Tag: one-pan dinner

Vietnamese-adjacent noodles with beef, chilli and mint

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Chopsticks and a mint sprig on a pink and white plate of beef and noodles

Now, ‘adjacent’ might be a clunky suffix for this recipe when ‘inspired’ is right there for the taking. As someone who isn’t Vietnamese, I intend to acknowledge the combination of flavours, familiar in nước chấm among other Vietnamese recipes—while making clear that I’m not breezily swooping in with entitlement to improve upon anything. But then, I think recipe titles should tell a brief story in and of themselves—in the case of Vietnamese-adjacent noodles with beef, chilli and mint, it’s flagging necessary attribution, that the noodles are as prominent as the beef, with a warning siren for chilli, mollified by the promise of mint’s tempering coolness. It also tells you, I guess, that I am amused by words, and like to play with them as much as I do with ingredients. Whether ‘adjacent’ catches on as a modifier or even makes sense to anyone else, we’re nonetheless never eating anything devoid of context, are we?

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Mascarpone butter beans, sausage and gremolata

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A blue and red patterned plate of sausages and beans on a white painted background

Although this is the kind of rhetoric one usually saves for significantly-numbered wedding anniversary speeches, sometimes you lock eyes with a cookbook from across the crowded marketplace of ideas and think “aha! yes!” and immediately foresee many happy years of culinarily monogomous bliss together. In this case it was not one but three Claire Thomson cookbooks, all borrowed from the library but destined to become for-life fixtures. And though this recipe begins with manhandling sausage to coax their insides out; the results is shockingly fast and lovely, and so perfectly formed that I didn’t need to tinker with it materially at all—and which I now humbly present to you: Mascarpone butter beans with sausage and gremolata.

And I do mean humbly. I don’t even know what food blogging means as we sink into a war-fuelled fuel crisis on top of the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, neither of which the government care about. It’s a weird dichotomy, where I obstinately don’t want a group of psychopathic men’s multi-pronged greed-trips to be a reason to stop blogging. I also don’t want to be laminating croissant dough while Rome burns. I honestly don’t know; and while I’m mad about this, it pales in comparison to other things I’m mad about and we’ll work out what’s the most important thing to be mad about as and when it happens. Either way, it probably won’t be this food blog.

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