Category: Dairy Free

and my eyes more red than the devil is

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 oh, just casually eating a bowl of rubies for lunch to absorb their power, you? 

Ya girl is moving house again! 2014 was a year of four different addresses, so I’m tentatively hoping this time things are even marginally more settled, but if not, at least I’m used to it? I’m really looking forward to properly unpacking all my stuff when I slide into my new address in early February, and and am going to try sooo embarrassingly hard to make my room all dreamy and tumblr-ish (meaning fairy lights and sheer, draping fabrics. It will very likely be a tacky mess. But it’ll be my tacky mess.) I am less looking forward to trying to spatula together a bond payment from behind the couch pillows of my bank account, but hopefully it all comes together. And in what is a coup for my co-dependency (I guess I also have coup-dependency, now that I think about it) the new digs will be just around the corner from where I’m currently lodging with one of my best friends, so I can still visit all the time. And continue my mission to become best friends with their cat Ariel. We’re currently on a first name basis kind of thing, although over Christmas we did have a nap together and it was without exception the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me. 
I see red, I see red, I see red 

So, I am trying very hard to not spend any money that doesn’t urgently need to be spent in anticipation of all the costs involved in moving house. I immediately bought a pomegranate after deciding this, but at least I put it to good use in this amazing salad, rather than how I usually treat spontaneous luxurious food purchases: gaze at it reverently for days, not daring to actually eat it, until it is completely withered and decayed and implodes at the slightest touch. (I also bought myself a coffee today but I admitted it so you can’t scold me now.) Anyway, my dear flatmates had made this gorgeous tomato and pomegranate salad from Ottolenghi’s newish cookbook Plenty More, and generously shared it with me. It was the kind of perfect deliciousness where you know you’re going to try recreate it at the nearest possible opportunity, and so here we are.

This combination is glorious, so juicy and sweet and surprising and sunny, with the blissful crunch of pomegranate and the soft, juicy tomato and a tiny pinprick of smoky oregano and a dressing made with lip-smackingly sour pomegranate molasses and olive oil. And it looks like you’re eating a bowl of damn rubies, I swear – so glossy and red and glowing. It’s just the prettiest. While it causes me deep sighs to have to dice up all those tomatoes, keeping everything small means you can’t tell where one ingredient starts and another ends and makes the pomegranate just as much of a star as anything else, instead of a garnish. It’s just spectacular, okay. I love being surprised by food in the same way that I love being surprised by music – you know when you hear a new song and suddenly think yes, how did this song not exist in my life and I can’t believe someone brought it to life out of thin air just when I thought all the songs that could possibly exist had already been written. Food can be like that too.

tomato and pomegranate salad

a recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi, from his book Plenty More

I’ve left his recipe pretty much as is here, but like, the tomato selection at the supermarket was no fun, so I made do with some cherry tomatoes, vine tomatoes, and regular tomatoes. The dressing is so full of life that it’ll embiggen some fairly pale produce, but try to make sure at least some of the tomatoes that you’re using taste like tomatoes. Oh also I left out the red onion but whatever. 

200g red cherry tomatoes, cut into ½cm dice
200g yellow cherry tomatoes, cut into ½cm dice (or, sigh, just more normal cherry tomatoes)
200g tiger (or plum) tomatoes, cut into ½cm dice
four medium vine tomatoes, cut into ½cm dice 
one red capsicum, cut into ½ cm dice 
one small red onion, finely diced 
two cloves garlic, crushed 
half a teaspoon ground allspice (or cinnamon)
two teaspoons white wine vinegar (you could use almost any other vinegar here instead – balsamic, red wine, etc)
1 1/2 tablespoons pomegranate molasses (this stuff is sublime, but replace with lime or lemon juice if you can’t find it)
60ml olive oil, plus a little extra to drizzle at the end
the seeds from one pomegranate
one tablespoon fresh oregano leaves

salt and pepper


Mix the diced tomatoes, capsicum, and onion together in a bowl. In another bowl mix the garlic, vinegar, pomegranate molasses, allspice and olive oil and stir this into everything. Either transfer everything to a big flat plate, which is Ottolenghi’s recommendation, or leave it in the bowl, which is what I did, and then sprinkle over the pomegranate seeds and oregano. Drizzle over some more olive oil. This benefits from plenty of salt, so do some stirring and sprinkling and tasting till you’re satisfied. That’s it! 

red, the blood of angry men, tea, a drink with jam and bread (oh wait.)

This is almost ludicrously nourishing and vitamin-rich, which is a pretty cool side-effect of eating something so massively delicious and beautiful. It’s the full package. I ended up eating 90% of it just as is by the bowlful, but it’s obviously going to make anything else amazing if you serve them up together – halloumi springs to mind, but then, halloumi always does.

As well as being frugal, planning to move house, and smugly eating vegetables, ya girl is also dying her hair. This is of course something that people do all the time, since the beginning of time, but I’ve made it 28 years without a single drop of dye touching my hair and so it was kind of a big deal for me. While there were slight “what have I dooooone” vibes to start off with I’ve had a ton of fun bleaching and toning and tinting and generally wreaking havoc upon my poor mop of hair, and have ended up reaching more or less what I was aiming for, what I call Sunset Hair. (It also might look like a sunrise of the tequila kind, according to Kate, but I’m cool with that. Tequila is delicious. I do hate the Eagles song of that same name though.)

candy candy candy I can’t let you go

The colour is a little mellower than this in person. Oh, and I love it! It’s funny how as soon as you modify your appearance in some way it’s suddenly no big deal and just the appearance you have and it doesn’t seem like things have ever been any different, you know? And it’s just hair. It grows back. Mine grows at a suspiciously fast rate, so a total do-over is not implausible.

Less mellow were the weird and whiny “I’ve achieved nothingggggg” thoughts that occasionally haunt me, although I then looked at the date today and like, it’s only January 12. But still. Time to get moving on some ambitions and agendas and stuff. Not least because doing that will be an excellent way to procrastinate from packing for moving house!
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title from: Nicki Minaj, Kanye West, and Jay Z, Monster. If you haven’t heard this, please love yourself and go straight to Nicki’s verse. She kills it effortlessly, as per. I looove dancing to this song. 
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music lately: 

sometimes there is nothing you can do except curl up on your bed and listen to Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die and Taylor Swift’s All You Had To Do Was Stay a few hundred times over. (It’s really really hard to find a link to Swift’s song online, soz, however if this means you seek out the entire album then: you’re welcome)

The Ting Tings, That’s Not My Name. This song came on In The Club recently and it is just such a great song to jump up and down with friends and total strangers to.

Billie Piper, Honey To The Bee. This song is never not swoonily dreamily magnificent, okay?
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next time: Feeling kind of obsessed with pomegranate molasses right now, but only time will tell if I make elegant, nuanced recipes from it or just sit on the kitchen floor drinking it straight from the bottle before passing out. 

rise up wise up say it loud

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greet the new year with arms and bread wide open

On New Year’s Day, my best girls Kim and Kate and I crawled into a small tent, away from the angry heat of the sun, and did tarot card readings for the year ahead. The tent was already up and we were at a barbeque/picnic thing, we didn’t just go into a field and purposefully erect a Tent of Mystery, although that would’ve been pretty neat. Next year? The cards were from The Wild Unknown and each design was so utterly beautiful that I want the whole lot of them tattooed all over my body. The card that I ended up picking as my overall theme for 2015 was not the funnest but when I found out the meaning, I was like UGH you accurate damn tarot cards. It is all about not deceiving myself or being deceived, seeing reality instead of what I want to see, and not being sucked in by wishful thinking or being stuck inside my own head (two things that like, define me currently.) So it’s not quite “a thousand riches shall befall you instantly and you can chill out indefinitely” but it’s very wise and for someone who needs to take such advice on board, I’m sorta impressed with myself for instinctively being drawn to this particular card when I was choosing from the pack, instead of gravitating towards something nicer but less direct.

Another thing I did on New Year’s Day was get up early and bake bread with my own two hands, despite being out verrrry late the night before dancing wildly to Beyonce (the only way to end the year since she was my soundtrack for the entirety of it.) Am I a hero? Yes. Although, as far as they go this is a nice, unthreateningly simple bread recipe, which requires no difficult ingredients, very little kneading, and the deep characteristic slashes in the dough make it eye-catchingly gorgeous. Which means that you can loudly and obnoxiously announce “Oh, just some simple rustic artisinal exquisite Italianate bread” when you place it at the table in front of people.

This particular bread, with its leafy, sliced-open facade, is known as Fougasse. When I was a youth I used to claim that fougasse bread was my favourite food – if I was ever asked – because I tried it once from a bakery in Titirangi with my family, and was deeply impressed with it, and I guess, also with myself. I think my train of thought was that it made me sound loftily sophisticated, which when you grow up in tiny rural farmland with big city dreams and a hearty respect for Stacey McGill, is apparently very important. No-one actually cared about fougasse being my favourite food and the only impression it gave off was (an accurate) one of insufferableness. But at least my tastes weren’t misguided! I wasn’t wrong! Because fougasse bread is highly delicious.

This recipe produces two loaves (one of mine was much larger than the other because when I divided the ball of dough in half I didn’t really get the ‘half’ bit right) of chewy, airy, crisp, wonderful bread. While it would be a fine accompaniment to literally anything (including another loaf of bread) probably my ideal way of eating it would be like this: just myself, sitting at a table with an entire loaf of fougasse, a bowl of very good olive oil, and maybe some balsamic vinegar and sea salt. And some wine.

fougasse bread

recipe by myself, mashed together from a bunch of different recipes I read online. The instructions look scarily lengthy but I just like to hand-hold you through anything that might be slightly unfamiliar or confusing.

500g bread/hi-grade flour
one sachet dried yeast
two teaspoons sea salt or some similarly fancy sodium product (or one teaspoon regular salt)
one teaspoon sugar
one and a half cups water
one tablespoon olive oil, plus more for brushing
dried herbs of your choice for sprinkling over – I used za’atar, a mix of dried thyme, sumac, and sesame seeds. Some grated parmesan would be rad here.

In a large bowl, stir together the flour, yeast, salt and sugar. Slowly pour in the water – just cold tap water is fine – and the oil, and stir together to make a sticky mass. Knead the dough either in the bowl or on a floured surface, pushing it away with your knuckles and folding it over and repeating, decisively, adding a little more flour or water if it seems to require it. However, it should come together on its own. When it’s ready, the dough should be a smoothish, slightly springy ball. Put the dough back into the bowl (you might want to wash and dry it first) and cover with gladwrap/clingfilm.

Allow the dough to rise in a warmish spot – a sunny windowsill, a hot water cupboard, something like that, but don’t stress too much about temperature, just on the bench is fine – and in an hour’s time it should be puffy and doubled in size.

At this point, set your oven to 250 C/480 F and put an oven tray in there to heat up with it. Place a large sheet of baking paper on the bench, cut the dough in half, and carefully transfer half of this dough onto the baking paper. Use your fingers to gently push it out into a large, rough oval shape – the idea is to retain lots of air, which is why you aren’t using a rolling pin – and when you’re satisfied, use a sharp knife to make cuts in it to form a kind of leafy pattern like I have done in the pictures here. Spread the slices apart with your fingers (otherwise they’ll merge back together when you bake them) and then brush the loaf with a little olive oil and sprinkle over your sprinklings of choice – as I said in the ingredients, I went with za’atar. Cover loosely with gladwrap/clingfilm and allow to sit for fifteen minutes, which will help it puff up a little. Finally, open the oven, being careful not to blast yourself with the heat of it like I did, and carefully pick up the piece of baking paper with the dough on it (it’s not that hard to transfer it, but like, don’t wave it around or anything.) Place the baking paper and dough straight onto the oven tray and bake the loaf for ten to fifteen minutes, until deep golden and bready-looking. While it’s baking, get another sheet of baking paper and shape the second half of the dough as per the instructions above, and once it has rested for fifteen minutes, bake that one. Yayyy, two loaves of bread!

slash fiction

I truly hope that all of you reading this (and also basically everyone, even people who don’t read my blog deserve love) have exciting goals, thrilling plans, and a lot of love for yourself as you start this year. And if you don’t, that’s incredibly normal and fine and tomorrow’s another day. 2014 was a seriously weird year and very uneasy in places, but 2015 seems to be tentatively full of promise. Good and bad and strange and surprising things will always happen though, and I’m just going to do my very best to do my very best.

title from: those twin cuties Tegan and Sara with their scrappily heartfelt song Missing You.

music lately:

Nicki Minaj, Pills’n’Potions and Azealia Banks, Soda. I feel like these two sad, sweet, dreamy songs go together well. Also, both these women have new albums out and they are killer, go listen, go listen.

Scarlett Johansen, Anywhere I Lay My Head. Her album of the same name is SO great, and this is my favourite from it. It’s just glorious. (Yeah, she made an album.)

next time: gosh! I don’t know. Something summery and dreamy, hopefully.

 

we live in a wheel where everyone steals but when we rise it’s like strawberry fields

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December is really dissolving like a sachet of colourfree raspberry flavoured Raro juice powder into a litre of water, huh? For some reason this year I’ve barely heard Christmas music or been exposed to any other trappings of the season. I’ve seen like, one Christmas tree. For all I know it could still be mid-September. I clearly need to find a pine tree to lean into and reverently sniff and then to play thirty two renditions of Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You, y’know, basically method acting that it’s this time of year until it sinks in that it really is this time of year.

Somewhere in the middle of all this seasonal denial I made breakfast for my roomie Kate, who was being a bridesmaid, as well as for the bride herself and the rest of the bridesmaids. That same weekend I was also feeding a friend’s cat while they were away. How unlike me to be so selflessly helpful! How like me to tell everyone about my good deeds and blow them way out of proportion! I made a large jar of Strawberry Jam Granola, and then chopped up some actual strawberries and a mango and sprinkled them with sugar and put them in the fridge overnight to let the flavours sort of get to know each other better, and then there were also grilled croissants with brie which Jason made and I therefore cannot take credit for (I swiped some and they were so, so delicious.)

The recipe comes from my cookbook, and you should know that I still have copies left and it makes a really, really good Christmas present. The thought of them all being finally gone fills me with a weird kind of foggy dread, because the book itself isn’t being reprinted and so these are the only remaining copies left in the world. Just one year ago I was in a glowing bubble of joy from being freshly published. I exist in the pages of those books. Once they’re gone, that’s it. It won’t be available anywhere, to anyone. Oh wow, so I’m doing a truly appalling job of encouraging you to buy my book from me, but yeah, I unyieldingly believe that my cookbook is a brilliant read that you all deserve to own. If you do want to order one of the remaining copies from me – and my stocks are dwindling rapidly, so better hustle – then completely ignore all my existential angst and confidently email me (my email address is in the sidebar of this blog).

This granola is very, very easy and fairly adaptable – I doubled it without any difficulty and always use the cheapest jam I can find when I make this. The strawberry jam gives the oats a sticky-sweet summery flavour while making them pleasingly clumpy, and the almonds and linseeds bring their own toasty crunchiness. Add other nuts or seeds if you like, but I find almonds and strawberries to be particularly friendly together.

strawberry jam granola

a recipe by myself, from my cookbook Hungry and Frozen

  • one and a half cups whole oats
  • one and a half cups rolled oats
  • three tablespoons linseeds
  • 70g almonds
  • 50g brown sugar
  • half a cup strawberry jam

Place everything except the jam in a large saucepan and stir over a low heat till lightly toasted and warmed through. Stir in the jam and continue stirring over a low heat till it’s sticky and slightly clumpy. Allow to cool then transfer to an airtight container or jar.

The gloriously lipgloss-like scent of the strawberry jam slowly seeps into the milk, making this a highly perfect breakfast (especially with fruit and a large mound of thick Greek yoghurt) but I also like to just grab a handful from the jar at any time of day to snack upon carte blanche.

The granola itself would also make a swell Christmas present – personally all I ever want is wine, food, or money, (or something so meaningful and so deeply from the heart that it makes me cry as soon as I see it, no biggie!) so giving someone a jar of breakfast cereal doesn’t seem in the slightest bit weird to me. Put it in a cute mason jar, since they’re everywhere these days, tie a cute ribbon around it, you could even write the recipe out on a cute notecard for the person. Cute!

Once more with feeling, in case you haven’t quite absorbed what I’m trying to impart because I am far, far too wordy while trying to get my point across: if you want to buy a copy of my cookbook for a Christmas present then there’s no better time than now. Considering it’s like, not yet Christmas. It’s yours for the taking while my stocks last! Give the gift of literary perfection! (Well, so far I’m the only person who has described the book like that, but I think I’m a fairly trustworthy source.)

title from: Bush, Glycerine. I remember when I first heard this on the radio when I was maybe eight or nine and did not get it at all, pronouncing it boring and gloomy and pointless. For what it’s worth, Bush, I quickly realised I loved grungey music and that your song wasn’t that pointless after all. (Gavin Rossdale: “well thank goodness for that”)

music lately:

Sky Ferreira, I Blame Myself. This song is really, really perfect. That is all.

Belle and Sebastian, The Blues Are Still Blue. I always thought the only Belle and Sebastian song I liked was Lazy Line Painter Jane (which I could listen to over and over and over again) but yay, I found another one! This one is so simple but also zigs just when you think it’s gonna zag.

Janet Jackson, I Get Lonely. Damn, though.

next time: Gonna try and be more Christmassy! And might make a list of lots of food-present ideas and recipes.

 

i’m taking the knife to the books that i own and i’m chopping and chopping and boiling soup from stone

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mushroom and lentil soup with sage leaves fried in butter. Thank goodness for garnish huh, imagine how gross this would look without those sage leaves. 
So, I got a job! I am employed, so hard! I’m working at a massively swanky cinema in town at their massively swanky bar, shaky-handedly pretending I know how to make lattes, being sassy with customers, and recommending wines with minor self-confidence. It’s rad. It’s also pretty tiring, which doesn’t necessarily explain why I woke up this morning an hour and a half before my alarm was due to go off, craving some kind of intense, hearty soup. 
But yeah, I got a job! I know it’s a tough market out there but I was getting a bit downtrodden there for a while at my perpetual cycle of applying for jobs and getting rejected. Makes you feel like you’re at your first school disco getting turned down by all the popular kids when you ask them to dance. Actually I take it back, that scenario is way worse than unemployment. 

While I was lying in bed, and in the time when I wasn’t thinking about how I’d regret this careless awakeness later on when my next shift starts at work, I was thinking about soup. Which is unusual for me, soup doesn’t hold a ton of interest and I don’t eat it very often – I tend to like things that are crunchy, crispy, fried, just generally textural, and so a bowl of liquid has to work hard to appeal to me. Lentils are unlikely to be anyone’s definition of “devastatingly sexy as far as food goes” let alone delightful texture-wise, but this recipe just appeared in my head, fully formed, as they often do, and I decided to trust myself and go with it. By the time I went out and got the mushrooms and then came home I wasn’t actually hungry any more, but did have some, and can most definitely confirm that it is worth your reading this blog post further (well, it’s always worth reading my blog posts, but y’know.)

mushroom and lentil soup with sage leaves fried in butter

a recipe by myself. You could fry the sage leaves in olive oil to make this vegan/dairy free if you wish. 

3/4 cup brown lentils
ten button mushrooms
one carrot
one large clove of garlic
olive oil
one teaspoon or so of vegetable stock powder
25g butter
four or five fresh sage leaves

If you can, pour boiling water over the lentils at least an hour before you start making the soup – it’ll help them cook way faster. 

Slice the mushrooms and dice the carrot and garlic. Gently fry them in plenty of olive oil in a medium-sized pot. You want the mushrooms to brown and sizzle slightly, and the carrot to soften. Tip in the lentils and the stock powder and pour over four cups of water. Bring to the boil and then simmer for about 20 minutes, or until the lentils are completely tender. Add more water if it has absorbed/evaporated too much. Remove from the heat and carefully spoon/tip half the soup into a food processor, and blend till it’s fairly smooth. Tip it back into the rest of the soup.

Heat the butter in a small pan and throw in the sage leaves, allowing it all to sizzle and bubble until the leaves are crisp. Divide the soup between two bowls (well, that’s how much it makes, I had some from the bowl you see pictured here and then the rest will be for another time) (if you care about such semantics) and scatter over the sage leaves. Spoon over a little of the butter if you like, and I do, and then serve. 

I always do this when I talk about lentil recipes – go on and on about how unlikeable they are before trying to convince you that this one recipe I’ve made is actually good. Sorry, lentils. Sorry you’re so unlikeable! Ha. But when I’m not being all Mean Girls up on it, this soup is delicious – simple, robust, the rough earthy flavours of the mushrooms and lentils shot through with nuttish browned butter and aromatic sage. Blending half the mixture gives it some body and textural contrast but you could just leave it as is, or pour cream in, or whatever, really. It’s simple, it’s very cheap, it’s fast, and it tastes rather excellent. The crisp sage leaves cater to my love of crisp things, and as always with soup, I am reminded as I eat it that eating something hot and non-threateningly liquefied in the middle of winter is actually wonderful.

Even more important than my getting a job, my friends got a cat from the SPCA! Her name is Minerva and she is beautiful and I’m smitten with her, both vicariously and in person.

I love her so much that we started to morph into one half-human half-cat creature, it was quite awkward to explain it to my friends who own her. 

So yeah, things will be interesting from now on – well, they always are, sometimes too interesting – as I hold down my job and this blog and my side hustle cookies. Proud of myself though.
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title from: Regina Spektor’s song The Flowers. Her voice is magic.
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music lately: 

One Direction, I Would. These loveable scruffs and their music just makes me so happy! And this is probably my favourite one of theirs. It’s just, so…right.

Icona Pop/Charli XCX, I Love It. This song always makes me feel reckless and free, and never more so when it came on the other night when I was out dancing, just when I needed to hear it most. Seriously just turn off the lights and jump and thrash around to this and everything will be good.

Saycon Sengbloh, Young Gifted and Black. Those harmonies, oof.
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next time: ummmm…I know not. But it will be good. 

all i wanna do is cook your bread, just to make sure you’re well fed

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literal banana bread 

Me oh my, guess who has been busy lately? Me of course, who else do I talk about on here. I mean, this blog post opens with two sentences both starting with the word “me”. And then a sentence beginning with “I”. Well, that’s why it’s called “a blog” and not “a Place of Altruistic Humility”, I guess. Pop psychology aside, I have been one busy kitten recently, and happily, it’s all stuff that I enjoy doing. Like freelance writing and starting a small yet successful chocolate cookie dough pretzel thing delivery business. The latter of which was a clever idea by my clever friend Kate, which I kind of dismissed at first – not because I thought it was a bad idea, but because I thought no-one would care. Turns out people care hard about my cookie dough pretzel things. I have been striding all over town, getting way more exercise than I care for, dropping off parcels of chocolatey salty-sugary glory to both suspecting and unsuspecting people. The unsuspecting ones are fun – when people order them as a surprise for a friend, and then I get to appear at their work saying “hello, you don’t know me, but I’m Laura and I started a small cookie delivery business and your friend ordered some for you.” Cookie dough is sweet, but so is being the recipient of a human being’s surprised joy, I’ve come to learn.

I’m still drifting around in a “what am I doing with my life what’s to become of me I’m still not a famous cookbook empire-wielding squillionaire with many tumblr fansites dedicated to me yet I have clearly failed wait chill out Laura it’s only Tuesday” kind of haze, but am definitely feeling more productive now that I’m making it rain cookie dough. And it also means that this week I’m paying my rent with money that exists, instead of doing it with my credit card!

Speaking of being super-unemployed, I am feeling very reproachful towards myself for not using the time I had being all jobless to make like, make falling-to-pieces-tender casseroles and brisket and hummus from scratch using soaked dried chickpeas and brioche and rich broth and so on and such. Time flies when you’re not making the most of it to make exquisite slow-cooked food, I tell you. However, I did make one thing that befits the time on my hands: literal banana bread, from my cookbook. My underground, rare collector’s item, soon-to-be-out-of-print, definitely-have-come-to-terms-with-this-lololol cookbook.

This is the photo that appears in my cookbook. Kim and Jason did all the beauteous photos for it, but neither could remember who took this one, so I’m going to praise them both just to be diplomatic. All I know for sure is that my nails were painted this way because I dressed up as a Gold Lion for a party the previous night. 

This is a really easy recipe, because you don’t have to do any kneading. Just stir and wait and bake. It’s charmingly simple. The bananas take the place of any fat and sugar that you might add normally, not because I don’t adore both those things, but because I wanted to see if bananas had it in them to be used in a yeasted bread recipe as the major source of flavour and sweetness. Also I really like the idea of using the word “literal” in a recipe title. Y’know, because banana cake baked in a loaf tin is called banana bread, but this is actual bread made with bananas, so the title is literally justified.

literal banana bread

a recipe by myself, from my soon-to-be rare cult hit collector’s item cookbook Hungry and Frozen. Makes one large loaf.

500g flour
one sachet dried instant yeast
one teaspoon salt
two ripe bananas
300ml warm water
two tablespoons raw sugar

Mix the flour, yeast and salt together in a large bowl. Mash the bananas, and mix them into the flour with the water. It’ll look a bit gross. 

Cover the bowl with a tea towel and leave in a gently warmish place for two hours.

At this point it should be risen and puffy and frankly even more gross looking – a bit greyish and unpromising. Scrape it into a well greased (or baking paper lined) loaf tin, and leave to sit for twenty minutes while you heat the oven to 180 C. 

Sprinkle over the sugar, and bake for 45 minutes. Allow to sit for a minute or two before tipping it out of the tin. You might need to run a knife around the sides to loosen it. 

You end up with this piping hot loaf of gently banana-scented bread, crusty and doughy and really wonderful when thickly sliced and spread with butter and honey, or even better, butter and cream cheese and brown sugar. It’s a good one to try if you’re unsure about breadmaking, since all you need is a little time, a bowl, and a spoon. And all the ingredients I listed. And, um, an oven. And I’ll stop there, because you probably don’t need me to elaborate further (although I always am concerned that people do, and never quite know when to stop over-explaining things.) I actually don’t love bananas just on their own – something about the texture and the sickly scent and the freakish little nubbin bits at each end of the fruit put me off, but they suddenly become appealing again when they’re baked into something. The banana flavour isn’t overwhelming here – just a sweet, promising hint of it with every bite.

literally delicious
So if you’re in Wellington CBD and you want chocolate cookie dough pretzel things delivered to your door with what will most likely be a smile, giz a yell. If you’re not in Wellington CBD, here’s what you’re missing, sorry.
dark chocolate, white chocolate, bounty thing. I eat a lot of cookie dough, I am highly authorised to assure you these are majorly delicious.
just a reminder that I’m literally cute. Hey, I said this is a blog, not a Place of Altruistic Humility!
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title from: the truly excellent Etta James singing I Just Wanna Make Love To You. 
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music lately:

the aquadolls. I really love all their music, it’s kind of foul-mouthed surfy pop and it’s so much fun.

Dillon, Texture of My Blood. Dreamy and feelingsy.

FKA Twigs, Two Weeks. Almost too dreamy to bear, tbh.

Jesse Thomas, Say Hello. Lovely, happy, country-ish music, so naturally it makes me feel sad.
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next time: not sure, yeah? something delicious written about in a charming manner, no doubt. 

this is jam hot, this is jam hot

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It’s gonna look so pretty: well established by now as a large part of my motivation for making food, ever

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I was mightily spiritual as a kid. Obsessed with Linda Goodman, attempting to cast spells with limited resources (where is a twelve year old going to obtain tincture of nettle, honestly), loitering by the 100 bit of the nonfiction section of the library, seeing how many significant words I could make from the letters of my name (AURA, OMG) placing great faith in rose quartz, jasper, hematite and whatever other semi-precious stones I could buy with my pocket money, burning essential oils, lighting incense, moonlighting as a palm-reader during my primary school lunchtimes after reading a book and thinking I knew what I was doing (the teachers did not approve of that one), making tea from herbs, fervently interpreting my dreams. Huh, I even surprised myself just now as I wrote that. Examples kept springing to mind. Anyway, I’ve retained some of that – a kind of fondness for what I got up to in my witchy youth, and a still-fascinated respect for it all. Which is why I was totally chill with having my tarot cards read on the first day of 2014. Where I’m going with this is, my tarot card for May was essentially “lol everything will go wrong and you’ll have no money” which, alas, was almost too on the nose. But June: this month the cards suggest I’m battle-weary but I’m gonna win. Exhausted but determined. Setback-y but resilient-y. Etc. And…I’m kinda feeling it. That’s me right now.

(I’d like to add here that I don’t simply allow things to happen because a particular card says so, but consider it more of a snapshot of how things might be and where I can go from there. Humans are just generally always looking for meaning and direction, right? Whether it’s religion or reading your horoscopes or txting a friend a picture of yourself and asking if they think this dress seems really “you.”)

So yeah. Despite setbacks and rejection emails and uh, still being unemployed, I’m feeling curiously better about my future as a human who does stuff. I’m actually not quite sure what I want to do specifically with my cooking and writing to become incredibly famous and celebrated for my cooking and writing, but I feel like an idea is just out of reach, just around the corner, on the tip of my dreams, that kind of thing. As per usual though, if you want to employ me to be wonderful and write freelance but in a paid capacity for you, I would oblige so hard.

Possibly this uncharacteristically bullish outlook is nothing to do with the suggestions of the tarot cards and everything to do with the vitamins and minerals my system has been waterblasted with after eating heaps of this berry chia seed jam I made. It’s just chia seeds and berries, you can’t help but feel good after eating that. Chia seeds are a rather fashionable superfood, but don’t hold that against them. They look unassuming at first but when mixed with liquid they swell up, soften, and thicken gelatinously in a way that admittedly sounds horrifying, but can be very applicable in the kitchen. Here, they absorb the juice of the berries, holding it all together in a rudimentarily jammy fashion. It’s not spreadable like the usual jam, but hot damn it tastes wonderful. And involves very little effort. I used a mixture of frozen strawberries and raspberries, mostly because it’s what I had in the freezer, but also because I liked the idea of the chia seeds echoing the texture of the raspberries, and of the balance between sweet and sharp that the two berries would give each other. I imagine this would be excellent with blackberries or boysenberries – anything with seeds, particularly – but try whatever you like.

berry chia seed jam

with thanks to sans ceuticals for this recipe

  • two cups of berries, frozen or fresh. I used one cup frozen strawberries, one cup frozen raspberries, and I most definitely recommend it.
  • half a cup of water
  • juice of a lemon
  • three to five tablespoons of chia seeds
  • one tablespoon honey, maple syrup, sugar, whatever really

If your berries are frozen allow them to defrost, otherwise place the berries in two bowls, roughly half in each, although I went for more of a two thirds/third kinda thing. Add the water to whichever bowl looks more full, along with the lemon juice and honey/whatever sugar you’re adding. Mash thoroughly with a fork till it’s roughly pureed and liquidish. Stir in the whole berries and the chia seeds, and then spatula it all into a jar and refrigerate overnight. Try to make sure all the chia seeds are actually in amongst the berries, if they ride up onto the insides of the jar they will stick like glue. Other than that: now you’ve got jam, honey.

It’s delicious. It’s beautiful. It’s easy. And chia seeds are stuuuupidly good for you, so that’s something to bask in.

It’s not proper jam but actually I like it better. For someone who eats so much sugar that I probably have pure syrup running through my veins instead of your regular human-blood, I’ve never been alllll that big on jam. I tend to find that any fruit flavour is overpowered by sickly sugariness. Whereas this stuff is pure, intense, sun-bursting-through-the-clouds berry flavour, barely altered and instantly accessible to your lucky, lucky mouth.

Some things you could do with this jam (I mostly went for the first two options, so you know)

eat 90% of it from the jar while leaning on your kitchen bench // spoon it into thick delicious yoghurt for a dessert-like snack, or snack-like dessert // add it to your porridge // eat spoonfuls of it alternated with generous pumps of canned whipped cream (wish I’d done this, what am I doing with my life) // spoon it over ice cream // smear it on your face, go out and terrify the neighbourhood children, rinse it off and notice that your skin has benefited from the high vitamin content of the berries // irritate a strict jam traditionalist by talking loudly about how wonderful it is // give a jar of it to a cool person // fill tartlets with it and top with lemon curd // google “things to do with jam” // spread it on buttery toast // employ me as a glamorous and thrilling food writer for your excellent media outlet (would also consider: having own TV show; being paid to do nothing for some reason I haven’t yet worked out.)

title from: Beats International, Dub Be Good To Me. I was just a nipper in the early nineties but this gives me nostalgia for it all the same. Which is the most impressive type of nostalgia: the kind for a place you ain’t even been. And Lindi Layton’s vocals are stunner.

music lately:

Lana Del Rey, Brooklyn Baby. I’ll always love Lana Del Rey, even though her music puts me through an emotional wringer. This new single is jam hot, but if you want to feel entranced yet chilled to your bones, you better listen to her covering Once Upon A Dream from Sleeping Beauty.

Gossling, Never Expire. My favourite genre: dreamy.

next time: probs some more fancy plans and pants to match with recipes to go with Nautilus Wine! That’s right, I’ve still got some fancy left in me.

 

they go to a lake of fire and fry, won’t see ’em again till the fourth of july

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After all my harping on about being unemployed making it a lot easier for me to blog more often, it has definitely been a minute since my last post. I had my reasons, some of which were fun (Auckland mini-break with my friend Kate!) some of which were less fun (a vague sense of not being able to get my act together! Other personal stuff!) but here I am, ready to type, resplendent in my $10 floral leggings and $4 wooly jumper sitting in the north wing of my office (aka the couch. The south wing is my bed. There is no west wing because my apartment is kind of L-shaped. So to go hard west would defy the laws of physics and sensible-ness.)
it was an honour to briefly gallivant round Auckland with this stone cold fox

While in Auckland I finally got to go to Barilla, where you can eat incredible dumplings and drink green tea under fluorescent lighting. We got this side dish of fried beans with spicy salt, and they were honestly one of the best things I’ve ever eaten, crisp and piled high on this huge plate with dried chillis, cumin and coriander seeds, a slight crunch of sugar, and a ton of salty wondrousness. I got home and really wanted to recreate them, but had no idea how and also lacked most of the ingredients that I’d detected. Except, shamefully, dried chillis: I have a bag of them but they’re right at the back of a tall cupboard and laziness overtook all things, including, quite shockingly for me, aesthetics. So I made up a sort of tribute to what Kate and I had, and while it didn’t turn out like Barilla’s elusively salty-hot dish, these beans are still super cool by their own damn selves. 

fried green beans with chilli and garlic

a recipe by myself, inspired by the beans at Barilla, but if you’re in proximity of that place just ignore this entire blog post and run down there to order plateful after plateful of the real thing, seriously

many green beans (just…many, okay?)
two tablespoons olive oil
two tablespoon sesame oil
three cloves garlic, roughly diced
two teaspoons sugar
one tablespoon soy sauce
one tablespoon white vinegar
two tablespoons sriracha or other chilli sauce of your choosing
tiny pinch of ground cinnamon

Top and tail the beans and slice in half. If you’ve rinsed them in water before doing this, dry them thoroughly on a paper towel, because if even a droplet of moisture gets into the hot oil it will spit aggressively everywhere. 

In a saucepan heat the oils until you’re quite sure they’re stupidly hot. Throw in the beans and allow them to fry, stirring very occasionally, until they’re uniformly blistered and browned and a little crisp.

While this is happening, mix the garlic, sugar, vinegar, sriracha and cinnamon in a small bowl. Remove the beans and sit them on a paper towel, and tip out most of the oil into your sink – carefully, it might spit a bit – and return the pan to the heat. Tip in the remaining ingredients and fry them for a couple of minutes before returning the beans to the pan, stirring them till everything’s all sticky and wonderful-looking. Remove from the heat, spatula into a bowl, eat the lot. 

You weren’t born yesterday, you haven’t been living under a rock and this most definitely isn’t your first rodeo, so I appreciate that it’s a bit obvious when I say fried things generally taste better than when they’re cooked any other way. But nevertheless, did you know that frying makes beans taste amazing? They go all wrinkly and crisp and a little smoky, with that grassy burst of flavour still present when you bite into them. The sauce goes all sticky and excellent, the sugars caramelising a little and the hint of cinnamon giving subtle depth, while the vinegar and chilli distract from, yet elevate, the oiliness. And it’s really simple. The hardest thing is slicing the ends off the beans. Like, I can’t stress enough what a burden this is. If you can lure someone else into doing it for you, perhaps with the promise of fried beans as a reward, then do so (bonus hilarity: they’ll need to chop twice as many beans so that there’s enough for them to be rewarded with.) 
Hey, so I know I talked a lot about Swonderful in my last blog post, but I would like to charmingly draw your attention to the rest of my amazing sponsors. Go check out their websites, do it for your own good, discover some delightfulness, or in fact ignore them completely, because it is a free country (despite many laws and discrepancies that conclusively suggest otherwise.) I love these guys, and you may well end up feeling the same way. 
Skinny Love: tiny, easy weddings, for if you don’t want fuss and stress but still want maximum dreaminess and delight. I know I like, recently cancelled my own wedding, but that doesn’t mean I can’t celebrate cool people running the show and helping other people with their declarations of love. Dreamy weddings are not a zero sum game. Oh and even if you’re not getting married they have a sweet blog with lots of lovely photos and inspiration and such. 
Holland Road Yarn Company: I have talked so much about how obsessed with knitting I am, and without this shop my life would be singularly bereft of all that woolly joy. If you’re in Wellington there are often classes and events, or you can just walk into one of the two shops to politely nuzzle the yarn. If you’re over yonder or overseas you can still purchase all the gorgeous stuff on offer, including the owner Tash’s hand-dyed skeins of glorious Knitsch yarn. 
Six Barrel Soda Co: aside from the fact that I could and have spend entire hours at their eponymous cafe in Wellington, I gotta say, it is so wonderful having incredibly delicious non-alcoholic options for drinks now that they have started stocking their syrups more and more widely around town. With flavours like Vanilla Cream, Orange Dandy, Raspberry and Lemon, Cherry and Pomegranate, all hand-made and bottled in small batches, like, I can’t even remember how I was planning to finish this sentence because I’m suddenly feeling really parched and in need of a fizzy drink. Anyway, you can order them online and they’re soon going to be selling ready-made sodas too. Hurrah! 
Yay sponsors! Keeping the wolves from this unemployed blogger’s door. Although I’d really like to befriend some wolves and have them as my loyal yet adorable companions, so…looks like someone needs a better metaphor. 
This chronic overheater and lover of burrowing into duvets also says: yay winter! 
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title from: Lake of Fire, Nirvana’s Meat Puppets cover from their majorly excellent MTV Unplugged album. Kurt Cobain’s pretty face plus his raspy voice and the pleasingly old-timey stride of this song are a fairly amazing combination. 
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music lately
Beyonce feat Drake, Mine. “Let’s get carried away”…Kind of like when you look into a Viewmaster and click around the different scenes, songs from Beyonce’s last album move forward and backward into significance for me. Currently it’s this one on my mind. And while the music video is reliably stunning the album cut has the important line “been about you and I’m still about you” so I dunno, settle in and absorb both I guess.
Janine and the Mixtape, Little Bit. Love this woman and her new single is, as per usual, silky-smooth gorgeous R’n’B. 

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Next time: I made a really cute chocolate cake. 

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

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

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

double cauliflower salad

a recipe by myself

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

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

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

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

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

music lately:

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

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

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

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

girls girls get that cash, if it’s nine to five or shaking that ass

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Every winter I forget how to take photos when it’s dark outside, but decided I liked the mysterious moody what’s-her-story vibe that I ended up getting from these ones.

Tomorrow is my last day of work. The day after that is my birthday. Let’s face it, I am both commanding and exuding some serious special snowflake-ness right now.

With that in mind – the sentence could actually end there, like, just always keep in mind that I am a special snowflake, but actually I did have more to say than that – I have installed a donate button, just on the offchance that anyone feels like supporting me fiscally. Then, after Easter, I’m going to start featuring sponsors. Sponsors being the elegant blogger word for advertising.

This may make my blog seem less authentic or more cluttered to you or something, but honestly, everything is advertising. Why, I’m advertising myself right now just by getting you to read these words. Furthermore, money is useful and nice, and I’m sure you can relate to that.

Don’t for one second feel like you’re obliged to click the donate button, it’s mostly there in case some opportunistic rich person looking to burn through some cash just to feel something real happens to wander past and like what they see. It simply doesn’t hurt to have it there. I adore this blog and while I’d love it to be my primary source of income…somehow…I’ve been more than happy thus far to throw myself at it with every resource I have. But considering I’ve been writing it since 2007, and again, I’m going to be unemployed from 5pm tomorrow, I am entirely chill with my new gimme-the-loot attitude. Plus I’m only going to be collaborating with lovely, cool sponsors, in case you’re worried that you’ll start seeing ads for margarine.

And so, to the food. I made up this recipe in my head as I wandered around the vege market on Sunday. Considering I’d been kept up till 3am on both Friday and Saturday night by fun and good times, I feel I definitely deserve a bouquet of flowers for just being able to put on pants and make decisions like this. But honestly, it’s barely a recipe, it’s just vegetable A on vegetable B on vegetable C, and what motivated it was the freezing weather and the thought of having the oven on for a long time to warm up both the house and the soul.

I tend to blast eggplant with as high a heat as possible, but figured that slow-cooking might break it down in an equally appealing way. And, forever keeping texture in mind, I decided that it needed some kind of contrast, which is where the fried cauliflower comes in. It was all very easy, it worked, and it tasted wonderful. By the way, you can arrange the eggplant and butternut however you feel. My alternating slices felt more pleasing than typical lasagne-style layers, but it all gets covered in cauliflower and falls apart when you spoon it onto your plate. If you still need to arrange them really specifically even with this in mind, I can most definitely respect that.

slow roasted eggplant and butternut with fried cauliflower

recipe by myself.

1 large butternut
2 medium eggplants, or one large one, or literally whatever
1/3 cup cream
1/2 cup vegetable stock
olive oil
butter
half a cauliflower
thyme leaves

Set your oven to 160 C. Slice the eggplant and butternut into rounds. This will be harder with the butternut, just do what you can. I had lots of half-moon scraps that I just tucked underneath everything else. Layer them up how you please, pour over the cream, the stock, and plenty of olive oil – a good couple of tablespoons – and roast for two hours, although check at one and a half if you’re impatient.

Melt at least 25g butter in a pan till it’s sizzling. Roughly slice the cauliflower florets into tiny pieces and fry in the butter, not stirring too much, till they are all dark brown and crisp and crunchy. Remove the dish from the oven, sprinkle the cauliflower over evenly and scatter with thyme leaves. Serve immediately, because the cauliflower will lose its crunch if you leave it sitting too long. Oh and PS, you could replace the cream with more stock and the butter with more olive oil if you want to make this vegan/dairy-free.

I was nervous before I started eating it that I’d somehow failed at putting vegetables in the oven. The liquid hadn’t reduced down much and some of the eggplant looked unpromisingly undercooked. But I was wrong. Which means I was actually right in the first place. The bottom layers slowly absorb the stock, and it was all excellent: butternut softer than the plush underside of an expensive persian cat, yieldingly silky eggplant, buttery nutty popcorn-crisp cauliflower. You can add a zillion more things to this – mustard, nuts, more cream, more herbs, spices, bla bla bla, but I felt like being lazy and letting the flavour of the vegetables shine. Plus there’s butter, and sometimes that’s all you need.

As I said, the liquid doesn’t reduce down very much, so ideally you’d serve this over rice or couscous, or just something that can absorb it all and which you can squash the butternut into with the prongs of your fork. But just as is: super cool.

I feel like I say this a lot lately, but thanks for the kindness following my mega-bleak post last week. While I’d like for you to not have to worry about me (apart from in the “is Laura famous enough yet? Whatever can I do to make this happen? Let’s talk about our top 25 favourite instagrams of hers” kind of way) it also doesn’t sit right with me to be falsely perky simply to attempt to reassure you. It’s not like I’m the only person going through stuff here, I just happen to be very open about it on the internet.

Who could possibly be falsely perky while eating pizza while wearing pizza socks? Admittedly I always get some existential angst going on around my birthday – about how I have this one day, and I have to make it the best it can be and not waste a second and have the time of my life and have I achieved anything lately and so on, but am hoping I can trick this one into being low-key yet excellent. Could also go for dramatically excellent, as long as there’s some excellence involved.
title via: feminist icon, rap icon, general icon Missy Elliot dispensing sound financial advice in her song Work It. “Ain’t no shame ladies do your thing, just make sure you’re ahead of the game.”music lately:

PJ Harvey, My Good Fortune. This song has been with me a long time and remains so, so good with that zig-zag guitar riff and the ey-ey-ey-ey stretching out of the words that is so perfect for dancing to.

Patsy Cline, Walkin’ After Midnight. This song is everything.

Trip Pony featuring Jaykin, Daze. Dreamy dreamy dreamy.
 
next time: hopefully things will be looking even further upwards, and I can get some cool baking done over the easter break.

 

and after that, we can ketchup like tomato

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Nothing makes me feel like I’m smugly going to avoid scurvy (she says, having only eaten pizza, Nerds, and beer all day) than eating a vegetable one time. Despite my wayward ways, I do actually love vegetables not simply because they keep me more or less alive, but because they’re delicious and abundant and almost all of them taste incredible when they have heat applied to them followed by lots of olive oil. 
I’m one week in back at work, and without casting aspersions on my work ethic (why cast aspersions when you can be frank: my work ethic is usually in the category of “reluctant yet non-existent, at best”) it should be obvious enough that I’d much rather be on holiday. Who among us can say, etc etc. However, as with the chocolate brownies last week, I’m doing my best to improve upon last year’s trend of bleak lunches, month in and out. From days of pot noodles, to seemingly endless bowls of plain couscous with butter and salt, to microwaved cheese sandwich (we’re not allowed a toaster in the work kitchen. Oh, I know) I’ve decided I deserve better. By “better” I guess I mean “not having scurvy” but it’s all part of life’s rich tapestry, or something. 

Simple though the concept is, I’m not always good at remembering to make a large enough dinner to allow for lunch leftovers the following day. That’s where this Ottolenghi recipe for Mejadra, from his book Jerusalem, is useful – it uses such unstressfully-priced ingredients as lentils, rice, and onions, it’s all cooked in one pan, and it makes a metric butt-ton. I hear you, that those ingredients aren’t the first to spring to mind as examples of “whoa, alluring”, but there’s something in the crunchy-crisp fried onions, and the spices which find their way into the earthy lentils and rice, that is really rather wonderful.  

I’m just going to link to Ottolenghi’s recipe for Mejadra rather than write it out in full, because…oh, I’m very lazy. That’s it, really. I told you my work ethic was found wanting.

I shall, however, heroically type out another Ottolenghi recipe that I made to go with the Mejadra – this is properly simple, both of ingredients list and execution, and while it doesn’t sound like much it’s super excellent. Fried slices of tomato, bursting at the seams with sweet ripeness, a little garlic and chili for, well, the flavour of garlic and chili, and plenty of soft, buttery olive oil…when we have tomatoes at such peak being-in-season-ness, there’s not a lot that needs to be done to them. When they’re at their most prolific, I kinda like to eat them like apples. For now, this fast recipe can help bolster up anything from toast, to scrambled eggs, to…to rice and lentils and onions.

fried tomatoes with garlic

from Yotam Ottolenghi’s book Jerusalem.

three garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 a small hot chilli, finely sliced (I just used some sriracha as I was lacking a small hot chilli, or indeed a chilli of any size)
two tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
three large, ripe, firm tomatoes
two tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Mix the garlic, chilli, and parsley together in a small bowl, and set aside. Top and tail the tomatoes and slice thickly vertically – about 1.5cm thick, but like, whatever. Heat the olive oil in a pan and then fry the tomato slices, turning over after a minute or two. I used an enamel roasting dish that can be used on a stove top, but I suppose it’s better the more surface area you have. It’s just that my saucepan was being used for the Mejadra, and…enamel is cute. Add the garlic mixture, fry a little longer, and then serve. 

It’s the sort of thing that you could – and in fact probably already have – come up with yourself quite easily, but nevertheless, sometimes it’s pleasingly comforting to be told what to do when cooking.  

And straightforward as it is, this recipe is pretty spectacular. All sweet and spicy and rich, yet very simple and plain and unfancy.

And very fitting on a table full of potluck brunch. I’m trying something called luxterity (luxe + austerity) this year, where there’s more care with spending (necessarily so) but in as elegant/dramatic/sybaritic a manner as we can manage (also necessarily so, because I like those things.) Having friends over for brunch saves a lot of money, is super fun, and there’s nothing like an air of “pants are barely required because I’m in my own damn house” to add a frisson to your morning repast.

That’s about it, really. This week has been very long yet very fast. Full of hangings-out (out-hangings?) and knitting (a hat) and reading (The Character of Rain/Amelie Nothomb; Are You My Mother?/Alison Bechdel) and watching (Pretty Little Liars and Practical Magic and all the new Beyonce videos again and again) and eating (endless Mejadra – that recipe really makes a lot; plus as many seasonal berries as I can find) and small but joyful things like that.

Also, I got a new beanie that I adore.

This isn’t going to make my knitted hat any less fun of a project, for one thing, I intend to put a pom pom on top of that one. Wellington’s weather has been monumentally horrible lately, so weird as it sounds to be thinking about warm hats in the middle of summer, that’s what we’re dealing with. I couldn’t care less. As long as tomatoes continue being cheap for a while longer…so if nothing else, I can pre-load on vitamins to cover me during my next inevitable stretch of candy and sodium chloride.
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title from:  Mariah Carey, More Than Just Friends. Even when it’s not the mid-nineties any more, Mariah still rules my heart and ears. 
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music lately

City Oh Sigh, Still Let Me In. Dreamy, too dreamy.

Joan Jett, Roadrunner. The original by the Modern Lovers is one of my very, very favourite songs. But hurrah for good covers, like this boisterous one by the babein’ Jett.
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next time: I may have a hat that says “witch” but I don’t know everything. You’ll find out when I do.