Category: Pudding and Dessert

a custard pirate lost at sea

11 Comments

In the middle of writing this, there was a small but hefty-feeling earthquake in Wellington. At first it felt like a truck backed into our flat. Then the bottles on top of our fridge started clinking together and everything shook. I dove under the table which holds up the computer that I’m typing on, clutching my phone – just like I’ve imagined doing a million times over the past week actually. I’m normally over-scared of earthquakes as it is, but hot on the heels of last week’s disaster in Christchurch a jolt like this, even though it was forty km deep and only went for about 10 seconds, had me unable to stop my hands from shaking while I tried to text mum to let her know. And then Christchurch got some aftershocks themselves. Ugh. Am looking very respectfully at the ground, at the hills in the distance (well, what I can see over the high rise apartments) and at the sky and asking them all to just…keep still.

First of March today, meaning it’s only about three weeks till Tim and I head off on our massive-for-us trip to London, Berlin, Warsaw and LA. It has also been a week since the earthquake in Christchurch, which is hard to believe – time goes fast enough as it is, but that was really a blur. And we’re not even in it.
After the fantastic time I had on Saturday baking and selling it for Christchurch at Grow From Here with Millie Mirepoix I got to thinking even more about comfort food. As I said in my last post, on Tuesday night when I got home, I made Tim and I a risotto. Since then we’ve eaten soup, curry, more soup, rice and beans…there’s something about food that’s hot and soft and bowl-confined, and I don’t want to overthink it, which administers delicious psychological aid when times are tough.
One good reason not to overthink it is that I’m lucky to be in a position to choose what is my opinion of comfort food at all in this time, when plenty in Christchurch are eating whatever’s in their rapidly warming freezer, whatever they can reach or whatever they’re given.
Nevertheless, if you need comfort food, then the zenith of yieldingly soft bowl-food is probably this coconut custard semolina, which I invented fairly successfully this evening. It’s hot, it’s fast, you eat it with a spoon. Another example of how I’m really not doing so badly is I fully struggled with what to call it. On the one hand, it’s really just custard flavoured semolina made with coconut milk, why I’ve named it thus. On the other hand I hate the word semolina but to call it coconut custard would be misleading given its ingredients. Yeah, this is how I think sometimes.
Of course the food that brings you peace might be some seriously spicy prawns or a giant steak or something (both of which appeal right now to be honest). Just in case you were considering it, don’t let me tell you what your comfort food is, or that you should buy into the concept at all. However, the very act of making what is considered comfort food can be comforting in itself, a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. The stirring, the heat, the slow thickening of textures, the minimum of chewing required.
At best you’ve cooked yourself something and have the attitude of: Look at me being inevitably comforted by this so-called comfort food against my better judgement! Looook at me! Oh my, I feel a sense of calm. At the very least you’ve cooked yourself something that will stop you feeling hungry for a bit, and which costs hardly anything.
Instant Coconut Custard Semolina

2 tablespoons semolina
1 heaped tablespoon custard powder
1 can (400mls?) coconut milk or coconut cream
Brown sugar

A little whisk is one of the best tools here but if not a wooden spoon or a silicon spatula is more than fine. In a small pan, mix together the semolina and custard powder so there’s no lumps. Mix in enough of the coconut milk to make a smooth paste, then tip in the rest. Don’t worry if it’s a grey-ish colour from the coconut milk, it goes more golden as it heats up. Stir over a low heat for about five minutes.

It thickens quickly – at first like white sauce, before stiffening up significantly, like really thick cake batter. At this point take it off the heat, spatula it into a bowl or two, and pour over as much brown sugar as you like.
Initially I would’ve said this just serves one but it probably wouldn’t be silly to divide this generous bowlful between two people. Looking back, one can of coconut milk is maybe a lot for one person. But it’s delicious, so if you want to eat the lot yourself you have my blessing and my example to follow.
Until you add the brown sugar it’s a formless, hot bowl of gently-flavoured mush. Which is more or less what I was aiming for. The grains of semolina swell and disappear, muting the coconut flavour somewhat. The milky vanilla of the custard powder is subtle in all ways except for the yellow food colouring. It’s incredibly easy to eat, a thick, smooth, coconut scented paste untroubled by any semblance of texture. And then with the sweetness of the brown sugar it all makes sense somehow, the flavours immediately enhanced. The coconut, vanilla custard and melting caramelly sugar are all gorgeous without overpowering each other, but feel free to add a shake of cinnamon, which is one of the most comforting flavours I can think of, or some vanilla extract if you like.
Back to where I started, I can’t believe we’re actually going to be going on our holiday so soon. I’m a bit nervous (as I am about all things) but I also seriously can’t wait. As I’ve said before, if anyone has been to London, Berlin or Warsaw recently and knows something good, your shared knowledge would be hugely appreciated. It’s a different world now to back in 2005 when we were there. No more sequined boho skirts (as was the style at the time) for one thing.
____________________________________________
Title via: local maven of tunes, Sam Flynn Scott. Mostly a member of the Phoenix Foundation, but also does his own delightful solo stuff occasionally too, like this song Llewellyn from his album Straight Answer Machine. He’s also pretty fantastic on Twitter, one of those types where you nod and shout “me too” after everything you read.
____________________________________________
Music lately:

I’ve been listening to the music of Michael John LaChiusa, both startling and awesome in its time signatures, pastiche of styles, and subject matters. Not much of it is on youtube, but Gloryday from See What I Wanna See, which I did track down, still gives me thrill-shivers every time I listen to it.
________________________________________
Next time: Again, one day at a time. Got some raw vegan chocolate truffles that I made which may end up being next in line though…

see these ice cubes, see these ice creams

11 Comments

More ice cream! Am I obsessed with this stuff or what? Look: I had a can of lychees stashed in the freezer in the hopes of recreating this drink I had a Thai restaurant in Panmure. Without warning, in the middle of the day, the idea of lychee and cucumber sorbet manifested in my mind, eclipsed the previous idea, got the jump on anything else I’d been planning to blog about, and left me more or less unable to concentrate from then on till I could make it happen.

Saturday was spent catching up with close friends and family in fast succession (amazingly fun and good for the soul) but today, Sunday, stretched ahead with no real agenda. It was one of those monumentally rare, still blue-skied days in Wellington and rather than nuking myself in the afternoon heat, the cool shade of indoors was the ideal environment to make this fragrant, juicy sorbet. Because of the high water content it’s icier than most which is why – sorry – I recommend the double-blitzing in the food processor. That said it’s barely hard work to make, and if you do it all on one day, you can get away with washing the processor just the once. (We don’t have a dishwasher so most decisions that don’t revolve around how I can work more ice cream into my life tend to revolve around how I can minimise potential dishwashing.) All you’re doing is freezing then blending then freezing then blending. Then eating.

Yes, you’re putting a salad vegetable into your pudding, but something about cucumber’s chilled, melon-ish texture and the lychee’s perfumed slippery softness makes them ideal buddies to share a loving and iced existence together.

Lychee and Cucumber Sorbet

  • 1 can lychees in syrup (they only seem to come in syrup, so that’s what I used)
  • 1 decent-sized cucumber

Now, I’m guessing you don’t actually have to freeze the lychees beforehand, it really doesn’t add anything to the recipe, but as I said I started off thinking this was going to be something else.

So: freeze the can of lychees overnight, or longer if you’re like me and forget about it. Peel your cucumber, then halve it lengthwise and scoop out the seeds with a teaspoon (I just ate them, felt a bit wasteful otherwise) before chopping into chunks.

Open up your frozen can of lychees and tip into a food processor (it’ll probably take some gouging and digging with a knife like mine, but it’s possible it could come out clean) along with the cucumber chunks. Process the heck out of it, pausing to spatula down the sides occasionally – this will take a while to get rid of any errant solid bits.

Pour into a container and freeze for a couple of hours before – I’m sorry – processing again till very smooth. You can leave out this step but it’ll be all chunky and icy and rough. Refreeze and then serve as and when you wish.

Making up new ice cream is one of my favourite ways to use my brain (and I know this is a sorbet, but I give the umbrella heading because “iced dessert” sounds way too corporate) and luckily for everyone around who has to deal with me, this worked out exactly as I’d hoped. There’s only so many ways of saying fragrant without sounding weird/awkward, so to be straightforward, this stuff smells sooo good and tastes just as wonderful: juicy and hydrating and sweet. The second blitzing gives it more of a frozen coke consistency, rather than a granular, tooth-fissuring grittiness.

Scraped by the frosty spoonful, its diaphanous minty green colour barely hints at the strength of summery flavour it brings. These photos were totally taken on my bed by the way. I try to keep my food photography as real-life as possible without too much tutu-ing round but that’s where the light was, and it’s really not implausible that I’d eat ice cream in bed.

Title via: That exercise in then-exciting minimalism, Drop It Like It’s Hot by Snoop Dogg and my then-crush Pharrell (the song’s still good and of course he’s still good looking, but I don’t have a poster of him on the wall or anything).

Music lately: 

We had such an amazing time at Nas and Damian Marley’s Distant Relatives concert on Wednesday night. Might’ve just been the atmosphere but every song felt really important and significant…like this one. 

The sadly gone-early Patsy Cline with Stop the World – this is a gorgeous live recording of her singing this song. She was what I guess you’d call a consummate performer, filling every word with genuine but not excessive emotion. 

Next time: I feel like it has basically been nonstop pudding lately so I’m hoping the next one will involve vegetables a-plenty, and not by putting them into a sorbet, either.</p>

you’re not into making choices, wicked witches, poppy fields…

18 Comments

So, I recently became in possession of 1kg of poppyseeds.

From Moore Wilson‘s grocery store of course, and while they’re not all-bulk, I guess they’ve seen enough people come and go to only stock their poppyseeds writ large and behind the counter. Ask for them by name. I only wanted some to make the dressing for this bean salad, and assumed rakishly that I could use up the rest with ease. But, like some cruel, curve-of-the-earth perspective trick, whenever I walked towards the bag it seemed to grow bigger and bigger, poppyseeds regenerating themselves when removed by the incremental spoonful.

Actually it’s not as dramatic as that. There is in fact…no drama. The bag of poppyseeds can sit pretty much forever on the shelf waiting to be used. It’s just that their plentiful existence has caused me to consider them pretty closely, and what I could do with at least some of them.

Unfortunately a perfunctory search of recipes didn’t serve up anything too inspiring. And then I wondered, as I always wonder, if they’d make a decent ice cream, especially since I had some lemons lurking round that Tim’s mum had given us. Should I do a custard based ice cream? A semifreddo thing? That would’ve meant buying ingredients, and we’re trying to save money by using up things we have in the cupboard. What I did have however, as always, was canned coconut milk. And so…that’s all I used. I didn’t even make a coconut milk custard, like I do for my Chocolate Ice Cream recipe. I guess it’s a slight stretch to call this ice cream now, but it’s a stretch I’m going to make. It sets so solid that all you can do is cut it with a knife like that’s what you meant to do in the first place, and it’s truly delicious.

I still have a little Cocoa Sorbet left in the freezer but decided that two ice creams on the hop would be practical. I can’t remember how I justified it, I think it was something like “I love ice cream!”

Lemon Poppyseed Ice Cream

  •  2 x 400ml cans plain, full-fat coconut milk
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • Juice and zest of 2-3 lemons (depending on the juiciness)
  • 3 tablespoons poppyseeds

In a large pan, gently heat the coconut milk and sugar, stirring, till the sugar has dissolved. Continue to gently heat and stir for another five minutes then remove from the heat and allow to cool a bit.

Stir in the lemon juice and zest, and pour the mixture into a loaf tin (depending on how much lemon juice you used and the size of your loaf tin there may be a bit too much mixture) Carefully – don’t spill it like I did – place in the freezer. Allow to partially freeze, then stir it briskly with a fork or small whisk, then stir in the poppyseeds (at this stage, so they don’t all sink to the bottom) and return it to the freezer. To serve, cut thick slices.

I love this ice cream. Firstly it’s so easy to make. Just stir and pour. It has a popsicle-fresh, clean sweet lemony goodness, a thick and icy but still pleasing texture, and the nuttishly flavoursome poppyseeds delivered lovingly to your mouth in each spoonful. The coconut flavour isn’t overly pronounced, but whatever you do recognise will only be enhanced by the other ingredients. And if you have poppyseeds around already, and you’re lucky enough to either have a lemon tree or a lemon benefactor, then it’s a very, very inexpensive recipe. You could always leave the poppyseeds out and use a mix of lemon and orange juice and zest. Toasted coconut stirred through instead of the poppyseeds might work too. Play round and see what you like, although I do recommend first just trying this recipe itself – the summery, zingy lemon with the poppyseeds is pretty lovely.

My poppyseed adventuring didn’t end there, as, deciding on ‘both’ instead of ‘which’, I also made a lemon poppyseed cake (using this recipe here). Was it overkill? Most definitely not.

The very opposite of the ice cream, this cake is soft, buttery, and lush, the lemon flavour absorbed into the golden grit of the polenta and almonds to produce something wildly good. Pictured here is, sadly, the last piece.

Tim and I had an amazing night at Aloe Blacc’s concert on Thursday – he was an absolute diamond performer with a stupefyingly lovely voice and hugely comfortable stage presence. We took some photos, which you can see here and here. Tonight we’re going to the Wellington Laneway show which should be fun as, and if you’re in Wellington and want tickets they’re available for purchase here.

In our travel plan developments…we bought tickets to see Wicked in London! It sorta feels like the only appropriate response is a youthful OMG.

Title from: the song of the same name from the late Jonathan Larson’s musical 30/90, which I was able to see performed by a local theatre group a couple of years ago. It was fairly thrilling then, so one can only speculate what the Lear Jet-voiced Raul Esparza would have been like in the lead role in his day.

Music lately:

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Round and Round from Before Today, strangely alluring with its “na na naaah” opening deceptively evoking the sort of music that plays when you’re put on hold on the phone, swirling into something uplifting and exciting and…swirly. He’ll be at Laneway too, so.

Sadly not at Laneway or anywhere near my line of vision, is Idina Menzel, whose album I Stand – which still feels recent-ish – became three years old the other day. You go, Idina. While her debut Still I Can’t Be Still remains a flawless highpoint for me, I Stand is fantastic and I hope she continues to write music. And that I actually see her sing one day for real.

Next time: I made some gingerbread cut-out cookies but it has been heavy on the sweet things lately so I might instead do the pasta I made tonight with a raw tomato sauce. Either way: delicious.

cream (get the money) dollar dollar bills y’all

14 Comments

In case you missed out on the really-exciting-for-us news outlined in my last post, Tim and I are going on holiday in April! To London, Berlin, Krakow, Warsaw, and LA! I’ve been to the first four of those before but that was many, many years ago, so if you know something good we should do, or if you’d like to be so kind as to extend us a couch for the night on account of how nice we seem (seeming is believing), or just have some insider knowledge like: “there’s a new kind of currency!” or “You mean you haven’t had your wombat vaccination?” etc, we’d be hugely obliged if you’d share it.
I guess this is a pretty exciting thing in our fairly mellow lives but I’ll try to not talk about it to the point where you want to hoof your computer out a window in despair. I realised the other day that because this is our first holiday together and because it’s such a big deal to us, we sometimes dope-ily end up projecting our feelings of extreme happiness onto other people, like we’re all in this together and every single bank teller and travel-centre person and colleague and email contact are singing and dancing in jaunty formation like one of those TV ads where that sort of thing happens.
But bear with me. Till we actually leave the country we’re trying to spend as little money as possible, which means just buying bare minimum stuff (milk, soymilk, eggs, bread, frozen peas, Dust-Bix for Tim, oats for me, butter for twenty…still) and trying to get creative with what already exists in the cupboard. We’re really lucky that we live so close to a good vege market so all our greens can come from there for a cheeky tenner. As I said last time, we’ve done it before, but this time there’s something really fun to look forward to at the end.

Not everyone’s a food-loving food hoarder like me, so we’re definitely going to do okay – considering I’d absentmindedly bought two separate kilo bags of bulghur wheat. For example. I had this bottle of cream that had been leftover from when we had friends over for dinner, and half a bag of blackberries taking up space in the freezer. Neither ingredients are overly expensive but admittedly they’re also not necessarily the sort of things you’d always have mooching round waiting to be used. Unless you’re like me.
The cream needed using and a pudding – specifically, a Fool – came to mind. While the blackberries themselves could’ve sat round happily in the freezer more or less forever, the idea of a Fool wasn’t leaving my brain. By the way a fool is just a bowl of whipped cream with stuff (usually fruit) folded through it. Then eaten. It’s a simple, but bold concept.
This recipe is very, very easy. It uses but three ingredients. And for a moment, you get to pretend you’re in one of those TV ads where mixed berries and and a dairy product fly through the air at each other in slow motion to indicate how hardcore-ily fruity and authentic their product is.
Blackberry Fool For Two
1-2 cups frozen blackberries (I specify a vague quantity because I like to walk past the bowl and eat the sugary berries while they wait, so it pays to have back-up…)
1/2 cup sugar
1 300ml bottle chilled cream (or around 1 cup cream plus a splash more)
Place your berries in a bowl with the sugar, and leave for an hour or so – they’ll defrost some, and their juices will absorb sugar and create gorgeous dark purple juices and it’ll be all good.
Whisk your cream in a good-sized bowl – you can use electric beaters if this is easier for you, but I like to just whisk – until significantly thickened, and when you lift the whisk a peak of cream follows it. You don’t want it too whipped though – keep it soft and relaxed of texture.
At this point, grab a spatula and carefully fold the berries and their sugary juice through the cream for a few seconds. You’re after a kind of swirled pink and white look, not completely blended. Divide between two bowls, eat with a spoon.
Essentially you’re eating a bowl of whipped cream, but the Fool has been around longer than all of us, with its origins in the 1500s (when it was known as ‘Foole’) and no doubt it’ll be round in centuries to come. Probably because it’s completely easy, but is still an actual thing that you can serve up with deserved pride. And importantly, it’s incredibly delicious. A soft, cool mass of creaminess colliding with sharp, collapsing, superjuicy berries. It makes so much sense.
And, if ‘pretty’ is what you look for in a pudding, you’re in luck. Well, I’d like to think so.
Lucky Tim and I – not only do we have distant exciting things, we also have immediately pending exciting things, in the form of Aloe Blacc’s concert in Auckland on Thursday night, and Laneway Wellington next Tuesday. These were things we’d organised before we knew we were going away…beyond this it’s nothing but DVD-watching for us so we’ll enjoy it while we can (that said, I looooove watching DVDs).
____________________________________________________________________________
Title via: Wu-Tang Clan, that many peopled and blazing-of-trail group who dropped their debut Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) from which comes C.R.E.A.M back in 1994, and are still creating in various formations and combinations today.
____________________________________________________________________________
Music lately:
I left my iPod behind when I went home for Christmas and am still waiting on Mum to send it up…I’m really, really missing the Grey Gardens Off-Broadway Cast Recording, waiting all day to get home from work to listen to it on iTunes (if no-one’s home)
St Rupertsberg, Albania – found out about this band on Tumblr from another band, Bear Cat. I like it a lot.
____________________________________________________________________________
Next time: I asked whoever was listening on Twitter whether I should make lemon poppyseed cake or lemon poppyseed ice cream. And then, probably the conclusion I would have come to with or without input from others – I made both!

no more cocoa leave-io, one two three

19 Comments

In 1993 the band Blur released an album called Modern Life is Rubbish. While I can’t speak for Damon Albarn and his not-overly-merry men, maybe if that album had been made today, they might have called it Modern Life is Rubbish (Except For Twitter). Or even something like Modern Life is Rubbish (Except For Twitter, Wikipedia, free blogging platforms and the wide accessibility of humorous gifs which can replace actual content/emotion.)

Twitter briefly: a website where you log in with a username and deliver thoughts, or news commentary, or links to other content in 140 characters or less, as well as following people who do the same, and potentially re-share – with acknowledgement – those people’s content of the aforementioned nature, people who may include verified celebrities, celebrity parodies, companies/brands, and people from other cities that you don’t know but whose blog you really like. If you suspect it’s not for you then you may well be right, and that’s fine. Me, I love it.
Because of things like this:
My already cement-thick adoration for Twitter was further set into steadfast concrete last week. I’d been wanting to make Chocolate Sorbet for a long time now and not having a recipe, I asked my followers whether or not anyone had made it before and if they had any stories to share. Through one person replying and including someone else’s Twitter name (yeah, talking about Twitter outside of Twitter can sound cringey), and that someone else happening to be Giapo, the extremely busy-with-good-reason gelato shop on Queen Street in Auckland. I ended up procuring a stunning recipe for Cocoa Sorbet because Giapo – whoever does their tweeting – delivered it to me via Twitter. Told me I only needed cocoa, and asked for the fat content of said cocoa in as caring a manner as 140 character tweets can convey. Kindly told me to go ahead and share the recipe here, that there’s no intellectual property on what they do.
Well, it would’ve been churlish not to after all that effort. Luckily it tastes incredibly stunning, as it should – this recipe uses 200g of expensive cocoa. I trusted Giapo since they make their living from ice cream-related things, but I was still pretty wary, because it felt almost terrifyingly reckless to tip that much cocoa into one bowl. The point is, this recipe only has three ingredients, cocoa, sugar and water. The cocoa flavour will shine, so…it needs to be good stuff with around 20% fat content. I use Equagold, which comes in 300g jars and has 21% fat content. This does make it an expensive recipe, however the other two ingredients are cheap and free, respectively, and it’s not like you’re paying for eggs, cream, or chocolate. But still. Been warned.
This much cocoa!
Cocoa Sorbet
Recipe provided with thanks and acknowledgement to Giapo.

200g best-quality cocoa (with around 20% fat, such as Equagold)
200g sugar (any old white sugar! woohoo!)
500g water (from the tap! yeah!) (also: yes, grams. Weigh it like it’s flour or something, for accuracy purposes.)
Bring your water to the boil in a pan. In the meantime, in a large bowl, measure out the cocoa, fan yourself at the amount needed, move on, and measure out the sugar into the same bowl. Important: stir this (I used a small whisk) untill the cocoa and sugar “are one and the same” in Giapo’s words.
Turn off the stove when the water has boiled and pour it carefully into the cocoa and sugar. “Stir, stir, stir” said Giapo – you want this to become a thickish, dark syrupy liquid with no errant cocoa lumps. This is called a cold hot infusion. Allow to cool, then pour into a container and freeze. Every couple of hours go back and whisk it or stir it to break up any ice crystals. Allow to defrost a little before you try and eat it.
With that much cocoa in it, so light-absorbing and chocolate-ful, this recipe had to taste decent. However I was still nervous when I first rolled my spoon across the surface of the sorbet. But: it was actually amazing. The cocoa flavour is unsurprisingly strident, and while there’s the necessary sugar to stop this being a throat-clogging, inedible paste, the cleanness of the water allowed the pure, heady, earthy cocoa flavour to be the star.
Without the (admittedly delicious) mellowing of any cream or custard this made for a fairly intense eating experience. A smallish portion satisfies with its aggressive cocoa-ness, but it’s easy to keep going. Truly, truly delicious stuff, I absolutely recommend it. The only thing I would change – with all due respect – is to maybe up the amount of water to 750g. While the cocoa itself provides quite a lot of bulk, I feel that the mixture can handle being extended a bit, which also makes it go further and therefore helps justify the use of that much cocoa. I also figure that, if you’ve only got regular cocoa, you could maybe use just 100g of it, and roughly chop up 200g very dark chocolate and stir it in with the cocoa and sugar.
Hey! Exciting news! As if cocoa sorbet wasn’t enough: Tim and I are going on holiday in April. Our first holiday together…ever. To London. And Berlin. And somewhere in Poland, once I remember if I preferred Krakow or Warsaw better first time round. And on our way back to New Zealand we’re spending two nights in LA. That’s LA, AMERICA! As soon as Tim told me that he jacked that stopover up at the travel agency, I can half ashamedly/half defiantly tell you that the Baby-Sitters Club Super Special “California Girls” was the first thing that sprang to mind. By the way, the reason I’m disproportionately excited about going to America is that I’ve never been there, whereas London/Berlin/Poland is a re-visit. This is pretty massive for Tim and I – while we met over in England (him from Wairoa and me from Otaua, haha) the last time we stepped foot in an international airport was when we got back to New Zealand in December 2005. We’re now, in 2011, finally scraping ourselves into a position financially to be able to travel. We are SO EXCITED. And we’re going to book tickets for Wicked in London! I’ll finally see it – admittedly not with an Idina Menzel or a Julia Murney in the cast – but still. It has been interesting to love a musical to the point where my feelings have evolved into a kind of “how very 2007, and isn’t it a flawed story” fondness without ever having seen it live…but it will be even more interesting to just see it for real. So we’re trying something that I’ve called “nil by purse” where we basically don’t spend any extraneous dollars. It’ll be like back when we first moved in together, except now we’ve got an exciting endpoint other than just surviving.
So, since it’s nearly six years since I’ve been to London, Berlin and Poland, and since all I know about LA comes from things like the Baby Sitters Club and music videos, if anyone knows any cheap-but-awesome places to eat, or if anyone would like to (but not in any way be obliged to, because that’s just awkward) provide a couch or a floor for two extremely nice New Zealanders to crash on, or know of any amazing things to do and sights to see, then please share your knowledge! (and feel free to email me at hungryandfrozen@hotmail.com.)
Further exciting news: I’m trying to make a recipe index for this blog. Because I don’t have a head for strategy it’s a bit all over the place and there’s not necessarily a heading for everything (mostly just for foods that are a priority to me, like tofu and ice cream). And it’s not completed. But it might be useful! To find it, cast your eyes just under the heading picture.
_____________________________________________________________________
Title via: the gone but not forgotten Notorious B.I.G with Things Done Changed from Ready To Die, which swirls round contemplatively to a pretty devastating final verse.
_____________________________________________________________________
Music lately:

Emily 2.0 by Wellington’s Mammal Airlines from their EP Life of Mammals which you can seriously download for free. I love their music, they deserve to be huge with fuzzy catchy goodness like this.

I Wanna Be Your Dog by The Stooges from their album of the same name. I managed to catch about 15 minutes of Iggy on my break at Big Day Out. From my vantage point up in the stands, miles away, the sound was fairly appalling and…I actually have no idea what I was listening to. But it was fun just to see him at all, exactly as he appears in video footage of other music festivals: sinewed, shirtless, boucy.
_____________________________________________________________________

Next time: It has been a while since I’ve been on here, mostly because I was up in Auckland working at Big Day Out, which takes some recovering from. I’m working on more frequency though. Next time there’ll probably more skiting about our upcoming holiday. Also, more relevantly, a recipe for blackberry fool.

i wear my leather jacket like a great big hug

11 Comments

Homemade plum fruit leather. Like rollups (in texture, anyway, they look more like Yonks here.) We didn’t really get too many popular kid-type snacks in the lunchbox when I was growing up but I do have a distinct memory of folding a rollup and pressing it across my teeth like a slowly dissolving, sugary mouthguard. It’s mildly surprising that I still have any teeth after that. This plum leather is like those rollups except super sour. Like DYC white vinegar in handy chewable form. It’s a snack that you can’t eat absent-mindedly, I’ll give it that.
Even though we’re well into January by this point, I still haven’t shaken the whole new year contemplation vibe. Is there such thing as a good year? Being such a long stretch of time, it’s fairly impossible not to accumulate some form of difficulty and sadness. Even if – just imagine somehow – every single person in the world was somehow able to not murder, attack, assault, rob, or cause any kind of physical or emotional harm or discrimination, and overwhelming poverty and lack of education was overcome with the help of many…well there’s still Mother Nature to contend with. No amount of goodwill can hold back the earth’s movements. And like most years before it 2010 was an absolute shocker, from the most orchestrated actions of humans to the unpredictability of nature.
On a personal level however, 2010 for me was pretty damn fantastic. Bragging, sure, but some decent achievements really did stack up for me last year and I’m pretty proud of myself.
– I was featured in a CLEO magazine article about food bloggers
– I was nominated for a CLEO/Palmolive Wonderwoman thing
– I was interviewed for the Morning Glory show on 95bFM
– I was nominated for a Wellingtonista Award for ‘Best Contribution to the Internet By A Wellingtonian.”
– Tim and I became cafe reviewers for Sunday Star-Times (the lower North Island edition). For what it’s worth, I like our reviews better than any other Wellington-based ones I’ve seen round. You might too…
– I got a small but thrill-making mention in Rip It Up magazine, especially considering the high company my fairly nondescript tweet keeps on their quotes page.
– The seriously lovely Lisa from Sky TV just up and sent me Nigella Lawson’s book Kitchen. Seriously.
– Tim and I started up 100sand1000s which has provided nonstop joy, from interviewing and feeding cake to Grayson Gilmour to staring quietly at gifs for hours.
– Tim and I hit the five year mark! Woo! And we got to spend our first Christmas together.

***Edited 13th Jan because I’m such a forgetful and ungrateful clod; clearly it’s a decent year when all the nice things that happened to you start to tumble out of your brain like icing sugar in a sieve.

As well as the above, I was also invited to the launch of Wellington On A Plate by the fantastic Angela Moriarty. I got a nametag with my blog’s name on it. I met Angela Walker from Sunday Star-Times and possibly alarmed her with my gratitude. I met the amazing Millie and Florence from Gusty Gourmet, who coolly quizzed a cheesemaker about pasteurising and taught me how to eat oysters. And then the three of us had the singularly thrilling experience of meeting Ray McVinnie, one of my food idols – in fact, one of my idols from any genre of leisure activity – seriously I don’t know how I forgot this from my list.

Angela M also gave myself and Millie the opportunity to meet up with such overwhelmingly legit aussie bloggers as Peter from Souvlaki for the Soul, Helen from Grab Your Fork, Billy from A Table For Two, plus the lovely Andrea from Auckland’s So D’lish. In an unrelated piece of organisation, I also got to meet up with some truly lovely and inspiring Wellington food bloggers (check my sidebar).

Go me. Now that I’m back in Wellington, (working again and lamenting the fact that the beach feels like it’s several solar systems away), I’m hoping that 2011 will bring some similarly awesome opportunities and that I’ll be able to keep blogging, hard. It has been a slow start but today I bring you this plum leather. I happen to get a kick out of making things that already basically exist. Like butter. Or marshmallows. But as far as it goes, homespun fruit leather seems like an alarmingly resourceful task, the sort of thing (like haircuts!) best left to the people paid to do it.
I found a good looking recipe though, the fruit it calls for is easy to get hold of right now and even though I’ve never felt any real suffering for lack of fruit leather, I felt drawn to making it.
It’s basically plums simmered into paste, spread onto a tray and then baked in an oven set to low, about the temperature of heavy mouth-breathing. The only real taxing bit is all the time and patience involved. Plums are cheap as this time of year and apparently this stuff lasts for up to five months so you could make tons now and store it up for the year ahead if you’re feeling particularly organised.
It’s a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingsal recipe, and while I know who he is and that he does good things, I’ve never actually tried any of his recipes. Having been kindly sent the River Cottage 2011 diary from Lisa and the good people at Sky though, which is filled with the sort of recipes – a generous three per month! – that make you nod frequently and think “I want to cook all those things”, I have no excuse not to give him a try.
However I’ve noticed he’s also – and it might just be the brief nature of the recipe layout in the diary – not one to make recipes super simple. The plum leather recipe could have done with slightly more information, which I can hopefully fill in for you now that I’ve tried it myself.
Spiced Plum Leather
1 to 1.5 kilos of plums
Honey
Cinnamon

Roughly slice your plums, discarding the stones, and place in a large saucepan. You can be pretty cavalier with the quality of your plums but cut away any really bad bits that look like they’re well on the fermenting-into-Moonshine process. Add enough water to just cover the base of the pan, and heat gently till the plums collapse a bit and release a lot of juice – around ten minutes although it all depends on your plums.

Push the pulp through a sieve into a bowl. No-one ever tells you what an excruciating job this is. There’s no way to speed up the process or to make it feel like you’re not wasting heaps of fruit, but persevere – I used a colander, the sort you’d drain potatoes with, sat over a bowl and a spatula constantly stirring and pressing. You should end up with a seriously good looking, deep cerise, thick liquid.

Scrape this back into the pan and simmer till thickened somewhat, stirring occasionally. Hugh doesn’t give a time for this but I found it took about half an hour and even then, there was no dramatic change in the look of the puree, it had just reduced slightly. Add a little honey and a dash of cinnamon at this point.

Finally, spread thinly and evenly across two paper-lined baking trays using your spatula and bake for as long as you can in a very low oven (around 60 C, which feels like barely turning it on). You’re supposed to leave it for 12 hours, but I couldn’t psychologically deal with having the oven on overnight, even if it is so low. Maybe make this early in the morning when you know you’re going to be hanging round. However it can also handle being baked in a few bursts when you have the time. Allow to cool completely in the oven, at which point you should be able to peel it off the baking paper, however you can roll it up and cut it into slices in its paper. Use within 5 months.
It looks truly gorgeous, especially when held up to the light, and has a strong jammy flavour from the slowly heated plums, tempered by an intense fruitish sourness.
But yeah, there’s no denying this is fairly time-consuming and takes some effort. While I’d be hard-pressed to say that the flavour entirely outweighs this, if you were one of those kids who ate lemons or always went for the sour gummy worms then you’ll love this. I’m sure you could add sugar to the fruit while it simmers without it coming to any harm – I mean, rollups were just toffee dressed up to look like a legit snack. And whatever the flavour may lack in accessibility, it’s made up for with the extreme sense of accomplishment you’ll probably feel once it’s all done.
__________________________________________________________

Title via: local long shadow-casters The Chills and their memorable 1986 tune I Love My Leather Jacket.
__________________________________________________________

Music lately:

The Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry as covered by Tourettes and Caoimhe for the aforementioned Morning Glory show on bFM. You even have the excellent option of downloading a massive selection of such songs for free here.

Aloe Blacc’s Miss Fortune from Good Things…even though there’s a fair bit of effort, time and money involved we’ve booked ourselves in to his Auckland show later this month, I seriously can’t wait.

Heidi Blickenstaff performing Kander and Ebb’s Sing Happy at some one-off gig in New York…sigh. She’s so lovely. Lucky New Yorkers, where things like this casually happen all the time.
__________________________________________________________

Next time: I made an awesome bean salad, hopefully by the time my next blog post rolls around I’ll have worked out a better way to describe it though.

flourless, we are flourless

8 Comments

2011! What? How’d that happen already? Well, it’s here and the changing of another year has passed me by in a non-threatening blur of crosswords, novel-reading, and playing 500 with Mum and Dad at the beach. And being absent from the computer, which really wasn’t so bad at all. We’re back out to the beach tomorrow, using the very last of my leave, but Tim’s back to work tomorrow – he heroically came out to help us erect the tents and then cover them with tarps (couldn’t possibly buy a new tent or anything) which we managed to do without having a family meltdown, maybe some lasting buried tension but no meltdown. In the meantime I’m serving up a recipe that I made for Christmas night, which…seems like an extremely long time ago now. And a mighty fine Christmas it was too, I was lucky enough to get heaps of food-related things which I’m sure will all eventually appear here on the blog when I get back to Wellington.




So, apologies for the now outdated Christmas imagery in the background…should have thought more about this and posed the cake in front of a beachtowel or a picture of a dolphin or something to make it more generally summery.

Ever since I can remember we’ve spent Christmas evening with the family who grew up next door to my Mum’s family, and this year I was asked to bring along a pudding (suspect I would have taken it upon myself to bring one along whether it was asked for or not). The open brief of “bring pudding” is one of my favourites and for some reason, out of all the many many pudding recipes Nigella has (or anyone, but for me Christmas is Nigella’s time to shine more than usual) my heart set itself on her Christmas-Spiced Chocolate Cake. It’s a variation on her flourless chocolate cake, gussied up with the yuledtidish fragrance of cinnamon, cloves and orange.


It’s very easy to make and apart from all the eggs it’s pretty low-key, the quantities of chocolate, ground almonds and butter aren’t terrifying and all you need to do is some melting and mixing. You don’t even have to worry about it sinking – it’s practically supposed to. Altogether a non-stressful Christmas pudding option that wouldn’t be out of place any day of the year. As long as you don’t use the title. Not that I referred to it by its full title at any point. Can you imagine walking into a room and saying “here’s my…

Christmas-Spiced Chocolate Cake

From Nigella Christmas

150g dark chocolate, chopped (I used Whittakers Dark Ghana)
150g butter
6 eggs (at room temperature)
250g sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
100g almonds
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Zest of 1 clementine/satsuma/just use an orange
4 teaspoons instant coffee (preferably espresso)

Topping:

Juice from the above citrus fruit
15g butter
1 tablespoon sugar
Pinch ground cinnamon
50g flaked almonds (they tend to come in 70g packets, you can use the lot here no worries).

Set your oven to 180 C/450 F, and butter and line a 23cm springform tin. That said, all I had at Mum and Dad’s was a 21cm tin that I’d brought up myself and it was all good.)

Break the eggs into a good sized bowl. In another bowl, gently melt together the chocolate and butter. Mum and Dad have a microwave so that’s what I did, but you can also put it in a metal bowl and sit it over a pan of simmering water…just melt the two together, it’s not complicated.)

While the chocolate is cooling, add the sugar and vanilla to the eggs and whip together till thick and pale and at least doubled in texture. This is easier with an electric beater but not impossible with a whisk. Gently fold in the rest of the ingredients, including the magically delicious chocolate-butter mixture. A big silicon spatula is best for this, and for transferring the mixture into the tin. Bake for about 35-45 minutes, and allow to col completely.

For the topping, simmer all the ingredients together till thick and syrupy and then topple them over the chocolate cake, which may well have dipped significantly in the centre.


This cake is seriously fantastic, chocolatey in an upfront way but without making you feel like you’re eating a damp, cocoa-scented piece of soap, as some flourless chocolate cakes can taste. The spices give it a real Christmassiness, showing that the sort of flavours which might show up in a fruitcake are equally fantastic against the slight grit of the ground almonds and the richness from the chocolate. The sticky, orange-syruped almonds on top make it look beautiful too – I just bunged them on and they somehow looked amazing, like shining golden tiles, so if you even put in the slightest bit of effort you’re guaranteed some gorgeousness.



This overachiever of a cake is also gluten-free and keeps for ages.

Hopefully everyone had a decent Christmas/New Years – I don’t really go in for resolutions, preferring to take each day as it comes but also to be receptive to as much positivity, creativity and safe fun as possible. Hope all that comes your way too.

Title via: Something about the panicky nature of Blackout from the fantastic Broadway musical In The Heights makes me feel slightly bad about appropriating their “powerless, we are powerless” line…not so bad that I haven’t done it.

Music lately:

I actually haven’t been listening to a whole lot of music this summer. I brought my ipod up but ignored it, preferring the sound of sea moving slowly across sand and tui calling to each other. Once I’m back in the city on Sunday and this holiday seems unbelievably far away I’m sure I’ll have music coming out my ears (and then going back in my ears again, of course.)

Next time: As I said I got a whole lot of food-stuffs for Christmas and it’s anyone’s guess what I’ll get into first. While part of me never wants to leave the beach, I do miss Wellington and am looking forward to reconnecting with my kitchen…

honey to the bee that’s you for me

16 Comments

Note: As mentioned in my last blog post, I’ve been nominated for a Wellingtonista award, and while it’s seriously exciting and happiness-inducing to be amongst some distinctly high-profile nominees, it’s also quite nice to be voted for, so I can hype myself up into thinking I might win. As well as myself, you can also vote for other Wellington-related things you like, or nothing at all – the only compulsory fields are your name and email address. What I’m trying to say is that if you do vote (here here here) it’d be really great and I’d appreciate it heaps and heaps.

I recently got sent some honey – two jars – from the astute folk at Airborne. I was caught off-guard when they contacted me, am not sure where I stand on “accepting then blogging about free stuff” because it hasn’t really happened till now. Some people are hardline about this, refusing to accept anything, and I suspect I’d want to avoid it too – this is my blog and I’ll talk about what I want when I want – but damnit, I liked the idea of free honey and was 99% sure it would taste good and not compromise some kind of policy I haven’t even got the kind of clout to be developing in the first place. To find out more about Airborne, by the way, their “Why Choose Us” page is a reassuring read – these people treat their bees and their honey well.
So, two jars arrived – a large jar of thick, creamy Kamahi and a smaller jar of liquid, clear Tawari. And, thought I, here’s the chance to try all those recipes with lots of honey in them! But for some reason I either couldn’t find anything, or the stuff I could find, I was all “eh” about, so I decided to just make up my own stuff instead. (That said, Mum, if get the time could you please email me the recipe for those honey buns we used to make? From that handwritten recipe book I think?) (Edit: Thanks heaps Mum!)
At the vege market down the road there’s this amazingly good tofu at $4 for a large block, scored into four ‘fillets’ as I call them. However no matter how much I try, I can never quite finish it before it starts to go all orange and creepy. There’s only so much dense, filling firm tofu I can get through in a couple of days. On top of that we somehow ended up with three heads of brocolli, because I forgot that we had it and then bought some more. I hate wasting food but I’m also very forgetful, so this just sometimes happens. This following recipe however takes some neglected brocolli, some teacher’s pet asparagus, and some tofu that was somewhat past its best (not at the ‘unsafe’ stage or anything, just not looking so happy to see me when I opened the fridge) and turns it into a feast.
Honey Miso Roast Vegetables

I used a square of firm tofu, a head of broccoli, and a handful of asparagus. Use what you have – the veges need to be able to withstand some roasting. Cauliflower and kumara would be pretty perfect here too.

Whisk together:
  • 2 teaspoons white miso paste

  • 1 tablespoon clear honey (I used Airbourne’s Tawari)

  • 1 teaspoon (or more) sambal oelek or other red chilli paste

  • 1 teaspoon sesame oil

  • 1 teaspoon wholegrain mustard

Set your oven to 200 C. Chop your vegetables and tofu into fairly similar sized smallish pieces. lay the chopped vegetables on a baking-paper lined tray and spoon over the miso-honey mixture. You could also pour the mixture into a big bowl and toss the veges through it, but I couldn’t be bothered with the extra dishes. Roast for about 20 minutes or until everything looks burnished and cooked through. Eat over rice or noodles or just as is.
Don’t be alarmed by the dark, miso-toffee bits that appear (strangely delicious too, I couldn’t help peeling it off the baking paper and eating it) as whatever clings to the vegetables and tofu will taste incredible – sticky, savoury and full of complex, fragrant flavour. The tightly clenched branches of brocolli stretch out under the heat and become deliciously crisp, while their stems remain juicy and tender. The flavour of the asparagus intensifies under the caramelly, hot honey and the tofu becomes…totally passable.
Obviously with honey some kind of pudding or baking attempt is only right. It was relatively recently that I learned about frangipane, a buttery, almondy mix for filling pies and tarts and so on. I had an idea that honey could be a good exchange for the sugar. So I did it.
Honey, Almond and Dried Apricot Tart

1 square of bought puff pastry (I guess you should try and get good quality all-butter stuff. The ingredients on my Edmond’s ready-rolled sheets said “butter” but I have heard terrifying rumours of some awful sounding substance called “baker’s margarine”.)
1 egg
2 tablespoons creamy honey – I used Airborne’s Kamahi
Heaped 1/3 cup ground almonds
40g butter, melted
About 20 soft dried apricots

Set your oven to 220 C, and place the square of pastry onto a baking paper-lined tray. Lightly score a 1cm border around the edge with a sharp knife (don’t cut right through). Once in the oven, this will puff up and look really pretty.

In a small bowl, whisk together the egg and the honey. Stir in the ground almonds and melted butter. This will make enough for the tart plus a generous amount for you to taste (it’s delicious!) Spoon carefully over the centre of the pastry, spreading a thin layer across to meet the edge of the margin you’ve scored (as per the picture.) Carefully pull or slice the apricots in half or – if you’ve got lots of apricots, just leave them whole – and arrange on top of the pastry. Paint a little melted butter or egg yolk round the margin if you like. Bake for about 15-20 minutes – as long as you can leave it in without burning.
The first time I made it, I was doing the dishes and forgot to check on the oven. All the sugars in the honey and apricots couldn’t take being ignored, and the tart was a blackened mess (did this stop us eating it? Erm, no). It was late at night, the kitchen was covered in frangipane-smeared implements (myself included), and the ingredients aren’t the cheapest, so I may have yelled “I’m never doing the dishes again! It’s a sign! I hate everything!” Or something to that effect.
The second time I made this tart earlier in the evening and with new enthusiasm, I watched it like I was judging gymnastics at the Olympics – focussed, scrutineering, coldly assessing for any stepping outside the lines. I can’t have eaten nearly enough delicious frangipane mixture though because there was too much on the pastry – it billowed up and spilled over. I quickly turned the oven off to halt the frangipane pilgrimage to the edge of the oven tray, but this meant that the centre of the pastry sheet didn’t have time to get light and flaky. It wasn’t uncooked, just sadly damp, floppy and uncrisp.

While this was happening Tim was watching footage of the Pike River chief executive Peter Whittall, who can’t have slept in the past week, showing a map of where the 29 miners were thought to be, deep in the stomach of the earth. The projector cast shadows across Whittall’s face, and I looked at the tart and thought “oh well”. So we ate it, and it was fine – delicious in fact, with what I considered a bonus breadth of cakey frangipane to pull off the tray contemplatively. Yes, the underside needed longer in the heat, but the soft dried apricots were warmed to an heady, jammy perfumedness, while the fruity, creamy Kamahi honey somehow amplified the fresh, Christmassy flavour of the often dull ground almonds.

While it may need some tweaking here and there, you can feel free to go ahead and make this recipe. Although, while I ended up with deliciousness I’ve only made this recipe twice and it was somewhat fail-y both times…don’t blame me if you get frangipane all over your oven/walls/hair.
For any international readers, the Pike River mine explosion last Friday caused the disappearance, followed by confirmed death after a second explosion on Wednesday, of 29 miners on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. I was a bit naive and was saying “I hope they’re staying calm” to which people would reply, “if they’re alive”. The sickening sadness that their families, friends, colleagues and community went through, and continue to go through, makes the heart ache. If you read the newspaper (and it’s usually the narrow columns to the left and right of the page that relay the saddest stories in the briefest of paragraphs) you’ll see that tragedy happens everywhere and every day. The scale and public nature of this disaster means it has particular resonance across the country though. With that in mind – with anything in mind really – a burnt or awkward tart is something I can shrug at.
On Thursday morning, the Kamahi honey was spread thickly across hot toast, cut from a loaf of Rewena, the honey slowly filling the pools of butter that gathered in the bread’s crevices. The simplest solution of all, and it was so good. And, at a stretch, a kind of an early prototype version of the above tart. Actually I bet honey and apricot jam on toast (just spontaneously riffing here) would be amazing.
________________________________________________
Title via: YES, quoting Billie Piper’s Honey To The Bee here. It’s strange how, while not one note of the rest of her music appeals to me, I have an intense and unapologetic love for this one song. The swooning rapturousness with which the bizarre lyrics are delivered, the slow-dripping melody, and the late-nineties technological charm of its video make for quite the experience.
________________________________________________
Music lately:
Mariah Carey, Emotions from her album of the same name. Listening to her non-stop brings me no closer to the secret of what makes her so flawless.
The Damned, Eloise. Excellence!
____________________________________________
Next time: most definitely the Chicken Salad Lorraine, plus we’re off to Tiger Translate tonight so there’ll probably be a breathless account of that too.

one night in bangkok makes a hard man crumble

8 Comments

Crumble has got to be some of the the best kind of food in existence, among the comforting-est of all the comfort food. In Nigella Express, there is this very cool idea where you make up some crumble topping in advance and freeze it so if you ever want pudding, but the thought of actually having to cook makes you weepy, you’re still good to go. I mean, there’s a bit of initial effort that goes into it. But that’s the good thing about Nigella – there’s options. Whether you’re in the mood for a seven layer trifle where you make your own sponge and custard by hand, or something more or less instant but not so instant that you’re sitting on the couch ejecting a can of whipped cream into your mouth, she’s got you covered.

That said, I can’t help being suspicious of crumble recipes, and will often think “that’s not nearly enough butter!” as I read the list of ingredients. I definitely trust Nigella Lawson, the woman who taught me that 250g butter in one cake is just fine, but even so when I saw that her recipe was for four servings, it took effort to stick to the 50g she stipulated. Worrying, maybe, but true. No one wants wafer-thin crumble coverage.
Turns out 50g was all good, and there was no need to get so hand-wringingly righteous over it. That said, when you divide 50 between 4 that’s only like…less than 1 tablespoon of butter per person. That’s practically nothing. But go with it, you somehow end up with just the amount of crumble you need. Nigella calls this “Jumbleberry Crumble”, which is just an olde English term for “whatever berries you have”. I had the end of a packet of frozen blackberries, plus some cranberries leftover from last Christmas. While I held back from exaggerating the topping quantities, I did add some dark chocolate chunks to the fruit. It felt right, but then adding chocolate to things usually does…right?
Jumbleberry Crumble

From Nigella Lawson’s Nigella Express

For the Crumble Topping:
50g butter
100g flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoons brown sugar

Rub the butter into the flour and baking powder, till it resembles coarse crumbs (with some inevitable floury dustiness). Stir in the sugar, and then tip into a freezer bag till needed.

Assembly:
Set your oven to 220 C. Get some ovenproof ramekins, fill with frozen berries (and a few dark chocolate chunks if you like), sprinkle over 1 teaspoon cornflour, two teaspoons sugar, and a couple of tablespoons (roughly 50-75g) frozen crumble topping. Bake for 15-20mins depending on the size of the ramekin – 125g ones for the lesser time, but 250-300ml ones will take a little longer.
I made these fairly late at night with both low lighting and low camera battery, not giving me a lot of room to move as far as getting quality photos. Next time?
These were delicious – the chocolate melting into the sharp juices released by the frozen berries as they stewed in the oven, creating a thick, rich sauce for the fruit. The crumble topping was highly satisfying despite my earlier nervousness – biscuity, sweet and gratifyingly crisp in places. Plus, because there’s only the two of us, I’ve got some crumble mix in a sandwich bag in the freezer, just waiting to be sprinkled over fruit on another cold evening. For all that I talked about Spring and skipping along in the mild sunshine with armfuls of asparagus bushels in my last post, the weather in Wellington is so variable (and it varies heavily towards the murkier, chillier end of the scale more often than not. This is a pain, but there is an upside when it means you’re more likely to be in the mood to eat crumble.)
Title via: One Night In Bangkok from the musical Chess. Confession: I actually thought that my title was the lyrics but it turns out it’s actually “makes a hard man humble”. Whatever. I love this song – the strange, theatre-plus-rapping that became a chart hit despite having perhaps seriously Top 40-unfriendly lyrics and concept. Adam Pascal’s take is pretty fabulous, from the 2008 concert with Idina Menzel and The Wire’s Clarke Peters, but is cruelly unavailable on Youtube. You’ll just have to buy the DVD…Nevertheless Murray Head’s original has its dubious charms also. I did a jazz dance to this many, many years ago, I can still remember bits of it to this day.
 
Music lately:
The Little Things by TrinityRoots. We saw them on Sunday night at the Opera House on their ‘reunion’ tour. They seemed so comfortable with each other – spinning a tune out for ten minutes and then with a collective nod seamlessly bringing it back down to earth. All three of them are wonderful to watch – Warren Maxwell looking calm and spiritual, Riki Gooch’s boyish face belying his monster talent on the drums and Rio Hemopo providing welcome bass in both guitar and voice. They were supported by Isaac Aesili, who is hugely talented in his own right, and Ria Hall, who I’d met before when she emceed the Smokefree Pacifica Beats, and has an absolutely stunning voice. It was a beautiful night.
What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye, from the album of the same name. Tim got some Marvin Gaye on vinyl and this song is just up there with the very best of all music, like crumble is among the best of all foods.
Next time: As I said last time, I have some options, so it all depends on what I feel like…by the way, I’ve tinkered round and added the option of a Facebook ‘like’ button just below, in case you’re all “I don’t like change!” I don’t even really like Facebook so am a bit unsure about actively letting it invade my blog but wanted to give this ‘like’ thing a whirl. Considering how rubbish the photos are this week it possibly isn’t the best place to start and will probably put any new readers off, but anyway, if you don’t know, now you know…

my mother said i should eat an ice cream cone

13 Comments

I love ice cream so much. Maybe it’s that extremely cold food is more exciting, maybe it’s that the creamy chillyness is the ideal taxicab to drive a million different flavours to your tastebuds, maybe it’s that particular melty smoothness.

Maybe it’s that ice cream reminds me of good times growing up. So many of my ‘birthday cakes’ were a tub of vanilla ice cream sprinkled with Smarties or jellybeans and spiked with sparklers, which were then set alight for extra glamour. Mum would put a scoop of ice cream in a cup and top it up with Coke or Fanta to make ice cream sodas for everyone which I thought was very cool. (Some kids got lovingly baked cakes but not everyone’s mum has the foresight to combine Tip Top and gunpowder.)

So… I love ice cream. And one of the best, best, and once more best recipes in the world is one that I’m sharing today. I can’t remember where I absorbed it from, it just mysteriously became part of my frozen repertoire. I’d like to say “I absorbed it from my own brilliant mind” but that’s just not true. What I did invent was this particular version – a completely vegan, two-ingredient, relatively instant and completely delicious-ful ice cream.

Confession: I don’t usually serve my ice cream on a bowl-within-a-plate thing. And I never eat it with second-hand commemorative spoons. It was all done so the photos would look nice. Between that and the precisely situated forkful of risotto last week, this blog has become an offal pit of visual lies! To force some honesty into the situation, I made myself eat that bowl of icecream using only the decorative spoon which has a palm-tree embossed cavity of 2cm. It took roughly forty minutes.

Anyway! That’s a lengthy bit of emotional baggage for such a quick recipe. I first made this last year using delicious cream but not only does coconut milk make it vegan-tastic, it also lends a fluttery flavour of its own. How this works is – I think – as the food processor blades reduce the frozen fruit to rubble, the liquid is forced through at great speed, turning it into a kind of instantly frozen puree thing which resembles actual ice cream. It’s not perfect – you have to eat it on the spot as it loses its texture if refrozen – and it’s not overly sweet, so pour in sugar if you like. I chose blackberries because they were cheapest at the time – the seeds to get in your teeth a bit but between friends it’s no biggie, plus their tart berryishness and beautiful colour makes up for any of that.

Blackberry-Coconut Ice Cream

2 1/2 cups frozen blackberries (or other)
250ml/1 cup canned coconut milk (or cream, or yoghurt)


Put everything in a food processor. Add some sugar if you like. Blend. Be warned: it will make a racket. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides and process again till it looks like magical ice cream. Scoop into bowls and sprinkle with coconut if you like (or any kind of sprinkly thing, really).

I’m not sure how many this serves – only you can look inside yourself and find the answer – by which I mean Tim and I finished this but it probably could have been divided between four people. It tastes sparklingly and singularly of the fruit that went into it, with a clean, softening hint of coconut. It comes together in seconds, so if you have a can or two of coconut milk in the cupboard and a bag of frozen fruit in the freezer you’re only ever moments from ice cream. Which is a very good feeling. 


Spontaneous dinner party? Spontaneous children appear? Spontaneous vegan children appear? Spontaneous simple desire for ice cream? Sorted.


On Thursday night Tim and I went to the Whitireia Performing Arts School’s first year performance of Godspell, a musical by Stephen “Defying Gravity” Schwartz, who wrote the bulk of the music when he was only in his early 20s. The cast themselves on Thursday night must have been around 19 and they were brilliant – there were some beautiful voices, sure, but the humour was sharp and the ability to grab props and change character out of nowhere was fairly mind-boggling. I ended up sitting next to this woman who knew my dance teachers from when I was growing up south of Auckland, miles and miles away from Wellington. Small world, isn’t it…It was funny in the intermission, they played a karaoke version of Wicked. You could hear pockets of girls in the audience singing along quietly. In these post-Glee days it’s more cute than anything else but a couple of years back I probably would have gone and introduced myself with a qualifying “Oh my gosh you know who Idina Menzel is”.
___________________________________________________________
Title via: The philosofly girl Coco Solid in another incarnation as Parallel Dance Ensemble with their song Weight Watchers, which won best video at Handle The Jandal awards last year. I was there – imagine those donuts and psychedelic licorice allsorts writ large across the Embassy cinema screen in psychedelic colours. Lip-smackingly delicious both to watch and listen to.
___________________________________________________________
Music lately:


Michael Franti and Spearhead, Sometimes, from their 2001 album Stay Human. Nice as this song is, I love the acoustic version, although the fact that I learned a dance to it at a workshop a few years back may have cemented it in my mind – sometimes it’s impossible not to love the music you learn dances to, no matter how bad. Not that this is bad. This is gorgeous.

By My Side from the aforementioned Godspell. We used to sing this in choir sometimes, it’s satisfying for an alto like me. Such a beautiful, beautiful song, I can’t believe it was the pretty but abrasively earnest Day By Day that instead made it onto the Billboard charts when Godspell came out in the 70s. The video I linked to is the film version featuring an astonishingly good-looking young Victor Garber as Jesus. (FYI, he’s in the Superman tshirt). The harmonies aren’t as clear as I’d like but it’s one of the better versions available on Youtube. Plus, Victor Garber, hello!
___________________________________________________________
Next time: I think this is the third time I’ve put off the Grumble Pie. With a name like that I can’t keep denying it a blog post…