ROCKET & SQUASH | A Cook's Digest | by Ed Smith

ROCKET & SQUASH | A Cook's Digest | by Ed Smith

Share this post

ROCKET & SQUASH | A Cook's Digest | by Ed Smith
ROCKET & SQUASH | A Cook's Digest | by Ed Smith
Good Things #4 | Dinnertime

Good Things #4 | Dinnertime

Extremely tasty scran — via a new steak restaurant, plus a trio of cracking recipes from Meera Sodha

Ed Smith's avatar
Ed Smith
Aug 16, 2024
∙ Paid
8

Share this post

ROCKET & SQUASH | A Cook's Digest | by Ed Smith
ROCKET & SQUASH | A Cook's Digest | by Ed Smith
Good Things #4 | Dinnertime
1
Share

Have you made plans already?

Hello

There are a host of Good Things this week — maybe they’ll influence your weekend meal plan?

First up, a new cookbook recommendation: Dinner, which is the latest collection of recipes from Meera Sodha.

I hope you already have one or all of Meera’s first three books. And / or know her via recipes in The Guardian’s Feast supplement.

Assuming that’s the case, you’ll be familiar with her (mostly) Asian-inspired and flavoured recipes (albeit often using British and European ingredients), which just so happen to be vegetarian or vegan.

No doubt you’ll also agree that: they’re always light touch yet exhilarating to eat (a consequence of Meera’s extremely thorough approach to creating and testing recipes is that the combinations are smart, the methods efficient, and no ingredient is a passenger); they’re frequently outside of your repertoire; and they’re always more exciting and satisfying than your basic mid-week meat and two veg.

Dinner continues in a similar vein to Fresh India, East and indeed her New Vegan column. But it is also, I think, her most confident, complete and personal cookbook to date. She’s been extremely open about burnout, and how cooking dinner and then writing this book has helped her reconnect with a love for cooking — and for feeding others. You can feel that in the end result and the generosity of many of the dishes.

Get yourself a copy of Dinner

So I’m really pleased to say that there are three recipes extracted from the book here:

  • Miso butter greens pasta, which is a level up from the now fairly ubiquitous blitzed kale-sauced pasta/gnocchi/beans.

  • Butter paneer. As in, butter chicken. Except there’s paneer instead of chicken … and no butter; and

  • Crispy chocolate salted Thai rotis. Which involves a clever little hack to get round the tricky/time-consuming matter of hand-making roti.

Also below for paid subscribers:

  • London’s newest and quite possibly best steak restaurant;

  • the best thing I’ve bought to cook with over the last 5 years;

  • and a chance to win a copy of Dinner.

These things are for paid subs this week. Come join us?


Good steak

Seamlessly segueing from a vegetarian cookbook to steak …

… six weeks ago, I enjoyed what might well have been the best steak I’ve ever eaten in London.

This post is for paid subscribers

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in
© 2025 Ed Smith
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start writingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture

Share