Choc chip cookie dough ice cream

a spoonful of ice cream from a tin

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

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Basil olive dip

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

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

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Peppermint espresso martini

several espresso martinis in front of a glass filled with mini candy canes

Discovery can feel like invention. When you encounter a combination of flavours so prepossessingly ravishing yet so utterly unknown to you that surely — with all your life experience and accumulated years — this must be the first of its existence? I’m not referring here to culinary colonisation and staking a flag in someone else’s heritage, I’m talking about tasting a peppermint espresso martini for the first time. What do you mean it’s extremely, publicly common? Entirely un-gatekept? There’s only so many hours in the day, but I’ve had plenty enough of them to hear about this!

I’ve quoted him before, but Pete Campbell of Mad Men really has earned his place as a patron saint of food writers when he said “turned out it already existed, but I arrived at it independently”. In the fullness of time — the week out of 38 years in which I’ve known of this flavour combination — the important thing is that I arrived at all.

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The 14th Annual Hungryandfrozen edible gift guide with 87 recipes for you

A jar with a ribbon around it surrounded by baubles.


Despite last Christmas only having occured 27 minutes ago, it’s suddenly next Christmas – so without further existential crises let’s launch into the all-singing, all-dancing 2024 edition of a favourite tradition for the past 14 years of my 17-year-old blog, something we can all count on, or at least, that we can all count: The 14th Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Guide! With 87 recipes rounded up for you!

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Lemon halloumi angel hair soup

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

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

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mint choc-chip ice cream

a blue ice cream scoop and a spoon resting on a tin of mint choc chip ice cream

I am quite happy to admit when I am incorrect, not least because I have so few opportunities to do so — culinarily, at least! Outside the kitchen it’s a nonstop onslaught of realising and abegnation — but today I contritely retract my claim that mint chocolate tastes like toothpaste has fallen into my dessert. Now, supermarket mint choc-chip ice cream is still vile, with its dusty pellets of solidified cocoa-tinted vegetable oil surrounded by puffy, indiscriminately sweet frozen dairy. But when a beautiful woman tells me it’s her favourite flavour, what am I to do but promptly make several batches of it? And it turns out that my mint choc-chip ice cream isn’t just relatively more delicious than the supermarket stuff, or even than my dim expectations, it is in fact singularly sensational. Indeed, it makes my churlish toothpaste claim feel akin to those people who look at modern abstract art and say “my toddler could do that”.

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Broccoli coriander salad

a white and pink plate of broccoli salad on a white tablecloth

Unlike the unfortunate sector of society with the OR6A2 gene that makes coriander taste like soap, my ancestors blessed me with a hearty hyper-tolerance for the herb, and I can happily consume buckets of it like a blithe drayhorse in a meadow. That being said, I didn’t come to this broccoli coriander salad on purpose — it was the happiest and most serendipitous of accidents based on that humble yet potent activity; the fridge-raid dinner. Put it this way, I expected this to (a) taste fine and (b) use up exactly what I had at hand and no more. I did not expect it to blow my hair back so thoroughly, and I’ve had it for or with dinner repeatedly ever since. So, now I’m sharing it with you.

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Salty pecan oat sables

A stack of biscuits with a few sprigs of lavendar next to them

As much as I enjoy a culinary pun, I also enjoy a culinary trompe-l’œil, like my feta with chilli oil pine nuts which is doing its best to resemble both soft tofu with chili oil, and cream cheese with sweet chilli sauce — a delicious double bluff. In the case of these salty pecan oat sables, they’re endeavouring to appear as banausic and unremarkable as a biscuit can be, and yet below their drab surfaces lurk layers and layers of cunning flavour.

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kefte bi tahini [lamb meatballs and tahini sauce]

A roasting tray of potatoes and lamb kefte

Meat-and-potatoes is a phrase I’ve come to think of tinged with not a little pejorative, whether applied to outlook or dinner — but one of the most effective ways to sidestep the lowering veil of culinary or generalised boredom is, of course, to see how other people are doing it better. In the case of this Palestinian recipe for kefte bi tahini, it’s both a glamorously dashing yet earthy pairing and an opportunity to celebrate and experience Palestine’s cuisine. This recipe comes from Yasmin Khan’s wonderful Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen, and it’s one I’ve cooked from before. I first found a similar recipe in The Palestinian Table, a compelling book by Reem Kassis that I’ve also cooked from before — the relative simplicity of Khan’s version turned my head, but its inclusion in both books only served to make me want to cook it more; clearly this is a recipe people love.

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Tamarillo Sidecar

Two tamarillo cocktails, a tamarillo and a red fabric rose on a white tablecloth

Cooking is about formulas and working out which jigsaw pieces you can slot in and out of the whole to make something new; but so is drinking. And when you realise how many cocktails are based on liquor + sour + sweet: daiquiris, margaritas, cosmopolitans, mojitos, gimlets, and so on, then you can be emboldened, with the right proportions, to start tinkering. In this case, the tinkering was done for me — I was served a wonderful cocktail at Caretaker and wanted to recreate it at home — but — and this is the last time I’ll say the word ‘tinkering’ — I could not resist tinkering further. Actually, it was that other classic recipe formula: reverse-engineering a trebuchet to launch you as close as possible to your desired recipe using the ingredients you have already in your pantry, which is how I landed on this Tamarillo Sidecar cocktail. That is, if I’d had white rum, it might’ve been the original tamarillo daiquiri I was served at the cocktail bar but needs must, which is an absurd thing to say when cognac is involved but — they must!

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