it’s only comfort, calling late

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I wrote this entire blog post last night and then it disappeared somehow, which more or less didn’t bother me since a life of breaking and losing things constantly does nothing if not really prepare you for a life of breaking and losing things constantly. The only unfortunate thing is I can’t exactly recapture the magic since I was writing it in a certain location: on the floor of a friend’s house, by a merrily humming heater, in a dimly lit room, with a beautiful dog wandering around and occasionally booping me. In this deleted blog post I talked about the nature of things that bring comfort – because for me, sitting on the floor in the dark next to a heat source that’s emitting white noise is literal serene heaven – and now that I’m rewriting it, I’m in a completely different place. I don’t know if I can recreate that comfort, but in a way all attempts at comforting yourself is just trying to artificially recreate comfort, yeah? Long story short: back your stuff up and press save often, people.  

Included in the thoughts I put forward was the idea of comfort food, which I write about on here often: in this case, it takes the form of gnocchi, a pasta that’s made from potatoes and therefore gives you carb-on-carb comfort, like sleeping with a thick blanket on top AND an electric blanket underneath at the same time. It’s the middle of winter, we’ve all got sniffles and iron deficiencies and debt, the very least we can do for ourselves is cook something warm and moderately stodgy. Normally gnocchi involves peeling and boiling and draining and mashing potatoes like someone with seven years of spare time and a non-tendency to burst into tears at the slightest provocation, but here I shorten the path from A to Carb by using instant mashed potato flakes, and m8888, they are a revelation. Sacrilegious? Sacrelicious! 

When fried in hot oil you end up with these little pillowy puffs that are golden and gratifyingly crispy on the outside and marshmallow-soft within, like the love child of a roast potato and a bowl of fettuccini. Fried brussels sprouts give sprightly green crunch, rosemary adds sex appeal (possibly highly niche sex appeal: I can’t help that I find the scent of fried or flamed rosemary deeply attractive) and pine nuts are just nice as hell. On top of which I made this for myself after having had literally forty minutes of sleep the previous night, so like, you got this. 

fast fried gnocchi with brussels sprouts, rosemary and pine nuts

a recipe by myself

  • one cup instant mashed potato flakes
  • half a cup (125ml) recently boiled water
  • one cup flour
  • a pinch of sea salt
  • a handful of brussels sprouts (idk, six?), halved lengthwise
  • a sprig of rosemary
  • two tablespoons of pine nuts
  • olive oil

Mix the potato flakes, boiling water, and salt together in a bowl, then stir in the flour and knead it a few times (just push the dough away and then pull it towards you and then push it away again, basically emotionally abuse it) till it forms a smooth-ish ball. Add a splash more water if it’s really not coming together. Roll it out into a square about half an inch thick, then slice horizontally and vertically in parallel lines to form a bunch of small rectangles. Roll the back of a fork over them, to press some indentations in, (sort of rolling them lengthwise as you do it) and then set aside.

Heat a good amount of oil – at least three tablespoons – in a large saucepan, and fry the brussels sprouts, cut side down, till they’re browned. Turn them over for a bit just to heat the other side, then remove them to your serving dish. Add some more oil if need be and then tip in the gnocchi, frying them on both sides till they’re golden and crisped. Remove them to the serving plate, and then finally, strip the sprig of rosemary of its leaves and throw them in the hot oil till they’re sizzling, and then finally briefly toast the pine nuts. Tip all of this on top of the gnocchi and sprouts, and then eat it. 

As someone with hardcore, spine clenching anxiety I’m always trying to keep abreast (ha) of the stuff that (I take back that “ha”, so immature) gives me some semblance of calm and staunches that feeling that the veins in your arms have slithered up your shoulder blades and wrapped themselves around your neck. Obviously nothing in particular is going to cure it, but if rain noises or whatever make me feel 9% calmer then that’s still 9% calmer than I was before. (Also, I retract the retracted “ha”, abreast is a funny word and I stand by it. I stand abreast with it, even.) 

Look for comfort where you can. The world kind of sucks. These gnocchi look like they’re all giving you a supportive fist bump, or at least that’s how it looks to me in the photo at the top of this post. And that’s something. 

Pavlov's Good Boys

Pavlov’s Good Boys

(Evidence that the tableau I described did happen.)

title from: Placebo, the name of one of my favourite bands and also one of my favourite effects, with their nasal goth hit Every You Every Me. 

music lately: 

Spook the Horses, Footfall. Deliciously heavy. 

Laura Lee Lovely, Hot Blood. I got to meet this absolutely beaut person for real recently after years of us exchanging heart emojis on each others instagram selfies, and she’s just released a dreamy banger of a tune. If you like music that makes you feel happy and sad at the same time, give it a hoon. 

next time: Whatever it is, I’m pressing save VIGOROUSLY the entire time I write it. 

and you’ve just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low

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My last blog post was kind of a downbuzz (an honest one, but like, never the damn less) so I’ve decided to come to you this time with some things that have made me proud of myself. Admittedly I’ve got one small initial burst of negativity: I’m SO annoyed that it’s taken me until now (it’s like what, the fortieth day of August or something?) to write a new blog post, but as with all things in my life, not achieving does not equal not trying. Which makes it all the more frustrating, naturally. But now that this brief flail is over, let’s move on to the positive things! All of which involve the cunning instincts of my tastebuds, in one way or another, so it’s all neatly related. 

First thing! Kicking off with some jaunty exclamation marks! If I go any harder with this punctuation it’ll be like I’m trying to convince myself of something!!! So, I was invited to attend a masterclass with Joy Spence, Master Blender of Appleton Estate in Jamaica. This was a sprightly and fascinating dissemination of information coupled with some truly superb rums, plus the singular delight of face time with the first woman in the world to occupy this role, who has been running things in her field for 20 years now. There were like, at least 30 of us there and we were given some unmarked bottles to make our own rum blend, to be judged by her sincerely distinguished palate, and I bloody won, didn’t I! Not only did I get a bottle of Appleton Estate 21 Year (which a surreptitious google search reveals to be hilariously expensive) I got it signed by her and I was all like, look I run a rum bar and I’m the first woman to manage it and this means so much to me as a bartender and as a woman, and she was extremely gracious and nice about it and it was just such a cool experience, you guys. 

I know lots of people say this but I’m really an extreme mix of confident and knee-shakingly uncertain of myself, which is why it was so lovely to have the blend that I instinctively put together be deemed as Good by someone so discerning. It would’ve been an amazing experience either way, but stuff like this just doesn’t happen to me all that often, you know? 

The next thing! Visa Wellington on a Plate has begun, and if you hear an ominous rumbling in the distance it’s the noise of every single restaurant and bar in town clamouring for the attention of the public in an extremely crowded environment (myself included.) This year stands out for me though because I submitted a cocktail to the programme on behalf of Motel (said rum bar that I run) and it got accepted and now it’s like…out there. People have come to my work to order a drink that I invented because they saw it published in the programme and it’s, I don’t know, it’s just such a big deal for me, in terms of backing myself and my cocktail-mixing abilities and instincts for flavour and so on. I never thought I’d get to this point! I literally kept the receipt from the first sale of the cocktail that I did because I’m so proud of myself. 

The cocktail, by the way, is called The Emotional Baggage Daiquiri and it has halloumi infused golden rum and Gunpowder rum and blackberry and flamed rosemary and it’s a whole lot but also extremely amazing, I’m pretty sure of that. And if you don’t understand the name of it then you’ve clearly never lived in Wellington. 

Finally, the recipe I’ve got for you today also has me kind of proud. You may have picked up from my last few blog posts that I’ve been overtired and underinspired. Well, the other night I was all overachieving in the field of insomnia, and as 6am approached and I was still awake and on the point of utter madness, all of a sudden I started thinking up recipe ideas. Really, really good ones. I think this is what is sometimes referred to as ADHD superpowers – basically it means that you suck at literally everything but every now and then you’ll be really intensely creative for about half an hour. What a trade off! Anyway I wrote down all the recipe ideas, including these mushrooms, stuffed with pine nuts and coriander seeds. I made them for myself and was thus not only replete with vegetable nutrients, I’d also given myself some content for this godforsaken blog, and done something nice for myself, by feeding myself.

My early morning insomnia-fuelled inspiration did not let me down, by the way – these mushrooms are SO delicious. Rich and juicy, with their flat rumps dusted in cornflour and roasted in hot olive oil till sticky and crispy, with the soft crunch of pine nuts and the lemony-earthy coriander seeds. Balsamic vinegar gives a mellow sweetness which balances the intense savoury umami (ooh, mami) of the mushrooms and the tahini, as well as providing the glue to stick all the stuffing to, adds to the richness of it all. Honestly, this is such a good dish and three mushrooms alone made for a satisfying lunch, but these would be great with a salad as a starter or multiplied to accompany some kind of roasted something. 

field mushrooms stuffed with tahini, garlic, pine nuts and coriander seeds

a recipe by myself

  • three large flat mushrooms
  • two tablespoons of tahini
  • two tablespoons of pine nuts
  • one tablespoon of coriander seeds
  • two garlic cloves
  • two tablespoons of cornflour
  • a pinch of ground cumin
  • olive oil
  • balsamic vinegar
  • sea salt

Set your oven to 220C/450F, pour a decent amount of olive oil into a small roasting tray – enough so that the base is completely slicked with about a millimetre of oil.  Place it in the oven to heat up while you deal with the mushrooms. 

Brush any dirt off the mushrooms and gently pull the stems out. Roughly chop said stems with the garlic cloves till they’re all uniformly small and like, chopped up. 

Mix the cornflour and cumin together and dunk the base of the mushrooms in it so they’re generously dusted in it. I just put the cornflour directly onto the paper bag that the mushrooms came in so I could bundle it up and bin it once I was done. 

Mix the tahini with two tablespoons of water to make a paste, then spread this thickly over the top of the mushrooms (as in, the spore-y cavity, the underside of the top, the bit where you’d expect to stuff a mushroom, idk, just look at the pictures) and divide the mushroom stem-garlic mixture between the three of them. Sprinkle over the coriander seeds and pine nuts and press everything into the tahini so it kind of glues it into place. 

Take the tray of hot oil out of the oven and place the mushrooms in it. Roast them for about 20 minutes or until the pine nuts are golden brown. Use a spatula or something to gently lever the mushrooms from the tray onto a plate, and carefully drain some of the olive oil into a small bowl. Mix the oil with the balsamic vinegar and sea salt and spoon it over the mushrooms. Garnish with fresh herbs if ya like. 

Every time I eat roasted mushrooms I’m all like, yes, this tastes of tramping in the woods and running my hands through damp soil and licking mighty oak trees and making a splendid cape out of autumn leaves and leading an army of truculent stags through the forest while butt naked, but really, don’t they taste mysteriously good? And how good are coriander seeds, little crunchy bursts of herbal intensity? And how damn expensive are pine nuts? Why is no one talking about this? 

So these are all things that I’m proud of myself for. I’m trying this thing where I try to not frame my life in such a negative way – self-deprecation included – so it’s a little new for me to be so openly supportive of myself, in fact it’s at the point where I’m like, literally proud of myself for being proud of myself at all. LIFE, huh. 

song title from: Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit. Don’t eat the brown acid.

music lately: 

Willow Smith, IDK. I believe the Smith kids are our future. 

Sneaky Feelings, Throwing Stones. The early eighties was a damn goldmine for New Zealand music, I swear. 

CC Dust, New Ways. File under “songs that make me emotional” (all songs ever are filed under that category, lol) 

next time: hopefully going to make more of my insomnia-recipes into delicious reality. 

call my name through the cream

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You know when someone puts something so succinctly and you’re like yes, this articulates something I didn’t even know I needed articulating but I feel so seen having absorbed these words? Yes? Well, yesterday I read a tweet that said “this year I kept feeling like ‘sorry I wasn’t the successful mental health recovery story you wanted'” and I was like…yes. Me. Earlier this year when I got my ADHD diagnosis I was all, my problems are solved! Ritalin helps everything! I’m great now! But in fact, to the surprise of absolutely no one except my wilfully naive self, one success does not equal a nonstop upwards trajectory. By which I mean, I’m in a weird place currently where all my resources are exhausted – my brain is tired, my body is tired, I’m pretty sure my skull is still tired from my wisdom tooth operation even though it was like, a week ago, and the hamster running in the treadmill of my mental health faculties is very, very tired. 

All I want to do is sleep for a thousand years, but also all I can do is sleep and it’s the most frustrating thing ever because I can’t get out of my own way – or bed – and get anything done that would help myself – like tidy my room or do yoga or whatever other vague self-care things you’re supposed to tick off on the road to wellbeing. As well as feeling hellaciously lethargic, my anxiety is scratching a sharp, bitten fingernail down the back of my spine more than ever. I’m really hoping I can bust out of this feeling of being suspended in a bowl of jelly, unable to claw my way through and find myself, because being tired is so tiring. 

As such I haven’t really cooked for myself in a while – I’m eating regularly, I just don’t have the energy to stand up and put one ingredient inside another. Fortunately my disinclination towards progress has its own shady rewards, as in, here’s one I prepared earlier! But totally missed the boat on blogging about because, like so many small tasks, I just didn’t. For all that I am coming across as TOTALLY MISERABLE the fact that I’m actually here writing this blog post and putting one foot in front of the other and one letter of the alphabet in front of the other is a definite achievement, so – dubiously – yay me. 

So let’s get to the less uncomfortable content! Panna cotta is an Italian dessert, comprised more or less of cream heated and set with gelatine – silky, yielding yet firm, immensely ploughable to the spoon, rich yet light, rather fancy yet childishly reminiscent of packet-born pudding. I had this idea that turmeric – as in the whole turmeric root, not the vivid yellow powdered stuff – would go well with vanilla – as in the excoriated black dust from an entire bean, not the essence in a bottle. I was pleasingly correct. It’s all very simple – just heat the vanilla and turmeric with the cream and throw in some sugar and gelatine – but has glorious results. The turmeric tints the cream a pale primrose colour and gives it a slight lemony-carroty freshness (I don’t know if that sounds awful but I promise you it’s good) and the vanilla seeds have a soft, almost chocolatey richness which makes it taste incredibly luxuriant and scented-candle-y. If you can’t get hold of whole turmeric root I imagine a small teaspoon of powdered stuff would work okay but it might be a bit intense and earthy – maybe change tack completely and instead use the grated zest of a lemon or grapefruit. 

Generally panna cotta is set in small moulds and then turned out but I was happy to cut out any additional stress by instead pouring it into cute receptacles and eating it straight from them. I recommend you do the same. 

turmeric and vanilla panna cotta

a recipe by myself

  • 300ml cream
  • three leaves of gelatine
  • three tablespoons of caster sugar
  • one vanilla bean
  • one knob/root (lol) of turmeric

Peel the turmeric roughly (I just use a sharp knife to slice the skin off) and roughly chop into pieces. Place it in a saucepan with the cream and then slide a knifepoint down the length of the vanilla bean and scrape, as best you can, the seeds of it into the cream, then just chuck the bean itself into the cream as well. 

Heat the cream gently till it’s juuuust starting to wobble on the surface. Meanwhile, soak the gelatine leaves in a bowl of cold water – they’ll turn translucent and soft after a minute or two. 

Remove the cream from the heat, and either strain it into a bowl or scoop out the vanilla bean and bits of turmeric. I prefer the latter because…less dishes. Scoop up the soft gelatine leaves – which will feel pretty delightful – and give them a squeeze to remove any clinging water before dropping them into the cream. Add the sugar and give it a stir to dissolve everything. 

Pour this mixture carefully between two waiting vessels of around 150ml each. Refrigerate them for a couple of hours and then they’re all yours to eat. 

Serves two. I ate both at once. 

Leaf gelatine is generally available in supermarkets these days and is much more fun to use than the traditional powdered stuff – it comes in sheets that look like old fashioned glass windows, which soften in cold water and then dissolve in the hot cream. As a result, the texture of this is incredible – so pillowy and satiny, like the feeling of raking your fingers through cool water as it slides across your tongue. 

Seriously though, I’m sorry to be so damn glum, it’s like, I’m fine, honestly, I’m just really really really tired in every possible way but also totally fine and don’t worry about me but also someone please pick me up and lay me down on a soft, warm loaf of bread and let me sleep until I finally feel rested, while taking care of all my responsibilities and maybe rewiring my brain while you’re at it, but also I’m fine? I mean, I wouldn’t say I’ve never been better, but I’ve definitely been worse! And I’ve written this blog post, which is absolutely something. And now to try and work on more somethings. 

Something!

Something!

title from: Soundgarden, Black Hole Sun. The unbelievable sadness about Chris Cornell aside, this song is magnificent and huge and was the first music video to truly terrify me. Like, for real, I’ve linked to a lyrics video here rather than the original one because I honestly still can’t watch it. 

music lately: 

Sky Ferreira, Everything Is Embarrassing. I mean! 

Kesha, Praying. I’m happy she’s back. 

next time: well I finally read some of a book about coping with ADHD that has been under my bed, untouched, since February. And I’ve been reading the food blogs and cookbooks that spur on my hunger for cooking the most. It’s something! 

hard to be soft, tough to be tender

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Ever feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself? Well, I went to sleep on Monday morning in a dentist chair and woke up having lost three wisdom teeth, to be specific. Two of which were total normies, straight up and down and toothy looking, and one massively challenging one (according to the dentist who was extremely proud of themselves for getting through it and I was like yeah, great, for you) whose roots appeared to be doing a leg pop like you see in romantic comedies where a man kisses a woman. Trust me to have a whimsical damn wisdom tooth.

Fittingly, when I got there I didn’t realise that I had to arrive half an hour early if I wanted to be sedated. Yes, there was a form that I signed, but I didn’t like, read it or anything. When it became clear that I was about to get hysterical, they just gave me the sedative anyway. Afterwards Kate heroically came and shuffled a dribbling and confused me out into the street, and Matt picked us up and drove us to her house. I was strapped into the backseat and immediately fell asleep, and next time they turned around to check on me I was keeled over sideways but still strapped in, my head lolling with every slight bump on the road and a trail of blood running out of my mouth. When I fiiiiinally came to, I found this story extremely amusing. Me, the zombie in the backseat, they in the front pretending everything is normal to anyone else passing by and indeed, to each other. 

Anyway, to the shock of no one, it’s been nonstop soft food since then. I was taken extremely good care of at Kate and Jason’s house – Matt bought me a jumbo pack of mini popsicles, I was made the most beautiful nourishing vegetable soup, I was given a gigantic tub of KFC potato and gravy all for myself, Ariel the cat repeatedly curled up on the bed with me while I worked my way through the ludicrous-even-for-PLL final season of Pretty Little Liars and Ghost the dog provided extremely good snugs, once he worked out that I was not going to be able to play our usual game of “I’ll chase you and then you chase me” and got over his subsequent passive-aggressive ennui. 

I’m back at work now, which is good because I missed it so much – however I’m still eating in a very tentative manner. And I’ve been literally having lucid dreams about crunchy, chewy food. So I was like, what can I make myself that will be so damn seductively delicious and wonderful that I won’t even care that the texture is aggressively uniform and uninterrupted by the slightest bit of, well, texture. 

Enter burrata: a cheese that’s extremely exciting even by cheese itself’s standards. I would describe it as a parcel, made of stretched out soft mozzarella, encasing fresh cream and cheese curd off-cuts. It’s a way of using up leftover bits and pieces during the cheese-making process but is entirely wonderful in its own right. I read the words “burrata mousse” briefly a few days back in some companion book to a blender (it’s a boring story, but I feel like giving credit where it’s due) and was like, whatever that is, I NEED TO MAKE IT. For contrast and vitamin content I decided to pair it with some bright orange butternut squash mash – you could of course use kumara or pumpkin instead but I love how easily butternut turns soft in the oven, and its gentle sweetness of flavour. 

You don’t have to have these things together by the way – if my tender mouth was more up for it I’d definitely serve the burrata mousse sprinkled with za’atar (a stunning mix of sumac, toasted sesame seeds and dried thyme) or red chilli flakes or some kind of toasted nut situation, and I’d spread it thickly on chewy flatbreads or crunchy sourdough or…anyway, I’ll stop there before I get too flustered. The mashed butternut of course can also be served as a side alongside literally anything. But as is, and considering my limited options, it was an immensely delicious time – the impossibly creamy, silky, ever-so-slightly tangy burrata mousse against the plush, mellow butternut. I would’ve licked the plate clean if it didn’t hurt to open my mouth that wide. 

And of course, both components are very, very easy to make.  

butternut mash, nutmeg, burrata mousse, olive oil

a recipe by myself. Makes enough for one with solid leftovers. 

  • half a good sized butternut squash
  • butter (or extra virgin olive oil)
  • sea salt
  • whole nutmeg
  • one tub of burrata
  • 200g mascarpone
  • one lime
  • extra virgin olive oil

Set your oven to 240C/450F. Wrap the butternut snugly in tinfoil and place it, cut side up, in the oven and just leave it there for about 40 minutes, or until you can stick a knife in through the tinfoil and it just slides right in without the slightest bit of resistance. 

Meanwhile, drain the burrata and pop it in a high speed blender, or a food processor (just be prepared to blend it a bit longer if you’re using the latter.) Spoon in the mascarpone and squeeze in the juice of the lime. Blitz the heck out of it until it’s a smooth, smooth, creamy and thick mixture. Add plenty of sea salt, and spatula into a container or whatever and refrigerate till you need it. 

Carefully lift the tinfoil from the cut side of the butternut and scoop out the waiting orange flesh – I just spooned it directly into a container so that I could store anything I wasn’t going to be eating right away – and mash in as much butter as you like with the back of a fork. Or, if you want to make it dairy free, use extra virgin olive oil. Grate over a smattering of fresh nutmeg. I didn’t want to waste any of the butternut so scooped up all the stuff clinging to the seeds and pushed them through a sieve, which created some extra cleaning up but – minimal waste. Once you’re quite sure you’ve fleeced the butternut of its goods, just wrap up the remaining shell and seeds in the tinfoil and bin the lot. Easy! No dishes. 

Spread as much butternut as you fancy and as much mousse as you fancy onto a plate, or spoon them into a bowl, or WHATEVER, and sprinkle over more sea salt. Drizzle olive oil across the mousse, and then tuck in.  

By the way, if you can’t find burrata – it’s usually at Moore Wilson but otherwise hard to come by – try a block of soft feta or some buffalo mozzarella for a similar effect. Similarly, feel free to use lemon juice instead of lime in the mousse – I just wanted that extreme acid sharpness puncturing the luscious richness of the mascarpone and cheese. Oh, and! I took the leftover butternut squash to work and thinned it down with a little stock and cream in a saucepan and it made an excellent, near-instant, soup. Which is of course, one of the other three things I can eat. 

My teeth were not all I lost this week! In a series of events extremely typical of me, I broke the SD card for my camera. So on the day that I made this recipe – literally while the butternut was in the oven – I dashed out and bought myself a new card. I took nice photos. I then put the SD card in my pocket and took my laptop out to go blog at a cafe somewhere. The SD card had disappeared. Luckily I’d taken some photos on my phone, which are what you see here, but like, agh. This is so extremely par for the course for me – pick something up, it disappears into thin air – when I was a teenager and still kept a diary I had a running list of things that I’d misplaced/made disappear somehow, because that’s how often it happened. Unfortunately doctors can’t prescribe antibiotics for that affliction. 

So in lieu of further photos of my food, please enjoy instead this photo of Ariel the cat being a total Vermeer babe in the sunlight, shortly before sitting directly on top of my laptop keyboard in the middle of the penultimate episode of Pretty Little Liars and acting extremely confused as to why I wanted her to move.

the girl with the purrrrl earring

the girl with the purrrrl earring

title from: Metric, with their me_IRL-as-hell titled song, Help I’m Alive.

music lately: 

The Mojo Brothers, Killing Floor. Not as far as I can tell, a cover of the Howlin’ Wolf song, although their vibes are not dissimilar. Anyway this song was playing during a scene in Pretty Little Liars which took place in a diner and was so weird and awesomely Twin Peaksy and no matter how stupid this show became and how many harmful tropes it doubled down on instead of skewering, I can’t deny that it’s been a huge part of my life for the last few years since I first discovered it. Also, good song. 

Underworld, Rez. If ten million fireflies were at ten million typewriters there’s a good chance they’d end up writing this song. 

next time: I really hope I’ll be able to have more of a variety of textures by the next time I post. At this point I’m craving crunchy food so much that it’ll probably just be like, here’s a recipe for a bowl of gravel for you. 

this is no corn-fed day it’s gloomy blue and cold

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Unfortunately my one personality trait right now is “teeth” (wait: “tired bartender” is the sole other facet to this diamond) so this salad that I made was inevitably tooth-related: devised in anticipation of my wisdom teeth being from my mouth untimely ripp’d next Monday (that’s like, a reference to MacBeth there). I know all I’ll be consuming next week is broth, pureed foods, painkillers and my own drool, so I wanted to make myself something crunchy, salty, spicy and acidic – everything my tender mouth will be shunning mere days from now. 

That vision ended up taking the form of this blackened corn and tortilla salad – crunchy toasted peanuts, juicy charred corn, shards of tortilla, crisp cos lettuce and plenty of sourness and heat in the form of lime, chilli, salt and cumin. Plus some fairly blameless cherry tomatoes. 

Being my generally idiotic heedless self it will come as no surprise when I tell you that I broke my SD card for my camera somehow and so had to instead take the photos of this salad on my phone (other things I’ve broken this week: my Laura necklace, a large glass jar of hot sugar syrup, the will and resilience of everyone around me) so as such the effect is a liiiittle more grainy than I’d like. Also my flatmate of the past year moved out and had the temerity to take his own property with him so I no longer have his immensely sexy slab of a coffee table to take my photos on, and as the next logical place for me to eat is in bed that’s why everything here is pictured against my duvet, giving it something of an eighties glamour shot vibe.

Fortunately I displayed competency in one area at least: this salad is fantastically delicious. The corn is deliciously sweet and charred and chewy, and the textures of the peanuts, fried tortilla, and lettuce – each crunchy in their own way, the peanuts all soft and (duh) nutty, the tortillas crisp and oily, the lettuce super fresh – is extremely delightful. The chilli and lime gives it a great big high kick of flavour and on top of that it couldn’t be easier to make. By the way you really only need one large tortilla but they taste so good when they’re all fried up that I allowed an extra one to account for you eating them all as you make the salad. Maybe you’re more restrained than me, who knows. That aside, the quantities of each ingredient are pretty much up to you and your personal tastes. If avocados are not housing-market-preventatively-expensive in your neighbourhood they they would be a delicious addition and there’s also nothing stopping you adding some meat, but as it is it’s pretty perfect. 

blackened corn and tortilla salad

a recipe by myself

  • one small cos lettuce
  • two flour or corn tortillas
  • a handful of peanuts
  • one punnet cherry tomatoes
  • two cups of frozen corn kernels
  • olive oil
  • a teaspoon or so of chilli flakes
  • a pinch of cumin
  • sea salt
  • a lime

Heat up a large frying pan over a high heat. Toast the peanuts till they’re lightly browned and tip them into a big mixing bowl. Heat up some butter or olive oil and tear the tortillas into small pieces and fry them in the hot pan till they’re crisp and golden. Add them to the bowl with the peanuts. Next, tip the corn into the pan and let it sit without stirring too much so that it gets slightly charred and browned as it cooks.

While this is happening, wash and tear up the lettuce leaves and add them, with the cherry tomatoes, into the mixing bowl. Once the corn is where it needs to be tip that into the mixing bowl. Squeeze in the juice of a lime, add the chilli flakes and cumin, some sea salt and plenty of olive oil. Give it a good stir and then divide between two bowls. Sprinkle over some more cumin and chilli if ya like. 

This honestly makes what I would consider to be two servings, but I ate the entirety in bed (as pictured!) before falling immediately into a deep sleep, I’m not sure if that was related to the ingredients or more to my generally being tired, but I can heartily recommend the two activities together. 

As I said in the last blog post, I’m actually really nervous about getting these teeth out – something about the sedation process and the potential recovery time and oh, the IMMENSE PAIN and BRUTAL PRICE TAG but I am going to be taken under the wing of my dear friends Kate and Jason who will be looking after me and making sure I don’t like, run naked through the town while coming out of sedation (or indeed, at any time, no one should rule it out completely.)

title from: Say Anything, Night’s Song. Praise the night, the only time I feel alright.  

music lately:

One Direction, Teenage Dirtbag. Oh, these simpler times! Their cover of this song is so perfect, and the way Harry Styles is all “Her name is Noelle” at the start does funny things to my heart. 

Oh Land, Sleepy Town. This song is so dreamy and beautiful and it’s not on Spotify which is ruining my entire life! 

Chance the Rapper, No Problem. Such! A! Bop! 

next time: I probably won’t get the opportunity to write till after my tooth-times so it’ll be wall to wall soft foods. 

do you love me ’cause i can mash potato?

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So I spent all of last week extremely bedridden and in unreal amounts of pain while recovering from my wisdom teeth coming through with all the haste and frantic energy of a character entering the room from stage left in a farcical French play about a dinner party gone lightly awry. I’m a very like, impulsive type idiot and so it was almost equally as painful to have to go from living in the moment to living in the bed, and on top of that food bearing any kind of texture whatsoever was out of the question as I could hardly open my mouth and the slightest attempt at chewing caused dagger-stabs of pain right into the very core of my gums. My one solace was that the Tramadol I’d been prescribed, while it didn’t do much whatsoever for the pain, was an extremely good time.  

And so, that’s why I’m blogging about mashed potato. Not because I invented it, or think you don’t know how to make it, and not even because I’m labouring under some kind of delusion that my recipe below is particularly revolutionary in any way, but: it’s what I ate last week. My other options include “half a container of yoghurt, consumed tearfully” and “a bowl of strawberry jelly that had ‘serves four’ on the package”. 

I think I absorbed this method from Nigella Lawson, which makes sense since for most of the week all I could handle concentrating on was her old TV series on loop on youtube – the pop culture equivalent of mashed potato (and pop culture consumption is almost as important as food consumption to me.) It’s very simple – you just throw whole potatoes in a hot oven and bake them, then scoop out the fluffy interiors and fork through as much cream and butter as you wish. Like seriously, I’m not even giving you quantities in this recipe because only you know how much you both desire and can handle. I much prefer this method to boiling the potatoes on the stove top, as there’s no peeling or waiting for the water to boil or draining and also cooking the potatoes without moisture results in, I believe, a far superior mash. 

The only thing I really feel strongly about is that your mashed potato should have some freshly ground nutmeg on it – it gives such a warm, cosy note of spice in the same way cinnamon does on top of, say, porridge, just a tiny hint of subtle depth against the blanketing blandness of the potato. Also my specification for six potatoes is just a guess, really – if you use more potatoes or bigger ones you’ll get more mash, that’s about all there is to it.  

mashed potatoes

  • around six medium sized floury potatoes
  • cream
  • butter
  • sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • nutmeg

Set your oven to 220C/450F, and scrub the potatoes if need be, but don’t peel them. Place them directly onto the rack in the oven – like, not on a baking tray or anything – and let them sit for around half an hour or until they’re extremely, 100% tender when you pierce them with a knife. 

Halve them lengthwise and scoop the soft flesh out into a bowl. Squash it all about with a fork, stirring in as much butter and cream as you like, but if you’re completely unsure start with a few tablespoons of the former and about 20g of the latter. Obviously I added more. If you heat it up it’ll be easier to add in and won’t lower the temperature of the potato. 

Sprinkle over plenty of salt, pepper, and a little freshly grated nutmeg. Dive in. 

Don’t throw out the be-scooped potato skins – if you sprinkle them with grated cheese and I don’t know, some smoked paprika or something and blast them under the grill till the cheese is bubbling you are in for a very good time. Unfortunately, as previously discussed, anything even remotely textural was off limits for me so I tearfully and apologetically hoofed them into the bin. 

The mashed potato itself though: good god. So soft. Eating it is like the feeling of lying on the carpet and being warmed by sun streaming through the window. Like turning off your alarm clock and being wrapped in a thick duvet. Like coming in from the cold and turning on a fan heater and just shutting your eyes and listening to the gentle humming noise it makes. Cream and butter are a simple conduit to happiness (presuming you like, enjoy the taste of them) and every last granule of potato seems to swell fatly with the richness of these ingredients. Salt and the aforementioned nutmeg stops everything from being too plain, and it’s all just very calming and delicious. I ate the whole bowl in bed and then fell asleep. 

Thanks to the magic of antibiotics and bedrest I eventually improved, which means I’ve been back at work this week and I could not be happier about it. My first shift back I honestly got the stupidest grin on my face while making my first cocktail of the night, and all that aside it’s a joy to just be around people again. The errant teeth are going to be pulled out on July 3 though, so we’re not entirely out of the woods yet. My teeth have been so extremely well behaved my whole entire life so I’ve never had any real dentist experiences before – and I apologised to my dentist for being such a cliche but – I’m super nervous about it. So, I’ll probably be revisiting this recipe again many times during that week. Till then, gonna eat so many crispy chewy foods while I can. It’s crunch time! 

title from: Liz Phair, Easy Target. It’s grumbly and whiny, like me! 

music lately: 

Lorde, Writer in the Dark. WHAT IS SHE PLAYING AT ??? How DARE (I’m obsessed with this album if you can’t tell.) 

Lash, Take Me Away. This song is from 2001 or something and it really feels like it production-wise, this band went absolutely nowhere but this is such a bop still, like, that chorus!! 

Polly Scattergood, Wanderlust. This song is so extremely everything I look for in pop music – fizzy and dreamy and a little melancholic. 

next time: something aggressively crunchy before settling back into post-operation pain-fuelled soft foods!!

yes in a dream all my teeth fell out

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I have this weird half-memory of a story on cassette tape that my teacher would sometimes play to the class when I was like, eight years old, about some kids who were cursed or something and they forgot how to sing Happy Birthday and when they tried to it came out as this disturbing, discordant mumble. (I tried googling the premise and can’t find anything about it but I swear I didn’t make this up.) Anyway, that’s kind of how I feel about blogging right now. I’ve apparently forgotten how. All I’ve been doing, and I mean all, is just working and sleeping and working and sleeping and obsessively binge-watching Frasier, and every time I’ve been like “right you idiot time to do some goddamn blogging, that thing that you love” I just sit there and stare at the screen and everything that comes out is all stilted and mumbly.  

AND THEN. On Monday night I hauled myself out of bed and forced myself to write, and managed about half of this very blog post, before a WISDOM TOOTH of all things decided to roundhouse kick its way through the left side of my mouth, causing indescribable pain (and like, my idea of fun is describing stuff) not to mention a deeply vanity-denting swelling of the left cheek and an enormous sense of helpless neediness. 

Seriously, I did not expect this at all. Firstly, my teeth are so well behaved, and secondly, wisdom teeth were supposed to be an issue like, a decade ago. All I can surmise is that my extreme young-at-heart nature also extends to being young-at-mouth, either way it’s monumentally inconvenient and painful and horrible. I ended up going to hospital at 4am on Tuesday night because I was deranged from the pain, followed by a dentist visit where the dentist was astounded at the speed with which my wisdom tooth barged in unannounced (and I was like “this is so Aries of me.) It’s very likely I’ll have to have the unwelcome guest to my mouth ripped out and I’m extremely nervous about it, but till then I’m hepped up on a grunty cocktail of antibiotics and Tramadol, and have been a charming mixture of intensely dozy and high as a kite all day. I decided that while I’m vaguely lucid I might as well try to finish this stupid blog post, since the stiltedness of my creativity has been a major cause of anxiety to me and if I can both distract my brain from the pain with writing and also tick something off my to-do list I might feel slightly better about how much time this vexatious tooth is wasting. 

So uh, last week I made this granola stuff, and it is really good and I’m going to attempt to talk about it here in the manner of, you know, a food blog. (Imagine several elaborate air quote gestures inserted at various points in that sentence.) 

By “granola” I really mean a collection of toasted grains and seeds and whatnot masquerading as breakfast cereal. It’s crunchy and nutty and puffy and really weirdly delicious and filling but also extremely light-textured, with not a single oat in sight: instead I round it out with toasted buckwheat which is super nutty and crunchy, and puffed amaranth, which is just devastatingly adorable – when you put the granules of it over a high heat it puffs up like the tiniest popcorn, like popcorn for bees, like, I don’t know why the sight of tiny miniature stuff doing its best makes me emotional, it’s not even the Tramadol that’s making me get worked up about this, but all we can do, collectively across humankind, is try to accept it. Maple syrup glues it together – an expensive ingredient, hence the “lux” of the granola’s name – and makes it pleasingly clumpy and sweet, and the almonds and sesame seeds give further nutty toasty flavour and crunch. Plus simply knowing about all the superfood-on-superfood action happening in the ingredients is extremely good for the soul, and presumably the bod also. 

Also please note that while the recipe looks complicated you’re honestly just toasting all the individual ingredients in a pan over a high heat, that’s like, it, I just for some reason cannot explain it in any kind of succinct manner. 

lux maple granola

a recipe by myself

  • one cup amaranth
  • one cup quinoa
  • one cup buckwheat
  • one cup sesame seeds
  • one cup almonds
  • four tablespoons maple syrup
  • pinch of sea salt

Get yourself a large, ideally nonstick frying pan, and a large bowl. Put the pan on a high heat, and then pour in a few tablespoons of the amaranth. After a few seconds it should start popping and puffing up. Keep it moving so it doesn’t burn, and don’t worry if all of it doesn’t puff up – as long as most of it does, you’re all good. Tip it into the bowl and carry on with the rest of the amaranth. Then, tip in some of the quinoa – some of the grains might pop a bit but your aim here is just to gently toast the grains. Once they’re sufficiently browned, tip them into the bowl with the amaranth and continue to toast the rest. Then, toast the buckwheat grains until they smell nutty and are lightly browned, followed by the sesame seeds – which should brown really quickly – and finally the almonds. Roughly chop up the toasted almonds before tipping them into the bowl as well. Finally, add the salt and pour in the maple syrup, give it a good stir and then transfer into an airtight jar or container.  

I ate it, as you can see from the pictures, layered up with really thick natural yoghurt and freeze-dried raspberry powder, which was a spectacularly good way to enjoy it. I’m just someone who happens to have a lot of freeze-dried powdered fruits around for some reason, but it would be also wonderful in a bowl drenched in your preferred kind of milk, or just served alongside a heaping spoonful of yoghurt with whatever fruit and accoutrements you fancy. You could also layer it up all cute like I did but use IRL fruit or something – jarred passionfruit syrup or tinned peaches would also be delightful here. You’ve got options, is what I’m saying. 

bed granola

bed granola

All I’ve done today, aside from thrashing about in pain and having extremely dribbly naps, is watch Nigella Lawson re-runs, possibly the most comforting TV I can imagine in these difficult-of-tooth times. At one point I literally dreamed that she put her cool hand on my hot forehead and it was honestly almost worth the entire ordeal just for that dream; but also watching her cooking reminds me that this is what I love to do and it’s something I can do and will do. I’m really hoping that once this useless fang heals up that I’ll be all It’s A Wonderful Life and be completely reinvigorated to write, like, vigorously, but even just feeling something other than nonstop pain would be a real kick right now. 

Anyway, I’m feeling the Tramadol pulling me downwards which means it’s time for me to snooze and dribble lavishly on my pillowcase again, but I’m glad I got this done and also I can’t wait for my stupid face to get better so that I can eat the rest of this delicious granola. Currently the simple act of chewing causes black-out levels of pain! Good times. 

title from: The Knife, Silent Shout. I love the hook in this song, it’s like the sensation of lemonade bubbles rising and falling in musical form. 

music lately:

Anthems for a Seventeen-Year Old Girl, Broken Social Scene. I CANNOT STOP LISTENING TO THIS SONG. The repetitiveness, especially about halfway through when it really kicks in, is so hypnotic and melancholy. I love it. 

Animal Nitrate, Suede. I really like this song. 

The Avalanche, Sufjan Stevens. This is the only song of this that I like and it’s not on Spotify and it’s ruining my life! I also have not listened to any other songs by him. 

next time: let us hope that I have my ability to write back and also my ability to have teeth in my mouth in a chill manner. 

bruises on the fruit, tender age in bloom

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It has taken me what feels like forever to get this blog post done and it’s not because I’ve been doing anything exciting by any means, I’ve just been busy with work and overtired and rinsing and repeating. That’s a lie, I’m not even rinsing. Just grubbily unproductive. But here I am and I’m determined to make this happen because, if nothing else, the recipe I’m talking about involves quince which is in season for about the same length of time as the brief nap I wish I was currently having.

So quinces, yeah, they look like large pears and smell like if an apple was presenting you with a bunch of flowers and blushing nervously. They’re impossible to eat raw and rock hard when you try to cut through them and take forever to cook but once they do, you get blessed with soft, melting texture with just a little of that autumnal fruit grittiness, and intense, perfumed sweetness of flavour.

I bought two, knowing full well I’d probably get too busy to do anything other than occasionally appreciatively sniffing them before ruefully throwing them in the bin once they’d deteriorated beyond the point where I could ignore it; however I surprised myself by actually doing something. And that thing was delicious. I grated the quince – not the easiest task, since they’re so concrete-like, but I managed – and cooked it in plenty of butter with sliced pears, and then just added water slowly, almost risotto like, until everything was cooked and soft. A tiny bit of sugar was all that was needed, no spices or anything – I mean, you absolutely could, I just wanted the fruit to be the undistracted star. If I was going to add something here I’d personally go for cardamom – a tiny bit lemony and gingery and less obvious than cinnamon, or indeed, actual ginger. The butter with the fruit is so lush, and flavour enough, making everything all rich and sweet and juicy and, well, buttery.

buttered quince and pears

a recipe by myself

  • one large quince
  • two pears
  • 40g butter
  • one tablespoon sugar
  • water

Peel the quince (just use a vege peeler) and carefully grate the flesh, till you’re left with just the solid core. This is a bit of an undertaking because quinces are, as I said, extremely tough. Throw the butter into a large frying pan and over a medium to high heat, melt it and tip in the quince. Finely slice the pears and add them to the pan too. Continue to stir until the pears have softened a bit.

Sprinkle over the sugar, add some more butter if you feel like it, turn the heat up on high and add 125ml/half a cup of water. Continue stirring regularly until the water has evaporated, and then continue in this fashion, adding water and stirring till it’s gone, until the quince has almost dissolved into a nubbly paste coating the pears and everything is very, very tender and golden.

I ate it with extremely thick natural yoghurt, the type you can basically stand a spoon up in, and a mixture of toasted almonds and pumpkin seeds, roughly chopped and mixed with coconut sugar and sea salt. The textures and temperatures and sweet-salty-buttery-fruity thing going on was sensational, but also extremely, calmingly simple. You can do what you like with this nubbly fruity mixture though – put it under crumble, stir it into whipped cream, fold it into a cake batter, eat it with ice cream, and I suspect it would also work with some kind of pork or alongside sharp goat’s cheese.

If you’re up to your neck in quinces right now I also suggest some other recipes that I’ve blogged about – like quince sorbet, quince brandy, quince glaze and quince loaf cake  (that last post I linked to is from early 2008 which was literally 84 years ago).

And that’s like, it, really. In fact as soon as I hit publish I’m scooting to work again. I will do my very, very best to get into some wacky anecdote-worthy scrapes and capers for you so that the next blog post has more filler material. Au revoir till next time.

title from: Nirvana’s aggressively bucolic song In Bloom.

music lately: 

Gideon, by My Morning Jacket. This song is from 2005 but sounds like it could’ve been written in like, 2015, it’s all soaring and dreamy and wonderful, but above all I’m thankful for this band because of the scene in Happy Endings where Alex is like “There’s my My Morning Jacket jacket!”

Santa Fe, by Beirut. God this song is uplifting from the second it kicks off, it’s just lovely and happy and simple and good.

next time: I made some extremely good polenta with olive oil and roast garlic, I’m also really, really wanting to do some kind of slow cooking with the weather being so freezing. I also promise anecdotes or something. 

look into my eyes and tell me girl you know you gotta watch your health

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It’s an analogy that’s brought up a lot, but one of the differences in the way that mental and physical health are treated is that like, if you have a broken leg it’s considered completely reasonable to be seen immediately and have it put in a cast and then get follow-up therapy to strengthen your stupid broken leg. Unlike mental health, which is like…imagine if you broke your leg and you were told you had to wait six weeks to see someone, and then when you saw them you really, really had to convince them that your leg was broken even though you’ve tried meditation, and then you’re told to wait another six weeks and at the end of that you’re finally given, with great reluctance, a plaster and some supermarket paracetamol.

This isn’t exactly relevant, I honestly just wanted to complain. But where I’m going with this is, I’m so used to focussing on the moving target that is my mental health that I’m always completely taken by surprise when I get, y’know, physically unwell in the traditional sense. To me, getting actually sick is kind of not an option, simply because I don’t have time for this and so I refuse to acknowledge it.

And yet, here I am, and this head-cold/flu-adjacent thing that is occupying my bod is refusing to acknowledge my refusal to acknowledge it, and as such, I’ve done the only thing anyone can do – google which foods are the most aggressively able to fight germs and then make a recipe out of as many of them as I can get hold of. Since cabbage came up extremely high on the list of “will make your nose bleed from vitamin overload” I decided to use it as the base of a slaw, adding watercress and fennel, a dressing made from ten cloves of garlic, and a scattering of raw turmeric and almonds.

So yeah, it’s good for you – you can wikipedia the individual ingredients if you want to know specifically how, for me it’s just enough to know that they’re doing something – but it also tastes completely fantastic. Cabbage and watercress are both super peppery and fennel has that aniseed heat, but there’s a ton of olive oil and salt to soften it all, plus the incredibly mellow dressing, made by simmering the garlic cloves till they’re softened, both physically and in terms of eye-watering burn. On top of that the almonds – and I use heaps of them – add a kind of contrasting creamy nuttiness, so it’s not all too astringent and cold and a chore to get through. Finally, raw turmeric has a kind of gingery carrot vibe flavourwise and adds pleasing bursts of chrysanthemum yellow against all the purple and green. And it’s SO good for you, guys.

Did it help? I mean honestly, I’ve never felt less healthy. But does correlation equal causation? Am I mad at this salad for not curing me and indeed, solving all the problems in my life? Can you be mad at a salad? Am I doing a terrible job of selling this recipe to you as something you might want to make? If nothing else it surely didn’t do me any harm and above all it tastes amazing so…that will have to do for now.

Feel free to mix and match ingredients depending on what you’re able to get hold of – you could add kale, or use white cabbage, have walnuts or hazelnuts instead of almonds, use rocket instead of cress, anything at all. But as it is in the recipe below, it’s pretty spectacular – so crunchy, oily, salty, garlicky, crisp, peppery, everything. Also – I feel like I say this a lot, but – the recipe looks really long but it’s truly super simple, I’m just super talky. You’re really just chopping up a bunch of stuff and putting it in a bowl.

healthy af slaw

a recipe by myself

  • half a purple cabbage
  • one fennel bulb
  • two handfuls of watercress
  • turmeric root, a couple of inches thereof
  • at least two handful of almonds
  • ten cloves of garlic, give or take
  • plenty of extra virgin olive oil
  • two teaspoons apple cider vinegar
  • a couple of drops of maple syrup or clear honey or golden syrup or honestly whatever
  • sea salt

Firstly, put the garlic cloves in a pan and just cover them with water. Bring to the boil and let them simmer away for about five minutes, during which time you can prepare the salad itself. 

Get an enormous serving bowl ready. Peel the thick outer leaves from the cabbage and slice the rest as finely as you can manage, transferring it all into the serving bowl once you’re done. Repeat with the fennel (slightly more difficult due to the unwieldy shape of the bulb.) Then, and this might sound stupid, but drizzle over some olive oil and scatter over some salt and use your hands to vigorously lift and scrunch the cabbage and fennel. This will mix it together but also kind of soften and relax the aggressively stiff purple and white shreds a little. Just do it. 

Roughly chop the almonds and throw them in, and then give the watercress a brief chop before adding them to the salad as well. Use a small sharp knife to slice off the outer peel of the turmeric root and very finely chop up the bright orange flesh underneath, scattering that over the vegetables.

Remove the garlic from the heat (if you haven’t already) and, if necessary, give the cloves a quick rinse under cold water so you don’t burn yourself on them. Remove the papery casing – they’ll be so soft that you just need to give them a squeeze and they should pop out – and either mash them with a fork, blitz them in a food processor, or pulverise them in a pestle and mortar (I chose the latter because my flatmate owns this amazing huge one that I’ve always wanted to use.) Add the cider vinegar, the maple syrup, a good pinch of sea salt, and like, heaps of olive oil, at least three tablespoons but honestly way more than that. Drizzle it over the salad and mix it all together and add more olive oil and salt if you think you need it, plus perhaps more chopped almonds – and then serve. 

It’s – she says, in a Justin Timberlake voice – gonna be May, and the rapid change of one month to another is as good a time as any to look at my life and where I’m at and generally take stock of things/panic wildly about the disproportionate size of the passage of time compared to the Stuff I Have Achieved. On January 1 of this year I published a thing about my struggle with the mental health system and the mental health of my own self. Since then things have zig-zagged wildly but most definitely on an upwards trajectory, and as such I’d like to draw your attention to this podcast I recorded with Ollie, this magical guy who, as well as being the doorman at work, also has his own podcast where he talks to people from all walks of life about, well, their walks of life. I feel like it’s a natural post-script to my original piece. I mean, so many things are still a monumental struggle and I congratulate myself for every day that I get through, but it’s kind of amazing looking at the difference between the me of that podcast and the me of the January 1 article.

Meanwhile, I’ve still got this damn head cold thing, but at least I know it’ll get some attention from the doctors if I tell them about it. And, I’m full of vitamins.

PS: If you’re feeling this slaw, you may well want to check out some other recipes I have along these lines, such as the Lee Brothers’ Cabbage and Lime Salad with Roasted Peanuts, my Silverbeet, Parsley and Horseradish Slaw, or my Aggressively Healthy Bowl with Matcha Mayonnaise (and there’s nothing stopping you making the mayonnaise to dress the slaw in this blog post, it would certainly fit the context.)

title from: Grimes’ amaaaaaaazing song Oblivion, which I will never ever get sick of.

music lately:

Harry Styles, Sign of the Times. NO BIGGIE I”M JUST SOBBING SO HARD I HAVE A BLOOD NOSE anyway I quite like this song is what I’m saying.

Chelsea Jade, Life of the Party. I love this gal and everything she does is gold.

next time: I bought some quinces! So I’m super keen to do something with them! 

rosemary, oh heaven restores you in light

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Making your own bread is undeniably impressive. Like, you’ve used your own hands (look at them! Those hands!) to coax life from raw ingredients, patiently letting it rise and fall and rise again to eventually become this foodstuff steeped in ancient tradition. And it’s delicious as hell.

Extremely deniable in terms of being impressive: the ageing process, which involves all the effort of an oiled billiard ball rolling down a highly polished diagonal slope. You can literally do it in your sleep. What I’m trying to say is, I had a moderately underwhelming birthday on Monday, mostly through my own complete lack of organisation (example: I could’ve taken myself out for a fancy brunch but instead I laid in bed watching Frasier) and now I’m like…wait! I’m not done with it being my birthday yet! I can do better! After about twelve minutes of soul-searching though I learned an important lesson from all this, and that is: hey! Paying me massive amounts of attention is not a finite resource and can, should in fact, be done on any day regardless of whether it’s my birthday or not. A comforting thought for all and something to keep at the forefront of all our minds! (It’s evidently on my mind.)

Back to bread though: it’s honestly not too taxing to make, if anything, it’s the length of time that’s the annoying thing rather than the frankly minimal effort of the kneading. So don’t be scared. This particular recipe occurred to me, like most of my ideas do, all at once and fully formed: I liked the idea of using maple syrup to lightly sweeten the dough and to echo the smokiness of it with also-smoky, fragrant rosemary. The maple syrup is actually extremely mellow, in case you’re concerned for the sweetness of the finished product – like, honestly, if you don’t actually have access to the real stuff then just use honey or golden syrup or even a few tablespoons of sugar. As long as there’s sweetness there – it balances the intensely savoury-yet-floral rosemary and hypes up the fruitiness of the olive oil. Salt is the all-important thing tying it together. Like, don’t skip out on anything here.

It’s best eaten the second it gets out of the oven – I just tore pieces off and dipped them in more olive oil mixed with the tiniest pinprick of maple syrup with more salt over the top. Salty, sweet, rich – it’s a heady and addictive combination (by which I mean, I ate 3/4 of this loaf thing in this one sitting.) You could just spread it with butter or drizzle over olive oil or dip it in, like, dips, or just eat it nakedly plain while it’s still soft and warm.

maple, rosemary, and olive oil turkish bread

a recipe by myself

  • three cups of high-grade/bread flour
  • one sachet of instant yeast
  • two generous tablespoons of real maple syrup
  • one teaspoon salt
  • just under 250ml/one cup of warm water
  • three tablespoons olive oil, plus more for drizzling and eating
  • a couple of stems of fresh rosemary

Mix the flour, yeast, and salt in a large bowl. Tip in the maple syrup, olive oil and water, and use a spoon to mix the lot together into a frankly unimpressive looking floury lump of dough. 

Begin kneading the dough – I usually just do this to the dough while it’s still inside the bowl, to save making a mess on the bench, but do what you like. I tend to just push the dough away from me with my palm, then fold it over back towards me and push it away again with either my palm or knuckles. Basically you want to give your dough extremely mixed messages with your hands. It should come together fairly quickly to form a smooth, but still floury ball of dough which should spring back immediately when you prod it with a finger. At this point, drizzle it with a little more olive oil and cover the bowl in clingfilm and leave it in a warmish place (or literally anywhere) for about thirty minutes to an hour to rise. I filled the sink with warm water and sat the bowl in it, but I don’t know that it necessarily had that much effect.

At this point, you’re so nearly done: squash down the hopefully now-puffy dough with your fist, and then put it on a baking tray (either lined with baking paper, or, if you don’t have any like me, scatter some flour across it first) and press it out with your hands into a rough oval shape. It should be fairly pliant and stretchy but if you feel it resisting, let it rest for ten minutes before giving it another nudge. Set your oven to 220 C/450 F, cover the dough with a teatowel and let it have one final rise for about 25 minutes. At this point, you want to drizzle over a little more olive oil, scatter it with some rosemary leaves, and then bake it for around 15 minutes – keep an eye on it at the 12 minute mark though, and depending on your oven and the curve of the earth and what not it could take up to 20 minutes.

Take it from the oven and you’re ready to go.   

There’s this scene in The Simpsons where Homer is trying to build his own barbeque and the instructional video ebulliently reassures Homer that it’s no harder than installing your own aviary or Olympic-sized swimming pool and I KNOW that’s the vibe that comes off when I’m all, “you can totally make your own bread at home!” But guess what. You can totally make your own bread at home. Just set aside an afternoon, be prepared to get covered in a light but persistent dusting of flour, and have some faith in yourself.

(Also, side note: a lot of really nice things did happen on my birthday, I’m just an existentially-challenged brat. And I do genuinely believe in not being restrained by a flimsy concept like the date of my own birth as far as garnering massive amounts of attention goes.)

If you’re on a roll with your breadmaking (ROLL! GET! IT!) then feel free to consider some of my other blog posts on this delicious subject, such as Italian Fougasse Bread; this recipe for Beetroot Bread (from back in 2009 so like, bear with me), or Aunt Daisy’s Condensed Milk Bread.

title from: Interpol’s song Evil from their album Antics. I got into this album in a huge way in 2005 to impress a random boy but happily, while I can’t even remember what the guy’s name is I still really love this album. 

music lately:

It’s a year since Beyonce blessed us with her thunderbolt of an album, Lemonade. The whole thing is incredible, but watch Sorry or Formation as an example of its brilliance.

Pink Floyd, Brain Damage/Eclipse. I was working on the night of my birthday (on purpose! My friends were all out of town, I might as well earn money) and I decided to play Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety just for kicks. The final tracks are so damn satisfying, that little upward emphasis on “all you create, and all you destroy” and the way the word “sun” in “everything under the sun is in tune” is sung so hard kinda makes my heart sing. It’s so dated that it’s timeless.

I’m neither here nor there on opera but Pavarotti’s fifteen year old niece, Sislena Capparros, singing Nessun Dorma, made me literally sob actual tears. The ending is so hardcore!

next time: I’m kind of sick at the moment in a sore throat way, so maybe something intensely medicinal.