Kimchi Tagliata

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Though I celebrate culinary simplicity in theory — a crystalline yet oleaginous broth, a salted ripe tomato wreathed in basil, a steamed new-season potato — I am, in practice and in soul, a meddler who often mistakes more for superior. You know, “this recipe or menu item must be the best (and best value for money) because it has the most components”. And, in all honesty, I only desire a plain steamed potato, no matter how lovingly and organically grown, about zero point seven five times a year. Getting a firm grip on my maximalist tendencies doesn’t mean sacrificing flamboyance: see my café brûlot ice cream, which I accepted was significantly better with less condensed milk while still retaining both richness of flavour and component frequency. And so, this kimchi tagliata — a supremely simple recipe — has only been meddled with marginally, walking back my initial excess aspirations to great effect.

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No-bake Chocolate Ganache Tart

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A base of butter-coated crumbs clinging to each other, a simple ganache filling, a little stove-top action, but the dial of the main oven remains untwisted; that, to me, is perfection. In this content-saturated world that semiotically re-introduces its creators in an endless loop (I never know if I’ve used the word semiotic correctly but I figure if I keep using it, I’ll have to be correct eventually), I grow weary of the need for faux-deep wraparound justifications for each recipe, all of which eventually sound the same — you know, here’s the thing: it’s time we talk about tubers; here’s part one in my series called, it just me or is no one celebrating the cephalopod; call me crazy but I’ve had it up to here with [x ingredient that they have previously shared nineteen recipes of] and it’s time to admit that [y ingredient which has one molecule’s difference from x ingredient] is superior. But without wanting to accept self-awareness as a means to an end; I’ve got to hand it to the dull-to-me food creators in this one regard: when I consider this no-bake chocolate ganache tart, I genuinely do feel like saying bland platitudes about how it’s superior to all other chocolate goods, indicating that I’m the first person to ever feel this way. Ever taste a chocolate tart so good it makes you boring?

I’d shudder, if it weren’t so distractingly delicious.

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Pappardelle with Fennel and Bean Escabeche

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Sometimes I’m not sure who my recipes are for, other than myself. It’s not that they’re so very different, as you can find ice cream and pasta anywhere without vigorous effort. It’s more that they’re neither technically whizz-bang nor weekdayishly practical, on top of which they aren’t arriving with any reliable consistency and when they do, there’s caveats. Caveats like: this Pappardelle with Fennel and Bean Escabeche is too fancy to be truly humble, but too humble to be truly fancy; small children probably won’t like it; it’s as pale as a pile of crumpled cashmere mock-neck sweaters; and it contains four tablespoons of vinegar.

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Lemon Feta Pistachio Cookies

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For quite some time — coinciding with me nervously and vaguely muttering “freelancer” whenever anyone asked what I did for a job — I had a Patreon account where I shared recipes and interminable snippets of poetry and manuscripts to a supportive group of subscribers. I’ve since closed it down, now that I have a real live job, but one of these for-your-eyes-only recipes was a lemon curd made with preserved lemons that I was inordinately fond of. I had of late imagined a salted lemon ripple ice cream flowing with that very curd, but couldn’t find any preserved lemons within a walkable radius. No mere velleity, the thought of lemon and salt together lingered, and, nudged along by the flavours of the Palestinian dessert knafeh, the idea morphed deliciously into these Lemon, Feta, and Pistachio cookies.

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Espresso Tahini-swirled Banana Bread

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I feel we have taken the whole “we eat first with our eyes” ethos too far — not so much celebrating beauty as chasing and discarding it like some endless game of culinary paintball. And yet — I concede — I do love a rippled food, from ice cream to soup. Whether it jogs some innate, abstract art-via-fingerpainting Stendhalian response or whether it’s a satisfying visual demonstration of flavours at the edge of their breaking point before they acquiesce and blend together, or whether it’s because it’s cute, the ripple appeals to me and I keep finding myself returning to it. Even, in the case of this Espresso Tahini-swirled Banana Bread, where you can taste it but not really see it, where you have to trust me that it’s there — something for the true ripple-heads who don’t need mere visual stimulus to enjoy the weaving together of edible elements.

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buttered greens with basil

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Not wishing to minimise time in the kitchen and having a genuine proclivity for drama, I don’t energetically seek out recipes solely based on how easy and quick they are as a rule. But I also won’t say no. With that in mind, it’s possible I can’t quite be trusted when I claim a recipe is both easy and quick — though I’m very, very confident that this recipe for Buttered Greens with Basil fits that bill. Easily. It is, in fact, so work-of-moments that it’s more of an idea, really — just a bit of light chopping and a few turns in a hot pan and it’s ready to become your next established side dish.

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chocolate fudge ripple ice cream

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For someone who harps on about not only how much they love ice cream but who also takes such noisy pride in circumventing Big Ice Cream Machine with my no-churn recipes, it had been a shameful and inexcusable year and two weeks between the café brûlot ice cream I posted about in January, and the last ice cream recipe prior. To rescue this claim from the realm of prevarication and braggadocio and worse, mere adventitiousness, I’ve endeavoured to make more ice cream. Maybe next time I can rescue myself from my inability to say a single normal sentence! But also, maybe not.

Now, where the café brûlot ice cream was grown up and worldly, this chocolate fudge ripple ice cream is significantly more approachable.

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shorbat jarjir | rocket soup

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You know a soup recipe is good when I can overcome its exo-seasonal heat through my sheer demanding curiosity to know what it tastes like. Sure, every time I step outside it feels like I’ve been clamped in a pair of hair straighteners, but I also just had to taste this Shorbat Jarjir, bustling with rocket and spices, from Yasmin Khan’s Palestinian cookbook Zaitoun. It was the rocket itself that lured me in, tangled and peppery, then the warm dusting of spices, then the promise of a satiny puree. I had half-planned to make some dukkah-crusted croutons to accompany it but this soup needed no extra distraction; nor could I be bothered, to be honest. They might have been great, I’m telling myself they weren’t necessary.

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Café Brûlot Ice Cream [no-churn]

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As a sedulous devotee in the field of recipe development, “what if this existing recipe was an ice cream flavour?” is a pertinent question I ask myself repeatedly, and — in the case of this café brȗlot ice cream — it’s a question I sometimes find an answer to. Repurposing one recipe into another format isn’t a lazy madlibs way to come up with ideas — although it can help – it’s more that I adore ice cream and it’s the first thing on my mind. You might as soon ask, could this recipe be a lasagne? Despite summer being my least-favoured season, ice cream is my favourite food and I like to mark the passing of each year with a new one for reasons of both personal satisfaction and benefiting from its practical cooling properties.

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