Category: Vegetables

grass grows greener on the other side, corn is sweeter on the other side

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This recipe is based on one that I found in a fancy cookbook at the fancy house that I stayed at with my friends last weekend (a callback for the fans!) specifically, the Genius Recipes cookbook from the Food52 website. There’s something about the language they use that occasionally even my hyperbolic-assed self will blanch at (not least the attribution of “genius” to everything) but I can’t deny that the recipe in it for what they call corn butter is genuinely incredible.

It’s literally just corn kernels, blitzed in a food processor, strained and heated, and somehow it turns into this satiny-smooth intensely buttery-rich stuff, with the texture of expensive moisturiser and with the flavour of corn to the power of corn times corn. Squared. Like corn yelling its own name through a megaphone. Like….it’s really corny. If you’re having trouble picturing it, it’s pretty much exactly like what lemon curd is to lemons in both taste and texture, if that makes sense. The book suggests using it in a risotto, so that’s exactly what I did.

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The risotto itself is very simple, to allow the Aggressive Corn flavour of the corn butter to shine through like the liquefied sunshine that it is. However, I use the husks and pulp leftover from the strained corn to make a quick stock to flavour it, lest you fear it’s going to be too bland, or indeed, wasteful. This doesn’t take too much effort but the effect on the flavour is amazing. And then the cool, silky corn butter against the rice’s softly gritty creaminess, from the starch in the rice grains bleeding into the stock with every turn of the wooden spoon around the saucepan – it’s honestly spectacular. Despite how wordy the method is the actual making of it is very simple too – all you’re doing is slowly adding water to rice and letting it absorb bit by bit, the hardest bit is having the patience to just keep stirring. In risotto, as in life. But mostly risotto.

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Corn Butter Risotto

2 ready-to-eat ears of corn*
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil plus more for drizzling
3 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
1 cup risotto rice (I use calasparra rice because that’s what was in the cupboard, arborio tends to be the least expensive and always does the trick)
A splash of white wine or dry vermouth
salt and pepper to taste
one sprig of basil for garnish so your risotto doesn’t look nakedly yellow in the photos

1: Corn Butter

Carefully slice the corn kernels from the cob, throw them in a blender, and blitz to a thick yellow puree. Pour it through a sieve into a saucepan, pushing with a spatula and scraping underneath to get out as much velvety liquid as possible. Retain the remaining corn mush, because you’ll be using that to make a quick stock for the risotto.

Stir the sieved corn puree over a fairly high heat for a few minutes – it should thicken pretty quickly and start to look like lemon curd. Remove from the heat and set aside.

2: The risotto.

Put a kettle of water on to boil. Put the remaining corn mush from the sieve into a 1 litre measuring jug, fill it with the freshly boiled water, and give it a stir. If you don’t have a litre measuring jug, just use whatever size you have and add more water as you need it.

Heat the olive oil in a wide saucepan, and tip in the risotto rice, stirring it over medium heat for a few minutes just to allow the grains to toast a little, which makes the whole thing taste way nicer. Add the garlic, a good pinch of salt, and the splash of white wine which will steam dramatically and smell amazing.

Pour the corn stock through a sieve over the rice in small quantities – about half a cup at a time – and stir over a low heat till the rice has more or less absorbed all the stock before you add another quantity. Keep on stirring and topping up with more stock until the rice is super tender and creamy. If you need to add more liquid just add more, if you need less then that’s like, also fine.

Once you’re happy with the tenderness of the rice, remove the saucepan from the heat. Drizzle over some more olive oil (a tablespoon or two I guess) and add salt and pepper to taste. This is a really mellow-flavoured risotto so I tend towards plenty of both. To serve, spoon the risotto onto your plate and swirl generous spoonfuls of the corn butter through it.

This recipe serves two, more or less, because like, I ate it all, but in two goes.

*So, the recipe in the book asks for uncooked corn on the cob, but all I could find was the ready-to-eat variety. If you’re using uncooked corn, just be prepared to cook the puree for longer before it thickens. With that in mind, you could probably use canned corn (the plain kernels, not creamed corn) with similar effect.

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My younger brother has been staying with me this weekend and while I haven’t cooked us anything I’ve been enjoying catching up with him over those things only someone who’s grown up with you can appreciate (eg the doctor who saw me after I had a horrible horse-riding accident in 1996 is still there at the same practice and is still astonishingly handsome.) In-between me being at work all the time, we went to an art gallery, ate at a pop-up vegan cafe, he visited Te Papa, he bought a sitar, just normal weekend-y things like that.

All I’ve been doing otherwise is working or going deep into the snake hole of fan theories about House of Leaves which I read last weekend, it’s the kind of book where you’ll be nineteen pages deep into an online forum at 3am and find yourself whispering “oh my god the protagonist’s name is an anagram for….protagonist” and being so unsettled as a result that you have to sleep with the light on. If it’s not obvious, I highly recommend it. I’ve also just finished The Miseducation of Cameron Post which has that kind of bubbling-hot-tar-mosquito-bite-sticky-faced American Gothic quality that I adore.

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I cannot wait to make vast quantities more of corn butter – the recipe above gives you about half a cup, but I know I need more than that around, to spread on toast, to daub onto grilled corn (how wry!), to fold through pasta, to enliven a salad, to spread over my entire body before floating in the sea, the options are simply endless.

If you are on a corn buzz may I also recommend such further recipes of mine as Roast Corn and Tomatoes or Blackened Corn and Tortilla Salad.

title from: In A Hole, by Jesus and Mary Chain. I love these guys SO much. It literally sounds like someone was doing the vacuuming while this song was being recorded and that is precisely the amount of (a) scuzzy reverby grubbiness and (b) white noise I want around me at all times.

music lately:

We Are Scientists, The Great Escape. Saying this song sounds like every British indie record from 2005-2007 was put in a blender and strained through a sieve, cooked over a low heat and what remained covered with water to use as a flavoursome stock does it something of a disservice; the way that the chords climb on “great idea/wait right here” is truly thrilling to the ears.

Lynne Thigpen, Bless The Lord, from the film adaptation of the musical Godspell. This song belongs to her, there is no better rendition – her demeanour so effortlessly joyful, her voice so effortlessly enormous. The way she does those “Ohhh, yeaahhhh” bits, like, they’re just begging to be sampled into something.

Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté’s album that they collaborated on, called rather straightforwardly, Ali and Toumani. It’s so heavenly and calm and beautiful!

Next time: I made some vegan cheese that tasted AMAZING-ly adequate, I cannot express how aggressively neutral I am towards this cheese, and you all frankly deserve better than to hear any more about that. So hopefully it’s not what I end up blogging about.

Also: if you wish to receive these blog posts newsletter-style every Sunday before everyone else gets it and with such exclusive subscriber-only content as (having just checked what I wrote) an extended metaphor for gratitude that turns into a tirade about the local housing system, by all means sign up here. 

her legs are chafed by sticky wings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sticky Sesame Peanut Cauliflower

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

half a head of cauliflower
olive oil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

music lately:

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

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

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

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three, that’s the magic number

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For the last week or so I’ve been sick with a really rough cold that I’m juuuust coming out the other side of, mostly due to a drinking game that I call “take lemon honey ginger every time you cough”, a game with a sub-rule of “strawpedo Robitussin at any and all opportunities” which is curiously followed by “the floor is now lava.” I’m well aware that my last blog post was essentially a bowl of nuts and the blog post prior to that was pasta and now, what is this blog post about but a bowl of PASTA AND NUTS but as I said – I was sick! An unfailingly watertight excuse! I’m sorry I bailed on you, I was sick! I’m sorry I stole your car in the middle of the conversation we were having and then drove it into your other car, I was sick!

My tastebuds have been woefully muffled from having a blocked nose, but I woke up this morning not only feeling a lot better, but also thinking, “what if pesto, but with three different kinds of nut instead of just one” and decided, as I do with most of my thoughts regardless of content or consequence, to act upon it immediately. I feel that pesto was to 2003 what halloumi was to like, 2013, I remember being absolutely obsessed with it and having it feel hugely unattainable, and so I’d try and incorporate it into as many of my cooking class modules in high school as I could get away with (I really didn’t do well in cooking in high school but I think that’s because being a freewheeling spoon-licking pre-ADHD diagnosed idiot didn’t mesh well with teachers trying to get to grips with the assessment regime and a minimal budget that didn’t allow for just like, snorting mounds of pesto.)

But wait, who am I to think I can improve upon pesto? Well I’m me, but this isn’t a one-up so much as a side-step; I’ve subtracted the cheese and instead added knotty, sinuous walnuts and buttery pistachios to the original pine nuts. Which means yes, this fairly plain dish of pasta will cost you roughly $90 dollars, on top of which, even though the quantities of the recipe look huge it really doesn’t make that much pesto because it all reduces down to nothing in the blender, but in spite of all of these red flags may I offer you this one counterpoint! Here it is: it’s really, really delicious.

Walnuts give the mixture body and a bitter smokiness, pistachios give creamy richness and added green, the pine nuts are all…you know, they’re pine-nutty? And when thrown through glassy olive oil and basil leaves at great speed it produces the most incredibly wonderful-tasting freshly-mown-grass-looking paste to stir through pasta or to be consumed however feels right.

pasta with three nut pesto  

a recipe by myself

  • one third of a cup of shelled pistachios
  • one heaped half cup of walnuts
  • one third of a cup of pine nuts
  • one garlic clove
  • a squeeze of lemon juice (roughly a tablespoon) 
  • sea salt
  • the leaves from one of those supermarket basil plants, roughly three loose handfuls of leaves I guess? But seriously, use all the leaves, you know that no matter how diligently you try to water the plant the it’s gonna die immediately and like, how is it that they can stay alive in the supermarket but die so fast once you take them home? What’s going on there?)
  • three quarters of a cup of extra virgin olive oil
  • 100g dried spaghetti or similar

Bring a large pan of water to the boil, add plenty of salt, then cook the pasta for about ten minutes or until it’s like, cooked, then drain the pasta and set aside. I always use the water from a freshly boiled kettle in the pan because it goes way faster than just boiling it on the stovetop. 

In a large frying pan, gently toast the nuts over a high heat, stirring often, until the pine nuts are lightly browned (they’re the easiest to see the color on.) Tip the nuts into a food processor or high speed blender along with the garlic clove, lemon juice, a large pinch of salt, the basil leaves and the oil, and process until it’s a thick, dark green paste. Stir a couple of spoonfuls through the drained pasta and put the rest in an airtight container in the fridge.

Honestly, this stuff is just spectacularly good and makes the simplest pile of pasta feel like a monumental treat. You can do millions of things with pesto though – stir it through roasted vegetables, spread it on toast, thin it with olive oil and drizzle it over fried halloumi for a real galaxy-brain type combination, add a spoonful as a garnish to brighten up almost any soup, whatever your tastebuds decide, follow them in the direction they’re heading.

And if you’re on a permanent pasta buzz as I seem to be, may I direct your attention gently but firmly from me, back to me, by way of these old blog posts if you want some further recipes, eg something I called Sexy Pasta; Nigella’s Pasta with Marmite; or turmeric pappardelle with brioche crumbs.

title via:  De La Soul’s The Magic Number, I love how shambling and lo fi and almost big beat the production is on this old school (I mean old school, not like “here’s one from back in the day in 2009”) track. 

music lately:

Mogwai, Take Me Somewhere Nice. Just shut your eyes and listen.

Bizet’s Pearl Fishers Duet, sung by Jussi Bjorling and Robert Merrill. It was probably the Robitussin in my system but as the sun streamed through my window this morning I swear this song was literally playing and I don’t know, it’s just kind of magical and soaring and you too should listen to it really loud while lying down in a dark room where the light is starting to creep in.

next time: my friend Jen gave me a bunch of limes from her tree so I’m gonna do something with them. I don’t know what yet though but having that many limes, in this economy, is very exciting! 

you turn my legs into spaghetti, you set my heart on fire

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There are milestones, there are millstones, as they sing in the Broadway musical Gypsy, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart, but I clocked two milestones this week that I’m not undelighted to have out of the way: firstly I competed in my first cocktail competition finals, and secondly it was my 32nd birthday, the latter in swift succession of the former. I didn’t win the competition but in all honesty I’m quite okay with it because the real prize for me was all the attention and getting to stand in front of an audience with a microphone. I appreciate that public speaking is many people’s idea of actual hell incarnate, but for me there’s nowhere I’d rather be than in front of a crowd of people that I have to quickly win over using little more than charm and yet more charm. However, it also is a bit of a sigh of relief that it’s finally done. I’m proud of myself and I’m suuuuper proud of my friends who won in their respective categories, and I learned a honk-ton of information (did you know that Suntory was established in 1923 initially to sell imported wine? Did you know that Canadian Club was the most smuggled liquor into the states during Prohibition? Did you know Kid Rock did the forward to the book about Jim Beam that I read?)

And then it was my birthday, and I find them a bit stressful because while it’s just another day ostensibly, there’s also all this pressure (almost entirely self-directed to be fair) to have the time of your life, but to my mild surprise, I had a genuinely fantastic birthday. I’m feeling exceptionally calm about turning 32, despite having a general one-step-forward-three-steps-backwards existence I feel like I am every day growing gradually more focussed and able to cope with life to the point where I very occasionally even feel like I could kick a hole in the sky.

And another small but nevertheless achieve-y achievement: I made myself some food! WooooOO! It was actually a staff meal at work that inspired me to make this vegan take on spaghetti bolognese, we were given pasta with sundried tomatoes and pine nuts and there was something in the richness and bite of It all that made me want to extrapolate it out further. I figured that walnuts would provide texture and a little smokiness and mushrooms would add further depth and that if you blended them with said sundried tomatoes, so you couldn’t tell where one element started and another finished, it could be an extremely good time. All three of these ingredients have a kind of meatiness, not that they actually taste like meat, but they’ve got body and heft and savoury intensity and presence.

Anyway once you’ve got your ingredients together this is all extremely easy – you just blitz the mushrooms, tomatoes and walnuts in a processor and fry it with some tomato passata (which is like tomato purée and pretty easy to find in the supermarket). It honestly looks and tastes a lot like bolognese, all richly comforting and tomato-y, but also is extremely delicious in its own right, like, not just as a meat substitute. I don’t know why I feel like I’m bending over backwards to not insult a mushroom by comparing it to meat but you know what I mean? This is really good because it just is, not because it is quite successfully mimicking something. On top of which it’s been so icy cold lately which I actually love, I really enjoy that wintery vibe of getting covered in blankets or wearing enormous coats and doing cosy things like drinking cups of tea and googling “how to spoon yourself”, and mate, there’s nothing like some spag bol eaten in bed on a cold day.

vegan spaghetti bolognese   

  • six or seven large button mushrooms (or better yet, about four big field mushrooms) 
  • 10 sundried tomatoes
  • half a cup of shelled walnuts  
  • four cloves of garlic
  • olive oil
  • a splash of red wine (optional)
  • 250ml/one cup tomato passata  (or use a can of chopped tomatoes) 
  • salt and pepper  
  • 200g dried spaghetti  
  • fresh basil leaves, to serve

Cook the pasta in boiling salted water according to the packet instructions, eleven minutes usually does it, then drain and tip it onto two serving plates. I use water from a freshly boiled kettle just to make the process faster. 

Meanwhile, throw the mushrooms, sundried tomatoes, walnuts and garlic cloves into a food processor and blend it all together till it’s a roughly chopped paste mixture type thing.  

Heat some olive oil – a couple of tablespoons, I suppose – in a large saucepan, and spatula the mushroom mixture into the pan. Stir over a high heat for about ten minutes – mushrooms tend to give off a little liquid when they cook and you want to get it to the point where this has all evaporated. At this point I add a splash of red wine to the pan which adds some wonderful depth to it all but if you’re strictly vegan and not sure on the origins of your wine just leave it out. Add the tomato passata and let it simmer away till it’s looking all thick and saucy. If too much liquid has evaporated add more passata or some water, just trust your instincts. 

At this point give it a taste and add some salt and pepper if you think it needs it, and pile on top of your cooked spaghetti. Throw some basil leaves on top and eat. Serves two. 

You can, as with most of my recipes, just take this and run with it: add any number of herbs that you feel like, use a mixture of nuts (although I really feel like walnuts are the best here, a mixture of Brazil and almonds could probably hold their own), have the sauce on toast or use it in a lasagne-type layered up fashion.

I was not lying about eating it in bed, but also why would someone lie about that to be fair   I was not lying about eating it in bed, but also why would someone lie about that to be fair

If you’re on a vegan buzz then I recommend by way of further reading these other recipes I’ve blogged about: Vegan Apple Cake; almond feta; and this “fried chicken” recipe using jackfruit that I wrote about on my Frasier food blog.

title from: Dillon’s gently achey song Thirteen Thirty Five, 

music lately:  

Car Seat Headrest, My Boy. A good song for wallowing, I know at least one of you out there other than just me needs this information.

California Soul, the Diplo remix of Marlena Shaw’s already excellent 1967 track.

Washington On Your Side from the cast recording of Hamilton, the Broadway musical. Look, it’s so jaunty!

choked up on the smoke and the charcoal

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

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

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

charcoal noodles with ginger, chili, and crispy edamame  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

music lately:

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

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

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

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

 

rye whiskey makes the band sound better, makes your baby cuter, makes itself taste sweeter, oh boy

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I would be filled with consternation and a rage as hot as the fire of a thousand French fries about the monogamous relationship I’ve drifted into with my concussion if doing so didn’t require so much energy. Previously, on the TV show that I self-absorbedly regard my life to be (and please read this in the solemn tone of the “Previously, on” voice over artist of your choice) I relayed the tale of how I fainted and whacked my head and as such have not been up to much at all other than sleeping and going to work, well guess what, I have nothing new to report!

But I refuse to let this slow me down, achieving such (topically!) Olympian feats as walking two blocks to the chemist to get my passport photos taken before having to go back home for a nap.

Even previously-er, I mentioned that I was the proud recipient of a place in the finals of the Perfect Blend cocktail competition, held by Beam Suntory; this week I’ve had my cocktail available at work and it’s like…really fun! I mean I love anything where I get the opportunity to draw attention to myself, it’s not often that the opportunity is fairly legitimate and not just me being all, with neither context nor requisition, “look at me!”

(Look at me!) (also lol I screencapped this from instagram and there’s still the scroll left dots at the bottom) (also my massively talented friend Ryan Dominico took this photo!)   (Look at me!) (also lol I screencapped this from instagram and there’s still the scroll left dots at the bottom) (also my massively talented friend Ryan Dominico took this photo!)

Anyway I’ve cooked precisely one (1) thing this week and that was a coffee cake for my Frasier food blog, and yeah you should definitely go read it, but delicious as it was I couldn’t exactly double up on the recipe here, that would be a move lazier than even I could countenance (I was not so lazy that I didn’t end up looking up “the shortest distance between two points is called what” to illustrate this, uh, point, and found an Archimedes quote being all “it’s a straight line”, like COOL STORY Archimedes, of course it’s a straight line, this is not a compelling quote, stick to excitedly getting in the bath, mate.)

As such I thought I would, since I occasionally foray into drink recipes on here, cocktails being one of my true loves in this life (unlike my frosty and passionless relationship with my concussion!) share the recipe for my competition cocktail – the Wry Aside – with you all. You can now, should you choose, make it yourself at home or indeed, in any location. Yes, it involves some significant legwork and the procurement of several alcohols, but if nothing else I’m hoping this will give a little insight into the building of a cocktail and the process I took to achieve this drink of mine. Plus, having a recipe with multiple sub-recipes nestled within it makes me feel extremely Dominique Crenn-esque, a feeling that can’t be had enough, quite frankly.

Wry Aside

a recipe by myself

Beetroot purée: 

  • three large, fresh beetroot
  • a dash of olive oil
  • roughly a quarter cup of lime juice 

Set your oven to 180C/350F. Trim the tops and tails off the beetroot, slice them roughly into quarters, and place in a roasting dish. Drizzle with the scantest amount of olive oil and bake for around 40 minutes, although check them occasionally, until they are slightly crisp and wrinkled without and extremely tender within. Using a high speed blender or whatever similar appliance you have on your person, blitz the beetroot with the lime juice (mostly there so that the motor doesn’t stress out completely. Transfer this into a jar and refrigerate till needed. 

 Blackberry and Pink Peppercorn Liqueur 

This is really more of a highly alcoholic syrup, if you want to actually drink it on its own I would add sugar to taste, rather than to my specs.  

  • Two cups frozen blackberries (I mean, I assume this is how you’re going to get them, fresh is A-ok) 
  • Two tablespoons pink peppercorns
  • 600ml overproof Jamaican rum  
  • white sugar 
  • two tablespoons citric acid

Put the blackberries, pink peppercorns, and rum in a non-reactive mixing bowl or jug. Cover and leave for at least six hours or overnight. At this point, give it a good stir, mashing up some of the berries to release as much juice and color as possible; then strain it into another jug. Weigh this liquid and add the same weight of white sugar, plus the citric acid, stirring to dissolve it. Refrigerate till needed.

 Beetroot Garnish

  • one small, fresh beetroot

Slice the beetroot into thin discs. Roast slowly in a hot oven or better yet, place them in a dehydrator until crisp enough to hold their shape. If you’re going to dehydrate them, cut a slit halfway through each slice, if you’re roasting the slices you can cut them when you need them. Either way, this slit then slots onto the coupe glass that you serve the drink in, a bit like a lime wheel or something, y’know?  

To make the cocktail: 

  • 50ml Jim Beam Rye
  • 15ml sweet vermouth (not one that’s too sweet, mind) 
  • 30ml blackberry and pink peppercorn liqueur
  • two heaped barspoons of beetroot purée  
  • 25ml freshly squeezed orange juice
  • 5ml lime juice

Shake everything hard in an ice-filled cocktail shaker or jam jar or whatever sealable vessel you have to hand (I’ve used a biscuit tin once when things were really desperate) and double strain (that is, use a small sieve held over the serving glass to make the texture silky smooth and to remove any bits of beetroot and such) into a coupe glass. Stick a wheel of dehydrated beetroot on the lip of the glass by way of garnish.

That’s ALL you have to do!

 (photo again, by Ryan Dominico ) (Thanks, Ryan!)   (photo again, by Ryan Dominico ) (Thanks, Ryan!)

So yeah, there’s a lot of prep involved to get to the moment where you actually get to drink the damn thing, but I wanted a drink that was thoughtful and that didn’t have any chance of being replicated previously, as opposed to pedantry for the sake of it. I adore rye – the Sazerac is my favourite cocktail of all time – and I wanted the dry, slight spiciness of the Jim Beam Rye to be met with sweetness and earthiness: the beetroot thing was more about trying to capture the nutty caramelised flavour of roasted beetroot rather than just willfully flinging vegetables at random into a cocktail shaker. I love the gentle warmth of pink peppercorns and the juicy tartness of blackberries, I also liked the dovetailing of similar colours even though obviously the peppercorns don’t actually lend any tint to the liqueur. But anyway! You can read more about the story behind this drink at the World Bartender Day website (you have to enter your date of birth, then click on the Perfect Blend button, then the NZ button, then scroll down to find me but IT’S THERE) as well as checking out the other dazzling finalists and their drinks. There’s a mighty decent number of finalists from Wellington, I’m super proud to be part of it all alongside so many friends. Oh and non-negotiably but only if you want, come get the drink off me at my place-of-employ, Laundry Bar.

The finals themselves are on April 16th, and yes, I hear you gasp, that is the day before my birthday! Whilst I’m like, deeply competitive and winning stuff is definitely a hobby of mine, I also really extremely love public speaking and so like, getting a microphone and an audience? Best birthday ever already.

Oh and if you are all, I can’t believe this blog post is over! What next for my life? Then may I direct your attention to my blog post about the time I made vegan gin sours with aquafaba; the time I made Fernet-Branca ice cream; or the time I went to Hanging Ditch and tried a ton of their cocktails.

title from:  Rye Whiskey by the Punch Brothers, a rambunctious and foot-stomping and admittedly cautionary tale via the medium of bluegrass. 

music lately: 

After mentioning that I was going up to Auckland to see Fall Out Boy this March, a customer at work gave me a list of bands I should listen to and like, they were all such good recommendations! To pluck but one from this list I’m going to recommend in turn that you listen to American Football and their song I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional, which like…lol.

It was Rihanna’s birthday recently and on social media at least it felt like the whole world was celebrating, as well they might be! Love on the Brain is just one of the most beautiful songs on earth.

next time:  If I’m not feeling more energetic and recovered from this concussion I’m going to do absolutely nothing about it, aren’t I!!! 

 

we can make it if we try, for the sake of you and i

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Me: new year, new me! Anything could happEn!!

Also me: sets my alarm really early in the morning to make a birthday cake for someone dear to me, goes and buys ingredients, makes a ton of buttercream, puts the cake layers in the oven, realises the oven is broken, because OF COURSE, eats a not insignificant quantity of the buttercream, accepts own fate of being inescapably unable to escape own fate.

Luckily the birthday person in question found this hugely amusing.

Despite largely failing without fail, one thing I did without failing this week was make myself a small, serene jar of pickled radishes. There’s something about preserving things that’s so soothing and self-care-y; I guess maybe because you’re literally investing in your own future? The world cannot end if you have to allow for some vinegar-soaked thing quietly maturing in the fridge for not-quite-yet consumption, yeah? It’s also an act of resourcefulness (would it be more resourceful to not spend my scarce money on radishes in the first place, probably, but whatever) which feels good, and things twinkling away in jars are pleasing to the eye, and therefore, the soul.

Plus, these pickled radishes taste completely fantastic. I used Nigella’s easy recipe for quick-pickled carrots in her book Simply Nigella as a starting point. Indeed, I used Nigella’s enthusiasm for pickling things altogether as even more of a starting point, even though the tone of Simply seems a little more muted and subdued compared to her previous entries, her delight in this particular area of cooking cannot help but be infectious. On the other hand, I’ve always been all “how high” to her “jump”, so who really knows, the point is: I made some pickled radishes and it was easy and good.

I decided it might be fun to replace the water in the pickling liquid with sake, as in, Japanese rice wine, feeling that its clean, granular flavour would complement the clean, icy-peppery flavour of the radishes. I used plain old apple cider vinegar because that’s what I had, but next time around – and there will be a next time – I reckon I’d also spring for rice vinegar. The sake itself is not expensive stuff, I literally just was like, which one is cheapest and good for cooking and got pointed in the direction of a modest bottle for a mere $9.

sake pickled radishes

a recipe by myself, inspired by a recipe of Nigella’s. 

  • Like…six? radishes? Enough to fill a small jar once sliced? How is anyone supposed to know this
  • 125ml/half a cup of apple cider vinegar
  • 125ml/half a cup of sake
  • two teaspoons sea salt flakes
  • two teaspoons sugar
  • one bay leaf
  • a few coriander seeds

Thinly slice the radishes into coins, and pack them into a small, clean jar of about 300ml. Put the rest of the ingredients into a small pan and heat till just boiling. Remove the bay leaf from the pan and then carefully tip the liquid over the radishes in the jar, put the lid on, and refrigerate them till cold. 

The fuchsia-coloured skin of the radishes merges into their icy white flesh once they’ve been sitting in the jar for a while, giving you sour-sweet crunchy disks of breathtaking millennial pink. Use them to adorn sandwiches, salads, tacos, bowls of rice (my preference), as part of a cheeseboard or charcuterie platter, whatever you fancy. The bright pink pickling liquid is nice used in a dressing with some soy sauce and sesame oil, nothing need go to waste.

It’s obnoxiously humid currently in Wellington and honestly I wish I could submerge myself in liquid and store myself in the fridge; till the technology comes to make that viable I’m stuck eating cold things instead to try and regulate my soaring temperature, for which these pickles will do quite, quite nicely.

If you are feeling exceptionally pickled-minded (ha) then may I also interest you in some other blog posts I’ve done on this very subject: like this recipe for taco pickles, this recipe for pickled blueberries, and this recipe for lime pickle, that is, limes done in the same way as preserved lemons.

title from: a slight reach here with this…I want to say heteronym? But nevertheless I’m never sorry about drawing your attention to Don’t Let Go (Love), an absolutely impeccable song by En Vogue.

music lately:

Green Grow the Rushes O, an earnest English folk song that dates back at least to the mid-1800s, mentioned frequently, (and inspiration for the title of) Jilly Cooper’s novel Rivals. I first read this book well over ten years ago but only just decided to actually look up the song. My verdict: it’s a banger!

So Alive, a 1989 song by Love and Rockets that is far more sultry than it has any business to be.

Nobody Needs To Know, sung by Norbert Leo Butz from the cast recording for 2002 off-Broadway musical The Last Five Years, filed under “songs I can only listen to occasionally due to the ensuing feelings!” The slow build and the squalling violins (or whatever it is) and the mood of what I once read somewhere described as “regret bordering on horror” makes for intense listening, and Norbert and his rich “r” pronunciation are right there to carry you through it all.

next time: well I have a LOT of buttercream, still. 

came to my senses and i chilled for a bit

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

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

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

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

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

Tarata (chilled eggplant and Greek yoghurt soup)

Adapted from a recipe in the Alice B Toklas cookbook. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

music lately:

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

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

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

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

oh i wish i had a pizza and a bottle of wine

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There’s this movie called Wet Hot America Summer, released in the summer of 2001 to very little attention or acclaim. It’s become notable in the ensuing years for how immensely high profile most of the ensemble cast has gone on to become (Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Elizabeth Banks) and the deliciousness of seeing them in their career infancy. People also finally started to appreciate how stupidly funny it is, and it gathered a lot of steam in a cult-hit kind of way. Anyway, I really love it and it’s one of those movies where whatever is happening in your life, it feels like nothing bad can happen when you’re watching it. I have similar feelings about the One Direction movie.

There’s also this bit in the movie where one of the characters tells the girl that he has a crush on, “I’ve really grown up a lot since before dinner when we last talked”. Due to my live-life-ten-seconds-at-a-time haphazardly whimsical and exhausting persona I have always related to this moment since I first encountered it, but I am like, really feeling it currently.

actual footage of me actual footage of me

As I said in my last blog post, I’ve started on some new medication for my anxiety and whatnot. It’s been a trip. My doctor was all, there might be some weird side effects, and I was all, ma’am, respectfully, my whole LIFE is a side effect, I’m just keen to try something new. There’s some massively positive stuff, the most of which is that I’m now so UNNERVINGLY calm in comparison to the spiky, nervous tumbleweed of buzzing wires and thorny branches and barbed wire that I was hitherto rolling along in the guise of. I mean, I’m still me, that can’t be helped, but I feel much more able to process information quietly, make decisions, and anticipate things without a constant sound of wasps in my ears and sirens in my stomach.  I feel more able to stand my ground whereas previously I would’ve just panicked. It’s not perfect, but it’s really something observing myself being this person. So yeah, I’ve really grown up a lot since before dinner when we last talked.

Bad side effects are some morning sluggishness and some nighttime head-spins, but in the middle I’m afforded at least a few hours of intense, clear-eyed activity. Which is how, on Monday morning, I found myself making this entire damn pizza from scratch and then eating it within the space of an hour and a half.

I’ve had potato pizza on my culinary to-do list after having it at brunch at Loretta with a friend a while back; theirs had darkly beautiful purple potato slices and I could only find, at best, red-skinned potatoes, but no harm done. On a whim I decided to use fresh yeast instead of the usual instant dried stuff, and I’m a fan! Having not tried this particular recipe, which I made up on the spot, with anything other than fresh yeast, I couldn’t tell you precisely how it’s different to the dried kind but you should know that it’s very little effort, requires barely any kneading or rising time and tastes magical.

Potatoes on pizza is a classic Italian combination, and there’s nothing quite so comforting as carb on carb. The dough is tender and puffy, the potatoes are sliced so thin that they’re almost translucent and so they crisp up quickly under the oven’s heat. I draped slices of nutty, sweet Emmentaler over the pizza, but you could definitely use Gruyere if you can stomach the price. A schmeer of rich, creamy mascarpone with mustard, chilli, and cider vinegar spikes the bland calmness of the other ingredients and the resiny pungency of thyme is just, I don’t know, I really love thyme and like putting it on everything.

Scared though you may be of tackling any kind of yeasted dough from scratch, this one comes together with a few brief stirs, prods, and a rise time so fast you don’t even have to have a TV show cued up to watch while you wait. I suppose there’s more olive oil in it than you might normally expect but I feel that it adds to the soft, puffy texture and the flavour. Plus, you make enough dough for some pizza now, and some pizza for future-you. Planning for the future? ME? Whomst even am I?

yoink yoink

potato pizza

a recipe by myself

dough:

  • one heaped teaspoon fresh yeast
  • one tablespoon golden syrup (or honey, or maple syrup) 
  • 500ml (two cups) lukewarm water
  • 80ml (1/3 cup) olive oil
  • six cups high grade/strong/bread flour
  • two teaspoons sea salt

the on top stuff:

  • one medium red potato
  • 150g mascarpone
  • one tablespoon chilli oil
  • one teaspoon apple cider vinegar
  • one teaspoon dijon, english, or similar mustard
  • 150g emmentaler, thinly sliced
  • fresh thyme leaves

Set your oven to 250C/480F and put an oven tray (or if you have it, a pizza stone) in to heat up. 

Place the yeast, golden syrup and warm water in a large bowl and leave it for fifteen minutes till it’s a little frothy on top. Tip in the salt, oil, and flour, and stir together till it forms a rough, sticky dough. Give it a really quick knead, adding just a little extra flour if you need to, till it’s a smoothish coherent ball. Cover with a tea towel and leave it for fifteen minutes till it’s puffy. 

While this is happening, mix the mascarpone, mustard, chilli oil, and cider vinegar in a small bowl. Use a vegetable peeler to make thin, thin slices out of the potato. You won’t need the whole thing, but just throw the remaining potato in with the pizza as it’s cooking and then eat it or something. Sit the potato slices in a bowl of cold water. This will bring out some of the starches and make it roast quicker. 

Cut the dough in half and place the remaining dough in an airtight container in the fridge to use another time. Place the dough on either a nonstick silicon baking mat or a sheet of baking paper and using your hands, gently push the dough out into a rough rectangle shape. If it seems like it won’t stretch as far as you want, let it rest for a few minutes and continue to shape it. 

Spread the mascarpone across the pizza base. Drain the potato slices and pat them dry with a clean tea towel. Layer the potato and cheese over the mascarpone and finally sprinkle with a little more sea salt. Leave to sit for ten minutes. 

Carefully lift the baking sheet or piece of paper and place it on the hot oven tray or pizza stone. Bake for 15 – 20 minutes, or until the cheese is golden brown and the edges are crisp. Scatter with thyme leaves before eating. 

Pizza is so unfathomable, in that if you cut this rectangle into eight large squares then you could give that to eight people, but you could also QUITE comfortably eat at least half of this yourself and then reheat the other half later, or share it between two people but still be kind of hungry? It’s this strange loaves-and-fishes alchemy that I’ll never understand. Unsurprisingly though, I was in the half-now-for-me, half-now-for-later category of consumers. However you slice it, this pizza is stupidly delicious.

If you’re on a DIY dough buzz, may I suggest some further reading from my archives, such as no-knead Challah, Fougasse Bread, or Nigella’s Maple Walnut Bread.

Till next time…I guess this is growing up.

title from: this surfy punky bratty band (I LOVE surfy punky bratty bands) called Girls, and their song Lust for Life. 

music lately:

SO another weird side effect of the medication is that I’m feeling music on a hellaciously deep level, like I was listening to Meadowlark as sung by Liz Calloway the other day while walking down the street and nearly threw up and fell over sideways from the intensity of it all. I’ve always had the proclivity to y’know, cry at songs and feel like they were written for me and me alone, but this is next level.

I’ve been hitting the Les Mis pretty hard and folks, I’ve never felt more pumped for 1800s Frenchy War Stuff in my life. To pluck but one example from the air, literally every time I watch this clip from the 2014 Tony awards I genuinely cry and get full body shivers (particularly at the revoltingly beautiful face of Ramin Karimloo and Kyle Scatliffe’s monumental voice and Will Swenson’s appealingly nasal Javert) and I’ve been watching it a LOT.

Also been seriously feeling the Meat Puppets lately. Lake of Fire, famously covered by Nirvana, is so sludgy and about to topple over with its own heaviness, but then you’ve got like, Up On The Sun or Aurora Borealis which are just really, really nice grunge.

next time: IT’S DECEMBER! What? Whomst? How? That’s all I have to say about THAT. 

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

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

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

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

velvety chilled beetroot and cauliflower soup

a recipe by myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

music lately:

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

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

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

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