What I’ve been up to lately…

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I have taken a lot of photos of things I have been cooking over the last week or so to build up a collection for this blog. In order to get up to speed, I thought I’d post a few below. Hopefully it doesn’t take too long for y’all to load the pictures…

Chicken Gougere: from the Supersavers book. I made this for dinner last Friday. It consists of a circle of choux pastry in which you put sauteed chicken and vegetables (the sauce of which is mysteriously addictive – I’m amazed there was enough left by the time I’d finished “tasting it to check the seasoning”) I guess choux pastry does seem a little deranged for Friday night dinner after work, but, well, I love what Nigella calls “putskying” round in the kitchen and if you are gonna make pastry, choux surely looks the most impressive for the limp stirring it requires to make. This was really delicious, and supposed to serve 6 – worryingly, Tim and I polished it all off while watching the Simpsons.


Above: Chicken Gougere, darl.

Gingerbread Muffins: from Nigella’s Feast. I had a bad head cold a couple of weeks ago (which I haven’t quiiiite managed to shake off) and as a result lost my sense of smell. I mean, I had my nose in the Rawleighs, in my bag of star anise that Mum and Dad got me, in the jar of crushed garlic (which I really don’t like actually) and I couldn’t smell anything. Nada. Not a sausage. Hence the fact that I cooked a lot of chilli and curry that week. I also made these wondrous muffins of Nigella’s, because I had a hankering to bake and thought that the heavily spiced ingredients might break through my nasal passages of steel. They didn’t but they had, er, a lovely texture. Tim and flatmate Kieran raved about them though, so when I got my sense of smell and thus my sense of taste back, I made another batch. Oh boy, was it worth the wait. Heady with cinnamon, cloves, and ginger (naturally) and made dense with golden syrup, these are fantastic. Will have to make some next time I’m up home. By the way the photo below isn’t so much to show you the muffins as to show our kitchen table in a very, very rare state of cleanliness.


Above – Gingerbread muffins…on a clean table!

Pasta with Asparagus, Lemon, Garlic and Parsely – Nigella’s Forever Summer. Made this because asparagus was going cheap at 4 Square down the road, and asparagus is one of those foods that seems to herald the arrival of warmer weather. It was hosing down the night that I made this, but whatever. I served it with some chorizo that I had bought ridiculously cheap at the Food Show earlier this year (well, we wouldn’t have chorizo otherwise) You may notice that it is made with macaroni, which I’m pretty sure isn’t exactly what Nigella had in mind…but we were out of penne. Either way it tasted lovely, but didn’t look as nice as it would have had it been made with something more upmarket…


Above: Note the flash salt! As Kieran would say, “What is this, France?”

Also, just thought that I should point out that I made a South African mince dish for dinner the other night, from the New Zealand Cookbook, called Bobotie. Now, this recipe was an adaptation, and I adapted it further, so I wouldn’t want to serve it to the ambassador of South Africa or anything but…it was delicious! Quite unusual, with the inclusion of curry powder, worcester sauce, sultanas, turmeric, vinegar, apricot jam (I used some quince jam I’d made earlier this year) and milk-soaked bread. You then put it in a loaf dish, cover with beaten eggs, and bake. The thing is…it looks kind of gross. It tastes good but…the camera doesn’t love it. Hence the description sans picture. I was very pleased with this on the whole though, as I am always on the lookout for ‘new’ interesting mince recipes.

Do You Remember The First Time?

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Asked Jarvis Cocker of Pulp in their song of the same name. I thought it would be rather pleasing for my first post here (not counting the long winded introduction below!) to be about the first ever Nigella recipe I made, which I recreated for dinner the other night. I was about 14 or 15 when I first saw her TV show Nigella Bites and while I didn’t quite have an epiphany involving God-beams, I was pretty enthralled and had never really come across what we might now call a “celebrity chef” with such passion and such a way with words. Jamie Oliver was the big thing at the time and I found him interesting but too…frantic. Nigella was different.

Anyway, one of the things she made was this gorgeous looking creation called lemon linguine which I attempted for dinner that night using (cringe!) a can of reduced cream instead of the real thing, as it was all we had. It still tasted fantastic and since then I guess Nigella was destined to be part of my life. So, in the interest of having a nice starting point for my blog, and because I had all the ingredients to hand, I made it for dinner the other night. Was going to serve as is before remembering that well-meaning relatives would see the picture and so hastily boiled up some brocolli that our flatmate Stefan brought back for us from his parents’ orchard in Hawkes Bay.


Lemon Linguine with brocolli!

Welcome to my blog!

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Aka, an outlet for my desire to talk about food, or the ultimate procrastination tool.
I thought long and hard and asked for the brutally honest opinion of those around me before getting started with this – for one thing, does the world need another food blog? There are millions! With really classy photographs as well! What on earth do I have to offer the world?

For one thing I think the perspective of a student living on a budget could be interesting. Okay, so not every student’s budget allows for pink peppercorns, cardamom pods and Boyajian orange oil but…For another thing, when I was living overseas I loved writing about what I had been up to and emailing it out to friends and family who were, to my surprise and delight, only too happy to hear what I had to say (at great length more often than not – as some wit said, “If I’d had more time I’d have written a shorter letter.”) As I am flatting in Wellington now and going to uni, there isn’t so much call for me to send out massive epistles, so perhaps this blog can be a natural transition – presuming people are interested in what I have been having for dinner (and trust me, I’ll tell you about it anyway.)

Anyway, my hopes for this blog is that people will actually read it, that it will be fun to read, and that it will bring something new to the world of cooking blogs, without being an extended love letter to Nigella Lawson (I use non-Nigella cookbooks sometimes!). The title itself is a little tongue in cheek – there was a long period of time last year where pretty much all we ate was rice, but things are easier now that we are in a slightly less dodgy flat. It is also a line in a song from one of my favourite musicals, Rent, (I don’t know why, but I am always embarrassed to admit I love this) and seems to embody the whole student aesthetic rather snappily.

Cooking dinner is certainly one of the things I look forward to most (interjection from Tim in a hopeful voice: “apart from coming home from work to see me?”) and, as Nigella Lawson (well, who else?) says in Feast, “How we eat and what we eat lies at the heart of who we are – as individuals, families, communities.”

When it comes down to it, what I have been up to lately and what I have been cooking are often the same thing.

And thus, my entry into the world of blogging begins.