Category: Dairy Free

a custard pirate lost at sea

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In the middle of writing this, there was a small but hefty-feeling earthquake in Wellington. At first it felt like a truck backed into our flat. Then the bottles on top of our fridge started clinking together and everything shook. I dove under the table which holds up the computer that I’m typing on, clutching my phone – just like I’ve imagined doing a million times over the past week actually. I’m normally over-scared of earthquakes as it is, but hot on the heels of last week’s disaster in Christchurch a jolt like this, even though it was forty km deep and only went for about 10 seconds, had me unable to stop my hands from shaking while I tried to text mum to let her know. And then Christchurch got some aftershocks themselves. Ugh. Am looking very respectfully at the ground, at the hills in the distance (well, what I can see over the high rise apartments) and at the sky and asking them all to just…keep still.

First of March today, meaning it’s only about three weeks till Tim and I head off on our massive-for-us trip to London, Berlin, Warsaw and LA. It has also been a week since the earthquake in Christchurch, which is hard to believe – time goes fast enough as it is, but that was really a blur. And we’re not even in it.
After the fantastic time I had on Saturday baking and selling it for Christchurch at Grow From Here with Millie Mirepoix I got to thinking even more about comfort food. As I said in my last post, on Tuesday night when I got home, I made Tim and I a risotto. Since then we’ve eaten soup, curry, more soup, rice and beans…there’s something about food that’s hot and soft and bowl-confined, and I don’t want to overthink it, which administers delicious psychological aid when times are tough.
One good reason not to overthink it is that I’m lucky to be in a position to choose what is my opinion of comfort food at all in this time, when plenty in Christchurch are eating whatever’s in their rapidly warming freezer, whatever they can reach or whatever they’re given.
Nevertheless, if you need comfort food, then the zenith of yieldingly soft bowl-food is probably this coconut custard semolina, which I invented fairly successfully this evening. It’s hot, it’s fast, you eat it with a spoon. Another example of how I’m really not doing so badly is I fully struggled with what to call it. On the one hand, it’s really just custard flavoured semolina made with coconut milk, why I’ve named it thus. On the other hand I hate the word semolina but to call it coconut custard would be misleading given its ingredients. Yeah, this is how I think sometimes.
Of course the food that brings you peace might be some seriously spicy prawns or a giant steak or something (both of which appeal right now to be honest). Just in case you were considering it, don’t let me tell you what your comfort food is, or that you should buy into the concept at all. However, the very act of making what is considered comfort food can be comforting in itself, a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. The stirring, the heat, the slow thickening of textures, the minimum of chewing required.
At best you’ve cooked yourself something and have the attitude of: Look at me being inevitably comforted by this so-called comfort food against my better judgement! Looook at me! Oh my, I feel a sense of calm. At the very least you’ve cooked yourself something that will stop you feeling hungry for a bit, and which costs hardly anything.
Instant Coconut Custard Semolina

2 tablespoons semolina
1 heaped tablespoon custard powder
1 can (400mls?) coconut milk or coconut cream
Brown sugar

A little whisk is one of the best tools here but if not a wooden spoon or a silicon spatula is more than fine. In a small pan, mix together the semolina and custard powder so there’s no lumps. Mix in enough of the coconut milk to make a smooth paste, then tip in the rest. Don’t worry if it’s a grey-ish colour from the coconut milk, it goes more golden as it heats up. Stir over a low heat for about five minutes.

It thickens quickly – at first like white sauce, before stiffening up significantly, like really thick cake batter. At this point take it off the heat, spatula it into a bowl or two, and pour over as much brown sugar as you like.
Initially I would’ve said this just serves one but it probably wouldn’t be silly to divide this generous bowlful between two people. Looking back, one can of coconut milk is maybe a lot for one person. But it’s delicious, so if you want to eat the lot yourself you have my blessing and my example to follow.
Until you add the brown sugar it’s a formless, hot bowl of gently-flavoured mush. Which is more or less what I was aiming for. The grains of semolina swell and disappear, muting the coconut flavour somewhat. The milky vanilla of the custard powder is subtle in all ways except for the yellow food colouring. It’s incredibly easy to eat, a thick, smooth, coconut scented paste untroubled by any semblance of texture. And then with the sweetness of the brown sugar it all makes sense somehow, the flavours immediately enhanced. The coconut, vanilla custard and melting caramelly sugar are all gorgeous without overpowering each other, but feel free to add a shake of cinnamon, which is one of the most comforting flavours I can think of, or some vanilla extract if you like.
Back to where I started, I can’t believe we’re actually going to be going on our holiday so soon. I’m a bit nervous (as I am about all things) but I also seriously can’t wait. As I’ve said before, if anyone has been to London, Berlin or Warsaw recently and knows something good, your shared knowledge would be hugely appreciated. It’s a different world now to back in 2005 when we were there. No more sequined boho skirts (as was the style at the time) for one thing.
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Title via: local maven of tunes, Sam Flynn Scott. Mostly a member of the Phoenix Foundation, but also does his own delightful solo stuff occasionally too, like this song Llewellyn from his album Straight Answer Machine. He’s also pretty fantastic on Twitter, one of those types where you nod and shout “me too” after everything you read.
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Music lately:

I’ve been listening to the music of Michael John LaChiusa, both startling and awesome in its time signatures, pastiche of styles, and subject matters. Not much of it is on youtube, but Gloryday from See What I Wanna See, which I did track down, still gives me thrill-shivers every time I listen to it.
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Next time: Again, one day at a time. Got some raw vegan chocolate truffles that I made which may end up being next in line though…

i’ve got strength and endurance, so i count my blessings

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So. After Tuesday’s horrific earthquake in Christchurch, from which the sad news continues to eclipse any good, I couldn’t consider much of anything, let alone blogging. Which is fine.

Tim and I and my whole family are so lucky. Removed physically from the horror, although not emotionally. My cousin and his partner down in Christchurch were fine, despite being in the city centre at the time, and we were able to hear this news pretty quickly. Any other friends and family we had down there have been accounted for. But the number of fatalities climb with sorrowful speed. We had two people staying in our lounge last night, friends of our flatmate’s who were in Christchurch when it happened. Their stories were a further reminder to be thankful for what I’ve got.
Thankful or not (and it’s not proper gratitude, how can you be truly thankful that something awful happened to someone else and not you?) I’ve been changed by this earthquake. Wellington, where I live, is supposed to be earthquake central, not Christchurch. I used to be such a daydreamer, floating down the street in my own world. Now I dart from block to block, each shop front a potential missile that I pass like a small victory. I take my phone everywhere. I feel nervous when Tim and I go our separate ways for work in the morning. I lie awake, mentally assessing what might fall on me in the night, the useless-in-an-earthquake concrete walls staring back at me, every twitch of my muscles or distant slamming door feeling like the opening bars of an earthquake’s crescendo. One good thing about staying up so late to listen to the news and refresh Twitter is that my eyes shut that much faster when I do get to bed.
Worth pointing out here that this specific fear of earthquakes and feeling like every creak of a building is nature getting angry isn’t anything new. It’s been this way ever since a well-intentioned but excessively heavy school assignment on disasters when I was about 10. Just now it’s a lot more…near.
As with when I was 10, I try to comfort myself with the thought that my grandma Zelda, who died when she was about 75 (would’ve been so much longer if emphysema hadn’t set in) once told me that she’d never once been in an earthquake. She might’ve been lying to an overly nervous kid (that said, she did live in Tuakau, not known for its tremors.) But then and still now, I tell myself like a mantra that if Grandma could be that age and never be in an earthquake, then maybe I could be that person too. Then there’s practical things to help soothe the mind too: we refreshed our bottled water supply, located a torch, that kind of thing.
Of course there’s food. On Tuesday night I came home and made us a risotto with extra butter and frozen peas, remembering Nigella’s philosophy of the mindless stirring being good for the soul. It wasn’t half bad, just focussing on that wooden spoon spiralling through the slowly expanding grains of rice. We ate it out of bowls on the couch and listened to Radio New Zealand till well after midnight.
With some renewed sense of purpose, I baked some stuff for the bring-and-buy sale happening at Grow From Here up the road. In a sort-of humorous twist, the friends from Christchurch who I mentioned earlier were asleep on our lounge floor while I was trying to quietly, quietly ice a cake and wrap up cookies without waking them. At Grow From Here we met up with another local food blogger, Mika of Millie Mirepoix. I’d made Chocolate Guinness Cake, gluten-free peanut butter cookies, and a couple of fruit tea loaves. Mika had made lemon-iced gingerbread (as in the dense sticky cake, not the biscuit), lemon shortbread, and mini cinnamon-raisin-walnut pinwheels. Other people had bought clothes, shoes, a stack of (mostly amusement-causing, MOR-tastic) vinyl thanks to Real Groovy, homemade candles, jigsaws, even a TV. I’m glad Tim and I were there – it felt extremely self-helpful to do something positive for others. There were so many nice people that came and bought things, often giving extremely generous donations, and it was so cool to hang with Mika and with Kaye who is one of the people who runs Grow From Here. FYI if you’re near Wellington and longing for some plant-life, totally go see Kaye at Grow From Here, she’s lovely and full of good advice and their range of fruit and vegetable plants is amazing. Massive respect to them for getting this organised.
With our powers combined, about $200 was raised by the afternoon. All going to Christchurch. I went back and visited again this afternoon and at that point $700 had been raised. Kaye said that about five minutes after Tim, myself and Mika left, someone turned up asking if they could volunteer. For all the the universe gets it really twisted sometimes, it also provides. I’m going to be dropping some more baking off tomorrow morning and while I can’t hang around, please come to the top of Cuba Street if you can – just a donation of any kind and you can take what you like. And there’s plenty of deliciousness for the taking.
Before Tuesday, this blog post was going to be a salute to vegetables, but not only do I not have the energy to talk about them in detail, I have even less energy to write recipes out. But in the interest of not being entirely lazy and self-pitying…
…if you roast a halved eggplant, a few good halved tomatoes, and a halved red onion and some garlic cloves with some salt and olive oil, then simmer them (as is) with stock or water, then peel the garlic cloves and puree everything (carefully…maybe fish out the vegetables and puree them then pour them back into the stock in the pan) with some chilli then you’ll have yourself a delicious, thick and darkly savoury soup. Vegan too. I got this recipe from the latest issue of Cuisine magazine.


And if you slice a cucumber into sticks, mix it with some sliced red onion (sit the onion in water for a while to make it less tongue-harsh) mint leaves, finely chopped roast peanuts and some crisply fried garlic, and then pour over a dressing of white vinegar, fish sauce, a little sugar and sliced red chilli (I just used a spoon of sambal oelek as that’s what I had) then you have Vatcharin Bhumichtr’s gorgeously contradictorial Yoam Droksok, a Cambodian salad which heats and cools on impact and is strangely addictive.

So the baking has helped some. We went to see friends in Ngaio for book group on Wedneday night and played with/coveted deeply their kitten and ate their mini lemon meringue pies and laughed so much, which also helped. Every time I pause from any activity though, my mind goes immediately to Christchurch. Which I guess is just fine. It’s not over for them just because a little time has passed. It’s probably never going to be ‘over’ in fact, just…different.
I’m sure you’ve seen this information in a million other places but in the interest of being part of the solution:
  • Red Cross seems to be one of the most reputable ways to donate. Anything helps, but if you haven’t got anything to give, then maybe pass the link on through your networks.
  • If you’re on Vodafone (in New Zealand) you can txt Quake to 333 or 555 which will send $3 or $5 respectively to the Red Cross. Telecom users txt 4419 – a simple way of doing the above option.
  • MusicHype has an enormous ‘mixtape’ where you can download roughly a metric ton of music for a donation which goes to Red Cross. Very cool idea, and it’s also awesome that they got it set up so quickly. Artists include Salmonella Dub, Mel Parsons, King Kapisi, 1995, DJ Sticky Fingas and literally quite a few more. Click here for more info.

Finally: as a blogger it has been so heart-swellingingly good to know that all the Christchurch people whose blogs I read and who I follow on Twitter are more or less okay.

Stay safe.
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Title via: Nas and Damian Marley’s Count Your Blessings from Distant Relatives. It feels like ages ago since anything, let alone when I saw them live earlier this month, but their lyrics feel as important now as they did then.
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Music lately:

Well…I’ve spent a good long time listening to what I consider Mariah Carey’s Early 90s Trifecta of Emphatic Reliability: Anytime You Need A Friend, I’ll Be There, and Hero. In times of high stress comes both comfort food and comfort listening. And all those songs with the simple theme of “I’ll be there”, just listen to these songs enough and you do get some sense that yeah, you can get through this. Temporary it may be, but it does help. It might help more if you have songs of some kind of equivalence to this. Maybe listening to Mariah Carey really, really wouldn’t help some of you right now.
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Next time: Each day as it comes so… Who knows. Promise I’ll write the recipes out proper though.

see these ice cubes, see these ice creams

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More ice cream! Am I obsessed with this stuff or what? Look: I had a can of lychees stashed in the freezer in the hopes of recreating this drink I had a Thai restaurant in Panmure. Without warning, in the middle of the day, the idea of lychee and cucumber sorbet manifested in my mind, eclipsed the previous idea, got the jump on anything else I’d been planning to blog about, and left me more or less unable to concentrate from then on till I could make it happen.

Saturday was spent catching up with close friends and family in fast succession (amazingly fun and good for the soul) but today, Sunday, stretched ahead with no real agenda. It was one of those monumentally rare, still blue-skied days in Wellington and rather than nuking myself in the afternoon heat, the cool shade of indoors was the ideal environment to make this fragrant, juicy sorbet. Because of the high water content it’s icier than most which is why – sorry – I recommend the double-blitzing in the food processor. That said it’s barely hard work to make, and if you do it all on one day, you can get away with washing the processor just the once. (We don’t have a dishwasher so most decisions that don’t revolve around how I can work more ice cream into my life tend to revolve around how I can minimise potential dishwashing.) All you’re doing is freezing then blending then freezing then blending. Then eating.

Yes, you’re putting a salad vegetable into your pudding, but something about cucumber’s chilled, melon-ish texture and the lychee’s perfumed slippery softness makes them ideal buddies to share a loving and iced existence together.

Lychee and Cucumber Sorbet

  • 1 can lychees in syrup (they only seem to come in syrup, so that’s what I used)
  • 1 decent-sized cucumber

Now, I’m guessing you don’t actually have to freeze the lychees beforehand, it really doesn’t add anything to the recipe, but as I said I started off thinking this was going to be something else.

So: freeze the can of lychees overnight, or longer if you’re like me and forget about it. Peel your cucumber, then halve it lengthwise and scoop out the seeds with a teaspoon (I just ate them, felt a bit wasteful otherwise) before chopping into chunks.

Open up your frozen can of lychees and tip into a food processor (it’ll probably take some gouging and digging with a knife like mine, but it’s possible it could come out clean) along with the cucumber chunks. Process the heck out of it, pausing to spatula down the sides occasionally – this will take a while to get rid of any errant solid bits.

Pour into a container and freeze for a couple of hours before – I’m sorry – processing again till very smooth. You can leave out this step but it’ll be all chunky and icy and rough. Refreeze and then serve as and when you wish.

Making up new ice cream is one of my favourite ways to use my brain (and I know this is a sorbet, but I give the umbrella heading because “iced dessert” sounds way too corporate) and luckily for everyone around who has to deal with me, this worked out exactly as I’d hoped. There’s only so many ways of saying fragrant without sounding weird/awkward, so to be straightforward, this stuff smells sooo good and tastes just as wonderful: juicy and hydrating and sweet. The second blitzing gives it more of a frozen coke consistency, rather than a granular, tooth-fissuring grittiness.

Scraped by the frosty spoonful, its diaphanous minty green colour barely hints at the strength of summery flavour it brings. These photos were totally taken on my bed by the way. I try to keep my food photography as real-life as possible without too much tutu-ing round but that’s where the light was, and it’s really not implausible that I’d eat ice cream in bed.

Title via: That exercise in then-exciting minimalism, Drop It Like It’s Hot by Snoop Dogg and my then-crush Pharrell (the song’s still good and of course he’s still good looking, but I don’t have a poster of him on the wall or anything).

Music lately: 

We had such an amazing time at Nas and Damian Marley’s Distant Relatives concert on Wednesday night. Might’ve just been the atmosphere but every song felt really important and significant…like this one. 

The sadly gone-early Patsy Cline with Stop the World – this is a gorgeous live recording of her singing this song. She was what I guess you’d call a consummate performer, filling every word with genuine but not excessive emotion. 

Next time: I feel like it has basically been nonstop pudding lately so I’m hoping the next one will involve vegetables a-plenty, and not by putting them into a sorbet, either.</p>

i look like a woman but i cut like a buffalo

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I kinda love it when celebrities that I already like turn out to be really into their food, I guess because it makes them more relatable to me – why else do we want to find out about what they do in their spare time? Little did I know that Alicia Silverstone of important film Clueless is now a website-wielding vegan, letting recipes and tips and stories fall for whoever wants to catch them. The recipe on her site The Kind Life which caught my eyes wasn’t actually from her, but a site member. However, Silverstone herself is evidently no slump in the kitchen. Her recipes are not only extremely legit and delicious looking, some also appear hastily flash-photographed in a kind of charming, regular-people way.

I’d been looking for a decent cut-out cookie recipe since I got some seriously awesome tiny cutters from my godfamily for Christmas, including a tiny star, a tiny ace of spades, and a tiny teardrop. I actually got my little brother some excellent cookie cutters for that same Christmas – now he can make ninjabread men. I also got him Street Chant’s album Means. I’m a good sis. So Julian, if you’re reading this…then keep reading.

The recipe I found was from Madeline Tuthill and because it’s vegan, as per Silverstone’s ethos, you don’t have to stress about the fact that butter is now upwards of $5 a block (whyyyyyy) or anything like that. All the ingredients are of the comfortingly within-reach variety – some oil, some flour, some syrup – and all you have to do is mix and roll. (“Rolling with the homies“…oh Brittany Murphy. So amazing in Clueless.) The dough is pliant and stands up to many a re-roll, lifting easily from its cut-out indentations to leave behind your shapes. However, I had to add more flour because it was initially too soft to cut properly – this could be due to anything, ingredients, height above sea level, the weather – so if you’re making these, pay attention to your dough and see if you need to add more flour or if it’s all good as is. And though it asks for wholemeal flour, you could just use all plain. I did, with some quinoa flakes added because they were sitting round, looking awkwardly unused.

Gingerbread Cut-Out Cookies

Adapted from a recipe of Madeline Tuthill’s, from The Kind Life.

  • 1 and 1/2 cups wholemeal flour
  • 1 and 1/2 cups regular flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon each cinnamon and nutmeg
  • 2 teaspoons ground ginger
  • 1 cup golden syrup, maple syrup, or honey, or agave nectar, or cough syrup (kidding!) or a mix of whatever you’ve got.
  • 1/2 cup oil, I use rice bran oil because it doesn’t taste too oily.

Set your oven to 190 C/375 F and lay some baking paper on an oven tray.

Mix together all the dry ingredients, making sure the baking soda and baking powder are well incorporated. Make a well in the centre, pour in the syrup and oil and whisk together before mixing the lot together. Or you could whisk the wet ingredients separately, but this saves on dishes.

If it looks too soft and sticky to roll and cut out, then add a little more flour. I had to, so you might too. Grab a chunk and roll it out, I used two bits of greaseproof paper and rolled it between them, because that saves washing the bench and the rolling pin. If you don’t have a rolling pin, a bottle of wine or something similar shaped will do just fine.

Cut out however you like – if you don’t have any cookie cutters, just use a glass with the rim dipped in flour, or just cut them into squares with a knife. Lay the shapes onto the tray and reroll the scraps, before grabbing another chunk of dough and repeating. Once the tray’s full, bake for 10 minutes only – then carefully transfer to a wire rack to cool, and continue like this till you run out of dough.

Makes plenty – depends on how big your cutters are.

I love how these cookies turned out – a little chewy from the syrup but still crisp and biscuity. I used golden syrup because I have a massive tin of it, and it makes an ideal carrier for spicy flavours with its caramelly depth and darkness. All that syrup means these keep for ages as well, to be eaten by the contemplative handful as and when you desire.

I did consider icing them but their small surface area would’ve made it a complete mission. However bigger cookies lend themselves to all kind of sugary artistic notions. Especially if you’re making this with kids (or, not to be narrow-minded, yourself) – make faces or swirls or squiggles or Jackson Pollock drips with different colours, sandwich ’em together, stick lollies to them, whatever makes you happy. Plain, they were still perfect – the gingery intensity of flavour was all the embellishment these tiny shapes needed.

Title via: Dead Weather’s I Cut Like A Buffalo from their album Horehound. It’s a total pity that buffalo mozzarella is so expensive, because there are heaps of good songs with the word buffalo in their title for me to exploit. Shuffle off to Buffalo, Buffalo Gals, Buffalo by the Phoenix Foundation, Buffalo Soldier, Buffalo Stance…what’s the deal?

Music lately:

Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s Winter In America, bluesy and beautiful. Love the of-the-timely H20gate Blues.

PJ Harvey’s new, extremely magnificent song The Words That Maketh Murder. New PJ Harvey!!

Next time: I’ve reconnected with my Aunt Daisy cookbook and it feels like every page throws up something I really, really want to make. So you can expect something from her next time for sure.

 

when tomatoes are flying, duck, but smile

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First: Happy Waitangi Day, everyone. As I said on this day last year, it is important to me for many reasons. Firstly, the reason it exists at all: in 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi was signed at Waitangi, near Paihia in the Bay of Islands, a place where my ancestors on both sides have strong links to. Read up on the treaty if you like, it’s one of the more interesting and game-changing events in New Zealand history. Secondly: It marks the date that I had my first ballet lesson, 21 years ago. Evidently ballet waits for no public holiday. A tough business, had I lingered till the next day I could’ve been considered “past my prime” (FYI: this probably isn’t true, and also, I was three years old)

 
Anyway, yikes, February already, so there’s only one month left of summer. And in Wellington it feels like winter’s cutting ahead of autumn in the tuckshop line. One month ago it was all sand and sunscreen and deliciously dizzying heat, now it’s all sporadic sun, pushy gale-force wind, greying clouds and woolly jumpers. Either that or knuckle-dragging humidity. What gives?
One way to remind myself that it is still in fact summer is to immerse myself culinarily in seasonal food, which – bonus – is generally cheaper, easier to get hold of, and tasting its best. Like the tomato, currently at its richest red of colour, fullest of cheek and glut-est of availability.
I read a recipe of the much-googled and widely lauded Martin Bosley’s in his food column for The Listener magazine recently which completely took my fancy: a sauce of raw, chopped tomatoes, steeped in good things and tumbled over pasta. I stupidly didn’t actually copy it down anywhere, and unfortunately The Listener doesn’t seem to have an up-to-date online recipe database in the same way that, say, Cuisine magazine does. (Not that they’re obliged to provide me recipes for free. But gee, if the internet hasn’t half conditioned my brain to expect it!)
I knew there was something particularly impact-y about this recipe which made me want to recreate it, but I just couldn’t remember what. So, with a bowl of rapidly deflating, perfectly ripe tomatoes bought on the cheap, I decided to just be inspired, and improvise.
Raw Tomato Pasta Sauce with Avocado Oil and Cinnamon
 
Inspired by a recipe of Martin Bosley‘s
 
3 ripe tomatoes
Avocado oil (but of course, olive oil is so welcome here instead)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon sugar
Salt, flaky sea salt if possible – tastes nicer, and you need less.
1 T Balsamic Vinegar and/or the juice of a lemon
1 clove garlic, crushed
Around 180g to 200g spaghetti or other long pasta, to serve
 
Roughly chop the tomatoes, fairly small, and pile them into a non-metallic bowl (apparently metal does very bad things when it reacts to the acidic tomatoes.) Pour over as much avocado or olive oil as you like, but around 2 tablespoons is what I used.
 
Sprinkle over the salt and sugar, the vinegar, and the garlic, and mix thoroughly. Leave for as long as you like at room temperature, but at least do it before you get started on the pasta, so it gets a decent sit.
 
Bring a large pan of water to the boil, salt it, and cook the pasta in it, till it’s done to your liking. Drain and divide between two plates. Spoon over the chopped tomato ‘sauce’, pouring over any juices that have collected, and drizzle over more avocado or olive oil if you like.
 
Serves 2.
Great as this is, I had a massive head-desk when I eventually located the original recipe of Bosley’s – it had almonds and chilli in it. How could I not have remembered something that deliciously significant? My invention was cool, but almonds and chilli. I want that in a sauce.
Still, mine had its own cinnamony charm, with the tomatoes soft and cool and luscious on the hot pasta, the avocado oil’s mellow nuttiness against the sweetly sharp balsamic vinegar and almost lemony-fragrant tomato juices dripping into the depths of the tangle of pasta. Because of how I chopped my tomatoes it was less a sauce and more of a…pile of stuff. But I liked it.
To go with I boiled some peas and edamame and once they were cool sprinkled over a little sesame oil, and chopped in what I could salvage from a disappointing avocado. It was delicious, and pleasingly reflective of the avocado oil with the tomatoes. The reason I used avocado oil is because I got some for Christmas (cheers Dad!) and it’s really delicious, furthermore I’ve run out of olive oil and every time I go to buy some more it just feels too expensive. However if you’re the other way round, as I said in the recipe, of course olive oil is great to use here too.
Poor Tim had to pause here for a minute because I looked across the table and suddenly felt like what I saw (alas, minus his pleasant above-shoulder region) needed to be photographed. It wasn’t posed, he was about to feed himself and I wailed “don’t move!” and grabbed the camera. But still, nice to shake up the usual one-aerial one-closeup-fuzzy shot routine.
So: as long as you can handle, or at least sell to the people you’re feeding, the idea of pasta and a chopped up vegetable being your dinner, then this is one truly summery and seriously unpricey recipe which not only requires hardly any effort, it’s also extremely delicious and not so heavy and stodgy that you need to lie down immediately with a cold compress after eating it. Cheers, Martin Bosley for the inspiration. As I said, he’s heralded wide and far but I’ve never actually tried a recipe of his, and I guess…this doesn’t really count. While some of his recipes, though delicious, seem a bit inaccessible to my time, skills, and cupboard contents, I can’t fault the blueprint which inspired this blog post – a simple, sexy and delicious-sounding tomato sauce. And he also gets a free pass for life because when I approached him to say hi at the City Markets one time, he said “Oh, you’re Hungry and Frozen” which, let’s face it, is a fast way into my heart.
Title via: the King Lear of Broadway musicals, Sondheim’s Gypsy – you’d think that Smile, Girls could at least be found on youtube. But no. So…smugness from those who have cast recordings. Although I think you can listen to its sage advice – or at least some of it – here (click on “girls”.)
Music lately:
Beach House, Walk In The Park from Teen Dream – gosh this is a pretty song, like the catchiest bits of Where Is My Mind and, um, Eyes Without A Face combined…at last. We were lucky enough to see Beach House at Laneway Presents: Wellington on Tuesday night, and this song was an early and beautifully delivered highlight of the evening.
Mum sent my iPod back along with a whole bunch of other goodies (lentils, pasta, Whittaker’s Chocolate and so on) and having been without it for three weeks, it’s quite the sensory overload to have music and so much of it again while I walk around. I’ve been reconnecting seriously with the cast recording of Hair (Original Broadway and 2009 Revival Broadway cast recording, thank you).
Lively Up Yourself – Happy birthday, Bob (the other important thing about February 6)
 
Next time: It was going to be ginger cut-out cookies, and lovely as they are, I made this morning a batch of Nigella’s Norwegian cinnamon buns and they were so astoundingly good that they’re overtaking the cookies…
 
*speaking of disappointing avocados, feel free to read the guest post I did for the blog about Diamond Dogs, a play that’s going to occur in Wellington on the 15th, 16th and 17th of February.

you’re not into making choices, wicked witches, poppy fields…

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So, I recently became in possession of 1kg of poppyseeds.

From Moore Wilson‘s grocery store of course, and while they’re not all-bulk, I guess they’ve seen enough people come and go to only stock their poppyseeds writ large and behind the counter. Ask for them by name. I only wanted some to make the dressing for this bean salad, and assumed rakishly that I could use up the rest with ease. But, like some cruel, curve-of-the-earth perspective trick, whenever I walked towards the bag it seemed to grow bigger and bigger, poppyseeds regenerating themselves when removed by the incremental spoonful.

Actually it’s not as dramatic as that. There is in fact…no drama. The bag of poppyseeds can sit pretty much forever on the shelf waiting to be used. It’s just that their plentiful existence has caused me to consider them pretty closely, and what I could do with at least some of them.

Unfortunately a perfunctory search of recipes didn’t serve up anything too inspiring. And then I wondered, as I always wonder, if they’d make a decent ice cream, especially since I had some lemons lurking round that Tim’s mum had given us. Should I do a custard based ice cream? A semifreddo thing? That would’ve meant buying ingredients, and we’re trying to save money by using up things we have in the cupboard. What I did have however, as always, was canned coconut milk. And so…that’s all I used. I didn’t even make a coconut milk custard, like I do for my Chocolate Ice Cream recipe. I guess it’s a slight stretch to call this ice cream now, but it’s a stretch I’m going to make. It sets so solid that all you can do is cut it with a knife like that’s what you meant to do in the first place, and it’s truly delicious.

I still have a little Cocoa Sorbet left in the freezer but decided that two ice creams on the hop would be practical. I can’t remember how I justified it, I think it was something like “I love ice cream!”

Lemon Poppyseed Ice Cream

  •  2 x 400ml cans plain, full-fat coconut milk
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • Juice and zest of 2-3 lemons (depending on the juiciness)
  • 3 tablespoons poppyseeds

In a large pan, gently heat the coconut milk and sugar, stirring, till the sugar has dissolved. Continue to gently heat and stir for another five minutes then remove from the heat and allow to cool a bit.

Stir in the lemon juice and zest, and pour the mixture into a loaf tin (depending on how much lemon juice you used and the size of your loaf tin there may be a bit too much mixture) Carefully – don’t spill it like I did – place in the freezer. Allow to partially freeze, then stir it briskly with a fork or small whisk, then stir in the poppyseeds (at this stage, so they don’t all sink to the bottom) and return it to the freezer. To serve, cut thick slices.

I love this ice cream. Firstly it’s so easy to make. Just stir and pour. It has a popsicle-fresh, clean sweet lemony goodness, a thick and icy but still pleasing texture, and the nuttishly flavoursome poppyseeds delivered lovingly to your mouth in each spoonful. The coconut flavour isn’t overly pronounced, but whatever you do recognise will only be enhanced by the other ingredients. And if you have poppyseeds around already, and you’re lucky enough to either have a lemon tree or a lemon benefactor, then it’s a very, very inexpensive recipe. You could always leave the poppyseeds out and use a mix of lemon and orange juice and zest. Toasted coconut stirred through instead of the poppyseeds might work too. Play round and see what you like, although I do recommend first just trying this recipe itself – the summery, zingy lemon with the poppyseeds is pretty lovely.

My poppyseed adventuring didn’t end there, as, deciding on ‘both’ instead of ‘which’, I also made a lemon poppyseed cake (using this recipe here). Was it overkill? Most definitely not.

The very opposite of the ice cream, this cake is soft, buttery, and lush, the lemon flavour absorbed into the golden grit of the polenta and almonds to produce something wildly good. Pictured here is, sadly, the last piece.

Tim and I had an amazing night at Aloe Blacc’s concert on Thursday – he was an absolute diamond performer with a stupefyingly lovely voice and hugely comfortable stage presence. We took some photos, which you can see here and here. Tonight we’re going to the Wellington Laneway show which should be fun as, and if you’re in Wellington and want tickets they’re available for purchase here.

In our travel plan developments…we bought tickets to see Wicked in London! It sorta feels like the only appropriate response is a youthful OMG.

Title from: the song of the same name from the late Jonathan Larson’s musical 30/90, which I was able to see performed by a local theatre group a couple of years ago. It was fairly thrilling then, so one can only speculate what the Lear Jet-voiced Raul Esparza would have been like in the lead role in his day.

Music lately:

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Round and Round from Before Today, strangely alluring with its “na na naaah” opening deceptively evoking the sort of music that plays when you’re put on hold on the phone, swirling into something uplifting and exciting and…swirly. He’ll be at Laneway too, so.

Sadly not at Laneway or anywhere near my line of vision, is Idina Menzel, whose album I Stand – which still feels recent-ish – became three years old the other day. You go, Idina. While her debut Still I Can’t Be Still remains a flawless highpoint for me, I Stand is fantastic and I hope she continues to write music. And that I actually see her sing one day for real.

Next time: I made some gingerbread cut-out cookies but it has been heavy on the sweet things lately so I might instead do the pasta I made tonight with a raw tomato sauce. Either way: delicious.

no more cocoa leave-io, one two three

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In 1993 the band Blur released an album called Modern Life is Rubbish. While I can’t speak for Damon Albarn and his not-overly-merry men, maybe if that album had been made today, they might have called it Modern Life is Rubbish (Except For Twitter). Or even something like Modern Life is Rubbish (Except For Twitter, Wikipedia, free blogging platforms and the wide accessibility of humorous gifs which can replace actual content/emotion.)

Twitter briefly: a website where you log in with a username and deliver thoughts, or news commentary, or links to other content in 140 characters or less, as well as following people who do the same, and potentially re-share – with acknowledgement – those people’s content of the aforementioned nature, people who may include verified celebrities, celebrity parodies, companies/brands, and people from other cities that you don’t know but whose blog you really like. If you suspect it’s not for you then you may well be right, and that’s fine. Me, I love it.
Because of things like this:
My already cement-thick adoration for Twitter was further set into steadfast concrete last week. I’d been wanting to make Chocolate Sorbet for a long time now and not having a recipe, I asked my followers whether or not anyone had made it before and if they had any stories to share. Through one person replying and including someone else’s Twitter name (yeah, talking about Twitter outside of Twitter can sound cringey), and that someone else happening to be Giapo, the extremely busy-with-good-reason gelato shop on Queen Street in Auckland. I ended up procuring a stunning recipe for Cocoa Sorbet because Giapo – whoever does their tweeting – delivered it to me via Twitter. Told me I only needed cocoa, and asked for the fat content of said cocoa in as caring a manner as 140 character tweets can convey. Kindly told me to go ahead and share the recipe here, that there’s no intellectual property on what they do.
Well, it would’ve been churlish not to after all that effort. Luckily it tastes incredibly stunning, as it should – this recipe uses 200g of expensive cocoa. I trusted Giapo since they make their living from ice cream-related things, but I was still pretty wary, because it felt almost terrifyingly reckless to tip that much cocoa into one bowl. The point is, this recipe only has three ingredients, cocoa, sugar and water. The cocoa flavour will shine, so…it needs to be good stuff with around 20% fat content. I use Equagold, which comes in 300g jars and has 21% fat content. This does make it an expensive recipe, however the other two ingredients are cheap and free, respectively, and it’s not like you’re paying for eggs, cream, or chocolate. But still. Been warned.
This much cocoa!
Cocoa Sorbet
Recipe provided with thanks and acknowledgement to Giapo.

200g best-quality cocoa (with around 20% fat, such as Equagold)
200g sugar (any old white sugar! woohoo!)
500g water (from the tap! yeah!) (also: yes, grams. Weigh it like it’s flour or something, for accuracy purposes.)
Bring your water to the boil in a pan. In the meantime, in a large bowl, measure out the cocoa, fan yourself at the amount needed, move on, and measure out the sugar into the same bowl. Important: stir this (I used a small whisk) untill the cocoa and sugar “are one and the same” in Giapo’s words.
Turn off the stove when the water has boiled and pour it carefully into the cocoa and sugar. “Stir, stir, stir” said Giapo – you want this to become a thickish, dark syrupy liquid with no errant cocoa lumps. This is called a cold hot infusion. Allow to cool, then pour into a container and freeze. Every couple of hours go back and whisk it or stir it to break up any ice crystals. Allow to defrost a little before you try and eat it.
With that much cocoa in it, so light-absorbing and chocolate-ful, this recipe had to taste decent. However I was still nervous when I first rolled my spoon across the surface of the sorbet. But: it was actually amazing. The cocoa flavour is unsurprisingly strident, and while there’s the necessary sugar to stop this being a throat-clogging, inedible paste, the cleanness of the water allowed the pure, heady, earthy cocoa flavour to be the star.
Without the (admittedly delicious) mellowing of any cream or custard this made for a fairly intense eating experience. A smallish portion satisfies with its aggressive cocoa-ness, but it’s easy to keep going. Truly, truly delicious stuff, I absolutely recommend it. The only thing I would change – with all due respect – is to maybe up the amount of water to 750g. While the cocoa itself provides quite a lot of bulk, I feel that the mixture can handle being extended a bit, which also makes it go further and therefore helps justify the use of that much cocoa. I also figure that, if you’ve only got regular cocoa, you could maybe use just 100g of it, and roughly chop up 200g very dark chocolate and stir it in with the cocoa and sugar.
Hey! Exciting news! As if cocoa sorbet wasn’t enough: Tim and I are going on holiday in April. Our first holiday together…ever. To London. And Berlin. And somewhere in Poland, once I remember if I preferred Krakow or Warsaw better first time round. And on our way back to New Zealand we’re spending two nights in LA. That’s LA, AMERICA! As soon as Tim told me that he jacked that stopover up at the travel agency, I can half ashamedly/half defiantly tell you that the Baby-Sitters Club Super Special “California Girls” was the first thing that sprang to mind. By the way, the reason I’m disproportionately excited about going to America is that I’ve never been there, whereas London/Berlin/Poland is a re-visit. This is pretty massive for Tim and I – while we met over in England (him from Wairoa and me from Otaua, haha) the last time we stepped foot in an international airport was when we got back to New Zealand in December 2005. We’re now, in 2011, finally scraping ourselves into a position financially to be able to travel. We are SO EXCITED. And we’re going to book tickets for Wicked in London! I’ll finally see it – admittedly not with an Idina Menzel or a Julia Murney in the cast – but still. It has been interesting to love a musical to the point where my feelings have evolved into a kind of “how very 2007, and isn’t it a flawed story” fondness without ever having seen it live…but it will be even more interesting to just see it for real. So we’re trying something that I’ve called “nil by purse” where we basically don’t spend any extraneous dollars. It’ll be like back when we first moved in together, except now we’ve got an exciting endpoint other than just surviving.
So, since it’s nearly six years since I’ve been to London, Berlin and Poland, and since all I know about LA comes from things like the Baby Sitters Club and music videos, if anyone knows any cheap-but-awesome places to eat, or if anyone would like to (but not in any way be obliged to, because that’s just awkward) provide a couch or a floor for two extremely nice New Zealanders to crash on, or know of any amazing things to do and sights to see, then please share your knowledge! (and feel free to email me at hungryandfrozen@hotmail.com.)
Further exciting news: I’m trying to make a recipe index for this blog. Because I don’t have a head for strategy it’s a bit all over the place and there’s not necessarily a heading for everything (mostly just for foods that are a priority to me, like tofu and ice cream). And it’s not completed. But it might be useful! To find it, cast your eyes just under the heading picture.
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Title via: the gone but not forgotten Notorious B.I.G with Things Done Changed from Ready To Die, which swirls round contemplatively to a pretty devastating final verse.
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Music lately:

Emily 2.0 by Wellington’s Mammal Airlines from their EP Life of Mammals which you can seriously download for free. I love their music, they deserve to be huge with fuzzy catchy goodness like this.

I Wanna Be Your Dog by The Stooges from their album of the same name. I managed to catch about 15 minutes of Iggy on my break at Big Day Out. From my vantage point up in the stands, miles away, the sound was fairly appalling and…I actually have no idea what I was listening to. But it was fun just to see him at all, exactly as he appears in video footage of other music festivals: sinewed, shirtless, boucy.
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Next time: It has been a while since I’ve been on here, mostly because I was up in Auckland working at Big Day Out, which takes some recovering from. I’m working on more frequency though. Next time there’ll probably more skiting about our upcoming holiday. Also, more relevantly, a recipe for blackberry fool.

i’ve bean waiting so long, to be where i’m going

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Have I got a relatively exciting bean salad for you. Bean salad in and of itself isn’t all that thrilling, but compared to other bean salads this one is pretty special. Aaand I think I’ve used up my quota of saying “bean salad” just there. It was never something I sought out as a kid, although it’s not like my tastebuds were all that sophisticated – mind you neither is bean salad. I do remember eying it up at the deli counter of the supermarket. It looked dubious, a pile of small brown and green pebbles bathed generously in a tub of watery vinegar. This recipe is neither dubious nor watery. It’s verging on sexy. Again…relatively.

I found it while searching for something else entirely on Cuisine’s website and was tangentially inspired, thinking it would be an awesome summer dinner – filling, fast, cheap, oven barely required. As I’ve veered well away from the original, you too can muck round with the following recipe. If you want to use cannellini beans or whatever, no worries. If you want to use more than three kinds, be my guest. If you want to use lemon juice instead of cider vinegar because that’s what you’ve got, then you’re more than welcome to. I included the avocado oil and nigella seeds because I got them for Christmas (thanks, Mum and Dad!) but also because I wanted their respective mellow richness and subtle oniony kick. However you use what you like. As long as there’s some form of bean involved, otherwise…you’re not even really making this recipe at all.
Bean Salad with Poppyseed Dressing

Inspired by this recipe by Fiona Smith from Cuisine magazine.

1 can borlotti beans
1 can chickpeas (I found some super intriguing red chickpeas on special, but regular is obviously fine.)
Roughly 1 cup frozen edamame/soybeans (I say frozen because I presume that’s how you got ’em) You could use frozen peas or broad beans instead.
Handful of almonds
Mint, to serve

Cook your soybeans in boiling water – I tend to throw the beans and the water in the pan at the same time so they all heat up together, as I imagine it’ll shave a couple of minutes off the cooking time. Drain and refresh under cold water. In a hot pan – you can use the same one once the beans are drained – briefly toast the almonds, and then slice up roughly.

Dressing:

3 tablespoons decent-tasting oil. I used avocado, but olive or peanut oil would be great.
2 tablespoons cider vinegar (or lemon or lime juice)
1 tablespoon honey
2 tablespoons poppyseeds
1 fat clove garlic, finely chopped
A pinch of nigella seeds OR cumin seeds (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste.

In a large bowl, whisk together the oil, the vinegar, and the honey. Tip in the poppyseeds, the garlic, the nigella seeds if using and a pinch of seasalt (or a small pinch of regular salt) plus some pepper if you like. Whisk again. Drain the two cans of beans from their creepy can-liquid, and tip into the bowl of dressing along with the cooked soybeans. Using a spatula or large spoon, carefully fold the lot together so that everything becomes properly covered with the dressing, but none of the canned beans get too crushed.

Transfer into the bowl you’re going to serve it from, and top with the almonds and the mint. Or just add both to the bowl you’ve mixed it in if you want to save on dishes.

This salad is brilliant – light, filling, flavoursome, and kinda pretty as far as bean salads go. There’s something texturally satisfying about the combination of soft canned beans and the bite-ier, nutty green soybeans. The dressing also pleases, with its balance of sweet, sharp, salty, rich, and crunchy, and soaks flavoursomely into the otherwise mild beans. The almonds and mint are really just there to make it seem more exciting (something about a plate of beans doesn’t seem like anyone’s first choice) but contribute in a way that you’d want them there every time.
This made enough for dinner alongside some brown rice and sliced, fried zucchini, with the leftover rice stirred into the beans to take for dinner at the Botanic Gardens. It was night one of the ASB Gardens Magic and we saw the wonderful Nudge (standing in for the Thomas Oliver Band). It started to rain about ten minutes into their show but we stuck around and had a fantastic night, first watching people dance round in the rain and then joining in ourselves.
Speaking of rain, but in more horrifying quantities, the dreadful flooding in Australia has been on my mind a lot. The number of deaths seems to rise like the water itself, and it must be awful to have everything you know just…underwater. For what it’s worth, my heart goes out to everyone affected by it (including all the animals), and I hope this land of extreme weather settles down soon.
Having finished my first week back at work (hitting the ground at a brisk canter, this is a busy time for us) I can only conclude that my heart and brain are both at the beach. Feels like a squillion years ago that the most taxing decision I had was which book to read (answer: Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, Witi Ihimaera’s Tangi, a tribute to Jennifer Paterson, and half of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.)
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Title via: Gotta say, when I started typing this up I thought “ha! There must be sooooo many songs that use the word ‘been’ which I can twist for my purposes.” But with my aforementioned brain at the beach, Sunshine of Your Love by Cream was all I could think of. It’s a mighty fine song, but I know there’s something better out there. Hopefully for all of us my brain returns to its rightful location soonish.
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Music lately:
The aforementioned Nudge. They crop up here and there in Wellington and are fantastic live, all three members being fearsomely talented and easily watchable.
Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, Happy Days Are Here Again/Get Happy. Too beautiful.
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Next time: I managed to procure from Giapo, via Twitter, a recipe for Cocoa Sorbet. Yay for Twitter, and yay for you if it turns out decent because I’ll be blogging about it.

i wear my leather jacket like a great big hug

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Homemade plum fruit leather. Like rollups (in texture, anyway, they look more like Yonks here.) We didn’t really get too many popular kid-type snacks in the lunchbox when I was growing up but I do have a distinct memory of folding a rollup and pressing it across my teeth like a slowly dissolving, sugary mouthguard. It’s mildly surprising that I still have any teeth after that. This plum leather is like those rollups except super sour. Like DYC white vinegar in handy chewable form. It’s a snack that you can’t eat absent-mindedly, I’ll give it that.
Even though we’re well into January by this point, I still haven’t shaken the whole new year contemplation vibe. Is there such thing as a good year? Being such a long stretch of time, it’s fairly impossible not to accumulate some form of difficulty and sadness. Even if – just imagine somehow – every single person in the world was somehow able to not murder, attack, assault, rob, or cause any kind of physical or emotional harm or discrimination, and overwhelming poverty and lack of education was overcome with the help of many…well there’s still Mother Nature to contend with. No amount of goodwill can hold back the earth’s movements. And like most years before it 2010 was an absolute shocker, from the most orchestrated actions of humans to the unpredictability of nature.
On a personal level however, 2010 for me was pretty damn fantastic. Bragging, sure, but some decent achievements really did stack up for me last year and I’m pretty proud of myself.
– I was featured in a CLEO magazine article about food bloggers
– I was nominated for a CLEO/Palmolive Wonderwoman thing
– I was interviewed for the Morning Glory show on 95bFM
– I was nominated for a Wellingtonista Award for ‘Best Contribution to the Internet By A Wellingtonian.”
– Tim and I became cafe reviewers for Sunday Star-Times (the lower North Island edition). For what it’s worth, I like our reviews better than any other Wellington-based ones I’ve seen round. You might too…
– I got a small but thrill-making mention in Rip It Up magazine, especially considering the high company my fairly nondescript tweet keeps on their quotes page.
– The seriously lovely Lisa from Sky TV just up and sent me Nigella Lawson’s book Kitchen. Seriously.
– Tim and I started up 100sand1000s which has provided nonstop joy, from interviewing and feeding cake to Grayson Gilmour to staring quietly at gifs for hours.
– Tim and I hit the five year mark! Woo! And we got to spend our first Christmas together.

***Edited 13th Jan because I’m such a forgetful and ungrateful clod; clearly it’s a decent year when all the nice things that happened to you start to tumble out of your brain like icing sugar in a sieve.

As well as the above, I was also invited to the launch of Wellington On A Plate by the fantastic Angela Moriarty. I got a nametag with my blog’s name on it. I met Angela Walker from Sunday Star-Times and possibly alarmed her with my gratitude. I met the amazing Millie and Florence from Gusty Gourmet, who coolly quizzed a cheesemaker about pasteurising and taught me how to eat oysters. And then the three of us had the singularly thrilling experience of meeting Ray McVinnie, one of my food idols – in fact, one of my idols from any genre of leisure activity – seriously I don’t know how I forgot this from my list.

Angela M also gave myself and Millie the opportunity to meet up with such overwhelmingly legit aussie bloggers as Peter from Souvlaki for the Soul, Helen from Grab Your Fork, Billy from A Table For Two, plus the lovely Andrea from Auckland’s So D’lish. In an unrelated piece of organisation, I also got to meet up with some truly lovely and inspiring Wellington food bloggers (check my sidebar).

Go me. Now that I’m back in Wellington, (working again and lamenting the fact that the beach feels like it’s several solar systems away), I’m hoping that 2011 will bring some similarly awesome opportunities and that I’ll be able to keep blogging, hard. It has been a slow start but today I bring you this plum leather. I happen to get a kick out of making things that already basically exist. Like butter. Or marshmallows. But as far as it goes, homespun fruit leather seems like an alarmingly resourceful task, the sort of thing (like haircuts!) best left to the people paid to do it.
I found a good looking recipe though, the fruit it calls for is easy to get hold of right now and even though I’ve never felt any real suffering for lack of fruit leather, I felt drawn to making it.
It’s basically plums simmered into paste, spread onto a tray and then baked in an oven set to low, about the temperature of heavy mouth-breathing. The only real taxing bit is all the time and patience involved. Plums are cheap as this time of year and apparently this stuff lasts for up to five months so you could make tons now and store it up for the year ahead if you’re feeling particularly organised.
It’s a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingsal recipe, and while I know who he is and that he does good things, I’ve never actually tried any of his recipes. Having been kindly sent the River Cottage 2011 diary from Lisa and the good people at Sky though, which is filled with the sort of recipes – a generous three per month! – that make you nod frequently and think “I want to cook all those things”, I have no excuse not to give him a try.
However I’ve noticed he’s also – and it might just be the brief nature of the recipe layout in the diary – not one to make recipes super simple. The plum leather recipe could have done with slightly more information, which I can hopefully fill in for you now that I’ve tried it myself.
Spiced Plum Leather
1 to 1.5 kilos of plums
Honey
Cinnamon

Roughly slice your plums, discarding the stones, and place in a large saucepan. You can be pretty cavalier with the quality of your plums but cut away any really bad bits that look like they’re well on the fermenting-into-Moonshine process. Add enough water to just cover the base of the pan, and heat gently till the plums collapse a bit and release a lot of juice – around ten minutes although it all depends on your plums.

Push the pulp through a sieve into a bowl. No-one ever tells you what an excruciating job this is. There’s no way to speed up the process or to make it feel like you’re not wasting heaps of fruit, but persevere – I used a colander, the sort you’d drain potatoes with, sat over a bowl and a spatula constantly stirring and pressing. You should end up with a seriously good looking, deep cerise, thick liquid.

Scrape this back into the pan and simmer till thickened somewhat, stirring occasionally. Hugh doesn’t give a time for this but I found it took about half an hour and even then, there was no dramatic change in the look of the puree, it had just reduced slightly. Add a little honey and a dash of cinnamon at this point.

Finally, spread thinly and evenly across two paper-lined baking trays using your spatula and bake for as long as you can in a very low oven (around 60 C, which feels like barely turning it on). You’re supposed to leave it for 12 hours, but I couldn’t psychologically deal with having the oven on overnight, even if it is so low. Maybe make this early in the morning when you know you’re going to be hanging round. However it can also handle being baked in a few bursts when you have the time. Allow to cool completely in the oven, at which point you should be able to peel it off the baking paper, however you can roll it up and cut it into slices in its paper. Use within 5 months.
It looks truly gorgeous, especially when held up to the light, and has a strong jammy flavour from the slowly heated plums, tempered by an intense fruitish sourness.
But yeah, there’s no denying this is fairly time-consuming and takes some effort. While I’d be hard-pressed to say that the flavour entirely outweighs this, if you were one of those kids who ate lemons or always went for the sour gummy worms then you’ll love this. I’m sure you could add sugar to the fruit while it simmers without it coming to any harm – I mean, rollups were just toffee dressed up to look like a legit snack. And whatever the flavour may lack in accessibility, it’s made up for with the extreme sense of accomplishment you’ll probably feel once it’s all done.
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Title via: local long shadow-casters The Chills and their memorable 1986 tune I Love My Leather Jacket.
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Music lately:

The Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry as covered by Tourettes and Caoimhe for the aforementioned Morning Glory show on bFM. You even have the excellent option of downloading a massive selection of such songs for free here.

Aloe Blacc’s Miss Fortune from Good Things…even though there’s a fair bit of effort, time and money involved we’ve booked ourselves in to his Auckland show later this month, I seriously can’t wait.

Heidi Blickenstaff performing Kander and Ebb’s Sing Happy at some one-off gig in New York…sigh. She’s so lovely. Lucky New Yorkers, where things like this casually happen all the time.
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Next time: I made an awesome bean salad, hopefully by the time my next blog post rolls around I’ll have worked out a better way to describe it though.

food beyond compare, food beyond belief…

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Another year goes past, another flat Christmas dinner is planned for and cooked and eaten and then reminisced about. Our first was in 2006, before I even had this blog, and when we’d just moved into our then-flat. The second one was the day after the David Beckham game, 2008’s was when I’d finished uni and started full-time work and Emma our then-flatmate was stranded in Thailand. She got back to NZ just fine, by the way, but still. Last year was our first Christmas dinner in our current flat and was also the day that I was on the cover of the Sunday Star-Times Sunday magazine (which meant a lot of “oh this? Oh I had no idea that was on the table there lookatmeeveryone“) This year was a pretty low-key happening, with just seven of us, but it was an amazingly happy day. Partly because of the awesome friends and whanau who were there, and partly because…my first ever Baked Alaska was not a disaster.

I’ve made this Involtini from Nigella Bites for the last three Christmas Dinners and it’s one of the best Christmassy vegetarian recipes I’ve ever found. Basically it is spoonfuls of herbed, nutty cooked bulghur wheat rolled up into parcels with long thin slices of fried eggplant, which are then tucked in to a casserole dish, covered with tomato puree and baked. It’s incredibly good and can be done ages in advance, and while Nigella’s original recipe contains lots of feta, it’s easy enough to make this dairy-free or completely vegan as I did. Pistachios are even prettier than feta anyway…
This year I had the idea that I could cook the eggplant slices quickly in a toasted sandwich press brushed with a little oil. It totally worked! Didn’t look as sexy as Nigella’s glistening griddle-striped slices, but since it’s all getting covered in tomato sauce anyway, I didn’t really care, and it saved me from sweating over a hot oily pan.
The roast chicken was the only thing in the whole damn day that had dairy products in it, and that’s because Ange, our very good friend and ex-flatmate, is vegetarian as well as dairy-free. I poured cream all over the chickens before roasting them, inspired by a recipe of Ruth Pretty’s I read in the 2005 Nov/Dec issue of Cuisine magazine. It felt like an amazingly extreme thing to be doing, plus it made the birds tender, golden and crisp. Notice in the background the boiled potatoes and roasted capsicums…I don’t have the energy to photograph and talk about them individually: just know that they were there too and they tasted great. I didn’t plan for gravy but quickly boiled up the roasting pan juices (there was heaps, was a shame to waste it) with a little flour and, without any white wine to hand, threw in some sake instead. It smelled amazing and tasted just fine too.
(Sorry to keep putting you on the spot Ange) For the first time my favourite stuffing (Cornbread and Cranberry from Nigella’s Feast) was dairy-free, made with rice bran oil (what, you thought margarine? Pffft) and soymilk. Even though I really love the bit where you crumble the already buttery cornbread into a pan of melted butter and cranberries, it was still delicious, and in fact the soymilk made it almost spookily puffy and light-textured. Except I ended up baking it for too long so instead of a soft, moist stuffing it was more like a large savoury biscuit. Eh, still tasted good.
The cranberry sauce! I have to co-sign with Nidge on this one, it really is as redder-than-red as she insists. I didn’t even up the saturation in this photo.
Anyway all that was cool, but The Baked Alaska. Oh my gosh. I always like to use this day as an excuse to try out a challenging new pudding but this one had an element of stage fright to it. (In case you’re wondering, 2006 was Nigella’s Rhubarb and Mascarpone Trifle, 2007 was her Rugelach, 2008 I made her White Chocolate Almond Torte, and last year I did her Chocolate Pavlova.) The cake and ice cream I made in advance but the last bit – whipping up meringue, spreading it over them and blasting it in the oven right before serving had humungous potential for wrongness.
I used a recipe from the Floridita’s cookbook for the base and invented my own coconut-blackberry ripple ice cream for the next layer, partly because I had some blackberries in the freezer already. I know it seems unfair to recommend making your own ice cream when it’s only going to be covered in meringue. But the good thing about it is that without the preservatives and who knows what else that goes into a lot of commercial ice cream it’s way more solid and therefore a bit more forgiving when you shunt it under a blazing oven. I’d argue that it’s much more fun to make your own but that’s just me. I like making ice cream.
The ice cream was made by whisking together 4 egg yolks (the egg whites I put in a plastic container and refrigerated to use, plus two more, for the meringue) and about 150g sugar. I then heated a can of coconut milk without letting it boil, and quickly whisked it into the egg yolk mixture. All of that got returned to the pan and gently heated, while constantly whisking, till it thickened like custard. I stirred in a can of coconut cream and then began to freeze it in a shallow dish (the same one I baked the cake in actually). Then I defrosted about 150g blackberries (you could use any berry really) mashed them with a couple of tablespoons of sugar and the juice of a lemon, and drizzled it into the still-softish ice cream.
Tim took this photo and also put the ice cream and cake on top of each other on the tray while I whisked up the meringue topping. For which I’m seriously grateful, because it only occured to me halfway through making the meringue that I still had to do all that.
I made sure to follow my Nana’s advice to make sure the meringue completely covered the cake and ice cream – it provides a thick blanket of protection which allows the ice cream to survive under the heat, but if it’s not uniformly covered, the ice cream can seep out and then you’ve got a small crisis on your hands. I also followed some last-minute tweeted advice from Martin Bosley about warming up the sugar first before its beaten into the egg whites. It’s not every day that this kind of interaction comes my way so I thought I might as well try it – sat the sugar in a shallow metal bowl in the oven while it was heating up, enough to make the crystals warm but not enough to melt them into syrup. Cannot deny that my meringue whisked up in minutes with more volume and shine than a shampoo commercial.
But it worked, it worked! I felt a rush of happiness and pride just looking at it. Baked Alaska are generally supposed to resemble mountains, mine was admittedly more of a plateau, like a Baked Cape Town Table Top Mountain.
Look at the jelly in the background somehow managing to steal the show with its ruby-glow.
So on top of looking spectacular – like a pudding from a Dr Seuss book, or a Graeme Base book, or let’s face it, a Barbie film adaptation of a classic fairytale – it tasted wonderful too. It’s like having three puddings at once, all compressed into a handy cube. The radicalness of hot meringue against still-frozen ice cream. The sweetness of the topping and the creamy berry-sharp coconut ice cream against the dark cocoa-y cake. Stunning. I may have high-fived myself.
Finally: Cakeballs! So satisfying to say, make and eat. They came about because when I made the cake for the Baked Alaska and tried to turn it out of its tin onto a tray it…broke. Not so much that it couldn’t be more or less patched up, but it did leave me with a significant pile of cake crumbs. I could have eaten the lot in despair, but then I remembered Nigella’s recipe in her Christmas book for “Christmas Puddini Bonbons” aka…cakeballs. Mine were pretty simple – the cake crumbs mixed with about 125g melted chocolate and 2 tablespoons golden syrup before being rolled into balls and drizzled with more dark chocolate. What gave them that superfunk-Christmas look and transformed them from “hastily covered-up mistake” to “incredible bonbons that I will fight you for” was the judicious sprinkling of edible glitter. I’ve walked past the cupcake lady at the City Market nearly every Sunday asking how much her edible glitter is. Finally I decided that it wasn’t even expensive at all especially considering it lasts forever, and bought a small vial of it. Ohhhh how I love it. Had to hold myself back from glittering up the roast chickens.
Tim and I have been living off the leftovers ever since, which I love. We’re going up to my place for Christmas this time next week so we’re trying not to buy too much new food…just using up what’s there. I tell you, there’s nothing like standing at the kitchen bench, wordlessly eating leftover jelly off a plate to bring you closer together. (I grabbed two spoons from the draw, and then was like “Well I’ve got my spoons” like I was going to have one in each hand. Yeah, I gave him one of the spoons. But I think he believed me…I think I believed me for a second.)
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Title via: Les Miserables, Master of the House. Last night Tim and I saw the live recording of the 25th Anniversary Les Mis concert at Embassy Theatre. It was amazing – Norm Lewis (he of the faint-making voice), Lea Salonga, Ramin Karimloo, erm…Nick Jonas (he wasn’t awful per se, anyone would look useless next to Ramin). Matt Lucas of Little Britain was Thenardier, who knew the man could sing so well! I know Les Mis isn’t the height of pop culture awesomeness, especially in this post-Boyle, post-Glee time, but whatever, the music is still incredible, totally unashamed about the tears that appeared during Salonga’s I Dreamed A Dream and Lewis’ Stars.
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Music lately:
I’ve been listening to A Very Little Christmas heaps – it was put together by a whole bunch of local musicians, has some excellent seasonal tunes both original and familiar, and you can download it free, what!
Sideline, a new track from David Dallas with Che Fu. Woohoo! Is all I have to say. Because I’ve spent three days trying to write this blog and my sentence-forming ability is dissolving like sugar in a hot oven…
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Next time: Proper recipes…vegetables…