Category: Nigella Lawson

house of the rising bun

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While in my last post I extolled the joys of the five-day Easter weekend, I spent this whole week at work scrambling to get up to speed with everything. Hence, my lack of presence round here. The intention was definitely there, but the time didn’t materialise. Anyway the upshot of this is that if the food blogging world was a party, my hot cross buns would be Kate Moss, arriving scandalously late and with a fabulous rockstar on their arm, making everyone else wish they’d dared to be so louche and devil-may-care.

At least that’s what I tell myself.

As well as my seasonal buns, you can also look forward to a surprising amount of cafe reviews and a little shoutout to myself for being born upon a particular day (yesterday, if you’re wondering).

To provide a bit of context, I made my initial batch of hot cross buns on Easter Sunday. I’d just flown back to Wellington from Auckland where I saw The Winter’s Tale. It was a spellbinding production, for a three hour play it flew by and stellar performances were delivered by all, despite the fact that the theatre was far from full (cough ‘economic climate’ cough). I’ll be frank, I wasn’t wildly taken with Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet (and much less taken with Julia Stiles’ Ophelia) but in The Winter’s Tale he was fabulous, playing his character like the lovechild of Bob Dylan and Captain Jack Sparrow. But Shakespearean.

Before I went up to Auckland I scoured through my Cuisine magazines and sussed out where some fun foodie shops were so I could hunt them down and possibly part company with a business card or two for my blog while spending time and money therein. The fates (and possibly stupidity) were against me as I just couldn’t find a bus to Mt Eden, where said shops were located. I can’t say it served to endear the city to me, however I did spend a happy hour or so at the art gallery taking in the delightful Yinka Shonibare exhibition.

I also met a friend at Alleluya Cafe in St Kevin’s Arcade on Karangahape Road. Apparently it is the sort of place that attracts the sort of people that attracts the sort of words like “hipster” and “scene”, but it wasn’t intimidatingly so when I arrived on Saturday afternoon. My coffee, a long black, didn’t arrive but the guy behind the counter looked so shocked – nay, crestfallen, when I told him I’d been waiting for a while that I didn’t harbour any animosity, especially when it finally arrived with a complimentary biscotti and was the smoothest, mellowest black coffee I’ve had in forever. My friend and I shared a slice of lemon yoghurt cake, which was pleasant, and a piece of Jewish ginger cake, which was way good and still haunts my dreams a week later.

Alleluya Cafe
St Kevin’s Arcade, K’Rd, Auckland CBD
09-377 8424
Verdict: Ignore the sneaking suspicion that you’re not cool enough to be there because the coffee is gorgeous and it was worth the plane fare for that Jewish ginger cake alone.

Back in familiar Wellington and on a Shakespeare high, I got stuck into the joyful task of making hot cross buns following Nigella’s recipe from Feast. Everything was going well until the final hurdle. I burnt the sodding things. Considering they took the better part of the afternoon I was mightily unhappy, but I could only blame myself for letting them bake for too long.

Having said that it took only a bare amount of convincing to make another batch the next day. Upon closer inspection the burnt buns were still salvageable – I cut off and discarded all the severely blackened parts, bagged the lot up and put it in the freezer, where they will one day become the base of a warm, spicy bread and butter pudding. I can’t wait. For round two I tried an Alison Holst recipe, partly because I was intrigued by her method and partly because there’s something suspiciously trustworthy about her.

Hot Cross Buns

As I said, the method is a little unusual but don’t be scared – it’s seriously easy and the finished buns have a marvellous texture.

1 cup milk
½ cup hot water
2 T sugar
4 tsps/1 sachet active dried yeast
2 cups high grade strong bread flour
100g soft butter
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon salt
1 T mixed spice
1 T cinnarmon
1 t ground cloves
1 cup currants/sultanas
2-3 cups high grade strong bread flour

Place the first four ingredients into a large bowl, making sure that the liquid is neither too warm nor too cold before you add the yeast. Stir in the first measure of flour, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and leave in a warm place to rise. This won’t take a heck of a long time – maybe half an hour.

Meanwhile, cream the butter and sugar together, add the egg, salt, spices and dried fruit. Following a suggestion of Nigella’s I added some cardamom seeds here which worked beautifully. The spices get really diluted in the dough so don’t worry about the fact that the measurements look large. When the original mixture has doubled in size and is looking spongy, mix in the fruit mixture and the second measure of flour. Knead till it comes together in a springy ball, then form into 16-24 buns. Arrange on a paper-lined tray, cover with plastic wrap and leave to rise, which they should do significantly. Don’t leave them for too long – trust your eyes.
Alison recommends a mixture of flour, butter and water rolled into thin strips for the crosses but I found that they tended to fall off after baking. Anyway, brush the buns with milk and lay the crosses o’er them. Bake uncovered at 225 C for 10-12 minutes till browned lightly.

Well Alison, you win this time. These hot cross buns were immensely delicious, filling the kitchen, as with many kitchens across the world, with a warm, cinnamony scent, like a hug in perfume form. I flagrantly added a handful of chocolate chips to the dough and…I liked it. A lot.

Needless to say, they were at their best still warm from the oven and liberally buttered. I’m thinking this recipe is definitely a keeper and would like to make these buns in other forms – without the crosses – throughout the year, as the basic recipe is too good to keep confined to one day in April.

Speaking of one day in April, yesterday was my birthday and I gotta say, I didn’t have high expectations. I almost forgot that it was coming up – it felt as though it was a shadowy date in the vague distance as opposed to being on the immediate agenda – and I’ve had a hearty cough getting the better of me this week, not to mention the fact that I was working. Nevertheless it turned out to be one of the nicest self-anniversaries I’ve had in a long time. Everyone at work was lovely – there were balloons and flowers on my desk, a coffee appeared out of nowhere, I was taken out to lunch and a homemade banana cake replete with candles was produced at the beginning of a three hour meeting in the afternoon, all completely unexpectedly. Extended family members from home sent me a kitchen blowtorch, which I’m quite wild to use on a crème brulee pronto, I had cards sent from dad and my great-aunty, and there were text-messages a-plenty. Mum, who is in Argentina, put a video of her charming classroom singing Happy Birthday to me in Spanish and English. With all of that it’s amazing I wasn’t weeping sentimentally the whole day. In case you are wondering, I am now 23, which is hopefully still young enough to be ‘interesting’ as a food blogger.

After work Tim and I bought a bottle of cheap red and found this adorable middle Eastern BYO called Casablanca to quaff it in. The service was perfect, the food was cheap, plentiful and fast, and the atmosphere was delightful. It’s not very fancy, but it’s fun, and the food tastes comfortingly home-made as opposed to assembled. A small plate of complimentary bread and dips appeared after we sat down, and we were asked if we were ready for our mains to be made after we finished our starters, both nice little touches that made the dining experience that much better. I wish I’d had my camera to take a photo of my taboulleh which was particularly delicious – full of verdant, fresh parsely and juicy tomato.

Casablanca
18 Cambridge Tce (off Courtenay Place)
Wellington CBD
04-384 6968
Verdict: It’s not the Logan Brown but it’s probably more fun (unless some kind benefactor wants to shout me dinner there and refute this opinion). The menu could charitably be described as succinct, but what’s there is nicely done. I can definitely see myself returning.

From there we spent a significant amount of time at one of my favourite haunts in town, a themed bar called Alice, tucked away down an unassuming side road off Tory Street. You tunnel through a quiet, curtained corridor and emerge into a softly-lit, split level room which seeks to recreate some kind of Alice in Wonderland experience. The drinks are expensive but classy and potent, and you can make them worth your while if you get one of the cocktails for two which comes in a teapot. The bar is much lower than the floor itself which adds to the surreal effect and there are framed illustrations from the novel and distorted mirrors everywhere. I’m not describing it very well but it’s a great place to sit for hours having cosy discussions about things that seem very important at the time, which is exactly what we did.

After concluding that the only way we’d get away with sitting there any longer would be to spend a small fortune on another cocktail, we decided to hightail it out of there for a fortifying coffee. I have to say, betraying my country village background maybe, that personally there is something hugely exciting about getting a coffee or a bite to eat late at night – it makes me feel deliciously sophisticated and worldly, and of course by being so excited about it instantly renders me distinctly un-sophisticated. But there you have it. We chose to patronise Deluxe, which is apparently something of a Wellington institution. It has so far always passed me by, because it’s only fairly recently that I’ve had more of an income to spend recklessly on coffee from funky cafes.

Deluxe is hugely popular in Wellington, even at 11.00pm we had to strain to find a table. I’ll be honest, our coffee wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, but I suspect this was due to the fact that it was late at night and we’d had a couple of drinks and were therefore perhaps not a priority for quality control. Which is a shame, if this is true, but it’s better than the idea that their coffee is generally below average, yes? I’ve certainly had worse, and the delicious chocolate brownie that Tim and I shared raised our opinion of the place. We sat there for about half an hour, pretending to be hipsters as we drank our late night black coffee and chuckled over the pithy content in Vice magazine. I think I’ll definitely try Deluxe again, as 11.00pm on a Friday night is hardly condusive to a thorough, well thought critique of a café.

Deluxe
10 Kent Terrace (Next to the glorious Embassy Theatre)
04 801 5455
Verdict: This place probably is too cool for us, but that won’t stop me returning to give it a proper scrutiny. As it is, my opinion doesn’t matter since it is constantly packed with customers.

This morning Tim and I met with our friend Dr-to-be Scotty at Roxy Café. I hastily snapped some photos of what we ate, the images aren’t great but the food was. Special mention must be made about the hash browns, which were large, crunchy without and deliciously potato-ey within, and quite the nicest that I’ve had in a long time. Good friends and hash browns is a winning combination and we had a lovely morning talking smack with Scott.

Above: My French Toast with fresh fruit (and I ordered a hash brown on the side.) The toast itself was great, and generous at three pieces, although I felt that the chopped apple, pear and banana that made up the bulk of my “fresh fruit” was a little cheap, could they not have stretched to a stone fruit or something? The hash brown was fantastic.

Above: Tim and Scott ordered big breakfasts with extra hash browns. According to Tim his poached egg was perfect, and of course you already know about the hash browns at this place. Although I was comfortably full after my meal, I found myself looking wistfully at the small but intriguing lunch menu, which features some delicious sounding choices. The service was fine, I like that they brought out a carafe of water right away, and the cafe itself was a cool and airy respite from the heat of the outside world this morning.

Roxy Cafe
203-205 Cuba St
Wellington City
04-890 3939
www.roxycafe.co.nz
Verdict: All I can think about right now is their hash browns. This place is very nice and I’d definitely like to try it out again, the pricing is pretty reasonable so this shouldn’t be an issue. They get an extra star for serving butter on a little dish with the big breakfasts. This sort of behaviour is to be encouraged.
If you made it through all that then congratulations. And I mean really reading it, not just looking at the pictures. There’s gold in them thar paragraphs.

Next time: While up in Auckland I bought a fabulous Italian cookbook which I’ve already delved into and of course you know how excited I am about my kitchen blowtorch. I forsee a creme brulee on the horizon…

viva las veges

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It’s the miracle of life! I have borne fruit! (well, a vegetable, to be precise)

To grow you is to love you.

It seems I can’t pick up a magazine or lifestyle section of a newspaper without some recessionista sighing smugly about how they are positively overrun with their homegrown zucchini and if they have to eat another fritter they will just die. Tim and I, with all the best intentions, embraced our inner hippies and exchanged a large amount of coin for various packets of seeds, a bag of potting mix, a pair of gloves that make your hands chafe and a trowel that bends at the slightest pressure. Three months of tenderly weeding our little garden, gently throwing coffee grounds and potassium-rich banana peels at it in the anticipation of a bounty of zucchini, beetroot and runner beans…

And our impotent, nutrient-deficient soil threw forth one, solitary sodding zucchini.

I couldn’t be prouder. Okay, so gardening isn’t as easy as every chatty columnist claims it is, (I mean, exactly where are our beans and beetroot?) but the endorphin increase I got from this single vegetable must equal a positively delirious hallucinogenic head rush if you actually manage to harvest an actual garden of edible goodies. So we’re planning to buy some more seeds and start again – the grow must go on…

The zucchini was sliced lovingly and went into a ratatouille to accompany the above roasted chicken on Sunday night. I had a feeling that I hadn’t eaten meat in forever and needed to remedy this immediately by consuming the sort of protein you just can’t get from lentils. When we do eat meat I want it to be good. Luckily the chicken I purchased from Moore Wilson’s was tender and fleshy and tasted like the happiest ex-bird ever to socialise and dust-bathe in its natural environment.

While I was being unorthodox, and continuing with the homegrown theme, I thought I might as well make some flatbread to mop up the chicken and ratatouille juices. I don’t know about you, but if the gap between the present moment and when I last made bread grows too wide, I become a little antsy. Making bread is just something I really enjoy – watching the unlikely mixture of flour and liquid come together as I knead it, the slow swelling of the yeasted dough, and the incredible smell it imparts as it bakes. To say nothing of the ridiculously wonderful taste of it hot from the oven (with butter, thank you…)

I’ve made this recipe a couple of times before, it’s a very easy dough to work with and while home-made flatbreads aren’t perhaps as visually rewarding as a proudly towering traditional loaf of bread, they are just as delicious and make a meal feel like a feast.

Garlic and Parsely Hearthbreads adapted from How To Be A Domestic Goddess, by Nigella Lawson.

500g bread flour
1 sachet (7g) instant yeast
1 tablespoon nice salt (if you’re using iodised table salt, halve this amount)
300-400mls warm water
5 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat oven to 190 C. Combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl, then stir in the water and oil. Stir to combine then knead till it becomes a soft, springy dough, which I find happens quite quickly with this particular recipe. Form into a ball, wash out and dry the bowl, tip in a little olive oil and turn the ball of dough in it before covering it with clingfilm and leaving it to rise for an hour or so. Meanwhile, trim the tops off two large heads garlic, dribble with a little olive oil and wrap loosely in tinfoil, then pop n the oven to cook for about 45 minutes. If you sit the bowl of dough on top of the warm oven it will aid the rising process.

Once the dough is sufficiently risen, punch it down and leave it while you remove the garlic from the oven and turn it up to 200 C. Divide the dough in two and press each out into a large, roughly oblong shape (you will need two lined baking trays for this) Prod them with your fingers to make dimple marks and cover them with a teatowel and allow to prove for about 20 minutes. Meanwhile, Nigella recomends blitzing the cloves of garlic (squeezed out of their skins) and a good bunch of flat leaf parsely in the food processor but you might find it easier just to chop it all together. Mix in a little olive oil either way, and spread this fragrant mixture across the dough.

Bake for 20 minutes or so until the breads are golden brown and cooked.

These are unbelievably delicious.

Is it slightly obscene that the two of us ate roughly one and three quarters of these enormous flatbreads on Sunday night?

I’ve also been doing a bit of baking. I like to keep the old tin full at all times in case of any unexpected dips in blood sugar from The Diabetic One, but I just like to bake selfishly for its own sake too, to be honest.

I found this recipe in the February/March edition of the magazine Essentially Food. It can be hit and miss in terms of content, but it’s improving and they are really worth sifting through because there’s almost always a couple of brilliant recipes in there. This is one of them – Belgian Slice. I don’t know if y’all around the world get Belgian biscuits which are essentially two small spicy cookies bound with jam and bearing a disc of pink icing. What they have to do with the nation of Belgium is beyond me – perhaps they’d be more appropriate if they smelled of fine beer and were sandwiched together with aioli, but who am I to question culinary history? This following recipe is infinitely easier, combining the flavours of Belgian biscuits in non-threatening slice form.

Belgian Slice

120g butter
120g sugar
1 egg
1 Tablespoon golden syrup

2 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons mixed spice
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup raspberry jam

Preheat oven to 170 C. Cream the butter and sugar, then add the egg and beat well. Mix in the golden syrup and then the dry ingredients. Press the mixture into a baking paper lined swiss roll tin and spread carefully and evenly with the jam. Bake for 20-25 minutes.

Essentially Food recommends covering it with pink-tinted icing before sprinkling over raspberry flavoured jelly crystals but as I didn’t have any in the house, I compensated by adding raspberry flavouring to the pink buttercream instead.

There’s something about the refined, spiced biscuit underneath and the garish, artificially flavoured buttercream and the contrasting textures of each that is both comforting and strangely delicious. Like a culinary crossroads between “childish” and “grown-up” flavours.

I’m really tired this week, all this going out to gigs and such is kind of catching up on me. My feet are bruised from being constantly stood on in audiences and my neck ached all last week from craning my neck (being undertall, I was doing this quite a lot…) The Kills last Wednesday were great fun, I was right up in the front and could practically grope their achingly hip, Kate Moss-dating ankles. However being up the front meant we were dealt a terrific mauling due to the extremely vigorous jostlings of the audience. We emerged feeling like potatoes that had been pressed through an expensive ricer (well those weren’t Tim’s exact words). At Kings Of Leon on Friday it wasn’t much better, even though we were considerably further back. They were in cracking good form and handsome as ever, even though they didn’t talk as much as they did at their concert last year. The next big thing on my horizon is the production of The Winter’s Tale, directed by (gasp!) Sam Mendes, up in Auckland and Sylvie Guillem back here in Wellington later next month. I think I can confidently say that watching Shakespeare and ballet should be fairly moshpit-free.
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In other news, (self-pimping alert here) I’ve been asked by menumania.co.nz to write for their blog. Check out my first post by clicking —————> here. I’m still finding my feet with the direction I want my posts to take but it’s fun to stretch myself and certainly an honour to be noticed and invited!
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Next time: Bearing in mind that what I say will happen next time often bears little relation to what actually happens next time…I have this pie recipe I really want to try from an old edition of the gorgeous Cuisine magazine. Watch this space.

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?