lazy jane, all the time

June 24, 2013March 11, 20208 Comments

Tulips holding up well. As is my twee agenda, it seems.

Also holding up well: this risotto recipe. I’ve made it three times in the last week. Once, twice, three times a lady recommending this recipe to you all. I know I often go on about how I work myself down to a nub writing this blog and the cookbook and meeting other various deadlines, but that aside, I’m really very lazy. If there’s a way I can do less than what’s required, even at the expense of the outcome, I will. It’s just the way it is. Some people accept that there’s hard work involved in life, some people (me) want to sit around and knit or check Twitter all day. Fortunately for me, Tim tends to meet this laziness with shrugging resignation/lifting/cleaning of all the things, but occasionally it works out well for both of us. In the case of this risotto, that is. I already love making risotto, with its calmingly repetitive stirring motion, and I don’t mean to sound like Troy McClure, but sometimes I want to take an already pretty easy thing and make it even more flagrantly low in effort. And not only does this make enough excellently delicious risotto for dinner and then a non-bleak lunch the next day (in your face, instant noodles!) it also uses only one dish. So, less dishes for Tim to do, or for him to rinse and then put in the dishwasher (I can’t comprehend how we have a machine to do the dishes for us but still have to pre-wash them, hence why I never do it.) I’m not trying to be proud of how lazy I am or anything, in fact I’m too lazy to expend any feelings over it whatsoever. Kidding! On the one hand, I feel like “why should naturally helpful, good people in society be celebrated when I can’t help being this unhelpful” and on the other hand sometimes I am just being a dick to see how much I can get away with not doing.

Back to the risotto, you wouldn’t necessarily think a version that you just shunt into the oven would work, since it’s the constant stirring of it that slowly releases the starch from the rice grains and gives it that soft, collapsing texture. But somehow it does, and frankly I don’t care to question why. It just does. The first time I tried this I simply stirred some herbs in and topped it with a little Whitestone Butter by Al Brown Manuka Smoked Butter that arrived in the mail because that’s right, I have the veneer of a fancy food blogger (as always, I wish I could tell my much younger self that this would happen, as something to cling on to and look forward to.) I’m not just saying this because I got it for free (I mean, in a roundabout way I am, but I would never lie to you about butter, okay?) this butter really is quite incredible, the manuka smoke somehow making it meatily rich while the texture is dissolvingly creamy and light. It’s the ideal substance atop a very plain, but perfect risotto. But regular butter and plenty thereof is also always the right choice, too.

Oven Risotto

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

2 cups arborio rice

2 teaspoons vegetable stock powder

1 tablespoon dijon mustard

5 cups water, of which up to 1 cup is white wine

Optional: fistfuls of butter, lemon zest and juice (especially if you don’t have wine), herbs. I guess the mustard is optional too, but you want this to taste like something.

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

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

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

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

Some other cool things of late, in order of most to least of what I thought of first to write about:

Am quite obsessed with knitting. It’s so calming, and repetitive. A bit like risotto, but you don’t have to stand up to do it!

Witness the knitness.

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

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

Finally: saw some cool hund friends!

Finally-finally: I’m going to bring up again that I was published in Cuisine magazine, because I’m just so happy and excited and self-proud.

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title via: Lazy Line Painter Jane, by Belle and Sebastian. This is one of about three of their songs that I am into, but I am so VERY into this song. The breakdown at the end is spectacular.

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music lately:

Camera Obscura, The Sweetest Thing. This song is from an album called My Maudlin Career, which is a bit of a great title. The song also rules. Otherwise I wouldn’t have put it here, of course.

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

square cut or pear shape these rocks won’t lose their shape

June 11, 2013March 11, 20209 Comments

I don’t mean to deliver this like it’s candlelit-vigil level news, but the following exchange happened late last week:

Tim: we’ve exceeded our 60 gigabyte monthly internet bandwidth allowance.

Me: *dramatic gasp* No internet? But I’ll be insufferable.

Tim: I know. I know.

I mean, a breezy and heedless thank goodness for 3G on smartphones, but still, I’ve had to write this as hastily as possible, in the knowledge that we get charged significantly extra for every gigabyte over the monthly allowance that we use. Just keep that in mind if there’s, I don’t know, any tiny thing you don’t like ever. This is my excuse.

This is how we do it.

I also don’t mean to deliver the following like it’s two-roads-diverging-in-a-yellow-wood level news of life-changing significance, but Tim and I have been in our house for around six months now, and only just had our first dinner party on Monday night. Not to harp on like some kind of harp about Game of Thrones, but this dinner party was in honour of the season three finale last night. Spoiler alert: some bits were all “whoaaa” and some bits were all “um, ugh, awkward white saviour moment”. I do love this show, although many’s the time after particular treatment of women within it that I have proclaimed myself absolutely done with it. And then I keep coming back, because it’s possible to enjoy something and have major problems with it at the same time. But if nothing else, it gave us an excellent opportunity to have our first dinner party in our now not-so-new house, in the form of a twelve person potluck. And it was wondrous. Quesadillas, Balti curries, roast butternut salad with tahini dressing, potatoes with caramel and prunes (oh Ottolenghi, you maverick), orzo salad, spicy pumpkin pie, and my offerings, a kind of grilled courgette and couscous layered dish covered in tomato sauce and capers, and these baked pears.

Baked pears with almonds, chocolate, and rosewater. I was deeply impressed with myself at how they turned out, in that I thought them up on Monday afternoon and hastily made them just before everyone arrived. Then maybe had just one too many wines during dinner to be truly effective, and almost forgot about them till halfway through watching the show itself. Luckily Tim reminded me about them at what turned out to be their optimal cooking time. I’m so used to screwing up recipes that I make up on the fly lately, so was really pretty prepared for these to be awful right up until the moment that I had my first bite. But they worked out perfectly. Serendipity makes everything more delicious.

What also makes everything more delicious, is when it’s ridiculously delicious. Pears have this sweet perfumed mellowness which the touch of rosewater and almond helps subtly amplify, like the Rise filter on Instagram. Everything caramelises and intensifies, but covering the dish with tinfoil means that the chocolate doesn’t scorch and the pears stay juicy and yielding. So you know, these are quite, quite amazing the next day for breakfast, cold from the fridge with cream poured over.

The way these came about in my head was that I wanted to make something vegan for pudding, to accommodate friends, but also wanted something fairly luscious and rococo to go well eaten alongside an HBO fantasy show with an enormous budget and phrases like “good brown ale” and “I will take what is mine with fire and blood”. The secret ingredient here is tahini, which ties the ingredients together with an accommodatingly nutty, rich backdrop of flavour.

Baked Pears with Almonds, Chocolate, and Rosewater

Recipe by myself. On the one hand, these are some slightly high-falutin’ ingredients. On the other hand, pears are maybe a dollar a kilo these days.

6 ripe pears
Half a lemon
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 heaped tablespoons tahini
1 x 70g packet ground almonds (this is how they come in New Zealand, anywhere between 50-100g would be fine if you can’t specifically find this amount.)
2 teaspoons rosewater
25g dark chocolate (I use Whittaker’s Dark Ghana, which has no dairy in it. And is wildly delicious.)

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Slice each pear straight down the middle vertically, trimming off the nubbly base and stem as you please (because little would be more shuddery than accidentally eating either.) Use a teaspoon to scoop out the seeds and a little flesh to create a hollow for the stuffing. Mine were entirely asymmetrical, so don’t worry about looks at this point. Lay the pears, cut side up, in a roasting dish and squeeze over the juice of the lemon. This will stop them browning while you make the stuffing but also helps complement the rosewater flavour.

Carefully mix together the tahini, sugar, and rosewater – tahini can sometimes be ridiculously thick and un-pliant, so expect something that eventually looks like cookie dough – then roughly, coarsely slice up the chocolate into shavings and chunks and stir that through. Using a teaspoon, fill each pear hollow – really packing it in and heaping it on – with the stuffing. This should make the perfect amount for 12 pear halves, with an extra teaspoon or so for nibbling on. Cover the roasting dish with tinfoil and bake for around an hour, or until an implement slides easily into one of the pears. Like Valerian steel into one of the endless parade of now-dead characters on Game of Thrones.

Last week was a series of ups and downs, the downs being I was sick with some mysterious sore throat and zero energy affliction, the ups being Tim and I went to the Visa Wellington on a Plate launch and mingled energetically with incredible bread and butter, lots of cool people, and the beauteous Garage Project dogs (you can see them on the event’s website, and perhaps understand why I ended up taking so many ‘best friends!’ type selfies with these hunds). Despite my jangled nerves at crowded social events like this – I’m an all or nothing mingler, either doing it with aplomb or awkward horror – It was a very, very fun night and the programme looks utterly bananas. Judging by my casual flick through it, it’s going to be a very good time to be in Wellington. The streets will be paved with halloumi and local chocolates.

Back to the downs, I’m still not sleeping any better – if anything it’s getting worse. I woke up at 3.45am today, just casually awake. I take longer and longer to sleep, but wake up around 5am. On the weekends, with no alarms and no surprises, I find my eyes flying open at 7am. Which is technically a decent sleep-in by my standards, but still. On the other hand I’m not sure if it is getting worse or just swirling to a climax, as I look back over the last few years and am unsure if there’s a time when I ever slept well. Are there night classes in sleeping? Oh, wait. (Don’t worry, I’ll go see a doctor about it or something.)

But then back to the ups, I did, as promised a while back, start learning to knit and I adore it. It’s so soothing and quiet and repetitive and tactile and also very fun watching the creation (thus far: an oh-so-slightly wobbly square which will become a blanket) slowly grow like a soft wooly plant.

Also on the ups: bought some sriracha. The cool thing about sriracha is that it’s very instagrammable and cool and people perk up and say “ohhhh I’m addicted to that stuff” if you mention it (like Game of Thrones!). But also it really is incredibly addictive, slightly tangy hot chilli sauce, and I can’t wait to pour it on everything. (Which: seriously, what is life. On the downside I never ever sleep but on the upside I have a small bottle of nice hot sauce.)

Posing? Me? Well, often, but I really am eating sriracha in this photo. Cinema verite!

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Title via: I acknowledge that Moulin Rouge spoke to me deeply at a particular time (there was one point where I was watching it more or less daily) but for these purposes I shall link to the ever-diverting Marilyn Monroe crooning Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.
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Music lately:

Demi Lovato, Give Your Heart a Break. Perfect, from the slicey uplifting violins to the flawless chorus.

Brigitte Bardot, Moi Je Joue. I followed a link to this song from The Moveable Feasts, a food blog I love, and was rewarded with this adorably scrappy, impetuous delight of a song.

Laura Marling, Master Hunter. Tim and I bought her new record and are finding ourselves unable to stop listening to it. Love her music to pieces.
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Next time: Sriracha on EVERYTHING.

"That was Groffle: The Awful Waffle, a book that I wrote on behalf of my education initiative"

May 7, 2013March 11, 202012 Comments

As you can see, my photos lately either take the form of badly lit dinner, or nicely lit but faux-artless scenes of plates and knives and forks. Or both. This scene is real, for what it’s worth (or I would’ve moved the damn lens cap out of the way.)

I have a theory. Well, that implies that it’s well thought-out – at this stage it’s less of a theory, more of a sentence on a blog. But: I swear food can sense fear, like horses can. (I know, I had a horrible horseriding accident at age ten. Sustained whiplash and a respectful terror of horses.) I have been on a ruining rampage in the kitchen lately, and it’s as if the food can tell I’m all nervous and have bad instincts about it. My latest screw-up was a salted caramel slice where I burned one can of condensed milk in the pan, and then, obtusely, the next batch refused to cook. Just wouldn’t. Slid around, off the base, which I’d already baked but which managed to somehow un-bake itself under the liquidy topping. I called it fail-slice. And ate most of it anyway over the next day or two, because the ingredients themselves still tasted okay.

That seemed so much more door-slammingly dramatic in my head, but to be fair, every time I ruin something I’m cooking it feels like the first and only time in humankind this has happened. The waste of ingredients, the bass-drop letdown after all that anticipation, the hangdog way that I have to impart the disappointing news to any expectant eaters. With that in mind, I am amazed that these falafel waffles, with their high level of novelty-induced-anticipation, and with their delicate, unbuttressed structure…worked. Worked just fine. Despite my nerves. So maybe food can’t smell fear, and all I have is a sentence, not a theory, and a lot of coincidentally recent cooking mistakes. The point is, I also have falafel waffles, and their relative success has helped my kitchen nerves no end, like in Sonic the Hedgehog when you gather up lots of sparkly rings, so it doesn’t matter if you lose a few here and there, because you will still have more rings to spare. (I played a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog one time.)

Sliced my lemon this way because I saw it in a fancy magazine. It looks so pretty but is kind of stupidly wasteful since you only get two slices per fruit. And now I’m in an aesthetics vs practicality food blogging quandary. Which is kind of like a metaphor for the waffles! (Or perhaps just kind of like the waffles.)

I like a good portmanteau-ing as much as the next person, and “fawaffle” is pleasing, but I think I better enjoy the rolling assonance (hey…oh?) of falafel waffle written in full. I first heard of these when a friend Kat (who I’ve met all of once, but you know, the internet!) emailed me with some suggestions of things to do in New York while Tim and I were there in October last year. She mentioned that we should definitely try falafel waffle. We never made it to this mystical place but the idea stuck in my head. Falafel mix, but instead of baking or frying it, clamp it between the crenellated arms of a waffle maker. There’s significant aesthetic outcome involved, sure, but falafel is delicious and enwaffling it is surprisingly practical. It makes a lot at once, you don’t have to watch it, it’s really cute.

Let me first apologise hugely though, for posting a recipe that you need specialised equipment for. I try not to do this. In my defensive defense, not one of the bajillion ice cream recipes that I’ve posted on this blog needs an ice cream machine. But I really can’t see myself getting around the waffle maker thing in order to make waffles appear. I don’t know if there’s some alternative that involves indenting pancakes with the end of a fork or something. I…hope not.

Falafel Waffles

Makes two. Recipe by me. Concept not mine. To cold-weary to google them.

2 cans chickpeas (I’d really wanted to soak chickpeas overnight and blend them up, but continually forgot.)
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon tahini (or peanut butter, in a pinch)
1 handful chopped herbs: coriander, parsely, chives, or all three. I only had a tablespoon of chives, but still.
1 teaspoon ground cumin, more if your cumin has been sitting around for years
1 pinch ground cinnamon
1 egg

To serve: anything at all – lemon slices, thick plain yoghurt, more tahini, mustard, chilli sauce, tomato sauce, whatever.

Drain the chickpeas and blend them up in a food processor (more specific equipment, sorry, I’m on a roll here) till quite well-blended but not pureed – you want a a mix that’s nubbly in places yet smooth in places. Basically: be half-hearted about your processing and it will probably turn out how it’s supposed to. Add the salt, tahini, herbs, cumin, cinnamon and egg and pulse briefly to mix.

Heat up a little oil in your waffle iron, putting it on a very high setting. Once you’re sure it’s good and hot, spoon in half the falafel mix, pushing it round evenly with the spoon, and shut down the lid. Leave it for a good solid five minutes, maybe longer – till it really seems cooked through. Use a spatula to carefully lever it away from the bottom grill, then lift it up and onto a plate. Repeat with the remaining mix.

I know two damn waffles doesn’t sound like much at all, but these are ridiculously filling, and when you think about it, each embossed heart segment is like a whole falafel on its own. There’s not that deep-fried crunch of the real thing, but it’s still excellent, outside of its looks. The cumin is rich and aromatic (that feels stupid now that I’ve written it down but it just is, okay) the indents making for maximum crispness within the baked-not-fried context, and chickpeas have a nutty deliciousness all of their own. Plus I covered mine in tahini and thick plain yoghurt and mustard and lemon juice, which made it look appalling but taste even better.

Is a waffle iron even worth it? Kinda. I adore waffles, but they are best if someone else is making them for you, otherwise I tend to get tired/bored halfway through the bowl of batter. Also they just aren’t as good as ones from a cafe generally. But on the other hand: waffles! Whenever you want them and also have the energy and ingredients! Tim and I got ours through Fly Buys, which is this points-gathering rewards scheme that takes forever to accumulate (one point per $25 spent on groceries. I mean really. Anyone rich enough to gather up enough points to get anything with that kind of system doesn’t need the system!) After seven or so years we scraped together enough points to get this waffle iron though, so…hooray for the system. The system is sound.

As well as apologising for your needing a waffle iron to make waffles, I’d also like to apologise if this particular post seems grave and unenthused: I have a cold and every word I type feels like an effort, the kind of effort when you’re trapped in a dream and you have to try and wake yourself up with an exhausting push of the body because it feels like a house is flattening you. I may also feel like the only person who has ever had a cold before, but it doesn’t help that work is so busy this week that I can’t take a forseeable sick day anytime soon, despite feeling deliriously atrocious. Even with my dramatics, that’s pretty much telling it like it is without too much embellishment. Which is all I’ll say about that – I’m always nervous to talk about work on here in case I get pulled into an office and am told “you said the word ‘work’ on your blog. That crossed a line between the professional and the personal. You’re fired and/or arrested.” (I’m basically always nervous, in fact.) I’m hoping I can outwit this cold with my smarts though, like Liam Neeson in Tooken 2. I still currently retain my sense of smell and taste, and the coughing only happens at night when I’m trying to sleep, so there’s that. I have ginger and whisky and vitamins and determination to get better by the weekend. And an immunity boosting ego trip from successfully making falafel waffles!

Between the cold and work I’ve been either running around or laying low but I had a good wine-fuelled impromptu-dance-party on Friday night, swooned frequently over Lost in Austen (it’s silly, but wins on swoon-per-capita) and saw this cool cat on Sunday at book group. Someone commented on instagram that this cat’s face is a bit like my natural face in photos. What a compliment! (That’s not sarcasm.) Like a horse smelling fear, or a recipe possibly smelling fear, cats can normally tell how badly I want to be their friend and so, being the bloody-minded creatures they are, remain aloof. But despite its sneer here, this cat (Oscar) was in fact super friendly and flopsy and nuzzlingly ridiculous.

(hands up who wants a pet cat more than ever now)

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Title via: Occasionally I quote things other than songs here. And really, who is more glowingly waffle-proud than Parks and Recreation’s glorious hero, Leslie Knope? (She’s a TV character, in case you don’t know. And if you didn’t: find out.) But also I suspect Leslie Knope would really hate falafel waffles, on account of their being full of legumes and lacking syrup. But still: waffles. So important.
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Music lately:

Flip Grater, The Quit. Quiet and smoky, I love it.

What I Did For Love, from the musical A Chorus Line – just one of the most gorgeous songs in the world. The lyrics are so, ugh, just so good. “Look, my eyes are dry, the dream was ours to borrow…” I predictably love Idina Menzel’s version which she sang for President Obama, no big.

Robin Thicke, TI, Pharrell, Blurred Lines. Cannot quit this song.
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Next time: Something non-specialised like waffles, something gleaming with triumph because I definitely won’t have this cold anymore, no way. No ma’am.

if I rap soup my beats is stock

April 30, 2013March 11, 202012 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Dead roses: I really like them.

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

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

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

A recipe by myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

reminds us of our birthdays which we always forget

April 16, 2013June 11, 202019 Comments

As I was eating my dinner and watching Game of Thrones this evening, I thought: I really shouldn’t be doing this. Either eat, or watch Game of Thrones, but don’t do them simultaneously because the onslaught of viscera is decidedly not food-friendly. This has nothing to do with anything, I just wanted to make the point.

Anyway, it’s my birthday tomorrow! But you get the presents! In the form of a recipe for braised lentils. Birthday Eve, I call it, and as such, one’s thoughts turn to reflection. Ha. I live every day like it’s the contemplative lead-up to further aging, and reflect upon everything I’ve ever done so much that, like a long-running TV show, the whole process should be able to go into syndication so I don’t have to come up with new stuff any more. Instead, just looping around without any effort from me, while I take time out to snooze. I got to have a late, long lunch with the fantastically high-achieving and welcoming Marianne Elliot from La Boca Loca on Saturday, and we talked about everything – the names people will call women but not men to bring them down; standing by things you’ve said; tacos; and this sense of constantly running towards the next thing having barely achieved the last thing. The latter was oddly heartening, in that basic way that recognition of something can be. I have recently been getting back into that troubled but utterly addictive musical Chess, and there’s this line that I never even noticed before that Josh Groban doesn’t so much sing as massage into the air with his throat: “Now I’m where I want to be and who I want to be and doing what I always said I would and yet I feel I haven’t won at all – running for my life and never looking back in case there’s someone right behind to shoot me down and say you always knew I’d fall“. Heavy! And yet I was like whoa, Josh Groban, way to pluck words from my brain with your rich vanilla scented-candle of a voice and articulate them perfectly via a convoluted musical that can’t even commit to its own plot.

And yet, and yet. I received some final pdfs for my cookbook that I’m driving you all away from with my angst and lentils; and oh wow. As you know a lot of time has been put into proofing the proofs (if you didn’t know, the proofs are like, here’s what your book will look like but on hundreds of pieces of paper which you will immediately drop, and as they hit the floor they will both papercut the tender vamp of your bare foot and shuffle themselves out of order with the impeccable swiftness of a Vegas croupier.)

The proofs were really beautiful, and I felt every late night and early morning and email back and forth between the publishers and the whipsmart feedback of my friends and team, photographers Kim and Jason and stylist Kate, and every thought Tim had pretty much ever had since he’s good with wisdom-requiring stuff like this…was not only worth it, but completely evident in the soon-to-be real pages of this book. Which is out in September so sure, put a circle round that month on your calendar but also don’t go rushing into bookshops just yet – she says optimistically – because September is still some significant distance away. As I was reading through it I thought to myself: this book is amazing and you’re such a good writer and you deserve this. A surprisingly nice thing to think about one’s self. And also…a nice thing to think about a consumer item that you have to eventually put your name to in the public arena and sell copies of.

The word braised: I first heard it when I spent a couple of years at boarding school. It essentially means roasted but in significant liquid, but when the kitchen said “braised steak” was for dinner, they essentially meant wet beef, boiled cheerlessly in a weakly tomato-based sauce. And so…it’s not a cooking method I go out of my way to use. I’m not sure what I’m even thinking, trying to braise lentils, second only to tofu as far as maligned leguminous foodstuffs go. But word associations can change, and plus, something about the wilful ugliness of it all makes it almost head back round again to appealing? Well, whatever it sounds like to you – and I mean, it does help if you don’t entirely hate lentils in the first place – this is really very delicious. Simple and easy and surprisingly full of rich, bold flavour from the lemon, mustard and herbs, as well as a lot of oil and salt.

A lot of this can be changed for what you have to hand, although while I want to offer options it would be unhelpful not to have some kind of base recipe that I stand by. If you don’t have hazelnuts, almonds would be perfect, something like carrots would be fine instead of parsnips, use more rosemary instead of thyme, and so on and so on. But hazelnuts and thyme – my favourite herb – are rich and resinous, parsnips have a natural caramelised sweetness, and in a dish like this, cardamom is one of those stealth spices that lets you know flavour is present without revealing how or from where. But you could just leave it out.

Braised Lentils and Vegetables with Hazelnuts, Lemon and Thyme

Serves two, with some leftovers. A recipe by myself.

1/2 cup dried brown lentils
2 parsnips
2 courgettes
1 capsicum
1/3 cup olive oil
Juice of one large lemon, or two of those stupid tiny near-juiceless ones that tend to dominate the supermarket
1 tablespoon dijon mustard (or wholegrain. I could eat either with a spoon.)
Pinch of ground cardamom, or seeds from two cardamom pods
1 teaspoon dried rosemary (or “rubbed rosemary” as my packet calls it. Which made me laugh. That said, if you don’t have it, dried oregano, sage or marjoram is also fine.)
Good pinch salt
1/3 cup whole hazelnuts
A couple of stems of fresh thyme, or a couple of teaspoons of dried thyme leaves

Place the lentils in a bowl and cover with freshly boiled water. Leave to sit for an hour – although the longer the better, really. An hour is fine though, and certainly makes the whole thing more feasible straight after work or at the end of a long day.

Drain the lentils, and tip them into the base of a medium sized oven dish. Trim anything inedible from the vegetables and slice them into fairly uniform strips/sticks, then lay them on top of the lentils in the oven dish. Set your oven to 180 C/350 F.

Mix together the olive oil, lemon juice, mustard, cardamom, rosemary, and a generous pinch of salt. Pour this over the vegetables and lentils, then pour over a cup (250ml) of hot water. Place in the oven and cook for an hour. At this stage, taste the lentils – they should be firm, but cooked through. If not, return to the oven for a little longer. Then, turn the oven up to 200 C, scatter the hazelnuts and thyme leaves over the top, and return to the oven for a further ten minutes. Serve, turn the oven off and leave the door open to try and heat your house up.

The firm lentils and softly bulging vegetables slowly taking in all that lemony, oily dressing; the hazelnuts giving luxe and depth and crunch; my beatific smile at all of this being filled with more vitamins than my body can physically process. It’s a quiet, calming dinner after a Saturday night spent drinking cider while ten-pin bowling; grapefruit daquiris while celebrating the third birthday of coolhaunt Monterey, and beer while loitering at a fancy pub as Devon Anna Smith played records I liked (it maybe looks worse on paper, I was fine.)

Some facts about my birthday:

There are ELEVEN notable ice hockey players born on April 17, according to Wikipedia.

I’m the oldest child. I was born at 8.50pm-ish. I frowned a lot and immediately got colic and did not stop screaming for six months. Luckily I made up for it by being a very overachieving preschooler.

While I can’t afford all the trinkets I want I did buy this cool cat (bottom centre), a print from local artist Pinky Fang. It seems to go well with the sinister cat we bought in New Orleans, and my Devon Anna Smith print. Three cats seems like a good number to have around.

Tomorrow is the final reading of the Marriage Act Bill which will decide whether marriage equality is happening in New Zealand or not. Every day it seems more and more unfair that I’m allowed to marry someone just because of the ridiculous coincidence that they happen to be a man. I wrote a long thoughtsy thinkpiece paragraph after this and then deleted it because it’s much simpler to just say: this bill means a lot to me not quite just because I’m a more-or-less decent person who wants equal rights for all, or because Tim and I are engaged but have decided not to marry unless it goes ahead, but also because I’m also…not straight. The Q in LGBTQ. Yes. I won’t say much more about this, apart from that I realised it an awfully long time ago, but only articulated it relatively recently. Articulating all this was like putting on glasses and seeing things just as they are but a little clearer (I use this analogy a lot, sure, but looking at things is just so great since I got my glasses). Doing so is of course a totally private, personal choice for everyone, and this is just my way. While I worried that I’d left it too long -whatever that means – or that I’d somehow express all this horribly wrong, or that braised lentils wasn’t how I wanted to remember it happening in years to come, or that maybe I should say it next time, or next-next time, I also thought I’d just…say it. It’s still a scary thing to do. But every day brings us closer to a time when it will be less and less scary to say it. Armed with the knowledge that you’re all cool and I’ve never once heard anything said against it that made the slightest bit of sense, I figure you all know pretty much everything about me anyway, and this is just another thing to matter-of-factly know.

I’m turning 27. This is an age where people will still say “so old” but also “so young” at you, depending on the person. I’m not sure when that will stop.

Victoria Beckham is born on April 17. When I was in my deadly-fervent Spice Girls phase, sharing a birthday with one was seen as some kind of ancient sacrosanct blessing. (Seen by me, and me alone.)

Title via: Side By Side By Side, from the Sondheim musical Company. The AMAZING Sondheim musical. Please keep having birthdays, Sondheim.

Music lately:

Blurred Lines, Robin Thicke with Pharrell and TI. I am addicted to this song like wo. And also reminded of the massive crush I used to have on Pharrell.

Birthday, Sugarcubes. Ones thoughts also turn to songs with the word birthday in the title. Bjork’s soaring, growling belting here is outrageously amazing. Extra fun in Icelandic!

Next time: Hoping to have another I Should Tell You interview up on Friday. Who’s it going to be? Why, who do you think I am, some kind of organised person?

how do ya like them egg rolls, mr goldstone?

April 8, 2013March 11, 202023 Comments

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

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

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

Miso Scrambled Eggs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is maybe a fifth of the books she gave us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i add two and two, the most simple addition

March 26, 2013March 11, 20209 Comments

It’s fascinating how faltering memory is. My best friend from high school was in town last night and came to visit Tim and I ahead of a one-way trip to South America in June (we never ever see each other so even though that sounds far away, this is, as they say, it.) I lamented how I could go for six months without making a cup of tea but still know how to make one, while remembering language is like trying to grasp the details of a vivid dream. Unless you’re in amongst it, it just slips out from between your fingers the harder you try to grasp onto what you know.

I was also recounting to Tim recently a vague yet arresting memory from my early years: being at the house of a friend of my parents, a supercool sophisticated older girl (probably…nine?) being really nice to me, bawling my eyes out when we had to leave because I liked her so much, and then the girl showing me all her Barbie accessories and saying I could choose any one to take home. Even then at age, oh, six? I was floored by her generosity. In hindsight, it could’ve been a number of things – she’d outgrown the dolls and could afford to be magnanimous, her mother had stage-whispered at her behind my back to give me something to stop me crying, genuine generosity, who knows? All I know is I ended up with a laughably impressive pink Barbie Corvette convertible. I never saw those people again. Or maybe I did, and maybe I remembered this all wrong, y’know? I’m so sure that’s how it went, but memory is tricksy and mercurial like that.

Where am I going with this? Literally nowhere. It’s just this recipe is quicker than a sneeze and I wanted to indulge in some vignette-ery. Wanna make something of it?

This is my blog, and I will have my clunky segue and eat it too. I recently got to have the spoils of this roasted butternut recipe, invented by my friend Brendan and made by my also-friend Kim, and it was so good that I was determined to make it myself as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It’s also so very simple that words haven’t been invented yet to describe how little you have to do to achieve the finished result.

Cinnamon-Golden Syrup Roasted Butternut Squash

Full credit to my friend Brendan for inventing this and letting me blog about it, full credit to Kim for txting me the premise of the recipe after already telling me twice, and for just being great.

1 butternut squash
2 tablespoons olive oil, or a blasting of cooking oil spray (I didn’t have the latter)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoons golden syrup or brown sugar
Salt

Note: did I actually use these measurements? Nooo. I just enthusiastically shook the bottle of olive oil over the cut halves, gave it enough of a crop-dusting of cinnamon so that the surface was speckled and brown, and lightly drizzled over golden syrup from a squeezy bottle. But on the other hand, I appreciate that sometimes actual quantities can be useful when you’ve never made a thing before, or if you don’t cook all the time.

Slice the butternut in half lengthways, sprinkle over all the remaining ingredients – don’t hold back on anything – and roast on a baking paper lined oven tray at about 200 C/400 F (or 180 if your oven is particularly blasty) for about 40 minutes, until it is soft and darkened and almost collapsing in on itself. That is it.

It might sound too simple, it might sound like it’s going to turn into pudding, but butternut’s dense, firm texture can handle a lot of what you’re throwing at it, quietly absorbing all that cinnamon and syrup without turning into creme brulee. The oil and salt are what keep it in check, making it more fulsomely luscious and counteracting the blush of sweetness on the surface, and it smells incredible. Butternut is already a little sweet and rich, and the tickle of cinnamon and stab of salt just points up everything good about it, while slowly roasting it makes it soft and pliant enough that you can plunge a spoon into it. I just dropped a large spoonful of it onto a plate and stirred in butter and more salt, Tim spread his on a slice of baguette and topped it with tomato. The next night I stirred the leftovers into cooked spaghetti with lemon juice, burned butter, capers, toasted almonds and lemon zest. It’s versatile stuff. Thanks, Brendan!

Making something so perfect, and perfectly simple was the ideal activity on Sunday night after throwing our friend Ange a Twin Peaks themed birthday/farewell one-two punch party (I just like saying one-two punch, this party had no pugilism subtheme) and also after attempting to make Ange a birthday cake that was far too ambitious in its scope and doomed to failure. A triple-layer bundt cake, make particularly enormous by being layered up on top of a ring cake. It had no structure, it was sliding sideways, bits of bundt were chipping off, it was not the sophisticated elegant thing I’d vainly pictured. Tim returned home from picking up ice to find me recklessly slinging the top layers of bundt into a bowl while Ange laughed, possibly nervously. The blackberry custard I’d made to sandwich together the layers gave the remaining ring cake a kind of blood-smeared look that we decided we really liked, and so I studded it with cornflake chocolate (melted dark chocolate poured over cornflakes, frozen, broken into irregular pieces) and pierced it with long, thin beeswax candles which make anything look dramatic, and suddenly…it worked. But oh damn. It might be a while before I attempt to make a foot-tall, triple layer vegan bundt cake again. On the other hand I did get to refer to myself as Special Agent Fail Cooper.

Photo by the aforementioned Kim. Whose photos from early in the night you should most definitely check out, because they are stunning and my friends are all such babes that I have no more swoons to give.

Fortunately the party itself went off without a hitch, in fact describing it like that does it a disservice. It went off amazingly. Our clever friends Kate and Jason had sent us a rasterbated image of the waterfall used in the opening credits – rasterbation is when you blow up an image across as many pieces of paper as you want and it’s all pixellated and it looks amazing – and yes, I cannot even deal with the fact that rasterbating is a word – and we all put it up on one of our walls on Thursday night.

As Saturday went on, the place acquired a black and white chevron rug; a red curtain (actually an old duvet cover, but who can tell in the dark?) red and black balloons; the stunning Welcome to Twin Peaks sign painted by Kate pictured above; a slightly crappy RR Diner sign painted by me; a table full of donuts; a cherry pie (made by me and it was so great, in case you’re thinking I’m being self-effacing for the sake of it); lots of coffee; a Wanted sign for BOB; red light bulbs; owls; candles; brie and butter baguettes, and finally: a framed picture of Laura Palmer whose eyes follow you round the room. Even when you uneasily sit it face down on the shelf.

I went as secret-video-footage Laura Palmer, wearing a turtleneck for the first time since, oh, 2003, a dark green sweater, a tweed skirt, peachy ballet tights and brogues. I sweated myself into a stupor, but it was fun. I had planned to get progressively deader and plastic-wrapped as the night went on, but a guest arrived already wrapped in plastic looking so committed and excellent that I decided – with some small relief – to just stay put.

Tim was special agent Dale Cooper because who else could he be? We also had a David Lynch, a Bobby Briggs, a swoonful Audrey Horne (that was Ange) a Nadine, a Lucy Moran, a cousin Maddy, a veritable creepy suburb of characters in fact. And because it was a party thrown for someone else, I only knew about half the people in the room and so got to live out my somewhat pitiable fantasy of introducing myself to people and saying one or all of the following: “It’s a little lavish, but we call it home”; “We’re very informal here, as you can see” or “we’re tres liberal“. If you hear a faint whooshing sound, it’s probably the breeze caused from the collective shaking of heads of people reading this. But I care not.

It was an incomprehensibly fun night, although all the frantic dancing and fun-having and so on merely clouded the fact that I’m going to miss Ange so much when she moves to London. She was the very first person Tim and I met when we moved to Wellington, and while it was no meet-cute (“I guess we’re living together…okay bye”) we nevertheless have stayed firm friends, getting firmer and firmer as the years go on, our friendship near-on calcifying by this point in fact. Sigh. Partying is such sweet sorrow.

(I also love saying that.)
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Title via: The Music That Makes Me Dance, from the musical Funny Girl. I kinda tear up even just typing the name Laurie Beechman, but it’s worth the inevitable sniffles to see her sing this gorgeous song.
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Music lately:

I liked it just fine at the time, and I wouldn’t necessarily play it for fun on a day-to-day basis, but put R Kelly’s Remix to Ignition on and suddenly there’s ain’t no mountain high enough to keep me from the dancefloor. Verily, this was proven on Saturday night.

I’ve already mentioned it a zillion times on this blog but in case you’ve been hiding under a bushel like some self-effacing person’s light: Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart, from Twin Peaks, sung by Julee Cruise. It gets better with every listen, and not a week goes by that I don’t play it about five times over. So.

Bobby Womack, The Bravest Man In The Universe from the record of the same name. A record that I can keep flipping over and over and not get sick of.
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Next time: Something slightly more complicated, but…not triple layer bundt complicated.

have a cool yule and a frantic first!

December 22, 2012March 11, 202014 Comments

I suppose this will be my final post for 2012. So I’d better make it a good one.

*crickets, galloping endlessly on spinning tumbleweeds as though they are hamsters in a wheel, whilst making their cricket noise that signifies on reality television that someone has nothing of consequence to say*

I actually do have plenty to say, I just really like imagining crickets traveling across the land by scooting inside rolling tumbleweeds, conveying concentrated nothingness.

So here’s what I have to say: I started my new job last week, only to find myself on holiday all of a sudden. To Tim’s and my endless relief, I got paid for the small quantity of hours I managed to get under my belt before the year ended. And piling further relief on top of that, the Christmas Pulled Pork recipe that I’d had rolling around my brain since about June was made today, and worked. Because…Tim did some noodling around with our incoming and outgoing funds over the next few weeks and it would’ve been way painful had this experiment not worked out. I like to think I have something of a knack for inventing recipes that work the first time (I mean I wrote a damn cookbook) but I did have a play with this a few months ago and it really didn’t turn out well. So I was wary. Nervous. Apprehensive. And other such synonyms.

Check that out though. That’s no failure. It is being photographed on the floor (floorpork!), but we’ve only got one tiny table that friends have donated to us and it became immediately covered in stuff, the kind of stuff that you just don’t know where to put, and I really couldn’t be bothered clearing any of it. Also the wooden floor against the brick wall kinda aesthetically appealed, and this is, after all, a food blog.

I know pulled pork isn’t necessarily what springs to mind for a traditional Christmas meal – in fact it’s probably pretty far down the food chain after turkeys and chickens and so on and so forth. However. I have endeavoured to imbue this tender, shredded pork with so much Decemberific flavour that you can’t help but wonder why we ever even bother with turkey in the first place. So – why not just make it this year?

Firstly, it’s SO DELICIOUS and that argument alone should have some significant weight. Secondly, it involves very little effort. It does admittedly take over the oven for a long time, and needs a low temperature, but you really hardly have to do anything to it. Thirdly, wow your guests with your unapologetic, tradition-flouting now-ness! For what it’s worth. Fourthly: vegetarians aside, I’ve never met anyone who isn’t tearfully, seraphically happy while eating pulled pork. Fifthly: In case you were concerned about the oven being occupied for so long, just make a coleslaw (out of red and green cabbage if you like, for seasonal tonality) and provide a pile of soft, fresh bread rolls, plus an array of condiments – mustard, mayonaise, etc – and you have yourself one hellish heck of a festive meal.

If Christmas isn’t part of your life, you could of course change the title and just call it like, Cranberry Cinnamon Pulled Pork (which somehow sounds even christmassier? Sorry.)

Christmas Pulled Pork

A recipe by myself.

2kg (or thereabouts – depending on how many you’re serving, and you’ll want leftovers) of belly-cut pork shoulder, or just plain pork shoulder. I used belly-cut here. Because it’s what I could find.
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons ground ginger
3 or 4 cloves – or 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon dried mustard
2 tablespoons brown sugar
A pinch of salt

1/4 cup strong, black coffee
2 tablespoons Cointreau (or similar orange liqueur, or the zest and juice of an orange)
2 tablespoons tomato-based chutney, or tomato paste
A handful of dried cranberries

Turn your oven to 140 C (280-ish Fahrenheit) and place the slab o’ pork in an oven dish. I have this theory that ceramic or glass ones are good for slow cooking as they don’t conduct heat so well as say, metal or enamel. But really, just an oven dish of some description is what you want.

Mix together the spices, sugar and salt in a small bowl and spoon nearly all of it over the cut side of the pork. Then turn this over and rub the remaining into the fat. Cook it, fat side up, for four hours.

Mix together the coffee, Cointreau, and chutney. Tip this into the roasting dish once the four hours are up, sprinkle over the cranberries, and cover the dish tightly with tinfoil. Reduce the heat to 130 C, and cook it for another half hour or so.

Once this time is up, remove the tinfoil and carefully shred the pork to pieces – including the crackling, although discard some of it if it makes you feel squicky – I use a fork and a pair of tongs. Stir it through all the sauce and fattened cranberries, and then serve, with masses of pride.

I know the mix of coffee, orange liqueur, and tomato chutney sounds all kinds of odious, but please, trust me. The coffee just mellows and melts into the background, providing dark depth of flavour and a kind of general punchy undertone to the rich pork, without tasting like you’ve inadvertently dropped ham into your flat white. Both orange and tomato work oddly well with said coffee, while pointing up the pork’s sweetness and bringing strident Christmas flavour to echo that of the cinnamon, cloves, and ginger. The coffee needn’t be anything flash, as long as it’s strong and black – even just some instant granules stirred into water will be fine. The dried cranberries are there because sometimes restriction causes solutions – I wanted to include cranberry juice in the liquid, but was wary of adding too much sugar – which could burn – and also of the fact that I would then have to go out and spend money on said juice. I then found dried cranberries in the back of my wardrobe (as you do) while we moved house, and thought they’d be even better – they become swollen with the meaty juices in the oven, and then provide bursts of sour-sweetness once dispersed through the torn apart pork. And they make it look a bit more twinkly and festive.

So whether or not I’ve convinced you to do it, I believe I will be making this on Christmas day for my family.

Our tree keeps on tree-ing!

Christmas is, of course, a time for thinking about consumer items you’d really like. Trinkets that I have my heart set upon this year (and don’t take this to heart Santa, this is more like stuff I’ll buy myself once my earnings buffer up my bank account again) include Pinky Fang’s teeth barrette (just the word barrette fills me with Claudia Kishi thrills); Nigella Lawson’s new book (I don’t even care if it’s good or not, I just love her so much); Devon Anna Smith’s witchy Kittens and Oak print (obsessed); a really good thesaurus (I’d like to become even more wordy!); the dvd of Sondheim’s Company (impossibly thrilling) some new pots and pans that are both photogenic but also really, really good (realised during the move that I have hardly any, and what I have is rubbish); a pet cat and a fleet of Alsatian dogs. Nothing less than a fleet will do. What about you? What’s making you drop heavy hints around the nearest gift-giver in your life these days?

And of course, it’s a time for being around as many people as you love as possible. Well, that’s what they say in the Hallmark cards. I am truly looking forward to seeing my family again, to listening to our old tapes and CDs that are wheeled out every year (favourites: the Tin Lids “Hey Rudolph” tape and this jazzy, blatty, high-sheen Disney CD), to hanging out with the indifferent cats, and to making this pulled pork for everyone and seeing what happens. Since it’s high summer, it’ll likely be grey and insufferably humid – I can’t wait.

(PS: not to make it all about me, except actually to make it all about me since I have this weird – endearing? – tendency to do that anyway, I do believe this strawberry ice cream cake would make the perfect pudding to follow this up.)

See you, yes you, in 2013! Fa la la la la!

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Title via: The so important Wanda Woodward in the John Waters movie Cry-baby. Inexplicably, I could not find a screencap or gif of her saying this, but just know that she is the most. To say the least. The very least.

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Music lately:

Watercolours, Pazzida. Brand new, and so very cool. Not least because she does this dreamy old-timey tap dance halfway through. I miss tapdancing.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Christine Ebersole. Voice like crystal, and fulfills my need for Broadway stars singing seasonal songs.

Jessie Ware, Wildest Moments. This song is just so swoonful, o! how I wish I was seeing her at Laneway next year.

And one for luck: Johnny Cash and Neil Young, The Little Drummer Boy. A little strange, a lot wonderful. Their voices are like photo negatives of each other.

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Next time: It’ll be 2013! I look forward to blogging all often-like and stuff. And till then, I wish you all a Sensible Night, Appropriate Night. Function with relative ease!

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.

holy moly, me oh my, you’re the apple of my eye

November 13, 2012June 11, 202011 Comments

There is nothing like the frantic job-hunt to make you consider yourself – not as in the significantly annoying, yet impossible to remove from one’s brain once it’s there song from the musical Oliver! – I mean to consider your personality, and your approach to things, and your skills. Just your general self-ness.

Yes. I, Laura Vincent, am prowling like a jungle panther in search of that elusive, distant gazelle: gainful employment. After three months of being married to the cookbook and a further month traveling in America, there are no more savings and no more distractions. I have learned that even with two significant smarty-pantses proofreading my CV I can still somehow then go and insert the words “data entry” twice into my list of skills. That’s about all I’ve learned so far since I haven’t got a job yet, but I am remaining positive. Six years since I last looked for a job, I’ve been finding it interesting reconciling the difference between talking about my achievements in a non-threateningly corporate manner while at the same time blogging in my usual lavishly verbose way here. Both the CV and this blog are totally honest, but I’m not going to talk here about a recipe being a series of key deliverables, just as I’m not going to mention having a panic attack or eating pastry dough on my CV. My CV says that I work well in a team, while in real life I’m a total non-compromising grump about certain things. Is my inability to compromise on what I feel strongly about a sign of immaturity and a bad attitude, or does it make me a strong person who knows themselves? (Probably both, right?) But see? All this talking myself up is making me self-scrutinise all over the place. Nevertheless, I’m hoping there’s some kind of job out there for me – occasionally belligerent and anxious and over-analysey as I am, if any potential bosses are reading, I’m pretty much definitely employment material, honest.

Now, if inventing new recipes constantly was an employable skill – which I suppose it technically is, what with my writing a cookbook and all – I’m sure I could work my way up to CEO quite fast. Ruling with the enthusiasm and abundant excellence of Leslie Knope, the powerful vintage dresses and street smarts of Joan Holloway, and the cool songs and intimidation abilities of Ursula from the Little Mermaid. Till that day, I’ll just share the most recent recipes I came up with here for you all. Minus the intimidation and so on, although incidentally I am wearing a vintage dress today. (It’s purple!)

Have you ever had Turkish apple tea powder before? It’ll set you back about $7 for a tin, but I can’t apologise because it’s so utterly, spoonful-by-the-spoonful delicious that you’ll be glad to have it around for aimless snacking purposes. It occurred to me, as these things often do, that it might be quite fantastic rubbed into pork which is then slowly, slowly cooked.

Well, speaking of honesty, I’m giving you this recipe with the caveat that I’m not entirely sure it was successful for me, but I’m very confident it could be successful for you. That is, it tasted incredibly good, but I don’t think I quite cooked it long and slow enough. I’m not the Grand High Chancellor of Meat Knowledge (or am I…okay, I’m really not) and every recipe of my own is an experiment that might or might not work. If you just cook this a little slower and longer than what I did, it will undoubtedly be perfection.

Every other time that I’ve made pulled pork with belly-cut shoulder or pork belly, it has quickly become ludicrously, dissolvingly tender. This time with regular shoulder it resisted my fork’s proddings, and its fibres didn’t separate into meaty strands at the tugging of my tongs. I may have panicked a little, I may have contemplated whether or not human tears are an effective meat tenderising condiment, I may have played good cop bad cop with the pork in the oven (mostly bad cop.) At the very last minute it appeared to have gained some tenderness, but wasn’t quite at the falling-to-pieces level I was used to. So I shredded it to bits anyway – surprisingly therapeutic, recklessly hacking at a large piece of meat with little care for aesthetics – and as the ever-pragmatic Tim ever-pragmatically pointed out, two kilos of pork is still two kilos of pork. The point is, it still tasted really, really good. So it’s highly likely this will work for you.

Though the pork unavoidably requires a lot of your time, the accompanying slaw is as swift as swift can be. Its provenance is simply that I had silverbeet and parsley and horseradish in the fridge and not much else. I would’ve wanted a more interesting nut to go with, like almonds or pine nuts, but sunflower seeds are what I had. And with a little toasting they can hold their own. If you have almonds or pine nuts or whatever though, for goodness sakes use them instead. Sorry sunflower seeds, no offense intended.

Apple Tea Pulled Pork

A recipe by myself.

2 kg belly cut pork shoulder, or pork belly, or or or, pork shoulder
2 heaped tablespoons Turkish apple tea powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspooon smoked paprika
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

Set your oven to 130 C, and place the pork in an ovenproof dish into which it fits rather snugly. Mix together the apple tea and the spices, taste it if you like, as it’s compellingly weird, then tip it evenly over the pork, turning the meat over to make sure it’s evenly covered. Press the tea powder and spices into any slices in the meat and really rub it into the surface, spooning over any that falls off.

Bake slowly for as long as you like really, but for at least five or six hours. Turn it over once or twice and spoon over any roasting juices. A couple of hours in, pour the vinegar over the meat, then return to the oven.

Tear to shreds with a pair of tongs, one in each hand (or however you choose, this is what works for me) discarding any bones and off-puttingly large pieces of fat (I have no idea whether or not you want to eat it, it’s up to you of course) and mix it in its roasting dish with any saucy liquid that has formed during the cooking process. Serve.

Silverbeet, Parsley and Horseradish Slaw

A recipe also by myself.

1 bunch of silverbeet
1 handful curly parsley
1 tablespoon horseradish sauce from a jar
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
A pinch of salt
3 tablespoons sunflower seeds (or anything cooler. Almonds would’ve been cooler.)

Wash and drain the silverbeet if you like, then finely slice it into shreds, in the same way that you might with a cabbage if you were making coleslaw. Roughly chop the parsley. Mix the two together in a large bowl, or indeed, the bowl you’re going to serve it in. In a small bowl or cup or whatever, mix together the horseradish, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and salt, then stir this through the leaves till they’re evenly coated. Finally, toast the sunflower seeds in a pan till fragrant and lightly browned, and stir them through the slaw.

Pork and apple are an OTP from way back, but this gives a new slant to these classic bedfellows. The apple tea powder soaks into every last filament of the pork, giving the already sweetness-friendly meat a kind of juicy, fresh sugariness. The paprika’s throat-catching smokiness and the cumin’s deep, earthy savouriness counteract any bubblegum tendencies and give it that I’ve-just-been-barbecued vibe even though it was just in my tiny oven for a few hours.

Silverbeet and curly parsley are both a little bulky and bitter and unsexy, but once finely sliced the silverbeet tendrils become light and aerated and the old-timey, boldly verdant flavours of both greens work surprisingly well together. It’s the dressing that makes this memorable though, with the fresh sting of horseradish mellowed by the olive oil and the sweetness of balsamic, giving the potentially dull greenery a much-needed sprucing. The sunflower seeds aren’t actually strictly necessary, but I like my salads crunchy, so what can you do?

I guess this shows my problem solving abilities (even if, like Kristy Thomas from the Baby-sitters Club, it’s perhaps not so much about problem solving, but about seeing no problem, creating a problem, and then fixing it.) Yes, I hate to compromise and do things I don’t want to do, but I’m also willing to put in a whole ton of effort. Um, for the want of pulled pork, but nevertheless: effort. And for all you know, I put data entry twice on my list of skills on purpose because I just really love it…okay I don’t, but what human does? Experience has taught me though, that as long as I’ve got some headphone-funneled source of music, I can more or less shut off my brain and enter data for hours on end. So: still feeling positive about my job prospects, for now at least.

It’s worth noting that the pulled pork is also quite magnificent cold the next day, as I found out while drinking gin with my dear friend Kim as we sat side by side and contentedly, silently blogged. We had nothing to eat it with, but both of us decided simultaneously that heaped into a bowl and eaten with a fork would be fine: it totally was. The caramelised sugars and spices lends the pork a certain beguiling smoky stickiness once cold – it’s worth buying more pork than you feasibly think you can cope with for this reason alone.

Title via: Home, by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. When I first heard this I dismissed it as designed to manipulate your emotions immediately with its breezy twee-ity. And then I was like, shut up Laura, so is most pop music! And so now I just love it.

Music lately:

Atlantis, Azealia Banks. This woman is just flinging out singles like she’s the one holding the bag of candy at a lolly scramble. I love the video for this, it reminds me of when my family first had a computer, and the amazingly terrible, but of course amazing-then graphics, but as well as that the song itself is brilliant too.

Another Hundred People, Melanie C. Spice Girls plus Broadway, that Broadway being specifically Sondheim’s Company which I’m quite obsessed with? Oh, my heart. Melanie’s creamy, elastic voice is showcased rather excellently here in this challenging song, too, and I like to think in this case she’s singing about London rather than the intended New York. I like to think about these things, okay?

Next time: Still intent on making something from the Momofuku cookbook that I bought in NYC…