Dukkah, asparagus & hot smoked salmon potato salad – loaded with pomegranate, hazelnut dukkah, fresh parsley and mint, and chunks of avocado.  Jump to Recipe 

I’ve spent the weekend making layers and layers of tender buttermilk chocolate cake (eleven, to be precise), dressed up in the fudgiest, smoothest, darkest chocolate frosting I’ve ever made, thanks to Thalia (and yes, it’s worth all those superlatives). So much cake that by Saturday evening I would have been happy not to see any again for a week, with chocolate-coated dishes piling up in the hot kitchen, over-heated by our poorly insulated oven, and that sickly sweet mouth-feel from taste testing for much of the day.  But then I woke up this morning – to a clean kitchen – and realised that’s a complete lie. Give me a 24 hour break and I’ll be right back on the chocolate wagon.

I’m lucky my family puts up with the constant clatter and whir of the stand mixer, the lack of available surfaces in the kitchen, and (for my brothers), seeing masses of cake pass through the house without having access to any of it. Though the boys did get to scrape out the bowl a couple of times – it was the least I could do. This week I’m also starting the Christmas mince tarts for the season – packed with sultanas, dried apricots, prunes, mixed peel and chunks of dark chocolate, all laced with spices and a deluge of brandy. If anyone is in Auckland and wants to put in an order for fruit mince tarts or Christmas party cakes, send me a message!

To me, summer in New Zealand is synonymous with outdoor dinners and barbecues. Our Christmas is a lighter affair too, with barbecued lamb and spatchcocked chicken, Ottolenghi-style salads and icy cold desserts and pavlovas having a firm place on the table. I’ve never been a huge potato salad fan: it used to bring to mind flashes of pot-luck offerings of sun-warmed mushy potatoes, coated in heavy store-bought mayonaise and topped with a couple of green-tinged hardboiled eggs. BLEUGH. It was the summer potluck salad option I would always bypass – along with maybe the mayo-coated coleslaw. Instead, this summer I’ll be making this vietnamese green mango slaw, and today’s dukkah, asparagus & hot smoked salmon potato salad.

The counter point to the heights of December decadence, it uses crisp fresh spring asparagus and just-tender new potatoes. It’s studded with bright jewels and bursts of pomegranate and loaded with parsley, mint and zesty lemon. Chunks of creamy avocado meld with the burnished orange streams of egg yolk, and the hazelnut dukkah provides both crunch and extra flavour. It’s worth making your own dukkah – this recipe makes about 1 and a half cups, and you can use it in countless ways. Lately I’ve sprinkled it on eggs of all kinds, smashed butternut & feta toast, homemade hummus, smoky baba ganoush, and every kind of grilled vegetable, to name a few.

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A fast, easy weeknight stir-fry – an easy miso ginger marinade is used to coat salmon, roast broccoli and eggplant, then meld it all together with soba noodles and edamame.  Jump to Recipe

I have this strange feeling at the moment of simultaneously wanting time to speed up, skip ahead to next weekend already, and wanting it to just slooow right on down. It’s that end of semester atmosphere, where it seems like you are suddenly accelerating out of control down a steep hill, desperately trying to gain some control while also conscious that the only way for it to finish is to get the bottom, preferably asap. I guess you could compare it to the rush before Christmas?

Next Saturday a friend and I pack our bags and head to Cambodia and Vietnam – a couple of weeks of exploring Angkor Wat, experiencing the craziness of Phnom Penh, eating our way through the street food of Saigon, taking part in cooking classes in Hoi An, and market shopping like a local in Hanoi. And relaxing, hopefully. I can’t wait for the lack of actually having things scheduled! But also the fresh herbs and zingy fish sauce-lime dressings, the exposure to a multitude of new Vietnamese and Cambodian dishes, the humidity and heat (extremely over 3°C Melbourne mornings), and just generally adventuring through new cities and meeting new people. Be prepared for many photos, and many new South-East Asian inspired recipes.

The to-do list before then is insane, however. Exams are next week and I’m behind on blog posts, so it is a crazy race of keeping up with medicine, keeping up the blog (and trying to think of, make and photograph another successful, quick recipe!), keeping up with life and sleep, and getting things finalised for the trip. Literally a hamster on a treadmill right now. Today was leaving in the dark for 745 wardrounds,  in theatre in the morning, then tutorials, editing these photos in the gaps, driving home again in the dark, and finally typing this up before I try to convince myself to go to swim training…but it is an outdoor pool and dark and cold and that is very much up in the air at this stage. This is why exercising in the morning is easiest for me – no chances to talk myself out of it!

This miso salmon, eggplant & soba noodle stirfry is ideal at the moment. It’s on the table in 20-30 minutes, depending on your speediness, and packed with healthy chunks of seared salmon, roasted broccoli and eggplant. Half way between a teriyaki sauce and a miso dressing, the marinade is thrown together in the jar with soy sauce, mirin, white miso, fresh ginger and sesame oil and used for the salmon, broccoli, eggplant and the final stir-fry stage. Pretty it up with spring onions, edamame and toasted sesame seeds at the end, and you are good to go. And it heats up well as next day leftovers – what more could you ask for?,It’s not as elaborate as the apple-walnut tarts with miso butterscotch, or as WOW as these thai brioche fish burgers with green mango & papaya slaw…but I would be seriously impressed if you pulled the latter off on a busy weeknight, put it that way!

Hopefully next week I will sound slightly more put together, and a little less stressed – but in the meantime, if anyone has any tips for Vietnam and Cambodia – an out-of-the-way restaurant to try, a guide to get in touch with, a hotel we should stay at – let me know.

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A realisation of the past week: eating well on a budget is not as impossible as I imagined before moving out. The misconception probably stemmed from formerly doing supermarket shopping for a family of six, all armed with large appetites, eating meat every night and not actively trying to cut costs. I was vaguely concerned that I would move out and have to subsist on slightly more lackluster meals, avoiding herbs, fish, and non-minced red meat and losing ingredients like ground almonds, dark chocolate and cream cheese in my baking. Couldn’t have been more wrong, really.

Stocking up on basics at the start helps: your fish sauce, soy sauce, spices, pomegranate molasses, tahini, pearl barley, rice, ginger, vinegar and oils. Buying what’s on special is huge – for example, in this meal you can use whatever greens you like. Grow your own herbs (our is a work in progress!) and you could save at least $5 a day. Hummus has become a staple in our house- for the price of a $1 can of chickpeas, a squeeze of lemon and a clove of garlic, I have something to go with lunch for the week, or a protein source for a middle-eastern inspired dinner. Judicious use of left-overs is absolutely key – make slightly more dinner and you have covered another meal in lunch the next day. Buy ciabatta when it is on sale at the end of the day and keep it in the freezer, or make your own bagels for an eighth of the price. It also helps that three girls don’t tend to eat quite as much as my three teenage brothers!

So much easier than I originally assumed. Coffee is something I continue to fork out for, however. Getting accustomed to Dad’s home-roasted beans and cafe-worthy espresso machine over summer means I have turned into a bit of a coffee snob, I have to admit.

With university often not finishing up until 6pm, dinners like this are necessities. I made up these teriyaki salmon bowls with sesame greens and avocado after a rare lunch out with Mum over summer at the recently opened &Sushi in Auckland. One of the more unique Japanese fit-outs around, it offers non-traditional takes on sushi and donburi with more of a health-food angle – the menu includes quinoa and sweet potato, purple rice is present in spades, and sushi garnishes include edible flowers and strawberry slices. Restaurant and cafe meals are one of my favourite sources of inspiration – I find it difficult to turn off the side of my brain that is constantly considering the components and ingredients, and how I could recreate them or change them up. The teriyaki salmon bowl we ate was a prime example.

Sticky, sweet teriyaki sauce coats tender seared salmon fillets on a bed of sushi rice and crispy-edged greens sautéed in sesame oil. Extra texture in the form of scattered spring onion, nori, toasted sesame seeds, avocado wedges and a drizzle of extra teriyaki sauce finish it off. AND it is healthy, packed with flavour, fast and budget friendly (if that doesn’t stretch to salmon, chicken thighs are almost as good).

The teriyaki sauce ingredients will last for ages, so after you have made it once, you won’t need to buy them again for a while. The sauce takes 5 minutes – all you do is boil them together in a pot. Buy whatever greens are cheap: use your leftover zucchini and broccoli sitting in the fridge, or if asparagus and snow peas happen to be in season, use them. Go crazy and use a mix of them all if you want. Add cabbage and green beans, and splurge on an avocado (there is a shortage of the latter in Melbourne currently, pushing the price up to about $3 each, so avocados are bought sparingly and used carefully around here!).

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Right now it is hot. Extremely hot. Like, sticky, sweaty, way-too-hot-to-turn-an-oven-on-just-need-water hot. Days like this have been frequent since Christmas – unusual for Auckland, where they ordinarily seem (to me, anyway) to occur only a few times a year. This summer has definitely outdone itself. However, I clearly have not been looking at the forecast and taking my own advice: bread dough was made last night, is currently rising in the fridge, and will be made this evening into pizzas. Though I am sure they will be delicious, all I can think about is that I will need to crank up the oven as hot as possible – SO not ideal. Days like today call for these instead – beautiful, cool, no-oven-required, corn, avocado and salmon tortillas.
I got my planning wrong and made these tacos two nights ago, on an evening with wind chill cold enough to force our outdoor dinner inside – perfect pizza weather, in other words. Anyway, you should try these tonight. Or tomorrow. Or any other day, to be perfectly honest. The perfect mix of rich and crispy blackened salmon, creamy avocado and juicy summer corn, all offset by a chilli lime tomato salsa on homemade barbecue tortillas – what is not to love?!
The tomato salsa can be made ahead, as can the corn salad. The tortillas are much easier than they look, and will thoroughly impress with how much better they are than any store bought tortilla ever was, while the salmon is coated with cajun spices and barbecued briefly to crisp the outside while remaining meltingly tender on the inside.
The recipe is inspired from various sources: the tomato salsa adapted from an Anyway, after all these photos and trying desperately to describe its deliciousness (which I think is impossible and I am starting to gush so will stop now), all I can say is MAKE THESE. You will not regret it.

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