and we walked off, to look for america

As the late, always-makes-me-cry-so-I-can-only-listen-to-her-occasionally, great Laurie Beechman sang in the original Broadway production of Annie: "NYC, I give you fair warning: up there, in lights, I'll be."

I also give YOU fair warning: Tim and I have a plane to catch in less than two hours. All the tasks and jobs and endless succession of things that needed doing pushed this necessary blog post further, and further, and further back, till suddenly I'm typing really fast and realising that I haven't had breakfast but I have had two coffees and I still need to finish packing.

With that, please allow me some self-indulgently breathless bullet points. I'll try to make them wordily eloquent bullet points though. 

- I handed in my cookbook manuscript. It made me feel a bit like this:

This cookbook has been my life for the last three months. Frankly, it has been my life since I got the email from my publisher back in January asking if I was interested. Franklier than that, it has been my life for a much longer time, it just didn't realise it yet. Or something. It's so strange not to be working on it - a little bittersweet and empty, a watermark left from a glass of campari on a table - but my flipping gosh it's good to have achieved it. I feel like I climbed a huge mountain, only way better, because there was no actual mountain-climbing involved. My creative team of Jason, Kim and Kate (plus project-manager Tim) were utterly brilliant to the last. I'll be full of more details about the book itself as the process goes along, but for now: I'm just going to enjoy not thinking about it quite so hard.

- Here is some pasta I made. It's a very specific recipe, based on there being almost no food left in the house because we're leaving for a month, but also some foods that really need eating. I like bowtie pasta because of its rakish, eyebrow-wagglingly charming shape, but use whatever, of course.

Bowties with Smoked Paprika Burnt Butter and Almonds

A recipe by me. Serves one.

100g bowtie pasta
30g butter
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
50g almonds
Green stuff for garnish. Parsley is good here.

Cook the pasta in boiling salted water till al dente. Drain. 

While the pasta's cooking, melt the butter in a pan and allow it to properly sizzle and burn. This will give you marvelous depth of flavour. Tip in the paprika, and stir, followed by the almonds. Continue to cook a little longer till the almonds are coated and lightly browned. Remove from the heat, tip on top of the drained pasta, and blanket with any kind of garnishy greens.

This is simple, yet highly delicious. Nutty, saltily fulsome butter. Smoky, intense paprika. Crunchy, lightly scorched almonds. The greens aren't really that necessary but the paprika tints the butter dark orange and it does have connotations of engine grease. If I wasn't photographing it I probably wouldn't have bothered, really.

More bullet points ahoy!

- Dearest Jo made me this amazing and delicious cake to say congratulations for finishing the book. It's appropriate because I have SO MANY feelings. We ate it, along with waffles and other important breakfast foods, while watching the new season of Parks and Recreation. Did I say feelings? FEELINGS.

- Speaking of Parks and Rec, a pie recipe of mine is featuring in the new edition of BUST magazine, which has the clever and hilarious and stunning Aubrey Plaza on the cover. BUST is an American magazine, even, so just try to calculate how blown my mind is right now.

- I guess I'll leave it there, since I really, really, really do have to carry on packing and cleaning and such before we go. These beyond-dreamy prints by Colette St Yves arrived in the mail today though: I may just quietly swoon over them instead of doing anything productive. 

Tim and I threw ourselves a little going-away party on Wednesday night and afterwards I fully started sobbing. Tim, ever the logical person, said "it's only a month". To which I, ever the logical-in-my-head person, replied "yes but we always do so much every month". A self-indulgent cry out of the way, I am now more or less full of excitement about America. There might be a tiny, tiny bit of maudlin pillow-hugging before we leave though, what can I say. Feelings. 

I promise real, proper blogging will resume when we get back at the end of October. But - oh what a but - I have two thoroughly awesome guest bloggers to house-sit this blog for me while I'm away. Guest blogger the first is Kate, stylist queen of my cookbook and all round purveyor of excellence. Guest blogger the second is cooler-than-ice cream artist-in-every-sense-of-the-word Coco Solid. You're in mighty good hands.

However, while I'm gone Tim and I are upkeeping a travel blog, which we've called USA! USA! USA! (it was so hard not to try to make some kind of Babysitters Club or Broadway-related title, a Homer Simpson quote is a good compromise.) You're welcome to read it and keep abreast with our traveling times.

Thanks for all the good words as I felt my way through this cookbook-writing process - if it's not too disconcerting, imagine me hugging my laptop right now by way of metaphorical gratitude. I mean the gratitude is real, me hugging the laptop is a metaphor for me hugging you all. Actually I'm not sure if it is a correct metaphor, maybe more of a - well, anyway. You get what I mean. 

And so: au revoir. Ka kite. See you soon.

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Title via: Simon and Garfunkel's America. Dreamy. 

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Music Lately: The All-American Edition

Azealia Banks released her new video for Luxury last night. What a talented babe is she.

Lana Del Rey, Jump. Del Rey always makes me feel a bit moody, but I love her songs so much, so what can you do? I feel like I'm building up an immunity though, this is one of her more bewitching songs that's juuuuuust upbeat enough.

Seasons of Love, from the movie soundtrack (though the original cast recording is also beautiful and I unsurprisingly recommend both) of RENT. We're going to New York. Where RENT is from. What is life? 

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Next time: well I'll certainly have plenty to talk about, won't I?

some are born to rise above sleepless nights and sloe gin love love love

If you wouldn't mind indulging me for a moment:

I've become slightly infatuated with Cinemagram, this app on my phone. It lets you create little gif-like moving images that can border from the barely mediocre (ahem) to the breathtakingly gorgeous. If you can't view the above, what's there is a bowl of ice cream ingredients and a bottle of cream, the former eternally emptying its delicious contents into the grateful latter. 

I won't, however, use this as a segue into talking about indulging in ice cream, because I refuse to buy into that. Ice cream is just what I eat when I feel like ice cream, no need be stacking on the guilt when you could stacking on the chocolate sauce instead. Right? Right. 

And I feel like eating ice cream a LOT. Good thing my ability to think up ice cream recipes can keep up with desire to eat ice cream. 

What a week it has been. On Thursday morning I read the news and punched the air joyously at Obama vocalising his support of marriage equality. On Friday night Tim and I went to Queer the Night, a march against homophobia and transphobia, with friends of ours. We ran into more friends along the way, and walking the streets of Wellington on a clear night chanting "two, four, six, eight, don't be sure your kids are straight" felt right and good. Hearing heart-clenchingly sad stories from those who spoke was a reminder that there's no place for complacency. An impromptu-ish party followed, from which my fondest memories include so many hugs, spreading crackers with butter and sprinkling them with salt, doing a highkick and landing in the splits (at the encouragement of others, not of my own volition, although I hardly require arm-twisting) and gasping over the staggering beauty, and utter importance of the Parks and Recreation final. I freely admit I've been inordinately affected by this half hour comedy show, and that there was a whole lot of crying and shaking going on. I may or may not have (or actually did) tweeted "Leslie Knope, moon of my life." Make of this what you will. 

And on top of all that, I thought that Gin and Tonic Ice Cream would be nice. Gin and tonic go together so excellently well. Why wouldn't they excel together in ice cream form? Well, it wasn't so much "nice" as "high-kick-then-landing-in-the-splits-ingly rapturous", but you be the judge. 

You no more need an ice cream machine for this than you need to know how to do the splits. It really couldn't be easier. Or more unconditionally delicious. Seriously, this is one of my finest creations, and I say that as someone who says that every time they create something, so...who can you trust? Only your own tastebuds, once you've made this for yourself.

Gin and Tonic Ice Cream

A recipe by myself.

1 cup sugar

Juice of a lemon (about 2 tablespoons)

3 tablespoons gin

125 ml tonic water

600ml cream

Tip the sugar into a bowl and add the lemon juice, gin, and tonic water. Stir to dissolve a little, then pour in the cream. Whisk till thickened. You're not looking for whipped cream here, just something that has the texture of, say, a good thickshake. Transfer to a freezer-proof container (like - haha! - an old actual ice cream container) and allow to freeze, of course.

Whilst vodka and soda water with no lime is my very favourite (I like a sneeringly dry drink) I have much room in my heart for gin. Gin comes with a sense of occasion and history. It calls to mind high summer, when I knew I was cool because mum and her friends let me have a G&T with them when we were camping. (Okay, 'cool' and 'hanging out with one's mum' can be mutually exclusive, but hey.) It speaks of nights spent watching Gossip Girl with dear friends. And...I just really like the taste. What you end up with here is an ice cream bearing a delicate yet absolutely present hit of gin's citrussy bitterness, which the inclusion of tonic, the arch older cousin to lemonade, only helps with. 

The proportion of liquor to cream gives you the most ridiculous texture - it's like soft-serve ice cream, straight from the freezer. Alcohol slows down the freezing process, but you don't want too much or you'll never actually get to the point of ice cream. It'll be sludge. Exquisite sludge, but still. For all its simplicity, this is one of the most delicious ice creams I've ever tasted. Creamy and aerated, yet with a lemon sorbet-lightness. And importantly, it's on just the right side of boozy, so you don't make this face when you eat a spoonful. 

And, if you're given to flights of dinkiness and frivolity, which I often am, you might as well garnish it with a slice of lemon.
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Title via the Lowdown-down from the other version of The Wild Party musical, both equally as exciting as each other, really. This one had Eartha Kitt, Mandy Patinkin, and a swell Toni Collette as Queenie, who sings this glorious song.

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Music lately:

Frail Girls/Salad Daze, the double A-side single from Street Chant. Will likely form some more comprehensive thoughts around this soon, but for now: I really, really, REALLY like these songs.   

Ghostface Killah ft Raekwon, Kilo. He's coming to NZ! And not just NZ, but Wellington. If I had a nickel for every act that just went to Auckland, probably entirely justifiably, but still, I'd be able to afford to fly up there more often.
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Next time: Not sure, should probably do an actual dinner recipe or something as a bit of a contrast though, I guess....

just twist your hip and do the dip

You know how you learn something and then find you see it everywhere? Like you'll learn a new word and then hear it in a song and read it in an article and hear someone say it in passing. I recently read a book - The Sense of an Ending - which has a whammy moment when you realise one character had been repressing, or at least not divulging, a particularly significant memory. No sooner had I read this book, when I'm flipping aimlessly, and I do mean aimlessly, through a weekly magazine. And I am confronted with an advertisement bearing the blankly content face of a commemorative Kate Middleton porcelain doll in a wedding dress. And it reminded me of something I haven't thought about in years and years: that I used to be a little obsessed with those Franklin Mint porcelain dolls and would rip the advertisements out of aunties' and nanna's magazines and catalogue them in a folder in alphabetical order (well they all had names, Heather and Rosa and so on) and dream of the day I could own them all. Luckily for my now utter horror at the idea of walking into a room full of expressionless doll eyes staring back at you, I had no disposable income at the age of eight or so, and as such the folder was as far as it went. But isn't it strange what you forget and remember again - not the traumatic things - but these vivid little slices of your life that remind you exactly who you were and are?



Leaving behind the "I Was an Awkward Awkward" chapters for now, I'd like to bring your attention to hummus. I know, hummus, that ubiquitous beige lotion which has gone from Moosewood territory to the sort of thing we get charged $5.50 for and purchase more per head of population than we ever did of pesto. How can it have still more surprises up its sleeve? Well who more reliable to elicit such surprises than my idol Nigella Lawson, who only goes and replaces the tahini (sesame seed paste) in homemade hummus with Peanut Butter. So important. And so importantly, so delicious. Peanut butter has a somewhat brash flavour, but against the mild chickpeas and smoothing yoghurt it mellows out and provides this sweet, nutty, oleaginously compulsive edge to your hummus. I really love tahini - sesame being one of my favourite flavours - but the tastebuds grow weary, and peanut butter doesn't so much deliver the goods as urgent courier them while wearing appealingly fitted shorts and saying in a warm voice, "I've got a big package for you".

Peanut Butter Hummus

Recipe from Nigella Lawson's book Kitchen, I've simplified it slightly. Really, just play with quantities of the ingredients as they please you. If you're not able to eat dairy, I'd add an extra tablespoon of water and lemon juice and peanut butter and it'll be all good.

1 can chickpeas, drained
1 clove garlic
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons peanut butter
2 tablespoons lemon juice
3 tablespoons Greek yoghurt
1 teaspoon cumin
Salt

Blend all together thoroughly till smooth. Add a little more yoghurt or water if it's not spreadable enough.

Because I feel that hummus alone isn't quite enough to bolster this blog post, a second recipe for you. I'm really sorry that both of these require a blender/food processor - I hate when recipes give directions for making cake batter in a cake mixer when said cake mixers cost many hundred dollars, or when an ice cream recipe finishes with "and then put it in your ice cream maker and follow their instructions" or whatever. I'm sorry. You could effectively crush up the chickpeas with a fork or a potato masher, but the strawberries really need the swift action that only an electric rotating blade can provide. 



What, you don't have a dedicated hummus knife commemorating the Parahaki War Memorial in Whangarei? Look I'm not saying your party is "ruined" as such...

If you do have a blender though, there aren't many happier foodstuffs in this world than pink lemonade. I first tried making it with raspberries, and that was great, but strawberries are even more delicious, which is brilliant because they're also half the price.

Pink Lemonade

A recipe by myself

2 1/2 cups frozen strawberries (bully for you if you've got real ones, but it's winter in NZ right now. And frozen strawberries are really pretty cheap any time of year)
2 1/2 litres of lemonade
Optional: passionfruit syrup, mint leaves

Place the strawberries in a blender and allow them to defrost somewhat. Add 1/2 cup of water and blend till smooth and gloriously pink, adding more water if your blender can't deal with it. Spatula into a jug and slowly top up with lemonade. The bubbles and the strawberry puree will form scuzzy bubbles on top, just stir it with a wooden spoon to break it up.

And lo, a joyful jugful of deeply pink, wondrously delicious lemonade shot through with the fresh taste of strawberry. A little passionfruit syrup helps sharpen up this berry flavour, and mint leaves are just delicious with nearly anything, but simply strawberries and lemonade on their own are more than fine.

I served both these delights over the weekend at my inaugural Ice Cream Demonstration Party (that's not necessarily what it's called but the capital letters make it seem official) where in front of a small group of lovely people I demonstrated and imparted pretty much every particle of knowledge I have about ice cream, taking them through recipes for said ice cream and sauces to go on top, then we all built our own ice cream sundaes and then they went home with a goodie bag. It was super fun and you can check out photos from the night (one of the guests was also a great photographer) on my Facebook page, if you please.

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Title via Rock the House by Gorillaz. Tim and I were lucky enough to see them in 2010 and it was so brilliant that my brain starts melting every time I think about it. Like, there's Damon Albarn, one of the first people who got me realising that I could have a crush on another person. Also present: Bobby freaking Womack.
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Music lately:
Lee Fields, Faithful Man. Tim insisted we buy this record. He insisted accurately. Fields is just really, really good.

Madeline Kahn, Getting Married Today. Mixing my obsession for the musical Company with my new fascination for the hilarious, babely, and sadly late Kahn, she does well with this horrendously challenging song.
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Next time: Still have some quinces lying there looking at me reproachfully. The time has come to do more than just sniff them rapturously, any suggestions?

shedding a tear, lending a shoulder

On Wednesday night I had a panic attack. Wait, don't click another tab. I know, food bloggers are supposed to drift round in a content haze of aspirational recipes, instagrammed photos of coffee and noodles, and bacon cupcake-flavoured macaron whoopie pies. Yet here I am. I was going to sort of pass it off with an "enough of that, here's the food" kind of segue since this may not be what you want to read, but since the only criteria I keep for this blog is, did I cook it and/or did it happen to me...I'm talking about it.



I'm no stranger to panic attacks but it has been a while, and just in case anyone else had had a similar experience recently I share mine, in the spirit of you-are-not-alone-ness, of not-being-ashamed-ness, and other such forcibly portmanteau-ed words. So. I went from standing there aimlessly to sweating, heart thumping, knees buckling, having to support myself by leaning on a wall, weird thoughts flying round my brain, a massive sense of unease, gulping for shallow breath. It went for about five minutes. And then it just subsided, and all I was left with were shaking hands and confusion. The thing I found weird was that nothing in particular had happened that day. On the other hand, I tend towards being highly anxious pretty easily, and have had some fairly clenched-knuckled moments over the last year - possibly this was a reaction to a long build up of tension. It's not ideal, and life would doubtless be much easier if I was more happy-go-lucky, but I'm not, and at least I know that...right?



You know what helps panic attacks? I don't know, and pulled pork isn't the answer, but it is what I was making when it happened. And the thing with making pulled pork is that it just sits there for hours and hours, but bully for me, the attack came on just at the point where it was in the middle of the basting/resting/pulling/making accompanying cornbread stage. If nothing else, it was good to have something to focus on, but my hands continued to shake for at least an hour after the attack, which is not so condusive to taking elegant blogworthy photos of my dinner. Earlier that week I'd spied some belly-cut pork shoulder that was both free range and on special, and without having ever considered making pulled pork before, suddenly it was on my mind. Pulled Pork is a classic American treatment for a side of pig, and generally one that requires a smoker or barbeque. Neither of which I have. There seemed to be so many differing methods, that I decided to gather knowledge from everywhere and make something that works for me. I'd like to lend particular gratitude however to Michelle at Thursday Night Smackdown whose recipe was the only one who advised me to sit the pork fat side up, and had the simplest method to emulate.



One does not simply walk into Pulled Pork. Although...I kind of did. At 10am I decided I wanted to make it, at 6pm we were eating it. That is not, I emphasise, a very long time for it to be in the oven. And, I didn't marinate the pork for 12 hours in the way that every recipe recommended, either. This is a highly important step to audaciously leave out, but it was still the nicest thing I've ever eaten. My theory was that it's in the oven for such a long time, on such a low heat, that the spices just marinate it as it goes along. It's not right, but it's okay. That is, it's not deeply authentic, but it's inauthentic with the greatest respect.



I literally did not require this pestle and mortar to make the rub, but gosh it made me feel like I knew what I was doing. (Further confession: I just put that cinnamon stick there for artistic effect and used ground cinnamon in the rub. If the panic attack didn't get rid of you, hopefully that isn't the final straw.)

Pulled Pork, HungryandFrozen-style. 

With thanks to Thursday Night Smackdown's recipe for guidance.

2 kg or more - basically a goodly slab - of belly cut pork shoulder. Or just pork belly.

Rub:

1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp mustard powder 
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp cumin seeds
A grating of nutmeg (or 1/2 a teaspoon ground nutmeg)
1/2 cup brown sugar, darker the better but plain brown's fine
Decent pinch of salt

Mop (What you use to baste it, to ensure it'll have not a skerrick of dryness about it)

1 cup cola
1/2 cup cold strong coffee (I used Carlos Imbachi from Supreme, but instant'll honestly do the trick)
1 tablespoon chilli sauce (I used sambal oelek)
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar (or malt vinegar)
1 tablespoon golden syrup
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
Another decent pinch of salt

Set your oven to low - around 140 C/ 300 F. Put your pork in a decent sized roasting dish. Mix together all the rub ingredients and rub into the surface of the pork, all over, leaving it fat-side-up and sprinkling over any leftover rub. Place in the oven and leave there for several hours - at least four. At this point, mix together the mop ingredients and pour 1/2 a cup of it over the pork every hour till it's gone, then continue to cook for about another 1/2 hour after that to help the fat crisp up some.

Finally, remove it from the oven, cover with tinfoil and leave to sit for an hour to rest and cool slightly, before shredding the heck out of it with two forks. Bust up any bits of crackling that have formed and add them to the pulled pork too, and should you still have any porky-mop-spicy liquid in the bottom of the roasting dish, tip that in too. Ey, why not?

If you're wondering what could motivate you to funnel that much of your time into a briquette of meat, the answer is pure, headrushy deliciousness. The pork basically melts down gradually over time till it falls apart unexpectedly when prodded (like me! This pork is both allegorical and delicious!) The spices, warm cinnamon and ginger and so on, and the sticky dirty coffee-cola mix just imbue the meat with mysterious savoury-sweetness, or umami if you will, laquering the fat as it crisps up and soaking the fibres with dark smoky flavour. 

It's so wonderful.

I served it with this cornbread, which I've made roughly a squillion times, only this go around, as if it knew how much I needed it, the same old recipe produced the most beautiful, soft, tender cornbread of my life. Thanks, cornbread.

I wish it was Easter Weekend every week. This one just gone was amazing, the delightful times unfolding with increasing fantasticness, activities within activities (drinking wine while watching Flashdance while at Princess Camp; eating roast lamb while decorating cookies; busting one hell of a move to dubious music videos on YouTube while uh, drinking wine; watching Veronica Mars while tweeting about how happy I was to be watching Veronica Mars.) I flew too close to the sun though and the price for all that fun was getting absolutely nothing whatsoever done, and achieving a really sore neck from dancing so hard. But a sore neck was worth it for how great it was hanging out with the best people all weekend (and, presumably, worth it for everyone to witness my sweet dance moves.)

And thanks, not just to cornbread, but to anyone who did keep reading. Panic attacks aren't the very worst thing in the world, but they're also not the greatest - that is, I'm not seeking out Elizabeth Wakefield-type shoulder squeezes here, but I'm not trying to brush it off as nothing - it just is what it is.
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Title via: Company, one of my favourite musicals ever, and its mid-point showstopper Side By Side By Side. 
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Music lately:

Grimes, Oblivion. Really pretty obsess-over-able.

Chic Gamine, Closer. I'm not a fan of their actual name but I'm such a sucker for growly vocal riffs and harmonies like these.
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Next time: Apropos of nothing, it's my birthday next week! Whoa! Still working out what to do, but I'm hoping it involves more outrageous dancing to YouTube videos. This month is wildly busy though, might just have to have a very merry unbirthday later in the year...

everybody rise, rise, rise, rise, rise...

I know I'm always trying to work more ice cream into my life, but bread-making is well up there on the continuum of my favourite things to cook. Plunging your hands into soft dough, their warmth kicking it into life, watching it rise like you're David Attenborough narrating the time-lapsed life cycle of a rare tree, the intoxicating scent of it as it bakes, the impressed gasps of those around you when you tell them that today, you achieved bread. Bread is wonderful enough as it is, but brioche is like the Baby-Sitters Club Super Special edition of the leavened dough family: richer and sweeter and far more exciting. It tastes just like a croissant but is more solid and grippable. Don't you hate with croissants how all the best bits crumble off upon impact and end up caught in the fibres of your wooly jumper and worked into your ponytail and embedded in the seams of your jeans? (Just one of the reasons I no longer wear jeans.) No danger of this with brioche. All of the butter and none of the disintegration.

I was recently musing upon the great cafe combinations of the nineties. Now I don't want to come across as a snob. I mean, I eat cold spaghetti from the tin for fun, and I didn't try couscous for the first time till well into the new millenium. I am no human barometer of what is good. And yet. When I see a chicken, cranberry and camembert panini or apricot and brie panini or whatever being sold for $8.95, I can't help but shake my head wearily. Do people really like them? Still? Spinach and feta is slightly later on the timeline, if I remember right, but it was the combination of a certain time. And while eating a spinach and feta scone I got to pondering: What's the deal? What does the spinach even do? It works in spanakopita: surrounded by crunchy pastry and generations of existence, the spinach shines. But sliced up and baked into limp submission inside a scone, it provides green stripes, at best. At worst, it's bitter, every last particle of it gets caught in your teeth, and it takes up valuable space where more feta could be.

Now mint, on the other hand. Mint provides that toothpaste-cool hit which works beautifully with feta, giving it that summery light-hearted vibe, lifting the saltiness and butteriness with its pure, sweet flavour. And mint is about a twelfth as likely to get in your teeth, since there's so much less of it.  

As I said, I love bread baking, but I haven't done it in ages - and really, late afternoon after flying home from my brother's 21st birthday up home might not have been the most prudent time to embark upon an invented yeast-based recipe. But my instincts were convincing enough that I went ahead with it anyway. And it worked! Thank goodness, because we only buy feta about once every three months and I didn't want to waste it on a failed project. Brioche is not that scary - the only annoying thing about it is all the time it needs to rise. Three times it rises! Three! But please persevere. It can have varying degrees of butteriness: I only used 90 grams since...that's what we had in the fridge. Don't worry about needing any special tins - I spied the muffin tray and thought (okay, maybe I said it aloud) "You there! You'll do!" I was right.

Feta and Mint Brioches

Makes 8. An idea by me.

500g flour (plain is fine)

1 sachet active dry yeast

3 tablespoons sugar

3 eggs

1/2 cup lukewarm water

80g soft butter

pinch salt

100g feta, chopped roughly and mixed with 2 tablespoons chopped mint

In a large bowl mix the flour, sugar, salt and yeast. Crack in the three eggs, pour in the water, and mix to a sticky dough. Knead till soft and bouncy, then massage in the butter, small pieces at a time. This might take a while. But it's really fun. Leave covered with clingfilm to let it it rise, for about an hour. Punch it down, right square in the middle, then form into a ball and let it rise again for an hour or two in the fridge. Finally, cut it into eight pieces, force a little pocket in the middle of each piece with your finger, then stuff with a little mint-feta mix. Pinch the edges closed, then sit each one in a buttered muffin tin, pinch side down. Leave again - I'm sorry! - for an hour before baking at 200 C for 25 minutes. Carefully lift a brioche up and tap its base - if it sounds hollow, should be all good.

If at any stage you feel you need a little more liquid or flour, trust your instincts, as different ingredients/temperatures/metres above sea level will produce different results. But only go a tiny bit at a time.

The movie A Mighty Wind is one of my very favourites, and it stands up easily to many a re-watch. I'd say I watched it more times last year than I ate feta, for one thing. Since watching it, I've latched on to the phrase "it can't be overstated", which is used to describe the kiss between Mitch and Micky in their song (okay, you had to be there.) I might overuse it the way some overuse the word "literally" (am looking at you, Chris Traegar, but it's literally adorable on you) but I like it, and it's so applicable: the deliciousness of these brioches frankly just can't be overstated. See?

The crust is crisp and yet with all the buttery promise of a flaky croissant, without the crumbliness.  Inside is soft, golden-tinted and warm with the sharply salty feta dissolving creamily on the tongue. The mint is not there in large quantities, but absolutely present, cooling and contrasting with everything else. Altogether flipping brilliant.

And, as I said, I managed to make it after flying home from my brother's 21st in the late afternoon, so you can surely do it anytime. We had such an awesome time up home - the party was music-themed (I don't know about you but my family has a thing with dress-up 21st parties) and Tim and I dressed up as the White Stripes. My Mum and her best friend were Agnetha and Anni-Frid from ABBA, Dad was a Seargeant Peppers-era Beatle, and my brother made a commendable Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins. It was just one of the best parties I've been to. There were streamers, a live band - which Dad used to play with, and which played good music to dance to - not even the sort of music where inside you're like "Oh my gosh I hate this so much but there are people around that I care about so I'll pretend to enjoy dancing to it". Dad - whose birthday it was also, since he's born on the same day as my brother - got up at one point to do a fairly wild keyboard solo. Later in the evening he and my brother played a rollicking rendition of Saw Her Standing There by the Beatles.

There were alsatians that ran up and down the road and inside the hall. Two giant alsatians! They didn't seem to be looking for trouble, they could probably just smell the many kilos of ham. Nonetheless, I'd forgotten that that sort of thing just happens at home. And I secretly wanted to confiscate them and make them my pets.

There was a cake that I made and iced to look like a record, at my brother's request. I may never get the black food colouring off my hands, but with some logistical supervision from Tim and my 9 year old cousin, I think it turned out pretty snazz-tastic.

And there was kilo after kilo of ham. Which we all got to eat the next day after people had arisen from where they fell. I also got to see my long-missed Australian-based Aunty, got to nick the gorgeous - well I think so - bit of fabric that the brioches are sitting on, and...while looking for old schoolbooks of my brothers to festoon the party with, Mum found this that I'd made many years ago:

After the laughter subsided, I realised how little I've changed. Obsessive about things and in a super-righteous way; full of dubious ideas that seem great in my head but are a bit awkward on paper; misguidedly entrepreneurial; liable to mix up simple things like AM and PM. But I think I turned out alright in spite of, nay because of it. (Also: if you look closely you'll see that my signature then did not in anyway resemble my name, but rather a small figure surfing on the back of a swan. This was because I didn't want to be shackled by the conformity of your signature actually having to look like your name when it could be an artistic expression instead, or SOMETHING. My uncoolness cannot, as they say in A Mighty Wind, be overstated.)
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Title via: The Ladies Who Lunch, a song more salty and sharp than feta from Company, one of my favourite musicals. Sung perfectly by the wonderful Elaine Stritch. Please watch. I'm pretty sure even if you don't like musicals, there might be something in this for you.
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Music lately:

Radar Love, Golden Earring. This got played at the party. Mum and Dad both like this song - it has some significance, I can't remember what exactly - Mum? - and there's something about watching one's parents dancing away dressed up as pop stars to a song that makes one like it too.

Wings of a Dragon by the equally glorious husband and wife Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally. Treat yo'self and watch it. As well as being internet-breakingly hilarious, it's surprisingly catchy.
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Next time: Hmm, well it is February, but no love hearts here (Shmalentines! I say.) Might be something sensible and dinner-related, might be a towering cake or something. 

super duper, come let's mix where rockefellers walk with sticks

I've already professed my affection for the sadly late Hudson and Halls (they made a chicken salad and named it after a New Zealand beauty queen!) but it's the kind of thing that I can easily re-profess without feeling like I've exhausted my capacity for...professing stuff. Their cookbooks were so full of enjoyment and playfulness and humour. Which cookbooks often completely lack. They'd write "nothing is more boring to do than pickled onions, but despite this, these are worth doing", beside a recipe for pickled onions. Cute, right? Always remembering, they were figures of entertainment at a time when being themselves - being gay - was illegal. As I've said, we're not exactly in a progressive wonderland these days, but I wonder what their lives together could've been under a somewhat more supportive environment. While your time wouldn't be misspent just reading through their cookbooks tittering at their formidably late-seventies recipes - Tomato Sorbet, Egg Mayonnaise with Olives, Tripe Fritters, Steak Tartare Balls with Caviar...Coffee...there are also heaps of practical, easy, fun recipes that you could try making. 

Recipes like their Super-duper Pancake. I promise you it's totally deserving of that intensifying "-duper" suffix on the end there. That grammatical flourish was not in vain. 

It looks like there's a benignly smiling bearded face in that pancake, right? Is it just me projecting my loving feelings towards the pancake, onto the pancake? I think yes. And yes. Also please excuse my unpleasingly granular photography, it must've been darker than I thought when I took the photos. It'll make you appreciate it more when they improve, though!

This is really your average Yorkshire Pudding - you could always use it for that - and I love that H&H suggest it as a meal in itself, "with lemon wedges and sugar, or little bits of fried sausage and pickles"...very cool. They recommend using a paella dish but I don't have one of those, or a frying pan that can go in the oven, but I suspected that my ancient pie plate would do the trick. It did. Which makes me think you could make this in nearly anything ovenproof and round, as long as it has walls - a caketin would probably work just fine.  

Such little effort and you end up with this puffy, crisp disc of daffodill-coloured, comforting goodness. Somehow it tastes like french toast, pastry, scrambled eggs and yes, pancake, all at once. That's some high-level complexity from just eggs, flour, milk and butter. I served it alongside steak and an avocado-spinach salad but on its own it'd be brilliant. 

Super-duper Pancake

From Hudson and Halls Gourmet Cookbook.

25g butter

3 eggs

3/4 cup milk

3/4 cup flour

Put the butter in your chosen pan and place it in a 225 C oven to heat up and sizzle away while you mix the batter. Beat the eggs till light and fluffy, then gradually beat in the milk. This is what's going to make it puff up so try not to be lazy with the whisking effort at this stage. Whisk in the flour, making sure there's no lumps, then quickly pour the batter into the hot, buttery tin. Place quickly back in the oven, bake for 20-25 minutes and serve immediately in the pan. Just slice it up or rip bits off, as you please. 

Two things happened when I made this which might have something to do with the pan I used. First: some of the butter pooled on top in the centre of the pancake. To the uninitiated it might look a little terrifying, I took it within my stride (the only alarming butter situation I can think of is if there is none) and reframed the pancake as 'considerately self-buttering.' Also some of the surface coating of the pan flaked off and stuck to the pancake. Slightly disturbing, but...I ate it anyway. Hope it doesn't happen to you.

The recipe on the page opposite the Super-duper pancake is equally compelling - Scrambled Eggs with Vermouth. How good does that sound? I'd need to actually get some vermouth first, the last time I had it was in 2008 - you can see it in the header photo - before I could even pronounce it properly. They say "As this is rather nice for breakfast, serve it with some chilled champagne and follow with fresh fruit and cream laced with a liqueur." Wherever you are, Hudson and Halls...cheers.

Talking of luxuriating in food, I recently had my misanthropic tendencies gently sieved out when something really lovely happened: I got invited to try out 'The Deg' degustation at Matterhorn, one of the fancy-pantsiest joints in the whole country. Yes, invited. My first degustation. Very exciting. Eventually Tim and I hope to feel like we're not in some kind of Home Alone 2-esque heist whenever things like this happen. The food was ornately exquisite the whole way through, with matched cocktails - beautifully dry - and wines - nicer than we've ever drank - and not in an intimidating way either, but also not so unintimidating that you leave thinking you could've done it yourself, you know? The person in charge of us was charming and engaging and gave us plenty of exposition on each course and - this always puts me in a good mood, so keep it in mind - they talked to us about the food and wine as if they thought we knew exactly what they were talking about. Did I explain that right? We weren't talked down to, is what I'm saying. So if you're really comfortable with your bank balance I do recommend it because it was an absolutely glorious evening. Fun fact: on our first course we raised a toast. To the internet. For getting us to dinner at the Matterhorn. Truly, we clinked our glasses and said "thank you, Internet." (It was my suggestion, Tim might not've been so enthusiastic or loud.) Also, even though it sometimes feels like one of those things you do to prove you're having fun, we spent some time making up dialogue for various diners around us, which was all very humourous until this couple opposite us had such gloomy body language that it wasn't as fun anymore. Where was I? Matterhorn. Delicious.

It's been a simple weekend, but I've managed to spend much of it with beloved friends, which is worth more than a billion degustations laid end to end so they reach the sun, or something.
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Title via: Puttin' On The Ritz, that intriguingly arranged song which hoofer Fred Astaire totally owns - his subtlety and assuredness in this tap dancing number is utterly brilliant. Fun fact: I once ambitiously choreographed, taught and danced in a dance to this for some choir performance thing in primary school, when I was about ten. It wasn't, er, quite as good as Fred Astaire's, and our canes were bits of dowelling, but if I remember right it was quite well received.
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Music lately:

Be warned: Will Swenson (erstwhile cast member of erstwhile Broadway show Hair) is one of THE most beautiful people on earth. And in this song Donna from Hair, he's NOT WEARING PANTS. So. Also he has an amazing voice and we both dance very similarly, which is always something that endears me to people. (A further fun fact!)

R.I.P Etta James.
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Next time: I've been working on some sorbet using Whittaker's Berry and Biscuit chocolate. That is all.

drinking peppermint schnapps with jackie wilson and sam cooke...

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

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.

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

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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 never really got into her first time round but can't stop listening to her debut album after hearing it properly recently. Like...daily. I know.
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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.

everyone jump on the peas train

It was Tim's birthday last Sunday. We don't really do presents, but I did get him 25 individually filled out birthday cards. Keep in mind that this came about after about a week of laughing at him and telling him there was no way I was going to get him a birthday card. At the eleventh hour, the idea of not only getting him a birthday card after all, but in fact surprising him with a card for every year of life suddenly gripped me and by the time I'd bought a few, I had to go through with the whole thing. 

(Fluffy couldn't be contained by any envelope. Fluffy also meowed a disturbingly discordant "Happy birthday to you" when you rubbed her stomach.)

There was a party on Wednesday, where we drank Purple Jesus, ate chocolate dipped potato chips (and mighty delicious they are too), several cheeses, venison salami (who knew it existed?) a whole lot of ice cream, and...speaking of outlandish ideas that I have...a cake I made that looked like Tim. It's not something I paraded around on Twitter for fear of mass unfollowings but just in case, reassure me, there's nothing tooooo weird about making a cake that looks like someone for their birthday, is there? It's worth noting that the cake's real-life counterpart is better looking, or at least has a more significantly visible chin. Tim was wearing the exact same clothes as the cake (following a conversation about which of his pants would be easiest to recreate in icing) which of course added to the fun. And maybe the weirdness. But mostly the fun.

It was such a fun night, but between one thing and another I've been feeling lingeringly seedy since, not helped by a weekend away for work. Having returned to Wellington, all my instincts tonight wailed "get take-out satay". But instead I hunted out a recipe that not only takes a bare minimum of brain effort to make it work, it's also delicious, and very good for you. Like taking your brain cells and your tastebuds out for a swim in the kind of cool, artesian mountain stream that you read about on the back of fancy bottled water.

Peas and water, that's all it is. Peas, water. And a blender. Unfortunately this recipe won't work without said blender, so if you don't have access to one, I'd change it up and make some kind of peas and rice combination instead. If you do have one though, and some peas in the freezer, then you're bare minutes from the foamiest, floamiest, greenest soup in existence. My photos don't really demonstrate how vigorously green it is, because it was on the dark side when I snapped these. I've been on the lookout for some polystyrene to reflect light a bit, but really I'm just lazily hanging out for it to continue getting lighter in the evenings. 

For all that I'm such a crusader for this soup, I was initially suspicious of it. I've known about this recipe of Nigella Lawson's for years, but always thought she was talking it up way too much. It just sounded too simple, and in my mind I pictured, like...water with peas floating in it, not this inconceivably velvety puree. 

Turns out she wasn't talking it up nearly enough. Should've trusted her, since it was Nigella and all.

It tastes gorgeous - like you're drinking the very meaning of green in itself (frozen peas have this effect on me sometimes, sorry). But it's even better if you do like I did and add a spoonful of rich, gritty white miso paste, and a few basil leaves. You could use mint or coriander too, whatever you have, or just nothing at all - but the clean, nutty pea flavour benefited from the herbacious peppery depth of basil. You could also add rocket leaves, spinach leaves, any other green bits you have slinking around in the fridge. 

Easiest Pea Soup

Adapted slightly from a recipe of Nigella Lawson's from her seminal text How To Eat.

450g frozen peas

1 1/2 cups water

Optional but recommended and awesome:

1 teaspoon white miso paste

Basil leaves

Boil together the peas and the water (plus the miso if you like) in the usual way, as if you were going to serve them just as is. Remove from the heat, carefully tip into a blender and whizz away till very smooth. Add the basil leaves at this point and blitz again. Tip into two bowls and serve.

Thanks so much to everyone for all the nice feedback on my video tutorial on how to to make ice cream! Seriously. I was braced for complete indifference, at best. And now I'm currently working on the second one: a salute to homemade pastry. 

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Title via: Cat Stevens' lovely song Peace Train. And let's all just take a moment to appreciate what a babe young Cat Stevens was.

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Music lately:

Like I said, I was away this weekend, and when I got home I um...listened to Mariah Carey's monumentally good MTV Unplugged album at least four times in a row. So, no change since last week, I'm afraid.

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Next time: I'm not sure, but I'm in the mood to do some proper baking.