Summer corn, nectarine and haloumi salad with fried zucchini, herbs and za-tar: jump to recipe here.

A record low single recipe here in 2023 – at least the bar for improvement is low. It’s not that I didn’t cook, but the cycle of study, exams and work meant time and motivation for recipe development and photos was missing. The rise of Instagram reels and Tiktok has resulted in a decline in traditional food blogging as it was when I started: many of my favourite bloggers have stopped all together, or switched medium to cookbooks, videos or pure social media content. 

I’m not quite ready to give it up yet. Food remains both a huge way to show love (dinner parties and birthday cakes are IN for 2024) and a creative outlet, and combining those here in this format of words + photo + recipe is the only way I can continue to squeeze it into life in a more permanent way than disappearing moments within a deep phone scroll. Maybe an optimistic statement – only time will tell whether this holds me slightly more accountable! 

This is the first of what will (hopefully) be a series of my favourite meals for weeknights or work lunches or dinner parties – mostly, for food with friends. It’s a summer corn, nectarine and haloumi salad, a favourite in the ‘fruit in salad’ category. The most important thing is perfectly ripe, juicy and sweet but not bruised or floury stone fruit. Nectarines or peaches ideally. Gooey haloumi fried at the last minute, smoky charred corn, fried zucchini for heft, lots of herbs and a lemon-y olive dressing make it a salad that can do it all: barbecue, pot luck, work lunch or quick dinner. Variants have been on repeat around here- use peaches and tomatoes if that’s what you’ve got, swap the haloumi for feta or a ball of burrata, use basil and shaved parmesan and add walnuts or pinenuts for a more Italian take.

If you’re looking for more summer recipe inspiration, here are my standouts for 2023: 

• Charred eggplant, tomato, tahini by Eden Grinshpan. Always a hit. See also her incredible roast sweet potatoes with sunflower seed and basil gremolata– we love a whole roast sweet potato moment.
• Ottolenghi’s fusion eggplant caponata with silken tofu – a classic in our lives at least. 
• My work lunches on repeat: lemon-y asparagus risoni salad (skip the salmon and use smoked instead for even more speed), zucchini soba noodles with miso salmon, corn or mango slaw with peanut tofu. 
• Ricotta gnudi with cherry tomato sauce: the friends dinner or date dinner you never knew you needed- mostly for the way you can get all cleaned up while it finishes off in the oven. And the mandatory sourdough for moping it up. 

And just because reading has made a post exam comeback, my favourite reads of 2023:

• Lola in the Mirror, Trent Dalton: the only one that for me has come close to Boy Swallows Universe (or surpassed?!).
• Birnham Wood, Eleanor Catton: writing like The Luminaries, but a environmental thriller set in small town New Zealand. Creepy and I loved it. 
• Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver. 10/10
• Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin: don’t let the initial gaming chapters put you off if you’re not a gaming person!
• Good Material, Dolly Alderton: not my favourite in the first half, but Dolly Alderton realllyyy has a way with words and that second half made it worth it. 
• Crushing, Genevieve Novak: contemporary Melbourne 20s/30s life in a novel. Almost a Sally Rooney-esque feel. 
• Love and Virtue, Diana Reed.

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Passionfruit, lemon and olive oil cake, otherwise known as sunshine in cake form. Jump to recipe here.

IIt’s difficult to believe it has been a year since my last post here – thank you to the friends who reminded me that the pear chocolate crumble had sat at the top of the homepage for too long. My only excuse is study. The physician exams I sat this year were undeniably harder than anticipated or could imagine. Everyone told us to expect the most challenging period of medical training we may ever face, but you still had to dive into it with the assumption that you’d be fine – or it would be too daunting to ever start. It already feels like there is very little choice in the matter: you’ve come this far, right? You got into medical school, you got through your university exams, you started working (which got easier and more satisfying), you found an area you loved with a future you could imagine, and this was just the mandatory next step on the road there. Unsurprisingly, studying full time on top of work drained a lot of the fun out of it. We are still sitting in the unfortunate anxious period of not having exam results yet, which is a black hole where every time you accidentally relive exam day you deduct another 10% from your imaginary mark. Best avoided if possible. Maybe I’ll look back at this with rosier tinted lenses on the other side!

When you’re exhausted it’s hard to have the emotional capacity or time to be creative, so baking went mostly by the wayside. I still cooked enough to feed myself – salmon dill and lemon risoni salads (a riff on this recipe) into too many tupperware containers, zucchini and melty goats cheese frittatas after work, eggplant tomato spaghetti dolloped with ricotta and showered in parmesan for pre-exam comfort. And it was friends who got me through it more than anything else: Lilli with home cooked Ottolenghi on the days I arrived home late and frazzled; Chloe for shared commiserations and study sessions over tubs of Luther’s scoops croissant and honey ice cream; Marnie for long run debriefs followed by butter drenched fruit toast (Wildlife is the winner); Anna and Eleanor with the frequent work escape long blacks; the best study group friends for pizza and wines and sharing the load – to name only a few. Mum and Dad always on the other end of the phone to listen.  

My window for complaints though is rapidly closing. I am typing this from a cafe in Paris (!), eating a slice of cherry studded clafoutis (from Gramme, would highly recommend), golden topped and densely creamy (and now at the top of my list to recreate next summer). I was lucky to get my mandatory 5 week block of annual leave now, after exams, so have joined the mass exodus of Australians and New Zealanders to sunnier climates. You can follow along over here for more of the holiday photographs if you like. 

In the meantime, this lemon, passionfruit and olive oil cake is pure sunshine in cake form. It’s zesty and fragrant, light and fluffy but still stays moist for days with both the yogurt and oil. It’s based on a cake we made when I was growing up frequently – the easiest one bowl people-pleasing cake in the repertoire with a side of nostalgia. The bundt tin allows a large capacity and means it cooks very evenly (it’s a versatile tin and makes the easiest afternoon tea cakes – would recommend if you don’t have one). Just make sure to grease your tin well and turn the cake out after about 5-10 minutes cooling time to ensure no sticking. 

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Pear, Walnut & Dark Chocolate Crumble

A new recipe for you courtesy of work I did with Walnuts Australia towards the end of last year – incidentally perfect for Melbourne’s current ‘polar blast’ iciness and the dark evenings. It’s one of my favourite winter crumbles: thinly sliced pears in brown sugar, vanilla and lemon with a buttery, oat-y walnut studded topping, dark chocolate melted and oozing through the crevices. Previous iterations had involved cooking down the pears in a buttery caramel – which whilst delicious and still a recommended alternative, churns up significant time and dishes when you’re probably at the point of just wanting to get dessert in the oven. 

The walnuts themselves were outstanding: I’d never quite appreciated how good freshly cracked buttery walnuts could be compared to the almost-turning-rancid ones left at the back of the pantry. You can find the rest of the walnut recipes over on their website: a walnut raspberry frangipane slice; my favourite walnut cinnamon scrolls with cream cheese frosting; walnut and maple granola; cheese platter worthy spiced tahini walnuts with comte; and the gooey centred brown butter & dark chocolate walnut cookies. 

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White chocolate, rhubarb and raspberry cake with almonds, a hint of orange and topped with cream cheese frosting. Jump to recipe.

Apparently you can expect recipes to be a rarity from me this year – cake has slid further down the priority list than I would like. It seems like a fact of life that every year gets busier (with a brief pause there with lockdown baking time), but the addition of exam study and attempts at research on top of work has really tipped it over. I’ve always wished I was one of those people who could be incredibly productive until the small hours of the morning and survive on less sleep than the rest, but sadly sometimes fatigue means only a meaningless phone scroll (maybe an episode of euphoria) and bed is possible.

I am still eating (and therefore cooking) so maybe badly lit iphone photos of a thrown together risoni salad is all I can offer – but maybe that’s all you are out there making too? The reintroduction of social lives and the end of WFH really spelled the end for sourdough projects and time to page through cookbooks. 

In better news, the New Zealand borders finally opened and I managed to escape back for a few weeks of annual leave. This white chocolate, rhubarb and raspberry cake was a product of Mum’s successful rhubarb plants (we also had rhubarb and raspberry tart for those with similar crops). It’s a variation on a theme – my favourite cakes are buttery, moist and rich, often nut based (almonds, pistachio, coconut or walnuts) and full of seasonal fruit, whether that’s apricots, plums or berries. It’s one layer (cleaning up 2 cake tins is just too much) and hastily dressed with a swoop of citrus-y cream cheese frosting. This one is studded with chopped white chocolate which partially melds with the batter – normally I find white chocolate too sickly (dark all the way) but it stands up to the sharp rhubarb and raspberries here perfectly.

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Baked spinach and ricotta gnudi in roast tomato eggplant sauce. Jump to recipe.

Gnudi: Tuscan dumplings, akin to extra large ricotta gnocchi without the shaping and boiling steps. It often takes people aback when you say it, like they might have just heard you suggest nudes of some variety (gnudi does literally mean naked in Italian). The name apparently comes from the fact that they are similar to ravioli filling, only disrobed without their surrounding pasta. The term gnudi is more commonly used in areas near Florence, whereas they are also known as malfatti (meaning badly made) in Siena. This version were born of a day during COVID isolation when a friend dropped off a care package including ricotta, cherry tomatoes and a sourdough baguette (a friend that knew me well, clearly). True comfort food in a bubbling dish, and much easier than either ravioli or gnocchi – less potential for mishap.

As a sidenote, friends dropping off coffee and treats really got us through that home isolation period and I would highly recommend it to anyone else (especially New Zealanders right now who are in the midst of a COVID outbreak). Who knew how exciting a door knock would become when you weren’t allowed to leave the house – our days were bookmarked by what might come through it.

These baked gnudi are soft and pillowy, reliant on good ricotta with wrung out spinach, lemon and parmesan then nestled in a simple roast cherry tomato and eggplant sauce and baked for half an hour. They can be prepped ahead right up until the baking step (just keep covered in the fridge in the baking dish) if you’re short on time later. It’s the sort of meal where you end up having done all the dishes by the time you’re ready to serve it straight from the oven, ideal for both weeknights and easy entertaining. 

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