let the bun shine in

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Tim whacked his knee on the bedframe yesterday (a common occurrence here, except I’m clumsier and shorter so my thighs are perpetually a fetching dappled shade of purple). I took advantage of his searing agony and got him to agree that we should go to dinner at La Bella Italia. An hour before we are due to leave the house, I remember that La Bella Italia is not open on the weekends. I don’t know if this is karma or just standard issue stupidity on my part. I call stupidity, as I forgot that La Bella Italia is only a Monday-Friday joint and Tim did seem keen in spite of himself. Either way I feel there is some kind of proverb emerging… “Ask not the significant-other in deep pain to take you out to dinner, you don’t need to pay $23 for a bowl of pasta to ‘really communicate’ with each other. The sharp teeth of karma bite ye once more!” But maybe not. I feel like it’s a recurrent theme of my life that I get really, really excited about something and then it doesn’t materialise. You’d think that now that I’m all grown and wise with 23 years under my belt I’d see these situations approaching and tamp myself down accordingly. Not so. I was really flipping disappointed last night that we couldn’t go to La Bella Italia. We ended up having chilaquiles and watching DVDs of 30 Rock and Dexter like every other night which was fun, but still. La Bella Italia. The food just…slays me.

A similar situation has been happening recently. Bearing in mind that we’re moving from up the hill in Kelburn down into the city centre, I said to Tim that we should have a coffee at Cafe Mode down the road and sample their seriously lush scones asap before we leave. Well we’ve been there seventeen thousand times in the last two weeks, and every single time they’ve been out of scones. Every single time. It’s like wanting a baby or something. I’ll start telling people that we’re “trying really hard” for a scone. There’s not a big window of opportunity – the clock is ticking! I need some kind of beeper to let me know when the cafe is scone-ulating!Sometimes random aspects of my existence can be kind of exhausting. But I will get my scones, damnit.

Okay, I’m pretty excited about this particular recipe so I’ll launch straight into it rather than try and offer some kind of esoteric lead-in paragraph. Do you recall, back in April I made hot cross buns only to inadvertently turn them into burnt offerings instead. And if you don’t recall, may this handy url jog your memory for you? Refusing to let this culinary snafu get me down, I sliced off the charred bits and froze the rest of the hot cross buns, relatively inedible as they were, to use down the line in a bread and butter pudding.

As we need to start using up any extraneous stuff lurking icily in our freezer, it occurred to me last week that it might be pertinent to make this bread and butter pudding already. I defrosted the hot cross buns (or cold cross buns if you will, hahahahaha) and while I was being practical, pulled out a massive slab of sheep that Tim’s parents sent us back to Wellington with a while back. I know mutton isn’t all that fashionable (which can only mean it’s due for a wildly fashionable comeback in restaurants) but it really does taste good, especially when the sheep had been fortunate enough to live a happy life on Tim’s parents’ farm, baa-ing merrily with verdant grass nuzzling its hoofs. The idea of having an old-timey roast and bread and butter pudding for a Sunday dinner was hugely pleasing to me.

Carne con carne. All I did to the mutton was put it in the oven for about 5 hours on a very low heat (around 160 C). That’s all. No spices, no oil, no tinfoil, no nothing. And it was beautifully tender, densely meaty and rich, and filled the whole house with the heavy perfume of roasted protein. I didn’t serve it with a gravy, since rendered sheep fat just isn’t that sexy. I did, however, bake some potatoes and other vegetables and it was an absolutely wonderful meal. A roast is so delightfully low-maintenance, you just bung it in the oven and that’s it. The next night I made us shepherd’s pie out of the leftovers, surprisingly quick when you don’t have to actually cook the meat. And really, really good.

But the bread and butter pudding. I swear I could hear angels chorusing when I took a bite. It was exquisite. Considering it started its life as tough, dry buns, it was a makeover of Hollywood film proportions. Actually there isn’t really a Hollywood movie that uses the makeover theme that I can compare this to, as in all those movies – Pretty Woman, The Princess Diaries, She’s All That, My Fair Lady, Miss Congeniality – the “ugly duckling” is always blatantly stunning. What is Hollywood trying to impart to us? That brunettes can never truly be happy unless their eyebrows are brutally waxed to pop music in a montage scene?

Um, anyway, what I’m trying to say is that to look at, these hot cross buns were seriously nothing special, no glimmer of Anne Hathaway or Sandra Bullock beauty within their overcooked exteriors. Because I made the recipe up totally on the fly, I wasn’t even sure if it would work or if I would end up just chalking it up on my list of things-I-got-disproportionately-excited-about-which-then-turned-to-FAIL. But it was an absolute minx of a pudding, the eggy custard giving the buns a soft, burnished, gloriously puffy texture. The spices – cinnamon, cardamom, ginger – were heavenly nestled against the warm, rich Marsala wine that I generously sloshed into the mix. The whole thing was just flipping marvelous. Gather round, my children. And listen:

Hot Cross Bun Bread and Butter Pudding

Obviously, you don’t need to go to the trouble of making your own buns and then overcooking them. Because we live in such a flagrantly heathenish age, I’m sure you can go down to your local supermarket and purchase hot cross buns at any time of year. So, buy some, allow them to go stale, and you’re good to go.

Ingredients:

6-8 shop-bought hot cross buns, allowed to go stale or 10-12 slightly burnt hot cross buns made to the recipe from Nigella Lawson’s Feast
50g very soft butter
75g brown sugar
3 eggs
500mls milk
Marsala wine

Heat up the milk and about 1/3 cup Marsala in a pan. I don’t want you to boil it, but it needs to be hot enough that you really wouldn’t enjoy the whole lot being thrown in your face. Slice up the buns and layer across a loaf tin. Beat the butter and sugar together, add the eggs and whip as though you were making a cake. Slowly whisk in the hot alcoholic milk, then pour this crazy mess over the buns. Let this sit for about 10 minutes to absorb the liquid somewhat, then bake at 170 C (roughly 330 F) for about 40 minutes. Eat. Ice cream would make an ideal partner, as would cream or just plain, cold milk.

Serves 4

Seriously compelling stuff. In hindsight, I probably could have cut off some more of the darkened bits of the buns, but truly this was less alarmingly carginogenic looking in real life as it is in this photo. I’ll just coolly pass it off as “ramshackle” and ignore any dissenting views.
 
On shuffle whilst I type:

Problems from Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols by The Sex Pistols

Stars and The Moon, a song by Jason Robert Brown sung by Julia Murney and OH MY GOSH it made a small compartment of my life quite complete to hear her sing this beautiful tune.

I Ran from the Original Cast Recording of Little Fish. I am pretty well addicted to this song. Itunes may not have actually ‘shuffled’ on to it every time if you know what I mean.

Next time: July is set to be pretty manic. So as yet, the next post is a mystery to us all. And yes, my title barely makes sense but I don’t care, I’m on a Hair kick right now. Never mind that it doesn’t make sense, the revival cast living it up on Broadway right now are absolutely stunning, listen to it enough and EVERYTHING will make sense.

twist and stout

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Cheers everyone for your enthusiastic well-wishing for Tim’s and my big move, I’ve built it up so much that soon it will surely have its own snappy title, corresponding font, and swelling theme music.

I feel as though every time Old Frau Winter hobbles into town on her icy boots, I complain that it’s the coldest one we’ve had yet. Even though I suspect it’s human nature to largely block out any past discomfort and focus on what’s happening to the body right now, hot damn if it isn’t the coldest June in living memory. It’s a particular quality of temperature – that bone chilling, dry, Nordic chill, which, combined with the damp, windy climes of Wellington, makes for quite the experience.

With this in mind, we’ve been doing a lot of that bolstering, sustaining style of eating lately. While I love sponteneity in the kitchen I hate cooking in an entirely reactive way every night (as in, “cripes I’m hungry and it’s 7.30pm! Why did I spend all that time looking at Tony Award performances on youtube instead of making dinner? Now I have to cobble together something incoherent from what’s in the cupboard!”) One of the nice things about this season is sitting down with recipe books, post-it notes and a notepad, planning out slow-cooked winter meals and writing a shopping list accordingly. One such planned meal was the following casserole, taken from Nigella Lawson’s seminal text How To Eat. (I think I refer to it as that every time. It’s like one word in my head: seminaltexthowtoeat.)

Beef With Stout and Prunes
I realise that the words ‘stout’ and ‘prune’ aren’t overly come-hither. Nigella says this is a version of Beef Carbonnade which is possibly a better option if someone fussy asks what’s for dinner tonight.

I’ll be honest, my copy of How To Eat is buried under a lot of other cookbooks in a neat pile behind another hefty pile of cookbooks and it does not behoove me to disturb the order of things and dig it out. Plus I’m feeling lazy. You hardly need a recipe for this though, so allow me to guide you through the process gently but firmly. Dust sliced beef in mustard-spiked flour (I used beef shin from Moore Wilson’s, basically you want a cut that requires long cooking) and sear in a hot pan. Transfer into a casserole dish with some carrots, sliced into batons, finely sliced onions, and prunes that have been hitherto soaked in some dark stout. I used Cascade, an Australian stout from Tasmania, because it’s what they had at the local shop and wasn’t heinously expensive. I also added some whole cloves of garlic. Cover this and place in a slow oven, and cook for as long as you like but no less than two hours. I served over plain basmati rice. It can be a little brown and plain to look at, so by all means sprinkly liberally with chopped parsely which will please both aesthetically and…tastebuddily.
Et viola, a rich, hearty, deeply flavoured casserole for you and your loved ones. And if ‘your loved ones’ means just you and your stomach, then so much the better. Freeze in portion-sized containers and microwave it back to life when you need a fast dinner. This recipe actually comes from the low-fat section of How To Eat, as long as you don’t fry the floured beef in six inches of melted butter, enticing as that now sounds, it really is a trim meal all up, with the only fat coming from the meat.
The Cascade stout came in a six-pack and while Tim was happy to quaff the unused five bottles, he impressed upon me how a chocolate Guinness cake would be an economical, ideal, nay, the only logical use for the remaining stout. So I made one. I always forget how utterly stupendous Nigella’s Chocolate Guinness Cake is. It’s so ridiculously transcendent that it makes me type excessively in italics like some overexcited damsel in an LM Montgomery novel.

The Cascade Stout was not as abruptly bitter as the stipulated Guinness but more than held its own as a worthy understudy for the part. The above photo was taken on the bedside table, as Tim has had some blood sugar antics happening in the middle of the night lately and so that’s just where the cake was sat. Because he has had nocturnal low blood sugar with soothing regularity, a lot of the cake has been eaten by him while I’m in a half-asleep state and so I only managed to secure about two slices to myself after all that. It really was as delicious as it should be though: large, dark, densely chocolately and like Angela Lansbury, even better with age.

Chocolate Guinness Cake

From Feast, by Nigella Lawson. (It has a chocolate cake chapter, so, you know it’s good)
250mls Guinness
250g butter
75g cocoa
400g sugar
145mls sour cream (one of those little yoghurt-tub sized, er, tubs, or roughly a 1/2 cup)
2 eggs
1 T real vanilla extract
275g plain flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
Set your oven to 180 C and butter/line a 23cm springform tin. First of all you want to get a big pan, pour in the Guinness and add the butter – cut into small pieces – and gently heat it so the butter melts. It shouldn’t bubble, keep the heat low. Now, simply whisk in the rest of the ingredients and pour into your tin. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, depending on your oven. The kitchen will smell heavenly, I promise you.

Once cool, ice with a mixture of 200g cream cheese (NOT low-fat), 125mls whipped cream, and 150g icing sugar folded together. I refrained from icing it this time round as I just couldn’t be bothered spending exorbitant amounts on dairy products, but the combination of sharp icing and dark, damp chocolate cake is incredible, the icing really makes it sing.

It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the other key player in this cake: (apart from the stout and Tim’s persuasiveness) the cocoa. And not just any cocoa – proper Dutch cocoa from Equagold. The very first time I’ve ever used it. Don’t act all shocked, I’ve only just started working full time and in the food world there’s so much to keep up with – do you spend your money on the vanilla beans, or the premium brand happy pig bacon, or the Himalayan pink salt and if you let one ball drop is it tantamount to subterfuge meaning that you are forever shunned by food bloggers worldwide? I know I add fuel to the fire myself by going on about vanilla beans vs vanilla essense. With that in mind I’m lucky enough to have a wonderful whanau who will often give me such treats for Christmas and birthday presents. I’m not sure quite where I’m going with this rant but before I carry on shaking my fist for no good reason any more I’ll get back to my original point: proper Dutch cocoa has until now eluded me because it is really expensive. But as Led Zeppelin say, now’s the time, the time is now, and so I decided to buy myself a jar last week from the delightful La Bella Italia cafe/restaurant/deli on The Terrace. The woman behind the counter was impeccably helpful and friendly without being the slightest bit pushy and I emerged a very satisfied customer.

And when I opened the jar for the cake…My word. The first thing I noticed about it was the incredible cocoa scent, the second thing was how rich and dark the colour is. The deep-toned flavour of this cocoa stood comerade-like against the strident flavour of the stout and made for a surprisingly complex chocolate cake, to the point where I felt I should be eating it like one would drink a really expensive and fancy glass of wine – slowly and with reverence. What more can I say – this cake is begging to be made! Oh the feuds that could be ended with a slice of it (unless the parties who have beef with each other happen to be gluten-intolerant).

In smashing news, I interrupt this waffling to say:

My dad Mark, (el presidente of the Otaua Village Preservation Society – OVPS ) received a phone call from the OVPS’s lawyer today to say that WPC have withdrawn their appeal to the Environment Court. This means that they are no longer considering relocating their business to the Otaua Tavern site.

To reiterate: this is an “unofficial” withdrawal by WPC. There are still the lawyer’s bills to pay so the fund-raising continues. And the Otaua Tavern site is still vacant and who knows that a group even more shadily heinous and heinously shady may want to move in?

But for now: an enormous, enormous THANK YOU from the bottom, sides, inside and outside of my heart for everyone who helped by watching the video at my behest, for your supportive comments here and on youtube – it really did make a difference, and at last not just to our morale. I shudder to think of what might have had to have gone down if had the sorry WPC had their way and moved in (does that sentence even make sense? I’m a little excited, sorry for the nightmarish syntax). I have been so touched that people all round the world, people who enjoy making elaborate cakes and beautiful roasts and who have nothing to do with the woes of a tiny, clout-less village in New Zealand, have been so actively supportive. Though I am often conflicted in what I believe in (well, I’m only 23, I’ll ‘find myself’ in good time yet) I am pretty well certain on something: good deeds reap more good deeds and positive thought can have positive impact. One doesn’t want to get too mawkish and Miss World-like in one’s thank-you speeches so I’ll endeth it here, but it is an absolute relief and a triumph to be reporting this news to you all. Kia ora.

Am pretty sleepy after a weekend spent attending Smokefree Rockquest events here and in Lower Hutt, which may go some way towards explaining why my writing is so scatty but it could just be that this is how I write and you’re all dooooomed to deal with it forevermore. The students performing in Smokefree Rockquest here and in the Hutt basically melted my brain with their seriously fierce talent. I look forward to seeing some of them blaze a musical trail in the near future. Oh and I got to present an award last night. I’d like to think my many years on stage as a dancer/etc stood me in good stead, but as I was announced there was a perceptible milisecond of awkward silence that I feared would stretch into a yawning wave of quiet indifference from the audience. Luckily Tim and my godsister were there as my plus-ones to cheer and get the momentum going…

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On shuffle while writing this:

Overture, from Jesus Christ Superstar, 1994 New Zealand Cast recording (just try and find it in shops. Your loss.)
Watermelon Blues from The Legend Of Tommy Johnson, Act 1: Genesis 1900’s-1990’s by Chris Thomas King
Das Hokey Kokey (Original Version Vocoder Mix) from Das Hokey Kokey by Bill Bailey

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Next time: Tim and I have one episode left on our DVD of season 1 of The Wire and if it turns out as traumatic as I think it will I may need to go to ground for a bit. Believe the hype. It’s incredible. But don’t let your kids watch it, there’s violence and cussing and whatnot by the spade-load. (And by ‘whatnot’ I mean low-level nudity.) But otherwise, have I got some stuff for you. I made the bread and butter pudding to end all bread and butter puddings. Stale, defrosted hot cross buns, Marsala wine, no recipe…could have been a tear-inducing disaster of Anne Shirley proportions but sweet fancy Moses it turned out delicious.

housekeeping

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Kia ora readers. For those of you who don’t keep candlelit vigil on my Twitter account, you may not have absorbed the news that Tim and I are moving house. In the grand scheme of things, a little ho-hum maybe, seeing how people do this all the time. Especially young people living in flatting situations. But considering that we’ve been at our current digs since November 2006, it’s pretty significant.

There’s no one real reason we are moving out, but there have been various frustrations that we will be glad to leave behind – including the olive oil on the kitchen shelf regularly solidifying in the cold, the sight of breath in front of our faces as we talk to each other inside the house, the bathroom where long-legged spiders rule with eight iron fists each on slowly crumbling walls, or perhaps the undulating and loose-bricked stairs leading down to our flat from the road which bely the idea that a landlord should have their tenants’ wellbeing in mind.

When we first moved in in 2006 it was tantamount to being in a mansion compared to our first flat – there was carpet as opposed to billiard table covering, the toilet wasn’t in the same room as the shower, our rent was halved, and there was a hot water cupboard! Oh, and the landlord wasn’t going to try and run us down with a steamroller (we had some ‘issues’ with our first one) And we were students, living with a group of friends, life could not have been sweeter, really. The theme song from Cheers could almost be heard whenever you walked in the door. Now that Tim and I are the last ones left of that initial group and while we could easily carry on living here for a good long time – it’s not that bad – we decided that this was to be our final year here.

And then one of my colleagues who is moving overseas lives there and sent round an email asking if anyone knew anyone who knew anyone who wanted to move into her fantastic place in town. Not to be overly dramatic, but I knew this was it. Luckily my instincts, while hysterical, were accurate: the other guy living there seemed to like Tim and I. We got the room.

One of the many exciting things about this new place we’re moving to next month – perhaps the single most exciting thing (apart from the fact that it has a sauna, I know) is that it gets sunshine. Real, genuine, sunshine. Imagine you’ve spent your whole life using synthetic, cheap vanilla essence and then suddenly you inhale the scent of a real vanilla bean (possibly smearing its shiny black seeds on your face to enhance the effect). That’s what it will be like. Amazing.

Which will mean exciting things for my food photography potential. Much as I’d personally take content over photography, the wider body of blog-readers seem to demand exquisite, magazine-ready photography as well as scintillating, original prose. Not that I’m claiming I can (or do) provide either, just…I’m going to be in a better position to take nice pictures, which can only be a good thing for us all.

Just realised I used that vanilla analogy in my last post. So much for original prose. And come to think of it, I could have just said “imagine you’ve been living in a cold dark house and then you move to a nice warm sunny house.” Hmm. Anyway, I predict lots of reminiscing from Tim and I between now and when we move, possibly resembling one of those cheesy clip shows that surface occasionally on things like Friends, and Home Improvement, and Saved By The Bell, which was really one giant clip show in a way. Or, knowing Tim and I, it might be more like THIS.

What I’m listening to: They Might Be Giants and Michael John LaChiusa.

Next time: Chocolate Guinness Cake!

tortilla queen (guaranteed to blow your mind)

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The month of June is a fast dame. August is lapping at my heels like a rising tide. July is more packed with commitments than a half-cup of brown sugar. Kindly excuse my ramblings, I found a nice notebook to write my thoughts in and am suddenly convinced I am an artiste, like almost all those people who carry notebooks to write thoughts in. I’ve been traipsing hither and yon across the country (well, I went to Dunedin for two days and a pub quiz last night) and haven’t really had any meaningful eye-contact with the blog lately, but the month of June isn’t really helping matters by going so darn swiftly.

I usually save my food-blog browsing for after I’ve finished a blog post of my own, because I’m in the right frame of mind and have the time to do it. I’ve occasionally wondered if it comes across as a little self-interested (oh hi, that looks delish, I haven’t been here since the last time I updated my blog and wanted comments ohwhatacoincidence) but that’s just how I roll. I roll without agenda or ulterior motive. Anyway while on such a blog-perusing journey after finishing my last post, I found on Thursday Night Smackdown a most enticing missive dedicated to chilaquiles. Mexican food here in New Zealand for the most part runs to bland, pre-packaged DIY enchilada kits, with dry, curling flatbreads and pre-spiced cans of watery beans. Not so bad, just I feel it’s not a cuisine that has been thoroughly probed here. Which could be why I’ve never heard of chilaquiles before. They’re sort of like huevos rancheros, only a bit more deconstructed and a lot less healthy.

I gotta say, there was something about Michelle’s post on Thursday Night Smackdown that really sold this idea to me. I was genuinely excited about making this recipe, which more or less comprises a spicy tomato sauce, tortilla chips, and a fried egg. By the time I got halfway through it making it all though I was starting to have my doubts. Why would anyone want to soak tortilla chips in tomato sauce? Would a fried egg on top of tortilla chips taste freaky at best? Why have I never realised how much fat is embedded into tortilla chips?

Despite the fact that my version was hugely low-rent – and despite the fact that my tastebuds were shuffling their feet dubiously – this is beautiful. Incredible stuff. There’s something about the spicy sauce and the way it softens some of the crunch of the chips, and then the savoury fried taste of the egg kind of drips all over everything. Again, I hasten to add the disclaimer that my chilaquiles were seriously inauthentic, but they were fast and also used what I had in the cupboard. For those of you playing at home, I sauteed a finely chopped onion, several cloves of chopped garlic, a chopped capsicum and a diced carrot in a large pan. Once all that was soft, I poured over half a jar of spaghetti sauce and added a little minced chilli from a jar. After allowing that to bubble and thicken, I poured it over two substantial bowls of tortilla chips (chilli lime flavour, now with extra trans-fats!) and quickly fried two eggs in the pan, not really bothering to wipe it clean or anything. Once done to done-ness, the bowls had an egg each draped overtop and a generous bump’n’grind of salt and pepper. Obviously coriander would be ideal, but I just didn’t have any and remain fairly unscarred by this omission.

The eggs really make it though. You have to buy good eggs. On a whim I purchased some GlenPark Woodland Free Range Eggs, thinking they were quite the bargain. Turns out my mathmatical prowess is exponentially deteriorating with each year because according to Tim I am wrong and they’re actually bordering on heinously expensive. That said, they are, and I do not say this lightly, the single most delicious eggs I have ever eaten. I know, I know, I wax enthusiastic about everything but these eggs truly are exquisite. It’s like the moment you first smell vanilla beans after a lifetime of using synthetic vanilla essence. It’s heady stuff. Find them. Buy them. Eat. I will definitely be buying these again.

The flat we’re living in is blooming ancient, and, as I’ve often whined, freezing cold. One of its particular idiosyncracies is having, at best, one powerpoint per room. This is 2009. We plug in a lot of stuff. Including a heater, without which one might as well go recline under a tree in the rain and read a book of an evening because inside really isn’t much balmier than outside. What all this exposition is leading up to is that the other night – an hour shy of the premier of Outrageous Fortune – we blew a fuse. All four bedrooms and the lounge were unusable. And freezing. In a mad, generation-Y frenzy fuelled by lack of technology I dovetailed my two main interests at that point – staying warm/alive and blogging – by utilising the one room that still had power – the kitchen. I made banana muffins. And then got all up in the oven’s personal space to try and defrost. If I could have, I would have curled up in the warming drawer.

I’ve made these muffins before (recipe here and, after re-reading my old post I’m not sure if I could improve upon the description of them) and they’re fantastic for when you feel as though there’s nothing in the cupboard, because the batter is essentially tiny. Don’t go eating any (I don’t know if this is a warning necessary for sane people, but as you know I tend to eat a lot of mixture) because there’s not a lot there. What is there though makes beautifully tender, cinnamon-warm muffins, the sort you’d never see in a cafe because those bulbous, dry, sandy $3.90 cakes (the sort that especially frequent airports and chain coffee shops) are de rigeur instead.

Tim got home at this point and with a mere manly flick of a switch on the powerboard restored the soothing hum of electricity to our flat. Just in time for Outrageous Fortune. Phew. Last night Scotty graced us with his presence to watch the second episode, and I didn’t know which was more mesmerising – Kasey’s magnificent bosom or the welcome presence of some character development in Judd. Scott and I also both agreed that an episode should be devoted to little more than the character of Van holding baby Jane. Clearly, Season 5 is going to be good.

Finally: The Tonys happened. Not here in New Zealand on TV of course, because basically no-one knows about them over here (that said, we have some bizarre programme placement choices made here, and why?) but importantly: Alice Ripley won best actress in a musical. Some say her speech is weird, some are getting strangely angry over it, I think she was truly magnificent. I wish I could speak in public like that. For what it’s worth though, Brett from Poison’s untimely collision with a piece of scenery could have been the best thing to happen to the already awesome show Rock of Ages – the clip of him getting smacked upside the head by a giant sign has been zooming round youtube and was actually on the news here. I admit to being wildly excited that the word “Tony’s” was used on mainstream TV news.

On Shuffle whilst I type:
Black Tambourine, Beck, from the album Guero (because Tim’s currently obsessed with him)
Flume, Bon Iver, from For Emma, Forever Ago
Birdhouse In Your Soul, Kristin Chenoweth and Ellen Greene, from the Pushing Daisies soundtrack (it uses the word “filibuster!”)

Next time: I realise the photography has been a bit up and down lately, that’s because if I photograph stuff at night it looks awful, during the day, not so much. I’m not sure what I’ve got on the upcoming food agenda but I’m hoping for something a little more friendly on the eye.

sweet dreams (are made of this)

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Tim and I have been pondering whether to purchase an espresso machine. Not the sort where you press a button, I mean the real deal, steam wand and inserty-doohicky with pressy-downy thing and all that. Not one of the ones that costs the same as a small European commonwealth either, we’re neither of us rich and still trying to save to travel. But there have been some inexpensive ones on the market and we both love our coffee. And you know, good to help out flailing businesses in the recession and whatnot.


Apropos of little, I mentioned a while ago on here that I did a training session at work where I was defined as a “Creator-Innovator.” We had a follow up sesh this afternoon. Exciting as being creative and innovative sounds, I can’t deny that bearing the rather triumphant title of “Thruster-Organiser” appeals also. Unfortunately I am neither organised nor sufficiently thrusty according to the pre-test. Anyway, as previously stated, Creator-Innovators are future-thinking dreamers, full of ideas. And not so good with deadlines. As you may have noticed.


Even though we don’t even own the espresso maker yet, I’ve already dizzily planned what I can make with the egg whites left over from making the ice cream that I’ve set aside a precious vanilla bean for so that we can make affogato (affagati?). Did I mention that Creator-Innovators sometimes appear to have their head in the clouds? (That’s actually what the description in my booklet said. Head in the clouds.) I’m actually excited about cooking from the leftovers of something I haven’t cooked yet to go with something that doesn’t exist yet. The training session was nothing if not a windex-ed mirror held up to my soul.

We were fortunate enough here in New Zealand to have Monday off for the Queen’s Birthday. It’s nice to have a baggage-free long weekend, and the occasional four-day week cannot be underestimated in terms of well-being and morale. I did very little, apart from meeting a friend in town for coffee on Saturday, and it was all rather blissful. The fact that the weather was unfortunate helped with this – although largely cold, bleak, rainy and windy, there were also intermittent bursts of hail and blazing sun. Tim had about forty different essays to write for uni so I kept out of his way by baking and doodling and happily pottering through books and magazines, my trackpants ensconcing me cosily like a pastry case. On Saturday night I made a slow-cooked beef stew – all happiness-inducing cold weather weekend activities.

So, the baking. Y’all know the torrid flirtation I have with white chocolate. Buttons of it lure me, siren-like to the cupboard to eat by the handful. An actual bar of the stuff can be dealt with in a matter of semiquavers. I don’t know why – it’s not as darkly complex as proper, cocoa-y chocolate but as I said today in the team meeting when talking about RENT*, you can’t predict or control what will have an impact on you in life. For me: white chocolate.

* We had to bring in some pictures/things that would help describe ourselves to the group. I may or may not have indicated explicitly that Nigella Lawson has influenced every business decision I’ve made this year. I was met with troubled shuffling of papers from the team.

So when I saw this recipe for white chocolate cheesecake cookies on Hayley B’s blog, well, I’m sure I don’t need to explain at this late stage how enamoured I was to the point of openly salivating with the very thought of them. (apologies Hayley, for besmirching your good name with imagery of me drooling, but you started it with all that white chocolate.)

The recipe is very easy and bears the distinct virtue of having the finished product actually taste even better than the uncooked dough. Don’t try to pretend like you haven’t tried raw cookie dough. You have the butter and sugar, which tastes pretty special, then you add egg, which makes it taste all raw and nasty, but then in goes the flour, which somehow neutralises the egg and makes it taste amazing again and…well that’s probably enough delving into my dark psyche for one day. I’ll give you the recipe.

White Chocolate Cheesecake Cookies

I modified this ever so mildly by using roughly chopped white buttons instead of chips.

225g butter
225g cream cheese (ie, one tub)
1 cup white sugar
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 ½ cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 cups chocolate chips/3 handfuls white chocolate buttons, chopped roughly

Preheat the oven to 180°C, line a couple of baking trays with baking paper. Cream butter and sugars together, add the egg, cream cheese, and vanilla extract and beat until well-incorporated. If your cream cheese is super fridge-cold it won’t mix in very well but I liked the idea of having small pockets of cream cheese in the cookies anyway. Add the flour, baking powder and salt. Fold in chocolate. Try not to eat the lot. Roll tablespoons of dough into balls and place on baking tray. Flatten each ball if you want a flatter cookie, but they’re fairly well behaved and won’t spread alarmingly. Bake for 8 minutes, or until edges are slightly golden. Don’t worry if they look underdone, as long as they are visibly set on top then they’ll be perfect. If you bake them any longer they’ll lose the cheesecake tang. They will be very soft but once cool will be recognisably cookie-ish.

These are basically the nicest cookies I’ve had since I was born.

They are soft with a soft crumb, and a magical sweet-and-tang kick from the combination of cream cheese and sugary white chocolate. Seriously…genius. Words fail me on how to describe the vanilla-butter flutter that the white chocolate imparts and how it contrasts with the almost lemony squish of cream cheese. Actually that sort of does describe it really.

Because we had the necessary ingredients, and again, to remove myself from out of Tim the Vigilant Essay Writer’s way, I decided to just…keep on baking. I first made Apple Blondies back in July 2008, a simpler time when my life too vaulted from uni essay to uni essay and I hadn’t yet tasted quinoa. They are no less delicious 11 months later. The fact that they are called Blondies I could take or leave – this is basically one of your average slice-cake things. I don’t know if I’m being particularly close-minded but I personally feel that it’s not a blondie unless a goodly portion of it is made of white chocolate. And therefore, not a brownie. Actually come to think of it, this recipe would be amazing with a couple of spoonfuls of cocoa in it. I guess you could call it an apple brunette in that case.

The recipe can be found here from last year’s blog, although you’ll have to wade through all manner of other things before I actually start talking about the apple blondies. Ah, the naive Hungry and Frozen of 2008, with so much time on her hands. The blondies were as moist and apple-tatious as I remembered them to be, although considering their presence in my life in conjunction with the cookies I decided not to ice them. Yes, after eating half a batch of white-chocolate encrusted cookie dough and then making sugary apple cake, not adding icing can definitely be classified as a heavy consession.


I used four apples in the recipe but really, two is plenty. Any more and the batter almost can’t hold it all together. What I got in the end was still delicious – a moist, fruity counterpart to the full-on sugar of the cookies. The spritz of apple in the batter made the kitchen smell incredible while it was baking. Many thanks to Kelly Jane, via whom the recipe was snaffled all those months ago.
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On Shuffle whilst I type:
Here I Go Again from the Rock of Ages Original Broadway Cast Recording (The Great Whitesnake Way?)
That’s The Way by Led Zeppelin, from Led Zeppelin III
Dogs Were Barking by Gogol Bordello, from Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike
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Next time: possibly less psychobabble, more slow-cooked meals. I made an Italian beef casserole with pasta on Saturday and last night’s dinner was beef shin in stout with prunes, a Nigella Lawson recipe from How To Eat. I’m heading down to Dunedin this weekend for work (my first ever SmokefreeRockquest!) so it may be a tiny while between posts but I’m sure the wider world will cope. Peace.

the memory remains

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It has been a little while now since The Food Show, and I’ve eaten most of the loot I bought therein. There’s a little bit left – some preservative-laced ageless salami, the occasional lonely sprout, half a tub of yoghurt. And the Lindt chocolate is sitting in my wardrobe, waiting for that special chocolate recipe. Most of the good stuff is gone though. However since blogging about eating food is a somewhat slower process than just eating food, it has taken me a little while to get round to discussing how I used my purchases.

Some of the yoghurt and sunflower seeds went into a batch of banana muffins. The bagels got eaten in a matter of hours. The mirin I bought made me wish I’d come across it years ago. And the white chocolate Lindt chocolate balls, the very thought of which are making me a little dizzy with wanting right now, I think I inhaled them accidentally while blinking or something.

I devised this salad in my head on a break at work and was pleased with how it sounded – roasted kumara and radish salad with chorizo, halloumi, brocolli and organic sprouts. I was looking forward to it, imagining peppery radish with the sweet kumara, searing hot halloumi against the cool sweet crunch of sprouts, the paprika-d chorizo whispering an oily hymn to the verdant brocolli.

I presented it triumphantly, sat down smugly, held my fork aloft and then cursed loudly. I’d forgotten to add the chorizo. Even though it was sitting right there in the fridge and was one of the main components of the meal. You’d think I would have learned. Time and time again it is proven that if I have an idea and don’t write it down, I’ll forget half of it. Even if it’s something really fundamental to what I’m doing, I’m reliably unreliable.

Luckily the chorizo-less salad was delicious.
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If you’ve never roasted radishes before – and I don’t blame you if you haven’t, the idea never occured to me until I read it in Jo Seagar’s The Cook School Recipes. Drizzle a little olive oil over the halved radishes, and bake at 220 C for 20-40 minutes till they are slightly darkened and caramelised in places. They retain that familiar peppery tang but softened somehow, which worked marvelously with the buttery, chewy halloumi draped over. Seriously, I love halloumi so much it’s a good thing it’s nosebleed-inducingly expensive or I’d be absentmindedly frying up entire blocks of it to eat while I think about what I’m going to make for dinner.
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The halloumi in question was Canaan, and marvelously wonderful stuff it is too. Tumbled over the salad were organic Wright sprouts, also bought at the Food Show. And as you now know, the bargain chorizo remained quietly in the fridge… I wish I hadn’t used it recklessly in some tossed together dinner this week though because upon reflection, Nigella has a LOT of recipes using chorizo and as we hardly ever have it in the house, well there goes a prime opportunity to try out more of her recipes.
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This following dish – Slow Cooked Lamb with Cumin, Cinnamon and Feijoas – was actually made before the food show but I have never got round to blogging about it, and while it’s very different to the above meal gosh darnit it’s my party and I’ll attempt to dovetail disparite culinary themes if I want to.


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First of all I softened one finely chopped onion and an intimidating amount of garlic in my lovely non-stick pan (not one of those pans that just masquerades as nonstick, this one really doesn’t require oil) then tipped in a hefty pinch of cumin seeds, stirring for a bit before adding cubed lamb shoulder that I’d tossed in a little flour. I stirred quickly to brown the meat on all sides then added two carrots, sliced into batons. In went a can of chopped tomatoes, which I then rinsed out with enough water to just cover the meat. After a sprinkling of ground cinnamon, the pan lid went on and the whole lot simmered away for a good long time on a low heat. After a while I took the lid off to try and allow the liquid to thicken somewhat, before stirring in a slice of finely chopped preserved lemon, and the thickly chopped flesh of about six ripe feijoas. Finally I stirred in some spinach, allowing it to wilt before serving over couscous.

It was a bit of a gamble – I made this up on the fly – and I wasn’t entirely sure if feijoas wouldn’t be a bit too freaky with lamb. But, it makes sense – other stews pair lamb with dates, or dried apricots, or figs, so why not feijoas? Their sweet, tangy, elusive flavour and grainy texture contrasted deliciously, with the preserved lemon’s pronounced salty sourness offsetting the warmth of the cumin and cinnamon. The sweet-and-salty element to the stew made it quite moreish, and it was a perfect lazy Sunday dinner. If you are unfortunate enough to live in a country where feijoas aren’t available, then by all means substitute dates, dried apricots…a diced pear might work deliciously as well. But if you’re in New Zealand, they’re surely not going to get any cheaper at the market: now’s the time, the time is now. I got mine for 99c a kilo which is pretty hard to beat.

Work is a bit on the exhausting side and Wellington remains resolutely arctic which is why this post may or may not be up to my usual luminous standards. Unless you’re stinking rich, New Zealand houses tend not to have airconditioning, but in Wellington flats (and I’m sure elsewhere) just some simple honest building insulation would be appreciated. I feel like I wear more clothes to bed than I do to leave the house. That said, this place is warmer than our old flat, where the ground in our room was – I kid you not – permanently damp (a good way to discourage leaving clothes on the floor), we had a hole in our window covered with newspaper, and on more than one occasion we’d rug up in layer upon layer of clothing only to discover it was warmer outside than in. Anyway, musn’t grumble as we are both very fortunate to (a) have a roof over our head, crumbly like a Weetbix or otherwise, and (b) relatively secure employment.

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On Shuffle while writing this:

Machismo, by Gomez, from the album Machismo

Frei und Schwerelos (Defying Gravity) by Willemijn Verkaik from the Wicked Original German Cast Recording

Basket Case, by Green Day from Bullet In A Bible: Live at the Milton Keynes Bowl

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Next time: I’m not sure, although I feel like I’m about due to revisit Nigella again – it’s one thing to be inspired to create my own recipes but I miss her…

bachelorette

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I did this training session thing at work on Monday afternoon, where you fill in a questionaire online and from that they ascertain what kind of patterns you follow and which personality aspects affect the way you work. It basically told me that I am a creative, beliefs-driven, spirited hippy who is quite au fait with a lack of structure and can be very relaxed with deadlines. It was rather like a horoscope reading session – and a lot of it rang true with me.

For everything on this earth except graduating. I graduated on Tuesday (with a Bachelor of Arts in Media and English Lit) and was a nervous wreck the whole time. For this one event, I want structure and rules and advance, pertinent information. Which I feel we didn’t receive. Had the “So, You’ve Decided To Graduate” pamphlet told us specifically how the evening was going to be run, I would have been a lot more chillaxed. But all it really conveyed was something to the effect of “you will instinctively, like a spider making its web, know where to walk to and where to be seated.” A little mystery and coyness is fine, but in the proper context, please. Had I known that the whole thing would be quietly run by wonderful attendants stationed every two metres to tell you exactly where you were supposed to be going, in soothing, hushed tones, I wouldn’t have stressed quite so much.

That aside, it was a wonderful day, and I was lucky enough to share it with lots of other people I knew who were graduating, including Tim, a colleague, an old schoolmate, former flatmates, and one of my cousins. Parading through the town was exciting, if a little fraught – the (miraculously rain-free) wind threatening at any point to separate trenchers from heads, and parents constantly yelling out “stop! look over here!” and attempting to take photos while the orderlies barked at us to keep walking and stay within the lines. An old family friend joined us for lunch at the Black Harp (where I had a wonderful mushroom ragout) and after the ceremony itself Tim’s and my families shared a raucous meal at the reliably fantastic BYO Istanbul on Cuba Street. The ceremony itself was something of a blur, my surname being Vincent I was right at the end and so couldn’t properly relax until it was all over. We were priveleged to have speak at the event (after getting an honorary doctorate), author and Victoria University alumni Lloyd Jones, whose book Mr Pip won the Booker Prize. All in all a very exciting, momentous time – swelling string quartet music would not have been out of place at several points – and I miss wearing the robe and swooping through town allowing the excessive fabric to subtly draw attention to my higher education and no doubt superior intellect. I am Laura Vincent, BA. It’s funny how fast those three years went – I remember reading the book of Anne of Green Gables where she’s doing her schooling and thinking “well, LM Montgomery rather skimmed over those three years a little flagrantly”, but no, it really does go pretty briskly.

My parents arrived on Monday night took and Tim and I out to dinner, well actuallywe took them out to dinner as neither really know Wellington well. Wanting to find somewhere near their hotel that wouldn’t require a traumatically lengthy walk, somewhere non-franchisey and something a little “Wellington”, I chose La Bella Italia on The Terrace. I had never been there before but have heard good things about it. It wasn’t full and the atmosphere a little bright and cold for an Italian place but this makes sense as it is a deli as well as a cafe (with significantly more reasonable prices than another visible Italian cafe in Wellington). Our service was prompt, friendly and matter of fact, the waitress being able to talk to us at length (when questioned), about the puffin-eating habits of the people of the Faroe Islands and also able to make a fabulous long black coffee.

The food was fantastic – well thought out combinations simply served and made with beautiful ingredients.

I had the egg tagliatele with tomato bolognaise sauce and parmesan. The pasta was delicious although had just a touch more bite to it than I like. The sauce was excellent – rich, tomatoey and nourishing.

Mum had the most wonderful vegetarian eggplant dish – actually I think we all ended up eating vegetarian that night for some reason – the eggplant was cooked perfectly and the sauce was divine.

As you can tell I basically tasted everyone’s dinners including my own. Tim had the gnocchi which was incredible – smooth and surprisingly light and tasting of the finest, milkiest ricotta cheese. Dad had a different kind of gnocchi, with a tomato sauce, unfortunately the photo didn’t turn out so well but he seemed to enjoy it. Despite being comfortably full we decided to get two desserts and four spoons to share them with.

First up was vanilla gelato with our choice of liqueur. We went for limoncello, which was silky and tangy with a not unpleasant alcoholic kick. The liquid against the smooth, cool gelato was quite wonderful. It came punctuated with two thin, crisp biscuits which were perfect for dipping into the last of the gelato and limoncello as they melted together.

This chocolate and prune terrine with hazelnut meringues was incredible. So often – too often – when we go out for dinner the dessert has blatantly been assembled or unwrapped rather than created. So it’s nice to find a place where it’s quite clearly the opposite. This terrine was incredible – the dark chocolate bitter and smooth against the sweet crunch of the meringues and the soft dark juicy prunes.

Verdict: I will definitely come back here, if not right away for a meal then definitely to check out the deli side of things. I need some of that pasta.

La Bella Italia
101 The Terrace
Wellington City
Open Monday – Friday 7am till late.
Website


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On Shuffle while typing:

These Four Walls, Gavin Creel, from GoodTimeNation
Calliope! The Veils, from Nux Vomica
Modern Love, David Bowie, from Let’s Dance

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Next Time: I make dinner using ingredients bought at the Wellington Food Show, plus…well that’s it. Nevertheless, I remain, Laura Vincent, BA.

the hardest butter to butter

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Maybe in years to come, when my blog has changed lives, and gets turned into a beautiful book, and then the movie of the book of the blog changes peoples’ lives (oh wait, that’s Julie and Julia that I’m thinking of, and somewhat more feasibly, I’ll probably slide quietly into further obscurity), and a naive child asks their grandparents what the ultimate blog post that would describe Hungry and Frozen would be, what the very distilled essence of this whole strange business is, the ur-text, the definitive piece of writing, their grandparents might lean down and utter with a wise, earthy croak: The one where she made her own butter.

I call this one: Self Portrait.

Okay, whoa, things got self absorbed there for a bit, but such is the nature of blogging. I’ll be straight with you: I love butter. I don’t know what it is, there’s definitely the soft, creamy, golden, slightly saline flavour which plays a part. But then there’s also the texture, something that can’t be imitated. It’s a texture echoed in other good things – dark chocolate, pistachios, avocados… I just love it. Somewhat aggressively. I love what it does for cakes, I love butter icing on top of cakes, I love butter smeared thickly across freshly made scones which also have butter in them…I’m not the only person like this, right? Not to mention my strident rejection of margarine. I don’t mind cakes with oil in them, some are just supposed to be that way, but don’t get me started on margarine – I’ll go all twitchy. Anyway, some other lovely bloggers (like Culinary Travels and Tea and Wheaten Bread) have made their own butter recently, which inspired me to do it myself – it seemed so right somehow. Making butter. By hand. Being at one with it. Well, more so than I normally am…

It’s simple enough, but there are some rules to be observed. Rather like the movie Fight Club, which, by the way, I’m secure with never having seen because I know it will be light years too violent for me to deal with. Thanks to its Wikipedia page though, I’m still able to discuss it critically with people who actually have watched it.

The first rule of making butter is: You need far more cream than your ability to gauge will let you think you will need, and then some.

I used a litre, which in America you could also see as four measuring cups full, of cream. To add further confusion, you’d want to make this double, or heavy cream, if you were in Britain or America respectively, since our cream in NZ is just called ‘cream’ and we don’t tend to have divergence into ‘single’ or ‘double’.

Why can’t we all just get along?

Appalling lack of culinary unity aside, 1 litre/four cups cream will yield around 400-500 grams of butter. You’ll also get about 250mls/1 cup of gorgeous buttermilk. Where the rest goes, I don’t know. I can’t pretend I know much about science, which I suspect could go some way to explaining this conundrum.

The second rule of making butter is: Keep going. Don’t stop when it looks like this picture below.

Why yes, when I make stuff by hand I mean by hand. A somewhat deranged venture, I grant you, whisking a litre of cream into stiff peaks. But my justification was, if I was going to make butter I might as well really do it, not remove myself from any of the process. Just as I love kneading bread by hand, not in a machine, so it follows that whisking cream doesn’t really bother me.

I do use the electric beaters, it’s just when all’s said and done, and you’ve finally found the machine in the bottom draw with the potatoes and onions, located the beater that fell behind the oven and the other one which was behind the pots and pans, sitting quietly in a plastic chinese take-out container, it’s probably quicker and easier just to grab a whisk.

The third rule of making butter is: It involves a degree of messiness.

At some point it will separate – often quite suddenly – into tight, nubbly little curds, and thin, whitish buttermilk. At this stage you want to drain off the liquid – don’t throw it away though, it can be used in baking, or soup, or you could actually drink it – and I found it pays to squeeze out the curds themselves into the receptacle for the buttermilk as they hold a lot of liquid.

At this stage, you cover the butter-to-be in water and knead it – that’s right – then discard the water, repeating this until the water stays clear while you’re kneading it. I understand this step helps to make it last longer.

From here you can keep the butter as is, or knead in some salt. In New Zealand 99% of our butter comes salted, it doesn’t taste salty in the slightest, just a little…fuller. Nevertheless it’s what I’m used to so it’s what I did. Like all the hip young things these days, I too have some pink Himalayan salt (gifted to me by one discerning Santa Claus) which I carefully kneaded into the primrose yellow lump of dairy – about 1 1/2 teaspoons. Go easy at this stage because you can always add more salt later.

And then…

Cue the Halleluja chorus. Using only two ingredients – fresh New Zealand cream and Himalayan salt, I made actual butter. It’s really that colour too – I don’t know where all the yellow hides when it’s in cream form, but you whip it up and suddenly it changes colour. That night I made scones using the buttermilk, and the taste of the butter melting slowly onto the tender scones was spectacular. Please note the adorable pink silicone container, which is actually a mini loaf dish, a birthday present from my aunty Lynn, as was the pink silicone mini heart which I used to make my couer-a-la-beurre at the start of this post.

So as you can see making your own butter is easy, so easy that you can make some and suddenly get an inflated ego and entertain fanciful notions of your blog being turned into a movie starring Hollywood heavyweights and indie flick darlings.

Speaking of things that are wildly important to me: If you happen to be in the vicinity of the good village of Otaua tomorrow, please visit the Mighty Otaua Village Garage Sale at the Otaua Village Hall (established in 1985!). This is by no means limited to people of Otaua, if you are from Waiuku, Tuakau, Pukekohe, any nook or cranny in the wider Franklin region, heck, if you’re anywhere in the Waikato why not make a scenic trip down to Otaua. You can (a) scout out some ridiculously cool bargains in a recession-tastic manner, and (b) support a tiny village who are trying their best to fight against the ugliness of WPC Ltd who want, of all ill-conceived ideas, to relocate their waste oil treatment plant to Otaua Village.

If you can’t make it to Otaua then why not shake your fist at WPC Ltd and the potentially devastating effects of their aims in a virtual way by watching the song on youtube that my father wrote (and videoed!) to protest their actions. For those of you that have been reading this blog for a while, this venomous typing will probably come as no surprise, but for those of you who are newcomers to this strange land, check out the Otaua Blog for the full rundown on the ignorance of WPC Ltd. Ugh, it’s totally ruined my butter high just thinking about them – I’m typing all angrily, hitting the keys hard – I feel like I’ve just seen some margarine or something – so let’s try to keep it positive: get yourselves down to Otaua Village for the sure-to-be-awesome Garage Sale.

It has been a busy week – on Monday Tim and I saw Dylan Moran (of Black Books fame) who was, despite being visibly weary as so many stars are by the time they get to New Zealand on their tours, deliriously funny. We were fortunate enough to meet him at the stage door afterwards, he said no photos but signed our ticket happily enough. On Wednesday we were at Bodega for Okkervil River, who were delightful, friendly, generous of encore. The venue, however, was troublingly warm. So warm that I could barely concentrate, let alone applaud. On top of that, work has been pretty manic and suddenly it’s Friday already. Which is why I was glad to get home early and bunker down with some chicken noodle soup away from the cold tonight.
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On Shuffle while I wrote this:

Blank Generation, by Richard Hell and the Voidoids, from the album Blank Generation
Santa Fe, from the Rent Original Broadway Cast Recording
Central Park by Mark Kudisch from the See What I Wanna See Original Cast Recording (Kudisch can currently be seen on Broadway’s 9 to 5, rocking a moustache like he was born wearing it.)

Next time: Well, Tim and I are both graduating on Tuesday, which is very exciting, so I may be relatively quiet until then. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. Peace.

the show must go on

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Take a deep breath. If you were at the Wellington Food Show over the weekend, you’d be needing the deep breaths anyway, because no doubt all the pesto and organic ice cream and free range bacon has rendered the passage of air from the heart to the lungs and back again a little slow and laboured. And if you weren’t there, you’ll need the extra oxygen because this is going to be one heck of a post: it’s my annual Food Show Review (well, I did one last year, and in these uncertain, Gen-Y-ruled, recession-at-your-heels times, doing something more than once is quite enough grounds to call it a tradition.)
Perhaps a little ill-advisedly, Tim and I turned up at to the Westpac Stadium – known affectionately/derisively as “the cake tin” due to its severely grey round shape – at about 10.30am and stayed there until 6pm. You could say we got our money’s worth out of the place. You could say we are lunatics. You could say many things. We wouldn’t have answered, because our mouth would have been too full of food samples.
Here’s a few of my favourite things (and my apologies to any of the following businesses, I’m no Ellen Degeneres so don’t expect a wild upturn in sales of your product as a result of my grainy photography and almost-witty comments…on the other hand I think my blog is awesome and frankly you could do worse than to be recommended by me.)
In order of how the photos were stored on my hard drive…
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I’ll be honest. I don’t have an ice cream maker, but I make ice cream all the time. I’m sure there is some kind of pact amongst ice-cream-maker-makers, to convince you that you can’t possibly create something worth eating if you haven’t churned it in an expensive piece of machinery. Bollocks, I say. They just tell you that so you buy their products. And further to this, I think the ice cream I make at home tastes better than any shop-bought ice cream I’ve ever tasted, even better than the well known, celebrated gourmet brands in New Zealand as well as the more commercial juggernaut types.
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Except… Kohu Road ice cream is the very best, non home-made ice cream I’ve ever tasted. And so it should be, at $17 a litre (luckily the samples were free and plentiful!) and I know it’s crass to mention the price when they are a small company, who use local produce and are commited to the environment but…that’s very expensive. But – how do I put this – you can taste every dollar. You can taste the golden syrup, the bergamot, the subtle differences between their milk chocolate and dark chocolate flavours. Buy this, savour it slowly, perhaps with one other lucky person, don’t for goodness sake eat it while watching TV, and you’ll realise that there is some merit in having a little of something astoundingly delicious rather than 2 litres of something cheap, full of colouring and preservatives and unnatural fats and not much else.
As well as this, the people at the Kohu Road stall were lovely, including the highly pleasant Greg Hall who was more than happy to allow me to photograph the ice cream, and the rest of the people working there who never so much as glared at me even though I returned multiple times to sample all the delectable flavours…
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Many a nip of this utterly delightful New Zealand made lemon liqueur was had on our travels round the stadium. The friendly people at the Lemon-Z stall were more than happy to refill our tiny glasses and also added a splash of cranberry which made a delicious drink of complex tanginess. But my favourite was just the limoncello on its own – this particular brand is smooth, not in the slightest bit acrid, and delightfully, utterly lemony. And also triumphant – you can see on their website how many awards this has won internationally. I long to pour it over vanilla ice cream…
I don’t like beer. Can’t stand it. I haven’t yet found the best way to explain what it is I don’t like about it – the harsh taste, the strident bubbliness, the weird after-bitterness, I don’t know.
I kind of loved this stuff though. I don’t think I could drink huge amounts of it, but that is no indication of its quality – as I said, I’m just not a beer person. If you are a beer person, however, please look them up. Not only is it made without additives or preservatives, it’s made with certified organic Artesian water and comes in such alluring flavours as Manuka honey and Feijoa, as well as classic Artesian. And the people at the Mata Beer stand were fantastically friendly. It made me wish I could drink more beer, which is honestly not a thought I often entertain…(that’s a compliment by the way)
Look at all those jams lined up, twinkling like jewels…Barker’s as a brand has long been associated with fruity things in New Zealand, but of particular interest to Tim and I at the food show were their range of no-added-sugar jams. According to the website this means they can’t legally be termed jam, to which I say: oooh, subversive! With 99% fruit content, a card-carrying diabetic like Tim can hardly go wrong. As well as being worthy these jams are also delicious, but with all that fruit in there taking up the space that sugar and artificial flavours take up in other jams, how could they not be?
I only tried this briefly, but was entranced. Normally I like to make my own marinadey-rub-saucy stuff but I realise not everyone is as militant as I. At Raymond’s stall was a range of flat mushrooms, each swimming appealingly in its own individual marinade for the tasting. I tried the Persian one and it was gorgeous – enticingly warm and spicy, which contrasted beautifully with the juicy, meaty mushrooms.
Avocado oil is special, and this Grove Avocado Oil is some of the finest avocado oil that I’ve had the pleasure of dipping a piece of bread into. It’s actually delicious stuff – rich but not cloying, mellow and flavoursome and, you can hardly tell from my hastily taken photo, the most gorgeous, luminous verdant green colour.

7. The Wright Sprouts (so organic that they don’t even have a website!)

I guess it goes without saying that I’d be into sprouts. Since I’m also a known lover of the rolled oat and the lentil. But whatever, I say, these are really, really good. And I don’t mean just “good for, you know, sprouts”, I mean good. Crunchy, wholesome, light, crisp, juicy, leafy tasting sprouts are what the Wright Sprout people do and they do it well. And they gave me an extra bag for free (now I have five bags of sprouts!) so in my mind they can do no wrong.
As I said earlier, I’m one of those cooking freaks who likes to make their own stuff, but if you are like the 99% of people who don’t have the time or the inclination to make lime curd, then I can wholeheartedly recommend the stuff that St Andrews Limes makes. The lime curd itself is wonderfully tangy and full-flavoured with a particularly beautiful texture, that so many other commercial brands get wrong. Also in their impressive lineup of products is a saffron infused lime curd – intense in flavour and deeply golden in colour – and Lime Burst, which they describe as an “eggless aioli”. It is sour and salty and seriously addictive (you’re allowed to sample the products at the food festival but I wanted to run off with the jar and drink this stuff.) All products are gluten free and made without additives or preservatives – bravo! And their website features all manner of enticing recipes.
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I ate about a kilo of each type of sausage that they had on display. I don’t think they’re organic or sustainable or anything like that but their sausages are ridiculously good and sometimes that outweighs everything. Don’t hate me.
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Also there’s something about the word “smallgoods” that makes me giggle. We were there for seven hours, okay?
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I left this till last because frankly, words fail me when it comes to even attempting to describe the deliciousness of the Canaan cheeses and yoghurts. The yoghurt surpassed any I’ve ever tried – including in Europe – thick, soft and voluptuous in texture and creamy yet tangy in flavour. I ended up buying four pots of the stuff. Don’t even get me started on their halloumi. For those of you who don’t know, halloumi is a special type of cheese that holds its shape when pan-fried. And as with the yoghurt, the Canaan brand is quite the nicest I’ve ever had, quickly fried on the spot in front of me and handed on a toothpick by the charming people at the stall. All the cheeses are Kosher, made with vegetarian rennet and without preservatives. I have nothing but praise for this company and frankly there’s little I’d rather do right now than lock myself into a room with nothing but a vat of their strawberry yoghurt and a spoon for company. Buy some, and soon!
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Honourable mention must go to the Petone House of Knives, whose lovely representatives managed to charm me into buying a potato ricer when I wasn’t even entirely sure that I needed one; the fantastic Freedom Farms bacon being given out by the good people at the SPCA; Tim was happy as a clam with his 5 containers of Kono Mussels for $10 (including Manuka Smoked ones); and the good people at Lindt who were handing out the faint-makingly wonderful white chocolate Lindor balls with gay abandon; the fragrant LemonFresh Pantry Essentials stall who handed out beautiful little cakes and whose stall I could have stood by inhaling all day; and the SeJuice Feijoa juice which was just…perfect.
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We also managed to take in a presentation by charismatic NZ fabulosity Peta Mathias, who enrobed shrimps in yoghurty marinade and potatoes in ghee while telling us tales of the cuisine of Rajasthan. She finished by singing La Vie En Rose by Edith Piaf to one of the event organisers, which was bewildering but also touching…I was disappointed that my favourite Cuisine magazine writer, Ray McVinnie, was only presenting on the Friday and Saturday, but perhaps next year…I was also disappointed that we didn’t win the Electrolux fridge. I just was.
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So there you have it. This is by no means a comprehensive review – (it’s ad hoc, as I say when I’m at the office) – and there were many other fantastic companies presenting food. It wasn’t perfect – it felt as though there were slightly less exhibitors this year, although I’m not one of nature’s gaugers so I could be wrong. In spite of heaters blasting at intervals (usually near wide open doors) the venue was pretty freezing. And again, the lack of Ray McVinnie on Sunday was a little dampening. But on the whole it was one heck of a day, opening my eyes to a range of new, exciting products and of course, enabling me to partake in one of my favourite hobbies, sampling free food.
On Shuffle while I’m writing this:
For once, no Broadway, but instead a mix of Okkervil River tunes as we’re going to see them tomorrow night and I want to get in the zone.
That said, I have also listened to Birdhouse In Your Soul, by the beautiful Kristin Chenoweth and Ellen Greene, from the soundtrack to the equally beautiful Pushing Daisies soundtrack, oh, 18 times this evening…
Next time: I make my own butter. Lovingly.

shank goodness

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Breaking News: IT’S CURRENTLY LESS THAN 48 HOURS TILL THE FOOD SHOW (actually it already started today, but I’m going on Sunday, and I’m hopeless at maths and can’t actually figure out specifically how much less than 48 hours it is away so…momentum sustained!) I have blog business cards at the ready and my camera batteries charged and once at the event I will blog…hard.

We Wellingtonians are lucky folk. Sure, Auckland gets EVERYTHING, but we have Moore Wilson’s food warehouse, which is superior to any food place I’ve ever been. And friend, I have been food places.

That said, I popped in there casually last Sunday, looking for quinces and brisket – you know, the usual basics – and found neither. Being as Moore Wilson’s is well on the other side of town from where I live I decided I wasn’t leaving without buying something to make the trip worthwhile and, in that sort of daze that ensues after walking a long distance and contemplating how long it will take you to get back home again, I ended up purchasing some succulent, happy farm-raised lamb shanks and a bag of organic pearl barley. The brisket I wanted for a recipe I saw in the latest Cuisine magazine, the publication of my heart, but with shanks in hand an idea of my own materialised quickly…

(Speaking of quinces, I hope I haven’t missed their season. I understand it lasts from about 7.40am May 1st to 4.20pm May 10th, well in the Southern Hemisphere at least.)

Lamb Shanks with Marsala, Tomatoes, and Borlotti Beans

A few things you should know prior to the recipe reading experience:

1- I made this up on Sunday, so it hasn’t been thoroughly tested or anything.
2- The lamb shanks came in a pack of three, even though lambs have four legs. Can anyone explain this as it has been preventing me from focussing on more important things in life.
3-This type of casserole is very low-maintenance, feel free to add other things to it. This is just what I did…

In a large casserole dish, place two onions, finely sliced, four cloves of garlic, also finely sliced, and two carrots, chopped into batons. On top of this, place your lamb shanks. Pour over 125 mls dry Marsala, 400 mls water, and a tin of chopped tomatoes. Add a couple of bay leaves, place the lid on top, and bake at 160 C for an hour or two. About half an hour before you’re ready to serve, rinse a tin of borlotti beans and add this to the casserole dish, stirring a little. You may need to add a little butter and flour rubbed together to the liquid, which will thicken the sauce as it cooks in the oven. Serve as you like – over rice, couscous, potatoes, or as I did, wet polenta.

Is there a word for the moment where you’re stirring your polenta and you taste it to see if it’s done – if all the grit has cooked into delicious softness – and in doing so you burn the roof of your mouth? I bet the Italians have, like, thirty ways to describe this.

Above: No false modesty here – these lamb shanks were really good. I don’t think you could go wrong with the ingredients though, so maybe culinary conservativeness on my part was the reason it turned out so well. The meat straddled a pleasing crossroads, being partly melt-off-the-bone tender and partly maintaining enough reassuring ‘bite’ to it, to ensure it didn’t lose its identity in the dish entirely. Marsala is amazing, adding its reliably fabulous flavour to the whole shebang. And the borlotti beans held their own, providing an earthy counterpoint to the sweetness of the meaty young shanks and the creaminess of the polenta.

By the way, I LOVE polenta. I make it in an unorthodox way (if you’re Italian, cover the eyes of any young children around and avert your own) in that I add the cornmeal to the water while it’s cold, stir till smooth, and then heat that mixture to the boil. It’s just that I haven’t mastered the art of adding the cornmeal to boiling water without it siezing up in unforgiving, solid clumps that will not be whisked out. And there are few things more depressing than lumpy polenta.

The next day, inspired by a post on the lovely Sarah’s blog (when I say inspired, I think I read the post around six month ago) I used the leftover lamb shanks in a risotto.

I sauteed two chopped onions and a couple of cloves of chopped garlic, then added carnaroli rice (actually I accidentally dropped the bag into the pan, spilling out quite a lot of rice grains. This is not the method I recommend you take. Chronic clumsiness + obscenely expensive artisinal rice = howls of pain). After stirring this for a bit, I poured in a generous slosh of Noilly Prat – from the bottle pictured in my header picture, come to think of it – and then stirred in the tomatoey sauce from the lamb shank dish, and plenty of water, stirring till the rice absorbed it. I carried on in this fashion – add liquid, stir, absorb, etc, and then finally chopped up all the remaining meat off the third shank and folded it into the risotto, whose grains of rice had now swollen puffily to absorb the meaty, winy, tomatoey juices.

Is there an Italian word for that thing where you eat so much risotto in the process of making it – bearing in mind that you have to stand there stirring it for at least half an hour – that by the time it gets to eating the finished product for dinner you’re not really hungry? From what I nibbled stoveside, it was delicious, a really hearty, wholesome, heftily flavoursome dinner. So thankyou Sarah for the inspiration, now that the opportunity has finally arisen! I should point out that Sarah went on to make leftover leftover-stew-risotto risotto cakes, however I cannot even attempt to achieve those dizzy heights of food recycling.

Speaking of Wellington, if you’re ever lurking near the Terrace (ie, the office building hub of the city) I can thoroughly recommend the coffee at Rise, where my work team had a little farewell lunch for a beloved colleage. I hate goodbyes but I loved Rise. The service was impeccable – attentive but not creepy, sassy but not rude. She’s a fine line. The food was excellent, if a little on the expensive side, but you could tell it wasn’t scooped out of a vat out the back (and if it was, they did a fine job of disguising the fact). And, as I said, the coffee – in this case a long black – was perfect.

Rise Cafe
90 The Terrace (straight across the road from the top of the Woodward St Stairs)
Wellington City
04-472 2400
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On Shuffle while I was writing this:
1: A Thousand Beautiful Things/Beautiful Day – by the fantastic Julia Murney at Birdland, one of the few people I’d trust to take on Annie Lennox…can be found on her album I’m Not Waiting
2: Deborah – T-Rex, from John Peel: A Tribute
3: I’m Straight – Modern Lovers, from their eponymous album, which I finally found after a long search this year. It’s surprisingly elusive…
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Next time: I’m blogging the Wellington Food Show. Well, someone has to – last year when I did it I got the blankest stares from most of the people running the booths, and I’m endeavouring to change that. It’s nothing heroic, mostly self-promotion, but nevertheless something I feel strongly about. Also I have this urge to make butter from scratch and bought myself a litre of cream with which to do so.