Category: Vegetarian

Broccoli coriander salad

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a white and pink plate of broccoli salad on a white tablecloth

Unlike the unfortunate sector of society with the OR6A2 gene that makes coriander taste like soap, my ancestors blessed me with a hearty hyper-tolerance for the herb, and I can happily consume buckets of it like a blithe drayhorse in a meadow. That being said, I didn’t come to this broccoli coriander salad on purpose — it was the happiest and most serendipitous of accidents based on that humble yet potent activity; the fridge-raid dinner. Put it this way, I expected this to (a) taste fine and (b) use up exactly what I had at hand and no more. I did not expect it to blow my hair back so thoroughly, and I’ve had it for or with dinner repeatedly ever since. So, now I’m sharing it with you.

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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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lemon, turmeric, black pepper and white chocolate cookies

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Lemon turmeric cookies with white chocolate drizzled on them

Patience is not an attribute I’m overburdened with, as you’ll be able to corroborate if you ever witness me bashing the crossing light buttons at an intersection and the up or down arrows on an elevator. However, patience demonstrated her rewards to me with these lemon, turmeric, black pepper and white chocolate cookies, which started off fine, blameless, but not quite right on day one — too crisp and crunchy, prompting a back-to-the-drawing-board sigh. By day two they’d relaxed and softened and become exactly what I wanted — tender, yielding, just a little chewy. Though I’m not the most credible ambassador for ongoing acts of patience; in this case — I get it!

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Ginger, lemon, and brown butter kisses

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ginger cookies on a cooling rack

Logic would suggest — dictate, even — that balance is of foremost and utmost importance when considering a recipe’s sweetness; and I’m not here to tell you that’s falsehood and calumny. But sometimes, as Robert Frost suggested, the only way out is through, and the only way to challenge sweetness is to run at it, headlong and dauntless, with more sweetness. This madcap attitude is how I came to create, back in 2011, a pavlova covered in Smarties which was insolently exquisite and appallingly logical (and I notice deep in this ancient blog post that thirteen years later I still haven’t acted upon the notion to create a pavlova with a cream cheese-based topping but I’m writing it down in my notebook; sometimes you have to look to the past to move into the future!) This is also how I came to dip the already molasses-heavy Joe Frogger cookies into skull-achingly sweet white chocolate; and this is how I came to adapt those cookies and sandwich them together with icing to create these ginger, lemon, and brown butter kisses. Sometimes more is not simply more, it’s enough.

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Instant gnocchi, big beans, and red chilli pesto sauce

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A brown scallowed bowl of gnocchi on a pink and white patterned plate

Though it’s my favourite meal of the day, I struggle to approach dinner with any conceptual normalcy, probably partly driven by not having to account for anyone’s tastes but my own. What do I mean by this? It might only make sense in my head, but you may notice a lack of everyday, meal-prep-food-kit-type practicality to the recipes on here. I favour a certain abstraction and loose formlessness and outsized abundance when it comes to dinner, and of course am perpetually hostile to the kind of SEO that other food blogs blandly benefit from. Hence all the big plates of pasta or dishes that could be sides consumed as the meal in their entirety. The closest I get to traditional friendly dinner recipes are still vast and singular: this hands-free black bean and brown rice casserole or my sheet pan gnocchi puttanesca. Somewhere in the middle of the nebulous and the breezily circumspect sits this recipe for instant gnocchi, big beans, and red chilli pesto sauce.

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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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No-bake Chocolate Ganache Tart

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A base of butter-coated crumbs clinging to each other, a simple ganache filling, a little stove-top action, but the dial of the main oven remains untwisted; that, to me, is perfection. In this content-saturated world that semiotically re-introduces its creators in an endless loop (I never know if I’ve used the word semiotic correctly but I figure if I keep using it, I’ll have to be correct eventually), I grow weary of the need for faux-deep wraparound justifications for each recipe, all of which eventually sound the same — you know, here’s the thing: it’s time we talk about tubers; here’s part one in my series called, it just me or is no one celebrating the cephalopod; call me crazy but I’ve had it up to here with [x ingredient that they have previously shared nineteen recipes of] and it’s time to admit that [y ingredient which has one molecule’s difference from x ingredient] is superior. But without wanting to accept self-awareness as a means to an end; I’ve got to hand it to the dull-to-me food creators in this one regard: when I consider this no-bake chocolate ganache tart, I genuinely do feel like saying bland platitudes about how it’s superior to all other chocolate goods, indicating that I’m the first person to ever feel this way. Ever taste a chocolate tart so good it makes you boring?

I’d shudder, if it weren’t so distractingly delicious.

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Pappardelle with Fennel and Bean Escabeche

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Sometimes I’m not sure who my recipes are for, other than myself. It’s not that they’re so very different, as you can find ice cream and pasta anywhere without vigorous effort. It’s more that they’re neither technically whizz-bang nor weekdayishly practical, on top of which they aren’t arriving with any reliable consistency and when they do, there’s caveats. Caveats like: this Pappardelle with Fennel and Bean Escabeche is too fancy to be truly humble, but too humble to be truly fancy; small children probably won’t like it; it’s as pale as a pile of crumpled cashmere mock-neck sweaters; and it contains four tablespoons of vinegar.

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Lemon Feta Pistachio Cookies

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For quite some time — coinciding with me nervously and vaguely muttering “freelancer” whenever anyone asked what I did for a job — I had a Patreon account where I shared recipes and interminable snippets of poetry and manuscripts to a supportive group of subscribers. I’ve since closed it down, now that I have a real live job, but one of these for-your-eyes-only recipes was a lemon curd made with preserved lemons that I was inordinately fond of. I had of late imagined a salted lemon ripple ice cream flowing with that very curd, but couldn’t find any preserved lemons within a walkable radius. No mere velleity, the thought of lemon and salt together lingered, and, nudged along by the flavours of the Palestinian dessert knafeh, the idea morphed deliciously into these Lemon, Feta, and Pistachio cookies.

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Espresso Tahini-swirled Banana Bread

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I feel we have taken the whole “we eat first with our eyes” ethos too far — not so much celebrating beauty as chasing and discarding it like some endless game of culinary paintball. And yet — I concede — I do love a rippled food, from ice cream to soup. Whether it jogs some innate, abstract art-via-fingerpainting Stendhalian response or whether it’s a satisfying visual demonstration of flavours at the edge of their breaking point before they acquiesce and blend together, or whether it’s because it’s cute, the ripple appeals to me and I keep finding myself returning to it. Even, in the case of this Espresso Tahini-swirled Banana Bread, where you can taste it but not really see it, where you have to trust me that it’s there — something for the true ripple-heads who don’t need mere visual stimulus to enjoy the weaving together of edible elements.

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