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!
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!
As winter comes to an end here – unceremoniously and full of rain — so, perhaps, ends my long summer century of ice creams based on a mixture of condensed milk and whipped cream. Not that I’m denouncing that method by any means, it’s spectacular and pretty foolproof, even for this fool. But my eye has been turned by a quasi-custard semifreddo method where egg yolks are whipped with sugar over steam heat, it’s considerably more work, I grant you, but it’s a commitment I’m happy to make. Why? Because I like cooking! The prospect of a little vigorous whisking is in fact a joy, not something to be sidestepped or eliminated. Also, the resulting ice cream has a particular feathery, tender-shouldered lusciousness that evokes its store-bought relatives a little more closely; though store-bought ice cream fades and melts from view when you consider, instead, this Blueberry Sour Cream Ice Cream recipe.
Patience is not an attribute I’m overburdened with, as you’ll be able to corroborate if you ever witness me bashing the crossing light buttons at an intersection and the up or down arrows on an elevator. However, patience demonstrated her rewards to me with these lemon, turmeric, black pepper and white chocolate cookies, which started off fine, blameless, but not quite right on day one — too crisp and crunchy, prompting a back-to-the-drawing-board sigh. By day two they’d relaxed and softened and become exactly what I wanted — tender, yielding, just a little chewy. Though I’m not the most credible ambassador for ongoing acts of patience; in this case — I get it!
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.
I’m no statistician but I’m confident that there are likely more people throughout the world whose cultures celebrate corn in dessert form than there are those who think it’s weird. Nevertheless, you might need warming up here, ironic, when it comes in the form of something frozen — corn, raspberry, and mascarpone ice cream. This inspiration came to me via another, entirely savoury recipe that I’ll also post about down the line at a discreet remove; but it’s implicitly influenced by all those corn-based desserts and puddings consumed worldwide; if not by the same logic that presumably drove those recipes into existence: corn is sweet! Where else are you going to put it?
There’s a certain power to the foods you read about in books when you’re at that preciocious-yet-still-given-to-phonetics stage, and have little life experience with which to contextualise the words like an obliging Viewmaster. There’s also a certain discombobulating power to reminiscing about something incorrectly – in this case, my blurred memory of reading about characters eating seed cake, striking a flare of curiousity within my young self that I had yet to act upon until now. Enid Blyton, of whom I was a hungry child acolyte, always had her characters foraging food and eating it in verboten or impermanent settings. Initially when writing this blog post I confidently attributed my knowledge of seed cake to her Magic Faraway Tree series; upon double checking it seems I was wrong, but I must have read about seed cake somewhere because I sure didn’t invent it and needed that first hint to plant the, well, seeds that would eventually bloom into this Fennel Seed Cake recipe. I still live in hope of knowing the jumbles and plumcake from What Katy Did at School – at least I know for sure they were actually mentioned in the book.
The irony of the “Florals for spring? Groundbreaking.” quote from The Devil Wears Prada is that invoking it has also become something of a cliche; but like most cliches, it is a useful shorthand. I rewatched this film back in January when I had Covid, assuming it would be exactly the sort of undemanding fare that my diminished self could handle, and weirdly, though I do not dream of labour I also have come to realise I hate movies where the main character gives up an incredible job opportunity for love — make of that what you will. Meryl Streep’s icily supercilious performance is of course easily the high point, but I could hear her imperious murmur encircling my brain as I planned out this recipe. Pork meatballs with fennel, apple, mustard and creme fraiche — for late autumn? Groundbreaking. What next, maple syrup? Cinnamon? But, remember what I said about cliches being useful? Well, they can also be delicious.
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.
As a sedulous devotee in the field of recipe development, “what if this existing recipe was an ice cream flavour?” is a pertinent question I ask myself repeatedly, and — in the case of this café brȗlot ice cream — it’s a question I sometimes find an answer to. Repurposing one recipe into another format isn’t a lazy madlibs way to come up with ideas — although it can help – it’s more that I adore ice cream and it’s the first thing on my mind. You might as soon ask, could this recipe be a lasagne? Despite summer being my least-favoured season, ice cream is my favourite food and I like to mark the passing of each year with a new one for reasons of both personal satisfaction and benefiting from its practical cooling properties.
Hungry and Frozen 