crouton, crouton, crunchy friend in a liquid broth

April 22, 2010March 12, 202011 Comments

We had a power outage this afternoon in Wellington. I’m glad I wasn’t stuck in an elevator when it struck, or halfway through roasting a chicken, because that would not have been fun at all. No drama for me though – all it meant was sitting round in the foyer at work reading up on policies and then scooting home early. When I got there the new Cuisine magazine had arrived in the mail, like a warm gamma ray of electricity in an otherwise dimly lit afternoon. We’re heading up to Auckland tomorrow so I didn’t want to make anything huge for dinner that would leave us with piles of leftovers. I found this soup recipe within the pages of Cuisine – and yes, it has been cold enough lately in Wellington to start getting all soupy again – and something about the complete simplicity of the ingredients appealed to me.

The recipe was a bit oddly vague in places so the following is slightly adapted. This recipe is boxfresh – only Cuisine subscribers will have seen it so far so…scoop!

Roast Garlic, White Bean, and Bread Soup

From the May issue of Cuisine (one day they’ll interview me, one day!)

20 cloves garlic (try to get really good stuff that will actually taste like garlic)

2 large onions

1 teaspoon thyme leaves

1 teaspoon sweet smoked paprika

1 litre chicken, vegetable, or (my favourite) porcini stock

400g tin butter beans or cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

Parsely and chervil to serve (I used basil, it’s what I had)

1 cup sourdough croutons

Peel the garlic cloves and roast them in a little olive oil at 180 C/350 F for about half an hour till soft. I did this by wrapping them into a pouch of tinfoil and then wrapping that in another layer of tinfoil – keeps them soft and saves on dishes.

Once this is on its way, slice the onions into half-moons and gently fry in a little olive oil till soft and golden. This will take a while, so by the time they’re good and soft the garlic should be ready. Mash the cloves with a fork (including the oil they were roasted in) and add them to the pan along with the thyme and the paprika. Pour in the stock, bring to a simmer, and tip in the beans. Simmer till the beans are well heated through and season well. Serve with the parsley, chervil and croutons (I didn’t have sourdough so just used some regular bread, cut into cubes and tossed with a little olive oil, and chucked them in the oven which I’d just turned off, the remaining heat turned them into croutons.)

Serves about 6. Nice with a bread roll or scone on the side.

This made for a seriously perfect chilly-evening dinner, the ingredients coming together to make a hearty but still elegant soup that seemed awesomely European, even though I have no real clue if this has any actual continental background or if the author just made it up on the spot. Sometimes just feeling European is enough. The softly flavoured beans, the fantastically garlicky broth, and the still-crisp croutons sinking into it were a rather stunning combination. Worth mucking round with bits of garlic for. This recipe reminded me why soup is so brilliant, even if it’s not as sexy as some other dinner options.

So, like I said, we’re heading up to Auckland tomorrow. I can’t wait to catch up with the whanau – I haven’t been home since Laneways and it’s really not very often that I get to go up to Auckland just to see family without any work agenda. We’re going to see the Auckland Music Theatre production of RENT – and when I say we, I mean my whole family and Tim – and I am so excited about seeing it on a big stage by such a renowned company. I don’t need to outline how much I love RENT here, you know I’ve done it enough before, and I don’t need anyone to outline its shortcomings to me – I’m well aware of them too. I’m a little trepidatious about how this cast is going to work out but I think overall it will be a very, very good time. And I’m just really happy to see RENT being performed on such a visible scale in New Zealand. Between this, and Idina Menzel appearing on Glee, it feels like it’s all starting to come together…

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Title coming your way via: The Mighty Boosh‘s small but very excellent soup song.

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Music lately:

I’ve actually been avoiding RENT for a little while now so it can be particularly impacty when I see it on Saturday. Other than that…

Love of My Life by Erykah Badu featuring Common from the Brown Sugar soundtrack…a sweet ode to hip hop music, this video is just as gold as the song itself (not least because of the clips of Idina Menzel’s husband, the lovely Taye Diggs). Watching Erykah Badu makes me never want to cut my hair ever again. Found out today that Common is doing a couple of shows in Auckland in June, quiiite keen to go along…

Superboy and the Invisible Girl from the Broadway cast recording of Next To Normal. This was the very first song from this musical that I ever heard, and it had been a long time since I’d heard lyrics this beautiful and innovative and poetic in any genre of music, not to mention a guitar riff as alluring. OH how I’d love to see this show, Alice Ripley and the rest of the stunning cast will have to amaze me from afar till such time as I do…

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Next time: You can safely bet that I’ll be quoting RENT at you.

to yoga, to yoghurt, to rice and beans and cheese

February 10, 2010March 12, 20205 Comments

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Today I spilled boiling hot tea on myself three times (and once on my office chair). I burnt my left hand on a hot pan while cooking dinner and whacked the other hand on the corner of the bench as I walked into it instead of past it. Finally I dropped beetroot on our telephone. Truly. It’s like I’m in a Florence & The Machine song or something. I’m not sure if clumsiness begets more clumsiness – I know from experience that it’s really, really easy to have one thing go wrong in the morning and then not even give the rest of the day a chance to do right by you, when that happens there’s no doubt you’re going to walk into doorframes. But today I woke up feeling relatively optimistic. I guess it just shows…I’m plain clumsy.

Such clumsiness is partially the reason why you’re more likely to see recipes on this blog that don’t involve sugar thermometers or weighing egg whites or…you know, that sort of thing. Rice and Beans involves – at least the way I make it – none of the above. It’s stress-free, one-pan, traditional comfort food. Not traditional to me personally, but sometimes just knowing it’s comfort food to someone is in itself comforting…right? And I always have room for adopting new traditions.

Rice and Beans

I kind of made this up on the fly, inspired by a dish I had at the amazingly good Amigos on Tory Street.

Heat a wide, non-stick pan and toss in a finely chopped onion and plenty of finely chopped garlic. The first time I made this I added a diced carrot, the second time I added a diced zucchini. Once this has softened a little, without browning too much, add a pinch of smoked paprika, a teaspoon of wholegrain mustard, a teaspoon of coriander seeds and 2/3 cup of long grain rice and stir through. Pour in 250mls water, cover, and simmer for five minutes. Add more water, stir, cover – the kind of rice you use affects the amount of water you need and basmati seems to need more water than other kinds. Add a splash of beer, a drained tin of corn kernels and a drained tin of red beans. Add more liquid if the rice still needs it, partially cover and let it simmer over a low heat for a further ten minutes. Serves 2 generously. Maybe cover with feathery, torn coriander leaves or stir grated cheese through if you like.

This is one of the cheapest, nicest, heartiest dinners you can make for yourself. It’s quicker if you use canned beans but cheaper if you take the time to cook up dried – up to you. The savoury warmth of the spices and the beer against the soft, grainy beans and rice is simple but incredible. And, as you will know once I’m done telling you, rice and beans are quoted in La Vie Boheme which put the idea in my head in the first place. (Truly. Was listening to it, thought, “huh, am now hungry for rice and beans”. Power of suggestion, right there.)

Sunny Santa Fe would be…nice

While you’re buying red beans for the above recipe, you might as well stock up good and proper for this Santa Fe Ceasar Salad. The recipe comes from Simon Rimmer’s The Accidental Vegetarian, and the first hundred times I flicked past it I was all “hmm, bit random” but all of a sudden on flick-through #101 it seemed like a something I wanted to try. Allow me to fast-track this process for you and just tell you to make it already.

Santa Fe Ceasar Salad

I didn’t use any chillies. I had some pita bread that I used instead of tortillas, and I didn’t have any parmesan to hand so just left it out. Still so good.

1 Cos lettuce, trimmed
2 soft corn tortillas
1 tin pinto or kidney beans, drained
2 red chillies, deseeded and chopped
1 ripe avocado, chopped
fresh coriander leaves

Dressing:

125mls good mayonnaise
125mls plain unsweetened yoghurt
1 garlic clove, crushed
Juice of 1 lime or lemon
2 Tablespoons white vinegar
100g freshly grated parmesan cheese

Whisk dressing ingredients together, set aside. Break up the corn tortillas, dry-fry in a hot pan till a little charred. Tear up the lettuce leaves, place in a bowl with the cooked tortillas, drained beans, avocado and chillies. Fold through the dressing, top with coriander leaves and sprinkle with parmesan to serve.

Clearly, the dressing is sublime, what with the eggy, oily mayonnaise, rich garlic and sharp vinegar coming together. The crunch of tortilla croutons against those grainy red beans and the crisp lettuce is marvelous. It’s surprisingly filling and while not entirely healthy, you could certainly do worse. You could have an actual ceasar salad.

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Title comes to you via: Surprise! La Vie Boheme from RENT, the musical that inspired the title of this blog and also inspired me to go to both Levin and Palmerston North to see local productions of it. I love this bit of the musical so much that I’m going to direct lucky you to both a stealthy clip of the Original Broadway Cast in 1996 and the altogether shinier 2005 film version where most of the still-stunning original cast reprised their roles. Oh sure, you could be snide about a bunch of self-titled bohemians prancing about shouting out their carefully chosen influences, I say this is laziness and it’s much better to look beyond that and actually love it for the joyfulness, the inclusiveness, the catchiness, and the awesomeness of rhyming “German wine, turpentine, Gertrude Stein”…
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Music while I type:

Laurie Anderson’s O Superman which you can find on the album Big Science. Breathy but direct, strangely meditative, this song made itself known to me via a few different channels – a John Peel compilation, an American Lit paper with a delightfully passionate teacher (“Language! It’s a virus!”) and RENT (as in, all roads lead to) with Idina Menzel’s character Maureen being clearly something of an homage to Anderson as witnessed in the sublime Over The Moon. Seeing The Groove Guide twitter about this song today, plus hearing another of her songs on Radio Active this evening made it feel like I’d be lying if I didn’t put it down here.

Bucky Done Gun by M.I.A from her album Arular. I first saw the music video to this song in a hotel room in Germany in 2005, it’s as acid-bright as her hand-penned album artwork. It was about the most exciting thing I’d heard in a year clogged with Razorlight et al. Five years on it still thrills and I still wish I could handle a jumpsuit like her.

Matthew and Son. It’s my absolute favourite Cat Stevens song. You know I could tell you why, but I’ll let Mr Cat Steven’s snake hips in this video do the talking for me.

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Next time: I found this highly do-able recipe for vegan banana cake on the Savvy Soybean’s blog and long to try it. I appreciate both savviness and soybeans in a person so have no doubt this recipe will be good.

plantain in vain

November 5, 2009March 12, 202011 Comments

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I don’t know why, or what it says about me, but I go through these intense, whirlwind infatuations with foodstuffs, consume vast amounts of them, and then move on, breaking it off as fast as it started. There was lentils, then oats…later tofu followed by soy products in general…then plantains. At the moment it’s tahini. Make of this what you will. The only good thing we can take from this is that my eating patterns usually settle into something more normal afterwards. Like, not soy products six times a day. This post will outline my brief but heady flirtation with plantains.

As far as food goes – as far as any old thing goes, in fact – plantains are pretty special. They look like bananas, but clenched and stumpy. Like a banana that has tensed up in anticipation of getting a punch to the face. They’re infomercial-tastic in their multipurposeness. They start off green, tight-skinned, firm and savoury, with a flavour echoing kumara (or sweet potato.) Then they progress into a yellow shade, becoming sweeter – but wait there’s more! They finally blacken, becoming even softer and more sweet in the process. Something particularly cool about the plantain is that they have similar complex carbohydrates that you’d find in a potato, but they cook in about ten seconds flat. If you have the deep misfortune to be a coeliac type-one diabetic, you could do well to look these up.

I grabbed them on a whim from our local supermarket because they were cheap and intriguing, like all good things in life. Unfortunately they don’t seem to be stocking them any more. The lesson is – I should have updated this blog sooner. However bear in mind that a lot of the time, bananas can be readily substituted for plantains – even in savoury dishes. The following though, is something you’ll have to get the actual article for. I first dipped my toe in the water by taking firm green plantains, peeling them, slicing them thickly and frying them in a sizzling dab of butter and drop of rice bran oil till they were golden and crisp on the outside.

And there you have it. Looks like banana, tastes like potato. Truly. They cook up in about five minutes, but have that same solid, fluffy bite of a baked potato. With a banana’s potassium! This made a fantastically sunny side dish to something – I can’t even remember what it was now – and was repeated several times over in the following days.

Following an idea from Simon Rimmer’s The Accidental Vegetarian, I tried stirring some fried, sliced plantains through dahl made with red lentils. Amazingly, surprisingly good. The graininess of the lentils and the fried plantains worked excellently together. However the photos I took were kinda heinous and I won’t subject you to them. You’re better off without them.

Realising I’d enthusiastically brought far more plantains than I could really deal with, and that they were ripening with alarming speed, I decided to use them for sweeter pursuits, and turned them into Plantain Ice Cream. A cursory Google search didn’t throw forward any recipes so I made up my own. I threw about 6 ripe, soft plantains into the food processor and blended them till smooth. I then added 2 crumbly tablespoons muscovado sugar and 2 tablespoons of juice from a can of pineapples and continued to process till it was light, fluffy and moussy. I considered adding some coconut milk but decided to leave well alone and not be so damn obvious with my flavour pairings. When I say moussy – the blended plantains really were curiously aerated and could actually have been chilled and served as some kind intensely natural alternative to those powdery, whizzed up instant puddings of my youth.

And then I froze it.

Having made virtuous ice creams before of fruit and not much else, I remembered how utterly rock-hard they set, and had intended to give this a cursory second blitz in the food processor before tasting it. Well there must be some enzyme in plantains which makes them awesomer than other fruit because it was perfectly spoonable straight from the freezer. Curiouser and curiouser!

And completely, amazingly delicious. The fun thing about it is that you’re more or less eating just fruit, which is quite the exciting concept to grasp when your brain is sending “ICE CREAM, OOH BABY BABY” messages around your body. It tastes sugary, but it’s pretty damn healthy. In terms of taste, sure it’s banana-y, but the plantain is somehow zestier, zippier, (apologies for the supercilious vagueness of my description there) almost citrussy compared to the banana. Which is not to say that you couldn’t get perfectly fine ice cream out of a banana, I’ve done it myself and you may substitute freely if plantains aren’t available. Just make sure you process it again after it has frozen, to break up the ice crystals it will form.

I just realised that I’ve purposefully not included a photo of the dhal that I snapped just before it was eaten because it was terrible, whereas these carefully styled photos of ice cream are here on display. In the past I might have obstinately included the terrible photo of the lentils simply because I have this feeling that blogging about what you’re cooking and eating should show what you’re eating as it exists in real life, not how it looks in a studio set-up, painstakingly lit and strewn with vanilla beans or…autumn leaves or something. And yet here I am, choosing the created over the real. I mean, I can assure you that I stood there leaning on the windowsill, eating the ice cream while I was taking photos of it, but it was in my bedroom, on my chest of drawers, and that blue fabric is a scarf of mine. Eh. I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this. I’d like to think I’m relatively principled in my aims for this blog. But ice cream is prettier than under-exposed, grainy CCTV-esque footage of lentils, let’s face it.

I guess I shouldn’t get so wound up about stuff I can’t really explain adequately. All that aside, the ice cream is an ideal use of this beguiling fruit and worth letting them sit around to ripen for. Cooling, refreshing, not at all heavy and arrestingly delicious. Thus…if you see plantains at your local market or whatever, don’t be afraid of them. They’re cool. Take a walk on the wild side.

Tim and I just got back from seeing Elaine Paige live in concert. What a night. She was so dynamic, so engaged, so sparklingly classy and in such good voice. I know I joked a while back that I’m surprised she didn’t play Elphaba in the London transfer of Wicked, but truly – she has been in so many shows, and it was amazing to hear a kind of retrospective of many of these. As she was singing Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, I reflected on how astounding it is that I have been able to see the original London and the original Broadway stars of Evita sing this song in less than six months, in New Zealand – Patti LuPone back in July, and now Elaine Paige. She didn’t sing Nobody’s Side, as I’d hoped, suspecting a live version would have more passion and soul than her strangely (or not so strangely, really) sterile pop version. Instead she came out and sang Someone Else’s Story, and then I Know Him So Well, with the orchestra filling in on the other part. Well, I guess she had to do that one. There were so many classic songs she gave us that it was hard to keep track but a highlight was when she poured herself into the character of Edith Piaf and gave a stunning rendition of Je Ne Regrette Rien. It was an incredible night and…we were easily the youngest there. I felt lucky to be a part of it all.

If you get the chance, check out Glee on TV3 on Friday nights at 7.30pm (with repeats on C4TV at the same time on Wednesdays). It’s a bit strange to me to see all these Broadway stars plastered across New Zealand media channels and hearing people talk about them. Not in a snobby way, like I don’t want anyone to know about them – but literally in a strange, blinky kind of way. I double-take every time I see a picture of Lea Michelle or Matthew Morrison in a local magazine. I’m just used to a large chunk of the pop-culture stuff I like being completely obscure to the general population. If it means that things like choirs and singing and musical theatre and dancing are made to seem okay and ‘cool’ to young people, then bring it on. All that aside, I’ve seen most of season one already and it is sharp as a tack and great fun. Find it!

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On Shuffle while I type

Smart Women by Stephanie J Block, from her debut album This Place I Know. While I admire SJB and think she’s a fantastic singer, actress, and surely person too, I really didn’t click with her album. But this song from it, oh my. I’m obsessed with it. Don’t even try to listen to it or you will be too. It’s beautiful.

Dominoes by The Big Pink from their album A Brief History Of Love. Okay, the lyrics to the verses are kind of useless, and it is maybe derivative and will probably get ridiculously overplayed, and normally the only music from Big Pink I’m interested in is the one coming from The Band but all that aside…WHAT a chorus.
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Title comes to you via…The Clash, Train In Vain. Why? Because…I like The Clash almost as much as I like inserting rhyming words awkwardly into places they don’t belong.
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Next time: I predict that next time I will be deeply, deeply in denial that it’s November already and a good chunk of it has passed at that.

it’s all grand and it’s all green

August 24, 2009March 12, 202017 Comments

So the best place to buy tofu as far as I can ascertain is the vege market on a Sunday. I branched out this week and went for soft tofu instead of firm; the name doesn’t lie. It near on falls to pieces if you look at it sideways. I guess it’s kind of the minced beef to firm tofu’s rump steak.

I ended up with a whole lot of root vegetables that needed eating on Sunday night. Usually my fallback option in this situation is some kind of pseudo-Moroccan would-be tagine-esque thing, which is seriously what I thought I was cooking last night until I realised it had actually shifted direction altogether into a curry. It’s a fine line – all that cumin, tumeric, coriander… suddenly I found myself wondering whether I should add more tomatoes and feta cheese or biff in a can of coconut milk. Coconut milk won out and I suddenly had this rather gorgeous vegan curry on my hands.

I defrosted some unshelled soybeans (I go through bags of them these days) and popped the beans within into the stew for a little colour contrast…to stop it being overwhelmingly like a braised curtain from the 70s (or, in fact, the curtains I remember us having at home while I was growing up – I have distinct memories of some yellow and brown floral motif…Mum?) The soybeans were awesomely elphaba-green against the earthy vegetables, their colour softened by the coconut milk.

While licking the lid of the coconut milk tin, to catch the sneaky extraneous cream that gathers there, it occurred to me that chocolate ice cream made with coconut milk could potentially be mindblowingly nice. Especially with chunks of milk chocolate and toasted coconut shreds, like a posh version of the Choc Bar ice creams of my youth (and occasional nights in town – for some reason I always crave ice cream if I’m out and about of an evening, you can keep your kebabs and pies thank you). If you haven’t had a Choc Bar it’s basically the above but in a $2.50 icecream-on-a-stick form and laced with palm oil (yeah, I went there. And while I was there, through rigorous testing, discovered that Whittaker’s white chocolate is comparitively amazing.)

The recipe for this suddenly-curry is chilled out, the only thing I measured out with any strict attention to detail was the rice. Nevertheless I’ll tell you exactly what I did in case the idea takes your fancy. It made a fantastic relaxed Sunday dinner. Warming and hearty, the creaminess of the coconut milk soaking into the ridiculous amount of vegetables (seven veges – eight if you count the tofu, which you might as well.) You basically can’t get it wrong which is also nice.

Root Vegetable Curry with Tofu and Soybeans

1 Onion
3 garlic cloves
1 swede (is Swede a root vegetable?)* diced
1 carrot, diced
1 parsnip, chopped
1 kumara, diced thickly
1/2 a cauliflower, chopped into small florets
Good handful soybeans

2 teaspoons cumin seeds
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
2 teaspoons tumeric
1 teaspoon ginger
1 red chilli, seeded and chopped (optional if it’s not your thing)
Zest and juice of a lime
1-2 teaspoons of honey

1 tin crushed tomatoes
1 tin coconut milk
As much tofu as you like

Chop onion and garlic finely and gently saute in a wide pan. Once it has softened a little, add the spices, chilli, honey and lime juice. This will caramelise the onions slightly, you want to keep stirring it so the spices don’t char.

Add the vegetables at this point and stir thoroughly to coat them in the spicy onion mixture which by now will be quite dry. Tip in the tin of tomatoes, half fill the tin with water and swish it into the pan. Stir, cover and allow to simmer till the veges are tender (the swedes are the slowest to kick into action I’ve found).

Stir in the podded soybeans, tofu, and as much coconut milk as you like. Allow to simmer for ten minutes or so. Serve over rice (or ree-cheh if you will)

Serves 4

This was delicious. The vegetables (and inevitably, my entire face) all stained yellow by tumeric, the coriander seeds providing bursts of subtle citrus to complement the lime, the strident warmth of the spices cutting through the creamy coconut…the emerald-bright soybeans doing no wrong as per usual…
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overheard in our kitchen
Me: Do fish bleed?
Tim: …………………..Yes.
Me: Yeah, but when you cut into them…there’s no arteries…they’re not like, say, sheep, which are basically built like humans in that they’ve got leg bones and muscles and…
Tim: They’re just like sheep. They bleed.
Me: Yeah, but you cut open a fish and there’s the skeleton, but it’s just…surrounded by fish fillets.
Tim: I was thinking more like fish fingers.
Me: Yeah. Tightly woven fish fingers.

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Tim and I went to see Wizard of Oz at Embassy cinema yesterday afternoon. It was wonderful seeing it on a big screen, partying like it was 1939. The technicolour made me gasp and the Wicked Witch was still as terrifying as I remember from my youth. But, this is the first time I’ve watched this film since reading the jaw-dropping Wicked and making a connection with the musical of the same name. And it was impossible to remove that context, to view it without that lens. Why does no one show sympathy when the Wicked Witch’s sister has died? Why did the Wizard get away with lying like that? How is Glinda so ‘good’ when, let’s face it, she appears to be on valium? She can hardly connect with Dorothy’s feelings of fear – although let’s also face the fact that the film wouldn’t have been so satisfying if, 23 minutes in, Dorothy was safely assisted back to Kansas.)

I actually cried during Somewhere Over The Rainbow (Judy Garland – so tragic! And it’s a beautiful song). And again when the Witch dies – it’s an emotionally fraught moment! I couldn’t help but imagine Glinda somewhere behind a curtain or pillar watching it happen a la the musical. Or the Witch being frantic by lack of sleep and an inability to communicate effectively a la the book. And I might have cried again when Dorothy said goodbye to the Tin Woodsman, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion. (Who, in retrospect, are deeply camp, yes? Also: Fiyeeeeeeeroooooo!) I really never cry in films or books or things like that so I’m always a bit interested to note when I do. And…I really want to see Wicked now. I know, it’s so done by all the cool people already but as I’ve said many times, it’s not as easy when you’re in New Zealand.
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On Shuffle whilst I type:

Die, Vampire, Die by Susan Blackwell and the rest of the cast of [title of show] from the cast recording of [title of show]. Had a slight epiphany Monday morning while unable to sleep (I woke up at 5:00am! And remained awake! It’s not fair!) that I could so do the role of Susan Blackwell. It’s like it was made for me (except it was made for the real Susan Blackwell. Confused? Maybe you should be. But if you’ve made it to this segment of the blog unsullied by confusion then you’re doing pretty well, all things considered. Also, Wikipedia it, my children.)

Rez, by Underworld. It’s on this compilation from the nineties that I found. I wish I’d had this compilation back in the actual 90s because it would have made life a lot easier. Instead I lay awake at night with my ear pressed to the radio and its hopelessly crackly signal, waiting for Flagpole Sitta – back in the days before the internet when I didn’t even know what the song was called, but the lyrics “the agony and the irony they’re killing me” seemed so meaningful to a 13 year old – or something by Radiohead to come on. Anyway Rez by Underworld is incredible – like what I imagine the fairies from Shirley Barber’s beautiful picture books would dance to if they went to a rave on a lily pad. See?

Galang by MIA from Arular. Have been a fan of hers since I saw the video for Bucky Done Gun in a hotel room in Germany in the summer of 2005. Didn’t realise music was capable of sounding like that.

Is it bad that I have this urge to make some kind of dish (probably ice cream, my default flavour-carrier) heavily featuring galangal so that I can use galangalangalang as my blog post title?

The title for this post is bought to you by: One Short Day from the musical Wicked, where Glinda and Elphaba travel to the emerald city for the first, fateful time…pausing only for a kicky song-and-dance number.

Next time: Considering this post bears little resemblance to what I promised would be happening I’m not sure if it matters what I write here. Truth be told I’m a bit terrible at snappily rounding things off so this is like an ‘out’ for me. Like on Whose Line Is It Anyway when Colin Mochrie would pretend to faint so that he didn’t have to come up with a verse in an impromptu hoedown. Does anyone remember the vastly superior British version of that show? Whatever happened to it?

don’t dream it, be it

August 2, 2009March 12, 202012 Comments

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Do you ever think up something new only to find out that this something already exists? Recently I was mildly amused by some of the artists on offer while flicking through the blues section at Slow Boat Records, and thought it would be kinda fun if there was some kind of “Blues Name Generator.” A website where you enter your name and it in turn spat out out something that would ostensibly be your blues artist name, something like Stumblin’ Tuscaloosa Mary or Three Fingered Lowell Pickering or Pork Cracklin’ McDooley. But yeah, the internet is already home to multiple blues name generators. Multiple. Shoulda known. Moving on.

It must be the nature of existing in the world we do though, right? There are millions and millions of people wandering round and it’s only inevitable that some of our ideas will overlap and occur without connection to each other. Sometimes it can be a positive thing though, this doubling up of concepts. It can act as a kind of reinforcement that the idea was a good thing in the first place. (Not that people can’t have collectively terrible ideas, where to start with examples…)

To wit: I had it in my head that lentils topped with a poached egg might be cool. This developed further when I thought about padding it out with what else was in my kitchen – butter-fried leeks, a sprinkling of almonds and feta… Then I completely second-guessed myself. Is lentils and egg together both freaky and depressing? At best? Leeks – are they still hip? Would the whole thing be too earthy and aggressively sulphuric? Would the brown, yellow and green shades call to mind a polyester blouse from the 70s instead of effortless culinary elegance?

Then, reading a copy of esteemed local publication the Listener, I found in Martin Bosley’s food column a recipe that more or less mirrored what I came up with. Since Mr Bosley himself is such an estimable and celebrated local foodsmith, like a passive fairy godmother saying “you shall go to the ball,” I gained from his similar idea the confidence to proceed with my own.

Not saying you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment. Not at all. But seriously. Lentils. Sometimes a little positive reinforcement helps. And this definitely leans more towards modern elegance than 70s polyester in food form. I should have had more faith in myself – after all, it seems these days you can drape a poached egg over practically anything and it suddenly becomes chic.

To have this happen in your own life, bring a large pan of water to the boil and once it is at a merry rolling bubble, pour in 150g brown lentils. (I added the rest of a near-empty packet of tiny stelline pasta for no other reason than it was annoying me) The lentils should cook through in about 20-25 minutes. Meanwhile, wash and thinly slice a leek. Melt a generous knob of butter in a pan and once it’s sizzling gently add the leeks and stir continuously till they collapse and become slightly caramelised. I added a splash of very good balsamic vinegar because I’m lucky enough to have some. Once the lentils have cooked through, drain them thoroughly and transfer them to the pan of soft, buttery leeks (now off-heat) and stir through. Finally, poach four free range eggs. Divide the lentils between two plates, place two eggs on each, and sprinkle with sliced almonds, feta cheese, and smoked paprika.

Serves 2.

This dish is pretty delightful. The softened, slightly fuzzy lentils against the silky egg yolk, the nutty bite of the almonds against the slippery leeks and sharp, creamy cheese all tastes brilliant together. The range of flavours and textures made it way more interesting to eat than it could initially sound. Thanks Martin Bosley for unwittingly providing the affirmation that I needed.

It’s not being precious or, I don’t know, elitist to say that you need really good free range eggs for this. It’s pretty simple. Surely Jamie Oliver has put out enough TV shows for this to be obvious now. Granted, laying eggs is what hens do, but it surely isn’t the most dignified way to make a living and I’m pretty sure these hens aren’t supposed to be laying eggs on command every single day while being underfed and cramped in a tiny cage with no room to move, alongside thousands of their similarly oppressed sisters like a nightmarish scene from a dystopian novel from the 1950s. Hens deserve better than that. Why, buying free range eggs is positively an action of female empowerment. Support your feathered sisterhood. I think I’m on to something here. Free range is a feminist issue. Unless it has already been written about by the lovely Bust magazine or somesuch… At the rate I’m going I wouldn’t really be surprised. Ooh I’ve thought of something. No. It already exists.

So there’s all that. But also, importantly, free range eggs taste comparitively amazing to the super cheap, sinister battery cage eggs. They really do. If you think otherwise, I’m afraid your opinion is wrong. Choose free range: not only are you getting a better tasting egg, you’re helping hens break through the glass ceiling! Or something.

This next dish comes without any such quasi-political fist-shaking attached to it. This was dinner a week or so ago.

Roasted Kumara with Roasted Beetroot Risotto. Seriously good stuff. I wrapped a large kumara and a large beetroot in tinfoil and roasted the pair for about an hour in a hot oven. I made a risotto of half arborio rice, half pearl barley (any excuse to use an unsexy grain, me) and once the vegetables were roasted I roughly chopped the beetroot and stirred it through the risotto. The kumara I cut in half and divided between two plates along with the risotto and sprinkled it with coriander seeds – my latest obsession, their dusky lemony flavour is delicious – and also actual coriander which I discovered quietly floundering in the fridge in dire need of use. It’s funny, I always feel like I need coriander but then whenever I buy it, it tends to get forgotten about.

A pretty fabulous dinner this was, and unlike the last dish, a Bollywood-bright plateful of gorgeous colour. The earthy sweetness of the beetroot and kumara, emphasised by the long roasting time, went really nicely together and I’ve always loved the texture of pearl barley which lends itself easily to a risotto.

Had a smashing time up in Auckland (I was up there for six days, hence the rolling tumbleweed/chirping crickets nature of the blog lately). I met some fantastic people and ventured into the oft-talked of ‘burb of Ponsonby, wherein I felt often felt pretty Wellington and occasionally…very rural. I was naively excited to patronise such classy places as SPQR and Prego, that I’d previously only read about in Cuisine magazine. You’re not in Otaua now, Laura.

Words can barely, barely express the joy that was Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin in concert. I read an adequate review of the night from the NZ Herald newspaper but I think what the author missed out on was how exciting it is that these two people are in New Zealand at all. This sort of thing just does not happen. Broadway stars don’t come here. Whoever at The Edge organised it, I salute you and hope this sets a prescedent for other performers that there is, in fact, an audience for them in New Zealand.

Anyway, words clouding issue here. They were both spectacular. For those of you who don’t know, I usually found it easiest to describe Mandy Patinkin to people as the guy who played “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die” in The Princess Bride. Patti LuPone probably graces a lot of peoples’ CD collections without them realising it – Wikipedia her. She should need no introduction but it’s not really our fault here in New Zealand, at the bottom of the world, that we’re not exposed to people like her very often. When she sang that intensely dynamic opening line, “I had a dream, a dream about you baby” from Everything’s Coming Up Roses, from the show Gypsy that she won a Tony for last year…it was surreal. And incredible. Tim was there with me, and Mum and Dad at the last minute bought cheaper rush tickets so it was nice to have people around to share the excitement with. I could go on about how fantastic they both were – wait, I already have – but it’s not really necessary, it kind of goes without saying. They were both so comfortable on stage and a serious joy to watch. And I got a photo afterwards with Mandy. Woohoo!

Also: saw It Might Get Loud, which only served to make Tim and I each fall more in love with Jack White (Meg is awesome too, but he was the focus of the film, so). Jimmy Page was a complete gem and of course the Edge is a talented guy. It’s not his problem that U2 isn’t really my thing, I’m sure. On Thursday night I saw a fab local band called Alex The Kid who play super fun music with a scientific bent; due to their name they’re a bit hard to google so why not click here for their Myspace? The following night, after It Might Get Loud we went to see Auckland rapper Tourettes, who I’ve been enamoured with for some time now. The opener was this guy called Tommy Ill, when he came onto the stage I totally judged him on his Where-the-wild-things-are style furry hat but he was adorable and fun and I’d easily pay money to see him again. Tourettes was just seriously fantastic, and I was beyond stoked that he did two spoken word segments during the gig. I can’t pretend I’m a huge listener of rap, I like a bit of De La Soul (specifically: Ooh), Wu Tang Clan and Beastie Boys, but it’s not really my first choice. So maybe that amplifies how much I like this guy’s stuff.

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On Shuffle Whilst I Type Feverishly

Farewell Ride, from Guero by Beck. It’s funny, I never think of myself as being a massive Beck fan but every time something of his comes on Shuffle I’m all, hmm, yeah, I like that.

La Ville Inconnue from L’Immortelle by Edith Piaf. She continues to amaze.

Thank You For Sending Me An Angel from More Songs About Buildings and Food by Talking Heads. Imagine if Talking Heads and Velvet Underground never existed. What on earth would cool people these days be influenced by?

Honourable mention: The chords G and C. Tim bought a guitar! We’re gonna be rockstars!

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Next time: I made my first bundt cake using my new silicone tin. I was predictably excited. The results were unfortunate. All the gritty details for you… Hopefully I’ll have something that actually worked to display as well since I’m pretty sure food blogs don’t blossom on fail. Hence why I didn’t even bold out the text in this segment.

shank goodness

May 7, 2009March 12, 20209 Comments

Breaking News: IT’S CURRENTLY LESS THAN 48 HOURS TILL THE FOOD SHOW (actually it already started today, but I’m going on Sunday, and I’m hopeless at maths and can’t actually figure out specifically how much less than 48 hours it is away so…momentum sustained!) I have blog business cards at the ready and my camera batteries charged and once at the event I will blog…hard.

We Wellingtonians are lucky folk. Sure, Auckland gets EVERYTHING, but we have Moore Wilson’s food warehouse, which is superior to any food place I’ve ever been. And friend, I have been food places.

That said, I popped in there casually last Sunday, looking for quinces and brisket – you know, the usual basics – and found neither. Being as Moore Wilson’s is well on the other side of town from where I live I decided I wasn’t leaving without buying something to make the trip worthwhile and, in that sort of daze that ensues after walking a long distance and contemplating how long it will take you to get back home again, I ended up purchasing some succulent, happy farm-raised lamb shanks and a bag of organic pearl barley. The brisket I wanted for a recipe I saw in the latest Cuisine magazine, the publication of my heart, but with shanks in hand an idea of my own materialised quickly…

(Speaking of quinces, I hope I haven’t missed their season. I understand it lasts from about 7.40am May 1st to 4.20pm May 10th, well in the Southern Hemisphere at least.)

Lamb Shanks with Marsala, Tomatoes, and Borlotti Beans

A few things you should know prior to the recipe reading experience:

1- I made this up on Sunday, so it hasn’t been thoroughly tested or anything.

2- The lamb shanks came in a pack of three, even though lambs have four legs. Can anyone explain this as it has been preventing me from focussing on more important things in life.

3-This type of casserole is very low-maintenance, feel free to add other things to it. This is just what I did…

In a large casserole dish, place two onions, finely sliced, four cloves of garlic, also finely sliced, and two carrots, chopped into batons. On top of this, place your lamb shanks. Pour over 125 mls dry Marsala, 400 mls water, and a tin of chopped tomatoes. Add a couple of bay leaves, place the lid on top, and bake at 160 C for an hour or two. About half an hour before you’re ready to serve, rinse a tin of borlotti beans and add this to the casserole dish, stirring a little. You may need to add a little butter and flour rubbed together to the liquid, which will thicken the sauce as it cooks in the oven. Serve as you like – over rice, couscous, potatoes, or as I did, wet polenta.

Is there a word for the moment where you’re stirring your polenta and you taste it to see if it’s done – if all the grit has cooked into delicious softness – and in doing so you burn the roof of your mouth? I bet the Italians have, like, thirty ways to describe this.

Above: No false modesty here – these lamb shanks were really good. I don’t think you could go wrong with the ingredients though, so maybe culinary conservativeness on my part was the reason it turned out so well. The meat straddled a pleasing crossroads, being partly melt-off-the-bone tender and partly maintaining enough reassuring ‘bite’ to it, to ensure it didn’t lose its identity in the dish entirely. Marsala is amazing, adding its reliably fabulous flavour to the whole shebang. And the borlotti beans held their own, providing an earthy counterpoint to the sweetness of the meaty young shanks and the creaminess of the polenta.

By the way, I LOVE polenta. I make it in an unorthodox way (if you’re Italian, cover the eyes of any young children around and avert your own) in that I add the cornmeal to the water while it’s cold, stir till smooth, and then heat that mixture to the boil. It’s just that I haven’t mastered the art of adding the cornmeal to boiling water without it siezing up in unforgiving, solid clumps that will not be whisked out. And there are few things more depressing than lumpy polenta.

The next day, inspired by a post on the lovely Sarah’s blog (when I say inspired, I think I read the post around six month ago) I used the leftover lamb shanks in a risotto.

I sauteed two chopped onions and a couple of cloves of chopped garlic, then added carnaroli rice (actually I accidentally dropped the bag into the pan, spilling out quite a lot of rice grains. This is not the method I recommend you take. Chronic clumsiness + obscenely expensive artisinal rice = howls of pain). After stirring this for a bit, I poured in a generous slosh of Noilly Prat – from the bottle pictured in my header picture, come to think of it – and then stirred in the tomatoey sauce from the lamb shank dish, and plenty of water, stirring till the rice absorbed it. I carried on in this fashion – add liquid, stir, absorb, etc, and then finally chopped up all the remaining meat off the third shank and folded it into the risotto, whose grains of rice had now swollen puffily to absorb the meaty, winy, tomatoey juices.

Is there an Italian word for that thing where you eat so much risotto in the process of making it – bearing in mind that you have to stand there stirring it for at least half an hour – that by the time it gets to eating the finished product for dinner you’re not really hungry? From what I nibbled stoveside, it was delicious, a really hearty, wholesome, heftily flavoursome dinner. So thankyou Sarah for the inspiration, now that the opportunity has finally arisen! I should point out that Sarah went on to make leftover leftover-stew-risotto risotto cakes, however I cannot even attempt to achieve those dizzy heights of food recycling.

Speaking of Wellington, if you’re ever lurking near the Terrace (ie, the office building hub of the city) I can thoroughly recommend the coffee at Rise, where my work team had a little farewell lunch for a beloved colleage. I hate goodbyes but I loved Rise. The service was impeccable – attentive but not creepy, sassy but not rude. She’s a fine line. The food was excellent, if a little on the expensive side, but you could tell it wasn’t scooped out of a vat out the back (and if it was, they did a fine job of disguising the fact). And, as I said, the coffee – in this case a long black – was perfect.

Rise Cafe

90 The Terrace (straight across the road from the top of the Woodward St Stairs)

Wellington City

04-472 2400

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On Shuffle while I was writing this:

1: A Thousand Beautiful Things/Beautiful Day – by the fantastic Julia Murney at Birdland, one of the few people I’d trust to take on Annie Lennox…can be found on her album I’m Not Waiting

2: Deborah – T-Rex, from John Peel: A Tribute

3: I’m Straight – Modern Lovers, from their eponymous album, which I finally found after a long search this year. It’s surprisingly elusive…

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Next time: I’m blogging the Wellington Food Show. Well, someone has to – last year when I did it I got the blankest stares from most of the people running the booths, and I’m endeavouring to change that. It’s nothing heroic, mostly self-promotion, but nevertheless something I feel strongly about. Also I have this urge to make butter from scratch and bought myself a litre of cream with which to do so.

aubergine genie

March 16, 2009May 9, 20209 Comments

I’m writing this in a slightly dazed state of mind – I was working at the Vodafone Homegrown music festival on Saturday from 9.30am till midnight and at about 3pm this afternoon I got slapped in the face with the wet fish of exhaustion. If I start making vicious syntactical errors or mumbling about my desire to own a donkey, discreetly ignore me and scroll down to the recipes. It’s nothing that a stretch of good night’s sleeps and several mugs of hot tea can’t make right. Although having more than one early night in a row is a thing of the past (no, I haven’t given birth to octuplets) as we are in the thick of March and it seems that every other day I am going to a music gig.

It’s unfortunate that Tim really isn’t into aubergines because (a) they are very cheap at the market, and (b) I just keep on cooking them. My latest recipe using them is the Aubergine Moussaka from Nigella Lawson’s consistently astounding seminal text How To Eat. There is nothing out there quite like this book. I can abandon it for weeks and then come back to it and be inspired anew by some previously forgotten recipe. I’d never tried this particular one but since I had all the ingredients to hand and it seemed like an inexpensive meal, I thought I might give it a go. There’s one thing you should know – it’s nothing like the traditional idea of moussaka and I’m still a bit in the dark as to why it got its name. It’s more of a warm, gently spiced chickpea vegetable curry. Which in itself is a good thing, just not very moussaka-y…

Aubergine Moussaka, adapted liberally from How To Eat

2 large, glossy aubergines, diced
2 onions, finely chopped
8 fat cloves garlic, also finely chopped
150g dried chickpeas, soaked overnight then cooked in boiling water till tender
1 ½ tablespoons pomegranate molasses
1 can chopped tomatoes
½ teaspoon each cinnamon and allspice
200mls water
mint and feta to serve

Fry the onion, garlic, and eggplant in a little oil till softened and lightly golden. I actually used no oil at all, if the pan is hot enough and you stir regularly, the eggplant cooks quite nicely. Add the rest of the ingredients, simmer for an hour, and serve over rice or indeed as is, sprinkled with mint and feta. By the way, I don’t have any pomegranate mollasses so in its place I used a chopped up slice of equally fragrant and sour preserved lemon (made for me by my godmother. Viv, if you are reading this: they are addictive. I have to stop myself from just picking them out of the jar and eating the lot…)

I must admit: I added some sneaky beetroot when I made this. Predictably it made the whole thing bright pink which was a little distracting but tasted fine. As a whole the flavours and textures are wonderful and it’s delightfully easy to make. It also reheats well and is the sort of vegetarian dish (actually without the feta it might even be vegan, come to think of it) that is wonderfully satisfying, rather than making me look wistfully at the patch on my plate where a steak could be resting juicily.

I promised last time that I was going to get old school with Girl Guide biscuits, and old school I did get. I’m pretty sure Girl Guides or Girl Scouts are a fairly universal concept so you know what I’m talking about, yes? Wholesome, jolly young gals trying to sell biscuits is a yearly thing here in New Zealand and despite me being dreadfully snobby towards shop-bought biscuits on the whole (apart from the miraculously good Toffee Pops and Squiggles), Tim and I bought a couple of packets because of the sheer nostalgic appeal they wielded. They just taste like your average hydrogenated palm-oil based plain cookie but there’s nothing like tradition to add a veneer of deliciousness. Plus with the biscuits come a dizzying array of sugary recipes on the Girl Guide website, including that New Zealand modern classic, Chocolate Fudge Slice. I remember making this once with Mum back when I was in Brownies (another young gal’s brigade, nothing to do with the cake unfortch) and I marvel at its squidgy deliciousness now as I did when I was nine years old.

Chocolate Fudge Slice (adapted from the website)

This looks like it shouldn’t hold together but somehow it does. The website has such modern-fangled additions as preserved ginger and chopped cherries but pah! I say.

1/2 a cup of coconut, however, would be quite permissible.

1x 250g packet Girl Guide biscuits, crushed
1 egg
125g butter
¾ cup sugar
1 Tbsp cocoa
½ cup chopped walnuts
½ tsp vanilla extract (or don’t even bother if it’s just essence as the website suggests. I don’t mean to sound disparaging of this useful and friendly website, but really. It’s 2009. Get some real vanilla.)

Melt the butter, and stir in the sugar, cocoa, walnuts, vanilla, biscuit crumbs and lightly beaten egg. Press into a greased 20x30cm tin and refrigerate overnight. The website suggests icing it with cocoa buttercream, and while I’m never one to say no to buttercream, I had run out of cocoa and so abandoned that idea and it was more than serviceable.

Above: This stuff just tastes…aagggghhh…magically delicious. And how could it not – it’s full of all the good things in the world – cocoa, biscuit crumbs, butter…it’s impossibly to stop at one piece and frankly it’s kind of difficult to get the delicious mixture into the tin in the first place without snarfing the lot, doing the dishes and pretending you never started at all. More pragmatically, you could also make this coeliac-friendly by crushing up gluten-free biscuits instead.

It’s not just a busy time for me. This Friday, my very talented mother flies to Argentina for a month (in a plane, by the way, her talent isn’t that she can fly) to live with a family and teach in a school there on some prestigious scholarship thing she successfuly applied for (that incidentally my godmother – the one who made me the preserved lemons – has also done). Unfortunately I won’t get to see Mum before she goes, but I’m sure the month will go fast enough and the wonders of modern technology mean that we’ll probably keep in touch more than we would have when we’re both in the same country.

Also – you may remember last year the ongoing battle against the Pukekohe WPC waste oil treatment plant who wanted to taint Otaua, the village of my youth, with their silos of poison (hey, it’s late at night, I can get mildly dramatic if I want) – initially we managed to overthrow them in a hearteningly David vs Goliath manner. But because this isn’t a Hollywood movie, they appealed, and because they’ve got money and we don’t they’ll probably get it. I’ve got a solution for you WPC: Just…don’t. To the Franklin District Council: Make it stop. You’re the council. You should be looking out for, you know, the people of Franklin. (Again, it’s late at night- I can be dramatic and overly simplistic.) If I’m psychologically exhausted considering the implications for the future of Otaua I can’t even imagine how drained the Otaua Village Preservation Society must be feeling. Just food for thought anyway. A part of me would love it for someone working against us to Google themselves, find their way here, and be conflicted by the overwhelming hate-vibes being directed towards them from my direction and their desire to continue reading my blog for the intriguing cake recipes.

Next time: Well, it’s St Patrick’s Day tomorrow which means I shall call upon the Irish blood cells that make up a goodly chunk of my lineage and make Nigella’s Chocolate Guinness Cake. Grown men have wept (in my imagination) for this cake. It’s special stuff. Do join me…

O Broth, Where Art Thou?

July 6, 2008March 14, 202015 Comments

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Just because it is summer in America, does not (unfortunately) mean it is summer in New Zealand. Just putting it out there – while y’all are consuming sorbets and frozen yoghurts and cooling salads, we have had snow in previously un-snowed locales, closed roads, gale force winds…Because of the said seasonal conditions, I have been on something of a soup kick lately. We’ve had it in various forms all week for dinner, and it’s ideal for combatting the incessant sharp chill of winter that permeates our damp, un-insulated, World Health Standard-violating flat.

Soup 1:

Above: Gold on gold…a taste of sunshine for when it’s rainy outside. This soup is something I came up with while riffing on my standard pumpkin soup recipe. Basically it is the same – roasted pumpkin, mashed roughly with a wooden spoon and with stock stirred in – but I added dense, mushy cooked red lentils, a good 2/3 cup which and pretty much made it a complete meal. As well as this I sprinkled over plenty of yellow tumeric, as you can see in this picture, and ras-el-hanout, a spice mix to which I am quite addicted. It isn’t too obscure, most places these days are stocking it, and it imparts headily warm, aromatic, gentle spiciness.

As well as being seriously healthy, pumpkin and lentils are two of the cheapest things around these days. The lentils I used were some organic ones my mum sent me and the pumpkin was from the local vege market. Mmm, moral fibre and actual fibre in one bowl.

To go with the soup, and to augment the sunny golden-ness, I whipped up a batch of cornbread. The recipe I use is Nigella’s and is a favourite of mine, it always works and can be fiddled and faddled with to no ill effect and is the perfect accompaniment to almost anything (particularly butter…)

Cornbread

175g cornmeal (or polenta, same diff so look for either)
125g plain flour
45g caster sugar
2 t baking powder
250ml full fat milk
1 egg
45g butter, melted

Set oven to 200 C. Grease whatever you’re using – a muffin tin, a 20cm-ish brownie tin, etc. What I usually do is melt the butter in a decent sized microwave-proof bowl. Then I stir in the milk and egg with a fork. Then tip in all the dry ingredients, mix till just combined – don’t worry about lumps – then pour into your receptacle and bake, for 20-25 minutes. I have made this with superfine cornmeal and the more granular stuff, and a mix of the two, anything is fine really although the granular stuff gives slightly more bite to your finished product.

We had this soup again, with leftover cornbread for mopping up, the next night. This time I roasted some carrots as well and mashed them in once tender. They gave an added note of natural sweetness which was quite effective…
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Soup 2:

One of my favourite things about Cuisine magazine is Ray McVinnie’s Quick Smart column, where he gives, every month – how does he do it? – an exhaustive list of meal ideas and recipes based on a particular theme. After reading his promptings to make any number of soups, I tried this. I sauteed finely chopped onions and garlic, then added some chopped free-range bacon, stirring till cooked. I added diced, floury potatoes, dried thyme, and porcini stock, and allowed it to simmer till the potatoes were utterly tender and melting into the stock. I sprinkled over some nutmeg and pink peppercorns and biffed in a crisp green handful of chopped spinach, which wilted on impact. This deliciously thick, comforting soup was what Tim and I ate while watching Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story on DVD. After we finished watching it we weren’t overly impressed, but the next day we were repeating quotes back and forth and cracking up…anyway it’s worth it for Jack White’s cameo as Elvis Presley alone.

On Friday night Tim and I had fish and chips, a decision perhaps fuelled by the amount of wine I had at after-work drinks that afternoon (nothing to worry about, but put it this way – I didn’t make it to Bikram yoga.) Through work I scored free tickets to see Samuel Flynn Scott, one of New Zealand’s most prolific musicians. He is well-known for his work with the Phoenix Foundation and the Eagle vs Shark soundtrack, as well as dabbling in other side projects yet…I’d never really heard any of his stuff. All I knew about him was that he was endowed with a fullsome beard and had participated in our Smoking: Not Our Future campaign. What can I say – we had a great night. He and his equally beardy band Bunnies on Ponies were tight, charismatic, fun, and the banter mercifully tended to err on the side of witty. Because I’ve never really heard much of their music I wouldn’t want to make any comparisons in case they were absolutely wrong but…they had a kind of ModestMouse-happyREM-SplitEnz thing going on. They finished with a rousing cover of the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society, a ditty that I love…

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On Saturday I was lucky enough to catch up with my mother and my godmum, who were in town for a language teachers’ conference…after an enormous lunch with them at the Black Harp Tim and I had soup number 3 for dinner – a light, noodly Japanese-style broth.

Soup 4:

I have stopped buying exciting ingredients with such mad gay abandon these days, partly because of money, partly because of lack of space, but when I found some dried borlotti beans going very cheaply at the Meditteranean Warehouse in Newtown I consciously ignored that rule…They were soaked, and simmered up for Nigella’s Pasta e Fagioli from Nigella Bites. It couldn’t be simpler – it is basically just cooked up beans and pasta. I added a tin of tomatoes and a splash of sherry, and it made for a perfect Sunday night dinner. No accompaniments necessary, apart from a spoon.

Tim and I start back at university tomorrow. It seems like just yesterday that I was dashing up hill and down dale in February trying to register for my classes in the sweltering heat and now I’m in my final term. I’m doing three 3rd year papers this semester, hopefully it’s not too gruelling, but then I think to myself, surely nothing could be as gruelling as the photography paper. By the way, I finished up with a good, solid B as my final mark for that particular gem of a class, not bad eh what? And in a matter of months I shall be Laura Vincent, BA…

Jamon, Jamon (Ham, Ham!)

May 13, 20088 Comments

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We had fish and chips for dinner tonight. Sometimes I’m too exhausted from you know, going to lectures at 11am or whatever it is that students do, to make dinner so I do something like Tomato Rice or pasta with whatever’s in the freezer biffed in it. Tonight I couldn’t even get that far. As I’ve mentioned before, I get unnattractively grouchy if I can’t cook dinner; let this be an indication of how munted I am from schoolwork. I’m not going to outline the details, they’re not that interesting, but let me tell you this: my brain feels crispy.

Above: This actually is pasta with everything, and is what we had for dinner a few nights ago. Kindly take a moment to really admire the photo, because it took me a squillion goes to get it right, holding the ladle in my right hand, resting the mini-tripod against my bosom, (not, by any means, the most level of surfaces) and using my left hand to adjust the aperture and press the button…the things I’ll do to have a macro shot like the cool kids! I’ll warn you now, my photos aren’t that great this time, but (external validation! Swoon!) my honeycomb picture two posts down was one of the most-hit-upon links on tastespotting.com! People rate me up there with Peanut Butter Green Tea Cupcakes with a Creme Brulee Centre and Vegan Mocha Peppermint Chip Frosting! (Ohhh, I’m not being snarky, but really, those cupcakes! I can haz clarity?)

Back to the pasta, I started off emulating Nigella’s Baked Veal and Ham pasta, (minus the veal of course – can’t afford) from How To Eat. In the end the only thing that the two had in common was ham and a splash of Marsala, and instead I just loaded the dish up with vegetables – capsicum, frozen peas, spinach, carrot, onion…it would have been a fairly healthy dinner had I not stirred a heap of butter into the pasta after draining it. Like a moth to the flame…

Above: Hot dish coming! And he’s carrying pork! Oh go on, force out a chuckle. I got Tim to be the bearer of Sunday night’s dinner because the there were no clean surfaces in the kitchen at the time and I didn’t like the idea of putting it on the floor to take the photo. We hardly ever have pork, because I want quality, happy pig stuff which is even more expensive than your normal variety. But Tim and I saw that per kilo pork was cheaper than mince at the supermarket the other day, which is how we ended up with it. I served it, Italian-style (by which I mean, I don’t know if it bears any relation to Italy) with a bowlful of brown lentils, into which I stirred spinach and tinned tomatoes. This is so easy and makes a proper, big dirty old fashioned roast.

Care of Nigella, via How To Eat.

Loin of Pork with Bay Leaves

(I should point out here that I’m not sure if what we had on Sunday was a loin – I’d totally fail at Letterman’s Know Your Cuts of Meat game – but it worked fine anyhow)

6 T extra virgin olive oil (this is 125mls or half a cup, I dare say you could use less, I did)

4 cloves garlic, crushed somewhat

6 peppercorns, also crushed, or “bruised” as Nigella poetically instructs…

6 dried or fresh bay leaves

2 1/2 kilos loin o’ pork, boned derinded and rolled (which will give you 1.8kg oven-ready pork)

1 medium onion

More bay leaves
150mls white wine.

In a large bowl or snaplock plastic bag, marinate the pork in the oil, garlic, and peppercorns (I used mild and beautiful pink ones), for as long as you have, be it one hour or 24 hours. I’d veer towards the latter but my pork only sat around for three and was scrumptious so there you go. I also only used two bay leaves in the marinade. Did you know, we have a bay tree at home, which has been my home for 22 years now, and it was only in April – last month – that I realised that what I thought was the bay tree was actually nothing of the sort, and the innocent bay itself was about three trees over. Goodness knows what I’ve been putting in our corned beef…Heat the oven to 200 C. Make sure the pork is at room temperature before you cook it. Tumble the pork with its marinade into a roasting dish, slice up the onion and add it along with more bay leaves as you wish. Roast for 1 3/4 hours, basting at regular intervals. Once it is done, use the wine to deglaze the pan for delicious gravy. Mm, pork fat. Oh and the onion bits taste incredible. Cook’s treat. I actually used some bacon fat, leftover from flatmate Emma’s morning fryup, to shmeer over the pork, this made the pan juices, and indeed my arteries, marvelously hammy.

This should serve six, if you follow directions. Our bit of pork had a whacking great bone in the middle, with some judicious carving it might have served four people who are far too polite to pretend how hungry they are. Or two with plenty of leftovers.

Above: With the leftovers the next night – Monday – I made a sort of salady thing (much to Tim’s quiet dismay, having been cheated out of roast potatoes the night before, and now there were more lentils) comprising of the leftover pork, steamed brocolli, and more brown lentils. The salad was actually delicious, with wonderfully contrasting textures and the earthiness of the lentils and the red wine vinegar I splashed in cutting through the fat pork. I gotta say I have a lot of time for humble brown lentils – cheaper and slightly nuttier than the Puy variety and pleasingly they hold their shape unlike red lentils.

Perhaps one day people will link me with lentils the way that they mention Proust every time they make madelines.

Above: Patatas Bravas, which is Spanish for love. And is the awesomest thing Spain has ever graced us with (apart from, perhaps, Javier Bardem, hence the title of this post) Oh sure, I love roast potatoes (Nigella style, with semolina and buckets of fat) but this stuff is truly transcendant, and is what I made to go with the salad above. I first found it in The Accidental Vegetarian but never consult the recipe; you needn’t either. Simply take lots and lots of floury potatoes, cube them, and while you are doing this heat up some olive oil in a roasting dish in a 200 C oven. Tip your potatoes into the hot roasting dish and let them bake for about 20 minutes till crispy. If you have garlic cloves on you, throw some in. After they’ve baked for a bit, stir in a tin or two of chopped tomatoes (depending on the size of your dish) and some chopped red chilli if you like (I don’t) and put it back in for another 20 minutes or so. Viola, a vat of Patatas Bravas! Not to be particular about it but if you don’t love this you hardly deserve tastebuds.

It’s even better the next day.

Congratulations to Tim’s mother who is graduating on Wednesday (again!) from Massey. Now Tim’s mother is nice and all but when we are getting B’s and whatnot at uni and the powers that be are having to invent new letters for her because A+ isn’t high enough…well, it certainly spurs you on.

In non-food news, and if you’re interested – these aren’t the photos that got ridiculed last week, but in fact a new batch for the next assignment, ready for whatever criticism comes their way in class. I decided to post them because they took forever to do, but are never going to actually get used (they’re basically a draft.) Maybe also to showcase the fact that I got to level 61 Tetris with a score of 980,000. I am a Tetris Savant. Of all things… Please excuse the crudity of my photos, they aren’t finished products. Oh, and the concept itself – the classic tale, boy plays tetris, boy awakes to find tetris pieces floating everywhere, boy nearly crushed by stacking tetris pieces, boy at the mercy of however I figure out the end of the concept, Laura trying to convince everyone she didn’t come up with this on an acid trip. (Am far too meek for that sort of thing; My density brought me here.)

Above: On the one hand, yes, Tim needs a haircut. On the other hand: Fierce!

Above: The red thing there is the roof of our flat (I spake the truth when I said we were wedged into a hill.) I realise the tetris pieces might look a little rough, but once photographed ($2 shop mosaic pieces!) every shape had to be painstakingly resized, the saturation adjusted, rotated, and layered on individually, with the background brushed out. Yeah, I don’t understand Photoshop either.

Above: Model through it. The background shot of Tim wasn’t terribly well lit, but the battery flattened on me and I didn’t have time to take more. However I’m rather fond of this. Am very nervous about how it will all go in class, mind you I’m so tense I’ll probably just burst into sobs when the teacher says hello, let alone actually starts to critique my work.

Better than crying though, would be to boldly inquire “What? Why?Be more constructive with your feedback, please. Why?”

(Passe, I know, to be quoting FOTC now and not in 2002 before they got enormous or something, but still a salient question, I feel.)

“And Wednesday, don’t mention Wednesday…”

May 8, 2008March 22, 202018 Comments

Yesterday was a bad day for me. Oh sure, a decent enough day in a global sense but, on my own terms it was pretty rough. .

I had Photography. This was all well and good until we had to display our assignment photos (that we’d handed in on Tuesday) and get critiqued, one at a time, by the teacher. The teacher told me that my photos were completely unsuccessful, in front of the entire class, and now I guess I’m just waiting to see if I failed or not. I wasn’t the only one, she didn’t seem to like anyone’s efforts, which made for an incredibly uncomfortable three hours. After all the time I put into the photos it was all I could do not to burst into tears (which I am wont to do at inopportune moments) and run screaming from the class. Mercifully I held it together, but really what do you say to someone when they tell you that your photos are terrible? Are you supposed to say “thankyou so much for that valuable insight! Now I’m all fired up for the next project!” The point is, she may well have been right – the photos probably weren’t that great – it is a bloody beginner paper after all- but her opinion counts because she’s doing the marking.

Catharsis over! On the upside I was pleased enough with my Media essay that I handed in yesterday (managed to slip in “the subordination of women” although didn’t find a place for “juxtaposed”) and I saw the Magic Dog on my way back to the flat. The magic dog is this snowy white Samoyed that lives down the road from us and Tim and I get a bit worked up when we see it. Trust me, it’s one majestic beast. Tim and I decided this dog was magic and assigned it properties as such – you know, if it sniffs you, you will never die from drowning, where it urinates shall spring forth an ancient oak tree, that sort of thing.

When I was a lot younger I had this nightmare about the Donny and Marie Show, which is odd because I’ve never in my life seen an episode. They starting singing I’m a Little Bit Country and A Little Bit Rock’n’Roll. Marie then sang “I’m a little bit crunchy,” turned into a giant Crunchie bar and Donny bit her head off. It was this that I reminisced still-nervously about as I made homespun Crunchie bars.

By the way – oh the irony! – the above is a very special photo for me because it’s the first one ever where I’ve managed to manually do that sharp-foreground-blurry-background thing that has so long eluded me. Hello macro button! I’ve finally found you! No more complaining about it, I promise. Thanks for all the advice, too 🙂 If it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t have known that the macro button was capable of such wizardry.

This recipe is so easy yet so rewarding. First of all, the kitchen smells like caramel while the sugar is cooking. Then you get to watch the mixture whoosh up when you add the baking powder. It’s fun, and stress-releasing, to bash the finished product into shards and chunks with a rolling pin. It tastes amazing. Oh, and there’s only three ingredients…

Cinder Toffee (Nigella’s words, not mine) from How To Be A Domestic Goddess

200g caster sugar (I used regular to no obvious ill effect)
4 T golden syrup
1 T baking soda

Above: does making this for a Type-1 diabetic with sore teeth make me a bad person?

Liberally butter a 21cm square tin, although this will fit into whatever you’ve got around that size to be honest. Mix the golden syrup and sugar to a granular paste in a heavy bottomed saucepan, and then cook it over a low heat. This takes a wee while but it is fun to watch the sugar go all melty and ripply like in the picture above. Simmer gently for about 3 minutes, it will darken but you don’t want it to be too dark. Once it has bubbled away for a while take it off the heat and using a fork or something stir in your tablespoon of baking soda. It’s a bore, but it might pay to sift the soda into a small bowl first so you don’t end up with lumps. The caramel will foam up awesomely. Quickly spread into your tin and leave it to set, which will take at least an hour. Tip out of the tin, bash with a rolling pin (don’t even try to slice it!) and dip or drizzle with chocolate as desired.

Above: It tastes so good, just like proper Crunchie bars. Which I happen to love.

But I had this idea that folding some honeycomb into the batter for one of those self-saucing puddings (or as I knew it as a child, “Chocolate Floating Pudding”) might be kinda cool. It wasn’t, I have to admit, entirely successful – I think I had unnattainable dreams of a butterscotchy sauce with chunks of still-crunchy honeycomb in the finished product – but it still tasted rather good.

Mmm, gooey. I had planned to make a pudding last night as a “Yay Wednesday’s Over For Another Week” kind of thing but was too exhausted in the end. Mayhaps tonight…Oh and just in case you’re worried I’ve been spending the last couple of days cleaning my teeth with muscovado and washing my hair with treacle: We have been having worthy, healthy dinners. Not quite soul food, but definitely brain food.

Above: This lentil and pumpkin take on shepherd’s pie came from Jill Dupleix’ Lighten Up, and while it can’t replace the real thing, it was very pleasant and warming and just stupidly healthy. It had five vegetables in it. And if lentils weren’t enough…I’m a little ashamed to admit this…I added a handful of rolled oats to the mixture. Well, they sort of disappear, so it’s not like I was being insanely militant. The good thing about this dish was that between the lentils, the pumpkin, and the oats, there were more than enough long lasting carbs for Tim so I didn’t have to boil up some rice or anything. We had this with roasted cauliflower, just to bring another vegetable to the party.

Speaking of roasted cauliflower, the next night I repeated the Orzotto for dinner – barley being cheap and superhealthy – and managed to cram in spinach, capsicum, and carrots to the mixture. It looked so depressingly earnest that I didn’t even bother to get photographic evidence, but it tasted pretty good.

By the time I got home last night I knew I wanted pasta and had decided on carbonara until I realised we had no cream. So instead I used the rest of the bacon that I splashed out on for my birthday, and fried it in butter till crispy. I then added a generous slosh of Marsala, more butter and served it over spaghetti to which I’d added some peas. Alongside was roasted beetroot and broccoli, and it was…just what I wanted.

Above: I find pasta SO comforting. I suppose nothing beats a bowl of buttery mashed potatoes, but for low effort, quick balm to the soul, pasta is my carb of choice.

It’s not all dire as far as my education goes though. I got an A- for an English essay I did…and if nothing else my photography assignment has introduced me to the awesomeness that is Richard Maxted whose work I was inspired by. Don’t try and google him – he has a lamentably low profile on the internet. In a moment of “why the heck not” I sent him an email using the contact address on his site…and he replied, was incredibly nice, and even answered some questions to provide quotes for my assignment. Seriously, he’s kind of a big deal in the photography world (though he has no Wikipedia page!) so for him to actually reply was very exciting. If you feel like looking at ridiculously good photography go to his website and wait for the red asterisk to turn fuzzy (you then click on it to enter the site.) I had planned on uploading a couple of my own photos here but now I’m far too disillusioned so I’ll leave you with one of Maxted’s rather more reliable works instead.

Above: Guess what this is a photo of.
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Toothpicks. Clever, yes? Hopefully his help can save my grade…*update* 9/5/08 – Thanks for the kind words! but I’d just like to make clear that (having had a sense of the-teacher-is-always-right instilled into me at an early age by my mother, who teaches) it’s not exactly being told I was rubbish that I object to (it sucks! but if they’re technically bad photos then that’s that) it’s the fact that it was done in front of the whole class for three hours. I am sure there was a less heartbreaking way to do it. Didn’t want to make it seem like I was on some kind of woe-is-me, heat-of-the-moment vitriolic rampage (heck, I’d cooled off thoroughly by this stage. Can you imagine how worked up I was at the time?) But yeah, the teacher was of course well within her rights to give me her unadulterated opinion. Cheers 🙂