Category: Vegetables

i am the definite feast delight

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Apropos of nothing: If – although let’s go with when – I get famous, I should like to do many things. I’d like to start a trend for not having to wear a bra if you don’t want to. Not that I can necessarily “get away” without one, but sometimes on a humid day they just feel so punishing and unfair. And really, if someone pulls you aside and says “look, you’re not wearing a bra and it’s making me really uncomfortable”, I’d wager it says more about them than you, right? Second order of business: try and wangle an OPI HungryandFrozen nailpolish range. Am thinking matte rainbow-coloured dots which look like hundreds and thousands sprinkles, a rich yellow butter colour, perhaps a sophisticated, buff-tinted “Cake Batter”, and something else which still hasn’t fully formed in my brain yet. Nigella-Cardigan-Pink? The colour of those heavy velvet curtains that sweep across a stage before and after a show? Something Claudia Kishi-inspired? The third thing I’ve been thinking about is just buying a huge warehouse somewhere with a huge speaker system, so anytime you want to dance around a room like this, you can hire it for an hour from me. Apart from the high likelihood that my dancing moves and I are occupying it already, that is.

Apropos of nothing, I really enjoy saying apropos of nothing! Indubitably!

Anyway here I am. Can’t hurt to daydream about everything in such minute detail that it can never possibly happen the way I want it to and I end up disillusioned and sad when it doesn’t, right? Right!

In the meantime I am rich in friends and famous in my brain, which is a good start. You know friends are good friends when you see them practically every day but it still feels like something exciting’s going to happen every time you do. As a few of us were coincidentally all going to see the band Bon Iver on the same night I suggested that I cook us all dinner beforehand. Which was perhaps an even more exciting prospect than the concert itself at the time. I just love orchestrating situations where I get to cook for people I like. The finished menu was a logical middle point between maximising on what I had on hand already, what recipes I liked the look of, and what would actually be delicious to eat.

It somehow, despite being entirely created in the space of an hour and a half, all came together to form a spectacular vegan feast. Which I liked so much that I’m going to share with you. All three of these recipes are very loosely based on actual recipes – the first two from the Meat-free Mondays book and the third from Katrina Meynink’s gorgeous Kitchen Coquette book. It’s not that the original recipes didn’t sound perfect as they were, it was all about minimising time taken and money spent. And yes, I did just happen to have pomegranate seeds lying round. In a container in the freezer no less. But if it’s any consolation they were over a year old. So I can be smug, but not that smug.

Lentils are just alright with me, but this is lifted from its admittedly beige earnestness by the juicy pomegranate seeds and smoky, tender eggplant.

Barley, Lentil, and Eggplant with Pomegranate and Mint


1/2 cup brown lentils
1/2 cup barley
1 eggplant
1 onion
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tomato, chopped roughly
2 tablespoons chopped preserved lemon or hot lemon pickle (or just some lemon juice)
Seeds of a pomegranate and a handful of mint leaves

Optional – and I did – 1 can cannellini beans or chickpeas to beef (heh) it out. 


Soaking the barley and lentils at least a few hours before you get started will make the cooking process quicker. Boil them together in a pan with plenty of water till tender. Drain, set aside. Slice up the eggplant into chunks, fry in a little oil  – in batches is easier – till browned and softened. Tip them into the lentils and barley. Slice the onion up and in the same frying pan brown it with the garlic. Add the tomato, chilli sauce and lemon, and continue to cook for a little longer. Return the eggplant, lentil and barley to the pan, stir to warm through and season to taste. Serve scattered with pomegranate seeds and shredded mint leaves.

Feel free to just use barley OR lentils. But this is a great way to use up those stupid tail-end packets of things which inevitably sit round for guilty years in your pantry. Free your lentils, and your mind will follow. Actually the whole thing with these recipes is that since I’ve already messed around with them to suit my needs, feel free to do the same. They are very low stress. No watercress? Use rocket. No almonds? Use any other nut. No pomegranate? Sprinkle over feta or just use more mint or something!

Something about blackening the corn and partnering it with toasty-sweet almonds and peppery watercress in this salad is surprisingly spectacular.

Rice, Charred Corn, Avocado, Watercress and Almond Salad


1 cup rice – I used basmati but brown rice would be really good here.
1 cup frozen corn kernels (or you know, however YOU get hold of them)
1/2 cup rice bran oil plus extra for frying
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoons chili sauce
1/2 cup whole almonds
1 tablespoon icing sugar
1 teaspoon ground cumin
A handful of watercress leaves, rinsed and chopped
1 avocado, diced


Cook the rice as you usually would, and allow to cool a little. Stir the 1/2 cup oil, the cinnamon and the chili sauce through it, plus plenty of salt. Taste to see if you think it needs any more of anything in particular. Set aside and heat up a frying pan. Mix together the almonds, sugar and cumin and then heat them in the pan till fragrant and toasted. Set aside. Rinse the pan – or don’t – and heat up a tablespoon or two of oil. Throw in the corn kernels and let them fry till some are slightly darkened and scorched in places. They might start to ‘pop’ and jump around a little so watch out. Stir occasionally. Tip them into the rice along with the watercress, almonds, and avocado and mix thoroughly. 

These are just edamame beans and regular green beans cooked in boiling water and stirred through a dressing made of 1 tablespoon shiro miso paste, 1 tablespoon sesame oil, 1 teaspoon honey and a little chopped fresh ginger and garlic. Miso’s intense, fermented flavour is strangely addictive and even more strangely versatile. Here it’s nutted up with sesame and used to coat creamy edamame and crunchy green beans.

Cheers to Kate and Jason and Ange and Ricky for indulging me. And cheers to Bon Iver for putting on a seriously good show.

I was almost as happy with my dress as I was with anything else. If only there was an Instagram filter called “Cheekbone Finder” or something. But yes, the show, wow. From listening to Bon Iver’s music, I was expecting one guy, one microphone, and maybe a mandolin and a few handkerchiefs. But there was a many-peopled band all outstanding in the field of excellence, a glittering light show, and the singer, Justin, seemed so happy to be here! Which is always an endearing trait in someone you’ve paid a lot of money to see. This might sound weird, but I think my favourite bit was an unsettlingly brilliant saxophone solo, which brought to mind the eeriness of the dinosaur sequence in Fantasia.

And…apropos of something, recently Tim and I were in line for another gig, in front of three guys. From their clothes and piercings and so on, they looked like interesting-enough, open-minded people. And then they started talking. And Tim and I wanted to vomit. I wanted to say something – especially since several of my friends have felt able to speak up to people to tell them what they think recently – but it was late, and there were three of them and two of us, all those kinds of reasons. Tim and I just had to stand there in line and listen. And while I wasn’t up to doing anything that night, I’m able to pass on to you my convictions instead. Please. If you ever hear people saying things so casually like “they aren’t saying yes but they weren’t saying no” and “if they’re that drunk they’re asking for it” or worse – please understand how terrible this is. How it builds. Keeps a particular victim-blaming attitude accepted. I’m not saying this very well but I feel really strongly about it so I’m going to let some other people say it better than I can. If you like pithy analogies, this one might help open your eyes a little. This might make you think about the conflicting messages women are constantly given, and this is the flipside which is told all too little. And this is Derailment Bingo. Many thanks to the Wellington Young Feminists Collective site for resources. If I was more confident in the results I could’ve talked to those people, if I was Veronica Mars I could’ve somehow sassed the bouncer into not letting them in, but all I can do is pass on some excellent links to people who, I would guess, might know all this already. I know it’s not usually the direction I go in on here, but this blog is where I write about what’s important to me…
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Title via: Sugarhill Gang, Rappers Delight. The song is 14 minutes long so I don’t really feel the need to add anything further to the conversation.
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Music lately:

Eileen Jewell, Shaking All Over. Her voice is deliciously mellow and relaxed and after hearing Wanda Jackson’s version so many times, I like the calmer but still dirty arrangement of this classic.

Christine Ebersole’s voice goes from crystal-clear to shrieky in a matter of seconds while she’s acting her face off in Grey Gardens the musical. Will You is one of the more crystalline moments in the show, and while the song was only written a few years ago it sounds like a lost track from the forties. Beautiful.

This is probably a decent Bon Iver song to listen to if you’ve never heard them before. It was way souped up live!
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Next time: It’s nearly midnight and I feel like chocolate. And I don’t see any reason why that want would be inconsistent when I’m next in the kitchen cooking something…

we’ll buy you the rice, if only this once, you wouldn’t think twice

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For something so simple – just rice that you biff into a pan, cover with water and ignore for a bit – pilaf goes by many names. Some call it pilaff with the sneaky double f. Some call it pilau. Still others call it ‘polo’ if you look in a cookbook old enough, or the delightful ‘plov’ if you look on Wikipedia. It’s not unlike a risotto, but while less ritzy, it’s a billion times easier, and the very thought of how easy it is can nudge me into actually cooking it for dinner rather than lying on the couch sleepily eating spoonfuls of peanut butter. Which isn’t a bad thing. What it is, is a self-fulfilling prophesy, since peanuts have some chemical in them that makes you sleepy. So like a snake eating its own tail, I shall…mix my metaphors.

Before you go wrongly thinking of me as some kind of queen of organisation, the pilaf was tucked under a packet paneer tikka masala and bought hot lemon pickle. But even on its own, it’s emphatically good stuff. Why was I even so tired that I could hardly handle harmless grains of rice? Nothing important, oh wait, WEBSTOCK. I’ve already told you all about the glumness that I get when fun times are over, but gosh was it ever hard to let go of this amazing experience. It left me unbelievably inspired, full of scribbled notes and ideas, more enamoured of my friends than ever while surprised by how many cool new people I managed to meet. And caffeinated enough to charge up a fancy-brand touchscreen tablet just by pointing at it with eyes narrowed.

Trying to describe Webstock to people who weren’t there but are a bit interested, is a bit like that scene in the Simpsons where Bart’s not allowed to go to the Itchy and Scratchy movie and Lisa comes home and says “It wasn’t that great” and Bart says “Be honest” and she says “it was the GREATEST MOVIE I’VE EVERY SEEN IN MY LIFE! And you wouldn’t believe the celebrities who did cameos: Dustin Hoffman, Michael Jackson – of course they didn’t use their real names, but you can tell it was them.”

But the organisers put on such an amazing show that comparing it to the Itchy and Scratchy Movie is the best compliment I can pay it right now. Especially because my brain was worked so hard that all I’ve got room for is the aforementioned pilaf. It’s inspired by a recipe in the beautiful Meat-free Mondays cookbook which I’ve recently acquired. Although Tim did point out that we should start a Meatful Mondays movement just for us, since we hardly ever eat meat anyway. And when I say inspired I really mean…lazily appropriated with great laziness. They used whole spices, mine were mostly ground. I threw in some bits of other vegetables I had. I didn’t wait for things to boil. You get the idea.

Easy Lazy Sunday Night Pilaf with Cinnamon, Turmeric and Vegetables

  • 1 teaspoon each cumin seeds, ground cinnamon, ground ginger, turmeric. Or really, whatever you’ve got that you feel instinctively could work (garam masala, ground coriander, etc.)
  • 1 tablespoon oil and 1 knob of butter. (In butter but not as in life, it can be as large as you please) or, leave the butter out to make this dairy-free. 
  • 1 cup basmati rice
  • 1 cup frozen peas
  • Any other bits of green vegetables, chopped up small – I used zucchini and three green beans that had sadly got left behind.

    Heat the oil and butter together in a pan and add the spices, gently stirring over a low heat. Tip in the rice granules. While they’re totally uncooked, a generous amount of time over the heat does something delicious to their flavour. Tip in 2 1/4 cups of water, which should hiss up a bit on impact with the hot pan. Bring to the boil, then cover and lower the heat. Simmer gently for about ten minutes, add the vegetables and simmer a little longer. Add salt to taste, and serve. This makes enough for two people plus leftovers for one person.
Another reason I was so tired – Tim and I and Brendan and Kim went to the Wairarapa! I’d never been to Martinborough before and as a lover of food this was apparently a bit of an oversight. The Rimutakas were delightfully foggy and eerily atmospheric, once I’d added some filters in Instagram to the photo above I snapped out of the window of the moving ute. Martinborough and Greytown were super cute, and at last count there were roughly a billion antique shops for us to carefully explore.

 

I found some serious treasures, including the amazing book above, and the beautiful plate below from Vintage Treasures NZ. Its use is gratuitous at best – like, I didn’t really need the cumin seeds on a plate while making the recipe and they were such a pain to tip cleanly back into the packet but…look how pretty the plate is!

 

Barely gratuitous at all, the more I look at it.

 

Speaking of gratuitous, the necessary diagonal teatowel. One day I’ll get the ratio of fold:fabric angle at an optimal, most-likely-to-be-shared-by-users angle! The lovely teatowel was given to me by my Mum and godmum Vivienne, by the way.

Earthy with turmeric and calming with cinnamon, this pilaf shows that the simplest foods can be among the nicest. Left to its own devices, the rice absorbs the butter and the spices and whatever flavour the vegetables have left to give up. It’s a comforting and tastes grand, and its speed, cheapness and total lack of brainpower required only serve to augment said factors. As long as you’ve got a bit of salt and some butter or oil handy, you could leave out everything else that the rice cooks in and still be guaranteed much deliciousness, no matter how sleepy you are.
Title via: The King Lear of musicals, Gypsy. The song If Momma Was Married is most exquisitely harmonizing, I think, in the hands and throats of the 2008 cast with Laura Benanti as Louise and Leigh Ann Larkin as Baby June. (If you’re committed, they start singing 3 minutes into the video.)
Music lately:
Anna Coddington, Bolt. With one thing and another and many a “d’oh!” I missed her recent show in Wellington. But I can still listen to her awesome music! Phew.
TLC, Diggin’ On You. Flawless.
Next time: That book above of American puddings is making me want to make cake and pie nonstop, plus we got many kilos of plums in Greytown while on our Wairarapa daytrip, so expect the two to intersect or appear independently. I’m thinking plum pie and plum liqueur…

“your wife is sighing, crying, and your olive tree is dying”

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As I say every year, I don’t dig Valentine’s Day (val-meh-ntines?) partly as a “whatever” to corporate pushers of expensive heteronormative cards and presents, but also as a fist bump of solidarity to the Dolly magazine reading full o’ sighs younger me. Waitangi Day is a much more important date to circle on the calendar for me.
However, should you want to impress someone in a woo-ing manner, say it with tofu! If they reply with “NONE OF THAT EXOTIC FOREIGN RABBIT FOOD MUCK FOR ME”, then they’ll be really surprised and impressed with the deliciousness of this and they’ve handily let you know how small-minded they are so you don’t have to hang out with them anymore. If they’re a nice person who’s either “I love tofu!” or “huh, tofu, haven’t tried that before but this sounds nice” then you’re good to go. A further option: I just made this for myself, and it was wonderful. Indubitably!

Would I ever shut up about the price of dairy in this country? Not till its price ceases to make me wince like lemon juice swiftly applied to a papercut. With this in mind, I recently got this strange idea – what if I could make tofu taste like haloumi? They’re the same shape, for a start. I was trying to analyze exactly what flavour haloumi is closest to, and settled upon black olives. Think about it. Oily, salty, intense…Then it turned out so delicious I decided to just call it what it is. Tofu pride!

Black Olive Marinated Fried Tofu Salad

Recipe by me.

1 block of firm tofu (250g-ish)
1/2 cup black olives, stones in
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 big cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 heaped tablespoon fine cornmeal 
1 tablespoon sherry
1 big handful green beans
1 big handful clean spinach leaves

Sometimes I suggest substitutions but please don’t undermine your own tastebuds by getting those pre-sliced olives – they’re so gross and vinegary and bland. Olives with the stones in them are a bit more work, but the oily fullness of flavour will reward you tenfold. Also, if you don’t have sherry, try sake, Marsala, or a little white wine. 

Squeeze the stones out of the olives (seriously, just squeezing them is the easiest way) and mash the olive flesh with a fork in a bowl with the oil and garlic cloves. Slice the tofu into cubes and mix with the olives – pour over a little more olive oil if it looks like it needs it. Leave it while you slice the ends off the beans and simmer them in a pan of water. Once you’ve got that sorted, add the cornmeal to the olive mixture and stir it round so every bit of tofu has some grains clinging to it.

Heat a frying pan up, and lift out all the tofu cubes (sorry, also fiddly) and drop them in it. Fry over a decent heat on all sides, till excellently crisp. Tip into a bowl. By this time the beans’ll be where you need them to be – drain and add them to the tofu. Roughly slice the spinach and add that to the bowl. Finally, heat up the frying pan again, tip in the remaining marinade, including all the squashed olives, add the sherry and fry for about ten seconds. Mix into the tofu and serve! 

It is wildly good. The olives have this soft, mellow intensity and a rich saltiness, which absorbs quickly into the tofu’s usefully porous surface. The cornmeal is subtly sweet yet unsubtly crunchy, and the flavour from the sherry hitting the hot pan is basically indescribably good, but generally adds to the whole savoury, buttery, lusciousness of it all. The juicy crunch of the beans are improved by a slick of oily marinade, and the spinach is…present. And makes the salad go further. Thanks spinach!

I am proud of my brain. It did right by me with this. And I can tell you it’s very, very good the next day too. Tofu doesn’t always last so well once it has seen the light of day, but if anything, this got even nicer. It almost tastes like cold fried chicken. Indubitably! (I like that word.)

The weekend was a full and busy one, where the hobnobbing was non-stopping. Caught up with my wise and awesome aunty who has been living in Australia for years, plus her son (my cousin) and his son (who I’m also calling my cousin…I don’t need it to be more complicated than that.) We visited our dear friend Ange at her tiny, tidy flat which is really close to ours (so we can be the Kimmie Gibbler to her Tannerino!) We also went to superlovely cafe Arthur’s with Kim and Brendan and met up with Perth-based blogger Emma of Lick My Cupcakes, whose blog I just love. She was really sweet and I love that her photos of Wellington show the city in different way how I usually see it. Finally, Tim and I reflected upon Waitangi Day, shook our heads sadly at a few people and nodded them agree-antly with other, and watched some more of Season 2 of Twin Peaks. SO CREEPY. So important. “Mares eat oats and does eat oats…”
 
Title via: All For The Best, a song from just one in a very long list of musicals with which I’m well obsessed: Godspell. I learned a tap dance to this song once, but muscle memory didn’t see fit to hold on to that one. Even if musicals aren’t your thing, a young Victor Garber was surprisingly babein‘ as Jesus. 
Music lately: 

Ten seconds in, all I could think was ‘this is a bit weak and makes no sense’ but as it goes on it becomes an intoxicatingly catchy song and I love it, indubitably. M.I.A Bad Girls.

Eclipsed only in catchy goodness by Kei Konei Ra by Ahomairangi. They’re young, they’re talented, they’ll make you want to press repeat over and over on this song.

Next time: Aforementioned aunty got me some ceramic pastry weights for baking blind. If that makes no sense at all: it has to do with making pie. PIE! So I might do that. Or it might be something slightly simpler but still cake-tatious. 

mushrooms and roses is the place to be

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Disliking, and having zero aptitude for science at school doesn’t preclude me coming up with several scientific theories, the hypothesis and measurement both being “I think it’s real and so…yeah.” One such theory being: Time totally, without doubt, speeds up when I’m with people I love. Fact. For example, Tim and I spent our New Year at Raumati Beach with the sort of amazing friends we only ever get to envy other people having. Between the beautiful blanket fort, the nail painting, the guitar playing, the Point Break watching, the homemade liqueur and gin and wine drinking, the feasting, the dancing to Wuthering Heights (alas caught in real time on video somewhere), the nail-painting, the swimming, the reading of many books, the frying of many potatoes, the crying of many tears with laughter and the taking of one stroll, well it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that time would unfairly speed up during all that.

Time also speeds up a little if one of your friends has cleverly made cat ears in your hair made of plaits and pipe cleaners and bobby pins. It whooshes right through your cat ears with increased aerodynamics.

I’ve always, since day dot, been hopeless at saying goodbye. Memories of crying when things are over – anything from great big emotional ballet performances to visiting an older, cool and magnanimous girl from down the road to play for the afternoon – all blur into one another. Luckily there was less of the actual tears and more of the joking about tears (to keep from the actual tears fighting through, you see) when the Raumati Beach times started to wind up, but I couldn’t help be reminded of all the times I’d been bad at accepting things are over. If you’re hanging out with me and I make yawny noises and comment on the time, instead of wild-eyedly suggesting we bust into the good whiskey, then you can either be disappointed…or, I guess, shiny with relief-sweats.

I made this marinated mushroom recipe four times in the last two weeks, and every single time it has been perfect. This is a sneaky lazy blog post, as I’ve already basically given the whole recipe in this story I wrote for 3news.co.nz on what to cook when it’s too hot to think about cooking. However I am tired and frankly a bit sneaky and lazy at the best of times too, plus, putting the recipe in two separate places on the internet shows you just how strongly I love it.

Speaking of things I love, wasn’t I lucky to score these knives and forks and bowl from Mum! The knife and fork have been in the family for generations and the plate just looks like one that has been in the family for generations, which is good enough for us. You don’t even need a knife to eat these mushrooms but I like how it looks, so it stays in the picture.

I made this for myself on the 29th, for the aforementioned friends on New Year’s Eve, for family on the 7th, and for myself again last night. Something about the name Marinated Mushrooms makes people nervously say “Oh no! You should’ve started it six weeks ago! We’ll have to have it another time” but this is actually good to go as soon as you stir it. It’s at its peak deliciousness after about 12 hours in the fridge, but truly. I tend to eat half of it while I’m making it, that’s how good it tastes.

Marinated Mushrooms

I came up with this myself, but with a little inspiration from recipes belonging to the wondrous Nigella Lawson and the also quite wondrous Yotam Ottolenghi. Quantities are vague because I never once thought to weigh or measure the amount of mushrooms I was using. Just guess though. Science can’t get you here.

  • Mushrooms; as many as you’d normally feed people – maybe a heaped handful per person though if you’re stuck. Use the cheapest white button ones you can find.
  • 1/2 cup rice bran oil or olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon maple syrup or golden syrup
  • Juice and zest of a lemon or 1 tablespoon cider vinegar
  • 1 tablespoon Dijon or American mustard
  • Salt

Wipe or peel the mushrooms – dirt will cling, and though it sounds fussy sometimes peeling’s much easier. Slice thinly and pile into a bowl. In a small cup or bowl mix the dressing ingredients together, tasting often and adding more of whichever ingredient your tastebuds feel it requires. Pour over the mushrooms, mix carefully. If it looks like it’s not dressed enough, drizzle in some more oil. Taste for salt – I add quite a lot – then either eat immediately or cover and refrigerate. 

Maple syrup on mushrooms might sound a little too daring, sure. But raw mushrooms are quite mild and almost like tofu in that they can absorb into their porous surfaces nearly every flavour that passes them by. However, not to the point where you might as well be sucking salad dressing dejectedly (or happily!) from a sponge soaked with it. Their delicate, rain-on-cut-grass freshness is mighty fine with the smoky maple syrup and sharp mustard, and the polystyrene texture becomes even more pleasingly yielding to the tooth the longer it sits there in its dressing. Basically: this stuff is addictive so watch out. I’ve never eaten so many mushrooms in one sitting, in my life.

Needless to say, camping at this place with whanau for the 25th year in a row made time speed up significantly again. Somewhat grounding was how I got bitten to pieces by mosquitos, feasting away at my apparently delicious blood till my legs looked like bubble wrap. However I’ve bought some antihistamines and am hoping for the best, and now that I’m back in the world of Monday mornings and routines and so on, heck, they’re a reminder that summer holidays did happen and they were amazing. Until I got bitten.

What did you all get up to over the Christmas/New Years era? I’ve missed this blog a bit while internet was intermittent, but I’ve loved sleeping properly, seeing family and friends, eating well and reminding myself of the good things in my life.

Title via: Janelle Monae, Mushrooms and Roses from her album The Archandroid. This song’s a little ridiculous but I love her and the melody and intense chorussing pulls you along in a dreamy fashion. And it does have the word mushrooms in it. 

Music lately:

Pat Benetar, We Belong. I’ve always disliked every single song Pat Benetar has ever called her own – except this one. It’s so annoyingly alluring and floaty and lush and I can’t honestly say I don’t like it. In fact…without quadruple negatives to hide behind…I like this song.

Stephanie J Block, Get Out And Stay Out. Her voice is stunning. Everything from the emotional, shuddery talk-singing at the start of this song to the crystal clear, exhilarating but not over-extended belting at the end is just so very listenable. 

Next time: Something new, something you’ve never seen before, something highly edible, for starters.  I guess this is the last time I can get away with saying it before it gets too weird, so…Happy New Year, everyone!

it won’t be long now, any day…

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A true story about an untrue story: During my dictionary-reading, daydreaming, dancing, painting-my-nails-with-twink-ing youth, I tried writing a Baby Sitters Club book. I didn’t know it was “fan fiction” at the time, due to the internet not being widespread – the only people I knew who had it was my cool cousins who lived in Auckland, and my uncommonly tech-savvy Nanna. No, I pridefully considered it something of a manuscript that I could mail to Ann M Martin, and she would then be so grateful and impressed that she might publish it or something. (Fun fact: in the plot I may have unwittingly and independently invented the concept of grills/jewelled clip on braces. I kid you not.) 
I have a point. It is this: at the time of all this writing, I did not believe in self-editing. It was probably a bit of youthful vanity, as well as how I knew the Baby Sitters Club every which way to Sunday and they’re pretty easy to write once you get the hang of things. I would just write and write in my big notebook and then declare it all perfect. Fast forward to this year, when I went to a course where we were advised to reread everything we write for online then cut it in half, so it appeals to the fickle, short attention spanned readers. I’m better at editing now, but am still resolutely long-form in my blogging, no matter what the experts say.
Wait, this is the point: Christmas is coming, everyone’s tired, nobody has time, so I’m going to try make this blog post much shorter than usual by editing myself more ruthlessly. I could’ve just said that at the start of this blog post, but um, I’m not that good at self-editing. And what other food blogger’s gonna freely divulge their questionable, oblivious fan-fic past? (Because if there are others, can you let me know? I bet we’d be great friends.) 
This recipe is a convergence of a few different ideas that I had, turning into this: Halved capsicums, with a halved tomato tucked inside each half. Once roasted, fill a further time with scorched, crisp cauliflower pieces. It doesn’t sound like much but I promise you it’s brilliant. 

While I’m getting confessional, around the same time I also attempted to write a young adult novel about a teen girl who wins a radio competition to meet her favourite girl band who she’s obsessed with but she has to shave her hair first. Then her, her mum and her best friend fly to New York and meet the girl band. And make friends with a nightclub singer. (I’d just seen Pretty Woman for the first time, so I called the nightclub The Blue Banana.) Gotta admit, I did think it would make me a Teen Millionaire. (It didn’t.)

Roast Capsicum with Roast Tomato and Fried Cauliflower

Two firm red capsicums
Two ripe tomatoes
Five or so cauliflower florets
Rice bran oil
Brown sugar
Cinnamon

Thyme leaves


Set your oven to 220 C (450 F) and put a sheet of baking paper on an oven tray. 


Halve your capsicums, carefully removing any seeds, membraney stuff and the green stems. Half the tomatoes, slicing out the green bit. You also want to slice out the dividing wall of flesh – no need to worry about the seeds, all good if they’re in or out – but you want to make sure there’s a bit of a cavity for the cauliflower later.

Sit a halved tomato inside each capsicum half, so they fit/spoon together. Over each, sprinkle about a teaspoon of oil and a pinch of brown sugar. Scatter over a little salt and lightly dust with cinnamon, then roast for 30 minutes or until softened, wrinkly-skinned, and slightly scorched.  



While it’s roasting, finely slice up your cauliflower florets into small pieces. Heat up a couple of tablespoons of oil in a pan and throw in the florets, stirring a bit but allowing to sit as well so it browns thoroughly. Remove the tray from the oven, roughly fill each tomato cavity with cauliflower and throw over some thyme leaves. Serve, with rice or pasta or bread or anything you like. 

They’re flipping delicious (of course they are, or I wouldn’t be telling you about them.) Something in the sweet, smoky red vegetables and the nutty, crunchy cauliflower with the rich thyme leaves makes it feel like you’re eating so much more than a few vegetables sitting awkwardly on top of each other. Anyway, they only sit awkwardly at first. Give the tomatoes and capsicums some time under the oven’s heat and they start nestling and burrowing into each other like sleepily benign cats, leaving plenty of space to add the cauliflower. Add anything you like to this – feta, coriander seeds, sesame oil – but I like it clean and plain and simple. 

This afternoon I fly up home for Christmas with my family. I’ll be a bit sad not to be hanging out with Tim over this time but I can’t wait to see whanau, to sleep, to eat, to hang out with the cats, to listen to our old Christmas cassettes and CDs, and to generally be thankful for the good things in life. What else can you do?

Witness the swiftness: this blog post is nearly finished already, while normally at this point I’d still be describing at length the emotions I feel when I eat cauliflower. Also: you may have noticed that the blog is looking slightly different, I had a tutu round and managed to score much bigger photos and a better font already for my header image. Am amazed I have any readers at all, considering how long my usual blog posts are and, upon reflection, how gross the font was on my previous header image. Give yourself a pat on the back for your perseverance! 
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Title via: It Won’t Be Long Now, sung by the amazing Karen Olivo from the (presumably – I’ve never actually seen it) also amazing musical In The Heights, from the genius mind of mondo-babe Lin-Manuel Miranda. 
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Music lately:

I bought Ria Hall’s EP this morning and have already listened to it many, many times. Best of Me is still my favourite song off it but I Am A Child struck me as particularly beautiful, all contemplative and dreamy but slowly building in momentum.

Pieces of a Man is one of my most-loved Gil Scott-Heron records, and while I don’t have a favourite track off it, When You Are Who You Are i songs that always makes me happy.
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Next time: You know what, I reckon I can get another quick blog post in before the big day itself. I’m thinking last minute Christmas food gift ideas and several cat photos (well, that’s what I do when I’m at home – chase round after the cats with my camera.) 

i salt and pepper my mango

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Story time.

The weather in Wellington has been particularly extreme over the last couple of days. It’s no time for skirts or dresses. Luckily I’ve got a super awesome bright red jumpsuit with power shoulders, gold buttons and palazzo pant legs. Don’t try and construct an image of what that might look like, just believe me on the “super awesome” claim. Especially when it’s worn with a turquoise scarf. Said jumpsuit has all the delightful flippiness of a skirt, with all the reassuring practicality of pants. On most days. Today the breeze rendered the crotchal-region fabric near-pointless as it continuously inflated my trouser legs so they looked like spooning hot air balloons. No major biggie though, were it not for my rapidly-sinking stockings. They would not stay up. There came a point where they were making their way towards my ankles just as my pant-legs were flying upwards. Taking advantage of the quiet side street I was walking through, I hiked up my stockings back to where they belong, around my waist. Doing the job properly, I was getting quite into it – lunging and wiggling and really luxuriating in the hoisting action till they were back up on my hips again. Finished, I look up, and see an elderly person, holding a video camera. Pointing straight at me.

The camera wasn’t sinister; I got the impression they were optimistically filming the nearby thoroughfare in case the wind caused anything strange to happen, so they could then pass it on to the humourous segment of a late-night news show so they could gain fame and riches. I…could well be that segment filler. Needless to say, my tights started sagging again immediately, but I didn’t hike them up till I was round the corner. I have my dignity.

I have come to the conclusion that I’ll never be intimidatingly cool, or even just intimidating and/or cool (either of which would’ve come in handy SO MANY TIMES in my life) but on the other hand…at least I’ve got some stories to tell. And you never need feel nervous about saying hello to me. Unless you’ve got a video camera and I’ve been lavishly adjusting my undergarments.

Also not intimidating: the recipes I have for you today. One, a simplified version of a beautiful Yotam Ottolenghi recipe – rice, mangoes, coconut, peanuts, chilli, mint – and the other, a little dish I came up with involving roasted cauliflower and whole spices and almonds.

I say simplified because I had so many moments of “well I can’t find that so I’ll use this” and “that’s a bit expensive, I’ll use this instead” and also I’m in bed and don’t have the mental capacity to get out of bed and find the Plenty cookbook. So this is my adaptation. A truly lazy dinner. You’re essentially cooking some rice and stirring stuff into it. But, as with any recipe of that tricksy and handsome man Ottolenghi, there’s so much beauty and freshness and bold flavour that it’s only you who need know how easy it really is.

Rice Salad with Mango, Coconut and Peanuts

Adapted from Ottolenghi’s Plenty.

  • 1/2 cup basmati rice
  • 1/2 cup long grain brown rice (OR just one cup basmati)
  • 1 tablespoon rice bran or peanut oil
  • 1/2 a ripe, but firm mango
  • 1 red capsicum
  • 1/3 cup peanuts
  • 1 red onion or a bunch of spring onions, finely sliced
  • 1 red chilli, finely sliced, or 2 teaspoons sambal oelek (which is what I used)
  • 1/2 cup shredded coconut or dessicated (but preferably shredded) (but I only had dessicated, so)
  • A handful each of mint and coriander

In a large pan with a lid, heat the rice grains in the oil for a minute or two, stirring a little to stop it burning. Tip in 2 1/2 cups water and a pinch of salt, bring to the boil then lower the heat, clamp on the lid, and leave slowly cooking away for about 15 minutes (although check for done-ness at 10). Allow to cool a little and tip into a bowl.

Roast the peanuts till darkened in the oven – it takes a little while but don’t ignore them. Fry the spring onions or red onion till crispy, thinly slice the capsicum and dice the mango flesh. Toast the coconut in a pan or spread it out on a baking sheet and use the same heat of the oven that you cooked the peanuts in, either way you want it to be light brown in colour.

Mix everything into the rice – carefully – and divide between two plates. Top with the herbs.

The right mix of raw and hot here – you’ve got the cooling, slippery, elusively fragrant mango and crisp juicy capsicum rubbing shoulders with almost-crunchy coconut, nutty (duh!) peanuts and the red chilli’s bite. Rice itself tastes beautiful – I don’t really appreciate it enough being a pasta fiend – but it really suits hanging out with these ingredients. Obviously it’s better if you can find shredded coconut but I promise the cheapest dessicated stuff will have its place once you toast the heck out of it. Cheers, Ottolenghi.

As for my recipe, Roasted Cauliflower with Toasted Whole Spices and Almonds it’s even lazier. Stick as many cauliflower florets as you like on a baking tray and roast them at a high heat – I went for 230 C, which is 450 F, till tinged thoroughly with brown. Towards the end – or even immediately after you turn off the heat on the oven – roast 1/4 cup whole almonds for five – ten minutes, till slightly darkened. In a pan, heat 1 teaspoon each of cumin seeds, coriander seeds, nigella seeds, and fennel seeds if you’ve got them. The two essentials are coriander and cumin, so play round if you like. Only do it for a minute or so, then remove from heat, stir in a shake of ground cinnamon and a pinch of salt, and tip onto a chopping board along with the almonds. Chop everything roughly (I’m not expecting much to happen here with the spices, just agitate them a little with the blade, it’s the nuts getting chopped that’s the main thing.) Arrange the cauliflower florets on a plate, drizzle with sesame oil, and sprinkle over all the nuts and seeds. Eat.

Viewed in close up, the seeds and nuts look all earthy and magical and like they should have the words “GAME OF THRONES” superimposed over the top (maybe just in my mind. How often can I use “it’s so late at night and I’m tired” as an excuse? All the times!)

More importantly, it’s delicious – all that heating and roasting and toasting brings out everything good about the ingredients. Coriander seeds have this addicting lemony-bitter-numbing quality while cumin seeds are more pungent and warm (it’s also possible my spices are ancient) while cauliflower cooked in this way is nut-ular and crisp and its flavours are echoed pleasingly in the chopped almonds.

The weekend happened, it was good in places and intense in others. Had people over spontaneously on Friday night to farewell some lovely but impermanent Swedes that we’d become friends with, on Saturday Tim and I had a necessary coffee at Customs and exercised our democratic right to vote; later in the day we gathered with the sort of people you need round when the outcome of lots of people exercising said right unfolds. The night became the morning but somehow we had the energy to plough on with weekend-y activities, buying vegetables and having cider with Kate and one of us witnessing a much needed win from the Wellington Phoenix (clue: it was Tim) all finishing up by making the meal that I’m presenting to you now.

Title via: I’ve read sneering things about her, I’ve read hyperbolic things about her, but when Arular was released it was one of the most exciting albums ever to interest my ears and I’ve been into M.I.A’s music ever since. Sunshowers from that album is where today’s title gets itself from.

Music lately:

Over at The Corner there’s a two-part post on favourite Flying Nun songs (Flying Nun being an important New Zealand record label) which not only presented me with some brilliant writing but also plenty of unheard new-old goodness to listen to. Including Garageland’s Struck.

The Marvelettes, Mr Postman; I love how chilled and restrained and yet disciplined and sharp the singing is on this track.

Next time: Whatever it is, I haven’t made it yet. It could be another practical dinner, it could be a link to a video of “frowning girl adjusts pantyhose in public: The remix!” which could possibly do considerably more for my hopes to write a cookbook than actually working on developing recipes and so on.

 

am I ever gonna see my wedding day?

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To sleep, perchance to dream, that is the question…is not actually what Hamlet said, but I’ve helpfully paraphrased. It seems I’m either pursuing or avoiding sleep, but hardly ever actually just having it when I should be. Damn you elusive sleep you! (and that definitely wasn’t Shakespeare, although it’s fun to imagine Hamlet saying it while shaking his fist so hard his pantaloons start to flap around.) Luckily this recipe for Cambodian Wedding Day Dip is so easy you could make it in while sleep deprived, but equally it’s so loaded with aggressive flavours that it wakes you up fast like one of those dreams where you’re walking along and then all of a sudden you trip over and slide into your own bed like an elaborate home-run in that sport with the home runs. (I’m just playing, I know it’s softball – I was so dedicated to the Baby Sitters Club that I never once skipped the boring chapters about Kristy’s team that she coached.)

The knife really doesn’t have any purpose here but I’m so not good at these exposition type shots and it just felt right to put it there, okay?

My current state of sleepiness is self-inflicted though – last night Tim and I met up with our friends Pia and Fiona (Piona!) and went to this park on Mt Vic to have a picnic and watch the fireworks. They’re two of the nicest, funnest people we know and excellent hosts – Pia was all “we made a fancy salad” and I was all “I know, I can see it” while having their beetroot and chickpea salad and then she was all “no, this!” and pulled out another amazing salad with sliced oranges and black olives. After the fireworks (which were spectacular, although not quite as exciting as Pia running from flames like an action hero when one of her own fireworks fell over after being lit) they then invited us to play Cranium with Fiona’s sister and their friends, which went on till 2am. It may not sound so cool, but correctly identify Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat song after your teammate hums three bars of it and see how cool you feel.

Despite this ongoing feeling that I’m running towards something that keeps moving further away, this week has, upon reflection, been full of really good things. I’m going to try to keep this succinct: Broadway Bites is the blog set up by these actual Broadway stars like Adam Chanler-Berat of Next to Normal and Andy Senor Jr from a million different casts of RENT, including the international tour with Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp, and Matt Shingledecker from Spring Awakening. And all three of them are in RENT’s off-Broadway revival. And they ran this competition on their blog where you email in your favourite breakfast recipe and so I did (these two) not even thinking I’d hear anything from it, and then – to take us back to the start of the story – I got this tweet from them saying I’d won, and it linked to this video of them having made the recipe and talking about it and making a porridge recipe I sent them and performing in the musical that this blog was named for. And tweeting me. To sum up: Ha-whaaa? While there’s no reason people on Broadway should be interested in this blog just because I talk about Broadway musicals in relation to food, I’ve also always dreamed of this happening, ever since I started writing it four years ago. Now if the amazing Julia Murney could just check out my recipe for pancakes… (that’s a Broadway injoke, sorry everyone.)

Then I get this parcel from Kate, who Tim and I stayed with in Oxford earlier this year – remember, her and her husband were complete strangers to us but they were from New Zealand and she liked my blog? We had a fantastic time and they were lovely of course, and when she emailed asking for my address because she had something to send me for my blog’s fourth birthday, I was expecting, say, a novelty keyring, but it was in fact a cookbook almost but not quite as gigantic as author Hugh Fearnley-Whittingsall’s name, and entirely dedicated to vegetarian recipes, which I love.

This recipe comes from that cookbook and as I said, it’s called Cambodian Wedding Day Dip, which is a pretty romantic name because it’s not only a food but it also sounds like a cool dance. The ingredients are the kind that I float towards like a moth to a light source – peanut butter, coconut milk, chili – plus plenty of chopped up mushrooms – all of which politely resist overpowering each other and instead all let each other shine gently as they roll over your tastebuds. Creamy, nutty sweetness respectfully busting a move with spicy, earthy smoky flavours.

It’s next-level delicious, somehow showcasing the richness of the peanut butter and coconut milk without tasting like you’re eating satay sauce (not a bad thing, I love satay sauce – it’s just different) and you don’t even need to be having a wedding to dip sliced up vegetables in it. It’s worth keeping in mind that the finished product is essentially a pale brown paste, hence my liberal carpeting of coriander leaves in the photos. Coriander is like the icing sugar of the savoury world: makes everything look all good again. Tonight Tim had it over rice for dinner, I’d eaten so much of it during the cooking process, that I was too full for that kind of commitment. But not to the point where I couldn’t sneak out later and eat some dip and then cry “Agh! So Full! What Hath I Wrought!” like Hamlet totally would.

Truly. That stack of crackers – with which this Cambodian Wedding Day Dip is ideal – was much, much higher when I started taking these photos. Kate – thanks so much again for sending this to me and I totally recommend this recipe.

Cambodian Wedding Day Dip

500g chestnut mushrooms (confession: used plain old button mushrooms. All I could find)
1 tablespoon oil (I use rice bran)
1 small red chilli, finely chopped (I used a tablespoon of sambal oelek, it’s what I had)
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tablespoon curry powder or mild curry paste (further confession: the vagueness of this direction and my lack of any curry paste whatsoever led me to leave this out and shake in a little cinnamon and ground cumin, some weird instinct kicking in I guess.)
2 tablespoons crunchy peanut butter (confession: I followed this step exactly)
1 x 400ml can coconut milk
Juice of half a lime (used a lemon, had no lime)
Dash of soy sauce
Coriander leaves (optional, but used them because I actually had them).


Finely dice the mushrooms, or blitz them in the food processor. Not toooo fine – you want them to be the size of, say…I can’t actually think but you want them bigger than grains of rice, okay? Like 4mm square, ish. Heat the oil in a pan and fry the mushrooms, stirring while the liquid in them appears and then evaporates. Add the chili and the garlic, and cook a little further, before adding the peanut butter and curry paste (if you’ve got it) and stirring through the mushrooms. Tip in the coconut milk, and then let it bubble away, stirring often so it doesn’t burn, till it reduces down and is much thicker.

Those weren’t the only good things that happened this week though, I know, what kind of happy-go-lucky weirdos are we? Not that happy-go-lucky, I promise you. I for one, am more like clumsy-go-anxious. But sometimes you can actually force happy-go-luckiness to come your way, like when you throw a Simpsons party and invite your friends round and make a giant donut and floor-pie and an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet and nuts’n’gum. And your friends bring twinkies and rib-wiches and candy. And you all drink Skittlebrau. It was amazing fun. I’m going to be writing about it for 3news.co.nz’s National News section (just kidding, it’s under lifestyle) so if you ever get the urge to throw yourself a similar party, you’ll know how. So many people came along even though it was a very last-minute thing, the sort of people that are so good for your soul that all you can hope is that you provide some kind of similar function in return.

Title via: Wedding Bell Blues by the late Laura Nyro. Her voice is stunning, this song is all sad and poignant, and when you put the two together, my stars it is something. Props for the cool name too, Nyro.

Music lately:

SWV, It’s All About U. Some 90s R’n’B is so gold that while you’re listening to it, it feels better than any music of any other genre ever. Not that it’s a competition, you can like more than one thing. What I’m saying is, I love this song.

Erykah Badu is coming to New Zealand! That’s good. But it’s to a festival that’s far, far away from Wellington. That’s not so good. Might have to get my vicarious and much cheaper thrills by just playing more of her amazing music.

Next time: I made some frozen yoghurt! But I also made more things from this book. I think frozen yoghurt will win though.

girls would turn the color of the avocado when he would drive down their street in his el dorado

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Magical things, avocados.

But first a BIG thank you, as big as the words Thank You made out of colourful rubber and inflated to the size of a forty-foot building, with a noble capybara balancing on top of it looking thoughtfully into the distance, for all the nice comments and emails about my last blog post. From the bottom of my chocolate-iced heart.

Back to avocados; aren’t they exciting? Like nature’s version of rich creamery butter, kept in an endearingly curvaceous, bumpy casing. Nutty and smooth and yes, buttery, I love it mashed into guacamole to be scooped up with corn chips, spread on toast for a breakfast treat anytime of day, or sliced into a bowl of salad so that you can try and surreptitiously dig for it all with the spoons when serving yourself.

But to turn them into pudding? Inconceivable!

Conceive of this. I know I go on about Hannah at Wayfaring Chocolate a fair bit, so I’ll try and squash down the enthusiasm a little here so I don’t sound like some kind of creepy person who waits outside your window and cries “the hunter has become the hunted!” No, it’s not like that. It’s just that she’s got one of my favourite food blogs in the world, is all. And while I’ve heard of using avocados in non-savoury recipes, it was she who prised open my eyes to how delicious and non-threatening it could be. Through the medium of raw vegan brownies. Regular baked brownies have their place (and that place is a table marked “DELICIOUS THINGS HERE, PLEASE”) but it’s fun to push the limits of creativity in the kitchen sometimes by restricting your parameters. Which is what Hannah did with this amazingly delicious recipe.

Yes, those are useless-ish stripy novelty straws: they make my heart soar, and what price soaring? Occasionally I buy into pretty things, and occasionally…I literally buy them. Treat yo’self.
A daring mixture of dates and nuts are whizzed up in a food processor with cocoa to form the base, and then the power of a whole avocado is harnessed to create the icing. It’s amazing – you add golden syrup and cocoa and suddenly it turns into this creamy, darkly chocolatey, shiny ganache-like substance.
Unfortunately when I busted anticipationally into the avocado it wasn’t entirely usable – instead of two bowl-like halves offering up smooth, unbroken greenness, there were significant portions that were bruised and horribly stringy. I scooped out what was salvageable, and this is why the layer of icing on my brownies is sadly thin. But another time, another avocado. 
Raw Vegan Chocolate Brownies with Spectacular Avocado Icing

Adapted slightly, and respectfully, from Hannah’s recipe which she adapted from another recipe of her own anyway: inception! Feel free however to just click through to hers.

2 cups nuts: I used a mixture of almonds and pecans, but near-on anything would suit. 
2 cups dates, roughly sliced
1/3 cup cocoa powder

Blend the living heck out of these ingredients in a food processor. It may take some time to come together. Eventually it will be a fine-ish, crumbly mixture of tiny ingredient particles. Turn it out into a baking dish, roughly 20cm square or a little bigger or smaller. Press down on it with a spoon, freeze while you make the icing.

1 ripe, perfect avocado
2 tablespoons golden syrup 
2 tablespoons cocoa
2 teaspoons vanilla extract (optional, by which I mean I forgot)
Small pinch of salt

Thoroughly clean out your food processor, then blend all of the above till smooth and shiny and amazing. Add more of anything to taste, then spread evenly across the base. Return to the freezer, slice once ‘set’.

I admit: I had issues making this. I increased the base quantities a bit from Hannah’s recipe and I don’t know if it was because of that, but the food processor just Would. Not. Break. Them. Down. Rather than being sliced up, it was like the blades were some kind of carnival ride for the dates and nuts to scoot round on. I’d be processing the heck out of it, take the lid off, look in: perfect, whole almonds and dates. Stir it round, repeat. Look in: perfect, unblemished nuts and dates. So confusing. I’m not sure if I should’ve soaked the dates first or something but eventually, eventually, they started to break down. This is why I recommend you chop them first.

But despite that, as long as you own a food processor these are a complete breeze to make, and even though I’ve only eaten a few pieces I know I’m going to make this again, and often. For one thing, to get a better quantity of icing. For another thing, to try out all the different flavours (except carob, I can’t go for that) like having maple syrup in the icing or walnuts in the base. This is incredibly delicious stuff – a little crumbly, although I suspect that’s my own fault – but caramelly and dark and biscuity and cold and wonderful. Something about the texture of the dates and the intensity of the cocoa makes it taste and feel almost like solid chocolate. And the icing – oh my. Even with the mean scraping of it across the top it’s almost aggressively luscious, showing how avocados in sweet things makes total sense – the buttery flavour, its yielding texture, and whipped-cream body. And they’re vegan and gluten-free! (Well I’m not sure if golden syrup is strictly vegan, but it seems to be…if not, just use maple syrup as per her recipe.)

Thanks Hannah – and I urge you to run, not walk, to her blog and read through all the other good things she’s come up with.

What have we been up to lately, apart from eating all this brownie? Went to the SPCA to drop off some newspapers but also to hang out with the beautiful cats and dogs there for a bit – seriously, I want them all. Baddddd. Words can only hint at how cool the cats were and at the depths of love in the dogs’ eyes. I just wish we had the space! We were a little slow-moving that day though because what started off as a spontaneous BYO dinner to toast Jo’s job success on the previous night had escalated into a spontaneous-er wingding at our place. On Sunday I went with Tim to the Wellington Phoenix’s first football game of the season (The Pheen, as I call them, but it doesn’t seem to be catching on). It almost didn’t happen – the internet cafe I usually go to was inexplicably full, then when I finally found another one my e-ticket refused to print for ages. The upshot of it was that arriving late to the stadium meant I didn’t suffer that mid-point slump – as I really don’t like sports in the first place, my attention span is not cut out for ninety minutes of people running round kicking a ball. Anyway, they won, which was super pleasant. Hooray for weekends.
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Title via: The laconic and shambling but nonetheless exciting Pablo Picasso, by the Modern Lovers. LOVE this band. Not least for the fact that they use the word avocado in this song.
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Music lately: 

Shout, Isley Brothers. I know I say this about so many songs, but this has just got to be one of the best songs in the world. It’s beautiful.

Badd Energy, Third Eye – am a huge Coco Solid (she who makes up part of this act) fan so clicked through the moment I saw a link to this. While it stands up easily on its own, if you can watch the video you’re in for some fun times. Fun cats-wearing-robes-and-shooting-at-you times.
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Next time: I tried making quinoa balls tonight, kinda like meatballs, and while they predictably fell to bits what was there tasted SO SO good and so that’ll likely be my next blog post.

she gets too hungry, for dinner at eight

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I am a tired person these days. It’s because I think about this blog a lot. I think about what I can do on it. I think about whether other people are thinking about it, loving it as much as I do. I stay up late writing stuff. I write stuff early in the morning. I’m not sure if it’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to admit, but it’s true. When I finally go to bed at night, instead of relaxing into a powerful sleep, my silly brain is all “meeean now’s my chance to brainstorm! Get it? I’m a brain! Time to plan a squillion smurfillion things…to stay awake and think. Hard.” My kingdom for a more cooperative brain! (Or as some dry fellow once said, “if I only had a brain!“) (Also I had a late night last night at a party for cool lady Kim’s birthday. Double tiredness! But this was the good kind at least.)
Conversely, I’ll often arrive at needing to make dinner, one of my favourite times of the day, and my brain’ll be all “umm…there’s cookbooks everywhere, and yet…I can’t even?” However this week, despite not sleeping all that much and having a brain whittled down to a nub, I somehow managed to get some spontaneous inspiration happening. So I made sure I remembered what I did. I don’t have the monopoly on tiredness, needing to eat and wanting something delicious all at the same time, and these two hasty dinners I made recently might work for you too.
Spicy Tomatoes and Chickpeas with Coconut Milk.
Fun because: three cans of stuff = dinner. And it takes all of seven minutes and costs hardly anything.
Pasta with Bacon, Pears, Pecans, Rocket
Fun because: you can change heaps of the ingredients for other things you have. 

Spicy Chickpeas with Tomatoes and Coconut Milk


1 can tomatoes
1 can chickpeas
1 can coconut milk 
1 teaspoon each of the following: cumin seeds, coriander seeds, cinnamon, nigella seeds…oh, whatever you like, really, but that’s a good mix)
1 tablespoon chilli sauce
1 onion
Optional – to garnish – plain yoghurt, coriander, more coriander seeds.


Disclosure: my canned tomatoes were the cherry kind, and my chickpeas were “brun” because I go in for fancy stuff like that, but the plainest of plain stuff will be great too.


Slice up the onion, and fry it in a little oil over a good fierce heat till browned. Tip in the drained chickpeas, the tomatoes (with their juice), the spices, and the chilli sauce and let it come to the boil. Simmer away, stirring, for a couple of minutes, then pour in as much coconut milk as you like, stir, and remove from the heat. Divide between two bowls, and top with whatever garnish you fancy. 

We got delicious, quilt-sized garlic naans from Aaina (at 255 Cuba Street) and they were perfect for absorbing up this soupy spicy mess and making it feel like a feast. The mild coconut milk seeps into the spiced up tomatoes, the sturdy chickpeas give it some body – add a little chilli sauce and it’s gonna rock your pants. It’s vegan till you add the yoghurt – which isn’t even necessary, you could just drizzle over whatever’s clung to the coconut milk can – completely gluten free too.



Pasta with Bacon, Pears, Pecans and Rocket


This was inspired by a recipe of Al Brown’s in the latest Cuisine magazine. I admit, I tried getting in touch with my deeply Germanic roots by making Spaetzle, a kind of pasta dish that I love but have only ever had made for me. The recipe didn’t quite work for me…like the pasta ended up delicious but the dough was like the strongest adhesive and wouldn’t go through the colander like it should and was a big complicated messy mess. I recommend you just use regular pasta.


200g pasta
100g streaky bacon, cut into small squares.
1 pear, cored and sliced.
Butter.
Handful of rocket
Handful of pecans
Thyme leaves


Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil, and cook your pasta till…it’s cooked. Meanwhile, heat up a little butter in a saucepan and fry your bacon till nearly crisp, then add the pear slices. Let them get a good amount of heat on each side so they colour up a bit, then tip it all onto a plate and cover with tinfoil to keep warm. Hot trick: tip it onto your plate so you get extra bacony-flavour goodness when it’s all served up. In that same pan, quickly toast the pecans. Drain the pasta thoroughly, add it to the pan along with the bacon and the pears, stir it all together, and divide between two plates. Cover with rocket and thyme leaves and serve. 

It’s one of those dinners that might not look like much – almost like a bunch of different garnishes all piled on top of each other, masquerading as a proper meal. But hear me out. You’ve got the salty, butter-fried crisp bacon, the caramelised and juicily sweet pears, and toasty, softly crunchy pecans all twirled into your pasta. Cover it in a peppery tangle of rocket, both virtuous and visually sprucing and a few sprigs of thyme just because, and it’s honestly tastebud magic right there. 
Apart from how spectacularly excellent it tastes, it’s also versatile as: use whatever pasta you like, for a start, or even something like leftover boiled potatoes that have been fried in butter. The bacon’s optional, the pecans – they aren’t always cheap – could be walnuts or almonds or even sunflower or pumpkin seeds. Rocket could be swapped for spinach or any other green stuff you fancy, the pear could be a green apple…see? 
Despite my brain being like a crumbly old Ryvita, it has been a fantastic weekend – lurking with friends old and new, drinking tea and cider and vodka, making up ice cream, practicing cornrowing Tim’s hair so he can look like Ron Swanson for Halloween (I’m going to be Elphabaaaa!) reading in the sun, admiring Snacks the goldfish, that kind of thing. The kind of weekend you wish it could be every weekend…
…it’s also now time to get started on fulfilling the tasks on my List which I haven’t really properly finalised yet (maybe I should add “finish list” to my list?)
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Title via: there are literally zillions of awesome versions of The Lady Is A Tramp, but the most recent to take my fancy is a duet by Lady Gaga and Tony Bennet – am not a fan of her music or anything but she’s incredible in this. 
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Music lately:
Wooden Shjips, Lazy Bones. Rather like it.
Not Fade Away – it owes more than a little to Bo Diddly with that rhythm, which is possibly why it’s one of my favourites by the sadly shortlived (of both career and life) Buddy Holly.
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Next time: I still have that idea for the pear sorbet sitting there, but as I ended up using one of the pear’s in that pasta, it’s looking less likely it’ll be happening right away. However, I have made my first hummingbird cake – I haven’t tasted it yet but all the ingredients sound amahzing on paper at least. 

give ’em the old double whammy

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It’s spring! Which means asparagus! Which means… (sing it with me now)

…increased asparagus photo-taking opportunities!

I don’t know what it is about those spindly fronds with their layered, tapering points that makes me so camera-wieldy. Or perhaps that’s exactly why. That said, things aren’t exactly the springtime wonderland yet. Asparagus is still expensive. Rather than being nauseatingly rapturous about the changing of the seasons like I had anticipated, I frugally but committedly bought one small bunch. I did manage to make that small bunch go quite far over lunch on Sunday, via a one-two high kick of recipes from a favourite magazine of mine, Fine Cooking.

This salad uses shavings of asparagus to make a crisply raw salad. While I can’t deny that scraping off strips of this particular vegetable with a potato peeler is not a job without its frustrations, the light leafiness of it all makes it more or less worth it, with the asparagus showing off its grassy-fresh flavour unfiltered by any cooking process.

I altered this recipe a bit, for example I didn’t have the cheese specified – didn’t have any cheese in fact, because of its fist-shakingly high prices – so I just left it out and upped the nut quotient instead. Either follow Fine Cooking’s original recipe or my adaptation below.
Shaved Asparagus Salad (feel free to change the title too if you think it has unappetisingly hairy connotations for the asparagus)
Dressing:

1 tablespoon rice or cider vinegar
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon honey
Salt and pepper to taste

Whisk altogether in a bowl that can hold all the salad and increase quantities of something to taste.

Salad:

As much asparagus as you like – maybe around five spears per person for a side.
As much rocket or fancy lettuce as you like – around a cupped handful per person is good.
1/2 cup toasted nuts such as almonds, hazelnuts or macadamias.

Remove the tips and ends of the asparagus spears, discard the ends and throw the tips them in with the dressing. Using a vegetable peeler, carefully remove thin strips of asparagus from each spear, until you can’t do any further, at which point just chop it finely lengthways. If you aren’t up to peeling, you could just chop the whole lot up finely lengthways. Add to the bowl of dressing along with the leaves, then divide between plates and sprinkle over the nuts.

Despite the fiddly chopping it really is a simple recipe and delicious too, with the lively astringence of the dressing making nice with the toasty almonds that I used here.

What I made while the salad sat around, allowing the dressing to penetrate its pores, was this Asparagus Ravioli with Brown Butter Sauce. I don’t have the mental energy to retype the recipe here so you might as well follow the link, especially since Fine Cooking did such a good job of it in the first place, and I didn’t really deviate (apart from to leave out the anchovy paste and mascarpone and replace them with truffle paste and sour cream, and also to fold the wonton wrappers in half instead of sandwiching two together, and I didn’t have any parmesan. And I just roughly chopped up the asparagus instead of blending it) (Oh, okay. But still.)

Whoever thought up using wonton wrappers to make ravioli deserves a hug and an autographed photo from their top three favourite celebrities, because it’s an absolutely genius plan. A neat stack of ready-made squares, ready to be filled, which magically stick to each other and cook quickly in the boiling water to the extent that even I, the gnocchi-ruiner, can feel confident and calm about them. Yes, gnocchi-ruiner. If this hyphenated phrase intrigues you, then you might like to read the scoop on kitchen disasters and how to cover your tracks, which I wrote for 3news.co.nz.

Once each folded parcel has been quickly boiled up, the wrappers become meltingly silky-soft, their thin surface only barely containing the grassy-green interior. A triumphant combination of textures and flavours, this is rich but light, soft but crunchy, filled with asparagus but dripping with nutty, heat-darkened butter (as was my face after eating these, they’re a bit floppy and ridiculous to wrangle with a fork but I can’t see a better option.)

 People of the internet reading this blog right now, I’d like to introduce to you…Tim’s and my new pet goldfish, Snacks! 

Snacks is calm and sure of hoof, with glinting fins that range from charcoal black to burnished golden. Snacks was donated to us by a person that Tim works with who had a slightly larger abundance of goldfish than was necessary. Snacks is also, not being overly sentient, really difficult to photograph so don’t mind the blurriness here please.
We were also able to drive out to this person’s house in the suburbs to pick up Snacks, now that Tim (a) has his restricted license and (b) is handily ute-sitting his dad’s vehicle while he’s overseas. It’s so much fun driving round with Tim, and opens up a whole new world of what I call “car humour”, that I’d never known before. For example, a really terrible, boring, slow adult contemporary-type song comes on the radio station. Turn it up loud in the middle of Tim’s sentence, make air drums just before the (slow) chorus and yell “Sing it Tim“, point an imaginary microphone at his face (keeping a respectful distance so he can concentrate on the road, of course) and if he does start to sing, interrupt him by yelling “this is such the song of our generation” or if it’s a particularly slow, mid-verse bit of the song: “I love this bit!”. Car humour.
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Title via: That initially flopsome musical Chicago, which starred the magnificent and late Jerry Orbach (yes, the dad from Dirty Dancing and the old guy from Law and Order) and its song Razzle Dazzle. While the footage I’ve linked to is incredible, please also watch his hoofer peer, Cabaret and Wicked’s Joel Grey (who, get this, is the literal father of Jennifer Grey who played Baby in Dirty Dancing) singing Razzle Dazzle with the muppets. Okay did you also know that Michael C Hall, aka TV’s Dexter, also played Billy Flynn on Broadway? With awesomeness? So did Chuck Cooper but sadly for us all, but maybe luckily for the succinctness of this paragraph, there’s no footage of that surfaced yet.
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Music lately:

Is not Biology by Girls Aloud one of the most amazing and weirdest songs ever by which all other songs should aspire to? When you think about it? And if that isn’t, then what about the Sugababes Freak Like Me mashup of Adina Howard and shiny boy Gary Numan? Which I’m either listening to or I’m not, by which I mean once I start it I have to repeat it about 12 times, I can’t just let it pass me by once.
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Next time: While asparagus is still pricey, rhubarb’s become cheap as, so I bought up large on it over the weekend to put it all in a large cake (well that’s my thinking so far) however I also found this super cool and also blisteringly hot chili sauce recipe that I liked the look of. Could go either way.


Also: I went to a Social Cooking class on Sunday and talked to the lovely Chef Philippe Clergue, which I’ll be writing up and likely publishing on my next blog.


Oh, and: I’ve been editing a new HungryandFrozen tutorial video for you! Will upload it to YouTube tonight which will take approximately six weeks and all our bandwidth, once that’s done I’ll let you know about it.