you said i must eat so many lemons, because i am so bitter

November 12, 2016March 11, 2020Leave a comment

1. I have nothing clever to say about the presidential election, no one comes to this blog for politics, and it was with massive sorrow and anxiety that I watched the livestream chug on endlessly with a friend (we got so stressed that we had to break for ice cream and then we both felt sick immediately after and I was like OH THIS IS THE LAST STRAW U MADE ME BE NEGATIVE ABOUT PRECIOUS, BEAUTIFUL ICE CREAM) and it was with massive sorrow and anxiety that I found out the confirmed results. There’s nothing exciting or able-to-be-romanticised or hilarious about Trump being president elect and it’s not even my battle by any means but if you’re hurting then I’m hurting with you and if you need support I support you and if you need compassion, I love you.

2. It’s possible that it’s really just a conflation of a million different things and feelings but I’m feeling almost overwhelmingly devastated by the death of Leonard Cohen. It’s weird, like…he was so old. People die. As I said, I guess it’s just the timing, really. But his songs have been so important to me ever since I was around 16 and I was introduced to him when my aunty made an offhand comment about how his music was nice to play when you’re going to sleep. That year I went off to boarding school and I would play the CD of his that I got for Christmas every single night when I went to bed. But only when I was home. His music to me feels like safety and warmth and calm; yet of aching and longing and quietly waiting for something that might never arrive. In 2009 I spent an enormous amount of money on a ticket to see him live – years later I would joke that if I’d known he was going to keep touring every year to pay off his debts I would’ve just waited and spent less money – but now I’m glad I did it. Like I said, he was OLD and it’s hardly the most shocking news, but like, spare a thought for the guy at the supermarket checkout who innocently asked how I my day was going and who had to listen to me tearfully talking going on about it (him: “oh that guy, yeah we sang Hallelujah in my primary school” me: “that sounds right” him: “was he really religious?” me: “well he used a lot of religious imagery…he was kind of a bad ass” also me: “I should go now.”)

3. Last week I travelled with friends to Otaki for the wedding of two of our very good also-friends. Gosh, if weddings don’t make you just THINK about your LIFE, you know? But, it was a happy, lovely, full-of-love day from start to finish and I was super grateful that I got to witness it in all its beauty. And that I didn’t fall out of my surprisingly practical strapless jumpsuit. The couple generously gave away little jars of homemade preserved lemons as party favours and I adore preserved lemons so gathered up every spare jar I could find.

On Monday I halved a bunch of tomatoes and smothered them in a mixture of olive oil, spices, some sliced up preserved lemons, and sugar, and roasted them first at a low heat then at a high heat. They were incredible and I accidentally ate all eight tomatoes in one sitting rather than leaving some for future use because they were just that delicious.

Preserved lemons have a compelling lemony (duh) saltiness; and strange though it seems all you need from each soft piece of fruit is the actual yellow skin – slice off as much of the flesh and white pith as you can (and then inevitably eat it to see if it could be that salty: yes it bloody is.) The remaining zest is full of concentrated sourness and salt, yet it’s somehow kind of mellow too – a bit like how garlic can be rich and sweet and make your eyes water at the same time. Stir it into pasta, use it in anything even vaguely Mediterranean, eat on its own out of curiosity, use it to flavour olive oil. Or do what I did: make these gorgeously scorched little roasted tomatoes, warm with cinnamon and caramelised slightly and stir them into pasta or anything vaguely Mediterranean, or just eat them squashed onto a bagel with some thankfully perfect avocado.

fast slow-roasted tomatoes with preserved lemon, cinnamon and garlic

a recipe by myself

eight smallish, ripe tomatoes
two big garlic cloves
about three tablespoons of olive oil, but y’know, whatever
half a lemon’s worth of preserved lemon
two teaspoons coriander seeds
a pinch of ground cinnamon
a teaspoon of brown sugar

Set your oven to 150 C/300 F.

Roughly chop the garlic cloves or mince them if you’ve got one of those contraptions. Rinse the lemon slices (I’m assuming your preserved lemons came sliced into quarters) and slice off as much flesh and pith as you can, leaving you with just the actual skin of the lemons. Now that you’re finally at this point, roughly or finely slice them as you please. Mix the garlic and lemon slices in a small bowl with the coriander seeds, olive oil, cinnamon and sugar. Taste it – if you want a bit more sharpness, add in a dash of the preserving liquid from the jar of lemons or indeed, another quarter lemon’s worth of sliced lemon rind.

Halve the tomatoes and lay them, cut side up, in a small roasting dish. Spoon the lemon-garlic-oil mixture evenly over them, scraping every last bit of flavoursome oil into the dish.

Roast them at that low heat for 20 minutes, and then turn up the temperature to 220 C and continue to roast until the tomatoes are slightly scorched.

The sweetness of the tomatoes is intensified under the heat and the lemon’s bite works beautifully with this. They taste best when they’ve had some time to sit and lose that scalding heat, which means you can put the whole tomato half in your mouth and allow the seeds to burst, pleasurably, full of garlic and cinnamon and salt, without causing yourself any damage. The coriander seeds have a hint of bitter lemon to them as well but if you don’t have them just leave them out or use cumin seeds instead for a different kind of earthy spiciness. I feel like this would be particularly spectacular with mint leaves scattered on top, but alas my mint plant has died from neglect and I was like, I don’t know if I’m actually ready to commit to another one and I shouldn’t reward myself for my bad plant husbandry by just replacing the erstwhile one immediately. But definitely mint or indeed, basil, would be perfect here.

what a beautiful wedding

Thanks Vanessa and Reuben for the sour lemons that provided some definite sweetness this week. And also for playing I Want You by Savage Garden at the reception.

If all of this appeals and you want more, I recommend using preserved lemon in my recipe for Slow Cooked Lamb with Cumin, Cinnamon and Feijoas; or in this Barley, Lentil, Eggplant, Pomegranate and Mint salad; or get high on your own supply with Nigella’s delicious recipe for preserved limes.

PS: thanks for reading, always.

title from: Kate Nash’s debut single from 2007, Foundations. The whole Made of Bricks album that this comes from makes me feel way too many things, I love upbeat songs about sad things and this is a classic example of that genre.

music lately:

I don’t even know where to begin with Leonard Cohen but listen to him singing Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye live at the Isle of Wight in 1970 if you dare.

The Saddest Song, from the musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Not even trying to be funny about the political timing of it all, I just can’t stop listening to this song.

Laura, by Girls, which contains everything I love: surfy sound, sad sad sad lyrics set to upbeat music, my name in the title.

next time: well I still have a lot of jars of preserved lemons, guys.

oh baby you’re young but that’s okay, what’s give or take nine years anyway

October 18, 2016March 11, 2020Leave a comment

Apparently I’ve been in such a daze from life being, y’know, life, that I completely missed my blog’s ninth birthday. I realised it while sitting on the floor drinking wine, (thanks, floor-wine) and figured I ought to at least try to play catch up and make something nice for myself in honour of the occasion, even if now it’s several days after the fact. That something nice is Halloumi and Pancetta Mac and Cheese from my cookbook. Seems appropriately garish and celebratory and self-referential, no?

I’m honestly really proud of myself for maintaining this blog for basically a third of my entire time on this earth. My attention span is so short that I often can’t make it to the end of a 90 minute movie so to get to this point in my life and still have this blog with me is very heartening. And I haven’t just maintained the blog, I’ve believed in it and loved it fiercely. Do you believe in something right now? Something that you’re working on and constantly creating and pouring yourself into? Well I can’t express how hard I believe in this blog. I know it sounds like hyperbole when I describe it as “probably the best food blog in the world”, but trust me: I literally never use hyperbole. I LOVE hungryandfrozen.com. Believing in something you’ve made is not a feeling that comes along every day. Let alone every day for nine whole years!

don't you just want to dive in don’t you just want to dive in

I suspect – there’s always something with me, isn’t there – that the reason I’ve been so distracted is that I’m going through this charming patch of feeling panicky all the time, real awesome stuff like immediately overheating and feeling like I’m going to throw up and my heart’s pounding really hard and I forget my own name. Is it better to feel creeping dread over absolutely nothing, or to actually see something specific that causes you to panic? Let me tell you, my brain is super woke and does not discriminate. Why not both? it says, with arms wide open. Luckily I’m immensely good at telling myself sternly that the show must go on and also have some helpful resources at my shaky fingertips. I just thought I’d tell you this because why not, it happens, it’s no big deal. It’s soooo chill how not-chill I am. Unfortunately though it does seem somewhat tied up in my feelings about this mac and cheese that I made. Fortunately, this mac and cheese tastes amazing no matter what’s going on in my life. Or indeed, yours.

this mac and cheese also has no chill

When I wrote this recipe for my cookbook – several years ago now, gosh – I wanted to make something wilfully ridiculous. So there’s not merely an entire block of halloumi fried up and stirred through it. There’s not just pancetta, that fancy-pants cousin of bacon. There’s also 500ml of cream in the white sauce, instead of the usual milk. Well, go big or go home, you know? I can’t deny that this is all very rich and intense for the sake of it, but it’s not overpowering – just soft and comforting and punctuated with mouth-fillingly buttery bursts of halloumi and salty pancetta bits. It’s honestly very non-threatening – splendidly enormous enough for a casual dinner party but still recognisably the classic comfort food that you can eat while horizontal on the couch watching, oh, the golden era of The Simpsons or something.

It’s also really easy to make. You can just serve it straight from the pan once you’ve stirred it all together, but it looks wonderful transferred into a big serving dish and browned a little in the oven, even if it does mean more dishes.

pancetta and halloumi mac and cheese

A recipe by ME from my COOKBOOK which you can’t BUY ANYMORE but it’s still NICE that it happened

300g dried macaroni
150g pancetta (or streaky bacon if it’s too expensive or you can’t find it)
200g halloumi
20g butter
1 teaspoon mustard powder
2 tablespoons flour
500ml cream
Fresh nutmeg

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil, and cook the macaroni in it according to packet instructions.

Dice the pancetta and fry in a large pan till crisp and dark pink. Lift it out of the pan with a slotted spoon, and arrange evenly in the base of a 20 x 30 (or thereabouts) oven dish. Slice the halloumi block in half lengthwise, then into slices crosswise. Fry these in the same pan, then evenly arrange the slices on top of the pancetta.

Still in the same pan, melt the butter and stir in the mustard powder and flour. Continue to stir till thick, then slowly stir in the cream. A whisk is particularly good here. Simmer till thickened. This won’t take long.

Drain the macaroni, tip it into the roasting dish along with the cream sauce and mix carefully. Retain a little of the macaroni cooking water to stir into the sauce if it’s tooooo thick. Grate over a little fresh nutmeg, and bake for 20 minutes till golden on top.

As I said, you could also just tip the drained macaroni, fried halloumi, and fried pancetta directly into the pan of white sauce and serve it from that. Whatever works!

Serves 1. Or like, slightly more people.

You can trust me about this mac and cheese. It’s truly, truly good.

It’s weird, having got some of the things I wanted so badly – a cookbook, specifically – and having them not turn out the way they did in my dreams, has made me a little unsure of where this blog is going next. If all I do is keep on writing about recipes and my sweatiness levels I guess that’s okay. I love the idea of having some kind of funny web series that gets turned into a cool TV show eventually; or to perhaps write a more low key, storybook cookbook that I have a lot more creative control over. On the other hand I truly believe there are far too many cookbooks in the world right now and the last thing anyone needs is another one from me.

In the last nine years I’ve been a million different people; done a zig-zag career path from finishing my BA at university to working in marketing and public health; to travelling; to government administration; to diving into hospo and suddenly running a bar. My hair has changed colour a zillion times, I’ve moved house too many times, I’ve skated wildly about on the Kinsey scale; I’ve hidden immensely hard stuff and probably talked way too much about other immensely hard stuff. I got a damn cookbook deal offered to me. I still continue to love writing with all my heart and I love inventing recipes and being excited and inspired by other peoples’. I love feeding the people I love. I really love the sound of my own voice, apparently. So without any real sense of direction from here, I’m going to settle for just being proud of myself for making it this far with hungryandfrozen.com by my side, just us two, still together after all these years.

If you’re not already sick of my boundless ability to talk about myself like I’m a topic that affects us all; may I suggest on this anniversary that you check out some classic cuts from HungryandFrozen: a few of my favourite posts. (I basically started scrolling backwards through my blog and picking some here and there and only made it as far as 2013 so this whole exercise is flawed. The simplest solution: set aside an entire day to read my whole blog from the top. I remain unconvinced that you have anything going on that would be more fun and worthwhile than this.) Nevertheless as a starting point: My blog post about honeycomb sauce that I wrote in the style of a Babysitters Club book; the recipes I made for Nautilus Estate Wines; my post-election Mars Bar slice; my portmanteau triumph, Sore Throatmeal; and tbh the last blog post I did about mint, pea and avocado salad was pretty good.

Here’s to a billion more years of hungryandfrozen.com. *clink!*

title from: Liz Phair’s delicious I’m-an-older-woman track Rock Me. I love the line “you don’t even know who Liz Phair is.” Such scathing.

music lately:

my little brother sent me this track by a band called HEX suggesting I might like it. Considering they’re called HEX and this song is called The Moon, I was like yes, I love it sight unseen. (It’s a really good song though.)

New music from the swoony Laura Lee is always a treat. She has a bubbly clubby new track out called I Feel and I love it!

Lana Del Rey, Born To Die. If you feel like you haven’t done enough lying down on the floor and wailing lately, let this song inspire you. Ugh I love her, in all her manipulatively emotional glory.

next time: I mean at least I have a whole year now to remember my blog’s birthday.

i wish i had a river, that i could skate away on, but it don’t snow here, it stays pretty green

October 12, 2016March 11, 20204 Comments

Avocados are like a metaphor for life, right? You have all this hope and anticipation that it’s going to be perfect and it’s really expensive but you do it anyway because it’s an avocado and you’d give up everything for this avocado and you feel, gently, from the outside that it’s going to be a good one this time! You’ve been burned before but damn it, you just know this avocado is the one. And you carry it home, imagining all the good times you’re going to have together – will you spread it on toast? Eat it in its entirety with a teaspoon, sprinkled with salt? Roughly mash it into guacamole? You could do anything! The taste is almost in your mouth, your teeth can almost feel that sensation of crushing through its soft, soft flesh. And then you finally slice into it and it turns out that despite your very best efforts, it was not ready to be cut open and exposed to the world; it was underripe and cold at its core. Or it had been left for too long and could not be saved no matter how you try to disguise it – greying and sulphuric and with no way to make you happy. Even though you wanted it so, so bad and you paid so much for it.

Or sometimes you just randomly buy an avocado because it’s on special and like, slice into it and it’s perfect and you’re like “phewf, don’t know what I would’ve done for lunch otherwise” and that’s kind of that.

pretty, green

I was not particularly in the mood for metaphors when I made myself lunch the other day: the avocado was green and unblemished and yielding and that was enough for me. I used it in a simple, beautiful pea, mint and avocado salad from Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat. A book I turn to again and again when I forget how to eat: it’s the most trustworthy manual I know. Her tone is gently bossy yet undone and dishevelled at the same time and it’s ever so comforting.

Yeah, it’s Spring, so eating sprightly green stuff feels obvious, but no matter what time of year it is this salad is gorgeously delicious. Especially because all you really need to worry about is the state of your avocado – the peas can be frozen and the salad leaves are highly interchangeable for whatever’s seasonal. You can basically make the entire thing in the bowl you’re planning to serve it in, which appeals to my utter laziness, and while it’s meant to be a side salad it makes a thoroughly satisfying meal all on its own, depending on your appetite I suppose. It’s also vegan, which is nice.

oh wow, here’s the salad from this angle

The flavours here are so wonderful – the green-green-greenness (yes) of the peas, the bitterness of the leaves, the sweet, ice cold mint, the buttery avocado. Then you’ve got crunch and softness and oiliness and saltiness and honestly, all I want is a whole bowlful of this and nothing else. I do think it would be a good vehicle for some roasted asparagus if you’ve got the inclination – I mean, it is Spring! – and you could always add some chopped nuts to add further crunch. But it’s truly perfect just as Nigella stipulates it. As per usual though I have given lots of alternatives and notes because I get helpfully nervous about being too specific in case people feel like they can’t make something because they don’t have the exact right thing.

pea, mint, and avocado salad

recipe by nigella lawson from her important book How To Eat, below is the vague quantitiy I made though which doesn’t quite match her specs

three quarters of a cup of frozen peas, or thereabouts
half a bag of baby spinach
one perfect, beautiful avocado
one whitloof, radicchio, or other bitter lettuce, or just something else crunchy – heck, half a regular iceberg lettuce would be chill here
several tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, at least three but definitely more
a pinch of sugar
one tablespoon of white wine vinegar; you could always use apple cider vinegar though
a handful of mint leaves, plus more to serve
sea salt

Briefly cook the peas in a pan of boiling water and then strain under cold running water. If you’ve just bought them from the supermarket and they’re not super frozen you can probably get away with just letting them defrost in a bowl, maybe filled with warm water to hasten the process. Basically: get your frozen peas to be unfrozen, please.

Put the olive oil, vinegar and sugar in the bowl you’re planning to serve the salad in. You can always add more oil later. Rip up some mint leaves and stir them in. Tip in the drained peas and the baby spinach. Tear in the whitloof leaves, or whichever crunchy leaves you’re adding in, and then halve your avocado and scoop out rough spoonfuls, letting them fall into the same bowl. Use a large spoon to carefully mix all this together, adding a little sea salt and more oil if you like. Throw over a few more mint leaves. You’re done.

oh wow here’s the salad from THIS angle now

As I said, this recipe is given by Nigella as a side dish, but I quite contentedly polished off the entire thing by myself and didn’t feel inclined to need anything else for a long time after; avocados and olive oil are good like that, making you all shiny-haired and full.

stock image #58639 woman laughing with salad

And it’s surprisingly practical when eaten lying down: I honestly didn’t expect that.

title from: Joni Mitchell, River. Lol…………………….this song is so sad.

music lately:

The Damned, New Rose. I made a kind of surfy punky playlist for work and it turns out I am a sucker for pretty much anything with big drums, this song included.

New Editions, Something About You. If you haven’t heard this song from 1996 do yourself an enormous favour, it’s so great.

next time: more acknowledgements of Spring, I guess? I haven’t actually eaten any asparagus since last year so should get on to that, what with uh, being a food blogger and all.

you’ve got eggs in the same basket, writing the check

September 6, 2016March 11, 20201 Comment

I’ve been trying to write this blog post for a week and a half now and every time I’ve laid my fingertips on the keyboard I’ve almost immediately fallen asleep. Including one point on Wednesday where I determinedly took my laptop to a cafe to write, and suddenly felt almost ill with tiredness and had to go home to body slam my bed for some aggressive napping. This afternoon, finally with some time to myself, I went to write in an “I’m tying this laptop to my head until I’ve finished a blog post” kind of way and then my laptop died and refused to charge for forty minutes.

If it wasn’t for the fact that this sundried tomato scramble is so delicious, I’d be thoroughly tempted to throw both my laptop and myself into a bin, as it seems to be the most productive course of action right now. The issue is not that I’m working even later nights than I used to as a bartender, the issue is that my idiot body insists on waking up at 7.30am every day, even if I didn’t get home till 5.00am.

a candid photo of me blogging today

All of this has been just creating layers and layers of frustration, a lasagne, if you will, of inactivity: I have this weird guilt about sleeping in because I feel like I should be working during that time, but because I’m so underslept the hours pass this zombie by; and the more I don’t get this blog done the more irritated I am with myself but also the harder it is to make any progress because I’m just looking at the same thing over and over.

But here we are finally! I’ve acquired some Valley of the Dolls brand sleeping pills, the kind I used to rely on during periods of intense insomnia, and I’ve also got, for the first time in forever, after two years sleeping on a couple of mattresses stacked on top of each other on the floor: a real, grown up, incredibly comfortable and supportive bed. Did you know that having a nice bed is nice? I’m as astounded as you are! My butt feels so calm just sitting on it, when I lie down it’s like being held aloft by a friendly cloud. So this is definitely something I’m working on.

Back to this scramble though: it was in the middle of an up-ludicrously-early fugue state that I invented it, the recipe somehow building up before me as I went along, like the landscape in an old school racing computer game. It’s so simple that it can’t help but work though – roughly chopped sundried tomatoes become soft and fattened in a pan of butter and olive oil, before turning almost jammy with the addition of a little tomato paste and water. You then stir through eggs which become gently, softly scrambled. Put some feta and thyme on top mostly to make it look less unsightly, add some buttered bread and you have yourself a perfect little meal, be you hungover, in rudely good health, or 92% asleep.

The sundried tomatoes have such intensity of flavour – almost bacon-like with their salty-sweet-savoury vibes – that the eggs provide the ideal backdrop, all creamy and mild in comparison. The sundried tomatoes I had were a particularly sandblastingly salty kind, so if you suspect yours are similar maybe reduce the quantity somewhat, the ones from the supermarket deli or sold in jars are generally a bit more mellow though.

As I said, the feta and herbs and capers are mostly aesthetic, and I had a small handful of each in the fridge waiting patiently to be asked to dance so I figured I might as well use them up – you certainly don’t have to though. You could add parmesan, or toasted pine nuts or walnuts, or parsley, or oregano, whatever! Thyme is one of my favourites though and I will put it on top of anything (like, I would make a crown out of it for my own head if I could get it to hold its shape) and feta can do no wrong. At the other end of the scale, leave the cheese off and use olive oil only and this is easily dairy free. As per usual with my recipes, a sentiment of “whatever works” prevails.

sundried tomato scramble

a recipe by myself

half a cup of sundried tomatoes, roughly diced
about a tablespoon each of olive oil and butter
one tablespoon tomato paste, or puree/pasta sauce if it’s all you’ve got
half a cup of water
two eggs
thyme and feta or similar and some capers to serve

Heat the olive oil and butter in a good sized frying pan. Add the sundried tomatoes and stir them till they’re softened and warmed through. Add the tomato paste and water, and more butter or olive oil if you like, and stir over a high heat till it has formed a thick sauce. Lower the heat significantly and add the two eggs, stirring slowly to incorporate them into the tomato sauce till they thicken and gently scramble. Gentle is the key word here – you don’t want to overheat or overmix this stuff, or the eggs will be all tough instead of creamy and soft. Remove from the heat altogether, scatter with feta, herbs and capers and serve with toast or fresh bread if ya like.

The fact that we’ve suddenly catapulted into September has not exactly aided with my chillness; but I’m doing my best to be all like, mindful and peaceful and accepting that I need sleep sometimes and that sleeping is not a morally wrong activity to partake in now and then. Plus: exciting new bed. Plus, my horoscope this month was all “maybe kinda look after yourself and try to get into a good routine or something you dingus” so you know it’s meant to be.

Oh, and if eggs are your thing, kindly also consider my recipes for miso scrambled eggs and Spanish potato omelette.

title from: brat-pop artist Uffie and her really, really good 2010 song Difficult

music lately:

Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj, Side to Side. It’s a great track and visually it’s like, everything, but as per Nicki completely makes it.

The Internet, Girl. God this song is so dreamy and I shall never be sick of it.

Alien Ant Farm, Movies. There’s something so heartfelt about this song that makes me love it a billion years on.

next time: good grief, I’m going to try to not lose so much sleep over it but also sleep so much on it simultaneously, also I found this recipe for homemade matcha spaghetti which sounds amazing.

these girls fall like dominoes

July 17, 2016March 11, 20203 Comments

I would describe my demeanour this week as Literal Zombie But With Slightly Worse Hygiene. The reason I have not blogged up until the very moment that you’re reading this is that I have been working on an enormous freelance project with a big company, it was a brilliant opportunity that I would’ve been an idiot to turn down, it did however take up every waking moment when I was not at work. Okay, I’m exaggerating, on Wednesday I took 30 minutes to eat a sandwich and do some thoroughly decent selfies. As I said, I’ve been working my usual hours too and on top of that am also attempting to deal with my personal life in that unspecial everyone-has-their-own-struggle way that we all are, so as a result my brain is FORLORN. But I got the project done and I’m proud of myself for it and I’m delighted that I was considered to do it: something had to give though and alas it was writing this blog post.

I’m already a bit daft at the best of times – I interpret stuff in a verrrry face value way (April Fool’s Day is honestly so embarrassing for me) and also sometimes forget a simple term and can only elaborately describe my way around it. I’m Occam’s Razor on Opposite Day, basically. This week it has been amplified x a squillion, for example: the recipe below involves cutting potatoes into a particular shape and I could not, just could not recall what the name of that shape was. I googled it, all I got was talk of shapes with names like decadocadecoflipagon which was all too spooky. I took to Facebook to ask: it turns out out the shape I was trying to name was…a cube. I forgot what a cube was. What about a long-ass cube though? I asked. A brick? Suggested my friend Charlotte. Reader, I hung my head.

Later this week I happened to look at my hand and was noticed, idly, that I had got something blue on it. I was wearing blue eyeshadow and it’s no surprise for the makeup on my face to migrate to the rest of my body in streaky patches as I go scruffily about my day. When it wouldn’t wash off however, I started silently freaking out. I messaged my two best friends Kim and Kate to say I was highly nervous because a vein on my hand had grown wide like pappardelle pasta and were the rest of my veins going to follow in this fashion and bust out of my stupid body, and as if I have time for this right now because I have this massive freelance project to finish. Kim was like “it sounds like a bruise” and Kate was like “yep it’s a bruise” and I was like “ohhh yeah. Bruises.”

Amongst all this one needs to feed one’s self, and also to stop referring to one’s self as “one”, probably. Ever since reading about them on Food52 I’ve been completely entranced by Potato Dominoes, a method of roasting potatoes where you cut all the rounded edges off and then slice the remaining potato verrrry thinly in a brick shape (or a long-ass cube, if you will, this is also the point where I got into a spot of bother with mathematical terms) and push them over slightly – hence the domino name. It all sounds like a lot of faff for very little result but kindly believe my hype. Slicing them all thin creates a ton of surface area and edge bits to get almost hilariously crunchy and crisp, whilst providing a solid base to get all creamy and soft and lush. Is it worth it? Let me work it. Also yes, yes it is worth it.

Even if they fall apart they are still wonderful (the title of my new pop punk album?) but I nevertheless suggest making them for yourself a few times to get the hang of it before you feed them to, I don’t know, an ambassador’s husband. They’re not difficult, just a tiny bit fiddly. Before you get het up about the utter wastefulness of slicing all the rounded edges off the potatoes, I’m not suggesting you throw them out the window or anything. You can keep em to add to stews or soups or stocks, or do the obvious thing: roast them alongside the potato dominoes and eat them too, as a kind of sneaky chef’s treat.

Here I’ve used a ton of butter, which melts over the potatoes under the blasting heat of the oven, however I made them again with olive oil in the interests of vegan possibilities and simple curiosity. They were, unsurprisingly, equally excellent. If you don’t have any in the house, the thyme and capers aren’t crucial to the proceedings, but! Thyme’s resiny, sweet herbal flavour is beautiful with the buttery, nutty potatoes, and capers are so salty and good and get as crunchy as the edges of the potatoes that they’re adorning.

potato dominoes with thyme and capers

adapted gently from a Food52 recipe, which probably has way more helpful instructions than mine.

two big, evenly sized potatoes
butter, around 75g OR a plenty of extra virgin olive oil
a tablespoon of capers
a few sprigs of fresh thyme

Set your oven to 220C/450F. Slice all the rounded sides off the potatoes so you end up with a potato brick/cuboid thing. Slice crosswise (I think that’s the word? Not lengthwise, basically) through the potatoes, as thinly as you can muster. Push them into place so they hold their brick shape even when all sliced up. Use a spatula or pancake flipper to transfer them to a baking tray, and push them over slightly so they are like a pile of tipped-over dominoes, or a spread of cards, or a pile of books on a lean, that kind of thing. Surround them with the off cuts of potato if you like. Generously layer slices of the butter across the top of each potato, and use any remaining butter to dot on top of the off cuts, if you’re using them.

Roast for around 20 minutes, although much will depend upon your oven and the type of potatoes you’ve got. The more waxy and watery the potato, the longer it will take. Scatter with the thyme and capers, eating a few offcuts on the way to test for done-ness, and return to the oven till the capers are crisp and the potatoes are cooked through and thoroughly golden on the outside.

I fear I have not emphasised enough how delicious these are. They’re SO CRISP. But SO SOFT underneath. It’s SO NOT a huge deal to have to slice them up all funny. All I could find was stupid waxy potatoes that seemed to be filled with water and they STILL turned out gorgeously browned and crisp. I have SO MORE CAPITALISATION where that came from. Anyway I was eating a big plateful of these the other day and my brain was at a particularly low ebb, like the tide carrying any knowledge had washed away out to sea and I was too tired to chase it, or indeed, to come up with a better metaphor, and I was looking at these beautiful, golden and brown, crunchy crisp potatoes, and I got the theme song from Friends in my head and for one rather silly second I attributed the qualities of being there for you when the rain starts to pour and like they’ve been there before to these potatoes and felt comforted. It’s like the potatoes gave me the supportive words I needed but it turns out those words were in my heart all along.

Omg this beautiful woman! Lucky London.

Speaking of words that were in one’s heart all along, I found myself doing karaoke last night for the second Saturday in a row and it’s amazing how good for the soul it is (apart from wondering, injuriously, why there is no audience out there who wants to hear a moderately terrible singer and thus I can never become a pop star.) All my emotions were slammed around anyway because it was the leaving party for my dear, beautiful friend Charlotte who is bereaving us of her presence but blessing the lesbians of London by moving there for good; on the other hand my angel friend Kate had just returned after a month overseas. Considering I was already at the point of feeling like I was receiving bolstering messages from a bowl of potatoes, you can imagine the near-hysteria in the air last night. Why not add lusty singing into the mix? It was a wonderful night though, so full of support from actual humans and hugs and laughter and new friends and bottles of Rose wine which kept appearing out of nowhere and – once I’ve finished my shift at work that I’m about to head off and do – I made it through this week. Thanks, potatoes.

If you, too, are on a potatoes vibe then may I also suggest checking out my recipes for Quite Fast Garlic and Parmesan Potatoes, Baked Potato Salad, and/or Halloumi, Fried Potato and Raw Fennel Salad.

title from: Nicki Minaj’s wonderfully sweet and pro-woman song, Girls Fall Like Dominoes. We are so lucky to have her.

music lately:

I don’t know if it’s indicative of where my head’s at but I’m all “no time like the present to develop an odd obsession with Roxette”, specifically the song The Look which I’ve listened to at least fifty times this week, conservatively estimating. It’s horrifyingly intoxicating. I’m listening to it right now.

Mr Big, To Be With You. Lol, idk.

next time: I made AMAZING white chocolate and burnt butter ice cream and I’m very excited about it. I just have to get photos of it before I eat it all, thus far a losing battle.

garlic springs up where you walk, bells ring out baby when you talk

May 24, 2016March 11, 202011 Comments

a pile of battered, fried garlic cloves

I started this blog nine years ago and – five thousand percent understatement – it was a very different landscape. No Pinterest, no Instagram, the barest hint of twitter and facebook, all that obvious stuff. However, comments were everything. Everything! I used to be all like “oh nooo this blog post only has thirty/fourteen/ten etc comments on it, what can I do?” And mate, you could absolutely tell when bloggers didn’t care a wit about you and were just trying to get clicks through to their own page, because you’d write a long post about how your only goldfish, who had also raised you like a parent through childhood and worked so hard to put you through medical school, had just died, and they’d be all “great post! Looks delicious! Check out my chocolate malteaser cupcakes photographed sterilely against a baby blue background!” It was 2007, okay. We’d just discovered cupcakes and polka dots. Bacon was as yet a distant fever dream. We commented, it was what we had.

These days, I don’t need blog comments to know people are reading – I get most of my feedback on Twitter and Instagram and occasionally Facebook and sometimes by holding my palms towards the sunset and closing my eyes intently and whispering my URL backwards three times. The comments I do get are usually something nice from a dear friend or a generally lovely message from a reader. The lack of volume means I really pay attention to them whenever they happen.

And last week I received a comment that really got to me. Before I go any further, I hear what you’re saying – be the bigger person! Be a literal grown up! Ignore it and move on! Well you don’t need to worry, I did that. For five days. And now having got that out of the way, I’m allowing myself a brief foray into being petty.

Dear Anonymous:

I do have life happenings that have distracted me from this blog. It’s called a job. It’s called duh. I work around a billion hours and have a hilariously big rent and bills to pay, as do many people. To my great disgust I have to sleep at some point of each day so that doesn’t leave me a lot of time or energy to buy food and cook for myself and photograph it and then write thoughtfully about it. And yet still I manage to get a blog post out every week. Because this blog means so much to me. You think I’m better than scone dough pizza? Do you know how delicious that pizza was? Do you know how exhausted and unhappy I was when I made it because I’d slept through my entire day off and hadn’t blogged yet and felt worthless because I tie my up my value in the work I do for some reason and how pleased I was that I managed to accomplish that one small thing? Do you know how much I think about this blog and worry about what I’m achieving with it? Did you read the bit where the recipe was adapted from one I wrote for my literal published cookbook? Which should thus validate it somewhat for you? Did you read the bit where my goldfish toiled day and night to put me through medical school? Did you appreciate me trying to lighten the mood a bit here?

Anyway, my main question for you, Anonymous, is: when are you going to get your act together? By giving me money? If you give me money then I’ll be able to have more time to cook and write for this blog and pitch writing to other sites and finally redesign the hilariously outdated yet hopefully loveable look of this thing. I don’t know who you are and thanks for saying that I have a lovely way with words. But ya hurt my damn feelings, Anonymous. I try really, really, really hard here, okay. That’s all. If you’re that worried about my priorities then maybe you should prioritise funding my life so I can write the blog you want from me. This is all I’ve got right now.

Wow, awkward! Now that I’ve done railing misguidedly against late capitalism, let me caveat that (a) I adore my job and have never been happier than I am now in a position of employment except I wish I had more money but so does everyone so that’s not a controversial stance, (b) I’M SO SICK right now with some kind of queasy-making, energy-sapping coughing-fit head cold so while I’m totally accountable for my actions, I’m not like, that accountable.

Which is why I ate two whole bulbs of garlic yesterday for lunch. That may sound like a lot, even by a garlic lover’s standard! But once you’ve individually battered and deep fried each clove, it suddenly becomes the most insurmountable task and you’re all, why didn’t I do this with five bulbs of garlic. I guess it’s the same as potato crisps: if you said “I just ate forty slices of potato” you might raise some eyebrows but if you said “I just hooned a can of Pringles, salt and vinegar flavour” you’ll receive nothing but envious sighs and sage nods of understanding.

It’s hard to explain exactly but I’m always trying to undo layers when when I think up recipes: with this one I didn’t have the appetite for a big meal and simply wanted a ton of garlic, rather than having to eat something else that had been annointed with garlic, if that makes sense. What if I fried the garlic cloves themselves so they became crunchy little morsels, like fries? This proved to be surprisingly easy. And monumentally delicious. A quick simmer in water to soften the garlic and remove its harsh, burning edge, a very quickly made batter, and a quick fry in a little oil. That’s it! And in a charming piece of serendipity, the leftover batter itself, when fried, makes delicious little garlic-tinted pancakes, so you don’t have to waste anything if you don’t want.

But the garlic is the star: bite through the hot, crisp exterior and the centre is pure, soft, sweet dissolving garlic. You could argue that they’re kind of pointless (you could do a number of things) but you could increase the number of bulbs and make a bowlful as a Netflix-and-chill type snack or scatter them through a salad or pasta or combine them with some other small fried thing like halloumi, or indeed, just use them to ward off your own sickness. I’m not going to lie: I totally drank the water that the bulbs had simmered in, in the vain hope of gaining every last bit of garlicky goodness. It was honestly delicious in a broth-y type way and there’s no reason you can’t save it for a risotto or soup or similar. The turmeric isn’t exactly crucial but it gives a gorgeous golden colour and is also full of cold-fighting skills so you might as well include it, yeah?

crunchy golden fried garlic cloves and crispy garlic pancakes

a recipe by myself.

two garlic bulbs (or more! You won’t regret it.)
three tablespoons of tapioca flour (or regular flour)
three tablespoons of fine cornmeal
one heaped teaspoon of turmeric
three tablespoons or so of cold water
salt and pepper
plain oil, such as rice bran, for frying

Place the whole garlic bulbs in a good-sized saucepan and cover, just, with water. Bring to the boil, and place a lid on top slightly askew so you let out some steam. Let them briskly simmer away for about ten minutes or until a knife stabbed at them suggests they’re pretty soft. Remove from the water and put them in a sieve under cold running water for a bit so they’re cool enough to handle. Slice the base off – it should come off fairly easily.

In a bowl, mix together the tapioca flour, cornmeal, turmeric, salt, pepper, and water, to form a thickish batter. Add a little more water or a little more cornmeal if it needs thinning or thickening.

Heat about a centimetre of oil in a wide pan over a high heat. Gently coax the garlic cloves out of their casings – this shouldn’t be too hard although allow for the occasional delicious casualty – and drop them in the batter. Once coated, drop them in the oil and allow them to fry for roughly a minute each side or until golden brown and crisp. Repeat with the remaining garlic. If some cloves bust into pieces while you’re trying to extract them from their casings just throw them in the batter and fry them anyway, it’s all good. Remove the fried cloves to a paper towel or similar till you’ve done all of them, then, if you wish, fry spoonfuls of the remaining batter until crisp and dark golden. EAT THE LOT.

It’s like fried chicken, but it’s garlic. It’s like those mozarella sticks you can sometimes get from BK, but it’s garlic. I wish there was another word instead of garlic that I could use to describe these but, uh, it’s garlic. Garlic is so good.

serendipity-licious

I’m so sick that I had to actually have a lie down after walking twenty metres to the fruit and vege mart around the corner from my apartment to get this garlic, so hopefully that is some indicator of the relative ease of this recipe that I was able to make it at all.

Okay, I do feel a tiny bit weird about that rant that I went on – I usually respond to that sort of thing a lot more privately by complaining about it to friends in real life or something. And I’m really lucky that the amount of bother I encounter online is relatively small compared to the tremendous amount that many people, including several friends of mine, put up with. But if you’re supposed to be the bigger person and ignore everything that hurts you, does that mean people get to just hurt your feelings forever and ever and that’s it? Seriously? You can’t sell me on that. And I’m very easily sold on stuff. So you know it’s a bad concept. You know what’s a great concept? Individually battering and frying every last clove in a bulb of garlic, twice, and then eating the lot, and then lying down and binge-watching Miss Fisher’s Charming Murder Mysteries on Netflix. Period procedural dramas are the paracetamol of television, and television is the paracetamol of life, and garlic is nature’s paracetamol. Then have some actual paracetamol, which is the real paracetamol of life, and you’re momentarily set, until the next coughing fit at least.

PS Some other recipes that I’ve done that I feel convey this unpacking of layers of flavour and texture that I’m really into but not good at explaining are: Garnish Salad and Browned Butter Ice Cream. Basically I just lie there and I’m like “yes but what do I want?” until the idea simplifies down to its purest form. Being massively sick clouds that vision somewhat but I came through!
____________________________________________________________
title from: Thee Oh Sees and their charmingly scuzzy song Grease.
____________________________________________________________
music lately:

Laura Lee, Dreamers. The bae Laura Lee is back at it again with her moody, swoony style of music and I’m so happy about it.

Craig Mack, Flava In Ya Ear. One of the most perfect songs ever, indubitably.
____________________________________________________________
next time: More scone pizza? I’m kidding Anonymous, we’re good? Either way, if I’m still sick I’ll be so mad!

turn the music up way too loud, charge the pizza to the house

May 16, 2016March 11, 20204 Comments

I have kind of a weird relationship with time, in that I’m never particularly relaxed and I always feel like whatever time I have is running out on me and that’s all I can focus on. I think a lot of this has to do with my writing and trying to make enough space to do that and freaking out when I fall asleep instead, but I was like this before I was writing and even if I abandoned this blog today I’d probably still end up feeling the same way. Does anyone else get that? Like if you wake up at 9am you’re all like “well it’s 9am, the day is practically over and I have achieved nothing” (don’t even get me started on the horror of waking up at 11am.) I mean, I remember thinking this as a child. There wasn’t even any internet then, what was I worried about not being on top of? Anyway, on Monday – one of my days off – I slept till 3pm because I physically could not stop going to sleep, and uh, this was kind of horrifying to me. It’s like…it’s not just writing I have to do. I can’t remember when I last did laundry! My room has not been tidied in forever which is in itself a source of stress! Six weeks ago I was supposed to start doing twenty minutes of yoga per day! I need to cook myself something so I actually have something to blog about even though I’m too tired to write! And it’s 3pm which means it’s basically tomorrow! Compounding to all this horror is the fact that it’s suddenly the following Monday and I’m in the exact same position.

Last Monday, upon waking, I somehow managed to briefly get my act together in a “I suspect there are worse problems out there than this you dingus” kind of way to make myself this scone pizza as a calming snack. One week later I’m finally spatula-ing together the time to write about it. This recipe is so easy and has a pleasing mix of so many comforting foods – not just the obvious two, scone and pizza, it also gives off cheese toastie and pie vibes. It is all good things. It is scone pizza.

I adapted it from a recipe in my OWN COOKBOOK (yes, I know, and no, you can’t buy a copy because every last one was sold and Penguin never republished it which means it’s a cult underground collectors item, not a failure) because why not be inspired by yourself? The recipe in my cookbook involves a simmered zucchini and tomato sauce to go on top, from a book of recipe clippings belonging to my paternal grandmother. But this time around I had a couple of tomatoes in the fridge and half a block of cheese and immediately knew I wanted both in my mouth together at an elevated temperature. Melted cheese is 100% my idea of a good time.

What you end up with is a thick, slightly crunchy and soft base, with the scorched sweetness of the magma-hot tomatoes and a hefty layer of melted cheese made moderately more elegant in a cacio-e-pepe kind of way by a grind of fresh pepper. I have until extremely recently hated black pepper, as it tasted like mouth-burning dust and nothing more, but I’ve come to appreciate its subtle sweetness and what it adds to a dish. Either that or my tastebuds are dying as I’m aging and this is my attempt at trying to feel something real. Little from column A, little from column B?

scone pizza

adapted from a recipe from my cookbook, Hungry and Frozen: The Cookbook.

200g plain flour (this is roughly two hastily-scooped cups full, if you don’t have scales) (which I don’t currently)
one teaspoon baking powder
25g melted butter
125g (half a cup) thick, plain yoghurt
pinch of salt
two tomatoes
as much grated cheese as you like
cracked pepper

Set your oven to 200C/400F and place a sheet of baking paper on a baking tray.

Briefly mix the flour, baking powder, butter, yoghurt and salt together in a bowl. Add a little bit more yoghurt if it’s way too floury. Squish it together gently with your hands to form a soft ball. Tip it onto the baking tray and softly roll it out to form a rough circle of a couple of centimetres. Brush it with a little extra melted butter if you like – I didn’t do this myself but it has just occurred to me now that it would be a good idea, probably.

Thickly slice the tomatoes and arrange them on top of the scone base. Grate over as much cheese as you like, and then some. Bake for around 20 minutes, till the cheese is bubbling and the tomatoes are a bit scorched and softened. Grind over some pepper.

Allow it to cool for a minute and then slice into four and hoon the lot.

Note: I, for some reason, had like two tablespoons of yoghurt left in the bottom of a container so just made up the remaining amount with milk and this worked perfectly. Consider yourself permitted to do something similar if you find yourself in this position.

As with all food, it tastes excellent in bed. It’s one thing to hang out in bed heaps and consume your main meal of the day in there, but sleep? In your bed? How troublingly self-indulgent.

By the way, I am trying to work on this strange thing I have with time, because it benefits absolutely no-one if I’m stressing constantly about it. I just don’t know how to. So far my only technique is being frustrated at myself for being stressed, followed by frustration at myself for my frustration at myself. Also trying to actually let myself sleep if I need it without being too angry about it.

Without being too on the nose, I have, uh, bought myself some thyme. This was inspired by my Stargrazing horoscope for May in Lucky Peach magazine:

“This season, for you, is about translating jittery emotions into healthy, productive action. Yer an original, Aries, so I’m into forking over an idea you can truly make your own: This is a completely excellent time to plant yourself a little herb garden with whatever you like in it (…) That dualism—embarking on a project that’s all yours and has tangible, visible rewards (LI’L PLANTS!), while also slow ride, taking it easy—is perfect for you, jitterbug. Pick up a few cheapo herb plants of your choosing. Care for them diligently, as a way of transmuting the care you’re unsure of giving yourself right now. See this attention and love as the same thing.”

I mean, does that resonate or what. Thyme is one of my very favourite herbs and is also very pretty, with its gently tangled mass of tiny leaves, and I am so going to nurture this lil plant, and I guess myself as well. My first order of business: acknowledging that I’m actually asleep right now as I type this, and to let myself have a nap.

title from: Blink 182, Reckless Abandonment

music lately:

I Will Never Leave You, from the very short-lived 1996 musical Side Show. This showcases the spectacular voices of Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner, and is one of those songs that’s all like, ugh we have to get this stupid first verse out of the way so we can get to the AMAZING BELTING IN THE CODA and the payoff is thoroughly worth it.

Digital Versicolour, Glass Candy. This song is on the playlist at work and every time it comes on I’m like “woooooo!” I know, what fascinating provenance. It’s just very mellow and hypnotic and good.

Sean Paul, Like Glue. I heard this song on loop five times in a row the other day and it was honestly the ideal way to consume this song. It’s the sound of a warm evening in summer, without any of the hassle of having to be overheated.

next time: my friend Rose gave me some old Seventeen magazines that used to belong to her mum and the recipes in them are so great and I seriously want to try one.

to loving tension, no pension, to more than one dimension

January 19, 2016March 11, 2020Leave a comment

So I watched this video on quantum physics dimensions (yes, times are strange lately) and it explained how humans live in the third dimension, as in, we are 3D, and basically each following dimension eats up the previous dimension like The Very Hungry Caterpillar until you’re at this stage where you’ve got all possible timelines and outcomes to the point of infinity but even that can be shrunk down to a small dot containing all the previous dimensions. The last week has been kind of like this. Things just kept happening that would absorb what had happened the previous day – David Bowie died, Alan Rickman died, I was a bridesmaid in a wedding, Pretty Little Liars returned…and that’s just the stuff I feel like going into. I’m not sure if I’m explaining any of this very well, least of all the dimensions of quantum physics which I begrudgingly concede might take more than a quick youtube video to properly understand. Basically: wow, lots of stuff, every day.

I hadn’t been a bridesmaid since 2004 and this time around I was there to support a dear friend from high school. It was such a long, surreal day, but really genuinely beautiful and lovely and all the good adjectives and it was an honour to be part of it. I was away from Wellington for three and a half days; during which time my main achievement was discovering that for some reason during this visit Poppy the cat was outraged at how much she likes hanging out with me.

the face of a cat who has just realised they’ve given too much information away

such begrudgement

waves of disapproval emanating

I made myself this noodle-y thing the day before I left for the wedding, but I was thoroughly naive in believing I would have time to write about it before then. This recipe was born from me running round the supermarket and being all “I crave garlic” but also “I really don’t feel like trying very hard at anything right now”. All this comprises is noodles and a series of things all fried briefly in the same pan. Calling the tahini sauce “satay” is a bit of a stretch, and indeed, feel free to use peanut butter instead if you want, but you get the idea.

Green tea soba noodles have the barest hint of grassy bitterness to them which keeps things lively, tahini is all sesame-nutty, and the bursts of golden, sticky garlic are frankly the universe rewarding you for existing.

This is one of those recipes that you can add a million different things to – a seared salmon steak laid across it would be wonderful – but is also extremely satisfying in its simplicity. I enjoy recipes like this, where it looks like there’s not much going on but you get whammed in the tastebuds with flavour and texture. PS: fresh garlic is a little different from the usual stuff, it is all youthful and mellow and usually has a trimmed green stalk at the top; regular garlic is of course still good. And if you want to use different noodles, it’s not going to ruin anything.

green tea soba noodles with fried garlic and edamame beans, and tahini satay sauce

a recipe by myself

45g/a handful of dried green tea soba noodles
three large cloves of fresh garlic, or four of regular garlic
a handful of frozen podded edamame beans
olive oil
two tablespoons of tahini
one tablespoon soy sauce
one teaspoon sesame oil
a pinch of brown sugar
a dash of chilli sauce
sesame seeds, to garnish

Bring a large pan of water to the boil, drop the noodles in and allow them to boil away till the noodles are soft and cooked through. Drain them in a colander or sieve and run some cold water over them. Set aside.

While the noodles are cooking, slice the garlic cloves into thin slivers and gently fry them in a few tablespoons of olive oil. Carefully remove them from the pan and set aside and then tip the edamame beans into the same pan. Let them fry briskly till they’re heated through and a little scorched in places from the heat. Finally, remove the beans and set aside, and proceed to make the sauce – throw the tahini, the soy sauce, the brown sugar and the chilli sauce into the pan and stir over a low heat. Add water about half a cup at a time and continue stirring – it will be all weird at first but it should thicken fairly quickly. Continue to add water till you’re pleased with the consistency, and taste to see if it needs more salt, sugar or heat.

Arrange the noodles between two plates, pile some sauce on top, then scatter over the fried beans and garlic pieces. Spoon over more sauce if you like, and then blanket with sesame seeds.

Noodles! So good. This whole thing is kind of at its best at room temperature, eaten immediately, otherwise the tahini gets all thick and solid. If you have to eat it cold the next day from the fridge in a giant gluey mass it’ll probably still be more or less excellent though.

Going back a few dimensions, the whole David Bowie thing hit me really hard, he was one of those artists that was present and meaningful throughout my entire life, you know? Labyrinth was the first movie that really had a proper impact on me at around three or four (and I maintain that Bowie in that was my first crush) and from then on he was just everywhere. I’m barely exaggerating when I say he gave off immortal vibes, like if he’d been all “yes I’ve low-key been an immortal alien this entire time and I will never die” I’d be like, yeah that checks out. But there he went. I have nothing particularly intelligent to add to the obituarial chorusing but through his personas he explored and played with ideas of gender presentation while being one of the coolest people on earth because of it, not in spite of it – we were lucky to have him.

found another cat at the wedding to befriend, in your face Poppy (love you Poppy)

If you need me, I’ll be over here lying down while trying to process how every possible outfit I could choose to wear tomorrow morning counts as the start of its own potential timeline. I told you I understand quantum physics.
title from: La Vie Boheme, Act 1 closer to the indefatigably ebullient and important-to-me musical RENT (from which this blog gets its name)
music lately:

Craig David covering Justin Bieber’s Love Yourself. Welcome back to the singer so smooth he’s basically a human creme brulee. Actually that implies crunchiness, but the bit under that is really smooth, okay? And this cover is amazing.

Scritti Politti, The Sweetest Girl. Such an unnerving and stunning song, the sort that I will listen to on a loop five times in a row quite happily, even though not a lot happens in it.

Sia, Chandelier. It’s not new but I’ve been listening to it a bunch lately, if you haven’t seen the video but watching unsettlingly incredible dancing and choreography raises your heartbeat then I strenuously recommend you watch it.

Cold War Kids, First. It is just so, so, so good.
next time: I’m way overdue something sweet, tbh

but i tell ya, it’s gonna be a champagne year

December 30, 2015March 11, 20201 Comment

the kale gaze

How do I know I’m getting old? I’m delighted that I get asked for ID when buying alcohol, instead of being righteously indignant, and you can barely make eye contact with me without me leaning in conspiratorially and saying “this year has gone so fast, hasn’t it!” Luckily I have immaturity of spirit and a confusingly youthful face on my side should things get all too ancient up in here (people tend to think I’m 21 or 22, I am in fact staring down the barrel of thirty entire years old.) And how do I know it’s nearly a new year? Because the talk of how fast the year has gone increases alarmingly, and one’s thoughts turn to things like self-improvement and goals and horrifically hi-def introspection.

2015 has been a year of surprises and changes; of staying broke, of things not going how I wanted them and things going better than I ever thought possible in ways that I still have and in ways that are now gone to me. But I have managed to finish it sleeping well for pretty much the first time, in the best job I’ve ever had, and somehow closer than ever with my two best friends Kim and Kate.

The next year though, is going to be the year of the following for me – just a few low-key easily achieved resolutions, because I love to make things easy for myself, don’t I:

eat a vegetable but for real this year
drink a ton of water, stay hydrated 2K16
hustle more and blog harder and really do things with this blog because it’s so great and generally just shine really bright
go to more fancy dinners
save money so that living paycheck to paycheck isn’t the norm, and eventually so that I can actually save money to travel again
stay on top of the anxiety
get buffer arms so that I am better at lifting the glass bins at work and also look powerful
give the illusion of being bordering-on-terrifyingly hot without making too much effort really
move to a nice apartment in town that feels like a haven and then damn well make it a haven
try to not ruin good things or get stuck in bad things
know who I am and be peaceful about it
cook as much as possible since I know what kind of hours I work so can’t use that as an excuse really even thought I looooove using things as an excuse
get a good liquor collection finally, like, seriously
drink more Real Champagne
read more books
dance heaps
pay off my credit card debt (loooooool! But y’know, go big or go home)
keeping some form of planner/diary so I remember things more often
probably more things that I’ve forgotten about

So it should surprise no-one, with this in mind, that my head start on the goals comes in the form of eating some kale. Which itself comes in the form of this very pretty salad.

I read about massaging kale in the Little Bird Unbakery raw vegan cookbook, which is where you put sea salt and a olive oil on your leaves and give them a good rub to soften them somewhat, I’m guessing because they absorb the oil as the salt draws out the moisture. Kale is combatively healthy and does have a fantastic flavour but tends towards a kind of off-puttingly hostile toughness of leaf; doing this process – despite making me feel like I should’ve asked my salad “was that good for you?” – does in fact help make everything more delicious and approachable. And it’s not like you have to make eye contact with it, or indeed anyone, while you’re doing it.

And then, in case you’re all, “just one noted superfood in this recipe? Why don’t I just go eat literal garbage?” I’ve also included pomegranate seeds. These beautiful red jewels look incredible against the green leaves, and they provide a sourness that both melds with and uplifts the potential heaviness of the oil and salt. They’re also crunchy! Which is fun!

not entirely convinced that pomegranate is real. What are thoooooose.

Quantities in the recipe are vague as, since this is summer (or at least, it is in New Zealand, where I am) and I don’t want your brain to overheat, and also because you can increase or decrease things depending on your needs. While this would be delightful with some avocado, fried halloumi or crumbled feta added, as a complete salad on its own it’s very excellent. I ate the lot for a late lunch yesterday (I know it’s just salad but it was soooo hot outside and I could only face food that was 90% water) and upon consuming it I could practically feel my red blood cells smiling beatifically as they scooted around my in my veins.

baby kale and pomegranate salad

a recipe by myself

two or three handfuls of baby kale leaves
seeds from half a pomegranate (or a whole one! live your truth)
five or six cherry tomatoes, halved or quartered
quarter of a cup sunflower seeds or small nuttish thing of your choice
extra virgin olive oil
sea salt
mint leaves
basil leaves
a tiny pinch of cinnamon

Put the kale leaves into a good-sized bowl, sprinkle over a pinch of sea salt and drizzle over a generous quantity of olive oil (but okay, about a tablespoon or so) and massage the leaves, like, just do it, all you have to do is rub them between your fingers and thumbs till they soften a little and change to a darker green. When you can no longer deal with this, stir in the pomegranate seeds, sunflower seeds, tomatoes, cinnamon, and as many mint and basil leaves, roughly chopped, as you like.

Give it a taste and if you think it needs more olive oil and more sea salt then go hard. I feel like there’s not a salad in the land that doesn’t benefit from being oilier and saltier.

I had a distinctly wonderful Christmas, spent largely with rad work people eating lush barbecue food and brining myself in generous quantities of Real Champagne. The weather was searingly hot and yet I managed to not really get sunburned, and both Santa and family members charmingly got some parcels sent to me in time so I had presents to open on the day. I’m also looking after a friend’s adorable cat which means waking up to a curled up wee ball of fluff beside me every morning! It’s all I’ve ever wanted! He’s also fearsomely bloodlusty though, which made Christmas Eve a little interesting. The cat seemed to want to recreate the Gifts of the Magi story for me, presenting first an enormous dead rat, and then the world’s vastest cockroach. I was like, what’s next? Frankincense? Me? Is it me? But luckily a Christmas miracle occurred and the third gift was the gift of no more corpses.

I hope your Christmas and/or general holiday December times have been equally charming and way less rat-filled. I am going to be working New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and am quite chill with that, since there are worse ways to spend an evening than making drinks and earning money. I’m also going to try and eat more kale between now and the end of the year (tomorrow!) since I am the actual greatest hero this world has ever known.
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title is from: St Vincent’s achingly slow and gorgeously gorgeous song Champagne Year. It feels appropriate and even if it didn’t it’s still (threefold!) gorgeous.
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music lately:

Say Anything, I Want To Know Your Plans. This band which has been around forever has been one of this year’s very very best discoveries for me.

Dark Dark Dark, Patsy Cline the lyrics to this are so sad that you should put a helmet on your heart before listening. Like, do yourself a favour and don’t listen to it. (But do! But don’t.)

Primal Scream, Movin’ On Up. In summary, it’s so summery!
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next time: it’ll be 2016! Laura’s time to shine!

and morning soup can be avoided If you take a route straight through what is known as parklife

December 3, 2015March 11, 2020Leave a comment

It has been a bit of a time for ya girl of late, what with – she says vaguely – one thing and another. Notably I spent the weekend firmly swaddled in illness due to kidney problems, which came with bonus excruciating back ache and the admittedly interesting conundrum of being both hellaciously feverish and shiveringly cold simultaneously. I have no idea what it is or what caused it or what its deal is, but something very similar happened to me back in 2007 so I guess it’s just that my kidneys like to act the fool once every decade. Also, when it happened in 2007 it was misdiagnosed as a sprained rib, to which I was like “um, do you even know how unlikely that is and how sedentary I am”, to which the doctor was like “nope definitely a sprain”, henceforth giving me a lifelong suspicion of diagnoses.

Anyway, I read online that tomatoes are really good for your kidneys – on one of those websites that’s all “make a tincture of parsley and sorrel and then when that’s ready six weeks later make a rudimentary poultice and apply it to the hurty bit of you” (I had to spend an amount at the after-hours clinic that was so huge it almost made me cry in order to get a prescription for antibiotics, so you see why I was initially trying to cure it on my own using dirt and leaves and stuff.) The antibiotics have more or less swept away all the pain but I figured it couldn’t hurt to up the tomato quotient in my life, in an attempt to appease my truculent kidneys.

This Ottolenghi recipe for burnt aubergine soup had caught my eye, but I really wasn’t sure when I was going to make it, on account of my opportunities to cook for myself are few and rare. Luckily the hand of fate intervened! I had some appallingly bad nightmares which woke me up at 4.30am the other day, and could not go back to sleep no matter how firmly I squeezed my eyes shut and listened to soothing meditation videos telling me I’m a good person who’s definitely relaxed and sleepy. By 8am I realised I really wasn’t going back to sleep, and in the feverish grips of all that, decided I might as well be productive with all this time. Making soup suddenly felt like a really good use of my morning, so I hurtled to the supermarket, bought the ingredients (hurrah for having spontaneous cooking whims post-payday) and started making it, all before 9am.

I think I say this in every single post about soup that I’ve ever done, but…soup usually really doesn’t appeal to me that much. It’s just a bowl of wet stuff! There’s not nearly enough crispness and crunchiness! You can’t deep-fry soup! And so on. This soup is super excellent though; the smoky grilled eggplant against a backdrop of rich tomato; the fried cubes of eggplant on top providing proper texture and silky oiliness with every bite, the feta being delicious feta.

The recipe below looks horrifyingly long, and I shan’t candy-coat it for you: this recipe does take up quite a lot of time. But it’s so easy! And I just wanted to talk you through all the steps to make sure I had explained it all properly. Really all the instructions you need for this soup are grill, fry, heat, stir, blend, eat.

burnt aubergine soup with fried aubergine, tomato and feta

adapted from a recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi. I know we call them eggplants here in New Zealand but the recipe itself calls them aubergines and it sounds more poetic. So.

three large eggplants
plenty of olive oil
salt
one large onion, finely diced
one and a half teaspoons ground cumin
a teaspoon of sugar
a tablespoon of lemon juice
one can of crushed tomatoes
a stock cube of your chosen persuasion
feta cheese

First, deal with your eggplants. Turn the grill on your oven to as high as it will go, stab two of the eggplants a few times with a knife, and then put them on a baking tray preeettty close to the grill. Leave them there for what will feel like hours, but is probably an hour maximum, turning them occasionally. Don’t worry if they’re all blistered and deflated looking, it’s what we’re going for here. Remove them from the oven, allow them to cool a little – or don’t, if you’re impatient like me – and remove the skin, which should be crunchy and fall away with a little encouragement. I ate the lot, discard it if you like. Place the frankly weird looking eggplant flesh into a sieve set over a bowl, and allow it to sit there weirdly while you get on with everything else.

Take the remaining eggplant, dice it into small squares, and then in a saucepan that you’ll later make the rest of the soup in, heat up about an inch of olive oil till it’s sizzling. Fry the cubes of eggplant, in batches if necessary, letting them really just sit there in the hot oil so they get properly browned, before carefully turning them over so they darken on the other side. Add more oil before tipping the next batch of eggplant in if need be. Just deal with how much oil this uses. Carefully remove the browned crispy pieces to a sieve over a bowl and sprinkle with salt (this bit is honestly probably not that necessary? Unlike the earlier sieving bit.) And try really, really hard to not eat the lot.

Okay now you’re finally done with all the damn prep stuff, and you can actually make soup. With the remaining oil in the pan (there should be around a tablespoon or so) gently fry the onion for five to ten minutes till it’s very soft. Add the cumin, the lemon juice, sugar, can of tomatoes, stock cube and then fill up the tomato can with water from the tap and tip that in. Add another can full of water if you like and want the soup to go further. Let all this simmer briskly till it has thickened and reduced a little and, you know, looks like the makings of some literal soup.

Finally! Add the eggplant flesh to the pan (the burnt stuff, not the fried stuff) and either puree it with a hand-held stick blender thingy, if you have one, or do the stressful thing and transfer it perilously to a food processor and blitz thoroughly. I did the latter, and it doesn’t make it entirely velvety but any texture is pleasing, so, whatever. It’s just so much more of a pain to clean and also it might fly everywhere and you might spill it while getting it in and out of the processor bowl, but anyway. You now have your soup. Ladle into bowls, top generously with the fried eggplant cubes and crumble over plenty of feta.

Serves two-ish. You could add another can of tomatoes if you want it to go further.

As well as changing some details I reduced the original recipe’s quantities, but if I were you making this I’d increase the quantities of the liquid and the eggplant just because if you’re going to that much damn time-consuming effort you might as well get a ton of soup out of it and feed an appreciatively gasping crowd. Is it worth it just to do all that for yourself though? Of course! There’s no one more important than me. Is what you should be saying to yourself. I know I hear it enough to occasionally believe it. For real though, this soup has such excellent depth of flavour and the fried eggplant bits are so compulsively good: it is so much more than just a bowl full of wet stuff.

A bright firework of light through all this is that today is the five year anniversary of my friend Kate and I meeting each other at Mighty Mighty in a breathless, hand-clasping fashion, and ALSO Lucy Liu’s birthday. We both love Lucy Liu with the fire of a thousand fires so let’s just say it is feeling auspicious up in here. I can’t believe my life has been this blessed for five years now and I also can’t believe I didn’t meet Kim, the third prong in our equilateral triangle of friendship, till halfway through the following year.

one of my favourite photos of Kate and I, this is pretty much how our initial meeting went too.

All of everything else aside, I know it’s a dull take but I CANNOT BELIEVE it’s literally December now. I’m not ready! Also December always makes me super introspective and I’m already feeling introspective so it’s all just a double helix of feelings. On the upside, the smell of pine sends me into catnip-esque conniptions and we have erected an enormous, splendidly bushy real Christmas tree at work, every time I pass it by I feel more and more seasons greetings-y. Thanks, Pavlov’s Christmas tree!

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title via: Parklife! Man I used to have the crushiest crush on Blur’s Damon Albarn. I literally wrote angrily in my diary in 1996 about him dating Justine Frischmann from Elastica; as if their being together somehow made him less accessible to me than he already was.
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music lately:

Turkey Lurkey Time from the 1969 musical Promises, Promises. It’s my own personal Christmas tradition that every time the first of December comes around, then and only then will I rewatch this video of this utterly ludicrous song being performed. Honestly the song is ridiculous but I’m in it for the incredible dancing, especially from Donna McKechnie who blatantly has elastic where her bones should be. It’s hard to explain, but this is just weirdly important to me. The video, not the consistency of her bones, I mean.

One Direction, Hey Angel. I had very low expectations for these guys post-Zayn, but UGH this is such a good song. It is just so big and manipulative and I love it heartily.
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next time: hopefully some exponentially increasing xmas spirit and exponentially decreasing introspection. And chilled out kidneys.

Hungry and Frozen

possibly the best food blog in the world, since 2007

Category: Side Dishes and Snacks

you said i must eat so many lemons, because i am so bitter

oh baby you’re young but that’s okay, what’s give or take nine years anyway

i wish i had a river, that i could skate away on, but it don’t snow here, it stays pretty green

you’ve got eggs in the same basket, writing the check

these girls fall like dominoes

garlic springs up where you walk, bells ring out baby when you talk

turn the music up way too loud, charge the pizza to the house

to loving tension, no pension, to more than one dimension

but i tell ya, it’s gonna be a champagne year

and morning soup can be avoided If you take a route straight through what is known as parklife