Category: Side Dishes and Snacks

feet don’t fail me now, take me to the finish line

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Pride (hey there, purple-socked-feet of mine)

Pride goes before a fall. It’s not a saying I like, firstly because why can’t we just wallow in being proud of stuff sometimes, and secondly because I fall over plenty without the help, nay, the luxury of pride (just yesterday I fell up some stairs.) It’s a biblical quote anyhow, and as I’m fascinated by religion but not religious, I guess I can use the old “you’re not my real mom!” comeback here too.

the fall (this was supposed to be…cookies.)

In case none of that made sense what I’m saying is that I not only screwed up these amazing pretzel chocolate chunk cookies that I’d planned to make, blog about smugly, and then take to work to make snacking under fluorescent lighting in front of a spreadsheet less bleak…I also, after I had been so pleased with my sleeping progress last time, had a terrible night’s sleep, then this entire week have been far too drowsy to blog. It’s a little harsh knowing that the world actually isn’t going to fall off its axis if I don’t update this blog as immediately as I’d like, but I have so little time and try really hard to keep this ticking over while having a full-time job and it frustrates me to my core if I can’t do that. So. Plenty of pride going before falling this week.  

But you can’t catch me, mere idiom, because here I am, just awake enough to put my hands on the keyboard and make words and with teeth probably about to float away like the fairy-light seeds of a dandelion from eating almost all of the failed cookie dough which, when frantically spatula’d into a pie dish and baked, made at first a huge puffy mess, but after some healing time and investigative forking, the most delicious, fudgy, crisp, caramelly cookie pie thing.

Also I made some dinner that night and that worked, even though it’s really just putting some vegetables into the oven for a bit I would not have been surprised by that point if they’d turned out rubbish, too. Not only did dinner merely not fail, it in fact tasted excellent.

I don’t know precisely which element of this recipe made the eggplant so meltingly delicious – was it the marinating? The slow cooking? Witchcraft? Either way, I got thinking that it might be fun to marinate slices of eggplant before putting them in the oven, so that their spongy interiors could soak up as much flavour and olive oil as possible, which would then intensify in a slow, warm oven, and then get a little caramelised and crisp-edged with a final blast of heat. Whatever: it worked. While this would certainly make a pleasing side (and you can obviously increase quantities based on numbers that you’re feeding) Tim and I had it on its own, on top of some couscous. It was terrific.

kinda-marinated eggplant with lemon, paprika, cumin, olive oil and asparagus

A recipe by myself. It’s not cookies, but the price is right. Also, serves two. 

1 eggplant
juice of half a lemon (or all the lemon, if it’s a pain to just use half)
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 teaspoon ground cumin
three or so tablespoons olive oil
a handful of asparagus
more olive oil
salt

Slice the eggplant into rounds, about 1cm thick. Layer them in the base of a roasting dish and squeeze the lemon juice over them evenly, then sprinkle the spices on top and pour on the olive oil. Leave to sit for ten minutes. Bake at 160 C for half an hour, then lay the asparagus on top, pour over some more olive oil if you like, and turn up the heat to 200 C. Roast for another 20 or so minutes, till the asparagus looks a little wizened and the eggplant is a toasty brown colour. 

If you can stand the wait, the eggplant is spectacular when just merely warm, not hot. All salty and dissolving and shot through with the gentle heat of paprika and cumin and just so good.

This is not exactly a useful photo of the eggplant dish, but my house was looking really cute in the background so I indulged it. Houses can’t take selfie photos so I was just being a good tenant. 

Some other nice, non-failure-y things that have happened lately:

So important. If you haven’t read Hyperbole and a Half, the blog from which this book emerged, be kind to yourself and spend all day reading it from front to back. It’s everything.

Tim went up to visit his mum and bring home the car we bought off TradeMe (yes, we bought a car, no, the nausea-inducing credit card debt is definitely, definitely worth it, oh yes definitely?) and apparently his mum had some wool she no longer needed and thought I might enjoy. This was my reaction. Snug life! He also brought me back some peonies from her garden after I shrieked at him via txt message that they were the rarest unicorn of them all and like seventeen dollars each in a shop. They’ve mostly stayed alive, which is a small triumph against nature and capitalism and also really pretty. 
And even though I had a bad night’s sleep, while it was happening I felt a lot more calm and relaxed than I used to, and have managed to get myself back on track so that I am, you know, sleeping at night like a human again. And I even managed to finish this blog post. There is a good chance I’ll fall over today, but it sure won’t stop me being proud of these things (or taking things very literally it seems, I know ‘fall’ has a broader meaning in this context but…I literally fall over a lot.)
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title via: might as well get a case of the morbs with Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die. I love this song so much.  

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music lately: 

Rick Ross ft Lil Wayne, 9 Piece. I really enjoy a shouty chorus.

Aaliyah, If Your Girl Only Knew. Sigh. Oh, Aaliyah.

Good Morning, from Singin’ in the Rain: my desire to watch re-re-rewatch this movie burns with the heat of a thousand french fries.
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next time: might even try playing with that failed cookie recipe to see if I can turn it into the caramelly pie it almost became. 

this is my idea of fun

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Halloumi fries: they’re not just A Thing, they’re really something.
For all that I go on at length, such length, about how my brain can make my life difficult, occasionally it serves up an idea of distinct majesty that almost makes everything else worth it. Most recently: it was a frustrating, and frustratingly typical sleepless night when I had the idea for halloumi fries. What if you slice halloumi into thin rectangles, dust them with flour and deep-fry them? Would they be crunchy on the outside and melting on the inside with the stability of fries and the yielding salty tumescence of cheese? Or would they dissolve into puddles the instant they hit the hot pan, melting messily everywhere and absorbing half the oil and being generally horrific, in terms of taste, texture and money squandered?
Happily – rapturously, in fact, mere happiness doesn’t quite convey the um, rapture of the situation: it worked. I’m pretty used to things going disastrously wrong in the kitchen. Sometimes ingredients just don’t do what I assume of them, sometimes I am very clumsy, sometimes an idea is misguided or, like athletics and mathematics and haircuts, simply better done by a professional that isn’t me.
But these were perfect. Really, really, sorta bafflingly exceptional. Given the propensity for things to go wrong – halloumi is expensive, hot oil is intimidating, I am me, I couldn’t believe how breathtakingly straightforward the path to deliciousness was.

Simply coating these in flour before frying makes them so spontaneous-fist-in-the-air crisp and crunchy, yet the insides still have that soft, buttery halloumi bulginess. They are delicious, so delicious that you will eat them with brows furrowed in wonderment at how you’ve hit the one of the (hopefully many) high points of your very own existence.

(I don’t know, I kinda like this recipe, I guess.)

an unattractive but necessarily informative picture for you of the cheese frying. So now you know that this is what the cheese looks like when it’s frying. 
 
They are sufficiently sublime on their own, but if you want some kind of accompaniment, I’d suggest a tomato relish of some form, or a mix of wholegrain mustard and mayonnaise, or maybe aioli if you’re able to handle the rich-rich-rich of it all, or perhaps even just a dish of balsamic vinegar, which takes me back to pairing fish and chips with vinegar as a child.
 
halloumi fries
 
a recipe by myself. I considered adding chili powder or paprika to the flour but minimal is best here, to show off the excellence of the cheese and the frying process. My one main caution here is make sure you use a brand of halloumi that you know is firm and holds its shape. Some brands are more melty than others. I used Axelos since it was all the no-good supermarket had, and it worked fantastically.
 
serves two, but only if you really like the person and can manage to huffily, begrudgingly sacrifice some of these fries to them (I’m such a dick, I know.) 
 

1 block – 200g or so – of halloumi
1/2 cup plain flour (I initially wanted to use polenta but I only had flour, so: flour.) 
Plain oil, such as rice bran or grapeseed, for frying

Slice the halloumi into relatively even rectangles. I can’t tell whether I like these better as slightly wider, flatter shapes or thinner, more french-fry esque, so tend to do a bit of both. Any bits that crumble or fall off can still be used as a mid-frying snack for yourself. 

Heat up around an inch and a half of oil in a saucepan – really, that’s all you need – using a little offcut of halloumi to work out when it’s ready to go – put it in the pan and there should be rapid bubbles moving around it. Then eat it, of course.  

Place the flour on a plate and put about half the halloumi on it, turning over each slice to thoroughly coat it. Spoon each slice carefully into the pan – they might slowly float towards each other but they shouldn’t stick or anything. Also I just used a regular metal serving spoon for this, tongs might be easier but I didn’t want to dent or break the cheese slices. Allow the oil to bubble away and turn the slices over after a minute or so, once they’re golden brown on the underside (obviously you will have to check this, I don’t expect you to just know somehow.) Remove with the spoon to a plate with a couple of pieces of paper towel on it, and continue with the rest of the halloumi. The second batch tends to cook a lot faster, because the oil has really hit its stride in terms of being blastingly hot. 

Seriously. Thanks, brain. When I was eating these, I thought “this might actually be the most significant and valuable discovery of 2013“. I think I was being pretty sincere, too. Which is a little concerning. But you eat these, and then try telling me I’m exaggerating. Presuming you both like and can eat cheese in the first place, of course. I know hybrid foods – the cronut, the…um, cronut, it’s all I can think of right now – can be both overwrought and overdone till they’ve lost all sense of context and of being an actual food. These may speak of gimmick and wilful excess, neither of which I really have a problem with, but I promise you, in a fairly confident and calm manner, that these are simply incredibly good.

Also maybe some kind of potential phenomenon, if only in my brain. Which is not such a bad place all the time, after all.

Also: I finished my latest knitting project, a hooded cape. I am so proud of myself about this – it’s a large garment, it involved hours of stitching, I learned so many new moves, and…now I have a witchy cape which is hugely warm but also practical but also makes me feel a bit like Little Edie Beale in Grey Gardens. Not that she had an easy life, but she sure knew how to dress cunningly.
Finally, I had a lovely, super-fun interview about my cookbook in Canta, the Canterbury Uni student magazine. You can see a pdf of it here, and I’m on page fourteen. Yay interviews, I love them!
Finally-finally, I am still trying to organise an Auckland launch party for the cookbook so if you have any perspicacious thoughts regarding that, get in touch.

title via: Lana Del Rey, Video Games. She knows a thing or two about a thing or two. 
music lately:

Little Mix, Move. If you liked Girls Aloud’s Biology, that kind of twenty-two-pop-songs-whisked-into-one sound, then this should appeal.

Kanye West, Mercy. I love Kanye more every time he does something. Literally, almost anything he does, I’m like “yeah, Kanye!”

what kind of girl is she? (are you gonna eat that pickle)

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I keep things honest on here. Panic attacks, bad habits, coming out, failed pastry, engagement announcements (not that I’ve had plural engagements, but it didn’t flow so well syntactically in the singular), tattoos, book deals (again, not plural but flows nicer in the plural, as would not explaining the flow of my sentence in the middle of my sentence.) Thus: if it has happened to me and is my story to tell, then there’s a high likelihood I won’t be able to stop myself telling you about it. But these past few of weeks – or even longer than that, really – some things that have been happening are a bit hard to describe, which is frustrating for a dictionary-nuzzling person as myself, because…I’ve just been feeling vaguely weird. Not every day, and not every minute, but enough, too much: bad brains, I call it. So many things in my life are so, so good, really, and yet my brain is not catching up with all of this. Bodies! They’re so confusing. Life! So odd. No-one prepares you for just the sheer difficult weirdness that is existence. For not being able to sleep, for losing your appetite, for being closely focussed on strange things, for suddenly hyperventilating in the middle of the supermarket after a really good day and then having to lie down for two hours once you get home. But what is easier to explain is how I’m trying to fix it, which is with doctors and medication and counseling and talking to Tim and to friends, many of whom know what it’s like anyway, and by trying to be a little kinder to myself. Being even just a little bit kind to yourself is a surprisingly easy thing to forget to do.

So, um, food blogging, yeah, alright! Actually for those of you who read this a lot, and read between the lines, all this probably will hardly be a surprise. But it’s still a thing that’s happening to me, and that is mine to tell, so here we are. Luckily, here are some other things that have happened:

It was Tim’s birthday on Wednesday. We both took that day and Thursday off work, and it was terrifically fun to just hang out and sleep in and read and watch things and drink coffee and eat brunch and just exist quietly but excitingly so. Except when we went to the Fishhead magazine third birthday party and existed loudly. On Thursday I made Tim his favourite food – lasagne – which, despite trying to bust out of its tin as you can see in the above photo, was amazing. Just straight up amazing.

On the day of Tim’s birthday we caught a bus into Newtown and went record shopping and had lunchtime beers, and bought this excellently cheap cabinet, all the better to see our trinkets with. There are now even more things in it, and yet curiously, no noticeable space has been made by moving things in there.

Aaaand, I got some new eyebrows, a shape and tint, something I’ve never done before. Felt like stronger brows might equal a stronger me, or something, plus the ones my face came with were so pale that they might as well have not existed.

And – I guess you’re wondering why I’ve brought you here – I made some tiny fried pickles! Tiny, tiny deep-fried pickles in puffy, light batter. Like popcorn chicken, but with pickles, and minus the magically delicious herbs and spices (these are really good, but they’re no popcorn chicken. Really, what could be? I’m sorry. I should’ve chosen a better analogy.) They’re really easy to make, and for all that deep-frying stuff is a little intimidating in theory, you only need an inch or so of oil in a wide pan, not whole vats of the stuff. And these pickles cook up really, really quick. Drain them, throw them in some smoked paprika and a little more salt because hurrah for sodium, and that’s it.

tiny fried pickles
A recipe by myself. Dairy-free!
1 jar pickles
1 egg
1/2 cup soda water/sparkling water/whatever you call it in your neighbourhood
1 cup flour
pinch salt
pinch sugar
plain oil for frying
Drain the jar of pickles and slice into rounds. Don’t even think about measuring them, but roughly a centimetre wide is a good size to aim for. On the other hand, I’m horrendously fussy and discarded all the ends like some kind of wastrel. Sit the slices on a couple of paper towels. This helps absorb some of the pickle-vinegar, which will help the batter stick and stop it spluttering like whoa in the hot oil.
Then, mix the egg and soda water together, then add the salt, sugar, and – slowly – the flour, and stir to a thick batter. Doing it in this order stops it getting lumpy.
Heat up about 1.5 inches of plain oil in a wide pan. It has to be properly hot, so try dropping a little batter in it to test once you think it’s ready, and it should bubble up and you know, fry.
Now, it’s possible there’s a better/more logical way of doing this, but this worked for me: tip all the slices of pickle into the bowl of batter. Take a large spoonful of the pickle-y batter, and with a smaller spoon, push slices off into the hot oil. Some batter may fall into the oil too. This is cool. The lil pickles should take a minute or two to get brown and puffy, if they need it use a pair of tongs to carefully turn them over in the oil, then remove them – still using the tongs – to another plate lined with paper towels and spoon some more slices in. Finally, dust the fried, puffy pickles with smoked paprika and more salt and serve immediately.

 

Salty, sharp slices encased in batter that’s crisply browned on the outside while fluffy and light on the inside, the sweet smokiness of the paprika and the doughy batter tempering the vinegar bite of the pickles. They’re really, really good.

Back on the cookbook front, since that still exists and is still the most improbably wonderful thing: I found out today that my book is currently at 6th place on the Independent Booksellers List! Cool, hey? I’m currently trying to plan an Auckland launch party for it (despite having no money, no time, and no brain space) because that seems like…fun! Oh and I have literally had people come up to me and say that they are fans, which is one of the top ten excellent feelings in the world. Yeah excellent feelings! They don’t make the weird ones disappear, but they do help balance them out some.
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title via: What Kind of Girl is She from the important musical [title of show]. This particular song isn’t on youtube, but uh, Die, Vampire, Die from the same musical is, and it’s pretty perfect.
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Music lately:

The National, the Thanksgiving Song. They did a cover of a song that Lynn Belcher from the wondrous Bob’s Burgers sings. It’s odd and sinister and not even as good as the cartoon original, but I admire their commitment.

Miley Cyrus, Wrecking Ball. Yeah. This song is so, so good.

Frank Ocean, Super Rich Kids. Dreaminess.
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Next time: I did this cool thing with blueberries and chili and lime and stuff and I have no idea what it is, but it’s addictively good. If I work out what it is…salsa? I might blog about it. 

we’d roll and fall in the green

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Today has been a bit of a dick, between one thing and another. I took a sleeping pill last night in the hopes that I’d force myself into actually sleeping. It worked, but then I was like a forlorn jellyfish the rest of the day, somnambulant and dopey and fractious and essentially undoing all the good work I had done by having a good night’s sleep. And I currently feel queasy, although I can’t tell if it’s because of the dinner I just made or something else. 
But, as Dave from Happy Endings would say, let’s back up. (PS: Max and Jane are my favourites. Also Brad and Alex. And Penny. Just in case you thought Dave was my favourite.)
Yesterday was pretty wonderful. I woke up just before 6am, lightly hungover from a gathering the night before for dear friend Kate’s birthday. This early start was for a skype date with Ange, erstwhile flatmate and forever friend, who now lives in London. Also because I can’t help waking up hilariously early on the weekend. It all started because Ange and I were emotionally snapchatting about our feelings about Top of the Lake and wanted to discuss them in a less rudimentary fashion, and ended with a “huh, we should probably Skype more often since it’s really convenient and stuff.”
We had brunch with Kate and Jason, which included an excellently bitter Campari and grapefruit juice. This turned into coffee where we ran into other friends, which turned into record shopping, which turned into ice cream sundaes with fixings leftover from the party the night before, which turned into beers at the pub around the corner. We saw a cute dog, we parted ways, and Tim and I went home to play candy crush and knit (respectively) and watch West Wing. And all I really felt like was eating greens, so I made us this.
Just greens on greens on greens, with some butter and lime juice and sesame seeds to make it more of a meal and less of a pile of stuff that happens to be technically edible. I am a firm believer in just eating what you feel like eating at any given moment, without guiltily focussing on whatever the properties of the food are (admittedly it was only roughly last year that I reached this calm conclusion) and so if I feel like eating a dinner composed largely of bits of plant, then that’s what I do. Of course, I could take a hell of a lot better care of myself on a day-to-day basis (my lunch today was basically just coffee and fruit burst lollies, which was down to apathy and stuff rather than actually wanting it) but it’s nice when what you feel like, and what you have, and what you’re able to make, are all the same thing. In this case, I happened to have a few vegetable-y bits and pieces getting wearily limp in the fridge, and they all benefited from this stirfry-steam-cover-in-butter method. 

greens with sesame lime butter

A recipe by myself. This mix of greens is a good one, but use what you have – beans, courgettes, etc – in the quantities of your choosing. 

broccoli, about half a head thereof
bok choi or pak choi, a bunch
a large handful of baby spinach leaves, or larger spinach leaves, chopped
2 teaspoons sesame oil
25g butter
1 teaspoon kecap manis or soy sauce
1 lime
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
1/3 cup cashew nuts

Wash the broccoli and bok choi leaves. Heat up a teaspoon of the sesame oil in a large pan, then throw in the broccoli and bok choi and stir around for a little bit to coat in the oil, then tip in 1/4 cup water and put a lid on the pan, so the water can bubble up and quickly steam everything. Once the water is evaporated, or thereabouts, and the vegetables have softened a little but are still bright green, remove the lid and stir in the spinach. Then remove all of that to a serving dish. Finally, melt the butter in the same pan, stir in the kecap manis, juice and zest of the lime, sesame seeds and cashew nuts. Allow to bubble away until the sesame seeds have browned slightly, then remove from the heat and tip onto the vegetables. Either stir through or take it to the dining table and make everyone wait while you photograph it, because you’re a highly strung food blogger.

Broccoli is already a little nutty and sweet, so adding sesame oil and sweet kecap manis only but embiggens everything good about it already. Astringent pak choi and fast-wilting, metallic spinach are helped by the rich butter and crunchy seeds and cashews, and the lime simply brightens everything up with its citrus intensity. It’s very simple and plain, but not to the point of nondescript, where you forget that you’ve eaten immediately after you put your fork down. Nope, this is delicious stuff. And a terrific end to my Sunday.

And then today happened and undid all the good work of yesterday. But I have high hopes for tomorrow, even if Tuesdays are often the worst. If nothing else, there is more knitting (my current project: a black hooded cape) and reading (have finished NW by Zadie Smith, am halfway through Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, am upping my weights at the gym so I can pick up The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton) and more Orphan Black to watch, and I have a list of recommendations of other sleeping pills that won’t make me feel like a baffled sock the next day.

PS…I still have a cookbook! It’s still strange and exciting and amazing and a lot to take on! If you like, you can listen to a very fun interview I did with Charlotte Ryan at Kiwi FM, where I got to pick some songs as well. I started off making a consciously careful, everything-rests-on-this list of tunes to play, but luckily ended up going with whatever I felt like at the time. What were the songs? You’ll have to listen to the interview! Or just ask me, I’m a total pushover.
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Title via: Wuthering Heights, a very important song by Kate Bush. If I had a dollar for every high kick I’ve done to this song, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting a good night’s sleep for work tomorrow, that’s for sure.
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Music lately: 

Dear Time’s Waste, These Words Stick Me To You. Dreamy.

ASAP Rocky, Problems. Effective, and effectively stuck in my brain.

Had the house to myself for most of Saturday, so naturally played some crowd-unpleasing Broadway and danced out my feelings, or at least some of them. Did some particularly bold pirouettes and leaps to Age of Aquarius from Hair and Heaven Help My Heart from Chess. (musicals with an arbitrary noun for a name, huh?)
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Next time: Whatever I feel like, evidently. 

lazy jane, all the time

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Tulips holding up well. As is my twee agenda, it seems.
Also holding up well: this risotto recipe. I’ve made it three times in the last week. Once, twice, three times a lady recommending this recipe to you all. I know I often go on about how I work myself down to a nub writing this blog and the cookbook and meeting other various deadlines, but that aside, I’m really very lazy. If there’s a way I can do less than what’s required, even at the expense of the outcome, I will. It’s just the way it is. Some people accept that there’s hard work involved in life, some people (me) want to sit around and knit or check Twitter all day. Fortunately for me, Tim tends to meet this laziness with shrugging resignation/lifting/cleaning of all the things, but occasionally it works out well for both of us. In the case of this risotto, that is. I already love making risotto, with its calmingly repetitive stirring motion, and I don’t mean to sound like Troy McClure, but sometimes I want to take an already pretty easy thing and make it even more flagrantly low in effort. And not only does this make enough excellently delicious risotto for dinner and then a non-bleak lunch the next day (in your face, instant noodles!) it also uses only one dish. So, less dishes for Tim to do, or for him to rinse and then put in the dishwasher (I can’t comprehend how we have a machine to do the dishes for us but still have to pre-wash them, hence why I never do it.) I’m not trying to be proud of how lazy I am or anything, in fact I’m too lazy to expend any feelings over it whatsoever. Kidding! On the one hand, I feel like “why should naturally helpful, good people in society be celebrated when I can’t help being this unhelpful” and on the other hand sometimes I am just being a dick to see how much I can get away with not doing.  
Back to the risotto, you wouldn’t necessarily think a version that you just shunt into the oven would work, since it’s the constant stirring of it that slowly releases the starch from the rice grains and gives it that soft, collapsing texture. But somehow it does, and frankly I don’t care to question why. It just does. The first time I tried this I simply stirred some herbs in and topped it with a little Whitestone Butter by Al Brown Manuka Smoked Butter that arrived in the mail because that’s right, I have the veneer of a fancy food blogger (as always, I wish I could tell my much younger self that this would happen, as something to cling on to and look forward to.) I’m not just saying this because I got it for free (I mean, in a roundabout way I am, but I would never lie to you about butter, okay?)  this butter really is quite incredible, the manuka smoke somehow making it meatily rich while the texture is dissolvingly creamy and light. It’s the ideal substance atop a very plain, but perfect risotto. But regular butter and plenty thereof is also always the right choice, too.
Oven Risotto

Adapted from a Donna Hay recipe. Makes plenty for four, or in our case, for two people and then two lunches the next day. 

2 cups arborio rice
2 teaspoons vegetable stock powder
1 tablespoon dijon mustard
5 cups water, of which up to 1 cup is white wine 
Optional: fistfuls of butter, lemon zest and juice (especially if you don’t have wine), herbs. I guess the mustard is optional too, but you want this to taste like something.

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. In an oven dish – around 2L capacity – tip in the rice, the wine, the water, the mustard and the stock powder. At this point I also dice up plenty of butter and add that in too, but if you don’t have butter or can’t eat dairy, I would lavishly drizzle in some olive oil. 

Cover the dish tightly with tinfoil, then bake for around an hour. At this point, you can stir in more butter, some lemon zest and juice, some herbs, some cream, parmesan, whatever, really. For this I grabbed a handful of chives and thyme leaves, since that’s what I had. 

Just plain, with a little mustard and butter and lemon, it’s surprisingly fulsome – heftily creamy and starchily comforting, the rice’s natural flavour shining through.

However, it also lends itself well to not being utterly plain. I made a glossy pink roast beetroot version of this – sliced up beetroot, roasted in plenty of olive oil, before adding the rice and liquid and baking. Last night I made a roasted parsnip version, with so much butter that the rice itself couldn’t quite absorb it all. It basically turned to nutty, caramelised paste. And was really wonderful. But uh, if you want to make your own, just bear in mind that it can only absorb about 150g butter before it starts heading paste-wards.

Some other cool things of late, in order of most to least of what I thought of first to write about: 
Am quite obsessed with knitting. It’s so calming, and repetitive. A bit like risotto, but you don’t have to stand up to do it! 
Witness the knitness.

On Friday I went to a secret party to celebrate ten years of Creative HQ. As with receiving butter, occasionally I get to go to A Thing. Tim and other friends were also there, and it was really quite an amazingly surreal, and just generally amazing night – fancy beer, a dance troupe, green screens, dry ice, a photobooth, a glitter cannon, pretzel sticks, chocolate schnapps. It gave me lots of good ideas on how I want my life to be (more glitter cannons! And pretzel sticks! And dance troupe-ing! And everything I just said, really.)

And today a really wonderful-for-me thing happened: I had my first story ever published in Cuisine magazine. I’ve spoken so often of how much I love this magazine and I won’t go on about it too much in case anyone from said magazine happens to read this and gets distinctly weirded out, but: I adore this magazine, and have been an avid reader of it since before I even knew how to cook. The fact that I have a story in there is a very big deal to me. The story itself is a piece on Treme, New Orleans, and the sights and sounds and eats therein, based on the time Tim and I spent there last October.

Finally: saw some cool hund friends!

Finally-finally: I’m going to bring up again that I was published in Cuisine magazine, because I’m just so happy and excited and self-proud. 
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title via: Lazy Line Painter Jane, by Belle and Sebastian. This is one of about three of their songs that I am into, but I am so VERY into this song. The breakdown at the end is spectacular. 
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music lately:
Camera Obscura, The Sweetest Thing. This song is from an album called My Maudlin Career, which is a bit of a great title. The song also rules. Otherwise I wouldn’t have put it here, of course.

The sadly late Selena, Dreaming of You. Silky-soft early nineties pop/r’n’b. Alas, my particular obsession with reading about tragically dead celebrities on wikipedia was what reminded me about how sweet this song is.
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Next time: possibly something from the new Cuisine magazine, if I ever manage to stop reading my byline over and over that is. 

you like tomato and i like tomahto

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It’s nice to have a happy little rut of recipes that are easy enough that you can make them while mentally and emotionally exhausted, not to mention physically exhausted (for example: from merely existing, or from watching the latest Game of Thrones, amiright? Spoiler alert: omg.) But they’re also adjustable and reliably versatile, like an old comfortable bra, that you can really throw them into anything and you’ll feel like you’ve done something nice for yourself of an evening. Somehow, this Tomato, Almond and Smoked Paprika sauce has become that to me. I think it’s based on a sauce I saw on a cooking show one time – seriously, those are the only details that I can remember – and occasionally I add other things to it. But it manages to be utterly simple, vaguely nutrient-adjacent (considering the nutritional value of my lunchtime pot noodles is akin to that of their polystyrene containers) and yet a little flashy and sexy and interesting. One of my very favourite things to do with it is to very slowly fry eggs in about five tablespoons of olive oil, then use that olive oil in the sauce itself, then serve all of that over couscous. But on Monday – Queen’s birthday, oh that joyous occasion…of a Monday off! – I made it to have roasted vegetables dipped into it or blanketed under it, while my friend Kim and I watched The Craft. 

I was curious to see if The Craft was still the piece of important, flawless filmmaking that it seemed to be to me in 1996. It um, wasn’t quite. But it was also still really fantastic in some ways, most of them fashion-related, and I still appreciate what it meant to me back in the day. A film about women, into witchcraft, who said “we are the weirdos, mister?” Thumbs up.

(The red candle in front melted rapidly and spilled over onto the floor. Which we only noticed after the movie finished. I admit, at first my brain thought “gasp! It’s an evil thing like the thing from the thing in the movie!” But really…it was just spilled wax. Phew.)

This sauce is just ridiculously delicious, although frankly I think the batch I made for myself and Kim was my weakest so far. Possibly because I used multigrain bread, which meant the sauce had linseeds dispersed through it, which…yeah. Not quite what I was going for. Generally though, this sauce is rich and luscious and a little smoky from the paprika and brilliant with all sorts of things – the aforementioned fried eggs, stirred through pasta, poured over cubed roasted potatoes for a patatas bravas effect, tipped onto polenta…it just goes with all things. Particularly these crisp, collapsing and slightly charred vegetables.

Roast Cauliflower and Parsnip with Tomato, Almond and Smoked Paprika Sauce

A recipe by myself.

As much cauliflower and as many parsnips as you please. I found about half of the former and two of the latter fit comfortably on one oven tray and will feed 2-3.
Olive oil
2 slices thick white bread (I used seeded this time round. Uh…don’t.)
1/2 cup whole almonds
1 can tomatoes
1 heaped teaspoon smoked paprika
Salt

Set your oven to 220 C and line a baking tray with baking paper. Slice the parsnip and cauliflower up however you like, but the more flat/thin you go, the better likelihood of crisp-ity there is. Arrange in one layer on the tray, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and roast for about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, blast the bread and almonds together in the food processor till the almonds are good and nubbly and small. This may take some time. If your bread is quite stale, soak it in a little cold water for a while. Then drain the can of tomatoes of its liquid – I know, this seems kind of wasteful. I don’t know, drink the liquid if you feel bad about it (actually don’t, it’s weird and metallic and horrible on its own from the tin) and tip the tomatoes into the food processor with the bread-almond stuff and continue to process till it looks saucy and incorporated. Finally, add the paprika, a good pinch of salt, and plenty of olive oil – about three tablespoons – and process again. Taste to see if it wants any more salt or paprika, then either serve cold or heated gently in a saucepan in a bowl on the side of the vegetables. 

Dip the vegetables in the sauce or pile them into small bowls and spoon the sauce over. 

In case you’re wondering, the reason these are sitting on a cardboard box is because our one small table has our projector sitting on a chair on top of it. It’s kind of an awkward fixture to have in the house, but then we keep wanting to use the projector, so perhaps this is our life now. It’s not a bad life, considering how fun it is watching things projected in large scale onto the wall. 

What else happened on the long weekend? Why, plenty.

We went to our friend Craig’s 30th. It was a very fun night (less fun the next morning) especially bedizening ourselves with fake tattoos of Craig’s face (tattoo locations of Craig’s face include Tim’s actual face) and “Tattoos are for losers”.

First new duvet cover since 2006. As per, “is it instagrammable” guilelessly affected the decision-making process. It’s so crisp and clean and whenever I wake up I feel like I’ve been sleeping inside a bed of white chocolate ganache, I love it.

Amazing burritos occurred.
Hello.
And finally I got an email telling me an advance copy of my cookbook (which isn’t due out till September so don’t try asking your bookstore about it yet, unless you think it will build up major h y p e) which I received in the mail today and nearly cried and threw up everywhere when I saw it because every emotion in the world suddenly played out in my brain. I mean, I’m really happy with it of course, but there was just such a rush of feelings when I held it in my hands for the first time, so much more intense than just seeing the printouts of the design and the manuscript and so on. I will have to work on this so I don’t black out every time I walk into a bookshop in September. It’s just very exciting and terrifying and strange and happy all at the same time. Cookbook! 
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Title via: Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, a song about a couple who say words differently sometimes. Adorable! Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong do a reliably snappy version. 
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Music lately:

Mariah Carey feat Miguel, Beautiful. This dreamy, warm song feels like a return to form for my favourite singer ever who’s non-returns to form I’d totally justify anyway. Have listened to it many, many, many times. 

The final few episodes of Nashville just slew me. I shed human tears and couldn’t move for half an hour after the season finale. A joyful highlight though, was Clare Bowen as Scarlett O’Conner, singing the hugely pretty Looking For A Place To Shine. 

Polly Scattergood, Wanderlust. Cannot. Stop. Listening. To. This song. 
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Next time: Umm. I know not of any specifics yet. Will see where my brain takes me. Could probably do with a better weekday lunch than pot noodles, that could be a thing. 

running through the whisker wheat chasing some prize down

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I have been so damn verbose lately (verbose, fittingly, has so many delicious synonyms – pleonastic, circumlocutory, prolix) and more than a little negative (in fairness, there is much to be negative about out there. Maybe I’m just being myself) that I’m aiming for this post to be snappier and sunnier.

So, here are some succinct, happy things, before I get to the food (note: an insuccinctly massive list of succinct things)

Slowly but actually diminishing credit card debt // Getting home from work, forcing my slatternly self to immediately hang up my coat and put away my clothes, and chaging into one of my softest, oldest tshirts and underwear right away. The winter auxiliary mode includes options like adding thick fluffy socks, or not adding socks and sitting right by the heater, or rolling yourself in a blanket like you’re a cinnamon bun // a healed tattoo and oh so specific daydreams about more // Yoga // Dusky grey and pastel coloured nailpolish // A letter from dear Ange in London, the breathless opening and reading of which had distinct Pride-and-Prejudice-era thrills to it // Coffee, always coffee // Carefully planned spontaneous dance parties (also just spontaneous ones) // Looking after myself a bit, in various ways // Game of Thrones has had a lot of scenes featuring amazing butts lately // Buying a very cheap and probably utterly useless trenchcoat I bought online, in the hopes of looking like Bel Rowley from The Hour (I also want to look like Lix, with her high-waisted trousers and gorgeous blouses, all the better to drink whisky in. Marnie’s party dresses, less so, but I just wanted to mention Marnie. Um.) // Balancing imminent cookbook panic with flights of fancy about pretty much charming the world in interviews and being a cool person and stuff plus reminding myself that panicing about a cookbook means I’ve still written a cookbook // txts from friends that are mostly encouraging emoji // Watching episode after episode of Elementary with Tim, we’re pretty obsessed (also: Bob’s Burgers) // Parks and Rec renewed for a sixth season // The warm tofu at Tatsushi, it’s celestial // Google imaging lop-eared bunnies // Kissing // Laughing so hard with friends at Rose Matafeo’s brill comedy show, also saying hi to her afterwards and not screwing it up in my usual socially awkward manner // Going to a doctor who actually listened to me about my anxiety and other bits and pieces, unlike the last one who I paid $60 to be dismissive // Spontaneous and swoonful cherry pie at Six Barrel Soda.

Also: The Carb on Carb Agenda.

Remorse hit as soon as I started heaping this upon the large white dish. Like, it’s not even a plate, I think it’s more for putting cakes on. Who do I think I am. Some kind of…food blogger? Well, okay. But tiny grains and a flat surface are not practical for extracting spoonfuls of. It looked dramatic and pretty though, and what price that? Anyway, stepping back a little, what you are looking at here is golden, fried tiny cubes of potato, stirred into soft, spiced burghal wheat, jeweled with walnuts and nigella seeds and rocket. Carbohydrates, be they bread or pasta or rice or noodles or couscous, or, in this case, wheat and potatoes, have this “everything’s gonna be alright” filling warmth to them, and so it goes that carb-on-carb is doubly comforting. Potato pizza. Marmite and crisps sandwiches. Spaghetti on toast. Dipping hot chips into potato and gravy. And this. Which I thought up myself, although I’m sure I must have seen it somewhere before – I’m good, but not that good.

Really, you can just fry the potatoes and stir them into burghal wheat and you’ll still have a meal fit for a Khaleesi. But the extra bits and pieces make it superlative-worthy.

Fried Potato Burghal Wheat with Walnuts and Rocket

A recipe by myself. Serves two, with some left over for just one person for lunch the next day. 

Two medium or three small potatoes. Or however many feels right. In your heart.
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup burghal wheat (this is also known as bulghur wheat.)
1 teaspoon ras-el-hanout (or a mixture of ground cinnamon, cumin, and cardamom)
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 handful walnuts
1 handful rocket leaves
1 teaspoon nigella seeds, or sesame seeds, or anything small and garnishy, really.

Slice the potatoes into very, very small squares – a few millimeters to 1cm wide. Don’t actually bother to measure them or make them uniform, or even square. It’s the smallness that matters. 

Heat the oil in your largest saucepan, and tip in the pieces of potato. Spread out so they’re roughly in one even layer, and cover with a lid for five minutes – the steam will help cook the potato through. Then remove the lid, turn up the heat to high, and simply let the potato fry for about ten – fifteen minutes, stirring only occasionally, till the cubes are largely golden and crisp. It really doesn’t take too long but at the same time, does require some patience.

Meanwhile, tip the burghal wheat into a bowl, and add the ras-el-hanout and coriander seeds. Bring a jug of water to the boil, and once it’s done, pour into the bowl so it’s about 1cm above the level of the burghal, and then sit a dinner plate on top of the bowl – a plate bigger than the bowl, obvs – for about five minutes. 

Once the potatoes are good and crisp, lift the dinner plate off the bowl to reveal fluffy, enfluffened, fluffed up (yes) burghal. Remove the potatoes from the heat, tip in the burghal, stir it all around, tip that into a serving bowl, and sprinkle over the rocket leaves, the walnuts, and the nigella seeds. 

I can see how this might sound a little nose-wrinklingly odd, but the crouton-crunch of the potatoes against the fluffy, nutty, spicily warm burghal is AMAZING. Predictably, I dug for more crispy potato bits with the spoon, but both elements work so beautifully together. Also, on a distinctly lazy note, it’s nice to eat something with potatoes in it, but to not have to wait at least forty-five minutes for them to cook. This is surprisingly fast. And monumentally delicious.

On Sunday afternoon I had this sudden, intense notion that we should cut loose and go somewhere and do something. I sort of hate Sunday evenings, with their muffled, melancholic anticipation of the Monday to come, and their post-Friday/Saturday comedown, but sometimes it’s oddly pleasing to sort of bask in it, drive as far as you can go and stare listlessly at the sinking light in the sky and the landscape skidding by. And so we did. (Okay for all my romantic talk, it was more like this. Tim: why are we going to the beach? What? Me: I ‘unno, we could instagram the skyline, try to take photos of me jumping in the air by the shore like I’m a happy carefree person. Tim: Well, okay.) So we drove, and drove, and drove, out to Wainuiomata Beach.

The beach was isolated, and empty of all other people. The sky was mauve and orange, the colours fading into each other like a beautiful eyeshadow compact that I would look at admiringly but probably never wear.

And then the sky got darker and the beautiful moon appeared. And we drove home. Completely ruining the moodiness with our laughter.
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Title via: Joni Mitchell, Coyote. Complicated and stunning. Like a coyote. Okay, not really. But I stand by the first bit. Plus, coyotes might have hidden depths we just don’t know about. 
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Music lately:
Janine and the Mixtape, Hold Me. Brand new. Beautiful. One to watch, this one. 
Dave Brubeck, Take Five. The jauntiest damn tune there ever was.
Rachel Stevens, Some Girls. Mmmhmm. The odds were possibly against it, Stevens being an ex S Club 7 and all, but it’s so, so, sosososo good.
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Next time: I have the feeling I’ll be in the mood to bake this weekend. So you might see some of that.

"That was Groffle: The Awful Waffle, a book that I wrote on behalf of my education initiative"

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As you can see, my photos lately either take the form of badly lit dinner, or nicely lit but faux-artless scenes of plates and knives and forks. Or both. This scene is real, for what it’s worth (or I would’ve moved the damn lens cap out of the way.)

I have a theory. Well, that implies that it’s well thought-out – at this stage it’s less of a theory, more of a sentence on a blog. But: I swear food can sense fear, like horses can. (I know, I had a horrible horseriding accident at age ten. Sustained whiplash and a respectful terror of horses.) I have been on a ruining rampage in the kitchen lately, and it’s as if the food can tell I’m all nervous and have bad instincts about it. My latest screw-up was a salted caramel slice where I burned one can of condensed milk in the pan, and then, obtusely, the next batch refused to cook. Just wouldn’t. Slid around, off the base, which I’d already baked but which managed to somehow un-bake itself under the liquidy topping. I called it fail-slice. And ate most of it anyway over the next day or two, because the ingredients themselves still tasted okay.

That seemed so much more door-slammingly dramatic in my head, but to be fair, every time I ruin something I’m cooking it feels like the first and only time in humankind this has happened. The waste of ingredients, the bass-drop letdown after all that anticipation, the hangdog way that I have to impart the disappointing news to any expectant eaters. With that in mind, I am amazed that these falafel waffles, with their high level of novelty-induced-anticipation, and with their delicate, unbuttressed structure…worked. Worked just fine. Despite my nerves. So maybe food can’t smell fear, and all I have is a sentence, not a theory, and a lot of coincidentally recent cooking mistakes. The point is, I also have falafel waffles, and their relative success has helped my kitchen nerves no end, like in Sonic the Hedgehog when you gather up lots of sparkly rings, so it doesn’t matter if you lose a few here and there, because you will still have more rings to spare. (I played a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog one time.)

Sliced my lemon this way because I saw it in a fancy magazine. It looks so pretty but is kind of stupidly wasteful since you only get two slices per fruit. And now I’m in an aesthetics vs practicality food blogging quandary. Which is kind of like a metaphor for the waffles! (Or perhaps just kind of like the waffles.)  

I like a good portmanteau-ing as much as the next person, and “fawaffle” is pleasing, but I think I better enjoy the rolling assonance (hey…oh?) of falafel waffle written in full. I first heard of these when a friend Kat (who I’ve met all of once, but you know, the internet!) emailed me with some suggestions of things to do in New York while Tim and I were there in October last year. She mentioned that we should definitely try falafel waffle. We never made it to this mystical place but the idea stuck in my head. Falafel mix, but instead of baking or frying it, clamp it between the crenellated arms of a waffle maker. There’s significant aesthetic outcome involved, sure, but falafel is delicious and enwaffling it is surprisingly practical. It makes a lot at once, you don’t have to watch it, it’s really cute.

Let me first apologise hugely though, for posting a recipe that you need specialised equipment for. I try not to do this. In my defensive defense, not one of the bajillion ice cream recipes that I’ve posted on this blog needs an ice cream machine. But I really can’t see myself getting around the waffle maker thing in order to make waffles appear. I don’t know if there’s some alternative that involves indenting pancakes with the end of a fork or something. I…hope not.

Falafel Waffles

Makes two. Recipe by me. Concept not mine. To cold-weary to google them.

2 cans chickpeas (I’d really wanted to soak chickpeas overnight and blend them up, but continually forgot.)
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon tahini (or peanut butter, in a pinch)
1 handful chopped herbs: coriander, parsely, chives, or all three. I only had a tablespoon of chives, but still.
1 teaspoon ground cumin, more if your cumin has been sitting around for years
1 pinch ground cinnamon
1 egg

To serve: anything at all – lemon slices, thick plain yoghurt, more tahini, mustard, chilli sauce, tomato sauce, whatever.

Drain the chickpeas and blend them up in a food processor (more specific equipment, sorry, I’m on a roll here) till quite well-blended but not pureed – you want a a mix that’s nubbly in places yet smooth in places. Basically: be half-hearted about your processing and it will probably turn out how it’s supposed to. Add the salt, tahini, herbs, cumin, cinnamon and egg and pulse briefly to mix. 

Heat up a little oil in your waffle iron, putting it on a very high setting. Once you’re sure it’s good and hot, spoon in half the falafel mix, pushing it round evenly with the spoon, and shut down the lid. Leave it for a good solid five minutes, maybe longer – till it really seems cooked through. Use a spatula to carefully lever it away from the bottom grill, then lift it up and onto a plate. Repeat with the remaining mix.

I know two damn waffles doesn’t sound like much at all, but these are ridiculously filling, and when you think about it, each embossed heart segment is like a whole falafel on its own. There’s not that deep-fried crunch of the real thing, but it’s still excellent, outside of its looks. The cumin is rich and aromatic (that feels stupid now that I’ve written it down but it just is, okay) the indents making for maximum crispness within the baked-not-fried context, and chickpeas have a nutty deliciousness all of their own. Plus I covered mine in tahini and thick plain yoghurt and mustard and lemon juice, which made it look appalling but taste even better.

Is a waffle iron even worth it? Kinda. I adore waffles, but they are best if someone else is making them for you, otherwise I tend to get tired/bored halfway through the bowl of batter. Also they just aren’t as good as ones from a cafe generally. But on the other hand: waffles! Whenever you want them and also have the energy and ingredients! Tim and I got ours through Fly Buys, which is this points-gathering rewards scheme that takes forever to accumulate (one point per $25 spent on groceries. I mean really. Anyone rich enough to gather up enough points to get anything with that kind of system doesn’t need the system!) After seven or so years we scraped together enough points to get this waffle iron though, so…hooray for the system. The system is sound.

As well as apologising for your needing a waffle iron to make waffles, I’d also like to apologise if this particular post seems grave and unenthused: I have a cold and every word I type feels like an effort, the kind of effort when you’re trapped in a dream and you have to try and wake yourself up with an exhausting push of the body because it feels like a house is flattening you. I may also feel like the only person who has ever had a cold before, but it doesn’t help that work is so busy this week that I can’t take a forseeable sick day anytime soon, despite feeling deliriously atrocious. Even with my dramatics, that’s pretty much telling it like it is without too much embellishment. Which is all I’ll say about that – I’m always nervous to talk about work on here in case I get pulled into an office and am told “you said the word ‘work’ on your blog. That crossed a line between the professional and the personal. You’re fired and/or arrested.” (I’m basically always nervous, in fact.) I’m hoping I can outwit this cold with my smarts though, like Liam Neeson in Tooken 2. I still currently retain my sense of smell and taste, and the coughing only happens at night when I’m trying to sleep, so there’s that. I have ginger and whisky and vitamins and determination to get better by the weekend. And an immunity boosting ego trip from successfully making falafel waffles!

Between the cold and work I’ve been either running around or laying low but I had a good wine-fuelled impromptu-dance-party on Friday night, swooned frequently over Lost in Austen (it’s silly, but wins on swoon-per-capita) and saw this cool cat on Sunday at book group. Someone commented on instagram that this cat’s face is a bit like my natural face in photos. What a compliment! (That’s not sarcasm.) Like a horse smelling fear, or a recipe possibly smelling fear, cats can normally tell how badly I want to be their friend and so, being the bloody-minded creatures they are, remain aloof. But despite its sneer here, this cat (Oscar) was in fact super friendly and flopsy and nuzzlingly ridiculous.

(hands up who wants a pet cat more than ever now)

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Title via: Occasionally I quote things other than songs here. And really, who is more glowingly waffle-proud than Parks and Recreation’s glorious hero, Leslie Knope? (She’s a TV character, in case you don’t know. And if you didn’t: find out.) But also I suspect Leslie Knope would really hate falafel waffles, on account of their being full of legumes and lacking syrup. But still: waffles. So important.
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Music lately: 

Flip Grater, The Quit. Quiet and smoky, I love it.

What I Did For Love, from the musical A Chorus Line – just one of the most gorgeous songs in the world. The lyrics are so, ugh, just so good. “Look, my eyes are dry, the dream was ours to borrow…” I predictably love Idina Menzel’s version which she sang for President Obama, no big.

Robin Thicke, TI, Pharrell, Blurred Lines. Cannot quit this song.
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Next time: Something non-specialised like waffles, something gleaming with triumph because I definitely won’t have this cold anymore, no way. No ma’am.

reminds us of our birthdays which we always forget

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As I was eating my dinner and watching Game of Thrones this evening, I thought: I really shouldn’t be doing this. Either eat, or watch Game of Thrones, but don’t do them simultaneously because the onslaught of viscera is decidedly not food-friendly. This has nothing to do with anything, I just wanted to make the point.

Anyway, it’s my birthday tomorrow! But you get the presents! In the form of a recipe for braised lentils. Birthday Eve, I call it, and as such, one’s thoughts turn to reflection. Ha. I live every day like it’s the contemplative lead-up to further aging, and reflect upon everything I’ve ever done so much that, like a long-running TV show, the whole process should be able to go into syndication so I don’t have to come up with new stuff any more. Instead, just looping around without any effort from me, while I take time out to snooze. I got to have a late, long lunch with the fantastically high-achieving and welcoming Marianne Elliot from La Boca Loca on Saturday, and we talked about everything – the names people will call women but not men to bring them down; standing by things you’ve said; tacos; and this sense of constantly running towards the next thing having barely achieved the last thing. The latter was oddly heartening, in that basic way that recognition of something can be. I have recently been getting back into that troubled but utterly addictive musical Chess, and there’s this line that I never even noticed before that Josh Groban doesn’t so much sing as massage into the air with his throat: “Now I’m where I want to be and who I want to be and doing what I always said I would and yet I feel I haven’t won at all – running for my life and never looking back in case there’s someone right behind to shoot me down and say you always knew I’d fall“. Heavy! And yet I was like whoa, Josh Groban, way to pluck words from my brain with your rich vanilla scented-candle of a voice and articulate them perfectly via a convoluted musical that can’t even commit to its own plot.

And yet, and yet. I received some final pdfs for my cookbook that I’m driving you all away from with my angst and lentils; and oh wow. As you know a lot of time has been put into proofing the proofs (if you didn’t know, the proofs are like, here’s what your book will look like but on hundreds of pieces of paper which you will immediately drop, and as they hit the floor they will both papercut the tender vamp of your bare foot and shuffle themselves out of order with the impeccable swiftness of a Vegas croupier.)

The proofs were really beautiful, and I felt every late night and early morning and email back and forth between the publishers and the whipsmart feedback of my friends and team, photographers Kim and Jason and stylist Kate, and every thought Tim had pretty much ever had since he’s good with wisdom-requiring stuff like this…was not only worth it, but completely evident in the soon-to-be real pages of this book. Which is out in September so sure, put a circle round that month on your calendar but also don’t go rushing into bookshops just yet – she says optimistically – because September is still some significant distance away. As I was reading through it I thought to myself: this book is amazing and you’re such a good writer and you deserve this. A surprisingly nice thing to think about one’s self. And also…a nice thing to think about a consumer item that you have to eventually put your name to in the public arena and sell copies of.

The word braised: I first heard it when I spent a couple of years at boarding school. It essentially means roasted but in significant liquid, but when the kitchen said “braised steak” was for dinner, they essentially meant wet beef, boiled cheerlessly in a weakly tomato-based sauce. And so…it’s not a cooking method I go out of my way to use. I’m not sure what I’m even thinking, trying to braise lentils, second only to tofu as far as maligned leguminous foodstuffs go. But word associations can change, and plus, something about the wilful ugliness of it all makes it almost head back round again to appealing? Well, whatever it sounds like to you – and I mean, it does help if you don’t entirely hate lentils in the first place – this is really very delicious. Simple and easy and surprisingly full of rich, bold flavour from the lemon, mustard and herbs, as well as a lot of oil and salt.

A lot of this can be changed for what you have to hand, although while I want to offer options it would be unhelpful not to have some kind of base recipe that I stand by. If you don’t have hazelnuts, almonds would be perfect, something like carrots would be fine instead of parsnips, use more rosemary instead of thyme, and so on and so on. But hazelnuts and thyme – my favourite herb – are rich and resinous, parsnips have a natural caramelised sweetness, and in a dish like this, cardamom is one of those stealth spices that lets you know flavour is present without revealing how or from where. But you could just leave it out.

Braised Lentils and Vegetables with Hazelnuts, Lemon and Thyme

Serves two, with some leftovers. A recipe by myself.

1/2 cup dried brown lentils
2 parsnips
2 courgettes
1 capsicum
1/3 cup olive oil
Juice of one large lemon, or two of those stupid tiny near-juiceless ones that tend to dominate the supermarket
1 tablespoon dijon mustard (or wholegrain. I could eat either with a spoon.)
Pinch of ground cardamom, or seeds from two cardamom pods
1 teaspoon dried rosemary (or “rubbed rosemary” as my packet calls it. Which made me laugh. That said, if you don’t have it, dried oregano, sage or marjoram is also fine.)
Good pinch salt
1/3 cup whole hazelnuts
A couple of stems of fresh thyme, or a couple of teaspoons of dried thyme leaves

Place the lentils in a bowl and cover with freshly boiled water. Leave to sit for an hour – although the longer the better, really. An hour is fine though, and certainly makes the whole thing more feasible straight after work or at the end of a long day.

Drain the lentils, and tip them into the base of a medium sized oven dish. Trim anything inedible from the vegetables and slice them into fairly uniform strips/sticks, then lay them on top of the lentils in the oven dish. Set your oven to 180 C/350 F.

Mix together the olive oil, lemon juice, mustard, cardamom, rosemary, and a generous pinch of salt. Pour this over the vegetables and lentils, then pour over a cup (250ml) of hot water. Place in the oven and cook for an hour. At this stage, taste the lentils – they should be firm, but cooked through. If not, return to the oven for a little longer. Then, turn the oven up to 200 C, scatter the hazelnuts and thyme leaves over the top, and return to the oven for a further ten minutes. Serve, turn the oven off and leave the door open to try and heat your house up.

The firm lentils and softly bulging vegetables slowly taking in all that lemony, oily dressing; the hazelnuts giving luxe and depth and crunch; my beatific smile at all of this being filled with more vitamins than my body can physically process. It’s a quiet, calming dinner after a Saturday night spent drinking cider while ten-pin bowling; grapefruit daquiris while celebrating the third birthday of coolhaunt Monterey, and beer while loitering at a fancy pub as Devon Anna Smith played records I liked (it maybe looks worse on paper, I was fine.)

Some facts about my birthday:

There are ELEVEN notable ice hockey players born on April 17, according to Wikipedia.
I’m the oldest child. I was born at 8.50pm-ish. I frowned a lot and immediately got colic and did not stop screaming for six months. Luckily I made up for it by being a very overachieving preschooler.
While I can’t afford all the trinkets I want I did buy this cool cat (bottom centre), a print from local artist Pinky Fang. It seems to go well with the sinister cat we bought in New Orleans, and my Devon Anna Smith print. Three cats seems like a good number to have around.
Tomorrow is the final reading of the Marriage Act Bill which will decide whether marriage equality is happening in New Zealand or not. Every day it seems more and more unfair that I’m allowed to marry someone just because of the ridiculous coincidence that they happen to be a man. I wrote a long thoughtsy thinkpiece paragraph after this and then deleted it because it’s much simpler to just say: this bill means a lot to me not quite just because I’m a more-or-less decent person who wants equal rights for all, or because Tim and I are engaged but have decided not to marry unless it goes ahead, but also because I’m also…not straight. The Q in LGBTQ. Yes. I won’t say much more about this, apart from that I realised it an awfully long time ago, but only articulated it relatively recently. Articulating all this was like putting on glasses and seeing things just as they are but a little clearer (I use this analogy a lot, sure, but looking at things is just so great since I got my glasses). Doing so is of course a totally private, personal choice for everyone, and this is just my way. While I worried that I’d left it too long -whatever that means – or that I’d somehow express all this horribly wrong, or that braised lentils wasn’t how I wanted to remember it happening in years to come, or that maybe I should say it next time, or next-next time, I also thought I’d just…say it. It’s still a scary thing to do. But every day brings us closer to a time when it will be less and less scary to say it. Armed with the knowledge that you’re all cool and I’ve never once heard anything said against it that made the slightest bit of sense, I figure you all know pretty much everything about me anyway, and this is just another thing to matter-of-factly know.

I’m turning 27. This is an age where people will still say “so old” but also “so young” at you, depending on the person. I’m not sure when that will stop.

Victoria Beckham is born on April 17. When I was in my deadly-fervent Spice Girls phase, sharing a birthday with one was seen as some kind of ancient sacrosanct blessing. (Seen by me, and me alone.)

 
Title via: Side By Side By Side, from the Sondheim musical Company. The AMAZING Sondheim musical. Please keep having birthdays, Sondheim. 

Music lately: 

Blurred Lines, Robin Thicke with Pharrell and TI. I am addicted to this song like wo. And also reminded of the massive crush I used to have on Pharrell.

Birthday, Sugarcubes. Ones thoughts also turn to songs with the word birthday in the title. Bjork’s soaring, growling belting here is outrageously amazing. Extra fun in Icelandic!
 
Next time: Hoping to have another I Should Tell You interview up on Friday. Who’s it going to be? Why, who do you think I am, some kind of organised person? 

i add two and two, the most simple addition

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It’s fascinating how faltering memory is. My best friend from high school was in town last night and came to visit Tim and I ahead of a one-way trip to South America in June (we never ever see each other so even though that sounds far away, this is, as they say, it.) I lamented how I could go for six months without making a cup of tea but still know how to make one, while remembering language is like trying to grasp the details of a vivid dream. Unless you’re in amongst it, it just slips out from between your fingers the harder you try to grasp onto what you know.

I was also recounting to Tim recently a vague yet arresting memory from my early years: being at the house of a friend of my parents, a supercool sophisticated older girl (probably…nine?) being really nice to me, bawling my eyes out when we had to leave because I liked her so much, and then the girl showing me all her Barbie accessories and saying I could choose any one to take home. Even then at age, oh, six? I was floored by her generosity. In hindsight, it could’ve been a number of things – she’d outgrown the dolls and could afford to be magnanimous, her mother had stage-whispered at her behind my back to give me something to stop me crying, genuine generosity, who knows? All I know is I ended up with a laughably impressive pink Barbie Corvette convertible. I never saw those people again. Or maybe I did, and maybe I remembered this all wrong, y’know? I’m so sure that’s how it went, but memory is tricksy and mercurial like that.

Where am I going with this? Literally nowhere. It’s just this recipe is quicker than a sneeze and I wanted to indulge in some vignette-ery. Wanna make something of it?

This is my blog, and I will have my clunky segue and eat it too. I recently got to have the spoils of this roasted butternut recipe, invented by my friend Brendan and made by my also-friend Kim, and it was so good that I was determined to make it myself as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It’s also so very simple that words haven’t been invented yet to describe how little you have to do to achieve the finished result.

Cinnamon-Golden Syrup Roasted Butternut Squash

Full credit to my friend Brendan for inventing this and letting me blog about it, full credit to Kim for txting me the premise of the recipe after already telling me twice, and for just being great. 

1 butternut squash
2 tablespoons olive oil, or a blasting of cooking oil spray (I didn’t have the latter) 
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoons golden syrup or brown sugar
Salt

Note: did I actually use these measurements? Nooo. I just enthusiastically shook the bottle of olive oil over the cut halves, gave it enough of a crop-dusting of cinnamon so that the surface was speckled and brown, and lightly drizzled over golden syrup from a squeezy bottle. But on the other hand, I appreciate that sometimes actual quantities can be useful when you’ve never made a thing before, or if you don’t cook all the time. 

Slice the butternut in half lengthways, sprinkle over all the remaining ingredients – don’t hold back on anything – and roast on a baking paper lined oven tray at about 200 C/400 F (or 180 if your oven is particularly blasty) for about 40 minutes, until it is soft and darkened and almost collapsing in on itself. That is it.

It might sound too simple, it might sound like it’s going to turn into pudding, but butternut’s dense, firm texture can handle a lot of what you’re throwing at it, quietly absorbing all that cinnamon and syrup without turning into creme brulee. The oil and salt are what keep it in check, making it more fulsomely luscious and counteracting the blush of sweetness on the surface, and it smells incredible. Butternut is already a little sweet and rich, and the tickle of cinnamon and stab of salt just points up everything good about it, while slowly roasting it makes it soft and pliant enough that you can plunge a spoon into it. I just dropped a large spoonful of it onto a plate and stirred in butter and more salt, Tim spread his on a slice of baguette and topped it with tomato. The next night I stirred the leftovers into cooked spaghetti with lemon juice, burned butter, capers, toasted almonds and lemon zest. It’s versatile stuff. Thanks, Brendan!

Making something so perfect, and perfectly simple was the ideal activity on Sunday night after throwing our friend Ange a Twin Peaks themed birthday/farewell one-two punch party (I just like saying one-two punch, this party had no pugilism subtheme) and also after attempting to make Ange a birthday cake that was far too ambitious in its scope and doomed to failure. A triple-layer bundt cake, make particularly enormous by being layered up on top of a ring cake. It had no structure, it was sliding sideways, bits of bundt were chipping off, it was not the sophisticated elegant thing I’d vainly pictured. Tim returned home from picking up ice to find me recklessly slinging the top layers of bundt into a bowl while Ange laughed, possibly nervously. The blackberry custard I’d made to sandwich together the layers gave the remaining ring cake a kind of blood-smeared look that we decided we really liked, and so I studded it with cornflake chocolate (melted dark chocolate poured over cornflakes, frozen, broken into irregular pieces) and pierced it with long, thin beeswax candles which make anything look dramatic, and suddenly…it worked. But oh damn. It might be a while before I attempt to make a foot-tall, triple layer vegan bundt cake again. On the other hand I did get to refer to myself as Special Agent Fail Cooper.
Photo by the aforementioned Kim. Whose photos from early in the night you should most definitely check out, because they are stunning and my friends are all such babes that I have no more swoons to give.
Fortunately the party itself went off without a hitch, in fact describing it like that does it a disservice. It went off amazingly. Our clever friends Kate and Jason had sent us a rasterbated image of the waterfall used in the opening credits – rasterbation is when you blow up an image across as many pieces of paper as you want and it’s all pixellated and it looks amazing – and yes, I cannot even deal with the fact that rasterbating is a word – and we all put it up on one of our walls on Thursday night.
As Saturday went on, the place acquired a black and white chevron rug; a red curtain (actually an old duvet cover, but who can tell in the dark?) red and black balloons; the stunning Welcome to Twin Peaks sign painted by Kate pictured above; a slightly crappy RR Diner sign painted by me; a table full of donuts; a cherry pie (made by me and it was so great, in case you’re thinking I’m being self-effacing for the sake of it); lots of coffee; a Wanted sign for BOB; red light bulbs; owls; candles; brie and butter baguettes, and finally: a framed picture of Laura Palmer whose eyes follow you round the room. Even when you uneasily sit it face down on the shelf. 
I went as secret-video-footage Laura Palmer, wearing a turtleneck for the first time since, oh, 2003, a dark green sweater, a tweed skirt, peachy ballet tights and brogues. I sweated myself into a stupor, but it was fun. I had planned to get progressively deader and plastic-wrapped as the night went on, but a guest arrived already wrapped in plastic looking so committed and excellent that I decided – with some small relief – to just stay put. 

Tim was special agent Dale Cooper because who else could he be? We also had a David Lynch, a Bobby Briggs, a swoonful Audrey Horne (that was Ange) a Nadine, a Lucy Moran, a cousin Maddy, a veritable creepy suburb of characters in fact. And because it was a party thrown for someone else, I only knew about half the people in the room and so got to live out my somewhat pitiable fantasy of introducing myself to people and saying one or all of the following: “It’s a little lavish, but we call it home”; “We’re very informal here, as you can see” or “we’re tres liberal“. If you hear a faint whooshing sound, it’s probably the breeze caused from the collective shaking of heads of people reading this. But I care not.

It was an incomprehensibly fun night, although all the frantic dancing and fun-having and so on merely clouded the fact that I’m going to miss Ange so much when she moves to London. She was the very first person Tim and I met when we moved to Wellington, and while it was no meet-cute (“I guess we’re living together…okay bye”) we nevertheless have stayed firm friends, getting firmer and firmer as the years go on, our friendship near-on calcifying by this point in fact. Sigh. Partying is such sweet sorrow.

(I also love saying that.)
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Title via: The Music That Makes Me Dance, from the musical Funny Girl. I kinda tear up even just typing the name Laurie Beechman, but it’s worth the inevitable sniffles to see her sing this gorgeous song. 
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Music lately:

I liked it just fine at the time, and I wouldn’t necessarily play it for fun on a day-to-day basis, but put R Kelly’s Remix to Ignition on and suddenly there’s ain’t no mountain high enough to keep me from the dancefloor. Verily, this was proven on Saturday night.

I’ve already mentioned it a zillion times on this blog but in case you’ve been hiding under a bushel like some self-effacing person’s light: Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart, from Twin Peaks, sung by Julee Cruise. It gets better with every listen, and not a week goes by that I don’t play it about five times over. So.

Bobby Womack, The Bravest Man In The Universe from the record of the same name. A record that I can keep flipping over and over and not get sick of.
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Next time: Something slightly more complicated, but…not triple layer bundt complicated.