take it all with a belly full of salt

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.

when tomatoes are flying, duck, but smile

First: Happy Waitangi Day, everyone. As I said on this day last year, it is important to me for many reasons. Firstly, the reason it exists at all: in 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi was signed at Waitangi, near Paihia in the Bay of Islands, a place where my ancestors on both sides have strong links to. Read up on the treaty if you like, it's one of the more interesting and game-changing events in New Zealand history. Secondly: It marks the date that I had my first ballet lesson, 21 years ago. Evidently ballet waits for no public holiday. A tough business, had I lingered till the next day I could've been considered "past my prime" (FYI: this probably isn't true, and also, I was three years old)

Anyway, yikes, February already, so there's only one month left of summer. And in Wellington it feels like winter's cutting ahead of autumn in the tuckshop line. One month ago it was all sand and sunscreen and deliciously dizzying heat, now it's all sporadic sun, pushy gale-force wind, greying clouds and woolly jumpers. Either that or knuckle-dragging humidity. What gives?

One way to remind myself that it is still in fact summer is to immerse myself culinarily in seasonal food, which - bonus - is generally cheaper, easier to get hold of, and tasting its best. Like the tomato, currently at its richest red of colour, fullest of cheek and glut-est of availability.

I read a recipe of the much-googled and widely lauded Martin Bosley's in his food column for The Listener magazine recently which completely took my fancy: a sauce of raw, chopped tomatoes, steeped in good things and tumbled over pasta. I stupidly didn't actually copy it down anywhere, and unfortunately The Listener doesn't seem to have an up-to-date online recipe database in the same way that, say, Cuisine magazine does. (Not that they're obliged to provide me recipes for free. But gee, if the internet hasn't half conditioned my brain to expect it!)

I knew there was something particularly impact-y about this recipe which made me want to recreate it, but I just couldn't remember what. So, with a bowl of rapidly deflating, perfectly ripe tomatoes bought on the cheap, I decided to just be inspired, and improvise.

Raw Tomato Pasta Sauce with Avocado Oil and Cinnamon

Inspired by a recipe of Martin Bosley's

3 ripe tomatoes

Avocado oil (but of course, olive oil is so welcome here instead)

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon sugar

Salt, flaky sea salt if possible - tastes nicer, and you need less.

1 T Balsamic Vinegar and/or the juice of a lemon

1 clove garlic, crushed

Around 180g to 200g spaghetti or other long pasta, to serve

Roughly chop the tomatoes, fairly small, and pile them into a non-metallic bowl (apparently metal does very bad things when it reacts to the acidic tomatoes.) Pour over as much avocado or olive oil as you like, but around 2 tablespoons is what I used.

Sprinkle over the salt and sugar, the vinegar, and the garlic, and mix thoroughly. Leave for as long as you like at room temperature, but at least do it before you get started on the pasta, so it gets a decent sit.

Bring a large pan of water to the boil, salt it, and cook the pasta in it, till it's done to your liking. Drain and divide between two plates. Spoon over the chopped tomato 'sauce', pouring over any juices that have collected, and drizzle over more avocado or olive oil if you like.

Serves 2.

Great as this is, I had a massive head-desk when I eventually located the original recipe of Bosley's - it had almonds and chilli in it. How could I not have remembered something that deliciously significant? My invention was cool, but almonds and chilli. I want that in a sauce.

Still, mine had its own cinnamony charm, with the tomatoes soft and cool and luscious on the hot pasta, the avocado oil's mellow nuttiness against the sweetly sharp balsamic vinegar and almost lemony-fragrant tomato juices dripping into the depths of the tangle of pasta. Because of how I chopped my tomatoes it was less a sauce and more of a...pile of stuff. But I liked it.

To go with I boiled some peas and edamame and once they were cool sprinkled over a little sesame oil, and chopped in what I could salvage from a disappointing avocado. It was delicious, and pleasingly reflective of the avocado oil with the tomatoes. The reason I used avocado oil is because I got some for Christmas (cheers Dad!) and it's really delicious, furthermore I've run out of olive oil and every time I go to buy some more it just feels too expensive. However if you're the other way round, as I said in the recipe, of course olive oil is great to use here too.

Poor Tim had to pause here for a minute because I looked across the table and suddenly felt like what I saw (alas, minus his pleasant above-shoulder region) needed to be photographed. It wasn't posed, he was about to feed himself and I wailed "don't move!" and grabbed the camera. But still, nice to shake up the usual one-aerial one-closeup-fuzzy shot routine.

So: as long as you can handle, or at least sell to the people you're feeding, the idea of pasta and a chopped up vegetable being your dinner, then this is one truly summery and seriously unpricey recipe which not only requires hardly any effort, it's also extremely delicious and not so heavy and stodgy that you need to lie down immediately with a cold compress after eating it. Cheers, Martin Bosley for the inspiration. As I said, he's heralded wide and far but I've never actually tried a recipe of his, and I guess...this doesn't really count. While some of his recipes, though delicious, seem a bit inaccessible to my time, skills, and cupboard contents, I can't fault the blueprint which inspired this blog post - a simple, sexy and delicious-sounding tomato sauce. And he also gets a free pass for life because when I approached him to say hi at the City Markets one time, he said "Oh, you're Hungry and Frozen" which, let's face it, is a fast way into my heart.

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Title via: the King Lear of Broadway musicals, Sondheim's Gypsy - you'd think that Smile, Girls could at least be found on youtube. But no. So...smugness from those who have cast recordings. Although I think you can listen to its sage advice - or at least some of it - here (click on "girls".)

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Music lately:

Beach House, Walk In The Park from Teen Dream - gosh this is a pretty song, like the catchiest bits of Where Is My Mind and, um, Eyes Without A Face combined...at last. We were lucky enough to see Beach House at Laneway Presents: Wellington on Tuesday night, and this song was an early and beautifully delivered highlight of the evening, distracting Tim and I entirely from the fact that our camera frustratingly wasn't allowed in, and there was no coatcheck so Tim had to run it home. I whinged about it at length, more quizzical than aggrieved by that point, on 100s and 1000s. That, and perhaps-uninformed comparisons aside, I do like this song a lot and it was lovely to see it performed live.

Mum sent my iPod back along with a whole bunch of other goodies (lentils, pasta, Whittaker's Chocolate and so on) and having been without it for three weeks, it's quite the sensory overload to have music and so much of it again while I walk around. I've been reconnecting seriously with the cast recording of Hair (Original Broadway and 2009 Revival Broadway cast recording, thank you).

Lively Up Yourself - Happy birthday, Bob (the other important thing about February 6)

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Next time: It was going to be ginger cut-out cookies, and lovely as they are, I made this morning a batch of Nigella's Norwegian cinnamon buns and they were so astoundingly good that they're overtaking the cookies...

*speaking of disappointing avocados, feel free to read the guest post I did for the blog about Diamond Dogs, a play that's going to occur in Wellington on the 15th, 16th and 17th of February.