masters of raw

February 2, 2010March 12, 202012 Comments

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Rawr.

So, when I’m not making butter-and-golden-syrup sandwiches or having pancakes for dinner I enjoy the occasional dog-paddle through the chilled, unsalted waters of raw cooking. This isn’t something I’d want to make a lifestyle of but it’s fun to try new recipes. It can hardly be a secret that the less you do to vegetables, the better they are for you and I’m all for including more of them on my plate. I’m not so convinced by recipes that require half a bottle of agave nectar and a kilo of cashews sitting in a dehydrating machine for nine hours till it turns into some kind of cheesecake-esque creation – that doesn’t seem quite right to me.

These raw ‘cookies’ are a particularly lovely example of this sort of carry-on – the ingredients are likely to be in your cupboard already and they’re cheap if you don’t have them. It’s quick but involved enough to make you feel like you’re doing something, and you can eat them as soon as you’ve made them. They’re practical – energy dense and hardy – and also really, really delicious which is, I guess, a requirement rather than an eye-brow raising bonus with healthier recipes these days. I found this fantastic recipe on Gourmeted, but changed it up a tiny bit. The original was composed of dates and raisins but I swapped the altogether sexier dried apricots for the sad pinched little raisins. I added a tiny bit of liquid and included linseeds. You do as you wish.

Date and Apricot ‘Cookies’.

1 cup oats of some form – wholegrain, rolled, raw (I used the big wholegrain ones)
2 tablespoons linseeds, whole or ground
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3/4 cup dates, pitted, packed
1/2 cup dried apricots

Combine oats, linseeds and cinnamon in food processor and pulse until you get small pieces. Add dates and pulse well. You should have a thick/dense paste, but don’t fear if it is still crumbly. Add a tablespoon of water if it’s really not coming together at all, but the apricots will help. Add apricots and whizz to blend them through. I then just wet my hands, rolled small tablespoonfuls of ‘dough’ and pressed/squeezed them flat into ‘cookies’. I say squeezed for a reason – the texture of this is a little different but they will work, trust me.

As I said, these ‘cookies’ are delicious – in their own right, not just in a “not bad for something without butter in it” kind of way. In fact they really deserve to just be called cookies, rather than being encased in patronising apostrophes. Be free from my sneering punctuation, cookies! They are figgily dense in texture, fragrant with apricot, and fantastically chewy. They make a perfect hurried breakfast, and probably would be brilliant with some roughly chopped dark chocolate included in the mixture. On top of all that they’re a really cheap way of filling the biscuit tin.

Had been feeling a bit grumpy while writing this – waited for a phone call today that never arrived which meant I put off other things, wrangling with all manner of other things in the meantime, and finally ruining dinner – I somehow managed to oversalt the cooking water for the pasta despite every cookbook seeming to imply that no amount of salt can be too much. I persisted in eating it all the same so there wasn’t any waste but feel a bit like a preserved lemon now. Coupled with the inevitable post-Laneways-blahs, it’d be easy to feel sorry for myself and snap at people for the sake of it. Let us instead relive the happiness of Monday’s shenanigans…

Monday was Auckland Anniversary Day, which unfortunately isn’t recognised as an official holiday in Wellington. So it was with a day’s annual leave clutched tightly in my hands that Tim and I attended the inaugural Laneways music Festival at Britomart. The day was exceptionally relaxed, with the intentionally small audience moving like schools of fish between and around the two stages. The brilliance of the lineup became more and more apparent as the day went on. Highlights included…

– the mellow, be-caped stompiness of the Phoenix Foundation.
– seeing Chris Knox emerge from behind a fence to watch the Black Lips with the rest of the audience.
– Daniel Johnston’s entire set, punctuated by a rather joyfully sung-along rendition of You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away. Nearly had wobbly tears in my eyes till I recognised someone with a similar look on their face and checked myself for being an unnecessarily sentimental git.
– Realising I knew more Echo and the Bunnymen songs than I initially thought.
– Florence Welch. She was almost a lowlight – so gorgeous and long-legged, must she have this gloriously swirling voice tucked in her throat as well? I’ve never, ever been into acrobatic female vocalists (Well, I did and still do have a soft spot for Mariah Carey but she’s different) – have always been resolutely unmoved by Beyonce or Christina Aguilira, and any of those dime-a-dozen introspective bores that appear on Grey’s Anatomy – but listening to Florence live made me realise how thrilling seeing someone belt their face off could be. To any of you out there who have seen Idina Menzel or Julia Murney singing live – my envy grew tenfold after Florence.

Above: Chris Knox flanked by the always elegant Shayne Carter. They performed a swift but crunchily powerful set which was, not forgetting the fact that Knox suffered a stroke last year, pretty marvelous.

The day was made easier by the fact that the “Friends and Family” area had much nicer toilets, chairs and shade, plus no queues to get a bottle of water or beer. The only real frown-inducing thing about the day was my uncanny but unfortunate ability to get stuck behind the person in the audience who insists on smoking. I can’t even understand why someone would think everyone directly around them wants to breathe in poisonous smoke as well. All I could think the whole time was “there’s no safe level of exposure to cigarette smoke.” But on the whole the day was utterly smashing and not much apart from that troubled me. Oh wait. There was the crowd of girls behind me who insisted on shriekily singing along with Florence at great volume. Sounds simple enough, even curmudgeonly on my part, but it’s the sort of thing that after a long day makes you want to push someone into a swimming pool. A bit like the smoking thing – what made them think I paid to hear them sing? That aside, am already anticipating what untold joys next year’s lineup could bring. Laneways – I think you really need a round of applause.

The night before Tim and I went relatively spontaneously to “Dig Deep” at Fubar, the proceeds of which went to aid Haiti. It was a very good night, in particular Tourettes’ set; but between that and Laneways I’m now feeling like the pasta we struggled at dinner – limp and overly saline.

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Title brought to you by: Bob Dylan’s Masters of War from The Freewheeling Bob Dylan. The lyrics really bear little resemblence to quietly making cookies, or maybe they do – he’s pretty deep, that Bob Dylan.

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On Shuffle lately:

Dance My Pain Away by Rod Lee from The Wire:…And All The Pieces Matter. There are few soundtracks I’ll seek out (cast recordings, different story) but this is such a perfectly structured gem. We are inordinately excited about the approaching release of Season 5 on DVD. The tourism guide books will tell you that New Zealand is a fabulous place to live and raise a family and it may well be; it’s a terrible place to wait for a DVD to be released. We are always woefully behind.

You Got The Love by Florence and The Machine from her aptly titled album Lungs. When you first hear this cover you might think “hmmm, prosaic enough” but then it gets all swirly and wonderful. Less swirly but no less special is the XX remix which was put over the loudspeakers once the XX finished their set – was great fun watching everyone who’d diligently waited for Daniel Johnston on the other stage getting panicky that Florence was making an unexpected early cameo.

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Next time: I bought some wonton wrappers! They’re much easier to get your hands on than they sound, and made some potstickers which miraculously turned out perfectly and were ridiculously good. It’s Waitangi Day this Saturday, and because it’s a Saturday PLUS a public holiday it’s like, quadruple guaranteed that Tim will be making coffees for people but I’ll probably traipse out to One Love anyway, sounds like it’s going to be an excellent day…

raw into gold

October 31, 2009March 12, 202010 Comments

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I realise most food is better for you in its most untampered, natural, unadulterated-by-animal-products form, but some things about going full raw don’t quite sit right with me, and it’s not the obvious (no butter). Take that stalwart of the non-meat eater’s reportoire, lentils. Lentils are so good for you it’s almost obscene, but how are you supposed to eat them raw? Hmm? And then what about potatoes? How do you eat them without applying heat of some kind?

Though, complex being that I am, I can get every bit as excited about the rawest of raw vegan recipes as I might over some butter-thick seven layer chocolate cake. Sometimes you read through an ingredient list and everything just makes sense. This happened when I was perusing Elle’s New England Kitchen and found this recipe for Cinnamon Rolls. The name is basically correct – there’s cinnamon in there and you roll them up – but don’t go getting a mental image of some kind of buttercream-smeared sticky bun. This is a whole different beast, and it’s probably better to think of it as a Cinnamon Roll in its own right, rather than a substitution for something else. Funny how you often have to go through these mental processes when eating ridiculously healthy food – “this is exciting, this is a treat, I’m not missing out at all“.

Anyway, I was reading through the recipe and realised I actually had all the ingredients in my pantry – even the agave nectar, which was a Christmas present last year. The method sounded fun and Elle painted an enticing picture of how the finished product tasted. So on Monday I set aside my buttery prejudices for the time being, and gave these Cinnamon Rolls a go.

It’s slightly terrifying in places – the sushi-style rolling of the mixture had me worried, plus the slicing of the now rolled up log, which threatened to crumble every time the knife came near it – I guess I’d go to pieces if someone was trying to cut me up too, haha – but overall it is very do-able, with plenty of faffing and stirring and mixing and measuring to make you feel like you’re actually doing something in the kitchen.

Raw Vegan Cinnamon Rolls

You can just, of course, simply call them Cinnamon Rolls, but I like to keep the “raw vegan” bit there at the start in the same way that if I actually wash the dishes I like to tell Tim about it repeatedly – why yes, I would like a medal for it, and thank you.

Don’t go freaking out at the list of ingredients – it’s all pretty simple straightforward stuff really, and most of it can be found very cheaply in both supermarkets and health food shops. Substitute honey for agave nectar if you like, if anything it would probably add a more complex depth of flavour – agave nectar is viciously sweet and not much else.

1 1/4 cups ground flaxseeds (I actually used whole, but we’ll get to that)
1 1/4 cups ground almonds
1 1/2 tablespoons cinnamon
1 pinch sea salt
1 cup soft pitted dates
1/4 cup water
1/8 cup olive oil
1/8 cup agave nectar
1/4 cup sultanas (the original stated raisins, but um, ew. I shall irrationally prefer one foodstuff over another very similar foodstuff.)
1/4 cup nuts of some kind

I am not the hugest fan of ground flaxseeds – the texture and flavour can be all murky and gluey. However – lesson learned – whole flaxseeds don’t really grind themselves down in a food processor. If anything, the whizzing blades make them ever more defiantly whole. Luckily this didn’t affect the finished product, however I imagine the texture would be a bit different – and probably less crumbly – if you use the ground flaxseeds that the recipe actually asks for.

Tip the flaxseeds, almonds, 1/2 tablespoon cinnamon and pinch of sea salt into a large bowl.

Blend the dates and water till very smooth. I actually soaked the dates in boiling water for about half an hour beforehand just to make them super soft. Scoop out just over half and mix it into the flaxseeds/almond mixture, along with the olive oil and agave. Mix really well – it shouldn’t be too dry but add a tiny bit more date mixture if it does.

Carefully flatten this mixture on a sheet of baking paper, making a good sized square of around half an inch thick. Add the rest of the cinnamon to the the date mixture in the blender, along with the sultanas and pulse briefly to mix. Spread this thinly and evenly over the square of mixture, making sure all surfaces are covered to the edge. Sprinkle over the nuts and a few extra sultanas.

Here comes the tricky-ish bit – using the baking paper for help, carefully roll the mixture into a tight, fat log. Don’t be afraid of it – the mixture should hold together. Keeping the log wrapped in baking paper, refrigerate for an hour or so to let it get good and firm. Slice into discs as thin or as thick as you like, using a very sharp knife. The good thing about this mixture is that if a slice looks like it might fall apart, you can simply press it back into shape using your fingers.

“Icing”

If you want – feel free to top it with this intriguing mixture.

1 cup raw cashews, soaked in water for at least four hours
1/8 cup water
6 Tablespoons honey
Juice of an orange

Blend the cashews thoroughly with the water. Add the honey and orange juice and continue to blend till the mixture is thick and smooth. What with my palate being used to buttercream and such I wasn’t sure how to take this, but as you can imagine something that full of cashews must taste good. 6 Tablespoons seemed like a lot of honey to me, but you need it for the texture – I stopped at three though. Instead of the orange juice I used a couple of drops of Boyajian orange oil, basically because I have some in the fridge and like to think it’s a useful purchase. This becomes a thick, hummus coloured mixture that is strangely good…I think next time I make these I’d be just as happy to leave the cinnamon rolls uniced.

These are actually…completely delicious. Nutty, rich, wholesome but toothsome, and warm with cinnamon. One roll is pretty filling – I guess it’s all the protein and such – and keeps you full of energy for a long time. Of coure, let’s not get carried away, these are possibly hugely calorific, what with all the nuts and dried fruit and oil and so on…but – and I hate focussing on calories anyway – you can be assured that every particle, every last molecule of these is doing you good. They’d be sweet as without the topping but I guess it makes the finished product more aesthetically pleasing, as well as providing a bit of textural contrast as you bite into each disc. I’ve been eating them for breakfast for the last week and I definitely make it through to lunch without wanting to eat my body weight in chocolate – not a bad litmus test of any foodstuff, really.

Last night we saw Mamma Mia, of which New Zealand was lucky enough to host the international touring cast. A friend of ours from England is in the cast and got us tickets to their final show. The story is more lightweight than a baby kitten holding a helium balloon but it’s great fun, the cast was gloriously talented and classy and we spent the whole time grinning away, even though neither of us are what you’d call ABBA fans. Hilariously, one of the male leads was played by Michael Beckley, known to New Zealand audiences as Rhys from Home and Away…It was also a bit mind-boggling just catching up with this friend of ours in the cast – she’d been a student at the performing arts school in England that Tim and I worked at in 2005, and now she’s in the international tour of a top-selling musical. She’s the first person we’ve seen (in person, Facebook doesn’t count) from that time of our lives and it felt a bit like Glinda dropping in to see Dorothy in Kansas or something – a strange overlapping of worlds. But fun!

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Title of this post comes to you via: Straw Into Gold, a bewitching song that doesn’t really see the light of day that much from Idina Menzel’s debut album, Still I Can’t Be Still.
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On Shuffle while I type:

Junk – a collaboration between Eyedea and Abilities from their album By The Throat. I love it. It’s one of those songs that cleverly combines minty freshness with the feeling that you’ve heard it a million times before already.

Goodbye Until Tomorrow/I Could Never Rescue You sung by Sherie Rene Scott and Norbert Leo Butz on the original off-Broadway cast recording of Last 5 Years. This song. Those driving piano notes…the way Sherie says “I open myself one stitch at a time”…it’s almost too good to listen to, except that would be silly.
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Next time: Everything’s been a bit plantain-heavy lately – I do get overexcited by stuff – and so I have lots to show for myself. Will try and get on to it a little swifter than I was with this post!

slice of heaven

October 25, 2009March 12, 202015 Comments

Marvel at the joy that is butter and sugar mixed together.

When left to my own devices of a weekend I tend to start baking without even thinking. Ginger Crunch or Ginger Slice or even Ginger Crunch Slice if you want to be equal-opportunistic, is something of an example of traditional New Zealand baking and for some reason it has been top of my to-do list for a while…I guess since I last baked something. Sometimes I can be thinking about baking something but also excitedly anticipate the next thing I’ll bake after that – special, huh.

Google Ginger Crunch and you will be met with roughly the same recipe from all the usual reliable channels – Edmonds Cookbook, Alison Holst, Chelsea Sugar (who I am deeply suspicious of now that they’ve released chocolate-flavoured icing sugar – I hate the term ‘nanny state’ but that’s what, of all things, sprang to mind when I saw it on shelves) etc etc. I can now say with confident confidence, that the Ginger Slice I made yesterday improves greatly upon anything you will find on Google. I say ‘improves’ not ‘is vastly superior and practically perfect in every way’ because in all fairness, I simply added a few crucial elements to the various traditional recipes floating round everywhere and would not have come up with it in the first place were it not for what has been set in place by Edmonds et al.

Ginger Crunch Slice

Base:

250g soft butter
1/2 cup dark muscovado sugar (or brown sugar)
2 teaspoons ginger
1/2 cup rolled oats
2 tablespoons bran (optional, I just happened to have some in the cupboard)
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder

Set the oven to 180 C. Grab a regular sized square or rectangular brownie/slice tin – you know the kind I’m talking about – and tip in the rolled oats. Put this tin in the oven for a couple of minutes while the oven is heating till the oats are nicely toasted but absolutely not burnt.

Using a wooden spoon or spatula or some other kind of utensil that takes your fancy, beat the butter and sugar together till light and creamy. Muscovado sugar is a little dense and crumbly so fear not if some of the sugar remains in lumps. As I said, brown sugar is fine too, and is what I generally use if I see muscovado sugar asked for in a recipe. But muscovado was cheap at the local supermarket…

Tip in the toasted oats (putting a sheet of baking paper into the now-empty brownie tin), bran, flour, ginger and baking powder. Stir together carefully till it looks like biscuit dough, soft and clumpy. Tip this mixture into the brownie tray, pressing down with the back of a spoon. Bake for 15-20 minutes till nicely golden on top.

Icing

100g butter
3 heaped tablespoons golden syrup
2-3 teaspoons ground ginger
2 1/2 cups icing sugar

This is one of the simplest and loveliest icings you can make. While the base is baking, gently melt together the butter, golden syrup and ginger in a small pan over a low heat. Once it comes together in a golden spicy puddle, remove from heat and stir in the icing sugar. As soon as the base is cooked, pour the icing over it, still warm and smooth out if necessary. Refrigerate for 1/2 an hour or so before slicing into fingers.

I lined this photo up all carefully on the benchtop and then realised that I couldn’t see into the viewfinder and that the icing was moving faster than I could take photos and this is why you see the icing being poured from a mysteriously hovering vessel with no-one apparently holding on to it. But the price is right.

Ah, the cutesy things we do with our food for the sake of our food blogs.

Anyway: this stuff is quite ridiculously amazing. Adjectives fail me.

Not to sound like the girl who cried ‘ridiculously amazing’, I admit I say this about lots of things that I blog about, but I guess this means I only cook stuff I really like to eat, right? The base is thick and biscuity, with a slight nutty quality from the toasted oats. The icing is incredible, fudgey and dense and throat-warmingly gingery. So delicious you’ll want to pour it all over your own head. Together? Faintmakingly excellent. There’s something about the caramel qualities of golden syrup and dark brown muscovado that provide the perfect vehicle for ginger’s heat and fragrance. Kindly don’t just take my word on this – make it immediately! It’s so easy and quick and you’ll have people simply falling at your feet with gratitude. If it was physically possible, I would have fallen at my own feet after eating a slice of this slice. As I said earlier though, it was entirely inspired by the original recipe that you will find in the Edmonds Cookbook and other stalwarts of New Zealand food-making that I duly salute here.

It’s actually currently Labour Day weekend here in New Zealand, which means that drearly melancholy Sunday afternoon feeling that can sometimes set in is bypassed by a happy Monday off work. My weekend is a mellow one but I’ve got a few ailments that I’m trying to fight off so it’s nice to just have time to chill out. On Friday night Tim and I had the immense joy of seeing Little Bushman combining their considerable talents with that of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra at the Town Hall, for an evening of incredible, incredible music. The sound ranged from the deepest psychedelic rock to the most hushed of gentle ballads, amplified by the full-on orchestra surrounding them. Our tickets were a bit of a last minute acquisition but I’m so glad we went.

No thanks whatsoever to Ticketek though, who made us pay $8 extra for “venue pickup”. After waiting 20 minutes in line at the venue we were told that we had to go to the Ticketek office down the road to get the tickets. While I’ve got my ranty hat on, can someone who falls under the category of ‘powers that be’ please enlighten me – why on EARTH are theatres built with seats from which you may be hidden behind an enormous pillar or can’t actually see the stage? And then tell me why companies like Ticketek can charge enormous amounts for “restricted view” seats? It makes no sense. By the way, we’re going to see Elaine Paige. Or at least, we’re going to hear Elaine Paige while seeing an enormous pillar’s dramatic interpretation of Elaine Paige. Maybe we can stick a cutout of her face on the pillar? (I don’t actually know if we’re literally behind a pillar, and it is admittedly my fault for not buying tickets sooner, but my point stands: why? Also: I hope she does Nobody’s Side! Am currently listening to Chess like there’s no tomorrow.)

Title of this post brought to you by: That perennially sunny song from Dave Dobbyn and Herbs, Slice of Heaven, from the Footrot Flats: The Dog’s Tale soundtrack. We had it on video (taped off the telly) when I was young and it was completely thrashed. I could probably act it out for you from start to finish I watched it so often as a wee nipper. After the movie was done it would fade into Mr Bean’s Christmas special which funnily enough we were also happy to watch year-round. I dunno if this song has also been thrashed – though not as much as some of Dobbyn’s tunes – but listening to it now still makes me feel happy

On Shuffle While I Type:

– Nature of Man from Little Bushman’s album Pendulum

– Welfare Mothers from Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps – was on a complete Neil Young kick today and while I’m not someone who chooses favourites, this amazingly good track is definitely up there with the other thousand favourite songs I have.

–Minuet by Idina Menzel from her debut album Still I Can’t Be Still. You won’t find this in shops but it’s a gem worth tracking down…seldom have I heard an album so full of personality, depth, honesty, so full of self as this, plus the mid-to-late 90s overproduction is adorable. It’s ideal for blasting loudly on a weekend morning.

Hope all the New Zealand readers have a peaceful, restful, generally super Labour Day break. And that everyone makes this ginger slice. It’s marvelous! Feel free to pronounce it ‘slee-che’, people will think you’re really sophisticated if you do.

america is not the world…

October 3, 2009March 12, 20209 Comments

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…but they do know a thing or two about peanut butter.

Though we’ll enthusiastically spread it on our toast, I’m pretty sure I can confidently say, without sweepingly rewriting our heritage, that here in New Zealand we’ve never had a history of using peanut butter like America does. In fact, we’re probably more likely to spread Marmite or Vegemite on our toast (The former owned by Seventh Day Adventists, the latter by Philip Morris and Australians, so choose whichever you find easier to swallow.)

Which is possibly why, when faced with an emptying jar of peanut butter approaching its use-by date, none of my New Zealand cookbooks offered any solutions for what to do with it. All I wanted was a simple peanut butter cookie, and even Nigella Lawson with her love of Americana didn’t have a specific example. I’ve only got one American cookbook and it’s all about Italian cooking so I finally turned to the internet. Had a flick through the search functions of Tastespotting and Foodgawker and found a recipe at Erin’s Food Files, which highlighted a product gratifyingly American – maple flavoured peanut butter (oh the rich tapestry of life!) I thank Erin for the recipe, which I fiddled with only slightly. However you may like to refer to her website if you are already more comfortable with measuring butter in cups and baking with Fahrenheit.

Maple Peanut Butter Cookies

Adapted from a recipe on Erin’s Food Files.

125g soft butter
1/3 cup white sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/3 cup peanut butter
2 teaspoons maple syrup (or golden syrup if you don’t have maple to hand)
1 cup plain flour
1/3 cup rolled oats
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
75g good dark chocolate (milk also would be nice), chopped roughly into chunks and shards.

Set oven to 160 C/325 F.

Using a wooden spoon (because it’s better that way), cream together the butter and two sugars until the mixture is lightened and fluffy. Then beat in the peanut butter, followed by the egg and syrup. Stir in the flour, oats, baking powder and baking soda and finally the chocolate. It will be a relatively soft mixture.

Drop heaping tablespoons of the mixture onto a lined tray – no need to flatten – and bake for about 15 minutes, no more. They may still be soft when you take them out of the oven but will continue to cook as they cool. Transfer them carefully by spatula to a rack or just another tray while you bake the second batch.

Delicious from this angle…

…and also this angle.

These cookies are really, really good. I can’t say that the maple flavour is terribly strong, so don’t fret if you haven’t got any. The oats don’t make themselves stridently felt either, almost melting into the mixture as it bakes to provide an overall satisfying chewiness. You want to make sure your butter is really good and soft, and it’s a bit of a faff to get the peanut butter out of the bottom of the jar without covering yourself head to toe in the stuff, but apart from that these cookies are very little hassle to make and surprisingly quickly done.

Elaine Paige is coming to Wellington to do a show which is really rather cool. If you don’t know who she is, here’s a good way to find out. Take a dart, and throw it at any West End production cast recording since 1970-something and it’s likely she played a starring role in it. Seriously, I’m surprised she wasn’t cast as Elphaba when Wicked opened in London. You may not have her in your memory, but trust me, you know her so well. (Okay, sorry for the tenuous puns.) She’s been all over theatre in Britain (and Broadway) since forever and it’s really exciting to have the opportunity to see her. Tickets are a little on the jaw-droppingly expensive side, but I think I’ll file it under “Merry Christmas to me” and deal with it.

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The title of this post is brought to you by: Morrissey. All you need to know about him you can probably find in the youtube comments.
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On Shuffle whilst I type:

Not specifically on my computer, but on the shuffle of my mind if you will, is the Newtown Rocksteady, a band of many people, copious facial hair, several hats, and much skill. Caught them at the Southern Cross last night as one of the members is a friend of our flatmates. Their joyful sound whipped the audience into a frenzy of dancing (and may well have been what inspired the couple directly in front of me to kiss passionately and at great length.)

To be honest I’ve been to busy at work this week to listen to an awful lot of music (apart from the usual Broadway-on-my-way-to-and-from-the-office) but I have been streaming a lot of George FM and 95bFM. Both great channels, and although bFM can be ludicrously Auckland-centric, as they are primarily an Auckland-based channel it would be remiss to shake my fist at them for that. Especially when there is such great music and dialogue abounding.

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Next time: I was gifted a healthy bunch of asparagus today from my flatmate’s friend (the one in the band…such a kind act would I suppose now make him my friend now too). Plus I bought, on a whim, some whole wheat – also known rather charmingly as wheat berries. Am looking forward to using both tonight and documenting it…

I’d be surprisingly good for you

September 27, 2009March 12, 20209 Comments

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First lovingly assemble your ingredients on a wooden board

I’ve had the weekend to myself, as Tim has been away in the South Island touring with his choir. I haven’t taken advantage of this absense to cook anything particularly idiosyncratic for myself (ie, mushroom-heavy). It’s all too easy these days to be tempted by grabbing cheap take-out from the squillion eateries dotting the landscape and twinkling in my peripheral vision. I tell myself it’s all in the name of keeping the economy alive. For lunch on Saturday I simmered some elderly tofu in half a jar of spaghetti sauce that had also seen better days as some way of counteracting the excessive time spent not in the kitchen.

Yesterday morning I bussed out to Brooklyn, one of the ‘burbs that huddle round the central city of Wellington, to see Every Little Step at the Penthouse Cinema. Every Little Step weaves two stories together – the inception of ground-breaking musical A Chorus Line in 1974, and the audition process for the revival of the same musical in 2006. A documentary about people auditioning for a musical about people auditioning for a musical. It was fascinating to see some more established Broadway names (oh hi, Amy Spanger, Yuka Takara, Charlotte D’Amboise, etc) learning choreography, waiting for phone calls, pacing back and forward, being told to repeat songs…The dancing was eye-popping and I was actually tearful in one audition scene where this beautiful young guy just nailed a ‘difficult’ monologue to the wall with his intensity. If you get a chance to see this, please do – I don’t think you need to be versed in musical theatre or dance to get a (ha!) kick out of it.

Seeing it really, really made me want to dance again. As I mentioned on Twitter, I was once told by some grand dame in a pashmina at a ballet workshop, that all passion and no talent can only get you so far – and all talent and no passion will get you even less. Unfortch I always erred on the side of “all passion”. That said, after ballet productions and recitals I would often get told by complete strangers that they loved watching me dance, perhaps because I looked so utterly happy to be twirling round on stage or something. It’s unlikely that there is an audience out there for an enthusiastic, past-a-prime-she-never-really-had dancer but I’ll keep my ear to the ground (which I can do surprisingly deftly, having maintained my dancer’s flexibility if nothing else).

With Tim’s impending return and the cake tin empty I thought a lazy Sunday afternoon would be as good a time as any to do some baking. Not that I’m some kind of 1950s housewifely type. No ma’am. To pluck an example from the air, I still can’t work a washing machine (just this evening my red sheets dyed yet another white tshirt pink) and Tim does 99% of the cleaning and dishes. But I’ll be damned if he ever has to cook himself a meal in his life. I guess it kind of balances out into something healthy-ish.

Speaking of healthy-ish, what I ended up making was a recipe that caught my eye from this Australian Women’s Weekly chocolate cookbook that I’ve had for a year or two now. I’ve been pretty good lately at not eating half the cake mix as I go but for this I really couldn’t stop myself. Cast your eyes over the ingredient list and nod in agreement with me. It’s marvelous stuff. It’s full of oats which I’m not even going to try and brightly joke makes it good for you, but it certainly can’t hurt. And chocolate is healthy in that spiritual way, so.

Chocolate Oat Slice

Adapted from Sweet and Simple: Chocolate, an Australian Women’s Weekly book.

90g butter
2 tablespoons golden syrup or condensed milk
100g milk chocolate
2 tablespoons good cocoa
2 cups rolled oats, lightly toasted
1/2 cup pistachios, toasted and chopped (I used walnuts)
1/2 cup dessicated coconut

Resist where I couldn’t, my children!

In a good sized, heavy based pan, melt together the butter, chocolate and golden syrup/condensed milk. Resist the urge to grab a spatula and chaperone it directly into your mouth. Stir in the cocoa, oats, nuts and coconut. Spread this mixture into a lined 20cm springform tin and refrigerate. It should set fairly quickly, and once it has, ice with chocolate buttercream if you want (and I did, as the song goes) and slice into triangles or whatever takes your fancy.

Might sound a bit strange, all those uncooked rolled oats just sitting there. But the oats soften up with all that butter and chocolate, and provide a fantastic chewy bite that makes it difficult to stop at one ‘test’ piece. The oats also soften up the sweetness somewhat. It’s not overwhelming, but this slice would be really good with a cup of thick black tea or strong black coffee to temper all the sugar. The Australian Women’s Weekly is renowned for triple-testing all their recipes, I can only imagine the sublime happiness emanating from the test kitchen during the writing of this particular book.

Did you know I’ve been asked three times in the last week if I’m still in high school? For fear of making myself sound even younger I’ll try not to rant about it too much, but really. I’m 23. I have a degree. I have a job where I make important decisions for the greater good of the nation. I’ve traveled. I’m legitimately grown-up. (Except I can’t drive or operate a washing machine.) Yes, I am generally more ‘clunky pun-dropper’ than ‘intimidating sophisticate’ but the idea that I carry myself like a high school student, that I don’t exude worldly-traveledy-employedyness…is not so fun. But enough personality dialysis! Let us focus on the positive: living in New Zealand under a gaping ozone hole has not left me a withered crone older than my years. Also, in a few years I’ll no doubt look back on myself with and dismissively think “Oh, 23 year olds. So annoying,” as I overheard someone on the bus once saying. I thought 23 was a pretty decent age to achieve, but the lesson is there’s always someone older than you who will greet your every action with disdain. Unless you’re 90, in which case you can drink whisky and eat cake and talk disdainfully about anyone you like.

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On Shuffle whilst I type: (the other day, Tim said “I’m sure you just put whatever song you feel like talking about on here, not actually what’s on Shuffle. To which I sigh and say, “Oh 23 year olds. So annoying.”)

You Got The Love by Chaka Khan and Rufus, from Rags To Rufus. Chaka Khan. It’s always the right time.

Connection by Elastica from their eponymous album. This song is…very cool.

Something 4 the Weekend by Super Furry Animals from their album Fuzzy Logic. It’s a great song, I like that they’re connected to the Welsh language so strongly and their name always makes me think of bunnies and kittens and such. What a package.

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Title brought to you by: I’d Be Surprisingly Good For You from Evita, by the exquisite Patti LuPone. If you’ve got the time, you must check out this promotional TV ad for Evita. The voiceover! The fervour! The sass! Patti’s eyes at the end!
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Next time: Signs of Spring are popping up everywhere but I’m still yet to see asparagus at a satisfactory price. When I do you can be sure this blog will be overflowing with the stuff.

brown sugar, how come you taste so good

August 16, 2009March 12, 202012 Comments

I’ve got a bit of that Sunday night ‘blah’ feeling that can happen after a really good weekend. The reason for this weekend going so well was because several family members (Mum, godmother, godmother’s sister) coming from afar to visit, acting as entourage for my godsister who was having her university house ball. Now that they’re gone and my mind has to turn to practical things, like waking up early tomorrow for work…You know how it goes. Of course there are several cures for such feelings: make sure you live in a charming flat on Cuba Street for one thing, listen to the relentlessly sunny revival cast recording of Hair, eat tofu, absorb the happiness of those around you that the Wellington Phoenix football team actually won a game, that sort of thing. I happen to be doing all those things simultaneously right now so there’s barely a moment to feel wibbly.

I spontaneously invited everyone round for dinner on Friday night. We had take-out noodles from my noodle hut of choice: Chow Mein Cube on The Terrace, plus hot chips from the excellent chippie across the road. I made a salad and they bought the wine. Pudding consisted of brown sugar meringues that I’d made that evening after work (I know, how deranged housewife am I) and two different kinds of ice cream, Kohu Road vanilla and Whittaker’s Peanut Slab. It is with some pinkness of cheek that I admit my love for the peanut slab ice cream, since I had so emphatically stated that Kohu Road is the only kind of non-homemade ice cream I’d ever consider buying. Well, now I can add Whittaker’s to the list. It’s flipping lovely stuff.

These meringues have the edge on their paler sisters – I normally find meringues to be a bit too blatantly, in-yer-face sweet, whereas here the brown sugar gives complexity of flavour and a pleasing dark caramel taste. You could of course use something like muscovado sugar for an even more intense experience. I found this recipe in Italian Comfort Food by the Scotto family, a cookbook that persists in changing my previously held perception that all American cookbooks are unusable and ask for incomprehensible ingredients like Bisquick and half-and-half.

Brown Sugar Meringues

Adapted from Italian Comfort Food by the Scotto Family.

4 egg whites
1 cup brown sugar

Preheat oven to 140 C/300 F and line a tray with baking paper. You may need two trays but I managed to squish everything onto one. This recipe is so simple you could fit it into a Twitter update. Whisk egg whites till frothy. Carry on whisking, slowly adding brown sugar till a stiff meringue forms. Drop spoonfuls onto tray, bake for an hour. You should get 16-18 out of this. And I made it with an actual whisk so don’t feel like you can’t either. No need for heavy machinery here.

What’s really, really fun is then to take spoonfuls of ice cream and sandwich it between two meringue halves. This becomes almost impossibly sublime after a day or two when the meringues have softened slightly. It’s so good you practically need to slap yourself back into reality afterwards. The contrast between cold, creamy ice cream and resolutely dry room temperature meringue is surprisingly seductive while the strong caramel of the slowly cooked brown sugar counteracts any excessive sweetness. They’re aesthetically pleasing too, calling to mind those fancy macarons that you see all over the place but in a much simpler, ramshackle fashion.

It’s a little difficult to really paint a picture in words how delicious this is, especially when it seems so simple. I might have to eat another so that I’m inspired into further colourful description.

If your life is like the Tom Wolfe novel Bonfire of the Vanities you might consider making your own ice cream to go with the meringues. It will drive home to your dinner guests that you are an aggressively accomplished cook. Their self esteem will wither and the only way they will be able to jump over this raised bar is by baking individual souffles at their next dinner party. Even if your life is not like a Tom Wolfe novel and does not involve making individual desserts while wearing pearls, and even though we’re all well aware by now that there is perfectly sufficient stuff available on the market, making your own ice cream is not difficult. To paraphrase an argument that I often employ (if the Dire Straits were that good, surely I’d like them?) if ice cream was really that difficult then surely I wouldn’t be able to achieve it.

A while ago I got it in my head that palm sugar might be a delicious ice cream flavouring. It is highly likely that I should have been focussing on spreadsheets at the time which is why the idea was not immediately acted upon. However this time of idea-incubation allowed me to also consider adding kaffir lime leaves to this icecream-in-my-mind.

Last weekend I had a crack at it, making a custard boldly infused with kaffir lime leaves and a syrup of palm sugar. The two were mixed together and frozen and I’ll be honest, it actually worked. The flavours were subtle but intriguing. Not overtly limey and not wildly sugary, but both elements definitely present, cutting through the frozen custard with their unfamiliarity.

I’ll give you the recipe I used – which I made up – but I’m not quite sure it’s the exact final prototype yet. There was something about the texture that I wasn’t entirely sure about. However Tim, with his simple rustic wisdom, said I was overthinking and he couldn’t see anything wrong with it. So feel free to give it a go yourself.

Palm Sugar and Kaffir Lime Leaf Ice Cream

4 egg yolks
3 tablespoons brown sugar
600 mls cream
5 dried kaffir lime leaves
4 lumps of palm sugar (does this make sense? Palm sugar generally comes in rounded lumps. There might be a better way of describing it)

Heat half the cream (300mls) with the kaffir lime leaves in a pan till it’s pretty hot but not boiling, just slightly wobbly. Remove from heat and let it sit for a while to allow the lime leaves to infuse. Whisk the egg yolks and brown sugar together gently, then pour the heated cream into it, still whisking. Rinse and dry the cream pan and then transfer the egg-sugar-cream mix back into the pan and heat it gently, stirring all the while, till it thickens into custard. This isn’t hard at all but it can be good to have a sink full of ice cold water ready to plunge the pan into to stop it cooking. You can choose to remove the lime leaves at any stage here, but I left them in as long as possible.

Put the custard aside to cool while you put the palm sugar into a pan, and add 1/2 cup water. Heat very gently till a syrup forms. Depending on the palm sugar it may take a while to break down. The aim of this excercise is more to melt the sugar into a usable liquid rather than cook it into a caramel, if that makes sense. Once it has dissolved into liquid put it aside to cool for a little bit before whisking it into the custard (with lime leaves removed) and finally, stir in the final 300 mls cream. Sorry if this all sounds a bit complicated.

Pour into a container and freeze, stirring occasionally. It makes around 900mls which is a good, non-threatening quantity for an experimental batch like this.

Anyway it must have been pretty good because Tim and I managed to get through it in less than a week. Largely aided by the fact that it tasted so mind-blowingly smashing sandwiched between meringues. Be not afraid to try it. The instructions may not fit on a Twitter update but they’re pretty straightforward.

Last night the lot of us – Tim, myself, visiting family members went to La Kasbah, a Morrocan restaurant down the Left Bank arcade of Cuba Street. It’s an adorable place with a short but solid menu, gorgeously painted walls and friendly wait staff. We were all very much taken with our meals and in particular I loved the tumeric-yellow bread that came with the breads and dips. Well, I hope it was tumeric that gave it that radioactive tint. I’d love to know their recipe because it’s gorgeously moreish stuff. It was a seriously lovely night and I definitely recommend it if you’re looking for another BYO to add to your inventory.

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The title of this blog is bought to you by: The Rolling Stones
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On Shuffle whilst I type:

Where Do I Go? sung by Gavin Creel and the Tribe from the 2009 revival cast recording of Hair. It’s more thematic than plot-heavy, which makes sense for a show that follows its own rules, but I have the feeling that this is currently among the best ways to spend a few hours on Broadway right now. The current Broadway cast is so full of energy and joy that even a million miles and continents away it is impossible not to love them.

Meadowlark by Patti LuPone from Patti LuPone at Les Mouches. Recorded in 1980 this is an utterly gorgeous and occasionally hilarious album.

You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket (live) by the White Stripes from the Blue Orchid single. Thought this song is most excellent on the album, live it just…soars.
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Next time: Nigella Lawson has this chocolate Coca Cola cake in How To Be A Domestic Goddess, and I thought it might be fun to switch the cola for ginger beer. It was flipping lovely, let me assure you, and you’ll be finding out all about it in good time…

bake this longing

July 19, 2009October 29, 202312 Comments

Enamoured with the kitchen in my new house, I have been making all these really interesting, healthy, beautiful dinners lately. Dishes with slow-revealing, layered flavours and more often than not featuring something really quite beautiful, like a whole cinnamon stick or a poached egg draped lovingly across the top, or couscous… But despite all this, I’ve decided to showcase a bit of baking today. It has been too, too long since I’ve baked. (At least ten days.) We’ve finally unpacked all our boxes and the bookshelf is upright and laden with goods and so help me I actually found myself looking almost flirtatiously at all my cookbooks leaning across the shelves. Clearly a sign that (a) the ‘going mad’ process has stepped up a notch, and (b) it was time to connect with some butter.

I bring you two fairly disparite recipes: one for very sober, bran-dense biscuits and the other for flamboyant Italian chocolate puffy meringue things. They both stand together under the broad umbrella of “cookie” and while equally delicious, couldn’t be more different in appearance or method.

Health Biscuits

This recipe is from the wildly successful, and justifiably so, New Zealand cookbook Ladies, A Plate by Alexa Johnston, although my recipe came via the September 2008 issue of Cuisine. Not what they were talking about in the film The September Issue, but beautiful and exciting nonetheless (to me at least.)

These biscuits are calm and unfancy but not in any way boring – they have a gorgeous crisp, snappish texture and are the ideal partner to a cup of tea. They keep well and the syrup used makes them seemingly taste better and better with age. And any recipe that uses this much butter while calling itself “Health biscuits” gets many a bonus point from me.

225g soft butter

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 egg

2 tablespoons malt or golden syrup (I used maple)

1 cup bran

1 cup wholemeal flour (I used plain)

1 cup coconut

1/2 cup rolled oats

1/2 cup sultanas (I used currants)

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1 small teaspoon baking powder

extra white flour

Set oven to 180 C/350 F, line two trays with baking paper.

Cream butter and sugar till light and fluffy. Add the egg and the syrup. Add all the rest of the ingredients and knead together adding extra white flour till a good stiff-soft biscuity dough is achieved.

Roll out sections of the dough pretty thin and slice into squares or rectangles, transferring to the baking trays with a spatula. They don’t spread much so put them close together. The recipe says to prick them with a fork; I totally forgot but I’m sure it helps. Bake for about 20 minutes, no longer, and they should be a lovely deep golden brown and smell heavenly. Cool on a rack and then store in a tin.

The original writer of the recipe suggests that these biscuits be served buttered; I suggest she is a genius.

The next baking adventure was one of a different nature, involving copious amounts of egg whites. And you know, egg whites are so the diva of the cooking world. The Barbra Streisand, the Mariah Carey, the Elizabeth Taylor. Egg whites are difficult to get hold of, and once you’ve managed to get some face time with them there’s still massive room for error. They’re all, “I only respond to a copper bowl. If there is any yolk present I’ll just refuse to work. Where is my assistant! Also, I want the kitchen repainted to match my eyes, and I will only work by candlelight. By that I mean candles imported from Belgium at great cost to you.” And it goes on.

That said, you can get some pretty exciting results from egg whites, once you’ve coaxed them out of their shell without disturbing the yolk, got them in the correct bowl, used the right utensil, and worked quickly so they don’t get huffy and deflate or separate. The following recipe is one such example. I saw it in my gorgeous Scotto family cookbook and was intrigued, and the time seemed right, as after making vanilla ice cream I had egg whites sitting in the fridge waiting to be used.

I kid you not, the quantities I specify below are half what the original recipe asked for.

Brutti Ma Buoni

This is Italian for “ugly but good.” I can think of many things that are ugly but good, but these meringue-like, matte-brown, light-as-air puffs are quite lovely in my eyes. So with these standards in mind I’d rather not be coolly appraised by an Italian any time soon. I wonder what their word is for “neither beautiful nor practical?” Or, “could stand to wash the cake batter out of her hair?”

5 egg whites

400g icing sugar (or 1/2 pound powdered sugar – this is an American book after all)

1/2 cup good cocoa

1/2 cup walnuts or almonds, roughly chopped

Set the oven to 150 C/300 F. Measure out your cocoa and icing sugar. Place the egg whites in a large metal bowl and whisk continuously till foamy. Gradually, slowly, add the icing sugar, whisking till a stiff meringue is formed. I should warn you that my meringue was very thick and shiny by the end but not so stiff that it would stay still; it continued to form ribbons no matter how vigorously I whisked. To elaborate further, it takes quite a bit of shampoo to get meringue out of one’s hairline. Fold in the cocoa and nuts, and I added a bit of finely chopped good quality chocolate for good measure.

Line a tray with baking paper and measure out medium sized spoonfuls. Bake for 35 minutes. As I said I wasn’t sure if my mix was a total disaster but it worked beautifully so fear not. You can even make it in batches – the mixture that waited round for 35 minutes was in no way inferior. Carefully peel the cooked Brutti ma Buoni off the baking tray and leave to cool before eating.

These are wonderful, definitely worth the jumping through hoops that egg whites make you perform. Light but dense at the same time, crisp on the outside and melting on the inside, and, despite a wince-inducing amount of icing sugar, they’re not painfully sweet. Give them a go if you end up with some egg whites – they’re a step up on meringues and go well with a dark coffee at the end of the night.

On Saturday night Tim and I went to see Dimmer at bar Bodega. They were beautiful. Even though they started at 11:50pm. At night. According to Wikipedia the erstwhile Straitjacket Fits frontman Shayne Carter is pushing 45, (and looking fabulous still) so there you go. I’m clearly not very rock’n’roll. As I said though it was a wonderful, wonderful gig. Find their albums. But then I look on fishpond.co.nz and all their albums are currently unavailable or discontinued. Good one, fishpond.

Speaking of music, if you suspect that the words “Jack/Meg White have my babies” apply to you, then you may want to check out this preposterously interesting blog, Every Jack White Song. I’m notorious for being late to jump on a bandwagon so I hope, not just for the author’s sake but for my own smug-ity, that this becomes huge. It certainly deserves to, anyone who devotes so much time critically analysing Jack White songs should go far, no argument.

Still speaking of music, on Shuffle whilst I type:

You Are Not Real from the original cast recording of The Apple Tree. This song has a ridiculously moreish waltzing melody and a delightful, singalong chorus. Did you know that MASH‘s Alan Alda was in the original cast? However I find the eye-popping revival cast, namely the magnificently eyebrowed Brian D’arcy James, the magnificently moustachioed Marc Kudisch, and the generally magnificent Kristin Chenoweth even more exciting…

Idioteque from Kid A by Radiohead. I like this album better than OK Computer. There. I said it.

Next time: I totally go on business this week, but will endeavour gallantly to get in another blog post before I leave. Because I really have been making some nice, blog-worthy dinners lately…Among other things, I’ve made lentil salad with poached egg and feta, beetroot risotto with rice and barley, and roasted vegetables with Israeli couscous. That kind of thing.

sweet dreams (are made of this)

June 3, 2009March 12, 202010 Comments

Tim and I have been pondering whether to purchase an espresso machine. Not the sort where you press a button, I mean the real deal, steam wand and inserty-doohicky with pressy-downy thing and all that. Not one of the ones that costs the same as a small European commonwealth either, we’re neither of us rich and still trying to save to travel. But there have been some inexpensive ones on the market and we both love our coffee. And you know, good to help out flailing businesses in the recession and whatnot.

Apropos of little, I mentioned a while ago on here that I did a training session at work where I was defined as a “Creator-Innovator.” We had a follow up sesh this afternoon. Exciting as being creative and innovative sounds, I can’t deny that bearing the rather triumphant title of “Thruster-Organiser” appeals also. Unfortunately I am neither organised nor sufficiently thrusty according to the pre-test. Anyway, as previously stated, Creator-Innovators are future-thinking dreamers, full of ideas. And not so good with deadlines. As you may have noticed.

Even though we don’t even own the espresso maker yet, I’ve already dizzily planned what I can make with the egg whites left over from making the ice cream that I’ve set aside a precious vanilla bean for so that we can make affogato (affagati?). Did I mention that Creator-Innovators sometimes appear to have their head in the clouds? (That’s actually what the description in my booklet said. Head in the clouds.) I’m actually excited about cooking from the leftovers of something I haven’t cooked yet to go with something that doesn’t exist yet. The training session was nothing if not a windex-ed mirror held up to my soul.

We were fortunate enough here in New Zealand to have Monday off for the Queen’s Birthday. It’s nice to have a baggage-free long weekend, and the occasional four-day week cannot be underestimated in terms of well-being and morale. I did very little, apart from meeting a friend in town for coffee on Saturday, and it was all rather blissful. The fact that the weather was unfortunate helped with this – although largely cold, bleak, rainy and windy, there were also intermittent bursts of hail and blazing sun. Tim had about forty different essays to write for uni so I kept out of his way by baking and doodling and happily pottering through books and magazines, my trackpants ensconcing me cosily like a pastry case. On Saturday night I made a slow-cooked beef stew – all happiness-inducing cold weather weekend activities.

So, the baking. Y’all know the torrid flirtation I have with white chocolate. Buttons of it lure me, siren-like to the cupboard to eat by the handful. An actual bar of the stuff can be dealt with in a matter of semiquavers. I don’t know why – it’s not as darkly complex as proper, cocoa-y chocolate but as I said today in the team meeting when talking about RENT*, you can’t predict or control what will have an impact on you in life. For me: white chocolate.

* We had to bring in some pictures/things that would help describe ourselves to the group. I may or may not have indicated explicitly that Nigella Lawson has influenced every business decision I’ve made this year. I was met with troubled shuffling of papers from the team.

So when I saw this recipe for white chocolate cheesecake cookies on Hayley B’s blog, well, I’m sure I don’t need to explain at this late stage how enamoured I was to the point of openly salivating with the very thought of them. (apologies Hayley, for besmirching your good name with imagery of me drooling, but you started it with all that white chocolate.)

The recipe is very easy and bears the distinct virtue of having the finished product actually taste even better than the uncooked dough. Don’t try to pretend like you haven’t tried raw cookie dough. You have the butter and sugar, which tastes pretty special, then you add egg, which makes it taste all raw and nasty, but then in goes the flour, which somehow neutralises the egg and makes it taste amazing again and…well that’s probably enough delving into my dark psyche for one day. I’ll give you the recipe.

White Chocolate Cheesecake Cookies

I modified this ever so mildly by using roughly chopped white buttons instead of chips.

225g butter
225g cream cheese (ie, one tub)
1 cup white sugar
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 ½ cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 cups chocolate chips/3 handfuls white chocolate buttons, chopped roughly

Preheat the oven to 180°C, line a couple of baking trays with baking paper. Cream butter and sugars together, add the egg, cream cheese, and vanilla extract and beat until well-incorporated. If your cream cheese is super fridge-cold it won’t mix in very well but I liked the idea of having small pockets of cream cheese in the cookies anyway. Add the flour, baking powder and salt. Fold in chocolate. Try not to eat the lot. Roll tablespoons of dough into balls and place on baking tray. Flatten each ball if you want a flatter cookie, but they’re fairly well behaved and won’t spread alarmingly. Bake for 8 minutes, or until edges are slightly golden. Don’t worry if they look underdone, as long as they are visibly set on top then they’ll be perfect. If you bake them any longer they’ll lose the cheesecake tang. They will be very soft but once cool will be recognisably cookie-ish.

These are basically the nicest cookies I’ve had since I was born.

They are soft with a soft crumb, and a magical sweet-and-tang kick from the combination of cream cheese and sugary white chocolate. Seriously…genius. Words fail me on how to describe the vanilla-butter flutter that the white chocolate imparts and how it contrasts with the almost lemony squish of cream cheese. Actually that sort of does describe it really.

Because we had the necessary ingredients, and again, to remove myself from out of Tim the Vigilant Essay Writer’s way, I decided to just…keep on baking. I first made Apple Blondies back in July 2008, a simpler time when my life too vaulted from uni essay to uni essay and I hadn’t yet tasted quinoa. They are no less delicious 11 months later. The fact that they are called Blondies I could take or leave – this is basically one of your average slice-cake things. I don’t know if I’m being particularly close-minded but I personally feel that it’s not a blondie unless a goodly portion of it is made of white chocolate. And therefore, not a brownie. Actually come to think of it, this recipe would be amazing with a couple of spoonfuls of cocoa in it. I guess you could call it an apple brunette in that case.

The recipe can be found here from last year’s blog, although you’ll have to wade through all manner of other things before I actually start talking about the apple blondies. Ah, the naive Hungry and Frozen of 2008, with so much time on her hands. The blondies were as moist and apple-tatious as I remembered them to be, although considering their presence in my life in conjunction with the cookies I decided not to ice them. Yes, after eating half a batch of white-chocolate encrusted cookie dough and then making sugary apple cake, not adding icing can definitely be classified as a heavy consession.

I used four apples in the recipe but really, two is plenty. Any more and the batter almost can’t hold it all together. What I got in the end was still delicious – a moist, fruity counterpart to the full-on sugar of the cookies. The spritz of apple in the batter made the kitchen smell incredible while it was baking. Many thanks to Kelly Jane, via whom the recipe was snaffled all those months ago.

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On Shuffle whilst I type:

Here I Go Again from the Rock of Ages Original Broadway Cast Recording (The Great Whitesnake Way?)

That’s The Way by Led Zeppelin, from Led Zeppelin III

Dogs Were Barking by Gogol Bordello, from Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike

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Next time: possibly less psychobabble, more slow-cooked meals. I made an Italian beef casserole with pasta on Saturday and last night’s dinner was beef shin in stout with prunes, a Nigella Lawson recipe from How To Eat. I’m heading down to Dunedin this weekend for work (my first ever SmokefreeRockquest!) so it may be a tiny while between posts but I’m sure the wider world will cope. Peace.

rock the oat

April 26, 2009March 12, 202011 Comments

There is something almost blissful about a Sunday where it’s raining softly and you have no pressing tasks ahead of you. I’m the first to acknowledge that there’s nowt more depressing than a quickly diminishing Sunday afternoon, but a gentle rain and a little slothfulness can counteract that swiftly. Right now I’m casually blogging and shmoozing the internet. Later on I’m going to make some bread rolls – in itself something best done when you have time to knead the dough and let it rise – and shape meatballs which will be simmered in rich tomato sauce. On a Saturday this might be a bit too slow-paced, not exciting enough. But on a rainy Sunday – perfect.

Before I get too nauseatingly earnest…I spent yesterday perambulating between the kitchen and my computer with equal laziness. Not that it was a day wasted – Tim and I were up at 4.50am to get to the dawn service. For those of you who don’t have a working knowledge of New Zealand, 25th of April is ANZAC day, a time of remembrance and acknowledgement for those who have participated and lost their lives in war. (The acronym stands for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps.) Although largely associated with WWI, it encompasses all those who have served. I won’t go too far into it because you’ll be able to tell that I’ve just reworded stuff from Wikipedia. I got home from the dawn service at about 7am (I had to walk up the hideous hill as the cable car wasn’t open) and excitedly anticipated having the whole day ahead of me to do necessary, productive things. Then I fell asleep for three hours.

World War I is of particular interest to me, probably influenced by my mother’s own enthusiastic study of this time. I’m not pro-war in the slightest, but the horrors of these times shaped New Zealand irrevocably and I am lucky enough to have visited several areas of Belgium and Northern France where young Kiwi men – some pathetically young – lie buried in graves that bear row upon unfathomable row of white crosses.

Anzac biscuits are part of New Zealand baking tradition, not exclusive to any particular day, but what with the power of suggestion and all I decided yesterday, once I’d come to from my nap, would be as good a day to make some as any. The accepted story behind these biscuits is that Kiwi women sent them over to the troops in WWI because they were economic to make and kept well – but I don’t know for sure and again, one doesn’t want to appear to have plundered Wikipedia for information. Frankly, most of the ones you can buy in shops are really not that nice – all hard and mealy and undelicious. Much better made at home, and a gratifyingly buttery way to feel a connection with my country.

ANZAC Bicuits (never, ever ‘cookies’.)

As every recipe you will ever find is basically the same, I don’t feel the need to attribute this to anyone. I did, however, replace the normal white sugar with brown and up the butter slightly. And it produced a superior biscuit.

150g butter

1 cup brown sugar

1 tablespoon golden syrup

1 cup plain flour

2 cups rolled oats

1 cup dessicated coconut

1 teaspoon baking soda

Set the oven to 180 C/350F. Melt the butter, sugar, and golden syrup together gently in a pan over a low heat. Once it has formed a delicious caramelly puddle, stir in the dry ingredients. Dissolve the baking soda in a little hot water and mix it in quicky and thoroughly. Form mixture into small balls on a baking tray and carefully flatten with a fork (you may need to squish them together if the balls fall apart). Bake for 12 minutes, remove from the oven and allow to cool.

Above: Uncooked Anzac biscuits, ready for the oven. This recipe should make about 30. Having said that I ate a lot of mixture. Maybe it makes more than 30. You’d think I’d learn.

Once baked, they are far superior to anything you’ll buy from a shop. Buttery, oaty, a little crisp and – as I said last Anzac day – “chewy with tradition”, they are like apple crumble topping in cookie form. A seductive concept, yes? There’s little fancy or fussy about these biscuits but they’re child’s play to make and considerably economical as far as baking goes.

Earlier this week Tim and I were fortunate enough to see Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant in Push, a show that has been touring worldwide and made its way to Wellington. Once again, if you want to know the history of Sylvie Guillem’s life, Wikipedia will do a better job that I can (I don’t mean to sound all caustic, it just puts me off when blatant chunks of information that came from some site or other on peoples’ blogs appear sandwiched between the normal writing.) What you do need to know is that she is a legend in her field – dance – and widely considered one of the most brilliant dancers of modern times. She’s not young – for a dancer that is – and being as New Zealand is by and large geographically estranged from where anything exciting happens, it was an utter privelege to have the opportunity to see her.

Guillem was so…limber. Like a flame, flickering across the stage. It was wonderful to watch someone utterly in control of their body, dancing with grace and ease and power. Maliphant was something of a revelation as well – and the two of them together were just faint-makingly beautiful. In the final piece of the programme they danced together as though there was a magnet connecting their bodies – Guillem would fling herself fearlessly at Maliphant and somehow land on his shoulder with one leg in the air. Not a hint of exhalation or exhaustion from either of them. The whole thing was just…exquisite. Celebrity alert – we saw the gorgeous Loren Horsley, (from Eagle vs Shark with Jemaine Clement), and – somewhat unexpectedly – a man we were quite convinced was Danyon Loader, Olympic medal-winning swimmer. Also present were a lot of ballet-dancery type girls who reminded me that I will never be a ballerina. Nevertheless, I can still be someone who appreciates and loves dance, and someone who dances round the bedroom with my iPod on…someone who arabesques while drying and putting away dishes and who plies to pick up something off the floor…

Finally: I still haven’t kicked this dirty cough that I have. It’s croupy, and worse from 6pm onwards – I end up coughing nonstop at about 2am, and my poor tired brain can’t keep up with it. Anyone have any ideas? I’d rather be a hippy and not get antibiotics if I can help it, and I know your grandmother had some kind of natural remedy you can share with me. For what it’s worth, I’ve been drinking my body weight in fresh ginger and lemon tea and have eaten a lot of garlic…any ideas muchly appreciated!

Next time: I did some homemade beetroot ravioli last night, and will probably bake something frivolous between now and whenever I blog next. Can you believe April is nearly done? Coming up on the calendar- The Wellington Food Show, which I am ridiculously excited about and shall be blogging about with vigour. We’ve managed to secure tickets to see charming comedian Dylan Moran on the 11th and the band Okkervil River on the 15th, and then on the 19th it’s our graduation. Busy times ahead…

New stuff! After every blog I’ll list three songs that came on shuffle while writing this blog. Why? Mostly narcissism probably, but also because I love music with a dark passion and I like the idea of possibly broadening your horizons, providing a little insight into who I am, or at the very least getting The Final Countdown stuck in your head.

1: Let Me Drown – Brian D’Arcy James and Idina Menzel – The Wild Party Original Cast Recording

2: Mad Tom of Bedlam – Jolie Holland – Escondida

3: Farmer John – Neil Young – Weld

viva las veges

March 30, 2009March 12, 202013 Comments

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It’s the miracle of life! I have borne fruit! (well, a vegetable, to be precise)

To grow you is to love you.

It seems I can’t pick up a magazine or lifestyle section of a newspaper without some recessionista sighing smugly about how they are positively overrun with their homegrown zucchini and if they have to eat another fritter they will just die. Tim and I, with all the best intentions, embraced our inner hippies and exchanged a large amount of coin for various packets of seeds, a bag of potting mix, a pair of gloves that make your hands chafe and a trowel that bends at the slightest pressure. Three months of tenderly weeding our little garden, gently throwing coffee grounds and potassium-rich banana peels at it in the anticipation of a bounty of zucchini, beetroot and runner beans…

And our impotent, nutrient-deficient soil threw forth one, solitary sodding zucchini.

I couldn’t be prouder. Okay, so gardening isn’t as easy as every chatty columnist claims it is, (I mean, exactly where are our beans and beetroot?) but the endorphin increase I got from this single vegetable must equal a positively delirious hallucinogenic head rush if you actually manage to harvest an actual garden of edible goodies. So we’re planning to buy some more seeds and start again – the grow must go on…

The zucchini was sliced lovingly and went into a ratatouille to accompany the above roasted chicken on Sunday night. I had a feeling that I hadn’t eaten meat in forever and needed to remedy this immediately by consuming the sort of protein you just can’t get from lentils. When we do eat meat I want it to be good. Luckily the chicken I purchased from Moore Wilson’s was tender and fleshy and tasted like the happiest ex-bird ever to socialise and dust-bathe in its natural environment.

While I was being unorthodox, and continuing with the homegrown theme, I thought I might as well make some flatbread to mop up the chicken and ratatouille juices. I don’t know about you, but if the gap between the present moment and when I last made bread grows too wide, I become a little antsy. Making bread is just something I really enjoy – watching the unlikely mixture of flour and liquid come together as I knead it, the slow swelling of the yeasted dough, and the incredible smell it imparts as it bakes. To say nothing of the ridiculously wonderful taste of it hot from the oven (with butter, thank you…)

I’ve made this recipe a couple of times before, it’s a very easy dough to work with and while home-made flatbreads aren’t perhaps as visually rewarding as a proudly towering traditional loaf of bread, they are just as delicious and make a meal feel like a feast.

Garlic and Parsely Hearthbreads adapted from How To Be A Domestic Goddess, by Nigella Lawson.

500g bread flour
1 sachet (7g) instant yeast
1 tablespoon nice salt (if you’re using iodised table salt, halve this amount)
300-400mls warm water
5 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat oven to 190 C. Combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl, then stir in the water and oil. Stir to combine then knead till it becomes a soft, springy dough, which I find happens quite quickly with this particular recipe. Form into a ball, wash out and dry the bowl, tip in a little olive oil and turn the ball of dough in it before covering it with clingfilm and leaving it to rise for an hour or so. Meanwhile, trim the tops off two large heads garlic, dribble with a little olive oil and wrap loosely in tinfoil, then pop n the oven to cook for about 45 minutes. If you sit the bowl of dough on top of the warm oven it will aid the rising process.

Once the dough is sufficiently risen, punch it down and leave it while you remove the garlic from the oven and turn it up to 200 C. Divide the dough in two and press each out into a large, roughly oblong shape (you will need two lined baking trays for this) Prod them with your fingers to make dimple marks and cover them with a teatowel and allow to prove for about 20 minutes. Meanwhile, Nigella recomends blitzing the cloves of garlic (squeezed out of their skins) and a good bunch of flat leaf parsely in the food processor but you might find it easier just to chop it all together. Mix in a little olive oil either way, and spread this fragrant mixture across the dough.

Bake for 20 minutes or so until the breads are golden brown and cooked.

These are unbelievably delicious.

Is it slightly obscene that the two of us ate roughly one and three quarters of these enormous flatbreads on Sunday night?

I’ve also been doing a bit of baking. I like to keep the old tin full at all times in case of any unexpected dips in blood sugar from The Diabetic One, but I just like to bake selfishly for its own sake too, to be honest.

I found this recipe in the February/March edition of the magazine Essentially Food. It can be hit and miss in terms of content, but it’s improving and they are really worth sifting through because there’s almost always a couple of brilliant recipes in there. This is one of them – Belgian Slice. I don’t know if y’all around the world get Belgian biscuits which are essentially two small spicy cookies bound with jam and bearing a disc of pink icing. What they have to do with the nation of Belgium is beyond me – perhaps they’d be more appropriate if they smelled of fine beer and were sandwiched together with aioli, but who am I to question culinary history? This following recipe is infinitely easier, combining the flavours of Belgian biscuits in non-threatening slice form.

Belgian Slice

120g butter
120g sugar
1 egg
1 Tablespoon golden syrup

2 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons mixed spice
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup raspberry jam

Preheat oven to 170 C. Cream the butter and sugar, then add the egg and beat well. Mix in the golden syrup and then the dry ingredients. Press the mixture into a baking paper lined swiss roll tin and spread carefully and evenly with the jam. Bake for 20-25 minutes.

Essentially Food recommends covering it with pink-tinted icing before sprinkling over raspberry flavoured jelly crystals but as I didn’t have any in the house, I compensated by adding raspberry flavouring to the pink buttercream instead.

There’s something about the refined, spiced biscuit underneath and the garish, artificially flavoured buttercream and the contrasting textures of each that is both comforting and strangely delicious. Like a culinary crossroads between “childish” and “grown-up” flavours.

I’m really tired this week, all this going out to gigs and such is kind of catching up on me. My feet are bruised from being constantly stood on in audiences and my neck ached all last week from craning my neck (being undertall, I was doing this quite a lot…) The Kills last Wednesday were great fun, I was right up in the front and could practically grope their achingly hip, Kate Moss-dating ankles. However being up the front meant we were dealt a terrific mauling due to the extremely vigorous jostlings of the audience. We emerged feeling like potatoes that had been pressed through an expensive ricer (well those weren’t Tim’s exact words). At Kings Of Leon on Friday it wasn’t much better, even though we were considerably further back. They were in cracking good form and handsome as ever, even though they didn’t talk as much as they did at their concert last year. The next big thing on my horizon is the production of The Winter’s Tale, directed by (gasp!) Sam Mendes, up in Auckland and Sylvie Guillem back here in Wellington later next month. I think I can confidently say that watching Shakespeare and ballet should be fairly moshpit-free.
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In other news, (self-pimping alert here) I’ve been asked by menumania.co.nz to write for their blog. Check out my first post by clicking —————> here. I’m still finding my feet with the direction I want my posts to take but it’s fun to stretch myself and certainly an honour to be noticed and invited!
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Next time: Bearing in mind that what I say will happen next time often bears little relation to what actually happens next time…I have this pie recipe I really want to try from an old edition of the gorgeous Cuisine magazine. Watch this space.