Pickled Fried Cauliflower and Marinated Tofu Salad with Creamy Herb Dressing

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What’s in a recipe title? Whether or not it’s obvious (or indeed, warranted) I cogitate over the titles of my recipes with all the eleventh-hour fervency of Tom Wambsgans and Cousin Greg resolving the “We Hear For You” slogan in Succession, analysing my titles in terms of vibe, aesthetic, syntax, proximity, logical and lexical semantics, global political temperature, whether or not it’s stupider than something Tom and Greg would come up with, and uh, actual accuracy. In the case of today’s Pickled Fried Cauliflower and Marinated Tofu Salad with Creamy Herb Dressing the adjectives and nouns were weaving in and out and around like a high-spirited Jane Austen heroine at a Regency ball. I finally settled on the current iteration but need to include the caveat that nothing here is literally long-term preserved, there’s just pickle brine involved and so the cauliflower is experiencing being pickled in the same way that a TV character might use their surname as a verb and proclaim “you just got [surname]-ed” at another unsuspecting character. The tofu is definitely marinated, though! No vagaries there.

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Tomato and Bread Soup with Fried Carrot Pesto

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One good thing I’ll say about the state of the world right now is that both Yellowjackets and Succession are back with new seasons and the specific effect these shows have on my serotonin levels is indubitably making up for me not receiving serotonin from any other sources. Both are tales of survival and its often gruesome ramifications except the former involves teen girls facing cannibalism in the Canadian wilderness and the latter concerns New York billionaires attending board meetings; both shows are weighing so overwhelmingly on my brain that while in the supermarket shopping for soup ingredients — and being inexplicably unable to locate a single mossy leaf of basil and so pivoting on the spot to flat-leaf parsley — I couldn’t help but congratulate myself for how well I would cope in both the wilderness and in the thrust and parry of the obtuse world of business with such a nimble demonstration of initiative and quick thinking.

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Double Vanilla Loaf Cake with Strawberry Jam Icing [vegan]

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Two loaf cakes, back to back? Yes, I am aware, let’s just say I was eating the previously-blogged dark chocolate molasses fruit loaf, and the power of suggestion worked even more expeditiously than usual, a loaf immediately begetting another loaf. And besides, it’s nearly Easter, the sanctified season of sugar, we can just roll with this delicious déjà cake and put off our adherence to content strategy structure till after the long weekend.

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Dark Chocolate Molasses Fruit Loaf [vegan]

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“I make this all the time” is a blogging claim that narrows my eyes in skeptism — I mean, I myself have blogged about literally hundreds of recipes that I’ve made once and never again, not because I didn’t love them but simply because I kept moving forward onto new things — but I acknowledge that there are few comforts more supreme than finding another recipe that nestles into your subconscious, repeated and revisited to the point where the ingredients spring into your hands from muscle memory requiring only the barest glance at the source, and every time you return to that recipe it’s like greeting an old (and very delicious) friend. For me, this includes Nigella Lawson’s sandwich loaf, my mocha cake; my spaghetti with caramelised tomato sauce; my instant gnocchi; this vegan panna cotta and its variants; of course, the fried carrot noodles; my Thai yellow curry Mac’n’cheese, and Bryant Terry’s ginger-molasses cake, and it’s the latter which inspired, directly, today’s Dark Chocolate Molasses Fruit Loaf.

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creamy gochujang tomato pasta

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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.

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Marble Heart Cookies

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It’s a delight and an honour to be inspired by other people’s recipes — sure, I’m good at invention, but my repertoire and palate would be limited and repetitious and probably deeply cringe without the welcome expertise and experiences of others. I love reading cookbooks as if they were novels and feeling my mind expand as much as I love taking screenshots of food styling and recipes, immediately forgetting them, and then finding them again while searching my folders for some long-lost meme and being inspired anew. That being said, my ability to conjure up recipes out of thin air and test them is like one of those theories of economics effects; it tends to correlate with experiencing relative stability in my personal life, with the data skewed by the occasional outlier flash of genius, or near-enough. At the moment I am, needless to say, leaning more on my own existing recipes or the wealth of knowledge from other people, and I am grateful for it! (That being said, and more important than any recipe: by sheer geographical luck my family and I avoided the devastating brunt of the recent floods and Cyclone Gabrielle; if you were also fortunately out of harm’s way and want to help, here is a round-up of donation sites, including links to support iwi relief funds.)

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One-pan Fried Chickpeas, Rice, and Greens

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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!)

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chilled cannellini bean soup with basil spinach oil

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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.

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Roasted Cherry Tomatoes with Cherry Tomato Dressing

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As someone perpetually sliding around in the gauzy formlessness 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!

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chocolate, rum, and prune truffle ice cream [vegan, no-churn]

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2023! Personally, I think we’ve gone too far and should try a do-over of one of the previous years but since — as we’ve well and truly established — I have no influence over the passage of time, here we are and here I am, hastily squeaking a blog post in while we’re barely still in that phase of January where you can reasonably keep saying “happy new year”; accompanied by a handful of blurry photos of ice cream from my phone. December was a tumultuous month for reasons out of my control, like being handed a punctured bucket of sand and being told every grain of sand you lose is going to cost you twenty dollars and you also are expected to tap dance while picking up the falling grains; and unsurprisingly none of that has magically gone away just because December finally ended, hence my unsteady launch into a new year of food blogging, but — as always! — while very little else can be counted on, this recipe for Chocolate, Rum, and Prune Truffle Ice Cream is, at least, so delicious.

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