friends Archives | World Food

Grilled summer squash and preserved lemon salad

August 17, 2020August 17, 2020
by Jono

Grilled squash and preserved lemon salad.

A perfect summer salad, we made this recipe from a spaghetti squash kindly given to us by our neighbors Una and Berian – it’s a wonderful, comforting and unusual pasta salad that’s very versatile! Taking inspiration from the Wicked Healthy book, this is vegan, healthy, and delicious.

This is perfect next to all sorts of things, and works well as a standalone meal – just bulk up with the grilled tofu/halloumi as suggested. Works well with cherry tomatoes, basil, whatever you have lying around.

Preserved lemons are one of our favourite ingredients, for a few reasons – they’re cheap and easy to make, last forever, and taste amazing! They’re also frightfully expensive to buy for some reason, so well worth the effort to make a jar. There’s a recipe here.

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Fusion

Perfect tofu kofta (Turkish meatball) feast!

May 17, 2020May 17, 2020
by Jono

Perfect tofu kofta (Turkish / Lebanese meatballs) with all the trimmings, from scratch.

Is it possible to make a perfect vegetarian kofta with tofu? We’ve been puzzling over this idea for a while, and we finally cracked it! The texture is very important here, you want something with that semi-meaty bite, not too squishy but also not dry and starchy.

This is a feast recipe – how to do each element that you’ll need for a great, easy, Turkish themed dinner party! We go through making the perfect tofu kofta, yoghurt flatbreads, sumac pickled onions, chopped salad and tahini sauce, all from scratch.

This is a great spread for friends – messy and delicious!

These are about as close to perfect as you can get with household ingredients – some companies like Beyond Meat have made virtually indistinguishable meat alternatives, but you’re not going to be able to replicate that in your home kitchen from scratch.

Kofta is a skinless meatball eaten over an enormous area – literally from Eastern Europe to India – but the most famous are the Turkish and Lebanese ones. This is more along the lines of a Lebanese kofta simply because of how we put it together, but there’s loads of overlap between cuisines in the area.

This is such a fun food to eat with your hands – makes for a great dinner party! Grab a few friends, break out the Raki, and make your own flatbreads. Messy, healthy, delicious – this is our kind of eating! Perfect for a casual supper where you want to show off your plant based cooking skills 😉

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European

Homemade oat trofie with mushroom marinara sauce

May 13, 2020May 14, 2020
by Jono

Homemade oat trofie with mushroom marinara sauce

This is indeed what you are suspecting – pasta made from oat flour! Delicious, healthy, and surprisingly easy, this is a great weeknight dinner or fancy lunch with friends. This takes a little over an hour from start to finish, and can be simplified a lot by making an easier sauce, while you get on with making a salad or whatever else.

I love fresh pasta. I simply can’t get enough, and I really do feel that it’s so perfect in it’s simplicity – one of the timeless dishes that is so often reduced to dry, supermarket packets, and so rarely done properly. Anyone who has made their own pasta will agree – it’s one of the most delicious things out there.

There are a few myths around making pasta: Firstly, that you need a pasta machine. This is simply not true – The Italians have been making pasta for hundreds of years before the invention of the pasta machine, and you’re perfectly capable too. In fact, you don’t even need a rolling pin for some of them – these Trofie for example, or Gnocchi.

Second myth: You need loads of time. While it’s true that making your own pasta is more time consuming than throwing pre-bought pasta into the microwave, it’s still very doable for a weeknight dinner, going from start to finish in about an hour, with 30 mins or so of resting time included.

And lastly – that you need special skills or Italian genes. Not true! As in the immortal words of SuzelleDIY – “Because anybody can”. There are no dark arts involved here, just patience, mindfulness, and a love of cooking – the rest will fall into place naturally.

Trofie is the traditional pasta to eat with pesto, being a Ligurian speciality, and happens to be a very easy pasta shape to make by hand. However, if you want to make pappardelle or linguine or strozzapreti or whatever, feel free 🙂

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Southeast Asia

Quick Thai mango salad

April 18, 2020April 18, 2020
by Jono

Quick and easy, this Thai mango salad can be adapted in loads of ways, including your choice of protein, herbs, crunchy veg, depending on what you have lying around.

While most of this salad is thoughtless and easy, the trick is the mango – This isn’t a green mango salad, but at the same time try not to get mangoes that are gloriously soft and sticky – find the greenest mango you can of the ones the supermarket is selling, which should be pale yellow and slightly sweet and crunchy inside – skip any that feel soft when you pick them up, or have a sweet ripe odour.

The dressing is amazing and super versatile – works well as a dipping sauce for all sorts of things, and don’t be scared at all the fish sauce – it’s beautifully balanced out by the lime juice and sugar. Loads of super bold flavours here!

European

Chickpea fusilli with basil pesto and asparagus

April 17, 2020April 18, 2020
by Jono

Chickpea fusilli with a cucumber basil pesto and raw asparagus – this incredibly healthy dinner also happens to be oil free, sugar free, and vegan! Fusilli (and trofie) is the traditional pasta to eat with pesto, since the pesto fills the grooves in a very satisfying way.

We understand that Chick Pea (and other pulse based pastas) are still an expensive food item in some parts of the world, and if you can’t get it, feel free to use regular pasta. We chose to use it because of the nutritional benefit of the extra protein (and it’s cheap in Ireland!), so bear in mind that if you’re using regular pasta you’ll need to fortify with a protein source (adding tofu into the pesto etc) to make it more nutritionally complete.

This raw, fresh pesto smells incredible – no oil or animal products, just incredibly healthy, fresh ingredients. There are one or 2 slightly more offbeat ingredients, but these are definitely items that can be used to add fantastic flavour to all sorts of things, so worth seeking them out.

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European

Beetroot pappardelle with ricotta and spinach

April 15, 2020April 15, 2020
by Jono

Beetroot Pappardelle with Ricotta and Spinach – This is a “from scratch” recipe that also happens to be oil free, sugar free and vegetarian! This will work with shop bought pasta, of course, but the pasta is the hero of this dish – Spend a bit of time doing it properly.

This is one of those dishes that is truly spectacularly delicious, that you just close your eyes and get transported into gastronomic pleasure. We live for those moments of bliss, those memorable meals, and hopefully this will hit the spot for you too.

Homemade fresh pasta is truly one of life’s greats, one of those timelessly simple foods that are so, so much better when made by hand. Pappardelle means “to gobble up” in Italian (Or so I was told!) – and this is exactly what happens with this dish!

Bear in mind – Making pasta from scratch takes a bit of effort, so do this on a weekend when you have lots of time and want to make something special. This was done without a pasta machine (all you need is a rolling pin), but if you do have one lying around it’ll save you some work.

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European

Whole roasted cauliflower with tahini, bacon and preserved lemons

April 19, 2018
by Jono

Let me start out by saying that this recipe contains pretty much all of my favourite ingredients, and is stunning.

It is also very adaptable, so feel free to chop and change according to what you have in your cupboards.

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Indian

Aubergine and chick pea curry

February 19, 2018
by Jono

Basic, delicious vegetarian food, hearty and satisfying. Indian food is, in our opinion, some of the best in the world. The indian subcontinent has been refining its cuisine over centuries to produce complex, wonderful food that is both cost effective and healthy.

This is our take on a classic weeknight supper – bear in mind that all ingredients are approximations, and should be guided by your gut feel, and not the exact amounts. Spices vary in intensity depending on freshness, tomatoes vary in sweetness and sourness, chillis vary in hotness, and so forth – use your intuition.

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