The 13th Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Recipe Round-up, with 80 recipes for you

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img_5646 copy(Chocolate Pistachio Fudge)

Every year Christmas feels more like one of those anxiety dreams about Christmas where it’s suddenly the day itself and you haven’t done any shopping or packed for the airport and you’re running late and although Christmas is ostensibly about family and giving and eating and tradition it really is above all about our perception of time, what’s changed, what hasn’t, who is no longer here, who you no longer hear from, how unprepared you are and how it was only just last Christmas I swear and how much time has passed since you were a marginally less jaded child. Time, that indefatigable brute!

But it’s also about eating. And before we lose sight of that, let’s leap into the 2023 edition of a favourite tradition of mine for the past thirteen years, something we can all count on, that no anxiety dream can rend asunder: my Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Recipe Round-Up! With EIGHTY recipes this year!

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Nigella’s Granny Boyd’s Biscuits

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I have always faltered at getting the timing right; I either play my cards so soon they haven’t yet been dealt, or I over-project meaning onto something and never get to achieve it at all. On my birthday two years ago I found — in a moment of pure magic that I still haven’t processed — Judy Holliday’s 1958 Trouble is a Man record, a circle of vinyl I didn’t even know existed in New Zealand, let alone for me, let alone on my birthday. For some reason, I promised myself that I wouldn’t listen to it until I had my very own space, beholden to no one but myself and my whims (and also my landlord) and that alone would be the perfect context to finally absorb this record. Two years and then some passed, and I have, as of December 1st, at last moved into a place where I am the only resident, and yet — I don’t know, it still just hasn’t been quite right, I haven’t been in the right frame of mind, and so I still haven’t listened to this record despite it meaning the world to me.

I have, however, made some cookies, and I baked a loaf of bread, and both were Nigella Lawson recipes, so despite my existential fumbling for the needlessly unattainable, this new place is undeniably mine, all mine now. (And my landlord’s. But for the purposes of romantic drollery: mine, all mine.) If in doubt, Nigella. If really in doubt: Nigella and chocolate.

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Gingerbread Espresso Martini

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Despite five years in hospitality and more than triple that with a food blog where I try to convince you of my authority, some skills-based aspects of food elude me: I’ve never poached an egg convincingly, I don’t have the engineering project management qualifications required to get sourdough off the ground, and I’m abysmal at making coffee. Working a Friday rush when a customer would order a round of espresso martinis, perhaps not realising that this involved grinding everything to a halt and preparing each individual coffee shot with maddening torpor — was a particularly piquant slice of hell. When I was promoted to running a cocktail bar that resolutely didn’t have a coffee machine, we cleverly used cold brew instead in our espresso martinis — most effectively — and with this new relaxed approach I could finally appreciate the cocktail.

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msabaha (chickpeas in tahini sauce)

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This is the second recipe I’m sharing from the beautiful book The Palestinian Table by Reem Kassis, after the Avocado, Labeneh and Preserved Lemon Spread from last time. Again, again, as a simple and heartfelt acknowledgement of Palestine’s nationhood and culture that I would’ve been making anyway, but make more emphatically now.

This Msabaha recipe is simple yet divertingly hands-on, with simmer-softened chickpeas wallowing in a lemony tahini pool, some whole, some crushed into sauce-thickening rubble, dusted with earthy cumin and deep, smoky paprika that enlivens the dish like a luminous sweep of highlighter to the browbone.

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Avocado, Labaneh, and Preserved Lemon Spread

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I’ve never had a library card that didn’t carry with it fines of some shape. How many other eleven-year-olds have you known to get debt collection letters from Baycorp? That was me, starting as I meant to go on. Some two years ago, Auckland City Libraries — my newish local — stopped enforcing fees, unlocking a new level of relaxation I hadn’t known possible to access. It’s amazing how quickly one adjusts, how quickly things feel normal. I love getting out a stack of cookbooks periodically from the library for inspiration without having to worry that the brisk passage of time will suddenly incur mounting fines; one such book that I rented six weeks ago, and still haven’t quite yet returned, was The Palestinian Table by Reem Kassis.

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Easy Pear and Parmesan Tart with Chilli Honey Walnuts

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As a kid I used to wonder – worry, even – about how rich people worked out what presents to get their loved ones each year. If everyone around you can buy whatever they want, whenever they want, how do you get them something special? I’m still yet to be in a position to find out; but I’m not alone in this fear if the Succession through-line of characters being utterly woeful at giving and receiving gifts is anything to go by (I still cringe to think of Connor offering his aging billionaire father a sourdough starter for his birthday).

I was reminded of this when considering the majesty of the frozen puff pastry sheet: the way it turns a humble handful of ingredients into culinary elegance, lending instant opulence. Even if people are quite well aware that it came out of the freezer ready-rolled, its presence suggests time and sedulous care.

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roasted brussels sprouts with agrodolce and feta

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In this charmless era where the murmurs of backlash begin to brew before a rising entity has time to be completely perceived, let alone overrated, I do enjoy a good slow-burn image rehabilitation. When deserved. In the case of the blameless brussels sprout, that metonymic representative of a small child’s innate suspicion of greens, that dinner-as-punishment vegetable, it’s unsurprisingly much more palatable when roasted or generally scorched over high heat in some fashion than boiled into limp and pallid reprehensibility.

And when you add agrodolce and a snowfall of crumbled feta? The brussels sprout is not only rehabilitated, it’s utterly impervious to the backlash cycle.

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kūmara chocolate button cookies

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Even someone as relatively jaded as I can occasionally still have my brain rewired by a tweet, for example, the claim by Folu (of Unsnackable acclaim) that chocolate chip cookies should have 30% less chocolate. (And I am nothing if not a scholar; historians found records of this opinion dating as far back as 2014.) It seems counter-intuitive — what, after all, is the point of chocolate if not to push you to take its presence to the extreme in every possible application — and yet it makes sense; cookies themselves should be the main character, not a merely tolerated and oversaturated vessel, if you want it that much just eat some chocolate. It was this tweet that guided my hand while making these kūmara chocolate button cookies; each softly mountainous ball of dough holds three chocolate buttons, tops, and that contained rarity only adds to the chocolate’s allure.

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caramel banana self-saucing pudding

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I was explaining to a friend how tired I am, and illustrated my point by saying I’d watched Goodfellas a week prior but still hadn’t worked up the energy to log it on Letterboxd; and immediately realised that probably wasn’t a dramatic as it sounded in my head. But the fact is I am tired and this blog has suffered as a result (and so have my numerous other open tabs, including Goodfellas on Letterboxd which I finally logged yesterday; whereupon the nation undoubtedly breathed a sigh of relief.) Indeed, I made this Caramel Banana Self-Saucing Pudding several weeks ago and apparently needed this much run-up to write about it, but here it is at last, and it’s fantastically delicious.

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