Couscous salad is a quick and simple lunch, perfect for home or a lunchbox. You can vary the ingredients based on what you have in, and it’s very useful for using up leftovers or ingredient odds and ends – that last stub of cucumber or half a carrot. Whilst it can be packed with lots of fresh salad vegetables, the couscous base is filling, so the goodness of this lunch is not undone by a circa 3pm carb-crash that can only be addressed with half a pack of ginger-nuts.
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This is a recipe for sugar cookies topped with ultra-processed store-bought frosting. They taste like birthday cake. This post is for tired parents who are out of ideas, and for people who need some extra sugar. Also for people who want to eat birthday cake without having to eat an entire birthday cake – cookie dough freezes really well! Make some now, make some later. Always have birthday cake.
When we started this food blog in June 2020, we could not imagine that less than a year later we would be looking at the panicked eyes and forced cheerfulness of the lady in this 1940s propaganda poster and feeling such total empathy. We love food, and want to prepare healthy and enjoyable meals for our families. But planning, shopping, and making meals was always a daily grind, and the Covid-19 epidemic has suddenly made those tasks significantly harder. It is no longer possible to simply ‘pop to the shops’ for a forgotten ingredient or to restock on milk or bread. Every trip to a supermarket brings with it the risk of taking home a deadly disease, and there is no guarantee the ingredient you want will even be there. We are writing this post to acknowledge this new reality, and reflect on some of the things we feel we need to do to get through the next unspecified number of weeks. Our hope is to continue to deliver posts and recipes that will be useful to the home cook. We welcome contributions and comments, so please let us know what you are making now and how you are coping.
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I am no stranger to adjusting my cooking to avoid certain allergens. Milk protein, chickpeas, sesame, peas and nuts can all cause problems for various members of my family, potentially turning a nice meal into a panicked whirlwind of swelling, hives, wheezing and syringes of anti-histamine. However, when I needed to cook a meal suitable for someone with sulphite intolerance, I found I was completely unprepared. It seems there are sulphites in practically everything!
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This was supposed to be a recipe for a vegan trifle. It was going to be easy, fast, and extremely delicious. It was going to be in honour of my mother, whose birthday would be this month, had she not passed away in 2007. I was going to use Alpro custard, coconut whipped cream, and some kind of shop-bought vegan cake. Unfortunately, this kind of cake appears not to exist in our area, or if it does, it was so hard to find that I lost the will to continue searching for it. Continue reading
It is National Student Money week, and so I find myself looking back on my student life and what constituted a ‘meal’ in those days. The thing about student money is that you usually have less than none of it, and there are many things that you want, or need, to spend this non-existent money on. An almost universal part of the student experience is therefore trying to feed yourself as cheaply as possible.
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It’s hard to read all the reports about greenhouse gases and the cow industry and not feel a pang of guilt every time you sit down to eat a burger. Beef stew had been in regular rotation in our house because it was so easy and cheap. Usually I would use a tough cut, like a shin, and stick that in the slow cooker all day, or put it on at midday on high when I was working from home. I would cook it until the meat would fall apart and the disc of bone would be left nestling somewhere in the centre of the stew, bare and pale.
In honour of Chinese New Year, this week’s recipe is a simple stir-fry dish, suitable for week-night dinners. I’ve got it down to about 20 minutes by being fairly careless with the chopping and pretty generous with the heat.
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Soup mix. Why are the directions on your packet so useless? What are we supposed to do with you? Just, like, boil you in some water? And then what? What are you supposed to taste like? Are you really just barley and pulses and water? Can that really be it? Continue reading
My meticulous and academically-approved approach to research – looking on Wikipedia – led me to learn that the first documented recipe for Bolognese sauce was in 1891, in an Italian cookbook by Pellegrino Artusi. Though not uncommon at that time, I think it is notable that Pellegrino Artusi had twelve siblings. If there is one thing that Bolognese is excellent for, it is serving lots of people. And not just any people. A lot of households find that it is something all ages enjoy, even the notoriously fickle and hard to please under-fives. If all you need to do is serve the dish in such a way that sauce and pasta never touch, you are still winning my friend.
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Democratic Kitchen 