Pizza and wedges, or, why do I give Domino’s $25 for puke on bread?

Pizza and beer is the earthquake comfort food of choice here on Planet Portaloo, but our local takeaways fall into two categories – fallen down, or not quite good enough – and it’s easier to just make one from scratch. I am exceptionally impatient so I am not a big fan of yeast based dough as I poke at it and sniff it and get annoyed and cook it too early and then it tastes like concrete. No yeast doughs are better because they take little skill, fuck all ingredients, and very little time.

Thankfully, my time on the hospo front lines taught me a number of helpful things. I cooked at a cafe for a couple of years – it was the best of times (cooking all day, good workmates, excellent coffee, nice place), it was the worst of times (minimum wage, 12 hour shifts, asshole employers, carpal tunnel syndrome) – and pizzas were the best way to keep the cabinets filled over the very busy lunch rush as once you got a production line going they were bloody quick to put together. The first helpful thing was to never stay longer than your shift because of understaffing otherwise you’ll have done 17 hours and your boss will still think you are scum, just scum he can walk all over. The second was that everything belongs on pizzas.

Start with the base – you can season it if you’re feeling inventive. Then, sauce: chutney, tomato paste, hummus, anything gloopy. Then, a small amount of cheese. Then, anything (meat, veggies, leftover roast dinner, seeds, nuts, herbs, spices, pickled things). Then, more cheese. Then, more sauce if you want it, plus cracked pepper. Then, cook. For a dessert pizza use cream cheese mixed with brown sugar and cinnamon as the sauce, topped with sliced bananas and stewed fruits or berries, then sprinkle with nuts and brown sugar and chocolate oh yeah chocolate.

No Yeast Pizza Dough

I am pretty sure I found this recipe online somewhere but I have no idea. Either way, it’s a good recipe and seeing as it’s now in my handwritten cookbook, the rules of the kitchen qualify it as mine.

• 2 ½ cups flour
• 2 ¾ teaspoons of baking powder and a generous pinch of salt OR 1½ teaspoons baking soda
• 1 ½  tablespoons oil
• Up to 1 cup of cold water
• A little extra flour for dusting
• Optional extras: a few pinches of dried herbs like oregano or rosemary, a small handful of grated or dried parmesan cheese

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Combine the dry ingredients (including the optional extras) in a bowl. Make a well in the middle and add the oil and 3/4c of the water. Stir until it forms a ball, adding a little more water if it’s too stiff and adding a little more flour if it’s too sticky. When the dough is nice and soft, sprinkle a clean surface (like a sheet of baking paper or a chopping board) with a little flour and knead the dough for 3 or 4 minutes. Roll the dough out into your pizza shape – if you don’t have a rolling pin then wrap a wine bottle or other sturdy bottle with glad wrap and use that instead, being careful not to press too hard thereby killing your friends with glass shards in their food. Put the rolled out dough on a baking tray that you’ve sprinkled with flour (stops it sticking, see). Add your toppings, then cook for around 20 minutes or until you’re happy with how everything is looking.

Serve with garlic bread, wedges, and beer.

Spicy wedges

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Take three or four large potatoes and slice them into wedges, like you would an orange - 8 wedges per big spud seems to work well.  Put a very light coating of oil on a tray or roasting dish (the spray stuff is good). Take the wedges and put them into a clean, intact supermarket shopping bag. In a little bowl, mix up your flavourings – I use a tablespoon of flour and a tablespoon of soft brown sugar to start, then a couple of big pinches of cumin and paprika, a pinch of rosemary, a teaspoon of chicken stock power, a bit of pepper, and (if you’re Mr Longbean) a bucketload of chilli for flavour. 

Splash some oil over the wedges in their bag, then add the mixed up flavours, and shake it all about. Arrange the wedges skin side down (if they balance) then cook for 20 minutes – you can use a baking tray, but I scored an enamel roasting dish at Briscoes in one of their ridiculous sales a while back and now I prefer to use that as you can be a bit messier. Shake them around a bit, then cook for as long as it takes for them to look like they are done. (Your mileage may vary.)

A word about ovens: firstly, check that they are empty before you turn them on. This is a burny, smelly lesson you only need to learn once. Or maybe twice. The Very Important Thing to remember is that if your oven is fan forced, you need to drop the cooking temperature by 20 degrees or you’ll end up with something, at best, crispified, or at worst, carcinogenic.

Basic Bolognese, or, dear students of the world, please stop killing a classic

I was in large part inspired to write this column having flatted with someone who honest to god couldn’t cook (you know who you are). He mostly lived off of bananas, packet porridge, takeaways and Nescafe, and the only things that I ever saw him cook from scratch in nearly two years of living together were boiled potatoes (with broccoli!) and something he termed his ‘signature dish’, an unappealing mushy mess called ‘special mince and pasta –with broccoli!’ Suffice it to say I was perturbed that someone could be ten years out of home and still not be able to cook something that looked remotely edible. Finally, when my flatmate admitted that he was a lost cause, I felt compelled to try to save others from this culinary fate.

For those of you who also have this sort of institutional slop high on your flat menu, THERE IS A WAY OUT. Spend a bit of time mastering a basic meat sauce: it is easily up- or downscaled, freezes incredibly well, is an excellent lasagne sauce, and if done right is cheaper than the boring preservative-filled stuff from the supermarket. Here are some tricks of the trade:

• Patience, grasshopper - the bolognese disasters I encountered (or enacted) as an undergrad largely related to cooking time – cooking this sort of thing quickly results in a watery, slightly astringent sauce, but being patient when simmering it gives a rich concentrated flavour that shits all over anything you’ll find in a jar. I used to make a stock pot full on a Sunday, when I knew I’d be home, let it feed me for a few days and then freeze the rest.
• Tomatoes – the cheapest brand is usually fine, but all not brands are created equal so check the percent of tomatoes vs water / filler. I prefer diced to whole.
• Mince – if you’re buying beef mince, which is easily the cheapest, try buying a little higher than the bottom rung. Cheap mince contains a lot of fat so it shrinks substantially and stays quite greasy, which can alter the taste and texture in an unpleasant way. Ultimately, you’ll get more bang for your buck if you buy something a little more expensive.
• Pasta - cook it in as much lightly salted water as you can, in the largest pot you can. If you’re making it beforehand, drain it in a colander (that bowl thing with the holes in), rinse it with cold water to cool it down and stop it from sticking, and then tip a jug of boiling water back over it when you are ready to serve. 

Bolognese / meat sauce

Staples

• Oil
• 2-3 cloves of garlic
• As many brown onions as you like (minimum: one)
• 500gm mince from the animal of your choosing (or more or less depending on greediness levels)
• 2 – 3 cans of diced tomatoes 

Optional extras

• Half a glass of cheap red wine or dark beer – real beer!
• An oxo cube, crumbled
• Dried herbs (oregano, rosemary, a couple of whole dried bay leaves)
• A big squirt or spoonful of tomato paste
• A few dashes of Worcestershire sauce or a big spoon of marmite

Peel and dice the garlic. Cut up the onion – top and tail it, then remove the outer skin, and chop it up however small you like. Heat a splash of oil in a large pot, and cook the onions and garlic over a low heat. Don’t go fast – the aim is to get them looking nice, soft and transparent, not crispified.

Turn up the heat a little then add the mince, breaking it up as quickly as you can with a wooden spoon. Cook it until it’s nicely browned and looks crumbly. If you’ve bought cheap mince, then now is the time to drain off the fat that’s escaped so as to avoid slimy gloop for dinner– carefully pour it into a cup or bowl without losing half your dinner into the sink (a good life skill) and dispose of it later.

Add the tomatoes and as many of the flavoursome extras as you feel like. Gently simmer (don’t boil!) the sauce for at least 30 – 45 minutes, but preferably a couple of hours, stirring occasionally to make sure it’s not burning. It will reduce down substantially, and if you’re worried about it being a little thick then add half a can of water or stock, or a bit more wine or beer. Taste it, season it with salt and pepper if needed, and serve with pasta.

P.S. Don’t eat the bay leaves.

Variations

5+ a day: this sort of thing is perfect for sneaky veggies. Add fresh or frozen veggies while the sauce is simmering, or fry up mushrooms with the onion and garlic. The earlier you add them the squishier they’ll be. For vegetarians, omit the meat, or replace it with a meat substitute or lentils, and add in anything else you prefer while simmering the tomatoes.

Chilli: swap out some of the tomatoes for a can or two of drained red kidney beans (cheap) or chilli beans (not as cheap but already flavoured). Add some cumin, cayenne or ground chilli, and paprika. Serve with rice or on nachos.

A word about herbs and spices: if you’re on a budget, or starting your kitchen from scratch, then buying a bunch of herbs, spices, sauces, and other such flavourings can be an exercise in expenditure. However, good seasoning can make even the crappiest student slop palatable. A helpful way around this is to put aside a couple of bucks for something every time you go shopping, rather buying it all in one go or as you need it. Figure out what you like the best – if you bake a lot, then cinnamon, nutmeg, mixed spice, ginger, vanilla essence and cassia (cinnamon’s angrier cousin); if you like Italian, then basil, oregano, marjoram, thyme, and rosemary; if you like Mexican, then cumin, oregano, paprika, garlic powder and dried chillies, and so on. If you’re confused, check out the ingredients on a premade spice mix you already like and buy them separately - not that there’s anything wrong with the spice mixes themselves, they just are expensive, have a lot of filler and don’t really allow for creativity. Even better, grow your own.

Sweet stuff for the cooks who can’t cook

Just because you’re lazy, have no proper oven, or are culinarily challenged, doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to have something nice in your lunch box or to impress your new hottie lab partner. No bake slices tick all the boxes for the nascent student baker – there’s some melting of stuff, some smooshing of stuff, and a whole bunch of smashing of stuff. If you don’t have a food processor or blender to destroy your biscuits, then put them in a clean plastic shopping bag, put that in another plastic bag, take the air out of them, then wrap it all up in a tea towel or similar and beat the crap out of it with a rolling pin or hammer. If you don’t have a fridge, well, good luck to you.

One of the dangers of opening a can of sweetened condensed milk is that it tastes incredibly nice and will likely get eaten (ie, licked off of grubby fingers) if it’s not all used up. The preferred solutions in the Longbean house are to either double the recipe and die a happy, albeit diabetes-tinged death, or make two different things, feel productive, and make visitors feel domestically inferior. Otherwise, you can mix the leftovers with an equal part of vinegar and a little mustard for a sweet coleslaw dressing. An awful looking American cooking website tells me that it is a key ingredient in something called a ‘chocolate glazed cookie pizza’ but I am not quite ready to switch sides on the war on obesity just yet.

Lollie cake

This is the root cause of many children’s birthday party sugar comas, and seems to be a rare example of kiwi ‘cuisine’ that hasn’t been pinched from somewhere else or argued over for decades. I can say with relative certainty that Sir Ernest Rutherford, Kate Sheppard, and Sir Edmund Hillary were fuelled to succeed by the heady combination of crushed malt biscuits and sickly sweet milk.  If you haven’t made your own before, give it a try, even if it is just so you can see that bought lollie cake really is crap.

Fruit puffs disappeared for a while, but Pams now does them and you can buy them in bulk from Bin Inn. For those of a more adventurous bent, try using plain chocolate or spiced biscuits, or experiment with different lollies, as long as they are fairly soft – may I recommend RJ’s soft red licorice.

• 120g butter (approx half a cup)
• ½ can (200g) sweetened condensed milk
• A squirt of golden syrup (optional)
• One packet (180g) of fruit puffs or Eskimos
• One packet (250g) of malt biscuits smashed as small as you can manage
• 1 teaspoon of cinnamon (also optional)
• Dessicated coconut (to roll)
• Waxed paper (helpful)

Cut up the lollies into small bits, and smash up the biscuits until they are totally crushed.

Put the sweetened condensed milk, the butter and the syrup in a pan (for the stovetop) or in a large glass bowl (if you’re using a microwave). Slowly melt them together, stirring regularly, until they are completely combined – don’t boil!  Remove from the heat, then add the biscuits, lollies and cinnamon and stir until it’s a big mess.

Here you have options. If you want to make kiwi grandmothers across the nation proud, take a long sheet of wax paper, sprinkle some coconut on it, and form / roll the cake mess into a log on the paper (good time to use latex gloves, see?). Sprinkle it with more coconut, pat it down a bit, wrap it up and refrigerate til firm and slice. To get a bit flash on it, you could roll it into truffle-like balls, or form it into little minicakes.

Mix and match refrigerator slice, or, truffles for dummies 

(for those who like to pretend that lollie cake is passé)

This is essentially the same recipe, but without the lollies, and easier to modify – it’s like a choose your own adventure, but with cake. Try: chocolate and Milo, or rum and raisin, or apricot and orange, or lemon and white chocolate.

Basic mix:

• 1 packet (250ish grams) of plain biscuits, smashed into coarse pieces (super wines, digestives, malt biscuits, plain chocolate biscuits)
• 125g butter
• ½ can sweetened condensed milk
• 1/4c brown sugar (only for those with a serious sweet tooth)

Flavoursome things:

• 1 cup of stuff – chopped up dried fruit, sultanas, chocolate chips, soft nuts (like walnuts), sweets, whatever
• Other extras, depending on your flavours: some orange or lemon zest and a big squeeze of juice, a few tablespoons of liqueur, 2 tablespoons of cocoa power, 1/4c Milo powder, cinnamon, a teaspoon of vanilla, whatever.

As above, melt together the sweetened condensed milk and the butter, add all the other ingredients, and stir. You can make a log or balls, or you can press it into pretty much any sort of dish, as long as it is either lightly greased with butter or lined with baking paper, otherwise you will be chipping it out. If you’re being tidy, use a baking tin and make it nice and even. Stick it in the fridge. Eat it.

If you want to add a topping before you put it in to cool, you can use chopped nuts, or melted chocolate, or desiccated coconut. Keen beans can make their own icing by combining 2 cups of icing sugar, about 100g of very soft or melted butter, a splash of milk, and whatever flavourings you like. Experimentation is good for the soul, if not for the stomach.

A word about butter: these sorts of recipes are great for those of you who like to, er, make your own butter but who don’t do much cooking or baking. You might find that things with stronger flavours – like chocolate, or booze, or chocolate and booze – taste the best.  Just remember to make things bite sized or you will, ahem, get too full too quickly, and that’s not fun for anyone, let alone the purple monkey hanging from the ceiling.

Cheaper than a coke and a steak and cheese pie

Unless you’re being fed by the halls, or you still have your parents making your lunch for you (it’s more common than you think, look for the neatly labelled gladwrap parcels and the crusts cut off), then you are going to discover pretty quickly that buying food at uni every day is expensive, time consuming and often an utter disappointment. On the other hand, bringing stuff from home can be a bit dispiriting, especially if you’re living in the student slums and all your spare money is going on Double Brown. Handily, potatoes are dead cheap, fairly tasty, and easy to prepare.

I first learned how to make stuffed potatoes in form 1 manual training, which I guess would be called something namby-pamby like ‘millennial food technology for young adults’ now, and be an option rather than something you had to do (or sit in the library with the dorky kids who didn’t get their slips signed). Upon reflection, lots of the things I learned how to make there I still use (muffins, muesli, mysteriously combusting pizzas), so good work Mrs Whatshername at Cobham Intermediate, skills for life and all. The best thing about doing cooking was that everyone else in the bus wanted to be your friend on the way back to school – an early lesson that people like people who can feed them nice food.

Baking potatoes in the oven is time consuming, and not always great for the power bill, but in fairness, if it’s the middle of winter, you’re probably already using the oven as a heater anyway. You can pre-bake potatoes in the microwave, with about 5 – 7 minutes per potato, but as microwave ovens vary significantly you might have to experiment a bit. Unfortunately oven baked potatoes taste amazing and microwave cooked potatoes taste a bit rubbish, so you’ll have to figure out where your priorities lie. If your potatoes are still a bit firm in the middle and slightly bitter tasting they’re not cooked properly (hello, potato bar in the main cafe) – you want them to be almost sweet and a little bit mushy. If, after they’ve cooled, the spuds have shrunk a bit and the skin looks a little loose, you’ve done well.

Stuffed potatoes (makes 8)

4 large potatoes, washed and pricked with a fork a few times (to stop them from exploding)

Bake them at 190degrees for about an hour, or until they feel a little squishy. If you’re organised, do this a few hours beforehand or the day before to allow the spuds time to cool down – it makes scooping out their innards much easier.

Slice your cooked potatoes in half lengthways, so that each half sits nicely and flattish by itself. Scoop the cooked potato out, being careful not to break the skins, and put it all in a bowl. Mash it up a bit.

Add to the mash:

• 1 onion, skinned and chopped into little bits
• 1 can creamed corn (or chilli beans or whatever takes your fancy)
• a handful of grated cheese – resist the urge to put in heaps, it goes gloopy

To flash it up a bit, you could add any of the following (bearing in mind that you don’t want so much filling that the spuds explode):

• Veggies: chopped mushroom, finely diced or grated courgette, chopped tomato (preferably with the seeds removed, they go soggy), a clove or two of crushed or sliced garlic 
• Meat: chopped bacon, chopped ham, a little can of tuna, chopped leftovers or mystery meat, but definitely nothing uncooked 
• Herbs, spices and condiments: some dried or fresh parsley, coriander (Watch out, it’s potent), basil, oregano, marjoram, cumin, paprika, cracked pepper, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, or a big squirt of sweet chilli sauce

Mix up your mash, then fill up your eight potato cases. While spoons are great and all, it’s easiest to use your (impeccably clean) hands or use gloves so you can pack it in tight and make the top nice and round. Sprinkle some cheese on top and place your potatoes on a baking sheet or (preferably) a roasting pan (good for spillage). Cook at 190 degrees until they are warmed through, or the cheese is nice and melty – anywhere from 15 – 30 minutes depending on how overboard you’ve gone. These store in the fridge well for a few days, especially if you wrap them up individually.

A word about latex gloves: laugh all you like over naughty nursey or poofinger jokes, latex gloves are some of the best things to have in your kitchen or bathroom. You can buy boxes of them in the supermarket, but don’t buy the lemon fresh ones unless you want your food to taste like air freshener. I use them for cleaning, or for things like stuffing chickens, playing with messy raw meat, scooping out muffins, cutting things that stain, like beetroot, or in this case filling potatoes. For extra fun, try them while clearing the drain or cleaning up the cat’s latest love-gift.