Category: Vegetables

food beyond compare, food beyond belief…

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Another year goes past, another flat Christmas dinner is planned for and cooked and eaten and then reminisced about. Our first was in 2006, before I even had this blog, and when we’d just moved into our then-flat. The second one was the day after the David Beckham game, 2008’s was when I’d finished uni and started full-time work and Emma our then-flatmate was stranded in Thailand. She got back to NZ just fine, by the way, but still. Last year was our first Christmas dinner in our current flat and was also the day that I was on the cover of the Sunday Star-Times Sunday magazine (which meant a lot of “oh this? Oh I had no idea that was on the table there lookatmeeveryone“) This year was a pretty low-key happening, with just seven of us, but it was an amazingly happy day. Partly because of the awesome friends and whanau who were there, and partly because…my first ever Baked Alaska was not a disaster.

I’ve made this Involtini from Nigella Bites for the last three Christmas Dinners and it’s one of the best Christmassy vegetarian recipes I’ve ever found. Basically it is spoonfuls of herbed, nutty cooked bulghur wheat rolled up into parcels with long thin slices of fried eggplant, which are then tucked in to a casserole dish, covered with tomato puree and baked. It’s incredibly good and can be done ages in advance, and while Nigella’s original recipe contains lots of feta, it’s easy enough to make this dairy-free or completely vegan as I did. Pistachios are even prettier than feta anyway…
This year I had the idea that I could cook the eggplant slices quickly in a toasted sandwich press brushed with a little oil. It totally worked! Didn’t look as sexy as Nigella’s glistening griddle-striped slices, but since it’s all getting covered in tomato sauce anyway, I didn’t really care, and it saved me from sweating over a hot oily pan.
The roast chicken was the only thing in the whole damn day that had dairy products in it, and that’s because Ange, our very good friend and ex-flatmate, is vegetarian as well as dairy-free. I poured cream all over the chickens before roasting them, inspired by a recipe of Ruth Pretty’s I read in the 2005 Nov/Dec issue of Cuisine magazine. It felt like an amazingly extreme thing to be doing, plus it made the birds tender, golden and crisp. Notice in the background the boiled potatoes and roasted capsicums…I don’t have the energy to photograph and talk about them individually: just know that they were there too and they tasted great. I didn’t plan for gravy but quickly boiled up the roasting pan juices (there was heaps, was a shame to waste it) with a little flour and, without any white wine to hand, threw in some sake instead. It smelled amazing and tasted just fine too.
(Sorry to keep putting you on the spot Ange) For the first time my favourite stuffing (Cornbread and Cranberry from Nigella’s Feast) was dairy-free, made with rice bran oil (what, you thought margarine? Pffft) and soymilk. Even though I really love the bit where you crumble the already buttery cornbread into a pan of melted butter and cranberries, it was still delicious, and in fact the soymilk made it almost spookily puffy and light-textured. Except I ended up baking it for too long so instead of a soft, moist stuffing it was more like a large savoury biscuit. Eh, still tasted good.
The cranberry sauce! I have to co-sign with Nidge on this one, it really is as redder-than-red as she insists. I didn’t even up the saturation in this photo.
Anyway all that was cool, but The Baked Alaska. Oh my gosh. I always like to use this day as an excuse to try out a challenging new pudding but this one had an element of stage fright to it. (In case you’re wondering, 2006 was Nigella’s Rhubarb and Mascarpone Trifle, 2007 was her Rugelach, 2008 I made her White Chocolate Almond Torte, and last year I did her Chocolate Pavlova.) The cake and ice cream I made in advance but the last bit – whipping up meringue, spreading it over them and blasting it in the oven right before serving had humungous potential for wrongness.
I used a recipe from the Floridita’s cookbook for the base and invented my own coconut-blackberry ripple ice cream for the next layer, partly because I had some blackberries in the freezer already. I know it seems unfair to recommend making your own ice cream when it’s only going to be covered in meringue. But the good thing about it is that without the preservatives and who knows what else that goes into a lot of commercial ice cream it’s way more solid and therefore a bit more forgiving when you shunt it under a blazing oven. I’d argue that it’s much more fun to make your own but that’s just me. I like making ice cream.
The ice cream was made by whisking together 4 egg yolks (the egg whites I put in a plastic container and refrigerated to use, plus two more, for the meringue) and about 150g sugar. I then heated a can of coconut milk without letting it boil, and quickly whisked it into the egg yolk mixture. All of that got returned to the pan and gently heated, while constantly whisking, till it thickened like custard. I stirred in a can of coconut cream and then began to freeze it in a shallow dish (the same one I baked the cake in actually). Then I defrosted about 150g blackberries (you could use any berry really) mashed them with a couple of tablespoons of sugar and the juice of a lemon, and drizzled it into the still-softish ice cream.
Tim took this photo and also put the ice cream and cake on top of each other on the tray while I whisked up the meringue topping. For which I’m seriously grateful, because it only occured to me halfway through making the meringue that I still had to do all that.
I made sure to follow my Nana’s advice to make sure the meringue completely covered the cake and ice cream – it provides a thick blanket of protection which allows the ice cream to survive under the heat, but if it’s not uniformly covered, the ice cream can seep out and then you’ve got a small crisis on your hands. I also followed some last-minute tweeted advice from Martin Bosley about warming up the sugar first before its beaten into the egg whites. It’s not every day that this kind of interaction comes my way so I thought I might as well try it – sat the sugar in a shallow metal bowl in the oven while it was heating up, enough to make the crystals warm but not enough to melt them into syrup. Cannot deny that my meringue whisked up in minutes with more volume and shine than a shampoo commercial.
But it worked, it worked! I felt a rush of happiness and pride just looking at it. Baked Alaska are generally supposed to resemble mountains, mine was admittedly more of a plateau, like a Baked Cape Town Table Top Mountain.
Look at the jelly in the background somehow managing to steal the show with its ruby-glow.
So on top of looking spectacular – like a pudding from a Dr Seuss book, or a Graeme Base book, or let’s face it, a Barbie film adaptation of a classic fairytale – it tasted wonderful too. It’s like having three puddings at once, all compressed into a handy cube. The radicalness of hot meringue against still-frozen ice cream. The sweetness of the topping and the creamy berry-sharp coconut ice cream against the dark cocoa-y cake. Stunning. I may have high-fived myself.
Finally: Cakeballs! So satisfying to say, make and eat. They came about because when I made the cake for the Baked Alaska and tried to turn it out of its tin onto a tray it…broke. Not so much that it couldn’t be more or less patched up, but it did leave me with a significant pile of cake crumbs. I could have eaten the lot in despair, but then I remembered Nigella’s recipe in her Christmas book for “Christmas Puddini Bonbons” aka…cakeballs. Mine were pretty simple – the cake crumbs mixed with about 125g melted chocolate and 2 tablespoons golden syrup before being rolled into balls and drizzled with more dark chocolate. What gave them that superfunk-Christmas look and transformed them from “hastily covered-up mistake” to “incredible bonbons that I will fight you for” was the judicious sprinkling of edible glitter. I’ve walked past the cupcake lady at the City Market nearly every Sunday asking how much her edible glitter is. Finally I decided that it wasn’t even expensive at all especially considering it lasts forever, and bought a small vial of it. Ohhhh how I love it. Had to hold myself back from glittering up the roast chickens.
Tim and I have been living off the leftovers ever since, which I love. We’re going up to my place for Christmas this time next week so we’re trying not to buy too much new food…just using up what’s there. I tell you, there’s nothing like standing at the kitchen bench, wordlessly eating leftover jelly off a plate to bring you closer together. (I grabbed two spoons from the draw, and then was like “Well I’ve got my spoons” like I was going to have one in each hand. Yeah, I gave him one of the spoons. But I think he believed me…I think I believed me for a second.)
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Title via: Les Miserables, Master of the House. Last night Tim and I saw the live recording of the 25th Anniversary Les Mis concert at Embassy Theatre. It was amazing – Norm Lewis (he of the faint-making voice), Lea Salonga, Ramin Karimloo, erm…Nick Jonas (he wasn’t awful per se, anyone would look useless next to Ramin). Matt Lucas of Little Britain was Thenardier, who knew the man could sing so well! I know Les Mis isn’t the height of pop culture awesomeness, especially in this post-Boyle, post-Glee time, but whatever, the music is still incredible, totally unashamed about the tears that appeared during Salonga’s I Dreamed A Dream and Lewis’ Stars.
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Music lately:
I’ve been listening to A Very Little Christmas heaps – it was put together by a whole bunch of local musicians, has some excellent seasonal tunes both original and familiar, and you can download it free, what!
Sideline, a new track from David Dallas with Che Fu. Woohoo! Is all I have to say. Because I’ve spent three days trying to write this blog and my sentence-forming ability is dissolving like sugar in a hot oven…
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Next time: Proper recipes…vegetables…

i’m miss world watch me break

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You just don’t see elaborate dishes created in people’s honour these days. I mean, there are those so established that you forget – Peach Melba, Fettuccine Alfredo, Margherita Pizza, Beef Stroganoff… but nothing like the “Souffle Bowes-Lyon” from the QEII recipe book I once bought from an op shop, very 1980s with its tales of how much champagne they go through weekly and chilled gazpacho and colour plates of extremely tanned people with large hair.

A couple of years back Mum sent me a Hudson and Halls cookbook, and then this year at the library book sale I picked up another of theirs – a plastic-wrapped cookbook called Favourite Recipes from Hudson and Halls. Published in 1985, its black, dustjacketed cover has H & H in tuxedoes gazing solemnly at the reader, positioned in front of various items on a bookshelf and dresser – a clock, a lamp, a trumpet, ‘A Woman of Substance‘. Inside, their forward foreword breaks formalities with its “we have cooked together for nigh on twenty years, some of it good…some of it not so good!” Inside I found a recipe for Chicken Salad Lorraine with Peanut Cream Sauce which they named for 1983’s Miss World, New Zealand’s Lorraine Downes. I love a recipe with a decent backstory like that and I also really love peanut sauce…win win.
An often quoted line of theirs is “are we gay? Well we’re certainly merry”. With hindsight there’s sadness in that while the studio audience of their TV show would drink their wine and laugh at their comic timing, some kind of societal necessity prevented any actual openness at how this was a TV show fronted by two men in love with each other. At the time of the cookbook itself being published, the problematically worded, but comparatively progressive Homosexual Law Reforms were only just coming into effect in New Zealand. We don’t exactly live in a liberal wonderland right now, and I’m no expert on the history of NZ’s gay rights, but certainly leaps and bounds have been made since. As I’m privileged to have the world I live in and the media I consume largely reflect my own life, I can only guess at what it would have been like for H&H back then. I do know they wouldn’t have been the only ones in their position.

I’m not sure if it’s a mid-eighties thing or what, but H&H specified melons (oh my!) in the salad and much as I’m fairly adventurous, I wasn’t quite ready for it covered in peanut sauce…I figured the easier-found cucumber was within the same gene pool and along with some capsicum, would provide colour and juicy crunch. As I switched the required egg noodles for a lighter-textured pile of slippery, soft rice noodles, there’s nothing stopping you swapping the chicken for slices of fresh, firm tofu. And the more I think about it, the more it feels like peanut sauce on melons would have worked just fine…if you try it yourself, let me know!
There is on youtube an opportunity to see H&H in action which, apart from their merry chemistry, is a joy in itself as a slice of New Zealand television at the time – the giant electric frypan, the grey animated opening titles, the pinkly lit background of the studio kitchen. They snap and banter with each other, and burst into laughter. As Hudson spoons ingredients into a pan, listing them aloud, Halls interrupts offscreen with “Garlic?” to which Hudson responds “I haven’t got there yet, could you just mind your own business?” But then Hudson throws out the aside of “very good for the wrist action” while grinding pepper, which, while not as camp as Halls’ crying “Isn’t he wonderful!” while throwing his hands joyfully in the air, is still the sort of thing that continues to raise eyebrows when Nigella says it over 20 years later. I could go on and recreate an entire transcript but you might as well watch it – it’s wonderful stuff.
Chicken Salad Lorraine with Peanut Cream Sauce

With thanks to Hudson and Halls

300g good, free-range chicken thighs
1 stick of carrot, a few peppercorns, a bay leaf, coriander seeds and sprig of thyme if you have it
1/2 a lemon
1/2 a cucumber
1 yellow (or red or orange) capsicum
Peanut or sesame oil
Spring onions (optional)

Dressing

3 heaped tablespoons smooth peanut butter
1/4 cup stock (from poaching the chicken)
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1 clove garlic, crushed
small piece of ginger, peeled and grated or finely minced
1 teaspoon sugar
Juice from the other 1/2 a lemon
Tobasco or other hot sauce
About 1/2 cup of cream or thick Greek yoghurt or sour cream.
Egg or rice noodles to serve.

Place chicken thighs in a pan and just cover with water. Add the carrot stick, bay leaf, peppercorns, seeds and thyme (I didn’t have any thyme but it still tasted all good) and turn on the heat, allowing the water to simmer and bubble away gently till the chicken is no longer pink and seems tender – around 15-20 minutes. Remove the chicken to a chopping board and get rid of the spices and things. Bring the remaining liquid to the boil and let it reduce somewhat. Shred the chicken or slice into bite-size chunks. Poached chicken thighs aren’t the sexiest to look at, but there’ll be plenty of distracting colour later on.

Set aside 1/4 cup of the stock for the peanut sauce, and top up the remaining stock in the pan with water, bring to the boil and cook your noodles in it according to packet instructions. Drain the noodles, toss with the peanut or sesame oil, and divide between two plates.
Slice the capsicum and the cucumber into sticks, and arrange on top of the noodles along with the chicken. Finally, whisk together the dressing ingredients (or you could blast them in a food processor) till very smooth. Drizzle the sauce over the two plates of salad, scatter with spring onions or coriander if using.

Note: I didn’t have a lemon or cream, but I did have some amazingly thick, tangy Zany Zeus Greek yoghurt which I figured would cover off both needs. It did, and how. Sour Cream would probably be great as well, or you could just leave out the dairy altogether and replace the stock with water (or vegetable stock).
Serves 2

Lorraine Downes’ name was not taken in vain here – this salad is stunning. Though, it was easier for me to arrange it between two plates rather than put it all in a bowl, so I’m not quite sure if it really even is a salad still. Oh well – the poached chicken is amazingly tender, the peanut sauce is thick but light, blanketing the crunchy vegetables and soft, deliciously bland noodles. I just love peanut sauce but even so, the mix of textures and tastes is wonderful and it’s a great dinner on one of those evenings that is hot, but not so hot that you only want to eat an ice cube for dinner.

There’s plenty to love in this book, especially the descriptions before each dish – some of it practical, some hilarious (“once met someone who was on a diet and was drinking rum essence in diet cola…it tasted abysmal.”) When you turn to the back cover, they’re on a farm, Hudson is wearing a bucket hat and sunglasses and leaning on a spade, while Halls wears tiny shorts and has a rifle casually swung over his shoulder while lunging against a fence – two large black dogs sit beside them. Hudson died of cancer in 1992 and Halls left pretty soon after him. Their books aren’t so easy to track down – while they might be due for a reprint sometime soon, it’s worth hunting next time you’re in an op shop or at a book fair. They’re a lesser known chapter of New Zealand history, not to mention there aren’t many other places these days you’ll find a salad named after a 1983 beauty queen.
Tim and I were at Wellington’s opening night of Rocky Horror Show at the St James tonight – it was an absolutely incredible show, I seriously recommend you go along if you’re even halfway curious. The staging, the quality of the acting and singing, and the sheer energy is all turned up to eleven and besides, watching an audience so joyfully receive music – it’s a beautiful thing. Obviously it was exciting to see the strangely ageless Richard O’Brien who created the show, star as narrator (the round of applause on his entrance brought the performance to a halt) and you gotta hand it to Kristian Lavercombe playing O’Brien’s original role of Riff Raff with such wicked aplomb. Special mention must go to Juan Jackson who played Frank’n’Furter; he barely needed acting ability with his charismatic muscle structure, but luckily he could emote realistically, sing like the great-grandchild of Paul Robeson, and skip carelessly in platform heels. Being a rock opera it maintains a cracking pace – it’s easy to forget just how many incredible songs are crammed into this one wonderful show.
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Title via: Hole’s Miss World from Live Through This. Have much love for Courtney.
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Music lately:
I’ve been trying to avoid Christmas songs but seeing as it’s December 1st (eeeeek!) I’ve indulged myself with the sublimely ridiculous Turkey Lurkey Time from Promises Promises. Seriously, just watch it.

As well as the seasonal stuff I’ve been listening to a fair few John Peel compilations lately – which means Buzzcocks, What Do I Get/Lion Rock by Culture etc etc…
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Next time: For some reason this blog post took me forever to get done, and I guess things are only going to get busier from here on in…but hopefully I’ll get another blog post in before the end of the week, it’ll either be something vegetable-based (woo!) or this amazing cake recipe I found which has mayonnaise (what!) in it.

honey to the bee that’s you for me

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Note: As mentioned in my last blog post, I’ve been nominated for a Wellingtonista award, and while it’s seriously exciting and happiness-inducing to be amongst some distinctly high-profile nominees, it’s also quite nice to be voted for, so I can hype myself up into thinking I might win. As well as myself, you can also vote for other Wellington-related things you like, or nothing at all – the only compulsory fields are your name and email address. What I’m trying to say is that if you do vote (here here here) it’d be really great and I’d appreciate it heaps and heaps.

I recently got sent some honey – two jars – from the astute folk at Airborne. I was caught off-guard when they contacted me, am not sure where I stand on “accepting then blogging about free stuff” because it hasn’t really happened till now. Some people are hardline about this, refusing to accept anything, and I suspect I’d want to avoid it too – this is my blog and I’ll talk about what I want when I want – but damnit, I liked the idea of free honey and was 99% sure it would taste good and not compromise some kind of policy I haven’t even got the kind of clout to be developing in the first place. To find out more about Airborne, by the way, their “Why Choose Us” page is a reassuring read – these people treat their bees and their honey well.
So, two jars arrived – a large jar of thick, creamy Kamahi and a smaller jar of liquid, clear Tawari. And, thought I, here’s the chance to try all those recipes with lots of honey in them! But for some reason I either couldn’t find anything, or the stuff I could find, I was all “eh” about, so I decided to just make up my own stuff instead. (That said, Mum, if get the time could you please email me the recipe for those honey buns we used to make? From that handwritten recipe book I think?) (Edit: Thanks heaps Mum!)
At the vege market down the road there’s this amazingly good tofu at $4 for a large block, scored into four ‘fillets’ as I call them. However no matter how much I try, I can never quite finish it before it starts to go all orange and creepy. There’s only so much dense, filling firm tofu I can get through in a couple of days. On top of that we somehow ended up with three heads of brocolli, because I forgot that we had it and then bought some more. I hate wasting food but I’m also very forgetful, so this just sometimes happens. This following recipe however takes some neglected brocolli, some teacher’s pet asparagus, and some tofu that was somewhat past its best (not at the ‘unsafe’ stage or anything, just not looking so happy to see me when I opened the fridge) and turns it into a feast.
Honey Miso Roast Vegetables

I used a square of firm tofu, a head of broccoli, and a handful of asparagus. Use what you have – the veges need to be able to withstand some roasting. Cauliflower and kumara would be pretty perfect here too.

Whisk together:
  • 2 teaspoons white miso paste

  • 1 tablespoon clear honey (I used Airbourne’s Tawari)

  • 1 teaspoon (or more) sambal oelek or other red chilli paste

  • 1 teaspoon sesame oil

  • 1 teaspoon wholegrain mustard

Set your oven to 200 C. Chop your vegetables and tofu into fairly similar sized smallish pieces. lay the chopped vegetables on a baking-paper lined tray and spoon over the miso-honey mixture. You could also pour the mixture into a big bowl and toss the veges through it, but I couldn’t be bothered with the extra dishes. Roast for about 20 minutes or until everything looks burnished and cooked through. Eat over rice or noodles or just as is.
Don’t be alarmed by the dark, miso-toffee bits that appear (strangely delicious too, I couldn’t help peeling it off the baking paper and eating it) as whatever clings to the vegetables and tofu will taste incredible – sticky, savoury and full of complex, fragrant flavour. The tightly clenched branches of brocolli stretch out under the heat and become deliciously crisp, while their stems remain juicy and tender. The flavour of the asparagus intensifies under the caramelly, hot honey and the tofu becomes…totally passable.
Obviously with honey some kind of pudding or baking attempt is only right. It was relatively recently that I learned about frangipane, a buttery, almondy mix for filling pies and tarts and so on. I had an idea that honey could be a good exchange for the sugar. So I did it.
Honey, Almond and Dried Apricot Tart

1 square of bought puff pastry (I guess you should try and get good quality all-butter stuff. The ingredients on my Edmond’s ready-rolled sheets said “butter” but I have heard terrifying rumours of some awful sounding substance called “baker’s margarine”.)
1 egg
2 tablespoons creamy honey – I used Airborne’s Kamahi
Heaped 1/3 cup ground almonds
40g butter, melted
About 20 soft dried apricots

Set your oven to 220 C, and place the square of pastry onto a baking paper-lined tray. Lightly score a 1cm border around the edge with a sharp knife (don’t cut right through). Once in the oven, this will puff up and look really pretty.

In a small bowl, whisk together the egg and the honey. Stir in the ground almonds and melted butter. This will make enough for the tart plus a generous amount for you to taste (it’s delicious!) Spoon carefully over the centre of the pastry, spreading a thin layer across to meet the edge of the margin you’ve scored (as per the picture.) Carefully pull or slice the apricots in half or – if you’ve got lots of apricots, just leave them whole – and arrange on top of the pastry. Paint a little melted butter or egg yolk round the margin if you like. Bake for about 15-20 minutes – as long as you can leave it in without burning.
The first time I made it, I was doing the dishes and forgot to check on the oven. All the sugars in the honey and apricots couldn’t take being ignored, and the tart was a blackened mess (did this stop us eating it? Erm, no). It was late at night, the kitchen was covered in frangipane-smeared implements (myself included), and the ingredients aren’t the cheapest, so I may have yelled “I’m never doing the dishes again! It’s a sign! I hate everything!” Or something to that effect.
The second time I made this tart earlier in the evening and with new enthusiasm, I watched it like I was judging gymnastics at the Olympics – focussed, scrutineering, coldly assessing for any stepping outside the lines. I can’t have eaten nearly enough delicious frangipane mixture though because there was too much on the pastry – it billowed up and spilled over. I quickly turned the oven off to halt the frangipane pilgrimage to the edge of the oven tray, but this meant that the centre of the pastry sheet didn’t have time to get light and flaky. It wasn’t uncooked, just sadly damp, floppy and uncrisp.

While this was happening Tim was watching footage of the Pike River chief executive Peter Whittall, who can’t have slept in the past week, showing a map of where the 29 miners were thought to be, deep in the stomach of the earth. The projector cast shadows across Whittall’s face, and I looked at the tart and thought “oh well”. So we ate it, and it was fine – delicious in fact, with what I considered a bonus breadth of cakey frangipane to pull off the tray contemplatively. Yes, the underside needed longer in the heat, but the soft dried apricots were warmed to an heady, jammy perfumedness, while the fruity, creamy Kamahi honey somehow amplified the fresh, Christmassy flavour of the often dull ground almonds.

While it may need some tweaking here and there, you can feel free to go ahead and make this recipe. Although, while I ended up with deliciousness I’ve only made this recipe twice and it was somewhat fail-y both times…don’t blame me if you get frangipane all over your oven/walls/hair.
For any international readers, the Pike River mine explosion last Friday caused the disappearance, followed by confirmed death after a second explosion on Wednesday, of 29 miners on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. I was a bit naive and was saying “I hope they’re staying calm” to which people would reply, “if they’re alive”. The sickening sadness that their families, friends, colleagues and community went through, and continue to go through, makes the heart ache. If you read the newspaper (and it’s usually the narrow columns to the left and right of the page that relay the saddest stories in the briefest of paragraphs) you’ll see that tragedy happens everywhere and every day. The scale and public nature of this disaster means it has particular resonance across the country though. With that in mind – with anything in mind really – a burnt or awkward tart is something I can shrug at.
On Thursday morning, the Kamahi honey was spread thickly across hot toast, cut from a loaf of Rewena, the honey slowly filling the pools of butter that gathered in the bread’s crevices. The simplest solution of all, and it was so good. And, at a stretch, a kind of an early prototype version of the above tart. Actually I bet honey and apricot jam on toast (just spontaneously riffing here) would be amazing.
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Title via: YES, quoting Billie Piper’s Honey To The Bee here. It’s strange how, while not one note of the rest of her music appeals to me, I have an intense and unapologetic love for this one song. The swooning rapturousness with which the bizarre lyrics are delivered, the slow-dripping melody, and the late-nineties technological charm of its video make for quite the experience.
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Music lately:
Mariah Carey, Emotions from her album of the same name. Listening to her non-stop brings me no closer to the secret of what makes her so flawless.
The Damned, Eloise. Excellence!
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Next time: most definitely the Chicken Salad Lorraine, plus we’re off to Tiger Translate tonight so there’ll probably be a breathless account of that too.

if you want my gravy, pepper my ragu

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I guess the food I grew up on wasn’t fancy. Things like 2-minute noodles, boiled potatoes, microwaved frozen mixed veges were standard. I’ve probably said it before, but for a long time we mostly ate just microwaved food (sure, Mum had this amazing golden syrup sponge pudding recipe, but there’s definitely a reason why ‘Microwave Gourmet’ cookbooks are always over-represented at op shops and book fairs). Anyway, we ate just fine, and I should count myself lucky to have got regular meals anyway. But I wonder if it’s a product of my non-fancy upbringing, plus maybe some general deep-seated New Zealand backwards-in-coming-forwards-ness that I sometimes feel a bit bashful with fancy sounding recipes. Just realised I’ve said fancy about twelve times now. Anyway, the reason I got to thinking about this was that I have a recipe for Ragu Di Piselli – Italian for Pea Ragu – and for some reason my mind automatically went “well I’ll just call that peas and tomatoes”. Why? False modesty? At what? It’s not like I have to worry about Tim not eating his dinner because it doesn’t sound familiar (ha!). It’s not like you readers can’t handle some culinary Italian language.

Really, you can call this what you like, although it’s nice to acknowledge the lineage of something, food or not. I found this recipe in a Cuisine magazine (September 2005) and if nothing else, the Italian name cleverly masks the fact that this sauce is just peas and tomatoes. Maybe the sort of person who would sneer at an unrecognisable name for their dinner would also sneer when they found out that their dinner largely consists of two vegetables. Maybe these people can deal with it and learn something – it’s seriously delicious. From my own experience, Italian food can be aggressively simple. It’s good to just go with it, rather than be nervous that what you’re serving isn’t ‘enough’. (as I learned with the Peaches In Muscat back in February.)
Ragu Di Piselli/Pea Ragu/Peas and Tomatoes

From the September 2005 issue of Cuisine magazine

50g butter
1 T olive oil
1 onion, finely diced
100mls white wine
200g frozen peas (or fresh, but frozen is mostly how they arrive)
400g can cherry tomatoes or whole peeled tomatoes
One teaspoon tomato paste
Salt, pepper, parsely and Parmesan to serve

Melt half the butter with the olive oil in a pan. Saute the chopped onion till translucent, pour in the wine and allow it to fizz up and evaporate slightly. Now, add the peas and tomatoes. If you’ve got cherry tomatos, handle them carefully so they stay whole, but if you’ve got bigger tomatoes mash them up. Add the tomato paste, simmer on a low heat until the sauce thickens slightly. Stir in the remaining butter and serve.
Notes:
  • Canned cherry tomatoes are getting easier to find. But the usual whole or chopped ones are fine.
  • One teaspoon of tomato paste is an annoying measurement. If you don’t have any, just leave it out.
  • I’ve made this before with sake when I didn’t have any white wine. It was awesome.
  • I added some frozen soybeans along with the frozen peas here.
  • If you just use olive oil and leave out the Parmesan (which I hardly ever have anyway) you’ve got yourself a vegan dinner. If you want to take things in the other direction, chorizo or bacon could be added.
  • The recipe apparently serves six, but…nahh. This amount fed two of us.
  • I served it on a huge pillowy pile of polenta, which I’m a bit obsessed with, but pasta is obviously good and what the original recipe recommends.
Simple, sure, but also amazingly delicious. The tomato becomes sweet and soft and intensified, the peas give texture and bite, while the wine imparts a mysteriously good flavour once it makes contact with the hot pan. Something about the vibrant colours and juicy tomatoes means that it doesn’t feel like you’re just eating two vegetables stirred together (a bit like the soup from last time). Whatever you want to call it, this dinner can be made entirely from stuff at the back of your cupboard and freezer, which is really awesome for when you want to make dinner but feel like there’s nothing around. Sometimes I do run out of frozen peas and canned tomatoes…that’s not fun.
The conference last week up in Auckland went really well – my presentation bit was hitch-less, I learned heaps and I had an amazing lychee shake at a Vietnamese restaurant in Panmure that I really want to recreate. I got back on Friday night absolutely exhausted though, so even though I had grand plans to head out again, I ended up quickly faceplanting, unfortunately missing the fireworks. Luckily people round Wellington have interpreted this as “Guy Fawkes Season” rather than sticking to the actual night itself, and so there have been plenty of lit-up skies. I love fireworks (and still have a soft spot for sparklers) so it was a shame to miss the big show on the waterfront. The weather on Friday night was particularly brutal though, so I was happy as to just flag it and go to bed. Either way, it felt so, so good to be back in Wellington.
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Title via: The cast recording of Chicago (Chita Rivera, Gwen Verdon, Jerry Orbach, hello!). The 2002 film soundtrack I can hear in its entirety just by closing my eyes thanks to an aunty who played it a lot (something I can totally understand.) From it comes the beautiful Queen Latifah’s portrayal of Matron Mama Morton, whose big number When You’re Good To Mama is where this title comes from.
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Music lately:
I know I mentioned her last week, but whatever. On Saturday night we saw Ladi6, back in New Zealand after some significant creative time in Berlin, at San Francisco Bath House. She was amazing and I wrote some thoughts here at 100s and 1000s. Her punchy ode Like Water from new album The Liberation Of… has been rippling persistently through my mind ever since then.
Gomez, Bring it On, from their album Liquid Skin. I’m not sure how consistent these guys are but there’s a lot of amazing stuff on this album – maybe I’m a bit biased as I listened to it a lot back when I was in England – I love the mix of layered, bluesy sounds and voices.
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Next time: I’ll probably start panicking about how close to Christmas it is. I’ve found some photos from the first recipe I made from Nigella Kitchen (apple cinnamon muffins) so I should really blog about them sooner rather than later…

sunshine is a friend of mine…

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I’ve got about a squillion things to get done tonight (including “make your own muesli” “watch the rest of The Simpsons season 4” “PACK YOUR BAG ALREADY” and “have an early night so you can get better”) because I’m flying up to Auckland for a conference for the next three days…and I’ve been annoyingly sick for ages now, a rotating cast of germs is using my body as a stage, with coughing, sneezing, headaches, feeling weak and insomnia all starring. So to get it crossed off the list I’m trying to make this post relatively succinct. I don’t even know what the word for this is but I’m also trying to avoid that situation where I’ll write a sentence then delete half of it then rewrite it then delete it all and repeat that over again till I suspect I have actually got no thoughts at all about the soup.

The soup in question, luckily, stirs up heaps of thoughts, even though it’s more or less just corn and capsicums and water. For all that Nigella Lawson barely has to murmer an item’s name to send armies of viewers hunting tirelessly through supermarkets for pomegranates and sugar roses and and tiny whisks (surprisingly useful), hot damn does she have some economically and nutritiously sound recipes.
I love corn in all its various alter egos, from the canned creamed corn on toast that was a regular weekend breakfast as a kid, to the softest polenta (where I’ll amuse myself by feeding it with butter which melts into the grains – both yellow, so it’s deliciously difficult to notice the saturation point). Corn fritters can be stodgy and damp and gross, but done well it’s easy to see how they managed to become as ubiquitous as camembert and cranberry paninis (now that I never liked) in cafe cabinets. I don’t think I’d ever really had corn soup before, but I wish I’d had this recipe a few years back when Tim and I were trying to scrape together an existence while scraping the mould off our student flat’s walls as it’s a cheap, nutritious and satisfying meal (let’s be honest though, we sent ourselves off to university, no-one forced that pennilessness on our relatively comfortable lives). Not to mention this soup is aggressively cheerful to look at, if you subconsciously associate ‘yellow’ with ‘happiness’ like I guess I must do. Well, Nigella does it too, calling this ‘Sunshine Soup’.
Sunshine Soup

From Nigella Lawson’s Kitchen

1 yellow pepper
1 orange pepper
2 teaspoons garlic oil
1 litre vegetable or chicken stock, whether homemade, powder, cube or concentrate, preferably decent stuff
500g frozen sweetcorn kernels

Set your oven to 250 C. Cut out the core and seeds from the peppers and then slice thickly. Lay them on a baking sheet, drizzle with the oil and roast for about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, bring the stock to the boil, add the corn and bring back to the boil again, simmering for about 20 minutes.

Remove about half a cupful of corn for later, then blitz the rest, in batches if necessary, along with the peppers in a food processor. Serve with the reserved corn stirred back into it.
Because of the starchy, fibrous nature of corn this will never turn into a velvety puree, but it’s worth digging out the food processor for, otherwise all you’ve really got is corn floating in water. Leaving that visual aside, this is delicious stuff – deep bowls full of golden, fragrant sweet flavour. It is surprisingly hearty despite, as I said, not having much to it.
Speaking of, that’s all there is to this tonight.
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Title via: Baltimore’s sparkily dance-tastic Rye Rye and her MIA-chorussing track Sunshine.
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Music lately that I’m too tired to talk about properly:
Bang Bang, new single from the amazing Ladi6, who has just released her new album The Liberation Of… More on her later, as we’re seeing her live at San Fransisco Bath House on Saturday night. Can’t wait.
While we’re local, Homebrew’s 12” Last Week arrived in the mail today in all its bright blue vinyl glory. I’m not sure if “hard to dislike” is a proper compliment. These are seriously enjoyable sounds from a master of words and familiar stories. Love it.
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Next time: I better be better, I’ll definitely have more time on my hands and words in my head, and after all this dinner it’s probably about time for some baking…

and all shall fade, the flowers of spring

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Whenever Spring rolls round again (I know it’s boring to insist how fast the year seems to be moving but: the year seems to be moving fast) there’s this flurry of asparagus-loving that goes on in the food-related media. Which is fair enough since it’s really delicious and takes its sweet seasonal time getting here and, importantly, its arrival means we’re getting closer to summer. Somehow I haven’t really embraced asparagus much this year – it’s nearly November and this is the first time I’ve cooked it. I’ve been travelling round a bit lately and had a few late nights that slow down my ability to get to the vege market, and while “social life > asparagus” looks good on paper…it’s good to finally have some in the fridge.

I couldn’t fight the inexplicable need to take lots of is-it-isn’t-it-focussed photos of it first.
This would have been a lot more dramatic if I’d had more asparagus, but whatever.
The reason I don’t have more asparagus up my sleeve to take fancy photos of is because I used half my stemmy green bounty earlier this week in something that Nigella calls “Sweet Potato Supper” – a roasting dish of chopped kumara, stems of asparagus, and chopped bacon, sprinkled with thyme and drizzled with oil then baked for an hour. So good.
With the remainder, once I’d finished snapping it from high and low angles, I made a recipe from the Floriditas cookbook. Floriditas is a restaurant down the road and the sort of place that I find myself gazing wistfully at as I pass. Similar to how, if we were ever at the Warehouse in town, I used to ask salespeople to find out how many Spice Girl polaroids there were left in stock, and how much one cost. When they came back and told me I would then sigh and say “okay, thanks” and just stand there, looking wistful. I don’t know why, I guess I was hoping some eccentric millionare would be wandering through the Pukekohe Warehouse and take pity on me or something. Anyway, Floriditas is so, so nice. I’ve only ever been in there for coffee and cake as it’s a bit out of our reach but their elegant cookbook allows it to come closer to home.
It’s divided into months, beginning with December, and recipes reflect the seasonal produce and mood of each time of year. It assumes you know a lot – recipes tend to be sparsely worded – and it could have done with a bit of subediting, but there are a lot of beautiful things to be made, gorgeous pictures and a lovely introduction from Julie Clark and Marc Weir, both of whom can often be seen through the windows serving diners. I only really wish that it had more baking recipes in it – but then as their cakes are so amazing maybe they don’t want to play all their cards at once.
My main reason for attempting their Asparagus and Tarragon Spaghetti with Garlic Crumbs was that I’d spontaneously bought a giant tarragon plant from those stands selling herbs at the supermarket because it felt like a good idea at the time. This recipe not only helped out with that but also is a decent showcase for the asparagus spears sitting in the fridge and the idea of ‘garlic crumbs’ was pretty alluring. It’s a recipe for two people but you fry the breadcrumbs in 100g butter. It’s like they were thinking of me, specifically, when they were writing this.
Asparagus & Tarragon Spaghetti with Garlic Crumbs

Adapted slightly from Morning, Noon and Night, the Floriditas cookbook.

For the crumbs:
1/2 a loaf fresh ciabatta
8 cloves garlic, finely chopped
100g butter
2 tsps olive oil

Tear the ciabatta into chunks (I left the crust on, despite being told to remove it) and use a food processor to chop the bread into fine-ish crumbs. I should have done this, but couldn’t be bothered getting out the food processor for one job, so instead I hacked and sliced the crumbs into submission with a serrated knife. In a large pan, melt the butter and oil together, then add the crumbs and garlic, stirring regularly till they are golden and crunchy and starting to colour slightly. It might look a bit terrifying to some at this point but the bread absorbs all that butter very quickly. Anything you steal from the pan at any stage will taste amazing.

For the spaghetti:

100g spaghetti (I upped this to 200g for the two of us – 100 seemed too little)
1 bunch asparagus
olive oil
1/2 cup fresh tarragon leaves
4 T freshly grated parmesan
Optional: I added a handful of frozen peas to the pasta during the last five minutes of the cooking time. With all that butter I wanted a bit of extra vegetable.

Cook the spaghetti as per packet instructions in a pot of boiling salted water. Meanwhile, slice the ends off the asparagus then slice the stems diagonally. Heat a little olive oil in a pan and saute the asparagus till it turns bright green and is cooked through and a little darkly crisp in places. Once the pasta is cooked, drain it and toss into the pan with the asparagus, mixing gently to disperse (never very easy, to be fair). Add the tarragon leaves, parmesan and crumbs, mixing gently again, and then divide between two plates.
I knew if I made the crumbs first I’d end up eating them all while the pasta was cooking. So, to save the crumbs and also to save on washing up, I sauteed the asparagus first, set it aside, then made the crumbs in that same pan in the last five minutes of the pasta cooking. I thought this was a good thing but it turned out to highlight how my good intentions don’t always turn out right. Nothing dramatic, I just forgot that I’d set the asparagus – one of the central, yay-it’s-Spring-already ingredients – to the side. It wasn’t till I’d finished taking photos and we’d sat down to eat that I remembered.
So there’s the asparagus, hastily
It was incredibly good – the grassy, slightly scorched sauteed asparagus against the deeply buttery crumbs and intense garlic flavour. It possibly doesn’t sound like much of a meal – bits of vegetable and bread on spaghetti – but it’s not only filling, it also tastes somehow luxurious but comforting, with the smell of fried bread as you stir the crumbs…it’s a fantastic way to celebrate one of the nicest Spring vegetables, but even if you don’t have asparagus you could make this with just peas, or maybe courgettes, to give green juiciness against all that butter and crunch.
Last night Tim and I went to see Sage Francis at San Fransisco Bath House. I’m very glad we went along – it’s supposed to be the last tour he’s ever doing. We’ve seen opening act Alphabethead once or twice before and he was as alarmingly dynamic as ever, deftly throwing in So So Modern’s Berlin (a couple of the band members were in the audience) and doing things that I can’t even describe on the turntables but they looked very complicated. And he seemed really happy to be doing it, which is awesome. Sage Francis appeared draped in a flag bearing the logo of his record label and gave us his fired-up, powerful and occasionally humorous material, (at one point ripping off a toupee) delivered with amazing flow – the way he twisted words and rhymes around rhythms was awe inspiring. Tim and I hung back, curious and interested observers, but it was cool to see many in the crowd obligingly throwing his own lyrics back to him whenever he lifted the needle on the track. He finished with the stunning, spine-tingly The Best of Times, which, even if you aren’t sold on my description of the evening, I urge you to check out. Then he jumped into the crowd and started shaking hands and taking photos. We left the true fans to it, feeling like we’d seen something seriously special.
Speaking of turntables, Tim got home from work yesterday holding one. We’ve been together for five years now (‘anniversary’ sounds a bit uncool but there it is) and he decided to get it as a present for us, even though we don’t really ‘do’ presents. I guess it was more of an excuse than anything, but to be fair he did secretly bus to Petone to one particular second-hand music shop to find me some old Broadway records. It’s exciting times – there’s all these ancient recordings and they’re so cheap. I’ve been listening to the original Broadway cast recording of Hair more or less non-stop. Not that we’re going to replicate our music collection on vinyl, it’s more of a case-by-case thing (or for me, a caseload-by-caseload of Broadway thing). Although, now that I’ve fleeced Real Groovy and Slowboat, it might be time to look further afield…especially if I want Sondheim…
Finally in music-related stuff, my dad’s band Apostrophe has their first music video for their song The Skeptic – I’m proud as, especially as I know all the work that went into it. Bear in mind it was all made during whatever spare time was available, with zero funding and relatively unfancy technology. Feel free to check it out by clicking —> HERE.
Title via: Spring Awakening‘s finale, Song of Purple Summer. A beautiful song with some gorgeous harmonies. Going more ‘thematic’ here since there just isn’t a wealth of songs about asparagus.
Music lately:
Amongst the Streisand and the Liza and the (unfortunately skippy) Godspell and so on, we picked up this amazing collection of 38 Bessie Smith songs. All gold, but If You Don’t, I Know Who Will is one of my favourites.
Typical Girls by The Slits. Ari Up, aspirational woman who formed The Slits when she was only 14, died on the 20th aged 48.
 
Next time: I am in a rare situation where I’ve ended up with a ton of things to blog about so it could be anything depending on what I feel like writing about when I next get some spare time – but my money’s on that crumble.

give peas a chance

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So long since my last update – sorry you were stuck with that badly-exposed brisket for ages. I was in Hamilton over the weekend for the Smokefreerockquest finals and arrived back in Wellington on Sunday afternoon feeling very tired and still a bit blah that I’d missed Tim’s birthday on Saturday. I really wanted to stumble into bed, but dinner needed sorting and after a weekend of hastily grabbed dinner (specifically: pineapple lumps and a packet of ready salted chips) I didn’t want to get take-out. Tired, uninspired, and with not much in the cupboard, I turned to Nigella’s seminal text How To Eat, feeling instinctively (and maybe a little overdramatically) that it would provide the answer.

 
Sure enough, after some aimless page-flipping her Pea Risotto stopped me. Rice. Frozen peas. Got them both. Not to mention, Nigella quite often bangs on about the soothingly zen properties of exhaustedly stirring a risotto into starchy submission, which significantly adds to the glamour of making dinner while half asleep.
 
I didn’t have any of the required parmesan cheese, so instead I added a few strips of lemon zest and a handful of peppery rocket to provide a similar kick. I normally feed my risottos with butter, but with the lack of parmesan I decided instead to use extra virgin olive oil instead and make the whole thing vegan. I’m pretty sure the fact that I met an incredibly good looking vegan on the weekend has nothing to do with it – but who knows what decisions are secretly made by our subconscious.
 
 
My subconscious is reminding me that I can’t lie: these photos was taken the next morning before I went to work. Once I’d finished snapping I scraped all the cold rice into an empty Tupperware container and took it to work for lunch. I even placed that pea deliberately on the fork. It’s just that we were watching a documentary when I was making the risotto the night before and the lights were all off – not healthy photography settings. So the next day I recreated our dinner from the leftovers. If my photography can’t be honest, at least I am, right?
 
This is a very simple dinner but devastatingly good – creamy rice, bright green peas bursting with their pea-flavour (can anyone effectively describe the flavour of a pea? At this stage: not I). Yes, there’s a lot of stirring but think like Nigella and wallow in the romance of it all.
 
As well as removing the dairy aspect of this risotto, I also made a few other slight tweaks. I had no fresh nutmeg so left it out. Instead of heating up stock, I crumbled in half a porcini stock cube (my favourite, all-purpose flavour) and had a pan of hot water simmering next to the pan of rice. Rather than pureeing the peas I just divided them into two small bowls, mashing one half with a fork while leaving the other plain. I had no vermouth or white wine so went daringly cross-country and splashed in some Sake instead, which worked perfectly – its warm, ricey depth of flavour naturally complementing the rice it was absorbed into. I can’t pretend like I don’t think good carnaroli rice tastes a million times nicer than the bland gluggy Sun Rice arborio from the supermarket but I’m also lucky enough to be in a position to choose between rices (don’t get me wrong – good rice isn’t cheap, but there are other areas I don’t spend my money…so.) You do what works for you.
 
 
Pea Risotto
 
Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat
 
60g butter (or more! Or olive oil)
150g frozen peas
Approximately 1 litre stock
Freshly grated nutmeg
1 small onion or shallot
200g arborio or Carnaroli rice
80mls white wine or vermouth
lemon zest and rocket, to serve 
Melt half the butter in a pan and add the peas, cooking for a couple of minutes. Remove half the peas, and to the pan add about half a cup of stock. Simmer till the peas are very soft, remove and puree along with a tablespoon each of parmesan and butter and a pinch of nutmeg, or if you don’t have the energy, mash roughly with a fork. You should now have an empty pan and two small bowls of peas, one solid, one not.
 
Finely chop the onion and melt some more butter in the pan. Cook the onion, stirring occasionally, till golden and soft. Add the rice and stir “till every grain glistens with the oniony fat” as Nigella says. Pour in your wine – or sake! – and allow it to absorb. Now here comes the commitment. Add a ladleful of hot stock (or hot water if you’ve crumbled in a good stock cube like me) and continue to stir till absorbed. Repeat. And again. And then some more. You can’t rush it, you can’t walk away. Just keep stirring, watching the rice slowly expand and absorb all the liquid. After about ten minutes, return the whole peas to the pan and continue to slowly add hot liquid. When you’re satisfied that it’s done (taste as you go) stir through the pea puree and as much butter or extra virgin olive oil as you want. Divide between two plates and sprinkle with parmesan if you like, or lemon zest and rocket as I did. 
 
 
As I said, this is simple food, but very, very good – soft, dense granules of rice studded with Elphaba-green peas. Very easy to eat curled up in a chair, feeling better about the world with every mouthful. The scent of sake hitting a hot pan is something else – I can almost taste its savoury, buttery aroma just thinking about it. The porcini stock cubes add a subtly earthy flavour and the peas have their green sweetness. And it’s all absorbed by the rice. Positively meditative stuff. 
Title via: John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, I know it’s a sorry pun but I’ve got the “I’m tired” card and I’m putting it on the table right here. Plus, you really should give peas a chance. They’re awesome as far as vegetables go.
Music lately:
 
Spotted a tweet from the mighty DJ Sirvere on Sunday inviting people to share their favourite Jay Z guest spot. Not an expert on this but my mind immediately presented me with his appearance in Mariah Carey’s Heartbreaker. Which then spiralled into hours of unproductive inactivity. Oh sure I blame the tiredness, but I haven’t listened to Mariah in years and with one click of the mouse I was riding the Mariah Carey Love Train all the way through youtube. Highlights included the delicious Can’t Let Go, Honey (Bad Boy Remix) this reminds me of when MTV Europe was briefly on our TVs, One Sweet Day with Boyz II Men (slathers you with emotion like I slather butter on toast) and Thank God I Found You with Nas and Joe. I don’t often like power ballads, and endless impressing upon the listener about how in love they are isn’t usually my thing either but what can I say. Mariah is flawless.
 
I Aint Mad At Cha by Tupac, from All Eyez On Me. Yesterday was 14 years since Tupac was shot. There’s no right age to have someone take your life…but he was only 25.
 
So, The Good Fun were the winners of the Smokefreerockquest on Saturday night – check out footage of them performing their song Karaoke for the sell-out crowd. I liked all the finalists in their own way but The Good Fun definitely have an out-of-nowhere zany awesomeness – I hope they go far.
Next time: It’ll be the Grumble Pie that I promised for this time round. Photographed at night right before it was eaten, even. Also, right now: Happy birthday, Mum! 

blaze a blaze galangalangalang

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I’ve been feeling sorta dispirited the last couple of months, a bit “mehhhh”, like time is sliding by so fast and I haven’t been able to get a grip on the days and suddenly it’s August and, I don’t know, maybe this strikes a chord or maybe it makes no sense whatsoever.

I think, hypothesizingingly, this could have something to do with the fact that I have made almost no stews or casseroles or soups this winter. Nigella’s Slow Food chapter in that seminal text How To Eat has been unstained with ingredients, there’s been no brisket becoming meltingly soft as it cooks in stock over time, forcing you to wait for it, or kumara simmering with spices and all those other romantic things that you think about when you are, well, hungry and frozen. I guess I’ve just been busier lately, had more going on…anyway I’m trying. I made Nigella’s Beef with Stout and Prunes for the first time in more than a year over the weekend and it was SO good. Luckily in Wellington it’s winter for about 85% of the year anyway so even though it’s nearly September, there’s still plenty of scope for making up for lost time foodwise.
Me: I’m going to make Penang Beef Shin Curry for dinner tonight.
Tim: Woohoo!
Later

Me: I’ve decided to use tofu instead of beef.
Tim: Woohoo..?
Luckily, Tim does like tofu. Actually, I take back that ‘luckily’. It’s not some great magnanimous concession to like tofu, the sort of thing you discuss later with starry eyes (“he doesn’t complain when I cook tofu and he puts the toilet seat down! What a catch!”) It ain’t luck. Tofu just tastes good. At least, when I cook it. Witness: tofu balls!
This not-beef Penang Curry was a recipe I found in an old Cuisine magazine – July 2004 – and while using tofu makes it significantly faster, it still has that involved, pestle-and-mortar, simmer-till-tender vibe going on. The list of ingredients might look a bit stressful, and I guess I’m lucky I live in Wellington where stuff is a bit nearer to my fingertips, but it’s not so bad -suss out your local markets, check out the local Asian Supermarkets, explore your neighbourhood or even the next ‘hood over…or just improvise with what you have. Shallots can become spring onions, dried chillis can be fresh glossy ones, and the gently fragrant galangal of my blog post title could just be plain ginger…but you might want to call it “Penang-ish” curry instead, I guess I should, too considering how much I’ve changed it up already.
Penang Tofu Curry

Adapted from Cuisine, July 2004

Penang Curry Paste

4 long dried chillies, deseeded and soaked in hot water for 20 minutes
Pinch salt
3 shallots, peeled and chopped
4 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
2 teaspoons chopped coriander root and stalk
1 tablespoon chopped galangal
1 tablespoon chopped lemongrass stalk
A little grated fresh nutmeg
3 tablespoons natural peanuts, boiled for 25 mins, drained and cooled (I have to admit…I didn’t boil them for 25 minutes. Maybe five. And I didn’t let them sit round and cool either.)

Either blitz everything in a food processor, adding the peanuts last and pulsing to a roughly textured mixture, or go hands-on with a pestle and mortar. I did the latter, not because I’m all superior but because sometimes in my backwards mind, bashing away at herbs with a ceramic thingy is easier on my nerves than washing the food processor after using it. Either way, refrigerate until you need it.

2 square ‘fillets’ of fresh, firm tofu, sliced (or as much as you want, really)
1 can coconut milk
2 tablespoons grated palm sugar
3 tablespoons fish sauce (I used soy sauce instead – you could too, to make it vegan)
2 cups loosely packed spinach leaves
4 kaffir lime leaves, torn in half
1 small, hot chilli, cut in half
2 tablespoons Thai basil leaves (didn’t have any of this)
5cm fresh ginger, peeled and cut into thin batons (I just used more galangal)
1/4 cup coriander leaves

Bring half the coconut milk to the boil in a heavy saucepan. Reduce heat and add the curry paste, stirring as it cooks. Add the palm sugar, the fish sauce, and the tofu slices. Simmer for a few minutes, then stir in the spinach, lime leaves, galangal, chilli and basil. Serve in bowls with the coriander on top, over hot rice. This served two, but all you’d need is more tofu and more coconut milk to feed four.
Soul-restoring stuff – the gentle coconut flavour harshed up by the roundhouse kicky of the chilli, fragrant with the delicately gingery galangal, the incredibly good-smelling lemongrass and lime leaves and the coriander, all of which is absorbed into the fresh, delicious tofu. If you like what you see, maybe try making triple the curry paste, covering it with some oil and refrigerating it for the next time you need some midwinter zing.
Okay, I’d just like to point out that I initially typed “zingage” instead of just ‘zing’, and it didn’t get a little red spellcheck underline…weird. Sitting here typing, I can tell you that “flavour”, “harshed”, and “chilli” all are spelled wrong according to the red lines underneath them, but “zingage”, as in what I imagine to be “possesses zing” is apparently a legit word? Weirdage!
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Title via: M.I.A’s very cool song Galang from her album Arular…gah I love this woman’s music. And also her dancing. Even if you start listening to Galang and feel like this scoop of spluttery, slangy excellence is not your thing, the constant dancing, graphic art, and colourful jackets in her music video are awesome (as is the harmonising towards the end).
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Music lately:

I bought Liz Callaway’s Passage of Time online recently and it took soooo long to arrive, finally landing on my desk last week. Have been thrashing it ever since. Youtube is painfully lacking in Liz Callaway tracks but here’s a recording of her singing Make Someone Happy/Something Wonderful from this album – devastatingly good stuff.

Speaking of devastatingly good, Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night from the album of the same name. I heard a song from this album on the radio over the weekend and it reminded me how much I love this collection of songs. My favourite album of his, hands-down.

Still speaking of devastatingly good, check out the late, wonderful Lena Horne’s take on Rocky Racoon with the musical assistance of Gabor Szabo. Over on our blog 100s and 1000s, Tim and I shared our thoughts on some of the good Beatles covers out there, and Mum commented asking if anyone had every covered Rocky Racoon. Well here it is. And I only wish we’d found it sooner. Cheers Mum!
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Next time: Apart from wanting to slow down and make more old-timey casseroles, I’ve also had the urge to make some cookies but haven’t had the time or energy. When you don’t have the energy for cookies you know it’s time for some stern self-talk. Find the energy, Laura! Make the time!

here comes the brand new flava in your ear

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While I’m usually as inspired by Cuisine magazine and its contents as the next person, the July issue that arrived in the mailbox a few days ago seemed to make me want to cook even more than I usually do. Be aware: this is some high-level longing. Inside its pages is an interview with Yotam Ottolenghi, who, apart from having an extremely cool name, has developed a small empire of eateries in the UK (the name Ottolenghi is really built to carry an empire, I’m not sure mine is) and penned a cookbook here and there too. He has a new one out called Plenty, of which a sampling of recipes were featured in Cuisine. From this one alone I think I would, at the very least, go make puppy-dog eyes at Plenty in a bookshop and stroke its elegant cover thoughtfully. (Hello, at $70 – sure, it’s probably worth actually buying, but at this stage the only headway I can afford is to make significant eye contact with it.)

The thing that attracted me to this recipe was not just that I magically had all the ingredients – (except the green chilli but I made up for this by adding a daring spoonful of chilli paste to the sauce; I substituted kumara for butternut because that’s what I had) – but that the combination of flavours seemed so new and yet so obviously meant to be together. I’d never had cardamom like this before or poured tahini over kumara. I wanted to try it, and immediately.

Roasted Kumara with Lime, Yoghurt Tahini Sauce and Chilli

Adapted from a recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi from his book Plenty, in the July Cuisine magazine.

2 whole limes
4 Tablespoons olive oil1 large kumara, or enough to make about 900g (or of course, butternut)2 tablespoons cardamom pods
1 teaspoon ground allspice100g plain, Greek-style yoghurt
30g tahini
1 green chilli, thinly slicedcoriander leaves
Sea salt
Preheat oven to 210 C. Trim the tops and tails off the limes, stand on a chopping board and carefully slice off the peel and pith (a bit like this recipe here). Quarter the limes from top to bottom, and cut each quarter into thiin slices (basically – you want really thin slices of lime. The instructions are a little fiddly.) Place the slices in a small bowl, sprinkle with a little sea salt and pour over one tablespoon of the olive oil. If you have a really, really nice olive oil this is the place to use it.

Cut the butternut or kumara into slices about 1cm thick. Lay them on a baking tray. Grind the cardamom pods in a pestle and mortar (or you could probably use a food processor or something) so the seeds are extracted, and then discard the greenish pods (this took forever! The recipe does not mention this fact!) and continue to work them into a rough powder. Add the allspice and remaining oil (I used only about a tablespoon or so) and brush over the slices, sprinkle with a little salt and place in the oven for 15 minutes or until tender. Remove from the oven.
Meanwhile, whisk together the yoghurt, tahini, a tablespoon of lime juice squeezed from one of the slices chopped earlier, 2 tablespoons of water and a pinch of sea salt. To serve, arrange the slightly cooled slices of butternut or kumara on a plate, drizzle with the yoghurt sauce, spoon over the lime slices and scatter the coriander and chilli over the top.

These flavours together were so stunning. After one mouthful I involuntarily cried “Damn this is good!” and defied anyone within my empire (Tim) not to agree with me. Luckily he liked it too.

Here’s what this plate is serving you: the soft, satiny, caramelised slices of sweet kumara, roasted with lemony, tongue-numbing cardamom and cooled with earthy, nutty, tangy yoghurt and tahini sauce. The wince-inducing sharpness of the limes is somehow softened during their brief olive oil and salt spa session, leaving only pure, juicy lime flavour. You know what perky lift the coriander brings, that’s why it’s so popular. The chilli that I added into the sauce brought a little necessary dark heat. We had this with rice and it was a small but perfect dinner for two. You could leave out the yoghurt and make this completely vegan or serve it alongside a gingery roasted chicken or sesame and soy-marinated steak. It’s something special all right. So special I wheeled out alllllll those adjectives.

Speaking of adjectives…

On Monday Tim and I were fortunate enough to see Wanda Jackson performing live at the San Francisco Bath House. At 75 years of age her voice is as menacing as it ever was and she put on an amazing show, revisiting old favourites (Let’s Have A Party – hooo!) and new zingers, with stories of how she got to be where she is. Afterwards she appeared on the floor and waited patiently to sign photos for everyone, Tim and myself included – we got squeezed to the back by some understandably, but undeniably pushy folk so she looked a little dazed by the time our turn rolled round, but was still friendly. She’s often mentioned in conjunction with dating Elvis and for Jack White producing her next album but far from being defined by the men in her life she appeared on stage as who she is – an incredibly talented, powerful, gracious woman.

In my last post I mentioned the All Whites’ exciting trajectory in the FIFA World Cup – Tim and I got up and trudged to the pub in the freezing cold at 2am Thursday night to witness their final game of the tournament against Paraguay. While they didn’t win they definitely didn’t lose either – they remain one of the few unbeaten teams of the whole shebang and truly, when you compare the amount of times that Paraguay could have scored, but didn’t, and our few chances at a goal, it was a fairly astonishing game. ___________________________________________________

Title via: Craig Mack’s superfine Flava In Ya Ear from Project: Funk Da World.
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Music lately:

Wanda Jackson’s devastatingly good Shakin’ All Over, produced by Jack White for Third Man Records. On Monday night Jackson was wearing this white, heavily fringed sweatshirt (it reminded me a little of a pink sweater I used to have as a kid with a giant purple fringed V-shape across the front, I called it my “Barbie Goes West” outfit because I was cool like that) which she used to great effect in performing this song. I love it!

Devo’s new-ish song Fresh from their album Something For Everybody. I do love a song that exercises its right to multiple tempos and both Fresh and Shakin’ All Over do this staggeringly well.
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Next time: I did promise pavlova and it is on its way, but I also made some seriously enticing homespun marshmallows today and they might well jump the queue. In other news Tim and I have embarked on a side-project together, a little site largely devoted to music called 100s and 1000s, check it out if you’d like to…

looking through a glass onion

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It is so, so freezing in Wellington lately, that straight-through-your-clothes harsh chill which makes getting out of bed in the morning that much more aggrieving. I was in Christchurch and Dunedin over the weekend for work which was also an intensely cold experience, not to mention pretty exhausting (can’t say I’ve been sleeping well recently, and sitting in clenched frustration for an hour and a half on a plastic chair in the Dunedin airport where there is nothing to do while waiting for your flight, followed by a further hour and a half’s wait at the Christchurch airport will take it out of you. This is New Zealand, not the mighty plains of Canada, I don’t see why we need flights with stop-overs.) Hence why it has been a while since I’ve blogged.

There’s not much I love doing more in winter than sitting by a roaring heater with a pile of my cookbooks, going through and imagining what shenanigans I could get up to. Cooking in winter is fun – all those long-simmered warming dishes that make the house smell amazing and warm you as you stand over them – unlike the summer heat when all you really want to do for dinner is sit quietly inside the freezer and lick its icy walls. One book that I had a flick through recently was the Supercooks Supersavers Cookbook, which I picked up at the local opshop back home for about a dollar a few years back. I love its season-based chapters, its 1980 style, and its seriously enthusiastic title.
I found this awesome sounding recipe for Onions Smothered with Walnuts. It’s basically onions roasted in a sticky, spicy sauce, and though they’re more “vaguely scattered” than “smothered” with the walnuts it’s a gorgeous combination of flavours.
Onions Smothered with Walnuts
From the Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook

450g small pickling (pearl) onions, peeled (I didn’t have any, so just used whole onions, quartered)
75g walnuts, chopped
25g melted butter
2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon chilli sauce
1/2 cup stock or water
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper to taste

Heat oven to 170 C. In a bowl, mix everything together and pour into an oven-proof dish. Cover with tinfoil, and bake for around an hour, stirring once or twice. *Use olive oil and balsamic vinegar instead of the butter and worcestershire sauce to easily make this vegan. Yay!
It’s so good that I actually made it two nights in a row. In a weird twist of events, the first night I made it in a silicon dish and the second night I made it in a metal dish, and the second night the onions and sauce turned all black. Made me a little nervous, but not so nervous that I didn’t carry on eating the lot. This recipe has a lot going for it – it has punchy, warm flavours, it’s very cheap to make, it’s versatile, and it just cooks away by itself, not really requiring any attention. The honey, chilli and cinnamon are a brilliant combination and it’s perfect over pasta, which is how I had it, but would also work on couscous, mashed potatoes, rice, or stirred into a stew or roasted vegetables. Thanks, Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook!
As I said, I’m pretty weary from the weekend, I haven’t been sleeping so well and on top of that I actually wasn’t feeling that great over the weekend. There were some diverting moments – seeing Graeme Downes of The Verlaines, The Dead C’s Bruce Russell and Flying Nun’s Roger Shepherd weighing in on a discussion panel about NZ Music, subsequently sitting behind the Verlaines on the flight to Dunedin, meeting with former flatmate Emma for a jolly catch-up, having an enthusiastic person “help” me by picking up my phone that I’d put on the ground right by my feet so I could take down a poster at an event, only to watch them accidentally drop it down three flights of stairs…
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Title via: The Beatles’ Glass Onion from The White Album. One of their more intriguing contributions…
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Music lately:
A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow, sung by Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, from the film A Mighty Wind. This is absolutely my favourite film, and having it on my iPod made the four plane trips over the weekend much more bearable. This song is gorgeous even though it’s sending up the folk music genre, and Catherine O’Hara is just…perfect. Makes me want to learn the autoharp. Sincerely.
Bloodbuzz Ohio from The National’s new album High Violet. The album itself didn’t set me on fire but this song is a stunner and really showcases everything that’s good about The National. And you can check out a lengthier review I did of High Violet here at The Corner if you like.

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Next time: I’ll hopefully be a touch more awake. It’s Queen’s Birthday weekend in a day or two, nothing like a Monday off to make you feel unbendingly fond of the monarchy. I found this really cool recipe for pumpkin bread that I’m keen to try, I also am thinking of getting the crock pot out from its hiding place, it’s now definitely cold enough out there…