Small Plates - Supper

Whipped Feta with Hot Honey

Delphine Roy — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One generous bowl, for six with bread
13 min total — Serves 6 — Easy

Ingredients

For the feta

250 g feta, in brine, drained
100 g thick Greek yogurt
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 small garlic clove
black pepper

For the hot honey

4 tbsp runny honey
1 tsp chilli flakes
1 tsp red wine vinegar
toasted sesame seeds, to finish

This is the dish I make when people are coming and I have not planned anything, and it has never once failed to be the thing that gets finished first. It takes ten minutes and three of them are the food processor running.

Why it needs the full two minutes

Feta is a curd cheese with a crumbly, granular structure. Blitzed briefly it becomes a paste of smaller crumbs; blitzed properly, with fat and acid present, the protein network breaks down and reassembles around the oil and yogurt into something aerated and genuinely light. The transition is sudden and it happens well after the point you would assume it was done.

Stop at forty seconds and you have made a slightly wet feta. Run it to two minutes and you have made something that looks like it came from a restaurant.

Brine matters

Feta sold in a block in brine has been kept wet and has nothing added to it. Pre-crumbled feta is dusted with potato or cellulose starch to keep the pieces apart, and that starch is why it goes claggy rather than smooth in a processor. It is the single most common reason this recipe disappoints people.

Hot honey, quickly

Honey held over heat for more than a minute darkens and starts to taste of caramel rather than of honey, and the chilli goes bitter. Thirty seconds is enough to loosen it and bloom the chilli oil. The vinegar off the heat is what makes it a dressing rather than a syrup.

Ridges, not a dome

Spread it wide and drag a spoon through it. Honey poured over a smooth mound runs off to the edges; poured into a landscape of ridges and wells it stays where it lands, and every scoop of bread gets both.

Warm flatbread, torn focaccia, or raw radishes and cucumber if you would rather not have bread at all.

Blistered Shishito Peppers with Lime

Delphine Roy — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A bowl for four, with drinks
10 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

300 g shishito or padrón peppers
1 tbsp neutral oil, not olive — it will smoke first
1 lime, cut into wedges
flaky salt, more than seems polite

The shortest recipe on this site, and one of the two or three I make most often. It is what to cook when people arrive and you want something on the table in the time it takes to open a bottle.

The pan has to be genuinely too hot

Blistering is not roasting. You want the thin skin of the pepper to char and lift away from the flesh underneath in patches, which happens fast and only at high temperature. A moderate pan cooks the peppers through evenly and gives you something soft and green and dull.

Cast iron holds the heat best, because three hundred grams of cold peppers will drop the temperature of a thin pan the moment they land.

Neutral oil, not olive

Olive oil’s smoke point is well below where this needs to happen, and it will fill the kitchen with acrid smoke and taste of it. Groundnut, rapeseed, or sunflower.

Salt while the oil is hot

Salt sticks to hot oil and slides off cool peppers. Tip them into the bowl and salt them immediately, tossing, and use more than you think is reasonable — these are eaten with fingers, one at a time, and each one needs to carry its own seasoning.

The lottery

Shishitos and padróns are mild cultivars that occasionally, unpredictably, produce a fruit with real capsaicin in it — usually reckoned at about one in ten, though it varies with the season and how stressed the plants were. There is no visual tell.

Serve them with a cold drink and let people find out.

Marinated Olives and Warm Almonds

Delphine Roy — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two bowls, for six
22 min total — Serves 6 — Easy

Ingredients

For the olives

400 g mixed olives, with stones, drained
5 tbsp olive oil
2 strips of orange peel, pared with a knife, no white
2 garlic cloves, lightly crushed, skin on
1 tsp fennel seeds
½ tsp chilli flakes
2 rosemary sprigs

For the almonds

200 g blanched almonds
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp flaky salt
½ tsp smoked paprika
¼ tsp caster sugar

Everything on this site takes longer than this and almost nothing gets eaten faster. It is also the only recipe here that is genuinely better made in advance.

Infusing is not frying

The temptation with a pan of oil and aromatics is to hear something. Resist it. Above about 60C, rosemary turns medicinal, garlic starts to brown and go bitter, and the orange peel loses its top notes. Eight minutes on the lowest flame your hob will hold extracts the fat-soluble aromatics without cooking any of them.

If it sizzles, take it off, let it cool a little, and start again lower.

Orange peel, pared not zested

Cut strips with a knife or a peeler and check the backs for white pith, which is bitter. The oil in the coloured layer is what you want, and it is the ingredient that makes a bowl of supermarket olives taste like they came from somewhere.

Two hours minimum, three days better

The olives are already cured and salted; what the marinade does is displace some of that brine at the surface with flavoured oil, and that takes time. Two hours is noticeable. Overnight is much better. Three days is the point at which people ask where you bought them.

Room temperature throughout. The fridge is the enemy of this dish.

The almonds, and toasting them dry

Nuts toasted in oil from cold fry unevenly and the oil takes on a slightly stale note before the centres are done. Toasted dry, they roast from the inside, and the oil goes on at the end purely as a vehicle for the salt and paprika.

They should be warm when they reach the table. It is a small thing and it makes an ordinary bowl of nuts into something somebody comments on.

Avocado Toast with Chilli Crisp and Lime

Delphine Roy — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

2 large slices
12 min total — Serves 2 — Easy

Ingredients

2 thick slices of sourdough
2 ripe avocados
1 lime, juiced, plus wedges to serve
2 tsp chilli crisp, with plenty of the sediment
1 tbsp olive oil
flaky salt and black pepper
coriander leaves, optional

It is easy to be cynical about avocado toast, and then somebody makes you a good one and you remember there is a reason it took over. The good version and the bad version use the same three ingredients; what separates them is texture management.

The toast has to be armour

Avocado is roughly seventy per cent water. Put it on lightly toasted bread and within ninety seconds you have a damp, structureless thing that folds when you pick it up. Toasted dark and then brushed with oil, the surface is dry, rigid, and briefly hydrophobic, and it holds.

Sourdough or any bread with an open, chewy crumb. Sliced sandwich bread will not survive this no matter how you toast it.

Crushed, with lumps

Six strokes with a fork. Every additional one turns more of it to purée, and purée on toast is a spread rather than a topping — there is nothing left to bite through. Lumps also hold the lime juice and salt in pockets rather than distributing them into anonymity.

Acid, more than you would use

A whole half lime for two avocados. Avocado is very fatty and quite bland, and without real acidity it reads as rich and flat within three mouthfuls. The lime is doing the same job the lemon does in the bean stew: making the fat legible.

Chilli crisp, from the bottom of the jar

The oil at the top is the least interesting part. What you want is the sediment — fried garlic, shallot, chilli flake, sometimes fermented soy bean — because that is where both the crunch and the savour are. Push the spoon to the bottom.

Tomato Toast with Sesame and Cold Butter

Delphine Roy — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

2 slices
8 min total — Serves 2 — Easy

Ingredients

2 thick slices of good bread
30 g cold salted butter, sliced thin, straight from the fridge
2 ripe tomatoes, at room temperature
1 tbsp toasted sesame seeds
1 tsp olive oil
flaky salt and black pepper

A Catalan pa amb tomàquet has bread, tomato, oil, and salt, and it is one of the great things you can eat. This is a northern-European corruption of it with butter in place of some of the oil, and it is the thing I make most often for lunch when there is nothing in the house.

Cold butter, in slices

The instinct is to spread. Do not. Cut the butter into thin slabs with a knife and lay them on the toast — the underside melts into the hot crumb and seals it, while the top of each slice stays cool and solid. When you bite through, you get warm buttered bread and cold salted butter in the same mouthful, and it is much better than either alone.

This only works with genuinely cold butter, so it comes out of the fridge at the last second.

Salting the tomato first

Two minutes with salt on it does two things: it seasons the tomato all the way through rather than only on the surface, and it draws out a little juice which then gets poured back over. The same principle as the tomato salad, on a smaller scale and a shorter clock.

Sesame, toasted

Sesame is here for texture and for a nutty note that flatters the tomato in a way that basil, the obvious choice, does not. But it has to be toasted — raw sesame is faintly bitter and contributes almost nothing.

Two minutes in a dry pan, moving constantly, until they colour and start to pop.