Category: Gluten-free

Let The Good Times Roll

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It is hard to contemplate (A) that it is exactly one week till Christmas and (B) that Outrageous Fortune has really finished- it just doesn’t feel like a Tuesday without it. Tim and I are getting up super early tomorrow to go Christmas shopping, so hopefully there is nice weather for it – there were massive wintry rainfalls today which was a bit worrisome.

I’ve been trying to make sure we eat relatively healthily this week. It doesn’t always work.

Above: I always thought that rice paper rolls were a bit like haircuts – best done by professionals. But the recipe in Nigella’s Forever Summer showed me that they were in fact, incredibly do-able. A little fiddly, yes, but nevertheless a simple, impressive, and healthy nibble. We even made them while camping last year, if that is any indication of their non-threateningness (should such a word exist.) I made very simple rolls on Sunday night – just grated carrot, sliced avocado and mint, no noodles or anything. I think they were in fact the nicest ones I have ever made. Once you get into a rhythm of dunking the rice paper, laying the filling on their softened surfaces, and rolling them up, there’s not much to it at all.
Above: The rice paper rolls were a precursor to our actual dinner, which consisted of roasted vegetables, boiled potatoes, and my usual fall-back when I have no idea what to cook for dinner but Tim wants some kind of meat component to the meal – mince spiced with cumin, cinnamon, etc. I added some cooked down red lentils to the mince, just to make it all the more sparklingly healthy, and grated in some carrot. All in all a model dinner…until…

Above: The real Canadian cake! Alicia’s friend sent her a box of Betty Crocker cake mix, complete with a TUB OF ICING and we made it after dinner. Although I am generally vehemently opposed to cakes made from boxes, I was intrigued to say the least. You might not be able to see it in the photo but everything on the packaging is charmingly translated into French as well as English. Anyway, we mixed this up and baked it while watching the Simpsons movie on DVD. How do I put this – the cake was appallingly fabulous. It had this spookily puffy, moist texture, like something not found in nature, and the icing tasted like butter. It also had little clumps of e-numbers, I mean sprinkles, clustered throughout. It tasted pretty amazing, but left me rolling around groaning afterwards, filled with too much sugar.

Above: This was last night’s dinner and I have to say, all self-congratulatory, that it was an absolute stonker of a feed. Tim and I went to New World Metro in town to grab some milk after work and ended up spontaneously buying some steak for dinner. I followed a recipe from the New Zealand cookbook, which basically involves frying it and deglazing the pan with sherry and cream. I used the sherry Mum gave me, and the little bit of cream that I had leftover from the pav. Well. It tasted INCREDIBLE, like restaurant food or something. The smell, when the sherry hits the hot pan and starts sizzling, is sensational.
To go with I made a salad of raw, sliced beetroot, blanched brocolli, and cashews, which was very fresh and crisp tasting, and roasted some potatoes. What a feast.

Above: Tonight I kept it fairly simple. Penne pasta, with avocado and roasted beetroot, capsicum, and courgette. I drizzled over a little of the basil oil that Mum and Dad got me when they went to Australia earlier this year, and it was the perfect foil for the mix of flavours on the plate. The beetroot inevitably stained the pasta, but I thought the combo looked rather festive.
Above: Well, I kept it simple until I started to make baked cheesecake, that is…Apparently we are having some kind of flat barbeque tomorrow, I say apparently because it is Emma that is organising it and I’m not quite sure on the particulars. As long as it doesn’t rain like it did today we should have a jolly old time. Either way I’m always up for feeding people and so volunteered to make the Chocolate Lime Cheesecake from Nigella Bites, using gluten free cookies for the base. It is largely a case of bunging all the ingredients in the processor, the difficult bit is baking it in a waterbath, but not much is difficult in the kitchen when you have Tim to lift things for you. It is cooling on the bench now and smells pretty amazing. I’ll let you know tomorrow night what the general consensus is. I’ve never made a cheesecake before so it’s all a bit exciting.
Alright, it’s now past midnight and I have to brave a shopping mall tomorrow, so I need my sleep.

Epic Proportions

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I didn’t realise how long it was since I’ve last posted here, so another long post, sorry! This time of year is pretty busy though, and I can’t believe that there is only one week till I go home for Christmas 🙂 and Kieran leaves our flat 😦 although obviously, he will always be a part of Team Hadfield.

Above: It has been so humid and tropical in Wellington lately that we have been eating our dinner outside a lot. I made this for dinner the other night, using some chops that Tim’s parents gave us when we went to their farm in September to help with docking. After defrosting them (naturally, I hadn’t kept them in the fridge for three months) I baked them with some of the cranberry conserve that Santa gave me last year, mixed with a little dry mustard powder. They were delicious, all sticky and blackened and meaty. To go with I made the Egyptian Tomato Salad from Nigella Bites, using some of the tomatoes we got from the vege market. This recipe is very easy and really summery. You peel the tomatoes, slice them up with some spring onion, pour over a little olive oil, and leave it to sit for a while for the flavours to develop. The potatoes I just parboiled and fried in my non stick pan in cubes, with some cumin seeds and plenty of salt.

On Friday night I didn’t even have dinner (Tim had some toast and leftover lentil soup) because we went to the stadium to see the Phoenix vs Queensland, and by the time I’d got home from work there wasn’t any time to cook. It was a very warm, muggy night, perfect for being outside, and the game was lots of fun. We went with Kieran (flatmate) and Alicia (Canadian who also works at Starbucks) and I have to say that being in a crowd of soccer fans (I think there was just over 9000 people there, pretty good for a non-Beckham game here) is a great way of letting out any repressed anger you might have as you yell and curse and chant along that “All we want is a decent referee.”

Above: I wish I could say I made this! Tim, Kieran, Alicia and I went out to breakfast the next morning (how very Sex and The City! I thought to my unsophisticated self) at Epic, on Willis Street. They serve the most amazingly enormous and imaginative breakfasts, for very reasonable prices. The above – savoury French toast with mushrooms, chorizo, spinach, grilled capsicum, hollandaise and chutney was only $13, and being the glutton that I am, I got a couple of hash browns on the side. It was seriously good and slowed me down too – I hate paying for tiny meals – and everything tasted of quality, not as though it was out of a packet.

Above: Tim ordered the big vegetarian fry up and then, rather idiosyncratically, asked for bacon and kranky on the side. He had started eating this by the time I took a photo of it, but really, it looks pretty good, huh? Tim said his eggs were cooked perfectly.
Above: Kieran had the Mexican Big Breakfast, with corn fritters on the side, and Alicia had the three-egg omelette. Everything was sooo good! We got there bang on 9.00am (quite an achievement on a Saturday morning, especially since we had been drinking the night before) and there were hardly any people there, but it filled up quickly.

If you are ever in Wellington, make sure you check this place out. There was also a blackboard menu which I forced myself not to look at for fear of never being able to make a decision. Kieran and Alicia got latte bowls, Tim got a flat white (I think the general concession was ‘good, but not as good as Starbucks’) and I got a lovely spirulina.
Tim had work to go to, but Kieran and Alicia and I made the most of the sun by driving out to Island Bay, which is near to the airport. I’d never been there before – it’s such a jewel of a place on a sunny day, real postcard stuff – blue sky, blue-green sea, the cliffs…we chilled in the sun (and yes, I schmeered myself with copious amounts of sunblock) on the pebbly beach and tried to avoid being bitten by the mosquitos that were as big as 747s.


Above: Island Bay. Unlike many beaches in NZ, this one has sun-warmed pebbles instead of sand.

When I got home I started making a pavlova. I didn’t have any real motivation to do it, in that we weren’t celebrating or something like that, but I had a pomegranate, and I had lots of egg whites in the freezer, and since we are all going home for Christmas soon it’s a nice time to eat that sort of food. So, following the recipe for Pomegranate Pavlova in How To Be A Domestic Goddess, I started whipping those egg whites into shape.

Above: Everything was going fine until I realised I’d ran out of cornflour, and of course in the unstable world of pavlova every ingredient is crucial. So I thought maybe I could substitute it with custard powder, which is mostly cornflour anyway, right? Well, I sifted it in, poured over the vinegar…and it made this funny bubbling noise. So I folded it all together, spread the shiny mixture onto the baking tray, and put it in the oven quickly. Then I looked at the ingredients on the custard powder and it had cream of tartar in it. Uh oh! I thought. And hoped for the best.
Anyway while it was baking I got on with dinner, which was good old spag bol (hey, we are students) I put some of the red wine that I wasn’t drinking in the spaghetti sauce, which made it smell delicious. I also added some red lentils to it, which cooked down into nothing and added texture and of course, added healthiness. But of course you all should be familiar with my lentil obsession by now…


Above: We ate outside again, because it was so warm. The spag bol tasted great – if only cheese wasn’t so expensive, we could have grated some over the top.

We were sitting outside drinking and talking (Tim: beer, Emma: Loud and Lola Cosmopolitan mix, Kieran and I: Red Wine) when the timer went off for the pav. I checked for signs of disaster but apart from being ENORMOUS (it has expanded to take up nearly the whole darn baking tray, which I think the cream of tarter may have had a hand in doing) it seemed to be absolutely fine. I whipped some cream and spread it thickly over, and then came the fun part.
Above: You may or may not know this, but one of the more effective ways of seeding a pomegranate is to hit it repeatedly with a wooden spoon till the ruby seeds rain down. So, here I am, well, smacking the pomegranate.

Above: This pav was soooo delicious, all crisp and sugary without and yieldingly marshmallowy within. The pomegranate also makes a great topping – it looks gorgeous and its fragrantly acidic, crunchy seeds go well with the cream and all the sugar. This is the third pav of Nigella’s that I’ve tried and I have to say they are fantastic recipes.




Above: From the top, the Pomegranate Pav, the Nectarine and Passionfruit Pav, and the Chocolate Raspberry Pav. They make me think of Miss World contestants, all lined up like that. Which do you think looks the prettiest? I sure can’t decide…

In other news: Less than ten days till Christmas! Aaaaahhh!!!

“Nowtro.”

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“The costumes are retro now, but they weren’t retro then. They were ‘nowtro.'” (A Mighty Wind) (one of my favourite films.)

After a retro cooking challenge was issued by an online food forum I frequent (ooh, alliteration!) I had a think about what I consider to actually be retro food. There is the obvious stuff – cheese fondue (which I have made successfully, and yes, it is delicious) or prawn cocktail, Boef en Croute and black forest gateaux – the sort of thing one reads about in a Jilly Cooper novel. And I concluded that as a child of ’86, I was really too young to be thinking about foods as retro – the closest I can get is being snide about that period in the late nineties/early 2000’s, where if it wasn’t drowned in balsamic vinegar it was covered in sweet chilli sauce, and chicken, cranberry and brie was the height of haute cuisine.

So I decided to let what was in our cupboards decide for me, and ended up with two distinctly different ‘retro’ dishes – one being Ratatouille, a dish densely packed with vegetables and, I understand, a classic of the seventies. The other thing I made – little coffee flavoured cakes, inexplicably named “Crybabies,” came from an Aunt Daisy cookbook that belonged to my great grandmother. Its margins are scrawled with notes and it is a piece of family history – indeed, social history- which I am very happy to own. It’s not what I would necessarily call retro, since the book would have been published in the 30’s or 40’s, but still pleasingly seems to go with the notion of cooking from the past.


Above: Ratatouille! The recipe I found in Nigella’s seminal text, How To Eat. It is so easy to make and is, if one entertains friends this way inclined, both vegetarian and gluten free. I had bought most of the ingredients at the vege market, and the only thing I didn’t put in the eggplant-courguette-tomato mix was capsicum because they are really expensive at the moment. It turned out absolutely delicious, by the way, and was a breeze to make in the non-stick pan I got for a 21st birthday present from family friends. (More alliteration, brought to you by the letter F)


Above: The Crybabies (sounds like a bad, coat-tail riding sixties girl group, speaking of retro…) These little cakes were so delicious and easy to make, that I’m going to list the recipe. I halved the original, by the way, but if you have the patience and a ton of golden syrup- be my guest.

Crybabies

Mix together the following: 1/2 cup hot, very strong coffee, 125 g soft butter, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup golden syrup (or, 6 tablespoons if this helps) 1 t each ground ginger and nutmeg. Stir in enough plain flour till it has a thick, cake batter dropping consistency. Pour 1/2 a teaspoon vinegar over one teaspoon baking soda, let it foam up and stir thoroughly into the batter. Drop spoonfuls onto a baking tray and bake at 180 for 20-25 minutes.

These are so good – spicy and doughy and treacly and perfect for dipping into a hot drink, or, as we ate them, to accompany a good movie. In our case, the amazing animated film Spirited Away, which we watched last night.

So; that was my retro project. I have a small problem now – I am going to be cooking lots of presents for Christmas – if this makes sense – but I can’t blog about it because a large proportion of my readers (ie my family) are to be the recipients for said food-gifts and I don’t want to ruin the surprise. So, although I have a lot of exciting stuff planned for the rest of the fast-speeding away time before Christmas, you probably won’t hear about it!

"The Brain, The Brain, The Centre of The Chain."

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The title doesn’t have much to do with anything except for the fact that I am very excited, in a sniffly, boffinish way, to have discovered a Baby Sitters Club blog wherein a 20-something woman goes back and re-reads the books and then writes up all the glaring logistical errors and continuity flaws. The quote is taken from the BSC movie, something I had forgotten about until recently. Yesterday’s obsession is todays’ charmingly kitsch retro-pop-culture…so watch out. And by that, I mean that I have been on Trademe for BSC books. Shh!

We don’t have a heck of a lot of food in our cupboards at the moment. After the massive spree that was shopping for the Christmas dinner, I didn’t want to spend any more money on actual groceries. Let me tell you, I am looking forward to the vege market tomorrow.

Above: This here is the very last of the leftovers, and indeed, the last of most of our vegetables. I’m not so good at ‘making up’ salads, but I was proud of this concoction – the rest of the roast chicken, with roasted cauliflower and red peppers, avocado, and capers. It was so unbelievably delicious! We had this dumped on top of rice, and it was surprisingly filling (you know, for a salad.)

Above: Fish Pie. It is actually a kind of low-rent fish pie that I make a lot in Winter, and since the weather was jarringly cold and wet the other day I decided to have another go at it. Basically it is a can of tuna stirred into white sauce with anything else you have in the fridge – in my case, frozen peas and beans – and topped with breadcrumbs made from crushing toasted bread in your hands. It was inspired by a recipe in the NZ Cookbook, which uses a splash of sherry in the white sauce. I used the sherry Mum gave me recently – its first outing! – and the sauce smelled divine, all winey and warming and delicious. We had this with rice too, some Basmati that Mum sent us (and yes, it does taste a lot nicer than Budget Long Grain.)
Above: Lentil and Potato Pie…you may or may not know that I have a slight obsession with lentils, I think it’s just because they are so good for you that I find their very presence in my meal soothing. This was such an easy dish to make, and came from the NZ Cookbook also. Just layers of onion, potatoes, and brown lentils (I biffed a handful of red lentils in too just for kicks) and then pour in some stock and bake for an hour. I used the Knorr porcini stock cubes (that Nigella uses!) that my aunt brought back for me from Italy, which are so intensely savoury and almost fudgily dense with flavour that they make any bland combination of flavours taste wonderful. This was even better the next day, cold for breakfast, as unappetising as it sounds.
Above: I served the potato-lentil amalgam with mince. Just mince. Sometimes I try so hard to make mince exciting and different to what we had the night before (ie, Bobotie, anyone?) that I forget how nice it can be on it’s own, just fried with some onion and a splash of soy sauce (for Alison Holst Chic!) It reminds me of this time when I was much younger and Mum was away for the week somewhere. Dad cooked us mince and mashed potatoes, (and no doubt some veges too, knowing Dad) plain as anything, and suggested that the two were nice mixed together. It was so delicious I can remember this meal over ten years later. So, simple can be your friend.

I didn’t post last night (Mum, I’m talking to you, here) because of the stonkering fabulous Friday night line up on UKTV. After America’s Next Top Model on 3, there is the genius Green Wing on UKTV, followed by Little Britain, Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and Shameless. The only thing missing is the old Men Behaving Badly, which I always had a soft spot for. But for real, what a night! How is anyone supposed to move from the telly to go out and do Friday night-type things?
Anyway had better go and cobble together a meal before Tim gets home from making syrup-cinos, so…

Good Bive!

Above: I know, I said no more kittens and music and non-food stuff but…I didn’t mean it. Got this photo off a colleague of mine who was also at the game and could nay resist.

We’ll Meat Again

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“I don’t feel a house is a home until there are leftovers in the fridge, and Christmas leftovers are my all-time favourite.”

-Nigella Lawson

At times like these Nigella is highly reliable for a quote about food that doesn’t get eaten. She is possibly the only person I can pluck out of the air that fits this description. Having said that, and not surprisingly in a house of five voracious people, there really isn’t that much food left after The Christmas Dinner, so my visions of playing what Jade from ANTM 6 would have called “Leftover Lady” have been somewhat quashed. Nevertheless:

Above: Paprikasburgonya! Although it sounds as though it should be followed by the word Gesundheit, this is actually the name of what I made for Tim and I on Monday night to go with the rest of the sweet, sweet ham, and comes from my lovely Jewish Cooking for Pleasure book. And no, I didn’t pair the kosher with the pointedly non-kosher just to be funny…the opportunity merely presented itself when I discovered I had all the ingredients.

The title doesn’t lie: it was indeed a pleasure to make. Whole, boiled potatoes are cubed and fried till crisp, with capsicum and onions, sprinkled with paprika and swirled with sour cream. Although it sounds stodgy it tasted surprisingly light and used up the rest of the sour cream that went into the rugelach pastry. Pleasingly circular, no?

Last night I thought I’d better use up some of the chicken, which was stirred into penne pasta along with some of the cream cheese (it sort of melts into a sauce), peas, tomatoes, capers, feta and walnuts. Not sure what I was going for, but it certainly tasted alright.

Above: We ate this while watching Coro…which was really just something to occupy our time until Outrageous Fortune. We were all lulled into a soft fug of warm-fuzziness at Loretta being nice and sisterly to Pascalle, and at how adorable Van was being, when we were slapped in the face with Munter’s arrest! Not kind, wise Munter! Not to mention the inevitable fireworks that will ensue at Wolf’s return – oooh he makes me nervous…

I have the day off work today, which means I can have a leisurely breakfast rather than the usual hastily snatched feed before dashing off. Although breakfast isn’t usually my thing – I mean, Weet Bix, those overpriced sawdust-cakes, barely deserve the title of food, and who has time to make stacks of pancakes or blueberry waffles on weekdays, like the supermom in Sweet Valley High “who is often mistaken for the twins’ older sister.” I suppose this attitude stems somewhat from my years at boarding school, where the only options for breakfast were depressing cereal or cold toast with margarine, not butter. They fed us well there, it wasn’t some kind of Dickensian institution, but the breakfasts left a heck of a lot to be desired.

What a rant! Never realised how I felt about the first meal of the day, when all I was trying to say was that I had something nice to eat this morning.

Above: Toast with the most:Nine grain bread, toasted and spread with avocado, linseeds and Maldon sea salt. Worth getting out of bed for!
I have noticed that tons of food bloggers lately are cooking from La Lawson’s new book, Nigella Express. If I were a character in a comic book, there would be wiggly lines above my head surrounding the word COVET!! I had a quick look at it in a bookshop in town the other day, and it looks seriously gorgeous. There aren’t many things in this world that get me all anticipational like the idea of new Nigella material. But, it is also a lesson in restraint (she says, having cooked a million kilos of meat this week) in that I could probably afford to buy it but need to keep money in the bank for rent and bills and the like.
Also, while I am musing indulgently, you may have noticed a new addition to my Pet Sounds – Loveless, the album by My Bloody Valentine. I got this from my younger brother, a guy with relatively impeccable taste in music (he does like some rubbish stuff, but hey, I like Rent) This is my New. Favourite. Album. I listened to it on my iPod at work yesterday, and as soon as it was finished I listened to it again. It is seriously dreamy, and lush, and swirly, and shuffling, and all those other nice words, and slightly Cocteau Twins-esque, and a little difficult to listen to with all the layered guitar- I like music that doesn’t just hand it to you on a plate. I played it for Tim and he didn’t really like it. Now, I am always trying to get Tim to like stuff (haven’t succeeded yet with Rent, but finally managed to convince him that a life without Neil Young is a life wasted) but I had to admit it did sound a bit rough coming out of the computer. Then I tried listening to it this morning through these really good headphones that we have, and it sounded incredible. So, I have concluded that this is an album to listen to by yourself, with headphones, unless you have high class speakers, otherwise it will just sound jarringly messy.
By the way, I seriously apologise for the massively chunky paragraph above, I have tried a million times to enter a break between the separate points, but for some reason Blogger isn’t having a bar of it. It stings the eyes!

“Bring Me Flesh And Bring Me Wine”

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“lalalalalala….deep and crisp and even…” Thanks to Mum for the idea for the title by the way. And the donation – we would be eating bread dipped in water were it not for her kind, unexpected cash injection. And – just try and act surprised – this is a lengthy post, so don’t read it if you have to be somewhere in the next hour.

SO, the Team Hadfield Annual Christmas Dinner is officially over. I am officially all kinds of shattered after Tim and I spent over an hour doing the dishes (I washed, he dried, I felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice with the neverending plates appearing) but I can’t really complain since I’m the reason all the dishes were there in the first place. The dinner was a massive success, so much fun, and left us all groaningly full. Here it is – no pictures of Beckham, no kittens, no music reviews. Just FOOD.

As you know from the previous post (that’s if you actually read it and didn’t just pause on the David Beckham picture) I had been making things in advance, and the same pattern continued on Sunday. Tim had work at Starbucks at 7.30am, so I was awake fairly early. That is, my body was awake, my brain was a little on the fuzzy side.

First thing I did was make the ice cream. Sound a little madcap, I know, but I thought the Lemon Prosset would look rather stingy in bowls on its own and this is the easiest ice cream recipe I know. Nigella (who else!) has variations of it in a few of her books, the version I used was the Bitter Orange Ice Cream from Nigella Bites. It defies everything one is taught about making ice cream and shouldn’t work, but oh, how it does. Simply dissolve icing sugar – about 150g – in the juice of a couple of oranges, add 600mls cream, whisk till softly whipped and…freeze. You are supposed to add lime juice to this but I didn’t have any, so I upped the orange hit with a teaspoon of my beloved Boyajian Orange Oil (Nigella actually namechecked it in her books!) which made it headily…you know it’s difficult to find a synonym for “orange” so I’ll stop talking about it.


Above: The Orange Blossom Special…I used a whisk, rather than the electric beaters, because I figured that any extra activity would be beneficial. Considering all the cream.

While the ice cream was a-freezing I got on with the Rugelach. Now, I’m not one to appropriate other cultures – she says – but I think that there is nothing wrong with enjoying the many foods that the world has to offer. I say this because of a photo I saw of Justin Timberlake poking out his tongue in imitation while receiving a powhiri – Maori welcome – on his recent visit to New Zealand. I’m not quite sure why this annoyed me, but I had a bit of a think and concluded that it was one thing for me to make Jewish food, but it would be another thing entirely to say, wear a yarmulke while doing so. Anyway, I was getting so philosophical you could call me Anne of Green Gables and I nearly forgot to actually make the blooming things. Luckily they are a doddle.


Above: Doesn’t the sight of this make you want to convert…just a schmeer? Rugelach is pastry (which has butter, sour cream AND cream cheese in it, making it very sticky but easy to roll out) brushed with melted butter and, for artery thickening effect, rolled around chocolate and brown sugar. It is glutinous, but it was the only glutinous thing on the menu and frankly I’m not a miracle worker. This recipe comes from Nigella’s Feast and is, she says, a Hannukah treat. Nigella herself is actually Jewish, although not a practising one, hence the fact that I used her recipe for ham as well!

My cousin Paul came over at this stage and I realised that (a) I needed more chocolate to dip the truffles in and (b) I really wanted a drink. Luckily I managed to juggle both without detrimental effect, but I will say this – vanilla Galliano is sickly. I tend to enjoy a drier drop. There was a funny limbo time in the afternoon, because I didn’t want to get started on the meat and veges too soon, but of course everything would need quite a long time cooking.

The Fully Festive Ham, also from Feast, is a complete joy to make. It is worth pointing out that what I used was not what New Zealanders would know as ham – here we tend to get ours precooked, which we then just glaze and cook on Christmas day. The stuff Nigella uses – which is easier to find in England than here – is uncooked ham, called gammon, or here, pickled pork. Don’t be put off by the ‘pickled’ bit, it’s truly just uncooked ham. This means you can simmer it in whatever you want. Like coca cola. But that’s another story…


Above: The ham, submerged in a litre each of apple and cranberry juice, plus onion, cinnamon sticks, pink peppercorns and a star anise. You are supposed to use allspice berries but I didn’t have any. Anyhow I thought the star anise looked rather pretty bobbing round and the pink peppercorns would add the necessary earthiness. This simmers away for a couple of hours so it doesn’t really require too much effort.

I stuffed the chickens, which was about as undesirable a job as I remember it to be (and the cavities are strangely cold.) I scrapped the idea of challah, and bought some bread rolls, as well as a gluten-free loaf instead – didn’t have the psychological space in my head for dealing with more dough – so luckily I didn’t have to worry about faffing about with oven temperatures.

The potatoes went in the oven and the kumara and parsnips were chopped up to go in Tim’s electric frypan that he got for his 21st. It is worth knowing that you can quite effectively “roast” vegetables in this machine, if you are feeding a crowd. I made a quick salad, to offer crisp contrast, out of a packet of fancy salad mix and half a block of feta. Ooooh I love feta. I made a quick dressing out of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, and that was it – simple is best sometimes (ha!)

Above: The ensalada. The “green stuff” that saved our arteries from all the chicken and ham and chocolate…

As we were setting the table, Emma said “weren’t you going to do some peas?” Bugger! Quickly biffed them in the microwave, and then thought, heck, I might as well make some gravy too. So I poured the chicken roasting juices into a pot, with a spoonful of the cranberry sauce that I used to glaze the ham (which was in the oven at this point) and even though it ultimately makes things gluggy, a spoonful of gluten-free cornflour. While this was boiling up I added a slosh of Marsala, quarter of a porcini stock cube and a cup or so of water and let it bubble away.


Above: “They call it riding the gravy train…” I’m something of a gravy novice, and gluten-free is probably not the best way to start, but it was pretty good stuff. Behind you can see the remainder of the stuffing which I cooked in my silicone muffin tray for people.

And then, it was time to eat.


Above: The groaning board (which handily extends out.) Far left is the ham, then the chickens, and the salad on the right. Of course the chickens were free range, they taste so much better, and as the ham came from our delightful local butchers I was reassured it was a happy pig in life.


Above: Tim’s plateful. I’m full just looking at it.

Mercifully, everyone liked it. The stuffing was very well received, the ham was unbelievably tender (hey, it’s a good recipe) and we all just ate and ate and ate and ate. We had a brief pause between courses, just enough to try and locate a nook into which pudding could fit.


Above: Psychocandy – from front to back, the Rugelach, the Crunchie Bar Slice, and the Chocolate Truffles. For some reason I never got a photo of the ice cream or the Lemon Prosset, but here – one looks pale and slightly orange, the other looks pale and slightly yellow. As Jack White opined, “Sugar never tasted so good.” I’m so glad I decided to do heaps of things- I honestly can’t decide which I like more. By the way, the sweeties above are resting in none other than my Nigella Lawson Living Kitchen platter, which is ENORMOUS. I got it ridiculously cheap on Trademe and didn’t realise how huge it was when I bought it. It is gorgeous though and the perfect vessel for the dessert. Again, a giant “phew” that everyone loved the desserts. I knew the Lemon Prosset wouldn’t fail me!

Now that I have been cooking for two days, washing up for over an hour and typing for two hours…well I don’t know how to finish that sentence but my brain is tired and I’m not looking forward to work tomorrow. It was a seriously rewarding weekend (not least because of all the eating) and I had such a great time cooking up The Feast and feeding people who are important to me. It doesn’t feel that long ago that we had ours last year, and I who knows where we will be this time next year…

By the way if anyone is here at this point -thanks for reading so far and sorry if it is a little uninspired…but to be fair, my sinuses are packed with ham and my lungs are filled with truffle mixture which may have contributed to the syntactical errors and glaring ommissions above…To finish, it has to be said that the only thing that is better than having an enormous Christmas dinner…is roast potatoes for breakfast the next day. Note to self – rekindle your relationship with Pontious Pilates.

"Victoria, What Do You Want From Him?"

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Above: Doesn’t that question kinda answer itself?

I got this photo off the stuff.co.nz website (wherein you can also see a photo from last night with Emma’s head in it – we were sitting in front of some very dressed up girls whose photo got onto this site) Since Tim’s camera is broken we used Emma’s – she has the same model – but it is very slow and has terrible zoom. Therefore none of our photos are worth writing home about, unlike the above… When the game finished massive fireworks went off, which was all very thrilling, and Becks waited for ages before taking off his shirt. Everyone cheered when he did – he must have known that’s what half the crowd was there for. He played for the whole game, which was fantastic, because he was only contracted to play a minimum of 55 minutes. What a guy!


Above: Becks in action – as Cheeky Hobson would say, “It’s so physical!” Becks is in the dark blue, by the way.

All semi-nudity aside though, it was an amazing game and Beckham was all kinds of classy. Even though we lost, the crowd got on their feet and cheered when he scored a goal. It was unbelievably exciting to watch him in action – I don’t know much about soccer (Me:”who is that guy in yellow, Tim?” Tim:”The ref.”) but whenever he had the ball it looked effortless and graceful. Every now and then I would turn to Tim and say “I can’t believe we are watching Beckham!!” Alright, the gushing is over already!

Because the weather was so exemplary yesterday – one of those days that come along just often enough in Wellington to remind you why on earth you live there – it was very difficult not to join Tim, my cousin, and his mates outside to drink in the sun. But there were most definitely things to be done!!

Above: The chocolate malteaser slice from Nigella.com. Except it has chopped up Crunchie bars in it instead. Who knew that malteasers were heavily glutinous? Not I! Crunchies are a more than worthy substitute in this gloriously tacky slice, which comprises a heady mix of biscuit crumbs (gluten free of course) melted chocolate, golden syrup, crushed Crunchies, and, ahem, butter. I am going to chop it into elegant triangles and serve it with coffee alongside the truffles and rugelach, but if you make this for a five year old I guarantee they will be your best friend for life.


Above: Tim, helpfully stirring the stuffing for me. Frankly, with all the bacon in it the stuffing didn’t look so wonderful in close up…unlike Tim!

The recipe is from Nigella’s Feast, and is slightly unusual but intriguingly delicious. Three onions and two green apples, blitzed in the food processor followed by a ton of bacon (the idea of finely chopping it all makes me want to weep – hoorah for food processors! Unfortunately the onions made me sob like a baby anyway) which is fried up in butter with the zest of an orange. When it is cool, crumble in a loaf of gingerbread – the unusual bit – and add some eggs before cooking. It tastes and smells incredible and is also made with gluten free gingerbread (the stuff that comes in the green plastic packet at the supermarket – expensive but really really edible.)

After this I made the chocolate truffle mixture, which came up looking too unattractively brown in the photos, so I thought I’d wait for the finished product before commiting it to film. Then I got Tim to help me peel vast amounts of potatoes, which I was parboiling in advance (Nigella says it’s okay!) for roasting them tonight. I only have one stockpot, you see, which will be occupied with the ham.


Above: Potatoes, tiddly tee! But really – that is a Big Pot.

After that I sat down in the sun for a while, with another Nigella creation, from Forever Summer, a cocktail that goes by the joyfully camp name of “Pomme Pomme.”It is a combination of Apple Schnapps and apple juice and is seriously a delight to imbibe. So delightful that I forgot to take a photo of it. So I had another one. And forgot to take a photo of that. So I had another one…and decided that since a drink that is largely apple juice doesn’t make the most exciting photo subject I’d just leave it.

I also made the Lemon Prosset, which doesn’t come with a photo, (would you believe I forgot again?) but it does come with a recipe as it is so flipping fantastic. The recipe is from an old edition of Cuisine Magazine, and is child’s play to make. In fact the only hard thing about it is trying to measure 600mls and 100mls, both are rather awkward amounts.

Lemon Prosset:

Bring to the boil, stirring all the time: 600 mls of cream and 2/3 cup sugar. As soon as it starts to boil, turn the heat way down and stir for exactly three minutes. Once the time is up, take it off the heat, and stir in 100mls of lemon juice. Chill overnight, in about 6 ramekins or one bowl, and serve to your rapturous guests.

By the time all this had been achieved, it was time to head into town for the game, and you all know how that went. Tonight’s the night, as Neil Young would say, and I have so far made some orange ice cream (surprise! A new addition to the menu, because I can) and started on the rugelach. So, a lot to get done…better get to it then! Next time I post I may or may not be ten kilos heavier…

Chickpeas in unexpected places…

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Shakespeare Exam tomorrow! Forsooth! I actually reeeally enjoy Shakespeare and will miss incorporating him into my blog in the vague hope that everything-is-learning (in the same way that Mum and I watched Amelie when I was studying for French in high school.)

Boring as it is to begin with weather, it needs to be said that it has been horrible lately in Wellington – humid and windy, (so your hair goes both frizzy and knotty) blustery, damp and generally miserable. What happened to the sunny days of last week, and the week before? In spite of this, Tim, Kieran and I schlepped down to the vege market and I ended up with all sorts of cheering goodies – another tray of free range eggs, a fennel bulb, rhubarb, beetroot, brocolli, coriander, chillies, kaffir lime leaves, strawbs ($1.50 a punnet!) bananas, celery, and red capsicums, all for very cheap.
For dinner tonight I made Nigella’s Chicken Stew with Chickpeas and Harissa from How To Eat. I wish I’d thought to make it sooner on in the year because it is very easy and relatively inexpensive. It does require forward planning; the chickpeas I soaked, earth-motherlike, in a bowl overnight, and the harissa I made this afternoon.
Above: The ingredients for the harissa, which I arranged artfully on this board before realising that now I had to veeery carefully chop the chillies and garlic without disturbing the mound of salt.
Harissa is – from experience – a sort of paste of chillies, garlic, salt, cumin, coriander, caraway, vinegar and olive oil. I personally can’t deal with much chilli but find this mixture completely addictive. I only used one chilli, and made the whole thing in my pestle and mortar that I got from Mum and Dad for Christmas a few years back. I dry-fried a teaspoon each of cumin, coriander and caraway seeds, then ground them into dust in the P&M. In this goes the chopped chilli, garlic, and sea salt, plus a little vinegar and enough olive oil to amalgamate the lot.
Above: Harissa. I can eat it by the spoonful…
It is worth pointing out that I cooked the chickpeas while this was happening. I then assembled the chicken stew which involved nothing more arduous than putting a whole lot of stuff in a pan, covering it with water, and bringing it to the boil. The harissa gets stirred in too, which is why it needs making first. You can, of course, buy harissa, but I guess it is in my nature to want to make this sort of thing from scratch.

Above: The chicken was so tender after its hour or so simmering away that it fell to pieces at the mere prod of a wooden spoon. Considering it was freezer-burned chicken that I’d found buried under the frozen peas and forty half-bags of mixed veges, I was Very Impressed. I served this with bulghur wheat, and it was really, seriously delicious and comforting.
The rest of the chickpeas that I’d cooked up went into – of all things – a chocolate cake. I found a recipe from Nigella.com for this gluten-free creation, based on chickpeas as opposed to the usual ground almonds. Intrigued by its simplicity and the positive review that the person who posted it gave, I decided to make it.
Above: Good grief! It’s fantastic! It is chocolately, moist, and has a somehow puffy yet dense texture.
Emma, our resident gluten-shunner is happy as most cakes suitable for her involve hundreds of dollars worth of ground almonds, or are seriously rich – it has to be said that celiac cakes tend to be very puddingy, rather than tasting of homespun baking. In fact I’m so taken with it that here is the recipe. I used orange juice squeezed from oranges that Stefan’s dad sent him from the Hawke’s Bay – acerbic and heavy with juice.
Gluten Free Chocolate Chick Pea Cake (okay, that title is awful, sorry)

  • 300 -400g chickpeas (I had about 350g freshly cooked, otherwise I would use a well-drained can.)
  • 2/3 cup orange juice
  • 2/3 cup cocoa
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 t baking powder
  • 1 t baking soda
  • 4 eggs

Whizz up the chickpeas in a food processor, till very smooth. Add the other ingredients, whizz till incorporated, pour into a baking paper lined tin (I used 22cm) and bake at 180 for 50 minutes till a skewer comes out clean. If there are any remaining lumps of chickpea in the cooked cake – just tell people its walnuts.

PS – sorry bout the squint-making incongruity in paragraph size/spacing etc – try as I might, I haven’t managed to figure out how to make it uniform. In other words, it’s the computer, not me!

No pudding again? Souper…

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First post of November! Wait, it’s November already? Aaargh! Tim and I spent 4 hours at the library today, watching the BBC production of Richard III, which although erring on the side of endless, is really very enjoyable, with lots of fantastic lines. But still: Four Hours. I am drained…

I have restrained myself from making pudding lately, because, well, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to lay off the sugar a little. And boy, do I miss making pudding…sometimes a quartered orange just doesn’t cut it, but it is, as Nigella accurately notes in How To Eat, “something to stave off that moment of loneliness and despondency that always threatens to settle when you realise eating is over for the day.” Though it pains me a little to quote Meatloaf, she took the words right outta my mouth. The words were no doubt covered in butter.

Last night I made another recipe from Nigella.com, Tomato, Red Lentil and Chorizo Soup. I realise that chorizo probably isn’t the thing to eat if one is worrying about having too much pudding, but I figure the inclusion of red lentils and canned tomatoes instantly squashes any of that…At any rate, it was flavoursome and full of veges (and lentils!) and was very easy to make.


Above: Everything looks good in the bowls Ange left at our flat. Thanks, Ange.

Speaking of which, this soup would, I’m sure, be fine if you wanted to take it in a vegetarian direction and leave out the chorizo, or indeed you could replace the chorizo with bacon or somesuch to make it gluten-free. Now that I’ve talked it up, I feel I should provide the recipe, which is…here! Note – I halved it, used canned tomatoes, and didn’t have any capsicums. Still great!
To go with, I used a recipe from Annabel Cooks, a book by a very pleasant NZ cook, which I haven’t really used much because of the…expensive…nature of many of her recipes. I realise that someone so devoted to Nigella can’t throw stones but it’s different with her!! Anyway, Annabel Cooks is all “feta cheese” and “creme fraiche” this and “pine nuts” and “boneless skinless chicken breast” that. I did however find a recipe containing things I had in my cupboard, which was her variation on a dish that I consider to be a Kiwi ”classic” – potato bake.

The main difference in this one is that the potatoes are grated (kindly done by Tim.) It bakes slowly in the oven, ensconced in a mixture of eggs, milk and cheese, and comes out almost like a giant baked rosti, with lots of delicious crunchy bits on top and creamy yielding potato below.

Above: Looks good, right? Also vegetarian and gluten-free…oh what a world we live in.

Tonight’s dinner was a bit dull because I was pretty drained after all that Richard III and hadn’t planned anything exciting (and obv there was no pudding.) More soup though – something from Alyson Gofton’s Flavours cookbook, which is a million times superior to her schilling Watties products for Food in a Minute. Flavours has a good concept, too – each recipe is dedicated to a different flavouring, some familiar, like cocoa, vanilla pods, and ginger, some a little more interesting, like sherry, tumeric, and walnut oil, and some are those “I bought this on a whim and now what?” flavourings like saffron, verjuice and tamarind. I made the Garlic Soup, which although worryingly flatulent in title is nothing more taxing than onion soup with garlic in it. It is easy to make, with a lovely creamy texture – despite no cream – and is good for when you don’t think you have anything in the cupboards.
Above: Someone else: “Why is that photo cut off…let me adjust it a…” Me: “It’s supposed to be creative!” Just as some people can strew throw-pillows about their houses without looking messy, while others just look like they dumped cushions everywhere, well…you guess which category I fall into.
PS: Without wanting to sound like I’m asking for them…Don’t be shy with comments!

"Brevity is the soul of wit…"

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Spake the irritating Polonius in Hamlet, before launching into a lengthy speech, unaware of his foolishness…well at least I’m aware that this is a long post.

As I type I am having a very serene afternoon tea- a bowl of miso soup (made by adding boiling water to a spoonful of white miso paste.) I am even drinking it straight out of the bowl, both hands cupped around its warm curves – how very zen!


Above: What Othello might have called “Ocular proof” that I am, in fact, having soup. Anyway, I need all the “zen” I can get, as I have Shakespeare coming out my ears, rather than staying in my brain where he belongs, and our exam (Monday by the way) looms ever closer.
Last night I decided to peruse a much-loved but never used book of mine – the Victoria League of Auckland’s Tried Recipes, 5th edition (price: 2/-) It has recipes sent in by Good Women of Auckland, and has many chapters, including “Creams, Jellies, and Pretty Sweet Dishes” and “Gravies, Forcemeats and Sauces for Meat Dishes.” How I yearn for the days when cream-based puddings had their own category in cookbooks. I must admit, I was surprised to see the chapter “Vegetarian Cookery and Salad Dressings,” in that I small-mindedly didn’t think anyone was ‘allowed’ to be vegetarian in ‘those days.’ Should the discerning vegetarian about town in the 1940s/50s be looking for a meat-free substitute for brawn, this book has it. (And I quote – “The sago binds it”)

This book, like all good books of its kind, has three trillion variations on fruit cake, not to mention a plethora of obscurely named puddings that all seem to be the same – has anyone out there ever heard of: Chandos Pudding, Russel Pudding, Verney Pudding, Totnes Pudding, Marlborough Pudding? I think it’s worth pointing out that you could replace the word ‘pudding’ with ‘disease’ or ‘syndrome’ and they would sound quite credible. I know they were economising on eggs and butter but surely not beautiful words too? (also noted – the book includes recipes for both American Pudding and Canadian pudding and they are different, thank you very much.)
I know it sounds like I’m making fun of this book, but oh how I love it, and others of its ilk (Aunt Daisy, I’m looking at you.) In fact, last night’s dinner came from it, and I was snared instantly by its straightforward, thrifty title: “A Way to Cook Fish.”
It goes thusly: Fry an onion in butter, add some fish, lemon juice, and two egg yolks (into which I stirred a little cream.) It took as long to cook it as it did to type it out, and it is very, very good. I served it on top of pasta, with some greens that I had squeezed the rest of the lemon over.

Above: Yes, not much based on canned tuna will ever be photogenic. But, it tasted great. So, to Miss E.T Rose, of Stonehurst, Auckland, from whence this recipes came, I salute you.

In the spirit of economy, I decided to use the egg whites for dessert. I had found a recipe on Nigella.com for Butterscotch Mousse, which sounded like one of those store cupboard recipes that the Victoria League would go nuts for. It is very simple. First of all, make a caramel sauce, by melting 75g butter, 1/2 cup brown sugar, and 100 mls cream together in a pot. Let this cool thoroughly, and then whisk up two eggs whites till stiff, and fold them in, followed by 200mls whipped cream (I used the same bowl.) It is rich and creamy and has a wonderful caramel flavour. If you cannot be bothered with whisking things, the sauce on its own would be great poured over ice cream.

Above: The Mousse, partially eaten.
It doesn’t ‘set’ like a gelatine-based mousse but completely makes up for its gloopiness with its voluptous butterscotch kick. We all (even Emma – it’s gluten free!) ate out of the same bowl, passed from person to person, as we watched Outrageous Fortune (technically studying since the title is a quote from Hamlet.)