swallow my pride, oh yeah

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The nice thing about Mum's (circa 1971) copy of the "De Luxe Edition" of Edmonds Cookbook that she sent me as a birthday present back in April is...that while there are great recipes and all, just reading through it can be pretty fun in its own right. Beautiful and useful as many of the newer cookbooks celebrating old-time New Zealand cooking are, I like the unromantic straightforwardness of the original text itself.

I like how it informs you that Edmonds is manufacturer of such time-saving, of-the-era items as "Instant Chopped Onions", "Start" (what even is that?) and "Pronto Instant Beef Tea" (with that kind of title, I can hardly fathom its speed of assembly.) How it coolly gives a recipe for "Grated Nut Cakes" when neither the act of grating nor presence of nuts are involved in the method.

On page 37 is a recipe called Walnut Pride and even though reading through it didn't reveal anything fist-raisingly representative of being proud, I felt instantly and strongly drawn to making it. Probably so that if people came over and went to the cake tin to look inside (and they do) and asked what it was, I could say "Walnut Pride. Want some?"

Really, it's just your average cakey slice, with some nuts thrown in. As it was, I used Brazil nuts because they were cheaper than walnuts, as a bonus Brazil nuts have a prouder sound to them than walnuts...right? There's nothing outrageous about this recipe but it's tasty, and easy to make, and non-threateningly good-looking, and as far as baking goes, sometimes there's not much more you could ask for.

If anyone does actually know where the name came from, feel free to share. Without being overly simplistic, according to Wikipedia the first gay pride events in New Zealand were in the 1970s, so maybe this cake is what people ate to give them energy and to share amongst friends while marching..?

Brazil Nut Pride

Adapted from The Edmonds Cookbook.

120g butter

250g brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 egg

1/3 cup milk

250g plain flour

1 moderate teaspoon baking powder

1/2 cup Brazil nuts (or, of course, the original walnuts)

1/2 cup sultanas

Set your oven to 180 C/370 F, and line a baking tin - not too big, not too small - with baking paper. Cream butter and sugar, then add the vanilla. Beat in the egg, then alternatively mix in the milk with the dry ingredients. Stir in the Brazil nuts and fruit. Bake for 40 minutes, then ice with lemon icing when cool and cut into squares. I mixed up some lemon juice with icing sugar till it was a thick enough to drizzle off a spoon onto the cake, but feel free to smear it with lemon butter icing as the recipe suggests.

It tastes just fine - not faint-makingly delicious, but good and cakey, a bit flutteringly caramelly from the brown sugar, with the occasional creamy nutty crunch from the Brazil nuts lodged throughout. And in case you're wondering what a "moderate teaspoon of baking powder" is, well so am I. My interpretation involved casually swiping a spoon into the box of baking powder while squinting with my head tilted to the side, then tapping the spoon slightly to remove any excess. You...you do what feels right.

I was home from work sick today with what I've called the proto-flu - my throat was all constricted and I felt shivery and very sensitive to the touch last night, but after a good sleep and lots of tea and water, I'm back to just having a sore throat again. So I'm basically fine. The fact that I felt like three bits of marmite and cheese on toast for lunch was a good indication. If I don't want to eat, it usually means I'm sick. Sometimes when I get really crook, I end up sadly telling Tim, usually from the foetal position, "I guess I'll just have to stop the food blog, I can't even imagine why I wanted to talk about food in the first place". As soon as it passes I start thinking about cheesecake and fried chicken and spaghetti that sort of thing again.

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Title via: To those of you who thought I might quote U2's (Pride) In The Name Of Love...pshh. They're all very talented people. I just don't like their music enough to use a lyric as a post title. Now, the Ramones - I love their song Swallow My Pride, especially the way the chorus lurches surprisingly-but-pleasantly upwards. And it is they who bring us today's title.

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Music lately:

Tim put on some Smiths this evening, haven't listened to them in aaaaages. A favourite of mine is Shoplifters of the World Unite from Louder Than Bombs. The beginning always catches me off-guard with its directness, and Morrissey sounds typically wonderful.

Today I watched the 1993 film of Gypsy, one of the greatest musicals ever written, starring the awesome Bette Midler as Madame Rose. Also awesome was Mad Men's Elizabeth Moss in a small role as Baby Louise, and Tony Award winner Christine Ebersole playing burlesque stripper Dressy Tessy Tura. This movie is criminally under-represented on youtube, but check out Midler's brassy and sassy Everything's Coming Up Roses. I can't even imagine how extremely amazing the recent Broadway production (with Patti LuPone, Laura Benanti, Boyd Gaines and Leigh-Ann Larkin) must have been.

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Next time: The brisket!

go and part the seas in malibu

Yikes last week went fast. I most definitely meant to blog sooner but one thing leads to another and all of a sudden it's a dark Sunday afternoon and I'm pretty convinced it's time to go to bed but it's really only just past lunchtime. That's how you maintain a blog, people! That said, if the week went as quickly for everyone else, then no harm done - we're all on the same page.

Nothing like rifling through the sepia-d pages of the Edmond's Cookbook of Mum's that she gave me to make things feel a little more slow and relaxed. I've already made a bunch of crazy marshmallows from this book, but today I felt like something with more practical application to our lives. Not that marshmallows are an unreasonable possession. They have their reasons.

Am I trying to recreate a Frankie magazine photoshoot or what. Except theirs happen on beautiful fabrics and paper and stuff, and mine is on a cheap and grubby teatowel.

I've always been a fan of coconut but recently I've been really embracing the stuff - I love that it's so intensely rich and delicious and creamy and fragrant but also very cheap. That said it feels like forever since I've had an actual coconut, drank the water from it and bit into the chewy, juicy white flesh (so long ago that I can remember doing it but not where or when or anything...maybe I just dreamed this bit.)

Apparently New Zealanders have loved coconut for generations, although in its most mainstream form it's really the least appealing - I'm not talking fragrant curries or moist puddings eaten with mangoes or whatever here, I mean the dry, dessicated white flakes that cling to the edges of lamingtons or lolly cake (usually falling off and getting all over everything inbetween being on the plate and getting in your mouth). Nevertheless, as an ingredient dessicated coconut is definitely practical and still gives that definite, beachy flavour, and was recognised as such by several interesting recipes in this pretty old (sorry Mum) Edmonds Cookbook.


Coconut Kisses

These biscuity biscuits are supposed to be stuck together with butter icing...While I'm seriously the last person that would act as a gatekeeper between butter icing and the rest of the world, I liked the idea of having twice as many biscuits around if I left them alone.

110g butter

2 tablespoons hot water

1/2 cup sugar

1 cup flour

3/4 cup coconut

1 heaped teaspoon baking powder (you could do as the good book tells you to and use Edmonds)

Note: I added 1/2 a teaspoon Boyajian orange oil, partly for flavour and partly because it was really expensive and I like to pretend like it's a useful ingredient to have around, I mean it is and all, but, you know.

Melt butter and hot water together (I sat the bowl on top of a small pot of simmering water), mix in the rest of the ingredients. Roll into balls, put on a baking tray and flatten a little (I forgot!) Bake 15 minutes at 180 C/375 F. You can, of course, stick pairs together with butter icing.



Notice the lovely cake stand, given to me for my birthday by my godmother and family!

They don't look overly exciting but these coconut kisses are in fact mighty delicious - crisp on the outside but meltingly shortbready within. They'd be perfect dunked in a cup of tea as long as you didn't drop them - they're pretty small - and they have echoes of several coconut-flavoured biscuits out there on the market except of course they're way nicer, and much cheaper to make than buy. You could also try using oil instead of the melted butter - I'm sure it would work, and if so: vegan!



Because one kind of coconut flavoured baked good is just not enough, I also gave the Coconut Cakes a crack. They're really just small, coconut-enhanced scones, and in fact after eating one, what I really wanted to do was spread them with raspberry jam and sandwich them together with whipped cream.

Coconut Cakes

110g flour

45g butter

30g sugar

60g coconut

1 heaped teaspoon baking powder

1 teacup milk (I used just under 3/4 cup)

Sift flour, rub in butter, stir in the rest of the dry ingredients. Mix to a stiffish dough with the milk. Edmonds says "place in rocky shapes" on your baking tray, I just dropped rough dessertspoons-ful onto the tray and hoped for the best. Bake 15 minutes at 180 C/375 F.



These are so good - really quick to mix up and incredibly tender and light, not a biscuit and not a cake. The coconut makes them flavourous and textural (yeah they're words!) and they smell amazing while they're baking. I think you could definitely get away with buttering these before eating (not that I'm the best yardstick to measure healthy buttering behaviour against) or serve with cream and jam as I mentioned earlier, but they're great just as they are - soft and delicious.

The New Zealand International Film Festival has rolled into town again, replete with cinematic plenty. On Friday night we saw The Illusionist at the prompting of our former-flatmate-current-friend Ange - it was directed by Sylvain Chomet, who also did Triplets of Belleville. It was beautiful, so beautiful but utterly sad and desolate as well. I definitely recommend it all the same, and don't feel that subtitled films aren't for you because in fact there is almost no dialogue whatsoever in this film. Just beauty! I also recommend that afterwards you go somewhere warm and drink French red wine and eat homemade chocolate macaroons, it definitely worked out well for us.

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Title via: okay, all this coconut talk made me think of a certain coconut liqueur, and like all good songs named after an object or a person or something, the very thought of it had me humming Hole's wonderful 1998 song Malibu and now here we are. Of course, I've already outlined my enjoyment of Courtney Love previously here...

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Music lately:

I Heart Nigella by Wellington band Mammal Airlines. Tim and myself interviewed them recently for our website 100s and 1000s (please excuse the insultingly bad quality of the video, we're getting there, we are...) and the three of them were awesomely nice and fun to talk to. But perhaps most awesomely nice of all is the fact that they have a song called I Heart Nigella, and what's more, it's really good. They've made both their EPs available for free download, so take advantage of that generosity, hey?

This Song Has No Title from Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I know Elton John has an electric boot planted firmly in the middle of the road these days but I have no fear in saying I love this album. The reason it's on my mind though is because Tim put it on the stereo and managed to trick me into thinking we were listening to War of the Worlds, which I really hate. I was getting pretty aggravated until album opener Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding dropped speed and changed tempo and all of a sudden I realised we were actually listening to Elton John. Now we sound like incredibly unexciting people, but it's a true story and you heard it here first.

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Next time: I made ceviche for the first time and it was so good! Not so good was my pronunciation. Even though Nigella was all "it's Mexican!" I've been pronouncing it all French-like, "se-veesh"...

gunpowder gelatine, dynamite with a laser beam

Okay: I didn't win the blog category of that CLEO/Wonder Woman thing. In hindsight, I already knew this, but for a while there it felt like everyone in the world was voting for me and we'd all linked hands and started a wild mazurka of joy, spiralling with love for this blog and each other. And then I opened the July issue in a 24-hour convenience store at lunch today with Tim and the mazurka ceased, and David Dallas' Big Time ended its chorus in my mind. (What's a mazurka? You ask? Only one of the coolest folk dances ever, as this video confirms.) BUT as I've said previously, this has been a fun wave to flutterboard across and it was lovely being unexpectedly nominated, and of course, I'd like to extend a giant chocolate cake with "congratulations" piped across the top in icing to the actual winners at So Much To Tell You. I'm sure we all wanted this in equal amounts! I just felt particularly wanty, and this kind of obliterated any idea that anyone else could want it more and I wouldn't win. But it's okay. It was fun to be nominated. And to raise awareness of my desire to own a capybara. And a mightily enormous thanks to everyone that emailed in and voted for me: it means a lot! I don't bust out folk-dancing imagery for just any old situation.

So.


Of powdered gelatine, Nigella Lawson authoritatively sneers "God knows how anyone can make that work...leaf gelatine is the answer". It sort of has an implied "and if you want to consider yourself any kind of fan of mine, lowly blogger, then you ought to agree" tacked onto the end. In some ways, Nigella is right - leaf gelatine is much more reliable and easier to use, and very pretty. But if a packet of Davis powdered gelatine hadn't been sighing unwantedly in my cupboard, I would not have been able to make Moonshine Biffs: then what?

My Mum gave me her old copy of the Edmonds Cookery Book, the 1971 edition I believe. It's the sort of thing you don't want to buy new, you want to be given it or find an old copy somewhere...I read once about how young people are able to have nostalgia for things they never knew - for things that their parents or even their grandparents experienced. Or even nostalgia for things that someone's parents and grandparents might have experienced (ie: the 60s), which, if any of that makes sense, could explain why I get a feeling of warm safeness inside when I turn the pages of this book and read curtly delivered recipes for spiced rock cakes or Dolly Varden Cake even though I never, ever ate them growing up.




As I was leafing through the pages I discovered the recipe for Moonshine Biffs and decided whatever the heck they even were, I was going to make them for their name alone (for the same reason I'm no good to play Scrabble with because I'd rather make silly words than gain points...and I get really impatient waiting for people to have their turn...And also I'm pretty sure I don't really like Scrabble.) I thought they'd be like marshmallows but they are in fact, better yet, essentially Milk Bottle lollies in square format.

Moonshine Biffs

From the Edmonds Cookery Book.

• 3 dessertspoons Gelatine (I used a regular, stuff-eating spoon, the kind you'll find in the spoon compartment in your cutlery draw, you know...spoon.)
• 1 breakfastcup sugar (I used just under a 250ml measuring cup)
• 1/2 pint water (A heaped measuring cup) (psych! You can't heap water)
• 1/2 pound icing sugar (250g)
• coconut
• vanilla

• Place gelatine, water and regular sugar in a saucepan and boil for eight minutes. This was a little scary, but because the Edmonds Cookery Book is always pretty vague, to put an instruction in italics made me want to follow it. That said, if you suspect your stove-top generates a significantly hotter heat than what they had in the 70s then go slow and boil a little less.
• Add the icing sugar and vanilla (I had some vanilla paste, proper extract would be fine, you could, I suppose, go era-specific and use essence) and beat until thick and white - I used a silicon whisk and nearly fainted from the exertion, you're welcome to use electric beaters or whatever.
• Pour into a wet tin - again, silicon makes life easier here, otherwise use baking paper to line the tin - and leave to set for a couple of hours. It doesn't matter if it won't fill the tin - it's not a huge mixture and just stops and sets where it is. Slice up, toss in coconut. FYI, mine set very smooth and coconut wouldn't stick to one side of it. Edmonds didn't prepare me for that but I was chill.

As I said, these really do taste like Milk Bottles - chewy, a little creamy, very sweet. But good - so good. And they cost around 30 cents and a little arm-work to make. If your kids/flatmates aren't snobs about what shape their lollies come in, try them on a rainy weekend and see if you don't feel awesome about yourself and the world once you have a pile of them sitting on a plate in front of you.

On a gelatine rampage, I couldn't help trying something else further down the page: Toasted Honey Marshmallows. Significantly more sophisticated, these intensely honeyed, soft sweets would be perfect after a spicy dinner or alongside liqueurs and truffles instead of pudding. There's no getting around the fact that gelatine is not vegetarian, and is no less made of animal than if steak was the main ingredient of marshmallows, so if you are thinking of making either of these maybe check with your meat-shunning mates what their limits are.




Toasted Honey Marshmallows

Also from the Edmonds Cookery Book.

Soak 1 level tablespoon Gelatine in 1/4 breakfastcup cold water in a metal bowl for 3 minutes. Dissolve over hot water, by sitting the metal bowl on top of a small pot of simmering water. Tip in 1 breakfastcup liquid honey. Beat with egg beater (or whatever you have - again, I derangedly used a whisk) until fluffy and white - about ten minutes. Turn into a wet shallow tin (again, silicon is best here) and leave 24 hours. Cut into squares carefully with a sharp knife and roll in toasted coconut.




Yes, you have to wait for ages which is why these are less child-friendly, but as I said the flavours and textures that unfolded from such minimal ingredients were incredible. The taste of honey suspended within impossibly soft marshmallows against the damp, nutty and textured coconut was amazing.

Last week Tim and I, having read several two-thumbs-up reviews, went to see Cemetery Junction. Even though it all ties itself up nicely and eventually good things happen to all the good people, it's done in a way that makes you quite happy to be taken along with it. It's gorgeously filmed with some rollicking humour coinciding with those wonderfully quietly heartbreaking moments that the British seem to have patented, it's full of good-looking, shiny-haired young Brits (although solemnly countered by some more menacingly lived-in faces) and it's directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant so, hello. We recommend it heartily.

By the way everyone, Tim has a job! Yeah! Turn Big Time back up again! It's a Monday to Friday office job which might sound hellish but they all sound nice and after barista-ing at dawn on a daily basis, it's completely welcome. Apparently he saw off other people with more experience; of course he did! It's Tim! Anyway, cheers for the words of encouragement from everyone, we are now on a dual income which means if I do nothing but cook from the Edmonds book that pet capybara and my dreams of Broadway may not be so far off after all. Soon we'll hit the big time...

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Title comes to you via: Queen's Killer Queen...I know they're not that cool, well neither am I. There's a lot of Queen I'm not keen on, luckily this song isn't in that list because I'm yet to see a better lyric about a setting agent.
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Music lately:

Fats Domino's Ain't That A Shame...the way the chugging opening melody slides into the titular question really does somehow convey a sense of something being a shame, besides that it's a great, great song and I love Youtube for making all this old footage available.

Julia Murney singing People from the musical Funny Girl...I guess I do mention her more than occasionally but friends: this woman is amazing. The bad thing about being a Julia Murney fan is that while she performs a lot she's relatively below the radar and will never come to New Zealand and I'll never get to see her in New York, the good thing about being a Julia Murney fan is that she performs a lot of fabulous songs at benefits and concerts and they often find their way to Youtube. And uh, looks like it's the salute to Youtube segment on the show now.

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Next time: I've been promising pavlova for a while but excitement about homemade marshmallows overrides anything else. Including whether I really have any true need for marshmallows. Pavlova truly will be next time, promise. Also, you're still most welcome to check out Tim's and my side-project blog 100s and 1000s, where so far we've interviewed Grayson Gilmour, talked about new music we may or may not like, and I managed to winkle an Idina Menzel reference in there.