Low-chop dinners for lazy nights
Burst cherry tomato pasta, after dinner mints and Japanese curry
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Hi!
How nice is it to be out of lockdown? I’ve been on a road trip to visit my in-laws and loved being away from my home long enough to miss it.
There are so many good shows out at the moment, so nights at home have been about watching something new with popcorn and choc-dipped ice creams from the supermarket.
Tony’s been making buttered popcorn with chipotle salt, which is equal parts chipotle powder, salt and sugar. It’s dangerously good and maybe even better than chips.
Here are the best things I cooked from the internet recently...
The recipes
The best thing I made last month was creamy gochujang pasta with burst cherry tomatoes. I love a fusion pasta and this one reminds me of fusilli alla vodka, with a bit of heat from the gochujang, a Korean fermented chilli paste.
This recipe involves hardly any chopping or none at all if you own a microplane, which feels very rare! As far as prep goes, you grate some garlic into butter, grate a pile of Parmesan cheese and roast some cherry tomatoes.
Tiny notes: My oven runs hot, so both times I made this my tomatoes were ready at the 12 minute mark. I like things mildly spicy, so only used 1.5 tablespoons of gochujang. And I served mine with some steamed broccoli, which was great for mopping up any extra sauce.
Similarly great: 15-minute pasta with burst cherry tomato sauce.
I made the tinned seafood spaghetti from Bre Graham’s very beautiful weekly newsletter. She created the recipe on holidays and it definitely tastes like one with plenty of lemon, parsley and olive oil. There’s some wiggle room in the recipe, and I went with a tin of anchovies and the last remaining packet of spaghetti from our lockdown stash.
I’ve also made Bre’s roasted tomato rice with honey baked feta. It’s a lovely meal for chilly, rainy nights.
And then for nights when you want something simple but don’t really feel like cooking, try Eric Kim’s Gyeran bap, a rice and egg bowl with roasted, salted seaweed. The fried egg is cooked in browned butter and drizzled with soy and sesame oil as it cooks.
Scoop some hot rice out of your rice cooker, open a packet of roasted seaweed, steam some veggies if you feel like it and dinner’s done.
Onto sweets! If you too love an oversized cookie, make sure you try this recipe which makes five jumbo ones (Tony gasped when they came out of the oven). It’s a choc chip cookie recipe that manages to be slightly crispy around the edges and chewy in the middle, with plenty of pockets of melted chocolate.
Because the recipe makes just five cookies, it feels easy to mix up and bake. The dough rests in the fridge for a few hours, so I made the dough before dinner and baked them while waiting for an 11pm delivery (!).
A weeknight-friendly project
Last month I tried a bunch of different Japanese curry recipes, where you make the curry roux from scratch rather than buying a boxed version. This veggie-filled one is the easiest and reminded me of a lunch set I once had at an Osaka cafe. The cafe was very simple and offered a choice of curry with rice and a salad, a slice of cake (mine was a spiced honey roll!) and a hot drink. A dream meal.
This version is subtly delicious. There’s a grated apple in the recipe and I added a tiny bit of sugar at the end. I ordered this Japanese curry blend to make it and served it with sushi rice. We had some leftover pork in the freezer, so we crumbed them to make katsu curry, but I’m keen to try the recipe as is, where the meat cooks in the sauce.
To finish
After dinner mints! Wendy, my mother-in-law, made chocolate mousse for our first dinner together post-lockdown. She tucked a tiny after dinner mint into each one and it was so nostalgic. Now I want to buy a box.
I bought this cult Japanese diary for 2022, which has a space to record what you had for dinner each day! Very specific side note: its creator also voiced the dad in My Neighbour Totoro.
And I played this fast and silly food-themed card game at my niece’s birthday dinner. Everyone was in stitches and it’d be a fun one to own for any little visitors.
Catch you next month!
Sonya