Got lemons? Get 18 lemon recipes.

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.

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Corn, raspberry, and mascarpone ice cream

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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?

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Caramelised Onion Butter Bean Soup with Chilli Butter Pumpkin Seeds

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It’s not on purpose — though I am something of a neurotically focus-pulling autonarrating main character myself — but there’s no way to say this without sounding like I’m trying to do a Carrie Bradshaw voice-over, so you’ll have to both go with it and trust me that it was simply a coincidentally-cadenced train of thought and not me doing a bit; and I’m also going to put a full stop here before I articulate that thought so we don’t all pass out from lack of opportunity to pause for a breath. So — with another deep breath — if the truism holds that soups and stews taste better the next day, and if it’s also true that I made this Caramelised Onion and Butter Bean Soup and it tasted better the next day, and even more glorious the next day, and positively rapturous the day after that— I couldn’t help but wonder, am I ever meant to eat this soup?

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Kimchi Tagliata

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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.

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buttered greens with basil

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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.

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chocolate fudge ripple ice cream

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For someone who harps on about not only how much they love ice cream but who also takes such noisy pride in circumventing Big Ice Cream Machine with my no-churn recipes, it had been a shameful and inexcusable year and two weeks between the café brûlot ice cream I posted about in January, and the last ice cream recipe prior. To rescue this claim from the realm of prevarication and braggadocio and worse, mere adventitiousness, I’ve endeavoured to make more ice cream. Maybe next time I can rescue myself from my inability to say a single normal sentence! But also, maybe not.

Now, where the café brûlot ice cream was grown up and worldly, this chocolate fudge ripple ice cream is significantly more approachable.

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shorbat jarjir | rocket soup

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You know a soup recipe is good when I can overcome its exo-seasonal heat through my sheer demanding curiosity to know what it tastes like. Sure, every time I step outside it feels like I’ve been clamped in a pair of hair straighteners, but I also just had to taste this Shorbat Jarjir, bustling with rocket and spices, from Yasmin Khan’s Palestinian cookbook Zaitoun. It was the rocket itself that lured me in, tangled and peppery, then the warm dusting of spices, then the promise of a satiny puree. I had half-planned to make some dukkah-crusted croutons to accompany it but this soup needed no extra distraction; nor could I be bothered, to be honest. They might have been great, I’m telling myself they weren’t necessary.

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Café Brûlot Ice Cream [no-churn]

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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.

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Banadora Wa Sumac — Tomato, Mint and Sumac Salad

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It’s a new year! To paraphrase Dorothy Parker — out of indolence, not because she needs editing — another one? How? 2024 feels too far into the future for my taste, we all know too much but we’ve learned nothing and Google doesn’t work anymore and the date of my birth is shrinking in the distance to the point where it’s improbable that I existed both now and then. But, here we are, now, and based upon experience I approach the early days of January 2024 cautiously — like I’m throwing a steak to distract and appease a pugnacious neighbourhood dog — but not without hope.

On that somewhat discordant note, I’m beginning the year with Banadora Wa Sumac, an ebullient salad from Palestine on a Plate by Joudie Kalla that echoes the nation’s flag colours and cools the brain while delighting the palate.

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feta with chilli oil pine nuts

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Around 2002, 2003 at the latest, you’d find on tables at any parties wherever three or more aunties or office workers, or both, were gathered: a gleaming white slab of Philadelphia cream cheese on a plate dripping with almost neon sweet chilli sauce, like blood on Fargo snow. Eventually the good people at Philadelphia realised they had a good thing going here and produced their own line of pre-soused tubs of cream cheese and sauce ready to be upended, but it wasn’t the same — the organic gathering of inorganic ingredients and the trend passing from gathering to gathering whether by whisper network or osmosis was the point.

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