Category: Vegetarian

lick an ice cream cone, crack a bone

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Supposing yesterday began when I woke up around 8am, I then went on to spend roughly fifteen or so further hours in bed. I rose briefly around noon to make myself some roasted vegetables, which did not have the galvanising effect on me that I’d hoped they would, because I then went back to bed until just after midnight when I had a sudden fit of activity: I got up, ate the remainder of this white chocolate and burnt butter ice cream and then made myself a small loaf of cornbread. Oh sure, I’m super tired at the moment, but it was more than just tiredness, it was like, One of Those Days. Apologies for referring to depressive times with a knowing wink, what else can ya do.

(Okay I have to confess here that I accidentally typed “knowing wank” instead of knowing wink which is ridiculous because the i and the a are not even remotely close to each other on the keyboard, it just happened and I can’t stop laughing at it.)

Anyway: there is nothing profound about the fact that I ate this ice cream after a day spent in bed willing myself to do anything, even to just binge watch TV shows, but being unable to maintain any kind of momentum; it was not even a particularly abnormal day, it was a day that anyone might have every now and then. But! If nothing else, the ice cream is exceptionally delicious and as I was eating it I was like “well this is nice,” and it being a nice moment was enough, just for now.

knowing wink knowing wink

I’ve said it before, but ice cream is one of my very, very favourite foods and I love coming up with recipes for it. I mean, I argued successfully for an entire ice cream chapter in my cookbook. I love the stuff, and something in that cold, cold, creamy texture is the perfect vehicle for flavours to shine.

It sounds almost like I’m parodying myself to load an already loaded ice cream with literal butter but my reasons are sound, I promise. Butter, when browned over a high heat, becomes intensely rich and nutty and caramelly. When you put this with white chocolate – gently buttery, soft and vanilla-y – the effect is absolutely glorious.  It’s like butterscotch, like white chocolate refracted through a prism, like freezing cold fudge, like plunging your hands into a pile of expensive folded robes made of the softest fabric at some kind of fancy department store. The pile of robes topples over. You slink away, unseen. You got away with it but you feel bad about the probably underpaid store attendant who has to tidy it up. You think about it still, eight years later. I don’t know where I’m going with this. The ice cream is delicious.

I’d like to emphasise that it is very, very simple to make, which is how I like my ice cream to be. You don’t need an ice cream maker! That’s what Big Ice Cream Maker wants you to think! I mean if you have one, that’s lovely, I just try to make a point of making recipes that require minimal equipment so that the maximum amount of people might consider trying them out. This ice cream requires three steps – browning the butter, melting the cream and chocolate together, and letting the cornflour thicken the cream mixture somewhat. Then you bung it in the freezer, don’t even worry about stirring it at this point, just wait for it to freeze and it’s all yours.

white chocolate and burnt butter ice cream

a recipe by myself

  • 100g butter
  • three cups (750ml) cream
  • one tablespoon cornflour
  • 200g genuinely nice white chocolate, eg Whittakers
  • 3/4 cup sugar

First, your butter: melt it in a saucepan large enough to hold all the rest of the ingredients, since you might as well use as few pans as possible. Once it’s melted, keep it on the heat so it starts to bubble up and brown – once it’s at the point of having thick golden fluffy foam on top and being a rich golden brown underneath, remove it from the heat and transfer it to a small bowl to cool slightly. 

Rinse out the pan and then over a low heat, melt the chocolate into the cream, stirring occasionally. Mix the cornflour with a couple of tablespoons of water – I just do this in the measuring cup I used for the cream – and tip it into the chocolate/cream mixture. Continue stirring over a low heat until it thickens a bit – you’ll feel it changing as you stir, going from being very thin liquid to a more saucy, thickshake type vibe. Remove it from the heat.

Stir in the sugar, and finally, spoon or pour in the butter, or more specifically, the dark golden brown middle layer of the butter – it will have separated into sediment on the bottom, super rich dark brown butter in the middle, and a golden salty layer on top. The middle stuff is what we want, but if other bits get in the mix it’s not the end of the world. 

Freeze till solid – around 4-6 hours – and then it’s all yours for the eating. 

The cornflour, without any effort on your behalf, thickens up the cream and turns it into a pseudo custard, and the texture when frozen is incredible – so, so smooth and satiny. But the burnt butter with the melted white chocolate! Seriously, I don’t know whether I’m more excited about the flavour or the texture in this one. Just trust me on it and try it for yourself. For what it’s worth, it tastes good no matter what kind of day you’re having.

Also! If you like the idea of ice cream then I have a ludicrous quantity of recipes for you, but you could consider: apple cinnamon ice cream; chocolate peanut butter ice cream; and grapefruit curd ripple ice cream.

Also I’m still laughing about “knowing wank”.

title from: The Dead Weather, Blue Blood Blues. This song is so crunchy, I love it.

music lately:

Brandy, Tamia, Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight, Missing You. This was playing at the coffee shop I was at this morning and I got a sudden flashback to being ten years old and (rightly) getting suuuper emotional over this song.

Billie Myers, Tell Me. This song flew massively under the radar in 1999 or whenever it came out, but it’s so good and the chorus is so big, I love it.

next time: well that cornbread was amazing. I am very sure I’m going to make it again at some point. 

suddenly colder, it bowled me right over

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So it has come to this: ya girl made what is basically a salad and when writing the recipe, called it a bowl instead.

Compelling, no?

But yeah, while bowl food carries with it an oddly smug, insistent attitude, it would be equally insistent and smug of me to deny how good it is; I love that you can really just put anything on top of rice and call it A Bowl, how it contains so many different tastes and textures, and really makes you feel like someone who is a Pinterest star under the name of She Wears Striped Boatneck Tshirts or My Glowing Clean Natural Kitchen or Oh! Dream a Dream, You Wanderer rather than just being an achingly tired rat-human making fun of blog names on Pinterest.

Over the last few days my body has been doing this thing where my sinuses are suddenly made of concrete and I’m even dopier than usual which is honestly something to behold and I cannot, simply cannot, stop sneezing. I decided to put a whole lot of rudely healthy ingredients into a bowl in the hopes of it having some effect on me (the woman who served me at the supermarket: “you should put some ice on your sinuses, your face is all puffy.” me, internally: “I feel like there’s some kind of code you just violated.”) The crowning jewel of it all is the matcha mayonnaise, pairing matcha powder’s intense, oh-wow-I-accidentally-swallowed-grass flavour with equally green olive oil and a little apple cider vinegar, the effect of it all is surprisingly wonderful. If you don’t have matcha powder or feel weary at the thought of making your own mayonnaise, simply spoon over aioli or some other condimenty-paste thing.

Similarly, you can substitute any number of things for any number of things here, but this is the recipe I made and it is so, so very good – a ton of texture and crunch, with earthy turmeric and oily, charred broccoflower and sweet baby carrot and salty, creamy feta and magical walnuts.

I cannot lie, this actually takes a ton of effort to put together and uses so many dishes, especially if you haven’t made the mayonnaise ahead of time, but it is so delicious and has the decency to produce a fair amount of leftovers. And importantly, it’s full of health-making ingredients to make your immune system remember who the boss is here (I mean, I’m still massively sick the following day after eating it but I’m sure I’d be way worse without it, right?)

aggressively healthy bowl with matcha mayonnaise

a recipe by myself. 

  • half a cup of quinoa
  • one teaspoon ground turmeric
  • two tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus more for roasting the vegetables
  • half a head of broccoflower (or broccoli or cauliflower, obviously) 
  • four or so baby carrots
  • a few cloves of garlic, left whole and unpeeled
  • a handful each of walnut kernels and pumpkin seeds
  • half a bunch of cavolo nero leaves
  • 100g or so feta (optional, I suppose)

Cook the quinoa in a large pan of boiling water until it’s fluffy and expanded and, well, cooked. Drain and rinse in a sieve under cold water, then place in your serving bowl and stir in the olive oil and turmeric, plus sea salt to taste. 

Meanwhile, set your oven to 220C/450F and slice the broccoflower into halved and quartered florets. Leave the carrots whole but trim the frondy tops off. Place the florets and carrots plus the garlic cloves on a baking tray, drizzle generously with olive oil, and roast until a bit charred and browned on the edges – around fifteen minutes or so.

Arrange the roasted vegetables and garlic cloves (pop them out of their papery casings first) on top of the quinoa. Place the feta, cubed or crumbled with your own hands, in the bowl. Scatter over the walnuts and pumpkin seeds – I put them on the baking tray that the vegetables were on and used the remaining heat from the oven that I’d just turned off to toast them a bit first – and tuck cavolo nero leaves around the edges of everything. I tried to put everything in neat lines, but it doesn’t really matter! Spoon over the matcha mayonnaise and add more salt if you feel like you need it. 

matcha mayonnaise

  • one large, fresh, organic, free range, bla bla bla egg
  • one heaped teaspoon of matcha powder, or more if you like
  • one teaspoon dijon mustard
  • one tablespoon boiling water
  • around half a cup rice brain oil, or similarly plain oil
  • a third to one half of a cup of extra virgin olive oil
  • two tablespoons apple cider vinegar
  • sea salt, to taste

Crack the egg into a bowl, and add the matcha powder and mustard. Whisk briskly just to get everything incorporated, then add the boiling water while continuing to whisk. Continue whisking for what will feel like forever, while slowly adding the oil in a slow drizzle, around a tablespoonful at a time, continually whisking between additions. Does this make sense? Whisk hard, add oil slowly, that’s all. Once you’ve added all the oil, whip in the apple cider vinegar and salt. 

Now, by this point, either it will have thickened significantly and look like mayonnaise, or it will have thickened a bit at resemble a kind of green milkshake. Not to worry: put it in the fridge for an hour and it should turn lusciously thick. Give it a stir before using. Keep for a week or two. 

I’m not going to go down the line and list all the good vitamins and minerals that you get from everything in here but suffice to say, turmeric is powerful stuff and it’s my understanding that a tablespoon of matcha powder is the equivalent of replacing your entire bloodstream with green tea, plus all that olive oil and the nuts and seeds will make you shiny, and garlic and cider vinegar are all germ-fighty and quinoa is, y’know, quinoa, and I haven’t even got started on the green vegetables.

The matcha mayonnaise recipe makes an awful lot but it’s a charming way to take in that green powder – the vinegar and the oil plus the silky, aerated texture sort of encases any harshness of flavour and lifts it up and glides it right to the parts of your tastebuds that enjoy that sort of bitter vibe without dropping it too hard. Uh, it tastes nice, is what I’m saying. Don’t be afraid of how much oil goes into it – you can use less extra virgin olive oil and more plain if you’re worried about the expense – but use some, even just a couple of tablespoons, please, because the green-on-green flavours are so perfect together. Use leftovers as a spread for sandwiches, to rakishly dip truffle fries in for some kind of intensely pastoral experience, to accompany pickled vegetables (it’s 2016, I know you have pickled vegetables on your agenda), however you please.

If you read this and were all “hot dog, I need more vegetables in my life”, perhaps consider these other salads I’ve blogged about –  Baby Kale and Pomegranate Salad, Silverbeet, Parsley and Horseradish Slaw, or The Rainbow Room Peanut and Carrot Salad.

title from: local hero Bic Runga and her oh so stunning song Suddenly Strange, from, I wanna say, 1996? Maybe 1995? From a time when your opportunity to see music videos was limited to a two hour show on Sundays at 10am that played the top 20 hits in the country that week. I don’t wanna be all “kids these days” but guys, it sucked.

music lately: 

Honestly I don’t know when it’s a good time to watch The Last Five Years – a movie based directly on the Jason Robert Brown off-Broadway musical which follows the blooming and deterioration of a relationship, but with the two main characters’ stories traveling backwards and forwards in time simultaneously, meeting in the middle for one song. I KNOW. Anyway the last song, Goodbye Until Tomorrow/I Could Never Rescue You is my absolute favourite and brings me to my knees and if you’re feeling fragile you probably definitely should listen to it because why not, the sheer optimism from her colliding with his resigned it’s-over self and then-her is unaware of now-him and now-her and it’s awful! But! Such a beautiful, beautiful song, listen to it, watch the whole thing, do it.

Hailee Steinfeld, Love Myself. This song is also good!

next time: white chocolate and burnt butter ice cream.

these girls fall like dominoes

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I would describe my demeanour this week as Literal Zombie But With Slightly Worse Hygiene. The reason I have not blogged up until the very moment that you’re reading this is that I have been working on an enormous freelance project with a big company, it was a brilliant opportunity that I would’ve been an idiot to turn down, it did however take up every waking moment when I was not at work. Okay, I’m exaggerating, on Wednesday I took 30 minutes to eat a sandwich and do some thoroughly decent selfies. As I said, I’ve been working my usual hours too and on top of that am also attempting to deal with my personal life in that unspecial everyone-has-their-own-struggle way that we all are, so as a result my brain is FORLORN. But I got the project done and I’m proud of myself for it and I’m delighted that I was considered to do it: something had to give though and alas it was writing this blog post. 

I’m already a bit daft at the best of times – I interpret stuff in a verrrry face value way (April Fool’s Day is honestly so embarrassing for me) and also sometimes forget a simple term and can only elaborately describe my way around it. I’m Occam’s Razor on Opposite Day, basically. This week it has been amplified x a squillion, for example: the recipe below involves cutting potatoes into a particular shape and I could not, just could not recall what the name of that shape was. I googled it, all I got was talk of shapes with names like decadocadecoflipagon which was all too spooky. I took to Facebook to ask: it turns out out the shape I was trying to name was…a cube. I forgot what a cube was. What about a long-ass cube though? I asked. A brick? Suggested my friend Charlotte. Reader, I hung my head. 

 

Later this week I happened to look at my hand and was noticed, idly, that I had got something blue on it. I was wearing blue eyeshadow and it’s no surprise for the makeup on my face to migrate to the rest of my body in streaky patches as I go scruffily about my day. When it wouldn’t wash off however, I started silently freaking out. I messaged my two best friends Kim and Kate to say I was highly nervous because a vein on my hand had grown wide like pappardelle pasta and were the rest of my veins going to follow in this fashion and bust out of my stupid body, and as if I have time for this right now because I have this massive freelance project to finish. Kim was like “it sounds like a bruise” and Kate was like “yep it’s a bruise” and I was like “ohhh yeah. Bruises.” 

Amongst all this one needs to feed one’s self, and also to stop referring to one’s self as “one”, probably. Ever since reading about them on Food52 I’ve been completely entranced by Potato Dominoes, a method of roasting potatoes where you cut all the rounded edges off and then slice the remaining potato verrrry thinly in a brick shape (or a long-ass cube, if you will, this is also the point where I got into a spot of bother with mathematical terms) and push them over slightly – hence the domino name. It all sounds like a lot of faff for very little result but kindly believe my hype. Slicing them all thin creates a ton of surface area and edge bits to get almost hilariously crunchy and crisp, whilst providing a solid base to get all creamy and soft and lush. Is it worth it? Let me work it. Also yes, yes it is worth it. 

Even if they fall apart they are still wonderful (the title of my new pop punk album?) but I nevertheless suggest making them for yourself a few times to get the hang of it before you feed them to, I don’t know, an ambassador’s husband. They’re not difficult, just a tiny bit fiddly. Before you get het up about the utter wastefulness of slicing all the rounded edges off the potatoes, I’m not suggesting you throw them out the window or anything. You can keep em to add to stews or soups or stocks, or do the obvious thing: roast them alongside the potato dominoes and eat them too, as a kind of sneaky chef’s treat. 

Here I’ve used a ton of butter, which melts over the potatoes under the blasting heat of the oven, however I made them again with olive oil in the interests of vegan possibilities and simple curiosity. They were, unsurprisingly, equally excellent. If you don’t have any in the house, the thyme and capers aren’t crucial to the proceedings, but! Thyme’s resiny, sweet herbal flavour is beautiful with the buttery, nutty potatoes, and capers are so salty and good and get as crunchy as the edges of the potatoes that they’re adorning. 

potato dominoes with thyme and capers

adapted gently from a Food52 recipe, which probably has way more helpful instructions than mine. 

  • two big, evenly sized potatoes
  • butter, around 75g OR a plenty of extra virgin olive oil
  • a tablespoon of capers
  • a few sprigs of fresh thyme

Set your oven to 220C/450F. Slice all the rounded sides off the potatoes so you end up with a potato brick/cuboid thing. Slice crosswise (I think that’s the word? Not lengthwise, basically) through the potatoes, as thinly as you can muster. Push them into place so they hold their brick shape even when all sliced up. Use a spatula or pancake flipper to transfer them to a baking tray, and push them over slightly so they are like a pile of tipped-over dominoes, or a spread of cards, or a pile of books on a lean, that kind of thing. Surround them with the off cuts of potato if you like. Generously layer slices of the butter across the top of each potato, and use any remaining butter to dot on top of the off cuts, if you’re using them. 

Roast for around 20 minutes, although much will depend upon your oven and the type of potatoes you’ve got. The more waxy and watery the potato, the longer it will take. Scatter with the thyme and capers, eating a few offcuts on the way to test for done-ness, and return to the oven till the capers are crisp and the potatoes are cooked through and thoroughly golden on the outside. 

I fear I have not emphasised enough how delicious these are. They’re SO CRISP. But SO SOFT underneath. It’s SO NOT a huge deal to have to slice them up all funny. All I could find was stupid waxy potatoes that seemed to be filled with water and they STILL turned out gorgeously browned and crisp. I have SO MORE CAPITALISATION where that came from. Anyway I was eating a big plateful of these the other day and my brain was at a particularly low ebb, like the tide carrying any knowledge had washed away out to sea and I was too tired to chase it, or indeed, to come up with a better metaphor, and I was looking at these beautiful, golden and brown, crunchy crisp potatoes, and I got the theme song from Friends in my head and for one rather silly second I attributed the qualities of being there for you when the rain starts to pour and like they’ve been there before to these potatoes and felt comforted. It’s like the potatoes gave me the supportive words I needed but it turns out those words were in my heart all along. 

Omg this beautiful woman! Lucky London. 

Omg this beautiful woman! Lucky London. 

Speaking of words that were in one’s heart all along, I found myself doing karaoke last night for the second Saturday in a row and it’s amazing how good for the soul it is (apart from wondering, injuriously, why there is no audience out there who wants to hear a moderately terrible singer and thus I can never become a pop star.) All my emotions were slammed around anyway because it was the leaving party for my dear, beautiful friend Charlotte who is bereaving us of her presence but blessing the lesbians of London by moving there for good; on the other hand my angel friend Kate had just returned after a month overseas. Considering I was already at the point of feeling like I was receiving bolstering messages from a bowl of potatoes, you can imagine the near-hysteria in the air last night. Why not add lusty singing into the mix? It was a wonderful night though, so full of support from actual humans and hugs and laughter and new friends and bottles of Rose wine which kept appearing out of nowhere and – once I’ve finished my shift at work that I’m about to head off and do – I made it through this week. Thanks, potatoes.  

If you, too, are on a potatoes vibe then may I also suggest checking out my recipes for Quite Fast Garlic and Parmesan Potatoes, Baked Potato Salad, and/or Halloumi, Fried Potato and Raw Fennel Salad. 

title from: Nicki Minaj’s wonderfully sweet and pro-woman song, Girls Fall Like Dominoes. We are so lucky to have her. 

music lately: 

I don’t know if it’s indicative of where my head’s at but I’m all “no time like the present to develop an odd obsession with Roxette”, specifically the song The Look which I’ve listened to at least fifty times this week, conservatively estimating. It’s horrifyingly intoxicating. I’m listening to it right now. 

Mr Big, To Be With You. Lol, idk. 

next time:  I made AMAZING white chocolate and burnt butter ice cream and I’m very excited about it. I just have to get photos of it before I eat it all, thus far a losing battle. 

this town’s a different town to what it was last night, you couldn’t have done that on a sunday

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I swear I ate and cooked best in my second and third year of university, weird though that seems – I mean, my first year was definitely full of lukewarm toast and trying to stay alive in a flat made of damp breakfast cereal held together with cobwebs (if it weren’t for that vigilant spider army my flat probably would’ve fallen down. Thank you spider army, I respect and fear you still) – but by second year I’d hit my stride. Living in a marginally less cold and damp flat felt like occupying a palace and importantly, I had both the time and the means in winter to make a ton of stews and casseroles and soups and slow-cooked things. Going into the office-job life obliterated that, because there’s no time during the day and when you get home you want feeding immediately, and going into hospo means I just eat when I can, and that might be 3am. But as a student: goddamn. All that free time during the day between lectures, searching out super cheap cuts of meat or soaking dried chickpeas because it cost less than canned, baking a cake so we’d be warmed by the oven’s heat – I’m totally not nostalgic for that time, or anything, but I also don’t want another winter to pass me by without somehow making the most of food that suits the icy weather.

(I went back to my very early days of writing this blog post just to make sure I wasn’t making this all up and glorifying the past and if anything, I undersold it. I used to make pudding every night! In one of my blog posts from November 2007 I talk about how sick I am of blind-baking pastry for pies! That’s how often I was making pastry by hand for homemade pies and tarts! Last year I literally did a blog post about cinnamon sugar on toast and a McDonalds burger. It was a difficult time, sure, but still.)

bread! stuffed! with three! different types! of! cheese! 

I believe it’s without even the slightest bit of hyperbole that I say my life would be unmitigated and incomparable garbage without Kim and Kate, the two earth-angels whom I call my best friends. Remember that Because You Loved Me song by Celine Dion? “You were my strength when I was weak, you were my voice when I couldn’t speak, you were my eyes when I couldn’t see, you saw the best there was in me” etc? I never understood that song when it was first on the radio and/or everyone’s mum by law had a copy of that cassette so it was perpetually in the background. I was like…is she singing to her boyfriend? Or is she a pet rock singing to their owner? Seriously, if you imagine a small rock with googly eyes stuck on it singing this song to someone it makes so much sense than a human singing it, so utterly codependent and clingy and bodily needy it is. It’s definitely sung by a small rock.

At least that’s what I thought, until my aggressively supportive and beautiful friendship with Kim and Kate. Then, at last, did I understand the lyrics to Because You Loved Me. (“You’ve been my inspiration! Through the lies you were the truth!”) I’m like, ah, this song is chill and not at all hysterical. The lyrics are calm and normal.

So between all that and me wanting to get back into slow-ass cooking and, monumentally, Kate being very close to travelling through the UK and Europe for a month (excitingly for her, tear-stainedly fraught for the rest of us) I decided to make the three of us a lavishly rustic, simple lunch before my shift at work on Sunday. It all came together despite attempting a recipe I’ve never tried before, the upshot of which is, if I can manage to throw this together in the middle of three ten hour shifts then all you need is a passing interest in cooking and a small amount of motivation and you can definitely achieve some version of this yourself with massive ease.

Nigella Lawson’s magical cookbook Feast inspired both the recipes I made – firstly, a red and gold root vegetable stew with turmeric and saffron from which I used a Tunisian meatball dish as a starting point. Kate is vegetarian and Kim can’t do garlic or onions so my result ended up having about two ingredients in common with what was on the page, but that’s how inspiration works, yeah? The second recipe, a Georgian cheese-stuffed bread called Nana’s Hatchapuri, was more direct – I just fiddled with the quantities a little to make it more affordable. Speaking of affordable, feel free to leave the saffron out of the stew – I just have a ton of it around because I’m the kind of person who gets given food by people for my birthday etc (which I love) but in all honesty the turmeric completely does the trick as far as flavour and colour. I don’t care about the tautological goldenness though, the doubling down was a pleasingly luxuriant note in an otherwise, let’s face it, highly plain stew.

Anyway, both were SO GOOD. And somehow so do-able. The vegetable stew I made more or less effortlessly the day before and just left it on the hob, ready to reheat. The cheesebread – despite the lengthy looking recipe below – was made very quickly before Kim and Kate got to mine, and once I’d let them in – my hands covered in flour – I just shoved it in the oven while we joyfully mixed orange juice and Lindaeur that Kate had both bought and brought from the nearest dairy.

nana’s hatchapuri (georgian cheesebread) 

my gently adapted version of Nigella’s (who had already adapted it from a woman named Nana, so) from her book Feast. 

six cups plain flour
two cups thick, plain yoghurt
two eggs
50g very soft butter
one teaspoon baking soda
one teaspoon sea salt, or a pinch of regular table salt
one 250g tub of ricotta cheese
two large handfuls of grated mozzarella, like, the super cheap stuff 
150g feta cheese
one more egg

Set your oven to 220 C/450 F and place a baking tray in the oven to heat up. Put the flour in a large bowl, and mix in the yoghurt, eggs, and butter till a soft, sticky dough forms. I used a wooden spoon to stir in the yoghurt and eggs and then my hands to work in the butter; you end up looking like your hands belong to zombies, but it’s very effective! Otherwise just keep on stirring. Add a little extra flour if it’s toooo sticky and knead this in with the baking soda and salt, which should leave you with a springy, soft ball of dough. Cover and leave it for 20 minutes. 

Slice the dough in half and roll out both pieces into a rough oval shape around 1.5cm thick, although it’s up to you, really. Circle, square, Mickey Mouse ears, whatever works. I recommend rolling them out on two large pieces of baking paper, that way it doesn’t mess up your bench top and you can then slide it straight onto the baking tray when it’s ready to cook. 

In the same bowl that you mixed the dough in – because, why not – roughly mash together the ricotta, the feta, and the mozzarella with the remaining egg. Spread this golden mixture thickly across one of the rolled out pieces of dough, leaving a few centimetres border around the edge. Carefully lay the second rolled out dough across the top of this – if a few holes appear, just patch them up, the dough is pretty forgiving – and roll over the edges or pinch them together securely with the prongs of a fork. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until it’s puffy and golden and bready on top. Give it a few minutes before slicing into it. 

root vegetable stew with saffron, cinnamon, and turmeric

a recipe by myself, inspired loosely by Nigella’s Tunisian stew in Feast. This recipe is vegan and gluten-free.  

olive oil
about four sticks of celery
three carrots
two parsnips
half a butternut squash, or one small crown pumpkin, or that quantity of similar
two tins of tomatoes
one cinnamon stick
two heaped teaspoons turmeric
a pinch of ground cumin
three tablespoons golden sultanas (or dried apricots, chopped roughly)
a handful of sundried tomatoes, chopped roughly
pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds, to garnish, plus any green herb you like – flat leaf parsley or coriander would be great here 

Using a large knife, finely chop the celery sticks and two of the carrots into small dice – it doesn’t have to be neat, just keep chopping till you have a pile of formless orange and green. 

Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large saucepan and tip in the carrot and celery. Sprinkle over some salt and allow to cook gently over a medium heat until softened. Meanwhile, chop the remaining carrot into thick cubes or half-moons or whatever you like; slice the parsnip into short sticks, and peel and cube the pumpkin. Throw all these vegetables into the pan and stir them, then add the two tins of tomatoes, the cinnamon stick, the turmeric, cumin, sultanas and dried tomatoes.

Add some salt and pepper, and bring all of this to the boil. Reduce the heat back to low, and then let it simmer for about an hour, adding a little water or stock if it looks a bit too dry. You’re basically done at this point, but you could carry on simmering it for several more hours if you like, or let it to sit and then reheat it the next day – essentially, nothing can hurt this dish. Add more spice or salt and pepper if you see fit. Once you’re ready to serve it, simply scatter it with pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds, and bring it to the table. More olive oil to drizzle over would be nice. 

Obviously softly sweet pumpkin and parsnip with earthy turmeric and saffron and richly tomato-y sauce is going to be wonderful, all hearty and spiced and twinkling with jewel-like green pumpkin seeds and golden sultanas, but the main attraction was obviously the cheese bread. Three different kinds of cheese? In this economy?

The combination of salty feta, the barging-into-your-mouth melty nature of mozzarella, and mild, milky ricotta is superb, and when surrounded by soft, warm, scone-like bread, leavened only by eggs and baking soda, it’s celestially – almost stressfully – good. Make this, I implore you. My only other proviso is to grind over plenty of black pepper once you’ve sliced into it – the cacio e pepe vibes make it spring to life.

The three of us sat on the floor around my flatmate’s amazing coffee table, toasted to ourselves with the world’s cheapest mimosas, ate heartily, and cackled with laughter at ourselves, half in the funny-haha way and in the oh-my-god-what-is-life-I’m-breaking-the-fourth-wall-to-ruefully-shrug-at-the-studio-audience-haha way. And then I staggered to work, full of cheese and good feelings (one and the same, really) and safe in the knowledge that when I got home there was a billion tons of leftovers.

Extra delightfully, I got to dance with my two best girls last night at Dirtbag Disco, the fundraiser dance party for Ballet is For Everyone. If you’ve ever considered supporting a cause, this is a super nice one. Please keep Kim and I in your prayers and candlelit vigils during Kate’s absence, although having consumed a large quantity of this hatchapuri already this week I see it filling the void that her presence leaves more or less adequately.

PS: If slow-cooked vegetable food appeals, then maybe consider similar blog posts I’ve done, about Penang Tofu Curry and Slow Roasted Eggplant and Butternut with Fried Cauliflower.
 

title from: Arctic Monkeys, From the Ritz to the Rubble from their amaaaazing first album
 

music lately: Dirtbag Disco edition

A$AP Rocky/Drake/2Chainz/Kendrick Lamar, F***in’ Problems. This song remains so addictive and the best thing to dance to.

M.I.A, Bad Girls. This song remains so addictive and the best thing to dance to.

Rihanna, We Found Love. This song remaings so addictive and the best thing to dance to.

next time: all I’ve been eating is leftovers from this! But I will make something happen. 

 

eleanor rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been

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I started writing this blog while slightly hungover after the Visa Wellington on a Plate launch party, and I’ll finish it slightly drunk. Or at least that’s what I thought two nights ago when I got in after work (and after a couple of after-work drinks); when I woke up on Sunday morning I realised I’d been distinctly less productive than how it felt at the time, and had to delete a very rambling paragraph where I tried valiantly to really convince you of the specificity of the tanginess of buttermilk. This is what happens when I miss out on my window of opportunity to write solidly! On the upside “The Specificity of the Tanginess of Buttermilk” sounds 100% like a lesbian novel set in the 60s that would get adapted into an acclaimed and beautiful but ultimately award-snubbed feature film, doesn’t it?

It was now a whole week ago that I made this, but it resonates still: a risotto containing not much at all but somehow still incredibly full of flavour depths and things of interest to your tastebuds. Walnuts toasted in butter, sizzled capers, slightly crisp from the heat, miso paste and buttermilk.

The miso paste acts like an instagram filter, boosting everything it touches while still leaving the original risotto below fairly unchanged. The buttermilk, even more than the miso, is the magic ingredient here – it gives the aforementioned specific tanginess that echoes thick Greek yoghurt or sour cream, but somehow still gives a creaminess to the texture as well. It makes the richness of the browned butter more sharpened without making the overall dish too heavy. It’s just really good. You end up with this aggressively simple yet deeply-toned dish that’s as intensely comforting to eat – all soft and warm and creamy – as it is to make. Or at least, I find risotto comforting to make, all that endless stirring of the rice as it slowly, slowly swells and cooks becomes meditative, like white noise in food form. In Nigella Lawson’s book Kitchen she refers to it as “the solace of stirring”, and the result is threefold, TBH – as well as the cooking and eating of risotto being calming, reading about Nigella describing the calming nature of risotto is honestly the most soothing thing ever.

buttermilk risotto with miso, toasted walnuts and capers

a recipe by myself

  • around 25g butter
  • a handful of walnuts (70 – 100g) roughly chopped
  • two tablespoons of capers
  • one cup of risotto-friendly rice such as arborio or carnaroli
  • three tablespoons of dry vermouth such as Noilly Prat, or use dry white wine (sparkling is fine! Just nothing too sweet)
  • one stock cube of your choosing (I used chicken because that’s what I had)
  • one tablespoon white miso paste
  • three tablespoons of good-quality buttermilk (I used Karikaas – it has the texture of thin yoghurt. Some commercial buttermilk is kind of lumpy and weird. But also: aren’t we all.)

Fill a kettle with water and bring to the boil. (You’ll be using this in a bit to top up the risotto as it’s cooking.) Melt the butter in a saucepan and then tip in the walnuts. Once they’re lightly browned remove them from the pan and set aside (I just put them on the plate I was planning to eat my cooked risotto on) and then throw in the capers. Once the capers are thoroughly sizzled, remove them to the same plate as the walnuts, and pour in the rice. Stir the grains in the butter so they’re all covered and get a chance to toast a little, then pour in the vermouth – it will hit the pan with a hiss and smell amazing. Once it’s absorbed, crumble in the stock cube and stir in the miso paste.

Pour in some hot water from the kettle and start your stirring process – just keep stirring over a medium heat till the rice grains have absorbed it all, then add more. This will take a good twenty minutes and there’s no way around it, but it’s nice to just stand there in a trance over a warm pan.

Once the rice is thoroughly cooked, all soft and creamy but with a tiny bit of bite, remove from the heat and stir in the buttermilk – adding more if you like – and tip over the walnuts and capers, scraping in any browned butter that has pooled under them. Stir in more actual butter if you like (I always do) and serve immediately.

I tried turning the leftovers into arancini but they fell apart pretty well immediately (to which I was like “I can relate to this”) but having swiped a forkful of the cold risotto before adding eggs and breadcrumbs and then ruining everything, I can attest to the fact that it definitely keeps well. The walnuts can be changed out for whatever nut you like, but I did choose them on purpose – their autumnal butteriness and soft bite is the only interruption I want in this otherwise formless bowl of rice.

Back to where I started on this post, I would like to reiterate that the Visa Wellington on a Plate launch was super cool! I ate lots of gin and elderflower jelly and drank many chardonnays (I once had a dream about chardonnay where it was described as “buttery and rowdy” and I swear that’s how all chardonnays have presented themselves to me since) and hung out with cool people and hooned much fernet and champagne at the extremely great Noble Rot wine bar launch afterwards. Never mind moderation, I’m about spending three weeks in bed followed by sand-blasting myself with glamour and fanciness for 24 hours. Better than any fancy event this week however was the fact that I finally saw a capybara IRL after being fans of them for many years, and five years on from my tragic (tragic, I tell you!) and fruitless wait at the Berlin Zoo to try and see them. There are FOUR of them at the Wellington Zoo direct from Paris – how sophisticated – and seeing their beautifully regal, yet utterly dingus-y faces today made five-years-ago me feel finally at peace.

So calm. Like a risotto.

PS: If you enjoyed reading about this risotto and want to immerse yourself in the damn stuff, please consider considering this Oven-baked Risotto and this Pea Risotto that I’ve also blogged about here.

title from: Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles, although for many years I genuinely believed my dad wrote this song because his band did a cover of it and so my first introduction to it was hearing them play it during their Sunday band practices.

music lately:

Johnny Cash, I Hung My Head. It has the most phenomenally beautiful – and immediate – building of piano chords, which are typical of many of the songs in his later collections of covers. (Kudos to one of the user comments on the Youtube video: “how are like all his songs about playing with guns going wrong”)

The Cribs, Mirror Kissers. Whatchu know about 2006 nostalgia?

Joan Osborne, Right Hand Man. This song goes OFF and I don’t know how that What if God Was One of Us song became her only real big hit when this one is so big and hitty.

next time: I made a big lunch for my two best friends and I’m gonna blog about it!

 

turn the music up way too loud, charge the pizza to the house

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I have kind of a weird relationship with time, in that I’m never particularly relaxed and I always feel like whatever time I have is running out on me and that’s all I can focus on. I think a lot of this has to do with my writing and trying to make enough space to do that and freaking out when I fall asleep instead, but I was like this before I was writing and even if I abandoned this blog today I’d probably still end up feeling the same way. Does anyone else get that? Like if you wake up at 9am you’re all like “well it’s 9am, the day is practically over and I have achieved nothing” (don’t even get me started on the horror of waking up at 11am.) I mean, I remember thinking this as a child. There wasn’t even any internet then, what was I worried about not being on top of? Anyway, on Monday – one of my days off – I slept till 3pm because I physically could not stop going to sleep, and uh, this was kind of horrifying to me. It’s like…it’s not just writing I have to do. I can’t remember when I last did laundry! My room has not been tidied in forever which is in itself a source of stress! Six weeks ago I was supposed to start doing twenty minutes of yoga per day! I need to cook myself something so I actually have something to blog about even though I’m too tired to write! And it’s 3pm which means it’s basically tomorrow! Compounding to all this horror is the fact that it’s suddenly the following Monday and I’m in the exact same position.

Last Monday, upon waking, I somehow managed to briefly get my act together in a “I suspect there are worse problems out there than this you dingus” kind of way to make myself this scone pizza as a calming snack. One week later I’m finally spatula-ing together the time to write about it. This recipe is so easy and has a pleasing mix of so many comforting foods – not just the obvious two, scone and pizza, it also gives off cheese toastie and pie vibes. It is all good things. It is scone pizza.

I adapted it from a recipe in my OWN COOKBOOK (yes, I know, and no, you can’t buy a copy because every last one was sold and Penguin never republished it which means it’s a cult underground collectors item, not a failure) because why not be inspired by yourself? The recipe in my cookbook involves a simmered zucchini and tomato sauce to go on top, from a book of recipe clippings belonging to my paternal grandmother. But this time around I had a couple of tomatoes in the fridge and half a block of cheese and immediately knew I wanted both in my mouth together at an elevated temperature. Melted cheese is 100% my idea of a good time.

What you end up with is a thick, slightly crunchy and soft base, with the scorched sweetness of the magma-hot tomatoes and a hefty layer of melted cheese made moderately more elegant in a cacio-e-pepe kind of way by a grind of fresh pepper. I have until extremely recently hated black pepper, as it tasted like mouth-burning dust and nothing more, but I’ve come to appreciate its subtle sweetness and what it adds to a dish. Either that or my tastebuds are dying as I’m aging and this is my attempt at trying to feel something real. Little from column A, little from column B?

scone pizza

adapted from a recipe from my cookbook, Hungry and Frozen: The Cookbook.

200g plain flour (this is roughly two hastily-scooped cups full, if you don’t have scales) (which I don’t currently)
one teaspoon baking powder
25g melted butter
125g (half a cup) thick, plain yoghurt
pinch of salt
two tomatoes
as much grated cheese as you like
cracked pepper

Set your oven to 200C/400F and place a sheet of baking paper on a baking tray.

Briefly mix the flour, baking powder, butter, yoghurt and salt together in a bowl. Add a little bit more yoghurt if it’s way too floury. Squish it together gently with your hands to form a soft ball. Tip it onto the baking tray and softly roll it out to form a rough circle of a couple of centimetres. Brush it with a little extra melted butter if you like – I didn’t do this myself but it has just occurred to me now that it would be a good idea, probably.

Thickly slice the tomatoes and arrange them on top of the scone base. Grate over as much cheese as you like, and then some. Bake for around 20 minutes, till the cheese is bubbling and the tomatoes are a bit scorched and softened. Grind over some pepper.

Allow it to cool for a minute and then slice into four and hoon the lot.

Note: I, for some reason, had like two tablespoons of yoghurt left in the bottom of a container so just made up the remaining amount with milk and this worked perfectly. Consider yourself permitted to do something similar if you find yourself in this position.

As with all food, it tastes excellent in bed. It’s one thing to hang out in bed heaps and consume your main meal of the day in there, but sleep? In your bed? How troublingly self-indulgent.

By the way, I am trying to work on this strange thing I have with time, because it benefits absolutely no-one if I’m stressing constantly about it. I just don’t know how to. So far my only technique is being frustrated at myself for being stressed, followed by frustration at myself for my frustration at myself. Also trying to actually let myself sleep if I need it without being too angry about it.

Without being too on the nose, I have, uh, bought myself some thyme. This was inspired by my Stargrazing horoscope for May in Lucky Peach magazine:

“This season, for you, is about translating jittery emotions into healthy, productive action. Yer an original, Aries, so I’m into forking over an idea you can truly make your own: This is a completely excellent time to plant yourself a little herb garden with whatever you like in it (…) That dualism—embarking on a project that’s all yours and has tangible, visible rewards (LI’L PLANTS!), while also slow ride, taking it easy—is perfect for you, jitterbug. Pick up a few cheapo herb plants of your choosing. Care for them diligently, as a way of transmuting the care you’re unsure of giving yourself right now. See this attention and love as the same thing.”

I mean, does that resonate or what. Thyme is one of my very favourite herbs and is also very pretty, with its gently tangled mass of tiny leaves, and I am so going to nurture this lil plant, and I guess myself as well. My first order of business: acknowledging that I’m actually asleep right now as I type this, and to let myself have a nap.

title from: Blink 182, Reckless Abandonment

music lately:

I Will Never Leave You, from the very short-lived 1996 musical Side Show. This showcases the spectacular voices of Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner, and is one of those songs that’s all like, ugh we have to get this stupid first verse out of the way so we can get to the AMAZING BELTING IN THE CODA and the payoff is thoroughly worth it.

Digital Versicolour, Glass Candy. This song is on the playlist at work and every time it comes on I’m like “woooooo!” I know, what fascinating provenance. It’s just very mellow and hypnotic and good.

Sean Paul, Like Glue. I heard this song on loop five times in a row the other day and it was honestly the ideal way to consume this song. It’s the sound of a warm evening in summer, without any of the hassle of having to be overheated.
 
next time: my friend Rose gave me some old Seventeen magazines that used to belong to her mum and the recipes in them are so great and I seriously want to try one.

 

everyone is waiting, waiting on you and you’ve got thyme

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A Season For Peaches, a novel by Henri Michel

In case you are all, “damn that Laura is the epitome of perfection I really love what she does I just wish she’d sometimes display some kind of minor flaw to humanise her more” – and I have zero reason to believe this isn’t what people are thinking all the time – then have I got a relatable and relatively dull anecdote for you about how I made a terrible dinner.

On Monday I was exceptionally tired and not really thinking and as a result, I made the most aggressively bland, horrible pasta of my life, and the more I tried to fix it the worse it got. I started off wanting to make some kind of dairy-free cauliflower sauce, where you puree an entire head of cooked cauliflower and it turns out all creamy and delicious. Why? Honestly, I don’t know, but I’ve been reading too much pinterest but also if I can effortlessly conjure up a dope vegan pasta bake then that’s a pleasing outcome. However it turned into the equivalent of mashed potato and refused to puree and also tasted of absolutely nothing so in a panicked state I … upended an entire bottle of cream into it. It still wouldn’t liquefy, so with mounting panic I mixed this mashed potato-esque stuff into cooked rigatoni along with some eggplant I’d roasted, so it was like…this weird billowy mass studded with the occasional piece of eggplant. How did I think this was going to turn into an awesome pasta bake? I topped it with parsley. That made it even less good. I shoved it in the oven to grill, which, as there was nothing in it to melt, just made it more warm and didn’t change it miraculously on the cellular level that I’d been hoping for.

It might sound “insufferable” or like “not a real problem” or “good god shut up Laura” but like I said, I was super tired and making dinner is a thing I’m always good at when all else crumbles around me and honestly, just the waste of money and ingredients was incredibly disheartening. However, I did manage to avoid panic-eating the lot, and dealt with it by going for a nap and searching youtube for ASMR videos specifically featuring someone telling you repeatedly in a very gentle voice that you’re actually a good cook. (A later cursory prod of the abandoned pasta bake revealed that it had not improved with time but I made myself eat some anyway, because I was both hungry and miserably stubborn about the aforementioned waste of money and ingredients.)

This is all completely unimportant and not terribly interesting, it’s just every time I do something stupid I feel pathologically compelled to tell the entire internet about it. An incident of totally sucking shared is an incident of totally sucking halved, I say.

Having since made a few things that mercifully turned out deliciously, I am safely back in the mindset that I love cooking and it loves me. For example, these honey and thyme roasted peaches. I went to brunch at Flight Coffee Hangar with one of my dearest friends Charlotte for her birthday and had brioche covered in vanilla mascarpone and said peaches. (It’s one of those places where the menu is so good that it’s actually inconvenient, because I can never choose what to get.) I was so taken with my brunch that I bought peaches on the way home and immediately tried to recreate what they’d done.

I don’t know how similar my method is to what the cafe does, but it worked incredibly well for me. Before you even get to taste them, the slowly roasting peaches fill your house with their heady perfume, so rich and intoxicating that you want to float through the air with hearts for eyes like some kind of amorous cartoon animal from a bygone era.

There’s something oddly lovely and lazily sensual about drizzling sticky, slow-moving honey over soft freshly cut peaches before scattering them with fragrant herbs, like you have no cares in the world apart from getting weirdly skittish over ripe stone fruit.

Cooked, they have this floral depth of sweetness from the slick of honey and the caramelising heat of the oven, and the smoky herbal thyme cuts through this and makes it more than just merely sugary. With very little effort suddenly you have yourself this gorgeous quantity of fruit that you can tuck around scoops of ice cream, stir through muesli, arrange on top of a cake, or indeed, add to toasted brioche with mascarpone as they did at the cafe.

honey thyme roasted peaches

a recipe by myself, but inspired directly by my brunch at Flight Coffee Hangar

four large ripe peaches
two teaspoons runny honey
one teaspoon olive oil – I guess you could leave it out but I feel it adds some fruity richness and will put a shine on your coat
several sprigs of fresh thyme

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Roughly slice the peaches into quarters or thirds or whatever and lay them on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Drizzle over the honey and the olive oil, then scatter over most of the thyme leaves, and just throw the remaining sprigs on top.

Roast for twenty minutes, then turn the oven off and leave the peaches in there while it cools, for about an hour. Use how you please, and throw any remainders into a jar and keep in the fridge.

That afternoon, 100% not sick of peaches yet, I ate them with Nigella’s miso ice cream that I’d made a variation on (by adding shredded coconut and white chocolate) and it was an incredible combination, the kind of thing that makes you feel so incredibly grown up that you end up going full circle and feeling childish again because you feel so grown up; then this morning I added them to some intensely healthy chia seed muesli to which they brought depth and sweetness. I still have half a jar left, I may just eat them straight from it with a fork but I like the idea of deploying them savoury-ly, perhaps in some tagine-type dish or to accompany crispy, slow-cooked pork belly. What I’m saying is, you will not regret making these. If you avoid honey for whatever reason, I do believe maple syrup would be an excellent substitution; if you don’t like thyme then that’s a little harder as it’s not as though you could successfully use, like, parsley instead – I’d just leave it out altogether. I adore thyme though and am pretty much forever trying to work it into everything I cook.

Because my friend Charlotte and I are practically twins (that is, we’re very similar personality-wise and we were born only a handful of days apart, one can only dream of having a face as beautiful as hers) her birthday happening means that mine is getting super close. I’m feeling more chill about it than I was a few blog posts ago, I mean…it’s going to happen. It just is. Also I remembered that you get presents and lots of attention, both things that I adore, and I’m frankly curious to see what thirty-year-old me is like. It will possibly involve singing Grown Woman by Beyonce with increasing desperation, but who knows!

title from: You’ve Got Time, the stunning Orange is the New Black theme song by Regina Spektor. We have this cocktail at work that has thyme in it and whenever someone orders it I always get this song in my head, I figured I might as well pass on this gift and curse to you too.

music lately:

Sevendust featuring Skin, Licking Cream. Some nu-metal is oddly timeless, okay? This song is so exhilarating and big and soaring and happy? And honestly it’s impossible to tell who is hotter out of Skin or the Sevendust lead singer LaJon Witherspoon (when Skin sings “crawling down your spine” I’m pretty sure she wins but it’s not actually a competition and I’m just incredibly glad they collaborated on this amazing song.)

Chelsea Jade, Low Brow. This stellar human who I am proud to call a pal has released this gloriously dreamy new tune with a video that’s both beautiful and beautifully silly. “Just hold me closer than you know how to” – ugh it’s so good.

next time: I may well have to make some kind of elaborate pasta bake again to exorcise the demons of the last failed one. Will make sure I’ve slept enough this time.

i got my batches and cookies

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As a kid I actually really wanted to be a fashion designer, and would fill up scrapbooks with drawings of clothes that I wished would exist. For example, one outfit that I invented when I was about 9, that I would totally wear now, is a hooded white velvet minidress with a long zip up the front and hot pink feathers around the edge of the hood. Honestly, like, someone please make me that immediately for a casual daytime look. Somehow fashion design morphed into recipe design, but I still love clothes so, so, so much, and approach them much the same way in which I do food – with my mind on texture and bringing together slightly strange elements with more recognisable and familiar things. Not much makes me happier than fossicking through op shops and vintage shops, allowing time to dissolve like a sachet of colourfree raspberry flavoured Raro juice in a jug of water as I try on garment after garment and imagine how I can incorporate them into my daily costumes.

However! I can talk myself out of buying clothes, no matter how much I need them, like, my shoes will be held together with superglue and have the holes in the soles buffered with beer coasters and I will still be all “uhhhh I probably shouldn’t spend money on these new, excellent value, durable, good-looking replacement shoes, I will just hobble around in these travesties for another year.” When it comes to food though, I go into a damn trance. Just two days ago I went in to the supermarket to get cocoa and buckwheat flour and walked out of the supermarket with a jar of raw organic probiotic sauerkraut (which is, thankfully, SO delicious.) I absentmindedly meandered into Commonsense Organics the other day and came out with seven whole turmeric roots.

they pair well with a rose wine from the local dairy and one’s bed

I’m kind of not really going anywhere with this – it’s just that the reason I was going to buy cocoa and buckwheat flour was because I was going to make the cookies that you see here, and it got me thinking about myself because that’s all I think about, apparently.

These cookies though! I was recently given a copy of Simply Nigella, the new cookbook by my idol Nigella Lawson. I want to make pretty much everything in it but this recipe caught my eye with the inarguable motivating factor of, if I make them then I will have cookies. It also seemed like a nice thing to be able to tell my newish roommate that there are cookies on the bench and they can help themselves to as many as they want – I just like being that person!

The buckwheat flour in these cookies makes them gluten-free, which might be pleasing news to some of you, and also gives it a rather fascinating smoky tone echoed in the rich cocoa and almost throat-burningly dark chocolate. They’re all cakey and melting and punctuated with chunks of chocolate. They look like lumps of coal and are altogether highly compelling wee things; you could make them with regular flour which would make them taste more normal but I like the oddly addictive husky flavour the buckwheat gives. I am lacking in measuring scales and so had to estimate the quantities in cup measures; thus I have written out here the recipe I made since this is the one that worked for me. I accidentally got white sugar instead of the brown sugar requested in her recipe, because my reading comprehension is useless – I’m very sure they’d be even nicer with it though.

smoky triple chocolate buckwheat cookies

from Simply Nigella, altered slightly to accommodate for things like cup measures and the fact that a block of chocolate here is 250g and I couldn’t be bothered buying an extra 20g chocolate to make up her specified quantities.

125g melted dark chocolate
125g dark chocolate, roughly chopped (or the same amount of buttons/chips etc)
60g soft butter
half a cup sugar
two fridge-cold eggs
one cup buckwheat flour
quarter of a cup of cocoa
half a teaspoon baking soda
a good pinch of sea salt

set your oven to 180C/350F and line a baking tray with paper (or in my case, realise you have no baking paper so just hope for the best.)

Beat the butter and sugar together with a wooden spoon or whatever, until it’s quite light and fluffy. Briskly beat in the melted chocolate – make sure you let it sit for a minute or two so it’s not boiling hot before you tip it in – and then beat in the eggs quickly. It will look far too liquid at this point but stir in the flour, cocoa, baking soda and finally the remaining chocolate bits and it will suddenly turn into a thick cookie dough.

Take heaped spoonfuls of the dough and drop them onto the baking tray – Nigella suggests leaving 6cm space between them but they don’t spread that much – and bake for 8-10 minutes. Remove them from the oven and leave them to sit on the tray for five minutes before carefully transferring them to a plate or rack, then repeat with the remaining dough, which you should put in the fridge while you’re waiting for each batch to cook.

These are so good! I’ve had one in my mouth pretty much the entire time that I’ve been typing this (that is, I’ve eaten several in quick succession, it wasn’t just one cookie) and couldn’t be happier about it. For once I got as many cookies out of the batch as the recipe promised, as the raw dough is honestly not thaaaaat nice – however the grainy density of the buckwheat becomes entirely delicious once it’s all cooked. They’re even better the next day, somehow even more melting and more chocolatey.

All I’ve done lately is work so I have little to report but coincidentally I’m feeling moderately financially chill for the first time in living memory (I have the memory of a goldfish though, but also goldfish are incredibly intelligent and their three-second memory is a total myth so…ha! Okay, I got a bit lost here.) I don’t know how I’m doing so okay as my rent is more expensive than it has ever been but I’m trying really hard at budgeting and freelance hustling and so on; I’ve always identified heavily with grubby uselessness-monger Nick Miller from the TV show New Girl, but as the latest season unfolds it’s nice to see we are growing together.

“they said avocado is extra and I said shh, I know it’s extra. but I want it.” Nick is I and I are Nick.

title from: the siiiiick Lizzo song Batches and Cookies featuring Sophia Eris. Such queens.

music lately:

DZ Deathrays, Blood on My Leather. I spontaneously went to see these guys at Bodega a couple of years ago and they were sooooo good. I love their bratty sound.

Rihanna feat Drake, Work. She released a double video for this and they’re both so dreamy and gorgeous. This song just gets better with every listen: praise Rih.

Stereo Total, I Love You, Ono it starts off disguised as an irritating song but suddenly the more you listen the more it gets stupidly endearing.

next time: maybe something more from Simply Nigella, this book is a stunnerrrrrr.

 

you got the peaches, i’ve got the cream, sweet to taste, saccharine

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moving house = new background surfaces in photos on the blog
No matter how many times I dramatically fall over and hit every surface on the way down, one thing I can count on is how I almost always land on my feet one way or another. Alas, I’m only talking metaphorically here, because when it comes to literal fallings-over my kneecaps have a 100% hit rate with the ground.  
By which I mean: oh wow I finally, finally, found an apartment! I knew I would, and that the right place would appear at the 11th hour, but the lead-up to that was still such a stressful overwhelming time (and, as I noted in a previous blog post, it was also a heinously sweaty time schlepping about town to flat viewings.) My new place is everything I want though: It’s up high, it’s in the middle of the city, it has those exposed-brick-New-York-Loft vibes that I just can’t quit (seriously: if you were all, “Laura you can live in this perfectly lovely villa or you can hold this one singular brick in your right hand and sit in a ravine” there is a ludicrously high chance that I’d take the brick) it has an elevator out of a noir film about murder, there’s excellent light for food photography, and I’ve only got one other flatmate and they seem very cool and nice. I’m so happy! I really am! Like, so damn content! What is this feeling, so sudden and new? 
The actual moving process was hellishly exhausting (I acknowledge that I got movers in to do most of the legwork but there was definitely a point while packing where I was like what if I just lie down and shut my eyes eternally and let my possessions eat me alive) but now that I’m properly installed in the new place and have, at least, made my bed and hung up my clothes, it does feel like it’s all starting to work out. 

As a moving-in treat I bought myself the new Cuisine – a local food magazine which for years I would collect with religious ferocity. I haven’t picked it up in a while, but there’s nothing like living in a new space to get me all renewed-vigour-y for cooking (obviously not the most practical way to get one’s vigour renewed, however it is what it is.) At first I was slightly aghast that Ray McVinnie is no longer at the helm of the Quick Smart segment, an entertainingly rapidfire list of recipe ideas based around a theme, but I quickly got over that when I saw reliable replacement Ginny Grant’s suggestion for Peach and Mozzarella Panzanella.  I do love a salad where it’s essentially a process of buying five nice ingredients and putting them all on a plate together, and this is an excellent example – really rather removed from the original Tuscan recipe for panzanella, but whatever. It’s the combination of the peaches, all crisp and fragrant and summery, with fresh mozzarella, all aggressively mild like Ned Flanders, which makes this special – crunch and sweetness plus pillowy softness plus the oiled, toasty bread…you may not personally consider salad a thrilling time, but this one: it thrills.  

peach mozzarella panzanella

adapted slightly from a recipe from the January issue of Cuisine magazine. Serves two-ish, but I could eat all of this quite joyfully and only be mildly uncomfortable afterwards. The quantities are kind of vague, please deal with it. 

half a loaf of ciabatta
two crisp, firm peaches (I went for a variety called Elegant Lady literally because of the name)
one tub of bocconcini mozzarella (or one big ball of it, I just find the smaller stuff easier to slice up) 
one punnet of cherry tomatoes (around a cupful I guess? Or 300g? Just like, get some tomatoes.)
a few handfuls of salad leaves of some description
olive oil
red wine vinegar
salt

Set your oven’s grill to high. Slice the bread and then tear the slices into rough cube-type things, and place in an oven dish. Drizzle with plenty of olive oil, and place under the grill till lightly browned. 

Slice the peaches, halve the tomatoes (a pain, I know! But it makes them go further and gets all the tomato juice out) and finally, slice the mozzarella and then tear it into smaller bits. 

Mix all of this together with your salad leaves in a large bowl, then drizzle over more olive oil and around a tablespoon of vinegar. Add plenty of salt and stir again, and leave to sit for about an hour if you can, but even if you just do all the clean up first before eating that should allow some time for all the flavours to start moving.  Feel free to pour over more olive oil and add more salt once you’ve served it – salads can never be too oily or too salty in my opinion. 

I love this table at my new apartment, prepare to see it plenty in the future

This salad really benefits from sitting around for a bit first before you eat it, as the tomato juice and the olive oil soaks in to everything, making the bread deliciously soggy (I know, two words that don’t seem like they should go together) but if you have to eat it all right away I understand.

setting up my wardrobe is my favourite part

things that also benefit from sitting: me, when I’m unpacking 
It has only been two days and already I’m blooming like a flower from living in the centre of town again (also wilting like a flower from the heat! That’s right: I pledge to you, on bended knee, that I will never ever stop complaining about the weather.) It’s just lovely to be able to walk out the door and be immediately in the middle of the city, then to go home again without having to take forever catching expensive busses, it makes everything feel easier and more fun. And I’m just moments from work! I am absolutely going to miss Newtown – my bedroom there was so sweet, and there were countless gregarious neighbourhood cats…but I’m happy to be back here. Less delighted about unpacking, but the promise of my bedroom becoming more and more of a haven is greatly motivating. (She says, immediately launching into another barely-justifiable nap.) 
PS: I can’t be the only one who thinks Peach Mozzarella Panzanella is totally a name you want to check into a hotel with when you’re a famous celebrity trying to travel incognito?
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title from: I mean, it’s a Def Leppard song that has an unparalleled success rate for getting me on the dance floor, but for me Tom Cruise’s appallingly sexy Stacee Jaxx in the Rock of Ages movie does the definitive version. 
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music lately: 
Is there anything worth talking about other than Beyonce’s brand new song Formation? It’s incredible and it’s powerful and she’s incredible and powerful. Watch it, I implore you. 
That said, I am super obsessed (obsessed anew, I should say, since I loved these guys when I was three) with You Got It (The Right Stuff) by New Kids On The Block. Till One Direction came along I fully believe there was no other boy band song that came even close to this one. Those oh-oh-ohhh’s! So good! 
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next time: there’s this coconut-crusted fried eggplant recipe in the Cuisine magazine that has majorly caught my fancy. But also I am planning to make some ice cream! Either way: yay new kitchen! 

now she’s eating chocolate to induce sleep, in a chemical world it’s very, very, very cheap

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It seems completely unfair that so many property leases come to an end in January/February in New Zealand. It’s the middle of summer, and we should all be in the throes of some popsicle-fuelled montage of laughing on the beach, ruefully standing in front of an electric fan, prancing about under sprinkler systems on the front lawn, punting an endless cavalcade of volleyballs into the top-right corner of the camera frame, and, I don’t know, resting icy-cold cans of beer against our foreheads as the sun slowly goes down, letting the condensation run down the side of our faces and drip onto our jorts. 
Instead, thousands of us are staggering about in the humidity going from flat viewing to flat viewing to compete for underwhelming rooms against the forty-five other people at the viewing and wasting the best hours of our lives refreshing the flatmates wanted/for rent pages online. It is so stressful! And then if I even manage to find somewhere to live, I have to pack up all my belongings which is a deadly combination of boring and tiring; then there’s the matter of funneling every last dollar you’ve ever breathed on into the bond for your next flat, then you either have to get charged for moving companies or you have to literally break every bone in your body moving yourself, and then you have to unpack, but also you have to do all the other things you would normally be doing in this time while doing all that, like going to work and brushing your teeth. 
Hoofing a large quantity of white chocolate gingerbread brownies is not going to help with this in the long-term, but it does offer a brief and delicious respite. I recommend it whether or not you’re apartment-hunting, but for those of us in that boat, I really recommend it. 

Let the record state that I think white chocolate is easily the superior chocolate, followed by milk chocolate, then dark chocolate. White chocolate tastes of vanilla seeds, of pure creamery butter, of having a lucid dream that you’re into the air and sinking down upon a thick, fluffy cloud which supports your entire body weight for an uninterrupted meta-nap. Dark chocolate tastes of obligation and charcoal being rubbed against your two front teeth. It’s fantastic to bake with! I just don’t want to eat the stuff en masse.

So with these brownies I took my beloved white chocolate and decided to pair it with ground ginger and brown sugar to create a kind of caramelly, gingerbready vibe. And the warm spiciness of the ginger against the gentle sweetness of the white chocolate is, I’m not gonna sugar coat it for you, an amazing combination. Like, just when you think the sugar is going to blowtorch your teeth into nothingness, the ginger comes in and lifts everything up, and just when it threatens to burn your throat with its intensity the white chocolate and cakiness softens everything.

On top of that these are really, really easy to make. Which, when you’re feeling all fragile, is worth taking into consideration.

white chocolate gingerbread brownies

a recipe by myself

200g butter, melted 
one cup brown sugar – press down to make sure it’s firmly packed in
two eggs
100g white chocolate, roughly chopped (or more! I just ate over half the 250g block that I bought for making these and so was like “i guess this small remaining quantity is what’s going in the recipe”)
one tablespoon ground ginger
one cup plain flour
one teaspoon baking powder
a pinch of salt

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and line your usual brownie/medium-sized rectangular tin with baking paper. 

Mix the melted butter and sugar together, and – making sure the mixture isn’t at all hot at this point – beat in the eggs. Fold in the remaining ingredients, and spatula the lot into the baking tin. 

Bake for 25-30 minutes, until it’s firm and golden on top but still appears to have some below-the-surface squish. Allow it to cool a little and then slice it up. 

I was so delighted by these that after making a batch and leaving it for my flatmates (after inhaling like five pieces at once) I made a second batch to take to work for fun snack times, and even though I overcooked it slightly it was still really, really, really good. White chocolate and ginger, I ship them heartily.

Speaking of really, really, really good, the other thing this week distracting me from the horrors of abode-seeking is that, and it’s really hard to not gasp until I faint while I type this, I made and wrote about a Crush Cake for Peter Gallagher’s O.C character Sandy Cohen on The Toast, and Peter Gallagher himself read it and tweeted me to say thanks! I realised that is actually an incredibly obscure and vague run-on sentence, so let me distill it down to: I adore this celebrity, I wrote about this celebrity, and then this celebrity actually read what I wrote and thanked me for it. WHAT!

Isn’t that just THE MOST, to say THE LEAST? But even if Peter Gallagher hadn’t blessed me with his bestowal of gratitude, I would still have been perfectly content, because writing for The Toast is a majorly excellent achievement for me in itself and I feel like the story I wrote about Peter Gallagher/Sandy Cohen is the best one I’ve done yet.

But also: aaaaaaah!

And also-also: for those of you also schlepping about trying to find somewhere to live instead of living your truth this summer, kia kaha but…please don’t take the room I want.
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title from: Blur, Chemical World, from their 93 album Modern Life is Rubbish. Damon Albarn is frolicking about in a field in the video and there is a bunny present and just like, get out of here Damon Albarn. And take your beautiful face with you. 
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music lately: 

DNCE, Cake By The Ocean. Who knew that a former Jonas Brother singing the aggressively jaunty chorus refrain of “Cake! By! The! Ocean!” would skewer my heart like this? I seriously can’t stop listening to this song and even though I’m not sure if it’s even that good I can’t possibly bring myself to care. (Oh wait, it’s definitely amazing.)

Lisa Stansfield, All Around The World. Such a damn classic and one of the very best bridges in songwriting history.
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next time: I finally, finally bought another SD card for my lovely camera so can start using it for food photography again instead of using my phone. Knowing my luck I’ve probably completely forgotten how to use it, but I’m looking forward to reacquainting myself.