an evening with yotam ottolenghi at sydney opera house

There is a lot I love about Yotam Ottolenghi. I’m telling you, it’s not just his appreciation for vegetables. He’s an incredibly non-assuming and humble person, too. Just pure coolness.

We were at Sydney Opera House last night for an Ottolenghi talk. An Evening with Ottolenghi.

When I saw that he was going to be interviewed by Adam Liaw, I was quite happy about that as well because he is such a lovely guy, too.

Yotam Ottolenghi in conversation with Adam Liaw at the Sydney Opera House was a sold-out event. As you can see above, the Concert Hall was packed before the event.

Ottolenghi’s new cookbook, Simple, recently came out, as you may know and my ticket included a copy of it but I wasn’t sure if it was going to be signed or would there be a book signing at the end of the event. Usually, you find out when you’re there, not before. That’s how these events are organised.

My problem here is all of my Ottolenghi cookbooks are signed. Especially, Jerusalem is signed by Ottolenghi as well as Sami Tamimi. I didn’t want Simple to be sitting next to those ones, feeling like an orphan, to be honest.

I have been very lucky so far because John was in London at some stage and he brought back a few signed copies with him for me. So, that covered a large portion of the books. When Plenty More came out, this time we were both in London. So, I had a chance to buy it directly from Ottolenghi’s restaurant in Islington and wrote about it in a blog post. Now, Simple is out and I am lucky again because there really was a book signing at the end of the event.

Here, Ottolenghi is just about to sign my book. And finally, I had a chance to tell him how much I appreciated his work.

I knew that my book was going to be signed but I didn’t know if someone from Opera House was going to be scribbling down my name on a post-it and slap it on the cover page to make it easier for the author like they sometimes do. Just to be safe, I took my food blog name card with me. Well, there was no such thing this time. Like I said, you only find out about these things on the day, not before. So, I’m standing there with my finger on my name so that it can be spelt out correctly and Ottolenghi is talking about my stuffed peppers photo on the card!

I designed my food blog name card with one of my recipe photos. Turkish stuffed peppers, that is. It was one of those recipe/photo that made me quite popular between food and recipe groups. One particular group on Google even asked to use it as their group photo!

Anyway, instead of signing my name, Ottolenghi took my food blog name card and said “I’ll have a look at it.” Now, I wasn’t expecting that.

In case you’re wondering why there is a lemon next to Ottolenghi’s cookbook, Simple actually came with a lemon. Because I hadn’t seen the cover of the book until last night, I couldn’t make the connection when someone handed over a lemon or the t-shirt Yotam Ottolenghi was wearing during the night.

Here’s the story behind the lemon: he was asked if there was one ingredient he was allowed to take with him on a deserted island and he said it would be lemon. So, there is a lemon on the cover Simple and he specifically ordered a t-shirt to wear with a lemon on it. On top of that, we were sent home with one. I thought it was a lovely touch.

The whole conversation with Ottolenghi was personal, warm and quite inspiring. Especially his view on cauliflower was quite interesting:

“Cauliflower is more versatile than meat. You can eat it raw, deep fry it until crunchy, you can roast it so the centre is soft. Everything yields different results. I’m fascinated with how far you can take vegetables, and it’s very far.”

No wonder, I find him incredibly inspiring. And on another personal note, he is the only Westerner chef who gets preparing Turkish style eggplant for stuffing right.