Category: Dairy Free

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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Freeform black bean cobbler

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a dish of black bean cobbler with a serving inside a bowl in front of it

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.

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Absolutely nothing chocolate cake (with a cookie variation)

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A square chocolate cake drizzled in melted chocolate

Given these vile economic times that we find ourselves unwilling pawns in, I’ve resurrected this absolutely nothing chocolate cake recipe which uses no eggs, no butter, and no substitutions after a long time between bites. And it really does come together out of various dusts and a bit of tap water to form a cake that isn’t just surprisingly good, it’s just a good — and functional — chocolate cake. Now, the last thing I want to do is bring you a recipe that I’m obliged to damn through faint praise, and I was somewhat uncertain as this baked away in the oven. Yes, it’s based on the recipe that fed my childhood, but given that I also used to make myself tomato ketchup and cheese sandwiches, microwaved until either the cheese or the plastic plate was volcanically bubbling, and pretend it was pizza, I’m not sure my tastebuds’ memories can be trusted in that regard. I then repurposed this recipe for my 2013 cult hit eponymous cookbook, published through Penguin — but that was a long decade ago, and then some.

After a further, and for now, final tutu with this recipe, I am happy to report that it tastes genuinely, beguilingly fantastic. Whether a birthday is looming ominously or a vexing (or celebratory) day requires dessert, you deserve cake, regardless of possessing the means to make one. This can be that cake.

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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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Guinness Beef Chilli

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A yellow bowl of chilli with stacked plates in the background

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.

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24 Valentine’s Day Recipes for you

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Marble heart cookies


Valentine’s Day doesn’t inspire within me great frenzied levels of interest, but I do care about (a) drawing attention to myself and (b) encouraging you to make delicious food. If you haven’t got plans already, avoid perching side-by-side with all the other awkward couples like toothpicked cubes of cheese and pickled onions stuck into a halved grapefruit and stay in, instead (then go out to dinner the next night — let it not be said that I’m not here for the restaurant industry). This round-up is much simpler than fiendish beast that is my annual Christmas Gift Guide, but there’s plenty to choose from and I’ve tried to select a few unsung heroes from my back catalogue.

Whether your dance card is full this Valentine’s Day with multiple mouths to feed or it’s single servings — this one goes out to all the lovers.

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The 14th Annual Hungryandfrozen edible gift guide with 87 recipes for you

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A jar with a ribbon around it surrounded by baubles.


Despite last Christmas only having occured 27 minutes ago, it’s suddenly next Christmas – so without further existential crises let’s launch into the all-singing, all-dancing 2024 edition of a favourite tradition for the past 14 years of my 17-year-old blog, something we can all count on, or at least, that we can all count: The 14th Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Guide! With 87 recipes rounded up for you!

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Broccoli coriander salad

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a white and pink plate of broccoli salad on a white tablecloth

Unlike the unfortunate sector of society with the OR6A2 gene that makes coriander taste like soap, my ancestors blessed me with a hearty hyper-tolerance for the herb, and I can happily consume buckets of it like a blithe drayhorse in a meadow. That being said, I didn’t come to this broccoli coriander salad on purpose — it was the happiest and most serendipitous of accidents based on that humble yet potent activity; the fridge-raid dinner. Put it this way, I expected this to (a) taste fine and (b) use up exactly what I had at hand and no more. I did not expect it to blow my hair back so thoroughly, and I’ve had it for or with dinner repeatedly ever since. So, now I’m sharing it with you.

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Tamarillo Sidecar

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Two tamarillo cocktails, a tamarillo and a red fabric rose on a white tablecloth

Cooking is about formulas and working out which jigsaw pieces you can slot in and out of the whole to make something new; but so is drinking. And when you realise how many cocktails are based on liquor + sour + sweet: daiquiris, margaritas, cosmopolitans, mojitos, gimlets, and so on, then you can be emboldened, with the right proportions, to start tinkering. In this case, the tinkering was done for me — I was served a wonderful cocktail at Caretaker and wanted to recreate it at home — but — and this is the last time I’ll say the word ‘tinkering’ — I could not resist tinkering further. Actually, it was that other classic recipe formula: reverse-engineering a trebuchet to launch you as close as possible to your desired recipe using the ingredients you have already in your pantry, which is how I landed on this Tamarillo Sidecar cocktail. That is, if I’d had white rum, it might’ve been the original tamarillo daiquiri I was served at the cocktail bar but needs must, which is an absurd thing to say when cognac is involved but — they must!

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Salmon with roasted cherry tomatoes and fennel

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A piece of salmon resting on roasted cherry tomatoes and fennel on a green plate with a fork

I’ll tell you soon as look at you: SEO ruined food blogging. The death of Google, the concept of pivoting to video, AI and the word I don’t even want uttered near my blog because it makes me so belligerent and queasy — ChatG*T — are carving up the remaining carrion. I’ll leave expanding that preamble for another day, but all of this is to say, contextually, that while I’m a rabid hater of roughly 79-86% of food content out there (up to and including the word “content” to describe writing and developing recipes), there are still pockets of hope to be found, like the dimpling air bubbles in a focaccia — people who are driven by a bona fide and guileless love of food, not a love of affiliate link kickbacks (whatever they even are, other than none of my business!) I’m talking of course about people like Bettina Makalintal, ItsHolly, and in the case of the recipe that inspired today’s salmon with roasted cherry tomatoes and fennel, Hailee Catalano.

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