Fried eggs and green bananas

Multi-tasking. I think I've proven today that I am just as adept at this as any other woman.

• I drank a cup of tea while drying my hair and running late for uni. 
• I weighed up the pros and cons of borrowing a couple of lemons off a tree from a garden down the street while crossing the road without being struck by a car. (And no, I'm doing going to steal their fruit, even under the cover of darkness, though it's awfully tempting). 
• I cooked dinner while setting off the smoke alarm.
• And right now I'm typing a blog entry while watching a cheesy romantic comedy, drinking a Pisco sour, staring at the pile of washing I should be folding and putting off doing the washing up.

Speaking of Pisco sours, if there's a better way of using raw egg white, I haven't discovered it yet. 

On that note, the bottle's just about empty so if anyone knows where I can find Pisco in New Zealand, I'm all ears. 

I cooked a typical Peruvian meal tonight hence the Pisco sour for afters. Rice, fried green bananas and egg makes a simple and substantial meal that is sold in most cheap restaurants in Peru and better yet is normally the most budget friendly item on the menu. 

To jazz up the rice you can make tacu tacu instead. It's rice fried with beans and served in a pattie-shaped mound on the plate. In Peru it's one of the many ways of serving up the same chicken and rice but with a different name. 

There were no white beans in the pantry so I used chickpeas. I also switched out yellow chili sauce for chili powder. 

Here's the recipe:

• Boil white rice then drain it. 
• Fry one diced onion in a generous splosh of oil. Add the chili powder. 
• Add the cooked rice and beans to the pan. Stir fry on a high heat until it starts to get a bit of a brown skin. 
• While that's cooking in another pan fry chopped green banana in oil (one per person).
• Dish up the rice mixture (the tacu tacu) - like a big pancake-like pattie. Put the green banana on the side. 
• Quickly fry up one or two eggs per person and pile them on top.
• Enjoy.

Mine doesn't look all that pretty or taste as authentic as the real deal from a cheap roadside diner but it's filling and tasty enough. 

The proper recipe is in this great Peruvian cookbook The Food & Cooking of Peru by Flor Arcaya de Deliot that I plan to slowly cook my way through - a bit of a Julie Powell style challenge. It might take me a while to pluck up the courage to cook the tripe dishes though!

typical breakfast of spicy sausage and patacones
(fried banana) in Tarapoto, Peru

tacu tacu with chicken in Huanchaco, Peru

A square for Christchurch

Just because I have a million and one projects on the go already, doesn't mean I can't cast on another, right?!

I'm about to start knitting a square. Oooh a square - how exciting does that sound? Well this one square is going to be part of a cosy big enough to cover a SHIPPING CONTAINER which makes it just a little bit more bad ass. 

Down in Christchurch they've had to put a line of shipping containers at the bottom of a hillside to protect people and property from further rockfall due to the earthquakes. Some clever person saw these in all their ugliness and though, hey why don't we jazz it up a bit and knit it a cosy?. As far as ideas go, I think this one is pretty darn awesome. 

They need squares of any pattern and colour - they just have to be 30x30cm. The details are on their Facebook page. (Hopefully that link works - otherwise just search container love on Facebook). 

Right I'd better get cracking if I want to get this square started before I have to hit the hay.

Sassy snapper

There are not many meals I enjoy more than beer battered snapper. 

D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S

Normally I use a lager but I had sassy red in the fridge and it so sassy it was.
Served with cheesy pea mash.

Lazy dinners

What do you do on those nights when you just can't be bothered cooking? Takeaways? Beans on toast? Or throw together something incredibly simple with ingredients you always have on hand?

Tonight's been one of those nights for me. Therefore dinner is one of the simplest meals in my repertoire - spag bol, the meatless kind.

Serves around 4 people

Put 2 pots of water on the stove top to boil. In one, boil 1 1/2 cups red lentils for 8-10 minutes. The other is for the pasta (used 1/2 bag budget spaghetti - that's 30 whole cents worth).

Chop a couple of cloves of garlic and one onion. Fry in a little oil. Then add the lentils, a can of tinned tomatoes, tomato paste, soy sauce, vegetable stock, worchestershire sauce, salt & pepper, dried herbs and either a little water or red wine. Chuck in any vegetables sitting in the fridge or freezer - tonight's had capsicum, frozen veges  and handful of baby spinach stirred through at the end. Top with cheese and voila, a cheap, easy and healthy meal that took bugger all time to prepare.

It's just missing the meat, really. The original recipe can be found on the Healthy Food Guide website. It was in the first issue I ever bought which has been well thumbed as it tells you all about how to cook pulses and beans  which saves a bundle being able to buy them dry rather than in a tin.

One flag + one scared cat = one bottle of chili sauce

It's quite difficult to hold a cat in one hand and take a photo with the other... all in pursuit of getting a picture to win a bottle of Hot! Samoan Boys Chili Sauce. Don't worry mum, I haven't bought a cat, I've just stolen the neighbours'.

 

A freak hailstorm to break the monotony of a quiet day at work

Lucky I had my camera stashed in my bag today, because this is the view I had from the kitchen at work. So much hail, it nearly looks like snow! It was such a quiet day that we nipped outside to take some photos and back in again without neglecting any customers, or burning anything! 

I also booked myself in for a haircut (and blonde highlights) this Friday. It's actually been nearly 2 years since I paid for a haircut and my gosh, did it always cost so much?! $130 (more than a weeks rent - eek!) and no student discounts either. Ah well, this week it is 6 months since I shaved my head to raise funds for a cancer charity and let me tell you, 6 months of hair growth = mini mullet. It will be money well spent! 

 

Postcard from Wellington: Te Papa Tongarewa

Well there is a new exhibition at Te Papa and it is AWESOME! 

I was lucky enough to head along for free the other night after going to a (also free) lecture series where I learnt all about chicken DNA and all sorts of other interesting things linking Polynesians to South America - in a 'they sailed there in their boats, dropping off some chooks and bringing back a few baskets of kumara' kind of way. So interesting. I'll see if I can find a link to post to some of the research being done; it's been on the news a bit recently. It's a new frontier of Pacific research which was what the themes of the lectures were all about. 

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/06/070604-chickens.html

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/people-pacific/matisoo-ask-expert

http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/hawaiian/voyaging/pvs/rapanui/mapuche.html

Anyway the Oceania exhibition is wonderful. The pieces on display are beautiful, interesting, amazing, thought-provoking (in a how-the-heck-do-they-weave-that-massive-ie-toga-1mm-thin sense)..... 

I particularly loved the warrior body armour from Kiribati complete with puffer fish helmet. 

The plan for this weekend is to see the sister exhibition at the City Gallery and perhaps hit the Frank Kitts market if I can keep my wallet in my pocket, and only stroke and fawn over the yarny goodness on display. Actually, probably best to leave my wallet at home. I have no self-restraint when it comes to knitting yarn and way too big of a stash already!

Hmm I believe it's grown since these photos were taken about 6 weeks ago. Whoops! Bring on November and uni-free knitting time.