Pistachio and lemon loaf

Since my success with Nigella Lawson's lemon tendercake, I've looked to expand my range of reliably delicious cakes that just happen to be vegan. I'd come across this recipe, from Ochre Bakery in Detroit, some time ago, and it was every bit as good as I hoped. Moist and nutty from the ground pistachios, puckeringly sour sweet with lemon and in loaf form, it's an easily made and transportable picnic cake. 

Lemon tendercake

If you're a baker, words that will strike fear into your heart are "I'm a vegan". A cake without eggs or butter, or any sort of dairy at all seems somehow lacking in essential joy, not to mention texture or taste. At least that's what I would have said last week. 

A good friend of mine recently had a birthday. She had also recently become vegan. As luck would have it, I'd just seen an episode of one of Nigella Lawson's cooking shows in which she'd made something she called a lemon tendercake. It looked absolutely delicious and amazingly, happened to contain no animal products whatsoever. Better still, it called for no strange substitutes, featured flavours I loved and honestly couldn't have been easier to make. The miracle ingredient here is coconut. The creamy milk binds the batter and a yoghurt made from it (you don't have to make it yourself - it's readily available in supermarkets) serves as a sort of icing, adding an thick tang to the lighter than air lemony cake below and the sharp sweetness of the blueberries above. All together, it really does look quite spectacular and it made my friend very happy. This is a great cake not just for vegans but for all of us trying to reduce our dependence on animal products in the midst of this climate crisis. And an extraordinary cake in its own right.

Sticky dates

Somehow I have three jars of marmalade in my fridge. I can explain. My mum makes cumquat marmalade, so there's one of hers that made its way south sometime in my carry on baggage. Inspired by a burst of bright orange in the midst of grey winter I recently tried my hand myself with tangelos. And, a few weeks ago, I was gifted a jar of mandarin marmalade (laced with brandy!) by my friend Amy's mum (a wonderful cook), made with fruit from her backyard tree. There's only so much toast you can eat. Or cakes you can make. So it seemed a good time to give this recipe a go. Especially in a week in Sydney when temperatures climbed to mid-summer levels in early spring. When you don't feel like cooking, when the only things you want to eat are cold, when you don't necessarily want to eat that much at all... Dates are delicious all on their own. Caramelly and dense and sighingly sweet. But when you combine them with some sharp citrus and pretty pale green pistachios, they are elevated into an effortless, elegant dessert. Three ingredients, two bites, one spectacular sweet for spring, summer, any season really. 

Strawberry sorbet

Winter in Australia is different to winter in other parts of the world. It means strawberries. It means the occasional day that is not merely mild, but downright warm. With this being my 100th post, it seemed as good a time as any for ice-cream... well, strawberry sorbet to be exact. It's hard to believe that just three ingredients and very little effort (all the heavy-lifting is done by the machinery involved) produces something as spectacular as this. The whole lemon gives a lovely zing to a fruit that in refrigerated (much less frozen) form can often be quite blandly sweet. Instead, with its inclusion, the flavour matches the colour in intensity - scarlet, sticky, sweet.

Have it in a cone, or a bowl, or straight out of its freezer container with a spoon. Have it simple and unadorned or marry it with mascarpone, meringue, rose petals and pomegranate seeds - like Yotam Ottolenghi in this month's Bon Appétit - for a Middle-eastern mess. Have it with kids, with a vegan (no eggs or dairy!), or even a person who doesn't like strawberries (I swear, it may convert them). However you have it, ice-cream is always a celebration. Happy 100th. Thanks for reading.

Tomato chilli jam

My mother and I are very different cooks. I'm a recipe-follower, she's more of a free-wheeler, adding and subtracting ingredients, changing cooking times, processes, and equipment, following her instincts. I clean as I go when I cook (a by-product of living in an apartment with a small kitchen) and she, well, to put it bluntly, does not. These fundamentally different approaches mean that when the two of us are in the kitchen together we drive each other crazy. After every visit home I vow never to put myself in that situation again. But her tomato chilli jam is so good it was worth making an exception.

My mum, a keen gardener, jokingly refers to this savoury jam as dynamic lifter. And indeed, it does elevate anything it's spread on to a whole new level of flavour. Mum uses it most often on a sandwich or with crackers and cheese, but it would be great dolloped on eggs, corn fritters, served alongside a sausage roll or swirled into sour cream as a dipping sauce. The heat of the chilli is offset by the sweetness of the tomatoes (and the sugar they're cooked with!) so if you're worried about serving it to anyone averse to spicy things, don't be. Conversely, if you like things hot (and you're more of a recipe-meddler, like my mother), you may want to up the chilli content. Whatever your approach, you can't go wrong.

Socca

It's great when you discover something you really, really love, and find out later that it just so happens to be gluten-free, even vegan. This is not because I have any food intolerances (in fact, one could accuse me of being intolerant of intolerances), but I do have a growing number of friends who do. Socca is not any new-fangled food made with faux flour or dairy substitutes. It's something that's been around for generations in the south of France and further afield in the Mediterranean. I must have had it when I was a 16 year old exchange student going to high school in Cannes, but my food memories of that time are mainly of pain au chocolat and cheese, which I'm sure is all I subsisted on at that time. My more recent memory of socca is of eating it at bloodwood, a restaurant that opened in my old neighbourhood just before I moved away. It's the sort of place that you wish was walking distance from your house and now that it's not, I'm forced to recreate their dishes all the way over the other side of town. Luckily, it's not that hard. All you need is chickpea flour, water, oil and a cast-iron skillet.

Socca, or farinata, or torta de ceci, is basically a savoury chickpea pancake - a crispy at the edges, nutty in the centre, burnished golden base on which to pile all manner of good things. My favourite toppings are labneh or goat's cheese with mushrooms (sautéd with garlic, thyme and rosemary) but really, you could do anything you like. Roast pumpkin would be lovely, blue cheese too, but if you're vegan, by all means skip the dairy.

There's a bit of advance thought required for this, in that you have to make the batter two hours ahead of time but really, when it's just a matter of putting ingredients in the one bowl and whisking them together (do it at breakfast time for lunch or dinner that day), it couldn't get any easier. It's the real definition of fast food, on the table in less time than it would take to pick up takeaway or wait for it to be delivered.

Socca
Adapted from a recipe by David Leibowitz, from his book The Sweet Life in Paris

You can use the quantity below to make one thick pancake or two or three thinner ones. I tend to favour the one big one, so that you can pile on your toppings, then slice it up at the table, family-style. You can find chickpea flour at health food shops, good delis or Indian grocery stores.




1 cup (130g) chickpea flour (besan)
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (280ml) water 
3/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/8 teaspoon ground cumin 
2 1/2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
freshly-ground black pepper, plus additional sea salt and olive oil for serving

Mix together the flour, water, salt, cumin, and 1 1/2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Let batter rest at least 2 hours, covered, at room temperature.

To cook, heat the grill in your oven. Oil a 9- or 10-inch (23cm) cast-iron skillet with the remaining olive oil and heat the pan in the oven.

Once the pan and the oven are blazing-hot, pour batter into the pan, swirl it around, then pop it back in the oven.

Bake until the socca is firm and beginning to blister and burn. The exact time will depend on your grill (but it should be somewhere around the 5 minute mark).

Slide the socca out of the pan and onto a cutting board, then shower it with coarse salt, pepper, and a drizzle of olive oil.

Braised fennel wedges with saffron and tomato

It may come as a shock to anyone reading this blog regularly that I don't subsist entirely on cake, or pulled pork or pie. From time to time I have been known to eat the odd vegetable... and no vegetable is odder than fennel - a pale, squat, decidedly hardy bulb with delicate green fronds. Last Sunday I was looking down the barrel of an unusually busy week. I knew I'd get to the end of each day and not feel much like cooking. I'd be hungry though and want something warm and hearty to sustain me after a long day and propel me into the next. Fennel wouldn't have been the obvious choice but I had a new recipe I was keen to try out and because of this, had all the ingredients to hand. 

For a non-meat dish, I have to say this was one of the messiest I'd ever cooked. The splatter factor with the fennel (when frying it prior to adding the stock) was on par with bacon, but the end result every bit as delicious. And there was something thoroughly satisfying about hoeing into a fat wedge of fennel as you would a steak, pinning it down with your fork as you sawed into it with a knife. Apologies to non-carnivores for the constant mention of meat in what is an entirely vegetarian - vegan even! - recipe. No comparison is necessary. This dish stands on its own - rich, robust, salty, sweet and so, so good. 

Date, cashew and coconut truffles

I eat everything - meat, dairy, gluten, sugar... everything that is, except what those with food allergies, dietary restrictions or particular ethical beliefs routinely eat (and enjoy) because they can't eat those things. I'm squeamish about soy milk. I'm suspicious of margarine and other chemically-manufactured substitute products (though I'm grateful that whatever that is my dad spreads on his toast is lowering his cholesterol). To me, TVP sounds more like a disease than something I'd ever feel like tucking into, and as for tofu ice-cream, I'm not the slightest bit curious. Quite possibly this prejudice of mine is a problem. But I'm not inclined to work on it - not even remotely - when there are recipes like these featuring everyday, natural, wholly delectable ingredients that allow me to cook for the people in my life with dietary restrictions and myself at the same time. We all win.

These truffles contain neither butter nor cream yet they're rich, decadent and delicious while still being gluten-free, dairy-free and even vegan. A lactose-intolerant friend tried one and remarked that it tasted "like it should be much worse for you than it actually is", which was about as high a compliment as it could have possibly received. So go on, have another. I'm going to.

Conchiglie with saffron, capers and raisins

There are a million reasons not to invite people over for dinner. Your apartment is too small. You don't have enough time. Or nice enough plates. Money for fancy ingredients. Mastery of complex cooking techniques. It doesn't help that the top-rated shows on television at the moment are ones featuring so-called "home cooks" poaching salmon in temperature-controlled olive oil baths, or constructing edible towers strewn with micro-herbs or native berries. If that's your idea of a good time, then great. For me, having people over is about being together, and it should be easy and fun, generous and relaxed. I love to cook but I want to spend time with my guests, not be stuck in the kitchen all night, then into the early hours of the morning with the washing up. 

So on Saturday I had some friends over. One of them was a vegetarian. I made pasta. Most of the ingredients I already had on hand (except celery, which I purchased for the grand total of 69 cents), which is the beauty of this particular dish by Israeli-born, London-based chef Yotam Ottolenghi. It's as if he'd came up with it by pulling random grocery items from his fridge and cupboards and throwing them all together. It's a crazy combination of flavours and textures but it works - salty, sweet, crunchy, soft, strident, subtle... It takes no time to make, tastes good hot or cold (one of my favourite parts of having people over are the leftovers the next day) and makes everyone happy. Even those who hate raisins... of my four guests, there were two of these, who both enthusiastically dug in for seconds.