Category: Chocolate

Chickpeas in unexpected places…

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Shakespeare Exam tomorrow! Forsooth! I actually reeeally enjoy Shakespeare and will miss incorporating him into my blog in the vague hope that everything-is-learning (in the same way that Mum and I watched Amelie when I was studying for French in high school.)

Boring as it is to begin with weather, it needs to be said that it has been horrible lately in Wellington – humid and windy, (so your hair goes both frizzy and knotty) blustery, damp and generally miserable. What happened to the sunny days of last week, and the week before? In spite of this, Tim, Kieran and I schlepped down to the vege market and I ended up with all sorts of cheering goodies – another tray of free range eggs, a fennel bulb, rhubarb, beetroot, brocolli, coriander, chillies, kaffir lime leaves, strawbs ($1.50 a punnet!) bananas, celery, and red capsicums, all for very cheap.
For dinner tonight I made Nigella’s Chicken Stew with Chickpeas and Harissa from How To Eat. I wish I’d thought to make it sooner on in the year because it is very easy and relatively inexpensive. It does require forward planning; the chickpeas I soaked, earth-motherlike, in a bowl overnight, and the harissa I made this afternoon.
Above: The ingredients for the harissa, which I arranged artfully on this board before realising that now I had to veeery carefully chop the chillies and garlic without disturbing the mound of salt.
Harissa is – from experience – a sort of paste of chillies, garlic, salt, cumin, coriander, caraway, vinegar and olive oil. I personally can’t deal with much chilli but find this mixture completely addictive. I only used one chilli, and made the whole thing in my pestle and mortar that I got from Mum and Dad for Christmas a few years back. I dry-fried a teaspoon each of cumin, coriander and caraway seeds, then ground them into dust in the P&M. In this goes the chopped chilli, garlic, and sea salt, plus a little vinegar and enough olive oil to amalgamate the lot.
Above: Harissa. I can eat it by the spoonful…
It is worth pointing out that I cooked the chickpeas while this was happening. I then assembled the chicken stew which involved nothing more arduous than putting a whole lot of stuff in a pan, covering it with water, and bringing it to the boil. The harissa gets stirred in too, which is why it needs making first. You can, of course, buy harissa, but I guess it is in my nature to want to make this sort of thing from scratch.

Above: The chicken was so tender after its hour or so simmering away that it fell to pieces at the mere prod of a wooden spoon. Considering it was freezer-burned chicken that I’d found buried under the frozen peas and forty half-bags of mixed veges, I was Very Impressed. I served this with bulghur wheat, and it was really, seriously delicious and comforting.
The rest of the chickpeas that I’d cooked up went into – of all things – a chocolate cake. I found a recipe from Nigella.com for this gluten-free creation, based on chickpeas as opposed to the usual ground almonds. Intrigued by its simplicity and the positive review that the person who posted it gave, I decided to make it.
Above: Good grief! It’s fantastic! It is chocolately, moist, and has a somehow puffy yet dense texture.
Emma, our resident gluten-shunner is happy as most cakes suitable for her involve hundreds of dollars worth of ground almonds, or are seriously rich – it has to be said that celiac cakes tend to be very puddingy, rather than tasting of homespun baking. In fact I’m so taken with it that here is the recipe. I used orange juice squeezed from oranges that Stefan’s dad sent him from the Hawke’s Bay – acerbic and heavy with juice.
Gluten Free Chocolate Chick Pea Cake (okay, that title is awful, sorry)

  • 300 -400g chickpeas (I had about 350g freshly cooked, otherwise I would use a well-drained can.)
  • 2/3 cup orange juice
  • 2/3 cup cocoa
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 t baking powder
  • 1 t baking soda
  • 4 eggs

Whizz up the chickpeas in a food processor, till very smooth. Add the other ingredients, whizz till incorporated, pour into a baking paper lined tin (I used 22cm) and bake at 180 for 50 minutes till a skewer comes out clean. If there are any remaining lumps of chickpea in the cooked cake – just tell people its walnuts.

PS – sorry bout the squint-making incongruity in paragraph size/spacing etc – try as I might, I haven’t managed to figure out how to make it uniform. In other words, it’s the computer, not me!

What would Scarlett O’Hara Do?

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I admit that I haven’t actually seen Gone With The Wind, but I remember reading years ago in…a Sweet Valley High book (oh the delicious juxtaposition between high and low culture) that she was particularly resourceful. Incidentally, is it worrying that “Johanssen” not “O’Hara” is the first thing that pops into my head upon hearing the word Scarlett?

Anyway, what S’OH might have done, if she found out that her boyfriend had deleted the photos of roast pork and the ensuing stir fry (when of course, she should have uploaded them sooner so the blame is on both sides)…is shown the world some photos she prepared earlier! This year, before I started this blog, I was taking photos fairly regularly of recipes (usually Nigella’s) that I’d made. In fact, it was in pondering why I took these photos that I first considered starting a blog.
So; with a flourish to distract you from the empty promises of previous posts- a trip down memory lane! Disclaimer – these photos were taken before I started this blog and so aren’t that great – not that the rest of my photos are – but, well, this is what our food looks like under the light of our kitchen.

Above: Custard Cream Hearts, from Nigella’s Feast. The custard buttercream filling is quite, quite addictive. I’m lucky there was any left to fill these beauties!

Above: Chickpea and Zuchinni Filo Pie, from Nigella’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess. It sounds much more like something you’d buy at a cafe and not ever contemplate making at home, but it isn’t tooooo fiddly (despite the word ‘Filo’ in the title) and tastes soooo good, all fragrant with cumin and tumeric. I recommend this if you are ever needing to seduce a vegetarian.
Above: Chocolate Fudge Cake, from Nigella Bites. It is an old fashioned, solid chocolate cake and the icing is just ridiculously good.I made it for Tim’s birthday in September.
Above: Pasta from my impulse-bought pasta machine. It is more delicious than any pasta I have ever had…definitely worth the effort! I used the pasta recipe from Nigella Bites (1 egg to every 100g flour, which feeds one person – an easy equation) and got Tim to help me crank the machine. It cooks in literally seconds, in boiling salted water, and I dressed it simply in butter and nutmeg. If I had the time, I’d probably eat this every day.
The roast pork, by the way, was from Nigella’s Feast, and was an Italian recipe for New Years called “Roast Pork Cinghiale.” The marinade involved marsala fine, pink peppercorns, garlic, allspice, olive oil, brown sugar, and a few other bits and pieces. Once roasted, the sugar and the wine caramelised it wonderfully while the pepper and spices provided a densely earthy flavour. A seriously great way of treating pork.
In honour of the New Years Pork: I resolve to be more organised!

The Hardest Button To Button…

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We had a bit of a feast yesterday because, well, yesterday marked two years since Tim and I started going out. Yay for us! We toyed with the idea of going out to dinner but (a) it would cost too much, (b) I like to cook too much and (c) we didn’t want to make too big a deal of it. So instead, we splurged on some steak, which I marinated, Scandinavian-styles, in vodka, garlic, thyme and olive oil. This recipe comes via Nigella’s Feast and is very simple. I did take a photo of the steak marinading in one of those bags you get at the bulk section at Pak’n’Save (which I always hold on to for this very purpose) but…it looked a little too unattractively like something out of “Silence of the Lambs” for my liking. For all of our sakes, it will not feature here.

I had a hankering to do something with white chocolate for pudding and found the perfect recipe in Nigella’s Forever Summer: Blonde Mocha Layer Cake, so named for its pairing of coffee and white chocolate flavours. Sounds like hard work, but really it isn’t. It is a coffee flavoured sponge sandwiched together with creamy white chocolate icing, and it’s a doddle to make. So, while the steak was marinading fleshily, I got on with the cake.

It is based on a Victoria Sponge recipe, one that Nigella often adapts in her books. I creamed equal amounts of butter and sugar (225g) and added four eggs, 225g self raising flour, 1/4 cup strong black coffee and a tablespoon of milk. Dollop this into two buttered and lined 21cm caketins and bake at 180 C for 25 or so minutes. This recipe can be made plain – with all milk instead of coffee – and roughly halved (that is, 125g butter, sugar, and flour, 2 eggs, 2 T milk) it makes fantastically easy cupcakes, which you bake for about 20 or so minutes. Anyone passing through our flat earlier this year will remember my brief but torrid affair with cupcakes, which resulted in all sorts of creations (mostly Nigella’s)…lavender cupcakes, orange cupcakes, carrot cake cupcakes, coca-cola chocolate cupcakes…The point is, it is all kinds of versatile.


Above: Two moons! Actually, the golden coffee flavoured sponges fresh from the oven. (incidentally, I found out that it was the place where I work that was behind the “Two Moons” ad all those years ago! It has been their most well received ad campaign ever apparently.)

While they were cooling I boiled the potatoes in preparation for another recipe from Feast, “Sticky Garlic Potatoes.” While they were bubbling away I heated up some olive oil in a roasting dish in the oven, and chopped some garlic cloves. The idea is, once you have drained the boiled potatoes, you bash them up a bit with the end of a rolling pin or somesuch, tip them, with the garlic into the hot roasting dish, and roast them, the garlic and oil sort of “catching” the fuzzy bits and making it all crispy and delicious.

Once they were in the oven, I heated up the pan for the steak and put some frozen beans on to boil. Now I have to admit here that I forgot to scale down the marinade ingredients (Nigella’s recipe feeds a lot more than two) so…the steak was a schmeer on the intense side. To be honest, I had to send it back for a second go in the pan in order to cook out all the vodka. I was a bit annoyed with myself because I’d made this before with great success. In the end it tasted great – and looked pretty good too.


Above: Say it with steak, not flowers, I reckon…the potatoes were all they promised to be: crunchy (but creamily fluffy within!) and garlicky. The beans were…well, they made our dinner look healthier.

Because the table was too covered in junk for us to eat on we opted for the lounge where we watched another installment of Season 2 Outrageous Fortune on DVD…before switching over to TV3 to watch the current season’s episode. They should definitely be paying me for all the free advertising I’m giving them! In the ads I made the icing for the now-cooled sponges. It involved butter, (90g) white chocolate, (250g) sour cream (250g) and icing sugar (250g) in rather terrifying proportions. It was very easy to make though – melt this, stir this, sift that – and looked absolutely wondrous:


Above: Mmmmmmmm….There was actually rather a lot of icing, which made licking the bowl all the more gratifying.

I then thickly iced and sandwiched the sponges. It has to be said that the baked sponges look rather shallow and unimpressive, but once they are filled and iced it is another story altogether. I thought a dusting of cocoa on top might make it evocative of a cappucino…See?


Above: The finished Blonde Mocha Cake.

I have to say, it is an inspired flavour pairing. I think if I was having an actual espresso, I would rather have some dark chocolate, but for coffee in cake-form, white chocolate is the way to go. It’s rich fudginess is the perfect foil for the smoky depth that the coffee provides, the slight bitterness of which means that the combination isn’t at all cloying.

From Pig’s Bum to Cowpats…

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Haven’t posted in a wee while on account of studying for an upcoming Shakespeare exam, my only one – hoorah!

Last night’s dinner came via Nigella.com, which has a section where people can post their own recipes. It is indeed fertile ground for food creations, and I found two recipes that suited the ingredients I had to hand. The main was a Turkish dish, very easy, more of a suggestion than a recipe. Into a casserole dish go chicken pieces (I used thighs as that is what we always have) a chopped onion, chopped potatoes, a can of tomatoes, and a sprinkling of cinnamon. Bake till the chicken and potatoes are cooked, and well, that’s it. To go with I made something called Pumpkin Tian, which involves cubing some pumpkin, dusting with a little seasoned flour, sprinkling with grated parmesan and baking.

The end result:

Above: Turkish Chicken with Potatoes and Tomatoes.

There was a photo of the chicken with the pumpkin on the side but the stove looked a bit toooo grimy for my liking – it has since been given a wipe so don’t worry! The chicken tasted great, really warming and hearty, and cooking everything bathed in tomatoes meant that the chicken was super moist and the potatoes flavoursome. I can’t honestly say that I tasted the cinnamon, so I added an extra shake before serving. If I was to make this again I might biff a whole cinnamon quill in while it cooks and fish it out at the end, for extra flavour.

Because it was a day of the week ending in Y, I had a hankering for some pudding. To go with the homestyle dinner, I thought that a chocolate self-saucing pud might be good. I think chocolate self saucing pudding is one of those dishes in the canon of “classic” New Zealand food, I’m not sure how or why this came about though. I remember Mum making it occasionally for pudding when I was younger, in my household it was called, rather poetically, “Chocolate Floating Pudding.” The recipe I used came from Nigella’s Feast, and is not only easy to make but requires the simplest of ingredients – a great one for when you think you have nothing in the cupboard. Nigella’s recipe is a somewhat modern take on the original though, with cinnamon in the mixture and an optional slug of rum in with the water that goes on top. Not having rum, I used some Marsala all’uovo.


Above: Closeup on the Chocolate Floating Pudding. Nigella succinctly notes that the pudding “isn’t the most beauteous creation, there is a touch of the cowpat about it.” I feel that my photo is a direct visual realisation of her description.

No harm done, as it tasted fantastic. The marsala added resiny depth and fullness of flavour and it was as easy to eat (doused liberally with milk) as it was to make.

A Steaming Mishap, and late-night brownies.

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I got home from work a bit early yesterday, and convinced myself that it was cold enough to use my steamer (it was quite mild outside really.) In my Supersavers book, there is a recipe for what looks like steamed, deconstructed, spag bol. That is, you cook some short pasta (I did macaroni, as the book recommended) add mince, canned tomatoes, frozen beans, dried thyme, garlic and an egg. Put it in your pudding steamer and steam for two hours. I was smitten not only because I got to steam something again, but also because miraculously, we had the exact ingredients required. So, two episodes of Season 1 Outrageous Fortune later, (did I mention that we bought the DVD and are rapturously pleased with it?) it was ready. I served it with the remaining asparagus, which I roasted, as per a suggestion of Nigella’s in How To Eat. If you are a fan of asparagus, PLEASE try this! It is wonderful! Just a 220 C oven, a tablespoon of olive oil, 15 minutes, and then sprinkle it with a little salt. It is nutty and slightly crispy and absolutely fantastic. Second only to asparagus rolls (on white bread with canned asparagus) for my favourite way of eating it.

Anyway…maybe I didn’t grease the pudding bowl enough (didn’t grease it at all, come to think of it) but the steamed mince thingy really didn’t unmould well – only half of it, as you can see below, came out. No matter – it’s not what you would call a ‘photogenic’ dish and I’m sure that it would have looked ugly even if it had turned out properly!
Above – Half of our dinner. The other half is still in the steamer…

Well, it tasted good, which was the important thing, but I don’t see how a combination of its ingredients could really go wrong. And it did seem like the exact sort of recipe you could expect to find in a book called “Supersaver’s.” It benefited from salt, and it could have definitely been improved with some cheese. But, cheese is expensive and grating is a pain, so we don’t often eat it frivolously. As you know, the asparagus was amazing.
Emma was babysitting last night, and Kieran, Stefan, Tim and I were all watching Outrageous Fortune. (pausing only to switch off the DVD and turn to Prime for Flight of the Conchords) Somewhere in the middle of this, I got a real hankering for some kind of pudding. Problem was, time was ticking on. Suddenly I decided to make something I used to do a lot as a youngster – Alison Holst’s chocolate brownies. Now, I’m not teeerribly fond of La Holst (she does seem to take the fun out of cooking) but as I said, I am very familiar with these brownies and knew they’d do the trick. I used the Dollars And Sense cookbook that Mum gave me some years back (a book filled with many gems actually) and got Tim to help me round up ingredients so as to get it going faster.
It is very easy, one of those wonderful one-pot melt and mix recipes that leave you with a minimum of washing up! No fancy ingredients required, but I added some chopped dark chocolate (had a bit lying round in the cupboard.) We put it in the oven, and halfway through another episode of Outrageous Fortune, they were ready. Not as densely squidgy and delicious as Nigella’s, but good for a quick fix, and much cheaper. You can see below what was left of them!
Above: Brownies, made in a silicone tin (can it still be called a tin if it’s made of silicone?) that Tim’s parents gave me.