Pasta with Fried Marinated Zucchini

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Well-intentioned people spent years telling us, quite rightly, that we should be eating seasonally but now between climate change and inflation and the insistence on growing and selling us out-of-season food anyway, I’m not sure seasons even exist meaningfully anymore, not least culinarily. Which is why I’m making this kind of flagrantly summery recipe for pasta with fried marinated zucchini in the middle of winter because, I don’t know, the in-season food isn’t any cheaper nor better quality.

I’m also making it because it’s delicious but you know I can never miss an opportunity to pitch stentorian wrath towards the supermarket duopoly! And they certainly keep me rich in such opportunities (if not in seasonal produce.)

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Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Snacking Cake with Brown Sugar Icing

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Look, I am standing with a foot on both sides of the fence here: I still find the phrase “snacking cake” irritating and yet continuously, willfully bake cakes that undeniably fit this billing. I think it started when I got myself a 25cm square tin: such width, such surface area, there’s something so accessible and appealing and genuinely snackable about the cakes its shallow walls bear. The latest iteration is this Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Snacking Cake with Brown Sugar Icing; yes, it’s a cake, but it’s definitely of the snacking variety, almost veering into slice territory. After getting most of my disdain out of the way with my Lemon Polenta Snacking Cake I’ve probably got about one more cake like this left before I have to give up on the whole scornful thing and just proceed in earnest.

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Roasted Beetroot with Za’atar and Fried Mint

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I’ve just realised this recipe for Roasted Beetroot with Za’atar and Fried Mint has a certain pink Hi Barbie! energy, which is entirely coincidental because I’m too tired to come up with any ruthless marketing tactics proactively this week. That being said, if it’s my subconscious who thought of it then I thank them (love doing things subconsciously, it’s like having an executive assistant whose work I can take credit for). This recipe is the seasonal inverse of my Tomatoes and Fried Mint; I’ve given it a thick, wool-lined winter coat and a darker shade of lipstick and am sending it on its way again.

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Pecan Pie Crunch Slice

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Asking what my favourite anything is — colour, song, movie, production of Sondheim’s musical Company — will not warrant a simple response but instead invites you to a dialogue, no, a diatribe, where I meticulously explain the respective merits of my many, many favourite things. I’m indecisive, sure, but may I reframe it: there is just so much in this world for me to love, and who could possibly commit to a singular favourite under such circumstances? That being said, slices — both the baked and the melt-and-mix-and-refrigerate type — are high up in the echelons of my favourite sugar-based foods and possibly, if I really had to choose, they could be my actual favourites (along with cakes, cookies, muffins, puddings, ice cream, pastries…) It’s that texture-forward focus of slices that makes them so inviting to the bite, and their oddly alluring ability to hold numerous pre-packaged ingredients; this Pecan Pie Crunch Slice absolutely delivers on both fronts.

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Cauliflower Marbella

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I am a woman of some few traditions; one of which is that every summer I reread Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel Rivals, which got its hooks into me at a formative age and whose pages comfort despite my not particularly enjoying any of Cooper’s other books that I’ve tried. Maybe I should hastily add more intellectual titles that I’ve read to balance this admission, but whatever, my post-Christmas humid somnolence is simply not the same without this poorly-aged yet wildly scintillating book. And besides, Rivals is intellectual, with its characters quoting poetry off-book and enthusing over operas, and provides a treasure trove of 80s food references throughout its ceaseless parade of dinner parties and boozy lunches. And one such reference inadvertently influenced today’s recipe for Cauliflower Marbella.

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Lemon Polenta Snacking Cake with Lemon Custard Buttercream

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While I am curious and uninhibited about emerging food trends, the term “snacking cake” inspires within me a certain luddite cantankerousness. How can this term justify its existence when all cakes can be snacked upon? I don’t need a cake to announce its relevance to me! And the offered criteria seems to just describe, well, cakes. I understand that we have yoga pants and riding boots and breakfast burritos and so on but “snacking” is too broad a verb to cling to that noun with such unmerited authority as far as I’m concerned.

However!

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Hands-free Black Bean and Brown Rice Casserole

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Where last week’s recipe was flighty and fancy, this Hands-free Black Bean and Brown Rice Casserole is more sensible and functional — not exactly dinner party fare but highly amenable to that evening slump in energy and inspiration when you require dinner but wish to neither think nor try. While my blog is not generally a perky resource for busy people with many mouths to feed — it’s merely a collection of recipes that I love — I aim, at least, to be practical about the outwardly impractical. This recipe, however, is pure pragmatism without qualification. You plonk a bunch of long-life pantry ingredients in an oven dish, bake for an hour, and there’s your dinner.

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Lemon Vodka Pasta

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You might well ask, how can I possibly wring further mileage out of the pairing of lemon and pasta when there’s already the Pasta with Lemon, Garlic, and Thyme Mushrooms; the Lemon Rosemary Fettuccine; and the Lemon “Parmesan” Spaghetti recipes on here for starters? It’s not just a case of if you get it you get it, but to me each of these recipes has their own personality, narrative, energy, and — importantly — flavour — and I could probably come up with another ten recipes combining lemon and pasta and argue for each of their relevance. But still, you might well ask, and I shall answer: what sets this Lemon Vodka Pasta apart is its spirited spin on the French beurre blanc sauce, where wine and vinegar are evaporated down before having butter whisked in. Here, the strong and sour components come from vodka and lemon, further adulterated with cream to give the emulsion a helping hand.

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Blackberry White Pepper Gingerbread

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In my ongoing battle to bargain with my brain to do small, unremarkable tasks, I’ve found that I have better success with my to-do lists if I scatter the jobs across the page — like sprigs of basil adorning a plate of pasta al pomodoro — rather than simply listing them one after the other. It’s stupid, but it generally works, which means it’s possibly not so stupid after all. Frequently, one of those untethered tasks is the phrase “vibe with food” which is my designated time to sit on the couch and try to invent or mentally develop and coax recipes into existence. Alas, because this task is non-urgent and fun it tends to get shunted (the system is sound but not bulletproof) but on my most recent attempt at vibing with food, two ingredients bobbed in my head: ginger and blackberries, and like Homer Simpson’s “dental plan/Lisa needs braces” reverie, through the repetition of both words I eventually thought: what if I put blackberries in gingerbread?

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stovetop buffalo cauliflower mac and cheese

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This may be a common way of visualising the various events and diary-dates of one’s life and not worth commenting on but when drifting through my memories I tend to recall most sharply what I ate and what I wore — that night was the Chorizo Wellington, that evening was the vintage black velvet jumpsuit, that party was the Lemon Prosset when I tried to make a double batch and it didn’t quite set, and so on. And so, it is with earned confidence that I can claim I’m very sure I’ve never actually had buffalo sauce, or any buffalo-adjacent dish in my life, and it is with unearned confidence that I present today’s recipe for Stovetop Buffalo Cauliflower Mac and Cheese. Does dousing something in buffalo sauce make it, well, buffalo? Possibly not. But, does this taste good? You already know!

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