Tag: Ingredient: Chilli

my heart’s a tart your body’s rent

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Don’t get me wrong, everything is DIFFICULT. Life is hard. A genuine slog. I’m not even talking about in a global bees-are-dying-ice-caps-are-melting-america-is-political-hell way, I’m talking very much in the personal, up here in my head kind of context. But I’m not going to focus on that today! Lol I’m ADHD, I can’t focus on anything! Kidding: I’m instead going to talk about some lovely things that have happened, because no matter what’s happening, if you don’t stop and acknowledge good things and hold onto them they might disappear, like a dream you can’t quite remember even though you can picture frames and fragments of it. (Side note though: last night I dreamed that I composed an incredible pop punk song, and in my dream I even wrote down, well, not the notes because I don’t know how to write them, but I drew a line that depicted which directions the melody went in, because I was like I’m going to want to remember this, and then I woke up and all I had left was a few flashes of the accompanying music video and like, there goes my definitely burgeoning and inevitable music career.)

But anyway? What’s good, you ask? Last week I found out I was a national finalist in a cocktail competition. Isn’t that amazing! I’ve been feeling a tiny bit shaky about my abilities of late but it was a shot (ha) of confidence that I needed and honestly just such a wonderful happy feeling, that a cocktail I created out of my own brain resonated with someone. I’m so excited and happy to be involved and cannot wait to present it to the judges because if there’s one thing in this life that gives me joy, it’s having an audience.

On Saturday I had the supreme joy of going to the wedding of two dear friends of mine. I’m gonna be straight up with you, one of said people getting married was Tim, who I used to talk about on this blog a lot on account of he was my partner for some time. It was such a wonderful thing to be there to witness and share the special day for him and his now-wife, and the whole time was so filled with happiness and love and good friends and literal puppies because they held it at the SPCA (thus setting the gold standard for any future weddings I shall attend: will there be puppies?) I’ve been to some fairly dull weddings, this one was pure nonstop goodness and a golden high point of my week.

Last week I also got to be squired to dinner at Shepherd, a fancy restaurant of the kind that I could only go if someone was indeed squiring me. My two best friends, Kim and Kate, and Kate’s mum (the one whomst squired us) drank champagne and ate amazing food and I left replete and happy. I don’t get to go out to dinner, well, honestly ever because I’m either broke or working, so this was a rare treat and to share it with my favourite people was just perfect. On that note, if anyone ELSE wants to squire me out to dinner, you need only but giz a yell.

I’m trying out a new medication in order to temper the wild grunty cantering boar that is my anxiety and the leaden-weighted lead weight that is my depression, and while it’s making me super sluggish I’m kind of excited to be doing something new and to have a doctor who listens to me and is trying to take practical steps to help me out. Thus far the sluggishness is a bit deadening but on the upside I’m too sleepy and gluey of brain to be truly anxious, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when it starts to even out a bit.

And! The other night, in a CLASSIC me move, I thought up this recipe whilst unable to sleep. Ironically, I was so excited about it that all I wanted to do was go to sleep so that I could wake up and buy the ingredients to make it. As with most ideas, it appeared in a rush – a fig and feta tart with layers of spiced butter brushed on each sheet of filo pastry in the base. I figured it would be elegant, with the filling all tart and salty and darkly sweet, and that the delicate buttery bite of the filo pastry would be excellent against the grainy figs and creamy feta. As is so often the case, I was correct.

Even if the idea of just up and making a tart sounds like too much admin, this one is supremely easy – no one on earth will ever, nor should they, expect you to make your own filo but damn if it doesn’t look fancy once it’s all baked up. The rest is more or less literally just feta and figs, no actual real filling to worry about, and the spice-studded butter gives it immensely good depth of flavour and stops it being, you know, too uncomplicated.

feta, fig, and spiced butter filo tart

a recipe by myself

  • one package of filo pastry
  • 50g butter
  • one teaspoon ground cumin
  • half a teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • half a teaspoon dried chilli flakes
  • 250g – 300g feta cheese (look for one that’s soft and creamy – happily, this is usually the cheapest one)
  • 100g figlets or dried figs, but ideally the uh, soft and damp kind, if that makes sense? Not those rock-solid crystallised ones. 
  • one tablespoon balsamic vinegar
  • one tablespoon olive oil
  • one teaspoon Dijon mustard, or any mustard that you fancy
  • pink peppercorns and thyme leaves, to garnish

Set the oven to 200C/400F. Melt the butter and stir in the cumin, cinnamon, and chilli flakes. 

Using a pastry brush, paint the base and sides of a 20cm pie dish or fluted tart tin with the spiced butter. Place a sheet of filo pastry on top of it, pressing it gently into the inner rim of the dish. Paint it with butter and layer with another sheet of filo. Continue in this manner for roughly ten sheets of filo, pressing them snugly in to fit the tin as you go. It’s honestly up to you how many layers you do really but once you run out of butter that’s as good a time as any to stop, I guess. Trim any major overhang from around the ruffly, layered edges. 

Take 2/3 of the feta and mash it roughly with a fork along with the olive oil, vinegar, and mustard. Spatula all of this into the filo-layered pie dish, spreading it gently and evenly over the base. 

Slice the figlets in half and place them more or less evenly on top of the feta, then sprinkle over the remaining 1/3 block of feta. Drizzle with a little olive oil and then bake it for about 20 minutes, or until the edges of the pastry are a deep golden brown. Sprinkle with pink peppercorns and thyme leaves, and some more balsamic vinegar if you like. 

PS: if all you can find is really dry hard mean figs, try soaking them in some boiling water first to plump them up and soften them somewhat. 

The textures at play here are wonderful and even though it’s a modestly filled disc of pastry, the buttery richness and punchy flavours make it extremely satisfying. That said, I reckon two people could demolish this quite qualm-free. It would be easy enough to make it bigger – just use a bigger pie dish and more butter, feta, and figs. I feel like pistachios would be a wonderful addition here, not least because of their colour, but anything at all really. Filo pastry is so lovely – almost dissolving under the weight of your teeth, so fragile and crisp and delicate and butter-absorbing. If you’re feeling like a fancy person this would happily translate to individual tart tins for a dinner party or something too.

Guess what, something ELSE nice happened – I was interviewed by Re: about my ADHD (ADHD is an acronym that stands for “I Will Literally Never Let This Slide and Will Reference It At Every Given Opportunity”) and it was a really fun experience because as I said, I love attention! And also drawing attention to mental health issues! We ended up talking for about ninety minutes but it got sliced down to a snappy four minute clip that you can watch here if you like. Also I woke up about nine minutes before this interview was taken and got dressed in a panicked frenzy and was not happy with my outfit that I ended up choosing; please make any snap judgements with this context in mind.

Also, you’re on a total pie buzz may I also suggest the following for your consideration? Quince tarte tatin, Tomato and feta tart, Chorizo Wellingon, or Scone Pizza.

title from: Every Me Every You by Placebo. Deliciously whiney. Imagine getting to be the first person who wrote about this band for a magazine or whatever and getting to be the first to use the title “The Placebo Effect”. I wonder where that person is now. 

music lately: 

Marystaple, Labourer. I was obsessed with this song during its major rotation on Channel Z back in like….I wanna say 2000? 2001? Anyway if the lead singer still looks like that and is reading this, CALL ME. Either way, the song is still extremely good after all this time.

Alan Alda, You Are Not Real, from the 1966 musical The Apple Tree. Yeah, as in Hawkeye. He sings, too. This song is weird to listen to out of the context of the story that it’s telling but also so weirdly compelling in a romping, bawdy, kind of way that you could just have it come on shuffle and be quite happy to leave it on. I like it, is what I’m saying.  

Tricky, Evolution Revolution Love. This is another 2000-y song, and it’s like, really lovely. Even if old mate from the band Live who features feels toooo earnest. We were all so earnest back then!

next time: Here’s another nice thing, I have had TWO perfect avocados in the past week. So maybe I’ll tempt fate and get more. I mean, to make something with, I’m not saying the next blog post is going to just be a picture of an avocado. 

no postcode envy

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My patriotism has never manifested itself in any particularly outrageous fashion. I treated rugby, our national sport, with all the disdain that someone who had panic attacks on athletics day and got picked last for teams can muster; leaving aside two brief dalliances: my thumping great crush on Doug Howlett during the world cup final of 2003 (there wasn’t much else to do at boarding school) and the appreciation of the sensually clashing thighs and men raising other men towards the sun using only their bare forearms that was all flagrantly on display, without any kind of PG 13 warning, during the last world cup final.  I’m not much into like, getting out there in the nature and stuff so our beautiful landscapes kind of leave me cold. I mean I’m not a total psychopath, we have those good mountains that everyone bangs on about but much like sports, I’m happy to let other people do it and leave me alone. The Lord of the Rings movies are really, really boring and someone should tell Peter Jackson “no” for once. Our national anthem is emphatically not a banger. 

So what gets me going? Lorde’s entire existence makes me jazzed to be a kiwi. Maori culture is unique and precious and should be both protected and elevated, especially since the whole awkward colonialism trampling of it and then half-assedly making vague stabs at acknowledging it aren’t exactly a stellar reflection on, well, anyone, and not much makes me feel quite so heart-swellingly of this place than anything that celebrates this crucial part of us. I’m one of those dinguses who gets really excited when we’re mentioned in pop culture, like that episode of Full House when they accidentally board a flight to Auckland, New Zealand, instead of Oakland, California (a ludicrously impossible premise but how thrilling to hear the actors say our country by name!) I heard yesterday that some rugby player is dating Hollywood actress Shailene Woodley and was genuinely like, “how exciting for us all!” So there’s that.

mate 

mate 

And then there’s onion dip. And Marmite.

The former, a genius and oddly American-style combination of packaged onion soup powder, canned reduced cream, and vinegar, which produces the most face-punchingly compulsive thing you’ve ever dragged a crisp sheet of deep fried potato through. The latter, an oddly good and polarising inky-coloured salty paste that you spread thinly on your buttered toast to make sure the fine crust of sodium caked around your arteries isn’t in any danger of dissipating. 

I love them both. When I eat onion dip I come close to having the slightest understanding of why Americans are so obsessed with their flag. (I mean, I don’t really. It’s a bit of fabric. What’s the deal. Admittedly with a dope design, maybe if ours was less embarrassingly dull I’d care about it too.) If you were like “Laura you can have everlasting happiness but you have to sacrifice Marmite, what’s it going to be”, I’d be all “Marmite IS everlasting happiness, sicko” and drop-kick a piece of toasted Vogels at your head. 

Anyway. Over artisinal mimosas ($10 sauvignon blanc from the dairy and Just Juice bubbles) my friend Emily and I devised a mac and cheese so patriotic it would make Helen Clarke weep. I’m going to be honest, I think most of it actually was her idea, but no one else was there in the room where it happened so I’m taking at least partial credit. And I was the one that actually made it, so. Equally bringing stuff to the table. It started with the revelation that her grandmother used to crush up salt and vinegar chips on top of her mac and cheese. That alone nearly made me faint. Then somehow in a crescendo of overactive brains it all came out at once – what if we put onion dip in the sauce? WHAT IF WE ADD MARMITE? IT’S UMAMI! DARE WE? 

We dared. 

It might all sound kind of horrifying, and too much, and maybe even bordering on that clownish style of social-media friendly cooking where it’s all doughnuts stuffed with bacon wrapped in rainbow layer cake but guys. Guys. It tastes incredible. Upon eating it we were struck into sybaritic silence for a good twenty three minutes, which is astonishing for either of us given our tiny collective attention spans. 

Let me break it down for you: pasta and cheese sauce are both comfortingly gentle of texture and flavour. Soft, bland, creamy, blanket-y. Adding the packet of onion soup powder to the sauce gave it a depth of flavour without compromising these factors – onions themselves being one of those base-level ingredients that assist rather than steal thunder. Reduced cream gave it more richness and a pleasing note of almost-sourness. The marmite, slowly whisked in tentative spoonful by tentative spoonful with me frantically yelling “ANOTHER!” after every taste test, gives beefy, brothy saltiness and savouriness, in other words, old mate Umami. The salt and vinegar crisps crumbled up on top are charmingly crunchy and the hint of said vinegar, tingly on the mouth, stops it being all too throat-cloggingly rich.  

Upon tasting it, I finally understood why people care about rugby for reasons unrelated to thighs. I was like, my country did this and no other country could. 

So can you. 

MATE. 

MATE. 

chip and dip mac and cheese, aka mac and sleazy

  • 500g macaroni elbows, pasta shells, or other small friendly pasta
  • one tablespoon chilli oil
  • 50g butter
  • four tablespoons plain flour
  • milk (I guess two cups/500ml?) 
  • one to two tablespoons of marmite
  • one package onion soup powder
  • one can reduced cream
  • one and a half cups grated cheese
  • one bag of salt and vinegar chips

Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil, and then tip in the pasta. Let it boil away for about ten minutes or until the pasta is tender,  then drain and toss with the chilli oil. Don’t be tempted to leave this out, it just gives the slightest hint of heat at the end of each mouthful. 

While this is happening, melt the butter in a large saucepan and stir in the flour, so that it forms a thick paste. Continue to stir this over a medium heat for a while, just to allow the flavours to develop, and then slowly, slowly add the milk, a splash at a time at first (it will absorb pretty instantly) and then continue adding more and stirring it into the butter and flour till it looks like thick pancake batter. If it looks lumpy, switch to a whisk. Tip in the onion soup powder and stir it in, then add the can of reduced cream. Continue to stir for another few minutes until you’re satistfied with the texture, then whisk in the marmite, small spoonful at a time, tasting it as you go, till you’re happy with the flavour. You’d be surprised at how much marmite it can take, and the pasta will soften the flavour, so don’t be shy. 

Stir in the drained pasta and half a cup of the grated cheese, and set your oven to 170C/330 F. Transfer the contents of the pan into a baking dish and pop it in the oven for about half an hour. Finally, crush up the salt and vinegar chips (just smash the bag around with your hands, should do the trick) and take the dish out of the oven. Sprinkle the pasta with a layer of cheese, then a thick, even layer of potato chip crumbs, and then top with one more layer of cheese. Return to the oven and change the setting to grill, turning up the temperature to 220C/450F. Let it sit there till the top is golden brown and scorched in places. And there you have it. 

MAAAAAATE. 

MAAAAAATE. 

Bonus Marmite content: If you melt butter and mix it with a spoonful of marmite and then liberally apply this to chicken and roast it, you have yourself a truly good and delicious time. 

Speaking of patriotism! Had a tender moment of feeling like the country doesn’t suck when Jacinda Adern of Labour suddenly became prime minister this week (I’m not explaining the process to you, look it up, it happened is all you need to know), after two weeks of us sitting around under the impression that National had won the election. The last time National wasn’t in power was 2008 which was actually a million years ago in so many ways, and while I have reservations about a ton of things, it’s low-key thrilling to be here in a time of change. I honestly didn’t have faith in New Zealand this time around that the left would be able to take the lead, so it’s not only pleasantly surprising, it’s like…for the first time in ever so long, I’m excited as opposed to filled with dread to see what policies are enacted.  

Eat the rich!….tasty macaroni and cheese. 

title from: our Lorde! Her debut Royals is still pretty jaw-dropping no matter how over-exposed to it you may be. 

music lately: 

Fiona Apple, Across The Universe. You wanna sob self-indulgently? Of course you do. Better than the original, in my correct opinion. 

Her Space Holiday, Something To Do With My Hands. You wanna sob self-indulgently? Of course you do. 

Limp Bizkit, Faith. You wanna sob self- okay lol. It’s uh, not better than the original but it is an indelible part of my life. 

next time: I actually totally missed my blog’s tenth birthday by an entire week due to my inability to remember, well, anything, but I’m still determined to mark the occasion somehow.

she don’t use butter, and she don’t use cheese

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That’s right, it’s another classic “Laura is tired and braindead and has been too busy with work to do a blog post” blog post! But because I’ve got like an hour until I start my next shift I’m going to dispense with the usual self-disapproval posturing and crack on with the post itself, as I’m determined to not let yet another day of October go by without me getting anything done on here. Besides, though work has occupied all my spare time lately, it’s also work stuff that gave me the content for the following recipes, so like, when one door closes you fall out a window or however the saying goes. 

make it till you fake it

make it till you fake it

Ya girl is majorly into her sustainability these days. Let’s face it, the world is absolutely completely garbage currently and attempting to recycle like, one small thing a week is my tiny way of doing some good and reducing my impact on this crumbling trash earth. As a bartender it pains me how much stuff we throw out – straws, plastic bottles, fruit offcuts – but also when it gets to 3.30am and you just want to go to bed (or to the next bar that’s open slightly later than yours) you don’t necessarily have the energy to suddenly start seventeen different craft projects. So I’m doing little things here and there. One of my more successful missions was taking all the soaked almonds I’d used to make orgeat (almond syrup) and turning them into vegan feta. Last time I took them home I made this almond brittle that I blogged about a few weeks back, but feta has a more practical application, let’s face it. 

There is some work involved here – some soaking, some straining, some waiting, but you end up with a vast tray of rather wonderfully delicious feta-like stuff – creamy, slightly crumbly, tangy, basically everything you could want from something without dairy in it that’s trying its best to convince you that it is what it’s not. On top of that I can only but speculate wildly at how good it is for you to be eating this much condensed almond, they’re absolutely stacked with vitamins and minerals and will give you a glossy coat and supple fetlocks, or something.  

The recipe below is pretty closely modelled on this one here, and there’s nothing stopping you clicking through to their site and following their clear and useful instructions and ignoring my extremely general and vague ones. 

vegan almond feta

a general recipe inspired directly by this one. 

  • blanched almonds
  • olive oil
  • lemon juice
  • garlic cloves
  • sea salt

Cover your almonds in water overnight, or for at least six hours. Keep them refrigerated while you’re doing this. 

Drain the almonds (retain the water if you have any particular purpose for it) and blitz said almonds, in batches if you need to, in a blender with olive oil, lemon juice, garlic cloves, water, and a generous pinch of sea salt, till it forms a smooth, thick mixture. As far as quantities go, for every, say, cup of almonds, you want to add a tablespoon of olive oil, a tablespoon of lemon juice, and half a cup of water. Use your instincts though and add more of anything as you go if you feel you need it. 

The next bit requires some creativity. You want to take this thick white almond mixture and pour it into a cheesecloth lined sieve, and then place that sieve over a bowl of some sort and leave it overnight so that the excess liquid in the almond mixture can slowly drip out. 

After this – you’re so close – press the drained almost-feta into a baking paper lined baking dish and put it in an oven that you’ve set to 160C/325F for about 30 minutes until it’s firm and a little golden on top. Allow it to cool, and you’ve got yourself a ton of vegan cheese. 

Now that you’ve got all this damn stuff, what are you going to do with it? Why, anything you like! I first had it, as photographed above, simply crumbled in a bowl, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and sprinkled with smoked paprika, rosemary, salt and pepper. I roasted potatoes and sprinkled the feta over for the last ten minutes in the oven. I also, as you can see from the picture at the top of this post, did the following recipe with it, which was honestly pretty wonderful. Obviously you can also extremely make this with regular feta, either way, please accept this extra recipe as a peace offering to make up for my lack of, well, literally anything lately. 

potato wrapped roasted red chilis stuffed with vegan feta

  • three large red chilis
  • 100g vegan feta (or, again, regular feta) 
  • one garlic clove, chopped
  • one tablespoon dijon mustard
  • one small floury potato
  • sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • olive oil

Set your oven to 220C/450F, generously drizzle a roasting tray with olive oil and pop it in to heat up while you get on with everything else. Slice an incision along the length of the chilis, using your finger to prise it open gently, and pull out as many of the seeds and membranes as you can. Giving the insides of the chilis a quick rinse in cold water helps with this process. 

Mix together the feta, garlic, and mustard in a small bowl and pack as much as you can into the now empty chilis till they’re nicely bulging. 

Carefully, using a peeler, create long ribbons of potato by peeling around and around the potato for as long as you can without breaking said ribbon of peel. Once you have three, wrap them carefully around the stuffed chillis, tucking the ends underneath. The starch in the potato should act as a kind of glue to keep it in place but it really doesn’t matter if it slides around a bit.

Gently place the stuffed, wrapped chilis onto the hot oven tray and roast for about 20 minutes or until the potato is crisp and the chilis are softened and slightly blistered. Turn them over and roast for another five or ten minutes, then remove from the oven and sprinkle over salt and pepper. 

This recipe is admittedly fiddly but it looks fairly spectacular and tasted wonderful – the kettle-chip crispness of the potato against the soft, sweetly hot chili and the creamy salty feta. You want to eat them as soon as possible so that the potato stays crisp, but having wolfed one down several hours later there is a certain charm to a soggy room temperature stuffed chilli as well, however unappealing that might sound. 

My other forays into reducing, reusing and recycling have had mixed results – I made a fantastically tasty fermented Mexican drink called Tepache out of leftover pineapple skins and cores, and some intensely bland cordial out of fruit offcuts. It’s fun though. Really the only hard part is, as I said, not locking myself into seventeen million different projects at the end of a long night – eg, picking my battles – and not getting the Captain Planet song stuck in my head interminably.  

title from: the lovely and weird song She Don’t Use Jelly by the Flaming Lips. 

music lately: 

MF Doom, Fenugreek. This song makes me SO happy. 

Intro by The XX. This song is extremely calming and some clever wag made an hours long loop of it on YouTube, which is amazing, because the only bad thing about the song is when it comes to an end and you’re like damn it there goes my calm vibe! 

next time: My blog turns TEN ACTUAL YEARS OLD this month which is somewhat unreal to me but I want to do something celebratory about it – maybe an enormous cake? I don’t know. 

on a steady diet of soda pop and ritalin

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Before I get into this, let me tell you a small story. 

On Wednesday morning I got out of bed and thought- I should make my bed now, so it’ll be ready for me when I get back in later.

I’ve never had this thought in my life. I do not make my bed. I barely ever made my bed as a child. In fact the only beds I make are the kind you have to metaphorically lie in because you’ve done something more or less irrevocable. So I made my bed. And I was like, “wow this Ritalin is GOOD”. 

I told you it was a small story.

So to back up a bit, let me tell you my friends: ya girl has been given the joyous gift of an official ADHD diagnosis. Just like that! And all it took was six months, an unspeakably hellish prolonged period of depression and anxiety, several fruitless GP appointments that led me nowhere, literally five thousand phone calls and emails, a small quantity of self-gaslighting about how I was imagining all of this and I was just a stupid idiot for life, constantly being picked up and dusted off by my friends, a butt-tonne of crying, stacks on stacks on stacks of paperwork, one highly revealing and personal article on Medium, an astonishing amount of crowdfunding from kind friends and strangers, several sessions with a truly nice trainee psychologist, and dropping $1000 on roughly two and a half hours of time from a psychiatrist to get there!  

As I said during a conversation with a four year old yesterday, “it sounds like I’m exaggerating for comic effect! If only I were!” (I was at a wedding.) (There were lots of kids there.) 

carbs for president

carbs for president

So now I’m a few days in on Ritalin and I can’t impress upon you enough how much it’s helping already. Without going into the minutiae of my life, it helps me get on with the minutiae of my life. That’s all. It’s made my internal monologue all able to put tasks in order and fix small things that would otherwise cause me mental paralysis. Like deciding what socks to wear. Again: being super literal here. You very don’t want to know how many sock-related meltdowns I’ve had.

Am I fixed? No! However, AS I HYPOTHESISED ALL ALONG, the ability to scoot around and get stuff done in a calm manner has already given me a lot more brainspace to deal with my anxiety and depression and is starting to alleviate some of the symptoms that were making everything more difficult than it already was. It’s like my mental health was all overheated and while the room it’s in is still really warm I’ve at least been able to kick the blankets off it and sit it next to an oscillating fan. IDK about that metaphor, I’m just kind of overheated right now so it’s the first thing that sprang to mind. 

Anyway, oh my god, let’s talk about food. I am trying to get back into that whole thing, since I apparently love it so much and all. 

One extremely shiny, silvery bright spot during the difficult start to this year was that my friend Hannah came over to visit New Zealand from Australia. We’ve known each other online since about 2010 where we became mutual admirers of each others food blogs, our travels coincided for one beautiful day in 2012 in New York where we got to meet each other, and we’ve been extremely in touch ever since throughout each other’s various Life Stuff. Her brain and my brain are like twins over so many things and her writing was always an entrancing mermaid in a sea of dull, copycat, forgettable food blogs. So yeah, you could say I kinda like this gal. We talked and talked and talked over Chow takeout on the floor, we went to see Swan Lake and got super emotional over it, I made her fancy chartreuse-based cocktails when she came to visit me at work, we had fancy brunch. And then we were like, man it seems kind of illegal for two food bloggers to come together and for there to not be cooking involved.

i'll clink to that

i’ll clink to that

So I made her dinner. Now: I will self-deprecate until I’m nothing but a pile of dust that says “lol don’t fight over me all at once, handsome suitors” to no-one in particular. But I am really, really good at making dinner out of pasta and whatever the heck is in my pantry. Admittedly: I had some good stuff on me this time around. Half a bag of frozen prawns. Half a bag of frozen peas. Some small jars of preserved lemons which were party favours from a wedding in November. But still! I’m a pasta whisperer. And this was the result of such whisperings: 

one-pot prawn, pea and preserved lemon spaghetti

  • 200g spaghetti or dried pasta of your choice
  • 150g or so of frozen raw prawns
  • 100g or so frozen peas
  • two pieces of preserved lemon, rinsed with the flesh sliced off
  • 25g butter
  • lots of olive oil
  • lots of dried chilli flakes
  • lots of nice salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • a handful of fresh thyme leaves

Get a large pan of salted water on to boil, and then once it’s like, boiling, drop in the spaghetti. Once it’s almost tender – about ten minutes in – add the prawns and peas, letting it return to the boil. Continue to cook until the grey frozen prawns have turned all pink. Drain the lot, and return to the pan (off the heat) and stir through the butter till it’s melted. 

Meanwhile! Finely slice the lemon peel and mix in a small bowl with about three tablespoons of olive oil, as many dried chilli flakes as you fancy, some salt and pepper and most of the thyme leaves. Stir this through the buttery cooked pasta, prawns, and peas, and upend the lot into a serving dish (or just serve straight from the pan.) Top with more thyme, olive oil, salt and pepper as you wish. 

Serves 2. 

food prawn

food prawn

What’s great about this recipe is right there in the title – it’s all done in one pot, so you barely have to think or clean – two of my least favourite activities – and the ingredients are simple but bring plenty to the table. Prawns and peas are both mild and sweet, but then the fiercely salty lemon and hot chilli flakes do their thing and pull it all together. You can leave out the butter and just pour over more olive oil if you’re not feeling dairy, but it gives juuust a little richness and of course, the delicious flavour of butter. 

During a week when everything was so very hard, making food for a darling person and then sitting on the floor and hooning into it with them while talking about everything in our lives up until this very minute was honestly the nicest, nicest thing. 

apropos of nothing but I like how triumphant I look here, and as I always say, look the part be the part

apropos of nothing but I like how triumphant I look here, and as I always say, look the part be the part

I know it has been a long time since I last wrote here, but near the top of the list of things I don’t want to give up on is this blog, and now that I have the friendly horse that is Ritalin to gallop about on (note to self: def give up on metaphors tho) I hope it will be easier to both cook and write and care about them again too. 

And seriously: I am so, so happy about this diagnosis. “Sarah”, I said, when the psychiatrist told me, “Sarah, I really feel like I should crack out some champagne with you right now.”  Once again, said with utmost sincerity. 

title from: speaking of sincerity, the super chill track Jesus of Suburbia by Green Day whom I will love unreservedly forever and ever.

music lately:

Your Best American Girl by Mitski, I am a sucker for emotion and walls of sound and HECK this song is like WHAT how my ears what’s happening

Life Upon The Wicked Stage, from the 1927 musical Showboat, as sung in a concert in 1998 by a 12 year old Anna Kendrick and, for some reason, the Kit Kat Girls from Cabaret, made oddly compelling by deadpan delivery (seriously, she is the deadest pan) and the alternating of the arrangement between sweet and jauntily bawdy. And yeah, I get that this is weird but I can’t stop listening to it.

next time: unsure, but next time will come around much, much sooner, promise. 

like peaches ‘n cream, she’s gonna wish on stars and touch the sky, you know what I mean

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Laura please don’t knock this off the ledge onto the walkway below Laura please don’t knock thi

It was a full moon in Pisces this week, so I don’t need to tell you that this particular horoscope stirred up some intense emotions. Luckily for me I was coolly prepared by already maintaining a lifestyle of nonstop emotional intensity! Also luckily there were lots of nice things going on, like eating a giant pretzel Momofuku cake for my girl Kate’s birthday, dressing up as Columbia for a special screening of Rocky Horror at work, more pats with Percy the corgi, and discovering and then watching the entirety of in one evening, the truly heart-wrenchingly delightful TV show Faking It. It was also the excellent Tim’s birthday, and I made him this peach balsamic barbecue sauce as a present. I had a half tin of peaches in the fridge and many spices and condiments in the pantry and a budget that stretched to one small red onion. This recipe that I found appealed to me because of all these reasons, but also there’s something oddly pleasing about making your own preserves and sauces and such, and I thought the peachiness might add a sweet, summery Americana vibe to something already so very American. (Also…I had half a can of peaches in the fridge.)

Apologies for including a fiddly specialty ingredient like liquid smoke, but it’s not that hard to get hold of a bottle of it in fancy food shops or online, and if you like things to taste smokey then you can either find some or sigh perpetually about how nothing tastes smokey. (That’s as much tough love as I can possibly muster: buy this thing if you like, but only maybe, and either way I’m sorry.) If you can’t find it you’ll still have a deliciously peachy sweet-sour sauce, but as soon as the liquid smoke is stirred in it suddenly becomes like sunshine on your shoulders and protein seared on magma-hot metal (said protein could be tofu, I’m easy) and your hair being scented like woodchips for days and being ravenous and everything taking so, so long to be cooked through so you have to drink a lot of beer while you wait. So like, you might want to get some.

peach balsamic barbecue sauce

adapted from this recipe on damndelicious.net, makes around 250ml

  • one tablespoon olive oil
  • one red onion, diced
  • one tablespoon chilli sauce (or to taste, I used sriracha which is kinda mild, hence a tablespoon)
  • one teaspoon cumin seeds
  • two large ripe peaches, diced, or the equivalent of canned peaches
  • two tablespoons maple syrup (or golden syrup or honey – maple is smokier though)
  • 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar
  • one tablespoon dijon mustard
  • one tablespoon tomato sauce/paste/similar
  • about half a teaspoon of liquid smoke
  • salt and brown sugar to taste – it definitely needs salt, sugar though? Depends on you.

Heat the oil in a pan and gently fry the red onion till it’s soft but not browned. Throw everything else in, except the liquid smoke, and allow to come to the boil while stirring constantly. Simmer for about ten minutes, then either blend it till smooth in a food processor or use one of those stick things that you use for pureeing soup (they’re genius! So little washing up to do!) (my new flat has one, I’ve never used them before) (anyway) and pour it into a small jar/small jars or directly into a bowl to serve alongside/on top of your dinner.

(red and white twine to evoke The White Stripes)

This sauce is so delicious. And I’m not entirely a heathen, I didn’t go eating Tim’s birthday present, there was in fact enough to fill a jar for him and a small ramekin leftover for me. I intended to pour it over rice or something but I just ended up eating the lot with a spoon. The aggressive throat-pinching sourness of the vinegar and heat of the chilli sauce is mellowed by the sweet, sweet peaches, and the spices give it depth and, well, spice. And as I’ve already iterated at feverish length, liquid smoke is also good. It doesn’t make an awful lot but then at least you don’t have to stress about desperately pressing bottles of it onto visitors forevermore, and if it’s really not to your tastes then at least all you wasted was a couple of tablespoons of this and that. Conversely, if you really love it, the recipe is very easy to double or triple. Barbecue sauce for all! I always thought I hated barbecue sauce actually, but it just turns out that I dislike the particular overly sweet nothingness-paste that gets swirled onto certain takeaway pizzas, which tastes like neither barbecue nor sauce. And it certainly doesn’t taste like going on for paragraph after paragraph about sunshine on one’s shoulders, etc.

I’m flying up home this afternoon for the first time since Christmas, so that’s something. Am looking forward to seeing my family and the cats (the cats are family but you might not pick up on my implications unless I spell it out for you) and spending time knitting and reading.

Finally: It’s election time in New Zealand! Can’t wait for it to be over so that I don’t have to see billboards everywhere, but am looking forward to voting. It’s completely appalling that prisoners can’t vote, but hopefully my own small vote and my right to do it can help be a snowflake in an ever-rolling snowball of good change. Your politics are your own business, but what you do with them affects everyone, you know?

But also: you can now buy my cookbook directly from me! Which is exciting because ya girl remains flat broke, and unlike when it was sold in stores, every dollar from books sold through me goes straight to me. Yay though, right? My cookbook isn’t so easy to get hold of anymore so if you’re wanting a copy you better get moving as my stocks are limited…

title via: Britney Spears’ important song Brave New Girl. It’s easily one of my very favourite songs of hers, that kind of headrush-pop that fills my heart with glitter.

music lately:

Dum Dum Girls, Coming Down. Six minutes and thirty-two seconds of dreamy sad perfection.

Sarah Jaffe, Lover Girl. Was listening to my favourites Dark Dark Dark on Spotify and looked at related artists and was like, “Spotify, show me something new!” So I tried listening to this woman and I immediately loved every single song I listened to, starting with this.

Next time: seems like all I have in my pantry right now is pasta, which I’m happy about because I love pasta, so…yeah. We’ll see?

alone, listless, breakfast table in an otherwise empty room

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The box in the background is where all my kitchen accoutrements will go, including this bowl and fork. Once I’ve washed them, don’t worry.

This is the last blog post I’ll be writing from my not-quite-my-home-anymore-home, before I move house next Wednesday. The new place is like…fine, but I’m going to miss where I am now so much: the celestial light, the concrete floors, the bathroom that looks like it’s from a nice hotel, waking up in the night to see the moon hovering protectively outside my window, how stupidly instagrammable it all is, how enormous my room is, and so on and (self-indulgently wallowing) so forth. But, as I say to myself sternly, a change could be good for me, and whether or not it is, it’s still happening, and I can do my best to turn my new room into a beautiful haven too. I have a recurring bad dream where it’s suddenly Christmas Day and I have five minutes to get to my plane home and forgot to buy any presents and am generally very lost and confused as to how it all happened so fast, and that’s a decent description of how I feel right now, but…yeah. It’s happening. And I’m sure I’m gonna love this new place too.

All I’ve been doing with my spare time is looking for a flat, visiting flats, and packing my things up, so not much time to cook, but I wanted to minimise the amount of things I had to transfer between houses and so decided to make some kind of all-inclusive salad from the various nubbins of food in the pantry and fridge. Which means this is kind of ridiculous and bitsy and piecey and not really anything at all, but since it’s the last thing I’m likely to cook here and I don’t want to sacrifice writing this blog just because I am so busy making all signs of myself slowly reduce as the place becomes more and more empty…I thought I’d share it here anyway.

Also gosh, sorry for being so maudlin and overwrought, in my defence, I’m maudlin and overwrought. I am being relatively practical and calm in comparison to my own self, if that makes sense. As I said in my last blog post, a lot of things just kinda suck right now, but I’m working on what I can control (ha! very little) and getting through the rest somehow. Just like everyone else is.

brown rice, wheat berry, fried bean salad

a recipe by myself; makes quite a lot.

half a cup wheatberries 
half a cup brown rice
one cup frozen green beans (or fresh ones trimmed and sliced, you fancy thing you)
half a cauliflower, sliced into florets
two cloves garlic
a couple of tablespoons of capers
50g butter, at least
a handful of almonds, sliced 
olive oil
white wine vinegar
a tablespoon harissa
pinch salt

Soak the wheatberries and rice in boiling water for a couple of hours – this will speed up the cooking process, which will still take kind of ages. There is a reason that they’ve been sitting untouched in my cupboard for so long. 

Cook them together in boiling water in a good sized pot for around 25 minutes or until both the rice and the wheat are tender. Drain, and set aside. Melt the butter in a saucepan till it’s sizzling, then throw in the beans, cauliflower, capers and garlic and allow to fry aggressively till everything is quite browned and cooked through. Add the almonds at this stage and allow them to brown a little too, then remove from the heat. Stir all this into the rice/wheat mixture, then in a small bowl, stir together about three tablespoons of olive oil, one and a half tablespoons of the vinegar, and the harissa and salt. Stir this through the salad then serve. 

The important thing here is lots of olive oil and lots of texture. There are a zillion ways you could change this to suit your own needs – use barley instead of wheat berries (infinitely easier to find/cook anyhow) use just one type of grain, fry different vegetables like broccoli or courgette, use different nuts, use something other than harissa to flavour the dressing, make so many changes that it’s essentially an entirely different recipe, that kind of thing. The soft bite of the grains with the crisp, oily vegetables and crunchy nuts is excellent though, and adding plenty of salt and oil and chilli-rich harissa makes sure it’s delicious and elegant, rather than the punishing and dour.

It keeps well – I ate about a third for lunch on the day that I made it, then ate another third in spoonfuls taken from the bowl while standing in front of the fridge at various hours of the day, and then had the remainder for dinner at work last night. The fridge and pantry are now significantly denuded of things, and I looked up wheatberries on wikipedia and damn they are a good-for-you foodstuff! Satisfaction all round. Except for the photos, it was high afternoon sun and I only decided at the last minute to actually snap this dish, so… Not the best final view of the place, but what can ya do? (Not a lot.)

Just a short blog post today because yeah, got to carry on packing my belongings into boxes until infinity – isn’t it weird how physics is literally a thing and yet if I spend an hour piling books and trinkets into boxes I will have created no extra space and my pile of said books/trinkets will not appear to have diminished whatsoever? Pretty suspicious.

(FC = Fancy Clothes. Please be assured that this is but one bag of clothing that fits this description.)

Okay, lies: have also been rewatching Twin Peaks and knitting myself a blanket from my yarn scraps. Isn’t it too dreamy? Yes it is, Audrey Horne. 

So, next time you see me here it’ll be in my new place. Weird…but hopefully good. 
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title from: I do enjoy Ye Olde Pearl Jam (anything after about 1995 am not interested in whatsoever) and if you haven’t tried ever had a go at singing along while studiously imitating Eddie Vedder’s voice, you’re missing out on some good clean fun, I can tell ya. I had Deep Feelings about the song Daughter in my teens but now just think it’s pretty rad.  
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music lately:  

Joanna Newsom, Sawdust and Diamonds. Um. I have always enjoyed Newsom’s music but am properly close-readingly appreciating it heaps right now. Her lyrics are so spectacular and literary and full of the elements and fragments of stories, I love it. Also her harp is like wo. 

Beyonce, XO. This song makes me feel rapturous. 

Patti Smith, Gloria. I like putting this one on when I’m closing the bar at work, it’s all snarly and good to bounce along to while washing dishes and mopping and inevitably knocking over literally everything and so adding many, many minutes to your closing process. I will never ever tire of the bit where she’s all “Ah, uh, make her mine”.
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next time: I know not, but it’ll be from my new place! So! New things for you all to look at! So there’s that! 

they go to a lake of fire and fry, won’t see ’em again till the fourth of july

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After all my harping on about being unemployed making it a lot easier for me to blog more often, it has definitely been a minute since my last post. I had my reasons, some of which were fun (Auckland mini-break with my friend Kate!) some of which were less fun (a vague sense of not being able to get my act together! Other personal stuff!) but here I am, ready to type, resplendent in my $10 floral leggings and $4 wooly jumper sitting in the north wing of my office (aka the couch. The south wing is my bed. There is no west wing because my apartment is kind of L-shaped. So to go hard west would defy the laws of physics and sensible-ness.)
it was an honour to briefly gallivant round Auckland with this stone cold fox

While in Auckland I finally got to go to Barilla, where you can eat incredible dumplings and drink green tea under fluorescent lighting. We got this side dish of fried beans with spicy salt, and they were honestly one of the best things I’ve ever eaten, crisp and piled high on this huge plate with dried chillis, cumin and coriander seeds, a slight crunch of sugar, and a ton of salty wondrousness. I got home and really wanted to recreate them, but had no idea how and also lacked most of the ingredients that I’d detected. Except, shamefully, dried chillis: I have a bag of them but they’re right at the back of a tall cupboard and laziness overtook all things, including, quite shockingly for me, aesthetics. So I made up a sort of tribute to what Kate and I had, and while it didn’t turn out like Barilla’s elusively salty-hot dish, these beans are still super cool by their own damn selves. 

fried green beans with chilli and garlic

a recipe by myself, inspired by the beans at Barilla, but if you’re in proximity of that place just ignore this entire blog post and run down there to order plateful after plateful of the real thing, seriously

many green beans (just…many, okay?)
two tablespoons olive oil
two tablespoon sesame oil
three cloves garlic, roughly diced
two teaspoons sugar
one tablespoon soy sauce
one tablespoon white vinegar
two tablespoons sriracha or other chilli sauce of your choosing
tiny pinch of ground cinnamon

Top and tail the beans and slice in half. If you’ve rinsed them in water before doing this, dry them thoroughly on a paper towel, because if even a droplet of moisture gets into the hot oil it will spit aggressively everywhere. 

In a saucepan heat the oils until you’re quite sure they’re stupidly hot. Throw in the beans and allow them to fry, stirring very occasionally, until they’re uniformly blistered and browned and a little crisp.

While this is happening, mix the garlic, sugar, vinegar, sriracha and cinnamon in a small bowl. Remove the beans and sit them on a paper towel, and tip out most of the oil into your sink – carefully, it might spit a bit – and return the pan to the heat. Tip in the remaining ingredients and fry them for a couple of minutes before returning the beans to the pan, stirring them till everything’s all sticky and wonderful-looking. Remove from the heat, spatula into a bowl, eat the lot. 

You weren’t born yesterday, you haven’t been living under a rock and this most definitely isn’t your first rodeo, so I appreciate that it’s a bit obvious when I say fried things generally taste better than when they’re cooked any other way. But nevertheless, did you know that frying makes beans taste amazing? They go all wrinkly and crisp and a little smoky, with that grassy burst of flavour still present when you bite into them. The sauce goes all sticky and excellent, the sugars caramelising a little and the hint of cinnamon giving subtle depth, while the vinegar and chilli distract from, yet elevate, the oiliness. And it’s really simple. The hardest thing is slicing the ends off the beans. Like, I can’t stress enough what a burden this is. If you can lure someone else into doing it for you, perhaps with the promise of fried beans as a reward, then do so (bonus hilarity: they’ll need to chop twice as many beans so that there’s enough for them to be rewarded with.) 
Hey, so I know I talked a lot about Swonderful in my last blog post, but I would like to charmingly draw your attention to the rest of my amazing sponsors. Go check out their websites, do it for your own good, discover some delightfulness, or in fact ignore them completely, because it is a free country (despite many laws and discrepancies that conclusively suggest otherwise.) I love these guys, and you may well end up feeling the same way. 
Skinny Love: tiny, easy weddings, for if you don’t want fuss and stress but still want maximum dreaminess and delight. I know I like, recently cancelled my own wedding, but that doesn’t mean I can’t celebrate cool people running the show and helping other people with their declarations of love. Dreamy weddings are not a zero sum game. Oh and even if you’re not getting married they have a sweet blog with lots of lovely photos and inspiration and such. 
Holland Road Yarn Company: I have talked so much about how obsessed with knitting I am, and without this shop my life would be singularly bereft of all that woolly joy. If you’re in Wellington there are often classes and events, or you can just walk into one of the two shops to politely nuzzle the yarn. If you’re over yonder or overseas you can still purchase all the gorgeous stuff on offer, including the owner Tash’s hand-dyed skeins of glorious Knitsch yarn. 
Six Barrel Soda Co: aside from the fact that I could and have spend entire hours at their eponymous cafe in Wellington, I gotta say, it is so wonderful having incredibly delicious non-alcoholic options for drinks now that they have started stocking their syrups more and more widely around town. With flavours like Vanilla Cream, Orange Dandy, Raspberry and Lemon, Cherry and Pomegranate, all hand-made and bottled in small batches, like, I can’t even remember how I was planning to finish this sentence because I’m suddenly feeling really parched and in need of a fizzy drink. Anyway, you can order them online and they’re soon going to be selling ready-made sodas too. Hurrah! 
Yay sponsors! Keeping the wolves from this unemployed blogger’s door. Although I’d really like to befriend some wolves and have them as my loyal yet adorable companions, so…looks like someone needs a better metaphor. 
This chronic overheater and lover of burrowing into duvets also says: yay winter! 
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title from: Lake of Fire, Nirvana’s Meat Puppets cover from their majorly excellent MTV Unplugged album. Kurt Cobain’s pretty face plus his raspy voice and the pleasingly old-timey stride of this song are a fairly amazing combination. 
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music lately
Beyonce feat Drake, Mine. “Let’s get carried away”…Kind of like when you look into a Viewmaster and click around the different scenes, songs from Beyonce’s last album move forward and backward into significance for me. Currently it’s this one on my mind. And while the music video is reliably stunning the album cut has the important line “been about you and I’m still about you” so I dunno, settle in and absorb both I guess.
Janine and the Mixtape, Little Bit. Love this woman and her new single is, as per usual, silky-smooth gorgeous R’n’B. 

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Next time: I made a really cute chocolate cake. 

she wore blue velvet

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Last week was big. I flew up home for the first time since Christmas (it’s easy to be wayward when time moves so ridiculously fast, I for one refuse to believe it’s any later than June. And certainly not October) and enjoyed wonderful, necessary quality time with family both immediate and extended, including the cats Roger and Poppy. Who were not entirely averse to my nuzzles.

This is Poppy. She looks like Roger, also a tabby. You can tell who is who though, because Roger’s always studiously trying to be left alone and Poppy’s always fixing to shred you like a confidential document.

I then met with friends on a sneaky weekend trip to Auckland, where we managed to halt the process of time somehow – unless it moves differently up there – and fit in a million different joyful activities, including magnificent brunch and endless coffee at Federal, hanging at Flash City, eating ice cream at The Dairy, drinking lunch beers at Tin Soldier, and trying on fancy beautiful dresses at Miss Crab. As well as that I met up for a coffee with rapper/poet Tourettes, which put the cool in “be cool” and that was all just Saturday, before we had a group snooze and pre-show beers and snacks and then saw WICKED. This was to be my third time seeing this musical, the first momentous occasion happening in London in 2011 and then again in New York City just a year ago. Having bawled so hard that I needed electrolyte replacement previously, I was prepared for more of the same, but managed to stay quite dry-faced for the most of it. Tears appeared, however, in I’m Not That Girl, (ughhh the poignancy) One Short Day (they’re just such good friends!) and verily rained down during For Good (just run away together!) It was an incredible production, the cast was amazing, and – we are a tiny country – it was kinda neat to have such a juggernaut, a real proper modern Broadway show, here in New Zealand at roughly the same scale it should be. And even though I know every beat and tick of this show off by heart, nothing ever prepares me for the said-heart-dissolving experience of the end of Defying Gravity. Okay, I think I cried in that one, too.

I hadn’t been to Auckland since November last year, which seems odd when I say it like that, but it’s just how it has happened. So it was exciting to rush around and take in all the things it has and to feel all bright-lights-big-city (I adore Wellington, but it is wee.) Through some well-earned serendipity and just enough planning we managed to get into almost everywhere we wanted (except Depot – but hey) without delay, there were always carparks and everything we ate, from the swankest brunch to the most rapidly cooling fries-stuffed cheeseburgers with wine and beer at the kitchen table, was so, so excellent.

Speaking of eating excellent things: I had this idea recently, that mixing blueberries with a lot of aggressive yet balanced savoury ingredients could produce something quite delicious. I was correct – blueberries, sitting around in olive oil, lime juice, vinegar, spices, chilli, are so compelling, so head-shakingly correct together, that I nearly ate the lot before I even worked out what they were supposed to be. I called them pickled blueberries, but was it enough to just make them and eat them? I didn’t think they’d work with chicken, steak and fruit is a derisive no, lamb – not quite, duck – too expensive, salmon – maybe? And then I had the idea to pair them with a chickpeas, their similar shape appealing to me, plus lots of creamy, rich, sharp feta, and to just build a salad from there. And it was the nicest thing ever.

But: don’t feel you have to have a montage of self-discovery to make these, I mean, they really would’ve been perfect simply eaten out of the bowl till they were gone, and I still think they’d be swell with salmon, so if you want to make them and just do that: cool. There are no wrong answers. (Unless you serve it with steak. That is wrong.)

Blueberries have a particular sweetness, different to the jamminess of strawberries or the particular sour tang of raspberries – it’s more subtly floral and muted. So, slightly unsettling though this recipe might sound, they actually work so well with all these strong flavours and textures, their blue juiciness bursting in your mouth with a rush of salt and sourness.

pickled blueberries

a recipe by myself. I wasn’t sure if these actually counted as being pickled or whether they were just marinated or even just “blueberries with stuff” and was I just unconsciously buying in to some overarching pickle trend and then I was like “well this is just what I’m doing.”

  • 1 cup frozen blueberries (or fresh, get you with your seasonal fruit)
  • 3 tablespoons olive oil, the best you can handle
  • 1 large red chilli, deseeded and sliced finely
  • 1 tablespoon rice vinegar
  • Juice and zest of one lime
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 2 teaspoons coriander seeds
  • a dash of cinnamon
  • As much salt as you please

If the berries are frozen, allow them to defrost in a bowl, otherwise simply mix together all the ingredients, taste to see if you think it needs more salt, sugar, oil or vinegar, then leave to sit for at least ten minutes at room temperature before eating. They last around a week in the fridge, although the texture of the oil goes a bit odd when it’s that cold it’s certainly still very, very, thrice very edible.

I then stirred about 1/2 a cup of the berries into a salad along with 1 drained can of chickpeas, a few handfuls of handful of baby spinach leaves, one finely sliced and overpriced capsicum, an entire damn packet of feta, roughly crumbled, plus some more olive oil and coriander seeds and a generous spoonful of fried shallots from a packet. It was a wondrous combination – crispness and crunch of the juicy, fresh kind and the fried, brittle kind; the sweet blueberries against the creamy salty feta and the bite of chili against everything, really.

Am still delighting in being a real cookbook author. In fact, I’m currently trying to organise an Auckland launch party for my cookbook, so get in touch if you want to give me a ton of premium champagne for free. If not: don’t bother (oh my gosh, kidding, I’ve had so much lovely feedback and correspondence from people about the cookbook and it’s the sweetest, kindest, heart-swellingest thing ever. Much sweeter than champagne.) Am still also not winning the gold medal for sleeping decently, in fact am somehow getting even worse at this sleeping regularly thing. But: getting there, slowly. One day at a time.


title via: Blue Velvet. Obsessed with Lana Del Rey’s cover of it.

music lately:

The never-not-astounding Lorde’s 400 Lux. Got a lot to not do.

Icona Pop’s Just Another Night. I love the way the singer’s voice breaks a tiny bit when she sings “it’s just another night, on the other side.”

Sky Ferreira, You’re Not The One. I love the enormous drums and spaciousness and general perfection of it all.

next time: after a week away, I kind of have no idea…

 

take it easy on me, shed some light, shed some light on things

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My fork is the much, much smaller one on the top right.

This is a slight, small recipe, willfully simplistic. But also oddly fancy. I make this a lot, since it’s not very much effort, but is also just the kind of thing I want to eat following a Sunday afternoon of book group, mainlining candy (specifically: Nerds, fizzy Spongebob Squarepants lollies) and drinking just enough cider to feel pleasantly fuzzy. Seriously, we had so many good snacks – kumara chips, hummus that I’d made myself with brown chickpeas and harissa, Turkish bread, manuka smoked butter. I just felt like sugar. Until I didn’t – you know that wall you hit? Well, this is the perfect antidote. It’s intensely savoury, with rich oiliness, sharp saltiness, bursts of citrus and pinchings of smoky heat. Not the slightest bit sweet at all. And you can make it post-cider times, without hurting yourself. At least, I did, and I am so clumsy-prone that it’s a pretty decent test of what the rest of the world is capable of.

The other nice thing about this is that all you need is one pot and one or two small bowls. If you want to make even less dishes, you could soak the dried chili first, then use that same emptied bowl to put the olive oil in. I just used lots of fancy little bowls because sometimes my “how will this look on the blog” aesthetics override my already skewed logic. Also since moving into a house with a dishwasher for the first time, I like casually using as many dishes as I can, safe in the knowledge that some machine is going to do all the work for Tim and me. Hooray for dystopian futures!

spaghetti with chili, lemon, capers and olive oil

200g spaghetti
1 large dried red chili
1 lemon
1 tablespoon of capers, rinsed of any salt if they’re salt-packed
salt
extra virgin olive oil

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil, and cook the pasta according to packet instructions – usually takes between 9-12 minutes. While it’s cooking, put the chili in a small bowl and cover with boiling water for five minutes to allow it to rehydrate. In another small bowl, pour several tablespoons of olive oil – two to three is probably fine, though I go for four-ish mostly – and either grate or use a lemon zester to remove as many curling golden strands of lemon peel that you can. Tip the lemon zest and capers into the olive oil, retrieve the chili carefully from its water bath and roughly chop (removing seeds and stem as you please – and I do, a lot of the burn is in those seeds) into small pieces, adding that to the oil too. Finally, drain the cooked pasta, tip in the oil and all the bits and pieces in it, stir carefully and divide between two plates. I often cut the lemon in half and squeeze its juice over the pasta too, at this point. Pour over more olive oil if you like, sprinkle over more salt if you need it, and eat. Obviously.

Chilis can seem intimidating if you’re not used to them, if at the most you eat sticky, syrupy sweet chili sauce, if all your references are all cartoonishly exaggerated pop culture. Or in fact literally cartoons in pop culture, like Homer Simpson’s viaje mysterioso. Despite seeming that way, chilis are not simply a straightforward delivery method of a burning sensation. They have a whole spectrum of flavour, from smoky like, well, smoke, to fruity like the darkest dried plums, to sweet and lemony…kick the seeds and internal spine out and you might find you can handle a lot more than you thought. The chili I used for this was long, leathery and with a rich wine-dark colour and flavour and just a little prickling heat here and there. Together with the salt of the capers and the bright lemon zest, it’s really something. Even though it sorta looks like nothing.

Now that it’s suddenly July – cue my obligatory yet sincere incredulity at the passing of time, as always – Tim and I are entering crunch time on planning our engagement party, which is partway through this month. Lots of things about it are making us nervous, mostly around disparite groups of people in one room, but we have been having so much fun looking through old photos of ourselves to get printed for a photoboard. The pre-us-getting-together “whoa that chemistry” moments caught on film. Tim’s fluctuatingly enormous hair. The entirety of 2006 when we were each as much of a hipster scene kid as we could muster. Our utterly squalid flats. The six months in 2008 when a neighbourhood cat decided to adopt us (cue some obligatory but deeply sincere howling from my direction at the sorrow of it all now, in that we can’t have a cat.) Our first holiday, finally, to Europe in 2011. All that tequila. “Oh, that’s the time I wore a singlet as a dress”; “Why did I have a permanent spot on my chin for three years”; “ah, the night where everyone had to wear hats and dance to Fall Out Boy”; “why were we obsessed with taking photos of our feet?”; “how on earth did I pass that photography paper?” and so on, and so on. It’s making me want to stop and be a bit more grateful and aware of the good things we have going on right now. Like insulation and personal space and the aforementioned dishwasher. And no photos of our feet. And new-old friends but also old friends from the moment we first lived together (Ange! That’s you!) And each other, still.

In case this was getting all too sentimental, I got another tattoo! Ain’t nothing sentimental about being stabbed with needles for an hour and a half. It’s at the aren’t-bodies-fascinating scabbed healing stage right now, but once it’s fully there I’ll take a photo, in case you’re interested. In the meantime, here’s me excitedly pointing at it. The super great Nursey at Dr Morse did the design, and also the stabbing itself. Which was oddly enjoyable – it burned, but there’s something about sitting through that pain and knowing you can just do it and you’ll get something you adore forever is kinda powerful. Or at least do-able.

It’s a crescent moon with clouds drifting over it and the lupus (wolf) constellation over the top. It’s very soft and dreamy and a little ancient. And it’s forty centimetres long! Kidding, it’s a couple of inches. I’m very, very happy with it. In a week where people have fought so hard for other people’s rights to simply have autonomy over their own bodies (particularly the brave Senator Wendy Davis who filibustered into the night, on her feet, without water or food, for this very idea) it’s – and not to tenuously link between myself and Davis, because seriously – but it’s nice to be able to make this small decision.

title via: Feist, My Moon My Man. It’s grand. I love the sneaky Tainted Love-esque beat.

music lately:

Lorde, Tennis Court. Yeah Lorde! Still being astonishing!

Blur, Beetlebum. Oh, sexy sexy Damon Albarn.

Connie Converse, How Sad How Lovely. Occasionally I return to this sorrowful, beautiful song from the mysterious Converse. I should return to it more.

Next time: I Should Tell You is back, with Delaney Davidson, which is really exciting. For me. And hopefully you too. His music is excellent.

 

a sunday kind of love

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I haven’t blogged all year! (Sorry, bad joke is bad.) This is my sixth first-post-of-the-year since I started hungryandfrozen.com and it comes with no less thoughtful reflection than any blog post on any day of any month ever, since that’s just the kind of self-absorbed person I am. I did, however, make some new years resolutions. I intend to stick to them, too – I mean, in 2011 I vowed I’d get a book deal somehow, and then 19 days later a publishing company emailed me to say they’d like me to write a cookbook. I’m not saying I’m a witch. But I’m pretty sure if you send out waves of furrow-browed determinism, something has to happen, even if that something is just the people around you inwardly sighing oh no, not this rant again. (Related: I’m not saying I’m a witch, but I did manage to roll the dice while playing Trivial Pursuits recently and have it land on the exact number my team were hoping for, several times in a row.)  
New Years Resolutions for 2013:
1: Be intensely successful in everything to do with this blog and my foodwriting and most of all, my upcoming cookbook. I don’t think this is particularly surprising, but still.
2: Get bufty arms. It came to my attention recently, when Tim and I moved house, that I am essentially useless in the upper arm region. I’d like to be able to lift stuff with dignity. I’d like to be able to lift stuff at all. So some gentle weight-lifting will ensue. 
3: Eat more vegetables. Moving house, and therefore trying to get rid of all our perishables, plus not having a job, meant for a while there we were doing things like having scrambled eggs on buttered toast, or just plain buttered toast, (or buttered popcorn) for nearly every single meal. I love them, but I don’t want scurvy. This year: some snipped chives on my scrambled eggs on buttered toast, at least.
4: Envy: deal with it. Try not to compare my success to that of others. Look, I’ve been a snappishly jealous person since the beginning – why, in the movie of the story of my life you could have a montage of scenes from little me to right now. Not just general success – relationships and experiences and any old thing, really. It’s just not a particularly good item to have in my inventory of personality traits. I can’t deny it, but I can work on reigning it in.
5: Add many, many new words to my vocabulary. I love words. Want to win my heart? Use fancy language (or flatter me, I guess – see points 1 and 4). I’ve got a bit lazy recently, relying on the same old adjectives. I want to know more. Why, I used to read the dictionary for fun as a kid! I want to do that again. 
Will I achieve all of this? Hopefully a devastatingly successful, firm-of-bicep-region, robustly healthy, beatifically mellow Laura will be able to reply “indubitably!” in one year’s time. 
It’s Sunday night, the new years break is well and truly over and I go back to work tomorrow. I am attempting to keep myself in check from being too petulant about this, since I spent so much time and effort finding a job in the first place. But holidays are just so lovely and they do go by so fast, no matter how hard I try to be aware of every moment as it happens, to cling on to the days with clenched fists and to stay up as late as possible. Especially when these holidays are spent with deliciously wonderful people in an old mansion out in the countryside. 
But anyway, before we all forget that this is even a food blog, here’s some food: I decided to meet the back-to-school blues head on by baking up delicious things to be eaten at 10:30am and 3:30pm – when your ebbs are usually at their lowest, right? Katrina Meynink’s gorgeous book Kitchen Coquette offered up Pumpkin, Chili and Feta Loaf, which is just the sort of thing I want to look forward to during a working day. It’s very fast and easy to make, and has just the kind of ingredients which feel like you’re treating yourself to a good time (admittedly, my idea of a good time is relatively low-expectational) but without requiring you to spend lots of money or go hunting endlessly for obscure foodstuffs. And – start as you mean to go on – it has vegetables in it! Peachy! 
Kumara, Chili, and Feta Loaf

Adapted ever-so-hardly-at-all from Katrina Meynink’s book Kitchen Coquette. I only used kumara because that’s what I could find – it’s an unsurprisingly worthy substitute for the original. The recipe also called for a chopped onion and some basil, both of which I left out because I didn’t have them.

400g chopped golden kumara (or butternut pumpkin)
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 small red chillies, deseeded and finely sliced
Salt and pepper
1 cup buttermilk (note – I just used milk, also I increased it slightly from what the book specified as it looked to need it)
2 eggs
2 teaspoons sugar
450g self raising flour (I used regular flour and 3 teaspoons baking powder)
200g feta cheese

Set your oven to 160 C/315 F and butter a loaf tin. 

Place the chopped kumara on a baking tray, sprinkle with oil, the sliced chilli and salt and pepper. Roast for about 15 minutes, till tender and a little darkened at the edges. 

Mix together the buttermilk (or milk), eggs, sugar, and flour, to form a very thick dough. Crumble in the feta and tip in the kumara and gently mix. Inevitably, some of the kumara will kind of smush into the dough. But whatever. Scrape it into the loaf tin and bake for an hour. Turn out of the tin and allow to cool completely before slicing thickly.
As with the pear cake I blogged about last time, I had to have a slice of this before its intended eating time, in order to be able to describe it on this blog. That might sound a little like my life is being ruled by this blog or something, but hey, I got to eat some delicious baking. And I can tell you authoritatively that it really is delicious. The kumara is sweet and a little nutty, the creamy saltiness of the feta is pleasingly addictive against the occasional bursts of fiendishly hot chilli on the tongue. It has the comforting carb-slab nature of a scone, but is also a bit fancy. And I bet a few days down the track, zapped in the microwave in the office kitchen and buttered abundantly, it’ll still be good. 

This is where we stayed over new years. Swoon, right? It’s the sort of place where your very existence makes it feel like you’re in a gorgeous dreamy novel or movie or something (the point is: dreamy.) I read books, I painted my nails, I gossiped on a four-poster bed, I watched movies, I made a huge vat of mac and cheese and ate many feasts made by others (including woodfired pizza in the shape of a cat), I patted a wayward hund, I drank plenty of gin, and generally had a wonderful time with wonderful friends. 
Tim and me! Me and Tim! Was there ever a dapper-er babe than he? My opinion says nay!

 So engaged right now.
Speaking of dreamy and swoon, the two above photos were taken by the uncommonly talented Sarah-Rose, who, if you’re interested in creeping on our holiday, took so many beautiful/hilarious photos during our time away. 

Finally, apropos of nothing: Tim and I bought some furniture. Our new flat is feeling more and more like a home every day. I would like to point out that the Garfield picture was drawn by Tim when he was a kid, and he just put it there as a joke – it’s not like, our most treasured, look-at-this piece of artwork. That said, I totally respect Garfield’s attitude towards both pasta and Mondays. Also that faux-fur on the daybed (daybed! It’s a bed you sit on during the day! Dreamy!) is leftover from when I made myself a lion costume for a party last year. Judge us for buying stuff with “would it look good on instagram?” as a dealbreaker, but not for that furry throw! (I was kind of joking about the instagram thing, by the way.)
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Title via: the sadly late Etta James, Sunday Kind of Love. A song that makes Sunday feel like a day to look forward to, not shun. 

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Music lately:

Lana Del Rey, Summertime Sadness. Hey, it’s still Sunday. Predictably dreamy.

Flat Duo Jets, You Belong To Me. A sexy, languid song, I might never have heard it had their album Go Go Harlem Baby not been rereleased by Third Man Records. Which we then took a chance on and bought when we were at Third Man Records in Nashville. This is a really good song, I’m not just using it as an opportunity to drop in that we went traveling recently or anything.
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Next time: at least one vegetable.