Category: Side Dishes and Snacks

Prawns, rocket, gruyere, lemon

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A white plate with pink floral border, with prawns and rocket piled up on it along with a fork

I have hit a rather preposterous stage of my sleep cycle proceedings where going to bed at 1am feels, comparatively, like an early night — but otherwise, when am I going to get these blog posts done? At a reasonable hour? Can you locate one for me? So, once again I find myself on the other side of midnight, rationalising every minute, but I’m going to keep ploughing onwards because it’s already October 3rd which means it’s basically mid-October which means it’s basically next June. And, importantly, because this recipe is so delicious that I’m committed to telling you about it in a relatively timely fashion. Fortunately it’s so sprightly-quick that by the time I’ve typed out its name — prawns, rocket, gruyere, lemon — you could be halfway to making it.

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Pipérade for all seasons

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A serving spoon lifting a spoonful of piperade from a frying pan

This blog has been a little quiet lately, mostly because my work-life balance has been abysmal, not something I’m happy about! Nor something I seem to be able to fix by pointing at myself in the mirror and yelling “work-life balance”. Curious. Nevertheless, here we are with a recipe my erstwhile Patreon patrons will recognise — though this is a slight adaptation rather than straight double-bounce. It’s that Basque classic pipérade, made pan-seasonal with a jar of roasted red peppers and canned cherry tomatoes. This makes it as much amenable to the most fruitless depths of winter as it does for those increasingly frequent disenchanting summers where the tomatoes are 20-denier, pale pink, and $15 a kilo. An enchanting dish, both in the haste of its method and the taste of the result, you’ll find reasons to cook this over and over, and with a few jars and cans in your pantry, you’ll have the means to do so, too.

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Got lemons? Get 18 lemon recipes.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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