Category: Vegetarian

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. 

heaven help my heart the day that i find suddenly i’ve run out of secrets…

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“And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house…” 
Shrewd readers will note that these photos haven’t been taken at my place. Less shrewd readers will note that these photos haven’t been taken at my place after I tell you that they haven’t. Hey, we can’t all be shrewd.
I made these Pineapple Secrets to take round to Kate, Jason, Kim and Brendan’s flat, which is Tim’s and my home away from home these days, to accompany a wild game of Settlers of Catan. For about 15 minutes it looked like I was going to out-strategise everyone and be queen of all I surveyed, but then I unsurprisingly slid back into last place. Fortunately there were Pineapple Secrets to sweeten the deal. I chanced upon them in by beloved Favourite Puddings of America cookbook, a book that keeps astounding me with its amazing recipe titles – like Perfect Divinity, don’t you just want to make that immediately? (It’s some kind of toffee-meringue confection, by the way.) Pineapple Secrets are part of your basic slice genus, being the kind which have half the mixture pressed into a tin, a filling spread across, and the rest of the mixture toppled over before baking the lot.   

That’s not baked beans in the yellow chequered bowl, by the way. Tim thought it was. It’s canned pineapple, simmered with a little cornflour and sugar.

Speaking of achingly cool things like playing Catan, on Friday night a party spontaneously formed at Tim’s and my place and – get you this – I managed to dupe everyone into listening to my Chess record, and if memory serves me correctly, it went down a treat. There is no better way to spend a Friday night than rapping to One Night In Bankok for a doubtless un-alarmed crowd, I promise you. I also remember Wuthering Heights being danced to, which feels hardly surprising – our capacity for that song has been tested but never met.

Still on the cooler-than-everyone* thing, on Saturday night we had book group at our place and attempted Literary Karaoke (where you look up songs on YouTube that reference books and then sing along!) Wuthering Heights got played again. Three separate versions. Told you we hadn’t reached capacity. (*When I say ‘cool’ I’m not being ironic*) (*I wasn’t being ironic there either.)

So while this cookbook can be heavy on recipes containing packaged cake mix or “marshmallow creme” whatever that is, when it’s good it’s brilliant, and these Pineapple Secrets are near-on spectacular. Even with all the cake mix I love the naive adventurousness of recipes from that 50s/60s era. Once I’d gotten over the adorable name (wait, that’s never going to happen) I appreciated how the ingredients were all in my cupboard or fridge at a time when both were feeling a little empty. This is just chance of course, but so delicious are the Pineapple Secrets that if you’ve got what it takes, I thoroughly advocate that you try making them yourself.

This slice is crumble-topping-esqe and sturdy, with a sweet, summery pineapple filling. While I love biscuits and cookies, the slice gets the jump on them any day with how easy it is to bring it into existence – no rolling out, or cutting, or cooking in batches. Not much of anything in fact, as this is not in any way a difficult recipe. Indeed what it lacks in difficulty it makes up for in deliciousness. Hooray!

Pineapple Secrets

Adapted slightly from America’s Favourite Puddings cookbook.

1 can crushed or sliced pineapple in juice
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons cornflour


2 cups flour
1 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
170g butter


Set the oven to 190 C/400 F. Simmer the pineapple and its juice, 1/4 cup brown sugar and cornflour together till thick and syrupy, stirring often. This shouldn’t take too long. Then, mix together the dry ingredients and rub in the cubed butter till thoroughly incorporated and resembling damp sand.


Take half the butter/flour mixture and tip into a greased, square baking tin. Wet the back of a spoon and use it to press down carefully on the mixture. Tip the pineapple and sauce over the top and spread across. Tip the rest of the flour mixture evenly over the top and use the back of the spoon again to very carefully smooth and press this down again. Bake for 30-40 minutes and allow to cool considerably before slicing.

It’s very simple but deceptively so – all that brown sugar bringing caramel intensity to the otherwise dull oats, the pineapple juicy and sweet and fragrant. I’m not sure how secret it is, since the title of the recipe completely gives it away, but it’s not unwelcome, even if you do see it coming. (Photo taken strategically to include their couch which I love. Alas, this is not my beautiful couch, although lucky for me I get to sit on it at least once a week usually.)
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Title via: Heaven Help My Heart from – how timely – the musical Chess. It’s a beautiful song, but when sung by Idina Menzel? Oh, the devastating. 
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Music Lately: 
Matthew Pickering: Your Beauty Transforms Every Space. Our friend Brendan was playing in a band with Pickering on Tuesday night at the ASB Gardens Magic series – all for free and featuring some very cool artists, like Ria Hall who was on before Pickering. It was all pretty lovely. Ria Hall’s I Am A Child is so stunning – would love to hear it a capella one day, her voice is just wild.

Audra McDonald: Summertime, from Porgy and Bess. Tim sent me this link the other day. It’s Audra McDonald, so you know it’s going to be special. And also it’s the Colbert Report, so you know it’s going to be…special.
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Next time: I’m away for the weekend so alas it’ll be a while before I can cook something again. Whatever that something is, depends on my exhaustion levels, which depends on a lot of things this weekend…anyone up for a recipe for heavily buttered toast?

banana by the bunch, a box of captain crunch would taste so good

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While there are large-scale diseases with varying degrees of manageability, on the day-to-day level the human body can still be pretty unfair to its inhabitant. I say this with full acknowledgement of my privilege – that is, I am sound enough of body. I mean your intentions going one way and your body going another.
But what’s got me thinking about this, is that it’s currently 5.30am. Not that shocking an hour really. But I’ve been absolutely, no-turning-back awake since 3.45am. Not for want of trying to sleep. My brain started getting stupid anyway. Like I’d be imagining rain on the roof and being all nice and calm, drifting away on a floating bed – suddenly my brain would insert into this lovely scene an enormous insect, a particular insect that terrifies the heck out of me and whose name I’m not even going to utter on this page. My brain did this about five times while I lay there in cold-then-hot discomfort, my normally reliable pillow becoming flat and concrete-like…when I checked my phone and over an hour had passed, I accepted there was not much I could do about it. So here I am.

Alas, this is quite typical. I’m not the best sleeper. Normally it manifests in my taking hours to fall asleep after turning off the light, but this time I had sleeplessness working its way to the middle from both ends of the night. As I sit here typing in the dark, Tim, the minxy hellion, is sleeping like he always does, deeply, unflappably, and with enviable briskness. Meanwhile I’ve been lying thinking “I’m going to be so fragile tomorrow. Does thinking I’m going to be fragile mean I’m going to be more fragile? Aagh, it’s that insect that I hate!”

Luckily I had the foresight yesterday to bake some banana bread, a warm pillowy slice of which I am confident will provide untold comfort.


Especially when that banana bread was spontaneously studded with the roughly chopped remainder of a vanilla-fluttery, buttery block of Whittaker’s white chocolate. (Please scuse the pink stains on my chopping board. Either everything is stained permanently or you never eat beetroot, there is no middle ground in life.)


Banana bread always seems like a rather lovely thing to me, perhaps because I associate it with the banana bread that shy, lonely Charlotte Johanssen brought over for her the Ramsey family in Babysitters Club #13: Hello Mallory, while the majority of Stoneybrook ignored the newcomers, quite racistly. While I didn’t exactly know what banana bread was at the time – we would’ve likely called it loaf cake in New Zealand – something about its compact, sliceable practicality all wrapped in tinfoil and carried over by Charlotte conveyed the sense of neighbourly friendliness better than any other food could’ve.

This is, kinda bafflingly, the FOURTH time I’ve blogged about Banana bread (Nigella’s beautiful recipe in 2008, and then in 2010 a vegan recipe and a highly recommendable Banana-lime Palm Sugar Loaf) and yet this new recipe still has its rightful place. Oh and I say ‘bafflingly’ because I can’t believe I’ve only just now brought up the Babysitters Club connection. Four banana bread recipes itself is not baffling. What’s this one bringing to the table though? It’s simple, it’s strewn with white chocolate, and it has the snuggly scent of cinnamon. It’s also gluten-free, if you want it to be.

Cinnamon White Chocolate Banana Cake

Adapted somewhatish from a recipe in Meat-free Mondays. That book just won’t quit!

125g soft butter
125g sugar (optional – half brown, half white sugar)
2 eggs
3 medium, ripe bananas (or 2 large)
50g roughly chopped white chocolate
170g rice flour, or plain flour 
50g cornflour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Pinch salt

 Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and beat the butter and sugar together till creamy and light. Beat in the eggs, then fold in the bananas and white chocolate. Finally, sift in all the dry ingredients and fold them in gently. Tip the batter into a paper-lined loaf tin, and bake for about 1 1/4 hours.

Something about the magical properties of cornflour make this light, puffy, and with a crisp yet mouth-meltingly tender crust. There might be more to it than that, but I’m pretty sure it’s the cornflour. While I’ll stand up for white chocolate’s deliciousness any day, sometimes being paired with a spice only makes it more delightful, and this is verily the case with the cinnamon. Its warm mellow fragranced-ness against the shards of creamy sweetness is brilliant, and makes me want to pair white chocolate and cinnamon together again in other baking. And soon.


Um, yes, that is a glass bottle with a stripey straw in it. Guess what’s in the bottle? Iced coffee. Part of me is all “but it’s so pretty” and the other half is saying “Ugghh this is so blogger-y”. As always, to prove to myself that form over function could still provide a function, and I wasn’t just using props in my photos for the sake of it, I drank that coffee through the straw. It gave the already fruity, complex brew distinct notes of warm cardboard. But, as Leslie Knope said when she married off two male penguins to each other at the zoo: “I firmly believed it would be cute”.  I think I need to stop guilting myself out over this.

And look, here I am at 6.45am! A blog post under my belt, and the day’s hardly begun. I think I’d still take the sleep though. Fingers crossed for tonight. Which is feeling a long, long way away – oh, did I mention it’s Monday? Cruel, cold Monday? Thank goodness for banana bread, hey?

Title via: I feel like there should be like, an airhorn going off or a balloon drop every time I use a song from RENT (which this blog’s named for) in the title of a blog post too. If I keep making banana bread I’m going to run out of title options, but for now kindly revel in the unspeakably glorious joy that is Angel’s big number, Today 4 U, performed with alacrity by Wilson Jermaine Heredia. 
 
Music lately:

My capacity for being obsessed with songs is boundless. Boundless, I tell you. So the fact that I listened to Marina and the Diamonds’ Shampain almost literally a million times this week shouldn’t surprise you.

Monkees, Last Train to Clarksville. RIP Davy Jones, heartthrob.

Next time: whatever it is, let’s hope I’m telling you about it on more than three hours of sleep.

dance on the coral beaches, make a feast of the plums and peaches…

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When I was a kid I used to draw and draw and draw and draw. When you’d get your stationary at the start of the year I’d ask to get an extra “jotter pad” (those A4 notebooks with weak, brownish paper and inevitably a cartoon elephant on the front), one for actual schoolwork and one to draw in. At one point I managed to procure, somehow, one of those enormous notepads for offices that are nearly the size of a table which I hubristically and ostentatiously kept on my desk for drawing on when I was done with my schoolwork. (It gets worse. I also used to also keep a large stack of books on my desk for reading in between being taught stuff. Like, while the teacher was right there still teaching everyone things. OH the conceit! But admit it, it’s a good idea.) There was untold envy and reverence for my best friend at the time, who got her hands on one of those large, seemingly endless rolls of butcher’s paper. Basically my life revolved around obtaining surfaces to draw on. What did I draw? Well…ladies. Initially the Babysitters Club (both scenes from books and those imagined) then Spice Girls (I had a jotter pad expressly for drawing them) and fashion designs and characters from my stories. Like a woman called Stuyvesant who had blue hair and a black belt in karate.

So you could say I liked drawing and did it a lot. Somewhere down the line though, I lost the habit of drawing constantly. Fast forward many years to yesterday, when I casually picked up a pen to doodle away and I just couldn’t. Muscle memory means I can still remember bits of dances I learned over fifteen years ago, but drawing was just not working for me. It wasn’t like getting back on a bicycle in any sense of the word, since…I can’t ride a bike either. (I know. What kind of child of New Zealand am I? Frankly drawing the Babysitters Club was much more fun than cycling looked, which didn’t help with my motivation. Also I could not stay upright.) Has this ever happened to you? Something you were so invested in, which suddenly disappears on you?

Happily, some skills work in the right way, going from fearful to awesome. Like pie! As a food-interested youth, pie seemed so far out of my league that I practically had a Pretty in Pink relationship with it, the out-of-reach Blane to my uncool Andie. These days I’m more like Clare in the Breakfast Club to pie’s…anyway, my point is I’m now really calm about making pie, pastry and all. It is no big deal to me. Even with an florid title like Plum Chocolate Meringue Crumble Pie. Although it sounds like too much detail to take on board, it’s a remarkably cohesive disc of deliciousness, inspired by two things: the many kilos of plums Tim and I bought in Greytown with friends Kim and Brendan, and the beautiful Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts book that I scored in Featherston, which I showed you in my last post.

So instead of showing you the book again, I’ll show you where we got the plums from. See how excited I got with the Instagram filters!

Like we were purchasing plums in a Primal Scream music video!

This Favourite Recipes book I mention was published in the sixties and is full of more delight than I can possibly convey. So I’ll just list a couple of its dishes. Berlin Peach Punch. Miami Beach Birthday Cake. Lime Highbrow. Raspberry Razzle. I should like to make them all. (Especially the Berlin Peach Punch, anyone want to donate me some brandy?) It was, however, very light on plum recipes. So I used another recipe from the book and ended up changing it so much that it doesn’t bear a ton of resemblance to the original. But thanks all the same, Mrs Ivan Kessinger of Morgantown, who submitted the Cherry Crunch that I based the following on.

It’s not as difficult as it sounds – for one thing, there’s no pastry to deal with or filling to mix and heat. There is, admittedly, meringue, but as it’s covered with crumble you don’t have to put too much investment into how good it looks, plus two lonely egg whites’ll whip up before your arm muscles have even had a chance to get sore.

And it is stunningly, well-timed-thwack-to-the-back-of-the-knees-staggeringly delicious.

Plum Chocolate Meringue Crumble Pie


1 packet of plain, cheesecake-bottomish biscuits (I used Budget Vanilla Rounds)
125g butter, melted
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon flour
7 plums (or so)
100g good milk chocolate (I used Whittaker’s, which is mysteriously caramelly and wonderful)
1/2 cup almonds
2 egg whites
1/3 cup sugar + 1 tablespoon


Smash up the biscuits – either in a food processor or with a rolling pin. Mix in the melted butter and cinnamon and try, just try not to eat it all because you’ll need it! If you suspect you will eat lots, then add more biscuits and butter, of course.


Press 3/4 of it into the base of a paper-lined pie tin, to cover the base and about 1cm of the sides. Keep the other 1/4 for later…


Bake at 180 C for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven, turn it down to 130 C, and throw in the almonds for a few minutes to roast, if you like – if you can’t be bothered, I understand. Either way, the oven needs to be 130 C. Sprinkle the tablespoon of flour and the extra tablespoon of sugar over the biscuit base, then slice up the plums and roughly chop the chocolate and layer them up on top of the flour and sugar. Try to layer the plums in such a way that they’re fairly smooth, so that you don’t have any trouble layering the meringue over.


In a clean metal bowl, whisk the egg whites till thickened and frothy, then slowly add the sugar while whisking continuously, till thick and shiny and bright white. Carefully spread this across the top of the plums in the pietin. Roughly chop the almonds and mix them into the remaining crumble, scatter this on top of the meringue. Bake the pie for 35 minutes. Allow to cool a little before eating. 

It’s honestly not as ridiculously sweet as it sounds. The salty butter and sharp, juicy plums keeps all that in check. You would not believe how brilliant sour plum juice and creamy milk chocolate is when it melts together. Not forgetting the soft solidness of the meringue relinquishing against the crunchy, almond-rich crumble top.

It’s genuflectingly delicious. Really the only problem is, as you can see, it’s not particularly solid. This could possibly be helped by refrigerating the heck out of it, but it’s wonderful at room temperature – all the flavours really shining – so just be prepared to carefully ease it out of the pie tin and eat the broken mess that lands on your plate with a spoon.

The reason I’ve been compelled to pick up a pen and put it to paper is that I’ve been home sick with a sudden sore throat, cough, attack of the phlegm, that kind of thing. As drawing wasn’t a goer – although I will keep trying – I’ve been occupying myself with Never Mind The Buzzcocks on YouTube. Later host Simon Amstell is adorable, and early host Mark Lamarr is so sharp and dry, so it’s win win really, and I’m reminded of late nights when I was living in England, watching it before bed with Hovis Extra-Thick Square Cut toast.
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Title: Warning: I’m going to use the word “obsessed” a lot now. I am obsessed with the song Meadowlark, which this lyric comes from. Liz Callaway’s version is tear-bringingly exquisite, honestly – if you click through please stick past the fairytale-ish opening lyrics, because it gets better, plus you’ll miss Callaway’s awesomely emphasised ‘r’ as she sings “larrrrk”. 
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Music lately:

I am also OBSESSED with the song Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart by Julee Cruise, from Twin Peaks – you do not want to know how many times I’ve listened to it this week, since first hearing it in an episode where it’s sung at the Roadhouse. I know the title is awful (I thought it was “right back” and I’d like to pretend it really is and everyone else has been wrong the whole time) but it’s so hypnotic that I don’t really mind.

Not obsessed with this song, but it is still quite good: St Vincent, Cruel. Delightful and delightfully catchy.
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Next time: I am still really compelled by the Meat-free Monday cookbook and will likely reproduce something from that, unless I get hold of some brandy and get to make the Berlin Peach Punch, of course. 

when 2 become 1

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This morning Tim said “Oh yeah, happy…um” and I romantically finished his sentence for him by saying “meh.” We’ve never really done anything particular for it – our first ever Valentine’s Day together years ago involved him saying he’d be working till midnight at his new job at McDonalds and me saying  – I kid you not – “Can they do that? Is that even legal?” Oh naive country gal that I was. Anyway, I don’t need a designated day to tell him how much I like him, he’s just that great!

I am quite the sucker for one foodstuff dressed up as another. Like this idea I had: Ginger Crunch Pikelets. That’s what the title of this blog post refers to by the way. Not Valentine’s Day. In case you were wondering. I like you people, but we’re not that familiar.

Straightening your tablecloth is so uh… bourgeois? Un-creative? Something I didn’t spot at the time of taking this photo?

Well let me bring it back to the subject: the pikelets have all the spicy heat and toffeed sweetness of the biscuity slice, but now with the added frivolousness of being a small round shape, fried in oil. If you do want to make the original slice itself, that’s still a sensible and delicious pursuit, and here’s my Ginger Crunch recipe. And while plain pikelets spread with a pikelet-sized dab of butter are perfect as is, they’re not so sacred that they can’t be tutu-ed with.

I’m very pleased with these. To be witheringly honest with myself, they could do with being a little lighter – maybe buttermilk or half milk half yoghurt could take care of that? If need be, I would guess you could use soymilk too – in fact the one time I made pancakes with soymilk they were the most fluffiest, lightest and satin-surfaced I’d ever had.

Ginger Crunch Pikelets

 Recipe by me.

 1/4 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup milk, buttermilk, yoghurt or a mixture
1/4 cup water
1 tablespoon golden syrup
1 tablespoon plain oil (I used rice brain)
150g flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
1/4 cup demerara/raw sugar
1 egg

 Soak the oats in the milk, water and golden syrup while you gather everything else. Whisk in everything except the dry ingredients, then fold them in gently. Fry in heaped tablespoons in a nonstick pan over a lowish heat. When bubbles form on top of the little spheres of cooking batter, use a spatula to ease under their surface and flip them over. Spread with butter if you like, but definitely serve drizzled with more golden syrup. If you don’t have raw sugar regular brown sugar’s fine, but the crunchy nature of it adds a little extra something. 

 Also note: altitude/number of years they’ve been sitting in your pantry/brand etc will affect your oats – the mixture shouldn’t be too thick, so if it looks more like scone dough, add more milk. Pikelet batter is pretty forgiving, so you should end up with something edible no matter what happens.

The scattering of oats keeps these densely filling, while the sticky golden syrup and granular raw sugar mellows out the ground ginger’s potent heat, which itself spices up the otherwise plain landscape of the pikelet. I made them for pudding, with the plan of having some leftover to reheat for a mid-morning snack the next day, but they would stand in happily for any meal, I think.

And you can make a pikelet golden syrup sandwich!

So, Whitney Houston, huh? I am really saddened by this news of her death. Mariah Carey has always been the diva I connect with most – might be something to do with my age, even – but Whitney’s vocal flawlessness and control and the conveying of emotion in her songs, from the intense joy of I Wanna Dance With Somebody to the intense stoicism of “they can’t take away my dignity” (seriously, who could get away with using the words “my dignity” in a song? Not many, if any) is something I’ve always appreciated. From a distinct but shady-edged memory of everyone singing I Will Always Love You at a family party, to the amount of times I quote “It’s not right but it’s okay”, Whitney: RIP.

What else has been happening? I got my practical, everyday-applicable gold dress fixed, but couldn’t fix my ability to catch the camera at the wrong time:

This was the least awkward of like, 17 photos. On Friday we had a GGG night (that’s Gin and Gossip Girl) which descended into a 90s YouTube video dance party…on Saturday we watched a whole lot of Veronica Mars…on Sunday we played the board game version of Game of Thrones…The whole weekend was essentially a celebration of television. We are clearly the coolest people you will ever meet.
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Title via: Okay, we’ve covered why it’s here. 2 Become 1 was the Spice Girls’ first ballad, a chance to reach out to the fairly lucrative Adult Contemporary, MOR, Easy Listening audience (see how lucrative they are by all these ways of describing them?) but with a subtle yet bold safe-sex message for everybody (“put it on, put it on”) and a sweet yet darkly wintery melody reflected in the AMAZING coats they all wore in the music video. And then that final bit with them all individually swaying and then a deer appears? It’s quite perfect.
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Music lately:

Whitney Houston – as I said on my Facebook page, her take on I Know Him So Well from Chess with her mother, Cissy Houston, is glorious.

Shy Guy, Diana King. This song was one such track that got thoroughly danced to on Friday night. You’ll know it even if you don’t recognise the title – it is glorious.

And something actually from this decade, and yet perhaps even less relevant to many: The Book of Mormon won the Grammy for Broadway cast recording! Yay! Andrew Rannells singing I Believe is adorable! So adorable.
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Next time: I had this really awesome meringue idea but I might save it for a while. I’ve scored the Meat-free Mondays book and it is GORGEOUS, so perhaps it’ll be something from there. Peace!

everybody rise, rise, rise, rise, rise…

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I know I’m always trying to work more ice cream into my life, but bread-making is well up there on the continuum of my favourite things to cook. Plunging your hands into soft dough, their warmth kicking it into life, watching it rise like you’re David Attenborough narrating the time-lapsed life cycle of a rare tree, the intoxicating scent of it as it bakes, the impressed gasps of those around you when you tell them that today, you achieved bread. Bread is wonderful enough as it is, but brioche is like the Baby-Sitters Club Super Special edition of the leavened dough family: richer and sweeter and far more exciting. It tastes just like a croissant but is more solid and grippable. Don’t you hate with croissants how all the best bits crumble off upon impact and end up caught in the fibres of your wooly jumper and worked into your ponytail and embedded in the seams of your jeans? (Just one of the reasons I no longer wear jeans.) No danger of this with brioche. All of the butter and none of the disintegration.

I was recently musing upon the great cafe combinations of the nineties. Now I don’t want to come across as a snob. I mean, I eat cold spaghetti from the tin for fun, and I didn’t try couscous for the first time till well into the new millenium. I am no human barometer of what is good. And yet. When I see a chicken, cranberry and camembert panini or apricot and brie panini or whatever being sold for $8.95, I can’t help but shake my head wearily. Do people really like them? Still? Spinach and feta is slightly later on the timeline, if I remember right, but it was the combination of a certain time. And while eating a spinach and feta scone I got to pondering: What’s the deal? What does the spinach even do? It works in spanakopita: surrounded by crunchy pastry and generations of existence, the spinach shines. But sliced up and baked into limp submission inside a scone, it provides green stripes, at best. At worst, it’s bitter, every last particle of it gets caught in your teeth, and it takes up valuable space where more feta could be.
Now mint, on the other hand. Mint provides that toothpaste-cool hit which works beautifully with feta, giving it that summery light-hearted vibe, lifting the saltiness and butteriness with its pure, sweet flavour. And mint is about a twelfth as likely to get in your teeth, since there’s so much less of it.  
As I said, I love bread baking, but I haven’t done it in ages – and really, late afternoon after flying home from my brother’s 21st birthday up home might not have been the most prudent time to embark upon an invented yeast-based recipe. But my instincts were convincing enough that I went ahead with it anyway. And it worked! Thank goodness, because we only buy feta about once every three months and I didn’t want to waste it on a failed project. Brioche is not that scary – the only annoying thing about it is all the time it needs to rise. Three times it rises! Three! But please persevere. It can have varying degrees of butteriness: I only used 90 grams since…that’s what we had in the fridge. Don’t worry about needing any special tins – I spied the muffin tray and thought (okay, maybe I said it aloud) “You there! You’ll do!” I was right.
Feta and Mint Brioches

Makes 8. An idea by me.

500g flour (plain is fine)
1 sachet active dry yeast
3 tablespoons sugar
3 eggs
1/2 cup lukewarm water
80g soft butter
pinch salt
100g feta, chopped roughly and mixed with 2 tablespoons chopped mint

In a large bowl mix the flour, sugar, salt and yeast. Crack in the three eggs, pour in the water, and mix to a sticky dough. Knead till soft and bouncy, then massage in the butter, small pieces at a time. This might take a while. But it’s really fun. Leave covered with clingfilm to let it it rise, for about an hour. Punch it down, right square in the middle, then form into a ball and let it rise again for an hour or two in the fridge. Finally, cut it into eight pieces, force a little pocket in the middle of each piece with your finger, then stuff with a little mint-feta mix. Pinch the edges closed, then sit each one in a buttered muffin tin, pinch side down. Leave again – I’m sorry! – for an hour before baking at 200 C for 25 minutes. Carefully lift a brioche up and tap its base – if it sounds hollow, should be all good.

If at any stage you feel you need a little more liquid or flour, trust your instincts, as different ingredients/temperatures/metres above sea level will produce different results. But only go a tiny bit at a time.

The movie A Mighty Wind is one of my very favourites, and it stands up easily to many a re-watch. I’d say I watched it more times last year than I ate feta, for one thing. Since watching it, I’ve latched on to the phrase “it can’t be overstated”, which is used to describe the kiss between Mitch and Micky in their song (okay, you had to be there.) I might overuse it the way some overuse the word “literally” (am looking at you, Chris Traegar, but it’s literally adorable on you) but I like it, and it’s so applicable: the deliciousness of these brioches frankly just can’t be overstated. See?

The crust is crisp and yet with all the buttery promise of a flaky croissant, without the crumbliness.  Inside is soft, golden-tinted and warm with the sharply salty feta dissolving creamily on the tongue. The mint is not there in large quantities, but absolutely present, cooling and contrasting with everything else. Altogether flipping brilliant.

And, as I said, I managed to make it after flying home from my brother’s 21st in the late afternoon, so you can surely do it anytime. We had such an awesome time up home – the party was music-themed (I don’t know about you but my family has a thing with dress-up 21st parties) and Tim and I dressed up as the White Stripes. My Mum and her best friend were Agnetha and Anni-Frid from ABBA, Dad was a Seargeant Peppers-era Beatle, and my brother made a commendable Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins. It was just one of the best parties I’ve been to. There were streamers, a live band – which Dad used to play with, and which played good music to dance to – not even the sort of music where inside you’re like “Oh my gosh I hate this so much but there are people around that I care about so I’ll pretend to enjoy dancing to it”. Dad – whose birthday it was also, since he’s born on the same day as my brother – got up at one point to do a fairly wild keyboard solo. Later in the evening he and my brother played a rollicking rendition of Saw Her Standing There by the Beatles.

There were alsatians that ran up and down the road and inside the hall. Two giant alsatians! They didn’t seem to be looking for trouble, they could probably just smell the many kilos of ham. Nonetheless, I’d forgotten that that sort of thing just happens at home. And I secretly wanted to confiscate them and make them my pets.

There was a cake that I made and iced to look like a record, at my brother’s request. I may never get the black food colouring off my hands, but with some logistical supervision from Tim and my 9 year old cousin, I think it turned out pretty snazz-tastic.

And there was kilo after kilo of ham. Which we all got to eat the next day after people had arisen from where they fell. I also got to see my long-missed Australian-based Aunty, got to nick the gorgeous – well I think so – bit of fabric that the brioches are sitting on, and…while looking for old schoolbooks of my brothers to festoon the party with, Mum found this that I’d made many years ago:

After the laughter subsided, I realised how little I’ve changed. Obsessive about things and in a super-righteous way; full of dubious ideas that seem great in my head but are a bit awkward on paper; misguidedly entrepreneurial; liable to mix up simple things like AM and PM. But I think I turned out alright in spite of, nay because of it. (Also: if you look closely you’ll see that my signature then did not in anyway resemble my name, but rather a small figure surfing on the back of a swan. This was because I didn’t want to be shackled by the conformity of your signature actually having to look like your name when it could be an artistic expression instead, or SOMETHING. My uncoolness cannot, as they say in A Mighty Wind, be overstated.)
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Title via: The Ladies Who Lunch, a song more salty and sharp than feta from Company, one of my favourite musicals. Sung perfectly by the wonderful Elaine Stritch. Please watch. I’m pretty sure even if you don’t like musicals, there might be something in this for you.
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Music lately:

Radar Love, Golden Earring. This got played at the party. Mum and Dad both like this song – it has some significance, I can’t remember what exactly – Mum? – and there’s something about watching one’s parents dancing away dressed up as pop stars to a song that makes one like it too.

Wings of a Dragon by the equally glorious husband and wife Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally. Treat yo’self and watch it. As well as being internet-breakingly hilarious, it’s surprisingly catchy.
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Next time: Hmm, well it is February, but no love hearts here (Shmalentines! I say.) Might be something sensible and dinner-related, might be a towering cake or something. 

the syrups and shaved ice, i ain’t gotta say it twice

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Did all of you have to write and say a speech in school, as part of the curriculum? Here in New Zealand it’s a long-standing tradition. I wrote a rather excellent think-piece on the Spice Girls (admittedly, there was no Google so I had to glean any knowledge of them from what was written on the side of chupa-chup packets and from analysis of lyrics like “She’s a real lay-dee!”); an award winning speech on well-known cats in literature (I got to the regionals with that speech, and of course I had lots of friends, why do you ask?) and then the next year, I admit, I phoned it in with a speech about chocolate. It was largely put together from quotes found in those “Little Book of Calm” tiny books which were very fashionable at the time. If I remember right, I won the school competition but lost out at the interschool level.
But those books that I quoted, glaze-eyed though they were, had it right. Chocolate is special and no loss at the interschool level for my speech which honestly wasn’t that good will take that away from me. Or any of us! Particularly special, on a national level now, is the compelling output of Whittaker’s, who this year launched their Berry and Biscuit block. 
Berry jelly, juiced up with real fruit, and crunchy bits of biscuits punctuating their caramelly milk chocolate. It’s damn good. I should disclose that the reason I’m able to so casually lay pieces of it upon a commemorative plate, and turn it into sorbet like it’s no big thing is this: I wrote – entirely without agenda – very nice things about Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit in a national paper, they liked what they saw and sent me some so I could really make sure I liked it. So I decided, because I am self-appointed duchess of ice cream (“see her melting crown!”) I would turn some of it into a pure and chilly Berry and Biscuit Sorbet. 

But first: some really exciting news from Tim and I. Guess! Guess! Or scan slightly further ahead in the text to where I’ve written it down. Last year Tim and I embarked on our first ever holiday, which we’d saved for five and a half years for (“feels like thirty”, as Jesus commented in Jesus Christ Superstar), and it was glorious. Well there’s nothing like landing back home to make you want to claw your way back to another travel adventure again. We’re not tap dancing happily about our bank balance right now, but we have been saving a bit of a nest-egg and while it might’ve been sensible to wait another year before planning the next trip…we thought…what if we just do it this year? What if we just? We can make it happen somehow! So we’ve put a down payment on flights to America. Specifically: NEW YORK. I need hardly elaborate on how heavily exciting this is. From my first musical I ever saw around age 5 – 42nd Street – to the Big Apple Style and hushed reverence of the city from the Baby Sitters Club’s Stacey McGill, to my heedless love of the musical RENT from which this blog gets its name, to every single cool restaurant there is being there…But wait: we’re also going to New Orleans, the place I’ve had a geographical crush on since about age 14, and Nashville, grand home of many a music-related thing. Thrilling. It’s all happening in October, so this space, be watching it.

Back to the chocolate sorbet. Not ice cream: the various elements of Berry and Biscuit are not blurred by cream or other dairy, instead only water, sugar, and a little cocoa is used to turn them into an icy mass of excellence. Not that I have anything against pouring cream into everything I see: I wanted to try something different here, and let the chocolate itself shine. Also note, I only used 3/4 of the block because it seems excessive to use the whole lot – if you’re shelling out for the good stuff, you might as well have some for fun nibbling times too. 

Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit Sorbet

A recipe by myself.

1 1/2 cups brown sugar
3 1/2 cups water
 4 tablespoons dark, dark cocoa (around 20% fat content is ideal for flavour and texture. However, use what you have!)
175g Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit Chocolate

In a decent-sized pan, bring the sugar, cocoa and 1 1/2 cups of the water gently to the boil, stirring often – as much to get cocoa lumps out as anything – until it has been bubbling for a couple of minutes. Remove from the heat, stir in the chocolate till smoothly melted. Stir again, pour into a freezer-proof container. Freeze overnight. Stir halfway through if you like, but frankly I didn’t find that large ice crystals formed with this much. 

Note: if you use any of Whittaker’s dark chocolate range, or any dark chocolate that you’re confident has not seen dairy products during its production, then this recipe becomes vegan. If Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit isn’t available where you are, use a ‘black forest’ style chocolate or really any unfilled chocolate you like. 

How I got to this delicious point is a bit chequered; I tried making this sorbet first time round but used too much sugar and the mixture refused to freeze. Because sugar slows down the freezing process. Since this meant I couldn’t feed it to my friends on the date I’d anticipated, before the second feeding opportunity I hastily tried adding more water to it to dilute the sugar and allow it to freeze. In the process dropping a significant, tears-worthy amount of the mixture on the floor. By the time it finally froze sucessfully I had no idea what the actual method and ingredients quantity was. I bravely started again.

Melting chocolate into water might sound a bit weak, but the simple background really allows the beautiful milk chocolate to shine, with the brown sugar and cocoa giving it a helping hand flavour-wise. The biscuit and berry pieces disperse, leaving a hinty trail of crunch and raspberry extract in their wake. Every spoonful dissolves intriguingly in the mouth. It’s not as intensely smooth as the sorbet you might find in a tub at the supermarket, but on the upside it tastes brilliant and is spoonable straight from the freezer. And look how easy it is to make! As long as you’re careful not to drop it on the floor, it really shouldn’t give you any trouble at all.


The only thing that could embiggen this already life-embiggening substance: edible glitter.
Instead of being used to feed friends post-Beirut concert two weeks ago, the fixed-up mixture was taken along to a Gossip Girls and Gin evening, and it actually nearly made someone cry happy tears, it was that good. So even if my words leave you unmoved, let their happy tears be the recommendation you need: this sorbet is just lovely. 
We’re heading up home this weekend for my little brother’s 21st! It’s music themed (Tim and I are going to be the White Stripes, my Halloween Elphaba wig getting a reprise here…for both of us) and I’m also making his cake. Can’t wait. All the significance of it being a family member, none of the stress of it being your own party. Not that mine was all that stressful, it was amazing fun. Perhaps my favourite part: the next day mum bought out a kilo of ham which had been hidden in the fridge behind all the other food, forgotten at the party. A bonus kilo of ham! Best birthday ever.
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Title via: In the Heights, a musical set in NEW YORK, CONCRETE JUNGLE WHERE DREAMS ARE MAAAADE OF (did I mention we’re going there?) with beautiful music and story by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who rapped for Obama and won many Tonys and is basically one of the most amazing people on earth. 
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Music lately:
Anna Calvi, Desire – am sad to be missing her show at Laneway on Monday, there’s something about her rich voice and rumbly music that I really love.
Annie Golden, Hang Up The Phone – such a crime that they went and cast her in the disappointing Hair movie and then didn’t even let her sing! This song’s subject is awesomely redundant in this day of multiple ways to communicate, but even more awesome is how every single second of the video is choreographed. Not one natural movement!
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Next time: *shrugs* we’ll see when I get back on Sunday night what I have the energy to make and whether it’s worth sharing. 

super duper, come let’s mix where rockefellers walk with sticks

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I’ve already professed my affection for the sadly late Hudson and Halls (they made a chicken salad and named it after a New Zealand beauty queen!) but it’s the kind of thing that I can easily re-profess without feeling like I’ve exhausted my capacity for…professing stuff. Their cookbooks were so full of enjoyment and playfulness and humour. Which cookbooks often completely lack. They’d write “nothing is more boring to do than pickled onions, but despite this, these are worth doing”, beside a recipe for pickled onions. Cute, right? Always remembering, they were figures of entertainment at a time when being themselves – being gay – was illegal. As I’ve said, we’re not exactly in a progressive wonderland these days, but I wonder what their lives together could’ve been under a somewhat more supportive environment. While your time wouldn’t be misspent just reading through their cookbooks tittering at their formidably late-seventies recipes – Tomato Sorbet, Egg Mayonnaise with Olives, Tripe Fritters, Steak Tartare Balls with Caviar…Coffee…there are also heaps of practical, easy, fun recipes that you could try making. 
Recipes like their Super-duper Pancake. I promise you it’s totally deserving of that intensifying “-duper” suffix on the end there. That grammatical flourish was not in vain. 
It looks like there’s a benignly smiling bearded face in that pancake, right? Is it just me projecting my loving feelings towards the pancake, onto the pancake? I think yes. And yes. Also please excuse my unpleasingly granular photography, it must’ve been darker than I thought when I took the photos. It’ll make you appreciate it more when they improve, though!
This is really your average Yorkshire Pudding – you could always use it for that – and I love that H&H suggest it as a meal in itself, “with lemon wedges and sugar, or little bits of fried sausage and pickles”…very cool. They recommend using a paella dish but I don’t have one of those, or a frying pan that can go in the oven, but I suspected that my ancient pie plate would do the trick. It did. Which makes me think you could make this in nearly anything ovenproof and round, as long as it has walls – a caketin would probably work just fine.  
Such little effort and you end up with this puffy, crisp disc of daffodill-coloured, comforting goodness. Somehow it tastes like french toast, pastry, scrambled eggs and yes, pancake, all at once. That’s some high-level complexity from just eggs, flour, milk and butter. I served it alongside steak and an avocado-spinach salad but on its own it’d be brilliant. 
Super-duper Pancake

From Hudson and Halls Gourmet Cookbook.

25g butter
3 eggs
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup flour

Put the butter in your chosen pan and place it in a 225 C oven to heat up and sizzle away while you mix the batter. Beat the eggs till light and fluffy, then gradually beat in the milk. This is what’s going to make it puff up so try not to be lazy with the whisking effort at this stage. Whisk in the flour, making sure there’s no lumps, then quickly pour the batter into the hot, buttery tin. Place quickly back in the oven, bake for 20-25 minutes and serve immediately in the pan. Just slice it up or rip bits off, as you please. 

Two things happened when I made this which might have something to do with the pan I used. First: some of the butter pooled on top in the centre of the pancake. To the uninitiated it might look a little terrifying, I took it within my stride (the only alarming butter situation I can think of is if there is none) and reframed the pancake as ‘considerately self-buttering.’ Also some of the surface coating of the pan flaked off and stuck to the pancake. Slightly disturbing, but…I ate it anyway. Hope it doesn’t happen to you.

The recipe on the page opposite the Super-duper pancake is equally compelling – Scrambled Eggs with Vermouth. How good does that sound? I’d need to actually get some vermouth first, the last time I had it was in 2008 – you can see it in the header photo – before I could even pronounce it properly. They say “As this is rather nice for breakfast, serve it with some chilled champagne and follow with fresh fruit and cream laced with a liqueur.” Wherever you are, Hudson and Halls…cheers.

Talking of luxuriating in food, I recently had my misanthropic tendencies gently sieved out when something really lovely happened: I got invited to try out ‘The Deg’ degustation at Matterhorn, one of the fancy-pantsiest joints in the whole country. Yes, invited. My first degustation. Very exciting. Eventually Tim and I hope to feel like we’re not in some kind of Home Alone 2-esque heist whenever things like this happen. The food was ornately exquisite the whole way through, with matched cocktails – beautifully dry – and wines – nicer than we’ve ever drank – and not in an intimidating way either, but also not so unintimidating that you leave thinking you could’ve done it yourself, you know? The person in charge of us was charming and engaging and gave us plenty of exposition on each course and – this always puts me in a good mood, so keep it in mind – they talked to us about the food and wine as if they thought we knew exactly what they were talking about. Did I explain that right? We weren’t talked down to, is what I’m saying. So if you’re really comfortable with your bank balance I do recommend it because it was an absolutely glorious evening. Fun fact: on our first course we raised a toast. To the internet. For getting us to dinner at the Matterhorn. Truly, we clinked our glasses and said “thank you, Internet.” (It was my suggestion, Tim might not’ve been so enthusiastic or loud.) Also, even though it sometimes feels like one of those things you do to prove you’re having fun, we spent some time making up dialogue for various diners around us, which was all very humourous until this couple opposite us had such gloomy body language that it wasn’t as fun anymore. Where was I? Matterhorn. Delicious.

It’s been a simple weekend, but I’ve managed to spend much of it with beloved friends, which is worth more than a billion degustations laid end to end so they reach the sun, or something.
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Title via: Puttin’ On The Ritz, that intriguingly arranged song which hoofer Fred Astaire totally owns – his subtlety and assuredness in this tap dancing number is utterly brilliant. Fun fact: I once ambitiously choreographed, taught and danced in a dance to this for some choir performance thing in primary school, when I was about ten. It wasn’t, er, quite as good as Fred Astaire’s, and our canes were bits of dowelling, but if I remember right it was quite well received.
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Music lately:

Be warned: Will Swenson (erstwhile cast member of erstwhile Broadway show Hair) is one of THE most beautiful people on earth. And in this song Donna from Hair, he’s NOT WEARING PANTS. So. Also he has an amazing voice and we both dance very similarly, which is always something that endears me to people. (A further fun fact!)

R.I.P Etta James.
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Next time: I’ve been working on some sorbet using Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit chocolate. That is all.