Potato Pizza, Aubergine and Carrot Salads

I had a potato pizza at Story Deli in Shoreditch once. This isn't it. Story Deli serves their paper thin crusts topped with a few slices of potato, rosemary, pine nuts and dried apricots, it's really incredible. Silver Spoon wants you to cover the generous topping of potato and rosemary with an obscene amount of pancetta and plenty of creamy cheese. It's very nice too, but not life changing. The biggest issue I have with it is that the crust turns into a cracker and is redundant to the whole thing, but I suppose a recipe for just potato slices covered in bacon and cheese wouldn't make it into the Silver Spoon (and if it had I wouldn't be making it) that's how they get you.

Baby aubergines get you too. They're nature's great joke, absolutely beautiful and very tempting when raw, and brown and muddy when cooked. But I can't resist buying them every time I see them. I made the Warm Aubergine Salad from Harumi's Japanese Cooking, which takes less then 10 minutes to make since all the cooking is done in the microwave. The taste is grown up, (that's a euphemism for there's booze in the dressing) smoky, nutty and a little sweet. I doubt that I will make this or the Carrot and Tuna Salad from the previous page again, but I love Harumi. All the recipes in this book are easy and she gives substitutes for hard to find Japanese ingredients. This is something I would have bristled at a year ago - I mean, how inauthentic! But now I appreciate as both of these salads were assembled from ingredients I didn't have to travel all over London to find, I already had them.

I don't know if it's a sign of maturity that I now deign to follow recipes that have less than 10 ingredients. Maybe it's being the main bread winner, or general exhaustion but I just can't face dishes that take a week to plan, layzeeass. I'm doing everything I can to snap out of this funk.