Category: Vegetarian

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!”

 

some are born to rise above sleepless nights and sloe gin love love love

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If you wouldn’t mind indulging me for a moment:

I’ve become slightly infatuated with Cinemagram, this app on my phone. It lets you create little gif-like moving images that can border from the barely mediocre (ahem) to the breathtakingly gorgeous. If you can’t view the above, what’s there is a bowl of ice cream ingredients and a bottle of cream, the former eternally emptying its delicious contents into the grateful latter.

I won’t, however, use this as a segue into talking about indulging in ice cream, because I refuse to buy into that. Ice cream is just what I eat when I feel like ice cream, no need be stacking on the guilt when you could stacking on the chocolate sauce instead. Right? Right.

And I feel like eating ice cream a LOT. Good thing my ability to think up ice cream recipes can keep up with desire to eat ice cream.

What a week it has been. On Thursday morning I read the news and punched the air joyously at Obama vocalising his support of marriage equality. On Friday night Tim and I went to Queer the Night, a march against homophobia and transphobia, with friends of ours. We ran into more friends along the way, and walking the streets of Wellington on a clear night chanting “two, four, six, eight, don’t be sure your kids are straight” felt right and good. Hearing heart-clenchingly sad stories from those who spoke was a reminder that there’s no place for complacency. An impromptu-ish party followed, from which my fondest memories include so many hugs, spreading crackers with butter and sprinkling them with salt, doing a highkick and landing in the splits (at the encouragement of others, not of my own volition, although I hardly require arm-twisting) and gasping over the staggering beauty, and utter importance of the Parks and Recreation final. I freely admit I’ve been inordinately affected by this half hour comedy show, and that there was a whole lot of crying and shaking going on. I may or may not have (or actually did) tweeted “Leslie Knope, moon of my life.” Make of this what you will.

And on top of all that, I thought that Gin and Tonic Ice Cream would be nice. Gin and tonic go together so excellently well. Why wouldn’t they excel together in ice cream form? Well, it wasn’t so much “nice” as “high-kick-then-landing-in-the-splits-ingly rapturous”, but you be the judge.

You no more need an ice cream machine for this than you need to know how to do the splits. It really couldn’t be easier. Or more unconditionally delicious. Seriously, this is one of my finest creations, and I say that as someone who says that every time they create something, so…who can you trust? Only your own tastebuds, once you’ve made this for yourself.

Gin and Tonic Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

  • 1 cup sugar
  • Juice of a lemon (about 2 tablespoons)
  • 3 tablespoons gin
  • 125 ml tonic water
  • 600ml cream

Tip the sugar into a bowl and add the lemon juice, gin, and tonic water. Stir to dissolve a little, then pour in the cream. Whisk till thickened. You’re not looking for whipped cream here, just something that has the texture of, say, a good thickshake. Transfer to a freezer-proof container (like – haha! – an old actual ice cream container) and allow to freeze, of course.

Whilst vodka and soda water with no lime is my very favourite I have much room in my heart for gin. Gin comes with a sense of occasion and history. It calls to mind high summer, when I knew I was cool because mum and her friends let me have a G&T with them when we were camping. (Okay, ‘cool’ and ‘hanging out with one’s mum’ can be mutually exclusive, but hey.) It speaks of nights spent watching Gossip Girl with dear friends. And…I just really like the taste. What you end up with here is an ice cream bearing a delicate yet absolutely present hit of gin’s citrussy bitterness, which the inclusion of tonic, the arch older cousin to lemonade, only helps with.

The proportion of liquor to cream gives you the most ridiculous texture – it’s like soft-serve ice cream, straight from the freezer. Alcohol slows down the freezing process, but you don’t want too much or you’ll never actually get to the point of ice cream. It’ll be sludge. Exquisite sludge, but still. For all its simplicity, this is one of the most delicious ice creams I’ve ever tasted. Creamy and aerated, yet with a lemon sorbet-lightness. And importantly, it’s on just the right side of boozy, so you don’t make this face when you eat a spoonful.

And, if you’re given to flights of dinkiness and frivolity, which I often am, you might as well garnish it with a slice of lemon.

Title via the Lowdown-down from the other version of The Wild Party musical, both equally as exciting as each other, really. This one had Eartha Kitt, Mandy Patinkin, and a swell Toni Collette as Queenie, who sings this glorious song.

Music lately:

Frail Girls/Salad Daze, the double A-side single from Street Chant. Will likely form some more comprehensive thoughts around this soon, but for now: I really, really, REALLY like these songs.

Ghostface Killah ft Raekwon, Kilo. He’s coming to NZ! And not just NZ, but Wellington. If I had a nickel for every act that just went to Auckland, probably entirely justifiably, but still, I’d be able to afford to fly up there more often.

Next time: Not sure, should probably do an actual dinner recipe or something as a bit of a contrast though, I guess….

 

he’s a hero, a lover, a quince, she’s not there

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I have come to recognise that while I’m pretty brainy (maths/science aside, but what have either of those disciplines ever, ever done for humanity?) said brain will sometimes mix things up entirely for me, usually the more confident I am that what I’m saying or doing or thinking is correct. For example, I got How To Be A Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson back in 2006 and it only just, just this week clicked into place how great her Food Processor Danish Pastry recipe is. Normally with recipes like this you need to slowly massage cold butter into the yeasted dough while rolling it out over and folding it over and over again. Nigella’s blasts the butter into the dough right at the start, so it’s already there come the rolling-out stage. This whole time I’ve been all, “oooh, I’m using a food processor to briefly cut in the butter, la de da” (in a Homer Simpson voice) not realising she was removing a ton of effort from an otherwise intimidating recipe. Oh Nigella, moon of my life.

Another example, because I don’t think I explained the singular drama of pastry comprehension very well: I recently with vociferous disdain described someone as a “typical 99 percenter.” I was well into my spiel before I realised, prompted by puzzled looks of those around me, that “wait! I meant 1 percent! I was dissing the 1 percent! You know that!” Way to go, brain, constantly making me backtrack when I could be making pie.

This recipe for Quince Tarte Tatin is a significant undertaking, so I’m letting you know well in advance that you’ll need to let yourself know well in advance that you want to make it. This is the kind of thing that ought to come with some kind of apologetic medical pamphlet covered in cartoonish diagrams. The pastry alone takes two days, the quinces at least two hours. However most of that time is waiting (apart from a brief but sweatily red-faced pastry-rolling session) and not all foodstuffs can appear to us immediately. If you want to make a pie with bought pastry and ingredients with swiftlier-to-disintegrate cell structure than quinces, that is completely fine. This is not the only pie in the world.

There’s three parts to this recipe: firstly the pastry, which is care of a Nigella Lawson recipe, then dealing with the quinces, for which I adapted a Floriditas recipe, and finally slapping it all together, where I went back to Nigella and followed her timings for an apple tarte tatin recipe.

This is most definitely not the required 50x50cm square, yet still it turned into pastry. So, hopefully that’s kind of encouraging to everyone. And it goes without saying that this is one of the most blissfully delicious kinds of uncooked pastry dough under the sun.

One nice thing about all the effort that goes into the pastry is that you only need half of it to make the tart, so I’ve frozen the other half for undoubtedly smug future use.

Processor Danish Pastry

From Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess – and if you don’t have a food processor then cube the butter and roughly rub it into the dry ingredients at the start with your thumb and fingertips, making sure there’s still visible bits of butter, and then proceed as per the recipe. I’m sure that would work out fine.

  • 350g bread flour
  • 250g butter, cold and sliced thinly synapse
  • Pinch salt
  • 25g sugar
  • 1 sachet instant dried yeast
  • 1 egg
  • 125ml (1/2 cup) room temperature milk
  • 60ml lukewarm water

Blend together the butter, flour, salt, sugar and yeast briefly till the butter is fairly well dispersed through in small pieces. Mix together the egg, water and milk in a bowl and tip in the floury buttery mixture. Stir together quickly, then cover and refrigerate overnight. This recipe takes time.

The next day, let it come to room temperature and roll it out to 50cm x 50cm, or the best you can manage. I undershot the mark ridiculously, but also my arms nearly fell off from the exertion and in the end I was proud of my wobbly 35cm shape. If it’s sticky – and mine was, immensely so – just continue to sprinkle over flour. Fold it in three, like a business letter or something, then roll it out again as best you can to the same shape. This got a bit painful but it’s necessary – all these folds are creating air pockets which will make the pastry deliciously puffy and layered as it bakes. Based on the results, I’d say attempt to roll it out as far as you can, but if you can only manage a weird shape like me, you’ll probably still be fine. Repeat this once more and just as you’re about to collapse, divide the pastry in half and either refrigerate for another hour before using once it’s returned back to room temperature, or wrap and freeze for another time. Just like that!

Not that quinces are a burden, as far as burdens – or anything – goes, it’s just that every year I get all “Hooray! Quinces! So fragrant! Sniff them! Seasonal eating, it’s quite the thing to do! Have YOU ever sniffed a quince?” and then realise I don’t have all that many recipes for them and I’m not entirely sure how to get the most out of their short autumnal tenure. I was lucky this year that Tim’s grandmother on his dad’s side gave us a bunch of quinces from Taihape, and also that in a comment on my previous blog post, Sophie recommended quince tarte tatin for using up quinces.

Quinces are rock-hard, can’t be eaten raw, take forever to cook and generally reward you by turning an odd pinkish brown colour. Maybe if they weren’t so irreverently rare we wouldn’t be so excited by them? I don’t know. But I love them, with their rich flavour of rose petals and lemon and pears and apples. Cooking them in the oven for a long time under a low heat slowly busts through their solidity and makes them as soft as canned peaches. Which would be a fine substitute, if you want a faster pie. I adapted this recipe from one in my Morning Noon and Night cookbook from the beautiful Floriditas cafe, basically by making it really lazy. The original recipe isn’t even that difficult or anything, I’m just a corner-cutter from way back.

Oven-poached Quinces

Adapted from Morning, Noon and Night, the Floriditas cookbook.

  • Quinces (about 2kg)
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1 litre water
  • 1 cinnamon stick
  • Squeeze of lemon juice
  • 1 tablespoon honey

Tip everything except the quinces into a large roasting dish and mix to combine. Then, rub away any fluff clinging to the surface of the quinces then chop them up, leaving the skin on. In half is fine although mine were in all sorts of irregular shapes because they were a bit blemished. I cut off the knobby bit at the top, but leave the seeds in. Sit the quince pieces in the roasting dish, and then cover with a sheet of baking paper under a sheet of tinfoil. You can scrunch the tinfoil over the edges of the roasting dish to hold the paper in place. Place in the oven and leave for about 2 hours. They won’t look overly promising but should be extremely tender and smelling wondrous. They’re done when a fork or skewer plunges easily into the fruit’s flesh.

Finally, to bring the two separate elements together in pie unity:

First catch your pie dish. Lots of people end up with those straight-sided fluted ceramic pie dishes, it’s not quite as good but it’ll do the trick. There is actually such thing as a tarte tatin dish, but I don’t even know what they look like so I’ll just give you instructions for what I used which was this metal plate with sloped sides which I got for a dollar at a garage sale in Paraparaumu.

Quince Tarte Tatin

1/2 measure pastry from above recipe
Poached quinces from above recipe

Set your oven to 200 C/400 F and put a baking tray to heat up at the same time. Place the fruit snugly in the dish and dot with about 25g chopped up butter and scatter with a tablespoon of sugar. Place in the oven to heat up a little while you roll out half of the pastry (freeze or refrigerate the rest of the pastry for another use). Remove the pie dish from the oven, drape the pastry on top of the fruit, tucking it in carefully round the sides, then bake on top of the baking tray for 20-30 minutes. It’ll be puffy golden brown on top. Remove from the oven, slide a knife round the sides and place a large plate over the pie dish. Carefully flip it over so that the pie drops onto the plate, revealing a crown of fruit. If some sticks to the pie dish, just pick it up and push it back into place.

Also: feel free to use a different fruit to quinces here. Something like apples or pears might require a little softening in a pan with some butter and sugar first, but anything from a can should be good to go.

The sheer deliciousness of this pie is augmented by relief that all that effort didn’t go to waste. I think so, anyway: honeyed, soft fruit and palpably excellent pastry, buttery and puffy and echoing all the good things about croissants.

You can serve it with syrup from poaching the quinces or just photograph it in a pretty bottle you bought then save it for mixing with vodka and lemonade. Up to you! We took it round to our dear friend Jo’s to eat while watching Veronica Mars (so important) with another dear Laura, who had brought some blue cheese. Someone suggested a slice of the blue cheese on the slice of the pie. It was pretty incredible.

You might think I throw round terms like ‘dear friend’ flippantly but seriously, look at the beauteous cake Jo, Kate and Kim made for me on my two-weeks-after-the-fact birthday party! Tim and I took the rest of the pie round to their place and that’s where it got finished. Which is really all good…because we’ve still got a significant volume of four-layer surprise birthday cake to get through.

Title via: Superboy and the Invisible Girl from the Broadway Musical Next to Normal, with the gorgeous and gorgeously talented Jennifer Damiano and Aaron Tveit. The actual line is ‘a lover a prince’, and even though I know that’s what it is I can never stop myself from saying ‘a lover of Prince’ whenever I’m singing along.

Music lately:

Am listening to the excellent new Homebrew album while I type. You can’t go wrong by listening to Listen to Us again, or ever.

212, Azealia Banks. Took a while, but: obsessed.

Next time: I have a lot of tofu in the fridge. And if there’s one thing I know about tofu, it’s that it doesn’t get better with age…

 

just twist your hip and do the dip

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You know how you learn something and then find you see it everywhere? Like you’ll learn a new word and then hear it in a song and read it in an article and hear someone say it in passing. I recently read a book – The Sense of an Ending – which has a whammy moment when you realise one character had been repressing, or at least not divulging, a particularly significant memory. No sooner had I read this book, when I’m flipping aimlessly, and I do mean aimlessly, through a weekly magazine. And I am confronted with an advertisement bearing the blankly content face of a commemorative Kate Middleton porcelain doll in a wedding dress. And it reminded me of something I haven’t thought about in years and years: that I used to be a little obsessed with those Franklin Mint porcelain dolls and would rip the advertisements out of aunties’ and nanna’s magazines and catalogue them in a folder in alphabetical order (well they all had names, Heather and Rosa and so on) and dream of the day I could own them all. Luckily for my now utter horror at the idea of walking into a room full of expressionless doll eyes staring back at you, I had no disposable income at the age of eight or so, and as such the folder was as far as it went. But isn’t it strange what you forget and remember again – not the traumatic things – but these vivid little slices of your life that remind you exactly who you were and are?

Leaving behind the “I Was an Awkward Awkward” chapters for now, I’d like to bring your attention to hummus. I know, hummus, that ubiquitous but excellent beige lotion, how can it have still more surprises up its sleeve? Well who more reliable to elicit such surprises than my idol Nigella Lawson, who only goes and replaces the tahini (sesame seed paste) with Peanut Butter. Peanut butter has a somewhat brash flavour, but against the mild chickpeas and smoothing yoghurt it mellows out and provides this sweet, nutty, oleaginously compulsive edge to your hummus. I really love tahini – sesame being one of my favourite flavours, but peanut butter doesn’t so much deliver the goods as urgent courier them while wearing appealingly fitted shorts and saying in a warm voice, “I’ve got a big package for you”.

Peanut Butter Hummus

Recipe from Nigella Lawson’s book Kitchen, I’ve simplified it slightly. Really, just play with quantities of the ingredients as they please you. If you’re not able to eat dairy, I’d add an extra tablespoon of water and lemon juice and peanut butter and it’ll be all good.

1 can chickpeas, drained
1 clove garlic
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons peanut butter
2 tablespoons lemon juice
3 tablespoons Greek yoghurt
1 teaspoon cumin
Salt

 Blend all together thoroughly till smooth. Add a little more yoghurt or water if it’s not spreadable enough.

Because I feel that hummus alone isn’t quite enough to bolster this blog post, a second recipe for you. I’m really sorry that both of these require a blender/food processor – I hate when recipes give directions for making cake batter in a cake mixer when said cake mixers cost many hundred dollars, or when an ice cream recipe finishes with “and then put it in your ice cream maker and follow their instructions” or whatever. I’m sorry. You could effectively crush up the chickpeas with a fork or a potato masher, but the strawberries really need the swift action that only an electric rotating blade can provide. 

What, you don’t have a dedicated hummus knife commemorating the Parihaka War Memorial in Whangarei? Look I’m not saying your party is “ruined” as such…

If you do have a blender though, there aren’t many happier foodstuffs in this world than pink lemonade. I first tried making it with raspberries, and that was great, but strawberries are even more delicious, which is brilliant because they’re also half the price.

Pink Lemonade

A recipe by myself

2 1/2 cups frozen strawberries (bully for you if you’ve got real ones, but it’s winter in NZ right now. And frozen strawberries are really pretty cheap any time of year)
2 1/2 litres of lemonade
Optional: passionfruit syrup, mint leaves

Place the strawberries in a blender and allow them to defrost somewhat. Add 1/2 cup of water and blend till smooth and gloriously pink, adding more water if your blender can’t deal with it. Spatula into a jug and slowly top up with lemonade. The bubbles and the strawberry puree will form scuzzy bubbles on top, just stir it with a wooden spoon to break it up.

And lo, a joyful jugful of deeply pink, wondrously delicious lemonade shot through with the fresh taste of strawberry. A little passionfruit syrup helps sharpen up this berry flavour, and mint leaves are just delicious with nearly anything, but simply strawberries and lemonade on their own are more than fine.
I served both these delights over the weekend at my inaugural Ice Cream Demonstration Party (that’s not necessarily what it’s called but the capital letters make it seem official) where in front of a small group of lovely people I demonstrated and imparted pretty much every particle of knowledge I have about ice cream, taking them through recipes for said ice cream and sauces to go on top, then we all built our own ice cream sundaes and then they went home with a goodie bag. It was super fun and you can check out photos from the night (one of the guests was also a great photographer) on my Facebook page, if you please.
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Title via Rock the House by Gorillaz. Tim and I were lucky enough to see them in 2010 and it was so brilliant that my brain starts melting every time I think about it. Like, there’s Damon Albarn, one of the first people who got me realising that I could have a crush on another person. Also present: Bobby freaking Womack.
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Music lately:
Lee Fields, Faithful Man. Tim insisted we buy this record. He insisted accurately. Fields is just really, really good.

Madeline Kahn, Getting Married Today. Mixing my obsession for the musical Company with my new fascination for the hilarious, babely, and sadly late Kahn, she does well with this horrendously challenging song.
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Next time: Still have some quinces lying there looking at me reproachfully. The time has come to do more than just sniff them rapturously, any suggestions?

like a week that’s only mondays, only ice creams never sundaes

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Look, when you’ve been 26 as long as I have, which is about 48 hours now, you learn some things, okay? Like…I may get older, but it looks like I’ll never grow out of being deeply clumsy (spilled lemonade all over a Settlers of Catan game.) Or being forgetful (I forgot something, I forget what.) Or being unable to follow a list of tasks I set myself. (Probably don’t need to provide an example for that one.) Or overthinking things. (I really overthought some things.) Yes, all of that in 48 hours.

Me on my birthday, in some of my favourite clothes. (Apparently I turned 26 in 1991.)

It wouldn’t be much of a celebration without ice cream, that foodstuff that I have so much love for.

As well as my birthday happening (and being absolutely over now, so I should really probably let it go already) another joyous time is upon us: feijoa season. There are those who say it’s like a reward for the cold weather but I’m the weirdo who actually loves the snappy chill of autumn and winter – slow-cooked stews; hearty warming soups; soft cosy woolly jumpers and socks; wrapping yourself in blankets; watching entire seasons of important TV shows; scarves; old-timey puddings; rain on the roof; the unbeatable unity of complaining about bad weather with strangers or those you struggle to make small talk with any other time of year. And there’s feijoas.

These edible jewels are well known in New Zealand but if you’re not from round these parts: imagine an egg-shaped, rough-skinned green fruit which you cut in half to scoop the insides out with a teaspoon – like a passionfruit. The texture is like that of canned pears and the flavour is intoxicatingly elusive. Like pear and old-fashioned grape and maybe a hint of elderflower or strawberry? It’s fizzingly tart yet fragrantly sweet. It’s so beautiful.

And it works brilliantly in ice cream, as I found out this week. As always with my recipes, you don’t need an ice cream maker to do this. In fact this is one of my simplest ice cream methods yet. Only a couple of ingredients, a bit of a blast in the food processor, and you’re done. Yet my reasons for making it this way are highly purposeful. Feijoas have a slightly gritty texture and I didn’t want to add to that with granulated sugar. Condensed milk smooths it all out and gives the ice cream itself a fantastic texture. To that I added lime juice to point up the feijoa’s own flavour, in the way you’d add salt to a tomato. To counteract all the sweetness of the condensed milk, and to reflect the tartness of the fruit, I used thick, creamy Greek yoghurt. And that’s it.

Feijoa Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

15 or so ripe feijoas
1 tin condensed milk
2 tablespoons lime juice
250ml/1 cup thick plain Greek yoghurt

Halve the feijoas and scoop out the flesh, tipping it all into the bowl of a food processor. Blend it thoroughly with the condensed milk and lime juice till well pureed. Then add the yoghurt and continue to blend till it is, uh, blended. Scrape into a freezer-proof container and put it in the freezer. Don’t worry about stirring it as it freezes, just let it do its thing. Allow to soften out of the fridge for about ten minutes before you serve it.

Notes:

– If you don’t have a food processor, don’t feel like you can’t make this. Either use one of those stick blenders for soup or a just fork and some extra effort to mash up the fruit – the texture will be a bit different but it’s all good.
– I know it asks for a lot of feijoas, but who goes looking for feijoa recipes to just use up one or two? This is for my people with plastic bags heaving with fruit from their aunty/kindly neighbour/roadside stall!
-I try not to be fussy about ingredients but I am about the yoghurt here – if you use anything other than thick Greek yoghurt the texture will be compromised significantly and it just won’t taste as good. If you can’t find that yoghurt I’d use the same amount of regular cream instead.

I think this is made even more delicious because of how little effort you have to put into it. The tiny burst of lime brightens and emboldens the fragrant feijoa flavour and the condensed milk gives it this incredible texture, interrupted by the ever-so-slight grit of the feijoa seeds. The only thing is that it has a slightly weird colour – beige-ish, I’d say? But the flavour is so shiningly, adamantly feijoa-esque that you can either overlook it or dump a ton of food colouring in there to suit yourself.

Just know: it’s wildly delicious. If you can’t access feijoas for whatever reason, I’d substitute two tins of drained canned pears. In fact I might try that myself as well, because it sounds so good in its own right.

Tim and I went to The Ambeli for my birthday, which is this swanky award-winning restaurant that I’ve been longing to go to. I don’t mean to sound like a naive rube, but the prices – admittedly more the wine than the food – were fairly faint-making and I sat there in my seat suddenly feeling like I didn’t belong there at all. However, emboldened by a few things (“Birthday!” “We haven’t gone to dinner in forever!” “it IS legal to charge this much!” “Be cool!”) I settled down and we ended up having a completely splendid time. If you’re rich or at least feeling that way, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Every element of the food was intensely exquisite, so that you wanted to eat it very slowly and taste every ingredient in every mouthful and then write an essay on your feelings about it. The wait staff were astute, lively and knowledgeable. The wine made us super talkative, you know, where you’re nodding along heartily because everything is so important and meaningful (I’d like to think we can be that without the wine.) We left with the sadness that a birthday comes but once a year, and also happily full and tipsy and analysing the food like it was some kind of intelligent movie we’d just been to see.

The next morning I had ice cream for breakfast. And it was good.

Title via: Without Love, featuring a young – well, younger – Aaron Tveit, from the musical Hairspray. The local musical theatre company is going to be putting on a production of it later this year, I am so very excited.

Music via:

Lianne Las Halvas, Forget. I love the scratchy strumming that loops round it and the equally looping chorus – it’s kind of understated and wacky at the same time. And Lianne has amazing clothes. So.

SWV, Co-Sign. New SWV! Which I couldn’t find on YouTube for ages because I kept searching for SVW by mistake. It’s never easy to capture prior magic, especially from a land as long ago as the 90s, but I like what they’ve done here.

Next time: I still haven’t made anything from my Little and Friday cookbook – for shame! Need to change this soon, since I love baking and it is full of baking and all.

ain’t it a shame that at the top they serve peanut butter and jam

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Lessons I was reminded about this week: just because you refresh and refresh your inbox it doesn’t mean a particular person is going to email you. And then a little (1) will appear but it’s just a newsletter that you’ve signed up to and now suddenly feel particularly hateful towards. Learn that one well. Another thing: respect deeply those people that can make a room look good. I tried sticking a bunch of images to one of our bedroom walls yesterday. Stood back to survey my room-embiggening skills – a picture fell off the wall, breaking the frame. Everything else was on at least a 45 degree angle. It looked so good in the pictures of other people’s houses! However, Tim and I gave our room a much overdue, much procrastinated clean on Monday – needed since January – and the unfamiliar feeling of just being able to walk in a straight line across the floor makes me feel like we should be featured on an interior design blog or something.

What else was I re-reminded of? That you should never read the comments (or, increasingly, the opinion columns, ammiright?) on news websites unless you feel like playing fast and loose with your blood pressure; that we LOVE Sam Cooke; that other people have actually heard of musicals and I shouldn’t be so surprised every time someone says they *gasp* like one; that people can be surprisingly generous and being generous can be fun; the simple joy of finding 20 cents on the ground; how supersonically fast I get anxious; how I can’t turn my brain off even when I’m having an amazing, wonderful, delicious massage from a professional. And importantly (or at least, relevantly) how much I LOVE making ice cream. I know I didn’t invent peanut butter chocolate ice cream, why it’s as old as the hills themselves, but the recent release of Whittaker’s new peanut butter chocolate block inspired me quickly to tackle this mighty combination for the first time. And it had been a significant while since I’d made ice cream – like our bedroom being tidy, the last occurence was back in January. Not sure how I got through, but I’m pretty brave.

I appreciate that your local supermarket might have gleefully marked up the price of the chocolate, which is why I didn’t use the whole block in the recipe – instead I made sure to leave some for judicious nibbling. I also completely appreciate that you might not be able to get hold of such chocolate at all, which is why I provided a more analogue alternative. I also wanted the making of this to be as easy as possible – this is an ideal one for a newcomer to ice cream to try. It practically makes itself. Whatever effort you have to put in though, will reward you at least tenfold in pure deliciousness.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream


Recipe by me.


200g Peanut Butter Chocolate, such as Whittakers OR 1/2 cup peanut butter and 150g milk or dark chocolate, depending on your preference, plus about 1/2 cup sugar.
250mls (1 cup) milk
Salt
300ml cream


In a pan over a low heat, melt the chocolate (or other things), milk, and a generous pinch of salt together, stirring occasionally until smooth. Chill till thickened significantly – might help to put it in the freezer for a while. Taste some. It’s wonderful. Once it has the texture of whipped cream, whip up your actual cream till fairly firm and thickened, but not verging on changing into butter, and then whisk the two together to form a soft, airy pale chocolatey mixture. Transfer into a freezerproof container then freeze. Allow to sit out of the freezer for about ten minutes before you want to eat it so you can scoop it easier.

The unfrozen mixture is like the best peanut butter smoothie of your life in the whole world, so with that in mind I’m not quite sure on the quantities this makes, but I’d say just under a litre, which I wouldn’t want to feed any more than four people with. As I said, the method is winningly uncomplicated, so it wouldn’t be too taxing to double all quantities. The salt is important – it really helps intensify the flavour and make everything taste more of itself. Don’t worry about stirring this as it freezes – the useful fat content keeps the texture hovering round the ‘perfection’ level even when completely untampered with. The ice cream itself is pale but the chocolate presence is definite, shot through with the cream’s light butteriness. Being ice cold softens any of peanut butter’s rougher flavour undertones and hanging out with chocolate brings out its earthy sweetness. It’s wackily delicious stuff.

Still other lessons present themselves to me: that whole “you can’t go back” thing, which I was reminded of when I realised it had been a whole year since Tim and I went on our first ever holiday, the holiday that we’d been saving six years for. Naturally, I re-read our entire travel blog and got a bit weirdly sniffly, not that the writing on our blog was particularly geared towards heartstring-pluckery, but I guess because we were so happy and optimistic and overseas and the whole thing is such a nice memory, but also as far away and untouchable as the first time we were over there in 2005. Anyway, we’ve got our trip to The America in just over six months to anticipate hotly and save frantically for, so no use looking backwards too much. A bit of backwards-wallowing every now and then though is pretty harmless.

Your lesson: make this ice cream, it’s truly not difficult, and even if you’re all “Aagh! Ice cream! The second-most intimidating foodstuff! (After souffles of course)” then be happily reassured that your opinion is wrong. As far as this recipe is concerned, at least.

But seriously, when I said I couldn’t turn my brain off during the massage, I did decide that I love what was happening to me and I want to have another one at some point this year. So I ask of you, other overthinkers out there (I see you!) if I accept that my brain won’t turn off no matter what fragrant oils and unguents are applied with firm capable hands to my less-firm exterior, what should I think about which will at least be calming? I suspect brainstorming new recipes will be too involving, planning the week ahead too counterproductive, remembering every regretful thing you’ve ever said and done too intuitively obvious…As a former dancer, I could just imagine someone dancing to the twinkly piano music that constantly plays in the room. Ideas?
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Title via: Rufus Wainwright’s California, so breezy and fun but he couldn’t have known that peanut butter used this way is exactly what you’d want to be served at the top. Or at any stage…
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Music lately:

Like I said, Sam Cooke. Ain’t That Good News subverts the usual “I got a letter this morning and my baby is dead/run off with someone else/etc and is simply a snappily fantastic song.

Ultravox, Vienna. I am easily manipulated by music, this is one such song that does it so well.
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Next time: I still have a couple of quinces staring at me as they get all saggy and old. But I also bought on special some pork shoulder. PULLED PORK TIME. Unless there’s some ye-olde style pork and quince slow-cooked thing out there that can tempt me with its magical deliciousness, that is.

raspberry beret, i think i love her

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There are so many things I’m no good at. I’ll be the first to tell you. But no false modesty about one thing: I can speed read. When I was a kid with no income (I lived in the country! There was no such thing as a paper run) my skills would be particularly useful – if we ever went to town, I could absorb a Babysitters Club book in around 15 minutes in the bookshop, thus saving my family a cool $5.95 each time. 

Further to this, it seems everyone I know has been reading the Hunger Games books recently. This week Tim and I planned to meet up with a group of friends for a BYO dinner on Friday night, after all of them had seen the Hunger Games movie. On Wednesday night Tim started reading the book itself out of curiosity and finished it the next day. On Thursday I realised I was going to be the only person at the dinner table on Friday night who wouldn’t have read it or seen the movie. So I thought to myself: Can I read it by the time we get to the movie? Could I what.

I finished it in less than three hours, that very night. Including checking Twitter constantly, and making dinner (which was toast, but still. Dinner.) While the book itself is easy enough to gallop through, I clearly still have the speedreading magic. At lunch on Friday it took little more than some significant eye contact for Tim and I to know exactly what the other person was thinking: we should book tickets to see the movie with everyone else that night. After the movie I nearly floated out of the cinema and analysed it so hard I almost lost my voice. Roughly 24 hours previous I was opening the book for the first time, knowing nothing about it other than the lead character was called Katniss and it was really, really popular. The only thing faster than my reading, was the material I was reading’s ability to win me over. It won me over so fast it deserves an ironically slow clap from a crowded room.

However, back when I made this Coconut Raspberry Loaf on Wednesday to eat during an afternoon with my friend Kate, I was none the wiser. I strode purposefully up to her house in Mt Vic with the cake only partially cooked, because I was already late and it was taking forever to cook and I was starting to feel like I was in one of those dreams where you’re trying so hard to get to your destination but things keep slowing you down and you never actually make it. Irrationally, I grabbed the wobbly loaf cake from the oven, wrapped the tin in several teatowels, put it in a bag and left (of course the wind dropped and the humidity rose at this point, directly in relation to the gradient of hill I was climbing) and continued baking it for a further 15 minutes at Kate’s. Still turned out fine, which bodes well for your baking it in uninterrupted circumstances.

My entire motivation in these photographs was getting the cool couch in the background.

Raspberry Coconut Loaf with Raspberry Icing

Adapted liberally from a recipe in the Best of Cooking for New Zealanders Book. 

150g butter, melted
250g sugar
2 eggs
250g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 cup dessicated coconut
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup frozen raspberries
1/2 a cup extra raspberries
1 – 2 cups icing sugar

Set your oven to 180 C, find a loaf tin and line it with baking paper. My way of doing this is to just get a large rectangle of baking paper, squash it down into the inner corners, and then throw in the batter to hold it down. Your finished loaf cake will have some inconsistent lumps and bumps but don’t we all?

Whisk together the melted butter and sugar to combine, and then beat in the eggs till the mixture is a little lighter in colour. Sift in the flour and baking powder, tip in the coconut and milk, and stir vigorously – you may need to move to a wooden spoon or spatula if it’s too much for the whisk. Finally fold in the raspberries, tip the mixture into the tin, and bake for about an hour and a half, although start checking it for done-ness at about an hour – give the top a prod and if it’s wobbly, it’s not done yet.

For the icing, simmer the raspberries in a tablespoon or two of water till soft, then push through a sieve to remove the seeds – I know, horrible job – then stir in icing sugar to the juice that remains below till you have a smooth electric pink icing. Thickly spread across the somewhat cooled cake. 

Not one drop of food colouring went into that icing. Who knew raspberries with their natural muted-garnet hue, had it in them to deliver electro spilled-nailpolish pink like this? Not I. I was expecting a kind of dull, uncooked steak colour at best, not this bodacious fuchsia, the stuff of $2 Shop lipgloss.

Coconut’s mild sweetness and the sharp juiciness of raspberries work beautifully together. While you could leave the icing off if you’re in a hurry or don’t have enough raspberries, the fast-dissolving nature of the icing sugar and retained sourness from the fruit adds marvelously to the overall deliciousness, more than your usual, potentially oversweet icing might. This cake is easy to make, slices beautifully, and the coconut and fruit makes sure it’ll be okay the next day too. Frozen raspberries are cruelly costly,  but I wanted them for a few different reasons and so stuck to my guns. But you could use the cheaper blackberries or boysenberries happily here. Or even just leave them out altogether and you’ve got yourself a rather choice plain coconut loaf recipe.

Basically it’s amazing, plus it easily stands up to a cross-town dash in the middle of the cooking process.

And the cake batter tastes brilliant. Bada bing.

Tim and I spent last night at the Wellington Zoo – with most of the people that we went to see the Hunger Games movie with. Yes. They run sleepovers during the warmer months, and usually schoolkids are their main market, but about 28 adults instead were there last night. Getting up close to the animals without any of the usual crowds? So cool. Sleeping on the floor, separated only from its unyielding flatness by a couple of thin sleeping mats? Do-able as. Discovering the Mighty Boosh-esque lizard lounge for various reptiles, decorated with records by Julio Iglesias? Delightful. Realising there was a pelican, one of the things I fear most in this world, living on Monkey Island where we gathered for 20 minutes to feed its simian inhabitants? Blood-chilling. Apart from that ugliness though (and thanks to everyone who helped by saying “it’s gone! Oh wait it’s back” while I hid my face in Tim’s shoulder) it was a fantatically awesome time.

Especially when this sunbear stood on her hind legs and waved to us.

So gorgeous. Partially because we’d all just seen it, and partially because of the heightened silliness you feel when a little underslept and in an unfamiliar place, but there was a lot of raised eyebrows-ing and “this is SO Hunger Games” and so on. What, I enjoy wallowing in the obsession of pop culture, okay? Also, does anyone else get young Catherine O’Hara vibes from Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Katniss in the film? That is not-given-lightly high praise, by the way.
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Title via: Raspberry Beret, that jaunty classic by the jaunty Prince.
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Music lately: 


Althea and Donna, Uptown Top Ranking. So very good, I was led to this track by a way inferior but admittedly clever sampling of it in a mainstream track. So, really, thank you inferior but admittedly clever mainstream track. 


Bic Runga, Tiny Little Piece of My Heart. As beauteous as she ever was at this sort of thing.


Bernadette Peters, Being Alive. Never not obsessed with this song! Or her.
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Next time: I have a couple of quinces that I need some, uh, quincepiration for (sorry…not!) but I also am very set on turning Whittakers‘ new peanut butter chocolate into ice cream. First, to get my hands on some…

i’d be so happy i could melt

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Before getting into why you might or might not win friends with salad, guess what I did on Monday? Okay, apart from arguing with the internet about how slow it was being, in the hopes that my yelling would motivate it to change its attitude? That aside, I spent significant time learning the dance moves from various music videos. The slowness of the internet didn’t allow for too much but I managed to suss out a decent amount of Gossip Folks, Creep, and uh, the swimming-like arm movements in this Marina and the Diamonds song I’m obsessed with. I haven’t done it in years, it was SO FUN and I’m open to suggestions for further music videos you think would be fun to absorb knowledge from. 
I also made this beautiful salad.

Roxette once sang, in a tune of theirs that I’m really not that fond of but which illustrates my point nicely: “Listen to your heart, there’s nothing else that you can do”. On Monday my heart realised I hadn’t really eaten any vegetables all weekend. My heart’s voice was muffled, as it was coming at me through a thick mantle of sodium build-up. Which, you know, whatever: I eat what I like, when I feel like it. And over the weekend, while working at an event in Auckland for about nine hours on Friday and fifteen hours on Saturday, never sitting, lifting huge boxes, et cetera, my body craved twisties and lollies shaped like snakes with real fruit flavour in order to keep going. And funnel cakes with strawberry sauce. And fruit-dense otai. All of which worked. But once returned to my usual slow-moving non-lifting pace, I noticed a leafy green voice whispering “Spinach. You want it.“

I then had this idea that salad dressing made with melted butter instead of oil would taste impressive, and decided to act on it. After all, melted butter and oil are pretty much the same thing structurally. Except melted butter has that salty, nutty, rush-of-blood-to-the-head flavour which can only serve to embiggen a bowl of leaves.

Also able to embiggen leaves are roasted beetroot, croutons, feta, and sweet, round New Zealand grapes. While the Simpsons may have said, nay, conga’d that you don’t win friends with salad, well I at least won myself over with this.

I even swooped in on Tim’s plate and cried “haha! You abandoned this crouton, it’s mine”. To which he replied, “it fell on the floor”. Said crouton was already in my mouth. “Erm…okay. I guess I’ll be fine. Hey, you left this bit of feta, it’s mine!” was my reply. That piece of feta had also fallen on the floor. Was there anything left on his plate that hadn’t fallen on the floor? That wasn’t now being eaten by me? Sadly no. The lesson here is, people generally don’t leave croutons and feta behind, so if they do, be suspicious, or be prepared for some extra germs. Just pretend like you’re eating that yoghurt that’s full of “good bacteria” and you’ll be alright, psychologically anyway.

Roast Beetroot and Spinach Salad with Croutons, Feta, Grapes, and Melted Butter Dressing.

A recipe by me. It’s simpler than my talkative instructions would have you believe.

3 medium beetroot
1 large bunch of spinach
2 large slices of fresh bread from a loaf, or three bits of regular bread from a packet
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup green grapes (the round, beautiful NZ ones if possible)
100g feta
25g butter
2 cloves garlic
1/2 teaspoon wasabi
1 lemon


Set your oven to 180 C. Trim the tops and tails off the beetroots, wrap each firmly in tinfoil, and roast on an oven tray for about an hour to an hour and a half – or until a cake tester or skewer will plunge into them unyieldingly. Once they’re done, remove them from the oven and allow to cool slightly. While the beetroot is doing that, spread a sheet of tinfoil across an oven tray – the same one as the beetroot were on, perhaps – and roughly slice the bread into 2cm cubes. Place the bread on the tinfoil, sprinkle over the oil, mix with your hands to make sure everything’s good and oily, then place in the oven for about 5 minutes. At this point you can just turn the oven off and let the residual heat continue to toast the croutons.


Tear up your spinach leaves and rinse them if they look gritty. Throw into your serving bowl. Remove the tinfoil from the beetroot and carefully push/rub the skin off – it should come away easily, revealing smooth, shiny beetroot underneath. Do this for all three then chop them roughly and add to the spinach. 


Finely chop the garlic cloves. Melt the butter in a pan with the garlic and wasabi, stirring it all together as it melts. It’s fine if the butter bubbles a little or starts to brown, this will add to the flavour. Remove from the heat and squeeze in the juice of the lemon (plus its zest if you’re feeling it) and tip over the spinach and beetroot, stirring well. Finally, roughly slice the feta and add 3/4 of it to the salad, along with the grapes and the croutons. Carefully mix so everything’s dispersed, and top with the remaining feta. 

My photos get steadily worse by the way – darkness had fully set in by the time we got round to eating this, and as we creep further into Autumn it’s only going to get darker earlier. Hence why I positioned the good one first to hook you in! Sorry. But a girl’s gotta eat.

Croutons and feta are unsurprisingly exactly the sort of thing you want to find on your fork, but both of them work well with the more austere ingredients. There’s a lot of natural sweetness – from the grapes and the beetroot, and strangely enough the wasabi, and also a lot of delicious nutty flavours from the butter and the beetroot again and even the fresh spinach – reminded me how good fresh spinach actually tastes. Everything works together fantastically. Melted butter as a salad dressing is downright amazing – especially with the mustard-hot wasabi (indeed, use mustard if you don’t have wasabi) and the sweet, sharp lemon stopping it from becoming too throat-cloggingly rich. There’s not even that much there – it was tempting to double the quantities – but this amount neatly coats the salad and lets you know it’s there, without dominating anything else or pooling in the base of the bowl. Although, when I put it like that…

Sunday got off to a non-advantageous start – on the way back from the airport to our place I txt Tim to ask him to come meet me on the streets to help carry my bags home or I might cry from exhaustion. I get a txt from him saying he can’t because our ute has been towed. Oh dear. Seriously, unless you’re rich enough to light your $200 scented candles with $100 notes, don’t go getting your car towed. However things started to look up from there – car achievement unlocked, we squired my in-town-for-the-weekend mum and two of her best friends to brunch and had many laughs and cakes. Went back to our place and had people over for a dual activity day of Drawing Club and the Game of Thrones Board Game. I was still tired and the fresh sting of the towing bill was like lemon juice to a papercut, but nothing like niche activities and plentiful snacks to improve things! There was sangria and cider and pink lemonade and homemade bread rolls and pretzels and mini-donuts (going stale so $3 a dozen! That’s not false economy!) and Polish cookies and chips and onion dip. And friends, dear dear friends.

But no vegetables. Everything else was glorious while it was there, but if I felt like spinach all of a sudden who was I to argue with myself?

It’s impossible to avoid getting pink beetroot stains on the feta, so just go with it. Anyone who tells you they can is a bounder and a cad.

I meant it about the music video suggestions by the way, I’m all ears. Or all face or whatever the internet equivalent of that saying is. Seriously, next time you’re the slightest bit grumpy or uninspired or burdened down by a giant “MEH”, try learning a dance from a music video.
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Title via: the always-amazing and inspirational and beautiful but not afraid to get ugly and generally reliably liable to make me drop all pretense of dignity person that is Idina Menzel with her opening song from Wicked: The Wizard and I.
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Music lately:

Somehow the whole 90s passed me by without my ever hearing a song from Jan Hellreigel. I knew she existed, her albums were always in those weird catalogues which would get mailed out occasionally and try to rope you into buying CDs monthly for triple the price or something. Discovered her music properly on the 5000 Ways blog the other day, and well, colour me obsessed. Pure Pleasure is pure pleasure.

Lloyd feat Andre 3000, Dedication To My Ex (I Miss That). This has to be the catchiest thing I’ve heard since ever. I don’t know how you describe that kind of stairstep, upwards leaning sound that the chorus has, but I am a sucker for that kind of thing. Regardless of whether I know what it was I’m trying to talk about, this is one snappy tune.
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Next time: I really want to try recreating the funnel cakes I had up in Auckland – they seem easy enough, it’s just getting over the fear of hanging out with burning hot oil – but in the meantime I’m going to be hanging out with my friend Kate tomorrow and will likely bake something dreamy to take with…with the sneaky ultierior motive of getting to photograph it for the blog at her sweet house. I do want to hang out with you just as you are though Kate, baking or not!

ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb

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When I was a kid I thought Robin Hood: Men In Tights was the last word in genius filmmaking. The very last. I rewatched it a few years ago and boo-urns, it really wasn’t that hilarious to me anymore. I guess when I was an impressionable youth, all it took was a few anachronisms and the merry men rapping their exposition and I was happy. I find it interesting what pop culture from my youth holds up to me – inexplicably Babysitters Club books yes, The Wedding Singer sadly no, despite how bodacious I thought Billy Idol was. Princess Bride, better with every watch, whereas time has not been kind to Aqua’s sound production. All 90s R’n’B without exception yes, Limp Bizkit…no. A thousand times nay. This is just me, what say you?  
I ask, because when eating a Cherry Ripe chocolate bar on the weekend (Americans: they’re like an Almond Joy with cherries instead of almonds) it became clear that it was unfairly undelicious. Weak chocolate. Nosebleed-inducing sweetness. Flavour more meh-ry than cherry. I was really, really hungry and I’d been lifting heavy things all afternoon so I ate the lot anyway. But I was sure they used to be nicer. Not that I had Scarface-level piles of cherry ripes around me as a kid. They’re only a relatively recent love of mine from the last decade or two. And yet. At first I thought it was my tastebuds evolving, and with all this “Mmm, tapenade and crackers” and “I love hummus!” and so on it had pushed out all the space available for enjoying the process of having your mouth waterblasted with sugar. But would a person who makes a pavlova and covers it in smarties say that? (I’m talking about myself, if you didn’t click that link.) I think not. So maybe it’s the fault chocolate bars? I do know a lot of people I’ve talked to are convinced Creme Eggs used to be better when they were kids. So.
Anyway I thought, to quote Jason Robert Brown: I can do better than that.

I had half a can of cherries in the fridge leftover from making Purple Jesus for Tim’s birthday last year. Coconut doesn’t cost much and I suspected condensed milk would be excellent glue to hold it all together. Finally I selected the kind of dark chocolate whose pure intensity of flavour and excellence of texture is matched only by its accessibility and reasonable price: Whittaker’s Dark Ghana. Bonus: sometimes if you’re lucky and the humidity is just so, this block of chocolate honestly sounds like a maraca when you snap it.
It worked. OH HOW IT WORKED! 
I’m not implying that if you do like Cherry Ripes we can’t hang out or anything, never! None of that. All I’m saying is: In my personal opinion I don’t like them anymore, and this is my attempt at recreating the Cherry Ripe so I do like it. So no need for hand-wringing.
Cherry-Coconut Chocolate Bars (Ah, c’mon, couldn’t use the registered brand name thingy, could I? I did consider Shmerry Shmipes, so feel free to use that.)

2 1/2 cups dessicated coconut
1 tin sweetened condensed milk
1 cup drained cherries from a jar
1 x 250g block very dark chocolate (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana)

In a large pan, over a low heat, lightly toast the coconut until slightly nut-brown in parts. At this point, tip in the entire can of condensed milk and continue to stir, doing your best, over a low heat. Add the cherries – it will turn a ridiculous purple-grey, just go with it – and continue stirring till it forms a solid paste-like texture.

Remove from the heat, and tip the mixture onto a large sheet of baking paper on a bench, or onto a silicon baking sheet. Use the spatula to prod and spread and shape this forgiving mixture into a rough square, then use either a dough cutter or a knife and a fish slice to divide them into squares and shift them apart from each other.

Break the chocolate into pieces and place in a metal or china bowl that’s big enough to rest on top of a small pot of water. Bring said pot of water to the boil, which will gently melt the chocolate. Or you could microwave it, if you’ve got one. Use a teaspoon to transfer melted chocolate on top of each square of coconut, spreading it across and down the sides as per the above photo. Once they’re set, use the fish slice or a spatula or whatever to carefully flip them over, then using the remaining chocolate – which you might have to carefully re-melt, drizzle chocolate over (I use a kind of loose-wristed flinging movement which isn’t overly successful, to be honest.) If you feel like you’ve got enough chocolate you could just spread the chocolate over the bases so the coconut is entirely concealed. Store in a cool place.

All that writing makes it look like the most painfully complex recipe in history but I’m just trying to be elaborate with the instructions. This is honestly easy. There’s nothing fiddly involved, just a bit of time. 

Just a bit of stirring and spreading and slicing and melting and spreading and Jackson Pollock drizzling and verily you end up with a whole flipping jar full of delicious, chewy-sweet chocolate bars. Not too sweet, weirdly enough, despite the entire can of condensed milk (minus whatever stuck to the underside of the top of the can, which I carefully removed with my tongue). I think this comes from the toasting of the coconut, the relative sourness of the cherries, and the cocoa onslaught of the dark, dark chocolate. These morsels are best kept in the fridge, which means when you bite into them you get the full texture ruckus of cold, firm chocolate snapping into softly coarse coconut and pliant condensed milk. It’s truly splendid.
Seriously now. Try before you buy.
Nothing overly wacky to report from the weekend, as I was up in Auckland toiling away for work. Hence the post-toil cherry ripe bar which inspired all this. The time away toiling has rendered me completely useless which is why this blog post took forever to get to you. And even with all this time simmering away, it hasn’t necessarily improved. Did however have a “drawing club” at Kate and Jason’s house with what little time was left of my weekend, which was as gloriously old-timily fun as it sounds (or as awful as it sounds, depending on your opinion I guess). I got a rush of happiness from doing something I haven’t done since probably 1994 – just lying on the floor at a friend’s place drawing all afternoon. Finished the day with Jo and Laura (another one!) seeing out the first season of Veronica Mars. Leslie Knope has a hot contender for being my Favourite Fictional Hero Whose Fictionality Doesn’t Hinder Their Influence Upon Me…I can tell you.
Wait! Something a bit exciting: at our last book group, you know, the one with literary karaoke to three different versions of Wuthering Heights, I got a call from Australia’s edition of Vice magazine because they were wanting to talk to some people in Wellington about what they were up to of a weekend. Despite being genuinely excited about book club I wasn’t sure if the concept would translate particularly well, but lo: here I am in Vice! FYI, they asked me to send in a photo and I didn’t realise it’d be that big. Has my face always been that crooked? And ruddy-nosed? And, let’s face it, was my hair always that awesomely huge?
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Title via: Runaways, Cherry Bomb. I love the threatening way Cherie Curry spits out “HELLO” in the chorus. 
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Music lately:
Tim made me listen to this song by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, 99 and a Half Won’t Do. Now I’m trying to make you listen to it. It’s a beauty.
Who Are You, by Julien Dyne feat Ladi6 and Parks. Brill. Complicated and straightforward at the same time. I love the twinkly triangles and swirly piano notes. 
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Next time: I’m heading back up to Auckland this week for yet more toiling, but hopefully it won’t be quite so long before I bounce back this time round.