Category: Pudding and Dessert

if green pears you like, if old chairs you like, if back stairs you like, if love affairs you like

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Poire Belle Helene – pretty Helen pear – man, everything sounds so much better in French, but then do the French sit around being like man everything sounds so romantic in English? I, uh, I doubt it. 

Because I am heedlessly whimsical and waggishly adorable, when the notion strikes me to make a classic French dessert for my lunch in its entirety, I indulge that whim. Hard. Some might describe that as not providing one’s body with enough necessary nutrients or a lot of work for a small result or even simply annoying, but I’ve said the magic word – whimsical – and as such am exonerated from all such opinions. For what it’s worth though, later that day I was later horribly ill and had to go home from work but I refuse to blame this poached pear in chocolate sauce. I don’t actually know what I’m blaming – it was all very mysterious and came out of nowhere, but I’ve eaten both pears and chocolate since and been utterly fine, so who knows. I hate going home sick from work – firstly when you’re a bartender you have to try and find someone to cover you at the last minute, secondly you miss out on hours, thirdly there’s this sense I have with hospo instilled from my ballet days where like, you can be coughing up blood and yet the show must go on – but maaaaan I was sick. Fortunately I have a marvelous girlfriend who was able to immediately administer panadol and cold flannels and such, but wow it was horrible. Um, anyway, this recipe is really delicious and you should definitely make it without fear of incapacitation. Definitely.

There’s this scene in the musical Company where the lead character, Robert, is recounting a story to a woman that he’s trying to sleep with, about another woman whom he tried to sleep with – in this story they had just met and were thoroughly into each other and rented a motel for the night, she then suggested that he go buy champagne, he drove to the nearest shop and bought all the champagne he could carry, sped back to the motel and – he says devastatingly – I could not find it. He then drove around for three hours looking for the motel before leaving. This was me, but with a block of Lindt dark chocolate that my mum had sent me. I was like, this would be perfect for the Poire Belle Helene whim that I’ve been taken with, and then I could not find it. I then ransacked my bedroom for twenty minutes. I don’t know how a person loses a block of chocolate in their room but I’m sure I’ll find it somewhere ridiculous when I least expect it, like in my sock drawer or on my head or melted and dripping down the mirror. I wanted some damn Poire Belle Helene though, so scooted to the corner dairy and bought some milk chocolate to use instead. A fascinating story, I know!

Honestly poached pears have never appealed to me that much as a dessert – if I wanted a damp fruit I could just open a can of them, thank you, don’t insult me with this pretense of a pudding – but cover them in chocolate sauce and suddenly I get it. Poire Belle Helene was a dessert invented by that clever man Escoffier in the late 1800s in honour of an opera (that was what people did for fun back then, I guess, and I’m all for it) and it’s a fetching combination – fragrant, sweet pear with creamy, rich chocolate sauce, the gritty yet yielding fruit against the silky, warm chocolate. It’s blatantly a good idea for lunch. My recipe here is for one person (hence the flighty name) but the quantities are easy enough to increase.

poire belle helene seulement pour vous  (poire belle helene for you only) 

a recipe by myself. Serves one.

one firm pear
four tablespoons sugar
two cups of water
a tablespoon or so of riesling or sweet white wine, if you have it
one teaspoon vanilla extract 

75g milk chocolate
half a cup of cream
a tablespoon of butter
a pinch of salt

Peel the pear, leaving the stalk intact. If it’s a bit wobbly and won’t sit upright, cut a small slice out of the base so it’s steady, otherwise leave as is. Put the sugar, water, riesling and vanilla in a small pot and lower the pear into it – it probably won’t be submerged but this is okay. Bring the pan to the boil and then lower to a simmer, turning the pear over occasionally so that all sides spend time submerged by the hot syrup. Stick a skewer into the pear after about ten minutes, and if it’s soft and yielding then you’re good to go. Remove it from the syrup and place in the bowl that you’re going to serve it in.

In a small pan, heat the cream till the surface is wobbly and it seems like it’s just about to bubble. Remove from the heat and add the chocolate, and allow it to sit for a minute – the heat of the cream will melt the chocolate instantly. Stir briskly till all the chocolate is melted and you have a smooth, shiny sauce. Stir in the butter and the salt and then pour lavishly over the pear. Drink the rest of the sauce or save it for something else, up to you. 

aggressively autumnal

Obviously this makes a fairly gorgeous pudding to be had at the usual time of after dinner, but honestly, in the middle of the day, eaten contemplatively and reverently at the kitchen table while wearing stretchy pants and a large, soft hoodie and wooly socks…it was sublime. Milk chocolate brings a different vibe than 80% cocoa dark chocolate but I’m such a fan of its friendly, vaguely caramelly flavour. Whatever chocolate you use, try to make sure it’s good, that is, that it’s actually going to impart some kind of chocolate flavour at all, you know? The pears can be any old trash but the quality of the chocolate is really going to make or break this thing. That said, I used the fakest, cheapest vanilla essence in the syrup because it’s all I had, and I manage to sleep at night (that’s not true, I’m a terrible sleeper, but it’s not from synthetic vanilla guilt at least!)

chomp

So the most exciting news in my life right now is that my flat now has A CAT. It’s actually so hard for me to type this because just the knowledge that there is a cat in my presence makes me want to do triumphant forward rolls around the room for a good solid forty minutes. Oh sure, you say, cats are nice, but do you have any idea how fervently my heart has been yearning for one? I mean, if you read this blog you should have a decent idea since I go on about it quite a lot, but if not, just imagine the ferocious intensity of a thousand perturbed alligators: that’s me. And now, a cat! Just as I was at the pinnacle of my I-have-no-cat feelings, the universe threw me a bone in the form of my flatmate, who was a last-minute replacement cat sitter for a friend going overseas for work for several months. Isn’t that wonderful? 
caaaaaaaaaaaat faaaaace
business cat has key performance indicators to think about and doesn’t have time for you right now, Bob

Her name is Wednesday and she has a tiny crooked tail and a curious disposition and she’s just the happiest little nubbin ever. And so am I. 
In the wider scheme of things there is a lot of terribleness out there right now (well, there always is, but right now it’s bubbling closer to the surface) and while I have nothing to say that would change or help, I would just like to draw your attention to the following two things while I’m here: if you’re able to contribute to the people of Nepal following the horrifying earthquake that hit them, this FB post has some very useful information. If you are able to contribute to the people of Baltimore in the wake of ongoing police brutality, a wonderful woman I follow on Twitter is doing great, highly transparent work gathering essential supplies for people and can be supported via her Indiegogo account here. That is all. 
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title from: the gloriously sassy title song from the glorious musical Anything Goes. Okay so you should absolutely listen to the stridently excellent Patti LuPone sing it on the 1988 Broadway cast recording and then I urge you to watch Sutton Foster breezily belt it out and then tap dance effortlessly at the 2011 Tony Awards, and then speaking of things called Tony, I really truly adore Lady Gaga and Tony Bennet’s take on it. Finally Melanie C’s version is so gorgeous. Listen to them all or get outta here, quite frankly. It’s just one of the best show tunes there is and Cole Porter, who wrote it, is an actual genius. 
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music lately:
DVS’s brand new mixtape DVTV is SO VERY good, as is he. 
Janelle Monae, Yoga. “Get off my areola” is honestly the best line of 2015.
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next time: anything goes! (loooool)

we’ll drink coffee and you can spend the night, we’ll do anything that makes you smile

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I was supposed to blog about this earlier today but then I also had to make a cake and while doing so I ate so much cake batter and icing that I needed a nap, during which time if you did an x-ray scan of my skull you would see that the brain had dissolved into a nourishing yet ultimately useless sugary syrup. Which is so much the story of my life, that you could put that opening sentence on the front cover of my (inevitable, hopefully) autobiography.

On that supposed-to-be-doing-stuff vibe, I was talking to my dear friend Kate the other day about motivation and wanting to get stuff done and worrying about where I am going with my life, I seem to do little other than half-assedly start projects and then abandon them through sheer tiredness and I hate it but I also can’t seem to keep up with myself or my expectations of myself, y’know? If I could get some kind of fairy godmother situation happening right now my request to them would be for me to write another cookbook and get a TV show. I so deeply miss that wacky montage time when I was nonstop writing my first cookbook and making food and there were photoshoots and plans and ridiculous recipe testing and just so much going on. Unfortunately, in what some might look at as being a bad sign, the word document in which I put lots of plans and recipe ideas in order to pitch a new cookbook to someone…disappeared. My computer ate it. I’m gonna try to start all over again, but gosh! Psychological and literal setbacks ahoy! And yeah, I did say pitch. I am always proud of how I was approached by Penguin to write my first cookbook, but this time around I can’t sit and wait and hope for the best, I need to, oh, rediscover my inner Leslie Knope and hustle like whoa. With that in mind, if anyone knows of any highly good and cool publishers that I should be approaching, let me know. If you want to tell me that the publishing industry is going down the toilet and unless I’m writing Fifty Shades of Grey fanfic I’m screwed, I’d be less appreciative, but I guess tough love has its place sometimes. That place is not here (by here I mean anywhere near my general person.)

I love these pastel sprinkles so much 

But why have an existential meltdown when you could eat ice cream? While having an existential meltdown? (Tagline: save the meltdown for yourself, not your frozen dessert) I made this coffee ice cream, a recipe of my queen Nigella Lawson’s, three times in about ten days – which speaks to both the excellence of said recipe and also my abilities at hoovering through ice cream like a vacuum cleaner with googly eyes stuck on it to give it a human-like quality.

This stuff is wondrous. The addition of sweetened condensed milk gives it a maddeningly pleasing chewiness, as well as making it spoonable and smooth straight from the freezer without any need for churning, stirring, or waiting for it to soften. The bulging caramel taste of the condensed milk also mellows out the harsh coffee dust, giving it a crema-soft coffee flavour with tiny specks of enlivening bitterness here and there. It’s so lush and delicious and I frankly expected nothing less of Nigella but it’s still good to have such relentlessly positive ideals reinforced.

Despite the recipe being monumentally easy, when I first made it I deviated slightly and used coconut cream instead of regular cream, simply because it’s what I had in my cupboard and also I’d spent three of my last ten dollars on a can of sweetened condensed milk and felt like this frugal act counteracted some of that heathenish wretchedness. (In my, and indeed anyone’s defense, sometimes having seven dollars and ice cream is better than having ten dollars and no ice cream, in terms of living your best life.)

It was so brilliant that it’s all I’ve done ever since for fear of breaking the magic spell of deliciousness, but feel free to use actual cream if you like. The coconut flavour is completely subtle and totally overpowered by all that coffee, if that’s something that concerns you.

very easy coffee ice cream

adapted from a recipe in Nigella Lawson’s book Nigellissima. Makes around 600ml. 

one 400ml (or so) can coconut cream
one can sweetened condensed milk
about three tablespoons of instant coffee, ideally instant espresso powder

Empty the two cans into a bowl, and whisk together along with the coffee powder. If you like you can dissolve the coffee in a tablespoon or two of boiling water, otherwise your ice cream will be dotted with coffee granules – either way is fine though.

Pour into a freezer-proof receptacle – I use an old take-out plastic container with a lid – and freeze for about six hours or until solid.

Eat, rapturously.  Or morosely, I’m not here to police your facial expressions. 

Ice cream is easily one of my very favourite foods, which is possibly another factor towards my ploughing merrily through so much of this stuff recently, but don’t just take my word for it – actually, do just take my word for it, this is a food blog, damn it. This is easy and delicious and wonderful and you deserve all those words in your life materialised in food form.

What have I been up to of late when not fretting luxuriantly about how much I’m not achieving? Swanning about and swooning about, I suppose, going to parties with my thoroughly and respectively wonderful friends and girlfriend; working at work; gasping and clutching at myself with great emotion while watching Pretty Little Liars; trying to not spend money; and oh look, dying my hair pinker than it has ever been:

je vois la vie en rose 
On a final, aggressively mercenary note, if my ability to buy cream is something you care about, may I remind you that you can still purchase copies of my amazing cookbook directly through me – I have a few left but stocks are dwindling so move with haste is my advice. Also if you’re a rich weirdo who finds lighting your scented candles with hundred dollar bills gauche and passé and you’re looking for a new way to get your kicks, my paypal is always open and any and everything is so very appreciated. 
Actually, let’s end not with capitalism but with more ice cream. Which is probably still capitalism, my knowledge of the economy is hazy and based on my own hyperbolic notions at best.
affogato made with coffee ice cream, for when being merely sybaritic is not quite enough.
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title from: Little Red, by Kate Nash. It’s so strange and magical and melancholy and narrative, this song. I love it. 
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music lately: 

Marina and the Diamonds, Shampain. This song still goes off and still gets me right in the heart, it’s so rapturously dreamy and poppy, and I’m always like oh wow it’s so meaningful no matter literally what is happening in my life at the time.

Pere Ubu, Modern Dance. I haven’t heard this song in foreverrrr but it’s so great, I love how hypnotic yet dinky the melody is.

Flo Rida/T-Pain, Low. I danced ever so happily to this on Friday night and have been singing it in my head ever since (“she hit the floorSHE HIT THE FLOOR”) and I don’t even mind because T-Pain is an actual delight of a human.
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next time: your guess is as good as mine, so, uh, ooh, how mysterious. 

down with love, with flowers and rice and shoes

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I have a day off today and approached it with gleeful anticipation of writing a blog post with diligence and discipline, but instead I had a terrible sleep last night (the kind where you just wake up at irritatingly regular intervals for no good reason) and I’m assuming it’s that which has left me staring listlessly at the screen unable to think of anything cool to say about this rice pudding.

So then I had a break and spontaneously danced around the lounge, free-limbed and embarrassingly passionate! I leapt and did high kicks and sank into the splits and twirled! And now I’m back on the couch sitting under my laptop and I’m still tired and uninspired but like, dancing was fun, I guess. But if doing enthusiastic self-flinging to Inside Out by Eve Six and Problems by ASAP Rocky and Honey to the Bee by Billie Piper can’t help inspire one to talk about rice pudding, then, well. What is there.

But now that I think about it, having worn holes in my socks from pirouetting on carpet and exhausted my lung capacity from doing powerful leaps, this rice pudding was really, really good. I don’t even consider myself someone who considers rice pudding…at all. But I had some at a cafe recently and was, upon eating it, filled with profound thoughts like “This is so exemplary, I might make my own damn rice pudding some time.”

The rice pudding I’ve made is part of a mighty enough English tradition of milk-based puddings, with this being rice cooked slowly in said milk till it has swollenly absorbed the lot and turned all creamy and soft and comforting. Numerous cultures worldwide have their own similar version, presumably with everyone coming to the same culinary conclusion around the same time many years ago. It can be utterly vile, and worse, boring, but when made right it’s pretty brilliant. Rice has its own subtle flavour and texture which suits the aggressive creaminess, and as a prop for other flavours – in this case, sesame-tinted caramel sauce and sugary blackberries – it’s excellent.

I was determined to avoid any troubling blandness here so used a mixture of full cream milk and water plus milk powder, which seems counter-intuitive for the sake of it, but if there’s one thing I enjoy, it’s seeming counter-intuitive for the sake of it. But also I do like the vanilla-salt-kick that milk powder gives, and have this vague and unfounded scientific feeling that a mixture of milk and water makes for better liquid absorption. The rice itself releases its starches slowly, making it stupidly creamy all on its own, and then you can pour over as much actual cream as you like once it’s cooked. The sesame seeds aren’t super necessary but their warm toasty nutty flavour makes things more compelling, and works oddly well with the particular tartness of the berries. And when you’re making a pudding that you’re not entirely sure you’re even that enthused about the concept of in the first place, “oddly well” is a highly respectable result.

rice pudding with blackberries and sesame caramel sauce

a recipe by myself. Serves four, although I ate the lot entirely alone (in two sittings, not that I’m entirely concerned what you think about my portion-related decisions) This makes honestly about seventeen times more caramel sauce than you need but it’s nice to wake up the next morning and drink the remainders of it while standing in front of the fridge. I’m assuming you’ve got frozen blackberries here, but by all means use freshly picked ones if you’ve got them, you princess of the meadow.  

three cups full fat milk
two cups water
four tablespoons full fat milk powder
two tablespoons sugar
a pinch of salt
three quarters of a cup of arborio rice

one cup of frozen blackberries
one tablespoon caster sugar
one teaspoon vanilla extract

one tablespoon of sesame seeds
50g butter
half a cup of brown sugar
half a cup of cream
a small pinch of salt

Place the blackberries, sugar, and vanilla in a bowl and leave to sit while you make the rice. 

In a large pot, bring the milk, water, milk powder, sugar, and pinch of salt gently to the boil. Pour in the rice and stir it, lowering the heat to a simmer. Allow to simmer, stirring often, for around thirty minutes or until the rice is swollen and soft. You may need to add extra water if it’s looking like this will never happen. I did. There was totally a point where I was like, ‘wow, I guess I’m never going to have rice pudding ever’, because the rice just would not soften entirely. You just have to keep stirring and tasting (don’t bother tasting till most of the liquid is absorbed though) and eventually it honestly will be cooked.

Let it sit while you make the caramel sauce – toast the sesame seeds in a small pan till they’re browned, then quickly tip them into a bowl (quickly, because they will burn swiftly if left unattended) and in the same pan, melt the butter and brown sugar together. Once it’s bubbling, tip in the cream and stir vigorously, then remove from the heat. It might look all weird and separated but stirring will bring it together! Tip the sesame seeds back in along with the salt and stir them through. 

The blackberries by now should have defrosted into the sugar and be all glossy and syrupy. Spatula the rice into a serving dish, fling the berries and some of their syrup over the top and then spoon over as much caramel sauce as you like. Serve with more cream and caramel sauce for pouring over. Should you have leftovers, it’s worth knowing that the rice near the berries will turn an unpromising blue colour, it’s all good and all still plenty edible. 

Describing rice pudding as comforting might seem a bit obvious, but sometimes things are obvious for a reason. It is just so soft, and creamy, and mildly sweet, and warm, like eating that particular feeling where you pull a pile of laundry out of the dryer and then lie down and pile it all on top of yourself like a cosy mountain. The caramel sauce pierces all the plainness with its dark sugary salty toffee vibes, and the blackberries bring some pure fruity sweetness which feels necessary in the face of all that milk and starch.

And importantly, the berries also look so pretty against the snowy white rice.

Aside from trying to write this post I’ve spent the weekend thus far rewatching Skins, reading up with terror and horror on Ferguson (I recommend this brief but devastating piece by Roxane Gay), making a pre-wedding breakfast for a bride and bridesmaids at my flat (my roomie Kate being one of those bridesmaids), lying in bed willing myself to go buy iron pills, and anticipating December with trepidation. My tarot card for November was all “it’s over, let it goooo” and “get lots of hugs” and I’m not sure that I’ve quite lived up to the potential of it but I mean, I did cut my hair.
I still have short hair! And that was the weekly Laura’s Hair Roundup

So the thought of December being amongst us is making me a little nervous – this will be the first ever Christmas I don’t spend at home with family, because I’ll be working, and also there’s just that weird thing where the end of a year makes you consider every damn moment that’s led up to this point and what you could have done differently and what it all means and who you are and where you’re going with life and stuff. But my tarot card for December is Queen of Wands, which is a super rad one to have, being all about things like creative vision and achieving goals; enjoying the limelight; acting upon feelings; and, according to one site, potentially finding love by meeting someone through a light-haired friend (am I that light-haired friend to myself?) Cool, yes? Well, whatever the cards say could happen, as long as I thrive aggressively and be 100% successful in all aspects of my life and get intimidatingly rich and radiate pure happiness, I’ll be quietly satisfied. 
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title from: Down with Love, by that queen Judy Garland. Up with love, I say, but the song’s sentiment is pretty understandable sometimes. Especially if Judy’s singing.
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music lately: 
Eve 6, Inside Out. Erm yeah I listened to this about nineteen times yesterday, whatever. 
Lorde, Yellow Flicker Beat, live at the AMA’s. The last five seconds, chills through my heart. 
En Vogue, Don’t Let Go (Love). The lyrics to this are blisteringly good. “Have the right to lose control”, omg. This is the kind of song that gives me false nostalgia about the nineties. Actually, so is the Eve 6 song. Damn it!
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Next time: I might blog about the granola that I made for the bridal kids? It’s delicious stuff and looked pretty, and those are my usual requirements covered. 

eating soft ice cream, coney island queen

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photographed this ice cream with an antique ice cream scoop but then used a regular spoon to actually scoop ice cream into my bowl because the antique one is cute but a pain to use and also I now have zero morals when it comes to photographing things as props but not actually using them.

I’m not going to sugar coat it for you, there are a lot of things in my life right now that range from “this kinda sucks” to “oh wow this majorly sucks”. But now that I’ve said that I’m going to hand you a snug coat made of pure cane sugar, because I’m keeping things on a rare need-to-know basis at the moment, and anyone who needs to know what’s happening already knows. I might as well not burden you all with it too if I don’t have to. Also: I have a recipe for apple cinnamon ice cream, so am kind of literally sugar-coating things here too.

So instead, some good things right now are:

I have amazing friends who are so very there for me // despite these last couple of weeks being very tiring, I still love my job. Although I do realise I’m not the first person in the world to ever do hospo so no it’s not actually a revelation to a lot of people that there is some arduous work involved. I didn’t realise I was so entitled! // I knitted a hot water bottle cosy for my nanna and it involved doing cabling for the first time and while it’s a tiny bit wonky it turned out rather beautiful // I drank an entire pot of tea today from a teapot shaped like an elephant // I recently discovered that my queen Lucy Liu has an instagram // I started a fun project called bathroomselfiehunter.tumblr.com // my tarot card for August is amazing and promises creative vision and being powerful and great and so I am determined to make that all come true // I saw a beautiful film called Reaching For The Moon at the film festival // I have seen a LOT of cute cats and dogs recently // I have a lot of parties to go to this month // I discovered the truly good Ask Andrew WK column for the Village Voice // I have a lot of homemade ice cream in the freezer.

Ice cream and pasta are probably my two favourite foods, but while I eat pasta all the time it has been a shamefully forever-long time since I’ve made ice cream. I’m on a massive cinnamon kick at the moment and am determined to scent my life with it (can tell you for free that putting cinnamon sticks in your oil burner does absolutely nothing apart from make your oil burner look like a very small dumpster) and like the idea of the cosy, warm flavour of said cinnamon being trapped in such a chilly context. I know it’s winter in New Zealand right now and ice cream is probably one of the last things you want to eat, but consider this: ice cream is really, really delicious. Also, apples are one of the few fruits that seem to be happily in season right now, as opposed to gasping for mere existence, and the method couldn’t be simpler – some stirring, some whisking, some waiting, and then you have ice cream.

An excellent thing about ice cream is that the frozen-ness somehow mutes any overload of sweetness, so while it may seem like there’s a lot of sugar in this, it’s all necessary and good. Something about the sticky texture of the sweetened condensed milk and the light, airy cream comes together to make something amazingly creamy and dense yet soft and spoonable. The simmered apples provide chewy bursts of sweet-sharp fragrant juiciness, and it’s altogether just pretty wonderful.

apple cinnamon ice cream

a recipe by myself

two apples, Granny Smith are good for this one
three tablespoons brown sugar
one can sweetened condensed milk
500ml cream
plenty of ground cinnamon

Finely dice the apples, but don’t worry about peeling them. Simmer them in a pan over a low heat with the brown sugar, until the sugar is bubbling and sticky and the apple pieces are very soft. 

Remove from the heat and allow to cool a little, then stir in the condensed milk. In another bowl, whisk the cream till thickened to roughly the texture of a good thickshake – you want it solid, but not actually whipped. Fold in the apple and condensed milk, then shake in plenty of cinnamon and stir again. Spatula this mixture into a freezer-proof container (I like loaf tins for this, hence…why I did that) and freeze for a bunch of hours or overnight. 

 

I just went and ate some more now from the freezer to see if anything new to say about it sprang to mind, and all I can say is wow it’s amazing, go me for making up such a great recipe. If you’ve ever felt like ice cream is something you want to tackle but it seems way too nervous-making, this simple, caramel-tinged winter wonderland of a thing is for you.

One thing I will tell you is that for reasons bewilderingly out of my control, I am in the market for a new place to live. My dealbreakers are: it has to be right in the city, an apartment, a big bedroom, lots of good light for food photography, and have an elevator. As you can imagine, finding such a place has been a total breeze. Truth is, I’ve got nothing, so if you are a Wellingtonianite and know of such a place that fits my needs, please let me know!

In the meantime, there’s not many things that ice cream can’t make slightly-to-very-much better.

PS I lost my camera’s SD card so took all this week’s photos on my phone, apologies for any drop in quality, but also I take back those apologies, because isn’t it amazing how my mere cellphone takes better photos than a lot of digital cameras did, say, four years ago? We’re living in the future!

title from: Lana Del Rey’s song Carmen. I ❤ her so much. 

music lately:

Dark Dark Dark, Hear Me. I hadn’t listened to this band in a while and now cannot stop, not sure how I forgot how dreamy and moody and perfect they are.

Drake feat Lil Wayne, Miss Me, his verse about Nicki Minaj is like…wonderful.

Speaking of: Nicki Minaj and Beyonce’s Flawless remix is So Important. Shivers every time I hear it.

next time: I don’t knowwww as I may not have a kitchen to call my own by the time I get round to the next blog post. We’ll see!  

fancy plans and pants to match: nautilus estate wines, part two

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Bread and Butter Chicken

Well hello there, and welcome to another installment of Fancy Plans and Pants to Match, where I overexplain somewhat apologetically about how sometimes I get cool free stuff because I’m an amazing blogger and cookbook author, and try to write about said free stuff in a way that makes me seem charming and only minimally insufferable. The name of this segment comes from a quote by Jimmy James, a character in the brilliant 90s sitcom NewsRadio.

This is part two of a series of recipes I created for Nautilus Estate wines. Last time I wrote about lemonade pancakes with strawberry sauce and pasta with chorizo and feta and chilli butter, and this time I’ve got more deliciousness for you. I hate to repeat text I’ve already written verbatim but I’m gonna power through the pain anyway, because…everything I said last time is still relevant and I’m not going to try and think of a synonym for every single word I wrote when the original will do fine. But consider yourself warned that (just) the following two paragraphs appeared when I previously wrote about this stuff.

So here’s the thing: Nautilus Estate got in touch with me and asked if I’d like to develop some recipes for them to go with their fancy fancy wines. Oh my gosh yes, said I. I love wine, I love thinking up recipes, I love receiving a butt-tonne of wine in the mail, and honestly it’s just nice to be thought of as someone who could do this, right? And then a whole lot of stuff happened in my life. Finally though, I got around to actually completing my original task. So thanks Nautilus, not only for the wine itself, but for your infinite patience and your “hey it’s cool we can wait the wine will probably be kind of useful right now anyway” attitude.

The pitch: Nautilus Vintage Rose 2011 and Cuvee Marlborough NV Brut. Both fizzy and fizzing with deliciousness. All I have to do is come up with some recipes to complement what they’ve already got going on. Important note: I cannot format a swishy little accent on the ‘e’ in rose/cuvee for some reason so when you read it please pronounce it “rose-ayyyyy” and “coo-vayyyy” in your head

fancy pudding with a fancy wine for a fancy lady who needs a synonym for fancy

What happened: somehow these recipes to match the wines came to me pretty immediately and fully-formed, perhaps because that’s something I am very good at doing (in the interest of being a self-deprecating New Zealander I feel like I should match this boastfulness with one of my failings: I can’t ride a bicycle. Self-deprecation, the wine matching of personal self-esteem!) The rose’s delicate but definite berry sweetness could handle something rich and buttery, and I liked the idea of pairing such an elegant drink with something so hearty and cosy. Not that I wouldn’t serve this bread and butter chicken to people I was trying to impress – it’s still at that level, but also really very easy and plain and comforting. Chicken, butter, bread: all as wondrous as it sounds, and ideal with a sparklingly ripe-flavoured wine like the rose.

butter is really delicious: I’m highly qualified to tell you this

bread and butter chicken

a recipe by myself
recommended wine pairing: Nautilus Estate Vintage Rose 2011

four chicken thighs, skin on, organic and free range if possible because I don’t like to be prescriptive but oh damn they taste so much better
100g butter
three thick slices stale white bread, eg white sourdough, those Vienna loaves, that kinda thing 
½ cup walnuts
fresh thyme leaves, around a tablespoon.

Set oven to 200 C, and place the chicken thighs snugly in a roasting dish. Cube the butter and scatter evenly on top of the chicken thighs. Put the dish in the oven and leave for around 40 minutes. 

Meanwhile, tear the bread into very small pieces, allowing some of it to crumble into breadcrumb dust and some of the pieces to be more crouton-esque. Basically just rip it up and whatever you do will be correct. Either roughly chop the walnuts and tip them in, or just break them up in your hands – they don’t need to be too small. Stir in the thyme leaves. 

Remove the chicken from the oven – it should be very crisp and golden and the juice should run clear when you puncture the thicker end of the thigh with a skewer. Scatter the breadcrumb-walnut mixture evenly over the top, and spoon over plenty of the buttery pan juices (there will be plenty!) so they can absorb it all. Some of the breadcrumbs will stay on top of the chicken, some will fall down into the spaces between the thighs, but it will all taste incredible. Return to the oven for around ten minutes or until the breadcrumbs look crisp and golden. 

I’d serve it with lemon wedges and a salad that has lots of peppery rocket leaves and flat leaf parsley in it, but to be honest I just ate one of the thighs with my bare hands straight from the oven with a glass of wine and it was quite perfect. 

I thought the more crisp, full flavour of the cuvee could happily lift the bittersweet and majorly-sweet grapefruit and white chocolate curds. On that note, I thought making a lemon curd thing but with white chocolate instead would be super fun, and oh, how right I was. I use a particular technique that perhaps in time they’ll call HungryandFrozen’s Unclassic Method, where I just throw all the ingredients in at once and stir over a low heat till the butter melts and it somehow comes together. The white chocolate curd has a rich vanilla-custard flavour and the grapefruit curd has a gentle sharpness, which, with the thick, tart yoghurt, is all so good you’ll want to say “OH SHUT UP” to no one in particular after having a mouthful because you don’t know what to do with yourself. As well as tasting excellent, the texture of the cool, bubbly brut goes well with the thick, saucy sweetness of this pudding.

grapefruit curd, white chocolate curd, greek yoghurt

a recipe by myself. Serves two – four, depending on the size of your serving glasses, I recommend going on the smaller side all the same and eating the remaining ones yourself at another happy time if you’ve only got two people to feed.
recommended wine pairing: Nautilus Estate Cuvee Marlborough NV Brut

two grapefruit
four eggs
three quarters of a cup of sugar
150g butter
100g white chocolate chopped as fine as you can be bothered to
several tablespoons of thick, plain Greek yoghurt

In a smallish pan, mix two eggs and half a cup of the sugar. Squeeze in the grapefruit juice and stir again. Dice half the butter into small cubes and tip them into the pan. Over a very low heat, patiently, stir this mixture constantly till the butter melts and it all thickens. Once it has all come together and is looking thick and saucy, but not necessarily too thick – better safe than sorry – remove from the heat and stick the pan into a sink which has a couple of inches of cold water in it, stirring constantly to lower the heat of the pan’s contents. Spatula this into a bowl and refrigerate while you get on with the white chocolate: whisk together the remaining two eggs and the remaining quarter cup of sugar, then add the cubed butter and chopped white chocolate. Again, over a very low heat, stir it constantly till the butter and chocolate have just melted and it becomes thick and smooth. Stick this pan in a sink of cold water too, just to make sure it doesn’t carry on cooking in the hot pan. Transfer this into a bowl and also refrigerate – ideally for at least an hour, but you can make the two curds a whole day ahead. 

Layer up generous spoonfuls of the grapefruit and white chocolate curd and Greek yoghurt in small serving bowls (125ml or so but larger is fine) and serve. Some mint leaves or chopped pistachios might be nice here, but there’s plenty going on already. 

silkier than a silkworm in fetching silk stockings descending gently to the earth from a silk parachute

bread and butter chicken: still delicious, don’t forget

from a scale of 1 to the entire verse of Once In A Lifetime by Talking Heads: As with last time, still a solid eight – this is so much nicer than the wine I usually drink, and it was sincerely thrilling having so much of it, with my only task ahead something I already adore: developing recipes.

would I do this for not-free? again, as with last time, I mean, I’m not just going to give people content for nothing – wait, I write a food blog – oh you know what I mean – but I would definitely buy this wine off the shelf now if it was on special or I was feeling, oh I don’t know, employed. It tastes excellent and the people behind it are blatantly pretty cool, so go forth and seek it, I say.

earnest thanks for making me feel fancy to: …Nautilus Estate! You rule.

finally, some slightly unrelated blog admin: my rent is not your problem, but I can so feel in my bones that there’s at least one eccentric millionaire who reads this blog and is fond of me in a monetary way. What I’m saying is, hi, this is a periodic reminder that you can totally donate to hungryandfrozen.com to help me continue to exist and to remain on the fringes of that fancy life. But also I shall not be fussed if you don’t. I’m kind of just trying to trick super rich people into Robin Hooding themselves to me. But also trying to pay rent and buy food and such. Anyway: consider it, if you like!

shorty get down, good lord

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Whether or not I want it – and I think I do – I am definitely more of a “why on earth did I do that” person than a “what if, why didn’t I do that” person. Hamlet, in the movie Hamlet (and also the play: Hamlet) goes on a lot about thought vs action and much as I’m like “goddamn Hamlet be nicer to Ophelia, she knows cool facts about flowers and doesn’t need your bad attitude”, I do get why thought vs action is such a huge theme of the play. As I discussed with dear-dear-dear Kate yesterday, it’s hard to reconcile long-term planning vs short-term dirtbag heedlessness. I love planning things, having lofty goals to look towards, building anticipation and hope and excitement and so on. But sometimes it seems like I just make plans so huge and lofty simply so it won’t be considered unreasonable if I never actually achieve them. I also am hugely impulsive and really enjoy being talked into things in the moment, act now and see what happens and worry about it later. I guess I approach life like it’s a window, that I’ve spent a long time learning how to open carefully and slowly so it doesn’t break, but then at the last minute, impatiently refusing to wait, I punch a hole in it and leap through to whatever might be on the other side, fragments and splinters of glass twinkling in my hair like diamonds (it’s my metaphor and I’ll twinkle if I want to.) 
By which I more or less mean: I got impatient halfway through making these shortcakes and kind of screwed them up. 
They still taste excellent, and there’s every chance they’ll succeed for you, and they look fairly cute, so I figured I’d blog about them anyway. Also as a sort of penance, as if making myself blog about this will teach me for not paying attention, maybe this time. 

In my defense, the recipe is from my Momofuku cookbook, and those recipes can be straight up fussy. Like, make an enormous cake, take a tablespoon of it and throw the rest away, then layer it with five other different cake batters and baste it for thirty hours and then store in an ice bath and then grill briefly before throwing it all away and serving the remaining crumbs or something. They are also recipes deeply ingrained with amazing technique, respect for tradition, playfulness, inventiveness, and deliciousness. I just often find that like haircuts, they’re better done by someone else. These shortcakes are one of the more simple recipes in the book, and I know exactly where I went wrong – I got impatient and added too much liquid, when I should’ve just let it be and allow the dough to absorb all it needed while it was resting. The result being, the shortcakes spread out hugely, making one large nebulous mass. At first I wanted to fling kitchen appliances into a ravine with frustration, but then I looked at them again and figured I could salvage them easily enough. So here we are.

By the way, my limited understanding is that shortcakes are supposed to be sort-of cakelike and sort-of scone-shaped, small and puffy, and delicately smooshed around whatever filling you like. Comparatively, my shortcakes are kind of longcakes, but they still taste good when sandwiched around thick plain yoghurt and strawberries that have been saucily sitting in icing sugar. And I have no doubt that if you just pay more attention than me, they’ll turn out perfectly. But isn’t it comforting to know that even hastily screwing them up still more or less works? To the point where I maybe haven’t learned a lesson about the importance of methodically thinking things through at all?

strawberry shortcakes, potentially not-so-short though.

Adapted just barely from the Momofuku cookbook.

1 large egg
just under 1/2 cup cream
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
pinch salt
125g butter, cold, cubed
3 tablespoons vegetable shortening (I used coconut oil) 
1/2 cup icing sugar, for dusting

Okay, bear with me: crack the egg into a half cup measuring cup. Stir it so that the white and yolk are thoroughly incorporated, then remove about a tablespoon of this egg, throw it in the sink or whatever, and pour cream into this measuring cup till it’s full. It just is what it is, okay?

Luckily the next bit is easy. Stir together all the dry ingredients, then add the butter and shortening and use your fingers to rub it all into the flour, or alternatively pulse it in a food processor for a bit or use a cake mixer if you’ve got one. Going by hand is simple enough, as you only need to get the fat more or less into the flour and sugar – you can stop once it’s looking gravelly and rubbly with lots of pea-sized bits of butter and shortening. Tip in the egg-cream mixture and stir to bring it together, mixing it as briefly and as little as possible. Leave to sit for ten minutes. Don’t be tempted to add more liquid, it will all come together as it sits.

Use a spoon to scoop out dough and form into rough ball shapes – about two tablespoons or so per shortcake – which should make around eight to ten, then refrigerate them for at least half an hour but you could leave them overnight if you like. Then, bake at 180 C/350 F for about 15 minutes on two different trays or in batches, because they need room to spread. 

Allow to cool, then do what you like with them. I sandwiched pairs together with really thick plain yoghurt and frozen strawberries that had been defrosting in a pile of icing sugar. 

Buttery, tender, cakey yet cookie-esque, crumbling into cold yoghurt and absorbing sweet red strawberries. These are amazing. Who knows, maybe they would’ve been too good if they’d actually worked out how they were supposed to? I know it’s pretty much winter now and strawberries are completely out of season, but I wanted Strawberry Shortcake and frozen berries are pretty cheap and there’s just something about that lemonade-sweet berry against the tender shortcakes that is rather magic.

I mean, you could use any fruit you want, and whipped cream instead of yoghurt, but this particular combination is a plateful of sunshine on a cold rainy day. (Side note: it has been very cold and rainy lately.)

to be or not to be? Thanks darlin’ Sarah-Rose for the birthday banner.

Last time I wrote here, it was the day before my birthday and also my final day at my then-job. I had a more wonderful and happy birthday than I dared hope, to be honest, it was just nonstop lovely. I am still looking for a job (hi!) but cannot fling my arms wide open enough to express how much more mellow and unstressed and happy I am to be wilfully unemployed right now. I spent the last week doing some Hard Relaxing, and am now ready to actually blog as much as I initially insisted I would.

Other than that, I have been knitting, getting a small crescent moon tattoo on my shin, home-dying my eyebrows, working on being businesslike with my new freedom, organising sponsors for this blog, trying to be as kind and full of love to myself as possible, inventing new recipes, and getting used to being 28 (especially considering last year for about six months I thought I already was 28? Maths, hey!)
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title from: Blackstreet, No Diggity. I’m cool that Pitch Perfect got people saying “oh wow that’s right that song was amazing” because for the first time since 1996 I hear this song allllll the time and couldn’t be happier. 
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music lately:

Uffie, Hot Chick. Obnoxious as hell stuff that I was really into in 2006/2007 and damn it, I still am. But also she released this truly amazing song called Difficult a few years later that I’ve been listening to a lot too.

Eartha Kitt, I Wanna Be Evil. Was there ever a better title? Her voice is so fascinating and gorgeous and every fraction of every movement she did, every flicker of her face or flourish of her hands was so full of power too.

Janine and the Mixtape, Hold Me. Have been pretty obsessed with this dreamy song since I first heard it, but especially right now, and there’s a new music video for it, so…yay!
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next time: a recipe that I can actually make, what with me being a food blogger and cookbook author and all, yeah? 

memory falling like cream in my bones

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Barbados Cream and coffee for breakfast. 

Sometimes there’s ups, sometimes there’s downs. Sometimes this happens all within one day, but this week is undeniably down. I’m learning very, very reluctantly that life is not like a movie where you get like, one shopping montage where everything’s fun and one sad montage where you learn your lesson and then everything’s fine afterwards. Nor does processing the stuff happening in your life move in an upwards diagonal line, sometimes it’s more like a hexagon shape with a star in the middle and flames shooting out one side.

Sorry to be bleak, but I feel like I’ve been pretty admirably lively for someone whose life has just changed in a million different ways, so, y’know. It’s okay to not be okay. It’s that weird thing where I’m like – this is my blog and I want to be honest! But don’t worry about me! But I want some people to be concerned but I don’t want to burden others! But I’m still getting out of bed! But things really are tough! And so on into infinity, by which time most people have stopped paying attention anyway because despite my suspicions, I know I’m not the only person on this earth with Stuff Going On.

I find old-school Nigella Lawson very, very comforting – I’d still protectively defend her and celebrate her till my feet bleed (I imagine there’s impassioned dancing involved to prove my point) but like Mariah Carey, she was at her absolute perfect best in the early years. Reading How To Eat, that seminal text, that important book, makes me feel like everything will be okay. And also, quite importantly, like cooking. This Barbados Cream isn’t actually cooking in the slightest, but I had the tail-end of a container of yoghurt to use, and so I bought a bottle of cream (sooo financially sound right now) to make this small, intriguing recipe.

It’s just yoghurt and cream mixed together, lightly blanketed in brown sugar, and left overnight in the fridge. It’s a recipe of Nigella’s grandmother, which explains a lot about it – a recipe from back when you could serve someone a bowl of formless cream for pudding and give it an uneasily “exotic” name and have people applaud you as an exemplary and sophisticated hostess. Personally, I think it makes a better breakfast.

barbados cream 

This is my slight adaptation of Nigella’s recipe from How To Eat, all I’ve done is have a tutu with the proportions to make it suitable for just one person. 

1/2 cup (125ml) really thick plain yoghurt, Greek or Greek-style or otherwise. I don’t like being stern, but this will be nasty if you use anything less tensile than a memory foam pillow. 
1/2 a cup (125ml) cream (just cream, no yoghurt-style rants here)
1 tablespoon or so of brown sugar

Whisk together the cream and yoghurt in a bowl till thickened enough that you can trail said whisk through the mixture and it will leave lines in the cream behind it. If that makes sense? This will happen quite quickly, after a minute or so. Spatula all this into a 250ml capacity ramekin or pretty trinket-y bowl, evenly sprinkle over the brown sugar, cover in gladwrap and refrigerate overnight. 

The next day, or after a suitably, unfairly long waiting time: eat. 

The sugar melts into the creamy yoghurt, getting fudgily crystallised but also saucily absorbed, giving a smoky swirl of butterscotch with every mouthful. Cream and thick yoghurt are both delicious, no further elaboration needed there. In fact the aggressive simplicity of these ingredients is what makes this so damn good. Especially first thing in the morning with an equally selfish plunger of coffee for one.

Seriously, the butterscotch-toffee-caramel family of flavours is the best thing on earth, yes?

Here’s what’s been happening in my life lately:

New stabs! Brooke at Tattoo Machine is incredible. And it has healed up with such amazing speed that I’ve been going round conspiratorially asking “am I a vampire though?” every time I show it to someone.

Been watching lots of ballet on youtube. Swan Lake is excellently bleak and beautiful and the music gets to me right in my heart and my temples. And, as they sing in A Chorus Line, “everything was beautiful at the ballet, raise your arms and someone’s always there…”

These amazing sunglasses arrived with terrible timing, not least because it has continuously rained all week.

And, I baked a seven-layer rainbow cake for a wonderful friend’s birthday. It was fun, and it looked spectacular, but uh, no-one else gets to ask me to do that for a long, long time. 

Speaking of birthdays, it’s mine in one week’s time. I wouldn’t mind if I could put it off for a month, since I always overthink birthdays with this whole “it has to be a really good wonderful perfect day” stressful attitude that I’m bringing to the table, but it is going to happen, and if nothing else – it will also be my first day after leaving my current job. So far I’ve been turned down from two jobs that I’ve applied for (it’s the strangest thing, like, it happens to everyone but it’s still so you-didn’t-want-me? demoralising) but am keeping my fingers crossed that I land on my feet. I’m also applying for more jobs, in case just keeping my fingers crossed doesn’t sound like a very sensible strategy.

That said, I really am just keeping my fingers crossed that everything works out okay. Hope is a powerful thing, and if you’ve got it, you’ve got to hold it tight. Oh my gosh, not to sound inspirational or anything, but seriously: hope is nice, right?
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title comes from: Elegie, by Patti Smith. It sounds like it’s from a musical, and also it’s so upfrontedly miserable and sad. So, naturally, I like it. (Also I can dance frantically and joyfully to Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances from this same album in case you’re like “okay Laura I get it. Bleak.”) 
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music lately: 

Lennon and Maisy, Love. These two girls are so talented and happy and this song is so sweet and happy and adorable and wise and yeah.

Ellie Goulding, Anything Could Happen. It makes me feel happy and like the title is…something true.
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Next time: still getting to know the kitchen at my new house, so…anything could happen.

pretty as a peach, she’s so out of reach

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Sometimes, no matter how significant it feels like it ought to be, little changes and developments can tip-toe into your life and establish themselves quietly before you even realise they’re there. By which I mean, it was after having a particularly miserable day recently, that I realised how great this was. My miserable day was caused by things that had happened that day. It had been quite a while since I’d felt really crushingly bleak for no apparent reason. Therefore, I think the medication I’m taking is helping. Since I wrote about it on here back when I started taking it, I thought I’d better, you know, clap my hands since I’m happy and I know it. Not that everything is solved or perfect, I am still reliably not-together, but bodies are such a work in progress at best, that I’m very pleased to have discovered this small but important thing about myself. So there’s that.
There’s also this. I have no idea really, how I come up with recipes so easily – perhaps it’s similar to how I can do the splits easily without ever practicing. The making-recipes part of my brain is as flexible as my hamstrings. (C’mon, being able to do the splits is kind of impressive, allow me to drop it into conversation sometimes.) This morning I woke up and thought about seasonal fruit and the idea for this recipe, which I’m calling peaches and cream, appeared quickly and fully formed. And since today was a Sunday where I’d managed to get my act together and get out of bed and deal with the crowds at the vege market, I decided to just go ahead and try making it. 

Seasonal fruit! Did you know it’s abundant and priced kindly? I really need to get to the vege market more often. 

As I said, it’s Sunday today, so what better day to make yourself pudding on, to try fend off any back-to-school blues you may be feeling, and to greet the new week with a sticky, happy smile. (Your smile might not actually be sticky, I just tend to always end up with with food on my face when I eat.) This requires some attention but not a lot of effort. Just peaches, simmered till soft, thickly covered in lemony cream. Through some mysterious augury the combination of cream and sugar heated together with lemon juice added, creates this satiny, smooth, rich, incredibly delicious substance. The method is based on this recipe I used to make all the time in my teens, back when cooking was starting to become “my thing”. So, you don’t actually have to have the peaches underneath, you could just divide the cream between a couple of ramekins (or very adorable teacups) and still be guaranteed a good time. But! Peaches! So peachy!

now you don’t see it…

now you see it. 

Heating the peaches turns up their perfumed, ray-of-sunshine sweetness, which the vanilla and lemon help bring out too, with their respective richness and tartness. I can’t overhype the cream enough, eating it is honestly like the feeling you get when you’re loitering in a fabric shop longer than your brief errand warranted, and nonchalantly but dedicatedly caressing all the rolls of satiny fabric. (Shout out to my people who do this, please be more than just me.)

peaches and cream

a recipe by myself

two large or three small ripe peaches, roughly diced
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract or the seeds from a vanilla pod if you’re feeling baller

300ml bottle of cream 
1/3 cup sugar
juice from two lemons (the mean, supermarket kind, that is. If you have a generous, homegrown lemon, you’ll probably only need one.)

Put the peaches, the tablespoon of sugar, and the water in a saucepan and stir over a decent heat, and continue till the water has evaporated and the peaches are very soft. You don’t have to turn this into jam or puree or anything, just break them down a little. The latter would probably be more sophisticated. But here we are. Divide the peaches – a couple of dessertspoons each, I find  – between two or three 125 ml ramekins or similar. Refrigerate.

In the same pan – maybe give it a quick wipe with a paper towel – bring the 300ml cream and the 1/3 cup sugar to a gentle boil, slowly, stirring constantly. Once it’s bubbling, stir for three minutes exactly, then remove from the heat. It’s science, okay? Seriously, watch your phone (or, I guess, your watch, mine tend to have stopped working and become what I call “sculptural bracelets”) and let that surprisingly long three minutes pass in full. Then, remove the cream from the heat, and stir in the lemon juice. With any luck, the cream should mysteriously yet delightfully thicken up as you do this. Divide this mixture between the two or three vessels of peach, bearing in mind that if there’s three, you’re gonna have less…and refrigerate. A couple of hours should thicken it up properly, but feel free to make it the night before.  

Make it for yourself and your significant other/s, eat it all by your significant self, or make someone pay to watch you eat the lot. If you want more, double the quantity. If you don’t have peaches, use something else. Just, um, don’t bother dusting it with icing sugar and sprinkling over lemon zest, because unless you have tons of it the zest just looks messy and the icing sugar absorbs into the surface but also looks dusty, and you’ll be all “but my food blog!” Luckily it tastes brilliant and also my teacups are cute enough to distract somewhat.

Hark! A new knitting project! It’s eventually going to be a very simple short-sleeved top. I’ve never knitted a garment or with two colours before, so it’s all very thrilling. As thrilling as an activity that involves sitting silently and barely moving can be, that is (hint: super damn thrilling.)

One month down, 2014 has already proven to be strange and fascinating and full of promise. Hopefully February will be even better. I, for one, am prepared.

(this was a conversation I had with Kate. I credit her with coining womanifest before my use of it here, and I credit myself with ordering a triple cheeseburger shortly after sending this txt.)
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title from: Jeff the Brotherhood, Leave Me Out. Their scuzzy, gloomy sound suits me.
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music lately:

Tegan and Sara, Drove Me Wild. Well, it does.

Ja Rule and Ashanti, Always On Time. I can listen to early-2000s Ja Rule/Ashanti all day (also quite a lot of J to the L-O and Ja Rule) especially this, with its dreamy, rather timeless chorus.
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next time: I don’t know why I have this next time bit! I never really know! I just want to entice you into coming back again! There, I said it. 

it’s been this way, since christmas day, dazzled, doused in gin

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For all that I’m really messy, inside and out, and will spend long stretches of time putting my nailpolish bottles into order by colour spectrum while ignoring, say, the dishes, every now and then I can really Get It Together and Be Organised. 
Every year, commencing 2006, I’ve held a big dinner party for flatmates and friends, which started as a way to toast ourselves and do something nice together before we all part ways for the summer. And that’s how it continued, because it’s a pretty decent concept that doesn’t require messing with. Last year Tim and I couldn’t have one because we’d just moved house and everything felt too difficult, but I feel like a good tradition should be malleable and flourish, rather than rigid and immoveable. 

And then, because why be merely fancy when you could be fancy in italics, Kate helped embiggen everything with her beauteous hand-made menus and table-setting ideas. It was dreamy, which is my favourite way for things to be or have been or have potential to be.

I was proud of myself at how it all worked out – it was a very last-minute fandango, but I managed to cook everything myself (including FOUR KILOS of pork belly, I mean really) and have it all appear ready to eat at a reasonable hour. Which may not sound like rocket science, but y’know, my oven is small while my ambitions are sky-high.

Speaking of, every year I use this as an opportunity to make a significant pudding. Like the year I made Baked Alaska. This year’s concept was not as impressive as I’d have liked, but luckily my concept of “not as impressive as I’d liked” is a bit like my concept of “corporate, office-friendly clothes” – quite, quite different to most other people’s.

So: berry ice cream pavlova layer cake! Two hastily thwacked-together discs of meringue, some insta-ice cream, and some preturnaturally glossy red pomegranate seeds, and you have yourself a rather fascinatingly-textured and terrifically-flavoured and most crucial of all, monumentally instagrammable pudding.

I know, pavlova is not necessarily that simple, but the good thing about this is that you can be a lot more confident about the making and baking, since it’s going to be buffered up with ice cream and covered in icing sugar and it doesn’t matter in the slightest if it cracks or deflates or, heck, breaks in two, because everything can be squished back together.

While my patriotism at the level of “New Zealand, it’s okay I GUESS” it is nice to graciously nod to the classic pavlova and time of year that xmas falls upon – high summer! – with this cold, fruity confection. You can use an electric beater, obviously, but all I have is a whisk and I managed just fine, and there’s nothing like standing in your underwear on a humid day furiously whisking egg whites to a stiff meringue to make you feel tantamount to Xena, Warrior Princess.

berry ice cream pavlova layer cake 

a recipe by myself. It looks complicated but that’s just because I’m the hand-holding type (hand-holding sounds much nicer than micro-management, yeah?) You could use cream or yoghurt instead of coconut milk but now it’s entirely dairy-free, which seems to suit a lot of people I know, so hurrah!

4 egg whites
200g sugar
1 teaspoon cornflour
2 teaspoons lemon juice or white vinegar

2 cups frozen berries (I used a packet of frozen mixed berries since they were cheapest, but plain frozen strawberries would be rad)
1/2 a can (although possibly more) coconut milk

Set your oven to 160 C/320 F and line a baking tray with baking paper. Using a 20cm caketin, or your own circle-drawing prowess, trace two circles on this sheet of baking paper. It doesn’t matter if they’re very close together. 

In a very clean, non-plastic bowl, whisk the egg whites briskly with a pinch of salt until soft peaks form. This means that the egg whites will be foamy and thickened, but not shiny, and when you lift the whisk up some mixture rises up with it but sinks back down into the bowl – if that makes sense. 

Continue whisking, despite your sore arms, and as you do this, slowly add the sugar a tablespoon or so at a time. The mixture will thicken and get shiny and bright white, continue whisking in the sugar and as hard as you can until the mixture is stiff and when you lift up the whisk, the mixture follows but stays quite still. Spread the mixture evenly between the two circles you’ve drawn on the baking paper, piling up the meringue mix and then smoothing it out so that they’re fairly evenly flat on top. You can be pretty aggressive with the mixture by this stage, so don’t worry.

Place this in the oven and bake for around an hour, although check at 40 minutes – it should look firm and dry and a little browned. Turn the oven off and allow the pavlovas to slowly cool in there, although I admit, I got impatient and took them out after half an hour of cooling. 

To serve, place one pavlova half on a pretty plate. Blast the frozen berries and coconut milk together in a food processor till they turn into a magical purple ice cream. Spoon/spread this immediately on top of the pavlova on the plate, and top with the other pavlova. Dust with icing sugar to cover any inevitable cracks and pile on some pomegranate seeds if you’ve got ’em, although fresh strawberries, raspberries, or simply more icing sugar would also be rad.

It may just be all the Poinsettia (fizzy white wine, cranberry juice, Cointreau) that I’d allowed myself to consume by this point, but this was damn spectacular. There’s something deliciously fun about the soft, dissolvingly sugary crispness of room temperature pavlova against creamy, freezing, tart berry ice cream. The juicy crunch of pomegranate seeds on top provides further antidote to all the sweetness, while still being friendly with the berry flavours in the ice cream. And they look SO pretty. The pavlova layers are a little bit of a pain to slice through, but by the time people get to pudding they’re not going to mind a hasty scoop of this in a paper bowl.

It was a wonderful, happy, lovely night. We listened to old xmas records and ate candy canes and talked good talk and also amassed a large pile of food brought by everyone to drop off at the foodbank. Even though I was a little oddly apprehensive that I was being pushy and annoying at trying to make this happen, perhaps mostly because everyone’s so busy this time of year and frankly a lot of my reasons for doing this are highly selfish, it was just a dreamy, excellent night and I’m so glad it happened.

And then on Saturday I went on a wedding dress shopping montage! Mostly with Kate, although I was joined by Kim later, with a cameo from Sarah-Rose, and man it was a strange but amazing day. Something about trying on dresses to get married in – I mean, I could marry Tim in the next five minutes very casually and not think twice about it, yet I could hardly look at myself in the mirror while trying on these beautiful dresses and when asked what occasion I was shopping for, I was all “a wedding…mine…pretty much…”

I did dally with the idea of a black wedding dress but ultimately what I was really wanting is just EVERY glorious dress I tried on. You’d think I’d get used to vicarious thrills sometime since there are so many in my life, but nope. There’s a particular ache at trying on a perfect garment then sadly putting it back on the rack.

I just love material possessions so much, okay. 

I’ve narrowed it down to two and a half potential definites, and if you’re curious, I don’t care if Tim or indeed all of the internet sees the dress before the wedding, but I do – now – want something very pale or white. Basically, it was a weekend as swoony as swoony can be, and I’m very pleased with that, even though now that it’s Monday it all feels like a million half-remembered dreams ago…
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title via: Placebo’s moodily terrific Taste In Men.
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Music lately:

Planet Z, Idina Menzel. Admittedly my love for her and my fondness for her early music is perhaps more boundless than most, but if there’s a song more bonkersly endearing and mid-nineties than this then I’ll probably listen to that too.

Frosty the Snowman, Fiona Apple. Have I said the word dreamy too many times in this post? I care not. This is the dreamiest.
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Next time: I’m gonna make a list of every recipe I know that is good for xmas presents and so on and so forth and it will be ever so much fun! 

there are marshmallow clouds being friendly, in the arms of the evergreen trees

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s’mores pie
I made this over the weekend to take to a Thanksgiving-y housewarming barbeque that some American friends were having. Thanksgiving isn’t my holiday (and let’s not forget that it has a troubling background of colonisation and oppression) but I love the food of America and so figured I’d try to improvise something fittingly flaming-eagle-on-a-clifftop-as-old-glory-waves to bring along. So: s’mores pie. There were some giant marshmallows left in the cupboard from the hallowe’en party, I have this amazing cookie-pie dough recipe that comes together out of almost nothing at all, and I had half a block of Whittaker’s dark dark chocolate to counteract the sugar-pillows of marshmallow with its bitterness. That’s it. cookie, marshmallows, chocolate. I had planned a whole lot more – custardy filling, that sort of thing – but in the end, s’mores really ought to only have those three main components. I’ve seen enough American TV to know that!
By the way, I’ve had no time to blog lately, which is why this has taken a while to get here. But today I woke up feeling horrendous, and inevitably/concerningly thought to myself, “ooh, a sick day! This is my one opportunity to finish that blog post!” So here I finally am, pie in hand, hand on heart, and head in hands, because there’s now pie all over me and in my hair. 

If you don’t like marshmallows, well, this really isn’t going to change anything for you. Since that’s mostly what it is. But I myself, am strange and unusual, and don’t like them that much either. However, when they get gooey and puffy and sticky and smokily browned from the heat of the oven – excellent. Especially with the bursts of dark cocoa-embittered chocolate and the warm cinnamon from the cookie dough. Just don’t overthink it. (As if being told not to overthink something helps you not overthink things! Wouldn’t life be simple if that were the case.)

s’mores pie

a recipe by myself

175g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup golden syrup or honey (or a mix of the two)
1/2 cup plain oil
1 teaspoon cinnamon
pinch of salt

4 large marshmallows or about 12-15 regular sized ones
100g dark, dark chocolate

Stir together the flour, baking soda and powder, the cinnamon and a pinch of salt. Tip in the syrup and oil and stir together to form a rough, crumbly cookie dough (the texture may vary depending on your flour, the humidity, bla bla bla, so add a little more flour if it looks unmanageably damp, otherwise it’ll probably be fine.) 

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F.

Reserving a couple of tablespoons of dough to sprinkle over the marshmallows, roll it out to a circle just larger than your pie plate (use one of around 21cm) and transfer it to said pie plate. I tend to roll out the dough between two sheets of baking paper, and then lift the entire thing up, place it in the pie plate, then remove the top layer of baking paper and press down the dough. That way there’s much less cleaning involved – of both the pie plate and your rolling pin.  

Jab the pastry a few times with a fork, which will help stop it puffing up in the oven, and bake for around ten minutes, till golden and a little crisp. 

If you have giant marshmallows, halve them and arrange evenly within the pie shell – otherwise just cram it with regular marshmallows. Roughly chop or break up the chocolate and tuck pieces of it evenly amongst the marshmallows. Grind over a little salt, and scatter with the reserved crumbs of dough. Bake until the marshmallows are puffy and a little browned  – about ten minutes. 

Surprisingly easy. It was dubbed “s’morestravaganza” at the party, and then “s’morepocalypse” and then I yelled out “s’mored of the rings!” and everyone laughed because you can always count on Lord of the Rings humour to be topical in New Zealand, since they have been making those films here for the last thirty years and will continue to do so for the following thirty years. Or at least that’s how it feels.

Pie aside, I was thinking those “where am I going with my life” thoughts, as I am wont to do every time my heart beats, and I have also been thinking a lot about my girl Nigella Lawson. Because she is so important to me and was one of the key people who shaped how I think about cooking, it seems right that she gets mentioned often when I have interviews about my cookbook and so on. I often bring her up myself, as an influence – but I was also thinking…

While I adore Nigella, I don’t want to be the next Nigella of cooking. There’s only her, and I could only be a diluted, carob-replacement version if that’s what I was trying to be. Nope. I want to be the Kanye West of cookbooks. The One Direction. The Mariah Carey. The Lorde. Kanye – he says some ridiculous things but makes so much sense and is all about his art and believing in his worth and generally being so brilliant that he can shoot down anyone who thinks he should keep quiet or be more humble. One Direction are so connected to their fans and recognise the ridiculousness of their situation and seem to just radiate fun and genuineness and also have a million gifs of themselves on tumblr, which I would love to have happen to me one day. Mariah Carey is flawless. But also very flawed. But also flawless. And Lorde – she’s such a young woman, and her words are different, and she’s not afraid to be clever yet simple, and she has amazing hair. So. Sounds maybe like I’m being toooooo ambitious, but I strongly believe in holding on to your instincts and flinging yourself at big ideas when they are kind enough to appear to you.

I’m sure you all feel so much richer for having read these musings I had about myself while like, washing my hair or painting my nails, but y’know. Look! Pie!

Try though I might, there’s no use fighting how far into December we are already. I’m having my annual flat xmas dinner tomorrow night with some friends so dear I’d make some kind of Rudolph The Red Nosed Rein-dear pun regarding them but I’m too tired to make it work. I’m really excited about it though, especially now that I’ve had my sick day and am feeling more like a human again. So that’s what I’ll be blogging about next time, as well as my annual list of food-related xmas gift ideas. I like saying phrases like “my annual xyz” as it makes me feel very established, like people will say “well if LAURA said that salted caramel bla bla bla this xmas then I will too!”
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title via: Dean Martin, that old so-and-so, singing Marshmallow World. Whether he phones it in or not, I could listen to him sing about the stupidest things, like fornicating trees and candy, for a very long time.
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music lately:

Angel Haze, No Bueno. I adore this person.

Turkey Lurkey Time, from the musical Promises Promises. The best thing ever about this time of year: it’s Turkey Lurkey Time time! Donna McKechnie is literally a goddess.
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Next time: My annual xyz!