When's the last time you cooked with sorrel leaves or nigella seeds? What about a marrow squash or verjuice? (Don't even know what a verjuice is? Neither did we it's a special sauce made from semi-ripe wine grapes.)

All these ingredients might sound exotic and complicated, but chef Yotam Ottolenghi is here to convince you that you don't have to be a professional chef to use them. In his new book Plenty More Ottolenghi demonstrates how some off-the-beaten path ingredients can turn your quotidian vegetable side dish into a thing of majesty.

Ottolenghi joins NPR's Rachel Martin to explain the difference between supermarket hummus and Middle Eastern hummus and why he doesn't like to call his cookbooks "vegetarian."

On calling his books vegetable-based, not vegetarian

Plenty and Plenty More are both vegetable-based books. I don't like to call them vegetarian because vegetarian, for me, rings of all sorts of things that I think these books are not.

... The difficulty with vegetarianism, I find, is that it's very exclusive. It means like, I never look at meat or fish in my life. I grew up in Jerusalem in the Middle East, and in various parts of the Middle East and Asia, the diet is very plant-based and doesn't include lots of meat in it. Meat is more special you add a little bit of it or you don't use it at all. That attitude, I think, is a very healthy attitude to eating. It's not about denying yourself of something completely. It's about celebrating the wonderful world of vegetables.

On the many different ways to eat vegetables

I'm trying to concentrate on the cooking techniques of vegetables. I think people's imaginations, when it comes to vegetables, focus often on one or two cooking techniques. More often than not it's boiling. You know, you simmer your vegetables and then maybe you dress them, and that's about it. ... Roasting is the next stop. But there's lots of other things you can do.

You can eat them raw, like cabbages and turnips and cauliflowers. You can eat them raw in slaws, you can fry them, you can chargrill them, which gives them that wonderful smoky aroma. You can steam them, you can braise them which is cooking with a little bit of liquid but not a lot. So, there's tons of ways of cooking vegetables and each cooking technique has particular results.

Yotam Ottolenghi is an Israeli chef and London restaurateur. His other cookbooks include Jerusalem, Plenty and Ottolenghi. Pal Hansen/Courtesy of Ten Speed Press hide caption

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Chef Ottolenghi Makes The Case For 'Plenty More' Vegetables