Category: Pasta

they served a real nice brisket and an 8 foot party sub

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I don’t know why it took so long to blog about this brisket. It’s not like it wasn’t delicious and it’s not like it hasn’t been the right weather for it lately. Maybe because it’s not as good looking as baking, it always gets pushed to the back. Sorry, brisket.

A lesson: Not all second-hand cookbooks from the seventies and eighties are adorably quaint, some are just plain terrible. Like most aspects of pop culture, you get the ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ cookbook, which, if you’re into that sort of thing, and I am, is why I continue to hold on to the QEII Cookbook with its Souffle Bowes-Lyon and tales of 24/7 caviar. Some of those cookbooks are genuinely uninspiring and dull though, and there’s a reason you see them at every single opshop. One pearl of a book that I picked up for $2 in Waiuku about three years ago is Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook. Its title is dubious, its 1980 photography is dubious and even some of its contents are dubious (carrot and oatmeal soup ahoy) but I’ve ended up using it almost as much as any Nigella volume.
A recipe that I’ve made many times from this book is the Greek Pot Roast, which is brisket slowly braised in a cinnamon-spiced, tomato-y liquid and then served over pasta. I’m not sure what makes it wildly Greek, and there’s something about the word ‘braised’ that’s always sounded unsexy to me, but the idea of stew and spaghetti together appeals heaps and you could even call it “ragout” or something if you wanted to serve it to fancy people. Or just be straight up and see who your true friends are (if your true friends are all vegetarian then this probably isn’t the best litmus test.)


Brisket costs hardly anything, but if you have the option of sourcing good quality meat, where you have an idea that the cow whose life was taken for your dinner had been reared in relative comfort, then so much the better. Brisket can sometimes come to you with more fat than actual meat, so choose carefully.

By the way, I’m aware that today’s photos are terrible. Baking is always easier in winter because I can 
wait till the next morning to snap it, but dinner has to be photographed on the spot, which means when it’s pitch-black outside you’re going to get weirdly exposed images like these. Still, at least it matches the book that the recipe came from. I look at some of those 70s and 80s cookbooks with their weird exposure and overdressed sets and wonder how a generation of designers actually stood back and thought “Dammit yes this harshly lit image of a pot roast sitting on a frilly tablecloth with carnations and apples strewn gently about makes me hungry.”

Greek Pot Roast

From Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook, find it if you can.

1.4kg brisket, rolled and tied if possible (I always just leave it)
3 medium sized onions, finely chopped
4 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3 cloves
1 bay leaf
150mls boiling stock
3 tablespoons tomato paste/passata

Note: I obviously don’t use that much meat for just me and Tim. I reduce the meat to around 400-500g for us both and use just one or two onions, but keep everything else the same. Also I just crumble in half a good stock cube and 150mls hot water rather than heating up a tiny amount of stock in a pan – same diff.

Heat your oven to 150 C/300 F. Heat a little olive oil in a flameproof casserole and brown the meat on all sides. Set it aside while you gently fry the onions, garlic and spices. If you don’t have a flameproof casserole, you could just do this in a frypan and then transfer it to an oven dish. Add the bay leaf, stock and tomato paste. Return the meat to the pan, cover and put it in the oven, leaving for at 2 to 2 1/2 hours. Serve over hot spaghetti with Parmesan cheese.


Or if you don’t have Parmesan, you could use, um, frozen peas like I did. Not quite the same, but still a nice contrast. And cheaper. And adds small bursts of vitamin-rich greenness to the incessant meatiness of the brisket. This is delicious and so easy, hence why it has become a regular fixture. The slow, low cooking process breaks down the potentially tough brisket and turns it into something intensely tender and rich-flavoured, which falls apart at the mere sight of a fork looming menacingly towards it. The tomatoey braising liquid doesn’t really reduce down or thicken up, but spooned carefully over the meat and pasta it’s delicious – deeply flavoured with the cinnamon and bay, all of which absorbs into the tangle of spaghetti below.

I hope all (do I even have any?) Canterbury and South Island readers of this blog are doing okay after the huge earthquake on Friday night, and its follow-up aftershocks. It was a scary time here in Wellington – mind you I’m terrified of earthquakes and always have been – but over pretty quickly and with no damage. Meanwhile, many, many homes and buildings in Christchurch have been completely wrecked. It’s incredibly good that not one person was killed, but there’s still so much damage to deal with – and it doesn’t help my nerves that the news media keep insisting that “the big one” is coming. Which means that every time I blink too hard I get nervous that it’s the overture tremors of said “big one”. Perspective though – I’m feeling very lucky to be sitting in my warm home with running water and electricity and to know that family and friends down in Christchurch are unharmed.
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Title via: Errr…30 Rock‘s Werewolf Bar Mitzvah. “Boys becoming men, men becoming wolves!” To be fair, I couldn’t find a youtube clip of Maury Levy telling Herc he’s mishpocheh.
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Music lately:

Elaine Stritch, Ladies Who Lunch, from Company. She’s incredible, but sometimes when she looks at the camera it feels like I got lemon juice in my eye. Wish I could have that kind of effect on people when I say “does anyone still wear…a hat.”

Mueve by Lido Pimienta. Read an interview with her in the new Real Groove magazine, looked her up on youtube and I’m entranced. It’s dreamy and sunny and – bonus – all en Espanol! Cross-posted to 100s and 1000s because I like it that much.
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Next time: Well the Supercooks book was so fruitful that I’ve made something else from it – the awesomely, awesomely named Grumble Pie. You don’t know how hard it was not to push the poor brisket to the back of the queue AGAIN for this.

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.

 

winehouse

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Firstly, consider your attention drawn to the following video, created and deftly edited by my very clever flatmate Jason of Nektar Films, Wellington, as the intro sting for the Rising Star award at the recent 2009 Handle the Jandal awards. Starring my hands. Funnily enough, my hands would be the body part I’m most sensitive about. Instead of being tapered, elegant and expressive, they’re almost aggressively stumpy and charmless, rounded and dimpled like the extremities of some vintage Kewpie doll. “Neither beautiful nor practical”, as a flatmate once aptly pronounced them. Anyway, gosh, there’s a lot to be thankful for and this isn’t supposed to be the Painful Scrutiny Half Hour – let’s just watch the video.
Fun, huh! Get it? Rising cupcake, rising star! It was Nigella’s cupcake recipe, which I don’t need a book to refer to for these days, pumped full of baking powder. That video was filmed in early October but the special cupcake is still sitting in a tupperware container in our fridge – we just can’t say goodbye to it. I’d hazard a guess that it’s not the most edible of products right now. The Handle The Jandal awards were held at the Embassy cinema where Peter Jackson held the premiere of Lord of the Rings years ago. Even though I was really looking forward to seeing all the music videos and seeing who won, it’s no stretch to say that it was hugely exciting seeing myself…well, my hands…moving across the enormous screen in such a gorgeous setting.
To the food! I am a pasta fiend, of Garfield-ian levels of fiendishness, but I’ve never tried cooking it in anything other than boiling, heavily salted water. I’d considered it however – thinking that some kind of broth flavoured with wine or garlic that the pasta absorbs while softening up could be kind of fun. A cursory once-over of Google shows that it already exists, which didn’t bother me in the slightest – it’s not so revolutionary when you think about it.

 

I didn’t refer to one particular recipe as it seemed we all had the same idea. Although, I also didn’t use a whole bottle of red in cooking my pasta as some have – that felt more extravagant than I could deal with comfortably – but a good 600mls went into the cooking water (and then the rest went into a wine glass) creating a wonderfully heady, plummy fragrance as it bubbled away.
Because the ratio of wine to water wasn’t that heavy, the pasta I used didn’t take on a dramatic amount of colour, but it was definitely a good solid pink. I used an Argentinean pinot noir that I grabbed very cheaply at On Trays in Petone, and bucatini pasta that I got marked down at the Meditteranean Warehouse in Newtown. People, bucatini is seriously cool. It looks outwardly like spaghetti but it actually a hollow tube – like thin, edible straws. In hindsight though, I think something a little denser might have worked better – the pasta is very difficult to slurp up satisfactorally due to the tube shape. Wind drag or something.
Red Wine Spaghetti
500-750 mls red wine (nothing too expensive)
At least 500 mls water
Lots of salt. Never undersalt the pasta water.
200g Spaghetti, Bucatini, or other long pasta
Butter
Bring the water and wine together in a large pan, salting recklessly. Once it’s bubbling away, add the pasta and allow to cook through, stirring occasionally. Drain, adding a tiny dab of butter, and dish out onto two plates. I served this with a little sliced steak, fried in a tiny bit of butter with that heavenly Marsala wine, plus zucchini, capers and mint.

Was a little tempted to up the saturation on Picassa to make this more of a “velvet theatre curtain” colour.

The pasta takes on a rich pinkish tint and holds a deliciously winey flavour. The steak in Marsala and buttery zucchini slices worked excellently with the pasta’s savoury richness while the salty capers and icy mint provided clean, fresh contrast. It’s pretty glam, but not scary or overwhelming to make for your next dinner party.

Tonight Tim and I, along with our flatmate and several other usual suspects, are heading out to Porirua to see The Wailers perform, (as in what were once Bob Marley and The Wailers, yes) supported by Hikoikoi and Katchafire. It’s sure to be a amazing night with all that stunning musical talent, plus the legendary-ness of the Wailers – we’re both seriously looking forward to it. Speaking of things we’re excited about: Jack White’s latest outburst of prolific activity, The Dead Weather, is coming to New Zealand in March! Why they’re playing all the way out of town in the Logan Campbell Centre I can’t fathom but we’ve got our tickets and we’ll get there from Wellington somehow. It’s not the same as a White Stripes tour (soon, please? We love you too Meg) but still very, very exciting stuff. Look them up on Youtube or something if you want to know more.
Title of this show brought to you by: Have you seen Glee’s take on Ms Amy Winehouse’s Rehab? It’s pretty addictive. Although, no video on Youtube? For shame, rights-holders, for shame! How are people going to get into it otherwise?
On Shuffle these days:
Stroke: Songs For Chris Knox, an album benefitting New Zealand musician and artist Chris Knox who had a stroke earlier this year. The album features some seriously excellent talent both local and international, reflecting just what he means to people – The Finn Family, The Verlaines, Yo La Tengo, Lambchop, The Mint Chicks, etc. I can’t pretend like I ever knew much about Knox’s music apart from the persistent Not Given Lightly, but I always loved reading his Max Media cartoons in the NZ Herald while I was growing up, thinking that I understood the content even though it was basically over my head. I also really enjoy his more recent, always vinegar-sharp stuff, often featured in Real Groove magazine. I look forward to exploring more of his music through this particularly good cause.
Also, as alluded to before, I’ve got hold of the music from Glee. I love how Lea Michele sounds so damn happy to be there whenever she sings – I don’t know if it’s the Broadway coming out in her but it’s not a quality you’d hear in most pop stars of the last decade. Nice to see Kristin Chenoweth popping up in there, although I wish they’d given her some better songs…My favourite Kristin Chenoweth-song-from-tv remains Birdhouse In Your Soul with Ellen Greene. It is genius. Anyway, despite not even being a fan of a lot of the material they cover, there’s something so ridiculously exuberant and joyful about the delivery that you can’t help but love anything Glee does. Also do you actually understand what Defying Gravity being sung on New Zealand mainstream TV could mean for, well, everything? Significant stuff, I predict (hope).

in the flesh?

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Note: Post edited 14th October to remove a lot of details which I, in my naive over-excitement, talked about far too loudly. This means you get the blog equivalent of films that get the swearwords and love scenes bleeped out for airlines, but the story is at least safe. Although, as the media has never had the slightest inclination to get in touch with me before it’s flattering to think that this blog could shake things up.

Okay, guess what. I hate suspense so I’ll tell you right now: I got interviewed by a nationwide publication about my blog. Never mind that I’ve been trying to thrust my food blog onto peoples’ radars for years now. I’ve been keeping this a secret for a good week and a half till the story got confirmed. Which it has been. Turns out I should have kept it quiet a bit longer as it’s not being published for a while but what can you do? I mean, there will be other food blogs, don’t think it’s a feature entirely devoted to my blog (all in good time, are you listening Cuisine magazine?) but whatever, it’s me! I’m giddy with excitement! How do famous people handle it? Important note: The story is due to run sometime in November. Deal with it.

That said, I may completely regret spreading this news far and wide when the story is published, as I really have no idea how, apart from sweaty, I came across in the phone interview. I spent the rest of my day second guessing myself (“I didn’t quote [title of show]! I didn’t convey my love for Nigella adequately!) The aforementioned Ange and I were talking about how interviews with celebrities always hinge on how petite they are and how they glow with thousands of luminous spheres. You know. “[Insert starlet here] enters the room, her delicate wrists offsetting her endless eyelashes and skin as dewey as a meadow after the rain. Despite wearing a plain grey tracksuit and not a lick of makeup, she exudes effortless chic and charming approachability. Merely gazing at her is like walking down a Parisian boulevard.”

It made me wonder how my intro would run. “Laura walks straight into the doorframe as she attempts to enter the room. She is wearing $6 men’s grey trackpants, the kind that Wolf from Outrageous Fortune wears in prison, and her thighs are even larger than she claims on her blog. She should really consider a deep-conditioning hair treatment…and she’s glaring at me.” Well, you’ve got to make the jokes about yourself before everyone else does. Anyway, let’s all hope for the best that I made a good impression and focus on the joyful fact that I’ve had my first proper interview. It’s really exciting, right? I was jittering all over the place when I found out and completely unable to concentrate. And also, finally, finally, the New Zealand lifestyle media is waking up to the fact that there are flourishing food blogs out there and that people might be interested in them.

To the food:

I think, lately, I’ve been eating so much tofu and soft, diaphanous rice stick noodles and coconut-drenched everything that I now instead crave something more animalistic and hearty. And they don’t come much heartier than lasagne.


I’m not going to give you a recipe for it, because I don’t think anyone needs it and I don’t even really know what I did…just a buttery, nutmeggy bechamel in one pot, tomato-sauced beef mince with garlic and red wine in another…all layered up with sheets of pasta and topped with cheese and finally baked for a while. I’m not saying that everyone should know how to make lasagne like a spider knows how to spin a web or they are failures at all aspects of life…just that it’s not something you necessarily need to stick slavishly to a recipe for.

I haven’t actually made lasagne since September 2007 (having a blog makes you know these useful facts) and I’d forgotten how rather brilliant it is…The best bit is the bubbling cheese on top (and only on top…who can afford to put cheese in every layer?) but the whole combination is amazing – soft pasta, milky sauce, rich, red-winey beef…If you possibly can, wait till the next day before eating it as the layers all settle in together and the flavours really develop feelings for each other. And it won’t fly everywhere when you try and cut it. I think the reason that I never make lasagne is that it’s a complete mission to cook and uses every pot and pan in the house, but seems so rustic and old-school that no-one thinks you’ve gone to any effort. Good lasagne is a bit of a revelation still though. And a squillion miles removed from those deepfried, crumbed Toppers that you used to be able to get from the school canteen. I feel slightly uneasy just thinking about them.

Continuing on this meaty theme, (with apologies to flinching vegetarian readers – although you can hardly claim that there’s a lot of meat on this blog), I finished off the Maryland chicken pieces last night by making Nigella Lawson’s Garlic Chicken from her seminal text How To Eat, the sort of recipe that garlic was surely invented for.

Garlic Chicken

2 heads garlic, cloves separated but unpeeled
400mls olive oil
Juice of 2 lemons
16 chicken wings

I scaled all this down accordingly for two large chicken legs. Don’t feel you have to stick to chicken wings for this either.

Put cloves of garlic in a small pan of cold water, bring to the boil and boil for ten minutes. Drain, push the cloves out of their skins (a little messy, but easily done) and whizz in a food processor with the lemon juice and olive oil. Or you could just mash/chop them roughly like I did, which, although you don’t have a food processor to clean, is actually much more of a pain to do.

Pour the garlic mixture over the chicken and marinade in the fridge overnight or whatever (I tend to err on the side of ‘whatever’ but no doubt this will be nicer the longer you leave it) When you’re good and ready, roast at 210 C for around an hour. Serve sprinkled with salt and perhaps with more lemon wedges for squeezing over. Easy as that.

Don’t even think about skipping the bit where you have to boil the garlic. It’s this which softens the eye-watering viciousness of it all and keeps the entire dish a mellow delight as opposed to some kind of excercise in how to encourage early-onset balding. The garlic marinade permeates every nook and cranny of the chicken while making it all good and crisp and magically delicious. I served this with ratatouille (eggplants have come down in price, rejoice!), new potatoes (which I frugally boiled in the garlic water, hoping it would impart some kind of wafting flavour…it didn’t) and roasted asparagus, also fantastically cheap these days. A totally fabulous meal full of flavours that totally kick winter to the curb. Even though it has been freezing and blisteringly windy and rainy for the last week. You tell yourself what you have to.

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The title of this blog is meatily brought to you by: Pink Floyd’s In The Flesh? from that troubled album The Wall. The bombastic guitars and wry lyrics make it a genius choice for a concert opener, a practice adopted by steely erstwhile Floyd member Roger Waters. Check it out here, in a clip from his In The Flesh DVD which would have a profound effect on my mid-to-late teenage years. We saw him live in 2007 opening his concert with this song – bliss. Aside of that, don’t you think he and Richard Gere are a bit doppelganger-y? They could surely play each other in the respective biopic films of their lives.
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On shuffle while I’m a-typing:

Standing In The Rain from local group Opensouls, from their album of the same name. We saw them at Bodega on a whim last Friday and they are fantastically sassy live -somehow managing to sound straight out of the sixties but also really fresh and modern and funky. Beautiful stuff, I highly recommend it.

Rising 5 by Hudson Mohawke from his forthcoming album Butter. This song seems to be all over every single radio station I flick between. It’s really sunny and summery for want of a better word, and for some reason reminds me of the sounds I was listening to in England back in 2005, which is not to say it sounds dated. Pitiful explaining aside, anyone calling their album Butter must be worth a listen.

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Next time: Contritely, I probably won’t mention the interview again.

lava you should have come over

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We’ve all been there. Quietly eating your wet polenta, but secretly thinking “Alas! If only this polenta was glutinous and significantly higher in fat and lower in nutritional value. Then I’d know real happiness.” Or maybe not. I have this yearly dalliance with gnocchi where just enough time has passed since I was last traumatised by it that I delude myself into thinking I can make it successfully. But every year, I fail.

For 2009’s attempt my head was turned by a recipe in a magazine for gnocchi which sounded delicious – a basic choux pastry mixture with cottage cheese added. It seemed pretty non-terrifying and so I gave it a go. The gnocchi was pillowy and light and slowly rose to the top of the pan of water. I pinched one out of the pan and tasted it – argh, so good. Smooth and creamy and yet gratifyingly unstodgy.

Then came disaster. I tipped the pan into a large colander and…the gnocchi broke. All completely flattened. Nary a solid pasta nugget to be found. After putting all this effort into it I was determined that the show would go on but seriously…

…that’s not gnocchi. The squashed gnocchi was kind of delicious, with the exact soft, grainy texture of polenta, just, you know, now with a higher GI rating and all the goodness of no cornmeal! After many years of failure, I’ve decided that gnocchi is like haircuts and half-marathons: best done for you by other people.

Let us distract ourselves from this ugliness with a ridiculously flamboyant cake – Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Coffee Volcano.

To mark the occasion of Tim’s birthday we threw a small shindig at our place on Sunday afternoon, inviting all of our closest friends (a very small, but mighty bunch, minus a few exceptions not based in Wellington naturally). I’d only been back in Wellington for an hour, since I spent the weekend up in Auckland for business meetings and the Smokefreerockquest finals (all of which went smooth as failed gnocchi). Instead of my usual post-travel mode, which is to put on my $6 grey trackpants and stare at the TV, I got stuck into making homemade custard and stuffing softened rice paper sheets like some pearl-wearing housewife from Bonfire of the Vanities.

The whole evening was very relaxed once this was out of the way. Let’s face it, no matter how many times you make custard there is still always the nagging fear that you’ll end up with sugary scrambled eggs. Luckily no disasters this time, particularly fortunate considering I’d substituted coconut milk for the stipulated cream, in a bid to make the pudding dairy-free for one of our friends who swings that way. (By the way, the cake uses oil, not butter. Do not consider for a SECOND that I’d stoop to margarine.)

So yeah, marvelous evening all round, good company, good nibbles, and particularly excellent cheese provided by Dr Scotty. Having it on a Sunday evening gave it a chilled out vibe wonderfully conducive to sitting round eating enormous quantities of food and light quantities of alcohol. Tim took over in the kitchen when the sausage rolls needed baking and the pork buns needed steaming (yeah, there was no real unifying theme to our nibbles) and they were pretty exciting, but the cake was the real star. Probably because I would not shut up about it and about how awesome it was that it was dairy free.

Let me describe it for you: a large, deep, undulating chocolate bundt cake (which, thank all that is good in the world, turned out of the tin neatly this time). The hole in the middle is filled with walnuts. Into said hole, over the walnuts, you pour rich custard, caramel brown with espresso (I actually forgot to add the coffee in the heat of the moment but no harm done as there was still plenty going on). Finally you sprinkle over brown sugar and using some kind of fire-producing implement, torch the sugar till it forms a caramelised, speckly creme-brulee surface on top of all the madness, all of which flows like magma once you slice into the cake to share it round.

It should probably be mentioned here that Nigella uses the words “infant-school easy” and “pa-dah!” to describe this cake. She uses these words…slightly carelessly. I wouldn’t be the first to volunteer a two-year old’s services in making a bundt cake which requires separated egg whites beaten to a meringue. Just sayin’ is all. But, if you have a few years’ experience behind you this cake is not impossible, as demonstrated by the fact that I could actually get it happening at all. It just requires a little focus and forward thinking. A kitchen blowtorch helps, I was given one for my birthday this year and was really excited about using it on something so worthy expending a little butane.

It does resemble a volcano, right? Eating it was an intense experience, and the reason the photos look so hastily snapped is because…they were. The cake is light in texture but very dark with cocoa. The caramelised sugar and hidden walnuts provide a crunchy respite against the rich, flowing custard. It’s just…marvelous. It’s the sort of thing that you have one bite of and decide that you want on a weekly basis. I realise it looks and sounds like there’s far too much going on. But it works.

Chocolate Coffee Volcano

Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess

CAKE

300g caster sugar
140g plain flour
80g cocoa
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 large eggs, separated, plus 2 more egg yolks (this is where it gets confusing if, like me, you have trouble counting to ten)
125ml vegetable oil (I used rice bran)
125ml water

Preheat oven to 180 C and lightly oil a 25cm Bundt tin.

In a large bowl mix together 200g of the sugar, all the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and baking soda. In another bowl, beat together the water, oil and 6 egg yolks. Pour over the dry ingredients gradually, whisking to combine.


Take yet another bowl and whisk the 4 egg whites till stiff. Keep whisking and slowly add the sugar spoonful by spoonful. Gently fold this into the chocolate mixture a third at a time. Pour mixture into the oiled Bundt tin and bake for 40 minutes, although it may need a little longer and covering with tinfoil.

CUSTARD

6 egg yolks
225mls double cream
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon instant espresso powder.


Note: I used four egg yolks and 1 tin coconut milk, using the same method. Whisk egg yolks, sugar and espresso powder together lightly. Heat up the cream in a pan but don’t let it boil. Slowly whisk it into the egg yolks. Wipe out the pan and transfer the mixture back into it, cooking over a low heat till it thickens significantly into custard.

Finally, sprinkle Tia Maria over the cake if you’d like to (another thing I forgot), fill the hole with walnuts, pour in the custard, allowing it to overflow and run down the creases of the cake. Sprinkle over about three tablespoons of brown sugar and torch it till it resembles the top of a creme brulee.

See? Infant-school easy! Pa-dah!

To go with I made another coconut milk custard into which I stirred melted dark chocolate and cocoa and froze into ice cream. As guests peeled off we were left with a few hangers on. There was a joyfully primal moment when we all stood round a kitchen countertop digging spoons greedily into the container of ice cream. Things got a little strange after that and, (poor Tim, was it ever even about him?) as some kind of signifier of this, Defying Gravity was played at great volume for Dr Scotty who had hitherto been living half a life and had never heard it before…

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The title of this blog is brought to you by: Jeff Buckley, singing Lover You Should’ve Come Over, okay sure, but maybe a little Eden Espinosa too…Yes, Jeff Buckley was special and all but I’m more of a Tim Buckley gal myself. And let us never forget who was the author of Hallelujah…
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On Shuffle whilst I type:

1: Like a Pen by excellent Swedes The Knife from their album Silent Shout. This song was regularly thrashed chez nous circa 2006/2007 but I heard it again yesterday while streaming George FM and was immediately taken back to those damper times. Had a nostalgic flashback to Alicia the Canadian teasing us for calling it was called “like a pin” with our New Zealand accents.
2: Cars by Gary Numan from The Pleasure Principle. Spurred on by marathon sessions of watching and listening to The Mighty Boosh I really had an urge to listen to this again. It’s blindingly glorious and swirly.
3: Cornerstone from the Arctic Monkeys’ latest, Humbug. It’s really good. Who would have thought back in 2005 that they’d be here now?

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Next time: Well, hopefully the next post will (a) arrive sooner and (2) have better photos. Like I said I’ve been travelling round the place, hence the yawning chasm between the last post and this one, but I got to touch base at home and catch up with all sorts of lovely and important relatives and get lots of important meetings done in the city AND act as sponsor representative at the fantastic finals for Smokefreerockquest. Plus make dairy-free custard after being back in Wellington for nary an hour. You try blogging after all that. Also, hopefully I make something that really succeeds. Either that or it’s time to get a ‘fail’ tag to add to my list.

bachelorette

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I did this training session thing at work on Monday afternoon, where you fill in a questionaire online and from that they ascertain what kind of patterns you follow and which personality aspects affect the way you work. It basically told me that I am a creative, beliefs-driven, spirited hippy who is quite au fait with a lack of structure and can be very relaxed with deadlines. It was rather like a horoscope reading session – and a lot of it rang true with me.

For everything on this earth except graduating. I graduated on Tuesday (with a Bachelor of Arts in Media and English Lit) and was a nervous wreck the whole time. For this one event, I want structure and rules and advance, pertinent information. Which I feel we didn’t receive. Had the “So, You’ve Decided To Graduate” pamphlet told us specifically how the evening was going to be run, I would have been a lot more chillaxed. But all it really conveyed was something to the effect of “you will instinctively, like a spider making its web, know where to walk to and where to be seated.” A little mystery and coyness is fine, but in the proper context, please. Had I known that the whole thing would be quietly run by wonderful attendants stationed every two metres to tell you exactly where you were supposed to be going, in soothing, hushed tones, I wouldn’t have stressed quite so much.

That aside, it was a wonderful day, and I was lucky enough to share it with lots of other people I knew who were graduating, including Tim, a colleague, an old schoolmate, former flatmates, and one of my cousins. Parading through the town was exciting, if a little fraught – the (miraculously rain-free) wind threatening at any point to separate trenchers from heads, and parents constantly yelling out “stop! look over here!” and attempting to take photos while the orderlies barked at us to keep walking and stay within the lines. An old family friend joined us for lunch at the Black Harp (where I had a wonderful mushroom ragout) and after the ceremony itself Tim’s and my families shared a raucous meal at the reliably fantastic BYO Istanbul on Cuba Street. The ceremony itself was something of a blur, my surname being Vincent I was right at the end and so couldn’t properly relax until it was all over. We were priveleged to have speak at the event (after getting an honorary doctorate), author and Victoria University alumni Lloyd Jones, whose book Mr Pip won the Booker Prize. All in all a very exciting, momentous time – swelling string quartet music would not have been out of place at several points – and I miss wearing the robe and swooping through town allowing the excessive fabric to subtly draw attention to my higher education and no doubt superior intellect. I am Laura Vincent, BA. It’s funny how fast those three years went – I remember reading the book of Anne of Green Gables where she’s doing her schooling and thinking “well, LM Montgomery rather skimmed over those three years a little flagrantly”, but no, it really does go pretty briskly.

My parents arrived on Monday night took and Tim and I out to dinner, well actuallywe took them out to dinner as neither really know Wellington well. Wanting to find somewhere near their hotel that wouldn’t require a traumatically lengthy walk, somewhere non-franchisey and something a little “Wellington”, I chose La Bella Italia on The Terrace. I had never been there before but have heard good things about it. It wasn’t full and the atmosphere a little bright and cold for an Italian place but this makes sense as it is a deli as well as a cafe (with significantly more reasonable prices than another visible Italian cafe in Wellington). Our service was prompt, friendly and matter of fact, the waitress being able to talk to us at length (when questioned), about the puffin-eating habits of the people of the Faroe Islands and also able to make a fabulous long black coffee.

The food was fantastic – well thought out combinations simply served and made with beautiful ingredients.

I had the egg tagliatele with tomato bolognaise sauce and parmesan. The pasta was delicious although had just a touch more bite to it than I like. The sauce was excellent – rich, tomatoey and nourishing.

Mum had the most wonderful vegetarian eggplant dish – actually I think we all ended up eating vegetarian that night for some reason – the eggplant was cooked perfectly and the sauce was divine.

As you can tell I basically tasted everyone’s dinners including my own. Tim had the gnocchi which was incredible – smooth and surprisingly light and tasting of the finest, milkiest ricotta cheese. Dad had a different kind of gnocchi, with a tomato sauce, unfortunately the photo didn’t turn out so well but he seemed to enjoy it. Despite being comfortably full we decided to get two desserts and four spoons to share them with.

First up was vanilla gelato with our choice of liqueur. We went for limoncello, which was silky and tangy with a not unpleasant alcoholic kick. The liquid against the smooth, cool gelato was quite wonderful. It came punctuated with two thin, crisp biscuits which were perfect for dipping into the last of the gelato and limoncello as they melted together.

This chocolate and prune terrine with hazelnut meringues was incredible. So often – too often – when we go out for dinner the dessert has blatantly been assembled or unwrapped rather than created. So it’s nice to find a place where it’s quite clearly the opposite. This terrine was incredible – the dark chocolate bitter and smooth against the sweet crunch of the meringues and the soft dark juicy prunes.

Verdict: I will definitely come back here, if not right away for a meal then definitely to check out the deli side of things. I need some of that pasta.

La Bella Italia
101 The Terrace
Wellington City
Open Monday – Friday 7am till late.
Website


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On Shuffle while typing:

These Four Walls, Gavin Creel, from GoodTimeNation
Calliope! The Veils, from Nux Vomica
Modern Love, David Bowie, from Let’s Dance

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Next Time: I make dinner using ingredients bought at the Wellington Food Show, plus…well that’s it. Nevertheless, I remain, Laura Vincent, BA.

the dough must go on

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My problem with homemade pasta is psychological: I always, every time, bury deep within me and ignore the fact that I have to roll out the dough using my deranged pasta machine and the traumatic act of doing so will render me too sweaty and exhausted and emotionally fragile to properly enjoy the finished product. Every time.

I think even if I had a pasta machine that didn’t emit high pitched death-squeals, and that didn’t change from setting 1 to setting 6 without warning, and whose handle wouldn’t fall off every thirty seconds, it is still the sort of thing that shouldn’t be undertaken in a kitchen such as ours.
To wit:
This is, more or less, the kitchen in my flat. It measures 3 1/2 metres by 2 1/2 metres, and I know, that sounds pretty spacious. But within that space, as well as what you see above, is a table, two fridges, a washing machine, a three-tier plastic rack which holds various things – spices, the tinfoil, our collection of plastic bags – and an entirely superfluous sink in the corner that doesn’t work and which serves as storage space for various cooking implements. This image above was taken for a photo essay I did last year, so be assured that while the spatula indeed was on the floor because of natural causes (ie, someone dropped it there and didn’t pick it up) it has since been moved. All that aside, can you imagine trying to make pasta in this space? It’s not exactly the spacious, sun-warmed cobbles of Tuscany or the spacious, granite-topped stainless-steel abode of Nigella Lawson. If one person turns the handle of the pasta machine, the other person feeding the lump of dough in and out of the roller ends up standing in the hallway, clutching the ever-thinning sheet of pasta, weeping softly as flour gets trampled permanently into the carpet.

Such is the power of an evocative cookbook – in this case, Italian Comfort Food by the Scotto Family of New York. It has a recommendation on the front cover from Regis Philbin so, you know, it must be good. It is filled with family photos – the Scotto family all glowing and gorgeously Italian – and anecdotes of famous customers to their cafe, Fresco (did you know Jennifer Aniston likes their tuna salad? Giuliani was a regular? And my favourite, Bill Clinton once ate seven ice cream sandwiches meant for his dinner guests, while they sat there watching politely?) It is one of the few American cookbooks that has instantly appealed to me (I know you’re the leaders of the free world but till you stop measuring butter in cups and sticks I remain unimpressed) and every single recipe gives me that feeling of kitcheny anticipation.

One such recipe was for ravioli with black truffles and red beets (or beetroot as we say here, and as I will from now on), which is the reason for my whole aforementioned rant about the Jeckyll-and-Hyde nature of my pasta machine and the lamentably tiny size of my kitchen. The recipe stuck in my head though and not only am I a sucker for beetroot, I also thought I could make use of this bottle of white truffle oil that I bought ages ago and have barely used since.

Perception is a funny thing though. Ravioli sounds pretty easy – lay out a sheet of pasta, make small piles of mixture, fold over your pasta, cut…but for me it was a classic case of easier said than done. After taking the above photo, I ended up individually wrapping the dough around the filling, pressing the edges together haphazardly and, towards the end, somewhat maniacally. I did about four or five ravioli at a time before heading back to the pasta machine to roll out another lump of dough. This was not a swift process, the dough would tear and refuse to stick to itself, and the beetroot would just…spread. Nevertheless, the finished product was utterly delicious, so if you want to recreate this emotional mess in your own kitchen, follow my lead.

I was pleased to see that the Scotto family recipe for pasta seemed to echo Nigella Lawson’s – one egg per 100g flour, which kneaded together equals one serving. None of this Jamie Oliver/Gordon Ramsey business where it seems as though they’re in silent competition with each other, trying to see who can have the most audacious number of egg yolks in their recipe. I’m not saying their pasta wouldn’t be delicious, or that they don’t know what they’re doing, just…three words: current economic climate..

For the filling I deviated from the delicious sounding recipe to accomodate what I had in my fridge. This is what happened: I roasted two foil wrapped beetroot for an hour, till a cake tester could be plunged into them without resistance. They were then mashed roughly (and I should have whizzed them in the food processer but was too lazy, don’t be like me) with 125mls sour cream, some chopped garlic, a few drops of white truffle oil, and some crumbled feta cheese. Once this was haphazardly and hamfistedly turned into ravioli, I cooked them in rapidly boiling, heavily salted water for about 1 minute.

And despite being the most woeful-looking, irregularly shaped ravioli to the point where it is almost an insult to Italy to name them as such, they tasted utterly marvelous.

So good I can almost forgive my pasta machine, even though I’m scared it might stab me in my sleep.
As you can see, beetroot isn’t the most well-behaved of vegetables and its deep crimson juice seeped into the pasta dough, creating a marbled pink surface on the cooked pasta which wasn’t really the least bit attractive. To serve, I tossed them in a little melted butter and sprinkled them with mint and parmesan. Despite appearances they really were good – the deep-toned creaminess of the sour cream mingling pleasingly with the sweetness of the beetroot and the almost terrifying pungency of the truffle oil, which made itself felt even in the tiny quantities that I used.

Tim and I went to a play last night, because we cultured like buttermilk. The play was God of Carnage, it’s very recent and currently lighting up Broadway and starring James Gandolfini, Jeff Daniels and Marcia Gay Harden. It is a French play but originated in English on the West End and starred the ridiculously cool Janet McTeer and Tamsin Grieg, plus the moderately cool Ralph Fiennes. With that alone in mind, it’s quite exciting that someone in New Zealand managed to secure the rights to stage it so soon. The play itself was hilarious, but rather excruciatingly so, as the four characters onstage slowly became less and less able to maintain their social graces and good manners with each other.

What Wikipedia can’t tell you however, is that at the age of 23 I managed to book tickets online for – how do I explain this – what I thought was the 2nd of May, but was actually the 1st. So, we had tickets for Friday night but I thought they were for Saturday night, and when we showed up to Circa Theatre on Saturday night wearing arty theatre-going clothes and anticipating an evening of light entertainment, the woman at the box office gave me a blank stare and said that we couldn’t go in. Mercifully, after a stomach-clenching wait wherein I was able to contemplate my own debilitating uselessness, we were told that there were two free seats – not together, but whatevs – that we could take. My peevish hatred for the box office lady who laughed at my predicament softened into the deepest gratitude. All of which seemed to heighten the awkwardness that the characters on the stage portrayed. A particular treat was that it starred the brilliant Jeffrey Thomas, who I recognised instantly from one of his more recent roles as irrepressible hippie commune polygamist Vern in Outrageous Fortune, and whose rich, mellifluous voice is a delight to the ears.

Afterwards we decided to have a debrief over a drink (or, as I used to say before I started working full-time in an office, “a conversation”) and found this delightful, utterly gorgeous place called Duke Carvell’s, off Cuba Street. It was so lovely that afterwards I wondered if I dreamed the whole thing. We went on a whim – after aimlessly walking up Cuba, not being able to settle on anywhere, it appeared out of nowhere, tucked down Swan Lane, which is really an abandoned parking lot and therefore not as charming as it sounds. Duke Carvell’s is quiet from the outside and softly lit with fairy lights – oh, I’m a sucker for fairly lights – and inside mismatched chandeliers and candles illuminate paintings of various sizes and the books and trinkets artfully laden upon the wall-mounted shelves.

Our dapper friend Scotty joined us for a drink, which was lovely, and then without warning a full-on brass band burst through the doors, circled the room playing their music, before leaving as swiftly and mysteriously as they came. I have no idea if the band were in cahoots with the owners of the place or if they were as bewildered as the rest of us, but it certainly added a delightfully surreal touch to the night. The drinks, however, are eyebrow-raisingly expensive, as though there’s a $2 surcharge for the ambience…
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Overheard In Our Kitchen

Laura: Man, that Duke Carvell’s place was cool. Really gorgeous. I’m glad we found it.
Tim: Yep.
Laura: But so expensive. Like they had a $2 surcharge for the ambience or something.
Tim: Sure.
Laura: Heh. Surcharge for the ambience. I’m gonna use that in my blog.
Tim: Okay…
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What came on shuffle while I was writing this:

1:  I Will Never Leave You, by Emily Skinner and Alice Ripley, from the 52nd Tony Awards performance
2: El Paso, by Marty Robbins, from Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs

Next time: Lamb shanks with Marsala. That’s if the photos turn out pretty, difficult with braisy-stewy-casseroly type dishes…

Finally: Addicted to Twitter like I am? Thought so! Follow me by clicking these hyperlinked words!

Pasta Of The House

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I apologise in advance if this post is lacking in my usual sparkle and moxie (presuming of course that I usually possess said qualities), Tim and I went out last night to our good friend Dr Scotty’s birthday shindig and…I awoke this morning with a sliiight (by which I mean thumping) headache. And now I’m craving apple crumble and so help me, we have no apples. Tim and I had a great night though, and I made some chocolate cupcakes to add to the general pool. At the last minute I adorned them with some garish sweets that mum gave me a while ago, and took a quick photo.

Above: Yes, I took the photo on Auto but I was in a hurry, my point being to illustrate the alarming extent to which these lollies resemble plastic. And don’t they just? But nothing says “par-taaayyy” like an elephant on a cupcake. They certainly seemed to go down well.

When I saw this recipe for Manti last week in the September 2004 Cuisine magazine I thought, “I’ve got flour, I’m got mince…cheap dinner! Kapow!” It wasn’t until halfway through that I realised I was actually knee deep in home-made ravioli, which, when put like that, sounded so much more complicated.

You’d think I would have figured it out sooner, since it completely resembles ravioli In. Every. Way. It really is easy in execution though, and has that rare virtue of being something new to do with mince. This is supposed to serve 6 as an entree or light lunch…but you could also comfortably serve it as dinner for two people like I did.

Okay I have a confession to make. After extolling the simplicity of this recipe, while re-reading it to type it up I just, JUST now realised that I actually missed out an important step. Where the recipe it tells you to cut the pasta into small squares, I just…didn’t. So Tim and I ended up with eight large ravioli as opposed to many small, dainty pieces as per the recipe. I mean it was delicious but…missing a whole step of the recipe? In the words of Rush, “Why does it happen? Because it happens.”

Manti – Turkish Ravioli

Pasta Dough:
1 egg
190g flour

Combine the egg with 1/4 cup water, mix into the flour and knead for five minutes till the dough is smooth and elastic. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and chill for half an hour. Chill the dough that is, although feel free to kick back and relax yourself.

Filling: Mix the following in a bowl.

250g minced beef or lamb
1 medium onion, grated (I used some of Nigella’s caramelised onion that I’d made earlier and frozen in 100g lots. I haven’t blogged about it so…nevermind)
handful finely chopped parsely
pinch of good salt.


Cut the dough into six pieces, and roll out each piece as thinly as possible. I did this by layering it between two pieces of gladwrap, which made it clean and easy to roll without sticking. Cut each rolled out piece into 5 squares about 9x9cm. Place a heaped teaspoon of the filling in each little square, fold over diagonally and press down to seal. Bring a large pot of water to the boil, salt well. Cook the ravioli in batches for about 3 minutes each, then drain well.

Above: Yes, I did take this photo on top of the washing machine. Well, it was the only available benchspace. I’m still Laura from the block you know.

I served the giant ravioli with a sauce made from Greek yoghurt, sumac, and chopped garlic (that I’d poached in the boiling pasta water to soften and mellow the flavour). Roasted asparagus and cos lettuce on the side, coriander sprinkled over…it really was a marvelous meal, the pasta was not stodgy in the slightest in spite of my heavy-handed rolling and the sauce gave it that lovely rounded flavour that only garlic and more garlic can provide.

One more recipe, because this is too delicious to let it get lost in my archives of dinners that I’ve photographed…

From Simon Rimmer’s excellent and meaty-in-the-non-literal-sense cookbook The Accidental Vegetarian comes Pan Haggerty, which you could describe as a kind of low-rent dauphinoise. It comprises astonishing proportions of butter, cheese, and potatoes, so need I say more?

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Pan Haggerty
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50g butter
1 onion, finely sliced
200g new potatoes, cleaned and finely sliced
75g mature Cheddar cheese

Preheat oven to 180 C. Heat half the butter in an ovenproof fan and fry the onions till soft, then set aside. Put a layer of potato in the pan and fry for a few minutes. Layer up with fried onion and sliced potato, finishing with a layer of potato on top. Dot with the remaining butter, bake for about 40 minutes. Just before serving, grate the cheese over and pop under a hot grill for a few minutes. If you don’t have an ovenproof fan, you can do what I did which was just transfer the fried onion and potatoes to a smallish pie plate. I forgot to layer the onions and just left them on the bottom but they went all caramelly and soft and wonderful so you know, serendipity! Oh and I used what was left of the Havarti cheese that mum sent down with me so feel free to use whatever you have to hand.
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Once again, sorry for lacking in lustre, I’m just pretty weary. Tomorrow Tim and I will attend our last ever lectures at university, which is pretty heavy, although we aren’t altogether finished – I have a socking great essay due on Monday and we both have an exam on the 4th. Hopefully after a good night’s sleep I can produce the kind of bloggery that you deserve…especially since this blog is almost one year old. Good night!

Pink Goes Good With Grain

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If anyone can tell me what is behind the (admittedly forced) pun in my title you win a million dollars.

Not. But, I would be kinda tickled if anyone can work it out.

Mum got me a bag of quinoa – something which I have, nerdily, been quite wild to try for some time now. I never thought I’d come across something more virtuous than lentils, but here I am. Life sure can take you on some interesting journeys. The Incans called quinoa the “mother of all grains” and are you going to argue with that recommendation? It contains forty squillion different vitamins and minerals and has more protein than any other non-meat product, and with all this you’d expect it to be kind of high maintenance, right? But no, a two year old could cook it. All you have to do is let it simmer for ten minutes, no pre-soaking or anything. As if all that weren’t thrilling enough, it actually tastes really good. Closest in texture to couscous, but much lighter, it has a somewhat nutty flavour which lends itself nicely to having chunks of roasted vegetables folded through…


Of course, adding roasted beetroot instantly turned the entire bowl of quinoa bright pink. Also in the mix was roasted carrot, walnuts, chopped spinach, and a perhaps-slightly-toooo-generous spoonful of ras-el-hanout. I thought about drizzling in some olive oil but the quinoa is so light and fluffy that I didn’t want it to be bogged down with gluggy oil.


Above: I did something very similar with some wholewheat pasta – more roasted beetroot, spinach, etc, but this time I included some mashed cloves of roasted garlic. The sweet nuttiness of the beetroot complemented the nuttiness of the pasta (I really need a new synonym to describe nuttiness huh?) and the garlic was a perfect addition. Again, as soon as I gave it a stir, the whole lot turned irrevocably, gaudily…pink.

Above: Once more – with organic burghal wheat. You probably don’t need me to point it out, but this inexplicably became tinted the pinkest of them all, which contrasted pleasingly with the snowy feta (added at the VERY last minute here for photographic purposes.) After that I kind of cooled it on the beetroot front but look, they’re really cheap and good for you, okay? And sometimes you have to take what you can get.

So it has been a bit of a wholegrain orgy in my kitchen lately. I know I’m smitten with them, but trust me, they’re more alluring than their earnest, hessian-weave image would suggest. And it’s not all roasted beetroot, for example, witness rolled oats cleverly disguised as pancakes…

I made these following an old recipe of Alison Holsts’s. It doesn’t make a lot, so is suited nicely to a cosy, lazy Sunday breakfast for two. They are surprisingly filling, but aren’t stodgy or lumpen at all.

Oaty Pancakes

3/4 cup rolled oats

3/4 cup milk

1/2 cup flour

1 t baking powder

1 egg

2 T sugar

2 T butter, melted

Pour the milk over the rolled oats in a good sized bowl, and leave to sit for 5-10 minutes, perhaps while you potter round getting the rest of the ingredients. Stir in the rest of the ingredients without overmixing, and add a little more milk to slacken if the batter looks too stiff. I did. I also melted the butter in the pan I planned on cooking the pancakes in, before tipping it into the batter (thus saving on dishes! Like a true student.) These work best as smallish cakes, about the size of one of Jennifer Lopez’ hoop earrings circa 2002 (meow!) and need flipping once bubbles appear. Don’t leave them for too long though as the bubbles aren’t as obvious with all those oats in the way. Eat however you want, with butter, with golden syrup, whatever.

All these various foods – oats, quinoa, burghal wheat, wholewheat pasta – are not only delicious they are also incredibly good for you. They are filling – when I used to have toast for breakfast I would not only be intensely hungry at lunch, I would also have that horrible empty-head-empty-stomach feeling. This is why I eat so much of them: So that I don’t end up buying chocolate bars at 10.00am, and so that I don’t feel bad about the big ol’ chocolate cake that I made this afternoon (and will blog about soon…)

In other news, I’m really enjoying all my papers so far this term. I may not feel that way when I’m wading neck-deep through assignments but so far, so enjoyable…however I am being positively haunted by advertising for Wicked in Melbourne, even long-suffering Tim pointed out a poster in excitement to me before – “oh” – realising it’s an Australian performance. Nevermind, these things all happen when they’re supposed to and it wouldn’t be so bad to see it in the West End even if I have to wait a while…Speaking of Broadway I am currently in love with the Spring Awakening soundtrack, if you don’t mind a little salty language and teenage angst the songs are utterly gorgeous.

What Am I? Chopped Liver?

14 Comments

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Obvious, but how could I let that title pass me by? I also considered “De-liver-ance” and “An Offal-y Big Adventure.” Sometimes I spend forever diddling over a title and now I have an embarrassment of riches. But truly, liver: it ain’t that bad. It’s not all that cheap either, unfortunately – a 300g pot of chicken livers costs $3.50. Considering the nature of offal – the fact that it’s so undesirable – shouldn’t it be cheaper? But after prowling through my Nigella books and also spurred on by Claudia Roden’s The Food Of Italy, I decided to dip my toe into the heady world of eating vital organs.


Above: Claudia Roden’s Chicken Livers with Marsala. As well as being generally disliked by children world-over, liver is also not going to win any Miss Photogenic sashes any time soon. Even soft-focus didn’t really help.

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Overheard in our kitchen:

Me: Tim, don’t hate me but…
Tim: (urgently) What did you do?
Me: We’re having liver for dinner.
Tim: Ah. (nonplussed silence ensues.)

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This was actually genuinely very, very good. Oh, I won’t lie, livers can have a funky texture – almost chalky in places, and disarmingly squishy in others – but they taste fine. Tim really liked it too. But then how could you turn down anything dripping with butter, bacon, and ambrosial Marsala wine? Probably a running shoe could be embiggened by being cooked in those ingredients.

Fegatini di Pollo al Marsala (sounds so much sexier in Italian, doesn’t it?)

200g chicken livers
1 small onion, chopped
15g butter
2 slices pancetta or bacon, chopped
6 T dry Marsala

Clean the livers and leave them whole. I should point out here that I diced them, because I felt I could handle them better in smaller chunks. Fry the onion in the butter, until soft but not browned. Add the bacon and fry for 2 minutes, stirring, then add the chicken livers. Saute quickly, turning over the pieces until browned but still pink inside. Add salt and pepper to taste and the Marsala. Cook for 1-2 minutes longer, then serve over noodles with lots of chopped parsely.

That wasn’t the end of my foray into liver though. Inspired by a couple of meatball recipes in Nigella’s How To Eat, I thought that combining beef mince and chopped liver to make meatballs would not only make the mince go further, it would provide intriguing flavour and add lots more vitamins. Livers are very, very healthy you know. Probably wouldn’t be so healthy if chickens were able to drink alcohol like humans.

Now I want to put liver into every meatball recipe. These were fabulous – soft and light and almost smoky in flavour. And because of the liver, we got eight meatballs each. Woohoo! I also added an egg, a grated carrot, some bran, a pinch of ground cloves, and a tablespoon of semolina. Frankly, the mixture looked completely nasty, but once they started to bake the kitchen smelled incredible. I whipped up a quick sauce by reducing some red wine (the dregs of a bottle from Tim’s and my night out a few weeks ago) and added a tin of chopped tomatoes, some dried oregano, and a spoonful of butter, before piling the whole lot over some rice. Tim flipping loved these. Hoorah for offal!
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Above: The obligatory whisk-with-something-attached photo.
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Not liver, but I’d completely forgotten to mention this so here it is. After Tim’s tooth operation last week (the utterly stupid dentists only completed about a quarter of his necessary work and then sent him off, unable to get an appointment for another week) he was in some crazy pain, so a dinner in puree form was my challenge. I came up with a Potato, Carrot, and White Bean Mash, which filled his need for carbs (and my need for legumes) as well as providing vegetables and protein. It was beyond simple, I just boiled the heck out of 500g unpeeled floury potatoes (hey, it was a cold night and we eat big) and 2 chopped carrots. I drained a tin of cannelini beans, before tipping the veges over them in the colander. This I tipped back into the pot, and using the masher, pulverised the lot. Because of the nature of the ingredients, this is never going to be super-fluffy, but nonetheless it’s worth getting out the whisk. I whisked in some milk, butter, salt and nutmeg, and piled this puffy, orange-and-white mash into two bowls. It turned out to be incredibly comforting stuff – warm, soft, buttery…If you are ever feeling fragile, I totally recommend it. It is probably worth mentioning that this would serve 3-4 normal people as a side dish.
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It is so nice to be on holiday but a bit depressing that it’s basically half over already. However, I can hardly describe the joy I felt in reading a book for its own sake. Just grabbing a book that I wanted to read. I turned to page one of Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch on Sunday afternoon, and by Monday morning I’d finished it. It was so good – so fully realised – so sinister -and so heartbreaking by the end. Thanks to everyone who attempted to vote for me at the Bloggers’ Choice Awards – I have no idea when it closes but I’m more than happy to reciprocate if there are any bloggers out there also having a go. And uh, yeah, their page is a little, shall we say, obtusely designed.

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Next time: In complete contrast to chicken livers, I dabble in raw vegan cookery. I’m not joking! Although cookery is obviously the wrong term. Perhaps ‘assembly’?