Category: Contains Nuts

almond looks, that chill devine

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

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

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

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

almond milk and coconut sugar creme brulee

a recipe by myself

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

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

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

a serene mess a serene mess

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

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

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

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

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

music lately: 

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

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

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

suddenly colder, it bowled me right over

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So it has come to this: ya girl made what is basically a salad and when writing the recipe, called it a bowl instead.

Compelling, no?

But yeah, while bowl food carries with it an oddly smug, insistent attitude, it would be equally insistent and smug of me to deny how good it is; I love that you can really just put anything on top of rice and call it A Bowl, how it contains so many different tastes and textures, and really makes you feel like someone who is a Pinterest star under the name of She Wears Striped Boatneck Tshirts or My Glowing Clean Natural Kitchen or Oh! Dream a Dream, You Wanderer rather than just being an achingly tired rat-human making fun of blog names on Pinterest.

Over the last few days my body has been doing this thing where my sinuses are suddenly made of concrete and I’m even dopier than usual which is honestly something to behold and I cannot, simply cannot, stop sneezing. I decided to put a whole lot of rudely healthy ingredients into a bowl in the hopes of it having some effect on me (the woman who served me at the supermarket: “you should put some ice on your sinuses, your face is all puffy.” me, internally: “I feel like there’s some kind of code you just violated.”) The crowning jewel of it all is the matcha mayonnaise, pairing matcha powder’s intense, oh-wow-I-accidentally-swallowed-grass flavour with equally green olive oil and a little apple cider vinegar, the effect of it all is surprisingly wonderful. If you don’t have matcha powder or feel weary at the thought of making your own mayonnaise, simply spoon over aioli or some other condimenty-paste thing.

Similarly, you can substitute any number of things for any number of things here, but this is the recipe I made and it is so, so very good – a ton of texture and crunch, with earthy turmeric and oily, charred broccoflower and sweet baby carrot and salty, creamy feta and magical walnuts.

I cannot lie, this actually takes a ton of effort to put together and uses so many dishes, especially if you haven’t made the mayonnaise ahead of time, but it is so delicious and has the decency to produce a fair amount of leftovers. And importantly, it’s full of health-making ingredients to make your immune system remember who the boss is here (I mean, I’m still massively sick the following day after eating it but I’m sure I’d be way worse without it, right?)

aggressively healthy bowl with matcha mayonnaise

a recipe by myself. 

  • half a cup of quinoa
  • one teaspoon ground turmeric
  • two tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus more for roasting the vegetables
  • half a head of broccoflower (or broccoli or cauliflower, obviously) 
  • four or so baby carrots
  • a few cloves of garlic, left whole and unpeeled
  • a handful each of walnut kernels and pumpkin seeds
  • half a bunch of cavolo nero leaves
  • 100g or so feta (optional, I suppose)

Cook the quinoa in a large pan of boiling water until it’s fluffy and expanded and, well, cooked. Drain and rinse in a sieve under cold water, then place in your serving bowl and stir in the olive oil and turmeric, plus sea salt to taste. 

Meanwhile, set your oven to 220C/450F and slice the broccoflower into halved and quartered florets. Leave the carrots whole but trim the frondy tops off. Place the florets and carrots plus the garlic cloves on a baking tray, drizzle generously with olive oil, and roast until a bit charred and browned on the edges – around fifteen minutes or so.

Arrange the roasted vegetables and garlic cloves (pop them out of their papery casings first) on top of the quinoa. Place the feta, cubed or crumbled with your own hands, in the bowl. Scatter over the walnuts and pumpkin seeds – I put them on the baking tray that the vegetables were on and used the remaining heat from the oven that I’d just turned off to toast them a bit first – and tuck cavolo nero leaves around the edges of everything. I tried to put everything in neat lines, but it doesn’t really matter! Spoon over the matcha mayonnaise and add more salt if you feel like you need it. 

matcha mayonnaise

  • one large, fresh, organic, free range, bla bla bla egg
  • one heaped teaspoon of matcha powder, or more if you like
  • one teaspoon dijon mustard
  • one tablespoon boiling water
  • around half a cup rice brain oil, or similarly plain oil
  • a third to one half of a cup of extra virgin olive oil
  • two tablespoons apple cider vinegar
  • sea salt, to taste

Crack the egg into a bowl, and add the matcha powder and mustard. Whisk briskly just to get everything incorporated, then add the boiling water while continuing to whisk. Continue whisking for what will feel like forever, while slowly adding the oil in a slow drizzle, around a tablespoonful at a time, continually whisking between additions. Does this make sense? Whisk hard, add oil slowly, that’s all. Once you’ve added all the oil, whip in the apple cider vinegar and salt. 

Now, by this point, either it will have thickened significantly and look like mayonnaise, or it will have thickened a bit at resemble a kind of green milkshake. Not to worry: put it in the fridge for an hour and it should turn lusciously thick. Give it a stir before using. Keep for a week or two. 

I’m not going to go down the line and list all the good vitamins and minerals that you get from everything in here but suffice to say, turmeric is powerful stuff and it’s my understanding that a tablespoon of matcha powder is the equivalent of replacing your entire bloodstream with green tea, plus all that olive oil and the nuts and seeds will make you shiny, and garlic and cider vinegar are all germ-fighty and quinoa is, y’know, quinoa, and I haven’t even got started on the green vegetables.

The matcha mayonnaise recipe makes an awful lot but it’s a charming way to take in that green powder – the vinegar and the oil plus the silky, aerated texture sort of encases any harshness of flavour and lifts it up and glides it right to the parts of your tastebuds that enjoy that sort of bitter vibe without dropping it too hard. Uh, it tastes nice, is what I’m saying. Don’t be afraid of how much oil goes into it – you can use less extra virgin olive oil and more plain if you’re worried about the expense – but use some, even just a couple of tablespoons, please, because the green-on-green flavours are so perfect together. Use leftovers as a spread for sandwiches, to rakishly dip truffle fries in for some kind of intensely pastoral experience, to accompany pickled vegetables (it’s 2016, I know you have pickled vegetables on your agenda), however you please.

If you read this and were all “hot dog, I need more vegetables in my life”, perhaps consider these other salads I’ve blogged about –  Baby Kale and Pomegranate Salad, Silverbeet, Parsley and Horseradish Slaw, or The Rainbow Room Peanut and Carrot Salad.

title from: local hero Bic Runga and her oh so stunning song Suddenly Strange, from, I wanna say, 1996? Maybe 1995? From a time when your opportunity to see music videos was limited to a two hour show on Sundays at 10am that played the top 20 hits in the country that week. I don’t wanna be all “kids these days” but guys, it sucked.

music lately: 

Honestly I don’t know when it’s a good time to watch The Last Five Years – a movie based directly on the Jason Robert Brown off-Broadway musical which follows the blooming and deterioration of a relationship, but with the two main characters’ stories traveling backwards and forwards in time simultaneously, meeting in the middle for one song. I KNOW. Anyway the last song, Goodbye Until Tomorrow/I Could Never Rescue You is my absolute favourite and brings me to my knees and if you’re feeling fragile you probably definitely should listen to it because why not, the sheer optimism from her colliding with his resigned it’s-over self and then-her is unaware of now-him and now-her and it’s awful! But! Such a beautiful, beautiful song, listen to it, watch the whole thing, do it.

Hailee Steinfeld, Love Myself. This song is also good!

next time: white chocolate and burnt butter ice cream.

eleanor rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been

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I started writing this blog while slightly hungover after the Visa Wellington on a Plate launch party, and I’ll finish it slightly drunk. Or at least that’s what I thought two nights ago when I got in after work (and after a couple of after-work drinks); when I woke up on Sunday morning I realised I’d been distinctly less productive than how it felt at the time, and had to delete a very rambling paragraph where I tried valiantly to really convince you of the specificity of the tanginess of buttermilk. This is what happens when I miss out on my window of opportunity to write solidly! On the upside “The Specificity of the Tanginess of Buttermilk” sounds 100% like a lesbian novel set in the 60s that would get adapted into an acclaimed and beautiful but ultimately award-snubbed feature film, doesn’t it?

It was now a whole week ago that I made this, but it resonates still: a risotto containing not much at all but somehow still incredibly full of flavour depths and things of interest to your tastebuds. Walnuts toasted in butter, sizzled capers, slightly crisp from the heat, miso paste and buttermilk.

The miso paste acts like an instagram filter, boosting everything it touches while still leaving the original risotto below fairly unchanged. The buttermilk, even more than the miso, is the magic ingredient here – it gives the aforementioned specific tanginess that echoes thick Greek yoghurt or sour cream, but somehow still gives a creaminess to the texture as well. It makes the richness of the browned butter more sharpened without making the overall dish too heavy. It’s just really good. You end up with this aggressively simple yet deeply-toned dish that’s as intensely comforting to eat – all soft and warm and creamy – as it is to make. Or at least, I find risotto comforting to make, all that endless stirring of the rice as it slowly, slowly swells and cooks becomes meditative, like white noise in food form. In Nigella Lawson’s book Kitchen she refers to it as “the solace of stirring”, and the result is threefold, TBH – as well as the cooking and eating of risotto being calming, reading about Nigella describing the calming nature of risotto is honestly the most soothing thing ever.

buttermilk risotto with miso, toasted walnuts and capers

a recipe by myself

  • around 25g butter
  • a handful of walnuts (70 – 100g) roughly chopped
  • two tablespoons of capers
  • one cup of risotto-friendly rice such as arborio or carnaroli
  • three tablespoons of dry vermouth such as Noilly Prat, or use dry white wine (sparkling is fine! Just nothing too sweet)
  • one stock cube of your choosing (I used chicken because that’s what I had)
  • one tablespoon white miso paste
  • three tablespoons of good-quality buttermilk (I used Karikaas – it has the texture of thin yoghurt. Some commercial buttermilk is kind of lumpy and weird. But also: aren’t we all.)

Fill a kettle with water and bring to the boil. (You’ll be using this in a bit to top up the risotto as it’s cooking.) Melt the butter in a saucepan and then tip in the walnuts. Once they’re lightly browned remove them from the pan and set aside (I just put them on the plate I was planning to eat my cooked risotto on) and then throw in the capers. Once the capers are thoroughly sizzled, remove them to the same plate as the walnuts, and pour in the rice. Stir the grains in the butter so they’re all covered and get a chance to toast a little, then pour in the vermouth – it will hit the pan with a hiss and smell amazing. Once it’s absorbed, crumble in the stock cube and stir in the miso paste.

Pour in some hot water from the kettle and start your stirring process – just keep stirring over a medium heat till the rice grains have absorbed it all, then add more. This will take a good twenty minutes and there’s no way around it, but it’s nice to just stand there in a trance over a warm pan.

Once the rice is thoroughly cooked, all soft and creamy but with a tiny bit of bite, remove from the heat and stir in the buttermilk – adding more if you like – and tip over the walnuts and capers, scraping in any browned butter that has pooled under them. Stir in more actual butter if you like (I always do) and serve immediately.

I tried turning the leftovers into arancini but they fell apart pretty well immediately (to which I was like “I can relate to this”) but having swiped a forkful of the cold risotto before adding eggs and breadcrumbs and then ruining everything, I can attest to the fact that it definitely keeps well. The walnuts can be changed out for whatever nut you like, but I did choose them on purpose – their autumnal butteriness and soft bite is the only interruption I want in this otherwise formless bowl of rice.

Back to where I started on this post, I would like to reiterate that the Visa Wellington on a Plate launch was super cool! I ate lots of gin and elderflower jelly and drank many chardonnays (I once had a dream about chardonnay where it was described as “buttery and rowdy” and I swear that’s how all chardonnays have presented themselves to me since) and hung out with cool people and hooned much fernet and champagne at the extremely great Noble Rot wine bar launch afterwards. Never mind moderation, I’m about spending three weeks in bed followed by sand-blasting myself with glamour and fanciness for 24 hours. Better than any fancy event this week however was the fact that I finally saw a capybara IRL after being fans of them for many years, and five years on from my tragic (tragic, I tell you!) and fruitless wait at the Berlin Zoo to try and see them. There are FOUR of them at the Wellington Zoo direct from Paris – how sophisticated – and seeing their beautifully regal, yet utterly dingus-y faces today made five-years-ago me feel finally at peace.

So calm. Like a risotto.

PS: If you enjoyed reading about this risotto and want to immerse yourself in the damn stuff, please consider considering this Oven-baked Risotto and this Pea Risotto that I’ve also blogged about here.

title from: Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles, although for many years I genuinely believed my dad wrote this song because his band did a cover of it and so my first introduction to it was hearing them play it during their Sunday band practices.

music lately:

Johnny Cash, I Hung My Head. It has the most phenomenally beautiful – and immediate – building of piano chords, which are typical of many of the songs in his later collections of covers. (Kudos to one of the user comments on the Youtube video: “how are like all his songs about playing with guns going wrong”)

The Cribs, Mirror Kissers. Whatchu know about 2006 nostalgia?

Joan Osborne, Right Hand Man. This song goes OFF and I don’t know how that What if God Was One of Us song became her only real big hit when this one is so big and hitty.

next time: I made a big lunch for my two best friends and I’m gonna blog about it!

 

for the want of the price of tea and a slice

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Things I’ve said at work lately:

– here, have this salted chocolate cashew butter slice that I made. It’s dairy free and gluten free!

– uhh I have to go to the bathroom because my satin jumpsuit is actually on backwards and I’ve only just noticed

– hey, I know we’re kind of busy but I have a rather singular situation, the centre bit of my bra is hanging on by a fragile, tautly pulled thread and if I shake one more cocktail it will very likely break and bust open, and since I’m wearing a cropped top there is very little room for error here. Is it okay if I run home and change my bra? I can be back really soon- oh, you were just coming to tell me I could sign out? So there was actually no need for me to tell you any of this?

As well as wearing clothing quite uselessly, I also like to occasionally bring in treats to work to boost both morale and blood sugar. In this case I’d been toying with an idea, batting it about like a cat with a small felt mouse on a string, about some kind of nut butter slice covered in chocolate. What I made was fine, with a soft, fudgy texture in the base followed by the snappish crunch of cold dark chocolate, but it wasn’t quite there. As soon as I sprinkled some salt on top the flavours sprang to life and it all made sense and tasted properly delicious as opposed to giving the illusion of tasting delicious. So don’t leave that bit out, even if it seems either excessively sodium-ish or small enough to forget about.

This is so easy to make – truly, the hardest bit is getting the various nut butters and coconut oil out of their jars without flinging them everywhere. Indeed: if you end up getting slightly more than half a cup of each ingredient it’s completely fine. I know I probably did.

salted chocolate cashew butter slice

a recipe by myself 

  • half a cup cashew butter
  • half a cup peanut butter
  • half a cup coconut oil, melted
  • half a cup LSA mix, or ground almonds
  • quarter of a cup icing sugar
  • one tablespoon honey or maple syrup
  • 150g dark chocolate
  • sea salt

Mix the nut butters and oil together till smooth, then tip in the sugar, honey, and LSA and stir again. Pour it into a brownie tin lined with baking paper, and freeze till firm. Gently melt the dark chocolate and remaining coconut oil together, and pour over the base. Freeze again. Once you’re pretty confident that it’s completely solid, sprinkle with plenty of sea salt and slice up however you like.

(Regarding that bra situation: I juuuust made it home before I heard this muffled popping noise indicating the valiant thread had finally snapped. I was sad to see it go, I called it my “power bra” because I got it in New York and it basically positioned you in such a way so you could break a glass ceiling with your own buoyant cleavage. I was like…I’ve defeated my power bra. Am I too powerful? Do I have to eat the bra now, like that scene with the Khaleesi in Game of Thrones?)

As well as giving you an energy boost and being full of shiny-making ingredients, this has a gorgeously buttery, mellow flavour with a pleasingly dense bite to it. Texture is everything here but you can totally play with flavour too – you’re welcome to use entirely cashew butter in the mix, but I decided to cut it with the much cheaper peanut butter so as to not make this ridiculously extravagant. You could, however, use almond butter or all peanut butter or add cinnamon to the base or whatever you like, really. If avoiding dairy isn’t a daily task for you, then you could definitely use white or milk chocolate on this instead – and I do adore both – but the bitter plainness of the dark chocolate against the creamy, nutty base is genuinely pleasing.

We ended up being extremely busy on the night that I brought in my container of this in to work, so I left it in the freezer and when I opened up the bar the next day it was entirely gone: I am taking this as positive feedback. I myself couldn’t stop eating the stuff that I’d left in the freezer at my apartment, so for what it’s worth my own personal feedback is highly positive.

All I’ve really been doing is working lately and I’m so tired that all I can talk about is how tired I am like it’s my one personality trait (as opposed to in high summer, when my one personality trait is that I’m sweatily overheated.) But I managed to make this delicious stuff, and I somehow overthrew my own Power Bra, so I guess I’m doing alright.

title from: Us and Them by Pink Floyd – I used to be incredibly obsessed with them, then dropped off a bit, and now am back to gently sincere fondness.

music lately:

Billy Bragg and Wilco, Walt Whitman’s Niece. I used to listen to this song all the time, it has this rollicking, shambling quality that I love and the call-and-answer bit is charming.

Roots Manuva, Witness Dub. This song is on the work playlist and no matter how exhausted I am it brings me back up every single time. It is a TUNE.

next time: I’ve been mucking around with this roasted broccoli turmeric coconut thing recipe which may appear here.

it is a new year I should be happy that I am still here

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Yeah that’s right, I ended 2015 and started 2016 with a blog post about a salad. On that note, happy new year to you all, I would’ve got this blog post out sooner in this infant year, but instead I’ve been involved in such rich, vibrant activities as “staring into space silently berating myself for not blogging” and “working a lot” and “staring blankly some more while unhelpfully self-flagellating.”
But when I get it right I damn well get it right, as this salad shall attest. I worked New Year’s Eve and the following day, which was all good – I have very strong feelings about money and getting it, after all – but it did mean I didn’t get to see my two best friends Kim and Kate, who keep more traditional hours. We decided to solve this by having a get-together on my next day off, wherein we drank the literal champagne (Moet! And I know it!) that had charmingly fallen into my lap over Christmas, and toasted to ourselves and the year ahead. We also got to debrief about our 2016 tarot cards (sometime between closing at work on New Years Eve and opening at work on New Years Day I managed to fit in the world’s quickest reading with them both) which was heartening because several cards made me nervous…but my card that represents the entire year is all about not being so insistent on doing everything by myself and not being afraid to ask for help and seeking out mentors and such which certainly has a soothing vibe to it that helps counteract the other cards with their subtext like “You ruin everything!” and “must you continue to ruin?” 
Earlier that week on a whim – the only way to fly! – I purchased a block of paneer, a South Asian cheese that delightfully holds its shape after being fried and has a fresh, calm flavour and a distinct lack of saltiness. I decided I’d make us three a salad to accompany the champagne, and this confrontationally simple recipe is the result of that decision. Just fried cheese, firm fragrant mango, toasty nutty cashews, and some leaves, and that’s it. I’m not sure if this is really what you are supposed to do with paneer but it sure as hell lends itself well to these flavours; all that’s really needed is some olive oil and salt and you have yourself an excellent time. 

paneer, mango and cashew salad

a recipe by myself

250g, or thereabouts, paneer
one firm mango
70g cashews
half a packet of baby kale leaves, or a few handfuls of your nearest green stuff (I had kale left over from the last salad so…yeah!)
olive oil
sea salt

Slice the paneer into pieces and heat up a few tablespoons of olive oil in a wide frying pan. Tumble the paneer slices in and allow them to fry till golden on both sides, which will take a few minutes. Not gonna sugar-coat it, the oil will sputter a bit but just try to dodge it and stick it out. 

Remove the paneer from the pan and tip in the cashews, stirring them for a minute or two till they’re a little toasted and browned. 

Slice the mango into roughly even smallish pieces, and mix together with the cashews, the paneer, and the kale leaves. Drizzle over more olive oil and sprinkle over a decent amount of salt, stir gently and there you have it: a salad. 

This has that salty, oily, slightly sweet, sour, fresh, crunchy thing going on whereby it doesn’t look like much but when you start eating it you just want to shovel it into your mouth for eternity. If your mango is particularly ripe you might want to squeeze in a little lime juice but it really doesn’t require much.

Bringing me nonstop joy over the holiday season was the beautiful baby raptor of a cat that I was looking after for a friend: I mean.

 look at him

look
aaaagh

I’m currently in the painful throes of looking for an apartment in town to move into when my current lease ends but a large part of me is like, what if I run to the hills and live alone with five hundred cats? There is no way that can’t end well? Look at his stupid happy little intelligent lion face though, honestly. 
I am not entirely failing at the maelstrom of resolutions that I set out for myself: I am eating vegetables, I am staying hydrated 2K16, I did drink some actual champagne. And I am going to be late for work if I don’t publish this and since having a literal dollar to my name is another of my resolutions and I have been hitherto too sleepy to write this, I shouldn’t overthink this moment and will leave you with a good selfie to provide you with bracing good cheer (she says, presumptuously…and yet accurately? And yet so presumptuously. But not without reason!) 
I got a long overdue fringe trim and the hairdresser used straighteners so I was briefly the shiniest.
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Title from: Say Anything, Try To Remember, Forget. Say it with angst! 
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Music lately:

Coco Solid feat Disasteradio, Slow Torture. This queen! Everything Coco Solid does is gold and so unsurprisingly this song is lush and sexy and poppy and cool as hell. 
Idina Menzel, See What I Wanna See I haven’t listened to this LaChiusa musical in so, so long and it is electrifying. There’s not a lot of it online but if you have spotify you’re in luck. And Idina remains my idol for like, wow, the tenth or so year now. 
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next time: no salad, for the sake of variety alone. 

but i tell ya, it’s gonna be a champagne year

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the kale gaze
How do I know I’m getting old? I’m delighted that I get asked for ID when buying alcohol, instead of being righteously indignant, and you can barely make eye contact with me without me leaning in conspiratorially and saying “this year has gone so fast, hasn’t it!” Luckily I have immaturity of spirit and a confusingly youthful face on my side should things get all too ancient up in here (people tend to think I’m 21 or 22, I am in fact staring down the barrel of thirty entire years old.) And how do I know it’s nearly a new year? Because the talk of how fast the year has gone increases alarmingly, and one’s thoughts turn to things like self-improvement and goals and horrifically hi-def introspection. 
2015 has been a year of surprises and changes; of staying broke, of things not going how I wanted them and things going better than I ever thought possible in ways that I still have and in ways that are now gone to me. But I have managed to finish it sleeping well for pretty much the first time, in the best job I’ve ever had, and somehow closer than ever with my two best friends Kim and Kate.  
The next year though, is going to be the year of the following for me – just a few low-key easily achieved resolutions, because I love to make things easy for myself, don’t I: 
  • eat a vegetable but for real this year
  • drink a ton of water, stay hydrated 2K16
  • hustle more and blog harder and really do things with this blog because it’s so great and generally just shine really bright
  • go to more fancy dinners
  • save money so that living paycheck to paycheck isn’t the norm, and eventually so that I can actually save money to travel again
  • stay on top of the anxiety 
  • get buffer arms so that I am better at lifting the glass bins at work and also look powerful
  • give the illusion of being bordering-on-terrifyingly hot without making too much effort really 
  • move to a nice apartment in town that feels like a haven and then damn well make it a haven
  • try to not ruin good things or get stuck in bad things
  • know who I am and be peaceful about it
  • cook as much as possible since I know what kind of hours I work so can’t use that as an excuse really even thought I looooove using things as an excuse
  • get a good liquor collection finally, like, seriously 
  • drink more Real Champagne
  • read more books
  • dance heaps
  • pay off my credit card debt (loooooool! But y’know, go big or go home)
  • keeping some form of planner/diary so I remember things more often
  • probably more things that I’ve forgotten about 
So it should surprise no-one, with this in mind, that my head start on the goals comes in the form of eating some kale. Which itself comes in the form of this very pretty salad.
I read about massaging kale in the Little Bird Unbakery raw vegan cookbook, which is where you put sea salt and a olive oil on your leaves and give them a good rub to soften them somewhat, I’m guessing because they absorb the oil as the salt draws out the moisture. Kale is combatively healthy and does have a fantastic flavour but tends towards a kind of off-puttingly hostile toughness of leaf; doing this process – despite making me feel like I should’ve asked my salad “was that good for you?” – does in fact help make everything more delicious and approachable. And it’s not like you have to make eye contact with it, or indeed anyone, while you’re doing it. 
And then, in case you’re all, “just one noted superfood in this recipe? Why don’t I just go eat literal garbage?” I’ve also included pomegranate seeds. These beautiful red jewels look incredible against the green leaves, and they provide a sourness that both melds with and uplifts the potential heaviness of the oil and salt. They’re also crunchy! Which is fun!  
 not entirely convinced that pomegranate is real. What are thoooooose.

Quantities in the recipe are vague as, since this is summer (or at least, it is in New Zealand, where I am) and I don’t want your brain to overheat, and also because you can increase or decrease things depending on your needs. While this would be delightful with some avocado, fried halloumi or crumbled feta added, as a complete salad on its own it’s very excellent. I ate the lot for a late lunch yesterday (I know it’s just salad but it was soooo hot outside and I could only face food that was 90% water) and upon consuming it I could practically feel my red blood cells smiling beatifically as they scooted around my in my veins.

baby kale and pomegranate salad

a recipe by myself

two or three handfuls of baby kale leaves
seeds from half a pomegranate (or a whole one! live your truth) 
five or six cherry tomatoes, halved or quartered
quarter of a cup sunflower seeds or small nuttish thing of your choice
extra virgin olive oil
sea salt
mint leaves
basil leaves
a tiny pinch of cinnamon

Put the kale leaves into a good-sized bowl, sprinkle over a pinch of sea salt and drizzle over a generous quantity of olive oil (but okay, about a tablespoon or so) and massage the leaves, like, just do it, all you have to do is rub them between your fingers and thumbs till they soften a little and change to a darker green. When you can no longer deal with this, stir in the pomegranate seeds, sunflower seeds, tomatoes, cinnamon, and as many mint and basil leaves, roughly chopped, as you like. 

Give it a taste and if you think it needs more olive oil and more sea salt then go hard. I feel like there’s not a salad in the land that doesn’t benefit from being oilier and saltier. 

I had a distinctly wonderful Christmas, spent largely with rad work people eating lush barbecue food and brining myself in generous quantities of Real Champagne. The weather was searingly hot and yet I managed to not really get sunburned, and both Santa and family members charmingly got some parcels sent to me in time so I had presents to open on the day. I’m also looking after a friend’s adorable cat which means waking up to a curled up wee ball of fluff beside me every morning! It’s all I’ve ever wanted! He’s also fearsomely bloodlusty though, which made Christmas Eve a little interesting. The cat seemed to want to recreate the Gifts of the Magi story for me, presenting first an enormous dead rat, and then the world’s vastest cockroach. I was like, what’s next? Frankincense? Me? Is it me? But luckily a Christmas miracle occurred and the third gift was the gift of no more corpses.

I hope your Christmas and/or general holiday December times have been equally charming and way less rat-filled. I am going to be working New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and am quite chill with that, since there are worse ways to spend an evening than making drinks and earning money. I’m also going to try and eat more kale between now and the end of the year (tomorrow!) since I am the actual greatest hero this world has ever known.
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title is from: St Vincent’s achingly slow and gorgeously gorgeous song Champagne Year. It feels appropriate and even if it didn’t it’s still (threefold!) gorgeous. 
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music lately:

Say Anything, I Want To Know Your Plans. This band which has been around forever has been one of this year’s very very best discoveries for me.

Dark Dark Dark, Patsy Cline the lyrics to this are so sad that you should put a helmet on your heart before listening. Like, do yourself a favour and don’t listen to it. (But do! But don’t.)

Primal Scream, Movin’ On Up. In summary, it’s so summery!
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next time: it’ll be 2016! Laura’s time to shine!  

we’re so much more than pointless fixtures, instagram pictures

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*lou reed voice* shiny shiny 

I’ve always been one to self-absorbedly imagine that I’m in a scene in a movie while doing otherwise mundane things like staring inscrutably out the window while on a train or sitting inscrutably on a park bench or getting a coffee by myself, inscrutably – I know I’m not the only one that does this! It’s like, this is the quiet bit in the indie movie where the camera stays fixed on me for an almost uncomfortably long time while I do something very normal but in an utterly enigmatic way. Right?

Anyway after spending the longest time of only listening to podcasts when getting to and from places, I’ve started listening to music through my headphones on my phone again (having got the Spotify app and an ad-free premium account) and wow, nothing enhances the “I’m a mysterious and important character in an indie film that you’ll guiltily download because you can’t stomach spending $25 on a ticket during festival season or waiting forever for it to have a limited-at-best release” feeling like walking down the road utterly immersed in your own personal soundtrack. Sauntering in the dark to Lazy Line Painter Jane by Belle and Sebastian – the lyrics are stupid but the beat and the melody are heavenly and the coda makes the mere act of walking seem like art; striding through the rain to Shazam by Spiderbait feeling like a complete brat as you jaywalk (in my defence the roads in Wellington are ridiculous and there’s nothing to do but jaywalk); drifting dreamily, almost floating, through the industrial end of town to Julee Cruise’s Rockin Back Inside My Heart. I know this is the most pretentious thing I’ve written in a long time and I sound like a teenager who has just discovered Morrissey (you should’ve seen me when I was a teenager who had just discovered Morrissey) but like, it’s just so, so, so long since I’ve done this and it’s such a small thing but it’s so amazing. That’s it, that’s the story: listening to music through headphones is nice, did you know?

*freddy mercury voice* hash! Aaa-aah, saviour of the universe!

Speaking of all the small things; I still haven’t replaced my lost SD card for my fancy digital camera, partly out of not wanting to spend excess money and partly out of a self-flagellating sense of punishment. As such my phone has graduated from being merely my best friend and confidante to my main camera. Which also makes it slightly harder to get a decent bundle of blog-worthy photos happening for any one dish I’ve made at any one time. In lieu of that, I’ve decided to do a wee round-up of some food I’ve made and quickly instagrammed lately – united they are greater than the sum of their parts, or something. All three of these things – peanut butter cookies; sausage and potato hash; and tomato and feta tart – are stupidly delicious and the recipes can be imparted to you super quickly, so…yeah. No harm done.

peanut butter cookies

one cup smooth peanut butter
one cup sugar
one egg
one teaspoon baking powder
dark chocolate

set your oven to 180 c/350 F. Mix all the ingredients together, roll the mixture into rather small balls (the smaller they are, the less likely they are to crumble) and place on a paper-lined baking tray. Press down slightly with the back of a spoon to flatten them juuuust a little. Bake for about ten minutes, then let them sit for ten minutes (important so they don’t crumble…again) before carefully transferring to a wire rack to cool. Melt the chocolate and spoon it over the top of the cooled cookies as you please. Makes many. 

If you’re a gluten-free person you will likely have encountered some version of this recipe already a million times but man it’s good – soft, chewy, salty-sweet cookies, the throat-coating peanut butter cut through with the crunch of bitter dark chocolate. I’d usually prefer milk chocolate here but using dark makes them dairy-free too – I made these to take into work one evening in a kind of a sustain-the-troops kind of move, and also because I thrive on presenting people with food that I’ve made whether they want it or not.

sausage and potato hash

four fresh pork sausages
two large floury potatoes
one onion, diced 
dried thyme
oil and butter
two eggs
HP sauce and/or ketchup/hot sauce/whatever other condiment your sodium-caked heart desires

It’s fairly uncool but if you microwave the sausages in a bowl of water for three minutes and then microwave the potatoes for three minutes (give both of them a stabbing with a fork first) then your life will be an awful lot easier. Otherwise consider simmering them in a pan of water for a bit first or just plough ahead and hope for the best. 

Heat plenty of olive oil or similar in a large pan. Gently fry the onion until softened and golden. Roughly chop the sausages and tip them into the pan, allow them to sizzle and brown. Then dice the potato fairly small, and add to the pan – try and get as much surface area touching the base of the pan as possible to encourage browning and crisping. Put a lid on the pan for about five minutes to allow the steam to cook the potato through, then remove the lid, turn up the heat, add a knob of butter and the thyme and allow everything to sizzle like whoa. Push everything to the side and crack the two eggs into the pan and allow them to fry till you’re quite satisfied. Remove from the heat; divide the sausage and potato mixture between two plates, top with the eggs, and apply as much sauce as you please. 

I made this for my wonderful girlfriend and myself on Sunday when we were both varying degrees of hungover and indecisive (okay, well she fried the eggs – I’m just not that great at eggs and she is) and it was the absolute perfect thing. Cheap, fast, fried, carb-loaded, slightly greasy, sustaining, nourishing, hot, covered in salt and sauce, and the ideal accompaniment to watching 21 Jump Street. From which we can learn two things: one, Dave Franco has ascended to being The Superior Franco, and two, Channing Tatum’s acting career is the greatest thing to happen to America this century.

tomato and feta tart 

one sheet ready-rolled puff pastry
half a tin of chopped tomatoes
one tablespoon cornmeal
about fifty or so grams of feta cheese
thyme leaves
a little oil, milk, melted butter or something for brushing the pastry with

Set your oven to 200 C/400 F and place some baking paper on a baking tray. Put the sheet of pastry on top and score a one-inch border around the edge – this is where you use the point of a knife to almost-but-not-quite cut through it, like you’re drawing a slightly smaller square inside of it. This is gonna make the edges puff up and make a fetching border once you bake it. Sprinkle the cornmeal over the middle of the pastry, drain the tomatoes well and spread them evenly across, then sprinkle/crumble the feta on top of the tomatoes. Brush the edges with melted butter or whatever if you like, and then bake for about 15-20 minutes until it’s golden, puffy and risen around the edges. Sprinkle with salt and strew with thyme leaves. Slice into bits and snarf the lot. 

Look, if you have some ready-rolled pastry in your fridge or freezer then you have the makings of a good time no matter how meagre the rest of your pantry supplies may be. You could literally just bake a piece of pastry and it would still be a charming snack. I mean, I wouldn’t be above such things. Tomatoes and feta are obvious pals so don’t even make me try to explain it to you, but there’s something fun about the tangy feta once it’s warmed through and how it contrasts with the relative sweetness of the tomatoes and the buttery, puffy pastry. This is another one that I threw together for my excellent gf and myself one Sunday and it’s the perfect lunch for two – cut it into four squares, have two each, put a little rocket or spinach on the side if you’re feeling outlandish, and deliciousness shall abound.

*no particular voice* this is a tomato and feta tart
As I alluded to before I’m trying so hard to spend as little money as possible right now, on account of how living paycheck to paycheck is no fun, but I also decided to ignore that rule and hoist myself off to a cafe to write this blog post over a coffee. Also it’s payday today! I doubt I’m gonna be able to afford to replace my SD card any time soon, so you’ll just have to get used to these phone-photos, but honestly instagram is so great that I’m not even too bothered (that said if you’re feeling like you’re too rich right now may I remind you that I have a paypal, pal) – somewhat unsurprisingly I love making my life look more dreamy and hazily lit than it really is. Just as I’m massively digging soundtracking my life like I’m the first person who discovered how to do this. Some might say it’s whimsical, some might say it’s insufferable and not even particularly interesting, but as long as they’re saying something I really don’t mind.
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title from: Queen Beyonce, with her drown-in-the-sexy song Rocket from her incredibly important self-titled album. Don’t listen to it unless you’re ready to fall over sideways. 
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music lately: 
Misterwives, Twisted Tongue. Uhhhh this is such a good pop song, I can’t even deal and I frankly refuse to deal. 
Beach House, A Walk In The Park. Another good one to make your way from A to B to. The perfect child of Billy Idol’s Eyes Without A Face and The Pixies’ Where Is My Mind (a perfect child that I never knew I needed, to be fair.) They’ve just been announced as coming to Laneway festival next year and I MUST GO. 
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next time: I mean technically it’s Spring, despite the weather being more appalling than it has been all winter, and I am determined to hunt down some asparagus. 

i’m not sick but i’m not well, and it’s a sin to live so well

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there is a Maori proverb: the kumara does not speak of its own sweetness. I love this proverb, but I do not resemble it, let’s face it.

After all my deep-lunging insistence in my last blog post that I want to be quadruply productive, the final week of July was a monumental write-off, as I was dramatically burdened with the literal flu. All I could do was lie in bed all flushed of cheek and starry of eye like some breathily consumptive side character from an LM Montgomery novel who gets struck down with illness as a cosmic punishment for being too “high-spirited”. Honestly it was absolute agony, I couldn’t even fill the time by watching movies or TV on my darling laptop because looking at screens cruelly made me feel queasy, and aside from hallucinating my way through several shifts at work all I did was sleep or doze fretfully while cursing this good-for-nothing flesh vessel of a body that had failed me so spectacularly and turned me into actual garbage. (I couldn’t even watch Pretty Little Liars. It was wretched, I can tell you.)

Needless to say I didn’t do any cooking. It’s 100% possible that I would’ve got better sooner if I hadn’t expended thousands of watts of energy on being angry and frustrated at how much time I was wasting by being sick – there has never been a more petulant and frowny invalid than I! – but here I finally am, maybe not entirely perfectly better but so improved and ready to exist again.

the blogger never stops speaking of their own sweetness

After spending that week living like my brain had been unceremoniously thrown into a ravine with me left behind to flail helplessly, I also felt like I’d forgotten what it was like to just up and make myself food like it was no big deal. I was, as such, writhing around indecisively being all “what shall I cooooook” yesterday when my flatmate and dear friend Charlotte mentioned that she’d made kumara chips with major success the night before. This suggestion inspired me to make something similar, and my brain finally made itself useful and presented me with the idea of roasting kumara and then covering it with some kind of feta-studded crumble.

It was an absolute, rapturous success – roastily sweet kumara with the crunch of lightly toasted walnuts and breadcrumbs roughly torn from a bread roll, bulgingly soft, tangy feta, and rich fragrant thyme. And not just to eat, but to look at, with the bright-white feta against the sunset orange of the kumara and jaunty pinpoints of herbal green. A damn masterpiece all round, and to make it even more endearing, it’s incredibly easy and fast to make.

roasted kumara with feta, walnuts, thyme and breadcrumbs

a recipe by myself

one good-sized orange kumara
olive oil
salt
about 100g soft feta
about half a cup fresh breadcrumbs (I just tore a bread roll into tiny/not so tiny pieces) 
a third of a cup of walnuts
about one tablespoon of fresh thyme leaves
one tablespoon pumpkin seeds

Set your oven to 200 C. Line a baking tray with baking paper. Slice the kumara fairly finely into slices of about half a centimetre – accuracy and uniformity is not particularly important here. Lay them on the baking tray and drizzle over some olive oil, using a pastry brush to spread it out evenly. Sprinkle over a little salt and roast them – I put the tray pretty close to the top of the oven – for fifteen to twenty minutes, turning over once halfway through, till they’re tender. 

While the kumara is in the oven, combine the breadcrumbs, thyme leaves, walnuts and pumpkin seeds in a small bowl, then crumble in the feta and gently mix it all together. Sprinkle this evenly over the kumara and return to the oven for another five to ten minutes just to toast the bread and soften the feta a little. Eat. 

If you don’t live within reach of a kumara, those gourd-shaped orange butternut squashes would be perfect instead, and you could always leave out the feta to make this completely vegan. 
I did do one other thing last week: I spatula’d myself out of bed long enough to go get a haircut, my first since I chopped my long hair off last year. It was nothing dramatic, just cleaning up the layers a bit so I didn’t look quite so much like I’d brushed my hair with a cheese grater; and I do believe the results are very cute.
Everything else, all my plans I’d had for Doing Things and Being Productive and Aggressively Achieving had to be put off, but on the upside I did insist on learning absolutely nothing from the experience about letting things go and putting one’s own wellbeing before one’s own expectations of, uh, one. 
Included in my plans for the upcoming unspecified period of time is reading The Sex Myth by Rachel Hills. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of it, but unfortunate enough for that to coincide with me being all busy and sick, but it’s nice to know it’s there, at least. Look at that sprightly cover art! Oh man I want to write another book. 
But let us be irritatingly positive and upbeat: I did feed myself, and it was wonderful. Go me. And if you’re feeling ill or been sick too in this bleak midwinter, my sincerest, like, so sincere it almost sounds like I’m making fun of you, sympathies. Get well soon! 
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title from: Harvey Danger, Flagpole Sitta. This song absolutely encapsulates for me that back-in-my-day thing of hearing a song on the radio and having to wait weeks to hear it again and having no idea what it was called or even what the lyrics were, in fact not even having heard it enough to satisfactorily hum it to yourself in your own head. It wasn’t until late 2000 that I learned what its name was and who wrote it, on some kind of song lyrics forum: yes, I’m kinda elderly. Also this song remains completely brilliant, if you don’t feel like springing about the room and singing lustily along with the chorus then I’m not sure we can be friends. (Also: I only just noticed how funny it is that they rhyme “well” with “well” in the chorus. How daring!) 
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music lately:

I remain on such a Faith No More kick and am playing the very heck out of their Live in London album on youtube; We Care A Lot is still so so so good. 
Demi Lovato, Cool For The Summer. I am so pro-Lovato, and love how we get all these summer bangers right in the middle of winter when they’re most needed. 
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next time: I refuse to be sick again, okay? I just refuse. So hopefully you’ll be hearing from me sooner rather than later. 

you could have my heart or we could share it like the last slice

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so delicious that Pony by Ginuwine starts to play non-diegetically when you take a bite

There’s a scene in the important film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, where Dewey Cox is starting his rapid trajectory towards being a famous rock’n’roll star. He tells his wife Edith, “I’m gonna miss some things, okay? I’m gonna miss some birthdays and some christenings. I’m gonna miss some births, period. It’s just unrealistic to expect that I’m gonna be here for every time you have a baby.” I’m currently relating heavily to this, apart from, tragically, the bit with the ascension to fame, because I’m week three into working roughly five thousand times more hours than I normally do. Luckily, I adore my job and doing so many hours does make payday fun, but all I’ve been doing is sleeping and working which doesn’t bode well for getting blog posts done, or indeed anything. In fact, I’ve been trying to write this very one here that you’re reading for about seven days now, but every time I went to write I would instead just stare into space and then wake up three hours later, gently spooning my laptop like it was some kind of ergonomically disappointing teddy bear.

Yet finally here I am! With a really wilfully stupid peanut butter chocolate caramel slice! It was in a brief moment of lucidity that I concocted it, taking a base made largely of peanut butter and actual butter, a centre made of condensed milk and more butter and a handful of roasted salted nuts, and a top of melted milk chocolate. Seriously, that’s really all there is to it. You pretty much know the recipe now.

hey baby, I think I wanna marry you

It sounds like it would be stupidly, almost uncomfortably sweet and rich, and while admittedly I have literal syrup running through my veins instead of blood and therefore my bar for the overly sweet is set quite high, I assert to you that it’s honestly very manageable to eat. In that you could easily manage to eat three quarters of it before you even realise the knife is in your hand and you’re standing at the fridge slicing off thick squares of it.

Oddly enough it’s the caramel centre that keeps it in check – you blast the hell out of the condensed milk and butter in the microwave before spreading it across the base, and all that heat reduces it down and brings out the ocean-deep dark toffee flavours present in the sugars. Then the roasted nuts, crunchy as popcorn and covered in salt, add to this. Just in case it starts to sound all too sensible I then cover it in the plainest sweetest mellowest milk chocolate, but with good reason, because dark chocolate would be too punishingly intense and make it a chore to eat.

it isn’t too hard to see, we’re in heaven

Speaking of important movies and delicious things that make people flustered, my one other accomplishment of recent time is, last night I went to the movies and watched Magic Mike XXL with my girlfriend and her flatmates. But Laura! I said to myself. Aren’t you really like…gay? How could a movie about male strippers possibly hold your precious attention? My people, this movie is one of the best pieces of filmmaking I’ve ever encountered, one of the most joyful, kind-hearted, generous movies, and honestly, a rare film where women of all shapes and skin colours and faces have fun and are celebrated and support their friends and are in charge and are never, ever the joke, even though you keep thinking that’s where the movie’s gonna go. A film where men are emotional and express their love for each other without once adding “no homo”, but also a bisexual character is not seen as a curiosity to be analysed and picked apart. A film where guys listen to women and help them, not in a “you frail stupid woman let me do this better than you” kind of way, but a “I’d like to make things better so you can be happy because that’d be nice” kind of way. Just when you think it’s gonna zig, it zags. Honestly I’m getting emotional just trying to write about it.

Oh and if you’re into the sight of men and stuff, there’s…a lot of abdominal muscles being flung around. But truly, this movie is so very good, in the way that an old dog tied up on the street waiting patiently for their owner is good. Take your mother, take your 300 year old grandmother, take your husband, take your nine year old child, take everyone to see this movie! Put it this way: I came out of it saying that I’d actually love to read think-pieces on it, and normally my attitude towards think-pieces is that they should be thrown into the ocean. So. While I’ve been berating myself frowningly for not being outstanding in the field of achievement lately, getting this movie under my belt (hey-oh!) makes me feel like I’ve used my time very wisely.

just imagine another song from the Magic Mike XXL soundtrack here okay

Okay, one more thing about this movie before I get back to that other ridiculously sexy caramel confection: I love that there was more or less zero conflict. The characters were just happy and chill and overcame small hurdles and that was it! I have come to realise that I hate when movies, especially movies about an existing entity are like, what shall we do with these characters that the audience knows and loves – better make them fight and be isolated from each other until about ten minutes before the end. (For some reason A Goofy Movie is what sprang to mind here: hot take, A Goofy Movie was a bit disappointing.) Up with niceness! Okay that’s quite the end of my breathless and shrieking thoughts on Magic Mike XXL. On here at least.

peanut butter chocolate caramel nut slice

a recipe that I made by smashing several Nigella recipes together and adding bits of my own thoughts so yeah

200g smooth peanut butter
50g soft butter
half a cup brown sugar
one and a half cups icing sugar

one tin sweetened condensed milk
200g butter
two tablespoons golden syrup
half a cup (or so) salted roasted mixed nuts 

200g milk chocolate

Line a brownie tin – either a 23cm square one or a regular sized rectangular one – with a large piece of baking paper. Use a wooden spoon to beat the peanut butter and butter together, then carefully stir in the sugars (I say carefully, because icing sugar tends to fly everywhere in dusty white clouds at the slightest provocation) until you have a sandy, crumbly mixture. Press it into the base of the baking tin, using the back of a spoon (it helps if you dust it with icing sugar first) to flatten it out fairly evenly. Refrigerate while you get on with the filling.

To make the filling, melt the butter in a decent-sized china bowl (or something else microwave-proof) and then stir in the condensed milk and golden syrup. Microwave for five to seven minutes, stirring every minute or so – it will bubble up angrily but shouldn’t overflow, it’s better to stir it too much than to let it burn or overflow though – by which stage it should be thickened, and darkened into a rich, but still fairly light, golden colour. Let it sit for a bit to cool slightly, and then stir in the nuts. Pour this over the peanut butter base, using a spatula to get every last bit out and to smooth it out on top, then refrigerate till set and firm. 

Finally, microwave the chocolate in short bursts till it’s collapsing, and stir till it’s totally melted and smooth. Gently spread across the caramel layer, and allow to set either in the fridge or a cool place. 

Wait, I’ve achieved two other things lately: I zoomed to a party after one of my shifts and danced my face off with friends and had my sister-from-another-species vibe with Percy the corgi reconfirmed.
And, I dyed my hair purple. Well, more specifically, I stuck my hands in the pot of purple dye and kind of mussed up my hair (which was at the time a fading blue colour) in a haphazard manner just to see what would happen. It turned out pretty well, I think. In fact there’s probably also a metaphor for my life in there (or at least I’m self-centred enough to think that pretty much everything could be a metaphor for my life and indeed, that my life is fascinating enough to warrant multiple metaphors to represent it.) (I’m not sure if that made any sense but in my defense: oh man I’m tired.)
title from: Drake, Best I Ever Had, which is just…so Drake. “Sweat pants, hair tied, chillin’ with no make-up on/That’s when you’re the prettiest, I hope that you don’t take it wrong.”
music lately:
 
Carly Rae Jepsen, Run Away With Me. It’s like the best eighties song you don’t remember. 
 
Janet Jackson, No Sleep. It’s so dreamy. She’s back and she never even left.  
next time: I’m still working a ton more than usual but I’m gonna try so hard to cook for myself one time and blog about it before, I don’t know, the next financial year end rolls around. 

swallow it down, what a jagged little pill

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that cactus is a visual metaphor for how my throat felt, also, juxtaposition! The word that saved me in Art History 101 

Next time you’re just hanging about, you know, existing within your corporeal form or whatever, take note of how many times you unconsciously swallow. Turns out humans do it a ton which is super fun when out of nowhere you have a sore throat and it feels like a serrated knife has lodged itself horizontally within your larynx. Every time you swallow. Which, as we’ve established, is unfairly often! Anyway so I’ve had a miserable bunch of days (the sore throat came with the free gift of an earache!) to the point where I couldn’t even eat soothing stuff like ice cream or soup because it was agony to swallow anything. Even cool, clear water might as well have been a nutritious bowl of sand, because they both would’ve felt the same to my poor tender throat.

In wonderful news I am now thoroughly improved, mostly due to ibuprofen, rest, and gargling so much salt water and apple cider vinegar that I’m surprised I haven’t turned into a pickle. However, I choose to attribute my entire recovery to the incredible bowl of porridge that I fixed for myself yesterday. I’d taken enough painkillers that my throat was tentatively amenable to food, and I wanted to have something aggressively nutritious and filling, but also soft and warm as the underbelly of a rabbit. Oatmeal covers all these bases, as well as allowing me to be irritatingly cute by using the portmanteau of Sore Throatmeal, and I do love to be irritatingly cute.

 rock the oat

I mean, everyone has their own way of making porridge and you can feel free to ignore my method or write it off as garbage (but if so, honestly, why are you still reading this far?) but mine has much going for it – the oats are toasted first, a step that only adds a minute to the cooking time but turns what could be gluey flavourless glue into a richly flavoured, warmly nutty concoction. I also stir in ground almonds, which add a gentle sweetness and swollen softness and richness and also, y’know, almonds put a shine on your coat. You could use any dried fruit you like but cranberries are full of anti-inflammatory and hella-vitamin properties, they also look incredibly pretty, all ruby red against the white cream and pale oats. Similarly, you could use coconut milk or almond milk or ginger instead of cinnamon and so on and so forth; but this is the recipe I made and it is so damn good.

Also I know this recipe looks really long and complicated, it’s because I’m talky and like to hold your hand throughout the process just in case there’s any small detail that confounds you. Once you sift through all my added nonsense it’s really, really straightforward, I promise.

the softest porridge, or, sore throatmeal

a recipe by myself

a handful of dried cranberries 
half a cup oatmeal or finely rolled oats
quarter of a cup of whole oats 
half a cup of water
half a cup of milk
a pinch of salt
quarter of a cup of ground almonds
cinnamon
brown sugar
cream, and lots of it

Place the cranberries in a small bowl and cover with water from a just-boiled kettle. 

Place a smallish saucepan over a medium and throw the oats in, stirring them frequently to allow them to toast – they’ll start to smell incredibly, well, toasty, and when this happens remove them from the heat and allow them to sit for a minute just to cool slightly. 

Stir in the water, milk, and salt, and return to a low heat, stirring occasionally to prevent it from sticking as it heats up and thickens. You want to get it to the stage where it’s starting to have big bubbles rise to the surface and burst, like some kind of geothermic mudpool (I think, I mean I have very little knowledge of geothermic…stuff) and at this point stir in the ground almonds and decide whether or not you think it needs a splash more milk or water – I like my porridge a little on the softer, creamier side, but you might like yours thicker. So, either it’s ready, or you need to stir it a bit longer with more liquid. 

Once you’re done, remove it from the heat, drain the cranberries (I just used a spoon to hold them back while tipping the water into the sink) and stir them in along with a hearty pinch of cinnamon. Spatula all this into a deep bowl (a deep bowl helps it stay warm for longer!) and spoon over as much brown sugar and cream as your mouth desires. 

I took one bite and was literally cured 

On account of this peskily sore throat I’ve done more or less nothing lately, I’ve either been in bed or at work; when in bed I’ve been on a Nigella-watching spree – I mean this in the nicest way, but I don’t have to think at all when I’m watching her show, and it doesn’t matter if I fall asleep halfway through, and all the stirring and gentle clattering and plummy vocals are utterly soothing to someone like me who adores background noise while I sleep. So you can see how I’m so Hallelujah-chorus rapturous over this porridge, it’s pretty much the most exciting thing to happen to me in the last few days. It was so delicious though, that I’m very sure it would still provide some kind of thrill even if you’re in full health.
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title from: Alanis Morrisette, You Learn. Remember when this album was the hugest thing in the world? This song has such a strange, meandering, conversational vibe to it that you don’t get a lot now, and I remember thinking how subversive and rad it was that her voice was kinda screechy and drawly (I was ten, okay.) 
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music lately:

Fiona Apple, Sleep to Dream. So dark and moody and intense, “this mind, this body and this voice cannot be stifled by your deviant ways,  so don’t forget what I told you, don’t come around, I got my own hell to raise” – ooof. 

Kendrick Lamar, Alright. I mean the song itself was already amazing but the video is just… *falls over sideways*
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next time: it is SO FREEZING in Wellington right now, so I’ll probably be cooking something to try and warm myself up, which at this stage is going to be a bowlful of the earth’s molten core.