It's cold give me soup.

Well! Hello there again my friends! Hey girl!

After another successful day of successfully not getting lost in Auckland (Success!) I have retired to my boudoir to drink mint tea (with honey. If you don't sweeten herbal teas they TASTE DIFFERENT TO WHAT THEY SMELL! And this bothers me greatly.) and muse upon my successful day.

What made this day so successful, small excited nutritionist? You may ask. And I would reply; I got up early and DID things! I gymmed! I walked to the City! (You just go vaguely in the direction of that rather unattractive pointy building and you don't get lost, I discovered) I chased a seagull, critiqued art in an extremely professional manner, spent money on things, and ran the Poodle. Good.

Auckland art gallery is really quite... It's like a delicious fennel and pork sausage with horseradish and a beer in your other hand; interesting, challenging (it may drip on your very nice blazer your mum got you) and just perfect. Do you like art? You should! Art galleries are great because you can wander round and have a little visual feast and be as utterly irritating as you possibly can without anyone even NOTICING let alone rolling their eyes and muttering under their breath. I went with Pretentious Lesbian #2 (I am obviously the more pretentious), and it was just fabulous! We discussed at length why Impressionism was dumb; why neo-Expressionism is a rip off, and probably doesn't even mean anything; and whether some dots on a particular Manet-ish thingy should be called splats or splodges and whether we could make a better one, given half an hour and a glass of wine. We basically won at art.

After a bit more art, we needed cake, obviously, so we went to this asian cake shop on High Street, which sold EVERY CAKE. I got a green tea sponge cake. Weird. And a "tea egg". Weirder! Apparently it is a Taiwanese thing (Taiwan either is, or isn't, part of China for Cute Girlfriend and any other geographically challenged people out there) where they put the egg in a big tureen full of tea and soy sauce. It was 90c. Do you know how obsessed I am with eggs? I am truly smitten. Apparently in the 60's there was an "egg a day" club. I want to BE this club! Tea Eggy was fished out of a giant pot for me and friendly asian gave me instructions (try not to eat the shell. I assured her I would do my best). I peeled him and we ate half each and it was... quite delicious! Sort of subtle soba-type flavour. Yum! I love tea eggs! I will attempt to make these in the future, possibly. I will let you know.

Anyhow! Yes yes, Excited Nutritionist, you were annoying at an art gallery and ate an egg. What are we cooking today?! Aha! I thought, since it is BLOODY FREEZING in Auckland (fell below 15 the other day!) I would teach you little chickens to make delicious, nutritious, ridiculously low-effort soup. Also cheap. Why wouldn't you, really?

Here is a diagram I made about soup.

This is my diagram of soup. One day you all will be able to make soups like a pro. In the meantime, follow my lovely steps of soupness below.


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THE RECIPE!

Grandma's pea and ham soup
(whatever grandmother. Take your pick. Mine was my great-grandma and she was a nutcase, possibly an alcoholic, and loved to make pea and ham soup. This was back in the days when having a blender pretty much made you the talk of the town, so this soup was at the forefront of food fashion.)

This soup is quite a thin soup, and is an epic bright green colour. Yum. Bits of ham. YUM! In all honesty, if you don't have a ham bone lying round, put in whatever you want. Bit of bacon. Some sausages. Lentils. Dog's bone? The split green peas (which you can get dried in supermarkets, usually near cans of things) are just so good with meat, but hey. Go crazy.

2 cups of split green peas that have been soaked overnight*
2 cups water
1 ham bone (or, if truly desperate, random bits of pig)
1 onion
4 cloves garlic
herbs! The more the merrier!**
salt and pepper

optional: chuck in a chopped potato with the onion and garlic. It will make your soup thicker, but taste a bit like potato, which tends to overwhelm things a wee bit.

1. Chop onion and garlic and herbs
2. Put everything except salt and pepper in v. large pot.
3. Simmer it for an hour (like a very low boil, you can only just see the bubbles rising)
4. Pick the ham off the bone (I rip it up and fry it then add it back to soup after it's been pureed, but feel free to puree it too if you want, or just add it back whole.) and remove the bone.
5. Puree soup
6. Season soup! Go mental with the salt and pepper. Make it "pop". If you truly want to weird things up, put in some lemon juice. Woah!
7. Eat soup.

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So yes! That is Soup! I am quite hungry now. Possibly, now that Uncle and Aunt have gone to bed, I can sneak back into the kitchen and eat some left over rack of lamb that may or may not be lurking in the fridge. He he he.

Goodnight my little soupsters! I hope you all have a lovely Tuesday! Cute Girlfriend is coming back from some Australian city full of gays and malls, she better have gotten me a novelty t-shirt or I will sulk into my soy latte.

Coming up next instalment... Possibly duck? Possibly satay? Any suggestions? Email me you smelly people.

luv
Ruby


*you don't have to do this. If you don't, your soup will take longer to cook and possibly be a bit sort of... chewier...? Fibreier? But hey, whatever, I'm not the boss of you!

**the most delicious with ham tend to be english-y sort of herbs e.g., sage, bay leaves, thyme, parsley. If you put in oregano or, god forbid, "mixed herbs", your soup will taste like cheap pizza. If you put in rosemary, it will taste like rosemary. Don't do that.  But, if you put in curry spices, it will probably be delicious but odd. When using herbs, fresh is best! Do you live in Dunedin? Steal some from the botanic gardens! Fun! Don't know what a herb looks like? Trial and error baby! You will either end up a) disgusted, b) delighted, c) high. Do you have questions about herbs? Email me. I will make up a story about fennel.

***thanks to women's weekly, whose recipe I looked at before not following.You go girls.
http://www.nzwomansweekly.co.nz/

Feeling Friandly?

Well! Hello again people!
How are we all? Good I hope. Have any of you eaten anything particularly delicious today? Or any other day? Do please tell me so that I can compete/daydream/drool a little. Mmmmmmm, food!


So! Still in Auckland. What a day!

I don't want to boast, but I have actually faced numerous perils today. Including, but not limited to nearly falling in Aunty's pool (twice! Just sayin') and touching weed-killer (surpisingly painful); and it is only now, at 6pm ish, that slightly grubby nutritionist gets to sit down with the Poodle and a glass of what is quite possibly strawberry liquer* (suggestions for how to spell this are welcome) and de-stress from the suburban safari.


Tonight, I am going to share with you a rather special little thingy, which I have only recently been introduced to; the Friand. Hurrah! They will soon become your favourite things as well.

These are my little friandies, just after extraction from the muffin cups. NOTE: not as pixellated in real life.


Friands (and, as I'm sure you're aware, I do say this word in a rather sangre-froid french sort of way; but if you are not up to this, just pronounce it how you will. I will only laugh at you if I overhear you, and, unless baking as a conversational topic gets about a billion times more popular over the next month, I most probably won't) are amazing. They are similar in appearance to little muffins, but substantially quite different.

Muffins, as I'm sure all my little nutritionettes are well aware, are basically butter, flour, eggs, and baking powder, plus delicious extras. Like a slightly less rich cake batter. Friands, on the other hand, are just sugar, egg whites, and a minuscule amount of flour. Instead of the baking powder as the rising agent, it is egg white, just like in pavlova and meringues, but, because it is combined with flour, it doesn't have a gooey texture, just a delicious soft light sweet inside. So many adjectives.

Friands are super easy to make, as long as you do NOT overmix! Foolish people. And be gentle with the batter as if it was the crying child of an extremely large and angry man. This recipe I have adapted from a cute BBC one** (ergo, the queen most probably made them), and takes about an hour of faffing around from start to in your mouth. Obviously if you are quite shit at cooking they will take longer. Also, if you are like me and chronically unable to measure anything it may take slightly longer as you panickedly attempt to stem lemon zesting-related blood flow from going over everything with one hand and pick bits of eggshell out of your life with the other.

These are cute friands as they sit in the oven. They rise quite a lot then fall slightly as soon as you take them out. Not pictured: mess.

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THE RECIPE!

The Queen's Friands

Makes 12

50g flour
200g icing sugar
120g ground almonds (can substitute other ground nuts or finely chopped coconut thread if suitably desperate)
150g butter
6 egg whites
3 lemons (you will only use the skin)
optional: berries to decorate

- Heat oven to 200 C.
- Grease 12 muffin pottles.
- Melt the butter and let it cool a bit (or it will accidentally cook your egg whites later. Fail).
- Mix almonds, icing sugar and flour (it's better if you sieve it all, but if you don't, probably nothing will happen, so don't stress.)
- Beat egg whites until they form soft peaks (i.e. almost stand up when you try make little towers with them like you used to with bubble baths, but the tips just fold over.)
- Make a well in the centre of dry things. Put in egg whites and zest of all three lemons (if you don't have a zester, grate the skins. If you don't have a grater, just peel the lemons and chop the skin into tiny bits. You povo.)
- Pour in slightly cooled butter and gently fold all the ingredients together. This is quite important to do right, but don't freak out! Just do big folds, quite slowly, using a spatula or flat wooden spoon. You are trying to keep your egg whites as fluffy as possible.
- When everything is JUST combined, place scoops of mixture in muffin cuppies. Mixture should be quite wet and fluffy. Don't let it go higher than edges of cups cos it will rise during cooking.
- Decorate with berries if you so desire.
- Put in oven for 15-20 mins or until golden brown and tops are JUST feeling firm to the touch. Do NOT stick a knife in to check! They are not muffins, they are delicate and sensitive.
- They can be tricky to get out. Make sure you have greased the trays well! Haha too late now! Try slicing around edge with a knife very gently, then scooping even more gently with a spatula.

EAT THEM!
Good with tea. Or coffee. Or probably beer, I don't know. I am drinking strawberry fizzy something and they are bloody good with that!

Enjoy!

This is a terrible picture of me gently massaging friand batter. So gentle! See the lovely egg white maintaining its... dimensions? Foaminess? Not squashedness? That.

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Right so, good luck my little friends! Just you wait. You will fall in love.
Okies... I am off to make dunner. Favourite Aunty is back and we are making (read: she is making and I will be scurrying and chopping things) roast lamb and leek and cauliflower gratin. Yum. Few things in this world are better than friands, but I think roast lamb is most definitely one of them.

Ummmm to look forward to... I go to somewhere in the Waikato to go for a run. Will I get lost? Probably. Will I eat a pie? Possibly? Will I hideously embarrass Cute Girlfriend in front of farmers? Most definitely.

Get cooking!

I adore you all
(especially you, Meg).

Ruby

PS give me ideas, women! Give me inspiration. I want to cook something weird. Challenge me to a souffle or something! Or all you gluten-free weirdos out there; what would you most like me to make once again edible to you sad people?




*I have just been informed they are "wild alpine mountain strawberries from Europe". Indeed.

**http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2114/blueberry-and--lemon-friands

What can you do with beer?

Well! Hello there everybody!
How are you?
I am good. Here I am in Auckland. Writing a small blogette about being an excited nutritionist, because I am both excited, and a nutritionist. The more times I say "nutritionist" in my head, the less like a word it sounds. Is it even a word? Spell check does think so but, I have my issues with spellcheck (thankyou, autocorrect, icecream.)

In the form of a short list, this is why I am in Auckland:

1. I quit the army (everyone was mutually satisfied by this.)
2. I entered a "fun run" in Otorahanga (where is this? Don't worry, nobody else knows either. I plan to just drive south-ish until I reach a part of the Waikato where there are more swanndris than subarus, and then ask a cow or something)
3. My aunty will pay me to do things like clean windows and mince around in an apron. Ideal!

So! In a spirit of being the best house elf ever, I got up this morning and decided to bake bread! Hurrah!

[This is a picture of my bread, taken with my incredibly terrible camera phone. Gosh it is bad. This shows delicious bread straight after coming out of the oven. It smells AMAZING. But you cannot smell it from this picture. Just imagine. Look at the golden brown loveliness. MMM. Bread.]


I was sort of bullied into crawling out of bed at 8 something by my bladder so had to get up, and as we had eaten all the bread yesterday (my uncle and aunt have a billion jars of exciting little thingies nestled at the back of the fridge and, in a spirit of sound scientific enquiry, I was forced to try all of them. On toast. With cheese) there was a panic moment. No bread! What am I going to put my delicious poached eggs on so that I can gently puncture the yolks and have delicious melty yolk on my toast with salt and pepper and feta and chutney? Enthusiastic Family Friend, attempting to deflect my meltdown, suggested I go down to the dairy (100m away) to purchase bread. I considered this for about thirty seconds before dismissing it as a loser's solution. I would MAKE bread! Go me!

After two coffees and a snuffle into various cupboards I worked out that in fact Uncle and Aunt had no yeast; what you would call a limiting factor in bread construction. No matter! Through my extreme nutritionist's knowledge I knew of another sort of bread. The "quick bread". Quick breads are bread that are leavened with baking soda (or baking powder) instead of with yeast, and are therefore quite quick to make cos you don't have to proof the yeast or raise the dough before baking. Soda bread is the quick bread most people think of, and it is a quintessentially Irish sort of thing; bit stodgy, full of butter, and tastes like a scone. Great with potatoes, probably. I don't know. I don't really like scones that much so tend to avoid making soda bread. Maybe one day I will reinvent it in a delicious way. You will just have to wait and see. Most quick breads have this sort of scone-y taste, APART FROM....

Beer Bread!

Yes. I realise this sounds weird. But let me briefly attack your mind with some sweet science. Beer has yeast in it, right? (Yes, it does, you idiots.) So... if you put it with some flour and various other little bread bitties, it will turn into bread? Remarkably, yes!

There are a few different ways of making beer bread, and I have adapted them to create a very easy, incredibly cheap, way of making bread that will be ready in about an hour (depending how crap you are at measuring things) and taste just like delicious expensive non-student bread. And is also, obviously, more delicious and healthier than the other shit recipes I found on the internet. One called for HALF A CUP of butter! For a recipe that served 6 people! WTF! Ergo, mine is better.

Here goes:


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THE RECIPE!

Ruby's quite delicious beer bread

serves 4 if you are very hungry/large hairy man/small but fat woman or 8 if you are just peckish.
(Alternatively, try out some cool maths by halving the recipe! Fun!)

Ingredients:

6 cups of flour
6 teaspoons baking powder*
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon of honey (or white sugar)
2 bottles of beer (the cheaper the better)
1 tablespoon of oil (or melted butter)

Optional: little seeds for sprinkling. E.g. sesame, poppy. Or chunky salt, or rosemary. Take your pick.

Grease large high-edged baking dish. Pre-heat oven to 180C. Can be metal, or ceramic or whatever. Metal will cook your base better.Mix dry ingredients in a big bowl. Make a well. Pour in beers, oil and honey. Fold mixture (this means you fold in the edges to the middle, turning the bowl round a bit with every fold). Do NOT overmix, you fool! Just combine enough that most of the flour is mixed in. It should be quite a wet mixture. Scoop into greased dish. Put into oven. Bake for 30 minutes. Take out and brush a bit of oil over the top and put your sprinklies on. Bake another 10 mins, or, until the top is turning golden and when you tap the loaf it is hollow sounding.

Enjoy! (Amazing with cheese, or soup, or... anything really.)
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So yes! That is what i have spent my morning doing. Also drinking coffee and patting the poodle. And writing this and eating bread. I shall be off now to make something off my life. Or make a sandwich. It is raining today, typical Auckland. But I will go for a run anyway COS exercise is the flip side of the coin from delicious food. I'm not taking the poodle though because last time I did he ran about a k then just sat down and stared at me and I had to drag him all the way back, up a hill, while he tried to remain sitting.

To look forward to next (possibly) week:
I may or may not tell you how to cook a duck. Anyhow, it will be fun.

Ciao my little beauties

Ruby.



*Note! A sneaky tip. If you have baking powder, and it looks a bit old and scummy, and you don't remember it being new within the last sort of 3 months, it is shit. Don't use it, it won't work. Baking powder is usually just baking soda, which is alkaline, and cream of tartar, which is acidic, and it works by making a reaction which makes little carbon dioxide bubbles make your thing rise. If the powder is old, all the chemicals have broken down a bit, and won't work as effectively, if at all. An alternative is just to make your own baking powder with 1 part baking soda to 2 parts cream of tartar, to make up the volume of baking powder required.

On a related note, if you are making things with acidic ingredients (like lemons, yoghurt, berries, etc.), you can just use baking soda cos then the acid will balance it out. Fun baking fact for the day.