Like any self-respecting home cook, we also have a few Ottolenghi cookbooks in our cupboard (this is absolutely not meant to be coquettish, Ottolenghi is pretty much the Pax Lomen of cookbooks). One of the house favorites is his egg salad with cauliflower and curry. It’s a tasty, simple and filling salad that you make by roasting cauliflower in the oven and then mixing it with a yogurt-mayonnaise sauce and no less than nine eggs. “This is what chicken curry salad would taste like if you replaced the chicken with cauliflower and hard-boiled egg,” reads the cover letter. ‘An introduction that seems to make no sense until you taste the egg-cauliflower version for yourself. If you do miss the chicken, you can serve it very well with the aforementioned poultry you roasted over the weekend’. What Ottolenghi forgot to mention is that the dish can also be used as a biological weapon on very hot days.
So it happened that a few days ago I opened the door of our house and was almost knocked unconscious by a thick, warm air, harnessed in an aroma of roasted cauliflower, boiled egg and curry. My girlfriend had to work out that night and had made the salad so she could take it home. She filled two Tupperware containers with it. One to take with me and one that my kids and I could eat, which would never happen. It was too hot to open all the windows and balcony doors, so to get rid of the air I turned the extractor hood on high and burned incense. It seemed to help somewhat, but that could also have to do with the irreparable damage my sense of smell had just sustained.
In the evening, when it was dark and the children had gone to bed, the smell had finally completely disappeared from the house. Satisfied, I was sitting at the kitchen table breathing clean and odorless air when my girlfriend came home. As she told how the day had gone, she unpacked her bag. I watched helplessly as she removed its lid from the plastic container that had been sitting in a warm backpack all day. It was as if a sewer truck had stopped in front of our door, put its hose through the kitchen window, and let the day’s produce pour in. Of course, you shouldn’t be too frivolous about trauma, but the effect is so effective and long-lasting that I occasionally have to interrupt this writing to gag.
Still, it is a really tasty salad.