Get Behind Me, Santa!

December 12, 2007March 14, 20202 Comments

Yes, I am excited about Christmas, but December seems to be going too fast. It’s difficult to focus on each day as it goes by, when you do that get up-go to work-come home-get up for work again thing too often. I realise this sounds horribly patronising coming from a student, but as Jamie Cullum said in his eponymous song, “blame it on my youth,” because uni in no way prepares you for the “real world.” I guess what I am try to say, in my bungling way, is that I don’t want to suddenly wake up and it’s Christmas and I have completely forgotten to enjoy the buildup. And go shopping.

By the way – and I can’t think of any better place to say it than here – it is one of my greatest regrets in life that I can’t sing. It’s not like something you can work for in a New Year’s Resolution kind of way – you either have it or you don’t. You may wonder why I begin my post like this, but I was singing loudly along to the Rent soundtrack today while doing the dishes and as I listened to myself caterwaul it struck me that no matter how much I love to sing, no one would ever hire me to star in a Broadway show. Sigh.

Anyway, enough grumbling! There is lots to catch up on! And I sent Tim on a mission to find tinsel after work, so I can feel more seasonal. The $2 Shop mini tree on top of the microwave just isn’t cutting it.

Above: Tomato Rice, a recipe from Nigella’s How To Eat, which I made for dinner the other night. This is a perfect example of Nigella’s genius. Seriously – please make it!

Tomato Rice (The title is thusly because I can’t decide if this is more of a soup or a risotto.)

Take a jar of tomato pasta sauce. Empty into a pot, then half fill the jar with water, put the lid on, give it a shake and tip the contents into a pot. Biff a teacup or so of long grain rice into the sauce, and add more water if there doesn’t seem to be enough liquid. Cook at a lowish heat for 20 or so minutes, stirring so it doesn’t stick, until the rice is cooked. Pa-dah!

It is warm, and comforting, and transports even the most low-rent jar of pasta sauce into something seriously delicious.

To go with this I made Nigella’s potato and onion hash, from Feast. It is basically cubed potato, fried till crispy with onion, topped with a fried egg. The perfect supper.

Above: Ahem. You don’t need me to point out that I’m not so good at cracking eggs into a pan. But still – it tasted great and is easy as to make. I recommend microwaving the potatoes for about 5 minutes first though, otherwise they take forever to cook in the pan.

Another dinner we had recently was a chicken curry. It was probably more Indian than Thai, despite the presence of a kaffir lime leaf. It’s funny, we hardly ever have chicken breasts – they are just so expensive, and thighs taste much better – but they are versatile. So, I thought that I’d have it made when I found some drastically reduced in price the other day (their best before date was looming.) But I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything to do with them. Anyway, I ended up making a kind of free-form curry. I fried an onion, and added cumin seeds, ground coriander, tumeric, garlic, and a spoonful of coconut cream, to make a kind of paste. To this I added the diced chicken, a tinful of chopped tomatoes, and a kaffir lime leaf. This simmered away and then I swirled in some more coconut cream and frozen beans before serving over rice. To be honest I was rather impressed with myself – it tasted really good!

Above: The curry bubbling away.

That night (Monday, by the way) I decided to make the Canadian Cake, from my great grandmother’s Aunt Daisy cookbook. This title amused me endlessly, I suppose because there is no explanation given for its nomenclature, and because we had a Canadian friend around who was equally amused (it doesn’t even have maple syrup in it!) I really had no excuse not to make it.

I made the whole thing in the food processor, which helped for the slightly unusual aspect of this cake – it had a whole orange biffed in it. I should have put the orange in sooner though, instead of at the end once the flour had been incorporated, as it took a while for the chopper blades to wear it down. Nonetheless, it was very easy to make, and despite the fact that we spontaneously decided to drink a lot of red wine on our courtyard outside I managed not to botch it up in any way.

Above: If you were wondering, this is what a Canadian Cake looks like. Tastes good too – a light, moist sponge with a distinct orange flavour and sultanas strewn throughout. Another winner from Aunt Daisy!

Last night’s dinner was something altogether different, the Spaghettini Al Sugo Crudo from Nigella’s Forever Summer. In layman’s terms, it is pasta with a sauce made from chopped tomatoes, steeped in olive oil and garlic. The only difficult thing about this recipe is actually finding decent inexpensive tomatoes. Luckily they are starting to fall in price – I can’t remember the last time Tim and I bought some – and we got a bushel of healthy looking ones at the vege market on Sunday. You have to peel them for this recipe but it’s really a doddle – just pour over boiling water and let them sit for a bit.

Above: This pasta is so delicious – very simple flavours, but elegant and summery. In a move that Aunt Daisy surely would have approved of, I used the water that I’d poured over the tomatoes to blanch the brocolli and cauliflour, and then used the same water to cook the pasta in. Could I be any more environmental right now?

Finally – I swear, this is the last thing – I made the Blackberry and Apple Kuchen from Nigella Bites. Nigella’s version is a sweetened slab of bread which has apple, blackberries, and crumble tumbled over before baking. I had found a punnet of blackberries at the local Four Square for $2.50, and so taken was I with how cheap they were that I had to buy them. This recipe is very easy, the dough is silkily easy to knead and roll out into its tin, and then all you have to do is dice the apple and make the cinnamony crumble. It’s a miracle that I didn’t muck it up somehow, as the final of Outrageous Fortune was starting when I put it in.

Above: Kuchen in the kitchen. This stuff is sooo good!

Am now off to make a list (and check it twice, I know) of ingredients for all the Christmas presents I’m going to be cooking over the next two weeks. Am also hoping that I get paid soon -eek!

We’ll Meat Again

December 4, 20074 Comments

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

-Nigella Lawson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above: Toast with the most:Nine grain bread, toasted and spread with avocado, linseeds and Maldon sea salt. Worth getting out of bed for!

I have noticed that tons of food bloggers lately are cooking from La Lawson’s new book, Nigella Express. If I were a character in a comic book, there would be wiggly lines above my head surrounding the word COVET!! I had a quick look at it in a bookshop in town the other day, and it looks seriously gorgeous. There aren’t many things in this world that get me all anticipational like the idea of new Nigella material. But, it is also a lesson in restraint (she says, having cooked a million kilos of meat this week) in that I could probably afford to buy it but need to keep money in the bank for rent and bills and the like.

Also, while I am musing indulgently, you may have noticed a new addition to my Pet Sounds – Loveless, the album by My Bloody Valentine. I got this from my younger brother, a guy with relatively impeccable taste in music (he does like some rubbish stuff, but hey, I like Rent) This is my New. Favourite. Album. I listened to it on my iPod at work yesterday, and as soon as it was finished I listened to it again. It is seriously dreamy, and lush, and swirly, and shuffling, and all those other nice words, and slightly Cocteau Twins-esque, and a little difficult to listen to with all the layered guitar- I like music that doesn’t just hand it to you on a plate. I played it for Tim and he didn’t really like it. Now, I am always trying to get Tim to like stuff (haven’t succeeded yet with Rent, but finally managed to convince him that a life without Neil Young is a life wasted) but I had to admit it did sound a bit rough coming out of the computer. Then I tried listening to it this morning through these really good headphones that we have, and it sounded incredible. So, I have concluded that this is an album to listen to by yourself, with headphones, unless you have high class speakers, otherwise it will just sound jarringly messy.

By the way, I seriously apologise for the massively chunky paragraph above, I have tried a million times to enter a break between the separate points, but for some reason Blogger isn’t having a bar of it. It stings the eyes!

That’s Entertainment…

November 25, 20071 Comment

Just a quick post, to tide things over. Tim and I have been back in Wellington, at Hadfield specifically, for a couple of hours now – after saying goodbye to Mum and Dad and bonding with the kitties for one last time, we jumped on the bus which would take us on our distinctly uncomfortable, 10-hour trip back to the capital. There is lots to write about, but I’ll do that tomorrow. In the meantime, I thought I would let you know that Muse were absolutely mind-blowingly wondrous. This isn’t my own personal music-review blog, exciting thought though that may be, but I will divert briefly from the food for today. As words can’t describe adequately how excellent this concert was, I thought this might help:

Above: This photo, taken by Tim, pretty much sums up what the gig was like.

Above: And this neatly describes how we felt the entire time. Dad and Julian loved it too; Julian braved the mosh pit, while the rest of us enjoyed the fantastic view from our seats.

What the pictures don’t quite convey, however, is how unbearably WARM it was inside the stadium – by the end we were sweating like mules carrying barrels of tequila to Mexico. Isn’t it funny with big-name concerts – you spend all the time beforehand thinking “How soon is now?” And then when it actually is happening, it feels like you have been there forever, but also that you need to focus on every-single-second before it is all over, and then when it is over – did that really even happen? Maybe this is just me – when I do care to engage my brain I tend to overthink a situation…

Anyway, we are about to collapse into bed, but just so we remember this is a food blog, I boiled us up some pasta when we got back to the flat, into which I stirred a little butter (okay quite a bit) and grated over some fresh nutmeg. Instant comfort food, which is what the soul craves (even if the hips don’t) after a ten hour bus trip.

Farewell to Feta, But Hopefully Not Jethro…

November 13, 20072 Comments

Thought I’d better post before Outrageous Fortune as it finishes late and looks like a weepie episode tonight. Will Jethro or Van go to prison? I hope not! It has been raining here but it isn’t dark yet, and the quality of the light is bizarre, almost sepia toned, and all the trees around us in the valley have taken on a hallucinogenic green colour. Yes, it sounds odd. I tried taking a photo to show what I mean, but it didn’t come out so well. And yes, I do live in the city but also adjacent to a verdant valley – welcome to New Zealand.

Anyway, what we have been eating lately:

Above: Nigella’s Greekish Lamb Pasta from Forever Summer, with some of its ingredients behind. This is truly delicious, and comfortingly reminiscent of spag bol for Tim (okay, he’s not hard done by in the food stakes but I know he appreciates something recognisable.) It was not, however, the last of the scenery-chewing feta…

Above: Parsnip and Brocolli Soup, which was tonight’s dinner. I didn’t use a recipe for this, just sweated the veges for a bit (such an unpalatable term!) simmered them in some stock and whizzed it up in my food processor with the last chunk of feta. In hindsight I probably should have crumbled it over the soup, I don’t know what I was expecting but whizzed up the flavour just disappeared. Nevertheless the soup was lovely, but really would have benefited from a bucketload of cream. Sigh. Afterwards we had pasta dressed simply with butter and nutmeg so it’s most likely a good thing the soup was relatively austere.

I am by no means on a diet, but after breaking a nail trying on some jeans at a shop the other day I figure it wouldn’t hurt to up the veges and lessen the butter. I’m always reminded, whenever I have moments like these, of that scene from the Simpsons –

Homer: “Marge, how could you let me get so fat?”
Marge: “I’m not the one who put butter in your coffee!!”

Somehow I think Homer and I are kindred spirits.

On a different note, I got an A for my Writ paper (bask!) for which one of my assignments was to write a review of something in the media. I chose Nigella’s How To Eat, which got an A-!! She did not fail me – and more importantly, neither did my lecturer.

Update: Outrageous Fortune has just finished and Jethro is okay! Phew! It is HOSING down here, and the sky is erupting with thunder and lightening. It is nice to go to sleep to though. I used to worry when Tim did midnight shifts at McDonalds in weather like this…I hope it has stopped raining by 5.30am tomorrow when he has to go to work at Starbucks!

For once: not Nigella.

November 9, 2007March 14, 2020Leave a comment

Apologies in advance if this post is a little lacklustre – have just watched a lot of telly and am pretty tired.

I have a difficult time staying consistently ‘healthy’ in my eating habits. I’ll do pilates, have some soymilk, and then follow it up with a buttered chocolate bar. Okay, I’m joking…barely. Last night’s dinner was a good enough example of this – salad and lentil soup (healthy) with homemade mince pies (unhealthy.) However, in my opinion, as long as there are lots of vegetables and other good things present, it can’t be too bad.

The lentil soup came from Alison Holst’s Dollars And Sense cookbook. I have no snarky comments to make – it was great soup, very easy and made from stuff I had in the cupboard. Yet another reminder of why this book is worth reading over.

Above: Lentils, vegetables, spices, water – this pretty much cancels out buttery pastry…right?

So taken was I with the beetroot and feta tarts that I thought I would make the pastry shells again and fill them with (much cheaper) mince to make a kind of homespun Big Ben pie, if you will. As you can see I got a little excited with the leftover pastry scraps…

Above: Twinkle, twinkle little pie…These were not just a pretty picture, they tasted rather lovely too. I could only manage one (my pie tin makes four) probably because I’d eaten too much pastry while making them, but Tim snarfed his down. He had my second one for breakfast this morning and said it was the best he’d ever had. Well, I guess anything beats Weet-bix (to which I have a particular aversion.)

Finally, balancing this out was a salad of beans, cucumber, and our old friends feta and walnuts. I didn’t have cucumber so replaced it with fennel, quelle surprise! This recipe comes from the New Zealand cookbook, and is a fabulous combination with a lovely lemony dressing. Tim and I hoovered it up in about ten seconds – it’s very more-ish.

Above: Hopefully everyone isn’t sick of seeing things scattered in feta and walnuts…

Dinner tonight was something I’ve been craving all day- a vast pot of pasta. I don’t know if there is Italian blood coursing through my veins somewhere but few things make me happier than pasta. Of course, creamy cheese-laden pasta dishes are a lot easier to love than the more austere tomato sauce that we had tonight, yet it was still richly flavoured and filling and all those other good things. I based the sauce on a Moroccan recipe in The Accidental Vegetarian, which adds cinnamon, cumin and tumeric to give aromatic depth. I biffed in a handful of red lentils and let them simmer away into nothing. It was delicious! I suppose it didn’t help that I ate half a packet of wine gums while watching America’s Next Top Model (oh the irony!)

Above: Made with canned tomatoes for 60c from Kmart! Tip for the wise: never buy your canned tomatoes from the supermarket, they are much cheaper at Kmart or the Warehouse. By the way…I crumbled some feta over the pasta, as you can probably see, but hastily stirred it through so it wouldn’t be a focal point of this picture.

Right, am off to bed now: being crosseyed and dozy does not make for a sparklingly witty blog.

What would Scarlett O’Hara Do?

October 27, 2007March 14, 20203 Comments

I admit that I haven’t actually seen Gone With The Wind, but I remember reading years ago in…a Sweet Valley High book (oh the delicious juxtaposition between high and low culture) that she was particularly resourceful. Incidentally, is it worrying that “Johanssen” not “O’Hara” is the first thing that pops into my head upon hearing the word Scarlett?

Anyway, what S’OH might have done, if she found out that her boyfriend had deleted the photos of roast pork and the ensuing stir fry (when of course, she should have uploaded them sooner so the blame is on both sides)…is shown the world some photos she prepared earlier! This year, before I started this blog, I was taking photos fairly regularly of recipes (usually Nigella’s) that I’d made. In fact, it was in pondering why I took these photos that I first considered starting a blog.

So; with a flourish to distract you from the empty promises of previous posts- a trip down memory lane! Disclaimer – these photos were taken before I started this blog and so aren’t that great – not that the rest of my photos are – but, well, this is what our food looks like under the light of our kitchen.

Above: Custard Cream Hearts, from Nigella’s Feast. The custard buttercream filling is quite, quite addictive. I’m lucky there was any left to fill these beauties!

Above: Chickpea and Zuchinni Filo Pie, from Nigella’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess. It sounds much more like something you’d buy at a cafe and not ever contemplate making at home, but it isn’t tooooo fiddly (despite the word ‘Filo’ in the title) and tastes soooo good, all fragrant with cumin and tumeric. I recommend this if you are ever needing to seduce a vegetarian.

Above: Chocolate Fudge Cake, from Nigella Bites. It is an old fashioned, solid chocolate cake and the icing is just ridiculously good.I made it for Tim’s birthday in September.

Above: Pasta from my impulse-bought pasta machine. It is more delicious than any pasta I have ever had…definitely worth the effort! I used the pasta recipe from Nigella Bites (1 egg to every 100g flour, which feeds one person – an easy equation) and got Tim to help me crank the machine. It cooks in literally seconds, in boiling salted water, and I dressed it simply in butter and nutmeg. If I had the time, I’d probably eat this every day.

The roast pork, by the way, was from Nigella’s Feast, and was an Italian recipe for New Years called “Roast Pork Cinghiale.” The marinade involved marsala fine, pink peppercorns, garlic, allspice, olive oil, brown sugar, and a few other bits and pieces. Once roasted, the sugar and the wine caramelised it wonderfully while the pepper and spices provided a densely earthy flavour. A seriously great way of treating pork.

In honour of the New Years Pork: I resolve to be more organised!

What I’ve been up to lately…

October 14, 2007March 14, 2020Leave a comment

I have taken a lot of photos of things I have been cooking over the last week or so to build up a collection for this blog. In order to get up to speed, I thought I’d post a few below. Hopefully it doesn’t take too long for y’all to load the pictures…

Chicken Gougere: from the Supersavers book. I made this for dinner last Friday. It consists of a circle of choux pastry in which you put sauteed chicken and vegetables (the sauce of which is mysteriously addictive – I’m amazed there was enough left by the time I’d finished “tasting it to check the seasoning”) I guess choux pastry does seem a little deranged for Friday night dinner after work, but, well, I love what Nigella calls “putskying” round in the kitchen and if you are gonna make pastry, choux surely looks the most impressive for the limp stirring it requires to make. This was really delicious, and supposed to serve 6 – worryingly, Tim and I polished it all off while watching the Simpsons.

Above: Chicken Gougere, darl.

Gingerbread Muffins: from Nigella’s Feast. I had a bad head cold a couple of weeks ago (which I haven’t quiiiite managed to shake off) and as a result lost my sense of smell. I mean, I had my nose in the Rawleighs, in my bag of star anise that Mum and Dad got me, in the jar of crushed garlic (which I really don’t like actually) and I couldn’t smell anything. Nada. Not a sausage. Hence the fact that I cooked a lot of chilli and curry that week. I also made these wondrous muffins of Nigella’s, because I had a hankering to bake and thought that the heavily spiced ingredients might break through my nasal passages of steel. They didn’t but they had, er, a lovely texture. Tim and flatmate Kieran raved about them though, so when I got my sense of smell and thus my sense of taste back, I made another batch. Oh boy, was it worth the wait. Heady with cinnamon, cloves, and ginger (naturally) and made dense with golden syrup, these are fantastic. Will have to make some next time I’m up home. By the way the photo below isn’t so much to show you the muffins as to show our kitchen table in a very, very rare state of cleanliness.

Above – Gingerbread muffins…on a clean table!

Pasta with Asparagus, Lemon, Garlic and Parsely – Nigella’s Forever Summer. Made this because asparagus was going cheap at 4 Square down the road, and asparagus is one of those foods that seems to herald the arrival of warmer weather. It was hosing down the night that I made this, but whatever. I served it with some chorizo that I had bought ridiculously cheap at the Food Show earlier this year (well, we wouldn’t have chorizo otherwise) You may notice that it is made with macaroni, which I’m pretty sure isn’t exactly what Nigella had in mind…but we were out of penne. Either way it tasted lovely, but didn’t look as nice as it would have had it been made with something more upmarket…

Above: Note the flash salt! As Kieran would say, “What is this, France?”

Also, just thought that I should point out that I made a South African mince dish for dinner the other night, from the New Zealand Cookbook, called Bobotie. Now, this recipe was an adaptation, and I adapted it further, so I wouldn’t want to serve it to the ambassador of South Africa or anything but…it was delicious! Quite unusual, with the inclusion of curry powder, worcester sauce, sultanas, turmeric, vinegar, apricot jam (I used some quince jam I’d made earlier this year) and milk-soaked bread. You then put it in a loaf dish, cover with beaten eggs, and bake. The thing is…it looks kind of gross. It tastes good but…the camera doesn’t love it. Hence the description sans picture. I was very pleased with this on the whole though, as I am always on the lookout for ‘new’ interesting mince recipes.

Do You Remember The First Time?

October 14, 2007Leave a comment

Asked Jarvis Cocker of Pulp in their song of the same name. I thought it would be rather pleasing for my first post here (not counting the long winded introduction below!) to be about the first ever Nigella recipe I made, which I recreated for dinner the other night. I was about 14 or 15 when I first saw her TV show Nigella Bites and while I didn’t quite have an epiphany involving God-beams, I was pretty enthralled and had never really come across what we might now call a “celebrity chef” with such passion and such a way with words. Jamie Oliver was the big thing at the time and I found him interesting but too…frantic. Nigella was different.

Anyway, one of the things she made was this gorgeous looking creation called lemon linguine which I attempted for dinner that night using (cringe!) a can of reduced cream instead of the real thing, as it was all we had. It still tasted fantastic and since then I guess Nigella was destined to be part of my life. So, in the interest of having a nice starting point for my blog, and because I had all the ingredients to hand, I made it for dinner the other night. Was going to serve as is before remembering that well-meaning relatives would see the picture and so hastily boiled up some brocolli that our flatmate Stefan brought back for us from his parents’ orchard in Hawkes Bay.

Lemon Linguine with brocolli!