Category: Contains Nuts

flourless, we are flourless

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2011! What? How’d that happen already? Well, it’s here and the changing of another year has passed me by in a non-threatening blur of crosswords, novel-reading, and playing 500 with Mum and Dad at the beach. And being absent from the computer, which really wasn’t so bad at all. We’re back out to the beach tomorrow, using the very last of my leave, but Tim’s back to work tomorrow – he heroically came out to help us erect the tents and then cover them with tarps (couldn’t possibly buy a new tent or anything) which we managed to do without having a family meltdown, maybe some lasting buried tension but no meltdown. In the meantime I’m serving up a recipe that I made for Christmas night, which…seems like an extremely long time ago now. And a mighty fine Christmas it was too, I was lucky enough to get heaps of food-related things which I’m sure will all eventually appear here on the blog when I get back to Wellington.




So, apologies for the now outdated Christmas imagery in the background…should have thought more about this and posed the cake in front of a beachtowel or a picture of a dolphin or something to make it more generally summery.

Ever since I can remember we’ve spent Christmas evening with the family who grew up next door to my Mum’s family, and this year I was asked to bring along a pudding (suspect I would have taken it upon myself to bring one along whether it was asked for or not). The open brief of “bring pudding” is one of my favourites and for some reason, out of all the many many pudding recipes Nigella has (or anyone, but for me Christmas is Nigella’s time to shine more than usual) my heart set itself on her Christmas-Spiced Chocolate Cake. It’s a variation on her flourless chocolate cake, gussied up with the yuledtidish fragrance of cinnamon, cloves and orange.


It’s very easy to make and apart from all the eggs it’s pretty low-key, the quantities of chocolate, ground almonds and butter aren’t terrifying and all you need to do is some melting and mixing. You don’t even have to worry about it sinking – it’s practically supposed to. Altogether a non-stressful Christmas pudding option that wouldn’t be out of place any day of the year. As long as you don’t use the title. Not that I referred to it by its full title at any point. Can you imagine walking into a room and saying “here’s my…

Christmas-Spiced Chocolate Cake

From Nigella Christmas

150g dark chocolate, chopped (I used Whittakers Dark Ghana)
150g butter
6 eggs (at room temperature)
250g sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
100g almonds
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Zest of 1 clementine/satsuma/just use an orange
4 teaspoons instant coffee (preferably espresso)

Topping:

Juice from the above citrus fruit
15g butter
1 tablespoon sugar
Pinch ground cinnamon
50g flaked almonds (they tend to come in 70g packets, you can use the lot here no worries).

Set your oven to 180 C/450 F, and butter and line a 23cm springform tin. That said, all I had at Mum and Dad’s was a 21cm tin that I’d brought up myself and it was all good.)

Break the eggs into a good sized bowl. In another bowl, gently melt together the chocolate and butter. Mum and Dad have a microwave so that’s what I did, but you can also put it in a metal bowl and sit it over a pan of simmering water…just melt the two together, it’s not complicated.)

While the chocolate is cooling, add the sugar and vanilla to the eggs and whip together till thick and pale and at least doubled in texture. This is easier with an electric beater but not impossible with a whisk. Gently fold in the rest of the ingredients, including the magically delicious chocolate-butter mixture. A big silicon spatula is best for this, and for transferring the mixture into the tin. Bake for about 35-45 minutes, and allow to col completely.

For the topping, simmer all the ingredients together till thick and syrupy and then topple them over the chocolate cake, which may well have dipped significantly in the centre.


This cake is seriously fantastic, chocolatey in an upfront way but without making you feel like you’re eating a damp, cocoa-scented piece of soap, as some flourless chocolate cakes can taste. The spices give it a real Christmassiness, showing that the sort of flavours which might show up in a fruitcake are equally fantastic against the slight grit of the ground almonds and the richness from the chocolate. The sticky, orange-syruped almonds on top make it look beautiful too – I just bunged them on and they somehow looked amazing, like shining golden tiles, so if you even put in the slightest bit of effort you’re guaranteed some gorgeousness.



This overachiever of a cake is also gluten-free and keeps for ages.

Hopefully everyone had a decent Christmas/New Years – I don’t really go in for resolutions, preferring to take each day as it comes but also to be receptive to as much positivity, creativity and safe fun as possible. Hope all that comes your way too.

Title via: Something about the panicky nature of Blackout from the fantastic Broadway musical In The Heights makes me feel slightly bad about appropriating their “powerless, we are powerless” line…not so bad that I haven’t done it.

Music lately:

I actually haven’t been listening to a whole lot of music this summer. I brought my ipod up but ignored it, preferring the sound of sea moving slowly across sand and tui calling to each other. Once I’m back in the city on Sunday and this holiday seems unbelievably far away I’m sure I’ll have music coming out my ears (and then going back in my ears again, of course.)

Next time: As I said I got a whole lot of food-stuffs for Christmas and it’s anyone’s guess what I’ll get into first. While part of me never wants to leave the beach, I do miss Wellington and am looking forward to reconnecting with my kitchen…

i’m miss world watch me break

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You just don’t see elaborate dishes created in people’s honour these days. I mean, there are those so established that you forget – Peach Melba, Fettuccine Alfredo, Margherita Pizza, Beef Stroganoff… but nothing like the “Souffle Bowes-Lyon” from the QEII recipe book I once bought from an op shop, very 1980s with its tales of how much champagne they go through weekly and chilled gazpacho and colour plates of extremely tanned people with large hair.

A couple of years back Mum sent me a Hudson and Halls cookbook, and then this year at the library book sale I picked up another of theirs – a plastic-wrapped cookbook called Favourite Recipes from Hudson and Halls. Published in 1985, its black, dustjacketed cover has H & H in tuxedoes gazing solemnly at the reader, positioned in front of various items on a bookshelf and dresser – a clock, a lamp, a trumpet, ‘A Woman of Substance‘. Inside, their forward foreword breaks formalities with its “we have cooked together for nigh on twenty years, some of it good…some of it not so good!” Inside I found a recipe for Chicken Salad Lorraine with Peanut Cream Sauce which they named for 1983’s Miss World, New Zealand’s Lorraine Downes. I love a recipe with a decent backstory like that and I also really love peanut sauce…win win.
An often quoted line of theirs is “are we gay? Well we’re certainly merry”. With hindsight there’s sadness in that while the studio audience of their TV show would drink their wine and laugh at their comic timing, some kind of societal necessity prevented any actual openness at how this was a TV show fronted by two men in love with each other. At the time of the cookbook itself being published, the problematically worded, but comparatively progressive Homosexual Law Reforms were only just coming into effect in New Zealand. We don’t exactly live in a liberal wonderland right now, and I’m no expert on the history of NZ’s gay rights, but certainly leaps and bounds have been made since. As I’m privileged to have the world I live in and the media I consume largely reflect my own life, I can only guess at what it would have been like for H&H back then. I do know they wouldn’t have been the only ones in their position.

I’m not sure if it’s a mid-eighties thing or what, but H&H specified melons (oh my!) in the salad and much as I’m fairly adventurous, I wasn’t quite ready for it covered in peanut sauce…I figured the easier-found cucumber was within the same gene pool and along with some capsicum, would provide colour and juicy crunch. As I switched the required egg noodles for a lighter-textured pile of slippery, soft rice noodles, there’s nothing stopping you swapping the chicken for slices of fresh, firm tofu. And the more I think about it, the more it feels like peanut sauce on melons would have worked just fine…if you try it yourself, let me know!
There is on youtube an opportunity to see H&H in action which, apart from their merry chemistry, is a joy in itself as a slice of New Zealand television at the time – the giant electric frypan, the grey animated opening titles, the pinkly lit background of the studio kitchen. They snap and banter with each other, and burst into laughter. As Hudson spoons ingredients into a pan, listing them aloud, Halls interrupts offscreen with “Garlic?” to which Hudson responds “I haven’t got there yet, could you just mind your own business?” But then Hudson throws out the aside of “very good for the wrist action” while grinding pepper, which, while not as camp as Halls’ crying “Isn’t he wonderful!” while throwing his hands joyfully in the air, is still the sort of thing that continues to raise eyebrows when Nigella says it over 20 years later. I could go on and recreate an entire transcript but you might as well watch it – it’s wonderful stuff.
Chicken Salad Lorraine with Peanut Cream Sauce

With thanks to Hudson and Halls

300g good, free-range chicken thighs
1 stick of carrot, a few peppercorns, a bay leaf, coriander seeds and sprig of thyme if you have it
1/2 a lemon
1/2 a cucumber
1 yellow (or red or orange) capsicum
Peanut or sesame oil
Spring onions (optional)

Dressing

3 heaped tablespoons smooth peanut butter
1/4 cup stock (from poaching the chicken)
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1 clove garlic, crushed
small piece of ginger, peeled and grated or finely minced
1 teaspoon sugar
Juice from the other 1/2 a lemon
Tobasco or other hot sauce
About 1/2 cup of cream or thick Greek yoghurt or sour cream.
Egg or rice noodles to serve.

Place chicken thighs in a pan and just cover with water. Add the carrot stick, bay leaf, peppercorns, seeds and thyme (I didn’t have any thyme but it still tasted all good) and turn on the heat, allowing the water to simmer and bubble away gently till the chicken is no longer pink and seems tender – around 15-20 minutes. Remove the chicken to a chopping board and get rid of the spices and things. Bring the remaining liquid to the boil and let it reduce somewhat. Shred the chicken or slice into bite-size chunks. Poached chicken thighs aren’t the sexiest to look at, but there’ll be plenty of distracting colour later on.

Set aside 1/4 cup of the stock for the peanut sauce, and top up the remaining stock in the pan with water, bring to the boil and cook your noodles in it according to packet instructions. Drain the noodles, toss with the peanut or sesame oil, and divide between two plates.
Slice the capsicum and the cucumber into sticks, and arrange on top of the noodles along with the chicken. Finally, whisk together the dressing ingredients (or you could blast them in a food processor) till very smooth. Drizzle the sauce over the two plates of salad, scatter with spring onions or coriander if using.

Note: I didn’t have a lemon or cream, but I did have some amazingly thick, tangy Zany Zeus Greek yoghurt which I figured would cover off both needs. It did, and how. Sour Cream would probably be great as well, or you could just leave out the dairy altogether and replace the stock with water (or vegetable stock).
Serves 2

Lorraine Downes’ name was not taken in vain here – this salad is stunning. Though, it was easier for me to arrange it between two plates rather than put it all in a bowl, so I’m not quite sure if it really even is a salad still. Oh well – the poached chicken is amazingly tender, the peanut sauce is thick but light, blanketing the crunchy vegetables and soft, deliciously bland noodles. I just love peanut sauce but even so, the mix of textures and tastes is wonderful and it’s a great dinner on one of those evenings that is hot, but not so hot that you only want to eat an ice cube for dinner.

There’s plenty to love in this book, especially the descriptions before each dish – some of it practical, some hilarious (“once met someone who was on a diet and was drinking rum essence in diet cola…it tasted abysmal.”) When you turn to the back cover, they’re on a farm, Hudson is wearing a bucket hat and sunglasses and leaning on a spade, while Halls wears tiny shorts and has a rifle casually swung over his shoulder while lunging against a fence – two large black dogs sit beside them. Hudson died of cancer in 1992 and Halls left pretty soon after him. Their books aren’t so easy to track down – while they might be due for a reprint sometime soon, it’s worth hunting next time you’re in an op shop or at a book fair. They’re a lesser known chapter of New Zealand history, not to mention there aren’t many other places these days you’ll find a salad named after a 1983 beauty queen.
Tim and I were at Wellington’s opening night of Rocky Horror Show at the St James tonight – it was an absolutely incredible show, I seriously recommend you go along if you’re even halfway curious. The staging, the quality of the acting and singing, and the sheer energy is all turned up to eleven and besides, watching an audience so joyfully receive music – it’s a beautiful thing. Obviously it was exciting to see the strangely ageless Richard O’Brien who created the show, star as narrator (the round of applause on his entrance brought the performance to a halt) and you gotta hand it to Kristian Lavercombe playing O’Brien’s original role of Riff Raff with such wicked aplomb. Special mention must go to Juan Jackson who played Frank’n’Furter; he barely needed acting ability with his charismatic muscle structure, but luckily he could emote realistically, sing like the great-grandchild of Paul Robeson, and skip carelessly in platform heels. Being a rock opera it maintains a cracking pace – it’s easy to forget just how many incredible songs are crammed into this one wonderful show.
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Title via: Hole’s Miss World from Live Through This. Have much love for Courtney.
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Music lately:
I’ve been trying to avoid Christmas songs but seeing as it’s December 1st (eeeeek!) I’ve indulged myself with the sublimely ridiculous Turkey Lurkey Time from Promises Promises. Seriously, just watch it.

As well as the seasonal stuff I’ve been listening to a fair few John Peel compilations lately – which means Buzzcocks, What Do I Get/Lion Rock by Culture etc etc…
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Next time: For some reason this blog post took me forever to get done, and I guess things are only going to get busier from here on in…but hopefully I’ll get another blog post in before the end of the week, it’ll either be something vegetable-based (woo!) or this amazing cake recipe I found which has mayonnaise (what!) in it.

honey to the bee that’s you for me

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Note: As mentioned in my last blog post, I’ve been nominated for a Wellingtonista award, and while it’s seriously exciting and happiness-inducing to be amongst some distinctly high-profile nominees, it’s also quite nice to be voted for, so I can hype myself up into thinking I might win. As well as myself, you can also vote for other Wellington-related things you like, or nothing at all – the only compulsory fields are your name and email address. What I’m trying to say is that if you do vote (here here here) it’d be really great and I’d appreciate it heaps and heaps.

I recently got sent some honey – two jars – from the astute folk at Airborne. I was caught off-guard when they contacted me, am not sure where I stand on “accepting then blogging about free stuff” because it hasn’t really happened till now. Some people are hardline about this, refusing to accept anything, and I suspect I’d want to avoid it too – this is my blog and I’ll talk about what I want when I want – but damnit, I liked the idea of free honey and was 99% sure it would taste good and not compromise some kind of policy I haven’t even got the kind of clout to be developing in the first place. To find out more about Airborne, by the way, their “Why Choose Us” page is a reassuring read – these people treat their bees and their honey well.
So, two jars arrived – a large jar of thick, creamy Kamahi and a smaller jar of liquid, clear Tawari. And, thought I, here’s the chance to try all those recipes with lots of honey in them! But for some reason I either couldn’t find anything, or the stuff I could find, I was all “eh” about, so I decided to just make up my own stuff instead. (That said, Mum, if get the time could you please email me the recipe for those honey buns we used to make? From that handwritten recipe book I think?) (Edit: Thanks heaps Mum!)
At the vege market down the road there’s this amazingly good tofu at $4 for a large block, scored into four ‘fillets’ as I call them. However no matter how much I try, I can never quite finish it before it starts to go all orange and creepy. There’s only so much dense, filling firm tofu I can get through in a couple of days. On top of that we somehow ended up with three heads of brocolli, because I forgot that we had it and then bought some more. I hate wasting food but I’m also very forgetful, so this just sometimes happens. This following recipe however takes some neglected brocolli, some teacher’s pet asparagus, and some tofu that was somewhat past its best (not at the ‘unsafe’ stage or anything, just not looking so happy to see me when I opened the fridge) and turns it into a feast.
Honey Miso Roast Vegetables

I used a square of firm tofu, a head of broccoli, and a handful of asparagus. Use what you have – the veges need to be able to withstand some roasting. Cauliflower and kumara would be pretty perfect here too.

Whisk together:
  • 2 teaspoons white miso paste

  • 1 tablespoon clear honey (I used Airbourne’s Tawari)

  • 1 teaspoon (or more) sambal oelek or other red chilli paste

  • 1 teaspoon sesame oil

  • 1 teaspoon wholegrain mustard

Set your oven to 200 C. Chop your vegetables and tofu into fairly similar sized smallish pieces. lay the chopped vegetables on a baking-paper lined tray and spoon over the miso-honey mixture. You could also pour the mixture into a big bowl and toss the veges through it, but I couldn’t be bothered with the extra dishes. Roast for about 20 minutes or until everything looks burnished and cooked through. Eat over rice or noodles or just as is.
Don’t be alarmed by the dark, miso-toffee bits that appear (strangely delicious too, I couldn’t help peeling it off the baking paper and eating it) as whatever clings to the vegetables and tofu will taste incredible – sticky, savoury and full of complex, fragrant flavour. The tightly clenched branches of brocolli stretch out under the heat and become deliciously crisp, while their stems remain juicy and tender. The flavour of the asparagus intensifies under the caramelly, hot honey and the tofu becomes…totally passable.
Obviously with honey some kind of pudding or baking attempt is only right. It was relatively recently that I learned about frangipane, a buttery, almondy mix for filling pies and tarts and so on. I had an idea that honey could be a good exchange for the sugar. So I did it.
Honey, Almond and Dried Apricot Tart

1 square of bought puff pastry (I guess you should try and get good quality all-butter stuff. The ingredients on my Edmond’s ready-rolled sheets said “butter” but I have heard terrifying rumours of some awful sounding substance called “baker’s margarine”.)
1 egg
2 tablespoons creamy honey – I used Airborne’s Kamahi
Heaped 1/3 cup ground almonds
40g butter, melted
About 20 soft dried apricots

Set your oven to 220 C, and place the square of pastry onto a baking paper-lined tray. Lightly score a 1cm border around the edge with a sharp knife (don’t cut right through). Once in the oven, this will puff up and look really pretty.

In a small bowl, whisk together the egg and the honey. Stir in the ground almonds and melted butter. This will make enough for the tart plus a generous amount for you to taste (it’s delicious!) Spoon carefully over the centre of the pastry, spreading a thin layer across to meet the edge of the margin you’ve scored (as per the picture.) Carefully pull or slice the apricots in half or – if you’ve got lots of apricots, just leave them whole – and arrange on top of the pastry. Paint a little melted butter or egg yolk round the margin if you like. Bake for about 15-20 minutes – as long as you can leave it in without burning.
The first time I made it, I was doing the dishes and forgot to check on the oven. All the sugars in the honey and apricots couldn’t take being ignored, and the tart was a blackened mess (did this stop us eating it? Erm, no). It was late at night, the kitchen was covered in frangipane-smeared implements (myself included), and the ingredients aren’t the cheapest, so I may have yelled “I’m never doing the dishes again! It’s a sign! I hate everything!” Or something to that effect.
The second time I made this tart earlier in the evening and with new enthusiasm, I watched it like I was judging gymnastics at the Olympics – focussed, scrutineering, coldly assessing for any stepping outside the lines. I can’t have eaten nearly enough delicious frangipane mixture though because there was too much on the pastry – it billowed up and spilled over. I quickly turned the oven off to halt the frangipane pilgrimage to the edge of the oven tray, but this meant that the centre of the pastry sheet didn’t have time to get light and flaky. It wasn’t uncooked, just sadly damp, floppy and uncrisp.

While this was happening Tim was watching footage of the Pike River chief executive Peter Whittall, who can’t have slept in the past week, showing a map of where the 29 miners were thought to be, deep in the stomach of the earth. The projector cast shadows across Whittall’s face, and I looked at the tart and thought “oh well”. So we ate it, and it was fine – delicious in fact, with what I considered a bonus breadth of cakey frangipane to pull off the tray contemplatively. Yes, the underside needed longer in the heat, but the soft dried apricots were warmed to an heady, jammy perfumedness, while the fruity, creamy Kamahi honey somehow amplified the fresh, Christmassy flavour of the often dull ground almonds.

While it may need some tweaking here and there, you can feel free to go ahead and make this recipe. Although, while I ended up with deliciousness I’ve only made this recipe twice and it was somewhat fail-y both times…don’t blame me if you get frangipane all over your oven/walls/hair.
For any international readers, the Pike River mine explosion last Friday caused the disappearance, followed by confirmed death after a second explosion on Wednesday, of 29 miners on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. I was a bit naive and was saying “I hope they’re staying calm” to which people would reply, “if they’re alive”. The sickening sadness that their families, friends, colleagues and community went through, and continue to go through, makes the heart ache. If you read the newspaper (and it’s usually the narrow columns to the left and right of the page that relay the saddest stories in the briefest of paragraphs) you’ll see that tragedy happens everywhere and every day. The scale and public nature of this disaster means it has particular resonance across the country though. With that in mind – with anything in mind really – a burnt or awkward tart is something I can shrug at.
On Thursday morning, the Kamahi honey was spread thickly across hot toast, cut from a loaf of Rewena, the honey slowly filling the pools of butter that gathered in the bread’s crevices. The simplest solution of all, and it was so good. And, at a stretch, a kind of an early prototype version of the above tart. Actually I bet honey and apricot jam on toast (just spontaneously riffing here) would be amazing.
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Title via: YES, quoting Billie Piper’s Honey To The Bee here. It’s strange how, while not one note of the rest of her music appeals to me, I have an intense and unapologetic love for this one song. The swooning rapturousness with which the bizarre lyrics are delivered, the slow-dripping melody, and the late-nineties technological charm of its video make for quite the experience.
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Music lately:
Mariah Carey, Emotions from her album of the same name. Listening to her non-stop brings me no closer to the secret of what makes her so flawless.
The Damned, Eloise. Excellence!
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Next time: most definitely the Chicken Salad Lorraine, plus we’re off to Tiger Translate tonight so there’ll probably be a breathless account of that too.

and if you don’t want to be down with me, you don’t want to pick from my apple tree

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I made these Apple and Cinnamon muffins ages ago – they were the second thing I tried from Nigella Lawson’s book Kitchen after the Spaghetti with Marmite (which got slated in a column in the local paper – any Dominion Post readers out there, don’t disregard its deliciousness! I guess that was one opinion, and mine is merely another, but still.) I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to blog about them, but…here they are.
I do agree with Nigella’s emphatic and continued suspicion of the muffins you run into in many cafes and supermarkets. What they lack in tenderness and flavour, they make up for in height and overpricedness. It could be easy to dislike the concept of muffins altogether if your main experience of them is handing over $4.50 for a mountain of foam mattress sprinkled in chocolate chips, somehow dry and oily simulataneously. Maybe you like this, or your experience of shop muffins is better than mine. All good.
However home-made muffins, while less uniform in shape, are very easy to make and as long as you don’t over-mix them, pretty well guaranteed to be extremely delicious. I realise apple and cinnamon muffins might sound like the obvious-est of the obvious but this recipe of Nigella’s is incredibly good – dense and sweet with honey and yoghurt and textured with chunks of apple and almonds. And it probably costs less to make a whole dozen than it would to buy just one from the supermarket.
Nigella uses spelt flour in this recipe instead of regular flour, which makes them more acceptable for some people who eat wheat-free, but not necessarily those who are gluten-free – it’s a little complicated but go with what you know is best for you, I guess. I bought a bag of spelt flour a year ago and never ended up using it so it was nice to have the opportunity to try it out. These muffins are so full of flavour that I couldn’t say they were distinctively spelt-ish, they just came out looking and tasting like muffins should. You could definitely just use regular plain flour rather than rushing out to find spelt.
Apple and Cinnamon Muffins

From Nigella Lawson’s Kitchen

2 apples
250g spelt flour (or just plain flour)
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
125g brown sugar
125ml honey (1/2 a cup)
60ml (1/4 cup) natural yoghurt
125 ml oil (1/2 a cup – and I use Rice Bran oil)
2 eggs
75g natural almonds, roughly chopped.

Set your oven to 200 C and line your muffin tin with papers.

Chop the apples into small dice, leaving out the core of course, and put to one side. Whisk together the brown sugar, honey, yoghurt, oil and eggs in a bowl.

Tip in the apples, flour, baking powder, half the almonds, and one teaspoon of the cinnamon into this and gently fold it together with a spatula. Try not to overmix – I tend to lift and shift the batter rather than do a full on stirring motion, if that makes any sense at all.

Spoon evenly amongst the muffin tin, and sprinkle with the remaining cinnamon and almonds, plus a little more brown sugar if you like. Bake for 20 minutes. Let them stand 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool.
While the comfort-food element of cinnamon and apple obviously works, the almonds, growing smokily nutty under the oven’s heat, and honey, complementing the diced apple’s clean but layered sweetness, keep these muffins from being predictable. They take minutes to throw together but stay good for ages in a sealed container, if anything becoming even more delicious with time (although that could be a product of imagination and anticipation, waking up thinking “OHBOY a delicious muffin for a mid-morning snack.”)
In fact, one of the excellent things about muffins is that they’re really just cake, but you can eat them any time of day including breakfast, without getting strange looks – in the sort of way that a pavlova or ice cream might. Not that avoiding strange looks should be your main motivation in life, not at all! It’s just a nice thought…breakfast cake.
Tim and I went out to Petone yesterday and at the record shop partway down Jackson Street, I found the original Broadway cast recording of Company on vinyl. I didn’t even think it existed in New Zealand – considering the juggernaut that is Amazon.com only has about 6 copies, one for US$90…and now for relative pennies I’ve got Elaine Stritch barking “she’s tall enough to be your mother” as people originally heard her the first time round in 1970. I had to keep taking it out of the bag and looking at it on the bus back into the city in case I’d just done a really good job of imagining it. But it exists. It’s damn exciting.

Speaking of, I am seriously anticipational about Tiger Translate on the 26th of November, if you’re in Wellington around this time you should most definitely give it your time of day. Even though I feel like I don’t quite have a grip on what it is, there’s a whole lot of creativity that’ll go down and there will be some amazing locals performing. We’ve been lucky to witness many of them in action already over the last year or so, with their powers combined who knows what kind of fresh mayhem will occur. TrinityRoots’ stunner drummer Riki Gooch, Julien Dyne and Parks who we saw just last week onstage with Ladi6, Homebrew, whose lyric-memorising male fans still astound months after we saw them with David Dallas at Watusi, Adi Dick who despite being in a squillion different music projects we’ve never actually seen live, the mighty intriguing Orchestra of Spheres, the amazing Electric Wire Hustle who we saw back in February and have since been galloping round the globe, Tommy Ill, Alphabethead whose happy style we love, Scratch 22, Fried Chicken Sound System, The Jewel School plus particularly special guest DJ Zooloo from Mongolia. Tim and I are going to be there and if you get a move on the first 500 people to register online get free tickets – not sure if this has filled up but either way check out their website for more info.
While I’m talking to Wellington, can anyone tell me where to get decent garlic? It seems like even the expensive stuff from the supermarket, with the pretty purple-tinged papery casing is all chomped and denty, gets green shoots quickly, and burns the tongue like raw onion. I guess people selling garlic have no way of knowing what’s underneath the stuff you peel off, but I’m also guessing you can’t return a bulb once you’ve bought it. Sure, there’s the mulched up stuff in jars, but for those times you want whole cloves…?
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Title via: Erykah Badu and her song Appletree from the beautiful album Baduizm. Such an amazing woman – I wish she’d tour on down to New Zealand.
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Music lately:
I Learned The Hard Way, by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, from the album of the same title. Now there’s an amazing woman who is coming to New Zealand, and luckily for us we were able to buy tickets. Can’t wait.
Obviously, have got Company doing many revolutions right now. Can’t get enough no.
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Next time: I am on a prawn high right now, watch out.

swallow my pride, oh yeah

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The nice thing about Mum’s (circa 1971) copy of the “De Luxe Edition” of Edmonds Cookbook that she sent me as a birthday present back in April is…that while there are great recipes and all, just reading through it can be pretty fun in its own right. Beautiful and useful as many of the newer cookbooks celebrating old-time New Zealand cooking are, I like the unromantic straightforwardness of the original text itself.

I like how it informs you that Edmonds is manufacturer of such time-saving, of-the-era items as “Instant Chopped Onions”, “Start” (what even is that?) and “Pronto Instant Beef Tea” (with that kind of title, I can hardly fathom its speed of assembly.) How it coolly gives a recipe for “Grated Nut Cakes” when neither the act of grating nor presence of nuts are involved in the method.


On page 37 is a recipe called Walnut Pride and even though reading through it didn’t reveal anything fist-raisingly representative of being proud, I felt instantly and strongly drawn to making it. Probably so that if people came over and went to the cake tin to look inside (and they do) and asked what it was, I could say “Walnut Pride. Want some?”

Really, it’s just your average cakey slice, with some nuts thrown in. As it was, I used Brazil nuts because they were cheaper than walnuts, as a bonus Brazil nuts have a prouder sound to them than walnuts…right? There’s nothing outrageous about this recipe but it’s tasty, and easy to make, and non-threateningly good-looking, and as far as baking goes, sometimes there’s not much more you could ask for.



If anyone does actually know where the name came from, feel free to share. Without being overly simplistic, according to Wikipedia the first gay pride events in New Zealand were in the 1970s, so maybe this cake is what people ate to give them energy and to share amongst friends while marching..?

Brazil Nut Pride

Adapted from The Edmonds Cookbook.

120g butter
250g brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg
1/3 cup milk

250g plain flour
1 moderate teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup Brazil nuts (or, of course, the original walnuts)
1/2 cup sultanas

Set your oven to 180 C/370 F, and line a baking tin – not too big, not too small – with baking paper. Cream butter and sugar, then add the vanilla. Beat in the egg, then alternatively mix in the milk with the dry ingredients. Stir in the Brazil nuts and fruit. Bake for 40 minutes, then ice with lemon icing when cool and cut into squares. I mixed up some lemon juice with icing sugar till it was a thick enough to drizzle off a spoon onto the cake, but feel free to smear it with lemon butter icing as the recipe suggests.


It tastes just fine – not faint-makingly delicious, but good and cakey, a bit flutteringly caramelly from the brown sugar, with the occasional creamy nutty crunch from the Brazil nuts lodged throughout. And in case you’re wondering what a “moderate teaspoon of baking powder” is, well so am I. My interpretation involved casually swiping a spoon into the box of baking powder while squinting with my head tilted to the side, then tapping the spoon slightly to remove any excess. You…you do what feels right.

I was home from work sick today with what I’ve called the proto-flu – my throat was all constricted and I felt shivery and very sensitive to the touch last night, but after a good sleep and lots of tea and water, I’m back to just having a sore throat again. So I’m basically fine. The fact that I felt like three bits of marmite and cheese on toast for lunch was a good indication. If I don’t want to eat, it usually means I’m sick. Sometimes when I get really crook, I end up sadly telling Tim, usually from the foetal position, “I guess I’ll just have to stop the food blog, I can’t even imagine why I wanted to talk about food in the first place”. As soon as it passes I start thinking about cheesecake and fried chicken and spaghetti that sort of thing again.

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Title via: To those of you who thought I might quote U2’s (Pride) In The Name Of Love…pshh. They’re all very talented people. I just don’t like their music enough to use a lyric as a post title. Now, the Ramones – I love their song Swallow My Pride, especially the way the chorus lurches surprisingly-but-pleasantly upwards. And it is they who bring us today’s title.
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Music lately:

Tim put on some Smiths this evening, haven’t listened to them in aaaaages. A favourite of mine is Shoplifters of the World Unite from Louder Than Bombs. The beginning always catches me off-guard with its directness, and Morrissey sounds typically wonderful.

Today I watched the 1993 film of Gypsy, one of the greatest musicals ever written, starring the awesome Bette Midler as Madame Rose. Also awesome was Mad Men‘s Elizabeth Moss in a small role as Baby Louise, and Tony Award winner Christine Ebersole playing burlesque stripper Dressy Tessy Tura. This movie is criminally under-represented on youtube, but check out Midler’s brassy and sassy Everything’s Coming Up Roses. I can’t even imagine how extremely amazing the recent Broadway production (with Patti LuPone, Laura Benanti, Boyd Gaines and Leigh-Ann Larkin) must have been.

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Next time: The brisket!

we sell our souls for bread

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Nothing like a persistently rainy long weekend to really push me back into the grippy arms of the kitchen. I seriously love making bread, but haven’t had a chance in ages so tip of the hat to the Queen for her birthday creating a Monday off this week. If New Zealand ever becomes a republic there’d better be some particularly concrete replacements for any long weekend we’d lose as a result. With extra time on my hands I’ve been making all kinds of things including this Nigella Lawson bread recipe from her flawless book of baking, How To Be A Domestic Goddess.

I was able to use these beautiful walnuts that Mum posted down to me from a family friend’s tree. They’re easy enough to get into, just a light tap from a hammer on the shell and a bit of digging quickly produces a pile of bamboo coloured, wrinkled heart shapes. They were soft and fragrant and tasted amazing – none of that tooth-coating bitterness that you sometimes get with those from a packet which have been sitting round too long.

This bread is fiddly-ish but no real mission to make. I didn’t have any of the wholemeal bread flour that Nigella specified but I did have plenty of half-empty packets of dusty offerings from the health food shop down the road (I don’t know, they’re just so compulsively purchasable) so if you’re in the same boat just do what I did and use 550g white bread flour and make up the rest of the weight with bran, rolled oats, that sort of thing. If you don’t have real maple syrup, use honey or golden syrup instead.


Maple Walnut Bread

Adapted from Maple-Pecan Bread in Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess (ie you can use pecans if you have them)
  • 500g wholemeal bread flour
  • 150g white bread flour
  • 1 sachet instant dry yeast
  • 300-400mls warm water
  • 4 tablespoons maple syrup
  • 50-100g walnuts
  • Walnut oil (if you have it, otherwise use plain eg rice bran)
Mix the flours and yeast together in a large bowl. Pour in the water and syrup and mix to make a sticky dough. Knead for a couple of minutes, then let it sit for 20 minutes. Knead again, sprinkling over the walnuts as you go. It will take a little while to incorporate them, simply because this type of dough is a little tougher than usual. Keep pushing and kneading until the walnuts are more or less dispersed throughout the dough and until it forms a smooth, elastic ball. Pour over a good tablespoon of walnut or other oil, and turn so all surfaces are covered. Cover in clingfilm, and leave for a couple of hours to rise.

At this stage, punch it down to deflate it, then knead it into a loaf shape. Cover with a teatowel and leave it for half an hour, meanwhile setting the oven to 220 C. Bake for 1/4 of an hour before turning down the temperature to 180C and baking for a further 20 or so minutes, covering with a sheet of tinfoil if it starts to get too brown.


The maple syrup isn’t aggressively present in the finished, baked bread, but gives a subtle, layered fragrance and sweet, chewy crust which goes brilliantly with the deliciously toasted walnuts. Last night for dinner, inspired by a Ray McVinnie Quick Smart column in one of my Cuisine magazines, I cooked chunks of butternut pumpkin in boiling water till soft, drained and mashed them with coriander and cumin seeds, fried squares of diced streaky bacon and wafers of haloumi till sizzling, and served all that on top of slices of the freshly baked bread. The sweetness of the pumpkin was echoed in the sweetness of the bread, incredibly good with the contrastingly salty bacon and cheese. Unfortunately that’s the last of the cut-price haloumi I got from The Food Show so it’s unlikely I’ll be able to recreate such a smashing dinner for a while. If however you yourself are in the regular-haloumi-buying demographic then by all means try it.

Other things that happened this mighty fine long weekend include forsaking a long-time-coming sleepin to stagger to the pub to watch the All Whites’ friendly pre-FIFA World Cup game against Slovenia on Saturday morning. Unfortunately we lost, but full marks to Slovenia considering their population is only 2.2 million or so. The upshot of it was that we had a great excuse to go to Customs and order great quantities of beautiful, beautiful filter coffee served by the lovely people there. We don’t get to go very often but they even recognised that Tim had got his hair cut. As well as making me want to cook things, the rain also meant we had a fine excuse to watch The IT Crowd last night. Britain seems to positively fling out these small, side-poppingly funny yet under-the-radar comedies, and while I’d known about The IT Crowd for a while I’ve never pinned it down for a good watch. I really enjoyed Richard Ayoade’s work withThe Mighty Boosh so it’s nice to see him in a leading role in this. Find it if you can – we finished the lot in very quick succession.

Speaking of coffee, and in exciting news for future employers, Tim has left Starbucks after three years. No hard feelings towards the green siren – it helped pay our rent through university and is highly educative coffee-wise. If anyone out there requires a ridiculously great guy with an Honours degree in media studies to do cool stuff like using skills learned in both university and life, then truly look no further than the now-available Tim. You think I deal recommendations lightly? Think again.
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Title via: Electric Blues from the Broadway musical Hair. My preoccupation with its amazing score rides again. This song is so exciting and dynamic, and I presume they use the word ‘bread’ to mean ‘money’ in this context, but then…maybe they’d tried this recipe too. And while lyrics like “we’re all encased in sonic armour, belting out through chrome grenades” make me smile, the next stanza’s “they chain ya and they brainwash ya, when you least expect it, they feed ya mass media” could definitely find relevance at any stage.
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Music lately:
Beth, by localers Voom from their debut album Now I Am Me. I first heard this song years ago on Channel Z and while I can’t say I cried or anything, I certainly felt that good, self-indulgent kind of desolation that you get from wallowing in excellent sad music about situations that you’re not sure if you can relate to but you allow them to reflect whatever it is you’re feeling anyway. Some bright spark put the video onto Youtube so I can now enjoy and wallow all over again as and when necessary.
Janelle Monae’s Tightrope from The Archandroid. There’s already so much being said about her on – dun dun – the internet, but at face value it’s a stonkeringly good tune.
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Next time: Maybe even more exciting than baking bread and watching DVDs on a Friday night, I made my own ricotta cheese yesterday! The recipe is so easy I could almost put it right here as an afterthought. But no. You’ll have to wait for next time, well either that or call my bluff and google “homemade ricotta” and render me completely unnecessary.

looking through a glass onion

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It is so, so freezing in Wellington lately, that straight-through-your-clothes harsh chill which makes getting out of bed in the morning that much more aggrieving. I was in Christchurch and Dunedin over the weekend for work which was also an intensely cold experience, not to mention pretty exhausting (can’t say I’ve been sleeping well recently, and sitting in clenched frustration for an hour and a half on a plastic chair in the Dunedin airport where there is nothing to do while waiting for your flight, followed by a further hour and a half’s wait at the Christchurch airport will take it out of you. This is New Zealand, not the mighty plains of Canada, I don’t see why we need flights with stop-overs.) Hence why it has been a while since I’ve blogged.

There’s not much I love doing more in winter than sitting by a roaring heater with a pile of my cookbooks, going through and imagining what shenanigans I could get up to. Cooking in winter is fun – all those long-simmered warming dishes that make the house smell amazing and warm you as you stand over them – unlike the summer heat when all you really want to do for dinner is sit quietly inside the freezer and lick its icy walls. One book that I had a flick through recently was the Supercooks Supersavers Cookbook, which I picked up at the local opshop back home for about a dollar a few years back. I love its season-based chapters, its 1980 style, and its seriously enthusiastic title.
I found this awesome sounding recipe for Onions Smothered with Walnuts. It’s basically onions roasted in a sticky, spicy sauce, and though they’re more “vaguely scattered” than “smothered” with the walnuts it’s a gorgeous combination of flavours.
Onions Smothered with Walnuts
From the Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook

450g small pickling (pearl) onions, peeled (I didn’t have any, so just used whole onions, quartered)
75g walnuts, chopped
25g melted butter
2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon chilli sauce
1/2 cup stock or water
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper to taste

Heat oven to 170 C. In a bowl, mix everything together and pour into an oven-proof dish. Cover with tinfoil, and bake for around an hour, stirring once or twice. *Use olive oil and balsamic vinegar instead of the butter and worcestershire sauce to easily make this vegan. Yay!
It’s so good that I actually made it two nights in a row. In a weird twist of events, the first night I made it in a silicon dish and the second night I made it in a metal dish, and the second night the onions and sauce turned all black. Made me a little nervous, but not so nervous that I didn’t carry on eating the lot. This recipe has a lot going for it – it has punchy, warm flavours, it’s very cheap to make, it’s versatile, and it just cooks away by itself, not really requiring any attention. The honey, chilli and cinnamon are a brilliant combination and it’s perfect over pasta, which is how I had it, but would also work on couscous, mashed potatoes, rice, or stirred into a stew or roasted vegetables. Thanks, Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook!
As I said, I’m pretty weary from the weekend, I haven’t been sleeping so well and on top of that I actually wasn’t feeling that great over the weekend. There were some diverting moments – seeing Graeme Downes of The Verlaines, The Dead C’s Bruce Russell and Flying Nun’s Roger Shepherd weighing in on a discussion panel about NZ Music, subsequently sitting behind the Verlaines on the flight to Dunedin, meeting with former flatmate Emma for a jolly catch-up, having an enthusiastic person “help” me by picking up my phone that I’d put on the ground right by my feet so I could take down a poster at an event, only to watch them accidentally drop it down three flights of stairs…
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Title via: The Beatles’ Glass Onion from The White Album. One of their more intriguing contributions…
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Music lately:
A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow, sung by Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, from the film A Mighty Wind. This is absolutely my favourite film, and having it on my iPod made the four plane trips over the weekend much more bearable. This song is gorgeous even though it’s sending up the folk music genre, and Catherine O’Hara is just…perfect. Makes me want to learn the autoharp. Sincerely.
Bloodbuzz Ohio from The National’s new album High Violet. The album itself didn’t set me on fire but this song is a stunner and really showcases everything that’s good about The National. And you can check out a lengthier review I did of High Violet here at The Corner if you like.

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Next time: I’ll hopefully be a touch more awake. It’s Queen’s Birthday weekend in a day or two, nothing like a Monday off to make you feel unbendingly fond of the monarchy. I found this really cool recipe for pumpkin bread that I’m keen to try, I also am thinking of getting the crock pot out from its hiding place, it’s now definitely cold enough out there…

20th century soy

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After all those feijoa brownies – which on one particular day served as both my breakfast and dinner, all I can say is that the heart wants what the heart wants – I thought I’d rekindle my relationship with tofu, get some soy back in my bloodstream. The stuff I like to get comes from the vege market on Dixon/Willis Street and is $4 for a generous block of four squares, or fillets if you like, of firm tofu.

We went to see Alice in Wonderland in 3D that night and I wanted a fast-moving dinner planned for when we returned home. It all worked out fantastically – crisp slices of matzoh-crumbed tofu resting on a bed, no, a beanbag of chickpea and golden sultana-studded couscous, and a garlicky tahini sauce on top. It was all made very quickly – such is the joy of couscous, instantly puffing itself up into a meal, and tofu, which has no bacteria squatting within its meatless walls to be smoked out in the cooking process, cutting down on pan-time.

Yes, the photos aren’t great but 1) I was tired and hungry and 2) all that beige. What would you do? There’s only so much coriander in my fridge.
Tofu with Garlic Tahini, Couscous and Chickpeas
Half a block of firm tofu
Breadcrumbs
3 fat cloves garlic
2 Tablespoons tahini
Pinch smoked paprika
1/2 cup couscous
Boiling water
1 tin chickpeas
1/3 cup golden sultanas (you could use normal sultanas, or currants, or dried cranberries etc)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Handful almonds (or other nuts)
Tip the couscous into a bowl, pour over boiling water to cover and sit a plate on top while you get on with the tofu. When you return to it, remove the plate and fluff up the couscous with a fork. Stir in the drained can of chickpeas and the sultanas (or whatever you’re using instead), the spices plus salt to taste.

Wrap the tofu in a couple of paper towels and press on it to let some of the moisture absorb away. Bin the paper and slice up the tofu. Put your breadcrumbs (I used matzoh meal) onto a plate and press the tofu slices into them, covering both sides of each slice. Heat a tablespoon or two of olive oil till good and hot, and fry the slices till golden, a couple of minutes each side.

Finally, crush or finely chop the garlic cloves, and fry gently (in the same pan that you did the tofu in is fine). Stir in the tahini and a tablespoon of water and adding as much water as you like till you have a smoothish pale sauce. Add the paprika. Serve the tofu slices on top of the couscous with the sauce drizzled over. Sprinkle with the almonds, chopped, and a handful of torn coriander.
The couscous thing was adapted from a Nigella Lawson recipe and was delicious- buttery chickpeas, tender couscous grains and chewy, sweet golden sultanas. I’m always happy to be eating tofu but pressing the crumbs into it provided a bit more texture and welcome crunch. The sauce tied it all together with its garlic smoothness, although undeniably it was a really ugly colour…even with the ‘sprinkle-the-coriander-over’ routine I still couldn’t disguise its utter beige-ity.
We ate this for dinner, as I said, after seeing Alice in Wonderland in 3D. It was my first 3D movie (yeah, so I still haven’t seen Avatar) and once I’d stopped jumping every time a leaf swirled out in front of me off the screen it was really fun. Because I loved the Alice books so much as a youngster I was a bit suspicious about what a film version could offer me, especially since the trailer made it look pretty rubbish but…I absolutely loved it. Not since Step Up 2: The Streets have I been so pleasantly surprised by a film. It was visually gorgeous for a start, but the acting and the fleshed-out characters really made it a wonderful experience. Mia Waisakowska’s Alice is powerful, at first simply reacting to what’s around her then gradually becoming more powerful, overall a highly compelling character. Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter are stunning queens. Apparently Bonham-Carter drew inspiration from Nigella for her role, and yeah, I could see it. And Johnny Depp is as captivating as, you know, he ALWAYS is. It drooped occasionally but the only thing I really didn’t like about it was the Avril Lavigne song that blasts immediately over the ending credits. It’s so bad that it’s like a parody of an awful song rather than just a simply awful song. Disney kindly showed us several fancy trailers for upcoming 3D films prior to Alice in Wonderland starting, including Toy Story 3, something about owls, and yet another Shrek sequel. I wonder if 3D is proving to be an exciting platform for companies to re-thrash already thrashed franchises…
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Title via: That other mad hatter, Marc Bolan, and T-Rex’s 20th Century Boy.
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Music lately:

Martha by Rufus Wainwright from his new album All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu. I love Wainwright’s music, his theatrical imagery and endless voice, so a new album is always a bit of a treat. This is just him and a piano, not sparse in the slightest, I’m not sure he could do ‘sparse’ but utterly beautiful and stripped of any real excess. Martha, presumably named for his sister, is one particularly affecting track on this album, the first he’s put out there since his mother’s death earlier this year.
Night Hawkes from Wellingtonian Red Steer’s latest EP, The Fever Fold. It’s an exciting track with an enviable beat that sneaks in partway through and makes me want to choreograph something. Tim reviewed it at The Corner, an NZ website so awesome that we both write for it, and you can even download the EP for free once you’re done reading up on it (and my review of MGMT’s Congratulations, there’s no free download but I do reference Hair, almost as exciting…)
Sleigh Bells’ Tell Em, crunchier than sandpaper and very fun. Their relentless fuzzity could be hard on the ears but as someone who grew up rural, ears pressed to the radio at night with one finger slowly inching the tuner round to pick up any kind of signal, it all makes sense to me.
Do you know what I’m emphatically not listening to? Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate’s Ali and Toumani, the collaboration that has recently been released, five year’s on from Toure’s death. We walked from the top of Cuba Street to the bottom of Lambton Quay at the other end of town, entering every single music shop we found and not one place had it. I know, I should have bought it sooner…
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Next time: Oh sure we ate tofu but…I also made a pudding of the ice-creamy variety. So you’ll find out about the all sharp change in direction when I next get time to update this.

tuna or later

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I really don’t eat a lot of kaimoana, which is a bit stupid since I live in a long thin country surrounded by healthy salt water. The fish are plentiful. With the weight of a thousand magazine articles about how Omega-3 will solve all your problems and also a feeling that I was some kind of useless lover-of-food if I wasn’t cooking fish occasionally, I went to the counter at Moore Wilson’s and confidently pointed at a slab of ruby-red tuna.

I was inspired by a recipe that I read on Lori’s Lipsmacking Goodness for soba noodles with salad, the particular eye-catcher being the peanut sauce that went with it. The further I read into the list of ingredients the hungrier I became and I felt like the salty, chilli flavours in the sauce, plus its richness, could stand up well against the heavy, oily tuna. After flicking through a couple of my Nigella Lawson cookbooks I decided to coat the tuna in a rubbly mix of roughly crushed peppercorns before searing them in a hot, hot pan, figuring that the sharp heat of the pepper would provide a further contrast to the fish beneath it.

Seared Pepper Crusted Tuna with Soba Noodles and Peanut Sauce

Thanks to Lori for the peanut sauce recipe and inspiration!

Serves 2

200 – 300g fillet of tuna
2 tablespoons mixed peppercorns
Salad leaves and soba noodles for 2 people

Roughly crush the peppercorns in a pestle and mortar. Do this carefully, as the little suckers will ping out all over the place. Sprinkle half of them over one side of the tuna, pressing them in gently. Meanwhile, heat a nonstick pan till it’s good and hot. Slide the tuna, pepper side down, onto the hot pan and let it cook for a couple of minutes. Sprinkle the rest of the pepper on the other side of the tuna. Once you’re satisfied with how cooked it is, carefully flip the tuna over using a couple of spatulas or a fishslice or something, and sear on the other side. Remove to a plate and cover in tinfoil. Cook the soba noodles in plenty of boiling water – this shouldn’t take long.

Sauce

1/2 teaspoon red chilli paste
4 tablespoons tahini
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
3 tablespoons rice bran oil
3 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons smooth peanut butter
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons Hoisin sauce
1 tsp ginger, finely chopped

Whisk all the ingredients together. This makes quite a lot – I halved it. I also had no Hoisin sauce so I left it out, and added a little garlic instead.

Assembly:

Arrange a bunch of mixed salad leaves on two plates, and top with the soba noodles. Thinly slice the tuna – about 5mm-1cm thick. Arrange the slices on top of the soba noodles, spoon over the peanut sauce, and top with sesame seeds or coriander if you like.

Feeling as though Nigella, across the other side of the world, would instinctively shudder without knowing why if I overcooked the tuna, I made sure to keep it fairly rare. With its red interior and seared crust it may resemble a steak, and certainly has the meatiness, but its texture is a lot softer and it is definitely richer than any of its four-legged counterparts. As I’d hoped, the tuna, the hot pepper, and the nutty sauce all worked together seriously well. The leafy, noodly base gave further, completely welcome textural contrast without competing too much flavourwise.

The sauce was a total revelation – thick, rich, amazingly nutty and spicy and delicious. I imagine it would be amazing poured over any number of other things – beef skewers, tofu, plain noodles, rice, or as a dipping sauce for sliced vegetables, spring rolls, rice paper rolls – seriously, it was wonderful stuff. Thank you Lori! Will I be cooking more fish? I guess I’ll try. The tuna ended up being pretty expensive but it was delicious – light years apart from the stringy, grey chunks of fish that you get in cans which are actually really expensive themselves. What’s with that? Nigella has so many recipes that I want to try, which is a good push in the direction of the fish counter. As long as I don’t have to look at the crayfish in their tank. Call me a hypocrite, I mean I eat meat, but the sight of those knock-kneed, sad-eyed crowded creatures makes me want to fall on the floor and sob. It’s true.

Speaking of, on Wednesday night Tim and I had the massively good fortune to see the Dead Weather live at the Powerstation in Auckland, afterwards I was wanting to fall to the floor and sob at Jack White’s BRILLIANCE. Please don’t expect this to be a definitive review – I feel like the more I talk about this gig the less I really say. What a line up – Queens of the Stone Age’s Dean Fertita, Jack Lawrence of the Raconteurs and Alison Mosshart from the Kills comprise the rest of the band and were, you know, really good. But as the song goes, I only have eyes for yooooooujackwhite. Friends, he was sublime. The Dead Weather’s music – heavy, sludgy, intense and metaphorical – sounded wonderful in the venue, particularly I Cut Like A Buffalo. Tim and I managed to negotiate a patch pretty near the front of the stage, but the crowd wasn’t the most fun to be in, especially these girls on our right who may or may not have been on P, judging by the way they were dancing so aggressively in such a tiny space. Narrowed eyes and a “huh?” expression don’t go very far in the dark. They continued all night, inciting more and more hatred in me as their heads swung round. The girl on the left continuously tried to push in front of me – we were so tightly packed that I have no idea where she thought she might end up. Apologies for getting caught up in the negatives but it was irritating to be in the presence of such an exciting band and for everyone to be so focussed on themselves. Am I secretly a naive yet curmudgeonly old man? Anyway!

 

Stripped of his eyebrow-waggling White Stripes persona, Jack White was as enigmatic as ever and completely amazing as a musician – switching from drums, to guitar and vocals and back to drums again. As I said the crowd was very full-on and afterwards my neck was actually twitching – I think I got carpal spine just from trying to stay upright in the seething mass of overexcited teens. Once it was all over, Tim and I, with no shame whatsoever, waited as close to the stage door as possible (flipping miles away, in case you’re wondering, but the security were nice guys and let us stay) and waved at Jack White as he was driven away in a large white van. He grinned, knocked on the window and waved back. It was a stupidly exciting moment considering what it amounted to really. I know I go on about lots of different things but Tim and I really, really love the White Stripes and all Jack White’s inspired tangents so to get the chance to see him performing again was incredibly special. Hence the dorky photo above outside the Powerstation.

I didn’t waste time while up in Auckland, going to lots of work meetings with plenty of lovely people. Maybe it’s a throwback to my rural upbringing but Auckland always seems a bit exciting no matter how many times I go there. I do love Wellington though and it is great to be back, despite the mountain of work that piled up in my absence. This weekend I am catching up with my best friend from school, we hardly ever see each other so I can’t wait. May even break out the girdlebuster pie which is still sitting quietly in the freezer…

Title brought to you by: Bob Dylan’s song One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later), and yes, sometimes on reflection it feels a little lazy to squeeze awful puns out of his back catalogue but the carpal spine I contracted while trying not to die in the audience for the Dead Weather has prevented me from doing anything cleverer. I didn’t mean to treat you so bad…


Music these days:

Billy Porter, King Of The World, from At the Corner of Broadway and Soul. Unfortunately no youtube video exists of him executing this song but you can listen to it at that link (it’s worth it – the ending is amazing!) I have recently reconnected with the astounding voice this man possesses. Watch him sing Beauty School Drop Out. Seriously. I think he discovered a new octave.

David Dallas, Big Time, the gorgeously mellow single from his album Something Awesome. Along with a whole bunch of other New Zealand artists, Dallas is at SXSW in Austin, Texas, and hopefully his sound resonates with that audience because – for what it’s worth coming from me – it feels like he could go so far. Not just saying this because I had a crush on him back when the remix for Scribe’s Not Many came out years ago.

Electric Blues from the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Hair. I know, would I stop talking about it already? I just keep getting more and more obsessed with this music. Every time I think I’m cool, I’m cool, I’ll see one tweet by Gavin Creel and then I want so bad to go to London to see the Broadway Cast transfer over there.
Next time: I’m not just going to invite my best friend round for dinner so that I can finally eat this girdlebuster pie, but if it does happen, y’all will be the first to know about it. Promise!

let’s have a ball girl and take our sweet little time about it

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My nana is seriously fantastic. She’s the only person in my life who will txt me to say that RENT is on TV and that she’s going to tape it, while also being able to identify buttonholing and stitching on a opshop dress of mine as dating it back to the 1950s. She was one of the very first readers and supporters of this blog back in 2007 and has always been a positive presence in my life. As if all that weren’t enough, a while back she commented on a tofu-centric post on this blog with Tofu “Balls”, a recipe she “used heaps over 20 years ago.”

I guess the title isn’t overly inviting – anything with inverted commas seems a little hesitant. That said, these literally are balls of tofu – just because there’s not any meat doesn’t make these any less, erm, ballsy, so there’s no need for them to cower behind quotation marks. Amusing thought they may be.

All hesitancy aside, they’re really, really delicious. I did kind of tweak the recipe – I love tofu, I love rolled oats, but I don’t think I can face them together. The combination belongs back in the shadows of “over 20 years ago”…for everyone’s sake. That said, if you’re game, then certainly go ahead and use them instead of the breadcrumbs/ground almonds.

Tofu “Balls”

With thanks to Nana for the heads-up.

In a food processor, mix the following till a crumbly mixture forms.

1/2 cup chopped peanuts or cashews
1 finely chopped onion
2/3 cup soft breadcrumbs, or 1/2 cup ground almonds
1 egg (optional – leaving it out makes these vegan)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
2 Tablespoons Shoyu or soy sauce
1 block firm tofu (I used half, or two squares, from those four-packs of firm tofu you get from the vege market)

Roll into balls, not too large – about the size of the old 50c pieces, or a walnut. The second time I made these I rolled them in ground almonds which was rather nice, but the world won’t fall apart if you don’t do it. Heat a little rice bran oil in a wide pan, and cook till the balls are crisp and browned on all sides.

Nana also recommended a sauce made by bringing peanut butter, lemon juice and water to the boil in a pan while stirring with a spatula, although I imagine any kind of dipping sauce you have to hand would work with these – chilli sauce, for example…

Forget your fear of tofu and maybe your further fear of well-meaning vintage recipes involving tofu. These are so good! A crunchy without, nutty and mouthfilling like peanut butter within. The tofu has a really lovely fresh flavour which balances out the richness of the nuts, but the softness of the texture means that they really slow you down – which is why you don’t want to roll them too large. They went brilliantly with a crunchy green salad of sliced cabbage, sugar snap peas and avocado, plus soba noodles, slippery and cool with sesame oil and soy sauce. Because tofu is so awesome and kind of holds everything together you can afford to toy with these as you wish. If you wanted to you could also add into the food processor a number of ingredients…sesame seeds, tahini, sunflower seeds, lemon rind, chopped ginger, garlic…As well as being a very filling main meal, you could make them even smaller – like bonker marble sized – and serve with toothpicks and a variety of dipping sauces at your next soiree.
Busy times lately – Tim and I spent both Thursday and Friday night at the cocoon of body heat that is the San Francisco Bath House firstly to see Brooklyn – as in New York – band Dirty Projectors, then local sensations Mint Chicks last night. Dirty Projectors have this unusual, intriguing sound – kind of minimalistic, with wonky time signatures, chunky drumbeats and flutey harmonies that take the role of instruments in places. Occasionally the sound got a bit repetitive, (and all those “ehhh-ohhhs” make me think of the Tellytubbies) although if I could sing like the gorgeous ladies in the band I’d probably do the same thing over and over too. They all looked really happy though which tends to endear me to performers, and damnit if I haven’t been humming the stunning No Intentions constantly. I’m glad we went and saw them – there’s some extraordinary talent within the band, I just wonder where they’re going to go from here with their sound.
Two of the Dirty Projectors. They looked so young, and for some reason the more the girl on the left – the main female voice – belted, the younger she looked…
The Mint Chicks’ set last night was fantastic although so loud that I occasionally felt nauseous. A compliment? More than any other local band I can think of they always feel like A Big Deal whenever they roll into town. That said, the audience – largely composed of new-in-town or returning students – seemed a little disengaged. Like the couple who spent 90% of the time pashing extensively next to me. Why even leave the house! Hopefully it was a good experience for the Mint Chicks themselves, they all looked completely impassioned while onstage but who could know? The sound quality seemed decent, so the scrawlyness of their music translated really nicely into a live setting and didn’t turn into a incomprehensible blur of noise. Their older songs sounded as brilliant as ever and their newest track Bad Buzz was maybe my favourite moment – it’s such a ridiculously fantastic song as I clumsily tried to explain here. I hadn’t seen them live since 2006 so it was wonderful to catch them again, hopefully they stick around and keep on creating…
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Title brought to you by: Ball and Biscuit from Elephant, the album you probably own if you’re a casual White Stripes fan. Casual we are not.
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Music to blog by:

The Dirty Projectors’ No Intentions, as above, from their album Bitte Orca. See? Intriguing! Hummable!

I Cut Like A Buffalo from the Dead Weather’s debut album Horehound. The music video for this is compelling stuff. I hope sincerely that Jack White recreates that dance on stage when we see them live on the 17th. I don’t think I’ll be that functional on the 16th. 2005 seems a long time ago.

Patti LuPone singing Rainbow High – say what you will about Andrew Lloyd Webber, but the music to Evita is stunning, and this cabaret performance from LuPone at Les Mouches in 1980 is particularly ferocious. Makes me want to grab a microphone and snarl “so Christian Dior me!” too. Wish someone would stage a version of it here.
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Next time: we’re having a combined Wellington Phoenix pre-game get-together/Rod Stewart Appreciation Day thing tomorrow (long story…actually no, that explains it all really) which I’m catering (self-imposedly) and the menu is growing more and more dizzying in proportions…no doubt I’ll have plenty to blog about. Like Nigella’s Girdlebuster Pie. Do you not want to know more with a name like that?