365DOP: Chicken Breasts with Lentils and Mashed Potatoes

Cross-posted from 365 Days of Peta.

This Insatiable dish is basically what it says on the packet, but with all the French-ified accoutrements that we've learnt to love from our Peta. As I'm writing this up, I'm looking over the recipe again and realise that the recipe also owes a lot to fusion cuisine, the dark time to which I've referred earlier. However, this is defo on the lighter end - essentially it is a French-style dish with a couple of Asian herbs thrown in for good measure.

How is it done?

The chicken: bresticles marinated in lots of Dijon mustard, lots of white wine, cumin and Vietnamese mint (in my case: regular mint because of the enormous mint tree at the back of the flat). Peta recommends at least two hours.

The marinade is reduced to make a sauce and the chicken is cooked in a fry pan, just a few minutes on each side. I seem to recall reading that, in terms of food poisoning, using the chicken marinade as a sauce is a terrible idea, so I was a bit hesitant to do this (as  in, didn't want to give my family salmonella).

Suffice to say, my trust in Peta was well rewarded. Not only did we all escape with our bottoms unscathed, but also OMG THE MOST DELICIOUS SAUCE EVER. The sauce was the highlight of the whole thing, as was agreed by Dad and Tom.

The lentils are cooked in a stock similar to the Smoked Fish and Puy Lentils dish that I made earlier: however, you can see that Peta has chilled out a bit with the ingredients, because the stock for these lentils is Kaffir lime leaves and spices (as oppose to umpteen vegetables that are later given the biff). I love lentils so hard, and I love that there are so many recipes of Peta's where she makes ample use of lentils.

Peta also notes that the French eat a lot of grains and pulses, and that Puy lentils are the créme de la créme. Shannon would agree.

In a fit of enthusiasm I also decided that there was nothing to be done but to follow Peta's mashed potato recipe. This is very different to how I would make mashed potatoes. Essentially, it's backwards - the potato is mashed and beaten into a pan of warm milk and olive oil.  This makes a fairly liquid mashed potatoes which I wasn't that impressed by, although my lack of a ricer or a mouli meant that it was a bit more lumpy than was ideal.

Conclusion:

I made this for my menfolk, and both Dad and Tom commented on how delicious it was - they don't usually gush but they definitely made a point of commenting on how good it was. I ate spoonfuls of the sauce while I was cooking and keep thinking about making it again. Maybe this weekend?

A++ for this one Peta!

(No pass mark for my food photography though. Does not do it justice.)

365DOP: My month of aging disgracefully; and It's Music Time?

Cross-posted from 365 Days of Peta.

Aging disgracefully over the last month has involved a lot of early nights and being cosily domesticated, and possibly drinking a little too much for me than is strictly necessary. Probably not quite enough though to qualify the adverb disgracefully: I have had no throw-backs to university days of drunken karaoke yodelling or Thursday night drinking sessions. Peta of course recommends consumption of red wine and dark chocolate in fair quantities, but I have been mostly consuming cider, white wine and cheese. (In Can We Help it if we're Fabulous, Peta comes down fairly hard on white wine (she loves her sweeping statements) and declares that it's only good for removing stains. Oh dear; I suspect that she'd be less than impressed by my quaffing of gallons of Sauvignon Plonk.)

Truthfully, my disgrace has more frequently included falling asleep on the couch with a book spread over my chest. Shannon has taken photographs of this every time it's happened. So much disgrace.

From memory, this was a particularly enjoyable snooze

The highlight of the month was the 30th birthday party - fabulous people, I was spoilt rotten, and I had a super awesome time. There were no photographs taken at all at the party, which was an inadvertently beneficial oversight. There are already too many photos extant of my drunken self and I'd like to start limiting those. I've never seen a photograph of myself boozed that I've thought was flattering in any way shape or form.

I intended to cook my little socks off, Peta-style, but in the end limited my experiments to my booze choices: I made the World's most punchy Punch, recipe from Insatiable:

• 3 bottles of rosé
• 500ml of cognac
• Some fruit and a vanilla pod

Feed to party-goers and watch as Shit Gets Weird.

From this I learnt a valuable lesson: Peta does not pull any punches when it comes to booze (thanks, I'll be here all week!).

Looking over my Peta list, I can say that I have at least thought about walking more, and have actually taken evening walks a little more frequently than I have in the past. I try to take a passeggiata at lunch time involving Stairs and Hills. I have not been as committed to vegetables as perhaps I might, but over Easter weekend I ate so much white carbohydrate cheesy stodge that I have been craving vegetables for the last three days.

This month I have marked down for Making Music.

I think that when I began this project I imagined myself joining a choir and learning to play the ukelele. The first is easiest enough - beginning next Wednesday I'll commit myself to going along to the Wellington Community Choir in Taranaki Street. Fascinated to know what it will be like; I imagine a little fruity?The ukelele is a little more difficult, but I'm hoping that the lovely Hayley will lend me one of hers and that I can learn to play at least one little song before the end of the month! Perhaps I can make a horrible video for you all.

Also: singing more around the house, and perhaps dragging some unsuspecting people along to karaoke.

Music! Fun!

365DOP: Ageing disgracefully

Cross posted from 365 Days of Peta

Peta is a little over 60. I know this because I saw it splashed across the covers of the New Zealand edition of the Australian Women's Weekly.

March is the month in which I turn 30. I am half of Peta in age - which is fitting, given that I am still but a disciple.

One of the things that I've always loved about Peta is that she is unashamedly herself when dressing, when doing her hair, when wearing her makeup - there's no playing up to the idea that older women should dress demurely et al. In saying that, she also comes across as not afraid of the fact that she's getting older - there's no freaky stretched-out facelifts here, or completely immoveable botox masks. I think her ability to accept her age without becoming a slave to it is testament to her chutzpah and general awesomeness. Big balls!

And how do I feel about approaching the 30 mark? To be honest, I'm looking forward to it! My twenties were perfectly acceptable, but it wasn't until I was about 26 that I learnt to accept and love myself and as a result, the last four years or so have been AWESOME. I'm looking forward to a decade where I'm sure of myself, am earning enough to live something approximating my ideal lifestyle, and am able to deal with most of what the world throws at me without becoming an anxious mess.

Quotes from Peta to take into this month:

You can deny your age a little bit, but by violently denying your age, you are denying a part of yourself. You are not going to become your fulfilled self, your most fabulous self, if you are ashamed of the most ordinary and inevitable of human conditions - that we all get older.

The ageing process eases us toward our certain end, forcing us to place value on our inner journey rather than on our outer selves.

You're only young once but you can be immature forever.

Wrinkles merely indicate where smiles have been - look after your body and it will look after you.

All from Chapter 6, Health, hormones and beauty: Nature is your enemy in Can we help if if we're fabulous.

Apart from writing these quotes across my mirror in lipstick, how else will I celebrate Peta-ness this month? Well, as Peta says:

The true secret to staying young, beautiful and healthy forever is boringly simple - diet. Fruit and vegetables, fruit and vegetables, fruit and vegetables ... It's also a good idea to drink one or two glasses of red wine daily... eat at least two squares of dark chocolate a day; drink as much coffee as you like; have as much sex as you can; and eat lots of fish for your brain.

Can we help if if we're fabulous, p. 152.

To break it down we have:

• Fruit and veggies
• Two glasses of red wine (kein Problem!)
• At least two squares of dark chocolate (bitchin')
• As much coffee as I like (never an issue)
• As much sex as I can - Peta says "If you can't have sex with someone, have it with yourself - it keeps you young and happy. Use it or lose it." (Can we help it if we're fabulous, p. 156-7)
• Lots of fish

She also notes that the thing with exercise - which she notes is important - is to make it incidental. Walk all the stairs! Walk around the block! Keep walking! Please add "walking" to the above list.

• walking

This month I'm also having my birthday party - which I plan to cater completely from Peta's books. In fact, she's bound to have some awesome party tips somewhere. Must research.

 

365DOP: A month of dressing the Peta Mathias way

Cross posted from 365 Days of Peta

It's been a very busy month here at Casa Ginger, with house moving and working flat out, and *also* the wedding of two of my favourite people.

However, for the first fortnight I approached my task with both diligence and enthusiasm. I have the pictures to prove it! I made a collage:

Most of these pictures were taken at work, and I'm pretty sure that there is at least one extra around: I seem to recall sitting in front of one of the orange walls during one of my shoots. Lovely Fran has been documenting my Peta attempts and I'm sure that we looked perfectly nutty with her taking snaps of me on her iPhone while we traipsed around the office.

As I've already mentioned, my attitude in approaching this part of my project was less to attempt to make myself a carbon copy of Peta, and more to try and listen to her philosophy and follow that. Thus, I found myself wearing more make up, especially lipstick, exhibiting FAR MORE topknots, and wearing more colours - or at least, trying to avoid the ubiquitous Wellington black. This also included me trying to wear more heels which is never easy for me given that I can fall off ballet slippers (not even joking).

The hair thing has been rather fun too: after a long Twitter conversation about Peta's powers of the freaky large hair, I bought myself some Bumpits. Things to say about Bumpits: OMG. Amazing much? Yes they are.

They've also lead me down a rabbit hole of augmented hair styles, thus today I find myself with an augmented top knot: behold the sock bun! (note also the improvement in my fringe from above photos).

The dressing month has been rather fun - it hasn't been always easy to maintain given that I've got so many things going on but I feel like I've managed to stretch myself a little. Back In The Day, I was quite dedicated to "theme dressing" - for one month the theme was pantomime pirate - but I've really fallen off the band wagon with this over the years. I'm afraid that I haven't even been trying very hard with dressing in general over the last two years or so - just rolling out of bed of a morning, pulling on the cleanest clothes I can find and going out the door.

Having a theme has made me much more excited about getting dressed. How can I be more Peta-esque today? Also: has reinforced the fact I can't wear heels. I am terrible at walking in heels.
I've planned March as my month of growing old disgracefully. Eighteen days until I am thirty!

365DOP: Dressing the Peta Mathias Way

Cross-posted from 365 Days of Peta

In my second month of living 365 Days of Peta, I'll be approaching Peta's life philosophy through the medium of dress. Living in New Zealand and growing up with Peta on my screens means that I already feel I have a handle on what it means to dress like Peta: bright red hair, very loud clothes, lipstick and never dressing sensibly. I am more than happy to live this way.

Confession is that I am somewhat obsessed with not using anything synthetic on my hair - I gave up using shampoo about half way through last year and haven't looked back. I also don't use synthetic dyes any more but am completely obsessed with the henna that Lush makes - where the herb is combined with a bunch of spices and good oils.  I think it makes my hair look beautiful, but henna does tend to fade quite quickly. I'm doing my best here to maintain my Peta-like head of hair while living within my own rules!

In regards to her own head of fabulously red locks, Peta has written (and I can't find the reference just now, dammit) that she has always been an inner red-head. This is a philosophy very close to my heart. (In saying that, I seriously doubt that anyone has every described themselves as an inner "mousy-brown-head").

The loud clothes/never dressing sensibly thing is somewhat interesting: in the ScreenTalk interview I posted the other week Peta implies that she dressed inappropriately as part of the act, yet in some of the other books Peta's sense of dress is not only a comedic foil but also intrinsic to her experience. For example, in Burnt Barley (2000) Peta talks about attending a cultural fair in Tipperary dressed in a Zambesi top, leather skirt and gumboots. Life imitating art perhaps? Or perhaps these two points of view - the act and the experience - are not really that removed from one another. Could the real Peta please stand up?

Lipstick, thank goodness, is a far less meta concept for me to deal with. Peta unequivocally states on page 24 of Can we help if if we're fabulous that

I'm all for pathetic artifice - a slash of lipstick (not pink, thank you), a line of eyebrow, and a rondelle of blusher transform a woman from plain to sparkling in thirty seconds. No woman over thirty should leave the house without at least lipstick on - not even to put the rubbish out. Why frighten the dog? Keep your nails manicured, do your hair, and have pride in your appearance.

I'm not thirty until March, but am more than happy to commit to a daily diet of red lipstick. I love putting lipstick on in the morning, but I'm terrible at remembering to reapply, and so this month will be a challenge of maintenance. And remembering not to rub my eyes while they're coated in eyeliner and mascara.

Finally, Peta is very outspoken about the colour black: maintaining that if you're not Italian, a nun, a magazine editor, left-wing intellectual, in public relations or a manic depressive, you shouldn't wear black. And if you do wear black, you should accompany it with a fuck-off face and dyed black hair. I know for a fact that I look terrible with black hair, so I am encouraged here to avoid The Black emphatically.

All in all, this brings me to my first week of Peta clothing rules:

• Red hair, top knot or curliness optional
• Inappropriate clothing: no more pyjama pants in the house in the evening, I shall only dress like a fabulously lounging lizard
• Lipstick, and remembering to reapply it.
• Bright colours! No all black! Black at the last resort and no mixing of blacks!

FYI: I began my dressing project on 1st of Feb, and have a bunch of photos to share with you. Prepare to be amazed/horrified. Also, how can I do this thing that Peta's done with her hair up here?

365DOP: Mint & chilli chicken on lime & coconut rice

Cross-posted from 365 Days of Peta

This week has been characterised by the acquisition of more Peta books. I bought both A Cook's Tour of New Zealand (2005) and Insatiable(2000) from Trade Me, and read Insatiable over my coffee on Saturday morning.

Insatiable came out at a special time for New Zealand cooking - I think it was only about then that people became more interested in cooking with the kind of Mediterranean flavours that Peta writes about, and which now form a fair part of my cooking repertoire. She also seems to be quite obsessed with extra virgin olive oil and verjuice in the book, both of which had recently emerged as THE thing to obsess about, in a culinary sense.

A Cook's Tour attempts to be an encyclopedia of New Zealand food and cooking, but it's a rather slim and completely subjective encyclopedia. I've flicked through it. The entry on roses includes a story about why rose gardeners are obsessed with roses: because the flower reminds them of women and female sexuality. Hokay.

Shannon and I were invited to a barbeque on Saturday night and I decided to take a Peta recipe from A Cook's Tour as our offering. The recipe that I chose was mint & chilli chicken on lime & coconut rice (p. 57). The chicken is marinaded in fresh mint, chilli, garlic and soy sauces for a couple of hours before being skewered and grilled. Peta recommends char grilling and serving the skewers with snake beans and rice cooked with coconut, ginger and kefir lime leaves.

I followed the recipe religiously - or at least, almost religiously. I dorked out on the lime required for the marinade and replaced it with lemon, I didn't have jasmine rice so I used basmati, I used chilli powder instead of chilli flakes because that's what I had on hand, and Moore Wilsons weren't carrying any snake beans when I went down for the ingredients - so I served green beans instead.

 

My skewers on the barbeque next to some freaky orange New World marinated skewers

 

The recipe was super easy to follow, and the meal was delicious! The skewers were easy enough to transport to the barbeque. For the rice: I prepared it at home as I thought I could just heat it up in the microwave. That worked fine in terms of quality etc, although nobody seemed too too keen on eating rice at a barbeque (quelle surprise?). I took about half the amount of rice home and my flatmate Fran made a lovely fried rice with it on Sunday night.

This meal then is quite different to anything I've done before ala Peta. Lots of Asian style flavours, and not terribly complicated in terms of technique. I usually avoid making rice using the absorption method but I was really happy with how the rice turned out - so ten points for excellent instructions Peta!

I'm super keen to make this again - partially because we have a glut of mint (for serious, so much) and partially because it's always nice to take something with interesting flavours to a barbeque. Don't get me wrong, I love sausages as much as the next person (Peta notes in A Cook's Tourthat New Zealand is a nation of sausage lovers with just under a third of people indulging once a week*) but it's always nice to mix things up on ye olde grill.

 

Dave has the skills, I am excited for dinner

 

*Peta also notes that one of her favourite kinds of sausage is Italian Pork and Fennel - FYI that's the sausage offering that we took with us. Peta much? Yes I am.

365DOP: Mayonnaise

Cross-posted from 365 Days of Peta

There was a definite shortage of ingredients in the house on Sunday, which is not very Peta-like at all I feel. However, the lack of exciting fresh ingredients did give me the opportunity to whip together my very first mayonnaise.

In my limited experience as spectator, I have always considered mayonnaise-making to be tricky, time-consuming, and liable to kill one's arm from endless whisking. HOWEVER. Peta has given me the Power of Mayonnaise!

My first attempt was a dismal failure. Instead of finding the mayonnaise recipe in the book (not hard to find FYI), I tried to use the aïoli recipe on page 145.

I discovered that It is not possible to make mayonnaise from this recipe. After a good fifteen minutes of desperate beating, I had nothing but a sad thin oily-eggy soup and a realisation that the two methods are QUITE different and that I had wasted a whole lot of perfectly good oil.

On the other hand, using this recipe introduced me to the idea of using an electric eggbeater to make the sauce.* When I successfully executed my wobbly eggy deliciousness (using the recipe from Haddock Fumé au Pain Perdu, p.29 - which doesn't mention the eggbeater FYI) the electric beater had saved my arm from falling off. Also, a moment please to thank the Boy for executing one of the most perfect "thin streams" of olive oil ever witnessed by Culinary Man.

There was a bit of mucking around to get some more flavour in the mayo - extra mustard, salt, lemon juice and lots and lots of herbs. I'm not sure what this says: was the recipe not that good? Was it my ingredients or the quantities in which I used them? Has my mayo-palate been ruined over the years by Best Foods? Is it a matter of the recipe dating - that is, the ingredient balance staying on the mild side while palates get more adventurous?

Since I now have the Power of Mayonnaise, I feel confident that mayonnaise flavour is something I will be able to perfect in future. In the meantime, I will buy some Dijon mustard. Peta likes Dijon mustard, and I suspect it's my Dijon-less-state that may have caused my flavourless mayo.

*Peta lists the mayo and the aïoli under "sauces" in the index, but doesn't if feel strange to call mayonnaise a sauce?

365DOP: Poisson Fumé au Lentilles

Cross-posted from 365 Days of Peta

On Monday, le Boy went diving and came back with the most beautiful butterfish, which he brandished at me in all its Fishy Glory.

"What are you going to do with it?!" he demanded.

Five years ago, someone waving a fish at me and demanding that I cook it would have made me boil with rage. These days, I am a fishier woman, and have more desire to cook, especially with an ingredient as awesome as a whole fresh butterfish. In addition, I'd spent all morning reading of Fête Accomplie and had the answer to this age-old question. I was going to cook Poisson Fumé aux Lentilles (smoked fish with lentils - p. 78), a recipe from Peta's Rose Blues days (Rose Blues is the restaurant that she ran while in Paris during the 80s). It seemed very simple, and I had all the ingredients to hand either in the garden or the pantry.

The first thing to do was to smoke the butterfish. The Boy filleted the fish, sprinkled it with salt and brown sugar, and left it overnight. The next day, he hot smoked it with manuka. Beautiful.


The recipe calls for you to cook puy lentils (the little green ones) with All the Ingredients in the World - and then throw the ingredients out. In future, I would maybe just cook them in a pre-existing vegetable stock instead of having to turf so many vegetables at the end of the cooking process - or very simply cook them with garlic cloves, cloves, half an onion, parsley stalks and a bayleaf. The carrot, celery and two(!) onions seemed WASTEFUL BEYOND BELIEF.

The finished product:


The fish is sliced thinly, warmed through in a pan of milk and then placed upon a bed of salad leaves, warm cooked lentils and diced tomato. The whole thing is then drizzled with a vinaigrette made with lots of herbs and a bit of onion (or I guess, shallot if you have such a thing just lying about). The recipe recommended wine vinegar, but I only had rice wine vinegar which probably is a bit mild. In future I'd even go so far as to use lemon juice as the acid in the vinegar because fish + lemon = heaven.

CONCLUSION: Yes, I shall be doing it again, with the changes suggested. Also, people liked it - nay, they loooooved it. We ate it outside and drank glasses of viognier and beer.

Furthermore, I'm feeling smug in that I applied some Peta philosophy to the preparation in terms of the seasonality and locality of the food. The cos and all the herbs came from our garden, the fish was prepared and caught locally. The only ingredient that travelled any distance were the lentils. Which came from France. Quelle horreur!

The people enjoying the food in the sunshine.

365DOP: Espresso-Spiked Lamb Loins and Tarte au Citron

Cross-posted from 365 Days of Peta.

On Monday morning I woke around eightish and read Fête Accomplie (1990), Peta's first book. This is probably my favourite book thus far - it mostly covers Peta's apprenticeships and experiences in various restaurants in Paris, and her life during a year spent working on a luxury barge in Burgundy. There are also lots of recipes that made me feel all EXCITED and INSPIRED, including one for Tarte au Citron (p. 117) which spurred me to leap out of bed and elevenish and ride my bicycle down to Moore Wilsons and pick up ingredients.

I had heaps of pictures, but my camera is terrible and has corrupted all the images. Out of the entire meal, I have only managed to get a photo of half of the tart. Everything else was eaten before I realised that the photos were ruined, which bodes well for the meal but not for any kind of future I might have planned as a food blogger. The only upside is that they were pretty crappy photographs to begin with and will give me yet another impetus to improve the photograph situation this end, and to flex my food-descriptive muscles.

THUS: My main course was Espresso-Spiked Lamb Loins from Don't Get Saucy with me Béarnaise (1996), p. 72-73. The recipe owes a lot to the dark period of New Zealand cooking that was dominated by fusion cuisine. Call me a traditionalist, but I strongly believe that most fusion cuisine just isn't as good as food that is consistent and that matches properly.*

In saying that, I have always been a huge fan of cooking lamb with coffee (we have an old family recipe for lamb roasted in coffee), and the lamb itself, the cut and the way that it was cooked, was quite delish. I'm not at all sure about the two side dishes that were suggested: cucumber marinated in ginger, sugar and rice vinegar; and a tomato sauce. In hindsight, I think I should have just read the recipe and made my own decisions about the what best to serve the lamb with - probably some kind of reduced sauce using the marinade, and maybe some spinach or green beans? I replaced the foccacia suggested in the recipe with boiled and buttered Jersey Bennes (new season potatoes) and they were lovely and covered my aim of eating seasonally. People of New Zealand, eat your Jersey Bennes while you still can!

The tart recipe was fairly straightforward and the result super delicious. I am so stoked with how well it turned out and I will certainly be making it again. Approval from Flatmate, little Brother and Boy. The tart crust was lovely and crisp and the filling nicely set without being too-too firm. In future I might cook it ever so slightly less so that the filling is a little softer.

IN CONCLUSION: The lamb recipe was great, and I'll repeat but with different sides (the cucumber thing was a little too odd for my tastes).  Tarte au Citron is now added to my arsenal of impressing-seeming desserts, but I think that dusting it with icing sugar looks a little tacky so will be laying off that in future. Second day living a la Peta is a success!

ALSO: this is what Peta has been eating, according to Facebook. I am inspired and I also happen to have a butterfish that the Boy speared today that is just begging to be smoked. Pity the strawberry patch is deeply affected by the freezing weather and that we have no homegrown potatoes since we gorged ourselves on the ones from the Boy's grandad's garden.

*Coconut pannacotta is the exception that proves the rule here.