Category: Vegan Mains and Dinners

Sweet and sour celery salad

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A new low, mingled with a new high: I had to leave the country to finally carve out time to write one single blog post. On the other hand, I have finally left the country after fourteen years (to which I strenuously add, no one is owed a little holiday! It just really felt as though I had completely expired, viability-wise.) My partner and I are in Sri Lanka; I write this overlooking an exquisite beach in pleasantly stifling evening heat, as though I’m a more functional, yet objectively less culturally impactful, Ernest Hemingway.

In the month of September, I went to Christchurch for the WORD festival, went home briefly for Mum’s 70th, sent two lit4lit newsletters, recorded my Hoods Landing audiobook, and left the country (around working full-time and then some), which is why it’s been so long since I last blogged. And, why we’re lucky this recipe, via Ixta Belfrage, for sweet and sour celery salad is SO sensational, otherwise, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t remember a single thing about it or which adjectives to apply to it. Fortunately, I am always rich in adjectives.

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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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Big green soup

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A bowl of soup on a wooden board with a bushel of flat leaf parsley and a spoon on it

Whatever it is going on in my brain, be it nameable or undesignated, it only occasionally manifests in the form of what is commonly known as ‘food hyperfixation’. I’ve always been emotionally fixated on the idea of food, specifically, cooking it—experiencing a certain scarcity-minded franticness when I’m unable to cook, which I suspect is, at the least, a bit weird. Now and then, though, a certain food will cohabitate with my habits, like having a writer in residence staying with you: this past week it was lentils. I yearned for their collapsing bodies, tipping them like a rainstick into a bowl ready to soak with cool water, endlessly testing little simmering spoonfuls—no, still not cooked yet.

This recipe for Big Green Soup actually uses split peas, but! Lentil Week is a state of mind type of nomenclature. Speaking of nomenclature, the recipe title misleads not at all: it’s Big (makes over a litre); it’s Green (if you have 400g of silverbeet drooping malevolently in the fridge, this is for you); and it sure is Soup. It is also, of course, delicious. That’s why we’re here.

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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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triple tomato beans

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Triple tomato beans and a gold spoon on a black and white striped plate, sitting on a blue and white cloth
Mariah Carey has taught us many things: gratuitious vocabulary words, chopping the top off your jeans with scissors so they’re more low-waisted, and of course, the art of the creatively honourable remix. For the true of heart, riffing on an existing idea doesn’t mean simply swapping out a teaspoon of this or that—it’s about giving a recipe another reason to live. In this case, I suspected that my triple tomato risotto could also be lavishly excellent when pulsified with beans instead of rice. I was correct—and it took quarter of the time to make.

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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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Noodles with smoky gochujang bokkeum

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A pan full of noodles and vegetables

Some years ago I posted a recipe for a vegan variation on gochujang bokkeum, a Korean fried chilli sauce, and though I’m no longer vegan, the sauce in this iteration has lost none of its monumental appeal. Here I’ve simply stirred it through wide, chewy noodles with some flash-wilted greens and a hazy splash of liquid smoke; it makes for a dinner of such wild splendidness that even though it’s something of a retread; it does both bear repeating and stand alone on its own merit. Indeed, I’ve made a slight variation of this three times this weekend alone because it has thrice been the exact correct answer to ‘what should we have for dinner’, prosaic though that is.

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Freeform black bean cobbler

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a dish of black bean cobbler with a serving inside a bowl in front of it

After last week’s rampant whimsy we’re back to something practical with this freeform black bean cobbler; so named because it’s so adaptable that it might veer all the way around to being annoying again — in that sometimes having too many options just means you have to make more decisions, but I shall attempt to make it clear why the main suggested path is worth traversing, culinarily.

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Butternut, chickpea, and peanut soup

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a spoon resting in a bowl of butternut soup with bread on a plate next to it

I have an old cookbook — as in, it’s from 1980 and I found it in an opshop — called, with brisk disregard for tautology, Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook. Fascinatingly, it lists milk, cheese, and eggs as three of the most important ingredients for an economical kitchen; meanwhile I remember butter and cheese quadrupling in cost overnight somewhere around the beginning of the recession in 2007 and never, ever lowering or even settling in price ever again. When the consumer cannot control the rapidly-shifting sands underneath our feet nor the repellant deciders who dictate the prices of ingredients, it makes me wary of claiming a recipe to be cheap or budget-friendly. But if you can’t guarantee cost-of-living-crisis-amenability — and it’s hard to guarantee much of anything at all in these trying times — I can at least promise a certain versatility that can meet you where you’re at, in this Butternut, Chickpea, and Peanut Soup.

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