ba-na-na (nanana!)

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I just ate a giant dinner largely composed of…roast potatoes. I feel so sleepy as a result that I can’t even describe how sleepy I feel, only repeat ineffectually that I feel so sleepy. Apologies if the following bloggery isn’t all that flash.

As I write there’s only a handful of hours left till the All Whites will play Paraguay at the FIFA world cup, oh my. The game’s at 2am and I’m hoping those potatoes will let me get some decent sleep beforehand. There’s this swirling uprising of coverage in the media in New Zealand at the moment and I just hope that, in the likely situation of us losing, there’s no “Black Friday” type headlines tomorrow. Because seriously. Let’s keep sight of things. It’s exciting that we’re there at all, we managed to stop the reigning champions from winning, and we’ve never, ever got this far before in football. I don’t even really like sports AT ALL and this is really exciting.

Speaking of really exciting…cake!




My aunty Lynn gave me Alyson Gofton’s book Flavours as a birthday present a few years back. I’m not sure where I stand on Alyson Gofton but this book would swing anyone in her favour – it’s packed full of innovative but not terrifying recipes, most of which sound incredibly delicious and are a good call to action to rifle through your spice rack and get to grips with how a particular flavouring agent can perk up a meal. The last time I made this recipe for Palm Sugar and Lime Banana Loaf was in 2004 (specifically, for Mum’s high school reunion lunch, if I remember right…?) and I can’t understand why it has taken me so long to return to it, since it’s really, really good. If you think banana cakes are the most obvious thing in the history of obvious things that are cakes, well, think again.

You know how sometimes you make those “cleaning out the fridge” kind of dinners that can never really be replicated because they use up all the bits and half-eaten pieces sitting round on your shelves hoping to be asked to dance? This cake, strangely enough, ended up being a similar exercise. Browning, speckled bananas in the fruit bowl, palm sugar I overenthusiastically bought by the bucketload, that large boxful of limes.

Palm Sugar and Lime Banana Loaf

Bear in mind there is no harder substance on earth than palm sugar. I’m pretty sure palm sugar could penetrate diamonds. The only way I can deal with it is by using a serrated Victorinox knife and scraping/shaving away at it till it’s a pile of gritty golden rubble.

150g soft butter
1/2 cup crushed palm sugar (roughly one circular lump)
1/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 cup mashed, ripe banana
Grated rind of 2 limes
2 and 1/4 cups self-raising flour
2 tablespoons milk
2 tablespoons lime juice

Set oven to 180 C and line a loaf tin with baking paper. Beat together the butter and sugars till light and creamy, add the eggs and lime rind. Fold in the bananas, flour, and liquids. It will be a very stiff dough, almost scone-like. Turn it into the loaf tin, and bake for 45 mins to an hour. When cool, drizzle over an icing made from about 1 cup icing sugar and the juice of a lime or two.


Don’t be fooled by the nothing-muchness of the icing – it really pulls the loaf cake together, mobilising all the flavours with its sticky tanginess. This is a moist, dense and easily sliced loaf, and while the palm sugar doesn’t exactly get all up in your face, its delicate fudge-like flavour along with the added lime make this a gently out of the ordinary delicious thing to bake. I photographed it this morning before work (grabbing one of the ‘artistic’ slices for a sneaky breakfast treat) and when I got home there was only a slender-ish chunk of loaf left sheepishly on the bench, as if it was trying to look bigger than it really was. I took it as a compliment.

Incidentally, it’s kind of fun reading over Flavours which is only all of seven years old, and seeing hints that basil pesto can be bought at the supermarket and avocado oil now being “available in two scented varieties.” Hee. How far we’ve come…well as far as pesto is concerned, anyway.

I guess I find out next week some time how the whole CLEO/Wonder Women thing went down. Voting closes tomorrow, Friday 25 June (which is, I guess, Thursday 24 June for all you international readers above the equator). I sort of feel like I’ve wrung dry everything I can from this, but if by chance you haven’t voted for me yet and would like to, firstly read why here and then email cleo@acpmagazines.co.nz with WONDER WOMEN in the subject line and “Voting for blogger: Laura Vincent” in the body of the email. Whatever happens, a mega-enormous thank you to everyone that did vote for me – and you can most definitely call on me to vote for you for anything in return.

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Title via: Look, it’s a skit/interlude from M.I.A’s mad awesome album Arular, and I’m really usually not into skits clogging things up but this is so weirdly catchy that I’ll find “ba…na…naaaa” popping into my head when I least expect it.
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Music lately:

Karen Elson’s The Ghost Who Walks, from the album of the same name. I love this album! It seems to hark back vaguely to ‘another time’ and is rich and full of melodies and warm, pretty Gillian Welch-ish harmonies. (Mum and Dad – I bet you’d love this one.) How lucky is Karen Elson – incredibly beautiful, married to Jack White, and luckiest of all, she can sing.

Big Boi’s new single Shutterbug, I just can’t get enough of it right now. It’s silkier than a silkworm, and the melody behind it reminds me of Grandmaster Flash’s The Message, but in a good way. I’ve always enjoyed Outkast’s take on hip hop and it’s cool that they’re just as capable of working as separate entities as they are together. This song is a diamond, and the man knows how to use the line “cut a rug” properly.

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Next time: By the time “next time” shuffles along, we’ll know what the outcome of the All Whites’ game was, we’ll probably know whether or not I caused my own out-of-nowhere result with the Cleo/Palmolive Wonder Women thing, and…I will have a giant pavlova to share with you (well, words about a giant pavlova, but these words will allow you to make one for yourself and then share it with absolutely no-one at all, if you like).

under the leaves of that old lime tree

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Achtung: I’m STILL hyping myself up about being nominated for CLEO magazine/Palmolive Wonder Woman (Read more about it here.) There’s still time to help out – just email cleo@acpmagazines.co.nz with WONDER WOMAN in the subject line and “voting for Blogger: Laura Vincent” in the body of the email. (FYI – you can only vote once) I should change my name to humbleandfrozen because of how nice so many people have been about this – whether or not I get anywhere, it has still been a fun wave to flutterboard on.



As I mentioned last time, Mum sent me a large box of gorgeously green limes. I hadn’t really done much more than sniff them luxuriantly, and throw a glossy wedge into the occasional glass of vodka and soda water. Until tonight, when I made this incredibly fantastic dressing from Nigella Lawson’s Forever Summer.


This recipe harnesses the power of one. whole. lime.

Lime Dressing


1 bunch (approx 125g) fresh coriander, or mint, or a mixture of the two
1 clove garlic, peeled
1-2 tablespoons fish sauce (you could make this vegan by using soy sauce)
1/2 a teaspoon sugar
1 green chilli, deseeded (optional)
1 lime
6 tablespoons rice bran oil

Cut the top nubby end off the lime, sit the now-flat end on a chopping board, and carefully slice off all the skin and pith. Cut off the other end, halve the now-peeled lime and flick out any seeds with a knife. Mine luckily didn’t seem to have any seeds. Throw the lime, and any juice that has collected, into a food processor with everything else except the oil. Blitz to a paste, pouring in the oil as you go. By the way, I only used half the oil because even for me that felt like a lot, but then if you were serving more people, you might want to keep the original quantities or even boost them, along with the rest of the ingredients.


This dressing is just perfect – sharp and full of lime, fragrant with coriander, deliciously salty, but not in the slightest bit oily. I could have drunk the stuff. Once I finished dinner, I not only licked the plate, I also ran a spatula around the inside of the food processor and licked that, and then finally – I’m sorry – ran my finger along the processor blade, picking up the excess dressing clinging to its slicey edges, and licked that too.

In Forever Summer, Nigella pairs this dressing in a salad draped with fried squid rings, and lovely as that sounds I didn’t have any of the ingredients. I took the liberty of pouring the dressing over a pile of flat rice noodles, carrot slices and soybeans, with a final sprinkle of black sesame seeds (Handy tip: don’t go pouring them over someone else’s plate while saying “Look! Ants!”) It might not sound like much of a dinner, to the point of barely even existing (when carrot slices are part of the main thrust of your meal it’s probably time to do some more groceries) but think again. The dressing soaked into the soft, silky noodles. The buttery, nutty soybeans contrasted marvelously with the sharp lime in the dressing. The sesame seeds provided a little crunch. The carrots…well, they were there too. But altogether it was damn special stuff. By the way, I recommend Forever Summer hard – it’s full of some of Nigella’s most inventive-yet-classic, beautiful food, and an amazing and inspiring ice cream chapter.

I had a couple of days off in lieu which was pretty amazingly blissful – not having an alarm clock in the morning was a nice feeling. All the good sleeping patterns were undone on Tuesday night however as we stayed up to watch the All Whites’ first game at the FIFA World Cup against Slovakia in South Africa, beginning 11:30pm our time. As if we were ever going to miss it – it was a thrillifying match, with Winston Reid’s equalising goal in the 93rd minute causing a complete rush of intense happiness to all of us watching. To be beaten at the World Cup is no disgrace, considering the eye-watering level of talent present, and considering New Zealand hasn’t been there in 28 years. But to draw against a team that’s miles ahead of us in the table – that was special. While what I know about sports could fit on one side of a black sesame seed, I can’t wait to see our next match against Italy – they’re one of the best teams in the world, so to simply prevent them scoring, or lose by a small margin is still some kind of victory. Although we might win…that’s what’s exciting about it, that we just could win a game. Pity the official All Whites scarves aren’t longer though – not very practical in windy Wellington to have something that doesn’t wind round the neck several times.
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Title via: Bright Eyes’ Lime Tree from his 2007 album Cassadaga. There’s only so many winsome male singer-songwriters I really ever need to listen to, but ol’ Bright Eyes makes the cut easily with his earnest, swoonsome songs. There’s something about the music behind this track that makes it sound like it could run over the opening credits of some 1930s film involving wide American plains and several scenes in a charming general store, which is more than enough reason to love it in my opinion.
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Music lately:

XXXO, MIA’s new single. I’ve long been a fan of MIA and new music from her is always greeted eagerly. It amuses me to read pearl-clutching comments on youtube (not that reading youtube comments is ever a good use of time) about how “mainstream” this sounds. I personally thought this song couldn’t be any less mainstream if it tried, but whatever. It always amazes me how MIA manages to be more or less what you’d call pop, but also a million miles removed from everyone else out there doing it. The chorus reminds me of all the best bits of those Real McCoy songs I used to adore. Can’t wait till she drops the album.

Connection by Elastica, from their self-titled album. I love gurgly opening riff and wish I could deliver anything as breezily as Justine Frischmann sings those lyrics.

Raul Esparza’s knee-wobblingly good cover of The Man That Got Away. Every particle of that man is filled with vocal talent. He needs a solo album, and fast!
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Next time: Well, I still have this box filled with limes…don’t think I’m done just yet.

big cheese, make me

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I’m still pretty excited/jittery about being nominated for CLEO magazine/Palmolive Wonder Woman (excited/jittery for reasons outlined here.) If you’d like to help out someone who’s not likely to win but wants to win heaps, kindly email cleo@acpmagazines.co.nz with WONDER WOMAN in the subject line and “voting for Blogger: Laura Vincent (hungryandfrozen.blogspot.com)” in the body of the email. If you want. I’ve been pretty humbled by all the niceness that has poured forth from people already, considering there’s no real benefit to anyone but myself (and Tim, for what it’s worth) if I get anywhere in this. Much love and appreciation to everyone that has voted for me.

FYI, I’m watching the Tony Awards while I’m typing this. CBS isn’t streaming outside of the USA so I’ve got this pixelated postage-stamp sized square of live feed that I found with some judicious searching through Twitter. In 2010, that just feels wrong. Live streams should be for everyone! Nevertheless it’s still very exciting. If things get a little bit “Cream the butter and sugar till fluffy ANGELALANSBURYILOVEYOU and then add the eggs ITHINKISAWIDINAMENZEL one by one” well, you’ve been warned. That said, Broadway and food blogging already co-exist most harmoniously here, so with any luck you probably won’t even notice.
So, I found this recipe for homemade ricotta cheese. It’s eyebrow-raisingly simple and after making it once you’ll be so enthralled with the deliciousness of the results, that you may consider throwing in the job to become svengali of your own small-time cheese conglomerate.
Homemade Ricotta Cheese

With thanks to Bell’Alimento for the recipe.

2 litres (8 cups) blue-top/whole milk (I used organic milk even, yusss)
250 mls cream (it comes in 300 ml bottles here, so I just threw the lot in)
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon or lime juice.

Get a colander and line it with muslin, cheesecloth or plain cotton (I went out and bought a big, undyed cotton serviette) OR, if you have it, a big coffee filter. Sit the colander over a large deep bowl and set aside.

Pour the milk, cream and salt into a big stockpot (seriously, use a big pot – it rises up a bit) and bring to the boil, stirring all the time. When it’s at a good solid boil – don’t be afraid to just let it bubble away, I know it looks freaky! – add the lemon or lime juice. Reduce the heat, and continue to stir while the mixture separates into curds and liquid. I continued stirring over a low heat for about a minute after adding the juice.

Carefully, carefully (with a buddy if you’re clumsy like me) pour the whole contents of the pan into the cloth-lined colander. The liquid will flow through to the bowl underneath, leaving soft, white ricotta cheese in the colander. Allow this to drain for at least an hour then transfer to the refrigerator. As soon as it’s properly cold, you can start eating it.

You should end up with about 500g of pure, fresh ricotta cheese. And how! It emerges from its cloth wrapping like a surmountable mountain of dairy joy, the only incline I’d be inclined to climb (long story short: I had a school camp once where we had to hike, and plough through plantations of cutty grass and so on – never again! Cheese mountains only for me from now on thanks.) It’s tender, incredibly creamy but with a lemony lightness that makes you want to just eat it by the fistful.
While I have a lot of time for cheese, we never really eat all that much of it, because it’s so expensive. Which is understandable – companies need to make money, and small, artisinal, niche products use a lot of dollars. You should totally support the companies who make the food you love, but now and then it’s superfun to support yourself and get a giant pile of beautiful cheese for about $5. It’s at its best eaten within around 48 hours but that’s probably the one kind of pressure-filled environment I could thrive in.
A goodly wedge of the cheese went into these gorgeous Ricotta and Polenta Hotcakes from Cuisine magazine. The recipe is can be found here (I didn’t make the syrup, by the way) They’re straightforward enough to make but still a bit of effort – if you’re looking for something more storecupboardy, that you can throw in a blender and make with your eyes closed then try Nigella’s recipe instead. They were a completely delicious start to the day – the toothsome grit of the cornmeal with the warm chunks of ricotta bound in a soft, crisp pancake spiced with cinnamon and orange.
So, the Tony Awards. Watching them via some non-authorised stream is frustrating, CBS, but it still feels exciting to be watching it at the same time as everyone else. In 12-second increments.
You don’t freeze up and start loading when Idina Menzel’s on. Learn from this.
I’m really not much of a Tony commentator because I’ve never been to New York to see any of these musicals or plays, and generally the only coverage I get is whatever goes on Youtube. I enjoyed Sean Hayes (star of Promises, Promises on Broadway with Kristin Chenoweth, or you may know him as Will & Grace’s Jack) as host, and there were some wonderful moments of theatre, but it does feel this year that they’re being really heavy-handed with the Hollywood celebrity presence (and the fact that Glee’s Matthew Morrison and Lea Michele were performing – they were on Broadway first, you know!) but what ya gonna do – they’re bankable.
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Title via: Nirvana’s Big Cheese from 1989’s Bleach. I just plain love Nirvana, and this is an excellent yet relatively underexposed example of their sinister sound.
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Music lately:
Lunatic Fringe by Auckland’s Drab Doo-Riffs. We caught them headlining at Mighty Mighty the other morning (ie, their set started around 1am) and they were a ton of fun. It’s a scrappy mix of surf, punk, rock, probably some other stuff, and as I’m a sucker for surf-rock drums they suit me just fine. The two frontpeople Karl Stevens and Caiomhe Macfehin kept things moving at a cracking pace, and were both incredibly entertaining to watch. I’m sure they’ll continue to do well, a) because girls can dance to it in that hunched-shoulder, foot-stampy way (hey, I was doing it too) b) their live sets are many and excellent and c) it’s such good-time music.
Sherie Rene Scott’s beautiful interpretation of Ricky Lee Jones’ Rainbow Sleeves from her semi-autobiographical musical Everyday Rapture. I’ve never even seen Sherie Rene Scott live so what do I know but I was a bit sad to see she didn’t win the Tony (Catherine Zeta Jones did, FYI…)
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Next time: Mum sent me a giant parcel of giant, fragrant green limes which is very exciting as limes tend to also be really expensive. I was going to say that unlike ricotta cheese, there’s no way of making your own limes, but then I remembered you can, you know, plant a lime tree. Sometimes I worry myself. Anyway, I’m looking forward to sussing out lots of recipes.

i want the one i can’t have

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Today after a three and a half hour meeting I was reading through CLEO magazine and found the list of CLEO/Palmolive Nutra Fruit Wonder Woman nominees. OooOOOooo, I thought, I wonder if there’s any cool new bloggers to discover in the blogger category. Then I saw my own name listed. What! I’m a woman who is potentially wonder-ous! I made my manager read it to me to make sure I hadn’t just imagined the whole thing.
Okay, I’m not quite sure what being a Wonder Woman means, but the winner gets $5000.
Let’s be cold: There are some seriously brilliant and famous women nominated for this, people out there doing really cool, creative things. Within the blog category alone there are some high-profile sites that I, a more-or-less unknown and I’m pretty sure the only food blogger, am up against. Spose the fact that I think my blog is basically the awesomest blog in the whole of New Zealand doesn’t count for much against established networks and fanbases.
Every time I stop to tell myself this isn’t a big deal and it’s fun just to see my name there and I don’t even really know what it all means anyway, the glint of the money gets into my peripheral vision and I start to get all hopeful and hyped up and imagine the wonderful things I could do with that money. The harder I daydream the more I want that $5000 and the more I tell myself I’m pretty stupid when there are all these other high profile people in the running. I’m teetering wildly between “what is this anyway?” and “I WANT THIS!” Look at what money makes us do – maybe you shouldn’t vote for me after all?
For what it’s worth, if I did find myself $5000 richer, here’s the two things I would do:
1) Throw a big dinner party and cook for all my friends – maybe make a vat of pasta and an equally giant pan of rich, slow-simmered homemade tomato sauce and let everyone help themselves, with a huge bowl chocolate mousse for pudding (and maybe some partying in there, I don’t know, homemade chocolate mousse is pretty exciting to me).
2) Travel somewhere with Tim. Tim and I met overseas in 2005. When we moved in together once back in New Zealand in 2006 and started university, it was pretty well settled in our minds that as soon as our graduation-hats were thrown in the air we’d be boarding a plane to travel again. Since that confident decision we have travelled…literally nowhere…which is not so much a bad thing as realistic, but all the same 2005 feels impossibly far away, and sometimes it seems like I spend far too much time observing Broadway shows open and close and change casts from afar. We could go to Poland – I loved it so much during my brief time there – go back to London, visit people from the performing arts school we worked at, go to New York to see a Broadway show, see what the Baby Sitter’s Club were on about in Super Special #6 New York, New York, maybe (while I’m being indulgent), Idina Menzel will have some kind of live gig happening and I could finally, finally see her in person. I could buy a pet capybara! A bouncy castle! The capybara could live in the bouncy castle on our roof! (Err, $5000 would stretch as far as all that?)
With your help, this could be what my roof looks like!
I guess this blog post has demonstrated that maybe I’m not quite Wonder Woman material, I mean look how out-of-hand I get when just presented with the opportunity to simply daydream about getting $5000.
If after all that voting for me is something you want to do, then please email cleo@acpmagazines.co.nz with WONDER WOMEN in the subject line, and “Voting for Blogger: Laura Vincent – hungryandfrozen.blogspot.com” plus your name and contact details in the body of the email. I feel a bit funny asking, but not so funny that I won’t ask, you know? Gigantic thanks to anyone who does vote!
Title via: The Smiths, keeping me honest (although I did consider quoting “god I hope I get it” from A Chorus Line, there’s no real way to do this without the wanty-want-want selfish overtones is there?)

we sell our souls for bread

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Nothing like a persistently rainy long weekend to really push me back into the grippy arms of the kitchen. I seriously love making bread, but haven’t had a chance in ages so tip of the hat to the Queen for her birthday creating a Monday off this week. If New Zealand ever becomes a republic there’d better be some particularly concrete replacements for any long weekend we’d lose as a result. With extra time on my hands I’ve been making all kinds of things including this Nigella Lawson bread recipe from her flawless book of baking, How To Be A Domestic Goddess.

I was able to use these beautiful walnuts that Mum posted down to me from a family friend’s tree. They’re easy enough to get into, just a light tap from a hammer on the shell and a bit of digging quickly produces a pile of bamboo coloured, wrinkled heart shapes. They were soft and fragrant and tasted amazing – none of that tooth-coating bitterness that you sometimes get with those from a packet which have been sitting round too long.

This bread is fiddly-ish but no real mission to make. I didn’t have any of the wholemeal bread flour that Nigella specified but I did have plenty of half-empty packets of dusty offerings from the health food shop down the road (I don’t know, they’re just so compulsively purchasable) so if you’re in the same boat just do what I did and use 550g white bread flour and make up the rest of the weight with bran, rolled oats, that sort of thing. If you don’t have real maple syrup, use honey or golden syrup instead.


Maple Walnut Bread

Adapted from Maple-Pecan Bread in Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess (ie you can use pecans if you have them)
  • 500g wholemeal bread flour
  • 150g white bread flour
  • 1 sachet instant dry yeast
  • 300-400mls warm water
  • 4 tablespoons maple syrup
  • 50-100g walnuts
  • Walnut oil (if you have it, otherwise use plain eg rice bran)
Mix the flours and yeast together in a large bowl. Pour in the water and syrup and mix to make a sticky dough. Knead for a couple of minutes, then let it sit for 20 minutes. Knead again, sprinkling over the walnuts as you go. It will take a little while to incorporate them, simply because this type of dough is a little tougher than usual. Keep pushing and kneading until the walnuts are more or less dispersed throughout the dough and until it forms a smooth, elastic ball. Pour over a good tablespoon of walnut or other oil, and turn so all surfaces are covered. Cover in clingfilm, and leave for a couple of hours to rise.

At this stage, punch it down to deflate it, then knead it into a loaf shape. Cover with a teatowel and leave it for half an hour, meanwhile setting the oven to 220 C. Bake for 1/4 of an hour before turning down the temperature to 180C and baking for a further 20 or so minutes, covering with a sheet of tinfoil if it starts to get too brown.


The maple syrup isn’t aggressively present in the finished, baked bread, but gives a subtle, layered fragrance and sweet, chewy crust which goes brilliantly with the deliciously toasted walnuts. Last night for dinner, inspired by a Ray McVinnie Quick Smart column in one of my Cuisine magazines, I cooked chunks of butternut pumpkin in boiling water till soft, drained and mashed them with coriander and cumin seeds, fried squares of diced streaky bacon and wafers of haloumi till sizzling, and served all that on top of slices of the freshly baked bread. The sweetness of the pumpkin was echoed in the sweetness of the bread, incredibly good with the contrastingly salty bacon and cheese. Unfortunately that’s the last of the cut-price haloumi I got from The Food Show so it’s unlikely I’ll be able to recreate such a smashing dinner for a while. If however you yourself are in the regular-haloumi-buying demographic then by all means try it.

Other things that happened this mighty fine long weekend include forsaking a long-time-coming sleepin to stagger to the pub to watch the All Whites’ friendly pre-FIFA World Cup game against Slovenia on Saturday morning. Unfortunately we lost, but full marks to Slovenia considering their population is only 2.2 million or so. The upshot of it was that we had a great excuse to go to Customs and order great quantities of beautiful, beautiful filter coffee served by the lovely people there. We don’t get to go very often but they even recognised that Tim had got his hair cut. As well as making me want to cook things, the rain also meant we had a fine excuse to watch The IT Crowd last night. Britain seems to positively fling out these small, side-poppingly funny yet under-the-radar comedies, and while I’d known about The IT Crowd for a while I’ve never pinned it down for a good watch. I really enjoyed Richard Ayoade’s work withThe Mighty Boosh so it’s nice to see him in a leading role in this. Find it if you can – we finished the lot in very quick succession.

Speaking of coffee, and in exciting news for future employers, Tim has left Starbucks after three years. No hard feelings towards the green siren – it helped pay our rent through university and is highly educative coffee-wise. If anyone out there requires a ridiculously great guy with an Honours degree in media studies to do cool stuff like using skills learned in both university and life, then truly look no further than the now-available Tim. You think I deal recommendations lightly? Think again.
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Title via: Electric Blues from the Broadway musical Hair. My preoccupation with its amazing score rides again. This song is so exciting and dynamic, and I presume they use the word ‘bread’ to mean ‘money’ in this context, but then…maybe they’d tried this recipe too. And while lyrics like “we’re all encased in sonic armour, belting out through chrome grenades” make me smile, the next stanza’s “they chain ya and they brainwash ya, when you least expect it, they feed ya mass media” could definitely find relevance at any stage.
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Music lately:
Beth, by localers Voom from their debut album Now I Am Me. I first heard this song years ago on Channel Z and while I can’t say I cried or anything, I certainly felt that good, self-indulgent kind of desolation that you get from wallowing in excellent sad music about situations that you’re not sure if you can relate to but you allow them to reflect whatever it is you’re feeling anyway. Some bright spark put the video onto Youtube so I can now enjoy and wallow all over again as and when necessary.
Janelle Monae’s Tightrope from The Archandroid. There’s already so much being said about her on – dun dun – the internet, but at face value it’s a stonkeringly good tune.
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Next time: Maybe even more exciting than baking bread and watching DVDs on a Friday night, I made my own ricotta cheese yesterday! The recipe is so easy I could almost put it right here as an afterthought. But no. You’ll have to wait for next time, well either that or call my bluff and google “homemade ricotta” and render me completely unnecessary.

looking through a glass onion

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It is so, so freezing in Wellington lately, that straight-through-your-clothes harsh chill which makes getting out of bed in the morning that much more aggrieving. I was in Christchurch and Dunedin over the weekend for work which was also an intensely cold experience, not to mention pretty exhausting (can’t say I’ve been sleeping well recently, and sitting in clenched frustration for an hour and a half on a plastic chair in the Dunedin airport where there is nothing to do while waiting for your flight, followed by a further hour and a half’s wait at the Christchurch airport will take it out of you. This is New Zealand, not the mighty plains of Canada, I don’t see why we need flights with stop-overs.) Hence why it has been a while since I’ve blogged.

There’s not much I love doing more in winter than sitting by a roaring heater with a pile of my cookbooks, going through and imagining what shenanigans I could get up to. Cooking in winter is fun – all those long-simmered warming dishes that make the house smell amazing and warm you as you stand over them – unlike the summer heat when all you really want to do for dinner is sit quietly inside the freezer and lick its icy walls. One book that I had a flick through recently was the Supercooks Supersavers Cookbook, which I picked up at the local opshop back home for about a dollar a few years back. I love its season-based chapters, its 1980 style, and its seriously enthusiastic title.
I found this awesome sounding recipe for Onions Smothered with Walnuts. It’s basically onions roasted in a sticky, spicy sauce, and though they’re more “vaguely scattered” than “smothered” with the walnuts it’s a gorgeous combination of flavours.
Onions Smothered with Walnuts
From the Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook

450g small pickling (pearl) onions, peeled (I didn’t have any, so just used whole onions, quartered)
75g walnuts, chopped
25g melted butter
2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon chilli sauce
1/2 cup stock or water
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper to taste

Heat oven to 170 C. In a bowl, mix everything together and pour into an oven-proof dish. Cover with tinfoil, and bake for around an hour, stirring once or twice. *Use olive oil and balsamic vinegar instead of the butter and worcestershire sauce to easily make this vegan. Yay!
It’s so good that I actually made it two nights in a row. In a weird twist of events, the first night I made it in a silicon dish and the second night I made it in a metal dish, and the second night the onions and sauce turned all black. Made me a little nervous, but not so nervous that I didn’t carry on eating the lot. This recipe has a lot going for it – it has punchy, warm flavours, it’s very cheap to make, it’s versatile, and it just cooks away by itself, not really requiring any attention. The honey, chilli and cinnamon are a brilliant combination and it’s perfect over pasta, which is how I had it, but would also work on couscous, mashed potatoes, rice, or stirred into a stew or roasted vegetables. Thanks, Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook!
As I said, I’m pretty weary from the weekend, I haven’t been sleeping so well and on top of that I actually wasn’t feeling that great over the weekend. There were some diverting moments – seeing Graeme Downes of The Verlaines, The Dead C’s Bruce Russell and Flying Nun’s Roger Shepherd weighing in on a discussion panel about NZ Music, subsequently sitting behind the Verlaines on the flight to Dunedin, meeting with former flatmate Emma for a jolly catch-up, having an enthusiastic person “help” me by picking up my phone that I’d put on the ground right by my feet so I could take down a poster at an event, only to watch them accidentally drop it down three flights of stairs…
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Title via: The Beatles’ Glass Onion from The White Album. One of their more intriguing contributions…
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Music lately:
A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow, sung by Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, from the film A Mighty Wind. This is absolutely my favourite film, and having it on my iPod made the four plane trips over the weekend much more bearable. This song is gorgeous even though it’s sending up the folk music genre, and Catherine O’Hara is just…perfect. Makes me want to learn the autoharp. Sincerely.
Bloodbuzz Ohio from The National’s new album High Violet. The album itself didn’t set me on fire but this song is a stunner and really showcases everything that’s good about The National. And you can check out a lengthier review I did of High Violet here at The Corner if you like.

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Next time: I’ll hopefully be a touch more awake. It’s Queen’s Birthday weekend in a day or two, nothing like a Monday off to make you feel unbendingly fond of the monarchy. I found this really cool recipe for pumpkin bread that I’m keen to try, I also am thinking of getting the crock pot out from its hiding place, it’s now definitely cold enough out there…

now let me welcome everybody to the wild wild west

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So, the novelty of a Monday at home is less novelty-ish when I’m coughing like a beast. Typing is a nice distraction from my chapped throat, but I’d sooner just get better. I’ve been downing tea made from lemon and ginger slices, crunching on vitamin C and echinacea, and sippin’ on gees linctus and juice. I’d had plenty of gees linctus when I was younger, but it turns out these days you have to state your intentions and hand over photo ID to get it, and it no longer comes in a pretty flask with a fancy label, but instead a tiny prescription bottle with one of those child-proof lids that are really difficult to remove.

I also have a whole mess of lozenges which are pretty good for noise control when I start coughing heaps. They were definitely useful at Tim’s graduation on Thursday. There were about forty thousand people (well, it felt like at least that many) getting graduated that night and I’m pretty sure not one of them wanted some lady spluttering during their moment of glory. In case you’re wondering, Tim was graduating with Honours in Media Studies which makes him super-qualified to do all sort of interesting things that no-one out there seems to need people to do right now, but fingers crossed that market opens up soon…Either way I’m pretty proud.
Tim’s family came down to be there for the graduation as well and his mum gifted us some bananas. There’s nothing I like more than a little unpremeditated push towards baking. Muffins felt a too obvious, but I couldn’t be bothered with anything too high-concept either. What a quandary. Then I remembered this eye-catchingly named recipe that I found while hopping from blog to blog like a frog on a lily-pad. It’s called Ponderosa Cake. According to the friendly person whose blog I found it on, the cake is named after some regional pine trees. Secretly I hope it was so named because someone wanted to immortalise their passion for Bonanza in baked form.
Ponderosa Cake
Recipe inspired by a recipe found on Chocolate & Chakra. I say inspired because I completely mucked things up as I went along – didn’t have enough butter, added 2 eggs by mistake instead of one, forgot the yoghurt till it was about to go in the oven – so the end result was almost a completely different cake…
100g soft butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
2-3 large, ripe bananas, mashed
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon each of baking powder and baking soda
1/2 cup plain yoghurt or sour cream

125g good chocolate, chopped roughly
1 -2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 cup brown sugar
Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and line a square or rectangular cake tin with baking paper. Cream the butter and sugar together till fluffy, then beat in the eggs. Add the bananas, then fold in the flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Finally mix in the yoghurt, plus half the chopped chocolate and cinnamon. Spread it into the cake tin, then sprinkle over the rest of the chocolate and cinnamon, plus the brown sugar. Bake for 25-30 minutes.
I’d rather have a thousand coughs than a blocked nose and lose my sense of taste, because Ponderosa Cake is incredibly good. It’s very light and tender and keeps well. The blast of heat in the oven caramelises the spiced, sugary chocolate topping slightly, providing depth of flavour and a pleasing gritty crunch to the moist, banana-y base. Happily, it used some of the treats I picked up at the recent food show – like The Collective yoghurt and Whittakers chocolate. Despite the fact that I somehow managed to get things wrong every step of the way, this is really a very straightforward cake. It’s ideal for those times where you want something a little out of the ordinary but not so far out of the ordinary that you’re up at 6am measuring the temperature and viscosity of sugar syrups.
I’m not sure if Hoss and Little Joe ever bonded over banana cake, but it’s a nice thought, right? I understand when my mum and her brothers and sisters were growing up, Bonanza was appointment viewing on TV… You know you want to hear that theme song again!
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Title via: 2Pac featuring Dr Dre, California Love. I know, it’s one state over from the Ponderosa. There couldn’t be a more obvious song that springs to mind for the sadly late Tupac Shakur, but no matter how often it’s thrashed it’s still a goodie, and one of those songs I knew all the words to (except for an embarrassingly long time I thought it was “city of corn chips” instead of “Compton”, what can I say, there was no Google back then.)
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Music lately:

The Music and the Mirror from A Chorus Line. This song is actually mostly dancing but the singing that’s there is so gorgeous – the line “I’ll do you proud” slays me a bit. It’s a song about a woman who needs a job, so she’s auditioning for the chorus even though she is good enough to be a star. Well, it seems a bit more dramatic when set to music anyway, and the original Donna McKechnie is pretty incomparable but there’s plenty of fun to be found on youtube of that amazing dance in the red skirt. If you’ve only seen the film version of A Chorus Line, they cut this song – criminal!
The Ali and Toumani album, a recently-released collaboration between the late Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate. It’s…an absolute beauty.
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Next time: well, hopefully I my immune system and I become friends again. I’m down in Christchurch on Friday for Chartfest then Dunedin on Saturday for Smokefreerockquest so I can’t afford to be this germtastic.

there’s no business like show business

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The time has come once more for me to assume the authority (authority that I don’t really have, hence “assume” instead of, say, “gather”) of writing up the Wellington Food Show. You know how some people really get into things like the Superbowl? The Food Show is my Superbowl. And it comes but once a year. Between working full time and growing older the year sweeps by alarmingly quick, the upshot of which is that this year the Food Show approached a lot sooner than I thought it would.
The following is a selection of the foodstuffs we sampled on Sunday. (And the drinkstuffs. At one point I remember telling Tim “I like margaritas. They help me make decisions.”) There are some points you should bear in mind as you scroll purposefully through them.
1) I’m mad useless at composition on the fly. Sorry, companies (and readers).
2) While I only talk about the good stuff, it’s not the definitive list. There were 185 stands, so out of practicality not all of them will be mentioned below.
3) I may or may not be half asleep while I’m writing this. Apologies for any inaccuracies or metaphors that go nowhere.
Firstly a massive “cheers” to The Wright Sprouts who actually sent me a pass to the show, which was both unexpected and very cool. It is entirely without agenda that I reiterate my genuine love for The Wright Sprouts’ products (their sproutput, if you, um, will). A wide range of nutty, crunchy, juicy organic sprouts that you can easily polish off by the handful straight from the bag or use in actual recipes. I know sprouts don’t necessarily spring to mind when you contemplate awesomely delicious food, but friend, let them spring.

The Wright Sprouts
Contact: (the lovely) katrina@wrightsprouts.co.nz

One of the hugely exciting highlights of the day was seeing Ray McVinnie’s cooking demonstration. He’s become a lot more well-known lately as a judge on NZ Masterchef but I was there in the front row simply as a long-time fan of his writing for Cuisine magazine. His Quick Smart column has always been a favourite of mine and it was nice to see he’s every bit as excellent in person as he is in paragraph form.

Total rockstar. Seriously. He made these two stunningly excellent sounding dishes, one a chicken dish sweetened and soured with damson jam, red wine and moscatel vinegar, and the other a chorizo and prawn dish. He was engaging, thorough, sensible of advice and humorous of anecdote. He even quoted Nigella Lawson. I know. He even kind of gestured at Tim and I at one point and asked if we could smell cinnamon, I seriously couldn’t but nodded eagerly all the same, not one to let the truth stand in the way of a good story.
To the food!
Freedom Farms
Harmony
Sunset Free Range

We were so happy to see the SPCA stand back once more to raise awareness of the importance of free range eggs and meat with their mighty omelets. I made the decision a while back to only purchase free range eggs and meat, for all those obvious reasons (like feminism – gotta look out for our feathered sisters and their wellbeing) and the deliciousness of the bacon and omelets we tried at this stand only further backed up my happiness in this decision. I realise it would be even more humane and actually just much better to just not eat eggs or meat at all but…not yet. Just love them too much really, and I’m happy to support people striving to get me those eggs and that meat in the best way possible.
Contact: gregor@freedomfarms.co.nz
Contact: orders@harmony.co.nz
anita@sunsetfreerange.co.nz
Essential Cuisine

There ain’t nothing wrong with a little getting someone else to make your stock. Essential Cuisine has the goods, light years away from the murky, salty, 2-minute noodle sachet type stuff donning a mask and calling itself stock these days. They make mighty fine pesto too and all their products come in these alluringly prod-able, jewel-coloured pouches.
St Andrews Limes


These guys have been around for a year or two now, so it was more of a perfunctory visit to their stand that I made. However I shouldn’t have been so presumptuous as their “Just a Dressing” – the stuff in the ramekin on the right – was so deliciously mustardy and sharp that I wanted to devise an elaborate plan to distract the people in charge of the stall so I could quickly swipe the bottle and drink the lot.
Contact: limes@limes.co.nz
Lisa’s

Lisa’s is another company that has been around for a while, but still shaking up the hummus scene with her ridiculously delicious new range. The above was roast kumara and chickpea hummus topped with glossy pumpkin seeds. It was lusciously silky and nutty, an amazingly good combination. We spent some serious quality time with it.
Contact: info@lhf.net
The Collective Dairy

I LOVE this yoghurt.

What to say. It was wonderful stuff – cold, thick, creamy and swirled with fruit. Their halloumi was so delicious – salty, squeaky, soft but solid. Actually that makes it sound kind of awful, but trust me it was genuinely heavenly. Top ranking stuff all round.
twitter.com/collectivedairy
Contact: ilya@epicdairy.com

Sweet Smart

These guys did sugar-free sour cola bottles that tasted real. Well, as real as actual sour cola bottles could get. They have an awesomely comprehensive range of sugar-free products online and were really friendly. Considering it was day three of the Food Show and all.
Contact: erika@sweetsmart.co.nz
Lindt Chocolate

One of their reps was strangely cold-mannered, they didn’t seem to have any business cards to hand and there’s not even an NZ website to speak of. From this cavalierness I would assume Lindt clearly don’t need me to promote them on my blog. Still, I kind of liked this picture. And their chocolate is just so knee-bucklingy delicious, particularly those legendary Lindor balls which are solid on the outside and meltingly truffly on the inside. It sells itself. You can find it in most supermarkets. I ended up buying a bar of 85% dark chocolate which I look forward to eating eventually – I’ve never had chocolate quite that dark before, maybe if it gets any darker it just turns into a charcoal briquette.
Loaf Handcrafted Breads
One of the perils of going to the Food Show on the last day is that some people might run out of food. Like these jammy dodgers from Loaf, whose shelves were nude but for what you see in the photo above when we got there first thing in the morning. While I love to make my own ginger slice, their take on it was pretty darn exquisite – soft, fudgey, and dark with gingery heat. Between the quality of their product and the disarming friendliness of the guys at the stand I’m not surprised at all that they were completely fleeced and ready to go home after our first lap of the stadium.
Contact: daniel@loaf.co.nz
Orcona Chillis’n’Pepper

Just the perfect thing to awaken the tastebuds mid-afternoon. Orcona has a fabulous range of chillis and chilli-related products. We were particularly taken with their harissa and their chilli feijoa relish – strangely sweet and hot at the same time and very moreish. I haven’t got tastebuds that can really stand up to the bullying heat of chillis but if yours can then look these guys up for sure.
Orcona Chillis’n’Peppers
Contact: orcona@xtra.co.nz

Moana Park of Hawkes Bay

This was the wine used in the aforementioned Ray McVinnie cooking demonstration and I felt obliged to show them how their advertising dollars had paid off handsomely in brand recognition. While I drink wine here and there I can’t say I know an awful lot about it in the technical sense, apart from what you pick up from listening to other people and reading and so on, but I really did like their Malbec – it had a good, robust, confident flavour. I then tried something called a “sticky” which frankly isn’t the name I’d choose to classify a wine but again, what know I? It was very good but awfully sweet, the sort of thing that would be nice with stone fruit or perhaps poured over a cake of some kind. The man at the stall was very nice, which is always appreciated when bumbling your way through this sort of thing.
twitter.com/moanaparkwinery
Contact: dan@moanapark.co.nz
Lemon-Z Limoncello
Lemon-Z is first an foremost a fabulous locally made limoncello, smooth, resiny and incredibly lemony. They also make a brilliant ice cream out of such reassuringly familiar things as cream and egg yolks. I felt a bit bad as I made a massive hash of all my photos of their drink, but not toooo bad as they’re doing alright for themselves without my awful photos – their international awards are many and prestigious.
Contact: info@lemon-z.co.nz
Soprano Limoncello

The Soprano limoncello was rich and fragrant, deliciously sour and with a sprightly liqueur-y kick. They’re relatively new to the limoncello party but clearly know exactly what they are doing. I liked it a lot.
Contact: sopranolimoncello@xtra.co.nz
Rejuva
I love it when people do the dinky shot-glass lineup thing, because it looks so pretty in photos. Look at them twinkle! Rejuva’s aloe juice is so strangely delicious that you won’t even think about how scarily spiky the actual aloe vera plant is, or how strangely gluey the sap encased within its spikes. Rejuva’s range of juices include Pomegranate with Aloe and Green Tea with Aloe. The flavour is a little hard to pinpoint – a little cucumbery, a little grapey, but overall light-textured, refreshing and delicious. And really, really good for you.
Contact: aloe@rejuva.co.nz
Lighthouse Gin


There’s a really long and complicated distillation process that makes Lighthouse gin a cut apart from the rest of the gin-peddlers out there, but the one thing I can remember is that they use hand-cut orange rind to flavour their gin, instead of the rather more pith-bitter dried stuff that most other makers use. Which appealed to me, as did their robustly delicious product, full of the evidence of that hand-zested fruit and whole spices.
Contact: james@lighthousegin.co.nz
Honourable mention to the following –
Martinborough’s Coney Wines, from whom I sampled two incredibly good Reislings. Their wines are named after music references and the people at the stand were incredibly friendly. I took advantage of their deliciousness and good value and bought myself a bottle. It was pouring with rain and the endless walk out of the stadium is completely unsheltered. The paper bag that the wine was in grew soggy, broke, and the wine smashed onto the ground. Aaaaaargh. Began to hate whoever designed the walkway out of the stadium (seriously, this walkway it’s about forty kilometres long, no roof at all, in Wellington of all places). Nevertheless, I’ll still be looking out for them in shops, only if it’s not raining.
Coney Wines – contact info@coneywines.co.nz
Las Margarita Restaurante Y Cantina from Lower Hutt, who were serving icy margaritas and wonderful hot-sauce doused, cheese-filled rolls called flautas, and the girl serving margaritas complimented me on my hair.
Contact: 04) 566 2646/bookings@lasmargaritas.co.nz
Piako Gourmet Yoghurt – another incredible NZ dairy product, unfortunately by the time I got round to them I was completely over taking photos. Wonderfully thick, delicious yoghurt in such alluring flavours as coffee walnut and lemon curd. Really, really gorgeous stuff.
Contact: logan@piakoyoghurt.co.nz
Oxfam, who were collecting signatures to petition supermarkets to stock more Fairtrade products. Fair deuce, said I, and signed up happily. Then he gave us a whole block of Whittakers chocolate to say thanks. I could not have been more filled with love for the Food Show at that moment.
And that, good people, is it, more or less. Less, rather than more, as I really only captured a bare sprinkle of the goods on display, but there you go.
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Title via: the formidable, deeply talented Ethel Merman (they don’t name ’em like they used to).
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Music lately:
Notorious B.I.G feat Method Man – The What from Ready To Die You sure don’t need me to tell you why this is good but one day when I’m more awake I might just do it anyway.
Best Coast, When I’m With You. I don’t know much at all about these people but I love this song – its lethargic, foot-dragging guitars and Hole-ish vocals are very appealing.
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Next time: Cheers for reading, everyone, I realise it’s a bit of a hike. So much new food to eat now – can’t wait. Maybe by the time the next one rolls round I’ll have my own cooking demonstration or something. Am secretly tempted to look at flights to Auckland for their leg of the Food Show…

pumpkin, you’re hollow within

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Tonight I was obliged to cook dinner for myself and no one else, because Tim’s in Palmerston North for his mother’s graduation (I understand it’s this new qualification two stages after PhD that they had to hastily invent to accomodate her smartness). Luckily, in case I was thinking of just having toast after lazy piece of toast, spread with fistfuls of butter, there’s Nigella Lawson. In the “One and Two” chapter of that seminal text, How To Eat, she luxuriates in the solitary dinner to the point where it seems alluringly rakish to be so exhausted that all you can do is make yourself pasta, gloss it with olive oil, sprinkle with garlic and chilli, and eat it in bed. I like eating in bed as much as the next person who likes eating in bed but she really makes it rock’n’roll.

Hidden in this One and Two chapter is Butternut and Pasta Soup, a recipe that will never be a calling card for Nigella like the Ham in Coca Cola or Chocolate Guinness Cake, but is certainly no less fantastically worthy of your time. There was a tick beside the recipe in my copy of How To Eat but I can’t remember when I actually last made it. Maybe because it’s not the flashiest combination of flavours on the block. However it’s warm, it’s cheap, it’s easy to make and it’s easy to eat. I had half a butternut pumpkin aging in the fridge (and not aging in the socially applauded way, like Helen Mirren) and an open bag of risoni pasta in the cupboard just waiting to be spilled on the floor, so I thought I’d give this another try.

Butternut and Pasta Soup

Serves 2 (I halved the liquid, pasta and pumpkin)

From Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat

  • 1 teaspoon olive oil
  • 1/2 small onion, chopped very finely
  • 250g butternut pumpkin, or any old pumpkin really, chopped into 1cm dice
  • 60mls vermouth or white wine
  • 600mls stock – chicken or porcini stock would be good here
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 60g small soup pasta, like stelline, ditalini or risoni

Heat the oil in a heavy-based pot and add the onion, stirring till soft, then add the cubes of butternut. Cook for around 2 minutes, stirring often, letting the orange cubes soften slightly. Tip in the wine (it will bubble up) and then the stock and bayleaf. Bring to a simmer and leave for about ten minutes.

Nigella then says to remove a ladleful and puree it before returning to the pan, but I said no, because I wasn’t in the mood to clean the food processor. It was fine. Add the pasta, cook for another 10 minutes till the pasta is tender. Ladle into bowls, serve with parmesan to grate over if you like.

The fact that it’s cheap and no hassle to make shouldn’t be the only thing that draws you to this recipe. Even though I didn’t have any stock cubes to hand and so had to use plain water, it was still flavoursome, filling, comfortingly soft and warm. A little sweet from the pumpkin and savoury from the bay leaf. You could gussy it up with a spoon of pesto, or harissa, or whatever. It was a delicious and serene solo meal on a chilly night. And a good reminder that it’s well worth properly re-reading Nigella’s cookbooks for hidden jewels like this.

On Saturday Tim and I went to Bodega to the launch of local musician Grayson Gilmour’s new album, No Constellation. It’s now a well-documented fact, but Gilmour is the first artist to be signed to the newly minted Flying Nun label, which must be pretty exciting for all parties involved – he’s enormously talented, and Flying Nun carries with it decades of respect. We’ve seen Gilmour perform with band So So Modern about a billion times but none of his elusive solo performances so we were really looking forward to it. We got there in time to see Vaults, who, despite getting a bit Deep Forest in places, were overall enjoyable, good music to wallow in. Gilmour’s music translated beautifully live with the help of the musicians backing him (including So So Modern’s Aidan Leong) particularly one of my favourites from the new album, the sparkling, sprinty Loose Change. He deserves to do well, and I hope it all works out for him so…he can perform this solo material a bit more often.

Title via: Tricky’s Pumpkin from Maxinquaye, assisted ably by the glorious Goldfrapp. It’s woozy, it’s mellow, listening to it is actually like being a grain of pasta, floating around slowly in a large bowl of warm butternut soup.

Music lately:

New Dead Weather album! Called Sea of Cowards, it continues, rather than showing strong progress, from their debut Horehound. But, it is still an exciting listen with its dark dark imagery and sizzling instrumentation. And Jack White.

Odessa, by Caribou from the album Swim. I don’t know anything at all about Caribou so I won’t patronise you with reconstituted Wikipedia factlets. But this song has been on the radio an awful lot lately and…I like it. I might even look up Caribou on Wikipedia.

The great Lena Horne passed away recently. I salute her and all her achievements with the obvious but always beautiful Stormy Weather.

Next time: Hopefully I’ll get a post in before then, but this weekend is OH MY GOSH the Wellington Food Show. I’m so excited. It will be my fifth year attending and my third year blogging it, you’d think by now I’d have my own segment or something. At the least I plan on eating my own body weight (or even a larger person’s body weight) in ‘free’ samples.

 

going back to canada on a journey through the past

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I had this pair of Chuck Taylors that lasted me four years, not bad since I wore them a lot and lived up a hill in Wellington, which wears out a shoe swift-fast. Towards the end of their existence, one had a large hole in the bottom and the tread had been buffed down to the thickness of a wonton wrapper, except for the bits where holes had emerged in the sole. So…I cut out some bubble wrap and slid it inside the shoes. And wore them for at least another 6 months. At the same time, I was also buying, like…gelatine leaves and shallots and cloth-aged cheddar. Priorities?

And yet there were things that even with this food-first shoes-later mindset, that still seemed out of my reach. Like maple syrup. That Canadian elixir. I’m pretty sure that if you look at it in the supermarket, then look away, then look back again, the price tag magically becomes more expensive. In all these years I’ve only ever bought one bottle of it, then been too nervous to even take off the lid in case I wasted a droplet (what with its street value rivalling that of most hard drugs).
Then I was given a bottle of maple syrup for my birthday by my late grandad’s wife, and it was an exciting new opportunity for me. To have some maple syrup. Simple as that. I should have known that someone whose chocolate eclairs I always admired as a child would give such an astute gift.
Ice cream is basically always on my mind so it was an easy decision to showcase the incredible flavour of maple syrup in that format. Nigella Lawson has a whole chapter about ice cream in her book Forever Summer (one day I will too! But it will be an even bigger chapter than hers) and within its pages is a recipe for Honey Semifreddo. It’s a quickly whipped up mixture of egg yolks, cream and honey, frozen once and then cut into slices. Amazingly good as that sounds, I thought I’d switch the honey for maple syrup and go forward from there.
Even though it’s pretty common, I’ve never made ice cream like this before – I tend to take the frozen custard path instead. This semifreddo however, was so exquisitely light-textured and quick to make that I might have to reconsider my methods.
Maple Syrup Semifreddo

Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s Forever Summer

1 egg
4 egg yolks (nice, free range eggs please)
100g real maple syrup
300 mls cream

Place the egg, yolks, and maple syrup in a good-sized bowl, and sit that bowl over a small pot of simmering water. Whisk the mixture thoroughly and constantly until it is thick, creamy and aerated – this won’t take a hugely long time. Set it aside, then in another bowl whisk the cream till thick and floppy but not completely whipped. Carefully fold it into the maple syrup mixture, and pour it into a 1-litre loaf tin, either lined with glad-wrap or plain if it’s a silicon one, and freeze till solid. Dip in hot water before turning out (for some reason it took a while to dislodge) and cut into slices.
The only problem with ice cream is that it’s hard to photograph – it’s all melting in front of you which makes composition and focussing a bit of a non-event. Eating it however is ridiculously easy. As I said, the texture of this is wonderful – light, creamy and not really rich at all. The maple syrup whisked through provides the most incredible flavour – elegantly sweet and smoky. A few walnuts folded through wouldn’t have gone amiss but its uninterrupted cold creaminess was perfect as is with nothing more than an extra drizzle of sticky maple syrup.
Maybe one day, when I’ve gotten all awesomely rich from writing a cookbook, I’ll be able to live like the Canadians on the “Canucks Amuck” episode of Angry Beavers, who crack open cans of cool refreshing maple syrup to quench their thirst. One day!
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Title via: Canada’s other fine export, Neil Young and his song Journey Through the Past. I was fortunate enough to see him live at Big Day Out in January 2009, wild Canadian beavers could not have kept me from that performance.
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Music lately:
Dam Native, Behold My Koolstyle from Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted…Aotearoa music for the ages. I love mellow melodies like this in hiphop, and I like that it’s so clearly about this place, not of course that all NZ music should be – imagine the awkwardness of every local act trying to create the kiwi equivalent of, say, Down In Albion.
Remote Control, Beastie Boys, from Hello Nasty. I like the Beastie Boys and all, really like some of their songs but this song is in a fantasy baseball league of its own. The bombastic beats, the fuzzyiness, the ambiguity of the chorus, it just slays me. This was one of those songs I heard on the radio late at night and I had no idea how to find out who sung it or where to find it…
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Next time: Dubious. Might crack out the slow cooker, it’s definitely cold enough…on the other hand I really want to make more maple syrupy stuff while I have the chance…