Category: Nigella Lawson

johnny all she does is lies

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If there’s one thing I’ve learned about cornbread (apart from the fact that I really really love it) it’s this: the only way to take an oven-hot slab of cornbread with a two-by-four sized slice of butter melting quietly on top and make it more fun, is to transform it into pancakes.

The mighty Nigella Lawson has this recipe for Johnnycakes in How To Be A Domestic Goddess, and while Wikipedia reckons the name of this American creation was adapted from ‘journey cakes’ I’d like to think there was an original Johnny, who wanted to blaze trails by combining the golden grittiness of cornbread with the circular fun-ness of a pancake. I was away up in Rotorua over the weekend (plus chasing the hour lost in Daylight Saving) but I managed to cobble these together without any trouble for a late lunch when I landed back in Wellington on Sunday afternoon. This recipe is forgiving – only a few Johnnycakes turned out bung, either buckling or sticking to the pan – the rest obediently slid onto the spatula and flipped over easily.

This one’s for you, generous, possibly non-existent Johnny.

Johnnycakes

From Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess.

  • 150g fine cornmeal/polenta
  • 100g plain flour
  • 4 teaspoons baking powder (gotta admit I was all “really? four?” about this, and put in only three teaspoons)
  • 2 teaspoons sugar
  • pinch salt
  • 2 eggs
  • 300mls milk
  • 30g butter

Stir together the dry ingredients in a bowl, then whisk in everything else till you have a thick, yellow batter (don’t worry about any small lumps.) Heat an oiled griddle or pan and drop tablespoons-ful into it. Once they’re thoroughly bubbled on top, carefully turn them over to cook on the other side. Transfer to a plate and cover with tinfoil till you’re finished.

When I was a kid I always impressed by those Disney movies where a character would have a whole stack of pancakes with butter and maple syrup on top, and then eat the stack all at once with a knife and fork. I’m sure it was Disney movies anyway, it must have happened a lot in order to stick in my brain like that… Johnnycakes are too stubby for this practice, so I unstacked them after these photos and ate them the best way – two sandwiched together with maple syrup.

While there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from making actual cornbread or actual pancakes, both being more practical in their own special ways, Johnnycakes are so good that it’s worth a bit of potentially dubious fusion (fusious?). The cornmeal gives a textural presence to the Johnnycakes which the average pancake sometimes lacks (like chewing through a foam rubber camping mattress if you’re unlucky) and you get a hearty jolt of bright yellow cheeriness without the need for pesky e-numbers, useful if you’re the sort of person who gets nervous around them. Their lightly perforated surface is an ideal conduit for ferrying lots of butter into the mouth. They’re slightly sweet and very light, and work with both savoury and sweet stuff on the plate. How To Be A Domestic Goddess is amazing – the Johnnycake recipe being just one example of the gems to be found within its pages. If you’re casually thinking about getting into baking intensely good food, you couldn’t do much better than finding this book.

Funnily enough when I last blogged about cornbread-related issues I was thinking about what my favourite food was in case I got asked in an interview with a cool magazine. A girl can dream, but nothing wrong with dreaming in a hubristically prepared kinda manner, right? Anyway this morning I had the mighty good fortune to have my first ever radio interview over the phone with Charlotte Ryan on 95bFM’s Morning Glory show. With the job I’m in I try to keep relatively non-partisan about NZ media but Morning Glory has most definitely been a favourite of mine for a while now. It was the first time I’d ever been on the radio (although I have this memory of requesting some Nirvana song from the late Channel Z years back) and I was nervous as, but Charlotte was so nice that I rambled away quite happily, sharing this recipe, my tooth-rattling nervousness while the endless intro song played through the phone forgotten. I’ll post a link to the podcast when it’s up so you can listen if you like. Just before I got the call I realised I might be asked what I love about cooking. I had this frenzied moment of panic where my mind blanked and the closest thing to a coherent sentence about why I loved cooking was “there’s so much deliciousness in this world and I like making it happen in front of me”. Luckily that specific question didn’t come up. An enormous thanks to Charlotte and bFM for having me on the show, the excitingness of it all can’t be underplayed, truly.

Title via: Salmonella Dub’s cautionary tale Johnny from their 1998 album Killervision. I have a feeling this was the first song of theirs I ever heard.

Music Lately:

Late Sunday afternoon Tim and I went to Embassy theatre to see a special screening of Hair. Having seen the movie before, I knew it’s pretty painful in places (and cuts out some of my favourite tracks – it’s gratifying to know that the creators of the musical it’s based on hated it) but I love the source music intensely, and I like having the opportunity to see a musical on the big screen. One flawless moment in all the awkwardness is Cheryl Barnes singing Easy To Be Hard. Heartfelt – not just belting for the sake of it (although if I could sing I’d be melisma-ing up a storm, daily) it’s one of my favourite recordings of this track. Apparently she did it in one take.

While we’re down the flawless lady/Hair road, and I’ve probably linked to this before, but here’s Nina Simone singing Ain’t Got No/I’ve Got Life, taking two songs from Hair and sieving them together to create something incredible. Her vibrato-y voice delivers the lyrics in her incomparable way (by incomparable, I mean I haven’t come up with a word to describe how good it is) over a fantastic music arrangement while her dinner-plate sized earrings sway.

Also: while I was up in Rotorua Tim went to see Lil Band O’ Gold at San Francisco Bath House. Apparently they played for two and a half hours and were seriously awesome.

Next time: I’m a Nigella lady to the core, but tried my first ever Delia Smith recipe last week, and that’s probably what I’ll put up next.

 

give peas a chance

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So long since my last update – sorry you were stuck with that badly-exposed brisket for ages. I was in Hamilton over the weekend for the Smokefreerockquest finals and arrived back in Wellington on Sunday afternoon feeling very tired and still a bit blah that I’d missed Tim’s birthday on Saturday. I really wanted to stumble into bed, but dinner needed sorting and after a weekend of hastily grabbed dinner (specifically: pineapple lumps and a packet of ready salted chips) I didn’t want to get take-out. Tired, uninspired, and with not much in the cupboard, I turned to Nigella’s seminal text How To Eat, feeling instinctively (and maybe a little overdramatically) that it would provide the answer.

 
Sure enough, after some aimless page-flipping her Pea Risotto stopped me. Rice. Frozen peas. Got them both. Not to mention, Nigella quite often bangs on about the soothingly zen properties of exhaustedly stirring a risotto into starchy submission, which significantly adds to the glamour of making dinner while half asleep.
 
I didn’t have any of the required parmesan cheese, so instead I added a few strips of lemon zest and a handful of peppery rocket to provide a similar kick. I normally feed my risottos with butter, but with the lack of parmesan I decided instead to use extra virgin olive oil instead and make the whole thing vegan. I’m pretty sure the fact that I met an incredibly good looking vegan on the weekend has nothing to do with it – but who knows what decisions are secretly made by our subconscious.
 
 
My subconscious is reminding me that I can’t lie: these photos was taken the next morning before I went to work. Once I’d finished snapping I scraped all the cold rice into an empty Tupperware container and took it to work for lunch. I even placed that pea deliberately on the fork. It’s just that we were watching a documentary when I was making the risotto the night before and the lights were all off – not healthy photography settings. So the next day I recreated our dinner from the leftovers. If my photography can’t be honest, at least I am, right?
 
This is a very simple dinner but devastatingly good – creamy rice, bright green peas bursting with their pea-flavour (can anyone effectively describe the flavour of a pea? At this stage: not I). Yes, there’s a lot of stirring but think like Nigella and wallow in the romance of it all.
 
As well as removing the dairy aspect of this risotto, I also made a few other slight tweaks. I had no fresh nutmeg so left it out. Instead of heating up stock, I crumbled in half a porcini stock cube (my favourite, all-purpose flavour) and had a pan of hot water simmering next to the pan of rice. Rather than pureeing the peas I just divided them into two small bowls, mashing one half with a fork while leaving the other plain. I had no vermouth or white wine so went daringly cross-country and splashed in some Sake instead, which worked perfectly – its warm, ricey depth of flavour naturally complementing the rice it was absorbed into. I can’t pretend like I don’t think good carnaroli rice tastes a million times nicer than the bland gluggy Sun Rice arborio from the supermarket but I’m also lucky enough to be in a position to choose between rices (don’t get me wrong – good rice isn’t cheap, but there are other areas I don’t spend my money…so.) You do what works for you.
 
 
Pea Risotto
 
Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat
 
60g butter (or more! Or olive oil)
150g frozen peas
Approximately 1 litre stock
Freshly grated nutmeg
1 small onion or shallot
200g arborio or Carnaroli rice
80mls white wine or vermouth
lemon zest and rocket, to serve 
Melt half the butter in a pan and add the peas, cooking for a couple of minutes. Remove half the peas, and to the pan add about half a cup of stock. Simmer till the peas are very soft, remove and puree along with a tablespoon each of parmesan and butter and a pinch of nutmeg, or if you don’t have the energy, mash roughly with a fork. You should now have an empty pan and two small bowls of peas, one solid, one not.
 
Finely chop the onion and melt some more butter in the pan. Cook the onion, stirring occasionally, till golden and soft. Add the rice and stir “till every grain glistens with the oniony fat” as Nigella says. Pour in your wine – or sake! – and allow it to absorb. Now here comes the commitment. Add a ladleful of hot stock (or hot water if you’ve crumbled in a good stock cube like me) and continue to stir till absorbed. Repeat. And again. And then some more. You can’t rush it, you can’t walk away. Just keep stirring, watching the rice slowly expand and absorb all the liquid. After about ten minutes, return the whole peas to the pan and continue to slowly add hot liquid. When you’re satisfied that it’s done (taste as you go) stir through the pea puree and as much butter or extra virgin olive oil as you want. Divide between two plates and sprinkle with parmesan if you like, or lemon zest and rocket as I did. 
 
 
As I said, this is simple food, but very, very good – soft, dense granules of rice studded with Elphaba-green peas. Very easy to eat curled up in a chair, feeling better about the world with every mouthful. The scent of sake hitting a hot pan is something else – I can almost taste its savoury, buttery aroma just thinking about it. The porcini stock cubes add a subtly earthy flavour and the peas have their green sweetness. And it’s all absorbed by the rice. Positively meditative stuff. 
Title via: John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, I know it’s a sorry pun but I’ve got the “I’m tired” card and I’m putting it on the table right here. Plus, you really should give peas a chance. They’re awesome as far as vegetables go.
Music lately:
 
Spotted a tweet from the mighty DJ Sirvere on Sunday inviting people to share their favourite Jay Z guest spot. Not an expert on this but my mind immediately presented me with his appearance in Mariah Carey’s Heartbreaker. Which then spiralled into hours of unproductive inactivity. Oh sure I blame the tiredness, but I haven’t listened to Mariah in years and with one click of the mouse I was riding the Mariah Carey Love Train all the way through youtube. Highlights included the delicious Can’t Let Go, Honey (Bad Boy Remix) this reminds me of when MTV Europe was briefly on our TVs, One Sweet Day with Boyz II Men (slathers you with emotion like I slather butter on toast) and Thank God I Found You with Nas and Joe. I don’t often like power ballads, and endless impressing upon the listener about how in love they are isn’t usually my thing either but what can I say. Mariah is flawless.
 
I Aint Mad At Cha by Tupac, from All Eyez On Me. Yesterday was 14 years since Tupac was shot. There’s no right age to have someone take your life…but he was only 25.
 
So, The Good Fun were the winners of the Smokefreerockquest on Saturday night – check out footage of them performing their song Karaoke for the sell-out crowd. I liked all the finalists in their own way but The Good Fun definitely have an out-of-nowhere zany awesomeness – I hope they go far.
Next time: It’ll be the Grumble Pie that I promised for this time round. Photographed at night right before it was eaten, even. Also, right now: Happy birthday, Mum! 

in cyberland we only drink diet coke

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When I tweeted on the Twitter recently that I was making Chocolate Coca Cola Cake, there was a massive flurry of like, two or three people tweeting back at me that they wanted the recipe. Never one to offend my constitchency, I obediently bring you…Chocolate Coca Cola Cake. Check out all those curvaceous C’s lined up like that. Nigella, you alliterative minx.

I’ve already told the story of how this was the first recipe I made from How To Be A Domestic Goddess in 2006, but the tl:dr version is that Tim bought it for me, even though we didn’t have any expensive-book-money kicking round, to cheer me up after some clothes I was pretty invested in got stolen off our washing line. What a nice fulla he is.
This recipe is fantastic – very reassuringly cake-like, nothing fancy here, but also like no other chocolate cake you’ve ever tasted. Yeah, the Coca-Cola might be a bit of an awkward-sounding ingredient, but it works I promise you. The flavour isn’t strident, but gives a slight lick of damp cinnamony fizziness. It’s easy as to make too – just melt and beat thoroughly till smooth. When I was a kid we never really had fizzy drink around (except on my birthdays when Mum made ice cream sodas) and I never buy it or drink it now but – there’s something SO good about the taste of a cold Coca-Cola. Which is exactly what Coca-Cola would like me to think, but there it is.
Chocolate Coca-Cola Cake

From Nigella Lawson’s amazing, amazing, How To Be A Domestic Goddess

200g plain flour
250g sugar (brown sugar is good)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 large egg
125 mls buttermilk (or 125 mls half yoghurt half millk)
125g butter
2 T cocoa powder
175mls Coca-Cola

Preheat oven to 180 C/375 F and put in a baking sheet/biscuit tray to heat up. Butter and paper-line a 22-23cm springform tin.

In a large pan, gently heat the Coca-Cola, cocoa and butter together till the butter melts. In another bowl sift together the dry ingredients and pour in the buttery cola. Whisk in the yoghurt and egg, mixing everything really well. Pour into the tin and bake for 40 minutes or until cooked through.
Nigella has a recipe for icing that goes with it but it makes a way huge amount. What I did was mix together 1/3 cup Coca-cola, 2 tablespoons cocoa, and enough icing sugar to make a smooth, pourable icing. Even so this made way too much and it flowed over the plate and pooled all over the benchtop. It took so long to clean it up.
I made this cake to eat with the band Alex The Kid during Tim’s and my interview with them for our blog 100s and 1000s. It was a fun afternoon, and as soon as they left I grabbed my photo and took a couple of snaps. But I waited till they were done. You don’t want to hinder people’s ability to eat this stuff.
So good.
Check out, if you will, out the sweet coasters Tim and I made! Neither of us tend to go in for crafty cute stuff but something about this project we found in the latest issue – finding old coasters, cutting up pages of old books, glueing them together and spraying with fix-y stuff – appealed. To be honest Tim ended up doing most of it but I spotted the book about the galaxy, and the end result is pretty sassy, hey?
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Title via: The incomparable (I think my heart beats faster just thinking about her) Idina Menzel who originated the role of Maureen in RENT on Broadway in 1996 and reprised it nearly ten years later in the film version of RENT. The audience’s first sight of her is when she does her fairly astonishing ‘performance art’ piece, Over The Moon, which the title of this post quotes. I kindly but firmly direct you to consult both the original Broadway and film version.
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Music lately:

Voom, King Kong – apparently this song only came out in 2006 but you hear it and get this feeling like you swear you were listening to it when you were 12. (Depending on where ’12’ was for you). This song (like Ash’s Burn Baby Burn) is made of so many hooks that a more cautious band might have made a whole album from the material crammed into King Kong’s 3-ish minutes. It is fantastic stuff. We managed to see them on Saturday night at Mighty Mighty, so much fun although we missed half their set (including Beth, sniffle) because we were at another gig at Bodega, for Amnesty, where we saw the outstandingly awesome local band Nudge who, for a three-piece, churned out the kind of sound that you’d expect from twelve people.

Dead Prez, Hip Hop…love the beat, the chant-along chorus, and how they tip their hat to Trenchtown Rock. I was working at Big Day Out when they came to New Zealand this year but managed to catch the tail end of their set on my shaved ice break. Even from where I was at the back of the field with a tired brain, a mouthful of syrup, and minutes to go before they left the stage, they were pretty electrifying.

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Next time: 99% sure it will involve tofu.

it’s that orange blossom special

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I try to keep things relatively practical and user-friendly on here, but every now and then a recipe comes along which, even though I can’t really work out what I’d do with it, sounds so pretty that I just go ahead and make it anyway. Like them marshmallows. Really, if I want to cook something badly it’s pretty easy come up with some kind of justification, however dubious.

I found this recipe for Orange and Saffron Confit in the latest Dish magazine. I always thought confit was something submerged in fat for purposes of preservation and deliciousness, but this is basically slices of orange simmered in syrup. I guess it’s for the best, although you know I wouldn’t turn my back on orange slices in a jar of melted butter. It sounded like so much fun, and even though I didn’t really have any need for it in my life I really wanted to try it.

It’s pretty cheap to make, and even if you never, ever use them, the jar looks unbelievably pretty with its tangerine-bright layers of orange spooning in their glossy liquid.

Saffron is admittedly really expensive, and the reason I’m relaxed about using it is because I’ve received it as a Christmas or birthday present so many times (I looooove getting food as presents FYI) that I’ve got plenty I can use. If you don’t have saffron to hand I reckon this would be amazing with a vanilla pod or a couple of cinnamon sticks (for a very cheap option) as a replacement.

Orange and Saffron Confit

From Dish Magazine (the current one with the pumpkin on the cover)

  • 2 large seedless oranges (I used 3)
  • 3 1/2 cups water (just under a litre)
  • Pinch of saffron threads, or whatever substitution you’re using
  • 2 1/2 cups caster sugar (I used regular)

Trim the ends off the oranges. Cut into 1/2 cm thick slices and place in a wide saucepan with the water and saffron threads. Bring to just below boiling point, let it simmer away gently for about 20 minutes. Then sprinkle over your sugar and continue to cook gently for about 30 minutes, until the liquid has reduced a bit. Occasionally you could spoon some of the liquid over the oranges but don’t try stirring them or they’ll fall apart.

Let them cool in their syrup, then carefully transfer the slices to a clean jar or two and pour over the remaining syrup.

Warning: You and your benchtop will get covered in sugary syrup. There is no way of avoiding this. This is what I’ve learned in my travels around the kitchen, anyway.

It smells so good while it’s simmering away, and for very little effort you end up with soft, gleaming slices of intensely flavoured orange and a gorgeously golden syrup flecked with red saffron strands and fragrant with that grassy, saffron-y perfume.

In case you’re thinking “yeah nice, but now what?”, well apart from loudly admiring your handicraft whenever someone walks past, Dish suggests a few options for using this confit. These include decorating cakes, accompanying chocolate mousse, or serving over ice cream. For a while there I was thinking it would be fun to give someone you were only pretending to like a jar of this as a present, so you could imagine them fumbling round trying to (a) come up with a use for it and (b) act like they’re sophisticated and orange confit is something they understand and deal with on a daily basis. However there’s actually plenty of uses for this stuff. Today I decided to chop up a few slices to use in a fruit cake of Nigella Lawson’s – but this cake is amazing on its own so don’t feel that the first recipe here has to happen before you can do the following one.

And if you can’t be bothered making the orange slices to go with this, take comfort in the fact that even though they look pretty, they make slicing the loaf a total pain.

Fruit Tea Loaf

From Nigella Lawson’s very amazing Feast

  • 1 x 250ml cup black tea
  • 375g dried fruit (I used half dates, half sultanas)
  • 125g brown sugar
  • 250g plain flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • pinch ground cloves (I used cinnamon)
  • 1 egg
  • Optional: 3 slices of orange from the above confit recipe, roughly diced, plus extra slices for decorating.

Make the cup of black tea (I used English Breakfast) and pour it into a bowl with the dried fruit and sugar, stir well, then leave sitting overnight. I know, I’ve just told you that you can’t have this cake until tomorrow. If you’ve got a microwave, you can try blasting it in there for a little bit to speed up the absorption process, letting the fruit cool a little before doing the rest of the recipe.

Set your oven to 170 C, and line a loaf tin with baking paper. Beat the rest of the ingredients into the dried fruit (retaining the liquid) and then spoon the mixture into the loaf tin. Bake for around an hour or so. If you’ve got some orange confit kicking round, drape a few slices over the cake and spoon over a little syrup.

  

I can’t even emphasise with words (only by gesturing wildly with my hands) how easy and delicious this cake is. If you haven’t got much in the bank for baking fancy things, this is the cake for you – dried fruit like sultanas, dates and apricots are always cheap. There’s no butter in it and only one egg. But it comes out of the oven tasting like one of those special Christmas cakes which have had days of effort and paychecks going into them. It’s really moist and fruity and rich, and the orange slices lend a sunny zestiness. For all that people get up in arms about Nigella’s recipes which have lots of expensive ingredients in them, if you take the time to properly read her books there’s a complete goldmine of practical, cheap things to fill your stomach with. And come to think of it, this cake would make a genuinely lovely gift to someone, at any time of year.

I really hadn’t thought about what I’d do with the slices of orange as I start cutting into the loaf. Guess I’ll just have to try hacking them up as I go? Or maybe I could push them further and further back as I slice more off the loaf…but it looks pretty. Speaking of pretty, I am a bit in love with that plate of ours which (you can’t see because there’s a slice of cake on it) has a guy and a girl earnestly playing tennis. Picked it up for a dollar from an op shop in town. The joy I feel whenever I see it is dampened a bit by how old it makes me feel that I get worked up about really ugly plates.

Last night Tim and I went to an evening of Rogers and Hammerstein with the always-awesome NZ Symphony Orchestra and West End conductor Martin Yates, with songs performed by West End soloists Jacqui Scott and Andrew Halliday. It was a fantastic evening – Tim and I probably lowered the average age of punters by about forty years – but I will point out that the Michael Fowler centre is awful, with its semi-circular seating arrangement meaning that 40% of the audience can’t see a thing, and for the price they were making people pay, you’d think Kerry Ellis or even Elaine Paige herself were going to be there.

The NZSO were in good form, providing a lush, expansive amble through some of Rogers and Hammersteins best-loved musicals, and songs like Shall We Dance, Some Enchanted Evening, Oklahoma, Climb Every Mountain, and Soliloquy were performed through the evening. The two singers were fantastic – Halliday had a rich and smooth Gavin Creel-esque sound and Scott was blessed with a powerful soprano voice. Gotta say even as a hardcore musical theatre person the Oklahoma can sometimes be a bit much for me – all that talk of how “birds and frogs’ll sing altogether and the frogs’ll hop”. The darkness of Carousel is more my scene, and to their credit, without any costumes or scenery and only marginal context, the two singers were great at switching characters between songs. If anyone’s listening, an evening of Sondheim would be seriously awesome. I probably wouldn’t even complain about the price of seats.

Title via: Johnny Cash, who sung Orange Blossom Special at Folsom Prison and San Quentin prisons. There is some incredibly good footage on Youtube of him performing, if you’re ever sitting round wondering what to do with your time you could definitely do worse than entering his name into the search bar.

Music lately:

King Kapisi feat Mint Chicks, Superhuman – a seriously meaty collaboration between two of Aotearoa’s finest acts. I’ve been lucky enough to see both of them live (Mint Chicks at SFBH in 2006 and earlier this year, and King Kapisi at Pasifika Festival at Western Springs in 2000 or 2001, my memory fails me – anyone else remember?), hopefully there’s the opportunity for people to see them perform this song together at some stage.

Speaking of collaborations, still loving Nas and Damian ‘Jr Gong’ Marley’s diamond of an album, Distant Relatives. Truly. Find it.

Next time: I made Nigella’s Coca Cola chocolate cake today…will be blogging about it soon.

 

what if the octopus, the flounder and the cod think we’re rather odd

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I’ve said it before here, that despite living in a country both surrounded and infiltrated by water, Tim and I just don’t eat a lot of fish. It’s not like it is that hard to come by, we just…don’t. (Yeah, cool story, bro.)

But – hold on to your hats – sometimes we just do.
Last Sunday night I made ceviche, a dish where raw fish is cured – and ultimately cooked without heat – through the mystical magic of citrus juice. Nigella Lawson has this recipe in Nigella Express where you chop the fish up small so that it only takes about ten minutes for the juice to ‘cook’ it – like a photograph developing before your eyes. Nigella suggests serving it on rounds of toasted bread or with tortilla chips but not having either, I piled the cooked-but-raw fish on top of lettuce, with crisp celery, juicy tomato slices, and soft chunks of avocado.
We loved it. But if fish that doesn’t look like fish-fingers makes you nervous, well, this might not change your mind. But don’t feel bad – I love fish fingers, I’m sure we had them at least once or twice a week for dinner when I was growing up. They have their place.
Chopped Ceviche


250g skinless and boneless black cod or monkfish fillet (or any fish that suits being eaten raw – I used red cod, it was the cheapest.)
1/2 a teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon Maldon sea salt or a small pinch table salt
80mls lime juice (I basically went with the juice of three limes, I don’t see this measurement as sacred)
3 spring onions, finely chopped
1 green chilli, deseeded and chopped (I used red)
Bunch of coriander, chopped

Chop the fish finely into tiny dice. Place it in a shallow wide dish (I used a silicon caketin) and sprinkle with the oregano and salt and pour over the lime juice. Leave for eight minutes, shaking the dish occasionally or moving the fish around gently with a spatula to make sure it’s all mixed in. The fish should go from pinkish and pearly to a definite opaque white. It must be fun to watch with something like salmon.

Drain the fish, and mix in the spring onions, chilli and coriander. Then you’re done!


So, you could serve these as Nigella suggests, on top of grilled bread or with tortilla chips. Or you could have it in a wrap, or make a superfresh salad like I did – for raw fish, it is surprisingly practical stuff.


As you can probably tell by the solitary sprig on top of the salad, our coriander plant is more ‘gasping’ than ‘flourishing’.
The fish is soft-textured and intensely flavoured by the lime. The zinging lime and creamy avocado cool down the hot chilli and the lettuce, I don’t know, makes it better for you and gives a bit of crunch. Is anyone out there passionate about lettuce? I could eat a bowlful of avocados but lettuce I’m neither here nor there on. It’s filler material, it tastes fine but there’s things I’d rather eat, like cheese on toast.
Anyway, this ceviche was so good that we made it again for dinner this week. It’s so fast and while the fish is busily morphing (or evolving, for you rogue Pokemon fans out there) you can busy yourself getting the accompaniments ready. It’s fresh and light, and while it would be perfect in the middle of summer, the heat of the chilli and the eye-opening flavours are just right in winter if you’re getting a little over stews and mash potato (hey, it happens.)
Hopefully this all makes sense, because I’m feeling a little weary. On Saturday we stayed up till 5am dancing, not something we do that often, but it was a fun night – it was our temporary flatmate’s birthday (our actual flatmate is on holiday in Canada) and as well as nestling into some haunts we already knew, we discovered some more, met some awesome people, and between Tim and myself, even found 80 cents on the ground (is that sad? If so: whatever.) We’re lucky in Wellington – if the agenda of the night is buying expensive yet tiny drinks, then at least there are plenty of exceptionally good-looking settings to do it in.
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Title via: Um, Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Actually, forget that “um.” This film is flawless. Angela Lansbury is one of the most bodacious babes on earth, and don’t think I’m trying to be ironic when I say that. She’s an awesome lady. You thought you liked the zero-gravity fight scene in Inception? Wait till you see Angela and David Tomlinson’s underwater dance in Beautiful Briny Sea. Now those are effects that are special.
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Music lately:
Tim and I have started re-watching The Wire from Season 1. Everyone talks about The Wire and how great it is and I have already plenty of times so I won’t add to that here. It has been described as “slow-moving” and “worth the effort” but in rewatching, it feels fast-paced, the roles and connections between each character are easier to remember, and hints of things that transpire later in the season are easier to pick up on. Which is probably not so comforting if you’re 25 minutes in thinking “wait, who’s the good guys here? Is this going to wrap up soon?” The theme tune is Tom Waits’ Way Down In The Hole, sung in the first season by The Blind Boys of Alabama. They know a thing or two about how to deliver a tune well – this is typically brilliant stuff from them. I like how the intro keeps you waiting a little longer than you’re used to.
Audra McDonald’s take on Gershwin’s Someone To Watch Over Me. (In a nice segue, McDonald totally resembles Wendy Grantham, who shines as Shardeen in Season 1 of The Wire) As well as being a fantastic actress, any song is lucky to be sung by her beautiful, beautiful soprano voice.
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Next time: I’ve been baking hardout this weekend so there’s plenty to choose from for next time. I realise there’s been some space between blog posts lately – will try to counteract that by following this one up a bit more snappily!

don’t dream it’s pavlova

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The New Zealand ‘identity’ has many characteristics to capitalise upon for advertising campaigns – how minimalistic we are as a people, how we generally don’t go into excessive details or facial expressions or go in for fancy things. I found myself thinking about this when I was given the opportunity to submit this blog post as part of a promotion for mega-cook and food hero Rick Stein’s impending visit to Aotearoa. The “ultimate New Zealand dish” was my brief, which is not something I feel authoritative enough to pinpoint down. But a pavlova immediately leapt to mind, and infuriatingly, so did all those ads.

On the one hand, it’s kind of amusing that we have this famous pudding which has appeared in recipe books and graced tables for years and years, but which is seriously a bit of a mission to make. Oh, us kiwis, being all casual about this complicated dessert! On the other hand I was annoyed with myself for buying into it all by having an advertising-fuelled self-deprecating chuckle. On the other hand, it made me wonder whether we are even all that relaxed and simple or whether it’s something advertising has constructed. On the other hand, marketing is hard, trying to get information to people in the spaces between the information they’re actually trying to absorb is a mission and a half, and I can’t help but salute any that winkle their way into everyday vernacular.

On the other hand, pavlova. Let’s not overthink it, eh?

Pavlova – made from egg whites, sugar, and a lot of air – isn’t overly straightforward, but if you’re careful and patient, it’s really no big deal. But importantly, it always looks like a big deal. Pavlova is one of those dishes over which arguments are dribbled back and forth between New Zealand and Australia about who thought it up originally. Fortunately the pavlova is unlikely to engage in the kind of reputation-smearing scandalous activity that prompts a flurry of “Australia can have him” responses from the public. While I’d like to think it’s ours, because I love ballet so much and it was named after the great ballerina Anna Pavlova, whose ethereal white tutu it supposedly represented, I’m not overly fussed. If Australia really does have claim to the first pav, so be it – I’m more charmed with the idea of dishes being created in honour of people at all. Maybe one day there will be a “Heavily Buttered Toast with Marmite and Melted Cheese, Microwaved a la Laura” in the same way that you get Peach Melba and stuff like that.

With all this in mind, I’ve adapted a Nigella Lawson recipe for my take on pavlova. Yes, Nigella Lawson the British non-New Zealander. If you want a plain pavlova recipe I’m sure you couldn’t do better than anything in the Edmonds cookbook or any other reliable local cookbook. My take on Nigella’s version of our usual, marshmallow-white creation is a darker, and (dare I say it in the same breath as the wholesome Edmonds cookbook) altogether sexier pavlova. Aren’t we always asking people, wide-eyed and hopeful, about what they think about New Zealand? Isn’t it a compliment to us that the mighty Nigella has so many pavlova recipes? Yes, our usual pavlova is covered in a thick layer of whipped cream and maybe a few slices of kiwifruit or spoonfuls of passionfruit seeds. These are both incredibly good options and my version – Chocolate, Tamarillo, and Pistachio Pavlova with Coconut Cream – is just another option, rather than any kind of attempt to kick the original white pav.

Chocolate, Tamarillo and Pistachio Pavlova with Coconut Cream

Based on the Chocolate Raspberry Pavlova (also excellent!) from Nigella Lawson’s Forever Summer.
6 egg whites
300g caster sugar
50g good cocoa (I use Fair Trade or Equagold)
1 tsp balsamic or red wine vinegar

6 tamarillos
2 tablespoons brown sugar
150g dark chocolate (I used Whittakers – made in Wellington!)
100g shelled pistachios
1 can coconut cream

Set oven to 180 C. Whip up the egg whites till satiny peaks form, then continue to beat them while adding the sugar a tiny bit at a time. Maybe get a buddy to help with this bit. Once the sugar is all added the mixture should be thick, shiny and stiff. Sift in the cocoa and sprinkle over the vinegar, folding in carefully. Spread mixture into a 23cm circle on a baking paper lined tray. Immediately turn down oven to 150 C and leave for about an hour. Once done, turn oven off and leave pav to cool completely.

While the pav is baking, scoop out the seeds and flesh of the tamarillo, tip into a small bowl and sprinkle over the brown sugar, allowing it to dissolve. Swipe a sharp knife through the flesh if the seeds aren’t loose enough – you want a loose, chunky mixture as opposed to large, separate pieces. I hope that makes sense. Melt the dark chocolate and drizzle spoonfuls generously, Jackson Pollock-styles across the pav. You don’t have to use the whole lot, but don’t let me hold you back. Spoon the tamarillo seeds, flesh and juice evenly over the top and finally sprinkle thickly with pistachios. Serve in wedges with a spoonful of coconut cream on the side.

Serves 6 or so.
Something I should probably point out is that I completely forgot to turn on the oven before making this, so the beaten egg whites sat around for a considerable amount of time before getting any kind of blast of heat. This, plus the fact that I made this using a whisk instead of any kind of electric equipment, may explain the overwhelming flatness of the finished product. Still, 6 egg whites were not going to be used in vain, and with a certain pioneering spirit (and very sore upper arms from whisking the egg whites) I carried on. I’d sent a txt to our good friend and ex-flatmate Ange, saying that for reasons too complex to explain in 160 characters I had to make a pav and would she like to help us eat it? Luckily she did, or I might have eaten the whole enormous flat mess while curled up on the floor – what pavlova? I never made a pavlova!

I really did this whole thing on the fly – running round Moore Wilson’s and looking at what was in season without a clear picture of what I wanted the end result to be apart from “damn amazing”. For a few dire moments it looked like the pavlova would have to be topped with mashed swede or something until Tim pointed out the tamarillos, dark red and rounded fruit encasing sharp, juicy flesh and seeds. My mind began to move remarkably fast, and I mentally paired the fruit with dark Whittakers chocolate and maybe some kind of nut for interest’s sake. Pistachios, green and gorgeous, presented themselves once I got to the baking goods shelf and all of a sudden it started to make sense.

This pavlova replaces the dairy of our robust industry for a large spoonful of coconut cream. It’s a nod to our place in the Pacific and also makes it accessible to those who can’t actually eat dairy. Between the hastily assembled concept, forgetting to turn the oven on, the fact that the kitchen and myself were starting to be covered in chocolate, and the visitors turning up to eat it, I was starting to get a bit nervous about how it would actually taste after all that.

Friends – fellow New Zealanders – it was flipping excellent. What the pavlova lacked in, shall we say, body, it made up for in fudgy cocoa-y depth, with that familiarly crisp surface which dissolved alluringly on the tongue. The tamarillos were juicily sharp and fragrant, contrasting with the dark, rich cocoa taste of the melted Whittakers chocolate, the soft, buttery pistachios, and the mellow coconut cream seeping into each slice. We ate slice after slice (once I’d taken an excessively long time photographing it, of course) and then my flatmate and his friends came home and they had some too. Then Ange’s boyfriend came over and ate some. It was a big pavlova but its lifespan was barely hours.

Is this New Zealand’s ultimate dish? Oh, who could say. Put it next to a roast lamb or a fresh crayfish and it might seem far too fussy and “not us” and downright excessive. It is, however, an example of what you can do with one of our best dishes. It’s a new take on a gorgeous original. Yes, we may be told repeatedly that we are short on emotion and expression but don’t let this hold you back from enjoying something magically delicious, Aotearoa.

For more info on Rick Stein’s New Zealand tour, give this site a look.

Two very cool things happened this week. One: I met Ray McVinnie. RAY MCVINNIE! Some know him as a judge on NZ Masterchef but I’ve been reading his Quick Smart column in Cuisine magazine hard for years and years now. Yes, he’s more of a niche celebrity than a complete household name but he’s easily my favourite NZ foodwriter and every single one of his columns is a diamond. If you don’t know who he is, try to think of your favourite local celebrity who seems accessible enough in status but also roughly the awesomest in their chosen field, and imagine you got to meet them. McVinnie was at the recent Visa Wellington on a Plate launch that I was lucky enough to attend and along with two other Wellington food bloggers at the event, I just kind of prodded him on the shoulder, and said “hello, I’m Laura, I’m a food blogger, I’m a really big fan of your writing.” We all introduced ourselves and even got a brief conversation out of him – “Keep writing about food,” he said (oh how I will!) and also he said something about food being the glue that holds society together, I can’t remember specifically what it was but I remember agreeing with it. No lie, I grinned all the way home (sorry to any passers-by), got in the door and did a high-kick of happiness. By the way, the Visa Wellington on a Plate sounds well exciting, all those set lunch menus at all the fancy restaurants is making me happy just thinking about it. For more info check out their website!

Then on Saturday, I had a seriously cool lunch at Duke Carvell’s with a whole bunch of Wellington-based food bloggers, including the aforementioned ladies of Gusty Gourmet who I met Ray McVinnie with. (Ray McVinnie! Okay I’ll stop talking about it now.) Everyone was super lovely, and just plain super, really, and it was fun learning about peoples’ stories and what made them start writing, and who the person is behind the blog name. It was a good feeling, being amongst other people who love food and love writing about it, and who all live in Wellington. Blogger solidarity!
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Title via: Crowded House…maybe I should feel slightly apologetic about this one, oh sure it’s a sharp-inward-drawing-of-breath-through-clenched-teeth-edly bad pun, but the way those opening chords teeter as if being plucked on the strings of a fully functioning heart instead of a guitar…I’m really not sorry at all.
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Music lately:

New Edition’s Something About You, from their 1996 reunion album Home Again. Those moves! It has been years and years since I’ve heard this song but I saw a tweet on Twitter mentioning 90s music and instantly thought of this. I used to love it and I don’t know if it’s just because I’m not really keeping an ear to the R’n’B ground these days but it feels like they don’t make ’em like this anymore. (Poetically, fishpond.co.nz offers this album on cassette, before informing you that it’s “currently unavailable”…no kidding.)

Meadowlark, a song from the musical The Baker’s Wife, sung by Liz Callaway. I’m a bit obsessed with Liz Callaway at the moment, I’ve enjoyed her singing for a while but recently it’s hit me just how intensely amazing she is. In a joyful coincidence, one of the songs she’s most famous for is something I’m also obsessed with right now. I’ll be trying to articulate this better on 100s and 1000s soon…
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Next time: It has been real pie-making weather out there lately…I have pie on the brain. When it’s this cold all I really want to do is read Nigella’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess, and then cook everything from it.

under the leaves of that old lime tree

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Achtung: I’m STILL hyping myself up about being nominated for CLEO magazine/Palmolive Wonder Woman (Read more about it here.) There’s still time to help out – just email cleo@acpmagazines.co.nz with WONDER WOMAN in the subject line and “voting for Blogger: Laura Vincent” in the body of the email. (FYI – you can only vote once) I should change my name to humbleandfrozen because of how nice so many people have been about this – whether or not I get anywhere, it has still been a fun wave to flutterboard on.



As I mentioned last time, Mum sent me a large box of gorgeously green limes. I hadn’t really done much more than sniff them luxuriantly, and throw a glossy wedge into the occasional glass of vodka and soda water. Until tonight, when I made this incredibly fantastic dressing from Nigella Lawson’s Forever Summer.


This recipe harnesses the power of one. whole. lime.

Lime Dressing


1 bunch (approx 125g) fresh coriander, or mint, or a mixture of the two
1 clove garlic, peeled
1-2 tablespoons fish sauce (you could make this vegan by using soy sauce)
1/2 a teaspoon sugar
1 green chilli, deseeded (optional)
1 lime
6 tablespoons rice bran oil

Cut the top nubby end off the lime, sit the now-flat end on a chopping board, and carefully slice off all the skin and pith. Cut off the other end, halve the now-peeled lime and flick out any seeds with a knife. Mine luckily didn’t seem to have any seeds. Throw the lime, and any juice that has collected, into a food processor with everything else except the oil. Blitz to a paste, pouring in the oil as you go. By the way, I only used half the oil because even for me that felt like a lot, but then if you were serving more people, you might want to keep the original quantities or even boost them, along with the rest of the ingredients.


This dressing is just perfect – sharp and full of lime, fragrant with coriander, deliciously salty, but not in the slightest bit oily. I could have drunk the stuff. Once I finished dinner, I not only licked the plate, I also ran a spatula around the inside of the food processor and licked that, and then finally – I’m sorry – ran my finger along the processor blade, picking up the excess dressing clinging to its slicey edges, and licked that too.

In Forever Summer, Nigella pairs this dressing in a salad draped with fried squid rings, and lovely as that sounds I didn’t have any of the ingredients. I took the liberty of pouring the dressing over a pile of flat rice noodles, carrot slices and soybeans, with a final sprinkle of black sesame seeds (Handy tip: don’t go pouring them over someone else’s plate while saying “Look! Ants!”) It might not sound like much of a dinner, to the point of barely even existing (when carrot slices are part of the main thrust of your meal it’s probably time to do some more groceries) but think again. The dressing soaked into the soft, silky noodles. The buttery, nutty soybeans contrasted marvelously with the sharp lime in the dressing. The sesame seeds provided a little crunch. The carrots…well, they were there too. But altogether it was damn special stuff. By the way, I recommend Forever Summer hard – it’s full of some of Nigella’s most inventive-yet-classic, beautiful food, and an amazing and inspiring ice cream chapter.

I had a couple of days off in lieu which was pretty amazingly blissful – not having an alarm clock in the morning was a nice feeling. All the good sleeping patterns were undone on Tuesday night however as we stayed up to watch the All Whites’ first game at the FIFA World Cup against Slovakia in South Africa, beginning 11:30pm our time. As if we were ever going to miss it – it was a thrillifying match, with Winston Reid’s equalising goal in the 93rd minute causing a complete rush of intense happiness to all of us watching. To be beaten at the World Cup is no disgrace, considering the eye-watering level of talent present, and considering New Zealand hasn’t been there in 28 years. But to draw against a team that’s miles ahead of us in the table – that was special. While what I know about sports could fit on one side of a black sesame seed, I can’t wait to see our next match against Italy – they’re one of the best teams in the world, so to simply prevent them scoring, or lose by a small margin is still some kind of victory. Although we might win…that’s what’s exciting about it, that we just could win a game. Pity the official All Whites scarves aren’t longer though – not very practical in windy Wellington to have something that doesn’t wind round the neck several times.
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Title via: Bright Eyes’ Lime Tree from his 2007 album Cassadaga. There’s only so many winsome male singer-songwriters I really ever need to listen to, but ol’ Bright Eyes makes the cut easily with his earnest, swoonsome songs. There’s something about the music behind this track that makes it sound like it could run over the opening credits of some 1930s film involving wide American plains and several scenes in a charming general store, which is more than enough reason to love it in my opinion.
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Music lately:

XXXO, MIA’s new single. I’ve long been a fan of MIA and new music from her is always greeted eagerly. It amuses me to read pearl-clutching comments on youtube (not that reading youtube comments is ever a good use of time) about how “mainstream” this sounds. I personally thought this song couldn’t be any less mainstream if it tried, but whatever. It always amazes me how MIA manages to be more or less what you’d call pop, but also a million miles removed from everyone else out there doing it. The chorus reminds me of all the best bits of those Real McCoy songs I used to adore. Can’t wait till she drops the album.

Connection by Elastica, from their self-titled album. I love gurgly opening riff and wish I could deliver anything as breezily as Justine Frischmann sings those lyrics.

Raul Esparza’s knee-wobblingly good cover of The Man That Got Away. Every particle of that man is filled with vocal talent. He needs a solo album, and fast!
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Next time: Well, I still have this box filled with limes…don’t think I’m done just yet.

we sell our souls for bread

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Nothing like a persistently rainy long weekend to really push me back into the grippy arms of the kitchen. I seriously love making bread, but haven’t had a chance in ages so tip of the hat to the Queen for her birthday creating a Monday off this week. If New Zealand ever becomes a republic there’d better be some particularly concrete replacements for any long weekend we’d lose as a result. With extra time on my hands I’ve been making all kinds of things including this Nigella Lawson bread recipe from her flawless book of baking, How To Be A Domestic Goddess.

I was able to use these beautiful walnuts that Mum posted down to me from a family friend’s tree. They’re easy enough to get into, just a light tap from a hammer on the shell and a bit of digging quickly produces a pile of bamboo coloured, wrinkled heart shapes. They were soft and fragrant and tasted amazing – none of that tooth-coating bitterness that you sometimes get with those from a packet which have been sitting round too long.

This bread is fiddly-ish but no real mission to make. I didn’t have any of the wholemeal bread flour that Nigella specified but I did have plenty of half-empty packets of dusty offerings from the health food shop down the road (I don’t know, they’re just so compulsively purchasable) so if you’re in the same boat just do what I did and use 550g white bread flour and make up the rest of the weight with bran, rolled oats, that sort of thing. If you don’t have real maple syrup, use honey or golden syrup instead.


Maple Walnut Bread

Adapted from Maple-Pecan Bread in Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess (ie you can use pecans if you have them)
  • 500g wholemeal bread flour
  • 150g white bread flour
  • 1 sachet instant dry yeast
  • 300-400mls warm water
  • 4 tablespoons maple syrup
  • 50-100g walnuts
  • Walnut oil (if you have it, otherwise use plain eg rice bran)
Mix the flours and yeast together in a large bowl. Pour in the water and syrup and mix to make a sticky dough. Knead for a couple of minutes, then let it sit for 20 minutes. Knead again, sprinkling over the walnuts as you go. It will take a little while to incorporate them, simply because this type of dough is a little tougher than usual. Keep pushing and kneading until the walnuts are more or less dispersed throughout the dough and until it forms a smooth, elastic ball. Pour over a good tablespoon of walnut or other oil, and turn so all surfaces are covered. Cover in clingfilm, and leave for a couple of hours to rise.

At this stage, punch it down to deflate it, then knead it into a loaf shape. Cover with a teatowel and leave it for half an hour, meanwhile setting the oven to 220 C. Bake for 1/4 of an hour before turning down the temperature to 180C and baking for a further 20 or so minutes, covering with a sheet of tinfoil if it starts to get too brown.


The maple syrup isn’t aggressively present in the finished, baked bread, but gives a subtle, layered fragrance and sweet, chewy crust which goes brilliantly with the deliciously toasted walnuts. Last night for dinner, inspired by a Ray McVinnie Quick Smart column in one of my Cuisine magazines, I cooked chunks of butternut pumpkin in boiling water till soft, drained and mashed them with coriander and cumin seeds, fried squares of diced streaky bacon and wafers of haloumi till sizzling, and served all that on top of slices of the freshly baked bread. The sweetness of the pumpkin was echoed in the sweetness of the bread, incredibly good with the contrastingly salty bacon and cheese. Unfortunately that’s the last of the cut-price haloumi I got from The Food Show so it’s unlikely I’ll be able to recreate such a smashing dinner for a while. If however you yourself are in the regular-haloumi-buying demographic then by all means try it.

Other things that happened this mighty fine long weekend include forsaking a long-time-coming sleepin to stagger to the pub to watch the All Whites’ friendly pre-FIFA World Cup game against Slovenia on Saturday morning. Unfortunately we lost, but full marks to Slovenia considering their population is only 2.2 million or so. The upshot of it was that we had a great excuse to go to Customs and order great quantities of beautiful, beautiful filter coffee served by the lovely people there. We don’t get to go very often but they even recognised that Tim had got his hair cut. As well as making me want to cook things, the rain also meant we had a fine excuse to watch The IT Crowd last night. Britain seems to positively fling out these small, side-poppingly funny yet under-the-radar comedies, and while I’d known about The IT Crowd for a while I’ve never pinned it down for a good watch. I really enjoyed Richard Ayoade’s work withThe Mighty Boosh so it’s nice to see him in a leading role in this. Find it if you can – we finished the lot in very quick succession.

Speaking of coffee, and in exciting news for future employers, Tim has left Starbucks after three years. No hard feelings towards the green siren – it helped pay our rent through university and is highly educative coffee-wise. If anyone out there requires a ridiculously great guy with an Honours degree in media studies to do cool stuff like using skills learned in both university and life, then truly look no further than the now-available Tim. You think I deal recommendations lightly? Think again.
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Title via: Electric Blues from the Broadway musical Hair. My preoccupation with its amazing score rides again. This song is so exciting and dynamic, and I presume they use the word ‘bread’ to mean ‘money’ in this context, but then…maybe they’d tried this recipe too. And while lyrics like “we’re all encased in sonic armour, belting out through chrome grenades” make me smile, the next stanza’s “they chain ya and they brainwash ya, when you least expect it, they feed ya mass media” could definitely find relevance at any stage.
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Music lately:
Beth, by localers Voom from their debut album Now I Am Me. I first heard this song years ago on Channel Z and while I can’t say I cried or anything, I certainly felt that good, self-indulgent kind of desolation that you get from wallowing in excellent sad music about situations that you’re not sure if you can relate to but you allow them to reflect whatever it is you’re feeling anyway. Some bright spark put the video onto Youtube so I can now enjoy and wallow all over again as and when necessary.
Janelle Monae’s Tightrope from The Archandroid. There’s already so much being said about her on – dun dun – the internet, but at face value it’s a stonkeringly good tune.
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Next time: Maybe even more exciting than baking bread and watching DVDs on a Friday night, I made my own ricotta cheese yesterday! The recipe is so easy I could almost put it right here as an afterthought. But no. You’ll have to wait for next time, well either that or call my bluff and google “homemade ricotta” and render me completely unnecessary.

pumpkin, you’re hollow within

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Tonight I was obliged to cook dinner for myself and no one else, because Tim’s in Palmerston North for his mother’s graduation (I understand it’s this new qualification two stages after PhD that they had to hastily invent to accomodate her smartness). Luckily, in case I was thinking of just having toast after lazy piece of toast, spread with fistfuls of butter, there’s Nigella Lawson. In the “One and Two” chapter of that seminal text, How To Eat, she luxuriates in the solitary dinner to the point where it seems alluringly rakish to be so exhausted that all you can do is make yourself pasta, gloss it with olive oil, sprinkle with garlic and chilli, and eat it in bed. I like eating in bed as much as the next person who likes eating in bed but she really makes it rock’n’roll.

Hidden in this One and Two chapter is Butternut and Pasta Soup, a recipe that will never be a calling card for Nigella like the Ham in Coca Cola or Chocolate Guinness Cake, but is certainly no less fantastically worthy of your time. There was a tick beside the recipe in my copy of How To Eat but I can’t remember when I actually last made it. Maybe because it’s not the flashiest combination of flavours on the block. However it’s warm, it’s cheap, it’s easy to make and it’s easy to eat. I had half a butternut pumpkin aging in the fridge (and not aging in the socially applauded way, like Helen Mirren) and an open bag of risoni pasta in the cupboard just waiting to be spilled on the floor, so I thought I’d give this another try.

Butternut and Pasta Soup

Serves 2 (I halved the liquid, pasta and pumpkin)

From Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat

  • 1 teaspoon olive oil
  • 1/2 small onion, chopped very finely
  • 250g butternut pumpkin, or any old pumpkin really, chopped into 1cm dice
  • 60mls vermouth or white wine
  • 600mls stock – chicken or porcini stock would be good here
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 60g small soup pasta, like stelline, ditalini or risoni

Heat the oil in a heavy-based pot and add the onion, stirring till soft, then add the cubes of butternut. Cook for around 2 minutes, stirring often, letting the orange cubes soften slightly. Tip in the wine (it will bubble up) and then the stock and bayleaf. Bring to a simmer and leave for about ten minutes.

Nigella then says to remove a ladleful and puree it before returning to the pan, but I said no, because I wasn’t in the mood to clean the food processor. It was fine. Add the pasta, cook for another 10 minutes till the pasta is tender. Ladle into bowls, serve with parmesan to grate over if you like.

The fact that it’s cheap and no hassle to make shouldn’t be the only thing that draws you to this recipe. Even though I didn’t have any stock cubes to hand and so had to use plain water, it was still flavoursome, filling, comfortingly soft and warm. A little sweet from the pumpkin and savoury from the bay leaf. You could gussy it up with a spoon of pesto, or harissa, or whatever. It was a delicious and serene solo meal on a chilly night. And a good reminder that it’s well worth properly re-reading Nigella’s cookbooks for hidden jewels like this.

On Saturday Tim and I went to Bodega to the launch of local musician Grayson Gilmour’s new album, No Constellation. It’s now a well-documented fact, but Gilmour is the first artist to be signed to the newly minted Flying Nun label, which must be pretty exciting for all parties involved – he’s enormously talented, and Flying Nun carries with it decades of respect. We’ve seen Gilmour perform with band So So Modern about a billion times but none of his elusive solo performances so we were really looking forward to it. We got there in time to see Vaults, who, despite getting a bit Deep Forest in places, were overall enjoyable, good music to wallow in. Gilmour’s music translated beautifully live with the help of the musicians backing him (including So So Modern’s Aidan Leong) particularly one of my favourites from the new album, the sparkling, sprinty Loose Change. He deserves to do well, and I hope it all works out for him so…he can perform this solo material a bit more often.

Title via: Tricky’s Pumpkin from Maxinquaye, assisted ably by the glorious Goldfrapp. It’s woozy, it’s mellow, listening to it is actually like being a grain of pasta, floating around slowly in a large bowl of warm butternut soup.

Music lately:

New Dead Weather album! Called Sea of Cowards, it continues, rather than showing strong progress, from their debut Horehound. But, it is still an exciting listen with its dark dark imagery and sizzling instrumentation. And Jack White.

Odessa, by Caribou from the album Swim. I don’t know anything at all about Caribou so I won’t patronise you with reconstituted Wikipedia factlets. But this song has been on the radio an awful lot lately and…I like it. I might even look up Caribou on Wikipedia.

The great Lena Horne passed away recently. I salute her and all her achievements with the obvious but always beautiful Stormy Weather.

Next time: Hopefully I’ll get a post in before then, but this weekend is OH MY GOSH the Wellington Food Show. I’m so excited. It will be my fifth year attending and my third year blogging it, you’d think by now I’d have my own segment or something. At the least I plan on eating my own body weight (or even a larger person’s body weight) in ‘free’ samples.

 

going back to canada on a journey through the past

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I had this pair of Chuck Taylors that lasted me four years, not bad since I wore them a lot and lived up a hill in Wellington, which wears out a shoe swift-fast. Towards the end of their existence, one had a large hole in the bottom and the tread had been buffed down to the thickness of a wonton wrapper, except for the bits where holes had emerged in the sole. So…I cut out some bubble wrap and slid it inside the shoes. And wore them for at least another 6 months. At the same time, I was also buying, like…gelatine leaves and shallots and cloth-aged cheddar. Priorities?

And yet there were things that even with this food-first shoes-later mindset, that still seemed out of my reach. Like maple syrup. That Canadian elixir. I’m pretty sure that if you look at it in the supermarket, then look away, then look back again, the price tag magically becomes more expensive. In all these years I’ve only ever bought one bottle of it, then been too nervous to even take off the lid in case I wasted a droplet (what with its street value rivalling that of most hard drugs).
Then I was given a bottle of maple syrup for my birthday by my late grandad’s wife, and it was an exciting new opportunity for me. To have some maple syrup. Simple as that. I should have known that someone whose chocolate eclairs I always admired as a child would give such an astute gift.
Ice cream is basically always on my mind so it was an easy decision to showcase the incredible flavour of maple syrup in that format. Nigella Lawson has a whole chapter about ice cream in her book Forever Summer (one day I will too! But it will be an even bigger chapter than hers) and within its pages is a recipe for Honey Semifreddo. It’s a quickly whipped up mixture of egg yolks, cream and honey, frozen once and then cut into slices. Amazingly good as that sounds, I thought I’d switch the honey for maple syrup and go forward from there.
Even though it’s pretty common, I’ve never made ice cream like this before – I tend to take the frozen custard path instead. This semifreddo however, was so exquisitely light-textured and quick to make that I might have to reconsider my methods.
Maple Syrup Semifreddo

Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s Forever Summer

1 egg
4 egg yolks (nice, free range eggs please)
100g real maple syrup
300 mls cream

Place the egg, yolks, and maple syrup in a good-sized bowl, and sit that bowl over a small pot of simmering water. Whisk the mixture thoroughly and constantly until it is thick, creamy and aerated – this won’t take a hugely long time. Set it aside, then in another bowl whisk the cream till thick and floppy but not completely whipped. Carefully fold it into the maple syrup mixture, and pour it into a 1-litre loaf tin, either lined with glad-wrap or plain if it’s a silicon one, and freeze till solid. Dip in hot water before turning out (for some reason it took a while to dislodge) and cut into slices.
The only problem with ice cream is that it’s hard to photograph – it’s all melting in front of you which makes composition and focussing a bit of a non-event. Eating it however is ridiculously easy. As I said, the texture of this is wonderful – light, creamy and not really rich at all. The maple syrup whisked through provides the most incredible flavour – elegantly sweet and smoky. A few walnuts folded through wouldn’t have gone amiss but its uninterrupted cold creaminess was perfect as is with nothing more than an extra drizzle of sticky maple syrup.
Maybe one day, when I’ve gotten all awesomely rich from writing a cookbook, I’ll be able to live like the Canadians on the “Canucks Amuck” episode of Angry Beavers, who crack open cans of cool refreshing maple syrup to quench their thirst. One day!
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Title via: Canada’s other fine export, Neil Young and his song Journey Through the Past. I was fortunate enough to see him live at Big Day Out in January 2009, wild Canadian beavers could not have kept me from that performance.
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Music lately:
Dam Native, Behold My Koolstyle from Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted…Aotearoa music for the ages. I love mellow melodies like this in hiphop, and I like that it’s so clearly about this place, not of course that all NZ music should be – imagine the awkwardness of every local act trying to create the kiwi equivalent of, say, Down In Albion.
Remote Control, Beastie Boys, from Hello Nasty. I like the Beastie Boys and all, really like some of their songs but this song is in a fantasy baseball league of its own. The bombastic beats, the fuzzyiness, the ambiguity of the chorus, it just slays me. This was one of those songs I heard on the radio late at night and I had no idea how to find out who sung it or where to find it…
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Next time: Dubious. Might crack out the slow cooker, it’s definitely cold enough…on the other hand I really want to make more maple syrupy stuff while I have the chance…