Category: Contains Nuts

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. 

let’s just make this part go faster

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mugging for the camera
Comfort food can take many forms. For me it’s usually something that gives you the masticatory impression of gently sliding into a warm bath, like a slowly-stirred risotto or a bowl of soft, butter-saturated polenta or an enormous pile of mashed potato, but sometimes comfort food is more about the act itself than whatever form the food ends up taking. Sometimes it can simply be like, it’s 2am and I just finished work and it’s too windy to stand up straight and you’re sad and I’m sad and I bought you this bag of crisps from a 24/7 dairy because the line at BK was too long and also I didn’t know what else to do but this $3 gesture represents a lot more than merely just crunchy sodium goods…y’know? 
But sometimes comfort food is very obvious and straightforward, in this case: a chocolate peanut butter cake that you make in a mug (the most comforting vessel!) microwaved briefly so that quite instantly you can reward yourself for existing with a piping hot, warm, rich cake. Just for you. I’d never made a mug cake before but I’d sure heard of them: in my completely unresearched experience mug cakes started off as the sort of thing that an enthusiastic relative would email you accompanied by sparkly gifs of puppies and a phrase along the lines of “This is the most dangerous cake in the world…..Because now chocolate cake IS OnLy five minutes away!” A few rotations of the earth and the very simple recipe is now a staple of pinterest and has morphed into such things as “choc chip cookie in a mug” (why would a cookie be in a mug though) and “red velvet layer cake in a mug” (this does not sound comforting or fast tbh.) However you come to it, and whatever your opinion on microwaves, there’s something thoroughly charming about going from point A – you standing there with no cake – to point B – you eating a small cake from a mug – within about five minutes. And so, in the mood for sugar and immediacy, I recently made my first mug cake. 
 stay inside, drink more coffee, make cake really suddenly

I made this recipe up based on ingredients I already had in my possession, basically just whatever dusts and pastes I could find that might together form a half-decent cake. A little cocoa, a little coconut sugar (included for its extraordinarily deep caramel flavour, but just use brown sugar or plain sugar if you like) a little peanut butter for those this-is-a-fun-cake vibes…and after a long 90 seconds it transformed into a soft, meltingly chocolately, utterly delicious brownie-type thing, which I poured cream all over and ate in a chocolate-scented haze of beatific calm. All of which could be yours really, really quickly if you make yourself this.

chocolate peanut butter mug cake

a recipe by myself

two tablespoons butter (around thirty grams)
one tablespoon coconut sugar or brown sugar
two tablespoons cocoa powder
two tablespoons peanut butter
quarter of a cup milk
a pinch of baking powder
a couple of squares of chocolate, roughly chopped

Place the butter in the mug that you’re using and soften it in the microwave. Stir in all the ingredients – a teaspoon with a long handle or a narrow whisk is good for this – and add a little extra milk if it seems toooo stiff. It should come to about halfway up the mug. I microwaved it for a minute on high, then another thirty seconds, by which stage it was firm enough on the surface for me to decide it was ready to eat. 

Plunge a spoon into the cake, pour cream or milk into it, and eat all by yourself. 

It doesn’t rise very much, mind you, but I was astounded at how filling it was, so what it lacks in height it makes up for in cellular density I guess? Also for the work of minutes that you can count on one hand it’s a pretty tidy result. In fact pretty tidy is underselling it: it’s really, completely, wonderfully delicious.

This blog post is also going to be fast and mug-sized, but to distract you (and indeed, myself) from this I will leave you with Wednesday the silly beautiful tiny dingus of a cat being a literal loaf.

loaf cat (the demonic glow is coming from my heater/the camera on my phone not being able to deal with said glow)

Wait, one more thing! If anyone out there could please recommend a rad web designer that would be excellent. I’m thinking about refreshing this old blog here since it currently looks thoroughly ancient and un-cute. I don’t know anything about anything so am hoping to go by personal recommendations for people who do good work like this, and am also hoping that my blog can undergo some kind of movie makeover transformation to the effect of a stunning brunette removing her glasses and undoing her ponytail and suddenly everyone gasps and notices how bodacious she is. 

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title from: mate, it has been a while since I’ve quoted RENT on here. This song that I quote today, I Should Tell You, is so fragmented and tentative and nervous and beautiful. Jonathan Larson could really, really write. 
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 music lately:

I don’t know why Anna Kendrick’s voice in the Don’t You Forget About Me bit of the final number in Pitch Perfect makes me feel emotional, but there you have it. (I saw Pitch Perfect 2 last night, there is wonderful singing and Anna Kendrick is great and it’s so weirdly racist and many other bad things! That’s my review.) 

Shazam, by Spiderbait, from one of my favourite music genres, “bratty”.
Lorde, Royals. I hadn’t listened to this song in forever and ever and wow it is still such a tune.  
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 next time: roast chicken in a mug! I’m kidding.  

she takes your voice and she leaves you howling at the moon

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I started writing this trying to compare my approach to food with Alice in Wonderland’s love of pretending and supposing and imagining and the comparison didn’t quite fit and so I deleted it and started again and deleted it and started again, along the way learning a valuable lesson: I subconsciously just wanted to show that I could use the word “adumbrated” confidently in a sentence (as in, I was going to say that I had adumbrated Alice’s words since I couldn’t remember where I had actually packed my copies of the books in order to quote them directly.) Long story short, I am pretty annoying and I have lots of ideas about food. 
Long hair short: this also happened. I may be pretty annoying, but am also pretty, comma, annoying.

My hair has never been shorter than shoulder length, and even that was only once. Many years ago. So: the smaller the hair, the bigger the deal, really. And I like it! It was terrifying having it happen, especially when it was really only spurred on by a vague sense of needing a change and also one time I tied my hair into a low bun and thought I looked alright without much hair going on, but I remain all or nothing and so was not going to settle for a mere bob or even an aggressive trim. I’m very happy with the results. It’s a whole new Laura! I now have so many new looks! Like “meanest girl in the 1960s boarding school” and “girl in a 1990 edition of Dolly having the time of her life” and “trying very hard to look like Edie Sedgewick” and “Justin Bieber”. In case you’re wondering, yes, I did keep the ponytail. I plan to plant it under a tree which I imagine will quickly flourish and bloom and grant wishes to passers-by who are true of heart. 

So yes, this salad came about because of an Alice-esque flight of fancy of mine – supposing there was a salad that was mostly made up of the sort of things that normally garnish a salad? As opposed to stupid vegetables? Lettuce leaves and cherry tomatoes were thus combined with the following good things: very buttery croutons, homemade basil almond pesto, fried sage leaves, toasted pumpkin seeds, crumbled feta, and pea shoots. I would’ve added avocado but none were ripe, but just know that it is supposed to be there also. I mean, this is essentially just “a salad”, really, but it’s fun to think of it as being comprised almost entirely of garnishes. So that’s how I’m going to pretend it is.

I know this is the same dish I used in the photographs for the last blog post, I understand if you never want to read this blog ever again now. 

garnish salad

a recipe by myself. Serves two with seconds, or four one time. 

one or two heads cos lettuce, roughly torn
a handful of cherry tomatoes, halved (sorry to be a monster, but they do go further this way) 
a third of a cup of pumpkin seeds
three pieces of slightly old white bread
lots of butter
a cup of fresh basil leaves
half a cup of sliced almonds
about 25g parmesan cheese
olive oil
a handful of sage leaves
about 50g feta
a handful of pea shoots
Make the croutons first, and while they’re cooking, get onto the pesto. Tear the bread into chunks around an inch wide, although it really doesn’t matter. Throw them into a baking dish with about 25g butter (or more) diced and dotted over the top, and bake at 160 C till browned and crisp. 

Meanwhile, using a large knife, roughly chop the basil, almonds, and parmesan till it forms a herbaciously fragrant rubble. Transfer all this into a bowl and stir in enough olive oil to make it a kind of pesto-resembling paste. Set aside. Melt a knob of butter in a heavy frying pan, and once it’s sizzling, throw in the sage leaves, removing and setting aside once they’re darkened and crisp. Finally, in the same pan, toast the pumpkin seeds until lightly browned. 

Now: put your lettuce leaves, croutons, most of the pesto, the feta, oh my gosh literally everything okay just put it all in a salad bowl and stir carefully so that it’s mixed together but not flung out of the bowl. Add a little extra olive oil to what remains of the bowl of pesto and spoon it over the top, and then serve. 

 we’ve curated the finest artisinal garnishes, just for you

It’s easy to make fun of salad, especially since the Simpsons gave us the truism that you don’t win friends with it, but when it’s as aggressively loaded up with as many good things as this it would be silly to deny its complete and utter deliciousness. Crunchy seeds and nuts, marvelous cheese and other cheese, sweet bursts of cherry tomato and dissolvingly buttery sage leaves. The lettuce has its place too, much as I’d happily eat a bowl of croutons on their own the fresh crispness of it helps bolster everything else and bring it all together. This is one of those things where you could make changes depending on what you have to hand or can find – use sunflower seeds instead of pumpkin, use walnuts instead of almonds (or use actual pine nuts but they’re monstrously expensive), use parsley instead of basil, increase or ignore quantities that sort of thing. Salad! It’s SO good. Or at least, this one is. 
So, I made another episode of Bedtime with Hungryandfrozen! This time about my love of grapefruit popsicles. I also obviously but totally recommend the first two videos, about cornflakes with chocolate milk and steak, respectively. I do get a little stressed about like, good grief, what am I doing with my life, shouldn’t I be doing something super successful in the field of being seen to be talking about food in a media capacity and instead I’m in bed making grainy videos about cornflakes, but…they are pretty fun. 
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title from: Linda Ronstadts’ sad, sweet cover of Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues. Leaves, lettuce leaves, yeah? My blog, my puns, okay!
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music lately
Zara McFarlane, Police and Thieves. Dad emailed me a link to this saying it was very cool: his opinion was correct. A little jazzy and a lot gorgeous. 
Fiona Apple, Across the Universe. So, so dreamy. 
Taylor Swift, Blank Space. Far out I love this song. The way she says “they’ll tell you Iiii’m insane” is so great. 
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Next time: I haven’t done any baking in a while and every time I have it has sort of screwed up in some way – fallen apart, overcooked, that kind of thing. So, I wanna counteract that by being brilliant. If that works, you’ll see it here first. 

alone, listless, breakfast table in an otherwise empty room

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The box in the background is where all my kitchen accoutrements will go, including this bowl and fork. Once I’ve washed them, don’t worry.

This is the last blog post I’ll be writing from my not-quite-my-home-anymore-home, before I move house next Wednesday. The new place is like…fine, but I’m going to miss where I am now so much: the celestial light, the concrete floors, the bathroom that looks like it’s from a nice hotel, waking up in the night to see the moon hovering protectively outside my window, how stupidly instagrammable it all is, how enormous my room is, and so on and (self-indulgently wallowing) so forth. But, as I say to myself sternly, a change could be good for me, and whether or not it is, it’s still happening, and I can do my best to turn my new room into a beautiful haven too. I have a recurring bad dream where it’s suddenly Christmas Day and I have five minutes to get to my plane home and forgot to buy any presents and am generally very lost and confused as to how it all happened so fast, and that’s a decent description of how I feel right now, but…yeah. It’s happening. And I’m sure I’m gonna love this new place too.

All I’ve been doing with my spare time is looking for a flat, visiting flats, and packing my things up, so not much time to cook, but I wanted to minimise the amount of things I had to transfer between houses and so decided to make some kind of all-inclusive salad from the various nubbins of food in the pantry and fridge. Which means this is kind of ridiculous and bitsy and piecey and not really anything at all, but since it’s the last thing I’m likely to cook here and I don’t want to sacrifice writing this blog just because I am so busy making all signs of myself slowly reduce as the place becomes more and more empty…I thought I’d share it here anyway.

Also gosh, sorry for being so maudlin and overwrought, in my defence, I’m maudlin and overwrought. I am being relatively practical and calm in comparison to my own self, if that makes sense. As I said in my last blog post, a lot of things just kinda suck right now, but I’m working on what I can control (ha! very little) and getting through the rest somehow. Just like everyone else is.

brown rice, wheat berry, fried bean salad

a recipe by myself; makes quite a lot.

half a cup wheatberries 
half a cup brown rice
one cup frozen green beans (or fresh ones trimmed and sliced, you fancy thing you)
half a cauliflower, sliced into florets
two cloves garlic
a couple of tablespoons of capers
50g butter, at least
a handful of almonds, sliced 
olive oil
white wine vinegar
a tablespoon harissa
pinch salt

Soak the wheatberries and rice in boiling water for a couple of hours – this will speed up the cooking process, which will still take kind of ages. There is a reason that they’ve been sitting untouched in my cupboard for so long. 

Cook them together in boiling water in a good sized pot for around 25 minutes or until both the rice and the wheat are tender. Drain, and set aside. Melt the butter in a saucepan till it’s sizzling, then throw in the beans, cauliflower, capers and garlic and allow to fry aggressively till everything is quite browned and cooked through. Add the almonds at this stage and allow them to brown a little too, then remove from the heat. Stir all this into the rice/wheat mixture, then in a small bowl, stir together about three tablespoons of olive oil, one and a half tablespoons of the vinegar, and the harissa and salt. Stir this through the salad then serve. 

The important thing here is lots of olive oil and lots of texture. There are a zillion ways you could change this to suit your own needs – use barley instead of wheat berries (infinitely easier to find/cook anyhow) use just one type of grain, fry different vegetables like broccoli or courgette, use different nuts, use something other than harissa to flavour the dressing, make so many changes that it’s essentially an entirely different recipe, that kind of thing. The soft bite of the grains with the crisp, oily vegetables and crunchy nuts is excellent though, and adding plenty of salt and oil and chilli-rich harissa makes sure it’s delicious and elegant, rather than the punishing and dour.

It keeps well – I ate about a third for lunch on the day that I made it, then ate another third in spoonfuls taken from the bowl while standing in front of the fridge at various hours of the day, and then had the remainder for dinner at work last night. The fridge and pantry are now significantly denuded of things, and I looked up wheatberries on wikipedia and damn they are a good-for-you foodstuff! Satisfaction all round. Except for the photos, it was high afternoon sun and I only decided at the last minute to actually snap this dish, so… Not the best final view of the place, but what can ya do? (Not a lot.)

Just a short blog post today because yeah, got to carry on packing my belongings into boxes until infinity – isn’t it weird how physics is literally a thing and yet if I spend an hour piling books and trinkets into boxes I will have created no extra space and my pile of said books/trinkets will not appear to have diminished whatsoever? Pretty suspicious.

(FC = Fancy Clothes. Please be assured that this is but one bag of clothing that fits this description.)

Okay, lies: have also been rewatching Twin Peaks and knitting myself a blanket from my yarn scraps. Isn’t it too dreamy? Yes it is, Audrey Horne. 

So, next time you see me here it’ll be in my new place. Weird…but hopefully good. 
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title from: I do enjoy Ye Olde Pearl Jam (anything after about 1995 am not interested in whatsoever) and if you haven’t tried ever had a go at singing along while studiously imitating Eddie Vedder’s voice, you’re missing out on some good clean fun, I can tell ya. I had Deep Feelings about the song Daughter in my teens but now just think it’s pretty rad.  
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music lately:  

Joanna Newsom, Sawdust and Diamonds. Um. I have always enjoyed Newsom’s music but am properly close-readingly appreciating it heaps right now. Her lyrics are so spectacular and literary and full of the elements and fragments of stories, I love it. Also her harp is like wo. 

Beyonce, XO. This song makes me feel rapturous. 

Patti Smith, Gloria. I like putting this one on when I’m closing the bar at work, it’s all snarly and good to bounce along to while washing dishes and mopping and inevitably knocking over literally everything and so adding many, many minutes to your closing process. I will never ever tire of the bit where she’s all “Ah, uh, make her mine”.
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next time: I know not, but it’ll be from my new place! So! New things for you all to look at! So there’s that! 

i’ve seen the world done it all had my cake now

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I individually plucked and arranged each leaf, it signifies the passing of time
(you know I’m kidding, I just kind of plonked the cake down by these wilting flowers and liked the look)
Baking isn’t necessarily what I turn to if I’m in a moody bad mood, despite the obvious benefits – you get to eat something very sweet and channel your energy into creating beauty out of raw ingredients – but there’s also a lot of room for error and the amount of times I’ve magnified a bad mood by completely ruining a cake that I’ve made to cheer myself up would make you think twice about letting me call myself a food blogger. But anyway, I had a conversation with one of my best girls Kate over coffee yesterday which essentially went along the lines of “I’m so mooooody, today is not good” “bake a cake?” “oh yeah I like cake.” “something with fruit in it maybe?” “yeah! Like, a plum cake. A cake with canned plums and peaches in it and…and cinnamon buttercream!” “alriiight!” 
(instagram made the icing way purple-er than it really is) (never stop doing your thing, instagram)
This heat-of-the-moment cake got downgraded to a more simple plum cake with a drizzle of icing sugar mixed with juice from the can of plums, but still. It did improve my mood. For what it’s worth, I also freestyled an amazingly compelling potential subplot for Hanna Marin from Pretty Little Liars over that same coffee with Kate, which I then downgraded to “I am not a writer for the show so I guess I’ll just like, carry on watching it.” I do enjoy scheming, even if it’s just a cake or a new life for a fictional character. 

One thing that’s always a good idea no matter what mood I’m in is re-reading my Nigella cookbooks. I picked up her important book How To Be A Domestic Goddess from my cookbook stack and it actually fell open right upon the perfect recipe for what I was thinking of – a very simple brown sugar cake with canned plums and ground almonds in it. I fiddled with it a very small amount, mostly by adding some cinnamon and plum juice to the icing because I’m obsessed with making everything smell like cinnamon at the moment, and the cake worked perfectly.

I discovered some electric beaters at the back of a cupboard in my apartment and tried using them to make the batter, and holy wow do they make a difference. I mean, every single cake that you’ve seen on this blog or in my book has been made with a wooden spoon or a whisk (including the pavlovas) and I can’t belieeeeve how much lighter and volumised the beaters make the batter. It’s kind of embarrassing, this cake turned out one and a half as big as mine usually do. I really like making cakes by hand but yeah, the results are, if nothing else, making me want to do some push ups or something so I can try and beat the machine.

winter plum cake with cinnamon plum icing

adapted a bit from a recipe in Nigella Lawson’s important book How To Be A Domestic Goddess

125g soft butter
one cup brown sugar
two eggs
one cup flour
one 70g packet of ground almonds
one and a half teaspoons baking powder
six plums from a tin of black doris plums, roughly chopped (and stones removed, obvs)

half a cup or so icing sugar
a tablespoon or so of the juice from the can of plums
ground cinnamon

Set your oven to 170 C and line the base of a 20cm springform tin with baking paper. Beat the butter and brown sugar together till it’s all light and fluffy and delicious. Continue, beating in the eggs till they’re completely incorporated. Fold in the almonds, flour, baking powder and plums. By the way, the canned plums are so soft that I just lift them out one at a time with a spoon, and use another spoon to carve off chunks into the cake batter. But by all means chop them on a chopping board. 

Spatula all this into the caketin and bake for an hour and a quarter, although check it out at after an hour has gone by, all ovens are unique and special snowflakes.  

Let the cake cool for a while in the tin, then run a knife around the inside of the tin and carefully transfer the cake to a plate to cool completely. Although, I could not be bothered and put the icing on the still-warm cake and it was totally fine, but general wisdom would suggest that you shouldn’t do this. Either way, mix the icing sugar and a good dash of ground cinnamon with a little of the plum juice – a teaspoon at a time – until it forms something you can drizzle roughly over the cake with a teaspoon. You may get to a point where you’ve been so liberal with the drizzling that you actually have to give up and cover the whole thing, but whatever, it will be fine. 

The almonds make it all moist and springy and tender, the plums taste so rich and dark and liqueur-ious that it seems bizarre that they’re not actually in season right now, and the cinnamon in the dusky pink icing gives it a blast of warmth, that feeling you get when you rush inside from the cold and turn on the heater and feel your bones relax. It’s just a very delicious cake and a good reason to stock up on canned fruit, just in case. You could ice this with something more involved, you could add more fruit, you could leave it plain, but the brief kick of pure sweetness from the icing brings it all together and also makes it look prettier. As for the rest of the plums, either eat them from the can, stir them into yoghurt, serve them with porridge, leave them to fester in the fridge and then shame-facedly dispose of them when you’re quite sure no-one’s home…Seriously though, I cannot get over how the cake was so much lighter and fluffier from being mixed up with the beaters. I shouldn’t be surprised I guess, but nevertheless: sigh!

So uh, I guess the plot and subtext of today’s blog post is that I am whiny and inobservant, but if you were observant yourself this would not be a surprise. I still love my job but currently while this particular film festival is on I’m working a zillion hours and so with it goes my ability to articulate myself, like flour slowly disappearing through a sieve. It’s just two and a bit weeks though, and then I’ll be back to my whiny and inobservant self!

Till then, prescribing myself many cups of tea and about 90% of this cake.

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title from: this is a Lana Del Rey appreciation blog, apparently, and her song Young and Beautiful from the Great Gatsby soundtrack is typically haunting and exquisite.
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music lately:

Courtney Barnett, Avant Gardener. Another of my best girls Hannah introduced me to this song and I knew I’d love it from the title alone but it reeeeally is good.

Janine and the Mixtape, Hold Me. I’ve talked about this a bunch before but it always gets me.

Sugababes, Freak Like Me. Did you know this is one of the best songs in the world? Especially when it’s very late at night and you’re trying to close the bar at work and feel like you have zero upper body strength all of a sudden.
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next time: Probably more cinnamon, to be honest, I can’t get enough. 

late night, come home, work sucks, i know

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I want to be happy, but I’m also always just a little suspicious of it. Just…it seems that so many times lately I’ve been all “I am confidently happy about this particular thing in my life and it is good and wonderful” and then it all immediately falls apart, as if I broke a spell simply by acknowledging it. This is also a suuuper immature way of looking at things because you have to enjoy life and there are always a ton of factors that could make something nice fall to pieces and if you look for patterns you’ll find them and so on. In my defense, I am very immature. Also I guess what I’m describing here is the phrase “pride goes before a fall” but I hate that phrase, like, are we supposed to not take pride in good things? As the queen Cordelia Chase says in Buffy when told she has no shame, “…like shame is something to be proud of?”

So I’ll say it carefully but definitely (am almost tempted to make the font three sizes smaller as if that would make the universe not notice it) thus far, I really love my new job. It’s so fun. I love being charming with lots of people and meeting all the nice staff and making fancy cocktails with increasing competency and damn, there’s even a weird satisfaction to be had from clearing a ton of dishes. Now that I’ve said something nice about washing dishes it’s definitely going to fall apart (okay, admittedly closing up the bar is a bit of a nightmare but even that I’m getting the hang of), but till then: yeah, me!

Now that I’m doing so many late nights (got out at 2.30am on Saturday night, wheeeee) I need to make myself food that can be hoofed down in a hurry on my short break, that will give me energy but also be delicious enough that it makes me happy, stores easily, is filling but without making me immediately fall asleep afterwards…I have no idea if this pasta salad really fulfils any of those ideals because I just liked the thought of it and so decided to make it, but it is seriously delicious. Of course, most anything might seem seriously delicious at 10pm after being on your feet for ages. But trust me. As if I would put a less-than-dazzlingly-spectacular recipe on this blog for you.

pasta salad with broccoli-pumpkin seed pesto, feta, mint and olive oil

oh yeah so it’s not even pesto, it’s just munched up broccoli and pumpkin seeds, but what, you want to make a recipe called ‘broccoli paste’? Nope, pesto it is. 

a recipe by myself

two heads of broccoli 
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds
olive oil
salt

100g short pasta like penne, bow ties, rigatoni, that kinda thing
50g feta (or as much as you want) 
a handful of mint leaves
olive oil

Chop the broccoli into small florets. Heat a little olive oil in a frying pan and gently cook the broccoli in it – stirring a bit, you just want to soften it a little and lose that total rawness, you know? However if it gets a little browned in places that’s great too. Tip the broccoli into a food processor, and then briefly toast the pumpkin seeds in the same pan till fragrant and browned slightly. Add them to the food processor too with a pinch of salt, and blitz the heck out of it, scraping down the sides with a spatula occasionally. Continue to process as you pour in olive oil – as much as you like, I probably used about three or four tablespoons. You’ll end up with a kind of nubbly, rubbly green substance which you can then spatula into a container and put in the fridge till you need it next. 

To make the pasta salad – cook the pasta in boiling salted water according to the packet instructions (although cooking it in boiling salted water is all there is to it, really) and then drain it under cold water for a little bit, just to take the immediate heat off. Mix together with two tablespoons – or much more – of the broccoli pumpkin seed pesto, the crumbled feta, and the mint leaves, and then drizzle over some more olive oil. 

Bursts of sharp, creamy feta and sweet, icy mint; life-giving carbs and rich pesto – it’s brilliant stuff to inhale during a brief sit (who doesn’t enjoy a good sit?) but also obviously you can eat this any day, any time, and on a proper plate instead of an old take-out container. The broccoli, pumpkin seeds and olive oil are brilliantly complementary, all the nutty, oily, grassy flavours being smashed together in the food processor. Now that I look at them, “grassy” and “oily” aren’t necessarily the most appealing words but they are the most accurate ones I could find in my tired brain today. It is filling but light and keeps for a while in the fridge but honestly the most defining feature of this pasta salad is that it will get green stuff stuck in your teeth in a major way, so totally clean your teeth afterwards if you have to talk to people and sell them consumable items.

it worked! Here’s me eating the pasta salad for dinner on my break. It literally saved my life. 

Use the leftover pesto in more pasta salad if you like, or…use it wherever else you might use pesto, I guess. It isn’t as liquid as the pesto you buy from the supermarket but it would be terrific stirred through couscous or added to a salad dressing or, you know, whatever.

me before starting my shift, feeling like a ghost. There is no after photo because I was working too diligently to pause for selfies, ha! Actually this could be argued for taking selfies just before work, but…my point stands.

As well as remaining employed for a whole week, another cool thing that I’ve done recently is have another Crush Cake published on monstrously wonderful website The Toast. This crush cake is for the decidedly late but decidedly great Clara Bow and I’m very proud of it. In your face, pride-going-before-a-fall. 
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title from: Blink 182’s still-rad song All The Small Things. Back in 1999 before I was all “nope, definitely a lesbian” I had such a crush on Tom DeLong and this was my favourite song of theirs. Also I really strongly hated boy bands and so loved the music video for this song where they send up lots of famous-at-the-time dudes. I don’t think I could, like, listen to a whole Blink 182 album but damn if they didn’t have some great singles. Oh also disclaimer, my use of this title is ironic. Or sarcastic. Or whatever I have to say to not get in trouble with anyone. 

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music lately:

Kate Nash, She Rules. This song is so sweet and simple and scrappy and I love it.

City Oh Sigh, My Love Has Gone. It’s…just…too dreamy, I guess.

Pixies, Where Is My Mind. This song stays amazing.
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next time: freezing though it is, I’ve been craving ice cream…

heartbeat drumming double time, i need one more chance to be with you

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I’m not saying I don’t have a tonne of feelings as I write this blog post – some might say I’ve got more than ever (“some” being my resentful self side-eyeing every last feeling involved in their unwelcome gentrification of my brain.) But you know, sometimes there’s nothing new to say and sometimes it’s too hard to articulate, and sometimes the food can just jolly well speak for itself. I mean, this is a food blog, not America’s Next Top Best Friend. (I think it has the potential to be that, though.) Besides, if you are hanging out for my feelings like they’re some kind of pizza delivery boy well overdue to knock on your door, well there’s all the other blog posts I’ve written leading up to this point. With extra cheese.

So fried cauliflower is excellent, and roast cauliflower is excellent, but it occurred to me while mindfully spreading butter upon slices of raw cauliflower and consuming them, that…I don’t know, I’ve got a lot of love for this vegetable. Let’s not forget cauliflower cheese, which I don’t see a lot of talk of lately but is still one of the best, most comfort-food foods there is. (Actually you know what else would probably be amazing? Cauliflower mac and cheese.) I thought it would be cool to double up on them as an ingredient, and combine the snappish crunch of raw florets, with their delicate, ever so slightly peppery-butter flavour, with some aggressively fried florets, oily and crisp and charred. It was so good that I pretty much ate an entire head of cauliflower in the process. I’m not sure if that’s impressive or horrifying or really, really…unexciting. The point is, it happened, and only because the salad was so delicious.

double cauliflower salad

a recipe by myself

one large cauliflower
olive oil
a couple of tablespoons of capers
one lemon
a handful or two of walnuts

Slice and break the cauliflower into small florets. Place half in the bowl you intend to serve all this in. Squeeze over the juice of a lemon, drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle over the capers. Heat more olive oil – a couple of tablespoons – in a wide saucepan and fry the remaining cauliflower. Don’t stir it too much, you want to let it sit and properly brown and scorch in places. Once they look like they’re nearly done, throw in the walnuts and let them toast for a bit. Remove it all from the heat, stir into the raw cauliflower in the serving bowl, and then…serve. 

(I also considered calling this Cauliflower, Fried and Raw because it reminded me of the title of the book Sarah, Plain and Tall – which I didn’t even like – or calling it Raw Cauliflower and Fried Cauliflower Salad because I can be a bit too literal at times, but double cauliflower salad seemed both the most accurate and the easiest to fit in a tweet. Isn’t food blogging just so fascinating and intellectually stimulating?)

As I said, the texture going on here is incredible, the buttery fresh crunch of the raw and the charred crisp crunch of the fried and then the soft, toasted walnuts echoing the flavours of both. This is surprisingly filling on its own, but could be something of a meal with bread and butter, or as a side dish to go with roasted chicken or some kind of pie, or could happily be stirred through cooled orzo pasta to make a salad, or served on top of soft, bursting-with-cream polenta. Or just eat the lot yourself. It’s probably best made quite close to when you want to serve it, as the fried stuff will start to flop and absorb the lemon juice if left for too long, but I’m not saying that wouldn’t have its own charms as far as eating goes.

Currently life is full of the following: taking myself and my laptop out for coffee dates so I can write and not end up turning my bed into my office, applying for jobs (hi!), getting rejected from job applications (hi!), having head pats and solace and general glorious friendship administered by Kim and Kate, saying “what the actual – oh my – what in the Rupert Campbell-Black was that?” at Orphan Black, and furiously knitting myself a jumper the colour of very rich dark red wine that is being drunk in a darkened room while you’re wearing dark sunglasses. That colour. One other exciting thing: it’s finally cold enough to spend evenings sitting by the heater while not actually wearing that much clothing, which is one of my favourite things to do in winter. Sure, not overly practical, but as Beyonce says: I’m a grown woman, I can do whatever I want. It’s not a bad rule to have in your head as you stumble and strut through life.
 
title from: Ladyhawke, My Delirium. Swoon! 

music lately:

Lit, My Own Worst Enemy. Sometimes I really like listening to bratty music from fifteen years ago.

Frank Ocean, Bad Religion. Oof. Words fail me, y’know?

Kacie Sheik, Air, from the 2009 Broadway Cast Recording of Hair. This song is bonkers but she has got one of the damn cutest voices I’ve ever heard and she makes it all sound lovely. Just watch me spark, I glow in the dark.

next time: who knows, maybe it’ll be truffles on truffles on truffles because I’ll have a job?