fancy plans and pants to match: Boulcott Street Bistro

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The story behind this occasional segment on my blog goes a little something like this: though I’m not actually terribly fancy (as I type I am wearing disintegrating trackpants, a jumper of Tim’s, socks stained with the red wine I just kicked over) occasionally fanciness is thrust upon me. For I…am a food blogger.

As I’ve said before, I initially felt like I never wanted to talk about the nice things that happen to me on account of this blog, in case I came across as a self-congratulatory dick (or at least, more so) and in case people were entirely put off by such stories of good times for free. But eventually I decided it might be an even better use of my time if I tried to write about them anyway, in spite of my awkwardness. It’s a good challenge to do so and not sound awful, plus I’m not entirely ungracious, plus there’s the chance that people are interested in what ideas and events are happening at restaurants and so on. And really, it doesn’t happen that often, so the occasional diversion from my usual recipes adds crucial novelty value! Or so I like to think. Finally, I named this segment for a quote from the shrewd and endearing Jimmy James of the wonderful and underwatched 90s sitcom NewsRadio.

With that overwritten and defensive prelude concluded, here’s the thing: I got invited to Boulcott Street Bistro to try their T-Rex Burger. Tim, my ever-affable plus-one, was delighted to come along too.

The pitch: Boulcott Street Bistro know a thing or two about the fancy life. Not least because this T-Rex burger won the Visa Wellington on a Plate Burger Wellington competition last year. Chef Rex Morgan is on top of his game, or at least this is what Tim tells me. Tim has been to this restaurant about three times already with his work, whereas I’ve never once walked through its adorable heritage doors. Not that Tim works in the Long Lunch 80s, but let’s just say his employers aren’t at the mercy of the scrutiny of the spending of taxpayer’s dollars like mine are. Not that either of us couldn’t have gone there under our own steam either, had we put our mind to it. But anyway: Boulcott Street Bistro are proud of this burger’s big win, and so are offering it for $20 every lunchtime for the whole of July.

What happened: I know weather is so boring to talk about, and yet it also unites us in conversation quite safely in a way that politics or religion can’t. So, confidently shall I disclose that it was raining wildly on the Friday that Tim and I went to BSB, absolutely gale-force-bucketing down. Fortunately the restaurant itself provides warm, glowing sanctuary from the outside world, and I was instantly drawn in, like a death’s head moth to a light source. Tim and I were presented quite quickly with our burgers, resplendently stacked upon the clean, smooth shoulder bone of an erstwhile cow. A neat pile of fries and a small dish of tomato sauce completed the meal.  Despite burgers being relatively modern it really has a rather prehistoric look to it, hence the name – although its earthy decadence wouldn’t feel entirely out of place on Game of Thrones, either. (Tim: um, did it occur to you that the T-Rex name might also be to do with Chef Rex Morgan? Me: omg…no. For shame.)

My dapper date. We were recommended the Tuatara APA (Aotearoa Pale Ale!) and the Emerson’s Bookbinder to go with. They’re both great beers, although we felt the clean maltiness of the Bookbinder went slightly better with the burger. Wine bar though it may be, the range of beers available at BSB is brilliant. 

The coolest bits: I, for one, was impressed by the imposingly large bone-as-plate conceit.  It just looks reeeeally cool. But that aside, the burger was disarmingly good. Beef upon beef, in the form of a chuck steak patty with BBQ short rib on top, celery mayo, lettuce, tomato all in the clasp of a substantive sesame seed bun. The beef was…sublime. The patty thick and rare, tasting properly of steak, undiluted real steak. The short rib – which I initially thought was brisket, since it had that shredded, falling-apart consistency – was ridiculous. Almost, I want to say, creamy? Just soft and tender and hinting at smoke and tomato sauce and vinegar without distracting from the pure beef flavour at hand. The pile of hand-cut fries didn’t look enormous, but were happily the ideal quantity. I like my fries a little crisper, but they were certainly the hot, goldenly salty accompaniment you want with this kind of food. The eye for detail extended to the tomato sauce, cooling, tangy and thick, and tasting of very recent construction. It was a spectacularly hearty thing to be eating on such a bleakly cold day, and it was quite clear how it managed to win last year’s competition.

I really wanted to lick my knife, as is my wont, but this place was not only fancy, but in public. 

On a scale of 1 to I Don’t Belong Here: 6. On the one hand, this is a relatively tidily priced lunch. On the other hand, I’d never been to Boulcott Street Bistro in my life before because I had this feeling it was slightly out of my reach, and made only for Rich People and Tim on his occasional 80s-style long lunches. So, it was exciting to be able to get through the doors finally, but I wouldn’t call this lunch unachievable in real life. Which is super!

Would I do this for not-free? I definitely would. I mean, I couldn’t quite insouciantly drop $20 on a lunch casually every day of the week (especially not Payday Eve), but if I framed it as a weekday-improving treat yo’self treat: sure! Achievable as. Last month they had a $20 T-Bone steak lunch, so keep an eye on them for what fun will unfold in future months. And you really do taste every last penny. In fact I’d pay a million bucks to just get that swoony short rib recipe.

Earnest thanks for making me feel fancy to: Boulcott Street Bistro, 99 Boulcott Street, Wellington. Ph 04 499 4199.

i should tell you: The Phoenix Foundation

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Well hello there, and welcome to volume fifteen of I Should Tell You, the segment on this blog where I interview cool musicians from that particular genre of ‘those who will reply to my earnest emails’. The same three questions about food every time, just to see what happens. 

Today I am greatly pleased to be talking to nearly every last damn member of The Phoenix Foundation. 
The Phoenix Foundation are a sparklingly brilliant band from Wellington, whose mellow-yet-stompy music has been delighting ears all over the world since years ago. Should you know nothing of the Phoe-Fou and want in, their jaunty and endearing song Buffalo is a good place to start. I also recommend the dreamy 40 Years with its video directed by local babe Taika Waititi. The fact that the entire band obligingly answered my questions surely demonstrates, if nothing else, how nice they are. Not that niceness is a reason to buy anyone’s records: luckily they back up all this niceness by being bloody great musicians too. I’ve seen them live several times now (“see” being relative. The last time was when they were at Slowboat Records in Wellington and short little me saw naught but the flanks of the man in front of me. And, if I leaned carefully, the top of Luke Buda’s head) and it’s always a swell time with Grade A banter. Should you be overdue to see them again, or feel like the time has come to see them for the first time, why! Today’s your lucky day. They’re back from traversing Europe on the back of their grand new record Fandango and are touring the major centres of this fair (or at least, fair enough) country this month. 
19 July The Bedford @ CPSU, Christchurch
20 July Queens, Dunedin
21 July Chicks Hotel, Dunedin
26 July The Cabana, Napier
27 July James Cabaret, Wellington
Tickets can be sought and bought in Wellington at Rough Peel Music & Slowboat, both around the corner from each other, so you might as well make a small shopping spree of it, and in Christchurch and Dunedin from Cosmic.

Thanks again, Sam Scott, Conrad Wedde, Luke Buda, Will Ricketts, and Chris O’Connor! The interview starts…now. 

Sam Scott:
1. Where’s somewhere you’ve eaten that you kinda like to brag about or drop into conversation?
It’s Chez Panisse in Berkley. Me and my wife were staying with friends in Oakland and a few people had suggested we check it out. Every single thing we ate blew our minds. It was the best service I have ever experienced. We got so carried away by the ambience and perfection of everything that I ended up proposing to my wife half way through the meal, completely unplanned. What I didn’t know at the time was that Chez Panisse was a the forefront of the local food movement. They have their own farms, vineyard etc. They brought us a complementary plate of stone fruit to eat while we finished our wine before desert and it was unquestionably the best I have eaten anywhere. 
2 What do you fix for yourself, or where do you go to eat, when it’s just you on your own?
If I’m cooking for anyone I will always make an effort. I love to cook for other people. My wife pleads with me to stop being so fancy and make something simple for once (as I tend to make a lot of dishes). If I’m cooking for myself I make no effort at all. Maybe plain spag with olive oil, lots of pepper and cheddar cheese. 
3 What’s one of your favourite food-related memories from your childhood?
My grandfather lived in Spain and we only got to visit him there once (he came to NZ quite a few times in childhood, he was a cool dude). Pretty much everything we ate in Spain was a revelation, but what stands out to me was the churros sold in the big open air market in Javea. The markets themselves were like a magical kingdom. We certainly didn’t have anything like that in Newtown in 1991, but the churros were just unbelievable. Cooked in a huge cauldron of fat over open flame. I pretty much found every churro since these ones to be nothing but a disappointment. 
Conrad Wedde:
1. Where’s somewhere you’ve eaten that you kinda like to brag about or drop into conversation?
I dont really like to brag about where i’ve eaten and havent been anywhere all that flash. but the food in vietnam is pretty amazing…soup on the street or epic banquets washed down with large bottles of beer, theres a place called cha ca la vong(i think) in Hanoi that does beautiful charcoal tumeric fish, I think the street it’s on is actually named after the restaurant.
2 What do you fix for yourself, or where do you go to eat, when it’s just you on your own?
rice or soba noodle soup with whatever bits I can find
3 What’s one of your favourite food-related memories from your childhood?
brown rice with grated cheddar cheese and corn fritters with home made tomato relish
Luke Buda:
 1. Where’s somewhere you’ve eaten that you kinda like to brag about or drop into conversation?
St John’s in London probably, because of its lauded “nose to tail eating”. Though if I’m truly honest with myself I found my food there mildly disappointing.  I had the Bone Marrow which is one of their signature dishes (found it a bit boring) and some duck thing which was a bit dry… Ha! Damning report. But some of the other guys had awesome stuff.  Tom had braised Ox heart. It was AMAZING. Also my dessert was great. Cheesecake with raisins that had been soaked in marsala for over 3 months.
The one that I am a total fan of however, is MORO (also in London). It’s probably as much to do with the fact that I have one of their cookbooks and it’s taught me heaps.  But I also like the fact it’s unpretentious. It’s not really fine dining as such, it’s just amazingly tasty food.  Like the Mansaf, their version of it is:  Saffron yoghurt soup with Lamb meatballs and pine nuts.  Simple.  Delicious.  All the meats are wood roasted or charcoal grilled.  Lot’s of nuts and yoghurt and all spice and cinnamon and sumac blah blah blah etc etc Your plate comes out COVERED in food. Very very good. Highest recommendation from me.
(here is Nigel Slater talking about why he loves it) 
2 What do you fix for yourself, or where do you go to eat, when it’s just you on your own?
I will almost always head to the Fisherman’s Plate in Bond St, Wellington, for their absolutely excellent Pho. Don’t be fooled by the way the place pretends to be a mere Fish’n’Chip shop!  The noodle soup is world class (this, of course is an absurd thing for me to say as I have never been to Vietnam BUT it’s better than any I had on London’s Kingsland Rd, and I had many, at highly regarded Vietnamese joints, well the Fisherman’s Plate Pho is superior!).
If i’m cooking for myself… well this hardly ever happens anyway, as I have 2 kids. Or at least, not for dinner. I probably make myself a flash brunch or lunch.  Probably crushed roasted new potatoes with a poached egg, or Shakshuka (a current have, from the Ottolenghi book Jerusalem) or just a nice frittata.
3 What’s one of your favourite food-related memories from your childhood?
Eating an entire giant can of halva. Poland (where I lived until I was 8) is mad on halva! You can buy halva bars in any corner store.  Just as popular as chocolate bars.  Also, whenever my mum would bring home some “serek” (kind of translates as: “cute little cheese”) which is basically fromage frais. It was only occasionally in the shops.  ALSO my uncle going to pick little red berries in the forest and then mushing them up with polish cottage cheese (quite different from the NZ variety, totally dry.  You can slice a slice, it’s crumbly.  Almost like not salty feta, or dry ricotta) then having that on very thinly sliced rye bread in the morning.
Will Ricketts:
1. Where’s somewhere you’ve eaten that you kinda like to brag about or drop into conversation?
i like to brag about a dinner in morocco with ritchie singleton, we ate a whole leg of slow cooked lamb in a sitting. it was unbelievably delicious.
i know that is not a restaurant but cant help despite myself, casually throwing that in when someone mentions a tagine or anything of the morrocan culinary experience.
2. What do you fix for yourself, or where do you go to eat, when it’s just you on your own?
i love to make myself pasta. if i eat out alone in wellington, i am strongly drawn to vietnamese food. my favourites being mekong on vivian st or phong vu in the left bank, to have a rare beef pho.
3. What’s one of your favourite food-related memories from your childhood?
hasn’t changed thankfully! when i go to stay at mums and i get up in the morning to a freshly cleaned kitchen, the sound of choral music and the smell of fresh bread cooling down on the kitchen table. spoilt i know!
Chris O’Connor:
 1. Where’s somewhere you’ve eaten that you kinda like to brag about or drop into conversation?
Jesus Maria in Cordoba province, Argentina. Castrating young bulls and frying up their testes for afternoon tea. During asado for dinner that evening there was a cut – saliva glands I think, that seemed to melt in my mouth…
2 What do you fix for yourself, or where do you go to eat, when it’s just you on your own?
Honey smeared roast vegetables with couscous.
3 What’s one of your favourite food-related memories from your childhood?
realizing my thumb tasted rather like chips, and thats why enjoyed sucking it so much.

excuse my french but i’m in france

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I’ve said before that I obstinately love winter. But I feel that above all, what really connects me to the nose-freezingly, spine-snappingly cold weather more than soft knee socks and duvets and watching dramatic, critically-acclaimed TV shows, and sitting by the heater, is the long and slow cooking of food. Casseroles, soups, stews, they’re the kind of thing that make me feel uncomfortably sweaty to consider in summer. But come winter, by putting some time into making meat fall from bones or dried beans swell and tenderise or, I don’t know, for other stuff to gradually turn into other stuff, I really feel at one with it all, like this is what I’m supposed to be eating and doing with my time. Despite these recipes usually being quite straightforward, making a casserole or soup from scratch over a matter of hours can feel like one hell of an achievement, and is the kind of food I can only properly enjoy this time of year.

The French, I posit sweepingly, know a thing or two about slow-cooked food. Coq au vin – which basically means chicken a la lots of wine – is excellently fancy but very old-world and rustic at the same time, and really quite easy. Or at least it is when I make it, more an homage than a strictly traditional method.

This recipe comes by way of Nigella Lawson’s important book How to Eat. Speaking of important…and a slight trigger warning here…I went back and forth and wrote and deleted things about what has happened to Nigella Lawson recently. I don’t want to write clumsily about domestic violence, but I don’t want to take her recipe then skate over other things brightly, politely. Much as I adore Nigella from afar, I don’t know her. But I do know that what happened to her, what happens to so many people, is not right. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, google carefully. If you’re about to pick up a newspaper or magazine that looks even vaguely victim-blaming or rationalising of this, or any similar story…maybe take that money and donate it to your local women’s refuge instead.

So. Nigella already went and made an easy recipe for this, adorably calling it half-coq au vin. Then I went and made hers even easier, lazy creature that I am.  I suppose I could call it quarter-coq, but I think it’s more like two-thirds-coq. Wait, but that’s more than half, right? Ugh, maths! I didn’t quit it in sixth form for nothing, so let’s just get back to the food. You still end up with this intensely savoury, rich, meaty stew with plenty of wine-heavy sauce for spooning over rice or mashed potato, dissolvingly tender chicken thighs, salty bacon, and densely earthy mushrooms. Fry it up, shunt it in the oven, and some time later you have dinner so comforting you could just cry, except there’s already enough sodium in there to crystallise all the cartilage in your body, and it probably doesn’t need any more. I say this as someone who loves sodium…and doesn’t really know much of anything about cartilage. Except that it’s creepily fascinating. I’m talking about sharks, yo. Deep-sea creature made entirely of cartilage. Nope, okay, definitely back to the food now.

Note: you could happily, depending on the size of your oven dish, double or triple this and then freeze portions for future good times. Also, there are supposed to be baby onions in this, but I forgot to buy some. Then I figured lots of people are allergic to onions, and I could just tell myself I was one of those people on this day. Note: you can also use 500ml red wine instead of half wine half water.

half-coq au vin

Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat

250ml red wine
250ml water 
a sprig of thyme 
2 garlic cloves
75-100g (I kind of grabbed a handful, but my hands are tiny) streaky bacon rashers
6 chicken thighs, boneless and skinless. Although skinless is the bit that matters really.
1 heaped tablespoon flour
12 or so button mushrooms

Set your oven to 150 C/300 F. I used the enamel dish above, which can go on the stovetop and then into the oven. It’s joyous! But if you don’t have one, just cook everything in a pot and then transfer it to an oven dish before baking. OR you can simmer it in the pot slowly, but I think the oven does a better job of taking care of it – no need to stand around nervously hoping it won’t boil over or get burnt.

In a small pot, bring the wine and water to the boil with the garlic cloves and thyme floating around in it, then continue to let it bubble away till it looks like it’s reduced by about half. Fish out the garlic and thyme, throwing away or eating curiously, and remove the wine from the heat.

Meanwhile, roughly dice the bacon and fry it in your dish or pot till lightly browned and sizzling. Push the bacon to the side slightly with your wooden spoon or chosen implement, and place the chicken thighs in, allowing them to really sit there and brown on one side. It’ll take a while, but it will happen. Halve or quarter, depending on size, your button mushrooms and tumble them in once the chicken’s browned. Finally, stir in the flour – it will turn all rough and sticky at this point – allowing it to fry a little, then tip in the wine mixture and another 250ml water. Cover the oven dish firmly with tinfoil and place in the oven for 1 1/2 hours. Uncover and serve, as you wish. 

I had the grand idea that, there being six thighs, and this being two-meat levels of extravagant, this could provide dinner for Tim and I on night one, and then lunch for us on day two and three. But then two of the thighs thwarted me by simply falling to small pieces in the sauce. Damn thwarting thighs! But still, two perfect meals out of this is not bad. While we enjoyed it served over rice, I get the feeling it would be sublimely good stirred into pappardelle pasta with some cream. Or spooned over creamy soft polenta. Or served with really crisp fries to dip into the gravy. This is just such superlative stuff.

The thyme really does make a difference, flavour-wise (okay, I will make a laboured joke about time making the difference here) but I don’t recommend fronds of it as a garnish like I did here. It got all tangled up sinisterly in the spoon every time I went in for more, like seaweed lazily but determinedly knotting itself round your ankles.

After an idyllically mellow weekend – Friday night drinks and living room dancing, Saturday brunch and knitting and the truly bizarre Mad Max 3, and Sunday morning coffee, afternoon scrambled eggs, and lounging with Luther and West Wing – this half-coq au vin was an wonderfully slow, methodical way to end the week. And after a fairly stupid Monday morning of forgotten things and spilled, badly-made coffee and bitten hangnails, it made for a wondrous lunch reheated in the microwave at work. 

Finally – if you like, but especially if you don’t like, you should definitely read my contribution to new site First Comes Love about my top five wedding locations, and my guest post for Holland Road Yarn about being a new knitter. What can I say, it’s a good time to ask me to talk to you about stuff! 

Okay, finally-finally: yeah, in case you’re wondering, I did make some deeply immature homonym-type jokes about coq the entire time I was making this dinner, and every time I referred to it thereafter. Cracking yourself up with utterly stupid wordplay is the highest form of wit.
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title via: the spiky, brilliant, Kanye and Jay Z collaboration …Paris. Ball quite hard.  
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Music lately:

Miley Cyrus, We Can’t Stop. Amazingly catchy-fuzzy pop. I do think it’s worth reading and acknowledging what Wilbert Cooper has written about this video also.

Metric, Help I’m Alive. Well, that’s a great song title. For a great song. I love how sinister yet low-key this is.
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Next time: More slow cooking? More cake? Will see where my whims take me, I don’t have anything specific planned yet. 

i should tell you: delaney davidson

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Well hello there, and welcome to volume fourteen of I Should Tell You, the show which is actually just a segment on this blog, where I interview cool musicians who will respond to my earnest emails. Only three questions about food, always the same, just to see what happens.

Today I’m delighted to be talking to Delaney Davidson, whose record Sad But True: The Secret History of Country Music Songwriting Volume 1 with Marlon Williams I’ve listened to so many times I could…just listen to it again, really. Simple yet complex, uplifting yet misanthropically dark, brilliant yet really brilliant. If you haven’t heard anything of this yet, I recommend the bar-room jangle of How Lucky You Are, or the moody Bloodletter, which won the APRA Best Country Song of 2013.

He’s currently eating BBQ and playing music in the US, but returns to NZ later this year to tour with the Topp Twins, and will be performing Kurt Weill music at the Christchurch Arts Festival on September 19. Tim and I were fortunate enough to see him with Marlon Williams late last year at Mighty Mighty in Wellington. It was a raucously excellent evening, and had us both saying “how are those vocal sounds coming from just two men?” In a good way, I mean – the sound was amazing, as you will know if you listen to the songs I recommended. Or indeed the entire album.

Thanks Delaney Davidson! The interview starts…now.

 1. Where’s somewhere you’ve eaten that you kinda like to brag about or drop into conversation?

I talk quite a lot about food, so I don’t drop it into conversations, more like the opposite.. I often talk about places I have eaten, but more of a dissection than a brag.. I like to figure out how things are made.. Once on the border of Vietnam and Thailand I went to a deserted market late one night, totally empty and completely dark all the tables were bare under the canopy, there was a little tent with a wok and a lady cooking. No one was round, then a guy appeared out of nowhere, came up and ordered something. I asked for the same.. It was fried eggs on rice.. absolutely killer. a thin sauce of soy and fish sauce with garlic and chilli…so simple.. but one of the best things I ever ate.. 


2 What do you fix for yourself, or where do you go to eat, when it’s just you on your own?
I often dream about cheese sandwiches. I like it when you eat one then you breath through your nose and you get the taste of fresh bread swirling round inside your nose and palate, I think the cheese sandwich is a great thing to eat as it has massive variations from country to country. Breads vary and cheeses do too.. Crusty fresh loaves from France, Rustico, Paesano..chewy crusty blackened sourdough.. soft asiago, oude gouda, appenzeller, or gruyere.. all worth a good day dream… the secret ingredient to a cheese sandwich is butter.. just a little to stick the cheese down and begin the lubrication… I know its not gluten free or dairy free, but think its in the genes and DNA of humans to chew wheat.. cultivate it, harvest it, grind it, bake it.. Its part of life…

3 What’s one of your favourite food-related memories from your childhood?
Cold roast chicken on a picnic… with grapes. behind a hedge at the zoo.
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i should tell you archives:

Janine and the Mixtape (May 18)
Coco Solid (April 19)
Michael Logie, Die!Die!Die! (April 5)
Watercolours (March 22)
Jeremy Toy, She’s So Rad (March 14)
Hera and Jed (March 7)
Eva Prowse (March 1)
Jan Hellriegel (February 21)
Dear Time’s Waste (February 14)
Flip Grater (February 7)
Tourettes (January 31)
Anna Coddington (January 24)
PS speaking of fun/strange things I’ve been doing, I’ve been making cakes for my celebrity crushes for Vice magazine. It might work one day! 

take it easy on me, shed some light, shed some light on things

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My fork is the much, much smaller one on the top right.

This is a slight, small recipe, willfully simplistic. But also oddly fancy. I make this a lot, since it’s not very much effort, but is also just the kind of thing I want to eat following a Sunday afternoon of book group, mainlining candy (specifically: Nerds, fizzy Spongebob Squarepants lollies) and drinking just enough cider to feel pleasantly fuzzy. Seriously, we had so many good snacks – kumara chips, hummus that I’d made myself with brown chickpeas and harissa, Turkish bread, manuka smoked butter. I just felt like sugar. Until I didn’t – you know that wall you hit? Well, this is the perfect antidote. It’s intensely savoury, with rich oiliness, sharp saltiness, bursts of citrus and pinchings of smoky heat. Not the slightest bit sweet at all. And you can make it post-cider times, without hurting yourself. At least, I did, and I am so clumsy-prone that it’s a pretty decent test of what the rest of the world is capable of.

The other nice thing about this is that all you need is one pot and one or two small bowls. If you want to make even less dishes, you could soak the dried chili first, then use that same emptied bowl to put the olive oil in. I just used lots of fancy little bowls because sometimes my “how will this look on the blog” aesthetics override my already skewed logic. Also since moving into a house with a dishwasher for the first time, I like casually using as many dishes as I can, safe in the knowledge that some machine is going to do all the work for Tim and me. Hooray for dystopian futures!

spaghetti with chili, lemon, capers and olive oil

200g spaghetti
1 large dried red chili
1 lemon
1 tablespoon of capers, rinsed of any salt if they’re salt-packed
salt
extra virgin olive oil

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil, and cook the pasta according to packet instructions – usually takes between 9-12 minutes. While it’s cooking, put the chili in a small bowl and cover with boiling water for five minutes to allow it to rehydrate. In another small bowl, pour several tablespoons of olive oil – two to three is probably fine, though I go for four-ish mostly – and either grate or use a lemon zester to remove as many curling golden strands of lemon peel that you can. Tip the lemon zest and capers into the olive oil, retrieve the chili carefully from its water bath and roughly chop (removing seeds and stem as you please – and I do, a lot of the burn is in those seeds) into small pieces, adding that to the oil too. Finally, drain the cooked pasta, tip in the oil and all the bits and pieces in it, stir carefully and divide between two plates. I often cut the lemon in half and squeeze its juice over the pasta too, at this point. Pour over more olive oil if you like, sprinkle over more salt if you need it, and eat. Obviously.

Chilis can seem intimidating if you’re not used to them, if at the most you eat sticky, syrupy sweet chili sauce, if all your references are all cartoonishly exaggerated pop culture. Or in fact literally cartoons in pop culture, like Homer Simpson’s viaje mysterioso. Despite seeming that way, chilis are not simply a straightforward delivery method of a burning sensation. They have a whole spectrum of flavour, from smoky like, well, smoke, to fruity like the darkest dried plums, to sweet and lemony…kick the seeds and internal spine out and you might find you can handle a lot more than you thought. The chili I used for this was long, leathery and with a rich wine-dark colour and flavour and just a little prickling heat here and there. Together with the salt of the capers and the bright lemon zest, it’s really something. Even though it sorta looks like nothing.

Now that it’s suddenly July – cue my obligatory yet sincere incredulity at the passing of time, as always – Tim and I are entering crunch time on planning our engagement party, which is partway through this month. Lots of things about it are making us nervous, mostly around disparite groups of people in one room, but we have been having so much fun looking through old photos of ourselves to get printed for a photoboard. The pre-us-getting-together “whoa that chemistry” moments caught on film. Tim’s fluctuatingly enormous hair. The entirety of 2006 when we were each as much of a hipster scene kid as we could muster. Our utterly squalid flats. The six months in 2008 when a neighbourhood cat decided to adopt us (cue some obligatory but deeply sincere howling from my direction at the sorrow of it all now, in that we can’t have a cat.) Our first holiday, finally, to Europe in 2011. All that tequila. “Oh, that’s the time I wore a singlet as a dress”; “Why did I have a permanent spot on my chin for three years”; “ah, the night where everyone had to wear hats and dance to Fall Out Boy”; “why were we obsessed with taking photos of our feet?”; “how on earth did I pass that photography paper?” and so on, and so on. It’s making me want to stop and be a bit more grateful and aware of the good things we have going on right now. Like insulation and personal space and the aforementioned dishwasher. And no photos of our feet. And new-old friends but also old friends from the moment we first lived together (Ange! That’s you!) And each other, still.

In case this was getting all too sentimental, I got another tattoo! Ain’t nothing sentimental about being stabbed with needles for an hour and a half. It’s at the aren’t-bodies-fascinating scabbed healing stage right now, but once it’s fully there I’ll take a photo, in case you’re interested. In the meantime, here’s me excitedly pointing at it. The super great Nursey at Dr Morse did the design, and also the stabbing itself. Which was oddly enjoyable – it burned, but there’s something about sitting through that pain and knowing you can just do it and you’ll get something you adore forever is kinda powerful. Or at least do-able.

It’s a crescent moon with clouds drifting over it and the lupus (wolf) constellation over the top. It’s very soft and dreamy and a little ancient. And it’s forty centimetres long! Kidding, it’s a couple of inches. I’m very, very happy with it. In a week where people have fought so hard for other people’s rights to simply have autonomy over their own bodies (particularly the brave Senator Wendy Davis who filibustered into the night, on her feet, without water or food, for this very idea) it’s – and not to tenuously link between myself and Davis, because seriously – but it’s nice to be able to make this small decision.

title via: Feist, My Moon My Man. It’s grand. I love the sneaky Tainted Love-esque beat.

music lately:

Lorde, Tennis Court. Yeah Lorde! Still being astonishing!

Blur, Beetlebum. Oh, sexy sexy Damon Albarn.

Connie Converse, How Sad How Lovely. Occasionally I return to this sorrowful, beautiful song from the mysterious Converse. I should return to it more.

Next time: I Should Tell You is back, with Delaney Davidson, which is really exciting. For me. And hopefully you too. His music is excellent.

 

lazy jane, all the time

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Tulips holding up well. As is my twee agenda, it seems.
Also holding up well: this risotto recipe. I’ve made it three times in the last week. Once, twice, three times a lady recommending this recipe to you all. I know I often go on about how I work myself down to a nub writing this blog and the cookbook and meeting other various deadlines, but that aside, I’m really very lazy. If there’s a way I can do less than what’s required, even at the expense of the outcome, I will. It’s just the way it is. Some people accept that there’s hard work involved in life, some people (me) want to sit around and knit or check Twitter all day. Fortunately for me, Tim tends to meet this laziness with shrugging resignation/lifting/cleaning of all the things, but occasionally it works out well for both of us. In the case of this risotto, that is. I already love making risotto, with its calmingly repetitive stirring motion, and I don’t mean to sound like Troy McClure, but sometimes I want to take an already pretty easy thing and make it even more flagrantly low in effort. And not only does this make enough excellently delicious risotto for dinner and then a non-bleak lunch the next day (in your face, instant noodles!) it also uses only one dish. So, less dishes for Tim to do, or for him to rinse and then put in the dishwasher (I can’t comprehend how we have a machine to do the dishes for us but still have to pre-wash them, hence why I never do it.) I’m not trying to be proud of how lazy I am or anything, in fact I’m too lazy to expend any feelings over it whatsoever. Kidding! On the one hand, I feel like “why should naturally helpful, good people in society be celebrated when I can’t help being this unhelpful” and on the other hand sometimes I am just being a dick to see how much I can get away with not doing.  
Back to the risotto, you wouldn’t necessarily think a version that you just shunt into the oven would work, since it’s the constant stirring of it that slowly releases the starch from the rice grains and gives it that soft, collapsing texture. But somehow it does, and frankly I don’t care to question why. It just does. The first time I tried this I simply stirred some herbs in and topped it with a little Whitestone Butter by Al Brown Manuka Smoked Butter that arrived in the mail because that’s right, I have the veneer of a fancy food blogger (as always, I wish I could tell my much younger self that this would happen, as something to cling on to and look forward to.) I’m not just saying this because I got it for free (I mean, in a roundabout way I am, but I would never lie to you about butter, okay?)  this butter really is quite incredible, the manuka smoke somehow making it meatily rich while the texture is dissolvingly creamy and light. It’s the ideal substance atop a very plain, but perfect risotto. But regular butter and plenty thereof is also always the right choice, too.
Oven Risotto

Adapted from a Donna Hay recipe. Makes plenty for four, or in our case, for two people and then two lunches the next day. 

2 cups arborio rice
2 teaspoons vegetable stock powder
1 tablespoon dijon mustard
5 cups water, of which up to 1 cup is white wine 
Optional: fistfuls of butter, lemon zest and juice (especially if you don’t have wine), herbs. I guess the mustard is optional too, but you want this to taste like something.

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. In an oven dish – around 2L capacity – tip in the rice, the wine, the water, the mustard and the stock powder. At this point I also dice up plenty of butter and add that in too, but if you don’t have butter or can’t eat dairy, I would lavishly drizzle in some olive oil. 

Cover the dish tightly with tinfoil, then bake for around an hour. At this point, you can stir in more butter, some lemon zest and juice, some herbs, some cream, parmesan, whatever, really. For this I grabbed a handful of chives and thyme leaves, since that’s what I had. 

Just plain, with a little mustard and butter and lemon, it’s surprisingly fulsome – heftily creamy and starchily comforting, the rice’s natural flavour shining through.

However, it also lends itself well to not being utterly plain. I made a glossy pink roast beetroot version of this – sliced up beetroot, roasted in plenty of olive oil, before adding the rice and liquid and baking. Last night I made a roasted parsnip version, with so much butter that the rice itself couldn’t quite absorb it all. It basically turned to nutty, caramelised paste. And was really wonderful. But uh, if you want to make your own, just bear in mind that it can only absorb about 150g butter before it starts heading paste-wards.

Some other cool things of late, in order of most to least of what I thought of first to write about: 
Am quite obsessed with knitting. It’s so calming, and repetitive. A bit like risotto, but you don’t have to stand up to do it! 
Witness the knitness.

On Friday I went to a secret party to celebrate ten years of Creative HQ. As with receiving butter, occasionally I get to go to A Thing. Tim and other friends were also there, and it was really quite an amazingly surreal, and just generally amazing night – fancy beer, a dance troupe, green screens, dry ice, a photobooth, a glitter cannon, pretzel sticks, chocolate schnapps. It gave me lots of good ideas on how I want my life to be (more glitter cannons! And pretzel sticks! And dance troupe-ing! And everything I just said, really.)

And today a really wonderful-for-me thing happened: I had my first story ever published in Cuisine magazine. I’ve spoken so often of how much I love this magazine and I won’t go on about it too much in case anyone from said magazine happens to read this and gets distinctly weirded out, but: I adore this magazine, and have been an avid reader of it since before I even knew how to cook. The fact that I have a story in there is a very big deal to me. The story itself is a piece on Treme, New Orleans, and the sights and sounds and eats therein, based on the time Tim and I spent there last October.

Finally: saw some cool hund friends!

Finally-finally: I’m going to bring up again that I was published in Cuisine magazine, because I’m just so happy and excited and self-proud. 
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title via: Lazy Line Painter Jane, by Belle and Sebastian. This is one of about three of their songs that I am into, but I am so VERY into this song. The breakdown at the end is spectacular. 
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music lately:
Camera Obscura, The Sweetest Thing. This song is from an album called My Maudlin Career, which is a bit of a great title. The song also rules. Otherwise I wouldn’t have put it here, of course.

The sadly late Selena, Dreaming of You. Silky-soft early nineties pop/r’n’b. Alas, my particular obsession with reading about tragically dead celebrities on wikipedia was what reminded me about how sweet this song is.
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Next time: possibly something from the new Cuisine magazine, if I ever manage to stop reading my byline over and over that is. 

people from the city having lunch in the park I believe that it’s called al fresco

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I had a day off today, on account of some time off in lieu I built up a while back at work. Strangely enough, I still found myself swatting away that creeping bleak Sunday evening feeling yesterday, even though I knew Monday was entirely mine. However it really was a lovely quiet little weekend. I baked, and Tim and I had burritos and grilled corn and Bloody Marias for brunch (the difference between a Mary and a Maria is vodka and tequila, to which I found myself asking aloud which was more of a brunch liquor, and tequila won because we felt like it, even though vodka had more of a morning feel to it. Yeah.) We also watched a lot of House of Cards and spent much time unpacking our swirling feelings around Top of the Lake and a few minutes unpacking Star Trek 2. I went to an exhibition launch at the City Art Gallery on Friday night and drank a lot of wine and all of a sudden it was Monday morning and all of today stretched out before me.

It all stretched out before me, because I slept in for seven minutes. On my day off. My body is annoying. And then, also annoying, I spent a lot of the morning curled up on the floor sniffling, on account of our landlord rebuffing Tim and I not once, but twice, in our request for a pet cat. Whether or not you’ve noticed that I talk about cats quite a lot, or have one tattooed on me, or have three paintings of cats on my wall, or whatever, the fact is I want a cat with every molecule of my being. It physically hurts my heart. And we just can’t have one, despite there being nothing in our tenant information about not having pets, or indeed, any reason whatsoever from our landlord, despite my very persuasive email. And apparently my yelling “I’m gonna take this to City Hall!” will have no effect, well, according to Tim. I really don’t want this to be the end of the road for Tim and Laura Having A Cat, but also I acknowledge that I’m not Leslie Knope and this isn’t a comical episode of Parks and Recreation where plotlines will be wrapped up neatly after some toiling. But I also feel like I can’t simply stop trying. Is there some kind of tribunal for if your landlord makes you cry because they just say no to a cat, without saying why?

But as I said, I did do some baking, as a means to a very specific end: work snacks. A few different factors – money, time, disorganisation, listlessness, money again – mean that my lunches for work are generally terrible. In that I’ve recently been having instant noodles for lunch, and that’s a distinct step up nutritionally and delicious-wise from what I used to eat. It’s a bit stupid but it’s the way it is: I can make myself elaborate (or at least decent) dinners or pretty weekend brunches or huge cakes, but I struggle to put any effort into lunch for work. Maybe because it’s hard to throw lots of time and money into something you’re going to wolf down under fluorescent lights, maybe because it’s hard to make something that is filling and that you look forward to and that you won’t get utterly sick of after five days (instant noodles, looking at you.) Maybe it’s just because I’ve only recently started to think about it, and it’s easy to fall into habits that require the least from your brain.

I do go through occasional bursts of inspiration, but I’m going to try to be more consistent now, so that I have the energy throughout the day to not fall asleep, and so that lunch isn’t something I dread yet long for because I’m so hungry but also know that it’s just dried noodles in a polystyrene cup. (They actually are pretty delicious as a snack, by the way, but they’re not that filling and day after day of them is not cool.)

Kinda typically, I completely screwed up one of my ventures, the granola bar. We might call them muesli bars in New Zealand, but that to me recalls memories of primary school morning tea, grimly dry, mealy, oaten briquettes which came in boxes of six or eight and occasionally had a mean sprinkling of chocolate chips on top or some vague apricot flavour. And also, oddly, a listening comprehension test from the same time where the narrator pronounced the word “muesli” as “mooooslie” and it was very distracting. Granola bars sounds a little more freewheeling and chewy and American and cool.

I made this recipe for Date Orange and Almond Granola Bars from The Moveable Feasts, a food blog I love – the author Amy just seems like someone I’d get on with in real life, and she is beautifully descriptive about food but in a relaxed way…I don’t know, a lot of food blogs these days have a really strange energetic style that I not only don’t enjoy reading, but also it blurs them all into one. This one though: it’s good. And this recipe seemed exactly what I was after to take to work – something sustaining and easy to make, and yet still snacky and sweet and enjoyable.

I then somehow added three times the required amount of oats. I don’t know how or why, just my usual heedlessness I suppose – it wasn’t till the next day that I worked it out – but it basically turned into granola, really really good granola, so all is not lost. Just diverted. I now have a container to take with me to work for eating by the handful, the spoonful, or the milky bowlful, depending on my needs.

So if you want to make the granola bars, just follow the link, and if you want to make this into granola bar granola…just triple the quantity of oats. On purpose.

Fortunately the other thing I made worked out just fine. I really like Fine Cooking magazine and figured I’d find something on its website that my brain could happily latch on to. Well, there was a little heedlessness involved here, too – this is supposed to be a recipe for Ginger Bars, but halfway through making it I realised I had no ground ginger. No harm done: I like cinnamon even better.

These have all the squish and sweetness of brownies, but with the pure rush of comforting warmth that cinnamon brings. They take about five minutes to make and get better each day. They just taste ridiculously good.

Cinnamon Bars

Adapted from a recipe from Fine Cooking magazine.

  • 180g soft butter
  • 4 tablespoons golden syrup
  • 2 tablespoons honey
  • 1 1/3 cups sugar
  • 2 teaspoons cinnamon
  • Pinch of salt
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and line a brownie tin with baking paper.

Cream the butter, sugar, honey, golden syrup, cinnamon and salt together till light, airy, and pale. (Also: you should totally eat some at this point, it’s amazing.) Beat in the eggs, then stir in the flour and baking soda. Tip the lot into the brownie tin, sprinkle over a little more cinnamon if you like, and bake for about 25 minutes. It should still be a little tender in the middle, not entirely wobbly and liquidy, but not too firm either.

Cute plate, yeah?

So, now that I am armed with two snacks, one of which can double as a lunch, I’m feeling a little better about the week ahead. Cat-related tears aside (which resurfaced this evening) (which I should really call having-no-cat-related tears.)

PS: I wrote something about Tim’s and my trip to Nashville for a national newspaper here, and it ended up online, if you want to read it. We loved Nashville so much, I could’ve written triple what I did here.

title via: Lily Allen’s LDN. Sunny and grey at the same time. Oh why oh why would I want to be anywhere else?

music lately:

Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, As Long as the Grass Shall Grow. Just really simple and beautiful.

Solange, Stillness Is The Move. This woman cannot make a musical misstep as far as my ears are concerned. I love this airy cover of the Dirty Projectors’ song.

Next time: I made some oven-baked risotto and it was as awesomely zero-effort as it was excellent-tasting.

 

square cut or pear shape these rocks won’t lose their shape

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I don’t mean to deliver this like it’s candlelit-vigil level news, but the following exchange happened late last week:
Tim: we’ve exceeded our 60 gigabyte monthly internet bandwidth allowance.
Me: *dramatic gasp* No internet? But I’ll be insufferable.
Tim: I know. I know.

I mean, a breezy and heedless thank goodness for 3G on smartphones, but still, I’ve had to write this as hastily as possible, in the knowledge that we get charged significantly extra for every gigabyte over the monthly allowance that we use. Just keep that in mind if there’s, I don’t know, any tiny thing you don’t like ever. This is my excuse. 
This is how we do it.
I also don’t mean to deliver the following like it’s two-roads-diverging-in-a-yellow-wood level news of life-changing significance, but Tim and I have been in our house for around six months now, and only just had our first dinner party on Monday night. Not to harp on like some kind of harp about Game of Thrones, but this dinner party was in honour of the season three finale last night. Spoiler alert: some bits were all “whoaaa” and some bits were all “um, ugh, awkward white saviour moment”. I do love this show, although many’s the time after particular treatment of women within it that I have proclaimed myself absolutely done with it. And then I keep coming back, because it’s possible to enjoy something and have major problems with it at the same time. But if nothing else, it gave us an excellent opportunity to have our first dinner party in our now not-so-new house, in the form of a twelve person potluck. And it was wondrous. Quesadillas, Balti curries, roast butternut salad with tahini dressing, potatoes with caramel and prunes (oh Ottolenghi, you maverick), orzo salad, spicy pumpkin pie, and my offerings, a kind of grilled courgette and couscous layered dish covered in tomato sauce and capers, and these baked pears. 

Baked pears with almonds, chocolate, and rosewater. I was deeply impressed with myself at how they turned out, in that I thought them up on Monday afternoon and hastily made them just before everyone arrived. Then maybe had just one too many wines during dinner to be truly effective, and almost forgot about them till halfway through watching the show itself. Luckily Tim reminded me about them at what turned out to be their optimal cooking time. I’m so used to screwing up recipes that I make up on the fly lately, so was really pretty prepared for these to be awful right up until the moment that I had my first bite. But they worked out perfectly. Serendipity makes everything more delicious.

What also makes everything more delicious, is when it’s ridiculously delicious. Pears have this sweet perfumed mellowness which the touch of rosewater and almond helps subtly amplify, like the Rise filter on Instagram. Everything caramelises and intensifies, but covering the dish with tinfoil means that the chocolate doesn’t scorch and the pears stay juicy and yielding. So you know, these are quite, quite amazing the next day for breakfast, cold from the fridge with cream poured over.

The way these came about in my head was that I wanted to make something vegan for pudding, to accommodate friends, but also wanted something fairly luscious and rococo to go well eaten alongside an HBO fantasy show with an enormous budget and phrases like “good brown ale” and “I will take what is mine with fire and blood”. The secret ingredient here is tahini, which ties the ingredients together with an accommodatingly nutty, rich backdrop of flavour.

Baked Pears with Almonds, Chocolate, and Rosewater

Recipe by myself. On the one hand, these are some slightly high-falutin’ ingredients. On the other hand, pears are maybe a dollar a kilo these days.

6 ripe pears
Half a lemon
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 heaped tablespoons tahini
1 x 70g packet ground almonds (this is how they come in New Zealand, anywhere between 50-100g would be fine if you can’t specifically find this amount.) 
2 teaspoons rosewater
25g dark chocolate (I use Whittaker’s Dark Ghana, which has no dairy in it. And is wildly delicious.)

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Slice each pear straight down the middle vertically, trimming off the nubbly base and stem as you please (because little would be more shuddery than accidentally eating either.) Use a teaspoon to scoop out the seeds and a little flesh to create a hollow for the stuffing. Mine were entirely asymmetrical, so don’t worry about looks at this point. Lay the pears, cut side up, in a roasting dish and squeeze over the juice of the lemon. This will stop them browning while you make the stuffing but also helps complement the rosewater flavour. 

Carefully mix together the tahini, sugar, and rosewater – tahini can sometimes be ridiculously thick and un-pliant, so expect something that eventually looks like cookie dough – then roughly, coarsely slice up the chocolate into shavings and chunks and stir that through. Using a teaspoon, fill each pear hollow – really packing it in and heaping it on – with the stuffing. This should make the perfect amount for 12 pear halves, with an extra teaspoon or so for nibbling on. Cover the roasting dish with tinfoil and bake for around an hour, or until an implement slides easily into one of the pears. Like Valerian steel into one of the endless parade of now-dead characters on Game of Thrones. 

Last week was a series of ups and downs, the downs being I was sick with some mysterious sore throat and zero energy affliction, the ups being Tim and I went to the Visa Wellington on a Plate launch and mingled energetically with incredible bread and butter, lots of cool people, and the beauteous Garage Project dogs (you can see them on the event’s website, and perhaps understand why I ended up taking so many ‘best friends!’ type selfies with these hunds). Despite my jangled nerves at crowded social events like this – I’m an all or nothing mingler, either doing it with aplomb or awkward horror – It was a very, very fun night and the programme looks utterly bananas. Judging by my casual flick through it, it’s going to be a very good time to be in Wellington. The streets will be paved with halloumi and local chocolates.  

Back to the downs, I’m still not sleeping any better – if anything it’s getting worse. I woke up at 3.45am today, just casually awake. I take longer and longer to sleep, but wake up around 5am. On the weekends, with no alarms and no surprises, I find my eyes flying open at 7am. Which is technically a decent sleep-in by my standards, but still. On the other hand I’m not sure if it is getting worse or just swirling to a climax, as I look back over the last few years and am unsure if there’s a time when I ever slept well. Are there night classes in sleeping? Oh, wait. (Don’t worry, I’ll go see a doctor about it or something.)

But then back to the ups, I did, as promised a while back, start learning to knit and I adore it. It’s so soothing and quiet and repetitive and tactile and also very fun watching the creation (thus far: an oh-so-slightly wobbly square which will become a blanket) slowly grow like a soft wooly plant.

Also on the ups: bought some sriracha. The cool thing about sriracha is that it’s very instagrammable and cool and people perk up and say “ohhhh I’m addicted to that stuff” if you mention it (like Game of Thrones!). But also it really is incredibly addictive, slightly tangy hot chilli sauce, and I can’t wait to pour it on everything. (Which: seriously, what is life. On the downside I never ever sleep but on the upside I have a small bottle of nice hot sauce.)

Posing? Me? Well, often, but I really am eating sriracha in this photo. Cinema verite! 

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Title via: I acknowledge that Moulin Rouge spoke to me deeply at a particular time (there was one point where I was watching it more or less daily) but for these purposes I shall link to the ever-diverting Marilyn Monroe crooning Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.
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Music lately: 

Demi Lovato, Give Your Heart a Break. Perfect, from the slicey uplifting violins to the flawless chorus.

Brigitte Bardot, Moi Je Joue. I followed a link to this song from The Moveable Feasts, a food blog I love, and was rewarded with this adorably scrappy, impetuous delight of a song.

Laura Marling, Master Hunter. Tim and I bought her new record and are finding ourselves unable to stop listening to it. Love her music to pieces.
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Next time: Sriracha on EVERYTHING.

you like tomato and i like tomahto

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It’s nice to have a happy little rut of recipes that are easy enough that you can make them while mentally and emotionally exhausted, not to mention physically exhausted (for example: from merely existing, or from watching the latest Game of Thrones, amiright? Spoiler alert: omg.) But they’re also adjustable and reliably versatile, like an old comfortable bra, that you can really throw them into anything and you’ll feel like you’ve done something nice for yourself of an evening. Somehow, this Tomato, Almond and Smoked Paprika sauce has become that to me. I think it’s based on a sauce I saw on a cooking show one time – seriously, those are the only details that I can remember – and occasionally I add other things to it. But it manages to be utterly simple, vaguely nutrient-adjacent (considering the nutritional value of my lunchtime pot noodles is akin to that of their polystyrene containers) and yet a little flashy and sexy and interesting. One of my very favourite things to do with it is to very slowly fry eggs in about five tablespoons of olive oil, then use that olive oil in the sauce itself, then serve all of that over couscous. But on Monday – Queen’s birthday, oh that joyous occasion…of a Monday off! – I made it to have roasted vegetables dipped into it or blanketed under it, while my friend Kim and I watched The Craft. 

I was curious to see if The Craft was still the piece of important, flawless filmmaking that it seemed to be to me in 1996. It um, wasn’t quite. But it was also still really fantastic in some ways, most of them fashion-related, and I still appreciate what it meant to me back in the day. A film about women, into witchcraft, who said “we are the weirdos, mister?” Thumbs up.

(The red candle in front melted rapidly and spilled over onto the floor. Which we only noticed after the movie finished. I admit, at first my brain thought “gasp! It’s an evil thing like the thing from the thing in the movie!” But really…it was just spilled wax. Phew.)

This sauce is just ridiculously delicious, although frankly I think the batch I made for myself and Kim was my weakest so far. Possibly because I used multigrain bread, which meant the sauce had linseeds dispersed through it, which…yeah. Not quite what I was going for. Generally though, this sauce is rich and luscious and a little smoky from the paprika and brilliant with all sorts of things – the aforementioned fried eggs, stirred through pasta, poured over cubed roasted potatoes for a patatas bravas effect, tipped onto polenta…it just goes with all things. Particularly these crisp, collapsing and slightly charred vegetables.

Roast Cauliflower and Parsnip with Tomato, Almond and Smoked Paprika Sauce

A recipe by myself.

As much cauliflower and as many parsnips as you please. I found about half of the former and two of the latter fit comfortably on one oven tray and will feed 2-3.
Olive oil
2 slices thick white bread (I used seeded this time round. Uh…don’t.)
1/2 cup whole almonds
1 can tomatoes
1 heaped teaspoon smoked paprika
Salt

Set your oven to 220 C and line a baking tray with baking paper. Slice the parsnip and cauliflower up however you like, but the more flat/thin you go, the better likelihood of crisp-ity there is. Arrange in one layer on the tray, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and roast for about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, blast the bread and almonds together in the food processor till the almonds are good and nubbly and small. This may take some time. If your bread is quite stale, soak it in a little cold water for a while. Then drain the can of tomatoes of its liquid – I know, this seems kind of wasteful. I don’t know, drink the liquid if you feel bad about it (actually don’t, it’s weird and metallic and horrible on its own from the tin) and tip the tomatoes into the food processor with the bread-almond stuff and continue to process till it looks saucy and incorporated. Finally, add the paprika, a good pinch of salt, and plenty of olive oil – about three tablespoons – and process again. Taste to see if it wants any more salt or paprika, then either serve cold or heated gently in a saucepan in a bowl on the side of the vegetables. 

Dip the vegetables in the sauce or pile them into small bowls and spoon the sauce over. 

In case you’re wondering, the reason these are sitting on a cardboard box is because our one small table has our projector sitting on a chair on top of it. It’s kind of an awkward fixture to have in the house, but then we keep wanting to use the projector, so perhaps this is our life now. It’s not a bad life, considering how fun it is watching things projected in large scale onto the wall. 

What else happened on the long weekend? Why, plenty.

We went to our friend Craig’s 30th. It was a very fun night (less fun the next morning) especially bedizening ourselves with fake tattoos of Craig’s face (tattoo locations of Craig’s face include Tim’s actual face) and “Tattoos are for losers”.

First new duvet cover since 2006. As per, “is it instagrammable” guilelessly affected the decision-making process. It’s so crisp and clean and whenever I wake up I feel like I’ve been sleeping inside a bed of white chocolate ganache, I love it.

Amazing burritos occurred.
Hello.
And finally I got an email telling me an advance copy of my cookbook (which isn’t due out till September so don’t try asking your bookstore about it yet, unless you think it will build up major h y p e) which I received in the mail today and nearly cried and threw up everywhere when I saw it because every emotion in the world suddenly played out in my brain. I mean, I’m really happy with it of course, but there was just such a rush of feelings when I held it in my hands for the first time, so much more intense than just seeing the printouts of the design and the manuscript and so on. I will have to work on this so I don’t black out every time I walk into a bookshop in September. It’s just very exciting and terrifying and strange and happy all at the same time. Cookbook! 
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Title via: Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, a song about a couple who say words differently sometimes. Adorable! Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong do a reliably snappy version. 
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Music lately:

Mariah Carey feat Miguel, Beautiful. This dreamy, warm song feels like a return to form for my favourite singer ever who’s non-returns to form I’d totally justify anyway. Have listened to it many, many, many times. 

The final few episodes of Nashville just slew me. I shed human tears and couldn’t move for half an hour after the season finale. A joyful highlight though, was Clare Bowen as Scarlett O’Conner, singing the hugely pretty Looking For A Place To Shine. 

Polly Scattergood, Wanderlust. Cannot. Stop. Listening. To. This song. 
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Next time: Umm. I know not of any specifics yet. Will see where my brain takes me. Could probably do with a better weekday lunch than pot noodles, that could be a thing. 

fancy plans and pants to match: La Boca Loca

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That’s right, sometimes one must take a trip to fancy town. It really doesn’t happen that often – that I get invited to a Free Exciting Thing – considering that the last time I wrote under this heading was back in February – but as I said then, occasionally I’ll be taking a diverting from my usual recipes to indulge in some full disclosure. As I said back in February:

“It’s also something I’ve felt really awkward about disclosing. Oh sure, I’ll post the occasional instagram or tweet or passing mention, but I’ve never quite been able to reconcile the joy of free extravagance with the fear of making lots of people hate me by talking about it. I mean, I’m the type to immediately assume people would sneer and be resentful if they read about me writing about fun free dinners and events, rather than being interested in the dishes and so on, since, in all honesty, I tend to roll my eyes at such writing myself. Unless it’s really good writing – which it often isn’t.

So what made me change my stance? Guilt! No, I’m kidding. I like to challenge myself, and I think it is a decent challenge to write about this kind of thing without sounding like a dick. Also there’s the fact that it may actually be of interest to some people – hearing about what ideas and innovations are happening in restaurants, about exceptionally delicious food, about my stumbling-baby-deer attempts to describe the wine I drank. And I do like expanding on this blog’s scope every now and then. 

I’ve decided to dub this segment Fancy Pants and Plans To Match, a quote from the woefully underwatched but utterly brilliant 90s TV show News Radio, spoken by the character Jimmy James. I could let this devolve into a ranty essay about why you should watch NewsRadio but I will instead say this: it’s a better title than my original idea “Sometimes I get free stuff PLEASE DON’T HATE ME.”

I feel like I’ve been a bit oddly cryptic and circular, as per, so here’s the thing: I got invited to a product launch and dinner at La Boca Loca. 
The pitch: La Boca Loca is launching a new range of food products that you can buy instore and soon online, and so they had a dinner as part of this on Sunday night. 
It was quite dark: hence the grainy photos. Everything looked a lot nicer in person, I promise. 

What happened: Tim and I arrived, mingled a little awkwardly, as is our wont, and then made our way down to the back of the restaurant to find a place at one of three large tables. Marianne Elliot started us off with an overview of what was going down, and Lucas Putnam (her partner, co-owner of the place with her, El Jefe and Master of Tequila – what a title!) followed that up by telling us about the journey to get to this point, including collaborating with villages in Mexico to get their amazing ingredients out here in New Zealand while simultaneously supporting their local industry. Then affable head chef Will Michell gave us a brief cooking demonstration, saying “If I can cook Mexican food – and I’m from Bristol – anyone can”. He mixed organic masa (a rough flour made from corn) into a pliant dough, then squashed balls of it, heated them, then chopped them up and fried them to demonstrate how quickly you could make both tortillas and corn chips. Food was then brought out to each table – addictively sweet-salty lime-tinged roasted sunflower seeds, and punchily hot roasted peanuts. Bowls of corn chips made from white, yellow, and blue corn masa, bafflingly creamy guacamole, zingy salsa verde, and smoky, mild salsa ranchero. Bowls of poblano cream chicken, shredded beef, slow-braised in their master stock, and pork that – damn it x a thousand – I can’t remember what they did with, but it was faint-makingly good. We were then given a product catalogue which lists all the things you can buy – the salsas, the hot sauces, the spices, and so on.

Coolest bit: Firstly, Marianne is one of the coolest, most interesting people I know (seriously. This woman.) So it was great just to be there and to talk with her and hear her speak and support La Boca Loca and so on.

Also: I only drank a chargrilled pineapple and black pepper margarita like it was no big thing.

Pineapple’s sweetness, especially when intensified by heat, can handle a lot of spice. As can tequila’s sinuous robustness. It was an excellent update on an already mighty concept. The food was exceptionally good, and I liked the convivial nature of it – passing bowls around the table, everyone filling their own tortillas exactly how they fancied, exclaiming over how utterly drinkable the salsa verde is with complete strangers. And it’s always good to be reminded of that there’s not just heat or an absence of chilli when it comes to, well, chilli. From tiny as a Christmas tree light and fierce, to large, disconcertingly floppy, and sweetly smoky in flavour.

And finally, I was given a bottle of banana vinegar! Those two words feel like they shouldn’t go together, but in fact it’s bizarrely good. Made from the abundant platano muchas of the Mexican State of Veracruz, it has a delicate, rounded fruity sweetness and I can’t wait to try and use it in something. I feel like it might be quite amazing with avocado, but also maybe in a ceviche with lime?

L-R – Salsa Verde, Salsa Ranchero, Guacamole. Don’t make me choose a favourite, I can’t.

Freshly made yellow corn tortillas

 My dinner. Very artistic.

Salsa!

Wild herbs and dried chillies. Yes, I know. The photos got worse. 

From a scale of 1 to “Is This A Dream?” 5. On the one hand, the dinner was very fun and relaxed, but on the other hand, I was at a product launch and got a bottle of banana vinegar and a bag of beautiful, leathery chillies. Thrills!

Would I do this for not-free? Any day of the week. I adore La Boca Loca. And it is very reasonably priced, which is good because plain adoring a place is not always enough to feasibly get you through the door.

Earnest thanks for making me feel fancy to: La Boca Loca, 19 Park Road, Miramar. Ph 04 388 2451