Guinness Beef Chilli

1 Comment

A yellow bowl of chilli with stacked plates in the background

One aspect I particularly appreciate about Nigella Lawson’s ‘In Defence of Brown Food’ chapter in Cook, Eat, Repeat is her note about how “allowing oneself ever to get roped into that game of rating food, or pitting one type against another, is both reductive and pleasure-draining.” We may be gasping and parched amid a nuance drought currently, but none of it is coming from Lawson, at least. She does also note that stews, that brownest of food, “can certainly be, in the wrong hands, unphotogenic”. Which in the case of this Guinness Beef Chilli, holds true — although I would, slightly defensively, clarify that I was being hasty against my will when I photographed it. Ironic, since everything about this recipe demands slowness; that achieved, I found myself with about twenty minutes of usable daylight within which to capture its challenging visage. You already know it, though: the taste is what matters, and this tastes incredible.

Continue reading →

Roasted green beans, fennel, potato, and feta

2 Comments

Green beans and fennel on a roasting tray

If brunch can be defined as not quite breakfast and not quite lunch, occasionally you require a similar framework applied to your dinner, whether through heat, haste, exhaustion or the lingering memory of prior repletion. I shall not wring a cramped portmanteau out of ‘dinner’ and ‘lunch’ — though others have tried — but I shall offer you this recipe for roasted green beans, potatoes, fennel and feta, which occupies that nebulous yet necessary space.

Continue reading →

Fig leaf gin

1 Comment

A jar of fig gin sitting on fig leaves on a white tablecloth

Though I spent a not insignificant portion of time with my writing group on Sunday taunting the kind of ironically insubstantial literary elitism that mistakes dogmatism and exclusion for Doing Something — oh, you know the kind I mean — here I am with an undeniably impractical and feckless recipe for Fig Leaf Gin. Not that I ever promised practicality, but I try to keep things within the realm of possibility. This is an outlier — a delicious one, though, and what it lacks in justification for its own existence it does, at least, make up for in ease of execution by being very, very easy to make.

Continue reading →

Triple tomato risotto

1 Comment

Tomato risotto and a fork on a pink plate

I had no real conceptual understanding, let alone appreciation of risotto until I encountered Nigella Lawson, from whom comes so much of my formative knowledge of food and the joys therein. In her 2010 book Kitchen, she speaks of “the solace of stirring” reiterating her stance that risotto’s comfort and calm emanates not only from its soft babyfood texture, but from the stirring itself, “the ritual of unchallenging but repeated actions”. There’s no fast-tracking risotto — or at least, if there is, I don’t want it — for twenty-five minutes you and the stove and the spoon are one, watching the rice rise under your clockwise or anticlockwise motion. It’s positively meditative.

Considering I lost most of Feburary to repeatedly testing a peanut brittle recipe where the science never quite matched my vision, it was a relief to have this recipe for triple tomato risotto stick the landing perfectly, its deliciousness providing as much comfort as the process of making it. I guess it’s good to be culinarily humbled now and then, but I wouldn’t want to make a habit of it, though more for cost-of-living reasons than maintaining my ego.

Continue reading →

Mango passionfruit summer trifle

2 Comments

a spoon on a white tablecloth in front of a bowl of trifle

This recipe for mango passionfruit summer trifle was something of an emotional rollercoaster but hopefully it was a ride for one person only — me — and I can simply manage all of your expectations without any jumpscares. In short — the idea of a low-effort trifle for sweltering weather appeared to me (creative smugness), the recipe took all of fifteen minutes to make (smugness peaking), it tasted bewilderingly lackluster despite the objective individual deliciousness of each ingredient (plummeting self-worth, paradise lost), I shoved it balefully into the fridge and pretended it didn’t exist (denial, abnegation), the next day I petulantly swiped another spoonful and it tasted sublime (soaring joy, paradise regained). Finally, I acknowledged my rash heedlessness and realised I should’ve known all along that a trifle improves with time, even one that takes no time at all to make (magnanimous, gracious concession).

Continue reading →

24 Valentine’s Day Recipes for you

Leave a comment
Marble heart cookies


Valentine’s Day doesn’t inspire within me great frenzied levels of interest, but I do care about (a) drawing attention to myself and (b) encouraging you to make delicious food. If you haven’t got plans already, avoid perching side-by-side with all the other awkward couples like toothpicked cubes of cheese and pickled onions stuck into a halved grapefruit and stay in, instead (then go out to dinner the next night — let it not be said that I’m not here for the restaurant industry). This round-up is much simpler than fiendish beast that is my annual Christmas Gift Guide, but there’s plenty to choose from and I’ve tried to select a few unsung heroes from my back catalogue.

Whether your dance card is full this Valentine’s Day with multiple mouths to feed or it’s single servings — this one goes out to all the lovers.

Continue reading →

Green oats, fried egg, bloomed paprika butter, salt and vinegar chips

2 Comments

A fried egg with crushed chips on top, in a white plate with a blue rim and a spoon resting on it

Now, you might look at this recipe title — green oats, fried egg, bloomed paprika butter, salt and vinegar chips — and expect me to implore you to trust me, to trust the process. You absolutely should not. It’s not that this dish is so offputtingly outlandish or hellbent on offending, but if there’s a voice in your head saying “abhorrent”, then I wouldn’t ignore it. If, however, your curiosity is piqued, then allow me to expatiate.

Continue reading →

Pasta with harissa, beans, and feta

2 Comments

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

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

Continue reading →

Choc chip cookie dough ice cream

2 Comments

a spoonful of ice cream from a tin

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

Continue reading →

Basil olive dip

Leave a comment

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

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

Continue reading →