From the Maldives across the Indian Ocean

It is summer here, with all the delicious produce that goes with it. At the markets I couldn't resist buying young coconuts and mangoes (among other yummies). Having no idea what to do with the coconut though, I had a peek in Chris and Carolyn Caldicott's 'World Food Cafe 2'. There I immediately found a marinated coconut recipe to accompany a mango, chickpea and butternut squash curry. It's a great cookbook, if you can get hold of one. It's full of exotic recipes and gorgeous photography from the couple's world travels. Having never visited the Maldives myself, I'm fairly keen to after trying these new recipes from our Indian Ocean 'neighbours'.

This curry surprised me by having no chilli (and no cumin - I had the ingredients ready and photographed before double checking the recipe - hence the mysterious packet in the photo). Despite the lack of chilli it is spicy and rich and the chunks of mango held their shape and flavour better than I'd hoped. The winning combination of all these exotic ingredients - mango, coconut milk, lime worked well in this savoury dish. So if mangoes, coconuts and such are in season and cheap near you, get cracking!






Maldivian Mango and Chickpea Curry

(I've adapted this recipe from the Caldicotts' to be vegan by substituting oil for butter and skipping the yoghurt at the end).

2 T canola oil
1 large red onion, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1-inch piece of ginger root, peeled and grated
10 curry leaves
2 t black mustard seeds
1 t ground coriander
1/2 t ground cinnamon
1/2 t ground cardamom
1/2 t ground turmeric
1/2 t ground black pepper

1 medium butternut squash, peeled and cubed (about 3 1/4 - 3 3/4 cups)
2 large tomatoes, chopped
1 c water
2 x 400g tin chickpeas (2 3/4 - 3 cups), rinsed and drained
2 large mangoes, peeled and cubed
1 x 400g tin coconut milk
1 T lime juice / or zest from 1 lime
salt, to taste (I didn't use any - very delicious already)



Heat oil in a wok or large pan, add the onion, garlic, ginger and curry leaves, and saute until the onion is soft. Add the mustard seeds, and when they crackle, add the remaining spices, stirring them into the oil. Add the cubed butternut squash and the tomatoes, and saute until the squash starts to soften. Add the water and the chickpeas, bring to a boil, cover, and simmer for 5 minutes. Add the chopped mangoes and coconut milk, cover again, and gently simmer for 10 minutes. Stir in the lime juice or zest. Taste, and add salt if necessary.
Serve with rice or Coriander Cheela (recipe to follow another day). I served mine with Fresh coconut (see below) and store bought spicy kumera and redbean cakes.



Fresh Coconut with Lime

A good accompaniment to any curry.

1/2 fresh coconut
1 garlic clove
2 green chiles, seeded and chopped
juice of two limes
salt, to taste

Cut coconut flesh into strips with a vegetable peeler - this is a little tricky (watch you don't cut yourself!) but produces the thinest, silkiest flat ribbons.
Combine the remaining ingredients and pour them over the coconut strips. Toss lightly then let it marinate for 1 hour or more before serving.

How to get the Coconut out of its shell? Read my tips on Opening a Young Coconut

From there the vegetable peeler bit was rather tricky so just slice those ribbons carefully! If you're using a more mature coconut, then, um, I'll give you more instructions once I've tried that! I'm new to this whole cheap coconuts thing!

How to Open a Young Coconut

So how to get the coconut from the coconut? I had bought a young coconut with some but not all the outside trimmed off.


Using a good big knife, cut away much of the outer fibres. This step is probably optional, but for me, it helped me be able to crack the shell open - all that outside layer just protected the coconut shell from my attempts at hitting it!



Put coconut in a plastic bag with no holes (tie it to keep juice in!) and hit with a rolling pin or mallet. Be careful as the coconut may roll or bounce a bit, but when you're confident you're not going to injure yourself, just give it a really good whack - one decent whack will do it. 10 little hits will do nothing but dent the fibres on the outside.


As soon as you've cracked the coconut shell, carefully open bag and pour juice through a sieve into a jug and set aside.


It also turns out young coconuts have this superb jelly-like white flesh - there isn't as much of it but it is worth the effort now and again, I'd say. As the coconut was so young, I peeled the flesh from the inside of the shell with a flatish spoon.


I strained the juice through a sieve into a jug to enjoy in a cocktail later. Mmm-Hmm!

How To Fake French

I am TRYING to learn French, ok? I'm at that understanding more than I can speak stage (read: I can understand a few words here and there and can still barely string two words together). Despite living with Frenchmen, all I seem to have picked up are these 'listening noises' shown in this video. That really is how they roll!
A-puh!
Oh lala!
Oh la la la la!
Achhhhhhhh



By the way, just pretending to be French (doing a French accent when reading) helps me get the right pronunciation and also (a handy thing about English being such a magpie language) half the time I can just 'make up' French words by taking a likely English word and saying it as a French stereotype would.

And here's how to use Oh la la (so versatile!)

Gyoza in Lemongrass Broth

This soup with dumplings (the Japanese 'potsticker' kind, not the stodgy British kind) is just delicious and makes a filling meal. I always thought of 'broth' as something like watery healthful but bland meat stock for the infirm - not so in this recipe! We've been getting asparagus just recently in our organic delivery box (Australia has food in season at strange times, lucky us). If you want to make this when asparagus is not in season, use your imagination and substitute some other yummy veg like something from the broccoli family maybe.

By the way, it's easy (at least here) to grow lemongrass. I have a border of it doing well along the wall below the leaky gutter - perfect as lemongrass likes water which is a scarce resource here.

This recipe comes from a beaut book by Nicola Graimes called New Vegetarian Kitchen: Raw/Broil/Fry/Steam/Simmer/Bake. (Recipe is hers but photo is of my attempt; hers looked good too!)




1. First make the gyoza. Put the aduki beans, sesame oil and half the soy sauce in a bowl and mash lightly with the back of a fork, leaving some of the beans whole. Stir in the ginger, spring onions, garlic, cornflour and cabbage, Season with salt and pepper to taste and mix well.

2. Put 1 heaped tablespoon of the filling in the centre of a gyoza wrapper - you want the parcels to be as full as possible. Brush the edge of the wrapper with water, top with another wrapper and press the edges to seal. Set aside and repeat to make 11 more gyoza.












3. To make the lemongrass broth, put the stock, lemongrass and lime leaves, ginger, vegetarian fish sauce, lime juice and caster sugar in a large saucepan. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes. Strain the stock into a clean bowl, discarding the solids, and return broth to the saucepan. Add the remaining soy sauce, coconut milk and chilli and cook for another 5 minutes until slightly reduced and thickened. Season with salt and pepper.

4. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 70 degrees celsius / 150 fahrenheit and heat a griddle pan (I didn't know what one was so used a frying pan) over medium heat. Toss the asparagus in the sesame and sunflower oils and griddle it (fry) for 5-7 minutes, turning occasionally, until tender and charred in places. Transfer to an ovenproof plate and keep warm in the oven.

5. I fried the gyoza with just a little oil in a non-stick frying pan but the recipe suggests deep frying: To deep fry the gyoza, heat the remaining sunflower oil in a deep saucepan to 180 C / 350 F, or until a cube of bread turns golden in 40 seconds. Fry the gyoza, 3 at a time, for 2 minutes, turning once, until golden and puffed up. Remove, using a slotted spoon, and drain on kitchen paper. Transfer to an ovenproof plate and keep warm in the oven while you cook the remaining gyoza.

6. To serve, heat the lemongrass broth, if necessary, then ladle it into four large, shallow bowls. Sprinkle with coriander and put three gyoza in the centre of each bowl, slightly overlapping them. Arrange the asparagus on top and serve immediately.

One Second films

We can observe a surprising amount in one second. I remember the moment I realised I count to ten in less than ten seconds; a revelation.


Enjoy these seconds of beauty.

Seconds Of Beauty - 1st round compilation from The Beauty Of A Second on Vimeo.

So Dead Happy

You know when you're so happy you have to watch yourself for smugness setting in? Well the following song, chorused along to in the car road-tripping around the North Island, really grew on me with the lush speed of the rain-drenched NZ Spring. It's catchy. The verses turn out to be a little more grim than the impression I'd got from the song -which was soley based on its smug wee chorus - 'so dead happy'.
I was watching Seinfeld the other day (YEAH, it's related!) and it was that episode where George decides to bow out of any office meeting where he makes a joke that cracks people up. He figures (thanks to advice from Jerry) that by leaving the meeting immediately he'll go out on a a high note like a stand up comic before he can lose them again with another joke that won't hit the mark. Well that kind of 'that's it from me, folks' feeling hits me pleasantly when I hit the hay some nights - ok, not so much a feeling of WANTING that night to be my last, but just that if it WAS, I'm all happy with my life and could leave it there -je ne regrette a rien. No regrets.

I may sort of regret this long-winded introduction but for me feeling content with my life in the moment and in general brings a lot of that 'so dead happy' feeling.



Here, from the album 'The Woolshed Sessions' my sister gave me (and the only CD we had to listen to for much of our trip!) is Dead Happy performed by Andy Hummel and mates. Just try not to sway your head in the chorus!

Cave of Forgotten Dreams review

He ran away from the circus to become a scientist. One of the charming experts featured in The Cave of Forgotten Dreams was so moved by the experience of visiting the Chauvet Cave that it changed his life (he still LOOKED like a juggler though).
This film may not have outright changed my life but it did fill me with awe and inspire me to experiment with 3D cinematography - do the people have to look so flat? It also made me wonder about the ethics of inflicting confusing accents on audiences for extended periods of time. Not even so much accents as voices - the filmmaker, Warner Herzog has a distinctive slow, 'storyteller' style of narration. (Here I was thinking 'Plastic Bag' had had an affected voice for humour's sake).

For me, the experience of watching this film was like a fairytale education - relaxing in the darkness and getting absorbed in the magic of this underground world. For my boyfriend, it was a long drawn out struggle to stay awake - a real test of love! "But I enjoyed the first 45minutes" he assured me. Didn't he marvel at the last part where finally the narrator just left us to the cave to enjoy without his sleepy commentary? "Well, yeah but I was already tired by then - why couldn't they have had that quiet beautiful part at the beginning and THEN explained all about it?". The man at the theatre had wished us good luck because, personally, he hated it. "I was bagging it just now actually. The narration - how wanky!" Got to love his honesty. "But you know, you might love it if you're an anthropologist, or an archeologist or something - are you an archeologist?" I'm not but really, you don't have to be, it probably wouldn't be academically in depth enough for archeologists. I'm sure they, and most people watching this film, would love it though. If you're a movie 'buff' like our man at the cinema, you might not like it stylistically as a film, but you will be amazed by the beauty. Sparkling stalactites and stalagmites, formations I'd never seen hanging like curtains from the cave roof, the way the shapes and depth of the cave is rendered in 3D, and most of all, the grace and energy of the cave art and the powerful way the lighting was used to reveal it.

My boyfriend didn't feel he'd learnt that much but then he knew a bit about the caves already. I, on the other hand, was amazed even to discover there had once been rhinoceroses in Europe! I was also fascinated (and admittedly a bit disappointed) by the fact that there were so few signs of human life aside from the rock art. And was I the only one who couldn't see the depiction of the lower half of a woman? Perhaps none of the audience saw it - after all, my boyfriend was likely half asleep at that point and the only other people in the audience were two old and grey couples and perhaps the 3D glasses didn't sit well over their ordinary ones. Maybe I was the only one awake in the darkness, the tiny audience was as silent as the grave. I did like the end where I felt alone in the wonder of the cave, exploring by torchlight.

The part right at the end though, well! I think I'll leave you to make up your own mind what that wee director's add on was for? How shall we tie up this cave art documentary? How about dreaming doppelganger nuclear-albino crocodiles? Did the circus guy have a hand in this or is this just Herzog trying to mess with people who go stoned to 3D movies?