Tag: Ingredient: Lemons

drinking peppermint schnapps with jackie wilson and sam cooke…

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So Christmas has been packed up and put back in the cupboard where you keep the Christmas things. The giant ham from lunch on the big day is being slowly whittled down with each leftovers-based meal, and the wrapping paper has had its sellotape pieces peeled off and been respectfully folded and put away to be used for next year’s presents.

I’ve spent a joyful few days like this:

Lying on the couch in a remarkably realistic small cat costume. Jokes! I’ve been lying on the couch at home reading a Julie Andrews biography and mucking round online and sleeping in. And feeling sufficiently emboldened to ask Mum and Dad “say, do you guys want to watch Parks and Recreation? It’s so amazingpleaselikeitIloveitsomuch.” (Result: we did watch an episode, they liked it!)

Now that I’m back in Wellington – briefly, before taking off for a sure-to-be-blissful New Years with friends and then back up home to go camping with whanau in the same place we’ve camped since 1986 – my thoughts turn to resourceful things, like…could I dissolve all our leftover candy canes in vodka, to form homemade peppermint schnapps? The sugar content of the candy canes would surely soften the taste and the peppermint flavour would give it icy edge.

Well, it worked. Spookily fast, the candy canes let go of their stripes and stain the vodka and glowing electric pink. By the next morning, there was no trace of them. How practical is a jar full of liquor that tastes like toothpaste and is filled with red food colouring? Um, not overly. But as with all funny liqueurs, you can find a use for them. Be it a punchily minty hot chocolate or…a punchily minty hot chocolate. Any ideas? But the cool thing about this is how instant it is, so if you get moving, you can have yourself a cute bottle of peppermint schnapps to see in the new year with.

Spot the new-old plate that I picked up from home. New to me, old because it belonged to my dad’s mum. The vodka you get doesn’t need to be fancy – if the price of one litre of it is the same price as 750mls of another brand, then it’s probably about right – but make sure it’s vaguely drinkable. I have a feeling the stuff I got was a little too rough-edged, however I figure another night in the jar will mellow it out a little and let the sugar soften it up.

Homemade Peppermint Schnapps

A recipe by myself

  • 1 litre vodka
  • 10 or more candy canes

Find an airtight jar (non-plastic) that will fit 1 litre of liquid. Unwrap the candy canes, pile them into the jar, then pour over the vodka. Leave a couple of days if you can, but at least overnight.

There was indeed more than one bottle of homemade drinks in the first photo. This one’s not nearly as instant, but what it lacks in speed it makes up for in visual novelty value. Like, it looks like you’re incubating an alien baby or something. It’s a great conversation starter. I found out about Forty-Four, as it’s known, in the Food Thesaurus book. You take an orange, make 44 cuts in it, push a coffee bean into each slice, and place in a jar with 44 teaspoons of sugar. Cover with brandy or vodka (I used vodka) and leave for forty-four days. On the forty-fourth day, remove the orange, cut it in half and squeeze the juice into the jar, leave for a day and then finally you’re good.

I kept forgetting to make this, so it has really only been sitting for 22 days, but I’d like to think it’s more or less where it needs to be.

There’s no way you’re going to get this before New Years, no matter how fast you move, however if you feel like a little project and something to look forward to, then feel free to try this too for fun times in the nearish future. The long sitting allows the sugar to slowly absorb into the resinous syrupy vodka, along with the intense oil from the pores of the orange skin and the coffee beans. At first all you taste is orange, followed quickly by a warm, slightly bitter hit of coffee. It might sound unusual but it’s a pretty brilliant combination.

Normally I try to keep it real on here – like, none of the photos are staged. If you see something in a photo, that’s how I was going to consume it. But at the start of the day and with heaps to get done I had to concede to pouring myself a drink I was going to tip right back into the jar. The schnapps was a little too underdeveloped by this point to slowly sip on its own, so I tried – for lack of anything better – mixing it with lemonade. It tasted weirdly good. But I might need to test it a couple more times before the verdict graduates into “definitely good”. Appropriately I also made cakeballs today, out of some leftover cake crumbled and rolled together with leftover cream cheese icing and melted white chocolate, and, for good measure, some raspberry flavouring. Two novelties are better than one, after all.

Tim and I will be taking these two fine-ish liqueurs out to the house we’re renting with some dear friends over New Years. Even though I prefer my liquor to be as dry as dry can be, I also find it very hard to say no to a novelty recipe. My head is all “what about Sour Coke Bottle Vodka? What about Orange Jellybean Vodka?” while my heart is like “you don’t like sugary drinks, fool.” And then my head replies with “But the pretty colours!” And I guess it’s obvious by now which organ won the battle.

Title via: the quietly appealing 2pac song Thugz Mansion featuring Nas and J.Phoenix.

Music lately:

Ethel Merman, There’s No Business Like Show Business. There’s something I find strangely comforting about her brassy, intense voice. And this song is amazing.

Kate Nash, Foundations. I can’t stop listening to her debut album. Like…daily. I know.

Next time: I hope you all have a safe and happy New Years. I’ll see you in 2012 with something non-novelty, I promise.

 

that’s all you take, for a cup of cold coffee and a piece of cake

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Fun to have up your sleeve: a super delicious cake recipe which can be easily made to look disproportionately spectacular in relation to the effort that went into it.

Not so fun to have up your sleeve: actual cake. Crumbly enough to make your elbows itch and move round everywhere as you try and shake it out, sticky enough to really winkle itself permanently into the fibres of the fabric.

Consider how many times a day that you blink your eyes. That’s probably how often I think about cake. Well, if I’m being realistic, that’s probably how often I’m thinking about all food, as opposed to cake specifically. While you’re blinking, I’m blinking and thinking about food…ing. In this case, I found some lipstick-pink rhubarb sticks at the vege market last week and had a vision of simmering them up and having them dripping out from the layers of a cake. I had a whole lot of sour cream leftover from another recipe, and so I mentally inserted that into the layers with the rhubarb. And then I thought, what if it was a bundt cake? How cool would that look? All diagonal and undulating and with a veneer of intimidation?
Pretty cool, yes indeed. Could almost walk away right now and let the cake speak for itself. Except that would be an ineffectual blog post, and also the cake would probably say, in a spongy voice “errr, look over there at that…pikelet. Way more appealing than my regal, creamy body.” And then the cake would quietly shuffle off to a hiding place. 
My grand visions don’t work out the way I hope they will (this goes for dinners, clothing, and judging when it’s the right time to say “that’s what she said”) so it’s most definitely enpleasening and good for the soul when it does. But if you need some convincing as to why you should try making this full-on cake, consider the following:
1) It looks awesomely ridiculous and ridiculously awesome.
2) It’s way easier to make than its outward appearance would suggest.
3) Without the filling, the cake is both vegan and delicious.

While you’re considering that, you could maybe consider considering another cake worth your consideration: Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Guinness Cake, which was the subject of my most recent cooking tutorial video on YouTube.

All the cakes! The Guinness cake was the reason I bought all that sour cream, by the way. Not that it needs a lot, but subconsciously I would’ve reached for the bigger amount at the supermarket so that I could have leftovers to use in another baking caper. I’ve got another video about bread on the make, but I’m waiting for this one to climb in views before I upload it (also it needs some severe editing, would you believe I could talk about bread for A WHOLE HOUR and I was aiming for a six-minute clip.)

Back to this cake: the only bit where you really have to tap into your concentration faculties is when slicing it into layers, but even that’s simple enough: just use your sharpest knife, go slowly, stop often to make sure it’s staying even, then slide some baking paper underneath the layer you’re slicing and lift it off. Onto the next one.

Despite sandwiching this together with sour cream wrought from the milk of the nation’s finest cows, my eye was caught by this vegan recipe, which harnesses the awesome power of coconut milk and not much else and turns it into a cake most delicious. The website that I found it on is fairly confusing but the recipe itself is sound as a pound.
Coconut Lemon Rhubarb Brown Sugar Sour Cream Layer Bundt 

Working on that title. But if I left something out…recipe adapted from this site here.

1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cup oil (I use rice bran, it’s nice and tasteless-tasting)
1 x 400ml (or 14oz) can of coconut milk
1/4 cup lemon juice (or substitute with the citrus of your choosing)
Zest of the lemons you juiced
3 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups shredded coconut (disclosure: totally forgot to add this)


Set your oven to 180 C/350 F, and thoroughly grease a bundt tin.


Whisk together the sugar, oil, coconut milk, lemon juice and zest. Sift together the dry ingredients – super important that you don’t have any lumps here or the whole cake will taste like baking soda. Whisk the flour in till you’ve got a thick batter, scrape it into the cake tin and bake for around an hour.

‘Fraid I didn’t actually weigh out the amount necessary but it was two decent-sized bunches of rhubarb, trimmed and chopped into short sticks, brought to a slow simmer in a pan with about 1/2 a cup of sugar (seriously, I’m sorry I chose this moment to be all instinctive and not record amounts.) Cook away, stirring often, till the fruit has mostly collapsed and softened. Allow to cool. Mix together 1 cup of sour cream (I used delicious Tatua stuff) together with 3 tablespoons of brown sugar. Cut the cake into two or three slices as per my instructions up there, then carefully spoon sour cream onto the bottom layer – less than you’d think and not all the way to the edge, as the weight of the next two layers pushes it out – and then spoon over some rhubarb. Carefully lift the next layer of cake and slide it off the baking paper and on top of the bottom layer. Repeat, finish with the top layer, dust with icing sugar if you like.

Whether or not you see all that as a lot of effort or not, this is delicious either way and encompassing all kinds of delicious flavours and textures: the double sour-sweet of the softly fibrous rhubarb melting into the cool, satiny sour cream. Squidgily creamy, sweet with coconut and pure sugar, sharply spiked with rhubarb and lemon, pink and golden like a decent sunrise, and tall as a house the size of a cake.
On Saturday I fed the cake to our top-notch friend Jo (well, she fed herself, but I passed the cake to her on a plate) and to myself before we went for a flounce round Petone, being fed truffled brie at Cultured, buying fizzy Limca drink, coriander seeds, mustard, and other food trinkets, browsing the treasures at Wanda Harland, and checking out the goods at the A La Mode relaunch, before driving back to the city to weigh up the whys and why-nots of buying whipped cream flavoured vodka (verdict: I want to try and make my own instead, but how??) All of which makes it sound like I’m some kind of obnoxiously frolicky blogger who runs around in a haze of pink-tinged high-contrast photos, but it’s all in the framing. Am mostly grumpy nervous and opportunistic, as opposed to the kind of carefree imagery this might’ve served up. Also: truffled brie is incredible stuff. Just enough of too much of a good thing, you know?
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Title via: Cat Stevens, proving his use to my blog once again. Matthew and Son is my very, very favourite song of his and I think I talk about this amazing video of him singing it at least once a week but if you haven’t watched it…do.
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Music lately:

Somehow a lot of time has gone by since I last had a proper wallow in some Julia Murney singing excellence. And then I realised, it’s because she’s just so, so good that if I watch too much it mucks with my brain and I get all miserable that I’ll never get to see her live and so on and so forth. Long story short, her rendition of Nobody’s Side from Chess is spectacular.

Soul II Soul, Back to Life. (“back tooo reality…”)
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Next time: I still have this chilli sauce recipe that I want to make, however I also had this pear sorbet idea which I haven’t had time to execute, but maybe if I train my body and mind to thrive on a quarter of the sleep I get currently.

stone cold soba as a matter of fact

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Note: I’ve been mucking round with fonts and things, Blogger’s formatting is a bit of a nightmare and it has all gone horribly wrong. I ended up having to put my old font back but stupid blogger won’t seem to let me get rid of all these weird gaps between the photos and the text. Shoulda left well alone! Maybe the .com went to my head…

Yes, again. Like you’ve never been obsessed with a plate shaped like an autumn leaf before.
 
I was recently reading Wayfaring Chocolate, one of my favourite food blogs, and its writer/custodian Hannah acknowledged her considerable fear of spiders, and how she hilariously freaked out at the sight of one in her room before realising it was in fact a sock that she’d owned for years, with spiders printed on it. In this spirit of laughing with, not at, I’d like to disclose how massively scared I am of…pelicans. Now as I said last time, I’m honestly pretty scared of many things, to the point of it not being particularly hilarious (I’m talking panic attacks) but people tend to find this specific fear funny. And well they might. When Tim and I were in Europe earlier this year we went to three different zoos and every time, I had to get Tim to be on lookout for them and whenever they were on the horizon, he’d tell me which direction to not look in order to avoid accidentally seeing their scary eyes and death-beaks.
 
If you’d read our little blog while we were traveling you’ll know how much I wanted to see a capybara. At one point, when it was starting to look unlikely, I said loudly “wouldn’t it be just my luck if the capybara and the pelicans were in the same enclosure” to kind of try and tempt fate or something, but no luck. There were just horrible shuddery pelicans (if anything, it’s like fate misheard me and was like “okay, gotcha, so you want heaps of pelicans and no capybara, right?)
 
In case you’re wondering what’s the deal, well solidarity, for one thing. And it’s a blog! I share without hurdles, I share without filters! (Don’t worry, this is actually me filtering.) And in case you’re wondering what’s the deal with pelicans, I had a spine-freezingly scary nightmare about them. And from that night forth, I’ve tried to keep my distance and avoid eye contact with them.
 

Anyway: Noodles. I love them. Cold, hot, spicy, salty, satay-y, wide, thin, whatever. In this case, intertwined with vegetables and with a hot and sour sauce coating each cold strand of soba. The always-important Nigella Lawson has this cool salad in Nigella Express which uses tom yam paste in the dressing, which uses the flavours of soup that you’d normally use said paste in, but in a concentrated manner. I took that dressing and instead dressed grainy buckwheat soba noodles and steamed vegetables with it. It only turned out the way it has because of what I had in the fridge and freezer (not a lot, to be honest) – you could use any number of things to make it SO much better than mine. Like broccoli, avocado, carrots, rocket, zucchini, mushrooms and so on. You could also swap it for any other noodles you’ve got hanging round – rice sticks, ramen, somen…I wouldn’t choose udon for this, since it suits a more solid bitey strand, but really as long as you’ve got the dressing, you’re all good.

I know I said it’d be Banana Pudding Ice Cream this time, but I only ended up making it late last night, and it wasn’t properly frozen this morning. So no photos, and therefore no blog post. I can tell you though, having ploughed into it with a spoon several times, that it is amazingly good and will be worth the wait.
Soba Noodles with Steamed Vegetables and Hot and Sour Dressing
(adapted from a Nigella Lawson recipe)

 
Serves as many as you provide for. I’d hazard a guess that this dressing can deliver for noodles for between 1-4 people, any more than that and start increasing quantities.
Ingredients:
Soba noodles
Selection of vegetables – I used frozen peas, frozen soybeans, cavolo nero, and one smoked capsicum because that’s all I could cobble together.
Coriander or mint, sesame seeds, sesame oil etc to serve.
Dressing:
1-2 teaspoons tom yam paste (depending on your taste)
2 tablespoons sesame oil
2 tablespoons rice vinegar, lemon juice or lime juice (I had a lime – yuss!)
1 teaspoon honey or sugar
Good pinch of salt, or a splash of soy sauce

Whisk together the dressing ingredients in a large bowl.

Cook the noodles according to packet instructions. While you’re boiling the water for the noodles, fit either a metal colander or a steamer over the top of the pot you’re cooking them in and put in it any of your vegetables that need cooking (like…peas yes, avocado, no) and allow them to steam away.

 
Once the noodles have had their time, tip the colander of vegetables into the bowl of dressing, drain the noodles under running cold water in the same colander (well, this works if you used a colander – if you have a steamer just drain them separately.)

 
Tip the noodles into the bowl as well and carefully mix it all together to incorporate the vegetables and the dressing. Divide between the plates of people you’re serving. Top with coriander and/or mint, and sesame seeds if you like.
 


Super spicy and sharp and awesome. Taste to see if you need any more of a particular ingredient – don’t feel constrained to the (admittedly already vague) parameters I gave you. You might find you want more heat, more salt, or that you want it to be oilier. Tim and I had this for dinner on Monday night and it was damn wonderful, the slightly softened greens leaning into the noodles as they twirled round my fork, and the strong buckwheat flavour of said noodles being ably challenged by the hot, limey dressing soaking into them. We then had it for lunch today, and apart from the already annoying peas (they just don’t stick to your fork) losing their bright colour overnight, it was just as good on day two.
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Title via: Elton John’s The Bitch Is Back. That’s right I love Elton John. If you click through the footage of him singing this on Top of the Pops in 1974 is grainy, but very fun (like soba noodles, incidentally.)
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 Music lately:
 
Somehow, even with the internet making everything accessible and instant, I hadn’t thought to look up Missing You from the Set It Off soundtrack, which would make it…15 years since I’ve heard it? It’s emotional, it’s harmony-tastic, it’s got CHAKA KHAN. Closely rivaled by En Vogue’s equally dramatic Don’t Let Go (Love) from the same album, for ‘best song ever from a movie or anything ever’.

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Next time: That Ice Cream.

i fought the slaw and the slaw won

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The brain does many strange things, one of which is the way songs can get stuck in it, without reason or end. If stereos were the size of tic tacs, it’d make sense. “Oh, that’s why I keep hearing that song! My boombox got stuck in my ponytail again! Ha ha ha!” But this is not the case. It’s just the brain. For example: last weekend when Tim was away in Taihape, one song got itself persistently in my mind, repeating itself with an alarming stamina.

That song was A Bear Went Over The Mountain.
Sometimes it was like the record had a scratch in it, and I would hear nothing but a sinister refrain of “and all that he could see! And all that he could see! And all that he could see!” Yeah. I don’t know what qualities cause a song to do this, but sometimes I call my brain’s bluff by actually loving the song that gets stuck in my head, like Kiss From A Rose (which I may have played about six times in a row on YouTube recently) or Purea Nei.
Basically I just couldn’t bear that (bear!) alone, but it does lead into my next point: sometimes recipes do this to me too. The ingredients list curls around my inquisitive mental imaging faculties, lodging there fairly permanently till I can find the time to bring the recipe into existence. Luckily for me, the most recent time this happened, I didn’t have to wait too long. On Friday night Tim and I went to the house of of the terrific Kate and Jason for an evening of ceaseless hilarity and sustained deliciousness – homemade cheese, sublime sweet potato pie with a lattice top, polenta, spicy soup, soft dinner rolls filled with fried tomato slices and the crispest bacon – and several of these recipes came from a particular book called Simple Fresh Southern by these guys called The Lee Brothers. I wanted the recipe for the cheese but Kate talked me into taking home the whole book to borrow, and I am so glad, because the moment I flipped it open (wait – the moment the wine wore off and I flipped it open) and made eyes with their Cabbage and Lime Salad with Roasted Peanuts recipe, I knew I had to make it my own. And then all the rest of their recipes. This book is so cool.
I agree with you entirely that a salad based on cabbage might sound severe and unsexy and like the very last sort of thing you want to eat in winter when there are casseroles and puddings to be had. But after a few nights out enjoying abundant food and wine and with more such evenings on the nearing horizon, I honestly do just want to bury my face in a cool, astringent, mustardy salad with bursts of citrus sourness.
Besides, the crisp peppery shredded cabbage, tart lime segments and hot mustard are mellowed out considerably by all the salt, the oil in the dressing, and the creamy bite of the roasted nuts. You could serve it with fish, chicken, a dirty great big steak, with rice noodles under or stirred into it, and so on. Or even on the side of a big slow-cooked casserole with a hearty pudding to follow.
Cabbage and Lime Salad with Roasted Peanuts

From Simple Fresh Southern by the Lee Brothers


1/2 small red cabbage, trimmed, cored, and shredded/finely sliced
1/2 small green cabbage, treated in the same way
1 tablespoon salt
1 bunch fresh baby spinach leaves, finely sliced
1 lime
Juice of 1-2 further limes
1 tablespoon Dijon or similar mustard
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon peanut oil
1/2 cup roasted, unsalted peanuts (or whatever you’ve got!) roughly chopped

The recipe says to toss the cabbage with the salt, then sit it in a colander over a bowl for two hours so that lots of liquid can drain out. But honestly, not a drop of water was in the bowl after two hours. Maybe our cabbages are different here in New Zealand? You do as you please. Otherwise, mix together all the leaves in a large bowl. Trim the ends off the lime and peel it, then carefully slice it into segments, peeling off the membrane where you can, and tear these segments into small pieces. Toss them into the leaves too.
Whisk together the rest of the ingredients to make the dressing, and thoroughly mix this into the salad, and finally stir through the chopped nuts. Serve!
Note to yourself: I used just purple cabbage since I’m only feeding the two of us, I used cavolo nero instead of spinach and almonds instead of peanuts since that’s what I had, and if you get a bit stuck you could use lemons instead of limes and wasabi paste instead of mustard.
This salad is punchily delicious, awakening you from any wintery downtrodden-ness with every drop of lime juice you absorb. It’s also very pretty to look at, with its queenly purple and green gemstone colours.
(I mean fairytale queen, not the actual Queen of England – that would have to be a more pastel-toned salad.) (Also: I got the pretty, pretty bowl in a moment of sale-induced single-mindedness from Swonderful.)
As if Tim and I making friends and eating their food isn’t enough excitement, this afternoon in Wellington it started SNOWING. It hasn’t snowed in Wellington since 1995! Honestly, when I was a kid I didn’t know that it snowed anywhere in New Zealand but that’s because I grew up south of Auckland, not really within cooee of a snow-capped mountain. In the CBD where we live it was more rainy than snowy and it didn’t really settle but there was an unmistakable icing-sugar dusting of snowflakes in the air and it was thrilling.
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Title via: yes I’ve used this song before as a title holder but not in this way and besides, I’m very tired (just in case anyone’s watching closely.) I love the Dead Kennedy’s version of this which changes it to “and I won” but it’s hard to go past Buddy Holly and The Crickets’ singing that the Law did in fact win, which must’ve been fairly reassuring to the nervously suspicious adults of the time.
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Music lately:
Tim and I saw the stunning movie Pina tonight, which luckily gives as much attention to sound as it does visuals. Shake It is one such example of its glorious music.
Speaking of Tim, being the diamond that he is, he bought me a Judy Garland and Liza Minelli live record and I love it. It’s them at the London Palladium in the early sixties, and they’re quite adorable, given the often distinctly non-adorable circumstances of Garland’s life. Their personalised take on Hello, Dolly is very sweet and shows off how good their similar voices sound together.
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Next time: Well I’ve loaded up on buttermilk to attempt more of the recipes in the Lee Brothers’ gorgeous book, and at the prompting of excellent lady Jo both via email and in person, since we were fortunate enough to see her twice this week, I’ll most definitely be pondering cupcakes for the SPCA Cupcake Day too…

take it all with a belly full of salt

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We don’t eat a ton of meat, it has been gradually receding from out meals, like the tide or someone’s hairline, to the point where we probably only eat it once a week – if that. I don’t know why. I mean, it has got more expensive, but it’s not as though I made a proper stand or decision at any point. Analysis aside, if the right recipe comes along I’ll make it, so today I’m serving up pork belly, care of a fantastic recipe by local epicure Martin Bosley. I found it many miles off the ground, in the pages of an inflight magazine – tore it out, tucked it in my handbag, and dreamed about it till I landed back in Wellington again. I love near-on everything that the terrific, radiant, humble pig offers up – bacon, sausages, ham, ribs – but pork belly is particularly special (admittedly, “particularly special” is what I’d be saying if I was talking about bacon or ribs here too) with its tooth-yieldingly, saltily sticky and fatty wondrousness.

Please excuse (sigh, again) the atrocious photos. Thought I knew my camera, but concede I’m no good at taking pictures when it’s dark. Next week’s will be better, I promise.
This recipe is extremely straightforward. The only real difficulty is when you have to faff around turning the heavy, boiling-hot pork over partway through cooking – use a couple of pairs of tongs, some oven mitts, and take care. I didn’t use oven mitts, and a splash from the bubbling toffee-like heat of the marinade leaping from the roasting dish and landing on the tender inner flesh of my wrist is like…almost enough to make me vegetarian. The ingredients feel easy enough to get hold of – I didn’t have any star anise so used fennel seeds instead, figuring they’d give that licorice twist flavour, although admittedly without looking anywhere near as pretty. If you don’t have an orange you could probably use bottled juice, a lemon, tamarind or even some vinegar for a different sour vibe.

Martin Bosley’s Pork Belly

Cheers to (surprise!) Martin Bosley for the recipe.

2kg pork belly
120g honey
3 T oyster sauce
1 orange
4 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
1 red chilli
4 whole star anise
salt and pepper

Wash the pork belly, place in a deep roasting dish. Mix together the honey, oyster sauce, juice and zest from the orange, and garlic in a bowl. Chop the chilli and add to the marinade along with the star anise and a little salt and pepper. Scrape the bowl of marinade over the pork with a spatula, turning it over so it’s properly covered. Refrigerate for at least an hour, overnight if you can.

When you’re ready to cook it, take it out of the fridge and set your oven to 180 C/350 F. Roast for 90 minutes, turning over occasionally. Slice and serve with steamed rice.
There is a lot of honey in this recipe but it’s not like you’re having pudding for dinner here – the honey caramelises in the oven, bubbling and hissing into the juicy fat from the pork and salty, pungent oyster sauce to create a fairly magical, darkly sweet and savoury flavour. Even though the recipe is simple, everything about the pork is worked with here – the honey and orange points up its sweetness, while the oyster sauce emphasises its saltiness and the anise and chilli distract from its richness. Brilliant.
Edit: I used free range pork and definitely recommend it, if you have the means.
Leftovers can be turned into a comforting noodle soup with stock, greens, broccoli, chilli, soba noodles (or any that you like of course), soy sauce, mint, and so on.
It has been a bit of a weird time in Wellington lately, making a soothing noodle-strewn broth entirely appropriate. What with the grimly embarrassing and regrettably expensive Wellywood sign apparently an unstoppable idea, plus our branch of the Real Groovy music shop and the Grow From Here garden centre – both practically Tim’s and my neighbours and places that we’d spent a lot of time – shutting down. Hopefully something happy eventually comes from these doors closing. This morning the big story was that the Wellington Phoenix football team were going to be relocating to Auckland. I flag after 20 minutes of a game and I was dismayed, so imagine how Tim, obsessed as he is, reacted. Luckily the whole story seems to be an out-of-control rumour and completely untrue. Unfortunately, the Wellywood sign is not. One thing that can be counted on though, is The Food Show – Tim and I went on Sunday and while there were noticeably less exhibitors this time round it was still an extremely fun time with bargain-ly prices and nibbles a-plenty. But no Ray McVinnie! Practically needed smelling salts when I found out he wasn’t doing a cooking demonstration. Luckily there was plenty of wine to sample…
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Title via: Chris Knox, local wonder, flexing his wordsmithery in A Song To Welcome The Onset Of Maturity from 1995’s Songs of Me and You.
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Music lately:

Doubly sad news came over the weekend – first that Jeff Conaway had died, and then Gil Scott-Heron too. I love Scott-Heron’s music and poetry – the world has lost any beautiful strong words and musical greatness he was sure to have continued to contribute. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised remains amazing. Jeff Conaway, despite evidently having a decent enough voice to tour with the Broadway production of Grease, wasn’t really given much to go on with song-wise in the film itself, which is a shame. RIP to them both.

On a mildly happier note, the song Nothing To Lose by The Adults rules.
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Next time: As with the last blog post, I got another cake recipe from my childhood – turns out it’s vegan, which’ll make a nice contrast to all this porkiness.

just a little too soft, al dente

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In a triflingly small number of sleeps, Tim and I will not be in New Zealand anymore. For a whole month. So don’t come looking for us. Unless you’re in London, in which case by all means come find us. Unless you’re into knife crime. Even though I never once felt unsafe during my time in London, well, at least up till July 7th 2005, I still can’t help thinking “knife crime!” said like the scene-change ‘dun-dunn!’ on Law and Order. But we’ll be fine. We’re confident, like Maria Von Trapp. Thanks so much to everyone who has emailed in offering ideas and websites and even their roof for us to stay under. And a massive thanks to my godmum and her family who loaned Tim and myself some awesomely functional luggage, especially compared to our sorry, carpal-tunnel-inducing offerings.

I can’t say that it has really made its way through to my brain properly – that instead of getting up and going to work every day, I’ll be on the other side of the world to where I am right now, for a month. Firstly, there have been some extremely heavy events both locally and overseas filling my mind – natural disasters, disastrous man-made situations…plus I was up in Auckland again on the weekend just been, this time working at ASB Polyfest (amazing but exhausting) so between that and Pasifika the weekend before, there hasn’t been much time to really properly consider it. Somehow it’ll all come together though. As I said. Confident. Like a Von Trapp.

Part of making it all come together is using up any perishable food. This might mean chugging a hefty volume of soymilk, or it might mean lots of thrown-together pasta dishes like the following, where a vegetable that’d otherwise curl up remorsefully in the fridge becomes the star. The star of what I named Sexy Pasta. I just looked at our dinner and the name appeared to me, organically and fully-formed.

Admittedly, it looked a lot sexier in person. Now that we’re further into the year and darkness falls earlier, I need to try and remember how to take decent photos at night.

But look at those ingredients. Hello. You don’t have to use pappardelle – it’s unfairly more expensive than other kinds of pasta, and I’m pretty unlikely to get it again for a long time, after the moment of wacky extravagance that got it in my cupboard in the first place. Regular spaghetti is more than fine, although something with a bit of width, like fettucini, would be great. I use almonds a lot because I bought a kilo from Moore Wilson’s for relatively cheap (much cheaper than buying little packets in the long run, I mean, and also cheaper compared to other bulk nuts) but use what you have – walnuts, pinenuts, pecans, cashews or Brazils would all rule.

Sexy Pasta aka Pappardelle with Roasted Capsicums, Sesame Garlic Toasted Almonds, Capers, Lemon and Mint

  • 160g pappardelle pasta or 200g other pasta
  • 3 capsicums
  • 1/2 cup whole almonds (be generous, this is your protein)
  • 1 clove garlic
  • 1 tablespoon sesame oil
  • 1 tablespoon capers, rinsed of their salt
  • Half a lemon
    Handful of mint leaves
  • Bring a large pan of water to the boil with plenty of salt, cook the pasta according to packet instructions (around 10 minutes) and then drain.

While this is happening, set your oven to 220 C. Halve the capsicums, remove the core and stem, and place cut-side down on an oven tray with some baking paper on it. Roast for about 20 minutes or until they’re a little blackened. Remove from the oven, tip them into a bowl and cover with gladwrap (this will make it easier to remove the skins later) and turn the oven down to 200 C.

While they’re roasting, finely chop the garlic clove. Once you’ve removed the capsicums from the oven tray – leaving the paper where it is – replace them with the almonds and the garlic. Drizzle with the sesame oil, and use a spatula to get it all mixed well, so each almond is slickly coated with oil and the chopped garlic is well dispersed. Return to the oven for about 5 minutes – make sure you keep an eye on it, burnt nuts are no fun.

Carefully peel the skin from the capsicums – should come away easily enough – and tear them into strips.

Finally – assemble. Divide the pasta between two plates, then divide the strips of roasted capsicum over that (including any syrupy juices that appear in the bottom of the bowl). Tumble over the almonds and the capers, squeeze the lemon’s juice on the top, and then rip the mint into bits and sprinkle over.

Soft, slippery capsicums, tender wide ribbons of pasta, salty capers, the sweetness of the almonds roasted into popcorn-crunchy, sticky nutty garlicky excellence, the fresh hit of the lemon and mint. The flavours and textures plow into each other to create a seriously gorgeous meal.

The next post’ll be the last one before our trip, but I’ll try to jump on here occasionally during our time away, to be all like “here’s a fuzzy picture of a hot chocolate I had” and “look! Me in front of a Krispy Kreme donut shop!” etc…

Title via: PNC’s recent single Murderer off his upcoming album. I love his music and it ably translated live, too, when we caught the end of his set at Homegrown earlier this month. I first heard this song a while ago and when he mentioned both Pad Thai and al dente I thought “huh, I’ll most likely end up using that in a title sometime…”

Music lately:

Gary Numan, Are Friends Electric? Whether they are, not much gets my head swaying dreamily from side to side, Stevie Wonder-styles, like this tune.

While looking for Julie Andrews singing Confidence on youtube I found this clip of her tapping and singing Supercalifragilisticexpialadocious with Gene Kelly. As well as being half adorable, half bewildering, it showcases the incredibly polished, staggeringly professional nature of stars at the time. When in doubt, lightly banter.

Next time: Like I said, last post before we go, and I’ve got a recipe for Chocolate Jam Bars for you. And I’ll maybe require some advice on how to be separated from your blog that you love for a month.

 

you’re not into making choices, wicked witches, poppy fields…

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So, I recently became in possession of 1kg of poppyseeds.

From Moore Wilson‘s grocery store of course, and while they’re not all-bulk, I guess they’ve seen enough people come and go to only stock their poppyseeds writ large and behind the counter. Ask for them by name. I only wanted some to make the dressing for this bean salad, and assumed rakishly that I could use up the rest with ease. But, like some cruel, curve-of-the-earth perspective trick, whenever I walked towards the bag it seemed to grow bigger and bigger, poppyseeds regenerating themselves when removed by the incremental spoonful.

Actually it’s not as dramatic as that. There is in fact…no drama. The bag of poppyseeds can sit pretty much forever on the shelf waiting to be used. It’s just that their plentiful existence has caused me to consider them pretty closely, and what I could do with at least some of them.

Unfortunately a perfunctory search of recipes didn’t serve up anything too inspiring. And then I wondered, as I always wonder, if they’d make a decent ice cream, especially since I had some lemons lurking round that Tim’s mum had given us. Should I do a custard based ice cream? A semifreddo thing? That would’ve meant buying ingredients, and we’re trying to save money by using up things we have in the cupboard. What I did have however, as always, was canned coconut milk. And so…that’s all I used. I didn’t even make a coconut milk custard, like I do for my Chocolate Ice Cream recipe. I guess it’s a slight stretch to call this ice cream now, but it’s a stretch I’m going to make. It sets so solid that all you can do is cut it with a knife like that’s what you meant to do in the first place, and it’s truly delicious.

I still have a little Cocoa Sorbet left in the freezer but decided that two ice creams on the hop would be practical. I can’t remember how I justified it, I think it was something like “I love ice cream!”

Lemon Poppyseed Ice Cream

  •  2 x 400ml cans plain, full-fat coconut milk
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • Juice and zest of 2-3 lemons (depending on the juiciness)
  • 3 tablespoons poppyseeds

In a large pan, gently heat the coconut milk and sugar, stirring, till the sugar has dissolved. Continue to gently heat and stir for another five minutes then remove from the heat and allow to cool a bit.

Stir in the lemon juice and zest, and pour the mixture into a loaf tin (depending on how much lemon juice you used and the size of your loaf tin there may be a bit too much mixture) Carefully – don’t spill it like I did – place in the freezer. Allow to partially freeze, then stir it briskly with a fork or small whisk, then stir in the poppyseeds (at this stage, so they don’t all sink to the bottom) and return it to the freezer. To serve, cut thick slices.

I love this ice cream. Firstly it’s so easy to make. Just stir and pour. It has a popsicle-fresh, clean sweet lemony goodness, a thick and icy but still pleasing texture, and the nuttishly flavoursome poppyseeds delivered lovingly to your mouth in each spoonful. The coconut flavour isn’t overly pronounced, but whatever you do recognise will only be enhanced by the other ingredients. And if you have poppyseeds around already, and you’re lucky enough to either have a lemon tree or a lemon benefactor, then it’s a very, very inexpensive recipe. You could always leave the poppyseeds out and use a mix of lemon and orange juice and zest. Toasted coconut stirred through instead of the poppyseeds might work too. Play round and see what you like, although I do recommend first just trying this recipe itself – the summery, zingy lemon with the poppyseeds is pretty lovely.

My poppyseed adventuring didn’t end there, as, deciding on ‘both’ instead of ‘which’, I also made a lemon poppyseed cake (using this recipe here). Was it overkill? Most definitely not.

The very opposite of the ice cream, this cake is soft, buttery, and lush, the lemon flavour absorbed into the golden grit of the polenta and almonds to produce something wildly good. Pictured here is, sadly, the last piece.

Tim and I had an amazing night at Aloe Blacc’s concert on Thursday – he was an absolute diamond performer with a stupefyingly lovely voice and hugely comfortable stage presence. We took some photos, which you can see here and here. Tonight we’re going to the Wellington Laneway show which should be fun as, and if you’re in Wellington and want tickets they’re available for purchase here.

In our travel plan developments…we bought tickets to see Wicked in London! It sorta feels like the only appropriate response is a youthful OMG.

Title from: the song of the same name from the late Jonathan Larson’s musical 30/90, which I was able to see performed by a local theatre group a couple of years ago. It was fairly thrilling then, so one can only speculate what the Lear Jet-voiced Raul Esparza would have been like in the lead role in his day.

Music lately:

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Round and Round from Before Today, strangely alluring with its “na na naaah” opening deceptively evoking the sort of music that plays when you’re put on hold on the phone, swirling into something uplifting and exciting and…swirly. He’ll be at Laneway too, so.

Sadly not at Laneway or anywhere near my line of vision, is Idina Menzel, whose album I Stand – which still feels recent-ish – became three years old the other day. You go, Idina. While her debut Still I Can’t Be Still remains a flawless highpoint for me, I Stand is fantastic and I hope she continues to write music. And that I actually see her sing one day for real.

Next time: I made some gingerbread cut-out cookies but it has been heavy on the sweet things lately so I might instead do the pasta I made tonight with a raw tomato sauce. Either way: delicious.

what good is cake you have but never eat?

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I don’t know why, or how to explain this in a straightforward way, but if there’s a recipe for a cake with an ingredient that wouldn’t normally be in a cake, I’ll really, really want to make it. Which is why I got my cake on immediately after finding the Beetroot Cake recipe, the Kumara Cake recipe, and…digging into the 2007 archives before I committed to a lyrical pun for every title…Chocolate Chickpea Cake (No lie. Chickpeas.) If it has a vegetable or similar trying to disguise itself as a cake – bring it on.

And then I found a recipe for a cake with mayonnaise in it. In a way it sounded familiar, like I’d heard of this combination before. But till now an actual recipe has never appeared to me, in fact it wasn’t even something I was actively searching for. Then I was reading the new issue of Spasifik magazine, and there was an advertisement for Best Foods Mayonnaise with a recipe for Amazing Cake Pasifika, sent in by the staff of the Glenn Innes Library. And it all made sense. I had to try it. Especially with an awesome title like that, as someone slightly given to hyperbole, I like a cake that announces itself as Amazing before you even try it.
When you think on it, mayonnaise in a cake isn’t so spooky after all. It’s more or less just eggs (or egg yolks), oil and vinegar – all things that help give a cake its cakeyness. Just don’t use aioli by mistake…and maybe check how high stuff like mustard appears on the list of ingredients while you’re at it…
Amazing Cake Pasifika
With gratitude to the Glen Innes Library Staff (if there’s any GI locals reading this, feel free to give your library staff a high five for me) and Spasifik Magazine.
Original recipe here.

1 cup Best Foods mayonnaise (if you don’t have that, then use some other decent mayo)
1 cup brown sugar, packed in
1 cup orange juice
1 cup coconut (desiccated is all good, but I saw “fancy shred” at the supermarket and was drawn to it…if I ever became a DJ – don’t worry, I won’t – DJ Fancy Shred could definitely be my pseudonym)
1 1/2 cups self raising flour
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Set your oven to 180 C/350 F. In a good sized bowl, whisk together the mayo, brown sugar, and orange juice. I will tell you now…it tastes kinda good. Mix in the rest of the ingredients and pour – it’ll be a fairly liquid batter – into a lined, greased 22-ish cm caketin. Bake for 45 minutes or so. The recipe suggests a lemon cream cheese icing (yum) but I just sprinkled it with more coconut (which looked pretty but fell off as soon as I cut into the cake…so. Stupid fancy shred.)
I guess it was something in the mayo, but this cake is incredibly moist, soft and light. Not actually so great for cutting into as you can see from the photo below – the slices would droop a bit and fall apart if handled too aggressively, but despite this it’s exactly the sort of thing you want to have if family or friends drop in on you – a big crowd-pleaser of a cake. You can even use it as a conversation starter if things start to get awkward (“hey, guess what the secret ingredient in this cake is?) Between the orange, coconut and the spices it might sound kind of aggressively flavoured but it wasn’t – just fragrantly delicious with an amazing golden colour.
And can you even taste the mayonnaise? Nahhhh (well a tiny bit. But only if you concentrate. The cake’s delicious, so if you can’t deal with mayonnaise in it then all the more for me, but if it helps, just remember the separate ingredients: egg, oil, vinegar.)
Tim’s down in Christchurch this weekend to see the Wellington Phoenix (starting to suspect that it’s Phoenix here *hold hand high* Laura here *hold hand less high*) and luckily they won – I was following the scoring on Twitter while writing this and it seemed like there was some kind of red card situation and…actually I’m not the best person to explain this. I’ve had an awesome weekend on my own – the weather was incredible on Saturday, I ate a whole eggplant for dinner tonight (Tim hates them), I did a yoga class, had a Christine Ebersole youtube marathon, and last night caught up with ex-flatmate but not ex-friend, Ange.
On Friday night Tim and I went to the Wellingtonista Awards at the mighty Mighty Mighty bar and…I didn’t win! I really wanted to but in the end it’s all good. It was fun just to be nominated, especially because I had no idea it was coming, and we had a seriously good night all the same. The crowded nature of the place – I was perched on a beer crate because there were no chairs left – meant we ended up getting practically on first name basis (if we’d thought to ask their names) with the sassy ladies of Wellington On A Plate who were next to us – at first it was all “we’ll cheer for you if you cheer for us” but suddenly we were rejoicing in each others raffle ticket victories and consoling (“it’s great just to be nominated”) each other’s respective non-wins.
We also ran into the lovely Anna Dean from Tiger Translate and Kate from Lovelorn Unicorn and tried to be cute in the super fun Amazing Travelling Photobooth. Good times all round. On top of that we won a Grow From Here voucher and a night tour of the Zealandia sanctuary (kiwis!!) from the raffle, so we didn’t even go home empty handed. A massive massive thanks to everyone who voted – I realise there’s been a bit of “vote for me! Please! Oh sorry I didn’t even win” highs and lows this year but I really, really appreciate it.
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Title via: Ate The Cake I Had, from the 2006 musical Grey Gardens. I’m sure there’s probably some mayonnaise lyric out there but I’m on the most humungous Grey Gardens kick these days (see: Christine Ebersole below) so it’s all good.
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Music lately:
ChakaKhanletmerockyouletmerockyouChakaKhan. On Saturday morning Tim and I grabbed I Feel For You on vinyl from Slow Boat (with “Happy Christmas, Annie” written in ballpoint across the front, did you just write on your album sleeves back then or something?) and I love the title track so much. And also Chaka Khan’s hair.
Christine Ebersole‘s entire back catalogue – a brief but dazzling intro here on 100sand1000s.
Mariah Carey’s Oh Santa from Merry Christmas II You. It cracked me up how the sticker on the CD claimed it was her new Christmas classic, but to be fair: it’s awesome. It maintains its upward bounce and has some minor key action and it’s extremely catchy and happy without trying to be All I Want For Christmas Is You. Love it.
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Next time: a couple of interesting new vegetable dishes I’ve tried out lately…

only a prawn in their game

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You know that saying “do something each day that scares you?” Yeah, well as a naturally scared-of-everything person, I can’t relate to that idea at all – I’m all about the reduction of nervousness. However, I very recently did something where the payoff was worth a bit of risk a squillion times over. Some people might see that saying and think “go skydiving” or “finally get that tattoo” or “ask boss for a raise” or something. I…bought some frozen prawns for the first time. And cooked them for dinner. All of a sudden I couldn’t think why I’d never done it before, since Nigella has so many recipes for them and all. I’d eaten them before, not often, yet in my mind, they had an aura of great expense and difficulty about them. It couldn’t be more the opposite. $16 for a kilo of frozen raw prawns (I understand the frozen cooked ones are pretty nasty), considering 100g is one serving and there’s only two of us, and considering what a kilo of various other meats would cost, it’s pretty reasonable. Although nothing is as reasonable as the enormous $4 block of tofu that I get from the vege market…

The first recipe I made was Nigella’s Japanese Prawns, and it was watching her make these on her latest TV show Kitchen which finally got me to make the simple connection between ‘Nigella makes lots of easy recipes with prawns’ and ‘I could make lots of easy recipes with prawns’. Nigella confides to the viewer that it’s a recipe that she probably cooks the most of, and I thought “O RLY,” a bold claim when she has so much excellence to choose from, but after tasting them I am inclined to agree.
Japanese Prawns
From Nigella Lawson’s Kitchen
2 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons sake
pinch sea salt
1 tablespoon lime juice (I didn’t have any – used cider vinegar)
1 teaspoon wasabi paste
2 teaspoons garlic oil
2 spring onions, finely sliced
200g frozen raw prawns
Salad leaves, rice or noodles and coriander to serve

Whisk together the water, sake, salt, lime juice and wasabi.

Heat the garlic oil in a large pan till sizzling, then stir in the spring onions and tip in the frozen prawns. Cook, stirring frequently for a couple of minutes till they’re properly pink. Tip in the sake mixture, allowing it to bubble up, and cook the prawns in it for another couple of minutes. Tip out onto a bed of salad leaves and sprinkle with coriander. Serve with rice, noodles, or just as is.

The smell of sake hitting a hot pan has got to be one of the best things in the world, savoury, fragrant, almost like the smell of bread baking. Combined with the sharp, mustardy wasabi and served with the gentle ocean-taste of the prawns, it’s a faint-makingly good dinner. Nigella also mentioned how she liked the clattering of frozen prawns tumbling into the pan, I had my doubts but it is oddly satisfying.
Having successfully cooked them once, I was in love, and I wanted to cook ALL the prawns. They’re just so easy. They’re done in mere minutes, but there’s something about them that looks as though you made a huge effort, as if you’d hewn each curly pink crustacean by hand out of…a bigger crustacean.
Equal rapture ensued when I made Nigella’s Lemony Prawn Salad from Forever Summer. Another extremely simple recipe combining quickly fried prawns with a flavour-heavy coat of dressing.
Lemony Prawn Salad
From Forever Summer by Nigella Lawson
1 lemon
2 cloves garlic
1 spring onion
2 tablespoons plain oil (I used rice bran oil)
5 tablespoons olive oil
375g raw prawns
cos lettuce and chives, to serve

Cut the top and bottom off the lemon, then slice off the peel and pith till you’re left with just a nude lemon. Chop it into four and place in the food processor with one of the cloves of garlic and the spring onion and blitz to mush. Scrape down the sides and then stick the lid back on and process, pouring in the plain oil and 3 tablespoons of the olive oil down the funnel as it goes. Tear your lettuce into pieces, toss it with most of the dressing and divide between two plates. Gently heat the remaining garlic clove with the remaining olive oil in a large pan. Remove the garlic clove and once the oil’s hot, add the prawns to the pan, and cook through. Transfer them to the two plates and snip over the chives, and spoon over any remaining dressing.

Notes:
  • I didn’t have that lettuce but I did have a packet of rocket.
  • For two people that seems like a huge amount of oil, I reduced it by about two tablespoons.
  • I used just 200g prawns and it was all good.
  • I didn’t bother with the garlic infusion thing…
  • I had an old-timey lemon with soft skin and enormous amounts of snowy pith and seeds. The more modern lemons with thin skin and hardly any pips work better for this logistically.
  • I had some brutal, burning cloves of garlic so I added a tiny pinch of caster sugar to the dressing to counteract this – worked nice.
  • You want the pan to be really pretty hot, because the frozen-ness of the prawns cools it down a bit and you want them to sear, not limply stew.
The dressing is magical – the lemon chunks and oil turn into a creamy, sour, rich yellow emulsion, which slides over the prawns and leaves onto the spaghetti below, basically making everything incredibly delicious.
The juicy, crisp-tipped asparagus was excellent with it too – it was just a seriously amazing meal. There are still many, many more prawn recipes I want to try now, and like Jasmine and Aladdin it’s a whole new world. Thank you, Nigella – thank you, prawns.
Tim and I (well, just Tim, but I was in the room when it happened) worked out a calendar of all the things we’ve got coming up over December and January – it’s dizzyingly busy times ahead. I think it would be completely logical to make December six weeks long so that you can fit in everything you need to but still get to sleep every now and then.
Title via: Bob Dylan, Only A Pawn In Their Game. Ah, Bob Dylan. He’s quite good. Although Tim insisted on getting this horrendous later album of his from a bargain bin, it was fairly unlistenable. In fact it was…Dire Straits-esque. I guess Dylan only had so much “Blowing in the Wind” inside of him. I like this song though, and how it speeds up and slows down whenever he says the title line.
Music lately:

Pharoahe Monch, Push from his album Desire – he’s in New Zealand right now but we didn’t have the time or the funds for it this time round – in lieu of that, he’s always available on youtube…
Kristin Chenoweth, Taylor The Latte Boy from As I Am – I generally can’t deal with stuff this intentionally cute but her stunning voice and quick-wittedness make this strangely compelling.
Next time: I made the awesomest dumplings from this blog here…I also have some honey-related stuff to talk about…

she likes her hair to be real orange

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I made Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Orange Loaf Cake yesterday and I gotta say, I absolutely love it, for all that I was never massively sold on Jaffas as a kid. Not that we ate lollies all the time, or that I would have turned Jaffas down given the chance. But when the rare money I came across coincided with a trip into town I would tend towards a dollar mixture, or those sherbety fizzy lollies, or, eventually, showing my Spice Girls influnce, chupa chups. What I bought most of all though was Grape Hubba Bubba bubble gum, fifty cents a packet if I remember right. I loved that stuff. The combination of fleeting, fake-grape flavour (a million years removed from the wasp-guarded vine that grew – then withered away – on our wire fence) plus the bonus time-passing activity of blowing bubbles was pretty heady. Especially since casually snapping gum and consuming grape-flavoured things seemed very American, which was pleasing since I was so obsessed with Baby Sitters Club books. Erm, anyway Jaffas were never that high on my list. Although I’ve since realised that they’re probably not the best example of the two flavours anyway, I doubt that any actual oranges or decent chocolate suffered in their making…

Reading through Nigella Lawson’s new book Kitchen, which continues to make me want to cook everything from its pages, her Chocolate Orange Loaf called out to me (not literally…though give it time). Plain, dark-brown, oblong, it’s nothing fancy to look at, and in fact I was almost about to make her Blondies which has cool stuff like chocolate chunks and condensed milk in it. But then fate, or maybe something way less dramatic, like me just making a different decision, intervened. And I’m not even that fussed because I’ll probably make the blondies too before the weekend is out. Either way I’m glad I went the way of the chocolate-orange combination, forgoing my Jaffa-indifference, because the result was pretty stunning.

 

Chocolate Orange Loaf Cake

From Nigella Lawson’s Kitchen

  • 150g soft butter
  • 2 x 15ml tablespoons golden syrup
  • 175g dark brown or muscovado sugar
  • 150g flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 25g best-quality cocoa (I tend to buy Equagold, nothing else seems to taste as good
  • 2 eggs
  • zest of 2 oranges and the juice of one

Set your oven to 170 C/340 F and butter and line a loaf tin (or hunt down a silicon one). Beat the butter, golden syrup and sugar together. This is the hardest part, really – it tastes so good. Nigella asks you to alternate the dry ingredients with the eggs but I didn’t have the energy and I’d somehow already made a ridiculous mess so I just beat in the eggs – which makes the mixture much lighter and aerated – then folded in the dry ingredients with a metal spoon (more control than a fling-y spatula), followed by the orange zest and juice. Don’t fear if it looks a little curdled at any stage. Pour into the tin and bake for around 45 minutes.

I was worried that I’d overcooked mine – it looked a little ‘solid’ round the edges. I considered doing my usual cake-rescue method of making up a syrup to pour over, but after curiously slicing off a sliver, it turned out the loaf was just fine. Better than just fine, even.

The orange flavour isn’t overpowering, more fragrantly suggested than in-your-face, but what’s there is completely delicious. The citrus and the caramelly golden syrup seem to pick up something good in the dark, dark cocoa, giving the cake an almost gingerbread intensity of flavour even though it’s very light-textured. It’s seriously good with a cup of tea and I reckon it would be amazing spread with cream cheese but unfortunately I didn’t have any in the fridge to test this theory.

I’m not sure how long this would last for but it seems to be one of those Bernadette Peters-style cakes which just keeps getting better and better as the days go by.

Title via: The Flaming Lips’ sweet tune She Don’t Use Jelly from Transmissions From The Satellite Heart. Which cavalierly rhymes “store” with “orange”. Whatcha gonna do?

Music lately:

I’ve been on a bit of a Sondheim kick, although it’s more like a Rockettes kickline than a solitary burst of commitment…I’ve been listening to so many interpretations of his music on youtube lately that linking to just one is a bit misleading but feel free to enjoy the late Eartha Kitt’s I’m Still Here from Follies.

Yesterday we bought Aloe Blacc’s new album Good Things, and the title doesn’t lie. It is a bit gloomy towards women but if that’s the experiences he had prior to writing these songs, well I guess fair enough, and it’s nicely balanced by the lump-in-throat inducing Mama Hold My Hand. The bouncy, catchy I Need A Dollar would be his best-known track but I love his slow-paced, sultry cover of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, which isn’t actually even on the album. Go find Good Things, it’s very easy to like.

Next time: I have so much Nigella going on right now that I’m probably going to have to hold up before I end up reproducing her entire book here on this blog. I’ve also made and loved her Apple Cinnamon muffins and crustless pizza and so they’ll no doubt end up on here soon.