Category: Gluten-free

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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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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