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.
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.
I’ll tell you soon as look at you: SEO ruined food blogging. The death of Google, the concept of pivoting to video, AI and the word I don’t even want uttered near my blog because it makes me so belligerent and queasy — ChatG*T — are carving up the remaining carrion. I’ll leave expanding that preamble for another day, but all of this is to say, contextually, that while I’m a rabid hater of roughly 79-86% of food content out there (up to and including the word “content” to describe writing and developing recipes), there are still pockets of hope to be found, like the dimpling air bubbles in a focaccia — people who are driven by a bona fide and guileless love of food, not a love of affiliate link kickbacks (whatever they even are, other than none of my business!) I’m talking of course about people like Bettina Makalintal, ItsHolly, and in the case of the recipe that inspired today’s salmon with roasted cherry tomatoes and fennel, Hailee Catalano.
It’s important to record how and what we eat, as a criterion of social history, reflecting us back at ourselves mouthful by mouthful. For example, when I first wrote about this salted caramel slice thirteen years ago in 2011, I said:
“There are many things in life to be afraid of. But, being a person who tends rapidly towards non-endearingly sweaty anxiety I can say this with confidence: adding salt to your caramel slice — or your caramel anything — should not be on that list of things you fear.”
Which is, in the fullness of hindsight, kind of hilarious. Salted caramel is so utterly normal now to the point of prosaic that it’s easily the default and I’m surprised when the word ‘caramel’ appears without its salted qualifier. It’s like walking in on someone in a state of half-dress — where’s its pants?
Hungry and Frozen 