It’s Gonna Be A Happy New Year…

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I’ve been joyfully camping in the great outdoors for the past few days and will return soon, this being just a brief respite for those modern wonders – high pressure showers, the sound of a flushing loo, the internets. The camping I do is nothing too taxing though – I’ve never drunk so many gin and tonics nor eaten so much blue cheese in my life and yesterday I read one and a half books in the space of a sunny afternoon. The only footwear I brought with me are jandals and ugg boots, so there’s no fear I might have to go hiking anywhere. Yes, that sort of camping. My whanau have been going to this particular beach yearly since I was but a wee baby and in coldest, rainiest July (remember, New Zealand’s seasons are opposite to the Northern Hemisphere) I think of camping with longing. I’m certainly not going to reveal where it is that we go however, it’s already far too crowded. (Anyone who has seen the Outrageous Fortune Christmas special episode will understand – “This is our spot!”)


Christmas itself was a jolly affair, with several dishes from Nigella Christmas making their debut successfully. It is this time that I really love though, when it’s neither this-year-nor-last-year and all I have to do is lie about in the shade – being pale as I am – and re-read beloved novels. I have also been reading lots of newspapers and magazines as they appear and have noticed that they all seem to have a round up of the years events. I was planning on doing my own recap of the year, and I typed it all out, but got to November (I know, so close) and suddenly got bored and did an abrupt volte-face on my idea. However who could forget this moment:

Just before the faint-makingly good Rufus Wainwright concert in February, Tim and I met Siobhan Marshall and Antonia Prebble, who play Pascelle and Lorette West respectively on Outrageous Fortune, the best New Zealand TV show there is (and I mean that in a straight up way, not a damning-with-faint-praise way).

Another exciting moment- in April, my first ever photo accepted to Tastespotting.com, that wonderfully inspiring website that can be something of a necessary evil to food bloggers. I wish I could say that my blog would have been as successful without it but frankly I don’t think it would have. Either way, this shot of a spoonful home made creme fraiche made it on there which was a huge boost to my confidence as a blogger.

And of course, Oscar the kitty and his death-defying faceplanting skills was there to boost morale at regular intervals.

There are a million other things I could have included here (these are just the photos I have handy) but the point is, it has been a long, varied and at times arduous year. As all years are in their own way, I suppose. I’ll be back in Wellington and cooking up a storm soon enough, and this place will once again resemble a fully-functioning food blog. I tend not to go in for wild revelry at this time of year, in fact sometimes I wish I could skip New Years altogether because that whole, desperate, “we must have FUN” thing can be all too stressful, and I prefer to have fun on my own terms rather than at the dictation of the calendar. All that Scrooge-ness aside, I sincerely hope all my readers have a fantastic time wherever you end up, and that 2009 heralds a vaguely more optimistic time for us all. Anyone have any New Years resolutions they plan on actually sticking to? At this stage nothing has really occurred to me personally, but I’d be interested to hear any – especially the more obscure. Has anyone here resolved to put on weight? To speak in an affected French accent for at least a month? To dye their hair a different colour each week? To take up carpentry? Do tell, and do have a safe start to the coming year.

PS – title quoted from RENT…what else?

Seasons of Love

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Because it seems to be the done thing in blog-land these days: Merry Christmas y’all. Or happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa…or even just happy nonstop-cheesy-movies-on-TV-season. Whatever you may or may not be celebrating right now I hope everyone has a grand old time and I’ll see you again soon.

Fruit ‘Em Up

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Christmas shopping: 3 Laura: -100,000,000,003.
I’ve attempted to Christmas shop every weekend for the last month and have ended up with very little to show for myself. I know it’s not all about the gifts, but after a lifetime of getting presents for my family, I can’t just stop now because I can’t find much of anything. I have one weekend left to scour Wellington for trinkets. Wish me luck. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one in this sorry boat.

Melodrama aside, we have been eating remarkably well lately because, to my endless happiness, summer fruit and vegetables are finally getting cheap, properly cheap, at the local market. I’ve eaten more fresh fruit in the last two weeks than I have all year and I am loving it. Strawberries for $2 a punnet, and three mangoes for a dollar more than makes up for six months eating uncrisp apples and canned peaches. Not that canned peaches don’t have a special place reserved in my heart, but there is something so exciting about summer fruit.

Vegetables too – I finally got my hands on some of those sugar snap peas that everyone talks about, $1.50 for a big bag (but they cost $4.95 for about 6 beans in the supermarket), a whole bag of red, swollen tomatoes for a dollar, bunches of asparagus for a song, and the top story in my world this week, beetroot has gotten really really cheap again.

Inspired vaguely by an orzotto in Nigella Christmas, I wrapped two large beetroot in tinfoil and roasted them at 200 C for about 45 minutes. While that was happening, I did the usual risotto thing – sauteed onion and garlic in butter, added vermouth, let the arborio rice sizzle (I know, arborio is the least culinarily desirable of the risotto rices but it’s also the cheapest), and ladled in vegetable stock, stirring all the while. I diced up the now soft and roasty beetroot and folded it into the risotto, which promptly turned the whole thing a garish (but pleasing!) pink and made the frozen peas which I’d added seem particularly green in contrast. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: pink goes good with green. A spoonful of sour cream and a sprinkling of basil from the garden finished off this almost ridiculously colourful dinner. Bright? It’s phosphorescent! And delicious too, but any reader of this blog will already know that I am a fan of the beetroot from way back.

We always seem to have a swag of overripe bananas kicking round. And, I’d found myself a very cheap ring cake tin at the Newtown Salvation Army store and was amped to make something in it. I’m not going to even try and present this cake to you as if it’s anything new and revolutionary, but who could possibly turn up their nose at a slice? I based the recipe on the Banana Breakfast Ring in Feast by Nigella Lawson. It’s a little more spongy and springy than your trad banana cake, but still moist and delicious and very simple to make. And is it just me being irrational, or are ring cakes way easier to slice up than normal ones?

Banana Cake

60g butter, melted
3-4 ripe bananas, mashed
2 eggs
150g brown sugar
50g white sugar
250g flour (I actually used 200g flour and 50g cornflour, but whatevs)
1 t each baking soda and baking powder
2 heaped tablespoons sour cream



Mix everything together gently, bake in a buttered and floured ring tin for about 45 minutes at 180 C. I iced it with a mix of butter, icing sugar and cocoa and it was perfect. Some kind of lemony icing would be equally marvelous, I’m sure. The cake may or may not keep well, it didn’t really sit round long enough for me to find out.

Well, well, well. Wellity wellity wellity. I hope to get another post in before Christmas, it has been quite slow here lately but my excuse about the slow computer still stands. Conversely, time is going so fast. I finish work for the year on the 23rd and then shall commence the annual war with my luggage in that (a) I have to cram everything in and (b) I have to pay exorbitant excess baggage fees on my flight home because they weigh too much, apparently saying bitterly, “Hey lady, it’s Christmas!” doesn’t really help the situation. Even though I’m only just getting home this side of the big day I hope to fit in a ridiculous amount of goodie-baking. New Years will be very quiet for me, and Tim will be in Wellington working through at Starbucks, but we will be hitting the ground running come 2009. In a matter of weeks -admittedly, several weeks- we will be seeing Neil Young and goodness knows who else at the Big Day Out, Arctic Monkeys (that’s right, we bought tickets to their Wellington gig even though they’ll be at Big Day Out), Kings of Leon AND The Who. Oh yes.

I haven’t been on Twitter for a while, once again the slowness of the computer prevents such frivolousities, but here are some random thoughts:

– I heard my neighbour singing the other day. Does this mean they heard me singing Defying Gravity while no-one else was home?

– What did we use for the saying “recharge your batteries” before the advent of electricity? Did people take mini-breaks or book facials because they needed to “stoke their coalrange” or somesuch?

– I wonder if Leonard Cohen ever got called Leotard as a child. Admit it. Now you’re wondering too.

Macaroon-age Daydream

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Apologies for the long gap between posts but I’m sure everyone else is just as busy as me if not wildly more so, what with the approaching Christmas and economy and global warming to worry about. Not helping is the fact that my computer has been monstrously slow of late. It took about five goes to upload my photos without the entire thing having a nervous breakdown, and you don’t even want to know how many frustrating minutes it took to even get to the point where I can type here. Using that same excuse, I apologise deeply if I haven’t been reading as many blogs as I should – I wish I could keep up with them all but my computer would require smelling salts and a cold compress. Now, seeing how this is the time of year that office parties and such become more prevalent, why not gaze upon this bowl of antioxidants as inspiration for what to do should you wish to engage in a little, um, oxidanting?

Above: You know that fruit that you get at markets sometimes that they sell for reeeally cheap because it needed to be eated ten minutes ago? Well I bought myself a bushel of the stuff on Sunday and using Nigella’s Antioxidant Fruit Salad from Nigella Christmas as a starting point, made myself an incredibly gorgeous breakfast. A slightly wilting mango was sliced into a bowl – the whole thing – followed by some strawberries, sliced and tumbled over, chopped mint from the garden and a handful of pomegranate seeds, lovingly harvested from a tupperware container in the freezer. Not pictured, but unbelievably essential, is a sprinkling of pistachio nuts, which gave the most fabulous contrast in textures and tastes, their waxy, almost chocolatey creaminess next to the zingy acidity of all that fruit. I added them at the last minute as an afterthought, but they completely made the salad.
Such are my mad domestic goddess skillz that I managed to whip up these chocolate macaroons while making the Christmas Dinner last week, obviously they aren’t the echt article from Pierre Hermes, you know, faint-makingly light, requires 19 egg whites, only 3 people worldwide know the recipe – these are rather unchic, stumpy little biscuits, but no less delicious.
I guess it’s fitting that such a quick and untaxing recipe comes from Nigella Express. I took them into the office the next day for a colleague’s birthday morning tea and they were, I’m immodestly proud to say, enormously popular. Of course, maybe people were just saying they like them because I was sitting right there. Who knows, they’re certainly easy enough to make so why not find out for yourself (although rigorous quality control in my kitchen proved that they were in fact fantastically good.)
Chocolate Macaroons
2 egg whites
200g ground almonds
30g cocoa powder
175g icing sugar
Heat oven to 200g C, and line a baking tray with paper or a silicone sheet. Mix the egg whites in a bowl with the rest of the ingredients till you have a sticky chocolatey mixture. As I said, this is very easy – no intrepid egg-white beating here. Roll the mixture into small balls and arrange on the baking tray. Bake for about 11 minutes although I took them straight out of the oven at about 8 or 9 minutes, that’s just because I get a bit nervous around biscuits – they always carry on cooking even when removed from the heat. They will be solidly chewy and densely chocolatey once cool, if you can wait that long, and are marvelous with coffee, ice cream, anything at all really.
On Monday, Tim and I went to the local Italian restaurant, Red Tomatoes, because with us both working full time and travelling round the place we’ve hardly seen each other. Red Tomatoes was recently on a New Zealand version of that Gordon Ramsey TV show where he goes into restaurants and swears a lot and then sorts out their problems. I’ve been to this place before a couple of times and it has definitely improved, in terms of decor, clarity of menu and staff attentiveness. The menu itself is not terribly adventurous, but this is not a bad thing, what is there is familiar and done well. The meals are still a little on the slow side, so don’t go there on an awkward first date. With Tim and I nattering away we barely noticed.
And the pizza is divine.

Thin, crisp, slightly chewy base…generous, piping hot toppings…lots of cheese…brilliant. Tim got the Meditteranean chicken and I got the Puttanesca and we swapped pieces as we went.

Can’t bond and connect emotionally, too busy eating own body weight in cheese.

As if cheese wasn’t exciting enough in its own right, the current economical crisis which had resulted in astronomically high prices for dairy means that eating cheese is now a hedonistic, decadently luxurious experience. They do say absense makes the heart grow fonder (and probably less clogged too, in this case.)
Next time: Who knows. Christmas is hot on my heels and I’ve barely done the dreaded but necessary shopping at all. I need a buffer month between November and December – who do you go to see about getting this sort of thing organised? And what could we call it – Lauratober?

Christmas Bells Are Ringing…

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So with all the feasting that ensued on the night of The Christmas Dinner, I entirely forgot to take a photo of the actual roast chickens. However, as the following photo essay demonstrates, there’s still plenty to see. I’m seriously exhausted, and it’s pretty late so I’m going to be dialogue-lite and let the pictures largely speak for themselves.

Above: I whipped up some pomegranate ice cream on Sunday morning, after I returned from the vege market. Literally – get it – Whipped? Cream? Okay, I told you I was tired, which is a perfectly legitimate excuse for dodgy puns.

Nigella keeps her pomegranates close and her cranberries closer. It’s a great thing that these berries are so expensive because she puts them in everything. Oh, I can’t be snide though because they really are rather Christmassy, the frozen ones looking like holly berries in thawing snow, and their fresh sourness can perk up otherwise heavy fare quite effectively.

Cornbread, Cranberry and Orange Stuffing (adapted from Feast)

This mixture is so delicious it almost didn’t make it into the chicken. Don’t for goodness sake be put off because you have to make cornbread first, it’s the easiest thing in the world and the recipe can be found here.

In a large pot, simmer 300g cranberries with the juice and zest of an orange. Add 125g butter slowly till it turns into a glossy, pinky-orange sauce, then crumble in the cornbread and stir to combine. When you’re ready to bake it, stir in 2 eggs and stuff your bird and roast, or spread it into a loaf tin and bake it at 180 for about 25 minutes.

Above: In front, Pear and Cranberry stuffing, and in the back, the cornbread stuffing. I may have made a bit extra so that they could stand in as another vegetarian dish. Inexplicably, I never liked stuffing as a child so you can see I am making up for lost time here.

I bought a brace of peppers at the market on Sunday morning and roasted them as soon as I got back. They seemed to just get silkier and more delicious as the day went on and were perfect served at room temperature, so the rich olive oil, clean fresh pomegranate, and salty caper flavours shone through vibrantly.

Chargrilled Peppers with Pomegranate (Nigella Christmas)

6 red and/or yellow peppers (although I got 7 to allow for muck-ups and nibbling-while-cooking)
Seeds from 2 pomegranates (although one is more than fine, Nigella)
2 T fresh pomegranate juice (just give the fruit a squeeze while seeding)
2 t lime or lemon juice
60ml extra virgin olive oil
15ml garlic olive oil
1/2 teaspoon Maldon sea salt
3 T drained capers


Set your oven to very, very hot – like 250 C. Cut the peppers in half, removing seeds and stalks, and place cut-side down on a baking tray. Roast in the oven till they blister – about 15 mins. Remove and carefully chuck them all into a bowl, quickly covering it with gladwrap till the peppers cool down considerably. From here it will be very easy to remove the skins – just pull them off. Tear the peppers into strips and place them in a serving bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Serve at room temperature. I made mine at about 11am and served it at 8pm, so it benefits from a bit of a sit. I just kept it covered and on the bench, although it won’t come to any harm in the fridge.

The involtini is another one that tastes best when it’s not piping hot. This turned out to be an amazing combination of flavours and textures, so much more than just a token vegetarian dish. There was hardly any left afterwards but what was there made for a luxe lunch the next day, microwaved for a bit and served with salad and leftover roast veges.

Above: The marvelously summery Sangria (and yes, we used those tacky plastic ice cube things…well, they’re practical! And this was hardly a classy joint to begin with.)

Poinsettia, a mix of cranberry juice, cointreau, and sparkling white wine (1 litre, 125 mls, and 750mls respectively) is an enchanting combination that completely owns Buck’s Fizz in terms of festive drinkability. Tip of the cap to Nigella, for all that she half-heartedly protests that she’s not much of a drinker, she can certainly navigate her way round a liquor cabinet.

The table! We managed to fit eight of us around it, not entirely comfortably though…

Above: The roasted pepper salad and boiled new potatoes with mint from our herb patch. Notice the gorgeous yellow bowl which was a Christmas present from the parents last year, and the beautiful Christmas crackers which were really way too classy for us. They contained real presents, like pens, corkscrews and measuring tapes. Nifty or what? True to form, as well as forgetting to photograph the chicken, I forgot to bring the parsnips out of the oven at all until after we finished the main course. They instead became a refreshing palate cleanser between meals, something to consider for your next dinner party perhaps…After dinner we played charming parlour games (well, we played Scattergories, is there a more satisfying game for bookish, wordy BA students to tackle?)

Drama! Tim is the only one in our flat capable of turning jelly out of a mould. He may be the only person in the world who can do it…perhaps we can never know.

The white chocolate almond cake was utterly gorgeous, although the problem with cakes that have white chocolate in them is that you quite often can’t actually taste the white chocolate as much as you’d like (who am I kidding, as much as I’d like.) So I upped the ante by drizzling over a melted milky bar, Jackson Pollock-styles (hey, I got an A in an essay about him in first year, I feel sufficiently qualified to pay homage to him via the medium of baked goods.) This is a fantastic cake for entertaining as you can make it in advance and it keeps beautifully, but looks rather impressive as far as puddings go. I’m not sure if it was supposed to rise much – or whether it has something to do with our oven – but the cake rose hugely then sunk, leaving a crevice that I filled with chopped pistachios (it was going to be silver cachous but they were $5.50 for a small cannister at New World – um, no thanks – and besides, the still-festive pistachios are actually pleasant to eat.)

Above: The official pudding table: the white chocolate almond cake, the “tortova”, pomegranate ice cream, red and green jelly, and strawberries, also virtuously purchased from the market. The chocolate torte turned out to be marvelous, somehow crisp and chewy at the same time and punctuated by welcome chunks of dark, dark chocolate.
It was altogether a fantastic meal shared with fantastic people, although it was such a shame that Emma couldn’t be there. She was however present in our minds and hopefully gets back to New Zealand asap safe and sound!
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In other news: I’m reading To Kill A Mockingbird. Tim found an old copy somewhere while dropping some stuff off at the Salvation Army, and I do love old books, (not those horrible shiny reissues with conceptual cover art) so he grabbed it for me. It was one of those that I knew I should have a look at one day, but the curmudgeon in me has this thing where the more a book is recommended to me, the more I stubbornly refuse to read it. I don’t know why, perhaps hype annoys me, but that’s certainly the reason I’ve never read The Kite Runner. Anyway, To Kill A Mockingbird is really very good, (she says condescendingly – didn’t it win the Pulitzer or somesuch?) I’m thoroughly enjoying it. I’ve also recently read Nigella Lawson’s unofficial biography, forwarded to me by the ever-thoughtful Linda. It is a cracking read, I think I devoured it in a day or two on my lunchbreaks at work but…it’s really not very well written. It quotes her cookbooks as though they were interviews – as though I don’t know them all word for word anyway – but it’s worth it for the luscious pictures of Nigella. What a beauty. I must say, it’s not a good book for the self esteem, as it constantly reiterates how goddess-like and creamy and striking she is and it can leave the reader feeling somewhat homely. I definitely recommend it for a bit of light reading though. Okay, this suddenly turned into Laura’s book corner, so I’d better get going…
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Next time: I attempt chocolate macaroons (the quick, chewy kind, not the faint-making Hermes kind) and make Ed Victor’s Turkey Hash with the scant leftover roasted chicken from the Christmas dinner.

Under Pressure

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A brief progress report on my last-minute preparations for the Christmas Dinner – which is tomorrow! – with no proper recipes yet because I don’t have time to type them out. Why? Tim and I are on our way to a seventies party. He’s dressing up as David Bowie, and after much pondering I’m going to be glam-rocking it up myself. I say pondering because it was surprisingly difficult to figure out what to dress up as (after Tim beat me to being Bowie that is). I mean, if I go as Charlie’s Angels-era Farrah, I look like Laura in trousers. If I go as Debbie Harry, I look like Laura in a dress. It goes on. I’d probably make a convincing Stevie Nicks, but I’m not a Fleetwood Mac fan and I have this feeling that you should be somehow committed to what you’re dressing up as. Stevie Nicks certainly seemed to be.

Anyway, that’s not what you came here for – you came for the close-up photos of foodstuffs! But before I get into that, we’ve had some slightly unsettling news that Emma – the gluten-free flatmate – is stuck in Bankok due to the shootings at the airport that you have probably heard about in the news. She’s on holiday there and was supposed to come back a few days ago – and then she was supposed to come back today – and now she’s not going to be back till next Wednesday. We’re all a bit nonplussed, and it’s not going to be the same without her, but the point is that she is completely safe where she is and that the show goes on.

Have I mentioned this before? You could get rapidly and dangerously inebriated if you played a little game called “Have a drink every time Nigella mentions the word ‘pomegranate’ in her latest book.” Pomegranate farmers the world over must fall on their knees and weep gratefully for Nigella because without her, the market would crumble. I know I myself, at her insistence, bought two of the oft-mentioned fruit from last week, and bashed out the seeds to freeze for later use. I couldn’t resist taking a photo of the shiny, ruby-like seeds first because they really are every bit as pretty as Nigella says. Tomorrow they will be sprinkled, with capers, onto roasted capsicum following a recipe from the aforementioned Nigella Christmas.

Today I made the involtini from Nigella Bites, and it is now stashed in the fridge ready for baking tomorrow afternoon. Although it’s quite an involved recipe – frying the eggplant slices, making the filling, rolling them up, saucing everything – it’s nothing too difficult. I adapted the recipe somewhat, only in the name of laziness – instead of making a simmered tomato sauce for these eggplant parcels, I just upended a couple of tins of chopped tomatoes over them. I’m sure Nigella would approve.

The filling, by the way, is a nubbly mix of bulghur wheat (although I substituted quinoa), feta cheese, pistachios, garlic, cinnamon and oregano. It’s bound with an egg, but I daresay without that it would make a lovely salad.

Above: Speaking of things Nigella would approve of, once it has the sauce poured over and is sprinkled with more feta and pistachios, the colours of this dish are entirely appropriate to Christmas. Doesn’t it look pretty?

Above: And of course, there’s pudding. I didn’t end up taking many photos of the making process of these because both puddings involve stressful beating of egg whites (I know, I am my own worst enemy) and I didn’t want to mess around taking photos and risk the whole lot going disastrously wrong. So all we have as proof of the White Chocolate Almond Torte – well, so far – is this picture of partially melted white chocolate. Due to my well-documented love of white chocolate it will come as no surprise that I had great difficulty refraining from burying my face in this bowl.

There’s chocolate in the other pudding – the Other Torte infact – although someone did suggest “tortova” which I think is rather sweet. This is one that you need to prep in advance for, because there’s a lot of chopped things involved – dark chocolate, walnuts, biscuits (luckily gluten-free biscuits crumble like, well, gluten-free biscuits) and dried apricots. All these are folded into a glossy meringue made from four egg whites, spread carefully into a lined 23cm caketin and baked at 180 C for about half an hour, then left to cool in the oven. I haven’t actually tasted it yet obviously so I can’t vouch for its deliciousness but it certainly smelled marvelous as it crisped up.


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I did snag a quick photo of the mix though – the things I do for you! Meringue can be a fickle beast to deal with and I certainly didn’t want to tempt fate by setting up several shots here. It waits for no one and needs to get into the oven without delay.

Next time you hear from me, the Christmas Dinner for 2008 will be over and – *faints* – it will be December already. With any luck there will also be amusing photos of Tim and I dressed up as glam rock scallywags. Actually, the nature of his multicoloured spandex jumpsuit ensures that all photos will be amusing.

Visions Of Sugarplums

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Occasionally, in the middle of the night, I’ll lie awake possessed by such thoughts as: If the year 2006 was two years ago, and I started uni in that year, how can I have finished my three year BA course this year? Don’t even try to work that one out or your brain will dissolve like baking soda in milk. But wait, there’s more. I possess an extensively vivid imagination, which is lovely if I want to write an allegorical children’s tale about a rabbit that falls in love with a whale, but it’s not so merry when I’m losing the battle with my brain which is thinking all sorts of things when I’m supposed to be asleep: New Zealand’s worst earthquake being moments away, Tim being hit by a bus, never seeing Wicked, killer pelicans enforcing their fascist regime upon us all.

At times like these, the only thing that really soothes – nay, distracts the mind, is thinking about baking. During a particularly awake moment recently, I came up with making the Breakfast Bars from Nigella Express. I had a tin of condensed milk kicking round and wasn’t sure what to do with it – caramel slice seemed too arbitrary, and for me there’s something rather seductive (culinarily speaking that is) about rolled oats, which the breakfast bars have by the truckload. And before you conclude that I’m totally batty, trust me. We’ve all been there, you know, watched the late night news, bogged down by everything going wrong in the world, unable to sleep in case you should be bottling your own urine because of the inevitable global shortage of water…just think about making cupcakes, or indeed any kind of sweet thing. It’s a bit like saying “happy place” over and over but more practical…and with cake at the end.


Breakfast Bars

1 can of sweetened condensed milk (roughly 400g)
250g rolled oats
75g shredded coconut
100g dried cranberries
125g mixed seeds (sunflower, linseed, pumpkin, etc)
125g unsalted peanuts


Preheat oven to 130 C, and oil a 23x33cm baking tin or throwaway foil tin. Warm the condensed milk gently in a pan till it is more liquid than solid. Remove from heat and then add the rest of the ingredients, stirring carefully with a spatula so everything is covered. Even out the surface, then bake for about an hour. Let cool for about 15 minutes then slice up. You should probably know that I left out the nuts, swapped the expensive cranberries for a cheaper mix of chopped dates and dried apricots, and that these do indeed make a brilliant breakfast on the run.

Above: They get better the longer they sit too. So if you can, try and hold off for a bit.

Something else keeping me up at night – but with happy anticipation – is the annual flat Christmas dinner which is going to be this Sunday. I cook the whole thing, the flat gets together with a few other usual suspects and we have a jolly meal before inevitably going our separate ways. It is always fun coming up with the menu, which this year needs to be both gluten free and vegetarian friendly as keeping with the needs of various people who will be attending. This isn’t a problem, you’d be amazed at how diverse Nigella’s recipes are…Here’s my menu concept so far:

2 roasted free range chickens
Cornbread stuffing (from Feast, with flour omitted to make it gluten-free)
Pear and Cranberry stuffing (from Nigella Christmas)
Roast pepper and pomegranate salad (from Nigella Christmas)
Involtini (eggplant dish from Nigella Bites as vegetarian main)
Honey Roasted Parsnips (from How To Eat)
Steamed new potatoes with mint from the garden
Peas
A big lettuce salad (ie, buy bag of salad leaves, upend into bowl)
Bread rolls (So Tim can have his requisite amount of carbs)

Pudding:
White Chocolate Almond Torte (Forever Summer)
Dark Chocolate, Walnut and Fruit Torte (basically a pavlova with all manner of good things stirred into it before baking…I’ve adapted the recipe from a few different places)
Sugar Free red and green jellies (which Tim will be in charge of)
Fresh fruit

I’m also going to try my hand at Poinsettia, a mix of white sparkling wine, Cointreau, and cranberry juice…the recipe is from Nigella Christmas and sounds completely drinkable…But you’ll hear more about all this later on in the week. It’s a lot more simplified than last year’s menu – just one meat course, veges which don’t need roasting (the fact that EVERYTHING needed oven space last year was a logistical nightmare) puddings that can be made in advance, and stuffings which are both vegetarian so I can roast whatever doesn’t fit inside the chickens and serve to everyone. We rarely eat chicken – probably once every 6-8 weeks, if that – well, I want to get the proper stuff when I do eat it but it’s soooo expensive – so I’m pretty excited about that.

I can’t believe it has been a whole year since the last Christmas dinner. I can’t believe it is a month till Christmas. Time to think of cupcakes again…

Banana O’Rily

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I’ve started full-time work this week, so you’ll have to forgive me if I get a little drunk on my own power and come over all megalomaniacal at you. I’ll try to keep it in check. Leonard Cohen tickets were selling on Trademe today (NZ’s Ebay-lite) for over $600, so as yet it looks like I’m really not going, and thus my dream of seeing my Canadian triumverate (Leonard, Neil, Rufus) is not quite going to come to fruition. No need to go listening to “Who By Fire” on constant loop just yet however, because I found out on the weekend – care of a certain lovely father of mine – that I’m going to be seeing The Who in March, and I am just ridiculously excited. For those of you who have been so unfortunate not to have had your ears blessed by their music…think of the CSI theme tunes. The original and the Miami and New York spin-off themes are all Who songs (who? I hear you say…)
We went to visit Tim’s parents over the weekend and they sent us back to Wellington with a large bag of ripe bananas, with which I decided to do the obvious thing and use them in some kind of cake. I made banana bread using a much-repeated recipe from Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess, a book so imbued with the spirit of baking that its very pages, were you to lick them, taste of cinnamon and nutmeg. Although that could well be because I’m so messy and schmeer batter everywhere.

It’s a non-threatening but diverting recipe, the batter spiked with luscious, rum-soaked sultanas (although I use Marsala al’uovo for preference, it’s flavour is impossible to better) and irregularly sized chunks of chopped chocolate folded through at the end. Rustic but elegant, easy to make but looks like you put in lots of effort…

Banana Bread


100g sultanas
75ml bourbon or dark rum (or Marsala, which makes it smell heavenly)
175g plain flour
2 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
125g melted butter
150g sugar
2 large eggs
4 small, very ripe mashed bananas (about 300g when peeled)
Optional – about 60g dark chocolate, chopped roughly



Put the sultanas and chosen alcohol in a small saucepan and bring to the boil, then let cool. Or, if you’re lazy like me, just zap them in the microwave. Mix the butter, sugar, eggs and bananas together, then fold in the dry ingredients. Finally, fold in the drained sultanas and chocolate and pour into a well greased and floured loaf tin. Bake at 170 C for about an hour, although it may need longer. I reserved the remaining dribble of Marsala that the sultanas had been warmed in and poured it over the cake as soon as it emerged from the oven.

Eat by the generous slabful. Not that I’d know or anything, but even if you overcook it slightly so it’s a bit too dark on top, it doesn’t seem to do any harm. In fact this cake stays serviceably moist for a couple of days after baking.

Surprise! A short, succinct post. It’s so short and lacking in banter that I don’t quite know what to do with myself, but since I’m not feeling overwhelmingly zany right now I might as well not try and force it. To be honest I’m pretty exhausted from travelling two weekends in a row and then starting full-time has been taking a lot of my brain-space. (“just because I get around”) I haven’t had any time to cook from the gorgeous Nigella Christmas yet – have hardly had time to cook at all to be honest – but I can’t wait to start chutneying it up – her chapter on homemade gifts is seriously inspiring!

Festival Medley

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I’ve been back from Christchurch for a day now, and although a little tired from travelling, I was absolutely going to update but…

I have been a trifle distracted…

By…

Nigella Christmas.

Look at her go. Did you know she’s nearly fifty?

It arrived in the mail yesterday from home – an entirely unexpected present to say congratulations for finishing university. I’ve barely been able to tear my eyes away from this book since I first opened it – it’s truly gorgeous and very Nigella – in the first few pages alone she is urging me to purchase lychee liqueur. Economic downturn – what economic downturn? It doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but there will be those who peevishly gripe at her lavish tendencies…completely ignoring the fact that, if you look beyond the blue cheese and pistachios and the pricey, difficult-to-find unguents, she has many practical, healthy and cost-effective recipes that are also very easy to execute. How else could a mere serf like me afford to cook from her books so regularly? Defensiveness aside, it is a beautiful book and I really thrilling at the thought of what I might make first from it.

I had a lovely time down south, even though Christchurch itself was not as immediately charming as Wellington. And it’s alarmingly flat compared to my hillocky adopted home. I don’t know why this bothered me…Anyway, I was working – yes, working – at the Southern Amp music festival, putting up anti-smoking signage and monitoring it throughout the event. This was a bit more full-on than it sounds, I wasn’t just swanning about watching music all day (again, excuse my defensiveness), and those posters and voluminous adshels don’t just erect themselves. Happily, I did get to see some brilliant bands, including Weta, a New Zealand band that I loved back in 2000 but sadly never got to experience much of since they broke up. For some reason they decided this was the place to get back together, and they were absolutely marvelous – all the songs sounded as cracking as they did when I was 13.

I also got to see the Charlatans…

Although whether the lead singer saw us is a whole other story. His hair was fascinating, a thick, homogenous bowl cut that clung over his eyes as though by suction. They played an all-too-brief set…perhaps they were miffed that their description in the brochure for the event described the pinacle of their achievements as a supporting slot for Oasis.

The Dandy Warhols were there, an intensely languid lot who bore the mild insult of being billed below The Living End. The Dandy’s slot was excellent as I’d forgotten how many of their songs I knew and liked, and because they played one of my favourite songs ever, the cumbersomely titled “Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth.” Jordan Luck, a New Zealand musical legend – and yes, the word is bandied about a lot these days – was brilliant live, and is looking alarmingly like Rod Stewart in his later years. You better believe I warbled tunelessly along to “Victoria”, “Who Loves Who The Most”, “I’ll Say Goodbye” and “Why Does Love Do This To Me?” Helping me at the event was a Scottish guy from work who has been in the country for a month, it was an interesting juxtaposition considering I can’t remember ever not knowing those Jordan Luck/Exponents songs whereas it was his very first time hearing them. We also managed to catch the end of Fur Patrol’s set – lead singer Julia was in fine voice and had gorgeous hair which I coveted on the spot – and finished off by seeing Dimmer, a band who have had enormous critical acclaim but who I’ve never really heard anything of. They were pretty darn brilliant, playing these enigmatic, hypnotically droning songs, while intriguing frontman Shane Carter gyrated lovingly with his guitar. And got us all joining in on a rousing, spontaneous chant of “John Key…*silence*…yeah…”

The above paragraph will possibly make little sense if you aren’t actually in New Zealand. However, as a gal who grew up in the pre-Google age, reading Baby Sitters’ Club books and wondering what on earth a Twinkie or a barrette or a Ring-Ding was, vindication I say! I do however apologise for the fact that the title will only make sense if you have some knowledge of [title of show], that much cannot be helped.

We also saw this guy: Lindon Puffin. He described himself as visually reminiscent of Morrissey…um? I can’t say his music was entirely gripping, but sweet mercy the man is funny. If you see his name at any event, try and catch him because the laughs come at you thick and fast like soft-serve ice cream. I’m from the North Island so I can only imagine how funny his jokes about Oamaru and Picton are if you’ve actually been there.

I did, I really did have a whole lot of food stuff planned for this post, seeing as it is an actual food blog and all, but frankly the photos weren’t that great – and in this bloodthirsty and friend-against-friend age of blogging, you need decent photos just to keep your head above water – and it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten what I was going to talk about. Here’s a snippet though…

So, last week sometime – or was it two neglectful weeks ago now – I roasted a large slab of piggy, following a lovely recipe in Cuisine magazine using sherry and fennel seeds. I had a prowl through my Wagamama Noodle cookbook for inspiration to use up the leftover cold pork, and following a recommendation, checked out the gyoza recipe. I ended up veering shamelessly off-course of the recipe (not least because I didn’t have any wonton wrappers) but ended up making baked spring rolls, flavoured with all kind of good things – fish sauce, ginger, sesame…If you’ve ever made rice paper rolls before – and if you haven’t, they’re not as scary as they look – you should totally try popping them in a hot oven for a while. They crisp up wonderfully but, because there’s no oil involved, are still incredibly healthy. Since the concepts of “deliciously crispy” and “virtuously healthy” hardly ever meet to shake hands, this is quite an exciting breakthrough for me.

Above: These crisp little parcels, while a little time consuming to roll up, can also be assembled well ahead of time and baked at the last minute. Did I mention that they’re good? They’re sooooo good.

Unfortunately it looks as though my dreams of seeing Leonard Cohen are not to be. The old so-and-so sold out within moments and as I was flying back from Christchurch on the day they went on sale, I completely missed out.

Next time: I promise to try and do something that actually resembles a food blog post.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

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I’m flying down to Christchurch on business early tomorrow morning, and won’t be back till Monday afternoon. I was hoping to get a post out about the roast pork I made earlier this week (I even had a punny title ready, but I’ll not reveal all my cards at once) However, Tim and I went to see the ballet Don Quixote tonight and so real life is getting in the way of blogging, as it should. I actually took ballet lessons for about thirteen or so years – long after the point where my childbearing knees and womanly shoulders and inability to reeeally pirouette made it painfully clear that I would never have a career in it. But even when it was causing my self-esteem to plummet it was still the thing that made me happiest, and I was highly excited to be immersing myself in ballet again. Don Quixote was one of the few big ballets I’ve never seen before… and it was utterly fantastic. It has been a while since I’ve seen a Royal New Zealand Ballet production, I used to go all the time in the nineties, so there was only one name I really recognised in the company – Sir Jon Trimmer. If you’re not from New Zealand you may not know who he is, but he’s not just a ballet legend, he’s just…a legend. He has been dancing with the RNZB forever and got awarded an MBE before most of you were even born. It was such a treat to see him again, playing the titular Don with great aplomb. I didn’t know the story of the ballet and for some reason was expecting it to be really dark, but it couldn’t have been a perkier time. Stunning sets, constant hilarity, the classic happy ending with multiple fouettes…I highly recommend it.

So, how ridiculously exciting was the American election? I realise that I’m probably the squillionth blogger to comment on it now, but let it be said once more: “WOOHOO!” I couldn’t be happier that Obama won. But so confusing was their system of feeding through information (ie, “this just in: Obama takes the state!…..we predict”) that I thought actually McCain had it. During Obama’s speech I was literally standing on the couch, I couldn’t remain seated. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to actually be American at that moment. It was enthralling…amazing…wonderful. Disappointing though, was that Prop 8 passed…who are these people that vote for it – that think it’s right to suppress and take rights from people for no good reason? Baffles me beyond belief.

Today I voted for New Zealand’s upcoming election. It was my first time voting – last time I was in England and had a meltdown trying to do it over the interweb – and I must admit I got a unique thrill being there in the booth. I already knew which party I wasn’t voting for – unfortunately I suspect they’ll end up being the party in power – but I read up diligently on everyone’s policies prior to making my final decision. It was exciting to think that my voice is worth something, and that whatever happens, I’ve done my part. And I felt soooo deliciously grown up.

Above: Pistachios – the loveliest nut in The Pantry…Yesterday I recieved the sad news that one of the founding members of a tight-knit online cooking forum I am part of had died. She went by the name of Pistachio and will be dearly missed by many. I never met her – she lived in Spain – and didn’t actually “know” her as well as some but I know that her presence online – and now lack thereof – will not be forgotten soon.