De Eeuw Van Mijn Vader

When you're almost literally on the other side of the world from your home country, you need a mummy and daddy.

You need them for the following things:
* helping you transport items of furniture around your new town because you have no car, and can't afford a delivery van
* putting up a curtain rail - or 6 - because even at the age of 29 you've never done that before and even if you had you don't have the necessary power tools to achieve this
* pretending your house looks wonderful after achieving the first two, even though it looks like a sparsely furnished hotel room
* sending you secret presents because they know you have no-one else who is going to do this for you and you might feel left out
* pretending that your proficiency in your new language is actually much better than it is
* inviting you around for dinner because they "want to spend time with you" (i.e. know that you have no other social life)
* offering to go on day trips with you to rural places because they know that you have no transport other than bikes (short haul) and trains (long-but-quite-specific-location haul)

And also for love and consolation when you're far away from the warmth of your own familial bubble.

I am so grateful that, unlike most of my colleagues, I have a constant and loyal source of support, advice and translation service on hand. Moving here would not have been nearly as seamless or as easy if we hadn't had friends and family here who, despite the distance, have kept in touch with my parents for the 30 years since they left the Netherlands in 1984. It makes you realise the value of friendship, and the value of creating friendships that will one day be part of yours (and your possibly your children's) lives in years to come.

Yay for friends.

Mint and Spinach Salad with Fried Tofu (Vegan)

Mr N was dubious when I said I was putting mint in this, but he was wrong.

Mint and Spinach Salad with Fried Tofu
Serves 2 for a meal, 3-4 for small portions

Ingredients

For the fried tofu

1 tablespoon curry powder

1 teaspoon salt

0.25 teaspoons cayenne pepper

0.5 cups fine breadcrumbs

2-3 tablespoons olive oil

250g (or thereabouts - packages seem to vary) firm tofu

For the salad

Prepare the vegetables according to your salad preferences/hunger level. The amount I used and what I did is in brackets.

Spinach (approx 1.5 cups per person of smallish leaves)

Carrot (I used two smallish carrots, sliced thinly into 3-4cm pieces)

Capsicum/Bell Pepper/Pepper (I used one that was half way between green and orange - it looked nice with the carrot - and cut it into thin lengths)

4-5 leaves of fresh mint, chopped finely

Balsamic essence (or whatever that thick balsamic stuff is called that posh restaurants use - the one I got is called "Acetico Balsamico de Modena" which according to Wikipedia is the real stuff, but it is very thick, not at all like vinegar, so now I don't know what to think)

Olive oil

Method

1. Mix the dry ingredients for the fried tofu in a bowl.

2. Chop the tofu into small chunks (I recommend slicing in half through the block, like filleting a fish, then chopping into cubes).

3. Mix the tofu and 2 tablespoons of olive oil in with the dry ingredients. The mixture should mostly stick to the tofu. If bits don't, add a little more olive oil.

4. Lightly oil a frying pan and heat over a medium to high heat.

5. Tip the bowl of tofu (even any bits of the mixture that haven't stuck to the tofu) into the pan.

6. If you're good at multitasking, you can prepare the salad ingredients white the tofu fries. Just mix around the tofu bits every so often to ensure they're not getting burnt. Once they are a golden brown all over, turn the heat off. They don't need to be totally hot when they go into the salad so they can sit there while you finish prepping the salad things.

7. Put the salad vegetables into bowls. (Or plates - I'm not judging.) Put the fried tofu on top. Drizzle a little olive oil and balsamic essence over the salad. (Bonus marks: make a nice pattern with the balsamic like they do on takeaway pizzas.)

Easy Thai Red Curry (Vegan)

At a later time I'll publish a post about making a Thai curry without curry paste, but on our recent trip to the UK I was so overwhelmed with finding vegan red curry paste (the ones I've found in New Zealand in the past all seemed to have shrimp paste in them) that I decided to go ahead and buy some. It certainly saves chopping a whole lot of ginger an chillies, but it does make me feel a bit lazy. Still, if it has to have an ingredients list, it must be cooking!

Thai Red Curry
Serves 2-3

Ingredients
1 medium onion
4-5 cloves of garlic
1 tablespoon oil
2 tablespoons Thai red curry paste
0.5 teaspoons salt
20-30 sugar snap peas
2 handfuls green beans/string beans
2 medium-sized carrots
1 capsicum, any colour ('pepper' for you American and English readers out there - goodness knows why New Zealanders say 'capsicum' if neither of you do)
3/4 tin of coconut milk
Rice to serve

Method
If you're serving this with rice (recommended), consider the fact that all methods of cooking rice take more than 10 minutes, which is the approximate time it takes to complete steps 3-7. Don't start too late! My old flatmate thought I was terrible at making stir fries - which is effectively what this is - but actually I was terrible at starting the rice on time, so the stir-fry would overcook.
1. Cut the vegetables into stir-fry-sized pieces. (I recommend cutting the carrot fairly thinly; the other vegetables will cook fairly quickly no matter what size they are.)
2. Dice onion and finely dice or mince garlic.
3. Fry the onion in the oil over medium heat for 2-3 minutes until translucent.
4. Add the curry paste and salt. Fry for a further 1-2 minutes, mixing constantly to ensure the paste doesn't burn. (A little water can be added if it does start to stick to the pan.)
5. Add the carrots and beans. Fry for 2-3 minutes.
6. Add the capsicum and snap peas. Fry for 1-2 minutes.
7. Add the coconut milk. Heat until the coconut milk is hot (2-3 minutes). Season with more salt if required.
8. Serve on rice.

Green Vegetable and Chickpea Salad with Pesto (Vegan)

When we first arrived in The Netherlands, we lived in a short-stay apartment with a beer fridge as its actual fridge. It wasn't really a beer fridge, of course, but the idea that something so small could be considered sufficient for a kitchen was alien to me.

Due to the space restriction, and our tendency to eat a lot of fresh vegetables, we ended up shopping once every 2-3 days. It was on the third day of one of these shopping units that we discovered that it was a public holiday. Our fridge contained half a jar of pesto, half a can of chickpeas, the wilted ends of a bag of spinach, and a little bit of broccoli and beans that were left over from the stir fry the night before. Oh, and some soy milk. We didn't even have any onions - just some garlic cloves. That was literally all there was to eat in the house.

And so I threw them all together, sans soy milk. What resulted what rather delicious, defying the expectations that I had had when I'd first looked into the fridge. Since then, I've tried to recreate the meal on multiple occasions, making various improvements, but it's never quite been right. So today I decided to put myself back in that position, imagining exactly what I had at the the and how I cooked it. Lo and behold, there it was again. It turns out that all the "improvements" that I made with a well-stocked fridge were actually the problem. As much as I felt the recipe needed onion, it really did not. Finally, after months of remembering nostalgically the Meal of Desperation, it has come into existence once again. And shall now be permanently - or as permanently as a cloud-based system for storing the sum total of human knowledge can be - be scribed for the world to recreate.

Green Vegetable and Chickpea Salad with Pesto

Serves 2

Ingredients
8 cloves of garlic
A good handful of green/string beans (100 grams or so)
One third to one half of a head of broccoli
Oil for frying
7-8 tablespoons pesto* (to taste - exact amount not required)
0.5 - 1 can of chickpeas
Spinach to serve (I suggest you wash and dry it before starting on the other stuff because there isn't a lot of downtime)
Salt to taste

* If you're new to veganism, or cooking for a vegan, be aware that some pesto contains cheese. Just check the label.

Method
1. Slice the garlic into thin pieces. Not too small, like if you were mincing it - more like you would slice a carrot, into rounds, only much, much thinner.
2. Cut the beans. I do 3-4cm slices, but hey, whatever's your favourite metric or imperial bean measurement will be fine.
3. Cut the broccoli into fairly small pieces. I cut each floret into 4-6, depending on the size.
4. Heat the oil on a medium-low heat in some kind of cookware. In the shower kitchen I used a saucepan. This time I used my cast iron pot. Other times I have used a frying pan. (Admittedly, the other times haven't been as good, but I don't think this can be ascribed to the pan.)
5. Add the garlic. Fry until soft. Try not to burn the garlic - I find keeping the heat fairly low is best.
6. Add the beans and broccoli. Fry for a couple of minutes.
7. As soon as the garlic starts sticking, add the pesto. Mix around with the veges for a few more minutes.
8. As soon as the pesto starts sticking (see how technical I am?), add the chickpeas. They will need to be drained first, but if they're not perfectly drained that's fine - a little bit of liquid will stop the stickiness.
9. It is done once everything is heated up and the veges are cooked but still crunchy. (They tend to go bright green, but trying to determine their greenness is a bit like noticing your own hair growing. If someone doesn't see you for a while, they're like, "Wow, your hair's grown heaps!", whereas you won't really have noticed. If you want to employ this method of determining your vegetables' cookedness, ask a helpful assistant to come and look at the vegetables before you start cooking, and then call them over every so often and ask if they seem brighter. Bear in mind that they stay bright up until the point where they are inedibly mushy, so your assistant will have to be very onto it. All things considered, I'd just do a taste test. Does the bean seem edible? Yes? Good.)
10. Serve on a bed of spinach. You may need salt to taste - I prefer it quite salty but it will depend on the brand of pesto and your own salt tolerance. Once you've cooked it a couple of times and you know how salty you like it, you can add in the salt between stages 8 and 9.

A Home At The End Of The World

It's funny how quickly you can fall into the trap of "home".

You know how it is when you travel: you decide to go somewhere cool & exciting, and when you get there you know you only have limited time to do all the cool & exciting things, so you try and do ALL the cool & exciting things that you can possibly fit into one trip, and you come home exhausted.

When you decide, as many well-off New Zealanders do between the ages of 18 and 30, to go and live somewhere overseas, you often have visions of all the cool & exciting things that that city/country/continent has to offer. Perhaps you have visited there before and thought, "This is pretty sweet, imagine living here!" Or you have talked to friends who've gushed about how they had SUCH a good time there and you'd love it too. Or perhaps you've read about somewhere different, and you've imagined your last trip to Whangamomona and how exotic that was, and you've thought about how much more exotic X overseas place is, and you've therefore assumed that the ratio of exoticness to interest will be directly proportional and so it will be entirely the most exotic and interesting place you've ever lived in your life.

The reality is that it's easy to think like a traveller when you make a decision to go and live elsewhere, but much harder to live like a traveller once you get there. Living a day-to-day working life has a lot of elements that are the same all over the world, no matter how exotic your location. Unless you work for yourself, or have some incredibly fabulous/flexible/varied job, you'll have to get up at the same time, 5 or 6 days a week, go to work (where you'll do the same job you were doing at home), come home again, cook dinner, and eventually go to bed. In your week you also have to fit in grocery shopping, cleaning and the various other chores that have to be done when you don't live a transient life.

That's not to say that you don't have time to do any of the fun things that your new city/country/continent has to offer, but picking up toilet paper from the supermarket or getting your brake pads replaced does not quite tally with the romantic visions of the traveller's life.

You also have to take into account the increased time spent communicating with friends and family back home; time which you may usually have spent with them if you were back home, but that time has to be dedicated to finding and making new friends. When you're travelling you tend to have a bunch of transient friends who you hang out with during the day and get drunk with during the night. While this does describe surprisingly accurately the relationship I have with my workmates, there are some subtle but significant differences, mainly to do with "being paid to actually achieve something during work hours" and "being able to function as a full human being before 12pm", facets which do not in any way describe the times I have spent travelling. When you actually live somewhere, you want to have the kinds of friends that you can have a wine with after a long day achieving things during work hours. So in a new place, you spend time getting to know those types of people. But the friends who you used to have a wine with after a long day of achieving something during work hours are also still interested in your life (mainly because they are still imagining your life as that of a traveller, and expect that you will have more interesting stories than the ones you had at home), and so you also spend time Skyping and emailing those people, so that when you eventually go home you don't have to start the friend-making process a third time. (Also because, generally speaking, your friends from back home are not the reason you left, and you quite like them.)

Ultimately, your new home is just like your old home, only with different friends, and with different things that you've been meaning to go and do but never quite get around to.

But I have to say that, on the occasional weekend that I decide to "get away", it's rather nice to think that three hours driving will get me to Belgium or Germany, rather than Dargaville. It's the small things.

Chocolate Raspberry Brownies (Vegan)

Ever since a colleague brought some of these in my my workplace a few years ago I've been desperate to try them. The sudden appearance of fresh raspberries in the supermarket in a Northern Hemisphere January made me desperate to create a vegan version. The ensuing guilt for buying a food completely out of season and therefore probably with thousands of food miles on its clock has probably burnt off all the calories they contained.

Chocolate Raspberry Brownies (Vegan)

Ingredients

Oil (to grease the baking dish)

2 tablespoons ground flax seeds

6 tablespoons warm water

1 cup margarine

0.75 cups muscovado sugar

0.75 cups white sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla essence

1.5 teaspoons baking powder

0.5 teaspoons salt

1 cup cocoa powder

1.5 cups plain flour

1 cup dark chocolate chips (or, as I like to call them, "Cut up bits of a block of chocolate from the supermarket")

1.5 cups fresh raspberries

Method

1. Mix the flax seeds and water and set aside.

2. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. (Point at which I actually achieved this step when making the recipe: around step 7.)

3. Grease and line a 25 x 25cm baking dish. (Or a dish with approximately the same square centimetrage.) I really recommend lining the dish because I have had terrible experiences in the past where I am VERY excited about eating brownies, only to find that they have adhered to the base of the dish in a way that makes it impossible to remove, except in "snack size", where the snack is being had by a mouse.)

4. Melt the margarine in a large bowl.

5. Mix in the flax-seed-and-water, vanilla essence, baking powder, both sugars and the salt. Whisk until smooth.

6. Mix in the flour and cocoa powder.

7. Mix in the chocolate chips and raspberries. (If you are using a block of chocolate and cutting it up, then pause at this point and cut up the chocolate, because no doubt you will have forgotten to do so if you are anything like me. Also, turn on the oven (see Step 2).

8. Transfer the mixture to the dish. Mush down so that the top is approximately level.

9. Cook at 180 for 23 minutes. (Why this amount of time? Just that mine turned out perfectly. But as long as the top springs back a bit when touched I'm sure it will be fine. It's not like there's raw egg in there waiting to give you salmonella.)

10. Leave to cool in the dish until you can lift it out (maybe ten or so minutes). Once you've got it out, leave it at least half an hour more before diving in. My experience is that brownies really need a chance to settle and congeal to reach the desired level of squidginess sans breakiness.

11. Mmmmmmmmmm.

* In future I have decided that I will give all tin sizes in square centimetres, because who ever has a dish exactly as it is described in a recipe? No matter how many recipes I try in my life, I never seem to have the right tin. This recipe was adapted from a few other recipes and I was sure that I'd measured the ingredients correctly for my dish, but when I actually got everything ready I realised that the dish was about 1/3 too bag. Solution? Fold up the end of the baking paper, lie a glass sideways in the dish, fold paper over glass to create false wall. Worked a charm. Rather harder to describe in words than in practice though, so I have provided you with visual assistance.

Artist's impression of baking tray and glass combination:

If blogging isn't for me, I intend to start a career as an online artist, just so you know.

Raspberry-Coconut-Currant Museli (Vegan)

Does it count as cooking if you make a breakfast cereal? What the hell, I'm going to do it anyway. Breakfast is a meal. And if you can call a salad recipe a recipe, even if it's just throwing together some leaves and seeds, I can totally call this a recipe. And if it's a recipe, then making the recipe is cooking. QED.

I've wanted to try making my own cereal for a long time. I'm not sure why I've waited, since obviously it's pretty easy, but it's one of those things that you don't necessarily think about when you go to the shops, and since I'm not in the habit of buying bulk bin spelt, it's the kind of thing that I can't ever "whip up" from what's in the cupboard.

But the other day I went out exploring and discovered a big organic/natural foods store in the next town over, replete with bulk bins. BONANZA.

Raspberry-Coconut-Currant Muesli
Makes enough for 5-6 breakfasts

Ingredients
4-5 cups "crunchy spelt" (I have no idea what this really is - that is genuinely the words that the Dutch used to describe it. Pretty much it looks like big muesli crumbs, which I suppose is exactly what it is. I'm sure you could substitute for whatever muesli base you prefer.)
0.5 cups freeze dried raspberries (They seemed really cheap until I realised that the are priced per 25g, which makes my stash of freeze dried raspberries worth about as much as the current street value of an equal amount of cocaine)
0.5 cups currants (though in my experience, when eaten alone, currants pretty much taste like raisins, so, you know, go with your gut feeling)
0.25 cups desiccated coconut
0.25 cups almond slivers

Method
Mix all these things together in a bowl. Put into a container. Eat some of it (probably with milk). It's really that simple.


Side note: Having just blogged this, Mr N leaned over and said, "There was far too much coconut in that muesli you made this morning you know." I felt like saying, "Perhaps that's because coconut tastes stronger at 11.30am" (the approximate time he got up), but I have taken this as a loving gesture on his part, fearing coconut overdose in you, my worshipful reader. Well, I have a confession to make. I didn't actually measure these ingredients exactly, since muesli making is not, in my opinion, a particularly specific science. You don't like coconut? Leave it out. You can't find freeze dried raspberries? Ditch 'em. You'd rather have organically produced, unprocessed cocoa nibs instead of almonds? Be my guest. Personally I quite like the taste of this, which is why I've blogged it. But I am not a cereal fascist, and I am here to tell you that it's your life, and you can do with it what you like.

Side-side note: Writing this post has made me realise how bad I am at spelling the word muesli. You may not think so, but that, my friends, is the joy of spellcheck.