Category: Side Dishes and Snacks

Caramelised Onion Butter Bean Soup with Chilli Butter Pumpkin Seeds

1 Comment

P1210718

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?

Continue reading →

buttered greens with basil

Leave a comment

P1210526

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.

Continue reading →

shorbat jarjir | rocket soup

8 Comments

P1210432

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.

Continue reading →

Banadora Wa Sumac — Tomato, Mint and Sumac Salad

4 Comments

P1210334

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.

Continue reading →

feta with chilli oil pine nuts

5 Comments

P1210272

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.

Continue reading →

Avocado, Labaneh, and Preserved Lemon Spread

8 Comments

P1210143

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.

Continue reading →

Easy Pear and Parmesan Tart with Chilli Honey Walnuts

Leave a comment

P1210127

As a kid I used to wonder – worry, even – about how rich people worked out what presents to get their loved ones each year. If everyone around you can buy whatever they want, whenever they want, how do you get them something special? I’m still yet to be in a position to find out; but I’m not alone in this fear if the Succession through-line of characters being utterly woeful at giving and receiving gifts is anything to go by (I still cringe to think of Connor offering his aging billionaire father a sourdough starter for his birthday).

I was reminded of this when considering the majesty of the frozen puff pastry sheet: the way it turns a humble handful of ingredients into culinary elegance, lending instant opulence. Even if people are quite well aware that it came out of the freezer ready-rolled, its presence suggests time and sedulous care.

Continue reading →

roasted brussels sprouts with agrodolce and feta

6 Comments

P1210109

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.

Continue reading →

Roasted Beetroot with Za’atar and Fried Mint

Leave a comment

IMG_9003

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.

Continue reading →