Category: Nigella Lawson

won’t get fooled again

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Two things that cause within me a sense of intense anticipation and upon which there is much potential for happiness or dismay – a new cookbook, and a new avocado. You know what they are when you go into the shop, you know that they can be awesome, you might even pick them up appraisingly to gauge whether it’s worth your time and money. But it’s not till you get them home, open them up and try them out that you really know what they are like inside.

I’ve had a pretty fortunate run of things lately with my avocado buying – every last one of them has been firm but yielding, nuttily rich and buttery and as chartreuse as a satin blouse from 1995. I was able to take advantage of the fact that Tim was out one night last week and made myself a solitary dinner of grilled mushrooms (one of Tim’s least favourite vegetables), spinach, and a whole avocado. A private pleasure, is the avocado – I’m loathe to share once I’ve found a good one. If you ask me for a bite of mine I’ll probably sigh and roll my eyes and make you feel bad that you even suggested it. But after this particular dinner, even someone as elephantine of appetite as I had to admit that a whole avocado is way too rich for one person.
It was a pretty fabulous meal though, one that I think will definitely go in my little notebook of potential recipes that will pay off my student loan. I clamped two large, flat field mushrooms in the George Forman grill, and while they were stewing away I used my mezzaluna to make quick work of roasted peanuts, capers, and a slice of preserved lemon. This was spooned over the outstretched palm-like cavity of the mushrooms and grilled again for another couple of minutes until wonderfully fragrant. I crumbled feta on top of them and sat them on a bed of spinach leaves, and then chopped up my triumphantly green, whole avocado.
For something containing no carbohydrates and bugger all protein it was hugely filling. I don’t know if this is a well documented problem – The Foodie’s Dillema perhaps – or just a personal quirk, but does anyone else ever find themselves in that position where they are becoming uncomfortably full, but can’t stop eating because (in this case) the avocado is so delicious and I can’t waste the opportunity for this perfect avocado over something as trifling as my waning appetite? I’m not sure if I explained it well, but it’s a bit like how I always eat lots of food if it’s there for free, even if I’m not hungry…Don’t even get me started on the caveman-style, eating for the next six years that I do at buffet tables.
Anyway, please do try the mushrooms because they were amazing. There’s no point being modest and coy, they really were delicious. They’re gluten free and vegetarian to boot, although I guess you could leave off the feta and call them vegan and dairy free as well.
As I mentioned earlier, avocados and cookbooks have many similarities. I tried out a recipe from a new cookbook of mine recently, Jo Seagar’s The Cook School Recipes. It was my first recipe from this book and I was really excited and it went DRAMATICALLY WRONG. Is there a disappointment as disappointing as gathering together ingredients and time and excitement and ending up with a gluey, sticky, doughy mass instead of a cake? I don’t want this to stop you from rushing out and buying Jo Seagar’s book – the culinary version of getting back onto a pretty horse that bucks you I suppose.
But riddle me this: does the idea of a cake, made solely from 2 cans of crushed pineapple, 4 cups self-raising flour, 1 1/2 cups sugar and 3/4 cups dessicated coconut, mixed together and baked for 45 minutes not sound somewhat unlikely? I mean, I can handle the fact that there are cakes out there that don’t have butter in them, and not everything is leavened with eggs. And I really wanted this to be amazing, because I loved the idea of such a store-cupboard, economic-climate friendly, and delicious sounding cake. Unfortunately it was awful. Even baking it for a further hour and a half couldn’t turn it into anything resembling a cake and it was far too gluey to serve as some kind of exotic trifle base. But with the hat of resourcefulness upon my head I turned to the woman who will never let me down – Nigella Lawson – and found a way to at least turn the non-cake into something useable.
In her book Nigella Christmas, La Lawson has a recipe for these little truffly bonbon things made from crumbled fruitcake, melted chocolate, liqueur, and golden syrup, which are then rolled into balls and festooned with white chocolate and cherries to look like miniature Christmas puddings.
So I thought why the heck can’t I create pina colada truffles using the crumbled up pineapple cake instead of fruitcake? I used melted white chocolate (125g) and a splash of Cointreau along with the golden syrup (3 tablespoons) and using my increasingly sticky hands rolled this challengingly viscous mixture into small balls. Tim and I then set to with toothpicks spearing the chilled truffles and rolling them in melted white chocolate. A fun job, but truly, you need more melted chocolate than is humanly fathomable to coat these truffles. Ours started off luxuriously blanketed, but the ones towards the end were only kind of smattered in chocolate. The main thing is that they tasted curiously…wonderful. A fine example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
I am of course predisposed to like these since I’m a mad fiend for the white chocolate, but there is something appealing in the combination of chewy, fragrant interior and crisp smooth exterior. And I love not wasting food. Although a small voice in my head says that I would have saved more money had I just thrown the cheap cake in the bin rather than adding expensive chocolate, liqueur and more chocolate to it. But whatevs.
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Of course if you wanted to recreate these without damaging your nerves, go out and buy a sponge cake, allow it to go stale, adding a little pineapple juice and coconut as you go. But like me, you needn’t be restricted by Nigella’s recipe. I’m sure there are truffles just begging to be made out of anything – stale blueberry muffins, a chocolate cake that didn’t rise, the last of a lemon and poppyseed loaf (which would probably be equally sensational coated with dark chocolate as it would white). Let your imagination run wild. And as for Jo Seagar’s book, like I said I’m not put off and I’ll definitely be trying something else out of it soon. It would be fantastic to hear from any other kiwis out there that have had success with this cake though. Surely the recipe must work or it wouldn’t have made it into the book at all, yes?
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Like Julia Murney (and Patti LuPone before her) in Evita, my mother will be able to say “What’s new, Buenos Aires,” as she is now officially in South America. I look forward to using this newfangled invention they call Skype to keep in touch with all her exciting news. My younger brother is heading to Australia next week to help out a dear family friend of ours at the motel she owns, and my dad, keeping it local, is working hard with the help of others on maintaining momentum in the fight against the intensely dislikeable Pukekohe Waste Petroleum Combustion Ltd who, as I’ve said time and again, are trying to render Otaua Village a lifeless vacuum by thwacking an unwanted waste oil plant there, regardless of the children, livestock and history that the place is teeming with and with full knowledge of the fact that we don’t have a lot of money or resources to fight them with. Very admiral stuff.

The reason that Otaua Village is so present in my mind is because I was just there on the weekend – which also accounts for my rejuvenated vigour in trying to promote and defend our cause. The reason I was up home is because Tim and I were fortunate enough to be able to go to see The Who with Dad and my brother Julian. Well, what’s left of the Who. People of a certain age and perhaps background (like the man who owns the chip shop down the road) will scoff and say “that’s not the real Who,” well, that’s what they’re calling themselves and I’ll take it, especially as I’m only 22 and it’s the only way I’ll ever come close to experiencing this sort of zeitgeist-embodying, era-defining music, the sort of music that many people of my generation listen to on their iPods with a yearning nostalgia for an age they never even born in. I could describe the evening for you but instead I’ve gathered my thoughts together in the form of a bad poem.

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The Who
Saturday, 21st of March
Our seats are excellent
If I had a dollar for every mullet haircut
Hello Sailor are the opening band and hearing Gutter Black live is a joy
Then the Counting Crows, who play…competently
Feelings of mild ambivalence towards them
turn into feelings of “Why are you here and why are you not the Who already”
The man sitting next to me eats slice after slice after slice of plastic-wrapped, processed cheese
the scariest cheese of all
Finally The Who appear
Roger Daltrey dapper and youthful of face, Pete Townshend wearing a hat
They are wonderful
Both in good voice
Nearly faint from the brilliance of Baba O’Riley
The knowledge that my godfather, a longtime Wholigan and fan to end all fans is in the audience makes me even happier
Forgot how fab the guitar riff from My Generation is
Their background videos rival Roger Waters’ for dizzying intensity
Hey! Ringo Starr’s son is on drums!
Feel benevolent towards the world, even the horrible tall people in front of me
A bittersweet feeling at the end with just Daltrey and Townshend onstage together…
Praise mercy our dubiously parked car was not towed away
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Next time: I just got a bunch of second hand Cuisine magazines and I’m in one of those I-want-to-cook-and-bake-everything moods but I haven’t really got anything specific planned yet.

aubergine genie

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I’m writing this in a slightly dazed state of mind – I was working at the Vodafone Homegrown music festival on Saturday from 9.30am till midnight and at about 3pm this afternoon I got slapped in the face with the wet fish of exhaustion. If I start making vicious syntactical errors or mumbling about my desire to own a donkey, discreetly ignore me and scroll down to the recipes. It’s nothing that a stretch of good night’s sleeps and several mugs of hot tea can’t make right. Although having more than one early night in a row is a thing of the past (no, I haven’t given birth to octuplets) as we are in the thick of March and it seems that every other day I am going to a music gig.

It’s unfortunate that Tim really isn’t into aubergines because (a) they are very cheap at the market, and (b) I just keep on cooking them. My latest recipe using them is the Aubergine Moussaka from Nigella Lawson’s consistently astounding seminal text How To Eat. There is nothing out there quite like this book. I can abandon it for weeks and then come back to it and be inspired anew by some previously forgotten recipe. I’d never tried this particular one but since I had all the ingredients to hand and it seemed like an inexpensive meal, I thought I might give it a go. There’s one thing you should know – it’s nothing like the traditional idea of moussaka and I’m still a bit in the dark as to why it got its name. It’s more of a warm, gently spiced chickpea vegetable curry. Which in itself is a good thing, just not very moussaka-y…

Aubergine Moussaka, adapted liberally from How To Eat


2 large, glossy aubergines, diced
2 onions, finely chopped
8 fat cloves garlic, also finely chopped
150g dried chickpeas, soaked overnight then cooked in boiling water till tender
1 ½ tablespoons pomegranate molasses
1 can chopped tomatoes
½ teaspoon each cinnamon and allspice
200mls water
mint and feta to serve


Fry the onion, garlic, and eggplant in a little oil till softened and lightly golden. I actually used no oil at all, if the pan is hot enough and you stir regularly, the eggplant cooks quite nicely. Add the rest of the ingredients, simmer for an hour, and serve over rice or indeed as is, sprinkled with mint and feta. By the way, I don’t have any pomegranate mollasses so in its place I used a chopped up slice of equally fragrant and sour preserved lemon (made for me by my godmother. Viv, if you are reading this: they are addictive. I have to stop myself from just picking them out of the jar and eating the lot…)

I must admit: I added some sneaky beetroot when I made this. Predictably it made the whole thing bright pink which was a little distracting but tasted fine. As a whole the flavours and textures are wonderful and it’s delightfully easy to make. It also reheats well and is the sort of vegetarian dish (actually without the feta it might even be vegan, come to think of it) that is wonderfully satisfying, rather than making me look wistfully at the patch on my plate where a steak could be resting juicily.
I promised last time that I was going to get old school with Girl Guide biscuits, and old school I did get. I’m pretty sure Girl Guides or Girl Scouts are a fairly universal concept so you know what I’m talking about, yes? Wholesome, jolly young gals trying to sell biscuits is a yearly thing here in New Zealand and despite me being dreadfully snobby towards shop-bought biscuits on the whole (apart from the miraculously good Toffee Pops and Squiggles), Tim and I bought a couple of packets because of the sheer nostalgic appeal they wielded. They just taste like your average hydrogenated palm-oil based plain cookie but there’s nothing like tradition to add a veneer of deliciousness. Plus with the biscuits come a dizzying array of sugary recipes on the Girl Guide website, including that New Zealand modern classic, Chocolate Fudge Slice. I remember making this once with Mum back when I was in Brownies (another young gal’s brigade, nothing to do with the cake unfortch) and I marvel at its squidgy deliciousness now as I did when I was nine years old.
Chocolate Fudge Slice (adapted from the website)
This looks like it shouldn’t hold together but somehow it does. The website has such modern-fangled additions as preserved ginger and chopped cherries but pah! I say.
1/2 a cup of coconut, however, would be quite permissible.
1x 250g packet Girl Guide biscuits, crushed
1 egg
125g butter
¾ cup sugar
1 Tbsp cocoa
½ cup chopped walnuts
½ tsp vanilla extract (or don’t even bother if it’s just essence as the website suggests. I don’t mean to sound disparaging of this useful and friendly website, but really. It’s 2009. Get some real vanilla.)
Melt the butter, and stir in the sugar, cocoa, walnuts, vanilla, biscuit crumbs and lightly beaten egg. Press into a greased 20x30cm tin and refrigerate overnight. The website suggests icing it with cocoa buttercream, and while I’m never one to say no to buttercream, I had run out of cocoa and so abandoned that idea and it was more than serviceable.
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Above: This stuff just tastes…aagggghhh…magically delicious. And how could it not – it’s full of all the good things in the world – cocoa, biscuit crumbs, butter…it’s impossibly to stop at one piece and frankly it’s kind of difficult to get the delicious mixture into the tin in the first place without snarfing the lot, doing the dishes and pretending you never started at all. More pragmatically, you could also make this coeliac-friendly by crushing up gluten-free biscuits instead.
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It’s not just a busy time for me. This Friday, my very talented mother flies to Argentina for a month (in a plane, by the way, her talent isn’t that she can fly) to live with a family and teach in a school there on some prestigious scholarship thing she successfuly applied for (that incidentally my godmother – the one who made me the preserved lemons – has also done). Unfortunately I won’t get to see Mum before she goes, but I’m sure the month will go fast enough and the wonders of modern technology mean that we’ll probably keep in touch more than we would have when we’re both in the same country.
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Also – you may remember last year the ongoing battle against the Pukekohe WPC waste oil treatment plant who wanted to taint Otaua, the village of my youth, with their silos of poison (hey, it’s late at night, I can get mildly dramatic if I want) – initially we managed to overthrow them in a hearteningly David vs Goliath manner. But because this isn’t a Hollywood movie, they appealed, and because they’ve got money and we don’t they’ll probably get it. I’ve got a solution for you WPC: Just…don’t. To the Franklin District Council: Make it stop. You’re the council. You should be looking out for, you know, the people of Franklin. (Again, it’s late at night- I can be dramatic and overly simplistic.) If I’m psychologically exhausted considering the implications for the future of Otaua I can’t even imagine how drained the Otaua Village Preservation Society must be feeling. Just food for thought anyway. A part of me would love it for someone working against us to Google themselves, find their way here, and be conflicted by the overwhelming hate-vibes being directed towards them from my direction and their desire to continue reading my blog for the intriguing cake recipes.
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Next time: Well, it’s St Patrick’s Day tomorrow which means I shall call upon the Irish blood cells that make up a goodly chunk of my lineage and make Nigella’s Chocolate Guinness Cake. Grown men have wept (in my imagination) for this cake. It’s special stuff. Do join me…

souperstar (do you think you’re what they say you are)

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Beetroot soup. Not the most wildly titillating words someone could whisper in your ear. Especially…lukewarm beetroot soup. But beetroot soup must have something going for it if Nigella Lawson has no less than three different recipes for it. And if anyone can bring the titillation, it’s La Lawson. I mean, I say this as a beetroot fan from way back, but this following soup is not only delicious in the traditional sense – it tastes good – it’s also visually delicious. Check it out…

This soup is the deepest crimson, perhaps what the word “love” would look like if someone threw it in a blender and added vegetable stock. Sorry, got a bit carried away there with my imagery. Look how beetroot affects me so.

Having said that, I didn’t entirely follow Nigella’s recipes, I sort of did a cross between the one from How To Eat and the one from Forever Summer. To clarify, the soup from HTE is basically boiled beetroot blended with stock, while the FS one is roasted beetroot blended with stock and sour cream. I roasted the beetroot but didn’t add sour cream…wait, are you still interested?

Roasted Beetroot Soup

2 large beetroot (I’m talking actual beetroot, not anything from a can)
1 teaspoon ground cumin (I actually used ras-el-hanout because I am a bit addicted to it)
1 litre chicken or vegetable stock
Optional:
250g sour cream (which I didn’t use but I’m sure is nice)
Feta and capers to serve

Wrap the beetroot in tinfoil and bake at 200 C for 1 and a half hours, or until you can plunge a cake tester into them easily. Unwrap partially and leave to cool somewhat, then carefully peel by rubbing off the skin (seriously, that’s what you do) and chop them roughly. Biff into a food processor and whizz till kind of pulpy. Add the stock…maybe in batches…and blitz once more until it resembles soup. Add the sour cream if you so wish, ladle into bowls and sprinkle over feta cheese and capers.

While you’re making soup you might as well get some bread on to go with. To be honest the beetroot soup doesn’t really need a carbohydrate chaperone, but if you’re making something a bit more lentil-and-vegetabley the following would be perfect. And it doesn’t even knead needing. I mean need kneading. Excuse me.

Above: And it’s nubblier than a sweater on The Cosby Show. It’s funny, the words ‘seedy’ and ‘grainy’ aren’t so attractive when used in conjunction with darkened streets and online video quality respectively, but when used to describe bread they become highly desirable adjectives.

This recipe comes from Nigella Express and is not entirely unrelated to a recipe from How To Be A Domestic Goddess, only simpler. It’s also a good example of why both books are so marvelous…

Lazy Loaf

200g best quality sugar-free muesli

325g wholewheat bread flour

1 sachet (7g) instant dried yeast

2 teaspoons sea salt, or 1 teaspoon table salt

250mls (1 cup) skim milk

250mls (1 cup) low-fat water (just kidding y’all, they haven’t invented that yet)

Mix together the dry ingredients. Add the water. Mix all that together. Tip into a silicone loaf tin (or a normal one, lined with baking paper and flour). Put into a cold oven, then immediately turn to 110 C and leave for 45 minutes. After these 45 minutes are up, turn it up to 180 C and bake for a further hour. Unorthodox, yes, but once you have completed these simple tasks you’ll have a loaf of real bread.

If you don’t have actual muesli to hand, you can just use about 180g rolled oats and make up the rest (and then some) with any dusty kibbled bits you have to hand – wheatgerm, amaranth, linseeds – in this modern age I know you have something like that in your pantry. I basically threw everything at it – all of the above plus poppy seeds, ground linseeds, kibbled rye and bran. Which is why I wasn’t in the slightest bit stressed that I only had plain white bread flour. You should also know that this is wonderful the next day, sliced and grilled and shmeered with avocado (which is what we had for breakfast this morning).

Above: And like everything in life, brilliant with butter.

Cultural roundup time! Are you ready to absorb my recommendations? On Monday, Tim and I went to see a singer called Jolie Holland. That’s right, the word Jolie is being used without “Angelina” preceding it. She was absolutely stunning, with a kind of old-school blues vibe about her. I’m talking 1800s old-school. She had an absolutely gorgeous voice, she bantered generously with the crowd and, non-insult to non-injury, she did a cover of a Leonard Cohen song (the ever-stunning Lady Midnight, for those of you playing at home.) She played guitar on many songs but we were lucky enough to see her play a kind of rough-hewn violin-fiddle thing (yes, that would be the technical term) and for her lengthy encore she invited the warm-up act, a man whose name eludes me, to sing with her. And it is a shame that I can’t remember his name because he was quite a gem – if some of his songs did sound a little similar to each other it didn’t matter because the voice he sung them in was so rich and lovely.

Last Saturday we went to Te Papa museum to see the Monet painting exhibition. If any of my readers are passing through Wellington I heartily recommend it, I’m a bit of a geek for the Impressonists and have been since I was a child (it’s no wonder I was so popular) so it was a genuine thrill for me to see some of the exemplary works of this period up close and personal. And, be still my beating heart, included in the mix were two Degas sketches and a sculpture…

On Thursday I had a double-bill night, beginning with Tick…tick…Boom! at the Garden Theatre which was everything I’d hoped – ie, it didn’t suck – and followed by the band of Montreal. It was, for reasons mentioned last time, hugely exciting for me to see TTB live, and the cast seemed to be as happy performing in it as I was watching them. They all sang gorgeously, had sparky chemistry, and really seemed to get the characters as opposed to just singing the lines with their faces forming the appropriate expressions. Erm, I could go on. I actually saw it again on Friday night, which should tell you a lot about me as a person. But truly, I can’t say enough nice things about this production. Hearing those fantastic songs live – magic.
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of Montreal were brilliant live, lead singer Kevin Barnes all enigmatic and urchin-like with his blue eyeshadow and orange sparkly tunic. Although light on banter they were heavy on theatrics – including a fellow who came out wearing an impressive array of animal masks and a grey-leotarded person who would swing from bars on the ceiling – and the music was a ton of loved-up swirly-electro fun. The audience was painfully hip (lots of carefully chosen vintage dresses, arty tshirts, canvas shoes and disdainful looks) and there is, in my heart, a special dark hatred reserved only for the bloke in front of me who was not only tall and bouffant-y of hair, but, insult upon insult, wearing a large trilby hat, the circumference of which completely blocked my view as he swayed intuitively from left to right at the very same time as me. May his view one day be obstructed in a similar manner. Hopefully by someone in a sombrero.
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Finally, speaking of soup – and back to food now – after purchasing a half-price can of chesnuts, I made the lentil and chesnut soup from How To Eat. Friends, it is extraordinarily good. It’s also not that photogenic. But I wanted to throw it open wide to you all, you foodie types, what would make a good substitute for the chesnuts? Because they’re too expensive to make this soup a regular option. I tried substituting potato, which was pleasant enough but too similar in texture to the cooked lentils to be really delightful. Any thoughts?

schmalentines

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With the briefest of glances o’er the foodblogosphere (yes, that is a word…now…) I observe that there is a plethora of pink-tinted, heart shaped, chocolate festooned Valentine-themed food going on. I personally don’t go in for Valentine’s Day myself, considering it a bit commercial and far too likely to inflict bitterness upon the firmly un-coupled out there. However there is a tiny, miniscule part of me that secretly wouldn’t mind being whisked off to Paris for the weekend or being presented with a sculpture of my own head made from chocolate mousse, or being forcibly thrown by forklift into a rose garden or whatever it is they do for Valentine’s in the movies. My actual day involved, would you believe it, nothing of the sort. Instead Tim’s friend, sister, sister’s friend, ex-flatmate, and flatmate’s friend all appeared for drinks. Fun – fantastic to see ex-flatmate again – but hardly condusive to heart-shaped food. Nevertheless, people need feeding, and drinkers need blotting paper, so I made an enormous vat of pasta (Nigella Lawson’s Penne Alla Vodka from Feast, it is seriously good) and for dessert, in a nod to the season, I made a tray of chocolate brownies.

Most of the time I feel that a brownie is a brownie is a brownie, there are forty squillion recipes out there for them, all promising ultimate-ness and all being fairly similar. Nigella’s recipe is, in all honesty, cut from similar cloth to anything you’ve read about brownies before…only the proportion of ingredients is roughly quadruple anything you’ve ever fathomed. They make for an incredible finished product, but I’m warning you, don’t read the recipe if you are faint of heart and don’t have your smelling salts handy. They will cost you about $300 to make. There is no coy concession of this from Nigella herself of course. And it does make quite a lot…

Above: Doesn’t the batter look good? I mean, I’m not just looking at it, I’m positively leering. Don’t you just want to buy it a drink, tell it to “get in my wheelbarrow, you cheeky vixen” and take it home? Quoting the Mighty Boosh here by the way – that’s not my own personal pick up line (although you’re welcome to try it…)

Brownies for An Economic Recession (sarcastic title my own, Nigella goes for the somewhat more fanciful “Snow Flecked Brownies”, admittedly this book was published in 2004 so she wasn’t to know about the grim future. From Feast.

375g butter
375g best-quality dark chocolate (don’t go using cheap compound buttons now)
6 eggs
350g caster sugar
1 tablespoon real vanilla extract (as above, if it’s fake, leave it out)
225g plain flour
250g white chocolate buttons

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Line the base of a 33x23x5.5cm roasting dish with baking paper. That’s right. A big, proper roasting dish that you’d normally cook a side of pig in. This is serious, y’all.

1. Melt the butter and chocolate together gently. I tend to let the chocolate melt a bit first before adding the butter so they both finish at the same time…
2. In a big bowl, beat the eggs and sugar together. Carefully pour in the slightly cooled chocolate mixture and vanilla extract.
3. Fold in the flour, stir in the white chocolate buttons.
4. Carefully spatula the whole lot into the roasting dish, smoothing the top. Bake for 25 minutes. Don’t be tempted to go for longer. After spending half a week’s pay on butter, chocolate and eggs, you don’t want dry brownies. Cut into squares when cooled some.

These are really, really good. I’m getting a little twitchy now just looking at pictures of them, knowing that they are right there in a tin in my wardrobe and I could grab one right now…yes, in my wardrobe, and hey, don’t judge, the kitchen in my flat is not quite visible to the naked eye and therefore one has learned to be creative with storage space. Which is why canned tomato, dried pasta and black beans jostle for position with my Swiss ball and my collection of high heels. If I call the whole set-up ‘charmingly bohemian, like RENT’ it’s not so annoying. Although it would be much easier to actually be charmingly bohemian if I lived in a loft in New York. Anywho…

I could just eat the whole lot…no one would need to know…

If Valentine’s Day is something you go in for, I hope it went well for you. Tim was working more or less all of the big day so I looked out for number one and went shopping. I bought myself some books with a voucher I had – The Cook School Recipes by Jo Seagar and Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. Both just jumped out at me, I didn’t set out with anything in mind to use my voucher for. Jo Seagar – despite her heavy use of sweet chilli sauce in everything – has always endeared herself to me. She seems to particularly excel at writing inspiring recipes for nibbles and baking, and since those are my two favourite food groups it makes sense that I should gravitate towards her. Plus I like the idea of supporting NZ cooks in these uncertain times. As for Everything Is Illuminated, I casually picked it up, read the first couple of lines, and knew instantly that it was something special. I’m only halfway through but – unless it descends into a chaos of derivative rubbish – I highly recommend it.

It is worth mentioning that on Friday night we caught up with our friend Dr Scotty who is finally back from his sojourn to Thailand and Cambodia. He returned looking all sleek and tan and it was SO cool to see him again. The fact that he got to New Zealand on Thursday and yet was able to converse to me about watermelon sorbet the very next night is testament to the rare breed of cool that he possesses.

Next time: I make beetroot soup, and it’s really really good.

smoke on the water(melon)

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For all that I adore summer, and the lighter, crisper, juicier sort of cooking that comes with it, the whole thing can quickly become a little fraught. I mean, there’s the overbearing heat, which can swiftly turn me from sassy cookstress into wilted puddle, unable to eat anything other than frozen peas. Also, and I guess this is because I am an overthinker, I get really dithery – do I go rice-papery and Japanese or mezze-bowley Greek salad-y or maybe some kind of Moroccan influenced flatbread wrap thing and I can’t choose so would it be weird to go Italo-Thai? There’s nothing like indecision to make you sweaty. Finally, I sometimes find myself unable to focus on anything approaching practicality, and instead become obsessed with making something sweet….

This was one of those times.

It was, I believe, back in October when I first felt the stirring desire to make watermelon sorbet. Unfortunately watermelons just weren’t around. Luckily I am emotionally study enough to wait patiently. They have finally become cheap at the markets and my wish is not only attainable, it’s much more seasonally appropriate.

I didn’t have a recipe to follow so I scoured the internet, and finally ended up with the following, a pastiche inspired by several sources.

Watermelon Sorbet

1 large watermelon
1 cup sugar
500mls water
1 egg white

Scoop out all the flesh from inside the watermelon and puree it in a food processor (I had to do it in batches since my watermelon was so huge). A lot of recipes said to strain the juice and discard the flesh but I thought that was kind of a waste of flavour and texture. Unfortunately that meant I had the relatively nightmarish task of picking out the black seeds. You choose what you’re up for. Meanwhile, bring the sugar and water to the boil in a pan on the stove, without stirring, and let it bubble away till reduced by half (but not burnt). Once this is cooled, pour it into the watermelon puree, stir, and then tip the lot into an appropriate container and freeze till solid. What you want to do now – and again, not the simplest of tasks – is puree the now-frozen watermelon and syrup in the food processor, which breaks down any inevitable ice crystals. Finally, whisk the egg white till stiff and carefully fold it through the pureed sorbet, then pop it back in the freezer. Don’t be put off by the egg white step, you can’t taste it at all and it gives the sorbet a great texture. Plus you won’t need an ice-pick to scrape out a bowl of sorbet.

Et voila. Sunset-coloured summery goodness in a bowl is only 24 hours, six bowls, and a sticky food processor away. Don’t let that put you off though. Not only is this delicious, it’s also very pretty, and not entirely unhealthy. I imagine it would be fairly awesome if you blended it with vodka and quaffed it from margarita glasses. For those of you paddling through winter on the other side of the hemisphere, it is worth waiting for, although this stuff is so good that you might as well pay $16 for a watermelon flown in from Madagascar to make it. Indeed, you might think watermelon in its unadulterated state is quite refreshing enough, thank you, and to a certain -extent it is – the stuff is like solidified vitamin water. But for those times when you just can’t leave well alone…

I actually bought two watermelons from the market. Well, I bought them, Tim brought them home…a fair transaction, I feel. For my next trick, I used a sizeable portion of the second one to make this incredible salad from Forever Summer by my (unwitting) muse Nigella Lawson. The combination may sound a little unusual but it works. As if I was going to question Nigella.

Watermelon, Feta, and Black Olive Salad (serves 8)

1 small red onion (which I left out because I didn’t have one)
2-4 limes depending on juiciness
1.5 kilos ripe watermelon
250g feta cheese
a bunch each of fresh flat-leaf parsely and mint
3-4 T extra virgin olive oil
100g pitted black olives

Peel and halve the red onion and slice finely. Put the slices in a small bowl with the lime juice. Meanwhile, remove the rind from the watermelon and cut into smallish triangular chunks. Either slice or crumble the feta and put them both into a wide shallow serving bowl. Tear up the parsely and chop the mint and sprinkle both over, followed by the onions and their juice, the oil, and the olives. Mix it gently and season with black pepper if desired.

I can’t remember what I served this with, but it really was lovely – cold, crisp watermelon against soft, salty cheese and tangy olives.

So, if cultural experience was a cup of soymilk, mine would be running over right now. Firstly, I am so excited because the Wellington Fringe Festival has started and would you believe it – someone is putting on a production of Jonathan Larson’s (ie, he who penned RENT) incredible musical Tick…tick…BOOM! This is pretty big stuff for me. Remember, I’m the one who travelled at (surprisingly) great expense to both Levin and Palmerston North to see their local theatre groups’ respective productions of RENT. As well as that, I’m seeing the band ‘of Montreal’ later this month, then in March Tim and I are going to see painfully hip band The Kills (one of them is dating Kate Moss…yes, they’re that hip), and as previously mentioned last time, The Kings of Leon and The Who.
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Finally, and this is where it gets really silly, we are going to see Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin in their showcase for the Auckland International Arts Season in July. I mean, this is huge. LuPone is so legendary on Broadway that it hurts. Just Wikipedia her. She originated the role of Eva Peron in Evita and Fantine in Les Miserables, and was most recently making people weep with joy as Rose in the Gypsy revival. She has Tony awards coming out the wahzoo. She’s a diva of the first water. I really have no idea what she is doing coming to New Zealand to be honest, but what an opportunity. I’m so all a-flutter it’s no wonder I can barely decide what to make for dinner. Oh yeah, and Mandy Patinkin is pretty awesome too. He has been all over Broadway – including starring with Toni Collette and the late Eartha Kitt in Michael John LaChiusa’s short-lived but intense The Wild Party – but y’all will probably mostly know him for his role as Inigo “you killed my father, prepare to die” Montoya in The Princess Bride.

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It is pretty busy in Wellington this weekend. It was Waitangi Day on Friday, and because it was a public holiday Tim was working at Starbucks. Because it is a weekend Tim was also working yesterday and today. Not to make your frappuccino tangy with the taste of guilt or anything, work is good in these uncertain times and I’m happy with my own company…every weekend… Further to this there was the Rugby 7s, an international rugby thing (seriously, that’s about as specific as I can make it) which is, I understand, 3% about rugby and 97% an excuse for drunken men to dress up as Borat and beer wenches and invade town at great speed.
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Next time: will probably be something involving my new favourite toy – a small container of proper sweet smoked paprika. I’ve been meaning to buy it for ages but price put me off. Luckily for me there was a sale at Kirkcaldie and Staines and I got a tin for a song. Unfortunately the reason it was so cheap was because its best-before date is April. Whatevs, at the rate I’m going I don’t think it will be a problem. This stuff is addictive and leaves normal paprika in the dust in terms of flavour. Actually, what is normal paprika but red coloured dust? How have spice companies got away with misleading us so flagrantly for so long?

don’t you courgette about me

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If I have been quiet lately it’s only because every time I try to talk it sort of comes out as “lksjdflkjsdkfjjjjjblaaaaarg,” on account of the fact that I saw Neil Young and Leonard Cohen in concert within five days of each other. These two musicians have been such an important part of the soundtrack of my life, so to see them live? People, it was intense. I was pit spitting distance from Neil Young, due to some assertive and judicious manhandling of myself to the front of the audience. I barely sang along, I didn’t shriek, I just stood there, transfixed during his set. My obscenely expensive Leonard Cohen ticket yielded – mercifully – a very decent seat, and I actually cried when he sang “Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye” and “So Long Marianne.” But every time I tried to properly describe the concerts to someone, I simply couldn’t form coherent sentences. I couldn’t describe it. For someone as, you know, excessive with words as I am, this is something. Even now I’m just talking around it, so my basic summary is: they were both sublime. I can’t believe that I managed to see Rufus Wainwright, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young within the space of a year, in New Zealand of all places.

So courgettes are incredibly cheap at the markets right now, and they’re not only cheap, they’re big, substantially cucumber-esque in size. So over the last week or so they have been featuring heavily in what Tim and I have been eating.

Firstly, in the form of a George Forman-ed dinner (we received a grill from Tim’s parents for Christmas and have already used it a ridiculous amount), where I discovered the joy of tiger-striped grilled vegetables. Seriously, all you do is slice up the courgettes, slam them in the grill for a bit, and they’re done. No dishes, no fat, but those glorious stripes…To go with we had grilled chicken, that I’d dusted with ras-el-hanout spice mix, some wild rice, roasted capsicum, and a kind of salad – more of a sprinkle than a salad though – of kalamata olives, feta cheese, and chopped preserved lemon, from a stash that had been kindly made for me by my godmother. I’d never tried preserved lemon before but I’m quite addicted – they belong to that same sharp, salty taste family as capers and olives but with an intense, salty lemon hit that’s pretty exhilarating when paired with the quieter tastes of chicken and courgette.

Courgette risotto was the next night’s dinner, nothing revolutionary in the mix here – just garlic, arborio rice (I can’t afford anything more authentically Italian-sounding than that), vermouth, diced courgettes, vegetable stock. It has been a while since I’ve made a risotto and I forgot how long they take but I don’t mind the constant stirring, and the finished result was rich and toothsome. With more grilled courgettes on the side, because they look so profesh.

Obviously you can’t move at cafes these days without bumping into corn fritters, but I think there’s a good case for the courgette version being the superior of the two be-frittered vegetables. I found this recipe in Nigella Lawson’s seasonally appropriate (for me in New Zealand, anyway) Forever Summer and decided to make them after discovering that I actually had all the ingredients. Once you’ve got all the boring grating out of the way these are pretty straightforward, and so delicious, knocking the beyond-ubiquitous corn fritter into a cocked hat.

Courgette Fritters

Approx 750g courgettes
3-4 spring onions, finely chopped
250g feta cheese
handful each of fresh parsley and mint, chopped
1 T dried mint
1t paprika
140g plain flour
3 eggs

Grate the courgettes. This is annoying, I grant you. Also somewhat annoying is that you then have to put the grated shreds of courgette onto a clean teatowel and let them sit, so the towel can absorb excess (and there is indeed excess) courgette liquid. It’s not like it’s difficult, but you will end up with a green, damp teatowel, and no matter how hard you shake it over a bowl, some flecks of courgette will remain stuck to the towel fibres. Anyway, put the spring onions, crumbled feta (and you should probably know that I left out the onions and used about half that amount of feta because that’s what I had) and herbs into a bowl. Stir in the rest of the ingredients till combined. Heat a little oil in a frying pan (although I didn’t use any because I have a good nonstick pan) and drop heaped spoonfuls of the raggedy green batter into it, flattening with the back of a spoon as you go. Cook for about 2 minutes a side, I find those silicone spatulas really useful for turning them over. As these are lovely room temperature, don’t fret unduly about getting them to the table now.

Nigella recommends lime wedges to squeeze over. To which I say, go right ahead, if you don’t mind paying $19 per piece of dry, unjuicy fruit or whatever it is they’re charging for whatever is masquerading as the humble lime these days.

Full time work is keeping me busy, and it was in a flurry of excitement that I received my first ever business cars last week. I don’t know if it means I’m institutionalised or what, but it was so exciting seeing my name on the index card.

I’m hugely tired and I have – naturally -work tomorrow so here endeth my song. Next time: well, I bought a huge watermelon at the markets on the weekend and eagerly turned it into slushy, rose-pink sorbet, so that may well feature.

start me up

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First post of the new year! Well, if I can’t be fashionable, I might as well aim for fashionably late. I’ve been largely away from technology while on holiday, and then coming back into full time work has, funnily enough, kept me ridiculously busy. To be honest it was a little liberating being apart from my blog but now I’m ready to spend some quality time with the kitchen and slide back into blogging like a pair of old socks. Hopefully the ‘good writing’ section of my brain gets swiftly awoken, but in the meantime, to make up for all the no-blogging I bring two recipes that are flipping delicious.

Looks like I’m as adept as ever in the kitchen.

I found this recipe for chocolate beetroot cake in a Jill Dupleix book that I got for Christmas from Nanna a couple of years ago. I’ve professed my love for all things roast beetroot in the past, but was completely intrigued, nay, consumed with the idea of using it in a cake. I have to admit I used a drained can of beetroot, which is perhaps not what Dupleix had in mind, but hey ho, the finished product was delicious, without betraying any of its vegetable-y origins. And call me a freak, but butter, sugar, and pureed beetroot mixed together is…bizarrely good.

Chocolate Beetroot Cake, adapted from New Food by Jill Dupleix

I made quite a few changes – canned instead of fresh pureed beetroot, I used a food processor to make it, and I used 250g melted butter instead of a cup of oil because that’s how I roll.

1 cup cooked beetroot, pureed
1 1/2 cups castor sugar
250g butter, melted
1/2 cup good cocoa powder
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3 eggs

If you’re using canned beetroot, drain it and then puree it in the food processor (which will take a couple of goes, whizzing and spatula-ing) then add all the rest of the ingredients, blitz to a pinkish-brownish batter (once again, scraping down the sides with a spatula occasionally) and pour into a 23cm paper-lined cake tin. Bake at 190 for roughly 45 minutes.

Above: Seriously, there is no hint of beetroot in the finished product, but you’re left with a moist, surprisingly light, unthreateningly plain chocolate cake. It’s delicious. Don’t be afraid…

While wandering aimlessly through the revamped Moore Wilson’s Fresh (off Tory Street in central Wellington) on Sunday, it struck me that I haven’t eaten roast lamb in forever, so I purchased a goodly slab of it and made off home to cook my spoils. I also purchased a bottle of Moore Wilson’s fresh-squeezed orange juice, they literally have a guy there squeezing it for you. Once you’ve tried it, it’s difficult to go back to any other bottled orange juice. It’s so fresh you can practically feel the vitamin C coursing through your veins with every sip.

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Using a suggestion of Nigella’s, I rubbed the lamb in olive oil and ras-el-hanout, that utterly, ridiculously deliciously fragrant spice mix. I roasted it for an hour and a half at 210 C, basting occasionally. To go with, I made a salad from a book I got for Christmas from my godfamily that I’m quite wild to cook my way through: Christelle Le Ru’s French Fare..

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Salade d’Aubergine (I don’t think I need to translate this?)
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1 aubergine
1 shallot
2 T extra virgin olive oil
1 red pepper
1/2 bunch parsely
55g feta cheese


Preheat oven to 210 C (375 F) Prick the aubergine with a fork and wrap it in foil. Bake for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, roll the pepper in foil and bake for about 10 or 15 minutes. Halve the aubergine, remove the flesh (it shouldn’t be too hard to peel at this stage) and press the flesh very firmly in a sieve to remove any juice. Remove seeds from the pepper, and chop both vegetables relatively small. Peel and finely chop the shallot. Mix all the vegetables together with the olive oil and chopped parsely. Finally, season with salt and pepper and crumble over the feta cheese.

This deliciously summery salad, which is quite versatile – I used mint instead of parsely and scattered some chopped walnuts through – went marvelously with the lamb, in a sort of pseudo-Meditterranean way. For tonight’s dinner I stirred the leftover, chopped lamb into the leftover salad, to which I added more feta and walnuts, plus the seeds of half a pomegranate, and served it with some grilled courgettes and wild rice. The lamb itself was tender and pink and pastorally delicious, and maybe even nicer second time round…

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It’s not a bad time to be me lately: tomorrow a whole bunch of us are going to see The Arctic Monkeys, then on Thursday Tim and I fly up to Auckland for the Big Day Out festival on Friday (ie, omgaaaaaah NEIL YOUNG) and then the following Tuesday I am – have mercy – going to see Leonard Cohen. I finally caved and spent a rather frightening amount bidding online for a ticket to his sold out gig; I figured it was only money and a once in a lifetime experience, but don’t even try to ask me how much I purchased it for because I’ll nay tell ye.

Well, that wasn’t so taxing, so hopefully I can keep up this food blogging lark with more regularity than I did over the last couple of weeks. I hope all your 2009s are getting off to a cracking start and I look forward to getting back into reading all the other fab blogs out there!
Edit: Actually, this is taxing. I’ve tried for the last fifteen minutes to split up the paragraphs in this last section but they persist in messily squishing themselves together! Aaargh! *shakes fist furiously at blogspot*

Macaroon-age Daydream

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Apologies for the long gap between posts but I’m sure everyone else is just as busy as me if not wildly more so, what with the approaching Christmas and economy and global warming to worry about. Not helping is the fact that my computer has been monstrously slow of late. It took about five goes to upload my photos without the entire thing having a nervous breakdown, and you don’t even want to know how many frustrating minutes it took to even get to the point where I can type here. Using that same excuse, I apologise deeply if I haven’t been reading as many blogs as I should – I wish I could keep up with them all but my computer would require smelling salts and a cold compress. Now, seeing how this is the time of year that office parties and such become more prevalent, why not gaze upon this bowl of antioxidants as inspiration for what to do should you wish to engage in a little, um, oxidanting?

Above: You know that fruit that you get at markets sometimes that they sell for reeeally cheap because it needed to be eated ten minutes ago? Well I bought myself a bushel of the stuff on Sunday and using Nigella’s Antioxidant Fruit Salad from Nigella Christmas as a starting point, made myself an incredibly gorgeous breakfast. A slightly wilting mango was sliced into a bowl – the whole thing – followed by some strawberries, sliced and tumbled over, chopped mint from the garden and a handful of pomegranate seeds, lovingly harvested from a tupperware container in the freezer. Not pictured, but unbelievably essential, is a sprinkling of pistachio nuts, which gave the most fabulous contrast in textures and tastes, their waxy, almost chocolatey creaminess next to the zingy acidity of all that fruit. I added them at the last minute as an afterthought, but they completely made the salad.
Such are my mad domestic goddess skillz that I managed to whip up these chocolate macaroons while making the Christmas Dinner last week, obviously they aren’t the echt article from Pierre Hermes, you know, faint-makingly light, requires 19 egg whites, only 3 people worldwide know the recipe – these are rather unchic, stumpy little biscuits, but no less delicious.
I guess it’s fitting that such a quick and untaxing recipe comes from Nigella Express. I took them into the office the next day for a colleague’s birthday morning tea and they were, I’m immodestly proud to say, enormously popular. Of course, maybe people were just saying they like them because I was sitting right there. Who knows, they’re certainly easy enough to make so why not find out for yourself (although rigorous quality control in my kitchen proved that they were in fact fantastically good.)
Chocolate Macaroons
2 egg whites
200g ground almonds
30g cocoa powder
175g icing sugar
Heat oven to 200g C, and line a baking tray with paper or a silicone sheet. Mix the egg whites in a bowl with the rest of the ingredients till you have a sticky chocolatey mixture. As I said, this is very easy – no intrepid egg-white beating here. Roll the mixture into small balls and arrange on the baking tray. Bake for about 11 minutes although I took them straight out of the oven at about 8 or 9 minutes, that’s just because I get a bit nervous around biscuits – they always carry on cooking even when removed from the heat. They will be solidly chewy and densely chocolatey once cool, if you can wait that long, and are marvelous with coffee, ice cream, anything at all really.
On Monday, Tim and I went to the local Italian restaurant, Red Tomatoes, because with us both working full time and travelling round the place we’ve hardly seen each other. Red Tomatoes was recently on a New Zealand version of that Gordon Ramsey TV show where he goes into restaurants and swears a lot and then sorts out their problems. I’ve been to this place before a couple of times and it has definitely improved, in terms of decor, clarity of menu and staff attentiveness. The menu itself is not terribly adventurous, but this is not a bad thing, what is there is familiar and done well. The meals are still a little on the slow side, so don’t go there on an awkward first date. With Tim and I nattering away we barely noticed.
And the pizza is divine.

Thin, crisp, slightly chewy base…generous, piping hot toppings…lots of cheese…brilliant. Tim got the Meditteranean chicken and I got the Puttanesca and we swapped pieces as we went.

Can’t bond and connect emotionally, too busy eating own body weight in cheese.

As if cheese wasn’t exciting enough in its own right, the current economical crisis which had resulted in astronomically high prices for dairy means that eating cheese is now a hedonistic, decadently luxurious experience. They do say absense makes the heart grow fonder (and probably less clogged too, in this case.)
Next time: Who knows. Christmas is hot on my heels and I’ve barely done the dreaded but necessary shopping at all. I need a buffer month between November and December – who do you go to see about getting this sort of thing organised? And what could we call it – Lauratober?

Christmas Bells Are Ringing…

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So with all the feasting that ensued on the night of The Christmas Dinner, I entirely forgot to take a photo of the actual roast chickens. However, as the following photo essay demonstrates, there’s still plenty to see. I’m seriously exhausted, and it’s pretty late so I’m going to be dialogue-lite and let the pictures largely speak for themselves.

Above: I whipped up some pomegranate ice cream on Sunday morning, after I returned from the vege market. Literally – get it – Whipped? Cream? Okay, I told you I was tired, which is a perfectly legitimate excuse for dodgy puns.

Nigella keeps her pomegranates close and her cranberries closer. It’s a great thing that these berries are so expensive because she puts them in everything. Oh, I can’t be snide though because they really are rather Christmassy, the frozen ones looking like holly berries in thawing snow, and their fresh sourness can perk up otherwise heavy fare quite effectively.

Cornbread, Cranberry and Orange Stuffing (adapted from Feast)

This mixture is so delicious it almost didn’t make it into the chicken. Don’t for goodness sake be put off because you have to make cornbread first, it’s the easiest thing in the world and the recipe can be found here.

In a large pot, simmer 300g cranberries with the juice and zest of an orange. Add 125g butter slowly till it turns into a glossy, pinky-orange sauce, then crumble in the cornbread and stir to combine. When you’re ready to bake it, stir in 2 eggs and stuff your bird and roast, or spread it into a loaf tin and bake it at 180 for about 25 minutes.

Above: In front, Pear and Cranberry stuffing, and in the back, the cornbread stuffing. I may have made a bit extra so that they could stand in as another vegetarian dish. Inexplicably, I never liked stuffing as a child so you can see I am making up for lost time here.

I bought a brace of peppers at the market on Sunday morning and roasted them as soon as I got back. They seemed to just get silkier and more delicious as the day went on and were perfect served at room temperature, so the rich olive oil, clean fresh pomegranate, and salty caper flavours shone through vibrantly.

Chargrilled Peppers with Pomegranate (Nigella Christmas)

6 red and/or yellow peppers (although I got 7 to allow for muck-ups and nibbling-while-cooking)
Seeds from 2 pomegranates (although one is more than fine, Nigella)
2 T fresh pomegranate juice (just give the fruit a squeeze while seeding)
2 t lime or lemon juice
60ml extra virgin olive oil
15ml garlic olive oil
1/2 teaspoon Maldon sea salt
3 T drained capers


Set your oven to very, very hot – like 250 C. Cut the peppers in half, removing seeds and stalks, and place cut-side down on a baking tray. Roast in the oven till they blister – about 15 mins. Remove and carefully chuck them all into a bowl, quickly covering it with gladwrap till the peppers cool down considerably. From here it will be very easy to remove the skins – just pull them off. Tear the peppers into strips and place them in a serving bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Serve at room temperature. I made mine at about 11am and served it at 8pm, so it benefits from a bit of a sit. I just kept it covered and on the bench, although it won’t come to any harm in the fridge.

The involtini is another one that tastes best when it’s not piping hot. This turned out to be an amazing combination of flavours and textures, so much more than just a token vegetarian dish. There was hardly any left afterwards but what was there made for a luxe lunch the next day, microwaved for a bit and served with salad and leftover roast veges.

Above: The marvelously summery Sangria (and yes, we used those tacky plastic ice cube things…well, they’re practical! And this was hardly a classy joint to begin with.)

Poinsettia, a mix of cranberry juice, cointreau, and sparkling white wine (1 litre, 125 mls, and 750mls respectively) is an enchanting combination that completely owns Buck’s Fizz in terms of festive drinkability. Tip of the cap to Nigella, for all that she half-heartedly protests that she’s not much of a drinker, she can certainly navigate her way round a liquor cabinet.

The table! We managed to fit eight of us around it, not entirely comfortably though…

Above: The roasted pepper salad and boiled new potatoes with mint from our herb patch. Notice the gorgeous yellow bowl which was a Christmas present from the parents last year, and the beautiful Christmas crackers which were really way too classy for us. They contained real presents, like pens, corkscrews and measuring tapes. Nifty or what? True to form, as well as forgetting to photograph the chicken, I forgot to bring the parsnips out of the oven at all until after we finished the main course. They instead became a refreshing palate cleanser between meals, something to consider for your next dinner party perhaps…After dinner we played charming parlour games (well, we played Scattergories, is there a more satisfying game for bookish, wordy BA students to tackle?)

Drama! Tim is the only one in our flat capable of turning jelly out of a mould. He may be the only person in the world who can do it…perhaps we can never know.

The white chocolate almond cake was utterly gorgeous, although the problem with cakes that have white chocolate in them is that you quite often can’t actually taste the white chocolate as much as you’d like (who am I kidding, as much as I’d like.) So I upped the ante by drizzling over a melted milky bar, Jackson Pollock-styles (hey, I got an A in an essay about him in first year, I feel sufficiently qualified to pay homage to him via the medium of baked goods.) This is a fantastic cake for entertaining as you can make it in advance and it keeps beautifully, but looks rather impressive as far as puddings go. I’m not sure if it was supposed to rise much – or whether it has something to do with our oven – but the cake rose hugely then sunk, leaving a crevice that I filled with chopped pistachios (it was going to be silver cachous but they were $5.50 for a small cannister at New World – um, no thanks – and besides, the still-festive pistachios are actually pleasant to eat.)

Above: The official pudding table: the white chocolate almond cake, the “tortova”, pomegranate ice cream, red and green jelly, and strawberries, also virtuously purchased from the market. The chocolate torte turned out to be marvelous, somehow crisp and chewy at the same time and punctuated by welcome chunks of dark, dark chocolate.
It was altogether a fantastic meal shared with fantastic people, although it was such a shame that Emma couldn’t be there. She was however present in our minds and hopefully gets back to New Zealand asap safe and sound!
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In other news: I’m reading To Kill A Mockingbird. Tim found an old copy somewhere while dropping some stuff off at the Salvation Army, and I do love old books, (not those horrible shiny reissues with conceptual cover art) so he grabbed it for me. It was one of those that I knew I should have a look at one day, but the curmudgeon in me has this thing where the more a book is recommended to me, the more I stubbornly refuse to read it. I don’t know why, perhaps hype annoys me, but that’s certainly the reason I’ve never read The Kite Runner. Anyway, To Kill A Mockingbird is really very good, (she says condescendingly – didn’t it win the Pulitzer or somesuch?) I’m thoroughly enjoying it. I’ve also recently read Nigella Lawson’s unofficial biography, forwarded to me by the ever-thoughtful Linda. It is a cracking read, I think I devoured it in a day or two on my lunchbreaks at work but…it’s really not very well written. It quotes her cookbooks as though they were interviews – as though I don’t know them all word for word anyway – but it’s worth it for the luscious pictures of Nigella. What a beauty. I must say, it’s not a good book for the self esteem, as it constantly reiterates how goddess-like and creamy and striking she is and it can leave the reader feeling somewhat homely. I definitely recommend it for a bit of light reading though. Okay, this suddenly turned into Laura’s book corner, so I’d better get going…
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Next time: I attempt chocolate macaroons (the quick, chewy kind, not the faint-making Hermes kind) and make Ed Victor’s Turkey Hash with the scant leftover roasted chicken from the Christmas dinner.

Under Pressure

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A brief progress report on my last-minute preparations for the Christmas Dinner – which is tomorrow! – with no proper recipes yet because I don’t have time to type them out. Why? Tim and I are on our way to a seventies party. He’s dressing up as David Bowie, and after much pondering I’m going to be glam-rocking it up myself. I say pondering because it was surprisingly difficult to figure out what to dress up as (after Tim beat me to being Bowie that is). I mean, if I go as Charlie’s Angels-era Farrah, I look like Laura in trousers. If I go as Debbie Harry, I look like Laura in a dress. It goes on. I’d probably make a convincing Stevie Nicks, but I’m not a Fleetwood Mac fan and I have this feeling that you should be somehow committed to what you’re dressing up as. Stevie Nicks certainly seemed to be.

Anyway, that’s not what you came here for – you came for the close-up photos of foodstuffs! But before I get into that, we’ve had some slightly unsettling news that Emma – the gluten-free flatmate – is stuck in Bankok due to the shootings at the airport that you have probably heard about in the news. She’s on holiday there and was supposed to come back a few days ago – and then she was supposed to come back today – and now she’s not going to be back till next Wednesday. We’re all a bit nonplussed, and it’s not going to be the same without her, but the point is that she is completely safe where she is and that the show goes on.

Have I mentioned this before? You could get rapidly and dangerously inebriated if you played a little game called “Have a drink every time Nigella mentions the word ‘pomegranate’ in her latest book.” Pomegranate farmers the world over must fall on their knees and weep gratefully for Nigella because without her, the market would crumble. I know I myself, at her insistence, bought two of the oft-mentioned fruit from last week, and bashed out the seeds to freeze for later use. I couldn’t resist taking a photo of the shiny, ruby-like seeds first because they really are every bit as pretty as Nigella says. Tomorrow they will be sprinkled, with capers, onto roasted capsicum following a recipe from the aforementioned Nigella Christmas.

Today I made the involtini from Nigella Bites, and it is now stashed in the fridge ready for baking tomorrow afternoon. Although it’s quite an involved recipe – frying the eggplant slices, making the filling, rolling them up, saucing everything – it’s nothing too difficult. I adapted the recipe somewhat, only in the name of laziness – instead of making a simmered tomato sauce for these eggplant parcels, I just upended a couple of tins of chopped tomatoes over them. I’m sure Nigella would approve.

The filling, by the way, is a nubbly mix of bulghur wheat (although I substituted quinoa), feta cheese, pistachios, garlic, cinnamon and oregano. It’s bound with an egg, but I daresay without that it would make a lovely salad.

Above: Speaking of things Nigella would approve of, once it has the sauce poured over and is sprinkled with more feta and pistachios, the colours of this dish are entirely appropriate to Christmas. Doesn’t it look pretty?

Above: And of course, there’s pudding. I didn’t end up taking many photos of the making process of these because both puddings involve stressful beating of egg whites (I know, I am my own worst enemy) and I didn’t want to mess around taking photos and risk the whole lot going disastrously wrong. So all we have as proof of the White Chocolate Almond Torte – well, so far – is this picture of partially melted white chocolate. Due to my well-documented love of white chocolate it will come as no surprise that I had great difficulty refraining from burying my face in this bowl.

There’s chocolate in the other pudding – the Other Torte infact – although someone did suggest “tortova” which I think is rather sweet. This is one that you need to prep in advance for, because there’s a lot of chopped things involved – dark chocolate, walnuts, biscuits (luckily gluten-free biscuits crumble like, well, gluten-free biscuits) and dried apricots. All these are folded into a glossy meringue made from four egg whites, spread carefully into a lined 23cm caketin and baked at 180 C for about half an hour, then left to cool in the oven. I haven’t actually tasted it yet obviously so I can’t vouch for its deliciousness but it certainly smelled marvelous as it crisped up.


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I did snag a quick photo of the mix though – the things I do for you! Meringue can be a fickle beast to deal with and I certainly didn’t want to tempt fate by setting up several shots here. It waits for no one and needs to get into the oven without delay.

Next time you hear from me, the Christmas Dinner for 2008 will be over and – *faints* – it will be December already. With any luck there will also be amusing photos of Tim and I dressed up as glam rock scallywags. Actually, the nature of his multicoloured spandex jumpsuit ensures that all photos will be amusing.