Category: Vegetarian

food beyond compare, food beyond belief…

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Another year goes past, another flat Christmas dinner is planned for and cooked and eaten and then reminisced about. Our first was in 2006, before I even had this blog, and when we’d just moved into our then-flat. The second one was the day after the David Beckham game, 2008’s was when I’d finished uni and started full-time work and Emma our then-flatmate was stranded in Thailand. She got back to NZ just fine, by the way, but still. Last year was our first Christmas dinner in our current flat and was also the day that I was on the cover of the Sunday Star-Times Sunday magazine (which meant a lot of “oh this? Oh I had no idea that was on the table there lookatmeeveryone“) This year was a pretty low-key happening, with just seven of us, but it was an amazingly happy day. Partly because of the awesome friends and whanau who were there, and partly because…my first ever Baked Alaska was not a disaster.

I’ve made this Involtini from Nigella Bites for the last three Christmas Dinners and it’s one of the best Christmassy vegetarian recipes I’ve ever found. Basically it is spoonfuls of herbed, nutty cooked bulghur wheat rolled up into parcels with long thin slices of fried eggplant, which are then tucked in to a casserole dish, covered with tomato puree and baked. It’s incredibly good and can be done ages in advance, and while Nigella’s original recipe contains lots of feta, it’s easy enough to make this dairy-free or completely vegan as I did. Pistachios are even prettier than feta anyway…
This year I had the idea that I could cook the eggplant slices quickly in a toasted sandwich press brushed with a little oil. It totally worked! Didn’t look as sexy as Nigella’s glistening griddle-striped slices, but since it’s all getting covered in tomato sauce anyway, I didn’t really care, and it saved me from sweating over a hot oily pan.
The roast chicken was the only thing in the whole damn day that had dairy products in it, and that’s because Ange, our very good friend and ex-flatmate, is vegetarian as well as dairy-free. I poured cream all over the chickens before roasting them, inspired by a recipe of Ruth Pretty’s I read in the 2005 Nov/Dec issue of Cuisine magazine. It felt like an amazingly extreme thing to be doing, plus it made the birds tender, golden and crisp. Notice in the background the boiled potatoes and roasted capsicums…I don’t have the energy to photograph and talk about them individually: just know that they were there too and they tasted great. I didn’t plan for gravy but quickly boiled up the roasting pan juices (there was heaps, was a shame to waste it) with a little flour and, without any white wine to hand, threw in some sake instead. It smelled amazing and tasted just fine too.
(Sorry to keep putting you on the spot Ange) For the first time my favourite stuffing (Cornbread and Cranberry from Nigella’s Feast) was dairy-free, made with rice bran oil (what, you thought margarine? Pffft) and soymilk. Even though I really love the bit where you crumble the already buttery cornbread into a pan of melted butter and cranberries, it was still delicious, and in fact the soymilk made it almost spookily puffy and light-textured. Except I ended up baking it for too long so instead of a soft, moist stuffing it was more like a large savoury biscuit. Eh, still tasted good.
The cranberry sauce! I have to co-sign with Nidge on this one, it really is as redder-than-red as she insists. I didn’t even up the saturation in this photo.
Anyway all that was cool, but The Baked Alaska. Oh my gosh. I always like to use this day as an excuse to try out a challenging new pudding but this one had an element of stage fright to it. (In case you’re wondering, 2006 was Nigella’s Rhubarb and Mascarpone Trifle, 2007 was her Rugelach, 2008 I made her White Chocolate Almond Torte, and last year I did her Chocolate Pavlova.) The cake and ice cream I made in advance but the last bit – whipping up meringue, spreading it over them and blasting it in the oven right before serving had humungous potential for wrongness.
I used a recipe from the Floridita’s cookbook for the base and invented my own coconut-blackberry ripple ice cream for the next layer, partly because I had some blackberries in the freezer already. I know it seems unfair to recommend making your own ice cream when it’s only going to be covered in meringue. But the good thing about it is that without the preservatives and who knows what else that goes into a lot of commercial ice cream it’s way more solid and therefore a bit more forgiving when you shunt it under a blazing oven. I’d argue that it’s much more fun to make your own but that’s just me. I like making ice cream.
The ice cream was made by whisking together 4 egg yolks (the egg whites I put in a plastic container and refrigerated to use, plus two more, for the meringue) and about 150g sugar. I then heated a can of coconut milk without letting it boil, and quickly whisked it into the egg yolk mixture. All of that got returned to the pan and gently heated, while constantly whisking, till it thickened like custard. I stirred in a can of coconut cream and then began to freeze it in a shallow dish (the same one I baked the cake in actually). Then I defrosted about 150g blackberries (you could use any berry really) mashed them with a couple of tablespoons of sugar and the juice of a lemon, and drizzled it into the still-softish ice cream.
Tim took this photo and also put the ice cream and cake on top of each other on the tray while I whisked up the meringue topping. For which I’m seriously grateful, because it only occured to me halfway through making the meringue that I still had to do all that.
I made sure to follow my Nana’s advice to make sure the meringue completely covered the cake and ice cream – it provides a thick blanket of protection which allows the ice cream to survive under the heat, but if it’s not uniformly covered, the ice cream can seep out and then you’ve got a small crisis on your hands. I also followed some last-minute tweeted advice from Martin Bosley about warming up the sugar first before its beaten into the egg whites. It’s not every day that this kind of interaction comes my way so I thought I might as well try it – sat the sugar in a shallow metal bowl in the oven while it was heating up, enough to make the crystals warm but not enough to melt them into syrup. Cannot deny that my meringue whisked up in minutes with more volume and shine than a shampoo commercial.
But it worked, it worked! I felt a rush of happiness and pride just looking at it. Baked Alaska are generally supposed to resemble mountains, mine was admittedly more of a plateau, like a Baked Cape Town Table Top Mountain.
Look at the jelly in the background somehow managing to steal the show with its ruby-glow.
So on top of looking spectacular – like a pudding from a Dr Seuss book, or a Graeme Base book, or let’s face it, a Barbie film adaptation of a classic fairytale – it tasted wonderful too. It’s like having three puddings at once, all compressed into a handy cube. The radicalness of hot meringue against still-frozen ice cream. The sweetness of the topping and the creamy berry-sharp coconut ice cream against the dark cocoa-y cake. Stunning. I may have high-fived myself.
Finally: Cakeballs! So satisfying to say, make and eat. They came about because when I made the cake for the Baked Alaska and tried to turn it out of its tin onto a tray it…broke. Not so much that it couldn’t be more or less patched up, but it did leave me with a significant pile of cake crumbs. I could have eaten the lot in despair, but then I remembered Nigella’s recipe in her Christmas book for “Christmas Puddini Bonbons” aka…cakeballs. Mine were pretty simple – the cake crumbs mixed with about 125g melted chocolate and 2 tablespoons golden syrup before being rolled into balls and drizzled with more dark chocolate. What gave them that superfunk-Christmas look and transformed them from “hastily covered-up mistake” to “incredible bonbons that I will fight you for” was the judicious sprinkling of edible glitter. I’ve walked past the cupcake lady at the City Market nearly every Sunday asking how much her edible glitter is. Finally I decided that it wasn’t even expensive at all especially considering it lasts forever, and bought a small vial of it. Ohhhh how I love it. Had to hold myself back from glittering up the roast chickens.
Tim and I have been living off the leftovers ever since, which I love. We’re going up to my place for Christmas this time next week so we’re trying not to buy too much new food…just using up what’s there. I tell you, there’s nothing like standing at the kitchen bench, wordlessly eating leftover jelly off a plate to bring you closer together. (I grabbed two spoons from the draw, and then was like “Well I’ve got my spoons” like I was going to have one in each hand. Yeah, I gave him one of the spoons. But I think he believed me…I think I believed me for a second.)
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Title via: Les Miserables, Master of the House. Last night Tim and I saw the live recording of the 25th Anniversary Les Mis concert at Embassy Theatre. It was amazing – Norm Lewis (he of the faint-making voice), Lea Salonga, Ramin Karimloo, erm…Nick Jonas (he wasn’t awful per se, anyone would look useless next to Ramin). Matt Lucas of Little Britain was Thenardier, who knew the man could sing so well! I know Les Mis isn’t the height of pop culture awesomeness, especially in this post-Boyle, post-Glee time, but whatever, the music is still incredible, totally unashamed about the tears that appeared during Salonga’s I Dreamed A Dream and Lewis’ Stars.
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Music lately:
I’ve been listening to A Very Little Christmas heaps – it was put together by a whole bunch of local musicians, has some excellent seasonal tunes both original and familiar, and you can download it free, what!
Sideline, a new track from David Dallas with Che Fu. Woohoo! Is all I have to say. Because I’ve spent three days trying to write this blog and my sentence-forming ability is dissolving like sugar in a hot oven…
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Next time: Proper recipes…vegetables…

what good is cake you have but never eat?

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I don’t know why, or how to explain this in a straightforward way, but if there’s a recipe for a cake with an ingredient that wouldn’t normally be in a cake, I’ll really, really want to make it. Which is why I got my cake on immediately after finding the Beetroot Cake recipe, the Kumara Cake recipe, and…digging into the 2007 archives before I committed to a lyrical pun for every title…Chocolate Chickpea Cake (No lie. Chickpeas.) If it has a vegetable or similar trying to disguise itself as a cake – bring it on.

And then I found a recipe for a cake with mayonnaise in it. In a way it sounded familiar, like I’d heard of this combination before. But till now an actual recipe has never appeared to me, in fact it wasn’t even something I was actively searching for. Then I was reading the new issue of Spasifik magazine, and there was an advertisement for Best Foods Mayonnaise with a recipe for Amazing Cake Pasifika, sent in by the staff of the Glenn Innes Library. And it all made sense. I had to try it. Especially with an awesome title like that, as someone slightly given to hyperbole, I like a cake that announces itself as Amazing before you even try it.
When you think on it, mayonnaise in a cake isn’t so spooky after all. It’s more or less just eggs (or egg yolks), oil and vinegar – all things that help give a cake its cakeyness. Just don’t use aioli by mistake…and maybe check how high stuff like mustard appears on the list of ingredients while you’re at it…
Amazing Cake Pasifika
With gratitude to the Glen Innes Library Staff (if there’s any GI locals reading this, feel free to give your library staff a high five for me) and Spasifik Magazine.
Original recipe here.

1 cup Best Foods mayonnaise (if you don’t have that, then use some other decent mayo)
1 cup brown sugar, packed in
1 cup orange juice
1 cup coconut (desiccated is all good, but I saw “fancy shred” at the supermarket and was drawn to it…if I ever became a DJ – don’t worry, I won’t – DJ Fancy Shred could definitely be my pseudonym)
1 1/2 cups self raising flour
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. In a good sized bowl, whisk together the mayo, brown sugar, and orange juice. I will tell you now…it tastes kinda good. Mix in the rest of the ingredients and pour – it’ll be a fairly liquid batter – into a lined, greased 22-ish cm caketin. Bake for 45 minutes or so. The recipe suggests a lemon cream cheese icing (yum) but I just sprinkled it with more coconut (which looked pretty but fell off as soon as I cut into the cake…so. Stupid fancy shred.)
I guess it was something in the mayo, but this cake is incredibly moist, soft and light. Not actually so great for cutting into as you can see from the photo below – the slices would droop a bit and fall apart if handled too aggressively, but despite this it’s exactly the sort of thing you want to have if family or friends drop in on you – a big crowd-pleaser of a cake. You can even use it as a conversation starter if things start to get awkward (“hey, guess what the secret ingredient in this cake is?) Between the orange, coconut and the spices it might sound kind of aggressively flavoured but it wasn’t – just fragrantly delicious with an amazing golden colour.
And can you even taste the mayonnaise? Nahhhh (well a tiny bit. But only if you concentrate. The cake’s delicious, so if you can’t deal with mayonnaise in it then all the more for me, but if it helps, just remember the separate ingredients: egg, oil, vinegar.)
Tim’s down in Christchurch this weekend to see the Wellington Phoenix (starting to suspect that it’s Phoenix here *hold hand high* Laura here *hold hand less high*) and luckily they won – I was following the scoring on Twitter while writing this and it seemed like there was some kind of red card situation and…actually I’m not the best person to explain this. I’ve had an awesome weekend on my own – the weather was incredible on Saturday, I ate a whole eggplant for dinner tonight (Tim hates them), I did a yoga class, had a Christine Ebersole youtube marathon, and last night caught up with ex-flatmate but not ex-friend, Ange.
On Friday night Tim and I went to the Wellingtonista Awards at the mighty Mighty Mighty bar and…I didn’t win! I really wanted to but in the end it’s all good. It was fun just to be nominated, especially because I had no idea it was coming, and we had a seriously good night all the same. The crowded nature of the place – I was perched on a beer crate because there were no chairs left – meant we ended up getting practically on first name basis (if we’d thought to ask their names) with the sassy ladies of Wellington On A Plate who were next to us – at first it was all “we’ll cheer for you if you cheer for us” but suddenly we were rejoicing in each others raffle ticket victories and consoling (“it’s great just to be nominated”) each other’s respective non-wins.
We also ran into the lovely Anna Dean from Tiger Translate and Kate from Lovelorn Unicorn and tried to be cute in the super fun Amazing Travelling Photobooth. Good times all round. On top of that we won a Grow From Here voucher and a night tour of the Zealandia sanctuary (kiwis!!) from the raffle, so we didn’t even go home empty handed. A massive massive thanks to everyone who voted – I realise there’s been a bit of “vote for me! Please! Oh sorry I didn’t even win” highs and lows this year but I really, really appreciate it.
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Title via: Ate The Cake I Had, from the 2006 musical Grey Gardens. I’m sure there’s probably some mayonnaise lyric out there but I’m on the most humungous Grey Gardens kick these days (see: Christine Ebersole below) so it’s all good.
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Music lately:
ChakaKhanletmerockyouletmerockyouChakaKhan. On Saturday morning Tim and I grabbed I Feel For You on vinyl from Slow Boat (with “Happy Christmas, Annie” written in ballpoint across the front, did you just write on your album sleeves back then or something?) and I love the title track so much. And also Chaka Khan’s hair.
Christine Ebersole‘s entire back catalogue – a brief but dazzling intro here on 100sand1000s.
Mariah Carey’s Oh Santa from Merry Christmas II You. It cracked me up how the sticker on the CD claimed it was her new Christmas classic, but to be fair: it’s awesome. It maintains its upward bounce and has some minor key action and it’s extremely catchy and happy without trying to be All I Want For Christmas Is You. Love it.
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Next time: a couple of interesting new vegetable dishes I’ve tried out lately…

honey to the bee that’s you for me

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Note: As mentioned in my last blog post, I’ve been nominated for a Wellingtonista award, and while it’s seriously exciting and happiness-inducing to be amongst some distinctly high-profile nominees, it’s also quite nice to be voted for, so I can hype myself up into thinking I might win. As well as myself, you can also vote for other Wellington-related things you like, or nothing at all – the only compulsory fields are your name and email address. What I’m trying to say is that if you do vote (here here here) it’d be really great and I’d appreciate it heaps and heaps.

I recently got sent some honey – two jars – from the astute folk at Airborne. I was caught off-guard when they contacted me, am not sure where I stand on “accepting then blogging about free stuff” because it hasn’t really happened till now. Some people are hardline about this, refusing to accept anything, and I suspect I’d want to avoid it too – this is my blog and I’ll talk about what I want when I want – but damnit, I liked the idea of free honey and was 99% sure it would taste good and not compromise some kind of policy I haven’t even got the kind of clout to be developing in the first place. To find out more about Airborne, by the way, their “Why Choose Us” page is a reassuring read – these people treat their bees and their honey well.
So, two jars arrived – a large jar of thick, creamy Kamahi and a smaller jar of liquid, clear Tawari. And, thought I, here’s the chance to try all those recipes with lots of honey in them! But for some reason I either couldn’t find anything, or the stuff I could find, I was all “eh” about, so I decided to just make up my own stuff instead. (That said, Mum, if get the time could you please email me the recipe for those honey buns we used to make? From that handwritten recipe book I think?) (Edit: Thanks heaps Mum!)
At the vege market down the road there’s this amazingly good tofu at $4 for a large block, scored into four ‘fillets’ as I call them. However no matter how much I try, I can never quite finish it before it starts to go all orange and creepy. There’s only so much dense, filling firm tofu I can get through in a couple of days. On top of that we somehow ended up with three heads of brocolli, because I forgot that we had it and then bought some more. I hate wasting food but I’m also very forgetful, so this just sometimes happens. This following recipe however takes some neglected brocolli, some teacher’s pet asparagus, and some tofu that was somewhat past its best (not at the ‘unsafe’ stage or anything, just not looking so happy to see me when I opened the fridge) and turns it into a feast.
Honey Miso Roast Vegetables

I used a square of firm tofu, a head of broccoli, and a handful of asparagus. Use what you have – the veges need to be able to withstand some roasting. Cauliflower and kumara would be pretty perfect here too.

Whisk together:
  • 2 teaspoons white miso paste

  • 1 tablespoon clear honey (I used Airbourne’s Tawari)

  • 1 teaspoon (or more) sambal oelek or other red chilli paste

  • 1 teaspoon sesame oil

  • 1 teaspoon wholegrain mustard

Set your oven to 200 C. Chop your vegetables and tofu into fairly similar sized smallish pieces. lay the chopped vegetables on a baking-paper lined tray and spoon over the miso-honey mixture. You could also pour the mixture into a big bowl and toss the veges through it, but I couldn’t be bothered with the extra dishes. Roast for about 20 minutes or until everything looks burnished and cooked through. Eat over rice or noodles or just as is.
Don’t be alarmed by the dark, miso-toffee bits that appear (strangely delicious too, I couldn’t help peeling it off the baking paper and eating it) as whatever clings to the vegetables and tofu will taste incredible – sticky, savoury and full of complex, fragrant flavour. The tightly clenched branches of brocolli stretch out under the heat and become deliciously crisp, while their stems remain juicy and tender. The flavour of the asparagus intensifies under the caramelly, hot honey and the tofu becomes…totally passable.
Obviously with honey some kind of pudding or baking attempt is only right. It was relatively recently that I learned about frangipane, a buttery, almondy mix for filling pies and tarts and so on. I had an idea that honey could be a good exchange for the sugar. So I did it.
Honey, Almond and Dried Apricot Tart

1 square of bought puff pastry (I guess you should try and get good quality all-butter stuff. The ingredients on my Edmond’s ready-rolled sheets said “butter” but I have heard terrifying rumours of some awful sounding substance called “baker’s margarine”.)
1 egg
2 tablespoons creamy honey – I used Airborne’s Kamahi
Heaped 1/3 cup ground almonds
40g butter, melted
About 20 soft dried apricots

Set your oven to 220 C, and place the square of pastry onto a baking paper-lined tray. Lightly score a 1cm border around the edge with a sharp knife (don’t cut right through). Once in the oven, this will puff up and look really pretty.

In a small bowl, whisk together the egg and the honey. Stir in the ground almonds and melted butter. This will make enough for the tart plus a generous amount for you to taste (it’s delicious!) Spoon carefully over the centre of the pastry, spreading a thin layer across to meet the edge of the margin you’ve scored (as per the picture.) Carefully pull or slice the apricots in half or – if you’ve got lots of apricots, just leave them whole – and arrange on top of the pastry. Paint a little melted butter or egg yolk round the margin if you like. Bake for about 15-20 minutes – as long as you can leave it in without burning.
The first time I made it, I was doing the dishes and forgot to check on the oven. All the sugars in the honey and apricots couldn’t take being ignored, and the tart was a blackened mess (did this stop us eating it? Erm, no). It was late at night, the kitchen was covered in frangipane-smeared implements (myself included), and the ingredients aren’t the cheapest, so I may have yelled “I’m never doing the dishes again! It’s a sign! I hate everything!” Or something to that effect.
The second time I made this tart earlier in the evening and with new enthusiasm, I watched it like I was judging gymnastics at the Olympics – focussed, scrutineering, coldly assessing for any stepping outside the lines. I can’t have eaten nearly enough delicious frangipane mixture though because there was too much on the pastry – it billowed up and spilled over. I quickly turned the oven off to halt the frangipane pilgrimage to the edge of the oven tray, but this meant that the centre of the pastry sheet didn’t have time to get light and flaky. It wasn’t uncooked, just sadly damp, floppy and uncrisp.

While this was happening Tim was watching footage of the Pike River chief executive Peter Whittall, who can’t have slept in the past week, showing a map of where the 29 miners were thought to be, deep in the stomach of the earth. The projector cast shadows across Whittall’s face, and I looked at the tart and thought “oh well”. So we ate it, and it was fine – delicious in fact, with what I considered a bonus breadth of cakey frangipane to pull off the tray contemplatively. Yes, the underside needed longer in the heat, but the soft dried apricots were warmed to an heady, jammy perfumedness, while the fruity, creamy Kamahi honey somehow amplified the fresh, Christmassy flavour of the often dull ground almonds.

While it may need some tweaking here and there, you can feel free to go ahead and make this recipe. Although, while I ended up with deliciousness I’ve only made this recipe twice and it was somewhat fail-y both times…don’t blame me if you get frangipane all over your oven/walls/hair.
For any international readers, the Pike River mine explosion last Friday caused the disappearance, followed by confirmed death after a second explosion on Wednesday, of 29 miners on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. I was a bit naive and was saying “I hope they’re staying calm” to which people would reply, “if they’re alive”. The sickening sadness that their families, friends, colleagues and community went through, and continue to go through, makes the heart ache. If you read the newspaper (and it’s usually the narrow columns to the left and right of the page that relay the saddest stories in the briefest of paragraphs) you’ll see that tragedy happens everywhere and every day. The scale and public nature of this disaster means it has particular resonance across the country though. With that in mind – with anything in mind really – a burnt or awkward tart is something I can shrug at.
On Thursday morning, the Kamahi honey was spread thickly across hot toast, cut from a loaf of Rewena, the honey slowly filling the pools of butter that gathered in the bread’s crevices. The simplest solution of all, and it was so good. And, at a stretch, a kind of an early prototype version of the above tart. Actually I bet honey and apricot jam on toast (just spontaneously riffing here) would be amazing.
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Title via: YES, quoting Billie Piper’s Honey To The Bee here. It’s strange how, while not one note of the rest of her music appeals to me, I have an intense and unapologetic love for this one song. The swooning rapturousness with which the bizarre lyrics are delivered, the slow-dripping melody, and the late-nineties technological charm of its video make for quite the experience.
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Music lately:
Mariah Carey, Emotions from her album of the same name. Listening to her non-stop brings me no closer to the secret of what makes her so flawless.
The Damned, Eloise. Excellence!
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Next time: most definitely the Chicken Salad Lorraine, plus we’re off to Tiger Translate tonight so there’ll probably be a breathless account of that too.

sugar dumpling, you’re my baby, i love you in every way

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I drank a massive amount of coffee before photographing this dumpling, it’s verging on miraculous that the pictures turned out alright.
Sometimes I find recipes that are so full of things I love dealing with that I can hardly concentrate till the time I get to create them for myself. I recently discovered the delicious Sasasunakku blog written by Sasa, a New Zealander living in Austria, and the first recipe I found therein was Germknodel. My eyes became wider and wider as I read through it – Austrian snack, yeasted dough, butter, sneaky jam filling, steam-cooked – I like the idea of all those things! At the point where you’re instructed to pour even more butter over them and sprinkle over poppy seeds, my eyelashes were near-on touching the back of my head (no mean feat, when you’ve got my stumpy lashes and high forehead). Yeah, this might all sound a bit dramatic and ridiculous, but just imagine something you really like – shoes, for example – and then imagine you found a way to make a shoe that you didn’t even know existed – actually I don’t think this is an idea that’s open to analogies. Just…bear with me.
It would be a big bad lie to tell you these are straightforward as to throw together, but they’re definitely not too difficult either, if you’re up for a bit of kitchen adventurism. If not, you could always just have jam on toast. They’re practical in their own way – each jam-filled ball can be frozen before cooking, and then steamed back to life direct from the freezer. I had it in my head (“oh well”) that we’d just have to eat all ten dumplings after they’d been steamed, but this is obviously also good.
Germknodel

With thanks to Sasasunakku – and please see her blog post about these for much clearer instructions than mine with several handy pictures.
Gently mix the following in a bowl and leave for 10 minutes:
  • 80ml (5 tablespoons or 1/3 cup) lukewarm milk
  • 10g fresh yeast or 1 sachet dried yeast (I used dry, was what I had)
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 30g flour
While that’s happening, weigh out 500g flour and set aside.
In another bowl, place the following:
  • 40g sugar (3 and a half tablespoons)
  • Pinch salt
  • 2 eggs plus one egg yolk
  • Zest of half a lemon
  • 80 soft butter
  • 125g (1/2 cup) room temperature milk
Pour the yeast mixture into the flour, briefly mix, then add the other ingredients and mix into a dough. Note: My butter just wouldn’t soften, so I measured the 500g flour into a bowl, rubbed in the butter, then mixed in the rest of the ingredients listed with the butter, followed by the 10-minute yeast mixture. This might be inauthentic, but it still turned out fine, and solved the problem of my solid butter (plus less bowls to wash!)

Knead this sticky mixture till it is springy, smooth, and resembles the lump of dough in the picture above. You can knead it inside the bowl if it’s big enough. I always forget that I now live in a place with a bit of benchspace and so took great joy in kneading it on the countertop. Place this dough-ball in an oiled bowl (I just rinsed out the bowl I mixed everything in) cover with a clean teatowel and leave to rise for 30 minutes. Doesn’t have to be in an overly warm spot – if you heat it too much, the yeast will give up on you. I used to sit bread dough on our hard drive before we got our new computer, but anywhere not fridge-cold is fine, really. A hot-water cupboard is great, I’ve lived in three different Wellington flats and never had one though.

Meanwhile, cut out ten squares of baking paper. Once 30 minutes has passed, roll the dough into a large, fat log and use a dough-cutter or a knife to divide it into ten roughly equal pieces.
Find: A jar of jam – I used Jok’n’Al’s sugarfree Blackcurrant and Apple Spread (what with Tim’s diabetes and all) but Sasa recommends Powidl, an austere Austrian plum spread – she also suggests Nutella, hello!

Flatten each piece slightly in the palm of your hand and place about 1/2 teaspoonful of jam in the centre. Pinch the edges together to make a round, jam-filled pocket. This dough is pretty forgiving so if you’re too rough and the top splits, you can easily patch it up. It’s best to use only a bit of jam though to make sealing each bun easier. Repeat with the remaining portions of dough.

Place each jam-filled ball seal side down on a square of paper on a baking tray, cover with the teatowel and let them sit for fifteen minutes, where they will rise up once more and become puffy. At this point, you can freeze them until you feel like eating them – OR – set a large steamer over a pan of simmering water and steam as many dumplings as you can handle for about fifteen minutes.
Once steamed, pour over a little melted butter, and sprinkle with icing sugar and poppyseeds. I didn’t have any poppyseeds on me but found a bag of black sesame seeds which I figured would provide similar dark nutty crunch. I was right. A teaspoon of plain sugar stood in for icing sugar, which I also didn’t have.
Yes, these are a bit of a mission, but each stage is relatively easy – the dough comes together quickly under your hands and patches up easily during the jam-filling, it only has to rise for half an hour, and you don’t even need to cook them right away. In fact the hardest thing was typing out the long recipe. Even cooking them is easy – unlike baking which can be a bit touch-and-go, steaming is very forgiving. The dumplings could sit in there for 25 minutes and still be edible. Speaking of, I use a large bamboo steamer which we got for about $6 from Yan’s Supermarket which we use regularly for steaming either pork or coconut buns (also from Yan’s) – while it might take a bit of roaming round the neighbourhood, don’t be fooled into paying $30+ for them at fancy cookware shops. Because that’s what they’ll try to charge you!
These Germknodel (say it! “gare-m-kner-dil!” And try not to smile!) taste amazingly fantastically delicious – incredibly soft from their sauna-time in the steamer, but with that gratifying real-bread flavour from the yeast, the murmer of lemon zest and jammy surprise centre – okay, I put it there myself but still, surprise! – providing tart fruity respite from all the buttery goodness. According to Sasa these are typical post-skiing treats for the Austrians. Which adds to their charm. I share Sasa’s inability to ski (inability barely describes me, I’ve had one terrifying go at skiing, trembling my way across the gentlest of slopes, falling over constantly onto the unfairly rock-hard snow while three-year old ski-bairns scooted and Telemarked merrily around me, occasionally backflipping, and Gunter the ski instructer gazed unhappily into the majestic Canterbury ranges. I now live with someone who skis excellently for fun, I am in great awe of anyone who can actually derive enjoyment from it. You deserve a jam-filled dumpling for that.)
Guess what? While I can’t ski (and just as well, ski-pants are really expensive) I can stare into a computer screen and type about myself, and the fine people at The Wellingtonista agree – I’ve been nominated in their The Annual Wellingtonista Awards for “Best Contribution To The Internet From Wellington” which is damned exciting really and took me completely by surprise. Yay for Wellingtonista, yay for the rest of the nominees who all seem to actually “contribute to Wellington”, and frankly yay for ME.
You can feel free to vote for me (or anyone! Truly!) HERE. It’s very, very easy, and even if you’re not from New Zealand you can vote because the only required bits are your name and email address. I won’t hassle you too much though.
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Title via: The lovely Sam Cooke and his song Sugar Dumpling, a mighty happy tune which I can’t help but interpret literally as I gaze at the Germknodel.
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Music lately:
Dudley Benson and the Dawn Chorus with the compelling, call-and-answer song Ruru which you can hear, along with other music creations of his, at his website. Tim and I saw him perform last night at Pipitea Marae before a very supportive audience. You’re probably best to read his bio and hunt round his site rather than have me recreate it here. It was an evening of beautiful music – just Benson, four guys as chorus, and Hopey One, beatboxer extraordinaire, filling the whare with the shaping and manipulation of their voices. Despite his warm, happy-go-lucky interaction with the audience between songs, there was a steely discipline to the performance – with incredible skill, accuracy and genuineness of spirit.
And The Angels Sing from Elaine Stritch’s unfussily named album Stritch. She is just so great.
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Next time: Either some honey-related baking or a salad named after a former beauty queen. Truly.

and if you don’t want to be down with me, you don’t want to pick from my apple tree

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I made these Apple and Cinnamon muffins ages ago – they were the second thing I tried from Nigella Lawson’s book Kitchen after the Spaghetti with Marmite (which got slated in a column in the local paper – any Dominion Post readers out there, don’t disregard its deliciousness! I guess that was one opinion, and mine is merely another, but still.) I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to blog about them, but…here they are.
I do agree with Nigella’s emphatic and continued suspicion of the muffins you run into in many cafes and supermarkets. What they lack in tenderness and flavour, they make up for in height and overpricedness. It could be easy to dislike the concept of muffins altogether if your main experience of them is handing over $4.50 for a mountain of foam mattress sprinkled in chocolate chips, somehow dry and oily simulataneously. Maybe you like this, or your experience of shop muffins is better than mine. All good.
However home-made muffins, while less uniform in shape, are very easy to make and as long as you don’t over-mix them, pretty well guaranteed to be extremely delicious. I realise apple and cinnamon muffins might sound like the obvious-est of the obvious but this recipe of Nigella’s is incredibly good – dense and sweet with honey and yoghurt and textured with chunks of apple and almonds. And it probably costs less to make a whole dozen than it would to buy just one from the supermarket.
Nigella uses spelt flour in this recipe instead of regular flour, which makes them more acceptable for some people who eat wheat-free, but not necessarily those who are gluten-free – it’s a little complicated but go with what you know is best for you, I guess. I bought a bag of spelt flour a year ago and never ended up using it so it was nice to have the opportunity to try it out. These muffins are so full of flavour that I couldn’t say they were distinctively spelt-ish, they just came out looking and tasting like muffins should. You could definitely just use regular plain flour rather than rushing out to find spelt.
Apple and Cinnamon Muffins

From Nigella Lawson’s Kitchen

2 apples
250g spelt flour (or just plain flour)
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
125g brown sugar
125ml honey (1/2 a cup)
60ml (1/4 cup) natural yoghurt
125 ml oil (1/2 a cup – and I use Rice Bran oil)
2 eggs
75g natural almonds, roughly chopped.

Set your oven to 200 C and line your muffin tin with papers.

Chop the apples into small dice, leaving out the core of course, and put to one side. Whisk together the brown sugar, honey, yoghurt, oil and eggs in a bowl.

Tip in the apples, flour, baking powder, half the almonds, and one teaspoon of the cinnamon into this and gently fold it together with a spatula. Try not to overmix – I tend to lift and shift the batter rather than do a full on stirring motion, if that makes any sense at all.

Spoon evenly amongst the muffin tin, and sprinkle with the remaining cinnamon and almonds, plus a little more brown sugar if you like. Bake for 20 minutes. Let them stand 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool.
While the comfort-food element of cinnamon and apple obviously works, the almonds, growing smokily nutty under the oven’s heat, and honey, complementing the diced apple’s clean but layered sweetness, keep these muffins from being predictable. They take minutes to throw together but stay good for ages in a sealed container, if anything becoming even more delicious with time (although that could be a product of imagination and anticipation, waking up thinking “OHBOY a delicious muffin for a mid-morning snack.”)
In fact, one of the excellent things about muffins is that they’re really just cake, but you can eat them any time of day including breakfast, without getting strange looks – in the sort of way that a pavlova or ice cream might. Not that avoiding strange looks should be your main motivation in life, not at all! It’s just a nice thought…breakfast cake.
Tim and I went out to Petone yesterday and at the record shop partway down Jackson Street, I found the original Broadway cast recording of Company on vinyl. I didn’t even think it existed in New Zealand – considering the juggernaut that is Amazon.com only has about 6 copies, one for US$90…and now for relative pennies I’ve got Elaine Stritch barking “she’s tall enough to be your mother” as people originally heard her the first time round in 1970. I had to keep taking it out of the bag and looking at it on the bus back into the city in case I’d just done a really good job of imagining it. But it exists. It’s damn exciting.

Speaking of, I am seriously anticipational about Tiger Translate on the 26th of November, if you’re in Wellington around this time you should most definitely give it your time of day. Even though I feel like I don’t quite have a grip on what it is, there’s a whole lot of creativity that’ll go down and there will be some amazing locals performing. We’ve been lucky to witness many of them in action already over the last year or so, with their powers combined who knows what kind of fresh mayhem will occur. TrinityRoots’ stunner drummer Riki Gooch, Julien Dyne and Parks who we saw just last week onstage with Ladi6, Homebrew, whose lyric-memorising male fans still astound months after we saw them with David Dallas at Watusi, Adi Dick who despite being in a squillion different music projects we’ve never actually seen live, the mighty intriguing Orchestra of Spheres, the amazing Electric Wire Hustle who we saw back in February and have since been galloping round the globe, Tommy Ill, Alphabethead whose happy style we love, Scratch 22, Fried Chicken Sound System, The Jewel School plus particularly special guest DJ Zooloo from Mongolia. Tim and I are going to be there and if you get a move on the first 500 people to register online get free tickets – not sure if this has filled up but either way check out their website for more info.
While I’m talking to Wellington, can anyone tell me where to get decent garlic? It seems like even the expensive stuff from the supermarket, with the pretty purple-tinged papery casing is all chomped and denty, gets green shoots quickly, and burns the tongue like raw onion. I guess people selling garlic have no way of knowing what’s underneath the stuff you peel off, but I’m also guessing you can’t return a bulb once you’ve bought it. Sure, there’s the mulched up stuff in jars, but for those times you want whole cloves…?
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Title via: Erykah Badu and her song Appletree from the beautiful album Baduizm. Such an amazing woman – I wish she’d tour on down to New Zealand.
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Music lately:
I Learned The Hard Way, by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, from the album of the same title. Now there’s an amazing woman who is coming to New Zealand, and luckily for us we were able to buy tickets. Can’t wait.
Obviously, have got Company doing many revolutions right now. Can’t get enough no.
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Next time: I am on a prawn high right now, watch out.

if you want my gravy, pepper my ragu

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I guess the food I grew up on wasn’t fancy. Things like 2-minute noodles, boiled potatoes, microwaved frozen mixed veges were standard. I’ve probably said it before, but for a long time we mostly ate just microwaved food (sure, Mum had this amazing golden syrup sponge pudding recipe, but there’s definitely a reason why ‘Microwave Gourmet’ cookbooks are always over-represented at op shops and book fairs). Anyway, we ate just fine, and I should count myself lucky to have got regular meals anyway. But I wonder if it’s a product of my non-fancy upbringing, plus maybe some general deep-seated New Zealand backwards-in-coming-forwards-ness that I sometimes feel a bit bashful with fancy sounding recipes. Just realised I’ve said fancy about twelve times now. Anyway, the reason I got to thinking about this was that I have a recipe for Ragu Di Piselli – Italian for Pea Ragu – and for some reason my mind automatically went “well I’ll just call that peas and tomatoes”. Why? False modesty? At what? It’s not like I have to worry about Tim not eating his dinner because it doesn’t sound familiar (ha!). It’s not like you readers can’t handle some culinary Italian language.

Really, you can call this what you like, although it’s nice to acknowledge the lineage of something, food or not. I found this recipe in a Cuisine magazine (September 2005) and if nothing else, the Italian name cleverly masks the fact that this sauce is just peas and tomatoes. Maybe the sort of person who would sneer at an unrecognisable name for their dinner would also sneer when they found out that their dinner largely consists of two vegetables. Maybe these people can deal with it and learn something – it’s seriously delicious. From my own experience, Italian food can be aggressively simple. It’s good to just go with it, rather than be nervous that what you’re serving isn’t ‘enough’. (as I learned with the Peaches In Muscat back in February.)
Ragu Di Piselli/Pea Ragu/Peas and Tomatoes

From the September 2005 issue of Cuisine magazine

50g butter
1 T olive oil
1 onion, finely diced
100mls white wine
200g frozen peas (or fresh, but frozen is mostly how they arrive)
400g can cherry tomatoes or whole peeled tomatoes
One teaspoon tomato paste
Salt, pepper, parsely and Parmesan to serve

Melt half the butter with the olive oil in a pan. Saute the chopped onion till translucent, pour in the wine and allow it to fizz up and evaporate slightly. Now, add the peas and tomatoes. If you’ve got cherry tomatos, handle them carefully so they stay whole, but if you’ve got bigger tomatoes mash them up. Add the tomato paste, simmer on a low heat until the sauce thickens slightly. Stir in the remaining butter and serve.
Notes:
  • Canned cherry tomatoes are getting easier to find. But the usual whole or chopped ones are fine.
  • One teaspoon of tomato paste is an annoying measurement. If you don’t have any, just leave it out.
  • I’ve made this before with sake when I didn’t have any white wine. It was awesome.
  • I added some frozen soybeans along with the frozen peas here.
  • If you just use olive oil and leave out the Parmesan (which I hardly ever have anyway) you’ve got yourself a vegan dinner. If you want to take things in the other direction, chorizo or bacon could be added.
  • The recipe apparently serves six, but…nahh. This amount fed two of us.
  • I served it on a huge pillowy pile of polenta, which I’m a bit obsessed with, but pasta is obviously good and what the original recipe recommends.
Simple, sure, but also amazingly delicious. The tomato becomes sweet and soft and intensified, the peas give texture and bite, while the wine imparts a mysteriously good flavour once it makes contact with the hot pan. Something about the vibrant colours and juicy tomatoes means that it doesn’t feel like you’re just eating two vegetables stirred together (a bit like the soup from last time). Whatever you want to call it, this dinner can be made entirely from stuff at the back of your cupboard and freezer, which is really awesome for when you want to make dinner but feel like there’s nothing around. Sometimes I do run out of frozen peas and canned tomatoes…that’s not fun.
The conference last week up in Auckland went really well – my presentation bit was hitch-less, I learned heaps and I had an amazing lychee shake at a Vietnamese restaurant in Panmure that I really want to recreate. I got back on Friday night absolutely exhausted though, so even though I had grand plans to head out again, I ended up quickly faceplanting, unfortunately missing the fireworks. Luckily people round Wellington have interpreted this as “Guy Fawkes Season” rather than sticking to the actual night itself, and so there have been plenty of lit-up skies. I love fireworks (and still have a soft spot for sparklers) so it was a shame to miss the big show on the waterfront. The weather on Friday night was particularly brutal though, so I was happy as to just flag it and go to bed. Either way, it felt so, so good to be back in Wellington.
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Title via: The cast recording of Chicago (Chita Rivera, Gwen Verdon, Jerry Orbach, hello!). The 2002 film soundtrack I can hear in its entirety just by closing my eyes thanks to an aunty who played it a lot (something I can totally understand.) From it comes the beautiful Queen Latifah’s portrayal of Matron Mama Morton, whose big number When You’re Good To Mama is where this title comes from.
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Music lately:
I know I mentioned her last week, but whatever. On Saturday night we saw Ladi6, back in New Zealand after some significant creative time in Berlin, at San Francisco Bath House. She was amazing and I wrote some thoughts here at 100s and 1000s. Her punchy ode Like Water from new album The Liberation Of… has been rippling persistently through my mind ever since then.
Gomez, Bring it On, from their album Liquid Skin. I’m not sure how consistent these guys are but there’s a lot of amazing stuff on this album – maybe I’m a bit biased as I listened to it a lot back when I was in England – I love the mix of layered, bluesy sounds and voices.
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Next time: I’ll probably start panicking about how close to Christmas it is. I’ve found some photos from the first recipe I made from Nigella Kitchen (apple cinnamon muffins) so I should really blog about them sooner rather than later…

one night in bangkok makes a hard man crumble

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Crumble has got to be some of the the best kind of food in existence, among the comforting-est of all the comfort food. In Nigella Express, there is this very cool idea where you make up some crumble topping in advance and freeze it so if you ever want pudding, but the thought of actually having to cook makes you weepy, you’re still good to go. I mean, there’s a bit of initial effort that goes into it. But that’s the good thing about Nigella – there’s options. Whether you’re in the mood for a seven layer trifle where you make your own sponge and custard by hand, or something more or less instant but not so instant that you’re sitting on the couch ejecting a can of whipped cream into your mouth, she’s got you covered.

That said, I can’t help being suspicious of crumble recipes, and will often think “that’s not nearly enough butter!” as I read the list of ingredients. I definitely trust Nigella Lawson, the woman who taught me that 250g butter in one cake is just fine, but even so when I saw that her recipe was for four servings, it took effort to stick to the 50g she stipulated. Worrying, maybe, but true. No one wants wafer-thin crumble coverage.
Turns out 50g was all good, and there was no need to get so hand-wringingly righteous over it. That said, when you divide 50 between 4 that’s only like…less than 1 tablespoon of butter per person. That’s practically nothing. But go with it, you somehow end up with just the amount of crumble you need. Nigella calls this “Jumbleberry Crumble”, which is just an olde English term for “whatever berries you have”. I had the end of a packet of frozen blackberries, plus some cranberries leftover from last Christmas. While I held back from exaggerating the topping quantities, I did add some dark chocolate chunks to the fruit. It felt right, but then adding chocolate to things usually does…right?
Jumbleberry Crumble

From Nigella Lawson’s Nigella Express

For the Crumble Topping:
50g butter
100g flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoons brown sugar

Rub the butter into the flour and baking powder, till it resembles coarse crumbs (with some inevitable floury dustiness). Stir in the sugar, and then tip into a freezer bag till needed.

Assembly:
Set your oven to 220 C. Get some ovenproof ramekins, fill with frozen berries (and a few dark chocolate chunks if you like), sprinkle over 1 teaspoon cornflour, two teaspoons sugar, and a couple of tablespoons (roughly 50-75g) frozen crumble topping. Bake for 15-20mins depending on the size of the ramekin – 125g ones for the lesser time, but 250-300ml ones will take a little longer.
I made these fairly late at night with both low lighting and low camera battery, not giving me a lot of room to move as far as getting quality photos. Next time?
These were delicious – the chocolate melting into the sharp juices released by the frozen berries as they stewed in the oven, creating a thick, rich sauce for the fruit. The crumble topping was highly satisfying despite my earlier nervousness – biscuity, sweet and gratifyingly crisp in places. Plus, because there’s only the two of us, I’ve got some crumble mix in a sandwich bag in the freezer, just waiting to be sprinkled over fruit on another cold evening. For all that I talked about Spring and skipping along in the mild sunshine with armfuls of asparagus bushels in my last post, the weather in Wellington is so variable (and it varies heavily towards the murkier, chillier end of the scale more often than not. This is a pain, but there is an upside when it means you’re more likely to be in the mood to eat crumble.)
Title via: One Night In Bangkok from the musical Chess. Confession: I actually thought that my title was the lyrics but it turns out it’s actually “makes a hard man humble”. Whatever. I love this song – the strange, theatre-plus-rapping that became a chart hit despite having perhaps seriously Top 40-unfriendly lyrics and concept. Adam Pascal’s take is pretty fabulous, from the 2008 concert with Idina Menzel and The Wire’s Clarke Peters, but is cruelly unavailable on Youtube. You’ll just have to buy the DVD…Nevertheless Murray Head’s original has its dubious charms also. I did a jazz dance to this many, many years ago, I can still remember bits of it to this day.
 
Music lately:
The Little Things by TrinityRoots. We saw them on Sunday night at the Opera House on their ‘reunion’ tour. They seemed so comfortable with each other – spinning a tune out for ten minutes and then with a collective nod seamlessly bringing it back down to earth. All three of them are wonderful to watch – Warren Maxwell looking calm and spiritual, Riki Gooch’s boyish face belying his monster talent on the drums and Rio Hemopo providing welcome bass in both guitar and voice. They were supported by Isaac Aesili, who is hugely talented in his own right, and Ria Hall, who I’d met before when she emceed the Smokefree Pacifica Beats, and has an absolutely stunning voice. It was a beautiful night.
What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye, from the album of the same name. Tim got some Marvin Gaye on vinyl and this song is just up there with the very best of all music, like crumble is among the best of all foods.
Next time: As I said last time, I have some options, so it all depends on what I feel like…by the way, I’ve tinkered round and added the option of a Facebook ‘like’ button just below, in case you’re all “I don’t like change!” I don’t even really like Facebook so am a bit unsure about actively letting it invade my blog but wanted to give this ‘like’ thing a whirl. Considering how rubbish the photos are this week it possibly isn’t the best place to start and will probably put any new readers off, but anyway, if you don’t know, now you know…

and all shall fade, the flowers of spring

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Whenever Spring rolls round again (I know it’s boring to insist how fast the year seems to be moving but: the year seems to be moving fast) there’s this flurry of asparagus-loving that goes on in the food-related media. Which is fair enough since it’s really delicious and takes its sweet seasonal time getting here and, importantly, its arrival means we’re getting closer to summer. Somehow I haven’t really embraced asparagus much this year – it’s nearly November and this is the first time I’ve cooked it. I’ve been travelling round a bit lately and had a few late nights that slow down my ability to get to the vege market, and while “social life > asparagus” looks good on paper…it’s good to finally have some in the fridge.

I couldn’t fight the inexplicable need to take lots of is-it-isn’t-it-focussed photos of it first.
This would have been a lot more dramatic if I’d had more asparagus, but whatever.
The reason I don’t have more asparagus up my sleeve to take fancy photos of is because I used half my stemmy green bounty earlier this week in something that Nigella calls “Sweet Potato Supper” – a roasting dish of chopped kumara, stems of asparagus, and chopped bacon, sprinkled with thyme and drizzled with oil then baked for an hour. So good.
With the remainder, once I’d finished snapping it from high and low angles, I made a recipe from the Floriditas cookbook. Floriditas is a restaurant down the road and the sort of place that I find myself gazing wistfully at as I pass. Similar to how, if we were ever at the Warehouse in town, I used to ask salespeople to find out how many Spice Girl polaroids there were left in stock, and how much one cost. When they came back and told me I would then sigh and say “okay, thanks” and just stand there, looking wistful. I don’t know why, I guess I was hoping some eccentric millionare would be wandering through the Pukekohe Warehouse and take pity on me or something. Anyway, Floriditas is so, so nice. I’ve only ever been in there for coffee and cake as it’s a bit out of our reach but their elegant cookbook allows it to come closer to home.
It’s divided into months, beginning with December, and recipes reflect the seasonal produce and mood of each time of year. It assumes you know a lot – recipes tend to be sparsely worded – and it could have done with a bit of subediting, but there are a lot of beautiful things to be made, gorgeous pictures and a lovely introduction from Julie Clark and Marc Weir, both of whom can often be seen through the windows serving diners. I only really wish that it had more baking recipes in it – but then as their cakes are so amazing maybe they don’t want to play all their cards at once.
My main reason for attempting their Asparagus and Tarragon Spaghetti with Garlic Crumbs was that I’d spontaneously bought a giant tarragon plant from those stands selling herbs at the supermarket because it felt like a good idea at the time. This recipe not only helped out with that but also is a decent showcase for the asparagus spears sitting in the fridge and the idea of ‘garlic crumbs’ was pretty alluring. It’s a recipe for two people but you fry the breadcrumbs in 100g butter. It’s like they were thinking of me, specifically, when they were writing this.
Asparagus & Tarragon Spaghetti with Garlic Crumbs

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

For the crumbs:
1/2 a loaf fresh ciabatta
8 cloves garlic, finely chopped
100g butter
2 tsps olive oil

Tear the ciabatta into chunks (I left the crust on, despite being told to remove it) and use a food processor to chop the bread into fine-ish crumbs. I should have done this, but couldn’t be bothered getting out the food processor for one job, so instead I hacked and sliced the crumbs into submission with a serrated knife. In a large pan, melt the butter and oil together, then add the crumbs and garlic, stirring regularly till they are golden and crunchy and starting to colour slightly. It might look a bit terrifying to some at this point but the bread absorbs all that butter very quickly. Anything you steal from the pan at any stage will taste amazing.

For the spaghetti:

100g spaghetti (I upped this to 200g for the two of us – 100 seemed too little)
1 bunch asparagus
olive oil
1/2 cup fresh tarragon leaves
4 T freshly grated parmesan
Optional: I added a handful of frozen peas to the pasta during the last five minutes of the cooking time. With all that butter I wanted a bit of extra vegetable.

Cook the spaghetti as per packet instructions in a pot of boiling salted water. Meanwhile, slice the ends off the asparagus then slice the stems diagonally. Heat a little olive oil in a pan and saute the asparagus till it turns bright green and is cooked through and a little darkly crisp in places. Once the pasta is cooked, drain it and toss into the pan with the asparagus, mixing gently to disperse (never very easy, to be fair). Add the tarragon leaves, parmesan and crumbs, mixing gently again, and then divide between two plates.
I knew if I made the crumbs first I’d end up eating them all while the pasta was cooking. So, to save the crumbs and also to save on washing up, I sauteed the asparagus first, set it aside, then made the crumbs in that same pan in the last five minutes of the pasta cooking. I thought this was a good thing but it turned out to highlight how my good intentions don’t always turn out right. Nothing dramatic, I just forgot that I’d set the asparagus – one of the central, yay-it’s-Spring-already ingredients – to the side. It wasn’t till I’d finished taking photos and we’d sat down to eat that I remembered.
So there’s the asparagus, hastily
It was incredibly good – the grassy, slightly scorched sauteed asparagus against the deeply buttery crumbs and intense garlic flavour. It possibly doesn’t sound like much of a meal – bits of vegetable and bread on spaghetti – but it’s not only filling, it also tastes somehow luxurious but comforting, with the smell of fried bread as you stir the crumbs…it’s a fantastic way to celebrate one of the nicest Spring vegetables, but even if you don’t have asparagus you could make this with just peas, or maybe courgettes, to give green juiciness against all that butter and crunch.
Last night Tim and I went to see Sage Francis at San Fransisco Bath House. I’m very glad we went along – it’s supposed to be the last tour he’s ever doing. We’ve seen opening act Alphabethead once or twice before and he was as alarmingly dynamic as ever, deftly throwing in So So Modern’s Berlin (a couple of the band members were in the audience) and doing things that I can’t even describe on the turntables but they looked very complicated. And he seemed really happy to be doing it, which is awesome. Sage Francis appeared draped in a flag bearing the logo of his record label and gave us his fired-up, powerful and occasionally humorous material, (at one point ripping off a toupee) delivered with amazing flow – the way he twisted words and rhymes around rhythms was awe inspiring. Tim and I hung back, curious and interested observers, but it was cool to see many in the crowd obligingly throwing his own lyrics back to him whenever he lifted the needle on the track. He finished with the stunning, spine-tingly The Best of Times, which, even if you aren’t sold on my description of the evening, I urge you to check out. Then he jumped into the crowd and started shaking hands and taking photos. We left the true fans to it, feeling like we’d seen something seriously special.
Speaking of turntables, Tim got home from work yesterday holding one. We’ve been together for five years now (‘anniversary’ sounds a bit uncool but there it is) and he decided to get it as a present for us, even though we don’t really ‘do’ presents. I guess it was more of an excuse than anything, but to be fair he did secretly bus to Petone to one particular second-hand music shop to find me some old Broadway records. It’s exciting times – there’s all these ancient recordings and they’re so cheap. I’ve been listening to the original Broadway cast recording of Hair more or less non-stop. Not that we’re going to replicate our music collection on vinyl, it’s more of a case-by-case thing (or for me, a caseload-by-caseload of Broadway thing). Although, now that I’ve fleeced Real Groovy and Slowboat, it might be time to look further afield…especially if I want Sondheim…
Finally in music-related stuff, my dad’s band Apostrophe has their first music video for their song The Skeptic – I’m proud as, especially as I know all the work that went into it. Bear in mind it was all made during whatever spare time was available, with zero funding and relatively unfancy technology. Feel free to check it out by clicking —> HERE.
Title via: Spring Awakening‘s finale, Song of Purple Summer. A beautiful song with some gorgeous harmonies. Going more ‘thematic’ here since there just isn’t a wealth of songs about asparagus.
Music lately:
Amongst the Streisand and the Liza and the (unfortunately skippy) Godspell and so on, we picked up this amazing collection of 38 Bessie Smith songs. All gold, but If You Don’t, I Know Who Will is one of my favourites.
Typical Girls by The Slits. Ari Up, aspirational woman who formed The Slits when she was only 14, died on the 20th aged 48.
 
Next time: I am in a rare situation where I’ve ended up with a ton of things to blog about so it could be anything depending on what I feel like writing about when I next get some spare time – but my money’s on that crumble.

she likes her hair to be real orange

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I made Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Orange Loaf Cake yesterday and I gotta say, I absolutely love it, for all that I was never massively sold on Jaffas as a kid. Not that we ate lollies all the time, or that I would have turned Jaffas down given the chance. But when the rare money I came across coincided with a trip into town I would tend towards a dollar mixture, or those sherbety fizzy lollies, or, eventually, showing my Spice Girls influnce, chupa chups. What I bought most of all though was Grape Hubba Bubba bubble gum, fifty cents a packet if I remember right. I loved that stuff. The combination of fleeting, fake-grape flavour (a million years removed from the wasp-guarded vine that grew – then withered away – on our wire fence) plus the bonus time-passing activity of blowing bubbles was pretty heady. Especially since casually snapping gum and consuming grape-flavoured things seemed very American, which was pleasing since I was so obsessed with Baby Sitters Club books. Erm, anyway Jaffas were never that high on my list. Although I’ve since realised that they’re probably not the best example of the two flavours anyway, I doubt that any actual oranges or decent chocolate suffered in their making…

Reading through Nigella Lawson’s new book Kitchen, which continues to make me want to cook everything from its pages, her Chocolate Orange Loaf called out to me (not literally…though give it time). Plain, dark-brown, oblong, it’s nothing fancy to look at, and in fact I was almost about to make her Blondies which has cool stuff like chocolate chunks and condensed milk in it. But then fate, or maybe something way less dramatic, like me just making a different decision, intervened. And I’m not even that fussed because I’ll probably make the blondies too before the weekend is out. Either way I’m glad I went the way of the chocolate-orange combination, forgoing my Jaffa-indifference, because the result was pretty stunning.

 

Chocolate Orange Loaf Cake

From Nigella Lawson’s Kitchen

  • 150g soft butter
  • 2 x 15ml tablespoons golden syrup
  • 175g dark brown or muscovado sugar
  • 150g flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 25g best-quality cocoa (I tend to buy Equagold, nothing else seems to taste as good
  • 2 eggs
  • zest of 2 oranges and the juice of one

Set your oven to 170 C/340 F and butter and line a loaf tin (or hunt down a silicon one). Beat the butter, golden syrup and sugar together. This is the hardest part, really – it tastes so good. Nigella asks you to alternate the dry ingredients with the eggs but I didn’t have the energy and I’d somehow already made a ridiculous mess so I just beat in the eggs – which makes the mixture much lighter and aerated – then folded in the dry ingredients with a metal spoon (more control than a fling-y spatula), followed by the orange zest and juice. Don’t fear if it looks a little curdled at any stage. Pour into the tin and bake for around 45 minutes.

I was worried that I’d overcooked mine – it looked a little ‘solid’ round the edges. I considered doing my usual cake-rescue method of making up a syrup to pour over, but after curiously slicing off a sliver, it turned out the loaf was just fine. Better than just fine, even.

The orange flavour isn’t overpowering, more fragrantly suggested than in-your-face, but what’s there is completely delicious. The citrus and the caramelly golden syrup seem to pick up something good in the dark, dark cocoa, giving the cake an almost gingerbread intensity of flavour even though it’s very light-textured. It’s seriously good with a cup of tea and I reckon it would be amazing spread with cream cheese but unfortunately I didn’t have any in the fridge to test this theory.

I’m not sure how long this would last for but it seems to be one of those Bernadette Peters-style cakes which just keeps getting better and better as the days go by.

Title via: The Flaming Lips’ sweet tune She Don’t Use Jelly from Transmissions From The Satellite Heart. Which cavalierly rhymes “store” with “orange”. Whatcha gonna do?

Music lately:

I’ve been on a bit of a Sondheim kick, although it’s more like a Rockettes kickline than a solitary burst of commitment…I’ve been listening to so many interpretations of his music on youtube lately that linking to just one is a bit misleading but feel free to enjoy the late Eartha Kitt’s I’m Still Here from Follies.

Yesterday we bought Aloe Blacc’s new album Good Things, and the title doesn’t lie. It is a bit gloomy towards women but if that’s the experiences he had prior to writing these songs, well I guess fair enough, and it’s nicely balanced by the lump-in-throat inducing Mama Hold My Hand. The bouncy, catchy I Need A Dollar would be his best-known track but I love his slow-paced, sultry cover of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, which isn’t actually even on the album. Go find Good Things, it’s very easy to like.

Next time: I have so much Nigella going on right now that I’m probably going to have to hold up before I end up reproducing her entire book here on this blog. I’ve also made and loved her Apple Cinnamon muffins and crustless pizza and so they’ll no doubt end up on here soon.

 

bangled tangled spangled and spaghetti-ed

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Firstly, sorry for the lack of blogging over the last week – I’ve been busy all over the place and was basically out of the house every single night. Presuming the lack of updates concerns people, I’ll try not to let it happen too often.

I was very, very lucky to be sent a copy of Nigella Lawson’s brand new book Kitchen which I’ve finally been able to spend some quality time with. The book fell open on the page with a recipe for Spaghetti with Marmite. I know it sounds like a kinda weird combination but as soon as I saw it, I was reminded of the million marmite and cheese sandwiches I must have eaten as a kid before ballet classes. Well, it was either that, or a Big Ben pie, or a 2-minute noodle or one of those dusty pasta snacks – if it could be microwaved, I would eat it. My specialty was stacking up about four pieces of white, heavily buttered toast bread, all spread with marmite and layered with slices of cheese, then microwaving it till the cheese was melted and bubbling fiercely in places. Marmite was my staple but sometimes I’d swap it for tomato sauce to make a kind of low-rent lasagne. With that in mind, the idea of stirring Marmite into pasta doesn’t scare me. Not much could, after that kind of after-school snack.

Anyway, Nigella attributes this recipe to Anna Del Conte and compares it to the Italian practice of spaghetti tossed with butter and a stock cube, so with that in mind this dish is practically high-class cuisine.

Spaghetti with Marmite

From Nigella Lawson’s Kitchen

  • 375g dried spaghetti
  • 50g unsalted butter
  • 1 teaspoon Marmite, or more, to taste
  • Freshly grated parmesan cheese

Cook the spaghetti in plenty of boiling, salted water. When it’s nearly done, melt the butter in a small pan and add the Marmite and a tablespoon of the pasta cooking water, mixing well. I don’t know if NZ Marmite is a bit special but it didn’t blend too easily – I had to use a mini whisk and stir hard to get it mixing. Although I’m sure it doesn’t really matter too much. Drain the pasta, reserving a little of the water, and pour the Marmite mixture over the top, stirring carefully to mix it through and adding a little of the reserved water if needed. Serve topped with plenty of parmesan.

Parmesan is too expensive – or at least, it’s one of those things that I always set out to buy, but then can’t bring myself to pay upwards of $7 for a tiny triangle of yellow matter. So I just grated regular cheese using the smaller holes to make it look fancier.

Tim reckoned I was too cautious with the Marmite but once it’s done it’s done – it’s not like I could smear more on the cooked pasta once the sauce was distributed. So with that in mind, don’t be too nervous with the “antipodean ointment” as Nigella typically and charmingly over-names it.

It tastes fantastic – but then buttery, slightly salty pasta will, right? It was admittedly a bit unusual on the tastebuds but overall fantastic. That savoury, salty-sweetness of Marmite is a perfect match with salty, rich butter (as years of experience have taught me) which is absorbed by the starchy pasta and only enhanced by the topping of cheese. Of course, you’re welcome to use Vegemite in this recipe – I hate the stuff but when you take a step back they’re both pretty freaky, and I can see how it’s just a case of personal taste.

For what seems like the first time, in Kitchen Nigella acknowledges that not everyone sweats money like her. She talks of cheaper cuts and substitutions and of her luxury of choice. She also seems a little defensive of any sugar content in places, but I think people just like to look for what they want to see – she has a huge variety of recipes in her books. So, it’s interesting charting the development of Nigella through her books, but this one is just as exciting as any of her others – the sort of thing where I flick through and think “I want to cook EVERYTHING! I love you Nigella!” Like the more grown-up equivalent of listening to Mariah Carey and wondering how she manages to put your feelings into song form.

So as I said, it’s been a busy time. Cool for me, this busyness included seeing two musicals and flying home to catch up with my family. Last Tuesday I saw the Toi Whakaari second year students’ production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company. I’ve been listening to this musical on high rotation recently so it was an awesomely awesome coincidence that I suddenly got to see it in real life. Overall, the performance was polished, sharp, clever and beautifully acted and sung – I absolutely loved it and wished they’d had a longer run.

On Saturday morning Tim and I flew up to Auckland to see 42nd Street with my family. Tim and I caught the shuttle into Queen Street then walked to Ponsonby Road to observe. Unfortunately, when Mum, Dad and my brother met up with us we somehow intuitively picked what had to be the worst cafe on the whole road for lunch, but that aside it was awesome to see everyone again, considering I hadn’t been up since RENT in April. 42nd Street was brilliant – although – the plot is definitely not as sharp as it seemed to me when I saw it nearly 20 years ago…the tap dancing and the singing was wonderful though, and it was great to see Derek Metzeger as Julian Marsh when I’d seen him about 15 years ago in Me and My Girl. The music is amazing and has so many brilliant lyrics that it makes me wonder how the dialogue got to be so bad. Fortunately it wasn’t long between tap dances.

It was an awesome 24 hours at home – five seconds in the local supermarket and I’d run into half the whanau, found out that my aunty had got the most votes and was elected to the local council, and had my plans rejigged to take in a dinner quickly organised at my Nana’s. The next day we took my cousin (age 7) round visiting even more people, before zooming back to the airport. I’d been up in Auckland already that week for meetings so I was pretty zonked by the time I got back to Wellington – but nothing that some spaghetti with Marmite can’t fix…

Title from: The musical Hair’s title song. Amazing as revival-star Gavin Creel is in so many ways, I do seriously love the way James Rado says “gimme” in the original Broadway cast recording with such conviction. Thinking about Hair has reminded me of something else I hate about the film adaptation – they cast Annie Golden, who has such a sweet voice, and didn’t get her to sing by herself once

Music lately:

Southside of Bombay, What’s The Time Mr Wolf? Last week news came that Ian Morris had died. His was one of those names I’d seen and heard around a lot but it was admittedly not until people began to share their thoughts that I became fully aware of his contribution to New Zealand music. Originally a member of Th’Dudes, he went on to produce some of our best music, including this song by Southside of Bombay, a band with a name that I’ve always liked because of its geographic relatability to where I grew up. A sunny tune with a questioning chorus that gets stuck in the mind….

Lullaby of Broadway from 42nd Street. Jerry Orbach (aka the dad in Dirty Dancing and the old guy in Law and Order) is typically fantastic originating the role of Julian Marsh on Broadway – this song is the first chance he gets to sing in the musical, at the start of Act 2, and he’s given plenty to work with, till it builds into yet another enormous song-and-dance number.

Next time: Definitely more of the same Nigella book – hard to tear myself away from it.