Category: Gluten-free

oklahoma, every night my honey lamb and i

10 Comments

Lamb shanks are lots of fun – they simmer away and make your house smell wonderful; the bone is a ready-made grippable handle, depending on how conservative your company is; they’re generally cheaper than other bits of lamb; they’re full of sweet, youthful meaty flavour; and, you can point at your plate and suggestively say “hey, nice shanks“.

Overall though, lamb is not one of those things that fills me with good feelings of “I can afford this regularly” (likewise with All Dairy Products, as I’ve complained about at length recently.) In fact, the last time I had lamb shanks was May 2009 – back when we were in our old flat! – so it was with happiness that I saw them fall into the range of X-per-kilo that I’m comfortable with. They are not so much fun to photograph though. To lull you into a false sense of capable blogging security: their accompaniment, figs!
Actually figs, wrinkled and greying as they are, also aren’t that attractive. Foiled again.
To have lamb shanks slowly becoming tender in a fig-studded broth is about the cheeriest thing you can do on a freezing and rainy day like today. Shank Sunday! As I’ve called it. However if you’ve got the time, this recipe of Nigella Lawson’s is perfect on any cold day of the week. Putting lamb, figs, honey and pumpkin together as she does might sound troublingly sweet. But what I found was that the flavours of the sugary things caramelised together which, with the lamb’s sticky meatiness, made for an outrageously good combination, with partially jam-ified figs, lamb-infused kumara sauce and a little cinnamon to warm things up further. Let’s not be naive though. This is a rich dish. I could hardly finish a whole shank.

Nigella makes this recipe as part of her Rosh Hashana spread in her book Feast, with part of its significance being that sweet foods are consumed at Rosh Hashana in the hope that the year ahead will also be full of such sweetness. However she also offers it as a general dinner recipe – and really, any day that you can is good to be proactively adding some sweetness and hope to your life. Be it literal, symbolic, or in the case of these shanks, both.


Lamb Shanks with Figs and Honey

Adapted – scaled down that is – from Nigella Lawson’s beautiful book Feast. Her recipe serves 10, if you have that many to feed then it’s more like 10 shanks, 1kg onions, 500g figs, 80mls honey and a whole bottle of wine.

3 lamb shanks
Olive oil
1 onion
2 garlic cloves
Either about a teaspoon of fresh rosemary leaves, or leaves from one decent stalk of thyme
1 can pumpkin puree/1 orange kumara
9 dried figs
1 cinnamon stick (or, 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon)
125mls red wine
1 heaped tablespoon (only way it can be done really) of honey
250mls/1 cup water

Finely chop your onions and crush/chop your garlic and – if you don’t live within reach of pumpkin puree – now’s a good time to peel and roughly, but finely, dice your kumara.

Heat a little olive oil in a large saucepan and brown the shanks, in batches if you need to. Set aside, covered with tinfoil if you like.

Add the onions, garlic and herbs to the pan, sprinkling over a little salt, and allow to soften without browning.

Now add everything else (except the waiting shanks) to the pan, and gently bring to the boil. Turn down the heat to as low as possible, add the shanks and cook for an hour and a half – at least – partially covered.
Notes:

– Figs are more expensive than I remember. You could always use dates, which I find stay reasonably priced, or even prunes or dried apricots – whatever works for you.
– As I’ve said, kumara is a decent substitute for canned pumpkin. If no kumara is to hand, butternut pumpkin is good too – it breaks down quickly. And if you’re really having trouble accessing them, Nigella recommends red lentils instead.
– I didn’t have red wine, so – sorry Nigella – just used some white. As I’ve said already, it still tasted amazing.
You may want to make this a day ahead, allow it to cool and then skim off any inevitable fat before reheating. Serve with whatever you like really – rice, mashed potato, more mashed kumara, a salad made of canned cannelini beans or chickpeas or the like, couscous, bulghur wheat – or just bread to scoop up the saucy kumara. Which is what we did.
As they sing and acknowledge in Chess, “these are very dangerous and difficult times“. But sheesh, this week has been quite the cluster of sadness and horror, with famine in the Horn of Africa, killings in Oslo, and Amy Winehouse’s death at age 27. Bad news is bad news, whatever the scale. It’s not a competition, and – as I saw written extremely well on Twitter today – compassion isn’t a finite resource. Something that’s good to keep in mind…as well as being thankful for things while you’ve got ’em to be thankful for.
___________________________________________________

Title via: Oklahoma, the song, from Oklahoma the musical. Which – while I strictly have to actually like the songs I quote here – I am not a huge fan of. I find the characters annoying (as admittedly many find those in RENT) and the whole dream-ballet segment feels awkward and overlong even within the context of when dream-ballets were more the norm. But the music, the music is amazing. One of my favourite renditions of this title song is by Tony Award winner Sutton Foster (who you may also know as Coco from Flight of the Conchords.) Also while you’re at it, it’s always a good time to watch her be triple-threateningly amazing in Drowsy Chaperone.
___________________________________________________

Music lately:

We went to the Bookfair yesterday and picked up so many fun second-hand books, but there were also heaps of really great records there. One such jewel was Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, whose songs like El Paso are as comfort food to the ears.
I was never an avid fan of the now-late Amy Winehouse, but definitely appreciated her talent, and certain songs stood out for me – like Tears Dry On Their Own. Just do yourself a favour and maybe avoid reading the youtube comments. It’s never worth it.
____________________________________________________

Next time: Tomorrow night book group is at my place and I’ve got a few discussion snacks on the make, one or more of which will likely end up here soon.

since folks here to an absurd degree seem fixated on your verdigris

15 Comments

After a brief survey of four people (one of which was myself) I’d like to make the sweeping generalisation that Brussels sprouts are a bit like Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West: green, and misunderstood. So misunderstood. None of us could remember ever eating them in our childhood, but there was definitely the feeling that it was not a vegetable to welcome with open arms. Yes, plenty of people here in New Zealand must’ve eaten them, overboiled and sulphuric balls of punishment on the dinnerplate, but I can only hypothesise, or whatever comes at this stage of a scientific study, that pop culture has influenced a lot of my suspicion. Same reason I made my own earrings out of shells and beads and then wore them, sincerely. The Baby Sitters Club. I’m not saying that series of books is everyone’s reason for disliking on impact the Brussels Sprout, but I’m pretty sure it’s my reason. (Not that I can, admittedly, name a specific example, but I know it’s there.)

Anyway, I saw this recipe in Plenty, my Yotam Ottolenghi cookbook, called “Brussels Sprouts and Tofu”. And I thought, oh really? A plucky move, pitting two generally disliked ingredients against each other in one dish and working to stop the competition between them to see which can make the eater unhappy first. Now I love tofu, but this is not a sexy recipe title. Yet its bold simplicity appealed to me, as did the fact that brussels sprouts were very, very cheap at the vege market.
And if anyone knows how to de-misunderstand brussels sprouts, it’s Yotam Ottolenghi. He who pairs eggs with yoghurt and chilli and garlic with more garlic.
Interestingly the ingredients are very simple – the three main givers of flavour are chilli, sesame oil and soy sauce. For me, what seems important is the cooking methods: for the sprouts, you fry them till they’re browned and scorched in places. For the tofu, you marinate it while you’re getting everything else ready, then fry it up till the marinade is caramelised. You could probably do this to any kind of food and it would taste good, but here the ingredients really open up, come alive, I want to say snuggle into the flavour but that feels wrong…anyway, the sprouts become crunchy and juicy, their peppery flavour amplified by the smoky scorching. The tofu is salty and dense, with a crisp edge, its mildness subverted by the chilli.
This isn’t just ‘not bad…for Brussels sprouts and tofu’, any food would hope to taste this good! I served it on soba noodles, but it would be great on rice or alongside something else, or just as is. If tofu is nay your thing, the sprouts on their own would also make a fantastic side dish to a bigger meal. Seriously, I had to stop myself eating them all before returning them to the saucepan with the tofu. They’re good. At last.
Brussels Sprouts and Tofu

Adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty. There are mushrooms in the original recipe but as Tim’s unfortunately not a fan I thought it’d be a bit harsh to leave them in along with everything else.

2 tablespoons sweet chilli sauce
1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons sesame oil (I reduced this to 1…sesame oil is expensive!)
1 teaspoon rice vinegar (I didn’t have any, used balsamic vinegar, worked a treat)
1 tablespoon maple syrup (I only had golden syrup, likewise was great)
150g firm tofu
500g Brussel sprouts
Mint, coriander, sesame seeds and (optional) toasted pumpkin seeds to serve

Whisk together the chilli sauce, soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar and syrup, then chop the tofu into cubes and add them to the bowl. Set aside while you get on with the next step.

Trim the bases off the brussel sprouts and remove any flappy excess leaves. This’ll probably take a while. I slightly misunderstood the instructions on how to slice them but I don’t think it matters – Ottolenghi requests thick slices from top to bottom but I just sliced them roughly into quarters.


Heat about 2 tablespoons plain oil in a pan, and once it’s properly hot, add half the sprouts and a little salt. It’s good to turn them round so that a flat surface is touching the bottom of the pan, but it’s no biggie. Leave them for a couple of minutes – don’t stir them if you can help it, but they won’t take long to cook through. When the sides touching the pan are a deep brown, set them aside and repeat with the rest of the sprouts. Remove them all from the pan, and carefully – using tongs is good – transfer the pieces of tofu from the bowl of marinade to a single layer in the hot pan. The marinade may splutter and sizzle a little at this point. Reduce the heat, cook the tofu for about two minutes a side till caramelised and crisp.

Remove the pan from the heat and immediately throw in the rest of the marinade, plus the sprouts. You’re supposed to garnish it with coriander, but I had none, and only a tiny bit of mint – so in the interest of visual interest, I toasted some pumpkin seeds and scattered them across – pretty and delicious.
By the way, my parents got a kitten. A tiny, tiny, outrageously cute kitten who they’ve named Poppy. Looook at her with her enormous blue eyes and tiny tail. As you may remember, the recently late Rupert left my parents a one-cat family, and the remaining cat Roger isn’t as impressed by newcomer Poppy as everyone else seems to be. Look, is it morally dubious that I’m suddenly filled with motivation to plan a trip home? I’m narrowing my eyes suspiciously even as I type the question; I think the answer’s yes…but Poppy’s so cute that I can’t feel that bad about it.
__________________________________________________________
Title via: The aforementioned misunderstood character Elphaba, as played by the amazing Idina Menzel in the musical Wicked, singing The Wizard and I. Sigh.
__________________________________________________________
Music lately:
Karaoke, by the Good Fun – it is both good, and fun. I heard this song a long time ago but this official recording has scrubbed it up well. Like the Brussel sprouts recipe, this can rest on its own laurels…it isn’t just ‘not bad, for young guys.’

Marvin Gaye, How Sweet It Is. It’s always a good time.
__________________________________________________________
Next time: I found an amazing recipe for black sesame brownies, but I’m not entiiiirely happy with how they turned out – may have to re-try and then report back.

every time I eat vegetables it makes me think of you

9 Comments
While I completely welcome, luxuriate in, and devote a lot of time to generating the puddings and soups and casseroles that Winter brings…sometimes it’s nice to interrupt all that, suspend the stodge-production and create something altogether more Spring-like and vegetable-focussed.
Although these are essentially just small pies, their unusual, sesame-studded pastry is light and crisp, and their filling has soft, caramelised vegetables contending with salty, fragrant miso. And I managed to make them while feeling physically dilapidated by a cold, which makes me think that they’re not that fiddly to make, either. (I’ve still got this cough, by the way, but I think as far as the battle goes I’m now winning.)
I found the recipe in the latest CLEO magazine (who, I should add, have been very good to me over the last year or so, if you see my “Attention” tab up the top there) and it’s by a clever lady called Janella Purcell who has a cookbook called Eating For The Seasons. Which, judging by this one excellent recipe, is probably a really good book. Despite what looks like Mistral font used on the cover.
The pastry is gluten-free, which is fun, especially if you can’t eat gluten yourself. I’m pretty sure that these are also vegan, so if you’re wondering what it is that’s even holding them together…read on.

Roast Vegetable Sesame Tarts

Adapted from a recipe by Janella Purcell, found in the July issue of CLEO magazine.

Pastry:

1 1/2 cups brown rice flour, or spelt flour, or whatever flour you’ve got really – even regular flour (which, I hope I don’t have to spell out to you, will mean these are no longer gluten-free)
1/2 cup sesame seeds, toasted if you have the energy (I didn’t)
2 tablespoons olive, rice bran or avocado oil
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon soy sauce or Tamari sauce
3/4 cup boiling water

Combine the flour and sesame seeds in a bowl. Tip in the oils, the water, and the soy sauce and mix together. Knead well till it forms a soft ball, then rest for 30 minutes while you get on with everything else.

Filling:

Olive oil
1 onion, finely sliced
1 cup pumpkin or kumara (I used kumara) diced or thinly sliced
1 fennel bulb, sliced
1 tablespoon white miso paste
Toasted seeds to garnish – pumpkin, sunflower, or just more sesame seeds if you like. Pine nuts or almonds would be nice too, but seeds are less expensive and just as delicious.

Heat the olive oil in a pan and slowly cook the onions till caramelised. While this is happening, roast the vegetables on a tray at 200 C/400 F for about 20 minutes.

Once your onions are cooked, but while your veges are still roasting, roll out the pastry fairly thinly and use a cookie cutter or similar (I used one of those ramekins that you might make creme brulee in) to stamp out circles of pastry. It’s a little different to the usual – quite springy and playdough-y, and you’ll need to re-roll it a couple of times. Just bear with it though, it will work. Fit your circles of pastry into a greased and floured/silicon muffin tray, not worrying if you get folds of pastry, it’s all good if it looks a bit ramshackle – and bake them, as is, for 15 minutes.

Once the cases are out of the oven, dab a tiny bit of miso paste on the inside of each, then top with your roast vegetables and a sprinkling of toasted seeds. They should remove easily from the muffin tray – and then eat!

Makes 12.

Note – I made the following changes:

– Halved the recipe (so you can easily double what’s above)
– Used spelt flour instead of brown rice flour, as that’s what I had
– You’re supposed to use all sesame oil in the pastry but as it’s expensive and precious I cut it back and replaced some with other oil, but you do as you like
– I only had black sesame seeds, but it’s all good
– Used soy sauce instead of Tamari as that’s what I had
– Changed the vegetables a little – the original recipe didn’t have fennel and had pumkin instead of kumara
– I think that’s it. One other thing to note is that different flours absorb water at a different rate so don’t be afraid to add more flour if your pastry dough is a sticky mess, or more liquid if it’s not coming together. Just a little at a time though.
So as you can see I adapted this recipe quite a bit, and I think you could continue to do so yourself. Once you’ve got the pastry cases sorted, it’s really all a matter of what’s in your fridge.
For example, the following could be delicious…
– Roast capsicums and tomatoes, with toasted chopped almonds and a little orange zest
– Sliced leeks, softened and caramelised in a pan, with feta
– Roast mushrooms with thyme, then chop them up, fill the tarts and top with pumpkin seeds
– Roasted zucchini with capers
– Raw grated beetroot, coriander leaves and toasted walnuts
– Slices of avocado and raw zucchini, topped with mint…
– Mince and cheese! Yay. Or, like, slow-braised beef ragu and parmesan.
I’m also thinking about removing the soy sauce from the pastry, using a plain oil, and filling the cooked cases with sweet things instead, like berries, or chocolate mousse, or – best of all – nuts and caramel sauce. And beyond that, I’m also wondering if you could just roll out the pastry and stamp out and bake awesome crackers from it.
But all those imaginary tarts aside, how did the actual ones that I made taste?
Amazing.
So delicious. The pastry is all nutty and biscuity, and just a tiny bit salty – a very addictive combination. I personally am glad I added the fennel, its aniseedy freshness and quick-to-caramelise, oniony structure was quite lush against the sweeter softer kumara. And they taste really, really good cold as well, to the point where I was wishing I hadn’t halved the original recipe. Twelve mini tarts between Tim and myself just wasn’t enough.

Hooray for pie!

_________________________________________________________


Title via: The Ramones, and the song really is called Every Time I Eat Vegetables I Think Of You. I love them (the Ramones, but also vegetables.)
_________________________________________________________

Music lately:
Ella Fitzgerald, When I Get Low I Get High. I think partly because of its compelling Puttin’ On The Ritz style fast swing, Fitzgerald’s gorgeous voice, and partly the fact that it’s just so short, is why I would’ve listened to this song roughly a squillion times over the last week or two.
Matthew and Son by Cat Stevens, I’ve said it before but I love this song so much that it’s always worth repeating: oh my gosh I love this song so much. The video (if you click through) is also quite incredible. His shoulder-pumping dance, the strangely bland and unaffected expressions on the young people’s faces, the bit around 1.55 where he stares down into the camera while singing *fans self*
__________________________________________________________
Next time: Billy Crudup’s Grandma’s Chocolate Fudge Pie. It’s wild.

at sideshow stalls, they throw the balls at coconut fur

14 Comments

Winter has got me, and not in an epic, sweepingly-caped Game of Thrones kinda way (although, phew, look at that show’s very casual body count) but in the more unremarkable, throat infection kind of way. While I’ve been coughing at intervals during the daytime, I’m starting to wonder if there’s some chemical or hormone that’s released just as you’re about to drift off to sleep (perhaps to dream about being cast as Amy in Company, as my brain somewhat plausibly presented me with recently) which reacts with whatever’s happening in your throat. Because it’s at night when I cough the most. My brain is woozy and dozy, but my throat and lungs are wide awake and on fire.

 

 

So I’ve generously applied a tea made from chopped, carroty-fresh tumeric root and fibrous chunks of fresh ginger. I’ve drunk a lot of water, sipped Gees Linctus, eaten leafy green vegetables, and dissolved so many lozenges on my tongue that my teeth’ll probably corrode before the season is out…and also had some whiskey. Fingers crossed this elixir mix gets the better of my immune system soon.

In the meantime, here are the promised Coconut Macaroons – luckily, as in previous winters, I haven’t got a blocked nose and therefore no sense of taste. Those winters are no fun at all. I’d take a cough and no energy over that any day. I’d never tried these Coconut Macaroons before, despite owning How To Be A Domestic Goddess since 2006. But one of the many manifest joys of Nigella Lawson is that with her massive quantity of recipes, there’s always deliciousness anew to discover and love.

This is how much coconut they use…On the other hand, only two egg whites! These macaroons are less sophisticated than their French macaron counterparts, but they’re significantly less terrifying to make, too.

Coconut Macaroons

From Nigella Lawson’s important book How To Be A Domestic Goddess

  • 2 egg whites
  • 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
  • 100g sugar
  • pinch of salt
  • 250g shredded/fancy shred/long thread coconut (if all you have/can find is dessicated, I’m sure it’s fine, but Nigella does make a bit of a point of saying that shredded is better – am just the messenger)
  • 30g ground almonds
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or coconut essence

Set your oven to 170 C/340 F and line a baking tray with baking paper. In a non-plastic bowl, whisk the eggs till just frothy, then add the cream of tarter and whisk some more till you get soft peaks forming.

At this point, carry on whisking – fun! – while gradually adding the sugar a teaspoon at a time. It should eventually be thick and shiny, by the time all the sugar’s used up.

Now plunder all this gorgeous meringue-y hard work by tipping in the coconut, salt, extract and ground almonds, and fold together till you have a sticky mixture. I’ll tell you now: this mixture tastes amaaaazing.

Take a quarter cup measure, and scoop out cups-ful, dumping them down onto the tray. You should get between 8 and 12 out of this mixture. Bake for around 20 minutes, or until lightly golden. If you like, once they’re cool, drizzle them or swirl their bases in melted dark chocolate (around 150-200g should do this lot)

I love them. They’re satisfyingly large, pleasingly occupying both biscuit and cake territory, chewy with the fresh, summery taste of coconut and the bounty bar-echoing delight of their optional chocolate coating. They’re just seriously delicious.

Title via: the very lovely David Bowie’s earlyish song Karma Man, from the album London Boy.

Music lately:

With the lack of sleep that recurrent coughing brings, I’ve not been drawn towards anything with a heavy beat or a heavy meaning to process lately. Which is why Patsy Cline and the serenely beautiful Ali and Toumani album, for example, have been played a lot.

Next time: I found this amazing roast vegetable tart recipe, vegan and gluten free and delicious and everything. Hopefully will be blogging with a non-inflamed throat next time, too.

 

clean clear crisp, we got a love like this water

12 Comments

I don’t want to come across all “Oh hi old friend, haven’t seen you in so long, oh wait I’ll just put my shiny new iPhone on the table there for everyone to see while opening up the FriendPal app, which I paid $3 for, it takes a photo of the person in front of you so you can talk to them while looking at a picture of them on your phone” etc. But I really, really love the FoodGawker app, which is where I found this recipe for Chocolate Mousse. While all the food that I blog about here makes me happy, sometimes I find an exciting recipe that just fills my thoughts constantly, because I’m so curious about it. A recipe that makes people’s voices slower, plane trips delayed, busses late and traffic more congested because they’re all standing between me and my kitchen.

 
 
 
Foodgawker is a site with page after page of thumbnails of stunning food photography, each photo linking to the recipe it depicts on the blog it came from. You’ve got to self-submit, and you’ve got to be good. Possibly related: they’ve consistently rejected all my submissions over the last year or so. But still I return, using it like Google for recipes. Their iPhone app condenses all this into a format that fits on your phone, and it’s a grand way to fill in spare time – although it helps to have some free Wi-Fi, I bet all those high-res pictures chew through the megabytes.
 
The reason this recipe caught my attention, while browsing through the app in an airport recently, was its ingredients. Or lack of.
 
 
 
 
Chocolate, water, juice, honey. (The honey was a total pain to scrape off the baking paper, by the way, and I didn’t even achieve visually what I was hoping for! Hopefully I learn from this.)
 
You get chocolate mousse out of hardly anything at all. I wish I’d known about this recipe a few years ago as a student – a little chocolate, turn on the tap, and you’ve got pudding. No eggs, no cream, no nothing. It’s amazing. As the German man on Tim’s and my train to Warsaw said when he found out we were from New Zealand: “Oh my gosh, that is further away than I could ever have imagined!” As they say in [title of show], “For anyone who’s ever dreamed, it’s time to believe in dreaming again….It’s time. Dream. Believe.” (Oh come on, it more or less applies to awesome chocolate mousse. Also: [title of show]!)
 
 
Water Chocolate Mousse
 
With a huge thanks to the Mess In The Kitchen blog where I found this recipe. I’ve adapted it slightly.
 
100g dark chocolate (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana)
1/4 cup juice (any flavour, I used more of that strawberry juice)
1/3 cup water
2 teaspoons honey
 
Bring the liquids and the honey to the boil in a pan, then remove from the heat and tip into a bowl. Break up the chocolate and add it to the bowl, stirring till the heat of the liquid melts it and you’ve got a shiny chocolate puddle.
 
Refrigerate for 10 minutes or so. Just before you take it out, fill your sink with a couple of centimeters of cold water, and add a handful of ice cubes.
 
Sit the bowl of chocolate in the water, and whisk. Whisk and whisk and whisk and eventually it will aerate, turning paler and thickened and – pa-dah – into chocolate mousse. If you end up with what looks like overbeaten whipped cream, just whisk in a little hot water till you get the consistency you want. Divide amongst two smallish bowls/glasses and serve.
 
Serves 2
 
 
Most recipes involving chocolate will stress that you can’t let any water get into it or it’ll seize up and turn all gross. So, it was with slight consternation that I mixed the two together. Through some miracle of science, the melted chocolate, rapidly cooling with every flick of your whisk, absorbs the liquid and becomes a soft, velvety pillowy pile of mousse, with the clean, unsullying water making the dark cocoa flavour so definite it’s like every single one of your tastebuds is wearing 3D glasses.
 
 
 
 
In terms of excitement-causing, second only to the astonishing minimalism of the ingredients is this recipe’s versatility. With no eggs or dairy or gluten, this could also serve as icing on a cake, the filling in a pie shell, or as a base for whatever flavour you want to push upon it – use orange juice, add vanilla or peppermint extract or cinnamon. If you don’t have juice or honey, I think you could use water for the entire liquid content, and just use two teaspoons of sugar.
 
 
 
 
And for interest’s sake, I tried it with white chocolate instead of dark. Apart from the sort of muddy colour (from the strawberry juice) and a softer-set texture, it worked amazingly well and now calls me, siren like, from the fridge.
 
 
 
Title via: Ladi6’s high-achieving single Like Water from her beautiful album The Liberation of…
 
 
 
Music lately:
 
Kiss From a Rose, Seal. OMG this song is good. Although it’s really hard to blog when you’re singing along to it. It requires all your concentration.
 
HAIR. While I appreciate that I’ve mentioned it a million times, it’s only because it’s really, really good. And I’m obsessed anew thanks to the arrival from America of the Actors Fund of America Benefit recording and the vinyl record of the 2009 revival cast. “All the clouds are cumuloft, walking in spaaaace”
 
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, How Can You Love Me. As commenter Pete20Pedro on Youtube says, “what a jam!” And their album came with a free tshirt, one of those nice ones with really soft fabric, even.
 
 
Next time: Nigella’s recipe for coconut macaroons…unless anything dinner-y overtakes my interest before then. That’s if I’m not asleep in every spare moment. Had another weekend away for work – fortunately, didn’t hit my head again, but I did have a weird sleepless night in my motel, which I’m still catching up on now.

red enough it could burn you…

7 Comments

I was away in Auckland for work over the weekend, but very happily, I got to fit a night at home with the family in around it. During my 18-hour stint at home I somehow managed to catch up with huge amounts of family, both extended and immediate. Well, the family minus one cat (Rupert, who died in May). Roger, the remaining feline, seemed to enjoy the extra attention but didn’t go so far as to actually sit on my lap for an extended time period or sleep on my bed that night.
While packing up on Sunday in my Auckland motel to head to the airport, I bent down to check if I’d left anything under the bed (I always do this, even if I hardly bring anything with me – I once found twenty cents!) and on the way down my right temple connected hard and swift with the wooden back of a desk chair. It hurt so bad, and I wailed really loudly. And then kind of laughed at the fact that there was no-one to hear me saying “owwww”, which…actually sounds fairly sinister now on paper. Anyway, if this blog is completely non-inspiring to read, blame it on my sore, impacted head.
The new Cuisine magazine arrived in our mailbox the day before I left to go up to Auckland, giving me just enough time to read it, but not enough time to cook any of its content. I did daydream about one particular recipe while away, which I then made pretty well immediately after returning home to Wellington. Rote Grutz, or its supercool translation Red Grits (I find it hard not to spell it Gritz) is a German recipe that Ray McVinnie, one of my very, very favourite local food writers, discovered while researching food in Berlin. I’m not even going to pretend to *cough* when I say: “Luckyyyy”.
It doesn’t look like there’s much to this recipe, and it’s true, but the ingredients come together to form something that’s a gorgeous merging of jam and custard. The ‘grits’ part of the name come from the berries’ seeds, at least that’s my guess. They’re certainly gritty. The cornflour and juice cooks together and becomes satiny and light (apart from that one lump of unstirred cornflour stirring in my glass), stunningly red, not too sweet. In fact, the sour-sugary aspect makes it compelling eating. I even sneaked back to the fridge in a bit of a trance while it was cooling to eat some more spoonfuls, then accidentally dropped a steak right into the bowl of berries. Luckily the steak was wrapped and on a tray and I removed it fast.
I didn’t have the exact ingredients that Ray McVinnie specified, but I’d like to think what I had worked just as well. There’s something nice about the red-on-red of the juices but I’m sure you could use orange or apple juice if that’s what’s most accessible to you.
Rote Grutze/Red Grits

From the June/July 2011 issue of Cuisine magazine.

250mls cranberry juice
150g sugar
800g frozen raspberries
50g cornflour mixed with 4 tablespoons water

Or, my appropriation based on what was in the fridge and the amount of people it was feeding:

125ml (1/2 cup) strawberry juice (I know! I bought it at the food show, the brand is NJoy but I can’t find anything about them online. Anyway, this seemed like a practical use for it.)
75g sugar
400g frozen cranberries and blackberries
25g cornflour mixed with 2 tablespoons water

Bring the sugar and juice to a boil in a saucepan. Add the berries, bring to the boil again and carefully stir in the cornflour mixture, stirring really well so you don’t end up with lumps of cornflour. Remove from the heat, cool, then pour into glasses. Out of mine I got enough for the two glasses you saw plus a couple of tablespoons left over to be saved for making future breakfasts more exciting.


The Red Grits are pretty to look at, dark as garnets and just as light-catching. While they’d taste gorgeous with a cascade of fresh cream plunging into their red depths, they were satisfactorily delicious as is. As well as served in glasses, I imagine these saucy berries could be spooned over ice cream, tucked under a crumble topping, or used to fill a pie shell.


And extremely easy to make. Tim and I never actually saw these on a menu in Berlin, but it does feel nice to be eating something Germanic, so that our holiday doesn’t feel quite so far away in the past.
Last week I had the extremely cool opportunity to go to the launch of Visa Wellington on a Plate. Which I’m really excited about. Particularly the set menus which allows me to briefly feel like a Lady Who Lunches. At last year’s launch I met Mika of Millie Mirepoix for the first time, and also the magnificent Ray McVinnie himself. He wasn’t there this year, but I re-met Delaney of Heartbreak Pie and Rosa of Mrs Cake, and met for the first time Joanna from Wellingtonista, etc. We ploughed through beautiful nibbles, ended up at Cuckoo round the corner for wine (I will pay you back Delaney and Rosa) and then Tim appeared and he and I ended up having a wild dinner at Foxglove with Jo and her friend Heather. It all happened really spontaneously which is a word that I don’t usually use to describe activities that I participate in. It was so fun, and several bonus points to the staff at Foxglove who dealt with our increasing raucousness. But as well as making real-life friends of people that also seem cool online, Wellington on a Plate has plenty to offer people who just want to eat stuff: check em out.
_______________________________________

Title via: Linda Clifford, Red Light, from the Fame soundtrack. I love this song so much. It’s also an amazing moment in the film itself – obviously Leroy is a total babe and it’s supposed to be humourous but I always felt so sad for Shirley Mulholland. When she says “who wants to go to a…school and learn to dance anyway” a bit of my heart chips off (this is why I can’t watch this film too often) because I know how she feels.
_______________________________________

Music lately:

Arctic Monkeys, Don’t Sit Down Because I’ve Moved Your Chair. Some of the music I was really wild about six years ago really hasn’t aged too well, or successive output has downright deteriorated. So it’s nice to see the Arctic Monkeys continuing to be awesome.

Patrick Wolf, The Magic Position. I had a bad headache today from the aforementioned head-hitting moment and so was feeling a bit grim. This song came on my ipod and, with its carousel-ride sound and Bolero-baiting violins, it was about halfway through before I realised I was happily swaying my head side to side like Stevie Wonder.
_______________________________________

Next time: I’ve been tutu-ing with the idea of making a Facebook page for this blog. On the one hand…it might be a good way for people to latch ever further onto this blog. A lot of people like Facebook. On the other hand, I don’t really like Facebook (it’s true! You have to scrape me away from Twitter with a silicon spatula but I can’t spend more than a minute on Facebook) and I wouldn’t know what to say on there, and research would suggest that you actually have to have an engaging Facebook page to keep people around. On a further, auxiliary hand, what if I built a Facebook page and nobody turned up? Any thoughts’d be appreciated.

like collard greens and whole eggs I got soul

20 Comments

Last time I said I was going to be posting a recipe for Snickerdoodles next. Oh, how I lied. Because instead I became distracted by this inconceivably good recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi.



I’m sure I’ve told this story a squillion times already and, depending on your mood, it may go some way to illustrate how nauseatingly/adorably (take your pick!) zany/useless (also take your pick here!) Tim and I are, but here goes anyway. In the summer of 2007/2008 we went grocery shopping. At first we looked at the cartons of a dozen eggs. Not enough for us! So we looked at the trays of 20. And there, on a clearance trolley beside the trays, was a plastic wrapped, many layered stack of egg trays. Tim, being handier with mathematics than I am, worked out that even though 80 eggs was kind of a lot to get through, the saving on cost per egg compared to the single tray or dozen carton was so tremendously significant – especially considering they were free range eggs – that we’d be completely unintelligent not to buy the huge tray. Of 80 eggs. Congratulating ourselves on such a bargain, we left the supermarket.
When we got home, a cursory glance at the label revealed the reason this multitude of eggs was so reasonably priced. According to the use by date, we had just under 10 days to eat all 80. Somehow we made it happen and with protein coursing through our veins came out the other side with not one egg wasted. The reason I bring this up is that, on a free weekend, to use up some of said eggs I made Nigella’s Strawberry Ice Cream and Chocolate Mousse Cake from Forever Summer and How To Be A Domestic Goddess respectively. These two recipes saw me successfully separate 18 eggs in a single day.
But while I can coolly part yolk from white eighteen times over and turn them into such delicate treats as mousse and ice cream, I have always been terrible at poaching eggs. It kinda sucks.
Luckily, thanks to this immensely delicious recipe I found in Ottolenghi’s book Plenty, poached eggs can sit down, because these baked eggs eclipse any ambition I have to be a decent poacher.


It’s so gorgeous. The first shamefully conservative thought that crossed my mind was “eggs and yoghurt? AND green stuff?” but I’m glad I squashed that thought down. Here is the recipe to recreate it yourself, even if – maybe especially if – you think you’re not the sort of person who could veer away from plain eggs on toast.

Baked Eggs with Yoghurt and Chilli

Adapted slightly from Ottolenghi’s Plenty

4 eggs
300g rocket (although I’d recommend curly kale)
2 tablespoons olive oil
150g Greek yoghurt
1 garlic clove, crushed
A generous knob butter
1 red chilli, finely sliced, or 1 spoonful sambal oelek
A pinch smoked paprika

Set your oven to 150 C. Heat the oil in a large pan, and gently cook your greens till they wilt a little.

Tip this into a small oven dish – I used an old pie plate – and make four indentations in your greens so that the eggs have a place to go. Carefully crack an egg into each space – being careful not to break the yolk – and bake for about 10 – 15 minutes. Don’t overcook, but make sure the egg whites are no longer translucent. The very low heat means you don’t have to stress about this too much.

While they’re cooking, mix the yoghurt and garlic together and set aside. Melt the butter in a pan (the same one you cooked the greens in if you like) and add the chilli, paprika, and let it cook away till the butter foams a little.

Spoon the yoghurt and the butter over the eggs. Serve on toast or just as is.

The thick, luscious garlicky yoghurt and the almost chewy greens, gorgeously verdant against the golden eggs, which yield to the fork’s prod, the salty-hot butter merging with the rich, slowly spilling yolks and coating the astringent leaves…it’s really something.


Ottolenghi says to use rocket as the green stuff but I definitely recommend curly kale, if you can get hold of it – its crisp leaves stand up to the heat, without getting all limp and watery and gross. While it might be a bit harder to find, it’s no more expensive than spinach, and it’s not one of those stupid leafy green vegetables that perishes floppily in the fridge the day after you buy it. Kale is built to last. If you wanted to make this dairy-free, you could just use olive oil instead of the butter and I bet tahini would be so, so good instead of yoghurt. Assuming you’re more likely to have tahini than yoghurt, that is.


On that note, does anyone have any particularly reliable tips for poaching eggs? Mine is to pay someone in a cafe to do it for you.
It was so, so dark when I got out of bed this morning, and the sky had barely lightened its shade to something daylight-resembling when I left for work. I’m surprised at how glum it made me feel. I will have to keep that in check, I mean if I’m feeling this way in early June, the bleak midwinter July mornings will probably be greeted with a howl. Unless I can get up early enough and make myself this for breakfast every morning. Might be time to look for another clearance tray of eggs…
______________________________________________________

Title via: Southernplayalistikcadillacmusic by the tremendous Outkast from their album of the same name.
______________________________________________________

Music lately:

Honestly…I haven’t had enough time to listen to anything much since my last post, which possibly indicates that time was used badly. I’ve been listening quite a bit to the Godspell soundtrack and cast recording for what it’s worth, which could be seen by some as still a bad way of using time. I’m clearly the only person in New Zealand who likes to listen to it, because whenever I go to a music store there’s usually at least five copies of it in their second-hand clearance section.
______________________________________________________

Next time:

Probably definitely the snickerdoodles…and I will endeavour to listen to something other than Godspell. Victor Garber was just so dreamy back then.

take it all with a belly full of salt

10 Comments

We don’t eat a ton of meat, it has been gradually receding from out meals, like the tide or someone’s hairline, to the point where we probably only eat it once a week – if that. I don’t know why. I mean, it has got more expensive, but it’s not as though I made a proper stand or decision at any point. Analysis aside, if the right recipe comes along I’ll make it, so today I’m serving up pork belly, care of a fantastic recipe by local epicure Martin Bosley. I found it many miles off the ground, in the pages of an inflight magazine – tore it out, tucked it in my handbag, and dreamed about it till I landed back in Wellington again. I love near-on everything that the terrific, radiant, humble pig offers up – bacon, sausages, ham, ribs – but pork belly is particularly special (admittedly, “particularly special” is what I’d be saying if I was talking about bacon or ribs here too) with its tooth-yieldingly, saltily sticky and fatty wondrousness.

Please excuse (sigh, again) the atrocious photos. Thought I knew my camera, but concede I’m no good at taking pictures when it’s dark. Next week’s will be better, I promise.
This recipe is extremely straightforward. The only real difficulty is when you have to faff around turning the heavy, boiling-hot pork over partway through cooking – use a couple of pairs of tongs, some oven mitts, and take care. I didn’t use oven mitts, and a splash from the bubbling toffee-like heat of the marinade leaping from the roasting dish and landing on the tender inner flesh of my wrist is like…almost enough to make me vegetarian. The ingredients feel easy enough to get hold of – I didn’t have any star anise so used fennel seeds instead, figuring they’d give that licorice twist flavour, although admittedly without looking anywhere near as pretty. If you don’t have an orange you could probably use bottled juice, a lemon, tamarind or even some vinegar for a different sour vibe.

Martin Bosley’s Pork Belly

Cheers to (surprise!) Martin Bosley for the recipe.

2kg pork belly
120g honey
3 T oyster sauce
1 orange
4 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
1 red chilli
4 whole star anise
salt and pepper

Wash the pork belly, place in a deep roasting dish. Mix together the honey, oyster sauce, juice and zest from the orange, and garlic in a bowl. Chop the chilli and add to the marinade along with the star anise and a little salt and pepper. Scrape the bowl of marinade over the pork with a spatula, turning it over so it’s properly covered. Refrigerate for at least an hour, overnight if you can.

When you’re ready to cook it, take it out of the fridge and set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Roast for 90 minutes, turning over occasionally. Slice and serve with steamed rice.
There is a lot of honey in this recipe but it’s not like you’re having pudding for dinner here – the honey caramelises in the oven, bubbling and hissing into the juicy fat from the pork and salty, pungent oyster sauce to create a fairly magical, darkly sweet and savoury flavour. Even though the recipe is simple, everything about the pork is worked with here – the honey and orange points up its sweetness, while the oyster sauce emphasises its saltiness and the anise and chilli distract from its richness. Brilliant.
Edit: I used free range pork and definitely recommend it, if you have the means.
Leftovers can be turned into a comforting noodle soup with stock, greens, broccoli, chilli, soba noodles (or any that you like of course), soy sauce, mint, and so on.
It has been a bit of a weird time in Wellington lately, making a soothing noodle-strewn broth entirely appropriate. What with the grimly embarrassing and regrettably expensive Wellywood sign apparently an unstoppable idea, plus our branch of the Real Groovy music shop and the Grow From Here garden centre – both practically Tim’s and my neighbours and places that we’d spent a lot of time – shutting down. Hopefully something happy eventually comes from these doors closing. This morning the big story was that the Wellington Phoenix football team were going to be relocating to Auckland. I flag after 20 minutes of a game and I was dismayed, so imagine how Tim, obsessed as he is, reacted. Luckily the whole story seems to be an out-of-control rumour and completely untrue. Unfortunately, the Wellywood sign is not. One thing that can be counted on though, is The Food Show – Tim and I went on Sunday and while there were noticeably less exhibitors this time round it was still an extremely fun time with bargain-ly prices and nibbles a-plenty. But no Ray McVinnie! Practically needed smelling salts when I found out he wasn’t doing a cooking demonstration. Luckily there was plenty of wine to sample…
________________________________________
Title via: Chris Knox, local wonder, flexing his wordsmithery in A Song To Welcome The Onset Of Maturity from 1995’s Songs of Me and You.
________________________________________
Music lately:

Doubly sad news came over the weekend – first that Jeff Conaway had died, and then Gil Scott-Heron too. I love Scott-Heron’s music and poetry – the world has lost any beautiful strong words and musical greatness he was sure to have continued to contribute. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised remains amazing. Jeff Conaway, despite evidently having a decent enough voice to tour with the Broadway production of Grease, wasn’t really given much to go on with song-wise in the film itself, which is a shame. RIP to them both.

On a mildly happier note, the song Nothing To Lose by The Adults rules.
________________________________________

Next time: As with the last blog post, I got another cake recipe from my childhood – turns out it’s vegan, which’ll make a nice contrast to all this porkiness.

like eating glass

13 Comments

I was supposed to have this blog post sorted last night, but by 7.30pm I was a loose-jawed, slumpy mess and didn’t really have what it took to stage a decent blog-comeback. However, I managed to at least get dinner done – the following recipe for Glass Noodles and Edamame – whilst bearing the increasingly shackle-like load of jetlag that I can’t seem to shake. I don’t want to complain about it as such, (oh poor me, I travelled so much and now I’m just too fatigued for words), I just want to draw your attention to the fact that I did make it at all despite wearing a heavy cloak of semi-somnolence, and therefore you should be able to make it on any given day. That said, I understand if exhaustion and unmotivation of the non-travel variety is part of your day-to-day routine. I’m not the only person ever to feel sleepy, or worse, sleepy in the middle of cooking something involving a little concentration, causing you to collapse to your knees into a bowl of soaking noodles and cry ceilingward, What have I doooooooooone?

But this is do-able. Plus, it comes from the Ottolenghi cookbook Plenty, which Tim got me for my birthday. We’d actually also reserved ourselves a table for an evening at Ottolenghi the restaurant on the day after my birthday. (The day of was all booked out. A month in advance.) It was such a cool night. They made a huge fuss of us having come all the way from New Zealand, gave us prime seats, our waiter was genuinely friendly, our food was genuinely amazing. It was also wildly expensive but it’s not the kind of place we go often…or ever. So we put the price in the back of our minds while we feasted on tender shredded brisket, cheese-stuffed zucchini flowers (the first time either of us had tried them), barley with asparagus and radicchio, so many beautiful flavours, followed by a plain but perfect vanilla cheese cake carrying crunchy, sugary, caramelised macadamias. I’d been a fan of Yotam Ottolenghi’s for a while now, and I found it hard not to grin throughout our meal.

Plenty allows me to recreate those beautiful flavours and combinations at home. It’s a completely vegetarian cookbook, with no pudding recipes (yet I love it still) and when I saw the following recipe for Glass Noodles with Edamame Beans, I could see it was one of those dishes that largely relies on your cupboard being stocked up, as opposed to any skill, and therefore is ideal for the first meal after a month away. There’s a little heating and chopping involved, and then suddenly you’ve got this gorgeous piled-up pile of salty-sweet noodles and edamame beans that taste so nutty and creamy they betray the fact that they are actually a vegetable.

I know glass noodles as vermicelli or rice noodles, but kept the name because it sounds kinda pretty. However I removed the “Warm” from the start of the title – maybe I read too many Baby-Sitter’s Club book scenes of Kristy Thomas describing the SMS cafeteria lunch offerings – but whenever I see the word “Warm” in a title (and it does appear a bit, you know, “Warm Salad of Lamb and bla bla bla” etc) I always mentally add the word “socks” afterwards. Warm…socks. Not cool, but there it is. I get frozen edamame beans – soybeans – at the supermarket up on Torrens Terrace or in Moore Wilson (if you’re in Wellington) but if they’re too hard to find, this would still rule with frozen peas as a substitute. That said, my ancient Aunt Daisy cookbook has a recipe for “Soya Bean Rissoles” (easily digestible seems to be their selling point) so they can’t be that obscure, right?

Glass Noodles and Edamame Beans

From Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty

  • 200g glass (rice, vermicelli) noodles
  • 2 T sunflower, rice bran or other plain oil
  • 3 garlic cloves, finely diced
  • 300g podded, cooked edamame beans
  • 3 spring onions
  • 1 fresh red chilli, chopped finely
  • 3 T chopped coriander, plus more to serve
  • 3 T shredded mint leaves
  • 3 T toasted sesame seeds

Sauce

  • 2 T grated galangal or fresh root ginger
  • Juice of 4 limes or 1 – 2 big lemons
  • 3 T peanut or rice bran oil
  • 2 T palm sugar, crushed or 1 T dark brown sugar
  • 2 tsp tamarind pulp or paste
  • 1 tsp soy sauce
  • 1 tsp fine sea salt

Soak the noodles in a bowl of hot water for five minutes, or until soft. If, like mine, they don’t soften up right away, tip them into a pot with a bit more water and simmer for a bit. Don’t let them get too soft and collapsing though. Drain.

Whisk together the sauce ingredients in a small bowl.

Heat the sunflower or rice bran oil in a large frying pan or wok, and add the garlic. When it starts to go lightly golden and smell amazing, remove the pan from the heat and add the sauce and the noodles. Gently stir together, so that you incorporate the sauce but don’t crush the noodles, then add the edamame beans, plus the spring onion, chilli, coriander and mint.

Divide between plates or pile onto a platter and scatter over the remaining beans, sesame seeds and coriander.

Notes: I used sambal oelek instead of chilli, lemon instead of lime, and brown sugar instead of palm – and I just didn’t have any coriander or tamarind. My cupboard is pretty well stocked but I’ve been away for a month and wasn’t going to spend heaps on a few ingredients when I could wait till the vege market this Sunday and get them for cheap. I also didn’t use mint because it grows up on the roof at my place and it was raining and freezing and windy and I just didn’t want to go outside to get it.

Please scuse the photos by the way – now that the late-afternoon darkness is a daily occurrence, I really need to remember how to take decent night-time photos.

Even though I wish we were still traveling and doing things like this:

…on a cold and rain-soaked evening I’m so happy to be back in the kitchen, and this is just the recipe to welcome me back to it. The flavours of chilli, ginger, garlic and soy lift the bland, slippery noodles into something substantial and the beans not only look gorgeous, their pistachio-like taste makes this fairly cheap dinner taste luxurious as. As Ottolenghi suggests, you could double the soy content by adding tofu to make it more of a meal, but I loved it as is.

Actually this isn’t even my greatest jet lag achievement. I did manage – somehow – to make caramel ice cream at Mum and Dad’s place on our first day back in the country, and I helped with the feijoa and apple crumble that went with it. Have you ever separated 6 eggs on 2 hours’ sleep? I don’t recommend it, but my drive to make everyone ice cream overrode my drive to be sensible. We did have a great weekend at home, landing at 5.30am only to be whisked up to the Manukau Heads to see Dad’s band Apostrophe play at a school fundraiser. Despite calling to mind something that Coco Solid once mentioned about the particular awkwardness of performing in the daytime, it was my first time seeing the band play and it was very cool. I don’t think it was just the jetlag that made the songs sound so good – between absorbing all those Dad-penned tunes and seeing Mum make up a bread and butter pudding on the spot with bits of leftover hot cross bun and bread rolls, I left for Wellington with a bit of a “my parents are awesome” glow. We managed to see heaps of family on our short time at home which was so great, even if the later it got in the afternoon the less sense we made.

Just checked the clock and it’s 9.20pm which is the latest night I’ve had yet since we got back on Saturday morning – yuss.

Title via: Bloc Party’s Like Eating Glass from Silent Alarm. I remember when they were all new and exciting and now they’re just…a bit old and exciting. When Kele Okerere sings “it’s so cold in this house” it’s like you can see the puff of air coming from his mouth.

Music lately:

I haven’t had time to listen to much since I’ve been back but of course there’s Apostrophe, my dad’s band – they have so many good songs but to be fair, I really can’t judge ’em unbiasedly, anyway the only thing of theirs online is their single The Skeptic, check it out.

Next time: I’ve got a day off on Friday and I’m going to be baking SO many things. Or at least, more than one thing. I’ve missed baking. There might also be a moment-by-moment recount of how I felt during Wicked. I will also be catching up on all the food blogs on Friday, looking forward to all the pending inspiration.

 

i hope you like jammin’ too

11 Comments

Firstly – got unexpectedly mentioned in the Sunday Star-Times newspaper today in the Focus section, very exciting. With the title of Comfort Food even, something I feel strongly about (well, that food comforts, at least). So if you’re here because of that, you clearly overcame the hurdle of some funny printing on the photo, making me resemble a hyperactive 12-year old who’s just eaten a pineapple Fruju. I guess I look like that in real life plenty to be fair. The generous comparison to Nigella Lawson made me smile and do a self high-five although I did wonder about the mention of “skinnier” – is that positive/negative/true/necessary? Anyway, I hope sincerely (and unsurprisingly) that you like what you read and stick around.

Given the events of the past few days making jam might sound misguidedly whimsical, but my intentions were practical. I had a whole lot of rhubarb in my fridge from a lady at work who has an enthusiastic plant, and it needed using. This jam recipe keeps for ages in the fridge and involves not much more than a little time, a bit of stirring, and a few thousand granules of sugar.

But first: a non-jam related preamble. I flew back to Wellington from Auckland today. I’d been working at Pasifika festival at Western Springs. Ate some awesome chop suey and a massive steamed pork bun from the Samoa village for lunch. Then immediately regretted it because my already indecent sweatiness from the fiery sun was compounded by the heat of the food. Cooled my insides with this juice from the Niue village called Tropical Crush – banana, apple, pineapple and coconut blended together.

Had a run-in that I thought was pretty funny.

I was talking to this kid who mentioned she was going back to Wairoa after the festival.

“My boyfriend’s from Wairoa” I said.

She asked what his name was.

He doesn’t live there anymore, I said, but I mention his mum’s family’s name.

She knew someone with that name in Wairoa, turns out it’s Tim’s cousin.

“Is [Tim’s cousin] your boyfriend?” the girl asked, suddenly confused.

“Nooo” says I jokingly, “he’s a bit young for me!”

The girl still looks thoughtfully at me, squints and says “nah…he’s in Year 12 isn’t he?”

Year 12 is 6th Form, FYI, or just under a decade younger than myself. Refrained from asking “so just how old do I look to you?” because I remember having a skewed idea of what age was and what constituted being a legitimate grownup and that sort of thing. So instead I smiled and said “small world huh”.

I also caught up briefly with Mum and my godmum Vivienne who were at a Spanish course in town (received a txt saying “Talofa y Hola”) which was very, very lovely. But it was hard to maintain that relentlessly upbeat work-mode in the face of the incomprehensible disastrousness continuing to unfold in Japan. The footage was both numbing and terrifying. I really hope you all quickly get in touch with anyone you know over there.

So again I turn to Aunt Daisy, whose quantity of recipes, old-timey resourcefulness (there’s a lot of things that weren’t great ‘back then’ but hot damn they knew how to be resourceful) and her resolutely authoritative tone brings me comfort always, but especially now. I’m not sure if Aunt Daisy was super kindly, or more of the snapping-turtle variety of older lady, but when she drops lines like “Cut bread into 1 inch cubes. Roll in condensed milk (sweetened). Fry in hot deep fat” I feel like I’m posthumously sinking into her blouse-clad bosom for a big hug.

This jam recipe is very simple, even though it’s not instant. Nevertheless I managed to burn it while – haha! – tweeting about how great my jam was. I acted fast – removed the pan from the heat, chucked it in the sink which I started filling with cold water, and then grabbed a spatula and transferred the jam to a bowl. I slid a cautious spoon into the bowl of jam half an hour later, tasted it and…all was forgiven. It tasted amazing. The sugars of the rhubarb had become toffee-intense during their brief scorching, and apart from the general texture being a little sticky instead of jammy (nothing that adding a bit of water while reheating couldn’t fix) the jam was completely salvageable. Still, it’s probably better if you manage not to burn it at all. So save the self-congratulatory tweeting till after it’s off the heat.

Rhubarb and Dried Fig Jam

Recipe from Aunt Daisy’s Favourite Cookery Book

Aunt Daisy asks for 6 pounds of rhubarb and 6 pounds of sugar and 1 1/2 pounds dried figs. This means you need roughly 2.5 kilos of rhubarb. Different times back then. I’ve adapted it a bit to suit my needs, the good thing is the method works for however much rhubarb you have.

  • Rhubarb (at least 400g)
  • Sugar
  • Dried Figs

Weigh your rhubarb and then measure out the same weight in sugar. Trim and chop up your rhubarb, place in a non-metallic bowl, layering with sugar from your measured amount. Reserve any excess sugar. Cover the rhubarb and leave overnight, or some similar length of time (like, if you do this in the morning you could come back to it late afternoon or in the evening).

An incredibly awesome pink syrup should have formed in the bowl of rhubarb, and everything should be all soft and shiny from the sugar. Drain off the syrup (reserve for adding to soda water or vodka or whatever you like, really) and tip the rhubarb slices into a pan with the remaining, reserved sugar from your initial measurement.

Bring to a simmer and don’t go tweeting about how cool you are, because the sugar heats up fast. Instead, keep stirring. The fruit should collapse fairly quickly and start to smell amazing. Time will vary depending on your quantities, but if you’re feeling like it’s going to turn into a blackened mess, just tip in a little water or better yet, some of the syrup. Aim for ten minutes or so stirring over a low heat.

Chop up as many dried figs as you like, I’d go about a cupful or a decent handful per 500g. Add them to the rhubarb mix and simmer till the fruit softens and disappears.

Pour into hot, sterilised jars.

Rhubarb and figs aren’t as sexy as raspberries or peaches or anything. Rhubarb’s sweetness is austerely astringent and dried figs have a kind of medicinal, camphor-chest sugariness to them. Simmered slowly together though, they bring out the best of each other, giving you jam of rich, honeyed, fructose-deep flavour, interspersed with the unmistakable grit of fig seeds. It sets good and thick and can handle a little overheating. Cheers, Aunt Daisy.

In case you’re thinking “great, now I have a sodding great pile of jam to use up”, you could consider making it into these steamily delicious Germknodel, using it in this loaf cake, spreading it on top of hot homemade bread…or on buttered toast using whatever you’ve got.

One thing about making your own jam – it gives you time to be grateful that you’ve got the time, resources and ability to make jam.

Title via: another late-great, Bob Marley and his song which of course isn’t about homemade preserves at all….Jamming from his album with the Wailers, Exodus.

Music lately:

Been so busy but…we were flicking through radio frequencies on the way to the airport this morning, and Sinead O’ Conner’s Nothing Compares 2 U came on. Something about the upward direction of her “Nuuuuthing” on the the chorus always gives me shivers.

Next time: Your guess as good as mine – I’m heading back up to Auckland again for work on Thursday, and so my dream of making that mango pickle is now fading a bit with my distinct lack of time…