Category: Dairy Free

candy cane girl, don’t you know my name girl?

23 Comments

Ever feel like what the French call les incompetents? If like me, “oui, le constantly-ment”, then I salute you. My useless actions always seem amplified – I’m much more likely to dwell on slamming into a doorframe, saying something without thinking, or hassling everyone about but not winning a blogging award. Or sometimes I’ll be walking quietly down the street and my brain will say something along the lines of “hey, remember this very specific mistake/bad judgement call/awkward situation?” When all this happens I try and steer the brain towards thinking positively, shrinkening the tiny or huge mistakes and remembering the good things. What else can you do? (Apart from not make mistakes? Which: doubties.)

I try instead to remember small things, like friends who instinctively invite themselves round for wine just when you feel like friends and wine. Like getting a tweet reply from people in The Wire or on Broadway. And like this utterly manageable Christmassy snack to go with my Christmassy movie reference. It has less ingredients than I have eyelashes after a night wearing mascara (seriously, mascara is like a tiny version of one of those weird rolly things that remove lint from your clothes…for my eyelashes) and – the snack that keeps on giving – is also charmingly simple to make, strangely delicious to eat, and aggressively festive to behold.

Make it when you’ve got people coming round and you don’t know what to serve up – especially since the two main ingredients can be bought from most corner dairies; make it when you feel like things should be more recognisably yuletide-y than they are; make it if you’ve had a hard day which can be soothed by the feeling of a knife blade plunging through solid sugar; make it when you’re wavering between “Shut up, self! Your life is good! Check your privilege and stop complaining!” and “I just want to hug a large cat and allow its soft pelt to absorb my salty tears.”

So, yes, this conversation again – I didn’t win the blogger award I was nominated for. D’oh! I feel like the Raul Esparza of blogger awards. But you can’t go round hitching your wagon to every star that rolls by. Had I won, of course, I would’ve talked about it heaps, and big congratulations to the winner. But here we are. Asking for votes isn’t something I love, and while I didn’t quite have the energy to be involved, I also didn’t have the energy not to be involved, if that makes sense. On the upside of things, it’s cool that someone/s nominated me, thanks heaps everyone who did vote because of – or in spite of – my petitioning, I’m pretty sure I got some new readers out of this (do stay!) and it’s a good learning experience.

So what even is this recipe? It’s so simple, and yet a triumph of both texture and flavour. The sugary crunch against soft chocolate snap; the spicy chill of synthetic peppermint flavouring melting into the cocoa darkness. While I have a feeling I’ve seen this recipe before somewhere other than my brain, I also can’t place it specifically. That said, I haven’t tried googling it or anything. But importantly, it’s easy, it’s delicious, it’s beautiful. In fact the most difficult part is wrangling the wrapping off the candy canes – this strange plastic, which on the candy canes is like trying to scrape off a layer of clear nail polish, and then when finally removed it floats around and clings obstinately to your eyebrows.

Candy Cane Bark

A recipe by myself

  • 250g dark chocolate. (I use Whittakers. It is both delicious, and the best.)
  • 1 tablespoon coconut oil or plain oil (I like rice bran) or even Kremelta, if you dare.
  • Five candy canes
  • Salt
  • Edible Glitter (optional)

Place the unwrapped candy canes on a chopping board, and carefully, using a big knife, chop away at them till they’re reduced to peppermint splinters.

Melt the chocolate, a decent grind of salt, and the oil together gently either in the microwave or in a metal bowl that’s sitting on a small pot of simmering water (not actually touching the water.) Pour into a smallish tin – if it’s silicone you’re all good, but consider lining it with baking paper if it’s ceramic or metal or something. Once it has cooled a little, sprinkle the candy cane shards over evenly and top with glitter. Chill and slice evenly.

This is best when freezing cold, to encourage maximum crunch and minimum melting in your hand. Also good topped, if you will, with a tasteful and elegant dusting of edible glitter. You could double the chocolate, to make it thicker, or double the candy canes, to make it crunchier and prettier. Don’t leave out the salt – I know salted everything these days is getting a little blah, but its intensity not only balances out the sweetness, but also makes everything taste more of itself.

Every time I’m convinced peppermint flavouring is as fun as eating food right after after cleaning your teeth, a combination like this comes along to change my mind. While it looks like it’d make an ideal gift, it’s a little too melty to be sit around in a wrapped box for hours under the tree. Instead, whip it out when you’ve got guests and they’ll hopefully be so dazzled by the pretty shards of candy cane, that you’ll look far, far more competent than you might be feeling.

I know I’m always sleepy these days but lately life’s been like when you go to get Chinese takeaways and you optimistically stuff way too much food from the buffet table into your plastic container and it bulges out the lid and noodles dangle out the side, and then you insist on eating it all rather than just put it in the fridge and admit defeat about your stomach capacity. That is to say, I was busy and had amazing times, like karaoke, cases of wine appearing, skidding down a hallway in socks, dancing – possibly terrifyingly – wild and free with friends, attending book group that went on for five hours because we were talking about everything ever. Would rather have the overstuffed $7 buffet container than a single crabstick off the menu any day (wait, that metaphor makes no sense, let’s just finish things here.)

Finally, I don’t know how many times you’ve seen Home Alone but that’s what the Les Incompetents quote comes from – I was talking to someone on Twitter about how I’d wanted to use it on my blog for a while, and lo, the universe provides me with lots of incompetency to not so much quote it as turn it into a thematic motif for my life, or something.

Title via: People, there are just not that many songs referencing candy canes, which makes no sense to me. Luckily the White Stripes not only made a song, they basically devoted their working life to resembling peppermint-flavoured candy.

Music lately:

Ladi6 released a beautiful video for her beautiful song Jazmine DL. She’s so awesome I can’t even talk about her properly without a good night’s sleep so I’ll just link through to the video and leave it at that.

The song that always, always makes me feel better, but especially during an attack of the les incompetents: Die, Vampire, Die.

Next time: I was going to tack it on as an afterthought but I like it so much it’ll get its own post, and hopefully act as a nice buffer between all the Christmas overload. I’ll leave you with one word: Capsimato. (Also these parentheses and this explanatational colon: it’s roast tomato inside roast capsicum. Just in case capsimato wasn’t working for you.)

i salt and pepper my mango

21 Comments

Story time.

The weather in Wellington has been particularly extreme over the last couple of days. It’s no time for skirts or dresses. Luckily I’ve got a super awesome bright red jumpsuit with power shoulders, gold buttons and palazzo pant legs. Don’t try and construct an image of what that might look like, just believe me on the “super awesome” claim. Especially when it’s worn with a turquoise scarf. Said jumpsuit has all the delightful flippiness of a skirt, with all the reassuring practicality of pants. On most days. Today the breeze rendered the crotchal-region fabric near-pointless as it continuously inflated my trouser legs so they looked like spooning hot air balloons. No major biggie though, were it not for my rapidly-sinking stockings. They would not stay up. There came a point where they were making their way towards my ankles just as my pant-legs were flying upwards. Taking advantage of the quiet side street I was walking through, I hiked up my stockings back to where they belong, around my waist. Doing the job properly, I was getting quite into it – lunging and wiggling and really luxuriating in the hoisting action till they were back up on my hips again. Finished, I look up, and see an elderly person, holding a video camera. Pointing straight at me.

The camera wasn’t sinister; I got the impression they were optimistically filming the nearby thoroughfare in case the wind caused anything strange to happen, so they could then pass it on to the humourous segment of a late-night news show so they could gain fame and riches. I…could well be that segment filler. Needless to say, my tights started sagging again immediately, but I didn’t hike them up till I was round the corner. I have my dignity.

I have come to the conclusion that I’ll never be intimidatingly cool, or even just intimidating and/or cool (either of which would’ve come in handy SO MANY TIMES in my life) but on the other hand…at least I’ve got some stories to tell. And you never need feel nervous about saying hello to me. Unless you’ve got a video camera and I’ve been lavishly adjusting my undergarments.

Also not intimidating: the recipes I have for you today. One, a simplified version of a beautiful Yotam Ottolenghi recipe – rice, mangoes, coconut, peanuts, chilli, mint – and the other, a little dish I came up with involving roasted cauliflower and whole spices and almonds.

I say simplified because I had so many moments of “well I can’t find that so I’ll use this” and “that’s a bit expensive, I’ll use this instead” and also I’m in bed and don’t have the mental capacity to get out of bed and find the Plenty cookbook. So this is my adaptation. A truly lazy dinner. You’re essentially cooking some rice and stirring stuff into it. But, as with any recipe of that tricksy and handsome man Ottolenghi, there’s so much beauty and freshness and bold flavour that it’s only you who need know how easy it really is.

Rice Salad with Mango, Coconut and Peanuts

Adapted from Ottolenghi’s Plenty.

  • 1/2 cup basmati rice
  • 1/2 cup long grain brown rice (OR just one cup basmati)
  • 1 tablespoon rice bran or peanut oil
  • 1/2 a ripe, but firm mango
  • 1 red capsicum
  • 1/3 cup peanuts
  • 1 red onion or a bunch of spring onions, finely sliced
  • 1 red chilli, finely sliced, or 2 teaspoons sambal oelek (which is what I used)
  • 1/2 cup shredded coconut or dessicated (but preferably shredded) (but I only had dessicated, so)
  • A handful each of mint and coriander

In a large pan with a lid, heat the rice grains in the oil for a minute or two, stirring a little to stop it burning. Tip in 2 1/2 cups water and a pinch of salt, bring to the boil then lower the heat, clamp on the lid, and leave slowly cooking away for about 15 minutes (although check for done-ness at 10). Allow to cool a little and tip into a bowl.

Roast the peanuts till darkened in the oven – it takes a little while but don’t ignore them. Fry the spring onions or red onion till crispy, thinly slice the capsicum and dice the mango flesh. Toast the coconut in a pan or spread it out on a baking sheet and use the same heat of the oven that you cooked the peanuts in, either way you want it to be light brown in colour.

Mix everything into the rice – carefully – and divide between two plates. Top with the herbs.

The right mix of raw and hot here – you’ve got the cooling, slippery, elusively fragrant mango and crisp juicy capsicum rubbing shoulders with almost-crunchy coconut, nutty (duh!) peanuts and the red chilli’s bite. Rice itself tastes beautiful – I don’t really appreciate it enough being a pasta fiend – but it really suits hanging out with these ingredients. Obviously it’s better if you can find shredded coconut but I promise the cheapest dessicated stuff will have its place once you toast the heck out of it. Cheers, Ottolenghi.

As for my recipe, Roasted Cauliflower with Toasted Whole Spices and Almonds it’s even lazier. Stick as many cauliflower florets as you like on a baking tray and roast them at a high heat – I went for 230 C, which is 450 F, till tinged thoroughly with brown. Towards the end – or even immediately after you turn off the heat on the oven – roast 1/4 cup whole almonds for five – ten minutes, till slightly darkened. In a pan, heat 1 teaspoon each of cumin seeds, coriander seeds, nigella seeds, and fennel seeds if you’ve got them. The two essentials are coriander and cumin, so play round if you like. Only do it for a minute or so, then remove from heat, stir in a shake of ground cinnamon and a pinch of salt, and tip onto a chopping board along with the almonds. Chop everything roughly (I’m not expecting much to happen here with the spices, just agitate them a little with the blade, it’s the nuts getting chopped that’s the main thing.) Arrange the cauliflower florets on a plate, drizzle with sesame oil, and sprinkle over all the nuts and seeds. Eat.

Viewed in close up, the seeds and nuts look all earthy and magical and like they should have the words “GAME OF THRONES” superimposed over the top (maybe just in my mind. How often can I use “it’s so late at night and I’m tired” as an excuse? All the times!)

More importantly, it’s delicious – all that heating and roasting and toasting brings out everything good about the ingredients. Coriander seeds have this addicting lemony-bitter-numbing quality while cumin seeds are more pungent and warm (it’s also possible my spices are ancient) while cauliflower cooked in this way is nut-ular and crisp and its flavours are echoed pleasingly in the chopped almonds.

The weekend happened, it was good in places and intense in others. Had people over spontaneously on Friday night to farewell some lovely but impermanent Swedes that we’d become friends with, on Saturday Tim and I had a necessary coffee at Customs and exercised our democratic right to vote; later in the day we gathered with the sort of people you need round when the outcome of lots of people exercising said right unfolds. The night became the morning but somehow we had the energy to plough on with weekend-y activities, buying vegetables and having cider with Kate and one of us witnessing a much needed win from the Wellington Phoenix (clue: it was Tim) all finishing up by making the meal that I’m presenting to you now.

Title via: I’ve read sneering things about her, I’ve read hyperbolic things about her, but when Arular was released it was one of the most exciting albums ever to interest my ears and I’ve been into M.I.A’s music ever since. Sunshowers from that album is where today’s title gets itself from.

Music lately:

Over at The Corner there’s a two-part post on favourite Flying Nun songs (Flying Nun being an important New Zealand record label) which not only presented me with some brilliant writing but also plenty of unheard new-old goodness to listen to. Including Garageland’s Struck.

The Marvelettes, Mr Postman; I love how chilled and restrained and yet disciplined and sharp the singing is on this track.

Next time: Whatever it is, I haven’t made it yet. It could be another practical dinner, it could be a link to a video of “frowning girl adjusts pantyhose in public: The remix!” which could possibly do considerably more for my hopes to write a cookbook than actually working on developing recipes and so on.

 

no boy, don’t speak now you just drive

19 Comments

Last time I promised a Christmas Cake – and recklessly did I make one, at 11pm after an evening of Viognier (where I learned both how to pronounce “Viognier” and also that I like Coopers Creek’s stuff). But even more reckless was my thinking that I could blog about the cake before this weekend just gone, where Tim and I drove up to Waiuku for an important family party, when we’ve had stuff on every night of the week. Perhaps reckless-est of all, on Sunday night after nine hours of travelling, I tried to blog. I didn’t achieve the state of sleeplessness-fueled focussed intensity I was hoping for. I just fell asleep. So finally, here we are.

And instead of Christmas Cake, today’s subject is Road Trip Snacks. I’ve never been on a road trip before – I know, what kind of friendless, half-hearted Kiwi am I – and this was really just a long trip which occurred via road but I’m claiming it and you can’t take it away from me. I’ve learned that writing on a laptop while in a car with barely-existent suspension and handling isn’t the easiest; the slightest tension is magnified by your ability to stare endlessly into the ever-approaching horizon (except Tim was all “yeah, nah, I didn’t notice that” so clearly whatever I was tense over was so subtly conveyed he didn’t notice it, meanwhile I thought I was being totally, point-makingly huffy.) Another thing I noticed is that when I’m in Wellington I put some effort into my clothes, but as soon as I get out of town I’m happy to shuffle round in trackpants, jandals and a saggy old singlet. And let us not forget the proliferation of roadside shops selling local crafts. I swear there’s more sheepskin shops per capita than there are both sheep and capita.

And snacks are of great importance. I started off trying to think of something healthy, veered towards “morale boosting” instead. When you’re several hours in and the countryside around you really isn’t providing much variety, a snack is as good as a holiday, not to mention if you actually have no driving skills, it allows you to feel smugly like you’re also bringing something to the table. Snack #1 is from one of my favourite new cookbooks, the brilliant Kitchen Coquette, and involved white chocolate, coco pops, and peppermint essence. Yes. That’s right. I’m a devotee of the white chocolate so I was expecting to like it and all, but I wasn’t anticipating this: it’s one of the more perfect things I’ve ever eaten. Honest.

If you can, try to get decent white chocolate since the taste of it is so prominent here. I use Whittakers because it’s extremely delicious. But also relatively affordable. White chocolate is a little fiddly to get right, and some stuff out there is loaded up with weird oils and flavourings in lieu of whatever it actually is that gets it to taste so magical. But not Whittakers. On the other hand, use the cheapest coco pops you can find, as they’re all much of a muchness and breakfast cereal is expensive than perfume. The nearest supermarket to me gatekeepingly only had the proper stuff, but the finished recipe was so good it was worth every cent.

White Chocolate Coco Pops Slice

(It’s called Peppermint Crispies in the book but with ingredients like this I really want to list them in the title.)

From Kitchen Coquette, by Katrina Meynink. I highly recommend it.

250g good white chocolate.
1 cup cocoa pops, puffs, snaps, or whatever you call them.
2 teaspoons peppermint essence (unless your pants are fancy and you have Boyajian Peppermint Oil, in which case use a couple of drops.)

Carefully melt the chocolate on the stovetop in a metal bowl sitting on top of a small pot of water that is half-full of simmering water. Throw the essence in and stir it round, which may make it sieze up a little – inexplicably – but persevere, tip in the coco pops and stir as best as you can.

Tip out onto a sheet of baking paper, flatten as best you can – try pressing down on it with another sheet of baking paper over the top – and don’t worry about rough edges or anything. Allow to set, then slice up. It will break naturally into rough jigsaw pieces instead of neat bars – all part of the charm.

Note: I feel the white chocolate + peppermint aspect of this is crucial, but if you’re unable to eat dairy, this would still be super alluring made with dark chocolate.

While I am not normally one to reach for the peppermint essence – it always makes me feel like toothpaste has fallen into my food – here it works stunningly, its icy heat cutting through the vanilla richness of the white chocolate and yet somehow, each mint-cooled inhale also enhances its buttery, melting-textured wonderfulness. The airy crunch of the coco pops amongst the surrounding white chocolate is surprisingly habit-forming, like edible bubble wrap. Something about the peppermint actually does wake up the brain a little as you trundle along. All told, a superior snack, and one that I feel truly lucky to know of.

Over on the other end of the snack horizon are these stunning Sesame Garlic Roast Almonds which I invented myself first to use in the Sexy Pasta back in March, but have adapted for more specific nut-eating purposes. Because they’re too good to just scatter over pasta. Scatter ’em over your tastebuds too (but not the floor of your car because the scents of garlic and sesame are persistant.)

.

Sesame Garlic Roast Almonds

You could of course use any nut here, but almonds have a sweet edge and a popcorn-crisp texture once roasted and they’re very reasonably priced in bulk at Moore Wilson – which is why they’re my go-to fancy nut.

2 cups whole almonds, labelled “Dessert Almonds” on my bag.
1 tablespoon sesame oil
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 heaped teaspoon brown sugar
Generous pinch salt

Set your oven to 200 C/400 F. Mix everything together in a bowl before tipping it out onto an oven tray. Putting a sheet of baking paper on it before doing this will save you a lot of dishes hassle. Roast the nuts for as long as you dare, until they’re darkened somewhat and smell amazing. Keep an eye on them though because it’s a fine line between roast and burnt. Allow to cool then tip into a container.

Also rivetingly good with their snappish texture and Inception-like nuttiness within nuttiness. And garlic, with its rich, rounded oniony flavour, is a far more suitable friend of the nut than chili, in my opinion. In case you’re wondering what the stuff in the photo is, I just threw the sugar over without mixing it in properly, which meant that lumps of it bubbled up under the oven’s heat and turned into a kind of garlickly brittle – strangely good. While the White Chocolate Coco Puff Peppermint slice has the edge in terms of immediate appeal, every time we brought these out to snack on we ended up grabbing them by the handful.

All that aside, we did have a terrific time up home – I got to hang out with my dear Nana a lot; see Tim dressed up as a Disney prince (veered between calling him Prince XYZ since they were never that interesting in the movies anyway, and calling him Prince Floribund which I just thought was funny) for the party we went to, which was a cartoon-themed dress-up one, in case you’re wondering what brought this alarming behavior on. I was Sleeping Beauty, Mum and Dad were an Ugly Sister and Dick Dastardly respectively, and my brother went as Jack Skillington. There was also a massive supper, a pudding buffet, beautiful speeches and a very cool birthday lady dressed as Sailor Moon. Absolutely worth the harrowingly long drive there and back!

Finally, and importantly, I saw Poppy the Kitten again who has grown just a tiny bit and has mellowed out slightly – she’s less of a baby raptor now, and will actually let you hold her without trying to claw out your nostrils. I did wake up with an ominous paw resting on my neck, but it turned out she was just using me as an overbridge so she could have a punch-up with the curtains. At 3am.
_____________________________________________________________
Title via: Bic Runga, lady of big achievements, with her early song Drive. I’ve loved this quiet, thoughtful song ever since Dad made me watch it on Video Hits or Max TV or something, saying “she’s going to be huge one day.” Shrewd, Dad.
_____________________________________________________________

Music lately:

I didn’t have time to make any kind of iPod playlist, and Tim’s sister’s car, which we swapped for on the way up as our ute drinks up petrol like it’s coming from one of those refill cups at Burger King, didn’t have anything to plug the ipod into. We ended up listening to National Radio and learning a thing or two, because we couldn’t find anything music-wise despite flicking obsessively through the stations.

On the last stretch of road home, having swapped back to the ute where we could plug in the ipod, we listened to Gil Scott-Heron’s Winter In America and I’m New Here – ideal music for anytime, not just cars. But it felt particularly right just then.
______________________________________________________________
Next time: the Christmas cake! That said, I have to taste it first to make sure it’s okay. But I also want to ice it. Dilemma. 

am I ever gonna see my wedding day?

13 Comments

To sleep, perchance to dream, that is the question…is not actually what Hamlet said, but I’ve helpfully paraphrased. It seems I’m either pursuing or avoiding sleep, but hardly ever actually just having it when I should be. Damn you elusive sleep you! (and that definitely wasn’t Shakespeare, although it’s fun to imagine Hamlet saying it while shaking his fist so hard his pantaloons start to flap around.) Luckily this recipe for Cambodian Wedding Day Dip is so easy you could make it in while sleep deprived, but equally it’s so loaded with aggressive flavours that it wakes you up fast like one of those dreams where you’re walking along and then all of a sudden you trip over and slide into your own bed like an elaborate home-run in that sport with the home runs. (I’m just playing, I know it’s softball – I was so dedicated to the Baby Sitters Club that I never once skipped the boring chapters about Kristy’s team that she coached.)

The knife really doesn’t have any purpose here but I’m so not good at these exposition type shots and it just felt right to put it there, okay?

My current state of sleepiness is self-inflicted though – last night Tim and I met up with our friends Pia and Fiona (Piona!) and went to this park on Mt Vic to have a picnic and watch the fireworks. They’re two of the nicest, funnest people we know and excellent hosts – Pia was all “we made a fancy salad” and I was all “I know, I can see it” while having their beetroot and chickpea salad and then she was all “no, this!” and pulled out another amazing salad with sliced oranges and black olives. After the fireworks (which were spectacular, although not quite as exciting as Pia running from flames like an action hero when one of her own fireworks fell over after being lit) they then invited us to play Cranium with Fiona’s sister and their friends, which went on till 2am. It may not sound so cool, but correctly identify Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat song after your teammate hums three bars of it and see how cool you feel.

Despite this ongoing feeling that I’m running towards something that keeps moving further away, this week has, upon reflection, been full of really good things. I’m going to try to keep this succinct: Broadway Bites is the blog set up by these actual Broadway stars like Adam Chanler-Berat of Next to Normal and Andy Senor Jr from a million different casts of RENT, including the international tour with Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp, and Matt Shingledecker from Spring Awakening. And all three of them are in RENT’s off-Broadway revival. And they ran this competition on their blog where you email in your favourite breakfast recipe and so I did (these two) not even thinking I’d hear anything from it, and then – to take us back to the start of the story – I got this tweet from them saying I’d won, and it linked to this video of them having made the recipe and talking about it and making a porridge recipe I sent them and performing in the musical that this blog was named for. And tweeting me. To sum up: Ha-whaaa? While there’s no reason people on Broadway should be interested in this blog just because I talk about Broadway musicals in relation to food, I’ve also always dreamed of this happening, ever since I started writing it four years ago. Now if the amazing Julia Murney could just check out my recipe for pancakes… (that’s a Broadway injoke, sorry everyone.)

Then I get this parcel from Kate, who Tim and I stayed with in Oxford earlier this year – remember, her and her husband were complete strangers to us but they were from New Zealand and she liked my blog? We had a fantastic time and they were lovely of course, and when she emailed asking for my address because she had something to send me for my blog’s fourth birthday, I was expecting, say, a novelty keyring, but it was in fact a cookbook almost but not quite as gigantic as author Hugh Fearnley-Whittingsall’s name, and entirely dedicated to vegetarian recipes, which I love.

This recipe comes from that cookbook and as I said, it’s called Cambodian Wedding Day Dip, which is a pretty romantic name because it’s not only a food but it also sounds like a cool dance. The ingredients are the kind that I float towards like a moth to a light source – peanut butter, coconut milk, chili – plus plenty of chopped up mushrooms – all of which politely resist overpowering each other and instead all let each other shine gently as they roll over your tastebuds. Creamy, nutty sweetness respectfully busting a move with spicy, earthy smoky flavours.

It’s next-level delicious, somehow showcasing the richness of the peanut butter and coconut milk without tasting like you’re eating satay sauce (not a bad thing, I love satay sauce – it’s just different) and you don’t even need to be having a wedding to dip sliced up vegetables in it. It’s worth keeping in mind that the finished product is essentially a pale brown paste, hence my liberal carpeting of coriander leaves in the photos. Coriander is like the icing sugar of the savoury world: makes everything look all good again. Tonight Tim had it over rice for dinner, I’d eaten so much of it during the cooking process, that I was too full for that kind of commitment. But not to the point where I couldn’t sneak out later and eat some dip and then cry “Agh! So Full! What Hath I Wrought!” like Hamlet totally would.

Truly. That stack of crackers – with which this Cambodian Wedding Day Dip is ideal – was much, much higher when I started taking these photos. Kate – thanks so much again for sending this to me and I totally recommend this recipe.

Cambodian Wedding Day Dip

500g chestnut mushrooms (confession: used plain old button mushrooms. All I could find)
1 tablespoon oil (I use rice bran)
1 small red chilli, finely chopped (I used a tablespoon of sambal oelek, it’s what I had)
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tablespoon curry powder or mild curry paste (further confession: the vagueness of this direction and my lack of any curry paste whatsoever led me to leave this out and shake in a little cinnamon and ground cumin, some weird instinct kicking in I guess.)
2 tablespoons crunchy peanut butter (confession: I followed this step exactly)
1 x 400ml can coconut milk
Juice of half a lime (used a lemon, had no lime)
Dash of soy sauce
Coriander leaves (optional, but used them because I actually had them).


Finely dice the mushrooms, or blitz them in the food processor. Not toooo fine – you want them to be the size of, say…I can’t actually think but you want them bigger than grains of rice, okay? Like 4mm square, ish. Heat the oil in a pan and fry the mushrooms, stirring while the liquid in them appears and then evaporates. Add the chili and the garlic, and cook a little further, before adding the peanut butter and curry paste (if you’ve got it) and stirring through the mushrooms. Tip in the coconut milk, and then let it bubble away, stirring often so it doesn’t burn, till it reduces down and is much thicker.

Those weren’t the only good things that happened this week though, I know, what kind of happy-go-lucky weirdos are we? Not that happy-go-lucky, I promise you. I for one, am more like clumsy-go-anxious. But sometimes you can actually force happy-go-luckiness to come your way, like when you throw a Simpsons party and invite your friends round and make a giant donut and floor-pie and an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet and nuts’n’gum. And your friends bring twinkies and rib-wiches and candy. And you all drink Skittlebrau. It was amazing fun. I’m going to be writing about it for 3news.co.nz’s National News section (just kidding, it’s under lifestyle) so if you ever get the urge to throw yourself a similar party, you’ll know how. So many people came along even though it was a very last-minute thing, the sort of people that are so good for your soul that all you can hope is that you provide some kind of similar function in return.

Title via: Wedding Bell Blues by the late Laura Nyro. Her voice is stunning, this song is all sad and poignant, and when you put the two together, my stars it is something. Props for the cool name too, Nyro.

Music lately:

SWV, It’s All About U. Some 90s R’n’B is so gold that while you’re listening to it, it feels better than any music of any other genre ever. Not that it’s a competition, you can like more than one thing. What I’m saying is, I love this song.

Erykah Badu is coming to New Zealand! That’s good. But it’s to a festival that’s far, far away from Wellington. That’s not so good. Might have to get my vicarious and much cheaper thrills by just playing more of her amazing music.

Next time: I made some frozen yoghurt! But I also made more things from this book. I think frozen yoghurt will win though.

"and one pasta with meatless balls (ew)"

11 Comments

It hasn’t been all that long since I’ve blogged last but it feels like it – to me at least – and for a while I just stared at the photos of the quinoa I made feeling a bit “meh” and disconnected from it. Then the more I looked at the photos, the more I remembered how delicious it was and now I’m feeling all enthusiastic about this recipe again.

So why’s it been a while since I’ve blogged? On Friday afternoon, Tim and I left the city to stay in Wairoa with his grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins, sisters, mother…and some awesomely cute canaries that his grandad has been keeping. One of them honestly looks like its mum gave it a bowlcut, the feathers on top of its head all sprayed out flat give it the most adorably vexed expression. I tried to get a photo but it didn’t work. I did, however, get a photo of one of their cats, an enormous thing that would come and lean heavily on you like a dog does, and which would luxuriate in the sun like so – in the sort of way that makes your own lazing around seem inelegant and stiff-ankled in comparison.

But, back to stuff that I ate ages ago. After a cool lady that I work with mentioned that she’d successfully imitated a particular dish from Deluxe cafe using quinoa, I was inspired to try it myself, only making it completely vegan – why not? You’re already using quinoa, might as well go all out. And then I wanted to modify it further, to make a kind of meatballs-type recipe. I didn’t like the name “quinoa balls” and couldn’t think of what to call these nubbly orbs – something about “BALLS” in a food title to me indicates it’s only imitating something else, plus, you know, the anatomical description does the dish no favours. (“Groin!”) Strangely, meatballs themselves manage to safely avoid both connotations.

The quinoa ended up solving this issue for me, even though I didn’t see it as a good thing at first. See, the quinoa would not be balled. See the above picture? You can spot the granules already escaping at the edges, unwilling to maintain sphericality, but I can’t even express the amount of coaxing and spooning and rolling that it took just to get them to that shoddy, crumbling state. Nonetheless, I persevered and baked them, thinking that the heat might bind them together. It didn’t. They got even more crumbly and reluctant. In fact, of the sixteen balls that I put my heart, soul, and flavoursome sweat into rolling, but one survived the journey.

So now it’s just Baked Quinoa with Miso Tomato Sauce, and I don’t have to worry about the whole “balls” naming issue. It took me some time to get to this calm place of acceptance, though. One ball. Out of sixteen.

The tomato sauce is particularly magical, with a secret ingredient. And that ingredient is Peanut Butter. Yes. It thickens the sauce up a treat, and gives it an ever-so-slight nutty richness without tasting like a piece of toast fell in your sauce by mistake. Don’t leave it out! Unless you’re allergic to nuts, but you didn’t need me to tell you that.

Baked Quinoa With Miso Tomato Sauce (The M in Miso is also for “Magically Delicious”) 

1 cup quinoa
3 tablespoons sesame seeds
3 tablespoons poppy seeds
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
3 tablespoons tahini, or hummus if you have it
1 teaspoon ground cumin

Sauce 

1 can tomatoes, preferably the chopped kind
1 teaspoon dijon mustard (or grainy, if that’s all you’ve got)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon hot sauce (or more or none at all if you like)
1 tablespoon white miso paste
1-2 tablespoons peanut butter (or tahini, if you prefer)
A few tablespoons fresh thyme leaves

Rocket and almonds to serve.

Set your oven to 200 C.

Rinse the quinoa in a sieve under cold water – helps get the inevitable dust off – and tip into a pan which has about three cups of water in it. Bring to the boil and cook till the grains are tender, pale and fluffy. Drain, back in that same sieve if you like, and tip into a bowl. Mix in the rest of the ingredients, season to taste, and spread across the base of a small roasting dish. (Line the dish with baking paper if you like – easy cleanup, hey-ohh!) Bake for 15 minutes.

Empty the can of tomatoes into a pan, then fill it halfway up again with water and tip that in the pan too. Add all the sauce ingredients except the thyme – using your wooden spoon to break up the peanut butter and miso and get it mixed in – then bring to the boil and allow to bubble away for a couple of minutes while stirring, till thickened some. 

Take the quinoa out of the oven, pour over the sauce, then return to the oven for another ten minutes. Strew with rocket leaves and almonds, and serve with pride.

Despite causing me some trouble initially, this is exceptionally good-tasting stuff. The quinoa’s weightless texture and nutty flavour is emphasised with the addition of poppyseeds and sesame seeds, the sauce covering the deliciousness spectrum from salty to rich to sweet. Pour it over pasta or rice or even over real meatballs, it’s supremely lovely.

And yeah, the rugby world cup final happened and we won. My disinterest in the game remains, but as everyone else was watching it on Sunday night at Tim’s grandparents’ it would’ve been rude not to play along. So I offered some ideas for the drinking game: 1) have a sip every time the commentators indulge in outrageous hyperbole like “a nation at a standstill”, and 2) every time the word “groin” is mentioned we all cry “GROIN!” and sip our drink. I’m not actually big on drinking games, preferring to just drink in my own time, but fear not – it was more about coming up with rules than anything else, and we only had one drink each. I also, with not unnoticed irony, was the one of the whole rugby-interested crowd who managed to get the closest prediction of when the first try scored would be and what the final score would be. Flummoxedly baffled doesn’t even cover it.
___________________________________________________________

Title via: the Broadway musical RENT – again! – and the Act 1 closer La Vie Boheme. Not to write an essay – I could – but I like this bit in the song, because it really does swirl round in a flurry of earnestness but then the waiter appears talking about their orders for miso soup and seaweed salad and tofu and so on, as if to say just the sort of thing you’d expect from them, thus subverting the earnestness somewhat. Anyway. That’s a story for another (hotly-anticipated, no doubt) essay. As always with RENT, I direct you towards both the movie version and the original Broadway version from opening night, 1996.
__________________________________________________________

Music lately:

One of the fun thing about long car journeys is playing DJ. I didn’t have the time to make an actual playlist (just another thing I didn’t have time for!) so instead I went through the songs alphabetically and just chose one when it took my fancy. There’s not much more fun when you’ve been going round winding roads and the driver’s feeling weary, to put on Orinocco Flow and yell “Best Car Song Ever! SAIL AWAY SAIL AWAY SAIL AWAY!” It’s always appreciated.

I also love this song Best of Me by local singer Ria Hall. Love that there’s a mix of English and Te Reo in there and also that the station I listen to is thrashing it at the moment.
___________________________________________________________
Next time: I’m making a pavlova, and if it works out alright, you’ll be seeing it here. 

girls would turn the color of the avocado when he would drive down their street in his el dorado

20 Comments

Magical things, avocados.

But first a BIG thank you, as big as the words Thank You made out of colourful rubber and inflated to the size of a forty-foot building, with a noble capybara balancing on top of it looking thoughtfully into the distance, for all the nice comments and emails about my last blog post. From the bottom of my chocolate-iced heart.

Back to avocados; aren’t they exciting? Like nature’s version of rich creamery butter, kept in an endearingly curvaceous, bumpy casing. Nutty and smooth and yes, buttery, I love it mashed into guacamole to be scooped up with corn chips, spread on toast for a breakfast treat anytime of day, or sliced into a bowl of salad so that you can try and surreptitiously dig for it all with the spoons when serving yourself.

But to turn them into pudding? Inconceivable!

Conceive of this. I know I go on about Hannah at Wayfaring Chocolate a fair bit, so I’ll try and squash down the enthusiasm a little here so I don’t sound like some kind of creepy person who waits outside your window and cries “the hunter has become the hunted!” No, it’s not like that. It’s just that she’s got one of my favourite food blogs in the world, is all. And while I’ve heard of using avocados in non-savoury recipes, it was she who prised open my eyes to how delicious and non-threatening it could be. Through the medium of raw vegan brownies. Regular baked brownies have their place (and that place is a table marked “DELICIOUS THINGS HERE, PLEASE”) but it’s fun to push the limits of creativity in the kitchen sometimes by restricting your parameters. Which is what Hannah did with this amazingly delicious recipe.

Yes, those are useless-ish stripy novelty straws: they make my heart soar, and what price soaring? Occasionally I buy into pretty things, and occasionally…I literally buy them. Treat yo’self.
A daring mixture of dates and nuts are whizzed up in a food processor with cocoa to form the base, and then the power of a whole avocado is harnessed to create the icing. It’s amazing – you add golden syrup and cocoa and suddenly it turns into this creamy, darkly chocolatey, shiny ganache-like substance.
Unfortunately when I busted anticipationally into the avocado it wasn’t entirely usable – instead of two bowl-like halves offering up smooth, unbroken greenness, there were significant portions that were bruised and horribly stringy. I scooped out what was salvageable, and this is why the layer of icing on my brownies is sadly thin. But another time, another avocado. 
Raw Vegan Chocolate Brownies with Spectacular Avocado Icing

Adapted slightly, and respectfully, from Hannah’s recipe which she adapted from another recipe of her own anyway: inception! Feel free however to just click through to hers.

2 cups nuts: I used a mixture of almonds and pecans, but near-on anything would suit. 
2 cups dates, roughly sliced
1/3 cup cocoa powder

Blend the living heck out of these ingredients in a food processor. It may take some time to come together. Eventually it will be a fine-ish, crumbly mixture of tiny ingredient particles. Turn it out into a baking dish, roughly 20cm square or a little bigger or smaller. Press down on it with a spoon, freeze while you make the icing.

1 ripe, perfect avocado
2 tablespoons golden syrup 
2 tablespoons cocoa
2 teaspoons vanilla extract (optional, by which I mean I forgot)
Small pinch of salt

Thoroughly clean out your food processor, then blend all of the above till smooth and shiny and amazing. Add more of anything to taste, then spread evenly across the base. Return to the freezer, slice once ‘set’.

I admit: I had issues making this. I increased the base quantities a bit from Hannah’s recipe and I don’t know if it was because of that, but the food processor just Would. Not. Break. Them. Down. Rather than being sliced up, it was like the blades were some kind of carnival ride for the dates and nuts to scoot round on. I’d be processing the heck out of it, take the lid off, look in: perfect, whole almonds and dates. Stir it round, repeat. Look in: perfect, unblemished nuts and dates. So confusing. I’m not sure if I should’ve soaked the dates first or something but eventually, eventually, they started to break down. This is why I recommend you chop them first.

But despite that, as long as you own a food processor these are a complete breeze to make, and even though I’ve only eaten a few pieces I know I’m going to make this again, and often. For one thing, to get a better quantity of icing. For another thing, to try out all the different flavours (except carob, I can’t go for that) like having maple syrup in the icing or walnuts in the base. This is incredibly delicious stuff – a little crumbly, although I suspect that’s my own fault – but caramelly and dark and biscuity and cold and wonderful. Something about the texture of the dates and the intensity of the cocoa makes it taste and feel almost like solid chocolate. And the icing – oh my. Even with the mean scraping of it across the top it’s almost aggressively luscious, showing how avocados in sweet things makes total sense – the buttery flavour, its yielding texture, and whipped-cream body. And they’re vegan and gluten-free! (Well I’m not sure if golden syrup is strictly vegan, but it seems to be…if not, just use maple syrup as per her recipe.)

Thanks Hannah – and I urge you to run, not walk, to her blog and read through all the other good things she’s come up with.

What have we been up to lately, apart from eating all this brownie? Went to the SPCA to drop off some newspapers but also to hang out with the beautiful cats and dogs there for a bit – seriously, I want them all. Baddddd. Words can only hint at how cool the cats were and at the depths of love in the dogs’ eyes. I just wish we had the space! We were a little slow-moving that day though because what started off as a spontaneous BYO dinner to toast Jo’s job success on the previous night had escalated into a spontaneous-er wingding at our place. On Sunday I went with Tim to the Wellington Phoenix’s first football game of the season (The Pheen, as I call them, but it doesn’t seem to be catching on). It almost didn’t happen – the internet cafe I usually go to was inexplicably full, then when I finally found another one my e-ticket refused to print for ages. The upshot of it was that arriving late to the stadium meant I didn’t suffer that mid-point slump – as I really don’t like sports in the first place, my attention span is not cut out for ninety minutes of people running round kicking a ball. Anyway, they won, which was super pleasant. Hooray for weekends.
_______________________________________________________
Title via: The laconic and shambling but nonetheless exciting Pablo Picasso, by the Modern Lovers. LOVE this band. Not least for the fact that they use the word avocado in this song.
_______________________________________________________

Music lately: 

Shout, Isley Brothers. I know I say this about so many songs, but this has just got to be one of the best songs in the world. It’s beautiful.

Badd Energy, Third Eye – am a huge Coco Solid (she who makes up part of this act) fan so clicked through the moment I saw a link to this. While it stands up easily on its own, if you can watch the video you’re in for some fun times. Fun cats-wearing-robes-and-shooting-at-you times.
_______________________________________________________
Next time: I tried making quinoa balls tonight, kinda like meatballs, and while they predictably fell to bits what was there tasted SO SO good and so that’ll likely be my next blog post.

how do you measure, measure a year?

22 Comments

…or four years, even. HungryandFrozen, this very blog that you are granting the power of your eyeballs to, is now four years old! How significant! To me! There’s no “it’s our birthday but you get the presents” happening here because I only just remembered a few days ago, and I’m not going to write anything profound that also sums up my whole life up until this point – but kindly let me indulge in some hazy-eyed pridefulness (I warn you, I’m writing this very late at night, so I may run into lengthy hyperbole even more so than usual.) HungryandFrozen has grown and changed and thankfully improved with me through the years, and become an important, central part of my life. Which might be a weird thing to say about a website, but consider that it has allowed me…

– to document my life
– to channel the millions of ideas flying in my head into something so said head doesn’t fall off from the pressure build-up
– to help the village I grew up in
– to get free accommodation with strangers in Oxford (thanks again, Kate!)
– to make some of the best new friends ever (the kind you feel instantly able to tell all your secrets to and in turn never whisper theirs to anyone)
– to be on the cover of a magazine in all my resolutely unphotogenic glory
– to get a radio interview
– to be nominated for (but not win, sniffle) cool awards
– to attempt to become a kind of Ruth Reichl-esque double act with Tim while reviewing cafes for a national paper
– to learn from others’ writing and photography
– to be certain that I’d be kindred spirits with certain other faraway food bloggers
– and to force my dreams upon you all in the hopes that if I say them enough and work hard enough they’ve just got to come true eventually.

And to create many a recklessly long and indulgently unedited sentence. It took me a while for the format to settle into this happy little rut with strict, unchanging elements: long-form, title quoting/mangling a song I like (or occasionally an exceptional TV/movie quote), recipe included, but never just a recipe, always with life and thoughts thrown round it like a cape – and it’s not one I plan on straying from.

Let me tell you a story: Tim and I first moved to Wellington in early 2006 and we had very little money (or things – for about three months our bed was two single mattresses pushed together on the floor, with all the softness and back support of a weet-bix.) Tim forwent his insulin (kidding! I’m kidding so hard I can’t even get to the end of the sentence before I interrupt to reassure you it’s not true) so I could buy Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat. I loved cooking so much and she had a way of presenting every meal, no matter how simple, as if it was something exciting for you to be doing for yourself. Like that’s how you deserved to eat. Again, with the no-money thing, if I ever cooked a recipe from her book it felt like I should photograph it, because it was such a big exciting deal, every dinner an occasion. I guess that’s where the whole documentation of what I eat vibe came about. Not a great story, but…it’s true. And now, here’s a cake.

This cake has nothing to do with my blog being four years old, it’s just a coincidence. It’s also a Hummingbird Cake, from the American South, where the food is good. 

I didn’t bother shifting the mess in the background of this photo, because I was lazy, but it was symbolic of the mess this cake itself caused – while stirring up the cream cheese icing I moved my spoon a little too sharply through the mixture and ended up shifting a dust-cloud of icing sugar all over myself. I was wearing a wooly jumper at the time and the icing sugar gleefully burrowed into its fibres. But still I caked on.

How this came about was that Tim brought home some uneaten bananas from his work. I could’ve turned them into modest muffins or banana bread, but uninspired by those this time round I turned instead to Hummingbird cake. What is this? Imagine banana cake…but with pineapple in it too, studded with pecans, double-layered and thickly painted with cream cheese icing. It’s like a really well-accessorised banana cake (the pecans would so be the earrings) (okay, on a roll here, the icing on top would be the cape, the icing in the middle a belt, and the pineapples…stick on diamantes? Sparkly hairpins?)

It’s the sort of thing I’d be tempted to tinker further with, in the name of improvement – adding coconut, mangoes, rum, grated carrots, white chocolate, maple syrup, that kind of thing. But believe me when I say it’s beautiful as is – anything else added would be delicious, but I wanted to try it in its purest form first. That said, I did spread some lemon curd between the layers. So, I guess I didn’t quite listen to own lofty advice. That alone was the extent of my tinkering, I swear. 

While it might look terrifyingly well-stacked, for one thing there were some recipes calling for triple layers, and for another thing, as with many recipes that I present here, there are options. As this makes two hefty cakes which you then sit on top of each other, you could always just halve the mixture and still be having a good time. The cream cheese icing is a little non-negotiable, but leave it off and the recipe’s suddenly dairy-free. Pecans, again, give it that proper southern vibe, but they are expensive – I believe their cheaper friend, the walnut, would be a more than delicious substitute.

Hummingbird Cake

Recipe via this one I found at The Enquirer – thanks, Enquirer!

3 eggs
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup oil (I use rice bran)
2 cups mashed ripe bananas (about 4 bananas)
1 can crushed pineapple
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda 
1 teaspoon salt

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and take two 22cm caketins and line them with baking paper. If you’re halving this, the three eggs are going to be an issue…My guess would be to use two eggs.

Whisk together the eggs, oil and sugar till frothy, then mix in the fruits and the cinnamon. Sift in the dry ingredients, fold together, then divide evenly between the two tins. Smooth out the surface with a spoon. Bake for about an hour until done – two cakes in the oven dilutes the heat a bit, I had to bake one of the layers for at least another half hour.

Icing: 

2 x 250 containers cream cheese
Icing sugar

This is going to make WAY more than you need, but I suspect that just one container of cream cheese wouldn’t be quite enough. I’m happy to be proven wrong though. Make sure your cream cheese is at room temperature – that’s important, it’s like trying to stir a brick otherwise – and whisk it up till smooth. Stir it icing sugar, probably around 250g but just keep going till it’s very thick and doesn’t look like it’s going to slide off the cake at the first chance. 

Sit one of the cakes on a plate, and spread it thickly with cream cheese icing, leaving about an inch border free to allow for spreading. Sit the second cake on top, and thickly spread this with the icing too. Most cakes you see online have the sides iced too, but I suspected, probably correctly, that my icing would just fall off. You could always follow the recipe I linked through to, which uses butter in the icing and is therefore more likely to be secure. 
The swiftest of glances at the ingredients list will mean it’s no surprise how luscious and gorgeous this cake is, but let me tell you anyway. Rich-textured with all that banana, gratifyingly enormous, with the summery, juicy flavour of pineapple, the smoky, soft crunch of the pecans, and the sticky, sharp cream cheese icing glueing it all together. It’s gloriously un-sensible and yet it’s not too much more effort than a regular banana cake, and what little effort you do have to put in is rewarded with some outrageous amounts of deliciousness.
Speaking of un-sensible, I made a new tutorial video! 

This one’s all about making bread, so if this intrigues you in the very slightest and you’ve got a spare ten minutes, kindly hit that play button.
Hard to believe it’s already mid-October. It’s also hard to believe the horrible, terrible situation in Tauranga with the Rena oil spill – I’m not going to say anything about it in case I say too much, but it makes me feel sick, sad and angry. 
So what next? I love this blog and I’m in no way ready to retire and receive my cut-glass bowl or gold watch. I guess I’ll keep working on my list, keep trying to discover recipes, keep writing and climbing that mountain (totally metaphorical, I’d never climb an actual mountain…never again) and just generally do things that involve the word “keep”. Thanks so much, from the bottom of my butter-clogged heart, to everyone who was there from the start (that’s you, Mum and Nanna) to everyone who’s stuck around, and basically to everyone who’s ever given me their time. Because, while the love of food and writing about it is strong, the knowledge that there are people out there reading this every time something new crops up is what really keeps me coming back here. 
THANK YOU. 
_____________________________________________________
Title via: Since this blog started with the musical RENT it might as well have a mid-point reflection with RENT too. This song is so, so very beautiful and I recommend aggressively that you watch both the original Broadway cast version and the movie version featuring many of the original Broadway cast. As a shrewd youtube commenter said, “Whoever disliked this cant Measure”.
_____________________________________________________
Music lately:
I honestly nearly cried when I listened to Tina Turner singing River Deep Mountain High recently, I think I was a bit underslept, to be fair, but the combination of the incredible, soaring melody and her wobbly, emotional voice hit me like a pie to the face. An emotional pie.

_____________________________________________________

Next time: Not nearly as much emotion, for one thing. I’ve got ideas, but I don’t have anything actual, so we will see.


Also: editing this to submit it to Sweet New Zealand – monthly blogging event created by Alessandra Zecchini, and this month hosted by lovely Sue of Couscous and Consciousness. Late, but not so late…that it’s too late.

she gets too hungry, for dinner at eight

19 Comments
I am a tired person these days. It’s because I think about this blog a lot. I think about what I can do on it. I think about whether other people are thinking about it, loving it as much as I do. I stay up late writing stuff. I write stuff early in the morning. I’m not sure if it’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to admit, but it’s true. When I finally go to bed at night, instead of relaxing into a powerful sleep, my silly brain is all “meeean now’s my chance to brainstorm! Get it? I’m a brain! Time to plan a squillion smurfillion things…to stay awake and think. Hard.” My kingdom for a more cooperative brain! (Or as some dry fellow once said, “if I only had a brain!“) (Also I had a late night last night at a party for cool lady Kim’s birthday. Double tiredness! But this was the good kind at least.)
Conversely, I’ll often arrive at needing to make dinner, one of my favourite times of the day, and my brain’ll be all “umm…there’s cookbooks everywhere, and yet…I can’t even?” However this week, despite not sleeping all that much and having a brain whittled down to a nub, I somehow managed to get some spontaneous inspiration happening. So I made sure I remembered what I did. I don’t have the monopoly on tiredness, needing to eat and wanting something delicious all at the same time, and these two hasty dinners I made recently might work for you too.
Spicy Tomatoes and Chickpeas with Coconut Milk.
Fun because: three cans of stuff = dinner. And it takes all of seven minutes and costs hardly anything.
Pasta with Bacon, Pears, Pecans, Rocket
Fun because: you can change heaps of the ingredients for other things you have. 

Spicy Chickpeas with Tomatoes and Coconut Milk


1 can tomatoes
1 can chickpeas
1 can coconut milk 
1 teaspoon each of the following: cumin seeds, coriander seeds, cinnamon, nigella seeds…oh, whatever you like, really, but that’s a good mix)
1 tablespoon chilli sauce
1 onion
Optional – to garnish – plain yoghurt, coriander, more coriander seeds.


Disclosure: my canned tomatoes were the cherry kind, and my chickpeas were “brun” because I go in for fancy stuff like that, but the plainest of plain stuff will be great too.


Slice up the onion, and fry it in a little oil over a good fierce heat till browned. Tip in the drained chickpeas, the tomatoes (with their juice), the spices, and the chilli sauce and let it come to the boil. Simmer away, stirring, for a couple of minutes, then pour in as much coconut milk as you like, stir, and remove from the heat. Divide between two bowls, and top with whatever garnish you fancy. 

We got delicious, quilt-sized garlic naans from Aaina (at 255 Cuba Street) and they were perfect for absorbing up this soupy spicy mess and making it feel like a feast. The mild coconut milk seeps into the spiced up tomatoes, the sturdy chickpeas give it some body – add a little chilli sauce and it’s gonna rock your pants. It’s vegan till you add the yoghurt – which isn’t even necessary, you could just drizzle over whatever’s clung to the coconut milk can – completely gluten free too.



Pasta with Bacon, Pears, Pecans and Rocket


This was inspired by a recipe of Al Brown’s in the latest Cuisine magazine. I admit, I tried getting in touch with my deeply Germanic roots by making Spaetzle, a kind of pasta dish that I love but have only ever had made for me. The recipe didn’t quite work for me…like the pasta ended up delicious but the dough was like the strongest adhesive and wouldn’t go through the colander like it should and was a big complicated messy mess. I recommend you just use regular pasta.


200g pasta
100g streaky bacon, cut into small squares.
1 pear, cored and sliced.
Butter.
Handful of rocket
Handful of pecans
Thyme leaves


Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil, and cook your pasta till…it’s cooked. Meanwhile, heat up a little butter in a saucepan and fry your bacon till nearly crisp, then add the pear slices. Let them get a good amount of heat on each side so they colour up a bit, then tip it all onto a plate and cover with tinfoil to keep warm. Hot trick: tip it onto your plate so you get extra bacony-flavour goodness when it’s all served up. In that same pan, quickly toast the pecans. Drain the pasta thoroughly, add it to the pan along with the bacon and the pears, stir it all together, and divide between two plates. Cover with rocket and thyme leaves and serve. 

It’s one of those dinners that might not look like much – almost like a bunch of different garnishes all piled on top of each other, masquerading as a proper meal. But hear me out. You’ve got the salty, butter-fried crisp bacon, the caramelised and juicily sweet pears, and toasty, softly crunchy pecans all twirled into your pasta. Cover it in a peppery tangle of rocket, both virtuous and visually sprucing and a few sprigs of thyme just because, and it’s honestly tastebud magic right there. 
Apart from how spectacularly excellent it tastes, it’s also versatile as: use whatever pasta you like, for a start, or even something like leftover boiled potatoes that have been fried in butter. The bacon’s optional, the pecans – they aren’t always cheap – could be walnuts or almonds or even sunflower or pumpkin seeds. Rocket could be swapped for spinach or any other green stuff you fancy, the pear could be a green apple…see? 
Despite my brain being like a crumbly old Ryvita, it has been a fantastic weekend – lurking with friends old and new, drinking tea and cider and vodka, making up ice cream, practicing cornrowing Tim’s hair so he can look like Ron Swanson for Halloween (I’m going to be Elphabaaaa!) reading in the sun, admiring Snacks the goldfish, that kind of thing. The kind of weekend you wish it could be every weekend…
…it’s also now time to get started on fulfilling the tasks on my List which I haven’t really properly finalised yet (maybe I should add “finish list” to my list?)
________________________________________________________
Title via: there are literally zillions of awesome versions of The Lady Is A Tramp, but the most recent to take my fancy is a duet by Lady Gaga and Tony Bennet – am not a fan of her music or anything but she’s incredible in this. 
________________________________________________________
Music lately:
Wooden Shjips, Lazy Bones. Rather like it.
Not Fade Away – it owes more than a little to Bo Diddly with that rhythm, which is possibly why it’s one of my favourites by the sadly shortlived (of both career and life) Buddy Holly.
________________________________________________________
Next time: I still have that idea for the pear sorbet sitting there, but as I ended up using one of the pear’s in that pasta, it’s looking less likely it’ll be happening right away. However, I have made my first hummingbird cake – I haven’t tasted it yet but all the ingredients sound amahzing on paper at least. 

hot like fire…take you higher

16 Comments

Given that the spiciest thing I was fed as a kid was Chinese takeaways….and considering chili can burn your face off like flaming magma…and also taking into account that the widespread availability of ready-made Thai curry pastes and the like happened locally well after my formative years…it’s unsurprising that it’s only in the last few years that I’ve got into hot spicy food.

Spooning chillies! Is what I thought when I uploaded this photo to the computer. That third one’s really getting into it. Giving the middle one a right old affectionate nuzzle.

Now, it’s got to the point where I near-on crave chilli – the tingly burn it brings to the corners of my mouth and the back of my throat, the fresh, almost lemony flavour of its crisp flesh. With this big talk I’m surprised I wasn’t crawling into the frame of the photo myself to spoon those chilies. What can I say. I’m a spicy convert. My latest chilli venture was to make Nahm Jim from a page I’d ripped out of a magazine  – unfortunately I missed the author’s name, but I am certainly grateful to them.

What is Nahm Jim? A flavour-ly balanced Thai sauce or dressing, which in this recipe harnesses the bright, colourful flavours of red chilli, coriander and lime, and rides them like a capable mule into the salty intensity of fish sauce and caramel fudge sweetness of palm sugar. It all becomes quite the drinkable finished product, which you can pour over things, mix into things, or use it like I did, to marinate things.

Red Chilli Nahm Jim

  • 1 1/2 long red chillies, seeds removed, finely chopped (I used 3)
  • 1 small red chilli, finely chopped (I didn’t use one)
  • 1 garlic clove, finely chopped
  • 4cm coriander stem with root attached, well washed and finely chopped (note: I just used the stem)
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons fish sauce
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons palm sugar (note: I ate so much palm sugar, it’s delicious)
  • Juice from about five limes 

Using a mortar and pestle, bash the chili, garlic, coriander and 1 tsp salt to a paste. This really didn’t happen for me, it was more just bashed up stuff, but it still worked. Use a food processor or just chop everything superfine by hand if you don’t have the equipment. Work in the palm sugar, then add the fish sauce and lime juice. Check the flavour balance, add more of something if necessary and refrigerate in an airtight container.

So a chili’s heat depends a lot on its size and colour. Big = mild, and red is milder than green, and therefore if you’re just getting into it, use the biggest red ones you can find, make sure all the heat-packing seeds are scraped out of its lengthy belly, and don’t whatever you do touch your face after dealing with them. I rubbed my nose after chopping up these ones and it was burning away for ages. It was a cold night, so it actually worked in my favour, but in the eyes is not so fun. That said, I wussed out of using the small chilli and upped the big chilli quantity – the sauce was gorgeous, don’t get me wrong – but in the end it wasn’t quite hot enough, so more fool me.

Who just puts noodles on the table? This fool.

I had a very appealing idea for marinating chicken in a mixture of this Nahm Jim and coconut milk, but a look at our bank balance meant it wasn’t really a chicken-buying kind of week. Instead I turned to that full-of-potential and megacheap foodstuff that is tofu, to make Coconut Nahm Jim Tofu and Rice Noodles.

My method went like so: slice up one block of firm tofu as you please (I chopped it into pretty diamond shapes which really just look like crooked squares, defeating the purpose completely) and place it in a small container (like a leftover plastic takeout one) and spoon over about half of your Nahm Jim. Or indeed any chilli sauce you like and have handy. Leave for as long as possible – I marinated mine for over 24 hours, on recommendation of Ally – and then about an hour before you cook it, like say when you come home from work, tip in half a can of coconut milk and let it marinate further. Heat up a little oil in a frying pan, spoon the tofu out of the container and into the pan, and let it sizzle away. I like my tofu to be either crunchily crisp, or super tender, and think this recipe suits it being on the tender side, but you do as you please. The residual coconut milk will bubble up and evaporate, and it’ll smell amazing. Remove from heat when you’re satisfied with the tofu’s level of cooked-ness. Meanwhile cook up some rice noodles, drain them, tip in any leftover marinade from the container, a little more coconut milk from the rest in the can, and some salt. Serve drizzled with sesame oil, the remaining Nahm Jim, coriander and sesame seeds.

I love tofu heaps and this may or may not convince you to also, but it’s a pretty simple dinner that looks and tastes good. Not to mention, doesn’t cost a whole lot. Tofu is so cheap and ridiculously filling, making it a pal to our bank balance. The Nahm Jim and coconut really soaks into its spongy surface during its marinading stage, and the sugars in both elements smell gorgeous when they hit the hot pan and start caramelising. While it’s perfect straight from the hot element, if you let it sit for a while the slippery rice noodles absorb the coconut milk and become even more luscious and silky-textured. Mint would be a nice substitute for coriander if you’ve got it – nothing like a bit of green sprinklage to make a plate of food look more professional. Oh, and you could feel free to spoon the uncooked tofu into a salad or something straight from the marinade – it tastes amazing as is.

Introducing The List:

I’m a very determined and ambitious person. Not that I’m used to things going my way. I am in fact extremely used to things going decidedly not my way. But in order to help me help myself to get more things going my way (if that makes sense) I’ve made a big to-do list, inspired by friends, all outstanding in the field of excellence, who have all previously created their own.

It’s all very well and good to be determined and ambitious, but it’s very very well and good to write stuff down so I don’t forget things, and so I can be accountable to my own brain, which flings around ideas like a pinball machine. I’ve already started writing it (and you can read my list here) and I’ve got till the end of Sunday to finalise it, and from there, till June 30 2012 to complete the tasks. I’m looking for some more things to add to it, so feel free to make suggestions (I’m talking kinda broad thematic things, not like, say, “Oi Peter Gallagher, resolve to pluck your eyebrows!” because that’s just not helpful.) Yes, I’m pretty serious when I say “get a book deal”, I don’t want this to sound like the tagline to a Justin Bieber movie but I dream bigtime big and I think I can make all these things happen, if I work at it. If I could keep our room tidy for a month though, that would honestly (I can’t emphasise my hopelessness) be almost as much of an achievement. And now that it’s written down on this list, I am going to make it happen. Hopefully. Wait, no! DEFINITELY. What would Leslie Knope Do? Is what I’ll remind myself when things look uncertain.

Oh yeah, and Snacks the Goldfish is now nearly two weeks into her new life with us and thriving. I like to amuse her/annoy Tim by singing to her whenever I get home from work and walk in the room. I can tell you with certainty that yelling “who let the dogs out!” and then pointing expectantly will not elicit a response of “who, who, who, who” from either Snacks or Tim.

Title via: the always sadly-late Aaliyah, shortlived R’n’B perfection, with Hot Like Fire.

Music lately:

Who do you love? I love Bo Diddley, you blazer of trails and creator of amazing guitar rhythms.

Nature Boy, Nat King Cole. We found a record of his at the Waiuku Bookfair that turned out to be the same one my grandparents on my dad’s side used to blast all the time. Nice to be able to remember them while listening to his beautiful, restrained singing.

Next time: I still have that poached pear sorbet idea under my skull, but there’s no way that can happen until we eat more of the existing ice cream…

that’s all you take, for a cup of cold coffee and a piece of cake

16 Comments

Fun to have up your sleeve: a super delicious cake recipe which can be easily made to look disproportionately spectacular in relation to the effort that went into it.

Not so fun to have up your sleeve: actual cake. Crumbly enough to make your elbows itch and move round everywhere as you try and shake it out, sticky enough to really winkle itself permanently into the fibres of the fabric.

Consider how many times a day that you blink your eyes. That’s probably how often I think about cake. Well, if I’m being realistic, that’s probably how often I’m thinking about all food, as opposed to cake specifically. While you’re blinking, I’m blinking and thinking about food…ing. In this case, I found some lipstick-pink rhubarb sticks at the vege market last week and had a vision of simmering them up and having them dripping out from the layers of a cake. I had a whole lot of sour cream leftover from another recipe, and so I mentally inserted that into the layers with the rhubarb. And then I thought, what if it was a bundt cake? How cool would that look? All diagonal and undulating and with a veneer of intimidation?
Pretty cool, yes indeed. Could almost walk away right now and let the cake speak for itself. Except that would be an ineffectual blog post, and also the cake would probably say, in a spongy voice “errr, look over there at that…pikelet. Way more appealing than my regal, creamy body.” And then the cake would quietly shuffle off to a hiding place. 
My grand visions don’t work out the way I hope they will (this goes for dinners, clothing, and judging when it’s the right time to say “that’s what she said”) so it’s most definitely enpleasening and good for the soul when it does. But if you need some convincing as to why you should try making this full-on cake, consider the following:
1) It looks awesomely ridiculous and ridiculously awesome.
2) It’s way easier to make than its outward appearance would suggest.
3) Without the filling, the cake is both vegan and delicious.

While you’re considering that, you could maybe consider considering another cake worth your consideration: Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Guinness Cake, which was the subject of my most recent cooking tutorial video on YouTube.

All the cakes! The Guinness cake was the reason I bought all that sour cream, by the way. Not that it needs a lot, but subconsciously I would’ve reached for the bigger amount at the supermarket so that I could have leftovers to use in another baking caper. I’ve got another video about bread on the make, but I’m waiting for this one to climb in views before I upload it (also it needs some severe editing, would you believe I could talk about bread for A WHOLE HOUR and I was aiming for a six-minute clip.)

Back to this cake: the only bit where you really have to tap into your concentration faculties is when slicing it into layers, but even that’s simple enough: just use your sharpest knife, go slowly, stop often to make sure it’s staying even, then slide some baking paper underneath the layer you’re slicing and lift it off. Onto the next one.

Despite sandwiching this together with sour cream wrought from the milk of the nation’s finest cows, my eye was caught by this vegan recipe, which harnesses the awesome power of coconut milk and not much else and turns it into a cake most delicious. The website that I found it on is fairly confusing but the recipe itself is sound as a pound.
Coconut Lemon Rhubarb Brown Sugar Sour Cream Layer Bundt 

Working on that title. But if I left something out…recipe adapted from this site here.

1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cup oil (I use rice bran, it’s nice and tasteless-tasting)
1 x 400ml (or 14oz) can of coconut milk
1/4 cup lemon juice (or substitute with the citrus of your choosing)
Zest of the lemons you juiced
3 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups shredded coconut (disclosure: totally forgot to add this)


Set your oven to 180 C/350 F, and thoroughly grease a bundt tin.


Whisk together the sugar, oil, coconut milk, lemon juice and zest. Sift together the dry ingredients – super important that you don’t have any lumps here or the whole cake will taste like baking soda. Whisk the flour in till you’ve got a thick batter, scrape it into the cake tin and bake for around an hour.

‘Fraid I didn’t actually weigh out the amount necessary but it was two decent-sized bunches of rhubarb, trimmed and chopped into short sticks, brought to a slow simmer in a pan with about 1/2 a cup of sugar (seriously, I’m sorry I chose this moment to be all instinctive and not record amounts.) Cook away, stirring often, till the fruit has mostly collapsed and softened. Allow to cool. Mix together 1 cup of sour cream (I used delicious Tatua stuff) together with 3 tablespoons of brown sugar. Cut the cake into two or three slices as per my instructions up there, then carefully spoon sour cream onto the bottom layer – less than you’d think and not all the way to the edge, as the weight of the next two layers pushes it out – and then spoon over some rhubarb. Carefully lift the next layer of cake and slide it off the baking paper and on top of the bottom layer. Repeat, finish with the top layer, dust with icing sugar if you like.

Whether or not you see all that as a lot of effort or not, this is delicious either way and encompassing all kinds of delicious flavours and textures: the double sour-sweet of the softly fibrous rhubarb melting into the cool, satiny sour cream. Squidgily creamy, sweet with coconut and pure sugar, sharply spiked with rhubarb and lemon, pink and golden like a decent sunrise, and tall as a house the size of a cake.
On Saturday I fed the cake to our top-notch friend Jo (well, she fed herself, but I passed the cake to her on a plate) and to myself before we went for a flounce round Petone, being fed truffled brie at Cultured, buying fizzy Limca drink, coriander seeds, mustard, and other food trinkets, browsing the treasures at Wanda Harland, and checking out the goods at the A La Mode relaunch, before driving back to the city to weigh up the whys and why-nots of buying whipped cream flavoured vodka (verdict: I want to try and make my own instead, but how??) All of which makes it sound like I’m some kind of obnoxiously frolicky blogger who runs around in a haze of pink-tinged high-contrast photos, but it’s all in the framing. Am mostly grumpy nervous and opportunistic, as opposed to the kind of carefree imagery this might’ve served up. Also: truffled brie is incredible stuff. Just enough of too much of a good thing, you know?
_______________________________________________________________
Title via: Cat Stevens, proving his use to my blog once again. Matthew and Son is my very, very favourite song of his and I think I talk about this amazing video of him singing it at least once a week but if you haven’t watched it…do.
_______________________________________________________________
Music lately:

Somehow a lot of time has gone by since I last had a proper wallow in some Julia Murney singing excellence. And then I realised, it’s because she’s just so, so good that if I watch too much it mucks with my brain and I get all miserable that I’ll never get to see her live and so on and so forth. Long story short, her rendition of Nobody’s Side from Chess is spectacular.

Soul II Soul, Back to Life. (“back tooo reality…”)
_______________________________________________________________
Next time: I still have this chilli sauce recipe that I want to make, however I also had this pear sorbet idea which I haven’t had time to execute, but maybe if I train my body and mind to thrive on a quarter of the sleep I get currently.