Category: Pudding and Dessert

it’s silly when we get into these crazy hypotheticals, you really want some bread then go ahead, create a set of goals

8 Comments

What’s really nice is making friends with people to the point where, when you hang out with them, you can just as easily talk and talk and talk about everything there is as the minutes rush by, or sit in companionable, untroubling silence, just being in each other’s presence. I haven’t always had this in my life, so I’m never-not grateful that I now (and for quite a long time now)…do have this. If you’ve got such friendship, give yourself a triumphant high five, or better yet, high kick. If you don’t, I don’t know, don’t try to force it on anyone but do your best to spend as much time with the people who make you feel most like yourself. Not that you guys need me to tell you that (did you also know that drinking water is good for you?) just didn’t want to, you know, make anyone feel bad. In case I sounded way too smug, don’t worry, there’s a squillion things I could complain about, it’s just interesting to be positive sometimes. Even in this particularly clunky way.

If you’ve noticed that the photos seem to be in a different place to my house, it means you’re a diligent reader and there will be a tasteful sports car as a prize under your seat. But really, it’s because I spent all day sprawling at my friend Kate’s, where we talked about everything and sat in calm silence on our laptops and – in the ultimate friends-forever-with-hearts-dotting-the-i move, we had a nap together. It was pretty blissful. We also ate this coconut, raspberry and almond bread and butter pudding for brunch. Unfortunately you can’t all have a friend that is Kate specifically, (it might be tiring for her) but hopefully you have some equally good friendly people in your life. If nothing else, you can definitely get this pudding with relative ease and certainly none of the potential fraughtness of human interaction.

It bakes into a rather impressive sight, all puffed and golden and studded with lipstick-pink raspberries but is truly simple – all you’re doing is taking bread, pouring some stuff over, and half-assedly baking it for a while. It’s like falling off a log (and not like “falling off a log…and into a ravine filled with ravenous hyenas and circling vultures,” which was my super professional response when my manager asked how a particular task was going at work the other day. It’s cool, we get on.)

raspberry, coconut and almond bread and butter pudding

Serves plenty. Ideal for breakfast. A recipe by myself. PS: dairy-free. 

1 french bread stick
1/2 cup frozen raspberries
5 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1 can coconut cream
2 teaspoons cornflour
generous shake of cinnamon
pinch of salt
handful of almonds, roughly sliced

Slice the bread into rounds a couple of cm thick – mine fluctuated between 1.5 and 3cm – and arrange in a baking dish where they will fit snugly. Scatter the raspberries over the top, pushing some of them inbetween the slices of bread with your finger.

Mix together the eggs, sugar, coconut cream and cornflour, not particularly thoroughly, just till it’s all incorporated. Evenly pour this over the bread slices, and allow to sit for half an hour. Sprinkle the almond slices over the top, and bake at 180 C/350 F for around 40 minutes or until puffy and golden. 

The rich, sweet coconut cream and sour little raspberries are excellent together, and at filling each slice of bread with their deliciousness. Don’t be tempted to leave off the almonds, as their toasty crunch is pretty sublime, but you could use another nut instead if that’s all you’ve got. It needs to sit for a while to allow the custard to sink into the bread, but the longer you leave it the less saucy it will be – whatever you do will be the right choice though.

Also leftovers are really wonderful fried in butter. Learned that one from Kate.

It was a rather quiet week, which was really nice – I need a lot of downtime doing nothing to counteract all the times I have to, you know, do things, and I enjoyed doing plenty of knitting and sitting and inhaling TV shows and such. In fact the most exciting thing that happened up until today was –

I got to hang out with a cat!

This cat! Suzie!
I’m at the stage now where cats are basically unicorns to me. (Quick summary: I love cats, landlord won’t allow cats despite my very persuasive and brilliantly worded emails, a thousand times sigh.) So rarely do I see one, that every occurrence of cat in my life is thrilling to the point of overstimulation. The cat in the above picture belongs to my friend, who I hate-watched Glee with on Friday night (oh, Glee, you’re doing more harm than good) and sadly scratched me after sitting on me for half an hour (the cat, not the friend) but it was still so fun! So cat! 
head boops!
Oh, and it would be remiss of me to not acknowledge how exciting it was that I also finally watched Fast and the Furious 6, which I’ve been calling 6 Fast 6 Furious for so long now that I had to google it to verify what the proper title is. It was bananas and hilariously fun and miraculously featured several cool women characters. And I will not be talked out of my theory that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s and Vin Diesel’s characters are secretly in love with each other. 
Quiet though this week was, I still wish, increasingly more so every day, that I had more time to write and focus on this blog and my cookbook and everything I love. Sometimes I forget I even have the cookbook because I have no time to think about it or how I can get more people reading it, and it takes all my energy just to get one blog post a week happening. There are so many projects and ideas and shenanigans I’d love to work on but there is just no time. But – at least there’s leftover bread and butter pudding to take to work for lunch tomorrow. 
_____________________________________________________________
title via 96,000, from the musical In The Heights, by literal genius Lin-Manuel Miranda. Long title today, but that rhyme pleased me. 

_____________________________________________________________

music lately:

Rilo Kiley, I Never. This song is really special. You should listen to it. Obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking about it here.

Salt’n’Pepa, Shoop. Few better songs for both dancing to and also driving round town on a hot afternoon to. Okay, there’s heaps of songs to fit that description, but this is working for me currently.
_____________________________________________________________
Next time: Sounds a bit dull, but I made some blueberry muffins and they were really good. So…maybe them?

unlimited, my future is unlimited

19 Comments

This is a strange and pretty wonderful day, but it’s also just another day.

I mean: my cookbook is released today! I spent all of last night in a flux (not a flux capacitator, I wish, 80s Michael J Fox on whom I still crush, call me!) of feelings, from the obvious excited to the also obvious terribly nervous, but generally settling on a strange blank overwhelmed kind of place. I’m very hard on myself, and I’ve wanted this so much, for so long, with every bit of energy I have, and it’s finally happening. But then it’s also just another day and I have to go to work and deal with invoices and stuff and so does everyone else. 

Okay, I just deleted an enormously introspective paragraph which included phrases like “running so hard” and “knowing myself” and which not only would’ve put off anyone from reading any further, it also got dangerously close to inadvertently quoting word for word the theme song from Party of Five. So. I will try this again. Forgive me, it’s just…I’ve never had a cookbook before, I’m still working out what it’s like and what you do and so on.

I’ve never had a cookbook before. Until today. Huh. It is a big deal. So, I raise a glass to myself.

A nervous toast, but still.

When I wasn’t taking self-deprecating Instagram selfies last night, I was also making chocolate mousse. Not the powdered mousse from a packet, foodstuff of my childhood, which you whip up with milk to produce a small quantity of dusty-textured, faintly chocolate-flavoured slurry. The mousse here requires some effort and logistics, which I enjoy – much as emphatically basic recipes are wonderful, I also like to make things that involve lots of steps, on account of I really enjoy cooking and tinkering round in the kitchen. So I don’t apologise for this recipe being slightly fiddly, as that’s what chocolate mousse requires. 

I do apologise for the fact that a lightbulb blew and so the only place with any decent light at all was this table, and even then the photos are a bit hopeless. If this insults your eyes so, you could always, um, buy my cookbook which is full of incredibly beautiful photos shot by my friends Kim Laurenson and Jason Aldous, styled by my friend Kate McLeod. That’s right I’m high-fiving myself for that smoothly unclunky segue into self-promotion. And that’s right I’m shaking my head baffledly at self-promotion of self-promotion within a blog all about myself in the first place. What a world we live in! Especially now that the world contains my cookbook. Gotcha again.

 

I kinda made this mousse recipe up, but it doesn’t deviate from any classic interpretation of this French confection. There’s whisked up egg yolks, there’s melted chocolate, there’s cream. I didn’t add the egg whites, as I don’t like the presence of tooooo much raw egg, and I prefer the flavour of cream. I added brown sugar to give a little caramelly darkness to the chocolate, but it honestly didn’t change the flavour outrageously, so you could just use plain white sugar. But whatever you do, it’s important to keep the following in mind:

  • Have all your ingredients ready, so that none of them are sitting around for too long.
  • If you can access free range eggs, they are a lot better here than the other kind – the yolks tend to whip up thickly and easily incorporate the other ingredients, and that spooky raw egg flavour disappears quickly.
  • There will be one point – before you add the cream – where it will all look very unlikely and you might find yourself thinking things like “omg this mousse has failed and no-one will buy my cookbook and here is a slide-show of everything I have ever done wrong in my life”. BUT. Once you add the cream, a little at first and then the whole lot of it, the mixture will mousse-ify and thicken and turn into something completely, soothingly recognisable.

Most important of all, is that it tastes incredibly wonderful. The cocoa bitterness of the dark chocolate is dispersed through all that cream, each making the other more delicious.

Silky, satiny, velvety, it is in fact like every cool fabric there is available. Fortunately not one part of it is wooly, though. There is a slight hint of sugar-grit in it, which I don’t mind, as this simply reminds me that this is very homemade – also there’s nothing I can do about it, so I might as well attempt to embrace it. If you leave it overnight in the fridge however, the sugar dissolves entirely and it all gets even more traditionally mousse-ish and puffy in texture (I just scooted to the fridge to verify this by eating some.) Either way, it’s chocolate delivered to you in a glossy, aerated mass. It’s so good.

chocolate mousse

a recipe by myself. Makes enough for two generous serves, plus some leftover for breakfast the next day. Or: three generous serves. Or: etc.

2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons white sugar
2 tablespoons brown sugar
150g dark chocolate
250ml cream

It’s very useful to have more than one person working on this. You don’t want tooooo much time to pass between each step. That said, I mean, mine was delicious, and I had such time passing.

In a medium sized bowl, whisk the egg yolks for a minute, then add the sugar and continue to whisk until it thickens and aerates into a thick, moussy, pale caramel-coloured substance. Melt the chocolate gently, and stir a little at a time into the egg yolk mix. Make sure you stir it thoroughly, so that any residual heat from the chocolate doesn’t cook the eggs. It will likely thicken into a scarily stiff paste at this point, but the cream will sort it out. Finally, whisk the cream till thickened but not whipped – sort of your ‘good quality thickshake’ type texture – and stir it thoroughly into the chocolate mixture. Add a little cream at first to slacken the chocolate mixture, then add the rest and whisk hard. Divide between your receptacles and allow to sit in the refrigerator for fifteen minutes before eating. 

The thing is, I saw these cups on sale at Supreme Coffee and my first thought was “oh wow I love pink and grey they would look adorable filled with chocolate mousse.” Usually whenever I make something with aesthetics first in mind – that is, will it look cool on the blog? – the recipe obstinately never works out, and I learn a lesson about the importance of friendship or something. But this time the mousse did work out, I suppose partially because wanting chocolate mousse is not simply an aesthetic thing. Chocolate mousse is seriously amazing and delicious. Phew, though.

So now what?

I sit and wait and see what happens, I guess. My cookbook, Hungry and Frozen, is in shops from today and all I can say is that I hope people like it as much as I do. Also that people don’t go on an introspective mental trip through the journey it took them to get there like I do every time I look at the book. You…don’t want that.

One more thing: oh wow, last week was ridiculous. Specifically the time when I dropped my precious, precious cellphone down an eighth-storey lift shaft to its doom, and also on Friday when (with a new and devastatingly expensive cellphone in hand) I experienced a very large earthquake at work. Almost worse than the quake itself was walking down the seventeen flights of stairs at work to get to the ground to try and meet Tim, who’d been evacuated from his work. From the tenth floor down, it was pitch black. Had to use every particle of my body to try and stop myself having a panic attack. Luckily, while the quake was really big, no-one was hurt, and I managed to find Tim fairly quickly. Our solution was to go meet friends at the pub. My body’s solution is to insist it’s feeling earthquakes every five minutes. Sigh. At least I had my phone on me. Am I a bad person for hoping there’s no earthquakes this week to distract from my cookbook? For what it’s worth, I never want any earthquakes to happen ever, so there’s that.

While my book is released today, on Tuesday night is the LAUNCH PARTY. Because I’m a real author! If you happen to be in Wellington that day consider yourself super welcome to come along. (Click the link to see the invite.) (Click here to see it too, just in case.)

Cookbook day! I have a cookbook! Remember when I got the call to say that Penguin were definitely going to publish it? How far I’ve come. I am so, so tired. Hope you like the book. Time for me to eat some chocolate mousse and get ready for work. Because it’s just another day. But it’s also THE day.
____________________________________________________________________________
title via: Idina Menzel singing The Wizard and I in the musical Wicked. Sigh, swoon, all the exhalations and faints.
____________________________________________________________________________
music lately:

Cat Power, Satisfaction. A foxy, laconic cover of the Rolling Stones song.

The Last Goodbye, The Kills. I keep telling Tim this will be our first dance at our wedding. He’s not quite convinced. 

Marvin Gaye, How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You). Isn’t it, though? Isn’t it?
____________________________________________________________________________
Next time: I’ll probably still be talking about this cookbook. Wouldn’t you?

take my hand, we’re off to never never land

77 Comments

Okay, let’s all check ourselves before we wreck ourselves: my cookbook is officially out next week, for real, in the flesh, etc. On 23 August. And at the end of this blog post there is a giveaway competition thing you can enter to win one of two copies for yourself! (COMPETITION CLOSED) But if you don’t read this entire blog post first – and it’s as long and self-indulgent as ever! – I will know and my ghost will hang around you and sigh heavily and say “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed”. And yeah, in this scenario I have a ghost while still being alive, it’s not entirely improbable, right? At the least, I’d read the heck out of a young adult lit book which had that plot.

The ‘after’ photo – above – of the plum hand pie is so much better than the ‘before’ photo of said hand pie and its little pie pals below, taken the previous evening. On account of I will possibly never work out how to take decent photos at night-time, illuminated only by an environmentally friendly lightbulb, which casts a gloomy yellow haze over everything within a metre of it and makes you squint like you’ve never squinted before, but does save ten percent power or something. Now that I’m done both damning myself and faintly praising myself, the important thing is: these hand pies are delicious and very easy and cute, and probably about to be really ‘in’, too. For what that’s worth. (Now that I’ve said it, hand pies will probably be widely denounced as embarrassingly tacky, which to be honest will probably make me love them even more.)
I made these to be eaten at a spontaneous-ish gathering of friends to watch a movie on our projector on Saturday night (Wet Hot American Summer, if you’re wondering, because as I always say, nothing bad can happen when Wet Hot American Summer is on.) It was a very fun evening, just really relaxed and lovely and silly and hilarious and low-key, the sort of fun you wish you could schedule in on a bi-daily basis, while knowing it’s best to just wait and let it happen accidentally.

 

Above: the morning after. Tim went to swoop in on the lone, remaining pie for a pre-breakfast snack, till I squawked “stop! The light is really great right now and I can salvage the terrible photos I took last night!” Oh, and that’s right, individual bowls for every snack and a commemorative teaspoon for the candy. Sure, we’re really messy, but we also have bizarrely specific high standards, you know?

So when I say hand pies I simply refer to what we might normally call pastries or turnovers or mini-pies. But ‘hand pies’ are deeply intertwined in the the cuisine of the American south, and I cannot resist a little culinary Americana. Or any Americana. As befits a kid who grew up in New Zealand but was obsessed with the Baby-sitters Club books and ensemble movies like Now and Then. Not that hand pies are mentioned in either of those, but let’s not get lost in semantics. My version is not strictly traditional, but what it is, is really very easy and fast and non-stressful. And delicious. I appreciate that there’s a bit of a cost at the outset in buying ready-rolled sheets of pastry, but sometimes it’s just as much looking after yourself to buy something pre-made as it is to make it from scratch.

Seriously, very little actual work gets you these fantastically good, gently spiced pockets of plummy sweetness. The the lemony warmth of the cardamom, the tear-jerkingly comforting scent of cinnamon and the toffee flavour of the brown sugar lends the tart juiciness of the plums some welcome richness. The fruit softens up but doesn’t collapse, and any juice is absorbed into the cornflour to give the filling a little heft. And they’re hand-sized! Who cares if they’re on-trend, as long as they’re on your hand and fast approaching your mouth.

plum, cinnamon and cardamom hand pies

a recipe by myself

2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon cornflour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
2 sheets ready-rolled puff pastry (all-butter if possible, but I know only three supermarkets in the fanciest bits of New Zealand actually sell that, so just deal with the weird fake margarine stuff this time round – you can’t even taste it if you don’t think about it.)
2 plums

Set your oven to 200 C/ 400F and line an oven tray with baking paper.

Mix the brown sugar, cornflour, cinnamon and cardamom together in a small bowl.

Finely dice the two plums, discarding the stones, obviously.

Slice the pastry sheets into nine equal-ish squares, by making three slices downwards and three across. Maths! Finally useful. Spoon half a teaspoon – at most – of the sugar-spice mix into the middle of each square. Spoon a small teaspoon of diced plum over the top of that, then fold the pastry in half, pinching at the edges to form a snugly-filled triangle. Repeat with the remaining squares. You might have some plum or spice-dust leftover. Arrange the triangles on the baking tray (it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out how the triangles could all fit on there evenly, I guess maths is useful, sort of) and bake for about 20 minutes. They’ll be piping hot at first, so let them cool a tiny bit.

Hand pies! Get some.

So, now you want to know how to win a copy of my cookbook, yes? I was going to interweave references to The Monster at the End of This Book throughout the blog post, but am too tired and so will cut straight to the point: I have two copies to give away. This competition is open to people in New Zealand only. Sorry, international admirers! However, I’m also giving away a copy on Instagram which anyone in the world can enter, so if you’re international and want in, follow me on there. (username: hungryandfrozen.) For everyone else…

here’s what you have to do. 

1: Leave a comment on this post telling me a recipe from this blog that you like the look of. It can be from like, last week, I’m not going to give extra points for people who go deep into my archives, but who knows, you might like what you see once you start looking.
2: Be a person from New Zealand.
3: Wait till 10am Sunday morning (sorry for those with short attention spans, myself included) which is when I’ll do a post on here letting people know who won.
4: See if you’re one of the two people who got drawn at random! And either console yourself by baking hand pies, or rejoice in your winning by baking hand pies. And emailing me your address.

May the odds be ever in your favour!

title via: my guitar heroes Metallica with their joyfully sinister song Enter Sandman.

Music lately:

Joan Osborne, Right Hand Man. This song is so excellent and saucy and great. And, um, also has the word ‘hand’ in it, but this is entirely coincidental.

Lillias White, Don’t Rain On My Parade. Brilliant song, oh-damn-that’s-so-true lyrics, and Lillias White’s smashing voice. There are a million different renditions of this song from Funny Girl, and at least a hundred of them, this included, are my favourite.

Next time: I don’t even know, especially as I’m going to be out of the house most nights this week, but we’ll see, we’ll see. Maybe even one of the recipes from my own book. If nothing else the words “my cookbook” will probably appear a lot, accompanied by a palpable air of smugness.

square cut or pear shape these rocks won’t lose their shape

9 Comments
I don’t mean to deliver this like it’s candlelit-vigil level news, but the following exchange happened late last week:
Tim: we’ve exceeded our 60 gigabyte monthly internet bandwidth allowance.
Me: *dramatic gasp* No internet? But I’ll be insufferable.
Tim: I know. I know.

I mean, a breezy and heedless thank goodness for 3G on smartphones, but still, I’ve had to write this as hastily as possible, in the knowledge that we get charged significantly extra for every gigabyte over the monthly allowance that we use. Just keep that in mind if there’s, I don’t know, any tiny thing you don’t like ever. This is my excuse. 
This is how we do it.
I also don’t mean to deliver the following like it’s two-roads-diverging-in-a-yellow-wood level news of life-changing significance, but Tim and I have been in our house for around six months now, and only just had our first dinner party on Monday night. Not to harp on like some kind of harp about Game of Thrones, but this dinner party was in honour of the season three finale last night. Spoiler alert: some bits were all “whoaaa” and some bits were all “um, ugh, awkward white saviour moment”. I do love this show, although many’s the time after particular treatment of women within it that I have proclaimed myself absolutely done with it. And then I keep coming back, because it’s possible to enjoy something and have major problems with it at the same time. But if nothing else, it gave us an excellent opportunity to have our first dinner party in our now not-so-new house, in the form of a twelve person potluck. And it was wondrous. Quesadillas, Balti curries, roast butternut salad with tahini dressing, potatoes with caramel and prunes (oh Ottolenghi, you maverick), orzo salad, spicy pumpkin pie, and my offerings, a kind of grilled courgette and couscous layered dish covered in tomato sauce and capers, and these baked pears. 

Baked pears with almonds, chocolate, and rosewater. I was deeply impressed with myself at how they turned out, in that I thought them up on Monday afternoon and hastily made them just before everyone arrived. Then maybe had just one too many wines during dinner to be truly effective, and almost forgot about them till halfway through watching the show itself. Luckily Tim reminded me about them at what turned out to be their optimal cooking time. I’m so used to screwing up recipes that I make up on the fly lately, so was really pretty prepared for these to be awful right up until the moment that I had my first bite. But they worked out perfectly. Serendipity makes everything more delicious.

What also makes everything more delicious, is when it’s ridiculously delicious. Pears have this sweet perfumed mellowness which the touch of rosewater and almond helps subtly amplify, like the Rise filter on Instagram. Everything caramelises and intensifies, but covering the dish with tinfoil means that the chocolate doesn’t scorch and the pears stay juicy and yielding. So you know, these are quite, quite amazing the next day for breakfast, cold from the fridge with cream poured over.

The way these came about in my head was that I wanted to make something vegan for pudding, to accommodate friends, but also wanted something fairly luscious and rococo to go well eaten alongside an HBO fantasy show with an enormous budget and phrases like “good brown ale” and “I will take what is mine with fire and blood”. The secret ingredient here is tahini, which ties the ingredients together with an accommodatingly nutty, rich backdrop of flavour.

Baked Pears with Almonds, Chocolate, and Rosewater

Recipe by myself. On the one hand, these are some slightly high-falutin’ ingredients. On the other hand, pears are maybe a dollar a kilo these days.

6 ripe pears
Half a lemon
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 heaped tablespoons tahini
1 x 70g packet ground almonds (this is how they come in New Zealand, anywhere between 50-100g would be fine if you can’t specifically find this amount.) 
2 teaspoons rosewater
25g dark chocolate (I use Whittaker’s Dark Ghana, which has no dairy in it. And is wildly delicious.)

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Slice each pear straight down the middle vertically, trimming off the nubbly base and stem as you please (because little would be more shuddery than accidentally eating either.) Use a teaspoon to scoop out the seeds and a little flesh to create a hollow for the stuffing. Mine were entirely asymmetrical, so don’t worry about looks at this point. Lay the pears, cut side up, in a roasting dish and squeeze over the juice of the lemon. This will stop them browning while you make the stuffing but also helps complement the rosewater flavour. 

Carefully mix together the tahini, sugar, and rosewater – tahini can sometimes be ridiculously thick and un-pliant, so expect something that eventually looks like cookie dough – then roughly, coarsely slice up the chocolate into shavings and chunks and stir that through. Using a teaspoon, fill each pear hollow – really packing it in and heaping it on – with the stuffing. This should make the perfect amount for 12 pear halves, with an extra teaspoon or so for nibbling on. Cover the roasting dish with tinfoil and bake for around an hour, or until an implement slides easily into one of the pears. Like Valerian steel into one of the endless parade of now-dead characters on Game of Thrones. 

Last week was a series of ups and downs, the downs being I was sick with some mysterious sore throat and zero energy affliction, the ups being Tim and I went to the Visa Wellington on a Plate launch and mingled energetically with incredible bread and butter, lots of cool people, and the beauteous Garage Project dogs (you can see them on the event’s website, and perhaps understand why I ended up taking so many ‘best friends!’ type selfies with these hunds). Despite my jangled nerves at crowded social events like this – I’m an all or nothing mingler, either doing it with aplomb or awkward horror – It was a very, very fun night and the programme looks utterly bananas. Judging by my casual flick through it, it’s going to be a very good time to be in Wellington. The streets will be paved with halloumi and local chocolates.  

Back to the downs, I’m still not sleeping any better – if anything it’s getting worse. I woke up at 3.45am today, just casually awake. I take longer and longer to sleep, but wake up around 5am. On the weekends, with no alarms and no surprises, I find my eyes flying open at 7am. Which is technically a decent sleep-in by my standards, but still. On the other hand I’m not sure if it is getting worse or just swirling to a climax, as I look back over the last few years and am unsure if there’s a time when I ever slept well. Are there night classes in sleeping? Oh, wait. (Don’t worry, I’ll go see a doctor about it or something.)

But then back to the ups, I did, as promised a while back, start learning to knit and I adore it. It’s so soothing and quiet and repetitive and tactile and also very fun watching the creation (thus far: an oh-so-slightly wobbly square which will become a blanket) slowly grow like a soft wooly plant.

Also on the ups: bought some sriracha. The cool thing about sriracha is that it’s very instagrammable and cool and people perk up and say “ohhhh I’m addicted to that stuff” if you mention it (like Game of Thrones!). But also it really is incredibly addictive, slightly tangy hot chilli sauce, and I can’t wait to pour it on everything. (Which: seriously, what is life. On the downside I never ever sleep but on the upside I have a small bottle of nice hot sauce.)

Posing? Me? Well, often, but I really am eating sriracha in this photo. Cinema verite! 

___________________________________________________________________________
Title via: I acknowledge that Moulin Rouge spoke to me deeply at a particular time (there was one point where I was watching it more or less daily) but for these purposes I shall link to the ever-diverting Marilyn Monroe crooning Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.
___________________________________________________________________________
Music lately: 

Demi Lovato, Give Your Heart a Break. Perfect, from the slicey uplifting violins to the flawless chorus.

Brigitte Bardot, Moi Je Joue. I followed a link to this song from The Moveable Feasts, a food blog I love, and was rewarded with this adorably scrappy, impetuous delight of a song.

Laura Marling, Master Hunter. Tim and I bought her new record and are finding ourselves unable to stop listening to it. Love her music to pieces.
___________________________________________________________________________
Next time: Sriracha on EVERYTHING.

plush velvet sometimes, sometimes just pretzels and beer, but i’m here

15 Comments
Just like the great Alanis Morrissette, my grasp of what is actual irony may well be as shady as my enjoyment of saying “isn’t it ironic” is fervent. But it does seem ironic or something how I am so tired that my brain feels like someone pressed pause on a video of a fallen ceramic vase smashing into a thousand pieces, and my brain is that vase, fragile and perpetually shattering. And according to this “today in your social media history” app I have, on this day last year I was tweeting about feeling the exact same way. That’s not the ironic bit, although it is…something. What I consider the isn’t it ironic don’t you think bit, is how I was writing about it for three long paragraphs here when suddenly, I literally couldn’t tell if I was just very tired, and therefore unable to continue reading and writing it, or so bored by my lifeless writing that I was falling asleep. And so I deleted the lot and forced myself to start again. So here we are. 
I do remember a high school English teacher telling us that irony was a lot like sarcasm, and feeling unfamiliar confusion, like I’d accidentally wandered into a maths class. Isn’t it more like…rain on your wedding day? Ironically – I think? – these days I really wouldn’t mind if it rains on my wedding day.  The point is: you are always correct in using the word ‘ironic’, but only if you say it with confident authority. And also, I am very, very tired and underslept. Partly from doing work on my cookbook proof – exciting! And partly from being not very talented at sleeping. Which is less exciting. 
Somewhere out there, Alanis Morrisette is quietly googling her own name out of idle curiousity, and sighing heavily.

Earlier this year I had the inexplicable but thank-goodness-it-was-me-not-someone-else honour of being named one of New Zealand’s People of Influence for 2013 by a major nationwide publication. Not to try and pre-empt eyerolls or anything, and I said this at the time, but I didn’t quite realise when I submitted my interview the nature of where it was going to end up. Hence why I’m talking about stuff like pretzels in it. But y’know, if I had my time over, my words would likely still be the same. Pretzels are so important. And I decided that since I’d said they were going to be a Big Deal this year, it was time to put my money where my mouth is by doing more than just putting pretzels where my mouth is.

And I made Caramel Pretzel Ice Cream. 

Possibly you were under the impression that pretzels were to be tipped into a bowl and eaten absent-mindedly till all that rock salt and mouth-drying crispness makes you gaspingly thirsty? Well, that’s still a reasonable use for them, but in a move that seems unsurprising in hindsight (I see you, chocolate dipped potato crisps) they’re propelled into a whole other stratosphere of deliciousness by the presence of sugar. And while they’re part of the cracker family more or less, something very specific about the dense crunchy texture and intense saltiness and rich, slightly malty (I think?) flavour makes pretzels my food of choice for this. Also, they have a cool shape. No mere circle they.

This is going to sound like a stupid thing to say on my own blog (well, considering some of the things I’ve said here, maybe a stupider thing), but this probably isn’t the very best pretzel ice cream out there. I could make one that’s more technical and involves a lot more steps and ingredients. It would be superior to this one – but this one you can make in about ten minutes. I tried making a more complicated one first and screwed it up every step of the way – overboiling the sugar, burning the pretzels – and once I’d calmed down from the waste of ingredients and significant dent to my self-esteem, I wanted to try again but make it as simple as possible, to put as few hurdles as possible between you and the finished product. And here it is. And it’s incredible.

Caramel Pretzel Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

I’d like to point out while this is an original recipe it’s not an original concept: a brief perusal of Pinterest’s woeful search function will bring up a squillion recipes for this, but for what it’s worth, I didn’t look at any of them. Just went with my instincts. Which will sometimes lead me astray, but not with ice cream. I’d also like to acknowledge the mighty Christina Tosi of the Momofuku restaurant empire, whose genius pretzel-milk infusion may well have kicked off this resurgence in the first place. I can’t say for sure, but I do know researching it would make me really hungry.

1 1/2 cups pretzels 
1 tablespoon butter
3 tablespoons sugar
500ml (2 cups) cream
4 tablespoons brown sugar

In a decent-sized pot or pan, heat up the butter and the 3 tablespoons of sugar. Don’t stir, just let it slowly dissolve and melt and bubble up. Once the mixture starts to turn an amber, whisky-ish colour, remove it from the heat and tip in the pretzels. Stir quickly to coat them, then tip them out onto a piece of baking paper on a baking tray. Scrape out as much syrup as possible onto them, then let them cool a little. 

Whisk the cream with the brown sugar till thickened significantly but not actually whipped – still liquidy but thick enough to leave a hint of a trailing line behind the whisk when you move it through the cream. 

Using a large knife, roughly chop the sugary pretzels into shards and fold it into the cream. Scrape the lot into a loaf tin or container of roughly a litre. Freeze, without stirring. 

If like me, you’re the boundlessly instagrammin’ kind, I recommend reserving a few of the choicest, shiniest caramelised pretzels for decoration as I did here. Also their extra crunch is welcome initially. After a day or so, the ice cream absorbs more of the caramel and the salt, and just gets better and better.

If you’ve never encountered this combination before I understand your suspicion. Beer accompaniments in cream? What now? But be not scared of this. Between the inseparable excellence of caramel and salt together, the roasty flavour that the pretzels bring, and their soft crunch as they slowly disintegrate into the frozen cream, it’s not so much delicious as a head rush in every spoonful.

I heedlessly sat the parfait spoon inside this shallow dish to take a photo: this is approximately three seconds after the spoon’s long handle overbalanced, flinging itself off the table onto the floor below.

On Saturday night myself and some other good friends went to see Cat Power at the Town Hall. It’s partly experience and partly my curmudgeon tendencies but I always set myself up for a fall with live music – there are just so many variables that can go wrong. Being short, I am sighingly prepared to see nothing (like – full circle! – when I barely saw Alanis Morrissette at the Supertop in 1996.) Being nervous, I anticipate seething, punchy crowds. The artist will be late. They’ll be grumpy. I’ll get tired. Someone will spill cheap beer on me. And so on. But Cat Power’s show was one of the most beautiful that I’ve ever had the luck to be at – the kind of show where you turn to the friend next to you and do that “increduluous eye contact shaking the head what is even happening” kind of face. She was powerful, generous, hilarious, charming. Oh my gosh I sound so earnest right now (powerful?) but truly – she continuously stalked the stage from left to right so that everyone got to see her, she threw flowers at the audience (including one up to the balcony, where it calmly sailed upwards into the hand of opening act Watercolours, as if by magic) and her voice, complemented by that of her backup singers, was as warm and scratchy like a soft wooly jumper as ever. I, um, may have cried a little. Very earnestly.

This is Tim’s instagram. Hold your seething, we weren’t standing there with our phones up the whole time blocking everyone’s view – she was just so close that it was impossible not to hastily snap a photo for remembrance. I’m one of you, I hate those people too! 
PS: I tried making pretzel-fried chicken too. What I ended up with wasn’t quite right, but the shadow of perfection was there. And let me exaggeratedly pretend-heroically assure you, I will make so much fried chicken till I get it right.
______________________________________________________________________

Title: Sondheim’s I’m Still Here. I like Eartha Kitt’s version best. Actually I just like Eartha Kitt best.
______________________________________________________________________
Music lately:

Someone recently asked if I’d heard much Nina Nastasia, and I was all, of course, I went through a stage of listening to John Peel compilations. But I was compelled to listen anew, especially when I saw she has a song called Counting Up Your Bones. It’s as good as its title promises.

Brand New Key, Melanie Safka. This song was played on Saturday night by a friend who clearly has exceptional taste in music as I’m now a bit obsessed with it. Don’t let the fact that Wikipedia describes it as a “novelty hit in 1970-71” put you off.

Ever ready to be obsessed with a song, another friend introduced me to another new tune to adore to pieces: Mountain Man, Play It Right. Why doesn’t everyone sing in three part harmony?
______________________________________________________________________
Next time: Probably another I Should Tell You interview. Which means it will be Friday! Best.

extraordinary, just like a strawberry

9 Comments
There is no way to talk about needing to distract yourself while two of your closest friends are out of the country for a significant amount of time to sound like a dork (at best), so all I’ll say is that Tim and I are moving house in two weeks and it is significantly distracting. I love our current flat of three and a half years in a way that I never thought a person could love the place they live – having had a succession of terrible, dark flats (crumbly, cold and damp like milk seeping into passionless wheaten breakfast cereal) overlorded by landlords ranging from the faintly bizarre to the terrifying. Here we have real sunshine, the kind that actually gets through the windows and blankets you in warmth rather than sodding off to hang out with your rich neighbours while your room is shrouded in darkness. We don’t have dampness, we don’t have mice, and so on and so forth. In the darkness and with mice my only friends was how I of course started this blog, and pretty much the best thing about living in horrible flats is that you get to spin ever-larger tales of their ill-repute later in life. If Tim and I, aged 19, had shacked up together in a mansion, well. Actually that would’ve been really awesome. I care not for the value of whatever lesson living in said horrible flat taught me: I’d take the mansion any day. 
Much as I hate things coming to an end, sometimes moving on feels right, and we’ve found a new place that we adore. It’ll be just us (nothing to do with us being engaged, we just like that notion) it’s enormous – plenty of dancing room – it has more storage room than we’ve ever known, and it has a dishwasher! I’m already pretty slovenly but I look forward to spiraling further downwards into a state of blissful sloth after welcoming this appliance into our lives. 
Packing has been strangely fun: I spent several hours doing it on Saturday while Tim was off playing the game of Game of Thrones. (I love the tv show, I devour the books, I can’t abide the endless and endlessly complicated game and was happy to be left alone, in case you’re thinking of getting righteous on my behalf.) On my travels through the dark corners of our wardrobe I discovered many a long-forgotten thing.
A faxed copy of my casually sexist birth certificate. My mum’s occupation and the question of their surnames being different were apparently not of interest in the mid eighties. (Faxed to me during high school so I could take part in a first year university philosophy paper, what an overachiever that baby turned out to be!) 

We have some fairly embarrassing DVDs in our collection, but also some really, really good books.

I wasn’t sure whether to admonish myself or be delighted at the sheer decadence of it all, either way I forgot that we had a bottle of champagne in the cupboard. Who even gets champagne at all, and then goes and forgets about it? Us sybaritic lotophagi, that’s who. (And who even says sybaritic lotophagi? This dick.)
I made this ice cream cake a couple of weeks ago now for a potluck dinner which was also something of a farewell for the two aforementioned now-traveling friends. The recipe comes from this glorious American book from the sixties that I own called “Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts (including party beverages)” (punctuation my own addition.) I love old-timey desserts, and American ones tend to have this particular heedless, uninhibited nature which I particularly adore, and have discussed at length when I made a plum meringue crumble pie from this same book earlier this year.

This recipe is as much about texture as it is flavour – crunchy biscuit crumbs puncturing and encasing the creamy, cold ice cream, itself studded with sorbet-like frozen slices of strawberry. It is pure summer, in spoonable form. In that you can serve it with a spoon, but I took that to a new level by lying on the couch and verily spooning the roasting dish that I made this recipe in, while feeding myself spoonfuls of what ice cream remained in said dish. Seriously though: this would be perfect for a southern hemisphere Christmas pudding – what with strawberries being in season and all – but if you’re up there in the northern hemisphere I recommend this insistently all the same, since you could easily use frozen berries and serve it alongside another pudding of a hotter nature. Just make it, okay? It’s brilliant.

Strawberry Ice Cream Cake 

From Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts – recipe submitted by Mrs Elaine Cruikshank, Montrose, Iowa. 

I know the method looks weird, since every recipe with separated egg whites goes on about how it needs to be whisked in a sterile environment and it WILL fail on you and so on and so forth. And here we are throwing a bunch of ingredients in a bowl and whisking them all devil-may-care. What can I say, it just works! So go with it. Also: the recipe called for 1/2 cup chopped nuts in the biscuit stage but I left them out for someone at the party who had an allergy, you can of course feel free to put them back in.

1 cup flour
1/4 cup brown sugar
125g melted butter
2 egg whites
1 cup sugar
2c sliced fresh strawberries (or use defrosted frozen, as I suggested)
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup cream
More sliced strawberries for decoration

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Stir together the flour, sugar and butter till it forms a soft, stiff dough. Press it evenly onto a paper-lined baking tray, so that it looks like a giant cookie and bake for 20 minutes. You could in fact stop right here and enjoy your giant cookie. I might well do this myself one day. But what you want to do is let it cool, then crumble with your fingers, and sprinkle 2/3 of the crumbs evenly into the base of a medium sized brownie tin/medium sized roasting tin – or you could use a cake tin, even, it really doesn’t matter. 

In a bowl, combine the egg whites, sugar, sliced strawberries and lemon juice. Whisk the heck out of this for as long as you can, but around 5-10 minutes. Despite the doubtfulness of it all, it will thicken and aerate and the whisking action will break down the strawberry slices, tinting the mixture a rather glorious pale pink. 

Whip the cream and fold it into the strawberry mixture, then scrape the lot over the top of the biscuit crumbs. Decorate with slices of strawberries if you like, and sprinkle over the remaining 1/3 of the crumbs. Freeze till solid. 

I already adore ice cream with inordinate fervency, but here with early strawberries, delicious with their early-season optimism, it’s more glorious than ever. And this is so, so easy and straightforward. 
Speaking of optimism, how goes my job-prowl? Not bad. I mean, I’m still unemployed, and feeling its pinch pretty keenly (moving house is SO EXPENSIVE) but my interview on Friday earned me a follow-up coffee this morning! Which is very exciting. Especially since I was quite, quite convinced I’d blown the interview itself. I have another interview on Wednesday, and I still am yet to hear back from another interview that I felt went well, so we’ll see. We’ll see. Even if my perception of how Friday’s interview went was way off, I promise you I’m perceiving this ice cream correctly: it’s damn incredible. I love it. Make it. Spoon with it, even – you’re not alone. 

__________________________________________________________________________
Title via: Ini Kamoze, Here Comes The Hotstepper. This song has aged so well. In my opinion. And my opinion is correct.
__________________________________________________________________________
Music lately: 

Rekindled my long-ago interest in Lisa Loeb. By way of playing Do You Sleep around 2938102938 times in a row one afternoon. You know how music can swiftly take you back to a particular time and place? Listening to this song now just reminds me of the time that I last listened to this song, because I have listened to it so much lately. Try it!

Tegan and Sara, Closer. It’s like, here are your feelings, neatly packaged in jaunty song form!

Barton Hollow, by the Civil Wars. I’d heard of this band before but really got into them when they were recently covered on this TV show I’m obsessed with, called Nashville. (Especially fun since Tim and I were just IN Nashville and so it’s all, “I recognise that landmark in this establishing shot!”) This country-ish, harmony-rich song is delicious.
__________________________________________________________________________
Next time: Lack of incoming funds + moving house has meant I’ve been making meals strictly based on what’s in our cupboards, fridge and freezer. So: hopefully something even bordering on coherent for you. 

but guess who is gonna be dessert

13 Comments
It’s funny, I grew up in a little village, and there was pretty much no shopping to speak of at our nearest town aside from groceries and takeaways and florists and such. And yet I have this very distinct memory of choosing which clip-on earrings to wear to go to the public library. Though I’m pretty sure I’ve always been quite cynical, bordering on snide, it also did not take much for me to get disproportionately excited (in fairness: the library was damn thrilling. A diary entry from 1996 marks the singularly bleak occasion where neither mum nor dad wanted to drive in that weekend and WHAT was I to do now?) But in terms of things that were genuinely exciting, every now and then Mum and I might go on a small spree, in the form of purchasing a Lindt Chocolate Ball each from – I can’t even remember which shop sold them, maybe the florist? 
The mouthpleasingly spherical chocolates encase a softer, buttery chocolate filling which bursts in the mouth with pupil-dilating deliciousness. Unlike many a chocolate from my youth, Lindt Chocolates have held up quality-wise, and still have that special-occasion, grab-your-clip-on-earrings rush of joy.

Which is why, when rereading Katrina Meynink’s delicious book Kitchen Coquette, I became a little fixated on her Lindt Chocolate Puddings, in which not one but two entire chocolate balls, frozen, are submerged in batter and briefly baked to produce a dark chocolate pudding with a slowly liquefying white chocolate Lindt centre. I rationalised hazily that buying a ten-pack of Lindt chocolate balls was better value than the three-pack; that I’d been doing some temping; that if I didn’t spend the money on the chocolates said money would only be sitting in my bank anyway, and that I’d really, really felt like pudding – one of those days, in fact, where you wake up and just know in your bones that you’ll need pudding later on.

That said, if you’re really fixing for this recipe but can’t physically bring yourself to fork out for Lindt – and I understand – pieces of decent white chocolate from a bar will still produce a damn excellent finished product, I’m sure.

Gold, since they cost as much as getting a gold tooth inserted into your mouth. Kidding! It’s more like the cost of a root canal procedure.

Seriously though, Katrina’s book is totally dreamburgers, and she’s a genuinely entertaining, evocative writer about food – not praise I really can say about all that many foodwriters. This recipe is but one of plenty recipes in Kitchen Coquette which will make you yearn to throw together ingredients immediately.

Lindt Chocolate Puddings

From Katrina Meynink’s book Kitchen Coquette.
Note: I halved this recipe, went for two eggs but 50g sugar.

200g dark chocolate
100g butter
3 eggs
115g sugar
2 tablespoons flour
8 white Lindt chocolate balls

Place the chocolate balls in the freezer for at least an hour. When said hour is up, set the oven to 200 C and gather ye four 250ml ramekins.

Melt the chocolate and butter together gently, then allow it to cool a little and quickly stir in the eggs, sugar and flour. (This allows you to just use one bowl, but mix up the non-chocolate stuff separately if you wish.) Divide the mixture between the ramekins, and unwrap the frozen chocolates and push two into each ramekin, spooning over a little batter if they’re popping out the top. Bake for 15 minutes, till firm on top and bulging out the top. Don’t overcook – you want that saucy squish of barely-set cake batter.

And yeah, as I said, I’ve been doing some temping, the sheer exhausting nature of it being why it’s been so long between posts here. It was fairly…um. I won’t actually say what I did and how I felt about it or I’ll just end up sounding deeply unprofessional: the point is, I got paid, it was only a week, and I got paid. As well as that I’ve had a couple of interviews lined up for jobs I’ve applied for, which is quite cool right? My last interview that I had was back in 2006, for a clothing chain store – I didn’t get it – so going through the process again is nothing if not good practice. That said, Tim and I joked about having a bake sale today to boost our dwindling funds, and the joking turned kind of serious and strategic. I know I’m talking about a lack of money in the same breath as buying fancy-pants chocolate, but I’m not into policing how people spend their money, however limited, so…am hardly going to start on myself. And look at this pudding: what cost that happiness?

Two of my dearest friends are flying to Japan today – Kate and Kim, who both worked on my cookbook with me (stylist and photographer, respectively) and I’m incredibly happy and excited for them, especially having done a huge trip overseas myself, but Kate’s not coming back till the end of January, which is really a long, long time away from someone so wondrous. Sigh. All the sighs. Kim is returning back to NZ in two weeks’ time, like some kind of collateral or flat bond (but a million times nicer), so there’s that. I’m hopeless at articulating myself at the time of significant goodbyes – but with people that are such good friends I feel that you don’t have to make big speeches or anything, you just know. And also, fortunately there are still excellent and dear friends here still. It’s Kim and Kate’s time to shine, and I’m sure they’ll shine hard like the ethically-sourced diamonds they are. If you hear any strange noises at any stage though, it’s just me expressing my dramatic emotions via the application of a pillow to my tearducts. Totally cool. No big deal.

In amongst all this caginess and hand-wringing maudlinness, what of the puddings? Were they delicious? Hot damn, yes. Like a hot, barely cooked chocolate brownie, the frozen chocolates slowly melting within creating a vanilla-y, creamy contrast to the bitter darkness of that surrounding it. I liked mine with cold, cold cream filling a spoon-excavated dent in the top and spilling out over the ramekin, Tim austerely preferred it without. Make them, and make them immediately, without excuse or delay, as soon as you’re able to and also feel like pudding.
____________________________________________________________________________
Title via: Barbra Streisand singing You Are Woman from Funny Girl with Omar Sharif. OH, her voice. 
____________________________________________________________________________
Music lately: 

Elastica, Connection. I remember feeling, speaking of 1996 diary entries, such injustice that Justine Frischmann and Damon Albarn were going out. Because that, specifically, prevented him being my boyfriend. Still sorta wish he was, still adore this song.

Neneh Cherry, Woman. Speaking of 1996. This song is intense, and intensely excellent.
____________________________________________________________________________
Next time: a supercool ice cream cake from my 60s American pudding cookbook. 

dance on the coral beaches, make a feast of the plums and peaches…

20 Comments

When I was a kid I used to draw and draw and draw and draw. When you’d get your stationary at the start of the year I’d ask to get an extra “jotter pad” (those A4 notebooks with weak, brownish paper and inevitably a cartoon elephant on the front), one for actual schoolwork and one to draw in. At one point I managed to procure, somehow, one of those enormous notepads for offices that are nearly the size of a table which I hubristically and ostentatiously kept on my desk for drawing on when I was done with my schoolwork. (It gets worse. I also used to also keep a large stack of books on my desk for reading in between being taught stuff. Like, while the teacher was right there still teaching everyone things. OH the conceit! But admit it, it’s a good idea.) There was untold envy and reverence for my best friend at the time, who got her hands on one of those large, seemingly endless rolls of butcher’s paper. Basically my life revolved around obtaining surfaces to draw on. What did I draw? Well…ladies. Initially the Babysitters Club (both scenes from books and those imagined) then Spice Girls (I had a jotter pad expressly for drawing them) and fashion designs and characters from my stories. Like a woman called Stuyvesant who had blue hair and a black belt in karate.

So you could say I liked drawing and did it a lot. Somewhere down the line though, I lost the habit of drawing constantly. Fast forward many years to yesterday, when I casually picked up a pen to doodle away and I just couldn’t. Muscle memory means I can still remember bits of dances I learned over fifteen years ago, but drawing was just not working for me. It wasn’t like getting back on a bicycle in any sense of the word, since…I can’t ride a bike either. (I know. What kind of child of New Zealand am I? Frankly drawing the Babysitters Club was much more fun than cycling looked, which didn’t help with my motivation. Also I could not stay upright.) Has this ever happened to you? Something you were so invested in, which suddenly disappears on you?

Happily, some skills work in the right way, going from fearful to awesome. Like pie! As a food-interested youth, pie seemed so far out of my league that I practically had a Pretty in Pink relationship with it, the out-of-reach Blane to my uncool Andie. These days I’m more like Clare in the Breakfast Club to pie’s…anyway, my point is I’m now really calm about making pie, pastry and all. It is no big deal to me. Even with an florid title like Plum Chocolate Meringue Crumble Pie. Although it sounds like too much detail to take on board, it’s a remarkably cohesive disc of deliciousness, inspired by two things: the many kilos of plums Tim and I bought in Greytown with friends Kim and Brendan, and the beautiful Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts book that I scored in Featherston, which I showed you in my last post.

So instead of showing you the book again, I’ll show you where we got the plums from. See how excited I got with the Instagram filters!

Like we were purchasing plums in a Primal Scream music video!

This Favourite Recipes book I mention was published in the sixties and is full of more delight than I can possibly convey. So I’ll just list a couple of its dishes. Berlin Peach Punch. Miami Beach Birthday Cake. Lime Highbrow. Raspberry Razzle. I should like to make them all. (Especially the Berlin Peach Punch, anyone want to donate me some brandy?) It was, however, very light on plum recipes. So I used another recipe from the book and ended up changing it so much that it doesn’t bear a ton of resemblance to the original. But thanks all the same, Mrs Ivan Kessinger of Morgantown, who submitted the Cherry Crunch that I based the following on.

It’s not as difficult as it sounds – for one thing, there’s no pastry to deal with or filling to mix and heat. There is, admittedly, meringue, but as it’s covered with crumble you don’t have to put too much investment into how good it looks, plus two lonely egg whites’ll whip up before your arm muscles have even had a chance to get sore.

And it is stunningly, well-timed-thwack-to-the-back-of-the-knees-staggeringly delicious.

Plum Chocolate Meringue Crumble Pie


1 packet of plain, cheesecake-bottomish biscuits (I used Budget Vanilla Rounds)
125g butter, melted
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon flour
7 plums (or so)
100g good milk chocolate (I used Whittaker’s, which is mysteriously caramelly and wonderful)
1/2 cup almonds
2 egg whites
1/3 cup sugar + 1 tablespoon


Smash up the biscuits – either in a food processor or with a rolling pin. Mix in the melted butter and cinnamon and try, just try not to eat it all because you’ll need it! If you suspect you will eat lots, then add more biscuits and butter, of course.


Press 3/4 of it into the base of a paper-lined pie tin, to cover the base and about 1cm of the sides. Keep the other 1/4 for later…


Bake at 180 C for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven, turn it down to 130 C, and throw in the almonds for a few minutes to roast, if you like – if you can’t be bothered, I understand. Either way, the oven needs to be 130 C. Sprinkle the tablespoon of flour and the extra tablespoon of sugar over the biscuit base, then slice up the plums and roughly chop the chocolate and layer them up on top of the flour and sugar. Try to layer the plums in such a way that they’re fairly smooth, so that you don’t have any trouble layering the meringue over.


In a clean metal bowl, whisk the egg whites till thickened and frothy, then slowly add the sugar while whisking continuously, till thick and shiny and bright white. Carefully spread this across the top of the plums in the pietin. Roughly chop the almonds and mix them into the remaining crumble, scatter this on top of the meringue. Bake the pie for 35 minutes. Allow to cool a little before eating. 

It’s honestly not as ridiculously sweet as it sounds. The salty butter and sharp, juicy plums keeps all that in check. You would not believe how brilliant sour plum juice and creamy milk chocolate is when it melts together. Not forgetting the soft solidness of the meringue relinquishing against the crunchy, almond-rich crumble top.

It’s genuflectingly delicious. Really the only problem is, as you can see, it’s not particularly solid. This could possibly be helped by refrigerating the heck out of it, but it’s wonderful at room temperature – all the flavours really shining – so just be prepared to carefully ease it out of the pie tin and eat the broken mess that lands on your plate with a spoon.

The reason I’ve been compelled to pick up a pen and put it to paper is that I’ve been home sick with a sudden sore throat, cough, attack of the phlegm, that kind of thing. As drawing wasn’t a goer – although I will keep trying – I’ve been occupying myself with Never Mind The Buzzcocks on YouTube. Later host Simon Amstell is adorable, and early host Mark Lamarr is so sharp and dry, so it’s win win really, and I’m reminded of late nights when I was living in England, watching it before bed with Hovis Extra-Thick Square Cut toast.
___________________________________________________________
Title: Warning: I’m going to use the word “obsessed” a lot now. I am obsessed with the song Meadowlark, which this lyric comes from. Liz Callaway’s version is tear-bringingly exquisite, honestly – if you click through please stick past the fairytale-ish opening lyrics, because it gets better, plus you’ll miss Callaway’s awesomely emphasised ‘r’ as she sings “larrrrk”. 
___________________________________________________________
Music lately:

I am also OBSESSED with the song Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart by Julee Cruise, from Twin Peaks – you do not want to know how many times I’ve listened to it this week, since first hearing it in an episode where it’s sung at the Roadhouse. I know the title is awful (I thought it was “right back” and I’d like to pretend it really is and everyone else has been wrong the whole time) but it’s so hypnotic that I don’t really mind.

Not obsessed with this song, but it is still quite good: St Vincent, Cruel. Delightful and delightfully catchy.
___________________________________________________________
Next time: I am still really compelled by the Meat-free Monday cookbook and will likely reproduce something from that, unless I get hold of some brandy and get to make the Berlin Peach Punch, of course. 

and what’s more baby, I can cook

13 Comments
Christmas christmas christmas christmas christmas christmas christmas!
Christmas christmas christm- I’m just kidding. But it is upon us once more. Which means it’s time for our 6th Annual Christmas Dinner and follow-up blog post! Back in 2006 there were five of us, I wasn’t on Twitter and I didn’t have my blog. What did I even do with my time? Six years later, there were at least fifteen people, the party went for 10 hours and there were intermittent twitter updates from nearly all involved, because that’s just how life is these days. In every sense: I never thought those years ago that we’d have a veritable family of so many good people. I’m not the best out there at making and keeping friends – to the point where getting referred to by someone as part of “my ladies” nearly brought me to tears the other day. 
But anyway, let the bumper Christmas Dinner edition blog post commence! The day goes like this: I cook a huge feast, everyone turns up and eats it. This is my idea of fun, so don’t imagine me crying in the kitchen while everyone else is whooping it up. Alas, not everyone that we love could be there on Saturday but on the whole it was pretty astounding that we got so many people in the room this close to Christmas. Or anytime. 

Involtini. I make this every year. It’s Nigella Lawson’s recipe, which for me has evolved and simplified into slices of eggplant, grilled four at a time in the sandwich press, with a spoonful of herbed, almond-studded quinoa rolled messily in each, covered in tomato sauce and baked. You’re welcome to feta it up or use bulghur wheat but I had some well-meaning half packets of quinoa that needed using up, resulting in this being not only entirely vegan but also gluten free. Hey-oh!

Keeping it Nigella I simmered vast quantities of pickled pork, or gammon as it’s known in the UK, in liquids till they turned into ham – in the foreground is the one I cooked in Old Mout Cranberry Cider, and in the hindquarter is one I cooked in Budget Cola. Both wonderful. Cola has a smoky cinnamon kinda flavour while cider has that distinctive musky fermented-fruit thing going on, both of which are excellent when absorbed into the fibres of sweet, salty pink ham. Pickled pork can be a bit of a misson to find but it’s worth it – I got mine from Preston’s butchers (near Yan’s on Torrens Terrace in Wellington city) and the people there were so friendly and it was so reasonably priced and I totally recommend them.

Didn’t have the mental capacity for gravy, so instead I made up a batch of the wondrous balm that is Bacon Jam, and then – as you might be able to make out here – sprinkled over some edible glitter. Christmas christmas christmas! Honestly, this is one of my favourite discoveries of 2011 – nay, my life. It’s jam, but instead of raspberries or whatever, there is bacon. It’s perfect, it tastes as dazzlingly sticky and sweet and salty as it sounds, and it gives the feast an insouciant Ron Swansonish air.

This Hazelnut, Cranberry and Mushroom Stuffing was a new recipe from Fine Cooking magazine – entirely vegan, with the ingredients being both Christmassy but also ideally suited to each other. I simplified it to suit my needs and budget. For a recreation of my appropriation (across the nation!) roughly cube a large loaf of sourdough or similarly intense bread, drizzle with oil and toast in a hot oven. Meanwhile, fry up a diced onion and a whole bunch o’ mushrooms – the fancier the better, but I used regular button types – the real important thing here is quantity, as they reduce down. Mix together the whole lot, add a large handful of toasted hazelnuts and dried cranberries. Pour over 1 cup of stock (I used miso soup – it’s what I had) and bake for about 40 minutes at 190 C/350 F. The rich, sweet hazelnuts and savoury aggro of the mushrooms plus the occasional burst of cranberry against the croutonesque bread is some kind of taste revelation, I assure you.  

I make this cornbread stuffing every year. Cornbread’s one of my favourite foods as is, but mixing it in with eggs, butter, and cranberries then baking it again is perfection achieved. There was a bit of trouble in making it this time though, and I’m going to write it in tiny, tiny letters so you don’t all go green around the gills and start crying instead of my intention of making you salivate like hungry Alsatians. (Three rotten eggs in a row. THREE. They had weeks before the “use by” date and I even did the thing where you check it in a glass of water. The utter depressingness of that dull, formless thud with which the contents of the shell hit the bowl combined with the smell which hits you straight in the back of the throat takes you to a dark place when people are turning up in an hour, but with some reassurance, some rescue remedy and some hastily opened windows we got through it.) Also, spot the peas – I heedlessly bought 2kg of them going cheap at Moore Wilson a while back and so their presence on this table, in order to cut down on my freezer’s crowded infrastructure, was non-negotiable.

Butter in cubes on a small plate with a proper knife: because I am turning into my mother more and more every day. I love that my friends who stayed for ages and required a late-night snack asked where this butter was so they could spread it on the leftover cold potatoes. 

“FLIRTINIS ALL ROUND”. Because of a few lines in The Mighty Boosh, and because increasingly it seems everything I consume has to have a pop culture reference attached to it, I made this drink. Increasingly come-hither was that Nigella Lawson herself recently put a recipe for it online, giving me even more assurance that it was meant to be. Flirtinis are fairly hardcore but divided amongst many guests and with lots of food as blotting paper it’s all good. In a large jug, mix one cup (250ml) vodka and one cup fizzy white wine (eg, Lindauer) and top up with pineapple juice – about a litre, depending on the size of your vessel of course. Stir with a wooden spoon like you’re Betty Draper and serve in plastic cups so you don’t have to do so many dishes. 

Oh, this pie. Coffee Toffee Salted Cashew Pie, to use its full title. Another revelation from Fine Cooking, which I adapted quite easily to make necessarily dairy-free. And, with all due respect to Fine Cooking, to be less sugary and to include cashews. I think American palates have a different capacity for sugar than ours, and also cashews make a cheaper – but still exciting – substitute for their choice of pecans. 
Into a pie plate lined with a half-batch of this cookie dough, (minus the spices, and you don’t need to blind bake it) tumble 1 cup of salted roasted cashews and pour over a whisked up mixture of 1 cup golden syrup, 3/4 cup dark brown sugar, 2 tablespoons rum (I used Smoke and Oakum’s Gunpowder Rum), 2 tablespoons instant espresso powder – yes instant, it’s useful for baking and it smells weirdly alluring, okay? Look for the blue packet by Greggs – 2 tablespoons rice bran oil and three eggs. Bake at 190 C/375 F for 45 minutes to an hour, covering with tinfoil if need be. You then need to let it cool completely. I didn’t see this instruction and it would’ve saved me a reckless moment of “We’ll just eat it now and if it’s not set it can just be sauce for the ice cream, dammit!” Fortunately everyone managed to talk me down in a chorus of soothing voices while we stashed it precariously in the freezer, and it really was better for a good chilling, especially as the cold went some way to soften the intense sugar hit. It’s an incredible pie, with salty creamy cashews in their pool of intensely dark caramel-caffiene filling. 

And finally, some ice cream, since that’s my kneejerk culinary response to the promise of people in our house. This is the only photo I got of said ice cream, but in the back is my own Chocolate Coconut Ice Cream – which I’ve made many times now since Christmas 2009. It’s beautiful and it’s dairy-free and I can now make it in my sleep almost literally, but should you be awake and trying it for the first time it’s not overly taxing either. In the front is Lemonade Sorbet (with a hard ‘t’) which started life as failed jelly; it was a little weird but refreshing, and the price was right. 
There were also two roast chickens – but no-one wants me to try and take a decent photo of their sorry hides, and beautiful canapes from Jo, and homemade bread rolls brought by Piona (that’s Pia and Fiona but don’t their names condense perfectly?) There was a moment where everyone became anxious and queasy during Barbra Streisand’s Jingle Bells (you think I’m exaggerating! Not this time!) there was a psychological skirmish during supercool boardgame Apples to Apples; there was an incredible reveal from Pia whose orange dress looked cool enough under her coat, but upon removal of that coat it turned out the dress sleeves were layered and ruffly like a flamenco skirt on each arm; there was candy cane whittling; there was imaginary Christmas cracker pulling; there was semi-unpremeditated singing of Total Eclipse of the Heart; there was a portrait of me etched in a pudding bowl; there were at least ten candy canes per capita, especially once I got changed into my candy cane-esque dress; and there was so much food brought to donate to the Downtown Community Ministry Foodbank that Tim and I will have to drive it down in our ute because it’s too much to lug down in our collection of environmentally conscious yet aesthetically designed shopping carry bags. We love our friends.

And now, mere singular days from Christmas I am typically underslept, however I managed to finally get a tiny bit of Christmas shopping done, including a small gift for myself of a flower hairclip. It’s amazing how when your personality and brainpower has evaporated due to lack of sleep, put a big flower in your hair and you can trick yourself into thinking you’re still an interesting person.

It makes me feel like this: Look at how zany and witty I am! There’s a flower in my hair! I have such a personality!
________________________________________________________________
Title via: Lea Delaria singing I Can Cook Too from On The Town. This challenging and excellently subject-ed song is especially good in her brassy growl of a voice.

________________________________________________________________
Music lately: 

Still Haven’t Got My Gift by The Goodfun. Hilarious. But also a really nice tune.

O Holy Night, Liz Callaway and her sister Ann Hampton Callaway. You may think you’re over this son but Liz’s silvery voice against Ann’s rich golden one is pure joy for the ear canals.

Julien Dyne, Fallin’ Down – the mellow, slinky antithesis to my Broadway dalliances.
________________________________________________________________
Next time: I was really convinced I’d have time to blog about the roast tomato-stuffed roast capsicums, but it just didn’t work out, no matter how I tried. So I guess I’ll change up that aim to see if I can get them done before Christmas now…

i need to be dazzling, i want to be rainbow high

21 Comments

For all that I occasionally struggle to count to ten accurately (specifically, I lose count of things really quickly. I can count to ten. I can!) my brain does put itself to good use coming up with ideas. I was in the middle of implementing one pavlova idea that I’d thought up when my brain sidestepped and reached into a previously unused pocket and presented me with yet another cool idea for pavlova.

This is the first idea. I got to thinking that we humans cover pavlova with various fruits – and that’s all. There’s good reason for this – pavlova is tongue-dissolvingly sweet, and fruit provides contrast of both texture and relatively lower sugar content. But when thinking about things that aren’t fruit, I hypothesised that a pavlova covered in smarties (or m’n’ms or pebbles or whatever, but let’s stick with smarties while we’re here) would be dazzling to look at and delicious to eat – imagining crunch of candy-covered chocolate against marshmallowy, yielding pavlova. Thick cream in the middle to sandwich it all together. And all those rainbow colours against an off-white pavlova base.

My hypothesis may have been shaky and my mathematics half-hearted, but truly:

Pavlova:

+ all of this:

 
= oh my goshness unbelievable gasp flavoursome excellence jazzy rainbow candy wow (and also this whole time you were performing a gleeful can can without even realising it.)

 

It actually tasted exactly like I imagined it would. Nice one, brain o’ mine! Now, don’t be fooled: this is sweet. But the crunchiness somehow counteracts the solid sugar hit. Apparently a glass of milk alongside is good. This is a highly decent fall-back pavlova recipe too, with only four egg whites and a straightforward, as far as these things go, method. The end result was almost weightless, large, and had a crisp, melt-in-mouth exterior encasing a soft interior.

 
 
Smartie Pavlova 
 
(or whatever you call the lollies) (and really, name it what you like, I’m not watching at your window like Kathy in Wuthering Heights to see what you call it. I can, however, be persuaded to dance like Kate Bush’s interpretation of her!)
 
Pavlova recipe itself from Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat.
 
4 egg whites
250g sugar (caster sugar if you can)
2 teaspoons cornflour
1 teaspoon vinegar – I used cider vinegar
 
300ml bottle of fresh cream 
2 tablespoons brown sugar
Between 300g and 500g smarties/m’n’ms/pebbles/equivalent. I picked out all the brown and white ones and ate them because I wanted bright colours only. 
 
Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. In a very clean non-plastic bowl, either whisk or beat with a mixer machine thing the egg whites till very frothy and quite stiff. In every other recipe in the world that I’ve seen, you’re supposed to add the sugar a tiny little bit at a time, but Nigella reckons to just add this quantity a third at a time. I nervously went with the incremental approach, but anyway, it’s going to get very, very thick and stunningly glossy. As you get on you can add the sugar in larger quantities. 
 
Spread it on a paper-lined baking tray to a circle of around 22cm across, smoothing out the top as well as you can, then put in the oven and carefully shut the door. Immediately reduce the heat to 150 C/300 F and bake for between an hour, and an hour and a quarter. Allow to cool.
 
Whisk the cream and brown sugar until stiff and spreadable, but not so stiff that it’s getting granular and threatening to turn into butter. Spread it thickly across the top of your cooled pav, and then carefully topple over the smarties. Half of them will probably fall off, but just scoop them up and use them to fill in the gaps. Admire.
 
 
This pavlova was carefully ferried by myself to be sliced into by friends while watching the important modern drama Gossip Girl. As you can see in the above photo the colouring on the candy shells of the smarties bleeds out a little on the cream – this is no real biggie but if you’re planning on trying this, decorate it at the last minute. The actual pavlova itself should last for a good long time in an airtight container, but everything else, assemble as late in the piece as you can to keep it at its twinklingly polychromatic best. Don’t be afraid of how ridiculous this may seem to you: it’s delicious and it makes sense when you gaze upon it and when you bite into it.
 
A few days after the last remaining slice of that pavlova disappeared, I met with the same group of friends at the same house, for a Halloween party. Neither Tim nor I had ever been to one before so we went all out, like Cady Heron in Mean Girls. None of this “I’m a mouse, duh!” here. I fulfilled a long-held desire to dress up as Elphaba/Wicked Witch of the West from Wicked (didn’t have time or a willing photographer to let me recreate every promotional photo since 2003, but maybe next Halloween) and it was so fun. That’s green eyeshadow all over my face, not facepaint – a little advice from me to you – and the hottest, itchiest, prone-to-moultingest $2 shop wig ever. 
 

Yeah, I downloaded Instagram. I wasn’t glowing fuzzily like that in real life. It’s just so prevalent that I start to wonder if the events I’m snapping really happened if they don’t feature blown-out lighting or a rosy glow. And it makes my grainy phone photos look like they’re supposed to be that way. And it was such a good night, culminating in some feverish dancing to Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights (I told you I could be persuaded) and some very specific and still-memorised dance moves to the Spice Girls’ important song Wannabe. 

 
 
Title via: Rainbow High from the musical Evita, which is such a gloriously stompy song and is best showcased by a much younger and giggly but still terrifyingly talented Patti LuPone, the original star on Broadway, performing it at Les Mouches nightclub.
 
 
Music lately:
 
Well, Spice Girls/Wannabe and Kate Bush/Wuthering Heights…of course.
 
Also the new video for David Dallas’ awesome song Start Looking Round is as good as you’d expect it to be, considering his recent output. Even with no kittens in it like the last one had. 
 
 
Next time: On Saturday morning Tim and I met up with Jo and also Kim in Petone and we kept running into each other and they gave me – well, Tim and I – parfait glasses! And now I want to make ice cream to put in the glasses. Because they are beautiful and I love them (the glasses AND the ladies.)
 
Oh yeah and the idea-within-an-idea for pavlova was, okay, imagine if instead of putting whipped cream on pavlovas, there was cream cheese icing instead? Maybe with caramel sauce on top or strawberries or who knows. Or imagine little tiny meringues sandwiched together with cream cheese. I just need a reason to try this, is all, so if someone has a need for an experimental pavlova in their life…