- Kitchen Bitch -
The recipes & the raw ingredients
Jam, dammit
Jam-making mythology exploded into gloopy, sputtering fragments. Generally, not too much harm is done when your frankenstein fruit glue goes awry. 'Can I make jam out of that?' is a something we should always be asking ourselves. |
On Mushrooms and Mortality
Mmmm, muuuushrooooms. Tis the season (southern hemisphere autumn) to be once more checking out your various secret fungi patches that you'll never tell anyone about, even if they put you in thumbscrews because mushrooms are that damn important to you. |
The Banana Blueberry Spectacular Cake,
née Edmonds After a mere ten or so years of crap banana cake, we discovered quite by accident that the problem was a dearth of bananas, if not soft fruit of any description, as well as an absence of any flavoring agent whatsoever. We have acted remedially. |
Harissa
Once you go harissa, you never go back. How quickly the susceptible can become enslaved by this unassuming Tunisian spice paste is a lesson for every incautious omnivore. It is a prong in the ruling triumverate of homemade staples prevailing in the Blackthorn Kitchen, along with quince jelly and Interstellar Relish. Each year as my supplies dwindle I get anxious about chili procurement and where the hell I'm going to get a bucketful of cumin seeds in short order and whether or not I'll have to cap some fool for it this time. |
Hummus & The Sisters of Mercy
I may be an old goth but Andrew Eldritch never did it for me. Some of his budget sub-Joy Division regurg did though, don't get me wrong- it's a fair cop and society's to blame. I think a few of us have, in our time, recognized certain rhythmic advantages within the Sisters' canon and put it to a use that shall remain, in the interests of decency, nameless; suffice to say that if you've never banged your favourite piece of sullen white meat on black sheets to select portions of Floodland, this is a cooking post and I would never be so irresponsible as to allude to that sort of thing here.... |
Corned beef
Silverside. Boil up. Hashed beef. Bully beef (from the 18thC French, bouilli - 'boiled'). A rose by any other name would probably not fill your house with the tang of vinegar and mustard with a dash of armpit but they do share the same shade of pink. |
Roasting a Free Range Chicken with Pan Gravy
You don't have to be embarrassed about not knowing how to roast a chicken well. It's really not something you can learn overnight or from a single demonstration. It's a trial and error thing, heavily dependent on your raw materials and that fickle jade Chance. Maybe you've only had access to crappy dishcloth-tasting industrial cripple chickens up til now. |
Making Gooseberry Jam- lavishly illustrated for the benefit of people who don't have a f*cking clue what they're doing. Carpe diem
Gooseberries are possibly my favourite berry of all, from a lazy ho's horticultural POV. They will fruit happily in a shady, rubbishy spot (along with blackcurrants) and don't need to be sprayed or even really netted, unless you have some very determined avian bandits in your vicinity. 
Cooking Quail Eggs & a bit about Quails
Quail eggs are generally those small chocolate-splotched numbers you see clustered in fancy gourmet food emporium cartons with the WTF price tag. We pick them up from the bottom of our aviary, courtesy of our Coturnix (Japanese Quail) family. |
Interstellar Tomato Relish
Tomatoes are vaguely evil. There is something innately gross about them; in fact, they are the Terry Richardson of fruit, which is why I staged the exploitative shot below- to jolt you out of your complacency, obviously. Look at a tomato and wonder where anyone got the guts to twist one off that stinky, wicked plant for the first time and put it in their mouths. Just like Terry. |
Goat Curry
I've been making a curry almost every week for the past twenty years of my life. That's well over a thousand of the darn things. I freely bastardise and refuckulate, smerging Tamil, Malay, Mughal and misc. into some very fetching concoctions and a few spectacular failures, just like a million kitchen bitches before me. It's just a spicy stew after all, endlessly mutable and a friend to the pedant, the freeballing innovator and the simpering dufus alike. |
Quince Jelly
The quince, perhaps more striking than handsome, is one of our most ancient fruity companions, originating in the Middle East slash Sou-west Asia and providing us with a number of highly delicious dishes since a long time before it featured in the Song of Solomon. Quince to me sounds like something vaguely soggy and sort of citrus but no, they're a hard, plain apple-like fruit that smells... hmmm... like hallucinogenic roses, really; like a nice pomander with a touch of that awesome glue you definitely never huffed in the 7th grade. |
Lime Curd
It's strange how many people remain stubbornly unfamiliar with, and even leery of, the delightful lime. According to Tantric tradition, limes are great against demonic possession and the evil eye. It is the lemon's hipster cousin, tasting definitely citric but rather more complex and fragrant than the latter, as if the coconut and osmanthus fairies had attended its birth and bestowed their fumy blessings. |
Wild Rabbit Casserole
Here in New Zealand, feral rabbits are an ongoing environmental and agricultural disaster, munching crops, degrading natural ecosystems and supporting a range of terrible introduced predators of our native wildlife. If you're going to eat meat, wild-caught pest species are probably the most ethical choice you could make and we have no qualms about consuming them, one furry little apocalypse at a time. 
Tadka Dal
Properly Dal Tadka,but we've always spoken of it the other way round in our extended family so that's the way it stays for this recipe. I think this is a Punjabi dish originally and a favourite of my Tamil aunt, who was raised in Malaysia and now lives in Australia; she passed this version to me, which I cook in New Zealand. It's a big old citizen of the world, lol. 
Black Rice
While I grew up cooking both Indian specifically and Asian food in general, I'd never done black rice at home. Perhaps because I've tried almost every other variety known to man and found they generally don't live up to the hype, because they're all just... rice, really; Oryza sativa, that ancient friend. An exception to this blanket dictum is a good montane basmati, which is truly distinct in both flavour and texture from your long/medium-grain standard commercial varieties. 
Tonka Beans
Fruit of the leguminous Cumaru tree (Dipteryx odorata), native to Central America and also exploited for its beautiful timber. They look like wizened troll nuts but I won't hold that against them. Tonka is familiar to most perfume fanatics and the note features heavily in the whacky Orientals I tend to favour (Serge Lutens et al), so it wasn't exactly a stranger when I unscrewed the bottle I received the other day. 
Blood Orange &
Ginger Jam Not everyone loves marmalade, but that's cool, because this isn't marmalade. I promise. Marmalade is justly unpopular with discerning citizens and for very good reason; there's a lot of really shitty material out there, just waiting to drag one's tastebuds on a horror ride from what is this into fucking hell get it off meterritory with its puzzlingly perverse and irredeemable bitterness. Orange jam is an entirely different thing. |
Tuna & Cannelleni Bean Casserole
Technically, this tuna casserole is more of a pasta sauce really, but it's eminently bakeable so I'm going with that designation. It's certainly not fancy and could even be accused of crossing over into that blasted commestible heath on which tin-based fails and student food wander like orphaned mooncalves, unloved and unlooked for. But that's just pointless snobbery; like all the best meals it is delicious, healthful, economical and flexible. You can have it on toast or in a panini. Or if, like me, you're largely eschewing starch and doing a Paleo type thing, it's yummy plopped over some stir fried veg. You can bake it under some cheese and breadcrumbs (Homer face) or over potatoes. 
Half-Basque Eggs
The meal to the left there might look like something that was struck by an improvised explosive device, and it is fair to say it's not exactly photogenic. But it's like sex in that respect; you can kill the hotness by trying to make it look good and commercial porn is proof of that particular pudding. We make this dish once a week and I can honestly report that this is possibly the most spectacularly ugly version I can remember, I think because we skimped on the eggs this time round. Never mind. 
Orange and Ginger Pork Belly
Pork belly sounds all exotic and difficult, but it's just pre-bacon, really, the side of a pig before all the salting and curing and slicing. Formerly cheap and cheerful, belly is latterly victim of bandwagoning foodie attention and therefore increasingly expensive; I paid $20 NZ for this 1 kilo free range piece, which will feed two people for two days. That doesn't sound particularly thrifty but we're being greedy; you can chop up leftover belly and add it to stirfry vegetables and broths etc to make it go further. 
Moroccan-style Vegetable Stew with Fish
We swapped alcohol for puff a couple of years back, so we don't get hangovers anymore and I'm one of those freaks who never suffered them anyway. We do feel seedy as hell, though, sitting in a dingy carb-hole after all that Friday/Saturday off-wagon surfeiting. This is a swift and virtuous one-pot, no-fail dish that allows you to shirk doing the dishes and makes all those adult-themed weekend mistakes seem like a distant blur. |
