Apricot and Walnut Cake by Yotam Ottolenghi (Image by Penwhisk)
Complicated is my relationship with Yotam Ottolenghi, the eminent Israeli-British chef, owner of notable culinary establishments in London and author of award-winning cookbooks. Ottolenghi and I have never met and we appear to be at very different stages in life. Currently, I am a stay-at-home mom and house-wife, an occupation, which, going by the look on the faces of those with whom I share this piece of information, makes me neither capable nor accomplished. I have won no awards as a stay-at-home mom. (This is fortunate, for I associate such distinctions with the Mother’s Cross of Honor, given to women in Hitler’s Nazi Germany.) Nonetheless, there are some things that Ottolenghi and I have in common. Firstly, both of us hold advanced degrees in Comparative Literature — he a M.A. and I, a Ph.D. Plenty More is the second thing we share. He wrote it and I must have used it cooking at least 150 times in the past year.