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

September 16, 2013March 11, 202010 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

tiny fried pickles

A recipe by myself. Dairy-free!

1 jar pickles

1 egg

1/2 cup soda water/sparkling water/whatever you call it in your neighbourhood

1 cup flour

pinch salt

pinch sugar

plain oil for frying

Drain the jar of pickles and slice into rounds. Don’t even think about measuring them, but roughly a centimetre wide is a good size to aim for. On the other hand, I’m horrendously fussy and discarded all the ends like some kind of wastrel. Sit the slices on a couple of paper towels. This helps absorb some of the pickle-vinegar, which will help the batter stick and stop it spluttering like whoa in the hot oil.

Then, mix the egg and soda water together, then add the salt, sugar, and – slowly – the flour, and stir to a thick batter. Doing it in this order stops it getting lumpy.

Heat up about 1.5 inches of plain oil in a wide pan. It has to be properly hot, so try dropping a little batter in it to test once you think it’s ready, and it should bubble up and you know, fry.

Now, it’s possible there’s a better/more logical way of doing this, but this worked for me: tip all the slices of pickle into the bowl of batter. Take a large spoonful of the pickle-y batter, and with a smaller spoon, push slices off into the hot oil. Some batter may fall into the oil too. This is cool. The lil pickles should take a minute or two to get brown and puffy, if they need it use a pair of tongs to carefully turn them over in the oil, then remove them – still using the tongs – to another plate lined with paper towels and spoon some more slices in. Finally, dust the fried, puffy pickles with smoked paprika and more salt and serve immediately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 12, 2013March 11, 202077 Comments

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

The ‘after’ photo – above – of the plum hand pie is so much better than the ‘before’ photo of said hand pie and its little pie pals below, taken the previous evening. On account of I will possibly never work out how to take decent photos at night-time, illuminated only by an environmentally friendly lightbulb, which casts a gloomy yellow haze over everything within a metre of it and makes you squint like you’ve never squinted before, but does save ten percent power or something. Now that I’m done both damning myself and faintly praising myself, the important thing is: these hand pies are delicious and very easy and cute, and probably about to be really ‘in’, too. For what that’s worth. (Now that I’ve said it, hand pies will probably be widely denounced as embarrassingly tacky, which to be honest will probably make me love them even more.)

I made these to be eaten at a spontaneous-ish gathering of friends to watch a movie on our projector on Saturday night (Wet Hot American Summer, if you’re wondering, because as I always say, nothing bad can happen when Wet Hot American Summer is on.) It was a very fun evening, just really relaxed and lovely and silly and hilarious and low-key, the sort of fun you wish you could schedule in on a bi-daily basis, while knowing it’s best to just wait and let it happen accidentally.

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

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

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

plum, cinnamon and cardamom hand pies

a recipe by myself

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

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

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

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

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

Hand pies! Get some.

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

here’s what you have to do.

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

May the odds be ever in your favour!

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

Music lately:

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

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

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

if i was a movie star, i’d sip honey from a pickle jar

July 29, 2013December 15, 202011 Comments

Sunday started off so productive. I did some deadline-y writing, I made a cake, Tim and I went to the vege market and I made these taco pickles with the fruits thereof (well, with the vegetables). Then a dark case of Sunday night bleakness set in, which I managed to largely see off with some West Wing and yoga. And then I lay awake for ages, as I do, but must have fallen asleep because at 1am I was zapped awake by another earthquake. Nothing huge, just a big rocking jolt that was over quickly, but every single one feels like it’s going to be the biggest thing ever. And then another largely sleepless night continued. But really: everything’s pretty okay. Sure, last Sunday’s big scary under-the-table-for-three-hours quake, and the aftershocks marching resolutely like the broomsticks in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, really sucked. But I keep reminding myself that nothing broke, no-one broke, and I don’t want to expend all my resilience on this when I might need it for another time. Take it easy. Everything is cool.

Chose the leafy bunch of cute tiny carrots for reasons threefold: to be annoying, they look cool in photos, and the tiny carrots are sweeter and less bitter than the bigger ones, so ha! Vindicated.

Despite convincing myself I’m so relaxed and not uptight anymore about these silly earthquakes, while typing this very paragraph two small-but significant aftershocks shook the house. The resolve I pretended to have disintegrated a little. Honestly though, who am I kidding. Relaxed, me, ever? Don’t make me laugh. (oh, John Travolta in Grease, specifically. Such a babe.) So I guess what I’m actually saying is, everything is cool until it’s not, but I’ll worry about it then, and also probably during all the inbetween times, but also acknowledge always that things could be a lot worse and have been a lot worse for other parts of New Zealand and so on and so forth. And also just live in the now, or something.

Luckily these super fast pickles haven’t disintegrated! Nice segue, yes? If not, just pretend it was, that might help. I discovered this recipe on evakolenko.com, a photographer’s website so stunningly beautiful that I don’t know why I even tried to recreate the recipe here, except that that I am audacious and incorrigible. These taco pickles immediately attracted me, with their swiftness of execution appealing to my ever-shrinking attention span, their translucent pink and orange discs of colour appealing to my sense of “hey that’s pretty”, and their vinegar-sugar-salt content appealing to my tastebuds, which are always craving sourness and sodium. Not to mention the very phrase “taco pickles” is kind of adorable.

I would cautiously assume that any firm-textured or root vegetable could be used here, but the mild sugary-nutty flavour of carrots along with the cool peppery radishes is quite perfect. The only thing I did to change the recipe was add a few coriander seeds, which point up the lemony, herbal fragrance of the leaves and add to the crunch. The brilliant thing about these is that they are so quick and easy to make, and so very versatile. Heap them on top of rice, throw them in a massive sandwich, eat them with cheese and crackers, stand in the kitchen absentmindedly eating them straight from the jar with a spoon.

taco pickles

adapted a tiny bit from a recipe by Eva Kolenko.

Carrots – about 10 small (the smaller the better, for flavour)
1 bunch radishes (or about six? seven? twelve? Just not like, two, okay.)
1/2 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 handful coriander leaves
Generous pinch of salt, to taste

Get yourself an airtight jar – everyone loves them these days, so they shouldn’t be too hard to find. Scrub, but don’t peel your vegetables, and slice them as thinly as you can muster. I find a kind of rocking motion with a large knife against a chopping board is good, but as I went on I got lazier and the slices got thicker. Just do the best you can.

Once you’re happy with how full the jar is – it doesn’t matter if it’s not full, as long as it’s not overflowing – tip the vegetables out of the jar into a bowl. Bring the vinegars and sugar just to the boil, allow to cool slightly, tip over the vegetables and stir in, along with the coriander seeds and leaves, and as much salt as you like. I like a lot. Spoon all this back into the jar, pouring the liquid that remains in last of all. You don’t actually have to use this order of proceedings, I just found it useful so I could make sure I wasn’t overfilling the jar, and also it’s easier to mix everything in a bowl rather than the jar. Refrigerate, and eat within three weeks.

As I said, these can be used many different ways, but the power of suggestion prompted Tim and I to make actual tacos, using some masa flour we got from La Boca Loca. It was all stupidly delicious. Warm, pliantly soft tacos, spicy tomato-rich beef, feta, crunchy vinegary vegetables, sriracha (we were, um, making do with what we found in the fridge, as opposed to being strictly traditional.) Our stupid stovetop kept turning off (it’s one of those weird newfangled flat-top touchscreen ones and it is a paaaaaain) so it took about an hour and much swearing to actually fry all the tacos, but even the slightly flabby undercooked ones tasted amazing.

Some other good things that happened recently, to distract me from my distractedness

Coffee // 80c packets of off-brand poprocks // knitting, knitting, knitting // the aggressive joyfulness that is On The Town // beer with friends // more tattoo planning and txt conversations with Kate about all the ideas I have // tipsily plaiting my hair with that of two other friends into one witchy braid, just for fun // expending all the feelings I have left on Orange is the New Black // yoga // wedding planning // all the wine leftover from Tim’s and my engagement party // seeing talented friends playing live music // buying tickets for NZ Film Festival films // realising it’s less than a month till my cookbook, my cookbook is published for real.

And I still adore this formica table.

title via: look, this song Delicious Surprise by Beth Hart isn’t the coolest – I mean, that title. But, it is gloriously 90s with those guitars and Americana-aspirational lyrics and also I learned a dance to it at a workshop back in 2000 which I can still remember a tiny bit of, and there’s no better way to endear a song to me than for that to happen.

music lately:

Kate Bush, Running Up That Hill. There’s not much dreamier than this. There is thunder in our hearts? Swoon. Also it’s her birthday today. HBD, Kate Bush!

You’ve Got Time, Regina Spektor. Aka the intro music for Orange is the New Black. It has been in my head at least once an hour every hour every day. Watch out.

Next time: the cake I mentioned that I productively made on Sunday is a lemon cake with white chocolate buttercream, and really delicious, so you bet your butts I’ll be blogging about it here next time.

take it easy on me, shed some light, shed some light on things

July 1, 2013March 11, 202010 Comments

My fork is the much, much smaller one on the top right.

This is a slight, small recipe, willfully simplistic. But also oddly fancy. I make this a lot, since it’s not very much effort, but is also just the kind of thing I want to eat following a Sunday afternoon of book group, mainlining candy (specifically: Nerds, fizzy Spongebob Squarepants lollies) and drinking just enough cider to feel pleasantly fuzzy. Seriously, we had so many good snacks – kumara chips, hummus that I’d made myself with brown chickpeas and harissa, Turkish bread, manuka smoked butter. I just felt like sugar. Until I didn’t – you know that wall you hit? Well, this is the perfect antidote. It’s intensely savoury, with rich oiliness, sharp saltiness, bursts of citrus and pinchings of smoky heat. Not the slightest bit sweet at all. And you can make it post-cider times, without hurting yourself. At least, I did, and I am so clumsy-prone that it’s a pretty decent test of what the rest of the world is capable of.

The other nice thing about this is that all you need is one pot and one or two small bowls. If you want to make even less dishes, you could soak the dried chili first, then use that same emptied bowl to put the olive oil in. I just used lots of fancy little bowls because sometimes my “how will this look on the blog” aesthetics override my already skewed logic. Also since moving into a house with a dishwasher for the first time, I like casually using as many dishes as I can, safe in the knowledge that some machine is going to do all the work for Tim and me. Hooray for dystopian futures!

spaghetti with chili, lemon, capers and olive oil

200g spaghetti
1 large dried red chili
1 lemon
1 tablespoon of capers, rinsed of any salt if they’re salt-packed
salt
extra virgin olive oil

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil, and cook the pasta according to packet instructions – usually takes between 9-12 minutes. While it’s cooking, put the chili in a small bowl and cover with boiling water for five minutes to allow it to rehydrate. In another small bowl, pour several tablespoons of olive oil – two to three is probably fine, though I go for four-ish mostly – and either grate or use a lemon zester to remove as many curling golden strands of lemon peel that you can. Tip the lemon zest and capers into the olive oil, retrieve the chili carefully from its water bath and roughly chop (removing seeds and stem as you please – and I do, a lot of the burn is in those seeds) into small pieces, adding that to the oil too. Finally, drain the cooked pasta, tip in the oil and all the bits and pieces in it, stir carefully and divide between two plates. I often cut the lemon in half and squeeze its juice over the pasta too, at this point. Pour over more olive oil if you like, sprinkle over more salt if you need it, and eat. Obviously.

Chilis can seem intimidating if you’re not used to them, if at the most you eat sticky, syrupy sweet chili sauce, if all your references are all cartoonishly exaggerated pop culture. Or in fact literally cartoons in pop culture, like Homer Simpson’s viaje mysterioso. Despite seeming that way, chilis are not simply a straightforward delivery method of a burning sensation. They have a whole spectrum of flavour, from smoky like, well, smoke, to fruity like the darkest dried plums, to sweet and lemony…kick the seeds and internal spine out and you might find you can handle a lot more than you thought. The chili I used for this was long, leathery and with a rich wine-dark colour and flavour and just a little prickling heat here and there. Together with the salt of the capers and the bright lemon zest, it’s really something. Even though it sorta looks like nothing.

Now that it’s suddenly July – cue my obligatory yet sincere incredulity at the passing of time, as always – Tim and I are entering crunch time on planning our engagement party, which is partway through this month. Lots of things about it are making us nervous, mostly around disparite groups of people in one room, but we have been having so much fun looking through old photos of ourselves to get printed for a photoboard. The pre-us-getting-together “whoa that chemistry” moments caught on film. Tim’s fluctuatingly enormous hair. The entirety of 2006 when we were each as much of a hipster scene kid as we could muster. Our utterly squalid flats. The six months in 2008 when a neighbourhood cat decided to adopt us (cue some obligatory but deeply sincere howling from my direction at the sorrow of it all now, in that we can’t have a cat.) Our first holiday, finally, to Europe in 2011. All that tequila. “Oh, that’s the time I wore a singlet as a dress”; “Why did I have a permanent spot on my chin for three years”; “ah, the night where everyone had to wear hats and dance to Fall Out Boy”; “why were we obsessed with taking photos of our feet?”; “how on earth did I pass that photography paper?” and so on, and so on. It’s making me want to stop and be a bit more grateful and aware of the good things we have going on right now. Like insulation and personal space and the aforementioned dishwasher. And no photos of our feet. And new-old friends but also old friends from the moment we first lived together (Ange! That’s you!) And each other, still.

In case this was getting all too sentimental, I got another tattoo! Ain’t nothing sentimental about being stabbed with needles for an hour and a half. It’s at the aren’t-bodies-fascinating scabbed healing stage right now, but once it’s fully there I’ll take a photo, in case you’re interested. In the meantime, here’s me excitedly pointing at it. The super great Nursey at Dr Morse did the design, and also the stabbing itself. Which was oddly enjoyable – it burned, but there’s something about sitting through that pain and knowing you can just do it and you’ll get something you adore forever is kinda powerful. Or at least do-able.

It’s a crescent moon with clouds drifting over it and the lupus (wolf) constellation over the top. It’s very soft and dreamy and a little ancient. And it’s forty centimetres long! Kidding, it’s a couple of inches. I’m very, very happy with it. In a week where people have fought so hard for other people’s rights to simply have autonomy over their own bodies (particularly the brave Senator Wendy Davis who filibustered into the night, on her feet, without water or food, for this very idea) it’s – and not to tenuously link between myself and Davis, because seriously – but it’s nice to be able to make this small decision.

title via: Feist, My Moon My Man. It’s grand. I love the sneaky Tainted Love-esque beat.

music lately:

Lorde, Tennis Court. Yeah Lorde! Still being astonishing!

Blur, Beetlebum. Oh, sexy sexy Damon Albarn.

Connie Converse, How Sad How Lovely. Occasionally I return to this sorrowful, beautiful song from the mysterious Converse. I should return to it more.

Next time: I Should Tell You is back, with Delaney Davidson, which is really exciting. For me. And hopefully you too. His music is excellent.

lazy jane, all the time

June 24, 2013March 11, 20208 Comments

Tulips holding up well. As is my twee agenda, it seems.

Also holding up well: this risotto recipe. I’ve made it three times in the last week. Once, twice, three times a lady recommending this recipe to you all. I know I often go on about how I work myself down to a nub writing this blog and the cookbook and meeting other various deadlines, but that aside, I’m really very lazy. If there’s a way I can do less than what’s required, even at the expense of the outcome, I will. It’s just the way it is. Some people accept that there’s hard work involved in life, some people (me) want to sit around and knit or check Twitter all day. Fortunately for me, Tim tends to meet this laziness with shrugging resignation/lifting/cleaning of all the things, but occasionally it works out well for both of us. In the case of this risotto, that is. I already love making risotto, with its calmingly repetitive stirring motion, and I don’t mean to sound like Troy McClure, but sometimes I want to take an already pretty easy thing and make it even more flagrantly low in effort. And not only does this make enough excellently delicious risotto for dinner and then a non-bleak lunch the next day (in your face, instant noodles!) it also uses only one dish. So, less dishes for Tim to do, or for him to rinse and then put in the dishwasher (I can’t comprehend how we have a machine to do the dishes for us but still have to pre-wash them, hence why I never do it.) I’m not trying to be proud of how lazy I am or anything, in fact I’m too lazy to expend any feelings over it whatsoever. Kidding! On the one hand, I feel like “why should naturally helpful, good people in society be celebrated when I can’t help being this unhelpful” and on the other hand sometimes I am just being a dick to see how much I can get away with not doing.

Back to the risotto, you wouldn’t necessarily think a version that you just shunt into the oven would work, since it’s the constant stirring of it that slowly releases the starch from the rice grains and gives it that soft, collapsing texture. But somehow it does, and frankly I don’t care to question why. It just does. The first time I tried this I simply stirred some herbs in and topped it with a little Whitestone Butter by Al Brown Manuka Smoked Butter that arrived in the mail because that’s right, I have the veneer of a fancy food blogger (as always, I wish I could tell my much younger self that this would happen, as something to cling on to and look forward to.) I’m not just saying this because I got it for free (I mean, in a roundabout way I am, but I would never lie to you about butter, okay?) this butter really is quite incredible, the manuka smoke somehow making it meatily rich while the texture is dissolvingly creamy and light. It’s the ideal substance atop a very plain, but perfect risotto. But regular butter and plenty thereof is also always the right choice, too.

Oven Risotto

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

2 cups arborio rice

2 teaspoons vegetable stock powder

1 tablespoon dijon mustard

5 cups water, of which up to 1 cup is white wine

Optional: fistfuls of butter, lemon zest and juice (especially if you don’t have wine), herbs. I guess the mustard is optional too, but you want this to taste like something.

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

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

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

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

Some other cool things of late, in order of most to least of what I thought of first to write about:

Am quite obsessed with knitting. It’s so calming, and repetitive. A bit like risotto, but you don’t have to stand up to do it!

Witness the knitness.

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

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

Finally: saw some cool hund friends!

Finally-finally: I’m going to bring up again that I was published in Cuisine magazine, because I’m just so happy and excited and self-proud.

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title via: Lazy Line Painter Jane, by Belle and Sebastian. This is one of about three of their songs that I am into, but I am so VERY into this song. The breakdown at the end is spectacular.

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music lately:

Camera Obscura, The Sweetest Thing. This song is from an album called My Maudlin Career, which is a bit of a great title. The song also rules. Otherwise I wouldn’t have put it here, of course.

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

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

June 11, 2013March 11, 20209 Comments

I don’t mean to deliver this like it’s candlelit-vigil level news, but the following exchange happened late last week:

Tim: we’ve exceeded our 60 gigabyte monthly internet bandwidth allowance.

Me: *dramatic gasp* No internet? But I’ll be insufferable.

Tim: I know. I know.

I mean, a breezy and heedless thank goodness for 3G on smartphones, but still, I’ve had to write this as hastily as possible, in the knowledge that we get charged significantly extra for every gigabyte over the monthly allowance that we use. Just keep that in mind if there’s, I don’t know, any tiny thing you don’t like ever. This is my excuse.

This is how we do it.

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

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

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

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

Baked Pears with Almonds, Chocolate, and Rosewater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

you like tomato and i like tomahto

June 4, 2013March 11, 20204 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

A recipe by myself.

As much cauliflower and as many parsnips as you please. I found about half of the former and two of the latter fit comfortably on one oven tray and will feed 2-3.

Olive oil

2 slices thick white bread (I used seeded this time round. Uh…don’t.)

1/2 cup whole almonds

1 can tomatoes

1 heaped teaspoon smoked paprika

Salt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazing burritos occurred.

Hello.

And finally I got an email telling me an advance copy of my cookbook (which isn’t due out till September so don’t try asking your bookstore about it yet, unless you think it will build up major h y p e) which I received in the mail today and nearly cried and threw up everywhere when I saw it because every emotion in the world suddenly played out in my brain. I mean, I’m really happy with it of course, but there was just such a rush of feelings when I held it in my hands for the first time, so much more intense than just seeing the printouts of the design and the manuscript and so on. I will have to work on this so I don’t black out every time I walk into a bookshop in September. It’s just very exciting and terrifying and strange and happy all at the same time. Cookbook!

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Title via: Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, a song about a couple who say words differently sometimes. Adorable! Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong do a reliably snappy version.

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Music lately:

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

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

Polly Scattergood, Wanderlust. Cannot. Stop. Listening. To. This song.

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Next time: Umm. I know not of any specifics yet. Will see where my brain takes me. Could probably do with a better weekday lunch than pot noodles, that could be a thing.

running through the whisker wheat chasing some prize down

May 15, 2013March 11, 20207 Comments

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

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

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

Also: The Carb on Carb Agenda.

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

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

Fried Potato Burghal Wheat with Walnuts and Rocket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then the sky got darker and the beautiful moon appeared. And we drove home. Completely ruining the moodiness with our laughter.

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Title via: Joni Mitchell, Coyote. Complicated and stunning. Like a coyote. Okay, not really. But I stand by the first bit. Plus, coyotes might have hidden depths we just don’t know about.

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Music lately:

Janine and the Mixtape, Hold Me. Brand new. Beautiful. One to watch, this one.

Dave Brubeck, Take Five. The jauntiest damn tune there ever was.

Rachel Stevens, Some Girls. Mmmhmm. The odds were possibly against it, Stevens being an ex S Club 7 and all, but it’s so, so, sosososo good.

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Next time: I have the feeling I’ll be in the mood to bake this weekend. So you might see some of that.

if I rap soup my beats is stock

April 30, 2013March 11, 202012 Comments

In a wearily unsurprising turn of events, I undercooked the cornbread in the photo above. I then returned it to the oven and overcooked it. Then tonight I took the crumbly leftovers and mixed them together with eggs and milk and cheese and butter – and then undercooked that. Well of course.

Of all the things I could be queen of, it’s not what I’d choose, but if Game of Thrones has taught me anything (apart from don’t watch it while eating dinner) it’s that sometimes the crown finds you. And I seem to be the queen of false starts. It’s not simply just a case of when it rains it pours (by the way, Shakespeare invented that phrase, along with all other phrases and words and probably food blogging) it’s more like…getting in my own way, constantly being underprepared for basic things and the general game of good luck roulette that is life not offering any help. I’m not saying I’m cursed or beleaguered or miserable. I mean, good things happen. Life is pretty alright. I just have a lot of cause to say things like “well of course this happened, because I am me.”

Like, I sometimes really struggle to leave the house in a hurry. It sounds strange, but time will speed up while my movements slow down, everything feels weird, I can’t find anything, I’ll drop things, my heart will start racing and I’ll feel like I need a shower and a lie-down. Often. But surely pretty much everyone has had that feeling where you’re trying to achieve something small and the more you try the more you push it away and break it apart. Oh my gosh, this has turned into the most negative start to this blog post. I was just trying to muse. To ponder. What a damn false start!

Luckily the parsnip soup I made turned out so good, so velvety and creamy and wonderful that I wanted to not so much eat it as to fall asleep on a li-lo drifting around in a large bowl of it, one hand idly trailing into the soup as I float on by. By li-lo I mean inflatable mattress thing for a swimming pool, not the actress Lindsay Lohan. Actually in this day and age I can’t tell which reference is less up-to-date and likely to be squinted at in confusion by young people. Perhaps a better solution is an undignified but sensible inflatable ring around my waist, keeping me safely bouyant. Or just eating the soup.

I don’t even go for soup all that often, it doesn’t seem as exciting as other significantly less formless foods. It’s not crisp, it’s not chewy, it’s not crunchy, it’s not deep-fried, all those good things, you know? And yet, whenever I actually get over that and have soup, I’m always like “…oh yeah. Soup.” And that’s the eloquent response I had to this parsnip soup after making it. It certainly helped me get over the cornbread a little bit.

Dead roses: I really like them.

The texture is cloud-like, aerated and foam-light, yet rich and plushly creamy. Despite not having cream or in fact any dairy in it whatsoever. Which is really good if you’re at that days-before-payday stage where there’s no money still and there’s not the option of running down the road to pick up extra ingredients from the dairy. This is more or less parsnips and water. You do absolutely need a blender though, that’s what allows the luxuriant texture to happen, but I’m pretty sure a food processor or stick blender will still be absolutely fine. Without one of those…I’m sorry, maybe make a different soup. Or something deep-fried.

It might look like there’s a lot of oil in this – or it might not, I can’t even tell anymore – but it’s there for the rich buttery olive oil flavour, as well as the way it turns vegetables and water into something with a little more body and soul. So, if you don’t have olive oil on you, I’d use actual butter which will provide similar flavour. If not…different soup? I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be pushing you away. But c’mon.

Velveteen Parsnip Soup (I don’t know how I feel about adjectives in front of recipe names. But I really like the word velveteen. And this soup really is all soft and fleecy and wondrous.)

A recipe by myself.

4 medium sized parsnips
3 cloves garlic
4 tablespoons of olive oil
Salt
1 tablespoon dijon mustard
Tiny pinch of ground cinnamon
3 cups water

Roughly dice the parsnips, and peel and trim the garlic cloves. Heat the oil in a large saucepan and fry the parsnips and garlic over a high heat for five minutes, stirring occasionally. Lower the heat, very low, sprinkle with a pinch of salt, cover with the lid and allow to slowly cook for about ten minutes. At this stage the parsnip pieces should be all soft and golden. Stir in the mustard and cinnamon and pour over the water and simmer gently for another ten minutes, or until the parsnip is completely tender. Blend the hell out of it – it’s a pain to get the stuff into the blender, but it’s worth the nervousness – until not one single lump of parsnip remains.

Optional caramelised nuts, for sprinkling over, optional since I’m not 100% sure about them

1 handful nuts, eg hazelnuts, almonds, a mix of whatever, whatever. I do have this feeling that peanuts are a no here, though.
30-ish grams butter
1/4 teaspoon/a few drops soy sauce
1/4 teaspoon/small pinch mustard powder
1 teaspoon brown sugar

Very roughly chop the nuts, then melt the butter in a pan – I used the same one I’d cooked the soup in, no need to wash – until it’s bubbling and hot. Tip in the nuts, and stir around till they’re lightly toasted. Stir in the soy sauce, mustard powder and sugar until it becomes a little clumpy and caramelised. Tip the lot, butter and gritty caramelised bits of sugar and all, into a small bowl and spoon it over your soup as you please.

(Me: sorry Tim. It’s going to be that kind of blog post where I photograph your spookily headless body while you pause mid-spoonful.)

Parsnips have a natural mild sweetness and butteriness that you wouldn’t think was there if you just bit into a raw one (have done, not…unpleasant) and which benefits from the slow frying, from the warm rounding out of cinnamon and mustard, and from lots of salt. And what this soup lacks in deep-fried-ness, it makes up for in baffling silkiness, and caramelly parsnip deliciousness. As I hinted at in the recipe, I’m not quite sure about the caramelised nuts that I made to sprinkle over the top – the soy sauce almost made them a little too rich, if such a thing is possible. I think I would’ve been better off just toasting them in butter rather than trying to be too fancy. And of course, there is the cornbread, all undercooked and stupid. But the thing I thought most of all was not going to work – the soup that I made up on the spot – was pretty perfect.

Talk about false starts, I took the day after a public holiday off on Friday with the intention of getting a lot of writing and blog admin done. I spent the day on the floor, frustrated and sick (when I wasn’t throwing up, that is. I always instinctively end up on the floor at times like this.) Oh, and I made some cookies to blog about (I mean, I made them to eat, which is my primary reason for cooking anything, just I thought they’d be good to blog about.) And they really didn’t turn out right. Not terrible or inedible, just not what I’d intended and not particularly fantastic. I dubbed them shame-cookies, because drama is its own reward.

Saturday was glorious though, in that I watched The Hour for the, uh, fourth time in about six months. And made another convert to its swooning, heart-punching gorgeousness (Kate.) And made this cake. I know I talk about it a lot, but I can’t overstate my love for this show. Fly, don’t run or walk, to find it.

PS wanna see my tattoo? Here is a peek of the sneaky kind. I just wanted to hold onto it for a while before I posted a picture of it online, and then of course as I mentioned in my last post, it went a bit gross while healing, which is to be expected.

It’s now more or less healed, which means I can wear pants again. But I don’t even want to. (No pants are better than pants, as I always think.) But really: I just want to keep gazing at it. You can too, right here.

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title via: Beastie Boys, Intergalactic. Sigh, poor Beastie Boys with only the two of them now.
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Music lately:

Let’s Get Ready to Crumble, Russian Futurists. I haven’t listened to these guys in so long! Literally not since, oh, 2009. And I really like them still. It’s hard to explain what they sound like, a little vague and dreamy but also quite punchy. I don’t know, it sounds like all that music that you like.

Fear No Pain, Willy Mason. It feels like if he’d released this now, in these post-Mumford times, he’d be intergalactic huge. But then maybe I’d instantly dislike him (I really don’t like Mumford and Sons, however I try to just let my ears tell me what music I like rather than letting taste dictate. Otherwise, let’s face it, I might not have named this blog after a line from RENT.) Anyway, it’s a gorgeous, sunny, Americana-y tune that comfortably lived-in and yet is only about five years old.

The Wayward Wind, Patsy Cline. A beautiful voice, singing one of the most beautiful songs.
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Next time: I don’t know, but I really hope whatever it is I make it on the weekend and there’s decent lighting for taking photos. And that I don’t under or over-cook the thing I make.

umami said knock you out

April 23, 2013March 11, 202012 Comments

Birthdays are a very important and special time for me.

Because I’m self-absorbed and love attention. No, I mean, yes, but there’s more to it than that. And not just the promise of neatly wrapped consumer items, either. But honestly, so many people said incredibly nice things to me on my birthday. I felt very loved and liked and lucky and a little bit tearful.

Birthday me. Twenty seven. This was one of about fifty photos that a drunk Tim snapped of me. I hated them all so willfully went for two particularly awkward shots. Can someone please get me some photogenic-ness for a late birthday present?

Like being my own hype man, I’d indulged in some deep pre-birthday buildup. The day itself though, was quiet but pretty ideal. It was raining, which made me so very happy. Tim made me fresh coffee and rice bubbles with canned peaches for breakfast. I did yoga. I had a long bath in which I drank whisky and read Joan Didion, since I enjoy doing things that let me use the words “sybaritic lotus-eater”. I met Tim for lunch at the very beautiful Nikau cafe, and had an Aperol spritzer (Aperol is like Campari, which I adore, only with more lunchtime-friendly levels of alcohol) and a quince and raspberry donut. I cried twice while watching Nashville. And later I watched while the NZ government passed the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill, meaning marriage equality was indeed A Thing.

Let’s just say: best birthday present ever. To try and articulate it further…I don’t know. I kept leaving this page and procrastinating on other pages because I couldn’t work out to say. I guess I’m just utterly happy with the result. It’s not a magic solution to all the ills and hate of the world, but it will not only do no harm, it will be super amazing. It was just so damn delightful to see politicians from all across the political spectrum – or rainbow, if you will – giving speeches that were eloquent and beautiful and impassioned, or at least vaguely sensible. To hear the vote results announced, and feeling like this was one more step in the right direction of affirming that we’re all okay. It made me feel really pretty okay. And proud of all those who had gone before so that we could be watching this debate unfold now in 2013. And while I should stay positive, I mean, I said in my last blog post that I’d never heard an anti-gay argument that made any sense whatsoever. So it’s just really vindicating and hopeful that the law, in this case at least, sides with those of us who do make sense.

You know how you can pop a balloon, so it explodes with a bang, or just carefully pierce the surface so it deflates slowly, almost imperceptibly, over time? I thought I was going to erupt in scream-tears like a popped balloon when it was finally, finally clear that we’d won. But I didn’t, instead just wiping away quiet tears and not even realising how much I’d been crying till later when my eyeliner had rendered my face panda-esque.

“No take-backs!” I yelled at Tim. Guess we’re really-really getting married now!

Umami is one of those words that gets evoked a lot in the food writing of yonder present times. Unlike many popular and overused words (“om”, “nom”, “nom”, and variations thereof), umami is a perfect and quite irreplaceable term from Japan which refers to the mysteriously savoury. That unmistakeable but pretty elusive quality that makes fried mushrooms and miso soup and soy sauce and gruyere cheese and worcestershire sauce particularly fascinating, and fascinatingly particular. Also can I just step back and point out from this short distance and say that I’ve made, and will make recipes that illustrate the concept of umami SO MUCH BETTER than these two but I liked the title that I came up with and so insisted on making this all fit.

Make these noodles once and then commit the concept to memory and ignore the recipe because they’re a perfect go-to, fallback meal when you feel like something resembling this end result, and you really don’t need to live or die by the below quantities. As it is, what I’ve written below is not Nigella’s original recipe – she was a little more restrained with the sesame oil than I, but it’s such an incredible flavour that I just wanted more. They’re cold and slippery and nutty and salty and delicious and many other positive adjectives besides.

Sesame Soba Noodles

Adapted just barely from Nigella Lawson’s excellent book Forever Summer

200g soba noodles (although they sometimes come in 90g packs, so y’know, two of those is fine.)
2 teaspoons rice vinegar
5 teaspoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon sesame oil
75g sesame seeds, or sunflower seeds like I did. Or peanuts. Or nothing.
Chives or spring onions to serve.

If you’ve got sesame seeds or whatever, toast them in a dry pan over a low heat, shaking or stirring often to prevent them burning. It will seem to take forever and then they’ll burn all of a sudden, so stay patient and you’ll be rewarded with a rich golden brown colour.

Cook the soba noodles according to packet instructions in boiling water. This probably won’t take long. Drain, running under cold water while you do so. Mix together the remaining ingredients and stir them into the slightly cooled, drained noodles. Finely slice the chives or green onions, and sprinkle over the top. Serves two.

Apologies that my photos are so weak this week, I adore winter but am in denial about the bad lighting it brings. Will try to do something about it so you can return to the kinda-decent photos you deserve.

Surprise second recipe, it’s something I just thought into existence all casual-like, with the hopes that it would work. Oh, how it worked. The butter sizzles in the oven emphasising its – all together now – umami properties, deepening and darkening its already amply pleasing taste. The rum is sweet and sticky and rich but not overpowering, matching the sweetness of the pumpkin and parsnip and making them taste like the best vegetables on earth. Mustard helps it not all taste like pudding, and thyme is my favourite herb (well, that and mint) and I’ve managed not to kill my potplant of it yet and so I thought I’d throw some in as well.

Pumpkin and Parsnips roasted in Butter and Rum

A recipe by myself. Serves 3-4, or two of us with leftovers.

1 small pumpkin (or butternut, or a couple of kumara)
2 medium parsnips
100g butter
2 teaspoons dijon mustard
1 tablespoon golden rum
Half a handful of thyme leaves (or one handful if your hands are tiny-tiny like mine.)

Set the oven to 190 C. Remove the skin from the pumpkin if you like, and slice it into thick chunks. Slice the parsnips into thick sticks. Place in a large roasting dish. Cube the butter and dot it over, then spoon over the mustard. Sprinkle with salt and roast for about 40 minutes, until the vegetables are a little browned and very tender. Pour over the rum and a little more salt, and return to the oven for another ten minutes. Serve.

Pumpkin and Rum: friendly. (Rumpkin? No, wait, I didn’t say that.)

Another thing I did on my birthday was – okay, after the whiskey and Aperol – only drink a tiny bit of cider while watching the marriage equality vote, because I had a tattoo booked the next day. Do you want to see it? Well, you can’t. It’s currently not fit to be seen, as a result of the long, fascinating, but ultimately sorta gross healing process. As Led Zeppelin and Johnny Cash played on the stereo I went through three solid hours of absurd pain, pausing only to have a fizzy drink or inhale deeply on a small bottle of pepperminty essential oils (which didn’t necessarily do that much, but did put my brain squarely back where it should be and made me feel all medieval) while Tim held my hand, and later, hands plural, which also didn’t seem to do anything as far as pain-assuaging and yet made me feel better. I was with Gill at Tattoo Machine, and he was brilliant. Super brilliant. And I mean, of course it’s going to hurt. I found it very interesting identifying the different kinds of pain – sometimes slicing, sometimes like a small yet mightily-toothed animal was chewing on me, sometimes an odd sensation like a tiny flaming vacuum was moving over my leg, and sometimes more straightforward: like a needle plunging deep into me. I felt weirdly powerful while I was lying there, thinking look what I can do, look what I’m capable of withstanding just because I want to. It’s also possible these are things that the brain tells itself while something like this is happening. At not one point, even during the most intense pain, did I think oh no this was the wrong choice. And now: I love it. I’m completely enraptured with it. Also probably 85 billion percent of people in New Zealand have a tattoo so maybe I’m rambling away on something that’s not particularly ground-breaking. But I’m very, very happy with mine.

Post-tattoo, while I lay on the couch with stabbed leg aloft, Tim trudged round town in the still-there rain and returned home with Voltarin, Bepanthen, a pie and a bunch of roses. He then made this platter of cheese (oh hey, umami), grapes and crackers to eat while we waited for the pies to heat up and poured me a whisky and patiently waited while I hobbled over to the table and took several goes to instagram the moment to my sufficient liking. Frankly, I’m surprised someone else didn’t try to marry him already with behaviour like that, but I’m glad it’s going to be, and can be, me.
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Title via that gleaming beacon of handsomeness, LL Cool J with Mama Said Knock You Out. Don’t call it a comeback!
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Music lately:

Gavin Creel must’ve bought his voice at the good voice shop or something, because damn son, he renders me unable to write a decent sentence about how great he sounds while singing Going Down from the musical Hair. I love this song anyway, he embiggens it like wo.

Garbage, Push It. Not sure how I missed how utterly terrifying this video was during the 90s. As far as those 90s-scary-subversive music videos go, this one has aged well. The song is brilliant, I bet there’s a version with just a static image if you’re reading this alone and in the dark. (PS thanks Kate for reminding me how excellent this is.)
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Next time: something photographed in better lighting, if I can. Got a yearning to make cookies, and also basically everything, so we’ll see.