Greg and Lucy Malouf's New Feast

"Whatever the motivations for wanting to change one's diet, for us, first and foremost, food has to be about pleasure."

Greg Malouf

It's a fasting day, and yes food is about pleasure and today, I think for the first time, I really felt tempted to blow my diet. I just fancied some bread and cheese. But I held firm.

Greg Malouf is probably my second go to chef for Middle Eastern food (Claudia Roden is tops and Yotam Ottolenghi - well maybe a tie with Greg Malouf). Greg Malouf is a chef who admits in his introduction to this book that he has been greedy, is overweight and has had, I think, two heart transplants. So he and his ex-wife Lucy, who still work together on cookbooks, so must have a reasonable relationship, apparently both simultaneously became concerned about eating less meat, and decided to produce this book as their latest effort. It is an attempt to entice us to eat less meat and fish and more vegetables, grains and pulses. There's quite a bit of dairy as well.

"the single most important thing we can do to minimise future health problems is increase the amount of unprocessed plant-based foods we eat. While other pieces of nutritional advice seem to be endlessly tweaked and revised, this dictum remains a constant." Greg Malouf

I too often think that I should be more vegetarian - I don't think I could ever be completely vegetarian, and we do definitely eat less meat these days, but I wouldn't say we have even reached the one vegetarian meal per week status as yet. Maybe I should add this to my New Year's resolutions. In his introduction Malouf describes very well how I and many others feel about going more vegetarian.

"so many people have such an ambivalent relationship with vegetables: they know they should eat more of them - they want to eat more of them - but they find preparing them a bit of a bore and, more often than not, mired in meat-centric food habits, they can't think of interesting vegetable dishes to cook. Other people worry that it just won't feel like a properly filling meal without a bit of meat on the plate." Greg Malouf

I don't think I find preparing vegetables boring but I do feel that if I don't have any meat at all in the dish, however small, I haven't really eaten properly. Well that's not quite true. There are certain vegetarian dishes that I can eat quite happily and consider myself well fed - spinach and ricotta lasagne or cannelloni, quiches, risottos, soups, pasta dishes, Belinda Jeffery's tomato cake. I'm sure there are more, but my vegetarian repertoire is pretty limited. And even in this book I'm not sure that there are any dishes that immediately leap out at me as a main meal, although plenty that I would consider combining with others.

But then this is also a book of Middle Eastern food and this is where the Maloufs have the advantage over me, because as he points out, the Middle Easterners are used to eating a variety of smaller dishes all put on the table at the same time rather than an entrée, a main and a dessert. Thus their vegetable dishes might not necessarily look like main dishes. Helpfully a series of different kinds of menus for combining some of the dishes together to make a satisfying meal are provided. And I certainly can eat like this in a Middle Eastern restaurant, an Indian one too come to that, but at home I find it difficult. So perhaps I should practice eating like this.

The other good thing about this book is how it is divided into short sections on the type of food rather than the part of the meal - dips, breads, sweets, breakfast, cold vegetables, fritters, stuffed vegetables ... There are lots of sections. And it all looks wonderful. I have even made one of the dips already - a spicy carrot dip which was pretty yummy. So I do mean to try out other things.

I also thought to look at the very first recipe as I noted when talking about Nigella Express. In this book - like that one actually - we start with breakfast and the very first recipe is for Summer berry salad with ginger, lime and labneh. It's accompanied by the lovely picture at right which, of course, is not of the actual dish. I don't know why they chose to do that but anyway they did. So a simple, and flexible fruit salad with a ginger and lime syrup served with honey flavoured labneh. The syrup is the only cheffy thing really and it's not difficult at all. A pretty tempting breakfast dish really. Certainly tempting enough to read on and find another fruity breakfast Blood oranges in spicy caramel sauce with ashta - a kind of honey and orange flavoured clotted cream, for which he gives a recipe. No picture at all for this one.

And then you get to a Middle Eastern granola with pomegranate, sour cherries and pistachios for which there is a picture. And if you are into granola then this is one to try.

And it's not complicated. In his introduction he says that as he gets older he is losing the compulsion to be 'cheffy' and complicated, and is now simplifying things. So we can all have a go.

And I'll finish with an utterly tempting looking and intriguing kind of fritter. Wild garlic and currant fritters with honey. I am not at all sure what wild garlic is. In brackets after the ingredient it said (ramps) and I haven't heard of that either. But I see we are talking about leaves rather than a garlic clove. I will look into it. And I guess this is exactly the kind of dish that you would serve as part of a new feast of Middle Eastern delicacies.

I shall be dipping into this book and next time I have my vegetarian friends round for dinner I shall be using it - along with Yotam Ottolenghi's Simple. Although maybe I should just try a Mediterranean feast for us anyway.