Category: Dairy Free

let me entertain you, and we’ll have a real good time yes sir

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Tim and I belong to a book group, which Ange, our ex-flatmate but still-friend started in early 2010. Every month we get together at someone’s house and discuss a book. Last night it was at our place, a commitment that always fills me with joy. Firstly because everyone in the book group is really, really nice and fun to be with, and secondly because I get the opportunity to provide a spread for people. An opportunity I’m always keenly looking for. Normally I do one recipe per blog post, but instead today I’ve serving up three small nibbly recipes; Marteani, Beetroot Hummus and Cannellini Bean Dip; all in the name of playing host.
As I’ve outlined somewhere in my unrestrained ‘About Me’ section, I like to keep the recipes here fairly accessible, but also amazing. Every now and then though, usually under the influence of Nigella, something kind of impractical takes hold of my imagination.
Like Marteani. Which uses lots of Cointreau – quelle expensive – vodka, and Earl Gray Tea (hence its name) to make a cocktail of orange-scented sumptuousness. Cointreau is not the kind of thing I would normally have just knocking around. However. I had about an inch in a 750ml bottle that my step-grandmother had given me, and then I had a further litre bottle that I bought in duty-free on the way back from Tim’s and my trip overseas in March. Both had sat untouched ever since they’d arrived (I think I got that partly-empty bottle in 2009?) and while it’s good not to use up all your expensive things at once, whatever they may be, there’s also a case to be made for actually enjoying what you’ve worked for before you drop it on the floor or something.


A little extravagant, sure…but never ever wasteful.
“I want your spirits to climb, so let me entertain you…”
Unfortunately I didn’t have a better-looking jug to put it all in, but tra la la. That in the background was another duty-free conquest – a strapping 1.75 litre bottle of Absolut. As far as vodka goes (and I don’t mean to sound like that guy from American Psycho, “I told you to keep Finlandia in this place”) I’m very particular. There are just some horrible vodkas out there that I don’t see any point in drinking. On the other hand, vodka is pretty pricey. Generally, I move between Absolut, for mixing (with soda water) and Zubrowka (yes, another duty-free, we really tested its limits) for sipping from a small glass over ice. When I drink at all. As I saw fit to last night, for book group.
If you’ve got a smallish amount of people coming around and the means to make it, I definitely recommend Marteani. It’s a recipe from Nigella Lawson’s book Nigella Christmas, and she suggests it with brunch.
Marteani

I tripled the tea content and halved the Cointreau – well, it was only a Monday, and Cointreau is still expensive. This made it go a lot further, while still maintaining a liqueury thrill. This would probably be ideal served in actual Martini glasses, but not having any, I just poured small amounts into whatever glasses we could find. Including a small glass jar shaped like a beer stein which used to have mustard in it (Tim bagsed that one.)

250mls/1 cup strong, cold Earl Gray Tea
250mls/1 cup vodka
250mls/1 cup Cointreau (or Nigella suggests Grand Marnier or Curacao or Triple Sec.)

Pour all the ingredients together in an ice filled jug. As I said, I used 750mls tea and 125 mls Cointreau. It was still extremely fine stuff.

Also I forgot to make ice ahead of time so I just put it in the fridge till needed: still good.
If you don’t have resiny, syrupy Cointreau then Limoncello would be an excellent substitute – it can be pretty reasonably priced and is in that same juicy, citrussy family of flavours.
Should you be having people around, I also emphatically recommend the following dips. One – the Beetroot Hummus – is kind of involved, and the other – Cannellini Bean Dip – delivers so much disproportionate deliciousness for how simple its recipe is that I could cry happy tears just thinking about it. Alas, you really do need a food processor for these. A stick blender could probably do the trick, otherwise maybe find a friend who’s got one and share some of the resulting dip with them.
Beetroot Hummus

Adapted from a recipe in the 2011 River Cottage Diary, a demonstratively multi-purpose book sent to me by the lovely Lisa at Prime TV.

3 medium sized beetroots, leafy tops and creepy tails trimmed off
1 piece of white bread, crusts removed
50g walnuts, almonds, brazils (whatever you can find – probably not peanuts though, their texture and flavour isn’t quite what’s needed here)
Ground cumin or Ras-el-hanout
Salt and olive oil to taste

Wrap each beetroot in tinfoil and roast at 180 C/350 F for about an hour and a half – till a fork can easily pierce through. Allow to cool. Toast whatever nuts you’re using – if you like, add them on a small tray to the oven that the beetroot are in once you turn off the heat, if that makes sense.

In a food processor, blitz the nuts and the bread until fairly fine. Remove the beetroot from the tinfoil, rub off their skin – it should happen easily, leaving you with oddly silky-smooth peeled beetroot – and chop them roughly before adding them to the food processor as well. I don’t recommend you wear white for this. Blitz again till a dark, chunky purple-red paste forms. Add a little salt, the spice, and a little olive oil if you like, and blend again. Spatula into bowls and serve.
Note: I completely missed the instruction in the recipe to add a tablespoon of tahini – which I love, but didn’t have any of anyway. It’s still brilliant without it, but it would add a little richness and texture, plus that sesame flavour.
Cannellini Bean Dip

This incredible recipe is one I’ve adapted slightly from the Scotto Family Italian Comfort Food book. It has barely any ingredients and yet is the most ridiculously creamy, luscious thing you can imagine. Especially considering it’s made from beans, not known for being life of the party, food-wise.

2 cans cannelini beans
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil (or avocado oil, or some other oil that you don’t mind the taste of)
Salt

Drain the cans of their liquid, pour the beans into the food processor, add a little salt, and blitz to a thick, wheat-coloured paste forms. Pause, scrape down the sides with a spatula, taste to see if it needs more salt. Blend again, pouring in the oil. That’s all.
The beetroot dip excellently plays up the vegetables sweetness and earthiness with the nuts and the cumin respectively. The beetroot becomes rich during its time in the oven yet the finished result – despite the nuts and bread – is very light. The cannellini dip is just all plush and velvety, like the dip version of…a bunny rabbit.
In case you’re wondering, the book I’d chosen was Barbara Anderson’s Long Hot Summer, which we all agreed was fine, but seemed to leave many potentially dark or exciting plot avenues gently unexplored. That said, we’ve been reading things like Therese Raquin and Frankenstein, it’s possible we just weren’t ready for such mildness.
Unfortunately the lurgy that I was labouring under a couple of weeks ago seems to be taunting my immune system once more. The weather in Wellington has been headline-makingly cold, and there has even been moderately unprecedented snow around the place – not in our neck of the woods, unfortunately. When I get the time, I plan on getting the thyme (HA! HA!) to make this restorative sounding brew. Anyone else in NZ had snow?
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Title via: Sondheim’s amazing musical Gypsy. Let Me Entertain You is a thematic tune running through the whole show, starting it off as performed by Baby June in her squeaky voice and eventually developing into what Louise sings during her stripping montage. Gypsy in all its stage and screen forms has starred some seriously stunning women over the years as Rose and Louise – Angela Lansbury, Patti LuPone, Bernadette Peters, Ethel Merman, Bette Midler, Laura Benanti, Natalie Wood…Hopefully I’ll see it live one day with a similarly worthy contender for the roles.
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Music lately:

I think I’m becoming a bit obsessed with Judy Garland. There, I said it. I might have listened to her Live At Carnegie Hall record three times in a row (which takes up quite a bit of energy, what with it having four sides and all.) I love Lena Horne’s famous version, but when Judy sings “can’t go on, everything I have is gone” in Stormy Weather my eyes can’t help but start pricklingly anticipating tears. (It really doesn’t help to listen to her singing while reading a biography of her.)
Moana and the Moa Hunters: AEIOU, especially as analysed by Robyn Gallagher on her fantastic site 5000 Ways To Say I Love You – wherein she will watch every single NZ On Air funded music video she can find.
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Next time:

Well, I saw this and any alternate plans disappeared.

oklahoma, every night my honey lamb and i

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Lamb shanks are lots of fun – they simmer away and make your house smell wonderful; the bone is a ready-made grippable handle, depending on how conservative your company is; they’re generally cheaper than other bits of lamb; they’re full of sweet, youthful meaty flavour; and, you can point at your plate and suggestively say “hey, nice shanks“.

Overall though, lamb is not one of those things that fills me with good feelings of “I can afford this regularly” (likewise with All Dairy Products, as I’ve complained about at length recently.) In fact, the last time I had lamb shanks was May 2009 – back when we were in our old flat! – so it was with happiness that I saw them fall into the range of X-per-kilo that I’m comfortable with. They are not so much fun to photograph though. To lull you into a false sense of capable blogging security: their accompaniment, figs!
Actually figs, wrinkled and greying as they are, also aren’t that attractive. Foiled again.
To have lamb shanks slowly becoming tender in a fig-studded broth is about the cheeriest thing you can do on a freezing and rainy day like today. Shank Sunday! As I’ve called it. However if you’ve got the time, this recipe of Nigella Lawson’s is perfect on any cold day of the week. Putting lamb, figs, honey and pumpkin together as she does might sound troublingly sweet. But what I found was that the flavours of the sugary things caramelised together which, with the lamb’s sticky meatiness, made for an outrageously good combination, with partially jam-ified figs, lamb-infused kumara sauce and a little cinnamon to warm things up further. Let’s not be naive though. This is a rich dish. I could hardly finish a whole shank.

Nigella makes this recipe as part of her Rosh Hashana spread in her book Feast, with part of its significance being that sweet foods are consumed at Rosh Hashana in the hope that the year ahead will also be full of such sweetness. However she also offers it as a general dinner recipe – and really, any day that you can is good to be proactively adding some sweetness and hope to your life. Be it literal, symbolic, or in the case of these shanks, both.


Lamb Shanks with Figs and Honey

Adapted – scaled down that is – from Nigella Lawson’s beautiful book Feast. Her recipe serves 10, if you have that many to feed then it’s more like 10 shanks, 1kg onions, 500g figs, 80mls honey and a whole bottle of wine.

3 lamb shanks
Olive oil
1 onion
2 garlic cloves
Either about a teaspoon of fresh rosemary leaves, or leaves from one decent stalk of thyme
1 can pumpkin puree/1 orange kumara
9 dried figs
1 cinnamon stick (or, 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon)
125mls red wine
1 heaped tablespoon (only way it can be done really) of honey
250mls/1 cup water

Finely chop your onions and crush/chop your garlic and – if you don’t live within reach of pumpkin puree – now’s a good time to peel and roughly, but finely, dice your kumara.

Heat a little olive oil in a large saucepan and brown the shanks, in batches if you need to. Set aside, covered with tinfoil if you like.

Add the onions, garlic and herbs to the pan, sprinkling over a little salt, and allow to soften without browning.

Now add everything else (except the waiting shanks) to the pan, and gently bring to the boil. Turn down the heat to as low as possible, add the shanks and cook for an hour and a half – at least – partially covered.
Notes:

– Figs are more expensive than I remember. You could always use dates, which I find stay reasonably priced, or even prunes or dried apricots – whatever works for you.
– As I’ve said, kumara is a decent substitute for canned pumpkin. If no kumara is to hand, butternut pumpkin is good too – it breaks down quickly. And if you’re really having trouble accessing them, Nigella recommends red lentils instead.
– I didn’t have red wine, so – sorry Nigella – just used some white. As I’ve said already, it still tasted amazing.
You may want to make this a day ahead, allow it to cool and then skim off any inevitable fat before reheating. Serve with whatever you like really – rice, mashed potato, more mashed kumara, a salad made of canned cannelini beans or chickpeas or the like, couscous, bulghur wheat – or just bread to scoop up the saucy kumara. Which is what we did.
As they sing and acknowledge in Chess, “these are very dangerous and difficult times“. But sheesh, this week has been quite the cluster of sadness and horror, with famine in the Horn of Africa, killings in Oslo, and Amy Winehouse’s death at age 27. Bad news is bad news, whatever the scale. It’s not a competition, and – as I saw written extremely well on Twitter today – compassion isn’t a finite resource. Something that’s good to keep in mind…as well as being thankful for things while you’ve got ’em to be thankful for.
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Title via: Oklahoma, the song, from Oklahoma the musical. Which – while I strictly have to actually like the songs I quote here – I am not a huge fan of. I find the characters annoying (as admittedly many find those in RENT) and the whole dream-ballet segment feels awkward and overlong even within the context of when dream-ballets were more the norm. But the music, the music is amazing. One of my favourite renditions of this title song is by Tony Award winner Sutton Foster (who you may also know as Coco from Flight of the Conchords.) Also while you’re at it, it’s always a good time to watch her be triple-threateningly amazing in Drowsy Chaperone.
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Music lately:

We went to the Bookfair yesterday and picked up so many fun second-hand books, but there were also heaps of really great records there. One such jewel was Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, whose songs like El Paso are as comfort food to the ears.
I was never an avid fan of the now-late Amy Winehouse, but definitely appreciated her talent, and certain songs stood out for me – like Tears Dry On Their Own. Just do yourself a favour and maybe avoid reading the youtube comments. It’s never worth it.
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Next time: Tomorrow night book group is at my place and I’ve got a few discussion snacks on the make, one or more of which will likely end up here soon.

since folks here to an absurd degree seem fixated on your verdigris

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After a brief survey of four people (one of which was myself) I’d like to make the sweeping generalisation that Brussels sprouts are a bit like Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West: green, and misunderstood. So misunderstood. None of us could remember ever eating them in our childhood, but there was definitely the feeling that it was not a vegetable to welcome with open arms. Yes, plenty of people here in New Zealand must’ve eaten them, overboiled and sulphuric balls of punishment on the dinnerplate, but I can only hypothesise, or whatever comes at this stage of a scientific study, that pop culture has influenced a lot of my suspicion. Same reason I made my own earrings out of shells and beads and then wore them, sincerely. The Baby Sitters Club. I’m not saying that series of books is everyone’s reason for disliking on impact the Brussels Sprout, but I’m pretty sure it’s my reason. (Not that I can, admittedly, name a specific example, but I know it’s there.)

Anyway, I saw this recipe in Plenty, my Yotam Ottolenghi cookbook, called “Brussels Sprouts and Tofu”. And I thought, oh really? A plucky move, pitting two generally disliked ingredients against each other in one dish and working to stop the competition between them to see which can make the eater unhappy first. Now I love tofu, but this is not a sexy recipe title. Yet its bold simplicity appealed to me, as did the fact that brussels sprouts were very, very cheap at the vege market.
And if anyone knows how to de-misunderstand brussels sprouts, it’s Yotam Ottolenghi. He who pairs eggs with yoghurt and chilli and garlic with more garlic.
Interestingly the ingredients are very simple – the three main givers of flavour are chilli, sesame oil and soy sauce. For me, what seems important is the cooking methods: for the sprouts, you fry them till they’re browned and scorched in places. For the tofu, you marinate it while you’re getting everything else ready, then fry it up till the marinade is caramelised. You could probably do this to any kind of food and it would taste good, but here the ingredients really open up, come alive, I want to say snuggle into the flavour but that feels wrong…anyway, the sprouts become crunchy and juicy, their peppery flavour amplified by the smoky scorching. The tofu is salty and dense, with a crisp edge, its mildness subverted by the chilli.
This isn’t just ‘not bad…for Brussels sprouts and tofu’, any food would hope to taste this good! I served it on soba noodles, but it would be great on rice or alongside something else, or just as is. If tofu is nay your thing, the sprouts on their own would also make a fantastic side dish to a bigger meal. Seriously, I had to stop myself eating them all before returning them to the saucepan with the tofu. They’re good. At last.
Brussels Sprouts and Tofu

Adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty. There are mushrooms in the original recipe but as Tim’s unfortunately not a fan I thought it’d be a bit harsh to leave them in along with everything else.

2 tablespoons sweet chilli sauce
1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons sesame oil (I reduced this to 1…sesame oil is expensive!)
1 teaspoon rice vinegar (I didn’t have any, used balsamic vinegar, worked a treat)
1 tablespoon maple syrup (I only had golden syrup, likewise was great)
150g firm tofu
500g Brussel sprouts
Mint, coriander, sesame seeds and (optional) toasted pumpkin seeds to serve

Whisk together the chilli sauce, soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar and syrup, then chop the tofu into cubes and add them to the bowl. Set aside while you get on with the next step.

Trim the bases off the brussel sprouts and remove any flappy excess leaves. This’ll probably take a while. I slightly misunderstood the instructions on how to slice them but I don’t think it matters – Ottolenghi requests thick slices from top to bottom but I just sliced them roughly into quarters.


Heat about 2 tablespoons plain oil in a pan, and once it’s properly hot, add half the sprouts and a little salt. It’s good to turn them round so that a flat surface is touching the bottom of the pan, but it’s no biggie. Leave them for a couple of minutes – don’t stir them if you can help it, but they won’t take long to cook through. When the sides touching the pan are a deep brown, set them aside and repeat with the rest of the sprouts. Remove them all from the pan, and carefully – using tongs is good – transfer the pieces of tofu from the bowl of marinade to a single layer in the hot pan. The marinade may splutter and sizzle a little at this point. Reduce the heat, cook the tofu for about two minutes a side till caramelised and crisp.

Remove the pan from the heat and immediately throw in the rest of the marinade, plus the sprouts. You’re supposed to garnish it with coriander, but I had none, and only a tiny bit of mint – so in the interest of visual interest, I toasted some pumpkin seeds and scattered them across – pretty and delicious.
By the way, my parents got a kitten. A tiny, tiny, outrageously cute kitten who they’ve named Poppy. Looook at her with her enormous blue eyes and tiny tail. As you may remember, the recently late Rupert left my parents a one-cat family, and the remaining cat Roger isn’t as impressed by newcomer Poppy as everyone else seems to be. Look, is it morally dubious that I’m suddenly filled with motivation to plan a trip home? I’m narrowing my eyes suspiciously even as I type the question; I think the answer’s yes…but Poppy’s so cute that I can’t feel that bad about it.
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Title via: The aforementioned misunderstood character Elphaba, as played by the amazing Idina Menzel in the musical Wicked, singing The Wizard and I. Sigh.
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Music lately:
Karaoke, by the Good Fun – it is both good, and fun. I heard this song a long time ago but this official recording has scrubbed it up well. Like the Brussel sprouts recipe, this can rest on its own laurels…it isn’t just ‘not bad, for young guys.’

Marvin Gaye, How Sweet It Is. It’s always a good time.
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Next time: I found an amazing recipe for black sesame brownies, but I’m not entiiiirely happy with how they turned out – may have to re-try and then report back.

every time I eat vegetables it makes me think of you

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While I completely welcome, luxuriate in, and devote a lot of time to generating the puddings and soups and casseroles that Winter brings…sometimes it’s nice to interrupt all that, suspend the stodge-production and create something altogether more Spring-like and vegetable-focussed.
Although these are essentially just small pies, their unusual, sesame-studded pastry is light and crisp, and their filling has soft, caramelised vegetables contending with salty, fragrant miso. And I managed to make them while feeling physically dilapidated by a cold, which makes me think that they’re not that fiddly to make, either. (I’ve still got this cough, by the way, but I think as far as the battle goes I’m now winning.)
I found the recipe in the latest CLEO magazine (who, I should add, have been very good to me over the last year or so, if you see my “Attention” tab up the top there) and it’s by a clever lady called Janella Purcell who has a cookbook called Eating For The Seasons. Which, judging by this one excellent recipe, is probably a really good book. Despite what looks like Mistral font used on the cover.
The pastry is gluten-free, which is fun, especially if you can’t eat gluten yourself. I’m pretty sure that these are also vegan, so if you’re wondering what it is that’s even holding them together…read on.

Roast Vegetable Sesame Tarts

Adapted from a recipe by Janella Purcell, found in the July issue of CLEO magazine.

Pastry:

1 1/2 cups brown rice flour, or spelt flour, or whatever flour you’ve got really – even regular flour (which, I hope I don’t have to spell out to you, will mean these are no longer gluten-free)
1/2 cup sesame seeds, toasted if you have the energy (I didn’t)
2 tablespoons olive, rice bran or avocado oil
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon soy sauce or Tamari sauce
3/4 cup boiling water

Combine the flour and sesame seeds in a bowl. Tip in the oils, the water, and the soy sauce and mix together. Knead well till it forms a soft ball, then rest for 30 minutes while you get on with everything else.

Filling:

Olive oil
1 onion, finely sliced
1 cup pumpkin or kumara (I used kumara) diced or thinly sliced
1 fennel bulb, sliced
1 tablespoon white miso paste
Toasted seeds to garnish – pumpkin, sunflower, or just more sesame seeds if you like. Pine nuts or almonds would be nice too, but seeds are less expensive and just as delicious.

Heat the olive oil in a pan and slowly cook the onions till caramelised. While this is happening, roast the vegetables on a tray at 200 C/400 F for about 20 minutes.

Once your onions are cooked, but while your veges are still roasting, roll out the pastry fairly thinly and use a cookie cutter or similar (I used one of those ramekins that you might make creme brulee in) to stamp out circles of pastry. It’s a little different to the usual – quite springy and playdough-y, and you’ll need to re-roll it a couple of times. Just bear with it though, it will work. Fit your circles of pastry into a greased and floured/silicon muffin tray, not worrying if you get folds of pastry, it’s all good if it looks a bit ramshackle – and bake them, as is, for 15 minutes.

Once the cases are out of the oven, dab a tiny bit of miso paste on the inside of each, then top with your roast vegetables and a sprinkling of toasted seeds. They should remove easily from the muffin tray – and then eat!

Makes 12.

Note – I made the following changes:

– Halved the recipe (so you can easily double what’s above)
– Used spelt flour instead of brown rice flour, as that’s what I had
– You’re supposed to use all sesame oil in the pastry but as it’s expensive and precious I cut it back and replaced some with other oil, but you do as you like
– I only had black sesame seeds, but it’s all good
– Used soy sauce instead of Tamari as that’s what I had
– Changed the vegetables a little – the original recipe didn’t have fennel and had pumkin instead of kumara
– I think that’s it. One other thing to note is that different flours absorb water at a different rate so don’t be afraid to add more flour if your pastry dough is a sticky mess, or more liquid if it’s not coming together. Just a little at a time though.
So as you can see I adapted this recipe quite a bit, and I think you could continue to do so yourself. Once you’ve got the pastry cases sorted, it’s really all a matter of what’s in your fridge.
For example, the following could be delicious…
– Roast capsicums and tomatoes, with toasted chopped almonds and a little orange zest
– Sliced leeks, softened and caramelised in a pan, with feta
– Roast mushrooms with thyme, then chop them up, fill the tarts and top with pumpkin seeds
– Roasted zucchini with capers
– Raw grated beetroot, coriander leaves and toasted walnuts
– Slices of avocado and raw zucchini, topped with mint…
– Mince and cheese! Yay. Or, like, slow-braised beef ragu and parmesan.
I’m also thinking about removing the soy sauce from the pastry, using a plain oil, and filling the cooked cases with sweet things instead, like berries, or chocolate mousse, or – best of all – nuts and caramel sauce. And beyond that, I’m also wondering if you could just roll out the pastry and stamp out and bake awesome crackers from it.
But all those imaginary tarts aside, how did the actual ones that I made taste?
Amazing.
So delicious. The pastry is all nutty and biscuity, and just a tiny bit salty – a very addictive combination. I personally am glad I added the fennel, its aniseedy freshness and quick-to-caramelise, oniony structure was quite lush against the sweeter softer kumara. And they taste really, really good cold as well, to the point where I was wishing I hadn’t halved the original recipe. Twelve mini tarts between Tim and myself just wasn’t enough.

Hooray for pie!

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Title via: The Ramones, and the song really is called Every Time I Eat Vegetables I Think Of You. I love them (the Ramones, but also vegetables.)
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Music lately:
Ella Fitzgerald, When I Get Low I Get High. I think partly because of its compelling Puttin’ On The Ritz style fast swing, Fitzgerald’s gorgeous voice, and partly the fact that it’s just so short, is why I would’ve listened to this song roughly a squillion times over the last week or two.
Matthew and Son by Cat Stevens, I’ve said it before but I love this song so much that it’s always worth repeating: oh my gosh I love this song so much. The video (if you click through) is also quite incredible. His shoulder-pumping dance, the strangely bland and unaffected expressions on the young people’s faces, the bit around 1.55 where he stares down into the camera while singing *fans self*
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Next time: Billy Crudup’s Grandma’s Chocolate Fudge Pie. It’s wild.

at sideshow stalls, they throw the balls at coconut fur

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Winter has got me, and not in an epic, sweepingly-caped Game of Thrones kinda way (although, phew, look at that show’s very casual body count) but in the more unremarkable, throat infection kind of way. While I’ve been coughing at intervals during the daytime, I’m starting to wonder if there’s some chemical or hormone that’s released just as you’re about to drift off to sleep (perhaps to dream about being cast as Amy in Company, as my brain somewhat plausibly presented me with recently) which reacts with whatever’s happening in your throat. Because it’s at night when I cough the most. My brain is woozy and dozy, but my throat and lungs are wide awake and on fire.

 

 

So I’ve generously applied a tea made from chopped, carroty-fresh tumeric root and fibrous chunks of fresh ginger. I’ve drunk a lot of water, sipped Gees Linctus, eaten leafy green vegetables, and dissolved so many lozenges on my tongue that my teeth’ll probably corrode before the season is out…and also had some whiskey. Fingers crossed this elixir mix gets the better of my immune system soon.

In the meantime, here are the promised Coconut Macaroons – luckily, as in previous winters, I haven’t got a blocked nose and therefore no sense of taste. Those winters are no fun at all. I’d take a cough and no energy over that any day. I’d never tried these Coconut Macaroons before, despite owning How To Be A Domestic Goddess since 2006. But one of the many manifest joys of Nigella Lawson is that with her massive quantity of recipes, there’s always deliciousness anew to discover and love.

This is how much coconut they use…On the other hand, only two egg whites! These macaroons are less sophisticated than their French macaron counterparts, but they’re significantly less terrifying to make, too.

Coconut Macaroons

From Nigella Lawson’s important book How To Be A Domestic Goddess

  • 2 egg whites
  • 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
  • 100g sugar
  • pinch of salt
  • 250g shredded/fancy shred/long thread coconut (if all you have/can find is dessicated, I’m sure it’s fine, but Nigella does make a bit of a point of saying that shredded is better – am just the messenger)
  • 30g ground almonds
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or coconut essence

Set your oven to 170 C/340 F and line a baking tray with baking paper. In a non-plastic bowl, whisk the eggs till just frothy, then add the cream of tarter and whisk some more till you get soft peaks forming.

At this point, carry on whisking – fun! – while gradually adding the sugar a teaspoon at a time. It should eventually be thick and shiny, by the time all the sugar’s used up.

Now plunder all this gorgeous meringue-y hard work by tipping in the coconut, salt, extract and ground almonds, and fold together till you have a sticky mixture. I’ll tell you now: this mixture tastes amaaaazing.

Take a quarter cup measure, and scoop out cups-ful, dumping them down onto the tray. You should get between 8 and 12 out of this mixture. Bake for around 20 minutes, or until lightly golden. If you like, once they’re cool, drizzle them or swirl their bases in melted dark chocolate (around 150-200g should do this lot)

I love them. They’re satisfyingly large, pleasingly occupying both biscuit and cake territory, chewy with the fresh, summery taste of coconut and the bounty bar-echoing delight of their optional chocolate coating. They’re just seriously delicious.

Title via: the very lovely David Bowie’s earlyish song Karma Man, from the album London Boy.

Music lately:

With the lack of sleep that recurrent coughing brings, I’ve not been drawn towards anything with a heavy beat or a heavy meaning to process lately. Which is why Patsy Cline and the serenely beautiful Ali and Toumani album, for example, have been played a lot.

Next time: I found this amazing roast vegetable tart recipe, vegan and gluten free and delicious and everything. Hopefully will be blogging with a non-inflamed throat next time, too.

 

my poor heart is achin’ to bring home the bacon

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Bacon. Jam. Bacon jam. At last. Tim was all “How are you going to explain it? What do you even do with it?” but I think it’s pretty obvious. (For one: hide in your room and eat it all with a spatula.)

Think of Bacon Jam as a variation on caramelised onions, or chutney – to be stirred into soups or casseroles, or meat sauce made from minced beef. To be spread on bread or crackers. Added to meatballs or meatloaf, inside or on top of a burger patty. Folded through cooked pasta, chopped fried mushrooms, or mustard-sauced, sauteed cabbage, or cooked, quartered waxy potatoes. Mixed with chilli sauce and used to top rice and broccoli. Added to the steak part of a pie’s filling or blanketed with melting cheese in a toasted sandwich or showcased inside a baked potato, freshly busted open and filled with sour cream.

I also have this feeling that it’d be good on top of real vanilla ice cream. McDonalds was basically my babysitter for a large part of my life (well, it was across the road from where I had dancing lessons, and for about a dollar I could get food and read Tearaway and be in a fairly safe place till someone came to pick me up and take me home again) and it was there that I learned to dip my french fries into the 50c ice cream cone, and the strange deliciousness that the combination of salty and sweet produced. If potato chips and pretty nasty ice cream can taste okay, I bet sticky, toffeed bacon on top of ice cream would work. In fact, I’m not even going to google it because it has probably already happened somewhere (I know you can get candied bacon cupcakes, so ice cream isn’t that much of a stretch.)

We don’t eat a lot of meat so it felt kind of outrageous chopping up 400g of the bacon, but as I’ve demonstrated above, there are so many uses for this stuff that it’s practically…practical.

Tim and I buy free-range pork, but I have no way of knowing what’s accessible to you, so use what you’re able to. Given that bacon is the focus of this, I did appreciate the particularly good taste of the Freedom Farm stuff that we used, and also that it didn’t leak any watery liquid during the cooking process.

Bacon Jam

Many thanks to The Family Kitchen, from whom I adapted this recipe.

  • 400g bacon (I think streaky or middle is probably best for this)
  • 1 onion, finely chopped
  • 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup coffee (instant is fine, but make it strong)
  • 1/4 cup golden syrup

Roughly chop the bacon up, and cook in a large pan. At first it’ll just stew, because of the quantity of bacon, but eventually it’ll start to crisp up a bit.

Depending on your bacon, some liquid may have emerged at this point – drain off as much as possible, also drain away as much fat as possible, then transfer the bacon to another bowl for a minute.

Gently fry the onions and garlic in that same pan – no need to wash it, and be careful not to let them brown – then add the rest of the ingredients, and return the bacon to the pan, and let cook for around half an hour over a low heat till the liquid has significantly thickened and looks a bit syrupy. I partially covered it during this time, giving it the occasional stir. Remove from the heat, and transfer to an airtight container or jar, and keep in the fridge for a week or two. Makes about 1 1/2 cups full.

Notes:

  •  Instead of golden syrup, you can use maple syrup or honey.
  •  Instead of coffee, you can use cola or beer, but so bitterly nutty and dark and rich is coffee against the salty, supersweet flavours at play here, that without having tried any other variants it’s still what I’d urge you to use.
  •  Use muscovado sugar if you can get hold of it. It’s so severely intense in flavour compared to regular brown sugar, it kind of goes with everything happening here.

So, despite the relatively unusual combinations happening here (unusual depending on how many blogs about candied bacon cupcakes you’ve read, that is) it works and gloriously so. Even while cooking it, the sizzling combination of coffee, dark sugary matter and bacon fat tasted impossibly delicious. Seriously: coffee with all meats from now on, please.

 

Unfortunately I didn’t have a pretty jar to put it in, so an old takeout container had to do.

It felt like I hadn’t cooked anything in ages, so today (Sunday) turned into a bit of a frenzied kitchen session. As well as the bacon jam, I also had a go at making homemade Daim bars, as per my promise on Facebook (yeh, I started a Facebook page for this blog in the end, you’re welcome to join or not to join, I won’t narrow my eyes at you if you don’t.) They didn’t quiiite work out. I also made another batch of Nigella’s coconut macaroons, which I’m becoming very attached to, and which will also be featured in my next blog post. Tonight for dinner I’m making a variation on an Ottolenghi recipe, a kind of roasted cauliflower omelet. Unfortunately I blackened the cauliflower florets, but who knew that they still tasted okay, if not great, when burnt? Me, now.

Edited to add: Such was the extent to which my homemade Daim bars weren’t quite successful -Tim was reading through this and then turned to me and said “What homemade Daim bars?” and I pointed to where they were situated on the table behind him. And then he said “ohhh thooooose” in a regretful kind of way.

Title via: The Laziest Gal In Town (so appropriate to me) choose whether you prefer Marlene Deitrich’s or Nina Simone’s version, for I sure can’t. Tony Award winner Jane Krakowski also has a very cool version on her album of the same name, but you can’t find it on Youtube.

Music lately:

Turtle Pizza Cadillacby Parallel Dance Ensemble. One portion of PDE, the spectacular Coco Solid, performed at San Francisco Bath House last night. Tim and I went along, had a very awesome time cutting a caper on the dancefloor and rapping along where we knew the words. We also ran into some nice people from Twitter! As in…someone that I follow, not like Biz Stone.

Gil Scott-Heron, I’m New Here, from the album of the same name. I love this, it’s quiet, brooding, and – I don’t like the word, but what can you do – haunting.

Next time: the aforementioned coconut macaroons. Right now: Obligatory “OMG it’s July” statement. Where is 2011 going, and why in such a hurry?

clean clear crisp, we got a love like this water

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I don’t want to come across all “Oh hi old friend, haven’t seen you in so long, oh wait I’ll just put my shiny new iPhone on the table there for everyone to see while opening up the FriendPal app, which I paid $3 for, it takes a photo of the person in front of you so you can talk to them while looking at a picture of them on your phone” etc. But I really, really love the FoodGawker app, which is where I found this recipe for Chocolate Mousse. While all the food that I blog about here makes me happy, sometimes I find an exciting recipe that just fills my thoughts constantly, because I’m so curious about it. A recipe that makes people’s voices slower, plane trips delayed, busses late and traffic more congested because they’re all standing between me and my kitchen.

 
 
 
Foodgawker is a site with page after page of thumbnails of stunning food photography, each photo linking to the recipe it depicts on the blog it came from. You’ve got to self-submit, and you’ve got to be good. Possibly related: they’ve consistently rejected all my submissions over the last year or so. But still I return, using it like Google for recipes. Their iPhone app condenses all this into a format that fits on your phone, and it’s a grand way to fill in spare time – although it helps to have some free Wi-Fi, I bet all those high-res pictures chew through the megabytes.
 
The reason this recipe caught my attention, while browsing through the app in an airport recently, was its ingredients. Or lack of.
 
 
 
 
Chocolate, water, juice, honey. (The honey was a total pain to scrape off the baking paper, by the way, and I didn’t even achieve visually what I was hoping for! Hopefully I learn from this.)
 
You get chocolate mousse out of hardly anything at all. I wish I’d known about this recipe a few years ago as a student – a little chocolate, turn on the tap, and you’ve got pudding. No eggs, no cream, no nothing. It’s amazing. As the German man on Tim’s and my train to Warsaw said when he found out we were from New Zealand: “Oh my gosh, that is further away than I could ever have imagined!” As they say in [title of show], “For anyone who’s ever dreamed, it’s time to believe in dreaming again….It’s time. Dream. Believe.” (Oh come on, it more or less applies to awesome chocolate mousse. Also: [title of show]!)
 
 
Water Chocolate Mousse
 
With a huge thanks to the Mess In The Kitchen blog where I found this recipe. I’ve adapted it slightly.
 
100g dark chocolate (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana)
1/4 cup juice (any flavour, I used more of that strawberry juice)
1/3 cup water
2 teaspoons honey
 
Bring the liquids and the honey to the boil in a pan, then remove from the heat and tip into a bowl. Break up the chocolate and add it to the bowl, stirring till the heat of the liquid melts it and you’ve got a shiny chocolate puddle.
 
Refrigerate for 10 minutes or so. Just before you take it out, fill your sink with a couple of centimeters of cold water, and add a handful of ice cubes.
 
Sit the bowl of chocolate in the water, and whisk. Whisk and whisk and whisk and eventually it will aerate, turning paler and thickened and – pa-dah – into chocolate mousse. If you end up with what looks like overbeaten whipped cream, just whisk in a little hot water till you get the consistency you want. Divide amongst two smallish bowls/glasses and serve.
 
Serves 2
 
 
Most recipes involving chocolate will stress that you can’t let any water get into it or it’ll seize up and turn all gross. So, it was with slight consternation that I mixed the two together. Through some miracle of science, the melted chocolate, rapidly cooling with every flick of your whisk, absorbs the liquid and becomes a soft, velvety pillowy pile of mousse, with the clean, unsullying water making the dark cocoa flavour so definite it’s like every single one of your tastebuds is wearing 3D glasses.
 
 
 
 
In terms of excitement-causing, second only to the astonishing minimalism of the ingredients is this recipe’s versatility. With no eggs or dairy or gluten, this could also serve as icing on a cake, the filling in a pie shell, or as a base for whatever flavour you want to push upon it – use orange juice, add vanilla or peppermint extract or cinnamon. If you don’t have juice or honey, I think you could use water for the entire liquid content, and just use two teaspoons of sugar.
 
 
 
 
And for interest’s sake, I tried it with white chocolate instead of dark. Apart from the sort of muddy colour (from the strawberry juice) and a softer-set texture, it worked amazingly well and now calls me, siren like, from the fridge.
 
 
 
Title via: Ladi6’s high-achieving single Like Water from her beautiful album The Liberation of…
 
 
 
Music lately:
 
Kiss From a Rose, Seal. OMG this song is good. Although it’s really hard to blog when you’re singing along to it. It requires all your concentration.
 
HAIR. While I appreciate that I’ve mentioned it a million times, it’s only because it’s really, really good. And I’m obsessed anew thanks to the arrival from America of the Actors Fund of America Benefit recording and the vinyl record of the 2009 revival cast. “All the clouds are cumuloft, walking in spaaaace”
 
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, How Can You Love Me. As commenter Pete20Pedro on Youtube says, “what a jam!” And their album came with a free tshirt, one of those nice ones with really soft fabric, even.
 
 
Next time: Nigella’s recipe for coconut macaroons…unless anything dinner-y overtakes my interest before then. That’s if I’m not asleep in every spare moment. Had another weekend away for work – fortunately, didn’t hit my head again, but I did have a weird sleepless night in my motel, which I’m still catching up on now.

red enough it could burn you…

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I was away in Auckland for work over the weekend, but very happily, I got to fit a night at home with the family in around it. During my 18-hour stint at home I somehow managed to catch up with huge amounts of family, both extended and immediate. Well, the family minus one cat (Rupert, who died in May). Roger, the remaining feline, seemed to enjoy the extra attention but didn’t go so far as to actually sit on my lap for an extended time period or sleep on my bed that night.
While packing up on Sunday in my Auckland motel to head to the airport, I bent down to check if I’d left anything under the bed (I always do this, even if I hardly bring anything with me – I once found twenty cents!) and on the way down my right temple connected hard and swift with the wooden back of a desk chair. It hurt so bad, and I wailed really loudly. And then kind of laughed at the fact that there was no-one to hear me saying “owwww”, which…actually sounds fairly sinister now on paper. Anyway, if this blog is completely non-inspiring to read, blame it on my sore, impacted head.
The new Cuisine magazine arrived in our mailbox the day before I left to go up to Auckland, giving me just enough time to read it, but not enough time to cook any of its content. I did daydream about one particular recipe while away, which I then made pretty well immediately after returning home to Wellington. Rote Grutz, or its supercool translation Red Grits (I find it hard not to spell it Gritz) is a German recipe that Ray McVinnie, one of my very, very favourite local food writers, discovered while researching food in Berlin. I’m not even going to pretend to *cough* when I say: “Luckyyyy”.
It doesn’t look like there’s much to this recipe, and it’s true, but the ingredients come together to form something that’s a gorgeous merging of jam and custard. The ‘grits’ part of the name come from the berries’ seeds, at least that’s my guess. They’re certainly gritty. The cornflour and juice cooks together and becomes satiny and light (apart from that one lump of unstirred cornflour stirring in my glass), stunningly red, not too sweet. In fact, the sour-sugary aspect makes it compelling eating. I even sneaked back to the fridge in a bit of a trance while it was cooling to eat some more spoonfuls, then accidentally dropped a steak right into the bowl of berries. Luckily the steak was wrapped and on a tray and I removed it fast.
I didn’t have the exact ingredients that Ray McVinnie specified, but I’d like to think what I had worked just as well. There’s something nice about the red-on-red of the juices but I’m sure you could use orange or apple juice if that’s what’s most accessible to you.
Rote Grutze/Red Grits

From the June/July 2011 issue of Cuisine magazine.

250mls cranberry juice
150g sugar
800g frozen raspberries
50g cornflour mixed with 4 tablespoons water

Or, my appropriation based on what was in the fridge and the amount of people it was feeding:

125ml (1/2 cup) strawberry juice (I know! I bought it at the food show, the brand is NJoy but I can’t find anything about them online. Anyway, this seemed like a practical use for it.)
75g sugar
400g frozen cranberries and blackberries
25g cornflour mixed with 2 tablespoons water

Bring the sugar and juice to a boil in a saucepan. Add the berries, bring to the boil again and carefully stir in the cornflour mixture, stirring really well so you don’t end up with lumps of cornflour. Remove from the heat, cool, then pour into glasses. Out of mine I got enough for the two glasses you saw plus a couple of tablespoons left over to be saved for making future breakfasts more exciting.


The Red Grits are pretty to look at, dark as garnets and just as light-catching. While they’d taste gorgeous with a cascade of fresh cream plunging into their red depths, they were satisfactorily delicious as is. As well as served in glasses, I imagine these saucy berries could be spooned over ice cream, tucked under a crumble topping, or used to fill a pie shell.


And extremely easy to make. Tim and I never actually saw these on a menu in Berlin, but it does feel nice to be eating something Germanic, so that our holiday doesn’t feel quite so far away in the past.
Last week I had the extremely cool opportunity to go to the launch of Visa Wellington on a Plate. Which I’m really excited about. Particularly the set menus which allows me to briefly feel like a Lady Who Lunches. At last year’s launch I met Mika of Millie Mirepoix for the first time, and also the magnificent Ray McVinnie himself. He wasn’t there this year, but I re-met Delaney of Heartbreak Pie and Rosa of Mrs Cake, and met for the first time Joanna from Wellingtonista, etc. We ploughed through beautiful nibbles, ended up at Cuckoo round the corner for wine (I will pay you back Delaney and Rosa) and then Tim appeared and he and I ended up having a wild dinner at Foxglove with Jo and her friend Heather. It all happened really spontaneously which is a word that I don’t usually use to describe activities that I participate in. It was so fun, and several bonus points to the staff at Foxglove who dealt with our increasing raucousness. But as well as making real-life friends of people that also seem cool online, Wellington on a Plate has plenty to offer people who just want to eat stuff: check em out.
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Title via: Linda Clifford, Red Light, from the Fame soundtrack. I love this song so much. It’s also an amazing moment in the film itself – obviously Leroy is a total babe and it’s supposed to be humourous but I always felt so sad for Shirley Mulholland. When she says “who wants to go to a…school and learn to dance anyway” a bit of my heart chips off (this is why I can’t watch this film too often) because I know how she feels.
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Music lately:

Arctic Monkeys, Don’t Sit Down Because I’ve Moved Your Chair. Some of the music I was really wild about six years ago really hasn’t aged too well, or successive output has downright deteriorated. So it’s nice to see the Arctic Monkeys continuing to be awesome.

Patrick Wolf, The Magic Position. I had a bad headache today from the aforementioned head-hitting moment and so was feeling a bit grim. This song came on my ipod and, with its carousel-ride sound and Bolero-baiting violins, it was about halfway through before I realised I was happily swaying my head side to side like Stevie Wonder.
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Next time: I’ve been tutu-ing with the idea of making a Facebook page for this blog. On the one hand…it might be a good way for people to latch ever further onto this blog. A lot of people like Facebook. On the other hand, I don’t really like Facebook (it’s true! You have to scrape me away from Twitter with a silicon spatula but I can’t spend more than a minute on Facebook) and I wouldn’t know what to say on there, and research would suggest that you actually have to have an engaging Facebook page to keep people around. On a further, auxiliary hand, what if I built a Facebook page and nobody turned up? Any thoughts’d be appreciated.

just slip on a banana peel, the world’s at your feet…

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I said this recently to someone on Twitter which is roughly as public as it gets – as recent international political situations might attest – so I think I can repeat it without shame here: whenever I can’t sleep because I’m feeling nervous about something, (and there is a lot to be nervous about in life and I’m not the best sleeper), I imagine cakes. Pies. Ice cream. Not just sitting in front of me waiting to be eaten, and not muffins jumping sheep-like over a fence to be counted, but things that I could make in future, new flavours to combine. Recipes I haven’t tried before, or new recipes made up on the spot.

It, ah, does require a certain predilection towards baking in the first place, but you’re welcome to try it. It’s surprising how well “would nutmeg and coconut go together in icecream” can squash thoughts like “was that the beginning of an earthquake or just the muscles in my leg twitching”. On that note…hope everyone in Christchurch is holding it down right now, after yesterday’s aftershocks of unfair size and frequency.


This banana cake is one such recipe, invented in the night and fortunately remembered in the morning, and even more fortunately, pretty delicious. Yes, banana cake is one of the more common cakes you might learn to make, and so you may not feel the need to pay much attention to this one…but I’d like to think it’s a sidestep to the left of your usual recipe.

Also, I appreciate that it’s a pain to weigh out bananas like I’ve asked, but a cake recipe calls for accuracy. This isn’t a bowl of cereal we’re making here. That said, it’s roughly three small bananas or two and a half good-sized bananas (oo-er) (sorry.)


Banana Cake with Golden Syrup Icing

250g ripe bananas
3 tablespoons oil (I use rice bran)
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla paste/extract
200g flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and line a 20cm springform caketin with baking paper.

In a large bowl, mash the bananas with a fork till they’re good and smooth. If you like, you can switch to a whisk to mash them up – it’s okay if there’s lumps of bananas, but a decent liquidy texture is what you’re after here.

Whisk in the oil, sugar and vanilla, and then sift in the flour, baking soda and baking powder. Carefully fold together with a spatula, then scrape into the prepared caketin.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, and allow to cool.

Icing:

Mix 1 tablespoon of golden syrup, about 1/2 cup icing sugar, and a tablespoon of water together. Add a tiny pinch of salt. If you’re using a whisk you might be able to get out all the lumps, otherwise it’d probably pay to sift your icing sugar. If you need more icing sugar, add more. Pour over the cake.
I had to have a slice before I committed to icing it and taking photos and writing about how nice it is – just in case my cake was delicious in the mind alone – so it’s lucky that it actually does taste gratifyingly good.
It’s tender and light, with a slightly chewy crust and a fresh banana flavour. There’s also a soft fluttering hint of vanilla, like someone’s eyelashes brushing against your cheek. The golden syrup, with its dark stickiness, and its buddy the pinch of salt, manage to temper the aggressively bland sweetness of the icing sugar. Altogether, it’s a bit of a masterpiece for something thought up in the middle of the night to ward off other bad thoughts.
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Title via: Donald O’Conner’s Make ‘Em Laugh, from one of the best films on this earth, Singing In The Rain.
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Music lately:

Tiny Ruins, Little Notes. It’s pretty, but not just pretty.

Neil Patrick Harris’ opening song from the Tony Awards yesterday. I love a good song and dance number as it is, but this is particularly excellent. I’m slowly working my way through this show on youtube.
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Next time: possibly (finally) those snickerdoodles, however I also have found the most amazing tofu recipe. Hopefully, whatever it is, there won’t be such a huge gap inbetween posts like there has been this month.

how long has this been going on…?

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If there was a defining recipe of my childhood, the above cake would be second only to microwaved Marmite and cheese sandwiches. Which is where you take many bread slices, butter them, spread them with Marmite, pull several slices of cheese from the block with the wire cutter, layer them all up in a stack on a plate (probably plastic and not microwave safe) and then nuke until the cheese is bubbling violently. Allow to cool slightly, then eat. Alternatives include tomato sauce and cheese (like a low-rent Margherita pizza…kind of) and, uh, golden syrup and butter. In fairness, this was in the days where I was dancing in every spare minute, and there wasn’t a lot of time or access to fancy snack foods. It’s no wonder I gravitated instinctively towards the improvisational and energy-dense. Plus I love melted cheese.

What I baked the most in my childhood though, for family members’ birthdays, for Calf Club (a kind of elaborate rural pet day, FYI) competitions and simply for my own entertainment, was this cake recipe which came with a glass bowl Mum bought in the 80s – one of those round, slightly opaque baking dishes with high, ridged sides. I suspect it became my go-to cake because it was very simple and didn’t involve any expensive ingredients and therefore wouldn’t be too stressful to my parents that I was making it so often. I didn’t realise it at the time when I was a kid, but it’s completely vegan – using water, vinegar, baking soda and oil in place of the richness and raising abilities in butter and eggs. These ingredients mean that it’s a fairly spartan-tasting cake, which I also didn’t really realise at the time, since I didn’t have much to compare it to. In hindsight, I feel a bit sorry for everyone in my family who had to choke down slices of it every time I insisted on baking it, but at least I was always generous with the icing.

After all this you might wonder why I even emailed Mum for the recipe. Partly curiosity about how whether I’d still like it, and partly in recollection of its dairy-free-ness, which makes it pretty attractive to me right now in these times of brutally expensive butter. Mum did say “wouldn’t you rather just turn off the heater and eat butter instead?” to which I respond…I’m sorry…that I want to have my cake and eat it too. I have made a few additions to the recipe though, so that you’re not stuck consuming the same firm, pale brown disc of cake I grew up on.

My Childhood Chocolate Cake, Improved Significantly

The title needs work, but at least the recipe doesn’t anymore.

  • 1 1/2 cups flour
  • 3 tablespoons cocoa, good dark stuff like Equagold if you can get it.
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/3 cup plain oil such as rice bran
  • A pinch of salt
  • 2 tablespoons malt vinegar or balsamic vinegar
  • 3/4 cup fruit juice of some kind, watered down a bit if you like (like, 1/2 cup juice, 1/4 cup water)
  • Optional but excellent: 100g very dark chocolate (I use Whittakers) roughly chopped.

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F, and line a 20cm tin with baking paper.

Sift the flour, cocoa, baking powder and baking soda into a bowl and stir in 1/2 cup white sugar and 1/4 cup brown or muscovado sugar (or just 3/4 cup white sugar)

Using the back of a spoon, make a well in the centre (like, a bit of a hollow/valley in the flour-cocoa mixture that you can pour liquid into. I used to spend ages on this bit, smoothing the mixture into precarious sand-dunes. Mind you I used to think those hideous framed sand-oil-water things were really cool) and pour in the oil, salt, vinegar, and fruit juice.

Using a spatula, stir everything together thoroughly, transfer to the prepared tin, and bake for around 40 minutes. Once cool you can ice, or it’s just as fine plain.

Mum concedes that it wasn’t the nicest cake but it was good for kids because they just want to eat the icing anyway, and it was very easy to put together, so “it never felt like a waste of time baking it.” In case you’re wondering where the changes were made, I upped the cocoa, and added brown sugar and chopped chocolate. These helped make it a little darker and richer. Then, I changed the liquid content from plain water to juice – the reason I say you can use any juice is that the flavour itself doesn’t seem to be overly strident once the cake is cooked, instead adding an overall extra layer of sweetness and distracting from the slightly fizzy vinegar aftertaste which could sometimes otherwise linger.

In short, and the reason you might want to make it at all, it’s a really delicious cake now, instead of being a cake that was okay for kids in the early 90s who didn’t know any better and who were mostly interested in the icing on top anyway. It has an unambiguous chocolate flavour with a pleasingly un-dry texture – almost bordering on brownie-like with the brown sugar and lumps of dark chocolate. It’s really good.

So good I made it twice this week, and tested it out on friends of ours on Friday night. So I can now tell you it also goes well with red wine.

In fact the consumption of this cake was just the beginning of what has been a fantastic weekend. On Saturday night Tim and I met up with another friend of ours at Foxglove to see the mighty pairing of David Dallas and PNC, down in Wellington on account of Dallas’ new album The Rose Tint, which you can download for free, what? Whoever did the sound last night deserves a gift basket of seasonal fruits or something because not only could we hear every single word – always fun at a hip hop gig – it also wasn’t so loud that I left with ringing ears and a bleeding nose, or vice versa. Very fun night. Continuing with the theme of mighty pairings, Tim and I were invited out to lunch by Kate of Lovelorn Unicorn and her husband Jason, we went to this place in Miramar called The Larder and it was all just highly delicious. Wish all weekends could be like this – don’t think I’d get bored of it in a hurry. (Can’t completely speak for Tim though, considering The Warriors and the All Whites both lost their games.)

Title via: Ella Fitzgerald. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any footage of her singing How Long Has This Been Going On but a voice like hers can stand tall in audio form alone.

Music lately:

I was listening to some Be Your Own Pet for the first time in about three years, (I think?) I’ve never met one other person that thought their music was good, but their songs still capture my ears after all this time. Fire Department, for one.

Paul Robeson, Going Home, from his Carnegie Hall concert in 1958. I don’t know why it is, but all his stuff on vinyl is always in the “we’ll pay you to take this” bin at record shops. Which works out nicely for me.

Next time: Kate and Jason were talking about Nigella Lawson’s recipe for snickerdoodles today from How To Be A Domestic Goddess, and I realised I’ve only made them once, and that was in 2006, and that they were so good and I can’t believe I’ve never revisited them. That time might be now. But on the other hand, I recently won a copy of the lovely Flip Grater’s cookbook and it’s full of recipes that I want to try repeatedly. So, it’ll likely be one of those options.