Category: Vegetarian

Pasta with harissa, beans, and feta

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A green plate with pasta and a fork on a white background

After last week’s particularly demented blog post, even by my imposing standards, rest assured that I’ve kept this edition relatively on the straight and narrow, perhaps because I’m heroically commencing writing at the prudent hour of 10pm instead of my usual midnight or 1am. To match this rare mood of shrewd practicality, this recipe for pasta with harissa, beans, and feta is equally pragmatic and functional, relying largely on storecupboard and long-lasting ingredients whose processes of preservation capture enormous flavour in, well, the process, meaning you have to do little more than nudge them together while half-sentient to achieve a fairly exquisite dinner.

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Choc chip cookie dough ice cream

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a spoonful of ice cream from a tin

The day David Lynch died, I started writing down my dreams again. Lately I’ve been dreaming of shiny ornaments and dead relatives and antique treasures and bodies of water, which are all the same thing, really. I’ve sporadically recorded my dreams since around 1996 and feel pulled to value them in this way once more. Though recipes sometimes appear to me as I sleep, with varying degrees of feasibility — I remain suspicious about the steak with Baileys that I dreamed about in 2003 — this ice cream inspiration came to me in the threshold of reality, that is, I heard the words “cookie dough ice cream” and wanted to better, or at least meet head-on, the foodstuff from whence those words were uttered. Making something so stridently yet winsomely Americana feels of a piece with processing the world without David Lynch, but to be clear, this is certainly not a celebration of America — can you imagine? — or even specifically of David Lynch, especially when I’ve previously written about the more pertinent cherry pie and my recipe for Twin Peaks Ice Cream. Writing this at 1am certainly adds to the dreamlike quality of today, tonight, or tomorrow, whatever you might call this time — vivid but not quite lucid for writer or reader, I suspect. Fear not, however, narratively speaking — though hungryandfrozen.com is frequently a liminal space, this is simply a sensational recipe for ice cream.

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Basil olive dip

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A red and white leaf shaped plate of dip next to a yellow and white plate of crackers

This summer has been a wildly overdue and blissfully extended break from using my brain for money, during which time I frolicked and cut capers and picnicked and read and daydreamed and ate ten (10) oysters. Unfortunately this blog also suffered from my briefly deadbeat absenteeism, but given everything going on locally, globally, macro, micro, I’m not sure anyone noticed or minded. That is not me nudging for expressions of having keenly felt my absence like a toddler who hasn’t yet grasped object permanence — though you’re welcome to — but merely a blunt observation. Nevertheless, I’m back for 2025, a year that is so preposterously far into the future that it’s bordering on inconceivable, with a simple recipe for basil olive dip to augment your summer snacking, whether half-hearted or elaborate.

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Lemon halloumi angel hair soup

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A spoon and a fork with pasta twirled around it in a yellow bowl

Prompting you to make soup when the season is not only heading directly towards summer but when we’ve also just experienced three solid days of brain-soaking humidity may appear to be inviting objurgation, but I have an explanation. This lemon halloumi angel hair soup has been my dinner almost every day for the past week — when it wasn’t the broccoli and coriander salad — and its gentle, soothing yet uplifting quality and utter ease of preparation makes it the perfect quickly-wrought meal and moment of calm amongst your regularly scheduled festive hustle, bustle, carousing, and general calendar-wrangling.

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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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