Mariah Carey has taught us many things: gratuitious vocabulary words, chopping the top off your jeans with scissors so they’re more low-waisted, and of course, the art of the creatively honourable remix. For the true of heart, riffing on an existing idea doesn’t mean simply swapping out a teaspoon of this or that—it’s about giving a recipe another reason to live. In this case, I suspected that my triple tomato risotto could also be lavishly excellent when pulsified with beans instead of rice. I was correct—and it took quarter of the time to make.
Category: Chickpeas, Lentils, Pulses Etc
Sha’aktoura (rice and lentil pilaf)
One of the more lamentable ways I begin sentences these days is “I saw this in a screenshot of a tweet on Instagram”. Now, to be fair, I could try receiving information in more highbrow, or at least more trustworthy formats and sources but those formats and sources are mostly decaying and I haven’t quite shaken the time-corrupting doomscroll muscle memory just yet, so here we nevertheless find ourselves. To that end; I saw a screenshot on Instagram of a tweet by cowboypraxis that said “i tried to make two plans in one day. as if i were god. as if i were literal god.” and I understood completely; My weekend comprised two such that-way-lies-folly plan-filled days, and yet! This Sha’aktoura from Sami Tamimi’s new cookbook Boustany is so breathtakingly calm and accommodating to cook that it can both be a plan and fit around your plans and make you feel really rather godlike in the process. Or, at the least, like someone who doesn’t begin sentences by referencing screenshots on Instagram.
23 Bean Recipes for you
To paraphrase Robert Altman: Beans, now more than ever! Real ones know beans shouldn’t be introduced with an apologetic tone—yes they’re cheap and nutritious, but they’re also elegant, buttery, robust, with the axis of history contained within their stout little bodies. If you’re after further inspiration, here’s a round-up of 23 recipes from my back catalogue for all the bean lovers out there, from Palestinian Msabaha to salt and vinegar beans, to freeform black bean cobbler. I’ve broadly included a few lentils in there, too.
Hummus Qawarma
If you’re going to have hummus—which may be commonplace, but never prosaic—then you might as well go as close to the source as possible. Its connection to place is indelible—as Palestinian chef and cookbook author Sami Tamimi puts it, “hummus with tahini is the intellectual property of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria”. Here, in this recipe for hummus qawarma from the Palestinian cook and food writer Yasmin Khan’s beautiful book Zaitoun, it takes you from a dip to a feast, without too much more effort than opening a gritty tub of supermarket hummus. Useful and delicious though that may be, this dish is, comparatively, the culinary equivalent of going from a cold ankle-deep paddling pool to the warm surf of the Pacific Ocean at sunset. Celebrating the food of Palestine is not something I do lightly—especially when countless people within its borders are being starved and violently disconnected from their families, culture, food, and basic safety. As well as celebrating, I am acknowledging and upholding—this cuisine can’t be erased and neither can the people. But I am lucky to eat it, and so are you.
Freeform black bean cobbler
After last week’s rampant whimsy we’re back to something practical with this freeform black bean cobbler; so named because it’s so adaptable that it might veer all the way around to being annoying again — in that sometimes having too many options just means you have to make more decisions, but I shall attempt to make it clear why the main suggested path is worth traversing, culinarily.
Butternut, chickpea, and peanut soup
I have an old cookbook — as in, it’s from 1980 and I found it in an opshop — called, with brisk disregard for tautology, Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook. Fascinatingly, it lists milk, cheese, and eggs as three of the most important ingredients for an economical kitchen; meanwhile I remember butter and cheese quadrupling in cost overnight somewhere around the beginning of the recession in 2007 and never, ever lowering or even settling in price ever again. When the consumer cannot control the rapidly-shifting sands underneath our feet nor the repellant deciders who dictate the prices of ingredients, it makes me wary of claiming a recipe to be cheap or budget-friendly. But if you can’t guarantee cost-of-living-crisis-amenability — and it’s hard to guarantee much of anything at all in these trying times — I can at least promise a certain versatility that can meet you where you’re at, in this Butternut, Chickpea, and Peanut Soup.
Guinness Beef Chilli
One aspect I particularly appreciate about Nigella Lawson’s ‘In Defence of Brown Food’ chapter in Cook, Eat, Repeat is her note about how “allowing oneself ever to get roped into that game of rating food, or pitting one type against another, is both reductive and pleasure-draining.” We may be gasping and parched amid a nuance drought currently, but none of it is coming from Lawson, at least. She does also note that stews, that brownest of food, “can certainly be, in the wrong hands, unphotogenic”. Which in the case of this Guinness Beef Chilli, holds true — although I would, slightly defensively, clarify that I was being hasty against my will when I photographed it. Ironic, since everything about this recipe demands slowness; that achieved, I found myself with about twenty minutes of usable daylight within which to capture its challenging visage. You already know it, though: the taste is what matters, and this tastes incredible.
Pasta with harissa, beans, and feta
After last week’s particularly demented blog post, even by my imposing standards, rest assured that I’ve kept this edition relatively on the straight and narrow, perhaps because I’m heroically commencing writing at the prudent hour of 10pm instead of my usual midnight or 1am. To match this rare mood of shrewd practicality, this recipe for pasta with harissa, beans, and feta is equally pragmatic and functional, relying largely on storecupboard and long-lasting ingredients whose processes of preservation capture enormous flavour in, well, the process, meaning you have to do little more than nudge them together while half-sentient to achieve a fairly exquisite dinner.
Instant gnocchi, big beans, and red chilli pesto sauce
Though it’s my favourite meal of the day, I struggle to approach dinner with any conceptual normalcy, probably partly driven by not having to account for anyone’s tastes but my own. What do I mean by this? It might only make sense in my head, but you may notice a lack of everyday, meal-prep-food-kit-type practicality to the recipes on here. I favour a certain abstraction and loose formlessness and outsized abundance when it comes to dinner, and of course am perpetually hostile to the kind of SEO that other food blogs blandly benefit from. Hence all the big plates of pasta or dishes that could be sides consumed as the meal in their entirety. The closest I get to traditional friendly dinner recipes are still vast and singular: this hands-free black bean and brown rice casserole or my sheet pan gnocchi puttanesca. Somewhere in the middle of the nebulous and the breezily circumspect sits this recipe for instant gnocchi, big beans, and red chilli pesto sauce.
Got lemons? Get 18 lemon recipes.
I’ve intended to photograph and write about food for the entirety of July thus far and have either been too tired, too busy, too tired from being busy, or not blessed with photography daylight to achieve anything (other than being incredibly grumpy about my lack of blogging). After lugging a spirit-liftingly full bag of lemons back to town with me following my last visit home, it occurred to me that a jaunty interstitial in the form of a round-up of lemon recipes could temporarily countermand this issue. Naturally, it immediately created a new burden of chaotic formatting and link-hunting; after all that I’m not sure if the lemon recipes I’ve gathered are that useful, but they are at least mildly out of the ordinary to anyone expecting a lemon meringue pie here.
Hungry and Frozen 