Category: Easy and/or Fast

kūmara chocolate button cookies

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Even someone as relatively jaded as I can occasionally still have my brain rewired by a tweet, for example, the claim by Folu (of Unsnackable acclaim) that chocolate chip cookies should have 30% less chocolate. (And I am nothing if not a scholar; historians found records of this opinion dating as far back as 2014.) It seems counter-intuitive — what, after all, is the point of chocolate if not to push you to take its presence to the extreme in every possible application — and yet it makes sense; cookies themselves should be the main character, not a merely tolerated and oversaturated vessel, if you want it that much just eat some chocolate. It was this tweet that guided my hand while making these kūmara chocolate button cookies; each softly mountainous ball of dough holds three chocolate buttons, tops, and that contained rarity only adds to the chocolate’s allure.

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caramel banana self-saucing pudding

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I was explaining to a friend how tired I am, and illustrated my point by saying I’d watched Goodfellas a week prior but still hadn’t worked up the energy to log it on Letterboxd; and immediately realised that probably wasn’t a dramatic as it sounded in my head. But the fact is I am tired and this blog has suffered as a result (and so have my numerous other open tabs, including Goodfellas on Letterboxd which I finally logged yesterday; whereupon the nation undoubtedly breathed a sigh of relief.) Indeed, I made this Caramel Banana Self-Saucing Pudding several weeks ago and apparently needed this much run-up to write about it, but here it is at last, and it’s fantastically delicious.

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Pasta with Fried Marinated Zucchini

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Well-intentioned people spent years telling us, quite rightly, that we should be eating seasonally but now between climate change and inflation and the insistence on growing and selling us out-of-season food anyway, I’m not sure seasons even exist meaningfully anymore, not least culinarily. Which is why I’m making this kind of flagrantly summery recipe for pasta with fried marinated zucchini in the middle of winter because, I don’t know, the in-season food isn’t any cheaper nor better quality.

I’m also making it because it’s delicious but you know I can never miss an opportunity to pitch stentorian wrath towards the supermarket duopoly! And they certainly keep me rich in such opportunities (if not in seasonal produce.)

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Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Snacking Cake with Brown Sugar Icing

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Look, I am standing with a foot on both sides of the fence here: I still find the phrase “snacking cake” irritating and yet continuously, willfully bake cakes that undeniably fit this billing. I think it started when I got myself a 25cm square tin: such width, such surface area, there’s something so accessible and appealing and genuinely snackable about the cakes its shallow walls bear. The latest iteration is this Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Snacking Cake with Brown Sugar Icing; yes, it’s a cake, but it’s definitely of the snacking variety, almost veering into slice territory. After getting most of my disdain out of the way with my Lemon Polenta Snacking Cake I’ve probably got about one more cake like this left before I have to give up on the whole scornful thing and just proceed in earnest.

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Pecan Pie Crunch Slice

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Asking what my favourite anything is — colour, song, movie, production of Sondheim’s musical Company — will not warrant a simple response but instead invites you to a dialogue, no, a diatribe, where I meticulously explain the respective merits of my many, many favourite things. I’m indecisive, sure, but may I reframe it: there is just so much in this world for me to love, and who could possibly commit to a singular favourite under such circumstances? That being said, slices — both the baked and the melt-and-mix-and-refrigerate type — are high up in the echelons of my favourite sugar-based foods and possibly, if I really had to choose, they could be my actual favourites (along with cakes, cookies, muffins, puddings, ice cream, pastries…) It’s that texture-forward focus of slices that makes them so inviting to the bite, and their oddly alluring ability to hold numerous pre-packaged ingredients; this Pecan Pie Crunch Slice absolutely delivers on both fronts.

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Cauliflower Marbella

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I am a woman of some few traditions; one of which is that every summer I reread Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel Rivals, which got its hooks into me at a formative age and whose pages comfort despite my not particularly enjoying any of Cooper’s other books that I’ve tried. Maybe I should hastily add more intellectual titles that I’ve read to balance this admission, but whatever, my post-Christmas humid somnolence is simply not the same without this poorly-aged yet wildly scintillating book. And besides, Rivals is intellectual, with its characters quoting poetry off-book and enthusing over operas, and provides a treasure trove of 80s food references throughout its ceaseless parade of dinner parties and boozy lunches. And one such reference inadvertently influenced today’s recipe for Cauliflower Marbella.

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Lemon Polenta Snacking Cake with Lemon Custard Buttercream

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While I am curious and uninhibited about emerging food trends, the term “snacking cake” inspires within me a certain luddite cantankerousness. How can this term justify its existence when all cakes can be snacked upon? I don’t need a cake to announce its relevance to me! And the offered criteria seems to just describe, well, cakes. I understand that we have yoga pants and riding boots and breakfast burritos and so on but “snacking” is too broad a verb to cling to that noun with such unmerited authority as far as I’m concerned.

However!

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Hands-free Black Bean and Brown Rice Casserole

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Where last week’s recipe was flighty and fancy, this Hands-free Black Bean and Brown Rice Casserole is more sensible and functional — not exactly dinner party fare but highly amenable to that evening slump in energy and inspiration when you require dinner but wish to neither think nor try. While my blog is not generally a perky resource for busy people with many mouths to feed — it’s merely a collection of recipes that I love — I aim, at least, to be practical about the outwardly impractical. This recipe, however, is pure pragmatism without qualification. You plonk a bunch of long-life pantry ingredients in an oven dish, bake for an hour, and there’s your dinner.

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Lemon Vodka Pasta

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You might well ask, how can I possibly wring further mileage out of the pairing of lemon and pasta when there’s already the Pasta with Lemon, Garlic, and Thyme Mushrooms; the Lemon Rosemary Fettuccine; and the Lemon “Parmesan” Spaghetti recipes on here for starters? It’s not just a case of if you get it you get it, but to me each of these recipes has their own personality, narrative, energy, and — importantly — flavour — and I could probably come up with another ten recipes combining lemon and pasta and argue for each of their relevance. But still, you might well ask, and I shall answer: what sets this Lemon Vodka Pasta apart is its spirited spin on the French beurre blanc sauce, where wine and vinegar are evaporated down before having butter whisked in. Here, the strong and sour components come from vodka and lemon, further adulterated with cream to give the emulsion a helping hand.

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Small-batch Peanut Mocha Cookies (gluten-free)

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Despite the fact that not once in my sixteen-year career as a food blogger have I ever had a large group of dependents to regularly feed, I still tend to bake as though many hands will be reaching for the finished product. What can I say, I like filling the tins, I like abundance, I like knowing that the sweetmeat I’ve eaten won’t be my last, that it has brothers rising up and multiplying behind it like the brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (actually that’s not a great analogy because that part terrified me as a kid, but it demonstrates the vibe nonetheless.) What care I for the small-batch cookie? Not much, initially. But my head can reliably be turned by novelty value, and so here we find ourselves with these Small-Batch Peanut Mocha Cookies, the yield of which can be easily summarised by Dee Dee Ramone counting off a song.

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