Month: August 2016

oh you bite your friend like chocolate

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As soon as I marched out into this earth, a freshly begotten newbown, I was immediately three things: extremely Aries, extremely ready for attention, and extremely terrible at dealing with things being over. I mean, as far as the latter goes, I was already like ten days past my due date and then immediately contracted colic, possibly as some kind of bloody-minded way of implying that I really shouldn’t have had to farewell the womb where there was food on tap and no responsibilities and calming ocean noises.

What say you, baby Laura?  “You mean I have to wait like twelve years for a coffee culture to develop in New Zealand?”

This week I’m moving from the bar I’ve been at for 18-ish months to start being a bartender at another bar owned by the same business. It’s an interesting mix of sentimentality and excitement. However on this rare occasion I’m not feeling entirely terrible about something being over, because there’s so much new stuff to learn and take on and absorb and learn. I’m sad, I’m happy, I’m so delighted about the opportunity, but ultimately my gut instinct told me I should do it and I think it was correct. (My gut instinct tells me really stupid things sometimes, like “you should work out what that crumb on the floor is by putting it in your mouth for some reason” and “you’re terrified of pelicans, lol”) As well as being in the same business group it’s also in the same building, so I’m still very much in the general family that I’ve grown to adore.

Also, did you know how much attention you get when you announce you’re going to leave a place? It’s delicious. Almost as delicious as these cookies I made to take in on my final Saturday shift at my old job which were definitely made out of the pure goodness of my noble heart and not motivated by “the glory”. But really though, I do like to bake nice things for people and wanted to have some kind of sugary vehicle for my gratitude to the team I was leaving, to help boost us through a long night, our bods filled with chocolatey energy.

In the interests of everyone’s allergy needs being met (okay fine, in the interests of “the glory”) I was after some kind of gluten and dairy-free cookie that I could make without having to gather and hunt too many random ingredients. The answer is this, which is vaguely based on an Italian cookie recipe from this book I have called The Scotto Family: Italian Comfort Food. It’s so easy – just plain egg whites stirred quickly into a mountain of icing sugar, cocoa, and cornflour, baked briefly. Somehow this bowl of not-much-at-all turns into these chewy, soft, rich-rich-rich cookies, with a kind of macaron vs brownie texture. I love them.

There’s a lot of cocoa in this, so use the darkest, strongest, high-fat-percentage stuff that you can find, if possible. That, plus the pinch of salt, is going to counteract the blatant sweetness blast of all that icing sugar, meanwhile the chunks of chocolate punctuate each bite with delicious texture.

flourless double chocolate cookies

a recipe by myself

  • three cups of icing sugar
  • one cup of good cocoa
  • two tablespoons of cornflour
  • three egg whites
  • 250g dark chocolate, roughly chopped (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana which is dairy-free.) 
  • a pinch of sea salt

Place the icing sugar, cocoa, and cornflour in a large bowl and stir gently to get rid of any lumps and to make it into a uniformly dusty-brown dust. Tip the egg whites in and carefully stir – it will seem like there’s not nearly enough liquid for all the dry ingredients but damn it if it doesn’t come together suddenly to form a thick batter. About halfway through this point tip in the chopped up chocolate and salt and stir it all through. 

Refrigerate the mixture for fifteen-ish minutes while you heat the oven up to 180C/350F and get a baking tray lined with nonstick paper. Bake small spoonfuls, around five on the tray at a time to allow for spreading, for eleven minutes or until firm and slightly cracked on top. I just used a regular spoon from the cutlery draw, the kind you like, eat stuff with. Repeat with the rest of the mixture. I just slid the baking paper sheet off the tray onto a wooden board to let them cool and started again with a new sheet of baking paper rather than trying to prise them off individually but you do you. 

Allow the cookies to cool completely and then store in an airtight container. 

Despite not having tried it I know for a fact that these would be incredible sandwiched around ice cream, however on their own they are just perfect. It was noted on Saturday night that they don’t taste as though they’re lacking in gluten or dairy, which comes down to that magical texture – a crisp outer shell barely encasing a chewy, almost gooey, aggressively chocolatey centre. The fact that they are so massively easy to make just renders them even more delicious to me.

So with these cookies ends one era and another starts. If you yourself are thinking of taking something sweet into the workplace, I thoroughly recommend these: they’re fast to make, most people can eat them, and there is of course, The Glory of being that person who brought cookies to work. To be honest I love the people I work with so much that I’d make them cookies even if it didn’t get me attention though. (What an attention-seeking thing to say.)

Let’s weigh in with toddler Laura, what say you? “I can’t believe I have to wait like twenty literal years before I can look up Aries memes on the internet”

If you’re on a cookies-with-chunks-of-chocolate vibe, may I further recommend these Smoky Triple Chocolate Buckwheat Cookies (also gluten free); Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Cookies; or Maple Peanut Butter Cookies.

title from: The 1975’s song Chocolate, gee they are good though right? Sliiiight INXS vibes, yeah? 

music lately: the work playlist edition

Roots Manuva, Witness Dub. Walk me down the aisle to this song, lower me into the grave to this song, dance around my glowing risen spectre to this song, honestly: this song can cure the longest hardest tiredest shift at work.

Santigold, Les Artistes. The sparkly poppy sound with the slightly plaintive chorus gets me right in the ventricles. This is from 2008 but sounds like it fell out of the internet just yesterday.

Phoenix, 1901. So joyful!

next time: hopefully it won’t be quite so obvious how underslept I am. Time for a nap now. Also might as well bake something to bring in for the new team I’m joining, yeah?

sometimes i can’t function, my heart’s spaghetti junction

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I think a lot about comfort, and comfort food, and self care, and everything in that soft little bubble. It’s sort of stupid – yet predictable – that the more you might need self-care, the more inclined you are to curl up into a small spiral and hide under a blanket for hours; the more you are needing of comforting food the less you have any energy to cook it; and the more you want general comfort at all the less you remember how on earth to find it. If, however, you’re bouncing around like the little ball in that atari-type brick-busting game that was on all computers in the 90s and feeling aimlessly ready for comfort food but don’t know what exactly: mate, I heartily recommend this spaghetti recipe that I’ve got for you. On that note, I’ve been watching a whole lot of the Netflix series Chef’s Table and aside from wanting to marry Chef Dominique Crenn soooo badly; just watching a beautifully made show about people passionately making beautiful food is super calming without having to actually do anything about it myself.

Watching TV to chill out and finding pasta to be comfort food: how revolutionary, I know. For someone who is pretty convinced that they are a complicated mystery woman I’m actually a pretty simple human. I guess it’s about catching myself in the act of doing really obvious things and then congratulating myself disproportionately for them?

Pasta – along with ice cream – is just straight up my favourite food, so I generally want it always, without any further existential context around it. This particular recipe for Very Simple Tomato Spaghetti uses a different method to how we’re usually told to cook the stuff – in an ocean of boiling salted water – instead you add a scant cup or two of water and let the pasta slowly absorb it in its entirety. I know! I grew up eating pasta cooked by microwaving it in a pyrex jug of water for 12 minutes so you should definitely trust me. My logic being, someone who has lived through such bad pasta like me would definitely know really, really good pasta too.

With this recipe, everything happens in the one pan. The starch from the pasta releases into the remaining liquid, and when you stir in some tomato paste it all becomes near-on preposterously creamy and rich. I know all the butter I hoof into it has some kind of effect as well, but the starch is important, honest. I came by this recipe in a roundabout way – I was thinking about cooking spaghetti in the same way that I’d make a risoni risotto, and then I came across a recipe on Food52 that confirmed the process for me; I had a tin of tomato paste that I’d bought because it was out-of-date stock and going super cheap and stuff that’s on special because it’s past its use-by date is aggressive me-bait; finally I required both lunch and comfort: thus this recipe was born.

i took a photography course one time last week and now i think I can get away with this  i took a photography course one time last week and now i think I can get away with this 

You add the butter at three stages: first to gently fry the uncooked sticks of spaghetti in, secondly to add flavour to the cooking liquid, and finally to rich up the tomato paste. As with all my recipes, I’m thoroughly desensitised to what constitutes “a lot” of butter, but this tastes like the exact right amount. The tomato sauce thickly coats each soft strand, and any fresh-from-the-tin acidity is softened completely. It’s rich, it’s luscious, it tastes like you spent hours reducing it down in a cast iron pan under the Tuscan sun using fresh tomatoes that a handsome, floppy haired man picked for you as a gift shortly before you ignore him for the rest of his life and he goes on to write bad poetry about it using the tomatoes misguidedly as a metaphor. It’s delicious.

very simple tomato spaghetti

a recipe by myself

  • 50g butter
  • 100g dried spaghetti
  • one and a half cups recently boiled water
  • one small tin of tomato paste; or around four tablespoons
  • herbs and cheese to serve, if desired

You add butter at three different stages, so begin by slicing the butter into fairly even thirds. In a wide saucepan – ideally wide enough to hold the spaghetti lying down, although you can break the strands up if need be – gently heat the butter over a medium heat and add the dried spaghetti, stirring to coat the sticks in butter as they spin around the pan. 

Add the water and the second measure of butter and turn the heat up high. Continue to stir occasionally as the water bubbles away, cooking the pasta as it reduces down. Taste a strand occasionally to test if it’s done. If need be, add a little more water. 

Once the pasta is cooked and the water has reduced down to a few tablespoons – it will happen! – stir in the tomato paste and the final measure of butter. Stir over a lower heat until the butter has melted and it’s all thick and saucy. Remove from the heat and serve. 

If you look up the word “comfort” in the dictionary, there is, by way of explanation, this picture of me sitting cross-legged on the floor of my best friend Kate’s house while she and my other best friend Kim are just out of frame, we are drinking wine and the fire is warming my back. The lights are low and there’s an extractor fan on making blissful white noise and a small seal pup of a dog is in front of me trying to kiss my nose. In lieu of being able to recreate this exact picture for yourself, pasta is a decent option. Especially when that pasta is so simple and takes hardly any time or ingredients and rewards you with a bowlful of creamily dense sauce coating each strand which you can strew with herbs and cheese such as thyme and feta if you like but it’s perfectly perfect on its own, looking like an upended can of spaghetti but tasting five zillion times superior. (Now, I used to bloody adore canned spaghetti but I am convinced that the recipe has been changed and it’s not what I used to be, I’m not just being snarky about it for the sake of it.)

And if you’re after more pasta-related comfort, maybe try my Garlic Miso Butter Risoni Risotto or Spaghetti with Chilli, Lemon, Capers and Olive Oil.

title via the immensely cool Elastica’s Car Song. If we all try really hard we might be as effortlessly cool as Justine Frischmann one day, but I doubt it. 

Flume ft Tove Lo, Say It. It can’t be good for one to listen too much to Tove Lo’s song Habits too often so I’m glad this exists as well.

Look, I’ll tell you when I’m sick of listening to INXS’s song Disappear, okay? Till then just assume I’m listening to it on a constant loop.

next time: I have been craving cookies lately??? Perhaps something will come of this. 

almond looks, that chill devine

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My mind bounces around a lot from idea to idea; sometimes I swear it bounces right out of my head leaving me to fend for myself, for example as I sit here now with my designated two hours of time to myself to blog and instead I am staring into the middle distance thinking small fragmented thoughts about nothing in particular, being all “have I ever even had an opinion about food in my life?” It’s like a nervous horse, the more you try to corral it the more likely you are to get a hoof to the neck; but on the upside, the same brain zig zags are what got me thinking up, out of nowhere, the recipe for almond milk and coconut sugar creme brulee.

(It also got me googling, against my better will, “where is a snake’s dick located” during a perfectly sensible conversation on the group chat with my two best friends where someone happened to mention an ouroboros in a metaphorical way. The result: you uh, don’t want to know how the sausage is made.)

Almond milk creme brulee though: what a calming thing to think about. It’s very simple – thickened over a low heat with cornflour to provide that luscious texture, with coconut sugar giving a particular deep caramel vibe – although you could just as easily use brown sugar. It’s not as creamily voluptuous and straightforwardly sweet as a traditional creme brulee, but it has its own charms: the gentle flavour of almonds suspended in a thick yet incredibly light custard, the delicious and almost savoury toffee flavour of the burnt sugar on top, powerless under the heat of the grill, the crunch of said sugar against the soft custard, and of course the fact that it takes hardly any time or effort to come to fruition.

The idea for this recipe appeared to me suddenly like someone was whispering it in my ear (I presume this was not actually the case) and I decided simply to act upon it. It made for a serene little lunch in its entirety and while it would not be hard at all to expand it out to make for more people than just yourself, sometimes it’s nice to selfishly throw some effort for you and you alone, right? You count too.

almond milk and coconut sugar creme brulee

a recipe by myself

  • one and a quarter cups of almond milk
  • one tablespoon of cornflour
  • two heaped tablespoons of coconut sugar, plus an extra tablespoon for sprinkling over
  • one teaspoon of vanilla extract (or whatever vanilla delivery mechanism you like) 

In a small bowl – I just use the cup measure that I’m going to use for the rest of the almond milk – mix together the quarter cup of almond milk and cornflour till smooth. Scrape this into a medium sized saucepan and stir over a low heat till it has thickened some. Add the remaining almond milk a little at a time, continuing to stir, until it has all been added and the mixture has thickened into something fairly custard-ish looking. Remove from the heat and stir in the two heaped tablespoons of coconut sugar and the vanilla. 

Spatula into a smallish ramekin of around one cup capacity. Sprinkle evenly with the remaining coconut sugar. Place your ramekin or serving dish or whatever into the oven, and turn on the grill. Putting it in the oven before you turn on the grill helps it to heat up more gently. Keep an eye on it, and remove it once the sugar has largely melted and is bubbling in places. Leave for a few minutes before cracking in. 

a serene mess a serene mess

Almond milk is really pretty accessibly priced these days, but you could always replace it with coconut milk for a more pronounced flavour, or with half milk half cream. Whatever works for you. If you have a small kitchen blowtorch then that will be a lot easier and faster than caramelising the sugar under a grill, but it does work!

This week and the week before it have been kind of intensely busy in both work and life, and with Wellington on a Plate coming up it’s going to get even busier, so when I’m not dashing around Doing My Thing I’ve been sitting very still doing very simple things: watching a continuous stream of old Nigella videos on youtube; watching INXS videos on Youtube, reading old, old America’s Next Top Model recaps…you get the picture. No alarms and no surprises, please: one small, spoonable pudding is achievable though.

On that note! If little spoonable puddings appeal to you, I recommend also taking a look at my recipes for Instant Coconut Custard Semolina; Poires Belle Helene For One; or Blackberry Fool for Two.

In lieu of any actual further thoughts, bouncy or otherwise, here’s a good selfie for you.

title from: Mystify by INXS. Yeah I’m still super obsessed with them. I feel like it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. 

music lately: 

Uh so awkwardly all I’ve really been listening to is INXS, and I found another version of Disappear that I really love. This time it’s a live version from 1990 and Michael Hutchence’s voice is aggressively confident.

Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! by Mint Chicks is a modern classic that I hadn’t heard in forever and then suddenly heard two days in a row, a good a sign as any to include it here.

next time: Honestly I don’t know, I need to cook myself something as asap as possible. 

but it sours into a routine deceit

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I’m sure I’ve conveyed it somehow, but if you were not aware, I am a fulltime bartender. I personally think I’m good at it. I love doing it. But I don’t tend to talk about it too much On Here apart from to like, flop around and whinge about how tired I am, which is something I’ve done whether I’ve been bartending or working in an office or conversely, working in a different office, throughout the entire lifetime of this blog. Interestingly, I sleep better now than I ever have before, possibly because I’m filling my usual insomnia hours with standing up and serving drinks to people.

But yeah! Cocktails! So fun to make! I love learning about the classics, especially the truly ancient and sometimes forgotten ones – back when someone would mix cold gin with a wineglass of this and a jigger of that and some cad would lean over the bar and be like “hot jimminy dog! This is swell! And I, Lord Flauntleroy, pronounce it a new sensation! I suggest we kiss now, Bertram.”  On that note, it is fun discovering fascinating bartenders from way back when. Like London’s Ada “Coley” Coleman, who invented the Hanky Panky — a variation on the classic Martini using gin, sweet vermouth and that friend of yours and mine, Fernet Branca. She started working as a bartender in 1899, at a time in England when you were either allowed to be devotedly married or quietly reading Pilgrim’s Progress, but nothing else, let alone be employed in the man-crusted world of night-alcohol.

Ada “Coley” Coleman extremely doing her thing

With that in mind, I decided to do an impressively deep, powerful lunge sideways from my usual food recipes today to provide a recipe for something that I spend almost as much time thinking about: cocktails. More specifically, my variation on one of my favourite drinks, to make it vegan. So: Sours are generally a shaken-to-heck mix of a spirit, lemon juice, a little sugar and some egg white, the latter of which creates a gloriously silky texture and frothy layer on top. Raw egg white in a drink might sound un-fun but please, bear with me, as I am currently super into them and compelled to make Everything Sours right now. Including any mocktails I make for the glassie during their shift (the person who washes our glasses on busy nights: as I always say, A Hydrated Glassie Is A Hydrated All Of Us.) Importantly, you neither taste nor smell the egg white — it just wraps its proteins around the molecules of the liquid and floofs everything up splendidly as you shake the cocktail, creating a spectacularly light, foamy drink.

Whisky sours are probably the most well-known take on this format, but I personally favour gin sours, an occasional amaretto sour and the fairly underrated Pisco Sour. Once you start extrapolating out — and why wouldn’t you spend four hours on wikipedia without realising it — it becomes clear how many cocktails fall into the greater Sour family, being a mix of liquor, sugar, and lemon or lime juice — like Margaritas and Daiquiris. Sours have a gloriously punchy, sweet-zingy taste and lush texture – there’s barely a liquor under the sun that isn’t improved by a little sugar and a little citrus. However, I also love sours because they’re quite easy to recreate at home. You only need one favourite bottle of spirits, and the rest is just kitchen stuff. Plus you’re getting a hit of protein and vitamin C with every sip. It’s basically an alcoholic multivitamin.

whisky sour whisky sour

However! If you can’t eat egg white — because of preference, allergy, whatever — it seems a massive shame to be missing out on this entire avenue of cocktail deliciousness. I’m neither vegan nor allergic to egg myself, but I don’t think that’s a compelling enough reason to not explore and reimagine existing recipes to make them available to more people. Or at least: I love thinking up recipes and I like challenges, so this is my idea of fun.

If you’ve not yet heard of it, the solution is slightly leftfield. At some point in the recent past, it was discovered that the liquid from canned chickpeas, called aquafaba, behaves almost exactly like egg whites. As in, the stuff that you normally drain off into the sink, can be whisked with sugar and baked and it honestly looks and tastes like meringue. I don’t know why or how, but it’s enough for me that it’s possible. Having used aquafaba successfully before to make pavlova, I got to wondering how it would work in a sour cocktail recipe. The most perfunctory of google searches reveals that roughly five billion people have already thought of this and tested it and I was like fine, I did not discover this, but in my defence, this is the first time that I’ve thought of it.

gin sour gin sour

Who cares about provenance when it works so well! First I made myself a whisky sour using aquafaba, then I made another one, just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, then I made a gin sour, and then I realised I hadn’t eaten yet and I was moderately tipsy. The important thing is though: it works! Look at how frothy these drinks are! I barely shook them and they turned into alcoholic foam immediately! I was honestly so excited. And tipsy. Now, the aquafaba liquid is not entirely tasteless —  it’s hard to explain what quality it brings, which possibly means I’m a terrible food blogger, but it just provides a slight background hint of…dust? Faint notes of literal chickpea? I counteracted this by adding slightly more sugar than I normally would. But as long as you’ve braced yourself for that, you’ve got a delicious drink on your hands that you can easily make sizeable batches of and drink joyfully while doing such activities as entertaining guests or testing cocktail recipes.

Please don’t in the slightest bit feel like you have to spend vast quantities on bartending equipment which you will possibly never use and only grow to resent and accidentally kick over all the time (curious, as you keep it on top of the fridge.) If you’ve got a clean jar with a lid you can put all your ingredients in there to shake vigorously and pour it through a sieve into your chosen glass. Some kind of plastic container, even, would work, or just your cupped hands if you want to get super artisanal (fine, I don’t condone this, but I do stand by the alcoholic multivitamin statement.)

Another thing to keep in mind if you haven’t made your own cocktails before is, Sours usually get what’s known as a Dry Shake, which, yeah, doesn’t sound great, but it’s just where you shake up the ingredients initially without any ice before shaking them up with ice to give the egg white a chance to emulsify and aerate. If your ingredients are all cold enough you could possibly get away without shaking it with ice at all, since this gets so foamy, however, a tiny bit of dilution from the water is actually desirable, just to meld all the ingredients together.

Finally, sugar syrup can be made hastily by dissolving equal parts of plain white sugar and water together. And I figure most people have some kind of shot glass lying about the house from when they went on a Con-Tiki trip ten years ago or were students or whatever, otherwise just work with the fact that one tablespoon measures 15ml and go from there.

vegan whisky sour

  • 45ml/one and a half shots of bourbon or rye whisky
  • 30ml/one shot of lemon juice
  • 15ml/half a shot of sugar syrup
  • 20ml/just under one shot of aquafaba

Place all the ingredients in either the glass of a Boston shaker or inside a clean, empty jar that you have a lid for. Bang the top of the boston shaker onto the glass, or screw the lid onto the jar if you’re using it, and holding them firmly, give them about ten good shakes — you’ll see the contents instantly become frothy and aerated.

Remove the top of the shaker or the jar lid, add a handful of ice, lid up and shake again briefly. Strain into your chosen glass, decorate with bitters if you wish, drink immediately. Peychaud’s bitters is more traditional but I happened to have a bottle of Angostura Bitters and so used that instead. Leaving your whisky sour naked is also highly acceptable.

vegan gin sour

  • 45ml/one and a half shots gin
  • 30ml/one shot lemon juice
  • 20ml/just under one shot sugar syrup
  • 20ml/just under one shot of aquafaba

Proceed as above — shake all ingredients together without ice, then add ice, shake again for a bit, strain into your chosen glass.

To make the non-vegan versions of these, use around 20ml/just under a shot of egg white per drink. I prefer using the pasteurised stuff that you can buy in packages at the supermarket but obviously freshly separated eggs have been doing just fine for quite some time now.

Of course, nothing’s stopping you from simply having a G&T or a beer at home, but if you happen to have been given a bottle of gin or something for Christmas or feel like being slightly impressive, well now you have one more option.

As for the remaining chickpeas, they unsurprisingly have their own merits. Realising quickly that I needed some kind of sustenance, I emptied them into a bowl with a handful of baby kale leaves, some salt, some coriander seeds, some apple cider vinegar and a ton of extra virgin olive oil. Coriander seeds are lemony and peppery and the oil brought out the buttery side of the chickpeas. Kale is healthy! But also actually tastes good.

this salad is like a non-alcoholic multivitamin this salad is like a non-alcoholic multivitamin

If putting one alcohol into another under your own roof appeals, I also recommend you try out my simplified take on the Lee Brothers recipe for something called Purple Jesus, and also this recipe for a Christmassy punch of Nigella’s called Poinsettia, halfway down this verrrrrrry old blog post of mine.

or come up and see me, also extremely doing my thing or come up and see me, also extremely doing my thing

title from: Third Eye Blind with their highly self-indulgent unreliably-narrated but extremely listenable song Losing A Whole Year. 

music lately: 

I have always enjoyed INXS but for some reason this week I’ve become obsessed with them. Is it mostly because the tragically late Michael Hutchence was so hot and charismatic? I mean, sure. Their music is amazing though and if you feel in the slightest bit like writing it off as 80s filler then I urge you to give it your ears again. Obviously all the hits are hits but I have been listening to Disappear over and over again and it just gets to me, I don’t even know, just the dreamy lightness of the verses with the sudden rush into the heady exuberance and promise of escapism in the chorus and the massive drums and Hutchence being in effortlessly good voice. Anyway it’s almost embarrassing how long I could go on about this for but I have 100% been listening to this song and you should too.

I actually have been pretty exclusively listening to INXS recently but…I did rewatch the intensely 90s movie Go and the soundtrack is just wonderful, so much big beats and trip hop and trance and just the sort of thing that makes you want to put on a pleather knee-length skirt and some brown lipstick, and put your hair into Bjork buns, ya know? The film’s remix of Fire Up The Shoesaw by Lionrock is one such excellent example here.

Uh, you should also watch Disappear from INXS’s live show at Wembley Stadium in 1991. Note I said “also”, not “alternatively”.