you gorgeous stack of pancakes you, you’re going nowhere till I’m through

February 11, 2018March 11, 20201 Comment

I’m sure I’ve said it before but do you ever like, stop and think to yourself, “it’s as if life is a series of unrelated events that are by and large out of our control?” No sooner had I landed myself a plummy new job and started to enjoy the unsought but distinct pleasure of bartending as a non-General Manager with absolutely zero wider responsibility, no sooner did all that come to fruition than I bloody went and fainted while trying to procure a ticket to a film (Call Me By Your Name, and no, I still haven’t seen it), falling straight over backwards in some kind of misguided trust fall, landing on my head and achieving what I’m quite certain is a concussion that’s really keen to overstay its welcome. As a result I’m aggressively lethargic with bursts of low-key nausea and just a general inability to do much of anything, and it’s SO annoying. Like, I didn’t put in all that effort to come out the other side of depressionfest 2016/17 just to land in the middle of this faux-depression bedridden state. Like, why don’t I just contract mono while I’m at it, who would even know the difference! Might as well develop anemia! What’s the point in anything! I would drop kick something at the wall in contempt to prove my point right now but I don’t have the energy (does anything prove a point as much as drop kicking something contemptuously though? I think not.)

I mean I’m like, totally fine, I just require a lot more resting than usual and it is a hope devoutly to be wished that I bounce back to my usual self soon. Pretty much all I’ve been doing is resting and drinking a metric butt ton of water, neither of which can be doing me any harm, all things considered. But just as Whitney Houston was saving all her love for you, I save all my energy for work, and then have been up to absolutely SQUAT of consequence in between, hence why it’s taken me a while to get my act together to write another blog post already.

Luckily I made these coconut pancakes a while back and then forgot to write about them, so the photos have been sitting patiently and serenely waiting for me to remember they exist, allowing me to produce a blog post all of a sudden with very little prior effort.

This recipe comes from my own cookbook, which was published roughly three lifetimes ago by Penguin (when I say three lifetimes ago, like, my old flatmate looked at it and asked if my sister wrote it because she didn’t think the person in the photos was me.) The excellent thing about these pancakes is that you can make them when you’ve got barely any ingredients in the house, and even if you must dash down to the corner shop to pick something up there’s nothing of great expense involved. In turn, they are also vegan, if that’s of interest to you: I chose to smother them in butter because I really like the stuff, but obviously if you’re already not into dairy then you can put what you like on them.

It takes barely a minute to whisk together the ingredients and even less time for them to fry merrily in a pan, yielding you a fat stack of thick, fluffy pancakes, the sort that might appear on the breakfast table in a Disney cartoon or a TV show where they’re inexplicably constantly eating lavish brunches that they continuously and wastefully abandon (okay I’m talking about Gossip Girl and I’m still mad about it, why are they always sitting at these groaningly laden tables if they’re just going to eat like, one strawberry and then stride off in a huff about the cotillion ball?)

coconut pancakes

a recipe from my literal cookbook

one can coconut milk (the standard size kind, I think they’re like…330ml? 400?)
250g plain flour (roughly one and a half cups)
half a teaspoon baking powder
50g sugar
quarter of a teaspoon baking soda
two teaspoons vanilla extract

Sift the flour, baking powder and baking soda together and stir in the sugar. Tip in the can of coconut milk and the vanilla and whisk to form a smooth, pale batter.

Heat up a large nonstick pan and cook heaped spoonfuls of the batter on it, flipping them over carefully when small holes form on the surface. Stack em up and eat them at your leisure.

I chose to make these more diminuitive, pikelet style, but big, small, Mickey Mouse ears, whatever you like works. They’re not actually particularly coconutty in flavour – it’s more a mellow sweetness, helped by the generous addition of vanilla. I don’t know how they’re so softly light and fluffy when there’s no eggs, I believe some magical alchemy occurs when baking soda interacts with pretty much anything, but they taste so good that I’m happy to not really question it too much and instead congratulate myself on my eyes-closed-head-first-can’t-lose instincts that helped me formulate this recipe in the first place. It’s also worth knowing, perhaps, that they reheat well in the microwave should you not be able to snarf them all in one sitting.

For all the dramatics (and I maintain that I’m never actually dramatic, I’m just responding at the precise level that a situation requires and that just often happens to require HIGH DRAMA) I have actually achieved 1 (one) thing recently: I started a Frasier food blog. I know, I struggle enough to keep this one updated! But! I also do what I want and I wanted to do this! It’s called La Cigar Volant and basically what I do is make a recipe inspired by every episode of Season 1 of the show, it’s very very low key because I didn’t want to make it into too much hard work but I’m also really quite pleased with it. It’s something that’s been in my head for a while now and I just watch SO much Frasier and hearing the immensely sad news that John Mahoney, who played Martin Crane on the show, had died, kinda spurred me on. So if you’re even one finely-shaven sliver as obsessed with Frasier as I am, kindly give it a hoon.

And if you’re particularly on a pancake buzz right now, may I also draw attention to other blog posts of mine, such as Halloumi Pancakes with Fried Sage, Butter and Walnuts; Lemonade Pancakes with Strawberry Sauce; or Cornbread Pancakes.

title from: PJ Harvey’s snarly and deliciously named song Primed and Ticking, a relative rarity from a John Peel session.

music lately:

Kate Nash’s new song Drink About You, like…shut up Kate Nash! I don’t need this right now!!!! (It’s perfect.)

Stabbing Westward, Save Yourself. I made a Spotify playlist called “songs to pierce ur eyebrow to” and you know this was the first thing I put on there. (There’s also like, Filter, Linkin Park, Hed PE, that song about the bodies and letting them hit the floor, you know the vibe I mean!!)

Scritti Politti, The Sweetest Girl. I love this odd, otherworldly, strange song so much.

next time: Mate! I went to the vege market today for the first time in forever and bought some perfect peaches, I’m thinking maybe peach crumble or some kind of rustic (read: messy as hell) tart.

it’s only comfort, calling late

August 22, 2017March 11, 2020Leave a comment

I wrote this entire blog post last night and then it disappeared somehow, which more or less didn’t bother me since a life of breaking and losing things constantly does nothing if not really prepare you for a life of breaking and losing things constantly. The only unfortunate thing is I can’t exactly recapture the magic since I was writing it in a certain location: on the floor of a friend’s house, by a merrily humming heater, in a dimly lit room, with a beautiful dog wandering around and occasionally booping me. In this deleted blog post I talked about the nature of things that bring comfort – because for me, sitting on the floor in the dark next to a heat source that’s emitting white noise is literal serene heaven – and now that I’m rewriting it, I’m in a completely different place. I don’t know if I can recreate that comfort, but in a way all attempts at comforting yourself is just trying to artificially recreate comfort, yeah? Long story short: back your stuff up and press save often, people.

Included in the thoughts I put forward was the idea of comfort food, which I write about on here often: in this case, it takes the form of gnocchi, a pasta that’s made from potatoes and therefore gives you carb-on-carb comfort, like sleeping with a thick blanket on top AND an electric blanket underneath at the same time. It’s the middle of winter, we’ve all got sniffles and iron deficiencies and debt, the very least we can do for ourselves is cook something warm and moderately stodgy. Normally gnocchi involves peeling and boiling and draining and mashing potatoes like someone with seven years of spare time and a non-tendency to burst into tears at the slightest provocation, but here I shorten the path from A to Carb by using instant mashed potato flakes, and m8888, they are a revelation. Sacrilegious? Sacrelicious!

When fried in hot oil you end up with these little pillowy puffs that are golden and gratifyingly crispy on the outside and marshmallow-soft within, like the love child of a roast potato and a bowl of fettuccini. Fried brussels sprouts give sprightly green crunch, rosemary adds sex appeal (possibly highly niche sex appeal: I can’t help that I find the scent of fried or flamed rosemary deeply attractive) and pine nuts are just nice as hell. On top of which I made this for myself after having had literally forty minutes of sleep the previous night, so like, you got this.

fast fried gnocchi with brussels sprouts, rosemary and pine nuts

a recipe by myself

one cup instant mashed potato flakes
half a cup (125ml) recently boiled water
one cup flour
a pinch of sea salt
a handful of brussels sprouts (idk, six?), halved lengthwise
a sprig of rosemary
two tablespoons of pine nuts
olive oil

Mix the potato flakes, boiling water, and salt together in a bowl, then stir in the flour and knead it a few times (just push the dough away and then pull it towards you and then push it away again, basically emotionally abuse it) till it forms a smooth-ish ball. Add a splash more water if it’s really not coming together. Roll it out into a square about half an inch thick, then slice horizontally and vertically in parallel lines to form a bunch of small rectangles. Roll the back of a fork over them, to press some indentations in, (sort of rolling them lengthwise as you do it) and then set aside.

Heat a good amount of oil – at least three tablespoons – in a large saucepan, and fry the brussels sprouts, cut side down, till they’re browned. Turn them over for a bit just to heat the other side, then remove them to your serving dish. Add some more oil if need be and then tip in the gnocchi, frying them on both sides till they’re golden and crisped. Remove them to the serving plate, and then finally, strip the sprig of rosemary of its leaves and throw them in the hot oil till they’re sizzling, and then finally briefly toast the pine nuts. Tip all of this on top of the gnocchi and sprouts, and then eat it.

As someone with hardcore, spine clenching anxiety I’m always trying to keep abreast (ha) of the stuff that (I take back that “ha”, so immature) gives me some semblance of calm and staunches that feeling that the veins in your arms have slithered up your shoulder blades and wrapped themselves around your neck. Obviously nothing in particular is going to cure it, but if rain noises or whatever make me feel 9% calmer then that’s still 9% calmer than I was before. (Also, I retract the retracted “ha”, abreast is a funny word and I stand by it. I stand abreast with it, even.)

Look for comfort where you can. The world kind of sucks. These gnocchi look like they’re all giving you a supportive fist bump, or at least that’s how it looks to me in the photo at the top of this post. And that’s something.

Pavlov’s Good Boys

(Evidence that the tableau I described did happen.)

title from: Placebo, the name of one of my favourite bands and also one of my favourite effects, with their nasal goth hit Every You Every Me.

music lately:

Spook the Horses, Footfall. Deliciously heavy.

Laura Lee Lovely, Hot Blood. I got to meet this absolutely beaut person for real recently after years of us exchanging heart emojis on each others instagram selfies, and she’s just released a dreamy banger of a tune. If you like music that makes you feel happy and sad at the same time, give it a hoon.

next time: Whatever it is, I’m pressing save VIGOROUSLY the entire time I write it.

hard to be soft, tough to be tender

July 8, 2017March 11, 2020Leave a comment

Ever feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself? Well, I went to sleep on Monday morning in a dentist chair and woke up having lost three wisdom teeth, to be specific. Two of which were total normies, straight up and down and toothy looking, and one massively challenging one (according to the dentist who was extremely proud of themselves for getting through it and I was like yeah, great, for you) whose roots appeared to be doing a leg pop like you see in romantic comedies where a man kisses a woman. Trust me to have a whimsical damn wisdom tooth.

Fittingly, when I got there I didn’t realise that I had to arrive half an hour early if I wanted to be sedated. Yes, there was a form that I signed, but I didn’t like, read it or anything. When it became clear that I was about to get hysterical, they just gave me the sedative anyway. Afterwards Kate heroically came and shuffled a dribbling and confused me out into the street, and Matt picked us up and drove us to her house. I was strapped into the backseat and immediately fell asleep, and next time they turned around to check on me I was keeled over sideways but still strapped in, my head lolling with every slight bump on the road and a trail of blood running out of my mouth. When I fiiiiinally came to, I found this story extremely amusing. Me, the zombie in the backseat, they in the front pretending everything is normal to anyone else passing by and indeed, to each other.

Anyway, to the shock of no one, it’s been nonstop soft food since then. I was taken extremely good care of at Kate and Jason’s house – Matt bought me a jumbo pack of mini popsicles, I was made the most beautiful nourishing vegetable soup, I was given a gigantic tub of KFC potato and gravy all for myself, Ariel the cat repeatedly curled up on the bed with me while I worked my way through the ludicrous-even-for-PLL final season of Pretty Little Liars and Ghost the dog provided extremely good snugs, once he worked out that I was not going to be able to play our usual game of “I’ll chase you and then you chase me” and got over his subsequent passive-aggressive ennui.

I’m back at work now, which is good because I missed it so much – however I’m still eating in a very tentative manner. And I’ve been literally having lucid dreams about crunchy, chewy food. So I was like, what can I make myself that will be so damn seductively delicious and wonderful that I won’t even care that the texture is aggressively uniform and uninterrupted by the slightest bit of, well, texture.

Enter burrata: a cheese that’s extremely exciting even by cheese itself’s standards. I would describe it as a parcel, made of stretched out soft mozzarella, encasing fresh cream and cheese curd off-cuts. It’s a way of using up leftover bits and pieces during the cheese-making process but is entirely wonderful in its own right. I read the words “burrata mousse” briefly a few days back in some companion book to a blender (it’s a boring story, but I feel like giving credit where it’s due) and was like, whatever that is, I NEED TO MAKE IT. For contrast and vitamin content I decided to pair it with some bright orange butternut squash mash – you could of course use kumara or pumpkin instead but I love how easily butternut turns soft in the oven, and its gentle sweetness of flavour.

You don’t have to have these things together by the way – if my tender mouth was more up for it I’d definitely serve the burrata mousse sprinkled with za’atar (a stunning mix of sumac, toasted sesame seeds and dried thyme) or red chilli flakes or some kind of toasted nut situation, and I’d spread it thickly on chewy flatbreads or crunchy sourdough or…anyway, I’ll stop there before I get too flustered. The mashed butternut of course can also be served as a side alongside literally anything. But as is, and considering my limited options, it was an immensely delicious time – the impossibly creamy, silky, ever-so-slightly tangy burrata mousse against the plush, mellow butternut. I would’ve licked the plate clean if it didn’t hurt to open my mouth that wide.

And of course, both components are very, very easy to make.

butternut mash, nutmeg, burrata mousse, olive oil

a recipe by myself. Makes enough for one with solid leftovers.

half a good sized butternut squash
butter (or extra virgin olive oil)
sea salt
whole nutmeg
one tub of burrata
200g mascarpone
one lime
extra virgin olive oil

Set your oven to 240C/450F. Wrap the butternut snugly in tinfoil and place it, cut side up, in the oven and just leave it there for about 40 minutes, or until you can stick a knife in through the tinfoil and it just slides right in without the slightest bit of resistance.

Meanwhile, drain the burrata and pop it in a high speed blender, or a food processor (just be prepared to blend it a bit longer if you’re using the latter.) Spoon in the mascarpone and squeeze in the juice of the lime. Blitz the heck out of it until it’s a smooth, smooth, creamy and thick mixture. Add plenty of sea salt, and spatula into a container or whatever and refrigerate till you need it.

Carefully lift the tinfoil from the cut side of the butternut and scoop out the waiting orange flesh – I just spooned it directly into a container so that I could store anything I wasn’t going to be eating right away – and mash in as much butter as you like with the back of a fork. Or, if you want to make it dairy free, use extra virgin olive oil. Grate over a smattering of fresh nutmeg. I didn’t want to waste any of the butternut so scooped up all the stuff clinging to the seeds and pushed them through a sieve, which created some extra cleaning up but – minimal waste. Once you’re quite sure you’ve fleeced the butternut of its goods, just wrap up the remaining shell and seeds in the tinfoil and bin the lot. Easy! No dishes.

Spread as much butternut as you fancy and as much mousse as you fancy onto a plate, or spoon them into a bowl, or WHATEVER, and sprinkle over more sea salt. Drizzle olive oil across the mousse, and then tuck in.

By the way, if you can’t find burrata – it’s usually at Moore Wilson but otherwise hard to come by – try a block of soft feta or some buffalo mozzarella for a similar effect. Similarly, feel free to use lemon juice instead of lime in the mousse – I just wanted that extreme acid sharpness puncturing the luscious richness of the mascarpone and cheese. Oh, and! I took the leftover butternut squash to work and thinned it down with a little stock and cream in a saucepan and it made an excellent, near-instant, soup. Which is of course, one of the other three things I can eat.

My teeth were not all I lost this week! In a series of events extremely typical of me, I broke the SD card for my camera. So on the day that I made this recipe – literally while the butternut was in the oven – I dashed out and bought myself a new card. I took nice photos. I then put the SD card in my pocket and took my laptop out to go blog at a cafe somewhere. The SD card had disappeared. Luckily I’d taken some photos on my phone, which are what you see here, but like, agh. This is so extremely par for the course for me – pick something up, it disappears into thin air – when I was a teenager and still kept a diary I had a running list of things that I’d misplaced/made disappear somehow, because that’s how often it happened. Unfortunately doctors can’t prescribe antibiotics for that affliction.

So in lieu of further photos of my food, please enjoy instead this photo of Ariel the cat being a total Vermeer babe in the sunlight, shortly before sitting directly on top of my laptop keyboard in the middle of the penultimate episode of Pretty Little Liars and acting extremely confused as to why I wanted her to move.

the girl with the purrrrl earring

title from: Metric, with their me_IRL-as-hell titled song, Help I’m Alive.

music lately:

The Mojo Brothers, Killing Floor. Not as far as I can tell, a cover of the Howlin’ Wolf song, although their vibes are not dissimilar. Anyway this song was playing during a scene in Pretty Little Liars which took place in a diner and was so weird and awesomely Twin Peaksy and no matter how stupid this show became and how many harmful tropes it doubled down on instead of skewering, I can’t deny that it’s been a huge part of my life for the last few years since I first discovered it. Also, good song.

Underworld, Rez. If ten million fireflies were at ten million typewriters there’s a good chance they’d end up writing this song.

next time: I really hope I’ll be able to have more of a variety of textures by the next time I post. At this point I’m craving crunchy food so much that it’ll probably just be like, here’s a recipe for a bowl of gravel for you.

get a little bit of bourbon in ya, get a little bit suburban

February 14, 2017March 11, 2020Leave a comment

I’ve lived in my current apartment for just over a year now. On Sunday, for the first time since moving in, I went to the vege market which happens weekly and is located exactly one block away. Thank you, Ritalin! I’ve spent a whole year full of good intentions about being a vege market person who gathers up bushels of seasonal produce to nourish my hot bod, but it’s never once happened. Either I cannot spatula myself out of bed with any conviction, or I make it there and am overwhelmed and panicky and can’t make a decision and forget how to breathe and have to leave immediately.

Not this Sunday though! Instead I strode, with unprecedented purpose, the short distance of one literal block from my apartment to the carpark filled with people and vegetables. And then went on a brief tangent where I saw this tiny, silky dachshund and a voice in my head said Follow That Dog, They Will Lead You To The Vegetable-Related Inspiration You Seek. In a dog-induced fugue state I trailed it, my low-bellied small-snouted muse, until it went and stood by….some cucumbers. I was jolted out of the trance, all like, wow I don’t feel like cucumbers and maybe this dog isn’t my spiritual vegetable guide but in fact just following its owner.

*clenches fist* so damn rustic

Luckily a more reliable voice said the words “maple bourbon roasted shallots” and suddenly I was inspired anew. This idea expanded out to include radishes (plus some beetroot that I bought for good measure for a later time) and with a bag full of pink-tinged vegetables, I left the market unflustered and happy.

Maple and bourbon are highly compatible bedfellows – the sweetness of both overlapping but also being tempered by the woodsy, smoky autumnal elements of the syrup. I figured that with shallots – mellow and onion-y – and the peppery, crisp radishes, it would make for an extremely delicious addition to say, some couscous or a salad.

Unfortunately – or not – we’ll never know how these damn things taste in that capacity because, after having let them cool somewhat and idly tasting a few to see how the combination worked…I lifted the roasting dish to my face and somehow – in my second fugue state of the day – demolished the entire lot, frantic forkful by frantic forkful, in about twelve seconds flat.

So, well, at least you know they’re really good. The shallots get all soft and caramelised and sticky, and the bourbon gives this rich depth. Shallots are a total pain to peel, but they look so, so pretty – like bunches of dried dusky pink roses, delicate and papery. If you’ve only ever had radishes raw before, they’re a revelation once some heat is applied, with their peppery bite softened into something quite luscious.

Should you have more restraint than me; here’s some suggestions for what to do with these things other than merely hoofing them in a daze. You could stir them through couscous with some rocket and toasted walnuts to respectively echo that peppery-smoky vibe; you could make a ton more and serve it alongside roast chicken (and consider using a marinade of maple, bourbon and olive oil for the chicken itself); you could boil some lil new potatoes and slice them up and stir the shallots and radishes into them with maybe like, some chives and a vinegary dressing to make a charming potato salad; you could put them in a bowl as part of a tapas-type spread with hummus and chargrilled peppers and flatbreads and whatnot, and finally, you could serve them as a component of a very zen rice bowl.

maple bourbon roasted shallots and radishes

a (vague) recipe by myself

many shallots, like at least nineteen
a bunch of radishes, like…five?
extra virgin olive oil
a couple of teaspoons of real maple syrup
a couple of teaspoons of bourbon
sea salt or a similarly fancy sodium

Set your oven to 170C/330F.

Peel the shallots, which is fiddly and annoying I grant you, but if you press down on them with the flat side of a large knife the skins should split making it easier to slide them out. Chop the radishes into wedges. Place them all in a roasting dish in which they fit snugly. Drizzle over plenty of olive oil, the maple syrup, the bourbon, and a good sized pinch of salt. Give it a stir if you like or just hope for the best.

Place in the oven and leave for around an hour till everything is lightly browned and tender and looking, y’know, cooked. Use however you like.

Or you could, honestly, just hoof them in a daze in their entirety, it’s 100% a good time.

As you can see, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged, despite my insistence upon returning to form as quickly as possible. But this is me trying, and I’m pretty pleased with the results. I will absolutely be cooking more and more and more – the other day I made myself GRANOLA – and the fact that I can go to a vege market without having a meltdown is definitely a good sign, even if I get waylaid by an occasional mysterious dachshund voyage. And honestly it’s nice to write a fairly straightforward blog post free of deep confessional angst (even if it’s always there ready to go.) There’s this bit in the Simpsons where Moe is telling Homer that he’s better than dirt, but not that fancy dirt with all the nutrients, and that’s how I’m feeling right now – just a tiny dirt grub, slowly getting better and better.

An good boy, and a dog called Ghost

PS: It’s Valentine’s Day today, and if that means something to you then I’m happy for you and not going to rain on your parade. I spent the morning with my work family at an adorable high tea put on by our bosses followed by some intensely loved up messages with my two best friends Kim and Kate and I cannot think of a more lovely way to celebrate the day. And during that high tea I had the most amazing cucumber sandwiches with minty cream cheese and I was like, oh my god, that dachshund was actually trying to tell me something…But whatever you’re doing – whether it’s wallowing in hearts-for-eyes-ness or studiously ignoring it, I hope it’s fun.

title from: my ultimate valentine Lana Del Rey and her incredible song Cruel World which, ugh, I love so much.

music lately:

Calexico, Alone Again Or. So I have been loving the original version of this song, by the band Love, for a long-ass time now, but this cover was recently brought to my attention and it’s so bouncy and ebullient and good and honestly, a very worthy take on a truly brilliant song. Listen.

Beyonce’s performance at the Grammy Awards. It’s SO IMPORTANT. I”M SOBBING. WATCH IT.

Blink 182, Always: exposure therapy.

Next time: whatever I make I’ll like, wait to use it before I eat it mid-process. Or will I?

on a steady diet of soda pop and ritalin

January 29, 2017March 11, 20204 Comments

Before I get into this, let me tell you a small story.

On Wednesday morning I got out of bed and thought- I should make my bed now, so it’ll be ready for me when I get back in later.

I’ve never had this thought in my life. I do not make my bed. I barely ever made my bed as a child. In fact the only beds I make are the kind you have to metaphorically lie in because you’ve done something more or less irrevocable. So I made my bed. And I was like, “wow this Ritalin is GOOD”.

I told you it was a small story.

So to back up a bit, let me tell you my friends: ya girl has been given the joyous gift of an official ADHD diagnosis. Just like that! And all it took was six months, an unspeakably hellish prolonged period of depression and anxiety, several fruitless GP appointments that led me nowhere, literally five thousand phone calls and emails, a small quantity of self-gaslighting about how I was imagining all of this and I was just a stupid idiot for life, constantly being picked up and dusted off by my friends, a butt-tonne of crying, stacks on stacks on stacks of paperwork, one highly revealing and personal article on Medium, an astonishing amount of crowdfunding from kind friends and strangers, several sessions with a truly nice trainee psychologist, and dropping $1000 on roughly two and a half hours of time from a psychiatrist to get there!

As I said during a conversation with a four year old yesterday, “it sounds like I’m exaggerating for comic effect! If only I were!” (I was at a wedding.) (There were lots of kids there.)

carbs for president

So now I’m a few days in on Ritalin and I can’t impress upon you enough how much it’s helping already. Without going into the minutiae of my life, it helps me get on with the minutiae of my life. That’s all. It’s made my internal monologue all able to put tasks in order and fix small things that would otherwise cause me mental paralysis. Like deciding what socks to wear. Again: being super literal here. You very don’t want to know how many sock-related meltdowns I’ve had.

Am I fixed? No! However, AS I HYPOTHESISED ALL ALONG, the ability to scoot around and get stuff done in a calm manner has already given me a lot more brainspace to deal with my anxiety and depression and is starting to alleviate some of the symptoms that were making everything more difficult than it already was. It’s like my mental health was all overheated and while the room it’s in is still really warm I’ve at least been able to kick the blankets off it and sit it next to an oscillating fan. IDK about that metaphor, I’m just kind of overheated right now so it’s the first thing that sprang to mind.

Anyway, oh my god, let’s talk about food. I am trying to get back into that whole thing, since I apparently love it so much and all.

One extremely shiny, silvery bright spot during the difficult start to this year was that my friend Hannah came over to visit New Zealand from Australia. We’ve known each other online since about 2010 where we became mutual admirers of each others food blogs, our travels coincided for one beautiful day in 2012 in New York where we got to meet each other, and we’ve been extremely in touch ever since throughout each other’s various Life Stuff. Her brain and my brain are like twins over so many things and her writing was always an entrancing mermaid in a sea of dull, copycat, forgettable food blogs. So yeah, you could say I kinda like this gal. We talked and talked and talked over Chow takeout on the floor, we went to see Swan Lake and got super emotional over it, I made her fancy chartreuse-based cocktails when she came to visit me at work, we had fancy brunch. And then we were like, man it seems kind of illegal for two food bloggers to come together and for there to not be cooking involved.

i’ll clink to that

So I made her dinner. Now: I will self-deprecate until I’m nothing but a pile of dust that says “lol don’t fight over me all at once, handsome suitors” to no-one in particular. But I am really, really good at making dinner out of pasta and whatever the heck is in my pantry. Admittedly: I had some good stuff on me this time around. Half a bag of frozen prawns. Half a bag of frozen peas. Some small jars of preserved lemons which were party favours from a wedding in November. But still! I’m a pasta whisperer. And this was the result of such whisperings:

one-pot prawn, pea and preserved lemon spaghetti

200g spaghetti or dried pasta of your choice
150g or so of frozen raw prawns
100g or so frozen peas
two pieces of preserved lemon, rinsed with the flesh sliced off
25g butter
lots of olive oil
lots of dried chilli flakes
lots of nice salt and freshly ground black pepper
a handful of fresh thyme leaves

Get a large pan of salted water on to boil, and then once it’s like, boiling, drop in the spaghetti. Once it’s almost tender – about ten minutes in – add the prawns and peas, letting it return to the boil. Continue to cook until the grey frozen prawns have turned all pink. Drain the lot, and return to the pan (off the heat) and stir through the butter till it’s melted.

Meanwhile! Finely slice the lemon peel and mix in a small bowl with about three tablespoons of olive oil, as many dried chilli flakes as you fancy, some salt and pepper and most of the thyme leaves. Stir this through the buttery cooked pasta, prawns, and peas, and upend the lot into a serving dish (or just serve straight from the pan.) Top with more thyme, olive oil, salt and pepper as you wish.

Serves 2.

food prawn

What’s great about this recipe is right there in the title – it’s all done in one pot, so you barely have to think or clean – two of my least favourite activities – and the ingredients are simple but bring plenty to the table. Prawns and peas are both mild and sweet, but then the fiercely salty lemon and hot chilli flakes do their thing and pull it all together. You can leave out the butter and just pour over more olive oil if you’re not feeling dairy, but it gives juuust a little richness and of course, the delicious flavour of butter.

During a week when everything was so very hard, making food for a darling person and then sitting on the floor and hooning into it with them while talking about everything in our lives up until this very minute was honestly the nicest, nicest thing.

apropos of nothing but I like how triumphant I look here, and as I always say, look the part be the part

I know it has been a long time since I last wrote here, but near the top of the list of things I don’t want to give up on is this blog, and now that I have the friendly horse that is Ritalin to gallop about on (note to self: def give up on metaphors tho) I hope it will be easier to both cook and write and care about them again too.

And seriously: I am so, so happy about this diagnosis. “Sarah”, I said, when the psychiatrist told me, “Sarah, I really feel like I should crack out some champagne with you right now.” Once again, said with utmost sincerity.

title from: speaking of sincerity, the super chill track Jesus of Suburbia by Green Day whom I will love unreservedly forever and ever.

music lately:

Your Best American Girl by Mitski, I am a sucker for emotion and walls of sound and HECK this song is like WHAT how my ears what’s happening

Life Upon The Wicked Stage, from the 1927 musical Showboat, as sung in a concert in 1998 by a 12 year old Anna Kendrick and, for some reason, the Kit Kat Girls from Cabaret, made oddly compelling by deadpan delivery (seriously, she is the deadest pan) and the alternating of the arrangement between sweet and jauntily bawdy. And yeah, I get that this is weird but I can’t stop listening to it.

next time: unsure, but next time will come around much, much sooner, promise.

so this is the new year and I don’t feel any different

January 3, 2017March 11, 20204 Comments

At ten seconds to midnight on the last day of December I led the countdown from behind the bar where I was working. At midnight we yelled Happy New Year and hugged and clinked our glasses of house sparkling wine. Then I yelled an expletive in the direction of 2016. And then, I immediately blasted Careless Whisper over the loudspeaker. (That’s right, “an expletive.” I’ve never sworn before on this blog and for some reason cannot bring myself to do it now after all these years out of some vague fear of being sent to the principal’s office or something even though swearing is harmless and a pretty delightful way to add texture and colour – or is that off-colour – to your words, generally? Why am I so hung up on this?) Anyway there’s no great conclusion to this anecdote, but the crowd went wild and no matter what happens this year I shall at least treasure the memory of standing in front of a lot of people – one of my favourite activities! – and seeing their faces as the glorious and iconic sax riff started playing. Started with a banger, if not a bang.

Earlier that same day I made myself gazpacho, acting upon a strong craving. I never crave soup. I have barely been feeling passionate about any kind of food lately in fact. But, not wanting to let these rare positive thoughts about liquidised vegetables get skittish and run away, I decided I might as well try and do something about it.

This soup is really, really simple. The only difficult thing is that it’s best made in a blender, if you don’t have one then like…I don’t know. Make something else. You could use a food processor, but a blender is better, something about the centrifugal motion and slicey knifey stuff. The point is, it’s really delicious, which, thank goodness, since I hardly ever have massive soup-adjacent desires in the first place. Soup always has to do everything backwards and in heels in order to impress me at the same level that other food does dancing forward in regular shoes (that’s a Fred and Ginger reference in case I briefly lost you there.) I use cherry tomatoes which, with their youthful sweetness, give a slightly bouncier tomato flavour but very ripe regular tomatoes would be absolutely fine. I also use only red capsicum instead of the usually prescribed red and green, because green ones tend to be unluscious and bitter, whereas the red ones, mellow and riper, echo the sweetness of the little tomatoes. The only other way in which I stray from the traditional is adding a pinch of cumin to lend a little earthy depth.

aw man, just realised that drizzle of olive oil kind of looks like a dick

This really does get better the next day so if you can forward-plan your cravings, so much the better, but immediately poured from the blender it’s wonderful, all thick and cold and tasting of sunshine, of soft grass under your bare feet, of cloudless skies, endless and blue, of other summer-adjacent imagery designed to inspire a vague sense of nostalgia and longing within you.

cherry tomato gazpacho

a recipe by myself

two punnets of ripe cherry tomatoes
one red capsicum (or pepper, if you’re American)
one small, soft white bread roll
two tablespoons of red wine vinegar, or sherry vinegar if you have it
three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, or more to taste (I did more)
a decent pinch of ground cumin
salt (ideally sea salt or something fancy) and freshly ground pepper to taste

Tumble the cherry tomatoes into the blender, reserving a couple for garnish if you like, and a couple to just eat for fun because they’re so delicious. Remove the core from the pepper and slice into rough chunks (in all honesty, I just tore it up with my bare hands). Run the bread roll under a cold tap – an unusual and counterintuitive-feeling activity, I grant you – and rip it into soggy pieces, and put all of this in the blender with the tomatoes. Tip two cups of cold water in, followed by the vinegar, olive oil, and cumin. Blend thoroughly till it forms a thickish, uniform looking puree. Taste for salt, and indeed, whether or not you think it needs more cumin, olive oil, vinegar, whatever – and blend again. Let it sit for an hour if you can, which will thicken it up, but you could just eat it right away.

I served it drizzled with more olive oil, scattered with freshly ground black pepper, and strewn with chunks of very ripe avocado and fresh thyme, since it’s what I had and I figured I might as well lean into the untraditional nature of it. I also halved one of the reserved cherry tomatoes and floated them on top, cutely. This makes enough for two servings.

The weather is actually resolutely unsummery at the moment but this soup nevertheless does its best to make you feel like its sunny, and is an ideal way to use seasonal produce if that’s what you’re into.

I have no doubt that you absolutely noticed, amongst the hustle and bustle of Christmas, New Years, public holidays, disrupted routines, taking stock of the year’s happenings and mourning celebrity deaths, that it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. This was because my laptop sulkily kept turning off mid-use, eventually giving up on the whole being-a-laptop thing altogether. I’ve also been monstrously depressed and anxious and unable to muster up the slightest inclination to cook for myself. Luckily, it’s all fixed now!

The laptop that is. Haha.

While I was waiting for it to be fixed, Kate very very kindly lent me hers. And rapidly, I decided to write about some things that were going on inside and outside of my head. The words came easily, pressing publish did not, but well, I’ve gone and bloody done it now. I’m not going to say too much more about it since you might as well read it – if you want. My whole thing was not wanting so much to be like, making a dramatic point about how I’m – gasp – going through some stuff, but more to highlight how sucky the system in New Zealand is if you’re trying to ask for help, while also just being like, I’m a human going through some stuff and the more people who talk about it the more it is normalised and I feel like I can do that, I can take a chance on talking about it where maybe other people can’t since I appear to not worry ever about the consequences of what will happen if I write about things going on in my life. On the other hand, it’s something I’d hidden with varying degrees of success for a few months now, so, sometimes acts of what could be called bravery take time to get into.

With all that in mind, my wanting to make myself something, and for that something to be vegetable-based soup, feels like a small victory. Super small, I mean. I still haven’t put sheets on my bed. I got drunk last night and lost my phone and then found it and then immediately lost it again and was like well, fair enough, I guess I’ve lost it. (I was at work, so I’m going to go pick it up, although it occurs to me today that being in a familiar place does not necessarily mean I didn’t somehow drop it in the bin or lose it inside a large glass of water or something.)

What he said.

But I’m trying. Well, I’m trying to try. Which is legit another victory.

Happy New Year. Fuck 2016.

title from: Death Cab For Cutie, The New Year. I am a sucker for an achy-breaky song about this time of year. Amongst other things.

music lately:

Breezeblocks, alt-j. Wowwwwwwww I like this song a lot. Also wowwww I am late to the party on alt-j.

Zayn Malik/Taylor Swift, I Don’t Wanna Live Forever. PREDICTABLY GOOD, WHOM COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS, I FEEL LIKE I SHOULD SAY A VARIATION ON THE WORD PREDICTABLE AGAIN NOW

next time: well hopefully I want to cook for myself more. So I’ll see you in June. JK, I’ll get there somehow. It helps when there are other people to cook for, and luckily there’s a lot of love-to-cook-for-them type people in my life.

sometimes i can’t function, my heart’s spaghetti junction

August 17, 2016March 11, 20203 Comments

I think a lot about comfort, and comfort food, and self care, and everything in that soft little bubble. It’s sort of stupid – yet predictable – that the more you might need self-care, the more inclined you are to curl up into a small spiral and hide under a blanket for hours; the more you are needing of comforting food the less you have any energy to cook it; and the more you want general comfort at all the less you remember how on earth to find it. If, however, you’re bouncing around like the little ball in that atari-type brick-busting game that was on all computers in the 90s and feeling aimlessly ready for comfort food but don’t know what exactly: mate, I heartily recommend this spaghetti recipe that I’ve got for you. On that note, I’ve been watching a whole lot of the Netflix series Chef’s Table and aside from wanting to marry Chef Dominique Crenn soooo badly; just watching a beautifully made show about people passionately making beautiful food is super calming without having to actually do anything about it myself.

Watching TV to chill out and finding pasta to be comfort food: how revolutionary, I know. For someone who is pretty convinced that they are a complicated mystery woman I’m actually a pretty simple human. I guess it’s about catching myself in the act of doing really obvious things and then congratulating myself disproportionately for them?

Pasta – along with ice cream – is just straight up my favourite food, so I generally want it always, without any further existential context around it. This particular recipe for Very Simple Tomato Spaghetti uses a different method to how we’re usually told to cook the stuff – in an ocean of boiling salted water – instead you add a scant cup or two of water and let the pasta slowly absorb it in its entirety. I know! I grew up eating pasta cooked by microwaving it in a pyrex jug of water for 12 minutes so you should definitely trust me. My logic being, someone who has lived through such bad pasta like me would definitely know really, really good pasta too.

With this recipe, everything happens in the one pan. The starch from the pasta releases into the remaining liquid, and when you stir in some tomato paste it all becomes near-on preposterously creamy and rich. I know all the butter I hoof into it has some kind of effect as well, but the starch is important, honest. I came by this recipe in a roundabout way – I was thinking about cooking spaghetti in the same way that I’d make a risoni risotto, and then I came across a recipe on Food52 that confirmed the process for me; I had a tin of tomato paste that I’d bought because it was out-of-date stock and going super cheap and stuff that’s on special because it’s past its use-by date is aggressive me-bait; finally I required both lunch and comfort: thus this recipe was born.

i took a photography course one time last week and now i think I can get away with this

You add the butter at three stages: first to gently fry the uncooked sticks of spaghetti in, secondly to add flavour to the cooking liquid, and finally to rich up the tomato paste. As with all my recipes, I’m thoroughly desensitised to what constitutes “a lot” of butter, but this tastes like the exact right amount. The tomato sauce thickly coats each soft strand, and any fresh-from-the-tin acidity is softened completely. It’s rich, it’s luscious, it tastes like you spent hours reducing it down in a cast iron pan under the Tuscan sun using fresh tomatoes that a handsome, floppy haired man picked for you as a gift shortly before you ignore him for the rest of his life and he goes on to write bad poetry about it using the tomatoes misguidedly as a metaphor. It’s delicious.

very simple tomato spaghetti

a recipe by myself

50g butter
100g dried spaghetti
one and a half cups recently boiled water
one small tin of tomato paste; or around four tablespoons
herbs and cheese to serve, if desired

You add butter at three different stages, so begin by slicing the butter into fairly even thirds. In a wide saucepan – ideally wide enough to hold the spaghetti lying down, although you can break the strands up if need be – gently heat the butter over a medium heat and add the dried spaghetti, stirring to coat the sticks in butter as they spin around the pan.

Add the water and the second measure of butter and turn the heat up high. Continue to stir occasionally as the water bubbles away, cooking the pasta as it reduces down. Taste a strand occasionally to test if it’s done. If need be, add a little more water.

Once the pasta is cooked and the water has reduced down to a few tablespoons – it will happen! – stir in the tomato paste and the final measure of butter. Stir over a lower heat until the butter has melted and it’s all thick and saucy. Remove from the heat and serve.

If you look up the word “comfort” in the dictionary, there is, by way of explanation, this picture of me sitting cross-legged on the floor of my best friend Kate’s house while she and my other best friend Kim are just out of frame, we are drinking wine and the fire is warming my back. The lights are low and there’s an extractor fan on making blissful white noise and a small seal pup of a dog is in front of me trying to kiss my nose. In lieu of being able to recreate this exact picture for yourself, pasta is a decent option. Especially when that pasta is so simple and takes hardly any time or ingredients and rewards you with a bowlful of creamily dense sauce coating each strand which you can strew with herbs and cheese such as thyme and feta if you like but it’s perfectly perfect on its own, looking like an upended can of spaghetti but tasting five zillion times superior. (Now, I used to bloody adore canned spaghetti but I am convinced that the recipe has been changed and it’s not what I used to be, I’m not just being snarky about it for the sake of it.)

And if you’re after more pasta-related comfort, maybe try my Garlic Miso Butter Risoni Risotto or Spaghetti with Chilli, Lemon, Capers and Olive Oil.

title via the immensely cool Elastica’s Car Song. If we all try really hard we might be as effortlessly cool as Justine Frischmann one day, but I doubt it.

Flume ft Tove Lo, Say It. It can’t be good for one to listen too much to Tove Lo’s song Habits too often so I’m glad this exists as well.

Look, I’ll tell you when I’m sick of listening to INXS’s song Disappear, okay? Till then just assume I’m listening to it on a constant loop.

next time: I have been craving cookies lately??? Perhaps something will come of this.

turn the music up way too loud, charge the pizza to the house

May 16, 2016March 11, 20204 Comments

I have kind of a weird relationship with time, in that I’m never particularly relaxed and I always feel like whatever time I have is running out on me and that’s all I can focus on. I think a lot of this has to do with my writing and trying to make enough space to do that and freaking out when I fall asleep instead, but I was like this before I was writing and even if I abandoned this blog today I’d probably still end up feeling the same way. Does anyone else get that? Like if you wake up at 9am you’re all like “well it’s 9am, the day is practically over and I have achieved nothing” (don’t even get me started on the horror of waking up at 11am.) I mean, I remember thinking this as a child. There wasn’t even any internet then, what was I worried about not being on top of? Anyway, on Monday – one of my days off – I slept till 3pm because I physically could not stop going to sleep, and uh, this was kind of horrifying to me. It’s like…it’s not just writing I have to do. I can’t remember when I last did laundry! My room has not been tidied in forever which is in itself a source of stress! Six weeks ago I was supposed to start doing twenty minutes of yoga per day! I need to cook myself something so I actually have something to blog about even though I’m too tired to write! And it’s 3pm which means it’s basically tomorrow! Compounding to all this horror is the fact that it’s suddenly the following Monday and I’m in the exact same position.

Last Monday, upon waking, I somehow managed to briefly get my act together in a “I suspect there are worse problems out there than this you dingus” kind of way to make myself this scone pizza as a calming snack. One week later I’m finally spatula-ing together the time to write about it. This recipe is so easy and has a pleasing mix of so many comforting foods – not just the obvious two, scone and pizza, it also gives off cheese toastie and pie vibes. It is all good things. It is scone pizza.

I adapted it from a recipe in my OWN COOKBOOK (yes, I know, and no, you can’t buy a copy because every last one was sold and Penguin never republished it which means it’s a cult underground collectors item, not a failure) because why not be inspired by yourself? The recipe in my cookbook involves a simmered zucchini and tomato sauce to go on top, from a book of recipe clippings belonging to my paternal grandmother. But this time around I had a couple of tomatoes in the fridge and half a block of cheese and immediately knew I wanted both in my mouth together at an elevated temperature. Melted cheese is 100% my idea of a good time.

What you end up with is a thick, slightly crunchy and soft base, with the scorched sweetness of the magma-hot tomatoes and a hefty layer of melted cheese made moderately more elegant in a cacio-e-pepe kind of way by a grind of fresh pepper. I have until extremely recently hated black pepper, as it tasted like mouth-burning dust and nothing more, but I’ve come to appreciate its subtle sweetness and what it adds to a dish. Either that or my tastebuds are dying as I’m aging and this is my attempt at trying to feel something real. Little from column A, little from column B?

scone pizza

adapted from a recipe from my cookbook, Hungry and Frozen: The Cookbook.

200g plain flour (this is roughly two hastily-scooped cups full, if you don’t have scales) (which I don’t currently)
one teaspoon baking powder
25g melted butter
125g (half a cup) thick, plain yoghurt
pinch of salt
two tomatoes
as much grated cheese as you like
cracked pepper

Set your oven to 200C/400F and place a sheet of baking paper on a baking tray.

Briefly mix the flour, baking powder, butter, yoghurt and salt together in a bowl. Add a little bit more yoghurt if it’s way too floury. Squish it together gently with your hands to form a soft ball. Tip it onto the baking tray and softly roll it out to form a rough circle of a couple of centimetres. Brush it with a little extra melted butter if you like – I didn’t do this myself but it has just occurred to me now that it would be a good idea, probably.

Thickly slice the tomatoes and arrange them on top of the scone base. Grate over as much cheese as you like, and then some. Bake for around 20 minutes, till the cheese is bubbling and the tomatoes are a bit scorched and softened. Grind over some pepper.

Allow it to cool for a minute and then slice into four and hoon the lot.

Note: I, for some reason, had like two tablespoons of yoghurt left in the bottom of a container so just made up the remaining amount with milk and this worked perfectly. Consider yourself permitted to do something similar if you find yourself in this position.

As with all food, it tastes excellent in bed. It’s one thing to hang out in bed heaps and consume your main meal of the day in there, but sleep? In your bed? How troublingly self-indulgent.

By the way, I am trying to work on this strange thing I have with time, because it benefits absolutely no-one if I’m stressing constantly about it. I just don’t know how to. So far my only technique is being frustrated at myself for being stressed, followed by frustration at myself for my frustration at myself. Also trying to actually let myself sleep if I need it without being too angry about it.

Without being too on the nose, I have, uh, bought myself some thyme. This was inspired by my Stargrazing horoscope for May in Lucky Peach magazine:

“This season, for you, is about translating jittery emotions into healthy, productive action. Yer an original, Aries, so I’m into forking over an idea you can truly make your own: This is a completely excellent time to plant yourself a little herb garden with whatever you like in it (…) That dualism—embarking on a project that’s all yours and has tangible, visible rewards (LI’L PLANTS!), while also slow ride, taking it easy—is perfect for you, jitterbug. Pick up a few cheapo herb plants of your choosing. Care for them diligently, as a way of transmuting the care you’re unsure of giving yourself right now. See this attention and love as the same thing.”

I mean, does that resonate or what. Thyme is one of my very favourite herbs and is also very pretty, with its gently tangled mass of tiny leaves, and I am so going to nurture this lil plant, and I guess myself as well. My first order of business: acknowledging that I’m actually asleep right now as I type this, and to let myself have a nap.

title from: Blink 182, Reckless Abandonment

music lately:

I Will Never Leave You, from the very short-lived 1996 musical Side Show. This showcases the spectacular voices of Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner, and is one of those songs that’s all like, ugh we have to get this stupid first verse out of the way so we can get to the AMAZING BELTING IN THE CODA and the payoff is thoroughly worth it.

Digital Versicolour, Glass Candy. This song is on the playlist at work and every time it comes on I’m like “woooooo!” I know, what fascinating provenance. It’s just very mellow and hypnotic and good.

Sean Paul, Like Glue. I heard this song on loop five times in a row the other day and it was honestly the ideal way to consume this song. It’s the sound of a warm evening in summer, without any of the hassle of having to be overheated.

next time: my friend Rose gave me some old Seventeen magazines that used to belong to her mum and the recipes in them are so great and I seriously want to try one.

everyone is waiting, waiting on you and you’ve got thyme

April 6, 2016December 1, 20243 Comments

A Season For Peaches, a novel by Henri Michel

In case you are all, “damn that Laura is the epitome of perfection I really love what she does I just wish she’d sometimes display some kind of minor flaw to humanise her more” – and I have zero reason to believe this isn’t what people are thinking all the time – then have I got a relatable and relatively dull anecdote for you about how I made a terrible dinner.

On Monday I was exceptionally tired and not really thinking and as a result, I made the most aggressively bland, horrible pasta of my life, and the more I tried to fix it the worse it got. I started off wanting to make some kind of dairy-free cauliflower sauce, where you puree an entire head of cooked cauliflower and it turns out all creamy and delicious. Why? Honestly, I don’t know, but I’ve been reading too much pinterest but also if I can effortlessly conjure up a dope vegan pasta bake then that’s a pleasing outcome. However it turned into the equivalent of mashed potato and refused to puree and also tasted of absolutely nothing so in a panicked state I … upended an entire bottle of cream into it. It still wouldn’t liquefy, so with mounting panic I mixed this mashed potato-esque stuff into cooked rigatoni along with some eggplant I’d roasted, so it was like…this weird billowy mass studded with the occasional piece of eggplant. How did I think this was going to turn into an awesome pasta bake? I topped it with parsley. That made it even less good. I shoved it in the oven to grill, which, as there was nothing in it to melt, just made it more warm and didn’t change it miraculously on the cellular level that I’d been hoping for.

It might sound “insufferable” or like “not a real problem” or “good god shut up Laura” but like I said, I was super tired and making dinner is a thing I’m always good at when all else crumbles around me and honestly, just the waste of money and ingredients was incredibly disheartening. However, I did manage to avoid panic-eating the lot, and dealt with it by going for a nap and searching youtube for ASMR videos specifically featuring someone telling you repeatedly in a very gentle voice that you’re actually a good cook. (A later cursory prod of the abandoned pasta bake revealed that it had not improved with time but I made myself eat some anyway, because I was both hungry and miserably stubborn about the aforementioned waste of money and ingredients.)

This is all completely unimportant and not terribly interesting, it’s just every time I do something stupid I feel pathologically compelled to tell the entire internet about it. An incident of totally sucking shared is an incident of totally sucking halved, I say.

Having since made a few things that mercifully turned out deliciously, I am safely back in the mindset that I love cooking and it loves me. For example, these honey and thyme roasted peaches. I went to brunch at Flight Coffee Hangar with one of my dearest friends Charlotte for her birthday and had brioche covered in vanilla mascarpone and said peaches. (It’s one of those places where the menu is so good that it’s actually inconvenient, because I can never choose what to get.) I was so taken with my brunch that I bought peaches on the way home and immediately tried to recreate what they’d done.

I don’t know how similar my method is to what the cafe does, but it worked incredibly well for me. Before you even get to taste them, the slowly roasting peaches fill your house with their heady perfume, so rich and intoxicating that you want to float through the air with hearts for eyes like some kind of amorous cartoon animal from a bygone era.

There’s something oddly lovely and lazily sensual about drizzling sticky, slow-moving honey over soft freshly cut peaches before scattering them with fragrant herbs, like you have no cares in the world apart from getting weirdly skittish over ripe stone fruit.

Cooked, they have this floral depth of sweetness from the slick of honey and the caramelising heat of the oven, and the smoky herbal thyme cuts through this and makes it more than just merely sugary. With very little effort suddenly you have yourself this gorgeous quantity of fruit that you can tuck around scoops of ice cream, stir through muesli, arrange on top of a cake, or indeed, add to toasted brioche with mascarpone as they did at the cafe.

honey thyme roasted peaches

a recipe by myself, but inspired directly by my brunch at Flight Coffee Hangar

four large ripe peaches
two teaspoons runny honey
one teaspoon olive oil – I guess you could leave it out but I feel it adds some fruity richness and will put a shine on your coat
several sprigs of fresh thyme

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Roughly slice the peaches into quarters or thirds or whatever and lay them on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Drizzle over the honey and the olive oil, then scatter over most of the thyme leaves, and just throw the remaining sprigs on top.

Roast for twenty minutes, then turn the oven off and leave the peaches in there while it cools, for about an hour. Use how you please, and throw any remainders into a jar and keep in the fridge.

That afternoon, 100% not sick of peaches yet, I ate them with Nigella’s miso ice cream that I’d made a variation on (by adding shredded coconut and white chocolate) and it was an incredible combination, the kind of thing that makes you feel so incredibly grown up that you end up going full circle and feeling childish again because you feel so grown up; then this morning I added them to some intensely healthy chia seed muesli to which they brought depth and sweetness. I still have half a jar left, I may just eat them straight from it with a fork but I like the idea of deploying them savoury-ly, perhaps in some tagine-type dish or to accompany crispy, slow-cooked pork belly. What I’m saying is, you will not regret making these. If you avoid honey for whatever reason, I do believe maple syrup would be an excellent substitution; if you don’t like thyme then that’s a little harder as it’s not as though you could successfully use, like, parsley instead – I’d just leave it out altogether. I adore thyme though and am pretty much forever trying to work it into everything I cook.

Because my friend Charlotte and I are practically twins (that is, we’re very similar personality-wise and we were born only a handful of days apart, one can only dream of having a face as beautiful as hers) her birthday happening means that mine is getting super close. I’m feeling more chill about it than I was a few blog posts ago, I mean…it’s going to happen. It just is. Also I remembered that you get presents and lots of attention, both things that I adore, and I’m frankly curious to see what thirty-year-old me is like. It will possibly involve singing Grown Woman by Beyonce with increasing desperation, but who knows!

title from: You’ve Got Time, the stunning Orange is the New Black theme song by Regina Spektor. We have this cocktail at work that has thyme in it and whenever someone orders it I always get this song in my head, I figured I might as well pass on this gift and curse to you too.

music lately:

Sevendust featuring Skin, Licking Cream. Some nu-metal is oddly timeless, okay? This song is so exhilarating and big and soaring and happy? And honestly it’s impossible to tell who is hotter out of Skin or the Sevendust lead singer LaJon Witherspoon (when Skin sings “crawling down your spine” I’m pretty sure she wins but it’s not actually a competition and I’m just incredibly glad they collaborated on this amazing song.)

Chelsea Jade, Low Brow. This stellar human who I am proud to call a pal has released this gloriously dreamy new tune with a video that’s both beautiful and beautifully silly. “Just hold me closer than you know how to” – ugh it’s so good.

next time: I may well have to make some kind of elaborate pasta bake again to exorcise the demons of the last failed one. Will make sure I’ve slept enough this time.

perfect hexagon of the honeycomb and you soothe yourself with the shapes you know

March 27, 2016December 13, 20237 Comments

how much trouble can one ice cream be?

Prologue: Laura.

Confused yet? I decided to write this blog post somewhat in the style of a Baby-Sitters Club book, for no good reason other than it occurred to me and I ran with it.

Chapter 1

WHUMP! CLATTER!

That’s the sound of me jumping onto my bed while holding a bowl of ice cream and delicious homemade honeycomb sauce, immediately knocking over the worrying number of empty juice cans that I’m lazily keeping beside it instead of putting them in the bin. “Auughhhh!” I just manage to stop the rapidly-melting ice cream and warm sauce from spilling over onto my bed. What a day!

I guess you’re wondering by now who I am, and what I’m wearing. Well there’s me, Laura – I hope you’re taking notes, I’m going to quiz you on this later! Psych! I’m kind of the humorous one here, or so I always say. I’ve got chin-length unruly red hair and glasses, but people do still hang out with me. I’m wearing these old cerulean blue shorts that I think used to be part of some boys’ high school regulation gym uniform (I love vintage!) and a white crop top that has the word “CHALLENGE” written across the front in big black letters, because I like to wear clothing that doubles as a friendly warning for what kind of person I am. I don’t have pierced ears, but people do still hang out with me. Most importantly, I’m eating ice cream, even though it’s not even breakfast time yet. I know what you’re thinking – how do I eat all this ice cream without getting in trouble? The thing is, I’m kind of an individual when it comes to doing what I want. I’m also the only person ever that has ever been into cooking. It’s kind of my one personality trait. If anyone else likes it, I’m certainly not acknowledging it!

this ice cream is sensitive and a good listener

Chapter 2

My best friends work during the day and I work at night, but when we get together, we always have a good time! We’re the best friends you’ll ever have. Does that sound like a threat? I’m inclined to tell you the intimate details of their respective family history, but that would be really weird, so I’ll just do a brief hagiography (that means documentation of the lives of saints, it’s a word I learned recently). There’s Kim, who has lo-oo-ong dark hair and the enormous macadamia-shaped eyes of a curious woodland deer. She’s kind of the wise, yet wickedly fun one of the group. Kate has just dyed her hair blonde, which means she is now even more popular and sophisticated – she also has a crazy household with a cat AND a dog, and a real, live, husband! Confusingly, Kate is also wise yet wickedly fun. This week because of Easter and having days off I’ve been able to see them relatively heaps and it has been very good for the soul, as the saying goes. For example, on Monday night we sat on the floor of my bedroom (it’s a great meeting space, I’m so lucky to have my own one!) and ate Pop-Tarts and drank Boulevardiers. That’s a cocktail which is like a negroni but uses bourbon instead of gin, and it’s one of my favourites. We clinked our glasses together in what we call “a toast”, and in that moment we felt like real Big City women.

darn it! I said ruefully. I only described their hair, not their outfits.

Chapter 3

“We’re finally getting to the plot!” I thought ruefully, tucking a lock of unruly red hair behind my tragically unpierced ears. So, I’m kind of the “food blogger” around here. I’m also kind of an ideas person. I have Big Ideas and then Occasionally Make Them Happen Around Three Weeks Later If I’m Awake Enough, I know, it’s a little exhausting trying to keep up with me! When my Ideas and food blogging combine – bam! Honeycomb Sauce. Okay, okay, I had honeycomb ice cream at a local restaurant and immediately decided that honeycomb was the new salted caramel, and wanted to make some version of it for myself to have again and again in the comfort of my own bed and/or more normal area in the house to eat. But after some time I learned a little bit about myself and a lot about the true meaning of friendship: it’s not a competition. Salted Caramel may be heavily overexposed, but that doesn’t make it any less delicious. Honeycomb is just a flavour I hadn’t thought about in forever!

I know what you’re thinking – just honey and sugar? Way too sweet. Booooring. About as fun as a pop quiz or getting Salisbury Steak for lunch, neither of which I’ve ever actually experienced.

In fact, the delicate floral sweetness of the honey and the richness of the butter come together to make something pretty magical, and very individual. It doesn’t taste overly of honey, it’s more reminiscent of (that means “reminiscent of”, it’s a word I learned recently) actual honeycomb, the kind of stuff that you find inside Crunchy Bars or other similar candies hidden around your room. This sauce isn’t perfect – I admit! – half of it remained saucy and the other half solidified as soon as it hit the cold ice cream, but this was all so fun and delicious that I decided to share it with you anyway.

honeycomb sauce: a delicious prototype

A recipe by myself. I’m thinking of adding a tablespoon or so of cream to it next time to see if that keeps it more liquid but I do love it just like this.

100g butter
half a cup of sugar
one tablespoon brown sugar
one heaped tablespoon honey

Heat everything together in a saucepan, stirring gently as it comes to the boil. Remove from the heat once it starts bubbling and continue stirring for a bit. Allow it to cool somewhat (it’ll be like actual lava initially) before pouring it all over your ice cream.

Chapter 4

I decided to end the day with ice cream and honeycomb sauce – after all, I’m a grown up and kind of a bad girl who makes her own rules. The remaining sauce had turned rock solid in the fridge, so I had to carefully sit the bottle inside a cup of boiling water to soften it, but during this time, I learned five more lessons about friendship. Unfortunately I’m still wearing the same outfit that I was at the start of this story, but to pad things out a bit, I’ll tell you about what I wore yesterday: a vintage white minidress with pink and orange diamond patterns across it and a high neck with a collar. I wore it with my yellow socks with pizzas on them and chunky black ankle boots – pretty wild, huh? I’m a pretty wild dresser!

feel free to judge how well the illustration matches the description

Prologue:

Ice cream twice in 24 hours – that day was a summer I’ll never forget.

title from: One Beat by Sleater-Kinney. Howl-y goodness. Oh yeah, and while I’m all “what would Kristy Thomas, President of the Babysitters Club, have to say about Sleater-Kinney?” I’m also dropping the conceit for the remainder of the blog post, okay?

music lately:

I’ve finally given Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton a proper listen and I am predictably entranced and addicted. Listening to one modern musical about historic political American times got me thinking about another one: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which in the opposite direction of the incredible success of Hamilton, ran for a mere hundred and twenty-something performances on Broadway before closing. I saw a production of it in New Orleans a few years back but haven’t listened to it since; its pop punk sound is like…perfect? I don’t know what the best entry point would be, maybe Rockstar if you want something fast or Saddest Song if you want something amazing.

Kid Cudi with MGMT, Pursuit of Happiness. Whatever track this samples is intoxicating and then the rest of the song has the temerity to be excellent as well. This song is moderately ancient but sounds so fresh.

next time: the novelty is over, kids, and I have some brussels sprouts to emphasise this (they’re fried with pistachios and truffle butter though, so)