Category: Vegetarian

this is my idea of fun

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Halloumi fries: they’re not just A Thing, they’re really something.
For all that I go on at length, such length, about how my brain can make my life difficult, occasionally it serves up an idea of distinct majesty that almost makes everything else worth it. Most recently: it was a frustrating, and frustratingly typical sleepless night when I had the idea for halloumi fries. What if you slice halloumi into thin rectangles, dust them with flour and deep-fry them? Would they be crunchy on the outside and melting on the inside with the stability of fries and the yielding salty tumescence of cheese? Or would they dissolve into puddles the instant they hit the hot pan, melting messily everywhere and absorbing half the oil and being generally horrific, in terms of taste, texture and money squandered?
Happily – rapturously, in fact, mere happiness doesn’t quite convey the um, rapture of the situation: it worked. I’m pretty used to things going disastrously wrong in the kitchen. Sometimes ingredients just don’t do what I assume of them, sometimes I am very clumsy, sometimes an idea is misguided or, like athletics and mathematics and haircuts, simply better done by a professional that isn’t me.
But these were perfect. Really, really, sorta bafflingly exceptional. Given the propensity for things to go wrong – halloumi is expensive, hot oil is intimidating, I am me, I couldn’t believe how breathtakingly straightforward the path to deliciousness was.

Simply coating these in flour before frying makes them so spontaneous-fist-in-the-air crisp and crunchy, yet the insides still have that soft, buttery halloumi bulginess. They are delicious, so delicious that you will eat them with brows furrowed in wonderment at how you’ve hit the one of the (hopefully many) high points of your very own existence.

(I don’t know, I kinda like this recipe, I guess.)

an unattractive but necessarily informative picture for you of the cheese frying. So now you know that this is what the cheese looks like when it’s frying. 
 
They are sufficiently sublime on their own, but if you want some kind of accompaniment, I’d suggest a tomato relish of some form, or a mix of wholegrain mustard and mayonnaise, or maybe aioli if you’re able to handle the rich-rich-rich of it all, or perhaps even just a dish of balsamic vinegar, which takes me back to pairing fish and chips with vinegar as a child.
 
halloumi fries
 
a recipe by myself. I considered adding chili powder or paprika to the flour but minimal is best here, to show off the excellence of the cheese and the frying process. My one main caution here is make sure you use a brand of halloumi that you know is firm and holds its shape. Some brands are more melty than others. I used Axelos since it was all the no-good supermarket had, and it worked fantastically.
 
serves two, but only if you really like the person and can manage to huffily, begrudgingly sacrifice some of these fries to them (I’m such a dick, I know.) 
 

1 block – 200g or so – of halloumi
1/2 cup plain flour (I initially wanted to use polenta but I only had flour, so: flour.) 
Plain oil, such as rice bran or grapeseed, for frying

Slice the halloumi into relatively even rectangles. I can’t tell whether I like these better as slightly wider, flatter shapes or thinner, more french-fry esque, so tend to do a bit of both. Any bits that crumble or fall off can still be used as a mid-frying snack for yourself. 

Heat up around an inch and a half of oil in a saucepan – really, that’s all you need – using a little offcut of halloumi to work out when it’s ready to go – put it in the pan and there should be rapid bubbles moving around it. Then eat it, of course.  

Place the flour on a plate and put about half the halloumi on it, turning over each slice to thoroughly coat it. Spoon each slice carefully into the pan – they might slowly float towards each other but they shouldn’t stick or anything. Also I just used a regular metal serving spoon for this, tongs might be easier but I didn’t want to dent or break the cheese slices. Allow the oil to bubble away and turn the slices over after a minute or so, once they’re golden brown on the underside (obviously you will have to check this, I don’t expect you to just know somehow.) Remove with the spoon to a plate with a couple of pieces of paper towel on it, and continue with the rest of the halloumi. The second batch tends to cook a lot faster, because the oil has really hit its stride in terms of being blastingly hot. 

Seriously. Thanks, brain. When I was eating these, I thought “this might actually be the most significant and valuable discovery of 2013“. I think I was being pretty sincere, too. Which is a little concerning. But you eat these, and then try telling me I’m exaggerating. Presuming you both like and can eat cheese in the first place, of course. I know hybrid foods – the cronut, the…um, cronut, it’s all I can think of right now – can be both overwrought and overdone till they’ve lost all sense of context and of being an actual food. These may speak of gimmick and wilful excess, neither of which I really have a problem with, but I promise you, in a fairly confident and calm manner, that these are simply incredibly good.

Also maybe some kind of potential phenomenon, if only in my brain. Which is not such a bad place all the time, after all.

Also: I finished my latest knitting project, a hooded cape. I am so proud of myself about this – it’s a large garment, it involved hours of stitching, I learned so many new moves, and…now I have a witchy cape which is hugely warm but also practical but also makes me feel a bit like Little Edie Beale in Grey Gardens. Not that she had an easy life, but she sure knew how to dress cunningly.
Finally, I had a lovely, super-fun interview about my cookbook in Canta, the Canterbury Uni student magazine. You can see a pdf of it here, and I’m on page fourteen. Yay interviews, I love them!
Finally-finally, I am still trying to organise an Auckland launch party for the cookbook so if you have any perspicacious thoughts regarding that, get in touch.

title via: Lana Del Rey, Video Games. She knows a thing or two about a thing or two. 
music lately:

Little Mix, Move. If you liked Girls Aloud’s Biology, that kind of twenty-two-pop-songs-whisked-into-one sound, then this should appeal.

Kanye West, Mercy. I love Kanye more every time he does something. Literally, almost anything he does, I’m like “yeah, Kanye!”

we’d roll and fall in the green

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Today has been a bit of a dick, between one thing and another. I took a sleeping pill last night in the hopes that I’d force myself into actually sleeping. It worked, but then I was like a forlorn jellyfish the rest of the day, somnambulant and dopey and fractious and essentially undoing all the good work I had done by having a good night’s sleep. And I currently feel queasy, although I can’t tell if it’s because of the dinner I just made or something else. 
But, as Dave from Happy Endings would say, let’s back up. (PS: Max and Jane are my favourites. Also Brad and Alex. And Penny. Just in case you thought Dave was my favourite.)
Yesterday was pretty wonderful. I woke up just before 6am, lightly hungover from a gathering the night before for dear friend Kate’s birthday. This early start was for a skype date with Ange, erstwhile flatmate and forever friend, who now lives in London. Also because I can’t help waking up hilariously early on the weekend. It all started because Ange and I were emotionally snapchatting about our feelings about Top of the Lake and wanted to discuss them in a less rudimentary fashion, and ended with a “huh, we should probably Skype more often since it’s really convenient and stuff.”
We had brunch with Kate and Jason, which included an excellently bitter Campari and grapefruit juice. This turned into coffee where we ran into other friends, which turned into record shopping, which turned into ice cream sundaes with fixings leftover from the party the night before, which turned into beers at the pub around the corner. We saw a cute dog, we parted ways, and Tim and I went home to play candy crush and knit (respectively) and watch West Wing. And all I really felt like was eating greens, so I made us this.
Just greens on greens on greens, with some butter and lime juice and sesame seeds to make it more of a meal and less of a pile of stuff that happens to be technically edible. I am a firm believer in just eating what you feel like eating at any given moment, without guiltily focussing on whatever the properties of the food are (admittedly it was only roughly last year that I reached this calm conclusion) and so if I feel like eating a dinner composed largely of bits of plant, then that’s what I do. Of course, I could take a hell of a lot better care of myself on a day-to-day basis (my lunch today was basically just coffee and fruit burst lollies, which was down to apathy and stuff rather than actually wanting it) but it’s nice when what you feel like, and what you have, and what you’re able to make, are all the same thing. In this case, I happened to have a few vegetable-y bits and pieces getting wearily limp in the fridge, and they all benefited from this stirfry-steam-cover-in-butter method. 

greens with sesame lime butter

A recipe by myself. This mix of greens is a good one, but use what you have – beans, courgettes, etc – in the quantities of your choosing. 

broccoli, about half a head thereof
bok choi or pak choi, a bunch
a large handful of baby spinach leaves, or larger spinach leaves, chopped
2 teaspoons sesame oil
25g butter
1 teaspoon kecap manis or soy sauce
1 lime
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
1/3 cup cashew nuts

Wash the broccoli and bok choi leaves. Heat up a teaspoon of the sesame oil in a large pan, then throw in the broccoli and bok choi and stir around for a little bit to coat in the oil, then tip in 1/4 cup water and put a lid on the pan, so the water can bubble up and quickly steam everything. Once the water is evaporated, or thereabouts, and the vegetables have softened a little but are still bright green, remove the lid and stir in the spinach. Then remove all of that to a serving dish. Finally, melt the butter in the same pan, stir in the kecap manis, juice and zest of the lime, sesame seeds and cashew nuts. Allow to bubble away until the sesame seeds have browned slightly, then remove from the heat and tip onto the vegetables. Either stir through or take it to the dining table and make everyone wait while you photograph it, because you’re a highly strung food blogger.

Broccoli is already a little nutty and sweet, so adding sesame oil and sweet kecap manis only but embiggens everything good about it already. Astringent pak choi and fast-wilting, metallic spinach are helped by the rich butter and crunchy seeds and cashews, and the lime simply brightens everything up with its citrus intensity. It’s very simple and plain, but not to the point of nondescript, where you forget that you’ve eaten immediately after you put your fork down. Nope, this is delicious stuff. And a terrific end to my Sunday.

And then today happened and undid all the good work of yesterday. But I have high hopes for tomorrow, even if Tuesdays are often the worst. If nothing else, there is more knitting (my current project: a black hooded cape) and reading (have finished NW by Zadie Smith, am halfway through Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, am upping my weights at the gym so I can pick up The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton) and more Orphan Black to watch, and I have a list of recommendations of other sleeping pills that won’t make me feel like a baffled sock the next day.

PS…I still have a cookbook! It’s still strange and exciting and amazing and a lot to take on! If you like, you can listen to a very fun interview I did with Charlotte Ryan at Kiwi FM, where I got to pick some songs as well. I started off making a consciously careful, everything-rests-on-this list of tunes to play, but luckily ended up going with whatever I felt like at the time. What were the songs? You’ll have to listen to the interview! Or just ask me, I’m a total pushover.
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Title via: Wuthering Heights, a very important song by Kate Bush. If I had a dollar for every high kick I’ve done to this song, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting a good night’s sleep for work tomorrow, that’s for sure.
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Music lately: 

Dear Time’s Waste, These Words Stick Me To You. Dreamy.

ASAP Rocky, Problems. Effective, and effectively stuck in my brain.

Had the house to myself for most of Saturday, so naturally played some crowd-unpleasing Broadway and danced out my feelings, or at least some of them. Did some particularly bold pirouettes and leaps to Age of Aquarius from Hair and Heaven Help My Heart from Chess. (musicals with an arbitrary noun for a name, huh?)
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Next time: Whatever I feel like, evidently. 

we like lovin’ yeah, and the wine we share

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A week and a bit into the cookbook author life, and I’m still very, very much at the pinch-me stage. If you’re new to this blog, hello! Get ready to co-wallow in all my feelings and cake batter.

Margaret Atwood probably has absolutely no knowledge of this. But still! But still. But still!

As Tim will tell you (or “my partner Tim” as it rather hilariously refers to him in my cookbook every single time, a bit like how the Baby-sitters Club books would tell you about all sitters’ family histories in chapter two of every last book on the offchance you were picking one up for the first time and just had to know whose stepmom was whose) and in fact as I will tell you right now, and not for the first time, I am a cool mix of wildly insecure and wildly over-secure. So I veer between reading my cookbook and saying “Tim, I’m such an amazing writer, how do you cope with it?” and being numb of brain and in a crumply heap in bed and requiring constant bolstering just to lift my head up for reasons I can’t even quite work out. Or simply feeling like this will in fact all be like the bit in the Princess Bride where – spoiler – Princess Buttercup is presented to the people but then the old woman comes out yelling “Boooooooo” and saying she’s princess of nothing. Luckily nothing specifically like that has happened. Or even vaguely similar to that. Yet?

But seriously, seeing my name there with Margaret Atwood’s on a whiteboard (“above her!” said someone. “Near her whatsoever!” I replied) filled me with so many feelings that I hardly knew what to do with myself. On the one hand: of course. On the other hand: how did I manage to fool everyone into letting that happen?

Speaking of such moments, the book launch party at Unity Books was completely wonderful, almost unbearably so – I wanted to claw back the time as it was racing past, just to make the whole thing not move so quickly. It felt almost sick, I was so happy, which is a strange way of putting it but it’s like all the emotions in me created a power surge that left me a bit light-headed. There was a great big crowd and so many lovely friends and cool people and Julie Clark of Floriditas launched it with a speech full of nice things about me. And then they announced my name and I stepped up to the mic and everyone cheered! Which is of course, fairly obvious at my own book launch, but wow, as Irene Cara sang: what a feeling. I am a cookbook author. A real one. And I can tell you one thing I’m certain and entirely secure of: I gave a terrific speech. Look, I just really love giving speeches.

A long line of people genuinely wanted their book signed, which was incomprehensibly exciting. Also, I was reminded of how changeable and hopeless my handwriting is. It’s…creative?

Being the heedless neophyte that I am, I forgot to organise any photos to be taken and didn’t get one single damn selfie the entire night. Despite my careful “I’m an auuuthorrr” outfit of dramatic black Kowtow sack dress and enormous witch hair. (Admittedly, my hair was in a very strange headspace – ha – that night, insisting on being fluffier than a Persian cat, but in the end I think it worked. Not sure why I’m compelled to point this out.) I also forgot to enlist Tim or anyone to video my speech for posterity/family/etc and feel a bit foolish about that. Now all I have are these stupid awesome memories. Unity Books did, however, take a few snaps on the night for their sweet write-up. Unity Books is one of my favourite places in Wellington, nay, the earth, and it was marvelous to be able to get all launched there.

So, the cookbook, huh? Last night I made my Chocolate Red Wine Cake from it, which – and maybe I am just saying this because it’s my own recipe from my own book, but I’m pretty sure it’s also the truth – is a simple, amazing, reliable chocolate cake that tastes brilliant. Comfortingly slabby in size, dense without being too rich, cocoa-dark without being dry, and the warm rush of red wine helps emphasise everything good about the chocolate without tasting too much of sediment or tannin.


Still getting used to the stove at our flat. But I also rather like the ominous, craggy slash that appeared in the top of this cake, most likely because the heat was up too high (it’s really hard to tell on the dials of this unfriendly oven.)

I probably said it best in the book itself, so while I usually rewrite all recipes in my own words, it would be a bit pointless to do it here, yes? So, in my own words:

red wine chocolate cake

recipe from my own cookbook, Hungry and Frozen.

Red wine and chocolate always make sense together, never more so in this sophisticated, yet very plain cake – tall, proud, gleaming with glossy ganache. The red wine is absolutely present, though not overpowering – its oaky darkness going beautifully with the bitterness of the chocolate and cocoa. You don’t have to use your best red here – the sugar and butter rounds out any rough, tannin-heavy aspects that might not be so pleasant by the glassful. Nevertheless, make sure it’s actually drinkable. It doesn’t have to be pinot noir, either – really, as long as it’s red, it should do the trick. 

200g dark chocolate
200g butter
1 cup pinot noir
70g good cocoa
250g sugar
3 eggs
250g flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

200g dark chocolate, chopped roughly
½ cup cream

Set your oven to 180 C, and line the base of a 23cm springform caketin.

Roughly chop the chocolate and butter and slowly melt them together with the red wine in a pan over a medium heat. It’ll look like an unholy mess but it will come together. Allow to cool slightly, then whisk in the rest of the ingredients.

Scrape this liquidy batter into the caketin and bake for an hour, but check after 45 minutes. Once it has cooled, pour the cream into a pan and heat till just below boiling point. Remove from the heat, and stir in the chocolate till it melts to form a thick ganache. Pour over the cake. 

Speaking of things that are better in the book, the photo of the cake in there is so much better than mine that it’s laughable. Not least because the cake in the book was photographed in natural light, whereas mine above was photographed at night in a dimly lit room because two of our bulbs have blown and both of them are annoyingly particular and require hunting round a shop inevitably called “Mr Light Bulb” while you wonder how a shop can survive solely dedicated to said light bulbs, then see the price on the ones you need to replace. Also my cookbook photographers (and friends) Kim and Jason are spectacular.

My friend Kim, who took many of the photos in the cookbook, did a gorgeous blog post of some of the photoshoot outtakes (which are themselves gorgeous, despite not making it into the book), in case you’re a little curious about this cookbook but unconvinced by this blog post alone (which would be…slightly worrying, truth be told.)

I have to admit, I’m looking forward to things returning to normal now. Lies. I want things to get less and less normal. And I was woefully insufferable the day after the launch party because I hate things being over and get bad post-thing comedown. The publicity for the cookbook has been a lot of fun (and if you feel like you’ve been left out from hearing my schtick then get in touch, I love publicity) and yesterday I got to appear on Radio New Zealand with the excellent Kathryn Ryan, which was a real trip. Of course, in a practical sense, radio does need nonstop content. But I love RNZ and it felt like I’d really hit the big time, being able to appear on there. If you want to listen to my interview, why, you can do that here!

Finally it inevitably behooves me to say the following: if you want to buy my book, and your local shop doesn’t stock it (and I would like to add: hurrah for supporting local bookshops) there are some options for you. Unity Books, the wondrous shop where I had my launch, can ship the book anywhere in New Zealand or worldwide if you ask them nicely. It’s also available at Fishpond and Mighty Ape, so: choices ahoy!
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Title via: Gomez, Whipping Piccadilly. As a commenter on songmeanings.com said…actually you should just read the whole comment, it’s a bit unintentionally hilarious. Which is better than being intentionally hilarious and failing at it. Oh, and I really like this song.
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Music lately:

David Dallas, Runnin‘. oh damn this song is good. Also it was fun to then listen to New World In My View by King Britt, which it samples, and then Sister Gertrude Morgan’s I Got The New World In My View, which that samples. Amazing beats, all.

Wu-Tang Clan, I Can’t Go To Sleep. The title speaks the truth.

The time has come, the walrus said, to lie on the floor and listen to Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart by Julee Cruise over and over and over again. Twin Peaks always gets me with its dreaminess.
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Next time: whatever it ends up being, one of these days I will make and photograph something during the day on the weekend so I don’t have to be so balefully apologetic about these badly-lit shots. 

unlimited, my future is unlimited

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This is a strange and pretty wonderful day, but it’s also just another day.

I mean: my cookbook is released today! I spent all of last night in a flux (not a flux capacitator, I wish, 80s Michael J Fox on whom I still crush, call me!) of feelings, from the obvious excited to the also obvious terribly nervous, but generally settling on a strange blank overwhelmed kind of place. I’m very hard on myself, and I’ve wanted this so much, for so long, with every bit of energy I have, and it’s finally happening. But then it’s also just another day and I have to go to work and deal with invoices and stuff and so does everyone else. 

Okay, I just deleted an enormously introspective paragraph which included phrases like “running so hard” and “knowing myself” and which not only would’ve put off anyone from reading any further, it also got dangerously close to inadvertently quoting word for word the theme song from Party of Five. So. I will try this again. Forgive me, it’s just…I’ve never had a cookbook before, I’m still working out what it’s like and what you do and so on.

I’ve never had a cookbook before. Until today. Huh. It is a big deal. So, I raise a glass to myself.

A nervous toast, but still.

When I wasn’t taking self-deprecating Instagram selfies last night, I was also making chocolate mousse. Not the powdered mousse from a packet, foodstuff of my childhood, which you whip up with milk to produce a small quantity of dusty-textured, faintly chocolate-flavoured slurry. The mousse here requires some effort and logistics, which I enjoy – much as emphatically basic recipes are wonderful, I also like to make things that involve lots of steps, on account of I really enjoy cooking and tinkering round in the kitchen. So I don’t apologise for this recipe being slightly fiddly, as that’s what chocolate mousse requires. 

I do apologise for the fact that a lightbulb blew and so the only place with any decent light at all was this table, and even then the photos are a bit hopeless. If this insults your eyes so, you could always, um, buy my cookbook which is full of incredibly beautiful photos shot by my friends Kim Laurenson and Jason Aldous, styled by my friend Kate McLeod. That’s right I’m high-fiving myself for that smoothly unclunky segue into self-promotion. And that’s right I’m shaking my head baffledly at self-promotion of self-promotion within a blog all about myself in the first place. What a world we live in! Especially now that the world contains my cookbook. Gotcha again.

 

I kinda made this mousse recipe up, but it doesn’t deviate from any classic interpretation of this French confection. There’s whisked up egg yolks, there’s melted chocolate, there’s cream. I didn’t add the egg whites, as I don’t like the presence of tooooo much raw egg, and I prefer the flavour of cream. I added brown sugar to give a little caramelly darkness to the chocolate, but it honestly didn’t change the flavour outrageously, so you could just use plain white sugar. But whatever you do, it’s important to keep the following in mind:

  • Have all your ingredients ready, so that none of them are sitting around for too long.
  • If you can access free range eggs, they are a lot better here than the other kind – the yolks tend to whip up thickly and easily incorporate the other ingredients, and that spooky raw egg flavour disappears quickly.
  • There will be one point – before you add the cream – where it will all look very unlikely and you might find yourself thinking things like “omg this mousse has failed and no-one will buy my cookbook and here is a slide-show of everything I have ever done wrong in my life”. BUT. Once you add the cream, a little at first and then the whole lot of it, the mixture will mousse-ify and thicken and turn into something completely, soothingly recognisable.

Most important of all, is that it tastes incredibly wonderful. The cocoa bitterness of the dark chocolate is dispersed through all that cream, each making the other more delicious.

Silky, satiny, velvety, it is in fact like every cool fabric there is available. Fortunately not one part of it is wooly, though. There is a slight hint of sugar-grit in it, which I don’t mind, as this simply reminds me that this is very homemade – also there’s nothing I can do about it, so I might as well attempt to embrace it. If you leave it overnight in the fridge however, the sugar dissolves entirely and it all gets even more traditionally mousse-ish and puffy in texture (I just scooted to the fridge to verify this by eating some.) Either way, it’s chocolate delivered to you in a glossy, aerated mass. It’s so good.

chocolate mousse

a recipe by myself. Makes enough for two generous serves, plus some leftover for breakfast the next day. Or: three generous serves. Or: etc.

2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons white sugar
2 tablespoons brown sugar
150g dark chocolate
250ml cream

It’s very useful to have more than one person working on this. You don’t want tooooo much time to pass between each step. That said, I mean, mine was delicious, and I had such time passing.

In a medium sized bowl, whisk the egg yolks for a minute, then add the sugar and continue to whisk until it thickens and aerates into a thick, moussy, pale caramel-coloured substance. Melt the chocolate gently, and stir a little at a time into the egg yolk mix. Make sure you stir it thoroughly, so that any residual heat from the chocolate doesn’t cook the eggs. It will likely thicken into a scarily stiff paste at this point, but the cream will sort it out. Finally, whisk the cream till thickened but not whipped – sort of your ‘good quality thickshake’ type texture – and stir it thoroughly into the chocolate mixture. Add a little cream at first to slacken the chocolate mixture, then add the rest and whisk hard. Divide between your receptacles and allow to sit in the refrigerator for fifteen minutes before eating. 

The thing is, I saw these cups on sale at Supreme Coffee and my first thought was “oh wow I love pink and grey they would look adorable filled with chocolate mousse.” Usually whenever I make something with aesthetics first in mind – that is, will it look cool on the blog? – the recipe obstinately never works out, and I learn a lesson about the importance of friendship or something. But this time the mousse did work out, I suppose partially because wanting chocolate mousse is not simply an aesthetic thing. Chocolate mousse is seriously amazing and delicious. Phew, though.

So now what?

I sit and wait and see what happens, I guess. My cookbook, Hungry and Frozen, is in shops from today and all I can say is that I hope people like it as much as I do. Also that people don’t go on an introspective mental trip through the journey it took them to get there like I do every time I look at the book. You…don’t want that.

One more thing: oh wow, last week was ridiculous. Specifically the time when I dropped my precious, precious cellphone down an eighth-storey lift shaft to its doom, and also on Friday when (with a new and devastatingly expensive cellphone in hand) I experienced a very large earthquake at work. Almost worse than the quake itself was walking down the seventeen flights of stairs at work to get to the ground to try and meet Tim, who’d been evacuated from his work. From the tenth floor down, it was pitch black. Had to use every particle of my body to try and stop myself having a panic attack. Luckily, while the quake was really big, no-one was hurt, and I managed to find Tim fairly quickly. Our solution was to go meet friends at the pub. My body’s solution is to insist it’s feeling earthquakes every five minutes. Sigh. At least I had my phone on me. Am I a bad person for hoping there’s no earthquakes this week to distract from my cookbook? For what it’s worth, I never want any earthquakes to happen ever, so there’s that.

While my book is released today, on Tuesday night is the LAUNCH PARTY. Because I’m a real author! If you happen to be in Wellington that day consider yourself super welcome to come along. (Click the link to see the invite.) (Click here to see it too, just in case.)

Cookbook day! I have a cookbook! Remember when I got the call to say that Penguin were definitely going to publish it? How far I’ve come. I am so, so tired. Hope you like the book. Time for me to eat some chocolate mousse and get ready for work. Because it’s just another day. But it’s also THE day.
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title via: Idina Menzel singing The Wizard and I in the musical Wicked. Sigh, swoon, all the exhalations and faints.
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music lately:

Cat Power, Satisfaction. A foxy, laconic cover of the Rolling Stones song.

The Last Goodbye, The Kills. I keep telling Tim this will be our first dance at our wedding. He’s not quite convinced. 

Marvin Gaye, How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You). Isn’t it, though? Isn’t it?
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Next time: I’ll probably still be talking about this cookbook. Wouldn’t you?

take my hand, we’re off to never never land

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Okay, let’s all check ourselves before we wreck ourselves: my cookbook is officially out next week, for real, in the flesh, etc. On 23 August. And at the end of this blog post there is a giveaway competition thing you can enter to win one of two copies for yourself! (COMPETITION CLOSED) But if you don’t read this entire blog post first – and it’s as long and self-indulgent as ever! – I will know and my ghost will hang around you and sigh heavily and say “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed”. And yeah, in this scenario I have a ghost while still being alive, it’s not entirely improbable, right? At the least, I’d read the heck out of a young adult lit book which had that plot.

The ‘after’ photo – above – of the plum hand pie is so much better than the ‘before’ photo of said hand pie and its little pie pals below, taken the previous evening. On account of I will possibly never work out how to take decent photos at night-time, illuminated only by an environmentally friendly lightbulb, which casts a gloomy yellow haze over everything within a metre of it and makes you squint like you’ve never squinted before, but does save ten percent power or something. Now that I’m done both damning myself and faintly praising myself, the important thing is: these hand pies are delicious and very easy and cute, and probably about to be really ‘in’, too. For what that’s worth. (Now that I’ve said it, hand pies will probably be widely denounced as embarrassingly tacky, which to be honest will probably make me love them even more.)
I made these to be eaten at a spontaneous-ish gathering of friends to watch a movie on our projector on Saturday night (Wet Hot American Summer, if you’re wondering, because as I always say, nothing bad can happen when Wet Hot American Summer is on.) It was a very fun evening, just really relaxed and lovely and silly and hilarious and low-key, the sort of fun you wish you could schedule in on a bi-daily basis, while knowing it’s best to just wait and let it happen accidentally.

 

Above: the morning after. Tim went to swoop in on the lone, remaining pie for a pre-breakfast snack, till I squawked “stop! The light is really great right now and I can salvage the terrible photos I took last night!” Oh, and that’s right, individual bowls for every snack and a commemorative teaspoon for the candy. Sure, we’re really messy, but we also have bizarrely specific high standards, you know?

So when I say hand pies I simply refer to what we might normally call pastries or turnovers or mini-pies. But ‘hand pies’ are deeply intertwined in the the cuisine of the American south, and I cannot resist a little culinary Americana. Or any Americana. As befits a kid who grew up in New Zealand but was obsessed with the Baby-sitters Club books and ensemble movies like Now and Then. Not that hand pies are mentioned in either of those, but let’s not get lost in semantics. My version is not strictly traditional, but what it is, is really very easy and fast and non-stressful. And delicious. I appreciate that there’s a bit of a cost at the outset in buying ready-rolled sheets of pastry, but sometimes it’s just as much looking after yourself to buy something pre-made as it is to make it from scratch.

Seriously, very little actual work gets you these fantastically good, gently spiced pockets of plummy sweetness. The the lemony warmth of the cardamom, the tear-jerkingly comforting scent of cinnamon and the toffee flavour of the brown sugar lends the tart juiciness of the plums some welcome richness. The fruit softens up but doesn’t collapse, and any juice is absorbed into the cornflour to give the filling a little heft. And they’re hand-sized! Who cares if they’re on-trend, as long as they’re on your hand and fast approaching your mouth.

plum, cinnamon and cardamom hand pies

a recipe by myself

2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon cornflour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
2 sheets ready-rolled puff pastry (all-butter if possible, but I know only three supermarkets in the fanciest bits of New Zealand actually sell that, so just deal with the weird fake margarine stuff this time round – you can’t even taste it if you don’t think about it.)
2 plums

Set your oven to 200 C/ 400F and line an oven tray with baking paper.

Mix the brown sugar, cornflour, cinnamon and cardamom together in a small bowl.

Finely dice the two plums, discarding the stones, obviously.

Slice the pastry sheets into nine equal-ish squares, by making three slices downwards and three across. Maths! Finally useful. Spoon half a teaspoon – at most – of the sugar-spice mix into the middle of each square. Spoon a small teaspoon of diced plum over the top of that, then fold the pastry in half, pinching at the edges to form a snugly-filled triangle. Repeat with the remaining squares. You might have some plum or spice-dust leftover. Arrange the triangles on the baking tray (it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out how the triangles could all fit on there evenly, I guess maths is useful, sort of) and bake for about 20 minutes. They’ll be piping hot at first, so let them cool a tiny bit.

Hand pies! Get some.

So, now you want to know how to win a copy of my cookbook, yes? I was going to interweave references to The Monster at the End of This Book throughout the blog post, but am too tired and so will cut straight to the point: I have two copies to give away. This competition is open to people in New Zealand only. Sorry, international admirers! However, I’m also giving away a copy on Instagram which anyone in the world can enter, so if you’re international and want in, follow me on there. (username: hungryandfrozen.) For everyone else…

here’s what you have to do. 

1: Leave a comment on this post telling me a recipe from this blog that you like the look of. It can be from like, last week, I’m not going to give extra points for people who go deep into my archives, but who knows, you might like what you see once you start looking.
2: Be a person from New Zealand.
3: Wait till 10am Sunday morning (sorry for those with short attention spans, myself included) which is when I’ll do a post on here letting people know who won.
4: See if you’re one of the two people who got drawn at random! And either console yourself by baking hand pies, or rejoice in your winning by baking hand pies. And emailing me your address.

May the odds be ever in your favour!

title via: my guitar heroes Metallica with their joyfully sinister song Enter Sandman.

Music lately:

Joan Osborne, Right Hand Man. This song is so excellent and saucy and great. And, um, also has the word ‘hand’ in it, but this is entirely coincidental.

Lillias White, Don’t Rain On My Parade. Brilliant song, oh-damn-that’s-so-true lyrics, and Lillias White’s smashing voice. There are a million different renditions of this song from Funny Girl, and at least a hundred of them, this included, are my favourite.

Next time: I don’t even know, especially as I’m going to be out of the house most nights this week, but we’ll see, we’ll see. Maybe even one of the recipes from my own book. If nothing else the words “my cookbook” will probably appear a lot, accompanied by a palpable air of smugness.

where troubles melt like lemon drops

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The laptop that I’ve written this blog on for several years now is continuing to suffer from a very specific condition that occurs when someone kicks a bottle of beer on top of it. At first I was so happy and baffled that it wasn’t me that did it for once, clumsy hoyden that I am, that it didn’t occur to me how long I might be without this precious technology, and how wince-makingly expensive fixing it would be, and how many files were on it. (But: Tim and I just discussed for the eighteenth time how, even with all his contrition, it is a miracle it wasn’t me that kicked over the beer first.)

So: take a good look, because this instagram, grainy and overcast with the Rise filter, is the only record I have left of the lemon cake with white chocolate buttercream that I made last week. All the nice photos I snapped from various angles are stuck somewhere in a no-person’s-land on my stupid beer-sodden laptop.

Which is excellent timing, since my cookbook is out on the 23rd of this month and I’m just starting to do publicity and it’s like “hey everyone, come check out my blog with this one badly-lit photo that I took on my phone”. But also, this is essentially a lovely problem, since I wouldn’t be worrying about it if I didn’t have a cookbook to promote in the first place, and the whole situation is still somehow rosily tinted with relief that it wasn’t me for once doing the stupidly clumsy, ruinous thing.

Tim is terribly apologetic though, of course. It wasn’t even nice beer.

Without twee photos to pad this out, I might as well cut straight to the chase. This cake is delicious. Lemon and white chocolate are rather wonderful together, both delicate flavours in cake form, but with the airy tang of the former lifting the richness of the latter, and vice versa. Both the cake and the icing are very easy, and the cake itself is dairy-free if that’s of use. Make sure you zest the lemon before juicing it for the cake – the feathery strands of zest look so pretty on top of the cake and add pure lemon-oil zing to the buttercream. Pistachios are less necessary, but they look really lovely with their muted dusty green against the swelling white icing, for what it’s worth.

lemon cake with white chocolate buttercream

A recipe by myself, with thanks to a loaf recipe from the Best of Cooking for New Zealanders book.

1/2 cup plain oil (rice bran is nice and doesn’t taste heavily oily)
1/2 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
3 eggs
200g sugar
pinch salt
250g flour
2 tsp baking powder

Set your oven to 180 C and line the base of a 22cm caketin with baking paper. You could probably make this easily in a 20cm tin as well, which would likely result in a smaller-but-taller cake.

Whisk together the oil, lemon juice, eggs and sugar till thick, then sift in the flour and baking powder and continue to stir briskly for another couple of minutes, until the mixture is thick and smooth and your upper arms are burning. Tip into the caketin and bake for about an hour, but check it around 45 minutes. It probably won’t rise very high. Allow to cool before icing.

75g soft butter
2 cups icing sugar, sifted if stupidly lumpy
100g white chocolate, decent stuff if you can

Beat the butter and icing sugar together- it will likely end up very thick and crumbly. This is okay. Melt the white chocolate and stir it in to the butter mixture, adding a little hot water if you need to, if it’s far too thick. Carefully spread across the top of the cooked cake once it’s cooled. Top with lemon zest and pistachios if you like.

Seriously, what can I do? Copy-paste that instagram photo again here? In the absence of photos, use your imagination to perceive that light, densely fluffy lemon-tinted cake spread thickly with buttery white chocolate icing is really excellent stuff, and worth your while for sure.

Other things you could look at instead of the photos of this cake, trapped in a stickily beer-tainted laptop:

Remember how I’m trying to read more books written by women? This wonderful story is another addition to that list, as is Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Don’t Tell Arthur by Nancy Mitford, and The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton.

 Trinkets.
 I finished my knitting project! I am very proud of myself. I tend to have lots of grandiose ideas that I throw myself into and then never finish, so there was some danger that this blanket would end up much the same. But look! I made a thing! (Don’t look too closely, or you will see a lot of dropped stitches and uneven knitting tension. This blanket is a bit of a Monet. )

And…introducing my cookbook, by way of this little ten second video!

Just to sensibly reiterate, my cookbook will be on the shelves of all nice bookstores on August 23, and I will be doing some giveaways in the leadup. I had my first interview for it today, which was partly thrilling, because I like talking about myself – in a way, every interview is like a therapy session – and partly terrifying, because what if I come across as a dick, or if I made no sense, or I got nervous and rose in upwards inflections at the end of every sentence? But overall, looking back, the person I was talking to was very nice and I felt like I represented myself well enough. There’s a lot of new land to navigate – I’ve been wanting this book to exist for so long, with so much of myself, that it’s strange to be right on the edge of it all. Trying to organise my schedule and a book launch that’s vaguely credible and pay all my bills and still work full time and also make sure that I’m not defined by this book entirely, that I don’t live or die by its success (considering I’m the kind of person who lives or dies by the most relatively trivial things, like are there rice bubbles left for my breakfast this morning, this is a bit of a challenge.) Hopefully you can bear with me through all of this…especially as it’s very exciting…

Till then, here’s a small, fun interview I did for mac+mae’s 100 days project.
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title via the song that always guarantees tears in my eyes, Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Judy Garland. I am totally a friend of Dorothy.
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music lately

Irene Cara, Fame. Gosh, my obsession with this soundtrack knows no bounds, and it might sound completely pride-goeth-before-a-fall but it felt like a good time to play the title track.

The Carter Family, Can the Circle Be Unbroken. Ye olde country to get you right in the ye olde heart.
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next time: Real photos! From my camera!  

everything i love is on the table, everything i love is out to sea

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Here are some things that happened over the weekend.
Tim and I drank a lot of coffee and started planning our wedding. We went to see Unknown Mortal Orchestra live at Bodega. They were amazing. A guy collapsed in front of me while we were there, which sent a shot of adrenaline to my heart like the “a shot of adrenaline to the heart” scene in Pulp Fiction, but by the time I ran to tell the bar staff his friend had taken him outside. I made burnt butter madeleines for friends Kate and Jason as a small token of my gratitude for giving us this beautiful formica table that they no longer needed. I’ve always loved formica, but it’s near-impossible to get hold of in Wellington, since every cafe and their mother seems to love it, too. 
And I spent three hours – three whole hours to the minute – huddled under the dining table, with Tim, and our friends Kim and Brendan, during a big earthquake, and through aftershock-after-aftershock. So, uh, yeah. The aftershocks continued throughout the night, when Tim and I (I dazedly, Tim pragmatically) gathered medication and a jacket and bottled water and then went to bed. I slept somewhere between midnight and 3.00am, and that was…it. There have been aftershocks all morning. The table that this laptop is sitting on wobbled just before, and it probably will again. Right now my legs and hands are shaking and my head is sort of spacey and my butt and heart are twitching in a syncopated motion and I sincerely can’t tell what is tiny aftershock and what is me. 
I’d like to acknowledge a ton of things: everything rattled fearsomely but nothing broke, we weren’t hurt, and Christchurch has dealt with this kind of thing x a million. Three hours is a long time to spend under a table, and admittedly we probably could’ve come out after an hour? Maybe even twenty minutes. But not only did it feel marginally safe under there, it was distracting. We had an instant world to focus our energies in. After the first big, terrifying quake finally subsided, we grabbed a bottle of whisky. Incidentally, the bottle Kim and Brendan gave us for an engagement present, and which we promised we’d drink with them sometime. This wasn’t what we’d pictured.
a whole new world.
Soon it acquired chips, pretzels, diet lift, dried fruit, knitting, the laptop that I’m typing this on, soothing music, cushions and blankets, and, as I joked weakly on Twitter, “a French Quarter”. While we were all varying degrees of scared, there was some bleak comedy happening under the table as well – like the shrieks of people excitedly playing Candy Crush on their phones jolting the rest of us, or when I elected to play Walk the Line instead of God’s Gonna Cut You Down (even if I don’t believe, Johnny Cash sounds like he means it), or our various Tetris-like attempts to fit comfortably under there. And just the fact that this was our house, and we had invited our friends there, gave me this unusual ability to channel general we-can-get-through-this Julie Andrews levels of brisk practicality. I mean, I was still kind of a mess, but honestly, relatively Andrews-esque. No one can brisk like her. After we’d dropped Kim and Brendan off at their house, I ended up having to ask Tim to pull over because I was having a small panic attack, I think my brain finally exhaled and stopped putting on a show. Later that night, after trying to lull myself into a false sense of security with Parks and Recreation, which is a surefire way to make myself feel like the world is a better place, I lay in bed absolutely awake, every particle of my body alert and unwilling to sleep. Tim, meanwhile, happy-go-lucky bastard that he is, was clearly half asleep already. And then he was all “we could just talk about stuff if you want, like the wedding” and so we did, even though I knew both of us were only trying to distract me. And it was so damn sweet I nearly cried. Oh no, wait, I did.
We’re both home today, partly because of my barely-slept NOPE in response to the world, but mostly legitimately – lots of CBD workers have been sent home or advised not to come in at all – trying to stay calm and ride out the aftershocks. My nerves are coming to pieces like the frayed end of a ribbon and everything feels very weird. A mix of “is this even that bad?” and “is this our life now? Waiting for earthquakes?” 
In the middle of all that, I found a madeleine that didn’t make it to the container for Kate and Jason, and ate it. Still good. 
Sweetly ruffled surface and palm-friendly shape aside,  these madeleines may look a little dryly unpromising from the outside. However each bite rewards your mouth with dense, buttery sponge, made rich with almonds and the purposeful, necessary burning of the butter. Madeleine tins aren’t the hardest thing to come by, or else I wouldn’t have one, but I’m sure you could try making this in cupcake liners and something delicious would still happen. These do take a bit of effort and musclework, but sheesh, your friends just gave you a whole table! 
burnt butter madeleines

recipe from issue 148 of that favourite magazine of mine, Cuisine. I doubled this, and used a whole 70g packet of ground almonds, because I just did.

150g butter
75g sugar
2 eggs
30g ground almonds
75g flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder

Firstly, get your madeleine tin ready and set your oven to 180C/350F. In a small pot, melt the butter over a high heat, and then let it continue to bubble away scarily until it goes from a bright yellow frothy mixture to a darker, more burnished gold. Sit it in a sink of cold water, or tip into a cold bowl, so it quickly cools down. Whisk the eggs and sugar together for about five minutes, till pale and thick, then continue to whisk in the ground almonds. Sift in the flour and baking powder, alternating with pouring in the butter, and fold it all together gently. Let it sit for fifteen minutes, by which stage it should have thickened up quite a bit. Brush the madeleine tin with melted butter or a neutral oil (or some of the residual burned butter in the pan) and spoon small dollops of the mixture into the tin. Bake for ten minutes, then repeat with remaining mixture, allowing the cooked madeleines to cool on a rack as you go. 

Am fresh out of adjectives, to the point of narrow-eyedly using the Thesaurus app on this laptop for the word ‘good’. I can advise, therefore, that these are outstanding, sterling, and simply ace. Like many foodstuffs I like, these are a pleasing melange (that was the thesaurus too) of fancy and plain, soft and spongy and sweet and yet calmly straightforward of flavour – despite the burned butter’s richness that I mentioned, they really just taste like sublime (that adjective was mine!) cake.

And I’d like to just mention again that I love the table. Formica is a little nostalgic, a lot practical, and looks damn sweet in photos. 
Today, despite my nerves, brittle and fragile like a crisp meringue, I am enjoying just spending time with Tim and consuming more Orange is the New Black and knitting. It’s a bummer we’re here under these strange, nerve-wracking circumstances, but we might as well try to enjoy it while we’re here and be thankful for what we’ve got. It’s so odd going from being anxious about vague nothingness, to suddenly having that plus anxiety about potential reality, but on the other hand this affliction means I’m pretty much always fight-or-flight ready anyway? It’s not right, but it’s okay, as the great Whitney Houston once sang. I’m also super grateful for Twitter – the importance of that instant feeling of not being alone can’t be overstated. Stay safe everyone, pals, suspicious non-pals, the indifferent. And if someone works out how to, I don’t know, throw an earthquake in jail, I’d be open to listening. Especially if there’s a robust rehabilitation programme and preventative societal change involved. 
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title via: Don’t Swallow the Cap, from The National’s marvelously dour new album, Trouble Will Find Me.
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music lately:
UMO’s song So Good At Being In Trouble. Bliss. And what a title.

Frank Sinatra, New York, New York. Rat Pack = soothing to me.

This isn’t music, but Tim and I listen to Bob Ducca’s list of ailments at least weekly, and did again on purpose last night. Makes me helpless with laughter every time.
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Next time: Um. No more quakes, please. Seriously.

people from the city having lunch in the park I believe that it’s called al fresco

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I had a day off today, on account of some time off in lieu I built up a while back at work. Strangely enough, I still found myself swatting away that creeping bleak Sunday evening feeling yesterday, even though I knew Monday was entirely mine. However it really was a lovely quiet little weekend. I baked, and Tim and I had burritos and grilled corn and Bloody Marias for brunch (the difference between a Mary and a Maria is vodka and tequila, to which I found myself asking aloud which was more of a brunch liquor, and tequila won because we felt like it, even though vodka had more of a morning feel to it. Yeah.) We also watched a lot of House of Cards and spent much time unpacking our swirling feelings around Top of the Lake and a few minutes unpacking Star Trek 2. I went to an exhibition launch at the City Art Gallery on Friday night and drank a lot of wine and all of a sudden it was Monday morning and all of today stretched out before me.

It all stretched out before me, because I slept in for seven minutes. On my day off. My body is annoying. And then, also annoying, I spent a lot of the morning curled up on the floor sniffling, on account of our landlord rebuffing Tim and I not once, but twice, in our request for a pet cat. Whether or not you’ve noticed that I talk about cats quite a lot, or have one tattooed on me, or have three paintings of cats on my wall, or whatever, the fact is I want a cat with every molecule of my being. It physically hurts my heart. And we just can’t have one, despite there being nothing in our tenant information about not having pets, or indeed, any reason whatsoever from our landlord, despite my very persuasive email. And apparently my yelling “I’m gonna take this to City Hall!” will have no effect, well, according to Tim. I really don’t want this to be the end of the road for Tim and Laura Having A Cat, but also I acknowledge that I’m not Leslie Knope and this isn’t a comical episode of Parks and Recreation where plotlines will be wrapped up neatly after some toiling. But I also feel like I can’t simply stop trying. Is there some kind of tribunal for if your landlord makes you cry because they just say no to a cat, without saying why?

But as I said, I did do some baking, as a means to a very specific end: work snacks. A few different factors – money, time, disorganisation, listlessness, money again – mean that my lunches for work are generally terrible. In that I’ve recently been having instant noodles for lunch, and that’s a distinct step up nutritionally and delicious-wise from what I used to eat. It’s a bit stupid but it’s the way it is: I can make myself elaborate (or at least decent) dinners or pretty weekend brunches or huge cakes, but I struggle to put any effort into lunch for work. Maybe because it’s hard to throw lots of time and money into something you’re going to wolf down under fluorescent lights, maybe because it’s hard to make something that is filling and that you look forward to and that you won’t get utterly sick of after five days (instant noodles, looking at you.) Maybe it’s just because I’ve only recently started to think about it, and it’s easy to fall into habits that require the least from your brain.

I do go through occasional bursts of inspiration, but I’m going to try to be more consistent now, so that I have the energy throughout the day to not fall asleep, and so that lunch isn’t something I dread yet long for because I’m so hungry but also know that it’s just dried noodles in a polystyrene cup. (They actually are pretty delicious as a snack, by the way, but they’re not that filling and day after day of them is not cool.)

Kinda typically, I completely screwed up one of my ventures, the granola bar. We might call them muesli bars in New Zealand, but that to me recalls memories of primary school morning tea, grimly dry, mealy, oaten briquettes which came in boxes of six or eight and occasionally had a mean sprinkling of chocolate chips on top or some vague apricot flavour. And also, oddly, a listening comprehension test from the same time where the narrator pronounced the word “muesli” as “mooooslie” and it was very distracting. Granola bars sounds a little more freewheeling and chewy and American and cool.

I made this recipe for Date Orange and Almond Granola Bars from The Moveable Feasts, a food blog I love – the author Amy just seems like someone I’d get on with in real life, and she is beautifully descriptive about food but in a relaxed way…I don’t know, a lot of food blogs these days have a really strange energetic style that I not only don’t enjoy reading, but also it blurs them all into one. This one though: it’s good. And this recipe seemed exactly what I was after to take to work – something sustaining and easy to make, and yet still snacky and sweet and enjoyable.

I then somehow added three times the required amount of oats. I don’t know how or why, just my usual heedlessness I suppose – it wasn’t till the next day that I worked it out – but it basically turned into granola, really really good granola, so all is not lost. Just diverted. I now have a container to take with me to work for eating by the handful, the spoonful, or the milky bowlful, depending on my needs.

So if you want to make the granola bars, just follow the link, and if you want to make this into granola bar granola…just triple the quantity of oats. On purpose.

Fortunately the other thing I made worked out just fine. I really like Fine Cooking magazine and figured I’d find something on its website that my brain could happily latch on to. Well, there was a little heedlessness involved here, too – this is supposed to be a recipe for Ginger Bars, but halfway through making it I realised I had no ground ginger. No harm done: I like cinnamon even better.

These have all the squish and sweetness of brownies, but with the pure rush of comforting warmth that cinnamon brings. They take about five minutes to make and get better each day. They just taste ridiculously good.

Cinnamon Bars

Adapted from a recipe from Fine Cooking magazine.

  • 180g soft butter
  • 4 tablespoons golden syrup
  • 2 tablespoons honey
  • 1 1/3 cups sugar
  • 2 teaspoons cinnamon
  • Pinch of salt
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and line a brownie tin with baking paper.

Cream the butter, sugar, honey, golden syrup, cinnamon and salt together till light, airy, and pale. (Also: you should totally eat some at this point, it’s amazing.) Beat in the eggs, then stir in the flour and baking soda. Tip the lot into the brownie tin, sprinkle over a little more cinnamon if you like, and bake for about 25 minutes. It should still be a little tender in the middle, not entirely wobbly and liquidy, but not too firm either.

Cute plate, yeah?

So, now that I am armed with two snacks, one of which can double as a lunch, I’m feeling a little better about the week ahead. Cat-related tears aside (which resurfaced this evening) (which I should really call having-no-cat-related tears.)

PS: I wrote something about Tim’s and my trip to Nashville for a national newspaper here, and it ended up online, if you want to read it. We loved Nashville so much, I could’ve written triple what I did here.

title via: Lily Allen’s LDN. Sunny and grey at the same time. Oh why oh why would I want to be anywhere else?

music lately:

Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, As Long as the Grass Shall Grow. Just really simple and beautiful.

Solange, Stillness Is The Move. This woman cannot make a musical misstep as far as my ears are concerned. I love this airy cover of the Dirty Projectors’ song.

Next time: I made some oven-baked risotto and it was as awesomely zero-effort as it was excellent-tasting.

 

i got a new rose, i got her good

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Guess who cooked something in the middle of the day and took advantage of the natural light to photograph it in.

 

You’d think I’d never seen natural light before. Could not stop photographing this cake. I really could take or leave sunshine most of the time anyway (which is lucky, since I live in Wellington) but it does help a cake look swell.

 

I am enamoured. I took so many photos that I could write this entire blog post in these stilted, sassy little sentences with images interspersed rather than my usual three-abreast enormous paragraphs. (I don’t know, I notice these things.) But will I? Ha! Folly!

Am currently riding the wobbly bicycle of two consecutive nights of appalling sleep. I had to stop – I counted – twelve times while typing the small paragraph directly above to yawn. For a while there it felt like I was back on the sleep wagon, but for the last month or so I’ve been reliably having horrifying visions just as I shut my eyes. I won’t even go into them here because I don’t want to freak you out too much (although, hmmm, a tamer one was a skull with two flailing arms reaching through the eye sockets) but there’s nothing like a chilling vision to make you suddenly very awake. I’ve also been waking up very early on weekends. Sigh. I’d happily be nocturnal if I didn’t have to also be administratively functional in an office during the day. But here I am. On a less alarming note…or is it…when I have managed to sleep, I have been having so many dreams about instagramming things. A majestic whale, swimming near the crystalline shore; a dazzlingly pink cherry tree in full bloom; a sunset as richly orange as a roasted apricot. What an age we live in! What an age I live in, in my head!

Back to the cake. On Sunday I wanted to bake something to be able to take along with me to augment my appalling work lunches (that’s a whole other story, but the condensed version is: for someone who likes food I’m not very good at feeding myself sometimes!) and I had a feeling we’d be seeing some friends later on in the day. “I’m going to make a goddamn marble cake” I announced with steely purposefulness, like some hardened cop in a buddy-movie having a moment of clarity. About deciding to make a marble cake. It was reading through old cookbook that I found in a bookfair once that reminded me of this confection: basic buttery sponge cake, divided into as many bowls as you like, each flavoured with a different tincture of some kind, and then dolloped back together to make a thrillingly dappled baked good. Back in my day, before I’d ever heard of the word “ombre” (and for shame, I read the dictionary for fun as a kid) marble cake was pretty high impact.

 

This one appealed to me particularly with its swirling of rosewater and dark chocolate-tinted cakes. Being fairly susceptible to romantic notions, eating something scented with roses feels gratifyingly sybaritic. Of course, rose isn’t for everyone – it’s a very particular flavour, delicate and sweet, but pour in too much and your cake will taste like shower gel. Here it subtly perfumes its half of the batter, contrasting the darker, plainer chocolate with a slightly floral, almost lemony burst of flavour. For a while I was a little sad I didn’t have any red food colouring to make the rose half of the batter pink, but decided it could be representing white roses. I also expressed some disappointment at no longer having that bunch of dead roses from while ago, which could’ve been in a vase in the background behind my rose cake. But then Tim said “mmm, synergy” and I didn’t feel so bad. In case you don’t work at an office of some kind, sometimes particular words or phrases get ruined through their overuse in work-related documents and communications. Don’t even get me started on “deliverables”. No wait – that word ruins itself. Enough of that ugliness though: this cake is very easy to make, it tastes like a dream, and looks pretty jazzy, especially if you do the old dusting-of-icing-sugar trick. If you’re really not sold on the concept of eating a cake that tastes like flowers, or indeed, if you just don’t have access to rosewater right now – I’d use a generous splash of vanilla instead, or anything you want, really. Peppermint extract could be fun, or you could make one half chocolate and one half orange.

Chocolate Rose Marble Cake

Adapted from The Chocolate Lovers Cookbook, one of a million bearing that title, but this one was published in 1985 and is by someone called Audrey Ellis. Thanks, Audrey! Ring tins are a little nervewracking because you can’t really line them with baking paper, but this cake slid out easily. Also: what they lack in that department, they make up for in being stupidly easy to cut nice even slices out of. I don’t know why, and I’m not sure I even care. It just happens.

1 tablespoon cocoa
2 tablespoons boiling water (this is a ridiculous quantity to boil, make yourself a cup of tea while you’re at it.)
250g soft butter
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
250g flour
4 teaspoons baking powder (sounds like a lot, yes? But go with it.)
1 tablespoon rosewater or 2 teaspoons rose flavoured essence

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Grease a ring caketin with butter, then shake a little flour round in it, getting rid of any excess by tapping at the base over the sink. In a small bowl, mix together the cocoa and boiling water (this helps intensify the cocoa flavour). Beat the butter and sugar together till light and fluffy, then beat in the eggs, followed by the flour and baking powder.  

Spoon roughly half the batter into another bowl. Into one bowl, mix the cocoa-water mix, and into the other bowl, the rosewater. Thoroughly mix each, then drop alternating spoonfuls around inside the ring tin, I mean, it’s not going to be perfectly checkerboard-like by any means, this is just a guide. As you can see, I just went for…whatever. Quickly swirl a knife once around the ring through the cake batter-  you don’t want to overswirl, or you’ll lose the pattern as they merge together while baking – and smooth out the top a little with the back of a spoon. Bake for about 45 minutes, or until springy on top. Leave in the tin for five minutes, then carefully turn out onto a plate. Dust with icing sugar.

Friends did indeed come round for coffee that afternoon. In a bid to prove I hadn’t just put the tablecloth out to make my photos look good on my blog, I left it there all day – in fact, it’s still there now, but I think the reasoning has progressed from justification to laziness. It was an excellent afternoon: we listened to records, made idle plans, caught up on happenings, ate a lot of cake. Idyllic stuff. Just the kind of thing I want to be doing with my Sunday.

 

Speaking of idyllic: I’m going to learn to knit! Snuglife! I can’t wait. That is, if I can bear to bust into this oddly adorable, leporine ball of yarn. Yeah, I really need a pet. Maybe I could knit myself one. Maybe I could knit myself a life and then dream about instagramming it. That’s if I ever fall asleep again! This is far too bleak a note to be ending this post on, let’s look at cake again.

 

Phew. Going to try to knit a beret-ish hat, in case you’re wondering. Winter still hasn’t quite started officially yet – that’s the first of June – but it’s certainly cold enough to try and make my life as plushly cosy as possible. In hindsight, knitting myself a life and then dreaming about it does have a rakishly Michel Gondry air to it, so who knows? Maybe everything’s working out the way it’s supposed to.

PS: tomorrow it’s one whole year since I found out for sure my cookbook was getting published. Feelings!

Title via: The Damned, New Rose. I love the start – “Is she really going out with him?” and those heartbeat-fast drums. 

Music lately:

La Vie En Rose, Edith Piaf. When one’s thoughts turn to roses…this song is just too pretty and yearning, damn that beautiful French language and her amazingly guttural vibrato! C’est lui pour moi, moi pour lui? Quelle swoon.

Bloodletter, by Delaney Davidson and Marlon Williams. From Sad But True, their record that we just keep turning over and over and over and over.

Next time: I’m gonna sleep on it (fingers crossed.)

"That was Groffle: The Awful Waffle, a book that I wrote on behalf of my education initiative"

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As you can see, my photos lately either take the form of badly lit dinner, or nicely lit but faux-artless scenes of plates and knives and forks. Or both. This scene is real, for what it’s worth (or I would’ve moved the damn lens cap out of the way.)

I have a theory. Well, that implies that it’s well thought-out – at this stage it’s less of a theory, more of a sentence on a blog. But: I swear food can sense fear, like horses can. (I know, I had a horrible horseriding accident at age ten. Sustained whiplash and a respectful terror of horses.) I have been on a ruining rampage in the kitchen lately, and it’s as if the food can tell I’m all nervous and have bad instincts about it. My latest screw-up was a salted caramel slice where I burned one can of condensed milk in the pan, and then, obtusely, the next batch refused to cook. Just wouldn’t. Slid around, off the base, which I’d already baked but which managed to somehow un-bake itself under the liquidy topping. I called it fail-slice. And ate most of it anyway over the next day or two, because the ingredients themselves still tasted okay.

That seemed so much more door-slammingly dramatic in my head, but to be fair, every time I ruin something I’m cooking it feels like the first and only time in humankind this has happened. The waste of ingredients, the bass-drop letdown after all that anticipation, the hangdog way that I have to impart the disappointing news to any expectant eaters. With that in mind, I am amazed that these falafel waffles, with their high level of novelty-induced-anticipation, and with their delicate, unbuttressed structure…worked. Worked just fine. Despite my nerves. So maybe food can’t smell fear, and all I have is a sentence, not a theory, and a lot of coincidentally recent cooking mistakes. The point is, I also have falafel waffles, and their relative success has helped my kitchen nerves no end, like in Sonic the Hedgehog when you gather up lots of sparkly rings, so it doesn’t matter if you lose a few here and there, because you will still have more rings to spare. (I played a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog one time.)

Sliced my lemon this way because I saw it in a fancy magazine. It looks so pretty but is kind of stupidly wasteful since you only get two slices per fruit. And now I’m in an aesthetics vs practicality food blogging quandary. Which is kind of like a metaphor for the waffles! (Or perhaps just kind of like the waffles.)  

I like a good portmanteau-ing as much as the next person, and “fawaffle” is pleasing, but I think I better enjoy the rolling assonance (hey…oh?) of falafel waffle written in full. I first heard of these when a friend Kat (who I’ve met all of once, but you know, the internet!) emailed me with some suggestions of things to do in New York while Tim and I were there in October last year. She mentioned that we should definitely try falafel waffle. We never made it to this mystical place but the idea stuck in my head. Falafel mix, but instead of baking or frying it, clamp it between the crenellated arms of a waffle maker. There’s significant aesthetic outcome involved, sure, but falafel is delicious and enwaffling it is surprisingly practical. It makes a lot at once, you don’t have to watch it, it’s really cute.

Let me first apologise hugely though, for posting a recipe that you need specialised equipment for. I try not to do this. In my defensive defense, not one of the bajillion ice cream recipes that I’ve posted on this blog needs an ice cream machine. But I really can’t see myself getting around the waffle maker thing in order to make waffles appear. I don’t know if there’s some alternative that involves indenting pancakes with the end of a fork or something. I…hope not.

Falafel Waffles

Makes two. Recipe by me. Concept not mine. To cold-weary to google them.

2 cans chickpeas (I’d really wanted to soak chickpeas overnight and blend them up, but continually forgot.)
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon tahini (or peanut butter, in a pinch)
1 handful chopped herbs: coriander, parsely, chives, or all three. I only had a tablespoon of chives, but still.
1 teaspoon ground cumin, more if your cumin has been sitting around for years
1 pinch ground cinnamon
1 egg

To serve: anything at all – lemon slices, thick plain yoghurt, more tahini, mustard, chilli sauce, tomato sauce, whatever.

Drain the chickpeas and blend them up in a food processor (more specific equipment, sorry, I’m on a roll here) till quite well-blended but not pureed – you want a a mix that’s nubbly in places yet smooth in places. Basically: be half-hearted about your processing and it will probably turn out how it’s supposed to. Add the salt, tahini, herbs, cumin, cinnamon and egg and pulse briefly to mix. 

Heat up a little oil in your waffle iron, putting it on a very high setting. Once you’re sure it’s good and hot, spoon in half the falafel mix, pushing it round evenly with the spoon, and shut down the lid. Leave it for a good solid five minutes, maybe longer – till it really seems cooked through. Use a spatula to carefully lever it away from the bottom grill, then lift it up and onto a plate. Repeat with the remaining mix.

I know two damn waffles doesn’t sound like much at all, but these are ridiculously filling, and when you think about it, each embossed heart segment is like a whole falafel on its own. There’s not that deep-fried crunch of the real thing, but it’s still excellent, outside of its looks. The cumin is rich and aromatic (that feels stupid now that I’ve written it down but it just is, okay) the indents making for maximum crispness within the baked-not-fried context, and chickpeas have a nutty deliciousness all of their own. Plus I covered mine in tahini and thick plain yoghurt and mustard and lemon juice, which made it look appalling but taste even better.

Is a waffle iron even worth it? Kinda. I adore waffles, but they are best if someone else is making them for you, otherwise I tend to get tired/bored halfway through the bowl of batter. Also they just aren’t as good as ones from a cafe generally. But on the other hand: waffles! Whenever you want them and also have the energy and ingredients! Tim and I got ours through Fly Buys, which is this points-gathering rewards scheme that takes forever to accumulate (one point per $25 spent on groceries. I mean really. Anyone rich enough to gather up enough points to get anything with that kind of system doesn’t need the system!) After seven or so years we scraped together enough points to get this waffle iron though, so…hooray for the system. The system is sound.

As well as apologising for your needing a waffle iron to make waffles, I’d also like to apologise if this particular post seems grave and unenthused: I have a cold and every word I type feels like an effort, the kind of effort when you’re trapped in a dream and you have to try and wake yourself up with an exhausting push of the body because it feels like a house is flattening you. I may also feel like the only person who has ever had a cold before, but it doesn’t help that work is so busy this week that I can’t take a forseeable sick day anytime soon, despite feeling deliriously atrocious. Even with my dramatics, that’s pretty much telling it like it is without too much embellishment. Which is all I’ll say about that – I’m always nervous to talk about work on here in case I get pulled into an office and am told “you said the word ‘work’ on your blog. That crossed a line between the professional and the personal. You’re fired and/or arrested.” (I’m basically always nervous, in fact.) I’m hoping I can outwit this cold with my smarts though, like Liam Neeson in Tooken 2. I still currently retain my sense of smell and taste, and the coughing only happens at night when I’m trying to sleep, so there’s that. I have ginger and whisky and vitamins and determination to get better by the weekend. And an immunity boosting ego trip from successfully making falafel waffles!

Between the cold and work I’ve been either running around or laying low but I had a good wine-fuelled impromptu-dance-party on Friday night, swooned frequently over Lost in Austen (it’s silly, but wins on swoon-per-capita) and saw this cool cat on Sunday at book group. Someone commented on instagram that this cat’s face is a bit like my natural face in photos. What a compliment! (That’s not sarcasm.) Like a horse smelling fear, or a recipe possibly smelling fear, cats can normally tell how badly I want to be their friend and so, being the bloody-minded creatures they are, remain aloof. But despite its sneer here, this cat (Oscar) was in fact super friendly and flopsy and nuzzlingly ridiculous.

(hands up who wants a pet cat more than ever now)

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Title via: Occasionally I quote things other than songs here. And really, who is more glowingly waffle-proud than Parks and Recreation’s glorious hero, Leslie Knope? (She’s a TV character, in case you don’t know. And if you didn’t: find out.) But also I suspect Leslie Knope would really hate falafel waffles, on account of their being full of legumes and lacking syrup. But still: waffles. So important.
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Music lately: 

Flip Grater, The Quit. Quiet and smoky, I love it.

What I Did For Love, from the musical A Chorus Line – just one of the most gorgeous songs in the world. The lyrics are so, ugh, just so good. “Look, my eyes are dry, the dream was ours to borrow…” I predictably love Idina Menzel’s version which she sang for President Obama, no big.

Robin Thicke, TI, Pharrell, Blurred Lines. Cannot quit this song.
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Next time: Something non-specialised like waffles, something gleaming with triumph because I definitely won’t have this cold anymore, no way. No ma’am.