Category: Vegetarian

america is not the world…

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…but they do know a thing or two about peanut butter.

Though we’ll enthusiastically spread it on our toast, I’m pretty sure I can confidently say, without sweepingly rewriting our heritage, that here in New Zealand we’ve never had a history of using peanut butter like America does. In fact, we’re probably more likely to spread Marmite or Vegemite on our toast (The former owned by Seventh Day Adventists, the latter by Philip Morris and Australians, so choose whichever you find easier to swallow.)

Which is possibly why, when faced with an emptying jar of peanut butter approaching its use-by date, none of my New Zealand cookbooks offered any solutions for what to do with it. All I wanted was a simple peanut butter cookie, and even Nigella Lawson with her love of Americana didn’t have a specific example. I’ve only got one American cookbook and it’s all about Italian cooking so I finally turned to the internet. Had a flick through the search functions of Tastespotting and Foodgawker and found a recipe at Erin’s Food Files, which highlighted a product gratifyingly American – maple flavoured peanut butter (oh the rich tapestry of life!) I thank Erin for the recipe, which I fiddled with only slightly. However you may like to refer to her website if you are already more comfortable with measuring butter in cups and baking with Fahrenheit.

Maple Peanut Butter Cookies

Adapted from a recipe on Erin’s Food Files.

125g soft butter
1/3 cup white sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/3 cup peanut butter
2 teaspoons maple syrup (or golden syrup if you don’t have maple to hand)
1 cup plain flour
1/3 cup rolled oats
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
75g good dark chocolate (milk also would be nice), chopped roughly into chunks and shards.

Set oven to 160 C/325 F.

Using a wooden spoon (because it’s better that way), cream together the butter and two sugars until the mixture is lightened and fluffy. Then beat in the peanut butter, followed by the egg and syrup. Stir in the flour, oats, baking powder and baking soda and finally the chocolate. It will be a relatively soft mixture.

Drop heaping tablespoons of the mixture onto a lined tray – no need to flatten – and bake for about 15 minutes, no more. They may still be soft when you take them out of the oven but will continue to cook as they cool. Transfer them carefully by spatula to a rack or just another tray while you bake the second batch.

Delicious from this angle…

…and also this angle.

These cookies are really, really good. I can’t say that the maple flavour is terribly strong, so don’t fret if you haven’t got any. The oats don’t make themselves stridently felt either, almost melting into the mixture as it bakes to provide an overall satisfying chewiness. You want to make sure your butter is really good and soft, and it’s a bit of a faff to get the peanut butter out of the bottom of the jar without covering yourself head to toe in the stuff, but apart from that these cookies are very little hassle to make and surprisingly quickly done.

Elaine Paige is coming to Wellington to do a show which is really rather cool. If you don’t know who she is, here’s a good way to find out. Take a dart, and throw it at any West End production cast recording since 1970-something and it’s likely she played a starring role in it. Seriously, I’m surprised she wasn’t cast as Elphaba when Wicked opened in London. You may not have her in your memory, but trust me, you know her so well. (Okay, sorry for the tenuous puns.) She’s been all over theatre in Britain (and Broadway) since forever and it’s really exciting to have the opportunity to see her. Tickets are a little on the jaw-droppingly expensive side, but I think I’ll file it under “Merry Christmas to me” and deal with it.

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The title of this post is brought to you by: Morrissey. All you need to know about him you can probably find in the youtube comments.
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On Shuffle whilst I type:

Not specifically on my computer, but on the shuffle of my mind if you will, is the Newtown Rocksteady, a band of many people, copious facial hair, several hats, and much skill. Caught them at the Southern Cross last night as one of the members is a friend of our flatmates. Their joyful sound whipped the audience into a frenzy of dancing (and may well have been what inspired the couple directly in front of me to kiss passionately and at great length.)

To be honest I’ve been to busy at work this week to listen to an awful lot of music (apart from the usual Broadway-on-my-way-to-and-from-the-office) but I have been streaming a lot of George FM and 95bFM. Both great channels, and although bFM can be ludicrously Auckland-centric, as they are primarily an Auckland-based channel it would be remiss to shake my fist at them for that. Especially when there is such great music and dialogue abounding.

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Next time: I was gifted a healthy bunch of asparagus today from my flatmate’s friend (the one in the band…such a kind act would I suppose now make him my friend now too). Plus I bought, on a whim, some whole wheat – also known rather charmingly as wheat berries. Am looking forward to using both tonight and documenting it…

I’d be surprisingly good for you

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First lovingly assemble your ingredients on a wooden board

I’ve had the weekend to myself, as Tim has been away in the South Island touring with his choir. I haven’t taken advantage of this absense to cook anything particularly idiosyncratic for myself (ie, mushroom-heavy). It’s all too easy these days to be tempted by grabbing cheap take-out from the squillion eateries dotting the landscape and twinkling in my peripheral vision. I tell myself it’s all in the name of keeping the economy alive. For lunch on Saturday I simmered some elderly tofu in half a jar of spaghetti sauce that had also seen better days as some way of counteracting the excessive time spent not in the kitchen.


Yesterday morning I bussed out to Brooklyn, one of the ‘burbs that huddle round the central city of Wellington, to see Every Little Step at the Penthouse Cinema. Every Little Step weaves two stories together – the inception of ground-breaking musical A Chorus Line in 1974, and the audition process for the revival of the same musical in 2006. A documentary about people auditioning for a musical about people auditioning for a musical. It was fascinating to see some more established Broadway names (oh hi, Amy Spanger, Yuka Takara, Charlotte D’Amboise, etc) learning choreography, waiting for phone calls, pacing back and forward, being told to repeat songs…The dancing was eye-popping and I was actually tearful in one audition scene where this beautiful young guy just nailed a ‘difficult’ monologue to the wall with his intensity. If you get a chance to see this, please do – I don’t think you need to be versed in musical theatre or dance to get a (ha!) kick out of it.

Seeing it really, really made me want to dance again. As I mentioned on Twitter, I was once told by some grand dame in a pashmina at a ballet workshop, that all passion and no talent can only get you so far – and all talent and no passion will get you even less. Unfortch I always erred on the side of “all passion”. That said, after ballet productions and recitals I would often get told by complete strangers that they loved watching me dance, perhaps because I looked so utterly happy to be twirling round on stage or something. It’s unlikely that there is an audience out there for an enthusiastic, past-a-prime-she-never-really-had dancer but I’ll keep my ear to the ground (which I can do surprisingly deftly, having maintained my dancer’s flexibility if nothing else).

With Tim’s impending return and the cake tin empty I thought a lazy Sunday afternoon would be as good a time as any to do some baking. Not that I’m some kind of 1950s housewifely type. No ma’am. To pluck an example from the air, I still can’t work a washing machine (just this evening my red sheets dyed yet another white tshirt pink) and Tim does 99% of the cleaning and dishes. But I’ll be damned if he ever has to cook himself a meal in his life. I guess it kind of balances out into something healthy-ish.

Speaking of healthy-ish, what I ended up making was a recipe that caught my eye from this Australian Women’s Weekly chocolate cookbook that I’ve had for a year or two now. I’ve been pretty good lately at not eating half the cake mix as I go but for this I really couldn’t stop myself. Cast your eyes over the ingredient list and nod in agreement with me. It’s marvelous stuff. It’s full of oats which I’m not even going to try and brightly joke makes it good for you, but it certainly can’t hurt. And chocolate is healthy in that spiritual way, so.

Chocolate Oat Slice

Adapted from Sweet and Simple: Chocolate, an Australian Women’s Weekly book.

90g butter
2 tablespoons golden syrup or condensed milk
100g milk chocolate
2 tablespoons good cocoa
2 cups rolled oats, lightly toasted
1/2 cup pistachios, toasted and chopped (I used walnuts)
1/2 cup dessicated coconut

Resist where I couldn’t, my children!

In a good sized, heavy based pan, melt together the butter, chocolate and golden syrup/condensed milk. Resist the urge to grab a spatula and chaperone it directly into your mouth. Stir in the cocoa, oats, nuts and coconut. Spread this mixture into a lined 20cm springform tin and refrigerate. It should set fairly quickly, and once it has, ice with chocolate buttercream if you want (and I did, as the song goes) and slice into triangles or whatever takes your fancy.

Might sound a bit strange, all those uncooked rolled oats just sitting there. But the oats soften up with all that butter and chocolate, and provide a fantastic chewy bite that makes it difficult to stop at one ‘test’ piece. The oats also soften up the sweetness somewhat. It’s not overwhelming, but this slice would be really good with a cup of thick black tea or strong black coffee to temper all the sugar. The Australian Women’s Weekly is renowned for triple-testing all their recipes, I can only imagine the sublime happiness emanating from the test kitchen during the writing of this particular book.

Did you know I’ve been asked three times in the last week if I’m still in high school? For fear of making myself sound even younger I’ll try not to rant about it too much, but really. I’m 23. I have a degree. I have a job where I make important decisions for the greater good of the nation. I’ve traveled. I’m legitimately grown-up. (Except I can’t drive or operate a washing machine.) Yes, I am generally more ‘clunky pun-dropper’ than ‘intimidating sophisticate’ but the idea that I carry myself like a high school student, that I don’t exude worldly-traveledy-employedyness…is not so fun. But enough personality dialysis! Let us focus on the positive: living in New Zealand under a gaping ozone hole has not left me a withered crone older than my years. Also, in a few years I’ll no doubt look back on myself with and dismissively think “Oh, 23 year olds. So annoying,” as I overheard someone on the bus once saying. I thought 23 was a pretty decent age to achieve, but the lesson is there’s always someone older than you who will greet your every action with disdain. Unless you’re 90, in which case you can drink whisky and eat cake and talk disdainfully about anyone you like.

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On Shuffle whilst I type: (the other day, Tim said “I’m sure you just put whatever song you feel like talking about on here, not actually what’s on Shuffle. To which I sigh and say, “Oh 23 year olds. So annoying.”)

You Got The Love by Chaka Khan and Rufus, from Rags To Rufus. Chaka Khan. It’s always the right time.


Connection by Elastica from their eponymous album. This song is…very cool.


Something 4 the Weekend by Super Furry Animals from their album Fuzzy Logic. It’s a great song, I like that they’re connected to the Welsh language so strongly and their name always makes me think of bunnies and kittens and such. What a package.

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Title brought to you by: I’d Be Surprisingly Good For You from Evita, by the exquisite Patti LuPone. If you’ve got the time, you must check out this promotional TV ad for Evita. The voiceover! The fervour! The sass! Patti’s eyes at the end!
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Next time: Signs of Spring are popping up everywhere but I’m still yet to see asparagus at a satisfactory price. When I do you can be sure this blog will be overflowing with the stuff.

lava you should have come over

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We’ve all been there. Quietly eating your wet polenta, but secretly thinking “Alas! If only this polenta was glutinous and significantly higher in fat and lower in nutritional value. Then I’d know real happiness.” Or maybe not. I have this yearly dalliance with gnocchi where just enough time has passed since I was last traumatised by it that I delude myself into thinking I can make it successfully. But every year, I fail.

For 2009’s attempt my head was turned by a recipe in a magazine for gnocchi which sounded delicious – a basic choux pastry mixture with cottage cheese added. It seemed pretty non-terrifying and so I gave it a go. The gnocchi was pillowy and light and slowly rose to the top of the pan of water. I pinched one out of the pan and tasted it – argh, so good. Smooth and creamy and yet gratifyingly unstodgy.

Then came disaster. I tipped the pan into a large colander and…the gnocchi broke. All completely flattened. Nary a solid pasta nugget to be found. After putting all this effort into it I was determined that the show would go on but seriously…

…that’s not gnocchi. The squashed gnocchi was kind of delicious, with the exact soft, grainy texture of polenta, just, you know, now with a higher GI rating and all the goodness of no cornmeal! After many years of failure, I’ve decided that gnocchi is like haircuts and half-marathons: best done for you by other people.

Let us distract ourselves from this ugliness with a ridiculously flamboyant cake – Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Coffee Volcano.

To mark the occasion of Tim’s birthday we threw a small shindig at our place on Sunday afternoon, inviting all of our closest friends (a very small, but mighty bunch, minus a few exceptions not based in Wellington naturally). I’d only been back in Wellington for an hour, since I spent the weekend up in Auckland for business meetings and the Smokefreerockquest finals (all of which went smooth as failed gnocchi). Instead of my usual post-travel mode, which is to put on my $6 grey trackpants and stare at the TV, I got stuck into making homemade custard and stuffing softened rice paper sheets like some pearl-wearing housewife from Bonfire of the Vanities.

The whole evening was very relaxed once this was out of the way. Let’s face it, no matter how many times you make custard there is still always the nagging fear that you’ll end up with sugary scrambled eggs. Luckily no disasters this time, particularly fortunate considering I’d substituted coconut milk for the stipulated cream, in a bid to make the pudding dairy-free for one of our friends who swings that way. (By the way, the cake uses oil, not butter. Do not consider for a SECOND that I’d stoop to margarine.)

So yeah, marvelous evening all round, good company, good nibbles, and particularly excellent cheese provided by Dr Scotty. Having it on a Sunday evening gave it a chilled out vibe wonderfully conducive to sitting round eating enormous quantities of food and light quantities of alcohol. Tim took over in the kitchen when the sausage rolls needed baking and the pork buns needed steaming (yeah, there was no real unifying theme to our nibbles) and they were pretty exciting, but the cake was the real star. Probably because I would not shut up about it and about how awesome it was that it was dairy free.

Let me describe it for you: a large, deep, undulating chocolate bundt cake (which, thank all that is good in the world, turned out of the tin neatly this time). The hole in the middle is filled with walnuts. Into said hole, over the walnuts, you pour rich custard, caramel brown with espresso (I actually forgot to add the coffee in the heat of the moment but no harm done as there was still plenty going on). Finally you sprinkle over brown sugar and using some kind of fire-producing implement, torch the sugar till it forms a caramelised, speckly creme-brulee surface on top of all the madness, all of which flows like magma once you slice into the cake to share it round.

It should probably be mentioned here that Nigella uses the words “infant-school easy” and “pa-dah!” to describe this cake. She uses these words…slightly carelessly. I wouldn’t be the first to volunteer a two-year old’s services in making a bundt cake which requires separated egg whites beaten to a meringue. Just sayin’ is all. But, if you have a few years’ experience behind you this cake is not impossible, as demonstrated by the fact that I could actually get it happening at all. It just requires a little focus and forward thinking. A kitchen blowtorch helps, I was given one for my birthday this year and was really excited about using it on something so worthy expending a little butane.

It does resemble a volcano, right? Eating it was an intense experience, and the reason the photos look so hastily snapped is because…they were. The cake is light in texture but very dark with cocoa. The caramelised sugar and hidden walnuts provide a crunchy respite against the rich, flowing custard. It’s just…marvelous. It’s the sort of thing that you have one bite of and decide that you want on a weekly basis. I realise it looks and sounds like there’s far too much going on. But it works.

Chocolate Coffee Volcano

Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess

CAKE

300g caster sugar
140g plain flour
80g cocoa
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 large eggs, separated, plus 2 more egg yolks (this is where it gets confusing if, like me, you have trouble counting to ten)
125ml vegetable oil (I used rice bran)
125ml water

Preheat oven to 180 C and lightly oil a 25cm Bundt tin.

In a large bowl mix together 200g of the sugar, all the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and baking soda. In another bowl, beat together the water, oil and 6 egg yolks. Pour over the dry ingredients gradually, whisking to combine.


Take yet another bowl and whisk the 4 egg whites till stiff. Keep whisking and slowly add the sugar spoonful by spoonful. Gently fold this into the chocolate mixture a third at a time. Pour mixture into the oiled Bundt tin and bake for 40 minutes, although it may need a little longer and covering with tinfoil.

CUSTARD

6 egg yolks
225mls double cream
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon instant espresso powder.


Note: I used four egg yolks and 1 tin coconut milk, using the same method. Whisk egg yolks, sugar and espresso powder together lightly. Heat up the cream in a pan but don’t let it boil. Slowly whisk it into the egg yolks. Wipe out the pan and transfer the mixture back into it, cooking over a low heat till it thickens significantly into custard.

Finally, sprinkle Tia Maria over the cake if you’d like to (another thing I forgot), fill the hole with walnuts, pour in the custard, allowing it to overflow and run down the creases of the cake. Sprinkle over about three tablespoons of brown sugar and torch it till it resembles the top of a creme brulee.

See? Infant-school easy! Pa-dah!

To go with I made another coconut milk custard into which I stirred melted dark chocolate and cocoa and froze into ice cream. As guests peeled off we were left with a few hangers on. There was a joyfully primal moment when we all stood round a kitchen countertop digging spoons greedily into the container of ice cream. Things got a little strange after that and, (poor Tim, was it ever even about him?) as some kind of signifier of this, Defying Gravity was played at great volume for Dr Scotty who had hitherto been living half a life and had never heard it before…

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The title of this blog is brought to you by: Jeff Buckley, singing Lover You Should’ve Come Over, okay sure, but maybe a little Eden Espinosa too…Yes, Jeff Buckley was special and all but I’m more of a Tim Buckley gal myself. And let us never forget who was the author of Hallelujah…
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On Shuffle whilst I type:

1: Like a Pen by excellent Swedes The Knife from their album Silent Shout. This song was regularly thrashed chez nous circa 2006/2007 but I heard it again yesterday while streaming George FM and was immediately taken back to those damper times. Had a nostalgic flashback to Alicia the Canadian teasing us for calling it was called “like a pin” with our New Zealand accents.
2: Cars by Gary Numan from The Pleasure Principle. Spurred on by marathon sessions of watching and listening to The Mighty Boosh I really had an urge to listen to this again. It’s blindingly glorious and swirly.
3: Cornerstone from the Arctic Monkeys’ latest, Humbug. It’s really good. Who would have thought back in 2005 that they’d be here now?

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Next time: Well, hopefully the next post will (a) arrive sooner and (2) have better photos. Like I said I’ve been travelling round the place, hence the yawning chasm between the last post and this one, but I got to touch base at home and catch up with all sorts of lovely and important relatives and get lots of important meetings done in the city AND act as sponsor representative at the fantastic finals for Smokefreerockquest. Plus make dairy-free custard after being back in Wellington for nary an hour. You try blogging after all that. Also, hopefully I make something that really succeeds. Either that or it’s time to get a ‘fail’ tag to add to my list.

freecurd!

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Not everything has to have a story. Some things are begotten, not created. This cake is somewhere in the middle. The flat that Tim and I currently live in used to be home to an ex-colleague of mine, from my program team at work. On the night of her farewell party, another colleague in the heat of the moment gave me two sample sachets of Barkers lemon curd. I don’t know where she got them from or why they were bestowed upon me. She didn’t say. We certainly haven’t mentioned it since. Lemon curd is hardly an illicit substance, but I don’t expect to have it conspiratorially pressed into my hand late at night and I could never quite figure out a way to bring it up again without sounding strange. Or at least stranger than usual.

The sachets sat undisturbed in my handbag for a while – a good month and a half after the farewell party of the person whose house we now live in. This is just how I roll. Things sit around forever. But while the sachets began to irritate me with their presence I couldn’t quite work out what to do with them. It was around this time that another Wellington-based gal I know began a blog and posted a recipe for, of all things, lemon curd cake. I made it. I tasted it. Everything suddenly made sense.

Seriously, this is a really nice cake. Just thinking about it is making me wish people thrust preserves upon me more often of an evening. I have to be really frankly honest here – Barkers lemon curd isn’t my first lemon curd of choice. I think there isn’t anything nicer than homemade stuff, and Barkers can be a little too sweet and viscous. However it was absolutely perfect stirred into this cake batter. This might also be nice if the lemon curd was replaced with jam, or marmalade…

Lemon Curd Cake

Thanks to Olivia at Berry Bliss

  • 170g butter
  • 1 1/2 cups sugar
  • 4 large eggs
  • zest of one lemon
  • juice of one lemon
  • 1½ cups flour
  • 1½ tsp baking powder
  • 100g lemon curd

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, then add each egg one at a time, beating between additions. Add the zest and juice of the lemon. I didn’t have a lemon on me but instead I added 2 teaspoons of Boyajian orange oil just for kicks. It added a subtle fragrant intensity to the finished cake. Sift the flour and baking powder into the mixture and fold together. Add the lemon curd and mix. I mixed it in quited well but not completely incorporating it. Pop into a 22cm lined and floured cake tin and into the oven at 180ºC for about 1 hour or until a knife comes away clean.

I overcooked it slightly and was a little worried by the look of the brown exterior, but it was gloriously sunshine yellow within and still tasted fantastic. All cakey and tangy on the inside but with this sugary-chewy crust which was so good. I’ll definitely be making this again.

Bonus cake!

It was Tim’s birthday on Friday night and at his request I made him Nigella Lawson’s chocolate Guinness cake. I suspect this cake has magical properties. Recipe here.

We went out for breakfast first thing the morning of his birthday (before I scooted to work) and I presented him with tickets for ex-Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker. Who is not related to Joe Cocker, but they’re both from Sheffield! That night we had dinner at Sweet Mother’s Kitchen -(where the slab of cornbread comes with a slice of butter the same size – I’m home!) and played card games in the corner while eating pecan pie. Then we went to see The Soloist using some vouchers we had. It was pretty lovely – Jamie Foxx did a great job and Robert Downey Jr, my latter-day crush, is doing well for himself these days – although it did feel a bit heavy handed in places and a bit “trying really hard to be Oscar worthy”. We then hung out all night at various classy bars and people watched (and on a Friday night, there were most definitely people putting on a show for the watchin’) and finally came home at 4am. Easily the first time we’ve done so all year. It was an excellent night.

It’s Mum’s birthday today, (Feliz cumpleanos!) and I couriered up some of Nigella’s gingerbread muffins for her afternoon tea party she was having yesterday. It’s quite fun sending food through the mail, I felt like some benevolent far-off mother from What Katy Did or a jolly Enid Blyton novel.

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The title of this post is brought to you by: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s FREEBIRD. It’s a beauty. For those of you who have been living inside a cockerel’s boot, they also do Sweet Home Alabama. You know, that song from the Forrest Gump soundtrack.
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On Shuffle Whilst I Type

Yellow House by Grizzly Bear. Ange came round and gave it to us to listen to, am liking what I hear but suspect I would be stupid not to.

Llewellyn from the album Straight Answer Machine by local bearded gem Samuel Flynn Scott and the B.O.P. Any song which includes lyrics about being “a custard pirate lost at sea” is clearly golden.

Diamond Dogs by Beck, from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack. Obviously there’s the David Bowie original which is fabulous, but this is quite the cover. Plus this soundtrack was my LIFE a few years back and that is not to be sneezed at. Is it bad that this is basically the only Timbaland-produced track that I like? (Yes, there is Come Around from M.I.A’s Kala which is all well and good until his verse starts and it just gets awkward.) Well so be it.

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Next time: I fail at gnocchi. I strain to remember ever making successful gnocchi. But still, at least once a year, I try it. This is me ticking the box for 2009.

ginger baker

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How To Be A Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson is possibly the only baking book you’ll ever need, supposing some fascist authority figure imposed a rule of only one baking book per person (and would they really be all that fascist if they at least allowed you to bake brownies?). How To Be A Domestic Goddess is not one of those compendiums that you can buy for $10 at Borders – you know, big illustrations, no obvious author, step-by-step recipes for the same old same old banana cake and sticky date pudding and double chocolate muffins. Practical but no soul. No ma’am. HTBADG is so intensely baking-y that its pages practically come pre-glued together with buttercream.

I received How To Be A Domestic Goddess in 2006 under fairly auspicious circumstances – it was a gift from Tim. We were living in our first place together, this bloody awful flat in Kelburn which was not so much damp as ankle-deep in water, presided over by a horrible landlord who lived on the same property. It was our first year at uni. Tim was working graveyard shifts at McDonalds and I was struggling to be employed full stop. We weren’t flush, to say the least.

I had excitedly bought my first pair of skinny-leg jeans for a significant sum (remembering this was early 2006 before you could get them everywhere) only to have them promptly stolen unceremoniously off our washing line, along with a pair of vintage white and red Adidas shorts that I’d bought at Camden market in London and worn to the Greenday concert at Milton Keynes in 2005. In one fell swoop I’d lost something excitingly materialistic and something pricelessly sentimental. As if I could afford another pair of jeans – as if I could replace the shorts and everything they represented. It was a pretty miserable time (rejected by supermarkets, unable to deal with the mathmatics section of the KFC employment sheet.)

Tim gets home from work one day soon after – miraculously in the middle of the day and not 4am – and hands me How To Be A Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson, a present to make me feel better about the stolen clothes and life in general. If ever a book could comfort the soul, if ever a woman could make you wonder why you even care about jeans in the first place, this book is the one.

Remember, this is years before we would go out casually purchasing DVD box sets and espresso machines. This is back when the minimum wage was $10.20. Nigella Lawson is not a cheap idol. The first recipe I made from it was the Chocolate Coca Cola Cake, not for any particular reason other than we had most of the ingredients to hand and coke is cheap. It’s a complete joy of a cake, (better than it sounds) and was ideal for scaring away the last remnants of misery at the missing clothing and unemployment.

For some reason I’ve never returned to it, but the other day a thought tickled my brain, that by replacing the Coca Cola with ginger beer it could turn out really quite nifty. I was right. And then I got to thinking about how I ended up with the book in the first place. And now I realise that I’m still really annoyed about those shorts. I want them back. I don’t like the idea of wishing actual ill upon people (in a public forum like this anyway) but I hope whoever stole them…always catches every red traffic light. And get constant phone calls from telemarketers. And their CDs always skip. Lots of papercuts. I could go on.

Ginger Beer Cake

Adapted from How To Be A Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson

200g plain flour
100g caster sugar
150g brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 large egg
125mls buttermilk (or 1/4 cup plain yoghurt, 1/4 cup milk)
125g butter
175mls ginger beer (I used Phoenix Organic, a light and gingery drop)

Preheat oven to 180 C.

In a good-sized pan, gently melt the butter and ginger beer together. Remove from heat, and sift in the dry ingredients, then mix in everything else. Pour into a lined 22cm springform tin, and bake for 40 minutes. This is a very liquid batter so it might pay to slide some foil under the cake tin.

Leave to stand in the tin 15 mins before turning out. If you like, you could make a buttercream by beating together soft butter, icing sugar, a little ground ginger and a tablespoon or two of the remaining ginger beer. Or I imagine a cream cheese icing would be wonderful here. We left it plain because I thought we were out of icing sugar (we weren’t but never mind). And it was absolutely excellent plain so no need to go to any great lengths to drape it in further sugary concoctions if you don’t want to.

This cake has the most beautiful texture – maybe it’s something in the bubbles? It’s both light but dense, squishy but solid, gingery but flirtatiously so. It’s not one of those cakes that needs 12 eggs or a large amount of butter to get by, making it ideal for when you don’t think you have much in the pantry. By the way to make the original version, replace the ginger beer with coca cola and the ground ginger with 2 tablespoons of cocoa.

Speaking of originals, they’re remaking Fame. WHAT. Wikipedia can’t explain why this is happening which in this day and age means there’s not much hope for it. I do love musicals – and did not Hugh Jackman claim ‘the musical is back’ at the Oscars this year? But this just seems pointedly unnecessary. No Gene Anthony Ray and his pelvic thrusts that will drive you insane! No Red Light! No Anne Meara who 20 years later went on to play Steve’s mother in Sex and The City! No I Sing The Body Electric! And I very much doubt that there will be a Garfunkel-esque ginger ‘fro as sported by Montgomery MacNeil in the original. Travesty! Travestyyy!

On a more serious note, ie this actually matters in the grand scheme of things more than shorts and movies, Tim has been staying with his family for the last week because his paternal great grandmother died, and they were travelling across the country yesterday for her funeral. While I never met this lady I hear from Tim she was pretty awesome and could farm harder than most men back in her day, and is also the line through which Tim gets his Maori heritage. It is sad news for his family indeed though I do think he’s fantastically lucky to have known his great-grandparents, not something I can lay claim to… In his absense I’ve been eating nonstop tofu and soybeans, business as usual really.

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On Shuffle whilst I type:

Never Alone by the Contemporary Gospel Chorus from the Fame soundtrack. That’s the 1980 film by the way, kids. Listen to this song once and see if you don’t want to recruit your own choir just so you can get them to perform this track.

I’m Alive In The World by L.A Mitchell, from the Fly My Pretties latest release, A Story. Pretty, pretty, pretty stuff. And there is a giant portrait of Ms Mitchell on my lounge wall which gives the listening esperience an extra something.

Alone Again Or by Love from the album Forever Changes. Those mariachis! This song is hauntingly fabulous. Arthur Lee, RIP. (Also doesn’t the fact that one user review on fishpond.co.nz says “There is only really one way to describe this album – hippie crap” actually make you want it even more?)

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The title of this post is brought to you by: A cheeky salute to a member of Cream. See them here performing White Room, introduced by the delightful John Peel…
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Next time: Nothing specific on the cards yet, but I’ll get to it all in my own mystical time. The latest issue of Cuisine Magazine arrived in the mail though so I look forward to spending some quality time with it.

brown sugar, how come you taste so good

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I’ve got a bit of that Sunday night ‘blah’ feeling that can happen after a really good weekend. The reason for this weekend going so well was because several family members (Mum, godmother, godmother’s sister) coming from afar to visit, acting as entourage for my godsister who was having her university house ball. Now that they’re gone and my mind has to turn to practical things, like waking up early tomorrow for work…You know how it goes. Of course there are several cures for such feelings: make sure you live in a charming flat on Cuba Street for one thing, listen to the relentlessly sunny revival cast recording of Hair, eat tofu, absorb the happiness of those around you that the Wellington Phoenix football team actually won a game, that sort of thing. I happen to be doing all those things simultaneously right now so there’s barely a moment to feel wibbly.

I spontaneously invited everyone round for dinner on Friday night. We had take-out noodles from my noodle hut of choice: Chow Mein Cube on The Terrace, plus hot chips from the excellent chippie across the road. I made a salad and they bought the wine. Pudding consisted of brown sugar meringues that I’d made that evening after work (I know, how deranged housewife am I) and two different kinds of ice cream, Kohu Road vanilla and Whittaker’s Peanut Slab. It is with some pinkness of cheek that I admit my love for the peanut slab ice cream, since I had so emphatically stated that Kohu Road is the only kind of non-homemade ice cream I’d ever consider buying. Well, now I can add Whittaker’s to the list. It’s flipping lovely stuff.

These meringues have the edge on their paler sisters – I normally find meringues to be a bit too blatantly, in-yer-face sweet, whereas here the brown sugar gives complexity of flavour and a pleasing dark caramel taste. You could of course use something like muscovado sugar for an even more intense experience. I found this recipe in Italian Comfort Food by the Scotto family, a cookbook that persists in changing my previously held perception that all American cookbooks are unusable and ask for incomprehensible ingredients like Bisquick and half-and-half.

Brown Sugar Meringues

Adapted from Italian Comfort Food by the Scotto Family.

4 egg whites
1 cup brown sugar

Preheat oven to 140 C/300 F and line a tray with baking paper. You may need two trays but I managed to squish everything onto one. This recipe is so simple you could fit it into a Twitter update. Whisk egg whites till frothy. Carry on whisking, slowly adding brown sugar till a stiff meringue forms. Drop spoonfuls onto tray, bake for an hour. You should get 16-18 out of this. And I made it with an actual whisk so don’t feel like you can’t either. No need for heavy machinery here.

What’s really, really fun is then to take spoonfuls of ice cream and sandwich it between two meringue halves. This becomes almost impossibly sublime after a day or two when the meringues have softened slightly. It’s so good you practically need to slap yourself back into reality afterwards. The contrast between cold, creamy ice cream and resolutely dry room temperature meringue is surprisingly seductive while the strong caramel of the slowly cooked brown sugar counteracts any excessive sweetness. They’re aesthetically pleasing too, calling to mind those fancy macarons that you see all over the place but in a much simpler, ramshackle fashion.

It’s a little difficult to really paint a picture in words how delicious this is, especially when it seems so simple. I might have to eat another so that I’m inspired into further colourful description.

If your life is like the Tom Wolfe novel Bonfire of the Vanities you might consider making your own ice cream to go with the meringues. It will drive home to your dinner guests that you are an aggressively accomplished cook. Their self esteem will wither and the only way they will be able to jump over this raised bar is by baking individual souffles at their next dinner party. Even if your life is not like a Tom Wolfe novel and does not involve making individual desserts while wearing pearls, and even though we’re all well aware by now that there is perfectly sufficient stuff available on the market, making your own ice cream is not difficult. To paraphrase an argument that I often employ (if the Dire Straits were that good, surely I’d like them?) if ice cream was really that difficult then surely I wouldn’t be able to achieve it.

A while ago I got it in my head that palm sugar might be a delicious ice cream flavouring. It is highly likely that I should have been focussing on spreadsheets at the time which is why the idea was not immediately acted upon. However this time of idea-incubation allowed me to also consider adding kaffir lime leaves to this icecream-in-my-mind.

Last weekend I had a crack at it, making a custard boldly infused with kaffir lime leaves and a syrup of palm sugar. The two were mixed together and frozen and I’ll be honest, it actually worked. The flavours were subtle but intriguing. Not overtly limey and not wildly sugary, but both elements definitely present, cutting through the frozen custard with their unfamiliarity.

I’ll give you the recipe I used – which I made up – but I’m not quite sure it’s the exact final prototype yet. There was something about the texture that I wasn’t entirely sure about. However Tim, with his simple rustic wisdom, said I was overthinking and he couldn’t see anything wrong with it. So feel free to give it a go yourself.

Palm Sugar and Kaffir Lime Leaf Ice Cream

4 egg yolks
3 tablespoons brown sugar
600 mls cream
5 dried kaffir lime leaves
4 lumps of palm sugar (does this make sense? Palm sugar generally comes in rounded lumps. There might be a better way of describing it)

Heat half the cream (300mls) with the kaffir lime leaves in a pan till it’s pretty hot but not boiling, just slightly wobbly. Remove from heat and let it sit for a while to allow the lime leaves to infuse. Whisk the egg yolks and brown sugar together gently, then pour the heated cream into it, still whisking. Rinse and dry the cream pan and then transfer the egg-sugar-cream mix back into the pan and heat it gently, stirring all the while, till it thickens into custard. This isn’t hard at all but it can be good to have a sink full of ice cold water ready to plunge the pan into to stop it cooking. You can choose to remove the lime leaves at any stage here, but I left them in as long as possible.

Put the custard aside to cool while you put the palm sugar into a pan, and add 1/2 cup water. Heat very gently till a syrup forms. Depending on the palm sugar it may take a while to break down. The aim of this excercise is more to melt the sugar into a usable liquid rather than cook it into a caramel, if that makes sense. Once it has dissolved into liquid put it aside to cool for a little bit before whisking it into the custard (with lime leaves removed) and finally, stir in the final 300 mls cream. Sorry if this all sounds a bit complicated.

Pour into a container and freeze, stirring occasionally. It makes around 900mls which is a good, non-threatening quantity for an experimental batch like this.

Anyway it must have been pretty good because Tim and I managed to get through it in less than a week. Largely aided by the fact that it tasted so mind-blowingly smashing sandwiched between meringues. Be not afraid to try it. The instructions may not fit on a Twitter update but they’re pretty straightforward.

Last night the lot of us – Tim, myself, visiting family members went to La Kasbah, a Morrocan restaurant down the Left Bank arcade of Cuba Street. It’s an adorable place with a short but solid menu, gorgeously painted walls and friendly wait staff. We were all very much taken with our meals and in particular I loved the tumeric-yellow bread that came with the breads and dips. Well, I hope it was tumeric that gave it that radioactive tint. I’d love to know their recipe because it’s gorgeously moreish stuff. It was a seriously lovely night and I definitely recommend it if you’re looking for another BYO to add to your inventory.

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The title of this blog is bought to you by: The Rolling Stones
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On Shuffle whilst I type:

Where Do I Go? sung by Gavin Creel and the Tribe from the 2009 revival cast recording of Hair. It’s more thematic than plot-heavy, which makes sense for a show that follows its own rules, but I have the feeling that this is currently among the best ways to spend a few hours on Broadway right now. The current Broadway cast is so full of energy and joy that even a million miles and continents away it is impossible not to love them.

Meadowlark by Patti LuPone from Patti LuPone at Les Mouches. Recorded in 1980 this is an utterly gorgeous and occasionally hilarious album.

You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket (live) by the White Stripes from the Blue Orchid single. Thought this song is most excellent on the album, live it just…soars.
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Next time: Nigella Lawson has this chocolate Coca Cola cake in How To Be A Domestic Goddess, and I thought it might be fun to switch the cola for ginger beer. It was flipping lovely, let me assure you, and you’ll be finding out all about it in good time…

complainte de la bundt

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It’s a truth universally acknowledged that cakes look more exciting and complicated if they’re baked in a fancy tin. It just seems more impressive if it’s shaped like castle turrets or a giant rosebud or the Trevi Fountain. I mean, it’s not like you actually painstakingly sculpted the cake into this particular form with a palette knife while wearing a beret. But there you go.

I was predictably excited to buy on sale recently a good sized silicone bundt caketin. I feel as though a bundt tin falls comfortably between practical and largely dust-gathering on the kitchenware scale. It’s really just another cake tin, not as usable as a 23cm springform but not as confoundingly quixotic as, say, a madeleine tray (nothing against madeleines – every time I make them I end up wondering why humans haven’t evolved to make small, honeyed cakes a staple food). A bundt cake just looks so majestic with its undulating curves and waves and towering hilltop form, so much more than your perfectly serviceable but normal looking regular round cake.

I was initially going to make a fabulous sounding orange cake from Annabelle White’s Annabelle Cooks, which sported a large, fetching image of an orange bundt cake. However the recipe specified a 26cm springform tin and the disparity between instruction and image made me far too nervous. Not on my first bundt.

Instead I went for an equally lovely sounding Spice Cake from my charmingly eighties (if it moved, they set it in gelatine) Best of Cooking For New Zealanders cookbook by Lynn Bedford Hall (look for it in your local charity shop – I could use it every single day). As well specifically requesting a ring tin, it also used less eggs than the spurned orange cake. It was all going just peachy. You know me, always happiest when messing around with cake batter. I piled the cinnamon-spiced, nut-spiked batter into the tin, put it in the oven, marvelled as the house filled with the warm, happy scent of cinnamon…Oh how wrong I was. Fate (and possibly Annabelle White) were standing behind me, pointing and laughing the whole time.

Because then this happened.

What now? That’s just not fair. You know how there’s that saying? Pride goeth before a fall? Well with me it’s excitement goeth before a fail. If I had a dollar for every time… Seriously, I don’t know what went wrong. Half the cake just decided it wasn’t ready to leave home yet. Any guesses from seasoned bakers out there? The tin was silicone and everything. I wonder if I didn’t leave it long enough before turning it out? Maybe I left it too long? I’m in a quandary!

Aesthetics aside, the cake itself is really delicious though and very, very easy to make. Whatever I did wrong – presuming it was my fault at all – I definitely won’t take it out on the recipe itself. If you want to recreate this psyche-damaging disaster in your own home feel free, may you have better luck than I had…

Spice Cake

2 tsp baking powder
350g brown sugar
2 eggs
450g flour
345mls buttermilk
250ml (1 cup) plain oil, like rice bran or grapeseed
2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp baking soda
175g sultanas (I used currants)
125g chopped nuts (I used walnuts)

Set the oven to 180 C (350 F). Place all the ingredients except for the nuts and sultanas into a large bowl and mix with electric beaters for one minute.

If you don’t have electric beaters (like me), mix together the oil and sugar, then the eggs, then everything else till it’s incorporated good and proper. Then, fold in the nuts and sultanas.

Spread this thick mixture into a bundt tin and bake for an hour, covering loosely with tinfoil if it starts to darken too much. Stand for five minutes (which I did!) before inverting onto a cake rack.

As you can probably tell from the ingredients this makes a large, moist, delicious cake that keeps well and has a gentle warmth from the spices used. Which means I can overlook the fact that it had a total breakdown in front of me. And I will carry on bundting.

For my sake at least, so I don’t feel completely like what the French call les incompetents, here below is an example of something I actually achieved without a hitch.

I’ve made this caramelly, oaty slice before, blogged about it even, but whatevs. I’m calling upon it again. And at least you know it’s good.

Breakfast Bars

From Nigella Express by Nigella Lawson

1 can of sweetened condensed milk (roughly 400g)
250g rolled oats
75g shredded coconut
100g dried cranberries
125g mixed seeds (sunflower, linseed, pumpkin, etc)
125g unsalted peanuts

Preheat oven to 130 C, and oil a 23x33cm baking tin or throwaway foil tin. Warm the condensed milk gently in a pan till it is more liquid than solid. Remove from heat and then add the rest of the ingredients, stirring carefully with a spatula so everything is covered. Spread into the tin, even out the surface, then bake for about an hour. Let cool for about 15 minutes then slice up. I swapped the expensive cranberries for a handful of currents lurking agedly in the pantry and left out the peanuts because I just didn’t have any.

Nigella reckons this slice gets better with age and I agree – it just sort of settles into a chewier, nuttier, caramellier bite the longer you leave them. Super easy and good to have on hand to assuage any dips in blood sugar.

For what it’s worth, and I realise there’s little more nauseating than couples who start talking in their own cutesy language, but we’ve ended up pronouncing the word slice, as in oaty slice, “slee-che”, inspired largely by Dr Leo Spaceman (pronounced spa-che-man) from 30 Rock. It’s funny how many words you can start manipulating in this way. Face, place, rice, ice…it’s like a Dr Seuss book here sometimes. Actually I have a really bad habit of mangling words when speaking casually. Such as ‘whatevs’ instead of ‘whatever’ which is a bad enough word in itself. I like to lengthen the ‘i’ in chicken so it rhymes with ‘liken’ and drop the end of ‘decision’ so it’s just ‘decish’ and frequently substitute the letter ‘j’ with a ‘y’ or an ‘h’…it’s all a bit obnoxious really but I like to think of it as taking a simple joy in linguistics. Look at this, I haven’t even been tagged with an internet meme and yet I’m revealing a bizarre fact about myself. Is that allowed?
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The big news in our lives right now is that Tim is walking around looking all medieval, as while I was in Auckland one of his teeth just crumbled on him like an uncooperative bundt cake. He didn’t tell me till six days later when we met up again as he couldn’t figure out how to explain it in a txt message. Fair enough, I guess. As per usual the dentists want him to mortgage the tooth against our house with his liver as bond (ooh, I’m typing all heavily just thinking about it, the prices dentists charge get me all fired up.) Because he couldn’t afford a root canal and I couldn’t even afford to support him for it, he instead paid a smaller (but still hefty) sum to have the tooth pulled altogether. It’s causing him no small amount of pain, and we’ve been eating very soft, liquidy dinners over the last couple of days – soup, long-simmered, falling apart stews, that sort of thing. Luckily it’s not an entirely visible tooth but nevertheless, I’d like to think he has the panache to pull off looking like a Renaissance-era minstrel.
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On Shuffle whilst I type:

Amen by Jolie Holland from Escondida. We were lucky enough to see her in a beautiful, intimate gig earlier this year. If the idea of Appalachian folksy blues appeals to you then you would do well to look her up. This particular song is simply stunning.

John The Revelator by Son House from The Roots of The White Stripes, a compilation of the original blues and folk songs that the White Stripes have covered either live or in albums. Sounds tacky as hell but it’s not – it’s a fantastic listen packed with gems both dust-covered and well known.

Why Can’t I Be Like The Boss a song cut from the 2006 Tom Kitt musical High Fidelity. I kinda love this song, especially when the Bruce Springsteen character really gets going.

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This blog title is bought to you by: Rufus Wainwright
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Next time: I got it in my head that ice cream flavoured with palm sugar and kaffir lime leaves would be pretty sassy. So I think I’m going to make that this weekend. Hopefully Tim’s teeth, or lack thereof, are up to it. And one day, I will make another bundt cake.

don’t dream it, be it

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Do you ever think up something new only to find out that this something already exists? Recently I was mildly amused by some of the artists on offer while flicking through the blues section at Slow Boat Records, and thought it would be kinda fun if there was some kind of “Blues Name Generator.” A website where you enter your name and it in turn spat out out something that would ostensibly be your blues artist name, something like Stumblin’ Tuscaloosa Mary or Three Fingered Lowell Pickering or Pork Cracklin’ McDooley. But yeah, the internet is already home to multiple blues name generators. Multiple. Shoulda known. Moving on.

It must be the nature of existing in the world we do though, right? There are millions and millions of people wandering round and it’s only inevitable that some of our ideas will overlap and occur without connection to each other. Sometimes it can be a positive thing though, this doubling up of concepts. It can act as a kind of reinforcement that the idea was a good thing in the first place. (Not that people can’t have collectively terrible ideas, where to start with examples…)

To wit: I had it in my head that lentils topped with a poached egg might be cool. This developed further when I thought about padding it out with what else was in my kitchen – butter-fried leeks, a sprinkling of almonds and feta… Then I completely second-guessed myself. Is lentils and egg together both freaky and depressing? At best? Leeks – are they still hip? Would the whole thing be too earthy and aggressively sulphuric? Would the brown, yellow and green shades call to mind a polyester blouse from the 70s instead of effortless culinary elegance?

Then, reading a copy of esteemed local publication the Listener, I found in Martin Bosley’s food column a recipe that more or less mirrored what I came up with. Since Mr Bosley himself is such an estimable and celebrated local foodsmith, like a passive fairy godmother saying “you shall go to the ball,” I gained from his similar idea the confidence to proceed with my own.

Not saying you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment. Not at all. But seriously. Lentils. Sometimes a little positive reinforcement helps. And this definitely leans more towards modern elegance than 70s polyester in food form. I should have had more faith in myself – after all, it seems these days you can drape a poached egg over practically anything and it suddenly becomes chic.

To have this happen in your own life, bring a large pan of water to the boil and once it is at a merry rolling bubble, pour in 150g brown lentils. (I added the rest of a near-empty packet of tiny stelline pasta for no other reason than it was annoying me) The lentils should cook through in about 20-25 minutes. Meanwhile, wash and thinly slice a leek. Melt a generous knob of butter in a pan and once it’s sizzling gently add the leeks and stir continuously till they collapse and become slightly caramelised. I added a splash of very good balsamic vinegar because I’m lucky enough to have some. Once the lentils have cooked through, drain them thoroughly and transfer them to the pan of soft, buttery leeks (now off-heat) and stir through. Finally, poach four free range eggs. Divide the lentils between two plates, place two eggs on each, and sprinkle with sliced almonds, feta cheese, and smoked paprika.

Serves 2.

This dish is pretty delightful. The softened, slightly fuzzy lentils against the silky egg yolk, the nutty bite of the almonds against the slippery leeks and sharp, creamy cheese all tastes brilliant together. The range of flavours and textures made it way more interesting to eat than it could initially sound. Thanks Martin Bosley for unwittingly providing the affirmation that I needed.

It’s not being precious or, I don’t know, elitist to say that you need really good free range eggs for this. It’s pretty simple. Surely Jamie Oliver has put out enough TV shows for this to be obvious now. Granted, laying eggs is what hens do, but it surely isn’t the most dignified way to make a living and I’m pretty sure these hens aren’t supposed to be laying eggs on command every single day while being underfed and cramped in a tiny cage with no room to move, alongside thousands of their similarly oppressed sisters like a nightmarish scene from a dystopian novel from the 1950s. Hens deserve better than that. Why, buying free range eggs is positively an action of female empowerment. Support your feathered sisterhood. I think I’m on to something here. Free range is a feminist issue. Unless it has already been written about by the lovely Bust magazine or somesuch… At the rate I’m going I wouldn’t really be surprised. Ooh I’ve thought of something. No. It already exists.
So there’s all that. But also, importantly, free range eggs taste comparitively amazing to the super cheap, sinister battery cage eggs. They really do. If you think otherwise, I’m afraid your opinion is wrong. Choose free range: not only are you getting a better tasting egg, you’re helping hens break through the glass ceiling! Or something.

This next dish comes without any such quasi-political fist-shaking attached to it. This was dinner a week or so ago.

Roasted Kumara with Roasted Beetroot Risotto. Seriously good stuff. I wrapped a large kumara and a large beetroot in tinfoil and roasted the pair for about an hour in a hot oven. I made a risotto of half arborio rice, half pearl barley (any excuse to use an unsexy grain, me) and once the vegetables were roasted I roughly chopped the beetroot and stirred it through the risotto. The kumara I cut in half and divided between two plates along with the risotto and sprinkled it with coriander seeds – my latest obsession, their dusky lemony flavour is delicious – and also actual coriander which I discovered quietly floundering in the fridge in dire need of use. It’s funny, I always feel like I need coriander but then whenever I buy it, it tends to get forgotten about.

A pretty fabulous dinner this was, and unlike the last dish, a Bollywood-bright plateful of gorgeous colour. The earthy sweetness of the beetroot and kumara, emphasised by the long roasting time, went really nicely together and I’ve always loved the texture of pearl barley which lends itself easily to a risotto.
Had a smashing time up in Auckland (I was up there for six days, hence the rolling tumbleweed/chirping crickets nature of the blog lately). I met some fantastic people and ventured into the oft-talked of ‘burb of Ponsonby, wherein I felt often felt pretty Wellington and occasionally…very rural. I was naively excited to patronise such classy places as SPQR and Prego, that I’d previously only read about in Cuisine magazine. You’re not in Otaua now, Laura.
Words can barely, barely express the joy that was Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin in concert. I read an adequate review of the night from the NZ Herald newspaper but I think what the author missed out on was how exciting it is that these two people are in New Zealand at all. This sort of thing just does not happen. Broadway stars don’t come here. Whoever at The Edge organised it, I salute you and hope this sets a prescedent for other performers that there is, in fact, an audience for them in New Zealand.
Anyway, words clouding issue here. They were both spectacular. For those of you who don’t know, I usually found it easiest to describe Mandy Patinkin to people as the guy who played “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die” in The Princess Bride. Patti LuPone probably graces a lot of peoples’ CD collections without them realising it – Wikipedia her. She should need no introduction but it’s not really our fault here in New Zealand, at the bottom of the world, that we’re not exposed to people like her very often. When she sang that intensely dynamic opening line, “I had a dream, a dream about you baby” from Everything’s Coming Up Roses, from the show Gypsy that she won a Tony for last year…it was surreal. And incredible. Tim was there with me, and Mum and Dad at the last minute bought cheaper rush tickets so it was nice to have people around to share the excitement with. I could go on about how fantastic they both were – wait, I already have – but it’s not really necessary, it kind of goes without saying. They were both so comfortable on stage and a serious joy to watch. And I got a photo afterwards with Mandy. Woohoo!

Also: saw It Might Get Loud, which only served to make Tim and I each fall more in love with Jack White (Meg is awesome too, but he was the focus of the film, so). Jimmy Page was a complete gem and of course the Edge is a talented guy. It’s not his problem that U2 isn’t really my thing, I’m sure. On Thursday night I saw a fab local band called Alex The Kid who play super fun music with a scientific bent; due to their name they’re a bit hard to google so why not click here for their Myspace? The following night, after It Might Get Loud we went to see Auckland rapper Tourettes, who I’ve been enamoured with for some time now. The opener was this guy called Tommy Ill, when he came onto the stage I totally judged him on his Where-the-wild-things-are style furry hat but he was adorable and fun and I’d easily pay money to see him again. Tourettes was just seriously fantastic, and I was beyond stoked that he did two spoken word segments during the gig. I can’t pretend I’m a huge listener of rap, I like a bit of De La Soul (specifically: Ooh), Wu Tang Clan and Beastie Boys, but it’s not really my first choice. So maybe that amplifies how much I like this guy’s stuff.

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On Shuffle Whilst I Type Feverishly

Farewell Ride, from Guero by Beck. It’s funny, I never think of myself as being a massive Beck fan but every time something of his comes on Shuffle I’m all, hmm, yeah, I like that.

La Ville Inconnue from L’Immortelle by Edith Piaf. She continues to amaze.

Thank You For Sending Me An Angel from More Songs About Buildings and Food by Talking Heads. Imagine if Talking Heads and Velvet Underground never existed. What on earth would cool people these days be influenced by?

Honourable mention: The chords G and C. Tim bought a guitar! We’re gonna be rockstars!

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Next time: I made my first bundt cake using my new silicone tin. I was predictably excited. The results were unfortunate. All the gritty details for you… Hopefully I’ll have something that actually worked to display as well since I’m pretty sure food blogs don’t blossom on fail. Hence why I didn’t even bold out the text in this segment.

bake this longing

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Enamoured with the kitchen in my new house, I have been making all these really interesting, healthy, beautiful dinners lately. Dishes with slow-revealing, layered flavours and more often than not featuring something really quite beautiful, like a whole cinnamon stick or a poached egg draped lovingly across the top, or couscous… But despite all this, I’ve decided to showcase a bit of baking today. It has been too, too long since I’ve baked. (At least ten days.) We’ve finally unpacked all our boxes and the bookshelf is upright and laden with goods and so help me I actually found myself looking almost flirtatiously at all my cookbooks leaning across the shelves. Clearly a sign that (a) the ‘going mad’ process has stepped up a notch, and (b) it was time to connect with some butter.
I bring you two fairly disparite recipes: one for very sober, bran-dense biscuits and the other for flamboyant Italian chocolate puffy meringue things. They both stand together under the broad umbrella of “cookie” and while equally delicious, couldn’t be more different in appearance or method.
Health Biscuits
This recipe is from the wildly successful, and justifiably so, New Zealand cookbook Ladies, A Plate by Alexa Johnston, although my recipe came via the September 2008 issue of Cuisine. Not what they were talking about in the film The September Issue, but beautiful and exciting nonetheless (to me at least.)
These biscuits are calm and unfancy but not in any way boring – they have a gorgeous crisp, snappish texture and are the ideal partner to a cup of tea. They keep well and the syrup used makes them seemingly taste better and better with age. And any recipe that uses this much butter while calling itself “Health biscuits” gets many a bonus point from me.
225g soft butter

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 egg

2 tablespoons malt or golden syrup (I used maple)

1 cup bran

1 cup wholemeal flour (I used plain)

1 cup coconut

1/2 cup rolled oats

1/2 cup sultanas (I used currants)

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1 small teaspoon baking powder

extra white flour

Set oven to 180 C/350 F, line two trays with baking paper.

Cream butter and sugar till light and fluffy. Add the egg and the syrup. Add all the rest of the ingredients and knead together adding extra white flour till a good stiff-soft biscuity dough is achieved.

Roll out sections of the dough pretty thin and slice into squares or rectangles, transferring to the baking trays with a spatula. They don’t spread much so put them close together. The recipe says to prick them with a fork; I totally forgot but I’m sure it helps. Bake for about 20 minutes, no longer, and they should be a lovely deep golden brown and smell heavenly. Cool on a rack and then store in a tin.

The original writer of the recipe suggests that these biscuits be served buttered; I suggest she is a genius.
The next baking adventure was one of a different nature, involving copious amounts of egg whites. And you know, egg whites are so the diva of the cooking world. The Barbra Streisand, the Mariah Carey, the Elizabeth Taylor. Egg whites are difficult to get hold of, and once you’ve managed to get some face time with them there’s still massive room for error. They’re all, “I only respond to a copper bowl. If there is any yolk present I’ll just refuse to work. Where is my assistant! Also, I want the kitchen repainted to match my eyes, and I will only work by candlelight. By that I mean candles imported from Belgium at great cost to you.” And it goes on.
That said, you can get some pretty exciting results from egg whites, once you’ve coaxed them out of their shell without disturbing the yolk, got them in the correct bowl, used the right utensil, and worked quickly so they don’t get huffy and deflate or separate. The following recipe is one such example. I saw it in my gorgeous Scotto family cookbook and was intrigued, and the time seemed right, as after making vanilla ice cream I had egg whites sitting in the fridge waiting to be used.
I kid you not, the quantities I specify below are half what the original recipe asked for.
Brutti Ma Buoni
This is Italian for “ugly but good.” I can think of many things that are ugly but good, but these meringue-like, matte-brown, light-as-air puffs are quite lovely in my eyes. So with these standards in mind I’d rather not be coolly appraised by an Italian any time soon. I wonder what their word is for “neither beautiful nor practical?” Or, “could stand to wash the cake batter out of her hair?”

 5 egg whites

400g icing sugar (or 1/2 pound powdered sugar – this is an American book after all)

1/2 cup good cocoa

1/2 cup walnuts or almonds, roughly chopped

Set the oven to 150 C/300 F. Measure out your cocoa and icing sugar. Place the egg whites in a large metal bowl and whisk continuously till foamy. Gradually, slowly, add the icing sugar, whisking till a stiff meringue is formed. I should warn you that my meringue was very thick and shiny by the end but not so stiff that it would stay still; it continued to form ribbons no matter how vigorously I whisked. To elaborate further, it takes quite a bit of shampoo to get meringue out of one’s hairline. Fold in the cocoa and nuts, and I added a bit of finely chopped good quality chocolate for good measure.
Line a tray with baking paper and measure out medium sized spoonfuls. Bake for 35 minutes. As I said I wasn’t sure if my mix was a total disaster but it worked beautifully so fear not. You can even make it in batches – the mixture that waited round for 35 minutes was in no way inferior. Carefully peel the cooked Brutti ma Buoni off the baking tray and leave to cool before eating.
These are wonderful, definitely worth the jumping through hoops that egg whites make you perform. Light but dense at the same time, crisp on the outside and melting on the inside, and, despite a wince-inducing amount of icing sugar, they’re not painfully sweet. Give them a go if you end up with some egg whites – they’re a step up on meringues and go well with a dark coffee at the end of the night.
On Saturday night Tim and I went to see Dimmer at bar Bodega. They were beautiful. Even though they started at 11:50pm. At night. According to Wikipedia the erstwhile Straitjacket Fits frontman Shayne Carter is pushing 45, (and looking fabulous still) so there you go. I’m clearly not very rock’n’roll. As I said though it was a wonderful, wonderful gig. Find their albums. But then I look on fishpond.co.nz and all their albums are currently unavailable or discontinued. Good one, fishpond.
Speaking of music, if you suspect that the words “Jack/Meg White have my babies” apply to you, then you may want to check out this preposterously interesting blog, Every Jack White Song. I’m notorious for being late to jump on a bandwagon so I hope, not just for the author’s sake but for my own smug-ity, that this becomes huge. It certainly deserves to, anyone who devotes so much time critically analysing Jack White songs should go far, no argument.
Still speaking of music, on Shuffle whilst I type:
You Are Not Real from the original cast recording of The Apple Tree. This song has a ridiculously moreish waltzing melody and a delightful, singalong chorus. Did you know that MASH‘s Alan Alda was in the original cast? However I find the eye-popping revival cast, namely the magnificently eyebrowed Brian D’arcy James, the magnificently moustachioed Marc Kudisch, and the generally magnificent Kristin Chenoweth even more exciting…
Idioteque from Kid A by Radiohead. I like this album better than OK Computer. There. I said it.
Next time: I totally go on business this week, but will endeavour gallantly to get in another blog post before I leave. Because I really have been making some nice, blog-worthy dinners lately…Among other things, I’ve made lentil salad with poached egg and feta, beetroot risotto with rice and barley, and roasted vegetables with Israeli couscous. That kind of thing.

let the bun shine in

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Tim whacked his knee on the bedframe yesterday (a common occurrence here, except I’m clumsier and shorter so my thighs are perpetually a fetching dappled shade of purple). I took advantage of his searing agony and got him to agree that we should go to dinner at La Bella Italia. An hour before we are due to leave the house, I remember that La Bella Italia is not open on the weekends. I don’t know if this is karma or just standard issue stupidity on my part. I call stupidity, as I forgot that La Bella Italia is only a Monday-Friday joint and Tim did seem keen in spite of himself. Either way I feel there is some kind of proverb emerging… “Ask not the significant-other in deep pain to take you out to dinner, you don’t need to pay $23 for a bowl of pasta to ‘really communicate’ with each other. The sharp teeth of karma bite ye once more!” But maybe not. I feel like it’s a recurrent theme of my life that I get really, really excited about something and then it doesn’t materialise. You’d think that now that I’m all grown and wise with 23 years under my belt I’d see these situations approaching and tamp myself down accordingly. Not so. I was really flipping disappointed last night that we couldn’t go to La Bella Italia. We ended up having chilaquiles and watching DVDs of 30 Rock and Dexter like every other night which was fun, but still. La Bella Italia. The food just…slays me.

A similar situation has been happening recently. Bearing in mind that we’re moving from up the hill in Kelburn down into the city centre, I said to Tim that we should have a coffee at Cafe Mode down the road and sample their seriously lush scones asap before we leave. Well we’ve been there seventeen thousand times in the last two weeks, and every single time they’ve been out of scones. Every single time. It’s like wanting a baby or something. I’ll start telling people that we’re “trying really hard” for a scone. There’s not a big window of opportunity – the clock is ticking! I need some kind of beeper to let me know when the cafe is scone-ulating!Sometimes random aspects of my existence can be kind of exhausting. But I will get my scones, damnit.

Okay, I’m pretty excited about this particular recipe so I’ll launch straight into it rather than try and offer some kind of esoteric lead-in paragraph. Do you recall, back in April I made hot cross buns only to inadvertently turn them into burnt offerings instead. And if you don’t recall, may this handy url jog your memory for you? Refusing to let this culinary snafu get me down, I sliced off the charred bits and froze the rest of the hot cross buns, relatively inedible as they were, to use down the line in a bread and butter pudding.

As we need to start using up any extraneous stuff lurking icily in our freezer, it occurred to me last week that it might be pertinent to make this bread and butter pudding already. I defrosted the hot cross buns (or cold cross buns if you will, hahahahaha) and while I was being practical, pulled out a massive slab of sheep that Tim’s parents sent us back to Wellington with a while back. I know mutton isn’t all that fashionable (which can only mean it’s due for a wildly fashionable comeback in restaurants) but it really does taste good, especially when the sheep had been fortunate enough to live a happy life on Tim’s parents’ farm, baa-ing merrily with verdant grass nuzzling its hoofs. The idea of having an old-timey roast and bread and butter pudding for a Sunday dinner was hugely pleasing to me.

Carne con carne. All I did to the mutton was put it in the oven for about 5 hours on a very low heat (around 160 C). That’s all. No spices, no oil, no tinfoil, no nothing. And it was beautifully tender, densely meaty and rich, and filled the whole house with the heavy perfume of roasted protein. I didn’t serve it with a gravy, since rendered sheep fat just isn’t that sexy. I did, however, bake some potatoes and other vegetables and it was an absolutely wonderful meal. A roast is so delightfully low-maintenance, you just bung it in the oven and that’s it. The next night I made us shepherd’s pie out of the leftovers, surprisingly quick when you don’t have to actually cook the meat. And really, really good.

But the bread and butter pudding. I swear I could hear angels chorusing when I took a bite. It was exquisite. Considering it started its life as tough, dry buns, it was a makeover of Hollywood film proportions. Actually there isn’t really a Hollywood movie that uses the makeover theme that I can compare this to, as in all those movies – Pretty Woman, The Princess Diaries, She’s All That, My Fair Lady, Miss Congeniality – the “ugly duckling” is always blatantly stunning. What is Hollywood trying to impart to us? That brunettes can never truly be happy unless their eyebrows are brutally waxed to pop music in a montage scene?

Um, anyway, what I’m trying to say is that to look at, these hot cross buns were seriously nothing special, no glimmer of Anne Hathaway or Sandra Bullock beauty within their overcooked exteriors. Because I made the recipe up totally on the fly, I wasn’t even sure if it would work or if I would end up just chalking it up on my list of things-I-got-disproportionately-excited-about-which-then-turned-to-FAIL. But it was an absolute minx of a pudding, the eggy custard giving the buns a soft, burnished, gloriously puffy texture. The spices – cinnamon, cardamom, ginger – were heavenly nestled against the warm, rich Marsala wine that I generously sloshed into the mix. The whole thing was just flipping marvelous. Gather round, my children. And listen:

Hot Cross Bun Bread and Butter Pudding

Obviously, you don’t need to go to the trouble of making your own buns and then overcooking them. Because we live in such a flagrantly heathenish age, I’m sure you can go down to your local supermarket and purchase hot cross buns at any time of year. So, buy some, allow them to go stale, and you’re good to go.

Ingredients:

6-8 shop-bought hot cross buns, allowed to go stale or 10-12 slightly burnt hot cross buns made to the recipe from Nigella Lawson’s Feast
50g very soft butter
75g brown sugar
3 eggs
500mls milk
Marsala wine

Heat up the milk and about 1/3 cup Marsala in a pan. I don’t want you to boil it, but it needs to be hot enough that you really wouldn’t enjoy the whole lot being thrown in your face. Slice up the buns and layer across a loaf tin. Beat the butter and sugar together, add the eggs and whip as though you were making a cake. Slowly whisk in the hot alcoholic milk, then pour this crazy mess over the buns. Let this sit for about 10 minutes to absorb the liquid somewhat, then bake at 170 C (roughly 330 F) for about 40 minutes. Eat. Ice cream would make an ideal partner, as would cream or just plain, cold milk.

Serves 4

Seriously compelling stuff. In hindsight, I probably could have cut off some more of the darkened bits of the buns, but truly this was less alarmingly carginogenic looking in real life as it is in this photo. I’ll just coolly pass it off as “ramshackle” and ignore any dissenting views.
 
On shuffle whilst I type:

Problems from Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols by The Sex Pistols

Stars and The Moon, a song by Jason Robert Brown sung by Julia Murney and OH MY GOSH it made a small compartment of my life quite complete to hear her sing this beautiful tune.

I Ran from the Original Cast Recording of Little Fish. I am pretty well addicted to this song. Itunes may not have actually ‘shuffled’ on to it every time if you know what I mean.

Next time: July is set to be pretty manic. So as yet, the next post is a mystery to us all. And yes, my title barely makes sense but I don’t care, I’m on a Hair kick right now. Never mind that it doesn’t make sense, the revival cast living it up on Broadway right now are absolutely stunning, listen to it enough and EVERYTHING will make sense.