at sideshow stalls, they throw the balls at coconut fur

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Winter has got me, and not in an epic, sweepingly-caped Game of Thrones kinda way (although, phew, look at that show’s very casual body count) but in the more unremarkable, throat infection kind of way. While I’ve been coughing at intervals during the daytime, I’m starting to wonder if there’s some chemical or hormone that’s released just as you’re about to drift off to sleep (perhaps to dream about being cast as Amy in Company, as my brain somewhat plausibly presented me with recently) which reacts with whatever’s happening in your throat. Because it’s at night when I cough the most. My brain is woozy and dozy, but my throat and lungs are wide awake and on fire.

 

 

So I’ve generously applied a tea made from chopped, carroty-fresh tumeric root and fibrous chunks of fresh ginger. I’ve drunk a lot of water, sipped Gees Linctus, eaten leafy green vegetables, and dissolved so many lozenges on my tongue that my teeth’ll probably corrode before the season is out…and also had some whiskey. Fingers crossed this elixir mix gets the better of my immune system soon.

In the meantime, here are the promised Coconut Macaroons – luckily, as in previous winters, I haven’t got a blocked nose and therefore no sense of taste. Those winters are no fun at all. I’d take a cough and no energy over that any day. I’d never tried these Coconut Macaroons before, despite owning How To Be A Domestic Goddess since 2006. But one of the many manifest joys of Nigella Lawson is that with her massive quantity of recipes, there’s always deliciousness anew to discover and love.

This is how much coconut they use…On the other hand, only two egg whites! These macaroons are less sophisticated than their French macaron counterparts, but they’re significantly less terrifying to make, too.

Coconut Macaroons

From Nigella Lawson’s important book How To Be A Domestic Goddess

  • 2 egg whites
  • 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
  • 100g sugar
  • pinch of salt
  • 250g shredded/fancy shred/long thread coconut (if all you have/can find is dessicated, I’m sure it’s fine, but Nigella does make a bit of a point of saying that shredded is better – am just the messenger)
  • 30g ground almonds
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or coconut essence

Set your oven to 170 C/340 F and line a baking tray with baking paper. In a non-plastic bowl, whisk the eggs till just frothy, then add the cream of tarter and whisk some more till you get soft peaks forming.

At this point, carry on whisking – fun! – while gradually adding the sugar a teaspoon at a time. It should eventually be thick and shiny, by the time all the sugar’s used up.

Now plunder all this gorgeous meringue-y hard work by tipping in the coconut, salt, extract and ground almonds, and fold together till you have a sticky mixture. I’ll tell you now: this mixture tastes amaaaazing.

Take a quarter cup measure, and scoop out cups-ful, dumping them down onto the tray. You should get between 8 and 12 out of this mixture. Bake for around 20 minutes, or until lightly golden. If you like, once they’re cool, drizzle them or swirl their bases in melted dark chocolate (around 150-200g should do this lot)

I love them. They’re satisfyingly large, pleasingly occupying both biscuit and cake territory, chewy with the fresh, summery taste of coconut and the bounty bar-echoing delight of their optional chocolate coating. They’re just seriously delicious.

Title via: the very lovely David Bowie’s earlyish song Karma Man, from the album London Boy.

Music lately:

With the lack of sleep that recurrent coughing brings, I’ve not been drawn towards anything with a heavy beat or a heavy meaning to process lately. Which is why Patsy Cline and the serenely beautiful Ali and Toumani album, for example, have been played a lot.

Next time: I found this amazing roast vegetable tart recipe, vegan and gluten free and delicious and everything. Hopefully will be blogging with a non-inflamed throat next time, too.

 

my poor heart is achin’ to bring home the bacon

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Bacon. Jam. Bacon jam. At last. Tim was all “How are you going to explain it? What do you even do with it?” but I think it’s pretty obvious. (For one: hide in your room and eat it all with a spatula.)

Think of Bacon Jam as a variation on caramelised onions, or chutney – to be stirred into soups or casseroles, or meat sauce made from minced beef. To be spread on bread or crackers. Added to meatballs or meatloaf, inside or on top of a burger patty. Folded through cooked pasta, chopped fried mushrooms, or mustard-sauced, sauteed cabbage, or cooked, quartered waxy potatoes. Mixed with chilli sauce and used to top rice and broccoli. Added to the steak part of a pie’s filling or blanketed with melting cheese in a toasted sandwich or showcased inside a baked potato, freshly busted open and filled with sour cream.

I also have this feeling that it’d be good on top of real vanilla ice cream. McDonalds was basically my babysitter for a large part of my life (well, it was across the road from where I had dancing lessons, and for about a dollar I could get food and read Tearaway and be in a fairly safe place till someone came to pick me up and take me home again) and it was there that I learned to dip my french fries into the 50c ice cream cone, and the strange deliciousness that the combination of salty and sweet produced. If potato chips and pretty nasty ice cream can taste okay, I bet sticky, toffeed bacon on top of ice cream would work. In fact, I’m not even going to google it because it has probably already happened somewhere (I know you can get candied bacon cupcakes, so ice cream isn’t that much of a stretch.)

We don’t eat a lot of meat so it felt kind of outrageous chopping up 400g of the bacon, but as I’ve demonstrated above, there are so many uses for this stuff that it’s practically…practical.

Tim and I buy free-range pork, but I have no way of knowing what’s accessible to you, so use what you’re able to. Given that bacon is the focus of this, I did appreciate the particularly good taste of the Freedom Farm stuff that we used, and also that it didn’t leak any watery liquid during the cooking process.

Bacon Jam

Many thanks to The Family Kitchen, from whom I adapted this recipe.

  • 400g bacon (I think streaky or middle is probably best for this)
  • 1 onion, finely chopped
  • 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup coffee (instant is fine, but make it strong)
  • 1/4 cup golden syrup

Roughly chop the bacon up, and cook in a large pan. At first it’ll just stew, because of the quantity of bacon, but eventually it’ll start to crisp up a bit.

Depending on your bacon, some liquid may have emerged at this point – drain off as much as possible, also drain away as much fat as possible, then transfer the bacon to another bowl for a minute.

Gently fry the onions and garlic in that same pan – no need to wash it, and be careful not to let them brown – then add the rest of the ingredients, and return the bacon to the pan, and let cook for around half an hour over a low heat till the liquid has significantly thickened and looks a bit syrupy. I partially covered it during this time, giving it the occasional stir. Remove from the heat, and transfer to an airtight container or jar, and keep in the fridge for a week or two. Makes about 1 1/2 cups full.

Notes:

  •  Instead of golden syrup, you can use maple syrup or honey.
  •  Instead of coffee, you can use cola or beer, but so bitterly nutty and dark and rich is coffee against the salty, supersweet flavours at play here, that without having tried any other variants it’s still what I’d urge you to use.
  •  Use muscovado sugar if you can get hold of it. It’s so severely intense in flavour compared to regular brown sugar, it kind of goes with everything happening here.

So, despite the relatively unusual combinations happening here (unusual depending on how many blogs about candied bacon cupcakes you’ve read, that is) it works and gloriously so. Even while cooking it, the sizzling combination of coffee, dark sugary matter and bacon fat tasted impossibly delicious. Seriously: coffee with all meats from now on, please.

 

Unfortunately I didn’t have a pretty jar to put it in, so an old takeout container had to do.

It felt like I hadn’t cooked anything in ages, so today (Sunday) turned into a bit of a frenzied kitchen session. As well as the bacon jam, I also had a go at making homemade Daim bars, as per my promise on Facebook (yeh, I started a Facebook page for this blog in the end, you’re welcome to join or not to join, I won’t narrow my eyes at you if you don’t.) They didn’t quiiite work out. I also made another batch of Nigella’s coconut macaroons, which I’m becoming very attached to, and which will also be featured in my next blog post. Tonight for dinner I’m making a variation on an Ottolenghi recipe, a kind of roasted cauliflower omelet. Unfortunately I blackened the cauliflower florets, but who knew that they still tasted okay, if not great, when burnt? Me, now.

Edited to add: Such was the extent to which my homemade Daim bars weren’t quite successful -Tim was reading through this and then turned to me and said “What homemade Daim bars?” and I pointed to where they were situated on the table behind him. And then he said “ohhh thooooose” in a regretful kind of way.

Title via: The Laziest Gal In Town (so appropriate to me) choose whether you prefer Marlene Deitrich’s or Nina Simone’s version, for I sure can’t. Tony Award winner Jane Krakowski also has a very cool version on her album of the same name, but you can’t find it on Youtube.

Music lately:

Turtle Pizza Cadillacby Parallel Dance Ensemble. One portion of PDE, the spectacular Coco Solid, performed at San Francisco Bath House last night. Tim and I went along, had a very awesome time cutting a caper on the dancefloor and rapping along where we knew the words. We also ran into some nice people from Twitter! As in…someone that I follow, not like Biz Stone.

Gil Scott-Heron, I’m New Here, from the album of the same name. I love this, it’s quiet, brooding, and – I don’t like the word, but what can you do – haunting.

Next time: the aforementioned coconut macaroons. Right now: Obligatory “OMG it’s July” statement. Where is 2011 going, and why in such a hurry?

clean clear crisp, we got a love like this water

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I don’t want to come across all “Oh hi old friend, haven’t seen you in so long, oh wait I’ll just put my shiny new iPhone on the table there for everyone to see while opening up the FriendPal app, which I paid $3 for, it takes a photo of the person in front of you so you can talk to them while looking at a picture of them on your phone” etc. But I really, really love the FoodGawker app, which is where I found this recipe for Chocolate Mousse. While all the food that I blog about here makes me happy, sometimes I find an exciting recipe that just fills my thoughts constantly, because I’m so curious about it. A recipe that makes people’s voices slower, plane trips delayed, busses late and traffic more congested because they’re all standing between me and my kitchen.

 
 
 
Foodgawker is a site with page after page of thumbnails of stunning food photography, each photo linking to the recipe it depicts on the blog it came from. You’ve got to self-submit, and you’ve got to be good. Possibly related: they’ve consistently rejected all my submissions over the last year or so. But still I return, using it like Google for recipes. Their iPhone app condenses all this into a format that fits on your phone, and it’s a grand way to fill in spare time – although it helps to have some free Wi-Fi, I bet all those high-res pictures chew through the megabytes.
 
The reason this recipe caught my attention, while browsing through the app in an airport recently, was its ingredients. Or lack of.
 
 
 
 
Chocolate, water, juice, honey. (The honey was a total pain to scrape off the baking paper, by the way, and I didn’t even achieve visually what I was hoping for! Hopefully I learn from this.)
 
You get chocolate mousse out of hardly anything at all. I wish I’d known about this recipe a few years ago as a student – a little chocolate, turn on the tap, and you’ve got pudding. No eggs, no cream, no nothing. It’s amazing. As the German man on Tim’s and my train to Warsaw said when he found out we were from New Zealand: “Oh my gosh, that is further away than I could ever have imagined!” As they say in [title of show], “For anyone who’s ever dreamed, it’s time to believe in dreaming again….It’s time. Dream. Believe.” (Oh come on, it more or less applies to awesome chocolate mousse. Also: [title of show]!)
 
 
Water Chocolate Mousse
 
With a huge thanks to the Mess In The Kitchen blog where I found this recipe. I’ve adapted it slightly.
 
100g dark chocolate (I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana)
1/4 cup juice (any flavour, I used more of that strawberry juice)
1/3 cup water
2 teaspoons honey
 
Bring the liquids and the honey to the boil in a pan, then remove from the heat and tip into a bowl. Break up the chocolate and add it to the bowl, stirring till the heat of the liquid melts it and you’ve got a shiny chocolate puddle.
 
Refrigerate for 10 minutes or so. Just before you take it out, fill your sink with a couple of centimeters of cold water, and add a handful of ice cubes.
 
Sit the bowl of chocolate in the water, and whisk. Whisk and whisk and whisk and eventually it will aerate, turning paler and thickened and – pa-dah – into chocolate mousse. If you end up with what looks like overbeaten whipped cream, just whisk in a little hot water till you get the consistency you want. Divide amongst two smallish bowls/glasses and serve.
 
Serves 2
 
 
Most recipes involving chocolate will stress that you can’t let any water get into it or it’ll seize up and turn all gross. So, it was with slight consternation that I mixed the two together. Through some miracle of science, the melted chocolate, rapidly cooling with every flick of your whisk, absorbs the liquid and becomes a soft, velvety pillowy pile of mousse, with the clean, unsullying water making the dark cocoa flavour so definite it’s like every single one of your tastebuds is wearing 3D glasses.
 
 
 
 
In terms of excitement-causing, second only to the astonishing minimalism of the ingredients is this recipe’s versatility. With no eggs or dairy or gluten, this could also serve as icing on a cake, the filling in a pie shell, or as a base for whatever flavour you want to push upon it – use orange juice, add vanilla or peppermint extract or cinnamon. If you don’t have juice or honey, I think you could use water for the entire liquid content, and just use two teaspoons of sugar.
 
 
 
 
And for interest’s sake, I tried it with white chocolate instead of dark. Apart from the sort of muddy colour (from the strawberry juice) and a softer-set texture, it worked amazingly well and now calls me, siren like, from the fridge.
 
 
 
Title via: Ladi6’s high-achieving single Like Water from her beautiful album The Liberation of…
 
 
 
Music lately:
 
Kiss From a Rose, Seal. OMG this song is good. Although it’s really hard to blog when you’re singing along to it. It requires all your concentration.
 
HAIR. While I appreciate that I’ve mentioned it a million times, it’s only because it’s really, really good. And I’m obsessed anew thanks to the arrival from America of the Actors Fund of America Benefit recording and the vinyl record of the 2009 revival cast. “All the clouds are cumuloft, walking in spaaaace”
 
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, How Can You Love Me. As commenter Pete20Pedro on Youtube says, “what a jam!” And their album came with a free tshirt, one of those nice ones with really soft fabric, even.
 
 
Next time: Nigella’s recipe for coconut macaroons…unless anything dinner-y overtakes my interest before then. That’s if I’m not asleep in every spare moment. Had another weekend away for work – fortunately, didn’t hit my head again, but I did have a weird sleepless night in my motel, which I’m still catching up on now.

red enough it could burn you…

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I was away in Auckland for work over the weekend, but very happily, I got to fit a night at home with the family in around it. During my 18-hour stint at home I somehow managed to catch up with huge amounts of family, both extended and immediate. Well, the family minus one cat (Rupert, who died in May). Roger, the remaining feline, seemed to enjoy the extra attention but didn’t go so far as to actually sit on my lap for an extended time period or sleep on my bed that night.
While packing up on Sunday in my Auckland motel to head to the airport, I bent down to check if I’d left anything under the bed (I always do this, even if I hardly bring anything with me – I once found twenty cents!) and on the way down my right temple connected hard and swift with the wooden back of a desk chair. It hurt so bad, and I wailed really loudly. And then kind of laughed at the fact that there was no-one to hear me saying “owwww”, which…actually sounds fairly sinister now on paper. Anyway, if this blog is completely non-inspiring to read, blame it on my sore, impacted head.
The new Cuisine magazine arrived in our mailbox the day before I left to go up to Auckland, giving me just enough time to read it, but not enough time to cook any of its content. I did daydream about one particular recipe while away, which I then made pretty well immediately after returning home to Wellington. Rote Grutz, or its supercool translation Red Grits (I find it hard not to spell it Gritz) is a German recipe that Ray McVinnie, one of my very, very favourite local food writers, discovered while researching food in Berlin. I’m not even going to pretend to *cough* when I say: “Luckyyyy”.
It doesn’t look like there’s much to this recipe, and it’s true, but the ingredients come together to form something that’s a gorgeous merging of jam and custard. The ‘grits’ part of the name come from the berries’ seeds, at least that’s my guess. They’re certainly gritty. The cornflour and juice cooks together and becomes satiny and light (apart from that one lump of unstirred cornflour stirring in my glass), stunningly red, not too sweet. In fact, the sour-sugary aspect makes it compelling eating. I even sneaked back to the fridge in a bit of a trance while it was cooling to eat some more spoonfuls, then accidentally dropped a steak right into the bowl of berries. Luckily the steak was wrapped and on a tray and I removed it fast.
I didn’t have the exact ingredients that Ray McVinnie specified, but I’d like to think what I had worked just as well. There’s something nice about the red-on-red of the juices but I’m sure you could use orange or apple juice if that’s what’s most accessible to you.
Rote Grutze/Red Grits

From the June/July 2011 issue of Cuisine magazine.

250mls cranberry juice
150g sugar
800g frozen raspberries
50g cornflour mixed with 4 tablespoons water

Or, my appropriation based on what was in the fridge and the amount of people it was feeding:

125ml (1/2 cup) strawberry juice (I know! I bought it at the food show, the brand is NJoy but I can’t find anything about them online. Anyway, this seemed like a practical use for it.)
75g sugar
400g frozen cranberries and blackberries
25g cornflour mixed with 2 tablespoons water

Bring the sugar and juice to a boil in a saucepan. Add the berries, bring to the boil again and carefully stir in the cornflour mixture, stirring really well so you don’t end up with lumps of cornflour. Remove from the heat, cool, then pour into glasses. Out of mine I got enough for the two glasses you saw plus a couple of tablespoons left over to be saved for making future breakfasts more exciting.


The Red Grits are pretty to look at, dark as garnets and just as light-catching. While they’d taste gorgeous with a cascade of fresh cream plunging into their red depths, they were satisfactorily delicious as is. As well as served in glasses, I imagine these saucy berries could be spooned over ice cream, tucked under a crumble topping, or used to fill a pie shell.


And extremely easy to make. Tim and I never actually saw these on a menu in Berlin, but it does feel nice to be eating something Germanic, so that our holiday doesn’t feel quite so far away in the past.
Last week I had the extremely cool opportunity to go to the launch of Visa Wellington on a Plate. Which I’m really excited about. Particularly the set menus which allows me to briefly feel like a Lady Who Lunches. At last year’s launch I met Mika of Millie Mirepoix for the first time, and also the magnificent Ray McVinnie himself. He wasn’t there this year, but I re-met Delaney of Heartbreak Pie and Rosa of Mrs Cake, and met for the first time Joanna from Wellingtonista, etc. We ploughed through beautiful nibbles, ended up at Cuckoo round the corner for wine (I will pay you back Delaney and Rosa) and then Tim appeared and he and I ended up having a wild dinner at Foxglove with Jo and her friend Heather. It all happened really spontaneously which is a word that I don’t usually use to describe activities that I participate in. It was so fun, and several bonus points to the staff at Foxglove who dealt with our increasing raucousness. But as well as making real-life friends of people that also seem cool online, Wellington on a Plate has plenty to offer people who just want to eat stuff: check em out.
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Title via: Linda Clifford, Red Light, from the Fame soundtrack. I love this song so much. It’s also an amazing moment in the film itself – obviously Leroy is a total babe and it’s supposed to be humourous but I always felt so sad for Shirley Mulholland. When she says “who wants to go to a…school and learn to dance anyway” a bit of my heart chips off (this is why I can’t watch this film too often) because I know how she feels.
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Music lately:

Arctic Monkeys, Don’t Sit Down Because I’ve Moved Your Chair. Some of the music I was really wild about six years ago really hasn’t aged too well, or successive output has downright deteriorated. So it’s nice to see the Arctic Monkeys continuing to be awesome.

Patrick Wolf, The Magic Position. I had a bad headache today from the aforementioned head-hitting moment and so was feeling a bit grim. This song came on my ipod and, with its carousel-ride sound and Bolero-baiting violins, it was about halfway through before I realised I was happily swaying my head side to side like Stevie Wonder.
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Next time: I’ve been tutu-ing with the idea of making a Facebook page for this blog. On the one hand…it might be a good way for people to latch ever further onto this blog. A lot of people like Facebook. On the other hand, I don’t really like Facebook (it’s true! You have to scrape me away from Twitter with a silicon spatula but I can’t spend more than a minute on Facebook) and I wouldn’t know what to say on there, and research would suggest that you actually have to have an engaging Facebook page to keep people around. On a further, auxiliary hand, what if I built a Facebook page and nobody turned up? Any thoughts’d be appreciated.

just slip on a banana peel, the world’s at your feet…

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I said this recently to someone on Twitter which is roughly as public as it gets – as recent international political situations might attest – so I think I can repeat it without shame here: whenever I can’t sleep because I’m feeling nervous about something, (and there is a lot to be nervous about in life and I’m not the best sleeper), I imagine cakes. Pies. Ice cream. Not just sitting in front of me waiting to be eaten, and not muffins jumping sheep-like over a fence to be counted, but things that I could make in future, new flavours to combine. Recipes I haven’t tried before, or new recipes made up on the spot.

It, ah, does require a certain predilection towards baking in the first place, but you’re welcome to try it. It’s surprising how well “would nutmeg and coconut go together in icecream” can squash thoughts like “was that the beginning of an earthquake or just the muscles in my leg twitching”. On that note…hope everyone in Christchurch is holding it down right now, after yesterday’s aftershocks of unfair size and frequency.


This banana cake is one such recipe, invented in the night and fortunately remembered in the morning, and even more fortunately, pretty delicious. Yes, banana cake is one of the more common cakes you might learn to make, and so you may not feel the need to pay much attention to this one…but I’d like to think it’s a sidestep to the left of your usual recipe.

Also, I appreciate that it’s a pain to weigh out bananas like I’ve asked, but a cake recipe calls for accuracy. This isn’t a bowl of cereal we’re making here. That said, it’s roughly three small bananas or two and a half good-sized bananas (oo-er) (sorry.)


Banana Cake with Golden Syrup Icing

250g ripe bananas
3 tablespoons oil (I use rice bran)
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla paste/extract
200g flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and line a 20cm springform caketin with baking paper.

In a large bowl, mash the bananas with a fork till they’re good and smooth. If you like, you can switch to a whisk to mash them up – it’s okay if there’s lumps of bananas, but a decent liquidy texture is what you’re after here.

Whisk in the oil, sugar and vanilla, and then sift in the flour, baking soda and baking powder. Carefully fold together with a spatula, then scrape into the prepared caketin.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, and allow to cool.

Icing:

Mix 1 tablespoon of golden syrup, about 1/2 cup icing sugar, and a tablespoon of water together. Add a tiny pinch of salt. If you’re using a whisk you might be able to get out all the lumps, otherwise it’d probably pay to sift your icing sugar. If you need more icing sugar, add more. Pour over the cake.
I had to have a slice before I committed to icing it and taking photos and writing about how nice it is – just in case my cake was delicious in the mind alone – so it’s lucky that it actually does taste gratifyingly good.
It’s tender and light, with a slightly chewy crust and a fresh banana flavour. There’s also a soft fluttering hint of vanilla, like someone’s eyelashes brushing against your cheek. The golden syrup, with its dark stickiness, and its buddy the pinch of salt, manage to temper the aggressively bland sweetness of the icing sugar. Altogether, it’s a bit of a masterpiece for something thought up in the middle of the night to ward off other bad thoughts.
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Title via: Donald O’Conner’s Make ‘Em Laugh, from one of the best films on this earth, Singing In The Rain.
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Music lately:

Tiny Ruins, Little Notes. It’s pretty, but not just pretty.

Neil Patrick Harris’ opening song from the Tony Awards yesterday. I love a good song and dance number as it is, but this is particularly excellent. I’m slowly working my way through this show on youtube.
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Next time: possibly (finally) those snickerdoodles, however I also have found the most amazing tofu recipe. Hopefully, whatever it is, there won’t be such a huge gap inbetween posts like there has been this month.

like collard greens and whole eggs I got soul

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Last time I said I was going to be posting a recipe for Snickerdoodles next. Oh, how I lied. Because instead I became distracted by this inconceivably good recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi.



I’m sure I’ve told this story a squillion times already and, depending on your mood, it may go some way to illustrate how nauseatingly/adorably (take your pick!) zany/useless (also take your pick here!) Tim and I are, but here goes anyway. In the summer of 2007/2008 we went grocery shopping. At first we looked at the cartons of a dozen eggs. Not enough for us! So we looked at the trays of 20. And there, on a clearance trolley beside the trays, was a plastic wrapped, many layered stack of egg trays. Tim, being handier with mathematics than I am, worked out that even though 80 eggs was kind of a lot to get through, the saving on cost per egg compared to the single tray or dozen carton was so tremendously significant – especially considering they were free range eggs – that we’d be completely unintelligent not to buy the huge tray. Of 80 eggs. Congratulating ourselves on such a bargain, we left the supermarket.
When we got home, a cursory glance at the label revealed the reason this multitude of eggs was so reasonably priced. According to the use by date, we had just under 10 days to eat all 80. Somehow we made it happen and with protein coursing through our veins came out the other side with not one egg wasted. The reason I bring this up is that, on a free weekend, to use up some of said eggs I made Nigella’s Strawberry Ice Cream and Chocolate Mousse Cake from Forever Summer and How To Be A Domestic Goddess respectively. These two recipes saw me successfully separate 18 eggs in a single day.
But while I can coolly part yolk from white eighteen times over and turn them into such delicate treats as mousse and ice cream, I have always been terrible at poaching eggs. It kinda sucks.
Luckily, thanks to this immensely delicious recipe I found in Ottolenghi’s book Plenty, poached eggs can sit down, because these baked eggs eclipse any ambition I have to be a decent poacher.


It’s so gorgeous. The first shamefully conservative thought that crossed my mind was “eggs and yoghurt? AND green stuff?” but I’m glad I squashed that thought down. Here is the recipe to recreate it yourself, even if – maybe especially if – you think you’re not the sort of person who could veer away from plain eggs on toast.

Baked Eggs with Yoghurt and Chilli

Adapted slightly from Ottolenghi’s Plenty

4 eggs
300g rocket (although I’d recommend curly kale)
2 tablespoons olive oil
150g Greek yoghurt
1 garlic clove, crushed
A generous knob butter
1 red chilli, finely sliced, or 1 spoonful sambal oelek
A pinch smoked paprika

Set your oven to 150 C. Heat the oil in a large pan, and gently cook your greens till they wilt a little.

Tip this into a small oven dish – I used an old pie plate – and make four indentations in your greens so that the eggs have a place to go. Carefully crack an egg into each space – being careful not to break the yolk – and bake for about 10 – 15 minutes. Don’t overcook, but make sure the egg whites are no longer translucent. The very low heat means you don’t have to stress about this too much.

While they’re cooking, mix the yoghurt and garlic together and set aside. Melt the butter in a pan (the same one you cooked the greens in if you like) and add the chilli, paprika, and let it cook away till the butter foams a little.

Spoon the yoghurt and the butter over the eggs. Serve on toast or just as is.

The thick, luscious garlicky yoghurt and the almost chewy greens, gorgeously verdant against the golden eggs, which yield to the fork’s prod, the salty-hot butter merging with the rich, slowly spilling yolks and coating the astringent leaves…it’s really something.


Ottolenghi says to use rocket as the green stuff but I definitely recommend curly kale, if you can get hold of it – its crisp leaves stand up to the heat, without getting all limp and watery and gross. While it might be a bit harder to find, it’s no more expensive than spinach, and it’s not one of those stupid leafy green vegetables that perishes floppily in the fridge the day after you buy it. Kale is built to last. If you wanted to make this dairy-free, you could just use olive oil instead of the butter and I bet tahini would be so, so good instead of yoghurt. Assuming you’re more likely to have tahini than yoghurt, that is.


On that note, does anyone have any particularly reliable tips for poaching eggs? Mine is to pay someone in a cafe to do it for you.
It was so, so dark when I got out of bed this morning, and the sky had barely lightened its shade to something daylight-resembling when I left for work. I’m surprised at how glum it made me feel. I will have to keep that in check, I mean if I’m feeling this way in early June, the bleak midwinter July mornings will probably be greeted with a howl. Unless I can get up early enough and make myself this for breakfast every morning. Might be time to look for another clearance tray of eggs…
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Title via: Southernplayalistikcadillacmusic by the tremendous Outkast from their album of the same name.
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Music lately:

Honestly…I haven’t had enough time to listen to anything much since my last post, which possibly indicates that time was used badly. I’ve been listening quite a bit to the Godspell soundtrack and cast recording for what it’s worth, which could be seen by some as still a bad way of using time. I’m clearly the only person in New Zealand who likes to listen to it, because whenever I go to a music store there’s usually at least five copies of it in their second-hand clearance section.
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Next time:

Probably definitely the snickerdoodles…and I will endeavour to listen to something other than Godspell. Victor Garber was just so dreamy back then.

how long has this been going on…?

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If there was a defining recipe of my childhood, the above cake would be second only to microwaved Marmite and cheese sandwiches. Which is where you take many bread slices, butter them, spread them with Marmite, pull several slices of cheese from the block with the wire cutter, layer them all up in a stack on a plate (probably plastic and not microwave safe) and then nuke until the cheese is bubbling violently. Allow to cool slightly, then eat. Alternatives include tomato sauce and cheese (like a low-rent Margherita pizza…kind of) and, uh, golden syrup and butter. In fairness, this was in the days where I was dancing in every spare minute, and there wasn’t a lot of time or access to fancy snack foods. It’s no wonder I gravitated instinctively towards the improvisational and energy-dense. Plus I love melted cheese.

What I baked the most in my childhood though, for family members’ birthdays, for Calf Club (a kind of elaborate rural pet day, FYI) competitions and simply for my own entertainment, was this cake recipe which came with a glass bowl Mum bought in the 80s – one of those round, slightly opaque baking dishes with high, ridged sides. I suspect it became my go-to cake because it was very simple and didn’t involve any expensive ingredients and therefore wouldn’t be too stressful to my parents that I was making it so often. I didn’t realise it at the time when I was a kid, but it’s completely vegan – using water, vinegar, baking soda and oil in place of the richness and raising abilities in butter and eggs. These ingredients mean that it’s a fairly spartan-tasting cake, which I also didn’t really realise at the time, since I didn’t have much to compare it to. In hindsight, I feel a bit sorry for everyone in my family who had to choke down slices of it every time I insisted on baking it, but at least I was always generous with the icing.

After all this you might wonder why I even emailed Mum for the recipe. Partly curiosity about how whether I’d still like it, and partly in recollection of its dairy-free-ness, which makes it pretty attractive to me right now in these times of brutally expensive butter. Mum did say “wouldn’t you rather just turn off the heater and eat butter instead?” to which I respond…I’m sorry…that I want to have my cake and eat it too. I have made a few additions to the recipe though, so that you’re not stuck consuming the same firm, pale brown disc of cake I grew up on.

My Childhood Chocolate Cake, Improved Significantly

The title needs work, but at least the recipe doesn’t anymore.

  • 1 1/2 cups flour
  • 3 tablespoons cocoa, good dark stuff like Equagold if you can get it.
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/3 cup plain oil such as rice bran
  • A pinch of salt
  • 2 tablespoons malt vinegar or balsamic vinegar
  • 3/4 cup fruit juice of some kind, watered down a bit if you like (like, 1/2 cup juice, 1/4 cup water)
  • Optional but excellent: 100g very dark chocolate (I use Whittakers) roughly chopped.

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F, and line a 20cm tin with baking paper.

Sift the flour, cocoa, baking powder and baking soda into a bowl and stir in 1/2 cup white sugar and 1/4 cup brown or muscovado sugar (or just 3/4 cup white sugar)

Using the back of a spoon, make a well in the centre (like, a bit of a hollow/valley in the flour-cocoa mixture that you can pour liquid into. I used to spend ages on this bit, smoothing the mixture into precarious sand-dunes. Mind you I used to think those hideous framed sand-oil-water things were really cool) and pour in the oil, salt, vinegar, and fruit juice.

Using a spatula, stir everything together thoroughly, transfer to the prepared tin, and bake for around 40 minutes. Once cool you can ice, or it’s just as fine plain.

Mum concedes that it wasn’t the nicest cake but it was good for kids because they just want to eat the icing anyway, and it was very easy to put together, so “it never felt like a waste of time baking it.” In case you’re wondering where the changes were made, I upped the cocoa, and added brown sugar and chopped chocolate. These helped make it a little darker and richer. Then, I changed the liquid content from plain water to juice – the reason I say you can use any juice is that the flavour itself doesn’t seem to be overly strident once the cake is cooked, instead adding an overall extra layer of sweetness and distracting from the slightly fizzy vinegar aftertaste which could sometimes otherwise linger.

In short, and the reason you might want to make it at all, it’s a really delicious cake now, instead of being a cake that was okay for kids in the early 90s who didn’t know any better and who were mostly interested in the icing on top anyway. It has an unambiguous chocolate flavour with a pleasingly un-dry texture – almost bordering on brownie-like with the brown sugar and lumps of dark chocolate. It’s really good.

So good I made it twice this week, and tested it out on friends of ours on Friday night. So I can now tell you it also goes well with red wine.

In fact the consumption of this cake was just the beginning of what has been a fantastic weekend. On Saturday night Tim and I met up with another friend of ours at Foxglove to see the mighty pairing of David Dallas and PNC, down in Wellington on account of Dallas’ new album The Rose Tint, which you can download for free, what? Whoever did the sound last night deserves a gift basket of seasonal fruits or something because not only could we hear every single word – always fun at a hip hop gig – it also wasn’t so loud that I left with ringing ears and a bleeding nose, or vice versa. Very fun night. Continuing with the theme of mighty pairings, Tim and I were invited out to lunch by Kate of Lovelorn Unicorn and her husband Jason, we went to this place in Miramar called The Larder and it was all just highly delicious. Wish all weekends could be like this – don’t think I’d get bored of it in a hurry. (Can’t completely speak for Tim though, considering The Warriors and the All Whites both lost their games.)

Title via: Ella Fitzgerald. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any footage of her singing How Long Has This Been Going On but a voice like hers can stand tall in audio form alone.

Music lately:

I was listening to some Be Your Own Pet for the first time in about three years, (I think?) I’ve never met one other person that thought their music was good, but their songs still capture my ears after all this time. Fire Department, for one.

Paul Robeson, Going Home, from his Carnegie Hall concert in 1958. I don’t know why it is, but all his stuff on vinyl is always in the “we’ll pay you to take this” bin at record shops. Which works out nicely for me.

Next time: Kate and Jason were talking about Nigella Lawson’s recipe for snickerdoodles today from How To Be A Domestic Goddess, and I realised I’ve only made them once, and that was in 2006, and that they were so good and I can’t believe I’ve never revisited them. That time might be now. But on the other hand, I recently won a copy of the lovely Flip Grater’s cookbook and it’s full of recipes that I want to try repeatedly. So, it’ll likely be one of those options.

 

take it all with a belly full of salt

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We don’t eat a ton of meat, it has been gradually receding from out meals, like the tide or someone’s hairline, to the point where we probably only eat it once a week – if that. I don’t know why. I mean, it has got more expensive, but it’s not as though I made a proper stand or decision at any point. Analysis aside, if the right recipe comes along I’ll make it, so today I’m serving up pork belly, care of a fantastic recipe by local epicure Martin Bosley. I found it many miles off the ground, in the pages of an inflight magazine – tore it out, tucked it in my handbag, and dreamed about it till I landed back in Wellington again. I love near-on everything that the terrific, radiant, humble pig offers up – bacon, sausages, ham, ribs – but pork belly is particularly special (admittedly, “particularly special” is what I’d be saying if I was talking about bacon or ribs here too) with its tooth-yieldingly, saltily sticky and fatty wondrousness.

Please excuse (sigh, again) the atrocious photos. Thought I knew my camera, but concede I’m no good at taking pictures when it’s dark. Next week’s will be better, I promise.
This recipe is extremely straightforward. The only real difficulty is when you have to faff around turning the heavy, boiling-hot pork over partway through cooking – use a couple of pairs of tongs, some oven mitts, and take care. I didn’t use oven mitts, and a splash from the bubbling toffee-like heat of the marinade leaping from the roasting dish and landing on the tender inner flesh of my wrist is like…almost enough to make me vegetarian. The ingredients feel easy enough to get hold of – I didn’t have any star anise so used fennel seeds instead, figuring they’d give that licorice twist flavour, although admittedly without looking anywhere near as pretty. If you don’t have an orange you could probably use bottled juice, a lemon, tamarind or even some vinegar for a different sour vibe.

Martin Bosley’s Pork Belly

Cheers to (surprise!) Martin Bosley for the recipe.

2kg pork belly
120g honey
3 T oyster sauce
1 orange
4 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
1 red chilli
4 whole star anise
salt and pepper

Wash the pork belly, place in a deep roasting dish. Mix together the honey, oyster sauce, juice and zest from the orange, and garlic in a bowl. Chop the chilli and add to the marinade along with the star anise and a little salt and pepper. Scrape the bowl of marinade over the pork with a spatula, turning it over so it’s properly covered. Refrigerate for at least an hour, overnight if you can.

When you’re ready to cook it, take it out of the fridge and set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Roast for 90 minutes, turning over occasionally. Slice and serve with steamed rice.
There is a lot of honey in this recipe but it’s not like you’re having pudding for dinner here – the honey caramelises in the oven, bubbling and hissing into the juicy fat from the pork and salty, pungent oyster sauce to create a fairly magical, darkly sweet and savoury flavour. Even though the recipe is simple, everything about the pork is worked with here – the honey and orange points up its sweetness, while the oyster sauce emphasises its saltiness and the anise and chilli distract from its richness. Brilliant.
Edit: I used free range pork and definitely recommend it, if you have the means.
Leftovers can be turned into a comforting noodle soup with stock, greens, broccoli, chilli, soba noodles (or any that you like of course), soy sauce, mint, and so on.
It has been a bit of a weird time in Wellington lately, making a soothing noodle-strewn broth entirely appropriate. What with the grimly embarrassing and regrettably expensive Wellywood sign apparently an unstoppable idea, plus our branch of the Real Groovy music shop and the Grow From Here garden centre – both practically Tim’s and my neighbours and places that we’d spent a lot of time – shutting down. Hopefully something happy eventually comes from these doors closing. This morning the big story was that the Wellington Phoenix football team were going to be relocating to Auckland. I flag after 20 minutes of a game and I was dismayed, so imagine how Tim, obsessed as he is, reacted. Luckily the whole story seems to be an out-of-control rumour and completely untrue. Unfortunately, the Wellywood sign is not. One thing that can be counted on though, is The Food Show – Tim and I went on Sunday and while there were noticeably less exhibitors this time round it was still an extremely fun time with bargain-ly prices and nibbles a-plenty. But no Ray McVinnie! Practically needed smelling salts when I found out he wasn’t doing a cooking demonstration. Luckily there was plenty of wine to sample…
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Title via: Chris Knox, local wonder, flexing his wordsmithery in A Song To Welcome The Onset Of Maturity from 1995’s Songs of Me and You.
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Music lately:

Doubly sad news came over the weekend – first that Jeff Conaway had died, and then Gil Scott-Heron too. I love Scott-Heron’s music and poetry – the world has lost any beautiful strong words and musical greatness he was sure to have continued to contribute. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised remains amazing. Jeff Conaway, despite evidently having a decent enough voice to tour with the Broadway production of Grease, wasn’t really given much to go on with song-wise in the film itself, which is a shame. RIP to them both.

On a mildly happier note, the song Nothing To Lose by The Adults rules.
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Next time: As with the last blog post, I got another cake recipe from my childhood – turns out it’s vegan, which’ll make a nice contrast to all this porkiness.

just like honey

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While in hindsight I did do quite a lot of baking as I was growing up, it wasn’t to the point where it was really obvious that I’d start blogging fervidly about food a few years later. Like, if ever questioned about food in my childhood you’re not going to hear me recount stories of instinctively rolling out pastry with an empty vermouth bottle found on the floor and studding it with halved plums from the orchard; or learning to handmake pasta while sitting on my great-great-grandmother’s floury knee. I think I’ve read too many interviews with chefs who had romantic-sounding upbringings. Ain’t nothing whimsical about 2-minute noodles and mass-produced “Kids Can Cook” books sponsored by 2-minute noodle companies, but…I seemed to have turned out okay.
There are a few recipes from my childhood which stick with me though, and which occasionally twinge both my heartstrings and tastebuds. Today’s recipe for Honeybuns is dairy free – as promised last week, in horrified reaction to $6 blocks of butter at the supermarket – and it’s one that Mum, and sometimes Mum and myself together, made a lot in my childhood. This isn’t simply nostalgia for its own hackneyed, rose-tinted-in-photoshop sake, these are in fact very very good. I had the urge to make them a while back and asked Mum to email me the recipe from the – if I remember rightly – pink scrapbook with big yellow flowers on it. I have this feeling that these were made so often that I was even nostalgic about them at like, aged 12, although that might be now-me trying to heap extra significance on these plain little cakes. (Which reminds me of that flawless film A Mighty Wind: “to do ‘then’ now would be retro, to do ‘then’ then was very nowtro”. I actually had an extremely vivid dream recently that Tim and I traveled to San Francisco and Fred Willard – who plays Mike LaFontaine in AMW – and Jake Gyllenhaal were shooting a movie on the street – some kind of comedy-Renaissance movie in fact – and I approached Fred and told him that I thought A Mighty Wind was a flawless film and in fact if I had to find a fault with it, it would be that it was too zealously edited and could’ve been longer. Jake was ignored until I asked him to take a photo of me and Fred. It was one of those dreams where you wake up thinking “YUSSS-ohhh wait.”)
Even if you don’t usually read through the recipe itself, I prod at you to sweep your eyes over this one – check out how fast and easy and ingredients-light it is. It’s one of those recipes you can make when you’re out of most cool ingredient-y things.
Honey Buns

I don’t know where the recipe itself is from originally…expect Mum will fill in the blanks in the comments.

125g honey
5 T oil (I use Rice Bran)
Good pinch salt
4 T water
125g wholewheat flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 eggs

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. If your honey is particularly solid, gently microwave or heat on stove till it’s runny. Whisk in the oil, salt and water, then sift in the flour and baking soda together (I don’t usually sift, but a few bad experiences with baking soda make me sift when it’s included in a recipe) and whisk thoroughly till there aren’t any lumps. Finally, mix in the two eggs. It’ll be quite a liquidy mixture. Spoon into your chosen cases and bake for about 15-20 minutes. Cover with tinfoil if they get too brown. If you don’t have wholewheat flour, plain is fine.
I would recommend if you can, switching the water for orange juice – from a carton/bottle is fine, although if you’ve got enough actual oranges, squeeze away. Its acidy freshness points up the fragrant nature of the honey no end.
These are actually much, much nicer than their squat, monotone appearance suggests. They’re definitely plain to look at (hence the jazzy orange plate!) but the honey gives them surprising depth and a sticky, date-like sweetness kept in check by by the pinch of salt. They keep for quite a long time and even as its crumbs start to clench and become dry, a zap in the microwave and a spreading of butter (well, I can never keep it too far out of arm’s reach) livens them up again. But in honesty, I took a couple to work today and it was only laziness that stopped me going to the microwave and my block of butter, and they really were just perfect without. I don’t say this lightly or anything. And, back to the original issue, as these don’t even gasp out for butter, you could remain $6 richer for a little bit longer.
Tim and I went to Lower Hutt last night to see the Speakeasy Theatre production of RENT at the Little Theatre. Having now racked up four different versions of RENT nationwide, I can easily say it was one of the strongest-voiced, best acted and excellently directed ones I’ve seen. The sound system was a bit shoddy, which was a shame as some nice harmonies were lost, but it really deserves to be seen, so if you’re within cooee of Lower Hutt move fast because its last show is Saturday night. Tim wasn’t exactly euphoric at being there but did concede that the singing was fantastic.
I don’t find it surprising that the whole “Wellywood sign” thing has caught the awareness of so many. For what it’s worth, I think it’s a terrible idea. Putting aside the emphatically negative response from the public, the shuddery feeling that everyone else will think we did want it, the lack of relevance to NZ, the words “bucket list” being used as a reason, and the general marring of the landscape that it will bring…it just feels like an outrageous waste of money at a time like this. Or ever. I hope it doesn’t go ahead.
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Title via: The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Just Like Honey from Psychocandy. I really like this song, even though with those opening drums I always think it’s going to be the Ronettes, and then can’t help being slightly disappointed in spite of myself.
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Music lately:

Typing this word as many times as I have done just now, my thoughts turn to that another excellent song named after that excellent substance, Mariah Carey’s Honey from the album Butterfly.
Walk on By, a fantastic song from local band Diana Rozz. We’d seen them before but not for a long time – then caught their album release show at Happy on Saturday night and they were so much fun, so cool, so noisy…even the people on the door were hilarious.
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Next time: Mum sent me another childhood recipe upon my request the other day, but I might space out all that nostalgia-tripping with a Martin Bosley recipe for pork belly. Also: the Wellington leg of The Food Show is this weekend and I’m SO excited. Hopefully there’s cheap halloumi and generous soymilk samples like last year!

who is all ginger and jazz, who is as glamourous as?

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As I said on Twitter earlier this week, I both realise and acknowledge that if I’m serious about wanting to write a cookbook, I can’t just earnestly hope someone will say “hey, I’d like to offer you a book deal” while I’m walking down the street, like how some models are discovered. I’ve got to arm myself with a ton of recipes, and work hard on developing them. There’s no cookbook without recipes. Maybe when I’ve got a whole bunch written I could take a week’s annual leave and test them all, and you could all come round and sample them! A bit of a fantasy, sure, but a person can dream. Prepared-ly.
I didn’t invent lemonade scones, and I don’t know who did, but it’s a fairly well-known recipe – the premise being that you mix a can of lemonade, a bottle of cream and a whole lot of self-raising flour and it magically turns into scones when you bake it. I had a wave of the brain one day that gingerbeer instead of lemonade might make for awesomely flavoured scones. I’m not trying to winkle out of making any original thoughts here, but this is one of the most fun things about cooking – taking an existing recipe, adapting and evolving it out of necessity – not having the right ingredients – or inspiration, and just seeing what happens.
My idea was more or less successful. Really delicious, light-textured, golden scones. But not exactly the ginger wonderland I predicted. Turns out that the gingerbeer became completely muffled by the blanket of flour and diluted by the cream. There was, if you concentrated and ate with your eyes shut, a fluttery subtext of flavour, but…yeah.
I liked them so much though, that I tried them again, with a different gingerbeer brand and a handful of chopped crystallised ginger. The latter of which you could definitely taste in the finished product. We loved both versions, so feel free to try them yourself:
Gingerbeer Scones

300mls cream (I use Zoorganic)
330ml can ginger beer
4 cups self raising flour; OR 4 cups flour plus 2 teaspoons cream of tartar and 1 tsp baking soda
Optional: a handful of chopped crystallised ginger, a handful of chopped dates

Set oven to 200 C. Mix all in a bowl together, as briefly as you can. Pays to sift the flour first. Turn out onto a baking paper-lined tray, pat gently into a rectangle. Using a knife, or better yet, a dough-cutter, slice into 12, keeping them very close together – helps them rise. Bake for about 25 minutes. Best served warm from the oven, but they keep surprisingly well.
So, the first time I made these I used Phoenix Organic Ginger Beer and added a handful of dates. For my second batch I was recommended Pam’s ginger beer by Plum Kitchen, so I asked Tim to get some on his way home from work. He txts to ask if I was sure, because apparently “Bundaberg = best-a-berg!” I replied something along the lines of “Pam’s = insur-pams-able!” but he came home with Bundaberg anyway, because there wasn’t any Pam’s at the supermarket.
It’s not really fair to compare the two batches since the second had actual ginger in it, so my hypothesis notes are as follows:
1) It doesn’t really matter what brand you use. From Budget all the way up to the most artisinal and elegantly-labelled product.
2) If you’re not going to add crystallised ginger, these will still be really nice, but you might as well just use lemonade.
3) I’d like to think that a mix of gingerbeer and crystallised ginger mutually benefit and augment each other’s flavours, rather than all the flavour coming from the crystallised ginger. Because then my initial idea would still be kind of right. Please humour me by agreeing?
4) On the other hand, that kind of coddling will get me nowhere in the cut-throat world of cookbook publishery! Humour me not!
Either way, these are a slightly more charismatic take on your regular scone. Something in the bubbles of the fizzy drink and the oleaginous properties of the cream bestows on the scones a charming lightness and softness of texture. I will make them again. Also, while typing right now, I had this idea that instead of lemonade, you could use a bottle of dry cider, add a pinch of mustard powder and some grated cheese, and how good would that be? A bit like a Welsh rarebit, but in scone form! On the other hand, maybe scones have been plain for centuries for a reason…
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Title via: Barbra Streisand, she of muscular voice and enormous back catalogue, singing I’m The Greatest Star, a song about self-belief if ever there was one, from the excellent musical Funny Girl.
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Music lately:

Gloryday from See What I Wanna See. Felt appropriate, given the rapture-baiting mood. Not to mention, Idina Menzel is always appropriate listening.

Never Can Say Goodbye, Gloria Gaynor. Isn’t this song just amazing?
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Next time: I went to the supermarket the other day and it was $6 for a block of butter! Is this real life? (translation: it’ll probably be dairy-free recipes for a while now.)