Category: Dips and Spreads

and when i hit that dip get your camera

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Do you ever get all like, this superfood is going to solve all the problems in my life? Well that’s how I feel about this pomegranate-laden hummus that I made. This is not a new thing for me; in fact I’ve probably discussed it before on here where I place enormous pressure on, say, goji berries or chia seeds or something to have some kind of ripple effect on the rest of my life, rather than actually doing anything about the rest of my life.

super super

Let me tell you a story to illustrate this. I swear I must’ve told it here before because it’s one I wheel out often to elaborately self-deprecate, but it bears repeating. So: I attended a girls boarding school for a couple of years in the early 2000s. This was peak time for two fads: the Atkins diet, and hating your own body. What can I say, we were all just humans with human bodies crammed together in a boarding house with not much to do, it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen outside of that context too. It just…is a thing. Anyway, not having any disposable income to buy the trappings of the Atkins diet – of which our interpretation was eating a lot of blueberries and unsweetened whipped cream – I was DELIGHTED to discover a grapefruit tree round the back of the boarding house. The grapefruit diet was even more hardcore and old-school than the Atkins one and I smugly lined up four plump, pale grapefruit on the windowsill, ready to be eaten for my breakfast.

After all that lead up, herein lies the kicker: I was boasting about my cunning ruse to someone. Grapefruit! For free! What larks!

There’s no grapefruit tree here, they told me. That’s an orange tree. You’ve been eating unripe oranges for the last four days.

Well that explains my sore stomach, said I.

So yeah, I’ve had idiotic ideas about food and the effect it will have upon me since way back; however I can’t deny that there really is something oddly calming about making yourself a vast quantity of hummus – allowing the dried chickpeas to swell up and grow plump in a bowl of water; slowly cooking them in an enormous pan till they’re completely tender; blitzing them to a soft, pillowy mass in the food processor, adding oil and lemon and salt and spice to reflect your own instinctive tastes; absentmindedly pouring tahini into your mouth and then nearly choking on it because it’s like actual glue in food form; spreading the nubbly hummus into a large bowl and tumbling over jewel-like pomegranate seeds, sliding a knife into a perfect avocado, eating the lot in one go; somehow finding yourself hooning the tahini again because it’s so delicious in spite of the quicksand perils of its texture.

There is literally nothing stopping you just buying a tub of hummus from the supermarket and having, y’know, hummus right then and there, but this is a food blog and as such I’m afraid I’m going to occasionally expose you to, y’know, cooking.

Making your own hummus from scratch aside, is it weird that I just ate a whole bowl of the stuff? As is? I’m going to say no, but there is absolutely nothing stopping you from serving this as it usually comes, as a dip to be plundered by lots of crackers and breads and such. I’m not going to call this a Hummus Bowl or Loaded Hummus or anything like that, it was just…this delicious stuff that I ate a lot of. As with the unripe grapefruit story, sure there’s some context there but it’s also not that deep: this hummus just tastes amazing.

Final caveat: I just started making it without following a recipe or anything and there will be truly about one billion recipes online already for this stuff, but if you’re lacking one you could do worse than to follow mine. It’s neither traditional nor perfect, but it’s mine. No wait, one more caveat: you OF COURSE don’t have to soak dried chickpeas and then simmer them in unsalted water for an hour and then drain them, you could just use canned, but they cost hardly anything and since you’re already making your own hummus you might as well go all out, yeah?

hummus with avocado, pomegranate, pine nuts and pumpkin seeds

  • four cups of dried, soaked, cooked chickpeas.
  • five tablespoons tahini
  • around four tablespoons of olive oil plus more for drizzling
  • one heaped tablespoon ground cumin, plus more if you like
  • two tablespoons lemon juice, plus more if you like  
  • plenty of sea salt or similarly “nice” salt, but use regular if it’s what you’ve got
  • up to one cup of water
  • the seeds from half a pomegranate
  • one small avocado
  • a few tablespoons each pine nuts and pumpkin seeds

Place the chickpeas in a food processor and blend the heck out of them, till they form a kind of nubbly, sandy rubble. Add the tahini, the olive oil, the lemon juice, the cumin, and a good pinch of salt, and process the actual heck out of it some more, while slowly pouring water down the feed tube till it appears to be a pleasing consistency. It will thicken up once it’s sat for a bit, so don’t worry toooo much if it looks too soupy. The important thing is the taste – is there enough salt? Enough cumin? Enough lemon? Add more and keep tasting till you’re happy. 

Transfer the lot – this makes around a litre – into a sealed container. Spoon some into a bowl, cover lavishly in pomegranate seeds, pumpkin seeds, slices of avocado, pine nuts, more salt, and a drizzle of olive oil. Eat. 

I probably over-emphasise this with every recipe I make but also I feel the need to tell you that of course you don’t have to use the specific things on top of the hummus that I did, or indeed use anything at all. It’s just really nice with this specific combination. Put coffee grounds and Lego on top of it for all I care. (Damn it, no, I care too much: please don’t do this.)

Pomegranates are getting cheaper and cheaper at the supermarket right now though and avocados are slowly becoming more reasonable and more likely to be ripe and perfect. Together – the silky bite of avocado as your teeth slide effortlessly through them paired with the sour crunch of the pomegranate seeds against the creamy, soft hummus – they’re rather wonderful and it all makes for a very satisfying snack-thing. And it’s so serene, like I couldn’t emphasise the serenity of this more if I was running through the streets yelling “Serenity!” through a megaphone while also crashing some cymbals together.

Look at these damn calming pomegranates.  Look at these damn calming pomegranates.

If you’re vibing making your own dips, may I suggest also: Nigella’s Peanut Butter Hummus; this incredible Turkish dip called Tarator which is almost literally just bread and water but tastes like a thousand things more; and this honestly INCREDIBLE Cambodian Wedding Day Dip which is, as I explain in the blog post, all the more delightful because it’s a recipe that also sounds like a dance.

title from: Azealia Banks’ perennial hit for the ages, 212. Say what you will about her, but we are blessed to have this song.  

music lately: 

Slow Ride, by Foghat. I’ve been watching a LOT of NewsRadio lately and there’s an episode that features this rather quintessential 70s rock song and well, now it’s in my head.

About A Girl, Nirvana. I saw Montage of Heck, the melodramatic but amazing and incredibly sad Kurt Cobain documentary last night, and now I obviously need to listen to a lot of Nirvana. Wasn’t their MTV Unplugged album just perfect, though?

next time: Possibly 12,000 uses for hummus since I made around a litre of the damn stuff. 

this is jam hot, this is jam hot

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

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

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

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

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

berry chia seed jam

with thanks to sans ceuticals for this recipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

music lately:

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

Gossling, Never Expire. My favourite genre: dreamy.

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

 

it’s not for lack of bread, like the greatful dead, darling

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This time of year in New Zealand, with the heat and the sprinkling of public holidays and the lazy stretched out sunny evenings giving way to spontaneous happenings, it’s good to have a few snacky options in your brain should something arise that you want to make food for. I mean, most people are happy with a few bags of chips. But if you want to provide a little something extra now or anytime of year, and you’re into cooking anyway (I presume that’s why you’re here in the first place, although I unsecretly and vainly dream of the day that people who don’t even care about cooking read this because it’s just that damn good) then I suggest this dip. Its credentials are near-flawless: it’s fast. It’s very cheap. It’s vegan. It tastes so, so good. And it has a flashy name. Tarator. Now that is something.

Being the contrary person I am, I kinda hate all this heat – which makes me sweaty and frustrated – and long for the biting cold of winter. Which makes me feel alert and snuggly. Like a cat! But it’s here, and how, particularly in Wellington – today was so punishingly hot I actually started crying a little in the street without really realising it. It was just discombobulatingly, dizzyingly hot. Which was great because then I had to go to the gym to buy a membership from the stunning and charming person who I’ve been consulting with while I’m there. Yes: gym membership. No-one is more surprised than me that I’ve been really enjoying myself. My arms are getting bufty, I have more energy, and most of all – for that one hour that I’m lifting weights or kicking into the air – I am not thinking. This is crucial. I am always overthinking things. I’m overthinking right now. But not while I’m at the gym. So even though it’s a significant expense in our lives, I can, and am happy to, make some space for it in the budget.

So: tarator. It sounds a lot more exciting than it looks. And also it sounds a lot more exciting than the list of ingredients looks. The bulk of this saucy dip, or dippy sauce, is in fact just bread and water. There are also walnuts, which is good, because they taste wonderful but also allow you to explain this as being a Turkish walnut dip, as opposed to blended up bread and water. The mint leaves are also important. Not because they necessarily add to the flavour – although their cooling pep helps lift the richness – but because of the inherent social code that exists which means you don’t have to explain to your guests that this substance is edible. They gaze upon your table of snacks and without even realising it, they think “Aha! That sprinkling of greenery is letting me know that this is not just suspiciously formless brown paste, but in fact imminent deliciousness in which to insert my crisped bread or sliced vegetable of choice!” (See: always overthinking. Even garnish.)

Tarator

This recipe is adapted from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s rather lovely book River Cottage Veg Everyday. I upped the bread a little and lowered the oil, just to make it a little more affordable. Use what you like, as long as it’s a little thick-cut and doesn’t have grains in it – I used Freya’s light rye, hence the colour of the finished product. It’s very forgiving, so add more dampened bread, oil, or lemon juice as you need till it tastes right.

  • 70-100g walnuts
  • 1 large garlic clove
  • 4 slices decent-ish, non-grainy white or light rye bread, either fresh or pre-sliced from a packet.
  • 5 tablespoons olive oil, or more to taste
  • 1/2 a lemon
  • Salt, to taste

Blitz the nuts and the garlic clove in a food processor until fairly finely ground. Run the slices of bread under cold water and squeeze out a little – it will feel weeeeird – then throw them in the food processor and blend to a thick, thick paste. Add the olive oil, the salt, and the juice of the lemon and continue to process, adding more oil or even a little water to thin it down a little if necessary. Taste for salt or lemon juice, then scrape into a serving bowl.

It’s astonishingly, intriguingly rich – in that same plumply smooth way that pate is. It’s intensely savoury and yet oddly light and creamy. It just tastes like good times, okay? I feel like it lends itself to being more than a dip – a sauce for pasta salad, for example – but for now, while this weather insists on being so infuriatingly pleasant, it’s perfect just heaped into a bowl and speared with slices of cucumber and carrot.

Important-ish: Tim and I saw the Les Miserables movie with our friends Kim and Brendan last week. I’ve grown up with the original London cast recording ever since I used to dance around to Castle on a Cloud as a child, and have seen the musical several times, so was prepared to scrutinise it sharply. Well. A few details aside, (Russell Crowe, who was like, fine, but no Norm Lewis) Tim and pretty much adored it. If nothing else, we certainly had a lot of feelings about it. We analysed it all the way home. We then watched the 25th anniversary DVD. We then discussed it on and off for the entire following week. While no-one really is clamouring for the notes from our two-person roundtable, I will say this. If you hate musicals, nothing, least of all the bombastic and earnest Les Mis, will win you over. But it’s so monumental and enormous and beautiful that it’s pretty delightful to be sucked into it, to let those emotionally manipulative refrains draw hot tears from your eyes, and to daydream about wearing red coats with epaulettes.

Finally: our friends Kate and Jason are back from Europe after two months away! I was so heart-poundingly overexcited when Kate txted me on Saturday morning to ask if we wanted to come along to brunch that I ended up doing this:

Says it all, I believe.

PS: Thanks for the super cool response to my new segment, I Should Tell You! I am nothing if not punt-taking but it’s still always an utter relief when it doesn’t fall over flat.
Title via: The titular song from the musical Hair. Hot damn I love musicals.

Music lately:

Tim and I have been playing the new Cat Power record Sun over, and over, and over. The songs are so new but feel like they’re already worn in and familiar, like the softest flannel sheets. I love Manhattan.

All these epic musicals with convoluted storylines are naturally making me re-obsessed with Chess. Idina Menzel singing Nobody’s Side is too, too much.

Even after watching it a squillion times, Frank Ocean singing Bad Religion live on Jimmy Fallon still makes my heart explode but also melt at the same time.

Next time: Might be another I Should Tell You! Dun dun dunnnn.

 

just twist your hip and do the dip

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You know how you learn something and then find you see it everywhere? Like you’ll learn a new word and then hear it in a song and read it in an article and hear someone say it in passing. I recently read a book – The Sense of an Ending – which has a whammy moment when you realise one character had been repressing, or at least not divulging, a particularly significant memory. No sooner had I read this book, when I’m flipping aimlessly, and I do mean aimlessly, through a weekly magazine. And I am confronted with an advertisement bearing the blankly content face of a commemorative Kate Middleton porcelain doll in a wedding dress. And it reminded me of something I haven’t thought about in years and years: that I used to be a little obsessed with those Franklin Mint porcelain dolls and would rip the advertisements out of aunties’ and nanna’s magazines and catalogue them in a folder in alphabetical order (well they all had names, Heather and Rosa and so on) and dream of the day I could own them all. Luckily for my now utter horror at the idea of walking into a room full of expressionless doll eyes staring back at you, I had no disposable income at the age of eight or so, and as such the folder was as far as it went. But isn’t it strange what you forget and remember again – not the traumatic things – but these vivid little slices of your life that remind you exactly who you were and are?

Leaving behind the “I Was an Awkward Awkward” chapters for now, I’d like to bring your attention to hummus. I know, hummus, that ubiquitous but excellent beige lotion, how can it have still more surprises up its sleeve? Well who more reliable to elicit such surprises than my idol Nigella Lawson, who only goes and replaces the tahini (sesame seed paste) with Peanut Butter. Peanut butter has a somewhat brash flavour, but against the mild chickpeas and smoothing yoghurt it mellows out and provides this sweet, nutty, oleaginously compulsive edge to your hummus. I really love tahini – sesame being one of my favourite flavours, but peanut butter doesn’t so much deliver the goods as urgent courier them while wearing appealingly fitted shorts and saying in a warm voice, “I’ve got a big package for you”.

Peanut Butter Hummus

Recipe from Nigella Lawson’s book Kitchen, I’ve simplified it slightly. Really, just play with quantities of the ingredients as they please you. If you’re not able to eat dairy, I’d add an extra tablespoon of water and lemon juice and peanut butter and it’ll be all good.

1 can chickpeas, drained
1 clove garlic
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons peanut butter
2 tablespoons lemon juice
3 tablespoons Greek yoghurt
1 teaspoon cumin
Salt

 Blend all together thoroughly till smooth. Add a little more yoghurt or water if it’s not spreadable enough.

Because I feel that hummus alone isn’t quite enough to bolster this blog post, a second recipe for you. I’m really sorry that both of these require a blender/food processor – I hate when recipes give directions for making cake batter in a cake mixer when said cake mixers cost many hundred dollars, or when an ice cream recipe finishes with “and then put it in your ice cream maker and follow their instructions” or whatever. I’m sorry. You could effectively crush up the chickpeas with a fork or a potato masher, but the strawberries really need the swift action that only an electric rotating blade can provide. 

What, you don’t have a dedicated hummus knife commemorating the Parihaka War Memorial in Whangarei? Look I’m not saying your party is “ruined” as such…

If you do have a blender though, there aren’t many happier foodstuffs in this world than pink lemonade. I first tried making it with raspberries, and that was great, but strawberries are even more delicious, which is brilliant because they’re also half the price.

Pink Lemonade

A recipe by myself

2 1/2 cups frozen strawberries (bully for you if you’ve got real ones, but it’s winter in NZ right now. And frozen strawberries are really pretty cheap any time of year)
2 1/2 litres of lemonade
Optional: passionfruit syrup, mint leaves

Place the strawberries in a blender and allow them to defrost somewhat. Add 1/2 cup of water and blend till smooth and gloriously pink, adding more water if your blender can’t deal with it. Spatula into a jug and slowly top up with lemonade. The bubbles and the strawberry puree will form scuzzy bubbles on top, just stir it with a wooden spoon to break it up.

And lo, a joyful jugful of deeply pink, wondrously delicious lemonade shot through with the fresh taste of strawberry. A little passionfruit syrup helps sharpen up this berry flavour, and mint leaves are just delicious with nearly anything, but simply strawberries and lemonade on their own are more than fine.
I served both these delights over the weekend at my inaugural Ice Cream Demonstration Party (that’s not necessarily what it’s called but the capital letters make it seem official) where in front of a small group of lovely people I demonstrated and imparted pretty much every particle of knowledge I have about ice cream, taking them through recipes for said ice cream and sauces to go on top, then we all built our own ice cream sundaes and then they went home with a goodie bag. It was super fun and you can check out photos from the night (one of the guests was also a great photographer) on my Facebook page, if you please.
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Title via Rock the House by Gorillaz. Tim and I were lucky enough to see them in 2010 and it was so brilliant that my brain starts melting every time I think about it. Like, there’s Damon Albarn, one of the first people who got me realising that I could have a crush on another person. Also present: Bobby freaking Womack.
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Music lately:
Lee Fields, Faithful Man. Tim insisted we buy this record. He insisted accurately. Fields is just really, really good.

Madeline Kahn, Getting Married Today. Mixing my obsession for the musical Company with my new fascination for the hilarious, babely, and sadly late Kahn, she does well with this horrendously challenging song.
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Next time: Still have some quinces lying there looking at me reproachfully. The time has come to do more than just sniff them rapturously, any suggestions?

am I ever gonna see my wedding day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cambodian Wedding Day Dip

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


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

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

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

Music lately:

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

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

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

"she used to say, harlan pepper, if you don’t stop naming nuts…"

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Having now made cashew butter for the first time, I can only hope that if you try it too, you don’t experience the same terrifying lows, dizzying highs and creamy middles that I endured to achieve one small bowl of camel-coloured paste. I first heard about cashew butter in a Baby-Sitter’s Club book, Dawn and the We Heart Kids Club, in fact. Who could’ve known that about fifteen years would pass before cashew butter had any further significance in my life?

Please ‘scuse the green stain on the teatowel.

I’ve now relayed this story dramatically on Twitter and Facebook, but for context, and because I’m not good at letting go of things easily, I’ll re-summarise here. I saw on Mrs Cake’s blog that she’d done homemade peanut butter, and breezily so, and I thought her method could be easily transferable to cashew nut butter. The sort of thing I read about – see above – but have never actually eaten.

While pulverising my cashews in the food processor, I saw that a significant amount of cashew-matter had crept up the sides and remaining there, safely away from the whizzing blades. So, unthinkingly, I got my wooden spoon, poked it through the feed tube in the lid of the processor, and waggled it round to scrape down the sides. It worked! But then the blades forced everything back up again. Instead of sensibly turning it off and scraping down the sides with a spatula, I just stuck the wooden spoon back in the tube again. And dropped it. There was an awful noise as the processor was almost jumping around with the exertion of trying to blitz at full speed with a spoon jammed in it, and finally with a crash, the plastic tube broke, pieces of it hurtling into the air, and all this forced the lid off so the food processor finally stopped going. Leaving me with butter dotted with tiny woodchips, a significantly clawed and scraped wooden spoon (it was my favourite!) and a busted food processor lid.

If you follow this method *except* for the wooden spoon bit, I promise you’ll have cashew butter – homemade, wildly delicious, fairly inexpensive if you snap them up on special, non-traumatic cashew butter. Unfortunately there’s no getting around the fact that you need a food processor. I kind of need one now, too.

Homemade Cashew Butter

  • Roasted, salted cashews, as many as you like
  • Plain oil such as rice bran (optional)

I say roasted and salted, because this is how they’re usually presented, but if yours are plain, then just roast and salt them as you wish.

Place the cashews in the bowl of the food processor. Put on the lid and blitz them pretty constantly, pausing occasionally to scrape down the sides and give the motor a break.

Eventually – it does take a while – the cashews will go from being crumbly particles, to forming a smooth, solid mass. This might be extremely solid, so feel free to drizzle in a little oil to soften it up a bit.

Transfer to a container and refrigerate.

Really, if you’re not going in for processor-busting shenanigans like me, the only difficult part of this operation is the horrible loud clattery noise that the food processor makes when it first starts chopping up the nuts. It’s like the sound of a massive snarling dog sitting on top of a ride-on lawnmower driving over gravel.

Consider the cashew: it’s a pretty ultimate nut. Classier and less abrasive than the peanut, easier to get at than a pistachio, less fancy than the pinenut, cheaper than macadamias, softer than Brazils, more savoury than the almond, and um…less wrinkly than pecans and walnuts. Its mild, creamy flavour and excellent affinity with sodium makes the cashew so favourably inclined to becoming a spreadable version of itself. The cashew butter has a caramelly richness which just hints at white chocolate (although I maintain that macadamias are the white chocolate of the nut world) but also that recognisable peanut butter quality of coating your throat and choking you if you eat it too fast. (I also maintain that clouds are the whales of the sky, but that’s mostly to annoy Tim.)

In case you’re wondering what to do with your cashew butter, apart from eat it euphorically (it really is good) you might consider these Spicy Cashew Noodles that I brought into being last night for dinner. In a bowl, place three tablespoons of cashew butter, chilli sauce in a make and quantity of your preference (I used 1 tablespoon sambal oelek) and either a little finely chopped fresh ginger or a brief dusting of ground ginger. Now add about 1/2 a cup water. Using a fork or a small whisk, mix this together till it forms a saucy sauce – the cashew butter will magically accommodate the water so add more if you like. The cashews are already salty and sweet but taste and see if you want to add sugar or salt. Finally, mix in a teaspoon of cider vinegar (that’s what I had, I can’t vouch for the taste of other vinegars but I’m sure they’ll work) and stir the sauce through the cooked noodles of your choice. Me, I went for rice sticks. Tip over a little more chilli sauce and some coriander or mint if you like.

And pa-dah. You have dinner, of sweet, spicy nutty sauce which coats each delicious strand of noodle. If cashews are out of your reach right now, you could always make this with peanut butter instead.

The NZ Film Festival has started in Wellington, and Tim and I are filming it up large in response. I particularly can’t wait for Pina and The Trip. Also Visa Wellington on a Plate starts this Friday so if you’re not already – there’s a significant amount of justifiable hype surrounding it like jus surrounds a cutlet – then Get Excited and check out their website for things to do that will bring yourself and food closer together.

Title via: A rare non-music title; the nut-monologue from Best in Show. A movie not quite as rapturously good as A Mighty Wind but still brilliance.

Music lately:

Ali Farka Toure, Beto. Beautiful music.

How To Dress Well, Decisions (Orchestral Mix) it’s actually playing on the radio right now and I like it so much that I had to look it up. Nice work, radio. (Or should I say, Martyn Pepperell on the radio, since he’s the one who played the song)

I know I go on about her a bit, but it’s with good reason. You should see Mariah Carey sing the ever-loving heck out of one of her early hits Emotions in this video. (I mean her awesomely peppy song of that name by the way, not the gross BeeGees one.)

Next time: Strange as it seems, it feels like ages since I’ve done any proper baking so it might be that; I also have some tamarillos up my sleeve….not literally…

 

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.