Category: Easy and/or Fast

take my hand, we’re off to never never land

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Okay, let’s all check ourselves before we wreck ourselves: my cookbook is officially out next week, for real, in the flesh, etc. On 23 August. And at the end of this blog post there is a giveaway competition thing you can enter to win one of two copies for yourself! (COMPETITION CLOSED) But if you don’t read this entire blog post first – and it’s as long and self-indulgent as ever! – I will know and my ghost will hang around you and sigh heavily and say “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed”. And yeah, in this scenario I have a ghost while still being alive, it’s not entirely improbable, right? At the least, I’d read the heck out of a young adult lit book which had that plot.

The ‘after’ photo – above – of the plum hand pie is so much better than the ‘before’ photo of said hand pie and its little pie pals below, taken the previous evening. On account of I will possibly never work out how to take decent photos at night-time, illuminated only by an environmentally friendly lightbulb, which casts a gloomy yellow haze over everything within a metre of it and makes you squint like you’ve never squinted before, but does save ten percent power or something. Now that I’m done both damning myself and faintly praising myself, the important thing is: these hand pies are delicious and very easy and cute, and probably about to be really ‘in’, too. For what that’s worth. (Now that I’ve said it, hand pies will probably be widely denounced as embarrassingly tacky, which to be honest will probably make me love them even more.)
I made these to be eaten at a spontaneous-ish gathering of friends to watch a movie on our projector on Saturday night (Wet Hot American Summer, if you’re wondering, because as I always say, nothing bad can happen when Wet Hot American Summer is on.) It was a very fun evening, just really relaxed and lovely and silly and hilarious and low-key, the sort of fun you wish you could schedule in on a bi-daily basis, while knowing it’s best to just wait and let it happen accidentally.

 

Above: the morning after. Tim went to swoop in on the lone, remaining pie for a pre-breakfast snack, till I squawked “stop! The light is really great right now and I can salvage the terrible photos I took last night!” Oh, and that’s right, individual bowls for every snack and a commemorative teaspoon for the candy. Sure, we’re really messy, but we also have bizarrely specific high standards, you know?

So when I say hand pies I simply refer to what we might normally call pastries or turnovers or mini-pies. But ‘hand pies’ are deeply intertwined in the the cuisine of the American south, and I cannot resist a little culinary Americana. Or any Americana. As befits a kid who grew up in New Zealand but was obsessed with the Baby-sitters Club books and ensemble movies like Now and Then. Not that hand pies are mentioned in either of those, but let’s not get lost in semantics. My version is not strictly traditional, but what it is, is really very easy and fast and non-stressful. And delicious. I appreciate that there’s a bit of a cost at the outset in buying ready-rolled sheets of pastry, but sometimes it’s just as much looking after yourself to buy something pre-made as it is to make it from scratch.

Seriously, very little actual work gets you these fantastically good, gently spiced pockets of plummy sweetness. The the lemony warmth of the cardamom, the tear-jerkingly comforting scent of cinnamon and the toffee flavour of the brown sugar lends the tart juiciness of the plums some welcome richness. The fruit softens up but doesn’t collapse, and any juice is absorbed into the cornflour to give the filling a little heft. And they’re hand-sized! Who cares if they’re on-trend, as long as they’re on your hand and fast approaching your mouth.

plum, cinnamon and cardamom hand pies

a recipe by myself

2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon cornflour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
2 sheets ready-rolled puff pastry (all-butter if possible, but I know only three supermarkets in the fanciest bits of New Zealand actually sell that, so just deal with the weird fake margarine stuff this time round – you can’t even taste it if you don’t think about it.)
2 plums

Set your oven to 200 C/ 400F and line an oven tray with baking paper.

Mix the brown sugar, cornflour, cinnamon and cardamom together in a small bowl.

Finely dice the two plums, discarding the stones, obviously.

Slice the pastry sheets into nine equal-ish squares, by making three slices downwards and three across. Maths! Finally useful. Spoon half a teaspoon – at most – of the sugar-spice mix into the middle of each square. Spoon a small teaspoon of diced plum over the top of that, then fold the pastry in half, pinching at the edges to form a snugly-filled triangle. Repeat with the remaining squares. You might have some plum or spice-dust leftover. Arrange the triangles on the baking tray (it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out how the triangles could all fit on there evenly, I guess maths is useful, sort of) and bake for about 20 minutes. They’ll be piping hot at first, so let them cool a tiny bit.

Hand pies! Get some.

So, now you want to know how to win a copy of my cookbook, yes? I was going to interweave references to The Monster at the End of This Book throughout the blog post, but am too tired and so will cut straight to the point: I have two copies to give away. This competition is open to people in New Zealand only. Sorry, international admirers! However, I’m also giving away a copy on Instagram which anyone in the world can enter, so if you’re international and want in, follow me on there. (username: hungryandfrozen.) For everyone else…

here’s what you have to do. 

1: Leave a comment on this post telling me a recipe from this blog that you like the look of. It can be from like, last week, I’m not going to give extra points for people who go deep into my archives, but who knows, you might like what you see once you start looking.
2: Be a person from New Zealand.
3: Wait till 10am Sunday morning (sorry for those with short attention spans, myself included) which is when I’ll do a post on here letting people know who won.
4: See if you’re one of the two people who got drawn at random! And either console yourself by baking hand pies, or rejoice in your winning by baking hand pies. And emailing me your address.

May the odds be ever in your favour!

title via: my guitar heroes Metallica with their joyfully sinister song Enter Sandman.

Music lately:

Joan Osborne, Right Hand Man. This song is so excellent and saucy and great. And, um, also has the word ‘hand’ in it, but this is entirely coincidental.

Lillias White, Don’t Rain On My Parade. Brilliant song, oh-damn-that’s-so-true lyrics, and Lillias White’s smashing voice. There are a million different renditions of this song from Funny Girl, and at least a hundred of them, this included, are my favourite.

Next time: I don’t even know, especially as I’m going to be out of the house most nights this week, but we’ll see, we’ll see. Maybe even one of the recipes from my own book. If nothing else the words “my cookbook” will probably appear a lot, accompanied by a palpable air of smugness.

pour some sugar on me

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Depending on what angle I look at it from, I have either had a terrible or a lovely week. Yes, I did faint at the gym, acquire a bellicose case of bad brains (you know, feeling down), get carsick, have very broken sleep every night, bite my nails too much, and have my laptop break down at lavish expense one week after our car did the same. And we’re still not allowed a pet cat, which hurts my heart so (this isn’t news, but I still feel injuriously inclined to bring it up occasionally.) But I also went to a restaurant opening and mingled with nice people and had cool cocktails, drank lots of coffee with Tim, had a swell Saturday night drinking beers with friends, read two novels (Scoop by Evelyn Waugh and Orlando by Virginia Woolf and yes I would like to talk about them), went to book group, saw a tragic French film with a friend and went out for yakitori afterwards with her husband and Tim, saw two further tragic foreign films with Tim, and made this sugar-cured salmon very successfully for Sunday’s dinner. I was resigned to the salmon perhaps inevitably failing, at least, it wouldn’t have surprised me after the week I’d had. But it worked, just how it should! I did, however, screw up the risotto that I’d hoped would accompany it. Like the universe was saying “you’re still you”. But then I decided that the risotto would’ve been too rich anyway, and the bulghur wheat that I hastily cooked up instead was a much better accompaniment, and we had the risotto for lunch the next day, like I was saying to the universe “how you like me NOW (please don’t drop an anvil on my head)”

So yes, the sugar-cured salmon: it worked. And it can work for you, too! It sounds really fancy but there’s really nothing to it, which is something I rather like in a recipe. I found this recipe in Kinfolk magazine, which is this beautiful publication full of beautiful people living beautiful, instagrammable lives. The juxtaposition of intimidating-sounding title and very straightforward method rather appealed, and also I just don’t cook fish as much as I ought, considering how it’s so fast and can handle so many different flavours and makes your hair shiny.

I was a little concerned that the sugar would seep too far into the fibre of the salmon and I would end up with dinner that thinks it’s pudding, and tastes like neither. Luckily it simply tasted…wondrous. You sit it in some salt and sugar (and I added a pinch of mustard powder, which I couldn’t taste in the slightest by the end so you do what you like) for a couple of hours, shunt it under a hot grill for single digit minutes, and then suddenly you have tender, satin-rich salmon, which has the barest hint of sweetness to it and a kind of rounded mellow juiciness, and that’s all. A little more sugar got caught in the butter that I added before I grilled the salmon, but bizarrely it tasted kind of amazing once it had caramelised and didn’t overpower it with sweetness at all.

sugar-cured grilled salmon

adapted from a recipe from Kinfolk magazine by Tara O’Brady and Nikole Herriott. Thanks for the inspiration, Tara and Nikole! Salmon is so rich and oily that I can’t eat too much of it, so this amount was perfect for two of us. But adjust quantities to suit.

250g salmon fillet, skin on. Boned or not, it’s up to you. We went for bone in, as it was about ten dollars cheaper per kilo, and only came close to choking us about seven times. 
A handful of sugar
two big pinches of sea salt (you only need the plainest sugar for this, so try to get hold of some fancy sea salt if you can, but if you can’t, just use a reasonable shake of salt for each side.)
1 teaspoon mustard powder (as I said, you can’t really taste it at the end. So leave it out if you like.)
Butter

Place half the sugar and salt in a bowl that will fit the piece of salmon, and lay said salmon skin down on it. Sprinkle over the rest, evenly. And the mustard powder, if you’re using it. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for two hours.

Turn your oven to grill and let it heat up well. Take the salmon and carefully, briefly rinse it under a cold tap, patting dry with a paper towel. Place it skin side down in a roasting dish, dot with a little butter (maybe 25g?) and grill for about four minutes. Carefully flip it over, and grill for another two or three minutes. Serve, with or without ruined risotto as you please.


The salmon goes from brightly luminous orange to pastel pink as it cures then cooks. Like eating a sunset, you sybaritic creature you.

 Lemon wedges and salmon: friendly.

My life is instagrammable too? Also note the taco pickles, proving their worth as an ideal side for salmon. Also, the salmon’s skin goes crunchy and crispy under the grill and tastes excellent. Steal it all for yourself, if you can. 

I’m not focussing too much on the laptop situation, which is possibly my brain going into a protective exoskeleton mode. Because if I really thought long and hard about every photo that’s on its hard drive and all the information scattered recklessly on the desktop that I stand to lose, and have to pay a lot of money to find out either way, I might cry. During the day, for hours. What I am focussing on is the other thing in my life right now: my cookbook is out on shelves on the 23rd of this month. It’s literally happening this month. It’s a real thing. Oh my. It’s so exciting, in a physical, heart-racingly, spine-pricklingly thrilling kind of way. It’s also very overwhelming. There’s so much to do! So much to organise! So many things to try and make appear out of nowhere! So much to just…take in. Most of it very cool. And so you know, because it is pretty interesting – I hope – I will be talking a bit more about the book over the next couple of weeks and how you can find it and perhaps how it can find you (I’m talking competitions, yo) and what you can expect from it and probably just lots more run-on sentences like this, really.

Whatever happens with this book, I truly love it. I was scared I wouldn’t, but I do, and I’m very sure you will too.
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title via: Pour Some Sugar On Me, by Def Leppard. The lyrics are bananas, the tune is so deliciously catchy. And um, Tom Cruise’s rendition in Rock of Ages is so super hot (um, sorry Hannah for mentioning him again.)
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Music lately:

Gil Scott-Heron, Lady Day and John Coltrane. So beautiful.

Sleigh Bells, Crown on the Ground. I saw The Bling Ring tonight and it reminded me how much I like this song and its big bratty beat.
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Next time: Whether or not the photos of it are recovered on the laptop (shudder) I will blog about lemon cake with white chocolate buttercream!

the day the sun turns black and there’s a money tree

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Here’s the thing. (I enjoy saying “here’s the thing” before whatever follows, because it makes me feel cavalierly authoritative.) Tim txts me yesterday afternoon to say that he won a $50 bar tab at a nice place in town. This being New Zealand, that buys us two and a half drinks and one snack, but still – drinks are drinks. I suddenly realise two things: time is passing by quickly, and my motivation for making dinner is waning slightly. Also, I’m wearing high heels that are tormenting my feet with the kind of blisters I haven’t seen since my days en pointe, also I’m trying to ignore the fact that Tim and I still urgently need to wash a lot of teatowels and dishes after our engagement party on Saturday. Also I really just want to get home, eat some good food, and settle in to watching Luther and Orange is the New Black. 
Rather than us spending money on take-out, I thought we could instead go to the supermarket on the way home and pick up some ingredients for fancy pasta, something that was almost more assembly than cooking. It’s Thursday, there has been a smallish protuberance in our bank balance, and we’ve just had some very free liquor. We can afford some packets of stuff. And really, that’s all this is: buying packets of cool things and arranging them on a plate. I call it payday pasta since the ingredients are kind of treats – pistachios, ricotta, and pancetta, oh that Terpsichore of the smallgoods. It has a bonus subtext of being the sort of manageable thing you can make for yourself near-instantly should you have gone out for a drink of an evening. I couldn’t actually find pappardelle, which is my favourite of the pastas, but after some feverish deliberation, I improvised by buying fresh lasagne sheets and slicing them up. 
“Pinenuts! They’re the definitive payday nut!” and “why can’t I bring myself to buy this pancetta even though I set out to buy pancetta…okay we will eat it really reverently” and “why is this dog roll called Wound Dog? No wait, it’s Hound Dog. No wait, why does it have a picture of a cat on it?” and “okay, what’s the second–fanciest nut?” I exclaimed, as we barreled from aisle to aisle, pallid under the fluorescent lights. And once home, I managed to get out of my high heels and dress and into trackpants and a soft old jersey and make this pasta and get it on the table within twenty minutes. 

It goes without saying, except that I’m saying it now, that you don’t have to actually buy pancetta and ricotta and pistachios. You could really sub in ‘most any gaspingly expensive protein and as long as you kept the butter-wine-mustard reduction (or gosh, just drizzle over some olive oil) it’ll be something. Pasta is very forgiving like that.

payday pasta

(apart from the pasta, I measured everything by handfuls or how much felt right, but in the hopes of being more helpful than that, the below measurements are roughly what happened. Don’t feel you have to stick to them to the very last milliliter, though.)

25g butter
1 tablespoon dijon mustard
1/2 cup dry white wine
200g pappardelle or fresh lasagne sheets
5 very thin slices pancetta
5 tablespoons ricotta
3 tablespoons raw pistachios
1 tablespoon capers
thyme leaves

In the same pot that you’ll later cook the pasta in, bring the butter, mustard and wine to a rapid boil, stirring occasionally, till golden, bubbly, and reduced by half. Meanwhile, bring a kettle full of water to the boil, and, if you got lasagne sheets, carefully cut them into slices about 2 1/2 cm wide. Lasagne sheets tend to come folded up, so it’s only a few incisions that you’ll have to make.

Tip the butter-wine mix into a small bowl, then fill up the pot with the freshly boiled water, add plenty of salt, and bring to the boil on the stove top. Add the pasta once it’s bubbling, and cook according to packet instructions. Fresh pasta only takes a couple of minutes.

Drain the pasta, and divide between two plates. Quickly tear up the pancetta and arrange evenly between the two plates, spoon over the ricotta, the pistachios, the capers, and the thyme leaves. Pour the butter-wine sauce over the two plates of pasta, and serve immediately.

For all that this is mostly assembly, the moving parts of which were very hastily acquired, it’s still a coherent and, in case you think I’m damning it with faint praise, a gratifyingly delicious dinner. Pappardelle is enormously fun to eat. So wide and cumbersomely floppy, all the cool, milkily plain ricotta cheese pressing into it as you twirl it round your fork, with elegantly salty, tissue-soft pancetta. I will here point out that you mercifully taste every penny of the pancetta. It’s not just overpriced ham. Pistachios add soft crunch, plus pink goes good with green, and the intensely flavoured butter-wine sauce somehow bundles it all together without overshadowing any of the other ingredients on the plate. It’s damn good, and worth waiting till payday for.

Sometimes it’s fun to spend a little money on something you’re just going to make disappear into your mouth as soon as possible. Sometimes that’s not an option. In case this all seems too chest-thumpingly pro-capitalism (to which I say please don’t ask me about capitalism, it’s good, it’s bad, etc, and also ouch, chest-thumping) a couple of payday-eve, or indeed anyday pastas you could consider include spaghetti with chili, lemon and olive oil, macaroni peas, and these two guys. 

What a week, huh. Tim and I finally had our engagement party. Families converging, some of whom hadn’t really converged themselves in a while, friends, us, all in one room – I was nervous. In fact for the first half of the evening I distinctly felt like my head was floating about two feet above my body. But it all went really well. And as Tim and I kept reminding ourselves, we’re not the only nervous ones, this is our house, and this is a happy occasion. In fact, here’s what happened – everyone appeared, there was nonstop talking and laughing and bonding, everyone got a massive laugh at Tim’s and my photoboard of us from 2005 till now, the food was excellent and all appeared on time, and it was just a very happy, fun night. I just wish I’d specifically organised a photo of Tim and myself, not least because my hair was ballin’ and I had an amazing new black velvet jumpsuit with a short floaty skirt (well…skorts) and enormous bow in the back, but because while making the photoboard we realised we didn’t have many recent photos of ourselves together. D’oh. Oh, and I made a FANTASTIC speech. I just did, it’s true, don’t be shocked by my un-New Zealand lack of modesty! Tim was also there to contribute to the speech once I’d had my ten minutes of ad-libbing (including a musical number fake-out which I’m quite proud of inventing on the spot) in case you’re wondering whether I’m getting married to myself, or something. Also, speaking of wondering, we fed everyone (yeah, I like to cater for forty people for kicks) like so:

snacks, chips, hummus-y dips

cornbread-topped chili, vegetarian cornbread-topped chili, paprika-fried tofu, ham in coca-cola, slaw, buns

vegan lemon-raspberry cake, spongebob squarepants candy, nerds, and jelly dinosaurs, dried fruit, grapes and cheeses.

And now we have leftovers upon leftovers (including maybe three thousand bottles of wine) which is the best way to ease yourself out of the inevitable post-event-planning slump. Nervous though entertaining them makes me, because I want everything to be just right, and slightly resentful though I was that they didn’t make good on my request to bring the cats down to visit too, it was really lovely to see my family and to show them a fun time in Wellington. And now that Tim and I have got this stressful thing out of the way, honestly, I’m feeling so casual about the wedding itself. For now.

In light of what a week it has been outside of my small world, I recommend you read this piece by the wonderful Questlove of The Roots, who wrote a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin. I also recommend what David Simon (the person behind The Wire and Treme and have you seen The Wire) wrote in response to it. You could also, counter to what I’d usually say, try reading the comments – there is some fascinating stuff coming out in them. I’d also like to acknowledge what Rob Delaney wrote after the sad, sad news that Glee actor Cory Monteith was found dead. All of them write with far more insight on these subjects than I could, and so I’m happy to just link to them and leave it there.

Finally, let’s all reflect upon my knitting progress. After some almost comically prolonged unpicking, I am onto the final square of my blanket. Ready to tackle a hooded cape next, to give me that mysterious-yet-snug demeanour I’m always going for in the winter.
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title via: The Money Tree, a gorgeously mournful Kander and Ebb song made all the more so when syncopated with Cabaret’s Maybe This Time and sung by the wondrous Julia Murney and Heidi Blickenstaff.
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Music lately:

On Sunday afternoon, after spending all Saturday evening there, our friends came back to watch Rock of Ages. I know it is, um, imperfect, but I love it, I just love it. And it is entirely perfect for watching after organising a large stressful party. ANYWAY, wow, anyone else feel uncomfortably red-faced while watching a disarmingly sexy Tom Cruise, who has never appealed to me before, singing Dead or Alive? Don’t even get me started on Pour Some Sugar On Me. 

Tim and I went to see local musician Watercolours (who I’ve talked to on here before!) at Puppies bar. Talk about disarming. I may have blurted out to her that her song Pazzida is in my walk-up-the-aisle-song shortlist. She took it well.
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Next time: I had a sudden urge to make a clafoutis on Tuesday. Still haven’t made good on said urge, but maybe this weekend?

take it easy on me, shed some light, shed some light on things

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My fork is the much, much smaller one on the top right.

This is a slight, small recipe, willfully simplistic. But also oddly fancy. I make this a lot, since it’s not very much effort, but is also just the kind of thing I want to eat following a Sunday afternoon of book group, mainlining candy (specifically: Nerds, fizzy Spongebob Squarepants lollies) and drinking just enough cider to feel pleasantly fuzzy. Seriously, we had so many good snacks – kumara chips, hummus that I’d made myself with brown chickpeas and harissa, Turkish bread, manuka smoked butter. I just felt like sugar. Until I didn’t – you know that wall you hit? Well, this is the perfect antidote. It’s intensely savoury, with rich oiliness, sharp saltiness, bursts of citrus and pinchings of smoky heat. Not the slightest bit sweet at all. And you can make it post-cider times, without hurting yourself. At least, I did, and I am so clumsy-prone that it’s a pretty decent test of what the rest of the world is capable of.

The other nice thing about this is that all you need is one pot and one or two small bowls. If you want to make even less dishes, you could soak the dried chili first, then use that same emptied bowl to put the olive oil in. I just used lots of fancy little bowls because sometimes my “how will this look on the blog” aesthetics override my already skewed logic. Also since moving into a house with a dishwasher for the first time, I like casually using as many dishes as I can, safe in the knowledge that some machine is going to do all the work for Tim and me. Hooray for dystopian futures!

spaghetti with chili, lemon, capers and olive oil

200g spaghetti
1 large dried red chili
1 lemon
1 tablespoon of capers, rinsed of any salt if they’re salt-packed
salt
extra virgin olive oil

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil, and cook the pasta according to packet instructions – usually takes between 9-12 minutes. While it’s cooking, put the chili in a small bowl and cover with boiling water for five minutes to allow it to rehydrate. In another small bowl, pour several tablespoons of olive oil – two to three is probably fine, though I go for four-ish mostly – and either grate or use a lemon zester to remove as many curling golden strands of lemon peel that you can. Tip the lemon zest and capers into the olive oil, retrieve the chili carefully from its water bath and roughly chop (removing seeds and stem as you please – and I do, a lot of the burn is in those seeds) into small pieces, adding that to the oil too. Finally, drain the cooked pasta, tip in the oil and all the bits and pieces in it, stir carefully and divide between two plates. I often cut the lemon in half and squeeze its juice over the pasta too, at this point. Pour over more olive oil if you like, sprinkle over more salt if you need it, and eat. Obviously.

Chilis can seem intimidating if you’re not used to them, if at the most you eat sticky, syrupy sweet chili sauce, if all your references are all cartoonishly exaggerated pop culture. Or in fact literally cartoons in pop culture, like Homer Simpson’s viaje mysterioso. Despite seeming that way, chilis are not simply a straightforward delivery method of a burning sensation. They have a whole spectrum of flavour, from smoky like, well, smoke, to fruity like the darkest dried plums, to sweet and lemony…kick the seeds and internal spine out and you might find you can handle a lot more than you thought. The chili I used for this was long, leathery and with a rich wine-dark colour and flavour and just a little prickling heat here and there. Together with the salt of the capers and the bright lemon zest, it’s really something. Even though it sorta looks like nothing.

Now that it’s suddenly July – cue my obligatory yet sincere incredulity at the passing of time, as always – Tim and I are entering crunch time on planning our engagement party, which is partway through this month. Lots of things about it are making us nervous, mostly around disparite groups of people in one room, but we have been having so much fun looking through old photos of ourselves to get printed for a photoboard. The pre-us-getting-together “whoa that chemistry” moments caught on film. Tim’s fluctuatingly enormous hair. The entirety of 2006 when we were each as much of a hipster scene kid as we could muster. Our utterly squalid flats. The six months in 2008 when a neighbourhood cat decided to adopt us (cue some obligatory but deeply sincere howling from my direction at the sorrow of it all now, in that we can’t have a cat.) Our first holiday, finally, to Europe in 2011. All that tequila. “Oh, that’s the time I wore a singlet as a dress”; “Why did I have a permanent spot on my chin for three years”; “ah, the night where everyone had to wear hats and dance to Fall Out Boy”; “why were we obsessed with taking photos of our feet?”; “how on earth did I pass that photography paper?” and so on, and so on. It’s making me want to stop and be a bit more grateful and aware of the good things we have going on right now. Like insulation and personal space and the aforementioned dishwasher. And no photos of our feet. And new-old friends but also old friends from the moment we first lived together (Ange! That’s you!) And each other, still.

In case this was getting all too sentimental, I got another tattoo! Ain’t nothing sentimental about being stabbed with needles for an hour and a half. It’s at the aren’t-bodies-fascinating scabbed healing stage right now, but once it’s fully there I’ll take a photo, in case you’re interested. In the meantime, here’s me excitedly pointing at it. The super great Nursey at Dr Morse did the design, and also the stabbing itself. Which was oddly enjoyable – it burned, but there’s something about sitting through that pain and knowing you can just do it and you’ll get something you adore forever is kinda powerful. Or at least do-able.

It’s a crescent moon with clouds drifting over it and the lupus (wolf) constellation over the top. It’s very soft and dreamy and a little ancient. And it’s forty centimetres long! Kidding, it’s a couple of inches. I’m very, very happy with it. In a week where people have fought so hard for other people’s rights to simply have autonomy over their own bodies (particularly the brave Senator Wendy Davis who filibustered into the night, on her feet, without water or food, for this very idea) it’s – and not to tenuously link between myself and Davis, because seriously – but it’s nice to be able to make this small decision.

title via: Feist, My Moon My Man. It’s grand. I love the sneaky Tainted Love-esque beat.

music lately:

Lorde, Tennis Court. Yeah Lorde! Still being astonishing!

Blur, Beetlebum. Oh, sexy sexy Damon Albarn.

Connie Converse, How Sad How Lovely. Occasionally I return to this sorrowful, beautiful song from the mysterious Converse. I should return to it more.

Next time: I Should Tell You is back, with Delaney Davidson, which is really exciting. For me. And hopefully you too. His music is excellent.

 

lazy jane, all the time

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Tulips holding up well. As is my twee agenda, it seems.
Also holding up well: this risotto recipe. I’ve made it three times in the last week. Once, twice, three times a lady recommending this recipe to you all. I know I often go on about how I work myself down to a nub writing this blog and the cookbook and meeting other various deadlines, but that aside, I’m really very lazy. If there’s a way I can do less than what’s required, even at the expense of the outcome, I will. It’s just the way it is. Some people accept that there’s hard work involved in life, some people (me) want to sit around and knit or check Twitter all day. Fortunately for me, Tim tends to meet this laziness with shrugging resignation/lifting/cleaning of all the things, but occasionally it works out well for both of us. In the case of this risotto, that is. I already love making risotto, with its calmingly repetitive stirring motion, and I don’t mean to sound like Troy McClure, but sometimes I want to take an already pretty easy thing and make it even more flagrantly low in effort. And not only does this make enough excellently delicious risotto for dinner and then a non-bleak lunch the next day (in your face, instant noodles!) it also uses only one dish. So, less dishes for Tim to do, or for him to rinse and then put in the dishwasher (I can’t comprehend how we have a machine to do the dishes for us but still have to pre-wash them, hence why I never do it.) I’m not trying to be proud of how lazy I am or anything, in fact I’m too lazy to expend any feelings over it whatsoever. Kidding! On the one hand, I feel like “why should naturally helpful, good people in society be celebrated when I can’t help being this unhelpful” and on the other hand sometimes I am just being a dick to see how much I can get away with not doing.  
Back to the risotto, you wouldn’t necessarily think a version that you just shunt into the oven would work, since it’s the constant stirring of it that slowly releases the starch from the rice grains and gives it that soft, collapsing texture. But somehow it does, and frankly I don’t care to question why. It just does. The first time I tried this I simply stirred some herbs in and topped it with a little Whitestone Butter by Al Brown Manuka Smoked Butter that arrived in the mail because that’s right, I have the veneer of a fancy food blogger (as always, I wish I could tell my much younger self that this would happen, as something to cling on to and look forward to.) I’m not just saying this because I got it for free (I mean, in a roundabout way I am, but I would never lie to you about butter, okay?)  this butter really is quite incredible, the manuka smoke somehow making it meatily rich while the texture is dissolvingly creamy and light. It’s the ideal substance atop a very plain, but perfect risotto. But regular butter and plenty thereof is also always the right choice, too.
Oven Risotto

Adapted from a Donna Hay recipe. Makes plenty for four, or in our case, for two people and then two lunches the next day. 

2 cups arborio rice
2 teaspoons vegetable stock powder
1 tablespoon dijon mustard
5 cups water, of which up to 1 cup is white wine 
Optional: fistfuls of butter, lemon zest and juice (especially if you don’t have wine), herbs. I guess the mustard is optional too, but you want this to taste like something.

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. In an oven dish – around 2L capacity – tip in the rice, the wine, the water, the mustard and the stock powder. At this point I also dice up plenty of butter and add that in too, but if you don’t have butter or can’t eat dairy, I would lavishly drizzle in some olive oil. 

Cover the dish tightly with tinfoil, then bake for around an hour. At this point, you can stir in more butter, some lemon zest and juice, some herbs, some cream, parmesan, whatever, really. For this I grabbed a handful of chives and thyme leaves, since that’s what I had. 

Just plain, with a little mustard and butter and lemon, it’s surprisingly fulsome – heftily creamy and starchily comforting, the rice’s natural flavour shining through.

However, it also lends itself well to not being utterly plain. I made a glossy pink roast beetroot version of this – sliced up beetroot, roasted in plenty of olive oil, before adding the rice and liquid and baking. Last night I made a roasted parsnip version, with so much butter that the rice itself couldn’t quite absorb it all. It basically turned to nutty, caramelised paste. And was really wonderful. But uh, if you want to make your own, just bear in mind that it can only absorb about 150g butter before it starts heading paste-wards.

Some other cool things of late, in order of most to least of what I thought of first to write about: 
Am quite obsessed with knitting. It’s so calming, and repetitive. A bit like risotto, but you don’t have to stand up to do it! 
Witness the knitness.

On Friday I went to a secret party to celebrate ten years of Creative HQ. As with receiving butter, occasionally I get to go to A Thing. Tim and other friends were also there, and it was really quite an amazingly surreal, and just generally amazing night – fancy beer, a dance troupe, green screens, dry ice, a photobooth, a glitter cannon, pretzel sticks, chocolate schnapps. It gave me lots of good ideas on how I want my life to be (more glitter cannons! And pretzel sticks! And dance troupe-ing! And everything I just said, really.)

And today a really wonderful-for-me thing happened: I had my first story ever published in Cuisine magazine. I’ve spoken so often of how much I love this magazine and I won’t go on about it too much in case anyone from said magazine happens to read this and gets distinctly weirded out, but: I adore this magazine, and have been an avid reader of it since before I even knew how to cook. The fact that I have a story in there is a very big deal to me. The story itself is a piece on Treme, New Orleans, and the sights and sounds and eats therein, based on the time Tim and I spent there last October.

Finally: saw some cool hund friends!

Finally-finally: I’m going to bring up again that I was published in Cuisine magazine, because I’m just so happy and excited and self-proud. 
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title via: Lazy Line Painter Jane, by Belle and Sebastian. This is one of about three of their songs that I am into, but I am so VERY into this song. The breakdown at the end is spectacular. 
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music lately:
Camera Obscura, The Sweetest Thing. This song is from an album called My Maudlin Career, which is a bit of a great title. The song also rules. Otherwise I wouldn’t have put it here, of course.

The sadly late Selena, Dreaming of You. Silky-soft early nineties pop/r’n’b. Alas, my particular obsession with reading about tragically dead celebrities on wikipedia was what reminded me about how sweet this song is.
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Next time: possibly something from the new Cuisine magazine, if I ever manage to stop reading my byline over and over that is. 

you like tomato and i like tomahto

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It’s nice to have a happy little rut of recipes that are easy enough that you can make them while mentally and emotionally exhausted, not to mention physically exhausted (for example: from merely existing, or from watching the latest Game of Thrones, amiright? Spoiler alert: omg.) But they’re also adjustable and reliably versatile, like an old comfortable bra, that you can really throw them into anything and you’ll feel like you’ve done something nice for yourself of an evening. Somehow, this Tomato, Almond and Smoked Paprika sauce has become that to me. I think it’s based on a sauce I saw on a cooking show one time – seriously, those are the only details that I can remember – and occasionally I add other things to it. But it manages to be utterly simple, vaguely nutrient-adjacent (considering the nutritional value of my lunchtime pot noodles is akin to that of their polystyrene containers) and yet a little flashy and sexy and interesting. One of my very favourite things to do with it is to very slowly fry eggs in about five tablespoons of olive oil, then use that olive oil in the sauce itself, then serve all of that over couscous. But on Monday – Queen’s birthday, oh that joyous occasion…of a Monday off! – I made it to have roasted vegetables dipped into it or blanketed under it, while my friend Kim and I watched The Craft. 

I was curious to see if The Craft was still the piece of important, flawless filmmaking that it seemed to be to me in 1996. It um, wasn’t quite. But it was also still really fantastic in some ways, most of them fashion-related, and I still appreciate what it meant to me back in the day. A film about women, into witchcraft, who said “we are the weirdos, mister?” Thumbs up.

(The red candle in front melted rapidly and spilled over onto the floor. Which we only noticed after the movie finished. I admit, at first my brain thought “gasp! It’s an evil thing like the thing from the thing in the movie!” But really…it was just spilled wax. Phew.)

This sauce is just ridiculously delicious, although frankly I think the batch I made for myself and Kim was my weakest so far. Possibly because I used multigrain bread, which meant the sauce had linseeds dispersed through it, which…yeah. Not quite what I was going for. Generally though, this sauce is rich and luscious and a little smoky from the paprika and brilliant with all sorts of things – the aforementioned fried eggs, stirred through pasta, poured over cubed roasted potatoes for a patatas bravas effect, tipped onto polenta…it just goes with all things. Particularly these crisp, collapsing and slightly charred vegetables.

Roast Cauliflower and Parsnip with Tomato, Almond and Smoked Paprika Sauce

A recipe by myself.

As much cauliflower and as many parsnips as you please. I found about half of the former and two of the latter fit comfortably on one oven tray and will feed 2-3.
Olive oil
2 slices thick white bread (I used seeded this time round. Uh…don’t.)
1/2 cup whole almonds
1 can tomatoes
1 heaped teaspoon smoked paprika
Salt

Set your oven to 220 C and line a baking tray with baking paper. Slice the parsnip and cauliflower up however you like, but the more flat/thin you go, the better likelihood of crisp-ity there is. Arrange in one layer on the tray, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and roast for about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, blast the bread and almonds together in the food processor till the almonds are good and nubbly and small. This may take some time. If your bread is quite stale, soak it in a little cold water for a while. Then drain the can of tomatoes of its liquid – I know, this seems kind of wasteful. I don’t know, drink the liquid if you feel bad about it (actually don’t, it’s weird and metallic and horrible on its own from the tin) and tip the tomatoes into the food processor with the bread-almond stuff and continue to process till it looks saucy and incorporated. Finally, add the paprika, a good pinch of salt, and plenty of olive oil – about three tablespoons – and process again. Taste to see if it wants any more salt or paprika, then either serve cold or heated gently in a saucepan in a bowl on the side of the vegetables. 

Dip the vegetables in the sauce or pile them into small bowls and spoon the sauce over. 

In case you’re wondering, the reason these are sitting on a cardboard box is because our one small table has our projector sitting on a chair on top of it. It’s kind of an awkward fixture to have in the house, but then we keep wanting to use the projector, so perhaps this is our life now. It’s not a bad life, considering how fun it is watching things projected in large scale onto the wall. 

What else happened on the long weekend? Why, plenty.

We went to our friend Craig’s 30th. It was a very fun night (less fun the next morning) especially bedizening ourselves with fake tattoos of Craig’s face (tattoo locations of Craig’s face include Tim’s actual face) and “Tattoos are for losers”.

First new duvet cover since 2006. As per, “is it instagrammable” guilelessly affected the decision-making process. It’s so crisp and clean and whenever I wake up I feel like I’ve been sleeping inside a bed of white chocolate ganache, I love it.

Amazing burritos occurred.
Hello.
And finally I got an email telling me an advance copy of my cookbook (which isn’t due out till September so don’t try asking your bookstore about it yet, unless you think it will build up major h y p e) which I received in the mail today and nearly cried and threw up everywhere when I saw it because every emotion in the world suddenly played out in my brain. I mean, I’m really happy with it of course, but there was just such a rush of feelings when I held it in my hands for the first time, so much more intense than just seeing the printouts of the design and the manuscript and so on. I will have to work on this so I don’t black out every time I walk into a bookshop in September. It’s just very exciting and terrifying and strange and happy all at the same time. Cookbook! 
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Title via: Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, a song about a couple who say words differently sometimes. Adorable! Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong do a reliably snappy version. 
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Music lately:

Mariah Carey feat Miguel, Beautiful. This dreamy, warm song feels like a return to form for my favourite singer ever who’s non-returns to form I’d totally justify anyway. Have listened to it many, many, many times. 

The final few episodes of Nashville just slew me. I shed human tears and couldn’t move for half an hour after the season finale. A joyful highlight though, was Clare Bowen as Scarlett O’Conner, singing the hugely pretty Looking For A Place To Shine. 

Polly Scattergood, Wanderlust. Cannot. Stop. Listening. To. This song. 
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Next time: Umm. I know not of any specifics yet. Will see where my brain takes me. Could probably do with a better weekday lunch than pot noodles, that could be a thing. 

if I rap soup my beats is stock

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In a wearily unsurprising turn of events, I undercooked the cornbread in the photo above. I then returned it to the oven and overcooked it. Then tonight I took the crumbly leftovers and mixed them together with eggs and milk and cheese and butter – and then undercooked that. Well of course.

Of all the things I could be queen of, it’s not what I’d choose, but if Game of Thrones has taught me anything (apart from don’t watch it while eating dinner) it’s that sometimes the crown finds you. And I seem to be the queen of false starts. It’s not simply just a case of when it rains it pours (by the way, Shakespeare invented that phrase, along with all other phrases and words and probably food blogging) it’s more like…getting in my own way, constantly being underprepared for basic things and the general game of good luck roulette that is life not offering any help. I’m not saying I’m cursed or beleaguered or miserable. I mean, good things happen. Life is pretty alright. I just have a lot of cause to say things like “well of course this happened, because I am me.”

Like, I sometimes really struggle to leave the house in a hurry. It sounds strange, but time will speed up while my movements slow down, everything feels weird, I can’t find anything, I’ll drop things, my heart will start racing and I’ll feel like I need a shower and a lie-down. Often. But surely pretty much everyone has had that feeling where you’re trying to achieve something small and the more you try the more you push it away and break it apart. Oh my gosh, this has turned into the most negative start to this blog post. I was just trying to muse. To ponder. What a damn false start!

Luckily the parsnip soup I made turned out so good, so velvety and creamy and wonderful that I wanted to not so much eat it as to fall asleep on a li-lo drifting around in a large bowl of it, one hand idly trailing into the soup as I float on by. By li-lo I mean inflatable mattress thing for a swimming pool, not the actress Lindsay Lohan. Actually in this day and age I can’t tell which reference is less up-to-date and likely to be squinted at in confusion by young people. Perhaps a better solution is an undignified but sensible inflatable ring around my waist, keeping me safely bouyant. Or just eating the soup.

I don’t even go for soup all that often, it doesn’t seem as exciting as other significantly less formless foods. It’s not crisp, it’s not chewy, it’s not crunchy, it’s not deep-fried, all those good things, you know? And yet, whenever I actually get over that and have soup, I’m always like “…oh yeah. Soup.” And that’s the eloquent response I had to this parsnip soup after making it. It certainly helped me get over the cornbread a little bit.

Dead roses: I really like them.

The texture is cloud-like, aerated and foam-light, yet rich and plushly creamy. Despite not having cream or in fact any dairy in it whatsoever. Which is really good if you’re at that days-before-payday stage where there’s no money still and there’s not the option of running down the road to pick up extra ingredients from the dairy. This is more or less parsnips and water. You do absolutely need a blender though, that’s what allows the luxuriant texture to happen, but I’m pretty sure a food processor or stick blender will still be absolutely fine. Without one of those…I’m sorry, maybe make a different soup. Or something deep-fried.

It might look like there’s a lot of oil in this – or it might not, I can’t even tell anymore – but it’s there for the rich buttery olive oil flavour, as well as the way it turns vegetables and water into something with a little more body and soul. So, if you don’t have olive oil on you, I’d use actual butter which will provide similar flavour. If not…different soup? I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be pushing you away. But c’mon.

Velveteen Parsnip Soup (I don’t know how I feel about adjectives in front of recipe names. But I really like the word velveteen. And this soup really is all soft and fleecy and wondrous.)

A recipe by myself. 

4 medium sized parsnips
3 cloves garlic
4 tablespoons of olive oil 
Salt
1 tablespoon dijon mustard
Tiny pinch of ground cinnamon
3 cups water

Roughly dice the parsnips, and peel and trim the garlic cloves. Heat the oil in a large saucepan and fry the parsnips and garlic over a high heat for five minutes, stirring occasionally. Lower the heat, very low, sprinkle with a pinch of salt, cover with the lid and allow to slowly cook for about ten minutes. At this stage the parsnip pieces should be all soft and golden. Stir in the mustard and cinnamon and pour over the water and simmer gently for another ten minutes, or until the parsnip is completely tender. Blend the hell out of it – it’s a pain to get the stuff into the blender, but it’s worth the nervousness – until not one single lump of parsnip remains. 

Optional caramelised nuts, for sprinkling over, optional since I’m not 100% sure about them

1 handful nuts, eg hazelnuts, almonds, a mix of whatever, whatever. I do have this feeling that peanuts are a no here, though.
30-ish grams butter
1/4 teaspoon/a few drops soy sauce
1/4 teaspoon/small pinch mustard powder
1 teaspoon brown sugar

Very roughly chop the nuts, then melt the butter in a pan – I used the same one I’d cooked the soup in, no need to wash – until it’s bubbling and hot. Tip in the nuts, and stir around till they’re lightly toasted. Stir in the soy sauce, mustard powder and sugar until it becomes a little clumpy and caramelised. Tip the lot, butter and gritty caramelised bits of sugar and all, into a small bowl and spoon it over your soup as you please. 

(Me: sorry Tim. It’s going to be that kind of blog post where I photograph your spookily headless body while you pause mid-spoonful.)

Parsnips have a natural mild sweetness and butteriness that you wouldn’t think was there if you just bit into a raw one (have done, not…unpleasant) and which benefits from the slow frying, from the warm rounding out of cinnamon and mustard, and from lots of salt. And what this soup lacks in deep-fried-ness, it makes up for in baffling silkiness, and caramelly parsnip deliciousness. As I hinted at in the recipe, I’m not quite sure about the caramelised nuts that I made to sprinkle over the top – the soy sauce almost made them a little too rich, if such a thing is possible. I think I would’ve been better off just toasting them in butter rather than trying to be too fancy. And of course, there is the cornbread, all undercooked and stupid. But the thing I thought most of all was not going to work – the soup that I made up on the spot – was pretty perfect.

Talk about false starts, I took the day after a public holiday off on Friday with the intention of getting a lot of writing and blog admin done. I spent the day on the floor, frustrated and sick (when I wasn’t throwing up, that is. I always instinctively end up on the floor at times like this.) Oh, and I made some cookies to blog about (I mean, I made them to eat, which is my primary reason for cooking anything, just I thought they’d be good to blog about.) And they really didn’t turn out right. Not terrible or inedible, just not what I’d intended and not particularly fantastic. I dubbed them shame-cookies, because drama is its own reward.

Saturday was glorious though, in that I watched The Hour for the, uh, fourth time in about six months. And made another convert to its swooning, heart-punching gorgeousness (Kate.) And made this cake. I know I talk about it a lot, but I can’t overstate my love for this show. Fly, don’t run or walk, to find it.

PS wanna see my tattoo? Here is a peek of the sneaky kind. I just wanted to hold onto it for a while before I posted a picture of it online, and then of course as I mentioned in my last post, it went a bit gross while healing, which is to be expected.

It’s now more or less healed, which means I can wear pants again. But I don’t even want to. (No pants are better than pants, as I always think.) But really: I just want to keep gazing at it. You can too, right here.

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title via: Beastie Boys, Intergalactic. Sigh, poor Beastie Boys with only the two of them now. 
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Music lately:

Let’s Get Ready to Crumble, Russian Futurists. I haven’t listened to these guys in so long! Literally not since, oh, 2009. And I really like them still. It’s hard to explain what they sound like, a little vague and dreamy but also quite punchy. I don’t know, it sounds like all that music that you like.

Fear No Pain, Willy Mason. It feels like if he’d released this now, in these post-Mumford times, he’d be intergalactic huge. But then maybe I’d instantly dislike him (I really don’t like Mumford and Sons, however I try to just let my ears tell me what music I like rather than letting taste dictate. Otherwise, let’s face it, I might not have named this blog after a line from RENT.) Anyway, it’s a gorgeous, sunny, Americana-y tune that comfortably lived-in and yet is only about five years old.

The Wayward Wind, Patsy Cline. A beautiful voice, singing one of the most beautiful songs.
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Next time: I don’t know, but I really hope whatever it is I make it on the weekend and there’s decent lighting for taking photos. And that I don’t under or over-cook the thing I make.

umami said knock you out

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Birthdays are a very important and special time for me.
Because I’m self-absorbed and love attention. No, I mean, yes, but there’s more to it than that. And not just the promise of neatly wrapped consumer items, either. But honestly, so many people said incredibly nice things to me on my birthday. I felt very loved and liked and lucky and a little bit tearful. 

Birthday me. Twenty seven. This was one of about fifty photos that a drunk Tim snapped of me. I hated them all so willfully went for two particularly awkward shots. Can someone please get me some photogenic-ness for a late birthday present?
Like being my own hype man, I’d indulged in some deep pre-birthday buildup. The day itself though, was quiet but pretty ideal. It was raining, which made me so very happy. Tim made me fresh coffee and rice bubbles with canned peaches for breakfast. I did yoga. I had a long bath in which I drank whisky and read Joan Didion, since I enjoy doing things that let me use the words “sybaritic lotus-eater”. I met Tim for lunch at the very beautiful Nikau cafe, and had an Aperol spritzer (Aperol is like Campari, which I adore, only with more lunchtime-friendly levels of alcohol) and a quince and raspberry donut. I cried twice while watching Nashville. And later I watched while the NZ government passed the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill, meaning marriage equality was indeed A Thing. 
Let’s just say: best birthday present ever. To try and articulate it further…I don’t know. I kept leaving this page and procrastinating on other pages because I couldn’t work out to say. I guess I’m just utterly happy with the result. It’s not a magic solution to all the ills and hate of the world, but it will not only do no harm, it will be super amazing. It was just so damn delightful to see politicians from all across the political spectrum – or rainbow, if you will – giving speeches that were eloquent and beautiful and impassioned, or at least vaguely sensible. To hear the vote results announced, and feeling like this was one more step in the right direction of affirming that we’re all okay. It made me feel really pretty okay. And proud of all those who had gone before so that we could be watching this debate unfold now in 2013.  And while I should stay positive, I mean, I said in my last blog post that I’d never heard an anti-gay argument that made any sense whatsoever. So it’s just really vindicating and hopeful that the law, in this case at least, sides with those of us who do make sense. 
You know how you can pop a balloon, so it explodes with a bang, or just carefully pierce the surface so it deflates slowly, almost imperceptibly, over time? I thought I was going to erupt in scream-tears like a popped balloon when it was finally, finally clear that we’d won. But I didn’t, instead just wiping away quiet tears and not even realising how much I’d been crying till later when my eyeliner had rendered my face panda-esque. 
“No take-backs!” I yelled at Tim. Guess we’re really-really getting married now! 

Umami is one of those words that gets evoked a lot in the food writing of yonder present times. Unlike many popular and overused words (“om”, “nom”, “nom”, and variations thereof), umami is a perfect and quite irreplaceable term from Japan which refers to the mysteriously savoury. That unmistakeable but pretty elusive quality that makes fried mushrooms and miso soup and soy sauce and gruyere cheese and worcestershire sauce particularly fascinating, and fascinatingly particular. Also can I just step back and point out from this short distance and say that I’ve made, and will make recipes that illustrate the concept of umami SO MUCH BETTER than these two but I liked the title that I came up with and so insisted on making this all fit.    

Make these noodles once and then commit the concept to memory and ignore the recipe because they’re a perfect go-to, fallback meal when you feel like something resembling this end result, and you really don’t need to live or die by the below quantities. As it is, what I’ve written below is not Nigella’s original recipe – she was a little more restrained with the sesame oil than I, but it’s such an incredible flavour that I just wanted more. They’re cold and slippery and nutty and salty and delicious and many other positive adjectives besides.

Sesame Soba Noodles

Adapted just barely from Nigella Lawson’s excellent book Forever Summer

200g soba noodles (although they sometimes come in 90g packs, so y’know, two of those is fine.)
2 teaspoons rice vinegar 
5 teaspoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon sesame oil
75g sesame seeds, or sunflower seeds like I did. Or peanuts. Or nothing.
Chives or spring onions to serve.

If you’ve got sesame seeds or whatever, toast them in a dry pan over a low heat, shaking or stirring often to prevent them burning. It will seem to take forever and then they’ll burn all of a sudden, so stay patient and you’ll be rewarded with a rich golden brown colour.

Cook the soba noodles according to packet instructions in boiling water. This probably won’t take long. Drain, running under cold water while you do so. Mix together the remaining ingredients and stir them into the slightly cooled, drained noodles. Finely slice the chives or green onions, and sprinkle over the top. Serves two. 

Apologies that my photos are so weak this week, I adore winter but am in denial about the bad lighting it brings. Will try to do something about it so you can return to the kinda-decent photos you deserve.

Surprise second recipe, it’s something I just thought into existence all casual-like, with the hopes that it would work. Oh, how it worked. The butter sizzles in the oven emphasising its – all together now – umami properties, deepening and darkening its already amply pleasing taste. The rum is sweet and sticky and rich but not overpowering, matching the sweetness of the pumpkin and parsnip and making them taste like the best vegetables on earth. Mustard helps it not all taste like pudding, and thyme is my favourite herb (well, that and mint) and I’ve managed not to kill my potplant of it yet and so I thought I’d throw some in as well.

Pumpkin and Parsnips roasted in Butter and Rum

A recipe by myself. Serves 3-4, or two of us with leftovers. 

1 small pumpkin (or butternut, or a couple of kumara)
2 medium parsnips
100g butter
2 teaspoons dijon mustard
1 tablespoon golden rum
Half a handful of thyme leaves (or one handful if your hands are tiny-tiny like mine.)

Set the oven to 190 C. Remove the skin from the pumpkin if you like, and slice it into thick chunks. Slice the parsnips into thick sticks. Place in a large roasting dish. Cube the butter and dot it over, then spoon over the mustard. Sprinkle with salt and roast for about 40 minutes, until the vegetables are a little browned and very tender. Pour over the rum and a little more salt, and return to the oven for another ten minutes. Serve. 

Pumpkin and Rum: friendly. (Rumpkin? No, wait, I didn’t say that.)

Another thing I did on my birthday was – okay, after the whiskey and Aperol – only drink a tiny bit of cider while watching the marriage equality vote, because I had a tattoo booked the next day. Do you want to see it? Well, you can’t. It’s currently not fit to be seen, as a result of the long, fascinating, but ultimately sorta gross healing process. As Led Zeppelin and Johnny Cash played on the stereo I went through three solid hours of absurd pain, pausing only to have a fizzy drink or inhale deeply on a small bottle of pepperminty essential oils (which didn’t necessarily do that much, but did put my brain squarely back where it should be and made me feel all medieval) while Tim held my hand, and later, hands plural, which also didn’t seem to do anything as far as pain-assuaging and yet made me feel better. I was with Gill at Tattoo Machine, and he was brilliant. Super brilliant. And I mean, of course it’s going to hurt. I found it very interesting identifying the different kinds of pain – sometimes slicing, sometimes like a small yet mightily-toothed animal was chewing on me, sometimes an odd sensation like a tiny flaming vacuum was moving over my leg, and sometimes more straightforward: like a needle plunging deep into me. I felt weirdly powerful while I was lying there, thinking look what I can do, look what I’m capable of withstanding just because I want to. It’s also possible these are things that the brain tells itself while something like this is happening. At not one point, even during the most intense pain, did I think oh no this was the wrong choice. And now: I love it. I’m completely enraptured with it. Also probably 85 billion percent of people in New Zealand have a tattoo so maybe I’m rambling away on something that’s not particularly ground-breaking. But I’m very, very happy with mine.

Post-tattoo, while I lay on the couch with stabbed leg aloft, Tim trudged round town in the still-there rain and returned home with Voltarin, Bepanthen, a pie and a bunch of roses. He then made this platter of cheese (oh hey, umami), grapes and crackers to eat while we waited for the pies to heat up and poured me a whisky and patiently waited while I hobbled over to the table and took several goes to instagram the moment to my sufficient liking. Frankly, I’m surprised someone else didn’t try to marry him already with behaviour like that, but I’m glad it’s going to be, and can be, me.
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Title via that gleaming beacon of handsomeness, LL Cool J with Mama Said Knock You Out. Don’t call it a comeback! 
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Music lately:

Gavin Creel must’ve bought his voice at the good voice shop or something, because damn son, he renders me unable to write a decent sentence about how great he sounds while singing Going Down from the musical Hair. I love this song anyway, he embiggens it like wo.

Garbage, Push It. Not sure how I missed how utterly terrifying this video was during the 90s. As far as those 90s-scary-subversive music videos go, this one has aged well. The song is brilliant, I bet there’s a version with just a static image if you’re reading this alone and in the dark. (PS thanks Kate for reminding me how excellent this is.)
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Next time: something photographed in better lighting, if I can. Got a yearning to make cookies, and also basically everything, so we’ll see.

how do ya like them egg rolls, mr goldstone?

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Our table, which Tim spent a goodly segment of easter weekend sanding and repeatedly basting in polish, is back. Which means now if I make us breakfast on it, everything suddenly looks 97% more idyllic in photographs. As Prop Joe from much-clasped-to-modern-hearts TV show The Wire said, look the part, be the part, huh? (…he ended the sentence with something a little saltier than “huh”.)

 

I’ve had a sorry run of egg-related kitchen failures lately. Like these terrible pastry cases that I wanted to make into lemon tarts. I refused to throw out, thinking I could eat them, the burden-of-your-shame-biscuits that they had become, and not waste ingredients – but they were dry and gravelly and yet soggy and falling to bits at the same time. Wasting ingredients and injuring your own self-esteem is a cruel combination. But while nervous, I had a good feeling about these miso scrambled eggs. Miso paste is used with water become a thin, unpromising, yet magically delicious broth. Wonderful as that is, miso paste as a general ingredient gives you this mysterious savoury tricksy flavour that makes everything taste like itself, but better. Like when I put my glasses on and everything in front of my eyes sharpens up.

It looks a little indisposed at first, the miso paste tinting the scrambled eggs a troublingly peachy shade. But it comes right, and if you’ve got some garnishy thing around to cover it with – in my case, fried shallots, but chives, coriander or sesame seeds would also be excellent – so much the better. Hooray for garnishes.

Miso Scrambled Eggs

A recipe by myself. Serves two, or one very hungry. Or four people a small spoonful each. Or six people, but three of them can only watch. Look, it’s 6am when I’m typing this, okay.

1 tablespoon white miso paste (heaped or level, depending on your sodium avidity)
2 tablespoons water
4 eggs
Plain oil for frying (I used rice bran. It has a pleasing lack of oiliness to its taste.)
Fried shallots for garnish (optional) (but way delicious)

In a medium sized bowl, whisk together the miso paste and water till smooth. Crack in the eggs and roughly mix, just to break up the yolks and swirl in the miso. Heat a little oil, about two teaspoons, in a saucepan over a medium heat. Pour in the egg mixture and allow to cook gently, stirring with a spatula or wooden spoon to scramble it as it firms. Once thick and fluffy and basically not liquid any more, divide between two pieces of hot fresh toast. 

If you’re the easily suspicious kind of person, and I understand how tampering with scrambled eggs might do that to you, be assured that this is ridiculously, non-threateningly delicious. The miso paste gives the eggs a rounded saltiness, the intensity of roasted mushroom or slow-cooked beef, but without changing anything about the texture or basic flavour. It’s subtle, but present. It’s really, really good. I love breakfast/brunch ever so much, and while going out for it is one of the more exciting things you can do with your life, sometimes it’s nice to kick up a fuss in the home. Also like all breakfast foods, this is a perfect dinner. Or midnight snack. Or lunch. Or one of those snacks that you have to help your brain think about what you’ll have for lunch. Which is different to brunch.

It’s my birthday next week. Birthdays can be stupidly melancholic – wanting to do something but not being sure what; reflecting on everything you’ve ever done up until this point in vicious detail; wanting all of the trinkets that there are; feeling this frantic stiltedness at trying to make the day a good one, followed by the post-birthday comedown. Bundle of fun, aren’t I? On the other hand I keep telling myself that it’s possible to enjoy yourself any old day of the year, that a birthday isn’t your one shot at a fun time (see, when it’s written like that my squirminess seems really ridiculous); and besides, two interesting things are happening: on my birthday itself the government will be making its final decision on whether marriage equality will go ahead in New Zealand. Which is a very big deal for a whole layer cake of reasons. Don’t make this a Justin Bieber-esque “worst birthday”, oh politicians. Plus, as Tim and I have solemnly vowed not to get married until marriage equality goes ahead, anything could happen! Surprise wedding! (There will be no surprise wedding. I’m terrible at bluffing, I promise I’m telling the truth.) Oh, and the next day, I am getting a tattoo! Wheeee! So far everyone I’ve mentioned it to has been either very excited, or, more amusingly, very politely reserved and pleasant and smiling brightly about it. I have not had anyone say “how will you get a job you’re ruining your life and why, why?” but just in case, I have some answers at the ready:

– I’m doing it for the attention
– Because I’m very influenced by the Spice Girls (these two reasons admittedly apply easily to other areas of my life, but not this one)
– I want it. It’s my body and I am in control of it, and isn’t it lovely to just want to do something and then do it? What is the point? And when did you last enjoy someone questioning what you do with your body?

I can’t wait. I can almost feel it. And what am I actually getting tattooed? No big, just a picture of Tim’s face, on my face. To scale.

Ha! I’ve joked about that so often that I’m now scared someone will overhear me and think it’s what I really want and organise it for a birthday present or something. Uh, no, what I’m getting is a cat, on my left thigh. I can already feel some “uhhh-huh” from here (and also some “oooh”, I see you cat fiends of the internet) and I don’t know, it’s just what I want. It came to me in a feverish vision one sleepless night in New York in October, and it has stuck with me so persistently that I decided I’d like it to stick with me literally.

My friend Ange (for whom the Twin Peaks party tolls) has officially left Wellington. I’m terrible at goodbyes, I mean even on the smallest scale, I just never want the party to be over. So there is much wallowingly sad sadness. But also a small bit of selfish delight, because she is letting Tim and I booksit her library.

This is maybe a fifth of the books she gave us.
I used to be the most intensely voracious reader as a child. But these days, with sleep feeling like a waste of time and a million things to write, reading hasn’t been a thing I’ve done all that regularly, apart from my monthly book group chosen text. And yet, like Ange had cast a spell on them or something, last week I read four whole books. They consumed me as I consumed them. Taking a trip in another person’s brain for a while, I’d forgotten how good it can be. And that all-consuming need to pick up the book whenever you get a spare moment – it has been too long.

Here’s what I’ve read over the last week:

The Book of Proper Names, by Amelie Nothomb. I yelled “OH MY GOD” after finishing this. It’s incredible. I also related to the main character in many ways. The main character was five years old for a lot of the book.

How to Breathe Underwater, by Julie Orringer. Devastating short stories, just the kind I like with sticky hot summers and awkward teenagers and some religious theory. One story was so weirdly close to home I wanted lie under a table and cry after reading it.

Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay. Dreamy and sinister and full of girlhood and intense friendships and sorrow. Might be too scared to see the movie adaptation, though.

Bonjour Tristesse, by Francoise Sagan. Not nearly as scandalous as the rather skittish blurb on my copy made out, but beautifully worded and excellently sybaritic all the same.

Honourable mention: Who Was That Woman, Anyway? by Aorewa McLeod, which I read for book group on easter Monday. Cantered through it, absolutely loved it.

There are a small number of blogs I really, really read all the time. Le Projet D’Amour is one, as the writing is riveting and the author, Hila, is always writing things I want to, or didn’t know I wanted to, read about. My acquiring all these books coincided with my reading Hila’s post about the Women Writers Reading Group, and her post about the statistics regarding authors who are women – spoiler alert, their books aren’t reviewed or highly regarded as much as those by men. I’d been trying to actively read more books written by women anyway, but this was, like stirring miso paste into scrambled eggs, a delicious intensifier of what was already happening.

I’ve been txting and tweeting Ange to ask her to continually tell me which book I should read next from her collection, partly because I’m paralysed with indecision and partly because it makes me feel like I’m in a beautiful movie or something about books and hushed correspondence and rainy days (oh, you know what I mean) and so she recommended the first two on the list. Picnic and Bonjour Tristesse are also hers, both of which I chose for myself by picking them up absentmindedly and then suddenly coming to and finding myself sitting on the floor uncomfortably, halfway through reading them. The next one she recommended is Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. The weather is getting icy colder and I am daydreaming about packaging myself in a soft, soft quilt and reading this book. Even right now, while I’m typing. Which is why it took me so long to write this paragraph.

Read anything good lately? I bet Ange has it in the pile she gave us.
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Title via: Rose’s Turn, the terrifying break-down ending of the musical Gypsy, the King Lear of musicals. The ageless unicorn Bernadette Peters, all raspy brittleness and witchy power, is one of my favourites in this role. Which reminds me, I have a Gypsy Rose Lee biography to read…
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Music lately:

The Four Tops, Reach Out (I’ll Be There). So achingly perfect. And I am never not endeared by the “rrrrah!” at the start of the first verse.

I watched Pitch Perfect again over the weekend with friends, and yes, there’s a lot problematic about it but ugh, so much good. Some stuff, too good. Anyway, I’ve been watching this clip over and over and over again since, and am not ‘fraid to admit it (I really tried to like the original T-Pain song that it’s covering but it’s just too empty without the allure of a cappella.)

Sara Ramirez (of Grey’s Anatomy but also a Tony Award winning Broadway star) has the most killer voice. Here she is singing a song that always makes my heart melt like an ice cream on a hot sidewalk: Meadowlark.
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Next time: Ange also gave/lent us that bodacious babe Ottolenghi’s new cookbook Jerusalem. It’s really, really exciting. I want to make every last thing in it. 

just pay me back with one thousand kisses

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I love Easter so much. The religion isn’t me, I swear the chocolate eggs deteriorate in quality every year, but a four day weekend with its reassuring semi-endlessness and total absorption of those late Sunday afternoon blues – it is unalloyed bliss. Catching up on sleep has been my main objective and I’ve been mildly successful, which is comparatively wildly successful considering how I usually sleep. It is great. Of course, not every day can be a restorative weekend, but it’s a start. In other “it’s a start” news, I bought some iron pills recently, suspecting that a downward swing in my mood and significant lethargy might partly have that to blame (“Tim, which of these iron pills are the best value for money, I’m too low in iron to work it out, I need some oh-the-irony pills hahahaaha but really”) and I think they’re helping somewhat in that vague way that iron does. I mean sometimes I just want to kick myself – I found myself saying to Tim that I felt like I was languishing and not achieving anything. To which he, with predictable logic, replied “you’ve written a cookbook which is being published later this year”. And I said something to the effect of “yeah, but…gah.” See? Hopefully iron pills can solve all of that. (Oh, I know they won’t solve everything. That’s what my omega-3 pills are for!) Anyway, that’s enough of the weekly Laura’s Brain Bulletin. Where was I? I love time off, ever so much.

I’ve ended up relatively busy this weekend, but with all this spare time one’s thoughts can’t help but turn to goddamn folly. And so, just because I felt like it and could do it, I decided to bake something from one of my very, very old cookbooks. I have a few of them, and I adore them for reasons that I’ve gone over before, but in case you’re new here – it’s their chronicling of history through what people ate or aspired to eat, it’s the crisply knowledgeable language, the occasional sincerely-delivered but horrifying-sounding recipe, and the many truly brilliant recipes. Like these kisses.

Which I admit, I was largely motivated to make because of the name. Kisses. Just that. Up with kisses, I say. I mean, isn’t kissing just the best? A top five, nay, top three activity? Not to be sweepingly generalistic: you might hate kissing for a number of reasons. To clarify, I’m simply musing rhetorically at myself. Like Homer Simpson with a thought bubble above his head. I then ignore the rhetoricalness and nod emphatically in response. So yes – I was drawn in for fairly shallow reasons, in that the cakes reminded me of stuff I like. But I wouldn’t have made the recipe if it didn’t sound like the end result would be as delicious as the name. Quickly mixed together buttery sponge, made helium-light with a lot of cornflour, spoonfuls of which are briefly baked and sandwiched together with jam. Just impractical and yet also just practical enough for me.

Shiny, untouchable table in the background. 

Tim, who seems to be appearing an awful lot in this blog post, also saw an opportunity this long weekend, and has been sanding down and varnishing the old table that we bought second-hand earlier this year. This means many things: Our house was covered in a fine layer of dust for a while. For a couple of hours every day there are some strongly medicinal varnish fumes emanating from the table. And…we’re not allowed to use it for a week. At first I was slightly put out (“don’t you know who I am? I need my attractively distressed table to photograph food on!” was definitely not said) but the push towards not doing my same-old same-old attractively distressed table photography of food was no bad thing.

 …Yes, I did move the flowers from the benchtop with the bowl of mixture and cookbook over to this table. Purely for the sake of the photo. I care not. (I care so much. Please like me!) (I actually don’t care) 

This recipe comes from an Aunt Daisy recipe book that belonged to one of my great-grandmothers. It is full of handwritten notes that I can barely read, because apparently inscrutable calligraphy was the style of the time. But still, I enjoy looking over those notes, trying to get more of a picture of this woman that I never met. The recipe for Kisses had something characteristically unfathomable written beside it. I considered my attention doubly caught.

Kisses

From Aunt Daisy’s recipe book. If you’re not from these parts, Aunt Daisy is not related to me. I got thirteen pairs out of this, plus one rogue extra. As always, the recipe is simpler than I make it look. 

225g soft butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 cup cornflour
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
Jam of your choice for sandwiching together, about a heaped teaspoon per pair

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and line an oven tray with baking paper. 

Briskly mix the butter and sugar together till light and fluffy. Add the eggs and continue to beat the mixture till it’s all combined. It will possibly look a little scrambled at this stage, but the flour will set it right, don’t worry. Tip in the cornflour, flour and baking powder and carefully stir together – cornflour is lighter than anything and has a tendency to fly into the air in dusty clouds at the slightest agitation. 

Drop spoonfuls about the size of a walnut in its shell onto the baking tray – the mixture is very soft, so you won’t actually be able to get them into a perfectly spherical shape, but using one spoon to scoop up the mixture and another to push it off worked fine for me. Bake them for ten minutes, until the balls have flattened somewhat and are a little brown around the edges. Give them a little space to spread – which does mean you can only bake half the mixture at a time. It’s kind of a pain, but on the other hand, that ten minutes does go fast. Allow them to cool before placing a spoonful of jam on the flat side of one cake and sticking the flat side of another one on top of it. 

There’s nothing like cake and jam to make you feel like you’re in an Enid Blyton novel – the good bits, where they had picnics and midnight feasts and camaraderie and talked of vocations and “putting on a show” and had names like Darrell, and Wilhelmina “Bill” Robinson, and Daffy Hope. Not the old-timey sexism/racism/classism bits. The cornflour makes the cakes tender and a little melting upon the tongue, but these are sturdy creations, an indelicate handful of buttery cake giving way to sweet, sweet jam and back to buttery cake again. I used the two jams I found in the fridge – Te Horo raspberry jam, and plum jam made for me by a materteral family friend. If you’re not into jam, there’s nothing stopping you sticking these together with any number of things – thick lemon curd, whipped cream, ganache, and so on. 

Also: the mixture itself is really delicious. Its deliciousness is indubitably the reason that there was a solo cake without a pair when I’d finished baking these. The lesson being, “if you’re going to eat the mixture, try to eat just the right amount so you’re not left with a leftover cake without a pair which you can then eat anyway, so really do whatever you like”. Probably easier to not eat the mixture at all, but it does taste particularly good and there’s something about Aunt Daisy saying “bake in a quick oven” without even specifying how long for (ten minutes was a lucky guess on my behalf) that makes me confident the mixture can stand having its quantities tampered with by my eating some of it.

So recently Google Reader shut up shop. I ignored it entirely till last year, finally started using it in a flurry of new-car-smell novelty, and then ended up subscribing to far too many blogs and ignoring it again. But darn it if it didn’t have its place in my life, since it has taken me an embarrassingly long time to remember all the blogs I used to read on it now that it’s gone. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, basically reading a lot of blogs can be a little taxing to the modern brain, so Google Reader lets you view them all in one place – a bit like subscribing to a lot of newspapers and magazines which then arrive on your doorstep every morning, rather than having to go to the shops every day to buy them all individually. Useful, no? Anyway, in case you’re shuffling around listlessly in its absence, I recommend Bloglovin. I don’t love its name (it’s no Kisses!) but it’s a lot cleaner and better looking than Google Reader, and something about it makes me want to read a lot more blog posts than I ever did. And if you want to subscribe to hungryandfrozen.com using it, she says waggling her sunglasses, why simply click here! Don’t miss a single self-absorbed paragraph or strategically placed vase of flowers!
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Title via: I’ll Cover You, a song from RENT, the musical that I named this blog for. It’s one of the lovelier songs not only in that musical but also in the existence of song. And I never, ever exaggerate.
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Music lately:

Etta James, Something’s Got A Hold Of Me. I’m going to sound a bit ancient when I say this, but as people are always mistaking me for being ten years younger than I am I think it’ll all even out: there’s a modern, dancy-type song that samples the first bit of this, and it’s really pretty cool. But oh damn, there is nothing like Etta’s boundlessly soaring voice and utterly sexy growl when she sings this.

Alma Cogan, Never Do A Tango With An Eskimo. Speaking of folly, or genius, I rewatched all twelve episodes of The Hour on Friday with some friends. We did not stop. We drank whisky. It was utterly excellent and also unsurprisingly kinda draining. Anyway, this song is performed in it and while it’s completely absurd, as befits a novelty song of the fifties, it’s also…it just embeds itself in your brain. I looked up the original version and found one Alma Cogan, a very interesting woman with a seriously endearing laugh in her voice. Which can embiggen even the most ridiculous song, it seems.
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Next time: took an easter break on the I Should Tell You interviews, but there’ll be another one next Friday. Not guaranteeing that I’ll get my act together and blog before then, but I’ll try.