Category: Dairy Free

these girls fall like dominoes

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I would describe my demeanour this week as Literal Zombie But With Slightly Worse Hygiene. The reason I have not blogged up until the very moment that you’re reading this is that I have been working on an enormous freelance project with a big company, it was a brilliant opportunity that I would’ve been an idiot to turn down, it did however take up every waking moment when I was not at work. Okay, I’m exaggerating, on Wednesday I took 30 minutes to eat a sandwich and do some thoroughly decent selfies. As I said, I’ve been working my usual hours too and on top of that am also attempting to deal with my personal life in that unspecial everyone-has-their-own-struggle way that we all are, so as a result my brain is FORLORN. But I got the project done and I’m proud of myself for it and I’m delighted that I was considered to do it: something had to give though and alas it was writing this blog post. 

I’m already a bit daft at the best of times – I interpret stuff in a verrrry face value way (April Fool’s Day is honestly so embarrassing for me) and also sometimes forget a simple term and can only elaborately describe my way around it. I’m Occam’s Razor on Opposite Day, basically. This week it has been amplified x a squillion, for example: the recipe below involves cutting potatoes into a particular shape and I could not, just could not recall what the name of that shape was. I googled it, all I got was talk of shapes with names like decadocadecoflipagon which was all too spooky. I took to Facebook to ask: it turns out out the shape I was trying to name was…a cube. I forgot what a cube was. What about a long-ass cube though? I asked. A brick? Suggested my friend Charlotte. Reader, I hung my head. 

 

Later this week I happened to look at my hand and was noticed, idly, that I had got something blue on it. I was wearing blue eyeshadow and it’s no surprise for the makeup on my face to migrate to the rest of my body in streaky patches as I go scruffily about my day. When it wouldn’t wash off however, I started silently freaking out. I messaged my two best friends Kim and Kate to say I was highly nervous because a vein on my hand had grown wide like pappardelle pasta and were the rest of my veins going to follow in this fashion and bust out of my stupid body, and as if I have time for this right now because I have this massive freelance project to finish. Kim was like “it sounds like a bruise” and Kate was like “yep it’s a bruise” and I was like “ohhh yeah. Bruises.” 

Amongst all this one needs to feed one’s self, and also to stop referring to one’s self as “one”, probably. Ever since reading about them on Food52 I’ve been completely entranced by Potato Dominoes, a method of roasting potatoes where you cut all the rounded edges off and then slice the remaining potato verrrry thinly in a brick shape (or a long-ass cube, if you will, this is also the point where I got into a spot of bother with mathematical terms) and push them over slightly – hence the domino name. It all sounds like a lot of faff for very little result but kindly believe my hype. Slicing them all thin creates a ton of surface area and edge bits to get almost hilariously crunchy and crisp, whilst providing a solid base to get all creamy and soft and lush. Is it worth it? Let me work it. Also yes, yes it is worth it. 

Even if they fall apart they are still wonderful (the title of my new pop punk album?) but I nevertheless suggest making them for yourself a few times to get the hang of it before you feed them to, I don’t know, an ambassador’s husband. They’re not difficult, just a tiny bit fiddly. Before you get het up about the utter wastefulness of slicing all the rounded edges off the potatoes, I’m not suggesting you throw them out the window or anything. You can keep em to add to stews or soups or stocks, or do the obvious thing: roast them alongside the potato dominoes and eat them too, as a kind of sneaky chef’s treat. 

Here I’ve used a ton of butter, which melts over the potatoes under the blasting heat of the oven, however I made them again with olive oil in the interests of vegan possibilities and simple curiosity. They were, unsurprisingly, equally excellent. If you don’t have any in the house, the thyme and capers aren’t crucial to the proceedings, but! Thyme’s resiny, sweet herbal flavour is beautiful with the buttery, nutty potatoes, and capers are so salty and good and get as crunchy as the edges of the potatoes that they’re adorning. 

potato dominoes with thyme and capers

adapted gently from a Food52 recipe, which probably has way more helpful instructions than mine. 

  • two big, evenly sized potatoes
  • butter, around 75g OR a plenty of extra virgin olive oil
  • a tablespoon of capers
  • a few sprigs of fresh thyme

Set your oven to 220C/450F. Slice all the rounded sides off the potatoes so you end up with a potato brick/cuboid thing. Slice crosswise (I think that’s the word? Not lengthwise, basically) through the potatoes, as thinly as you can muster. Push them into place so they hold their brick shape even when all sliced up. Use a spatula or pancake flipper to transfer them to a baking tray, and push them over slightly so they are like a pile of tipped-over dominoes, or a spread of cards, or a pile of books on a lean, that kind of thing. Surround them with the off cuts of potato if you like. Generously layer slices of the butter across the top of each potato, and use any remaining butter to dot on top of the off cuts, if you’re using them. 

Roast for around 20 minutes, although much will depend upon your oven and the type of potatoes you’ve got. The more waxy and watery the potato, the longer it will take. Scatter with the thyme and capers, eating a few offcuts on the way to test for done-ness, and return to the oven till the capers are crisp and the potatoes are cooked through and thoroughly golden on the outside. 

I fear I have not emphasised enough how delicious these are. They’re SO CRISP. But SO SOFT underneath. It’s SO NOT a huge deal to have to slice them up all funny. All I could find was stupid waxy potatoes that seemed to be filled with water and they STILL turned out gorgeously browned and crisp. I have SO MORE CAPITALISATION where that came from. Anyway I was eating a big plateful of these the other day and my brain was at a particularly low ebb, like the tide carrying any knowledge had washed away out to sea and I was too tired to chase it, or indeed, to come up with a better metaphor, and I was looking at these beautiful, golden and brown, crunchy crisp potatoes, and I got the theme song from Friends in my head and for one rather silly second I attributed the qualities of being there for you when the rain starts to pour and like they’ve been there before to these potatoes and felt comforted. It’s like the potatoes gave me the supportive words I needed but it turns out those words were in my heart all along. 

Omg this beautiful woman! Lucky London. 

Omg this beautiful woman! Lucky London. 

Speaking of words that were in one’s heart all along, I found myself doing karaoke last night for the second Saturday in a row and it’s amazing how good for the soul it is (apart from wondering, injuriously, why there is no audience out there who wants to hear a moderately terrible singer and thus I can never become a pop star.) All my emotions were slammed around anyway because it was the leaving party for my dear, beautiful friend Charlotte who is bereaving us of her presence but blessing the lesbians of London by moving there for good; on the other hand my angel friend Kate had just returned after a month overseas. Considering I was already at the point of feeling like I was receiving bolstering messages from a bowl of potatoes, you can imagine the near-hysteria in the air last night. Why not add lusty singing into the mix? It was a wonderful night though, so full of support from actual humans and hugs and laughter and new friends and bottles of Rose wine which kept appearing out of nowhere and – once I’ve finished my shift at work that I’m about to head off and do – I made it through this week. Thanks, potatoes.  

If you, too, are on a potatoes vibe then may I also suggest checking out my recipes for Quite Fast Garlic and Parmesan Potatoes, Baked Potato Salad, and/or Halloumi, Fried Potato and Raw Fennel Salad. 

title from: Nicki Minaj’s wonderfully sweet and pro-woman song, Girls Fall Like Dominoes. We are so lucky to have her. 

music lately: 

I don’t know if it’s indicative of where my head’s at but I’m all “no time like the present to develop an odd obsession with Roxette”, specifically the song The Look which I’ve listened to at least fifty times this week, conservatively estimating. It’s horrifyingly intoxicating. I’m listening to it right now. 

Mr Big, To Be With You. Lol, idk. 

next time:  I made AMAZING white chocolate and burnt butter ice cream and I’m very excited about it. I just have to get photos of it before I eat it all, thus far a losing battle. 

frozen inside without your touch

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It’s so interesting to me how the body doesn’t remember pain. As any scientist will tell you, it’s super necessary for us to forget what hurting feels like, to ensure the human race can continue…to get tattoos. And also give birth. On a smaller scale, hunger works like that. When you are hungry, it’s all like “I could definitely eat an entire cheesecake and probably a large bowl of chowder; I also think that seventeen is a good quantity of whole grilled eggplants for one human to consume. God I want some Nando’s.”

And then when you’re feeling nauseous and the thought of food leaves you blank and numb, suddenly it’s like…why do humans eat? What possible joy is there to be derived from food? Do the words “food blog” seem really weird to you? So it’s like…you write about food? That seems confusing? And so it goes, round in circles. Don’t even get me started on that “wait why do humans drink?” feeling that I get when hungover. Aren’t humans funny!

scoop! there it is (so not sorry for this pun, but I would unrelatedly like to follow this up with a sincere apology for it  scoop! there it is (so not sorry for this pun, but I would unrelatedly like to follow this up with a sincere apology for it

Anyway the point of all this high level impressive science talk is that I made this dark cocoa and olive oil sorbet simply because I was hungry for it. The ingredients seemed so rich and alive and I wanted to see how the flavours would work together. I’d been given a bottle of Seresin Estate olive oil, so aggressively green that the overture from Wicked would play in my head every time I looked at it; and had some organic cocoa that I was given by my godmother a while back, soft and dark like iron sand.  I made it and ate it, and it was incredible. I photographed it, and it looked really pretty. And now that I’ve come to write about it, I’m, well, not feeling very good. But this is my opportunity to write, and I am not going to let a mere thing like the sight of food making me recoil suspiciously get in the way of this super important blog, especially since I only just relaunched it with this shiny new pretty look. You know that “mere flesh wound” bit from Monty Python? (If you don’t, just ask literally any baby boomer and they’ll enthusiastically recreate it for you.) That’s me with this blog.

The thing is, I do remember this sorbet tasting unbelievably good: pitch-dark chocolate flavour saved from throat-burning intensity by all the sugar, with the glossy olive oil adding the slightest suggestion of black pepper and some general lusciousness. If you use a more buttery, less grassy olive oil it will absolutely be delightful, but I like how this particular one brought out the almost meaty richness of the cocoa. In case all this talk of meat and grass and pepper sounds unhelpful, like, please know that this sorbet is honestly just massively good with enormous chocolatey flavour and a pleasingly yielding texture. The icy coldness of it all just makes the taste of chocolate even more delicious.

dark cocoa and olive oil sorbet

a recipe by myself. 

  • one and a half cups of good dark cocoa
  • one cup of sugar
  • two and a half cups of boiling water
  • two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
  • a tiny pinch of sea salt

Either in a bowl, or in the container you plan to freeze it in – and you know I went for the latter – carefully mix the cocoa and sugar together so they form a sugary cocoa-y dust. Slowly pour in the olive oil and salt, and mix in a little. Add the water, a little at a time, stirring slowly till you have a thick, dark soupy liquid. I keep saying to do everything slowly because it’s really easy to fling clouds of cocoa everywhere or spill the lot, or at least it definitely is for me. 

Stick it in the freezer, and give it a stir every hour or so – normally I wouldn’t make you stir it this often but this is just to keep the olive oil all fully incorporated. After a few hours it should be frozen fully and ready to spoon into waiting mouths.  

Possibly more exciting than any aspect of the flavour that I can lay an alarming quantity of adjectives upon is: you can make it in the container that you’re going to freeze it in, thus avoiding the horror of washing one bowl. You’re using a lot of cocoa, but I do urge you to buy as good a quality one as you can muster – it doesn’t matter what brand, as long as the fat content is at least 20g per 100g of cocoa. At least. It’ll just be all palely not-quite-chocolatey without it. I just love ice cream so much and don’t want you to end up with frozen garbage! On the upside, water is free and sugar is really cheap and usually someone in your flat has a bag of it anyway. One other point about this sorbet: if you don’t get the chance to stir it every hour or so, the olive oil will obstinately separate from the water and freeze solid on its own: this is actually not the end of the world. It is, however, also science. Just break up the frozen oil by stirring it in – any remaining bits of it have the exact texture of nice chocolate and taste not unlike it too, so no harm done.

Leaving ice cream to the side for a minute: something in my life that I’ve been immensely proud of is being a contributor to The Toast website. (Noted readers include Hilary Clinton, I’ve just found out.) The Toast closed its doors this week, which left a particular emptiness in my heart and/or soul – it was always such a warm, safe place where I could go for an absolute escape; to find myself in the incredible specificities of the writing or to learn a ton of new stuff. It was a kind and clever and beautiful website and I’m bummed that it’s done but I’m so happy that I got to be a part of it with my Crush Cake series. I don’t know where I’m going to take the series next – maybe I’ll pitch it to someone else, maybe I’ll just let it be, but either way I feel like you should definitely read my two favourites: the profiterole mountain I made for Lucy Liu, and the giant bagel that I made for Sandy Cohen.

don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened

I know it’s the middle of winter here in New Zealand and tucking into food that you’ve wilfully frozen seems counterproductive but let me remind you of one of life’s greatest pleasures: sitting on the floor in your underwear with the heater blasting artificial warmth your way as you merrily eat vast amounts of ice cream. The very minute I feel like not-nauseous again – and I hope I did an okay job of convincing you to make this sorbet in spite of my present lack of enthusiasm – this is what I’m going to do. I hope it’s soon.

If you liked the look of this you may also want to suss out my recipes for lemon poppyseed ice cream, quince sorbet, lychee and cucumber sorbet, and this cocoa sorbet recipe I blogged about in 2010 which inspired today’s recipe.

title from: Evanescense, Bring Me To Life. Do not come into my blog and imply that this song does not hold up. Also don’t not try to analyse whether all the double negatives I’ve used just now render my point meaningless. 

music lately:

Beyonce, Sorry. You can really just count on Beyonce, can’t you?  This is from her brilliant and important visual album Lemonade and if you haven’t watched it yet I strenuously insist that you make time for it; it’ll improve your life, no biggie.

The 1996 song Jellyhead by Crush was already fairly forgotten as far as 90s nostalgia goes but even more injurious, you could only find an amazingly cheap-sounding house remix on YouTube. Today I discovered this terrible quality version of the original song, and it’s honestly one of the best pop songs of all time and even though it sounds like it was recorded through a sock I’m so happy to hear the original again finally! (As in, for the first time since 1997-ish.) 

next time: I found this broth recipe that looks super cool, and as broth normally makes me all like “ah yes, lightly salted water” the fact that I’m interested in this recipe is surely indicative at all of its potential. 

and the story’s brand new, i can take it from here, i can find my own bravado

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My friends and I would sometimes joke about the exaggerated length we’d go to in avoiding compliments. “Nice dress!” someone would say. “Oh this? I found it in a ditch somewhere. It’s covered in spaghetti”, we’d reply. “Love your hair today!” says a colleage. “Oh god, I’m so sweaty!” I inevitably and truthfully insist. And amidst a world that currently appears to be doing little more than kickflipping into a pile of garbage on a daily basis, I feel like something of a dingus implying that my blog having a fresh look is an event. Oh this new site? I found it down the back of the washing machine, covered in lint. A small rat was guarding it. I gained the rat’s trust. We are to have an Autumn wedding. It’s nothing really. I’m so sweaty. 

But it is exciting! Come October I’ll have been nine years in the damn food blogging game. I have learned and unlearned things along the way, I’ve had a cookbook published, I’ve moved house and across the spectrum a million times, I haven’t got any worse at photography, and I am ready for my blog to have a new pair of pants. I’ll always be fond of my previous and truly stupid header image, of Noilly Prat jostling for position on the shelf above the stove with a can of Double Brown beer, (made by screenshotting a photo, sticking it in Microsoft Word, typing over it and then screenshotting that) but I want something new and pretty – something that still contains elements of my goofy self but thrusts the photos in your face, has text that’s deliciously easy to read, and – sorry Blogspot, it’s me, not you – is more elegant and intuitive for me to use. So here I am!

As a full-time bartender I don’t have all the time in the world to cook, so when I have a new idea for a recipe, I need it to work first time round, otherwise like, that’s my cooking window for the week dashed, ya know? It’s happened before (most recently, involving dropping a spoon into boiling sugar and burning my arm) but I had a good feeling about this idea: what if I make crispy orange beef, the kind you might get at a Chinese restaurant, but using Fanta in the sauce? I was inspired by this when drinking Fanta while at Mrs Kim’s Korean restaurant down the road; the walls are bright orange so it was rather like being in a sensory deprivation tank where the theme was Fizzy Drink Propaganda. 

Anyway not only did this idea merely work, I feel confident that it’s one of the best things I’ve ever made or eaten or thought up ever in my entire history of having ideas. The beef is almost laughably crispy, and the sauce is remarkably balanced in flavour – aggressively salty, with sesame depth and the sweet, intense orange flavour of Fanta. The Fanta is indeed the secret ingredient but the secondary secret ingredient is the tapioca starch – it gives the sauce a syrupy, thick, almost gluey texture which is entirely desirable here. It also fries up with a quickness to form, as I’ve said, a fabulously crunchy crust on the strips of beef. The Fanta itself acts as the sugar component of the sauce as well as the flavouring, and the cartoonish orange tang is honestly perfect.  I’ve named it 211 Orange Beef after the E-number present in Fanta – so as well as giving you protein this dish will also give you the hyperactivity you need to get through a busy day! 

211 orange beef

a recipe by myself. 

  • 125ml/half a cup of fanta
  • 400g sliced steak, usually labelled as for stir-fry – otherwise if it’s cheaper, slice your own
  • three tablespoons tapioca starch
  • three tablespoons soy sauce (or Tamari, to make it gluten free)
  • one tablespoon sesame oil
  • three cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
  • plain oil for frying, I used rice bran
  • one spring onion, for garnish

Sprinkle the soy sauce over the beef, and then toss the strips of beef in two tablespoons of the tapioca starch. With pathological attention to cutting down on things I have to clean up, I did this by pouring the soy sauce directly onto the beef in the styrofoam tray it came packaged in, and then tipped it into the plastic grocery bag that I carried it home in with the tapioca starch and shook it a few times to coat the beef. It sounds stupid but as well as cutting down on several bowls to wash, it was also incredibly effective. 

Put the bag of starch-dusted beef in the fridge while you make the sauce. This is very straightforward – place the roughly chopped garlic, remaining two tablespoons of soy sauce, remaining tablespoon of tapioca starch, sesame oil and fanta in a large pan and heat gently, stirring often. It will look very nothing-y, but as soon as it starts to come to the boil it will spring to life, forming a thick, dark, syrupy sauce as you stir. Immediately remove it from the heat and spatula it into a bowl, or better yet, into the dish you plan to serve the beef in. 

Give the pan a quick wash and dry and then heat up a few tablespoons of the oil. Fry the beef strips a small quantity at a time – this will not take long. Turn them over frequently till the starch has turned crisp and golden and any red meat has been browned. That said, this is beef: you can’t really undercook it. 

As soon as the strips of beef are cooked, transfer them to the bowl of sauce and fry the next lot of beef, continuing like this – frying and transferring into the sauce – until it’s all done. Slice up some spring onions and sprinkle them across the top of the serving bowl and eat with the rest of the fanta alongside. 

Ostensibly this should serve two, especially if you make some rice to serve it over, but I ate the lot in bed in about four minutes. 

I’ve still got a lot to work out here – it was a painstaking process just transferring everything over (importing nine years of content took like seven minutes, but trying to work out how to get the domain name over here took, without a word of a lie, about seven hours nonstop and increasingly tearful work) and I am slowly working on the recipe index, which is already looking super beautiful. It’s all pretty exciting. Anyway I could go on and on but I just wanna press publish on this damn thing and present it to the world, holding it aloft to the sky like Rafiki holding up baby Simba at the start of Lion King, or like a rugby player gently grabbing another rugby player by the butt and lifting them closer to the warm sunlight during a lineout. Because then I can relax back into my usual heavily unrelaxed state. So: welcome to the new-ish hungryandfrozen.com! As Waldo Lydecker said in the 1944 noir film Laura, which I only watched because it had my name in the title but it turns out it’s really good – “It’s lavish, but I call it home”.

title from: the greatest living New Zealander, Lorde, and her highly rad song Bravado. 

music lately: 

Spiller feat Sophie Ellis Bextor, Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love) what a jam from a time we can never get back, the year 2000. This song is so dreamy, as is SEB’s face and plummy voice.

Panic! At the Disco, Don’t Threaten Me With A Good Time. They’re back and as reassuringly hysterical as ever and I love it. 

next time: well I made this organic cocoa and olive oil sorbet but I haven’t tasted it yet. I am obviously hoping it doesn’t suck; if this is the case you’ll probably see it here. 

this town’s a different town to what it was last night, you couldn’t have done that on a sunday

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I swear I ate and cooked best in my second and third year of university, weird though that seems – I mean, my first year was definitely full of lukewarm toast and trying to stay alive in a flat made of damp breakfast cereal held together with cobwebs (if it weren’t for that vigilant spider army my flat probably would’ve fallen down. Thank you spider army, I respect and fear you still) – but by second year I’d hit my stride. Living in a marginally less cold and damp flat felt like occupying a palace and importantly, I had both the time and the means in winter to make a ton of stews and casseroles and soups and slow-cooked things. Going into the office-job life obliterated that, because there’s no time during the day and when you get home you want feeding immediately, and going into hospo means I just eat when I can, and that might be 3am. But as a student: goddamn. All that free time during the day between lectures, searching out super cheap cuts of meat or soaking dried chickpeas because it cost less than canned, baking a cake so we’d be warmed by the oven’s heat – I’m totally not nostalgic for that time, or anything, but I also don’t want another winter to pass me by without somehow making the most of food that suits the icy weather.

(I went back to my very early days of writing this blog post just to make sure I wasn’t making this all up and glorifying the past and if anything, I undersold it. I used to make pudding every night! In one of my blog posts from November 2007 I talk about how sick I am of blind-baking pastry for pies! That’s how often I was making pastry by hand for homemade pies and tarts! Last year I literally did a blog post about cinnamon sugar on toast and a McDonalds burger. It was a difficult time, sure, but still.)

bread! stuffed! with three! different types! of! cheese! 

I believe it’s without even the slightest bit of hyperbole that I say my life would be unmitigated and incomparable garbage without Kim and Kate, the two earth-angels whom I call my best friends. Remember that Because You Loved Me song by Celine Dion? “You were my strength when I was weak, you were my voice when I couldn’t speak, you were my eyes when I couldn’t see, you saw the best there was in me” etc? I never understood that song when it was first on the radio and/or everyone’s mum by law had a copy of that cassette so it was perpetually in the background. I was like…is she singing to her boyfriend? Or is she a pet rock singing to their owner? Seriously, if you imagine a small rock with googly eyes stuck on it singing this song to someone it makes so much sense than a human singing it, so utterly codependent and clingy and bodily needy it is. It’s definitely sung by a small rock.

At least that’s what I thought, until my aggressively supportive and beautiful friendship with Kim and Kate. Then, at last, did I understand the lyrics to Because You Loved Me. (“You’ve been my inspiration! Through the lies you were the truth!”) I’m like, ah, this song is chill and not at all hysterical. The lyrics are calm and normal.

So between all that and me wanting to get back into slow-ass cooking and, monumentally, Kate being very close to travelling through the UK and Europe for a month (excitingly for her, tear-stainedly fraught for the rest of us) I decided to make the three of us a lavishly rustic, simple lunch before my shift at work on Sunday. It all came together despite attempting a recipe I’ve never tried before, the upshot of which is, if I can manage to throw this together in the middle of three ten hour shifts then all you need is a passing interest in cooking and a small amount of motivation and you can definitely achieve some version of this yourself with massive ease.

Nigella Lawson’s magical cookbook Feast inspired both the recipes I made – firstly, a red and gold root vegetable stew with turmeric and saffron from which I used a Tunisian meatball dish as a starting point. Kate is vegetarian and Kim can’t do garlic or onions so my result ended up having about two ingredients in common with what was on the page, but that’s how inspiration works, yeah? The second recipe, a Georgian cheese-stuffed bread called Nana’s Hatchapuri, was more direct – I just fiddled with the quantities a little to make it more affordable. Speaking of affordable, feel free to leave the saffron out of the stew – I just have a ton of it around because I’m the kind of person who gets given food by people for my birthday etc (which I love) but in all honesty the turmeric completely does the trick as far as flavour and colour. I don’t care about the tautological goldenness though, the doubling down was a pleasingly luxuriant note in an otherwise, let’s face it, highly plain stew.

Anyway, both were SO GOOD. And somehow so do-able. The vegetable stew I made more or less effortlessly the day before and just left it on the hob, ready to reheat. The cheesebread – despite the lengthy looking recipe below – was made very quickly before Kim and Kate got to mine, and once I’d let them in – my hands covered in flour – I just shoved it in the oven while we joyfully mixed orange juice and Lindaeur that Kate had both bought and brought from the nearest dairy.

nana’s hatchapuri (georgian cheesebread) 

my gently adapted version of Nigella’s (who had already adapted it from a woman named Nana, so) from her book Feast. 

six cups plain flour
two cups thick, plain yoghurt
two eggs
50g very soft butter
one teaspoon baking soda
one teaspoon sea salt, or a pinch of regular table salt
one 250g tub of ricotta cheese
two large handfuls of grated mozzarella, like, the super cheap stuff 
150g feta cheese
one more egg

Set your oven to 220 C/450 F and place a baking tray in the oven to heat up. Put the flour in a large bowl, and mix in the yoghurt, eggs, and butter till a soft, sticky dough forms. I used a wooden spoon to stir in the yoghurt and eggs and then my hands to work in the butter; you end up looking like your hands belong to zombies, but it’s very effective! Otherwise just keep on stirring. Add a little extra flour if it’s toooo sticky and knead this in with the baking soda and salt, which should leave you with a springy, soft ball of dough. Cover and leave it for 20 minutes. 

Slice the dough in half and roll out both pieces into a rough oval shape around 1.5cm thick, although it’s up to you, really. Circle, square, Mickey Mouse ears, whatever works. I recommend rolling them out on two large pieces of baking paper, that way it doesn’t mess up your bench top and you can then slide it straight onto the baking tray when it’s ready to cook. 

In the same bowl that you mixed the dough in – because, why not – roughly mash together the ricotta, the feta, and the mozzarella with the remaining egg. Spread this golden mixture thickly across one of the rolled out pieces of dough, leaving a few centimetres border around the edge. Carefully lay the second rolled out dough across the top of this – if a few holes appear, just patch them up, the dough is pretty forgiving – and roll over the edges or pinch them together securely with the prongs of a fork. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until it’s puffy and golden and bready on top. Give it a few minutes before slicing into it. 

root vegetable stew with saffron, cinnamon, and turmeric

a recipe by myself, inspired loosely by Nigella’s Tunisian stew in Feast. This recipe is vegan and gluten-free.  

olive oil
about four sticks of celery
three carrots
two parsnips
half a butternut squash, or one small crown pumpkin, or that quantity of similar
two tins of tomatoes
one cinnamon stick
two heaped teaspoons turmeric
a pinch of ground cumin
three tablespoons golden sultanas (or dried apricots, chopped roughly)
a handful of sundried tomatoes, chopped roughly
pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds, to garnish, plus any green herb you like – flat leaf parsley or coriander would be great here 

Using a large knife, finely chop the celery sticks and two of the carrots into small dice – it doesn’t have to be neat, just keep chopping till you have a pile of formless orange and green. 

Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large saucepan and tip in the carrot and celery. Sprinkle over some salt and allow to cook gently over a medium heat until softened. Meanwhile, chop the remaining carrot into thick cubes or half-moons or whatever you like; slice the parsnip into short sticks, and peel and cube the pumpkin. Throw all these vegetables into the pan and stir them, then add the two tins of tomatoes, the cinnamon stick, the turmeric, cumin, sultanas and dried tomatoes.

Add some salt and pepper, and bring all of this to the boil. Reduce the heat back to low, and then let it simmer for about an hour, adding a little water or stock if it looks a bit too dry. You’re basically done at this point, but you could carry on simmering it for several more hours if you like, or let it to sit and then reheat it the next day – essentially, nothing can hurt this dish. Add more spice or salt and pepper if you see fit. Once you’re ready to serve it, simply scatter it with pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds, and bring it to the table. More olive oil to drizzle over would be nice. 

Obviously softly sweet pumpkin and parsnip with earthy turmeric and saffron and richly tomato-y sauce is going to be wonderful, all hearty and spiced and twinkling with jewel-like green pumpkin seeds and golden sultanas, but the main attraction was obviously the cheese bread. Three different kinds of cheese? In this economy?

The combination of salty feta, the barging-into-your-mouth melty nature of mozzarella, and mild, milky ricotta is superb, and when surrounded by soft, warm, scone-like bread, leavened only by eggs and baking soda, it’s celestially – almost stressfully – good. Make this, I implore you. My only other proviso is to grind over plenty of black pepper once you’ve sliced into it – the cacio e pepe vibes make it spring to life.

The three of us sat on the floor around my flatmate’s amazing coffee table, toasted to ourselves with the world’s cheapest mimosas, ate heartily, and cackled with laughter at ourselves, half in the funny-haha way and in the oh-my-god-what-is-life-I’m-breaking-the-fourth-wall-to-ruefully-shrug-at-the-studio-audience-haha way. And then I staggered to work, full of cheese and good feelings (one and the same, really) and safe in the knowledge that when I got home there was a billion tons of leftovers.

Extra delightfully, I got to dance with my two best girls last night at Dirtbag Disco, the fundraiser dance party for Ballet is For Everyone. If you’ve ever considered supporting a cause, this is a super nice one. Please keep Kim and I in your prayers and candlelit vigils during Kate’s absence, although having consumed a large quantity of this hatchapuri already this week I see it filling the void that her presence leaves more or less adequately.

PS: If slow-cooked vegetable food appeals, then maybe consider similar blog posts I’ve done, about Penang Tofu Curry and Slow Roasted Eggplant and Butternut with Fried Cauliflower.
 

title from: Arctic Monkeys, From the Ritz to the Rubble from their amaaaazing first album
 

music lately: Dirtbag Disco edition

A$AP Rocky/Drake/2Chainz/Kendrick Lamar, F***in’ Problems. This song remains so addictive and the best thing to dance to.

M.I.A, Bad Girls. This song remains so addictive and the best thing to dance to.

Rihanna, We Found Love. This song remaings so addictive and the best thing to dance to.

next time: all I’ve been eating is leftovers from this! But I will make something happen. 

 

garlic springs up where you walk, bells ring out baby when you talk

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a pile of battered, fried garlic cloves

I started this blog nine years ago and – five thousand percent understatement – it was a very different landscape. No Pinterest, no Instagram, the barest hint of twitter and facebook, all that obvious stuff. However, comments were everything. Everything! I used to be all like “oh nooo this blog post only has thirty/fourteen/ten etc comments on it, what can I do?” And mate, you could absolutely tell when bloggers didn’t care a wit about you and were just trying to get clicks through to their own page, because you’d write a long post about how your only goldfish, who had also raised you like a parent through childhood and worked so hard to put you through medical school, had just died, and they’d be all “great post! Looks delicious! Check out my chocolate malteaser cupcakes photographed sterilely against a baby blue background!” It was 2007, okay. We’d just discovered cupcakes and polka dots. Bacon was as yet a distant fever dream. We commented, it was what we had. 
These days, I don’t need blog comments to know people are reading – I get most of my feedback on Twitter and Instagram and occasionally Facebook and sometimes by holding my palms towards the sunset and closing my eyes intently and whispering my URL backwards three times. The comments I do get are usually something nice from a dear friend or a generally lovely message from a reader. The lack of volume means I really pay attention to them whenever they happen. 
And last week I received a comment that really got to me. Before I go any further, I hear what you’re saying – be the bigger person! Be a literal grown up! Ignore it and move on! Well you don’t need to worry, I did that. For five days. And now having got that out of the way, I’m allowing myself a brief foray into being petty. 
Dear Anonymous: 
I do have life happenings that have distracted me from this blog. It’s called a job. It’s called duh. I work around a billion hours and have a hilariously big rent and bills to pay, as do many people. To my great disgust I have to sleep at some point of each day so that doesn’t leave me a lot of time or energy to buy food and cook for myself and photograph it and then write thoughtfully about it. And yet still I manage to get a blog post out every week. Because this blog means so much to me. You think I’m better than scone dough pizza? Do you know how delicious that pizza was? Do you know how exhausted and unhappy I was when I made it because I’d slept through my entire day off and hadn’t blogged yet and felt worthless because I tie my up my value in the work I do for some reason and how pleased I was that I managed to accomplish that one small thing? Do you know how much I think about this blog and worry about what I’m achieving with it? Did you read the bit where the recipe was adapted from one I wrote for my literal published cookbook? Which should thus validate it somewhat for you? Did you read the bit where my goldfish toiled day and night to put me through medical school? Did you appreciate me trying to lighten the mood a bit here? 
Anyway, my main question for you, Anonymous, is: when are you going to get your act together? By giving me money? If you give me money then I’ll be able to have more time to cook and write for this blog and pitch writing to other sites and finally redesign the hilariously outdated yet hopefully loveable look of this thing. I don’t know who you are and thanks for saying that I have a lovely way with words. But ya hurt my damn feelings, Anonymous. I try really, really, really hard here, okay. That’s all. If you’re that worried about my priorities then maybe you should prioritise funding my life so I can write the blog you want from me. This is all I’ve got right now. 


Wow, awkward! Now that I’ve done railing misguidedly against late capitalism, let me caveat that (a) I adore my job and have never been happier than I am now in a position of employment except I wish I had more money but so does everyone so that’s not a controversial stance, (b) I’M SO SICK right now with some kind of queasy-making, energy-sapping coughing-fit head cold so while I’m totally accountable for my actions, I’m not like, that accountable. 


Which is why I ate two whole bulbs of garlic yesterday for lunch. That may sound like a lot, even by a garlic lover’s standard! But once you’ve individually battered and deep fried each clove, it suddenly becomes the most insurmountable task and you’re all, why didn’t I do this with five bulbs of garlic. I guess it’s the same as potato crisps: if you said “I just ate forty slices of potato” you might raise some eyebrows but if you said “I just hooned a can of Pringles, salt and vinegar flavour” you’ll receive nothing but envious sighs and sage nods of understanding.

It’s hard to explain exactly but I’m always trying to undo layers when when I think up recipes: with this one I didn’t have the appetite for a big meal and simply wanted a ton of garlic, rather than having to eat something else that had been annointed with garlic, if that makes sense. What if I fried the garlic cloves themselves so they became crunchy little morsels, like fries? This proved to be surprisingly easy. And monumentally delicious. A quick simmer in water to soften the garlic and remove its harsh, burning edge, a very quickly made batter, and a quick fry in a little oil. That’s it! And in a charming piece of serendipity, the leftover batter itself, when fried, makes delicious little garlic-tinted pancakes, so you don’t have to waste anything if you don’t want.

But the garlic is the star: bite through the hot, crisp exterior and the centre is pure, soft, sweet dissolving garlic. You could argue that they’re kind of pointless (you could do a number of things) but you could increase the number of bulbs and make a bowlful as a Netflix-and-chill type snack or scatter them through a salad or pasta or combine them with some other small fried thing like halloumi, or indeed, just use them to ward off your own sickness. I’m not going to lie: I totally drank the water that the bulbs had simmered in, in the vain hope of gaining every last bit of garlicky goodness. It was honestly delicious in a broth-y type way and there’s no reason you can’t save it for a risotto or soup or similar. The turmeric isn’t exactly crucial but it gives a gorgeous golden colour and is also full of cold-fighting skills so you might as well include it, yeah?

crunchy golden fried garlic cloves and crispy garlic pancakes

a recipe by myself. 

two garlic bulbs (or more! You won’t regret it.)
three tablespoons of tapioca flour (or regular flour) 
three tablespoons of fine cornmeal
one heaped teaspoon of turmeric
three tablespoons or so of cold water
salt and pepper
plain oil, such as rice bran, for frying

Place the whole garlic bulbs in a good-sized saucepan and cover, just, with water. Bring to the boil, and place a lid on top slightly askew so you let out some steam. Let them briskly simmer away for about ten minutes or until a knife stabbed at them suggests they’re pretty soft. Remove from the water and put them in a sieve under cold running water for a bit so they’re cool enough to handle. Slice the base off – it should come off fairly easily. 

In a bowl, mix together the tapioca flour, cornmeal, turmeric, salt, pepper, and water, to form a thickish batter. Add a little more water or a little more cornmeal if it needs thinning or thickening. 

Heat about a centimetre of oil in a wide pan over a high heat. Gently coax the garlic cloves out of their casings – this shouldn’t be too hard although allow for the occasional delicious casualty – and drop them in the batter. Once coated, drop them in the oil and allow them to fry for roughly a minute each side or until golden brown and crisp. Repeat with the remaining garlic. If some cloves bust into pieces while you’re trying to extract them from their casings just throw them in the batter and fry them anyway, it’s all good. Remove the fried cloves to a paper towel or similar till you’ve done all of them, then, if you wish, fry spoonfuls of the remaining batter until crisp and dark golden. EAT THE LOT. 

It’s like fried chicken, but it’s garlic. It’s like those mozarella sticks you can sometimes get from BK, but it’s garlic. I wish there was another word instead of garlic that I could use to describe these but, uh, it’s garlic. Garlic is so good. 
serendipity-licious

I’m so sick that I had to actually have a lie down after walking twenty metres to the fruit and vege mart around the corner from my apartment to get this garlic, so hopefully that is some indicator of the relative ease of this recipe that I was able to make it at all.

Okay, I do feel a tiny bit weird about that rant that I went on – I usually respond to that sort of thing a lot more privately by complaining about it to friends in real life or something. And I’m really lucky that the amount of bother I encounter online is relatively small compared to the tremendous amount that many people, including several friends of mine, put up with. But if you’re supposed to be the bigger person and ignore everything that hurts you, does that mean people get to just hurt your feelings forever and ever and that’s it? Seriously? You can’t sell me on that. And I’m very easily sold on stuff. So you know it’s a bad concept. You know what’s a great concept? Individually battering and frying every last clove in a bulb of garlic, twice, and then eating the lot, and then lying down and binge-watching Miss Fisher’s Charming Murder Mysteries on Netflix. Period procedural dramas are the paracetamol of television, and television is the paracetamol of life, and garlic is nature’s paracetamol. Then have some actual paracetamol, which is the real paracetamol of life, and you’re momentarily set, until the next coughing fit at least.

PS Some other recipes that I’ve done that I feel convey this unpacking of layers of flavour and texture that I’m really into but not good at explaining are: Garnish Salad and Browned Butter Ice Cream. Basically I just lie there and I’m like “yes but what do I want?” until the idea simplifies down to its purest form. Being massively sick clouds that vision somewhat but I came through!
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title from: Thee Oh Sees and their charmingly scuzzy song Grease. 
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music lately: 

Laura Lee, Dreamers. The bae Laura Lee is back at it again with her moody, swoony style of music and I’m so happy about it.

Craig Mack, Flava In Ya Ear. One of the most perfect songs ever, indubitably.
____________________________________________________________
next time: More scone pizza? I’m kidding Anonymous, we’re good? Either way, if I’m still sick I’ll be so mad! 

philosophy is the talk on a cereal box

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In testament either to how good this granola is, or to what a monumental grub I am – why not both? – the last time I ate this granola was yesterday, in a charming tableau: I was on my bed, face smeared with organic coconut oil (it felt like a vaguely beneficial thing to do) and about to take a nap. I was, however, ravenously hungry. The jar of granola was the only thing I had to eat and it also happened to be on the floor by the bed. I sighed – so dustily unsatisfying, why couldn’t I have a jar of cheeseburgers by my bed instead – and listlessly opened the jar to paw myself out a handful.

One chewy, buckwheat-rich mouthful in and I was all, oh that’s right, I make amazing granola like it’s no big deal. Verily, I began chugging it straight from the jar, which obviously-in-hindsight ended up with granola dust tipping out heavily onto my face and sticking to the coconut oil that I was thickly daubed in. This…this did not stop me. I kept eating it, while it was also stuck to my face, and like, I did shower, but it was quite some time later. If this visual doesn’t impel you to make and eat this granola then frankly I understand completely.

This first time I ate it, I was catsitting for a good friend, on their wooden floor in a sunbeam like I myself were also a cat, eating it with almond milk and coconut butter, and reverently watching Beyonce’s new visual album and masterpiece, Lemonade.

My takes on Lemonade are absolutely not required, but I will just say that it’s one of the more exciting and beautiful and heartstoppingly good things I have ever witnessed, and whatever your thoughts hitherto on Beyonce and whether the music she makes is your kind of thing, you should 100% watch this. (Seriously: if you can sit through The Wall, you can easily make some time for this.) I was utterly transfixed.

This granola is largely comprised of buckwheat, which is super good for you and majorly gluten-free, despite the use of wheat in its name. I find this hilariously cavalier.

But anyway – buckwheat has a pleasing crunch to it and that same kind of non-committal I-am-your-breakfast flavour that oats have, making it an ideal background to whichever direction you’d like to take your granola in. I decided to have coconut be a major player, as if it were as important as the buckwheat itself rather than just a mixed-in secondary thing, if that makes sense. I’d been given some dried cranberries and so it seemed a reasonable idea to add them to it, and they work beautifully – little bursts of sour-sweet liveliness amongst all the mellow coconut. This is very, very easy to make and gives you a great big jarful. To make the coconut butter that I had sprinkled on top of it, just place two cups of toasted coconut chips in the food processor and blitz them for ages and ages until you’re scared that your processor will blow up, at which point let it cool down, and continue on until you’ve got what looks like peanut butter, but tastes like white chocolate. I let it firm up and harden, which made it even more like chocolate. It was a very good time.

buckwheat, cranberry and cinnamon granola

a recipe by myself

two cups hulled buckwheat
half a cup LSA mix (or other similar ground up thing, like plain ground almonds) 
one cup coconut chips/shredded coconut
one cup dried cranberries
two teaspoons of cinnamon but feel free to add more 
one cup mixed nuts and seeds, eg walnuts, almonds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds etc, all roughly chopped
two tablespoons chia seeds (optional

Put the buckwheat in a large bowl or measuring jug and cover with water. Leave to sit for about an hour, by which point the grains should have swollen up and absorbed a lot of the water (and feel free to top it up if need be.)

Set your oven to 130 C. Drain and rinse the buckwheat in a sieve, then spread fairly evenly in a thin layer on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Pop the tray in the oven and leave it for about half an hour. Put everything else except the cranberries and chia seeds onto the tray, turn the oven off and let it toast slightly in the remaining heat of the oven (or you can just leave it there cooking for another 20 mins, this is just my small attempt at being conscious of power usage and stuff.)

Stir in the cranberries and chia seeds if using, add more of anything that you feel like it needs more of, and then tip into a large jar. 

This is the cat I got to hang out with. He’s the same one I was looking after over Christmas and he is a character. I was incredibly grateful however that this time he did not bring me any offerings of rat.

look at this snug little piglet
title from: What I Am, by Emma Bunton, aka Baby Spice. It’s soooo nineeetieeeeees and so great. 
music lately
 
Cream, Prince. Like many, I was massively saddened by his recent death. This song hasn’t got any particular significance (I do remember dancing to it in a club in Greece one time I guess) but ugh it’s brilliant. So brilliant.
 
LEMONADE. Find it. 
next time: I made amazing fudge. AMAZING. You can make it too. 

i’m free but i’m focused, i’m green but i’m wise

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Ever since I was able to form cognitive thoughts I’ve been seriously into horoscopes and similar things. I can’t decide whether to joke that this means I’ve been into them since last week or, to paraphrase the T-Rex song over the opening credits of Billy Elliot, to imply that I was analysing my star sign in the womb, but either way, yeah. It’s a thing. It’s my birthday on Sunday which means that my usual self-absorption and introspection is now off the scale. I can’t stop thinking about myself! With all this in mind, my tarot card for this month was all, “don’t focus on what you don’t have and don’t push people away if you’re feeling down and don’t be stupid you stupid idiot” and my horoscopes are all telling me about how Mars is going into retrograde on my birthday, which like, why doesn’t the shunned fairy aunt in Sleeping Beauty just turn up and predict that I’m going to prick my finger on a spinning wheel and fall into a coma or something, and all in all I’m finding it a bit hard to just relax and be myself at the moment. It’s not because of what the tarot card and horoscopes said, but it’s more like I’m hyper aware of trying to not do stuff wrong because of their advice and I end up like a small bird flying into windows as a result. Classic Aries? Classic me, really.

(Seriously though, if you ever read descriptions of the various star signs it’ll be all, “Virgo – steadfast and thoughtful” and “Sagittarius people are ever so open-minded and motivated” and “Cancers are loyal and intensely nurturing” and then “Aries are big idiot babies who hit their head a lot and will not stop shouting to get your attention.” I mean, I don’t deny it…)

I’m short but I’m healthy, yeah

However! I’m not all uselessness. A particular horoscope that I joyfully subscribe to is the wonderful Meredith Graves’ Stargrazing column for Lucky Peach magazine. It’s food-related horoscopes and they’re very fun and interesting to read (truly – check yours out) and this month I was advised to get into soup, basically because I needed to be really kind and gentle to myself – funny that – and since I wasn’t in the mood for actual soup I decided instead to go find the most aggressively, ludicrously healthy ingredients I could lay my hands up on and make a thing out of that in the name of self-care. Those ingredients were matcha powder and chia seeds.

And that’s how I ended up with this matcha coconut raspberry chia pudding. Matcha powder is ground up green tea leaves and apparently one teaspoon of it has the power of 20 glasses of green tea, although it all depends on which Pinterest pin you’re reading. I nevertheless feel very calm and trusting of it. Chia seeds are little microbeads of intense goodness, with a billion omega’s and proteins and vitamins and antioxidants. Put them together and nothing will ever go wrong in your life, ever.

I’m lost but I’m hopeful, baby

Chia pudding is essentially a delivery mechanism for chia seeds to get into your stomach, but it is delicious. And easy. The seeds absorb liquid with the-thirst-is-real enthusiasm and end up like a cross between jelly and sago (which might sound horrifying, but go with it, please.) Pink and green are a rather ultimate colour combination in my opinion so scattering freeze-dried raspberries across the top helped both visually and flavour-wise, but honestly use whatever fruit you like – passionfruit would be cool here, as would defrosted frozen berries, canned pears, or juicy slices of ripe mango. Whatever fruit you put up on there will complement the delicate green flavour of the matcha-tinged coconut and look lovely.

And yeah, the flavour is what I would describe as very green. It’s green tea! What did you expect? There’s nothing wrong with this, but I add a little honey to gently sweeten it and mellow out any intense fresh-cut grass vibes. My tastebuds appreciated this – yours might too.

Wait, one more thing – okay so matcha powder and chia seeds are both expensive ingredients, but once you’ve got them you only need to use a teaspoon or two at a time and thus they last near-on forever. This is me here, I wouldn’t just casually tell you to buy something pricey! (Without getting defensive about it first.)

matcha, coconut and raspberry chia pudding

a recipe by myself although let us be real, I am 100% not the the inventor of this or anything. This is just what I made for myself.

one teaspoon matcha powder
around 125ml/half a cup of coconut milk or your choice of milkstuff
one teaspoon of honey or similar – I feel like agave syrup would be perfect here
one tablespoon of chia seeds
a handful of shaved coconut or coconut threads
a couple of tablespoons of freeze-dried raspberries

Using the teaspoon you measured them with, mix the matcha powder, coconut milk and honey together in a glass or whatever receptacle you’re making this in – I recommend a glass because that way you can see the pretty layers of colour, but that’s just me. Also when I say teaspoon and tablespoon I don’t, for once, mean the kind that you measure baking ingredients with. This stuff isn’t an exact science, so just use the kind of spoon you find in the cutlery draw and don’t worry about whether they’re heaped spoonfuls or whatever. Likewise just add more coconut milk if your glass doesn’t look full enough.

Stir in the chia seeds, making sure there aren’t any lumps, and then refrigerate the glass for about an hour, although you can leave it longer, and then when you’re ready to eat it, pile it up with coconut shavings and freeze-dried raspberries and wade in with a spoon.

and what it all comes down to is that I haven’t got it all figured out just yet

It’s so healthful that it seems like you’re gonna actually levitate after eating it. I’ve made it almost every day since, and while I can’t entirely tell if I feel more brilliant or not, it’s got to be doing something, right? It’s as easy to consume as it is to make- the swollen chia seeds give it this soft, barely-set texture and the zing of raspberries and quiet sweetness of the coconut milk work beautifully with the verdant-as matcha powder. It’s also remarkably filling, so makes an ideal breakfast or mid-snack snack.

And what with turning thirty and all, despite having done a deal with the devil so I stay looking young it certainly doesn’t hurt to think of one’s health more, right? (how I know I’m getting proper old: I used to be really indignant about being ID’d and now I’m like, “awwww yeah”) And it seems this is how I prefer to do health: by slothing about all day and then engaging in hardcore consumption of actual green tea leaves ground into dust like I’m the bones-eating giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. Like health shift-work. A lack of moderation followed by a hardcore lack of moderation!

everything’s gonna be fine fine fine

But back to my birthday: if you’re wondering to yourself, “what can I do to make more delightful the birthday of my favourite food blogger- nay, my favourite writer altogether” – well! My paypal is always open (it’s my email address – laura@hungryandfrozen.com) and any donations big, enormous or small would be majorly gratefully received by ya perpetually bank-account-challenged gal. For free you could spend the day in quiet, solemn reflection on how great I am on twitter, or…you could carry on with your day because I hear a horrifying rumour that I’m not the only person on earth to have a birthday and everything doesn’t stop on Sunday just because I do. It’s chill, I’ll be over here serenely glowing with omegas and the power of a thousand glasses of green tea and being myself and seeing what comes of it.

title from: Alanis Morrisette and her laconically powerful and kinda deeply meaningful song One Hand In My Pocket, from the iconic Jagged Little Pill album. I saw her in concert in 1996! What! Ladies be aging!

music lately:

Boy Problems by Carly Rae Jepsen. Her E-mo-tion album is SO important and this video is so important and her haircut in it is frankly very important and it’s all just very, very good.

The Kills, Sour Cherry. I’ve been watching a lot of Gossip Girl, and this song is on the soundtrack. I love how both this show and this band’s main aesthetic is “bratty”. I’m feeling very influenced by it, nearly ten years after the show actually screened.

next time: I made a massive three layer creme egg cake for a friend’s gf’s 21st birthday and was thinking about blogging about it just because, otherwise I made this mayo from scratch with matcha in it and it was amazing, so on the very other end of the scale, there’s also that.

 

everyone is waiting, waiting on you and you’ve got thyme

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A Season For Peaches, a novel by Henri Michel

In case you are all, “damn that Laura is the epitome of perfection I really love what she does I just wish she’d sometimes display some kind of minor flaw to humanise her more” – and I have zero reason to believe this isn’t what people are thinking all the time – then have I got a relatable and relatively dull anecdote for you about how I made a terrible dinner.

On Monday I was exceptionally tired and not really thinking and as a result, I made the most aggressively bland, horrible pasta of my life, and the more I tried to fix it the worse it got. I started off wanting to make some kind of dairy-free cauliflower sauce, where you puree an entire head of cooked cauliflower and it turns out all creamy and delicious. Why? Honestly, I don’t know, but I’ve been reading too much pinterest but also if I can effortlessly conjure up a dope vegan pasta bake then that’s a pleasing outcome. However it turned into the equivalent of mashed potato and refused to puree and also tasted of absolutely nothing so in a panicked state I … upended an entire bottle of cream into it. It still wouldn’t liquefy, so with mounting panic I mixed this mashed potato-esque stuff into cooked rigatoni along with some eggplant I’d roasted, so it was like…this weird billowy mass studded with the occasional piece of eggplant. How did I think this was going to turn into an awesome pasta bake? I topped it with parsley. That made it even less good. I shoved it in the oven to grill, which, as there was nothing in it to melt, just made it more warm and didn’t change it miraculously on the cellular level that I’d been hoping for.

It might sound “insufferable” or like “not a real problem” or “good god shut up Laura” but like I said, I was super tired and making dinner is a thing I’m always good at when all else crumbles around me and honestly, just the waste of money and ingredients was incredibly disheartening. However, I did manage to avoid panic-eating the lot, and dealt with it by going for a nap and searching youtube for ASMR videos specifically featuring someone telling you repeatedly in a very gentle voice that you’re actually a good cook. (A later cursory prod of the abandoned pasta bake revealed that it had not improved with time but I made myself eat some anyway, because I was both hungry and miserably stubborn about the aforementioned waste of money and ingredients.)

This is all completely unimportant and not terribly interesting, it’s just every time I do something stupid I feel pathologically compelled to tell the entire internet about it. An incident of totally sucking shared is an incident of totally sucking halved, I say.

Having since made a few things that mercifully turned out deliciously, I am safely back in the mindset that I love cooking and it loves me. For example, these honey and thyme roasted peaches. I went to brunch at Flight Coffee Hangar with one of my dearest friends Charlotte for her birthday and had brioche covered in vanilla mascarpone and said peaches. (It’s one of those places where the menu is so good that it’s actually inconvenient, because I can never choose what to get.) I was so taken with my brunch that I bought peaches on the way home and immediately tried to recreate what they’d done.

I don’t know how similar my method is to what the cafe does, but it worked incredibly well for me. Before you even get to taste them, the slowly roasting peaches fill your house with their heady perfume, so rich and intoxicating that you want to float through the air with hearts for eyes like some kind of amorous cartoon animal from a bygone era.

There’s something oddly lovely and lazily sensual about drizzling sticky, slow-moving honey over soft freshly cut peaches before scattering them with fragrant herbs, like you have no cares in the world apart from getting weirdly skittish over ripe stone fruit.

Cooked, they have this floral depth of sweetness from the slick of honey and the caramelising heat of the oven, and the smoky herbal thyme cuts through this and makes it more than just merely sugary. With very little effort suddenly you have yourself this gorgeous quantity of fruit that you can tuck around scoops of ice cream, stir through muesli, arrange on top of a cake, or indeed, add to toasted brioche with mascarpone as they did at the cafe.

honey thyme roasted peaches

a recipe by myself, but inspired directly by my brunch at Flight Coffee Hangar

four large ripe peaches
two teaspoons runny honey
one teaspoon olive oil – I guess you could leave it out but I feel it adds some fruity richness and will put a shine on your coat
several sprigs of fresh thyme

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Roughly slice the peaches into quarters or thirds or whatever and lay them on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Drizzle over the honey and the olive oil, then scatter over most of the thyme leaves, and just throw the remaining sprigs on top.

Roast for twenty minutes, then turn the oven off and leave the peaches in there while it cools, for about an hour. Use how you please, and throw any remainders into a jar and keep in the fridge.

That afternoon, 100% not sick of peaches yet, I ate them with Nigella’s miso ice cream that I’d made a variation on (by adding shredded coconut and white chocolate) and it was an incredible combination, the kind of thing that makes you feel so incredibly grown up that you end up going full circle and feeling childish again because you feel so grown up; then this morning I added them to some intensely healthy chia seed muesli to which they brought depth and sweetness. I still have half a jar left, I may just eat them straight from it with a fork but I like the idea of deploying them savoury-ly, perhaps in some tagine-type dish or to accompany crispy, slow-cooked pork belly. What I’m saying is, you will not regret making these. If you avoid honey for whatever reason, I do believe maple syrup would be an excellent substitution; if you don’t like thyme then that’s a little harder as it’s not as though you could successfully use, like, parsley instead – I’d just leave it out altogether. I adore thyme though and am pretty much forever trying to work it into everything I cook.

Because my friend Charlotte and I are practically twins (that is, we’re very similar personality-wise and we were born only a handful of days apart, one can only dream of having a face as beautiful as hers) her birthday happening means that mine is getting super close. I’m feeling more chill about it than I was a few blog posts ago, I mean…it’s going to happen. It just is. Also I remembered that you get presents and lots of attention, both things that I adore, and I’m frankly curious to see what thirty-year-old me is like. It will possibly involve singing Grown Woman by Beyonce with increasing desperation, but who knows!

title from: You’ve Got Time, the stunning Orange is the New Black theme song by Regina Spektor. We have this cocktail at work that has thyme in it and whenever someone orders it I always get this song in my head, I figured I might as well pass on this gift and curse to you too.

music lately:

Sevendust featuring Skin, Licking Cream. Some nu-metal is oddly timeless, okay? This song is so exhilarating and big and soaring and happy? And honestly it’s impossible to tell who is hotter out of Skin or the Sevendust lead singer LaJon Witherspoon (when Skin sings “crawling down your spine” I’m pretty sure she wins but it’s not actually a competition and I’m just incredibly glad they collaborated on this amazing song.)

Chelsea Jade, Low Brow. This stellar human who I am proud to call a pal has released this gloriously dreamy new tune with a video that’s both beautiful and beautifully silly. “Just hold me closer than you know how to” – ugh it’s so good.

next time: I may well have to make some kind of elaborate pasta bake again to exorcise the demons of the last failed one. Will make sure I’ve slept enough this time.

for the want of the price of tea and a slice

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Things I’ve said at work lately:

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

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

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

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

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

salted chocolate cashew butter slice

a recipe by myself 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

music lately:

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

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

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

i don’t think you’re ready for this jelly

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Much as I have respect for juice that is usually followed by the word “cleanse” and involves several pulverised green vegetables bringing joy to your liver, my preferred kind of juice is the sort that comes in rainbow colours, is preferably imported from somewhere exotic like America, and is found in the fridge in the dark back corner of the dairy down the road. Golden Pash is my absolute favourite, a passionfruit-tinged fizzy beverage in a purple can with hangover-healing properties in every carbonated bubble. I believe it’s manufactured in New Zealand but there’s something about its rather desperate insistence that it contains a whole 5% fruit juice that is kind of charming. Like, mate, my shampoo probably has five percent fruit juice in it. My shoes are probably five percent fruit juice (I’m a bartender, so this is actually possible, as opposed to hyperbole for hyperbole’s sake alone.) I’m ride-or-die for Golden Pash…but I am also easily swayed by pretty packaging and the promise of exciting flavours.

example: the results of a very casual trip to the dairy 

Anyway, after a recipe misfire where I thought I was making gummy-type candy out of Peach Snapple but instead ended up simply making delicious jelly, I thought: jelly! Fun! And so set about to make jelly on purpose out of the next juicy beverage which took my fancy. And that happened to be Arizona Iced Tea, pomegranate flavour.

one of two ingredients

Some might ask, why make your own jelly? But like, why do anything, really? In its favour, this is cute and really easy and perfect if you need to take a dessert to some kind of potluck situation or provide something for your friends – either go childs-birthday-party-esque and make a big bowl of it to be scooped up and served with ice cream, or pour it into dinky glasses and ramekins for individual servings. Oh, and it’s completely delicious – the surprisingly delicate flavour of the pomegranate, all fresh and gently astringent, tastes wonderful when suspended in gelatine. It’s refreshing, it’s barely sweet but just sweet enough, it’s gloriously wobbly when you smack it with the back of your spoon for no good reason other than to bring about your own good cheer; and if you hold it up to the light it glows gloriously red and pink like some kind of magical crystal, the sort of thing that Captain Planet would have as a household knick-knack, like a sunset’s reflection caught in water.

And there’s only two ingredients! One is simple: some kind of juice; you obviously do not need to use Arizona iced tea or even pomegranate flavoured iced tea or EVEN iced tea, I mean if you want to be truly unkind to yourself you could literally use plain water, this would not be a good time at all, but the gelatine won’t know the difference. However as I’ve outlined above, pomegranate flavour makes for a delightful jelly. The other ingredient is gelatine: mysterious, unfortunately-non-vegetarian, gelatine.

I used leaf gelatine which is pretty easy to get hold of in supermarkets and very easy to use – just let the sheets of gelatine soak in water, give them a squeeze, and then stir them into hot liquid and that’s literally it. However, if all you can find is powdered gelatine, I mean, that will be a perfectly fine substitute, and google should be able to help you with converting quantities.

pomegranate iced tea jelly

a recipe by myself

one 500ml bottle of arizona pomegranate flavour iced green tea; or whatever you like
4 sheets of gold-level leaf gelatine (I use Equagold) 

Soak the gelatine sheets in a bowl of cold water till they soften, then pick them up and give them a squeeze – this bit is delightful, not gonna lie – and tip out the water. Put the softened gelatine leaves back in the bowl and pour over about a third of a cup of recently boiled water from the kettle – just enough to cover the gelatine leaves – and stir till they’ve dissolved, which should only take a few seconds. You don’t need the entire bottle of tea, so you might as well have a sip or two first before pouring it slowly into the gelatine/hot water, stirring as you go. From here, simply pour it into cute serving bowls or one larger dish and leave in the fridge for a couple of hours to set. 

pomegranate jelly or a still from the sinister film Picnic at Hanging Rock?

Bonus: apparently gelatine helps put a shine on your coat and make your nails strong, so I look forward to being intimidatingly sleek and glossy any day now.

Speaking of monitoring one’s glossiness levels: somehow it’s March already, which means I’m turning thirty actual years old next month: I fluctuate between being terrified at this and all like “what if I am suddenly no longer interesting to anyone and everything I do is the actions of an elderly crone who no-one wants to care for” and being all like “Beyonce arguably did the most important and amazing work of her life post-thirty and she is only becoming more powerful with the passing of each day also you are not the first person to turn thirty so this is really kind of patronising and it’s probably the patriarchy’s fault that you have a weird sense of fear about leaving your twenties and how that relates to your value as a woman, nay, as a person, and to the merit of your work.” If there’s anyone out there who turned thirty and didn’t immediately turn into a small pile of ash, feeble and unwanted, then holla at ya girl!
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title via: Bootylicious by Destiny’s Child (speaking of Beyonce). I don’t think you’re ready for how obvious this song choice is for this recipe. 
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music lately: 

The Pharcyde, Drop. Made even better by its hypnotic backwards-forwards music video.

EMF, Unbelievable. I don’t really go in for youtube comments (full stop) where people are all nostalgic for the 90s when they were never even there, but there are a few songs where I’m like damn it why wasn’t I out clubbing in England somewhere in 1993. This is one such song.
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Next time: I haven’t had time to cook anything in a while so mate, I don’t even know.