Category: Easy and/or Fast

you could have my heart or we could share it like the last slice

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so delicious that Pony by Ginuwine starts to play non-diegetically when you take a bite

There’s a scene in the important film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, where Dewey Cox is starting his rapid trajectory towards being a famous rock’n’roll star. He tells his wife Edith, “I’m gonna miss some things, okay? I’m gonna miss some birthdays and some christenings. I’m gonna miss some births, period. It’s just unrealistic to expect that I’m gonna be here for every time you have a baby.” I’m currently relating heavily to this, apart from, tragically, the bit with the ascension to fame, because I’m week three into working roughly five thousand times more hours than I normally do. Luckily, I adore my job and doing so many hours does make payday fun, but all I’ve been doing is sleeping and working which doesn’t bode well for getting blog posts done, or indeed anything. In fact, I’ve been trying to write this very one here that you’re reading for about seven days now, but every time I went to write I would instead just stare into space and then wake up three hours later, gently spooning my laptop like it was some kind of ergonomically disappointing teddy bear.

Yet finally here I am! With a really wilfully stupid peanut butter chocolate caramel slice! It was in a brief moment of lucidity that I concocted it, taking a base made largely of peanut butter and actual butter, a centre made of condensed milk and more butter and a handful of roasted salted nuts, and a top of melted milk chocolate. Seriously, that’s really all there is to it. You pretty much know the recipe now.

hey baby, I think I wanna marry you

It sounds like it would be stupidly, almost uncomfortably sweet and rich, and while admittedly I have literal syrup running through my veins instead of blood and therefore my bar for the overly sweet is set quite high, I assert to you that it’s honestly very manageable to eat. In that you could easily manage to eat three quarters of it before you even realise the knife is in your hand and you’re standing at the fridge slicing off thick squares of it.

Oddly enough it’s the caramel centre that keeps it in check – you blast the hell out of the condensed milk and butter in the microwave before spreading it across the base, and all that heat reduces it down and brings out the ocean-deep dark toffee flavours present in the sugars. Then the roasted nuts, crunchy as popcorn and covered in salt, add to this. Just in case it starts to sound all too sensible I then cover it in the plainest sweetest mellowest milk chocolate, but with good reason, because dark chocolate would be too punishingly intense and make it a chore to eat.

it isn’t too hard to see, we’re in heaven

Speaking of important movies and delicious things that make people flustered, my one other accomplishment of recent time is, last night I went to the movies and watched Magic Mike XXL with my girlfriend and her flatmates. But Laura! I said to myself. Aren’t you really like…gay? How could a movie about male strippers possibly hold your precious attention? My people, this movie is one of the best pieces of filmmaking I’ve ever encountered, one of the most joyful, kind-hearted, generous movies, and honestly, a rare film where women of all shapes and skin colours and faces have fun and are celebrated and support their friends and are in charge and are never, ever the joke, even though you keep thinking that’s where the movie’s gonna go. A film where men are emotional and express their love for each other without once adding “no homo”, but also a bisexual character is not seen as a curiosity to be analysed and picked apart. A film where guys listen to women and help them, not in a “you frail stupid woman let me do this better than you” kind of way, but a “I’d like to make things better so you can be happy because that’d be nice” kind of way. Just when you think it’s gonna zig, it zags. Honestly I’m getting emotional just trying to write about it.

Oh and if you’re into the sight of men and stuff, there’s…a lot of abdominal muscles being flung around. But truly, this movie is so very good, in the way that an old dog tied up on the street waiting patiently for their owner is good. Take your mother, take your 300 year old grandmother, take your husband, take your nine year old child, take everyone to see this movie! Put it this way: I came out of it saying that I’d actually love to read think-pieces on it, and normally my attitude towards think-pieces is that they should be thrown into the ocean. So. While I’ve been berating myself frowningly for not being outstanding in the field of achievement lately, getting this movie under my belt (hey-oh!) makes me feel like I’ve used my time very wisely.

just imagine another song from the Magic Mike XXL soundtrack here okay

Okay, one more thing about this movie before I get back to that other ridiculously sexy caramel confection: I love that there was more or less zero conflict. The characters were just happy and chill and overcame small hurdles and that was it! I have come to realise that I hate when movies, especially movies about an existing entity are like, what shall we do with these characters that the audience knows and loves – better make them fight and be isolated from each other until about ten minutes before the end. (For some reason A Goofy Movie is what sprang to mind here: hot take, A Goofy Movie was a bit disappointing.) Up with niceness! Okay that’s quite the end of my breathless and shrieking thoughts on Magic Mike XXL. On here at least.

peanut butter chocolate caramel nut slice

a recipe that I made by smashing several Nigella recipes together and adding bits of my own thoughts so yeah

200g smooth peanut butter
50g soft butter
half a cup brown sugar
one and a half cups icing sugar

one tin sweetened condensed milk
200g butter
two tablespoons golden syrup
half a cup (or so) salted roasted mixed nuts 

200g milk chocolate

Line a brownie tin – either a 23cm square one or a regular sized rectangular one – with a large piece of baking paper. Use a wooden spoon to beat the peanut butter and butter together, then carefully stir in the sugars (I say carefully, because icing sugar tends to fly everywhere in dusty white clouds at the slightest provocation) until you have a sandy, crumbly mixture. Press it into the base of the baking tin, using the back of a spoon (it helps if you dust it with icing sugar first) to flatten it out fairly evenly. Refrigerate while you get on with the filling.

To make the filling, melt the butter in a decent-sized china bowl (or something else microwave-proof) and then stir in the condensed milk and golden syrup. Microwave for five to seven minutes, stirring every minute or so – it will bubble up angrily but shouldn’t overflow, it’s better to stir it too much than to let it burn or overflow though – by which stage it should be thickened, and darkened into a rich, but still fairly light, golden colour. Let it sit for a bit to cool slightly, and then stir in the nuts. Pour this over the peanut butter base, using a spatula to get every last bit out and to smooth it out on top, then refrigerate till set and firm. 

Finally, microwave the chocolate in short bursts till it’s collapsing, and stir till it’s totally melted and smooth. Gently spread across the caramel layer, and allow to set either in the fridge or a cool place. 

Wait, I’ve achieved two other things lately: I zoomed to a party after one of my shifts and danced my face off with friends and had my sister-from-another-species vibe with Percy the corgi reconfirmed.
And, I dyed my hair purple. Well, more specifically, I stuck my hands in the pot of purple dye and kind of mussed up my hair (which was at the time a fading blue colour) in a haphazard manner just to see what would happen. It turned out pretty well, I think. In fact there’s probably also a metaphor for my life in there (or at least I’m self-centred enough to think that pretty much everything could be a metaphor for my life and indeed, that my life is fascinating enough to warrant multiple metaphors to represent it.) (I’m not sure if that made any sense but in my defense: oh man I’m tired.)
title from: Drake, Best I Ever Had, which is just…so Drake. “Sweat pants, hair tied, chillin’ with no make-up on/That’s when you’re the prettiest, I hope that you don’t take it wrong.”
music lately:
 
Carly Rae Jepsen, Run Away With Me. It’s like the best eighties song you don’t remember. 
 
Janet Jackson, No Sleep. It’s so dreamy. She’s back and she never even left.  
next time: I’m still working a ton more than usual but I’m gonna try so hard to cook for myself one time and blog about it before, I don’t know, the next financial year end rolls around. 

swallow it down, what a jagged little pill

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that cactus is a visual metaphor for how my throat felt, also, juxtaposition! The word that saved me in Art History 101 

Next time you’re just hanging about, you know, existing within your corporeal form or whatever, take note of how many times you unconsciously swallow. Turns out humans do it a ton which is super fun when out of nowhere you have a sore throat and it feels like a serrated knife has lodged itself horizontally within your larynx. Every time you swallow. Which, as we’ve established, is unfairly often! Anyway so I’ve had a miserable bunch of days (the sore throat came with the free gift of an earache!) to the point where I couldn’t even eat soothing stuff like ice cream or soup because it was agony to swallow anything. Even cool, clear water might as well have been a nutritious bowl of sand, because they both would’ve felt the same to my poor tender throat.

In wonderful news I am now thoroughly improved, mostly due to ibuprofen, rest, and gargling so much salt water and apple cider vinegar that I’m surprised I haven’t turned into a pickle. However, I choose to attribute my entire recovery to the incredible bowl of porridge that I fixed for myself yesterday. I’d taken enough painkillers that my throat was tentatively amenable to food, and I wanted to have something aggressively nutritious and filling, but also soft and warm as the underbelly of a rabbit. Oatmeal covers all these bases, as well as allowing me to be irritatingly cute by using the portmanteau of Sore Throatmeal, and I do love to be irritatingly cute.

 rock the oat

I mean, everyone has their own way of making porridge and you can feel free to ignore my method or write it off as garbage (but if so, honestly, why are you still reading this far?) but mine has much going for it – the oats are toasted first, a step that only adds a minute to the cooking time but turns what could be gluey flavourless glue into a richly flavoured, warmly nutty concoction. I also stir in ground almonds, which add a gentle sweetness and swollen softness and richness and also, y’know, almonds put a shine on your coat. You could use any dried fruit you like but cranberries are full of anti-inflammatory and hella-vitamin properties, they also look incredibly pretty, all ruby red against the white cream and pale oats. Similarly, you could use coconut milk or almond milk or ginger instead of cinnamon and so on and so forth; but this is the recipe I made and it is so damn good.

Also I know this recipe looks really long and complicated, it’s because I’m talky and like to hold your hand throughout the process just in case there’s any small detail that confounds you. Once you sift through all my added nonsense it’s really, really straightforward, I promise.

the softest porridge, or, sore throatmeal

a recipe by myself

a handful of dried cranberries 
half a cup oatmeal or finely rolled oats
quarter of a cup of whole oats 
half a cup of water
half a cup of milk
a pinch of salt
quarter of a cup of ground almonds
cinnamon
brown sugar
cream, and lots of it

Place the cranberries in a small bowl and cover with water from a just-boiled kettle. 

Place a smallish saucepan over a medium and throw the oats in, stirring them frequently to allow them to toast – they’ll start to smell incredibly, well, toasty, and when this happens remove them from the heat and allow them to sit for a minute just to cool slightly. 

Stir in the water, milk, and salt, and return to a low heat, stirring occasionally to prevent it from sticking as it heats up and thickens. You want to get it to the stage where it’s starting to have big bubbles rise to the surface and burst, like some kind of geothermic mudpool (I think, I mean I have very little knowledge of geothermic…stuff) and at this point stir in the ground almonds and decide whether or not you think it needs a splash more milk or water – I like my porridge a little on the softer, creamier side, but you might like yours thicker. So, either it’s ready, or you need to stir it a bit longer with more liquid. 

Once you’re done, remove it from the heat, drain the cranberries (I just used a spoon to hold them back while tipping the water into the sink) and stir them in along with a hearty pinch of cinnamon. Spatula all this into a deep bowl (a deep bowl helps it stay warm for longer!) and spoon over as much brown sugar and cream as your mouth desires. 

I took one bite and was literally cured 

On account of this peskily sore throat I’ve done more or less nothing lately, I’ve either been in bed or at work; when in bed I’ve been on a Nigella-watching spree – I mean this in the nicest way, but I don’t have to think at all when I’m watching her show, and it doesn’t matter if I fall asleep halfway through, and all the stirring and gentle clattering and plummy vocals are utterly soothing to someone like me who adores background noise while I sleep. So you can see how I’m so Hallelujah-chorus rapturous over this porridge, it’s pretty much the most exciting thing to happen to me in the last few days. It was so delicious though, that I’m very sure it would still provide some kind of thrill even if you’re in full health.
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title from: Alanis Morrisette, You Learn. Remember when this album was the hugest thing in the world? This song has such a strange, meandering, conversational vibe to it that you don’t get a lot now, and I remember thinking how subversive and rad it was that her voice was kinda screechy and drawly (I was ten, okay.) 
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music lately:

Fiona Apple, Sleep to Dream. So dark and moody and intense, “this mind, this body and this voice cannot be stifled by your deviant ways,  so don’t forget what I told you, don’t come around, I got my own hell to raise” – ooof. 

Kendrick Lamar, Alright. I mean the song itself was already amazing but the video is just… *falls over sideways*
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next time: it is SO FREEZING in Wellington right now, so I’ll probably be cooking something to try and warm myself up, which at this stage is going to be a bowlful of the earth’s molten core. 

you think it’s easy, when you don’t know better

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*Kanye voice* what she order, fish filet?

So it has come to this: ya girl has been a combination of too busy, overcommitted, otherwise engaged, and pretty much any synonym for busy that you can think of, to even think of cooking. I haven’t blogged for over a week, which, considering my insistence on overachieving, means that I may as well just delete the whole blog and throw my laptop in a river because I have clearly failed and everything is pointless. However, instead of that mildly hyperbolic behaviour, I’ve decided to just accept the past week as a write-off, and write on the few things I did make myself this week, even though those things are: fish finger butties and marmite-and-chip sandwiches.

I’m not trying to pretend like I invented either of these concepts, or that you need a recipe for them, or that they’re high art as far as food goes, but – both were really, really delicious and made me happy, and even if they’re embarrassingly easy and simple, to be honest that’s good enough for me to blog about. Especially since I have zero other options, but still. Also stupid as it may seem for me to be telling you how to put prepackaged stuff in bread; I feel like if nothing else this blog post can serve as a reminder that these concepts exist. I mean, it had been forever since I’d had a marmite-and-chip sandwich and having revived that combination for myself I am now wanting them at least daily.

I think in some countries fish fingers are called fish sticks, either way they honestly sound terrible

The inspiration for the fish finger butties (ps, buttie is another word for sandwich, and you could just call it that but the word buttie just sounds more celebratory) came when my amazing girlfriend and I needed some sustenance after striding around the zoo in the bracing cold and beholding cute animals. It went like this: we were in the supermarket, she pointed at fish fingers and was all, “we could make sandwiches out of these maybe” and I squawked “you genius!” in total wonderment, because I have a very low bar for being impressed and in awe, to be honest. (I was then like “better get this pack of forty fish fingers just to be on the safe side.”)

Whether you prefer to use mayo or butter – and I actually prefer mayo here – the bread has to be the softest, whitest, and thickest you can find. The fewer minerals and vitamins and general health-giving content the better. Similarly, if you can find those fish fingers that are crumbed and have maybe 4% actual fish content in the ingredients, you’re on to a winner.

With the marmite-and-chip sandwiches, the chips in question are the crisps that come in a packet, not fries (I don’t know why we have such confusing language around potato products, it’s very troubling!) and obviously you can use whatever sodium-delivery-spread you like – Vegemite, Promite, English Marmite. I grew up on Marmite and adore it, whereas Vegemite to me tastes like salty dirt and misery. Many of you probably feel the reverse. Whatever, as long as the chips are crinkle cut and the plain salted flavour, you’re all good. I ate marmite sandwiches roughly a billion times when I was a kid, but a marmite and chip sandwich – and I have no idea who first came up with the idea – was such an exciting upgrade. And there’s nothing like casually eating the food that was thrilling to you as a kid, when you’re an adult who can do what they want when they want.

marmite and chips on white bread: you can clearly see how I got my book deal and I should definitely get another

So, the reason either of these sandwiches are worth your time is the magical, transcendently good textural contrast between soft, soft white bread and crunchy filling. It’s as simple as that. Bursts of crispness, salty savouriness, and comfortingly pillowy blandness.

fish finger butty

four fish fingers (three for the sandwich, one for snacking on) 
mayonaise 
two slices of the thickest, softest white bread you can find

Bake or fry the fish fingers till crisp and golden. My cunning trick is to put them in the sandwich press, but do whatever is most convenient for you.

Generously spread mayo on both pieces of bread, lay the fish fingers across one slice and top with the other slice, eat the remaining fish finger so you don’t fade away between now and eating your sandwich, and then eat your sandwich. 


marmite and chip sandwich

a packet of ready salted chips, ideally crinkle cut
plenty of soft butter
marmite
two slices of white bread, as soft and thick as you can find

Spread both pieces of bread thickly with butter and then thinly with marmite. Pile up potato chips evenly on top of one slice, then gently top with the other slice. Eat. 

 

                       *Peter in Jesus Christ Superstar voice* I think you’ve made your point now
It’s kind of hard to photograph these sandwiches in a way that makes them look majorly alluring, I feel like sticking one next to a vase of flowers was not my best work, I guess I’m also pointing this out so that you know that I know. Like I said, I haven’t cooked a thing this week and so this is what I’m working with. But honestly, I’m so convinced of the excellence of both these combinations that I’m not even bashful about having blogged about them now, because if you didn’t know about them, you’ve been missing out on a world of deliciousness. I’m not saying I’m a hero, I’m just saying…nope that actually is what I’m saying.

 

befriending everyone’s dogs and cats is time-consuming okay

So just what have I been doing with myself if not devoting myself to blogging? Working; partying; helping a friend choreograph a tap dance routine for a drag competition; going on cute outings with people from work; loitering with birthday pals; seeing a friend’s band perform; recovering from watching Pretty Little Liars; taking up lots of time being amazed at how time has gone so fast and it’s July already; dancing wildly; working; berating myself for having achieved nothing this month; that sort of thing. Ya girl is determined to get cooking again though, what with it being my favourite pastime and incredibly dear to my heart and all.

title from: The White Stripes, Hardest Button To Button. I love these guys so much, that is all.

music lately: 

Carly Rae Jepsen, Emotion. TUNE. Pop music that is really upbeat but sounds kinda sad is my kryptonite.

Chelsea Jade, Lowbrow. This honey just keeps making songs that are amazing. It’s amazing.

Nicki Minaj, Anaconda. Every time I listen to this or watch the video it just gets more and more spectacular and excellent, tbh.

next time: literal recipes, I promise

i’d have the cheek to say they’re equally as bleak

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slow cooked beef cheeks with cinnamon and kumara
I have achieved a lot this week, which I’m very proud of, because – as I’ll tell you soon as see you – I’m really only awake and functioning for around 90 minutes a day when I’m not at work. None of this changes the fact though, that I’m honestly a bit sad about one thing that I can’t achieve my way out of, whether or not I’m awake or asleep or thriving or unthriving: Wednesday the cat has gone. Gone to live at the Cat’s Protection League, so she will be a league-protected cat, but it’s so sad to not have her stupid wee half-moustached face and crooked broken little tail around. What happened was, the flatmate who was catsitting her had to move out to be nearer to her job (which is also a major bummer since she’s lovely) and couldn’t keep her, and the rest of us remaining were unable to keep Wednesday so the only real solution was to send her off. If I was around more or was not the sole person responsible I’d adopt ten million cats but I’m just not at home enough to give a cat the attention it needs (and then entirely ignores) so…that’s that. 
However, having Wednesday around for just one happy month was wonderful, so let’s cue a montage: 
holding paws

boop

arabesque

my favourite look: business cat
Better to have loved and lost than never to have had a cat at all, right? Again, I know this might sound all overwrought (and if there is a thing to be wrought, I’m first in line to do it overly) but Wednesday appeared just when I was reaching the zenith of my climb up Cat-Longing Mountain and the utter blanketing joy of suddenly having a soft little animal around was just just just so lovely.   
Anyway! Life goes on and luckily there will be other cats out there for me and also I have dear friends close by who own animals of varying degrees of willingness to be snuggled, so yeah. This may sound all very stupid and self-indulgently whiny but do you even know how I feel about cats? I FEEL.

*Goodbye To You by Michelle Branch playing on a constant loop* 
Speaking of things that are good to have in bed in the middle of this snappishly cold weather; I recently made my first proper slow-cooked casserole thing of the Winter (it’s not even technically Winter yet but Wellington cares not for your seasonal timelines.) Whilst sleepily wandering around Moore Wilson one morning I saw that beef cheeks were incredibly well priced – like, $5! – and I grabbed some, surmising that the time had come for me to get back into cooking such things. I’d never cooked using beef cheeks before but figured there couldn’t be much to it, and about this I was highly correct.  

Seriously, the only stressful thing about cooking this is that you need a lot of time. But during that time the house smells so completely incredible, that you can zone out and come to and feel like you’ve wandered into some enchantingly bucolic French bistro when in fact you’re just sitting in your Newtown kitchen playing idly on your phone while wearing tights that have holes in places that are, shall we say, not amenable to being public-facing, and a stained hoodie that you slept in and haven’t changed out of yet. So yeah, it takes time, but look at it this way, this is a recipe that you can achieve things to: put it in the oven and then get on your laptop and write, or tidy your room, or do whatever it is that you ought to be doing, and then you are rewarded with a mouth-quiveringly good feed.

I based this recipe on a few things that I found online, purposefully going with a recipe that doesn’t use any alcohol, despite how enticing the thought of braising this meat in Pedro Ximenez or a bottle of red wine was. On my current budget I just can’t bring myself to the point of tipping a whole ton of wine into a pan, when I could be drinking it. It makes me feel all flinch-y. This recipe simply uses cinnamon – one of my very favourite scents and flavours – and stock, and lets the beef itself do the rest. Leaving any wine you might have to be poured straight into your mouth (or like, use a wine glass, you adorable heathen.)

slow-cooked beef cheeks with cinnamon 

serves two to four people, depending on appetite and what is served with. 

around 300g beef cheeks (or more, whatever) 
butter
one onion
one good size orange kumara, or half a butternut squash
250ml beef stock (ideally from a carton, but use a cube if it’s all you’ve got for sure)
two cinnamon sticks

Set your oven to 150 C/300F. Slice the onion into thin half-moons and dice the kumara roughly. 

Heat an indescriminate amount of butter in a small frying pan (around a tablespoon is fine if you need someone to make this decision for you) and sear the beef cheeks on both sides, for around a minute each side, just to brown them. Once brown on both sides, remove from the pan and sit them in a medium-sized casserole or baking dish. Then, add a little more butter to the pan and gently fry the onion and kumara (you may need to do this in batches) until the onion is softened and the kumara is a little browned and crisped in places. Tip all this into the casserole dish on top of the beef. Finally, pour the beef stock into that same pan and allow it to come to the boil. Carefully pour this over the beef, onion and kumara, nestle the cinnamon sticks in amongst all that, cover with either a lid or tinfoil, and then place it in the oven. Leave for around three hours, and then serve, over rice or some kind of potato situation or simply with plenty of bread and butter. 

It seems almost impossible that a method so simple that you’re barely touching the food as you cook it, could taste so deeply delicious, but such is the joy of slow cooking. The meat was so tender I could literally slice into it with the edge of a spoon, and half-heartedly at that. There is a wonderful stickiness to this, from the gelatinously rich meat to the warmth of the cinnamon and the sweet, slightly scorched kumara. Actually I should mention now that beef cheeks have long been a very unfashionable cut of meat and are only really now coming into prominence – in the same way that lamb shanks did a few years back – but honestly they’re so, so good and fulsomely rich in flavour that they practically deserve to become overpriced restaurant food. Also, it’s all so arbitrary, right? I mean, rump steak is a fancy cut of beef but I mean, it’s the rump. You’re literally eating a cow’s butt?

On that note, I had it pointed out to me by some rakish wag (my dazzling girlfriend in fact) that if you say “beef cheeks” out loud it’s weirdly hilarious and uh, yeah, I agree. Beef cheeks! I don’t know, but giggles ensue! Immature of me, yes, but in my defence, I am very immature.

More sensibly, you should know that the leftovers of this are quite incredible heated up and stirred through hot pasta – ideally pappardelle for that hearty ragu vibe, but all I had was linguine and the meat, shredded roughly, with the pasta absorbing the gelatinous stock and some extra butter that I threw in because I’m incapable of doing anything else, was sublime. 
Despite living the catless life currently there is still SO much to look forward to: Pretty Little Liars, aka one of the most important TV shows in the Western canon; returns next week and so does the webseries of my heart, Carmilla. Also, next Monday morning (around 9.45am I believe?) I’ll be on Radio New Zealand talking to Jesse Mulligan about food, which should be rad as. I love being on the radio! And wherever Wednesday is, I love her too and am glad I got to meet her at all. 
*Don’t You Forget About Me by Simple Minds plays on loop* (ps oh man thanks for bearing with me, ya girl is maudlin)
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title from: Arctic Monkey’s moody Do Me A Favour. Those guys!
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music lately: 
Walk Through The Fire, from the musical episode Once More With Feeling from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Yes. I am at the stage with my Buffy-watching where I got up to the musical episode. Verdict: oh I don’t know, I think I want to/have to watch it like seventeen more times before I can properly calibrate my feelings on it (what I’m saying is I love it)
VCR, The XX – their music just makes me feel all warm and safe, it’s so dreamy and low-key. This is one of my very, very favourites of theirs. 
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next time: I know it’s freezing but I made some rum’n’raisin ice cream the other day and it was honestly the nicest thing I’ve tasted in forever. So I ate it all. In one go. But I’m going to make it again and let it hang around long enough to take photos of this time! 

it’s a little secret, just the robinson’s affair

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got a secret, can you keep it, swear this one you’ll save

In a completely unsurprising turn of events, I fell asleep while writing this blog post and now have a very small window of opportunity – more like a mouse-hole of opportunity, or perhaps a fissure of opportunity – to get it done before I have to take off for work. In fact I have no real proof that I’m not still asleep right now, so please keep this in mind as you read on. What I’m saying is, I coolly absolve myself of any need to make any sense as I try to finish this thing without falling asleep again.

Speaking of cool absolution, I am so chill with being inspired by my own self, which is honestly kind of practical – I mean, I should theoretically like and use the recipes I’ve created. Last Sunday I was invited to my girlfriend’s flatmate’s fundraiser potluck for local charity Kaibosh, and with cheerful self-absorption I turned to my own cookbook to browse it for suitable recipes. The recipe for Secret Centre Mini Pavlovas caught my (probably half-asleep) eye, as it is both elegant and awesome yet easy and inexpensive to make.

gonna lock it in your pocket (I’m quoting the Pretty Little Liars theme song here btw)
I was absolutely correct about these chocolate stuffed meringues being easy to make, and for the filling I used Whittaker’s caramel chocolate, partly to be obnoxiously excessive and partly because I thought it would taste wonderful. 
However! Diligently I walked from my house to the potluck venue at In Good Company, and about halfway through the journey I came to a long set of concrete stairs. A set of concrete stairs that I once fell down. Aha, I thought, my old foe, we meet again. Luckily I’m going up, not down this time, hey? HEY? And then I fell up the stairs. 
While I was totally fine, with little more than a delicately bruised knee on top of doubtless another bruise that had only just barely healed – the container of meringues that I was carrying dropped and they got all banged up inside. They were still edible but the edges were all ragged and shattery and some of the tops were a bit crushed and essentially they weren’t particularly photogenic. So, I decided to forgo my own photos altogether and just use the ones that go with this recipe in my cookbook. I can’t remember whether it was Kim or Jason who took these, so a huge thank you to them both just to be safe. 

secret centre mini-pavlovas

a recipe by myself from my cookbook HungryandFrozen: The Cookbook. I just wrote out the instructions from memory rather than copy-pasting what was in the book, even though it’s all my own words (I don’t know why I did this) but either way the recipe is a lot simpler than the length of this recipe would make it seem – I just kind of overexplain stuff a bit. 

two egg whites
a pinch of salt
100g sugar
filling of your choice – in this case I used caramel-filled chocolate but dark chocolate is a good starting point

Set your oven to 150 C and line a baking tray with baking paper. 

Whisk the egg whites (or use an electric beater if you’re more sensible than me) with the pinch of salt till they’re white and a little fluffy and when you raise the whisk the fluffy egg white raises up with it and falls down slowly (this is known as “soft peak stage” but in case you needed an expanded explanation, there it is.) At this point slowly whisk in the sugar, initially about a teaspoon at a time, until the mixture becomes thicker and shiny and gorgeous. It should get to the point where it’s really very stiff, and if you raise the whisk up out of the bowl the mixture will be thick and dollopy instead of falling in ribbons off the whisk. God I hope these descriptions make sense! 

Place heaped spoonfuls of the thick, gleaming meringue onto the baking tray, leaving a little space in between to allow for expanding. Top each spoonful with a piece of chocolate, and then spoon over a little more meringue mixture, so that the chocolate is entirely encased in white. 

Bake for thirty minutes, although check them at around 20 – 25 minutes in, just in case your oven is more grunty than mine. They should be a delicate pale brown colour on top and appear firm. Allow them to cool in the oven with the door slightly ajar, and then carefully remove them from the paper, peeling it away from their fragile bases, and then all you have to worry about is eating them.

never not dazzled by fairy lights

While my falling asleep constantly or falling up stairs or generally being involved in some kind of falling is barely news, these secret centre mini pavlovas are, at least, notably spectacular. Crisp, dissolving meringue gives way to a burst of chocolate that you wouldn’t otherwise know what there unless someone forewarned you. While it’s sweetness upon sweetness, something in the mix of textures keeps it fresh – whether the chocolate is still warm and gushes into your mouth or cooled and firmed and crunchy under the brittle meringue. The potluck dinner was so fun and fortunately no-one minded the mini-pavlovas being a little smashed up, and there was a ton of delicious food and lovely people and a very decent amount of money was raised for Kaibosh, an outcome sweeter than a meringue secretly stuffed with chocolate.

Am about to fall asleep again but before I spatula my tired self out of bed to get ready to go, I wish to impart two more pieces of crucial information to you:

Kate and Jason (the stylist and aforementioned co-photographer for my cookbook, but also like, wonderful people in their own right aside from their relation to my cookbook) GOT A BEAUTIFUL DOG and I got to hang out with him today. He’s blindingly white and fluffy like a freshly laundered towel and so friendly and silly and I’m quite in love.

 this is Ghost, also a good name for me because I am dead after looking at his face

Secondly, I had another Crush Cake story published in The Toast! The Toast is probably the very best website on the internet, if I was pushed to choose one, and little makes me prouder than being able to contribute to their spectacularly high quality accumulation of writing.

This is a crush cake dedicated to Drake. If you’re not intrigued and inspired to immediately find out exactly what this is all about, then…I mean I can’t blame you, but that’s kind of a bummer. 

bonus! dog! so! blessed!
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title from: Mrs Robinson, that cheerfully weird song by Simon and Garfunkel. I love the punchy yet thoughtful guitar chords. And also the lyrics which sound like they were written by a committee passing notes to each other. 
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music lately:

Ummm so the video for Beyonce and Nicki Minaj’s song Feeling Myself is still only available via subscription to Tidal but this 30 second teaser alone is giving me more life than literally anything else right now. Watch it and feel yourself become a better human. 

King Kunta, Kendrick Lamar. Yeah, still can’t stop listening to this on repeat eh.  
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next time: I made ice cream so amazingly nice that I literally ate nearly a litre of it in one sitting. Maybe you’ll be able to make it soon too. 

you know that i’d do anything for you, we should have each other to dinner

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miso marinated salmon and pea puree

Let me tell you right now, the photos I took for this week’s blog post are objectively horrendous! It looks like something out of a microwave gourmet book from 1982! But like, you could go literally anywhere on the internet and find beautiful food photography, where else are you going to get the innovation of fizzingly good writing paired with completely disgusting photos that do a total disservice to both the quality of the writing and that about which I write? Honestly I nearly considered not posting about this recipe but if I learned anything from doing ballet since the age of three it’s that the show must go on. There’s only one word for my actions here, and that is: so brave. 
proof that I at least tried to take these photos and didn’t just cut them out of a 70s cookbook that had been not particularly recently dropped in a puddle (also: the perils of me cooking for you – having to wait for me to photograph everything.)
So, because of the hours I keep at my recently-acquired job, I never ever get to cook dinner anymore. I love my job! But also I love cooking dinner. So much. When I first started flatting nine years ago I used to kick up such a fuss if I missed out on one night of cooking dinner, because apparently I was an enormous brat, but at least in a way that reaped useful dividends. Now I’m lucky if I get to cook dinner once a fortnight. I know it’s more or less a chore and as such a weird thing to complain about, but as Selena Gomez said, the heart wants what it wants. On Sunday night I was able to combine my love of cooking dinner with another favourite activity, cooking dinner for other people: in this case, my excellent and marvelous girlfriend. Since I was spiralling this disproportionately into such a high-stakes occasion, I turned to my desert-island book, the seminal text How To Eat by Nigella Lawson. 
I latched onto a recipe for homemade beef carpaccio but when I went to buy the required piece of tail-end beef the price made me scream repeatedly, so I went with a second option, which was an entirely more affordable miso marinated salmon with pea puree (combining bits of two separate recipes from different chapters of How To Eat, based upon what I had already in the fridge.) 
the alpha and the omega-3  

I love salmon fillets, all tender and pinky-coral and oily, but the oiliness can be disconcertingly, lung-cloggingly present. Fortunately this marinade not only cuts through that, but it also adds layers upon layers of vehemently meaty yet subtly sweet flavour, in the form of miso paste, that magical and mysterious stuff, and coconut sugar, which has its own elusive, deep-toned caramel vibe. Lemon juice and vinegar lighten it up and briskly stop it from being altogether too much of an intense onslaught, and all you have to do is flash it under a hot grill for the skin to turn crisp and chewy – like pork crackling but thin and delicate as rice paper – and the flesh below to become utterly tender.

seriously this lighting is so bad, I need to remember how to take photos under regular lightbulbs again since it’s dark 90% of the time these days, thank you for continuing to read this far

I have a tendency when I get the opportunity to cook for people I hold dear to be all pending-apocalypse about it, like, let’s eat a vat of pasta big enough for a moose to comfortably nestle in and then we’ll have seven different puddings and also here are several side dishes all involving fried potatoes and toasted nuts. This time around I wanted something that wouldn’t bring on that frantic feeling of having consumed twelve kilos of food, so went for a weightless pea puree alongside, made luscious with butter and mascarpone. It’s billowingly soft and creamy and works quite perfectly with the salmon, honestly I could eat a whole bowlful of it on its own (and in fact I did the next day with the leftovers.) 
when even instagram can barely embiggen your lighting situation you know you’re in trouble
miso-marinated salmon with pea puree

adapted from a couple of recipes from Nigella Lawson’s important book How To Eat

two salmon fillets, around 150g each

one heaped tablespoon white miso paste
one heaped tablespoon coconut sugar (if you can’t find it, use brown sugar or better yet, palm sugar)
one tablespoon apple cider vinegar
the juice of a lemon

two cups frozen peas
150g mascarpone (or use creme fraiche or even sour cream or a little actual cream)
50g butter
salt and pepper to taste

Mix the miso paste, sugar, vinegar and lemon juice together and smear across both sides of the salmon. What I did was roughly mix the stuff together in the dish I was planning to marinate the salmon in and then kind of schmeered it on the salmon from there before just leaving it in said dish to sit and absorb the flavour, this saves on dishes but is admittedly kind of hard to explain. Leave this to sit for at least half an hour.

Set your oven to grill (broil, I do believe it’s called in America?) and turn the heat up high. Meanwhile, bring the peas to the boil in a pan of water, and cook until they’re very, very tender. Remove the salmon from the marinate and wipe gently with a paper towel. Place the salmon onto a baking paper lined oven tray, skin side up. Drizzle over a little oil (I used olive) and put them in the oven, grilling them for around 5 to 8 minutes.

Meanwhile, drain the peas and blitz them in a food processor with the butter (the heat should melt the butter sufficiently) before adding the mascarpone and blending again till it’s a smooth green puree. 

Serve the salmon alongside the puree with whatever salad leaves you fancy. Serves two.  

if I wasn’t supposed to make this obnoxious caption then why does pea puree rhyme with bae?  

It was so, so delicious. And incredibly simple. A combination I appreciate. And now that I’ve overanalysed it a few times, these photos aren’t thaaaat bad. They are in fact, unequivocally hideous. Location-based discomfort aside, I feel like maybe I should take all food photos in the bathroom from now on, since the light in there is so good for selfies.

I mean really.

guess which one of us is genteel and which one of us is a plate-licking heathen (for the sake of not slandering anyone I’m the heathen, it’s me, but in my defence spatulas are not considered to be cutlery so what’s a gal to do?)

Cheers for bearing with me during this difficult time, people, clearly I need to cook dinner more often so I can remember how actually to take photos of dinner. But I got to cook dinner at all and it was ridiculously delicious and made for a dreamy evening, and despite everything, that is actually what counts. 
Yesterday on another rare night off I went to my friend Pinky Fang’s first solo art gallery opening with said excellent gf, and met lots of other swell friends there and ate the most amazing candy and drank wine from plastic cups and it was all very very fun. But more important than wine and candy (it’s true) is that Pinky’s artwork collection is incredible! I’m so proud of her! If you’re in Wellington you should absolutely definitely go to Thistle Hall this week while her show is running and if you’re not in Wellington you can at least access some of her massively rad works from her online shop (I have the “shut up” cat print on my wall and can highly recommend having its presence in your life.) Yay art and friends and good times! 
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title from: Lovecats by The Cute. Uh, I mean The Cure. But if you’re gonna write a song this wilfully adorable you’re gonna have me to deal with. 
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 music lately:

Zendaya, Replay. This song is so great with such a head-swingingly big chorus and I love a dance-in-front-of-the-mirror music video to be quite frank. 

Scritti Politti, The Sweetest Girl. This 1981 song is unsettling but sweet, dreamy but sinister, I adore it. 
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next time: I mean I very rarely cook dinner these days so the chances of me having to deal with unruly nighttime light anytime soon are slim but I’ll work on it either way, promise. 

let’s just make this part go faster

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mugging for the camera
Comfort food can take many forms. For me it’s usually something that gives you the masticatory impression of gently sliding into a warm bath, like a slowly-stirred risotto or a bowl of soft, butter-saturated polenta or an enormous pile of mashed potato, but sometimes comfort food is more about the act itself than whatever form the food ends up taking. Sometimes it can simply be like, it’s 2am and I just finished work and it’s too windy to stand up straight and you’re sad and I’m sad and I bought you this bag of crisps from a 24/7 dairy because the line at BK was too long and also I didn’t know what else to do but this $3 gesture represents a lot more than merely just crunchy sodium goods…y’know? 
But sometimes comfort food is very obvious and straightforward, in this case: a chocolate peanut butter cake that you make in a mug (the most comforting vessel!) microwaved briefly so that quite instantly you can reward yourself for existing with a piping hot, warm, rich cake. Just for you. I’d never made a mug cake before but I’d sure heard of them: in my completely unresearched experience mug cakes started off as the sort of thing that an enthusiastic relative would email you accompanied by sparkly gifs of puppies and a phrase along the lines of “This is the most dangerous cake in the world…..Because now chocolate cake IS OnLy five minutes away!” A few rotations of the earth and the very simple recipe is now a staple of pinterest and has morphed into such things as “choc chip cookie in a mug” (why would a cookie be in a mug though) and “red velvet layer cake in a mug” (this does not sound comforting or fast tbh.) However you come to it, and whatever your opinion on microwaves, there’s something thoroughly charming about going from point A – you standing there with no cake – to point B – you eating a small cake from a mug – within about five minutes. And so, in the mood for sugar and immediacy, I recently made my first mug cake. 
 stay inside, drink more coffee, make cake really suddenly

I made this recipe up based on ingredients I already had in my possession, basically just whatever dusts and pastes I could find that might together form a half-decent cake. A little cocoa, a little coconut sugar (included for its extraordinarily deep caramel flavour, but just use brown sugar or plain sugar if you like) a little peanut butter for those this-is-a-fun-cake vibes…and after a long 90 seconds it transformed into a soft, meltingly chocolately, utterly delicious brownie-type thing, which I poured cream all over and ate in a chocolate-scented haze of beatific calm. All of which could be yours really, really quickly if you make yourself this.

chocolate peanut butter mug cake

a recipe by myself

two tablespoons butter (around thirty grams)
one tablespoon coconut sugar or brown sugar
two tablespoons cocoa powder
two tablespoons peanut butter
quarter of a cup milk
a pinch of baking powder
a couple of squares of chocolate, roughly chopped

Place the butter in the mug that you’re using and soften it in the microwave. Stir in all the ingredients – a teaspoon with a long handle or a narrow whisk is good for this – and add a little extra milk if it seems toooo stiff. It should come to about halfway up the mug. I microwaved it for a minute on high, then another thirty seconds, by which stage it was firm enough on the surface for me to decide it was ready to eat. 

Plunge a spoon into the cake, pour cream or milk into it, and eat all by yourself. 

It doesn’t rise very much, mind you, but I was astounded at how filling it was, so what it lacks in height it makes up for in cellular density I guess? Also for the work of minutes that you can count on one hand it’s a pretty tidy result. In fact pretty tidy is underselling it: it’s really, completely, wonderfully delicious.

This blog post is also going to be fast and mug-sized, but to distract you (and indeed, myself) from this I will leave you with Wednesday the silly beautiful tiny dingus of a cat being a literal loaf.

loaf cat (the demonic glow is coming from my heater/the camera on my phone not being able to deal with said glow)

Wait, one more thing! If anyone out there could please recommend a rad web designer that would be excellent. I’m thinking about refreshing this old blog here since it currently looks thoroughly ancient and un-cute. I don’t know anything about anything so am hoping to go by personal recommendations for people who do good work like this, and am also hoping that my blog can undergo some kind of movie makeover transformation to the effect of a stunning brunette removing her glasses and undoing her ponytail and suddenly everyone gasps and notices how bodacious she is. 

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title from: mate, it has been a while since I’ve quoted RENT on here. This song that I quote today, I Should Tell You, is so fragmented and tentative and nervous and beautiful. Jonathan Larson could really, really write. 
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 music lately:

I don’t know why Anna Kendrick’s voice in the Don’t You Forget About Me bit of the final number in Pitch Perfect makes me feel emotional, but there you have it. (I saw Pitch Perfect 2 last night, there is wonderful singing and Anna Kendrick is great and it’s so weirdly racist and many other bad things! That’s my review.) 

Shazam, by Spiderbait, from one of my favourite music genres, “bratty”.
Lorde, Royals. I hadn’t listened to this song in forever and ever and wow it is still such a tune.  
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 next time: roast chicken in a mug! I’m kidding.  

if you got beef, your problem, not mine

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beef: got it
For a while there I was feeling some sizable angst about turning 29, partly because I was like, I’ve blatantly achieved nothing in my life and am an elderly loser (I know neither of these things are true but when you’re already prone to hyperbole it’s amazing the distance that your brain will take the existing hyperbole when you’re being down on yourself) and I also was like, I’m blatantly too old to achieve anything ever, am no longer an ingenue, am a giant snore in a trenchcoat and hat with a fake mustache on pretending to be human. (Again: the hyperbole! It really goes places, doesn’t it?) 
leftover birthday cake for breakfast

And then I reminded myself that Beyonce and Nicki Minaj are 33 and 32 respectively and have released the most fire music of their careers in the last couple of years, and that I have so much ahead of me and 29 is still really young and I should just drink some water and calm down a bit because the passage of time cannot be fought so you can either age yourself horribly by worrying about it or ignore it because it’s ultimately meaningless. I mean, Beyonce’s 2013 album is honestly life-changing, to put it casually. If she can do that at 32 with all her resources and brilliance, I can achieve something productive as a tired moderately broke but talented 29 year old.  
“Rosie, dear Rosie, there’s a rose in my heart for you” 
So yes, I had a birthday recently, and it was honestly quite perfect. My boundlessly marvellous girlfriend cooked me a Full English Breakfast with about seventeen different kinds of protein (including black pudding – seems somewhat gothically appropriate to start one’s birthday consuming literal blood) and we sybaritically clinked glasses of whisky to go with it. I dyed my hair purple, I had a beauteous dinner and follow-up drink with my very best friends Kim and Kate, and then said girlfriend and I went to the St James theatre (above) to see the musical Singin’ In The Rain, which I swankily yet utterly serendipitously had scored free tickets to. It was just wonderful and I urge you to see it if you have even a passing interest in musicals, old movies, tap dancing, and singing in and/or rain. The costumes were spectacular, the dancing was brilliant, the singing was on point – Gene Kelly casts an unfairly long shadow but the guy playing his role was ideal – and it was just so joyful. The night finished with cocktails and fries at my work and some general reflection on how completely good my birthday had been (and on how funny it was that I had reflexively replied “Happy birthday!” several times that day when someone had said “Happy birthday” to me.) 
sausages/beans/tomatoes/egg/mushrooms/black pudding/bacon/fried bread/whisky/hashtag blessed
Winding back to a couple of days before my birthday though, I made myself this Mediterranean-ish eggplant and beef dish. Since it was so simple and good I thought I might as well try to blog about it, and five million days later I’ve finally got around to it, with my usual efficiency and haste. 
this bowl makes everything look rustic and nice, thank you bowl 

It’s vaguely Mediterranean insofar as it includes some flavours of that (vast, varied, unable to be generalised and yet here I am) area, but since I just made it up based on what was in my pantry I hesitate to label it anything more specific than that. What I can confidently tell you is that it’s rich yet sharp, with spiky sour sumac and lemon zest lifting up the crisply fried, melting cubes of eggplant and tomato-y beef, with thick, creamy spoonfuls of Greek Yoghurt dropped here and there adding to that rich-sharp contrast. I love thyme so much, so that’s what I scattered over this, but oregano or mint would also be splendid in their own way. The only real change I’d make is using pine nuts instead of sesame seeds – they’re just a bit more exciting and lush – but as long as you have something nut-like there it’s all good really. If you can’t find sumac – a beautiful sour, lemony powder from sumac berries – then just add more lemon zest or simply leave it out. I mean, I love its flavour but probably the main thing you’d lose is the way it somehow ties the dish together visually and stops it looking like “beef that yoghurt got tipped on”.

fried eggplant and beef with sumac and greek yoghurt

a recipe by myself, serves two 

one large eggplant
one red onion
one garlic clove
300g beef mince
half a cup tomato passata/puree
one lemon
to serve: 
thick Greek yoghurt
sumac
sesame seeds
thyme leaves

Dice the eggplant, and fry in plenty of olive oil (around three tablespoons) in a large pan. Allow to get properly browned and crisp as much as possible before setting aside, and in the same pan, fry the onion, garlic and beef until everything is thoroughly browned and cooked through. 


Grate the zest from the lemon, then squeeze the lemon juice into the beef along with the tomato passata and allow to come to a brisk simmer. After about five minutes return the eggplant to the pan to heat through, then transfer it to a serving dish (or serve straight from the pan), finishing with spoonfuls of Greek yoghurt spooned over at random, a generous blanket of sumac (she says, not having intended to put that much on but got a shaky hand, so we’re going with it) a scattering of dried thyme and toasted sesame seeds. I also add plenty of salt. Because I love salt.  

The yoghurt I use is Zany Zeus which is so thick, thicker than sour cream – if all you have is runny, slightly chalky stuff then I would not personally go putting it on this, but you do you. I do maintain though, that it’s the intensely thick, satiny texture of the yoghurt which makes this. I really haven’t cooked meat in forever but in the last two weeks I made ribs (for my girlfriend’s birthday, which also fell in April) and now this. I can go weeks without eating meat, even though I do love it, but I’m glad I dazedly purchased this mince in an overtired haze and then even gladder that I worked out something so completely delightful to make with it. If you want to though, you could just double or triple the eggplant and leave out the beef, since the vegetable’s buttery softness and golden brown crispness after being vigorously fried is entirely enough joy for your tastebuds on its own.

go big or go home

My birthday didn’t stop when the clock struck midnight on the 17th though, as my flatmate and dear friend Charlotte and I had a joint birthday party the following night. (Her birthday is a week or so before mine.) There was dancing and punch and disco lights and a noise control notification (less fun! Unimpressed tbh! But uh, it happened) and cake and candy and a little tequila and so many good people and very importantly: I had an incredible yellow shaggy fluffy cardigan.

look the part be the part as I always say (the part here being someone with a super cool fluffy cardigan who is very happy with their birthday)

So now that I’ve had a wonderful birthday and spent some time in solemn pious meditation on the achievements of Nicki/Beyonce, I’m completely ready to enter my 29th year full of thrive and bliss. 
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title from: Mary J Blige, Family Affair. This song is nearly 35 years old but still sounds fresher than toothpaste and is so upbeat and positive in a gloriously instructive way. Leave your situations at the door, so when you step inside jump on the floor…
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music lately: 

Ben Folds Five, Army. Oh man has Ben Folds done some terrible music, but this song is incredible, one of those ones that I get stuck listening to on loop for hours. It’s got that perfect late 90s horn section going (I used to get it mixed up with Flagpole Sitta back in the days where you might hear your favourite song on the radio once every six weeks, so if you like that song you may well enjoy this.) Am a particular fan of the rollicking piano on this. 

Sia, Elastic Heart. This song is brutal and gorgeous and the dancing and storytelling in the video is utterly compelling. Thick skin and elastic heart, such imagery in those words! Oof. Also as one who would likely livetweet brushing their teeth if the notion took me, I admire Sia’s commitment to being mysterious and anonymous. 
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next time: I bought some pears and kinda dig the idea of making Poires Belle Helene! (Vanilla poached pears with chocolate sauce. I mean.)

now my life is sweet like cinnamon

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muffins! (I say this every time I hear a doorbell and I don’t know why but it’s some weird Pavlovian response possibly from something I saw on TV many years ago?) (That got deep, huh)
I continue to be an utter slattern at being organised and a regular blogger, and the only thing stronger than my conviction that I’m not going to slide out of blogging regularly, is my overwhelming need to nap hard during the day when I’m not at work all night. I mean, I started this blog in 2007 and it’s pretty much the only thing that has remained the same in my life since then, with only a tiny bit of exaggeration. But also being angry at myself for not being organised enough is not going to stop me being tired and making like, toast or something instead of having the time and energy to make real food. I’ll get there though! This blog has been there throughout all manner of tumultuous and/or tired times, and just because I am not as good at burning the candle at both ends as I used to be, doesn’t mean I can’t relearn that (albeit rather terrible) behaviour once more.
I house-sat and cat-sat for friends over the weekend when they went on a mini holiday, and it was so lovely and blissful, like escaping to a cabin in the woods somewhere (a nice one, not the horror-movie kind, way to ruin cabins in the woods, Joss Whedon.) I’ve been weighed down by such cat-longing feelings lately, I mean, I always am, but it has been stronger than usual, so I was excited about the thought of having a cat roomie for a few days. Unfortunately the cat in question was hellaciously skittish and I only saw her for a grand total of twenty seconds over the four days I was there, but she ate her food and didn’t cause trouble so it could’ve been worse. In happier news, the house was just darling, and it was more than enough to gaze rapturously around at it all. I decided on Sunday to make some muffins, since I just felt like baking a damn thing, but also they seemed like the perfect house-sitting foodstuff to make – easily made and consumed, not too taxing on the house-owners’ ingredients or infrastructure, able to be frozen and eaten later (not that it came to this since all but one were eaten by the time I left.)
suspect was catless, repeat, catless

When the weather turns extremity-stiffeningly cold my thoughts turn to cinnamon: how can I make everything around me scented of it? Baking is the obvious way (although if anyone knows of an amazing cinnamon-scented candle that won’t cost as much as a pet pony please give me details) and so I made some cinnamon-orange muffins, inspired by the sight of an orange in the fruit bowl that I could nick for this purpose. I swing wildly between finding muffins dull and basic and finding them tears-makingly comforting and delightful, and I guess over the weekend was a time when I was swinging towards the latter, because I could not have been more content with myself: being in a tiny, adorable kitchen, shaking clouds of cinnamon into the batter, melting butter, flinging flour onto the ground (that bit was not fun), dropping heaped spoonfuls of orange-tinted batter into the muffin tin, waiting around while they briefly baked in the hot oven and the room filled with the smell of warm cake. Muffins! They’re honestly so great.

cinnamon orange muffins

a recipe by myself – makes 12

75g butter, melted
one cup milk
two eggs
the juice of one orange
two and a half cups flour
two and a half teaspoons baking powder
half a cup brown sugar
a teaspoon or so of ground cinnamon

25g soft butter
quarter of a cup brown sugar
half a teaspoon or so of ground cinnamon
the grated zest of the orange
three tablespoons flour

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and lightly grease a 12-cup muffin tray. Or put little cupcake holders in them if you like, this will certainly save on a lot of washing later. 

In a large bowl, mix the butter, milk, eggs and orange juice till everything is well-dispersed and you can’t see any one ingredient floating about being all individual, if that makes sense. I mean, just mix them all together, that’s all, really. 

Tip in the flour, baking powder, brown sugar, and cinnamon. Very, very gently mix it all together – just turn it around and over a few times with your spoon, not worrying if everything’s still all lumpy and the flour isn’t 100% incorporated. Drop heaped spoonfuls of the batter into the muffin tin until all the batter is used up and the muffin tin is evenly filled. 

Quickly mix together the remaining ingredients – you can either bash it with a wooden spoon or use your fingertips to work in the butter, either way you want to end up with a dusty, crumbly, floury mix. Sprinkle a little of this evenly over each of the uncooked muffins. Bake for about 18 minutes, then allow to sit for about ten minutes before removing and eating, preferably sliced with more butter spread across. Because of the crumbly topping, you’ll probably need to run a knife around the edge of each muffin, but they should slide out easily. 

Look, muffins are so excellent. They take hardly any effort to make – in fact, if you put too much effort into stirring the mixture together they’ll toughen up like an old sponge. A mere gentle prod is all you need to bring the ingredients towards each other, then less than 20 minutes in the oven, and you have freshly baked goods. Isn’t that wonderful though? These are as winningly cinnamon-y as I’d hoped they’d be, with the pinpricks of orange zest in the crumbly topping and the juice of the orange in the batter giving gentle citrussy sweetness. If I had to sum up these muffins in one word it would be: snug. They tasted snug.

 

by this point I was literally just carrying the muffin around the house being all “here are more pretty things that I can photograph, I’ll just put the muffin on it and not care about whether you’d actually normally consume a muffin amongst a trolley of succulents”) 

It’s my birthday this Friday! Oh my gosh! How audacious of me! I’ve decided that my birthday treat to myself is going to be to break my general mood of grim austerity to buy myself a way cool outfit to wear to the joint birthday party that my flatmate and friend Charlotte are having the following day, and frankly I’m so excited about going clothes shopping. I saw this ridiculously amazing fluffy yellow oversized cardigan in a shop in town which in my daydreams looks incredible on me, so I guess that’s what I’m going to make a beeline for (and may end up looking like a literal bumblebee, or perhaps a small Big Bird, but we’ll see.) But what do I really want for my birthday, I conveniently imagine you asking? My needs and wants are simple, I simply want the following:

 

~ A pair of Victorian-ward-of-the-state-esque black boots for both work and frivolous times
~ more tattoos, or at least one more tattoo, singular
~ more hair dye in pastel blue, purple, peach, pink, whatever
~ Maldon sea salt and excellent coffee beans
~ a pet cat (c’mon universe, you know I deserve this)
~ the makings of a mighty liquor cabinet – perhaps a glamorous bottle of gin, some thoroughly decent peaty whisky, and a bottle of dry vermouth. Also some Disaronno and port and dark rum and I guess I’ve thought about this a lot.
~ a fake fur coat
~ a little record player so I could finally play all my records again
~ a cinnamon-scented candle, or something similarly glorious
~ some crystals for doing witchy deeds
~ Marc Jacobs Oh Lola perfume, I’ve run out and am utterly too broke to buy more, this is entirely my own fault for repeatedly using it instead of my Nivea roll-on and calling it “baller deodorant” but still
~ a facial but where someone pretty much just pats your hair and rubs the pressure points above your eyebrows and tells you that everything’s going to be okay and makes your skin smell incredible
~ to be financially chill enough to go to brunch more often (slash: at all)

 

So simple, those needs and wants of mine! I will report back after my birthday as to how successful I was with this list. Fingers crossed! But also I like to think I make my own luck. But fingers crossed as a back-up, in case that’s what the universe arbitrarily requires from me.

title from: Lana Del Rey, Radio. I just love her so much, quite frankly. 

music lately: 

Crucial Conflict, Hay. I found a “top 20 songs” list I made in 1996 and this song was on it, I am pretty sure I haven’t listened to it since that very time? It still goes hard though and honestly should be having its own No Diggity type revival (No Diggity was on the list too, haha)

One Direction, I Would. Don’t talk to me about Zayn leaving, okay? It’s still too soon (but honestly, who could blame him, all that relentless touring must’ve wilted those boys down like a three-day-old bouquet of flowers) (I love this song so so much still though)

next time: I’m gonna try so hard to cook stuff more often and take photos of it more often! Y’know, like, be a blogger. 

we should hash it out like a couple of grownups

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hashtag hash
I come to you buried under three layers of exhaustion: firstly I ate a lot of macaroni cheese for dinner and with every passing second the carbs are lulling me into a dopey stupor (well the only pasta I had was risoni and then I was like is this macaroni risoni or macarisoni and then I was like Laura quit being insufferable and eat your pasta. Once you’ve instagrammed it.) Secondly I had a useless night’s sleep last night. And reason the third, I am in the process of leaving my current job and starting another and there is some overlap of schedules and as a result of all these things I am less human and more a tired baby penguin, fluffy and confused and keen to get around by lying down and zooming on my stomach instead of having to stand up.  
(The changing of the jobs is all very jolly by the way, I’m grateful to the first job for teaching me a lot and delighted by the opportunity of the new job, which is also a bartender role. I realise I’m being cagey about what these places are called, but if you have an issue with that then that’s kinda weird.)
So it’s with all these floaty, veil-like layers of tiredness, that I can’t promise that this post is going to be my best work. Just kidding, all my blog posts are amazing. But uh, this one might sound a little strained as my eyes increasingly struggle to remember what their one job is.
oh look, the same thing from a slightly different angle. 

It wasn’t on my agenda to blog about this – I made it up on the spot and it seemed too simple and insubstantial. Then I told myself, that what is essentially a two-ingredient dish, which uses those specific ingredients because that’s all I had in the house and couldn’t afford to run out and buy more, could still be something that other people might want to have in their own lives on purpose.

And well you might, because it’s decidedly delicious.

 spot the can of golden pash in the background: very on-brand. Speaking of brands the hot sauce that I have is called Secret Aardvark and it comes from Portland, Oregon, and I just want to say Secret Aardvark again. 
I made this for my girlfriend and myself the morning after a friend’s beautiful engagement party, where there was wild dancing and cat-patting and wine-drinking and cake-eating and a general mood of lovely happiness. But yeah, let’s not bury the lede: there was so much dancing and wine drinking. I was determined to use only ingredients I had in the house to make something brunchily cool yet bolstering and reviving. Miraculously I had some eggs, which I scrambled, y’know, satisfactorily. This potato and corn hash was a bit of a revelation though, and so I’m sharing the recipe with you here. Quantities can be upped easily, just make sure your pan is big enough and your heart is true. (I’m so tired, okay.)

smoky potato and corn hash

a recipe by me

two decent sized potatoes (kind of the size of a decent-sized tomato, or a small avocado? No smaller than that but feel free to go wayyyy bigger)
about three tablespoons of olive oil 
roughly 20g butter
one cup frozen corn kernels
salt, to taste
liquid smoke 

Finely dice the potatoes into roughly 1/2 cm cubes/rectangles/any four sided shape you can approach a likeness of. Heat the oil in a wide frying pan and once it’s proper hot, tip in the potatoes and spread them out evenly. Allow them to fry for about ten or fifteen minutes, stirring and turning very occasionally – the longer you leave the potatoes in one place the more golden and crisp they get. At this point, add the butter and let it sizzle for a little longer, then tip in the corn and stir. Again, the less you stir the better, so that the corn gets a little bit scorched, but you don’t want it to get burnt. Basically, use your eyes, see what needs moving around and what needs more time on the heat.

Finally, sprinkle over a few drops of liquid smoke – you don’t need much – and stir it in, then add as much salt as your merrily brined wee heart desires, and divide between two plates. 

hot sauce hand model (also you can see in the foreground where we both spilled juice from a truculent and entirely uncooperative tetra-pak)

This would be so good with some chopped up herbs, or diced onion fried with the potato, or some parmesan grated over, or some turmeric and cumin, but on its own it was quite perfect. The potato is cut into minute pieces which cook quickly in the sputtering oil and become darkly golden and crisp in that way that makes you feel weepily grateful depending on what else is going on in your life. The corn is sweet and juicy and slightly browned in places and just wonderfully corn-like (I really like how corn-like corn is.) Liquid smoke has saved me from blandness many a time, but if you don’t have it – and it’s not necessarily that easy to get hold of – you’ll lose some of that standing-near-a-barbecue vibe, but it will still be so good. Just add more butter and salt and keep on truckin’.

what are you trying to hide, parsley sprig?  

Look, I just love brunch so much, it’s such a kind meal – you get to sleep in, you get to eat so many rich foods, you get to feel fancy, you get the rest of the day still to do things. Making it for yourself is charming in its own way that going out for it can’t replicate (especially if you are cooking for someone else) and while you have to do the dishes at least you can eat while wearing severely ancient trackpants and an insouciantly draped blanket.

I sold my last cookbook today, which was a strange feeling. I’m so determined to write another one, and soon, but also looking at this cookbook, which was written, tested and photographed in its entirety in just three months, I’m very proud of myself. On a wearily capitalistic note, it’s also a shame because I was making money from selling them and now I’m not, but I still have a good feeling that I’ll be a zillionaire or even a mere billionaire pretty soon. I’d just be so good at being rich!

One last thing, before I leave you, and frankly I can’t believe I made it this far, but of course I did because I am good at pushing myself to write when I’m 90% asleep, and anyway: I thought it would be kinda dinky and fun to put all the songs I’ve listed in the music lately section at the bottom of the blog onto a Spotify playlist. So far I have one for this year, one for the back end of last year, and one that I’m going to put Christmas songs in. My username is Laura Vincent if you want in – sometimes I couldn’t find the specific song (damn you Taylor Swift, release your iron grip and let the people listen to you on Spotify) so I’d try to get the next best thing, but it’s more or less everything I’ve been recommending. It’s…not coherent, but it’s cute! Like me.

bye
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title from: so hash is an interesting dish to find a title for…this one is from Drake and Jhene Aiko’s dreamy dreamy song From Time. Oh Drake, trust you to come through for me. 
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music lately: 
Fiona Apple, Every Single Night. This song is bewitching.
De La Soul with Redman, Oooh. I haven’t heard this in so long and it makes me so happy, how compelling is that melody! (very compelling.)
Rilo Kiley, I Never. This song is so beautiful, and sounds like it’s from another time, maybe the sixties? I don’t know. But I love how it gets so swoony and bigger and bigger the further it goes along.
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Next time: I’ll have done the groceries and have more to play with, don’t worry