Yotam Ottolenghi Cooked Quotations

My maternal grandmother made fantastic ox tongue with velvety roasted potatoes. She cooked sweet red cabbage and lovely cauliflower with butter and bread crumbs.

New-season lamb shoulder, cooked pink, is the perfect platform for a mixture of fresh and cooked herbs.

Food that's served at the table in a paper parcel always creates a remarkable culinary moment when opened, because the package is full of aromatic steam from the lightly cooked ingredients inside.

Black glutinous rice works in both savoury and sweet dishes. It's a popular pudding rice in south-east Asia, where you'll often come across it cooked with water, coconut milk and a pandan leaf.

In certain European cuisines, vegetables are cooked a long time. I take the term 'al dente' and use it for vegetables.

I rarely cook traditional risotto, but I love other grains cooked similarly - barley, spelt or split wheat. I find they have more character than rice and absorb other flavours more wholeheartedly.