If brunch can be defined as not quite breakfast and not quite lunch, occasionally you require a similar framework applied to your dinner, whether through heat, haste, exhaustion or the lingering memory of prior repletion. I shall not wring a cramped portmanteau out of ‘dinner’ and ‘lunch’ — though others have tried — but I shall offer you this recipe for roasted green beans, potatoes, fennel and feta, which occupies that nebulous yet necessary space.
Though I spent a not insignificant portion of time with my writing group on Sunday taunting the kind of ironically insubstantial literary elitism that mistakes dogmatism and exclusion for Doing Something — oh, you know the kind I mean — here I am with an undeniably impractical and feckless recipe for Fig Leaf Gin. Not that I ever promised practicality, but I try to keep things within the realm of possibility. This is an outlier — a delicious one, though, and what it lacks in justification for its own existence it does, at least, make up for in ease of execution by being very, very easy to make.
I had no real conceptual understanding, let alone appreciation of risotto until I encountered Nigella Lawson, from whom comes so much of my formative knowledge of food and the joys therein. In her 2010 book Kitchen, she speaks of “the solace of stirring” reiterating her stance that risotto’s comfort and calm emanates not only from its soft babyfood texture, but from the stirring itself, “the ritual of unchallenging but repeated actions”. There’s no fast-tracking risotto — or at least, if there is, I don’t want it — for twenty-five minutes you and the stove and the spoon are one, watching the rice rise under your clockwise or anticlockwise motion. It’s positively meditative.
Considering I lost most of Feburary to repeatedly testing a peanut brittle recipe where the science never quite matched my vision, it was a relief to have this recipe for triple tomato risotto stick the landing perfectly, its deliciousness providing as much comfort as the process of making it. I guess it’s good to be culinarily humbled now and then, but I wouldn’t want to make a habit of it, though more for cost-of-living reasons than maintaining my ego.
Hungry and Frozen 