Category: Side Dishes and Snacks

i am the new year, i’m the way home

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Well well well, if it isn’t 2019, waltzing in bang on time. To start the year off with perhaps unearned but nevertheless ebullient ebullience I have two recipes for you, one via my mother and one via my father.

But first: I have a suspicion about the momentousness of the New Year that I also carry for weddings – everyone’s all, “we’ve got to have the time of our life! It’s New Year’s Eve! The party of the year! New Year New Me! This year will be different!” But where is that energy on like, March 3rd? Where is that energy every time someone complains about Monday looming unwelcomely on the horizon? Why are we so pressed about this one particular day that we otherwise would regard with indifference at best? That’s right, the New Year is but another calendar day. (How, if you’re wondering, this relates to weddings is: at said weddings we are all “love’s purest incarnation stands before us! I can’t believe these two love each other! I’ve never experienced anything like this! Not since the last wedding I attended!” And then two years down the line, if we see the same couple doing their groceries or whatever, well, what then of the flower petals and glad tidings? Why do we not cry and do poetry readings right there in the cat food aisle? How is it that their love is super interesting on the day of the wedding and then super mundane for the foreseeable future?)

THAT SAID! Any nudge in the direction of reflection and self-improvement is not the entire worst, and if you can use the turning of the year as motivation to do literally anything slightly better then well done, you. Indeed, as I shall demonstrate, I myself am not above such nudging! Despite my strong yet wilfully simplistic feelings about weddings, I am not anti-New Years sentiment at all. It’s just, something I have learned in this rich and storied life of mine is that every day can be a fresh start, a tiny new year, and relentless self-pressure once a year is not, in fact, the same as clear-headed motivation.

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With all that in mind I have some cautious yet hope-filled intentions for the year, about which I’m just going to see what happens but also, y’know, put in some effort, and they are as follows: I’d like to save money so I can go somewhere, perhaps on holiday, as befits an adult of my age yet eludes me entirely; I like the idea of getting kind of jacked upper arms; I wish to resume knitting again but for real; I intend to maintain a bullet journal and use it to help me in turn maintain healthy choices (it’s working so far, I’ve already cleaned my teeth every single day this year); I’d simply love, come December, to look back on the year and not regret any time wasted although that’s obviously fairly abstract and difficult to control, but most specifically and above all: I will prioritise my writing this year. I spent a lot of 2018 feeling paralysed by various factors but in 2019 I want to create more recipes, plan a cookbook, pitch more things, do fiction or fiction-ish writing, work out if I’m any good at poetry, I’m sure I am, get literally anyone to read my excellent Frasier food blog, make this blog absolutely shine, embark on projects with confidence and just really sincerely believe in myself and to not let any bad mood or sad mood or person or rejection or fear or tiredness stop me from that. (When I went home for Christmas, Mum was like “when your lease ends in February you could always just move back here and pretend it’s a writers retreat” and I was like “honestly, you know, that like, for real, could like, you know?”)

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Speaking of, going home for Christmas was the inspiration for the double-feature of recipes that you get today! First of all, on Christmas Eve while I was drinking port and enthusiastically re-watching The Crown with Dad, Mum whipped up this batch of immensely wholesome crackers held together only with goodwill and the gluey properties of chia seeds. It’s a recipe she absorbed, chia-like, from her best friend Vivienne (hence the name: Viv’s Crackers) and I honestly could not get enough of them. Because they’re comprised entirely of seeds, cooked long and slow, there’s this incredible toasty crunch yet utter lightness to them, and they’re just fantastically addictive as well as undoubtedly putting a shine on your coat with each one consumed. Mum and Viv drove me up to the airport on the day I flew back to Wellington to go to work and I pressed them for the recipe and their response was pretty vague – it’s just one of those recipes where you squint at the mixing bowl and make choices in the moment, the sort of thing that Aunt Daisy with all her instinctive wisdom and lively brevity would cook if she were around today. What I’ve written above is a kind of amalgam of what they told me, and obviously you can add many other things – Mum’s batch had cashews and pistachios in it, and Viv recommends adding a little chilli to the mixture. Either way, you’re only minimal effort and admittedly several hours’ slow baking away from nutty, softly crunchy deliciousness.

The Pkhali, which is a Georgian spinach and walnut dip, comes from a recipe in a cookbook that I got from Dad for Christmas, called Eat Your Greens. Thanks Dad! I adapted the recipe a little to suit my own tastes but it’s pretty close to what’s in the book, and what you end up with is this intensely leafy, herbal mixture, nubbly with walnuts and fragrant with spices, with juicy sour crunchy bursts of light-catching pomegranate seeds scattered over. Upon initial tasting it was a little worrisomely spinachy and spinachy alone, but after it sat in the fridge for a while it mellowed and developed and was in fact extremely compulsive stuff. Far be it from me to say what you can and can’t do to a Georgian recipe but I imagine you can play around with the components of this somewhat, based on what you have to hand. The spices all worked beautifully though and I wouldn’t personally change a thing, and the difference between the taste of the mixture before and after I added the citrus was astonishing – I know we’re all watching Salt Fat Acid Heat on Netflix but like, it really livened it up immensely. I find that packaged pomegranate seeds tend to taste a little like nail-polish remover, so if you can’t get a real pomegranate to deseed, I would consider perhaps some lemon or lime zest over the top or maybe some chopped up cherry tomatoes? Anything that makes you be all “damn, that’s fresh.”

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Viv’s Crackers

  • 1/3 cup chia seeds
  • 1/3 cup sunflower seeds
  • 1/3 cup pumpkin seeds
  • 1/3 cup flaxseeds
  • a pinch of ground cumin (optional)
  • sea salt

Set your oven to 130C/260F and line a baking tray with baking paper.

Place the chia seeds in a mixing bowl and cover, by about a centimetre, with water. Use a spatula to scrape any seeds that have scooted up the side of the bowl to make sure as much of the chia is submerged as possible. Set the bowl aside for ten or so minutes until the chia seeds have absorbed most of the water and the mixture is all gluey and almost gelatinous.

Stir in the sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and flaxseeds, which should transform it into a thickly seeded paste. Add a splash more water if it seems not paste-y enough, and add more seeds if it seems to need that instead. Tip this unlikely looking mixture onto the baking tray and using your spatula or the back of a spoon, press it down evenly to a thickness of about just under a centimetre. It doesn’t matter what shape you make, as you’re just going to break it all up into pieces anyway, but a uniform thickness is pretty important. Sprinkle with sea salt and the cumin.

Bake for 1 – 2 hours – I know it’s vague, but it all depends on your oven and the curve of the earth and so on. It’s ready when the mixture is dry all the way into the centre and underneath when you lift it up, and the edges are raised slightly. If you can’t seem to be able to get the centre to dry out after an hour or so, try carefully flipping it over (it should be solid enough to do so at this point, by which I mean, I did it) so that the underside gets more heat.

Allow to cool completely, then break into pieces and store in an airtight container.

Pkhali (Georgian Spinach and Walnut Dip)

Adapted from a recipe from Eat Your Greens by Pete Evans

  • 1 large bunch of young spinach leaves or 2 bags of baby spinach leaves
  • a handful of coriander leaves, stalks attached is fine
  • a handful of parsley, stalks attached is also fine
  • 80g walnuts
  • 1 garlic clove
  • 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground fenugreek
  • 1/4 teaspoon turmeric
  • a pinch of cayenne pepper or chilli powder
  • 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons lime juice (or lemon juice)
  • sea salt and pepper, lots, to taste
  • pomegranate seeds, to serve

Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil. While this is happening, thoroughly wash your spinach (if it’s from a supermarket packet you should be fine but the fresh stuff in bunches is full of crevices for dirt to hide in) and then throw it into the pan of water, along with the coriander and parsley, for thirty seconds. Then, remove it from the heat, drain it, and run it under lots of cold water. Put all these wet leaves into a food processor and blend into a thoroughly chopped grassy mulch, then scrape into a bowl and set aside. You’re going to be putting it back in though, so you don’t have to like clean the processor or anything.

Now place the walnuts, garlic, spices, vinegar, lime juice, olive oil, and a decent amount of salt and pepper into the processor and give it a few good blitzes, so that the walnuts are moderately obliterated but not rendered into nut butter or anything. Tip the spinach and herb mixture back in and pulse to combine the lot, then spatula – with some effort this time – the whole lot into a serving bowl. Taste to see if it needs more salt – and it probably will – and consider adding another good drizzle of olive oil. Cover and refrigerate for at least an hour, which will allow the flavours to develop, and sprinkle generously with freshly shucked pomegranate seeds when you’re ready to serve.

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On January 1st I had a picnic with my two best friends Kim and Kate and we revelled in the glorious nothing-to-do-ness of it all. There’s something quite beautiful about the first day of the year, not knowing what’s up ahead, none of the events that will inevitably tarnish your view of the year have happened yet, all your intentions sing of potential and not of cowardice or time lost or avoidance, it’s like a safe little bubble. We ate these crackers and this dip and some other treats and talked each other up and it was really lovely. (New Years Eve itself I was just working, by the way, which is fine with me as it neatly solves any anxiety about what to do in order to have the time of one’s life, but I also managed cunningly to sign off at midnight and so did what anyone in my shoes – by which I mean me – might do: I danced for three hours. And then got my leg sliced by the contents of the glass bin which I’m choosing magnanimously to not see as a bad sign or anything.)

So, happy new year everyone! This is, I say with all the unearned ebullience of someone who has only yet experienced two and a half days’ worth of it: definitely our year.

title from: New Year by The Breeders. Dreamy yet purposeful, just like me.

music lately:

Clubbed to Death by Rob Dougan, notably used on the Matrix soundtrack. It just really feels like something important is about to happen when you listen to it!

Your Dog, by Soccer Mommy. Starts deceptively low-key and breezily meandering and then the lyrics are just like…wow.

Whilst I have listened to the song a squillion times I hadn’t actually seen the video for Mitski’s frantically lonely song Nobody and though I can guarantee every person has already said this, may I just say – it’s so Bjork-y! (By which I guess I mean, it’s so Michele Gondry-y!) In a wonderful way!

Next time: I made some “cheese” sauce with roasted carrots and other stuff and plan to turn it into mac and cheese at some point, however the weather is SO HOT at the moment that I might have to postpone that in order to favour something colder.

PS if you wish, you can sign up here to receive a version of these blog posts sent to your inbox before anyone else gets to read them, but like, I’m just going to put them up here anyway so you’re in no danger of missing anything if you don’t. Just an option!

oh, these sour times

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There’s no dramatic reason for me missing last week’s post, I was literally just really tired and kept being too tired to do anything, and that’s all there is to it. It’s not the kind of tiredness that feels sickness-related, but then it’s also possible that my show-must-go-on hospo work ethic plus my show-must-go-on hospo work hours have completely raised my bar of what sickness looks like far beyond normal. For a minute I was like…is this depression again? But surely not! I’ve been pretty on top of that whole hornets nest for a while now? In this economy, who can honestly tell.

I decided to give myself a hall pass for my lost week because, well, I can’t get it back so I might as well move forward. This week’s recipe is tangentially inspired by a Nigella Lawson recipe – and if anyone’s going to get me up and at it again, it’s she – for something she called Salt and Vinegar Potatoes. I acknowledge that her recipe looks completely delicious, but also, hers and mine ended up completely different in execution. I thought it would be cool to simmer potatoes in heavily vinegared water then roast them a high heat and just like, see what happened as a result. What happened was: they were SO delicious.

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Now obviously you have got to have a taste for salt and vinegar potato chips in the first place, if you don’t then this recipe is not going to change your mind since it so beautifully imitates the flavour of their packaged provenance. As for me, ever since I was a kid I always loved their intense sour-salty flavour, the way they flay the skin from the inside of your mouth like sandpaper and burn your lips. A snack that maims. I have a vague childhood memory of being at a birthday party and alternating handfuls of salt and vinegar chips with handfuls of gumdrops, their gelatinous sugariness providing a neutralising agent in the same way that you might have a cold beer with a dish laden with hot chilli. (I also remember, possibly from the same party, possibly not, thinking it was a good idea to put lollies in my glass of lemonade, showing an early predilection for being either a culinary maverick or a horrifying concern, your stance may vary. There’s no fever dream like a sugar-fuelled child’s birthday, I tell you.)

So anyway, now we’ve established that salt and vinegar as a combination is not something that one sits on a fence about, let me continue insisting on how good this recipe tastes. The potatoes are sliced super thin to ensure maximum surface area for absorption, and I used a combination of apple cider vinegar – softer, mellower – and white vinegar – aggressive, face-dissolving, sour as hell – to simmer them in. Because of all the liquid they absorb the potatoes won’t get super super crisp in the oven, but with a high enough heat they’ll catch and brown while staying lusciously tender underneath. I guess you don’t have to use red potatoes but I like the way they straddle the waxy/floury cellular axis and the colour of the skin just looks good, okay? The finished result is so oddly compulsive – but then I find anything sour and salty to be this way – and you just want more, more, to the point where I don’t really know how many this recipe would feed: I ate the lot in two sittings, but if you’re serving it with other stuff as a side I guess it could cover four people. If in doubt, just add more potatoes.

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Salt and Vinegar Red Potato Gratin

A recipe by myself

  • 5 good-sized red potatoes
  • 1 cup apple cider vinegar
  • 1/2 cup white vinegar
  • salt, lots of, preferably sea salt or similar
  • 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
  • fresh thyme, to serve

Slice the potatoes into rounds, as thinly as you can muster.

Place the potatoes in a saucepan with both the vinegars and then add enough water so they’re just covered. Simmer for 20 minutes, partially covered, until the potato slices are tender. If the liquid starts evaporating too much just add some more water, and give the slices a stir every now and then to make sure they don’t stick to the base and burn.

Meanwhile, heat your oven to 200C/400F.

Drain the potato slices and arrange them (as you can see I did it fairly haphazardly, mostly because the slices were super hot to the touch) in an oven-safe dish; drizzle with the olive oil and scatter over plenty of salt.

Bake for fifteen to twenty minutes on a rack positioned fairly close to the top of the oven – basically keep the potatoes in there until you’re satisfied with the level of browned and crispness of the exposed edges. This will all depend on your oven, your opinion, and your patience. Sprinkle over some fresh thyme to serve and…serve.

Don’t even try to hold back on the salt: the wall of sourness from the vinegar needs to be countered somehow. The thyme isn’t just window-dressing, but it’s obviously not the most important aspect, it does lend a gentle fragrant herbal richness to the whole affair.

The only other thing to keep in mind is that this really makes your house smell like the inside of a bag of chips for the rest of the day so make sure your scented candle budget is prioritised this week and keep as many windows open as you can. Eating this is worth having your tender olfactory bits attacked by airborne vinegar particles though: it’s just that delicious.

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I hate that feeling of being in overdraft but with one’s own energy; in lieu of any external factors in my life changing (give or take the occasional kombucha or smoothie upon which I place enormous pressure to solve everything that has been and all that shall ever be) I can only hope to level up. I guess not being super hung up for too long for missing a week of blogging is its own kind of levelling up! And anyway, here I am, full of vim and vinegar, (heavy on the vinegar, working on the vim.)

If you want further potato times; may I suggest some further reading in the form of recipes for Potato Dominoes, Mashed Potato, or with a little more effort, Potato Pizza. These happen to just be great blog posts to read even if you ignore the recipe completely, I was pleased to note.

title from: Sour Times, by Portishead. So silky and noir-ish.

music lately:

River Deep, Mountain High, by Tina Turner. I’m kind of obsessed with that Phil Spector Wall of Sound sound, there’s something so emotive yet calculated about it (quite literally in this hugely incredible song: Turner was reportedly made to do take after take after take for hours before Spector was satisfied.)

Patterns, by Suse Millemann. My friend sent this to me thinking I might like it, and…I do! It’s very understated yet lovely.

Stoned and Starving, by Parquet Courts. I love these guys and they’re coming to Laneway next year and SO IS MITSKI but do I have the energy for a festival? They’re of that genre where you’re like ah, this album from 1982 is fantastic wait what they’re like my age brilliant what am I doing with my life.

Next time: I had a dream about chilli corn relish and then it turns out Nigella – that minx! – has a recipe for something very similar so I’m probably going to try to make that.

PS: If you wish to receive these blog posts every Sunday-ish in your inbox, days ahead of the general public, then consider signing up here. On the other hand, reading it on here is not without its exclusive content, for example: I’m actually eating salt and vinegar chips while posting this and am wondering if it is the food writing equivalent of method acting; I’m also drinking black coffee alongside it and they’re a strangely beguiling flavour pairing? Better sign up AND read it here as well, just in case, is my staunch advice.

daylight, see the dew on the sunflower

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I admit, I held some concerns that this recipe was a little insubstantial, especially after the (a) pomp and (b) circumstance of the last blog post’s layer cake, but in a long long work week this felt, and was, manageable. On top of which, as I reasoned with myself: people always need dip. A pile of various crunch-adjacent foods and a bowl of something pliant into which to plunge them is 100% an ideal meal for me, there’s just something so abundant and yet casual, organised yet constraint-free about it.

And in case you were worried that it was all going to be too effortless, be assured that there are no less than two time-consuming steps involved in this, firstly the soaking of the sunflower seeds and then the roasting of the garlic. But nothing is required of you while both these things are happening!

I found this recipe while scooting around online and as you can see, if you click through, my recipe here is quite directly influenced by it. I made some distinct changes though based on interest and availability: the two main ones being I toasted the sunflower seeds before soaking to intensify their flavour, and because I couldn’t find the required black garlic I used regular stuff instead. Naturally I was all, “I feel like this calls for an entire bulb of garlic” – I’m at the point where my perception of garlic has shifted so much that I’m probably going to start treating bulbs of garlic as though they’re individual cloves, but we’ll cross that pungent bridge when we come to it. Honestly though once you roast the hell out of garlic like I did here the flavour is so sweetly mellow, if anything I wanted more of it but appreciate that it would be somewhat ridiculous.

(I also appreciate that it’s wantonly wasteful to turn an oven on for half an hour just for one lone garlic bulb, indeed, with guilt in my heart I also made a loaf of Irish Soda Bread to bake at the same time. It turned out to be absolutely disgusting somehow, completely inedible and I had to remorsefully throw the entire thing in the bin, with the best of intentions creating even more waste. Lesson learned: blameless garlic deserves to take up space.)

This dip (I cannot bring myself to call it hummus as per the recipe it’s based on since it doesn’t contain chickpeas but I grant you: the texture is similar) is just wonderful, buttery and fulsome with an intense nuttiness, with the earthy cumin and sharp lime keeping it from being too formless. Using sunflower seeds as the base was a bit of a revelation for me – they give gorgeous creamy texture and substance and incredible flavour, and delightfully, they cost hardly anything. I happily and willingly ate a whole plateful of vegetables simply because I had this dip to drag them through: against the sweetness of carrots the lime and cumin really sang, while the richness of the olive oil was a magnificent pairing with the surprisingly buttery baby turnips.

Toasted Sunflower Seed and Garlic Dip

A recipe inspired by this one

  • 1 cup sunflower seeds
  • 1 whole garlic bulb
  • 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1 tablespoon lime juice
  • 1 tablespoon tahini (I only had black tahini leftover from this salted caramel ice cream recipe hence the murky colour of the finished dip btw)
  • salt and ground pepper, to taste

Toast the sunflower seeds in a dry saucepan (that is, no oil in it or anything) over a medium heat, stirring and keeping an eye on them till they’re all more or less lightly browned. Tip them into a bowl or small jug, cover with water and refrigerate for around six hours, or overnight if that’s easier.

At this point, set your oven to 180C/350F, wrap the garlic bulb loosely in tinfoil and pop it in the oven for about half an hour.

Now it can all come together: Drain the sunflower seeds and tip them into a high speed blender (or a regular food processor, the finished result won’t be quite as smooth though.) Remove the garlic from the tinfoil and carefully disrobe each clove from its papery casing and add them to the blender. The garlic will (obviously) be very hot, but the softened cloves should pop out easily enough. Add the cumin, oil, lime juice, tahini, and plenty of salt and pepper, and blitz the lot together till it has become a smooth, slightly nubbly paste.

Add a little fresh water to thin it if need be, and taste for whether it needs anything more – whether it needs the sharpness of more lime, a little extra body from the oil, depth from the cumin or the old fashioned helping hand of more salt and pepper. Spatula into a bowl or container and refrigerate till you need it, and festoon with mint leaves, more olive oil, and sesame seeds (or of course: more sunflower seeds) to serve, if you wish.

And finally, its salinity helped replenish my depleted vital electrolytes after watching the remake of A Star Is Born, that monumentally melodramatic movie that I consumed with predictable breathlessness. I have many thoughts about it which I wrote and then deleted (on the one hand, there’s a lot of “I see you, Brunette Girl” as a trope, on the other hand, at last: a movie where Bradley Cooper is handsome) and literally whenever I even think about the bit in the trailer where Lady Gaga walks towards the mic and starts howling I get tearful and frantic like a fretful infant, but I also can’t stop rewatching the trailer just so I can see that bit again.

If you agree, enthusiastically, with my claim that people always need dip, then may I also recommend the following recipes on here: Tarator (somehow basically just bread and water but also incredible) pomegranate-laden Hummus, or lush Cambodian Wedding Day Dip.

title from: Memory, the ubiquitous torch song from the musical Cats. For me there is but one person who I acknowledge in the role of Grizabella, and that is the late Laurie Beechman. I thought I’d heard this song so many times that its power was entirely diluted but her singing it makes me cry every time including right now. The emphatic h’s that she throws in at the start of words (“all alone h-with h-my memory”); the gentle vibrato rumbling on “enter innnnnn”; the slight youthful creak to her voice that’s just so appealing, (reminiscent of Glynis Johns or perhaps even Alma Cogan); the way she belts so hard while looking like she’s barely getting started yet and you’re looking around like where did that voice come from? Just watch her.

music lately:

The Sacred Harp Singers, Soar Away. Yeah, I don’t know, I’ve just been listening to a lot of this particular kind of old-timey church music. This one though: a stern and ominous banger, I have played it back easily 100 times in the last week without exaggeration. There are stirring enough versions of modern sacred harp groups performing it on youtube but to my ears, the definitive rendition (on spotify only unfortunately) is this, a decades-old recording which has a kind of shouty, nasal, rough-and-ready vibe that renders modern interpretations too soft and polished and frankly unfearsome.

Wedding Bell Blues, by Laura Nyro. Man, she was just not afraid to be sad and haunting, even, if not especially, in the middle of what sounds deceptively like just a classic sixties-girl-group song.

Will You Smile Again For Me, by …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. It’s very good!

Next time: well, not that damn Irish Soda Bread, that’s for sure.

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her legs are chafed by sticky wings

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One week in to the return of Hungry and Frozen and I was already a day late, a buck short, on my self-appointed schedule that is; however I am undeterred and gaspingly but enthusiastically dragged myself over the finish line. Much like episode two of Frasier which was essentially a retread of the pilot; you may notice some common themes between this and the last blog post because to be honest I’m still finding my feet with this whole operating-on-a-routine thing, but I can tell you something for free: the recipe this week is absolutely BANGING.

I cannot wait to write one of these posts where I’ve comfortably settled into a routine and don’t feel like I’m racing against the clock like I’m trying to defuse a bomb in the manner of a character in Mission Impossible, or, say, Mission Impossible 2 (I more or less just woke up and have to go to work again soon and my battery on my laptop was ticking downwards rapidly in direct proportion to my heartbeat racing faster before I remembered that I was sitting in bed and could in fact lean over and plug it in to the charger.) But nevertheless, I’m pleased with myself for actually making a recipe more or less on time which is not only delicious, it also tastes incredible.

Related to this mood, I downloaded this horoscope app called costar which told me the following: “Exhaustion is not always a bad thing, sometimes it is the good result of hard work. Keep asserting yourself, you’re doing fine.” Sometimes the specificity is bordering on Black Mirror-level what-if-phones-are-bad horrifying (it literally told me to consider studying attachment theory) but I was like yes! I am tired and adequate! Thank you algorithm for truly seeing me.

Unlike me, cauliflower is really having its day in the sun, and has found itself mangled and extruded into all kinds of carb and meat replacements and dupes in the last few years. I’m not going to lie to you, while this recipe is something I devised myself, the concept of it stems from much scrolling through Pinterest and having people brightly insist that cauliflower can be made to taste exactly like chicken wings. Whatever, I love the taste of cauliflower as it is, particularly when massive amounts of heat are applied to it: its aggressive mildness becomes caramelised and nutty and just generally wonderful.

This recipe is all about texture – the crunch of peanuts and sesame seeds against the stickily crispy batter, which gives way to a creamily soft cauliflower interior. The combination of salty, sweet, oily and a touch of chilli heat makes it kind of addictively good, the eating equivalent of finding yourself scrolling through the same social media app on your phone and your computer at the same time. The method is not exactly fiddly, but there are a few steps and a lot of ingredients involved – the really important thing is to make sure the oven and the tray are really, really hot before you put the cauliflower in. And eat it right away: when left to sit for too long they go kind of soggy and soft, which is itself strangely beguiling, but not the real desired result.

But I happily ate the remainder of these sometime around 4.30am when I got in from work and in the way that cold leftovers eaten in the middle of the night often are, whether through actual merit or that Mallory Towers midnight feast illicit thrill elicited: they were still really good.

Sticky Sesame Peanut Cauliflower

A recipe by myself, serves two as a snack but just, to state the obvious, make more if you want to feed more people.

half a head of cauliflower
olive oil

Batter:
1/2 cup plain flour
a pinch of ground cumin
a pinch of ground chilli powder
a pinch of ground cinnamon
a pinch of ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup cold water
1 cup panko bread crumbs

Saucy stuff
2 tablespoons hoisin sauce
1 tablespoon rice vinegar or cider vinegar
1 teaspoon dijon mustard
1 tablespoon sesame oil
2 tablespoons toasted peanuts, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons sesame seeds, toasted

Firstly, set your oven to 240C/450F. Pour enough olive oil onto a large roasting dish to just coat the surface and put it in the oven to heat up too while you prepare the cauliflower.

Break the cauliflower into florets and cut them into smaller pieces, slicing through so you get decent surface area on each piece for the batter to cling to. Don’t stress about this step too much, you just need everything to be fairly small so it will cook quickly and evenly in the oven.

Mix the flour, spices, and water together in a small bowl to make an unappealing batter that if you’re anything like me you’ll be unable to stop yourself tasting anyway. Place the panko breadcrumbs in a bowl and dunk the cauliflower pieces first into the batter, then into the breadcrumbs. I find it easiest, cleaning-wise, to put a piece of baking paper down to sit the dunked cauliflower on until you’ve finished it all.

Transfer the cauliflower to the heated oven tray, in a single layer, and roast for ten to fifteen minutes. While they’re cooking, mix the hoisin sauce, vinegar, mustard and sesame oil together in a small bowl.

Once the time is up, remove the tray from the oven and carefully turn the cauliflower pieces over. Use a pastry brush to liberally dab the hoisin-sesame sauce onto the cauliflower pieces and sprinkle the roasted chopped peanuts and sesame seeds over everything.

Return the tray to the oven for another five to ten minutes – keep an eye on it because you definitely want it a little scorched and browned but not burnt. At this point, remove from the oven and you finally get to eat it.

If this has stirred you aflame with a potent desire to like, cook more cauliflower, may I also suggest my other recipes such as Velvety Chilled Beetroot and Cauliflower Soup, Roasted Cauliflower with Almonds and Whole Spices, or, entirely demonstrably, Double Cauliflower Salad.

title from: The Birthday Party, Release the Bats. “My baby is alright, she doesn’t mind a bit of dirt.”

music lately:

Linda Eder singing Man of La Mancha, from the 1965 Broadway musical of the same name, a song that was written for a male character but which was actually surely written and waiting for her to perform it. There’s this bit two minutes in where she starts just going off in flawless whistle register and she does this little eyebrow raise to show how easy it is and honestly, I didn’t think an expositional song about Don Quixote was going to floor me like this but here we find ourselves.

Skeeter Davis, The End of the World. This is just a perfect sad song.

Next time: I’m going away this weekend for best friend Kate’s birthday so I’m hopefully going to make at least contribute to at least one cute thing during that time! 

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i imagine that it’s there on a plate, your whole rendezvous rate

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So the deal with this week’s blog post is, there are no photos and I don’t even want to talk about the recipe. Because I made it – crispy rice with preserved lime, almonds and cardamom- three days in a row and now I’m so sick of it and can’t even think about it without feeling uneasy, bordering on queasy. Let’s try and go back in time though, to the middle of those heady days, where I simply couldn’t get enough of this incredible dish and ate it with such rapidity that, though thrice did I make it (THRICE! Threefold!) not once did I pause to record the moment. Let’s periodically pause while reading this blog post and pretend there is a photo of a plate of rice with some stuff on it in between every other paragraph. Let’s pretend it’s not today but Wednesday and I’m snarfing bowlful after bowlful of tender basmati rice that has turned crunchy and golden with olive oil and made aromatic by the lemony-gingery breath of cardamom and the warm earthiness of cinnamon and cumin, that has the buttery crunch of a tumble of almonds and sesame seeds and bursts of sharp, salty preserved lime slices.

I’m genuinely super annoyed at myself for not taking any photos and did contemplate long and hard for like nine minutes about whether or not to even write this but I concluded pragmatically that my photos are deeply hit and miss anyway and it’s the writing that’s the real juicy prize here.

I spent Sunday night at my best friend Kate’s house, doing what I love best: sitting on the floor by the warmth and white noise of her fireplace, quietly pottering about reading her cookbooks for inspiration while her husband brought me dinner and her dog scooted about scootily. The recipe below evolved from one in either A Modern Way To Cook or A Modern Way To Eat by Anna Jones, both lovely books filled with lovely recipes (sometimes too lovely, for example she has a recipe called “my bright root mash” and I’m like…can you hear yourself here.) Mine is a much more pared down and simplified version of her recipe largely because, honestly, I was pretty broke this week, but you can see how you could extrapolate this out wildly to make it more elaborate, with added herbs, fancier nuts, roasted things to strew across the top, and so on. The preserved limes are just there because I had some following my friend Jen giving me a bag of limes from her tree, but preserved lemons are pretty easy to get hold of and make a chill substitute. The best thing about this recipe is how high reward it is for how simple it is to make. Don’t be tempted to hold back on the final step of pouring more oil onto the rice and turning up the heat – the golden, crunchy base that forms where the rice hits the saucepan is magical. Well it was, till I ate too much of it.

crispy rice with preserved lime, almonds and cardamom

  • one cup basmati rice
  • three tablespoons olive oil  
  • one teaspoon ground cumin
  • half a teaspoon ground cinnamon  
  • two cardamom pods
  • three tablespoons sesame seeds
  • half a cup of almonds, roughly chopped 
  • four slices of preserved lime or preserved lemon   
  • sea salt, to serve

Rinse the rice in a sieve. Heat one tablespoon olive oil in a saucepan and tip in the rice, stirring it so that the grains get lightly toasted. Tip in two cups of water, the cinnamon, cumin, and cardamom pods. Before you throw in the cardamom pods, lean on them with the side of a knife to crush them slightly. Put a lid on the saucepan and let it cook away until the rice is tender and cooked, which should take around ten minutes. At this point, use the handle of a wooden spoon to push some holes in the cooked rice, and pour the remaining olive oil into the holes. Turn the heat up as high as it will go and let the rice cook away for another five or so minutes, creating a crispy crust on the base. 

Meanwhile, toast the sesame seeds and almonds in a dry frying pan until they’re lightly browned. Roughly chop up the preserved lime slices, or lemon if you’re using it, and mix in with the sesame seeds and almonds. Divide the rice between bowls and spoon over the lime and almond mixture, and then add plenty of salt to taste. 

This recipe serves two very generously and aside from me feeding some to my friend Emily during a floor picnic on the third day, I actually ate all of it every single time which is probably why I’m so wholeheartedly sick of it now, but also, I daresay, does speak to its singular deliciousness. If you’re intrigued by the mention of lime pickle, I have a recipe for it on my Frasier food blog which was in itself based on a recipe I posted about back on this blog in 2010. That’s right, I’ll link to myself all! day! long! I will never run out of energy for drawing your attention from me, to further-me, and yet-still-more-me!

Speaking of, if you’ve got yourself a big bag of rice and are all like “hmm” and “I feel a gentle yet tugging melancholy at reaching the end of this blog post and realizing that my time of paying attention to Laura is thus coming to an end” may I recommend some further recipes from On Here: Buttermilk Risotto with Miso, Capers and Toasted Walnuts; Rice Salad with Mango, Coconut and Peanuts; or Sunday Night Pilaf with Cinnamon, Tumeric and Vegetables.

title from:  Brianstorm by Arctic Monkeys. Alternate title: “…top marks for not trying”.

music lately:  

I’ve been listening to Eyedea and Abilities’ album By The Throat which I love, I guess if I was going to pick a starting point I’d go with Junk or Smile?

Janet Jackson, Rhythm Nation . She is such a LEGEND it’s unreal. I’ve been listening to heaps of her older music and having this one in particular on loop, the chorus is so addictive the way the back up singers’ voices rise up like bubbles in lemonade and the music video is honestly kind of stressful to watch because the level of discipline and work ethic is so laid bare in her incredible and highly technical and NONSTOP dancing.

next time: photos and non-feigned enthusiasm I swear. 

tell me what you saw, there was a crowd of seeds

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Sometimes I’ll make a recipe and it seems so bordering-on-nothing-y that I’ll hesitate to put it on here, but the truth of the matter is that this week I made myself a gigantic quantity of dukkah and that’s what I’ve been eating, and what I’ve been eating goes on here, so here it is. I remember first having dukkah with my aunty who lived in Hamilton, which seemed extremely cosmopolitan in comparison to the small small small town I was from. She was like, you have your bread, your oil, and the dukkah – a mixture of seeds and nuts and spices – and that’s the meal. As someone for whom a meal was either a microwaved pie or meat, potatoes, and microwaved broccoli, this was a damn exciting revelation. There’s something so wonderfully leisurely about just slowly eating bread and some kind of unguent, and I’m super here for it, especially since my weird working hours (as a bartender) mean my eating habits can be reflectively weird as well, like I might not desire food till 4pm or I might be wanting a six course meal at 4am (and unfortunately, they’re mighty hard to come by at that hour) so food that drifts with me like this is ideal. And to circle back to my original point, honestly who am I to proclaim this old school Middle Eastern dish as nothing-y anyway? It’s substantial and substantially delicious.

I don’t do anything particularly revolutionary with my recipe, since in all honesty it doesn’t need any further flourish. The spices are earthy cumin, lemony-gingery coriander seed, and the warmth of cinnamon, and then it’s just loads of sesame seeds and some walnuts, which have a soft, buttery crunch under the tooth. Pistachios would be wonderful but they stay prohibitively expensive, and besides I had some walnuts leftover from the recipe I made last week. Feel free to play with proportions as you wish though – this makes a sesame-seed heavy mix but add more or less, muck around with spices, follow your dreams, live your truth, look inside your heart and find the answer there, etc.

dukkah 

  • two tablespoons cumin seeds
  • two tablespoons coriander seeds
  • one teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • one cup sesame seeds
  • one cup walnuts
  • salt and pepper
  • Bread and olive oil, to serve

Heat up a large pan and gently toast the cumin and coriander seeds, stirring often, till they’re fragrant but not browned. Tip them into a pestle and mortar and smash em up, then tip this into a large mixing bowl. Tip the sesame seeds into the same pan and stir them until the seeds are lightly browned. Transfer them to the mixing bowl with the spices, and finally, tip the walnuts into the pan and stir around till they’re lightly toasted. You can either bash up the walnuts in the pestle and mortar or roughly chop them, but either way stir them into the sesame seed mixture. Add the cinnamon and plenty of salt and pepper and stir to combine, and that’s it. Transfer to an airtight container or like, eat the lot. 

I completely acknowledge, by the way, that my photos this week might be kind of rubbish – I was extremely taken with the stark sunbeam across the table as I was eating but there is every chance that what I saw and the photos I took do not exactly match up. Nevertheless, it’s what you’re getting. Anyway frankly who cares, when the food is so delicious it can speak for itself. I’m huge on texture and absolutely love anything crunchy and so the juxtaposition of soft, soft bread dipped in oil and then in turn into the bitey, nutty, warmly spiced coating of dukkah is incredibly pleasing. I highly recommend it.

And, if you’re in the mood for other bread-and-stuff type recipes, may I recommend further reading in the form of  my recipe for hummus, or Tarator (a walnut dip), or Cambodian Wedding Day Dip (they’re also all vegan, if that’s of interest.)

title from: Gold Lion by Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I love the opening drum beat so much, it reminds me of that iconic Be My Baby opening even though it’s not actually anything like it. 

music lately:  

Okay so I watched the film Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping the other day and it was like, fine, and pretty amusing, and I have a lot of time for Andy Samberg because I have an inexplicable crush on him, but I found one song from it in particular got completely stuck in my head, and then because the internet is wonderful, someone has uploaded to YouTube precisely what I actually wanted to listen to: not the song itself but the background, which samples a song from the 60s by the Marcel’s called Heartache: basically it’s like incredibly obnoxious and I want ten hours of it on loop. So here it is: So Humble, the instrumental version, which I physically cannot stop playing.

Upon recommendation I’ve been listening to a band called Idles and! They’re so good! I love shouty punky stuff and if you do too I recommend starting with their song Mother.

Fenugreek by MF Doom always makes me feel so, SO happy, I extremely recommend it.

Finally: following some longterm strenuous recommendation I finally watched The Lost Boys, an 80s film which ticks all my boxes: 80s, ensemble cast, disaffected young men, banging soundtrack. Naturally, I cannot stop listening to its suuuuper dreamy theme song, Cry Little Sister. 

next time: I want to get into feijoas while they’re still in season! 

choked up on the smoke and the charcoal

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I’m not one for the long game, I like a shortcut, me. This is an attitude that makes me highly susceptible to pyramid schemes and not susceptible to actually achieving anything, so apropos of this, I was having an idle wander around Yan’s supermarket the other day and saw a packet of charcoal noodles, upon which the only words that I understood other than “charcoal noodles” were “health benefits”, and I was like, these noodles are going to solve all my problems right now, I just know it. And so I bought them.

As I said in my last blog post I’ve been having incredibly strong cravings for sugar lately – my chocolate bar budget is through the roof – so I was determined to make myself at least one aggressively savoury thing to eat before, I don’t know, the year is out. These noodle presented themselves at precisely the right moment. To go with them I made edamame beans, lightly coated in spiced cornflour and deeply fried in oil till crispy, a salty-sweet-sour dressing, and some chopped roasted nuts. While I have no idea what the health benefits of these noodles are because I couldn’t read the language on the package, I trust implicitly the fact that there were health benefits, but if all you can find is regular noodles then there’s no harm done, I’m sure.

This is honestly barely a recipe and definitely doesn’t lean towards any particular region or have any claim to authenticity, but it is really, really nice: slippery noodles, crunchy, nutty fried beans, the balanced dressing with its salty, sour, hot and sweet notes in equal measure, and then the further crunch of the roasted nuts. I am such a huge fan of edamame beans, with their gorgeous emerald color, and when you fry them up they get this almost pistachio-like nuttiness going on. This recipe is incredibly easy to throw together, even with some semi-deep frying, and surprisingly filling. And it’s savoury as hell.

charcoal noodles with ginger, chili, and crispy edamame  

  • half a packet of charcoal rice noodles
  • one cup shelled edamame beans
  • three tablespoons cornflour
  • one teaspoon Chinese five spice powder
  • salt and pepper
  • two tablespoons sesame oil
  • one tablespoon rice vinegar
  • one tablespoon soy sauce
  • one tablespoon chili sauce eg sriracha
  • one tablespoon sugar
  • one inch fresh ginger, roughly chopped
  • a handful each of roast almonds and cashews
  • oil, for frying
  • Chili flakes, to serve (optional) 

First, get your noodles sorted: place them in a bowl, and cover with water from a freshly boiled kettle. Once they’re fully softened, drain them in a sieve and set aside.  

To make the dressing, whisk together the sesame oil, vinegar, soy sauce, chili sauce and sugar, then stir in the ginger. Pour over the drained noodles.

Run the edamame beans under cold water in a sieve if they’re super frozen, just to remove any extraneous ice crystals. Mix the cornflour, five spice powder, and a pinch each of salt and pepper in a bowl and throw the beans in. Heat about an inch of oil in a pan. Toss the beans in the cornflour mix and once the oil is hot, carefully spoon the beans into the oil in batches and fry till crisp and slightly browned. 

To serve, put the dressed noodles into a bowl, and pile on the edamame. Roughly chop the roasted nuts and sprinkle them over along with the chili flakes, if you wish. 

Meanwhile, I cannot believe it’s April already; who let this happen? It’s less than ten days till my birthday which means I’m extremely trying to not have some kind of where-am-I-what-am-I-doing-what-am-I-like existential breakdown, but also I’m like Laura, you’ve had several birthdays now, there’s no need to be surprised by the fact that another one is rolling around. Either way it’s definitely Aries season, which means watch out; I’m more powerful and at least twice as annoying than I would be at any other time.

If you’re on a noodle buzz, may I recommend some further reading: soba noodles with steamed vegetables and hot and sour dressing; Ottolenghi’s glass noodles with edamame beans; or pepper-crusted tuna with soba noodles and peanut sauce.

title from:  Limp Bizkit and Method Man, N2Gether. Yes, Limp Bizkit are objectively terrible, but for a good decent while there I absolutely loved them and honestly, this song still bangs. Is it mostly because of Method Man’s presence? Yeah, probably. But can you deny your nu-metal roots? No you cannot. 

music lately:

Marty Robinson, Big Iron. There’s something about Marty Robinson and his gunfire ballads, I find them so comforting!

Wildchild, Renegade Master, the Fatboy Slim remix. I am SUCH a fan of big beat, like the bigger and stupider the better. This song pops up quite often at work when we’ve got DJs on and no matter how tired I am it always makes me rise up from my grave and jump around.

Laurie Beechman, Memory  I know Memory from Cats is like the ultimate overdone overworked musical theatre song in existence but damn it, it’s beautiful, and the late Laurie Beechman singing it absolutely RUINS me, like, don’t click through and listen to this if you have to do literally anything at all of import afterwards, you’ll need a lie down, I assure you.

Next time:  I intend to have like, slightly more energy this time, promise!!

 

came to my senses and i chilled for a bit

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Well I for one went from being aggressively employed on December 31 2017 to aggressively unemployed on January 1 2018, giving the whole “New Year New Me” ethos an unsettling spin. There’s no such thing as long story short with me, but to bring you quickly up to speed in a “previously, on Laura’s Life” kind of fashion, the bar that I ran – Motel – closed for good and I, as such, am now a bartender without a bar. There’s this scene in an episode of Parks and Recreation where Leslie Knope has been suspended from work and nevertheless scurries in to grab folders with the aim of running the entire faculty from home; I myself am wary of the fact that I might break into my friends’ houses and start furiously polishing their glasses and attempting to sell their own cups of tea back to them at any minute. If a shark stops swimming it dies; and I don’t know how to stop swimming. However, unlike the shark, I’m going to be fine. I am blessed, dubiously, with idiotic serendipity – like I’ll get hit by a bus but I’ll find $2 on the ground as I lie there bleeding out, that kind of thing. As such I have faith that I’ll land on my feet, even if I bounce around for a bit first.

It’s hard though! The 11th hour number of the Broadway musical A Chorus Line is called Music and the MIrror, where the character Cassie is at her wits end because she just wants a part in the show, to be allowed to dance, and instead she keeps getting told that she’s overqualified, she’s too old, whatever. Her monologue is heartbreaking. “God I’m a dancer, a dancer dances” is where I’m at right now (and her insisting of “I’ll do you proud” makes me tear up every time) but also I’m trying really hard to actually genuinely relax since I know I need it. I’m not interested in playing Burn Out Olympics, but I definitely was running on empty for a while there and this enforced break surely must be good for me. Basically I’ve decided to see this whole thing as the universe handing me a new chapter, unasked for though it was, and to embrace the excitement of the fact that anything could happen. Anything at all!

In the meantime, there is no reason, other than the jet lag levels of lethargy I’ve been experiencing since halting production suddenly, why I can’t devote a whole lot more time to this blog. The weather has been just staggeringly sunny and warm and so cooking is not a massively come-hither activity, but I made myself a chilled soup for lunch and can envisage this recipe making several encores should the weather continue thusly. At this point I acknowledge that every time I talk about soup on this blog I always have a preamble about how boring soup is and none but THIS recipe has ever turned my head, maybe I need to come to terms with the fact that I do kind of like soup.

The recipe comes from the glorious 1954 Alice B Toklas cookbook. Probably best known as the partner of repetition-inclined poet Gertrude Stein (who wrote a poem for her called Tender Buttons, hello) Toklas is an engaging writer in her own right and collected a wonderful range of recipes with the most fabulous names. Sheharezade’s Melon. Pink Pompadour Bass. Chicken In Half Mourning. A Fine Fat Pullet. A Hen With Golden Eggs. Raspberry Flummery. Roast Beef For A Rainy Day. A hilariously un-coy recipe for “Haschich Fudge” (“It might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the D.A.R”) (“two pieces are quite sufficient.”) The anecdotes are marvelously glamorous. Of soup itself, Toklas gets to this recipe by way of explaining the different regional soups that bear relation to each other – “surely the calle de las Sierpes, the liveliest, most seductive of streets, would produce the cookbook that would answer the burning consuming question of how to prepare a gazpacho.” Heavens!

Chilled soup though, what a revelation! In this weather any extraneous movements will overheat you, so free yourself from the punishing labour of chewing and instead just drink in this bowl of iced silk. Eggplant has a total lusciousness already, purée it and it somehow becomes even more satiny and lush. Thick Greek yoghurt adds body and tangy lightness, and I like to eat it with a river of olive oil gouging its way through the surface and plenty of sea salt. Plus, I admit, I added some toasted sunflower seeds for texture so there actually is some chewing involved, but for the most part you can consume this with your eyes closed. More importantly, you can make it in an equally closed-eyed fashion as well.

Tarata (chilled eggplant and Greek yoghurt soup)

Adapted from a recipe in the Alice B Toklas cookbook. 

  • one eggplant
  • one red or yellow capsicum
  • two tablespoons of olive oil
  • two garlic cloves (or more, I ain’t stopping you)
  • 250ml/one cup thick plain Greek yoghurt
  • sea salt
  • extra virgin olive oil, chopped fresh mint, etc (to serve, optional) 

Peel the eggplant (easiest to do this lengthwise) and remove the stem and core from the capsicum, roughly chop both. You could just bin the purple ribbons of eggplant skin, but I fried them till crunchy and ate them sprinkled with salt, it was pretty good. 

Heat the olive oil in a large pan and gently fry the eggplant, capsicum, and the garlic cloves (no need to chop them or anything) until all softened and just barely browned. 

Allow this to cool a little, then purée it in a blender. Add a fat pinch of salt and a drizzle of olive oil, plus the yoghurt, and blend again to combine. You could actually eat it now at room temperature and have a good time of it, but otherwise refrigerate it till it’s ice cold and then consume at your nearest convenience, adding more olive oil, salt, and anything else you fancy.

This makes enough for two servings. Alice B Toklas makes six times the amount of this, if that’s how much you fancy then by all means go ahead. I kept the garlic proportions the same as her original six-person recipe, but that’s just how I feel about garlic. If it thickens up too much from its time in the fridge just add more yoghurt.

So what am I going to do next? Continue with this relaxing lark while attempting to hustle a fresh new bartending job are my two main objectives. With any luck, I’ll be able to have the headspace to do more on this blog while I’m at it.

I just realised that the first thing I blogged about in January 2017 was cold soup too (cherry tomato gazpacho) which makes sense from a seasonal point of view, but like….cute. Looking back over that blog post I am just in SUCH a better place than I was. Case in point, this time last year I posted an article about my struggle with the NZ mental health system, and this year I published an impassioned essay about the film adaptation of the musical RENT. (It’s niche, but it’s really well written!) Oh sure, I’m still not entirely brilliant and the things I need to resolve within myself could melt steel beams but I’m still genuine light years ahead of this-time-last-year me, I feel more full of potential and capable of good things and aware of myself and I’ve learned so much, lots of which wasn’t fun to learn, but I’m…yeah. Potential is the word that I keep alighting upon. Anything could happen.

title from: Salt’n’Pepa, Shoop. A classic! 

music lately:

I’ve been listening to a lot of Alice Coltrane, who was prolific and immensely talented. Spiritual Eternal from 1976 is so shamblingly joyous and uplifting, and then Om Rama, recorded in the early eighties but released just this year, is hypnotic, electrifying, stunning.

I cannot stop consuming Les Miserables. I’ve been jamming a lot of Who Am I – Colm Wilkinson, who created the role of Valjean, has the most chewy, rich voice, like his mouth is full of artisinal sourdough. The stirring build to that ludicrous note at the end of the song is just wonderful to have blasting when you’re walking down the street. I’m also obsessed with Kaho Shimada’s performance of On My Own on the Complete Symphonic Recording. Skip to 3 minutes in and just try to not faint.

Deadflowers, Might As Well Get Used To It. The power of suggestion…

next time: If the weather stays like this it’s gonna be a recipe for ice cubes, I swear.

you got a velvet mouth, you’re so succulent and beautiful

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I feel like every time I come here with a soup recipe I preface it by being all like ughhh soup is the worst and so boring and I’m not even into it but THIS one is okay. Because really, soup is not terribly interesting to me. Why consume a warm vegetal puddle when I could be eating something deep fried or roasted or just generally bringing to the table a more engaging texture than mushy and boiled to death? And yet. You know in the middle of the night when you wake up utterly parched, your throat a sun-baked desert and your tongue a dry, brittle leaf, and yet you’re just, just too sleepy to rouse yourself to get water, so you lie there uncomfortably for minutes shaped like hours fantasising about Fanta? A thirst trap, if you will. Well in the midst of one such lively session of dehydration, I found myself craving chilled soup, soft and cool and quenching and, importantly, with a velvety texture that you can only achieve by borrowing your flatmate’s high speed blender. And so, this recipe was born, in spite of my soup-related misgivings.

I was hoping that the mixture of red beetroot and white cauliflower would turn into my favourite colour, millennial pink, but instead the cooking process rendered it a kind of muted burnt scarlet. The taste however: genuinely incredible. Beetroot can be super earthy (to the point of tasting like literal dirt if you’re not careful) but caramelising it in the pan first before simmering in barely any water retains all its nuttiness and gentle sweetness. Cauliflower’s flavour is less pronounced but it gives a mellow butteriness as well as general body.

I initially didn’t want to add the coconut milk but I cannot deny that its subtle sweetness brings the whole damn lot together beautifully as well as adding an extra creaminess. It really just tastes spectacular and is an absolute pleasure to consume on a hot day, sliding coolly down your throat and making you forget you ever knew what thirst felt like. We’ve been experiencing some genuine unadulterated sunshine in Wellington lately, so, as Rihanna said in response to why she is braless all the time, you might as well make hay while the sun shines.

velvety chilled beetroot and cauliflower soup

a recipe by myself

  • two large beetroot, scrubbed and ends trimmed, roughly cubed
  • half a cauliflower, including stems, roughly chopped into small florets and pieces
  • two garlic cloves
  • sea salt
  • a generous pinch of cumin
  • half a tin of coconut milk
  • olive oil, an indiscriminate amount
  • water, an even more indiscriminate amount

Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large saucepan, then add the cauliflower, beetroot, and garlic. Stir them for a few minutes over a medium heat; once they have a nice tan, add just enough water to cover them. Let this simmer away, topping up with water as need be (keep an eye on it as it will evaporate quicker than you think) until the vegetables are extremely tender. This will take around 25 minutes. It will feel like forever.

Remove the pan from the heat. Scoop the vegetables out of the pan into a blender along with the cumin and salt. Blend the hell out of them, then slowly add the remaining liquid from the pan (up to half a cup/125ml) and the coconut milk and blend again till extremely smooth. Taste – does it need more salt? More cumin? More olive oil? If you’re all good with it then all you have to do now is refrigerate it till it’s cold, then pour into bowls and decorate however you please – I drizzled over some more olive oil and coconut milk, chopped up some of the leaves from the beetroot, and sprinkled over some sesame seeds and more cumin and salt. 

If I remember rightly this made like, two generous bowlfuls, but if you want more just add more of the beetroot and cauliflower and coconut milk. It’s a very easy formula and the whole thing is not going to fall apart if you decide to add three beetroot or a whole cauliflower or something. The important thing is to not be scared of how much olive oil you put in there – it’s crucial for that smooth, unctuous viscosity and stops it tasting entirely like merely like pulverised dampened vegetables.

But what of my life, you ask? What the heck have I been up to since I last blogged nineteen months ago? Literally not much really, just making cocktails and yelling “knuckle tatts voice: admin life!” whenever anyone asks what I’ve done with my day; being aghast at the speedy passage of time which continuously pushes more space between my last blog post and that which you’re reading; continuing to bumble along on that ADHD-anxiety life; and metaphorically, for now at least, snorting episodes of Frasier during every free moment.

If you are on a wholehearted soup buzz, then may I kindly but firmly direct your attention to these other recipes I’ve blogged about, such as butternut and pasta soup, cherry tomato gazpacho (another chilled one!) and velveteen parsnip soup, a blog post more notable for how BLATANTLY I’m describing the symptoms of having ADHD years before I’d get diagnosed, than for the recipe itself.

title from: the evergreen banger Born Slippy by Underworld, one of those songs of the genre that I call “this makes me want to head-butt Liam Gallagher”.

music lately:

I saw a production of the Broadway musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson in New Orleans a few years ago, a show about the founding fathers of America that did not capture the world in the way that Hamilton has, but is nevertheless extremely enjoyable, not least because it basically sounds like Green Day wrote the entire libretto (not to be confused with Green Day’s actual Broadway musical, American Idiot.) The song Rock Star could pretty much hold its own with any pop punk tune of the last 25 years and is extremely good to walk down the street to if you need to feel like you could kick a hole in the sky. And The Saddest Song is extremely good to listen to if you want to walk down the street feeling like no one understands what it’s like to be president. It’s SO GOOD.

Bright Eyes, It’s Cool We Can Still Be Friends. Looooooooooool.

The Schuyler Sisters from Hamilton the musical. I mean, it’s taken the world by storm for a reason.

next time: I haven’t cooked anything of consequence lately so I guess it’s time to get consequential. 

she don’t use butter, and she don’t use cheese

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That’s right, it’s another classic “Laura is tired and braindead and has been too busy with work to do a blog post” blog post! But because I’ve got like an hour until I start my next shift I’m going to dispense with the usual self-disapproval posturing and crack on with the post itself, as I’m determined to not let yet another day of October go by without me getting anything done on here. Besides, though work has occupied all my spare time lately, it’s also work stuff that gave me the content for the following recipes, so like, when one door closes you fall out a window or however the saying goes. 

make it till you fake it

make it till you fake it

Ya girl is majorly into her sustainability these days. Let’s face it, the world is absolutely completely garbage currently and attempting to recycle like, one small thing a week is my tiny way of doing some good and reducing my impact on this crumbling trash earth. As a bartender it pains me how much stuff we throw out – straws, plastic bottles, fruit offcuts – but also when it gets to 3.30am and you just want to go to bed (or to the next bar that’s open slightly later than yours) you don’t necessarily have the energy to suddenly start seventeen different craft projects. So I’m doing little things here and there. One of my more successful missions was taking all the soaked almonds I’d used to make orgeat (almond syrup) and turning them into vegan feta. Last time I took them home I made this almond brittle that I blogged about a few weeks back, but feta has a more practical application, let’s face it. 

There is some work involved here – some soaking, some straining, some waiting, but you end up with a vast tray of rather wonderfully delicious feta-like stuff – creamy, slightly crumbly, tangy, basically everything you could want from something without dairy in it that’s trying its best to convince you that it is what it’s not. On top of that I can only but speculate wildly at how good it is for you to be eating this much condensed almond, they’re absolutely stacked with vitamins and minerals and will give you a glossy coat and supple fetlocks, or something.  

The recipe below is pretty closely modelled on this one here, and there’s nothing stopping you clicking through to their site and following their clear and useful instructions and ignoring my extremely general and vague ones. 

vegan almond feta

a general recipe inspired directly by this one. 

  • blanched almonds
  • olive oil
  • lemon juice
  • garlic cloves
  • sea salt

Cover your almonds in water overnight, or for at least six hours. Keep them refrigerated while you’re doing this. 

Drain the almonds (retain the water if you have any particular purpose for it) and blitz said almonds, in batches if you need to, in a blender with olive oil, lemon juice, garlic cloves, water, and a generous pinch of sea salt, till it forms a smooth, thick mixture. As far as quantities go, for every, say, cup of almonds, you want to add a tablespoon of olive oil, a tablespoon of lemon juice, and half a cup of water. Use your instincts though and add more of anything as you go if you feel you need it. 

The next bit requires some creativity. You want to take this thick white almond mixture and pour it into a cheesecloth lined sieve, and then place that sieve over a bowl of some sort and leave it overnight so that the excess liquid in the almond mixture can slowly drip out. 

After this – you’re so close – press the drained almost-feta into a baking paper lined baking dish and put it in an oven that you’ve set to 160C/325F for about 30 minutes until it’s firm and a little golden on top. Allow it to cool, and you’ve got yourself a ton of vegan cheese. 

Now that you’ve got all this damn stuff, what are you going to do with it? Why, anything you like! I first had it, as photographed above, simply crumbled in a bowl, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and sprinkled with smoked paprika, rosemary, salt and pepper. I roasted potatoes and sprinkled the feta over for the last ten minutes in the oven. I also, as you can see from the picture at the top of this post, did the following recipe with it, which was honestly pretty wonderful. Obviously you can also extremely make this with regular feta, either way, please accept this extra recipe as a peace offering to make up for my lack of, well, literally anything lately. 

potato wrapped roasted red chilis stuffed with vegan feta

  • three large red chilis
  • 100g vegan feta (or, again, regular feta) 
  • one garlic clove, chopped
  • one tablespoon dijon mustard
  • one small floury potato
  • sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • olive oil

Set your oven to 220C/450F, generously drizzle a roasting tray with olive oil and pop it in to heat up while you get on with everything else. Slice an incision along the length of the chilis, using your finger to prise it open gently, and pull out as many of the seeds and membranes as you can. Giving the insides of the chilis a quick rinse in cold water helps with this process. 

Mix together the feta, garlic, and mustard in a small bowl and pack as much as you can into the now empty chilis till they’re nicely bulging. 

Carefully, using a peeler, create long ribbons of potato by peeling around and around the potato for as long as you can without breaking said ribbon of peel. Once you have three, wrap them carefully around the stuffed chillis, tucking the ends underneath. The starch in the potato should act as a kind of glue to keep it in place but it really doesn’t matter if it slides around a bit.

Gently place the stuffed, wrapped chilis onto the hot oven tray and roast for about 20 minutes or until the potato is crisp and the chilis are softened and slightly blistered. Turn them over and roast for another five or ten minutes, then remove from the oven and sprinkle over salt and pepper. 

This recipe is admittedly fiddly but it looks fairly spectacular and tasted wonderful – the kettle-chip crispness of the potato against the soft, sweetly hot chili and the creamy salty feta. You want to eat them as soon as possible so that the potato stays crisp, but having wolfed one down several hours later there is a certain charm to a soggy room temperature stuffed chilli as well, however unappealing that might sound. 

My other forays into reducing, reusing and recycling have had mixed results – I made a fantastically tasty fermented Mexican drink called Tepache out of leftover pineapple skins and cores, and some intensely bland cordial out of fruit offcuts. It’s fun though. Really the only hard part is, as I said, not locking myself into seventeen million different projects at the end of a long night – eg, picking my battles – and not getting the Captain Planet song stuck in my head interminably.  

title from: the lovely and weird song She Don’t Use Jelly by the Flaming Lips. 

music lately: 

MF Doom, Fenugreek. This song makes me SO happy. 

Intro by The XX. This song is extremely calming and some clever wag made an hours long loop of it on YouTube, which is amazing, because the only bad thing about the song is when it comes to an end and you’re like damn it there goes my calm vibe! 

next time: My blog turns TEN ACTUAL YEARS OLD this month which is somewhat unreal to me but I want to do something celebratory about it – maybe an enormous cake? I don’t know.