i should tell you: she’s so rad

3 Comments

Well hello there, and welcome to chapter eight of I Should Tell You, where I interview cool musicians who will answer my emails. The same three questions about food every time, just to see what kicks we can kick up. This week it’s Jeremy Toy from the band whose name is also a lovely compliment: She’s So Rad.

I’m not even going near the hornet nest that is trying to write a bio, since I’ve seen them described as a four-piece and a duo but She’s So Rad definitely does contain Jeremy Toy and Anji Sami, and I definitely adore their music. You can listen to their album In Circles in its entirety on bandcamp, and you can even buy a copy of it on vinyl, which I totally intend to do soon. The whole thing is effing dreamy, although I do favour the track called Ice Block. Posssibly because I just really like ice blocks. Their single Confetti is all gorgeous too, all swishy and light-reflecting like taffeta. Just listen to everything, okay? But perhaps most of all I recommend losing yourself several million times over in their cover of that pinnacle of utter dreaminess, Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart. (From Twin Peaks, so important.)

They also have a new video coming soon and a fresh EP out on Japanese label Wonderful Noise ere long. What! Heard it here first. If you heard it here first. But till then…the interview starts now. Thanks, Jeremy!

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

I took a trip to LA with a couple of mates and one lunch they were on a mission to find this place I knew nothing about. What  we ended up trawling backstreets for (pre-iphone) was Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles. This place is an institution and has fed many a celebrity (Kanye, Alicia, Biggie, Snoop). I foolishly ordered the chicken salad thinking it would be the healthy option however when it came out from the kitchen my initiation to Roscoe’s began as before me lay 2 deep fried chicken breasts sitting on a humongous bowl of lettuce and topped off with so much processed cheese that you could barely see the lettuce. My mate did a much better job of ordering and got the classic Chicken and Waffles, 2 pieces of fried chicken, whipped butter, maple syrup and 2 waffles. Amazing. I usually don’t like to entertain myself with the trash aspect of Los Angeles as there is so much more to the place than Hollywood and Disneyland but Roscoe’s is the one place I recommend to everyone going to LA as it is totally extreme food.


What do you fix for yourself, or where do you go to eat, when it’s just you on your own?

Bian at 183 Symonds St in Auckland is my go to place. They do a real good half serve of salmon and rice that gets the job done every time.


What’s one of your favourite food memories from your childhood? 

My old man used to do these amazing charcoal barbies. More often than not everything would come out looking like charcoal itself. After one night of brutal inedible sausage charring he took us on a mission with one of his charcoaled sausages and we posted it in his mate’s letterbox. 

you’re bleeding syrup, amour

22 Comments
I really like this photo.

I did not specifically bake this cake with aesthetics in mind. I baked it because I thought Earl Grey tea and maple syrup would be a swoon-makingly good pair when in cake form. But I also had the secret hope that I’d be able to ice it all cool and it would look like an Internet Cake. Just wanted to impress you guys, is all. And maybe enjoy the rush that comes with a flood of one-off hits to my blog from people who will probably never read it again or even make the cake via Pinterest, as I am but human and not saint. 
It ended up being a bit more Glittery Nipple than anything else, but no-one ever said glittery nipples were a bad thing – I’m not sure anyone ever said glittery nipple three times in one sentence even. (It’s edible glitter by the way, in case you thought my aesthetics really had got the better of me.)
It’s a layer cake, even though I could only find one of my 20cm caketins, which meant I had to bake half the mixture, then put that cake on a rack, then bake the rest of the mixture in the same tin. It’s not the greatest hardship recorded, but it is a pain. The two cakes were all mountainous, so I had to level one off with a serrated knife. And finally a rogue air bubble appeared in one of them, and I kept getting thumbprints in the icing, but the cake itself just tastes so good, and I told myself that it would be reassuring to the public or something. I also told myself if I was constantly reassuring the public that I’m not all that good at stuff they might not trust me to do anything, like write a cookbook. And then I was like “nope! It’s reassuring!” in a strained voice. Besides, Radiohead were singing “try the best you can, the best you can is good enough” through my computer speakers so I took it as a sign. And it’s not like it looks terrible. You have to get quite close to see all the flaws, and if you’re that close to cake, you might as well be eating it. 

Hack icing job and air bubbles aside, it tastes super excellent. The pillowy buttercream, sweet but darkly so, the cake all tender and awash with fragrant flavour. The buttercream is unsurprisingly all you can taste initially when you plunge your teeth into the cake, but the Earl Grey makes itself known at the end, with a pinprick of orange from the bergamot, and the palest suggestion of tea’s clean bitterness.

I haven’t even addressed yet that maple syrup is hellish expensive. I probably only buy it once a year, and what can you do with such an ingredient but send it to the cupboard like you’re Henry the Eighth, too wracked with guilt over price to actually use it, until eventually you forget you have it or it goes past its best-by date and coagulates. My solution to stop turning delicious maple syrup into Tincture of Financial Self-Reproach, is to use small amounts of it in really good recipes where its flavour can shine. So: this cake. Also, I don’t even drink Earl Grey, I’m more of an English Breakfast person, or whatever plain tea is available, consumed black. Well, that was the case until I forgot to have breakfast the other day and so subsisted at work on black tea with spoonfuls of sugar in it till I could meet Tim for lunch. As a result…I think I prefer it sweetened now. It just tastes good. At least, this preference is hardly spurred on by remembrance of the good times I had with it.

Earl Grey tea and maple syrup both have what you could call a complexity of flavour and scent. Earl Grey is all rounded and fragrant with bergamot, while maple is smoky, almost savoury. They are a perfect pair. It’s a dick move, but if I didn’t have real maple syrup I’m not entirely sure I’d use fake – at least, unless I could find a brand that doesn’t put ‘synthetic bouquet’ at the top of its priorities when taste-testing it. Golden syrup is what I’d use itself as intensely flavoured as maple. But seriously, just ignore me and use maple flavoured syrup if you dig the taste and you have it and you want this cake. I don’t want to stand between a person and their hypothetical cake.

Earl Grey and Maple Syrup Cake

A recipe by myself.

Speaking of not a big deal, all you have to do is half-heartedly mix this cake and you’re done. Faint-makingly good though the buttercream is, the cake recipe itself is dairy-free, and if that’s what you’re after you could try baking it in a 22cm tin for about 40 minutes. 

300g flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
Pinch salt
175g brown sugar
3 eggs
250ml very strong earl grey tea
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1/2 cup (125ml) plain oil, like sunflower

Set your oven to 180 C, and line the base of two 20cm caketins with baking paper. Or, if you only have one, just do one, but bake two cakes in a row. This is what I did, and it’s annoying, but the price is right. Place the flour in a large bowl, then sift in the baking soda and baking powder (sifting is boring but I’m terrified of lumps of baking soda) and stir in the salt and the sugar. Tip in the cooled tea, the eggs, the maple syrup and the oil, and stir thoroughly till it forms a thick, smooth batter. Either divide between the two caketins and bake for about 35 minutes, or tip half into one of the caketins and bake for 25 minutes, then remove it and scrape in the remaining batter and bake for another 25 minutes. Once cooled, slice off the top if you need to, to make a more flat surface for icing, then…ice it.

Maple Syrup Buttercream

180g very soft butter
300g icing sugar
4 tablespoons maple syrup

This may or may not sound like large quantities of ingredients. This is because you need a lot of icing. So. Carefully beat the butter and icing sugar together (icing sugar is wont to fly everywhere) till light and very thick and fluffy. Tip in the maple syrup, and continue to beat to form a thick, gorgeously coloured icing. Spread a large dollop on top of one of the cakes, sit the other cake on top, then carefully spread the rest of the icing over the top and side of the cake. 

Edible glitter entirely optional. I almost covered it in hundreds and thousands, but thought a glint of silver against the pale, buff-coloured buttercream would look devastatingly sophisticated. I…should’ve known better. But I stand by my cake.

Speaking of standing by stuff, while we wait, fingers ever crossed for marriage equality laws to pass in New Zealand, Tim and I were thinking of having an engagement party. Strangely it was Tim gunning for it more than me, even though I love having parties. I was all “but can’t I just hide in bed and ignore everything, like how we’re going to get family all in one place and make sure everyone enjoys themselves and that we don’t get stressed out by people and vice versa.” We also realised, having pooled our life experience, that neither of us really knows what to do at one. The one engagement party I’ve been to was practically a wedding in itself – tears, speeches, large piles of presents, waiting forever to eat. And ones that I’ve seen on TV have been either debutante cotillion-esque, or (*spoiler alert but really*) Leslie and Ben’s awkward meeting of families on the so important Parks and Recreation. Thus, any advice and thoughts and experiences would be appreciated. Especially if it’s given in a friendly way, not in a “if you don’t do this exactly you will be naught but the Bride of Failure-stein.” I mean, I will ask my married friends what they did, I just thought this would get me more comments on my blog. I mean, would engage with my audience. I mean. Honestly: I just want to hear some opinions from people who have done it, is all, and I bet you have a good one.

Finally: here’s something I noticed recently that made me…smile.

At my christening: Before I even grew eyebrows I was furrowing them.
Family photo: I can almost physically feel myself overthinking in this one.

Earlier this year: a relaxed photo I quickly took after getting a fringe trim I was really happy with. 

I recently realised I had all three of these photos on my phone, and had a bit of an “oh, you!” moment at myself. I suspect many of you have been in this situation, where someone – okay, it has never not been an older man – has said something like “smile, love!” or “cheer up!” or the weirdly specific “it might never happen!” All of which seems relatively innocuous to most, but is also so very creepy and imposing, and maybe I want to not smile right now, and stop trying to control my body you YOU FOOTSOLDIER OF THE PATRIARCHY*.
* heard this from a cool friend recently, noted it down for inevitable future need of it. 
I concede that I look grumpy often, but without defensiveness or apology, because frankly there’s a lot to be grumpy at in this world. And this is just what my face does sometimes. For what it’s worth though, and in typically extreme fashion, I also had the most bared-teeth enormous smile as a child. Total strangers would approach me after ballet recitals to tell me, age eight or so, that I had such a wonderful, huge smile. (This really did happen. Nothing I say on this blog is fictional flourish.) So…yeah. To my original point: Those three photos together made me feel happy inside. 
So did, to bring it full circle, this cake. It’s utterly delicious and it’s easier to make than it looks and it’s fancy and it looks like a glittery nipple. What a coup!
_________________________________________________________________________
title via: Lana Del Rey’s Velvet Crowbar. I almost literally have to limit my listening of her music to very rare occasions because it makes me feel all weird and feelingsy inside. I know what you’re thinking: so brave of me to quote it here, then. 
_________________________________________________________________________
Music lately: 

PJ Harvey, Good Fortune. As freshly obsessed with this song as when I first heard it on the radio. 

Connie Converse, How Sad How Lovely. Connie Converse disappeared in 1974. She left behind a small body of work. Haunting seems to be a dully obvious word to use, but it’s hard not to listen to these tunes without that context over the top. This song lives up to its name, is all. 
_________________________________________________________________________
Next time: New I Should Tell You interview. Woop, there it is! 

i should tell you: hera and jed

3 Comments

Well hello there. Welcome to the seventh I Should Tell You, where I interview musicians who are both cool and answer my emails. Same three questions about food every time, just to see what happens. This week – in lieu of the so rad She’s So Rad who will now be next week – it’s Hera and Jed! I first saw Hera a million years ago in Christchurch in 2008 when I was working at the Southern Amp festival (it’s 6.30am, don’t make me do maths or logic please). She was making music long before then and has continued to work away making music ever since.

A fun fact about Iceland: sometimes, when things are all too much, Tim and I will say to each other (sometimes adorably/really grossly in unison) “let’s make a new life in Iceland”. Where no-one can call us on the phone and no-one can bother us and we won’t be able to read the horrible letters to the editor and everything will be wonderful. Another fun fact about Iceland: it’s where Hera is from originally. However Christchurch has become her home, as with Jed, who also plays with the band House of Mountain, and it’s from there that they’ve been making music together since 2011.

Their song Issues, which I adore, is out now. It’s sweet and spiky like a friendly cactus and the video is very endearing. I’m not just saying this so you watch to the end, but the end is my very favourite part.

Find ’em at Fledge.co.nz | herasings.com | facebook.com/JedParsonsMusic

Thanks Hera and Jed! The interview starts…now.

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

HERA: There are lots of really special places around Iceland that I love, Hotel Framtíð – in Djúpivogur (a little seaside village, about an 8 hour drive from Reykjavik) has the most amazing langoustine soup.. all garlicky and buttery and comforting.. 
I also had the most perfect meals while touring in Italy – not at restaurants, but backstage in the kitchens of a few of the venues I played, there would be a really big table and everyone would gather for a late dinner, amazing pizzas, salads and yummy cheeses…

JED: There’s a really lovely local restaurant called McDo Nalds, they serve delicious gourmet burgers. You have the choice to upgrade your burger to a “combo” (I think that’s Italian for “even yummier” or something) where you can get a bunch of thinly sliced potatoes and a freshly poured beverage of your choice. 

What do you fix for yourself, or where do you go to eat, when it’s just you on your own?

HERA: I can be absolutely useless when I’m on my own, I forget to eat until I don’t function properly, then I eat badly.. but I do love to make pizza, and I have a few favorite salads (lentil and beetroot salads) and I really enjoy baking (much better at baking than cooking..)

JED: Luckily I still live at home and my mummy is the best cook in the world. However, If I’m home alone and I’ve managed to get over the tears and the fear of baddies coming to get me, I can usually nail a meal of 2-minute noodles. I prefer to put as much tomato sauce as possible over top, and then I like to grate half a block of cheese (edam if I’m feeling healthy – I find it is the lowest in fat out of all your standard cheeses) on top of that. 

What’s one of your favourite food memories from your childhood? 

HERA: I’m from Iceland, where the traditional food is a little ‘’different’’ We eat dried fish and rotten shark (traditionally served with ‘’Black death’’ an Icelandic liquor) When I was very young, I’d prefer rotten shark over chocolate..  (it’s a pretty amazing thing, think strong smelly cheese but with the texture of squid.. sort-of) 
Also, summer trips to the swimming pool in Iceland were sometimes followed by Ice cream, dipped in licorice sauce and rolled in candy… 

JED: Alphabet spaghetti. That was only on very special occasions. I also ate 25 weetbix in one sitting once (with 2 litres of milk). That’s not really a favorite memory because I felt pretty sick, but I thought I should brag about it anyway. OH, one more… Santa used to bring my brothers and I a tube of condensed milk each and put them in our stockings, that was yummy! He doesn’t come anymore though because one of my brothers swore once. 

(HungryandFrozen’s note: omg me too with the noodles and the tomato sauce and the ton of cheese. And I mean like, tomato sauce that you put on a pie or a sausage roll or something, not even pasta sauce.)

a cottage on cape cod for two, please – two peas in a pod

10 Comments
Me, snugging it up yesterday.
I kind of adore it when I get sick because it means I get to drop responsibilities, and be all snug, and watch TV (I love TV so much) and lie down (I love that too) both things I don’t get to do enough of while I’m out there earning money to pay rent. Could you say I look forward to getting sick? As long as it’s something manageable, then yeah I do. However, it also probably affected the snappishly creative part of my brain, because I spent last night undoing all the delightfulness of my day off by just staring at this very screen that you read, getting angrier and angrier at my inability to put fingertips to keyboard and write something. Quietly seething frustration didn’t prove a reliable model for getting stuff done, and in the end I went to bed. So here I am the following morning at 6.24am having spent 24 minutes slowly, lumpenly writing the second half of this opening paragraph. Maybe I’m still sick? Maybe my brain has given me all it can give ever? Are food blog paragraphs a finite resource? Best not be.
Macaroni Peas

I was very young – maybe five, maybe younger? I was an advanced reader – when I discovered the concept of meta, breaking-the-fourth-wall humour. Of course, smart as I was, I would not have used the word meta then. Why, I didn’t even eat couscous for the first time till I was seventeen! “Meta” I probably only used confidently for the first time in 2009. The conduit for this knowledge was important text, The Monster At The End of This Book, featuring Sesame Street’s Grover. When he flails and dramatically cries “You turned the page!” after I’d just turned the page? Well. There was a particular deliciousness, a certain “oh wow this is the height of wit and I just feel so clever”, which is something the Sesame Street/Muppets empire was very good at – not talking down to children, but building them up. So it was something of a disappointment to be told later in primary school by a teacher that writing a story in class about how hard it was to write a story in class was in fact not the height of wit: just lazy and unfunny. Meanwhile I was all “you know who broke the fourth wall? Shakespeare. In fact I still can’t shake that oh-so-in-on-the-joke satisfaction of the wink to camera. You should’ve seen me laugh in the 2011 Muppets Movie when they’re all “oh, okay we’ll pick up the rest of the Muppets via montage” and “we’ll travel by map!” Even though it was kind of heavy handed, it still just feels like the damn funniest thing for a character to acknowledge that they can see you seeing them.

But using it on this blog, when there isn’t even a fourth wall anyway? Okay, pretty blah. But look: here I am! Vaulted paragraphs ahead, and I didn’t even (quite) write a blog post about writing a blog post.

I’m not going to try and turn this recipe into some kind of theme-reflecting metaphor: it’s just macaroni and peas. It’s a recipe I saw in a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingsall cookbook, River Cottage Veg Every Day, and while I loved it I believed I could make it simpler. Some measures I took were practical: his recipe used about seven different saucepans whereas I managed to pare it back to one. Some were just circumstantial: the macaroni was surprisingly fast-moving and I ended up accidentally tipping 3/4 of the bag into the pan of boiling water – to which I responded, well I guess that’s how much pasta we’re having.

It really is just that simple though – macaroni, boiled peas blitzed in the food processor with my good friend butter and a little cheese, stirred back through the pasta – and while what I’m describing sounds tantamount to upmarket baby food – suddenly it tastes incredible. I think it’s the fact that it’s blended up – instead of being all these separate ingredients bumping round uncomfortably in your bowl, peas sliding off your fork as they are wont to do, it’s instead all amalgamated and bound together and ever so slightly sophisticated. But still very much not so. Ultimately as long as you like peas and pasta in the first place, it’s wackily delicious. And so, so easy.

It’s also not the prettiest. But it’s going to get all chewed up anyway?

Macaroni Peas

Adapted lazily from a recipe in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingsall’s book River Cottage Veg Every Day. I apologise if you don’t have a food processor – this recipe really needs it. You could try one of those blender sticks for soup, or a blender itself, otherwise maybe go hang with a friend who has one and offer to cook them dinner.

200g macaroni
2 1/2 cups frozen peas (or thereabouts)
75g butter
50g cheese, cubed. Like parmesan or colby or something, whatever you can manage.

You have two options. You can either boil the pasta and peas in two separate pans, or you can cook them one after the other in the same pan. It all depends on your dishwashing capabilities. Either way, cook the pasta in boiling salted water till tender, then drain and place in a large bowl with about 25g of the butter. Cook the peas in boiling water, then remove about 3/4 of them (really, don’t worry about the measurements here) and blitz in a food processor with the remaining butter and the cheese, till smooth-ish but still a bit nubbly from the peas. Mix this into the pasta with the remaining whole peas and divide between two bowls. 

Pasta and butter is one of my fallback, can’t-hardly-think self-feeding options anyway, and this is barely more effort. The processed peas still have their bright green flavour, but the cheese and butter, swiftly encorporated into them by their heat, bring luxe richness and savoury depth. If you don’t have cheese, frankly just double the butter. And vice versa, I guess. It’s also weirdly good cold the next day, but I think I might’ve just been convincing myself that because I couldn’t be bothered microwaving it. Which might make me the worst person in the world.

I don’t know if you have them overseas, but here in New Zealand, every bunch of years or so we fill out what is called the Census, which is supposed to provide super-accurate data and a snapshot of the nation at a certain point and so on. I was really excited to fill mine out, since I irrationally love filling out forms about myself, and also because several details about myself have changed since I last filled one out. But it ended up being a little vague, and over quickly, and in the end I wasn’t sure that I’d really contributed much of a picture of who I am. Apart from the religion-related question, there didn’t seem to be anything particularly specific or illuminating in most of the questions. For example, it asked if you were living in a same sex relationship but not if you were actually gay. It gave “walked/jogged” as an example of how you got to work on a particular day – when I would do the former all the time, but never the latter. It did, I concede, ask if you have a fax machine. So we will have some very specific knowledge about faxing capabilities in New Zealand. But still: Tim and I are in there, skewing up the data with our facts. A tiny bit like voting in an election, I feel like a granule of sugar in the sugar bowl, but still satisfied that I’ve made a small difference.

Oh and speaking of doing stuff about doing stuff: Tim and I recently went to see a local production of [title of show] a musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical. We both wrote a review about it on the Wellingtonista. Mine unsurprisingly had a lot of feelings.

And finally…I submitted a video to Hannah Hart’s Pitchin’ Kitchen thing for her My Drunk Kitchen tour to New Zealand. Because I really, really want her to come cook at our house. I think it would be so great. Oh wow, every time I try to talk about it I come over all inarticulate. I’m not actually quite sure what I’m supposed to do now but wait for inevitable disappointment (or….joy? But probably disappointment. But maybe joy? Shut up, heart of mine) but in the meantime feel free to watch the video if you like. Better yet, ignore my video and go straight to the My Drunk Kitchen channel, because good times ahoy!
____________________________________________________________________________
title via: Two Peas In A Pod from the terrifyingly good musical Grey Gardens. Or, Grey Gahhhhhdens as I can’t help but call it. This song, like several songs in the musical, is like an old-timey song you’re sure you’ve heard before but you actually haven’t. True story.
____________________________________________________________________________
Music lately:

Solange, Losing You. My friend Kate got me on to this song. It is allllll too dreamy. Just how I like it.

I’m Alive, Aaron Tveit, from the musical Next To Normal. I know he’s the totally obvious, don’t even have to go looking for it kind of handsome, but oh wow. And how. Some might say too babein’.
____________________________________________________________________________
Next time: got it in my head that an Earl Grey and Maple Syrup cake would be fun (possibly because it was the last day of summer recently and now I’m ready to go FULL AUTUMN.) 

i should tell you: Eva Prowse

Leave a comment

Well hello there, and welcome to the sixth (what!) edition of I Should Tell You, where I briefly interview musicians who are both cool and will answer my emails, about food. Same three questions every time, but what will the answers be? Therein lie the mild thrills. So far I’ve been lucky enough to talk to Anna Coddington, Tourettes, Flip Grater, Dear Time’s Waste, and Jan Hellriegel. This week…well.

This week there was a total kerfuffle, which I guess I could blame on tiredness except I feel I should stop talking about how tired I am because it’s like, we’re all tired Laura, stop trying to replace your lack of zany personality with talking about your lack of sleep (NB: am so zany.) I usually post this on a Friday, and was planning an interview with Jeremy Toy of She’s So Rad, but totally forgot, and then they’ve got some delicious news which meant I’d be better off posting their interview next week anyway, so I brought next week’s interview with Eva Prowse forward a week. At which point I feel like I should link to a picture of Jesus with his thumbs up saying “cool story, bro“.

Instead, a picture of Eva Prowse! Wait, did I just imply she was better than Jesus? We’ll never find out, because I’m so not going there. Even though – nah, actually not going there. Will inevitably offend.

Apart from being friendly and obliging about me moving round her interview suddenly, what else can I tell you about Eva Prowse? Well, I love her music. Her album, the excellently titled I Can’t Keep Secrets, was released in 2010, filled with pretty, folky songs sung in a self-assured, gorgeous voice. You can listen to, and purchase, the entire album on Bandcamp, but if you’re looking for just one to start with, the lead single Youngest Child is instantly charming. Eva Prowse has been living in London for a while but is back and working on an album to be released later this year. And she has also been absorbed into the Fly My Pretties family, which is pretty fancy.

Also fancy: Eva drinking a coconut in South East Asia.

Thanks Eva! The interview will start…now.

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

Currently that’d be Vietnam – just the whole country really – although we did have some delicious vegetarian Pho (traditional Vietnamese noodle soup) at a place called ‘Pho Real’… 

Everywhere we ate the food was delicious and cheap – we mainly ate with the locals sitting on tiny plastic chairs on the side of the road. Noodles of any kind are always a winner for me, and the street vendors would sell an array of deep fried delights that I probably ate too many of. 

The bonus brag here would be that even though I ate a lot of food off the streets/local street vendors and had ice in my beers, I never once got a sicky tummy situation on the whole trip (I was in SE Asia for a month)! 

What do you fix for yourself, or where do you go to eat, when it’s just you on your own?

For cooking it’d be anything that’s a one-pot wonder, i.e. one pot to cook/make, same pot to eat. A vegetarian something or whatever with lots of chilli, spices, and salt.

Failing to cook (often the case) then it’d have to be toast – the best food platform of all time, with cucumber, tomato, avocado, and/or vegemite on top.

Oh and cereal for those hungry in between times…or anytime really…

What’s one of your favourite food memories from your childhood?

Fairy Bread – it was so pretty, had a magical name, and was full of refined carbs and food colouring – perfect.

When I was living in London last year, I told my workmate all about fairy bread (and other NZ whitebread party treats e.g. asparagus rolls) – she’d never heard of it, no one had over there had in fact. So when it was my last day of work, she made it for my leaving do. Only a handful of workmates tried it, and they all thought it was just weird and the texture was uncomfortable. I thought it tasted like a blissful memory, so I basically polished off the plate and was on some crazy sugar trip for my last few hours of work. 

I’ve just now realised that reading this interview a couple of weeks ago when Eva sent it to me was probably-definitely what influenced my subconscious to want Fairy Bread myself last week. So, double thanks, Eva! Also, thanks to Jeremy Toy from She’s So Rad for being understanding about my forgetfulness. His interview will be next week, hooray!

plush velvet sometimes, sometimes just pretzels and beer, but i’m here

15 Comments
Just like the great Alanis Morrissette, my grasp of what is actual irony may well be as shady as my enjoyment of saying “isn’t it ironic” is fervent. But it does seem ironic or something how I am so tired that my brain feels like someone pressed pause on a video of a fallen ceramic vase smashing into a thousand pieces, and my brain is that vase, fragile and perpetually shattering. And according to this “today in your social media history” app I have, on this day last year I was tweeting about feeling the exact same way. That’s not the ironic bit, although it is…something. What I consider the isn’t it ironic don’t you think bit, is how I was writing about it for three long paragraphs here when suddenly, I literally couldn’t tell if I was just very tired, and therefore unable to continue reading and writing it, or so bored by my lifeless writing that I was falling asleep. And so I deleted the lot and forced myself to start again. So here we are. 
I do remember a high school English teacher telling us that irony was a lot like sarcasm, and feeling unfamiliar confusion, like I’d accidentally wandered into a maths class. Isn’t it more like…rain on your wedding day? Ironically – I think? – these days I really wouldn’t mind if it rains on my wedding day.  The point is: you are always correct in using the word ‘ironic’, but only if you say it with confident authority. And also, I am very, very tired and underslept. Partly from doing work on my cookbook proof – exciting! And partly from being not very talented at sleeping. Which is less exciting. 
Somewhere out there, Alanis Morrisette is quietly googling her own name out of idle curiousity, and sighing heavily.

Earlier this year I had the inexplicable but thank-goodness-it-was-me-not-someone-else honour of being named one of New Zealand’s People of Influence for 2013 by a major nationwide publication. Not to try and pre-empt eyerolls or anything, and I said this at the time, but I didn’t quite realise when I submitted my interview the nature of where it was going to end up. Hence why I’m talking about stuff like pretzels in it. But y’know, if I had my time over, my words would likely still be the same. Pretzels are so important. And I decided that since I’d said they were going to be a Big Deal this year, it was time to put my money where my mouth is by doing more than just putting pretzels where my mouth is.

And I made Caramel Pretzel Ice Cream. 

Possibly you were under the impression that pretzels were to be tipped into a bowl and eaten absent-mindedly till all that rock salt and mouth-drying crispness makes you gaspingly thirsty? Well, that’s still a reasonable use for them, but in a move that seems unsurprising in hindsight (I see you, chocolate dipped potato crisps) they’re propelled into a whole other stratosphere of deliciousness by the presence of sugar. And while they’re part of the cracker family more or less, something very specific about the dense crunchy texture and intense saltiness and rich, slightly malty (I think?) flavour makes pretzels my food of choice for this. Also, they have a cool shape. No mere circle they.

This is going to sound like a stupid thing to say on my own blog (well, considering some of the things I’ve said here, maybe a stupider thing), but this probably isn’t the very best pretzel ice cream out there. I could make one that’s more technical and involves a lot more steps and ingredients. It would be superior to this one – but this one you can make in about ten minutes. I tried making a more complicated one first and screwed it up every step of the way – overboiling the sugar, burning the pretzels – and once I’d calmed down from the waste of ingredients and significant dent to my self-esteem, I wanted to try again but make it as simple as possible, to put as few hurdles as possible between you and the finished product. And here it is. And it’s incredible.

Caramel Pretzel Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

I’d like to point out while this is an original recipe it’s not an original concept: a brief perusal of Pinterest’s woeful search function will bring up a squillion recipes for this, but for what it’s worth, I didn’t look at any of them. Just went with my instincts. Which will sometimes lead me astray, but not with ice cream. I’d also like to acknowledge the mighty Christina Tosi of the Momofuku restaurant empire, whose genius pretzel-milk infusion may well have kicked off this resurgence in the first place. I can’t say for sure, but I do know researching it would make me really hungry.

1 1/2 cups pretzels 
1 tablespoon butter
3 tablespoons sugar
500ml (2 cups) cream
4 tablespoons brown sugar

In a decent-sized pot or pan, heat up the butter and the 3 tablespoons of sugar. Don’t stir, just let it slowly dissolve and melt and bubble up. Once the mixture starts to turn an amber, whisky-ish colour, remove it from the heat and tip in the pretzels. Stir quickly to coat them, then tip them out onto a piece of baking paper on a baking tray. Scrape out as much syrup as possible onto them, then let them cool a little. 

Whisk the cream with the brown sugar till thickened significantly but not actually whipped – still liquidy but thick enough to leave a hint of a trailing line behind the whisk when you move it through the cream. 

Using a large knife, roughly chop the sugary pretzels into shards and fold it into the cream. Scrape the lot into a loaf tin or container of roughly a litre. Freeze, without stirring. 

If like me, you’re the boundlessly instagrammin’ kind, I recommend reserving a few of the choicest, shiniest caramelised pretzels for decoration as I did here. Also their extra crunch is welcome initially. After a day or so, the ice cream absorbs more of the caramel and the salt, and just gets better and better.

If you’ve never encountered this combination before I understand your suspicion. Beer accompaniments in cream? What now? But be not scared of this. Between the inseparable excellence of caramel and salt together, the roasty flavour that the pretzels bring, and their soft crunch as they slowly disintegrate into the frozen cream, it’s not so much delicious as a head rush in every spoonful.

I heedlessly sat the parfait spoon inside this shallow dish to take a photo: this is approximately three seconds after the spoon’s long handle overbalanced, flinging itself off the table onto the floor below.

On Saturday night myself and some other good friends went to see Cat Power at the Town Hall. It’s partly experience and partly my curmudgeon tendencies but I always set myself up for a fall with live music – there are just so many variables that can go wrong. Being short, I am sighingly prepared to see nothing (like – full circle! – when I barely saw Alanis Morrissette at the Supertop in 1996.) Being nervous, I anticipate seething, punchy crowds. The artist will be late. They’ll be grumpy. I’ll get tired. Someone will spill cheap beer on me. And so on. But Cat Power’s show was one of the most beautiful that I’ve ever had the luck to be at – the kind of show where you turn to the friend next to you and do that “increduluous eye contact shaking the head what is even happening” kind of face. She was powerful, generous, hilarious, charming. Oh my gosh I sound so earnest right now (powerful?) but truly – she continuously stalked the stage from left to right so that everyone got to see her, she threw flowers at the audience (including one up to the balcony, where it calmly sailed upwards into the hand of opening act Watercolours, as if by magic) and her voice, complemented by that of her backup singers, was as warm and scratchy like a soft wooly jumper as ever. I, um, may have cried a little. Very earnestly.

This is Tim’s instagram. Hold your seething, we weren’t standing there with our phones up the whole time blocking everyone’s view – she was just so close that it was impossible not to hastily snap a photo for remembrance. I’m one of you, I hate those people too! 
PS: I tried making pretzel-fried chicken too. What I ended up with wasn’t quite right, but the shadow of perfection was there. And let me exaggeratedly pretend-heroically assure you, I will make so much fried chicken till I get it right.
______________________________________________________________________

Title: Sondheim’s I’m Still Here. I like Eartha Kitt’s version best. Actually I just like Eartha Kitt best.
______________________________________________________________________
Music lately:

Someone recently asked if I’d heard much Nina Nastasia, and I was all, of course, I went through a stage of listening to John Peel compilations. But I was compelled to listen anew, especially when I saw she has a song called Counting Up Your Bones. It’s as good as its title promises.

Brand New Key, Melanie Safka. This song was played on Saturday night by a friend who clearly has exceptional taste in music as I’m now a bit obsessed with it. Don’t let the fact that Wikipedia describes it as a “novelty hit in 1970-71” put you off.

Ever ready to be obsessed with a song, another friend introduced me to another new tune to adore to pieces: Mountain Man, Play It Right. Why doesn’t everyone sing in three part harmony?
______________________________________________________________________
Next time: Probably another I Should Tell You interview. Which means it will be Friday! Best.

fancy plans and pants to match: Arbitrageur

3 Comments

So…sometimes I get to do fancy things. By virtue of being a blogger. And, let’s not be naive, my old-media leanings through being a newspaper cafe reviewer/freelancer. It would be stupid to lie about how great it is: it’s the greatest.

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.”

With that defensive preamble out of the way: Arbitrageur, and their Summer of Riesling Avec Menu.

The pitch: Arbitrageur, one of your unarguably more ritzy Wellington restaurants, has what they call their Avec Menu. Avec being French for “with”, it pairs several courses with a particular wine, in this case Riesling. European and New Zealand examples are served alongside the dishes – and that’s it really. Just well-considered food and wine pairings to get you questioning your tastebuds and providing some new stances on the delightful drink that is Riesling.

Crab and Avocado Taco with Coriander and Lime 


What happened: The menu was five courses, each with a half glass of a European and a New Zealand Riesling. The Riesling itself was divided into categories. So the first course had two from the Soft and Fruity category, the second course had two wines from the Crisp and Tangy category, and so on – Luscious and Exotic, Fresh and Aromatic, and Rich and Sweet making up the rest. So as well as being generally matched with two fitting rieslings, each course was matched with an overall genre. I think I may have overexplained this, but hopefully you get the idea.

The coolest bits: Firstly, everything was incredibly delicious. But the highlights easily included the market fish (pictured below), with its delicately crunching surface and texture as tender as mashed potato. You might think seaweed on fish bordering on shuddery overkill. But nay. It was punchily flavoursome in a deep, briny way, freshly salty, and perfect with the olive oil-rich soft eggplant and tomato that it rested upon. Tim and I decided that the New Zealand riesling – F Series Old Vine ’11 – was our preference of the two offerings. We also decided that tangelo was what we could taste in it, and that said element brought out the caramelised element of the crispy-skinned fish. The thing about trying to work out what you’re tasting in your wine is that it becomes easier to throw around statements like that the more you drink. Wheeee!

The other stand-out was the cheese course, featuring Over the Moon brie. Based on this experience, I should like to buy myself a pallet of their cheese, take a week off all work and socialising, and to quietly eat it all while watching a really good quality TV series in its entirety. Actually even without the cheese that sounds kinda blissful right now. But then I am, as ever, underslept. Uh, anyway, the cheese:  sublime. It tasted like butter, good homemade butter – soft and richly creamy yet clean with a mildly tangy finish. It was served with figs, quince paste, grapes, and walnut raisin bread. Each of which provided their own obvious complementary services to the cheese. The wine that went with it – we opted for just one option at this stage, Kerpen Wehlener Sonnenuhr Spätlese ‘10 from Denmark – was possibly the best glass of wine I’ve had in my life. Admittedly, most of the stuff I buy is in the $9-$12 category (oh okay, $9 – $9.50) but still. Like the cheese, it was somehow clean and rich at the same time, with luscious crisp hints of melon and cucumber and honeyed sweetness. Tim and I both felt genuinely a bit forlorn once our glasses were drained. And then we told ourselves to get over it, because: free.

And finally: I appreciated that restaurant manager Gary was friendly and relaxed. Dinners out can be a little intimidating in their own way – well, I sometimes get nervous I’m going to select the wrong fork and have every bourgeois person in the restaurant suddenly stand and point at me and cry “imposter!” or something. There was no chance of that here with Gary, who explained what was happening with each dish and wine without micromanaging our dinner in any way – more of a casual discussion whenever a new course came out. The menu itself was also substantial enough to be exciting but the courses weren’t so heavy and enormous that I felt like my lungs were starting to fill up with food. It was also kinda nice to not end up incredibly drunk from all the wine on a school night – half glasses were perfect.

Crispy-skinned market fish with seaweed seasoning and Mediterranean vegetables. 

Buttermilk bavoirois with rhubarb and strawberries Romanov 

From a scale of 1 to “Is this a dream?”: 6 – The menu was impressive but not intimidating or inscrutible, and the staff were friendly. On the other hand – one of the wines we had: a bottle of it would’ve put us back $161. We drank it verrrrry slowly.

Would I do this for not-free? Well, it’s not a particularly good time to answer this question, considering our bank balance is forcing us into not buying anything, let alone dinners out. If it was a special occasion, and spiraling credit card payments weren’t hanging over my head like credit card payments that had learned to fly, I think…yes. Honestly. All up, five courses and ten half glasses of occasionally-shockingly-delicious wine would come to around $180-ish, and if you choose one half glass per course, around $120. Which in Wellington at least, seems very comparable. Five courses. Considering plenty of places will charge you at least $30 for a main course, I mean, you do the maths. (Seriously, you do it, anyone do it, just not me. I hate maths.)

Earnest thanks for making me feel fancy to: Arbitrageur Wine Room and Restaurant. 125 Featherston Street, Wellington. 04 499 5530.

i should tell you: Jan Hellriegel

1 Comment

Well hello there, and welcome to the fifth installment of I Should Tell You. Every Friday I ask three short food-related questions of a cool musician who will answer my enthusiastic emails. Just to see what happens!

This week I am so happy to be interviewing Jan Hellriegel. She has been in what I (and…nearly everyone) call The Industry for a long time. And yet though I’ve always been aware of her music – to the point where I distinctly remember years ago, being a young intern and impressing a somewhat older member of staff simply by knowing who she was, what? –  it’s only relatively recently that I’ve been listening to it properly. And it is excellent. If you’re new to her stuff, I am sincerely obsessed with her 1995 song Pure Pleasure. It belongs in the canon of songs that I can and will listen to twelve times in a row without them losing their lustre. If anything: ever more lustre with every listen. I also recommend 2×2 from her recent album All Grown Up and It’s My Sin from her 1993 album of the same name. 

Jan is touring the North Island with Greg Johnson and some others in March – details here.  

Thanks, Jan! Here is the interview…here. 

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

When I was recording my first album It’s My Sin with American producer J.D Souther at Airforce Studios he had food brought in from The French Café every day. I don’t know if they would do this now. It was brilliantly decadent and I was convinced my life as a recording artist would from then on would be a never ending parade of gourmet cuisine …boy was I wrong. Parkside Café in Mt Albert is a recent discovery I’m sharing. Such a wonderful surprise – by day a regular suburban Eggs Benne-style café, but at night, the most delicious and authentic Vietnamese in Auckland.

What do you fix for yourself, or where do you go to eat, when it’s just you on your own?

I am rarely on my own but when I am it’s sardines on toast. That ensures I will be remain on my own for a few hours. I can only remember eating alone at a café once in the last few years and that was Selera in Newmarket, Auckland near where I work  – they make the best laksa ever and I just had to sit down and have one for lunch one day recently.

What’s one of your favourite food memories from your childhood?

My Dad makes the best tripe and onions ever. When I was a student or feeling a little down in my 20s – I would ask him to cook some for me.  For many it may be chocolate  or ice-cream but for me, comfort food is Tripe and Onions.  Because life is pretty  sweet these days I haven’t indulged for a really long time. My fiancé promised to learn how to make it for me –  I am still waiting. 

that dizzy dancing way you feel as every fairy tale comes real

10 Comments

I felt a little drunk from tiredness today. Which is why somehow it took me so long to shape this blog post. Even though the recipe can be summed up in four words: sprinkles on buttered bread. Self-frustration is not good for self-editing. But here I finally am.

Not to sound like a 90s stand-up comedian but what is the deal with spam comments these days? They’re coming towards me thick and swift. I could change my blog settings but the codes to decipher before commenting are getting as complicated and unreadable as the spambots are blithely persistent. So in the interest of not putting off nice commenters, since said comments are so seriously delightful to receive, I instead choose to duel with the spambots. My deal-questioning though, lies squarely with that which the spambots peddle. Back in the early days of this blog, it was very easy to catch them. Y’know, :::::free viagara here::::, they’d say. Now they’re more subtle. More conversational. One spambot actually, and quite sinisterly, complained about the presence of spam. I like to look at is the “click on my website” bit of the comment. That’s how you know they’re spam, and that’s where things get weird. Well, weirder than me casually interacting with communication sent to me by robots.

Some of them are obvious – the sites they’re pushing me towards have names like “Get followers”; “Make fast money”; “Free poker game”, and with some inevitability, “Find out more about ejaculation guru”.

But there are the ones that make me say “what’s the deal with this?” I just wonder, who on this earth is out there behind the following websites that I have been urged to visit?

“Emergency plumbers in Birmingham”
“10th birthday party ideas”
“Cooking frozen lobster tails”
“Stretching exercises to increase your height” (admittedly, this might fall under the viagara category)
“Toe rings white gold”
And my favourite: “Cliffs of Moher pictures”.
Wait, this is my favourite – being directed to a website called “make the truck your office.”

I mean…this spam is more endearing than some people I know.

I really do find that kinda hilarious, but maybe the reason I doth protest too much about misguided spambots is that this recipe for fairy bread not only hilariously simple…it’s also that for a lot of people in New Zealand, this is more equivalent to a reminder on a post-it note. The concept of fairy bread has been around for so long that I feel like I should say “recipe” in scare quotes. As for people out of New Zealand who have never had fairy bread, it may appear to have all the flavour and appeal of eating a reminder written on a post-it note.

On Sunday I suddenly felt like eating Fairy Bread. So I made it. There was a delicate and delicious balance between the nostalgia for that which I ate as a child and the grown-up joy of doing as I damn well please.

So in case you’ve never heard of it, or you just need a reminder, here is the recipe. (I wrote and deleted quote marks around the word recipe literally eight times just now.)

Fairy Bread

White bread
Butter 
Hundreds and thousands sprinkles (rainbow sprinkles)

Cut the crusts from the bread, or not. As you can see from the photos I’ve rakishly given myself both options. Butter the bread fairly thickly. Carefully tip over the sprinkles. Eat. (Allowing for sprinkle overflow to occur, they can’t all get indented into the butter.)

To paraphrase sweet Wesley from Princess Bride, we are people of action, lies do not become us. I cannot lie: this is really, really good. However, I don’t want to imply in any way that I invented this, firstly because I didn’t – it has been around since long before I was born and will surely outlive us all. And secondly because I’m not sure even my rainbows-and-sugar-loving brain could come up with something so simple and brilliant. I’m also not implying that you have no idea how to make this. It’s just – like I said – a reminder. Just not implying anything, okay? Other that “yeah Fairy Bread!”

But what does it even taste like? Beautiful though they may be, hundreds and thousands are more or less flavourless. They’re just mildly sugary. The appeal lies partly in eating a staple of the children’s birthday party and partly in the delicious unfolding layers of texture – the crunch of cavity-occupying tiny sprinkles embedded in the salty yielding butter, and the bread all thin and airy and soft.

And it’s really, divertingly, eye-flirtingly super pretty. Which, if the movies taught me anything, I bitterly concede counts for a lot.

So apart from louchely eating sprinkles on buttered bread, what else have I been trying my hand at?

My cookbook proof arrived. The name is appropriate, its existence is hard evidence to me that I didn’t just dream the last year. Right now I’m working deep into the night writing notes on it and making sure everything is as perfect as it can be, with the assistance of the book’s photographers and stylist (and my friends!) Kim, Jason and Kate. It was like the montage days of the cookbook photoshoots getting together with them last night to go over this. The old gang! Back for one last job! It’s also why this blog post took its sweet time getting to you. Proofing the proof hurts my brain. (PS: the cookbook isn’t coming out till later this year. If you read this blog, there is no way you can possibly miss it, because I will be justifiably talking about it a lot.)
I went to Webstock, which is this super-exciting conference held in Wellington every February. I had a brilliant time and left feeling all full of knowledge and inspiration and singularly brilliant catering. There were some specific things that were not cool (which became escalatingly troubling – and is outlined here by my friend Jo who also went) like some eye-rolling events of a dudebro-related nature. But there were also amazing people to meet or catch up with and incredible speakers like Karen McGrane and Adam Greenfield and Kelli Anderson (who gave me a new life goal: successfully pull off a heist.) The organisers do a breathtaking job and I’m now a tiny bit withdrawal-y that it’s over.

And, my glasses arrived! As a late-onset glasses wearer, everything that is second nature to Tim, who has had them since way back, is enchantingly novel to me. I’m all, “Hey! My glasses just steamed up when I opened the oven!” “Guess what! I went to push my glasses further up on my nose but they weren’t even there!” “I have glasses!” And so on. I…actually nearly cried when I picked them up, I could just see everything so much better and my eyes felt so relaxed. Now, a couple of days in, I’m still getting used to their presence – it’s like constantly having a cat sitting on your lap or something, how you can drift in and out of consciousness of its pressure against your body.

I really adore the look of hundreds and thousands sprinkles. I didn’t think I could love them more than I did, but they really look good through my glasses. The crispest rainbow ever. It’s a small thing, but it’s strangely exciting. But I think better than all of that, even better than food looking more beautiful…is how, because I have to use them for reading and computer work, I feel like Homer Simpson putting on his glasses when he does his Serious Business.
____________________________________________________________________
title via: A poignant-as comedown from all that food colouring, Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now.
____________________________________________________________________
music lately:

Elastica, Stutter. Too, too cool. Sigh.

Garbage, Only Happy When It Rains. Also too, too cool. Also, missing their Wellington show. All of the sighs.

M.I.A, Bad Girls. Never not obsessed. Never not losing the ability to make proper sentences about cool women making really great music too, apparently.
____________________________________________________________________
Next time: I stand by my fairy bread! But I promise a really, really complicated recipe to make up for the laughableness of this one.

i should tell you: Dear Time’s Waste

1 Comment

Well hello there, and welcome to the fourth installment of I Should Tell You, the new-ish blog segment that I’m gradually becoming more comfortable with instead of overexplaining, now that it has been going for a while. Nevertheless, if you’re new to these parts: every Friday I ask a cool musician who will answer my emails three short questions about food. Just to see what happens!

This week I talk to Claire Duncan of Dear Time’s Waste, whose music I want to describe as Cocteau Twin Peaks – but mostly because I really enjoy slightly forced portmanteaus. In fairness to Claire, I will be a little less self-indulgent and simply say: I love her songs with their push-pull between intensity and lightness, unsettling and swoony. Her videos are stunning as well, all cinematic and shadowy, and you can watch every last one on her site, starting with her latest release, Heavy/High.  You can also find Dear Time’s Waste being excellent on Tumblr.

The interview begins…now. Thanks, Claire!

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

I’ve never had spare cash to eat anywhere particularly flash, but I used to review hotels for a living which involved a fair amount of restaurant-dining and room-service. Eating potato gratin at three am in bed at the Museum Hotel in Wellington while watching Food TV is a personal highlight. Another favourite was banana and tomato pizza on an island in Vanuatu during the local village’s night-time celebration of thirty years of independence from Britain. 

What do you fix for yourself, or where do you go to eat, when it’s just you on your own?

I almost always cook on my own. I often make spiced lentil/bean/brown rice dishes with heaps of fresh spinach, yoghurt and cucumber…that sort of thing. Otherwise, soups in winter (tomato and capsicum with fresh goat’s cheese is a favourite) and salads in summer (chickpeas, onion, whatever kind of vegetable is on hand). I like making unfussy dishes that can be easily amplified to involve extra people. I’m also a sashimi fiend so if I’m lazy/hurried I’ll often get Japanese either from Bian (near home) or Haru No Yume in Mt Eden (near work). Or, if I’m in the region, the lemongrass Bun Ga from the Vietnamese place at Ponsonby Foodcourt goes bloody well with a cold beer and there are a lot of solo diners to be communally alone with.

What’s one of your favourite food memories from your childhood?

I was obsessed with macaroni cheese; I learnt to make it from the back of the diamond pasta packet when I was about seven years old and practiced it whenever I got the opportunity; it was all the more fun if I had an audience. We started cooking very young with minimal instructions, as a result I would make ‘everything stir-fry’ which involved chucking whatever was in the fridge in a pan and sizzling the sh*t out of it.