Category: Dairy Free

when someone great is gone

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As February draws to a close, it means one thing and one thing only: we are smack bang in the middle of Pisces Season, people. What does this mean? It means every time I get super irrationally emotional over something, I’m all, “classic Pisces Season.” A leading characteristic of the Pisces star sign, you see, and if you haven’t worked this out already, is emotional-ness.

However, sometimes emotions are entirely reasonable, such as when someone who has become one of the most important people in your life over the past year leaves the country. What can you even do in these situations? Well, you try and spend as much time with them as possible, and on the Monday before they go, you wait until they’ve finished their shift at work and then make a midnight feast for the both of you while you watch Desperate Housewives.

It being Monday, or “Payday Eve”, and me being extremely me, once I’d purchased mushrooms and cream at the guest’s request I essentially tried to forage everything else from what was already in my pantry: some tomatoes leftover from a team barbecue that day which I’d nicked; some black garlic and walnut butter that my mum had sent me; some vaguely elderly beetroot that I’d forgotten I’d bought at the vege market the previous week; some vermouth and bourbon from my brief flirtation with trying to have a decent liquor cabinet; it goes on. 

Mushrooms fried with garlic and cream are hardly revolutionary, but these ones are incredibly delicious: the vermouth hisses and disappears in the heat – relatable – leaving only a lick of winey flavour, and the cream reduces down to the most magnificently savoury sludge. Not necessarily the most appealing words, but you should know that they were the star on Monday and I’ve made this three times since because I love it so much. 

mushrooms with black garlic, vermouth and cream

an extremely vague recipe, but I feel like you can handle it

  • a whole ton of those big flat brown mushrooms that cost slightly more than regular button mushrooms
  • olive oil
  • dry vermouth, such as Noilly Prat
  • a clove or two of black garlic, or regular is fine! 
  • cream
  • freshly grated parmesan, salt and pepper to taste

Brush any dirt off the mushrooms and slice them up. Heat a generous couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large frying pan and tip the mushrooms in.

Let them fry in the hot oil till they soften and darken and reduce down somewhat – till they’re fried, basically – then pour in some vermouth, a couple of tablespoons at the most. This will hit the pan in a whoosh of steam and smell incredible. Stir till it’s evaporated, and then either slice or squash the clove of garlic and add it to the pan, followed by the cream – as much as you want, really. Start with a few tablespoons and then just keep pouring till it feels right. Carry on stirring over a high heat till the cream has reduced down somewhat – you want this thick and saucy.

Remove from the heat, pile on some parmesan cheese if you wish, but you don’t have to, and transfer to a bowl. Eat the lot, no matter how much you’ve made. 

The beetroot and tomato dishes were highly opportunistic on-the-spot flights of fancy but they both worked out well so I thought I’d pass on some form of a recipe of them both here. Baking beetroot in cream – leftover from the mushrooms – gives the earthy bitterness of the vegetable a fantastic mellowness, and the walnut butter makes everything almost fudge-like in texture. If you don’t have walnut butter, you could use cashew or almond butter or indeed, just leave it out and you’ll still have a good time. 

The tomatoes got a dash of bourbon on them because it was still there beside the stove from when I made those shallots and radishes last week, but it turns out they go well with these guys too. I just happened to have coconut sugar and its smoky intensity went perfectly with the sweetness of the tomatoes and the bourbon. They were sticky and sweet and bursting with juice and just so good. And I can’t even tell you how amazing the syrupy roasting juices tasted once all the tomatoes had been prised out. 

roasted beetroot with cream and walnut butter

Set your oven to 180C/350F. Chop your beetroot – however many you have – into quarters or chunks or whatever, really, and pile them into an oven dish that will comfortably fit them. Pour over enough cream so they get their feet wet but aren’t entirely submerged, and spoon over some walnut butter. Mix it all together so some of the cream and walnut butter amalgamates, then bung it in the oven and let it cook until the beetroot is extremely tender. Top with parmesan if you like. 

bourbon and coconut sugar roasted tomatoes

Again, set your oven to 180C/350F. Slice a bunch of ripe tomatoes in half and lay them, cut side up. Sprinkle over a little coconut sugar – like just a pinch per tomato. Follow this with a good solid drizzle of olive oil and then drizzle with a little bourbon – it’s easier to pour it into a spoon and then shake this over the tomatoes than trying to pour directly from the bottle. Finally sprinkle over some salt and roast em till they’re, like, roasted. 

So like, because it was at midnight when I was taking these photos I completely concede that they are Not Great and indeed, it was my own vanity that caused me to take more photos once I’d made the mushrooms again in the daylight, just in case a casual reader of this blog saw my night time photos and threw their laptop out the window in horror. But it all tasted so, so good, and it was such a nice night, that honestly: I don’t care. 

Okay I guess I do care since I bookended this blog post with nice photos of the mushrooms but still: I don’t care! (I care so much.) 

On Thursday night I finished my shift at work and then proceeded to not get any sleep until at least 7am, because this particular person had to be at the airport at 4am. I may or may not have got emotionally drunk; I may or may not have cried AND fallen asleep at the airport; I may or may not have written an extremely overwrought letter to this person about what they mean to me and then left it in the car and then had to clamber into the boot through the backseat because I couldn’t work out how to open said boot. However I’ve also come to the conclusion that Melbourne isn’t soooo far away and I could possibly even visit if I ever get my act/and/or savings together. And as they sing in the musical Wicked – and I warn you, it’s about to get disgustingly maudlin for just one second here – because I knew you, I have been changed, for good. 

skal for faen 

skal for faen 

Due to some spectacularly terrible luck or carelessness, this is the third time I’ve written out the blog post after accidentally deleting it, twice. By this point it feels almost surreal, like I’m going round in circles, but I think right here is definitively the end of this blog post. And seriously, it’s been barely a week and I’ve made those mushrooms three more times. They’re good, people. 

title from: LCD Soundsystem, Someone Great. Okay I wasn’t QUITE done with the maudlin. 

music lately: 

I am on a sincere Pink Floyd god damn BUZZ right now and am revisiting Roger Waters’ live album In The Flesh a whole ton. Just try to not fall in love with the immensely sexy yet unsexily named Doyle Bramhall II when he sings the chorus to Comfortably Numb, suckers. 

I saw Trainspotting 2 the other day and it was exactly what I wanted it to be; it also coincided with me being extremely into a genre of music that I like to call “Let’s drink lager and headbutt Liam Gallagher”. To that end, the Prodigy’s remix of Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life is honestly really good. 

next time: I have not made ice cream in FOREVER, friends! And since it’s finally looking like summer in Wellington, it feels entirely appropriate. Watch this space. 

get a little bit of bourbon in ya, get a little bit suburban

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I’ve lived in my current apartment for just over a year now. On Sunday, for the first time since moving in, I went to the vege market which happens weekly and is located exactly one block away. Thank you, Ritalin! I’ve spent a whole year full of good intentions about being a vege market person who gathers up bushels of seasonal produce to nourish my hot bod, but it’s never once happened. Either I cannot spatula myself out of bed with any conviction, or I make it there and am overwhelmed and panicky and can’t make a decision and forget how to breathe and have to leave immediately. 

Not this Sunday though! Instead I strode, with unprecedented purpose, the short distance of one literal block from my apartment to the carpark filled with people and vegetables. And then went on a brief tangent where I saw this tiny, silky dachshund and a voice in my head said Follow That Dog, They Will Lead You To The Vegetable-Related Inspiration You Seek. In a dog-induced fugue state I trailed it, my low-bellied small-snouted muse, until it went and stood by….some cucumbers. I was jolted out of the trance, all like, wow I don’t feel like cucumbers and maybe this dog isn’t my spiritual vegetable guide but in fact just following its owner. 

*clenches fist* so     damn     rustic

*clenches fist* so     damn     rustic

Luckily a more reliable voice said the words “maple bourbon roasted shallots” and suddenly I was inspired anew. This idea expanded out to include radishes (plus some beetroot that I bought for good measure for a later time) and with a bag full of pink-tinged vegetables, I left the market unflustered and happy.

Maple and bourbon are highly compatible bedfellows – the sweetness of both overlapping but also being tempered by the woodsy, smoky autumnal elements of the syrup. I figured that with shallots – mellow and onion-y – and the peppery, crisp radishes, it would make for an extremely delicious addition to say, some couscous or a salad. 

Unfortunately – or not – we’ll never know how these damn things taste in that capacity because, after having let them cool somewhat and idly tasting a few to see how the combination worked…I lifted the roasting dish to my face and somehow – in my second fugue state of the day – demolished the entire lot, frantic forkful by frantic forkful, in about twelve seconds flat. 

So, well, at least you know they’re really good. The shallots get all soft and caramelised and sticky, and the bourbon gives this rich depth. Shallots are a total pain to peel, but they look so, so pretty – like bunches of dried dusky pink roses, delicate and papery. If you’ve only ever had radishes raw before, they’re a revelation once some heat is applied, with their peppery bite softened into something quite luscious.

Should you have more restraint than me; here’s some suggestions for what to do with these things other than merely hoofing them in a daze. You could stir them through couscous with some rocket and toasted walnuts to respectively echo that peppery-smoky vibe; you could make a ton more and serve it alongside roast chicken (and consider using a marinade of maple, bourbon and olive oil for the chicken itself); you could boil some lil new potatoes and slice them up and stir the shallots and radishes into them with maybe like, some chives and a vinegary dressing to make a charming potato salad; you could put them in a bowl as part of a tapas-type spread with hummus and chargrilled peppers and flatbreads and whatnot, and finally, you could serve them as a component of a very zen rice bowl. 

maple bourbon roasted shallots and radishes

a (vague) recipe by myself

  • many shallots, like at least nineteen
  • a bunch of radishes, like…five? 
  • extra virgin olive oil
  • a couple of teaspoons of real maple syrup
  • a couple of teaspoons of bourbon
  • sea salt or a similarly fancy sodium

Set your oven to 170C/330F. 

Peel the shallots, which is fiddly and annoying I grant you, but if you press down on them with the flat side of a large knife the skins should split making it easier to slide them out. Chop the radishes into wedges. Place them all in a roasting dish in which they fit snugly. Drizzle over plenty of olive oil, the maple syrup, the bourbon, and a good sized pinch of salt. Give it a stir if you like or just hope for the best. 

Place in the oven and leave for around an hour till everything is lightly browned and tender and looking, y’know, cooked. Use however you like. 

Or you could, honestly, just hoof them in a daze in their entirety, it’s 100% a good time. 

As you can see, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged, despite my insistence upon returning to form as quickly as possible. But this is me trying, and I’m pretty pleased with the results. I will absolutely be cooking more and more and more – the other day I made myself GRANOLA – and the fact that I can go to a vege market without having a meltdown is definitely a good sign, even if I get waylaid by an occasional mysterious dachshund voyage. And honestly it’s nice to write a fairly straightforward blog post free of deep confessional angst (even if it’s always there ready to go.) There’s this bit in the Simpsons where Moe is telling Homer that he’s better than dirt, but not that fancy dirt with all the nutrients, and that’s how I’m feeling right now – just a tiny dirt grub, slowly getting better and better.

An good boy, and a dog called Ghost 

An good boy, and a dog called Ghost 

PS: It’s Valentine’s Day today, and if that means something to you then I’m happy for you and not going to rain on your parade. I spent the morning with my work family at an adorable high tea put on by our bosses followed by some intensely loved up messages with my two best friends Kim and Kate and I cannot think of a more lovely way to celebrate the day. And during that high tea I had the most amazing cucumber sandwiches with minty cream cheese and I was like, oh my god, that dachshund was actually trying to tell me something…But whatever you’re doing – whether it’s wallowing in hearts-for-eyes-ness or studiously ignoring it, I hope it’s fun. 

title from: my ultimate valentine Lana Del Rey and her incredible song Cruel World which, ugh, I love so much. 

music lately: 

Calexico, Alone Again Or. So I have been loving the original version of this song, by the band Love, for a long-ass time now, but this cover was recently brought to my attention and it’s so bouncy and ebullient and good and honestly, a very worthy take on a truly brilliant song. Listen. 

Beyonce’s performance at the Grammy Awards. It’s SO IMPORTANT. I”M SOBBING. WATCH IT. 

Blink 182, Always: exposure therapy. 

Next time: whatever I make I’ll like, wait to use it before I eat it mid-process. Or will I?  

 

so this is the new year and I don’t feel any different

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At ten seconds to midnight on the last day of December I led the countdown from behind the bar where I was working. At midnight we yelled Happy New Year and hugged and clinked our glasses of house sparkling wine. Then I yelled an expletive in the direction of 2016. And then, I immediately blasted Careless Whisper over the loudspeaker. (That’s right, “an expletive.” I’ve never sworn before on this blog and for some reason cannot bring myself to do it now after all these years out of some vague fear of being sent to the principal’s office or something even though swearing is harmless and a pretty delightful way to add texture and colour – or is that off-colour – to your words, generally? Why am I so hung up on this?) Anyway there’s no great conclusion to this anecdote, but the crowd went wild and no matter what happens this year I shall at least treasure the memory of standing in front of a lot of people – one of my favourite activities! – and seeing their faces as the glorious and iconic sax riff started playing. Started with a banger, if not a bang. 

Earlier that same day I made myself gazpacho, acting upon a strong craving. I never crave soup. I have barely been feeling passionate about any kind of food lately in fact. But, not wanting to let these rare positive thoughts about liquidised vegetables get skittish and run away, I decided I might as well try and do something about it.

This soup is really, really simple. The only difficult thing is that it’s best made in a blender, if you don’t have one then like…I don’t know. Make something else. You could use a food processor, but a blender is better, something about the centrifugal motion and slicey knifey stuff. The point is, it’s really delicious, which, thank goodness, since I hardly ever have massive soup-adjacent desires in the first place. Soup always has to do everything backwards and in heels in order to impress me at the same level that other food does dancing forward in regular shoes (that’s a Fred and Ginger reference in case I briefly lost you there.) I use cherry tomatoes which, with their youthful sweetness, give a slightly bouncier tomato flavour but very ripe regular tomatoes would be absolutely fine. I also use only red capsicum instead of the usually prescribed red and green, because green ones tend to be unluscious and bitter, whereas the red ones, mellow and riper, echo the sweetness of the little tomatoes. The only other way in which I stray from the traditional is adding a pinch of cumin to lend a little earthy depth. 

aw man, just realised that drizzle of olive oil kind of looks like a dick

aw man, just realised that drizzle of olive oil kind of looks like a dick

This really does get better the next day so if you can forward-plan your cravings, so much the better, but immediately poured from the blender it’s wonderful, all thick and cold and tasting of sunshine, of soft grass under your bare feet, of cloudless skies, endless and blue, of other summer-adjacent imagery designed to inspire a vague sense of nostalgia and longing within you. 

cherry tomato gazpacho

a recipe by myself

  • two punnets of ripe cherry tomatoes
  • one red capsicum (or pepper, if you’re American)
  • one small, soft white bread roll
  • two tablespoons of red wine vinegar, or sherry vinegar if you have it
  • three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, or more to taste (I did more) 
  • a decent pinch of ground cumin
  • salt (ideally sea salt or something fancy) and freshly ground pepper to taste

Tumble the cherry tomatoes into the blender, reserving a couple for garnish if you like, and a couple to just eat for fun because they’re so delicious. Remove the core from the pepper and slice into rough chunks (in all honesty, I just tore it up with my bare hands). Run the bread roll under a cold tap – an unusual and counterintuitive-feeling activity, I grant you – and rip it into soggy pieces, and put all of this in the blender with the tomatoes. Tip two cups of cold water in, followed by the vinegar, olive oil, and cumin. Blend thoroughly till it forms a thickish, uniform looking puree. Taste for salt, and indeed, whether or not you think it needs more cumin, olive oil, vinegar, whatever – and blend again. Let it sit for an hour if you can, which will thicken it up, but you could just eat it right away.

I served it drizzled with more olive oil, scattered with freshly ground black pepper, and strewn with chunks of very ripe avocado and fresh thyme, since it’s what I had and I figured I might as well lean into the untraditional nature of it. I also halved one of the reserved cherry tomatoes and floated them on top, cutely. This makes enough for two servings. 

The weather is actually resolutely unsummery at the moment but this soup nevertheless does its best to make you feel like its sunny, and is an ideal way to use seasonal produce if that’s what you’re into. 

I have no doubt that you absolutely noticed, amongst the hustle and bustle of Christmas, New Years, public holidays, disrupted routines, taking stock of the year’s happenings and mourning celebrity deaths, that it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. This was because my laptop sulkily kept turning off mid-use, eventually giving up on the whole being-a-laptop thing altogether. I’ve also been monstrously depressed and anxious and unable to muster up the slightest inclination to cook for myself. Luckily, it’s all fixed now!

The laptop that is. Haha. 

While I was waiting for it to be fixed, Kate very very kindly lent me hers. And rapidly, I decided to write about some things that were going on inside and outside of my head. The words came easily, pressing publish did not, but well, I’ve gone and bloody done it now. I’m not going to say too much more about it since you might as well read it – if you want. My whole thing was not wanting so much to be like, making a dramatic point about how I’m – gasp – going through some stuff, but more to highlight how sucky the system in New Zealand is if you’re trying to ask for help, while also just being like, I’m a human going through some stuff and the more people who talk about it the more it is normalised and I feel like I can do that, I can take a chance on talking about it where maybe other people can’t since I appear to not worry ever about the consequences of what will happen if I write about things going on in my life. On the other hand, it’s something I’d hidden with varying degrees of success for a few months now, so, sometimes acts of what could be called bravery take time to get into.

With all that in mind, my wanting to make myself something, and for that something to be vegetable-based soup, feels like a small victory. Super small, I mean. I still haven’t put sheets on my bed. I got drunk last night and lost my phone and then found it and then immediately lost it again and was like well, fair enough, I guess I’ve lost it. (I was at work, so I’m going to go pick it up, although it occurs to me today that being in a familiar place does not necessarily mean I didn’t somehow drop it in the bin or lose it inside a large glass of water or something.) 

What he said. 

What he said. 

But I’m trying. Well, I’m trying to try. Which is legit another victory.

Happy New Year. Fuck 2016. 

title from: Death Cab For Cutie, The New Year. I am a sucker for an achy-breaky song about this time of year. Amongst other things.  

music lately:

Breezeblocks, alt-j. Wowwwwwwww I like this song a lot. Also wowwww I am late to the party on alt-j. 

Zayn Malik/Taylor Swift, I Don’t Wanna Live Forever. PREDICTABLY GOOD, WHOM COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS, I FEEL LIKE I SHOULD SAY A VARIATION ON THE WORD PREDICTABLE AGAIN NOW 

next time: well hopefully I want to cook for myself more. So I’ll see you in June. JK, I’ll get there somehow. It helps when there are other people to cook for, and luckily there’s a lot of love-to-cook-for-them type people in my life. 

and if i recover, will you be my comfort

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My first recollection of the song One Night in Bangkok, from the troubled yet oddly compelling musical Chess (especially since it’s like two and a half hours of people singing about literal games of chess, it’s really punching up in the compelling stakes) was when I did a dance to it for one of my jazz dance exams, probably around 1994-ish timeline-wise. I can still remember quite a few of the steps, because muscle memory is funny about what it holds on to.

The track that I danced to had been dubbed to cut out what I later realised was there: this long, rather indulgent overture that goes on and on and on rather endlessly until the musical phrasing spins around and all of a sudden the beat drops and there’s a white guy rapping, kind of.

At 4.20 (nice) this morning as I drove in a taxi to the airport with this French guy who I used to work at Library with nearly every single day to farewell him as he moves overseas forever, it made me think of the overture of this song. I was with his flatmate and dear friend, and we were like…we knew this was coming ages ago but how is it so suddenly this very moment? Obviously I’m going to miss this guy heaps but it made me think about missing people in general. You’re going along, in the overture, everything feels fine, its repetitive nature lulls you into thinking well, I guess this is the song. And then suddenly there’s a tailspin and the beat drops and everything is completely different and you’re like, oh man. This is the song now. And the new bit of the song is so different to the overture that you’re like…why can’t I hear that overture right now, how is it so impossibly different to right now, how did it used to be all that there was.

comfort, food comfort, food

Anyway, the passage of time, wow, it’s a thing, I’m soooooo deep for noticing it. Whether or not the earth turning as it usually does has got you caught up or not, there’s really not much else to do right now but eat comfort food, and in the case of this recipe it’s a foodstuff I turn to often in times of need. Risotto.

I’ve talked about risotto so much On Here that there’s almost nothing new I can come up with about it; I think calling it “white noise in food form” was my highest apex of descriptiveness. It comforts in the making as well as the eating – obviously it’s soft, warm, creamy rice, as bland or as punchy as you want it to be, as close as you can get to actually eating a large fluffy blanket (okay, eating a freshly baked loaf of bread does challenge this notion) but the power of the calming, soothing, endless go-round of stirring hot liquid into the grains of rice and transfixedly watching them swell up slowly cannot be overstated.

A friend and coworker recently told me they were vegan now and I was like “wow, vegan, huh? That makes me think of…the word vegan.” And so I wanted to try and make a creamy as heck risotto without adding any animal products (specifically: my usual butt-tonne of cream and butter); I also wanted it to be fairly gentle and simple and non-aggressive.

It’s olive oil that gives this risotto its magical texture and richness; apart from that there’s just some pistachios and orange interrupting the soft grains. It may be non-threatening but it’s by no means bland though. The olive oil gives this intensity of buttery flavour and merges with the starch released by the rice, emulsifying into the most creamy and pleasingly gluggy finished product. The pistachios add soft crunch and their own almost-buttery flavour, and the orange brightens it all up but in a mellow way. It’s truly delicious, the flavour unfolding in this elusive way that makes you want to chase it with mouthful after mouthful.

This makes a large batch but the leftovers are strangely good cold from the fridge and if you roll them into tiny balls and dunk them in breadcrumbs before frying in some quantity of hot oil, you can get some highly serviceable arancini; crispy on the outside and creamy within.

orange, pistachio and olive oil risotto

a recipe by myself

  • one onion
  • plenty of extra virgin olive oil (soz to be vague, you just need plenty, okay)
  • one and a half cups of arborio rice (the cheapest stuff is fine here)
  • three quarters of a cup of white wine or dry vermouth (sorry this is a lot, but it makes a lot of risotto)
  • one tablespoon dijon mustard
  • one vegetable stock cube or a tablespoon of white miso paste
  • 70g pistachios, roughly chopped
  • one large orange, zest grated off
  • salt and pepper

Heat a generous tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil in a large pan. Finely dice the onion and tip it into the pan, and fry the pieces gently until they’re a little translucent and soft but not brown. Now tip in the uncooked rice grains and stir them in the oily onion for a minute or two. Pour in the wine or vermouth – it should bubble up merrily for a bit before settling down. This is where the stirring starts. Stir and stir over a medium heat (although I tend to impatiently turn it up high) till the rice has absorbed almost all the wine. Now add the stock or miso and the mustard, plus two tablespoons of the pistachios, and the orange zest, and continue adding water from a recently boiled kettle, about a cupful at a time, stirring and stirring till it’s absorbed and you can add the next one. Every time you add more water, also drizzle in a little more olive oil, about a teaspoon or so. Sorry I don’t have specific measures here, you just add liquid till it’s done, you know? 

Once it’s done it should be creamy and thick, with no granular bite when you taste the rice. Just yielding softness. Add salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste – and indeed, more mustard if you like. Serve drizzled with more olive oil, and squeeze over some of the orange’s juice. More salt and pepper is good here – and finish with a scattering of cheerfully green pistachios. 

It maybe sounds like there’s a nervous-making amount of olive oil in this but there’s not much of anything else, and you’re only adding a little at a time. Some of the cheapest extra virgin olive oils still have massive flavour, so don’t feel like you have to go high end here. Don’t skip out on the salt and pepper either, it ties everything together – salt makes everything taste more of itself, and I never used to like black pepper but it was just what I felt like having here – plus its dull heat helps stop the whole thing being too sleepy.

I know I bang on about comfort food and like, it’s not going to solve everything, but whatever’s going on you still need feeding and honestly, risotto is just the best, I can’t recommend it enough. If you can’t breathe, if you can’t think, if you can’t stand up, I believe that you can make it. The risotto I mean, but like, in general too.

As I said, I have five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred risotto recipes, but continuing in this vein, if you want more maybe try my take on Nigella’s Pea Risotto (which can be made vegan) or this oven-baked risotto if standing and stirring is beyond you right now (and if it is: I get it.)

title from: CHVRCHES affecting-like-whoa song Recover.

music lately: 

My song that I can’t stop listening to this week is Montaigne, Lonely, but beautiful as it is I’m trying to counteract it with taking Love Myself by Hailee Steinfeld repeatedly like it’s medicine. 

Muse, Plug In Baby. Emostalgia. 

next time: well it’s DECEMBER THE DAMN FIRST tomorrow and I’m NOT prepared in ANY way but maybe I’ll start thinking about xmas food. 

you said i must eat so many lemons, because i am so bitter

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1. I have nothing clever to say about the presidential election, no one comes to this blog for politics, and it was with massive sorrow and anxiety that I watched the livestream chug on endlessly with a friend (we got so stressed that we had to break for ice cream and then we both felt sick immediately after and I was like OH THIS IS THE LAST STRAW U MADE ME BE NEGATIVE ABOUT PRECIOUS, BEAUTIFUL ICE CREAM) and it was with massive sorrow and anxiety that I found out the confirmed results. There’s nothing exciting or able-to-be-romanticised or hilarious about Trump being president elect and it’s not even my battle by any means but if you’re hurting then I’m hurting with you and if you need support I support you and if you need compassion, I love you.

2. It’s possible that it’s really just a conflation of a million different things and feelings but I’m feeling almost overwhelmingly devastated by the death of Leonard Cohen. It’s weird, like…he was so old. People die. As I said, I guess it’s just the timing, really. But his songs have been so important to me ever since I was around 16 and I was introduced to him when my aunty made an offhand comment about how his music was nice to play when you’re going to sleep. That year I went off to boarding school and I would play the CD of his that I got for Christmas every single night when I went to bed. But only when I was home. His music to me feels like safety and warmth and calm; yet of aching and longing and quietly waiting for something that might never arrive. In 2009 I spent an enormous amount of money on a ticket to see him live – years later I would joke that if I’d known he was going to keep touring every year to pay off his debts I would’ve just waited and spent less money – but now I’m glad I did it. Like I said, he was OLD and it’s hardly the most shocking news, but like, spare a thought for the guy at the supermarket checkout who innocently asked how I my day was going and who had to listen to me tearfully talking going on about it (him: “oh that guy, yeah we sang Hallelujah in my primary school” me: “that sounds right” him: “was he really religious?” me: “well he used a lot of religious imagery…he was kind of a bad ass” also me: “I should go now.”)

3. Last week I travelled with friends to Otaki for the wedding of two of our very good also-friends. Gosh, if weddings don’t make you just THINK about your LIFE, you know? But, it was a happy, lovely, full-of-love day from start to finish and I was super grateful that I got to witness it in all its beauty. And that I didn’t fall out of my surprisingly practical strapless jumpsuit. The couple generously gave away little jars of homemade preserved lemons as party favours and I adore preserved lemons so gathered up every spare jar I could find.

On Monday I halved a bunch of tomatoes and smothered them in a mixture of olive oil, spices, some sliced up preserved lemons, and sugar, and roasted them first at a low heat then at a high heat. They were incredible and I accidentally ate all eight tomatoes in one sitting rather than leaving some for future use because they were just that delicious.

Preserved lemons have a compelling lemony (duh) saltiness; and strange though it seems all you need from each soft piece of fruit is the actual yellow skin – slice off as much of the flesh and white pith as you can (and then inevitably eat it to see if it could be that salty: yes it bloody is.) The remaining zest is full of concentrated sourness and salt, yet it’s somehow kind of mellow too – a bit like how garlic can be rich and sweet and make your eyes water at the same time. Stir it into pasta, use it in anything even vaguely Mediterranean, eat on its own out of curiosity, use it to flavour olive oil. Or do what I did: make these gorgeously scorched little roasted tomatoes, warm with cinnamon and caramelised slightly and stir them into pasta or anything vaguely Mediterranean, or just eat them squashed onto a bagel with some thankfully perfect avocado.

fast slow-roasted tomatoes with preserved lemon, cinnamon and garlic

a recipe by myself

  • eight smallish, ripe tomatoes
  • two big garlic cloves
  • about three tablespoons of olive oil, but y’know, whatever
  • half a lemon’s worth of preserved lemon
  • two teaspoons coriander seeds
  • a pinch of ground cinnamon
  • a teaspoon of brown sugar

Set your oven to 150 C/300 F. 

Roughly chop the garlic cloves or mince them if you’ve got one of those contraptions. Rinse the lemon slices (I’m assuming your preserved lemons came sliced into quarters) and slice off as much flesh and pith as you can, leaving you with just the actual skin of the lemons. Now that you’re finally at this point, roughly or finely slice them as you please. Mix the garlic and lemon slices in a small bowl with the coriander seeds, olive oil, cinnamon and sugar. Taste it – if you want a bit more sharpness, add in a dash of the preserving liquid from the jar of lemons or indeed, another quarter lemon’s worth of sliced lemon rind. 

Halve the tomatoes and lay them, cut side up, in a small roasting dish. Spoon the lemon-garlic-oil mixture evenly over them, scraping every last bit of flavoursome oil into the dish. 

Roast them at that low heat for 20 minutes, and then turn up the temperature to 220 C and continue to roast until the tomatoes are slightly scorched.  

The sweetness of the tomatoes is intensified under the heat and the lemon’s bite works beautifully with this. They taste best when they’ve had some time to sit and lose that scalding heat, which means you can put the whole tomato half in your mouth and allow the seeds to burst, pleasurably, full of garlic and cinnamon and salt, without causing yourself any damage. The coriander seeds have a hint of bitter lemon to them as well but if you don’t have them just leave them out or use cumin seeds instead for a different kind of earthy spiciness. I feel like this would be particularly spectacular with mint leaves scattered on top, but alas my mint plant has died from neglect and I was like, I don’t know if I’m actually ready to commit to another one and I shouldn’t reward myself for my bad plant husbandry by just replacing the erstwhile one immediately. But definitely mint or indeed, basil, would be perfect here.

what a beautiful wedding what a beautiful wedding

Thanks Vanessa and Reuben for the sour lemons that provided some definite sweetness this week. And also for playing I Want You by Savage Garden at the reception.

If all of this appeals and you want more, I recommend using preserved lemon in my recipe for Slow Cooked Lamb with Cumin, Cinnamon and Feijoas;  or in this Barley, Lentil, Eggplant, Pomegranate and Mint salad; or get high on your own supply with Nigella’s delicious recipe for preserved limes.

PS: thanks for reading, always.

title from: Kate Nash’s debut single from 2007, Foundations. The whole Made of Bricks album that this comes from makes me feel way too many things, I love upbeat songs about sad things and this is a classic example of that genre. 

music lately: 

I don’t even know where to begin with Leonard Cohen but listen to him singing Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye live at the Isle of Wight in 1970 if you dare.

The Saddest Song, from the musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Not even trying to be funny about the political timing of it all, I just can’t stop listening to this song.

Laura, by Girls, which contains everything I love: surfy sound, sad sad sad lyrics set to upbeat music, my name in the title.

next time: well I still have a lot of jars of preserved lemons, guys. 

and when i hit that dip get your camera

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Do you ever get all like, this superfood is going to solve all the problems in my life? Well that’s how I feel about this pomegranate-laden hummus that I made. This is not a new thing for me; in fact I’ve probably discussed it before on here where I place enormous pressure on, say, goji berries or chia seeds or something to have some kind of ripple effect on the rest of my life, rather than actually doing anything about the rest of my life.

super super

Let me tell you a story to illustrate this. I swear I must’ve told it here before because it’s one I wheel out often to elaborately self-deprecate, but it bears repeating. So: I attended a girls boarding school for a couple of years in the early 2000s. This was peak time for two fads: the Atkins diet, and hating your own body. What can I say, we were all just humans with human bodies crammed together in a boarding house with not much to do, it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen outside of that context too. It just…is a thing. Anyway, not having any disposable income to buy the trappings of the Atkins diet – of which our interpretation was eating a lot of blueberries and unsweetened whipped cream – I was DELIGHTED to discover a grapefruit tree round the back of the boarding house. The grapefruit diet was even more hardcore and old-school than the Atkins one and I smugly lined up four plump, pale grapefruit on the windowsill, ready to be eaten for my breakfast.

After all that lead up, herein lies the kicker: I was boasting about my cunning ruse to someone. Grapefruit! For free! What larks!

There’s no grapefruit tree here, they told me. That’s an orange tree. You’ve been eating unripe oranges for the last four days.

Well that explains my sore stomach, said I.

So yeah, I’ve had idiotic ideas about food and the effect it will have upon me since way back; however I can’t deny that there really is something oddly calming about making yourself a vast quantity of hummus – allowing the dried chickpeas to swell up and grow plump in a bowl of water; slowly cooking them in an enormous pan till they’re completely tender; blitzing them to a soft, pillowy mass in the food processor, adding oil and lemon and salt and spice to reflect your own instinctive tastes; absentmindedly pouring tahini into your mouth and then nearly choking on it because it’s like actual glue in food form; spreading the nubbly hummus into a large bowl and tumbling over jewel-like pomegranate seeds, sliding a knife into a perfect avocado, eating the lot in one go; somehow finding yourself hooning the tahini again because it’s so delicious in spite of the quicksand perils of its texture.

There is literally nothing stopping you just buying a tub of hummus from the supermarket and having, y’know, hummus right then and there, but this is a food blog and as such I’m afraid I’m going to occasionally expose you to, y’know, cooking.

Making your own hummus from scratch aside, is it weird that I just ate a whole bowl of the stuff? As is? I’m going to say no, but there is absolutely nothing stopping you from serving this as it usually comes, as a dip to be plundered by lots of crackers and breads and such. I’m not going to call this a Hummus Bowl or Loaded Hummus or anything like that, it was just…this delicious stuff that I ate a lot of. As with the unripe grapefruit story, sure there’s some context there but it’s also not that deep: this hummus just tastes amazing.

Final caveat: I just started making it without following a recipe or anything and there will be truly about one billion recipes online already for this stuff, but if you’re lacking one you could do worse than to follow mine. It’s neither traditional nor perfect, but it’s mine. No wait, one more caveat: you OF COURSE don’t have to soak dried chickpeas and then simmer them in unsalted water for an hour and then drain them, you could just use canned, but they cost hardly anything and since you’re already making your own hummus you might as well go all out, yeah?

hummus with avocado, pomegranate, pine nuts and pumpkin seeds

  • four cups of dried, soaked, cooked chickpeas.
  • five tablespoons tahini
  • around four tablespoons of olive oil plus more for drizzling
  • one heaped tablespoon ground cumin, plus more if you like
  • two tablespoons lemon juice, plus more if you like  
  • plenty of sea salt or similarly “nice” salt, but use regular if it’s what you’ve got
  • up to one cup of water
  • the seeds from half a pomegranate
  • one small avocado
  • a few tablespoons each pine nuts and pumpkin seeds

Place the chickpeas in a food processor and blend the heck out of them, till they form a kind of nubbly, sandy rubble. Add the tahini, the olive oil, the lemon juice, the cumin, and a good pinch of salt, and process the actual heck out of it some more, while slowly pouring water down the feed tube till it appears to be a pleasing consistency. It will thicken up once it’s sat for a bit, so don’t worry toooo much if it looks too soupy. The important thing is the taste – is there enough salt? Enough cumin? Enough lemon? Add more and keep tasting till you’re happy. 

Transfer the lot – this makes around a litre – into a sealed container. Spoon some into a bowl, cover lavishly in pomegranate seeds, pumpkin seeds, slices of avocado, pine nuts, more salt, and a drizzle of olive oil. Eat. 

I probably over-emphasise this with every recipe I make but also I feel the need to tell you that of course you don’t have to use the specific things on top of the hummus that I did, or indeed use anything at all. It’s just really nice with this specific combination. Put coffee grounds and Lego on top of it for all I care. (Damn it, no, I care too much: please don’t do this.)

Pomegranates are getting cheaper and cheaper at the supermarket right now though and avocados are slowly becoming more reasonable and more likely to be ripe and perfect. Together – the silky bite of avocado as your teeth slide effortlessly through them paired with the sour crunch of the pomegranate seeds against the creamy, soft hummus – they’re rather wonderful and it all makes for a very satisfying snack-thing. And it’s so serene, like I couldn’t emphasise the serenity of this more if I was running through the streets yelling “Serenity!” through a megaphone while also crashing some cymbals together.

Look at these damn calming pomegranates.  Look at these damn calming pomegranates.

If you’re vibing making your own dips, may I suggest also: Nigella’s Peanut Butter Hummus; this incredible Turkish dip called Tarator which is almost literally just bread and water but tastes like a thousand things more; and this honestly INCREDIBLE Cambodian Wedding Day Dip which is, as I explain in the blog post, all the more delightful because it’s a recipe that also sounds like a dance.

title from: Azealia Banks’ perennial hit for the ages, 212. Say what you will about her, but we are blessed to have this song.  

music lately: 

Slow Ride, by Foghat. I’ve been watching a LOT of NewsRadio lately and there’s an episode that features this rather quintessential 70s rock song and well, now it’s in my head.

About A Girl, Nirvana. I saw Montage of Heck, the melodramatic but amazing and incredibly sad Kurt Cobain documentary last night, and now I obviously need to listen to a lot of Nirvana. Wasn’t their MTV Unplugged album just perfect, though?

next time: Possibly 12,000 uses for hummus since I made around a litre of the damn stuff. 

i wish i had a river, that i could skate away on, but it don’t snow here, it stays pretty green

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Avocados are like a metaphor for life, right? You have all this hope and anticipation that it’s going to be perfect and it’s really expensive but you do it anyway because it’s an avocado and you’d give up everything for this avocado and you feel, gently, from the outside that it’s going to be a good one this time! You’ve been burned before but damn it, you just know this avocado is the one. And you carry it home, imagining all the good times you’re going to have together – will you spread it on toast? Eat it in its entirety with a teaspoon, sprinkled with salt? Roughly mash it into guacamole? You could do anything! The taste is almost in your mouth, your teeth can almost feel that sensation of crushing through its soft, soft flesh. And then you finally slice into it and it turns out that despite your very best efforts, it was not ready to be cut open and exposed to the world; it was underripe and cold at its core. Or it had been left for too long and could not be saved no matter how you try to disguise it – greying and sulphuric and with no way to make you happy. Even though you wanted it so, so bad and you paid so much for it. 

Or sometimes you just randomly buy an avocado because it’s on special and like, slice into it and it’s perfect and you’re like “phewf, don’t know what I would’ve done for lunch otherwise” and that’s kind of that. 

pretty, green 

pretty, green 

I was not particularly in the mood for metaphors when I made myself lunch the other day: the avocado was green and unblemished and yielding and that was enough for me. I used it in a simple, beautiful pea, mint and avocado salad from Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat. A book I turn to again and again when I forget how to eat: it’s the most trustworthy manual I know. Her tone is gently bossy yet undone and dishevelled at the same time and it’s ever so comforting. 

Yeah, it’s Spring, so eating sprightly green stuff feels obvious, but no matter what time of year it is this salad is gorgeously delicious. Especially because all you really need to worry about is the state of your avocado – the peas can be frozen and the salad leaves are highly interchangeable for whatever’s seasonal. You can basically make the entire thing in the bowl you’re planning to serve it in, which appeals to my utter laziness, and while it’s meant to be a side salad it makes a thoroughly satisfying meal all on its own, depending on your appetite I suppose. It’s also vegan, which is nice. 

oh wow, here's the salad from this angle 

oh wow, here’s the salad from this angle 

The flavours here are so wonderful – the green-green-greenness (yes) of the peas, the bitterness of the leaves, the sweet, ice cold mint, the buttery avocado. Then you’ve got crunch and softness and oiliness and saltiness and honestly, all I want is a whole bowlful of this and nothing else. I do think it would be a good vehicle for some roasted asparagus if you’ve got the inclination – I mean, it is Spring! – and you could always add some chopped nuts to add further crunch. But it’s truly perfect just as Nigella stipulates it. As per usual though I have given lots of alternatives and notes because I get helpfully nervous about being too specific in case people feel like they can’t make something because they don’t have the exact right thing. 

pea, mint, and avocado salad

recipe by nigella lawson from her important book How To Eat, below is the vague quantitiy I made though which doesn’t quite match her specs

  • three quarters of a cup of frozen peas, or thereabouts
  • half a bag of baby spinach
  • one perfect, beautiful avocado
  • one whitloof, radicchio, or other bitter lettuce, or just something else crunchy – heck, half a regular iceberg lettuce would be chill here
  • several tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, at least three but definitely more
  • a pinch of sugar
  • one tablespoon of white wine vinegar; you could always use apple cider vinegar though
  • a handful of mint leaves, plus more to serve
  • sea salt

Briefly cook the peas in a pan of boiling water and then strain under cold running water.  If you’ve just bought them from the supermarket and they’re not super frozen you can probably get away with just letting them defrost in a bowl, maybe filled with warm water to hasten the process. Basically: get your frozen peas to be unfrozen, please. 

Put the olive oil, vinegar and sugar in the bowl you’re planning to serve the salad in. You can always add more oil later. Rip up some mint leaves and stir them in. Tip in the drained peas and the baby spinach. Tear in the whitloof leaves, or whichever crunchy leaves you’re adding in, and then halve your avocado and scoop out rough spoonfuls, letting them fall into the same bowl. Use a large spoon to carefully mix all this together, adding a little sea salt and more oil if you like. Throw over a few more mint leaves. You’re done. 

oh wow here's the salad from THIS angle now

oh wow here’s the salad from THIS angle now

As I said, this recipe is given by Nigella as a side dish, but I quite contentedly polished off the entire thing by myself and didn’t feel inclined to need anything else for a long time after; avocados and olive oil are good like that, making you all shiny-haired and full. 

stock image #58639 woman laughing with salad

stock image #58639 woman laughing with salad

And it’s surprisingly practical when eaten lying down: I honestly didn’t expect that. 

title from: Joni Mitchell, River. Lol…………………….this song is so sad. 

music lately: 

The Damned, New Rose. I made a kind of surfy punky playlist for work and it turns out I am a sucker for pretty much anything with big drums, this song included. 

New Editions, Something About You. If you haven’t heard this song from 1996 do yourself an enormous favour, it’s so great. 

next time: more acknowledgements of Spring, I guess? I haven’t actually eaten any asparagus since last year so should get on to that, what with uh, being a food blogger and all. 

oh you bite your friend like chocolate

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As soon as I marched out into this earth, a freshly begotten newbown, I was immediately three things: extremely Aries, extremely ready for attention, and extremely terrible at dealing with things being over. I mean, as far as the latter goes, I was already like ten days past my due date and then immediately contracted colic, possibly as some kind of bloody-minded way of implying that I really shouldn’t have had to farewell the womb where there was food on tap and no responsibilities and calming ocean noises.

What say you, baby Laura?  “You mean I have to wait like twelve years for a coffee culture to develop in New Zealand?”

This week I’m moving from the bar I’ve been at for 18-ish months to start being a bartender at another bar owned by the same business. It’s an interesting mix of sentimentality and excitement. However on this rare occasion I’m not feeling entirely terrible about something being over, because there’s so much new stuff to learn and take on and absorb and learn. I’m sad, I’m happy, I’m so delighted about the opportunity, but ultimately my gut instinct told me I should do it and I think it was correct. (My gut instinct tells me really stupid things sometimes, like “you should work out what that crumb on the floor is by putting it in your mouth for some reason” and “you’re terrified of pelicans, lol”) As well as being in the same business group it’s also in the same building, so I’m still very much in the general family that I’ve grown to adore.

Also, did you know how much attention you get when you announce you’re going to leave a place? It’s delicious. Almost as delicious as these cookies I made to take in on my final Saturday shift at my old job which were definitely made out of the pure goodness of my noble heart and not motivated by “the glory”. But really though, I do like to bake nice things for people and wanted to have some kind of sugary vehicle for my gratitude to the team I was leaving, to help boost us through a long night, our bods filled with chocolatey energy.

In the interests of everyone’s allergy needs being met (okay fine, in the interests of “the glory”) I was after some kind of gluten and dairy-free cookie that I could make without having to gather and hunt too many random ingredients. The answer is this, which is vaguely based on an Italian cookie recipe from this book I have called The Scotto Family: Italian Comfort Food. It’s so easy – just plain egg whites stirred quickly into a mountain of icing sugar, cocoa, and cornflour, baked briefly. Somehow this bowl of not-much-at-all turns into these chewy, soft, rich-rich-rich cookies, with a kind of macaron vs brownie texture. I love them.

There’s a lot of cocoa in this, so use the darkest, strongest, high-fat-percentage stuff that you can find, if possible. That, plus the pinch of salt, is going to counteract the blatant sweetness blast of all that icing sugar, meanwhile the chunks of chocolate punctuate each bite with delicious texture.

flourless double chocolate cookies

a recipe by myself

  • three cups of icing sugar
  • one cup of good cocoa
  • two tablespoons of cornflour
  • three egg whites
  • 250g dark chocolate, roughly chopped (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana which is dairy-free.) 
  • a pinch of sea salt

Place the icing sugar, cocoa, and cornflour in a large bowl and stir gently to get rid of any lumps and to make it into a uniformly dusty-brown dust. Tip the egg whites in and carefully stir – it will seem like there’s not nearly enough liquid for all the dry ingredients but damn it if it doesn’t come together suddenly to form a thick batter. About halfway through this point tip in the chopped up chocolate and salt and stir it all through. 

Refrigerate the mixture for fifteen-ish minutes while you heat the oven up to 180C/350F and get a baking tray lined with nonstick paper. Bake small spoonfuls, around five on the tray at a time to allow for spreading, for eleven minutes or until firm and slightly cracked on top. I just used a regular spoon from the cutlery draw, the kind you like, eat stuff with. Repeat with the rest of the mixture. I just slid the baking paper sheet off the tray onto a wooden board to let them cool and started again with a new sheet of baking paper rather than trying to prise them off individually but you do you. 

Allow the cookies to cool completely and then store in an airtight container. 

Despite not having tried it I know for a fact that these would be incredible sandwiched around ice cream, however on their own they are just perfect. It was noted on Saturday night that they don’t taste as though they’re lacking in gluten or dairy, which comes down to that magical texture – a crisp outer shell barely encasing a chewy, almost gooey, aggressively chocolatey centre. The fact that they are so massively easy to make just renders them even more delicious to me.

So with these cookies ends one era and another starts. If you yourself are thinking of taking something sweet into the workplace, I thoroughly recommend these: they’re fast to make, most people can eat them, and there is of course, The Glory of being that person who brought cookies to work. To be honest I love the people I work with so much that I’d make them cookies even if it didn’t get me attention though. (What an attention-seeking thing to say.)

Let’s weigh in with toddler Laura, what say you? “I can’t believe I have to wait like twenty literal years before I can look up Aries memes on the internet”

If you’re on a cookies-with-chunks-of-chocolate vibe, may I further recommend these Smoky Triple Chocolate Buckwheat Cookies (also gluten free); Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Cookies; or Maple Peanut Butter Cookies.

title from: The 1975’s song Chocolate, gee they are good though right? Sliiiight INXS vibes, yeah? 

music lately: the work playlist edition

Roots Manuva, Witness Dub. Walk me down the aisle to this song, lower me into the grave to this song, dance around my glowing risen spectre to this song, honestly: this song can cure the longest hardest tiredest shift at work.

Santigold, Les Artistes. The sparkly poppy sound with the slightly plaintive chorus gets me right in the ventricles. This is from 2008 but sounds like it fell out of the internet just yesterday.

Phoenix, 1901. So joyful!

next time: hopefully it won’t be quite so obvious how underslept I am. Time for a nap now. Also might as well bake something to bring in for the new team I’m joining, yeah?

almond looks, that chill devine

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

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

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

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

almond milk and coconut sugar creme brulee

a recipe by myself

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

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

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

a serene mess a serene mess

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

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

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

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

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

music lately: 

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

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

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

but it sours into a routine deceit

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I’m sure I’ve conveyed it somehow, but if you were not aware, I am a fulltime bartender. I personally think I’m good at it. I love doing it. But I don’t tend to talk about it too much On Here apart from to like, flop around and whinge about how tired I am, which is something I’ve done whether I’ve been bartending or working in an office or conversely, working in a different office, throughout the entire lifetime of this blog. Interestingly, I sleep better now than I ever have before, possibly because I’m filling my usual insomnia hours with standing up and serving drinks to people.

But yeah! Cocktails! So fun to make! I love learning about the classics, especially the truly ancient and sometimes forgotten ones – back when someone would mix cold gin with a wineglass of this and a jigger of that and some cad would lean over the bar and be like “hot jimminy dog! This is swell! And I, Lord Flauntleroy, pronounce it a new sensation! I suggest we kiss now, Bertram.”  On that note, it is fun discovering fascinating bartenders from way back when. Like London’s Ada “Coley” Coleman, who invented the Hanky Panky — a variation on the classic Martini using gin, sweet vermouth and that friend of yours and mine, Fernet Branca. She started working as a bartender in 1899, at a time in England when you were either allowed to be devotedly married or quietly reading Pilgrim’s Progress, but nothing else, let alone be employed in the man-crusted world of night-alcohol.

Ada “Coley” Coleman extremely doing her thing

With that in mind, I decided to do an impressively deep, powerful lunge sideways from my usual food recipes today to provide a recipe for something that I spend almost as much time thinking about: cocktails. More specifically, my variation on one of my favourite drinks, to make it vegan. So: Sours are generally a shaken-to-heck mix of a spirit, lemon juice, a little sugar and some egg white, the latter of which creates a gloriously silky texture and frothy layer on top. Raw egg white in a drink might sound un-fun but please, bear with me, as I am currently super into them and compelled to make Everything Sours right now. Including any mocktails I make for the glassie during their shift (the person who washes our glasses on busy nights: as I always say, A Hydrated Glassie Is A Hydrated All Of Us.) Importantly, you neither taste nor smell the egg white — it just wraps its proteins around the molecules of the liquid and floofs everything up splendidly as you shake the cocktail, creating a spectacularly light, foamy drink.

Whisky sours are probably the most well-known take on this format, but I personally favour gin sours, an occasional amaretto sour and the fairly underrated Pisco Sour. Once you start extrapolating out — and why wouldn’t you spend four hours on wikipedia without realising it — it becomes clear how many cocktails fall into the greater Sour family, being a mix of liquor, sugar, and lemon or lime juice — like Margaritas and Daiquiris. Sours have a gloriously punchy, sweet-zingy taste and lush texture – there’s barely a liquor under the sun that isn’t improved by a little sugar and a little citrus. However, I also love sours because they’re quite easy to recreate at home. You only need one favourite bottle of spirits, and the rest is just kitchen stuff. Plus you’re getting a hit of protein and vitamin C with every sip. It’s basically an alcoholic multivitamin.

whisky sour whisky sour

However! If you can’t eat egg white — because of preference, allergy, whatever — it seems a massive shame to be missing out on this entire avenue of cocktail deliciousness. I’m neither vegan nor allergic to egg myself, but I don’t think that’s a compelling enough reason to not explore and reimagine existing recipes to make them available to more people. Or at least: I love thinking up recipes and I like challenges, so this is my idea of fun.

If you’ve not yet heard of it, the solution is slightly leftfield. At some point in the recent past, it was discovered that the liquid from canned chickpeas, called aquafaba, behaves almost exactly like egg whites. As in, the stuff that you normally drain off into the sink, can be whisked with sugar and baked and it honestly looks and tastes like meringue. I don’t know why or how, but it’s enough for me that it’s possible. Having used aquafaba successfully before to make pavlova, I got to wondering how it would work in a sour cocktail recipe. The most perfunctory of google searches reveals that roughly five billion people have already thought of this and tested it and I was like fine, I did not discover this, but in my defence, this is the first time that I’ve thought of it.

gin sour gin sour

Who cares about provenance when it works so well! First I made myself a whisky sour using aquafaba, then I made another one, just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, then I made a gin sour, and then I realised I hadn’t eaten yet and I was moderately tipsy. The important thing is though: it works! Look at how frothy these drinks are! I barely shook them and they turned into alcoholic foam immediately! I was honestly so excited. And tipsy. Now, the aquafaba liquid is not entirely tasteless —  it’s hard to explain what quality it brings, which possibly means I’m a terrible food blogger, but it just provides a slight background hint of…dust? Faint notes of literal chickpea? I counteracted this by adding slightly more sugar than I normally would. But as long as you’ve braced yourself for that, you’ve got a delicious drink on your hands that you can easily make sizeable batches of and drink joyfully while doing such activities as entertaining guests or testing cocktail recipes.

Please don’t in the slightest bit feel like you have to spend vast quantities on bartending equipment which you will possibly never use and only grow to resent and accidentally kick over all the time (curious, as you keep it on top of the fridge.) If you’ve got a clean jar with a lid you can put all your ingredients in there to shake vigorously and pour it through a sieve into your chosen glass. Some kind of plastic container, even, would work, or just your cupped hands if you want to get super artisanal (fine, I don’t condone this, but I do stand by the alcoholic multivitamin statement.)

Another thing to keep in mind if you haven’t made your own cocktails before is, Sours usually get what’s known as a Dry Shake, which, yeah, doesn’t sound great, but it’s just where you shake up the ingredients initially without any ice before shaking them up with ice to give the egg white a chance to emulsify and aerate. If your ingredients are all cold enough you could possibly get away without shaking it with ice at all, since this gets so foamy, however, a tiny bit of dilution from the water is actually desirable, just to meld all the ingredients together.

Finally, sugar syrup can be made hastily by dissolving equal parts of plain white sugar and water together. And I figure most people have some kind of shot glass lying about the house from when they went on a Con-Tiki trip ten years ago or were students or whatever, otherwise just work with the fact that one tablespoon measures 15ml and go from there.

vegan whisky sour

  • 45ml/one and a half shots of bourbon or rye whisky
  • 30ml/one shot of lemon juice
  • 15ml/half a shot of sugar syrup
  • 20ml/just under one shot of aquafaba

Place all the ingredients in either the glass of a Boston shaker or inside a clean, empty jar that you have a lid for. Bang the top of the boston shaker onto the glass, or screw the lid onto the jar if you’re using it, and holding them firmly, give them about ten good shakes — you’ll see the contents instantly become frothy and aerated.

Remove the top of the shaker or the jar lid, add a handful of ice, lid up and shake again briefly. Strain into your chosen glass, decorate with bitters if you wish, drink immediately. Peychaud’s bitters is more traditional but I happened to have a bottle of Angostura Bitters and so used that instead. Leaving your whisky sour naked is also highly acceptable.

vegan gin sour

  • 45ml/one and a half shots gin
  • 30ml/one shot lemon juice
  • 20ml/just under one shot sugar syrup
  • 20ml/just under one shot of aquafaba

Proceed as above — shake all ingredients together without ice, then add ice, shake again for a bit, strain into your chosen glass.

To make the non-vegan versions of these, use around 20ml/just under a shot of egg white per drink. I prefer using the pasteurised stuff that you can buy in packages at the supermarket but obviously freshly separated eggs have been doing just fine for quite some time now.

Of course, nothing’s stopping you from simply having a G&T or a beer at home, but if you happen to have been given a bottle of gin or something for Christmas or feel like being slightly impressive, well now you have one more option.

As for the remaining chickpeas, they unsurprisingly have their own merits. Realising quickly that I needed some kind of sustenance, I emptied them into a bowl with a handful of baby kale leaves, some salt, some coriander seeds, some apple cider vinegar and a ton of extra virgin olive oil. Coriander seeds are lemony and peppery and the oil brought out the buttery side of the chickpeas. Kale is healthy! But also actually tastes good.

this salad is like a non-alcoholic multivitamin this salad is like a non-alcoholic multivitamin

If putting one alcohol into another under your own roof appeals, I also recommend you try out my simplified take on the Lee Brothers recipe for something called Purple Jesus, and also this recipe for a Christmassy punch of Nigella’s called Poinsettia, halfway down this verrrrrrry old blog post of mine.

or come up and see me, also extremely doing my thing or come up and see me, also extremely doing my thing

title from: Third Eye Blind with their highly self-indulgent unreliably-narrated but extremely listenable song Losing A Whole Year. 

music lately: 

I have always enjoyed INXS but for some reason this week I’ve become obsessed with them. Is it mostly because the tragically late Michael Hutchence was so hot and charismatic? I mean, sure. Their music is amazing though and if you feel in the slightest bit like writing it off as 80s filler then I urge you to give it your ears again. Obviously all the hits are hits but I have been listening to Disappear over and over again and it just gets to me, I don’t even know, just the dreamy lightness of the verses with the sudden rush into the heady exuberance and promise of escapism in the chorus and the massive drums and Hutchence being in effortlessly good voice. Anyway it’s almost embarrassing how long I could go on about this for but I have 100% been listening to this song and you should too.

I actually have been pretty exclusively listening to INXS recently but…I did rewatch the intensely 90s movie Go and the soundtrack is just wonderful, so much big beats and trip hop and trance and just the sort of thing that makes you want to put on a pleather knee-length skirt and some brown lipstick, and put your hair into Bjork buns, ya know? The film’s remix of Fire Up The Shoesaw by Lionrock is one such excellent example here.

Uh, you should also watch Disappear from INXS’s live show at Wembley Stadium in 1991. Note I said “also”, not “alternatively”.