Category: Vegetarian

I’ll Be Home For Christmas…

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But Tim won’t be. I have just returned from the cable car, where I left Tim who was on his way to get his bus to Palmerston North. I’m catching a flight in an hour to Auckland…I know it’s only a week, but why oh why is Palmerston North so far away from Waiuku? Anyway, no need to be doleful because Christmas is nearly here! Hoorah! Fa la la la la! Today is the 23rd of December, “Little Christmas Eve” as my brother and I call it, and this is my last post from Hadfield for the year – next time it will be from the computer at home, and possibly after Christmas.

We have been eating funny meals lately, lots of bits and pieces. We had some bananas growing rapidly decrepit in the fruit bowl, so I thought I’d better make something with them. I ended up making the Banana Muffins from Nigella’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess. I had previously bypassed this recipe because, well, it didn’t really interest me – banana muffins are nice and all, but nothing new, if you know what I mean. Well I should have known that Nige would be able to create something exciting from even the most commonplace thing. The muffins were wonderful – light, spongy, redolent with honey. There is only 2 tablespoons of honey, no actual sugar, only 30g butter (bugger all when shared between 12 cakes) no eggs and no milk. I almost thought there was a typo when I first scanned the page – what on earth held the mixture together, I don’t know, but again, they tasted beautiful.


Above: Nigella’s banana muffins. Eating is believing – these really are special.


Above: Last night’s dinner was effectively the last meal I was going to be cooking for Tim and I before we went our separate ways, and anyone who knows how I feel about cooking dinner will know that this is a big deal. I didn’t want to spend any more money on food, so I followed Nigella’s wonderful pasta recipe, which makes a feast out of bugger all (some flour and a couple of eggs.)

There is a running joke in the flat that Tim and I get very, very tense with each other while trying to wrangle the pasta maker, causing the other flatmates to get nervous at its very presence. Luckily we were mature enough to work out our differences last night, even when I accidentally left the cut pasta in a fast-congealing lump and we had to re-roll the whole lot again. The pasta machine was an impulse buy (as one does) but is worth the effort for the silky, tender, unbelievably delicious pasta it yields.


Above: I tossed the pasta in a little butter and freshly grated nutmeg, and roasted the last of whatever veges we had in the fridge to go with it. Delicious!


Above: Because we are so recklessly impulsive, Kieran, Tim and I decided to go out for breakfast this morning instead of packing. Which is, to be fair, a rather miserable job. We went to Epic again, and it was just as amazing as it was last time. From left – Kieran’s Eggs Montreal, my Vegan big breakfast (“The Herbivore”) and Tim’s Ranch-style cookup. I didn’t feel like anything too heavy, which is why I uncharacteristically went for the vegan feed. It was perfectly filling, the veges were delicious and the grainy bread it was served on was incredible. We sat outside in the sun and sipped spirulinas with our meals. Seriously – go there if you are in Wellington.

Now I have to run round and do that last minute panic thing, as you do, and say goodbye to the goldfish. Not sure when my next post will be but I’m sure everyone’s far too busy to be online anyway. My bags are laden with all the foodie gifts I’ve made for people – I hope like heck that I don’t get fined for overweight luggage at the airport. Merry Christmas Everyone!!

Let The Good Times Roll

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It is hard to contemplate (A) that it is exactly one week till Christmas and (B) that Outrageous Fortune has really finished- it just doesn’t feel like a Tuesday without it. Tim and I are getting up super early tomorrow to go Christmas shopping, so hopefully there is nice weather for it – there were massive wintry rainfalls today which was a bit worrisome.

I’ve been trying to make sure we eat relatively healthily this week. It doesn’t always work.

Above: I always thought that rice paper rolls were a bit like haircuts – best done by professionals. But the recipe in Nigella’s Forever Summer showed me that they were in fact, incredibly do-able. A little fiddly, yes, but nevertheless a simple, impressive, and healthy nibble. We even made them while camping last year, if that is any indication of their non-threateningness (should such a word exist.) I made very simple rolls on Sunday night – just grated carrot, sliced avocado and mint, no noodles or anything. I think they were in fact the nicest ones I have ever made. Once you get into a rhythm of dunking the rice paper, laying the filling on their softened surfaces, and rolling them up, there’s not much to it at all.
Above: The rice paper rolls were a precursor to our actual dinner, which consisted of roasted vegetables, boiled potatoes, and my usual fall-back when I have no idea what to cook for dinner but Tim wants some kind of meat component to the meal – mince spiced with cumin, cinnamon, etc. I added some cooked down red lentils to the mince, just to make it all the more sparklingly healthy, and grated in some carrot. All in all a model dinner…until…

Above: The real Canadian cake! Alicia’s friend sent her a box of Betty Crocker cake mix, complete with a TUB OF ICING and we made it after dinner. Although I am generally vehemently opposed to cakes made from boxes, I was intrigued to say the least. You might not be able to see it in the photo but everything on the packaging is charmingly translated into French as well as English. Anyway, we mixed this up and baked it while watching the Simpsons movie on DVD. How do I put this – the cake was appallingly fabulous. It had this spookily puffy, moist texture, like something not found in nature, and the icing tasted like butter. It also had little clumps of e-numbers, I mean sprinkles, clustered throughout. It tasted pretty amazing, but left me rolling around groaning afterwards, filled with too much sugar.

Above: This was last night’s dinner and I have to say, all self-congratulatory, that it was an absolute stonker of a feed. Tim and I went to New World Metro in town to grab some milk after work and ended up spontaneously buying some steak for dinner. I followed a recipe from the New Zealand cookbook, which basically involves frying it and deglazing the pan with sherry and cream. I used the sherry Mum gave me, and the little bit of cream that I had leftover from the pav. Well. It tasted INCREDIBLE, like restaurant food or something. The smell, when the sherry hits the hot pan and starts sizzling, is sensational.
To go with I made a salad of raw, sliced beetroot, blanched brocolli, and cashews, which was very fresh and crisp tasting, and roasted some potatoes. What a feast.

Above: Tonight I kept it fairly simple. Penne pasta, with avocado and roasted beetroot, capsicum, and courgette. I drizzled over a little of the basil oil that Mum and Dad got me when they went to Australia earlier this year, and it was the perfect foil for the mix of flavours on the plate. The beetroot inevitably stained the pasta, but I thought the combo looked rather festive.
Above: Well, I kept it simple until I started to make baked cheesecake, that is…Apparently we are having some kind of flat barbeque tomorrow, I say apparently because it is Emma that is organising it and I’m not quite sure on the particulars. As long as it doesn’t rain like it did today we should have a jolly old time. Either way I’m always up for feeding people and so volunteered to make the Chocolate Lime Cheesecake from Nigella Bites, using gluten free cookies for the base. It is largely a case of bunging all the ingredients in the processor, the difficult bit is baking it in a waterbath, but not much is difficult in the kitchen when you have Tim to lift things for you. It is cooling on the bench now and smells pretty amazing. I’ll let you know tomorrow night what the general consensus is. I’ve never made a cheesecake before so it’s all a bit exciting.
Alright, it’s now past midnight and I have to brave a shopping mall tomorrow, so I need my sleep.

Get Behind Me, Santa!

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Yes, I am excited about Christmas, but December seems to be going too fast. It’s difficult to focus on each day as it goes by, when you do that get up-go to work-come home-get up for work again thing too often. I realise this sounds horribly patronising coming from a student, but as Jamie Cullum said in his eponymous song, “blame it on my youth,” because uni in no way prepares you for the “real world.” I guess what I am try to say, in my bungling way, is that I don’t want to suddenly wake up and it’s Christmas and I have completely forgotten to enjoy the buildup. And go shopping.

By the way – and I can’t think of any better place to say it than here – it is one of my greatest regrets in life that I can’t sing. It’s not like something you can work for in a New Year’s Resolution kind of way – you either have it or you don’t. You may wonder why I begin my post like this, but I was singing loudly along to the Rent soundtrack today while doing the dishes and as I listened to myself caterwaul it struck me that no matter how much I love to sing, no one would ever hire me to star in a Broadway show. Sigh.

Anyway, enough grumbling! There is lots to catch up on! And I sent Tim on a mission to find tinsel after work, so I can feel more seasonal. The $2 Shop mini tree on top of the microwave just isn’t cutting it.
Above: Tomato Rice, a recipe from Nigella’s How To Eat, which I made for dinner the other night. This is a perfect example of Nigella’s genius. Seriously – please make it!
Tomato Rice (The title is thusly because I can’t decide if this is more of a soup or a risotto.)
  • Take a jar of tomato pasta sauce. Empty into a pot, then half fill the jar with water, put the lid on, give it a shake and tip the contents into a pot. Biff a teacup or so of long grain rice into the sauce, and add more water if there doesn’t seem to be enough liquid. Cook at a lowish heat for 20 or so minutes, stirring so it doesn’t stick, until the rice is cooked. Pa-dah!

It is warm, and comforting, and transports even the most low-rent jar of pasta sauce into something seriously delicious.

To go with this I made Nigella’s potato and onion hash, from Feast. It is basically cubed potato, fried till crispy with onion, topped with a fried egg. The perfect supper.

Above: Ahem. You don’t need me to point out that I’m not so good at cracking eggs into a pan. But still – it tasted great and is easy as to make. I recommend microwaving the potatoes for about 5 minutes first though, otherwise they take forever to cook in the pan.
Another dinner we had recently was a chicken curry. It was probably more Indian than Thai, despite the presence of a kaffir lime leaf. It’s funny, we hardly ever have chicken breasts – they are just so expensive, and thighs taste much better – but they are versatile. So, I thought that I’d have it made when I found some drastically reduced in price the other day (their best before date was looming.) But I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything to do with them. Anyway, I ended up making a kind of free-form curry. I fried an onion, and added cumin seeds, ground coriander, tumeric, garlic, and a spoonful of coconut cream, to make a kind of paste. To this I added the diced chicken, a tinful of chopped tomatoes, and a kaffir lime leaf. This simmered away and then I swirled in some more coconut cream and frozen beans before serving over rice. To be honest I was rather impressed with myself – it tasted really good!

Above: The curry bubbling away.

That night (Monday, by the way) I decided to make the Canadian Cake, from my great grandmother’s Aunt Daisy cookbook. This title amused me endlessly, I suppose because there is no explanation given for its nomenclature, and because we had a Canadian friend around who was equally amused (it doesn’t even have maple syrup in it!) I really had no excuse not to make it.
I made the whole thing in the food processor, which helped for the slightly unusual aspect of this cake – it had a whole orange biffed in it. I should have put the orange in sooner though, instead of at the end once the flour had been incorporated, as it took a while for the chopper blades to wear it down. Nonetheless, it was very easy to make, and despite the fact that we spontaneously decided to drink a lot of red wine on our courtyard outside I managed not to botch it up in any way.

Above: If you were wondering, this is what a Canadian Cake looks like. Tastes good too – a light, moist sponge with a distinct orange flavour and sultanas strewn throughout. Another winner from Aunt Daisy!

Last night’s dinner was something altogether different, the Spaghettini Al Sugo Crudo from Nigella’s Forever Summer. In layman’s terms, it is pasta with a sauce made from chopped tomatoes, steeped in olive oil and garlic. The only difficult thing about this recipe is actually finding decent inexpensive tomatoes. Luckily they are starting to fall in price – I can’t remember the last time Tim and I bought some – and we got a bushel of healthy looking ones at the vege market on Sunday. You have to peel them for this recipe but it’s really a doddle – just pour over boiling water and let them sit for a bit.

Above: This pasta is so delicious – very simple flavours, but elegant and summery. In a move that Aunt Daisy surely would have approved of, I used the water that I’d poured over the tomatoes to blanch the brocolli and cauliflour, and then used the same water to cook the pasta in. Could I be any more environmental right now?

Finally – I swear, this is the last thing – I made the Blackberry and Apple Kuchen from Nigella Bites. Nigella’s version is a sweetened slab of bread which has apple, blackberries, and crumble tumbled over before baking. I had found a punnet of blackberries at the local Four Square for $2.50, and so taken was I with how cheap they were that I had to buy them. This recipe is very easy, the dough is silkily easy to knead and roll out into its tin, and then all you have to do is dice the apple and make the cinnamony crumble. It’s a miracle that I didn’t muck it up somehow, as the final of Outrageous Fortune was starting when I put it in.

Above: Kuchen in the kitchen. This stuff is sooo good!

Am now off to make a list (and check it twice, I know) of ingredients for all the Christmas presents I’m going to be cooking over the next two weeks. Am also hoping that I get paid soon -eek!

“Nowtro.”

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“The costumes are retro now, but they weren’t retro then. They were ‘nowtro.'” (A Mighty Wind) (one of my favourite films.)

After a retro cooking challenge was issued by an online food forum I frequent (ooh, alliteration!) I had a think about what I consider to actually be retro food. There is the obvious stuff – cheese fondue (which I have made successfully, and yes, it is delicious) or prawn cocktail, Boef en Croute and black forest gateaux – the sort of thing one reads about in a Jilly Cooper novel. And I concluded that as a child of ’86, I was really too young to be thinking about foods as retro – the closest I can get is being snide about that period in the late nineties/early 2000’s, where if it wasn’t drowned in balsamic vinegar it was covered in sweet chilli sauce, and chicken, cranberry and brie was the height of haute cuisine.

So I decided to let what was in our cupboards decide for me, and ended up with two distinctly different ‘retro’ dishes – one being Ratatouille, a dish densely packed with vegetables and, I understand, a classic of the seventies. The other thing I made – little coffee flavoured cakes, inexplicably named “Crybabies,” came from an Aunt Daisy cookbook that belonged to my great grandmother. Its margins are scrawled with notes and it is a piece of family history – indeed, social history- which I am very happy to own. It’s not what I would necessarily call retro, since the book would have been published in the 30’s or 40’s, but still pleasingly seems to go with the notion of cooking from the past.


Above: Ratatouille! The recipe I found in Nigella’s seminal text, How To Eat. It is so easy to make and is, if one entertains friends this way inclined, both vegetarian and gluten free. I had bought most of the ingredients at the vege market, and the only thing I didn’t put in the eggplant-courguette-tomato mix was capsicum because they are really expensive at the moment. It turned out absolutely delicious, by the way, and was a breeze to make in the non-stick pan I got for a 21st birthday present from family friends. (More alliteration, brought to you by the letter F)


Above: The Crybabies (sounds like a bad, coat-tail riding sixties girl group, speaking of retro…) These little cakes were so delicious and easy to make, that I’m going to list the recipe. I halved the original, by the way, but if you have the patience and a ton of golden syrup- be my guest.

Crybabies

Mix together the following: 1/2 cup hot, very strong coffee, 125 g soft butter, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup golden syrup (or, 6 tablespoons if this helps) 1 t each ground ginger and nutmeg. Stir in enough plain flour till it has a thick, cake batter dropping consistency. Pour 1/2 a teaspoon vinegar over one teaspoon baking soda, let it foam up and stir thoroughly into the batter. Drop spoonfuls onto a baking tray and bake at 180 for 20-25 minutes.

These are so good – spicy and doughy and treacly and perfect for dipping into a hot drink, or, as we ate them, to accompany a good movie. In our case, the amazing animated film Spirited Away, which we watched last night.

So; that was my retro project. I have a small problem now – I am going to be cooking lots of presents for Christmas – if this makes sense – but I can’t blog about it because a large proportion of my readers (ie my family) are to be the recipients for said food-gifts and I don’t want to ruin the surprise. So, although I have a lot of exciting stuff planned for the rest of the fast-speeding away time before Christmas, you probably won’t hear about it!

"The Brain, The Brain, The Centre of The Chain."

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The title doesn’t have much to do with anything except for the fact that I am very excited, in a sniffly, boffinish way, to have discovered a Baby Sitters Club blog wherein a 20-something woman goes back and re-reads the books and then writes up all the glaring logistical errors and continuity flaws. The quote is taken from the BSC movie, something I had forgotten about until recently. Yesterday’s obsession is todays’ charmingly kitsch retro-pop-culture…so watch out. And by that, I mean that I have been on Trademe for BSC books. Shh!

We don’t have a heck of a lot of food in our cupboards at the moment. After the massive spree that was shopping for the Christmas dinner, I didn’t want to spend any more money on actual groceries. Let me tell you, I am looking forward to the vege market tomorrow.

Above: This here is the very last of the leftovers, and indeed, the last of most of our vegetables. I’m not so good at ‘making up’ salads, but I was proud of this concoction – the rest of the roast chicken, with roasted cauliflower and red peppers, avocado, and capers. It was so unbelievably delicious! We had this dumped on top of rice, and it was surprisingly filling (you know, for a salad.)

Above: Fish Pie. It is actually a kind of low-rent fish pie that I make a lot in Winter, and since the weather was jarringly cold and wet the other day I decided to have another go at it. Basically it is a can of tuna stirred into white sauce with anything else you have in the fridge – in my case, frozen peas and beans – and topped with breadcrumbs made from crushing toasted bread in your hands. It was inspired by a recipe in the NZ Cookbook, which uses a splash of sherry in the white sauce. I used the sherry Mum gave me recently – its first outing! – and the sauce smelled divine, all winey and warming and delicious. We had this with rice too, some Basmati that Mum sent us (and yes, it does taste a lot nicer than Budget Long Grain.)
Above: Lentil and Potato Pie…you may or may not know that I have a slight obsession with lentils, I think it’s just because they are so good for you that I find their very presence in my meal soothing. This was such an easy dish to make, and came from the NZ Cookbook also. Just layers of onion, potatoes, and brown lentils (I biffed a handful of red lentils in too just for kicks) and then pour in some stock and bake for an hour. I used the Knorr porcini stock cubes (that Nigella uses!) that my aunt brought back for me from Italy, which are so intensely savoury and almost fudgily dense with flavour that they make any bland combination of flavours taste wonderful. This was even better the next day, cold for breakfast, as unappetising as it sounds.
Above: I served the potato-lentil amalgam with mince. Just mince. Sometimes I try so hard to make mince exciting and different to what we had the night before (ie, Bobotie, anyone?) that I forget how nice it can be on it’s own, just fried with some onion and a splash of soy sauce (for Alison Holst Chic!) It reminds me of this time when I was much younger and Mum was away for the week somewhere. Dad cooked us mince and mashed potatoes, (and no doubt some veges too, knowing Dad) plain as anything, and suggested that the two were nice mixed together. It was so delicious I can remember this meal over ten years later. So, simple can be your friend.

I didn’t post last night (Mum, I’m talking to you, here) because of the stonkering fabulous Friday night line up on UKTV. After America’s Next Top Model on 3, there is the genius Green Wing on UKTV, followed by Little Britain, Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and Shameless. The only thing missing is the old Men Behaving Badly, which I always had a soft spot for. But for real, what a night! How is anyone supposed to move from the telly to go out and do Friday night-type things?
Anyway had better go and cobble together a meal before Tim gets home from making syrup-cinos, so…

Good Bive!

Above: I know, I said no more kittens and music and non-food stuff but…I didn’t mean it. Got this photo off a colleague of mine who was also at the game and could nay resist.

We’ll Meat Again

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“I don’t feel a house is a home until there are leftovers in the fridge, and Christmas leftovers are my all-time favourite.”

-Nigella Lawson

At times like these Nigella is highly reliable for a quote about food that doesn’t get eaten. She is possibly the only person I can pluck out of the air that fits this description. Having said that, and not surprisingly in a house of five voracious people, there really isn’t that much food left after The Christmas Dinner, so my visions of playing what Jade from ANTM 6 would have called “Leftover Lady” have been somewhat quashed. Nevertheless:

Above: Paprikasburgonya! Although it sounds as though it should be followed by the word Gesundheit, this is actually the name of what I made for Tim and I on Monday night to go with the rest of the sweet, sweet ham, and comes from my lovely Jewish Cooking for Pleasure book. And no, I didn’t pair the kosher with the pointedly non-kosher just to be funny…the opportunity merely presented itself when I discovered I had all the ingredients.

The title doesn’t lie: it was indeed a pleasure to make. Whole, boiled potatoes are cubed and fried till crisp, with capsicum and onions, sprinkled with paprika and swirled with sour cream. Although it sounds stodgy it tasted surprisingly light and used up the rest of the sour cream that went into the rugelach pastry. Pleasingly circular, no?

Last night I thought I’d better use up some of the chicken, which was stirred into penne pasta along with some of the cream cheese (it sort of melts into a sauce), peas, tomatoes, capers, feta and walnuts. Not sure what I was going for, but it certainly tasted alright.

Above: We ate this while watching Coro…which was really just something to occupy our time until Outrageous Fortune. We were all lulled into a soft fug of warm-fuzziness at Loretta being nice and sisterly to Pascalle, and at how adorable Van was being, when we were slapped in the face with Munter’s arrest! Not kind, wise Munter! Not to mention the inevitable fireworks that will ensue at Wolf’s return – oooh he makes me nervous…

I have the day off work today, which means I can have a leisurely breakfast rather than the usual hastily snatched feed before dashing off. Although breakfast isn’t usually my thing – I mean, Weet Bix, those overpriced sawdust-cakes, barely deserve the title of food, and who has time to make stacks of pancakes or blueberry waffles on weekdays, like the supermom in Sweet Valley High “who is often mistaken for the twins’ older sister.” I suppose this attitude stems somewhat from my years at boarding school, where the only options for breakfast were depressing cereal or cold toast with margarine, not butter. They fed us well there, it wasn’t some kind of Dickensian institution, but the breakfasts left a heck of a lot to be desired.

What a rant! Never realised how I felt about the first meal of the day, when all I was trying to say was that I had something nice to eat this morning.

Above: Toast with the most:Nine grain bread, toasted and spread with avocado, linseeds and Maldon sea salt. Worth getting out of bed for!
I have noticed that tons of food bloggers lately are cooking from La Lawson’s new book, Nigella Express. If I were a character in a comic book, there would be wiggly lines above my head surrounding the word COVET!! I had a quick look at it in a bookshop in town the other day, and it looks seriously gorgeous. There aren’t many things in this world that get me all anticipational like the idea of new Nigella material. But, it is also a lesson in restraint (she says, having cooked a million kilos of meat this week) in that I could probably afford to buy it but need to keep money in the bank for rent and bills and the like.
Also, while I am musing indulgently, you may have noticed a new addition to my Pet Sounds – Loveless, the album by My Bloody Valentine. I got this from my younger brother, a guy with relatively impeccable taste in music (he does like some rubbish stuff, but hey, I like Rent) This is my New. Favourite. Album. I listened to it on my iPod at work yesterday, and as soon as it was finished I listened to it again. It is seriously dreamy, and lush, and swirly, and shuffling, and all those other nice words, and slightly Cocteau Twins-esque, and a little difficult to listen to with all the layered guitar- I like music that doesn’t just hand it to you on a plate. I played it for Tim and he didn’t really like it. Now, I am always trying to get Tim to like stuff (haven’t succeeded yet with Rent, but finally managed to convince him that a life without Neil Young is a life wasted) but I had to admit it did sound a bit rough coming out of the computer. Then I tried listening to it this morning through these really good headphones that we have, and it sounded incredible. So, I have concluded that this is an album to listen to by yourself, with headphones, unless you have high class speakers, otherwise it will just sound jarringly messy.
By the way, I seriously apologise for the massively chunky paragraph above, I have tried a million times to enter a break between the separate points, but for some reason Blogger isn’t having a bar of it. It stings the eyes!

Everybody Must Get Sconed

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Before you ask, I didn’t make scones just so I could use that as a title. I am not like the oily Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, who stored up delicate compliments and witticisms in the hopes of being able to drop them in the conversation at some stage…Ah, who am I kidding.

Outrageous Fortune is about to start and I’m blatantly not going to finish this by 9:30 – I guess I will have to dash back in the ads. If Judd doesn’t come back, or worse, if Cheryl pashes Gary I wouldn’t even try reading any further because it probaby won’t be coherent.
There is much to be excited about this week: David Beckham, old Goldenballs himself, is gracing our fair shores and the entire Team Hadfield (plus some ring-ins) are going to see him and LA Galaxy playing the Phoenix team this Saturday. Then on Sunday is the annual Hadfield Christmas Dinner (well, we had one last year, which is as good as a tradition to us fickle youth.)
The menu will run thusly, and you will be finding out about all this later on in the week.
Dinner:
Fully Festive Ham (From Nigella’s Feast)
2 Roast Chickens
Roast potatoes, pumpkin (if I can find someone to chop it for me) and kumara
A big green salad
Boiled peas.
I may attempt bread sauce. Am also toying with the idea of making challah, but don’t want to end up a gibbering wreck and not enjoying myself at all.
Dessert:
Lemon Prosset
Platter of Chocolate Truffles, Rugelach (a Hanukkah treat also from Feast) and Malteaser traybake, a recipe I found on Nigella.com which I am quite wild to try out.
I have already booked my slab o’ piggy from the butcher and will be picking it up on Saturday morning. I need to do a big grocery shop though – especially since Tim and I are still living off what was in our cupboards before we went up home last week. Like Santa, I will be making a list, and checking it twice. Last night’s dinner, by the way, was a vegetable curry with brown rice – the curry consisted of cauliflour, carrot, and parsnip, and although it tasted good the parsnip gave it an odd sweetness.
Above: Vege curry, brown rice, retro plate! To beef it up (ironically), I added some baked cauliflour on the side – it is a Nigella suggestion to dust them with ground cumin, which I didn’t have, so I used some garam masala instead. I prefer cumin, but it is a fine substitution. I realise the word ‘cauliflour’ doesn’t exactly make one’s knees quiver with excitement, but this is a great way of cooking it.

Above: It wasn’t Salute to Cauliflour Day or anything…I just had a lot of the stuff. Just bake florets, dusted in cumin, in a hot oven for about 20 minutes.
The scones I made quickly, without a recipe in fact, not because of some smug sense of self-importance, but because I wanted it done quickly. I do realise that a recipe gives you more chance of success, but I’ve never been one to roll out the dough and stamp out rounds – I prefer it more free-form, which also means you don’t handle the dough so much.
Above: “They’ll scone you when you’re at the breakfast table…” Once baked, the warm scones were eaten while we watched Knocked Up on DVD, a movie which is not for the faint-hearted but seriously, intensely funny.

Outrageous Fortune update: Loretta, don’t give away your baby! Cheryl, don’t go near Gary! And once more, Judd! Come back! Only two more episodes till the season ends which means only two things: things will get even more fraught on the show, and there will be a black hole in our Tuesday evenings till Season 4 starts.

"Once in a while I return to the fold…

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…of people I call my own.” Tim and I have about 20 minutes before we are to jump on a bus to Rotorua for my cousin’s 21st, after which we are going up to my home for a spell. Didn’t get to sleep till 2am last night, because Ange was visiting and Team Hadfield was united once more! Nevermind – we will have alllll the time in the world to sleep on the bus. For anyone not from NZ – find a map, look at where Wellington is and then where Rotorua is – you will see what I mean.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I have been trying to cook purely from what’s in the cupboards, since we are going away. It’s actually a good excercise in restraint. Last night I made the Union Square Nuts from Nigella Bites, which were incredibly moreish and quite beautiful looking, all burnished in varying degrees of gold.


Above: these are maaaarvelous; mixed nuts tossed in a little butter, brown sugar, cayenne pepper, and rosemary before being toasted in the oven.

Keeping with the nutty theme, I made some satay sauce to be poured over brown rice, which was just too overwhelmingly brown to take a photo of – trust me, it didn’t look so good on film. All in all a very unhealthy dinner – turns out I was labouring under a misapprehension that nuts are good for you, apparently the little blighters are densely packed with pure unadulterated fat. How depressing! They are very filling though, Tim and I ended up staggering about in a nut-filled stupor for a while after.

Am very much looking forward to going home, I’m sure I’ll get a chance to cook dinner and put it up here – not to mention a few gratuitous photos of Rupert and Roger the cats.

Farewell to Feta, But Hopefully Not Jethro…

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Thought I’d better post before Outrageous Fortune as it finishes late and looks like a weepie episode tonight. Will Jethro or Van go to prison? I hope not! It has been raining here but it isn’t dark yet, and the quality of the light is bizarre, almost sepia toned, and all the trees around us in the valley have taken on a hallucinogenic green colour. Yes, it sounds odd. I tried taking a photo to show what I mean, but it didn’t come out so well. And yes, I do live in the city but also adjacent to a verdant valley – welcome to New Zealand.

Anyway, what we have been eating lately:


Above: Nigella’s Greekish Lamb Pasta from Forever Summer, with some of its ingredients behind. This is truly delicious, and comfortingly reminiscent of spag bol for Tim (okay, he’s not hard done by in the food stakes but I know he appreciates something recognisable.) It was not, however, the last of the scenery-chewing feta…


Above: Parsnip and Brocolli Soup, which was tonight’s dinner. I didn’t use a recipe for this, just sweated the veges for a bit (such an unpalatable term!) simmered them in some stock and whizzed it up in my food processor with the last chunk of feta. In hindsight I probably should have crumbled it over the soup, I don’t know what I was expecting but whizzed up the flavour just disappeared. Nevertheless the soup was lovely, but really would have benefited from a bucketload of cream. Sigh. Afterwards we had pasta dressed simply with butter and nutmeg so it’s most likely a good thing the soup was relatively austere.

I am by no means on a diet, but after breaking a nail trying on some jeans at a shop the other day I figure it wouldn’t hurt to up the veges and lessen the butter. I’m always reminded, whenever I have moments like these, of that scene from the Simpsons –

Homer: “Marge, how could you let me get so fat?”
Marge: “I’m not the one who put butter in your coffee!!”

Somehow I think Homer and I are kindred spirits.

On a different note, I got an A for my Writ paper (bask!) for which one of my assignments was to write a review of something in the media. I chose Nigella’s How To Eat, which got an A-!! She did not fail me – and more importantly, neither did my lecturer.

Update: Outrageous Fortune has just finished and Jethro is okay! Phew! It is HOSING down here, and the sky is erupting with thunder and lightening. It is nice to go to sleep to though. I used to worry when Tim did midnight shifts at McDonalds in weather like this…I hope it has stopped raining by 5.30am tomorrow when he has to go to work at Starbucks!

"To Huevos Rancheros, and Maya Angelou"

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Yes, I realise referencing Rent in the title of my blog, at the bottom of my blog, and in the latest post of my blog may seem a little excessive, but let me tell you, I didn’t just make Huevos Rancheros for dinner tonight because they appear in a song from this musical. It is the reason why I made it the first time though…

After our weekend of excess I felt like something quick, but packed full of vegetables. I first made Huevos Rancheros from a recipe in The Accidental Vegetarian, which turned out wonderfully, indeed, exactly like the sort of dish you might sing about while doing scissor-kicks on a tabletop in a show of defiance against the “yuppie scum.” (What better way?)

Tonight I made it without a recipe, as I think it is open to interpretation depending what you have in the fridge. My salsa was made of capsicum, onion, fennel, celery, and chili, all of which I simmered together. Once it looks hot enough, carefully break in a couple of eggs, clamp on a lid, and leave a couple of minutes till the hot sauce has cooked the eggs. Genius!

Above: You can’t actually see the softly poached egg under all that salsa but it’s there. I sprinkled chopped coriander over because I think the flavours suit. When we last had this, I made a batch of Nigella’s cornbread to go with which Tim and I ate, buttering each slice as we went and dipping it into the tomato-ey sauce. It was a fantastic, and natural combination but I was looking for something faster and less likely to be ending up buttered. I couldn’t find any rice, so used my usual fall-back-carb of bulghur wheat, which couldn’t be easier, if somewhat unusual paired with this!

From tomorrow I enter my Thoroughly Modern Millie phase as a working girl, however unlike Millie I am not working simply to find a husband. Our student loan payments end this week so from now on I’ll be working 9-5 (what a way to make a living) and paying things like rent (oh how we have come full circle tonight) solely from whatever I earn. I realise that for many, many people this is just life, but for a uni student it is a comparitively big step…