving parmesan, its so speedy!), a small food processor (for chopping herbs, making pestos or meatballs) and, if you have a space, a pressure cooker which will revolutionise the way you cook and save you LOADS of time and money. My friend Catherine Phipps has a new newsletter all about pressure cookers and I highly recommend it. She is the recipe tester for all my cookbooks and I trust her judgment immensely.

6. Freeze leftover herbs in oil or water

   We all know what it's like to have a bunch of herbs dying in the back of your fridge after you’ve bought them for a recipe. But did you know you can freeze herbs in oil or water? It’s a great way to reduce food waste. Another way is to use any herbs you have for an Iranian Kuku Sabzi, it's a great way of using up leftover greens.

7. Toast and grind cumin and coriander seeds

   This is another hill I will die on — pre-ground supermarket bought spices just don’t taste good! Having said that, increasingly I’ve started including ground spice options in my recipes as I realise most people use these at home. So my suggestion here is for us to meet somewhere in the middle. If you want to speed things up and use pre-ground when you are cooking, why not grind the seeds yourself at the weekend? That way you can store cumin, coriander, cardamon etc in small batches and they will be much fresher and tastier than supermarket ones. I use a small spice grinder or coffee grinder for this.

8. Frozen vegetables are good — embrace them!

   Not only are frozen veggies much more affordable, they are great for whipping up quick meals and the freezing process keeps them packed full of nutrients. My freezer always has frozen spinach, peas and green beans in them and if I have any veg such as butternut squash or leeks that I won’t have time to use I also slice those up and freeze them too — they are great for making quick soups.

9. Buy expensive olive oil for dressing and use cheaper vegetable oils for cooking

   I wince when I see people fry food in fancy extra virgin olive oils. It doesn’t do anything for the flavour and is such a waste of an expensive product. I have several bottles of olives oils on the go at the same time in my house. I stick to cheaper, lighter, neutral oils for cooking, buy a medium-bodied one for adding to soups or stews, and have a really good quality strong-bodied one that never goes near any heat and is used for dressings or a final drizzle on a dish. Some of my favourite olive oils are these ones from Belazu, Zaitoun and Brindisa.

10. Taste your food throughout the cooking process and season at the beginning, in the middle and at the end

    The key to good cooking is understanding your palette and learning how to make tweaks to make things taste better. You’ll never get that through a recipe — it's all through practice and about getting familiar with the food you cook. So taste throughout and don’t forget to use lemon juice and olive oil as seasonings too.

Moroccan Chickpea, Squash and Apricot Stew

Photo: Christopher Testani; Food Styling: Jesse Szewczyk

Here is a new recipe I recently developed for the Kitchn. It’s Ramadan at the moment and in Morocco, evening Iftar meals often begin with a big bowl of harira — a hearty lentil, tomato, and chickpea soup. This recipe takes loose inspiration from that ever-popular dish and adds in butternut squash, dried apricots and fragrant strands of saffron, which lend depth and sweetness, while also making it a more substantial stew. However you want to label it, it’s a nourishing bowl of comfort food that will fill your whole kitchen with the heady scents of warming spices such as cinnamon, smoked paprika, and ginger. Serve it with warm fresh bread on the side, such as toasted buttered sourdough or flatbreads drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil. This is a great dish to make ahead, as the flavours taste even better after the stew has rested overnight. It also freezes really well so is great for batch cooking.

Serves 6

Ingredients

3 tbsp vegetable oil of your choice

2 medium yellow onions, finely diced

2 stalks celery, finely diced

4 fat cloves garlic, minced

1 1/2 tsp ground cumin

1 1/2 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp smoked paprika

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground ginger

170g/ ¾  cup dried split red lentils, rinsed

1/4 teaspoon saffron strands

1 pinch sugar

340g/ 12 ounces butternut squash, peeled and diced into ¾ inch/ 2cm cubes

8 dried apricots, halved

1 x (15-ounce/400g) can chickpeas, rinsed and drained

1 x (15-ounce/400g) can plum tomatoes 

500ml/2 cups chicken or vegetable broth

45g/ ¼  cup white rice

Salt and black pepper

1 large handful of fresh coriander leaves, finely chopped (extra to garnish)

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Juice of half a lemon 

Pul biber/Aleppo pepper, for serving

Method

Heat 3 tablespoons of oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onions and sauté until softened, stirring occasionally, for about 15 minutes. 

Add the celery, garlic and all the spices apart from the saffron. Fry for 2 minutes.

Add the dried split red lentils and 720ml/3 cups of just-boiled water. Cover and cook until softened, about 12 minutes.

Grind the saffron strands with a pinch of sugar in pestle and mortar. Add 2 tablespoons of just boiled water and leave to steep.

When the lentils have softened, add the squash, saffron, chickpeas, apricots, vegetable or chicken stock, can of tomatoes, rice, ¾ tsp salt and ½  tsp black pepper to the pan. Stir to combine.

Cover and simmer on a medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until the squash is completely soft and beginning to melt into the stew, around 25 to 30 minutes. Add more water if the stew is dry. 

In the last 5 minutes of cooking add the chopped coriander leaves to the stew, along with 3 tablespoons of olive oil. Taste and season as needed with more kosher salt, black pepper, or lemon juice. Serve garnished with the a few more coriander leaves and the red pepper flakes as desired.