Month: September 2017

you need to understand there’s nothing fake about this

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I’m highly impulsive, all things considered. If asked to come rob a bank, I’d probably shrug and say “well i haven’t got much on this afternoon, so yeah, why not.” Commitment however, is harder. I start ideas and forget them or leave them dangling, half-formed. Creative side-projects, rituals, routines, I can’t even begin to count how many I’ve gotten excited about and then just as quickly dropped. (This blog is one of the few things in my life I’ve managed to maintain, it’s turning ten years old in October.) I don’t know what I want, all I know is that I want it all, and sometimes I worry so much about not knowing what I want that it turns into a weird argument in my head over nothing. On that note, I’ve been thinking heaps lately about whether I want to become vegetarian or even vegan. I feel better when I’m eating lots of vegetables and cook mostly vegetarian anyway. My lifelong hyper-tolerance to dairy seems to be waning somewhat. The environment is like, a dystopian nightmare and we should do what we can to help it. But I can’t quite make the leap to committing. 

So I’ve decided to leave that question for now and just carry on as per usual, because I’m working on this thing at the moment called “not creating non-existent problems to get anxious over because you’re going to be anxious over IRL stuff anyway so seriously, get out of your own way”. 

To that end, here’s a vegan recipe for you, presented without any further overthinking. Jackfruit is being widely celebrated on the internet as a miraculous meat substitute; its cooked texture is incredibly juicy and fibrous like actual animal flesh, and it absorbs flavour beautifully. However, I’m not out here looking for meat substitutes. I’m just looking for good food, which this extremely is. Without being all, “this is vegan food that even meat-eaters can enjoy!”, this recipe for pulled jackfruit is like…unreal levels of delicious. No matter what your primary food source is. 

This unassuming fruit, which has been cooked prolifically in South and Southeast Asia for centuries but is just starting to hit the nation of White Moms on Pinterest (which is, I freely admit, where I come in) offers an incredible textural experience that’s hard to achieve in vegetables – a real chewy, fibrous (that word again, it’s kind of gross sounding but you know what I mean), cellular density, with heft, and richness, and, well, meatiness. On top of which, cans of it are way inexpensive and it has a wealth of vitamins and minerals and other stuff necessary to keep your body from crumbling into a pile of dust. I saw one of those Buzzfeed cooking videos that everyone shares on Facebook showing how to cook this fruit into “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” levels of submission, and it looked easy enough, so I thought I’d give it a go. 

The prevailing wisdom is to smother your cooked jackfruit in barbecue sauce before roasting it, however I have a weird quirk whereby I enjoy all the components of barbecue sauce, but actual commercial stuff makes me feel queasy (it’s something to do with bad associations from a drunkenly consumed Hell Pizza, I believe). Hardcore American barbecue sauce is all good – you know, the kind that has a picture of a horse holding a gun on the bottle and is called something like “Sweet Sammy Applebuttock’s Family Favourite”. That’s kind of hard to come by here in New Zealand though. With that in mind, I mix together a collection of things to make a flavour approaching barbecue sauce, but if you’re less delicate than me you could just tip in half a bottle of supermarket stuff and be done with it. 

And again, again, I can’t emphasise how amazingly delicious this is. Once you remove it from under the grill, half of it is all juicy and sauce-smothered and then the parts that have been scorched and caramelised are crunchy and crispy and oily and it’s all just kind of heavenly. I bought some plain steamed buns from the same supermarket I got the jackfruit from (Yan’s, if you’re in Wellington like me) microwaved and halved and stuffed the pulled jackfruit into them and it was a transcendent experience. I’m pretty obsessed, I can tell you. 

pulled jackfruit

a recipe by myself, the cooking technique is by no means my discovery though

  • two cans of green jackfruit in brine
  • olive oil
  • six cloves of garlic
  • one cup (250ml) vegetable stock (literally just water and stock powder) 
  • two tablespoons American or Dijon mustard
  • two tablespoons tomato sauce
  • three tablespoons maple syrup (or brown sugar, or honey if you don’t mind it)
  • one tablespoon soy sauce
  • one teaspoon ground cumin
  • a dash of ground cinnamon

Set your oven to 240C/450F. Put a couple of tablespoons of olive oil into a shallow roasting dish and pop it in the oven to heat up while you get on with the jackfruit itself. 

Drain the two cans of jackfruit and slice each wedge into thinner segments. Roughly chop the garlic cloves and cook them in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large saucepan over a low heat until they’ve softened a little. Tip in the jackfruit and stir briefly, then add the vegetable stock and raise the heat. Let the jackfruit simmer for about ten minutes, then remove it from the heat and using a wooden spoon or whatever implement you feel, mash the jackfruit roughly so that you have lots of fibrous bits and some still-solid bits. 

In a small bowl, mix together the mustard, tomato sauce, maple syrup, soy sauce and spices. Tip all of this into the pan of mashed up jackfruit and mix it together thoroughly. Remove the tray from the oven and (carefully, because it might spit) transfer the jackfruit from the pan onto the tray in an even layer. Pop it in the oven for about fifteen minutes, then change the oven setting to grill and leave the jackfruit for another ten minutes or until you have lots of caramelised browned crispy bits. You could move the tray up a level so it’s closer to the grill, but keep a close eye on it so it doesn’t burn. 

Eat however you like. 

It’s a while since I’ve been so damn jazzed by something, and I’m probably going to make myself sick of it before long, but I’m enjoying being obsessed at the moment and can’t stop thinking up different ways of using this magical fruit. 

My other obsession currently is almost equally as wholesome: I’ve got back into reading books. I’ve always been an alarmingly fast reader and would get out up to forty books at a time from the library as a child, but then, I had a lot more time on my hands. Between a full time job, the entire internet at my fingertips, and the attention span of a goldfish that’s accidentally taken some Class A drugs, I kind of fell off the whole books thing. So there’s a lot of concentration involved. But I feel like it’s doing me some good – using my brain for something that’s not a screen for once, escaping into another world and being far away from myself, absorbing other peoples’ ideas, that kind of thing. I’m averaging a book a day: The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes by Chris Tse, The Abbey Girls Again by Elsie J Oxenham, Iceland by Dominic Hoey, Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau, and Anastasia Ask Your Analyst by Lois Lowry. I’m pretty pleased with myself. 

Meanwhile, I have more cans of jackfruit at the ready in my pantry because this is all I feel like eating for the foreseeable future. At least I can commit to something.

title from: Our Lady Peace with their song Clumsy. Of this song, the band says “you can be destructive without being malicious by being clumsy” and I’m like, metaphorically tagging myself on Facebook under this sentence because it’s so relatable. 

music lately: 

In further relatable news, I’ve been enjoying Cheer Up Try Hard Tear Up Cry Hard by Wellington artist Alexa Casino. You can listen to more songs if you click on that link, which I highly recommend you do with your time.

The Look by Roxette, ugh this song is so perfect.  

next time: SAFE TO SAY probably more jackfruit? 

we’re gift-wrapped kitty cats

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I’ve talked a whole lot on here about how unskilled I am at sleeping. In a pink hardback baby book charting my first few months of existence, there’s a passage in my mother’s neat handwriting that tells – from my freshly birthed point of view – about how “I seem to require less sleep than everyone else” and “have already cried a lifetime’s worth of tears”. How completely prescient! Not that I have a ruthlessly raging case of colic as an excuse these days!

As I’ve also recounted here, my ADHD superpowers (having good ideas, absolutely sucking at every other aspect of life) came into play one night when I had trouble sleeping, and blessed me with this concept: what if I took thinly peeled slices of potato and wrapped them around other food and then roasted it so that the potato went all crisp and golden? (Thus neatly encapsulating three of the overarching themes of this blog: I never sleep, I was a small jerk of a child, with great mental health issues comes tiny, tiny kickbacks in the field of creativity.)

I figured this simply had to work, and wanted to try it with the new season’s asparagus. Being extremely pre-payday I had pretty much no money in my bank account, but after fossicking like a tenacious raccoon in all my pockets and the dark corners of my tote bag, I found enough coins to go down to the Cuba Street Fruit Mart. I purchased 1 (one) potato, and a handful of green beans, since asparagus isn’t actually out yet, handed over my pile of carefully counted out twenty cent coins, and went home to make my sleepless dreams a reality.

Guys, this was like...unreal. SO delicious. I could not be more enraptured with myself. Getting on a roll with achieving satisfactory lengths of peeled potato strips takes some work, but any extra bits can be roasted alongside the beans to be snacked upon leisurely (I recommend one of those peelers that’s kind of V shaped as opposed to a regular one.) What you end up with is slightly scorched beans, the oven’s heat giving them a kind of caramelised nutty juiciness (which is the worst thing I’ve ever written) encased in, essentially, a big kettle chip. The fried golden crunchiness of the potato against the beans is superb. I smashed some basil leaves into rock salt with a pestle and mortar just to point up the green taste of the beans, but just regular sea salt with chopped up basil or just salt on its own would be absolutely fine.

I feel like this would make an ideal starter for a dinner party, or you could make heaps and serve them with drinks. I guess they could also act as a fancy side for some kind of larger dish. They’re also vegan AF which is like, nice!

potato-wrapped green beans with basil salt

a recipe by myself

  • one floury potato
  • a handful of green beans
  • olive oil
  • one teaspoon of rock salt (or sea salt flakes)
  • three basil leaves

Set your oven to about as high as it will go – this is usually around 240C/480F. Pour some olive oil into a shallow roasting tray – the shallower the tray, the less oil you need to use, but whatever – so that it’s generously slicked. This is not a time to hold back. Place the tray in the oven so the oil heats up while you get on with preparing the ingredients themselves. 

Peel the skin from the potato (keep it to make vegetable stock or something if you’re virtuous) and then carefully peel long strips of potato from it. I found it easier to go lengthwise, and it took a few goes, but it gets easier, and any scraps can be thrown in with the beans and roasted till crisp for a delightful snack, so no harm done. Wrap the beans, in little bundles of three, with a long strip of potato (as per the picture) and sit them with the tail end tucked underneath. Generally potatoes have their own natural glueyness so you don’t have to worry about them unravelling wildly and flying about the room like a pulled out tape measure.

Place them carefully in the tray of hot oil, and roast for roughly twenty minutes, turning halfway through. However, you mostly want to go by eye here – when the beans look scorched and the potato wrapping is getting golden is when you want to turn them. At this point, add any other peelings and scraps of the remaining potato to the tray – seriously, they’ll turn into kettle chips and taste amazing, plus what else are you going to do with that remaining potato? 

In a pestle and mortar, bash the salt and basil leaves till they form a deeply green dust. If you don’t have this implement, just roughly chop the basil and sprinkle it and some salt over the finished beans. 

Remove the wrapped beans to a plate when you’re quite satisfied with their done-ness, sprinkle over some salt, and eat em. The remaining scraps are particularly good with some smoked paprika and the remaining basil salt.  

I roasted strips and scraps of the remaining potato and then sprinkled them with the remaining basil salt and some smoked paprika which was also ravishingly good. From one potato, sprang forth so much joy. I’m keen as to try this potato wrapped method on other foods – the asparagus of my initial intentions, halloumi, already-roasted beetroot, big red chiles stuffed with feta, maybe some kind of beef…thing…and I was even like, could I wrap potato in potato? Would that work? Am I the greatest genius whomst ever lived?

Well, no: another insomnia-idea was that I thought it’d be cool to roast pears stuffed with chocolate and then dip them in cake batter and bake them, so that they’d be encased in a layer of cake. The cake batter slid off and I ended up with two pears stuck in a large biscuit, which still tasted essentially fine, but was not something I’d recreate in a massive hurry. You can’t win em all, most of the time you can’t even win anything and in fact end up losing dramatically, so I’m quite content with this progression of events.

Back to the lack of sleep thing, before you all start a letter-writing campaign of great concern to your local government about my wellbeing or something, it’s not like I’m not working on it, and I do have naps during the day. I have a prescription for these amazing sleeping pills, I just keep forgetting to go get it filled out. I’ve got all the meditation and rain sounds in the world on YouTube, magnesium tablets, chamomile tea, yoga, you name it. Actually nothing makes me want to drop into a stupor like a gigantic meal of carbohydrates, so maybe potatoes are the way forward. Whether I’m sleepless and thinking about them or sleeping because of them: they are so good.

any colour you like

any colour you like

A callback for the fans; in my last post I went on a rose-coloured rant about Millennial Pink, and I decided to make a cocktail embodying the colour as well. Plantation Barbados 2000 rum, Peychaud’s bitters, Aperol, thyme bitters, sugar and cream, makes for an alluringly-hued and impressively tasty drink. Just in case you thought I was anything less than totally exhaustingly all-or-nothing.

Finally, if you like Things With Potatoes, you might consider reading some of my other blog posts, including recipes for Halloumi and Hash Brown Potatoes; Potato Dominoes; or a Fried Potato Toastie.

title from: one of the greatest pop songs of all time, Love Machine by Girls Aloud. Also worth listening to is the ebullient Arctic Monkeys cover.

music lately:

Old mate Chelsea Jade released a woozily sweet video for her stonkingly good tune Ride or Cry. Yay!

City and Colour, Northern Wind. Feeeeheeeeelings.

Harry Styles, Sign of the Times. Feeeeeeeeee *sobs* eeeeeeee *literally throws up* eeelings!

next time: I made pulled jackfruit and I’m effing obsessed with it. 

and her pink skies will keep me warm

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I was a very righteously-opinioned child. For example, I took the mathematics curriculum as a DIRECT PERSONAL SLIGHT against myself and would injuriously huff about it at any given opportunity (and especially in opportunities that weren’t given.) Like, in any schoolbook from my youth, I’ll take jabs at it — not least in the actual maths workbook itself where I’d constantly write evaluations of my work complaining about how unfair and stupid maths is, and take great pleasure in defacing each and every possible blue-lined square with colours and stars and patterns. God help the defenceless teacher if there was an “about me” section in any piece of work — I’d be all, “I’m Laura Vincent and I hate war, people who don’t understand the genius of the Spice Girls, and the fact that I have to do pointless, irritating mathematics.”

the rose tint the rose tint

That’s just one example. I was also vehemently against the colour pink, simply because I wanted to rebel against the generally held gender norms that pink was for girls and blue is for boys. I definitely went through a distinct Barbie doll phase (I was in it mostly for the fashion, but I do remember being with my cousins and pretending to burn a Shaving Ken at the stake while several other Barbies danced around him triumphantly as we sang Sacrifice by Elton John — “we’ve got a Shaving Ke-e-en, and he’s our sacrifice”) but after a point, I truly felt like not seeking out pink things made me somehow more superior. Pink was obvious. Obviousness was weakness.

Tiny jerkfaced me could never have predicted that in the year 2017, I would embrace the very shade that I so long derided (okay so from the years 1999 – 2014 I was honestly neither here nor there on it) in the form of Millennial Pink.

Millennial Pink is a real phenomenon (there’s a great article charting its rise to prominence) and I ADORE it. In these garbage times, this shade is soft, it’s kind, it’s calm AS HELL, it’s really, really pretty. And it’s increasingly charmingly genderless, which I feel lil no-wave-feminism-me might have appreciated. It’s the colour of soothing tumblr aesthetics, of Rihanna wearing pyjamas in the club, of watching makeup tutorials till you fall asleep, of late 90s slip dresses, of rose quartz crystals, of Jenny Holzer truisms, of the icing on top of cream buns and doughnuts, of peonies and rose petals, of bleached and coloured hair on Instagram, of sun-faded walls with bright green plants propped up against them, of fluffiness and softness and dreaminess.

All of which possibly sounds stupid, but I like what I like.

Hence why I found myself starting with colour as an inspiration point and working backwards from there, and ended up with this extremely delicious toffee.

I had some almonds kicking around from making orgeat for work and in the spirit of sustainability or the illusion thereof, I decided to surround them with crunchy, buttery toffee and smother them in rose-tinted white chocolate. Anything caramelly just bloody does it for me, and I sheepishly prefer white chocolate over the other sorts, so this resulting slice was extremely 100% my idea of a good time. Making toffee from scratch does require some patience and a healthy fear of getting too close to the relentlessly boiling sugar. What you get though is the most glorious stuff — your teeth sliding effortlessly through the silky, vanilla-y white chocolate into hard, almond-studded salty toffee which shatters as you bite down into chewy caramel crystals.  It’s intense and it’s wonderful.

millennial pink salted almond white chocolate toffee

a recipe by myself

  • 250g butter
  • one and a half cups caster sugar
  • a decent pinch of sea salt
  • one cup of toasted almonds, blitzed in a food processor so they’re rubbly and chopped
  • 250g white chocolate
  • one teaspoon vegetable oil
  • a few drops of pink food colouring

This recipe looks really really long but it’s just a convoluted way of saying boil stuff then chill it then cover it in chocolate, it’s all pretty straightforward I promise.

Line a regular-sized brownie pan with baking paper. In a large saucepan, heat up the butter, sugar and salt and allow it to come to the boil. Let it bubble away, stirring only occasionally (it might seem like the butter won’t absorb into the sugar but as it boils the sugar will take it in, give it a few gentle stirs though if it eases your mind.) After a while, take a spoonful of the boiling sugar and drop it in a glass of cold water. Let it sit for a few seconds and then taste it — the texture you’re after is a good hard toffee crunch. If it’s more fudge-like, then you need to let it carry on boiling.

Once you’re at this point, remove it from the heat and dump in the almonds. Give it a quick stir and spatula it briskly into the waiting brownie pan. This is the hottest thing on earth and it will continue to bubble VERY disconcertingly in the pan so just let it settle down for a bit before you put it in the freezer or it will throw your entire ecosystem in there out of balance.

Once the toffee is cooled and firm to the touch, melt the white chocolate gently with a teaspoon of vegetable oil and add the merest droplet or two of pink food colouring. Stir gently and add more colour if you desire but go slowly! I used literally three drops for this stuff. Spatula it evenly over the surface of the toffee, and gently bang the base of the tin against the bench to settle any lines in the chocolate. Return it to the freezer, and then when that is finally set, slice it however you like and eat.

pink is the flavour, solve the riddle pink is the flavour, solve the riddle

To be honest, almost every time I make something starting with aesthetic instead of flavour or texture as the inspiration point I end up screwing up the recipe completely, as though the universe is admonishing me for being driven by such base instincts, but this worked out perfectly. Proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that wanting things to be pretty is not the worst. I ended up taking it around town and dropping off tasters of it at various beloved establishments before bringing the rest to work for my team like some kind of actual heroic angel. I know there’s some still waiting for me tonight when I go to work and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Just one woman’s opinion, but go forth and embrace pink. Oh and maths really does suck, I was right about that one.

title from:  Frank Ocean, Sierra Leone, from his extremely very perfect album Channel Orange. 

music lately: 

I am regrettably completely head over heels for this guy from the UK called Rat Boy, who was clearly bred in a lab with the express purpose of being to my personal taste. Sample song: Revolution.

As well as being an absolute BOP, Charli XCX’s song Boys is like…Millennial Pink condensed into one explanatory video.