Category: Easy and/or Fast

and after that, we can ketchup like tomato

6 Comments
Nothing makes me feel like I’m smugly going to avoid scurvy (she says, having only eaten pizza, Nerds, and beer all day) than eating a vegetable one time. Despite my wayward ways, I do actually love vegetables not simply because they keep me more or less alive, but because they’re delicious and abundant and almost all of them taste incredible when they have heat applied to them followed by lots of olive oil. 
I’m one week in back at work, and without casting aspersions on my work ethic (why cast aspersions when you can be frank: my work ethic is usually in the category of “reluctant yet non-existent, at best”) it should be obvious enough that I’d much rather be on holiday. Who among us can say, etc etc. However, as with the chocolate brownies last week, I’m doing my best to improve upon last year’s trend of bleak lunches, month in and out. From days of pot noodles, to seemingly endless bowls of plain couscous with butter and salt, to microwaved cheese sandwich (we’re not allowed a toaster in the work kitchen. Oh, I know) I’ve decided I deserve better. By “better” I guess I mean “not having scurvy” but it’s all part of life’s rich tapestry, or something. 

Simple though the concept is, I’m not always good at remembering to make a large enough dinner to allow for lunch leftovers the following day. That’s where this Ottolenghi recipe for Mejadra, from his book Jerusalem, is useful – it uses such unstressfully-priced ingredients as lentils, rice, and onions, it’s all cooked in one pan, and it makes a metric butt-ton. I hear you, that those ingredients aren’t the first to spring to mind as examples of “whoa, alluring”, but there’s something in the crunchy-crisp fried onions, and the spices which find their way into the earthy lentils and rice, that is really rather wonderful.  

I’m just going to link to Ottolenghi’s recipe for Mejadra rather than write it out in full, because…oh, I’m very lazy. That’s it, really. I told you my work ethic was found wanting.

I shall, however, heroically type out another Ottolenghi recipe that I made to go with the Mejadra – this is properly simple, both of ingredients list and execution, and while it doesn’t sound like much it’s super excellent. Fried slices of tomato, bursting at the seams with sweet ripeness, a little garlic and chili for, well, the flavour of garlic and chili, and plenty of soft, buttery olive oil…when we have tomatoes at such peak being-in-season-ness, there’s not a lot that needs to be done to them. When they’re at their most prolific, I kinda like to eat them like apples. For now, this fast recipe can help bolster up anything from toast, to scrambled eggs, to…to rice and lentils and onions.

fried tomatoes with garlic

from Yotam Ottolenghi’s book Jerusalem.

three garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 a small hot chilli, finely sliced (I just used some sriracha as I was lacking a small hot chilli, or indeed a chilli of any size)
two tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
three large, ripe, firm tomatoes
two tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Mix the garlic, chilli, and parsley together in a small bowl, and set aside. Top and tail the tomatoes and slice thickly vertically – about 1.5cm thick, but like, whatever. Heat the olive oil in a pan and then fry the tomato slices, turning over after a minute or two. I used an enamel roasting dish that can be used on a stove top, but I suppose it’s better the more surface area you have. It’s just that my saucepan was being used for the Mejadra, and…enamel is cute. Add the garlic mixture, fry a little longer, and then serve. 

It’s the sort of thing that you could – and in fact probably already have – come up with yourself quite easily, but nevertheless, sometimes it’s pleasingly comforting to be told what to do when cooking.  

And straightforward as it is, this recipe is pretty spectacular. All sweet and spicy and rich, yet very simple and plain and unfancy.

And very fitting on a table full of potluck brunch. I’m trying something called luxterity (luxe + austerity) this year, where there’s more care with spending (necessarily so) but in as elegant/dramatic/sybaritic a manner as we can manage (also necessarily so, because I like those things.) Having friends over for brunch saves a lot of money, is super fun, and there’s nothing like an air of “pants are barely required because I’m in my own damn house” to add a frisson to your morning repast.

That’s about it, really. This week has been very long yet very fast. Full of hangings-out (out-hangings?) and knitting (a hat) and reading (The Character of Rain/Amelie Nothomb; Are You My Mother?/Alison Bechdel) and watching (Pretty Little Liars and Practical Magic and all the new Beyonce videos again and again) and eating (endless Mejadra – that recipe really makes a lot; plus as many seasonal berries as I can find) and small but joyful things like that.

Also, I got a new beanie that I adore.

This isn’t going to make my knitted hat any less fun of a project, for one thing, I intend to put a pom pom on top of that one. Wellington’s weather has been monumentally horrible lately, so weird as it sounds to be thinking about warm hats in the middle of summer, that’s what we’re dealing with. I couldn’t care less. As long as tomatoes continue being cheap for a while longer…so if nothing else, I can pre-load on vitamins to cover me during my next inevitable stretch of candy and sodium chloride.
____________________________________________________________________
title from:  Mariah Carey, More Than Just Friends. Even when it’s not the mid-nineties any more, Mariah still rules my heart and ears. 
____________________________________________________________________
music lately

City Oh Sigh, Still Let Me In. Dreamy, too dreamy.

Joan Jett, Roadrunner. The original by the Modern Lovers is one of my very, very favourite songs. But hurrah for good covers, like this boisterous one by the babein’ Jett.
____________________________________________________________________
next time: I may have a hat that says “witch” but I don’t know everything. You’ll find out when I do.

one more dawn, one more day, one day more

2 Comments
I don’t know who even has time to read blogs at the moment (indeed, I hardly have time to write this) with Christmas insisting on being closer and closer every minute. And it’s not just Christmas – there are other festive high days and holy days, people have birthdays, people have work, things still need to happen. So I’ll keep this as succinct as I can manage, which for me means a quick nine paragraph dissertation on my feelings followed by another six paragraphs on my feelings for today’s recipe, followed by an essay on why a particular song I’ve been listening to this week accurately and devastatingly reflects all this. Brevity! It’s the soul of wit. Or the lowest form of wit? Whatever, I guess it’s too late to carry on pretending I’m gonna provide it for you, but I honestly am trying, for what it’s worth. 
So, I’ve mentioned a few times on here about my steady diet of two-minute noodles, microwaved pies, and microwaved marmite and cheese sandwiches as I grew up. But, after getting out a thrillingly American cookbook from the library at the age of, oh, nine or so, I was struck by a rather chic and unusual sandiwich combination: apple and cheese, which it turned out, I loved. So, if I really felt like putting in some effort, like making myself a baller snack, like putting the glam in glamwich (which also puts the glam in sandwich. Portmanteaux! Talk about classy) youthful me would forego the marmite and instead make an apple and cheese microwaved sandwich. I know. You can see how I got a cookbook deal.
(PS: I’ve never actually said the word “glamwich” before and my christmas gift to you is that I’m never going to say it again.)

Nigella, that moon of my life, has an excellently fast recipe in her book Kitchen for something she calls Crustless Pizza. It’s kind of a cross between a yorkshire pudding and cheese on toast, hence its enormous appeal to me. While the original recipe of Nigella’s is perfectly brilliant, I suspected that an apple and cheese variation, spattered with mouth-heating mustard so you know for sure it’s not pudding, would be…equally brilliant.

Apple and cheese together have this bizarrely pleasing salty-sweet, crunchy-melting symbiosis, which isn’t so odd really. I mean, fruit appears in all forms on cheeseboards, and there’s something lovely about the clean, crisp, delicate freshness of the apple slices subverted by the golden, buttery, bubbling cheese. Oh wait, I was supposed to be succinct. It’s just really good, okay?

apple, cheese and mustard pie

Adapted from a recipe from Nigella Lawson’s important book Kitchen. Serves two. Or four, I guess, but I am terribly whiny and reluctant about sharing anything with melted cheese on it. 

1 cup flour
1 egg
1 cup milk
pinch salt
150g cheese, something cheddar-esque, grated
1 apple, I liked Granny Smith here
Dijon mustard

This is very simple. Set your oven to 200 C. Butter a 21cm pie plate or similarly shaped dish. Mix together the flour, egg, milk, salt, and about half the grated cheese. Bake for ten minutes. Meanwhile, slice the apple thinly. Remove the pie from the oven, arrange the apple slices howsoever you please on top, and sprinkle over the remaining cheese. Bake for another ten or so minutes, then drizzle over the mustard. Slice into four, and use a spatula or something to wiggle the slices out – they’ve never stuck once for me, so hopefully they don’t for you either.

And that’s it, really. It would be quite nice with a kind of peppery, crunchy salad of rocket and stuff like that, but there’s no need to play up the sophisticated side of this. It’s just as good eaten with your hands while staring glaze-eyed into space because you’re very tired and just want to deliver carbs to the outstretched, clasping hands of your blood cells with zero distraction.

So, Christmas, huh? It has arrived. Considering it’s Christmas Eve today, I really shouldn’t be too surprised about this. Were I much more flush with cash than I currently am, I would shower myself with the following gifts:

Vogue Knitting magazine
A deposit on another tattoo
At least one really pretty, out-of-my-reach sundress from twenty-seven names
A copy of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Nigella’s book Nigellisima
A supermarket pallet of San Pellegrino Limonata (when I get famous, this is going to be on all my riders. It’s tooth-zappingly lemony and my best friend while mildly hungover. But also I like to drink it other times.)
A bottle of Campari
An intense hand and nail cream
Candles, for lighting and feeling deep and purposeful (and flatteringly lit)
More Devon Smith artwork
A meadowlark trinket of some kind. So out of my reach currently that I’m not even at the stage of choosing one or two to sigh over.
A landlord who will let me have a pet cat. (I don’t know quite how, but I figure being rich makes everything simple.)
A pet cat.

What about you?

Whether or not you celebrate Christmas (even “celebrate” might be a little too enthusiastic, occasionally my mood is more like… “accept stoically” or “admit defeat in the face of”) I of course hope that times are good and people are nice and social situations are fairly stress-free and that your tables are laden with good food. Because stuff like that should be for life, not just for Christmas. (Like a pet cat. Hmph.) I’m flying home today to my parents’ house, and I can’t wait to see them, and the rest of my family, and the cats, who are of course family, but oh man I should really stop talking about cats. I’m planning on knitting myself a beanie, reading books, and taking lots of selfies with the cats.

Also, uh, I suppose it behooves me one last time to remind you that my cookbook Hungry and Frozen is super amazing and makes a majorly excellent present idea. Also if you already have it, there’s a fairly simple Christmas Cake recipe in there which you can make quite last minute and still feel good about.

May the rest of your December be dreamy.
_____________________________________________________
title from: facing the season with bared teeth and dizzyingly contrapuntal arrangement, One Day More from Les Miserables. The version I’ve linked to is the 25th anniversary concert. Featuring the bafflingly handsome Ramin Karimloo as Enjolras (look him up on Google images if you’re so inclined, I thoroughly recommend it.) I also like Key and Peele’s highly apt take on it. 
_____________________________________________________
Music lately:

I know I’ve linked to it twelve million times, but this is the only time of year I watch Turkey Lurkey Time from Promises Promises, and marvel at Donna McKechnie’s loose-limbed perfection and the sublimely bonkers choreography leading to a rather shivers-making ending.

Speaking of people worth looking up on google images to marvel at, Zooey Deschanel’s band She and Him made a thoroughly endearing Christmas album. As if Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree wasn’t already massively endearing to begin with, too.

Sleater-Kinney, One Beat. It’s not allllll carols round here.
_____________________________________________________
Next time: I might be reunited with this blog before the year is out, and then it really just depends on what I can excavate from my fridge….

there are marshmallow clouds being friendly, in the arms of the evergreen trees

9 Comments
s’mores pie
I made this over the weekend to take to a Thanksgiving-y housewarming barbeque that some American friends were having. Thanksgiving isn’t my holiday (and let’s not forget that it has a troubling background of colonisation and oppression) but I love the food of America and so figured I’d try to improvise something fittingly flaming-eagle-on-a-clifftop-as-old-glory-waves to bring along. So: s’mores pie. There were some giant marshmallows left in the cupboard from the hallowe’en party, I have this amazing cookie-pie dough recipe that comes together out of almost nothing at all, and I had half a block of Whittaker’s dark dark chocolate to counteract the sugar-pillows of marshmallow with its bitterness. That’s it. cookie, marshmallows, chocolate. I had planned a whole lot more – custardy filling, that sort of thing – but in the end, s’mores really ought to only have those three main components. I’ve seen enough American TV to know that!
By the way, I’ve had no time to blog lately, which is why this has taken a while to get here. But today I woke up feeling horrendous, and inevitably/concerningly thought to myself, “ooh, a sick day! This is my one opportunity to finish that blog post!” So here I finally am, pie in hand, hand on heart, and head in hands, because there’s now pie all over me and in my hair. 

If you don’t like marshmallows, well, this really isn’t going to change anything for you. Since that’s mostly what it is. But I myself, am strange and unusual, and don’t like them that much either. However, when they get gooey and puffy and sticky and smokily browned from the heat of the oven – excellent. Especially with the bursts of dark cocoa-embittered chocolate and the warm cinnamon from the cookie dough. Just don’t overthink it. (As if being told not to overthink something helps you not overthink things! Wouldn’t life be simple if that were the case.)

s’mores pie

a recipe by myself

175g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup golden syrup or honey (or a mix of the two)
1/2 cup plain oil
1 teaspoon cinnamon
pinch of salt

4 large marshmallows or about 12-15 regular sized ones
100g dark, dark chocolate

Stir together the flour, baking soda and powder, the cinnamon and a pinch of salt. Tip in the syrup and oil and stir together to form a rough, crumbly cookie dough (the texture may vary depending on your flour, the humidity, bla bla bla, so add a little more flour if it looks unmanageably damp, otherwise it’ll probably be fine.) 

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F.

Reserving a couple of tablespoons of dough to sprinkle over the marshmallows, roll it out to a circle just larger than your pie plate (use one of around 21cm) and transfer it to said pie plate. I tend to roll out the dough between two sheets of baking paper, and then lift the entire thing up, place it in the pie plate, then remove the top layer of baking paper and press down the dough. That way there’s much less cleaning involved – of both the pie plate and your rolling pin.  

Jab the pastry a few times with a fork, which will help stop it puffing up in the oven, and bake for around ten minutes, till golden and a little crisp. 

If you have giant marshmallows, halve them and arrange evenly within the pie shell – otherwise just cram it with regular marshmallows. Roughly chop or break up the chocolate and tuck pieces of it evenly amongst the marshmallows. Grind over a little salt, and scatter with the reserved crumbs of dough. Bake until the marshmallows are puffy and a little browned  – about ten minutes. 

Surprisingly easy. It was dubbed “s’morestravaganza” at the party, and then “s’morepocalypse” and then I yelled out “s’mored of the rings!” and everyone laughed because you can always count on Lord of the Rings humour to be topical in New Zealand, since they have been making those films here for the last thirty years and will continue to do so for the following thirty years. Or at least that’s how it feels.

Pie aside, I was thinking those “where am I going with my life” thoughts, as I am wont to do every time my heart beats, and I have also been thinking a lot about my girl Nigella Lawson. Because she is so important to me and was one of the key people who shaped how I think about cooking, it seems right that she gets mentioned often when I have interviews about my cookbook and so on. I often bring her up myself, as an influence – but I was also thinking…

While I adore Nigella, I don’t want to be the next Nigella of cooking. There’s only her, and I could only be a diluted, carob-replacement version if that’s what I was trying to be. Nope. I want to be the Kanye West of cookbooks. The One Direction. The Mariah Carey. The Lorde. Kanye – he says some ridiculous things but makes so much sense and is all about his art and believing in his worth and generally being so brilliant that he can shoot down anyone who thinks he should keep quiet or be more humble. One Direction are so connected to their fans and recognise the ridiculousness of their situation and seem to just radiate fun and genuineness and also have a million gifs of themselves on tumblr, which I would love to have happen to me one day. Mariah Carey is flawless. But also very flawed. But also flawless. And Lorde – she’s such a young woman, and her words are different, and she’s not afraid to be clever yet simple, and she has amazing hair. So. Sounds maybe like I’m being toooooo ambitious, but I strongly believe in holding on to your instincts and flinging yourself at big ideas when they are kind enough to appear to you.

I’m sure you all feel so much richer for having read these musings I had about myself while like, washing my hair or painting my nails, but y’know. Look! Pie!

Try though I might, there’s no use fighting how far into December we are already. I’m having my annual flat xmas dinner tomorrow night with some friends so dear I’d make some kind of Rudolph The Red Nosed Rein-dear pun regarding them but I’m too tired to make it work. I’m really excited about it though, especially now that I’ve had my sick day and am feeling more like a human again. So that’s what I’ll be blogging about next time, as well as my annual list of food-related xmas gift ideas. I like saying phrases like “my annual xyz” as it makes me feel very established, like people will say “well if LAURA said that salted caramel bla bla bla this xmas then I will too!”
____________________________________________________________________
title via: Dean Martin, that old so-and-so, singing Marshmallow World. Whether he phones it in or not, I could listen to him sing about the stupidest things, like fornicating trees and candy, for a very long time.
____________________________________________________________________
music lately:

Angel Haze, No Bueno. I adore this person.

Turkey Lurkey Time, from the musical Promises Promises. The best thing ever about this time of year: it’s Turkey Lurkey Time time! Donna McKechnie is literally a goddess.
____________________________________________________________________
Next time: My annual xyz!

honey you are my shining star, don’t you go away

10 Comments

Guess who has been sleeping through the night for the last couple of days? Actually, that question deserves an interrobang to imply the high stakes at, um, stake here: ME. I know. The universe even rewarded me with a really, really good dream about Pretty Little Liars (hello, obsessed, get in touch if you want to talk about it indepth) but then took that back with a dream about being ignored by friends, but the point is, both of these things were entirely fictional dreams, which took place in my head, while I was asleep. In case you haven’t caught up, or are wondering why I’m about to stage a medal ceremony to myself in honour of doing something that most people manage to get on with calmly and without ceremony…Insomnia. I have been in the thick of it for the last month, and it’s such an immense relief to get back to my usual six hours. I was starting to not feel like myself. It was scary.

In an entirely more delightful form of scary, Tim and I had a Hallowe’en party at our house on Saturday night. (I feel compelled to tell you that those are his old Goosebumps books in the above picture, not mine: strictly serialised fiction about Teen Girls Making Their Way In The World for me, thank you. I only read Goosebumps when I was at the reading-the-side-of-the-cereal-box stage of being desperate to consume words. Yep, glad we got that straight.) There was an excellent amount of candy, there was popcorn, and there were other foods that fell into the crispy/salty/crunchy/alcohol absorbing venn diagram, like chips and pretzels and these cheese stars that I made.

Despite being all, hello I’m a cookbook author, I tend to keep this kind of party food low-key. People need feeding, they’re not necessarily going to remember everything that was there unless it was awful, now’s not the time to be stuffing grape halves with tender figs and goat cheese. Lots of candy, lots of carbs. Make like, one thing from scratch so you look like a good person who cares. Me, I not only made these cheese stars, I also made hokey pokey. Because I’m an awesome person who really cares (yes, your level of greatness/compassion grows exponentially like that with each dish.)

Embiggening.

If anyone knows about party food, or in fact anything at all (I’d certainly like to hear her opinion on Pretty Little Liars) it’s Nigella Lawson. I knew I could trust her recipe for cheese stars to be calmly simple, and exactly the sort of thing that people want to eat while clutching a plastic cup of homebrew.

I’m going to say something very serious now: do not eat the dough. You might want to, and I understand that, I live this, but truly, the baked goods are a zillion times more delicious, and you’re going to be resentful of yourself for smiting a morsel of dough that could have become another star.

Cheese Stars

A recipe from Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat. They can of course be any shape, and I did intend to use all my cookie cutters on this pliant dough. But the thought of all those strange shapes mixed up displeased me, whereas a dish full of little golden stars was endlessly pleasing.

You really, absolutely need a food processor for this one. I’m sorry.

  • 200g grated cheese (Nigella says cheddar, I used the one on special)
  • 50g softish butter
  • 100g flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and put a sheet of baking paper on an oven tray.

Place all the ingredients in the food processor and blitz till they come together. This will take a while, and it will look like they’re just going to be fine little crumbs forever, but it will suddenly sieze up and spring together in more of a solid mass. Remove the dough, form into a thick, roughly disc-like shape, wrap in glad wrap and refrigerate for fifteen minutes.

Roll it out to a couple of millimeters thick – I find it useful to do this with half the dough at a time – and cut into stars or however you like. The dough will get more and more easy to roll the more you do it, and can be re-rolled plenty. Bake the stars for around ten minutes. Carefully transfer to a rack of some kind – they’ll get crisper as they cool.

They taste like pastry, like the flakiest golden buttery shards of pastry from a croissants underbelly, like the spatters of cheese that bubble and go hard on the toasted sandwich maker and which are almost more delicious than the sandwich itself, and, after a few drinks, like the most rapturously sublime foodstuff in the world, basically. Thanks, Nigella.

I dressed as Myrtha, Queen of the Willis, from the ballet Giselle. Google her, she’s wonderful. But the short explanation is that she’s kind of a misandry ghost queen ballerina. Tim’s costume was split down the middle – a man in a suit on one half, a woman in a dress on the other. It was impressively committed. And spurred on a lot of impassioned conversations about how ridiculous it is that men don’t wear dresses and have makeup marketed to them and so on and so forth. It was a riotously fun party, and it was so great having the house full of excellent people laughing and dancing and mingling with varying levels of aplomb and swapping costumes and everything, really.

A couple of nights of actual sleep hasn’t made up for weeks and weeks of near-sleeplessness, but I’m starting to feel more and more like myself. And as I more or less think myself is amazing (self-doubt and self-importance make strange bedfellows) this is a good thing.

title via: supreme slow jam Shining Star, by The Manhattans.

music lately:

Terribly, terribly sad about Lou Reed now being the late Lou Reed. When I worked in a German bakery when I was 19, I used to play Venus In Furs over and over, very loudly. To the perhaps justifiable concern of my employers whenever they dropped in.

Demi Lovato, Give Your Heart A Break. I love her so much and this song is perfection. So.

Next time: something that doesn’t need a food processor, I promise.

 

oops!…i did it again

3 Comments
apple butterscotch chip muffins
Initially, I was concerned that I’d been so busy I might not have time to cook anything I could even blog about. All you need is one party here and one catch up there and one overtired unhungry evening and a weekend and…suddenly you realise you’ve eaten naught but candy love hearts and coffee for three days. Or at least, I realise that. 
And then my concern changed into the shape of fear that this recipe would be off-putting, because it has the irritatingly specific butterscotch chips in it. But I figured you could joyfully replace them with white chocolate. 
And then, the biggest concern of the three – I realised, deflating like a sad balloon all the while – I’d already blogged this recipe back in 2010. 
As Homer Simpson once said: It’s like something out of that twilighty show about that zone.
Also more specifically: d’oh! 
Also less specifically: mmm, sacrelicious. 
I just really love Homer Simpson quotes, and relate to him quite a lot. (Him and Lisa.) 
To add to this increasing whirlpool of misadventure was that I then didn’t sleep the entire night – well, I slept for fifteen minutes, around 7am the next morning, but that’s all. Truly. At 3.30am I started writing this blog post obstinately anyway, in the face of all that doubtfulness. It seemed better than the alternative – staring at the walls in the dark. Sure, I’m feeling reproachful of myself for not being able to produce one single thing to blog about, but doubly sure I also have no time or brainspace, and c’mon, I gave you halloumi fries last week. Doesn’t that allow me some beatific laurel-resting till around the year 2017?

So, uh, admittedly the recipe hasn’t changed, but for the butterscotch chips instead of almonds. Said butterscotch chips were purchased from Martha’s Backyard, this amazing American foodstuff and stuff-stuff supply store in Auckland, where I also bought liquid smoke, three large boxes of nerds, and a bunch of fake plastic roses, all in black. For Hallowe’en, or whatever occasion seems fitting sooner. The butterscotch chips are fun, but not essential – they have an oddly artificial smoky caramel flavour and terracotta hue, but work with the juicy chunks of apple and warm cinnamon. 
Muffins are so easy to make – for one thing, you barely have to stir the mixture, in fact the less the better – and also they take hardly any time in the oven. Just enough to make your house smell snugly of cinnamon. They’re a lot smaller than your usual muffins from a shop, but they also have a tenderness that mass-produced ones tend to reject in favour of adopting the texture of a foam shoe insole. For a beige shoe.

These are just really delicious and comforting, and handle being frozen and then microwaved back to life as snacking needs dictate. And in case you missed it, again, the recipe is here. From…2010. At least it was late 2010!

Other life things:

Had a Campari and grapefruit cocktail during a last brunch before dear Kim and Brendan travelled overseas for seven weeks.

Started knitting a beanie with the leftover yarn from my cape. I just found a pattern online and worked out how to ‘read’ it, and started knitting. I’m very proud of myself for this progress.


Ate floor pizza and wine for Sarah-Rose’s birthday. Strewed nerds candy hither and yon, but luckily mostly into my own mouth.
Went to my first ever No Lights No Lycra. Just dancing around in the dark for an hour: it was euphoric.
In most pressing news, changed my usual eyeliner from flicky to overloaded and smudgy (this is probably the most important thing I’ve ever said on this blog.)

AND: I’ve been in cahoots with Delaney to plan my Auckland cookbook launch next Tuesday! The venue is only wee so if you’d like an invite for yourself or someone else, just email it and I’ll send it your way. I’m really excited – I get to make another speech! Come along! It will be fancy! If I have to say the word fancy once every five seconds!

_______________________________________________________________________
title via: Britney. I still remember the dance from the chorus to this song.
_______________________________________________________________________
music lately: 
Every now and then I listen to a lot of Kate Nash and howl at the moon from all the feelings it produces within me. We Get On does this in particular. So do all the rest of her songs.
Super Rich Kids, Frank Ocean. I adore this man. 
_______________________________________________________________________
next time: I will have had a sleep, I promise. And I also will have made some food that I can blog about. That I didn’t post about in 2010 (late 2010, at least!) 

this is my idea of fun

9 Comments
Halloumi fries: they’re not just A Thing, they’re really something.
For all that I go on at length, such length, about how my brain can make my life difficult, occasionally it serves up an idea of distinct majesty that almost makes everything else worth it. Most recently: it was a frustrating, and frustratingly typical sleepless night when I had the idea for halloumi fries. What if you slice halloumi into thin rectangles, dust them with flour and deep-fry them? Would they be crunchy on the outside and melting on the inside with the stability of fries and the yielding salty tumescence of cheese? Or would they dissolve into puddles the instant they hit the hot pan, melting messily everywhere and absorbing half the oil and being generally horrific, in terms of taste, texture and money squandered?
Happily – rapturously, in fact, mere happiness doesn’t quite convey the um, rapture of the situation: it worked. I’m pretty used to things going disastrously wrong in the kitchen. Sometimes ingredients just don’t do what I assume of them, sometimes I am very clumsy, sometimes an idea is misguided or, like athletics and mathematics and haircuts, simply better done by a professional that isn’t me.
But these were perfect. Really, really, sorta bafflingly exceptional. Given the propensity for things to go wrong – halloumi is expensive, hot oil is intimidating, I am me, I couldn’t believe how breathtakingly straightforward the path to deliciousness was.

Simply coating these in flour before frying makes them so spontaneous-fist-in-the-air crisp and crunchy, yet the insides still have that soft, buttery halloumi bulginess. They are delicious, so delicious that you will eat them with brows furrowed in wonderment at how you’ve hit the one of the (hopefully many) high points of your very own existence.

(I don’t know, I kinda like this recipe, I guess.)

an unattractive but necessarily informative picture for you of the cheese frying. So now you know that this is what the cheese looks like when it’s frying. 
 
They are sufficiently sublime on their own, but if you want some kind of accompaniment, I’d suggest a tomato relish of some form, or a mix of wholegrain mustard and mayonnaise, or maybe aioli if you’re able to handle the rich-rich-rich of it all, or perhaps even just a dish of balsamic vinegar, which takes me back to pairing fish and chips with vinegar as a child.
 
halloumi fries
 
a recipe by myself. I considered adding chili powder or paprika to the flour but minimal is best here, to show off the excellence of the cheese and the frying process. My one main caution here is make sure you use a brand of halloumi that you know is firm and holds its shape. Some brands are more melty than others. I used Axelos since it was all the no-good supermarket had, and it worked fantastically.
 
serves two, but only if you really like the person and can manage to huffily, begrudgingly sacrifice some of these fries to them (I’m such a dick, I know.) 
 

1 block – 200g or so – of halloumi
1/2 cup plain flour (I initially wanted to use polenta but I only had flour, so: flour.) 
Plain oil, such as rice bran or grapeseed, for frying

Slice the halloumi into relatively even rectangles. I can’t tell whether I like these better as slightly wider, flatter shapes or thinner, more french-fry esque, so tend to do a bit of both. Any bits that crumble or fall off can still be used as a mid-frying snack for yourself. 

Heat up around an inch and a half of oil in a saucepan – really, that’s all you need – using a little offcut of halloumi to work out when it’s ready to go – put it in the pan and there should be rapid bubbles moving around it. Then eat it, of course.  

Place the flour on a plate and put about half the halloumi on it, turning over each slice to thoroughly coat it. Spoon each slice carefully into the pan – they might slowly float towards each other but they shouldn’t stick or anything. Also I just used a regular metal serving spoon for this, tongs might be easier but I didn’t want to dent or break the cheese slices. Allow the oil to bubble away and turn the slices over after a minute or so, once they’re golden brown on the underside (obviously you will have to check this, I don’t expect you to just know somehow.) Remove with the spoon to a plate with a couple of pieces of paper towel on it, and continue with the rest of the halloumi. The second batch tends to cook a lot faster, because the oil has really hit its stride in terms of being blastingly hot. 

Seriously. Thanks, brain. When I was eating these, I thought “this might actually be the most significant and valuable discovery of 2013“. I think I was being pretty sincere, too. Which is a little concerning. But you eat these, and then try telling me I’m exaggerating. Presuming you both like and can eat cheese in the first place, of course. I know hybrid foods – the cronut, the…um, cronut, it’s all I can think of right now – can be both overwrought and overdone till they’ve lost all sense of context and of being an actual food. These may speak of gimmick and wilful excess, neither of which I really have a problem with, but I promise you, in a fairly confident and calm manner, that these are simply incredibly good.

Also maybe some kind of potential phenomenon, if only in my brain. Which is not such a bad place all the time, after all.

Also: I finished my latest knitting project, a hooded cape. I am so proud of myself about this – it’s a large garment, it involved hours of stitching, I learned so many new moves, and…now I have a witchy cape which is hugely warm but also practical but also makes me feel a bit like Little Edie Beale in Grey Gardens. Not that she had an easy life, but she sure knew how to dress cunningly.
Finally, I had a lovely, super-fun interview about my cookbook in Canta, the Canterbury Uni student magazine. You can see a pdf of it here, and I’m on page fourteen. Yay interviews, I love them!
Finally-finally, I am still trying to organise an Auckland launch party for the cookbook so if you have any perspicacious thoughts regarding that, get in touch.

title via: Lana Del Rey, Video Games. She knows a thing or two about a thing or two. 
music lately:

Little Mix, Move. If you liked Girls Aloud’s Biology, that kind of twenty-two-pop-songs-whisked-into-one sound, then this should appeal.

Kanye West, Mercy. I love Kanye more every time he does something. Literally, almost anything he does, I’m like “yeah, Kanye!”

she wore blue velvet

11 Comments

Last week was big. I flew up home for the first time since Christmas (it’s easy to be wayward when time moves so ridiculously fast, I for one refuse to believe it’s any later than June. And certainly not October) and enjoyed wonderful, necessary quality time with family both immediate and extended, including the cats Roger and Poppy. Who were not entirely averse to my nuzzles.

This is Poppy. She looks like Roger, also a tabby. You can tell who is who though, because Roger’s always studiously trying to be left alone and Poppy’s always fixing to shred you like a confidential document.

I then met with friends on a sneaky weekend trip to Auckland, where we managed to halt the process of time somehow – unless it moves differently up there – and fit in a million different joyful activities, including magnificent brunch and endless coffee at Federal, hanging at Flash City, eating ice cream at The Dairy, drinking lunch beers at Tin Soldier, and trying on fancy beautiful dresses at Miss Crab. As well as that I met up for a coffee with rapper/poet Tourettes, which put the cool in “be cool” and that was all just Saturday, before we had a group snooze and pre-show beers and snacks and then saw WICKED. This was to be my third time seeing this musical, the first momentous occasion happening in London in 2011 and then again in New York City just a year ago. Having bawled so hard that I needed electrolyte replacement previously, I was prepared for more of the same, but managed to stay quite dry-faced for the most of it. Tears appeared, however, in I’m Not That Girl, (ughhh the poignancy) One Short Day (they’re just such good friends!) and verily rained down during For Good (just run away together!) It was an incredible production, the cast was amazing, and – we are a tiny country – it was kinda neat to have such a juggernaut, a real proper modern Broadway show, here in New Zealand at roughly the same scale it should be. And even though I know every beat and tick of this show off by heart, nothing ever prepares me for the said-heart-dissolving experience of the end of Defying Gravity. Okay, I think I cried in that one, too.

I hadn’t been to Auckland since November last year, which seems odd when I say it like that, but it’s just how it has happened. So it was exciting to rush around and take in all the things it has and to feel all bright-lights-big-city (I adore Wellington, but it is wee.) Through some well-earned serendipity and just enough planning we managed to get into almost everywhere we wanted (except Depot – but hey) without delay, there were always carparks and everything we ate, from the swankest brunch to the most rapidly cooling fries-stuffed cheeseburgers with wine and beer at the kitchen table, was so, so excellent.

Speaking of eating excellent things: I had this idea recently, that mixing blueberries with a lot of aggressive yet balanced savoury ingredients could produce something quite delicious. I was correct – blueberries, sitting around in olive oil, lime juice, vinegar, spices, chilli, are so compelling, so head-shakingly correct together, that I nearly ate the lot before I even worked out what they were supposed to be. I called them pickled blueberries, but was it enough to just make them and eat them? I didn’t think they’d work with chicken, steak and fruit is a derisive no, lamb – not quite, duck – too expensive, salmon – maybe? And then I had the idea to pair them with a chickpeas, their similar shape appealing to me, plus lots of creamy, rich, sharp feta, and to just build a salad from there. And it was the nicest thing ever.

But: don’t feel you have to have a montage of self-discovery to make these, I mean, they really would’ve been perfect simply eaten out of the bowl till they were gone, and I still think they’d be swell with salmon, so if you want to make them and just do that: cool. There are no wrong answers. (Unless you serve it with steak. That is wrong.)

Blueberries have a particular sweetness, different to the jamminess of strawberries or the particular sour tang of raspberries – it’s more subtly floral and muted. So, slightly unsettling though this recipe might sound, they actually work so well with all these strong flavours and textures, their blue juiciness bursting in your mouth with a rush of salt and sourness.

pickled blueberries

a recipe by myself. I wasn’t sure if these actually counted as being pickled or whether they were just marinated or even just “blueberries with stuff” and was I just unconsciously buying in to some overarching pickle trend and then I was like “well this is just what I’m doing.”

  • 1 cup frozen blueberries (or fresh, get you with your seasonal fruit)
  • 3 tablespoons olive oil, the best you can handle
  • 1 large red chilli, deseeded and sliced finely
  • 1 tablespoon rice vinegar
  • Juice and zest of one lime
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 2 teaspoons coriander seeds
  • a dash of cinnamon
  • As much salt as you please

If the berries are frozen, allow them to defrost in a bowl, otherwise simply mix together all the ingredients, taste to see if you think it needs more salt, sugar, oil or vinegar, then leave to sit for at least ten minutes at room temperature before eating. They last around a week in the fridge, although the texture of the oil goes a bit odd when it’s that cold it’s certainly still very, very, thrice very edible.

I then stirred about 1/2 a cup of the berries into a salad along with 1 drained can of chickpeas, a few handfuls of handful of baby spinach leaves, one finely sliced and overpriced capsicum, an entire damn packet of feta, roughly crumbled, plus some more olive oil and coriander seeds and a generous spoonful of fried shallots from a packet. It was a wondrous combination – crispness and crunch of the juicy, fresh kind and the fried, brittle kind; the sweet blueberries against the creamy salty feta and the bite of chili against everything, really.

Am still delighting in being a real cookbook author. In fact, I’m currently trying to organise an Auckland launch party for my cookbook, so get in touch if you want to give me a ton of premium champagne for free. If not: don’t bother (oh my gosh, kidding, I’ve had so much lovely feedback and correspondence from people about the cookbook and it’s the sweetest, kindest, heart-swellingest thing ever. Much sweeter than champagne.) Am still also not winning the gold medal for sleeping decently, in fact am somehow getting even worse at this sleeping regularly thing. But: getting there, slowly. One day at a time.


title via: Blue Velvet. Obsessed with Lana Del Rey’s cover of it.

music lately:

The never-not-astounding Lorde’s 400 Lux. Got a lot to not do.

Icona Pop’s Just Another Night. I love the way the singer’s voice breaks a tiny bit when she sings “it’s just another night, on the other side.”

Sky Ferreira, You’re Not The One. I love the enormous drums and spaciousness and general perfection of it all.

next time: after a week away, I kind of have no idea…

 

what kind of girl is she? (are you gonna eat that pickle)

10 Comments
I keep things honest on here. Panic attacks, bad habits, coming out, failed pastry, engagement announcements (not that I’ve had plural engagements, but it didn’t flow so well syntactically in the singular), tattoos, book deals (again, not plural but flows nicer in the plural, as would not explaining the flow of my sentence in the middle of my sentence.) Thus: if it has happened to me and is my story to tell, then there’s a high likelihood I won’t be able to stop myself telling you about it. But these past few of weeks – or even longer than that, really – some things that have been happening are a bit hard to describe, which is frustrating for a dictionary-nuzzling person as myself, because…I’ve just been feeling vaguely weird. Not every day, and not every minute, but enough, too much: bad brains, I call it. So many things in my life are so, so good, really, and yet my brain is not catching up with all of this. Bodies! They’re so confusing. Life! So odd. No-one prepares you for just the sheer difficult weirdness that is existence. For not being able to sleep, for losing your appetite, for being closely focussed on strange things, for suddenly hyperventilating in the middle of the supermarket after a really good day and then having to lie down for two hours once you get home. But what is easier to explain is how I’m trying to fix it, which is with doctors and medication and counseling and talking to Tim and to friends, many of whom know what it’s like anyway, and by trying to be a little kinder to myself. Being even just a little bit kind to yourself is a surprisingly easy thing to forget to do.

So, um, food blogging, yeah, alright! Actually for those of you who read this a lot, and read between the lines, all this probably will hardly be a surprise. But it’s still a thing that’s happening to me, and that is mine to tell, so here we are. Luckily, here are some other things that have happened:

It was Tim’s birthday on Wednesday. We both took that day and Thursday off work, and it was terrifically fun to just hang out and sleep in and read and watch things and drink coffee and eat brunch and just exist quietly but excitingly so. Except when we went to the Fishhead magazine third birthday party and existed loudly. On Thursday I made Tim his favourite food – lasagne – which, despite trying to bust out of its tin as you can see in the above photo, was amazing. Just straight up amazing.

On the day of Tim’s birthday we caught a bus into Newtown and went record shopping and had lunchtime beers, and bought this excellently cheap cabinet, all the better to see our trinkets with. There are now even more things in it, and yet curiously, no noticeable space has been made by moving things in there.

Aaaand, I got some new eyebrows, a shape and tint, something I’ve never done before. Felt like stronger brows might equal a stronger me, or something, plus the ones my face came with were so pale that they might as well have not existed.

And – I guess you’re wondering why I’ve brought you here – I made some tiny fried pickles! Tiny, tiny deep-fried pickles in puffy, light batter. Like popcorn chicken, but with pickles, and minus the magically delicious herbs and spices (these are really good, but they’re no popcorn chicken. Really, what could be? I’m sorry. I should’ve chosen a better analogy.) They’re really easy to make, and for all that deep-frying stuff is a little intimidating in theory, you only need an inch or so of oil in a wide pan, not whole vats of the stuff. And these pickles cook up really, really quick. Drain them, throw them in some smoked paprika and a little more salt because hurrah for sodium, and that’s it.

tiny fried pickles
A recipe by myself. Dairy-free!
1 jar pickles
1 egg
1/2 cup soda water/sparkling water/whatever you call it in your neighbourhood
1 cup flour
pinch salt
pinch sugar
plain oil for frying
Drain the jar of pickles and slice into rounds. Don’t even think about measuring them, but roughly a centimetre wide is a good size to aim for. On the other hand, I’m horrendously fussy and discarded all the ends like some kind of wastrel. Sit the slices on a couple of paper towels. This helps absorb some of the pickle-vinegar, which will help the batter stick and stop it spluttering like whoa in the hot oil.
Then, mix the egg and soda water together, then add the salt, sugar, and – slowly – the flour, and stir to a thick batter. Doing it in this order stops it getting lumpy.
Heat up about 1.5 inches of plain oil in a wide pan. It has to be properly hot, so try dropping a little batter in it to test once you think it’s ready, and it should bubble up and you know, fry.
Now, it’s possible there’s a better/more logical way of doing this, but this worked for me: tip all the slices of pickle into the bowl of batter. Take a large spoonful of the pickle-y batter, and with a smaller spoon, push slices off into the hot oil. Some batter may fall into the oil too. This is cool. The lil pickles should take a minute or two to get brown and puffy, if they need it use a pair of tongs to carefully turn them over in the oil, then remove them – still using the tongs – to another plate lined with paper towels and spoon some more slices in. Finally, dust the fried, puffy pickles with smoked paprika and more salt and serve immediately.

 

Salty, sharp slices encased in batter that’s crisply browned on the outside while fluffy and light on the inside, the sweet smokiness of the paprika and the doughy batter tempering the vinegar bite of the pickles. They’re really, really good.

Back on the cookbook front, since that still exists and is still the most improbably wonderful thing: I found out today that my book is currently at 6th place on the Independent Booksellers List! Cool, hey? I’m currently trying to plan an Auckland launch party for it (despite having no money, no time, and no brain space) because that seems like…fun! Oh and I have literally had people come up to me and say that they are fans, which is one of the top ten excellent feelings in the world. Yeah excellent feelings! They don’t make the weird ones disappear, but they do help balance them out some.
___________________________________________________________________
title via: What Kind of Girl is She from the important musical [title of show]. This particular song isn’t on youtube, but uh, Die, Vampire, Die from the same musical is, and it’s pretty perfect.
___________________________________________________________________
Music lately:

The National, the Thanksgiving Song. They did a cover of a song that Lynn Belcher from the wondrous Bob’s Burgers sings. It’s odd and sinister and not even as good as the cartoon original, but I admire their commitment.

Miley Cyrus, Wrecking Ball. Yeah. This song is so, so good.

Frank Ocean, Super Rich Kids. Dreaminess.
___________________________________________________________________
Next time: I did this cool thing with blueberries and chili and lime and stuff and I have no idea what it is, but it’s addictively good. If I work out what it is…salsa? I might blog about it. 

we’d roll and fall in the green

9 Comments
Today has been a bit of a dick, between one thing and another. I took a sleeping pill last night in the hopes that I’d force myself into actually sleeping. It worked, but then I was like a forlorn jellyfish the rest of the day, somnambulant and dopey and fractious and essentially undoing all the good work I had done by having a good night’s sleep. And I currently feel queasy, although I can’t tell if it’s because of the dinner I just made or something else. 
But, as Dave from Happy Endings would say, let’s back up. (PS: Max and Jane are my favourites. Also Brad and Alex. And Penny. Just in case you thought Dave was my favourite.)
Yesterday was pretty wonderful. I woke up just before 6am, lightly hungover from a gathering the night before for dear friend Kate’s birthday. This early start was for a skype date with Ange, erstwhile flatmate and forever friend, who now lives in London. Also because I can’t help waking up hilariously early on the weekend. It all started because Ange and I were emotionally snapchatting about our feelings about Top of the Lake and wanted to discuss them in a less rudimentary fashion, and ended with a “huh, we should probably Skype more often since it’s really convenient and stuff.”
We had brunch with Kate and Jason, which included an excellently bitter Campari and grapefruit juice. This turned into coffee where we ran into other friends, which turned into record shopping, which turned into ice cream sundaes with fixings leftover from the party the night before, which turned into beers at the pub around the corner. We saw a cute dog, we parted ways, and Tim and I went home to play candy crush and knit (respectively) and watch West Wing. And all I really felt like was eating greens, so I made us this.
Just greens on greens on greens, with some butter and lime juice and sesame seeds to make it more of a meal and less of a pile of stuff that happens to be technically edible. I am a firm believer in just eating what you feel like eating at any given moment, without guiltily focussing on whatever the properties of the food are (admittedly it was only roughly last year that I reached this calm conclusion) and so if I feel like eating a dinner composed largely of bits of plant, then that’s what I do. Of course, I could take a hell of a lot better care of myself on a day-to-day basis (my lunch today was basically just coffee and fruit burst lollies, which was down to apathy and stuff rather than actually wanting it) but it’s nice when what you feel like, and what you have, and what you’re able to make, are all the same thing. In this case, I happened to have a few vegetable-y bits and pieces getting wearily limp in the fridge, and they all benefited from this stirfry-steam-cover-in-butter method. 

greens with sesame lime butter

A recipe by myself. This mix of greens is a good one, but use what you have – beans, courgettes, etc – in the quantities of your choosing. 

broccoli, about half a head thereof
bok choi or pak choi, a bunch
a large handful of baby spinach leaves, or larger spinach leaves, chopped
2 teaspoons sesame oil
25g butter
1 teaspoon kecap manis or soy sauce
1 lime
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
1/3 cup cashew nuts

Wash the broccoli and bok choi leaves. Heat up a teaspoon of the sesame oil in a large pan, then throw in the broccoli and bok choi and stir around for a little bit to coat in the oil, then tip in 1/4 cup water and put a lid on the pan, so the water can bubble up and quickly steam everything. Once the water is evaporated, or thereabouts, and the vegetables have softened a little but are still bright green, remove the lid and stir in the spinach. Then remove all of that to a serving dish. Finally, melt the butter in the same pan, stir in the kecap manis, juice and zest of the lime, sesame seeds and cashew nuts. Allow to bubble away until the sesame seeds have browned slightly, then remove from the heat and tip onto the vegetables. Either stir through or take it to the dining table and make everyone wait while you photograph it, because you’re a highly strung food blogger.

Broccoli is already a little nutty and sweet, so adding sesame oil and sweet kecap manis only but embiggens everything good about it already. Astringent pak choi and fast-wilting, metallic spinach are helped by the rich butter and crunchy seeds and cashews, and the lime simply brightens everything up with its citrus intensity. It’s very simple and plain, but not to the point of nondescript, where you forget that you’ve eaten immediately after you put your fork down. Nope, this is delicious stuff. And a terrific end to my Sunday.

And then today happened and undid all the good work of yesterday. But I have high hopes for tomorrow, even if Tuesdays are often the worst. If nothing else, there is more knitting (my current project: a black hooded cape) and reading (have finished NW by Zadie Smith, am halfway through Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, am upping my weights at the gym so I can pick up The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton) and more Orphan Black to watch, and I have a list of recommendations of other sleeping pills that won’t make me feel like a baffled sock the next day.

PS…I still have a cookbook! It’s still strange and exciting and amazing and a lot to take on! If you like, you can listen to a very fun interview I did with Charlotte Ryan at Kiwi FM, where I got to pick some songs as well. I started off making a consciously careful, everything-rests-on-this list of tunes to play, but luckily ended up going with whatever I felt like at the time. What were the songs? You’ll have to listen to the interview! Or just ask me, I’m a total pushover.
__________________________________________________________________________
Title via: Wuthering Heights, a very important song by Kate Bush. If I had a dollar for every high kick I’ve done to this song, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting a good night’s sleep for work tomorrow, that’s for sure.
__________________________________________________________________________
Music lately: 

Dear Time’s Waste, These Words Stick Me To You. Dreamy.

ASAP Rocky, Problems. Effective, and effectively stuck in my brain.

Had the house to myself for most of Saturday, so naturally played some crowd-unpleasing Broadway and danced out my feelings, or at least some of them. Did some particularly bold pirouettes and leaps to Age of Aquarius from Hair and Heaven Help My Heart from Chess. (musicals with an arbitrary noun for a name, huh?)
__________________________________________________________________________
Next time: Whatever I feel like, evidently. 

we like lovin’ yeah, and the wine we share

11 Comments
A week and a bit into the cookbook author life, and I’m still very, very much at the pinch-me stage. If you’re new to this blog, hello! Get ready to co-wallow in all my feelings and cake batter.

Margaret Atwood probably has absolutely no knowledge of this. But still! But still. But still!

As Tim will tell you (or “my partner Tim” as it rather hilariously refers to him in my cookbook every single time, a bit like how the Baby-sitters Club books would tell you about all sitters’ family histories in chapter two of every last book on the offchance you were picking one up for the first time and just had to know whose stepmom was whose) and in fact as I will tell you right now, and not for the first time, I am a cool mix of wildly insecure and wildly over-secure. So I veer between reading my cookbook and saying “Tim, I’m such an amazing writer, how do you cope with it?” and being numb of brain and in a crumply heap in bed and requiring constant bolstering just to lift my head up for reasons I can’t even quite work out. Or simply feeling like this will in fact all be like the bit in the Princess Bride where – spoiler – Princess Buttercup is presented to the people but then the old woman comes out yelling “Boooooooo” and saying she’s princess of nothing. Luckily nothing specifically like that has happened. Or even vaguely similar to that. Yet?

But seriously, seeing my name there with Margaret Atwood’s on a whiteboard (“above her!” said someone. “Near her whatsoever!” I replied) filled me with so many feelings that I hardly knew what to do with myself. On the one hand: of course. On the other hand: how did I manage to fool everyone into letting that happen?

Speaking of such moments, the book launch party at Unity Books was completely wonderful, almost unbearably so – I wanted to claw back the time as it was racing past, just to make the whole thing not move so quickly. It felt almost sick, I was so happy, which is a strange way of putting it but it’s like all the emotions in me created a power surge that left me a bit light-headed. There was a great big crowd and so many lovely friends and cool people and Julie Clark of Floriditas launched it with a speech full of nice things about me. And then they announced my name and I stepped up to the mic and everyone cheered! Which is of course, fairly obvious at my own book launch, but wow, as Irene Cara sang: what a feeling. I am a cookbook author. A real one. And I can tell you one thing I’m certain and entirely secure of: I gave a terrific speech. Look, I just really love giving speeches.

A long line of people genuinely wanted their book signed, which was incomprehensibly exciting. Also, I was reminded of how changeable and hopeless my handwriting is. It’s…creative?

Being the heedless neophyte that I am, I forgot to organise any photos to be taken and didn’t get one single damn selfie the entire night. Despite my careful “I’m an auuuthorrr” outfit of dramatic black Kowtow sack dress and enormous witch hair. (Admittedly, my hair was in a very strange headspace – ha – that night, insisting on being fluffier than a Persian cat, but in the end I think it worked. Not sure why I’m compelled to point this out.) I also forgot to enlist Tim or anyone to video my speech for posterity/family/etc and feel a bit foolish about that. Now all I have are these stupid awesome memories. Unity Books did, however, take a few snaps on the night for their sweet write-up. Unity Books is one of my favourite places in Wellington, nay, the earth, and it was marvelous to be able to get all launched there.

So, the cookbook, huh? Last night I made my Chocolate Red Wine Cake from it, which – and maybe I am just saying this because it’s my own recipe from my own book, but I’m pretty sure it’s also the truth – is a simple, amazing, reliable chocolate cake that tastes brilliant. Comfortingly slabby in size, dense without being too rich, cocoa-dark without being dry, and the warm rush of red wine helps emphasise everything good about the chocolate without tasting too much of sediment or tannin.


Still getting used to the stove at our flat. But I also rather like the ominous, craggy slash that appeared in the top of this cake, most likely because the heat was up too high (it’s really hard to tell on the dials of this unfriendly oven.)

I probably said it best in the book itself, so while I usually rewrite all recipes in my own words, it would be a bit pointless to do it here, yes? So, in my own words:

red wine chocolate cake

recipe from my own cookbook, Hungry and Frozen.

Red wine and chocolate always make sense together, never more so in this sophisticated, yet very plain cake – tall, proud, gleaming with glossy ganache. The red wine is absolutely present, though not overpowering – its oaky darkness going beautifully with the bitterness of the chocolate and cocoa. You don’t have to use your best red here – the sugar and butter rounds out any rough, tannin-heavy aspects that might not be so pleasant by the glassful. Nevertheless, make sure it’s actually drinkable. It doesn’t have to be pinot noir, either – really, as long as it’s red, it should do the trick. 

200g dark chocolate
200g butter
1 cup pinot noir
70g good cocoa
250g sugar
3 eggs
250g flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

200g dark chocolate, chopped roughly
½ cup cream

Set your oven to 180 C, and line the base of a 23cm springform caketin.

Roughly chop the chocolate and butter and slowly melt them together with the red wine in a pan over a medium heat. It’ll look like an unholy mess but it will come together. Allow to cool slightly, then whisk in the rest of the ingredients.

Scrape this liquidy batter into the caketin and bake for an hour, but check after 45 minutes. Once it has cooled, pour the cream into a pan and heat till just below boiling point. Remove from the heat, and stir in the chocolate till it melts to form a thick ganache. Pour over the cake. 

Speaking of things that are better in the book, the photo of the cake in there is so much better than mine that it’s laughable. Not least because the cake in the book was photographed in natural light, whereas mine above was photographed at night in a dimly lit room because two of our bulbs have blown and both of them are annoyingly particular and require hunting round a shop inevitably called “Mr Light Bulb” while you wonder how a shop can survive solely dedicated to said light bulbs, then see the price on the ones you need to replace. Also my cookbook photographers (and friends) Kim and Jason are spectacular.

My friend Kim, who took many of the photos in the cookbook, did a gorgeous blog post of some of the photoshoot outtakes (which are themselves gorgeous, despite not making it into the book), in case you’re a little curious about this cookbook but unconvinced by this blog post alone (which would be…slightly worrying, truth be told.)

I have to admit, I’m looking forward to things returning to normal now. Lies. I want things to get less and less normal. And I was woefully insufferable the day after the launch party because I hate things being over and get bad post-thing comedown. The publicity for the cookbook has been a lot of fun (and if you feel like you’ve been left out from hearing my schtick then get in touch, I love publicity) and yesterday I got to appear on Radio New Zealand with the excellent Kathryn Ryan, which was a real trip. Of course, in a practical sense, radio does need nonstop content. But I love RNZ and it felt like I’d really hit the big time, being able to appear on there. If you want to listen to my interview, why, you can do that here!

Finally it inevitably behooves me to say the following: if you want to buy my book, and your local shop doesn’t stock it (and I would like to add: hurrah for supporting local bookshops) there are some options for you. Unity Books, the wondrous shop where I had my launch, can ship the book anywhere in New Zealand or worldwide if you ask them nicely. It’s also available at Fishpond and Mighty Ape, so: choices ahoy!
_____________________________________________________________________

Title via: Gomez, Whipping Piccadilly. As a commenter on songmeanings.com said…actually you should just read the whole comment, it’s a bit unintentionally hilarious. Which is better than being intentionally hilarious and failing at it. Oh, and I really like this song.
_____________________________________________________________________

Music lately:

David Dallas, Runnin‘. oh damn this song is good. Also it was fun to then listen to New World In My View by King Britt, which it samples, and then Sister Gertrude Morgan’s I Got The New World In My View, which that samples. Amazing beats, all.

Wu-Tang Clan, I Can’t Go To Sleep. The title speaks the truth.

The time has come, the walrus said, to lie on the floor and listen to Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart by Julee Cruise over and over and over again. Twin Peaks always gets me with its dreaminess.
_____________________________________________________________________
Next time: whatever it ends up being, one of these days I will make and photograph something during the day on the weekend so I don’t have to be so balefully apologetic about these badly-lit shots.