Category: Beef

is this the comfort of being afraid

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I believe comfort food is subjective, and what brings solace to me might leave others completely unmoved. Also, all food is comforting in some way, really. But I do love curling up with a significant quantity of the food which warms my soul – generally anything yielding and hot and salty, like very buttery mashed potatoes, or spaghetti with lots of butter and nutmeg, or cheese on toast, or really creamy risotto. Or this thing: pasta, covered in sauce made from minced beef and canned tomatoes, covered in white sauce made with milk and cream, covered in cheese. (PS: I deleted this way enormous preamble about anxiety and the difference between comfort food we seek in times of crisis compared to just eating it because we feel like it and wow are you lucky I edited it out, it because it went on for miles.)

Something I got to thinking about recently is comfort food for the mind: feel-better, everything’s-going-to-be-alright pop culture. Food can only do so much, and sometimes you want to take your nervous brain and transport it somewhere else for a while. If your brain is processing something soothing while your stomach is eating something particularly heartwarming? So much the better. In that way that similarities occasionally cluster in your life to make it feel like you’re in a TV show with an overarching theme in each week’s episode, I’d ended up explaining on several different occasions why I loved a particular thing so much: because when I watched/listened/read etc it, it felt like everything was going to be okay. Since that’s not a feeling any of us can take for granted, I decided to investigate it further. (Weirdly, I also had FOUR separate occasions last week of getting frustrated at not being able to find something because it was written on paper rather than being in my inbox. Bet Ray Bradbury’s out there somewhere smugly nodding.)

Here’s my (whim-based, non-exhaustive, non-alphabetical) list of comfort food pop culture.

– Pop Culture Happy Hour, the nicest, happiest, snappiest podcast I’ve ever, ever heard. And it’s about pop culture, which I evidently have a general thing for.

– The Hour

– Nashville (Connie Britton’s mere existence is weirdly comforting, I don’t know how she does it.)

– Parks and Recreation (I want to say “you don’t understand” but that’s unfair. It’s just that it’s possibly bordering on concerning how much this show means to me.)

– NewsRadio (Caveat: Actor Phil Hartman was murdered between the fourth and fifth season and I cannot physically bring myself to watch anything past the penultimate episode of season four. Just can’t do it. Luckily the previous episodes all stand up to being rewatched a million times.)

– Maeve Binchy’s book Circle of Friends. (I’ve never been moved by anything else written by The Binch, but I reread this book every summer and couldn’t be happier while it’s happening.)

– Marty Robbins’ record Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs. Mmmhmm. Also more or less anything by the Rat Pack. Frankly, if it’s from a time where singers were likely to have praised the rich smooth tar of their cigarette company sponsors for keeping their crooning voices shipshape (lookin’ at you, Nat King Cole), I’ll probably be hugging myself while listening to it.

– Wet Hot American Summer (Or as I call it, “Nothing bad can happen when Wet Hot American Summer is on.”)

– The Big Chill (obvious choices are sometimes obvious for a reason)

– Audra McDonald singing more or less anything.

– Nina Simone singing more or less anything except the sinister Everyone’s Gone To The Moon

– My Drunk Kitchen

– Pride and Prejudice, the 1995 adaptation (Although Colin Firth’s smoldering and Jennifer Ehle’s heavily loaded politeness are almost too hot)

– Much Ado About Nothing, the Kenneth Branagh adaptation (There was a point in my life where I was watching this…literally…daily. I may have also had a small notebook filled with my favourite quotes from it which I carried everywhere)

– Side By Side By Susan Blackwell

– Baby-sitters Club books (I regret nothing)

– Leonard Cohen, the youthful-voice years.

– Wikipedia. Okay. I mean, it can be a little bleak (especially if you’re aimlessly searching along the lines of “whatever happened to…”) but there’s not much I love more than reading about the minutia of various TV shows or one-hit wonders or people’s lives or finding out how many towns are called Taft, or just looking up things like “kissing”.

There’ll be more that I haven’t mentioned, there’ll indubitably be things that look really good on paper that I’ve completely forgotten, but if you’re feeling all tense and twisty and in need of something to take your mind off bad things and zoom it to a land of delightful, I recommend all and any of the above. The list may look long, but it’s carefully chosen – it’s not just a case of something being really, really good. I predictably exult The Wire, I do not find it comforting. I am obsessed with many musicals, but listening to, say, Wicked or Grey Gardens will usually leave me more emotionally drained than at ease with life. No, to fall within the soft, inflatable bouncy castle walls of comforting pop culture it has to really make my heart kind of clench and release with happiness at the very thought of consuming it, and give you that rain-on-the-roof, snuggled in a blanket feeling that everything’s okay, even if the material itself isn’t that uplifting (I see you, Leonard Cohen.) (Admittedly, wikipedia is more what I read when I can’t sleep rather than like, a joyous occasion, but I stand by my inclusion.)

On Monday night I made this layered up, just-bordering-on lasagne dish for dinner and Tim and I ate it while sitting on the couch watching The Hour. Comfort food plus comfort pop culture? I nearly dissolved from contentedness. Even if it’s only a relatively quick fix, it’s a delicious one on all levels while it lasts. I’m not saying this recipe is particularly impressive, or even original – in the same way that various brands will assure you that one of their product is sold every seven seconds worldwide, I’m pretty sure recipes resembling this one are made every single night somewhere. But still, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time.

To clarify some things about the recipe: Yeah, I like my white sauce that buttery, although I can’t even tell anymore what is a reasonable amount of butter to the average person, since I eat so much of it. I didn’t specify any particular herbs because something about this reminded me of when I was first learning to cook, and adding any dried herbs at all – including those generic Dried Mixed Herbs packets – felt really knowledgeable and sophisticated. Plus, after a certain point on your shelf, most dried herbs start to lose their flavour anyway, so marjoram is just as friendly as basil or oregano or whatever. Finally, I really like adding a little cream or milk to a tomato-beef pasta sauce. It just rounds it out and lusciouses it up stops it just being a recently-frozen lump of mince and an ancient can of tomatoes.

Demi-lasagne (Aw c’mon, let me have that cute name. I know it’s still fairly inaccurate. But I hate any recipe that sounds like “pasta bake” and listing the main components fancy cafe-style – Pasta, Mince, Cheese Sauce – won’t do this any favours. And it is kinda lasagna-y.)

A recipe by myself. Serves two with leftovers for at least one lucky person the next day. The recipe looks long and complicated but it’s just me being talky, promise.

250g short pasta of some kind. Penne would look better in photos, but spirals is what I had.
1 tablespoon olive oil or butter
300g beef mince
1 tin of tomatoes
2 teaspoons dried herbs of some kind (I went for dried oregano, so old you had to actually plunge your nose inside the package to detect any scent!
2 tablespoons cream
50g butter
3 tablespoons flour
1 cup milk
1/2 cup cream, extra
As much cheese as you can deal with grating in whatever state you’re in while making this

Bring a pot of salted water to the boil and cook the pasta according to packet instructions – usually 10-12 minutes makes it edible. Tip the cooked, drained pasta into the base of an oven dish, you know the kind, like big enough that a cat would attempt to fall asleep in it but small enough to stack neatly in your cupboard. Just a typical oven dish.

While the pasta is boiling, heat the oil in a saucepan and fry the beef mince. Once it’s getting to the more-brown-than-pink stage, tip in the canned tomatoes (breaking them up with your wooden spoon if they’re the whole variety) and sprinkle over your herbs of choice. Allow it to bubble away merrily over a medium heat till the tomato liquid is reduced slightly, then tip in the cream, allow it to come to the boil again, and spatula the lot evenly over the pasta in the oven dish.

At this point, set your oven to 200 C. Finally, in the same pan (don’t bother washing it out, but at least make sure you gave it a decent spatula-ing) melt the butter, tip in the flour, and continue to stir constantly till it forms a thick, magically delicious paste. Once very thick, and a little darkened, slowly tip in half the milk, stirring continuously. Don’t worry about lumps – the milk will absorb into the flour and butter eventually. Slowly add the remaining milk, and then the cream, continuing to stir. Stir the lot for a bit longer over a low heat till thick and smooth, then pour this evenly over the tomato-beef mixture in the oven dish. Then, sprinkle grated cheese over evenly, and bake the lot for ten minutes. If you like, flick the oven over to grill for a few minutes to allow the cheese to get all bubbling and amazing.

It’s almost willfully unimpressive, but also tastes so good and needs nothing more. The joy of eating it is twofold – first of all the texture, in that you barely have to exert yourself, hardly need move your jaw, to eat this layering of the soft and the minced, and secondly in the unthreatening, familiar-to-me, sustaining and rich flavours of the beef and tomatoes with the melted cheese and bubbling sauce. Plus it’s all – well, some – of the fun of lasagne without most of the faffing around.

Last Wednesday night the Marriage Equality Bill passed its second reading. By a sound, impressive, prouder-than-I-thought-I’d-be majority. I had a good feeling about it but I also tend to quietly expect the worst as a kind of emotional safeguard. Perhaps related, I occasionally unhelpfully troll myself by reading the letters to the editor of local nationwide newspapers, and gee, will they ever give you a sad outlook on the world. But I won’t give any further time to such odium, because it did get voted to the next stage, and there were some incredible, hope-spurring speeches from all sides of the political spectrum.

Which means, amongst so many things, that Tim and I are one step closer to being able to marry! This isn’t the only reason this is incredibly important to us, but immediately after getting engaged we gave ourselves this goal – of not marrying unless Marriage Equality went through – and it’s pretty thrillsy to be a little nearer to it happening. I’m not quite sure when the next, possibly final reading is. But am cautiously allowing myself to continue to have good feelings about it.

Title via: I love those moments when you hear a song for the first time and it pushes aside everything else you’ve heard before then because you can’t believe music can sound like that. And I don’t think having that feeling when you’re relatively young makes it any less valid. Aaaand I still love the song One Armed Scissor by At the Drive-In as much as I did when I heard it thirteen years ago.

Music lately:

Metallica, Whisky In The Jar. St Patrick’s day did not pass us by unobserved this year.

A few of us went to see Rodriguez on Saturday night. I most definitely recommend Searching for Sugarman, the beautiful documentary about him (although, spoiler alert: reports of his death were greatly exaggerated.) Seeing him in person was astounding. Seventy years old, being helped up to the stage, and yet playing with all the vigor in the world and his voice sounding just as it does on his 1970 record. This Is Not a Song, It’s an Outburst, or: Establishment Blues sounded like it could’ve been written yesterday.

Next time: Another I Should Tell You interview. Whoop!

they served a real nice brisket and an 8 foot party sub

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I don’t know why it took so long to blog about this brisket. It’s not like it wasn’t delicious and it’s not like it hasn’t been the right weather for it lately. Maybe because it’s not as good looking as baking, it always gets pushed to the back. Sorry, brisket.

A lesson: Not all second-hand cookbooks from the seventies and eighties are adorably quaint, some are just plain terrible. Like most aspects of pop culture, you get the ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ cookbook, which, if you’re into that sort of thing, and I am, is why I continue to hold on to the QEII Cookbook with its Souffle Bowes-Lyon and tales of 24/7 caviar. Some of those cookbooks are genuinely uninspiring and dull though, and there’s a reason you see them at every single opshop. One pearl of a book that I picked up for $2 in Waiuku about three years ago is Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook. Its title is dubious, its 1980 photography is dubious and even some of its contents are dubious (carrot and oatmeal soup ahoy) but I’ve ended up using it almost as much as any Nigella volume.
A recipe that I’ve made many times from this book is the Greek Pot Roast, which is brisket slowly braised in a cinnamon-spiced, tomato-y liquid and then served over pasta. I’m not sure what makes it wildly Greek, and there’s something about the word ‘braised’ that’s always sounded unsexy to me, but the idea of stew and spaghetti together appeals heaps and you could even call it “ragout” or something if you wanted to serve it to fancy people. Or just be straight up and see who your true friends are (if your true friends are all vegetarian then this probably isn’t the best litmus test.)


Brisket costs hardly anything, but if you have the option of sourcing good quality meat, where you have an idea that the cow whose life was taken for your dinner had been reared in relative comfort, then so much the better. Brisket can sometimes come to you with more fat than actual meat, so choose carefully.

By the way, I’m aware that today’s photos are terrible. Baking is always easier in winter because I can 
wait till the next morning to snap it, but dinner has to be photographed on the spot, which means when it’s pitch-black outside you’re going to get weirdly exposed images like these. Still, at least it matches the book that the recipe came from. I look at some of those 70s and 80s cookbooks with their weird exposure and overdressed sets and wonder how a generation of designers actually stood back and thought “Dammit yes this harshly lit image of a pot roast sitting on a frilly tablecloth with carnations and apples strewn gently about makes me hungry.”

Greek Pot Roast

From Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook, find it if you can.

1.4kg brisket, rolled and tied if possible (I always just leave it)
3 medium sized onions, finely chopped
4 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3 cloves
1 bay leaf
150mls boiling stock
3 tablespoons tomato paste/passata

Note: I obviously don’t use that much meat for just me and Tim. I reduce the meat to around 400-500g for us both and use just one or two onions, but keep everything else the same. Also I just crumble in half a good stock cube and 150mls hot water rather than heating up a tiny amount of stock in a pan – same diff.

Heat your oven to 150 C/300 F. Heat a little olive oil in a flameproof casserole and brown the meat on all sides. Set it aside while you gently fry the onions, garlic and spices. If you don’t have a flameproof casserole, you could just do this in a frypan and then transfer it to an oven dish. Add the bay leaf, stock and tomato paste. Return the meat to the pan, cover and put it in the oven, leaving for at 2 to 2 1/2 hours. Serve over hot spaghetti with Parmesan cheese.


Or if you don’t have Parmesan, you could use, um, frozen peas like I did. Not quite the same, but still a nice contrast. And cheaper. And adds small bursts of vitamin-rich greenness to the incessant meatiness of the brisket. This is delicious and so easy, hence why it has become a regular fixture. The slow, low cooking process breaks down the potentially tough brisket and turns it into something intensely tender and rich-flavoured, which falls apart at the mere sight of a fork looming menacingly towards it. The tomatoey braising liquid doesn’t really reduce down or thicken up, but spooned carefully over the meat and pasta it’s delicious – deeply flavoured with the cinnamon and bay, all of which absorbs into the tangle of spaghetti below.

I hope all (do I even have any?) Canterbury and South Island readers of this blog are doing okay after the huge earthquake on Friday night, and its follow-up aftershocks. It was a scary time here in Wellington – mind you I’m terrified of earthquakes and always have been – but over pretty quickly and with no damage. Meanwhile, many, many homes and buildings in Christchurch have been completely wrecked. It’s incredibly good that not one person was killed, but there’s still so much damage to deal with – and it doesn’t help my nerves that the news media keep insisting that “the big one” is coming. Which means that every time I blink too hard I get nervous that it’s the overture tremors of said “big one”. Perspective though – I’m feeling very lucky to be sitting in my warm home with running water and electricity and to know that family and friends down in Christchurch are unharmed.
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Title via: Errr…30 Rock‘s Werewolf Bar Mitzvah. “Boys becoming men, men becoming wolves!” To be fair, I couldn’t find a youtube clip of Maury Levy telling Herc he’s mishpocheh.
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Music lately:

Elaine Stritch, Ladies Who Lunch, from Company. She’s incredible, but sometimes when she looks at the camera it feels like I got lemon juice in my eye. Wish I could have that kind of effect on people when I say “does anyone still wear…a hat.”

Mueve by Lido Pimienta. Read an interview with her in the new Real Groove magazine, looked her up on youtube and I’m entranced. It’s dreamy and sunny and – bonus – all en Espanol! Cross-posted to 100s and 1000s because I like it that much.
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Next time: Well the Supercooks book was so fruitful that I’ve made something else from it – the awesomely, awesomely named Grumble Pie. You don’t know how hard it was not to push the poor brisket to the back of the queue AGAIN for this.

gunpowder gelatine, dynamite with a laser beam

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Okay: I didn’t win the blog category of that CLEO/Wonder Woman thing. In hindsight, I already knew this, but for a while there it felt like everyone in the world was voting for me and we’d all linked hands and started a wild mazurka of joy, spiralling with love for this blog and each other. And then I opened the July issue in a 24-hour convenience store at lunch today with Tim and the mazurka ceased, and David Dallas’ Big Time ended its chorus in my mind. (What’s a mazurka? You ask? Only one of the coolest folk dances ever, as this video confirms.) BUT as I’ve said previously, this has been a fun wave to flutterboard across and it was lovely being unexpectedly nominated, and of course, I’d like to extend a giant chocolate cake with “congratulations” piped across the top in icing to the actual winners at So Much To Tell You. I’m sure we all wanted this in equal amounts! I just felt particularly wanty, and this kind of obliterated any idea that anyone else could want it more and I wouldn’t win. But it’s okay. It was fun to be nominated. And to raise awareness of my desire to own a capybara. And a mightily enormous thanks to everyone that emailed in and voted for me: it means a lot! I don’t bust out folk-dancing imagery for just any old situation.

So.


Of powdered gelatine, Nigella Lawson authoritatively sneers “God knows how anyone can make that work…leaf gelatine is the answer“.  In some ways, Nigella is right – leaf gelatine is much more reliable and easier to use, and very pretty. But if a packet of Davis powdered gelatine hadn’t been sighing unwantedly in my cupboard, I would not have been able to make Moonshine Biffs: then what?

My Mum gave me her old copy of the Edmonds Cookery Book, the 1971 edition I believe. It’s the sort of thing you don’t want to buy new, you want to be given it or find an old copy somewhere…I read once about how young people are able to have nostalgia for things they never knew – for things that their parents or even their grandparents experienced. Or even nostalgia for things that someone’s parents and grandparents might have experienced (ie: the 60s), which, if any of that makes sense, could explain why I get a feeling of warm safeness inside when I turn the pages of this book and read curtly delivered recipes for spiced rock cakes or Dolly Varden Cake even though I never, ever ate them growing up.

As I was leafing through the pages I discovered the recipe for Moonshine Biffs and decided whatever the heck they even were, I was going to make them for their name alone (for the same reason I’m no good to play Scrabble with because I’d rather make silly words than gain points…and I get really impatient waiting for people to have their turn…And also I’m pretty sure I don’t really like Scrabble.) I thought they’d be like marshmallows but they are in fact, better yet, essentially Milk Bottle lollies in square format.

Moonshine Biffs

From the Edmonds Cookery Book.

  • 3 dessertspoons Gelatine (I used a regular, stuff-eating spoon, the kind you’ll find in the spoon compartment in your cutlery draw, you know…spoon.)
  • 1 breakfastcup sugar (I used just under a 250ml measuring cup)
  • 1/2 pint water (A heaped measuring cup) (psych! You can’t heap water)
  • 1/2 pound icing sugar (250g)
  • coconut
  • vanilla
  • Place gelatine, water and regular sugar in a saucepan and boil for eight minutes. This was a little scary, but because the Edmonds Cookery Book is always pretty vague, to put an instruction in italics made me want to follow it. That said, if you suspect your stove-top generates a significantly hotter heat than what they had in the 70s then go slow and boil a little less.
  • Add the icing sugar and vanilla (I had some vanilla paste, proper extract would be fine, you could, I suppose, go era-specific and use essence) and beat until thick and white – I used a silicon whisk and nearly fainted from the exertion, you’re welcome to use electric beaters or whatever.
  • Pour into a wet tin – again, silicon makes life easier here, otherwise use baking paper to line the tin – and leave to set for a couple of hours. It doesn’t matter if it won’t fill the tin – it’s not a huge mixture and just stops and sets where it is. Slice up, toss in coconut. FYI, mine set very smooth and coconut wouldn’t stick to one side of it. Edmonds didn’t prepare me for that but I was chill.

As I said, these really do taste like Milk Bottles – chewy, a little creamy, very sweet. But good – so good. And they cost around 30 cents and a little arm-work to make. If your kids/flatmates aren’t snobs about what shape their lollies come in, try them on a rainy weekend and see if you don’t feel awesome about yourself and the world once you have a pile of them sitting on a plate in front of you.

On a gelatine rampage, I couldn’t help trying something else further down the page: Toasted Honey Marshmallows. Significantly more sophisticated, these intensely honeyed, soft sweets would be perfect after a spicy dinner or alongside liqueurs and truffles instead of pudding. There’s no getting around the fact that gelatine is not vegetarian, and is no less made of animal than if steak was the main ingredient of marshmallows, so if you are thinking of making either of these maybe check with your meat-shunning mates what their limits are.

Toasted Honey Marshmallows

Also from the Edmonds Cookery Book.

Soak 1 level tablespoon gelatine in 1/4 breakfastcup cold water in a metal bowl for 3 minutes. Dissolve over hot water, by sitting the metal bowl on top of a small pot of simmering water. Tip in 1 breakfastcup liquid honey. Beat with egg beater (or whatever you have – again, I derangedly used a whisk) until fluffy and white – about ten minutes. Turn into a wet shallow tin (again, silicon is best here) and leave 24 hours. Cut into squares carefully with a sharp knife and roll in toasted coconut.

Yes, you have to wait for ages which is why these are less child-friendly, but as I said the flavours and textures that unfolded from such minimal ingredients were incredible. The taste of honey suspended within impossibly soft marshmallows against the damp, nutty and textured coconut was amazing.

Title comes to you via: Queen’s Killer Queen…I know they’re not that cool, well neither am I. There’s a lot of Queen I’m not keen on, luckily this song isn’t in that list because I’m yet to see a better lyric about a setting agent.

Music lately:

Fats Domino’s Ain’t That A Shame…the way the chugging opening melody slides into the titular question really does somehow convey a sense of something being a shame, besides that, it’s a great, great song and I love Youtube for making all this old footage available.

Julia Murney singing People from the musical Funny Girl…I guess I do mention her more than occasionally but friends: this woman is amazing. The bad thing about being a Julia Murney fan is that while she performs a lot she’s relatively below the radar and will never come to New Zealand and I’ll never get to see her in New York, the good thing about being a Julia Murney fan is that she performs a lot of fabulous songs at benefits and concerts and they often find their way to Youtube.

stick with me honey and we’ll go far

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Saturday, February 6th was Waitangi Day here in New Zealand. This is a day that means different things to different people but 170 years have passed since the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, for better or for worse. It means a lot to me as my ancestors on mum’s side kicked things off around that very time when a woman named Pourewa and a man named Charles Cossill were married in Mangonui by the pragmatically named Bishop William Williams. February 6th also marked twenty years since my first ballet lesson. Talk about significant times for the nation. I was a rotund three year old who couldn’t skip and didn’t have a pushy mother with misguided ambitions for me – and even at that age you register differences in ability and atmosphere like that – but I was the only kid in that class who could touch my head with my toes.

Potstickers are perhaps the – or at least, a – culinary equivalent of getting your feet and your head to do a high-five. The process sounds a little painful. A lot of people don’t even try it in the first place. But the finished result elicits “oohs” and “aahs” at those who attempt it successfully. Actually this metaphor is a bit useless as you really need a decent set of hamstrings to do anything flexible while potstickers just require patience…but I needed a segue into the recipe and I’m damned if I’ll retreat now.

I saw this recipe in Ray McVinnie’s column in Sunday magazine a while back (the very magazine which put me on the cover! What, like I wasn’t going to mention it?) and even though I’ve seen recipes around for potstickers for years now for some reason it was this one that prompted me into action. I have to say, the Sunday magazine this week was ridiculously intuitive – it had a “Whatever happened to JTT?” piece which answered the very question I wondered as Tim and I watched a Home Improvement omnibus at 3am after getting home from Fubar last Sunday. There’s not much in this world that comforts like this – we didn’t watch a lot of TV when I was young but Home Improvement was family time). There was also an article about the man who wrote most of the jingles on the radio, when I’d just been explaining to Tim about the nostalgia I feel when I hear the ancient Auckland radio jingles (“Giltrap city, Toyota – we’re the one!”) on 1ZB after being in Wellington for so long.

I don’t love McVinnie’s column in Sunday as much as I adore his regular Quick Smart feature in Cuisine magazine but it’s still pretty engaging reading. The way he described potstickers made them seem not just do-able but necessary. I found myself lingering by the open freezers at the Asian grocery up the road, hoping wonton wrappers would be cheap – and they were. That, and the fact that there was a rapidly aging block of tofu in the fridge poured cement over the foundations of the idea in my mind. I didn’t follow his actual recipe so much as the directions but I have a feeling that as long as you keep to the method the filling is really up to you.



Potstickers (recipe via Ray McVinnie’s column in Sunday magazine)
If you want, you can take out the beef and up the tofu and cabbage a bit.

  • 150-200g beef mince
  • 200g firm tofu, diced
  • 1/4 white cabbage, finely sliced
  • Fresh ginger – about an inch, peeled and finely chopped
  • 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 1 teaspoon soy sauce
  • 2 teaspoons sesame oil
  • 2 tablespoons Chinese cooking wine, or sake if you prefer
  • Wonton wrappers
  • Rice bran oil, for frying

Stir fry the mince, tofu, and cabbage together with the seasonings until the mince is browned, the cabbage is reduced, and everything is good and fragrant. There’s no real artfulness to this – you just need it all cooked up.

This is great if you can get a friend to help you, if not it will just take a lot longer. Get your stack of wonton wrappers, a small bowl of water, a couple of plates and a couple of teaspoons. Grab a wonton wrapper, dip your fingers in the water and wet the edges of the wrapper. Get a teaspoonful of mince and tofu, place it in the centre of the wonton wrapper, fold it over to make a parcel and press the edges together. I folded the edges over each other and pressed down firmly. Put it onto a plate and start again, till you have as many as you think you’ll want.

Then! Heat a little rice bran oil in a good, wide pan which has a lid. Once it’s sizzling, fill the pan with your potstickers, all facing the same way. Don’t overcrowd the pan. Let them fry for a minute or two on that side, then flip them over and fry them for a minute or two on the other side. Pour over about a centimetre of water, clamp on the lid, and let them steam away till the water is evaporated. You want them over a good solid heat to aid the evaporation. Once the water is gone they should unstick themselves from the pan. Quickly use a silicon spatula or fish slice to lever the finished potstickers onto a plate, and eat them while the next batch is cooking.

One or two potstickers may well fall apart or stick obstinately while you try and remove them from the pan. This is not cause to get dramatic and throw the pan across the room screaming “Enough! I tried and I failed!” It’s just par for the course. They’re called potstickers for a reason. Eat them and move on to the next batch.

One bite, and you’ll likely forget the extensive effort it takes to bring these potstickers into existence. The frying-then-steaming method, while fiddly, makes the wonton wrappers crisp but silkily tender, encasing juicy savouryness. I made a quick dipping sauce out of soy, lemon juice, sesame oil, chilli oil and a little sugar which was an excellently zingy foil to the rich filling. Make plenty of these – we ate forty between the two of us – not comfortably, to be fair, but we did it. Maybe bank on about 10 to 15 per person, as they are so, so good. I heard from a relatively reliable source just this evening that if you leave the lid off the pan they get super-crispy – I may have to try this way of doing things next time. Because there will be a next time.

February 6th was also the date that the late Bob Marley was born in 1945. It seems fitting that someone who is loved by so many New Zealanders was born on the closest thing we have to a national day. Leaving Tim to make coffee on yet another public holiday, Ange and I went out to Hataitai velodrome to RadioActive One Love, the long-running event that commemorates Marley’s birthday while acknowledging Waitangi Day in a peaceful, musical fashion. The day was unnaturally warm – we really don’t get a lot of sun here in Wellington – and it was the perfect antithesis to the crowds of costumed people staggering drunkenly through town for the NZ International rugby Sevens tournament.

There was constant music, there were people everywhere of all ages and stages, there were amazing food and merchandise stalls, and in an act that seemed to sum up the happiness of the day, Liptons were giving out free iced tea. We saw Don McGlashan, The Midnights, Sola Rosa, Art Official and MC Silva (who gave my peanut butter cookies the thumbs up that very morning, to which I say look out for her album dropping later this year), watched people skanking merrily, ate glorious vegetarian curry, nodded approvingly at the host responsibility announcements, enviously gazed at children on the bouncy castle, bought insence-scented scarves, thought nice things about Bob Marley…magic. I didn’t love all the bottles littering the path on the way out, but other than that it was a seriously ideal way to spend the day. However, I think I’ll be airing out my scarves as I don’t feel quite so positive about the smell of incence as I did when I was 12. Tim and I headed to the Southern Cross later that night for an excellent time watching the Newtown Rocksteady also paying homage to Bob Marley through polished but joyful interpretations of his music, rounding off Waitangi day most satisfactorily.
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Title brought to you by: Freshmint! the charmingly fey song from Brisbane’s Regurgitator. “Stick with me honey and we’ll go far” feels like a line spoken over and over but slides rather nicely into the celebrity-weary lyrics of this song. I don’t like this band’s name and to be honest this is one of two songs of their I love. I remember hearing this for the first time on Channel Z, being deeply intrigued, but not knowing for months what it was called or who sang it, until the magic of lyrics websites threw me a bone.
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On Shuffle while I type:

While pondering Regurgitator my thoughts wandered to another elusive Australian song that I used to wait round for, never actually knowing what it was called till years later – Shazam by Spiderbait. It’s all fuzzy and whingy and sounds like a collection of chorusses – great fun, even if the band’s name is also bit gross.

Buffalo Soldier by Bob Marley – just such a great tune. I do enjoy a good bridge and this song enjoys one of the coolest out there.

The Juggernaut, from Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party, featuring Julia Murney, Taye Diggs, and the teeth-grittingly good use of Idina Menzel’s singing ability towards the end. This musical never made it to Broadway and could perhaps – who knows? – benefit from some tweaks. But it remains special to me for a number of reasons, and the original cast recording ten years on shines with jaw-dropping, brutal talent.
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Next time: It’s clearly been far too long since I’ve dealt you a heavy-handed reference to RENT in a food-related way, so look out for that next time when, inspired by a culinary lyric in La Vie Boheme, I make rice and beans…

twist and stout

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Cheers everyone for your enthusiastic well-wishing for Tim’s and my big move, I’ve built it up so much that soon it will surely have its own snappy title, corresponding font, and swelling theme music.

I feel as though every time Old Frau Winter hobbles into town on her icy boots, I complain that it’s the coldest one we’ve had yet. Even though I suspect it’s human nature to largely block out any past discomfort and focus on what’s happening to the body right now, hot damn if it isn’t the coldest June in living memory. It’s a particular quality of temperature – that bone chilling, dry, Nordic chill, which, combined with the damp, windy climes of Wellington, makes for quite the experience.

With this in mind, we’ve been doing a lot of that bolstering, sustaining style of eating lately. While I love sponteneity in the kitchen I hate cooking in an entirely reactive way every night (as in, “cripes I’m hungry and it’s 7.30pm! Why did I spend all that time looking at Tony Award performances on youtube instead of making dinner? Now I have to cobble together something incoherent from what’s in the cupboard!”) One of the nice things about this season is sitting down with recipe books, post-it notes and a notepad, planning out slow-cooked winter meals and writing a shopping list accordingly. One such planned meal was the following casserole, taken from Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat. (I think I refer to it as that every time. It’s like one word in my head: seminaltexthowtoeat.)

Beef With Stout and Prunes
I realise that the words ‘stout’ and ‘prune’ aren’t overly come-hither. Nigella says this is a version of Beef Carbonnade which is possibly a better option if someone fussy asks what’s for dinner tonight.

I’ll be honest, my copy of How To Eat is buried under a lot of other cookbooks in a neat pile behind another hefty pile of cookbooks and it does not behoove me to disturb the order of things and dig it out. Plus I’m feeling lazy. You hardly need a recipe for this though, so allow me to guide you through the process gently but firmly. Dust sliced beef in mustard-spiked flour (I used beef shin from Moore Wilson’s, basically you want a cut that requires long cooking) and sear in a hot pan. Transfer into a casserole dish with some carrots, sliced into batons, finely sliced onions, and prunes that have been hitherto soaked in some dark stout. I used Cascade, an Australian stout from Tasmania, because it’s what they had at the local shop and wasn’t heinously expensive. I also added some whole cloves of garlic. Cover this and place in a slow oven, and cook for as long as you like but no less than two hours. I served over plain basmati rice. It can be a little brown and plain to look at, so by all means sprinkly liberally with chopped parsely which will please both aesthetically and…tastebuddily.
Et viola, a rich, hearty, deeply flavoured casserole for you and your loved ones. And if ‘your loved ones’ means just you and your stomach, then so much the better. Freeze in portion-sized containers and microwave it back to life when you need a fast dinner. This recipe actually comes from the low-fat section of How To Eat, as long as you don’t fry the floured beef in six inches of melted butter, enticing as that now sounds, it really is a trim meal all up, with the only fat coming from the meat.
The Cascade stout came in a six-pack and while Tim was happy to quaff the unused five bottles, he impressed upon me how a chocolate Guinness cake would be an economical, ideal, nay, the only logical use for the remaining stout. So I made one. I always forget how utterly stupendous Nigella’s Chocolate Guinness Cake is. It’s so ridiculously transcendent that it makes me type excessively in italics like some overexcited damsel in an LM Montgomery novel.

The Cascade Stout was not as abruptly bitter as the stipulated Guinness but more than held its own as a worthy understudy for the part. The above photo was taken on the bedside table, as Tim has had some blood sugar antics happening in the middle of the night lately and so that’s just where the cake was sat. Because he has had nocturnal low blood sugar with soothing regularity, a lot of the cake has been eaten by him while I’m in a half-asleep state and so I only managed to secure about two slices to myself after all that. It really was as delicious as it should be though: large, dark, densely chocolately and like Angela Lansbury, even better with age.

Chocolate Guinness Cake

From Feast, by Nigella Lawson. (It has a chocolate cake chapter, so, you know it’s good)
250mls Guinness
250g butter
75g cocoa
400g sugar
145mls sour cream (one of those little yoghurt-tub sized, er, tubs, or roughly a 1/2 cup)
2 eggs
1 T real vanilla extract
275g plain flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
Set your oven to 180 C and butter/line a 23cm springform tin. First of all you want to get a big pan, pour in the Guinness and add the butter – cut into small pieces – and gently heat it so the butter melts. It shouldn’t bubble, keep the heat low. Now, simply whisk in the rest of the ingredients and pour into your tin. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, depending on your oven. The kitchen will smell heavenly, I promise you.

Once cool, ice with a mixture of 200g cream cheese (NOT low-fat), 125mls whipped cream, and 150g icing sugar folded together. I refrained from icing it this time round as I just couldn’t be bothered spending exorbitant amounts on dairy products, but the combination of sharp icing and dark, damp chocolate cake is incredible, the icing really makes it sing.

It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the other key player in this cake: (apart from the stout and Tim’s persuasiveness) the cocoa. And not just any cocoa – proper Dutch cocoa from Equagold. The very first time I’ve ever used it. Don’t act all shocked, I’ve only just started working full time and in the food world there’s so much to keep up with – do you spend your money on the vanilla beans, or the premium brand happy pig bacon, or the Himalayan pink salt and if you let one ball drop is it tantamount to subterfuge meaning that you are forever shunned by food bloggers worldwide? I know I add fuel to the fire myself by going on about vanilla beans vs vanilla essense. With that in mind I’m lucky enough to have a wonderful whanau who will often give me such treats for Christmas and birthday presents. I’m not sure quite where I’m going with this rant but before I carry on shaking my fist for no good reason any more I’ll get back to my original point: proper Dutch cocoa has until now eluded me because it is really expensive. But as Led Zeppelin say, now’s the time, the time is now, and so I decided to buy myself a jar last week from the delightful La Bella Italia cafe/restaurant/deli on The Terrace. The woman behind the counter was impeccably helpful and friendly without being the slightest bit pushy and I emerged a very satisfied customer.

And when I opened the jar for the cake…My word. The first thing I noticed about it was the incredible cocoa scent, the second thing was how rich and dark the colour is. The deep-toned flavour of this cocoa stood comerade-like against the strident flavour of the stout and made for a surprisingly complex chocolate cake, to the point where I felt I should be eating it like one would drink a really expensive and fancy glass of wine – slowly and with reverence. What more can I say – this cake is begging to be made! Oh the feuds that could be ended with a slice of it (unless the parties who have beef with each other happen to be gluten-intolerant).

In smashing news, I interrupt this waffling to say:

My dad Mark, (el presidente of the Otaua Village Preservation Society – OVPS ) received a phone call from the OVPS’s lawyer today to say that WPC have withdrawn their appeal to the Environment Court. This means that they are no longer considering relocating their business to the Otaua Tavern site.

To reiterate: this is an “unofficial” withdrawal by WPC. There are still the lawyer’s bills to pay so the fund-raising continues. And the Otaua Tavern site is still vacant and who knows that a group even more shadily heinous and heinously shady may want to move in?

But for now: an enormous, enormous THANK YOU from the bottom, sides, inside and outside of my heart for everyone who helped by watching the video at my behest, for your supportive comments here and on youtube – it really did make a difference, and at last not just to our morale. I shudder to think of what might have had to have gone down if had the sorry WPC had their way and moved in (does that sentence even make sense? I’m a little excited, sorry for the nightmarish syntax). I have been so touched that people all round the world, people who enjoy making elaborate cakes and beautiful roasts and who have nothing to do with the woes of a tiny, clout-less village in New Zealand, have been so actively supportive. Though I am often conflicted in what I believe in (well, I’m only 23, I’ll ‘find myself’ in good time yet) I am pretty well certain on something: good deeds reap more good deeds and positive thought can have positive impact. One doesn’t want to get too mawkish and Miss World-like in one’s thank-you speeches so I’ll endeth it here, but it is an absolute relief and a triumph to be reporting this news to you all. Kia ora.

Am pretty sleepy after a weekend spent attending Smokefree Rockquest events here and in Lower Hutt, which may go some way towards explaining why my writing is so scatty but it could just be that this is how I write and you’re all dooooomed to deal with it forevermore. The students performing in Smokefree Rockquest here and in the Hutt basically melted my brain with their seriously fierce talent. I look forward to seeing some of them blaze a musical trail in the near future. Oh and I got to present an award last night. I’d like to think my many years on stage as a dancer/etc stood me in good stead, but as I was announced there was a perceptible milisecond of awkward silence that I feared would stretch into a yawning wave of quiet indifference from the audience. Luckily Tim and my godsister were there as my plus-ones to cheer and get the momentum going…

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On shuffle while writing this:

Overture, from Jesus Christ Superstar, 1994 New Zealand Cast recording (just try and find it in shops. Your loss.)
Watermelon Blues from The Legend Of Tommy Johnson, Act 1: Genesis 1900’s-1990’s by Chris Thomas King
Das Hokey Kokey (Original Version Vocoder Mix) from Das Hokey Kokey by Bill Bailey

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Next time: Tim and I have one episode left on our DVD of season 1 of The Wire and if it turns out as traumatic as I think it will I may need to go to ground for a bit. Believe the hype. It’s incredible. But don’t let your kids watch it, there’s violence and cussing and whatnot by the spade-load. (And by ‘whatnot’ I mean low-level nudity.) But otherwise, have I got some stuff for you. I made the bread and butter pudding to end all bread and butter puddings. Stale, defrosted hot cross buns, Marsala wine, no recipe…could have been a tear-inducing disaster of Anne Shirley proportions but sweet fancy Moses it turned out delicious.

What Am I? Chopped Liver?

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Obvious, but how could I let that title pass me by? I also considered “De-liver-ance” and “An Offal-y Big Adventure.” Sometimes I spend forever diddling over a title and now I have an embarrassment of riches. But truly, liver: it ain’t that bad. It’s not all that cheap either, unfortunately – a 300g pot of chicken livers costs $3.50. Considering the nature of offal – the fact that it’s so undesirable – shouldn’t it be cheaper? But after prowling through my Nigella books and also spurred on by Claudia Roden’s The Food Of Italy, I decided to dip my toe into the heady world of eating vital organs.


Above: Claudia Roden’s Chicken Livers with Marsala. As well as being generally disliked by children world-over, liver is also not going to win any Miss Photogenic sashes any time soon. Even soft-focus didn’t really help.

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Overheard in our kitchen:

Me: Tim, don’t hate me but…
Tim: (urgently) What did you do?
Me: We’re having liver for dinner.
Tim: Ah. (nonplussed silence ensues.)

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This was actually genuinely very, very good. Oh, I won’t lie, livers can have a funky texture – almost chalky in places, and disarmingly squishy in others – but they taste fine. Tim really liked it too. But then how could you turn down anything dripping with butter, bacon, and ambrosial Marsala wine? Probably a running shoe could be embiggened by being cooked in those ingredients.

Fegatini di Pollo al Marsala (sounds so much sexier in Italian, doesn’t it?)

200g chicken livers
1 small onion, chopped
15g butter
2 slices pancetta or bacon, chopped
6 T dry Marsala

Clean the livers and leave them whole. I should point out here that I diced them, because I felt I could handle them better in smaller chunks. Fry the onion in the butter, until soft but not browned. Add the bacon and fry for 2 minutes, stirring, then add the chicken livers. Saute quickly, turning over the pieces until browned but still pink inside. Add salt and pepper to taste and the Marsala. Cook for 1-2 minutes longer, then serve over noodles with lots of chopped parsely.

That wasn’t the end of my foray into liver though. Inspired by a couple of meatball recipes in Nigella’s How To Eat, I thought that combining beef mince and chopped liver to make meatballs would not only make the mince go further, it would provide intriguing flavour and add lots more vitamins. Livers are very, very healthy you know. Probably wouldn’t be so healthy if chickens were able to drink alcohol like humans.

Now I want to put liver into every meatball recipe. These were fabulous – soft and light and almost smoky in flavour. And because of the liver, we got eight meatballs each. Woohoo! I also added an egg, a grated carrot, some bran, a pinch of ground cloves, and a tablespoon of semolina. Frankly, the mixture looked completely nasty, but once they started to bake the kitchen smelled incredible. I whipped up a quick sauce by reducing some red wine (the dregs of a bottle from Tim’s and my night out a few weeks ago) and added a tin of chopped tomatoes, some dried oregano, and a spoonful of butter, before piling the whole lot over some rice. Tim flipping loved these. Hoorah for offal!
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Above: The obligatory whisk-with-something-attached photo.
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Not liver, but I’d completely forgotten to mention this so here it is. After Tim’s tooth operation last week (the utterly stupid dentists only completed about a quarter of his necessary work and then sent him off, unable to get an appointment for another week) he was in some crazy pain, so a dinner in puree form was my challenge. I came up with a Potato, Carrot, and White Bean Mash, which filled his need for carbs (and my need for legumes) as well as providing vegetables and protein. It was beyond simple, I just boiled the heck out of 500g unpeeled floury potatoes (hey, it was a cold night and we eat big) and 2 chopped carrots. I drained a tin of cannelini beans, before tipping the veges over them in the colander. This I tipped back into the pot, and using the masher, pulverised the lot. Because of the nature of the ingredients, this is never going to be super-fluffy, but nonetheless it’s worth getting out the whisk. I whisked in some milk, butter, salt and nutmeg, and piled this puffy, orange-and-white mash into two bowls. It turned out to be incredibly comforting stuff – warm, soft, buttery…If you are ever feeling fragile, I totally recommend it. It is probably worth mentioning that this would serve 3-4 normal people as a side dish.
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It is so nice to be on holiday but a bit depressing that it’s basically half over already. However, I can hardly describe the joy I felt in reading a book for its own sake. Just grabbing a book that I wanted to read. I turned to page one of Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch on Sunday afternoon, and by Monday morning I’d finished it. It was so good – so fully realised – so sinister -and so heartbreaking by the end. Thanks to everyone who attempted to vote for me at the Bloggers’ Choice Awards – I have no idea when it closes but I’m more than happy to reciprocate if there are any bloggers out there also having a go. And uh, yeah, their page is a little, shall we say, obtusely designed.

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Next time: In complete contrast to chicken livers, I dabble in raw vegan cookery. I’m not joking! Although cookery is obviously the wrong term. Perhaps ‘assembly’?