Category: Vegetarian

isn’t it rich? are we a pear?

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I know, everyone’s on holiday and I said I wasn’t blogging till next year, but as Britney sang in her cover of the song My Prerogative, it’s my prerogative. Plus, cake! Cake.
 
 
 
The thing with traditions – they’re wonderful. They give you something to cling to in this strange, scary world, a sense of where you’ve been and where you might go – they give you stories to relay and build upon and argue over the precise order of; they give you something to pass on to other people. 
 
They’re also damn vexatious, because once you get sucked into a tradition it’s very difficult to break it. I have done roughly the same thing for Christmas every single year of my life, and as such the idea of being anywhere else during that time is un-contemplatable. (Admittedly: am not particularly good at compromising. Sure, Eartha Kitt romanticises it for me, but compromise does go some way to making other people happy.) As such, Tim and I have only spent one Christmas together in the past seven years…and that was when he came to my family’s place.
 
My family (in the very extended sense of the word) has been camping at this one particular beach every single year since I was born. I’m still pretty young, but that’s a lot of years. This year, for the first time, owing to a lack of money and time in equal measure, I’m not going along with them. I know I vocally dislike nature, but this place is magical and special and all we really do anyway is sit around and drink gin and play cards. Sigh.
 
And finally, the flat Christmas Dinner that I have had every year since 2006, when Tim and I moved in together, was not able to happen this year again due to a lack of time and funds – and also moving house on the 15th of December.
 
Damn you, traditions, getting me all emotionally attached to things and being so difficult to extricate myself from and making my heart hurt a bit! Is this what being a grown up is about? If so, then I stamp my feet petulantly in response. But also get on with it. Damn you too, grownuphoodity.
 
 
 
Before this gets all too, too hand-wringingly lachrymose, let us focus on a cake! Tim and I are spending New Years with a tangle of our best friends. I’m bringing novels of a worthy (Muriel Sparks) and trashy (Jilly Cooper) nature; plenty of whisky; languid-friendly dresses, and this cake.
 
I adapted it from a recipe that I found in the Meat Free Mondays book by Paul McCartney. I don’t eat a ton of meat as it is, let alone on Mondays, but there is many a brilliant and inspiring recipe for any day of the week to be found within its pages. This has ended up being really quite different to their recipe, but it’s what spurned on the idea, so a tip of the hat to them all the same. (PS: I would just like to say though, the caramel pear sauce was all my idea.) (I guess I’m not that grown-up yet.)
 
Pear and Almond Cake with Caramel Pear Sauce
 
PS: this needs a food processor to make it sorry – though if you don’t have one, I’d make sure the butter was quite soft, cream it with the sugar first, then the egg, then fold everything else in. So: still do-able, for sure.
 
1 x 70g packet ground almonds
150g flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
150g sugar
170g butter, cubed
1 egg
1 can of pears
 
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon golden syrup
2 teaspoons cornflour
30g butter
 
Set your oven to 160 C/320 F and line a 20cm springform caketin with baking paper.
 
Tip the ground almonds, flour, and baking powder into your food processor bowl and process for a bit to mix them together. Then add the sugar and butter and process thoroughly till it forms a thick dough. Tip in the egg and blitz briefly to mix it in. Spread this thick, luscious mixture into your caketin – it won’t be very high – and then drain your can of pears, reserving the liquid (important!) and arrange them, cut-side-up on top of the batter. 
 
Bake for about an hour, or till the cake feels springy and firm in the centre. 
 
Meanwhile, in a small pot or pan, mix the brown sugar, golden syrup and cornflour to an unlikely paste. Slowly mix in the reserved pear juice from the can, and then continue stirring it over a low heat. Allow it to simmer but not quite boil till it all becomes quite syrupy and thick and dark. When it reaches this stage, remove it from the heat and stir in the butter. 
 
Note: You have a choice when the cake is cooked – either do as I did, and leave it in its tin, spike several times with a skewer, pour over the hot caramel pear sauce and then allow it to cool completely. OR – unclip the cake from the tin, slice up, and serve the caramel pear sauce on the side to be poured over in quantities of each slice-eater’s choosing. 
 
 
So uh, even though I made this for other people to eat, I had to judiciously remove a small sliver and eat it, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to blog about it. Or I could, but the most conclusive thing I’d be able to say about it is that it’s very instagrammable. 
 
Luckily for us all, I heroically ate said sliver of cake. And it’s rather wondrous. The caramel sauce absorbs into its surface, making it a sticky confection of a thing, and the pear juice really does make itself known, flavourwise – giving the sauce a floral fragrance which elevates it above mere sugariness (though I do love mere sugariness too, to be fair.) The cake itself is dense and buttery and the almonds give it a slightly nubbly texture which echoes that of the pears. It’s damn good stuff.
 

Due to obstinate fog in Wellington canceling my flight and delaying my departure by 24 hours, my time up home was sadly briefer than I thought it’d be. But all the same it was a lovely time, seeing my family again and spending Christmas day with them. Everyone loved the gifts I got them and I loved the trinkets I received.

Cleaning out one of the cupboards stuffed with my old schoolbooks and things was surprisingly diverting. I was reminded how utterly, utterly righteous I was as a child. Seriously, almost all of my schoolbooks are filled with firmly written opinions like “why must we do maths? Why aren’t Spice Girls more integrated into the curriculum? UGH SPORTS WHY”.

I relayed this to Tim, who astutely pointed out that I could’ve believably expressed that same opinion yesterday.

 
I also adored hanging out with the cats. Or at least attempting to. Roger was largely disinterested, but at least sat still long enough that I could situate myself very close to him and pretend like we were friends. Poppy, ever the baby raptor, decided she hated me and tried to shred my face off every time we approached. I did manage to pick her up for a quick minute though, and even caught the brief affair on camera. Me, thrilled to the bone, Poppy, at least displaying only ennui, instead of her claws. A Christmas Miracle! 
 

Title via: Yes, I elect to end the year on a truly atrocious pun. And I’ll probably start next year with one too, as is my wont. I was always a bit terrified of the song Send In The Clowns from A Little Night Music when I was young, because frankly clowns are scary as hell. But after listening to it properly, I came to realise it’s one of Sondheim’s most quietly devastating tunes, and I rather love it. Especially when Dame Judi Dench absolutely kills it.

Music lately:

The Smiths, How Soon Is Now? We saw Morrissey in concert the night before we moved house. I know he can be horrible, but his music just turns my insides to melted butter and I love his voice and it was just amazing times a billion. It doesn’t excuse any of his horribleness, but I was glad we had the opportunity to see him. Before the show, we each picked three songs we really hoped he’d sing – cutely, or maybe grossly, we both picked the same three – and he did! He sang all three. This was one of them – a song from his erstwhile band which is so good I hardly ever listen to it, because it makes me feel all queasy inside. Not the best recommendation, but if you’ve never heard it before…just try.

Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blank Generation. Since being lent speakers by some friends, Tim and I have been ploughing through all the vinyl we bought over in America. This album of the same name is so utterly great, and I love this song, and Richard Hell is impossibly dreamy. Which maybe helps make the song sound better, who knows?

Next time: This really is the last post I’m doing for 2012 – have a joyous relaxed happiness-filled time, and I’ll see you on the other side. 

pass the what? (pass the popcorn)

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Once I’d finished thoroughly kicking myself for the very shamefulness of even uttering out loud the phrase “gosh, all this moving and job-hunting stuff means I’ve really failed to capitalise on the whole Christmas lead-up thing on the blog,” I realised this would be my very last blog post written in our current flat. Aw. And it’s about, uh, popcorn. When I say capitalise, I’m honestly not capitalising on anything (or I’d be blogging about something more grand than popcorn) but let’s face it, it IS December, and this IS a food blog, and at this time of year many a person’s thoughts inevitably turn to food of a particularly Christmassy nature and we’re already nearly halfway through this month and I’ve barely acknowledged it. However, I’m hoping it’s not too late. 
Note the enthusiastic piece of popcorn which popped right out of the pan after I lifted the lid. The escape act was all for naught, as I ate it anyway.

Burned Butter Maple Popcorn; Salt and Vinegar Popcorn. They both looked exactly the same so I sprinkled the maple one with rainbow sugar. Which immediately fell into all the cracks and crevices in the popcorn. So in case you can’t tell, it’s the top bowl. 

I’ve been eating so much popcorn, partly because it’s deeply inexpensive which suits us right now (moving costs, unemployment, bills, and a persistent post-holiday overdrawn credit card) but also because I had forgotten how really truly delicious and easy to make it is. I’ve been fixing up bowls of it all the time, for a pre-dinner snack, for a post-pre-dinner snack, to go with drinks…it might seem a little unconvincing and unsophisticated to serve to your fancy friends, but it really works.

It’s just so crunchy and porously butter-absorbant and flavour-permeable and a tiny quantity of popping corn makes so much fluffy white popcorn and – did I mention – I know I did, no need to be coy – it’s so cheap. Also it’s gluten-free, vegan-friendly if you use oil, and oddly thrilling as you wait for the mysterious dried corn to burst open.

We don’t have a microwave, so I make it on the stovetop, and it’s all very straightforward. I suppose you don’t have to use any fat in it, but it tastes quite bland without it – but it’s all up to your tastebuds. I like to heat up the popping corn kernels with the butter or oil in a lidded pan over a medium heat, wait for it to start popping after a minute or two, and that’s it really. All you need is a large saucepan with a lid, and for that lid to stay on until you’re quite sure the corn is done popping. Otherwise it will shoot out and land in your hair. It just will.

Burned Butter and Maple Popcorn

You don’t have to use maple syrup if you can’t get hold of it, it’s so expensive that I’m always too nervous to actually use it in anything, and honey or golden syrup would be a worthy substitute. I do think the flavour of this benefits from being popped in butter and then having extra butter added, it’s not the slightest bit gratuitous. Don’t worry in the slightest about the state of the butter in the pan either, the more it burns in the hot pan the more wondrous it will taste – all smoky and nutty and incredible. 

30g butter plus another 20g extra
2 teaspoons maple syrup
Salt
1/3 cup popping corn

Place the 30g butter and popping corn in a large pan, cover with a lid, and place over a medium heat. After a few minutes the corn will start to pop, excitingly – hold onto the lid and give it a shake every now and then to ensure that the popped corn itself won’t burn. Place one teaspoon and a grind of salt in the base of a large serving bowl, then tip most of the popcorn in and stir it around. Sprinkle over the remaining teaspoon of maple syrup, tip in the remaining popcorn and continue to stir. Do what you like to mix it all together really, this just seems to ensure maximum maple-coverage. Melt the remaining butter in the still-hot pan and then tip it over the popcorn evenly, giving one last stir. Rainbow sugar…optional. 

Salt and Vinegar Popcorn

Olive oil’s rich, green flavour is perfect with popcorn, and the sharp vinegar and bursts of salt makes you want to pretty much shovel this into your mouth with a cupped hand till there’s none left.  

1 tablespoon olive oil, plus extra for drizzling
2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
salt
1/3 cup popping corn

As above, heat the corn kernels in the tablespoon of oil in a lidded pan, allow them to pop, shaking it occasionally, and pour most of the popped corn into a bowl in which one teaspoon of balsamic vinegar and a grind of salt has been placed. Stir around, drizzle over some olive oil, stir some more, add the rest of the popcorn, sprinkle over the remaining balsamic vinegar, some more oil, and another grind of salt. Stir as best you can without flinging the weightless grains everywhere.  

So: popcorn. It’s easy. It can absorb as much butter as you’re willing to attempt to saturate it with. It’s so cheap. And it’s wildly delicious. 
By the way, guess what guess what? This might be old news if you follow me on Twitter, but I got a job! Some real employment! It’s very exciting. But fear not, this popcorn is so excellent that we’ll continue eating it long after we can afford to eat other stuff. Can I tell you what the job is exactly? Nay. It’s not that I’m particularly important, it’s just that it’s of a governmental nature and requires some discretion – I’m a little overnervous that I’ll say entirely the wrong thing about it. Just know that it has zero overlap with this blog and it’s going to pay the bills and the most you’ll hear about it might be the occasional “what a long day at the office and people who don’t label their yoghurt pottles in the shared staff fridge, amiright?” type of relatably vague exclamation. Maybe even that was too specific. Nerves aside – I start tomorrow! – I’m so, SO PLEASED to be employed again. Things were getting bad-ridiculous. Now they can start to get good-ridiculous. 
I found out at 4.30pm on Friday – seriously, there is no better way to start your weekend than to discover you’re newly employed. I recommend it. That night my old flatmate but always-friend Ange and I had a dance party of two, in which we danced not wisely but too well, to paraphrase Shakespeare – woke up the next morning with one fiercely sore neck from dancing so expressively. But it was worth it for the joy of the dancing, definitely. Now that the weekend’s over Tim and I only have a few more days left in this flat that has been our home for the past three and a half years. I’m going to miss it – it’s incredible! Tim and I could not believe our luck at being able to live in such a beautiful cool place. But I’m really looking forward to starting over – finding places for everything and getting to love a new place. Also, um, to not have to consider flatmates when, um, look: I’m just looking forward to not having to wear pants all the time, okay? They’re just so restrictive! Even drawstring elastic can be burdensomely present in its own way, but with flatmates you’re kinda obliged to not awkward up their days by going pantsless. With that delightful image in mind, I also can’t wait to make the most of the beautiful light for photography and to go wild in the kitchen. All of which you’ll soon see – it’s kind of like you’re moving with me, except without the hassle and the lifting and the barely-suppressed tension! 
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Title via: Pass The Popcorn, from the supercool The Roots’ very first album Organix. It looks like another one coming around…
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Music lately:
ROYALS, BY LORDE. Capitals necessary. She’s from New Zealand. She’s a teenager. She’s elusive. This song is incredible. I love that music can still surprise me like this. (This was danced to repeatedly on Friday night.) (Just LISTEN to it.) (Then to all the rest of her tracks.)

One other good thing about moving is that our living space will be big enough for me to try and learn magical Donna McKechnie’s dance from Turkey Lurkey Time. This is how I know it’s Christmas: I’m watching this incredible number from the 1968 Tony Awards. It’s ridiculous and it’s dated and it’s…yeah, really ridiculous, but damn if it doesn’t make my heart race every time it gets to the end.
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Next time: New flat! New flat! Tra la la la la la! And something quite, quite Christmassy will be abounding. 

extraordinary, just like a strawberry

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There is no way to talk about needing to distract yourself while two of your closest friends are out of the country for a significant amount of time to sound like a dork (at best), so all I’ll say is that Tim and I are moving house in two weeks and it is significantly distracting. I love our current flat of three and a half years in a way that I never thought a person could love the place they live – having had a succession of terrible, dark flats (crumbly, cold and damp like milk seeping into passionless wheaten breakfast cereal) overlorded by landlords ranging from the faintly bizarre to the terrifying. Here we have real sunshine, the kind that actually gets through the windows and blankets you in warmth rather than sodding off to hang out with your rich neighbours while your room is shrouded in darkness. We don’t have dampness, we don’t have mice, and so on and so forth. In the darkness and with mice my only friends was how I of course started this blog, and pretty much the best thing about living in horrible flats is that you get to spin ever-larger tales of their ill-repute later in life. If Tim and I, aged 19, had shacked up together in a mansion, well. Actually that would’ve been really awesome. I care not for the value of whatever lesson living in said horrible flat taught me: I’d take the mansion any day. 
Much as I hate things coming to an end, sometimes moving on feels right, and we’ve found a new place that we adore. It’ll be just us (nothing to do with us being engaged, we just like that notion) it’s enormous – plenty of dancing room – it has more storage room than we’ve ever known, and it has a dishwasher! I’m already pretty slovenly but I look forward to spiraling further downwards into a state of blissful sloth after welcoming this appliance into our lives. 
Packing has been strangely fun: I spent several hours doing it on Saturday while Tim was off playing the game of Game of Thrones. (I love the tv show, I devour the books, I can’t abide the endless and endlessly complicated game and was happy to be left alone, in case you’re thinking of getting righteous on my behalf.) On my travels through the dark corners of our wardrobe I discovered many a long-forgotten thing.
A faxed copy of my casually sexist birth certificate. My mum’s occupation and the question of their surnames being different were apparently not of interest in the mid eighties. (Faxed to me during high school so I could take part in a first year university philosophy paper, what an overachiever that baby turned out to be!) 

We have some fairly embarrassing DVDs in our collection, but also some really, really good books.

I wasn’t sure whether to admonish myself or be delighted at the sheer decadence of it all, either way I forgot that we had a bottle of champagne in the cupboard. Who even gets champagne at all, and then goes and forgets about it? Us sybaritic lotophagi, that’s who. (And who even says sybaritic lotophagi? This dick.)
I made this ice cream cake a couple of weeks ago now for a potluck dinner which was also something of a farewell for the two aforementioned now-traveling friends. The recipe comes from this glorious American book from the sixties that I own called “Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts (including party beverages)” (punctuation my own addition.) I love old-timey desserts, and American ones tend to have this particular heedless, uninhibited nature which I particularly adore, and have discussed at length when I made a plum meringue crumble pie from this same book earlier this year.

This recipe is as much about texture as it is flavour – crunchy biscuit crumbs puncturing and encasing the creamy, cold ice cream, itself studded with sorbet-like frozen slices of strawberry. It is pure summer, in spoonable form. In that you can serve it with a spoon, but I took that to a new level by lying on the couch and verily spooning the roasting dish that I made this recipe in, while feeding myself spoonfuls of what ice cream remained in said dish. Seriously though: this would be perfect for a southern hemisphere Christmas pudding – what with strawberries being in season and all – but if you’re up there in the northern hemisphere I recommend this insistently all the same, since you could easily use frozen berries and serve it alongside another pudding of a hotter nature. Just make it, okay? It’s brilliant.

Strawberry Ice Cream Cake 

From Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts – recipe submitted by Mrs Elaine Cruikshank, Montrose, Iowa. 

I know the method looks weird, since every recipe with separated egg whites goes on about how it needs to be whisked in a sterile environment and it WILL fail on you and so on and so forth. And here we are throwing a bunch of ingredients in a bowl and whisking them all devil-may-care. What can I say, it just works! So go with it. Also: the recipe called for 1/2 cup chopped nuts in the biscuit stage but I left them out for someone at the party who had an allergy, you can of course feel free to put them back in.

1 cup flour
1/4 cup brown sugar
125g melted butter
2 egg whites
1 cup sugar
2c sliced fresh strawberries (or use defrosted frozen, as I suggested)
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup cream
More sliced strawberries for decoration

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Stir together the flour, sugar and butter till it forms a soft, stiff dough. Press it evenly onto a paper-lined baking tray, so that it looks like a giant cookie and bake for 20 minutes. You could in fact stop right here and enjoy your giant cookie. I might well do this myself one day. But what you want to do is let it cool, then crumble with your fingers, and sprinkle 2/3 of the crumbs evenly into the base of a medium sized brownie tin/medium sized roasting tin – or you could use a cake tin, even, it really doesn’t matter. 

In a bowl, combine the egg whites, sugar, sliced strawberries and lemon juice. Whisk the heck out of this for as long as you can, but around 5-10 minutes. Despite the doubtfulness of it all, it will thicken and aerate and the whisking action will break down the strawberry slices, tinting the mixture a rather glorious pale pink. 

Whip the cream and fold it into the strawberry mixture, then scrape the lot over the top of the biscuit crumbs. Decorate with slices of strawberries if you like, and sprinkle over the remaining 1/3 of the crumbs. Freeze till solid. 

I already adore ice cream with inordinate fervency, but here with early strawberries, delicious with their early-season optimism, it’s more glorious than ever. And this is so, so easy and straightforward. 
Speaking of optimism, how goes my job-prowl? Not bad. I mean, I’m still unemployed, and feeling its pinch pretty keenly (moving house is SO EXPENSIVE) but my interview on Friday earned me a follow-up coffee this morning! Which is very exciting. Especially since I was quite, quite convinced I’d blown the interview itself. I have another interview on Wednesday, and I still am yet to hear back from another interview that I felt went well, so we’ll see. We’ll see. Even if my perception of how Friday’s interview went was way off, I promise you I’m perceiving this ice cream correctly: it’s damn incredible. I love it. Make it. Spoon with it, even – you’re not alone. 

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Title via: Ini Kamoze, Here Comes The Hotstepper. This song has aged so well. In my opinion. And my opinion is correct.
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Music lately: 

Rekindled my long-ago interest in Lisa Loeb. By way of playing Do You Sleep around 2938102938 times in a row one afternoon. You know how music can swiftly take you back to a particular time and place? Listening to this song now just reminds me of the time that I last listened to this song, because I have listened to it so much lately. Try it!

Tegan and Sara, Closer. It’s like, here are your feelings, neatly packaged in jaunty song form!

Barton Hollow, by the Civil Wars. I’d heard of this band before but really got into them when they were recently covered on this TV show I’m obsessed with, called Nashville. (Especially fun since Tim and I were just IN Nashville and so it’s all, “I recognise that landmark in this establishing shot!”) This country-ish, harmony-rich song is delicious.
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Next time: Lack of incoming funds + moving house has meant I’ve been making meals strictly based on what’s in our cupboards, fridge and freezer. So: hopefully something even bordering on coherent for you. 

but guess who is gonna be dessert

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It’s funny, I grew up in a little village, and there was pretty much no shopping to speak of at our nearest town aside from groceries and takeaways and florists and such. And yet I have this very distinct memory of choosing which clip-on earrings to wear to go to the public library. Though I’m pretty sure I’ve always been quite cynical, bordering on snide, it also did not take much for me to get disproportionately excited (in fairness: the library was damn thrilling. A diary entry from 1996 marks the singularly bleak occasion where neither mum nor dad wanted to drive in that weekend and WHAT was I to do now?) But in terms of things that were genuinely exciting, every now and then Mum and I might go on a small spree, in the form of purchasing a Lindt Chocolate Ball each from – I can’t even remember which shop sold them, maybe the florist? 
The mouthpleasingly spherical chocolates encase a softer, buttery chocolate filling which bursts in the mouth with pupil-dilating deliciousness. Unlike many a chocolate from my youth, Lindt Chocolates have held up quality-wise, and still have that special-occasion, grab-your-clip-on-earrings rush of joy.

Which is why, when rereading Katrina Meynink’s delicious book Kitchen Coquette, I became a little fixated on her Lindt Chocolate Puddings, in which not one but two entire chocolate balls, frozen, are submerged in batter and briefly baked to produce a dark chocolate pudding with a slowly liquefying white chocolate Lindt centre. I rationalised hazily that buying a ten-pack of Lindt chocolate balls was better value than the three-pack; that I’d been doing some temping; that if I didn’t spend the money on the chocolates said money would only be sitting in my bank anyway, and that I’d really, really felt like pudding – one of those days, in fact, where you wake up and just know in your bones that you’ll need pudding later on.

That said, if you’re really fixing for this recipe but can’t physically bring yourself to fork out for Lindt – and I understand – pieces of decent white chocolate from a bar will still produce a damn excellent finished product, I’m sure.

Gold, since they cost as much as getting a gold tooth inserted into your mouth. Kidding! It’s more like the cost of a root canal procedure.

Seriously though, Katrina’s book is totally dreamburgers, and she’s a genuinely entertaining, evocative writer about food – not praise I really can say about all that many foodwriters. This recipe is but one of plenty recipes in Kitchen Coquette which will make you yearn to throw together ingredients immediately.

Lindt Chocolate Puddings

From Katrina Meynink’s book Kitchen Coquette.
Note: I halved this recipe, went for two eggs but 50g sugar.

200g dark chocolate
100g butter
3 eggs
115g sugar
2 tablespoons flour
8 white Lindt chocolate balls

Place the chocolate balls in the freezer for at least an hour. When said hour is up, set the oven to 200 C and gather ye four 250ml ramekins.

Melt the chocolate and butter together gently, then allow it to cool a little and quickly stir in the eggs, sugar and flour. (This allows you to just use one bowl, but mix up the non-chocolate stuff separately if you wish.) Divide the mixture between the ramekins, and unwrap the frozen chocolates and push two into each ramekin, spooning over a little batter if they’re popping out the top. Bake for 15 minutes, till firm on top and bulging out the top. Don’t overcook – you want that saucy squish of barely-set cake batter.

And yeah, as I said, I’ve been doing some temping, the sheer exhausting nature of it being why it’s been so long between posts here. It was fairly…um. I won’t actually say what I did and how I felt about it or I’ll just end up sounding deeply unprofessional: the point is, I got paid, it was only a week, and I got paid. As well as that I’ve had a couple of interviews lined up for jobs I’ve applied for, which is quite cool right? My last interview that I had was back in 2006, for a clothing chain store – I didn’t get it – so going through the process again is nothing if not good practice. That said, Tim and I joked about having a bake sale today to boost our dwindling funds, and the joking turned kind of serious and strategic. I know I’m talking about a lack of money in the same breath as buying fancy-pants chocolate, but I’m not into policing how people spend their money, however limited, so…am hardly going to start on myself. And look at this pudding: what cost that happiness?

Two of my dearest friends are flying to Japan today – Kate and Kim, who both worked on my cookbook with me (stylist and photographer, respectively) and I’m incredibly happy and excited for them, especially having done a huge trip overseas myself, but Kate’s not coming back till the end of January, which is really a long, long time away from someone so wondrous. Sigh. All the sighs. Kim is returning back to NZ in two weeks’ time, like some kind of collateral or flat bond (but a million times nicer), so there’s that. I’m hopeless at articulating myself at the time of significant goodbyes – but with people that are such good friends I feel that you don’t have to make big speeches or anything, you just know. And also, fortunately there are still excellent and dear friends here still. It’s Kim and Kate’s time to shine, and I’m sure they’ll shine hard like the ethically-sourced diamonds they are. If you hear any strange noises at any stage though, it’s just me expressing my dramatic emotions via the application of a pillow to my tearducts. Totally cool. No big deal.

In amongst all this caginess and hand-wringing maudlinness, what of the puddings? Were they delicious? Hot damn, yes. Like a hot, barely cooked chocolate brownie, the frozen chocolates slowly melting within creating a vanilla-y, creamy contrast to the bitter darkness of that surrounding it. I liked mine with cold, cold cream filling a spoon-excavated dent in the top and spilling out over the ramekin, Tim austerely preferred it without. Make them, and make them immediately, without excuse or delay, as soon as you’re able to and also feel like pudding.
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Title via: Barbra Streisand singing You Are Woman from Funny Girl with Omar Sharif. OH, her voice. 
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Music lately: 

Elastica, Connection. I remember feeling, speaking of 1996 diary entries, such injustice that Justine Frischmann and Damon Albarn were going out. Because that, specifically, prevented him being my boyfriend. Still sorta wish he was, still adore this song.

Neneh Cherry, Woman. Speaking of 1996. This song is intense, and intensely excellent.
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Next time: a supercool ice cream cake from my 60s American pudding cookbook. 

blue wind gets so sad, blowing through the thick corn and bales of hay

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I was going to blog yesterday, but instead spent the afternoon nervously clutching a satin-bepillowcased cushion to my fervently beating heart (that is, I hugged a pillow) while watching the US election results unfold. I…should’ve seen that coming, that I wouldn’t get any blogging done. I can’t pretend I entirely saw Obama’s victory coming, but I am so utterly, viscerally relieved that he did get in again. That’s all I’ll say, except – how extremely excellent was his speech? I was punching the air pretty much the entire time, like an animated gif of Bender at the end of The Breakfast Club. 

What a week it has been. From dizzying highs – a Halloween party, purposefully in November so Tim and I could be there with our wondrous friends. Tim dressed as Effie Trinket from Hunger Games and I dressed as the Wicked Witch of the East (complete with a house fascinator and hand-spangled ruby slippers) – to literally dizzying lows, when I had a small panic attack on the street last Friday evening. It’s by no means the first one I’ve had, but it has been a good long while, and it took me completely by surprise. I was of all things, on my way to pick up my engagement ring which was being resized. I assure you, as I assured Tim, that my sudden inability to breath and my burning face and dizzy brain were nothing to do with the act of getting the ring. Tooootally unrelated. Which now makes it sound like I’m being deeply sarcastic, but honestly! It just happened. And it sucks, and it’s not a particularly food-bloggingly-sparkly subject, but what can I say? It’s my life, and though I’m annoyed by the signals my brain sends out occasionally, I shall be not ashamed of them. And in case you’re wondering, yes, almost a week later we are still finding red sequins everywhere that my shoes shed hither and yon.

Back to the dizzying highs: I made an incredibly good dinner and thought I’d share it with you.

Corn and Tomatoes doesn’t sound like much, and I guess it isn’t, but it’s intensely delicious – the corn sort of stews in the tomato juices, which become syrupy-rich with the olive oil. The paprika offers the sweetness of the corn and tomatoes a deep smokiness, and it suddenly seems all a lot greater than the parts of which it sums. I called it corn and tomatoes because that’s what it is, which seemed to justify the slightly fancifully-named Miso Poached Potatoes. It simply occurred to me that cooking new potatoes in miso-enriched water might make them rather magnificent. It did.

Corn and Tomatoes

A recipe by myself.

2 cups frozen corn
3 small, ripe tomatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon smoked paprika

Mix everything together in a roasting dish. Bake at 220 C for about 25 minutes.

Miso-poached Potatoes with Butter

Also a recipe by myself. I couldn’t possibly guess how many potatoes you can eat, but in case you’re wondering, for the two of us I went with about eight smallish potatoes, a heaped tablespoonful of miso paste, and about 50g butter.

New potatoes
White miso paste
Butter


Quarter the potatoes lengthwise (or really, cut how you please.) Fill the pot you’re going to cook them with half to two-thirds full of water, then add a few spoonfuls of miso paste depending on the quantity of water. Simmer the potatoes till they’re tender, then drain them and stir through as much butter as you please, till it’s melted. Serve.

The miso soup really seeps into every last granule of the potatoes, giving their blandly creaminess a kind of nutty, rich caramelised savouriness, which is only intensified once they’re smothered in fast-melting butter. I’m never particularly enthused over new potatoes (I like my potatoes to be sustaining crispness to 90% of their bodies) but this turns them into something thoroughly exciting. In direct proportion to the quantity of butter you coat them with.

Tim’s and my American holiday has suddenly been sucked into the realm of feeling like a distant, highly vivid dream. It’s over a week since we landed at Auckland at 5.40am. Speaking of things I did not see coming, Mum – my parents live an hour south – had hinted that she might or might not come meet us at the airport. My supposing was on the side of not, since it was so ridiculously early, but I murmured dazedly to Tim as we trudged through customs, “$5 says Mum is here and has turned this into a girls’ adventure with her best friend”. My small wager was in fact, correct, but I had entirely underestimated the crazy capers afoot. My mum and her best friend were indeed there, as was my aunty who I hadn’t seen in over a year. But wait. A small red checked napkin was produced by way of tablecloth. There were wine glasses. And bubbly. And a crystal bowl of strawberries. Right there in the food court at the international airport, to congratulate us on our engagement. Tim and I were slightly dazed, as well you might be at 6am after flying for thirteen hours and then suddenly finding yourself drinking fizzy wine, but we couldn’t have had a nicer, sweeter, more hilarious welcome back home.
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Title via: the adolescent-angst musical Spring Awakening, and its suitably mournful song Blue Wind. 
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Music lately: 

Moon River, as sung utterly plaintively and yet subtly and yet devastatingly as always by Judy Garland.  I mean this song could even render some emotional response from a particularly jaded lab rat, but in Judy’s hands, and lungs, it just slays me.

Baby Says, The Kills. These two are terrifyingly good. We were lucky enough to see them at Third Man Records in Nashville. Luckier still: the concert was being recorded live onto vinyl. Luckiest of all: a copy of that vinyl will eventually be sent to us here in New Zealand.
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Next time: I bought a copy of the Momofuku cookbook while we were in New York. Do you know how badly I want to cook every last thing in it? Quite, quite badly.

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!