Category: Easy and/or Fast

Pappardelle with calamari, corn, and mascarpone

4 Comments

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.

Continue reading →

Instant gnocchi, big beans, and red chilli pesto sauce

2 Comments

A brown scallowed bowl of gnocchi on a pink and white patterned plate

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.

Continue reading →

Got lemons? Get 18 lemon recipes.

1 Comment

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.

Continue reading →

Zibdiyit Gambari (Prawns in Spiced Tomato Sauce)

5 Comments

P1210812

When I say I saw the moon last month, I mean for real: through a mighty telescope, staring right at her, frankly exposed and yet somehow voyeuristic — like seeing a painted Edward Hopper character, but also through a telescope — and undeniably powerful, not least because it happened on my birthday, not least because it had rained all evening and in the final minutes before calling it for the night, the sky suddenly shrugged and cleared for us. On the other hand, I completely missed the Aurora Borealis this week, experiencing it only as a vicarious facsimile of a facsimile through other people’s photos; to which I say: it’s the same sky! Give it to me! Food blogging in winter evokes those same emotions when I’m in a breakneck race against the clock to photograph my food in the twelve usable minutes — at best! — of Good Light. I can see the blue sky! It’s light and airy in my apartment! Give me the light! Why does my food look so muddy and dull?!

Fortunately, I caught this Zibdiyit Gambari at the golden hour of 4.38pm-4.52pm, and so you get to see it and hear about it. And not that I deal in hypotheticals, because they’re not real options and therefore there’s no point considering, but if a small goblin appeared and offered me either the chance to see Aurora Borealis or the ability to always catch the perfect light for my food blogging I can’t tell you, hand on heart, that I’d definitely go for the captivating visual miracle of science. Or at least, not the one you’re thinking of.

Continue reading →

Kimchi Tagliata

1 Comment

P1210772

Though I celebrate culinary simplicity in theory — a crystalline yet oleaginous broth, a salted ripe tomato wreathed in basil, a steamed new-season potato — I am, in practice and in soul, a meddler who often mistakes more for superior. You know, “this recipe or menu item must be the best (and best value for money) because it has the most components”. And, in all honesty, I only desire a plain steamed potato, no matter how lovingly and organically grown, about zero point seven five times a year. Getting a firm grip on my maximalist tendencies doesn’t mean sacrificing flamboyance: see my café brûlot ice cream, which I accepted was significantly better with less condensed milk while still retaining both richness of flavour and component frequency. And so, this kimchi tagliata — a supremely simple recipe — has only been meddled with marginally, walking back my initial excess aspirations to great effect.

Continue reading →

No-bake Chocolate Ganache Tart

1 Comment

P1210673

A base of butter-coated crumbs clinging to each other, a simple ganache filling, a little stove-top action, but the dial of the main oven remains untwisted; that, to me, is perfection. In this content-saturated world that semiotically re-introduces its creators in an endless loop (I never know if I’ve used the word semiotic correctly but I figure if I keep using it, I’ll have to be correct eventually), I grow weary of the need for faux-deep wraparound justifications for each recipe, all of which eventually sound the same — you know, here’s the thing: it’s time we talk about tubers; here’s part one in my series called, it just me or is no one celebrating the cephalopod; call me crazy but I’ve had it up to here with [x ingredient that they have previously shared nineteen recipes of] and it’s time to admit that [y ingredient which has one molecule’s difference from x ingredient] is superior. But without wanting to accept self-awareness as a means to an end; I’ve got to hand it to the dull-to-me food creators in this one regard: when I consider this no-bake chocolate ganache tart, I genuinely do feel like saying bland platitudes about how it’s superior to all other chocolate goods, indicating that I’m the first person to ever feel this way. Ever taste a chocolate tart so good it makes you boring?

I’d shudder, if it weren’t so distractingly delicious.

Continue reading →

Pappardelle with Fennel and Bean Escabeche

2 Comments

P1210634

Sometimes I’m not sure who my recipes are for, other than myself. It’s not that they’re so very different, as you can find ice cream and pasta anywhere without vigorous effort. It’s more that they’re neither technically whizz-bang nor weekdayishly practical, on top of which they aren’t arriving with any reliable consistency and when they do, there’s caveats. Caveats like: this Pappardelle with Fennel and Bean Escabeche is too fancy to be truly humble, but too humble to be truly fancy; small children probably won’t like it; it’s as pale as a pile of crumpled cashmere mock-neck sweaters; and it contains four tablespoons of vinegar.

Continue reading →

Espresso Tahini-swirled Banana Bread

2 Comments

P1210558

I feel we have taken the whole “we eat first with our eyes” ethos too far — not so much celebrating beauty as chasing and discarding it like some endless game of culinary paintball. And yet — I concede — I do love a rippled food, from ice cream to soup. Whether it jogs some innate, abstract art-via-fingerpainting Stendhalian response or whether it’s a satisfying visual demonstration of flavours at the edge of their breaking point before they acquiesce and blend together, or whether it’s because it’s cute, the ripple appeals to me and I keep finding myself returning to it. Even, in the case of this Espresso Tahini-swirled Banana Bread, where you can taste it but not really see it, where you have to trust me that it’s there — something for the true ripple-heads who don’t need mere visual stimulus to enjoy the weaving together of edible elements.

Continue reading →

buttered greens with basil

Leave a comment

P1210526

Not wishing to minimise time in the kitchen and having a genuine proclivity for drama, I don’t energetically seek out recipes solely based on how easy and quick they are as a rule. But I also won’t say no. With that in mind, it’s possible I can’t quite be trusted when I claim a recipe is both easy and quick — though I’m very, very confident that this recipe for Buttered Greens with Basil fits that bill. Easily. It is, in fact, so work-of-moments that it’s more of an idea, really — just a bit of light chopping and a few turns in a hot pan and it’s ready to become your next established side dish.

Continue reading →

white chocolate-dipped joe frogger cookies

4 Comments

P1210471

I have all the time in the world for a droll, old-timey recipe title, the more obtuse and obscured in layers of misheard words and regional vernacular the better. Fortunately, as well as having the kind of eye-catching name that caught my eye and made me want to bake them instantaneously, these Joe Froggers are also strikingly delicious.

Continue reading →