dance on the coral beaches, make a feast of the plums and peaches…

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When I was a kid I used to draw and draw and draw and draw. When you’d get your stationary at the start of the year I’d ask to get an extra “jotter pad” (those A4 notebooks with weak, brownish paper and inevitably a cartoon elephant on the front), one for actual schoolwork and one to draw in. At one point I managed to procure, somehow, one of those enormous notepads for offices that are nearly the size of a table which I hubristically and ostentatiously kept on my desk for drawing on when I was done with my schoolwork. (It gets worse. I also used to also keep a large stack of books on my desk for reading in between being taught stuff. Like, while the teacher was right there still teaching everyone things. OH the conceit! But admit it, it’s a good idea.) There was untold envy and reverence for my best friend at the time, who got her hands on one of those large, seemingly endless rolls of butcher’s paper. Basically my life revolved around obtaining surfaces to draw on. What did I draw? Well…ladies. Initially the Babysitters Club (both scenes from books and those imagined) then Spice Girls (I had a jotter pad expressly for drawing them) and fashion designs and characters from my stories. Like a woman called Stuyvesant who had blue hair and a black belt in karate.

So you could say I liked drawing and did it a lot. Somewhere down the line though, I lost the habit of drawing constantly. Fast forward many years to yesterday, when I casually picked up a pen to doodle away and I just couldn’t. Muscle memory means I can still remember bits of dances I learned over fifteen years ago, but drawing was just not working for me. It wasn’t like getting back on a bicycle in any sense of the word, since…I can’t ride a bike either. (I know. What kind of child of New Zealand am I? Frankly drawing the Babysitters Club was much more fun than cycling looked, which didn’t help with my motivation. Also I could not stay upright.) Has this ever happened to you? Something you were so invested in, which suddenly disappears on you?

Happily, some skills work in the right way, going from fearful to awesome. Like pie! As a food-interested youth, pie seemed so far out of my league that I practically had a Pretty in Pink relationship with it, the out-of-reach Blane to my uncool Andie. These days I’m more like Clare in the Breakfast Club to pie’s…anyway, my point is I’m now really calm about making pie, pastry and all. It is no big deal to me. Even with an florid title like Plum Chocolate Meringue Crumble Pie. Although it sounds like too much detail to take on board, it’s a remarkably cohesive disc of deliciousness, inspired by two things: the many kilos of plums Tim and I bought in Greytown with friends Kim and Brendan, and the beautiful Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts book that I scored in Featherston, which I showed you in my last post.

So instead of showing you the book again, I’ll show you where we got the plums from. See how excited I got with the Instagram filters!

Like we were purchasing plums in a Primal Scream music video!

This Favourite Recipes book I mention was published in the sixties and is full of more delight than I can possibly convey. So I’ll just list a couple of its dishes. Berlin Peach Punch. Miami Beach Birthday Cake. Lime Highbrow. Raspberry Razzle. I should like to make them all. (Especially the Berlin Peach Punch, anyone want to donate me some brandy?) It was, however, very light on plum recipes. So I used another recipe from the book and ended up changing it so much that it doesn’t bear a ton of resemblance to the original. But thanks all the same, Mrs Ivan Kessinger of Morgantown, who submitted the Cherry Crunch that I based the following on.

It’s not as difficult as it sounds – for one thing, there’s no pastry to deal with or filling to mix and heat. There is, admittedly, meringue, but as it’s covered with crumble you don’t have to put too much investment into how good it looks, plus two lonely egg whites’ll whip up before your arm muscles have even had a chance to get sore.

And it is stunningly, well-timed-thwack-to-the-back-of-the-knees-staggeringly delicious.

Plum Chocolate Meringue Crumble Pie


1 packet of plain, cheesecake-bottomish biscuits (I used Budget Vanilla Rounds)
125g butter, melted
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon flour
7 plums (or so)
100g good milk chocolate (I used Whittaker’s, which is mysteriously caramelly and wonderful)
1/2 cup almonds
2 egg whites
1/3 cup sugar + 1 tablespoon


Smash up the biscuits – either in a food processor or with a rolling pin. Mix in the melted butter and cinnamon and try, just try not to eat it all because you’ll need it! If you suspect you will eat lots, then add more biscuits and butter, of course.


Press 3/4 of it into the base of a paper-lined pie tin, to cover the base and about 1cm of the sides. Keep the other 1/4 for later…


Bake at 180 C for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven, turn it down to 130 C, and throw in the almonds for a few minutes to roast, if you like – if you can’t be bothered, I understand. Either way, the oven needs to be 130 C. Sprinkle the tablespoon of flour and the extra tablespoon of sugar over the biscuit base, then slice up the plums and roughly chop the chocolate and layer them up on top of the flour and sugar. Try to layer the plums in such a way that they’re fairly smooth, so that you don’t have any trouble layering the meringue over.


In a clean metal bowl, whisk the egg whites till thickened and frothy, then slowly add the sugar while whisking continuously, till thick and shiny and bright white. Carefully spread this across the top of the plums in the pietin. Roughly chop the almonds and mix them into the remaining crumble, scatter this on top of the meringue. Bake the pie for 35 minutes. Allow to cool a little before eating. 

It’s honestly not as ridiculously sweet as it sounds. The salty butter and sharp, juicy plums keeps all that in check. You would not believe how brilliant sour plum juice and creamy milk chocolate is when it melts together. Not forgetting the soft solidness of the meringue relinquishing against the crunchy, almond-rich crumble top.

It’s genuflectingly delicious. Really the only problem is, as you can see, it’s not particularly solid. This could possibly be helped by refrigerating the heck out of it, but it’s wonderful at room temperature – all the flavours really shining – so just be prepared to carefully ease it out of the pie tin and eat the broken mess that lands on your plate with a spoon.

The reason I’ve been compelled to pick up a pen and put it to paper is that I’ve been home sick with a sudden sore throat, cough, attack of the phlegm, that kind of thing. As drawing wasn’t a goer – although I will keep trying – I’ve been occupying myself with Never Mind The Buzzcocks on YouTube. Later host Simon Amstell is adorable, and early host Mark Lamarr is so sharp and dry, so it’s win win really, and I’m reminded of late nights when I was living in England, watching it before bed with Hovis Extra-Thick Square Cut toast.
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Title: Warning: I’m going to use the word “obsessed” a lot now. I am obsessed with the song Meadowlark, which this lyric comes from. Liz Callaway’s version is tear-bringingly exquisite, honestly – if you click through please stick past the fairytale-ish opening lyrics, because it gets better, plus you’ll miss Callaway’s awesomely emphasised ‘r’ as she sings “larrrrk”. 
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Music lately:

I am also OBSESSED with the song Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart by Julee Cruise, from Twin Peaks – you do not want to know how many times I’ve listened to it this week, since first hearing it in an episode where it’s sung at the Roadhouse. I know the title is awful (I thought it was “right back” and I’d like to pretend it really is and everyone else has been wrong the whole time) but it’s so hypnotic that I don’t really mind.

Not obsessed with this song, but it is still quite good: St Vincent, Cruel. Delightful and delightfully catchy.
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Next time: I am still really compelled by the Meat-free Monday cookbook and will likely reproduce something from that, unless I get hold of some brandy and get to make the Berlin Peach Punch, of course. 

we’ll buy you the rice, if only this once, you wouldn’t think twice

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For something so simple – just rice that you biff into a pan, cover with water and ignore for a bit – pilaf goes by many names. Some call it pilaff with the sneaky double f. Some call it pilau. Still others call it ‘polo’ if you look in a cookbook old enough, or the delightful ‘plov’ if you look on Wikipedia. It’s not unlike a risotto, but while less ritzy, it’s a billion times easier, and the very thought of how easy it is can nudge me into actually cooking it for dinner rather than lying on the couch sleepily eating spoonfuls of peanut butter. Which isn’t a bad thing. What it is, is a self-fulfilling prophesy, since peanuts have some chemical in them that makes you sleepy. So like a snake eating its own tail, I shall…mix my metaphors.

Before you go wrongly thinking of me as some kind of queen of organisation, the pilaf was tucked under a packet paneer tikka masala and bought hot lemon pickle. But even on its own, it’s emphatically good stuff. Why was I even so tired that I could hardly handle harmless grains of rice? Nothing important, oh wait, WEBSTOCK. I’ve already told you all about the glumness that I get when fun times are over, but gosh was it ever hard to let go of this amazing experience. It left me unbelievably inspired, full of scribbled notes and ideas, more enamoured of my friends than ever while surprised by how many cool new people I managed to meet. And caffeinated enough to charge up a fancy-brand touchscreen tablet just by pointing at it with eyes narrowed.

Trying to describe Webstock to people who weren’t there but are a bit interested, is a bit like that scene in the Simpsons where Bart’s not allowed to go to the Itchy and Scratchy movie and Lisa comes home and says “It wasn’t that great” and Bart says “Be honest” and she says “it was the GREATEST MOVIE I’VE EVERY SEEN IN MY LIFE! And you wouldn’t believe the celebrities who did cameos: Dustin Hoffman, Michael Jackson – of course they didn’t use their real names, but you can tell it was them.”

But the organisers put on such an amazing show that comparing it to the Itchy and Scratchy Movie is the best compliment I can pay it right now. Especially because my brain was worked so hard that all I’ve got room for is the aforementioned pilaf. It’s inspired by a recipe in the beautiful Meat-free Mondays cookbook which I’ve recently acquired. Although Tim did point out that we should start a Meatful Mondays movement just for us, since we hardly ever eat meat anyway. And when I say inspired I really mean…lazily appropriated with great laziness. They used whole spices, mine were mostly ground. I threw in some bits of other vegetables I had. I didn’t wait for things to boil. You get the idea.

Easy Lazy Sunday Night Pilaf with Cinnamon, Turmeric and Vegetables

  • 1 teaspoon each cumin seeds, ground cinnamon, ground ginger, turmeric. Or really, whatever you’ve got that you feel instinctively could work (garam masala, ground coriander, etc.)
  • 1 tablespoon oil and 1 knob of butter. (In butter but not as in life, it can be as large as you please) or, leave the butter out to make this dairy-free. 
  • 1 cup basmati rice
  • 1 cup frozen peas
  • Any other bits of green vegetables, chopped up small – I used zucchini and three green beans that had sadly got left behind.

    Heat the oil and butter together in a pan and add the spices, gently stirring over a low heat. Tip in the rice granules. While they’re totally uncooked, a generous amount of time over the heat does something delicious to their flavour. Tip in 2 1/4 cups of water, which should hiss up a bit on impact with the hot pan. Bring to the boil, then cover and lower the heat. Simmer gently for about ten minutes, add the vegetables and simmer a little longer. Add salt to taste, and serve. This makes enough for two people plus leftovers for one person.
Another reason I was so tired – Tim and I and Brendan and Kim went to the Wairarapa! I’d never been to Martinborough before and as a lover of food this was apparently a bit of an oversight. The Rimutakas were delightfully foggy and eerily atmospheric, once I’d added some filters in Instagram to the photo above I snapped out of the window of the moving ute. Martinborough and Greytown were super cute, and at last count there were roughly a billion antique shops for us to carefully explore.

 

I found some serious treasures, including the amazing book above, and the beautiful plate below from Vintage Treasures NZ. Its use is gratuitous at best – like, I didn’t really need the cumin seeds on a plate while making the recipe and they were such a pain to tip cleanly back into the packet but…look how pretty the plate is!

 

Barely gratuitous at all, the more I look at it.

 

Speaking of gratuitous, the necessary diagonal teatowel. One day I’ll get the ratio of fold:fabric angle at an optimal, most-likely-to-be-shared-by-users angle! The lovely teatowel was given to me by my Mum and godmum Vivienne, by the way.

Earthy with turmeric and calming with cinnamon, this pilaf shows that the simplest foods can be among the nicest. Left to its own devices, the rice absorbs the butter and the spices and whatever flavour the vegetables have left to give up. It’s a comforting and tastes grand, and its speed, cheapness and total lack of brainpower required only serve to augment said factors. As long as you’ve got a bit of salt and some butter or oil handy, you could leave out everything else that the rice cooks in and still be guaranteed much deliciousness, no matter how sleepy you are.
Title via: The King Lear of musicals, Gypsy. The song If Momma Was Married is most exquisitely harmonizing, I think, in the hands and throats of the 2008 cast with Laura Benanti as Louise and Leigh Ann Larkin as Baby June. (If you’re committed, they start singing 3 minutes into the video.)
Music lately:
Anna Coddington, Bolt. With one thing and another and many a “d’oh!” I missed her recent show in Wellington. But I can still listen to her awesome music! Phew.
TLC, Diggin’ On You. Flawless.
Next time: That book above of American puddings is making me want to make cake and pie nonstop, plus we got many kilos of plums in Greytown while on our Wairarapa daytrip, so expect the two to intersect or appear independently. I’m thinking plum pie and plum liqueur…

when 2 become 1

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This morning Tim said “Oh yeah, happy…um” and I romantically finished his sentence for him by saying “meh.” We’ve never really done anything particular for it – our first ever Valentine’s Day together years ago involved him saying he’d be working till midnight at his new job at McDonalds and me saying  – I kid you not – “Can they do that? Is that even legal?” Oh naive country gal that I was. Anyway, I don’t need a designated day to tell him how much I like him, he’s just that great!

I am quite the sucker for one foodstuff dressed up as another. Like this idea I had: Ginger Crunch Pikelets. That’s what the title of this blog post refers to by the way. Not Valentine’s Day. In case you were wondering. I like you people, but we’re not that familiar.

Straightening your tablecloth is so uh… bourgeois? Un-creative? Something I didn’t spot at the time of taking this photo?

Well let me bring it back to the subject: the pikelets have all the spicy heat and toffeed sweetness of the biscuity slice, but now with the added frivolousness of being a small round shape, fried in oil. If you do want to make the original slice itself, that’s still a sensible and delicious pursuit, and here’s my Ginger Crunch recipe. And while plain pikelets spread with a pikelet-sized dab of butter are perfect as is, they’re not so sacred that they can’t be tutu-ed with.

I’m very pleased with these. To be witheringly honest with myself, they could do with being a little lighter – maybe buttermilk or half milk half yoghurt could take care of that? If need be, I would guess you could use soymilk too – in fact the one time I made pancakes with soymilk they were the most fluffiest, lightest and satin-surfaced I’d ever had.

Ginger Crunch Pikelets

 Recipe by me.

 1/4 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup milk, buttermilk, yoghurt or a mixture
1/4 cup water
1 tablespoon golden syrup
1 tablespoon plain oil (I used rice brain)
150g flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
1/4 cup demerara/raw sugar
1 egg

 Soak the oats in the milk, water and golden syrup while you gather everything else. Whisk in everything except the dry ingredients, then fold them in gently. Fry in heaped tablespoons in a nonstick pan over a lowish heat. When bubbles form on top of the little spheres of cooking batter, use a spatula to ease under their surface and flip them over. Spread with butter if you like, but definitely serve drizzled with more golden syrup. If you don’t have raw sugar regular brown sugar’s fine, but the crunchy nature of it adds a little extra something. 

 Also note: altitude/number of years they’ve been sitting in your pantry/brand etc will affect your oats – the mixture shouldn’t be too thick, so if it looks more like scone dough, add more milk. Pikelet batter is pretty forgiving, so you should end up with something edible no matter what happens.

The scattering of oats keeps these densely filling, while the sticky golden syrup and granular raw sugar mellows out the ground ginger’s potent heat, which itself spices up the otherwise plain landscape of the pikelet. I made them for pudding, with the plan of having some leftover to reheat for a mid-morning snack the next day, but they would stand in happily for any meal, I think.

And you can make a pikelet golden syrup sandwich!

So, Whitney Houston, huh? I am really saddened by this news of her death. Mariah Carey has always been the diva I connect with most – might be something to do with my age, even – but Whitney’s vocal flawlessness and control and the conveying of emotion in her songs, from the intense joy of I Wanna Dance With Somebody to the intense stoicism of “they can’t take away my dignity” (seriously, who could get away with using the words “my dignity” in a song? Not many, if any) is something I’ve always appreciated. From a distinct but shady-edged memory of everyone singing I Will Always Love You at a family party, to the amount of times I quote “It’s not right but it’s okay”, Whitney: RIP.

What else has been happening? I got my practical, everyday-applicable gold dress fixed, but couldn’t fix my ability to catch the camera at the wrong time:

This was the least awkward of like, 17 photos. On Friday we had a GGG night (that’s Gin and Gossip Girl) which descended into a 90s YouTube video dance party…on Saturday we watched a whole lot of Veronica Mars…on Sunday we played the board game version of Game of Thrones…The whole weekend was essentially a celebration of television. We are clearly the coolest people you will ever meet.
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Title via: Okay, we’ve covered why it’s here. 2 Become 1 was the Spice Girls’ first ballad, a chance to reach out to the fairly lucrative Adult Contemporary, MOR, Easy Listening audience (see how lucrative they are by all these ways of describing them?) but with a subtle yet bold safe-sex message for everybody (“put it on, put it on”) and a sweet yet darkly wintery melody reflected in the AMAZING coats they all wore in the music video. And then that final bit with them all individually swaying and then a deer appears? It’s quite perfect.
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Music lately:

Whitney Houston – as I said on my Facebook page, her take on I Know Him So Well from Chess with her mother, Cissy Houston, is glorious.

Shy Guy, Diana King. This song was one such track that got thoroughly danced to on Friday night. You’ll know it even if you don’t recognise the title – it is glorious.

And something actually from this decade, and yet perhaps even less relevant to many: The Book of Mormon won the Grammy for Broadway cast recording! Yay! Andrew Rannells singing I Believe is adorable! So adorable.
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Next time: I had this really awesome meringue idea but I might save it for a while. I’ve scored the Meat-free Mondays book and it is GORGEOUS, so perhaps it’ll be something from there. Peace!

“your wife is sighing, crying, and your olive tree is dying”

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As I say every year, I don’t dig Valentine’s Day (val-meh-ntines?) partly as a “whatever” to corporate pushers of expensive heteronormative cards and presents, but also as a fist bump of solidarity to the Dolly magazine reading full o’ sighs younger me. Waitangi Day is a much more important date to circle on the calendar for me.
However, should you want to impress someone in a woo-ing manner, say it with tofu! If they reply with “NONE OF THAT EXOTIC FOREIGN RABBIT FOOD MUCK FOR ME”, then they’ll be really surprised and impressed with the deliciousness of this and they’ve handily let you know how small-minded they are so you don’t have to hang out with them anymore. If they’re a nice person who’s either “I love tofu!” or “huh, tofu, haven’t tried that before but this sounds nice” then you’re good to go. A further option: I just made this for myself, and it was wonderful. Indubitably!

Would I ever shut up about the price of dairy in this country? Not till its price ceases to make me wince like lemon juice swiftly applied to a papercut. With this in mind, I recently got this strange idea – what if I could make tofu taste like haloumi? They’re the same shape, for a start. I was trying to analyze exactly what flavour haloumi is closest to, and settled upon black olives. Think about it. Oily, salty, intense…Then it turned out so delicious I decided to just call it what it is. Tofu pride!

Black Olive Marinated Fried Tofu Salad

Recipe by me.

1 block of firm tofu (250g-ish)
1/2 cup black olives, stones in
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 big cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 heaped tablespoon fine cornmeal 
1 tablespoon sherry
1 big handful green beans
1 big handful clean spinach leaves

Sometimes I suggest substitutions but please don’t undermine your own tastebuds by getting those pre-sliced olives – they’re so gross and vinegary and bland. Olives with the stones in them are a bit more work, but the oily fullness of flavour will reward you tenfold. Also, if you don’t have sherry, try sake, Marsala, or a little white wine. 

Squeeze the stones out of the olives (seriously, just squeezing them is the easiest way) and mash the olive flesh with a fork in a bowl with the oil and garlic cloves. Slice the tofu into cubes and mix with the olives – pour over a little more olive oil if it looks like it needs it. Leave it while you slice the ends off the beans and simmer them in a pan of water. Once you’ve got that sorted, add the cornmeal to the olive mixture and stir it round so every bit of tofu has some grains clinging to it.

Heat a frying pan up, and lift out all the tofu cubes (sorry, also fiddly) and drop them in it. Fry over a decent heat on all sides, till excellently crisp. Tip into a bowl. By this time the beans’ll be where you need them to be – drain and add them to the tofu. Roughly slice the spinach and add that to the bowl. Finally, heat up the frying pan again, tip in the remaining marinade, including all the squashed olives, add the sherry and fry for about ten seconds. Mix into the tofu and serve! 

It is wildly good. The olives have this soft, mellow intensity and a rich saltiness, which absorbs quickly into the tofu’s usefully porous surface. The cornmeal is subtly sweet yet unsubtly crunchy, and the flavour from the sherry hitting the hot pan is basically indescribably good, but generally adds to the whole savoury, buttery, lusciousness of it all. The juicy crunch of the beans are improved by a slick of oily marinade, and the spinach is…present. And makes the salad go further. Thanks spinach!

I am proud of my brain. It did right by me with this. And I can tell you it’s very, very good the next day too. Tofu doesn’t always last so well once it has seen the light of day, but if anything, this got even nicer. It almost tastes like cold fried chicken. Indubitably! (I like that word.)

The weekend was a full and busy one, where the hobnobbing was non-stopping. Caught up with my wise and awesome aunty who has been living in Australia for years, plus her son (my cousin) and his son (who I’m also calling my cousin…I don’t need it to be more complicated than that.) We visited our dear friend Ange at her tiny, tidy flat which is really close to ours (so we can be the Kimmie Gibbler to her Tannerino!) We also went to superlovely cafe Arthur’s with Kim and Brendan and met up with Perth-based blogger Emma of Lick My Cupcakes, whose blog I just love. She was really sweet and I love that her photos of Wellington show the city in different way how I usually see it. Finally, Tim and I reflected upon Waitangi Day, shook our heads sadly at a few people and nodded them agree-antly with other, and watched some more of Season 2 of Twin Peaks. SO CREEPY. So important. “Mares eat oats and does eat oats…”
 
Title via: All For The Best, a song from just one in a very long list of musicals with which I’m well obsessed: Godspell. I learned a tap dance to this song once, but muscle memory didn’t see fit to hold on to that one. Even if musicals aren’t your thing, a young Victor Garber was surprisingly babein‘ as Jesus. 
Music lately: 

Ten seconds in, all I could think was ‘this is a bit weak and makes no sense’ but as it goes on it becomes an intoxicatingly catchy song and I love it, indubitably. M.I.A Bad Girls.

Eclipsed only in catchy goodness by Kei Konei Ra by Ahomairangi. They’re young, they’re talented, they’ll make you want to press repeat over and over on this song.

Next time: Aforementioned aunty got me some ceramic pastry weights for baking blind. If that makes no sense at all: it has to do with making pie. PIE! So I might do that. Or it might be something slightly simpler but still cake-tatious. 

everybody rise, rise, rise, rise, rise…

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I know I’m always trying to work more ice cream into my life, but bread-making is well up there on the continuum of my favourite things to cook. Plunging your hands into soft dough, their warmth kicking it into life, watching it rise like you’re David Attenborough narrating the time-lapsed life cycle of a rare tree, the intoxicating scent of it as it bakes, the impressed gasps of those around you when you tell them that today, you achieved bread. Bread is wonderful enough as it is, but brioche is like the Baby-Sitters Club Super Special edition of the leavened dough family: richer and sweeter and far more exciting. It tastes just like a croissant but is more solid and grippable. Don’t you hate with croissants how all the best bits crumble off upon impact and end up caught in the fibres of your wooly jumper and worked into your ponytail and embedded in the seams of your jeans? (Just one of the reasons I no longer wear jeans.) No danger of this with brioche. All of the butter and none of the disintegration.

I was recently musing upon the great cafe combinations of the nineties. Now I don’t want to come across as a snob. I mean, I eat cold spaghetti from the tin for fun, and I didn’t try couscous for the first time till well into the new millenium. I am no human barometer of what is good. And yet. When I see a chicken, cranberry and camembert panini or apricot and brie panini or whatever being sold for $8.95, I can’t help but shake my head wearily. Do people really like them? Still? Spinach and feta is slightly later on the timeline, if I remember right, but it was the combination of a certain time. And while eating a spinach and feta scone I got to pondering: What’s the deal? What does the spinach even do? It works in spanakopita: surrounded by crunchy pastry and generations of existence, the spinach shines. But sliced up and baked into limp submission inside a scone, it provides green stripes, at best. At worst, it’s bitter, every last particle of it gets caught in your teeth, and it takes up valuable space where more feta could be.
Now mint, on the other hand. Mint provides that toothpaste-cool hit which works beautifully with feta, giving it that summery light-hearted vibe, lifting the saltiness and butteriness with its pure, sweet flavour. And mint is about a twelfth as likely to get in your teeth, since there’s so much less of it.  
As I said, I love bread baking, but I haven’t done it in ages – and really, late afternoon after flying home from my brother’s 21st birthday up home might not have been the most prudent time to embark upon an invented yeast-based recipe. But my instincts were convincing enough that I went ahead with it anyway. And it worked! Thank goodness, because we only buy feta about once every three months and I didn’t want to waste it on a failed project. Brioche is not that scary – the only annoying thing about it is all the time it needs to rise. Three times it rises! Three! But please persevere. It can have varying degrees of butteriness: I only used 90 grams since…that’s what we had in the fridge. Don’t worry about needing any special tins – I spied the muffin tray and thought (okay, maybe I said it aloud) “You there! You’ll do!” I was right.
Feta and Mint Brioches

Makes 8. An idea by me.

500g flour (plain is fine)
1 sachet active dry yeast
3 tablespoons sugar
3 eggs
1/2 cup lukewarm water
80g soft butter
pinch salt
100g feta, chopped roughly and mixed with 2 tablespoons chopped mint

In a large bowl mix the flour, sugar, salt and yeast. Crack in the three eggs, pour in the water, and mix to a sticky dough. Knead till soft and bouncy, then massage in the butter, small pieces at a time. This might take a while. But it’s really fun. Leave covered with clingfilm to let it it rise, for about an hour. Punch it down, right square in the middle, then form into a ball and let it rise again for an hour or two in the fridge. Finally, cut it into eight pieces, force a little pocket in the middle of each piece with your finger, then stuff with a little mint-feta mix. Pinch the edges closed, then sit each one in a buttered muffin tin, pinch side down. Leave again – I’m sorry! – for an hour before baking at 200 C for 25 minutes. Carefully lift a brioche up and tap its base – if it sounds hollow, should be all good.

If at any stage you feel you need a little more liquid or flour, trust your instincts, as different ingredients/temperatures/metres above sea level will produce different results. But only go a tiny bit at a time.

The movie A Mighty Wind is one of my very favourites, and it stands up easily to many a re-watch. I’d say I watched it more times last year than I ate feta, for one thing. Since watching it, I’ve latched on to the phrase “it can’t be overstated”, which is used to describe the kiss between Mitch and Micky in their song (okay, you had to be there.) I might overuse it the way some overuse the word “literally” (am looking at you, Chris Traegar, but it’s literally adorable on you) but I like it, and it’s so applicable: the deliciousness of these brioches frankly just can’t be overstated. See?

The crust is crisp and yet with all the buttery promise of a flaky croissant, without the crumbliness.  Inside is soft, golden-tinted and warm with the sharply salty feta dissolving creamily on the tongue. The mint is not there in large quantities, but absolutely present, cooling and contrasting with everything else. Altogether flipping brilliant.

And, as I said, I managed to make it after flying home from my brother’s 21st in the late afternoon, so you can surely do it anytime. We had such an awesome time up home – the party was music-themed (I don’t know about you but my family has a thing with dress-up 21st parties) and Tim and I dressed up as the White Stripes. My Mum and her best friend were Agnetha and Anni-Frid from ABBA, Dad was a Seargeant Peppers-era Beatle, and my brother made a commendable Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins. It was just one of the best parties I’ve been to. There were streamers, a live band – which Dad used to play with, and which played good music to dance to – not even the sort of music where inside you’re like “Oh my gosh I hate this so much but there are people around that I care about so I’ll pretend to enjoy dancing to it”. Dad – whose birthday it was also, since he’s born on the same day as my brother – got up at one point to do a fairly wild keyboard solo. Later in the evening he and my brother played a rollicking rendition of Saw Her Standing There by the Beatles.

There were alsatians that ran up and down the road and inside the hall. Two giant alsatians! They didn’t seem to be looking for trouble, they could probably just smell the many kilos of ham. Nonetheless, I’d forgotten that that sort of thing just happens at home. And I secretly wanted to confiscate them and make them my pets.

There was a cake that I made and iced to look like a record, at my brother’s request. I may never get the black food colouring off my hands, but with some logistical supervision from Tim and my 9 year old cousin, I think it turned out pretty snazz-tastic.

And there was kilo after kilo of ham. Which we all got to eat the next day after people had arisen from where they fell. I also got to see my long-missed Australian-based Aunty, got to nick the gorgeous – well I think so – bit of fabric that the brioches are sitting on, and…while looking for old schoolbooks of my brothers to festoon the party with, Mum found this that I’d made many years ago:

After the laughter subsided, I realised how little I’ve changed. Obsessive about things and in a super-righteous way; full of dubious ideas that seem great in my head but are a bit awkward on paper; misguidedly entrepreneurial; liable to mix up simple things like AM and PM. But I think I turned out alright in spite of, nay because of it. (Also: if you look closely you’ll see that my signature then did not in anyway resemble my name, but rather a small figure surfing on the back of a swan. This was because I didn’t want to be shackled by the conformity of your signature actually having to look like your name when it could be an artistic expression instead, or SOMETHING. My uncoolness cannot, as they say in A Mighty Wind, be overstated.)
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Title via: The Ladies Who Lunch, a song more salty and sharp than feta from Company, one of my favourite musicals. Sung perfectly by the wonderful Elaine Stritch. Please watch. I’m pretty sure even if you don’t like musicals, there might be something in this for you.
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Music lately:

Radar Love, Golden Earring. This got played at the party. Mum and Dad both like this song – it has some significance, I can’t remember what exactly – Mum? – and there’s something about watching one’s parents dancing away dressed up as pop stars to a song that makes one like it too.

Wings of a Dragon by the equally glorious husband and wife Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally. Treat yo’self and watch it. As well as being internet-breakingly hilarious, it’s surprisingly catchy.
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Next time: Hmm, well it is February, but no love hearts here (Shmalentines! I say.) Might be something sensible and dinner-related, might be a towering cake or something. 

the syrups and shaved ice, i ain’t gotta say it twice

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Did all of you have to write and say a speech in school, as part of the curriculum? Here in New Zealand it’s a long-standing tradition. I wrote a rather excellent think-piece on the Spice Girls (admittedly, there was no Google so I had to glean any knowledge of them from what was written on the side of chupa-chup packets and from analysis of lyrics like “She’s a real lay-dee!”); an award winning speech on well-known cats in literature (I got to the regionals with that speech, and of course I had lots of friends, why do you ask?) and then the next year, I admit, I phoned it in with a speech about chocolate. It was largely put together from quotes found in those “Little Book of Calm” tiny books which were very fashionable at the time. If I remember right, I won the school competition but lost out at the interschool level.
But those books that I quoted, glaze-eyed though they were, had it right. Chocolate is special and no loss at the interschool level for my speech which honestly wasn’t that good will take that away from me. Or any of us! Particularly special, on a national level now, is the compelling output of Whittaker’s, who this year launched their Berry and Biscuit block. 
Berry jelly, juiced up with real fruit, and crunchy bits of biscuits punctuating their caramelly milk chocolate. It’s damn good. I should disclose that the reason I’m able to so casually lay pieces of it upon a commemorative plate, and turn it into sorbet like it’s no big thing is this: I wrote – entirely without agenda – very nice things about Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit in a national paper, they liked what they saw and sent me some so I could really make sure I liked it. So I decided, because I am self-appointed duchess of ice cream (“see her melting crown!”) I would turn some of it into a pure and chilly Berry and Biscuit Sorbet. 

But first: some really exciting news from Tim and I. Guess! Guess! Or scan slightly further ahead in the text to where I’ve written it down. Last year Tim and I embarked on our first ever holiday, which we’d saved for five and a half years for (“feels like thirty”, as Jesus commented in Jesus Christ Superstar), and it was glorious. Well there’s nothing like landing back home to make you want to claw your way back to another travel adventure again. We’re not tap dancing happily about our bank balance right now, but we have been saving a bit of a nest-egg and while it might’ve been sensible to wait another year before planning the next trip…we thought…what if we just do it this year? What if we just? We can make it happen somehow! So we’ve put a down payment on flights to America. Specifically: NEW YORK. I need hardly elaborate on how heavily exciting this is. From my first musical I ever saw around age 5 – 42nd Street – to the Big Apple Style and hushed reverence of the city from the Baby Sitters Club’s Stacey McGill, to my heedless love of the musical RENT from which this blog gets its name, to every single cool restaurant there is being there…But wait: we’re also going to New Orleans, the place I’ve had a geographical crush on since about age 14, and Nashville, grand home of many a music-related thing. Thrilling. It’s all happening in October, so this space, be watching it.

Back to the chocolate sorbet. Not ice cream: the various elements of Berry and Biscuit are not blurred by cream or other dairy, instead only water, sugar, and a little cocoa is used to turn them into an icy mass of excellence. Not that I have anything against pouring cream into everything I see: I wanted to try something different here, and let the chocolate itself shine. Also note, I only used 3/4 of the block because it seems excessive to use the whole lot – if you’re shelling out for the good stuff, you might as well have some for fun nibbling times too. 

Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit Sorbet

A recipe by myself.

1 1/2 cups brown sugar
3 1/2 cups water
 4 tablespoons dark, dark cocoa (around 20% fat content is ideal for flavour and texture. However, use what you have!)
175g Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit Chocolate

In a decent-sized pan, bring the sugar, cocoa and 1 1/2 cups of the water gently to the boil, stirring often – as much to get cocoa lumps out as anything – until it has been bubbling for a couple of minutes. Remove from the heat, stir in the chocolate till smoothly melted. Stir again, pour into a freezer-proof container. Freeze overnight. Stir halfway through if you like, but frankly I didn’t find that large ice crystals formed with this much. 

Note: if you use any of Whittaker’s dark chocolate range, or any dark chocolate that you’re confident has not seen dairy products during its production, then this recipe becomes vegan. If Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit isn’t available where you are, use a ‘black forest’ style chocolate or really any unfilled chocolate you like. 

How I got to this delicious point is a bit chequered; I tried making this sorbet first time round but used too much sugar and the mixture refused to freeze. Because sugar slows down the freezing process. Since this meant I couldn’t feed it to my friends on the date I’d anticipated, before the second feeding opportunity I hastily tried adding more water to it to dilute the sugar and allow it to freeze. In the process dropping a significant, tears-worthy amount of the mixture on the floor. By the time it finally froze sucessfully I had no idea what the actual method and ingredients quantity was. I bravely started again.

Melting chocolate into water might sound a bit weak, but the simple background really allows the beautiful milk chocolate to shine, with the brown sugar and cocoa giving it a helping hand flavour-wise. The biscuit and berry pieces disperse, leaving a hinty trail of crunch and raspberry extract in their wake. Every spoonful dissolves intriguingly in the mouth. It’s not as intensely smooth as the sorbet you might find in a tub at the supermarket, but on the upside it tastes brilliant and is spoonable straight from the freezer. And look how easy it is to make! As long as you’re careful not to drop it on the floor, it really shouldn’t give you any trouble at all.


The only thing that could embiggen this already life-embiggening substance: edible glitter.
Instead of being used to feed friends post-Beirut concert two weeks ago, the fixed-up mixture was taken along to a Gossip Girls and Gin evening, and it actually nearly made someone cry happy tears, it was that good. So even if my words leave you unmoved, let their happy tears be the recommendation you need: this sorbet is just lovely. 
We’re heading up home this weekend for my little brother’s 21st! It’s music themed (Tim and I are going to be the White Stripes, my Halloween Elphaba wig getting a reprise here…for both of us) and I’m also making his cake. Can’t wait. All the significance of it being a family member, none of the stress of it being your own party. Not that mine was all that stressful, it was amazing fun. Perhaps my favourite part: the next day mum bought out a kilo of ham which had been hidden in the fridge behind all the other food, forgotten at the party. A bonus kilo of ham! Best birthday ever.
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Title via: In the Heights, a musical set in NEW YORK, CONCRETE JUNGLE WHERE DREAMS ARE MAAAADE OF (did I mention we’re going there?) with beautiful music and story by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who rapped for Obama and won many Tonys and is basically one of the most amazing people on earth. 
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Music lately:
Anna Calvi, Desire – am sad to be missing her show at Laneway on Monday, there’s something about her rich voice and rumbly music that I really love.
Annie Golden, Hang Up The Phone – such a crime that they went and cast her in the disappointing Hair movie and then didn’t even let her sing! This song’s subject is awesomely redundant in this day of multiple ways to communicate, but even more awesome is how every single second of the video is choreographed. Not one natural movement!
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Next time: *shrugs* we’ll see when I get back on Sunday night what I have the energy to make and whether it’s worth sharing. 

super duper, come let’s mix where rockefellers walk with sticks

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I’ve already professed my affection for the sadly late Hudson and Halls (they made a chicken salad and named it after a New Zealand beauty queen!) but it’s the kind of thing that I can easily re-profess without feeling like I’ve exhausted my capacity for…professing stuff. Their cookbooks were so full of enjoyment and playfulness and humour. Which cookbooks often completely lack. They’d write “nothing is more boring to do than pickled onions, but despite this, these are worth doing”, beside a recipe for pickled onions. Cute, right? Always remembering, they were figures of entertainment at a time when being themselves – being gay – was illegal. As I’ve said, we’re not exactly in a progressive wonderland these days, but I wonder what their lives together could’ve been under a somewhat more supportive environment. While your time wouldn’t be misspent just reading through their cookbooks tittering at their formidably late-seventies recipes – Tomato Sorbet, Egg Mayonnaise with Olives, Tripe Fritters, Steak Tartare Balls with Caviar…Coffee…there are also heaps of practical, easy, fun recipes that you could try making. 
Recipes like their Super-duper Pancake. I promise you it’s totally deserving of that intensifying “-duper” suffix on the end there. That grammatical flourish was not in vain. 
It looks like there’s a benignly smiling bearded face in that pancake, right? Is it just me projecting my loving feelings towards the pancake, onto the pancake? I think yes. And yes. Also please excuse my unpleasingly granular photography, it must’ve been darker than I thought when I took the photos. It’ll make you appreciate it more when they improve, though!
This is really your average Yorkshire Pudding – you could always use it for that – and I love that H&H suggest it as a meal in itself, “with lemon wedges and sugar, or little bits of fried sausage and pickles”…very cool. They recommend using a paella dish but I don’t have one of those, or a frying pan that can go in the oven, but I suspected that my ancient pie plate would do the trick. It did. Which makes me think you could make this in nearly anything ovenproof and round, as long as it has walls – a caketin would probably work just fine.  
Such little effort and you end up with this puffy, crisp disc of daffodill-coloured, comforting goodness. Somehow it tastes like french toast, pastry, scrambled eggs and yes, pancake, all at once. That’s some high-level complexity from just eggs, flour, milk and butter. I served it alongside steak and an avocado-spinach salad but on its own it’d be brilliant. 
Super-duper Pancake

From Hudson and Halls Gourmet Cookbook.

25g butter
3 eggs
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup flour

Put the butter in your chosen pan and place it in a 225 C oven to heat up and sizzle away while you mix the batter. Beat the eggs till light and fluffy, then gradually beat in the milk. This is what’s going to make it puff up so try not to be lazy with the whisking effort at this stage. Whisk in the flour, making sure there’s no lumps, then quickly pour the batter into the hot, buttery tin. Place quickly back in the oven, bake for 20-25 minutes and serve immediately in the pan. Just slice it up or rip bits off, as you please. 

Two things happened when I made this which might have something to do with the pan I used. First: some of the butter pooled on top in the centre of the pancake. To the uninitiated it might look a little terrifying, I took it within my stride (the only alarming butter situation I can think of is if there is none) and reframed the pancake as ‘considerately self-buttering.’ Also some of the surface coating of the pan flaked off and stuck to the pancake. Slightly disturbing, but…I ate it anyway. Hope it doesn’t happen to you.

The recipe on the page opposite the Super-duper pancake is equally compelling – Scrambled Eggs with Vermouth. How good does that sound? I’d need to actually get some vermouth first, the last time I had it was in 2008 – you can see it in the header photo – before I could even pronounce it properly. They say “As this is rather nice for breakfast, serve it with some chilled champagne and follow with fresh fruit and cream laced with a liqueur.” Wherever you are, Hudson and Halls…cheers.

Talking of luxuriating in food, I recently had my misanthropic tendencies gently sieved out when something really lovely happened: I got invited to try out ‘The Deg’ degustation at Matterhorn, one of the fancy-pantsiest joints in the whole country. Yes, invited. My first degustation. Very exciting. Eventually Tim and I hope to feel like we’re not in some kind of Home Alone 2-esque heist whenever things like this happen. The food was ornately exquisite the whole way through, with matched cocktails – beautifully dry – and wines – nicer than we’ve ever drank – and not in an intimidating way either, but also not so unintimidating that you leave thinking you could’ve done it yourself, you know? The person in charge of us was charming and engaging and gave us plenty of exposition on each course and – this always puts me in a good mood, so keep it in mind – they talked to us about the food and wine as if they thought we knew exactly what they were talking about. Did I explain that right? We weren’t talked down to, is what I’m saying. So if you’re really comfortable with your bank balance I do recommend it because it was an absolutely glorious evening. Fun fact: on our first course we raised a toast. To the internet. For getting us to dinner at the Matterhorn. Truly, we clinked our glasses and said “thank you, Internet.” (It was my suggestion, Tim might not’ve been so enthusiastic or loud.) Also, even though it sometimes feels like one of those things you do to prove you’re having fun, we spent some time making up dialogue for various diners around us, which was all very humourous until this couple opposite us had such gloomy body language that it wasn’t as fun anymore. Where was I? Matterhorn. Delicious.

It’s been a simple weekend, but I’ve managed to spend much of it with beloved friends, which is worth more than a billion degustations laid end to end so they reach the sun, or something.
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Title via: Puttin’ On The Ritz, that intriguingly arranged song which hoofer Fred Astaire totally owns – his subtlety and assuredness in this tap dancing number is utterly brilliant. Fun fact: I once ambitiously choreographed, taught and danced in a dance to this for some choir performance thing in primary school, when I was about ten. It wasn’t, er, quite as good as Fred Astaire’s, and our canes were bits of dowelling, but if I remember right it was quite well received.
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Music lately:

Be warned: Will Swenson (erstwhile cast member of erstwhile Broadway show Hair) is one of THE most beautiful people on earth. And in this song Donna from Hair, he’s NOT WEARING PANTS. So. Also he has an amazing voice and we both dance very similarly, which is always something that endears me to people. (A further fun fact!)

R.I.P Etta James.
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Next time: I’ve been working on some sorbet using Whittaker’s Berry and Biscuit chocolate. That is all.

caramel, i’ll love you forever, caramel

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For the first time in a long time on this blog, I found myself writing paragraphs and deleting them, venturing forward with sentences and then frustratedly reeling them back in with the backspace button. I’m not sure what’s more annoying – this whole process, or the fact that what I’m trying to write isn’t even a revelatory thing or big news, it’s just trying to knead it into the right shape that’s annoying me. But because I don’t have time, I’ll just try, and hopefully people pick up on what I’m putting down. I’m pretty sure some version of this question was voiced in an Anastasia Krupnik book, but is there a point in your adult life where you suddenly become a proper grown up? Where things fall into place?

I’m not claiming I’m the only person in the world to be constantly forgetful, concerningly clumsy, bafflingly untidy, bad with important papers/remembering dates/doing tasks by a certain date, constantly turning up to appointments at least a week early and heart-thumpingly anxious (Not to undersell myself, book-deal people. You’re different. I can deliver you a sparkling diamond of a manuscript by like, six weeks ago.) I also am not seeking perfection or anything, I suspect the answer to all of this is “you learn from your mistakes and you make lists and just be tidy already”, and the fact that it doesn’t seem fair that some people are just more developed and self-assured in these areas naturally confirms in my head that I’m just not grown-up yet. It doesn’t help that people always think I look years younger than I am – I’m not quiiiite old enough for it to be a compliment – am I ever going to get it right?

Well, colour me introspective.

If I’m not personally up for it – and my three-ish hours of sleep on Saturday night (admittedly, I was going to have a pretty late night anyway but then I got woken up by a whole lot of noise out of my control at 4pm, so it wasn’t all self-inflicted) at least this duplex of salted caramel sauces can deliver you some sweetness and light. And isn’t angsty person + caramel sauce > annoyingly happy person + no caramel sauce? (Mathematics, finally relevant to me!)

Yes, duplex. One recipe for plain Salted Caramel Sauce and one recipe for Vegan Salted Caramel Sauce. The former is about as perfect as it can get, the latter was an experiment I’m not sure I’ve properly perfected, but it’s still great enough that I’ll share it with you confidently. Salted caramel seems to be quite the bandwagon these days but it’s so uncomplicatedly delicious that I don’t even care. Will it become the pesto of the 2010s? I hope so, because that means it’ll be on everything, everywhere.

Above, vegan, below, not-vegan. Why both? Because I think the trinity of butter, brown sugar, and cream is easily the most unsurpassed in history, a salute to simplicity and the joyfulness of each ingredient. But if you don’t eat dairy products then it’s really not going to be as fun for you. And I want to spread the joy of caramel sauce, not hold it back. (Literally. Look at that sauce dripped on the teatowel. So symbolic.)

Caffeine shakes from downing great quantities of icy fretta coffee at Customs Brew Bar threatened to ruin all these photos but luckily I managed to salvage some non-blurry ones. If you look carefully in the caramel sauce above you can see my reflection looming! Self Portrait As Salted Caramel Sauce…

Salted Caramel Sauce

  • 120g butter
  • 120g brown sugar
  • 500mls cream
  • Salt – the nice flaky sea salt is good here, but use what you have

Gently melt the butter and sugar together till it forms a cohesive and alluring paste. Raise the heat a little and allow it to bubble up and boil. Remove from the heat and stir in 1/2 the cream (1 cup). It will likely bubble enthusiastically at this point. Stir till smooth, then stir in the second 1/2 of the cream. Once it’s cool enough to taste, try adding 1/2 a teaspoon of salt and then move up from there. It will thicken as it cools.

Vegan Salted Caramel Sauce

This uses the magical properties of cornflour to give smooth texture to the sauce, and a little coconut oil for body. You could use custard powder, but the fake vanilla flavour’s a little intense. Coconut oil can be a bit expensive, but I figure if you’re not buying butter or milk…

  • 1 tablespoon coconut oil
  • 2 tablespoons cornflour
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar, firmly packed in
  • 1 tablespoon golden syrup
  • 500ml (2 cups) water
  • Salt (as above, soft flaky sea salt is nice here.)

In a large pan, whisk together the sugar and cornflour so that any large lumps in the cornflour are dispersed. Then whisk in the coconut oil – just to mix it in roughly, be aware this is going to look a bit weird for a while. Set the pan over a low heat so that the sugar starts to soften and caramelise a little and the coconut oil melts into everything. It doesn’t need to be anywhere near liquid, just good and hot, when you add the first 250ml (1 cup) of water and the golden syrup. It will hiss and bubble, so stir it well till it’s smooth. Don’t worry about any cornflour lumps, they should disperse eventually.

Add the second 250mls water, bring it to the boil, and then let it bubble away until syrupy and somewhat reduced in volume. Remove from heat, and once it’s cool enough to taste, add salt till you’re happy.

Sauce one: Look, butter is just the best thing in the world, okay? It’s not a competition between the two, but while I’d happily pour the vegan one on my ice cream or other suitable catching nets, I could even more happily drink a pint of the other one. From a pint glass. Every day for a year. For all its simplicity, this sauce bears a deep, aggressive caramel flavour and luscious thickness, with hints of butter’s nuttiness and the brown sugar’s fudginess roughing up the cream’s own clean richness. I didn’t hold back on the salt – any more and it might be a little bit too soy-sauce marinade – but it’s perfect, a slight shock to the tastebuds, stopping it from being too straight-up sweet but delivering the dizzying flavours to you even faster.

Sauce Two: Oh no, I’ve used up all my adjectives for the word caramel describing the last one! This clever sauce has a double life – if you use it hot, straight from the pan, it’s a rich clear syrupy sauce, the kind that soaks well into spongy puddings. Once cooled it’s opaque with more body and a slow-moving texture thanks to the custard-thickening effect of the cornflour. Without the dairy to dilute and enrich it, the sweetness is a little more upfront – but when you’ve got the sticky toffee flavours of brown sugar and golden syrup providing the sweetness, this is no bad thing.

Despite the random acts of uselessness, my weekend was fantastic, and a bit of a reunion with everyone we went on holiday with over summer. The high point was Saturday night, which saw a group of us going to see Beirut, the band that sounds like a place, at the Opera House. They were just wonderful. The show was made even better by having said friends at our house both before and after for snacks and drinks. I had planned on feeding them all this caramel sauce but the chocolate sorbet I made for it to be poured over didn’t turn out as planned…but it’s a decent excuse to orchestrate other fun times. Or to drink the sauce by the pint!

I said last night, and I’ll claim the excuse of sleeplessness-induced clarity, “at least when things go wrong they sometimes don’t always go wrong’. I think I can extract some kind of take-home message out of that. Like running towards a rainbow, I guess the more I flail about not being all cool and on to it, the further I’ll push that state of being away. Just gotta keep running up that hill (only, and I mean only, in one of the following ways: as a metaphor for the journey through life, or as a quote from a Kate Bush song. I will not be running up a hill literally. That would ironically be a step backwards for me.)

Title via: Oh Blur, with your handsome handsome frontman and your song Caramel, so perfectly suited to my blog post.

Music lately:

Laurie Beechman. She died in 1998 so there’ll never be anything new from her, but luckily her incredibly powerful voice was commited to some albums and cast recordings. There’s precious little of her work on youtube but watch her sing On A Clear Day – I cried. If you don’t think you can sit through a Streisand cover, try Seth Rudetsky’s loving deconstruction of why her voice is amazing.

Beirut! And their song Santa Fe. Not all their stuff is geographical (oh gosh, they must get that a lot. Not that they’re reading this.)

Next time: I’ve been re-reading my glorious Hudson and Halls cookbooks so there might be something illuminated from within their pages…

 

mushrooms and roses is the place to be

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Disliking, and having zero aptitude for science at school doesn’t preclude me coming up with several scientific theories, the hypothesis and measurement both being “I think it’s real and so…yeah.” One such theory being: Time totally, without doubt, speeds up when I’m with people I love. Fact. For example, Tim and I spent our New Year at Raumati Beach with the sort of amazing friends we only ever get to envy other people having. Between the beautiful blanket fort, the nail painting, the guitar playing, the Point Break watching, the homemade liqueur and gin and wine drinking, the feasting, the dancing to Wuthering Heights (alas caught in real time on video somewhere), the nail-painting, the swimming, the reading of many books, the frying of many potatoes, the crying of many tears with laughter and the taking of one stroll, well it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that time would unfairly speed up during all that.

Time also speeds up a little if one of your friends has cleverly made cat ears in your hair made of plaits and pipe cleaners and bobby pins. It whooshes right through your cat ears with increased aerodynamics.

I’ve always, since day dot, been hopeless at saying goodbye. Memories of crying when things are over – anything from great big emotional ballet performances to visiting an older, cool and magnanimous girl from down the road to play for the afternoon – all blur into one another. Luckily there was less of the actual tears and more of the joking about tears (to keep from the actual tears fighting through, you see) when the Raumati Beach times started to wind up, but I couldn’t help be reminded of all the times I’d been bad at accepting things are over. If you’re hanging out with me and I make yawny noises and comment on the time, instead of wild-eyedly suggesting we bust into the good whiskey, then you can either be disappointed…or, I guess, shiny with relief-sweats.

I made this marinated mushroom recipe four times in the last two weeks, and every single time it has been perfect. This is a sneaky lazy blog post, as I’ve already basically given the whole recipe in this story I wrote for 3news.co.nz on what to cook when it’s too hot to think about cooking. However I am tired and frankly a bit sneaky and lazy at the best of times too, plus, putting the recipe in two separate places on the internet shows you just how strongly I love it.

Speaking of things I love, wasn’t I lucky to score these knives and forks and bowl from Mum! The knife and fork have been in the family for generations and the plate just looks like one that has been in the family for generations, which is good enough for us. You don’t even need a knife to eat these mushrooms but I like how it looks, so it stays in the picture.

I made this for myself on the 29th, for the aforementioned friends on New Year’s Eve, for family on the 7th, and for myself again last night. Something about the name Marinated Mushrooms makes people nervously say “Oh no! You should’ve started it six weeks ago! We’ll have to have it another time” but this is actually good to go as soon as you stir it. It’s at its peak deliciousness after about 12 hours in the fridge, but truly. I tend to eat half of it while I’m making it, that’s how good it tastes.

Marinated Mushrooms

I came up with this myself, but with a little inspiration from recipes belonging to the wondrous Nigella Lawson and the also quite wondrous Yotam Ottolenghi. Quantities are vague because I never once thought to weigh or measure the amount of mushrooms I was using. Just guess though. Science can’t get you here.

  • Mushrooms; as many as you’d normally feed people – maybe a heaped handful per person though if you’re stuck. Use the cheapest white button ones you can find.
  • 1/2 cup rice bran oil or olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon maple syrup or golden syrup
  • Juice and zest of a lemon or 1 tablespoon cider vinegar
  • 1 tablespoon Dijon or American mustard
  • Salt

Wipe or peel the mushrooms – dirt will cling, and though it sounds fussy sometimes peeling’s much easier. Slice thinly and pile into a bowl. In a small cup or bowl mix the dressing ingredients together, tasting often and adding more of whichever ingredient your tastebuds feel it requires. Pour over the mushrooms, mix carefully. If it looks like it’s not dressed enough, drizzle in some more oil. Taste for salt – I add quite a lot – then either eat immediately or cover and refrigerate. 

Maple syrup on mushrooms might sound a little too daring, sure. But raw mushrooms are quite mild and almost like tofu in that they can absorb into their porous surfaces nearly every flavour that passes them by. However, not to the point where you might as well be sucking salad dressing dejectedly (or happily!) from a sponge soaked with it. Their delicate, rain-on-cut-grass freshness is mighty fine with the smoky maple syrup and sharp mustard, and the polystyrene texture becomes even more pleasingly yielding to the tooth the longer it sits there in its dressing. Basically: this stuff is addictive so watch out. I’ve never eaten so many mushrooms in one sitting, in my life.

Needless to say, camping at this place with whanau for the 25th year in a row made time speed up significantly again. Somewhat grounding was how I got bitten to pieces by mosquitos, feasting away at my apparently delicious blood till my legs looked like bubble wrap. However I’ve bought some antihistamines and am hoping for the best, and now that I’m back in the world of Monday mornings and routines and so on, heck, they’re a reminder that summer holidays did happen and they were amazing. Until I got bitten.

What did you all get up to over the Christmas/New Years era? I’ve missed this blog a bit while internet was intermittent, but I’ve loved sleeping properly, seeing family and friends, eating well and reminding myself of the good things in my life.

Title via: Janelle Monae, Mushrooms and Roses from her album The Archandroid. This song’s a little ridiculous but I love her and the melody and intense chorussing pulls you along in a dreamy fashion. And it does have the word mushrooms in it. 

Music lately:

Pat Benetar, We Belong. I’ve always disliked every single song Pat Benetar has ever called her own – except this one. It’s so annoyingly alluring and floaty and lush and I can’t honestly say I don’t like it. In fact…without quadruple negatives to hide behind…I like this song.

Stephanie J Block, Get Out And Stay Out. Her voice is stunning. Everything from the emotional, shuddery talk-singing at the start of this song to the crystal clear, exhilarating but not over-extended belting at the end is just so very listenable. 

Next time: Something new, something you’ve never seen before, something highly edible, for starters.  I guess this is the last time I can get away with saying it before it gets too weird, so…Happy New Year, everyone!

drinking peppermint schnapps with jackie wilson and sam cooke…

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So Christmas has been packed up and put back in the cupboard where you keep the Christmas things. The giant ham from lunch on the big day is being slowly whittled down with each leftovers-based meal, and the wrapping paper has had its sellotape pieces peeled off and been respectfully folded and put away to be used for next year’s presents.

I’ve spent a joyful few days like this:

Lying on the couch in a remarkably realistic small cat costume. Jokes! I’ve been lying on the couch at home reading a Julie Andrews biography and mucking round online and sleeping in. And feeling sufficiently emboldened to ask Mum and Dad “say, do you guys want to watch Parks and Recreation? It’s so amazingpleaselikeitIloveitsomuch.” (Result: we did watch an episode, they liked it!)

Now that I’m back in Wellington – briefly, before taking off for a sure-to-be-blissful New Years with friends and then back up home to go camping with whanau in the same place we’ve camped since 1986 – my thoughts turn to resourceful things, like…could I dissolve all our leftover candy canes in vodka, to form homemade peppermint schnapps? The sugar content of the candy canes would surely soften the taste and the peppermint flavour would give it icy edge.

Well, it worked. Spookily fast, the candy canes let go of their stripes and stain the vodka and glowing electric pink. By the next morning, there was no trace of them. How practical is a jar full of liquor that tastes like toothpaste and is filled with red food colouring? Um, not overly. But as with all funny liqueurs, you can find a use for them. Be it a punchily minty hot chocolate or…a punchily minty hot chocolate. Any ideas? But the cool thing about this is how instant it is, so if you get moving, you can have yourself a cute bottle of peppermint schnapps to see in the new year with.

Spot the new-old plate that I picked up from home. New to me, old because it belonged to my dad’s mum. The vodka you get doesn’t need to be fancy – if the price of one litre of it is the same price as 750mls of another brand, then it’s probably about right – but make sure it’s vaguely drinkable. I have a feeling the stuff I got was a little too rough-edged, however I figure another night in the jar will mellow it out a little and let the sugar soften it up.

Homemade Peppermint Schnapps

A recipe by myself

  • 1 litre vodka
  • 10 or more candy canes

Find an airtight jar (non-plastic) that will fit 1 litre of liquid. Unwrap the candy canes, pile them into the jar, then pour over the vodka. Leave a couple of days if you can, but at least overnight.

There was indeed more than one bottle of homemade drinks in the first photo. This one’s not nearly as instant, but what it lacks in speed it makes up for in visual novelty value. Like, it looks like you’re incubating an alien baby or something. It’s a great conversation starter. I found out about Forty-Four, as it’s known, in the Food Thesaurus book. You take an orange, make 44 cuts in it, push a coffee bean into each slice, and place in a jar with 44 teaspoons of sugar. Cover with brandy or vodka (I used vodka) and leave for forty-four days. On the forty-fourth day, remove the orange, cut it in half and squeeze the juice into the jar, leave for a day and then finally you’re good.

I kept forgetting to make this, so it has really only been sitting for 22 days, but I’d like to think it’s more or less where it needs to be.

There’s no way you’re going to get this before New Years, no matter how fast you move, however if you feel like a little project and something to look forward to, then feel free to try this too for fun times in the nearish future. The long sitting allows the sugar to slowly absorb into the resinous syrupy vodka, along with the intense oil from the pores of the orange skin and the coffee beans. At first all you taste is orange, followed quickly by a warm, slightly bitter hit of coffee. It might sound unusual but it’s a pretty brilliant combination.

Normally I try to keep it real on here – like, none of the photos are staged. If you see something in a photo, that’s how I was going to consume it. But at the start of the day and with heaps to get done I had to concede to pouring myself a drink I was going to tip right back into the jar. The schnapps was a little too underdeveloped by this point to slowly sip on its own, so I tried – for lack of anything better – mixing it with lemonade. It tasted weirdly good. But I might need to test it a couple more times before the verdict graduates into “definitely good”. Appropriately I also made cakeballs today, out of some leftover cake crumbled and rolled together with leftover cream cheese icing and melted white chocolate, and, for good measure, some raspberry flavouring. Two novelties are better than one, after all.

Tim and I will be taking these two fine-ish liqueurs out to the house we’re renting with some dear friends over New Years. Even though I prefer my liquor to be as dry as dry can be, I also find it very hard to say no to a novelty recipe. My head is all “what about Sour Coke Bottle Vodka? What about Orange Jellybean Vodka?” while my heart is like “you don’t like sugary drinks, fool.” And then my head replies with “But the pretty colours!” And I guess it’s obvious by now which organ won the battle.

Title via: the quietly appealing 2pac song Thugz Mansion featuring Nas and J.Phoenix.

Music lately:

Ethel Merman, There’s No Business Like Show Business. There’s something I find strangely comforting about her brassy, intense voice. And this song is amazing.

Kate Nash, Foundations. I can’t stop listening to her debut album. Like…daily. I know.

Next time: I hope you all have a safe and happy New Years. I’ll see you in 2012 with something non-novelty, I promise.