Category: Easy and/or Fast

Pasta with harissa, beans, and feta

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A green plate with pasta and a fork on a white background

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.

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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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Lemon halloumi angel hair soup

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A spoon and a fork with pasta twirled around it in a yellow bowl

Prompting you to make soup when the season is not only heading directly towards summer but when we’ve also just experienced three solid days of brain-soaking humidity may appear to be inviting objurgation, but I have an explanation. This lemon halloumi angel hair soup has been my dinner almost every day for the past week — when it wasn’t the broccoli and coriander salad — and its gentle, soothing yet uplifting quality and utter ease of preparation makes it the perfect quickly-wrought meal and moment of calm amongst your regularly scheduled festive hustle, bustle, carousing, and general calendar-wrangling.

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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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kefte bi tahini [lamb meatballs and tahini sauce]

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A roasting tray of potatoes and lamb kefte

Meat-and-potatoes is a phrase I’ve come to think of tinged with not a little pejorative, whether applied to outlook or dinner — but one of the most effective ways to sidestep the lowering veil of culinary or generalised boredom is, of course, to see how other people are doing it better. In the case of this Palestinian recipe for kefte bi tahini, it’s both a glamorously dashing yet earthy pairing and an opportunity to celebrate and experience Palestine’s cuisine. This recipe comes from Yasmin Khan’s wonderful Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen, and it’s one I’ve cooked from before. I first found a similar recipe in The Palestinian Table, a compelling book by Reem Kassis that I’ve also cooked from before — the relative simplicity of Khan’s version turned my head, but its inclusion in both books only served to make me want to cook it more; clearly this is a recipe people love.

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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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Pipérade for all seasons

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A serving spoon lifting a spoonful of piperade from a frying pan

This blog has been a little quiet lately, mostly because my work-life balance has been abysmal, not something I’m happy about! Nor something I seem to be able to fix by pointing at myself in the mirror and yelling “work-life balance”. Curious. Nevertheless, here we are with a recipe my erstwhile Patreon patrons will recognise — though this is a slight adaptation rather than straight double-bounce. It’s that Basque classic pipérade, made pan-seasonal with a jar of roasted red peppers and canned cherry tomatoes. This makes it as much amenable to the most fruitless depths of winter as it does for those increasingly frequent disenchanting summers where the tomatoes are 20-denier, pale pink, and $15 a kilo. An enchanting dish, both in the haste of its method and the taste of the result, you’ll find reasons to cook this over and over, and with a few jars and cans in your pantry, you’ll have the means to do so, too.

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Pappardelle with calamari, corn, and mascarpone

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pappardelle, corn and squid on a green plate on a white tablecloth with lemons, plates, a pink vase and a plant in the background

Trust is a significant part of cooking; trust in the repetition of processes, in the muscle memory of your hands, in your materials, in the science, in the author. This recipe for pappardelle with calamari, corn and mascarpone might sound slightly odd — or it might strike you as rakishly intriguing — but I suspect it’s not what you had for dinner last night already; nevertheless — trust me. As a kind of safeguarding measure this recipe serves but one person, so that at least you only have to grapple with your own response and perception. However, if it helps, as a kind of offering of collateral, this combination is directly inspired by a headily compelling dish I had at Gilt Brasserie. Theirs was simpler — I’ve added the pasta — though I suspect their method had some more flourish to it — but the tableau of flavours and textures was one I knew I had to recreate, that I yearned for, culinarily speaking, before my plate was even cleared.

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