gratin de macaronis au fromage (and a bit of shopping)

That makes dirty old mac'n'cheese sound pretty special, doesn't it?  A bit more special than 'dirty old mac'n'cheese' anyway.

We've got a good old school mac'n'cheese recipe, but I made this one with a recipe from Rachel Khoo's Little Paris Kitchen cookbook (I want to be her when I grow up, remember?  or did we not discuss this fully enough?  I can't remember).  Made with a bechamel sauce and gryuere, it's  lovely but completely different to any mac'n'cheese I've had before.  It's really sharp, which would be the gryuere (I'm keen to try it with parmesan and see how that goes too - see how I can flavour it with the type of cheese), and the bechamel is simmered with a clove, nutmeg and bay leaf, and the requisite onion so it feels a bit flasher than your average bear (or, you know, mac'n'cheese).

Meatloaf and mac'n'cheese.  I'm totally taking over the world. 

(Also, that's not a tiny dish - it's huge pasta)

(And the kids ate it.  Bam!)

And don't panic that I've completely lost it.  There's a shopping post coming.  I'm just waiting until I'm completely embarrassed ... and done.  I'm doing my little office corner over.  So far, new very old desk and lamp.  To do - cushion (I'm obsessed with Gerty Brown cushions.  I must have a Gerty Brown cushion for my work chair), and a pantone mug for my pens (that one is colour driven).  I'll give you the grand total in ladles, if you want (actually, that reminds me.  I had a ladle moment recently.  Can't remember what it was ... I'll work on that too).

Ooooh ... yes!  And there's a book sitting on the windowsill behind my desk.  Also an interesting story.

Favourite places: The Beach Store

We found this gorgeous little design store by total accident, a few months after we moved to Kapiti.  The husband was taking me on a tiki tour through Paekakariki on our way back from the city one Friday (Friday is our day to cram in as many errands and necessary (or completely unnecessary) trips into the city and faraway places as possible) and there was The Beach Store, sitting right across from the beachfront. 

Now it's my go-to place for gifts, books or just a really nice spot to grab a coffee and let the kids climb and run around down on the beach.  It's one of those places that you go to for one thing, but you can't leave the store until you have been through every item and made sure that nothing new and gorgeous, or fascinatingly random, has appeared since the last time you visited.  I love those sorts of stores.  We even collected a chair there one visit.

They won my heart totally one visit when they sold us a toy, right out of the store toybox (it was an awesome toy).

Better yet - there is coffee, and tubs of gourmet icecream for sale (and to assist with the eating of said icecream, old school little wooden paddle-spoons to boot.  Wooha!)  It's just every inch beach living.

This is one of the best bits.  This is how you can enjoy your coffee or icecream (or your new book - I've done that too) after your visit. 

Salad! Ha!



You are quite possibly not that impressed.  I am though.  It was awesome spinach noms (and feta, and capers, and mixed toasted seeds and a sharp mustardy dressing), straight out of the Petite Kitchen cookbook.  I'm loving that book. 

 

I'm going to include this as learning to cook on a technicality, because salad is an excellent part of dinner and I'm about as backwards at salads as I am at everything else dinner related.

 

I do find myself wondering though if this poor blog is going to fill a how-not-to-take-a-photo niche somewhere down the track. 

 

 

I made dinner

And I’m silly proud of myself.

The thing is, I haven’t cooked for years. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I tried to feed the husband and myself (the kids are still at that painful separate meal stage. The smallest one wouldn’t be, but the biggest one is an ongoing project for a number of reasons and the little one wants to do what the big one does so ... painful separate meal stage).

I’m in a bit of a tricky spot though these days. The husband is travelling a lot for work, and this girl likes to eat good food. Toast for dinner wore thin pretty quickly.  It dawned on me too that the husband and I can eat quite differently and I could and kind of wanted to, start trying to make simple meals for myself.  I swear I could survive on soup for the rest of my life. He of the six meals a day, most of them the size of my dinner? Not so much. Plus, without a word of exaggeration, once I started playing with my Petite Kitchen cookbook, almost immediately, I started to feel better and my eating started to change.  What I wanted to eat started to change.

I’m fairly sure we would have covered once upon a time, when I was crapping on about infertility instead of food, that I have endometriosis. I had surgery several years ago, pre IVF and stayed clean as a whistle as far as I could tell until I carried the not-ginger. Maybe it was the girl-child hormones, or maybe it was just the life of the surgery, but I did not feel awesome an awful lot. I’ve never really paid much attention to the impact of diet and endo, but it’s not something I’m willing to go under the knife for again so now I’m starting to pay a bit more attention and that little cookbook I bought by complete accident has turned into a spring-board for something just a little bit exciting.

( *cough* it's a meatloaf *cough*)

(Also, it was delicious)

Don’t think that I’m not going to finish the Global Baker project though.  There's no way I can let that go!!  I’m just slowing it down a little in the name of health and wellbeing and experimenting with a few other things in between (and sanity, during a temporary period of crazy routine and life disruption, and kid holidays).

Old favourites, and new

Kindy holidays is not the time for the Global Baker project, and neither is when my nerves are already frayed from earthquakes, so it's simple baking again just for now.

Friendly road buns from 'Ladies, A Plate' the first ever baking book that I bought (after the Edmonds Cookbook).  These are like a soft, crumbly (the dog thinks the kids being given these is the best. thing. ever), lemony biscuity bun, topped with sugar.  Basic but good.

And spoon biscuits with raspberry jam.  Super sweet and they very much beg for a cuppa to go with.  Obviously, I am happy to oblige them.

Treats for the kitchen

As much as I love coffee, my day starts and ends usually with tea.  So far I haven't managed to find somewhere down this part of the Island that does tea quite as well as the place I used to buy it in Auckland, so about once a month I pretend there's no such thing as a carbon footprint and I have my tea supply couriered to me.  And every couple of months, they send me a sample of something new.  This was one of those months.  Yay!  Free treats! 

I've been an English breakfast girl for a very long time but it turns out, Scottish breakfast tea kicks English breakfast tea's ass.  Quite an exciting discovery (if someone waving something under your nose can be called a discovery) and now I'm going to have to try the Irish one too, just so that I've run the full ancestral gauntlet if nothing else.  What will be a laugh is if my tea preference aligns with the strongest of my heritage.

Also on the treat front and a little bit free (yes, there's such a thing.  Shush) - new coffee cups!  Better yet, they're the coffee cups from Citta Design that have been on my wishlist since I first came across them while I was reading The City Out My Window (which, incidentally, is still on the chair).  They remind me so much of the magic in that book.  Sweet!

I'm not entirely sure there's a short version to the coffee cup story, but let's try ...

Three of my magazine subscriptions (all courtest of hotpoints merchandise) expired this month.  I wanted to try a new publication but couldn't decide which ... around the time that Urbis advertised that they were giving away a $50 Citta Design voucher with new subscriptions, and voila!  Coffee cups.

 

 

And then, because I was on a bit of a roll, happiness is colourful kitchen stuff, the kids had smashed a couple of our small coffee cups, our old dishcloths barely resemble their original colours and seem to permanently smell like garlic and the husband set fire to a couple of tea towels (I am possibly exaggerating.  He possibly just singed holes in them) ...  more voila!  (Also, FYI - best. discloths. ever. and similarly awesome tea towels)

 

 

 





On the chair: Petite Kitchen by Eleanor Ozich

A funny thing happened about a week ago.  I was in a gorgeous wee Grey Lynn store (Father Rabbit) with my BFF (yay!  It doesn't happen often enough!!) and spotted the cutest little cookbook, Petite Kitchen.  It's one of those books that catches your eye and you just have to pick it up.  Seriously, you have to.  I'm pretty late to this party, but it turns out that Petite Kitchen has a huge Facebook following and a beautiful blog as well as producing beautiful recipe journals*.  And she's local, which I love even more, doing all of this right here in New Zealand (because it also means I can find all the ingredients she uses with relative ease).

So, I picked it up and I loved it but I don't cook so left it back on the shelf to think about.  And I knew Father Rabbit has an online store so I'd be able to find it again later.  As beautiful as it was and as much as I wanted it, the husband does all the cooking (he has for quite some time, since taking the task over a few years back probably as a means of preserving his own life.  I'm not joking) and I generally (always) leave him alone with his own recipes ... getting involved in the cooking at any level is a bit like making eye contact with that person you don't want to talk to, in my opinion. A bad, bad idea.

All I really did though was cost myself shipping once I got home.  And then two days after putting my online order in, when I was once again pouring through Petite Kitchen, I learned exactly how much attention I don't pay to things (quite a bit).

There's an italicised list that features at the bottom of the recipes on. every. page.

Gluten free ... grain free ... wheat free ... refined sugar free ... dairy free ... egg free ... nut free ... vegetarian ...

Some lists were slightly shorter than others, but you get the idea.

Horrors.  Absolute, total horrors.

Me, of the butter, sugar, eggs, sugar, butter, butter, more butter, as many eggs as possible, three different types of sugar? excellent! flour, miiiilk ... 

In possession of a cookbook free of ... 

It felt a bit like the ladle, all over again.  Do I show the husband?  Do I pretend I absolutely meant to do it (which he wouldn't believe at all)?  What if he makes me eat stuff?  He was out when the courier arrived, so I could just as easily hide it under the couch and act like nothing ever happend, and when the Mastercard bill arrives, maybe Father Rabbit was ... ahhh ... lunch.  Yes, lunch.  I mean, it's a cookbook, so it could potentially have been lunch, couldn't it?  I'm sure that's not fibbing ... exactly.

Except I'm all rusty and out of practice, and so I just showed him and sobbed (not really) that I made a dud purchase.  And he, not out of practice at all, flicks through it, hands it back to me open to a recipe for Vanilla Nut Butter Biscuits with Raisins saying:

"These look really nice.  And easy.  And we have all of this stuff too.  You could make those while I put the kids in the bath." and walks off to put the kids in the bath.

And since the biscuit tin was empty, and I had a free pass on skipping bath time, I did.

They weren't pretty (my homemade ground almonds weren't quite fine enough so my bickies were a bit breaky/crumbly when I flattened them for baking.  Must make them again asap to improve on the prettiness), or complicated, but they were fun and tasted beautiful.  Really, really yum.  It's a bit of an exciting new world too.  We've since tried Buttered Balsamic Lentils with Spinach and Garlic for dinner ... yuuum ... (the husband made that - I'm still working up to non-baking) and collected Chia seeds, coconut oil and milk and a big bag of ground almonds so that I can continue to play.

 

Chocolate Coconut Rough Macaroons with afternoon tea coffee (sooo good!).

 

* If anyone knows where I can get the first one, I'd be really grateful to know!

We went away for a long weekend so it'll probably take me until the end of the week to be fully caught up on work and home and be able to bake and blog again.  It was a brilliant weekend away and very exciting that we managed it too, to be perfectly honest - Wooooooo us!!  (was crapping myself about taking the two nutcases on a plane, disrupting their routines etc and praying they wouldn't behave like little psychopaths as a result)  Before about last Wednesday, I was just being useless and hadn't updated. 

(Also, I have no idea what the rules are about these things, so the above pic?  Stole it off the web!)