Pickled Fried Cauliflower and Marinated Tofu Salad with Creamy Herb Dressing

April 16, 20231 Comment

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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There are three distinct components to this salad: scorched, nutty cauliflower soused in lemon juice with sweet, smoky gochugaru and the rich, fancy taste of toasted fennel seeds; soft chunks of tofu humming with salt and vinegar; and a celadon-hued dressing tinted with the leaves furled around the cauliflower, all held together with flouncy rocket leaves. While it’s not exactly the work of mere moments, this salad in both looks and tastes amply reflects the effort.

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With all that vinegar and lemon and marinating it might seem like this salad has set its pickling sights on the inside of your mouth as you eat it, however, it comes together in a bracing but balanced way: the opaque mellowness of the tofu and the tender cauliflower can ably handle that level of tang, and the tangle of leaves diffuses it further. I drew a little inspiration from Sicilian Cauliflower and the concept of brining tofu to make a kind of vegan feta; however in this case I’m happy for it to simply be marinated tofu — I’m bringing its delicious taste and texture to this salad on purpose as opposed to it being a substitution. That being said, if you wanted to crumble some feta into this I’m sure it would be a fine addition, but I’d use it alongside, not instead of, the tofu.

Somewhat infuriatingly for a person like me who doesn’t like to plan ahead, the tofu does taste better the longer you leave it in the marinade — on the other hand, if you’re organised you can keep the main components of this salad separately in the fridge and then breezily merge them together at your leisure; the tofu in one container, the cauliflower in another (it will get a little floppy as it sits in its vinegars and spices but I don’t see this as a problem) and the dressing in a third; the rocket should be added right as you’re about to serve. I’m not talking weeks of forethought here, the morning of the dinner you’re planning to eat this salad at would be perfect. With bread for swiping through the dressing and a dessert to happily anticipate, this would be a charmingly light but bolstering dinner for two; it will of course serve more people if you have other dishes on the table. And if you want to make it a salad tasting flight, or if you live in a country where rocket is called arugula and therefore have different ingredients in season, you might also consider my Lentil, Radish, Avocado and Fried Potato Salad; my Tomatoes and Fried Mint; or Nigella’s spectacular Pea, Mint, and Avocado Salad.

Pickled Fried Cauliflower and Marinated Tofu Salad with Creamy Herb Dressing

A fancy but robust meal of a salad, full of punchy flavour. Prepare the tofu at least a few hours in advance if you can, but it’s still fine if it’s just sitting around while you make the rest of the salad. Recipe by myself.

Marinated Tofu:

300g firm tofu, drained and patted dry with a paper towel
1/4 cup white vinegar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon fresh thyme or oregano leaves
1 fat garlic clove, peeled and chopped roughly
1/2 – 1 teaspoon table salt, or to taste

Cauliflower + Salad:

1/2 a large cauliflower
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon gochugaru, or chilli flakes of your choice
2 tablespoons pickle brine, from a jar of pickles
1 tablespoon lemon juice
salt, to taste
3 tablespoons pumpkin seeds
100g rocket leaves

Creamy Herb Dressing:

20g tofu (roughly) from the block for marinating
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon honey
1 tablespoon fresh thyme or oregano leaves
a few of the cauliflower leaves (optional, if they came attached)
salt and pepper, to taste

1: First, get the tofu a-marinating by slicing the 300g block of tofu into cubes, reserving about 20g (about 4 cubes of tofu) for the dressing. In an airtight container that is big enough to fit the tofu in, stir together the 1/4 cup of white vinegar, the two tablespoons of lemon juice, the tablespoon each of olive oil and fresh herbs, the sliced garlic clove, and the half teaspoon (or more, to taste) of table salt. Tip in the cubes of tofu, place the lid on the container, give it a gentle shake, and set aside while you complete the rest of the salad. If you’re making this ahead of time, refrigerate the container until needed.

2: Next, the cauliflower — slice your half-cauliflower into small florets, and fry them in the two tablespoons of olive oil in a large pan, letting the florets sit undisturbed for a minute or two to let them brown before turning them. I like to put the lid on the container for a couple of minutes so that they steam as well as frying, but whatever works for you. Once the cauliflower is sufficiently browned and scorched in places, remove the pieces to a large mixing bowl. Turn the heat off the pan, and tip in the fennel seeds, letting them sit for about 30 seconds in the residual heat until fragrant, and then tip the seeds over the cauliflower in the bowl. Repeat with the three tablespoons of pumpkin seeds, clattering them into the still-hot pan and leaving them to toast until fragrant. If your stovetop doesn’t hold its heat forever like mine, you may need to turn up the heat again. Set the pumpkin seeds aside for garnishing later.

3: Add the teaspoon of gochugaru (or chilli flakes) to the bowl of cauliflower, along with the two tablespoons of pickle brine, the tablespoon of lemon juice, and salt to taste. You can cover this bowl and let the cauliflower sit for a couple hours if that’s more convenient than eating it right away.

4: Finally, make the creamy herb dressing and assemble the salad. Place the reserved 20g/few cubes of tofu into a blender along with the two tablespoons of olive oil, three tablespoons of water, the teaspoon each of lemon juice, garlic powder, and honey, the tablespoon of thyme or oregano leaves, the cauliflower leaves (if using) and plenty of salt and pepper. Blitz until you have a smooth, green-tinged puree.

5: Toss the 100g of rocket leaves through the cauliflower. Drain the marinated tofu and gently toss through the salad. Drizzle over a little of the herb dressing, and leave the rest on the table with a spoon for people to add their own. Scatter over the toasted pumpkin seeds, and serve.

Makes two hearty servings. This will serve 3-4 as a side, or more as part of a busy buffet table.

Notes:

You can use spinach or mixed leaves instead of the rocket, but the peppery nature of the rocket is preferable here. If you’re not using rocket you could consider adding a handful of watercress to your leaves.
Use another garlic clove in the dressing if that’s easier — sometimes raw garlic can be a bit acrid, hence why I used garlic powder instead.
If your lemon juice is coming from actual fruit instead of a bottle, you could definitely add the finely grated zest to this, perhaps with the cauliflower.
If your cauliflower comes with its leaves already trimmed, you could add a handful of parsley or basil to the blender for the salad dressing instead, bearing in mind that the basil will add a much stronger (but delightful!) flavour.

music lately:

As by Stevie Wonder, I could no sooner name my favourite Stevie Wonder song than I could identify which particular air particles I enjoy breathing the most. Nonetheless, this is my favourite Stevie Wonder song! The way that chorus shuffles up on you, the way the verses lap in and out like waves, the way it’s really hard to google if you forget what it’s called!

Ridin’ Low by L.A.D. I always assumed, when I’d hear this on the radio back in the day, that the chorus must have been sampled from some 1960s band, as the interpolation of Temptations guitars and Five Satins shoo-be-do-ing would suggest, but after extensive research, it seems that the composers, who I cannot find any credits for, just created one of the most beautiful choruses from scratch for this song and then disappeared into thin air? I need to know more!

Stop by Jane’s Addiction, the kind of guitar riffs that make you feel like you’re falling off a bicycle onto gravel; Perry Farrell’s stainless steel voice is a national treasure.

Brotherhood of Man, from the film adaptation of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Robert Morse’s loose-shouldered no-personal-space fidgety physicality! It has to be said!

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!

Tomato and Bread Soup with Fried Carrot Pesto

April 12, 20231 Comment

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.

(When it comes to such hypotheticals I generally don’t engage in the what-ifs, subscribing to the Kim Cattrall mantra of not wanting to be in a situation even for an hour, but while looking at a flimsy, paper-straw thin supermarket leek and pondering whether or not $6 is reasonable for its purchase, wondering if I will ever behold a single affordable vegetable again in my lifetime or if that will be relegated to the sphere of nostalgia like telethons and the TV test pattern on Sunday mornings, I mean, who needs to imagine threatening fictitious situations?)

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I don’t fool myself that I’m even slightly equipped with the necessary girl-scout tendencies that might befit the survivors of Yellowjackets, but I am blessed with an ability to improvise or reverse-engineer a meal into existence based on whatever half-filled bags and scraps are in my kitchen; in the case of this tomato and bread soup, aka Pappa al Pomodoro, it was a can of tomatoes in the pantry and some ciabatta buns in the freezer and the notion that not too much would have to be done to turn them into a soup that’s not only serviceable but based on a culinary precedent (and delicious.)

This soup is an exercise in trusting the process: for the twenty minutes of simmering it appears to be thin and watery and entirely unpromising, but then you drop in the torn-up ciabatta which thirstily reduces and thickens the broth, and the honey which dovetails with the sweetness of the tomatoes, and suddenly — as if you turned up the sharpness and definition on a photo — it becomes a hearty, almost stew-like potage with a gentle depth of flavour from the soft allium presence of the leeks.

Because I am typically incapable of eating soup without some kind of mollifying add-on, I’ve made a pesto (although the name is, well, nominal, as it really bears no resemblance to that Genovese delicacy) out of fried carrots, nutty and rich, blended up with almonds and the aforementioned flat-leaf parsley that I heroically substituted for the basil I couldn’t find. I’ve long been a proponent of frying your carrots (eg, these noodles and this salad) and the salty, caramelised vegetal qualities of the pesto add a dash of intrigue and panache to the otherwise humble soup, though you could add a dollop of actual pesto, or make a stack of cheese toasted sandwiches for dipping into the soup’s red depths. It’s the perfect food for this turn into autumn we at last find ourselves in, but if it’s hotter weather where you are, you might consider this Chilled Cannellini Bean Soup with Basil Spinach Oil instead; if this tomato soup is a soft blanket and a radiator heater, the bean soup is a cold damp cloth to the forehead.

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Tomato and Bread Soup with Fried Carrot Pesto

A simple and hearty Tuscan-ish soup, thickened with torn ciabatta and topped with blitzed-up fried carrots, almonds, and parsley. The soup recipe is adapted just a little from the Pappa al Pomodoro in Italian Comfort Food by the Scotto family, the pesto is my own recipe.

Fried Carrot Pesto:

250g (about 2 medium) carrots
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus 2-3 extra tablespoons for blending
1/3 cup slivered almonds
15g Italian flat-leaf parsley
1 teaspoon lemon juice
a hearty pinch of salt

Tomato and Bread Soup:

1 medium-sized leek, stem only
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes
800ml water
2 stock cubes of your choice
2 tablespoons honey
80g (about 1 large or 2 small buns) ciabatta

1: Slice your carrot into batons and heat the first two tablespoons of olive oil in a deep frying pan. Fry the carrot sticks in the hot oil, letting them sit for a minute or two before turning. Once golden brown, remove the carrot sticks to the side to cool down and proceed with the soup.

2: Slice the stem of the leek into half moons and saute it over a low heat in the remaining oil in the same pan that you cooked the leeks in. Once the leeks have softened — which should only take about a minute — add the tablespoon of tomato paste and the two crushed garlic cloves and stir for another minute. Tip in the tin of tomatoes, and then fill up the empty tin twice with water from the tap to achieve your 800ml (or thereabouts) of water, and add this to the pan along with the two stock cubes, crumbled in. Bring this mixture to the boil then allow it to simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes, during which time it should reduce a little.

3: After the simmering is up, remove the pan from the heat. Tear the ciabatta into smallish chunks and add it to the soup along with the two tablespoons of honey, give it a stir, and let it sit for ten minutes while you get on with the pesto, by whizzing up the somewhat-cooled fried carrots, the 1/3 cup of slivered almonds, the 15g flat-leaf parsley, the teaspoon of lemon juice, the two to three tablespoons olive oil and the pinch of salt to form a chunky paste. Taste for seasoning (you can also add more olive oil or a splash of water to thin it out if you want.)

4: Bring the heat up again on the soup if it needs it, otherwise divide the soup between two bowls and spoon over the pesto.

Makes two hearty servings, or 3-4 dainty servings.

Notes:

If you don’t eat honey, replace it with about a tablespoon and a half of sugar or brown sugar; you can also replace the almonds with cashews or hazelnuts, honestly, I chose the almonds because they were on special.
You can absolutely replace the parsley with basil, and I’d encourage you to do so, as it makes sense culinarily, I simply couldn’t find any at the supermarket.
The pesto is best made in a food processor, if you only have a blender then you may need to add even more olive oil and a few tablespoons of water to get it moving and adjust the seasoning accordingly.

music lately:

Never Leave Me Alone by Nate Dogg, the hook is of course unreal, but its beauty would be nothing without Nate Dogg’s immediately recognisable throaty vocals, where he sounds like he’s somehow harmonising with himself at two slightly different low-vibrating pitches. A perfect song.

Andelusia by Savage Republic, I love a no-lyrics number, and this is just the sort of vigorously droning music that makes you want to run down the side of a highway in the rain.

People from the Broadway musical Funny Girl, as performed in 1992 by Laurie Beechman; I have to genuinely limit my listening to her because she makes me so emotional (like, no one needs to be crying while watching her in the incoherent Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat medley at the 1982 Tony Awards and yet! Here we find ourselves) so as you can imagine, when her crisp belt and sensitive interpretation skills are applied to this already stunning song, all bets are off.

Double Vanilla Loaf Cake with Strawberry Jam Icing [vegan]

April 5, 2023April 5, 20231 Comment

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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.

While my synapses are still able to ping with recipe ideas, I’m not exactly in a position (as you may have gathered from the vibe of recent posts) to be wildly testing recipes, hence why I applied this concept over an existing reliable framework, taking the Minimalist Baker cupcakes (which I’ve already enjoyed many times over), increasing the vanilla, spatula-ing the batter into a loaf tin, and hoping for the best. The icing recipe is squarely my own, such as it is, using the cheapest, stickiest jam to tint the frosting the delicate pink of Bloch split-sole leather ballet shoes and imbuing it with concentrated strawberry flavour.

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I call it Double Vanilla because as above, so below, but I do think — and it could be that I was using cheap vanilla essence — that the cake could’ve withstood a little more; I certainly wouldn’t say no to folding through the scraped seeds from a real vanilla bean. The cake mix nobly shapeshifted from cupcakes to loaf form resulting in a golden slab with a light, moist crumb, a gentle crust, and a mellow, unobtrusive sweetness. Fine though it is, the loaf is really a seaworthy vessel for the necessary icing — if it’s a good plain loaf without icing that you’re after, then I’d recommend the ginger-molasses cake that last week’s recipe was based on. The icing itself tastes wonderful — and somehow a little buttery — with the hearty, practical sweetness of the jam turning dainty and soft when mixed with the coconut oil and icing sugar.

As a final note in its favour, this loaf cake comes together with just a bowl and a spoon, and if you’re assertive enough with your spatula you can make the icing in the same unwashed bowl that you used for the cake. It won’t keep as long as the molasses loaf from last week, but it’s very pretty, which must count for something. And should you be making this in northern hemisphere climes, where strawberries may well be coming into season, insofar as seasons mean anything anymore, you might consider decorating the surface with them; but the real joy of this recipe (aside from its utter deliciousness, of course) is that pretty much all the ingredients are long-lasting pantry items, so you can have your berry-pink sunshine year round, and eat it too.

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Double Vanilla Loaf Cake with Strawberry Jam Icing

A light, fluffy vanilla-scented loaf cake with jammy-pink icing, as fantastically easy to make as it is to eat. I used the cheapest strawberry jam here, it worked perfectly. The loaf cake recipe is adapted very slightly from these Minimalist Baker cupcakes; icing recipe by myself.

1 cup (250ml) soy milk, or milk of your choice
1 teaspoon malt vinegar (or ACV)
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup (125ml) olive oil
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon table salt
1 and 1/2 cups flour
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Strawberry Jam Icing

1 tablespoon very soft refined coconut oil
2 tablespoons strawberry jam
1 teaspoon soy milk, plus extra if needed
1 cup icing sugar
Very optional: powdered freeze-dried berries, for garnishing

1: Set your oven to 180C/350F and line a loaf tin (mine is 23x13cm, a little either side of this measurement is fine) with a sheet of baking paper.

2: Place the cup of soy milk and teaspoon of vinegar together in a large mixing bowl, and let them sit for a minute. Together they should curdle a little, giving a sort of buttermilk effect, which is entirely desirable, so don’t worry if it suddenly looks a bit lumpy.

3: Stir in the cup of sugar, the half cup of olive oil, the tablespoon of vanilla extract and the quarter teaspoon of salt, then sieve in the one and half cups flour, one and half teaspoons of baking powder, and the half teaspoon of baking soda. Fold the wet and dry ingredients together — don’t overmix, but make sure any errant lumps of flour are thoroughly incorporated.

4: Spatula your batter into the prepared loaf tin and bake for 35 – 40 minutes, or until lightly golden brown and springy on top. Allow the loaf to cool completely before frosting it.

5: To make the icing, beat together — perhaps in the same, scraped out bowl that you made the cake in — the tablespoon of soft coconut oil, the two tablespoons of jam, and the teaspoon of milk. This mixture will look very unlikely, but once you sieve in the cup of icing sugar and stir it together (carefully, so as not to send clouds of icing sugar everywhere) it will suddenly form a pale-pink icing. Add a splash extra milk if it’s too thick to spread easily, and smooth it across the surface of the cooled vanilla loaf. This doesn’t make a ton of icing, but it’s just enough to generously coat the cake. Dust the icing with a little freeze-dried berry powder (I admit, I mostly did it for the photos, it will taste great either way) if using.

Store the iced loaf in a sealed container, and consume within about 2 days to enjoy it at its best, though I wouldn’t turn it down on day 3.

music lately:

Fancy by Reba McEntire, she absolutely pounces on this song and makes it her own and I adore this live performance (but then, I am always inordinately impressed and moved by a quick-change moment); I am, however, also a fan of Julia Murney’s worthy cover and Bobbie Gentry’s original, less bombastic but with that bewitching Gentry storytelling quality and sixties production.

Sinatra by Helmet, big and dark and mottled, like dragging a weighted blanket uphill but in a really good way, and the greatest use of the word “ME” isolated in a song since the coda of Defying Gravity (or vice versa, since the latter was obviously written several years later, but my point stands.)

Snake Eyes by Main Source, so warm and captivating with that record crackle-pop horn-filled melody, and extremely satisfying verses, I love it.

Dark Chocolate Molasses Fruit Loaf [vegan]

April 2, 20231 Comment

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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.

I mean, it’s near-on exactly the same recipe with a few extra bits and pieces added — as I’ve noted in previous blog posts this year, that’s where I’m at currently — but it is nonetheless an idea that’s been percolating in my mind for a while now. Let us return to my initial blog post from 2020, where Bryant Terry’s recipe from his book The Inspired Vegan introduced me properly to molasses, and I described it thus: “That heady, thick magnesium richness, like sweetened road tar, like a puréed cedar hope chest, like a photo negative of Marmite.” You can see how the pointed intensity of molasses, and making this cake over and over again, might then lead me to consider adding chocolate to it, both in the form of cocoa and splintered pieces of dark chocolate, to echo the almost charred bitterness of the molasses and to make the loaf even more inkily dark and dense. It’s then not a stretch to consider adding sultanas, themselves made more intense by dehydration, to be welcomed by the sticky open arms of the molasses.

Each thick slab of this cake offers a fudgy, moist crumb with the satisfying soft bite of chocolate chunks and squashily sweet fruit. It’s not exactly like a Christmas-type cake — it would require significantly more fruit for that — but it’s definitely very grown-up and chic despite the functionality of the loaf shape and its unadorned plainness (to that end, the scattering of icing sugar in the photos is extremely unnecessary! I just wanted to make it look a bit cuter for you guys.) At this point, you might wonder why I left out the ginger: it’s because I realised halfway through making this that I’d forgotten to buy some. I’m sure it would be excellent with it left in, but something in that mystical vantablack depth of flavour of the molasses almost makes it seem like the ginger was there all along anyway.

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I’ve made the original cake so many times that I think I might, somewhat blasphemously, now prefer it with treacle, but I believe this chocolate-tinted recipe requires the molasses more strictly — it’s all about that fine line between savoury and sweetness which you can only get from the La Brea Tar Pits quality of that particular sugar by-product. It also occurs to me, speaking of blasphemy, that this might be an Easter-friendly baking opportunity, should you be the kind of person who likes to generate baked goods during this holiday. This cake keeps wonderfully — if anything it tastes better and better the longer you leave it; if you make it now it’ll probably still be hitting its stride, flavour-wise, by Easter. And if you want further baking ideas for the long weekend you might also consider the Roasted Carrot Cake with ACV Buttercream; these chocolate rosemary cookies; this very easy chocolate pistachio fudge; these cupcakes, this lemon poppyseed loaf, or the recent marble heart cookies, all of which are varying degrees more child-friendly than this loaf cake, should that be something you’re taking into account. Not that children have the monopoly on chocolate, nor lack the palates for this loaf cake, but it personally took a long time for the switch to flick over in my head where I finally accepted dried fruit and its place in baking, and you might as well make life easier on yourself here — plus, more than one baked good on the go is never a bad thing.

Dark Chocolate Molasses Fruit Loaf

A modest adaptation of one of my favourite and most-returned-to recipes, Bryant Terry’s ginger molasses cake, adding cocoa, chocolate, and dried fruit to emphasise the intense flavours of the syrup. It’s dense, dark, delicious — and only uses one bowl to mix it all up.

1 and 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons cocoa
1/2 teaspoon table salt
3/4 cup sugar
80g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
3/4 cup sultanas
1/2 cup refined coconut oil, melted
1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons molasses
1 cup + 2 tablespoons milk (I used soy)
1 tablespoon malt vinegar

1: Set your oven to 180C/350F and line a loaf tin (mine is 23x13cm, a little either side of this measurement is fine) with a sheet of baking paper.

2: Sieve the 1 and 1/2 cups flour, the teaspoon of baking soda, the two tablespoons of cocoa, and the half teaspoon of table salt together in a mixing bowl, then stir in the 3/4 cup of sugar, the roughly-chopped chocolate, and the 3/4 cup of sultanas.

3: Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients with your spoon, and pour in the 1/2 cup of melted coconut oil, and the 1/2 cup and two tablespoons of molasses — easier to do it in this order, so the residual oil in the cup measure helps the molasses to slide out. Stir the tablespoon of malt vinegar into your cup and two tablespoons of milk in a measuring jug and pour about half of it into the mixing bowl. Stir everything together gently, starting by jostling the liquids then folding in the dry ingredients, adding the rest of the milk and vinegar mixture as you go. Don’t mix it too hard, and stop once there are no traces of flour left.

4: Spatula this batter into your prepared loaf tin, and bake for 50 to 55 minutes, or until the surface is springy. While you can eat it fairly soon after it’s been in the oven, it will be much easier to slice cleanly once it’s cooled, and I prefer the bite of the chocolate pieces once they’ve re-solidified. Store in an airtight container.

Note: you can use apple cider vinegar or whatever you have instead of the malt vinegar — I like the notion of its flavour aligning with the molasses but it’s not really going to make a notable difference, and the original recipe uses ACV anyway.

music lately:

Hold On by En Vogue, to so casually give us two incredible songs in one with that a capella part at the start? Glorious!

Touched by VAST, do you know how difficult it is to locate a song when you can only remember the wordless chorus part and no other detail? Somehow I stumbled on this recently after having that howling refrain in my head for literal decades and only a vague recollection that the title and artist were single-syllable words. There must be a word for this specific achievement!

Falling Down by Chapterhouse, it sounds kind of like eleven different blue jeans commercials put into a blender, by which I obviously mean I love it a whole lot!

The opening, title song from the Broadway musical Ragtime — the recent 25th anniversary reunion concert has me revisiting this cast recording, it’s stunningly beautiful throughout but this opening sequence always sends shivers up my spine.

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.

Marble Heart Cookies

March 6, 20234 Comments

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.)

This Marble Heart Cookie recipe is, like several of the cookies I’ve shared on here recently, adapted from a recipe by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero; their creations are consistently reliable when I don’t have the time or space to come up with my own base cookie formula, moreover, their cookies have become repeatedly baked and loved in my kitchen. And the visual inspiration — a kind of calico cat tricolour marbling effect — was inspired by these Lanibakes strawberry lime cookies, and it was this imagery that drove the existence of these cookies. The neapolitan-ish pink/brown/funfetti effect was borne simply because I was using the random things I had in my pantry: cocoa powder, dehydrated plum powder, hundreds and thousands sprinkles, if I’d had something a little dehydrated-something-else these might have taken off in a different direction. As it happens the muted richness and sour zing of plum tastes wonderful undulating against the clouds of vanilla and chocolate.

I don’t expect you to have the exact same ingredients as me in your pantry: you could leave out the sprinkles to no ill effect (although I staunchly, yet perhaps baselessly, maintain that their presence adds a certain something); you could use dehydrated raspberry or strawberry powder or just add pink colouring and flavouring to the dough; you could also abandon the marble aspect, choose one flavour, and have regular cut-out cookies. Sometimes when I approach a recipe from a place of visual aspiration first I am punished for my vanity by having the recipe turn out terribly; clearly some higher force approved of this aesthetic prioritising because these cookies turned out perfectly and exactly as I pictured them in the ever-revolving Mad Men Kodak carousel in my mind; the flavours were harmonious, the colours merged like friendly patches in a handmade quilt, like a topographical map from a cartoon land, like the most delicious and low-stakes of Rorschach tests.

They’re delicious on their own, with the bloom of vanilla permeating throughout each heart, but these cookies also have a distinct sugary chewiness that I imagine would lend itself well to being sandwiched around ice cream, should you have the energy for that. Indeed, I considered calling them Chewy Marble Hearts since this textural aspect seems to be the defining feature of the finished cookie but left it out literally only because it sullied the shoegaze-album-title elegance of the name, and for no other sensible reason. And who could be sensible around cookies this pretty?

Marble Heart Cookies

Bewitchingly pretty and chewy cookies with splashes of colour and flavour unique to every heart (or whatever shape you like!) that you slice out. Recipe adapted from the chocolate cut-out cookies in Vegan Cookies by Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero, and inspired by the Lanibakes Strawberry Lime Cookies.

190g (3/4 cup) sugar
1/4 cup rice bran oil, or similar plain oil
1/4 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon salt
180g (1 and 1/2 cups) flour
1 tablespoon cornflour (or cornstarch in the US)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon freeze-dried plum powder (or raspberry or strawberry powder)
1 tablespoon cocoa
1 teaspoon 100s and 1000s/rainbow sprinkles

1: Using a wooden spoon, briskly mix the 190g sugar, 1/4 cup each of oil and milk, two teaspoons of vanilla and half teaspoon of salt together in a medium-sized bowl. Stir in the 180g flour, the tablespoon of cornflour, and the half teaspoon of baking powder till it forms a thick dough, and then divide the mixture into three fairly even portions (no need to stop and weigh them) leaving one portion in the mixing bowl and placing the others into two further bowls.

2: Stir the tablespoon of plum powder into one portion of cookie dough; the tablespoon of cocoa into the next portion of cookie dough, and fold the teaspoon of sprinkles into the remaining portion. Refrigerate the three bowls of cookie dough for half an hour, though longer is fine.

3: When the half-hour rest time is almost up, set your oven to 180C/350F, line a cookie tray/sheet with baking paper, and lay a second piece of baking paper on the bench or whatever work surface you’re using for rolling out the dough. I like to have another piece of baking paper between the dough and the rolling pin, to ensure the dough doesn’t stick to anything. Using your hands, form small balls — about a heaped teaspoon, or the size of a walnut — of the three lots of dough, and place them close to each other on the sheet of paper on your worktop, alternating the colours (and see the photo above for reference). Place the aforementioned third sheet of baking paper on top of the balls of dough and roll them out so they merge into one even layer, about 3-4 mm thick. Now, use a heart cutter to cut shapes out of the dough, turning the cutter upside-down and then back the right way again to maximise the space (as above in the photo, although I could’ve been more careful!)

4: Use a lifter/flipper to carefully shift the cookies onto the paper-lined baking tray and bake them for seven minutes (which sounds preposterously short but it’s all they need!) then transfer them to a cooling rack after they’ve sat on the tray for a couple of minutes. Re-roll the remaining dough and continue to cut hearts out and bake as above — the marbling effect will be less patchwork-y on the second roll-out, and will become continuously mottled as you keep re-rolling, so cut your hearts out as assiduously as you can on the first round.

Store the cookies in an airtight container once cool.

Makes around 26 cookies, depending on the size of your cutter and so on (the one I used is about 2.3 inches.)

Notes:

If you don’t have access to freeze-dried berry powder, carefully tint one of the portions of dough with pink food colouring and add a little flavoured essence of your choice (imitation raspberry is my 100% favourite) bearing in mind that adding too much liquid may affect the texture of the dough. You could also choose just one of these add-ins and have solely chocolate, vanilla, or pink cut-out cookies.
I don’t currently have a lot of bench space, so my solution was to roll out the cookie dough on the baking tray, then slide that sheet of baking paper with the cookie dough on it onto an upturned roasting dish, then place another sheet of baking paper on the now-empty baking tray, and then ferry the dough hearts from the upturned roasting dish to the awaiting baking tray. It’s a little fiddly but it works.
A double batch would be easy enough to make, as this only produces a fairly small quantity of dough; however to maintain as much of the patchwork marbling effect as possible, only roll out half the dough at a time.

music lately:

Hypnotized by Spacemen 3, imagine a distortion pedal just ran a half-marathon and is now lying on its back inhaling and exhaling deeply with a tremendous sense of achievement; that is what this song sounds like.

Jive Talk by The UMC’s, immeasurably jaunty, fantastically fantastic, that string-section sample from The Flock feels tailor-made for this purpose.

Revenge by Nomeansno, the chorus is so good I involuntarily started laughing when I first heard it.

The legendary Chita Rivera recently turned 90; may she enjoy many more birthdays and may we enjoy her superlative and gasp-worthy choreo and gasp-free breath control as she performs a medley of America from West Side Story and All That Jazz from Chicago (both songs from roles she originated on Broadway) in 1982 at the not-immoderate age of 49.

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, 20232 Comments

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”.

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

January 8, 2023Leave a comment

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.

While most of my ice cream recipes lean towards the dense rather than the fluffy, texture-wise, this one has a particular cellular compression, like a very solid ganache, hence adding “truffle” to the title to warn you of its approaching sturdiness, while also providing a distracting flourish from the presence of the prunes, which, to be fair, aren’t everyone’s favourite sweetmeat. Me, I love a prune, with their plummy, almost tannin-y sweetness and depth, and here they bring a potent, rum-drenched fruitiness to the ice cream, well-matched by the bitter dark chocolate and expansive sweet creaminess of the coconut.

The result tastes rather like Christmas cake mixed with brownie batter, immensely rich and grown-up, with a husky rummy finish that avoids overwhelming. It doesn’t look as elegant as it tastes, so if aesthetics are your watchword, you could consider having diminutive serving glasses as I’ve done in these photos, or freezing it in a lined loaf tin to cut into slices, or serving it with icing sugar-dusted raspberries for a pop of colour, or giving up entirely. On serving-based aesthetics, that is, not 2023 as a whole, because despite my recent lived experience I still have high hopes for the new year to nudge new good things into existence. I mean, we have this ice cream! That is a start.

Chocolate, Rum, and Prune Truffle Ice Cream

Dense, intense, rich, with plummy rum-soaked pureed fruit and dark chocolate. As always, no ice cream maker is necessary but you do need to allow several hours for the prunes to soak (and, of course, for the ice cream itself to freeze). Recipe by myself.

1 and 1/2 cups prunes
3 tablespoons dark rum (see notes)
200ml rooibos tea (that is, one cup minus about three tablespoons)
250g dark chocolate
1 x 320g tin condensed coconut milk (or condensed oat milk)
1 x 400ml tin full-fat coconut cream
a pinch of salt

1: Soak the prunes in the rum and tea for about six hours, or overnight, in a sealed container (or — I just poured the rum and cooled tea directly onto the prunes in their snaplock bag from the bulk section of the supermarket where I bought them.)

2: Once step one is complete, either several hours later or the next day, puree the prunes and any remaining liquid in a blender or food processor. It’s up to you whether you want this to be a velvety puree or to retain some texture, I went for the latter but either is fine.

3: From here it’s pretty simple; gently melt the 250g dark chocolate in bursts in the microwave or in a heatproof bowl resting (without touching the water) on a small pan of simmering water. Once the chocolate is melted, stir in your condensed milk and coconut cream, and then spatula the prune puree from your blender into the chocolate mixture and stir again to combine. Finally, stir in a decent pinch of salt, to taste.

4: Transfer this delicious mixture into a container with a lid; I like to let my ice creams rest in the fridge for two hours first as I, perhaps misguidedly, feel that it improves the flavour and texture, so either after that or straight away if you’re impatient, freeze the chocolate mixture for about six hours or until, well, frozen.

Makes roughly 1.25 litres. Because of the alcohol content you only need to let this sit for a few minutes to make it spoonable.

Notes:

If you don’t wish to use rum, Marsala would be my second choice (in fact, it might be my first choice if I had both in front of me), otherwise bourbon or Pedro Ximinez sherry would be great. If you don’t wish to use alcohol at all simply leave it out, bearing in mind that the ice cream will be a lot more rock-hard without the softening effect of alcohol. I’d also add a couple teaspoons of vanilla extract for another layer of flavour.
You also don’t have to use rooibos if you don’t like the taste. It’s my preferred tea to soak dried fruit in, however Earl Grey would not be out of the question.

music lately:

Pets by Porno for Pyros, I was going to call this song “nonplussedly cheerful” but one of the youtube commenters bested me with a more accurate description of “nihilistically hopeful”, and something in Perry Farrell’s scraped-hollow voice adds to the nihilism and the hopefulness of it.

Long Ago by Mariah Carey. Despite her staggering body of number 1 singles, she is never lethargic or parsimonious on the album tracks, and this slinky, low-lit song could’ve absolutely been a later release from the incredible Daydream.

Serenade in Blue by Ethel Ennis, her plush voice is glorious for interpreting this standard, but I am also fond of the long-shadowed cinematic orchestrations on the Glenn Miller original.

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!

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