Category: Dips and Spreads

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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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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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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Basil olive dip

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A red and white leaf shaped plate of dip next to a yellow and white plate of crackers

This summer has been a wildly overdue and blissfully extended break from using my brain for money, during which time I frolicked and cut capers and picnicked and read and daydreamed and ate ten (10) oysters. Unfortunately this blog also suffered from my briefly deadbeat absenteeism, but given everything going on locally, globally, macro, micro, I’m not sure anyone noticed or minded. That is not me nudging for expressions of having keenly felt my absence like a toddler who hasn’t yet grasped object permanence — though you’re welcome to — but merely a blunt observation. Nevertheless, I’m back for 2025, a year that is so preposterously far into the future that it’s bordering on inconceivable, with a simple recipe for basil olive dip to augment your summer snacking, whether half-hearted or elaborate.

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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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Got lemons? Get 18 lemon recipes.

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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.

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feta with chilli oil pine nuts

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Around 2002, 2003 at the latest, you’d find on tables at any parties wherever three or more aunties or office workers, or both, were gathered: a gleaming white slab of Philadelphia cream cheese on a plate dripping with almost neon sweet chilli sauce, like blood on Fargo snow. Eventually the good people at Philadelphia realised they had a good thing going here and produced their own line of pre-soused tubs of cream cheese and sauce ready to be upended, but it wasn’t the same — the organic gathering of inorganic ingredients and the trend passing from gathering to gathering whether by whisper network or osmosis was the point.

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Avocado, Labaneh, and Preserved Lemon Spread

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I’ve never had a library card that didn’t carry with it fines of some shape. How many other eleven-year-olds have you known to get debt collection letters from Baycorp? That was me, starting as I meant to go on. Some two years ago, Auckland City Libraries — my newish local — stopped enforcing fees, unlocking a new level of relaxation I hadn’t known possible to access. It’s amazing how quickly one adjusts, how quickly things feel normal. I love getting out a stack of cookbooks periodically from the library for inspiration without having to worry that the brisk passage of time will suddenly incur mounting fines; one such book that I rented six weeks ago, and still haven’t quite yet returned, was The Palestinian Table by Reem Kassis.

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The Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Recipe Round-Up!

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The thing about Christmas coming but once (thank goodness) a year is that with each iteration you realise, poignantly, how much has changed since the last one. While you could of course reflect upon this during any Tuesday or September, with its keen sense of tradition and consistency and focus on familial relationships and togetherness, Christmas certainly lends itself to introspection more than, say, Halloween — though don’t let me hold you back. It’s that very sameness that makes the changes sharply delineated, makes you wonder what will have transpired by next Christmas, but it can also be comforting; the same music, the same scent of pine, the same food. And despite the quinquereme of changes that 2022 has powerfully rowed into my life, we can all count on one thing remaining the same: my Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Recipe Round-Up!

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