plush velvet sometimes, sometimes just pretzels and beer, but i’m here

February 26, 2013March 11, 202015 Comments

Just like the great Alanis Morrissette, my grasp of what is actual irony may well be as shady as my enjoyment of saying “isn’t it ironic” is fervent. But it does seem ironic or something how I am so tired that my brain feels like someone pressed pause on a video of a fallen ceramic vase smashing into a thousand pieces, and my brain is that vase, fragile and perpetually shattering. And according to this “today in your social media history” app I have, on this day last year I was tweeting about feeling the exact same way. That’s not the ironic bit, although it is…something. What I consider the isn’t it ironic don’t you think bit, is how I was writing about it for three long paragraphs here when suddenly, I literally couldn’t tell if I was just very tired, and therefore unable to continue reading and writing it, or so bored by my lifeless writing that I was falling asleep. And so I deleted the lot and forced myself to start again. So here we are.

I do remember a high school English teacher telling us that irony was a lot like sarcasm, and feeling unfamiliar confusion, like I’d accidentally wandered into a maths class. Isn’t it more like…rain on your wedding day? Ironically – I think? – these days I really wouldn’t mind if it rains on my wedding day. The point is: you are always correct in using the word ‘ironic’, but only if you say it with confident authority. And also, I am very, very tired and underslept. Partly from doing work on my cookbook proof – exciting! And partly from being not very talented at sleeping. Which is less exciting.

Somewhere out there, Alanis Morrisette is quietly googling her own name out of idle curiousity, and sighing heavily.

Earlier this year I had the inexplicable but thank-goodness-it-was-me-not-someone-else honour of being named one of New Zealand’s People of Influence for 2013 by a major nationwide publication. Not to try and pre-empt eyerolls or anything, and I said this at the time, but I didn’t quite realise when I submitted my interview the nature of where it was going to end up. Hence why I’m talking about stuff like pretzels in it. But y’know, if I had my time over, my words would likely still be the same. Pretzels are so important. And I decided that since I’d said they were going to be a Big Deal this year, it was time to put my money where my mouth is by doing more than just putting pretzels where my mouth is.

And I made Caramel Pretzel Ice Cream.

Possibly you were under the impression that pretzels were to be tipped into a bowl and eaten absent-mindedly till all that rock salt and mouth-drying crispness makes you gaspingly thirsty? Well, that’s still a reasonable use for them, but in a move that seems unsurprising in hindsight (I see you, chocolate dipped potato crisps) they’re propelled into a whole other stratosphere of deliciousness by the presence of sugar. And while they’re part of the cracker family more or less, something very specific about the dense crunchy texture and intense saltiness and rich, slightly malty (I think?) flavour makes pretzels my food of choice for this. Also, they have a cool shape. No mere circle they.

This is going to sound like a stupid thing to say on my own blog (well, considering some of the things I’ve said here, maybe a stupider thing), but this probably isn’t the very best pretzel ice cream out there. I could make one that’s more technical and involves a lot more steps and ingredients. It would be superior to this one – but this one you can make in about ten minutes. I tried making a more complicated one first and screwed it up every step of the way – overboiling the sugar, burning the pretzels – and once I’d calmed down from the waste of ingredients and significant dent to my self-esteem, I wanted to try again but make it as simple as possible, to put as few hurdles as possible between you and the finished product. And here it is. And it’s incredible.

Caramel Pretzel Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

I’d like to point out while this is an original recipe it’s not an original concept: a brief perusal of Pinterest’s woeful search function will bring up a squillion recipes for this, but for what it’s worth, I didn’t look at any of them. Just went with my instincts. Which will sometimes lead me astray, but not with ice cream. I’d also like to acknowledge the mighty Christina Tosi of the Momofuku restaurant empire, whose genius pretzel-milk infusion may well have kicked off this resurgence in the first place. I can’t say for sure, but I do know researching it would make me really hungry.

1 1/2 cups pretzels
1 tablespoon butter
3 tablespoons sugar
500ml (2 cups) cream
4 tablespoons brown sugar

In a decent-sized pot or pan, heat up the butter and the 3 tablespoons of sugar. Don’t stir, just let it slowly dissolve and melt and bubble up. Once the mixture starts to turn an amber, whisky-ish colour, remove it from the heat and tip in the pretzels. Stir quickly to coat them, then tip them out onto a piece of baking paper on a baking tray. Scrape out as much syrup as possible onto them, then let them cool a little.

Whisk the cream with the brown sugar till thickened significantly but not actually whipped – still liquidy but thick enough to leave a hint of a trailing line behind the whisk when you move it through the cream.

Using a large knife, roughly chop the sugary pretzels into shards and fold it into the cream. Scrape the lot into a loaf tin or container of roughly a litre. Freeze, without stirring.

If like me, you’re the boundlessly instagrammin’ kind, I recommend reserving a few of the choicest, shiniest caramelised pretzels for decoration as I did here. Also their extra crunch is welcome initially. After a day or so, the ice cream absorbs more of the caramel and the salt, and just gets better and better.

If you’ve never encountered this combination before I understand your suspicion. Beer accompaniments in cream? What now? But be not scared of this. Between the inseparable excellence of caramel and salt together, the roasty flavour that the pretzels bring, and their soft crunch as they slowly disintegrate into the frozen cream, it’s not so much delicious as a head rush in every spoonful.

I heedlessly sat the parfait spoon inside this shallow dish to take a photo: this is approximately three seconds after the spoon’s long handle overbalanced, flinging itself off the table onto the floor below.

On Saturday night myself and some other good friends went to see Cat Power at the Town Hall. It’s partly experience and partly my curmudgeon tendencies but I always set myself up for a fall with live music – there are just so many variables that can go wrong. Being short, I am sighingly prepared to see nothing (like – full circle! – when I barely saw Alanis Morrissette at the Supertop in 1996.) Being nervous, I anticipate seething, punchy crowds. The artist will be late. They’ll be grumpy. I’ll get tired. Someone will spill cheap beer on me. And so on. But Cat Power’s show was one of the most beautiful that I’ve ever had the luck to be at – the kind of show where you turn to the friend next to you and do that “increduluous eye contact shaking the head what is even happening” kind of face. She was powerful, generous, hilarious, charming. Oh my gosh I sound so earnest right now (powerful?) but truly – she continuously stalked the stage from left to right so that everyone got to see her, she threw flowers at the audience (including one up to the balcony, where it calmly sailed upwards into the hand of opening act Watercolours, as if by magic) and her voice, complemented by that of her backup singers, was as warm and scratchy like a soft wooly jumper as ever. I, um, may have cried a little. Very earnestly.

This is Tim’s instagram. Hold your seething, we weren’t standing there with our phones up the whole time blocking everyone’s view – she was just so close that it was impossible not to hastily snap a photo for remembrance. I’m one of you, I hate those people too!

PS: I tried making pretzel-fried chicken too. What I ended up with wasn’t quite right, but the shadow of perfection was there. And let me exaggeratedly pretend-heroically assure you, I will make so much fried chicken till I get it right.

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Title: Sondheim’s I’m Still Here. I like Eartha Kitt’s version best. Actually I just like Eartha Kitt best.
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Music lately:

Someone recently asked if I’d heard much Nina Nastasia, and I was all, of course, I went through a stage of listening to John Peel compilations. But I was compelled to listen anew, especially when I saw she has a song called Counting Up Your Bones. It’s as good as its title promises.

Brand New Key, Melanie Safka. This song was played on Saturday night by a friend who clearly has exceptional taste in music as I’m now a bit obsessed with it. Don’t let the fact that Wikipedia describes it as a “novelty hit in 1970-71” put you off.

Ever ready to be obsessed with a song, another friend introduced me to another new tune to adore to pieces: Mountain Man, Play It Right. Why doesn’t everyone sing in three part harmony?
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Next time: Probably another I Should Tell You interview. Which means it will be Friday! Best.

that dizzy dancing way you feel as every fairy tale comes real

February 19, 2013March 11, 202010 Comments

I felt a little drunk from tiredness today. Which is why somehow it took me so long to shape this blog post. Even though the recipe can be summed up in four words: sprinkles on buttered bread. Self-frustration is not good for self-editing. But here I finally am.

Not to sound like a 90s stand-up comedian but what is the deal with spam comments these days? They’re coming towards me thick and swift. I could change my blog settings but the codes to decipher before commenting are getting as complicated and unreadable as the spambots are blithely persistent. So in the interest of not putting off nice commenters, since said comments are so seriously delightful to receive, I instead choose to duel with the spambots. My deal-questioning though, lies squarely with that which the spambots peddle. Back in the early days of this blog, it was very easy to catch them. Y’know, :::::free viagara here::::, they’d say. Now they’re more subtle. More conversational. One spambot actually, and quite sinisterly, complained about the presence of spam. I like to look at is the “click on my website” bit of the comment. That’s how you know they’re spam, and that’s where things get weird. Well, weirder than me casually interacting with communication sent to me by robots.

Some of them are obvious – the sites they’re pushing me towards have names like “Get followers”; “Make fast money”; “Free poker game”, and with some inevitability, “Find out more about ejaculation guru”.

But there are the ones that make me say “what’s the deal with this?” I just wonder, who on this earth is out there behind the following websites that I have been urged to visit?

“Emergency plumbers in Birmingham”
“10th birthday party ideas”
“Cooking frozen lobster tails”
“Stretching exercises to increase your height” (admittedly, this might fall under the viagara category)
“Toe rings white gold”
And my favourite: “Cliffs of Moher pictures”.
Wait, this is my favourite – being directed to a website called “make the truck your office.”

I mean…this spam is more endearing than some people I know.

I really do find that kinda hilarious, but maybe the reason I doth protest too much about misguided spambots is that this recipe for fairy bread not only hilariously simple…it’s also that for a lot of people in New Zealand, this is more equivalent to a reminder on a post-it note. The concept of fairy bread has been around for so long that I feel like I should say “recipe” in scare quotes. As for people out of New Zealand who have never had fairy bread, it may appear to have all the flavour and appeal of eating a reminder written on a post-it note.

On Sunday I suddenly felt like eating Fairy Bread. So I made it. There was a delicate and delicious balance between the nostalgia for that which I ate as a child and the grown-up joy of doing as I damn well please.

So in case you’ve never heard of it, or you just need a reminder, here is the recipe. (I wrote and deleted quote marks around the word recipe literally eight times just now.)

Fairy Bread

White bread
Butter
Hundreds and thousands sprinkles (rainbow sprinkles)

Cut the crusts from the bread, or not. As you can see from the photos I’ve rakishly given myself both options. Butter the bread fairly thickly. Carefully tip over the sprinkles. Eat. (Allowing for sprinkle overflow to occur, they can’t all get indented into the butter.)

To paraphrase sweet Wesley from Princess Bride, we are people of action, lies do not become us. I cannot lie: this is really, really good. However, I don’t want to imply in any way that I invented this, firstly because I didn’t – it has been around since long before I was born and will surely outlive us all. And secondly because I’m not sure even my rainbows-and-sugar-loving brain could come up with something so simple and brilliant. I’m also not implying that you have no idea how to make this. It’s just – like I said – a reminder. Just not implying anything, okay? Other that “yeah Fairy Bread!”

But what does it even taste like? Beautiful though they may be, hundreds and thousands are more or less flavourless. They’re just mildly sugary. The appeal lies partly in eating a staple of the children’s birthday party and partly in the delicious unfolding layers of texture – the crunch of cavity-occupying tiny sprinkles embedded in the salty yielding butter, and the bread all thin and airy and soft.

And it’s really, divertingly, eye-flirtingly super pretty. Which, if the movies taught me anything, I bitterly concede counts for a lot.

So apart from louchely eating sprinkles on buttered bread, what else have I been trying my hand at?

My cookbook proof arrived. The name is appropriate, its existence is hard evidence to me that I didn’t just dream the last year. Right now I’m working deep into the night writing notes on it and making sure everything is as perfect as it can be, with the assistance of the book’s photographers and stylist (and my friends!) Kim, Jason and Kate. It was like the montage days of the cookbook photoshoots getting together with them last night to go over this. The old gang! Back for one last job! It’s also why this blog post took its sweet time getting to you. Proofing the proof hurts my brain. (PS: the cookbook isn’t coming out till later this year. If you read this blog, there is no way you can possibly miss it, because I will be justifiably talking about it a lot.)

I went to Webstock, which is this super-exciting conference held in Wellington every February. I had a brilliant time and left feeling all full of knowledge and inspiration and singularly brilliant catering. There were some specific things that were not cool (which became escalatingly troubling – and is outlined here by my friend Jo who also went) like some eye-rolling events of a dudebro-related nature. But there were also amazing people to meet or catch up with and incredible speakers like Karen McGrane and Adam Greenfield and Kelli Anderson (who gave me a new life goal: successfully pull off a heist.) The organisers do a breathtaking job and I’m now a tiny bit withdrawal-y that it’s over.

And, my glasses arrived! As a late-onset glasses wearer, everything that is second nature to Tim, who has had them since way back, is enchantingly novel to me. I’m all, “Hey! My glasses just steamed up when I opened the oven!” “Guess what! I went to push my glasses further up on my nose but they weren’t even there!” “I have glasses!” And so on. I…actually nearly cried when I picked them up, I could just see everything so much better and my eyes felt so relaxed. Now, a couple of days in, I’m still getting used to their presence – it’s like constantly having a cat sitting on your lap or something, how you can drift in and out of consciousness of its pressure against your body.

I really adore the look of hundreds and thousands sprinkles. I didn’t think I could love them more than I did, but they really look good through my glasses. The crispest rainbow ever. It’s a small thing, but it’s strangely exciting. But I think better than all of that, even better than food looking more beautiful…is how, because I have to use them for reading and computer work, I feel like Homer Simpson putting on his glasses when he does his Serious Business.
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title via: A poignant-as comedown from all that food colouring, Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now.
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music lately:

Elastica, Stutter. Too, too cool. Sigh.

Garbage, Only Happy When It Rains. Also too, too cool. Also, missing their Wellington show. All of the sighs.

M.I.A, Bad Girls. Never not obsessed. Never not losing the ability to make proper sentences about cool women making really great music too, apparently.
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Next time: I stand by my fairy bread! But I promise a really, really complicated recipe to make up for the laughableness of this one.

creature creature, my own double feature

February 12, 2013March 11, 202013 Comments

Y’know, I will gently snark about the Baby-sitters Club series in a loving way till my dying breath, but sometimes, in hindsight, they really got it wrong: according to the BSC, wearing glasses = The Worst. They kept brightly exclaiming things like “Mallory’s got glasses and braces, but we still like her/she’ll look okay one day/she actually managed to get a sort-of boyfriend!” I guess Karen Brewer of the Little Sister spin-off was glasses-proud but I never did like those books – who wants to read about seven year olds when you could read about the (more or less literally) impossible, sophisticated exploits of that most worldly and cool age group, thirteen year olds? What I’m saying is – I found out recently that I need glasses. And, in your face Ann M Martin and inevitable ghostwriters: I’m really happy about it. I’d been getting headaches and tender, weary eyeballs in front of the computer (which, between this blog and work, I’m attached to at the face for 90% of my life.) It never occurred to me that I had anything other than brilliant eyesight. I may have even boasted, nay, crowed about it on occasion. But the bafflingly crisp, clear world around me when I tried on the right lenses and the utter relaxation of my face in the region from my under-eye rings to my eyebrows convinced me that I actually am pretty long-sighted. Also the optician told me so.

So, in ten working days, these will be my new face. Minus the price sticker. And I can’t wait! Glasses are cool! Speccy is sexy! Frames get the dames! Lenses get the menses! (oh wait god no I didn’t say that one.)

It doesn’t always come together: over the last couple of weeks I’ve been out of the house so much that I’ve hardly cooked dinner at all. Movies. (Jessica Chastain’s magnificent face starring in Zero Dark Thirty). Drinks. Other drinks. Burger rings and snacks and a marathon of the most important cinema franchise of our generation: The Fast and the Furious. Dinners out with friends. Sybaritic weekends. And…bank balance plummeting as a result. It all seemed fairly simple when I got my job – we’d pay off our post-America credit card so soon! We’d get tattoos! We’d put money away for our wedding! Even though we’re waiting for marriage equality laws to pass, weddings are expensive enough that we might as well start saving now.) But no. Things kept happening. Moving costs. Furniture. More furniture. Glasses. Spontaneous good times. Some self-enforced laying low is maybe in order. But I do love good times…

I cook pasta more than anything else already, but it’s what I turn to with vigour when we’re trying to just eat from what’s in the cupboard without spending any extraneous pennies. Pasta can handle being simple – just cook it, stir in a few things, and you have a plausible meal, a meal that looks like it took some care, and like someone cares.

That said, these two recipes are so uninvolved and small that they almost don’t exist. The sort of thing you can really only cook for yourself, or someone you know well enough that you could defame them with the secrets only you keep about them (as others might say, someone you trust.) It’s just, many might be perturbed by how utterly little there is happening on their plate. And so, I worry for your self-esteem. I’m pretty sure these are nay-sayer-deflectingly delicious, but still. I can’t guarantee someone won’t say “where’s the rest of dinner?” or something.

Pasta with Burnt Cream and Basil

A recipe by myself. I made this by cooking the cream in this adorably small, dinky red pot. It boiled over furiously, twice, and made an appalling mess on the stovetop. Use a slightly bigger pot, please. I guess I could just call it Pasta with Cream and Basil, as it’s more scalded and boiled than burnt. But I am fanciful, and I fancy that Burnt Cream sounds fancy.

200g dried spaghetti
250ml (1 cup) cream
A handful of fresh basil leaves

Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil. Once it’s bubbling away, tip in the pasta and cook according to packet instructions. Probably 10-12 minutes. In another good-sized saucepan, bring the cream to the boil and allow it to simmer away for a good five to ten minutes. Keep an eye on it and stir often. Cream bubbles up fast. Drain the pasta once it’s cooked, pour over the cream and stir it through along with the basil leaves. The sauce will still be very liquid and creamy – as you can see in the photo – but should have reduced in quantity somewhat.

Pasta with Tomato, Wine and Butter Sauce

A recipe by myself. Yeah canned tomatoes!

200g dried spaghetti
50g butter
125ml (1/2 cup) leftover white wine – or a little less if that’s all you have.
1 can cherry tomatoes (or chopped canned tomatoes)
A little olive oil

Cook the pasta according to packet instructions in a large pan of boiling salted water. In a medium sized pot, bring the butter and wine to the boil, then tip in the canned tomatoes and their juice. Allow to simmer for another five minutes – it will be pretty liquid – then pour over the cooked, drained pasta and stir carefully. Pour over some olive oil if you fancy the flavour.

I didn’t even intend to blog about the second recipe here, as you can probably tell from the last-minute, near-empty, Final Girl cherry tomato nature of the photos of it. But I was also well aware of the fact that I had nothing to blog about, and in fact that it might not be the worst thing in the world to write a post about my regular fallback of pasta-and-stuff. The burnt cream pasta might sound sinister, but all you’re doing is reducing down the cream so that everything incredible about its flavour – that buttery clean richness – is deepened and intensified and more wonderful than ever. I specify leftover white wine in the tomato pasta recipe because that’s what I used – should you find an inch of wine leftover after a party don’t throw it out! Wine seems to add insta-mystique to a meal, giving a elusive elegance and layering of flavour to whatever you add it to. In this case it cuts through the butter, points up the acidic nature of the tomatoes, and is just generally delicious.

Another drawn-on page in the ever-growing flip book that is our new flat: we finally hung up all our posters and prints. I love it.

Speaking of that which I love, I was interviewed recently by Fairfax Media, and it was published in several regional newspapers. If you like, you can read it here (right click on the image, open in new tab, zoom in). I just love being interviewed. More, if you please, world!

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Title via: The White Stripes, White Moon from their album Get Behind Me Satan. This song is beauteous enough as is, but as the closing scene to their documentary Under Great White Northern Lights? Devastasting. So much so that I’m going to dramatically not even link to it because it makes me so stupidly emotional. (It’s really easy to find on YouTube though.)
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Music lately:

Mary J Blige, Family Affair. Forgot how much I love this song. The beat and melody is kinda addictive to the ear, the lyrics are sternly positive, and the dance routine in the video is awesomely unhinged. And it has the word “hateration” in it.

Willemijn Verkaik is going to be the first person to play Wicked’s Elphaba in three different languages (German, Dutch, English) when she takes to Broadway this month. So very envious of people getting to see her, she’s unbelievable. I mean, you have to be fairly amazing to play the throat-challenging belt-fest that is Elphaba, but she’s one of my favourites. Here she is simply rehearsing No Good Deed (for the Stuttgart production, so in German) but being heart-stoppingly incredible.
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Next time: Another installment of my I Should Tell You interviews, with Dear Time’s Waste. Lucky me! Lucky you!

cause i bake the cake, then take the cake

February 4, 2013March 11, 20208 Comments

Show me a candle and I’ll try and burn both ends of it. In case that phrase and concept is not familiar to you, I feel I should explain that it is not because I’m of a generation that has only grown up with artificial light and therefore is all “what is this waxy tube and how’s it going to help me? Me, of the me-generation?” No, what I mean is that I’ll stay up late but also get up very early in order to do what I need to do. It helps that I’m somehow both a night owl and a morning person. At Tim’s and my old flat of three and half years – which we adored, by the way – this would mean sitting bolt upright in bed when my alarm went off, and slowly becoming slouchier as I typed away on my laptop in bed. No lights but that from the laptop itself and the slowly rising sun.

But here, in our new house, where it’s just us, I can quietly pad out of bed (inevitably locating the one piece of bubble wrap in the house by standing on it, which happened yesterday) fold myself up on one of our couches in a straight-backed manner, turn on the kitchen light, maybe even make myself a cup of tea. This morning there’s delicious rain on the roof. I can’t curb my candle-burning tendencies, but it sure is a lot nicer to do it here. Possibly a literal candle would be nice touch, even. My mum did in fact get me an oil burner as a housewarming gift (with two scented oils, “wellbeing” and “I’m worried about you get some sleep already” if I remember rightly) so it’s not out of the question. Strangely enough receiving that gift took me back to my attempted spell-casting youth. Where for a long time my favourite activity was hanging out at the 100-199 nonfiction section of the library, getting out particular books, and then lighting specifically coloured candles to heat patchouli and ylang ylang oil in the hopes that it would make something happen. (Patchouli and ylang ylang were the only two oils I could afford as an unemployed twelve year old, so basically everything I tried had to use them. As a result, all that really did happen was I was going around smelling like curtains from the seventies that had been stored in a camphor chest.)

Things keep happening to make this still-new place even more of a home. This week, our our new table – well, it’s new to us, but apparently very well loved by the family we bought it off, shadows of whom remain in the grain of the wood. A water stain here, a gouged-out dent from a truculent miscreant there, some glitter embedded in the varnish over in one corner, (which feels like a good sign). All these are things that might’ve happened with me around anyway, so, much as a brand new table would be delightful, it’s nice to have this lived-in one, and to not feel like I have to be nervous around it. Indeed, there’s enough I’m too nervous about already.

A table like this needs a cake on it, I said, being the logical pragmatist that I am. In my mind. In my defense, Tim and four others were playing the boardgame of Game of Thrones on Sunday, and since that game chews through your energy at a surprising rate for a large piece of cardboard with several small plastic game tokens – at one point someone expressed their sincere wish for nerve-calming sedatives because the game was too much of a rollercoaster ride of thrills – providing some sustenance made sense. When it comes to Game of Thrones I’m simply a Watcher (the capital W makes it seem more sinister!) though I have also started reading them as well – much as I’m not sure I love the books, damned if I can put them down once I pick them up. The board game…not my thing. Maybe not enough Khaleesi being all amazing with dragons? On a screen? Who knows, but I’m happy to have a rock-solid cake-excuse (of course, there’s always the most rock-solid reason of all: I want cake.)

It’s high summer so plums are around in abundance and really cheap. If you’re somehow sick of just sitting there eating them while their sticky juice runs down your face in determined rivulets, this chocolate plum cake with sour cream icing is a good diversion – pretty exciting, but also calmingly straightforward to make. There is so little to it that you can have it in and out of the oven and ready to eat – if you leave it uniced – in about forty minutes. The sour cream icing was just something that I thought might be fun. It’s not quite the fluffy creation I envisaged but more of an alarmingly fast-moving icing that helpfully drips over the side of the cooled cake for you – still very, very delicious though.

Chocolate Plum Cake with Sour Cream Icing

I adapted the cake itself from this delightfully simple recipe I found. Otherwise: a recipe by me.

If you leave the icing off, this cake is dairy-free. If you ice it…with sour cream icing…it’s really not.

1/2 cup (125 ml) plain oil like rice bran or sunflower

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

3 ripe plums

4 tablespoons cocoa

1 cup flour

1 1/2 cups icing sugar

2 tablespoons sour cream (maybe a little more)

Set your oven to 160 C/320 F. Line the base of a 20cm springform caketin with baking paper.

Mix together the oil, sugar, and eggs till quite thick. Dice the flesh of the plums into 1 or 2cm cubes (just guess) and stir them in. Finally, fold in the cocoa and flour, scrape it into the caketin and bake for 40 minutes (though check at 30 minutes – your oven may be gruntier than mine.)

Serve now, or allow to cool completely and then ice. To make the icing, sift the icing sugar into a bowl – or it will be obstinately lumpy – then slowly stir in enough sour cream, two tablespoons should do, to make a thick yet quite runny icing. Tip most of it over the cooled cake, letting it run over the edges. Decorate with finely sliced dark chocolate if you’re a food blogger who worries that your drippy cake will look weird in photos but also thinks that the extra chocolate will taste nice.

The juicy tartness of the plums with the dark backdrop of damp chocolate cake is really something in itself, but it’s made all the more lush by a blanket of sticky sour cream icing (seriously, look at that photo. This icing is going wherever gravity will take it.) Sour cream has enough buttery thickness and tang (so nearly wrote titular tang but that felt wrong, even for me) to see off the icing sugar’s aggressive sweetness, but to also complement the intensity of the plums and chocolate. It’s even better the next day, when the icing has had time to settle in and the cake absorbs some of the plum juice. You could make this with any stone fruit really, but rich plums and earthy cocoa together are specifically wondrous.

Speaking of things that go well on our new table, and because I have exactly one minute to get ready for work and can’t think of another way to wrap this up: we finally, after living in Wellington since January 2006, spatula-d together enough Fly Buys points to cash them in on something. That something was a waffle iron. WORTH IT.
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Title via: Ummm, because I don’t swear on this blog I can’t actually repeat the title of the song that I’m quoting. But I can tell you it’s by Wu-Tang Clan and it’s reeeeeeally good.
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Music lately:

Franz Ferdinand, Eleanor Put Your Boots On. Never stopped loving them.

Blind Willie McTell, Come Around To My House Mama. A song of face-fanningly casual sauciness, considering McTell recorded it in 1929. (I know they had bawdy songs and stuff back then, but still: it’s so casual!)
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Next time: Probably another I Should Tell You interview. Good times!

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

January 29, 2013March 11, 202011 Comments

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

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

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

Tarator

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

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

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

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

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

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

Says it all, I believe.

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

Music lately:

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

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

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

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

love is just a dialogue, you can’t survive on ice cream

January 13, 2013March 11, 20208 Comments

Who am I, anyway? Asks Paul in the opening number of the wondrous musical A Chorus Line. I’ve been wondering the same this week. I guess it’s not surprising that lots of people go to the gym in January – if headlines in certain women’s magazines are anything to go by, there is literally no other choice of resolution for your new year – but for me it’s not so straightforward. As I said in my last blog post, I want bufty arms this year. I want to be able to lift things without making an involuntary “nghghghhh” noise and straining my neck. A month’s free trial gym membership came to my attention. It all made sense to sign up and try some classes and so on.

Without going too deeply into my long and complicated history of just being myself, I will say this: until very recently it was difficult for me to reconcile doing exercise with general enjoyment and feeling good. Exercise to me was either compulsory institutionalised punishment (PE class ahoy!) or self-enforced to burn maximum calories for as long as I could stand it. (I completely understand and appreciate that PE/gym class is really enjoyed by lots of people, and also that wanting to lose weight is a personal choice and exercise is a way of doing that.) To me, exercise was all tied up in unhappiness and distress. It was all very black and white. Interestingly, my years of dancing sat outside of exercise in my mind – that was to music, and telling a story, and using expression and emotion and acting. And fun. That running or cycling or punching a boxing bag or playing, I don’t know, football, could fulfill that same function for someone else – I couldn’t make that leap of understanding.

So anyway, as a result I was nervous about going to the gym, having never been to one before – what if I’m useless? What if I get panicky? What if it’s really cliquey and my pants are wrong? And…what if I forget that I’m just here for enjoyment and to get strong? Does that make sense? But in fact, it was fun challenging myself, and I had friends there beside me, and I felt comfortable pausing when my legs simply refused to lunge once more. And this morning my muscles were constricted and sore, but in a good way – reminding me of all the effort I put in yesterday and how bufty they’re going to be soon. Nevertheless, I found myself tweeting things along the lines of “going to the gym, who am I?” as if to reassure myself…that I was still myself. But who else could I possibly be.

If you’re seeking a small challenge yourself, maybe this ice cream could be it. A calm, easy recipe which makes just enough for one or two people, depending on whether or not you want to share. (I don’t really like to share, but Tim lives riiiiight here in the same house and it would’ve been a bit weird not to. Plus, sharing leads to compliments on your cooking abilities! Which is probably not the main reason you should be sharing things.) This is good if you’ve never made ice cream before and want to start small in case it all goes horribly wrong (it won’t, though.) Or if you have made ice cream before but have a tiny tiny freezer. Or if you only have a small amount of ingredients to hand and don’t want to go to the shop. Strange as it seems, there are a number of situations where a small quantity of ice cream can be just as advantageous as a large quantity.

Small Chocolate Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

Makes around 300ml. Am not very sure how well it would double – maybe if you’re feeling more ice-cream-confident, search through all my recipes on this blog for one to make, hey hey?

250ml (1 cup) cream
50g dark chocolate (I use Whittaker’s. Because I love its flavour like no other.)
1 tablespoon cocoa
1 tablespoon sugar
1 egg

Gently melt the chocolate and cream together in a pan on the stovetop, or gently microwave the chocolate in the microwave and then stir in the cream. Either way, go slow, because chocolate burns quickly and will go all gritty if it happens. The ice cream will still be fine, but…gritty.

Remove from the heat and stir in the cocoa and sugar. Which give it a further depth of chocolate flavour, and a little bitterness-counteracting sweetness.

Break the egg into a bowl and mix it up with a fork, so that the yolk and white are all incorporated. Stir in a tablespoon or two of the slightly cooled chocolate mixture, mixing briskly. Doing this allows the egg to absorb some of the heat of the chocolate mixture and blend with it thoroughly – if you pour in the entire pan of chocolate, you might not be able to mix it fast enough to stop the egg being cooked by the heat of the liquid. And that would taste nasty. Anyway: pour in the rest of the mixture, mixing continuously. Then divide into two freezer-proof bowls, or one small container. Freeze till quite solid. If you freeze it overnight, it’ll need to stand on the bench for five minutes or so to soften a little. Being so small, it does freeze quite quickly though. Yay!

The path to success here is very short and simple: this chocolate ice cream just tastes like chocolate ice cream. A little cocoa-bitter, a little sweet, creamy and very cold. And, as I found out this morning, it makes a really good breakfast.

Who am I, anyway? Am I my resume? sings Paul in A Chorus Line. As well as getting used to the fact that I am now a person who goes to the gym because it makes me feel good and strong and stuff, I’m also trying to settle my brain down from racing at a hundred miles an hour. Because my brain does this cool thing where it simultaneously tells me I’m amazing at what I do but also not achieving anything much at all and no wonder. And I tell Tim this and he says “You have a cookbook coming out later this year!” and I say “yeah…but…” It’s like the opposite of resting on your laurels. Instead I run towards my laurels really hard and then leap over them and keep running for the next one so fast that the last one seems like it’s miles behind me in the dust. Resting on your laurels is a phrase that tends to be thrown around in a negative way, but to me it sounds kind of delightful – like, I achieved something good so I’m going to relax now and take a nap and maybe remind people about the thing I achieved occasionally. Does anyone else do this? Also, I guess, if anyone has any laurels they want me to not rest upon, let me know!

Boy, has this blog post ever got personal and intense. But that is often how life is. Till I figure it all out, if anyone has any tips for how to deal with tense muscles, shocked from their first go-round at the gym, I’d be super obliged.
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Title via: The Kills, always skittishly thrilling, with Cheap and Cheerful.
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Music lately:

Ella Fitzgerald, Mack the Knife. Specifically, when she sang it in Berlin and forgot half the words, but elegantly and sorta adorably improvised over the top of the melody with her usual breezily gorgeous voice. What a champ.

Sherie Rene Scott, Goodbye Until Tomorrow, from The Last 5 Years musical. This song always makes me feel pretty emotional. I adore SRS, but absolutely cannot wait to see what Anna Kendrick does with this when the film version of this show comes out.

Faith Evans, Love Like This. Modern classic.
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Next time: I made this pasta dish that I kinda like. I will probably write about that.

a sunday kind of love

January 6, 2013March 11, 202010 Comments

I haven’t blogged all year! (Sorry, bad joke is bad.) This is my sixth first-post-of-the-year since I started hungryandfrozen.com and it comes with no less thoughtful reflection than any blog post on any day of any month ever, since that’s just the kind of self-absorbed person I am. I did, however, make some new years resolutions. I intend to stick to them, too – I mean, in 2011 I vowed I’d get a book deal somehow, and then 19 days later a publishing company emailed me to say they’d like me to write a cookbook. I’m not saying I’m a witch. But I’m pretty sure if you send out waves of furrow-browed determinism, something has to happen, even if that something is just the people around you inwardly sighing oh no, not this rant again. (Related: I’m not saying I’m a witch, but I did manage to roll the dice while playing Trivial Pursuits recently and have it land on the exact number my team were hoping for, several times in a row.)

New Years Resolutions for 2013:

1: Be intensely successful in everything to do with this blog and my foodwriting and most of all, my upcoming cookbook. I don’t think this is particularly surprising, but still.

2: Get bufty arms. It came to my attention recently, when Tim and I moved house, that I am essentially useless in the upper arm region. I’d like to be able to lift stuff with dignity. I’d like to be able to lift stuff at all. So some gentle weight-lifting will ensue.

3: Eat more vegetables. Moving house, and therefore trying to get rid of all our perishables, plus not having a job, meant for a while there we were doing things like having scrambled eggs on buttered toast, or just plain buttered toast, (or buttered popcorn) for nearly every single meal. I love them, but I don’t want scurvy. This year: some snipped chives on my scrambled eggs on buttered toast, at least.

4: Envy: deal with it. Try not to compare my success to that of others. Look, I’ve been a snappishly jealous person since the beginning – why, in the movie of the story of my life you could have a montage of scenes from little me to right now. Not just general success – relationships and experiences and any old thing, really. It’s just not a particularly good item to have in my inventory of personality traits. I can’t deny it, but I can work on reigning it in.

5: Add many, many new words to my vocabulary. I love words. Want to win my heart? Use fancy language (or flatter me, I guess – see points 1 and 4). I’ve got a bit lazy recently, relying on the same old adjectives. I want to know more. Why, I used to read the dictionary for fun as a kid! I want to do that again.

Will I achieve all of this? Hopefully a devastatingly successful, firm-of-bicep-region, robustly healthy, beatifically mellow Laura will be able to reply “indubitably!” in one year’s time.

It’s Sunday night, the new years break is well and truly over and I go back to work tomorrow. I am attempting to keep myself in check from being too petulant about this, since I spent so much time and effort finding a job in the first place. But holidays are just so lovely and they do go by so fast, no matter how hard I try to be aware of every moment as it happens, to cling on to the days with clenched fists and to stay up as late as possible. Especially when these holidays are spent with deliciously wonderful people in an old mansion out in the countryside.

But anyway, before we all forget that this is even a food blog, here’s some food: I decided to meet the back-to-school blues head on by baking up delicious things to be eaten at 10:30am and 3:30pm – when your ebbs are usually at their lowest, right? Katrina Meynink’s gorgeous book Kitchen Coquette offered up Pumpkin, Chili and Feta Loaf, which is just the sort of thing I want to look forward to during a working day. It’s very fast and easy to make, and has just the kind of ingredients which feel like you’re treating yourself to a good time (admittedly, my idea of a good time is relatively low-expectational) but without requiring you to spend lots of money or go hunting endlessly for obscure foodstuffs. And – start as you mean to go on – it has vegetables in it! Peachy!

Kumara, Chili, and Feta Loaf

Adapted ever-so-hardly-at-all from Katrina Meynink’s book Kitchen Coquette. I only used kumara because that’s what I could find – it’s an unsurprisingly worthy substitute for the original. The recipe also called for a chopped onion and some basil, both of which I left out because I didn’t have them.

400g chopped golden kumara (or butternut pumpkin)

1 tablespoon olive oil

3 small red chillies, deseeded and finely sliced

Salt and pepper

1 cup buttermilk (note – I just used milk, also I increased it slightly from what the book specified as it looked to need it)

2 eggs

2 teaspoons sugar

450g self raising flour (I used regular flour and 3 teaspoons baking powder)

200g feta cheese

Set your oven to 160 C/315 F and butter a loaf tin.

Place the chopped kumara on a baking tray, sprinkle with oil, the sliced chilli and salt and pepper. Roast for about 15 minutes, till tender and a little darkened at the edges.

Mix together the buttermilk (or milk), eggs, sugar, and flour, to form a very thick dough. Crumble in the feta and tip in the kumara and gently mix. Inevitably, some of the kumara will kind of smush into the dough. But whatever. Scrape it into the loaf tin and bake for an hour. Turn out of the tin and allow to cool completely before slicing thickly.

As with the pear cake I blogged about last time, I had to have a slice of this before its intended eating time, in order to be able to describe it on this blog. That might sound a little like my life is being ruled by this blog or something, but hey, I got to eat some delicious baking. And I can tell you authoritatively that it really is delicious. The kumara is sweet and a little nutty, the creamy saltiness of the feta is pleasingly addictive against the occasional bursts of fiendishly hot chilli on the tongue. It has the comforting carb-slab nature of a scone, but is also a bit fancy. And I bet a few days down the track, zapped in the microwave in the office kitchen and buttered abundantly, it’ll still be good.

This is where we stayed over new years. Swoon, right? It’s the sort of place where your very existence makes it feel like you’re in a gorgeous dreamy novel or movie or something (the point is: dreamy.) I read books, I painted my nails, I gossiped on a four-poster bed, I watched movies, I made a huge vat of mac and cheese and ate many feasts made by others (including woodfired pizza in the shape of a cat), I patted a wayward hund, I drank plenty of gin, and generally had a wonderful time with wonderful friends.

Tim and me! Me and Tim! Was there ever a dapper-er babe than he? My opinion says nay!

So engaged right now.

Speaking of dreamy and swoon, the two above photos were taken by the uncommonly talented Sarah-Rose, who, if you’re interested in creeping on our holiday, took so many beautiful/hilarious photos during our time away.

Finally, apropos of nothing: Tim and I bought some furniture. Our new flat is feeling more and more like a home every day. I would like to point out that the Garfield picture was drawn by Tim when he was a kid, and he just put it there as a joke – it’s not like, our most treasured, look-at-this piece of artwork. That said, I totally respect Garfield’s attitude towards both pasta and Mondays. Also that faux-fur on the daybed (daybed! It’s a bed you sit on during the day! Dreamy!) is leftover from when I made myself a lion costume for a party last year. Judge us for buying stuff with “would it look good on instagram?” as a dealbreaker, but not for that furry throw! (I was kind of joking about the instagram thing, by the way.)

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Title via: the sadly late Etta James, Sunday Kind of Love. A song that makes Sunday feel like a day to look forward to, not shun.

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Music lately:

Lana Del Rey, Summertime Sadness. Hey, it’s still Sunday. Predictably dreamy.

Flat Duo Jets, You Belong To Me. A sexy, languid song, I might never have heard it had their album Go Go Harlem Baby not been rereleased by Third Man Records. Which we then took a chance on and bought when we were at Third Man Records in Nashville. This is a really good song, I’m not just using it as an opportunity to drop in that we went traveling recently or anything.
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Next time: at least one vegetable.

pass the what? (pass the popcorn)

December 11, 2012March 11, 202015 Comments

Once I’d finished thoroughly kicking myself for the very shamefulness of even uttering out loud the phrase “gosh, all this moving and job-hunting stuff means I’ve really failed to capitalise on the whole Christmas lead-up thing on the blog,” I realised this would be my very last blog post written in our current flat. Aw. And it’s about, uh, popcorn. When I say capitalise, I’m honestly not capitalising on anything (or I’d be blogging about something more grand than popcorn) but let’s face it, it IS December, and this IS a food blog, and at this time of year many a person’s thoughts inevitably turn to food of a particularly Christmassy nature and we’re already nearly halfway through this month and I’ve barely acknowledged it. However, I’m hoping it’s not too late.

Note the enthusiastic piece of popcorn which popped right out of the pan after I lifted the lid. The escape act was all for naught, as I ate it anyway.

Burned Butter Maple Popcorn; Salt and Vinegar Popcorn. They both looked exactly the same so I sprinkled the maple one with rainbow sugar. Which immediately fell into all the cracks and crevices in the popcorn. So in case you can’t tell, it’s the top bowl.

I’ve been eating so much popcorn, partly because it’s deeply inexpensive which suits us right now (moving costs, unemployment, bills, and a persistent post-holiday overdrawn credit card) but also because I had forgotten how really truly delicious and easy to make it is. I’ve been fixing up bowls of it all the time, for a pre-dinner snack, for a post-pre-dinner snack, to go with drinks…it might seem a little unconvincing and unsophisticated to serve to your fancy friends, but it really works.

It’s just so crunchy and porously butter-absorbant and flavour-permeable and a tiny quantity of popping corn makes so much fluffy white popcorn and – did I mention – I know I did, no need to be coy – it’s so cheap. Also it’s gluten-free, vegan-friendly if you use oil, and oddly thrilling as you wait for the mysterious dried corn to burst open.

We don’t have a microwave, so I make it on the stovetop, and it’s all very straightforward. I suppose you don’t have to use any fat in it, but it tastes quite bland without it – but it’s all up to your tastebuds. I like to heat up the popping corn kernels with the butter or oil in a lidded pan over a medium heat, wait for it to start popping after a minute or two, and that’s it really. All you need is a large saucepan with a lid, and for that lid to stay on until you’re quite sure the corn is done popping. Otherwise it will shoot out and land in your hair. It just will.

Burned Butter and Maple Popcorn

You don’t have to use maple syrup if you can’t get hold of it, it’s so expensive that I’m always too nervous to actually use it in anything, and honey or golden syrup would be a worthy substitute. I do think the flavour of this benefits from being popped in butter and then having extra butter added, it’s not the slightest bit gratuitous. Don’t worry in the slightest about the state of the butter in the pan either, the more it burns in the hot pan the more wondrous it will taste – all smoky and nutty and incredible.

30g butter plus another 20g extra
2 teaspoons maple syrup
Salt
1/3 cup popping corn

Place the 30g butter and popping corn in a large pan, cover with a lid, and place over a medium heat. After a few minutes the corn will start to pop, excitingly – hold onto the lid and give it a shake every now and then to ensure that the popped corn itself won’t burn. Place one teaspoon and a grind of salt in the base of a large serving bowl, then tip most of the popcorn in and stir it around. Sprinkle over the remaining teaspoon of maple syrup, tip in the remaining popcorn and continue to stir. Do what you like to mix it all together really, this just seems to ensure maximum maple-coverage. Melt the remaining butter in the still-hot pan and then tip it over the popcorn evenly, giving one last stir. Rainbow sugar…optional.

Salt and Vinegar Popcorn

Olive oil’s rich, green flavour is perfect with popcorn, and the sharp vinegar and bursts of salt makes you want to pretty much shovel this into your mouth with a cupped hand till there’s none left.

1 tablespoon olive oil, plus extra for drizzling
2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
salt
1/3 cup popping corn

As above, heat the corn kernels in the tablespoon of oil in a lidded pan, allow them to pop, shaking it occasionally, and pour most of the popped corn into a bowl in which one teaspoon of balsamic vinegar and a grind of salt has been placed. Stir around, drizzle over some olive oil, stir some more, add the rest of the popcorn, sprinkle over the remaining balsamic vinegar, some more oil, and another grind of salt. Stir as best you can without flinging the weightless grains everywhere.

So: popcorn. It’s easy. It can absorb as much butter as you’re willing to attempt to saturate it with. It’s so cheap. And it’s wildly delicious.

By the way, guess what guess what? This might be old news if you follow me on Twitter, but I got a job! Some real employment! It’s very exciting. But fear not, this popcorn is so excellent that we’ll continue eating it long after we can afford to eat other stuff. Can I tell you what the job is exactly? Nay. It’s not that I’m particularly important, it’s just that it’s of a governmental nature and requires some discretion – I’m a little overnervous that I’ll say entirely the wrong thing about it. Just know that it has zero overlap with this blog and it’s going to pay the bills and the most you’ll hear about it might be the occasional “what a long day at the office and people who don’t label their yoghurt pottles in the shared staff fridge, amiright?” type of relatably vague exclamation. Maybe even that was too specific. Nerves aside – I start tomorrow! – I’m so, SO PLEASED to be employed again. Things were getting bad-ridiculous. Now they can start to get good-ridiculous.

I found out at 4.30pm on Friday – seriously, there is no better way to start your weekend than to discover you’re newly employed. I recommend it. That night my old flatmate but always-friend Ange and I had a dance party of two, in which we danced not wisely but too well, to paraphrase Shakespeare – woke up the next morning with one fiercely sore neck from dancing so expressively. But it was worth it for the joy of the dancing, definitely. Now that the weekend’s over Tim and I only have a few more days left in this flat that has been our home for the past three and a half years. I’m going to miss it – it’s incredible! Tim and I could not believe our luck at being able to live in such a beautiful cool place. But I’m really looking forward to starting over – finding places for everything and getting to love a new place. Also, um, to not have to consider flatmates when, um, look: I’m just looking forward to not having to wear pants all the time, okay? They’re just so restrictive! Even drawstring elastic can be burdensomely present in its own way, but with flatmates you’re kinda obliged to not awkward up their days by going pantsless. With that delightful image in mind, I also can’t wait to make the most of the beautiful light for photography and to go wild in the kitchen. All of which you’ll soon see – it’s kind of like you’re moving with me, except without the hassle and the lifting and the barely-suppressed tension!

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Title via: Pass The Popcorn, from the supercool The Roots’ very first album Organix. It looks like another one coming around…

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Music lately:

ROYALS, BY LORDE. Capitals necessary. She’s from New Zealand. She’s a teenager. She’s elusive. This song is incredible. I love that music can still surprise me like this. (This was danced to repeatedly on Friday night.) (Just LISTEN to it.) (Then to all the rest of her tracks.)

One other good thing about moving is that our living space will be big enough for me to try and learn magical Donna McKechnie’s dance from Turkey Lurkey Time. This is how I know it’s Christmas: I’m watching this incredible number from the 1968 Tony Awards. It’s ridiculous and it’s dated and it’s…yeah, really ridiculous, but damn if it doesn’t make my heart race every time it gets to the end.
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Next time: New flat! New flat! Tra la la la la la! And something quite, quite Christmassy will be abounding.

extraordinary, just like a strawberry

December 3, 2012March 11, 20209 Comments

There is no way to talk about needing to distract yourself while two of your closest friends are out of the country for a significant amount of time to sound like a dork (at best), so all I’ll say is that Tim and I are moving house in two weeks and it is significantly distracting. I love our current flat of three and a half years in a way that I never thought a person could love the place they live – having had a succession of terrible, dark flats (crumbly, cold and damp like milk seeping into passionless wheaten breakfast cereal) overlorded by landlords ranging from the faintly bizarre to the terrifying. Here we have real sunshine, the kind that actually gets through the windows and blankets you in warmth rather than sodding off to hang out with your rich neighbours while your room is shrouded in darkness. We don’t have dampness, we don’t have mice, and so on and so forth. In the darkness and with mice my only friends was how I of course started this blog, and pretty much the best thing about living in horrible flats is that you get to spin ever-larger tales of their ill-repute later in life. If Tim and I, aged 19, had shacked up together in a mansion, well. Actually that would’ve been really awesome. I care not for the value of whatever lesson living in said horrible flat taught me: I’d take the mansion any day.

Much as I hate things coming to an end, sometimes moving on feels right, and we’ve found a new place that we adore. It’ll be just us (nothing to do with us being engaged, we just like that notion) it’s enormous – plenty of dancing room – it has more storage room than we’ve ever known, and it has a dishwasher! I’m already pretty slovenly but I look forward to spiraling further downwards into a state of blissful sloth after welcoming this appliance into our lives.

Packing has been strangely fun: I spent several hours doing it on Saturday while Tim was off playing the game of Game of Thrones. (I love the tv show, I devour the books, I can’t abide the endless and endlessly complicated game and was happy to be left alone, in case you’re thinking of getting righteous on my behalf.) On my travels through the dark corners of our wardrobe I discovered many a long-forgotten thing.

A faxed copy of my casually sexist birth certificate. My mum’s occupation and the question of their surnames being different were apparently not of interest in the mid eighties. (Faxed to me during high school so I could take part in a first year university philosophy paper, what an overachiever that baby turned out to be!)

We have some fairly embarrassing DVDs in our collection, but also some really, really good books.

I wasn’t sure whether to admonish myself or be delighted at the sheer decadence of it all, either way I forgot that we had a bottle of champagne in the cupboard. Who even gets champagne at all, and then goes and forgets about it? Us sybaritic lotophagi, that’s who. (And who even says sybaritic lotophagi? This dick.)

I made this ice cream cake a couple of weeks ago now for a potluck dinner which was also something of a farewell for the two aforementioned now-traveling friends. The recipe comes from this glorious American book from the sixties that I own called “Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts (including party beverages)” (punctuation my own addition.) I love old-timey desserts, and American ones tend to have this particular heedless, uninhibited nature which I particularly adore, and have discussed at length when I made a plum meringue crumble pie from this same book earlier this year.

This recipe is as much about texture as it is flavour – crunchy biscuit crumbs puncturing and encasing the creamy, cold ice cream, itself studded with sorbet-like frozen slices of strawberry. It is pure summer, in spoonable form. In that you can serve it with a spoon, but I took that to a new level by lying on the couch and verily spooning the roasting dish that I made this recipe in, while feeding myself spoonfuls of what ice cream remained in said dish. Seriously though: this would be perfect for a southern hemisphere Christmas pudding – what with strawberries being in season and all – but if you’re up there in the northern hemisphere I recommend this insistently all the same, since you could easily use frozen berries and serve it alongside another pudding of a hotter nature. Just make it, okay? It’s brilliant.

Strawberry Ice Cream Cake

From Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts – recipe submitted by Mrs Elaine Cruikshank, Montrose, Iowa.

I know the method looks weird, since every recipe with separated egg whites goes on about how it needs to be whisked in a sterile environment and it WILL fail on you and so on and so forth. And here we are throwing a bunch of ingredients in a bowl and whisking them all devil-may-care. What can I say, it just works! So go with it. Also: the recipe called for 1/2 cup chopped nuts in the biscuit stage but I left them out for someone at the party who had an allergy, you can of course feel free to put them back in.

1 cup flour

1/4 cup brown sugar

125g melted butter

2 egg whites

1 cup sugar

2c sliced fresh strawberries (or use defrosted frozen, as I suggested)

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 cup cream

More sliced strawberries for decoration

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Stir together the flour, sugar and butter till it forms a soft, stiff dough. Press it evenly onto a paper-lined baking tray, so that it looks like a giant cookie and bake for 20 minutes. You could in fact stop right here and enjoy your giant cookie. I might well do this myself one day. But what you want to do is let it cool, then crumble with your fingers, and sprinkle 2/3 of the crumbs evenly into the base of a medium sized brownie tin/medium sized roasting tin – or you could use a cake tin, even, it really doesn’t matter.

In a bowl, combine the egg whites, sugar, sliced strawberries and lemon juice. Whisk the heck out of this for as long as you can, but around 5-10 minutes. Despite the doubtfulness of it all, it will thicken and aerate and the whisking action will break down the strawberry slices, tinting the mixture a rather glorious pale pink.

Whip the cream and fold it into the strawberry mixture, then scrape the lot over the top of the biscuit crumbs. Decorate with slices of strawberries if you like, and sprinkle over the remaining 1/3 of the crumbs. Freeze till solid.

I already adore ice cream with inordinate fervency, but here with early strawberries, delicious with their early-season optimism, it’s more glorious than ever. And this is so, so easy and straightforward.

Speaking of optimism, how goes my job-prowl? Not bad. I mean, I’m still unemployed, and feeling its pinch pretty keenly (moving house is SO EXPENSIVE) but my interview on Friday earned me a follow-up coffee this morning! Which is very exciting. Especially since I was quite, quite convinced I’d blown the interview itself. I have another interview on Wednesday, and I still am yet to hear back from another interview that I felt went well, so we’ll see. We’ll see. Even if my perception of how Friday’s interview went was way off, I promise you I’m perceiving this ice cream correctly: it’s damn incredible. I love it. Make it. Spoon with it, even – you’re not alone.

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Title via: Ini Kamoze, Here Comes The Hotstepper. This song has aged so well. In my opinion. And my opinion is correct.
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Music lately:

Rekindled my long-ago interest in Lisa Loeb. By way of playing Do You Sleep around 2938102938 times in a row one afternoon. You know how music can swiftly take you back to a particular time and place? Listening to this song now just reminds me of the time that I last listened to this song, because I have listened to it so much lately. Try it!

Tegan and Sara, Closer. It’s like, here are your feelings, neatly packaged in jaunty song form!

Barton Hollow, by the Civil Wars. I’d heard of this band before but really got into them when they were recently covered on this TV show I’m obsessed with, called Nashville. (Especially fun since Tim and I were just IN Nashville and so it’s all, “I recognise that landmark in this establishing shot!”) This country-ish, harmony-rich song is delicious.
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Next time: Lack of incoming funds + moving house has meant I’ve been making meals strictly based on what’s in our cupboards, fridge and freezer. So: hopefully something even bordering on coherent for you.

but guess who is gonna be dessert

November 25, 2012March 11, 202013 Comments

It’s funny, I grew up in a little village, and there was pretty much no shopping to speak of at our nearest town aside from groceries and takeaways and florists and such. And yet I have this very distinct memory of choosing which clip-on earrings to wear to go to the public library. Though I’m pretty sure I’ve always been quite cynical, bordering on snide, it also did not take much for me to get disproportionately excited (in fairness: the library was damn thrilling. A diary entry from 1996 marks the singularly bleak occasion where neither mum nor dad wanted to drive in that weekend and WHAT was I to do now?) But in terms of things that were genuinely exciting, every now and then Mum and I might go on a small spree, in the form of purchasing a Lindt Chocolate Ball each from – I can’t even remember which shop sold them, maybe the florist?

The mouthpleasingly spherical chocolates encase a softer, buttery chocolate filling which bursts in the mouth with pupil-dilating deliciousness. Unlike many a chocolate from my youth, Lindt Chocolates have held up quality-wise, and still have that special-occasion, grab-your-clip-on-earrings rush of joy.

Which is why, when rereading Katrina Meynink’s delicious book Kitchen Coquette, I became a little fixated on her Lindt Chocolate Puddings, in which not one but two entire chocolate balls, frozen, are submerged in batter and briefly baked to produce a dark chocolate pudding with a slowly liquefying white chocolate Lindt centre. I rationalised hazily that buying a ten-pack of Lindt chocolate balls was better value than the three-pack; that I’d been doing some temping; that if I didn’t spend the money on the chocolates said money would only be sitting in my bank anyway, and that I’d really, really felt like pudding – one of those days, in fact, where you wake up and just know in your bones that you’ll need pudding later on.

That said, if you’re really fixing for this recipe but can’t physically bring yourself to fork out for Lindt – and I understand – pieces of decent white chocolate from a bar will still produce a damn excellent finished product, I’m sure.

Gold, since they cost as much as getting a gold tooth inserted into your mouth. Kidding! It’s more like the cost of a root canal procedure.

Seriously though, Katrina’s book is totally dreamburgers, and she’s a genuinely entertaining, evocative writer about food – not praise I really can say about all that many foodwriters. This recipe is but one of plenty recipes in Kitchen Coquette which will make you yearn to throw together ingredients immediately.

Lindt Chocolate Puddings

From Katrina Meynink’s book Kitchen Coquette.
Note: I halved this recipe, went for two eggs but 50g sugar.

200g dark chocolate
100g butter
3 eggs
115g sugar
2 tablespoons flour
8 white Lindt chocolate balls

Place the chocolate balls in the freezer for at least an hour. When said hour is up, set the oven to 200 C and gather ye four 250ml ramekins.

Melt the chocolate and butter together gently, then allow it to cool a little and quickly stir in the eggs, sugar and flour. (This allows you to just use one bowl, but mix up the non-chocolate stuff separately if you wish.) Divide the mixture between the ramekins, and unwrap the frozen chocolates and push two into each ramekin, spooning over a little batter if they’re popping out the top. Bake for 15 minutes, till firm on top and bulging out the top. Don’t overcook – you want that saucy squish of barely-set cake batter.

And yeah, as I said, I’ve been doing some temping, the sheer exhausting nature of it being why it’s been so long between posts here. It was fairly…um. I won’t actually say what I did and how I felt about it or I’ll just end up sounding deeply unprofessional: the point is, I got paid, it was only a week, and I got paid. As well as that I’ve had a couple of interviews lined up for jobs I’ve applied for, which is quite cool right? My last interview that I had was back in 2006, for a clothing chain store – I didn’t get it – so going through the process again is nothing if not good practice. That said, Tim and I joked about having a bake sale today to boost our dwindling funds, and the joking turned kind of serious and strategic. I know I’m talking about a lack of money in the same breath as buying fancy-pants chocolate, but I’m not into policing how people spend their money, however limited, so…am hardly going to start on myself. And look at this pudding: what cost that happiness?

Two of my dearest friends are flying to Japan today – Kate and Kim, who both worked on my cookbook with me (stylist and photographer, respectively) and I’m incredibly happy and excited for them, especially having done a huge trip overseas myself, but Kate’s not coming back till the end of January, which is really a long, long time away from someone so wondrous. Sigh. All the sighs. Kim is returning back to NZ in two weeks’ time, like some kind of collateral or flat bond (but a million times nicer), so there’s that. I’m hopeless at articulating myself at the time of significant goodbyes – but with people that are such good friends I feel that you don’t have to make big speeches or anything, you just know. And also, fortunately there are still excellent and dear friends here still. It’s Kim and Kate’s time to shine, and I’m sure they’ll shine hard like the ethically-sourced diamonds they are. If you hear any strange noises at any stage though, it’s just me expressing my dramatic emotions via the application of a pillow to my tearducts. Totally cool. No big deal.

In amongst all this caginess and hand-wringing maudlinness, what of the puddings? Were they delicious? Hot damn, yes. Like a hot, barely cooked chocolate brownie, the frozen chocolates slowly melting within creating a vanilla-y, creamy contrast to the bitter darkness of that surrounding it. I liked mine with cold, cold cream filling a spoon-excavated dent in the top and spilling out over the ramekin, Tim austerely preferred it without. Make them, and make them immediately, without excuse or delay, as soon as you’re able to and also feel like pudding.
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Title via: Barbra Streisand singing You Are Woman from Funny Girl with Omar Sharif. OH, her voice.
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Music lately:

Elastica, Connection. I remember feeling, speaking of 1996 diary entries, such injustice that Justine Frischmann and Damon Albarn were going out. Because that, specifically, prevented him being my boyfriend. Still sorta wish he was, still adore this song.

Neneh Cherry, Woman. Speaking of 1996. This song is intense, and intensely excellent.
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Next time: a supercool ice cream cake from my 60s American pudding cookbook.