Tag: Ingredient: Lemons

Truffle Mushroom Pasta with Gremolata

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As a food writer, truffle oil — the closest I’m getting to that elusive mushroom these days — poses an engaging challenge for my powers of description. Can I get away with saying it has notes of armpit, if said armpit belonged to someone wildly attractive? Can something smell silky? If I say it tastes like running your fingers through the cool, mossy detritus on a forest floor while holding a roasted bulb of garlic in your mouth — without chewing! — will that make sense? That it tastes like being proposed to by a crackling fire in an alpine lodge that’s been in your family for generations?

Either way, you can see how we’re only working with a couple of drops of it at a time here.

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That being said, you can leave out the truffle oil and this will still be a fantastically delicious mushroom pasta, so if all that talk of armpits and detritus is too much for your sensibilities, or if you simply don’t like the taste of truffle or you — quite reasonably — don’t have access to a bottle of truffle oil, there’s no need to miss out. Mushrooms themselves are no slouch in the arena of flavour that inspires overcooked metaphors, especially when you have a mix of oyster mushrooms and brown Swiss buttons as I have here — oysters for texture and delicately pronounced fungal richness, brown buttons for barky intensity, along with a sweetening splash of mirin (as with last week’s recipe, successfully taking the place of the wine I would’ve used if I’d had it) plus some herbs that echo the sylvan nature of the mushrooms.

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Putting a full stop on all that headiness is a handful of gremolata, that enlivening fluff comprising parsley, lemon zest, and garlic — I sliced my lemon zest by hand with a knife so that tiny bursts of lemon oil would pierce through the sumptuous pasta, and the sheer freshness of the gremolata is an ideal contrast to that which it covers. I was delightedly surprised to find the frilly fettuccine you see in the pictures at the supermarket by San Remo, an everyday workhorse pasta company. A new pasta shape dropping from a bottom shelf brand is like hearing a new planet has been discovered — at least it is in this economy — and I love the way this fettuccine gathers the mushrooms and herbs up in its ruffled skirts. Any long pasta will do nicely here though — regular fettuccine, linguine, bucatini, or that most reliable stalwart workhorse herself, spaghetti.

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The funghi component of this recipe is inspired by the mushroom ragout in Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat, and you could certainly subtract the pasta from the equation and serve these mushrooms, or an expanded quantity thereof, over polenta or mashed root vegetables or in any such capacity as you desire. And should you be needing further mushroom motivation, you could consider Nigella’s Pasta with Lemon, Garlic and Thyme Mushrooms, my Fast Crispy Sweet Chilli Oyster Mushrooms, or my Green Garlic Oyster Mushrooms.

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Truffle Mushroom Pasta with Gremolata

A heady mouthful of truffle-tinted fried mushrooms tangled through long pasta, this dish is classically elegant and incredibly delicious — and if you don’t have (or want) truffle oil, just leave it out. The mushrooms can stand on their own two feet just fine. Recipe by myself, though inspired by Nigella Lawson’s mushroom ragout in How To Eat.

  • 150g oyster mushrooms
  • 150g brown button mushrooms
  • 25g butter or 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • salt for the pasta water, and to taste
  • 200g long pasta (eg fettuccine, spaghetti, bucatini)
  • 1 red onion
  • 1 clove garlic
  • 2 tablespoons mirin
  • 2 teaspoons flour
  • 1 stock cube of your choice
  • 250ml water
  • leaves from a stem of thyme
  • leaves from a sprig of rosemary
  • A couple drops of white truffle oil
  • 15g Italian flat-leaf parsley
  • zest of a lemon
  • 1 clove garlic, extra

1: Wipe any dirt from the mushrooms with a paper towel and trim the clustered ends from the oyster mushrooms. Slice the oyster mushrooms into strips about 1cm wide, and slice the brown button mushrooms thinly. Heat the 25g butter or two tablespoons olive oil in a large, wide frying pan and tumble in the sliced mushrooms, letting them cook over a high heat, stirring and turning occasionally until the mushrooms have reduced in size, browned in places, and the liquid released from them has evaporated. This took me about twenty minutes — don’t rush this step, as the mushrooms really do need to cook down in their own good mysterious time. While the mushrooms are sizzling, bring a large pan of water to the boil and, once it’s boiling, salt it generously. Transfer the cooked mushrooms to a bowl and set aside. Turn off the heat from the mushroom pan, but leave it where it is.

2: Add the 200g pasta to the pan of boiling water, and cook for ten to twelve minutes or until al dente. While this is happening, finely dice the red onion and crush or dice the first garlic clove. In the same, now-empty pan that you cooked the mushrooms in, gently fry the diced onion and garlic over a low heat for a couple minutes until softened. Stir in the two tablespoons of mirin, letting it bubble up, and then stir in the two teaspoons of flour and then crumble in the stock cube. Slowly add half the water and stir it into the onion mixture, which should become thick and saucy as the flour absorbs the water. Add the remaining half cup of water, or as much of it as you need, if the mixture is too thick. Return the mushrooms to the hot pan, along with the thyme and rosemary leaves, and stir to warm through.

3: Remove the pan of mushrooms from the heat and stir in a couple drops of white truffle oil. Drain the pasta and stir it into the mushrooms. Make the gremolata by roughly chopping the 15g of Italian parsley and finely dicing or crushing the garlic clove, and mix them together in a small bowl with the zest of a lemon.

4: Check the pasta for seasoning, and to see if it wants a little more truffle oil. Divide the pasta between two plates and scatter with the gremolata.

Serves 2.

Notes:

  • You can play around with quantities and varieties of mushrooms — even if all you can find is white button mushrooms this will still taste good.
  • If you have a bottle of red open, or some Marsala handy, you can absolutely use that instead of the mirin.

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music lately:

Bring it On by Organized Konfusion, just two verses and a very to-the-point chorus but those verses pin you to the wall! The way Pharoahe Monche kneads the syntax like it were bread dough and rhymes “lobotomy” with “pottery”!

Sunshine by Alice in Chains, Layne Staley’s voice is as much an instrument as anything else going on here: slinky, gravelly, sinewy, gargantuan.

Mother’s Day sung by Sherie Rene Scott from the Broadway musical adaptation of Pedro Almodóvar’s utterly glorious Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Despite its astronomically stacked cast this musical, for reasons I can’t fathom, was not well-received and didn’t last long. At least we have the cast recording; this number sung by Ms Scott is so wistful and acoustic it could almost be an early-to-mid-90s singer/songwriter track that got to number 37 on the hot 100 charts.

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, 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!

Pickled Fried Cauliflower and Marinated Tofu Salad with Creamy Herb Dressing

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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

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(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.)

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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.

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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.

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!

Roasted Cherry Tomatoes with Cherry Tomato Dressing

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”.

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!

pasta with lemon, garlic and thyme mushrooms

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The first recipe you make from a new cookbook comes heavy with a certain ceremonial reverence; something about it suggests divining your own fortune, the shape of things to come, starting as you mean to go on, et cetera, or at least, that’s the needlessly strenuous way I approach things. This pasta with lemon, garlic and thyme mushrooms was the first recipe I made from Nigella Express back in January 2008 and I don’t know (or at least, can’t remember) what portent it held but I loved it then and I’ve been enthusiastic about it ever since, and what better fortune can you hope for than having a good pasta recipe in your life? Despite all this zeal I’ve never properly blogged about this pasta, outside of mentioning it briefly back in ’08, so here we finally are, slightly adapted for my current-day dairy-avoiding vibes.

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The success of this recipe hinges on how you feel about raw mushrooms (assuming that’s a stance you can immediately call to mind a lengthy opinion on) but these aren’t merely raw, in case you’re already backing away slowly. You thinly slice the mushrooms, then steep them in olive oil, lemon, garlic, thyme and plenty of salt. While the pasta cooks, the mushrooms absorb every good thing from those ingredients, their texture relaxing from squeaky to silky and ready to go — as per the ‘express’ of the cookbook title — before you can say al dente, the culinary equivalent of one of those astonishing Broadway quick-changes where a character is whisked out of one costume and into another in a matter of moments, appearing cool and unruffled to perform their next song.

@hungryandfrozen

pasta with lemon, garlic and thyme mushrooms from Nigella Express • recipe at hungryandfrozen dot com #pasta #mushrooms #food #vegan #nigella #foodblogger

♬ Our Day Will Come – Remastered – Nancy Wilson

In fact the mushrooms taste so amazing that when I make this for myself I barely scale them down to dress 100g of pasta, and nor should you. Button mushrooms aren’t the coolest of the funghi brotherhood but this lemon-and-oil process turns them elegant, chic, something you’ll long for again and again, in fact. Just don’t forget the parsley, as I did, if you’re serving this to people — not to be overly wedded to aesthetics but when it comes down to it, wet raw button mushrooms are kind of ugly, and benefit from a distracting flounce of green. I did my best for these photos with the toasted almonds and as many thyme leaves as I could rip from each stem, but fortunately — and importantly — it’s delicious either way, and once you taste the marinated mushrooms all thoughts of how it all looks will disappear from your head.

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Pasta with Lemon, Thyme and Garlic Mushrooms

One of my favourite Nigella recipes, it’s simple and stunning and you may just want a bowl of the mushrooms on their own, they’re that good. My only change is replacing the parmesan with toasted nuts, but you do what you like. Recipe from Nigella Lawson’s book Nigella Express.

  • 250g button mushrooms (or chestnut mushrooms, if you can find them)
  • 80ml (1/3 cup) extra virgin olive oil
  • juice and zest of one lemon
  • 2 teaspoons sea salt, or one teaspoon table salt (plus more for the pasta water)
  • leaves from four sprigs of fresh thyme
  • 1 garlic clove
  • 500g spaghetti, linguine, or other long pasta
  • 1 bunch parsley, chopped
  • pepper, to taste
  • 3 tablespoons slivered almonds

1: Wipe the mushrooms if they need it, thinly slice them, and place them in a bowl with the 80ml olive oil, the zest and juice of the lemon, the salt, and the thyme leaves. Crush or very finely chop the garlic clove and add it to the mushrooms.

2: Bring a large pan of water to the boil, salt abundantly, and cook the pasta in it till tender, which should take ten to twelve minutes. While the pasta is cooking, toast the almonds in a dry pan till just golden and fragrant, then set aside.

3: Drain the pasta, stir into the mushrooms (or stir the mushrooms into it, whichever is more practical) along with the parsley and almonds. If serving this in a way where visuals are a priority, save some almonds and parsley for scattering over each plate of pasta.

Serves four, though in making this for myself I only scale down the pasta, leave the marinade quantities as is, and maybe knock 100g off the mushrooms. It works. Also, I’ve included the parsley in the ingredients even though I forgot to buy it for myself.

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music lately:

Something’s Coming by Oscar Peterson, from his 1962 jazz reworking of the West Side Story score, somehow bringing languidness and fleet-footed urgency to an already urgent song. I’m also partial to Cal Tjader’s 1960 jazz stylings on West Side Story, that feline, rabble-rousing refrain in the Prologue/Jet Song lends itself wonderfully to noodly jazz interpretation.

Stairway to Paradise by Liza Minnelli. I’m not good at choosing favourites, but this is one of the Gershwin songs I love the most — it really makes you feel like you can achieve anything, or even just one thing — and Liza is on my mind (I mean, she’s a regular on my mind anyway, but) because I saw a screening of Cabaret on Friday night, speaking of favourites, and the big screen made every frame of it new and more stunning than ever.

Sabotage by the Beastie Boys. That build up to a scream at the start? Perfection. Never bettered. Never could be.

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 on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Vegetables à la Grecque

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I have all the time in the world for vegetables, but nothing makes my mood plummet quicker than a vegetable that has been boiled or steamed without any other mitigating spices, fats, seasonings or textural elements added to it. As a vegan — in fact, as a food writer — I should be able to face vegetables in such an untampered, intact state, and if politeness is required of a situation of course I will quietly capitulate, but internally it’ll be wall-to-wall culinary sorrow at the limpness of texture and blandness of vibe.

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Peevishly, I still crave variety, and there’s only so many times I can eat fried or roasted vegetables in quick succession. So, when I find a new-to-me method that allows me to hoon a vast quantity of vegetables in a way that’s pleasing to both my palate and boundaries, I’m obviously going to try it. It was in two separate books — Beard on Food by James Beard and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison — that I found this preparation for Vegetables à la Grecque, and while there is undeniably some boiling, it involves generous amounts of vermouth, olive oil, and spices, forming a rich yet graceful broth that you then reduce down to an intensely-flavoured liquor, before pouring it back over the vegetables, and then finally serving it chilled.

@hungryandfrozen

vegetables à la grecque #vegan #cooking #foodblog #recipes #fyp

♬ Maps – Yeah Yeah Yeahs

I chose fennel and green beans, and the result was so elegant: the tender, aniseed petals of fennel and the sweetness of the beans swimming in all that lush, lemony, herbal liquid, each doing their level best to infuse the other with flavour. Because this is made in advance and placidly sits in the fridge until required, it’s a useful recipe to have in your repertoire; it could stand up to a hearty stew or other slow-cooked thing as a vegetable side, but would fit happily on a table of smaller sharing plates, especially if there’s lots of bread for mopping up, and I can also see it being a friendly salad alternative in high summer when you can only face foods that have known the chill of refrigeration. I’d like to try it with cauliflower, in which case I might consider throwing in a handful of sultanas and even — should budget allow — a pinch of saffron. (Although let’s face it, with the cost of living these days the cauliflower is likely to be more expensive than the saffron.) My aversion to plain boiled vegetables may never be truly rehabilitated, but this recipe for all seasons is definite — and delicious — progress.

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Vegetables à la Grecque

A simple but elegant way to prepare vegetables, simmered and then chilled in a lush vermouth-y broth. If you need to feed more people, just add more vegetables and a bit more of everything else. Adapted from recipes by James Beard (Beard on Food) and Deborah Madison (Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone.)

  • 2-3 medium-sized fennel bulbs
  • 300g green beans
  • 1/3 cup dry vermouth or dry white wine
  • 1 lemon
  • 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
  • 1 teaspoon fennel seeds
  • 1 teaspoon coriander seeds
  • 1 bay leaf
  • a good pinch of salt
  • freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 and 1/2 cups water
  • fresh thyme, parsley, or other herbs of your choice to serve 

1: Trim the bases from the fennel bulbs and chop each bulb into quarters or sixths, depending on how big they are. Trim the ends off the beans.

2: In a saucepan big enough to fit the vegetables in (bearing in mind they will collapse down a bit as they cook) combine the 1/3 cup vermouth, the juice of the lemon and a long strip of its peel, the three tablespoons of olive oil, the teaspoon each of fennel and coriander seeds, the bay leaf, the pinch of salt and a few twists of pepper (or, if you like, you can throw in a couple of whole peppercorns.) If you have the necessary pestle and mortar you can bash about the seeds a bit first to release their fragrance, but it’ll be absolutely fine if you don’t. Pour in the 1 and 1/2 cups of water — you may not need all of it depending on the size of your pan — and bring everything to the boil.

3: Once the broth is at the boil, lower the vegetables into the pan and turn the heat down to a simmer, partially covering the pan with a lid. Simmer for about ten minutes, or until the vegetables are tender but still with a good bite to them. Depending on your vegetables you may want to stagger the timing a little — when I make this again I’ll probably add the beans a few minutes after the fennel so they keep their colour better.

4: Once the vegetables are tender but bite-y, remove them to a serving dish using tongs or some other similarly useful implement, then turn up the heat on the saucepan and let the broth cook away until it has reduced down by about half. Don’t get too hung up on the precision of this, but I find sticking the end of a wooden spoon into the pan at various intervals to see what the tide is like helps to keep track of the reduction. Once it’s reduced down sufficiently, pour the entire contents of the pan over the waiting vegetables in their serving dish, cover, and refrigerate until cooled. Chop up some fresh herbs — thyme, parsley, basil would be perfect — and scatter over before serving.

Serves 2 as a side, although I happily ate all of this by myself with some bread to dip into the liquor, and it could stretch to another person, maybe even two more, if you had plenty of other food on the table.

Note:

  • If you don’t like fennel, or beans, or can’t get hold of them, you could try using any other firm vegetable: James Beard recommends eggplant and artichoke, and Deborah Madison suggests cauliflower, carrots, mushrooms and turnips. While I haven’t made it with these myself, I am confident they would all be delicious.
  • If you have a few cloves of garlic on hand and like to eat it then definitely add them, finely sliced, to the simmering broth — the only reason I left it out was because I forgot it, but it’s good to know it tastes great without should I find myself in this situation again.

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music lately:

Sparks by Faith and the Muse. Weighs a ton and yet floats right through you.

No, No, No by Dawn Penn. A classic. A classic!

Roly Poly by Doris Day and Perry Blackwell from the film Pillow Talk. I wish there were more recordings of Blackwell available, her presence and voice are great, but at least we get this very fun moment in this very fun film.

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 on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

The Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Recipe Round-Up 

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To egregiously paraphrase Dickens, though I’m sure he’s quite used to it by this point: you there! What day is it? Why it’s my annual edible gift recipe round up! 

In case this doesn’t make any sense, let me explain: each December I gather a list of recipes from my prior blog posts here on hungryandfrozen.com which I believe would make ideal edible gifts, in case you want some kind of prompting in that direction, despite having the entire internet already at your disposal. It’s a self-serving action, yes, but hopefully helpful in some way – and all I ever really want is to be useful, but to also draw attention to myself in the process. I’ve kept a lot of the text in this post the same as last year’s as there’s only so many ways you can launch into this thing, and appreciate your understanding.

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This time last year I was naively hopeful that once 2021 drew to a close COVID-19 would be behind us but instead, it’s managed to get on top of us in new and innovatively terrifying ways. Just last week, after a quarter of the year spent in lockdown, I was (somewhat dramatically) not sure if Christmas would be happening at all, even now it feels like a bit of a mirage and I’m somehow overthinking it yet entirely unprepared at the same time. All of this is no reason not to cook though, if that’s what you like doing. If you’re confined to a relatively small circle of people, there are still neighbours, the postal service, any number of people nearby who might be cheered by a small jar or box of something in their letterbox, or on their doorstep (perhaps also with a note reassuring of your vaccination status if they’re a stranger that you’re giving something to). But even just you, alone, are reason enough to bake a cake.

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As for the financial pressure of this time of year – I won’t lie, between the ingredients, time, electricity, storage and wrapping, homemade edible gifts aren’t necessarily that cheap, and there’s no moral superiority in making your own jam. It is undeniably delightful to receive something homemade – but if this is too strenuous, stick with the food concept and do your Christmas shopping at the supermarket. Chocolates, candy, olive oil, fancy salt, spices, peanut butter, curry pastes, hot sauce, olives, a complicated shape of pasta – even just food you know someone eats a lot of. They love beans? Get them beans! I guarantee they’ll be pleased. Basically, we cannot escape capitalism but giving an edible gift of any kind has so many upsides: it’s delicious, it has immediate application, it will eventually cease taking up space in the receiver’s house, it makes you look like a really great person.

I realise to heaps of people Christmas is – quite reasonably – just another day of the week! But generally, there will be some point in your life where giving a gift is required, and almost all the recipes listed below work beautifully year-round (though I personally can’t eat candy canes out of season.)

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Anyway, let’s get to the list. I’ve grouped the recipes into three categories, and have also included some of the recipes I wrote for Tenderly over the years.

Two caveats: some of these recipes are from absolute years ago, as will happen when you have a fourteen-year-old food blog, but while details and contexts and locations and motivations have changed, the deliciousness remains constant. Also, I feel like it’s worth pointing out that anything involving an ingredient that either could melt or has been melted, should be stored in the fridge rather than under the tree.

Also – all these recipes are vegan.

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The Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Recipe Round-Up 

Category One: Things In Jars

No matter how uncertain the world we live in, you can still count on Things In Jars. From relish to pickles to the unsinkable salted caramel sauce, it’s always well-received, looks like you’ve gone to arduous levels of effort, and makes an ideal gift for everyone from your most marginally tolerable of coworkers to the most highly specific love of your life. For added personal flair – although this could just be my neurological predisposition for over-explaining – I suggest including a gift tag with recommendations on ways to use the contents of the jar.

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Savoury:

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Sweet

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Category Two: Baked Goods

They’re baked! They’re good! While biscuits and cookies are more commonly gifted, don’t rule out a loaf, perhaps wrapped in baking paper and then brown paper – the banana bread and ginger molasses loaf below keep well (especially the latter) and would make a charmingly convivial offering. At this busy time of year, having something to slice and eat with a cup of tea or a snifter of whatever weird liqueur you can find in the back of the cupboard is nothing if not a stroke of good fortune. I’ve made the first three (four, technically, since the Christmas Stars and Hundreds and Thousands Biscuits are basically the same) cookie recipes in this list a LOT this year and recommend them the most enthusiastically out of the biscuits on offer.

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Category Three: Novelty, No-Bake Sweets, and General Sugary Chaos

The best category, let’s be frank. Whether it’s dissolving candy canes in bottom-shelf vodka or adding pink food colouring to white chocolate for the aesthetic, sugar is the true reason for the season. And since dentists wildly overcharge us for their service, you might as well make them really earn it. Note: unless you can find overproof vodka, the passionfruit and mandarin liqueurs won’t be ready in time for Christmas; either give the intended receiver an IOU, or save it for their birthday – or next Christmas.

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music lately:

Turkey Lurkey Time from the 1969 Tony Awards performance of the musical Promises, Promises. If you’ve been here a while you’ll know that I have a small tradition where I wait till December and then watch this extremely grainy video of a very goofy song being performed and CRY. (Here I need to really emphasise that this is absolutely not a song you’re supposed to cry at.) It’s Donna McKechnie’s rubber spine, it’s the diagonal thing they do at the end, it’s the anticipation, it’s Christmas, it’s everything.

Fun Lovin’ Criminals, by The Fun Lovin’ Criminals. Why am I consistently drawn to rap rock? Because it’s fun and great, that’s why!! (When does rap rock become nu metal? Not here, but I’m very happy on either side of course.)

The Only Heartbreaker, by Mitski. Anxious and beautiful and synthy! I don’t know what it is about synths, specifically, that makes me all “this song sounds like it has already existed. How can this be a new song” and here I am again saying that this song sounds like you already know it. I don’t mean that it sounds derivative of anything – I mean that it sounds like it was your favourite song from a long time ago and you’ve only just heard it again for the first time in forever. I guess the obvious answer is that synths sound like they’re from the eighties and it tricks my brain into thinking I’ve already heard it but I think it’s something more in the neon yearning quality of synths themselves? Anyway, I love it!

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 on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Vegan Chocolate Guinness Cake

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As a rule, an abiding principle, a personal boundary: I hate anything that suggests even the merest hint of “team-building exercise”, three words that make my shoulders immediately stoop earthwards in resigned anticipation of all the time I’ll never get back from my one wild and free life. That being said I also like to please and being in this endless (necessary! but endless) lockdown does strange things to all of us, in my case it’s that I’ve ended up kind of throwing myself wholeheartedly into Mum’s lockdown project of honouring a new theme each day. Which brings us to this Vegan Chocolate Guinness Cake.

You see, first we did a letter of the alphabet each day (for example on W day we listened to the Who and classical waltzes and I made a Woon Heng recipe for dinner) and when lockdown exceeded 26 days we hastily assembled the next ongoing theme: a new country each day, that at least one person in the family had been to, in – and bear with me here – alphabetical order, with music from that country and at least one regional dish or attempt thereof for dinner. We’re up to the letter I, which brings us to Ireland, which I visited in 2005, and The Cranberries/The Undertones/Thin Lizzy/My Bloody Valentine/Enya as the day’s soundtrack. I found a couple of cans of Guinness in my cupboard leftover from making last year’s Christmas Cake and before I knew it I was spontaneously and enthusiastically throwing together a vegan version of Nigella Lawson’s classic Chocolate Guinness Cake, like someone who enjoys activities and showing initiative. I don’t, but I do like hyperfocussing on a project and I love the opportunity for arbitrary culinarily decisions and in all honesty it has been a lot of fun – not a bit like team-building exercises, in fact.

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As I said, this recipe is inspired by Nigella Lawson’s cake from her book Feast, which I used to make all the time – because it was so incredibly delicious! – and while this version lacks that throat-coating full-cream dairy factor from the cream cheese icing, it’s a pretty fantastic tribute and I’m very pleased with myself. In case you haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing this combination of chocolate and Guinness before, the bitter aggression of the Guinness provides an intense and dark backdrop to the cocoa and yet all its rough edges are entirely bevelled back and tempered by the cake batter and the sweetness in the icing. Curiously, despite the sugar in the cake exceeding that in the topping, the latter is much sweeter than the former, such is the black-hole abilities of Guinness to absorb everything that comes into its path. I’m not someone who can sit down and drink a Guinness with any conviction – it’s too blood-nosedly ferrous for me – but mixed with chocolate it’s quite spectacular, entirely palatable, and makes perfect sense – after all, dark coffee and chocolate are a go-to pairing, this just takes it one step further in the direction of bitterness.

@hungryandfrozen

vegan chocolate Guinness cake 🍫 recipe at hungryandfrozen.com 🤠 #vegan #recipevideo #chocolatecake #homemade #veganrecipes #nzfoodblogger #baking

♬ Another Day (kfc) – CMAT

Real hungryandfrozen-heads will notice that this recipe method doesn’t differ too much from my Incredibly Delicious Mocha Cake; that cake has never failed me and so I figured it would be a decent blueprint for this Guinness cake – and once more it came through. As well as being utterly delicious, dense yet light-crumbed, rich and celebratory yet unpretentious and comforting, this cake is a mere one-bowl situation and it leaves you plenty of Guinness leftover to drink from its tall can – if you have the palate for it – otherwise, I guess you’ll just have to make another cake.

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Vegan Chocolate Guinness Cake

A dense yet light-textured chocolate cake full of rich bitter Guinness – my vegan take on Nigella Lawson’s classic recipe. This is a one-bowl affair with a creamy, tangy frosting, and is just incredibly delicious. Recipe by myself.

  • 2 and 1/4 cups flour
  • 1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
  • 1/4 cup good dark cocoa (see notes)
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup plain oil, eg rice bran
  • 1/2 cup full-fat coconut milk
  • 1 tablespoon malt vinegar
  • 1 tablespoon golden syrup (or light corn syrup or treacle if you’re in the US)
  • a pinch of salt
  • 1 cup/250ml Guinness

1: Set your oven to 180C/350F and grease and line a 21cm springform or loose-based cake tin. Place the flour in a large mixing bowl, then sieve in the baking soda and cocoa and stir to combine. Make a well in the centre and add everything except the Guinness, and stir briefly – it will look thick and dry and unlikely at this point but we’ve still got the Guinness to go, so don’t you worry.

2: Pour in the Guinness and slowly stir everything together to form a thick cake batter, making sure there’s no lumps of flour caught in it. Spatula this mixture into your prepared cake tin and bake for forty minutes, covering with tin foil in the last ten minutes if need be. Allow to cool completely on a cake rack.

For the Icing:

This uses the sourness of citric acid and the fulsome saltiness of miso paste to emulate the vibe of the cream cheese icing that customarily goes with this cake; that being said if you can get hold of vegan cream cheese (or you’re happy to eat dairy) then feel free to use that instead in place of the coconut oil and coconut milk, leaving out the citric and miso and adjusting the lemon juice quantities as needed. I’ve included coconut milk here for its creaminess and because I figure you’ll have some leftover from the can you opened for the cake; you barely taste any coconut in the finished frosting. Finally, if you don’t have a food processor you can use a bowl and a wooden spoon to make this but it’ll take considerably more effort to get it thick and smooth. But, this is how people make icing for centuries so it’s not impossible.

  • 1 and 1/2 cups icing sugar
  • 3 tablespoons soft refined coconut oil
  • 1/4 teaspoon citric acid
  • 1/2 teaspoon miso paste
  • 1 teaspoon lemon juice
  • 1-3 tablespoons full-fat coconut milk

1: Tip the icing sugar into the food processor and pulse a few times to get rid of any lumps. Add the coconut oil, citric acid, and miso paste, and process to combine. Add a teaspoon of lemon juice and the coconut milk, one tablespoon at a time, and process until you have a very thick, very smooth, bright white frosting. If it needs more liquid add it a little at a time. Set the icing aside in a cool place until needed. (I put it in the fridge, which made it entirely too solid, but sitting the bowl in a second bowl of hot water and stirring it helped.)

2: Spatula the icing onto the top of the cooled cake and spread it evenly over the top, leaving the sides bare. Store in an airtight container.

Notes:

  • When buying cocoa, look for a brand that has a minimum of 20g fat per 100g – I try not to be fussy with you about ingredients but anything less than 20g is not worth your while and will taste weak and is false economy.
  • I accidentally overcooked my cake – it was fine, but the edges were a little crisp, so I just prodded it with a skewer and brushed it with a quick syrup of a few spoons of brown sugar dissolved in an equal quantity of hot water before applying the icing with a pastry brush, and I pass this along in case you find yourself in the same predicament.
  • You could probably use soy milk or something similar instead of coconut milk in the cake and still have it turn out fine; but Nigella’s original recipe uses sour cream and I wanted something particularly creamy and fat to offset the bitter Guinness, so I do think it’s necessary – the finished cake doesn’t taste anything like coconut, I promise.
  • If you don’t have miso paste or just don’t have any confidence in my decision making – and it’s true, we do ask a lot of miso paste these days, perhaps too much even – then leave it out and add a pinch of salt.

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music lately:

I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby! by CMAT – who, coincidentally, is from Dublin. My friend Jordan recommended her music to me and in turn, I enthusiastically recommend her to you (I also recommend to you to recommend songs to me in general, as long as you’re prepared for my candid evaluation.)

For Good from the musical Wicked as performed by original cast members Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel at the Tony Awards this week. Now – this is not something I say lightly – I don’t necessarily love this song in and of itself, it’s not the most exciting or lyrically dexterous, to me, but I will always drop everything to watch a live performance of it because what it does give you is four and a half minutes of Acting and Emotion and Unbearable Momentousness. To see Chenoweth and Menzel reunited here – a very rare occurrence in the eighteen years since Wicked launched on Broadway – at the first Tony Awards since 2019, to see them hold hands and perform this song with all the sincerity of their long-ago characters but also as themselves, to hear those gentle but defined harmonies where she goes low and she goes high – well, you already know I cried.

You Mean The World To Me by Toni Braxton, simply a perfect song – obviously you could take Babyface’s back catalogue to a desert island and never run out of hits but he and Braxton together are a match made in heaven – that “oh baby baby, baby baby, babyyyy” bit at the end of the chorus has to be up there with the various pinnacles of human creative achievement.

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 on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Instant Gnocchi [vegan]

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It was somewhere in that indistinct and malleable stretch of the early nineties before the internet became accessible, let alone entrenched, and before every minute was documented – somewhere in that time, I sat down brimming with cheerful anticipation for the latest episode of Full House only to be confronted with a hideous replacement show – Mountain Dew on The Edge – a show whose title is opaque to the point of meaninglessness and yet is somehow entirely and nakedly threatening to be about sports. (To my disgust, it really was about sports.) It was on that sombre day I learned that TV shows have seasons that end, and they don’t just spit out new episodes forever, and you can’t rely on anything or anyone in this cold world but yourself, kid. It was somewhere in that same era that I once again faced disappointment when I turned on the television expecting a brand new episode of a particular sitcom and was met, instead, with a clip show, that budget-saving device TV shows lean on occasionally by cobbling together an episode from previously filmed segments – and I had no media literacy or access to Wikipedia or the TV Tropes website to understand what was happening or why I felt so let down. Who can you trust, if not your TV in the nineties?

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Today’s recipe is, I apologetically acknowledge, something of a clip show, taking components familiar to long-term readers of both this blog and my Patreon – although hopefully it’s a clip show in the mildly superior vein of The Simpsons “All Singing, All Dancing” episode which had the grace to grant us the timeless Paint Your Wagon parody before getting into the replays. Just as Homer takes comfort in the presence of Lee Marvin – “he’s always drunk and violent!” – we can take comfort in knowing my recipes are always good, even if you’ve seen them before. And I’m currently in week three (I think?) of a Level 4 lockdown without any promised end date in sight, so I hope you can allow me a short rest on these comfortable laurels.

I wouldn’t be repeating this recipe, first seen here in 2017, if it wasn’t for good reason – this gnocchi is literally instant, using mashed potato flakes instead of peeled, boiled, and mashed potatoes. Whether you’re in lockdown, or you’re depressed, or you don’t have actual potatoes, or the thought of peeling potatoes and waiting for water to boil and then waiting for said potatoes to cook till tender makes you want to sob – whatever’s going on, this gnocchi can be yours in fifteen minutes from start to finish, even quicker if you’re feeling sprightly. (If this sounds like a glib recommendation, please know that I have made this gnocchi in every last one of these states and am speaking from experience.) This recipe is even faster than it was the first time around since I’ve dispensed with the time-consuming fork-rolling step – no great sacrifice and it makes the gnocchi look like tiny little pillows, a benignly pleasing notion.

@hungryandfrozen

instant mashed potato flakes = instant vegan gnocchi 🤠 #veganrecipes #gnocchi #comfortfood #carbs #easyrecipe #nzlockdown #lockdownrecipe #nz

♬ Crazy – Patsy Cline

Obviously – and perhaps this is what I should be really apologetic for – this is not the traditional Italian way of making gnocchi, and I imagine it’s not just the Italians who would get het up at putting instant mashed potato flakes front and centre of a recipe. But these instant mashed potato flakes are singularly useful to have around – they’re cheap, they last forever, they really are instant, and they’re a lifesaver square meal during times when you don’t know how your next actual square meal is going to fit into your bank account. They also make truly delicious gnocchi – light, puffy, golden-crisp and genuinely quite elegant – a dish that feels like a treat at any time, but especially in the middle of lockdown.

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Instant Gnocchi

This gnocchi is not traditional – taking a huge shortcut with instant potato flakes – but it is very fast and very delicious, and that counts for something. Recipe, proudly, by myself.

  • 3/4 cup instant mashed potato flakes
  • 3/4 cup just-boiled water
  • a generous pinch of salt
  • 1 and 1/4 cups flour, and perhaps a little more
  • olive oil, for frying

1: Mix the mashed potato flakes, water, and salt together in a bowl – which will turn the flakes, suddenly, into something resembling mashed potato – then stir in the flour, switching to your hands (a little carefully, since it’ll still be hot from the boiling water) to briefly knead/push it into a ball of soft, pliant dough. If it’s too sticky, add a little more flour, if it’s too floury, add more water.

2: Using your hands, roll portions of the dough into long snakes, and cut off pieces at 1-inch intervals, continuing with all the remaining dough till you have a pile of 1-inch pieces of dough, looking like tiny pillows. Obviously, you don’t have to measure with a ruler here. Just cut the stuff up.

3: You can cook the gnocchi in boiling salted water at this point – for a couple of minutes until they start floating on the surface – but what I prefer is to just tumble them into a hot frying pan with a couple spoonfuls of olive oil, place a lid on for a minute or so to sort of steam-fry them, and then remove the lid and turn them over so they get brown and crisp. I realise my lengthy description makes it look like this is the harder method; it’s much easier and, I think, significantly more delicious.

Serves two, modestly, or one, very generously.

Notes:

To make the also-fairly-instant sauce that goes with the gnocchi in the photos – which is adapted from a recipe of Nigella Lawson’s in her Forever Summer book – take a whole lemon, slice off the ends, the zest and most of the pith, chop the remaining flesh into pieces and throw it into a food processor along with some of the zest (flicking out any seeds that you see with the tip of your knife) and a very large bunch of parsley, process this into a lemony-green gunge, then add a pinch of sugar, a tablespoon of mushroom soy sauce, and at least three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and process again. Pour over your cooked gnocchi. If you have the energy and means, a few finely chopped garlic cloves and a piece of bread roughly chopped into large crumbs fried in olive oil is an excellent topping for all this.

Also feel free to refer to my original version of this recipe, which is served with a fantastically good mixture of fried Brussels sprouts, rosemary and pine nuts and which – as you can see by the similar-but-different quantities in the recipe – will hopefully reassure you that this gnocchi method is very forgiving and hard to get wrong. So many times I’ve made this I accidentally add the flour in with the mashed potato and boiling water and it still turns out quite edible.

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music lately:

Take Me To The Other Side by Spacemen 3. Psychedelic and messy and delicious.

Here Comes The Hotstepper by Ini Kamoze. The way this used to fill the dancefloor with reliability at the school disco, a time that feels as distant and improbable as when I last occupied a dancefloor as an adult, to be honest.

Biology by Girls Aloud – this song is always on my mind anyway but after band member Sarah Harding died at age 39 on September 5 it’s been on my mind, well, even harder. Say what you will about Girls Aloud but when they were good they were incredible – their only peers of that jewel-tone cocktail dress era in terms of boundary-pushing yet utterly manufactured pop were the Sugababes (with producer Xenomania in the middle of that Venn diagram). Biology asks, what if a song was all choruses, featured adequate dancing, and was the best thing you’ve ever heard? (And my heart is about as heavy as it can get with the loss of actor Michael K Williams today; no more bad news like this, I beg.)

Losing My Mind, from Sondheim’s musical Follies, performed here by the late Marin Mazzie – oh, since we’re already crying – “you said you loved me – or were you just being kind?”

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 on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Vegan Lemon Poppyseed Loaf Cake

5 Comments

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Just a simple one, this time. A simple, one-bowl vegan lemon loaf cake that deftly manages to be nothing special and utterly magnificent at the same time, the line that loaf cakes specifically are so good at balancing upon. We’re back in lockdown again, although for me it feels different to the first one in 2020 because we now have the benefit of hindsight. I was genuinely delighted when this lockdown was announced and welcome any extensions to its stay – a response less rigid than this would’ve been considerably more hellish and anxious to endure in both the short and long term.

I wasn’t even going to blog about this loaf cake – as you can probably tell by the very hasty and inelegant photos and lack of accompanying TikTok – it was a variation on an older lemon cake recipe, with some poppy seeds thrown in because I just think they’re neat. It tasted so good though, and was easy to make, and that’s reason enough to share it. And we’re in lockdown, what else am I going to do?

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This cake has a light, springy crumb and enjoys a triple dose of fresh lemon flavour – and there are few things so cleanly optimistic as the scent and flavour of lemon – in the batter, of course, in the icing, and in what I call The Brine, where you pour a mixture of lemon juice and salt over the cake while it’s still hot from the oven. I know that squeezing juice over an oven-hot cake is hardly a new proposition but in these trying times, you have to romanticise what you can – calling it a brine makes me feel like I’ve really Done Something. If you find that insufferable (a reasonable stance!) then absolutely feel free to ignore the name but please don’t ignore the step itself, which adds to the dense citrus presence and provides alluring contrast to the sugar in the icing.

It’s not that my thoughts turn to baking more while we’re in lockdown, since I’m always thinking about baking anyway – but if you’re in the market for something relaxed and delicious, indeed, if you’re simply in the market to think about baking more at all, this loaf cake could be the one.

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Vegan Lemon Poppyseed Loaf Cake

A simple, classic loaf cake mixed quickly in one bowl and positively levitating with lemon flavour. You can use oranges or limes or a mix instead, and of course, leave out the poppy seeds if you don’t have them. The icing is optional but also absolutely not optional – those are your options. Recipe by myself.

  • 1 and 1/2 cups flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 cup rice bran oil (or similar flavourless oil)
  • Juice and zest of 2-3 lemons – enough to give you 1/3 cup juice
  • 1 cup/250ml full-fat coconut cream
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 2 tablespoons poppy seeds

For the brine:

  • juice of 1 lemon
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt

For the icing:

  • 1 tablespoon coconut oil, melted
  • 1 tablespoon coconut cream
  • zest and juice of one lemon – enough to give you around 3 tablespoons of juice
  • 1 and 1/2 cups icing sugar (though be prepared to add more)

1: Set your oven to 180C/350F and line a loaf tin with baking paper.

2: Stir the dry ingredients together in a mixing bowl – I sieve in the baking soda and baking powder to prevent any lumps – then make a well in the centre and pour in the oil, lemon juice and zest, coconut cream, vanilla and poppy seeds. Fold everything together to form a thick pale batter, spatula it into the loaf tin, and bake for about 40 minutes – depending on your oven – or until the top is firm and springy without any liquidy wobble beneath. Also – shake the can of coconut cream first before opening it, as they tend to separate into thicker cream and watery liquid and you want a good mix of both.

3: For the brine, zest the lemon and set that aside for later use (either throw it into the icing or sprinkle it on top of the finished loaf cake) and then mix the juice of the lemon and the salt together in a small ramekin or measuring cup until the salt has more or less dissolved. Spoon this mixture evenly over the cake while it’s still hot from the oven, and then let the cake cool completely before icing.

4: For the icing, mix everything together in a bowl to form a thick frosting – you may need to add more icing sugar – and refrigerate until required. Spread the icing thickly over the cooled loaf cake and sprinkle over any remaining lemon zest (or just zest another lemon – or you could sprinkle over some more poppy seeds.)

Note: I’ve never made this with anything other than full-fat coconut cream. Logic would suggest you could replace this with any milk – but since I haven’t tried it, I can’t guarantee the cake will then turn out how it should. On the other hand, I used a little coconut cream in the icing since I had it leftover from the open can used for the cake batter; you can definitely just use soy milk etc here instead.

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music lately:

That Life by Unknown Mortal Orchestra. New music by UMO is always good news. When the music video employs dancing muppets, so much the better. I love the way their music goes down but up at the same time, you know?

Kiss Off by Violent Femmes, a shaggy, Modern Lovers-esque exercise in sincerity, the sort of song where every part that comes along makes you say “oh wait THIS is my favourite part”.

No Good Deed sung by Shoshana Bean, from the musical Wicked – in all my years of being a fan of this show I was never particularly occupied with Ms Bean – which is nothing whatsoever to do with her talent! – there are so many portrayals of this role and I only have so many hours in the day. But this rendition of Elphaba’s last big song of the second act – a grainy video from 2005 of a performance on the Martha Stewart show of all things – stopped me in my tracks. The power and control in her voice – the way she can make her voice leap a tall building and then bring it back into the palm of her hand – while still managing to do capital-A Acting – is astonishing. I’ve heard this song a zillion times, this felt like hearing it for the first time again.

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 on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!