Tag: Ingredient: Lemons

rye whiskey makes the band sound better, makes your baby cuter, makes itself taste sweeter, oh boy

Leave a comment

I would be filled with consternation and a rage as hot as the fire of a thousand French fries about the monogamous relationship I’ve drifted into with my concussion if doing so didn’t require so much energy. Previously, on the TV show that I self-absorbedly regard my life to be (and please read this in the solemn tone of the “Previously, on” voice over artist of your choice) I relayed the tale of how I fainted and whacked my head and as such have not been up to much at all other than sleeping and going to work, well guess what, I have nothing new to report!

But I refuse to let this slow me down, achieving such (topically!) Olympian feats as walking two blocks to the chemist to get my passport photos taken before having to go back home for a nap.

Even previously-er, I mentioned that I was the proud recipient of a place in the finals of the Perfect Blend cocktail competition, held by Beam Suntory; this week I’ve had my cocktail available at work and it’s like…really fun! I mean I love anything where I get the opportunity to draw attention to myself, it’s not often that the opportunity is fairly legitimate and not just me being all, with neither context nor requisition, “look at me!”

(Look at me!) (also lol I screencapped this from instagram and there’s still the scroll left dots at the bottom) (also my massively talented friend Ryan Dominico took this photo!)   (Look at me!) (also lol I screencapped this from instagram and there’s still the scroll left dots at the bottom) (also my massively talented friend Ryan Dominico took this photo!)

Anyway I’ve cooked precisely one (1) thing this week and that was a coffee cake for my Frasier food blog, and yeah you should definitely go read it, but delicious as it was I couldn’t exactly double up on the recipe here, that would be a move lazier than even I could countenance (I was not so lazy that I didn’t end up looking up “the shortest distance between two points is called what” to illustrate this, uh, point, and found an Archimedes quote being all “it’s a straight line”, like COOL STORY Archimedes, of course it’s a straight line, this is not a compelling quote, stick to excitedly getting in the bath, mate.)

As such I thought I would, since I occasionally foray into drink recipes on here, cocktails being one of my true loves in this life (unlike my frosty and passionless relationship with my concussion!) share the recipe for my competition cocktail – the Wry Aside – with you all. You can now, should you choose, make it yourself at home or indeed, in any location. Yes, it involves some significant legwork and the procurement of several alcohols, but if nothing else I’m hoping this will give a little insight into the building of a cocktail and the process I took to achieve this drink of mine. Plus, having a recipe with multiple sub-recipes nestled within it makes me feel extremely Dominique Crenn-esque, a feeling that can’t be had enough, quite frankly.

Wry Aside

a recipe by myself

Beetroot purée: 

  • three large, fresh beetroot
  • a dash of olive oil
  • roughly a quarter cup of lime juice 

Set your oven to 180C/350F. Trim the tops and tails off the beetroot, slice them roughly into quarters, and place in a roasting dish. Drizzle with the scantest amount of olive oil and bake for around 40 minutes, although check them occasionally, until they are slightly crisp and wrinkled without and extremely tender within. Using a high speed blender or whatever similar appliance you have on your person, blitz the beetroot with the lime juice (mostly there so that the motor doesn’t stress out completely. Transfer this into a jar and refrigerate till needed. 

 Blackberry and Pink Peppercorn Liqueur 

This is really more of a highly alcoholic syrup, if you want to actually drink it on its own I would add sugar to taste, rather than to my specs.  

  • Two cups frozen blackberries (I mean, I assume this is how you’re going to get them, fresh is A-ok) 
  • Two tablespoons pink peppercorns
  • 600ml overproof Jamaican rum  
  • white sugar 
  • two tablespoons citric acid

Put the blackberries, pink peppercorns, and rum in a non-reactive mixing bowl or jug. Cover and leave for at least six hours or overnight. At this point, give it a good stir, mashing up some of the berries to release as much juice and color as possible; then strain it into another jug. Weigh this liquid and add the same weight of white sugar, plus the citric acid, stirring to dissolve it. Refrigerate till needed.

 Beetroot Garnish

  • one small, fresh beetroot

Slice the beetroot into thin discs. Roast slowly in a hot oven or better yet, place them in a dehydrator until crisp enough to hold their shape. If you’re going to dehydrate them, cut a slit halfway through each slice, if you’re roasting the slices you can cut them when you need them. Either way, this slit then slots onto the coupe glass that you serve the drink in, a bit like a lime wheel or something, y’know?  

To make the cocktail: 

  • 50ml Jim Beam Rye
  • 15ml sweet vermouth (not one that’s too sweet, mind) 
  • 30ml blackberry and pink peppercorn liqueur
  • two heaped barspoons of beetroot purée  
  • 25ml freshly squeezed orange juice
  • 5ml lime juice

Shake everything hard in an ice-filled cocktail shaker or jam jar or whatever sealable vessel you have to hand (I’ve used a biscuit tin once when things were really desperate) and double strain (that is, use a small sieve held over the serving glass to make the texture silky smooth and to remove any bits of beetroot and such) into a coupe glass. Stick a wheel of dehydrated beetroot on the lip of the glass by way of garnish.

That’s ALL you have to do!

 (photo again, by Ryan Dominico ) (Thanks, Ryan!)   (photo again, by Ryan Dominico ) (Thanks, Ryan!)

So yeah, there’s a lot of prep involved to get to the moment where you actually get to drink the damn thing, but I wanted a drink that was thoughtful and that didn’t have any chance of being replicated previously, as opposed to pedantry for the sake of it. I adore rye – the Sazerac is my favourite cocktail of all time – and I wanted the dry, slight spiciness of the Jim Beam Rye to be met with sweetness and earthiness: the beetroot thing was more about trying to capture the nutty caramelised flavour of roasted beetroot rather than just willfully flinging vegetables at random into a cocktail shaker. I love the gentle warmth of pink peppercorns and the juicy tartness of blackberries, I also liked the dovetailing of similar colours even though obviously the peppercorns don’t actually lend any tint to the liqueur. But anyway! You can read more about the story behind this drink at the World Bartender Day website (you have to enter your date of birth, then click on the Perfect Blend button, then the NZ button, then scroll down to find me but IT’S THERE) as well as checking out the other dazzling finalists and their drinks. There’s a mighty decent number of finalists from Wellington, I’m super proud to be part of it all alongside so many friends. Oh and non-negotiably but only if you want, come get the drink off me at my place-of-employ, Laundry Bar.

The finals themselves are on April 16th, and yes, I hear you gasp, that is the day before my birthday! Whilst I’m like, deeply competitive and winning stuff is definitely a hobby of mine, I also really extremely love public speaking and so like, getting a microphone and an audience? Best birthday ever already.

Oh and if you are all, I can’t believe this blog post is over! What next for my life? Then may I direct your attention to my blog post about the time I made vegan gin sours with aquafaba; the time I made Fernet-Branca ice cream; or the time I went to Hanging Ditch and tried a ton of their cocktails.

title from:  Rye Whiskey by the Punch Brothers, a rambunctious and foot-stomping and admittedly cautionary tale via the medium of bluegrass. 

music lately: 

After mentioning that I was going up to Auckland to see Fall Out Boy this March, a customer at work gave me a list of bands I should listen to and like, they were all such good recommendations! To pluck but one from this list I’m going to recommend in turn that you listen to American Football and their song I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional, which like…lol.

It was Rihanna’s birthday recently and on social media at least it felt like the whole world was celebrating, as well they might be! Love on the Brain is just one of the most beautiful songs on earth.

next time:  If I’m not feeling more energetic and recovered from this concussion I’m going to do absolutely nothing about it, aren’t I!!! 

 

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

4 Comments

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. 

this is no corn-fed day it’s gloomy blue and cold

1 Comment

Unfortunately my one personality trait right now is “teeth” (wait: “tired bartender” is the sole other facet to this diamond) so this salad that I made was inevitably tooth-related: devised in anticipation of my wisdom teeth being from my mouth untimely ripp’d next Monday (that’s like, a reference to MacBeth there). I know all I’ll be consuming next week is broth, pureed foods, painkillers and my own drool, so I wanted to make myself something crunchy, salty, spicy and acidic – everything my tender mouth will be shunning mere days from now. 

That vision ended up taking the form of this blackened corn and tortilla salad – crunchy toasted peanuts, juicy charred corn, shards of tortilla, crisp cos lettuce and plenty of sourness and heat in the form of lime, chilli, salt and cumin. Plus some fairly blameless cherry tomatoes. 

Being my generally idiotic heedless self it will come as no surprise when I tell you that I broke my SD card for my camera somehow and so had to instead take the photos of this salad on my phone (other things I’ve broken this week: my Laura necklace, a large glass jar of hot sugar syrup, the will and resilience of everyone around me) so as such the effect is a liiiittle more grainy than I’d like. Also my flatmate of the past year moved out and had the temerity to take his own property with him so I no longer have his immensely sexy slab of a coffee table to take my photos on, and as the next logical place for me to eat is in bed that’s why everything here is pictured against my duvet, giving it something of an eighties glamour shot vibe.

Fortunately I displayed competency in one area at least: this salad is fantastically delicious. The corn is deliciously sweet and charred and chewy, and the textures of the peanuts, fried tortilla, and lettuce – each crunchy in their own way, the peanuts all soft and (duh) nutty, the tortillas crisp and oily, the lettuce super fresh – is extremely delightful. The chilli and lime gives it a great big high kick of flavour and on top of that it couldn’t be easier to make. By the way you really only need one large tortilla but they taste so good when they’re all fried up that I allowed an extra one to account for you eating them all as you make the salad. Maybe you’re more restrained than me, who knows. That aside, the quantities of each ingredient are pretty much up to you and your personal tastes. If avocados are not housing-market-preventatively-expensive in your neighbourhood they they would be a delicious addition and there’s also nothing stopping you adding some meat, but as it is it’s pretty perfect. 

blackened corn and tortilla salad

a recipe by myself

  • one small cos lettuce
  • two flour or corn tortillas
  • a handful of peanuts
  • one punnet cherry tomatoes
  • two cups of frozen corn kernels
  • olive oil
  • a teaspoon or so of chilli flakes
  • a pinch of cumin
  • sea salt
  • a lime

Heat up a large frying pan over a high heat. Toast the peanuts till they’re lightly browned and tip them into a big mixing bowl. Heat up some butter or olive oil and tear the tortillas into small pieces and fry them in the hot pan till they’re crisp and golden. Add them to the bowl with the peanuts. Next, tip the corn into the pan and let it sit without stirring too much so that it gets slightly charred and browned as it cooks.

While this is happening, wash and tear up the lettuce leaves and add them, with the cherry tomatoes, into the mixing bowl. Once the corn is where it needs to be tip that into the mixing bowl. Squeeze in the juice of a lime, add the chilli flakes and cumin, some sea salt and plenty of olive oil. Give it a good stir and then divide between two bowls. Sprinkle over some more cumin and chilli if ya like. 

This honestly makes what I would consider to be two servings, but I ate the entirety in bed (as pictured!) before falling immediately into a deep sleep, I’m not sure if that was related to the ingredients or more to my generally being tired, but I can heartily recommend the two activities together. 

As I said in the last blog post, I’m actually really nervous about getting these teeth out – something about the sedation process and the potential recovery time and oh, the IMMENSE PAIN and BRUTAL PRICE TAG but I am going to be taken under the wing of my dear friends Kate and Jason who will be looking after me and making sure I don’t like, run naked through the town while coming out of sedation (or indeed, at any time, no one should rule it out completely.)

title from: Say Anything, Night’s Song. Praise the night, the only time I feel alright.  

music lately:

One Direction, Teenage Dirtbag. Oh, these simpler times! Their cover of this song is so perfect, and the way Harry Styles is all “Her name is Noelle” at the start does funny things to my heart. 

Oh Land, Sleepy Town. This song is so dreamy and beautiful and it’s not on Spotify which is ruining my entire life! 

Chance the Rapper, No Problem. Such! A! Bop! 

next time: I probably won’t get the opportunity to write till after my tooth-times so it’ll be wall to wall soft foods. 

on a steady diet of soda pop and ritalin

4 Comments

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. 

and if i recover, will you be my comfort

Leave a comment

My first recollection of the song One Night in Bangkok, from the troubled yet oddly compelling musical Chess (especially since it’s like two and a half hours of people singing about literal games of chess, it’s really punching up in the compelling stakes) was when I did a dance to it for one of my jazz dance exams, probably around 1994-ish timeline-wise. I can still remember quite a few of the steps, because muscle memory is funny about what it holds on to.

The track that I danced to had been dubbed to cut out what I later realised was there: this long, rather indulgent overture that goes on and on and on rather endlessly until the musical phrasing spins around and all of a sudden the beat drops and there’s a white guy rapping, kind of.

At 4.20 (nice) this morning as I drove in a taxi to the airport with this French guy who I used to work at Library with nearly every single day to farewell him as he moves overseas forever, it made me think of the overture of this song. I was with his flatmate and dear friend, and we were like…we knew this was coming ages ago but how is it so suddenly this very moment? Obviously I’m going to miss this guy heaps but it made me think about missing people in general. You’re going along, in the overture, everything feels fine, its repetitive nature lulls you into thinking well, I guess this is the song. And then suddenly there’s a tailspin and the beat drops and everything is completely different and you’re like, oh man. This is the song now. And the new bit of the song is so different to the overture that you’re like…why can’t I hear that overture right now, how is it so impossibly different to right now, how did it used to be all that there was.

comfort, food comfort, food

Anyway, the passage of time, wow, it’s a thing, I’m soooooo deep for noticing it. Whether or not the earth turning as it usually does has got you caught up or not, there’s really not much else to do right now but eat comfort food, and in the case of this recipe it’s a foodstuff I turn to often in times of need. Risotto.

I’ve talked about risotto so much On Here that there’s almost nothing new I can come up with about it; I think calling it “white noise in food form” was my highest apex of descriptiveness. It comforts in the making as well as the eating – obviously it’s soft, warm, creamy rice, as bland or as punchy as you want it to be, as close as you can get to actually eating a large fluffy blanket (okay, eating a freshly baked loaf of bread does challenge this notion) but the power of the calming, soothing, endless go-round of stirring hot liquid into the grains of rice and transfixedly watching them swell up slowly cannot be overstated.

A friend and coworker recently told me they were vegan now and I was like “wow, vegan, huh? That makes me think of…the word vegan.” And so I wanted to try and make a creamy as heck risotto without adding any animal products (specifically: my usual butt-tonne of cream and butter); I also wanted it to be fairly gentle and simple and non-aggressive.

It’s olive oil that gives this risotto its magical texture and richness; apart from that there’s just some pistachios and orange interrupting the soft grains. It may be non-threatening but it’s by no means bland though. The olive oil gives this intensity of buttery flavour and merges with the starch released by the rice, emulsifying into the most creamy and pleasingly gluggy finished product. The pistachios add soft crunch and their own almost-buttery flavour, and the orange brightens it all up but in a mellow way. It’s truly delicious, the flavour unfolding in this elusive way that makes you want to chase it with mouthful after mouthful.

This makes a large batch but the leftovers are strangely good cold from the fridge and if you roll them into tiny balls and dunk them in breadcrumbs before frying in some quantity of hot oil, you can get some highly serviceable arancini; crispy on the outside and creamy within.

orange, pistachio and olive oil risotto

a recipe by myself

  • one onion
  • plenty of extra virgin olive oil (soz to be vague, you just need plenty, okay)
  • one and a half cups of arborio rice (the cheapest stuff is fine here)
  • three quarters of a cup of white wine or dry vermouth (sorry this is a lot, but it makes a lot of risotto)
  • one tablespoon dijon mustard
  • one vegetable stock cube or a tablespoon of white miso paste
  • 70g pistachios, roughly chopped
  • one large orange, zest grated off
  • salt and pepper

Heat a generous tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil in a large pan. Finely dice the onion and tip it into the pan, and fry the pieces gently until they’re a little translucent and soft but not brown. Now tip in the uncooked rice grains and stir them in the oily onion for a minute or two. Pour in the wine or vermouth – it should bubble up merrily for a bit before settling down. This is where the stirring starts. Stir and stir over a medium heat (although I tend to impatiently turn it up high) till the rice has absorbed almost all the wine. Now add the stock or miso and the mustard, plus two tablespoons of the pistachios, and the orange zest, and continue adding water from a recently boiled kettle, about a cupful at a time, stirring and stirring till it’s absorbed and you can add the next one. Every time you add more water, also drizzle in a little more olive oil, about a teaspoon or so. Sorry I don’t have specific measures here, you just add liquid till it’s done, you know? 

Once it’s done it should be creamy and thick, with no granular bite when you taste the rice. Just yielding softness. Add salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste – and indeed, more mustard if you like. Serve drizzled with more olive oil, and squeeze over some of the orange’s juice. More salt and pepper is good here – and finish with a scattering of cheerfully green pistachios. 

It maybe sounds like there’s a nervous-making amount of olive oil in this but there’s not much of anything else, and you’re only adding a little at a time. Some of the cheapest extra virgin olive oils still have massive flavour, so don’t feel like you have to go high end here. Don’t skip out on the salt and pepper either, it ties everything together – salt makes everything taste more of itself, and I never used to like black pepper but it was just what I felt like having here – plus its dull heat helps stop the whole thing being too sleepy.

I know I bang on about comfort food and like, it’s not going to solve everything, but whatever’s going on you still need feeding and honestly, risotto is just the best, I can’t recommend it enough. If you can’t breathe, if you can’t think, if you can’t stand up, I believe that you can make it. The risotto I mean, but like, in general too.

As I said, I have five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred risotto recipes, but continuing in this vein, if you want more maybe try my take on Nigella’s Pea Risotto (which can be made vegan) or this oven-baked risotto if standing and stirring is beyond you right now (and if it is: I get it.)

title from: CHVRCHES affecting-like-whoa song Recover.

music lately: 

My song that I can’t stop listening to this week is Montaigne, Lonely, but beautiful as it is I’m trying to counteract it with taking Love Myself by Hailee Steinfeld repeatedly like it’s medicine. 

Muse, Plug In Baby. Emostalgia. 

next time: well it’s DECEMBER THE DAMN FIRST tomorrow and I’m NOT prepared in ANY way but maybe I’ll start thinking about xmas food. 

you said i must eat so many lemons, because i am so bitter

Leave a comment

1. I have nothing clever to say about the presidential election, no one comes to this blog for politics, and it was with massive sorrow and anxiety that I watched the livestream chug on endlessly with a friend (we got so stressed that we had to break for ice cream and then we both felt sick immediately after and I was like OH THIS IS THE LAST STRAW U MADE ME BE NEGATIVE ABOUT PRECIOUS, BEAUTIFUL ICE CREAM) and it was with massive sorrow and anxiety that I found out the confirmed results. There’s nothing exciting or able-to-be-romanticised or hilarious about Trump being president elect and it’s not even my battle by any means but if you’re hurting then I’m hurting with you and if you need support I support you and if you need compassion, I love you.

2. It’s possible that it’s really just a conflation of a million different things and feelings but I’m feeling almost overwhelmingly devastated by the death of Leonard Cohen. It’s weird, like…he was so old. People die. As I said, I guess it’s just the timing, really. But his songs have been so important to me ever since I was around 16 and I was introduced to him when my aunty made an offhand comment about how his music was nice to play when you’re going to sleep. That year I went off to boarding school and I would play the CD of his that I got for Christmas every single night when I went to bed. But only when I was home. His music to me feels like safety and warmth and calm; yet of aching and longing and quietly waiting for something that might never arrive. In 2009 I spent an enormous amount of money on a ticket to see him live – years later I would joke that if I’d known he was going to keep touring every year to pay off his debts I would’ve just waited and spent less money – but now I’m glad I did it. Like I said, he was OLD and it’s hardly the most shocking news, but like, spare a thought for the guy at the supermarket checkout who innocently asked how I my day was going and who had to listen to me tearfully talking going on about it (him: “oh that guy, yeah we sang Hallelujah in my primary school” me: “that sounds right” him: “was he really religious?” me: “well he used a lot of religious imagery…he was kind of a bad ass” also me: “I should go now.”)

3. Last week I travelled with friends to Otaki for the wedding of two of our very good also-friends. Gosh, if weddings don’t make you just THINK about your LIFE, you know? But, it was a happy, lovely, full-of-love day from start to finish and I was super grateful that I got to witness it in all its beauty. And that I didn’t fall out of my surprisingly practical strapless jumpsuit. The couple generously gave away little jars of homemade preserved lemons as party favours and I adore preserved lemons so gathered up every spare jar I could find.

On Monday I halved a bunch of tomatoes and smothered them in a mixture of olive oil, spices, some sliced up preserved lemons, and sugar, and roasted them first at a low heat then at a high heat. They were incredible and I accidentally ate all eight tomatoes in one sitting rather than leaving some for future use because they were just that delicious.

Preserved lemons have a compelling lemony (duh) saltiness; and strange though it seems all you need from each soft piece of fruit is the actual yellow skin – slice off as much of the flesh and white pith as you can (and then inevitably eat it to see if it could be that salty: yes it bloody is.) The remaining zest is full of concentrated sourness and salt, yet it’s somehow kind of mellow too – a bit like how garlic can be rich and sweet and make your eyes water at the same time. Stir it into pasta, use it in anything even vaguely Mediterranean, eat on its own out of curiosity, use it to flavour olive oil. Or do what I did: make these gorgeously scorched little roasted tomatoes, warm with cinnamon and caramelised slightly and stir them into pasta or anything vaguely Mediterranean, or just eat them squashed onto a bagel with some thankfully perfect avocado.

fast slow-roasted tomatoes with preserved lemon, cinnamon and garlic

a recipe by myself

  • eight smallish, ripe tomatoes
  • two big garlic cloves
  • about three tablespoons of olive oil, but y’know, whatever
  • half a lemon’s worth of preserved lemon
  • two teaspoons coriander seeds
  • a pinch of ground cinnamon
  • a teaspoon of brown sugar

Set your oven to 150 C/300 F. 

Roughly chop the garlic cloves or mince them if you’ve got one of those contraptions. Rinse the lemon slices (I’m assuming your preserved lemons came sliced into quarters) and slice off as much flesh and pith as you can, leaving you with just the actual skin of the lemons. Now that you’re finally at this point, roughly or finely slice them as you please. Mix the garlic and lemon slices in a small bowl with the coriander seeds, olive oil, cinnamon and sugar. Taste it – if you want a bit more sharpness, add in a dash of the preserving liquid from the jar of lemons or indeed, another quarter lemon’s worth of sliced lemon rind. 

Halve the tomatoes and lay them, cut side up, in a small roasting dish. Spoon the lemon-garlic-oil mixture evenly over them, scraping every last bit of flavoursome oil into the dish. 

Roast them at that low heat for 20 minutes, and then turn up the temperature to 220 C and continue to roast until the tomatoes are slightly scorched.  

The sweetness of the tomatoes is intensified under the heat and the lemon’s bite works beautifully with this. They taste best when they’ve had some time to sit and lose that scalding heat, which means you can put the whole tomato half in your mouth and allow the seeds to burst, pleasurably, full of garlic and cinnamon and salt, without causing yourself any damage. The coriander seeds have a hint of bitter lemon to them as well but if you don’t have them just leave them out or use cumin seeds instead for a different kind of earthy spiciness. I feel like this would be particularly spectacular with mint leaves scattered on top, but alas my mint plant has died from neglect and I was like, I don’t know if I’m actually ready to commit to another one and I shouldn’t reward myself for my bad plant husbandry by just replacing the erstwhile one immediately. But definitely mint or indeed, basil, would be perfect here.

what a beautiful wedding what a beautiful wedding

Thanks Vanessa and Reuben for the sour lemons that provided some definite sweetness this week. And also for playing I Want You by Savage Garden at the reception.

If all of this appeals and you want more, I recommend using preserved lemon in my recipe for Slow Cooked Lamb with Cumin, Cinnamon and Feijoas;  or in this Barley, Lentil, Eggplant, Pomegranate and Mint salad; or get high on your own supply with Nigella’s delicious recipe for preserved limes.

PS: thanks for reading, always.

title from: Kate Nash’s debut single from 2007, Foundations. The whole Made of Bricks album that this comes from makes me feel way too many things, I love upbeat songs about sad things and this is a classic example of that genre. 

music lately: 

I don’t even know where to begin with Leonard Cohen but listen to him singing Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye live at the Isle of Wight in 1970 if you dare.

The Saddest Song, from the musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Not even trying to be funny about the political timing of it all, I just can’t stop listening to this song.

Laura, by Girls, which contains everything I love: surfy sound, sad sad sad lyrics set to upbeat music, my name in the title.

next time: well I still have a lot of jars of preserved lemons, guys. 

and when i hit that dip get your camera

3 Comments

Do you ever get all like, this superfood is going to solve all the problems in my life? Well that’s how I feel about this pomegranate-laden hummus that I made. This is not a new thing for me; in fact I’ve probably discussed it before on here where I place enormous pressure on, say, goji berries or chia seeds or something to have some kind of ripple effect on the rest of my life, rather than actually doing anything about the rest of my life.

super super

Let me tell you a story to illustrate this. I swear I must’ve told it here before because it’s one I wheel out often to elaborately self-deprecate, but it bears repeating. So: I attended a girls boarding school for a couple of years in the early 2000s. This was peak time for two fads: the Atkins diet, and hating your own body. What can I say, we were all just humans with human bodies crammed together in a boarding house with not much to do, it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen outside of that context too. It just…is a thing. Anyway, not having any disposable income to buy the trappings of the Atkins diet – of which our interpretation was eating a lot of blueberries and unsweetened whipped cream – I was DELIGHTED to discover a grapefruit tree round the back of the boarding house. The grapefruit diet was even more hardcore and old-school than the Atkins one and I smugly lined up four plump, pale grapefruit on the windowsill, ready to be eaten for my breakfast.

After all that lead up, herein lies the kicker: I was boasting about my cunning ruse to someone. Grapefruit! For free! What larks!

There’s no grapefruit tree here, they told me. That’s an orange tree. You’ve been eating unripe oranges for the last four days.

Well that explains my sore stomach, said I.

So yeah, I’ve had idiotic ideas about food and the effect it will have upon me since way back; however I can’t deny that there really is something oddly calming about making yourself a vast quantity of hummus – allowing the dried chickpeas to swell up and grow plump in a bowl of water; slowly cooking them in an enormous pan till they’re completely tender; blitzing them to a soft, pillowy mass in the food processor, adding oil and lemon and salt and spice to reflect your own instinctive tastes; absentmindedly pouring tahini into your mouth and then nearly choking on it because it’s like actual glue in food form; spreading the nubbly hummus into a large bowl and tumbling over jewel-like pomegranate seeds, sliding a knife into a perfect avocado, eating the lot in one go; somehow finding yourself hooning the tahini again because it’s so delicious in spite of the quicksand perils of its texture.

There is literally nothing stopping you just buying a tub of hummus from the supermarket and having, y’know, hummus right then and there, but this is a food blog and as such I’m afraid I’m going to occasionally expose you to, y’know, cooking.

Making your own hummus from scratch aside, is it weird that I just ate a whole bowl of the stuff? As is? I’m going to say no, but there is absolutely nothing stopping you from serving this as it usually comes, as a dip to be plundered by lots of crackers and breads and such. I’m not going to call this a Hummus Bowl or Loaded Hummus or anything like that, it was just…this delicious stuff that I ate a lot of. As with the unripe grapefruit story, sure there’s some context there but it’s also not that deep: this hummus just tastes amazing.

Final caveat: I just started making it without following a recipe or anything and there will be truly about one billion recipes online already for this stuff, but if you’re lacking one you could do worse than to follow mine. It’s neither traditional nor perfect, but it’s mine. No wait, one more caveat: you OF COURSE don’t have to soak dried chickpeas and then simmer them in unsalted water for an hour and then drain them, you could just use canned, but they cost hardly anything and since you’re already making your own hummus you might as well go all out, yeah?

hummus with avocado, pomegranate, pine nuts and pumpkin seeds

  • four cups of dried, soaked, cooked chickpeas.
  • five tablespoons tahini
  • around four tablespoons of olive oil plus more for drizzling
  • one heaped tablespoon ground cumin, plus more if you like
  • two tablespoons lemon juice, plus more if you like  
  • plenty of sea salt or similarly “nice” salt, but use regular if it’s what you’ve got
  • up to one cup of water
  • the seeds from half a pomegranate
  • one small avocado
  • a few tablespoons each pine nuts and pumpkin seeds

Place the chickpeas in a food processor and blend the heck out of them, till they form a kind of nubbly, sandy rubble. Add the tahini, the olive oil, the lemon juice, the cumin, and a good pinch of salt, and process the actual heck out of it some more, while slowly pouring water down the feed tube till it appears to be a pleasing consistency. It will thicken up once it’s sat for a bit, so don’t worry toooo much if it looks too soupy. The important thing is the taste – is there enough salt? Enough cumin? Enough lemon? Add more and keep tasting till you’re happy. 

Transfer the lot – this makes around a litre – into a sealed container. Spoon some into a bowl, cover lavishly in pomegranate seeds, pumpkin seeds, slices of avocado, pine nuts, more salt, and a drizzle of olive oil. Eat. 

I probably over-emphasise this with every recipe I make but also I feel the need to tell you that of course you don’t have to use the specific things on top of the hummus that I did, or indeed use anything at all. It’s just really nice with this specific combination. Put coffee grounds and Lego on top of it for all I care. (Damn it, no, I care too much: please don’t do this.)

Pomegranates are getting cheaper and cheaper at the supermarket right now though and avocados are slowly becoming more reasonable and more likely to be ripe and perfect. Together – the silky bite of avocado as your teeth slide effortlessly through them paired with the sour crunch of the pomegranate seeds against the creamy, soft hummus – they’re rather wonderful and it all makes for a very satisfying snack-thing. And it’s so serene, like I couldn’t emphasise the serenity of this more if I was running through the streets yelling “Serenity!” through a megaphone while also crashing some cymbals together.

Look at these damn calming pomegranates.  Look at these damn calming pomegranates.

If you’re vibing making your own dips, may I suggest also: Nigella’s Peanut Butter Hummus; this incredible Turkish dip called Tarator which is almost literally just bread and water but tastes like a thousand things more; and this honestly INCREDIBLE Cambodian Wedding Day Dip which is, as I explain in the blog post, all the more delightful because it’s a recipe that also sounds like a dance.

title from: Azealia Banks’ perennial hit for the ages, 212. Say what you will about her, but we are blessed to have this song.  

music lately: 

Slow Ride, by Foghat. I’ve been watching a LOT of NewsRadio lately and there’s an episode that features this rather quintessential 70s rock song and well, now it’s in my head.

About A Girl, Nirvana. I saw Montage of Heck, the melodramatic but amazing and incredibly sad Kurt Cobain documentary last night, and now I obviously need to listen to a lot of Nirvana. Wasn’t their MTV Unplugged album just perfect, though?

next time: Possibly 12,000 uses for hummus since I made around a litre of the damn stuff. 

but it sours into a routine deceit

3 Comments

I’m sure I’ve conveyed it somehow, but if you were not aware, I am a fulltime bartender. I personally think I’m good at it. I love doing it. But I don’t tend to talk about it too much On Here apart from to like, flop around and whinge about how tired I am, which is something I’ve done whether I’ve been bartending or working in an office or conversely, working in a different office, throughout the entire lifetime of this blog. Interestingly, I sleep better now than I ever have before, possibly because I’m filling my usual insomnia hours with standing up and serving drinks to people.

But yeah! Cocktails! So fun to make! I love learning about the classics, especially the truly ancient and sometimes forgotten ones – back when someone would mix cold gin with a wineglass of this and a jigger of that and some cad would lean over the bar and be like “hot jimminy dog! This is swell! And I, Lord Flauntleroy, pronounce it a new sensation! I suggest we kiss now, Bertram.”  On that note, it is fun discovering fascinating bartenders from way back when. Like London’s Ada “Coley” Coleman, who invented the Hanky Panky — a variation on the classic Martini using gin, sweet vermouth and that friend of yours and mine, Fernet Branca. She started working as a bartender in 1899, at a time in England when you were either allowed to be devotedly married or quietly reading Pilgrim’s Progress, but nothing else, let alone be employed in the man-crusted world of night-alcohol.

Ada “Coley” Coleman extremely doing her thing

With that in mind, I decided to do an impressively deep, powerful lunge sideways from my usual food recipes today to provide a recipe for something that I spend almost as much time thinking about: cocktails. More specifically, my variation on one of my favourite drinks, to make it vegan. So: Sours are generally a shaken-to-heck mix of a spirit, lemon juice, a little sugar and some egg white, the latter of which creates a gloriously silky texture and frothy layer on top. Raw egg white in a drink might sound un-fun but please, bear with me, as I am currently super into them and compelled to make Everything Sours right now. Including any mocktails I make for the glassie during their shift (the person who washes our glasses on busy nights: as I always say, A Hydrated Glassie Is A Hydrated All Of Us.) Importantly, you neither taste nor smell the egg white — it just wraps its proteins around the molecules of the liquid and floofs everything up splendidly as you shake the cocktail, creating a spectacularly light, foamy drink.

Whisky sours are probably the most well-known take on this format, but I personally favour gin sours, an occasional amaretto sour and the fairly underrated Pisco Sour. Once you start extrapolating out — and why wouldn’t you spend four hours on wikipedia without realising it — it becomes clear how many cocktails fall into the greater Sour family, being a mix of liquor, sugar, and lemon or lime juice — like Margaritas and Daiquiris. Sours have a gloriously punchy, sweet-zingy taste and lush texture – there’s barely a liquor under the sun that isn’t improved by a little sugar and a little citrus. However, I also love sours because they’re quite easy to recreate at home. You only need one favourite bottle of spirits, and the rest is just kitchen stuff. Plus you’re getting a hit of protein and vitamin C with every sip. It’s basically an alcoholic multivitamin.

whisky sour whisky sour

However! If you can’t eat egg white — because of preference, allergy, whatever — it seems a massive shame to be missing out on this entire avenue of cocktail deliciousness. I’m neither vegan nor allergic to egg myself, but I don’t think that’s a compelling enough reason to not explore and reimagine existing recipes to make them available to more people. Or at least: I love thinking up recipes and I like challenges, so this is my idea of fun.

If you’ve not yet heard of it, the solution is slightly leftfield. At some point in the recent past, it was discovered that the liquid from canned chickpeas, called aquafaba, behaves almost exactly like egg whites. As in, the stuff that you normally drain off into the sink, can be whisked with sugar and baked and it honestly looks and tastes like meringue. I don’t know why or how, but it’s enough for me that it’s possible. Having used aquafaba successfully before to make pavlova, I got to wondering how it would work in a sour cocktail recipe. The most perfunctory of google searches reveals that roughly five billion people have already thought of this and tested it and I was like fine, I did not discover this, but in my defence, this is the first time that I’ve thought of it.

gin sour gin sour

Who cares about provenance when it works so well! First I made myself a whisky sour using aquafaba, then I made another one, just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, then I made a gin sour, and then I realised I hadn’t eaten yet and I was moderately tipsy. The important thing is though: it works! Look at how frothy these drinks are! I barely shook them and they turned into alcoholic foam immediately! I was honestly so excited. And tipsy. Now, the aquafaba liquid is not entirely tasteless —  it’s hard to explain what quality it brings, which possibly means I’m a terrible food blogger, but it just provides a slight background hint of…dust? Faint notes of literal chickpea? I counteracted this by adding slightly more sugar than I normally would. But as long as you’ve braced yourself for that, you’ve got a delicious drink on your hands that you can easily make sizeable batches of and drink joyfully while doing such activities as entertaining guests or testing cocktail recipes.

Please don’t in the slightest bit feel like you have to spend vast quantities on bartending equipment which you will possibly never use and only grow to resent and accidentally kick over all the time (curious, as you keep it on top of the fridge.) If you’ve got a clean jar with a lid you can put all your ingredients in there to shake vigorously and pour it through a sieve into your chosen glass. Some kind of plastic container, even, would work, or just your cupped hands if you want to get super artisanal (fine, I don’t condone this, but I do stand by the alcoholic multivitamin statement.)

Another thing to keep in mind if you haven’t made your own cocktails before is, Sours usually get what’s known as a Dry Shake, which, yeah, doesn’t sound great, but it’s just where you shake up the ingredients initially without any ice before shaking them up with ice to give the egg white a chance to emulsify and aerate. If your ingredients are all cold enough you could possibly get away without shaking it with ice at all, since this gets so foamy, however, a tiny bit of dilution from the water is actually desirable, just to meld all the ingredients together.

Finally, sugar syrup can be made hastily by dissolving equal parts of plain white sugar and water together. And I figure most people have some kind of shot glass lying about the house from when they went on a Con-Tiki trip ten years ago or were students or whatever, otherwise just work with the fact that one tablespoon measures 15ml and go from there.

vegan whisky sour

  • 45ml/one and a half shots of bourbon or rye whisky
  • 30ml/one shot of lemon juice
  • 15ml/half a shot of sugar syrup
  • 20ml/just under one shot of aquafaba

Place all the ingredients in either the glass of a Boston shaker or inside a clean, empty jar that you have a lid for. Bang the top of the boston shaker onto the glass, or screw the lid onto the jar if you’re using it, and holding them firmly, give them about ten good shakes — you’ll see the contents instantly become frothy and aerated.

Remove the top of the shaker or the jar lid, add a handful of ice, lid up and shake again briefly. Strain into your chosen glass, decorate with bitters if you wish, drink immediately. Peychaud’s bitters is more traditional but I happened to have a bottle of Angostura Bitters and so used that instead. Leaving your whisky sour naked is also highly acceptable.

vegan gin sour

  • 45ml/one and a half shots gin
  • 30ml/one shot lemon juice
  • 20ml/just under one shot sugar syrup
  • 20ml/just under one shot of aquafaba

Proceed as above — shake all ingredients together without ice, then add ice, shake again for a bit, strain into your chosen glass.

To make the non-vegan versions of these, use around 20ml/just under a shot of egg white per drink. I prefer using the pasteurised stuff that you can buy in packages at the supermarket but obviously freshly separated eggs have been doing just fine for quite some time now.

Of course, nothing’s stopping you from simply having a G&T or a beer at home, but if you happen to have been given a bottle of gin or something for Christmas or feel like being slightly impressive, well now you have one more option.

As for the remaining chickpeas, they unsurprisingly have their own merits. Realising quickly that I needed some kind of sustenance, I emptied them into a bowl with a handful of baby kale leaves, some salt, some coriander seeds, some apple cider vinegar and a ton of extra virgin olive oil. Coriander seeds are lemony and peppery and the oil brought out the buttery side of the chickpeas. Kale is healthy! But also actually tastes good.

this salad is like a non-alcoholic multivitamin this salad is like a non-alcoholic multivitamin

If putting one alcohol into another under your own roof appeals, I also recommend you try out my simplified take on the Lee Brothers recipe for something called Purple Jesus, and also this recipe for a Christmassy punch of Nigella’s called Poinsettia, halfway down this verrrrrrry old blog post of mine.

or come up and see me, also extremely doing my thing or come up and see me, also extremely doing my thing

title from: Third Eye Blind with their highly self-indulgent unreliably-narrated but extremely listenable song Losing A Whole Year. 

music lately: 

I have always enjoyed INXS but for some reason this week I’ve become obsessed with them. Is it mostly because the tragically late Michael Hutchence was so hot and charismatic? I mean, sure. Their music is amazing though and if you feel in the slightest bit like writing it off as 80s filler then I urge you to give it your ears again. Obviously all the hits are hits but I have been listening to Disappear over and over again and it just gets to me, I don’t even know, just the dreamy lightness of the verses with the sudden rush into the heady exuberance and promise of escapism in the chorus and the massive drums and Hutchence being in effortlessly good voice. Anyway it’s almost embarrassing how long I could go on about this for but I have 100% been listening to this song and you should too.

I actually have been pretty exclusively listening to INXS recently but…I did rewatch the intensely 90s movie Go and the soundtrack is just wonderful, so much big beats and trip hop and trance and just the sort of thing that makes you want to put on a pleather knee-length skirt and some brown lipstick, and put your hair into Bjork buns, ya know? The film’s remix of Fire Up The Shoesaw by Lionrock is one such excellent example here.

Uh, you should also watch Disappear from INXS’s live show at Wembley Stadium in 1991. Note I said “also”, not “alternatively”.

and morning soup can be avoided If you take a route straight through what is known as parklife

Leave a comment

It has been a bit of a time for ya girl of late, what with – she says vaguely – one thing and another. Notably I spent the weekend firmly swaddled in illness due to kidney problems, which came with bonus excruciating back ache and the admittedly interesting conundrum of being both hellaciously feverish and shiveringly cold simultaneously. I have no idea what it is or what caused it or what its deal is, but something very similar happened to me back in 2007 so I guess it’s just that my kidneys like to act the fool once every decade. Also, when it happened in 2007 it was misdiagnosed as a sprained rib, to which I was like “um, do you even know how unlikely that is and how sedentary I am”, to which the doctor was like “nope definitely a sprain”, henceforth giving me a lifelong suspicion of diagnoses.

Anyway, I read online that tomatoes are really good for your kidneys – on one of those websites that’s all “make a tincture of parsley and sorrel and then when that’s ready six weeks later make a rudimentary poultice and apply it to the hurty bit of you” (I had to spend an amount at the after-hours clinic that was so huge it almost made me cry in order to get a prescription for antibiotics, so you see why I was initially trying to cure it on my own using dirt and leaves and stuff.) The antibiotics have more or less swept away all the pain but I figured it couldn’t hurt to up the tomato quotient in my life, in an attempt to appease my truculent kidneys.

This Ottolenghi recipe for burnt aubergine soup had caught my eye, but I really wasn’t sure when I was going to make it, on account of my opportunities to cook for myself are few and rare. Luckily the hand of fate intervened! I had some appallingly bad nightmares which woke me up at 4.30am the other day, and could not go back to sleep no matter how firmly I squeezed my eyes shut and listened to soothing meditation videos telling me I’m a good person who’s definitely relaxed and sleepy. By 8am I realised I really wasn’t going back to sleep, and in the feverish grips of all that, decided I might as well be productive with all this time. Making soup suddenly felt like a really good use of my morning, so I hurtled to the supermarket, bought the ingredients (hurrah for having spontaneous cooking whims post-payday) and started making it, all before 9am.

I think I say this in every single post about soup that I’ve ever done, but…soup usually really doesn’t appeal to me that much. It’s just a bowl of wet stuff! There’s not nearly enough crispness and crunchiness! You can’t deep-fry soup! And so on. This soup is super excellent though; the smoky grilled eggplant against a backdrop of rich tomato; the fried cubes of eggplant on top providing proper texture and silky oiliness with every bite, the feta being delicious feta.

The recipe below looks horrifyingly long, and I shan’t candy-coat it for you: this recipe does take up quite a lot of time. But it’s so easy! And I just wanted to talk you through all the steps to make sure I had explained it all properly. Really all the instructions you need for this soup are grill, fry, heat, stir, blend, eat.

burnt aubergine soup with fried aubergine, tomato and feta

adapted from a recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi. I know we call them eggplants here in New Zealand but the recipe itself calls them aubergines and it sounds more poetic. So. 

three large eggplants
plenty of olive oil
salt
one large onion, finely diced
one and a half teaspoons ground cumin
a teaspoon of sugar
a tablespoon of lemon juice
one can of crushed tomatoes
a stock cube of your chosen persuasion
feta cheese

First, deal with your eggplants. Turn the grill on your oven to as high as it will go, stab two of the eggplants a few times with a knife, and then put them on a baking tray preeettty close to the grill. Leave them there for what will feel like hours, but is probably an hour maximum, turning them occasionally. Don’t worry if they’re all blistered and deflated looking, it’s what we’re going for here. Remove them from the oven, allow them to cool a little – or don’t, if you’re impatient like me – and remove the skin, which should be crunchy and fall away with a little encouragement. I ate the lot, discard it if you like. Place the frankly weird looking eggplant flesh into a sieve set over a bowl, and allow it to sit there weirdly while you get on with everything else. 

Take the remaining eggplant, dice it into small squares, and then in a saucepan that you’ll later make the rest of the soup in, heat up about an inch of olive oil till it’s sizzling. Fry the cubes of eggplant, in batches if necessary, letting them really just sit there in the hot oil so they get properly browned, before carefully turning them over so they darken on the other side. Add more oil before tipping the next batch of eggplant in if need be. Just deal with how much oil this uses. Carefully remove the browned crispy pieces to a sieve over a bowl and sprinkle with salt (this bit is honestly probably not that necessary? Unlike the earlier sieving bit.) And try really, really hard to not eat the lot. 

Okay now you’re finally done with all the damn prep stuff, and you can actually make soup. With the remaining oil in the pan (there should be around a tablespoon or so) gently fry the onion for five to ten minutes till it’s very soft. Add the cumin, the lemon juice, sugar, can of tomatoes, stock cube and then fill up the tomato can with water from the tap and tip that in. Add another can full of water if you like and want the soup to go further. Let all this simmer briskly till it has thickened and reduced a little and, you know, looks like the makings of some literal soup.

Finally! Add the eggplant flesh to the pan (the burnt stuff, not the fried stuff) and either puree it with a hand-held stick blender thingy, if you have one, or do the stressful thing and transfer it perilously to a food processor and blitz thoroughly. I did the latter, and it doesn’t make it entirely velvety but any texture is pleasing, so, whatever. It’s just so much more of a pain to clean and also it might fly everywhere and you might spill it while getting it in and out of the processor bowl, but anyway. You now have your soup. Ladle into bowls, top generously with the fried eggplant cubes and crumble over plenty of feta. 

Serves two-ish. You could add another can of tomatoes if you want it to go further. 

As well as changing some details I reduced the original recipe’s quantities, but if I were you making this I’d increase the quantities of the liquid and the eggplant just because if you’re going to that much damn time-consuming effort you might as well get a ton of soup out of it and feed an appreciatively gasping crowd. Is it worth it just to do all that for yourself though? Of course! There’s no one more important than me. Is what you should be saying to yourself. I know I hear it enough to occasionally believe it. For real though, this soup has such excellent depth of flavour and the fried eggplant bits are so compulsively good: it is so much more than just a bowl full of wet stuff.

A bright firework of light through all this is that today is the five year anniversary of my friend Kate and I meeting each other at Mighty Mighty in a breathless, hand-clasping fashion, and ALSO Lucy Liu’s birthday. We both love Lucy Liu with the fire of a thousand fires so let’s just say it is feeling auspicious up in here. I can’t believe my life has been this blessed for five years now and I also can’t believe I didn’t meet Kim, the third prong in our equilateral triangle of friendship, till halfway through the following year.

one of my favourite photos of Kate and I, this is pretty much how our initial meeting went too. 

All of everything else aside, I know it’s a dull take but I CANNOT BELIEVE it’s literally December now. I’m not ready! Also December always makes me super introspective and I’m already feeling introspective so it’s all just a double helix of feelings. On the upside, the smell of pine sends me into catnip-esque conniptions and we have erected an enormous, splendidly bushy real Christmas tree at work, every time I pass it by I feel more and more seasons greetings-y. Thanks, Pavlov’s Christmas tree!

______________________________________________________
title via: Parklife! Man I used to have the crushiest crush on Blur’s Damon Albarn. I literally wrote angrily in my diary in 1996 about him dating Justine Frischmann from Elastica; as if their being together somehow made him less accessible to me than he already was.  
______________________________________________________
music lately:

Turkey Lurkey Time from the 1969 musical Promises, Promises. It’s my own personal Christmas tradition that every time the first of December comes around, then and only then will I rewatch this video of this utterly ludicrous song being performed. Honestly the song is ridiculous but I’m in it for the incredible dancing, especially from Donna McKechnie who blatantly has elastic where her bones should be. It’s hard to explain, but this is just weirdly important to me. The video, not the consistency of her bones, I mean.

One Direction, Hey Angel. I had very low expectations for these guys post-Zayn, but UGH this is such a good song. It is just so big and manipulative and I love it heartily.
______________________________________________________
next time: hopefully some exponentially increasing xmas spirit and exponentially decreasing introspection. And chilled out kidneys. 

now my life is sweet like cinnamon

2 Comments
muffins! (I say this every time I hear a doorbell and I don’t know why but it’s some weird Pavlovian response possibly from something I saw on TV many years ago?) (That got deep, huh)
I continue to be an utter slattern at being organised and a regular blogger, and the only thing stronger than my conviction that I’m not going to slide out of blogging regularly, is my overwhelming need to nap hard during the day when I’m not at work all night. I mean, I started this blog in 2007 and it’s pretty much the only thing that has remained the same in my life since then, with only a tiny bit of exaggeration. But also being angry at myself for not being organised enough is not going to stop me being tired and making like, toast or something instead of having the time and energy to make real food. I’ll get there though! This blog has been there throughout all manner of tumultuous and/or tired times, and just because I am not as good at burning the candle at both ends as I used to be, doesn’t mean I can’t relearn that (albeit rather terrible) behaviour once more.
I house-sat and cat-sat for friends over the weekend when they went on a mini holiday, and it was so lovely and blissful, like escaping to a cabin in the woods somewhere (a nice one, not the horror-movie kind, way to ruin cabins in the woods, Joss Whedon.) I’ve been weighed down by such cat-longing feelings lately, I mean, I always am, but it has been stronger than usual, so I was excited about the thought of having a cat roomie for a few days. Unfortunately the cat in question was hellaciously skittish and I only saw her for a grand total of twenty seconds over the four days I was there, but she ate her food and didn’t cause trouble so it could’ve been worse. In happier news, the house was just darling, and it was more than enough to gaze rapturously around at it all. I decided on Sunday to make some muffins, since I just felt like baking a damn thing, but also they seemed like the perfect house-sitting foodstuff to make – easily made and consumed, not too taxing on the house-owners’ ingredients or infrastructure, able to be frozen and eaten later (not that it came to this since all but one were eaten by the time I left.)
suspect was catless, repeat, catless

When the weather turns extremity-stiffeningly cold my thoughts turn to cinnamon: how can I make everything around me scented of it? Baking is the obvious way (although if anyone knows of an amazing cinnamon-scented candle that won’t cost as much as a pet pony please give me details) and so I made some cinnamon-orange muffins, inspired by the sight of an orange in the fruit bowl that I could nick for this purpose. I swing wildly between finding muffins dull and basic and finding them tears-makingly comforting and delightful, and I guess over the weekend was a time when I was swinging towards the latter, because I could not have been more content with myself: being in a tiny, adorable kitchen, shaking clouds of cinnamon into the batter, melting butter, flinging flour onto the ground (that bit was not fun), dropping heaped spoonfuls of orange-tinted batter into the muffin tin, waiting around while they briefly baked in the hot oven and the room filled with the smell of warm cake. Muffins! They’re honestly so great.

cinnamon orange muffins

a recipe by myself – makes 12

75g butter, melted
one cup milk
two eggs
the juice of one orange
two and a half cups flour
two and a half teaspoons baking powder
half a cup brown sugar
a teaspoon or so of ground cinnamon

25g soft butter
quarter of a cup brown sugar
half a teaspoon or so of ground cinnamon
the grated zest of the orange
three tablespoons flour

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and lightly grease a 12-cup muffin tray. Or put little cupcake holders in them if you like, this will certainly save on a lot of washing later. 

In a large bowl, mix the butter, milk, eggs and orange juice till everything is well-dispersed and you can’t see any one ingredient floating about being all individual, if that makes sense. I mean, just mix them all together, that’s all, really. 

Tip in the flour, baking powder, brown sugar, and cinnamon. Very, very gently mix it all together – just turn it around and over a few times with your spoon, not worrying if everything’s still all lumpy and the flour isn’t 100% incorporated. Drop heaped spoonfuls of the batter into the muffin tin until all the batter is used up and the muffin tin is evenly filled. 

Quickly mix together the remaining ingredients – you can either bash it with a wooden spoon or use your fingertips to work in the butter, either way you want to end up with a dusty, crumbly, floury mix. Sprinkle a little of this evenly over each of the uncooked muffins. Bake for about 18 minutes, then allow to sit for about ten minutes before removing and eating, preferably sliced with more butter spread across. Because of the crumbly topping, you’ll probably need to run a knife around the edge of each muffin, but they should slide out easily. 

Look, muffins are so excellent. They take hardly any effort to make – in fact, if you put too much effort into stirring the mixture together they’ll toughen up like an old sponge. A mere gentle prod is all you need to bring the ingredients towards each other, then less than 20 minutes in the oven, and you have freshly baked goods. Isn’t that wonderful though? These are as winningly cinnamon-y as I’d hoped they’d be, with the pinpricks of orange zest in the crumbly topping and the juice of the orange in the batter giving gentle citrussy sweetness. If I had to sum up these muffins in one word it would be: snug. They tasted snug.

 

by this point I was literally just carrying the muffin around the house being all “here are more pretty things that I can photograph, I’ll just put the muffin on it and not care about whether you’d actually normally consume a muffin amongst a trolley of succulents”) 

It’s my birthday this Friday! Oh my gosh! How audacious of me! I’ve decided that my birthday treat to myself is going to be to break my general mood of grim austerity to buy myself a way cool outfit to wear to the joint birthday party that my flatmate and friend Charlotte are having the following day, and frankly I’m so excited about going clothes shopping. I saw this ridiculously amazing fluffy yellow oversized cardigan in a shop in town which in my daydreams looks incredible on me, so I guess that’s what I’m going to make a beeline for (and may end up looking like a literal bumblebee, or perhaps a small Big Bird, but we’ll see.) But what do I really want for my birthday, I conveniently imagine you asking? My needs and wants are simple, I simply want the following:

 

~ A pair of Victorian-ward-of-the-state-esque black boots for both work and frivolous times
~ more tattoos, or at least one more tattoo, singular
~ more hair dye in pastel blue, purple, peach, pink, whatever
~ Maldon sea salt and excellent coffee beans
~ a pet cat (c’mon universe, you know I deserve this)
~ the makings of a mighty liquor cabinet – perhaps a glamorous bottle of gin, some thoroughly decent peaty whisky, and a bottle of dry vermouth. Also some Disaronno and port and dark rum and I guess I’ve thought about this a lot.
~ a fake fur coat
~ a little record player so I could finally play all my records again
~ a cinnamon-scented candle, or something similarly glorious
~ some crystals for doing witchy deeds
~ Marc Jacobs Oh Lola perfume, I’ve run out and am utterly too broke to buy more, this is entirely my own fault for repeatedly using it instead of my Nivea roll-on and calling it “baller deodorant” but still
~ a facial but where someone pretty much just pats your hair and rubs the pressure points above your eyebrows and tells you that everything’s going to be okay and makes your skin smell incredible
~ to be financially chill enough to go to brunch more often (slash: at all)

 

So simple, those needs and wants of mine! I will report back after my birthday as to how successful I was with this list. Fingers crossed! But also I like to think I make my own luck. But fingers crossed as a back-up, in case that’s what the universe arbitrarily requires from me.

title from: Lana Del Rey, Radio. I just love her so much, quite frankly. 

music lately: 

Crucial Conflict, Hay. I found a “top 20 songs” list I made in 1996 and this song was on it, I am pretty sure I haven’t listened to it since that very time? It still goes hard though and honestly should be having its own No Diggity type revival (No Diggity was on the list too, haha)

One Direction, I Would. Don’t talk to me about Zayn leaving, okay? It’s still too soon (but honestly, who could blame him, all that relentless touring must’ve wilted those boys down like a three-day-old bouquet of flowers) (I love this song so so much still though)

next time: I’m gonna try so hard to cook stuff more often and take photos of it more often! Y’know, like, be a blogger.