Category: Ice Cream and Sorbet

love is just a dialogue, you can’t survive on ice cream

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Who am I, anyway? Asks Paul in the opening number of the wondrous musical A Chorus Line. I’ve been wondering the same this week. I guess it’s not surprising that lots of people go to the gym in January – if headlines in certain women’s magazines are anything to go by, there is literally no other choice of resolution for your new year – but for me it’s not so straightforward. As I said in my last blog post, I want bufty arms this year. I want to be able to lift things without making an involuntary “nghghghhh” noise and straining my neck. A month’s free trial gym membership came to my attention. It all made sense to sign up and try some classes and so on. 
Without going too deeply into my long and complicated history of just being myself, I will say this: until very recently it was difficult for me to reconcile doing exercise with general enjoyment and feeling good. Exercise to me was either compulsory institutionalised punishment (PE class ahoy!) or self-enforced to burn maximum calories for as long as I could stand it. (I completely understand and appreciate that PE/gym class is really enjoyed by lots of people, and also that wanting to lose weight is a personal choice and exercise is a way of doing that.) To me, exercise was all tied up in unhappiness and distress. It was all very black and white. Interestingly, my years of dancing sat outside of exercise in my mind – that was to music, and telling a story, and using expression and emotion and acting. And fun. That running or cycling or punching a boxing bag or playing, I don’t know, football, could fulfill that same function for someone else – I couldn’t make that leap of understanding. 
So anyway, as a result I was nervous about going to the gym, having never been to one before – what if I’m useless? What if I get panicky? What if it’s really cliquey and my pants are wrong? And…what if I forget that I’m just here for enjoyment and to get strong? Does that make sense? But in fact, it was fun challenging myself, and I had friends there beside me, and I felt comfortable pausing when my legs simply refused to lunge once more. And this morning my muscles were constricted and sore, but in a good way – reminding me of all the effort I put in yesterday and how bufty they’re going to be soon. Nevertheless, I found myself tweeting things along the lines of “going to the gym, who am I?” as if to reassure myself…that I was still myself. But who else could I possibly be. 

If you’re seeking a small challenge yourself, maybe this ice cream could be it. A calm, easy recipe which makes just enough for one or two people, depending on whether or not you want to share. (I don’t really like to share, but Tim lives riiiiight here in the same house and it would’ve been a bit weird not to. Plus, sharing leads to compliments on your cooking abilities! Which is probably not the main reason you should be sharing things.) This is good if you’ve never made ice cream before and want to start small in case it all goes horribly wrong (it won’t, though.) Or if you have made ice cream before but have a tiny tiny freezer. Or if you only have a small amount of ingredients to hand and don’t want to go to the shop. Strange as it seems, there are a number of situations where a small quantity of ice cream can be just as advantageous as a large quantity.

Small Chocolate Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

Makes around 300ml. Am not very sure how well it would double – maybe if you’re feeling more ice-cream-confident, search through all my recipes on this blog for one to make, hey hey?

250ml (1 cup) cream
50g dark chocolate (I use Whittaker’s. Because I love its flavour like no other.)
1 tablespoon cocoa
1 tablespoon sugar
1 egg

Gently melt the chocolate and cream together in a pan on the stovetop, or gently microwave the chocolate in the microwave and then stir in the cream. Either way, go slow, because chocolate burns quickly and will go all gritty if it happens. The ice cream will still be fine, but…gritty.

Remove from the heat and stir in the cocoa and sugar. Which give it a further depth of chocolate flavour, and a little bitterness-counteracting sweetness. 

Break the egg into a bowl and mix it up with a fork, so that the yolk and white are all incorporated. Stir in a tablespoon or two of the slightly cooled chocolate mixture, mixing briskly. Doing this allows the egg to absorb some of the heat of the chocolate mixture and blend with it thoroughly – if you pour in the entire pan of chocolate, you might not be able to mix it fast enough to stop the egg being cooked by the heat of the liquid. And that would taste nasty. Anyway: pour in the rest of the mixture, mixing continuously. Then divide into two freezer-proof bowls, or one small container. Freeze till quite solid. If you freeze it overnight, it’ll need to stand on the bench for five minutes or so to soften a little. Being so small, it does freeze quite quickly though. Yay!

The path to success here is very short and simple: this chocolate ice cream just tastes like chocolate ice cream. A little cocoa-bitter, a little sweet, creamy and very cold. And, as I found out this morning, it makes a really good breakfast.


Who am I, anyway? Am I my resume? sings Paul in A Chorus Line. As well as getting used to the fact that I am now a person who goes to the gym because it makes me feel good and strong and stuff, I’m also trying to settle my brain down from racing at a hundred miles an hour. Because my brain does this cool thing where it simultaneously tells me I’m amazing at what I do but also not achieving anything much at all and no wonder. And I tell Tim this and he says “You have a cookbook coming out later this year!” and I say “yeah…but…” It’s like the opposite of resting on your laurels. Instead I run towards my laurels really hard and then leap over them and keep running for the next one so fast that the last one seems like it’s miles behind me in the dust. Resting on your laurels is a phrase that tends to be thrown around in a negative way, but to me it sounds kind of delightful – like, I achieved something good so I’m going to relax now and take a nap and maybe remind people about the thing I achieved occasionally. Does anyone else do this? Also, I guess, if anyone has any laurels they want me to not rest upon, let me know!

Boy, has this blog post ever got personal and intense. But that is often how life is. Till I figure it all out, if anyone has any tips for how to deal with tense muscles, shocked from their first go-round at the gym, I’d be super obliged.
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Title via: The Kills, always skittishly thrilling, with Cheap and Cheerful.
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Music lately: 

Ella Fitzgerald, Mack the Knife. Specifically, when she sang it in Berlin and forgot half the words, but elegantly and sorta adorably improvised over the top of the melody with her usual breezily gorgeous voice. What a champ.

Sherie Rene Scott, Goodbye Until Tomorrow, from The Last 5 Years musical. This song always makes me feel pretty emotional. I adore SRS, but absolutely cannot wait to see what Anna Kendrick does with this when the film version of this show comes out.

Faith Evans, Love Like This. Modern classic.
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Next time: I made this pasta dish that I kinda like. I will probably write about that.

extraordinary, just like a strawberry

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There is no way to talk about needing to distract yourself while two of your closest friends are out of the country for a significant amount of time to sound like a dork (at best), so all I’ll say is that Tim and I are moving house in two weeks and it is significantly distracting. I love our current flat of three and a half years in a way that I never thought a person could love the place they live – having had a succession of terrible, dark flats (crumbly, cold and damp like milk seeping into passionless wheaten breakfast cereal) overlorded by landlords ranging from the faintly bizarre to the terrifying. Here we have real sunshine, the kind that actually gets through the windows and blankets you in warmth rather than sodding off to hang out with your rich neighbours while your room is shrouded in darkness. We don’t have dampness, we don’t have mice, and so on and so forth. In the darkness and with mice my only friends was how I of course started this blog, and pretty much the best thing about living in horrible flats is that you get to spin ever-larger tales of their ill-repute later in life. If Tim and I, aged 19, had shacked up together in a mansion, well. Actually that would’ve been really awesome. I care not for the value of whatever lesson living in said horrible flat taught me: I’d take the mansion any day. 
Much as I hate things coming to an end, sometimes moving on feels right, and we’ve found a new place that we adore. It’ll be just us (nothing to do with us being engaged, we just like that notion) it’s enormous – plenty of dancing room – it has more storage room than we’ve ever known, and it has a dishwasher! I’m already pretty slovenly but I look forward to spiraling further downwards into a state of blissful sloth after welcoming this appliance into our lives. 
Packing has been strangely fun: I spent several hours doing it on Saturday while Tim was off playing the game of Game of Thrones. (I love the tv show, I devour the books, I can’t abide the endless and endlessly complicated game and was happy to be left alone, in case you’re thinking of getting righteous on my behalf.) On my travels through the dark corners of our wardrobe I discovered many a long-forgotten thing.
A faxed copy of my casually sexist birth certificate. My mum’s occupation and the question of their surnames being different were apparently not of interest in the mid eighties. (Faxed to me during high school so I could take part in a first year university philosophy paper, what an overachiever that baby turned out to be!) 

We have some fairly embarrassing DVDs in our collection, but also some really, really good books.

I wasn’t sure whether to admonish myself or be delighted at the sheer decadence of it all, either way I forgot that we had a bottle of champagne in the cupboard. Who even gets champagne at all, and then goes and forgets about it? Us sybaritic lotophagi, that’s who. (And who even says sybaritic lotophagi? This dick.)
I made this ice cream cake a couple of weeks ago now for a potluck dinner which was also something of a farewell for the two aforementioned now-traveling friends. The recipe comes from this glorious American book from the sixties that I own called “Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts (including party beverages)” (punctuation my own addition.) I love old-timey desserts, and American ones tend to have this particular heedless, uninhibited nature which I particularly adore, and have discussed at length when I made a plum meringue crumble pie from this same book earlier this year.

This recipe is as much about texture as it is flavour – crunchy biscuit crumbs puncturing and encasing the creamy, cold ice cream, itself studded with sorbet-like frozen slices of strawberry. It is pure summer, in spoonable form. In that you can serve it with a spoon, but I took that to a new level by lying on the couch and verily spooning the roasting dish that I made this recipe in, while feeding myself spoonfuls of what ice cream remained in said dish. Seriously though: this would be perfect for a southern hemisphere Christmas pudding – what with strawberries being in season and all – but if you’re up there in the northern hemisphere I recommend this insistently all the same, since you could easily use frozen berries and serve it alongside another pudding of a hotter nature. Just make it, okay? It’s brilliant.

Strawberry Ice Cream Cake 

From Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts – recipe submitted by Mrs Elaine Cruikshank, Montrose, Iowa. 

I know the method looks weird, since every recipe with separated egg whites goes on about how it needs to be whisked in a sterile environment and it WILL fail on you and so on and so forth. And here we are throwing a bunch of ingredients in a bowl and whisking them all devil-may-care. What can I say, it just works! So go with it. Also: the recipe called for 1/2 cup chopped nuts in the biscuit stage but I left them out for someone at the party who had an allergy, you can of course feel free to put them back in.

1 cup flour
1/4 cup brown sugar
125g melted butter
2 egg whites
1 cup sugar
2c sliced fresh strawberries (or use defrosted frozen, as I suggested)
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup cream
More sliced strawberries for decoration

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Stir together the flour, sugar and butter till it forms a soft, stiff dough. Press it evenly onto a paper-lined baking tray, so that it looks like a giant cookie and bake for 20 minutes. You could in fact stop right here and enjoy your giant cookie. I might well do this myself one day. But what you want to do is let it cool, then crumble with your fingers, and sprinkle 2/3 of the crumbs evenly into the base of a medium sized brownie tin/medium sized roasting tin – or you could use a cake tin, even, it really doesn’t matter. 

In a bowl, combine the egg whites, sugar, sliced strawberries and lemon juice. Whisk the heck out of this for as long as you can, but around 5-10 minutes. Despite the doubtfulness of it all, it will thicken and aerate and the whisking action will break down the strawberry slices, tinting the mixture a rather glorious pale pink. 

Whip the cream and fold it into the strawberry mixture, then scrape the lot over the top of the biscuit crumbs. Decorate with slices of strawberries if you like, and sprinkle over the remaining 1/3 of the crumbs. Freeze till solid. 

I already adore ice cream with inordinate fervency, but here with early strawberries, delicious with their early-season optimism, it’s more glorious than ever. And this is so, so easy and straightforward. 
Speaking of optimism, how goes my job-prowl? Not bad. I mean, I’m still unemployed, and feeling its pinch pretty keenly (moving house is SO EXPENSIVE) but my interview on Friday earned me a follow-up coffee this morning! Which is very exciting. Especially since I was quite, quite convinced I’d blown the interview itself. I have another interview on Wednesday, and I still am yet to hear back from another interview that I felt went well, so we’ll see. We’ll see. Even if my perception of how Friday’s interview went was way off, I promise you I’m perceiving this ice cream correctly: it’s damn incredible. I love it. Make it. Spoon with it, even – you’re not alone. 

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Title via: Ini Kamoze, Here Comes The Hotstepper. This song has aged so well. In my opinion. And my opinion is correct.
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Music lately: 

Rekindled my long-ago interest in Lisa Loeb. By way of playing Do You Sleep around 2938102938 times in a row one afternoon. You know how music can swiftly take you back to a particular time and place? Listening to this song now just reminds me of the time that I last listened to this song, because I have listened to it so much lately. Try it!

Tegan and Sara, Closer. It’s like, here are your feelings, neatly packaged in jaunty song form!

Barton Hollow, by the Civil Wars. I’d heard of this band before but really got into them when they were recently covered on this TV show I’m obsessed with, called Nashville. (Especially fun since Tim and I were just IN Nashville and so it’s all, “I recognise that landmark in this establishing shot!”) This country-ish, harmony-rich song is delicious.
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Next time: Lack of incoming funds + moving house has meant I’ve been making meals strictly based on what’s in our cupboards, fridge and freezer. So: hopefully something even bordering on coherent for you. 

life’s candy and the sun’s a ball of butter

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Is this a second post in a row featuring that bewitching golden distillation that is burnt butter? Affirmative. Is this some kind of salute to butter month that everyone has missed? Noooo…but then every day is Salute to Butter Month…day…when I’m around.
And yes, it is Burnt Butter Ice Cream. Snap Judge Ye Not! I’ve come to learn that some of my opinions are not the generally held ones (did you know I hated The Shawshank Redemption? And all the sports there are? Apart from watching Olympic gymnastics and figure skating with hands clamped over my eyes because I was scared they’d fall over?) and so I suspect that while I think butter-flavoured ice cream is something I quite casually make and see as normal, others might be horrified and pearl-clutching about. Let me straighten the record: butter flavoured ice cream is wonderful. Really, genuinely, hand-it-to-you-on-a-plate, unthreateningly delicious. Why, it’s as real as you and me. 

It is in fact very normal tasting ice cream. Almost bordering-on-disappointingly normal for someone like me, but for the less liberally buttery of you, perhaps a relief. The intensity is muffled somewhat once frozen. What you get this roundly rich, deeply creamy golden ice cream which gives you vividly toffeed caramel flavours and a lingering buttery nuttiness. It just tastes like amazing ice cream.

Be assured, it’s not like dragging a spoon across a cold block of butter. Nice as that is.

Be further assured, you don’t need an ice cream maker machine thing for this. I don’t have one myself, and my love for ice cream is way too river deep, mountain high for me to want to make it all exclusive or anything. All you have to do to this is freeze it.

It’s a while since I’ve made an old-timey custard-based ice cream. Custard ice cream is the patient person’s game. This is probably why I’ve avoided it for a while. But all that’s involved is a lot of stirring. As En Vogue said, don’t let go – just stand there by the pan stirring and stirring till the mixture finally rewards you by ambiguously thickening slightly. I for one recommend putting on a podcast (like mine, way-hey?) or an audiobook (I had Wuthering Heights) to distract the mind.

Burnt Butter Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

I did dither over whether to call this browned butter, or just butter, but I like the total un-vagueness of ‘burnt’, because that’s what it is.  

50g butter
2 cups cream
1 cup milk
3 egg yolks
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
(Note: New Zealand butter is always salted – if you’re using unsalted, add a generous pinch of salt when you add the butter at the end)

First, gather ye a saucepan, a good-sized bowl, and a freezer-proof container (as you can see I just used a glass loaf tin. The kind you might bake a loaf in.) Melt the butter over a decent heat in the saucepan, allowing it to carry on cooking beyond your usual sensibilities. As you can see above, it will start bubbling vigorously and separate out into layers of sorts. Once it’s all foamy and bubbly and darkened remove it from the heat and spatula it into a bowl while you get on with everything else.

In that same pan, gently heat up the milk and cream. While this is happening whisk together the yolks and sugars, it doesn’t have to be thick, just incorporated. Once the milk/cream has heated sufficiently – you don’t want it to boil, just get very hot – turn off the heat and carefully whisk about 1/2 a cup of the milk/cream into the egg/sugar mixture, then another 1/2 cup and another – continually whisking so you don’t end up with scrambled eggs.

Then pour all that back into the pan and stir over a low heat, stirring constantly so it doesn’t cook too fast. I warn you, this could take around 20 minutes. The texture will thicken to that of a good quality milkshake (if not thickshake) and the bubbles on the surface should minimise. The more egg yolks in your custard the thicker it will get so don’t stress too much about it.

Finally, whisk in the butter, which will likely have solidified by this point. Pour everything into your freezerproof container and freeze, without stirring, till it is, unsurprisingly, frozen.

Luckily this ice cream is air-punchingly awesome, because I have been seriously lacking in lustre while writing about it. I am tired. The week started mighty promisingly – seeing the movie version of the Broadway show Rock of Ages with my dear friend Kim, and the subsequent marveling over how disturbingly HAWT Tom Cruise was in it and how much we love Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand’s characters and how excellent Mary J Blige’s pantsuits are. And how I am ever more in hot pursuit of bigger hair. But since then I haven’t slept so well, a good wedge of my brain has been given over to working out details of my upcoming cookbook (obligatory mention!) and financial concerns, general stresses and what’s-the-deal-with-my-body annoyances (I mean like, not feeling well, nothing else) and I’ve been catching feelings like you wouldn’t believe.

On the up-and-up, there are Tony Award clips to watch, photos from Jo’s Double Super Sweet Sixteenth birthday party and memories of intense bedroom dance parties therein to reminisce over, our October trip to America to plan, a new podcast episode to edit, and this ice cream to eat. Just got to get through June…and everything will be cool.

While I’m generally a bit suspish of over-dressed food photography, I have no defensiveness for this. I’d held onto the jaunty flag decorations from the quadruple layer birthday cake my friends made me for me a few months ago and this one seemed just right plunged possessively on an angle into the ice cream. Also a long-distance hug to my god-parents and their family for the equally jaunty ice cream cups. All the better to eat ice cream out of, hey?
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Title via: Don’t Rain on My Parade, from Funny Girl. Here’s an effortless version from the sadly late Donna Summer. My very favourite person, Idina Menzel, singing it for Streisand herself at a concert with an adorable shoutout halfway through. And this incredible rendition by Lillias White from a 2002 benefit.

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Music lately:

Rockin Back Inside My Heart, a cover by She’s So Rad. As I’ve said constantly, I’m very obsessed with Julee Cruise’s song, but this cover is glorious – the voice is more present and definite than Cruise’s, without losing a shred of the song’s deliciously dreamy nature.

Fiona Apple Every Single Night. I love this song. Beautiful. Watched the first frame of the music video and decided it wasn’t for me though (spoiler: there’s an octopus! I like my octopi at a distance!)
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Next time: I promise, something non-buttery. I am super aware of how painfully expensive it is. I’m just slightly more super aware of how delicious it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gin and Tonic Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music lately:

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

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

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

 

like a week that’s only mondays, only ice creams never sundaes

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Look, when you’ve been 26 as long as I have, which is about 48 hours now, you learn some things, okay? Like…I may get older, but it looks like I’ll never grow out of being deeply clumsy (spilled lemonade all over a Settlers of Catan game.) Or being forgetful (I forgot something, I forget what.) Or being unable to follow a list of tasks I set myself. (Probably don’t need to provide an example for that one.) Or overthinking things. (I really overthought some things.) Yes, all of that in 48 hours.

Me on my birthday, in some of my favourite clothes. (Apparently I turned 26 in 1991.)

It wouldn’t be much of a celebration without ice cream, that foodstuff that I have so much love for.

As well as my birthday happening (and being absolutely over now, so I should really probably let it go already) another joyous time is upon us: feijoa season. There are those who say it’s like a reward for the cold weather but I’m the weirdo who actually loves the snappy chill of autumn and winter – slow-cooked stews; hearty warming soups; soft cosy woolly jumpers and socks; wrapping yourself in blankets; watching entire seasons of important TV shows; scarves; old-timey puddings; rain on the roof; the unbeatable unity of complaining about bad weather with strangers or those you struggle to make small talk with any other time of year. And there’s feijoas.

These edible jewels are well known in New Zealand but if you’re not from round these parts: imagine an egg-shaped, rough-skinned green fruit which you cut in half to scoop the insides out with a teaspoon – like a passionfruit. The texture is like that of canned pears and the flavour is intoxicatingly elusive. Like pear and old-fashioned grape and maybe a hint of elderflower or strawberry? It’s fizzingly tart yet fragrantly sweet. It’s so beautiful.

And it works brilliantly in ice cream, as I found out this week. As always with my recipes, you don’t need an ice cream maker to do this. In fact this is one of my simplest ice cream methods yet. Only a couple of ingredients, a bit of a blast in the food processor, and you’re done. Yet my reasons for making it this way are highly purposeful. Feijoas have a slightly gritty texture and I didn’t want to add to that with granulated sugar. Condensed milk smooths it all out and gives the ice cream itself a fantastic texture. To that I added lime juice to point up the feijoa’s own flavour, in the way you’d add salt to a tomato. To counteract all the sweetness of the condensed milk, and to reflect the tartness of the fruit, I used thick, creamy Greek yoghurt. And that’s it.

Feijoa Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

15 or so ripe feijoas
1 tin condensed milk
2 tablespoons lime juice
250ml/1 cup thick plain Greek yoghurt

Halve the feijoas and scoop out the flesh, tipping it all into the bowl of a food processor. Blend it thoroughly with the condensed milk and lime juice till well pureed. Then add the yoghurt and continue to blend till it is, uh, blended. Scrape into a freezer-proof container and put it in the freezer. Don’t worry about stirring it as it freezes, just let it do its thing. Allow to soften out of the fridge for about ten minutes before you serve it.

Notes:

– If you don’t have a food processor, don’t feel like you can’t make this. Either use one of those stick blenders for soup or a just fork and some extra effort to mash up the fruit – the texture will be a bit different but it’s all good.
– I know it asks for a lot of feijoas, but who goes looking for feijoa recipes to just use up one or two? This is for my people with plastic bags heaving with fruit from their aunty/kindly neighbour/roadside stall!
-I try not to be fussy about ingredients but I am about the yoghurt here – if you use anything other than thick Greek yoghurt the texture will be compromised significantly and it just won’t taste as good. If you can’t find that yoghurt I’d use the same amount of regular cream instead.

I think this is made even more delicious because of how little effort you have to put into it. The tiny burst of lime brightens and emboldens the fragrant feijoa flavour and the condensed milk gives it this incredible texture, interrupted by the ever-so-slight grit of the feijoa seeds. The only thing is that it has a slightly weird colour – beige-ish, I’d say? But the flavour is so shiningly, adamantly feijoa-esque that you can either overlook it or dump a ton of food colouring in there to suit yourself.

Just know: it’s wildly delicious. If you can’t access feijoas for whatever reason, I’d substitute two tins of drained canned pears. In fact I might try that myself as well, because it sounds so good in its own right.

Tim and I went to The Ambeli for my birthday, which is this swanky award-winning restaurant that I’ve been longing to go to. I don’t mean to sound like a naive rube, but the prices – admittedly more the wine than the food – were fairly faint-making and I sat there in my seat suddenly feeling like I didn’t belong there at all. However, emboldened by a few things (“Birthday!” “We haven’t gone to dinner in forever!” “it IS legal to charge this much!” “Be cool!”) I settled down and we ended up having a completely splendid time. If you’re rich or at least feeling that way, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Every element of the food was intensely exquisite, so that you wanted to eat it very slowly and taste every ingredient in every mouthful and then write an essay on your feelings about it. The wait staff were astute, lively and knowledgeable. The wine made us super talkative, you know, where you’re nodding along heartily because everything is so important and meaningful (I’d like to think we can be that without the wine.) We left with the sadness that a birthday comes but once a year, and also happily full and tipsy and analysing the food like it was some kind of intelligent movie we’d just been to see.

The next morning I had ice cream for breakfast. And it was good.

Title via: Without Love, featuring a young – well, younger – Aaron Tveit, from the musical Hairspray. The local musical theatre company is going to be putting on a production of it later this year, I am so very excited.

Music via:

Lianne Las Halvas, Forget. I love the scratchy strumming that loops round it and the equally looping chorus – it’s kind of understated and wacky at the same time. And Lianne has amazing clothes. So.

SWV, Co-Sign. New SWV! Which I couldn’t find on YouTube for ages because I kept searching for SVW by mistake. It’s never easy to capture prior magic, especially from a land as long ago as the 90s, but I like what they’ve done here.

Next time: I still haven’t made anything from my Little and Friday cookbook – for shame! Need to change this soon, since I love baking and it is full of baking and all.

ain’t it a shame that at the top they serve peanut butter and jam

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Lessons I was reminded about this week: just because you refresh and refresh your inbox it doesn’t mean a particular person is going to email you. And then a little (1) will appear but it’s just a newsletter that you’ve signed up to and now suddenly feel particularly hateful towards. Learn that one well. Another thing: respect deeply those people that can make a room look good. I tried sticking a bunch of images to one of our bedroom walls yesterday. Stood back to survey my room-embiggening skills – a picture fell off the wall, breaking the frame. Everything else was on at least a 45 degree angle. It looked so good in the pictures of other people’s houses! However, Tim and I gave our room a much overdue, much procrastinated clean on Monday – needed since January – and the unfamiliar feeling of just being able to walk in a straight line across the floor makes me feel like we should be featured on an interior design blog or something.

What else was I re-reminded of? That you should never read the comments (or, increasingly, the opinion columns, ammiright?) on news websites unless you feel like playing fast and loose with your blood pressure; that we LOVE Sam Cooke; that other people have actually heard of musicals and I shouldn’t be so surprised every time someone says they *gasp* like one; that people can be surprisingly generous and being generous can be fun; the simple joy of finding 20 cents on the ground; how supersonically fast I get anxious; how I can’t turn my brain off even when I’m having an amazing, wonderful, delicious massage from a professional. And importantly (or at least, relevantly) how much I LOVE making ice cream. I know I didn’t invent peanut butter chocolate ice cream, why it’s as old as the hills themselves, but the recent release of Whittaker’s new peanut butter chocolate block inspired me quickly to tackle this mighty combination for the first time. And it had been a significant while since I’d made ice cream – like our bedroom being tidy, the last occurence was back in January. Not sure how I got through, but I’m pretty brave.

I appreciate that your local supermarket might have gleefully marked up the price of the chocolate, which is why I didn’t use the whole block in the recipe – instead I made sure to leave some for judicious nibbling. I also completely appreciate that you might not be able to get hold of such chocolate at all, which is why I provided a more analogue alternative. I also wanted the making of this to be as easy as possible – this is an ideal one for a newcomer to ice cream to try. It practically makes itself. Whatever effort you have to put in though, will reward you at least tenfold in pure deliciousness.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream


Recipe by me.


200g Peanut Butter Chocolate, such as Whittakers OR 1/2 cup peanut butter and 150g milk or dark chocolate, depending on your preference, plus about 1/2 cup sugar.
250mls (1 cup) milk
Salt
300ml cream


In a pan over a low heat, melt the chocolate (or other things), milk, and a generous pinch of salt together, stirring occasionally until smooth. Chill till thickened significantly – might help to put it in the freezer for a while. Taste some. It’s wonderful. Once it has the texture of whipped cream, whip up your actual cream till fairly firm and thickened, but not verging on changing into butter, and then whisk the two together to form a soft, airy pale chocolatey mixture. Transfer into a freezerproof container then freeze. Allow to sit out of the freezer for about ten minutes before you want to eat it so you can scoop it easier.

The unfrozen mixture is like the best peanut butter smoothie of your life in the whole world, so with that in mind I’m not quite sure on the quantities this makes, but I’d say just under a litre, which I wouldn’t want to feed any more than four people with. As I said, the method is winningly uncomplicated, so it wouldn’t be too taxing to double all quantities. The salt is important – it really helps intensify the flavour and make everything taste more of itself. Don’t worry about stirring this as it freezes – the useful fat content keeps the texture hovering round the ‘perfection’ level even when completely untampered with. The ice cream itself is pale but the chocolate presence is definite, shot through with the cream’s light butteriness. Being ice cold softens any of peanut butter’s rougher flavour undertones and hanging out with chocolate brings out its earthy sweetness. It’s wackily delicious stuff.

Still other lessons present themselves to me: that whole “you can’t go back” thing, which I was reminded of when I realised it had been a whole year since Tim and I went on our first ever holiday, the holiday that we’d been saving six years for. Naturally, I re-read our entire travel blog and got a bit weirdly sniffly, not that the writing on our blog was particularly geared towards heartstring-pluckery, but I guess because we were so happy and optimistic and overseas and the whole thing is such a nice memory, but also as far away and untouchable as the first time we were over there in 2005. Anyway, we’ve got our trip to The America in just over six months to anticipate hotly and save frantically for, so no use looking backwards too much. A bit of backwards-wallowing every now and then though is pretty harmless.

Your lesson: make this ice cream, it’s truly not difficult, and even if you’re all “Aagh! Ice cream! The second-most intimidating foodstuff! (After souffles of course)” then be happily reassured that your opinion is wrong. As far as this recipe is concerned, at least.

But seriously, when I said I couldn’t turn my brain off during the massage, I did decide that I love what was happening to me and I want to have another one at some point this year. So I ask of you, other overthinkers out there (I see you!) if I accept that my brain won’t turn off no matter what fragrant oils and unguents are applied with firm capable hands to my less-firm exterior, what should I think about which will at least be calming? I suspect brainstorming new recipes will be too involving, planning the week ahead too counterproductive, remembering every regretful thing you’ve ever said and done too intuitively obvious…As a former dancer, I could just imagine someone dancing to the twinkly piano music that constantly plays in the room. Ideas?
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Title via: Rufus Wainwright’s California, so breezy and fun but he couldn’t have known that peanut butter used this way is exactly what you’d want to be served at the top. Or at any stage…
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Music lately:

Like I said, Sam Cooke. Ain’t That Good News subverts the usual “I got a letter this morning and my baby is dead/run off with someone else/etc and is simply a snappily fantastic song.

Ultravox, Vienna. I am easily manipulated by music, this is one such song that does it so well.
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Next time: I still have a couple of quinces staring at me as they get all saggy and old. But I also bought on special some pork shoulder. PULLED PORK TIME. Unless there’s some ye-olde style pork and quince slow-cooked thing out there that can tempt me with its magical deliciousness, that is.

the syrups and shaved ice, i ain’t gotta say it twice

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Did all of you have to write and say a speech in school, as part of the curriculum? Here in New Zealand it’s a long-standing tradition. I wrote a rather excellent think-piece on the Spice Girls (admittedly, there was no Google so I had to glean any knowledge of them from what was written on the side of chupa-chup packets and from analysis of lyrics like “She’s a real lay-dee!”); an award winning speech on well-known cats in literature (I got to the regionals with that speech, and of course I had lots of friends, why do you ask?) and then the next year, I admit, I phoned it in with a speech about chocolate. It was largely put together from quotes found in those “Little Book of Calm” tiny books which were very fashionable at the time. If I remember right, I won the school competition but lost out at the interschool level.
But those books that I quoted, glaze-eyed though they were, had it right. Chocolate is special and no loss at the interschool level for my speech which honestly wasn’t that good will take that away from me. Or any of us! Particularly special, on a national level now, is the compelling output of Whittaker’s, who this year launched their Berry and Biscuit block. 
Berry jelly, juiced up with real fruit, and crunchy bits of biscuits punctuating their caramelly milk chocolate. It’s damn good. I should disclose that the reason I’m able to so casually lay pieces of it upon a commemorative plate, and turn it into sorbet like it’s no big thing is this: I wrote – entirely without agenda – very nice things about Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit in a national paper, they liked what they saw and sent me some so I could really make sure I liked it. So I decided, because I am self-appointed duchess of ice cream (“see her melting crown!”) I would turn some of it into a pure and chilly Berry and Biscuit Sorbet. 

But first: some really exciting news from Tim and I. Guess! Guess! Or scan slightly further ahead in the text to where I’ve written it down. Last year Tim and I embarked on our first ever holiday, which we’d saved for five and a half years for (“feels like thirty”, as Jesus commented in Jesus Christ Superstar), and it was glorious. Well there’s nothing like landing back home to make you want to claw your way back to another travel adventure again. We’re not tap dancing happily about our bank balance right now, but we have been saving a bit of a nest-egg and while it might’ve been sensible to wait another year before planning the next trip…we thought…what if we just do it this year? What if we just? We can make it happen somehow! So we’ve put a down payment on flights to America. Specifically: NEW YORK. I need hardly elaborate on how heavily exciting this is. From my first musical I ever saw around age 5 – 42nd Street – to the Big Apple Style and hushed reverence of the city from the Baby Sitters Club’s Stacey McGill, to my heedless love of the musical RENT from which this blog gets its name, to every single cool restaurant there is being there…But wait: we’re also going to New Orleans, the place I’ve had a geographical crush on since about age 14, and Nashville, grand home of many a music-related thing. Thrilling. It’s all happening in October, so this space, be watching it.

Back to the chocolate sorbet. Not ice cream: the various elements of Berry and Biscuit are not blurred by cream or other dairy, instead only water, sugar, and a little cocoa is used to turn them into an icy mass of excellence. Not that I have anything against pouring cream into everything I see: I wanted to try something different here, and let the chocolate itself shine. Also note, I only used 3/4 of the block because it seems excessive to use the whole lot – if you’re shelling out for the good stuff, you might as well have some for fun nibbling times too. 

Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit Sorbet

A recipe by myself.

1 1/2 cups brown sugar
3 1/2 cups water
 4 tablespoons dark, dark cocoa (around 20% fat content is ideal for flavour and texture. However, use what you have!)
175g Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit Chocolate

In a decent-sized pan, bring the sugar, cocoa and 1 1/2 cups of the water gently to the boil, stirring often – as much to get cocoa lumps out as anything – until it has been bubbling for a couple of minutes. Remove from the heat, stir in the chocolate till smoothly melted. Stir again, pour into a freezer-proof container. Freeze overnight. Stir halfway through if you like, but frankly I didn’t find that large ice crystals formed with this much. 

Note: if you use any of Whittaker’s dark chocolate range, or any dark chocolate that you’re confident has not seen dairy products during its production, then this recipe becomes vegan. If Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit isn’t available where you are, use a ‘black forest’ style chocolate or really any unfilled chocolate you like. 

How I got to this delicious point is a bit chequered; I tried making this sorbet first time round but used too much sugar and the mixture refused to freeze. Because sugar slows down the freezing process. Since this meant I couldn’t feed it to my friends on the date I’d anticipated, before the second feeding opportunity I hastily tried adding more water to it to dilute the sugar and allow it to freeze. In the process dropping a significant, tears-worthy amount of the mixture on the floor. By the time it finally froze sucessfully I had no idea what the actual method and ingredients quantity was. I bravely started again.

Melting chocolate into water might sound a bit weak, but the simple background really allows the beautiful milk chocolate to shine, with the brown sugar and cocoa giving it a helping hand flavour-wise. The biscuit and berry pieces disperse, leaving a hinty trail of crunch and raspberry extract in their wake. Every spoonful dissolves intriguingly in the mouth. It’s not as intensely smooth as the sorbet you might find in a tub at the supermarket, but on the upside it tastes brilliant and is spoonable straight from the freezer. And look how easy it is to make! As long as you’re careful not to drop it on the floor, it really shouldn’t give you any trouble at all.


The only thing that could embiggen this already life-embiggening substance: edible glitter.
Instead of being used to feed friends post-Beirut concert two weeks ago, the fixed-up mixture was taken along to a Gossip Girls and Gin evening, and it actually nearly made someone cry happy tears, it was that good. So even if my words leave you unmoved, let their happy tears be the recommendation you need: this sorbet is just lovely. 
We’re heading up home this weekend for my little brother’s 21st! It’s music themed (Tim and I are going to be the White Stripes, my Halloween Elphaba wig getting a reprise here…for both of us) and I’m also making his cake. Can’t wait. All the significance of it being a family member, none of the stress of it being your own party. Not that mine was all that stressful, it was amazing fun. Perhaps my favourite part: the next day mum bought out a kilo of ham which had been hidden in the fridge behind all the other food, forgotten at the party. A bonus kilo of ham! Best birthday ever.
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Title via: In the Heights, a musical set in NEW YORK, CONCRETE JUNGLE WHERE DREAMS ARE MAAAADE OF (did I mention we’re going there?) with beautiful music and story by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who rapped for Obama and won many Tonys and is basically one of the most amazing people on earth. 
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Music lately:
Anna Calvi, Desire – am sad to be missing her show at Laneway on Monday, there’s something about her rich voice and rumbly music that I really love.
Annie Golden, Hang Up The Phone – such a crime that they went and cast her in the disappointing Hair movie and then didn’t even let her sing! This song’s subject is awesomely redundant in this day of multiple ways to communicate, but even more awesome is how every single second of the video is choreographed. Not one natural movement!
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Next time: *shrugs* we’ll see when I get back on Sunday night what I have the energy to make and whether it’s worth sharing. 

and what’s more baby, I can cook

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Christmas christmas christmas christmas christmas christmas christmas!
Christmas christmas christm- I’m just kidding. But it is upon us once more. Which means it’s time for our 6th Annual Christmas Dinner and follow-up blog post! Back in 2006 there were five of us, I wasn’t on Twitter and I didn’t have my blog. What did I even do with my time? Six years later, there were at least fifteen people, the party went for 10 hours and there were intermittent twitter updates from nearly all involved, because that’s just how life is these days. In every sense: I never thought those years ago that we’d have a veritable family of so many good people. I’m not the best out there at making and keeping friends – to the point where getting referred to by someone as part of “my ladies” nearly brought me to tears the other day. 
But anyway, let the bumper Christmas Dinner edition blog post commence! The day goes like this: I cook a huge feast, everyone turns up and eats it. This is my idea of fun, so don’t imagine me crying in the kitchen while everyone else is whooping it up. Alas, not everyone that we love could be there on Saturday but on the whole it was pretty astounding that we got so many people in the room this close to Christmas. Or anytime. 

Involtini. I make this every year. It’s Nigella Lawson’s recipe, which for me has evolved and simplified into slices of eggplant, grilled four at a time in the sandwich press, with a spoonful of herbed, almond-studded quinoa rolled messily in each, covered in tomato sauce and baked. You’re welcome to feta it up or use bulghur wheat but I had some well-meaning half packets of quinoa that needed using up, resulting in this being not only entirely vegan but also gluten free. Hey-oh!

Keeping it Nigella I simmered vast quantities of pickled pork, or gammon as it’s known in the UK, in liquids till they turned into ham – in the foreground is the one I cooked in Old Mout Cranberry Cider, and in the hindquarter is one I cooked in Budget Cola. Both wonderful. Cola has a smoky cinnamon kinda flavour while cider has that distinctive musky fermented-fruit thing going on, both of which are excellent when absorbed into the fibres of sweet, salty pink ham. Pickled pork can be a bit of a misson to find but it’s worth it – I got mine from Preston’s butchers (near Yan’s on Torrens Terrace in Wellington city) and the people there were so friendly and it was so reasonably priced and I totally recommend them.

Didn’t have the mental capacity for gravy, so instead I made up a batch of the wondrous balm that is Bacon Jam, and then – as you might be able to make out here – sprinkled over some edible glitter. Christmas christmas christmas! Honestly, this is one of my favourite discoveries of 2011 – nay, my life. It’s jam, but instead of raspberries or whatever, there is bacon. It’s perfect, it tastes as dazzlingly sticky and sweet and salty as it sounds, and it gives the feast an insouciant Ron Swansonish air.

This Hazelnut, Cranberry and Mushroom Stuffing was a new recipe from Fine Cooking magazine – entirely vegan, with the ingredients being both Christmassy but also ideally suited to each other. I simplified it to suit my needs and budget. For a recreation of my appropriation (across the nation!) roughly cube a large loaf of sourdough or similarly intense bread, drizzle with oil and toast in a hot oven. Meanwhile, fry up a diced onion and a whole bunch o’ mushrooms – the fancier the better, but I used regular button types – the real important thing here is quantity, as they reduce down. Mix together the whole lot, add a large handful of toasted hazelnuts and dried cranberries. Pour over 1 cup of stock (I used miso soup – it’s what I had) and bake for about 40 minutes at 190 C/350 F. The rich, sweet hazelnuts and savoury aggro of the mushrooms plus the occasional burst of cranberry against the croutonesque bread is some kind of taste revelation, I assure you.  

I make this cornbread stuffing every year. Cornbread’s one of my favourite foods as is, but mixing it in with eggs, butter, and cranberries then baking it again is perfection achieved. There was a bit of trouble in making it this time though, and I’m going to write it in tiny, tiny letters so you don’t all go green around the gills and start crying instead of my intention of making you salivate like hungry Alsatians. (Three rotten eggs in a row. THREE. They had weeks before the “use by” date and I even did the thing where you check it in a glass of water. The utter depressingness of that dull, formless thud with which the contents of the shell hit the bowl combined with the smell which hits you straight in the back of the throat takes you to a dark place when people are turning up in an hour, but with some reassurance, some rescue remedy and some hastily opened windows we got through it.) Also, spot the peas – I heedlessly bought 2kg of them going cheap at Moore Wilson a while back and so their presence on this table, in order to cut down on my freezer’s crowded infrastructure, was non-negotiable.

Butter in cubes on a small plate with a proper knife: because I am turning into my mother more and more every day. I love that my friends who stayed for ages and required a late-night snack asked where this butter was so they could spread it on the leftover cold potatoes. 

“FLIRTINIS ALL ROUND”. Because of a few lines in The Mighty Boosh, and because increasingly it seems everything I consume has to have a pop culture reference attached to it, I made this drink. Increasingly come-hither was that Nigella Lawson herself recently put a recipe for it online, giving me even more assurance that it was meant to be. Flirtinis are fairly hardcore but divided amongst many guests and with lots of food as blotting paper it’s all good. In a large jug, mix one cup (250ml) vodka and one cup fizzy white wine (eg, Lindauer) and top up with pineapple juice – about a litre, depending on the size of your vessel of course. Stir with a wooden spoon like you’re Betty Draper and serve in plastic cups so you don’t have to do so many dishes. 

Oh, this pie. Coffee Toffee Salted Cashew Pie, to use its full title. Another revelation from Fine Cooking, which I adapted quite easily to make necessarily dairy-free. And, with all due respect to Fine Cooking, to be less sugary and to include cashews. I think American palates have a different capacity for sugar than ours, and also cashews make a cheaper – but still exciting – substitute for their choice of pecans. 
Into a pie plate lined with a half-batch of this cookie dough, (minus the spices, and you don’t need to blind bake it) tumble 1 cup of salted roasted cashews and pour over a whisked up mixture of 1 cup golden syrup, 3/4 cup dark brown sugar, 2 tablespoons rum (I used Smoke and Oakum’s Gunpowder Rum), 2 tablespoons instant espresso powder – yes instant, it’s useful for baking and it smells weirdly alluring, okay? Look for the blue packet by Greggs – 2 tablespoons rice bran oil and three eggs. Bake at 190 C/375 F for 45 minutes to an hour, covering with tinfoil if need be. You then need to let it cool completely. I didn’t see this instruction and it would’ve saved me a reckless moment of “We’ll just eat it now and if it’s not set it can just be sauce for the ice cream, dammit!” Fortunately everyone managed to talk me down in a chorus of soothing voices while we stashed it precariously in the freezer, and it really was better for a good chilling, especially as the cold went some way to soften the intense sugar hit. It’s an incredible pie, with salty creamy cashews in their pool of intensely dark caramel-caffiene filling. 

And finally, some ice cream, since that’s my kneejerk culinary response to the promise of people in our house. This is the only photo I got of said ice cream, but in the back is my own Chocolate Coconut Ice Cream – which I’ve made many times now since Christmas 2009. It’s beautiful and it’s dairy-free and I can now make it in my sleep almost literally, but should you be awake and trying it for the first time it’s not overly taxing either. In the front is Lemonade Sorbet (with a hard ‘t’) which started life as failed jelly; it was a little weird but refreshing, and the price was right. 
There were also two roast chickens – but no-one wants me to try and take a decent photo of their sorry hides, and beautiful canapes from Jo, and homemade bread rolls brought by Piona (that’s Pia and Fiona but don’t their names condense perfectly?) There was a moment where everyone became anxious and queasy during Barbra Streisand’s Jingle Bells (you think I’m exaggerating! Not this time!) there was a psychological skirmish during supercool boardgame Apples to Apples; there was an incredible reveal from Pia whose orange dress looked cool enough under her coat, but upon removal of that coat it turned out the dress sleeves were layered and ruffly like a flamenco skirt on each arm; there was candy cane whittling; there was imaginary Christmas cracker pulling; there was semi-unpremeditated singing of Total Eclipse of the Heart; there was a portrait of me etched in a pudding bowl; there were at least ten candy canes per capita, especially once I got changed into my candy cane-esque dress; and there was so much food brought to donate to the Downtown Community Ministry Foodbank that Tim and I will have to drive it down in our ute because it’s too much to lug down in our collection of environmentally conscious yet aesthetically designed shopping carry bags. We love our friends.

And now, mere singular days from Christmas I am typically underslept, however I managed to finally get a tiny bit of Christmas shopping done, including a small gift for myself of a flower hairclip. It’s amazing how when your personality and brainpower has evaporated due to lack of sleep, put a big flower in your hair and you can trick yourself into thinking you’re still an interesting person.

It makes me feel like this: Look at how zany and witty I am! There’s a flower in my hair! I have such a personality!
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Title via: Lea Delaria singing I Can Cook Too from On The Town. This challenging and excellently subject-ed song is especially good in her brassy growl of a voice.

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Music lately: 

Still Haven’t Got My Gift by The Goodfun. Hilarious. But also a really nice tune.

O Holy Night, Liz Callaway and her sister Ann Hampton Callaway. You may think you’re over this son but Liz’s silvery voice against Ann’s rich golden one is pure joy for the ear canals.

Julien Dyne, Fallin’ Down – the mellow, slinky antithesis to my Broadway dalliances.
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Next time: I was really convinced I’d have time to blog about the roast tomato-stuffed roast capsicums, but it just didn’t work out, no matter how I tried. So I guess I’ll change up that aim to see if I can get them done before Christmas now…

cooler than ice cream and warmer than the sun…

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Mmmhmm. Another ice cream. What can I say. When the vision appears, there’s nothing you can do but meet it head on, climb on top of it, and skilfully fly it round like a hovercraft till you can alight upon the grassy knoll of recipe-confidence.

Let that extended metaphor be a red flag that warns you not only of my 3am bedtime last night, but also of increased potential for further extended metaphors. Anyway this ice cream leapt to mind fully-formed, no need for contemplative hovering: Cranberry Curd and White Chocolate Ripple Ice Cream.

Cranberries are pretty synonymous with Christmas food, and if they’re not for you they will be after reading books by Nigella Lawson. But I’m a fan any time of year, despite their kinda maligned image. They’re not as give-it-to-you-on-a-plate sweetly juicy as strawberries, not as popular as raspberries, not as purple as boysenberries and their medicinal purposes aren’t as dinner-table-conversational as blueberries. In fact cranberries are like the grapefruit of the berry world: sour, prone to bitterness, with connotations of…groin. Luckily Nigella Lawson’s here, with her recipes for cranberry sauce and cranberry stuffing and all kinds of good Christmassy things, to save the cranberry’s image.

I’ve gone one further, and taken one of her more interesting recipes – Cranberry Curd – and turned it into an ice cream, where swirls of frozen whipped cream whirl around slashes of crimson. A beautiful vortex, like holly berries on snow…that have been prodded at and moved around with a stick…the harshness of the berries muted with sugar, eggs, and butter; the plain cream embiggened by the gorgeous colour and the still-remaining hint of sourness, as well as the frozen, buttery crunch of white chocolate (Whittakers – my favourite and what I almost always use. Just enter the name into the search bar for proof…) While you can make this any old time, the colours and the frozen nature of it and the fact that I’m making it in mid-November means it’s ideal for a yuletide pudding. Especially since December is summertime in New Zealand. Although if I had a glazed ham for every December 25th that was either coldly rainy or airlessly humid…

The method looks really long and complicated but there’s nothing to get uncomfortably nervous about – apart from a particularly brutal sieving segment, the cranberry curd is delightfully untemperamental – and then you just half-heartedly whisk some cream, mix them together, admire the swirly prettiness like it’s your 6th form art board and you’re impervious to criticism, then let the freezer do its thing. My advice is to go slowly and calmly at all stages. I was on some kind of clumsiness roll and ended up doing many stupid things, like flinging cranberry curd everywhere and getting cream in my hair and wailing about curd on my tshirt before realising there was a slowly descending splodge of cream that had been there for even longer. Oh, and accidentally dropping all the remaining cranberries out of the sieve into the carefully strained mixture below. And dropping cream on the floor. It was like that scene with McNulty and Bunk in Season 1 of The Wire but with “WHY AM I SO CLUMSY” instead of one specific expletive used as my only dialogue. Mercifully it all ended up okay. More than.

Keeping in with the theme of Christmas usefulness, you could always double the cranberry curd ingredients, jar them up and give them away as gifts. It’s exactly like lemon curd but with cranberries, doesn’t it make you just want to invent a whole lot of different curds now? Banana coconut curd, raspberry curd, kiwi-strawberry curd…

Cranberry Curd White Chocolate Ripple Ice Cream

  • 500ml/2 cups cream
  • 3 tablespoons sugar
  • 100g or so white chocolate, roughly chopped (I used Whittakers)

Cranberry Curd:

  • 250g cranberries (straight from the freezer’s all good)
  • 100ml water
  • 200g sugar
  • 100g butter
  • 3 eggs

Bring the cranberries and the water to the boil in a small pan till the berries are softened and have released their juices. Now comes the one horrible job. You have to try push all this through a sieve into a bowl. There’s a technique – go slowly, keep pressing down and stirring with a spatula and then scraping the underside of the sieve with that spatula. You should end up with around 1/3 cup cranberry matter and a permanently clogged sieve.

From here it’s simple though. To the strained, velvety pink liquid add the butter and sugar and gently melt over a low heat, then beat the eggs and sieve them into the pan while stirring (ordinarily a pain but you’ve already got a dirty sieve, so?) continue to stir over a low heat until it has thickened a lot. Don’t let it overheat and curdle after all that trouble – if you suspect shenanigans, just remove it from the heat and keep stirring. Allow to cool. Stir in a few daring drops of red food colouring if you like – this particular time I did.

Meanwhile, whisk the cream and three tablespoons of sugar till it has thickened and has increased in body mass but isn’t at the point where you’d call it whipped. Fold in the shards of white chocolate, and spatula all this into a freezer-proof container. Tupperware lunchboxes like the one I’ve used here are perfect. [Note: I forgot to mention that the sugar goes here and have finally updated it, apologies to anyone who had to work this out for themselves.]

Ripple technique: I worked this out on the fly, as the spoonful of curd hovered questioningly over the container of whipped cream. Firstly, spoon the curd into the container of whipped cream in three rough horizontal lines (across the width, like a bumblebee) then take the handle of a spoon or a skewer or something, and make lines up and down across the length of the container, through the stripes. From here, carefully swirl all this around till you’re happy. Just remember you can’t un-swirl, so go slowly and carefully.

Freeze.

All these surrounding ingredients really truly mellow out the cranberry, leaving it velvety and intriguingly sweet and berryish without any of that mouth puckering, tooth-coarsening quality that you might expect. The stripe method of swirling means everyone’s guaranteed a decent portion of sherbety cranberry ripple to dissolve, and white chocolate is so delicious that I almost don’t want to demean it by explaining why it’s there, but its rich sweetness works perfectly with the ingredients and lends an alluring crunch to all that smoothness. I’m proud of myself for this one.

So I’m super tired because it has been a big weekend of activity, from a raucous book group on Friday night followed by a catch up with a friend at Havana, Saturday’s plans for mini-golf were dashed upon the raindrops, but we all went to Denny’s and ate a whole lot of food (including a proper coke float) and followed it up with a Whisky Appreciation Evening that carried on long after the night had turned into the next morning. That’s what weekends are for, but now my brain’s feeling a little frantically underslept – if nothing else I can lean on this container of ice cream, cool my fevered brow, and spoon it into my mouth while I’m at it with but a minimum of effort. Just like the ice cream itself. I feel like it’s not too early to start thinking about Christmas-related things, but if you do, then maybe come back and re-read this post in three weeks so you can absorb it more comfortably?

Title via: Eurythmics, Who’s That Girl – so our Whisky last night was Scottish, but I didn’t realise babein’ Annie Lennox was too. This song doesn’t encroach on Thorn In My Side’s Favourite Eurythmics Song territory, but it’s still damn good.

Music lately:

Mos Def, Rock’n’Roll. I absolutely love Jack White, truly, but I was a little surprised he didn’t get mentioned in this song.

Underworld, Rez. So twinkly and light and gratifyingly endless.

Next time: I started making progress on a Christmas Cake today. Would’ve actually made it but was far, far too sleepy. More fool me…

your shoulders are frozen, cold as the night

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It’s been a long time, shouldn’t have left you, without another ice cream recipe. Although this isn’t ice cream at all but its tangy cousin, Frozen Yoghurt. I did that thing where I dream up a cool ice cream flavour, but then I went and forgot it and tried to retrace my steps mentally to work out exactly what it was that I thought was so good – a bit like that Sweet Valley Twins book where Jessica accidentally made those amazing cookies then pretended that it wasn’t an accident and she had to recreate them for the TV show Lifestyles of the French and Famous and they stay up all night trying to work out what the flavour was and then they retrace their steps and get the flavour just in time and also the make up artist makes it look like they had a great night’s sleep. And Jessica does not acknowledge that serendipity played a part in her success. Just. Like. That. Fun fact: I didn’t Google any of this, I just knew it. 
Lucky for me, while trying to work out what it was that entranced me in the first place I managed to come up with something else entirely: Applemint and Fresh Tumeric Frozen Yoghurt. Yep, the very same tumeric that you normally put in curries, and yep, Applemint is just the words Apple and Mint squished together because it pleases me. Also pleasing is this combination of flavourants – crisp apple, cool mint and the golden presence of tumeric. Whatever the original idea was, this one wins – for one thing, it actually exists, unlike the other idea which continued to fade further and hazily-er out of reach the harder I searched for it. 

I’m not fussy about all things in life but I am about yoghurt. Clearwater’s Organic is the kind that I used for this recipe – it’s heavy and rich and topped with cream and you can buy it in a two litre bucket which I find truly exciting. Otherwise I’d look out for Collective Dairy or Zany Zeus, two other NZ brands that are outstanding in the field of excellent yoghurt. If you want to make this vegan, you could replace the yoghurt with a couple of cans of coconut milk and even call it Froconut if you like. Coconut milk makes awesome ice cream, so no need for fear here.

Please notice the beautiful parfait glasses, unexpectedly given to me on a trip to Petone by magnificent ladies Jo and Kim. Having these parfait glasses did motivate me to make some more ice cream to put in them, but that’s not saying much really because I could look at a shrub, a sofa cushion, a small badger, and still suddenly want to make ice cream.

Applemint and Fresh Tumeric Frozen Yoghurt

Note – if you don’t have access to fresh tumeric, leave it out and add in a teaspoon of ground ginger instead. If you don’t have palm sugar, use plain brown sugar or any sugar at all, to be honest. And finally, if you don’t have a food processor, just grate up the apple, and finely chop everything else and stir it in. This is just my lazy way.

2 1/2 cups lovely thick plain yoghurt
3 tablespoons palm sugar, roughly chopped
1 Granny Smith apple, roughly chopped (skin on)
About 1 centimetre segment of fresh tumeric, peeled and roughly chopped.
1/4 cup mint leaves – or as much as you like really – washed.


Blitz the apple, sugar and tumeric with a couple of tablespoons of the yoghurt in a food processor, until everything has become tiny and the green skin of the apple is as small as confetti. Add in the mint and the rest of the yoghurt, process for another ten or so seconds to mix everything in, then scrape into a 1-litre container and freeze, stirring occasionally.


Allow to sit out of the freezer for 20 minutes before serving so it’s not rock-solid.

To be straight up with you, this will be a lot more luscious if you blast it in the food processor halfway through the freezing process. I couldn’t be bothered, and this achieved me a frozen yoghurt full of ice crystals, which I soldiered through and ate anyway. It’s still delicious, but keep this in mind. The delicate and fragrant yet juicy apple is perfect with mint’s almost-spicy freshness, and the tumeric isn’t overtly present but hints at flavours of carrot, ginger and lemon, and it sounds quite cool in the title so don’t go leaving it out if you don’t have to. It’s all very light and refreshing but with plenty of flavour.
To remain straight up with you: frozen yoghurt doesn’t necessarily make the most effective ice cream soda. Its icy texture doesn’t really amalgamate in with the fizzy drink, instead busting into large particles floating round. It all looks unbelievably undrinkable, but it’s all good, as long as you don’t look too closely. I thought this flavour would be cool with ginger beer and I was so very correct – just avert your eyes and drink up. And yes, occasionally I succumb to pretty things and these stripy straws were one such instance of that. Just to convince myself that they weren’t just bought out of  aesthetic aimlessness, I made myself drink the entire glassful through them.

Sometimes pretty > useful.

Speaking of, we had a big clean-out of our closet and found heaps of things that hadn’t seen the light of day since we moved in two and a half years ago – including my old pointe shoes. And because instead of tidying, I tend to just wear as much of the clutter as possible…I tried them on.

That on the far left is a bloodstain, in case you’re wondering. This pair is actually one of my cleanest – Grischkos, still with the same ribbons I would’ve sewn on and burnt the edges of so they didn’t fray. While there came a point where it was very clear I wasn’t going to be a professional of any kind, nothing gave me as much happiness as dancing – I guess not till cooking came along. Best believe I’ve been prancing round in these more than once since, in fact attempting a pirouette ill-advisedly on our wooden kitchen floor this very evening. Put a stop to that quick though, no need to add more blood stains to these shoes!
Can’t believe I forgot to mention this but amongst all the hubbub of last week maybe it’s not surprising. A couple of weeks ago Tim and I attended the excellent launch of Fast Fresh Tasty, a new, local food app filled with seasonal and beautiful recipes. It’s best described over at the Wellingtonista – but if you’re into food apps and have a smartphone I definitely recommend it. 
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Title via: The Arctic Monkeys’ exciting 2005 debut, I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor. I wrote a probably terrible essay in uni on how The Internet was changing the music industry because these guys had a fanbase on Myspace or something. It all makes me feel very old and very young at the same time.
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Music lately:
The opening of The Crystals’ Da Doo Ron Ron has got to be one of the best there is, with those blaring horns and galloping handclaps. We used to sing this song in primary school, but it wasn’t nearly as cool as the original itself. 
Heavy D and The Boyz, We Got Our Own Thing. RIP, Heavy D.
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Next time: No kidding, I thought up another ice cream recipe idea almost immediately, but I might put that on hold and serve you up an awesome Christmas Cake recipe – you can’t ignore that it’s rapidly approaching, and Christmas Cakes need plenty of planning ahead!