Potato chip Florentines

June 21, 2025

   

After the great success of my tomato potluck desserts, I enjoyed musing over the possibility of potato potluck desserts for several weeks. This idea came late and fast: substitute plain potato chips in for the usual flaked almonds in my favourite Florentine recipe. So simple to do, and still so tasty! The potato chips toasted to perfection under the syrupy binding mixture, and the dash of salt was welcome. If anything I would have liked more potato flavour here. There's definitely room to play around with different potato chip brands and thicknesses, as well as the quantity added to the recipe. What a fun, tasty process of refinement that would be.

Potato chip Florentines

(adapted from this recipe by Meera Sodha)

60g pistachios, finely chopped 

90g thick/ruffled plain salted potato chips, crushed

50g hazelnuts, chopped 

100g dried cranberries (or other sour berries) 

2 tablespoons plain flour (can be gluten-free)

1/2 teaspoon salt 

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 

75g margarine 

50g brown sugar 

2 1/2 tablespoons golden syrup

200g dark chocolate

Heat an oven to 200°C. Line a large baking tray with paper.

Chop and crush all the ingredients that need it. Stir together all the nuts, chips and dried fruits in a large bowl. Stir through the flour, salt and cinnamon until combined.

Place the margarine, sugar and golden syrup in a saucepan and set it over medium heat. Cook the mixture, stirring, until everything has melted together and become smooth. (You can also heat in the microwave and stir together.) Take it off the heat and pour it over the nut mixture in the bowl. Stir it all together to combine, then pour the mixture out onto the baking tray. Form a large rectangle about 1 cm thick; mine was about 30 cm x 22 cm.

Bake the Florentine slab for 10-15 minutes, until golden brown - keep a close eye on it to avoid burning! Allow it to cool completely.

Melt the chocolate using your favourite method and pour it over the flattest side of the Florentine rectangle. Allow the chocolate to set completely at room temperature. Slice the Florentine slab into rectangles or diamonds to serve.  

Caramelised garlic, zucchini & butter beans

October 24, 2024

   

Cindy keeps a pretty good list of recipes bookmarked from around the internet, and remembered this one when we had a few key ingredients aging in the fridge. It's very, very simple to make and the pay off is a nice, messy dish of veggies, beans and sauce that really does cry out for accompanying fresh bread to sop things up. A very satisfying weeknight meal that was surprisingly rich - I guess miso, olive oil, wine and garlic are a pretty hearty combination of ingredients. This makes a pretty scant four meals, so we had some lunchy leftovers out of it, but it's not going to fill the freezer for the week. 

Caramelised garlic, zucchini & butter beans

(based on this recipe from Meera Sodha's Guardian column)

500g zucchinis, cut into rough bite-sized pieces

6 tablespoons olive oil

6 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed

150ml white wine

2 tablespoons white miso

800g butter beans, undrained

1 lemon, zested and juiced

small bunch parsley, leaves chopped

small bunch mint, leaves chopped

salt

Put a couple of tablespoons of oil into a frying pan on high heat and fry the zucchini, turning occasionally until they're golden, almost charred. Sprinkle with salt and set aside.

Put the rest of the oil in the same pan and fry the garlic for a couple of minutes until it's started to go golden. Add the wine and miso and stir the mix together so that it's smooth. Add the beans with their liquid and simmer for 10-15 minutes until you've got the texture you want - a bit liquidy, but you want it to have thickened up a bit.

Stir in the zucchini, lemon zest and juice and simmer for another minute. Kill the heat and stir through the herbs. Serve, with bread.

Mushroom & walnut samosas

August 29, 2024

   

Last Thursday I was trawling around for dinner ideas; I didn't seem to be in the mood for any of our usual favourites. I didn't recognise this Meera Sodha recipe for mushroom and walnut samosas at all when I found it among my bookmarks, but I liked the concept anew and gave it a go.

A large volume of mushrooms goes into the filling, and Sodha gives us the option of throwing them into a food processor rather than slowly, finely chopping the lot. It's a handy approach but I'd still recommend some patience with pulsing the mushrooms in small batches. I tried to process too many at once and ended up with an uneven, mostly very-finely-ground mixture. Filo pastry packets don't translate precisely across countries, so I just winged it with quantities that felt right and used up most of a box.

My approach generated about 30 golden packages of subtle savoury goodness. Though they're intended as an entree or snack to be shared around, we piled the samosas into shallow bowls for dinner and loved smearing them with lime pickle. The samosas also teamed brilliantly with a green bean salad that echoes the mustard seed and lime (we've been making it on and off for 18 years!). We relished two rounds of leftovers at home, where we were able to crisp up the pastries again in the oven.

   

Mushroom & walnut samosas

(slightly adapted from a recipe by Meera Sodha on The Guardian)

120g walnuts

600g mushrooms

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

3/4 teaspoon black mustard seeds

3/4 teaspoon cumin seeds

1/2 teaspoon nigella seeds

1 large onion, finely diced

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 tablespoon ginger, minced

2 green chillies, finely chopped

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground pepper

~220g filo pastry

spray oil or melted margarine

Grind the walnuts finely in a food processor and transfer them to a bowl. Pulse the mushrooms in a food processor in batches, until they're roughly pea-sized. (Don't over-fill the container, I did and ended up with very unevenly blended mushroom pieces.)

Set a large frypan over medium heat and pour in the oil. Add the mustard, cumin and nigella seeds. When they start to pop, add the onion and cook, stirring regularly, until soft and starting to brown (up to 10 minutes). Add the garlic, ginger and chilli, and cook for a further 5 minutes. Sodha says the onions should look like 'dark jewels'. Add the mushrooms and gently fold them through the onions, cooking for about 7 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and cook until all the liquid is evaporated, about 15 more minutes. (Be fussy about this! Too much moisture will make for soggy samosas.) Stir in the walnuts and cook for 3 minutes. At long last, turn off the heat and allow the filling to cool.

Preheat an oven to 220°C and line two baking trays with paper.

Unwrap the filo pastry and keep the unused bits lightly wrapped in a damp teatowel as you go. Slice through all the layers to form a rectangle roughly 23 cm x 10 cm - for me, that was the bottom quarter of the sheets. Take one piece and place about a tablespoon of the filling in the corner closest to you. Wrap the pastry upwards at 45 degrees to form a triangle; keep wrapping up and up to preserve the triangle shape and use up the whole rectangle. Apply a bit of oil/margarine to the outside and give the samosa a second wrapping. Place the samosa on a baking tray and repeat the wrapping process until all the filling is used up.

Apply a bit more oil/margarine to the samosas and bake for 15 minutes, until brown and crispy. Serve with chutney or pickle.

Gochujang vodka rigatoni

June 30, 2024

   

I picked up a little carton of cheap Oatly cream from Cheaper Buy Miles kind of by accident (I thought it was milk) but luckily I recalled that Meera Sodha uses it quite often in her Guardian-published vegan recipes. Here's one of them: a riff on vodka pasta sauce, which I don't see around in Australia but I recall encountering often in the United States. The traditional recipes seem to cook onions in butter or oil, combine them with tomatoes and cream, then include some vodka to help blend the latter two ingredients and give the sauce a sharp, clean finish. Sodha makes the obvious substitutions to render it vegan, then adds in gochujang for some extra heat.

My Oatly and pasta packages were larger than the recipe called for so I inflated the recipe by inexactly rounding up most of the ingredient quantities. I also swished tap water around the passata bottle and the Oatly carton to get the last bits out and into the sauce; as a consequence, I decided that I didn't really need the reserved pasta water included in the recipe. Happily, pasta is the kind of food that can take this casual attitude to measurements, although perfectionists might like to adjust the ratios more carefully.

I liked that this pasta was brightly tangy, almost fruity. I paired it with some more earthy burnt butter and black garlic Brussels sprouts.

Gochujang vodka rigatoni

(slightly adapted from a recipe by Meera Sodha published in The Guardian)

2-3 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 large onion, finely chopped

1 teaspoon salt

3 cloves garlic, minced

400g passata

1 1/2 tablespoons gochujang

1 1/2 tablespoon tomato paste

1/2 cup vodka

250mL Oatly vegan cream

500g rigatoni

Pour the oil into a large saucepan and set it over medium heat. Add the onion and salt and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is soft, about 8 minutes.

Add the garlic, stir for 2 minutes, then add the passata, gochujang, tomato paste and half of the vodka. Allow the mixture to bubble and reduce in volume for about 10 minutes. Stir in the remaining vodka and the cream, cook for another couple of minutes, then turn off the heat.

Bring a large pot of water to the boil and cook the pasta for 1 minute less than instructed. Save a cup of the pasta water and drain off the rest.

In whichever of the two saucepans is the best fit, stir together the pasta and the sauce and set them back on medium heat for a couple of minutes. Add some of the pasta water if needed, but aim for a thick sauce that clings to the pasta. Season to taste and serve.

Pasta & chickpeas in brothwith preserved lemon & chilli

January 15, 2024

   

Meera Sodha published this recipe around the same time that I noticed we had preserved lemon in the fridge, so I got onto it pretty quickly. Pasta is up front in the dish's name, and there's also more broth than I expected so I've brought that into the title as well. The recipe is probably better suited to autumn, but the weather turned cooler and broth-worthy as we were eating it.

I made a few substitutions for convenience. Having never encountered sun-dried tomato paste, I used regular tomato paste. I used some orecchiette languishing in the pantry instead of buying macaroni. I spooned out a little chipotle in adobo sauce instead of purchasing chiptole flakes. I think it's a recipe that can handle plenty of improvisation.

The result is comforting but light; liquidy while offering plenty to chew on; it's very warming and a little tangy, a little savoury. We'll wait until the season really changes before we go back for more.

Pasta & chickpeas in broth with preserved lemon & chilli

(a recipe by Meera Sodha in The Guardian)

olive oil

4 sprigs rosemary, leaves picked

1 onion, finely chopped

2 carrots, finely chopped

2 sticks celery, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

3 tablespoons tomato paste

2 x 400g cans chickpeas, including liquid

1 preserved lemon, seeds removed and finely chopped

160g macaroni (or, in my case, orecchiette)

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1 1/2 teaspoons chipotle in adobo sauce

20g nutritional yeast flakes

3/4 teaspoons ground black pepper

Make some rosemary oil. Pour 80 ml of oil and the rosemary into a small saucepan over low heat until bubbling, then turn off the heat and allow it to infuse while you cook the soup.

In a large saucepan, pour in 5 tablespoons of olive oil and set it over low-medium heat. Add the onion, carrot and celery and cook, stirring, until softened. Briefly stir in the garlic and tomato paste, then add just one of the tins of chickpeas with their canning water. Mash the chickpeas to form a rough paste.

Stir in the preserved lemon and the second can of chickpeas with its water. Add the pasta, salt, chipotle, and 1.5 litres of tap water. Cover the pot with a lid and simmer until the pasta is cooked (see what's recommended on the packet but note that it could take a little longer).

Stir in the yeast flakes and pepper and simmer for a few more minutes. Ladle the soup into bowls and drizzle over the rosemary oil to serve.

Potato salad with tamarind, coconut & cashews

September 3, 2023

   

Cindy picked this Meera Sodha recipe out for a friend's potluck picnic - it required just a few tweaks to tick everyone's dietary requirements (we cut the garlic and shallots out of the original), and it promised to be a full-flavoured variation on the bog standard picnic potato salad. I fumbled things a bit in the process - over-boiling my spuds, so the whole thing had less of a fancy potato salad vibe and more of a fancy mashed potato vibe. Luckily, it still tasted great - the curry leaves, tamarind, spices and coconut really elevating things and the cashews adding back some of the texture that I'd boiled away. I'll probably take another crack at this over this summer's picnic season, to see if I can come up with something more like the original photo. 

Potato salad with tamarind, coconut & cashews

(from this recipe on from Meera Sodha's Guardian column)

1kg baby new potatoes

3 tablespoons coconut oil

1 teaspoon black mustard seeds

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

10-15 fresh curry leaves

5 large shallots, peeled and sliced finely (we omitted these for FODMAP reasons)

3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed (and these)

1 tablespoon of minced ginger

2 green chillies, finely chopped

100g cashews

2-3 teaspoons tamarind paste

200ml coconut milk

salt to taste

Cut the spuds into bite-sized pieces (big ones I'd suggest, maybe just halved) and cook them in boiling water for about 10 minutes, until tender - I chopped mine quite small and so they were falling apart rather than tender by the time I rescued them from the pot. Drain them and put them aside to cool.

Heat the coconut oil in a large frying pan and add the mustard and cumin seeds along with the curry leaves. Once the seeds start to pop a bit, throw in the shallots and cook gently until they soften and start to brown - about 8 minutes. 

Add the garlic, ginger, chillies and cashews, and cook for a couple of minutes, stirring. Put the potatoes and salt in to the frying pan and cook on high for 5 minutes, turning the spuds once (you're trying to get them a bit crispy here, but mine were well and truly losing their structure at this point). 

Stir through the tamarind paste and coconut milk and cook for a few more minutes - the coconut milk is supposed to evaporate and leave everything with a kind of sticky glaze, but my spuds just drank it all up. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Florentines

May 8, 2022

   

My sewing machine is out of order, so I reverted to baking to entertain myself on Sunday. This fabulous Florentine recipe comes from my Meera Sodha Guardian bookmarking frenzy of January 2022. I've never thought of Florentines as a favourite, but I have long been fond of them. My mum had a Florentine recipe, most likely from this Australian Women's Weekly book. That's led me to occasionally choose the Florentines from café biscuit jars, although they often turn out to be stale.

This version is vegan (no butter, no honey!) and has a carefully curated ingredient list. No common old sultanas, glace cherries, or cornflakes; instead there are pistachios, dried cranberries, and crystallised ginger. That said, the preparation is less fussy than what I'm accustomed to: Sodha has us form the Florentine mixture as a large rectangular slab, which can be sliced into diamonds or just broken off by hand a piece at a time.

I rounded up the pistachio and almond quantities to use up what I had, and doubled the chocolate. No dainty drizzle for me! Instead I spread out a continuous layer of chocolate and used a fork to decorate it with waves like the café biscuits.

This recipe has promoted Florentines to a firm favourite, after all. I'm likely to make a second batch within the week!

Florentines

(slightly adapted from a recipe by Meera Sodha on The Guardian) 

60g pistachios, finely chopped

75g crystallised ginger, finely chopped

90g flaked almonds

50g hazelnuts, chopped

100g dried cranberries (or other sour berries)

2 tablespoons plain flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

75g vegan butter (I used Nuttelex)

50g brown sugar

50g golden syrup (about 2 1/2 tablespoons by my eye)

200g dark chocolate

Heat an oven to 200°C. Line a large baking tray with paper.

Chop all the ingredients that need it. Stir together all the nuts, ginger and dried fruits in a large bowl. Stir through the flour, salt and cinnamon until combined.

Place the 'butter', sugar and golden syrup in a saucepan and set it over medium heat. Cook the mixture, stirring, until everything has melted together and become smooth. Take it off the heat and pour it over the nut mixture in the bowl. Stir it all together to combine, then pour the mixture out onto the baking tray. Form a large rectangle about 1 cm thick; mine was about 30 cm x 22 cm.

Bake the Florentine slab for 10-15 minutes, until golden brown - keep a close eye on it to avoid burning! Allow it to cool completely.

Melt the chocolate using your favourite method and pour it over the flattest side of the Florentine rectangle. Use a fork to make decorative waves in the chocolate. Allow the chocolate to set completely at room temperature. Slice the Florentine slab into rectangles or diamonds to serve.  

Cornflake icecream bars

January 24, 2022

   

Here's a Meera Sodha dessert that I made, purely for the fun of it! It's a vegan icecream bar that celebrates breakfast cereal. There's the sugary, crunchy cornflake layers on top and bottom, most obviously, and the creamy filling is also infused with cornflakes. Between them there's a strip of tangy raspberries that save it all from cloying sweetness.

The recipe requires a blender but not an icecream maker. I really liked this combination of oat milk and cashews to form the icecream base. I could taste the cornflake infusion in the unfrozen mixture, but I think it's drowned out by the actual cornflakes in the finished dish and I'd be inclined to skip that process in future - it'll save time, mess and waste.

The coconut oil was surprisingly pleasant as a cornflake binder, but I think it's just inevitable that slicing and handling these icecream bars will be messy regardless. I wonder if it would just be easier to break this down into bowls of icecream scattered with Frosties and raspberries. I'm not sure that it would feel as fun, somehow.

This would also be a fun template for other cereal flavours - I'm imagining Coco Pops and strawberries, or (a vegan equivalent to) Froot Loops and blueberries!

Cornflake icecream bars

(slightly adapted from a recipe by Meera Sodha from The Guardian)

cornflake layers

175g cornflakes, crushed into crumbs

80g caster sugar

100g coconut oil, melted

250g raspberries (I used frozen), cut in half (I don't think this matters)

icecream

75g cornflakes

550mL oat milk

150g unsalted cashews

60g caster sugar

2 tablespoons maple or golden syrup

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

pinch of salt

Line a 20cm square cake tin with plastic wrap, leaving as much overhang as you can on the sides.

Make the cornflake layer by stirring together the cornflake crumbs and sugar in a large bowl. Pour in the coconut oil and thoroughly combine. Pour half of the cornflake mixture into the cake tin and use the back of large spoon to spread it out evenly and compress it as best you can. Arrange the raspberries across the base - Sodha manages to achieve large even halves in a grid across her tray, but mine were more haphazard. Place the cake tin in the freezer while you prepare the icecream.

For the icecream, stir together the cornflakes and oat milk in a bowl, to infuse the milk with the cereal flavour for around 20 minutes.

Place the cashews in a small saucepan and cover them with water. Bring them to the boil, and simmer the cashews for 20 minutes. Drain the cashews and place them in a blender.

Strain the cornflakes out of the oat milk such that the oat milk lands in the blender, and as much liquid as possible has been squeezed out of the cereal. Discard the soggy cereal. Add the sugar, syrup, vanilla, oil and salt to the blender and completely liquidise the mixture - expect it to take a few minutes. The mixture should be smooth and creamy.

Retrieve the cake tin from the freezer and carefully pour the cashew cream mixture over the raspberries; smooth over the top if it's uneven. Freeze for 2-4 hours, until the icecream is firm. Press the remaining cornflake crumbs into the top of the icecream and freeze for another 2 hours to set completely.

Slice the icecream cake into bars using a large, sharp knife that's been run under cold water. I found it easiest to flip the cake upside down onto a cutting board and cut it from base to top.

Meera Sodha's tomato curry

January 15, 2022

   

Several friends have enthusiastically recommended Meera Sodha's East to me in the past year. I recently learned that Sodha has been contributing a vegan recipe column to The Guardian for years, so I've decided to get to know her cooking through that first, and spent a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon bookmarking recipes in the archives. This curry interested me but I didn't bother to hold onto it, since Michael wouldn't be excited about such a tomato-heavy meal. But it remained fresh in my mind when Michael had a weekend out of town, and I went back in search of it. 

I had a nice time preparing this - toasting and grinding spices, chopping tomatoes, cooking everything down over half an hour - but I don't think I got it quite right. First, I wasn't able to buy curry leaves close by and I think they would have been terrific (I've kept them in the recipe below). Second, I cooked the curry for the recommended time period but I don't think I got the coconut milk down to the stage that Sodha aims for. Certainly my curry looks very different to The Guardian photo, though it can be hard to know sometimes where a recipe ends and the aspirational food styling begins. 

Anyway, my coconut milk remained quite milky over the instructed 20-25 minutes, and over several reheats in the following days, so perhaps I need to turn up the heat and/or take a lot longer over the final simmering stage. I did an image search of thakkali kuzhambu, the dish that inspired Sodha's, and it seems to be quite liquid in most cases, with the tomatoes collapsing or blended into the gravy.

Meera Sodha's tomato curry

(a recipe published in The Guardian, where it's credited to her book East)

1 1/4 teaspoons fennel seeds

1 1/4 teaspoons black mustard seeds

1 1/4 teaspoons cumin seeds

1 1/4 teaspoons coriander seeds

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 onions, finely chopped

1 1/4 teaspoons salt

8 fresh curry leaves

1.2 kg mixed tomatoes (I used a kilo bag of medium-sized plus a punnet of colourful cherry-sized)

1 green chilli, finely chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 1/2 teaspoons tamarind paste

400mL can coconut milk

In a frypan over medium heat, toast the fennel, mustard, cumin and coriander seeds for a couple of minutes. Turn off the heat and grind them coarsely with a mortar and pestle.

Put the frypan back on medium heat and pout in the oil. Add the onions, salt and curry leaves. Cook them for 10-12 minutes, until the onions are well softened. During this time, slice the tomatoes into large bite-sized pieces.

Add the chilli and garlic to the onions, cooking for a further 2 minutes. Transfer half of the onion mixture to a second frypan and set it over medium heat too. Divide the tamarind and coconut milk between the two frypans and stir it into the onion mixture. Spread the tomatoes out over the milky mixture, ideally in a single layer. Cook the tomatoes, without stirring, for 20-25 minutes. Sodha says that the aim is to drive off the water in the coconut milk, such that you can see oil on the sides of the pan, but the tomatoes remain juicy. I'll try cooking mine longer next time.

Serve with naan or rice.