Category: Easy and/or Fast

could be, who knows, there’s something due any day

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That’s all, folks.

Well, that’s almost all, folks. The very last photoshoot happened on Saturday, meaning this cookbook-writing montage is whirling to a close and the inspirational eighties song accompanying it is in the coda stage. I still have to edit the heck out of it – to make sure that I don’t use the word ‘buttery’ or ‘bodacious’ on every single page, which is…of concerningly high likelihood.

I also still have to test a bulging handful of recipes, which means, and has meant, that I have made more or less nothing in the last couple of weeks that isn’t specifically for this cookbook.

Apart from these nuts. They seem an even less worthy offering for you than the raspberry smoothie I blogged about last time but what can I do? We are overrun with food that I just can’t talk about.

I made these for a birthday party that we had for Tim on Saturday night, along with a cake that I iced to look like Jack White. I was particularly proud of managing to ice some sweaty strands of hair to Cake-Jack’s forehead. We drank some excellent whisky and danced and talked and sang “Happy Birthday” to the tune of the Game of Thrones theme song and everyone wrote nice things about Tim in a giant birthday card which was supposed to be a surprise but I forgot about it till an hour before the party started and had to tell Tim, then run out and buy it while he cleaned the house and the only big cards that were in the shop were either hideous or for a specific age (or both) so I got a card which said “good luck” in glittery letters because at that point it felt like the right sentiment.


The uber-dapper and somewhat long-suffering birthday man. 

Maple Horseradish Cashews

A recipe by myself.

700g cashews
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon horseradish sauce
2 tablespoons maple syrup
Salt, in abundance

Tip the cashews with a clatter into a large saucepan. Toast them, stirring constantly, over a low heat till they start to become fragrant and lightly browned in places. Stir in the oil, the horseradish, the syrup, and plenty of salt, and continue to stir till any liquid is evaporated and the cashews are varying stages of stickily scorched and shiny. You don’t want them actually burnt, as they’ll turn acrid and bitter, but try to get them as close to it as you can.

These nuts, with their burnished, sticky coating combine horseradish’s compellingly back-of-the-throat mustard flavour with the smokily sweet taste of maple. Cashews have their own mild sweetness which complements both but use what you have, I just happened to be hosting more than I knew what to do with in my pantry. If you don’t have horseradish sauce, try a tablespoon of dijon or American mustard, or as much wasabi as you dare – both will provide that hot-mouthed zing.

What else has been happening lately besides all that?
Well, I went to a lovely friend’s place on Sunday with a bevy of other lovely friends for a day we called Princess Camp. There was snuggling and Olympic gymnastics and dance movies and bubbles and cake and gossip and this beautiful cat who can do forward rolls (if only I’d got a video and she could’ve been an internet sensation).

I don’t see cats very often so this was rather thrilling. I should also point out that we watched the Spice Girls part of the Olympics closing ceremony, and I was recounting how ridiculous it was that I started crying when I watched it the first time, and then – I started crying again. I just couldn’t help it, it was all so momentous and the Spice Girls were together again at last, and seemed to be such good friends, and they all looked so happy and beautiful and…there’s really no good way to explain this, so perhaps just gaze upon the adorable cat in the photo.
I also helped start a trending topic on twitter with the highly excellent Sarah-Rose. Here’s what happened: I’d been thinking about the Baby-sitters Club, as is my wont. I spied Sarah-Rose tweeting about what she was wearing to someone else. It occurred to me, and so I tweeteth, that it’d be really cool if people described what they were wearing on Twitter in the manner of Claudia Kishi, who was the total queen of the BSC and always had the most incredible outfits. Sarah-Rose declared that it should definitely be a thing. Emboldened, we both tweeted our outfits with the hashtag #kishi. And then more people did. And more and more and more. 
On day two it trended and then continued to trend. Isn’t that the most, to say the least? I understand entirely if Twitter is a concept that eludes you, and now’s not the place for social media 101, but I LOVE IT. And managing to hoist a fairly niche-interest topic into the realms of trending was immensely thrilling. And it’s such a fun hashtag. Just as I loved reading outfit descriptions in the Baby-sitters Club books, so I do in real life. I love describing my trackpants, should I be wearing them, as lavishly and breathlessly as I would a dress. In short: FUN!
Finally, I made this short video on why I’m proud to support marriage equality.
Finally-finally, Tim and I have somehow been planning our trip to America. Which starts next Friday. We booked tickets to see Wicked on Broadway. What is life. But till that day comes: all the editing and all the feelings! And hopefully all of the blogging, too. I am sorry for not blogging more, and then for barely even coming correct when I do – next time it’ll be something more significant than Johnny-Come-Lately fried cashews, I promise. 
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Title via: Something’s Coming, from the beautiful musical West Side Story. I rather enjoy limber-voiced adorable gem Gavin Creel’s take on this stunning song. 
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Music lately:

Rodriguez, Crucify Your Mind: I don’t normally say things like this, but this man should be a billion times bigger than Dylan. He just should. 
Sky Ferreira, Everything Is Embarrassing. Terribly relatable.
O’Lovely, Bright Lights. I’ve been listening to this a lot lately, it’s so twinkly and dreamy so of course I adore it. 
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Next time: As I said: Sooner! Better than nuts!

i’ll drink to that, and one for mahler!

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Back when I first left my job and strode purposefully into the warm, sugary waters of cookbook-writing (before immediately getting sick for three weeks) I had it in my head that I’d be able to blog more than ever. Well, ha! I certainly learned a thing or two since then. Like I wouldn’t really have the time, at all. So, sorry to leave it so long between blog posts. Basically, if I am awake I am working on the cookbook. It leaves very little time for blogging. But as this blog is so deeply important to me, it does not behoove me to neglect it. So here I am, and I will attempt to keep this relatively snappish (a) so I can get onto preparing for today’s cookbook photoshoot and (b) because there is only so much one can say about a smoothie. 
It has been one heck of a week. If my last blog post indicated that it was crunch time and time was crunchy, well, time has since become ever more textured. Barbed. Studded. Clawed. Gritty. It’s grit time. Hopefully all this grit will bring forth a pearl of a cookbook though.
At book group the other day (which escalated with delightful predictability to into-the-night discussions on feminism, politics, and HBO television) I had an amazing Ottolenghi salad that the host, my longtime friend Ange had made. I then realised how long it had been since I’d cooked anything that wasn’t something being tested for the cookbook. Much as I’ll miss the montage that is my life currently, I am definitely looking forward to opening up someone else’s cookbook and making their recipes.
But I am still fair sparkling with excitement, every particle of me alive and tense with the knowledge that I am going to be a published author, that my ideas have actually taken me somewhere. Luckily the universe reminds me often enough of this, so that when I’m all grumpypants and don’t want to look at food, the amazing ridiculousness of this all sets in again, I remember that any problems I have are AMAZING PROBLEMS TO HAVE and I find energy to keep going. I mean, I physically cannot bring myself to complain about any of the more stressful elements of this whole process (please ignore any times I actually complained about it) because it’s all so…incredible.

Yesterday, pale with the knowledge that I’d hardly eaten anything vitamin-rich lately, I made myself a smoothie for breakfast. It was perfect – eye-wideningly zingy, not troublingly filling, and gloriously pink. Who am I to tell you how to make a smoothie? It’s just blended up stuff. When I was a child and my grandma gave me her old blender, which had a three-cup capacity and all the grunt of an electric toothbrush, my favourite thing to do was blend up a can of peaches in its syrup and drink that like the fancy lady I thought I was. What I’m saying is: smoothies, they’re not long division, but they are delicious. Here’s an idea for you.

Raspberry, Pear and Basil Smoothie

The secret ingredient is a sneaky, sour teaspoon of apple tea powder. Which in itself is a perfect snack. If you don’t have any, this is still more than fine of course. Consider a tiny pinch of citric acid instead, if you like.

1 heaped cup frozen raspberries
2 pears
1 lemon
1 tablespoon apple tea powder
A few basil leaves

Tip the raspberries into a blender (pausing to ostentatiously instagram them first, if you’re anything like me.) Peel the pears and roughly chop them, and add them to the blender too. Eat the peel to assuage any wastefulness-guilt. Squeeze the juice from the lemon into the cup measure, then top up with water. Pour this into the blender, add the apple tea powder and the basil leaves, then process thoroughly till smooth. 

I say use frozen raspberries, because who has heaps of fresh raspberries kicking around to be diluted into smoothies? Do you? Who are you, Marie Antoinette? You could use any berry you like – frozen strawberries are rather pleasing as their seeds aren’t so obvious between the teeth. On the other hand, the seeds kind of make you feel like you’ve got something to do as your teeth grind them down, so there is a case for both sides. The pears give a similar kind of bodily smoothness to the drink that bananas might, also their mild, fragrant juiciness is a good backdrop for the more boldly acerbic berries. Basil’s smokiness provides a little depth and warmth. And the finished smoothie is a really pretty colour. Really, really pretty. Let us not overlook its aesthetic value for the sake of pretending we’re overlooking its aesthetic value.

Last time I blogged I was urging anyone local to come along to the rally for Marriage Equality. Well, I went, with all my friends, and it was the most intense, happy, emotional day. I wore my big gold dress as it was the most celebratory thing I owned and also because it made me think of Edie Beale’s ‘Revolutionary Costume For Today‘ from Grey Gardens. (“The full-length velvet glove hides the fist”.) We marched together, all the way to parliament in the hot sun, to hear speeches from many different sides of the story, from the most recent of accepters to those who had been working longer than I’ve been alive to fight for equality, for people to just be who they are. It was incredibly moving. Later that evening, over lots of ice cream (I needed to test a ton of ice cream recipes, so I did just that, and then invited people round to eat it all) we huddled round a livestream of Parliament TV to watch, with lip-biting nervousness and then heart-soaring joy, as Louisa Wall’s bill was voted to go ahead to a select committee by a surprisingly generous majority. This isn’t the final hurdle – there are still so many steps to be taken for the bill to become law – but still, it was such an exciting, wonderful achievement. Watching it all unfold with people dear to me was even better. I’m really not expressing myself here, but it was all…just…so important.

If my paragraph hasn’t moved you in the slightest, perhaps this video of Mitt Romney being incredibly disrespectful will show just one reason I feel so strongly about this issue – I’ve watched this video three times and my eyes well up each time by the end.

Another exciting thing that has happened, on a much smaller scale – and yet no less large-scale in its way – I received an email from Julie Clark of Floriditas cafe, saying their bakery always has plenty of ingredients and she’d read about some of my recipe testing mishaps and she’d like to help me out. How kind, thought I, perhaps she has a spare bag of sugar for me! The next day she emails again to say she’s just down the road and has something for me.

That something was 20 blocks of butter and 60 eggs. I’d never even met Julie, and to receive so much kindness from a stranger near-on floored me. She didn’t know it at the time, but Floriditas was where Tim and I went for a celebratory dinner on the night I found out my book deal was confirmed, and also we often buy their loaves of bread to add to the snacks table at photoshoots for everyone to eat. So…synergy? Anyway, damn, sometimes these moments come out of nowhere and all you can do is say thank you. All my recipe testing since then has been monumentally less stressful, since, if something doesn’t work out quite right, there is still another remaining tonne of butter for me to use. Thank you, Julie!

Next time I blog, we may well have wrapped up the photography process and I’ll be very nearly finished the manuscript. The team – Kim and Jason the photographers, Tim the handsome project manager and Kate the stylist, are continuing to do such a brilliant job and putting so much energy into this and I am SO so excited for you all (I mean, no pressure, if you don’t want to buy the book that’s totally up to you) to see their amazing work.

Till then, I’ll be carving that butter sculpture of myself that I’ve always dreamed of.
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Title via: I’ve used this before but it’s so utterly plunder-able that I don’t care. And if you haven’t listened to it yet, please do yourself a favour and click here for the shivers-inducingly magnificent Elaine Stritch singing  Ladies Who Lunch from Sondheim’s Company.
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Music lately:

Thanks to a tip-off from Martyn Pepperell I’ve been streaming Alice Cohen’s album Pink Stream – so twinkly! And if there’s one thing I enjoy in music, it’s twinkliness. 

TLC, Creep. Always.

Liza Minnelli and Pet Shop Boys, Losing My Mind. I didn’t think Sondheim’s fragile, terribly sad original could be improved upon by dramatic eighties drums and synths, but…it can! And how! 
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Next time: I’ll be twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom. Not sure what that will bring, foodwise – Marmite on toast?

you got it allison. you got it raw!

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It is crunch time. The time is crunchy. There is less than a month till my manuscript is due, and just over a month till Tim and I go to America for a holiday. We’ve been having three photoshoots a week, we’re surrounded by cakes, and it was only as I, with primal instinct, rapidly transferred handfuls of fresh clean spinach leaves by the handful into my mouth while Celine Dion’s Power of Love played in my head, that I realised I haven’t eaten a lot of vegetables lately. I’d like to add that I’m not saying this in a “now I need to go for a jog to work it off!” kind of way. Just that my nutrition has been at the mercy of whatever it is I happen to be preparing for photoshoots on a given day. And: I feel great!

I couldn’t be happier. It’s like being in a montage! Here are some fleeting scenes that have been part of it all lately:

– Did I mention Tim and I are surrounded by cake. At first it was a novelty, and then I felt horrible that it was no longer a novelty, so I’ve been trying hard to make myself feel like it is, by constantly saying “look at all this cake! What a novelty! What is life?”
– I was on the way to the supermarket today to pick up some ingredients, checked the mail on the way, only to find a letter from Mum to find a much needed, much appreciated supermarket voucher.
– I had to make a pavlova at 11pm on Friday while feeling a little queasy. Said pavlova inevitably failed, when I went to check on it the next morning. A  snap decision was made to make another one again, an hour before a photoshoot. It mercifully worked.
– Did I mention I was making said pavlovas with nought but a whisk and a bowl (and ingredients too of course, smarty-pants.) Have been pretty much unable to use my right arm ever since. It’s weird, because I make cakes and whip cream and so on with a whisk all the time. I think the franticness must’ve made my muscles extra tensile.
– I have been paying what feels like obscene amounts of money for out-of-season fruit and vegetables. Since winter is here the only thing actually in season is one sole, limp, rapidly browning parsnip. And it is $7.
-Breaking: a hangover from a ridiculously enormous party is not conducive to wanting to test lots of recipes. And yet still I cooked.
– The kindness of friends continues to bring joy. Jo lent me her mother’s wonderful pottery. Willow lent me some glorious tablecloths. Martha of Wanda Harland gave our plate collection an early boost by loaning us some beautiful stuff. Jason (one of the photographers) bought pretty much the most stunning dessert spoons I’ve ever beheld. And it goes on.
– Since I have been making so, so, sososososososososo much food for photoshoots and general recipe testing, it has been persistently difficult to find time and energy and – importantly – general hunger to make food that I can blog about. There’s just no chance to be hungry. Don’t get me wrong. As far as problems go, this one is pretty wonderful, what with it being because I’m writing a cookbook and all. But still!

This is why these marinated tamarillos are perfect. Sharp, sweet, aromatic, spiced. Small slices with a cracker and some cheese makes for a snack of thrillingly punchy flavour and relief-inducing smallness. Frankly I really just love eating them with a spoon.

Recently I was able to attend a demonstration from Megan at little bird organics. It was a supercool experience, as she took us through making several courses of food – all raw. Their ethos is about food tasting and also making you feel amazing, and this recipe from the evening in particular caught the attention of my tastebuds. Clearly I am not a raw vegan, or even vegetarian, but I enjoy being inspired by people who love food, and being exposed to new ideas. Which is exactly what happened. Thanks so much Megan for allowing me to share this recipe here. Because it is freaking delicious.

Marinated Tamarillos.


With huge thanks again to little bird organics for the recipe, that I have adapted ever-so-slightly. 

8-10 tamarillos
1/4 cup maple syrup or agave nectar
250ml (1 cup) red wine
1 cinnamon stick
2 cloves
Salt

Slice the tops off the tamarillos and using a sharp knife, slice off the skin. Then slice the newly naked tamarillos lengthwise, or however you please, really. Place them in a bowl. Pour over the syrup and the wine, spear with the cinnamon stick and the cloves, and grind over plenty of salt. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. I don’t have a dehydrator, but the recipe recommends putting them in it if you do. 

There will be a lot of syrup – I just drained it off. I held on to it because I have a feeling it’ll be fantastic topped up with gin and soda.

Something in the salty, wine-deep intensity of these is quite compulsive. I love them. It may look like you’re making tons, but you’ll get through it all easily, I promise. Best of all, tamarillos are actually in season here and reasonably priced. But once they’re gone, I think I’ll try making these with sliced pears, and then next Autumn, perhaps I’ll make it with feijoas. Inbetween times, I predict this would also be a wonderful marinade for sliced plums…all I’m saying is, there are options for you outside the realm of the tamarillo. But it’s a very, very good start.

I saved the best montage scene for last. This afternoon I had to make a [redacted] pudding for tonight’s photoshoot. It felt like it was going to be highly straightforward. Well. I screwed it up royally. It did not cook right at all. So I panic-ate it. I just…ate it all, in a kind of fugue state. It felt oddly logical, so I went with it, because that way it would be gone and the ingredients wouldn’t be wasted and so on and so forth.

My second attempt at making the pudding failed also. Freaking out about wasting ingredients, about wasting precious time, about this stupid, sodding, straightforward pudding just refusing to work, I may have panic-eaten a goodly proportion of the second one, too. Luckily I came to and binned the rest of it, before my insides corroded. A few prickly, selfish tears were shed, I had some rescue remedy, and looked up pictures of Tom Hardy holding a dog. And, weary but sufficiently emboldened, I made a third go of that pudding. I could feel – perhaps a little irrationally – the ingredients not quite coming together the way I intended them to, but shunted it hatefully into the oven all the same. As soon as I could ascertain that it was not entirely successful, but at least relief-inducingly good-enough…I lay down on the ground and drank some vodka.

Lucky for me I have such a brilliant team in Kate, Jason and Kim. They’ve been able to make even the most doubtful dishes look so beauteous, it makes me feel this might all come together and…work. As Jessi says to Kristy in the Baby-sitters Club movie, “Kristy, this brilliant idea might actually be brilliant!” (I’m not sure whether the actor is not so great at her job, or the line is so bad that she couldn’t do anything with it, either way it’s kinda terrible – yet so applicable.)

In the face of all this exciting, tiring, wonderful, stressful, emotional, sugar-soaked, um, stuff, sometimes there is only one response:

A large Campari. If you can’t be fancy, you might as well fancy yourself as fancy.

PS: If you’re in Wellington and feeling able and up for it, there’s a Celebration Rally for Marriage Equality on Wednesday 29 August at noon in Civic Square. This is so important! I’m not sure that I’m going to have time to make a sign or anything, but I’m definitely going to be there. If you’re interested, click the link for details.

Title via: Normally I quote songs but this is a line from a movie – a musical comedy, in fact, but the point is, it is Cry-baby. An over-the-top, hilarious, sweet, wonderfully bizarre movie from John Waters starring a young Johnny Depp who overacts deliciously when saying such quotable lines as the title for this blog post. Also: there is Wanda Woodward. Find it, fast. 

Music lately:

Over at Lani Says I got wise to the ways of Jessie Ware. Her song Wildest Moments is LUSH.

Safety Dance, Men Without Hats. Make of this what you will. I can’t help loving this ridiculousness. And if your friends don’t dance then they really are no friends of mine.

Never not obsessed with the musical Hair. Here’s Flesh Failures/Let The Sun Shine In from the original Broadway cast.

Next time: Next time, I’ll be ever closer to the manuscript due date. And therefore you can look forward to me making even LESS sense than I did in this post. Good times, good times.

how lucky can you get?

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I intended on publishing this on Thursday or Friday, but a ton of other things got in the way, and then Tim and I have spent the last 24 hours driving many, many, many and then some miles to visit his grandparents, having realised we hadn’t done it in a while and it was an important thing to do. I’m all good with family outweighing this blog, just as I’m cool with this blog outweighing my need to sleep and generally function. Let’s go, on with the show.

You know what I love? What really makes me want to hug myself but also not want to draw attention to it for fear of breaking the spell and then it’ll all be over? Spontaneous good times. I just wish I could schedule them into my life more often. Like, “You there! Closest friends of mine! Nothing’s happening this Saturday, so let’s all pretend like we’re going to do other things separately but actually we all secretly understand that we’ll meet at someone’s house at 9pm and then drink lots of whisky and stay up all night talking about our lives and feelings!” Obviously life doesn’t actually work like that, but I think if we all tried to maintain this pretense, it could be quite, quite rewarding.

I say this because last Saturday, after a five-hour photoshoot for The Cookbook, we had a couple of people round for a game of Game of Thrones. (Yes, it’s a boardgame; no, it’s not just a group of us dressing up and talking all ye olde and calling everything we drink Summerwine or Good Brown Ale; yes I would probably be up for that too though; no there is no alternative to calling the board game ‘Game of Game of Thrones’.) That photoshoot was particularly exhausting – sounds ridiculous, but it takes it out of a person – we were all super low in energy when it was done, and I figured it was going to be a very quiet night. Smash cut to 11:00pm when I tweeted “Everyone in the world is at our house and no-one is allowed to leave until they’ve drank all our alcohol and eaten all our food” (because if I like you, that’s the kind of host I am.) There was a dance party in the kitchen. There was the Game of Thrones TV theme song sung while Brendan played it on the accordion (which is the most magnificent thing to hear – not us singing along with it so much, but the accordion itself – so imposing!). There was, well, pretty much everything the tweet implied.

It was so fun, and I had no idea it was going to happen. So let’s all plan for more spontaneous times, okay everyone?

But what about this chocolate cake already? It’s from Lucky Peach magazine, ‘a quarterly journal of food and writing’, exploring food with a kind of irreverence and fearlessness and coolness that hasn’t quite been done before, which in this everything-has-been-quite-done-before world is impressive. Like: David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, writes about his father’s love of sodium in this latest issue. By way of shorthand illustration of its coolth. (Also: coolth is a word. Cool huh!)

It’s not pretty, it’s occasionally kinda ugly, but the design is compelling and fun and the writing is generally super brilliant. It’s expensive but it’s only out four times a year and it’ll probably take me a quarter of a year just to read this issue. And it has this cake from pastry chef/musician Brooks Headley. It appealed to me – a plain, but excellent-sounding chocolate cake is what everyone needs up their sleeve (figuratively) and in their mouths (literally). The recipe is all in cups, being American, and in the magazine it was three times bigger than this – all I needed was one cake so I scaled it back. Forty-five minutes later when I finally figured out the mathematics of it all, I can attest that it is a fantastic recipe.

Chocolate Olive-Oil Cake, by Brooks Headley, from Issue 4 of Lucky Peach

Life is strange. I buy really expensive cocoa which actually tastes like chocolate, and used that here, but I couldn’t bring myself to use a full 2/3 cup of also-pricey olive oil, so I went for 1/3 cup olive oil and 1/3 cup plain cooking oil. You do what you like.

  • 1/2 cup cocoa
  • 2/3 cup water
  • 1 1/3 cups flour
  • 1 1/3 cups sugar
  • 1/2 t baking soda
  • 1 t salt
  • 2/3 cup buttermilk (I used unsweetened natural yoghurt)
  • 2/3 cup olive oil
  • 1 egg

Set your oven to 170 C and line a 20 or 21cm cake tin with baking paper.

The hardest thing you’ll have to do is heat the water and cocoa together. So to do that: in a decent-sized pot or pan, since you might as well mix everything else into it, stir the cocoa and the water together and heat gently – continuing to stir so it doesn’t burn – until it just starts to bubble. Remove from the heat and allow to cool down some – I filled the sink with an inch of cold water and whisked the cocoa and water to move this process along – then whisk in the remaining ingredients. Pour into your cake tin and bake for around 30 minutes.

Brooks states that this recipe is “foolproof”. I am wary of this description. Getting your learner driver license is foolproof, they told me. Well this fool just failed, I replied, tearfully. It goes on. But this cake really is very straightforward. And importantly: delicious. Don’t be scared of the olive oil, it has its own nutty, buttery flavours that are perfect for chocolate and it makes for a long-lasting cake with a light crumb. I made this to augment the contents of the ‘snack table’ during some photoshoots this week and the final slice, eaten for breakfast yesterday before driving up to Tim’s grandparents’ place, was every bit as good as the first.

So thanks, Lucky Peach. Long may you be excellent.

Title via: How Lucky Can You Get, the Kander and Ebb song from Funny Lady, the sequel to Funny Girl. I love Barbra, but Julia Murney interprets it deliciously. As she does with everything.

Music Lately:

Frank Ocean, Bad Religion. OBSESSED.

It’s not music, but I have been watching this video lots and crying nearly every time, which is what I tend to do with music anyway. Nadia Comaneci in 1976, getting – spoiler alert – a perfect 10 for her floor routine. I used to be so (here comes that word again) obsessed with her as a kid, and youtube has helped me remember just why.

Next time: Whatever it is, I’ll blog about it sooner this time, promise!

 

too much of something is bad enough

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Did I really hate brussels sprouts while growing up, or did all the American TV shows and movies I watched with feverish fervour make me think I didn’t like them? Well, I’ve already asked that question here when I blogged about Ottolenghi’s Brussels Sprouts with Tofu, and as it does not behoove me to repeat content, I won’t, and will instead just direct you back to that (although the long story short answer is: kinda the former, kinda the latter.) Anyway, where I’m going with this is that it’s no great revelation to announce that people are generally suspicious of brussels sprouts, and I believe this usually stems from people – or more specifically, people’s parents – having zero knowledge of what to do with them. And so they did what you did with all vegetables back in the day: boiled them. Boiled them till they were formless, flavourless, unloveable and interchangeable.

What you should really be doing with brussels sprouts is frying them or roasting them. No longer are they bitter, flappy mini-cabbages of sorrow. Instead when applied to direct heat or when blasted under a hot oven, they become crisp, wonderfully nutty, crunchy, and deeply delicious. Not only nothing to be scared of, but something to eat much of.

The reason I’m currently so pro-sprout, is because I am in the middle of testing a million recipes for my upcoming cookbook (which is, in itself, an intensely delicious thing to say out loud, well on paper, well on this screen, anyway) and the things I’m testing right now are largely within the genre of cake. We are surrounded by cakes. This is fantastic. However, I enjoy a little contrast, and my tastebuds have reacted to all this cake by craving intensely savoury food. Hence why I made myself this for lunch yesterday.

Couscous with Fried Brussels Sprouts, Cardamom and Sesame Seeds

A recipe by myself.

This is more a suggestion than anything. I like cardamom’s eucalytpy-lemony bite, and I just had some cooked couscous in the fridge. You could use whichever spices you please, and mix it with rice, or bulgur wheat, or quinoa, or anything. But let’s suppose you do have these ingredients – here’s what you’d do.

6 brussels sprouts
Olive oil
3 cardamom pods, roughly sliced so that the pods are pierced but not halved entirely.
1/2 cup cooked couscous
1 lemon
1 tablespoon sesame seeds

Trim the bases from the sprouts, then quarter them lengthwise. Heat about 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a pan, and throw in the sprouts and the cardamom seeds once it’s hot. Push them round so that one of the cut sides of each quarter is facing down on the hot pan. Place a lid on top and leave for a couple of minutes. This will allow the sprouts to fry and crisp up slightly, while also steaming them a little too, to actually cook them. Remove the lid and stir around – they should be considerably browned in places. Throw in the couscous and sesame seeds and squeeze in the juice of the lemons. Stir around to combine, then tip onto a plate. 

It might not sound like much but it’s a pretty perfect lunch, full of crunch and warmth and nutty deliciousness. And after eating it, I’m ready to face the cake again.

So guess what? I’m still kinda sick with that stupid head cold/flu/thing. Not nearly as sick, but still blowing my nose and coughing juuuuust enough to not feel entirely done with it. I am, however, well enough to get dressed up as a gold lion for a wild animal-themed party tonight. No doubt there will be amusing tails (haha!) to tell and photos to share once it’s done…in the meantime I’m looking forward to wearing lots of makeup, making my hair enormous (my main motivation for dressing up as a lion, I’ll be honest – I’m all about the big hair) and dancing big.
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Title via: The so important Spice Girls, with their single Too Much from their second album Spiceworld. This song is rather gorgeous and still holds up well. And the video is amongst their most babein-est, and sometimes too much of nothing really is just as tough, you know?
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Music lately:

Bernadette Peters, spookily ageless, always tears-inducingly good, singing No-one Is Alone from Into The Woods. Whether or not it’s true, it’s nice to have her sing it to you at least.

Ini Kamoze, Here Come The Hotstepper. You could play this to me at 4am on a rainy night after I’d been doing a graveyard shift as a bricklayer and I’d still get up and dance to it.
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Next time: I will not be sick, and I might have come round to the idea of sugar again.

you know i gave that horse a carrot so he’d break your foot

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So much for my posturing about how unemployment would mean I’d be able to blog all super-regularly, because guess what? I’m still sick. After all this time. And I’ve been too sick to cook. If I don’t cook, I can’t blog. And if I can’t blog, do I exist? I’m kidding, sort of. But yeah. Sick sucks. My cookbook writing didn’t start with the leader-of-the-pack style motorbike revving that I anticipated, but with a more of a sniffle and a wheeze.

I’ve spent the past four days up home at my parents’ place – after a flight to Auckland where I was in such a hazy, groggy daze of weak hopelessness I was terrified that I was going to be pulled aside by security for suspicion of being on and/or carrying multitudes of drugs. I’m not sure ‘it’s just the cough syrup, honest’ or even ‘if I was, surely I’d be having fun than this’ is a defense they’d believe.

I had plans to test a ton of recipes for the cookbook while up home, of writing half the book, of doing a tour of royal proportions of my family in the area…but instead I just spent the whole time on the couch. It was kinda lovely though. Mum giving me old family cookware to use as props in the cookbook (and also to use in real life of course); Dad discussing asset sales with me; my younger brother making me never prouder by bringing up the Bechdel test out of nowhere while we were talking about movies. My nana surprising me by appearing in the car that picked me up from the airport, my godmother dropping in with a gift of lemons and chillis, my old babysitter who’s now a prison warden (no coincidence I’m sure) visiting after years and years away. And me on the couch, wrapped up in a feather duvet, in front of a constantly going fireplace. It was excellent.

I should also mention me discussing how much I loved the cats with the cats themselves. They were fairly impervious to my advancements.

I was, however, rewarded with indescribable happiness when I woke up to find Poppy curled up on my bed. The former Jessica Wakefield/Baby Raptor kitten has mellowed into the softest, cutest cat. Also may I draw attention to the world’s most splendid bedspread? Instagram actually softens its effect somewhat, you really need to see it in person (not that that’s an invite) to appreciate its shiny, synthetic, unforgivably fluoro resplendence.

So I returned to Wellington yesterday afternoon, finally with a flicker of hunger to cook and eat again, which is good, because I have a million recipes to test. It was late afternoon and a snack was needed. Something simple. Something cheap. Something that would remind me that I actually like to cook and eat. Who do I turn to? Nigella of course, always. Nigella and her awesomely named Rainbow Room Carrot and Peanut Salad.

Depending on your tastebuds and their sense of style, this salad might sound weird. Like something that you might have made in the hopes of impressing someone in the late 1970s. Like there’s too much going on, like there’s not nearly enough going on. But it works – the different levels of crunchiness, the nutty sweetness, the salty, oily, sourness – all elements coming together to form something that you won’t be able to eat fast enough, I promise. I normally never peel my carrots by the way, but the ones I found in the fridge were a bit elderly and bendy…you know…so I made an exception. Kindly note the sunny yellow knife, a congratulatory present from Mum for getting the cookbook. And the tea towel came from her too. I told you I had a good time at home.

The Rainbow Room Carrot and Peanut Salad

a recipe from Nigella Lawson’s book Forever Summer.

4 carrots, scrubbed
75g salted peanuts
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar (or apple cider vinegar)
2 tablespoons peanut oil
A few drops sesame oil

Grate or thinly slice the carrots. Mix with the peanuts. Mix in the vinegar and oil. There you have it.

This also works well with salted roasted cashews, if you’re not peanut-inclined. But there’s something in the carrots’ own nutty sweetness that goes so brilliantly here.

Will I ever tire of framing photos this way? Maybe not till those flowers wilt beyond recognition. And I’ve had them since before Christmas, so I don’t fancy your chances…

I admit, there was one evening in the last two weeks involving Soju and karaoke and red wine. But a dear, dear friend was moving to Japan, so what can you do? I’m pretty sure that the length of this sickness is not due to that one night. Maybe it threw my recovery off-course slightly, but nothing more than that. All I can say is, I’d better be better by the next time I blog here. I don’t want to be sick forever!
 

Title via: The White Stripes, that enigmatic duo with a permanent place in my heart, and Well It’s True That We Love One Another, the final track on their album Elephant.

Music lately:

Frank Ocean, Channel Orange – stream the whole stunner mixtape here.

Vulindlela, by Brenda Fassie. I don’t know what she’s singing, but it’s so full of joy and beauty that it doesn’t matter. I mean, I want to know, but this is enough for now.

Nothing like thinking of those worse off than yourself when you’re sick – Fantine’s big number I Dreamed A Dream from Les Mis made me feel positively healthy every time I listened to it. And anything’s more healthy than Patti LuPone’s wig here.

Next time: I. Will. Not. Be. Sick.

i saw the sign, and it opened up my eyes i saw the sign

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It was Tuesday, May 21 when I got the phone call confirming that I had a cookbook deal. I’ve already talked about how, while waiting for that phone call, I watched clip after clip of inspiring Broadway videos and Leslie Knope achieving stuff. But before all that, I was, to keep myself sane, keeping an eye out for good signs. You know, little things that felt like the universe was giving me a thumbs up. Here’s the list I made on the day:

– I saw Bernie, the magical giant-hound-about-town, on the way to work.
– Barack Obama tweeted “Clear eyes, full hearts” and a photo of himself throwing a football. I mean, c’mon. That’s a good sign any day. 
– Jo tweeted me to let me know the actress who plays Arya on Game of Thrones was photographed wearing very similar bold pants to mine. I really wanted to get this cookbook okay people, and I was going to see good signs where I wanted to see them. 
-Tim and I beat our personal best time at getting to Customs Brew Bar that morning for a pre-work coffee, despite it feeling like we were going to be late.
-There was a man I’ve never seen, before or since, busking underneath my window, playing Beauty and the Beast on the saxophone. Anything that calls to mind the human hug that is Angela Lansbury has to be a good sign.
-And finally, spoilers ahoy, I felt like the way season four of Parks and Rec finished meant I just had to get this. 
Now I’m not super-superstitious – not as much as I used to be, anyway – plenty of life is just horribly, weirdly random. But still, I can’t help taking note of things like that when they come along.
So I was a bit concerned, because this week marked my very first days of writing my cookbook, the days I pictured spending typing furiously, drinking bottomless black coffee and gazing happily out the window, perhaps while an accordion plays somewhere in the background. I would possibly also be wearing a beret. 
And this week, I got sick. Kitten-weak, coughing constantly, aching head, my nasal passages like high pressure hoses jetting forth mucus, brain fuzzy as the ugg boots I wore to stay warm. You could say it’s not the best sign that this cookbook’s going to be amazing.

But I’ve decided to take it as a good sign. First, I’m hoping that being sick now at the start of Winter will mean I’m cool for the rest of it. Secondly, it neatly did away with any first-day-on-the-job awkwardness. Thirdly, after months of burning away on less than six hours sleep a night to put in the work to make myself as cookbook-worthy as possible, some enforced rest is kinda nice.

But yeah, did I mention kitten-weak? I could hardly lift my head yesterday. However there was a small window where hunger, my sense of taste returning, and my ability to stand up straight intersected, and I made good on it by cooking myself up some tomato soup, with sake, chilli, and cinnamon in its cherry-red depths. That aside, this is really just a can of tomatoes and some water, so as well as the fact that it ain’t no thing to make, it also costs little.

Tomato Soup with Sake, Chilli and Cinnamon.

A recipe by myself.

1 can tomatoes in juice (crushed makes your life easier, but sometimes whole are cheaper, so go with what you know.)
1 heaped teaspoon sambal oelek OR 1 red chilli, deseeded and sliced
1 tablespoon semolina
1 shotglass of sake
Cinnamon and salt to taste

Open the can of tomatoes and tip it into a pan. Fill up the can with water and tip that into the pan too. Add the sambal oelek or chilli, bring to the boil then simmer for about ten minutes, stirring occasionally. If you’re using whole canned tomatoes, mash them up with your wooden spoon as you go. Sprinkle over the semolina, stir it in quickly, and simmer for another five minutes till the soup is thickened. Finally, stir in the sake and a dusting of cinnamon (not even a quarter of a teaspoon – just shake some into your hand and scatter it in from there) plus salt to taste, and serve. 

Serves 1 – although easily multiplied for more.

Tomato soup is what it is – you either like it or don’t. This is special yet nothing special at the same time, making it a rather perfect lunch. There’s something inimitable about sake’s clean yet buttery taste and the way it mingles with the slow-simmered tomatoes. The semolina swells and thickens the soup superbly, and the chilli and cinnamon add necessary, fragrant warmth, generally distracting you entirely from the metallic beginnings of these tomatoes. If you don’t have sake kicking around, use sherry, and if you don’t have that kicking around, this will still be really nice, so fear not. And if you don’t have semolina you could use polenta, or just have your soup a little more watery. However, there is also something to be said for following my recipe as it is, too.

So I ate it for lunch yesterday with a cup of hot lime and honey – the lime simply a different take on the usual lemon drink that I’ve been having nonstop for the last few days. And it was wonderful.

I had my last day at work on Friday. It’s strange not to be going there anymore after so many years. At this stage it just feels like I’m on sick leave, but there is a persistent sense of having left something big behind – it’s a little sad, but it’s also very, very freeing, and growing more definite. And I left on good terms – the best terms in fact, dancing wildly with everyone at a local bar. Indeed, it’s possibly for the best that no-one has to make eye contact with me immediately following my particular brand of jiving to Tainted Love. I can’t help it, when the music plays I dance big, and I dance freely.

And any lingering feelings of “what have I dooooooone” were dissolved quickly on Saturday night at an amazing potluck dinner at our dear friend Jo’s (the same one who told me about Arya’s pants.) Friends that you feel comfortable enough to have a fullness-induced (slightly mulled wine-induced too, to be fair) lie-down in front of are good friends indeed. Seriously, when I get too full I have to lie down, and there’s really not many places outside the home that I can feasibly follow through with it.

So this is me now – not wearing a cool beret (or even an uncool beret), not having written gazillions of pages of my cookbook, and not feeling particularly well.

But I’ve made a tiny bit of progress and if nothing else there’s no sickness, it seems, that the right filter on instagram can’t fix. The journey has begun. And if it begins with me wearing my teenage-throwback Bjork buns and a blanket my mum crocheted for me and using a handtowel as a handkerchief because a mere handkerchief can’t sustain what my nose is throwing down, then so be it! 
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Title via: Ace of Base, The Sign. You know life like, is demanding, without understanding? 

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Music to write a cookbook to:


I already love Janine and the Mixtape’s song Bullets, but if anything’s going to make me listen to a remix of it, it’s the fact that Haz’Beats from Homebrew is behind it. Dreamy as.

Speaking of remixes, listen now to this Scratch 22 remix of Street Chant’s Salad Daze. Holy cow, is all I’ve got.

Was a little tipsy the other night and pulled my typical move of falling into a YouTube black hole of tears-inducing Broadway videos. And there are few more instantly tears-inducing than the late Laurie Beechman. Ugh, just typing it makes me want to cry. Watch her singing On A Clear Day…If you dare.
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Next time: I have the latest Cuisine magazine and am still planning to cook something from that, but whatever it is, hopefully I’ll be well enough to make it something a little more involved than a can of tomatoes and some water. But not too involved, you know me.

and i will be alone again tonight my dear

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I’m not all that good at just cooking stuff for myself to eat when Tim’s not around – which is weird for so many reasons. Like, I love food. And cooking for two people involves only one more person than cooking for one. At best. And I’m not all codependent or anything, honest. But if Tim’s not around, I tend to find myself spending the usual dinner-ing hours eating golden syrup or something. Maybe it’s because I coincidentally feel like eating golden syrup at those times? I don’t know. Sometimes things just happen and there’s no reason for it. If I get famous off this cookbook I request that everyone overanalyses it for me in the comments section.

I’m saying this because I had lunch by myself today and I felt like eating something marginally more diverse to the palate than golden syrup. Having spent last night drinking whisky and sloe gin at Brendan’s birthday party, I also didn’t feel like expending any extraneous energy.

So I made this: Fried Onion Rice with Nuts, Cardamom and Cinnamon. It’s literally just onion, rice, nuts, some water and some spices. And yet so much more vigorously flavoured than that restrained list would suggest. I adapted it from a recipe in Nigella Lawson’s book Feast, a book I’ve read about a squillion times, and yet which can still jolt me from my indolence and make me want to cook something for myself immediately.




You do need to really crisp up the onions for this. You know how you’re normally supposed to focus on the cooking? With this I encourage you to get distracted. I recommend checking twitter and perhaps peruse an aggregator of viral content like buzzfeed.com – whatever their latest list of animals doing cute stuff is, it should use up just the right amount of time to let the heat of the pan really char those onions. Don’t go any further than that though – the onions are for flavour, not just texture – this isn’t the time to go getting lost in a ‘where are they now’ quagmire of looking up 90s actors on Wikipedia or look at every single inexplicably happy photo on someone you used to go to school with’s Facebook. We’re not building a casserole here, people. 


Fried Onion Rice with Nuts, Cardamom and Cinnamon

Adapted from a recipe from Feast, by Nigella Lawson, moon of my life.


3 tablespoons/a handful/whatever of nuts – almonds, cashews or peanuts are good here
1 onion
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup basmati or other long grain white rice
Seeds from 3 cardamom pods (just slice the pods in half and shake out the seeds)
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Peel, halve, and finely slice your onion. Heat a large pan and toast the nuts in it till lightly browned. Set them aside. Heat the oil in the same pan and fry the onions in it till good and browned – they should have reduced in size with most of them crisp and darkened. Set aside with the nuts. In your same pan, stir the rice and spices over a low heat for a minute – this just helps with the flavour of things – before tipping in 1 cup/250ml water and a pinch of salt and clamping on the lid. Turn the heat down low and let it simmer away without disturbing it for about ten minutes. At this stage the rice should be completely cooked, but if not let it go a little longer. Remove from the heat, stir in the nuts and onions, and shuffle everything onto your plate. Serves 1.

I have tons of cardamom pods – what, I’m a food blogger – but if you don’t it’s not the end of the world and this is fine with just cinnamon. But cardamom’s particularly lemony-gingery, mildly eucalyptus-y flavour lends a particular elegance to the earthier, oilier flavours. But seriously, fried onions, nuts, rice? Some of the nicest things in the world, making this dish a worthy alternative to golden syrup. Less sticky and prone to getting in my hair, too.

Winter is good for so many things: cooking soup and stews and roasts and such; piling on as many soft cosy clothes as you can; weather complaining as a universal conversation topic; less potential for public sweatiness; whisky tastes better. It goes on. But above all of that, I love spending a lot of time watching TV, like really snuggling into a good TV series. I say that, because I really just wanted to say this:
Tim and I have been rewatching the short but incredible Freaks and Geeks and today I discovered I have the exact same sweater as the character Millie Kentner. I happened to be wearing it while we watched this episode. It’s difficult to photograph one’s self and a screen but trust me: these wooly jumpers are identical. Even in these exciting times, this stands out as a particular milestone.
The last week of June marks the last week of me being at my job – then my main focus in life is going to be bringing this cookbook into existence. It looks like it’s going to be a little nightmarish, logistics-wise – but I’m telling myself that I’ve never been a slave to logic, so everything looks like a logistical nightmare to me. Right? Right. I’ll totally get there though. Somehow.
But: if any fancy people out there are reading, but also staring out the window sighing wistfully because you can’t find the right freelance foodwriter to pay some money to, may I suggest…myself? While the book is going to take a lot of time I’m hoping to pick up some extra opportunities to bolster my soon-to-be-flailing bank balance. I already do lots of freelancing for reassuringly real things like Sunday Star-Times and 3news.co.nz, and I’ll tell you candidly: I think I’m a really good writer. And as another great writer made their awesome character say: thank you for your consideration.
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Title via: Love’s Alone Again Or. One of the most excellent songs I’ve ever heard. So there’s that.
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Music lately:

Azealia Banks, Liquorice. Not as immediately, life-changingly gripping as 212, but still super awesome with a catchy as heck chorus.

Nina Simone, Here Comes The Sun. Heard some Nina Simone on the radio today and reflected on how she can pretty much do no wrong, and how I wanted to hear more. So why not this video with its slideshow of unrelated artwork?
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Next time: I got the new Cuisine magazine – maybe something from that? Time will tell, better than I am right now. 

a dip in the butter and a flutter with what meets my eye

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Aren’t hormones just the darnedest things? I was thinking about the Spice Girls the other day and started crying a little. While on a public street in Wellington, walking to work. I know, what is life. It was pretty innocuous – something along the lines of ‘they were so pretty but accessible and they really did seem like the best of friends” and then I just got a bit teary, out of nowhere. Last time I cried while thinking about the Spice Girls was back in 1998 when Geri Halliwell left and I couldn’t listen to Viva Forever without my heart crumbling like a Spice Girls-branded Chupa Chup under someone’s back molars.

That really has nothing to do with anything (apart from everything) but it was an anecdote too large for Twitter and too strange for Facebook, and an anecdote nonetheless. I don’t exist on this many online formats to not be able to share awkward public tearfulness at the hands of a largely non-credible 90s pop group somewhere.

It has been a week of big decisions. The biggest being that with this cookbook looming ever closer, I’m leaving my full-time job to devote myself to writing. Writing the book, writing this blog (I don’t want to ever be too busy for it) and hopefully doing some more freelance writing too, in order to keep myself and Tim in butter. It’s not something I’ve decided to do lightly – money doesn’t come from nothing, I’ve gained a lot of opportunities from my current workplace, and honestly it still feels so recently that KFC and several supermarkets never called me back. But the book needs to come first, and so the end of June will also be the end of my office life for a while.

I almost wasn’t going to blog tonight – I did a lot of sleep-ignoring in the leadup to getting confirmation of the book deal and I can’t quite convince my body to carry on at that same hyper level now I’ve got it. However I conceded that I should blog, and could easily upload an instagram of dinner. Then I figured I might as well use my actual proper camera. By the time I started thinking “By gosh, this photo could use a loosely folded teatowel” I knew I was committed. This is just something I came up with tonight, a response to the brutally cold wet weather and to what I had in the fridge. I’m not the best at cooking polenta but this method, while not traditional, tends to work for me. Polenta will absorb pretty much whatever you throw at it, so if you don’t have cream, just use more water or milk and maybe add some butter, or you could use tomato juice, or well flavoured stock. There are options out there, this is but one.

Garlicky Polenta with Greens and Browned Butter


A recipe by myself.


1 cup fine polenta/cornmeal (they’re the same thing, but make sure it’s the finer, not coarser stuff.)
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 cup cream
1/2 cup milk
2 cups water
Salt
As many green vegetables as you like – I used broccoli, spinach, and avocado. Also good would be beans, peas, Savoy cabbage, rocket, edamame, etc…
Butter


First, slice up any of your vegetables that need it and have them ready. 


Then, in a medium sized pan, carefully whisk together the polenta, garlic, cream, milk and 1 cup of the water till smooth. Bring to the boil, continuing to stir, and adding the extra water if it gets too thick. It will bubble a little – big, slow-moving bubbles – but just continue to stir it, till, when you carefully taste it, the grains are soft and not the slightest bit gritty, with a texture verging on mashed potato-like. 


Set aside while you quickly deal to the vegetables – heat up the pan and add any non-leafy, non-avocado greens to it. Tip in 1/2 cup of water and let it bubble away. Then add your spinach or other leaves, and continue to cook till the water has evaporated and the leaves have wilted. 


Finally – spoon the polenta onto two plates, put the greens (including your avocado if you’ve got it) on top, and then finally heat up the same pan you cooked the veges in and throw in about 30g butter. Let it sizzle over a high heat till darkened, with golden bubbles appearing. Remove from heat and spoon it over the vegetables and polenta. Serve.

Polenta becomes quilt-soft and gently creamy in flavour – incredible comfort food, the likes of which I never even knew existed a few years back. Browning the butter means burning it, but if you’re wary of such brazen actions just know that it becomes more darkly rich and nutty and – oh, glorious new word! – pinguid than you dreamed possible. And hot browned butter on top of cool firm avocado is quite the revelation. It won’t be the last you’ll see this combination here, I assure you.

Pinguid pinguid pinguid. As satisfying to say as it is to think about things that are pinguid.

It has also been a week of podcast fraught-ness. If your original file never recorded properly, your laptop wall charger stopped working, you accidentally uploaded entirely the wrong file to iTunes and in a panic accidentally not only delete it entirely from your podcast website rather than calmly editing it, but also delete the first episode…would you feel like the universe was trying to say “stop trying to make fetch happen!“? It wasn’t just any wrong file I uploaded to iTunes, but a video. Yes, if you can’t tell by the crisp, stellar sound on my podcast, I just record myself talking on Photo Booth, then convert it to mp3, then upload it as a podcast. Except I forgot to convert it, so had you casually found my podcast on iTunes, you would’ve been greeted by my pale, unwashed face talking away in the semi-dark while I was wrapped in a wooly blanket, followed by me in an old tshirt with the angle of the camera directly up my nose, followed by me wearing the outfit I describe in the podcast, but still not at my best angle (I assume I have one.) iTunes does not make it easy for you to delete something in a hurry either. Awkward.

Again I’d like to throw some huge love in the direction of my friend Kate, who came and recorded twice after the first file was busted, whose husband volunteered me their own laptop wall charger after mine stopped working, and who is such a brilliant podcast guest that I was, while editing it, continually smiling and nodding and turning to Tim and yelling “I think it’s going to be good!” because I forgot that I always shout when I’m trying to talk with headphones on.

So if you want to listen to The HungryandFrozen #soimportant Podcast Episode 2, you finally can, on the website or here in iTunes.

It has also been a time of parties! I was going for queen of the dinosaurs here, but despite my hastily cobbled-together garland of dinos, I somehow ended up looking like I was selling Pears soap or something. (Photo by Kate – I guess it’s been a time of Kate too!) Still, it’s a much better look than what I saved you all from in the accidentally-uploaded-video-podcast horrorshow. I wish there were more opportunities to wear dinosaur garlands, I guess since I’m not going to be in the office for much longer I can make my own opportunities, right? This imminent lack of job is paying for itself!
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Title via: The Miller’s Son from Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. Sara Ramirez (as in Grey’s Anatomy’s Callie, or as in Tony Award winning Sara Ramirez) is so, so magnificent here.
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Music lately:

Liane La Halvas, Age. She’s gorgeous, the song’s gorgeous. Yay for her.

This isn’t a song as such, but if you have even the slightest interest in hearing people sing nicely (not to back you into a corner here) this Seth Rudetsky ‘Obsessed’ video with Morgan James of Godspell has me, well, obsessed. Her voice is incredible. Worth it entirely for the bit at the end, although everything leading up to it’s great as well – I must’ve watched this a zillion times.
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Next time: I can’t get enough brown butter at the moment, and Brown Butter Ice Cream keeps appearing in my head, but we’ll see, we’ll see.

some are born to rise above sleepless nights and sloe gin love love love

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If you wouldn’t mind indulging me for a moment:

I’ve become slightly infatuated with Cinemagram, this app on my phone. It lets you create little gif-like moving images that can border from the barely mediocre (ahem) to the breathtakingly gorgeous. If you can’t view the above, what’s there is a bowl of ice cream ingredients and a bottle of cream, the former eternally emptying its delicious contents into the grateful latter.

I won’t, however, use this as a segue into talking about indulging in ice cream, because I refuse to buy into that. Ice cream is just what I eat when I feel like ice cream, no need be stacking on the guilt when you could stacking on the chocolate sauce instead. Right? Right.

And I feel like eating ice cream a LOT. Good thing my ability to think up ice cream recipes can keep up with desire to eat ice cream.

What a week it has been. On Thursday morning I read the news and punched the air joyously at Obama vocalising his support of marriage equality. On Friday night Tim and I went to Queer the Night, a march against homophobia and transphobia, with friends of ours. We ran into more friends along the way, and walking the streets of Wellington on a clear night chanting “two, four, six, eight, don’t be sure your kids are straight” felt right and good. Hearing heart-clenchingly sad stories from those who spoke was a reminder that there’s no place for complacency. An impromptu-ish party followed, from which my fondest memories include so many hugs, spreading crackers with butter and sprinkling them with salt, doing a highkick and landing in the splits (at the encouragement of others, not of my own volition, although I hardly require arm-twisting) and gasping over the staggering beauty, and utter importance of the Parks and Recreation final. I freely admit I’ve been inordinately affected by this half hour comedy show, and that there was a whole lot of crying and shaking going on. I may or may not have (or actually did) tweeted “Leslie Knope, moon of my life.” Make of this what you will.

And on top of all that, I thought that Gin and Tonic Ice Cream would be nice. Gin and tonic go together so excellently well. Why wouldn’t they excel together in ice cream form? Well, it wasn’t so much “nice” as “high-kick-then-landing-in-the-splits-ingly rapturous”, but you be the judge.

You no more need an ice cream machine for this than you need to know how to do the splits. It really couldn’t be easier. Or more unconditionally delicious. Seriously, this is one of my finest creations, and I say that as someone who says that every time they create something, so…who can you trust? Only your own tastebuds, once you’ve made this for yourself.

Gin and Tonic Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

  • 1 cup sugar
  • Juice of a lemon (about 2 tablespoons)
  • 3 tablespoons gin
  • 125 ml tonic water
  • 600ml cream

Tip the sugar into a bowl and add the lemon juice, gin, and tonic water. Stir to dissolve a little, then pour in the cream. Whisk till thickened. You’re not looking for whipped cream here, just something that has the texture of, say, a good thickshake. Transfer to a freezer-proof container (like – haha! – an old actual ice cream container) and allow to freeze, of course.

Whilst vodka and soda water with no lime is my very favourite I have much room in my heart for gin. Gin comes with a sense of occasion and history. It calls to mind high summer, when I knew I was cool because mum and her friends let me have a G&T with them when we were camping. (Okay, ‘cool’ and ‘hanging out with one’s mum’ can be mutually exclusive, but hey.) It speaks of nights spent watching Gossip Girl with dear friends. And…I just really like the taste. What you end up with here is an ice cream bearing a delicate yet absolutely present hit of gin’s citrussy bitterness, which the inclusion of tonic, the arch older cousin to lemonade, only helps with.

The proportion of liquor to cream gives you the most ridiculous texture – it’s like soft-serve ice cream, straight from the freezer. Alcohol slows down the freezing process, but you don’t want too much or you’ll never actually get to the point of ice cream. It’ll be sludge. Exquisite sludge, but still. For all its simplicity, this is one of the most delicious ice creams I’ve ever tasted. Creamy and aerated, yet with a lemon sorbet-lightness. And importantly, it’s on just the right side of boozy, so you don’t make this face when you eat a spoonful.

And, if you’re given to flights of dinkiness and frivolity, which I often am, you might as well garnish it with a slice of lemon.

Title via the Lowdown-down from the other version of The Wild Party musical, both equally as exciting as each other, really. This one had Eartha Kitt, Mandy Patinkin, and a swell Toni Collette as Queenie, who sings this glorious song.

Music lately:

Frail Girls/Salad Daze, the double A-side single from Street Chant. Will likely form some more comprehensive thoughts around this soon, but for now: I really, really, REALLY like these songs.

Ghostface Killah ft Raekwon, Kilo. He’s coming to NZ! And not just NZ, but Wellington. If I had a nickel for every act that just went to Auckland, probably entirely justifiably, but still, I’d be able to afford to fly up there more often.

Next time: Not sure, should probably do an actual dinner recipe or something as a bit of a contrast though, I guess….