“My family has always moved together through food,” Ellie Bouhadana told Broadsheet recently. “There’s a feeling of fullness and warmth that you can only have after a good meal shared with good people.”
Bouhadana is the author of Ellie’s Table, a cookbook brimming with recipes for good meals shared with good people. Like the rest of her cooking, at the heart of the book is her love of gathering those she cares about around a table and feeding them – a love fostered during Friday-night Shabbat dinners growing up.
“It’d be something I’d look forward to at the end of school on a Friday, getting home and my mum and grandmother cooking. My aunties would come over and help and we’d be in charge of setting the table,” Bouhadana says. “As I got older and had my own space, I still wanted to curate that energy.”
The book is broken down into sections reflecting the stages of a dinner party, but also the way her family – North African Jewish on one side, Ashkenazi Jewish on the other – like to eat. The “cold plates” at the beginning (think preserved eggplant, fried zucchini with mint) are inspired by the snacky dishes her dad’s North African family would pass around at the start of a meal, while the bread section nods to her mum’s challah, baked for those Shabbat dinners. (The book also includes the recipe for Bouhadana’s famous focaccia.)
Bouhadana’s pasta at Hope St Radio, where she was the head chef until May 2024, developed a reputation of its own, and a chapter of the book is dedicated to pasta dishes and hand-making pasta. Many of the Italian-style recipes were developed and photographed in Rome, where Bouhadana bought fresh produce from markets, and absorbed the Eternal City’s warmth and energy.
“When I look for a cookbook I love to feel like I’m being taken to that place. But I didn’t want things to be too curated,” she says. “I wanted to create things in the moment and for people to feel like they were there [in Rome]. It felt like the right place to explore carbohydrates and fresh produce.”
This recipe combines both carbohydrates and fresh produce – a vivid green pasta dish with approachable ingredients that’s bound to catch the eyes of your guests at your next dinner party. It calls for home-made vegetable stock, which can be swapped out for water if time is tight. Bouhadana says the ingredients for the stock recipe are “intentionally a little vague, as this stock is something you can make with almost any vegetable and whatever alliums you have in the fridge – spring onions, mushrooms, red onions – almost nothing is off limits.
“Leaving the skins on the vegetables means extra flavour and less work for you, and browning them in the oven first deepens the flavour of the stock. Parmesan rinds, fresh herbs, kombu and dried mushrooms give a richer, more savoury flavour, so if you have any of these in your pantry or fridge, throw them in. Make a big pot of the stock, and then keep it in the fridge to use throughout the week, or freeze it in smaller quantities to defrost and use when you need it.”
Ellie Bouhadana’s conchiglioni with braised leek and cavolo nero green sauce
Serves 4
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 3 hours and 20 minutes
Ingredients
8 garlic cloves, peeled
Extra virgin olive oil to cover
350g baby leeks
120g cavolo nero (Tuscan kale)
75g butter
60ml white wine
2 parmesan rinds (optional)
2 tbsp grated Parmigiano Reggiano or Grana Padano, plus extra for sprinkling
Pinch of chilli flakes
440g conchiglioni
Block of parmesan to serve
Vegetable stock (makes 4L, this recipe requires 125ml)
1 leek, roughly chopped
2 onions, roughly chopped
2 red onions, roughly chopped
2 carrots, roughly chopped
4 celery stalks, roughly chopped, leaves left on
1 fennel bulb, roughly chopped, fronds left on
Couple of red chillies, sliced in half lengthways
Handful of fresh or dried mushrooms
Handful of bay leaves
Bunch of any fresh herbs you have on hand, such as flat-leaf parsley or thyme
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Pinch of paprika
Method
To make the stock, preheat the oven to 220°C.
Put all the fresh vegetables and herbs, except for the celery leaves and fennel fronds on a couple of roasting trays, douse in the olive oil and season with salt, freshly ground black pepper and the paprika. Roast until golden and caramelised, about 30 minutes.
Take the vegetables out of the oven and put them in a large stockpot, add the celery leaves and fennel fronds (if you have kombu or parmesan rinds, place them in the pot too), cover completely with cold water (about 5L) and bring to the boil over a medium heat. Reduce to a simmer and cook gently for about 1–2 hours until the stock has reduced a little and tastes savoury and full of flavour. Skim off any foam on the top of the broth, and taste and season with more salt and pepper along the way if needed.
Strain the broth, discarding the cooked vegetables, and store in the fridge for up to 5 days or in the freezer for about 6 months.
For the confit garlic, in a small saucepan, cover the garlic cloves with olive oil (about 250ml) and add a pinch of salt. Very gently simmer the garlic over a low heat for about 10 minutes, until the cloves are soft and golden brown, then turn off the heat and leave to cool. The garlic can keep like this, under oil, for up to a month in the fridge.
To braise the leeks and make the sauce, prepare each leek by cutting away its outer layer and discarding it. Slice the leeks down the middle lengthways to open them up, then slice them in half crossways and wash each thoroughly, as they are usually quite dirty inside.
Next pick the cavolo nero leaves, discarding the woody branches, and roughly chop them (you will want to have no more than 100g of leaves). Bring a saucepan of salted water to the boil and blanch the leaves for 2–4 minutes, until just cooked.
In a deep saute pan or casserole dish with a lid, pour 60ml of the oil from the confit garlic into the pan along with the butter and warm over a medium heat. Melt the fats gently, then add the leeks and stir. Cook gently for 5 minutes, then pour in the wine and let everything sizzle gently for 2 minutes until the alcohol has cooked off, but there is still liquid in the pan. Season with 2 tsp of flaky salt and a few grinds of black pepper. Throw in a couple of parmesan rinds, if you have them.
Heavily butter a piece of baking paper big enough to fit over the pan, then place it on top of the leeks, carefully tucking the edges of the paper in and under the leeks to create a cartouche. This will trap the steam, keeping all the cooking juices in the pot rather than letting them evaporate. Put the lid on the pan as well, and reduce the heat to low. Leave the leeks to stew over a low heat for about 15 minutes.
Remove the cartouche from the leeks and stir – by now the leeks should have collapsed and caramelised, and have an almost silky texture. Remove the parmesan rinds and turn the heat off.
Put the cavolo nero, parmesan, vegetable stock or water and chilli flakes in a food processor, together with 8 cloves of the confit garlic, 60ml of the confit garlic oil and a pinch of black pepper. Blitz until you have a smooth green sauce, then taste and season with flaky salt and freshly ground black pepper to your liking.
To cook the pasta and serve, bring a large saucepan of water to the boil over a high heat. Season well with salt, stir, then add the pasta and stir again. Cook the pasta until it is al dente, meaning that it is cooked through, but still has some bite to it (usually about 2 minutes less than the recommended cooking time listed on the packet).
Put the green sauce in the pan that contains the leeks, stir to combine and warm over a low heat. Lift the just cooked pasta out of the boiling water with tongs and put it in the pan. Sprinkle with a handful of parmesan, pour in about 80ml of the pasta water and toss everything together energetically with the tongs or a wooden spoon to emulsify. Don’t stop tossing the pasta until the sauce has thickened a little and coats every piece of pasta. Serve straight away, with a block of parmesan on the table for people to grate over the dish themselves.
This is an edited extract from Ellie’s Table by Ellie Bouhadana, published by Hardie Grant Books. Available in stores nationally from May 1 2024. Photography by Lucia Bell-Epstein.
Additional reporting by Alice Jeffrey.
