Food 19: a jumble of delicious things

cookbooks and recipes for your radar

Good morning! If you’re anything like me, your Sunday morning inbox will be like a traffic jam of Substacks, all honking their horn and wanting your attention, so I particularly appreciate you taking the time to read this one today.

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I wanted to put these small, gorgeous, single-subject cookbooks on your radar because they are fantastic. And, clearly, deeply aesthetically pleasing.

They’re so beautifully designed and illustrated. Look:

They’re from a small independent Irish publishing house called Blasta Books. The idea behind them is to create a space for new, fresh food voices that showcase the diversity of modern Irish food, which is so much more than Dublin coddle (heretical recipe but I agree with him about bare sausages, bit penissy) and soda bread - not that those aren’t delicious too, obviously.

Everyone involved in this project has serious cookbook-publishing chops, having previously either edited them for places like Penguin or publicised people like Alison Roman in the UK. Blasta Books say they are to cookbooks what street food is to restaurants, which perfectly gives you the idea of what they’re doing here. The recipes - top notch, as you would expect from the publishers’ back story - are for easy, modern, relaxed and moreish food. They publish four new titles quarterly. I really love the whole enterprise.

They also sell these stickers, which are the best stickers I’ve ever seen - I have them all over my laptop.

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I think we might be in for a brief hot spell here in the UK. Hottish, at any rate. Hotter. Certainly today and tomorrow are going to be properly piping where I am. One night recently it was so bleak that I made sausage pasta, which doesn’t normally appear until at least October. I know it’s mad to give a sausage recipe in late July, but this one is a tremendous keeper and it might come in handy because as a veteran of UK beach holidays, you just never know, weather-wise.

Pic: Sophie Davidson

I made this sausage pasta recipe, which is identical to the sausage pasta I make on autopilot except for the genius addition of lemon juice and zest, which transforms it into something comforting but also fresh and zingy. I really recommend it, and I also really recommend Eleanor Steafel’s book, which it comes from.

Paid subscribers have already read me raving about it at length, so I’ll spare them a repeat, but it is a) a really wonderful, ultra-usable, in fact lovable cookbook and b) she is unusually brilliant at writing about food. You know how some food writing - the actual writing, I mean, not the recipes - is a bit like an elephant trying to pick up peas? (Such a good line, HG Wells said it about Henry James. Or maybe it was ‘hippo’). Anyway: Eleanor Steafel is the anti-elephant.

Pic: Sophie Davidson

Here’s her recipe for seasonally-appropriate hake and soft tomatoes with chilli butter ↑, to give you an idea.

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I am very into this super-umami sauce, which I found in the Japan Centre in London last week. I’ve been putting it on everything - sliced tomatoes, steamed greens, roasted aubergines, pan-fried fish, hard boiled eggs, you name it. I’ve even drizzled lightly on posh crisps (very good). I haven’t tired of it yet.

It’s Kewpie mayonnaise - Japanese, made with egg yolks rather than whole eggs, so richer, creamier, more delicious - plus roasted sesame seeds, vinegar, porcini powder and various other things. I like it because you basically cook a thing - a vegetable or a piece of protein - drizzle a little of this over it and call it dinner (ideally with a side of jasmine rice). Sorry to say drizzle twice, it’s my worst word in the context of food.

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The courgette/zucchini situation is out of control - I plant far too many every single year because Iove them, until I don’t - so here are some useful, easy courgette recipes from Substack and elsewhere.

• A big old roundup plus an extra recipe for courgette dip from Auntie Bulgaria.

• Silky whole roasted courgettes with bean and pea purée, walnut gremolata and salty cheese - really good (I made it) from Sue Quinn.

• Also really good BBQed courgettes with brown butter and yogurt by Ben Lippett for Mob - you can either work out the recipe from its title or take out a cancellable trial sub.

• I was looking for an old (from Cook Simple) Diana Henry recipe for courgettes with ricotta and mint, but it’s not online and this one by Rosie Birkett is near-identical - the only difference - from memory - is that DH layers the courgette and ricotta and has fresh basil in there as well. It is a fantastic way of eating an industrial amount of courgettes. It is so delicious.

• Nigella’s pasta with courgettes.

• Here is Claire Thomson making a sort of courgette baba ghanoush, which I am absolutely going to try.

• Super-simple courgette salad from The River Café Look Book, ostensibly a children’s book: 1kg courgettes , ends trimmed; sea salt and freshly ground black pepper; 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil; the juice of a lemon; 10 basil leaves; 100g washed rocket (arugula) leaves; 100g Parmesan. Using a potato peeler, peel the courgettes into ribbons into a large bowl. Season the ribbons with salt and pepper. Add the olive oil and the lemon juice. Add the basil and rocket. Using the potato peeler, shave over the Parmesan.

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Here is a summery, really uncomplicated thing to do with a fish. It’s originally from an out of print book by Carmel Somers. For four sea bass fillets, you roughly chop rosemary leaves, say from two big garden-sized stalks, as many anchovies as you like (I always want about three times as many as recipes assume) and two fat cloves of garlic, plus parsley if you have it. Chop everything in one go with a mezzaluna if you have one. Then put everything in a bowl and add enough olive oil to make a loose paste, not too runny because it needs to sit mostly on the fish and not slide off too badly. Stir in a pinch of chilli flakes and the juice of a fat lemon.

Get your fish and smear this mixture generously on top, fish skin-side down, obviously. Cook the fish in the oven at 220 for about 12-15 minutes, depending on what manner of fish and what fatness. That’s it.

Sometimes I add chopped black olives to the mix and sometimes I add capers. You could if you had a mandoline or good knife skills slice some potatoes very very thinly, rinse and dry them well, toss them in olive oil and salt and cook them first, adding the fish on top after about 10 minutes.

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These chaps

Another fish thing I make all the time in the summer is white fish fillets with brown shrimp butter. Pan fry your fish fillets in a mixture of decent butter and oil; don’t be shy about the amount. As soon as they’re done - minutes - put them on a dish and quickly chuck in a packet of those little brown shrimps and a good squeeze of lemon juice. You could add a knife-point of cayenne. Heat everything through and pour on top of the fish. Eat immediately. I do this with boiled (in salted water) new or baby potatoes and, ideally, samphire on the side, or something else ferrous and dark green. I’ve read loads of times that you could just melt a tub of potted shrimps into the pan, but I’ve not tried this - you might need more butter if you do.

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If today is as hot as I think it’s going to be, I’ll be making Agua Fresca, from Mexico, this being fruit water with lime. Here is a recipe from NYT Food - I’ve discovered I can use a gift link, so you should all be able to read it without a sub. Doesn’t it sound delicious? Nice change from nimbu pani (ignore her mention of using fizzy drinks, Jeez Louise - use water only! Great recipes otherwise though).

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If you’re in the UK, did you know that Asma Khan, as in Darjeeling Express and that episode of Chef’s Table, now does ready meals for Ocado? It started in February. I had no idea. I haven’t tried them, but here they all are (not too many, reassuringly).

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Last thing: at the risk of overwhelming you with books, you may remember that I was raving about Meera Sodha’s new one, Dinner, two weeks ago. I’ve been cooking more things from it since and it’s unbelievably good - her best one yet, I think. It’s out this Thursday.

If you want to get a sense of it, four recipes from it were in yesterday’s Guardian Food supplement, here. Make the chilli-braised aubergines and celery. Make all the things, but really do make the aubergines asap. You’ll need a jar of this.

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Thank you for reading! These fortnightly food posts are free for everyone. They alternate with short picture posts, which are also free. Everything else is for paid subscribers, so do consider that if you’d like to. Either way, have a wonderful Sunday, enjoy the sun, and if you liked this post then do please super kindly hit the ❤️ button - it makes it more visible. Thank you!