Tag: winter dinners

Sweet and sour celery salad

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A new low, mingled with a new high: I had to leave the country to finally carve out time to write one single blog post. On the other hand, I have finally left the country after fourteen years (to which I strenuously add, no one is owed a little holiday! It just really felt as though I had completely expired, viability-wise.) My partner and I are in Sri Lanka; I write this overlooking an exquisite beach in pleasantly stifling evening heat, as though I’m a more functional, yet objectively less culturally impactful, Ernest Hemingway.

In the month of September, I went to Christchurch for the WORD festival, went home briefly for Mum’s 70th, sent two lit4lit newsletters, recorded my Hoods Landing audiobook, and left the country (around working full-time and then some), which is why it’s been so long since I last blogged. And, why we’re lucky this recipe, via Ixta Belfrage, for sweet and sour celery salad is SO sensational, otherwise, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t remember a single thing about it or which adjectives to apply to it. Fortunately, I am always rich in adjectives.

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Roasted carrot kushari

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This weekend I asked my modest number of Instagram followers whether they were currently feeling burnt out. 54% of people said yes, medically, 38% of people said they were very tired and almost burnt out. A mere seven total people said they were fine. Why did I ask? Well, I would describe myself as currently spending time googling the symptoms of burnout, if you know what I mean. But as I suspected, burning out is rarely something you’re doing alone.

One such prong on the serving fork of tentative burnout claims is my famous ongoing inability to carve out enough time to keep this blog updated frequently—which then leads to time-consuming self-flagellation and further stress and misery as the last blog post fades further into the calendar—and the cadence of posts here has continued to dwindle so much that there’s barely any pattern-recognition to be had. Nevertheless, here I am in the month of August—just—with a recipe that has truly kept me tethered to the earth on a weekly basis, which is why I’m eager to share it with you at last: Roasted Carrot Kushari. To be clear, this recipe will in no way solve your burnout. But I promise it won’t add to it.  

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Big green soup

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A bowl of soup on a wooden board with a bushel of flat leaf parsley and a spoon on it

Whatever it is going on in my brain, be it nameable or undesignated, it only occasionally manifests in the form of what is commonly known as ‘food hyperfixation’. I’ve always been emotionally fixated on the idea of food, specifically, cooking it—experiencing a certain scarcity-minded franticness when I’m unable to cook, which I suspect is, at the least, a bit weird. Now and then, though, a certain food will cohabitate with my habits, like having a writer in residence staying with you: this past week it was lentils. I yearned for their collapsing bodies, tipping them like a rainstick into a bowl ready to soak with cool water, endlessly testing little simmering spoonfuls—no, still not cooked yet.

This recipe for Big Green Soup actually uses split peas, but! Lentil Week is a state of mind type of nomenclature. Speaking of nomenclature, the recipe title misleads not at all: it’s Big (makes over a litre); it’s Green (if you have 400g of silverbeet drooping malevolently in the fridge, this is for you); and it sure is Soup. It is also, of course, delicious. That’s why we’re here.

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