i'd have the cheek to say they're equally as bleak

slow cooked beef cheeks with cinnamon and kumara

I have achieved a lot this week, which I'm very proud of, because - as I'll tell you soon as see you - I'm really only awake and functioning for around 90 minutes a day when I'm not at work. None of this changes the fact though, that I'm honestly a bit sad about one thing that I can't achieve my way out of, whether or not I'm awake or asleep or thriving or unthriving: Wednesday the cat has gone. Gone to live at the Cat's Protection League, so she will be a league-protected cat, but it's so sad to not have her stupid wee half-moustached face and crooked broken little tail around. What happened was, the flatmate who was catsitting her had to move out to be nearer to her job (which is also a major bummer since she's lovely) and couldn't keep her, and the rest of us remaining were unable to keep Wednesday so the only real solution was to send her off. If I was around more or was not the sole person responsible I'd adopt ten million cats but I'm just not at home enough to give a cat the attention it needs (and then entirely ignores) so...that's that. 

However, having Wednesday around for just one happy month was wonderful, so let's cue a montage: 

holding paws

boop

arabesque

my favourite look: business cat

Better to have loved and lost than never to have had a cat at all, right? Again, I know this might sound all overwrought (and if there is a thing to be wrought, I'm first in line to do it overly) but Wednesday appeared just when I was reaching the zenith of my climb up Cat-Longing Mountain and the utter blanketing joy of suddenly having a soft little animal around was just just just so lovely.   

Anyway! Life goes on and luckily there will be other cats out there for me and also I have dear friends close by who own animals of varying degrees of willingness to be snuggled, so yeah. This may sound all very stupid and self-indulgently whiny but do you even know how I feel about cats? I FEEL.

*Goodbye To You by Michelle Branch playing on a constant loop* 

Speaking of things that are good to have in bed in the middle of this snappishly cold weather; I recently made my first proper slow-cooked casserole thing of the Winter (it's not even technically Winter yet but Wellington cares not for your seasonal timelines.) Whilst sleepily wandering around Moore Wilson one morning I saw that beef cheeks were incredibly well priced - like, $5! - and I grabbed some, surmising that the time had come for me to get back into cooking such things. I'd never cooked using beef cheeks before but figured there couldn't be much to it, and about this I was highly correct.  

Seriously, the only stressful thing about cooking this is that you need a lot of time. But during that time the house smells so completely incredible, that you can zone out and come to and feel like you've wandered into some enchantingly bucolic French bistro when in fact you're just sitting in your Newtown kitchen playing idly on your phone while wearing tights that have holes in places that are, shall we say, not amenable to being public-facing, and a stained hoodie that you slept in and haven't changed out of yet. So yeah, it takes time, but look at it this way, this is a recipe that you can achieve things to: put it in the oven and then get on your laptop and write, or tidy your room, or do whatever it is that you ought to be doing, and then you are rewarded with a mouth-quiveringly good feed.

I based this recipe on a few things that I found online, purposefully going with a recipe that doesn't use any alcohol, despite how enticing the thought of braising this meat in Pedro Ximenez or a bottle of red wine was. On my current budget I just can't bring myself to the point of tipping a whole ton of wine into a pan, when I could be drinking it. It makes me feel all flinch-y. This recipe simply uses cinnamon - one of my very favourite scents and flavours - and stock, and lets the beef itself do the rest. Leaving any wine you might have to be poured straight into your mouth (or like, use a wine glass, you adorable heathen.)

slow-cooked beef cheeks with cinnamon 

serves two to four people, depending on appetite and what is served with. 

around 300g beef cheeks (or more, whatever) 
butter
one onion
one good size orange kumara, or half a butternut squash
250ml beef stock (ideally from a carton, but use a cube if it's all you've got for sure)
two cinnamon sticks

Set your oven to 150 C/300F. Slice the onion into thin half-moons and dice the kumara roughly. 

Heat an indescriminate amount of butter in a small frying pan (around a tablespoon is fine if you need someone to make this decision for you) and sear the beef cheeks on both sides, for around a minute each side, just to brown them. Once brown on both sides, remove from the pan and sit them in a medium-sized casserole or baking dish. Then, add a little more butter to the pan and gently fry the onion and kumara (you may need to do this in batches) until the onion is softened and the kumara is a little browned and crisped in places. Tip all this into the casserole dish on top of the beef. Finally, pour the beef stock into that same pan and allow it to come to the boil. Carefully pour this over the beef, onion and kumara, nestle the cinnamon sticks in amongst all that, cover with either a lid or tinfoil, and then place it in the oven. Leave for around three hours, and then serve, over rice or some kind of potato situation or simply with plenty of bread and butter. 

It seems almost impossible that a method so simple that you're barely touching the food as you cook it, could taste so deeply delicious, but such is the joy of slow cooking. The meat was so tender I could literally slice into it with the edge of a spoon, and half-heartedly at that. There is a wonderful stickiness to this, from the gelatinously rich meat to the warmth of the cinnamon and the sweet, slightly scorched kumara. Actually I should mention now that beef cheeks have long been a very unfashionable cut of meat and are only really now coming into prominence - in the same way that lamb shanks did a few years back - but honestly they're so, so good and fulsomely rich in flavour that they practically deserve to become overpriced restaurant food. Also, it's all so arbitrary, right? I mean, rump steak is a fancy cut of beef but I mean, it's the rump. You're literally eating a cow's butt?

On that note, I had it pointed out to me by some rakish wag (my dazzling girlfriend in fact) that if you say "beef cheeks" out loud it's weirdly hilarious and uh, yeah, I agree. Beef cheeks! I don't know, but giggles ensue! Immature of me, yes, but in my defence, I am very immature.

More sensibly, you should know that the leftovers of this are quite incredible heated up and stirred through hot pasta - ideally pappardelle for that hearty ragu vibe, but all I had was linguine and the meat, shredded roughly, with the pasta absorbing the gelatinous stock and some extra butter that I threw in because I'm incapable of doing anything else, was sublime. 

Despite living the catless life currently there is still SO much to look forward to: Pretty Little Liars, aka one of the most important TV shows in the Western canon; returns next week and so does the webseries of my heart, Carmilla. Also, next Monday morning (around 9.45am I believe?) I'll be on Radio New Zealand talking to Jesse Mulligan about food, which should be rad as. I love being on the radio! And wherever Wednesday is, I love her too and am glad I got to meet her at all. 

*Don't You Forget About Me by Simple Minds plays on loop* (ps oh man thanks for bearing with me, ya girl is maudlin)

_____________________________________________________________________

title from: Arctic Monkey's moody Do Me A Favour. Those guys!

_____________________________________________________________________

music lately: 

Walk Through The Fire, from the musical episode Once More With Feeling from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Yes. I am at the stage with my Buffy-watching where I got up to the musical episode. Verdict: oh I don't know, I think I want to/have to watch it like seventeen more times before I can properly calibrate my feelings on it (what I'm saying is I love it)

VCR, The XX - their music just makes me feel all warm and safe, it's so dreamy and low-key. This is one of my very, very favourites of theirs. 

_____________________________________________________________________

next time: I know it's freezing but I made some rum'n'raisin ice cream the other day and it was honestly the nicest thing I've tasted in forever. So I ate it all. In one go. But I'm going to make it again and let it hang around long enough to take photos of this time! 

it's a little secret, just the robinson's affair

got a secret, can you keep it, swear this one you'll save

In a completely unsurprising turn of events, I fell asleep while writing this blog post and now have a very small window of opportunity - more like a mouse-hole of opportunity, or perhaps a fissure of opportunity - to get it done before I have to take off for work. In fact I have no real proof that I'm not still asleep right now, so please keep this in mind as you read on. What I'm saying is, I coolly absolve myself of any need to make any sense as I try to finish this thing without falling asleep again.

Speaking of cool absolution, I am so chill with being inspired by my own self, which is honestly kind of practical - I mean, I should theoretically like and use the recipes I've created. Last Sunday I was invited to my girlfriend's flatmate's fundraiser potluck for local charity Kaibosh, and with cheerful self-absorption I turned to my own cookbook to browse it for suitable recipes. The recipe for Secret Centre Mini Pavlovas caught my (probably half-asleep) eye, as it is both elegant and awesome yet easy and inexpensive to make.

gonna lock it in your pocket (I'm quoting the Pretty Little Liars theme song here btw)

I was absolutely correct about these chocolate stuffed meringues being easy to make, and for the filling I used Whittaker's caramel chocolate, partly to be obnoxiously excessive and partly because I thought it would taste wonderful. 

However! Diligently I walked from my house to the potluck venue at In Good Company, and about halfway through the journey I came to a long set of concrete stairs. A set of concrete stairs that I once fell down. Aha, I thought, my old foe, we meet again. Luckily I'm going up, not down this time, hey? HEY? And then I fell up the stairs. 

While I was totally fine, with little more than a delicately bruised knee on top of doubtless another bruise that had only just barely healed - the container of meringues that I was carrying dropped and they got all banged up inside. They were still edible but the edges were all ragged and shattery and some of the tops were a bit crushed and essentially they weren't particularly photogenic. So, I decided to forgo my own photos altogether and just use the ones that go with this recipe in my cookbook. I can't remember whether it was Kim or Jason who took these, so a huge thank you to them both just to be safe. 

secret centre mini-pavlovas

a recipe by myself from my cookbook HungryandFrozen: The Cookbook. I just wrote out the instructions from memory rather than copy-pasting what was in the book, even though it's all my own words (I don't know why I did this) but either way the recipe is a lot simpler than the length of this recipe would make it seem - I just kind of overexplain stuff a bit. 

two egg whites
a pinch of salt
100g sugar
filling of your choice - in this case I used caramel-filled chocolate but dark chocolate is a good starting point

Set your oven to 150 C and line a baking tray with baking paper. 

Whisk the egg whites (or use an electric beater if you're more sensible than me) with the pinch of salt till they're white and a little fluffy and when you raise the whisk the fluffy egg white raises up with it and falls down slowly (this is known as "soft peak stage" but in case you needed an expanded explanation, there it is.) At this point slowly whisk in the sugar, initially about a teaspoon at a time, until the mixture becomes thicker and shiny and gorgeous. It should get to the point where it's really very stiff, and if you raise the whisk up out of the bowl the mixture will be thick and dollopy instead of falling in ribbons off the whisk. God I hope these descriptions make sense! 

Place heaped spoonfuls of the thick, gleaming meringue onto the baking tray, leaving a little space in between to allow for expanding. Top each spoonful with a piece of chocolate, and then spoon over a little more meringue mixture, so that the chocolate is entirely encased in white. 

Bake for thirty minutes, although check them at around 20 - 25 minutes in, just in case your oven is more grunty than mine. They should be a delicate pale brown colour on top and appear firm. Allow them to cool in the oven with the door slightly ajar, and then carefully remove them from the paper, peeling it away from their fragile bases, and then all you have to worry about is eating them.

never not dazzled by fairy lights

While my falling asleep constantly or falling up stairs or generally being involved in some kind of falling is barely news, these secret centre mini pavlovas are, at least, notably spectacular. Crisp, dissolving meringue gives way to a burst of chocolate that you wouldn't otherwise know what there unless someone forewarned you. While it's sweetness upon sweetness, something in the mix of textures keeps it fresh - whether the chocolate is still warm and gushes into your mouth or cooled and firmed and crunchy under the brittle meringue. The potluck dinner was so fun and fortunately no-one minded the mini-pavlovas being a little smashed up, and there was a ton of delicious food and lovely people and a very decent amount of money was raised for Kaibosh, an outcome sweeter than a meringue secretly stuffed with chocolate.

Am about to fall asleep again but before I spatula my tired self out of bed to get ready to go, I wish to impart two more pieces of crucial information to you:

Kate and Jason (the stylist and aforementioned co-photographer for my cookbook, but also like, wonderful people in their own right aside from their relation to my cookbook) GOT A BEAUTIFUL DOG and I got to hang out with him today. He's blindingly white and fluffy like a freshly laundered towel and so friendly and silly and I'm quite in love.

 this is Ghost, also a good name for me because I am dead after looking at his face

Secondly, I had another Crush Cake story published in The Toast! The Toast is probably the very best website on the internet, if I was pushed to choose one, and little makes me prouder than being able to contribute to their spectacularly high quality accumulation of writing.

This is a crush cake dedicated to Drake. If you're not intrigued and inspired to immediately find out exactly what this is all about, then...I mean I can't blame you, but that's kind of a bummer. 

bonus! dog! so! blessed!

______________________________________________________________ 

title from: Mrs Robinson, that cheerfully weird song by Simon and Garfunkel. I love the punchy yet thoughtful guitar chords. And also the lyrics which sound like they were written by a committee passing notes to each other. 

______________________________________________________________ 

music lately:

Ummm so the video for Beyonce and Nicki Minaj's song Feeling Myself is still only available via subscription to Tidal but this 30 second teaser alone is giving me more life than literally anything else right now. Watch it and feel yourself become a better human. 

King Kunta, Kendrick Lamar. Yeah, still can't stop listening to this on repeat eh.  

______________________________________________________________ 

next time: I made ice cream so amazingly nice that I literally ate nearly a litre of it in one sitting. Maybe you'll be able to make it soon too. 

you know that i'd do anything for you, we should have each other to dinner

miso marinated salmon and pea puree

Let me tell you right now, the photos I took for this week's blog post are objectively horrendous! It looks like something out of a microwave gourmet book from 1982! But like, you could go literally anywhere on the internet and find beautiful food photography, where else are you going to get the innovation of fizzingly good writing paired with completely disgusting photos that do a total disservice to both the quality of the writing and that about which I write? Honestly I nearly considered not posting about this recipe but if I learned anything from doing ballet since the age of three it's that the show must go on. There's only one word for my actions here, and that is: so brave. 

proof that I at least tried to take these photos and didn't just cut them out of a 70s cookbook that had been not particularly recently dropped in a puddle (also: the perils of me cooking for you - having to wait for me to photograph everything.)

So, because of the hours I keep at my recently-acquired job, I never ever get to cook dinner anymore. I love my job! But also I love cooking dinner. So much. When I first started flatting nine years ago I used to kick up such a fuss if I missed out on one night of cooking dinner, because apparently I was an enormous brat, but at least in a way that reaped useful dividends. Now I'm lucky if I get to cook dinner once a fortnight. I know it's more or less a chore and as such a weird thing to complain about, but as Selena Gomez said, the heart wants what it wants. On Sunday night I was able to combine my love of cooking dinner with another favourite activity, cooking dinner for other people: in this case, my excellent and marvelous girlfriend. Since I was spiralling this disproportionately into such a high-stakes occasion, I turned to my desert-island book, the seminal text How To Eat by Nigella Lawson. 

I latched onto a recipe for homemade beef carpaccio but when I went to buy the required piece of tail-end beef the price made me scream repeatedly, so I went with a second option, which was an entirely more affordable miso marinated salmon with pea puree (combining bits of two separate recipes from different chapters of How To Eat, based upon what I had already in the fridge.) 

the alpha and the omega-3  

I love salmon fillets, all tender and pinky-coral and oily, but the oiliness can be disconcertingly, lung-cloggingly present. Fortunately this marinade not only cuts through that, but it also adds layers upon layers of vehemently meaty yet subtly sweet flavour, in the form of miso paste, that magical and mysterious stuff, and coconut sugar, which has its own elusive, deep-toned caramel vibe. Lemon juice and vinegar lighten it up and briskly stop it from being altogether too much of an intense onslaught, and all you have to do is flash it under a hot grill for the skin to turn crisp and chewy - like pork crackling but thin and delicate as rice paper - and the flesh below to become utterly tender.

seriously this lighting is so bad, I need to remember how to take photos under regular lightbulbs again since it's dark 90% of the time these days, thank you for continuing to read this far

I have a tendency when I get the opportunity to cook for people I hold dear to be all pending-apocalypse about it, like, let's eat a vat of pasta big enough for a moose to comfortably nestle in and then we'll have seven different puddings and also here are several side dishes all involving fried potatoes and toasted nuts. This time around I wanted something that wouldn't bring on that frantic feeling of having consumed twelve kilos of food, so went for a weightless pea puree alongside, made luscious with butter and mascarpone. It's billowingly soft and creamy and works quite perfectly with the salmon, honestly I could eat a whole bowlful of it on its own (and in fact I did the next day with the leftovers.) 

when even instagram can barely embiggen your lighting situation you know you're in trouble

miso-marinated salmon with pea puree

adapted from a couple of recipes from Nigella Lawson's important book How To Eat

two salmon fillets, around 150g each

one heaped tablespoon white miso paste
one heaped tablespoon coconut sugar (if you can't find it, use brown sugar or better yet, palm sugar)
one tablespoon apple cider vinegar
the juice of a lemon

two cups frozen peas
150g mascarpone (or use creme fraiche or even sour cream or a little actual cream)
50g butter
salt and pepper to taste

Mix the miso paste, sugar, vinegar and lemon juice together and smear across both sides of the salmon. What I did was roughly mix the stuff together in the dish I was planning to marinate the salmon in and then kind of schmeered it on the salmon from there before just leaving it in said dish to sit and absorb the flavour, this saves on dishes but is admittedly kind of hard to explain. Leave this to sit for at least half an hour.

Set your oven to grill (broil, I do believe it's called in America?) and turn the heat up high. Meanwhile, bring the peas to the boil in a pan of water, and cook until they're very, very tender. Remove the salmon from the marinate and wipe gently with a paper towel. Place the salmon onto a baking paper lined oven tray, skin side up. Drizzle over a little oil (I used olive) and put them in the oven, grilling them for around 5 to 8 minutes.

Meanwhile, drain the peas and blitz them in a food processor with the butter (the heat should melt the butter sufficiently) before adding the mascarpone and blending again till it's a smooth green puree. 

Serve the salmon alongside the puree with whatever salad leaves you fancy. Serves two.  

if I wasn't supposed to make this obnoxious caption then why does pea puree rhyme with bae?  

It was so, so delicious. And incredibly simple. A combination I appreciate. And now that I've overanalysed it a few times, these photos aren't thaaaat bad. They are in fact, unequivocally hideous. Location-based discomfort aside, I feel like maybe I should take all food photos in the bathroom from now on, since the light in there is so good for selfies.

I mean really.

guess which one of us is genteel and which one of us is a plate-licking heathen (for the sake of not slandering anyone I'm the heathen, it's me, but in my defence spatulas are not considered to be cutlery so what's a gal to do?)

Cheers for bearing with me during this difficult time, people, clearly I need to cook dinner more often so I can remember how actually to take photos of dinner. But I got to cook dinner at all and it was ridiculously delicious and made for a dreamy evening, and despite everything, that is actually what counts. 

Yesterday on another rare night off I went to my friend Pinky Fang's first solo art gallery opening with said excellent gf, and met lots of other swell friends there and ate the most amazing candy and drank wine from plastic cups and it was all very very fun. But more important than wine and candy (it's true) is that Pinky's artwork collection is incredible! I'm so proud of her! If you're in Wellington you should absolutely definitely go to Thistle Hall this week while her show is running and if you're not in Wellington you can at least access some of her massively rad works from her online shop (I have the "shut up" cat print on my wall and can highly recommend having its presence in your life.) Yay art and friends and good times! 

____________________________________________________________________

title from: Lovecats by The Cute. Uh, I mean The Cure. But if you're gonna write a song this wilfully adorable you're gonna have me to deal with. 

____________________________________________________________________

 music lately:

Zendaya, Replay. This song is so great with such a head-swingingly big chorus and I love a dance-in-front-of-the-mirror music video to be quite frank. 

Scritti Politti, The Sweetest Girl. This 1981 song is unsettling but sweet, dreamy but sinister, I adore it. 

____________________________________________________________________

next time: I mean I very rarely cook dinner these days so the chances of me having to deal with unruly nighttime light anytime soon are slim but I'll work on it either way, promise. 

let's just make this part go faster

mugging for the camera

Comfort food can take many forms. For me it's usually something that gives you the masticatory impression of gently sliding into a warm bath, like a slowly-stirred risotto or a bowl of soft, butter-saturated polenta or an enormous pile of mashed potato, but sometimes comfort food is more about the act itself than whatever form the food ends up taking. Sometimes it can simply be like, it's 2am and I just finished work and it's too windy to stand up straight and you're sad and I'm sad and I bought you this bag of crisps from a 24/7 dairy because the line at BK was too long and also I didn't know what else to do but this $3 gesture represents a lot more than merely just crunchy sodium goods...y'know? 

But sometimes comfort food is very obvious and straightforward, in this case: a chocolate peanut butter cake that you make in a mug (the most comforting vessel!) microwaved briefly so that quite instantly you can reward yourself for existing with a piping hot, warm, rich cake. Just for you. I'd never made a mug cake before but I'd sure heard of them: in my completely unresearched experience mug cakes started off as the sort of thing that an enthusiastic relative would email you accompanied by sparkly gifs of puppies and a phrase along the lines of "This is the most dangerous cake in the world.....Because now chocolate cake IS OnLy five minutes away!" A few rotations of the earth and the very simple recipe is now a staple of pinterest and has morphed into such things as "choc chip cookie in a mug" (why would a cookie be in a mug though) and "red velvet layer cake in a mug" (this does not sound comforting or fast tbh.) However you come to it, and whatever your opinion on microwaves, there's something thoroughly charming about going from point A - you standing there with no cake - to point B - you eating a small cake from a mug - within about five minutes. And so, in the mood for sugar and immediacy, I recently made my first mug cake. 

 stay inside, drink more coffee, make cake really suddenly

I made this recipe up based on ingredients I already had in my possession, basically just whatever dusts and pastes I could find that might together form a half-decent cake. A little cocoa, a little coconut sugar (included for its extraordinarily deep caramel flavour, but just use brown sugar or plain sugar if you like) a little peanut butter for those this-is-a-fun-cake vibes...and after a long 90 seconds it transformed into a soft, meltingly chocolately, utterly delicious brownie-type thing, which I poured cream all over and ate in a chocolate-scented haze of beatific calm. All of which could be yours really, really quickly if you make yourself this.

chocolate peanut butter mug cake

a recipe by myself

two tablespoons butter (around thirty grams)
one tablespoon coconut sugar or brown sugar
two tablespoons cocoa powder
two tablespoons peanut butter
quarter of a cup milk
a pinch of baking powder
a couple of squares of chocolate, roughly chopped

Place the butter in the mug that you're using and soften it in the microwave. Stir in all the ingredients - a teaspoon with a long handle or a narrow whisk is good for this - and add a little extra milk if it seems toooo stiff. It should come to about halfway up the mug. I microwaved it for a minute on high, then another thirty seconds, by which stage it was firm enough on the surface for me to decide it was ready to eat. 

Plunge a spoon into the cake, pour cream or milk into it, and eat all by yourself. 

It doesn't rise very much, mind you, but I was astounded at how filling it was, so what it lacks in height it makes up for in cellular density I guess? Also for the work of minutes that you can count on one hand it's a pretty tidy result. In fact pretty tidy is underselling it: it's really, completely, wonderfully delicious.

This blog post is also going to be fast and mug-sized, but to distract you (and indeed, myself) from this I will leave you with Wednesday the silly beautiful tiny dingus of a cat being a literal loaf.

loaf cat (the demonic glow is coming from my heater/the camera on my phone not being able to deal with said glow)

Wait, one more thing! If anyone out there could please recommend a rad web designer that would be excellent. I'm thinking about refreshing this old blog here since it currently looks thoroughly ancient and un-cute. I don't know anything about anything so am hoping to go by personal recommendations for people who do good work like this, and am also hoping that my blog can undergo some kind of movie makeover transformation to the effect of a stunning brunette removing her glasses and undoing her ponytail and suddenly everyone gasps and notices how bodacious she is. 

__________________________________________________________________

title from: mate, it has been a while since I've quoted RENT on here. This song that I quote today, I Should Tell You, is so fragmented and tentative and nervous and beautiful. Jonathan Larson could really, really write. 

__________________________________________________________________

 music lately:

I don't know why Anna Kendrick's voice in the Don't You Forget About Me bit of the final number in Pitch Perfect makes me feel emotional, but there you have it. (I saw Pitch Perfect 2 last night, there is wonderful singing and Anna Kendrick is great and it's so weirdly racist and many other bad things! That's my review.) 

Shazam, by Spiderbait, from one of my favourite music genres, "bratty".

Lorde, Royals. I hadn't listened to this song in forever and ever and wow it is still such a tune.  

__________________________________________________________________

 next time: roast chicken in a mug! I'm kidding.