Category: Rice, Risottos, Pilafs, Etc

Roasted carrot kushari

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This weekend I asked my modest number of Instagram followers whether they were currently feeling burnt out. 54% of people said yes, medically, 38% of people said they were very tired and almost burnt out. A mere seven total people said they were fine. Why did I ask? Well, I would describe myself as currently spending time googling the symptoms of burnout, if you know what I mean. But as I suspected, burning out is rarely something you’re doing alone.

One such prong on the serving fork of tentative burnout claims is my famous ongoing inability to carve out enough time to keep this blog updated frequently—which then leads to time-consuming self-flagellation and further stress and misery as the last blog post fades further into the calendar—and the cadence of posts here has continued to dwindle so much that there’s barely any pattern-recognition to be had. Nevertheless, here I am in the month of August—just—with a recipe that has truly kept me tethered to the earth on a weekly basis, which is why I’m eager to share it with you at last: Roasted Carrot Kushari. To be clear, this recipe will in no way solve your burnout. But I promise it won’t add to it.  

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Spiced Pearl Barley Pilaf

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A red casserole dish of barley pilaf with a serving spoon and sprigs of thyme in front of it

If you’re not convinced that eating barley is a great way to spend the summer, think again—unless it’s winter where you are, in which case, I guess you can just continue thinking steadily. My mother got me a second-hand Lynn Bedford Hall cookbook for Christmas—Ms Bedford Hall, the author of one of my already most-beloved, most-1980s cookbooks, and this new-to-me volume was every bit as full of camp panache and gelatine despite being published in the futuristic year of 1993. Rocket is a “trend-setting herb”, tuna mousse is “ubiquitous” but “impressive”, while chilled broccoli and apple soup has “a quiet dignity”. It’s all charming stuff. It’s also surprisingly practical, and by and large alluring to both cook and eater—even the light-refracting wobbly solidity of gelatine starts to call one’s name after some persistent repetition and my desire to “add a splash of drama to a ladies’ luncheon”. From this volume, I’ve lightly adapted her spiced pearl barley pilaf recipe and in turn, urge you to adapt it further as you see fit. This pilaf is a stunningly bolstering dinner or packed lunch, and so delicious (and cheap, or as Ms Bedford Hall would say, “economical”) that it overcomes all unphotogenic shortcomings.

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Sha’aktoura (rice and lentil pilaf)

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a gold plate of sha'aktoura with mint leaves on a floral patterened fabric

One of the more lamentable ways I begin sentences these days is “I saw this in a screenshot of a tweet on Instagram”. Now, to be fair, I could try receiving information in more highbrow, or at least more trustworthy formats and sources but those formats and sources are mostly decaying and I haven’t quite shaken the time-corrupting doomscroll muscle memory just yet, so here we nevertheless find ourselves. To that end; I saw a screenshot on Instagram of a tweet by cowboypraxis that said “i tried to make two plans in one day. as if i were god. as if i were literal god.” and I understood completely; My weekend comprised two such that-way-lies-folly plan-filled days, and yet! This Sha’aktoura from Sami Tamimi’s new cookbook Boustany is so breathtakingly calm and accommodating to cook that it can both be a plan and fit around your plans and make you feel really rather godlike in the process. Or, at the least, like someone who doesn’t begin sentences by referencing screenshots on Instagram.

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23 Bean Recipes for you

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Hummus with pomegranate seeds and pine nuts.


To paraphrase Robert Altman: Beans, now more than ever! Real ones know beans shouldn’t be introduced with an apologetic tone—yes they’re cheap and nutritious, but they’re also elegant, buttery, robust, with the axis of history contained within their stout little bodies. If you’re after further inspiration, here’s a round-up of 23 recipes from my back catalogue for all the bean lovers out there, from Palestinian Msabaha to salt and vinegar beans, to freeform black bean cobbler. I’ve broadly included a few lentils in there, too.

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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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Green oats, fried egg, bloomed paprika butter, salt and vinegar chips

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A fried egg with crushed chips on top, in a white plate with a blue rim and a spoon resting on it

Now, you might look at this recipe title — green oats, fried egg, bloomed paprika butter, salt and vinegar chips — and expect me to implore you to trust me, to trust the process. You absolutely should not. It’s not that this dish is so offputtingly outlandish or hellbent on offending, but if there’s a voice in your head saying “abhorrent”, then I wouldn’t ignore it. If, however, your curiosity is piqued, then allow me to expatiate.

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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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Green Pesto Risotto

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Consider comfort: it’s as much in the mind as it is in the practical application, and what one person finds calming another will shudder at. Ascribing such properties to objects, tasks, sounds, textures, is what makes the world go round and for me, a scholar of Nigella Lawson, I have ended up with a kind of Pavlov’s Comforted Dog reaction to risotto through the frequent reading and re-reading of her cookbooks. The way Nigella writes about this dish and the reassuring joys of both making and eating it has staunchly solidified risotto’s place in my mind as a thing that comforts, and making risotto means It’s Comfort Time, there’s rain on the roof of my soul and a fire crackling in my heart and every fabric touching me is warm and soft. Presumably, if she’d spoken this way about, say, pancakes or steak tartare, that’s how I’d feel about those foods instead, but risotto speaks for itself — the repetitive, methodical stirring, the grains swelling under your spoon like a time-lapse video that hasn’t been sped up yet, the bowl-and-spoon homeliness of the finished dish, the acquiescent rice barely requiring any chewing from you.

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One-pan Fried Chickpeas, Rice, and Greens

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You know that phrase along the lines of if I’d had more time I’d have written a shorter letter, apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain but originating with Pascal? It springs to mind, somewhat tenuously, as I try to convince you of this recipe’s simplicity while firing off absolute paragraphs upon paragraphs of instructions — though as a votary of the School of Nigella, I am defiantly defensive of a wordy recipe. (And speaking of attribution, interesting how recency bias and perhaps incuriosity — but also being only human! — lead us to bestow the invention of a recipe to whoever the last person was that we saw making it, much as the glory for this phrase is usually thrown towards Twain. As an ambitious writer I can only but dream of such easy valour!)

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