Category: Gluten-free

blue wind gets so sad, blowing through the thick corn and bales of hay

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I was going to blog yesterday, but instead spent the afternoon nervously clutching a satin-bepillowcased cushion to my fervently beating heart (that is, I hugged a pillow) while watching the US election results unfold. I…should’ve seen that coming, that I wouldn’t get any blogging done. I can’t pretend I entirely saw Obama’s victory coming, but I am so utterly, viscerally relieved that he did get in again. That’s all I’ll say, except – how extremely excellent was his speech? I was punching the air pretty much the entire time, like an animated gif of Bender at the end of The Breakfast Club. 

What a week it has been. From dizzying highs – a Halloween party, purposefully in November so Tim and I could be there with our wondrous friends. Tim dressed as Effie Trinket from Hunger Games and I dressed as the Wicked Witch of the East (complete with a house fascinator and hand-spangled ruby slippers) – to literally dizzying lows, when I had a small panic attack on the street last Friday evening. It’s by no means the first one I’ve had, but it has been a good long while, and it took me completely by surprise. I was of all things, on my way to pick up my engagement ring which was being resized. I assure you, as I assured Tim, that my sudden inability to breath and my burning face and dizzy brain were nothing to do with the act of getting the ring. Tooootally unrelated. Which now makes it sound like I’m being deeply sarcastic, but honestly! It just happened. And it sucks, and it’s not a particularly food-bloggingly-sparkly subject, but what can I say? It’s my life, and though I’m annoyed by the signals my brain sends out occasionally, I shall be not ashamed of them. And in case you’re wondering, yes, almost a week later we are still finding red sequins everywhere that my shoes shed hither and yon.

Back to the dizzying highs: I made an incredibly good dinner and thought I’d share it with you.

Corn and Tomatoes doesn’t sound like much, and I guess it isn’t, but it’s intensely delicious – the corn sort of stews in the tomato juices, which become syrupy-rich with the olive oil. The paprika offers the sweetness of the corn and tomatoes a deep smokiness, and it suddenly seems all a lot greater than the parts of which it sums. I called it corn and tomatoes because that’s what it is, which seemed to justify the slightly fancifully-named Miso Poached Potatoes. It simply occurred to me that cooking new potatoes in miso-enriched water might make them rather magnificent. It did.

Corn and Tomatoes

A recipe by myself.

2 cups frozen corn
3 small, ripe tomatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon smoked paprika

Mix everything together in a roasting dish. Bake at 220 C for about 25 minutes.

Miso-poached Potatoes with Butter

Also a recipe by myself. I couldn’t possibly guess how many potatoes you can eat, but in case you’re wondering, for the two of us I went with about eight smallish potatoes, a heaped tablespoonful of miso paste, and about 50g butter.

New potatoes
White miso paste
Butter


Quarter the potatoes lengthwise (or really, cut how you please.) Fill the pot you’re going to cook them with half to two-thirds full of water, then add a few spoonfuls of miso paste depending on the quantity of water. Simmer the potatoes till they’re tender, then drain them and stir through as much butter as you please, till it’s melted. Serve.

The miso soup really seeps into every last granule of the potatoes, giving their blandly creaminess a kind of nutty, rich caramelised savouriness, which is only intensified once they’re smothered in fast-melting butter. I’m never particularly enthused over new potatoes (I like my potatoes to be sustaining crispness to 90% of their bodies) but this turns them into something thoroughly exciting. In direct proportion to the quantity of butter you coat them with.

Tim’s and my American holiday has suddenly been sucked into the realm of feeling like a distant, highly vivid dream. It’s over a week since we landed at Auckland at 5.40am. Speaking of things I did not see coming, Mum – my parents live an hour south – had hinted that she might or might not come meet us at the airport. My supposing was on the side of not, since it was so ridiculously early, but I murmured dazedly to Tim as we trudged through customs, “$5 says Mum is here and has turned this into a girls’ adventure with her best friend”. My small wager was in fact, correct, but I had entirely underestimated the crazy capers afoot. My mum and her best friend were indeed there, as was my aunty who I hadn’t seen in over a year. But wait. A small red checked napkin was produced by way of tablecloth. There were wine glasses. And bubbly. And a crystal bowl of strawberries. Right there in the food court at the international airport, to congratulate us on our engagement. Tim and I were slightly dazed, as well you might be at 6am after flying for thirteen hours and then suddenly finding yourself drinking fizzy wine, but we couldn’t have had a nicer, sweeter, more hilarious welcome back home.
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Title via: the adolescent-angst musical Spring Awakening, and its suitably mournful song Blue Wind. 
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Music lately: 

Moon River, as sung utterly plaintively and yet subtly and yet devastatingly as always by Judy Garland.  I mean this song could even render some emotional response from a particularly jaded lab rat, but in Judy’s hands, and lungs, it just slays me.

Baby Says, The Kills. These two are terrifyingly good. We were lucky enough to see them at Third Man Records in Nashville. Luckier still: the concert was being recorded live onto vinyl. Luckiest of all: a copy of that vinyl will eventually be sent to us here in New Zealand.
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Next time: I bought a copy of the Momofuku cookbook while we were in New York. Do you know how badly I want to cook every last thing in it? Quite, quite badly.

guest post the first: pocket witch

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Well hello there. It’s Laura here, Tim and I are still in America (reluctantly packing to leave intoxicating NYC, but excited to head to Nashville. My plan-so-cunning while I’m away, is to enlist a couple of dashing guest bloggers to keep hungryandfrozen.com afloat till my return with their own excellence. The first is my dear, dear friend Kate of pocket-witch.com. She is bodacious and clever and inspirational, like all my dear friends, and it’s an honour to have her here. And, as she alludes to, there is some kiiinda ridiculous news ahoy. Consider yourself told! I’ll now hand it over to Kate. Or at least, point you towards her writing which I copy-pasted below. Hooray for modern technology. And lentils!
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Hello! I’m Kate, and I can be found at my new blog, Pocket Witch. How nice to be asked to write a guest post for Hungry and Frozen! Laura is one of my very favourite people. We became friends IRL nearly two years ago when I blogged about wanting to join a book group, and she generously offered hers. As soon as we met I acquired the meanest friend-crush on her and Tim, and since then I’ve managed to worm my way into their lives as much as possible. To my wonderment, this culminated in being included in the cookbook crew, which was the most delightful time of satisfying work and uproarious play. So sad it’s finished! But onto the next adventure. I’m loving following along with Laura and Tim’s travels, and they are making me yearn for New York. Plus… how about that news! I literally cried in the street. Cannot wait to bombard them with inappropriately long hugs upon their return.
Laura has blogged quite a few recipes from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, but I couldn’t help but pick another. You must believe me when I say, this is the BEST cookbook. I’ve made nearly twenty things from it by now, which is an unparalleled number. I don’t even own it yet! Yeah, I wouldn’t advise lending me this cookbook if you want it back in a timely fashion. Aside from the outrageous number of ingredients in some recipes, Plenty is a perfect book, with all of the vegetables, flavours and herbs, and has taught amateur-me some wonderful new ways with food.
I suppose I do wish I’d picked a slightly sexier recipe. Lentils! What was I thinking? The other guest blogger is Coco Solid, and I’m posting a tarted-up dahl. Sigh. But you can’t be fancy all the time (though I do try), sometimes you’re just in the mood for something kinda wholesome.
Strangely, this is one of his more simple and relaxed recipes, but still the most complicated and involved lentil/dahl-type dish I’ve made. But don’t let that put you off, it’s also likely the nicest dish of this type that I’ve made, really warming and the perfect amount of spice. The yogurt is an excellent topping, despite my detesting cucumber in most settings (I have a weird thing about watery, fresh-tasting foods, don’t get me started on watermelon). The inclusion of the cucumber and olive oil made the yogurt super fresh and silky, perfect to cut through the filling lentils. I also found the stirred-in butter a delicious necessity, though it’s effect was most known in my first, fresh bowl. Some coconut milk would be lovely if you were looking to make it vegan.

Spiced Lentils with Cucumber Yogurt

from Plenty or The Guardian
  • 200g split red lentils
  • 1 bunch fresh coriander

  • 1 small onion, peeled

  • 40g ginger, peeled
  • 3 cloves garlic, peeled
  • 1 mild green chilli
  • 1½ tsp black mustard seeds
  • 4 tbsp sunflower oil
  • 1½ tsp ground coriander
  • 1 tsp ground cumin
  • ½ tsp ground turmeric
  • ½ tsp paprika
  • 10 curry leaves
  • 300g ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped
  • 2 tsp caster sugar
  • ½ tsp fenugreek (optional)
  • 1 pinch asafoetida (optional)
  • Salt
  • 150g Greek yogurt
  • 75g finely diced cucumber
  • 1½ tbsp olive oil
  • 70g unsalted butter
  • 1½ tbsp lime juice

Wash the lentils in plenty of water, drain and soak in 350ml of fresh water for 30 minutes. Cut the coriander bunch somewhere around its centre to get a leafy top half and a stem/root bottom half. Roughly chop the leaves. Put the stem half in the bowl of a food processor, add the onion, ginger, garlic and chilli – all roughly broken – and pulse a few times to chop up without turning into a paste.
Put the mustard seeds in a heavy-based pot and place over medium heat. When they begin to pop, add the onion mix and sunflower oil, stir and cook on low heat for 10 minutes. Add the spices and curry leaves, and continue cooking and stirring for five minutes longer. Now add the lentils and their soaking water, the tomatoes, sugar, fenugreek, asafoetida and a pinch of salt. Cover and simmer for about 30 minutes, until the lentils are fully cooked.
Before serving, whisk together the yogurt, cucumber, oil and some salt. Stir into the lentils the butter, lime juice and chopped coriander leaves, taste and season generously with salt. Divide into bowls, spoon yogurt on top and garnish with coriander.
I didn’t use curry leaves (couldn’t find them nearby) or asafoetida (I don’t even know what that is). I did use fenugreek but you could skip it if trying to cut down on ingredients. I doubled the recipe, as it seemed like a lot of effort to go through to feed only 2-4 people, and this it made mountains. It fed two people for lunch most of the week, by the third day I was getting a bit tired of the idea of lentils, but as soon as I actually sat down and began to eat them the tiredness would disappear. Because they are quite fantastic.
Thanks for having me, Laura! Enjoy the rest of your amazing trip, you crazy kids.

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

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That’s all, folks.

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

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

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

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


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

Maple Horseradish Cashews

A recipe by myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raspberry, Pear and Basil Smoothie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TLC, Creep. Always.

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

you got it allison. you got it raw!

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

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

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

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

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

Marinated Tamarillos.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music lately:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rainbow Room Carrot and Peanut Salad

a recipe from Nigella Lawson’s book Forever Summer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music lately:

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

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

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

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

and i will be alone again tonight my dear

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

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

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




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


Fried Onion Rice with Nuts, Cardamom and Cinnamon

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garlicky Polenta with Greens and Browned Butter


A recipe by myself.


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

who’d come through with lentils and to get the fundamentals

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There are so many things that are not delightful about life in New Zealand in 2012 but I’ll tell you one thing – and it doesn’t just apply to me here in my homeland – the internet is really on form. I remember when I first heard about the internet – I guess in the mid-nineties – marveling at how much information was on it. I remember specifically saying to someone (possibly one of the cats) “so you could find a website about anything, if you want a website about bottle caps then you could probably find it”. (Little did I know I predicted the zoomed-in nature of tumblr, where there probably is at least one dedicated to bottle caps.) Little did I know just how much ridiculously specific information this thing they call the internet could hold.

Where I’m going with this is, after a particularly wearying day of clumsy mishaps, I got into my usual grumble-rut of lamenting that women in comedy movies (TV sometimes too) often seem to be portrayed in a way that clumsiness is their only personality trait. You know. She fell over in a public place. And that’s how you know she’s nice and relatable and you want her to continue on this inevitably heteronormative path towards boy-meets-girlness, maybe falling over just once more in public just to remind you how ‘zany’ she is. Oh, I could ineffectually whinge further, but I suddenly thought, you know I just bet there’s something on the internet that demonstrates what I’m talking about. And I was right. We’re at the stage where information saturation means if you want a supercut of badly written female characters in rom-coms falling over, you can find it with the half-heartedest of Googlings. Sure there are the endless trolls, but still. For that I say 2012, you’re okay.
(If you’re wondering what it was that I did that got me thinking in such a vague manner about romcoms and clumsiness, it was the following:
Pulled on stockings in a hurry and in doing so dug a massive, red scratch with my thumbnail along…the side of my right buttock. Mmmhmm.
Took a drink of water, dribbled it all over myself, I can’t even think why.
Brought it all home with my masterstroke of weirdness: I walked into my bedroom swiftly and nearly got whiplash from being yanked backwards again because the doorhandle had got stuck in a buttonhole on my coat.)

Luckily, for those of us inclined towards ungainliness, the pear-shaped butternut squash is a squillion times easier than the pumpkin to slice into. Its tender flesh accepts the knife blade swiftly, as opposed to pumpkins which scare the heck out of me – every time I approach them with a knife it seems the stupid tough pumpkin shoots off in the opposite direction. Good to know for anything you require pumpkin for – butternut squash rules. Especially in this extremely simple soup I thought up. If you’re not blessed with a food processor there’s nothing to stop you taking the pesto ingredients and just adding them to the soup at the end – and there’s also nothing to stop you not calling this un-Italian paste ‘pesto’, I just can’t think of a better name for it.

Butternut, Lentil and Coconut Soup with Peanut, Rocket and Lime Pesto
 
A recipe by myself.
 
1 medium butternut squash, roughly diced and skin removed. (About two heaped cups)
1/2 cup red lentils
3 cups water
1/2 cup coconut milk or coconut cream
 
1/2 cup peanuts
2 handfuls rocket leaves
Juice of a lime
3 tablespoons sesame oil
Pinch salt
 
Place the diced butternut, red lentils and water in a saucepan, bring to the boil and then simmer slowly with the lid on for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add a little more water if you feel it needs it. At this point use your spoon/spatula/etc to mash up the bits of butternut as you wish – this is a fairly chunky soup, although there’s nothing stopping you from blending it all up, I suppose. Sprinkle in a little salt and stir in the coconut milk. Ladle into bowls and serve with as much of the pesto as you please and a swirl of coconut milk if you like.
 
Meanwhile, toast the peanuts lightly in a hot pan (I actually did this first, and then used that same pan to make the soup in. Minimising dishes for all!) and then throw them into a food processor with the rocket leaves and lime juice. Blend up, scraping down the sides as you need to, then add the salt and oil and blend again. 
 
This makes about enough for two people with some leftovers.
 
You’d think the soup would be a little boring but the mild, creamy sweetness of the butternut and coconut and the earthiness of the lentils bring their own excitement. The lentils melt into the butternut and the small amount of coconut makes it surprisingly rich. But even so, there’s the pesto – lentils and peanuts aren’t a million miles removed flavourwise, with peppery rocket and sour lime to stop it being too oily, but then plenty of sesame oil…in case it’s not oily enough.
I don’t always get all that enthusiastic about soup, but this is worthy of my time, a nice mix of familiarly comforting and compellingly stimulating. Perfect for those nights when you can see your breath puffing cloudily in front of you. While you’re sitting on the couch.
Title via: I was hoping to get Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner’s sprightly version of Little Me from the Broadway musical of the same name, but do you think I could find it on youtube? I could nay. And just when I was talking about how great the internet is. Luckily there’s Faith Prince singing it on the New Broadway Cast Recording.

 

Music lately:

I was saddened to hear of the death of Donna Summer. You know I love to obsess over a song and I Feel Love was one that stood up to two or three or seventeen repeat listens in a row. A huge talent lost.

Louie the ZU with Leroy Clampitt, I Want You To Know: dreamy goodness. I love it.

Next time: Apologies for being this cryptic on a Monday, but knowing what I know, hopefully I’ll have some interesting news for you.

sugar, she’s refined, for a small price she blows my mind

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I grew up with some fully-formed ideas about, of all things, Toblerone chocolate bars. Firstly, as a kid I convinced myself that the droning chorus-y bit to Heavenly Pop Hit by the Chills was them singing “Toblerone, toblerone” over and over again. I know, what? A slight stretch of the imagination, but I was young, and there was no Google, and possibly I liked the idea of a band singing about a chocolate bar more than I enjoyed fact-checking, so I let my ears believe what they wanted. Less bizarrely, but closer to the truth, this chocolate bar was indelibly associated with other people going overseas. Yes, Mum and I went to Melbourne once when I was five to see her best friend, but that aside we weren’t given to big holidays at the drop of a pay packet. However someone at school must’ve been, because I distinctly remember talk of Toblerones upon their return, and associating them with fancy-pants overseas trips. These days you can just buy this particular chocolate bar from your corner dairy, but back in the day, when it spoke of air travel and rock’n’roll, the very idea of just having one felt unspeakably sophisticated.

I’d like to posit myself as bearing no ill-will towards the Toblerone. They’re really, really nice if you manage to get your hands on one, there’s no attitude here of “the world needs urgently a new version of the Toblerone and I charge myself with the noble duty of providing an inconvenient and slightly inferior appropriation!” Nooo.

I just like crunchy toffee nutty chocolatey stuff, and why should Toblerone be the only thing that gets to monopolise that combination?

So I made this stuff, inspired by that chocolate bar. It’s kind of a slice, kind of just melted chocolate with more sugar added, but it’s simple and seriously wonderful to eat with its crystals of toffee and bashed up toasted almonds. Fine as is, broken into rough shards, particularly effective when chopped up and sprinkled over icecream.

Toffee Brittle Chocolate


1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup almonds
1/2 cup salt (jokes! A small pinch of salt, that’s all)
250g dark chocolate, broken into pieces (I used Whittaker’s Dark Cacao)


Firstly, toast the almonds in a saucepan over a low heat till lightly browned. Tip them into either a silicon baking dish, or a medium-sized baking dish (the sort you could fit a roast chicken into, but not two, or use a pie dish) lined with baking paper. In the same saucepan, slowly melt the sugars and the water over a low heat, and bring to the boil without stirring. Stirring causes bigger crystals to form which isn’t what we’re after here. Allow it to bubble away merrily for about five minutes until it smells like caramel and the syrup under the silvery bubbles appears to be dark brown. At this point, carefully but quickly pour it over the almonds, getting as much as you can out with the help of a spatula. Sprinkle over the salt and allow to set.


Once set, chop it all up very roughly and then transfer it all back into the baking dish. Then slowly melt the chocolate and tip it over the chopped up almond toffee, stirring to mix. It’ll look rough and like the chocolate’s not going to cover everything, but that’s all good. Pop in the freezer for a bit to set properly, then break into small pieces and serve as you wish.

Bubbling sugar and water is kind of beautiful, am I right? Just don’t get close, it’ll burn you faster than an insult from Blackadder.
It’s also quite pretty once all chopped up but before getting covered in chocolate – all golden and sparkly. I guess food blogging has conditioned my brain to think such things, but I swear it looked pretty in real life.

I’ve been keeping it in a container in the freezer, and something about the icecold chocolate makes the delicate almond crunchiness even more excellent. It’s perfect for a sweet thing after a big dinner but also, as I said, completely delicious chopped up over ice cream.

On Saturday night I went to see Rose Matafeo’s show Scout’s Honour as part of the Comedy Festival. I didn’t know tooooo much about her apart from she’s on TV and on Twitter seems like my kind of person, but in real life, on stage, she is a scream. Hilarious. She’s got some shows coming up in Auckland so if that’s where you’re from, I most definitely recommend attending. Not least because her show had tea and biscuits, and super-nice audience members. I was by myself and appreciated the rolling-with-the-punches niceness of the people either side of me. In that when I asked “can I sit here?” they said “sure” and smiled, rather than blankly staring at me, or saying no. But also: about halfway through her show she worked in a Babysitters Club joke, so, you know, free pass for life.

Luckily everyone can join in basking in the tiny, adorable splendour of Rory the kitten, one of our friend Jo’s foster cats. (Speaking of Jo, kindly check out this write-up she did of an incredible dinner we had at Hummingbird. Includes a panna cotta gif!) I can’t adequately express how tiny and sweet Rory is, but I’ll tell you this: he’s truly much the same size as he appears to be in this picture. Spent significant time adoring him inbetween episodes of Veronica Mars. So important.
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Title via: tick, tick…BOOM! the musical by a young Jonathan Larson, who would go on to write RENT, which this blog is named for. The song really is about sugar, in case you’re wondering, and it is good, especially with Raul Esparza wrapping his sweet, sweet vocal cords around it. 
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Music lately:
Woke up Saturday morning to the news that Adam Yauch, MCA from Beastie Boys had died. This is such sad news – Beastie Boys have been together longer than I’ve been alive and consistently putting out music that I love. Honestly part of the soundtrack of my life. Remote Control is one of my favourite songs of theirs. However I’d also like to call attention to this glorious rhyme from the glorious Sure Shot: “I want to say a little something that’s long overdue/ the disrespect to women has got to be through.”

Finally listened to some Lana Del Rey, and uh, have become mildly obsessed with her music. It’s just so utterly melancholy, I can’t help but love it.

It’s not actually him singing, but a young Johnny Depp with an also-young Amy Locane in John Waters’ Crybaby on Please Mr Jailer is worth suspending reality for. As is the heavily crushable Wanda Woodward, thanks to Kate for the necessary reminder!
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Next time: I was thinking about Gin and Tonic Ice Cream. First to catch my gin…