Quotes from Yotam Ottolenghi

The range of ingredients available to home cooks has expanded dramatically. People are incorporating herbs and spices like lemongrass, smoked Mexican chile, sumac, and za'atar mix.

The Guardian's 'Word of Mouth' blog bridges the gap between blogging and serious food journalism.

Swiss chard is undervalued in Britain. It's a great substitute for spinach and keeps its shape well.

For my money, celery hasn't got a mean bit of fibre in its body, and we all need to start being much nicer to it.

A well-made salad must have a certain uniformity; it should make perfect sense for those ingredients to share a bowl.

Call me tacky, but I love the union of sweet and sour, even in some now-unloved Oriental dishes incorporating pineapple and ketchup.

Cobnuts have a fresher flavour than any other nut I know of and go very well with autumnal fruit and light cheeses.

Good-quality nuts, toasted in a little butter and salt, make a magical addition to many salads.

Many ingredients are called 'earthy,' but none comes as close to fitting the bill as buckwheat. I'm mildly obsessed with the stuff.

The unlikely combination of potatoes and pasta does appear in some Italian recipes.

I like to add something unusual to a dish.

Most men say they can cook pasta, but I think you should find a little bit of an unusual angle on your pasta and make that your signature dish.

People don't know how good cauliflower is, because they always have this image of cauliflower cheese - awful, sticky, creamy and rich.

Miso makes a soup loaded with flavour that saves you the hassle of making stock.

Amaranth, the world's most nutritious grain, is available from health food stores.

A lemon, boiled whole and blitzed, makes a useful base for all sorts of dressings.

Poaching white fish in moderately hot oil guarantees soft-textured flesh and allows you to prepare a sauce calmly, without the usual panic about overcooking the fish.

Recipes can be incredibly vague where chillies are concerned.

There's nothing more marvelously wintery than orange root veg mash; some butter is all it needs.

Like brown rice, black rice is unmilled, and it is the dark outer husk that makes it so nutty and chewy. It's also why it takes longer to cook than many other rices.

After all these years of cooking and writing recipes, I am still amazed every time I notice how even the minutest of variation in technique can make a spectacular difference.

Almost every culture has its own variation on chicken soup, and rightly so - it's one of the most gratifying dishes on the face of the Earth.

I now understand how varied the world of cultivated rice is; that rice can play the lead or be a sidekick; that brown rice is as valuable as white; and that short-grain rice is the bee's knees.

Urfa chillies are a Turkish variety that are mild on heat but big on aroma. They're sweet, smoky, a lovely dark red, and go with just about anything.