Category: Gluten-free

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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Gingerbread Espresso Martini

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Despite five years in hospitality and more than triple that with a food blog where I try to convince you of my authority, some skills-based aspects of food elude me: I’ve never poached an egg convincingly, I don’t have the engineering project management qualifications required to get sourdough off the ground, and I’m abysmal at making coffee. Working a Friday rush when a customer would order a round of espresso martinis, perhaps not realising that this involved grinding everything to a halt and preparing each individual coffee shot with maddening torpor — was a particularly piquant slice of hell. When I was promoted to running a cocktail bar that resolutely didn’t have a coffee machine, we cleverly used cold brew instead in our espresso martinis — most effectively — and with this new relaxed approach I could finally appreciate the cocktail.

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Avocado, Labaneh, and Preserved Lemon Spread

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I’ve never had a library card that didn’t carry with it fines of some shape. How many other eleven-year-olds have you known to get debt collection letters from Baycorp? That was me, starting as I meant to go on. Some two years ago, Auckland City Libraries — my newish local — stopped enforcing fees, unlocking a new level of relaxation I hadn’t known possible to access. It’s amazing how quickly one adjusts, how quickly things feel normal. I love getting out a stack of cookbooks periodically from the library for inspiration without having to worry that the brisk passage of time will suddenly incur mounting fines; one such book that I rented six weeks ago, and still haven’t quite yet returned, was The Palestinian Table by Reem Kassis.

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roasted brussels sprouts with agrodolce and feta

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In this charmless era where the murmurs of backlash begin to brew before a rising entity has time to be completely perceived, let alone overrated, I do enjoy a good slow-burn image rehabilitation. When deserved. In the case of the blameless brussels sprout, that metonymic representative of a small child’s innate suspicion of greens, that dinner-as-punishment vegetable, it’s unsurprisingly much more palatable when roasted or generally scorched over high heat in some fashion than boiled into limp and pallid reprehensibility.

And when you add agrodolce and a snowfall of crumbled feta? The brussels sprout is not only rehabilitated, it’s utterly impervious to the backlash cycle.

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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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Roasted Beetroot with Za’atar and Fried Mint

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I’ve just realised this recipe for Roasted Beetroot with Za’atar and Fried Mint has a certain pink Hi Barbie! energy, which is entirely coincidental because I’m too tired to come up with any ruthless marketing tactics proactively this week. That being said, if it’s my subconscious who thought of it then I thank them (love doing things subconsciously, it’s like having an executive assistant whose work I can take credit for). This recipe is the seasonal inverse of my Tomatoes and Fried Mint; I’ve given it a thick, wool-lined winter coat and a darker shade of lipstick and am sending it on its way again.

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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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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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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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