creamy gochujang tomato pasta

March 21, 2023March 21, 2023Leave a comment

While I’m generally a little suspicious about the baseless seduction of nostalgia and our collective memories being strip-mined and sold back to us in a way that amounts to little more than jingling keys in front of a baby to distract it; I’ve nonetheless found myself sighing nostalgically for the early days of Instagram, where you’d merrily and heedlessly post grainy, filtered photos of a coffee cup or the clouds and it wasn’t an ad-clogged video platform with all the ambience of an abandoned shopping mall. But though Instagram is dimly lit by sputtering fluorescent lightbulbs and there’s a persistent sound of dripping water, there is still joy and inspiration to be found within its murky aisles: specifically, the Creamy Gochujang Tomato Pasta that Bettina Makalintal posted on her fantastic crispyegg420 account. I saw it, I wanted to make it, I made it, it was delicious, and now I’ve begrudgingly said one nice thing about Instagram as a result.

My interpretation of this enticing recipe title involves stirring tomato paste, gochujang, and a finely chopped slurry of sundried tomatoes over high heat, before adding pasta water and coconut cream to soften it up. I was after a minimal sauce that clings to the pasta for dear life as opposed to providing a pool it can swim in, but a heavier hand on the cream will do this no harm (and I can understand if the “creamy” aspect of the title isn’t represented well enough for some of you via this quantity of sauce) nor will increasing the gochujang if you want the fieriness more pronounced.

The gochujang has a dense, layered spiciness — not just heat, but a captivating yet subtle sweetness and tangy richness from the rice paste and its fermentation process. Naturally, it’s magnificent alongside the fresh acidic sweetness of tomato paste, itself caramelised into richness by the pan’s heat. The sundried tomatoes provide the midpoint between the two other red ingredients: intense and savoury, but darkly sweet.

The entire sauce can be made while your pasta is boiling, and the result is comforting without being stultifying, luscious without overwhelming, and immensely layered and flavoursome despite the minimal quantities of ingredients. And — the inspiration continues — as I was chopping the sundried tomatoes it occurred to me that for an even speedier version of this recipe you could simply replace the tomatoes and gochujang with a few heaping tablespoons of vegan gochujang bokkeum. The hardest part of this recipe was locating the particular pasta that I had my heart set on, which turned out to be available at a minimart just around the corner — the jaunty doi-oi-oing springs of fusilli bucati corti make any meal feel like an achievement. A shorter pasta is, I think, all the better here, but there’s really no wrong way to eat this and you certainly don’t need a fancy shape: bowties, penne, even just spaghetti would all be wonderful and benefit from that trois couleurs: rouge (I’m working my way through Kieślowski’s film trilogy if you couldn’t tell) sauce.

Creamy Gochujang Tomato Pasta

Spicy and luscious with caramelised tomato hugging every curve of the pasta. You can of course add more gochujang or cream or grate over a cloud of parmesan; however, this is how I made it and it was delicious. This recipe is directly inspired by Bettina Makalintal’s Instagram post and I recommend following her for further inspiration. Serves 2.

200g short and ridged or curly pasta of your choice (I used fusilli bucati corti)
salt, for the pasta water
1 tablespoon olive oil
4 tablespoons tomato paste
1 tablespoon gochujang
6 sundried tomatoes
1/4 cup coconut cream, or cream of your choice, plus more to taste
Leaves from 2-3 stems of fresh thyme, for garnish

1: Heat a large pan of water and generously salt it once it hits boiling point. Tip in the 200g pasta and let it boil away for 11-12 minutes or until the pasta is tender.

2: Once the pasta is in the water, finely chop the six sundried tomatoes, almost as if you’re trying to turn them into a paste (and if you want this finer-textured, have a stick blender, and don’t mind the extra dishes, feel free to pulverise them into an actual paste that way.)

3: Heat the tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan and dollop in the four tablespoons of tomato paste and single tablespoon of gochujang, followed by the finely-chopped sundried tomatoes. Stir this mixture over a high heat for about five minutes — it may appear loose-textured and like it doesn’t want to stick together, but the addition of cream and pasta water later on will turn it into a sauce. The mixture will darken in colour a little as you stir it; this is ideal and adds to the intensity of the tomato flavour.

4: Once the pasta is nearly al dente, remove 1/4 cup of the cooking water and stir it into the tomato mixture, followed by the 1/4 cup of coconut cream. At first the mixture will appear a rather oily and garish orange, but keep stirring and it will grow darker and more richly red as it bubbles away. At this point, it’s up to you whether you want to add more cream to make this (of course) creamier, or a little more pasta water to make it saucier. Remove the tomato mixture pan from the heat, drain the now-cooked pasta, and stir it into the sauce. Divide the pasta between two plates and sprinkle over the thyme leaves.

Notes:

If you mistime the pasta and have thoroughly cooked it before you’ve started the sauce, just remove half a cup or so of the pasta water, drain the remaining water from the pasta, and tip the pasta back into its still-hot pan (though keeping it off the element it was just cooking on, otherwise it will burn) while you finish the sauce.

music lately:

Hellbound by The Breeders, it sounds very 1990 but also, without too much reaching, like kids with teased beehive hairdos in the 1960s could do elaborate dances to it with names like The Hucklebuck and The Sprained Ankle; needless to say I love it.

I’ve Been Thinking About You by Londonbeat, the way it starts out at 100 miles an hour, the emphatic stab on each word in the chorus, what an eternal masterpiece.

Auto Surgery by Therapy?, like, there’s not much more to it than going quiet then loud then quiet then loud but that’s all it needs! It works!

Les Feuilles Mortes by Juliette Greco, if you haven’t heard of her I recommend spending some time with her Wikipedia page, she truly lived, meanwhile amongst all that living she was also a skilled singer, the simple, exquisite melancholy of this song really does evoke the falling autumn leaves of the title. If you’re feeling gloomy, this will make you feel gloomy but super cool at the same time, and sometimes that’s enough to make it through said gloom.

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours every month. There’s no better time than right now — your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

One-pan Fried Chickpeas, Rice, and Greens

February 27, 2023Leave a comment

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!)

Despite all my words this recipe really is simple, and, speaking once more of attribution, it’s little more than an offshoot of the Sunday night pilaf in my 2013 cookbook; fiddled with a little and given creamy-crunchy texture from fried, spice-dusted chickpeas. And I do not lie about it using only one pan! That being said, I’m not overly wedded to a singular pan as a useful framework for recipes — like, if I’m washing dishes then I’m washing dishes, and what you save in pan-space you tend to have to make up for in extra bowls to reserve all the various layers of the recipe — but who am I to argue with the SEO keyword clickable seduction of the words, one-pan. Anyone who’s spent more than one minute on my blog knows that SEO keywords have never been my priority, partially due to my disdain for their effect on the written word and partly due to my own fecklessness but sometimes the stars align!

Anyway, rice, greens, spices, chickpeas, nuts: this is serene, gentle food with a civilised jumble of textures — tender rice, popcorn-esque chickpeas, softly crunchy almonds, almost-melted greens. The spices are fairly calm as well, meant to suggest rather than boldly stride across the palate, but as I’ve mentioned in the notes, you can add more if you want, and if you also want to criss-cross this with sriracha or lacquer it with chilli oil, bravo on your initiative. To make it more luxurious you could add pine nuts or pistachios, to make it cheaper you could use pumpkin seeds or sunflower seeds, beyond that moment of decision, this is fairly soothing on the wallet to boot, inasmuch as anything can be in our debilitatingly enduring cost-of-living crisis. If greens are also too expensive, as well they might be, I used frozen peas in the original pilaf that inspired this, and they’d definitely be fine here too. Whatever you add or don’t add, perfectly cooked rice plus a little something stirred in will always be delicious.

One-pan Fried Chickpeas, Rice, and Greens

A simple recipe (despite how much I’ve written below) that you can add to or subtract from, as is however it’s delicious, calming, and as promised leaves you one pan to wash. Recipe by myself.

2 tablespoons flaked almonds
1 x 400g tin chickpeas
1 heaped tablespoon cornflour (or cornstarch in the US)
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
3 tablespoons rice bran oil, or similar
1 cup basmati rice
1 teaspoon ground cumin, extra
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
500ml/2 cups water
1 stock cube of your choice (or use 500ml prepared stock)
2 large handfuls silverbeet, baby spinach, or other robust green leaves
Fresh thyme leaves from 2-3 sprigs

1: Toast the almonds in a large nonstick frying pan that has a lid (although you don’t need the lid until later, and I’m sure some other type of pan would work fine, this is just what I specifically used) stirring the nuts over a medium heat until they become golden-tinged and fragrant. Turn off the heat and tip the almonds into a bowl or some other receptacle and set aside.

2: Drain the chickpeas and toss them in a bowl with the heaped tablespoon of cornflour, half teaspoon of smoked paprika, and half teaspoon of cumin, stirring to lightly dust the beans in the seasoning. Heat the three tablespoons of oil in the same pan as before, and then tumble in the chickpeas. Fry them over a high heat for about ten minutes, stirring only occasionally, until they’re crispy and browned, covering with the lid if the chickpeas become too agitated in the heat and threaten to ping out of the pan. It will take a good ten minutes or so to truly achieve a crispy texture, so patience is key here. Once the chickpeas are where you want them, tip them into a bowl (perhaps the one that had the cornstarch and spices in it before, hastily wiped out with a paper towel), and set aside.

3: Rinse the rice under cool water, and then place it (the rice, not the water) into the same pan as before. Stir for a couple of minutes over medium heat, just to let the residual water evaporate a little and for the grains to toast lightly, then stir in the teaspoon of cumin, the half teaspoon of cinnamon, and the 500ml water and stock cube (or 500ml prepared stock/broth.) Raise the heat, and as soon as the water comes to the boil, clamp the lid on the pan and bring the heat down to the lowest possible setting. Let the rice cook, without removing the lid, for ten minutes (it may take a minute or two longer, but you can cautiously lift the lid at this point and taste to check how al-dente the grains are.) Once the rice is satisfactorily tender, turn off the heat, roughly chop up your greens if they’re larger leaves — or simply leave them as they are if you’ve got baby spinach — scatter them over the rice, and place the lid back on top again to let the greens wilt in the heat and steam, which should only take a minute or two.

4: Remove the lid, stir the greens into the rice, along with the reserved fried chickpeas and most of the flaked almonds and thyme leaves. Taste to see if it needs a bump in seasoning or spices; serve scattered with the remaining almonds and thyme.

Serves 4, although I’d certainly have room for dessert afterwards.

Notes:

These spices are a jump-off point, if you have spices that you regularly reach for which appear, to your palate, to be missing, feel free to add them.
A dollop of yoghurt on top, or perhaps yoghurt and feta blended together, is very welcome, this would also be delightful with a tangle of fried onions, a step that you could add in perhaps before the chickpeas but after the toasted almonds, although by this point it might just be easier to use two pans.

music lately:

Come On Feet by Quasimoto, oddly poignant in its psychedelic spaciousness, yet also hopeful; either way, a killer beat.

Teenage Caveman by Beat Happening, another one that makes my heart ache with its upbeat yet plaintive opening hook that strongly echoes the emotional tumult of Classical Gas; weirdly the verses are more poignant than the “we cry alone” refrain of the chorus, I’m not musically clever enough to know why but I’m guessing it’s that minor key up to no good again!

Just Be Good To Me, as covered by Mariah Carey live in Tokyo in 1996; this song is so watertight-excellent that I’m not sure it’s possible to do a bad cover of it but nonetheless this is sumptuously casual and casually sumptuous, a fantastic choice for both the silky and raspy sides of Mariah’s unreal voice, and made glorious by that expansive, full-live-band-and-backup-singer lushness.

(Also, this isn’t the full song but it is, if I’m honest, the part I care most about — the “I’ve come home at last” bit — sung by Tony winner Stephanie J. Block emoting to the back row of as yet undiscovered planets during As If We Never Said Goodbye from Sunset Boulevard, I have watched this clip…many times.)

chilled cannellini bean soup with basil spinach oil

February 7, 2023Leave a comment

I absolutely did not intend to leave it so long between blog posts, but the circumstances which were in the process of changing dramatically around the time of my last post have now come to fruition, in fact I’d currently describe myself as kind of circumstance-less, and while all of it was out of my control, and has utterly derailed my plans for this blog and also literally everything else in my life, I can only wallow for so long and eventually have to attempt to flourish within my new non-circumstances. (If this sounds irritatingly cryptic it’s because I can’t speak too freely about the old circumstances till the new ones are secured, you know?) The wallowing is important! But it’s also important to be reluctantly practical.

And so, at last, a recipe: simple and soothingly chilled for these unsoothing and unchilled times; although our summer here in Auckland has been a particularly horrendous write-off culminating in the disastrous weather event at the end of January where we received all conceivable rain from all possible timelines all within one day, but with the rain comes humidity, and with humidity, a cold soup comes into its own.

You may look askance at the brief ingredient list: am I truly asking you to just puree some canned beans, and call it a soup? Well first of all, you’re an adult with free will, so you can add what you like to it, but it is — obviously — important to come at this from a place of already loving beans. I find cannellini beans to be truly delicious in a fairly un-tampered-with state (although I do also love a tampered-with bean), you may find that a splash of soy sauce or a crumbled stock cube isn’t even required; you may want to add sauteed shallots and garlic and celery and so on; as the cook and the eater, the recipe as I wrote it works for me. A bracing splash of pickle brine provides a spike of acidity, like dressmaking scissors slicing through velvet, and the opaque creaminess from the blitzed-up beans is luscious and elegant.

Of course, there’s the basil spinach oil to interrupt that unending ivory; basil for intensity of flavour, spinach because I had some in the fridge — dripped over the soup it rather resembles a giraffe’s pattern with the exposure turned up, or a forgotten petri dish, or a scene from the nuclear power plant in The Simpsons. The swirls are more accessibly pretty, but I am fond of the radioactive blob effect. Either way, the basil spinach oil lends peppery, herbal richness to the soup without overwhelming its frictionless calm. And as someone who tends to seek out from and recreate in food what I can’t get from the wider world, un-overwhelmed frictionless calm in a bowl sounds good to me.

Chilled Cannellini Bean Soup with Basil Spinach Oil

Very fast, very relaxed, a cool velvety pool of pureed beans with bright green lily pads of basil-tinted olive oil, and all you need is a blender. Recipe by myself.

2 x 400g tins of cannellini beans
1 teaspoon pickle brine or lemon juice (or caper brine, or red wine vinegar)
1/2 a stock cube of your choice, or a splash of soy sauce, or Maggi sauce
1/3 cup loosely packed basil leaves
1/3 cup loosely packed baby spinach leaves
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
salt, to taste

1: Place the unopened cans of beans in the fridge a couple of hours before you plan to eat to give them the titular chill — although I also like this at room temperature. Boil the jug (or if you don’t have a kettle, bring a small pan of water to the boil on the stovetop), place the spinach and basil leaves in a sieve, and, holding the sieve over the sink, pour the freshly-boiled water onto the leaves. Immediately follow this up by rinsing them with cold water from the tap, and set aside to drain. This is the fiddliest part of the whole recipe — blanching the leaves helps retain their bright lurid green, and seems to blend them into the olive oil more easily, too.

2: Drain the tins of beans — not too thoroughly and without rinsing, you want to keep some of the can liquid here — and place in a blender, along with the teaspoon of pickle brine or other acid and half stock cube, or splash of soy sauce, or whatever source of salinity you’re using. Fill one of the empty cans about 3/4 full with cold tap water, pour it into the blender with the beans, and blitz everything to a smooth puree. Taste to see if it needs more acid or more salt — I actually like this with pickle brine and lemon juice at the same time, but a little sour goes a long way here.

3: Divide the soup between two bowls and place them in the fridge to chill further while you make the basil spinach oil. Rinse any residual soup from the blender, and press the basil and spinach leaves against the sieve to remove as much water as possible. Blend the leaves, the half cup of olive oil, and a pinch of salt together until the basil and spinach are completely pulverised into bright green liquid, as opposed to oil with bits of green in it.

4: Drop spoonfuls of the basil spinach oil over the soup and either leave them as is or swirl, depending on which option appeals to you, and eat immediately.

Serves 2.

Notes:

A few colour-contrasting splashes of chilli oil or sriracha would be invigorating here.
You probably won’t use all the basil spinach oil at once, but any less oil and the blender wouldn’t be able to process it. Store any remaining in the fridge in a jar or sealed container and use within a day or two.

music lately:

Stuck on You by Failure, a song that achieves all it needs to in the first fifteen seconds and yet still gets better; nonetheless, I urge you to let that opening hook giving way into drums wash over you at least once.

Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in my Hand by Primitive Radio Gods. It may just be the sickly lure of nostalgia or the shuffling mid-tempo Beastie Boys-y beat carrying it but one-hit wonders simply do not hit, wonderfully, like they used to! Also, which is a more dated concept right now: needing to use a phone booth, or having money in your hand?

Pace, Pace, Mio Dio performed exquisitely by Leontyne Price, as the youtube account name says, this is coloratura!

Roasted Cherry Tomatoes with Cherry Tomato Dressing

January 16, 20231 Comment

As someone perpetually sliding around in the gauzy formlessess of liminal spaces — or at least, as someone who feels this way — or, at least, as someone who once heard the word “liminal” and really latched onto it without being 100% confident of deploying the word accurately and yet still blithely using it several times a day — I find myself drawn to recipes which occupy more than one space, not quite a side, not quite a main, able to be raked through linguine or spooned over bowls of various grains, or maybe just eaten on their own with nothing before or after. Recipes like the Chickpeas Diabolique, or Roasted Zucchini with Spinach-Peanut Pesto, or Salt and Vinegar Beans, or Vegetables a là Grecque, or today’s recipe, the equally nebulous but compelling Roasted Cherry Tomatoes with Cherry Tomato Dressing. Is it a side? How many does it serve? I don’t know! Is it delicious? Of course! Why else would we be here!

That being said, if you’re someone who quite reasonably likes to know where you stand, it might help to think of this as a definite side dish, or as a potential pasta sauce, having eaten it as both I can assure you of its success in either regard. Infuriatingly, but with weary predictability, despite it being the middle of summer the cherry tomatoes were stupidly expensive (for full transparency: two punnets of cherry tomatoes, a garlic bulb, a bottle of lemon juice because there were no lemons, and a basil plant cost twenty-two literal dollars) but because I had this idea in my head already and because supermarkets, themselves quite the liminal space, send me into a kind of automaton trance where I dazedly make stupid financial decisions in the name of feeding myself (although to be fair these days it’s hard to buy anything at the supermarket, even the driest bag of lentils, without it being a stupid financial decision), I bought the lot and proceeded with this recipe.

Anyway, enough of the requisite cantankerous captiousness at the state of supermarket prices; what does the dish taste like? As the title claims, it’s pretty simple: roasted cherry tomatoes, with a few unroasted tomatoes plucked out and whizzed up into a peachy-yellow dressing with lemon juice, garlic, and olive oil, then poured back over their friends, so you get this mix of summer-sweet, glorious intensity from the roasted tomatoes and glibly fresh, raw zestiness from the raw tomatoes in the dressing and all that lemon juice. The two opposites meld together gorgeously, aided by the dusky richness of basil leaves bobbing handsomely on the surface like boats in a harbour at sunset. It’s a soft, messy dish with a lot of sauce between that which springs from the tomatoes in the oven and all the dressing, should you not know quite what to do with it I’d just get a spoon and some bread and use the two to empty and wipe the roasting dish completely of every last drop. Looking at that mess of red, yellow and vivid green, it’s easy to forget that tomatoes are more expensive than diamonds and it has rained every single day of 2023, tasting it solidifies this even more so.

Roasted Cherry Tomatoes with Cherry Tomato Dressing

Simple and gorgeous, tastes like a rising sun, and ready to eat on its own or to be stirred through pasta. Recipe by myself.

2 punnets cherry tomatoes
1 tablespoon olive oil

Dressing

6 cherry tomatoes (from one of the above punnets)
1 garlic clove
2 tablespoons lemon juice
4 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon sugar
hearty pinch of salt
a handful of fresh basil leaves, to serve

1: Set your oven to 210C/420F. Remove six cherry tomatoes from one of your punnets and tumble the remaining cherry tomatoes into a shallow roasting dish into which they fit fairly snugly. You can halve some of the tomatoes if you want — I halved roughly a third of them before losing interest. Drizzle over the tablespoon of olive oil and roast the tomatoes for fifteen minutes or until they’ve softened and buckled in on themselves a little, at which point they’ll also release a decent amount of juice into the roasting dish.

2: While the tomatoes are roasting, get on with the dressing. Halve the six cherry tomatoes that you set aside earlier, and scoop out the seeds with a teaspoon. (A slightly fiddly job and I apologise! But you do get to eat the seeds as you go, at least.) Throw the halved and emptied cherry tomatoes in a blender with the peeled garlic clove, the two tablespoons of lemon juice, the four tablespoons of olive oil, the half teaspoon of sugar and a good pinch of salt. Blend it up into a frothy, pale-orange dressing, and taste to see if it needs any balancing of salt, sweet, or sour.

3: Once the tomatoes are done in the oven, pour over the dressing — you don’t need to stir it, but if you want to go for a mere nudge and lift, rather than a vigorous folding — and scatter over the basil leaves.

Serves 1—2, though it depends on how you dish it up. As a side dish, it could serve three to four, but more if there are a lot of dishes; or two to three when stirred through pasta or spooned over polenta, et cetera.

Notes:

Weirdly I could not find lemons at any supermarkets near me, which just adds to that feeling of losing grip on reality that confronts me whenever I do groceries; if you can get hold of one I would encourage you to strip off the zest before juicing it and to scatter it over the tomatoes at the end along with the basil.
If you only have a really large blender you might struggle to whizz up such a small quantity of ingredients, in which case a stick blender would be a lot easier, if you have neither then you could try pushing the tomatoes through a sieve or just really finely chopping and mashing them along with the garlic clove before stirring in the remaining ingredients.

music lately:

Sleep Walk by Santo and Johnny. There’s something about a beautiful instrumental piece of pop that occupies the same space in my brain as a beautiful piece of classical music; it evokes a mood and suggests a story with nothing more than notes and chord progressions, and listening to this glorious tune — and even if you don’t recognise the name, you’ve probably heard it — spins dozens of different stories, all poignant and atmospheric.

Manchild by Neneh Cherry, when those synths come in like a shiver up the spine, yes! To say nothing of the prescient lyrics!

Blues From a Gun by The Jesus and Mary Chain, part of the genre of music that I would describe, in this current economy, as “irresponsibly exciting”.

Chickpeas Diabolique

November 27, 2022November 27, 20221 Comment

We are truly working overtime down in the Just Gotta Get Through This Week salt mines this year (where we spend all day txting each other “just gotta get through this week”), though if the inexorable passage of time has taught me anything it’s that the universe or fate or whatever force is responsible for all this does not care that you’ve made it through this week/month/year! All of which is to say, the external stresses in my life are really externally stressing me this week, and so I’m reproducing a recipe some of you will have seen already last year in the small but mighty island nation that is my Patreon; but in this economy, I’m saying outfit repeating is not only cool, it’s the responsible choice.

P1200696

Joking about being a thesis replicant has rather backfired on me since upon reflection an actual replicant would be much better equipped to deal with trials and tribulations than I am; at the very least a replicant wouldn’t suffer pain in their thoracic spinal region from slumping over a laptop like a collapsed circus tent for eleven hours at a time in the library. But I can report one thing that is literally good: on Friday, I handed in my thesis (roughly 80k words all up, and on time!). Despite, if not because of everything else going on, I am very proud of myself, grateful to those who supported me along the way this year, and relieved to be typing again without the watchful chaperone of APA 7 referencing guidelines. This recipe for chickpeas diabolique is just the sort of barely-laborious cooking you can do when you’re half-conscious at best, and its rip-roaring red-orange hue reminiscent of molten red devil marbles, and surprisingly feisty cayenne heat will help make you feel full-awake.

This is my reworking of a Belgian scampi recipe; the chickpeas are not in the slightest bit intended to be a 1:1 analogue for seafood, it’s more that I thought this sauce and preparation would suit the legumes keenly, and I was correct. In fact, this is possibly my favourite chickpea recipe ever — so far — as much for its speed and ease as its dramatically delicious results from such a simple list of ingredients. Something remarkable, flavour-wise, happens somewhere between the tomato paste sizzling and caramelising and the vermouth hitting the hot pan and rising up again like a magician’s puff of smoke, and it tastes like you’ve done an awful lot more than you really have. It’s sticky, it’s messy, it’s rich and decadent but rustic and unpretentious, and it tastes amazing.

@hungryandfrozen

chickpeas diabolique, probably my favourite chickpeas of all? recipe at hungryandfrozen dot com 🤠 #chickpeas #vegan #cookingvideo #fyp

♬ The Dark Of The Matinée – Franz Ferdinand

Serving the chickpeas with bread to swipe at the lurid, lycopene-rich sauce makes sense, as does serving the dish as part of a table of mezze or small plates, and it goes without saying — but nonetheless, for the record — this would be wonderful stirred through pasta. I’d choose a ridged shape, to catch the sauce; I do like the idea of pappardelle with this, like a playground slide for the chickpeas, but something with more structural integrity would probably be a better choice, like bucatini or fettuccini. Any leftovers (I ate about 75% of what was in the enamel dish in the photos and refrigerated the rest) are strangely good cold, but probably best kept as a solo snack unless reheating. I still very much just gotta get through this week, but this recipe is another tick in the somewhat lonely “literally good” column, and will long continue to be.

Chickpeas Diabolique

Easy, fast, messily delicious, and with very few perishable ingredients you can keep the means to make it at any time safely in your pantry. Recipe by myself, but adapted from and inspired by the Belgian dish, Scampi Diabolique.

1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
olive oil, for frying — a couple tablespoons
1 x 400g tin of chickpeas, drained
1/4 cup tomato paste, heaped is fine
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
a pinch of cayenne pepper, or to taste
1/2 cup dry white vermouth (or dry white wine or dry sherry)
1-2 generously heaped tablespoons vegan aioli, plain vegan yoghurt, or anything else rich and creamy — even hummus or thick coconut cream
salt and pepper, to taste

1: Finely dice the onion and garlic cloves. Heat a couple tablespoons of olive oil in a wide frying pan and gently fry both alliums over a low heat till soft but not browned. Tip in the chickpeas, stirring to warm them through, along with the teaspoon of smoked paprika and pinch of cayenne.

2: Turn up the heat and stir in the 1/4 cup tomato paste, continuing to stir to let the tomato paste coat the chickpeas and get stickily caramelised in the heat.

3: After a minute or so of this, pour in the 1/2 cup dry vermouth, which will hit the pan with an enthusiastic hiss, and stir it in, along with the tablespoon or two (and I lean towards two), of aioli. Let this warm through, still stirring, then remove from the heat. Season and taste, add a splash of water to make it saucier if need be (or, indeed, more vermouth), and serve.

Serves one as a hearty snack, or two with accompaniments. Could stretch to three if stirred through pasta.

Notes:
I assume confidently that the “diabolique” part of the name refers to the heat of the cayenne. If you’re serving this to kids, perhaps leave it out, but up to you — the dish is more punchy than truly spicy, but cayenne gets exponentially hotter pretty quick so if whoever’s eating it is not spice-confident, add with caution.

music lately:

Out Here On My Own by Irene Cara, another shining star extinguished by this cruel year. I can’t begin to describe what the film Fame means to me, nor shall I try, so instead let’s just celebrate her singular talent — that delicate yet raw, gorgeously emotive voice, that vivid, vulnerable screen presence — in this, one of the most beautiful and perfect ballads of all time. If you feel like wallowing then you might follow it up with I Sing The Body Electric, an unhinged and extraordinarily joyous song that never lets you guess its next move, and which is often unfairly left out of the rightful praise heaped upon this film’s soundtrack.

Dragnalus by Unwound, seems like only yesterday I was recommending my little brother music to blow his mind and now he recommends me music because I am old and set in my ways and only listen to the same seven tracks over and over. Fortunately, this is music recommendation catnip for me: it’s old enough to rent a car, it’s obscure enough that I missed it first time around, and it sounds like angry chickpea tin cans fighting in the bottom of a council skip.

Nobody by Keith Sweat feat. Athena Cage. Even when playing over the speakers of the Chemist Warehouse, with its fluorescent lighting and narrow aisles closing in on you, surely the least amenable and most incongruent environment to hear this song, still a seductive slow-dance air pervaded between those disorientingly jammed shelves.

Vegan Chocolate-Nut Fudge Candies

November 15, 2022November 15, 20224 Comments

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You can usually pinpoint the exact moment that I become cognisant of Christmas approaching because I’ll suddenly post an utterly frivolous recipe whose existence clearly serves to augment my annual edible Christmas gift round-up. Case in frivolous point, these Chocolate-Nut Fudge Candies, which you’ll see added to this year’s imminent list in a couple of weeks. I mean, I’m also aware that the Fideles are Adeste-ing because I’ve started having those dreams where I wake up on Christmas Day and haven’t organised any presents and everyone is deeply disappointed in me. But only one of these internal alarm clocks results in chocolate, and even though I am still largely in Thesis Replicant Mode (a mode which, admittedly, feeds on itself more than my thesis probably requires at this point) I still heeded the call.

If you need to cook something giddy and impetuous there are few safer bets than a second-hand mid-century book of recipes compiled from women across America titled America’s Favourite Recipes, subheading: Desserts, sub-subheading: including party beverages. I love to read this book when in need of comfort, and they weren’t lying about the party beverages, such as Cranberry Eggnog, a “mock Tom Collins” with two cups of milk in it, and a punch that includes, but is not restricted to, maraschino cherries, pineapple juice, and peppermint extract. These chocolate candies — and I use the American word here since it makes sense, provenancially — are adapted from a recipe in the book by Mrs O.S. Dews, who was, at the time of publishing in 1968, the president of the Officers’ Wives’ Club in Ogden, Utah. Should Mrs Dews still be kicking about, I graciously thank her.

@hungryandfrozen

chocolate-nut fudge candies 🤠 full recipe at hungryandfrozen dot com #chocolate #vegan #ediblechristmasgifts

♬ Ive Got My Love To Keep Me Warm – Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra

Though there’s a bit of boiling sugar involved here this recipe is remarkably easy and very delicious — admittedly, not a super complex flavour profile, it instead evokes solidified chocolate icing, but this is hardly a bad thing. Also, despite having not a lick of dairy, the combination of toffee shocked into submission by a pile of chocolate really does end up tasting like fudge, with its wet-sand, tooth-exfoliating soft melting grittiness.

The dusting of dehydrated plum powder, scattering on the white baking paper like pohutukawa needles (or, I suppose, a Fargo-esque spray of blood) on fallen snow, is, I assure you, truly for aesthetic purposes only. You could consider sprinkling over edible glitter to give it the old razzle dazzle, lean into immaturity with rainbow sprinkles, or assume a soberly logical stance and simply press extra cashews into the surface of the cooling chocolate candies. Either way, these are delicious post-dinner fortifiers or, logically, edible gifts, and just be glad my eyes weren’t caught by the peanut brittle recipe at the bottom of the same page of this book, which lists 16 inches (!!) of paraffin wax in the ingredients; but then it did win a prize at the Tulsa State Fair…

Chocolate-Nut Fudge Candies

You need to pay a little bit of attention here but these aren’t too arduous and they make, needless to say, an excellent edible gift. With their simple chocolate flavour they’re very kid-friendly, but maybe keep them out of the way while you’re boiling the sugar. Recipe adapted from the Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts book.

200g dark chocolate
2 cups sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup golden syrup (or light corn syrup for the Americans)
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
1/2 cup roasted, salted cashews
1/4 cup boiling water
salt, for scattering over
dehydrated plum powder, to serve (very optional)

1: Roughly chop the 200g dark chocolate and set aside. Just leave it on the chopping board, no need to decant it into a separate bowl. You might as well rip off a couple sheets of baking paper and lay them on baking trays for later, too.

2: Place the two cups of sugar, cup of brown sugar, 1/4 cup golden syrup, 1/2 cup water and teaspoon of vinegar into a large heavy-based saucepan and cook over a low heat for about fifteen minutes, stirring constantly without letting it bubble up, until the sugar is entirely dissolved, or near enough. You’ll see it on the back of your spoon — it’ll look clear and shiny rather than gritty — and you should be able to feel it as you stir as well.

3: Once the sugar is dissolved, turn up the heat and let the sugar mixture boil, without stirring, for three minutes. The second three minutes are up, remove the pan from the heat, and once the bubbles have subsided, throw in the chopped chocolate and stir energetically.

4: Once the chocolate has entirely melted and incorporated and the mixture has thickened considerably, let it sit for ten minutes to cool a little. While this is happening, roughly chop the 1/2 cup of roasted salted cashews and boil the jug for the water. Stir the cashews into the saucepan along with the 1/4 cup boiling water — the chocolate mixture will go from quite dry and crumbly to shiny again — and drop tablespoons of the mixture onto baking trays lined with baking paper. Sprinkle over a little salt and, if you like, shake a little dehydrated plum powder (or any other red fruit, plum is just what I had in the cupboard) through a sieve over the chocolate candies.

Allow the candies to cool and firm up, then store them in an airtight container in the fridge. Makes around 30 – 35.

music lately:

American Teen by Ethel Cain, a fitting song to go with this recipe. Whether its an indictment of my age or just the fact that I genuinely prefer very old music, I’ve hit a point where I struggle to care about or resonate with much of anything that hasn’t already existed for many years, but this song broke through my walls and defences. Possibly because it has a distinct 1994-ish energy, but probably because it’s wildly beautiful and exhilarating with the kind of lively guitar riffs that make you want to raise a can of Pepsi-cola up a flagpole and salute it.

The Nitty Gritty by Shirley Ellis, the way this song perambulates and syncopates is so immensely satisfying, as is Ellis’ gorgeous voice, though little is as satisfying as the ludicrously sincere dancing in the video with it, I highly recommend clicking through.

(Birds Fly) Whisper to a Scream by Icicle Works, just the song you want playing as you run through concrete back alleys in the rain wearing a scratchy wool jumper while charmingly and cinematically coming of age circa 1983. Those drums — those drums!!

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours every month. There’s no better time than right now — your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Vegan Pistachio Toffee Cookies

October 24, 2022October 24, 20221 Comment

Since losing half of October to Covid I have struggled to get a grip on time, space, concepts, activities, et cetera, it’s like I’m trying to run underwater, (or, honestly, given my running abilities, trying to run on land) or get to the airport on time in a dream, everything feels liminal and indistinct. And it’s nearly November! And, let’s face it, pre-Covid I was not exactly a paragon of organization and grip-getting. However, these cookies appeared to me in a piercing moment of lucidity and the rush of coming up with a recipe again reminded me that just because my brain is still a bit out of reach, it does want to come back to me.

The cookies themselves are delicious enough, but when you add the bumpy, glassy toffee-coated pistachios like molten gold and emeralds poured over each cookie, it suddenly feels like an artisanal bakery has sprung up in your kitchen. I can’t even begin to impress upon you how excellent the texture is: crunchy, splintering toffee, firm and buttery pistachios, and dense cookie, all yielding to each other in every mouthful.

@hungryandfrozen

vegan pistachio toffee cookies • full recipe at hungryandfrozen dot com • #cookies #pistachio #toffee #foodblog #vegancookies

♬ Central Reservation (The Then Again Version) – Beth Orton

Pistachios aren’t cheap, I know, but I guess the upside of everything being stupidly expensive right now is that the price of pistachios isn’t so shocking, comparatively (and by “upside” I do not at all mean “I accept this current state of things”, to be clear), and this recipe makes a modest quantity go quite some distance. The cardamom and coffee flavours in the cookie dough below are subtle yet entirely essential, together they give a kind of mysterious, almost gingery flavour profile (and as I note in the recipe, if you don’t like cardamom you could use ginger instead) and lend a sophisticated note to balance all the rambunctious sweetness coating the cookies.

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And go big or go home, right? If anything, I’m touched that my brain thought I was capable of monitoring the caramelisation of sugar and then rapidly transferring spoonfuls of the aforementioned boiling sugar from a saucepan to a tray of cookies, and I, in turn, believe you can do it too. Yeah, it’s a bit of work, and mildly treacherous, but the result is undeniably charming.

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Pistachio Toffee Cookies

To make it easier you could just fold the chopped pistachios through the dough, but truly, it’s all about that crunch of pistachio-studded toffee giving way to spiced cookie below: worth the effort. Recipe by myself.

Cookie Dough:

1/2 cup rice bran oil, or similar neutral oil
1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
2 tablespoons golden syrup
2 cups plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
a pinch of salt
2 tablespoons coffee liqueur (see notes)
3 tablespoons oat milk, or similar

Toffee Topping:

3/4 cup caster sugar
3 tablespoons water
1/2 cup shelled pistachios
a pinch of salt

1: Set your oven to 180C/350F and line a cookie sheet/tray with baking paper.

2: Stir together the 1/2 cup oil, the cup of brown sugar, and the two tablespoons of golden syrup. Add the remaining cookie dough ingredients (and I tend to sieve in the baking soda because I live in fear of lumps of soda in my baked goods) and stir together to form a stiff dough. Add an extra splash of milk if it’s too floury still, but this should be just enough liquid to make it all come together.

3: Roll heaped tablespoons of cookie dough into balls and place about 2 inches apart on the paper-lined tray. Bake for 13 minutes, then transfer to a cooling rack, carefully as they’ll be a little fragile while they’re still hot, and then repeat this step with any remaining dough.

4: Once all the cookies are cooling on the rack (and not a moment before), you can start on the toffee. First, briefly chop the pistachios, so that some are left whole and some are in pieces. Rest the rack of cookies back on top of the paper-lined tray — as per the picture above — so it can catch any toffee drips.

5: Slowly dissolve the 3/4 cup caster sugar and 3 tablespoons of water together in a saucepan over a low heat, stirring occasionally. Once the sugar is dissolved — and you can check by dipping your spoon into the syrup and seeing if there are visible gritty sugar crystals on it — turn up the heat and bring it to a boil. Let it bubble away without stirring at all, until it turns from clear, to light gold, to a deeper amber-honey colour. As soon as it hits that point, remove the pan from the heat and tip in the chopped pistachios. Don’t be tempted to move away from the stove at any point, as it can quickly go from underdone to burnt, and will carry on cooking even when the heat is turned off.

6: Using a dessert spoon, and working quickly but not frantically, spoon the toffeed pistachios over each cookie. Don’t worry too much about uniformity or whether each cookie has an equal number of nuts, the haphazard, dripping vibe is part of their charm. Once you’ve done this, sprinkle juuust a little salt over the cookies.

7: Let the toffee coating cool completely, then remove the cookies from the rack (happily eating any crunchy toffee-droplets that fell through the rack to the baking paper below) and store them in an airtight container.

Makes about 18 cookies.

Notes:

If you don’t have coffee liqueur or don’t wish to use it, dissolve 1 teaspoon of instant coffee in two tablespoons of water, and add a splash of vanilla extract.
Just in case it’s not clear, by “shelled pistachios” I mean pistachios with their shells removed. If you can only find pistachios with the shell still on you’ll probably need twice the amount to make up 1/2 a cup of shelled nuts.
If you hate cardamom or just can’t find it, replace it with the same quantity of ground ginger or cinnamon.
Though the saucepan of toffee might look scary to clean, just fill it with boiling water from the kettle and let it sit for a bit. Once it’s cooled down, cold running water should dissolve any remaining stubborn toffee.

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music lately:

I Never Know When by Elaine Stritch, from the 1958 Broadway musical Goldilocks. Not, as the name might suggest, a depiction of the fairy tale, but a musical comedy about the silent film era, also starring Don Ameche and Margaret Hamilton, aka the Wicked Witch of the West. I tend to associate Stritch with more brassy, acerbic numbers rather than torchy, wistful songs like this, but even when wistful she radiates weary steeliness instead of mere sentimentality, and it’s really quite beautiful.

Dig It, by The Coup, while rewinding repeatedly to the “how now brown cow” verse because it’s so satisfying is probably not the listening experience the group intended, I can’t help it! It’s so satisfying! The rest of the song obviously rules, too.

Up on the Sun by Meat Puppets. We all have those songs, where you look them up on youtube and scroll through the sincere, superlative, breathless comments below, and instead of sneering you’re like “yeah, I would absolutely say that unprompted about this song to a stranger on the street”. Cannot overstate the effect that the long moan leading into the discordant and downbeat yet oddly uplifting chorus has on me.

Tomato, Bread, and Olive Hash

October 14, 2022October 14, 20222 Comments

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Each bracketed stretch of 365 days is unusual and burdensome in their own uniquely spiced way, but 2022 really does have more infinitely nihilistic, all-bets-are-off flavour than most. What is it this time, you ask? Well, I finally got Covid, and for nine days was pinned to my bed with all the force of a brick hurled into a paddling pool. On the upside I retained my sense of smell and taste, on the downside — brain fog. I feel so stupid, and not in the usual administrative ways that I’m used to. Unfortunately I’ve tied my entire personality and sense of self and worth into various acts of writing and it’s no fun having that gigantic part of my life become an arduous struggle, and I apologise if this is evident in today’s blog post. On the whole I’m grateful I got Covid when I did (post-vaccinations), am very grateful that I was taken care of, and I know my experience is comparatively tame, but still: 0/5 stars, would not recommend.

So it’ll be no surprise that I’m coming back with a purposefully simple recipe, this Tomato, Bread, and Olive Hash — I mean, just the word hash lets you know that there’s little visual or structural expectations at play here — three main ingredients, a little frying, that’s all there is to it. This recipe is more or less the same as Nigella Lawson’s in her book At My Table, but I’ve added olives coated in flour for a little extra encrispening (although you could skip this step if you’re impatient) and while I wouldn’t expect to pay forty dollars for a plate of this at a restaurant, its pastoral unfiddliness is reassuring, and a comfort both to regard and to eat.

@hungryandfrozen

Tomato, Bread, and Olive Hash, recipe at hungryandfrozen dot com 🤠 #vegan #recipes #cooking #olives #foodblog #foodblog

♬ It’s All Over Now Baby Blue – Marianne Faithfull

Simple it may be, but not bland: the tomatoes, just bursting and collapsing in the heat, soak into the oil-crisped cubes of bread, the almost meaty (almost, let’s not get carried away here) olives unite the tomatoes and bread with their briny salinity. I left out Nigella’s specified shallot and let the chives do the talking, allium-wise, and added the rosemary simply because I had some from Mum’s garden, but its earthy richness is always welcome. Something in the textural state of flux makes every mouthful of hash a thrill (specifically, will this piece of bread be crunchy or soggy?) and making, eating, and now writing about it makes me feel closer to being myself again.

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In happier news, hungryandfrozen.com is fifteen years old today! Having squandered all my brainpower on the preceding paragraphs I’ve got nothing clever to say about this momentous occasion, and wish I had the energy or resources to do something celebratory, but when it comes down to it I’m glad I started my blog and I’m glad it’s still here and to everyone who has ever taken time out of their day to read it: thank you.

Tomato, Bread, and Olive Hash

Simple, comforting, easy, beautiful. Feel free to glance at the quantities specified and then just use as much of any ingredient as you want; if you add more tomatoes it will be more tomato-y, and so on: you really can’t go wrong. Adapted from a recipe in At My Table by Nigella Lawson.

1/3 a crusty baguette, or one to two good-sized ciabatta or sourdough buns, depending on appetite
70g pitted green olives
2 tablespoons flour
2 large, ripe tomatoes
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon chives, snipped
the leaves from one stem of rosemary
salt and pepper, to taste

1: Slice the bread into rough cubes and chunks (about an inch an a half in length, but it doesn’t matter) and set aside. Briefly chop the olives so that some are left whole and others are in bits, and toss with the two tablespoons of flour in a small bowl. Finally, dice your tomato into pieces about the same size as the bread cubes.

2: Heat the olive oil in a wide frying pan and once it’s good and warm, tip in the bread cubes and let them sizzle away until golden and crisp and crouton-y. This requires patience but vigilance, as the cubes will first appear to be doing nothing and then they’ll rapidly toast up all at once, so be ready with the tongs to remove them to a bowl (or to your eventual serving plate, if you want to save on dishes). There should be a little oil left in the pan, but if not, pour in another tablespoon or so and fry the olives until all dusty traces of flour on their surface has cooked and they’re a little browned and crisped in places. Leaving the olives in the pan, tip in your chopped tomatoes, and stir for another minute or two, until the pieces of tomato start to collapse.

3: Return the toasted bread cubes to the pan, give it a stir just to amalgamate and to allow the bread to start absorbing the tomatoes, and then remove from the heat.

4: Pile everything onto a serving plate, and scatter over your chives (you can finely chop them on a board but I prefer to hold a handful over the plate and snip them with scissors) and the rosemary leaves. See if it wants any seasoning — probably more likely pepper than salt, since the olives are already salty — and eat.

Serves 1.

Notes:

I got some green olives that had been marinated in garlic which, as you can imagine, was a fine addition to the dish. If you can only get olives with the stone in them, remember that they’ll add extra weight, so you might want to use 90g instead of 70g (but also, those quantities are really just a guideline, add as many olives as you want.)
I know you’re not supposed to fry with extra virgin olive oil but everything is so expensive these days and it’s easier just to have one kind of olive oil on the go. If you have regular olive oil then use that for sure, but the olive flavour is important, so I wouldn’t recommend replacing it here with any other kind of oil like sunflower or rice bran.

music lately:

Beautiful Briny Sea by Angela Lansbury and David Tomlinson, from Bedknobs and Broomsticks. And we’re back to bad news: After Stephen Sondheim, Angela Lansbury’s was the inevitable death I’ve most been dreading. She was a continual and immensely comforting presence in my life and someone with even a quarter of her astonishingly diverse career could consider themselves a high achiever. Any number of her songs matter to me but I was raised on Bedknobs and Broomsticks, taped off the TV onto a VHS and watched and rewound till I could practically act it out for you off-book. I’m still not sure if there’s a higher form of wit than cartoon and live action characters interacting, and I love that Lansbury was allowed to become a major musical star with such an off-kilter voice. I’m sorry she’s gone — I’m glad our lifetimes overlapped for a while.

Out on the Floor, by Dobie Gray. This song radiates happiness, no, elation, and with every “hey-hey-hey” it feels like sunbeams are shooting out of your outstretched palms.

Hail Holy Queen from Sister Act; while in bed with Covid I wasn’t up to watching anything challenging but even so I’d forgotten what a balm this film is, with every minute of its runtime swaddling you, telling you it’s all going to be okay. Whoopi Goldberg is so charismatic yet grounded, and Dame Maggie Smith could do generic disapproval in her sleep but you truly feel the searing rays of her vexation, and this song — with its fake out initial verse leading up to the beat drop, Sister Mary Roberts’ riffing, and the punchy Latin bridge, makes me wildly emotional. I sang this once with my primary school choir, and it’s every bit as exhilarating to perform as it is to watch, let me tell you.

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now — your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Vegan Cardamom Thyme Chocolate Puddings

September 28, 2022September 28, 2022Leave a comment

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Every time I think I’ve Done Something by adding a pinch of cardamom to a recipe I hear Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly saying “florals, for spring? Groundbreaking”, but as I favour known deliciousness over needless striving for innovation (or worse: striving for virality) I can calmly tell this fictional character onto whom I’m projecting that yes, cardamom is wonderful, and here’s more of it. Obviously people have been using cardamom for centuries — it’s referred to in ancient Sanskrit texts, was beloved of Hippocrates, part of the Song Dynasty economy — and it’s pleasing to know, as I tuck into this chocolate pudding from the comfort of my bed, that I’m participating in the noble continuation of a grand culinary tradition.

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Sometimes the right answer isn’t where you’re looking for it. This recipe started off as an ice cream, and very fine it was, but the wistfully cardamom-tinted richness of the unfrozen mixture stuck with me more, so I made it again and dialled it back a few steps. Both cardamom and thyme have a kind of resiny, oily fragrance that’s wobbling just on the precipice of lemon without actually being lemony; together they lift the chocolate’s heavy curtains while still emphasising its richness, adding an air of mystery without being intrusive. Now, the first time I made this I let the coconut cream sit with its bashed cardamom pods for six hours to infuse, the second time I was in more of a hurry and it only sat for half an hour; it was still good but the cardamom didn’t make itself so known. If you end up in this same position, put ground cardamom on your shopping list and add as much as you need to the chocolate mixture till the flavour pops.

This recipe is, I grant you, kind of annoying: first I ask for cashew butter (what are we, squillionaires) and second it requires two separate saucepans, but at least you don’t have to use a blender? And after a certain point of streamlining and cutting corners we have to accept that cooking food does involve being in your kitchen. For your efforts and sink full of dishes, however, you get a chocolate pudding of astonishing lusciousness, so dense and dark that you half expect a curious hippo’s nostrils to emerge through its surface; wildly sophisticated thanks to the individual portions and fragrant cardamom (and my fairly low bar for what constitutes sophistication), and yet inner-childishly comforting with its yielding softness and vague evocation, as you drag your spoon through the chocolate, of being given a scraped-out bowl of cake batter to lick. (Also: no tiktok video this week, my phone has suddenly decided it has all the capacity and power of a 125mb thumb drive from 2006 and as such I was up till 3am last night trying to clear storage space so I could edit one single video of chocolate melting and was thwarted at every turn. I have about 1000 fewer photos on my phone but it’s still being all “no x” whenever I try to edit that one video. Can’t wait till I try this again next time!)

Cardamom Thyme Chocolate Puddings

Velvet-rich chocolate kissed with cardamom and fresh thyme: it’s a little messy to make and requires some advance planning, but every spoonful is a reward. And if you don’t have time to let the coconut cream infuse, add 1/2 a teaspoon ground cardamom — or more to taste — as you’re mixing it into the chocolate. Recipe by myself.

4 cardamom pods
2 sprigs fresh thyme
1 x 400ml tin full-fat coconut cream
1 cup/250ml water
1/2 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
2 tablespoons golden syrup
3 heaped tablespoons smooth cashew butter
200g dark chocolate
Extra thyme leaves, for serving

1: Split the cardamom pods with a knife to release the black seeds within, and place the seeds and pods along with the two sprigs of thyme and the tin of coconut cream in a small saucepan and gently heat it, stirring, till the coconut cream is just too hot to touch, with a couple small bubbles escaping to the surface, but nowhere near boiling. Remove it from the heat — if you have the time, let it sit for about six hours in the fridge to soak up all the cardamom and thyme flavour, if not, just set it aside while you get on with the rest of the recipe, and add some ground cardamom to taste when you mix it into the chocolate later.

2: Roughly chop the 200g dark chocolate and set aside. In another saucepan, stir together the cup of water, the 1/2 cup brown sugar, two tablespoons golden syrup and three heaped tablespoons smooth cashew butter. Bring to a boil, stirring regularly with a whisk — it’ll look very unlikely at this stage but with a little heat (and a lot of chocolate later) it will all come together. Once it’s reached the boil, by which point it should resemble caramel sauce, let it bubble away for two minutes, stirring constantly, and then remove from the heat.

3: Let the cashew syrup sit for a minute till it stops bubbling, then tip in the chopped dark chocolate and briskly stir till the chocolate has melted. Now, take your initial pan of coconut cream, and strain it into the chocolate mixture through a sieve, so it catches the leaves and bits of cardamom. Whisk the two mixtures together, adding ground cardamom at this point if you feel like it needs a boost, and divide this mixture between your chosen serving bowls. Refrigerate the puddings for about two hours (though they can happily sit in the fridge overnight if need be) and serve scattered with extra thyme leaves.

The number of servings depends on the size of your ramekins/bowls etc, but this makes roughly 700ml of pudding mixture, and I divided it between six different receptacles, which made for a comfortable serving of pudding: enough to feel like you’ve really eaten something, but not enough that you feel like you’ve overcommitted. It would look lovely in martini or other cocktail glasses, I also liked how they looked in the base of the capacious stemless wine glasses that you can see in some of the photos here. And you could always test how it will look by filling your glasses with the same amount of water first, eg if you have seven glasses then pour in 100ml water.

Notes:

I haven’t tested it either way so I couldn’t say for sure but if you can’t get cashew butter, I imagine you could replace it with smooth almond butter; you could possibly leave it out altogether, bearing in mind the effect this will have on the finished texture and richness. I periodically order cashew butter from Revive, it’s the best I’ve ever tasted, it keeps for ages, and they regularly put it on special.
If your cashew butter is unsalted, add a pinch of salt when you’re whisking the chocolate and coconut cream together; you could also sprinkle over some sea salt flakes to serve.
If you’re serving this to fusspots who don’t like cardamom and thyme, subtle though they are here, leave them out and add a couple teaspoons of vanilla extract when whisking everything together at the end.

music lately:

Kid by Steve Lawrence (aka Mr Eydie Gormé) from the 1968 musical Golden Rainbow. Apropos of nothing I’ve decided to work my way through every Broadway flop mentioned in the song Monkeys and Playbills from [title of show]; Golden Rainbow is second on the list and there’s something charming about this song, about that cavernous late-60s sound, and about Lawrence’s throaty, Scott Walker-esque voice.

It’s Like That, by Run-DMC and Jason Nevins. Simply cannot overstate the effect that this music video had on me in 1997! I require an oral history of it right now!

Seagull by Ride, the sort of song that makes you feel like you could run vertically up a gust of wind onto the roof of a tall building, perhaps following it up by leaping from rooftop to rooftop as you run from one end of the city to the other without any danger of falling.

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Clove-fried Onion and Marinated Mushroom Sandwich

September 14, 2022September 14, 20222 Comments

In this era of Covid and cancelled plans a little absence is hardly a surprise but nonetheless I’m sorry it’s been a while since I’ve posted! I have spent most of September knocked on my ear with a bad cold — not Covid, at least according to the four rat tests I did — but not at all pleasant. Aside from sneezing with metronome regularity, the most noticeable feature of this cold was that it rendered me both ravenously hungry and completely stupid. A unique and infuriating challenge: desperate for lavish meals, a backlog of writing work calling me, and barely able to concentrate on even the most lowest-common-denominator television. Somewhere around day nine, after a brief and congested visit home to see my parents (and to deplete their resources of tissue and eucalyptus oil); I made this sandwich. It pleased me greatly, I thought it was delicious, but I was still insensible with cold; fortunately for you it draws inspiration from two separate reputable sources so the odds are in your favour that it actually is quite good.

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It’s not very attractive, let’s get that out of the way first: pale bread, pale creamy onions, pale mushrooms, and of course I forgot to buy parsley for garnish, though I’m not sure just how much pale expanse it could’ve masked, all things considered. And yes, we eat with our eyes first, but we also literally eat with our mouths, so that’s the sector we should be most concerned with appeasing. I read about a sandwich filled with clove-scented fried onions in Niki Segnit’s rollickingly entertaining book The Flavour Thesaurus, and its simplicity and warmth appealed; to further bulk out the sandwich I remembered the marinated mushrooms from Nigella’s pasta recipe that I blogged about a few weeks back — yes, this is outfit repeating, but the cold really did make me dopey as hell and this was all I could think of. (To be clear, repeating recipes is obviously fantastic in real life, just not so practical in a food blogging content way.) The sensation of soft onions fresh from the pan against the cool, vinegar-tanged mushrooms is a contrast sensation that jolts you back to life in the same way that ejecting and blowing on a piece of uncooperative technology sometimes does the trick.

@hungryandfrozen

clove-fried onion and marinated mushroom sandwich, recipe on my blog at the link above 🥖 #vegan #sandwich #mushrooms #recipe #foodblogger #fyp

♬ Goodbye Horses – Q Lazzarus

The cloves offer comforting yet bracingly strident warmth and sophistication — I could only find whole cloves, which made for a more subtle flavour profile, next time I absolutely want the unequivocal hit of ground. Their presence contributed to the name of this recipe (you’re telling me a clove fried this onion? et cetera) but there’s plenty else going on: punchy, autumnal rosemary, the meekly savoury onions, the sophisticated rasp of red wine vinegar. There’s nothing stopping you adding more elements to this sandwich; fewer would be fine too — I’d happily eat a bun filled to dripping with the onions alone. And who knows, the cloves, looking like tiny rusty nails dropped into the frying pan, may have helped hasten the cold’s departure with all their purported antioxidants and other vague health-giving properties.

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Clove-fried Onion and Marinated Mushroom Sandwich

Ugly but delicious, and surprisingly luxurious for its humble ingredients. Recipe inspired by an entry in The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit.

4 button mushrooms
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus 2 tablespoons extra for frying
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon maple syrup
1 sprig rosemary
salt and pepper, to taste
1 large onion
3 whole cloves, or a scant 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
2 tablespoons dairy-free cream of your choice (optional)
1 fresh baguette

1: First get the mushrooms soaking up their marinade. Slice the button mushrooms (not too thinly, but not too thick either) and toss in a bowl with two tablespoons of the olive oil, the tablespoon of red wine vinegar, the teaspoon of maple syrup, the leaves from the sprig of rosemary, and salt and pepper to taste. Set aside while you get on with the onion.

2: Finely slice the onion and gently fry in the remaining two tablespoons of olive oil with a sprinkling of salt and the cloves. If you’re using ground cloves just stir them in, and if you’ve got whole ones, squash them a bit under a wooden spoon or bash them with a heavy knife to help release more of their fragrance, and make sure to push down on them as you stir the onions. Now, it’s up to you whether you want these onions brown and crisp or soft and caramelised, the only difference is heat and time. I wanted them tender and golden, so I kept the heat low and stirred them for about ten to fifteen minutes. Once you’ve got them where you want them, stir in the cream (if using) and remove from the heat.

3: Split your baguette in half, and spread a thick layer of the creamy fried onions over one side. Top with a layer of marinated mushrooms, clamp on the other half of the baguette, and eat, messily.

Makes one substantial sandwich.

music lately:

Goodbye Horses by Q Lazzarus. Toasty, hypnotic, otherworldly, makes me feel like I’m floating away but also like I’m extremely in the present moment.

This Bitter Earth/On the Nature of Daylight by Max Richter and Dinah Washington. These two songs are exquisite on their own, but mashed together? I honestly had a little Stendhal Syndrome moment when I first heard it as a bonus track on Richter’s gorgeous album The Blue Notebooks; it was recommended to me and now I’m recommending it to you.

The Whole World by OutKast ft Killer Mike, an unbelievably satisfying track, from Andre 3000’s Cole Porter-esque prelude to Killer Mike’s whip-snappishly dynamic verse and Big Boi’s words skittering around the beat like marbles in a Tupperware container.

Hungry and Frozen

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