My vegetable romance: the best marinade for grilled vegetables (verdure alla griglia)

ack in my Bangkok days, when I was still veg(etari)an, my staple diet was naturally Asian: mostly Thai and Chinese. Once in a while, I would also take to ransacking other restaurants in search of something I could sink my herbivorous teeth in.

One sultry (there they all are!) evening, I went on a date to one of Bangkok's fanciest Italian restaurants. My date was quite perplexed as per where to take me out to, as my militant vegan stance wouldn't have allowed anything animal-derived into my digestive system. Ah, the extremes of youth!

Italian is the favourite cuisine with a lot of Western vegetarians. A lot of dishes are vegetable-based, it is tasty, colourful and offers a reasonable variety of dishes. France is vegetarians' hell, Italy is their paradise. So, this Italian place was an almost inevitable choice.

It must have been my first encounter with real Italian alta cucina. Ridiculously overpriced, cooked to perfection, immaculately presented food served in a converted city mansion, enjoyed with the capital's swishest crowd. Of all the truly exquisite dishes, I was somehow most impressed with my starter, grilled vegetables. After the intense flavours of Thai food, it was quite a revelation that something so simple and unadorned with hardly any spice or herbs - and no chilies in sight! - could be so delicious. It was such a long while ago that now I don't quite remember how I got hold of the recipe. One thing I know is that this marinade makes vegetables taste exactly like on that memorable date.

So here is the recipe:

1. A dab of sea salt, a generous dash of aceto balsamico bianco, a lot of freshly grounded black pepper, a nice pinch of powdered garlic, a liberal glug of olive oil. I also use some fish sauce and a drop of liquid smoke, but you don't need to.
   
   
2. Let it all sit in a deep bowl until it all dissolves, then whisk into a homogeneous liquid .
   
   
3. In the meantime, slice zucchini, aubergines, pumpkins, fennel, onions, tomatoes and bell peppers, evenly and equally thick. Add a few pods of haricot beans. I also use shiitake mushrooms. Portobellos come out very nice too.
   
   
4. Marinate the vegetables for 15-20 minutes, not more, otherwise they become soggy.
   
   
5. Heat a ribbed skillet on a very strong fire. A gas stove is essential here as an electric one won't give you a high enough temperature.
   
   
6. Grill the vegetables until they are nicely seared on the outside. They taste best al dente, slightly crunchy inside, so mind not to overcook.

Indian tandoori marinade recipe

hey say tandoori chicken was invented by a shrewd Indian restaurateur who couldn't see tandoors (bread ovens) stay idle when there was no naan to bake. Knowing Indian business acumen, it sounds a plausible theory.

But back to gastronomy. Here is my recipe for the incomparable tandoori marinade for barbeque.

1. Peel one onion, half a head of garlic and about 6 cm of ginger. Put them in a kitchen processor and reduce them into homogeneous pulp. Add some water if necessary.
2. Chop finely one or two seeded chilli peppers.
   
3. Put about 150 g of natural yoghurt (the fatter the better, never skimmed one!) into a big bowl.
4. Add 1, 2, Tandoori Spice Mix, palm sugar and fish sauce.
5. Stir well until everything dissolves. It should taste pleasantly pungent with a nice balance of sweet, sour, salty and spicy.
6. Chop chicken, fish or what have you into bite-size chunks and mix well with 5.
7. Cover with cling film and let stay overnight in the fridge. Stir every 6-8 hours.
8. Remove from the fridge a couple of hours before cooking. It helps to have your barbecue evenly cooked when the raw mix is of room temperature.
   

Turkish chargrilled sardines in grape leaves (asma yaprağinda sardalye)

y first visit to Istanbul was, in hindsight, quite traumatic. Back in 1999 I was a hardcore vegan and the sight of all the Turkish goodies sizzling tantalisingly on charcoals left me scarred for years.

That is why I have put myself through a self-administered culinary therapy. I recreate all the stuff I missed out on then in Turkey, here in London. Kuzu pirzola, grilled lamb chops, is a good example.

When I received the good news that I was accepted to the SOAS postgrad school, I celebrated Russian style, with a barbeque. The difference was that it was alcohol-free and apart from the scrumptious hand-made Colombian sausages I bought at Brixton Market, I also made Turkish sardines wrapped in grape leaves. I nicked the recipe from wonderful Ghillie Başan's mouth-watering Turkish cookbook. As all great things it is quite simple.

1. Make marinade of olive oil, grated lemon rind, juice of the lemon, aceto balsamico bianco, clear honey, one crushed chilli pepper, sea salt and coarsely ground black pepper. Whisk all ingredients together well. The quantities are not arbitrary. The rule of thumb is that the marinade should come out pleasant to taste, a balanced mix of sweet, spicy and sour.
   
2. Cover gutted and scaled sardines with marinade and let stay for a couple of hours.
3. Wrap the sardine in grape leaves and baste them with the marinade.
4. Grill on white-hot charcoals for a couple of minutes on each side. Do not overcook: when the eyes are white, it is done.
5. I serve sardines with grilled vegetables (tomatoes, bell peppers, aubergines, courgette, onions, garlic) and turmeric rice.
   

Barbeque - most voted by our primeval ancestors

I was brought up on barbeque. My Dad would take me cross-country skiing miles and miles into the Sub-Arctic taiga where, after clearing up a little plot from 3-foot-thick snow we would make a camp fire and have home-made munches while waiting for the flame to calm down and the cinders to become white.

Lamb, reindeer, or sometimes even saiga or bear meat as well as whole tomatoes would have been marinated in vinegar, onions, and black pepper the day before. Pre-skewered by Mom, they would then slowly get cooked, becoming deliciously charred on the outside but remaining pink inside. The smoky and tangy aroma of Dad's barbeque is one of the most powerful memories of my childhood.



















Since then I have travelled around the world and seen other ways of cooking meat over charcoals: Japanese yakitori and Southern soul barbeque parties, Argentine parillada and Bavarian steckerlfisch, South African braai, Indian tandoori, Turkish fish grilled in vine leaves and Catalan charcoaled with parsley butter.

Best barbeques all around the world share the same secret. It is very simple yet too many people don't seem to understand it. All too often meat is yanked into raging fire only to end up as scorched bits of burnt animal protein. The Main BBQ Principle is so important it should be put to music and chanted as a mantra at dawn and sunset:

The coals must be white
With no flames in sight!

This mantra should also be in every beginner cook's textbook: chicken and rosemary, lamb and mint. These combinations are unbeatable. You can see both on the picture above.
Fish hardly needs any herbs or spices as they would overpower its delicate flavour, just some sea salt, coarsely ground black pepper and a sprinkle of lemon juice are more than enough. To make white-fleshed fish flavour more pronounced it can be soaked Japanese style in the mix of equal parts of sake, mirin and shoyu.

One more rule that can be emphasized enough: always pat dry whatever you barbecue. I use thick kitchen rolls for that. Wet meat yanked on hot coals ends up half-boiled instead  of deliciously sizzled.

Another fantastic way of grilling fish they know in Thailand. Thai fresh-water catfish is gutted, stuffed with  fresh lemon grass, rolled in sea salt and put on grill. It is served with a fiery dip of chopped chillies, crushed garlic and fish sauce.

The same dip is fantastic with Southern Thai grilled fresh-water prawn. They are done à pointe, so that the meat is just done but the buttery innards, called man goong in Thai, remain uncurdled. Delish!
These are great companions for barbecue (see the picture below):

• kurkuma rice
• Southern potato salad
• verdure alla griglia: grilled aubergines, zucchini, shiitake and red onions marinated in mix of olive oil, white wine vinegar, sea salt and coarsely ground black pepper
• grilled portobello mushrooms filled with sauce of crème fraîche, white wine, oyster sauce and, you guessed it, coarsely ground black pepper.