five things

1. Hazelnut Caramel Ice Cream. This might be the best ice cream I’ve ever made. Rich, vanilla and hazelnut flavoured ice cream with chunks of hazelnut caramel swirled throughout it. It’s dangerously addictive, I already can’t trust myself in a room alone with it. Recipe coming soon.

2. Red Lipstick on Rainy Days. Does anything brighten my mood on a wet, miserable day like rugging up in thick, snug knitwear and a bright swathe of cheery, cherry red lipstick? It makes me feel chic, put together and just a little bit fancy.

3. Peach Blush Roses. I picked this bunch of roses up a week ago and their sunny bloom has been keeping me company in the kitchen, making me smile whenever I go to the sink. I can never stop myself from leaning over and inhaling their perfume while I’m washing the dishes.

4. A Balanced Meal. Nothing says a healthy, well balanced meal like a long black, a plate of fries and aioli. Not something I’d eat every day… but admittedly something I indulge in almost every time I meet my mother for lunch at Brigittes. While the rest of their menu looks delicious, I always find myself going ‘hmm, not really in the mood for this. Coffee and chips it is.’ It’s almost ritualistic now.

5. Ballerina Buns. Whoever says that this is a easy hairstyle that you can just throw your hair into… no. Just, no. 13 bobby pins and copious amounts of hairspray and I was still unconvinced. But that might be my inherant fear of wearing my hair any way but down talking.

Stuffed and Squashed

Summer in New Zealand is a fragile thing, easily shattered by grey clouds overhead and sudden thunderstorms. For the past few days the skies have been threatening to rain down upon us and apparently today was finally the day. Sundays are perfect rain weather, it’s a day built for lazing around home and being domestic. So that’s exactly what I did.

My day was filled with steaming hot chocolate with a touch of vanilla and smoked sea salt, getting ahead of the game by pre-cooking tomorrow night’s venison and pancetta slow cooked stew and reluctantly leaving the house to do the grocery shopping – although I will gladly take any excuse to dress up in my winter clothes; oh cream woollen cape how I have missed you. Regardless, my reluctance soon turned to excitement when I found the most adorable butternut squashes, just the right size to be split in half and stuffed for dinner.

After slicing in half and scooping out the seeds, I sprinkled the obnoxiously orange flesh with a little pepper and truffle salt, topping each with sprigs of rosemary and sage to impart a gentle hum of flavour. I’m always a bit suspicious of this method of infusing flavour (But it’s just sitting on top of it! How could that possibly work?) but it really does work. Easy as that, they were ready for the oven.

Once they’d roasted until the flesh was soft, I pulled them out of the oven and prepared the stuffing.  First you need to scoop out the cooked pumpkin, leaving about a half centimetre of flesh so you can stuff it back in later. At this point you can go in almost any direction you want – if you were vegan then maybe a mixture of garlic, onions, rosemary and cannellini beans mashed with the pumpkin, if you’re craving Italian flavours then black olives and parmesan. It’s really up to you. Me? I was feeling vaguely Spanish.

I pulled the meat out of three unsmoked chorizo and fried it off, mixing that with the pumpkin, Persian feta, garlic, paprika, and pine nuts. I said vaguely Spanish, alright? Spooning it back into the oven, I topped it all off with a little more truffle salt, pine nuts and Persian feta and then put it back in the oven to finish.

After twenty minutes or so, the tops are crisp, browned and ready to be splashed with a little vino cotto to finish. The end product had an almost custardy texture that was both sweet and savoury, with a pronounced kick of paprika and feta. We all agreed that it would definitely be repeated the next day we had bleak weather – so much more interesting than the perennially boring backed potato but just as comforting and delicious.

Chorizo and Persian Feta Stuffed Butternut Squash

2 butternut squash
4 small sprigs fresh rosemary
4 sage leaves
4 small unsmoked chorizo, or 2 larger ones
¼ cup pine nuts
¼ – ½ cup Persian feta
2 tsp pureed garlic
1 tsp paprika
Truffle salt
Pepper

Preheat an oven to bake at 180 degrees c. Slice the squash in half lengthways and scoop out the seeds with a small spoon. Rub a small amount of olive oil across the face of the flesh and season with salt and pepper to taste. Arrange a sprig of rosemary and a sage leaf on top of each squash half and roast in the oven for a half hour or until the flesh is easily pierced with a fork.

Letting the squashes cool for a little while, remove the casing off of the chorizo, pull apart and fry off until browned. Next, scoop the cooked flesh out of the squash, leaving ½ – 1 centimetre of the flesh behind. Don’t scoop out so much that the squash collapses in on itself; the halves should still keep their shape.

In a bowl, mash the pumpkin together with the chorizo, pine nuts, feta, garlic, and paprika, seasoning to taste. With a spoon, push the mixture back into the squashes and top with extra pine nuts and feta. Put back into the oven for another twenty minutes or until the mixture has browned.

Serve immediately.

The Brownie Wars

I’m really not the kind of person who views food as ‘treats’ or ‘for a special occasion,’ I more believe in the idea that your body knows what it needs and if you listen to it, it will tell you. So sometimes I will have days where I only eat tomato salsa and raw snow peas, followed by a profiterole stuffed with salted caramel. And I never let myself feel bad about that – because hey girls, we have all spent long enough feeling bad about ourselves.

A few days ago, my body was telling me it needed brownies. Although… looking at that picture my body is going ‘brownies? Are we talking about brownies? ARE YOU MAKING BROWNIES AGAIN? LETS EAT BROWNIES!” So maybe that is one food my body can’t be trusted to tell the difference between truely needing and just wanting based from a chocolate whores lust. Anyway… I’ve been experimenting with brownie recipes for a while and have finally come across a recipe that I thought needed no improvement. It is soft and gooey, fruity and chocolatey and best of all it’s packed full of zuchinni, apple sauce and buckwheat flour so as far as I’m concerned it’s basically a health food.  So when my girl Zo from Two Spoons text me asking if I wanted to help her try out a recipe for raw brownies, I of course said we should have a brownie bake-off. Because that it how I roll. I had a barbeque to go to that afternoon which was going to be full of vegans, so I figured this was the perfect time to experiment with making this recipe completely animal product free, as usually my food is just packed full of delicious, delicious animal products.

In the end both recipes were a huge success, and between the two of us we have come up with some recipes that are guaranteed to shut up the most allergic, pernickety and food-intolerant of your friends. We both decided that the raw brownie will be more happily accepted if you consider it a delicious chocolate slice, rather than try to claim it is an actual brownie – but that is not to say that it isn’t delicious. I was a bit suspicious that with just three ingredients this would taste too much of raw cocoa powder, but actually in the end what we were all surprised about was how buttery and rich it tasted. The dates and walnuts mixed with cocoa powder make for such a rich and Moorish slice that I sort of regretted letting Zo go home with the entire batch. Head over to Two Spoons to check out the recipe.

But then I remembered that I had these little beauties sitting in wait for me. These are seriously delicious, and you wouldn’t know they weren’t vegan if someone didn’t tell you. The zucchini just melts away into the mixture in some kind of food magic, so don’t worry that you will be pulling strands of it out of your teeth, it just adds body and texture. This recipe is so rich and full of dark chocolate with a hint of cherry flavour to it, it is by far the best brownie I’ve ever had. If you like your brownies fudgey in texture then these might not be for you, they definitely fall into the cakey spectrum, but they are so dense with chocolate I doubt you’ll even notice.

The Best Vegan Brownies

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup  sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup  applesauce
• 1/2 cup buckwheat flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat or plain flour
• 1/2 cup / 45 g unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp ground cardamom
• 2 cups (about 300 – 320 g) grated zucchini
• 1 1/2 cups dark chocolate chips

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350°F / 180°C.

In a bowl, combine the vanilla extract, sugar, salt, and the applesauce.

Sieve the flour and the cocoa powder into another bowl.  Add the baking soda, the cinnamon and the cardamom.  Mix well.

Add the apple sauce mixture to the flour mixture and combine until the dry ingredients are mixed in well.

Add the grated zucchini and the chocolate chips. Mix once more.

Pour the brownie batter into a greased 8 x 8” / 20 x 20 cm baking tin or something with similar dimensions.

Bake at 350°F / 175°C for  40- 60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out somewhat clean. Because it is vegan, it will take somewhat longer to cook. If the top of the brownies begin to burn during this time, cover with foil.

Allow to cool completely in the pan.

 

The Basil Saga pt 1

Considering I am what can best be described as an ‘amateur’ gardener, my budding garden can be described as 90% guess work and 10% ‘I’ll water it some more just in case.’ What that basically means is that I spend a lot of time planting things that I think might be fun to have and then scratching my head as I watch the seedlings wither away. I think that there is something to be said for sheer cluelessness however, because I don’t have any idea of what plants are supposedly hard or easy to grow and instead I just plant at random.

Basil however, I know is hard to grow. I can hear people protesting that already and trust me I’ve been told that you can grow basil inside or outside and if you can’t grow anything else you can grow basil.

Not me.

I’ve been known to buy flourishing plants of basil and within days watch them shrivel and brown, mulishly refusing to grow and silently judging me and my ineptitude. So needless to say when this year’s crop went in courtesy of my father, I stayed far away from them. I hesitated to even look in their direction, preferring to make him water them so he couldn’t accuse me of inflicting my witchmagic on the poor plants.

And wouldn’t you know it – the man can grow some basil.

In fact he grew so much basil that we’ve been frantically trying to use the bulk of it before it all goes to seed. There’s only so many caprese salads, pizzas, lasagnes and sorbets (more on that later) that you can make before you need to pull out the big guns.

Pesto.

The quickest way I know to make an over-abundance of basil go away… into my mouth, is to make a big jar of pesto. The funny thing about pesto is whenever we are out, I never miss it, but the moment I have a jar of freshly made pesto in the fridge – suddenly everything would be better with a little of that magical green spread thickly over top of it. Asparagus? Mmm asparagus dipped in pesto. Chicken? Roasted chicken seasoned under the skin with pesto thanks. Empty Spoon? Fill with pesto, insert into mouth.

The best thing about pesto is how insanely easy it is to make.

Grab yourself some basil, pine nuts, parmesan and garlic, throw in a blender and season with good quality olive oil, salt and pepper. I personally try to go quite heavy on the basil and parmesan, and a bit lighter on the parmesan and garlic but you can mix them to whatever proportions taste the best to you. My dad thinks it is heresy to even consider squeezing lemon into that heavenly, fragrant mixture – while I personally think that the bite of the lemon cuts through the sometimes overwhelming richness of cheese and fatty nuts. Blend it until you are happy with it, again some people prefer it to be nearly paste like, but I prefer a little texture in mine.

I used two bulbs of garlic (yes, bulbs) because my little garlics are home grown and are curiously sweet and mild… as well as having grown as giant single bulbs instead of sectioned cloves, so even with that much garlic you won’t be knocked over the head with the punch of raw garlic. If you don’t like the taste of raw garlic you can use pre-minced, but you’ll lose some of the bright, vividness of the flavour that way. It’s really worth it to grow your own garlic, the flavour when fresh is completely different from buyign the dried bulbs from the supermarket; it’s sweet and sticky and mild, in a word amazing. And literally all it takes is sticking an old garlic clove that’s been sprouting in the back of your fridge (we’ve all been there, no judgement!) into some dirt and occasionally watering and throwing wistful glances in its direction. Garlic is the queen of unneedy planting.

Just like that! Literally minutes after starting, you’re done. There has got to be no easier recipe than this, in fact I would barely count this as cooking, more just blending and then putting in a jar. In my mind cooking should take longer than three minutes. In other words the time versus reward ratio for this recipe is completely off the hook. For something that takes almost no time at all, you have enough pesto to last for weeks as well as a big jar of self-satisfaction smiling back at you from the fridge every time you open it.

“Hi! You made me! Ready for some deliciousness?”

Pesto is a friendly food.

Traditional Genovese Pesto.

• 2 cups very tightly packed basil leaves
• 3 garlic cloves
• 8 tablespoons freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
• 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil – use the best quality possible.
• juice of 1/2 a lemon
• coarse sea salt
• pepper

Rinse the basil if home grown (we don’t want bugs in the mixture) and very gently so as not to bruise the leaves, pat dry. Place the leaves in a food processer with the pine nuts, garlic and a pinch of salt. Blend just a little at first, you don’t want to over-blend it beyond all recognition. Add the cheese and half of the olive oil and blend once more. If not saucelike enough in consistency add more of the olive oil. By this point it becomes a matter of taste testing to get it to where you like it. Season to taste and add the lemon juice if you like. Season conservatively because the flavours will develop over time.

Transfer mixture to a large bowl or jar and cover with the remaining olive oil. If not keeping in a jar make sure to tightly cover with plastic wrap or similar. This extra layer of oil will help keep the pesto fresh for longer without it turning black and going bad.

Pesto is best used the same day but keeps, its surface covered with a thin layer of olive oil and tightly covered, chilled, for 3 days.