Category: Contains Nuts

The 15th Annual Hungryandfrozen edible gift guide with 60 recipes for you

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A jar with a ribbon around it surrounded by baubles.

Something we can all count on, or at least, that we can all count: The 15th Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Guide is back! This year you have a round-up of:

  • 60 delicious gift-ready recipes
  • Many also-delicious off-the-shelf ideas if you hate cooking or are simply not up to it at this juncture
  • Gift guide suggestions and further worthy places to powerfully channel whatever consumer dollars you may have

Although it’s hellacious to format I love the work of making this annual list because it serves to disabuse you of the notion that Christmas gifts have to be things. People love food, and food gifts are nothing but upside. They have immediate practical application, they will eventually cease taking up space in the recipient’s house, and it’s a simple way to demonstrate care, appreciation, and love especially in this continually punishing economy. My fifteen-year accumulative model was getting excitingly close to three figures, but in 2025 I respect your time more than mine and have whittled down the list so you have fewer decisions to wrestle with and less scrolling.

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Chicken, red grape, pecan and brie salad

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A top-down shot of a leaf-shaped bowl of salad with a fork on a dark wooden board

Now that my debut novel Hoods Landing is past-tense launched in Wellington and Auckland, normal transmission must resume, and yet! Every time I blink an hour has passed and it’s next Thursday and a certain flat the-party’s-over malaise threatens.

Nonetheless I’m clambering onwards like a self-absorbed and energetic goat with a food blog, and bring you a salad of such glad tidings that it could only be inspired by a hedonistically carefree Silver Palate cookbook, whose authors address the reader as if we all have holiday homes in Portugal and the Hamptons, and let’s face it, the government still hasn’t worked out a way to privatise and flog off one’s personal vicarious thrills so you might as well get them while you can. And although it has a lot of words in the title, this chicken, red grape, pecan and brie salad is more or less practical, and can make quite a lot out of a little lux-ness.

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triple tomato beans

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Triple tomato beans and a gold spoon on a black and white striped plate, sitting on a blue and white cloth
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.

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23 Bean Recipes for you

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Hummus with pomegranate seeds and pine nuts.


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.

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Noodles with smoky gochujang bokkeum

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A pan full of noodles and vegetables

Some years ago I posted a recipe for a vegan variation on gochujang bokkeum, a Korean fried chilli sauce, and though I’m no longer vegan, the sauce in this iteration has lost none of its monumental appeal. Here I’ve simply stirred it through wide, chewy noodles with some flash-wilted greens and a hazy splash of liquid smoke; it makes for a dinner of such wild splendidness that even though it’s something of a retread; it does both bear repeating and stand alone on its own merit. Indeed, I’ve made a slight variation of this three times this weekend alone because it has thrice been the exact correct answer to ‘what should we have for dinner’, prosaic though that is.

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Hummus Qawarma

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a green plate of hummus and lamb on a white background with blue fabric

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.

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Shawarma-spiced roast vegetables with feta

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A serving spoon in a dish of roasted veges

A tray of roast vegetables is a noble dinner. Huddled low topographically yet covering so much surface area; the magnificent juxtaposition of tender internal cellular structure and crisp-lipped exterior; so much result for so little fuss. If you want to make a modicum of fuss, however—perhaps by borrowing the multiplicity of rich spices present in shawarma—and then crumbling over a genuinely modest quantity of feta—then you’re really in for a good time. The hardest part of these shawarma-spiced roast vegetables with feta, for me at least, is that every time I open up my spice drawer the boxes of spices have re-ordered themselves or got themselves all wedged and bunched up the back like an upwardly-directional pair of underwear; I intend to be the kind of person who has spices neatly contained in small, labelled containers but it never comes to pass, luckily this doesn’t put me off using them.

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Salmon, mango and coriander salad

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Salmon mango salad on a green plate, on a baking tray with a fork below it

Mango? Salad? In these final shrinking vestiges of autumn as it descends, sighing and officially, into winter? First of all, deliciousness knows no practical response to temperature, so jot that down. Secondly, every now and then I dunk my head under the humbling waters of my site analytics and am reminded that a shocking number of my viewership comes from the United States, despite my distinct non-Americanness — to wit, the very nomenclature of this recipe, which, stateside, would be cilantro. While America does enough self-pandering to last us all a lifetime, some of the best and coolest long-term mutuals that I’ve never met are from the US and it does occur to me that this Salmon, Mango and Coriander Salad would be particularly tempting if I lived somewhere with summer rapidly approaching. On the other hand, I’ve had this for dinner three times this week alone here in increasingly frosty New Zealand. Once tasted, you’ll want to make time for this recipe all year round. And with frozen, cubed mango, it’s quite possible to do this. (And, I feel strenuously driven to make clear above the fold, if you hate coriander I have a variation for you.)

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Butternut, chickpea, and peanut soup

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a spoon resting in a bowl of butternut soup with bread on a plate next to it

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.

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Peanut butter chocolate chunk squares

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Sliced peanut butter chocolate chunk squares

As this food blog approaches its eighteenth turn around the sun, it occurred to me to conduct some market research (instagram story polls) to learn more about what on earth people want; especially since I am, if I may be blunt, not in a period of engagement that history books will recall as significant. Whether this blog is flourishing or flopping, I’ll still keep writing it because I genuinely love it — which means it can never truly flop — but there’s no harm in asking questions and selectively heeding their responses. Today’s recipe for peanut butter chocolate chunk squares doesn’t, alas, meet any of the data’s findings, but it is what I had prepared for this week, and even if not data-informed, it is — of course! — delicious.

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