Category: Vegetarian

i got my eggs i got my pancakes too, i got my maple syrup, everything but you

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It’s been one heck of a time lately: there was a fire at the Burger King under my bar at 1am on a Friday night and we had to evacuate, the next day the bartender whom I saw more than anyone else in my life had their last shift at work, then I went up to Auckland to support them in a cocktail competition they were a finalist in before saying farewell for real when they moved to Melbourne, I then went home-home for the first time in forever, saw my parents, my nanna, my parents’ chickens and the less-disdainful of the two cats; flew home to Wellington in the middle of a cyclone on a flight so bumpy that they couldn’t serve us drinks; contracted a horrible cough, saw my brother who was down in Wellington from Auckland, fell down two flights of stairs on two separate days and made these halloumi pancakes. On top of that I’ve officially entered Existential Angst and Self-Evaluation mode as my birthday rapidly approaches. 

But back to these pancakes. A friend crashed at mine on Wednesday and when we woke up I was like, are you hungry? And they were like, nah. And I was like, me neither. But too bad, because I’ve had this really good idea and I’m going to make it for us. 

eggs milk and flour, pancake power

eggs milk and flour, pancake power

My idea went thusly: thick slices of golden fried halloumi, encased in pancakes as pillowy as the pillows you wrenched your head from to cook yourself breakfast. Fluffy, soft pancakes giving way to chewy, buttery cheese. Fried sage and walnuts on top, for contrasty crunch and because fried sage is just really, really good. 

My idea worked perfectly.  We were also, coincidentally, suddenly really hungry. 

I went for an American-style pancake, the sort that’s squat and thick rather than delicate and crepe-like, and adapted a fairly standard Nigella recipe for the batter. It’s honestly really easy, for all that X stuffed with Y implies massive fiddly-ness. My only advice is don’t be lazy and try to put four pancakes into the pan at once because they’ll all squish together and look horrible (in the spirit of egalitarianism, my friend and I got one decent pancake and one extremely ugly pancake each) but once you’ve scattered them with crumbling fried sage leaves and crunchy walnuts and the leftover browned butter it really won’t matter how it looks. 

halloumi pancakes with fried sage, butter, and walnuts

a recipe by myself

  • four thick slices of good halloumi
  • one and a half cups flour
  • two teaspoons baking powder
  • pinch of salt
  • a teaspoon of sugar
  • two eggs
  • one cup buttermilk
  • 60g butter
  • a handful of fresh sage leaves
  • a handful of walnuts

Briskly mix the flour, baking powder, sugar, eggs, and buttermilk together in a mixing bowl (a fork will do for this.) In a large nonstick pan, melt half the butter, tip it into the pancake batter, and stir it in. Set the batter aside. Place two of the slices of halloumi into the pan over a high heat, and fry for about ten seconds before scooping a half-cupful of batter over each slice so they are snugly covered. Continue to fry till bubbles appear on the surface of each pancake, then carefully flip them over and fry on the other side until you’re confident that they’re cooked through. Transfer to a serving plate and repeat with the remaining halloumi. 

Melt the remaining butter till browned and sizzling – the pan will be pretty hot by this point so it won’t take long – and drop the sage leaves in. Quickly remove them once they’re crisped and curled up at the edges, and scatter them over the pancakes. Tip the walnuts into the pan and give a quick stir to toast them briefly before removing the pan from the heat and scattering the walnuts (along with any remaining browned butter) over the pancakes. 

Halloumi on its own is obviously an unimpeachably perfect foodstuff, melting and yet solid, bulgingly salty and buttery, and needs little adulteration. But! If you happen to be feeling adulteratey, and indeed, have someone to impress (simply wanting to impress yourself is an extremely valid option here by the way) then these pancakes are both easy yet spectacular, which is one of my favourite combinations in a recipe. Another case of Well Done, Brain! on presenting me with an idea that actually works.

Speaking of me, as I said it’s my birthday coming up and I am like, flustered to say the least. Every year I get all like, what am I doing? What twenty things have I achieved since lunch? Who am I? Where do you come from, where do you go? Where do you come from, dated pop culture reference? Both my best friends are extremely out of town on the day and a google search for “what to do on your birthday alone” is all like, “take a trip! discover a museum!” which is like, all well and good if you don’t live in a tiny city and have 40 cents in your savings account. I am, however, working on some kind of scheme to make the day amazing and am also trying to be nice to myself about all the existentialism stuff, I mean: the world is awful, American politicians are out of control, the bees are dying, so just existing day to day is an excellent achievement. And if that sounded convincing, maybe I can believe it too. (On the other hand: oh god my birthday is coming and I’m the only person who ever had a birthday ever.) 

Anyway! If delicious pancakes are very your thing, you may also want to consider my blog post about Nigella’s American Breakfast Pancakes, or Johnnycakes (like cornbread in pancake form), or my recipe for Lemonade Pancakes with Strawberry Sauce. 

title from: tearjerker-era Jewel, You Were Meant For Me.

music lately: 

Rina Sawayama, Cyber Stockholm Syndrome. I got introduced to this song by the reliably reliable Martyn Pepperell and guys it’s amazing, like, euphoric. 

Jan Hellriegel, Pure Pleasure. This song still BANGS twenty-ish years later. 

next time: I plan on having a more mellow time of it. Also the weather is starting to get absolutely freezing so maybe something like…..broth-y? Slow-cooked? Vaguely warmed through?

workworkworkworkwork

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Generally my ideas come all at once, fully formed, or not at all. Like I’ll stare at my wardrobe for a literal forty minutes, paralysed with the inability to choose a simple garment to prevent my public nudity (admittedly, ritalin has helped alleviate these vibes) or I’ll wake up being like “I’m going to channel Victor Garber playing Jesus in the 1973 film adaptation of the musical Godspell and this is exactly how I’m going to do it!” I submitted a cocktail to Wellington on a Plate this year for work and I came up with it, concept, recipe, title and all, in precisely five seconds, but on the very last day that submissions were open. There’s other examples, just imagine I’ve given them to you (I’m very tired right now.) All of which leads us to this pomegranate cheesecake that I made on Tuesday night, simply because the words “pomegranate cheesecake” plus the entire recipe appeared in my head suddenly, and I was like…guess I better act upon this. Who am I to ignore the voice telling me to make a cheesecake that no one was asking for nor needing in their life? Who am I to not act upon every damn whim that occurs to me, no matter what it is? Who indeed?

Luckily the cheesecake was as delicious as my odd little brain promised.  

This is an extremely easy cheesecake to knock together, and in fact the only difficult part is sourcing the one key ingredient: not actual pomegranate, because I am a heathen who decided to forge ahead with this despite the fruit in question being wildly out of season, but instead: Monin Pomegranate Syrup. I’ll be honest with you, some of their fruit syrups are spectacular and some of them are…less so…but the pomegranate stuff is pretty magical: lip-smackingly, butt-smackingly sour, zestily sweet, and appealingly pink in colour. If you live in Wellington it’s easily available at Moore Wilson’s, otherwise I would try buying it online, or using something like Six Barrel Soda’s Cherry Pomegranate Soda syrup, or perhaps scout your local bars for who has it in stock and ask nicely if you can borrow a small quantity in a takeaway cup in return for a slice of cheesecake. Or you could change tack completely and look for a good-quality raspberry syrup, the kind which real fruit was harmed in the making of; you’ll still get that appealingly sour red fruit flavour. OR you could go archly artisinal and use pomegranate molasses while upping the sugar content: in fact I’m now extremely curious about this variation and want to try it.  

But back to the actual cheesecake that I actually made, actually. (Cheesecake…actually…is all around.) 

I went into work on Tuesday night to knuckle down and overhaul the till to add and remove and shuffle a zillion buttons to make it more useable (it’s one of those ancient systems that’s about on the level a Brick Game or even, for those of you in the audience from the previous generation, an Atari, but also like, it’s MY system that I know how to USE and if anyone changes it I’ll be mad because I can’t be BOTHERED learning new THINGS.) I also had an ulterior motive: I was going to make this cheesecake, and then feed the troops with it the following evening once it had chilled sufficiently overnight. Yes, it’s a refrigerated cheesecake, not a baked one, and I honestly kind of prefer them. I’m down if you are to engage in a lively debate about this. 

All of which means it’s fantastically easy to make. The filling itself is just cream cheese and whipped cream which somehow holds together and I do not question it, the lack of effort involved is enough for me. This concept is based on a Nigella Lawson recipe, so you know you can trust it. I made the base before starting on the till, refrigerated it while I got stuck in on said till, made the filling when I needed a break after realising I’d been programming everything completely wrong and was about to cry, and then put that in the refrigerator and ploughed ahead until some progress was actually made on the damn till. The next day, I came in and photographed the cheesecake, and then left it there to be consumed by whomsoever happened to be around and desiring surprise treats. 

So that’s how I got there, but what in the heck did it taste like? Absolutely amazing. I didn’t actually eat the finished product as a whole but I can tell you I ate an alarming amount of the biscuit base as I was pressing it into the cake tin, and also a near-on hilarious amount of the filling as I was making it, so I can confidently say, with my hand on my heart and one hand in my pocket and the other one flicking a peace sign, that it’s a really, really good cheesecake. The tartness of the cream cheese echoes the tartness of the pomegranate syrup but it’s in such a sherbety kind of way – not truly sour, just fizzy and fruity, softened by the billowing cream. The biscuit base tastes good because of course it does, it’s smashed up biscuits and lots of butter, I don’t have to explain that to you. The colour, a merest blush of rosy pink, is really pretty, and that is also important. 

While I’m being extremely heathenish and cavalier with regards to the seasonality of produce, I did buy a package of pomegranate seeds to put on top and they kind of tasted like nail polish remover but they looked so nice that my love of aesthetic won in the end. Besides, as I reasoned, you can always flick them off before you eat your slice of cheesecake. If this horrifies you too much or you just can’t access pre-packaged pomegranate seeds, simply drizzle the cheesecake with more syrup, or leave it as a plain expanse of pale, pale pink. 

pomegranate cheesecake

a recipe by myself

  • one packet of plain biscuits, the boring kind that are only useful for cheesecake bases
  • 100g butter
  • 250g cream cheese, full fat (I’m not trying to be cute, low-fat has a weird texture)
  • 300ml cream
  • half a cup of icing sugar (just spoon it in, don’t pack it down, you can always add more)
  • 60ml Monin pomegranate syrup
  • Pomegranate seeds to decorate (optional)

Get yourself a 20cm springform cake tin and line the base with a sheet of baking paper. Then, get those biscuits crushed. Either put them in a food processor and blitz them into dust, or put them in a plastic bag and bash them with something heavy (in my case, it was a muddler that I usually use for making, like, caipirinhas.)  Apply some heat to the butter till it’s anywhere from extremely soft to totally melted, it really doesn’t matter, and mix it into the biscuit crumbs. Tip all this into the cake tin and use the back of a spoon to press it fairly evenly across the base (I find if you run the spoon under water it helps the crumbs to not stick.) Pop this into the refrigerator while you get on with the filling, which is a matter of moments.

Make sure your cream cheese is at room temperature otherwise you’ll never get anywhere, in cheesecake or life. Mix it, the icing sugar, and the pomegranate syrup together briskly. Taste to see if it needs either more sugar or pomegranate. Then, whip the cream until it’s softly bulky but not like, super stiff, and fold it into the cream cheese. By the way, you can do this in a food processor or blender, mixing up the cream cheese first, removing it, and then blitzing the cream, but just be really careful to not overwhip the cream. Spatula all this on top of the biscuit base, smooth out the top, and refrigerate it for at least three hours, but ideally overnight.

When you’re ready to go, run a knife around the inside of the caketin and carefully unclip the springy bit to remove the sides. Transfer it to a cute serving plate, and either scatter with pomegranate seeds or drizzle over more syrup, but basically just do something aesthetic, okay?  

I came into work later the next night: the cheesecake was all but gone, a slender wedge remained. Obviously overtired largely-broke hospo people will eat a pile of dirt if someone implies that it’s free food (just me?) but I took that as a sign that yes, it was delicious, and yes, it was a good idea, even if I have no idea why it appeared or whether I truly needed to follow through on it. 

On the other hand, I am also considering making it a weekly thing now, so, thanks brain. That good idea was a good idea. 

title from: Barbados gave us rum and it gave us Rihanna, both of which are true blessings. Rihanna’s song Work is as glorious as she is. Please enjoy both versions of the video, don’t deprive yourself. 

music lately: 

Mint Chicks, Bad Buzz. This song is not on spotify and it hurts my feelings because I can’t put it on a work playlist till it is!! It’s so good!

Lorde, Liability. It’s so inconsiderate of her to release music in my lifetime when it affects my heart so much? But here she is anyway. Well Lorde, I don’t respect it, but damn it: I respect it. 

next time: The weather is getting colder rapidly so I’m keen to respond in a culinary way. Something slow-cooked and extremely comforting. Either that or I’ll wait until an idea hits my brain with a bang. 

i’m fond of twin peaks, afternoons, inexpensive wine…

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Okay, so I used to make ice cream ALL the time. In fact it was my default flavour vehicle, like, if I got the notion that X might taste good with Y, I’d put them in an ice cream together. These days, my bartendering self is far more likely to envisage how flavours would work in a cocktail, and my busy life of making cocktails (and, I concede, pestering other bartenders to make them for me) plus the fact that from October to January I was essentially going through a training montage except where I get more and more useless due to my mental health while Eye of the Tiger plays: it all adds up to not a lot of ice cream making from me. Which is a pity because damn it if ice cream isn’t one of my very favourite foods, not just to eat but to create recipes for.

“Mr Cooper, how do you take it?” “Black as midnight on a moonless night”

It was in a mood of buoyant, motivated optimism that I set out to make ice cream once more. The recipe in question was one I’d invented many years ago, back when I was writing a cookbook for Penguin (if you’re new here: I am a published cookbook author, yes) and felt like revisiting. The flavour is, specifically, coffee and cherry, but the name of it is Twin Peaks Ice Cream because I came up with it in tribute to the TV show. If you haven’t seen Twin Peaks, look it up on Wikipedia or I’ll accidentally spend seventeen paragraphs talking about it instead of ice cream, but its uneasy, dreamy weirdness was exceedingly and immediately compelling to me and I got into it in a big way. I still have a framed picture of central character Laura Palmer’s prom photo on my dressing table, just to keep me lightly spooked at all times. The flavours in question, however, reference the character Special Agent Dale Cooper’s unwavering dedication to coffee and his nakedly sincere admiration of the cherry pie he is served at the town’s diner.

Coffee and cherries might not immediately sound like they want to get into an ice cream together, but I confidently assert that they work beautifully. The coffee flavour comes by heating whole roasted coffee beans up in the cream before straining them out and turning it into a custard, and the cherries (Morello, from a jar) are added right at the end. The coffee’s bitterness is muffled by the blanketing effect of the cream, providing a rich backdrop for the tart sorbet-bursts of frozen Morello cherries, and the slight nuttiness of both – from the generally roasty flavour of the coffee and the marzipan territory that cherries naturally veer into – is extremely delightful in ya mouth. Not to mention pop culture references make everything more delicious, it’s just a fact.

“my log saw something that night”

If there is one soapbox I’m always at the ready to climb upon, it’s that you truly don’t need an ice cream machine to make ice cream. All I did was make this, bung it in a container, and put it in the freezer, and it was perfect. Like, that’s it. I used to think you had to stir the ice cream at intervals as it froze but these days I’m quite convinced that if you just freeze it and then eat it that’s all you need to do. Seriously. Anyway, now that I’m off my monumentally specific soapbox I will freely admit that this particular recipe does require some effort and confidence in your cooking skills. Making custard from scratch, with egg yolks, cream, and sugar, can be a little stressful simply because you’re trying to stir it over heat that’s high enough to slowly cook the eggs and thicken the mixture, but not so high that the egg can’t resist its natural urge to rapidly scramble. It is, however, a truly satisfying challenge and makes for a satiny, lush ice cream once frozen. If it’s all too much for you though I have a ton of ludicrously simple ice cream recipes for you and I’ll list some at the end of this post.

twin peaks ice cream

a recipe by myself

  • four egg yolks
  • 150g sugar
  • 600ml cream
  • a vague handful of coffee beans
  • a jar of pitted Morello cherries

Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together in a mixing bowl. Depending on your yolks this might form a kind of disturbingly thick paste, this is nothing to be concerned about though – you just need them mixed together. Gently heat the 300ml of the cream with the coffee beans together in a large saucepan until the cream is juuust wobblingly about to start bubbling, then remove it from the heat. Either strain the beans out or scoop them out with a small sieve, whichever is less stressful (for me: the latter.)  Briskly whisk a half-cupful or so of the coffee-infused hot cream into the egg yolks and sugar – you want to do it fast so that the yolks don’t seize up and cook in the heat. Whisk in another half cupful, and then finally just tip the lot in and stir to combine.  

Now! Throw all of this back into the pan, and stir over a low heat till it thickens. It will already be fairly thick, because there’s not a lot of cream, but persevere patiently and continue to stir, ideally with a silicone spatula, until it thickens somewhat. This should take about five minutes. It won’t really look noticeably different to when it started but don’t you dare overheat it and let it curdle: this is the bit of custard-based ice cream that’s a bit terrifying, and I freely admit it. Generally you’re looking for something that’s got the vibe of a good quality thickshake, and remove it from the heat immediately as soon as you suspect it’s at this point.

Immediately spatula this custard into a bowl or container and refrigerate it till chilled. From here it’s all easy stuff: whisk the remaining cream until thickened but not whipped, fold it into the chilled custard, and then stir in as many drained morello cherries as you like until it feels like it’s suitably cherried. Like seriously, it’s up to you, it just depends on how many cherries you want in your damn ice cream.

Freeze it. Don’t even worry about stirring it, unless you suspect all the cherries have fallen to the bottom and you want to redistribute them a bit. Eat it when it’s frozen.  

“every day, once a day, give yourself a present”

I believe it is particularly delicious if you eat it while swaying around dreamily like Audrey Horne, but maybe that’s just me.

Unfortunately, the story does not end there with me simply making ice cream and then happily eating it. After photographing this small coffee cup full of ice cream that you see here (and, thank you to my brother and his partner for sending them to me for Christmas!) I ate it, returned the rest of the ice cream to the freezer and carried on with my day, merry with the knowledge that when I returned home there would be gloriously smooth, creamy, cherry-studded ice cream waiting for me. Alas, like Twin Peaks, there was a tragic twist: the freezer immediately decided to break down and stop doing the one thing it is tasked with doing in its simple life. The ice cream turned to room temperature soup and had to be unceremoniously discarded. Leaving me with only the memory of that one damn fine coffee cup of ice cream.

Anyway I got over it pretty quickly, with the rueful acceptance that comes from years and years of regularly accidentally ruining things, but like, what a bummer, huh. At least I got to eat a little of it: just enough to enthusiastically recommend you try making it too.

“Laura had a lot of secrets”

It was disheartening that after all that momentum the ice cream was lost, but I’m not going to let it get me down and will indeed be making more ice cream sooner rather than later. In fact the only thing really holding me back is the fact that the freezer still isn’t working. On Monday night I was fortunate enough to attend a Chartreuse/Fernet-Branca tasting and (having recovered, more or less) my brain has gone full circle to the point where I’m pondering a kind of riff on mint choc chip ice cream using Fernet as an ingredient. Watch this space. Speaking of fortunate I was also given a Fernet Coin by the brand’s representative, a rare and elusive trinket that bartenders really care about and which is met with resounding shrugs from everyone else, and now I feel deliciously legit.

Speaking of deliciously legit and apropos of nothing I’d just like to add that I went to the Pride event Out in the Park on Saturday and looking around seeing happy young teens with rainbows painted on their faces and really old women walking around holding hands and every kind of person inbetween made my heart expand to the point where I was just a human-shaped heart. Plus there were so many dogs: our most important allies.

Anyway if you aren’t entirely put off the idea of making ice cream by my tale of woe, some other ice cream recipes I’ve come up with which are wayyyy easier than this one to make include Gin and Tonic Ice Cream, White Chocolate and Burnt Butter Ice Cream, and, just in time for the season: Feijoa Ice Cream.

title from: Make Out Kids, by Motion City Soundtrack. Whiny and full of feelings, like me.

music lately:

I went to Pixies a couple of weeks ago and while they’re like, not the same line-up that they used to be, it was euphoric. With extreme predictability we collectively lost it when they played Where Is My Mind but for me an unhinged and shouty rendition of Debaser was the highlight. 

Althea and Donna, Uptown Top Ranking. There is NEVER a bad time for this song.

Also, Lana Del Rey released a new song called Love and so nothing else matters or exists.

next time: nothing that involves refrigeration, I guess.

when someone great is gone

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As February draws to a close, it means one thing and one thing only: we are smack bang in the middle of Pisces Season, people. What does this mean? It means every time I get super irrationally emotional over something, I’m all, “classic Pisces Season.” A leading characteristic of the Pisces star sign, you see, and if you haven’t worked this out already, is emotional-ness.

However, sometimes emotions are entirely reasonable, such as when someone who has become one of the most important people in your life over the past year leaves the country. What can you even do in these situations? Well, you try and spend as much time with them as possible, and on the Monday before they go, you wait until they’ve finished their shift at work and then make a midnight feast for the both of you while you watch Desperate Housewives.

It being Monday, or “Payday Eve”, and me being extremely me, once I’d purchased mushrooms and cream at the guest’s request I essentially tried to forage everything else from what was already in my pantry: some tomatoes leftover from a team barbecue that day which I’d nicked; some black garlic and walnut butter that my mum had sent me; some vaguely elderly beetroot that I’d forgotten I’d bought at the vege market the previous week; some vermouth and bourbon from my brief flirtation with trying to have a decent liquor cabinet; it goes on. 

Mushrooms fried with garlic and cream are hardly revolutionary, but these ones are incredibly delicious: the vermouth hisses and disappears in the heat – relatable – leaving only a lick of winey flavour, and the cream reduces down to the most magnificently savoury sludge. Not necessarily the most appealing words, but you should know that they were the star on Monday and I’ve made this three times since because I love it so much. 

mushrooms with black garlic, vermouth and cream

an extremely vague recipe, but I feel like you can handle it

  • a whole ton of those big flat brown mushrooms that cost slightly more than regular button mushrooms
  • olive oil
  • dry vermouth, such as Noilly Prat
  • a clove or two of black garlic, or regular is fine! 
  • cream
  • freshly grated parmesan, salt and pepper to taste

Brush any dirt off the mushrooms and slice them up. Heat a generous couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large frying pan and tip the mushrooms in.

Let them fry in the hot oil till they soften and darken and reduce down somewhat – till they’re fried, basically – then pour in some vermouth, a couple of tablespoons at the most. This will hit the pan in a whoosh of steam and smell incredible. Stir till it’s evaporated, and then either slice or squash the clove of garlic and add it to the pan, followed by the cream – as much as you want, really. Start with a few tablespoons and then just keep pouring till it feels right. Carry on stirring over a high heat till the cream has reduced down somewhat – you want this thick and saucy.

Remove from the heat, pile on some parmesan cheese if you wish, but you don’t have to, and transfer to a bowl. Eat the lot, no matter how much you’ve made. 

The beetroot and tomato dishes were highly opportunistic on-the-spot flights of fancy but they both worked out well so I thought I’d pass on some form of a recipe of them both here. Baking beetroot in cream – leftover from the mushrooms – gives the earthy bitterness of the vegetable a fantastic mellowness, and the walnut butter makes everything almost fudge-like in texture. If you don’t have walnut butter, you could use cashew or almond butter or indeed, just leave it out and you’ll still have a good time. 

The tomatoes got a dash of bourbon on them because it was still there beside the stove from when I made those shallots and radishes last week, but it turns out they go well with these guys too. I just happened to have coconut sugar and its smoky intensity went perfectly with the sweetness of the tomatoes and the bourbon. They were sticky and sweet and bursting with juice and just so good. And I can’t even tell you how amazing the syrupy roasting juices tasted once all the tomatoes had been prised out. 

roasted beetroot with cream and walnut butter

Set your oven to 180C/350F. Chop your beetroot – however many you have – into quarters or chunks or whatever, really, and pile them into an oven dish that will comfortably fit them. Pour over enough cream so they get their feet wet but aren’t entirely submerged, and spoon over some walnut butter. Mix it all together so some of the cream and walnut butter amalgamates, then bung it in the oven and let it cook until the beetroot is extremely tender. Top with parmesan if you like. 

bourbon and coconut sugar roasted tomatoes

Again, set your oven to 180C/350F. Slice a bunch of ripe tomatoes in half and lay them, cut side up. Sprinkle over a little coconut sugar – like just a pinch per tomato. Follow this with a good solid drizzle of olive oil and then drizzle with a little bourbon – it’s easier to pour it into a spoon and then shake this over the tomatoes than trying to pour directly from the bottle. Finally sprinkle over some salt and roast em till they’re, like, roasted. 

So like, because it was at midnight when I was taking these photos I completely concede that they are Not Great and indeed, it was my own vanity that caused me to take more photos once I’d made the mushrooms again in the daylight, just in case a casual reader of this blog saw my night time photos and threw their laptop out the window in horror. But it all tasted so, so good, and it was such a nice night, that honestly: I don’t care. 

Okay I guess I do care since I bookended this blog post with nice photos of the mushrooms but still: I don’t care! (I care so much.) 

On Thursday night I finished my shift at work and then proceeded to not get any sleep until at least 7am, because this particular person had to be at the airport at 4am. I may or may not have got emotionally drunk; I may or may not have cried AND fallen asleep at the airport; I may or may not have written an extremely overwrought letter to this person about what they mean to me and then left it in the car and then had to clamber into the boot through the backseat because I couldn’t work out how to open said boot. However I’ve also come to the conclusion that Melbourne isn’t soooo far away and I could possibly even visit if I ever get my act/and/or savings together. And as they sing in the musical Wicked – and I warn you, it’s about to get disgustingly maudlin for just one second here – because I knew you, I have been changed, for good. 

skal for faen 

skal for faen 

Due to some spectacularly terrible luck or carelessness, this is the third time I’ve written out the blog post after accidentally deleting it, twice. By this point it feels almost surreal, like I’m going round in circles, but I think right here is definitively the end of this blog post. And seriously, it’s been barely a week and I’ve made those mushrooms three more times. They’re good, people. 

title from: LCD Soundsystem, Someone Great. Okay I wasn’t QUITE done with the maudlin. 

music lately: 

I am on a sincere Pink Floyd god damn BUZZ right now and am revisiting Roger Waters’ live album In The Flesh a whole ton. Just try to not fall in love with the immensely sexy yet unsexily named Doyle Bramhall II when he sings the chorus to Comfortably Numb, suckers. 

I saw Trainspotting 2 the other day and it was exactly what I wanted it to be; it also coincided with me being extremely into a genre of music that I like to call “Let’s drink lager and headbutt Liam Gallagher”. To that end, the Prodigy’s remix of Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life is honestly really good. 

next time: I have not made ice cream in FOREVER, friends! And since it’s finally looking like summer in Wellington, it feels entirely appropriate. Watch this space. 

to fill a whole, to shake the sky in two

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You know that Mozart banger, Symphony No. 40, First Movement, Allegro? If you sing “carb! on carb! on carb on carb on carb!” in your head along to the tune of it while making yourself a fried potato toastie, it’s kind of a fun thing to do.

It’s easy to say that 2016 has been a garbage year. I’ve said it myself. It has been an exceptionally hard year for me in ways I didn’t even think would be possible – at least the difficulties have been keeping it fresh and interesting, I guess? – and I’m just one small struggling drop in a bucket in which we’re all lil droplets having our own difficult times magnified in concave through our personal water droplet perspectives (I imagine being a droplet is like viewing everything through a fish eye lens, the kind they used in 90s hip hop videos.)

But consider this: has any year ever been good? Can you name one good year? It’s impossible. They all sucked. And if you think they didn’t, just look at the Wikipedia entry for any given 365 days in history and rest assured that there were atrocities abounding.

All we can really hold onto is moments. Small times. A perfect afternoon. Finishing a task and not failing. A really nice enveloping hug. Realising someone was thinking about you at the exact moment you were thinking about them. A nap where you had a beautiful dream. Catching yourself in the act of existing for one weightless minute of no anxiety. Laughter. The usual stuff.

Last weekend I was up the coast in Raumati South with my two best friends. A long time ago we organised a little getaway in the face of 2016 being so intense – little did we know how much more 2016 would happen between us booking the holiday and us actually getting there. And how much more was to come. On the first night, we were woken just after midnight – full of nachos and red wine and mere minutes into a deliciously early night’s sleep – by a fairly enormous earthquake. The kind that really does damage. And then aftershock upon aftershock upon aftershock. Now I’ve been truly terrified of earthquakes ever since doing a school project on disasters in 1997; yet somehow I was calm and almost managerial throughout the quake itself, comforting my friends and holding them tight and repeating logical things.

As soon as the shaking stopped I threw up three times and then slept a total of about six hours over the next three days that we remained out there. My cool leadership was nice while it lasted I guess. On the other hand being around your best friends in a little wooden bach up a hill is about as safe as you can be against any kind of trouble.

So now all of a sudden we’re in this post-quake time; what were we even doing before it? I’m immensely, immensely lucky that no damage was done at my apartment or workplace, but I’m constantly on edge and anxious and can’t stop myself. LUCKILY, she says self-deprecatingly, I’m always anxious and so this is at least nothing out of the ordinary for me. You’ve gotta keep on keeping on, I tell people, while refusing to leave my bed.

As such I have cooked myself 1 (one) thing in the last week, and it was this: a fried potato toastie. Comfort food, how obvious of me!  But who cares, this is something you can make for yourself which requires very little in the way of gathering ingredients, and there is something about carb on carb that brings some kind of calm to the soul; who am I to fight it.

It’s very simple. Small cubes of potato fried in olive oil till crisp – which doesn’t take that long. Sandwich them in two thick slices of bread spread with something, sit that in the pan till its golden, eat it in bed. There’s something about the salty crunch of potato against fluffy, soft white bread, sinking into the cool sour cream, that makes one feel like the world is a less scary place.

fried potato toastie

recipe by myself. It looks long but I just kind of over-explain everything, it’s really easy I promise. 

  • one large potato, the kind that is ideal for roasting (eg, not a new potato) 
  • olive oil
  • two thick slices of white bread
  • sour cream (or mayonnaise, I just had sour cream and liked the potato salad vibes it gave) or use some kind of vegan mayo or hummus or whatnot to make it vegan. 
  • mustard of some kind

Heat about three tablespoons of olive oil in a large, heavy pan. Dice the potato quite small, into rough cubes and chunks of one or two centimetres. Once the oil is hot, tip the potato into the pan, with the aim being to get all the potato in one single layer. Add a little more oil if you like. Leave the potato to fry for five to ten minutes and then once they’re golden on one side, turn each piece over to allow it to fry on the other side. This is possibly slightly tedious but it’s also calmingly methodical, and a regular spoon is the easiest way to turn over all the little pieces. Once the potato is all cooked through and crisply golden on both sides, remove them to a plate.

Fry one of the slices of bread on one side, then set it aside. Thickly spread the un-fried side with sour cream and mustard, and spread the same on one side of the other piece of bread. Put the unfried piece of bread in the pan, pile all the potato on top of it, top with the other piece of bread (sour cream side down…) and continue to fry for a little bit longer till the bottom slice appears toasted. Remove to a plate and eat in bed. 

After eating this I immediately fell into a thick, heavy nap, which I believe speaks to the toastie’s inherent power. I didn’t have any cheese to hand and have no doubt that it would improve everything, but the sandwich was perfect on its own – oily, salty, crispy, soft, all the good things.

So now what? I mean, you have to keep on keeping on, (she says, refusing to leave her bed) and making yourself a self-indulgent toastie is definitely one way of doing that. Just do what you can. And if you’re not up to feeding yourself, you know what you should do? Go out. Support your local hospitality scene, because they need you. What are you going to do with your money anyway, put it in a museum and look at it? No! Be with your friends, have a drink, come together, help businesses to keep going. In all honesty the best thing about Wellington is the places to eat and drink, and without them what have we got? In the last couple of days I’ve taken myself out to breakfast at Loretta, coffee at Customs, drinks at Library, shotgunned beers in the backyard with my friends in the sun like nothing was the matter at all; and I barely have any money or free time. I’m also, despite my nerves, doing my best to show everyone at my home-away-from-home Motel the best time possible, because anyone who comes through that door has made the effort to leave the house and connect with people and support us. (I mean I always try to show people a good time but damn it, this earthquake has made me sentimental as heck and suddenly the smallest things feel momentous.) I’m not saying I’m a hero by like, buying a coffee. I’d go with “icon,” personally.

Anyway – just keep looking for the nice moments, and creating as many as you can muster, they are there somewhere.

Also: If carb, on carb, on carb-on-carb-on-carb is your idea of comforting, may I also direct you to my recipes for Halloumi and Hash Brown Burgers; Fried Potato Burghal Wheat with Walnuts and Rocket; and Marmite and Chip Sandwiches.

title from: Blink 182’s sad as song All of This, featuring that sadness maven Robert Smith. 

music lately:

Amy Shark, Adore. I can’t stop listening to this song!

Dead Flowers, Might As Well Get Used To It. Might as well, huh. This song from this NZ band from 1998 is gloomily beautiful and sounds like a cross between that Radiohead song from the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack and that Gorillaz song Tomorrow Comes Today but is also very much its own, sadly charming thing.

Sharon Jones, Got A Thing On My Mind. In yet another thing that makes this year suck, she died the other day, at just 60. I was so lucky to see her live with the Dap Kings when they came to Wellington a few years ago, but it’s ugh, so horrible, she was so young and her music is the most alive thing ever.

next time: hopefully my nerves will subside a bit and allow me to move on from AGGRESSIVELY PRIMAL type cooking but if I’m stuck eating nothing but fried carbs for a while I’m chill with it. 

looking good when it comes to the crunch

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When I was a child I joined, for some odd reason since I really only loved dancing – although I do remember saying loftily, at some point, that “I want a busy life” – an organisation called Brownies. It was like a pre-Girl Guides/Scouts activity group for sprightly, do-gooding young gals and you’re welcome to google what their aspirations are but my main memories of it are as distinct as they are strange – a billowing brown sack of a dress that was the uniform; performing an elaborate song and dance about snails as some kind of occasional treat; going away on camps that had the inexplicable themes of Snoopy; Wombles; and Rock’n’Roll respectively; and the constant working towards getting badges for various exploits, such as Planting A Tree or Something. 

There was also, however, access to Girl Guide biscuits. If you’re in America I know you’ve got Girl Scout cookies of all different flavours and permutations because I’ve like, seen movies, but here in New Zealand we had but one, plain, vaguely sugary round mass-produced cookie to push onto the masses, damn it. I still have, at my parents house, a Girl Guide Biscuit box that’s used as a storage container for old stage show programmes and booklets, the vessel itself by this point providing as much nostalgia as that which it contains. 

Anyway so where I’m going with all this is that during Girl Guide Biscuit season everyone had an overabundance of them because New Zealand is small and there’s only so many people you can palm them off to before the degrees of separation means that literally every third person is your aunty and yes they’ve already bought three boxes and no they don’t want any more. 

So you made Girl Guide Biscuit slice: crushed up biscuits held together by an appealing buttery, sugary, cocoa-y gunge. It’s magnificently delicious and so much better than just choking down another plain dry biscuit for no discernable reason whatsoever (seriously, why would you eat these biscuits? They’re SO PLAIN. NO OFFENCE IF YOU LIKE THEM, YOUR OPINION IS VALID AND I RESPECT IT.) 

I recently came into possession of an unmarked shopping bag full of packets of biscuits very similar to these – the kind of nothing-spectacular biscuit that you’d make a cheesecake base out of. It was just some leftover stock from work, in case I made that sound far more excitingly illicit than it is. I’d held onto them for a while, just knowing that the perfect use for them would present itself to me. And lo; I started making batches of this Crunchie Bar Slice, an incredibly souped up version of the original Girl Guide recipe, and bringing it in for the people I work with at the bar on Fridays or Saturdays to provide some kind of sugary boost to get through the long shift. 

And then I kept making it every week. Smashed up biscuits, which I stirred into a buttery, sugary, cocoa-y mixture with milk chocolate melted softly into it and topped with sparkling golden smashed up Crunchie bar honeycomb dust. And it got to the point where I was like, well this is cute and I’m going to take some photos of it and blog about it. 

And then I realised I kind of buried the lede here: the people I’m making this slice for aren’t just my colleagues, they’re…my staff. Because I have become General Manager of the cocktail bar I work at. Large and in charge, queen bee, those kinds of words, y’know? Isn’t that exciting? Isn’t that nice? Not to undersell myself but if you were all “Laura, quick! Describe yourself!” I’d be like “…despite all my rage I am still just…a rat…in…a cage? Am I doing this right?” but here I am, with all this responsibility and a wonderful little team to look after and nurture and a fancy cocktail bar to run. I’m going to be straight up with you, I’ve never been in charge of ANYTHING in my life and I really thought this was how I was going to live out my days, always the bridesmaid never the manager; so obviously I’m determined to learn everything immediately and be a spectacular juggernaut of a success by approximately forty minutes in to my first day on the job otherwise I’m a complete failure. I’m also trying really hard to be nice to myself and let myself learn stuff slowly and go with the flow. Literally both these things at the same time. 

More importantly though, this slice tastes incredible and is so easy to make. It’s a textural triumph – the bite of the biscuits against the soft, fudge-like chocolate, ever so slightly gritty from the grains of sugar and the bursts of crisp Crunchie bar dissolving on your tongue. The chill from the freezer and the (once more for the people in the back) plainness of the biscuits counteracts any oversweetness, although by all means feel free to put, I don’t know, chocolate chips or drizzled white chocolate or something on top.  

As per, my recipe is really long and over-explainy but I strenuously assure you, this is easy to make. Actually the only real effort involved is reading through the recipe without being put off by how wordy it is. 

crunchie bar slice

a recipe by myself

  • 150g butter
  • one cup sugar
  • 50g milk chocolate (this is generally the size of a chocolate bar) 
  • one tablespoon of cocoa
  • one egg
  • one packet of malt biscuits/plain cookies/the sort of thing you’d make cheesecake base from
  • one regular-sized Crunchie bar or similar honeycomb style bar. 

Get a rectangular tin – the kind you might bake brownies or slice in – and have it sitting there along with a large piece of baking paper to line it, while you make the slice. I sometimes put it in the freezer if I’m in a hurry so that the mixture starts to cool as soon as I spoon it in. Whatever!

Using a rolling pin or something heavy, carefully bash the unopened packet of biscuits on all sides so that you can feel them crumbling beneath the surface of the packet. You don’t have to have created dust, just attempt to smash them up a bit. 

In a large pan, melt the butter gently over a low heat. Stir in the sugar and the milk chocolate, allowing the chocolate to melt into it. Remove from the heat and stir in the cocoa, then open up the packet of biscuits and tip them in, using your hands or your spoon to crush up any larger bits. Finally, stir the egg in as quickly as possible – the mixture will still be warm so you don’t want the egg to cook against it – and then spatula the lot into your waiting tin. Use the back of a metal spoon to press it evenly down into the corners. Finally, give the unopened Crunchie bar a bit of a bash as well, then open it up and sprinkle the golden chocolatey dust evenly over the surface of the slice, using the back of that spoon to push it in. 

Freeze for at least an hour, and then use a large knife to cut it into slices. 

As you can see from the recipe it’s really just a couple of pre-packaged things held together by not much at all, but a thick slice of this, straight from the freezer in the middle of a busy shift or indeed, any time at all, can leave you feeling briefly invincible. I accidentally typed invisible just now instead of invincible but same difference, all things considered. 

If bopping about making things that can be sliced up and received with happiness are your thing right now, may I also recommend my recipes for Ginger Crunch Slice and/or Peanut Butter Chocolate Caramel Nut Slice.  

PS: I’m honestly so excited about this sudden career trajectory, definitely come visit me.  

title from:  Neneh Cherry’s perfect song Buffalo Stance. 

music lately: 

will I ever stop listening to Disappear by INXS? Will you ever stop asking me stupid questions? 

Kill Em With Kindness by Selena Gomez sounds aggressively of this moment, but wow it’s so good. Your lies are bullets, your mouth’s a gun? Hello. 

next time: I have some frozen prawns in my freezer. So maybe something prawn-y. 

choking down her pasta that she always oversalts

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Before I talk at length about myself let me briefly draw attention to myself: uh, I am not thoroughly enjoying this eternal pattern of not having the energy to blog for what seems like ages and then writing long apologetic blog posts about it (I mean like maybe it happened one time but a week of inactivity On Here feels like seventeen dog years in my mind.)  I’m going through a phase of Intense Career Busy-ness which is wild and fun and there’s also just a lot of noise in my already noisy brain right now and let’s not forget that the renowned jerk planet Mercury is in retrograde which at least means I can blame everything on it; also my tarot card was weird this month and the curve of the earth and the flapping of a butterfly’s wings and so on.

It’s just so boring and annoying though and it’s something I’m going to work on! I need to be all like, more disciplined and better with my time but also nicer to myself! That is all.

You know what’s very not boring and only moderately annoying though? Homemade pasta.

like a bowl of lil snakes  like a bowl of lil snakes

As with many recipes on here that appear vaguely complicated, I’m like, guys: if I can do this, you most definitely can. When I’m cooking for myself the odds are enormous that I’m half asleep, wearing clothes from the bottom of the laundry pile, face streaked in my own lipstick that has migrated from my mouth to my cheeks during the night, and have my hair tied up with a gstring because I can’t find an elastic band despite buying packets and packets of them. If you’re even somewhat upright, you’re winning and you can do this. Not to glorify this whole “I’m so useless and can’t take care of myself and it’s hilarious” thing, it’s just like, literally sometimes we’re all kinda messy, and it’s no reason to not make ourselves pasta using our own two hands. (Also: if you want a lipstick that you can really sleep in, let’s just say there’s a reason why Rimmel Provocalips rhymes with “will survive a nuclear apocalypse.”)

I’ve got two recipes for ya: one is Matcha Spaghetti con Cacio e Pepe, which is pretty directly based on this recipe from the beautiful food blog Lady and Pups. From here I was inspired to make Turmeric Pappardelle and serve it with buttery, fried brioche crumbs; It’s essentially one recipe two ways.

The first time I made this, with the matcha recipe, I accidentally used high grade flour, the kind you’d use to make bread. It still tasted really good although it was a little bit tough, and the rolling out process pretty much gave me carpal tunnel syndrome after three minutes. When I used regular plain flour, the pasta practically made itself. So uh, pay attention to your ingredients. The delightful thing about this recipe though is that the ingredients are almost nothing – a bit of flour, one stupid egg, a half-hearted dribble of water, and it comes together to make satiny, dense, perfect ribbons of pasta. You don’t even need a pasta machine. Yes, you can use one, and my flatmate actually has one, but I decided to try using just a rolling pin so that as many people as possible could also try this recipe, and honestly it was easy and fine, and kind of fun – like playing with playdough.

And of course, you can make this just plain, without matcha or turmeric or any other flavourant! But if you happen to have these ingredients kicking about, you’re in for a good time: the matcha tints the pasta a soft, dusky sage green and offers a mild background note of grassy bitterness which works beautifully with the rich blandness of the cheese and the throat-kicking pepper.

The turmeric, on the other hand, stains the wide ribbons of pasta a glowing, sunshine gold colour, and gives a more pronounced earthy flavour. The golden buttery crumbs pleasingly echo the colour, and also taste wonderful as they get wrapped up in the thick pappardelle strands – nutty crunch against soft bite. I mean, you could put fried brioche (or any kind of bread) crumbs on like, a sock, and it would probably taste good, but I do believe it works particularly nicely here.

matcha spaghetti con cacio e pepe  

adapted from this recipe on Lady and Pups. 

  • one tablespoon (or more) matcha powder
  • one egg
  • two tablespoons water
  • one and a half cups plain/all-purpose flour
  • shaved parmesan cheese, other grated cheese if you like, butter, olive oil, freshly ground black pepper

Mix the matcha powder, water, and egg together in a large bowl with a fork or something, then throw in the flour. Knead it briefly till it forms an unpromising looking ball – it is entirely normal for it to be a little under-hydrated looking and crumbly, but it should come together easily enough still. Try to avoid adding extra water if you can help it – just keep pushing and kneading till it comes together. Nevertheless, the size of your egg and the curve of the earth and so on may affect things, so also don’t feel too scared to add more water, just go really slowly, y’know?

Wrap the dough in clingfilm and leave to rest on the bench for an hour. Get a sheet of baking paper and divide the dough into four portions (or however many, four just seems to make things easy.) Roll each portion out as this as you can manage – a couple of millimetres is ideal. The thing with having four portions is that as you roll each one out it gives the previous ones times to rest, which means when you give them a second rolling out the dough will be more relaxed and be likely to roll further. Don’t be afraid to rest it for a good ten minutes if it seems to be not yielding much. Use a pizza cutter to slice rough, thin ribbons from the sheets of pasta (or roll them up and take thin slices out if you don’t have a pizza cutter) and cook in a large pan of boiling, salted water for about two minutes. Drain the pasta and stir in grated cheese, butter, olive oil and black pepper in quantities that suit you. Divide between two plates and eat immediately. 

turmeric pappardelle with brioche crumbs fried in butter

a recipe by myself

  • one tablespoon ground turmeric
  • one egg
  • two tablespoons of water
  • one and a half cups plain, all-purpose flour
  • a couple of slices of brioche, or one brioche bun, or any kind of bread at all, really
  • 50g butter
  • a little olive oil

In a large bowl, mix the turmeric, water and egg together using a fork or something. Add the flour and stir briefly with the same fork till it forms rough crumbs. Knead inside the bowl using your knuckles and the heel of your palm to fold and push it until it forms a roughly coherent ball of dough, a little dry and cracked maybe, but a ball nonetheless. 

Wrap it in clingfilm and allow it to sit at room temperature on the bench somewhere for an hour. 

Divide it into four and roll out each portion as thinly as you can on a sheet of baking paper.  Feel free to let the dough rest for a bit after rolling it out, as this will allow the gluten to relax and let you roll it further. Using a pizza cutter or a very sharp knife, slice thick ribbons from the sheets of dough, and cook them in a large pan of boiling salted water until done – this will take a few minutes, tops. Meanwhile, heat the butter in a large frying pan and crumble in the bread (roughly chop it first if need be), stirring every now and then till the crumbs are golden and toasted. Drain the pasta, divide between two bowls and drizzle with a little olive oil, then evenly spoon the golden crumbs on top. Season with salt and pepper if you life and eat immediately. 

I say it a lot, but pasta is one of my very favourite foods – the texture and simple, calm flavour is so comforting, and it acts as a conduit between yourself and the most delicious ingredients quite easily. I also love that you can put something so simple on it – like, just black pepper and cheese, or an old bun that I found in the freezer along with some butter – and it both looks and tastes spectacular and entirely complete. Any food can be comfort food, but pasta is my comfort food, which is why making it from scratch two days in a row feels like no big deal and a good time – especially when homemade pasta just has this particularly magical taste that bought stuff can’t quite replicate.

If you, also, are on a pasta buzz, may I suggest checking out my recipes for Beetroot Baked with Cream, Balsamic Vinegar and Cumin with Spaghetti, Thyme and Pine Nuts; Pappardelle with Chili Butter, Chorizo and Feta; and from a week or two ago; Very Simple Tomato Spaghetti.

I also suggest checking out the most important thing that will ever happen to any of us: I dyed my hair again.

dying is easy young man, living is harder

It has been a truly busy week, with events at work and lots of big nights, and my mum and her best friend in town for the first time in ages (which was lovely!) and seeing my awesome brother for the first time in ages; and the birthday of one of my beautiful best friends Kate; and so much going on! But as I said, I am enormously determined to not let this blog slide down the scale in terms of Things I Can Do. Can’t wait.

title via: the deliciously overwrought song No More from the amazing and quite under-the-radar 2006 off-Broadway musical See What I Wanna See, sung by my hero Idina Menzel. It’s not on YouTube, tragically, but you can definitely find it on Spotify. The title track is on YouTube though, so maybe just listen to that instead? 

music lately: 

Red Sex, by Vessel. This track is so good, just such a persistent driving beat, it makes me want to run around the room.

Emily Edrosa, Corner of the Party. I am in love with this song, okay?

next time: no apologies for taking ages to blog, and also this amazing Crunchie Bar slice that I’ve been making a whole lot of. 

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

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

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

a candid photo of me blogging today

a candid photo of me blogging today

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

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

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

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

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

sundried tomato scramble

a recipe by myself

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

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

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

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

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

music lately: 

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

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

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

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

oh you bite your friend like chocolate

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As soon as I marched out into this earth, a freshly begotten newbown, I was immediately three things: extremely Aries, extremely ready for attention, and extremely terrible at dealing with things being over. I mean, as far as the latter goes, I was already like ten days past my due date and then immediately contracted colic, possibly as some kind of bloody-minded way of implying that I really shouldn’t have had to farewell the womb where there was food on tap and no responsibilities and calming ocean noises.

What say you, baby Laura?  “You mean I have to wait like twelve years for a coffee culture to develop in New Zealand?”

This week I’m moving from the bar I’ve been at for 18-ish months to start being a bartender at another bar owned by the same business. It’s an interesting mix of sentimentality and excitement. However on this rare occasion I’m not feeling entirely terrible about something being over, because there’s so much new stuff to learn and take on and absorb and learn. I’m sad, I’m happy, I’m so delighted about the opportunity, but ultimately my gut instinct told me I should do it and I think it was correct. (My gut instinct tells me really stupid things sometimes, like “you should work out what that crumb on the floor is by putting it in your mouth for some reason” and “you’re terrified of pelicans, lol”) As well as being in the same business group it’s also in the same building, so I’m still very much in the general family that I’ve grown to adore.

Also, did you know how much attention you get when you announce you’re going to leave a place? It’s delicious. Almost as delicious as these cookies I made to take in on my final Saturday shift at my old job which were definitely made out of the pure goodness of my noble heart and not motivated by “the glory”. But really though, I do like to bake nice things for people and wanted to have some kind of sugary vehicle for my gratitude to the team I was leaving, to help boost us through a long night, our bods filled with chocolatey energy.

In the interests of everyone’s allergy needs being met (okay fine, in the interests of “the glory”) I was after some kind of gluten and dairy-free cookie that I could make without having to gather and hunt too many random ingredients. The answer is this, which is vaguely based on an Italian cookie recipe from this book I have called The Scotto Family: Italian Comfort Food. It’s so easy – just plain egg whites stirred quickly into a mountain of icing sugar, cocoa, and cornflour, baked briefly. Somehow this bowl of not-much-at-all turns into these chewy, soft, rich-rich-rich cookies, with a kind of macaron vs brownie texture. I love them.

There’s a lot of cocoa in this, so use the darkest, strongest, high-fat-percentage stuff that you can find, if possible. That, plus the pinch of salt, is going to counteract the blatant sweetness blast of all that icing sugar, meanwhile the chunks of chocolate punctuate each bite with delicious texture.

flourless double chocolate cookies

a recipe by myself

  • three cups of icing sugar
  • one cup of good cocoa
  • two tablespoons of cornflour
  • three egg whites
  • 250g dark chocolate, roughly chopped (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana which is dairy-free.) 
  • a pinch of sea salt

Place the icing sugar, cocoa, and cornflour in a large bowl and stir gently to get rid of any lumps and to make it into a uniformly dusty-brown dust. Tip the egg whites in and carefully stir – it will seem like there’s not nearly enough liquid for all the dry ingredients but damn it if it doesn’t come together suddenly to form a thick batter. About halfway through this point tip in the chopped up chocolate and salt and stir it all through. 

Refrigerate the mixture for fifteen-ish minutes while you heat the oven up to 180C/350F and get a baking tray lined with nonstick paper. Bake small spoonfuls, around five on the tray at a time to allow for spreading, for eleven minutes or until firm and slightly cracked on top. I just used a regular spoon from the cutlery draw, the kind you like, eat stuff with. Repeat with the rest of the mixture. I just slid the baking paper sheet off the tray onto a wooden board to let them cool and started again with a new sheet of baking paper rather than trying to prise them off individually but you do you. 

Allow the cookies to cool completely and then store in an airtight container. 

Despite not having tried it I know for a fact that these would be incredible sandwiched around ice cream, however on their own they are just perfect. It was noted on Saturday night that they don’t taste as though they’re lacking in gluten or dairy, which comes down to that magical texture – a crisp outer shell barely encasing a chewy, almost gooey, aggressively chocolatey centre. The fact that they are so massively easy to make just renders them even more delicious to me.

So with these cookies ends one era and another starts. If you yourself are thinking of taking something sweet into the workplace, I thoroughly recommend these: they’re fast to make, most people can eat them, and there is of course, The Glory of being that person who brought cookies to work. To be honest I love the people I work with so much that I’d make them cookies even if it didn’t get me attention though. (What an attention-seeking thing to say.)

Let’s weigh in with toddler Laura, what say you? “I can’t believe I have to wait like twenty literal years before I can look up Aries memes on the internet”

If you’re on a cookies-with-chunks-of-chocolate vibe, may I further recommend these Smoky Triple Chocolate Buckwheat Cookies (also gluten free); Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Cookies; or Maple Peanut Butter Cookies.

title from: The 1975’s song Chocolate, gee they are good though right? Sliiiight INXS vibes, yeah? 

music lately: the work playlist edition

Roots Manuva, Witness Dub. Walk me down the aisle to this song, lower me into the grave to this song, dance around my glowing risen spectre to this song, honestly: this song can cure the longest hardest tiredest shift at work.

Santigold, Les Artistes. The sparkly poppy sound with the slightly plaintive chorus gets me right in the ventricles. This is from 2008 but sounds like it fell out of the internet just yesterday.

Phoenix, 1901. So joyful!

next time: hopefully it won’t be quite so obvious how underslept I am. Time for a nap now. Also might as well bake something to bring in for the new team I’m joining, yeah?

sometimes i can’t function, my heart’s spaghetti junction

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I think a lot about comfort, and comfort food, and self care, and everything in that soft little bubble. It’s sort of stupid – yet predictable – that the more you might need self-care, the more inclined you are to curl up into a small spiral and hide under a blanket for hours; the more you are needing of comforting food the less you have any energy to cook it; and the more you want general comfort at all the less you remember how on earth to find it. If, however, you’re bouncing around like the little ball in that atari-type brick-busting game that was on all computers in the 90s and feeling aimlessly ready for comfort food but don’t know what exactly: mate, I heartily recommend this spaghetti recipe that I’ve got for you. On that note, I’ve been watching a whole lot of the Netflix series Chef’s Table and aside from wanting to marry Chef Dominique Crenn soooo badly; just watching a beautifully made show about people passionately making beautiful food is super calming without having to actually do anything about it myself.

Watching TV to chill out and finding pasta to be comfort food: how revolutionary, I know. For someone who is pretty convinced that they are a complicated mystery woman I’m actually a pretty simple human. I guess it’s about catching myself in the act of doing really obvious things and then congratulating myself disproportionately for them?

Pasta – along with ice cream – is just straight up my favourite food, so I generally want it always, without any further existential context around it. This particular recipe for Very Simple Tomato Spaghetti uses a different method to how we’re usually told to cook the stuff – in an ocean of boiling salted water – instead you add a scant cup or two of water and let the pasta slowly absorb it in its entirety. I know! I grew up eating pasta cooked by microwaving it in a pyrex jug of water for 12 minutes so you should definitely trust me. My logic being, someone who has lived through such bad pasta like me would definitely know really, really good pasta too.

With this recipe, everything happens in the one pan. The starch from the pasta releases into the remaining liquid, and when you stir in some tomato paste it all becomes near-on preposterously creamy and rich. I know all the butter I hoof into it has some kind of effect as well, but the starch is important, honest. I came by this recipe in a roundabout way – I was thinking about cooking spaghetti in the same way that I’d make a risoni risotto, and then I came across a recipe on Food52 that confirmed the process for me; I had a tin of tomato paste that I’d bought because it was out-of-date stock and going super cheap and stuff that’s on special because it’s past its use-by date is aggressive me-bait; finally I required both lunch and comfort: thus this recipe was born.

i took a photography course one time last week and now i think I can get away with this  i took a photography course one time last week and now i think I can get away with this 

You add the butter at three stages: first to gently fry the uncooked sticks of spaghetti in, secondly to add flavour to the cooking liquid, and finally to rich up the tomato paste. As with all my recipes, I’m thoroughly desensitised to what constitutes “a lot” of butter, but this tastes like the exact right amount. The tomato sauce thickly coats each soft strand, and any fresh-from-the-tin acidity is softened completely. It’s rich, it’s luscious, it tastes like you spent hours reducing it down in a cast iron pan under the Tuscan sun using fresh tomatoes that a handsome, floppy haired man picked for you as a gift shortly before you ignore him for the rest of his life and he goes on to write bad poetry about it using the tomatoes misguidedly as a metaphor. It’s delicious.

very simple tomato spaghetti

a recipe by myself

  • 50g butter
  • 100g dried spaghetti
  • one and a half cups recently boiled water
  • one small tin of tomato paste; or around four tablespoons
  • herbs and cheese to serve, if desired

You add butter at three different stages, so begin by slicing the butter into fairly even thirds. In a wide saucepan – ideally wide enough to hold the spaghetti lying down, although you can break the strands up if need be – gently heat the butter over a medium heat and add the dried spaghetti, stirring to coat the sticks in butter as they spin around the pan. 

Add the water and the second measure of butter and turn the heat up high. Continue to stir occasionally as the water bubbles away, cooking the pasta as it reduces down. Taste a strand occasionally to test if it’s done. If need be, add a little more water. 

Once the pasta is cooked and the water has reduced down to a few tablespoons – it will happen! – stir in the tomato paste and the final measure of butter. Stir over a lower heat until the butter has melted and it’s all thick and saucy. Remove from the heat and serve. 

If you look up the word “comfort” in the dictionary, there is, by way of explanation, this picture of me sitting cross-legged on the floor of my best friend Kate’s house while she and my other best friend Kim are just out of frame, we are drinking wine and the fire is warming my back. The lights are low and there’s an extractor fan on making blissful white noise and a small seal pup of a dog is in front of me trying to kiss my nose. In lieu of being able to recreate this exact picture for yourself, pasta is a decent option. Especially when that pasta is so simple and takes hardly any time or ingredients and rewards you with a bowlful of creamily dense sauce coating each strand which you can strew with herbs and cheese such as thyme and feta if you like but it’s perfectly perfect on its own, looking like an upended can of spaghetti but tasting five zillion times superior. (Now, I used to bloody adore canned spaghetti but I am convinced that the recipe has been changed and it’s not what I used to be, I’m not just being snarky about it for the sake of it.)

And if you’re after more pasta-related comfort, maybe try my Garlic Miso Butter Risoni Risotto or Spaghetti with Chilli, Lemon, Capers and Olive Oil.

title via the immensely cool Elastica’s Car Song. If we all try really hard we might be as effortlessly cool as Justine Frischmann one day, but I doubt it. 

Flume ft Tove Lo, Say It. It can’t be good for one to listen too much to Tove Lo’s song Habits too often so I’m glad this exists as well.

Look, I’ll tell you when I’m sick of listening to INXS’s song Disappear, okay? Till then just assume I’m listening to it on a constant loop.

next time: I have been craving cookies lately??? Perhaps something will come of this.