Category: Vegetarian

there’s no place like home

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They say that certain activities are like riding a bicycle, you never forget. Well, “they” obviously never met Laura Vincent, She Who Could Not Be Bike-Broken. I’m sure I’ve brought it up before, but I cannot ride a bicycle. In New Zealand, when you say this, people will often sharply suck air through their front teeth or emit a low whistle, and say accusatory words to the effect of “you had no childhood.” It’s true, I never learned to ride a bike (I’m not that good at whistling, either.) Oh, people tried. At one point I did manage a few uncertain circles around a paddock before careening into a tree, but you know? I really don’t care about bike riding, not everyone has to do it, and the only reason I brought it up was that I was nervous that after a month away in America I would have totally forgotten how to blog. And yet here I am, already one long, self-absorbed paragraph in! Hooray!

Firstly, an enthusiastic kickline and a round of applause for my two glorious and excellent guest bloggers who filled in during my absence. Thanks a million, Pocket Witch and Coco Solid! You are the ruliest.

Tim and I had the wackiest month on holiday, during which time we concluded that we LOVE America. Oh sure, I’ll be the first to sneer at their politics (I mean, I love you hard Obama, my sneers are directed firmly towards Romney and his merry band of women-hating quease-mongers) and to be nervous about their gun-control laws and so on, but in general, it is the greatest. They have so much stuff. And that stuff is so cheap. And the people are so friendly, especially the further south we went. And, and, and. It was just, apart from a few mishaps which are now hilarious anecdotes the more time expands between myself and them, the greatest holiday ever.

And, uh, in case you’d missed me saying it, Tim and I are now affianced. Which is exciting and weird. In some ways it feels like it has been like this forever, and sometimes I will punch him on the shoulder and say “whaaaaat, we’re getting married, I can’t even.” It’s just so strange. It’s very exciting, and yet – people get married all the time. Married people are not exciting. Yet we are? I don’t know. Likewise, I veer between shrugging indifference towards the wedding and excitedly focussing on miniscule details and catering and planning three changes of dress during the party. However, we decided on the spot that we wouldn’t actually get married until marriage equality was law in New Zealand – which is not to say that we do not abide people who are already married or planning to get married. No! Not at all! This is just a very personal decision we made to stay true to ourselves. So uh, any MPs reading this: I want my wedding, damn it! And lots of people want their weddings. Don’t make me hate you. That aside – it’s all just…really nice. For all of our sakes, I’ll try to keep any syrupiness to a minimum. Which, given my non-propensity for syrupiness, shouldn’t be too burdensome.

As with blogging itself, a month away from cooking makes one a little apprehensive in the kitchen. After three intense months of writing, testing, and photoshooting my cookbook (that’s right! My cookbook!) it was utter bliss to traipse around America simply handing myself over to people and being fed. Would I be able to get back into it though? Well, yes. Luckily muscle memory kicked in and I actually remembered how to cook and bake after all.

Sorry to bring it up again, but rugelach were present at the picnic Tim and I had when he proposed to me (ugh, I know, the romance of it all) but that’s not quite the reason I made them upon returning to New Zealand. That is, I’m not blogging about them because they’re now my Cookies of Romantic Memories or anything, it’s just that – eating them again reminded me how damned good they are, and that I hadn’t made them since December 2007, and that I should make them again as soon as possible. That’s all. These Jewish confections are simple enough to make, but just fiddly and involved enough to also feel like I’m really significantly catching myself in the act of baking.

They’re also arrestingly delicious. Buttery pastry made particularly luscious with cream cheese kneaded through it, brushed with melted butter and rolled around chocolate and brown sugar. Oof. It really is everything good in this world, wrapped around everything else good in this world.

Rugelach

Adapted slightly from Nigella Lawson’s recipe in her truly excellent book Feast.

425g plain flour (awkward quantity, I know, but go with it.)
50g sugar
Pinch salt
250g cold butter, cubed
150g cold cream cheese 
1 egg
Optional: 1 sachet instant dried yeast. 

Filling:
50g butter, melted
250g chocolate (dark is specified, but all I had was Whittaker’s milk chocolate, which so richly, caramelly delicious that I minded not)
50g brown sugar (I reduced this to 25g since milk chocolate is sweeter than dark. Fiddle as you wish.)

I know yeast makes everything sound scary to the not-overly-confident baker, but all you have to do is throw it in. There’s no extra steps or anything. But if you really don’t want to, just leave it out and these’ll still be grand.

Mix together the flour, the sugar, and the yeast (do it, do it). Throw in the cubes of butter, and using the tips of your fingers and thumbs, rub everything together till the butter is incorporated and it all looks like damp sand. This is not a fast process, and you can totally just throw it all into the food processor. It’s just that some dear friends of mine had their food processor break down recently and it would’ve felt disrespectful of their pain to go on about how convenient this piece of machinery is. So in solidarity, and because damnit if I don’t like the feel of cold butter and flour against my fingertips, I went hands on. 

Either using your hands, or switching to a spoon, thoroughly mix in the cream cheese. It’ll start to look like a crumbly dough. Mix in the egg, which should, after some effort, see it coming together properly. 

Cover with gladwrap and refrigerate for an hour (regardless of whether you added the yeast or not.) You can also leave it overnight if you need to. Just take it out of the fridge fifteen minutes before you intend to use it, is all.

Set your oven to 190 C and line a baking tray with a piece of baking paper. Roughly chop (or, sigh, process) the chocolate into rubble, and mix it with the brown sugar.

Divide the dough into three even portions. Take one and roll it roughly into a circular shape, of about 25cm – though did I measure mine? Nay. Slice this circle like a pizza into eight triangular shapes. Nigella says 12, which you’re welcome to do, but with my shoddy geometry skills I felt better making eight. Which are, anyhow, bigger.

Brush the sliced up circle with melted butter. Liberally sprinkle over some of the brown sugar and chocolate, then, roll up each portion from the largest side till it forms a rather sweet, squidgy little croissant shape. Lay each one on the baking tray, and repeat with the remaining two portions of dough.

Brush the tops with any remaining melted butter, then, if you’ve used yeast allow them to sit on top of the oven for about 15 minutes first. Either way, bake them for 20 minutes till puffy and dark golden on top.

I ate, I would estimate, about an eighth of the pastry dough – it’s incredible, and these make so many that you can’t possibly feel bad about the diminishing returns. But it’s also worth stopping at some point, as these are one of those creations where the finished result honestly tastes even better than the uncooked mixture. Puffy and aggressively buttery, somehow not too sweet, the chocolate just a little smokily scorched from the oven – this is baking nirvana. And a pointed reminder that though I love being on holiday, it’s delightful to throw my arms around the kitchen again and give it a big old hug. Metaphorically, I mean.

I’ll leave it there lest I suddenly get sick again and have to postpone this blog post by yet another day. Thanks for coming back to me, my people! I’ma metaphorically throw my arms around you, too. Actually I think I mean…figuratively? Because it’s not a metaphor for anything. No: I really will leave it here, because I feel like my month away from constant writing and self-editing is becoming reeeeeally obvious all of a sudden.

In my haste to get this published, I did – somehow – forget one thing, which is that our friends met Tim and I at the airport at 9am, completely unbeknownst to us, to strew us with garlands and beads and hug us and pretty much make us feel like MUCH better people than we really are. The belovedness was just bouncing off the walls, and we couldn’t have fathomed a better way to come home. Friends: we love you. See a few beautiful snaps (please be charitably kind about my blanched, long-haul-flight face) from that morning from clever photographer Sarah-Rose, if you please.
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Title via: it’s not a song, but it’s Judy Garland’s quote from The Wizard of Oz, and Judy Garland is flawless perfection, so. 
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Music lately:

Dark Dark Dark, Daydreaming. With a name like that, I knew I was going to love them. Tim and I saw this band in New Orleans. They’re really, really beautiful.

Down In The Treme, by John Boutte. We…were not only staying in the Treme, we also saw John Boutte himself sing this song. Oh, that place. “It’ll get you, child”, as our host told me knowingly.
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Next time: I’m not sure – am looking forward to just regularly cooking again. However, I am on a noble crusade to find a really, really good American biscuit recipe, being so sad that they don’t seem to exist here in New Zealand – so if you know of one you can point me in the direction of, I’d be super obliged. 

guest blog the second: coco solid

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Well hello there! I’m writing to you from Treme in New Orleans. I am so excited to be here, it’s kind of a good thing that the all-powerful heat here is forcing me to slow it down a notch or I’d be high-kicking with joy all over the place. We only just got here today, and we still have a whole week in this city up ahead, so there really is no need to rush. And may I remind you that if you’re interested in following our intermittent updates, Tim and I have a travel blog thing going here. Meanwhile, for you all, my second guest post is from Coco Solid, a talented artist work I’ve admired for aaaages, and by way of cherry on top she’s a really congenial, cool, nice-to-run-into-in-the-street person. It’s an honour to have her words here on my blog, once you’re done reading I totally recommend you go see her site (and spend a creepily long time reading through her blog archives) and also check out a sprinkling of her music as part of Parallel Dance Ensemble and Badd Energy – for starters I recommend Turtle Pizza Cadillac; Third Eye, and the greatest music video there is, no contest, Weight Watchers.  
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Food is bomb. I don’t hate on food photos like many of my friends. I think it’s cool when someone has food to start with and that we are culturally honouring it more. Food psychology has become more enthused and amateur in recent years which has implicitly contributed to varying degrees of body-positivity and acknowledging the creativity of domestic life. Yeah, I think being engorged in chef elimination shows is a bit weird but it’s pretty educational viewing. (I wonder why there isn’t a violent version of Master Chef called The Real Hunger Games yet? Desperate television exec reading this – you’re welcome!)
I like to meld the ease and lovability of junkfood with the spiced considered effort of the flash. Context, my apartment is tiny ie. my desk is wider than my kitchen bench. I am also one month out from handing in my thesis. This statement reveals two things: I got f*#k all money and f*#k all time. But I was raised to respect your meal to the maximum of your abilities. I always make sure to serve the pedestrian as flamboyantly as possible. Major example: Ramen.
Ramen is seen as the barren fuel of the after-work slob, nihilistic teen or shelf scanning stoner. One (rude) individual could suggest I’m a mash-up of all three – the difference being I was lucky enough to roll deep in South Korea and Japan, where I was schooled on its possibilities. Infact I think this is the very ramen that flipped my script.
Tokyo 2009 at a ramen-only restaurant. After that I realized what I knew was merely the bed, we in the West treat noodles like the honeymoon and are ripping ourselves off.
So in this ramen I made, it wasn’t from a packet. I’m a Trident, Maggi, ‘zap a foam cup and add a packet’ kinda girl too but if you have the ingredients and time you might as well pimp out your bowl and get sustained in the process.
I made a simple soup with spring onion, ginger and miso paste. I put in some Japanese noodles. This concoction is not only nicer and healthier but it’s architecturally more stable than a packet job and can withstand the accessories I pile on. NB: worst food photographer in the world, I make these packets look like a gothic theatre production about Jack the Ripper.

 
 

If you have a keen eye you can see some garlic chipettes and a yellow oil atop the broth. This is a fantastic Burmese Garlic and Tumeric oil that one of my culinary idols makes. You can see the recipe here at Perfect Morsel.
I also make sigeumchi namul, a Korean spinach side-salad that rulz.
This was one of my favourite Banchan (side-dishes) in Korea so I learnt how to make it. Basically you put spinach in boiling water for 30 seconds, squeeze it til it’s semi-drained, chop it up and add it to a dressing of spring onions, soy sauce and sesame oil and whatever you like. The only beef I have is that it compresses four massive bunches into one medium serving (and then I skull it all) but here’s a supercute video of how to explain it.
After I had made the sigeumchi namul I kept the water boiling and put in two eggs which I add last as I’m curating my masterpiece lol. I also have Kimchi in there. You can get this from your local Asian supermarket. If you don’t know what I’m talking about kimchi is spiced and fermented cabbage, radish and assorted pickled bombs. It’s Korean, hot and amazing.
Then I added some sweetcorn and a knob of butter which is something I scabbed off Tan Popo, my favourite ramen place in Auckland. And then voila! You are supposed to add meat, tuna, fish but I thought this enough. Especially because my mate Greg came over and after chanting down Babylon we made….
MUTHAF*@#KIN SMORES
This is an easy campfire American stoner staple that I thought I’d throw in (Laura being in the US and all!) Lately I realised not many people in Aotearoa are down. People! Get down!
All you need: marshmallows, chocolate and the trick – Graham crackers
These US puppies are sturdy honey biscuits with the resolve of Digestives. They also chill the hell out of the sweetness and in a weird way steal the show.
Step 1: Put chocolate and marshmallows on one half of a Graham cracker


Step 2: Put these in the oven until they are melty and mangled
Step 3: Drop the other half of the Graham cracker to make a sandwich
Step 4: Watch Cartoons

Later guys!

guest post the first: pocket witch

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Well hello there. It’s Laura here, Tim and I are still in America (reluctantly packing to leave intoxicating NYC, but excited to head to Nashville. My plan-so-cunning while I’m away, is to enlist a couple of dashing guest bloggers to keep hungryandfrozen.com afloat till my return with their own excellence. The first is my dear, dear friend Kate of pocket-witch.com. She is bodacious and clever and inspirational, like all my dear friends, and it’s an honour to have her here. And, as she alludes to, there is some kiiinda ridiculous news ahoy. Consider yourself told! I’ll now hand it over to Kate. Or at least, point you towards her writing which I copy-pasted below. Hooray for modern technology. And lentils!
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Hello! I’m Kate, and I can be found at my new blog, Pocket Witch. How nice to be asked to write a guest post for Hungry and Frozen! Laura is one of my very favourite people. We became friends IRL nearly two years ago when I blogged about wanting to join a book group, and she generously offered hers. As soon as we met I acquired the meanest friend-crush on her and Tim, and since then I’ve managed to worm my way into their lives as much as possible. To my wonderment, this culminated in being included in the cookbook crew, which was the most delightful time of satisfying work and uproarious play. So sad it’s finished! But onto the next adventure. I’m loving following along with Laura and Tim’s travels, and they are making me yearn for New York. Plus… how about that news! I literally cried in the street. Cannot wait to bombard them with inappropriately long hugs upon their return.
Laura has blogged quite a few recipes from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, but I couldn’t help but pick another. You must believe me when I say, this is the BEST cookbook. I’ve made nearly twenty things from it by now, which is an unparalleled number. I don’t even own it yet! Yeah, I wouldn’t advise lending me this cookbook if you want it back in a timely fashion. Aside from the outrageous number of ingredients in some recipes, Plenty is a perfect book, with all of the vegetables, flavours and herbs, and has taught amateur-me some wonderful new ways with food.
I suppose I do wish I’d picked a slightly sexier recipe. Lentils! What was I thinking? The other guest blogger is Coco Solid, and I’m posting a tarted-up dahl. Sigh. But you can’t be fancy all the time (though I do try), sometimes you’re just in the mood for something kinda wholesome.
Strangely, this is one of his more simple and relaxed recipes, but still the most complicated and involved lentil/dahl-type dish I’ve made. But don’t let that put you off, it’s also likely the nicest dish of this type that I’ve made, really warming and the perfect amount of spice. The yogurt is an excellent topping, despite my detesting cucumber in most settings (I have a weird thing about watery, fresh-tasting foods, don’t get me started on watermelon). The inclusion of the cucumber and olive oil made the yogurt super fresh and silky, perfect to cut through the filling lentils. I also found the stirred-in butter a delicious necessity, though it’s effect was most known in my first, fresh bowl. Some coconut milk would be lovely if you were looking to make it vegan.

Spiced Lentils with Cucumber Yogurt

from Plenty or The Guardian
  • 200g split red lentils
  • 1 bunch fresh coriander

  • 1 small onion, peeled

  • 40g ginger, peeled
  • 3 cloves garlic, peeled
  • 1 mild green chilli
  • 1½ tsp black mustard seeds
  • 4 tbsp sunflower oil
  • 1½ tsp ground coriander
  • 1 tsp ground cumin
  • ½ tsp ground turmeric
  • ½ tsp paprika
  • 10 curry leaves
  • 300g ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped
  • 2 tsp caster sugar
  • ½ tsp fenugreek (optional)
  • 1 pinch asafoetida (optional)
  • Salt
  • 150g Greek yogurt
  • 75g finely diced cucumber
  • 1½ tbsp olive oil
  • 70g unsalted butter
  • 1½ tbsp lime juice

Wash the lentils in plenty of water, drain and soak in 350ml of fresh water for 30 minutes. Cut the coriander bunch somewhere around its centre to get a leafy top half and a stem/root bottom half. Roughly chop the leaves. Put the stem half in the bowl of a food processor, add the onion, ginger, garlic and chilli – all roughly broken – and pulse a few times to chop up without turning into a paste.
Put the mustard seeds in a heavy-based pot and place over medium heat. When they begin to pop, add the onion mix and sunflower oil, stir and cook on low heat for 10 minutes. Add the spices and curry leaves, and continue cooking and stirring for five minutes longer. Now add the lentils and their soaking water, the tomatoes, sugar, fenugreek, asafoetida and a pinch of salt. Cover and simmer for about 30 minutes, until the lentils are fully cooked.
Before serving, whisk together the yogurt, cucumber, oil and some salt. Stir into the lentils the butter, lime juice and chopped coriander leaves, taste and season generously with salt. Divide into bowls, spoon yogurt on top and garnish with coriander.
I didn’t use curry leaves (couldn’t find them nearby) or asafoetida (I don’t even know what that is). I did use fenugreek but you could skip it if trying to cut down on ingredients. I doubled the recipe, as it seemed like a lot of effort to go through to feed only 2-4 people, and this it made mountains. It fed two people for lunch most of the week, by the third day I was getting a bit tired of the idea of lentils, but as soon as I actually sat down and began to eat them the tiredness would disappear. Because they are quite fantastic.
Thanks for having me, Laura! Enjoy the rest of your amazing trip, you crazy kids.

and we walked off, to look for america

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As the late, always-makes-me-cry-so-I-can-only-listen-to-her-occasionally, great Laurie Beechman sang in the original Broadway production of Annie: “NYC, I give you fair warning: up there, in lights, I’ll be.”
I also give YOU fair warning: Tim and I have a plane to catch in less than two hours. All the tasks and jobs and endless succession of things that needed doing pushed this necessary blog post further, and further, and further back, till suddenly I’m typing really fast and realising that I haven’t had breakfast but I have had two coffees and I still need to finish packing.
With that, please allow me some self-indulgently breathless bullet points. I’ll try to make them wordily eloquent bullet points though. 
– I handed in my cookbook manuscript. It made me feel a bit like this:
This cookbook has been my life for the last three months. Frankly, it has been my life since I got the email from my publisher back in January asking if I was interested. Franklier than that, it has been my life for a much longer time, it just didn’t realise it yet. Or something. It’s so strange not to be working on it – a little bittersweet and empty, a watermark left from a glass of campari on a table – but my flipping gosh it’s good to have achieved it. I feel like I climbed a huge mountain, only way better, because there was no actual mountain-climbing involved. My creative team of Jason, Kim and Kate (plus project-manager Tim) were utterly brilliant to the last. I’ll be full of more details about the book itself as the process goes along, but for now: I’m just going to enjoy not thinking about it quite so hard.

– Here is some pasta I made. It’s a very specific recipe, based on there being almost no food left in the house because we’re leaving for a month, but also some foods that really need eating. I like bowtie pasta because of its rakish, eyebrow-wagglingly charming shape, but use whatever, of course.

Bowties with Smoked Paprika Burnt Butter and Almonds

A recipe by me. Serves one.

100g bowtie pasta
30g butter
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
50g almonds
Green stuff for garnish. Parsley is good here.

Cook the pasta in boiling salted water till al dente. Drain. 

While the pasta’s cooking, melt the butter in a pan and allow it to properly sizzle and burn. This will give you marvelous depth of flavour. Tip in the paprika, and stir, followed by the almonds. Continue to cook a little longer till the almonds are coated and lightly browned. Remove from the heat, tip on top of the drained pasta, and blanket with any kind of garnishy greens.

This is simple, yet highly delicious. Nutty, saltily fulsome butter. Smoky, intense paprika. Crunchy, lightly scorched almonds. The greens aren’t really that necessary but the paprika tints the butter dark orange and it does have connotations of engine grease. If I wasn’t photographing it I probably wouldn’t have bothered, really.

More bullet points ahoy!

– Dearest Jo made me this amazing and delicious cake to say congratulations for finishing the book. It’s appropriate because I have SO MANY feelings. We ate it, along with waffles and other important breakfast foods, while watching the new season of Parks and Recreation. Did I say feelings? FEELINGS.

– Speaking of Parks and Rec, a pie recipe of mine is featuring in the new edition of BUST magazine, which has the clever and hilarious and stunning Aubrey Plaza on the cover. BUST is an American magazine, even, so just try to calculate how blown my mind is right now.

– I guess I’ll leave it there, since I really, really, really do have to carry on packing and cleaning and such before we go. These beyond-dreamy prints by Colette St Yves arrived in the mail today though: I may just quietly swoon over them instead of doing anything productive. 
Tim and I threw ourselves a little going-away party on Wednesday night and afterwards I fully started sobbing. Tim, ever the logical person, said “it’s only a month”. To which I, ever the logical-in-my-head person, replied “yes but we always do so much every month”. A self-indulgent cry out of the way, I am now more or less full of excitement about America. There might be a tiny, tiny bit of maudlin pillow-hugging before we leave though, what can I say. Feelings. 
I promise real, proper blogging will resume when we get back at the end of October. But – oh what a but – I have two thoroughly awesome guest bloggers to house-sit this blog for me while I’m away. Guest blogger the first is Kate, stylist queen of my cookbook and all round purveyor of excellence. Guest blogger the second is cooler-than-ice cream artist-in-every-sense-of-the-word Coco Solid. You’re in mighty good hands.
However, while I’m gone Tim and I are upkeeping a travel blog, which we’ve called USA! USA! USA! (it was so hard not to try to make some kind of Babysitters Club or Broadway-related title, a Homer Simpson quote is a good compromise.) You’re welcome to read it and keep abreast with our traveling times.
Thanks for all the good words as I felt my way through this cookbook-writing process – if it’s not too disconcerting, imagine me hugging my laptop right now by way of metaphorical gratitude. I mean the gratitude is real, me hugging the laptop is a metaphor for me hugging you all. Actually I’m not sure if it is a correct metaphor, maybe more of a – well, anyway. You get what I mean. 
And so: au revoir. Ka kite. See you soon.
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Title via: Simon and Garfunkel’s America. Dreamy. 
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Music Lately: The All-American Edition
Azealia Banks released her new video for Luxury last night. What a talented babe is she.
Lana Del Rey, Jump. Del Rey always makes me feel a bit moody, but I love her songs so much, so what can you do? I feel like I’m building up an immunity though, this is one of her more bewitching songs that’s juuuuuust upbeat enough.
Seasons of Love, from the movie soundtrack (though the original cast recording is also beautiful and I unsurprisingly recommend both) of RENT. We’re going to New York. Where RENT is from. What is life? 
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Next time: well I’ll certainly have plenty to talk about, won’t I?

every task you undertake, becomes a piece of cake

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It was The Spice Girls who first said in their seminal text Wannabe, “now here’s the story from A to Z, you wanna get with me you gotta listen carefully”. And so it follows that if you wanna get with this cake you too should closely heed this recommendation. I guess what I’m saying is, this cake isn’t complicated but there’s plenty going on and so you might want to take the following hints into account. And the subtext: I really like quoting the Spice Girls on this blog.

– I can’t think of a better way of extracting the juice from the mandarins than peeling the fruit, holding it in your fist and then clenching thoroughly over a receptacle of some kind. It’s visceral, it’s effective, it neatly does away with including another kitchen implement that you have to wash.
– You can of course use oranges, lemons, grapefruit, limes, any other citrus that I’ve shamefully failed to name here instead of mandarins.
– The texture of your yoghurt will affect how much icing sugar you need. If it’s the more liquidy stuff, more icing sugar. If it’s the fabulously whipped-cream thick variety, perhaps less is needed.
– With this in mind, go slowly with adding more yoghurt to the icing or it might all just slide right off the cake and make you nearly cry frustrated tears when you put it on the cake. How do I know? I just do.
– Only arrange the plums just before you serve this. Or they will fall off. They just will. Perhaps it’s their passive-aggressive way of reminding us that they’re not in season, and therefore they’re not going to cooperate with no upstart food blogger.
– This cake is really delicious and not as scary as I’m making it sound.

Mandarin Cake With Yoghurt Icing and Plums

Cake adapted from a recipe in the Best of Cooking for New Zealanders by Lynn Bedford Hall. Icing and stuff all my idea though, for what it’s worth.

125ml mandarin juice (this depends on your mandarins, but maybe seven altogether?)
125ml plain oil, like rice bran or grapeseed
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
175 sugar
250g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
Pinch salt

6 plums
3 tablespoons sugar
1 extra mandarin

3 tablespoons plain unsweetened yoghurt
150g icing sugar, plus more if necessary

Set your oven to 170 C and line a 21cm springform tin with baking paper.

Whisk all the cake ingredients together (that’s from mandarin juice to the pinch of salt inclusive, by the way) for a few minutes till it forms a thick, pale golden batter. Tip this into the caketin and bake for an hour, though check after 45 minutes. Ovens can be tricksy.

Meanwhile, slice the plums into wedges and place them in a bowl. Sprinkle over the sugar and squeeze over the juice of the mandarin. Leave to sit at least for as long as the cake needs to cook, but overnight is even better.

Once the cake has cooled, whisk together the yoghurt and icing sugar till thick. Add more of either ingredient if necessary. Icing can be tricksy, too. Spread this thickly across the top of the cake, and place the plum slices on top.

Juicy plums, oddly-yet-pleasingly tangy icing, soft-crumbed and sweetly citrussy cake. Worth every Spice Girls quote it took to get to this point (and if you’re not weary of Spice Girls quoting, ignore that sentence and instead read this one: Yay, Spice Girls!)

As I said, plums aren’t in season, but they were only $6 a kilo and you can hardly get anything for $6 these days. If I sound a little defensive it’s only because I recently had the good fortune to meet Nadia Lim, winner of 2011 Masterchef, and she is VERY big on seasonal eating. Which is highly admirable. Sorry to let you down, Nadia, but if it’s any consolation, mandarins are in season right now so hard. And these ones couldn’t be fresher or more local, as they’re from Tim’s grandparents’ tree in Wairoa.

How did I meet her? My dear friend Jo and I were both invited to her Wellington On A Plate Masterclass by Pead PR. You can read Jo’s thoughts on the event here. As well as being a great friend, Jo is also good to hang with at a party. She’s all “Oh hey there Mayor Celia Wade-Brown, let’s hug and talk about our lives and this is my friend Laura”. And she stayed with me right to the end (the champagne helped the time fly by, admittedly) while I waited to meet Nadia and talk with her. Nadia herself should be commended for her massive patience in taking the time to talk to me after having talked to roughly a million other people beforehand. I admit I never actually saw Masterchef – we don’t have a TV, and while I love cooking shows I honestly find the hugely competitive ones a little stressful to watch. All that running around and plating up and being edited to look like a mean person! So while I’d heard Nadia Lim’s name around, and had read a few interviews with her and such, I didn’t have much of a feel for what she was like as a person or a cook. Well, she seems awesome. She’s enthusiastic about food, which I love, she’s confident and fun, she’s highly knowledgeable, and she made three different salmon entrees (using Regal King salmon) and a dessert in her half hour masterclass. All of which I wanted to try recreating myself as soon as possible. You know sometimes when a recipe is so simple and practical and delicious that you think “why haven’t I been making this all the time?” That’s how I felt about her salmon recipes.

And as I said, I got to have a chat with her and she graciously answered the three questions I threw down.
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HungryandFrozen x Nadia Lim

Me, Laura Vincent: You’ve just had a cookbook published. What’s something people should know about the process? 

Nadia Lim: Mine was a seasonal cookbook, so if you shoot in winter…I had to use imported stuff which I hated, because I’m a huge fan of eating seasonally and locally, it was a huge dilemma. There are things I had to leave out…and some things I just couldn’t use at all, like I couldn’t put feijoas in. That was a challenge.

Me: I hear that. I am struggling to find strawberries for my photos. Luckily butter’s always in season… I think it’s awesome that you’re young – 26 – and you’ve got a cookbook, you won this TV show, you’re out there getting yours. In an industry generally presided over by older males, what do you think a younger perspective brings?

Nadia: I’ve always stayed pretty true to my food philosophy. When I was twelve I came up with my philosophy of ‘eating from the ground, the sea and the sky, not the factory. But when you’re younger, you’re more more willing to learn new things. Sometimes people are a little stuck in their ways, their techniques, how they do things, but I’m very adaptable and I like to learn from lots of different people, I’m really open to it. And I also think the young generation has a real responsibility, now we’re going back to more, you know, finding out about your ingredients. Whether they’re ethical, sustainable, healthy, what their environmental impact is. That’s really important.

Me: Say someone gave you a million dollars and you could travel anywhere in the world to eat their food-

Nadia [immediately]: Turkey. Yes. I love Middle Eastern flavours. I haven’t been to the Middle East yet but I use a lot of their ingredients in my cooking. I love things like pomegranates, dukkah, labne…Turkish cuisine often – well, you know the flavour wheel, of whether your tastes are more tart/sour dominant or sweet, or salty…I’m quite sour orientated, and a lot of their food is quite tart, like their cheeses, and pomegranate molasses.

Me: And sumac?
Nadia: Yeah! They use so many things that I love in that type of cuisine, and it’s quite healthy, lots of grains and vegetables and freshly made food.

Me: I have spent one afternoon in Turkey – I didn’t eat anything, I had one glass of apple tea. 

Nadia: Apple tea is so good!

Me: Yes! Based on that I can definitely recommend the place. And thanks heaps for your time.

Nadia: Thank you!
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Thanks again Nadia Lim, now established as my second-favourite Nadia, right after Ms Comaneci.

In a world where there is so much to be outraged at, like awful pizza companies being awful, I’d like to also throw some light on some things making me happy lately. Whittaker’s sent me a wealth of their wonderful chocolate to assist my recipe testing, for which I’d like to individually hug every single Whittaker’s employee. Tim and I found out we’re going to be able to go behind the scenes at Third Man Records and will get to talk to co-founder Ben Swank when we’re in Nashville in October. We went to a Whisky Breakfast for Wellington on a Plate at Arthur’s cafe – our friend Kim has some glorious photos here on her blog. I got to meet Nadia Lim (okay, you already know that from just ten seconds ago, but I’m not above recycling nice news.) I finally finished and uploaded episode 3 of my podcast, The HungryandFrozen #soimportant Podcast. You can listen on iTunes or on the website. If you like.

And finally, this excellent cat video made me laugh.
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Title via: Was *this* close to quoting the ‘jaded mandarin’ line from Jesus Christ Superstar, which I thought for a long time was Judas calling Jesus a mandarin as in the fruit. But instead: MARY POPPINS with A Spoonful of Sugar. She is so important. 
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Music lately:

Willy Moon, I Wanna Be Your Man. He is one smooth babe.

Placebo, Slave to the Wage. Forgot how much I love them.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Down By The Riverside. She is the coolest.
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Next time: I’m as shocked as anyone, but it’s nearly spring! I’m hoping there’ll be some new fruit and vegetables coming in soon…I love winter so much but I’m ready for more fruit and for asparagus!

PS: I totally forgot to upload the photos first time I published this. Fail! But lots of people reminded me right away. Hooray for the people!

how lucky can you get?

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I intended on publishing this on Thursday or Friday, but a ton of other things got in the way, and then Tim and I have spent the last 24 hours driving many, many, many and then some miles to visit his grandparents, having realised we hadn’t done it in a while and it was an important thing to do. I’m all good with family outweighing this blog, just as I’m cool with this blog outweighing my need to sleep and generally function. Let’s go, on with the show.

You know what I love? What really makes me want to hug myself but also not want to draw attention to it for fear of breaking the spell and then it’ll all be over? Spontaneous good times. I just wish I could schedule them into my life more often. Like, “You there! Closest friends of mine! Nothing’s happening this Saturday, so let’s all pretend like we’re going to do other things separately but actually we all secretly understand that we’ll meet at someone’s house at 9pm and then drink lots of whisky and stay up all night talking about our lives and feelings!” Obviously life doesn’t actually work like that, but I think if we all tried to maintain this pretense, it could be quite, quite rewarding.

I say this because last Saturday, after a five-hour photoshoot for The Cookbook, we had a couple of people round for a game of Game of Thrones. (Yes, it’s a boardgame; no, it’s not just a group of us dressing up and talking all ye olde and calling everything we drink Summerwine or Good Brown Ale; yes I would probably be up for that too though; no there is no alternative to calling the board game ‘Game of Game of Thrones’.) That photoshoot was particularly exhausting – sounds ridiculous, but it takes it out of a person – we were all super low in energy when it was done, and I figured it was going to be a very quiet night. Smash cut to 11:00pm when I tweeted “Everyone in the world is at our house and no-one is allowed to leave until they’ve drank all our alcohol and eaten all our food” (because if I like you, that’s the kind of host I am.) There was a dance party in the kitchen. There was the Game of Thrones TV theme song sung while Brendan played it on the accordion (which is the most magnificent thing to hear – not us singing along with it so much, but the accordion itself – so imposing!). There was, well, pretty much everything the tweet implied.

It was so fun, and I had no idea it was going to happen. So let’s all plan for more spontaneous times, okay everyone?

But what about this chocolate cake already? It’s from Lucky Peach magazine, ‘a quarterly journal of food and writing’, exploring food with a kind of irreverence and fearlessness and coolness that hasn’t quite been done before, which in this everything-has-been-quite-done-before world is impressive. Like: David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, writes about his father’s love of sodium in this latest issue. By way of shorthand illustration of its coolth. (Also: coolth is a word. Cool huh!)

It’s not pretty, it’s occasionally kinda ugly, but the design is compelling and fun and the writing is generally super brilliant. It’s expensive but it’s only out four times a year and it’ll probably take me a quarter of a year just to read this issue. And it has this cake from pastry chef/musician Brooks Headley. It appealed to me – a plain, but excellent-sounding chocolate cake is what everyone needs up their sleeve (figuratively) and in their mouths (literally). The recipe is all in cups, being American, and in the magazine it was three times bigger than this – all I needed was one cake so I scaled it back. Forty-five minutes later when I finally figured out the mathematics of it all, I can attest that it is a fantastic recipe.

Chocolate Olive-Oil Cake, by Brooks Headley, from Issue 4 of Lucky Peach

Life is strange. I buy really expensive cocoa which actually tastes like chocolate, and used that here, but I couldn’t bring myself to use a full 2/3 cup of also-pricey olive oil, so I went for 1/3 cup olive oil and 1/3 cup plain cooking oil. You do what you like.

  • 1/2 cup cocoa
  • 2/3 cup water
  • 1 1/3 cups flour
  • 1 1/3 cups sugar
  • 1/2 t baking soda
  • 1 t salt
  • 2/3 cup buttermilk (I used unsweetened natural yoghurt)
  • 2/3 cup olive oil
  • 1 egg

Set your oven to 170 C and line a 20 or 21cm cake tin with baking paper.

The hardest thing you’ll have to do is heat the water and cocoa together. So to do that: in a decent-sized pot or pan, since you might as well mix everything else into it, stir the cocoa and the water together and heat gently – continuing to stir so it doesn’t burn – until it just starts to bubble. Remove from the heat and allow to cool down some – I filled the sink with an inch of cold water and whisked the cocoa and water to move this process along – then whisk in the remaining ingredients. Pour into your cake tin and bake for around 30 minutes.

Brooks states that this recipe is “foolproof”. I am wary of this description. Getting your learner driver license is foolproof, they told me. Well this fool just failed, I replied, tearfully. It goes on. But this cake really is very straightforward. And importantly: delicious. Don’t be scared of the olive oil, it has its own nutty, buttery flavours that are perfect for chocolate and it makes for a long-lasting cake with a light crumb. I made this to augment the contents of the ‘snack table’ during some photoshoots this week and the final slice, eaten for breakfast yesterday before driving up to Tim’s grandparents’ place, was every bit as good as the first.

So thanks, Lucky Peach. Long may you be excellent.

Title via: How Lucky Can You Get, the Kander and Ebb song from Funny Lady, the sequel to Funny Girl. I love Barbra, but Julia Murney interprets it deliciously. As she does with everything.

Music Lately:

Frank Ocean, Bad Religion. OBSESSED.

It’s not music, but I have been watching this video lots and crying nearly every time, which is what I tend to do with music anyway. Nadia Comaneci in 1976, getting – spoiler alert – a perfect 10 for her floor routine. I used to be so (here comes that word again) obsessed with her as a kid, and youtube has helped me remember just why.

Next time: Whatever it is, I’ll blog about it sooner this time, promise!

 

don’t you wanna be the life of the party? don’t you wanna be the cream of the crop?

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Guess what? I’m better! I nay have a cold anymore! No longer need I use handtowels as handkerchiefs (a mere handkerchief couldn’t sponge up my nose’s output! Just wallow in that image for a moment) or erode the roof of my mouth with pungent eucalyptine lozenges or down painkillers because my head feels like it’s shrinking around my brain.
Guess what other thing? I have pretty much taken over the lives of my friends in the process of this cookbook. Now I love, just love, being the centre of attention, but now that I am genuinely the centre of attention, I feel a little wary that because I have three friends in the role of photographers and stylist for the book, that every time we talk or meet for something it’s all about me. Even though I enjoy talking about myself. Why, just look at me making it all about me in my concern that it’s all about me even though I love it being all about me, via the most all-about-me medium there is, a personal blog! But generally this is a pretty stupid thing to wring one’s hands over, especially as the photoshoot process is going amazingly so far. I truly love the images I’ve seen so far from Kim and Jason, and Kate has been the most brilliant stylist, with more eye for detail than a fox pursuing walnuts (it’s a vegetarian fox). Tim has also shown aplomb as project manager, which involves tasks from the arduous – making sense of my hopeless document-naming system, doing dishes while I lie dramatically prostrate on the couch – to the resourceful, using his wiles to charm vast quantities of excellent coffee from the good people at Customs Brew Bar (he also used money to charm the coffee from them, but let’s not let facts get in the way of a good story.) And hey, get a load of these behind the scenes photos! Which really show you nothing at all, but still.  

And mercifully for our bank balances (buying ingredients but also existing on one income is a challenge, but these are happy times, so we can deal with it) the recipe-testing process has ranged from the merely successful to the ‘intermingling tears of smugness, joy and relief at the deliciousness I hath wrought’ kind of successful.
In the meantime, we still have to eat stuff, and this – Beetroot Baked in Cream, Balsamic Vinegar and Cumin with Spaghetti, Thyme and Pinenuts – was one such eaten stuff recently. It was just an idea I had, that so often beetroot is paired with sharper flavours when in fact it might lend itself perfectly to something richer. The cream makes it luxurious – I’m not talking something you should feel guilty over, or like you immediately have to go for a run afterwards to compensate for – because I would never talk like that anyway. I mean luxurious as in lifting the beetroot from its usual clean, austere nature and transforming it into something with a wealth of flavour as dense and layered and rich as a steak or roasted mushrooms. Cream. It is wonderful stuff. Not least because it can turn itself into butter.

During their time in the oven, the beetroot and the cream – two fairly dissimilar ingredients – start to meld, the sugars in both begin to caramelise, the silky texture of the cream echoes the soft, yielding beetroot, their more nutty elements become more emphasised together. And most gloriously of all, the cream turns a blinding, intensely bright pink.

It’s like you’ve melted MAC Lady Danger lipstick all over your dinner, and leaving aside how gross that would actually be, it’s a notion that kinda pleases me. Why can’t more food be this pink and this delicious?

Beetroot Baked with Cream, Balsamic Vinegar and Cumin with Spaghetti, Thyme and Pinenuts


A recipe by myself. You could of course serve this over rice or couscous or whatever, I just really, really, really, really love pasta. 


3 medium beetroot
3/4 cup cream
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon ground cumin
200g spaghetti (or linguine, or whatever long twirl-able pasta you like)
A small handful of fresh thyme leaves
2 tablespoons pinenuts


Set the oven to 190 C. Trim the tops and tails from the beetroot, and scrub them if they’ve got any dirt clinging. Slice in half and then slice those halves into semicircles – a bit like how you might cut an onion. Lay the slices in a roasting dish, not worrying if they overlap, and pour over the cream. Sprinkle over the salt, vinegar and cumin, then cover with tinfoil and bake for half an hour. Remove the tinfoil, and bake for another half hour. The cream will bubble freakishly, but don’t worry. This is all good. 

Cook the pasta in a pan of boiling salted water as per packet instructions, then drain and divide between two plates. Spoon the beetroot and its fuchsia sauce over the spaghetti, then throw the nuts and the thyme leaves on top and serve.

A scattering of rich thyme leaves and a precious handful of pinenuts (seriously, those things are expensive like diamonds) makes it all come together, and also tones down the retina-searing brightness some.

Last time I blogged I mentioned I was getting ready to dress up as a Gold Lion for a Wild Animals party organised by two friends of mine, both named Jo. I found a gold sparkly dress (the sequins of which scratched my arms up no end, but I danced through it) and a friend of mine plaited my hair with pipe cleaners and pinned them into lion’s ears like so:

And I put on sliiightly more makeup than usual. Like food, I enjoy my makeup bright and plentiful. The party was so much fun and I danced so hard with my fellow animal-dressed friends and increasing the joy even further, all proceeds went to the Wellington SPCA. The only dark spot in a glorious evening was the dudebros who yelled homophobic slurs from a bar balcony at a bunny-ears-wearing Tim on our walk home, which is wrong for so many reasons that I won’t overexplain to you (my main concerns being gay cannot continue to be used as an insult, and also what if they weren’t on that balcony? What if they were on the street with us?) We sometimes refer to what we call our ‘liberal bubble’ that our friends and I float around in, and like that night, occasionally the bubble gets popped with a harsh knifestab.

That fleeting moment of horribleness aside, the weekend was so glorious, especially when we got to hang out with some real animals at Jo’s house while watching Veronica Mars on Sunday evening, reminding me with a brief heart contraction just how much I love cats, how much I love Veronica Mars, and, bringing this blog post full circle, how much I love my friends. Either that or my heart was processing some cholesterol. But I think it was sentimentality!
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Title via: I’ve used this before as a title, but it’s so incredibly good that I just want to use it in every single blog post. The always-sublime Idina Menzel, getting dark and ugly in Life of the Party from Andrew Lippa’s musical The Wild Party. 
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Music lately:

I am totally a Liza fan, but a young Judi Dench’s version of Sally Bowles in the original London cast of Cabaret is so worth your ears – aching, intense, careless, and with the most charming, charming husky voice as she sings the title song.

I spied this cover on my friend Coley’s Facebook. Now, I do not like the Kings of Leon song Sex on Fire. But do you know who can make it effortlessly incredible? Beyonce. And I wish I had even one sixteenth of her gold-lion-ness.
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Next time: I am aware that there has been little-to-know pudding or cake or ice cream on the blog lately. This is not like me, and I will remedy it. 

life’s candy and the sun’s a ball of butter

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Is this a second post in a row featuring that bewitching golden distillation that is burnt butter? Affirmative. Is this some kind of salute to butter month that everyone has missed? Noooo…but then every day is Salute to Butter Month…day…when I’m around.
And yes, it is Burnt Butter Ice Cream. Snap Judge Ye Not! I’ve come to learn that some of my opinions are not the generally held ones (did you know I hated The Shawshank Redemption? And all the sports there are? Apart from watching Olympic gymnastics and figure skating with hands clamped over my eyes because I was scared they’d fall over?) and so I suspect that while I think butter-flavoured ice cream is something I quite casually make and see as normal, others might be horrified and pearl-clutching about. Let me straighten the record: butter flavoured ice cream is wonderful. Really, genuinely, hand-it-to-you-on-a-plate, unthreateningly delicious. Why, it’s as real as you and me. 

It is in fact very normal tasting ice cream. Almost bordering-on-disappointingly normal for someone like me, but for the less liberally buttery of you, perhaps a relief. The intensity is muffled somewhat once frozen. What you get this roundly rich, deeply creamy golden ice cream which gives you vividly toffeed caramel flavours and a lingering buttery nuttiness. It just tastes like amazing ice cream.

Be assured, it’s not like dragging a spoon across a cold block of butter. Nice as that is.

Be further assured, you don’t need an ice cream maker machine thing for this. I don’t have one myself, and my love for ice cream is way too river deep, mountain high for me to want to make it all exclusive or anything. All you have to do to this is freeze it.

It’s a while since I’ve made an old-timey custard-based ice cream. Custard ice cream is the patient person’s game. This is probably why I’ve avoided it for a while. But all that’s involved is a lot of stirring. As En Vogue said, don’t let go – just stand there by the pan stirring and stirring till the mixture finally rewards you by ambiguously thickening slightly. I for one recommend putting on a podcast (like mine, way-hey?) or an audiobook (I had Wuthering Heights) to distract the mind.

Burnt Butter Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

I did dither over whether to call this browned butter, or just butter, but I like the total un-vagueness of ‘burnt’, because that’s what it is.  

50g butter
2 cups cream
1 cup milk
3 egg yolks
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
(Note: New Zealand butter is always salted – if you’re using unsalted, add a generous pinch of salt when you add the butter at the end)

First, gather ye a saucepan, a good-sized bowl, and a freezer-proof container (as you can see I just used a glass loaf tin. The kind you might bake a loaf in.) Melt the butter over a decent heat in the saucepan, allowing it to carry on cooking beyond your usual sensibilities. As you can see above, it will start bubbling vigorously and separate out into layers of sorts. Once it’s all foamy and bubbly and darkened remove it from the heat and spatula it into a bowl while you get on with everything else.

In that same pan, gently heat up the milk and cream. While this is happening whisk together the yolks and sugars, it doesn’t have to be thick, just incorporated. Once the milk/cream has heated sufficiently – you don’t want it to boil, just get very hot – turn off the heat and carefully whisk about 1/2 a cup of the milk/cream into the egg/sugar mixture, then another 1/2 cup and another – continually whisking so you don’t end up with scrambled eggs.

Then pour all that back into the pan and stir over a low heat, stirring constantly so it doesn’t cook too fast. I warn you, this could take around 20 minutes. The texture will thicken to that of a good quality milkshake (if not thickshake) and the bubbles on the surface should minimise. The more egg yolks in your custard the thicker it will get so don’t stress too much about it.

Finally, whisk in the butter, which will likely have solidified by this point. Pour everything into your freezerproof container and freeze, without stirring, till it is, unsurprisingly, frozen.

Luckily this ice cream is air-punchingly awesome, because I have been seriously lacking in lustre while writing about it. I am tired. The week started mighty promisingly – seeing the movie version of the Broadway show Rock of Ages with my dear friend Kim, and the subsequent marveling over how disturbingly HAWT Tom Cruise was in it and how much we love Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand’s characters and how excellent Mary J Blige’s pantsuits are. And how I am ever more in hot pursuit of bigger hair. But since then I haven’t slept so well, a good wedge of my brain has been given over to working out details of my upcoming cookbook (obligatory mention!) and financial concerns, general stresses and what’s-the-deal-with-my-body annoyances (I mean like, not feeling well, nothing else) and I’ve been catching feelings like you wouldn’t believe.

On the up-and-up, there are Tony Award clips to watch, photos from Jo’s Double Super Sweet Sixteenth birthday party and memories of intense bedroom dance parties therein to reminisce over, our October trip to America to plan, a new podcast episode to edit, and this ice cream to eat. Just got to get through June…and everything will be cool.

While I’m generally a bit suspish of over-dressed food photography, I have no defensiveness for this. I’d held onto the jaunty flag decorations from the quadruple layer birthday cake my friends made me for me a few months ago and this one seemed just right plunged possessively on an angle into the ice cream. Also a long-distance hug to my god-parents and their family for the equally jaunty ice cream cups. All the better to eat ice cream out of, hey?
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Title via: Don’t Rain on My Parade, from Funny Girl. Here’s an effortless version from the sadly late Donna Summer. My very favourite person, Idina Menzel, singing it for Streisand herself at a concert with an adorable shoutout halfway through. And this incredible rendition by Lillias White from a 2002 benefit.

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Music lately:

Rockin Back Inside My Heart, a cover by She’s So Rad. As I’ve said constantly, I’m very obsessed with Julee Cruise’s song, but this cover is glorious – the voice is more present and definite than Cruise’s, without losing a shred of the song’s deliciously dreamy nature.

Fiona Apple Every Single Night. I love this song. Beautiful. Watched the first frame of the music video and decided it wasn’t for me though (spoiler: there’s an octopus! I like my octopi at a distance!)
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Next time: I promise, something non-buttery. I am super aware of how painfully expensive it is. I’m just slightly more super aware of how delicious it is.

a dip in the butter and a flutter with what meets my eye

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Aren’t hormones just the darnedest things? I was thinking about the Spice Girls the other day and started crying a little. While on a public street in Wellington, walking to work. I know, what is life. It was pretty innocuous – something along the lines of ‘they were so pretty but accessible and they really did seem like the best of friends” and then I just got a bit teary, out of nowhere. Last time I cried while thinking about the Spice Girls was back in 1998 when Geri Halliwell left and I couldn’t listen to Viva Forever without my heart crumbling like a Spice Girls-branded Chupa Chup under someone’s back molars.

That really has nothing to do with anything (apart from everything) but it was an anecdote too large for Twitter and too strange for Facebook, and an anecdote nonetheless. I don’t exist on this many online formats to not be able to share awkward public tearfulness at the hands of a largely non-credible 90s pop group somewhere.

It has been a week of big decisions. The biggest being that with this cookbook looming ever closer, I’m leaving my full-time job to devote myself to writing. Writing the book, writing this blog (I don’t want to ever be too busy for it) and hopefully doing some more freelance writing too, in order to keep myself and Tim in butter. It’s not something I’ve decided to do lightly – money doesn’t come from nothing, I’ve gained a lot of opportunities from my current workplace, and honestly it still feels so recently that KFC and several supermarkets never called me back. But the book needs to come first, and so the end of June will also be the end of my office life for a while.

I almost wasn’t going to blog tonight – I did a lot of sleep-ignoring in the leadup to getting confirmation of the book deal and I can’t quite convince my body to carry on at that same hyper level now I’ve got it. However I conceded that I should blog, and could easily upload an instagram of dinner. Then I figured I might as well use my actual proper camera. By the time I started thinking “By gosh, this photo could use a loosely folded teatowel” I knew I was committed. This is just something I came up with tonight, a response to the brutally cold wet weather and to what I had in the fridge. I’m not the best at cooking polenta but this method, while not traditional, tends to work for me. Polenta will absorb pretty much whatever you throw at it, so if you don’t have cream, just use more water or milk and maybe add some butter, or you could use tomato juice, or well flavoured stock. There are options out there, this is but one.

Garlicky Polenta with Greens and Browned Butter


A recipe by myself.


1 cup fine polenta/cornmeal (they’re the same thing, but make sure it’s the finer, not coarser stuff.)
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 cup cream
1/2 cup milk
2 cups water
Salt
As many green vegetables as you like – I used broccoli, spinach, and avocado. Also good would be beans, peas, Savoy cabbage, rocket, edamame, etc…
Butter


First, slice up any of your vegetables that need it and have them ready. 


Then, in a medium sized pan, carefully whisk together the polenta, garlic, cream, milk and 1 cup of the water till smooth. Bring to the boil, continuing to stir, and adding the extra water if it gets too thick. It will bubble a little – big, slow-moving bubbles – but just continue to stir it, till, when you carefully taste it, the grains are soft and not the slightest bit gritty, with a texture verging on mashed potato-like. 


Set aside while you quickly deal to the vegetables – heat up the pan and add any non-leafy, non-avocado greens to it. Tip in 1/2 cup of water and let it bubble away. Then add your spinach or other leaves, and continue to cook till the water has evaporated and the leaves have wilted. 


Finally – spoon the polenta onto two plates, put the greens (including your avocado if you’ve got it) on top, and then finally heat up the same pan you cooked the veges in and throw in about 30g butter. Let it sizzle over a high heat till darkened, with golden bubbles appearing. Remove from heat and spoon it over the vegetables and polenta. Serve.

Polenta becomes quilt-soft and gently creamy in flavour – incredible comfort food, the likes of which I never even knew existed a few years back. Browning the butter means burning it, but if you’re wary of such brazen actions just know that it becomes more darkly rich and nutty and – oh, glorious new word! – pinguid than you dreamed possible. And hot browned butter on top of cool firm avocado is quite the revelation. It won’t be the last you’ll see this combination here, I assure you.

Pinguid pinguid pinguid. As satisfying to say as it is to think about things that are pinguid.

It has also been a week of podcast fraught-ness. If your original file never recorded properly, your laptop wall charger stopped working, you accidentally uploaded entirely the wrong file to iTunes and in a panic accidentally not only delete it entirely from your podcast website rather than calmly editing it, but also delete the first episode…would you feel like the universe was trying to say “stop trying to make fetch happen!“? It wasn’t just any wrong file I uploaded to iTunes, but a video. Yes, if you can’t tell by the crisp, stellar sound on my podcast, I just record myself talking on Photo Booth, then convert it to mp3, then upload it as a podcast. Except I forgot to convert it, so had you casually found my podcast on iTunes, you would’ve been greeted by my pale, unwashed face talking away in the semi-dark while I was wrapped in a wooly blanket, followed by me in an old tshirt with the angle of the camera directly up my nose, followed by me wearing the outfit I describe in the podcast, but still not at my best angle (I assume I have one.) iTunes does not make it easy for you to delete something in a hurry either. Awkward.

Again I’d like to throw some huge love in the direction of my friend Kate, who came and recorded twice after the first file was busted, whose husband volunteered me their own laptop wall charger after mine stopped working, and who is such a brilliant podcast guest that I was, while editing it, continually smiling and nodding and turning to Tim and yelling “I think it’s going to be good!” because I forgot that I always shout when I’m trying to talk with headphones on.

So if you want to listen to The HungryandFrozen #soimportant Podcast Episode 2, you finally can, on the website or here in iTunes.

It has also been a time of parties! I was going for queen of the dinosaurs here, but despite my hastily cobbled-together garland of dinos, I somehow ended up looking like I was selling Pears soap or something. (Photo by Kate – I guess it’s been a time of Kate too!) Still, it’s a much better look than what I saved you all from in the accidentally-uploaded-video-podcast horrorshow. I wish there were more opportunities to wear dinosaur garlands, I guess since I’m not going to be in the office for much longer I can make my own opportunities, right? This imminent lack of job is paying for itself!
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Title via: The Miller’s Son from Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. Sara Ramirez (as in Grey’s Anatomy’s Callie, or as in Tony Award winning Sara Ramirez) is so, so magnificent here.
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Music lately:

Liane La Halvas, Age. She’s gorgeous, the song’s gorgeous. Yay for her.

This isn’t a song as such, but if you have even the slightest interest in hearing people sing nicely (not to back you into a corner here) this Seth Rudetsky ‘Obsessed’ video with Morgan James of Godspell has me, well, obsessed. Her voice is incredible. Worth it entirely for the bit at the end, although everything leading up to it’s great as well – I must’ve watched this a zillion times.
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Next time: I can’t get enough brown butter at the moment, and Brown Butter Ice Cream keeps appearing in my head, but we’ll see, we’ll see.

here’s your one chance fancy, don’t let me down

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It has been a little while since my last post but I feel I had a distinctly good reason to leave you all dangling expectantly, like…no, can’t think of a not unsavoury simile to end that sentence with.

But if by any chance you hadn’t heard me talking about it constantly, I still have a book deal and I’m still going to be publishing a cookbook and I’m still overcome with happy excitement. I’m a person who’s quite used to disappointment from way back, you know, the picked-last-for-the-team kind of kid, so it’s wildly unusual to have this existence of having achieved exactly what I wanted. I mean I still have to write the thing and it has to actually be a success, but even so, just getting asked to do it makes me feel like that scene in Fame, where Doris is slowly eating her dinner in a deeply aware manner, after her drama teacher instructs the class to study every aspect of how they move through life. Here I am, walking down the street, as a soon-to-be-published author. Here I am, putting on a sock, as a soon-to-be-published author. It’s really something. In your face, people who picked me last! Actually I take that back, for two reasons: firstly it’s not all those many kids’ fault that the teachers continually enforced such an unjust, merciless system of group distribution; secondly I would’ve picked me last too. I was hopeless. I really was not the person you wanted on your longball team. D’you know what I’d pick me first at though? A damn book deal, that’s what. And all you teachers who, King Joffrey-like, cruelly asked the cool sporty kids to pick teams? The book-deal-people (yeah I still can’t tell you who it is yet) approached me. Out of the blue. I didn’t have to go to them. In your face, specific teachers who did that! (But please buy my book.)

Let’s leave the enforced ugliness of gym class behind us. There’s better things up ahead. And I would like to present a sincere, heartfelt, serious thank you for all the nice things everyone has said to me about all this, via tweet and email and blog comment Facebook message and full-body hug. You’re all good people, and I can’t wait to write this book.

In the meantime, a gentle reminder that things will just refuse to fall into place more often than not, I invited my great friend Kate over to be on the next episode of my podcast. Because we fancy ourselves as fancy, I made these Fancy Tea Cookies from my Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts cookbook. We had us some crackling and sparkling dialogue for about 45 minutes, Kate left, I went to go edit the file to turn it into a podcast, and discovered that the recording had frozen up, ten seconds in. All of that for nothing, damn it.

Still at least they were good cookies. And completely…not fancy. But then the book was written in 1968, before the popularisation of, like, truffle oil.

Fancy Tea Cookies

Adapted slightly from Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts

  • 250g soft butter
  • 4 tablespoons sugar
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 cup dessicated coconut
  • 1 tablespoon sugar, extra

Beat the butter and sugar together in a large bowl with a wooden spoon (or whatever) till well combined, creamy, and light-textured. Carefully stir in the flour and coconut. If the mixture feels particularly soft, refrigerate for 20 minutes, then roll spoonfuls in your hands and flatten carefully (the mixture is a little crumbly but it will stick together if you push it into place!) Place the cookies on trays lined with baking paper, sprinkle with the extra sugar, and bake for 25-30 minutes at 150 C.

These don’t taste intensely of coconut, so if you wanted to you could ice them and sprinkle over even more coconut. They do have this densely buttery flavour and a wonderful shortbread-style texture, and even though they look sturdy they’re not even slightly crunchy, instead yielding – almost dissolving on the tongue – but not to overthink it, they’re just really nice cookies, okay? Okay. And as the name says, really good with a cup of tea.

Some more good times have swung my way lately. Yesterday, the female-proud juggernaut that is BUST magazine graciously asked if they could please post the recipe to my Gin and Tonic Ice Cream. I said yes, of course. Then this morning I found out that the cool Jessica of Foxes shop was talking about me on her Oh My Blog segment on Charlotte Ryan’s enviably excellent Morning Glory radio show on 95bFM. I was totally unprepared for how many nice things they’d say about me, I blushed so hard my face nearly fell clean off. Maybe something else will happen tomorrow and make it a trifecta of glory? Even if not, those are some laurels to rest upon.

While it might look like I’m going to do nothing but talk about this book deal, I’ll try to stay chill and at least only bring it up when it’s relevant. (Which I’m afraid is a 24/7/365 kind of thing.) I also don’t have any more details about it to share with you but I definitely will reveal all as and when there’s anything revealable to reveal. In the meantime, thanks again for all your kindness, and…I really do recommend those cookies.

Title via: Fancy, a Reba McEntire song, and though I have much love for Reba’s eponymous sitcom, and respect for her music career, my favourite take on this cautionary tale is by Broadway star Julia Murney. She is incredible and could embiggen any old tune but this one suits her well, unfortunately the only version of it on YouTube isn’t the bestest quality but there is a shinier studio version on her CD I’m Not Waiting if you’re that keen to hear it.

Music lately:

Gina G, Just A Little Bit. I do think this is a really good song still, it has aged better than some songs from, say, 2003. But perhaps Gina’s distinct babeliness helps with that.

Savage Garden, I Want You. Let the record state that I am an absolute non-fan of Savage Garden. My dislike for them is immense. But I have an almost sick adoration of this song and I’ve come to terms with this, mostly by listening to this song about seventeen times in a row.

Just in case you were concerned you’d stumbled onto a blog from 1996, look at this recent song I love too! Azealia Banks, L8R. I love this woman but I’d warn you not to click through if you’re made nervous by swearwords and stuff.

Next time: Haven’t thought this through too much, as every time I go to think about something instead my brain says “book deal!”