Category: Gluten-free

Butternut, chickpea, and peanut soup

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a spoon resting in a bowl of butternut soup with bread on a plate next to it

I have an old cookbook — as in, it’s from 1980 and I found it in an opshop — called, with brisk disregard for tautology, Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook. Fascinatingly, it lists milk, cheese, and eggs as three of the most important ingredients for an economical kitchen; meanwhile I remember butter and cheese quadrupling in cost overnight somewhere around the beginning of the recession in 2007 and never, ever lowering or even settling in price ever again. When the consumer cannot control the rapidly-shifting sands underneath our feet nor the repellant deciders who dictate the prices of ingredients, it makes me wary of claiming a recipe to be cheap or budget-friendly. But if you can’t guarantee cost-of-living-crisis-amenability — and it’s hard to guarantee much of anything at all in these trying times — I can at least promise a certain versatility that can meet you where you’re at, in this Butternut, Chickpea, and Peanut Soup.

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Guinness Beef Chilli

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A yellow bowl of chilli with stacked plates in the background

One aspect I particularly appreciate about Nigella Lawson’s ‘In Defence of Brown Food’ chapter in Cook, Eat, Repeat is her note about how “allowing oneself ever to get roped into that game of rating food, or pitting one type against another, is both reductive and pleasure-draining.” We may be gasping and parched amid a nuance drought currently, but none of it is coming from Lawson, at least. She does also note that stews, that brownest of food, “can certainly be, in the wrong hands, unphotogenic”. Which in the case of this Guinness Beef Chilli, holds true — although I would, slightly defensively, clarify that I was being hasty against my will when I photographed it. Ironic, since everything about this recipe demands slowness; that achieved, I found myself with about twenty minutes of usable daylight within which to capture its challenging visage. You already know it, though: the taste is what matters, and this tastes incredible.

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Roasted green beans, fennel, potato, and feta

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Green beans and fennel on a roasting tray

If brunch can be defined as not quite breakfast and not quite lunch, occasionally you require a similar framework applied to your dinner, whether through heat, haste, exhaustion or the lingering memory of prior repletion. I shall not wring a cramped portmanteau out of ‘dinner’ and ‘lunch’ — though others have tried — but I shall offer you this recipe for roasted green beans, potatoes, fennel and feta, which occupies that nebulous yet necessary space.

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Fig leaf gin

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A jar of fig gin sitting on fig leaves on a white tablecloth

Though I spent a not insignificant portion of time with my writing group on Sunday taunting the kind of ironically insubstantial literary elitism that mistakes dogmatism and exclusion for Doing Something — oh, you know the kind I mean — here I am with an undeniably impractical and feckless recipe for Fig Leaf Gin. Not that I ever promised practicality, but I try to keep things within the realm of possibility. This is an outlier — a delicious one, though, and what it lacks in justification for its own existence it does, at least, make up for in ease of execution by being very, very easy to make.

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Triple tomato risotto

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Tomato risotto and a fork on a pink plate

I had no real conceptual understanding, let alone appreciation of risotto until I encountered Nigella Lawson, from whom comes so much of my formative knowledge of food and the joys therein. In her 2010 book Kitchen, she speaks of “the solace of stirring” reiterating her stance that risotto’s comfort and calm emanates not only from its soft babyfood texture, but from the stirring itself, “the ritual of unchallenging but repeated actions”. There’s no fast-tracking risotto — or at least, if there is, I don’t want it — for twenty-five minutes you and the stove and the spoon are one, watching the rice rise under your clockwise or anticlockwise motion. It’s positively meditative.

Considering I lost most of Feburary to repeatedly testing a peanut brittle recipe where the science never quite matched my vision, it was a relief to have this recipe for triple tomato risotto stick the landing perfectly, its deliciousness providing as much comfort as the process of making it. I guess it’s good to be culinarily humbled now and then, but I wouldn’t want to make a habit of it, though more for cost-of-living reasons than maintaining my ego.

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24 Valentine’s Day Recipes for you

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Marble heart cookies


Valentine’s Day doesn’t inspire within me great frenzied levels of interest, but I do care about (a) drawing attention to myself and (b) encouraging you to make delicious food. If you haven’t got plans already, avoid perching side-by-side with all the other awkward couples like toothpicked cubes of cheese and pickled onions stuck into a halved grapefruit and stay in, instead (then go out to dinner the next night — let it not be said that I’m not here for the restaurant industry). This round-up is much simpler than fiendish beast that is my annual Christmas Gift Guide, but there’s plenty to choose from and I’ve tried to select a few unsung heroes from my back catalogue.

Whether your dance card is full this Valentine’s Day with multiple mouths to feed or it’s single servings — this one goes out to all the lovers.

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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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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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