Harvest pie, or, pastry is your ally in the war against hypothermia

The fresher ten happens for a reason – it’s your body’s way of protecting you and your vital organs from the cold and the damp in that ice box you call a flat as your body suffers through the shock of leaving your family home (just don’t start believing the lie that moving back home is a great idea). Being a student in winter sucks, so for the rest of the term these columns will look at filling, dense winter food, and will lead up to an epic Midwinter Christmas feast complete with boozy, creamy eggnog (in bulk). Start taking notes.

My mum used to make this freeform pumpkin and feta pie (oo fancy) when I was little and it ticks all of the winter comfort food boxes – cheap stodgy vegetables, cheese, pastry – and can be kept simple or flashed up depending on your preferred wank factor. Under perfect conditions, the onions caramelise and leak lovely sweet sticky goo out the holes in the pastry. It all needs a bit of organisation, and you still might need to wear your overcoat indoors, but this will warm up your puku. While the oven’s hot bake some potatoes and a crumble, for you are truly a kitchen deity.

Harvest pie

• One block of ready made puff pastry (or prerolled if you’re feeling lazy, but you might have to join the sheets together)
• 500g (ish) pumpkin
• 1 big onion (or more)
• 2 cloves of garlic (or more)
• ¼ cup white rice (uncooked)
• 1 egg
• A small block of feta (not the creamy stuff) – only use half a block if you find it a bit strong
• Oil, pepper

Getting sorted: Preheat the oven to 220°C. Prepare the pumpkin -  remove the seeds, cut off the skin, and chop the pumpkin into pieces (about the size of half an ice cube). Dice the onion and peel then chop the garlic – I usually use heaps more than asked for.  Parboil (halfway cook) the white rice – put it in a smallish bowl or jug with about half a cup of boiling water and microwave it for 5 minutes; drain it and let it cool. In another bowl , whisk up the egg. On a clean, floured surface, roll out your pastry into a something resembling a big circle. Place it on a baking tray ready to go – you can flour the tray or lay down some baking paper if you’re worried about things sticking. Have a beer, you’ve been very organised, well done.

Cooking things: Heat a splash of oil in a large frying pan and over a moderate heat cook the onion and garlic until they are tender and beginning to go a little transparent. Add the pumpkin and cook until it’s beginning to go tender – give it a poke with a wooden spoon, and if the outside is a bit mushy and the inside is still a bit firm, you’re pretty much there. Take it off the heat and let it cool slightly. Mix the egg and parboiled rice together – yes, this sounds gross, but it acts as a binder and you won’t notice it once everything’s cooked.

Assembling things: Using nice clean hands, crumble the feta over the top of the pumpkin and give it a quick stir. Add the eggy rice mix, season well with pepper and mix everything together. (You probably won’t need any salt, the cheese is salty as it is.) Pile the whole lot into the middle of your pastry. Gently bring the rest of the pastry up over the filling, joining the edges together as you go – you should get a lumpy roundish pie with a bit of a hole in the middle. Poke the pastry all over with a fork. If you have milk and a pastry brush to hand, give the pie a bit of a glaze.

Baking things: Bake for ten minutes at 220°C, then lower the temperature to 180°C and cook until it’s done. This can take anywhere from 30 – 45 minutes, depending on how thin the pastry is. If it’s a nice golden brown, and looking flaky and a bit puffed up, you’re pretty much set. If you want to colour coordinate your meal, it works well with baked spuds and corn on the cob.

Extras: if you like vegetables, or think orange food is a bit off putting, then you can add sliced mushrooms and courgette when you start to cook the pumpkin, or some torn up spinach just before you take it off the heat. If you know your way around the kitchen, you can also use filo pastry in place of puff pastry – just be gentle, follow the instructions and work quickly or the pastry sheets start tearing. Messy fun though.

A word about gear: You can get away with an awful lot of cheap equipment in the kitchen – things like baking trays, tins and utensils can be bought cheaply from places such as the Super Shed or the Salvation Army. However, knives are a different matter. While some cheap knives are fine – I’ve been using a crappy paring knife I got from a $2 shop for about 5 years – if you really like faffing about in the kitchen the one thing you should not skimp on is a good sharp chef’s knife. Otherwise, chopping things like pumpkins, or carving roasts, or even slicing tomatoes, will end in frustration, mess and possibly blisters. A decent knife is one of those investments that will last you forever, and if you ask Santa nicely you might (like me) get one in your stocking. Creepy?

French onion soup and toasties, or, food for kids = food for grown ups

As a postgrad student, I enjoy the finer things in life. A $12 bottle of wine instead of a 6 pack of Tasman Bitter, plunger coffee instead of Gregg’s Red Ribbon Roast, a Signature Range pepper grinder thing instead of that awful sneezy powdered black pepper. As I write this, in the holidays, I have my first cold of the season and all I want is little kid comfort food – soup and cheese on toast – and as I have been earthquake-evicted from my warm office to my cold flat I have a lot of time to mooch around the kitchen. No Maggi powdered soup and cruskits for me, I’m writing a thesis on something utterly irrelevant! I deserve better!

French onion soup is very easy to make – I first made it when I was 14 and borderline incompetent – and takes forever but tastes incredible. One recipe I found called it drunkard’s soup, as it would see you right during an epic hangover. This recipe is a bastardisation of the one made famous by the inimitable Julia Childs. The recipe asks for a dry white wine, which isn’t exactly at the forefront of any student kitchen, so here it’s optional (but recommended), and if you're stuck you could probably get away with red wine, beer or cider. It requires a brown stock, preferably beef, but mushroom or something similar will do for the vegetarians. You can also use half bought stock and half boiling water. I am a heathen and often use chicken stock for reasons outlined below. This soup is traditionally served with little floaty bits of cheesy bread or grated parmesan. Finally, lovely Julia also requests that a small amount of rum or cognac be added to the soup immediately before serving, but I drank all the spirits so left that bit out. Verdict: good for what ails you.

French onion soup – makes 6 small portions or 4 comfort-sized portions

• 5 – 7 onions (approx  700 grams)
• 50g butter
• 1 tablespoon oil
• A big pinch of white sugar (approx ¼ teaspoon)
• 3 tablespoons of flour
• ½ cup dry white wine (optional)
• 2 litres of stock or stock-type substance
• Salt and pepper

Slice the onions thinly – you will need about 5 cups worth. Have a cry. Place the onions, the butter and the oil in a pot, and over the lowest heat possible melt it together. Give it a stir, put a lid on it and let it cook for 15 minutes. Go check facebook.

Add the sugar and a little salt and turn up the heat a little. Cook the onions until they are a rich golden brown, like the colour of fudge. This will take a while, around half an hour or more, and you need to stir frequently to make sure they don’t burn or catch. Don’t leave out the sugar – it helps the onion caramelise.  This is the most important part of the recipe and will smell so good that your nosy scabby flatmates will start appearing to see what you are up to.

When the onions have caramelised, add the flour and cook for three minutes, stirring the whole time. If you are using the wine, add it all in one go and give it a big stir. Everything should look a little pasty. Add the stock, slowly at first, stirring between additions (it helps if you have heated it up first but if not oh well). Add pepper and salt if you think it needs it – be careful though, ready made stocks can be quite salty as it is. Simmer the whole lot for around 30 – 40 minutes. Eat it with cheese toasties.

Cheese toasties

Don’t turn up your nose, adding an egg to cheese toasties makes the topping light and fluffy and a bit more filling. This is enough for 3 – 4 bits of toast bread, depending on how much cheesiness you like and how big your bread is.

• 1 egg
• A couple of big handfuls of grated cheese
• Something to spread – eg, sweet chilli sauce or tomato sauce
• Thinly sliced bits for on top – eg salami, ham, mushroom, courgette, tomato

Preheat the oven to 190°C. Toast the bread lightly, enough to dry it out a little so that the toasties don’t go soggy. Whisk the egg and add the cheese until it is totally covered but not looking gloopy or snotty. If you want some sort of sauce, spread it sparingly on the toast. Smoosh the cheese mix on to the bread with a fork, going right out to the edges. If you want bits on top, arrange them over the top, then crack some pepper over the top. Bake the toasties on a tray for 15 – 20 minutes – the topping should puff up a little and go a nice golden brown, and feel firm if you poke it with your finger. You can also grill these but they can burn quite quickly as it takes some time for the egg to cook.

A word about stock: You can buy ready-made stuff, but it’s expensive (~$5/L) and you can use oxo cubes, about 1 to every 2 cups of boiling water, but be careful about salt. We make our own chicken stock whenever we have a roast or chicken legs for dinner. Take the carcass / bits, put them in a pot with a quartered onion, some broken up carrot, some celery and enough water to just cover it all and simmer for a couple of hours. When it looks and smells good, let it cool, drain off the fluid using a sieve (or similar) and either freeze it or use it. Easy as.

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.

Eating for earthquakes – or, you’ll put anything in your mouth if you’re desperate enough

Under ordinary circumstances this column would be dedicated to providing recipes for cheap, good eats for people who aren’t necessarily natural cooks. However, these are not ordinary circumstances and as such I feel it necessary to outline for you, if not outright recipes, then at least a vague meal plan for use should we be struck by another catastrophic earthquake. As you will have learned, having something ready and available to eat is of the utmost importance during a disaster, be you shovelling silt, spending all day looking for the cat, doing some heavy furniture lifting or just sitting around drinking and feeling unsettled.

For starters: three keys to basic hygiene

1. If you are lucky enough to have water, boil it for three minutes on a bbq or camp stove or put some bleach in it, as it might have poo in it. Use boiled water for food prep, wiping down the benches, and rinsing ingredients.
2. If you have silt dust everywhere, wipe if off your cooking and eating surfaces. It may not have poo in it, but it certainly smells like it does. Your emergency cask wine should not have un bouquet de merde et boue unless specifically indicated by the manufacturers (I’m looking at you, Chausseur medium red).
3. Sterilise your hands often. If you don’t have the proper stuff, try high proof liquor – a houseguest brought us some duty free Johnny Walker Black label and this seems to work well, although Bacardi 151 would be better (beware naked flames).

Step one: eat your perishables

As the power is out, many of your tasty frozen treats are thawing and dying a miserable, room temperature death, but this is not as bad as it seems for it means that you will eat like royalty for at least a day or so. To start, eat the ice cream and other associated frozen confections. Experts agree that squishy ice cream is acceptable for dinner during a crisis as the taste pleases, the sugar invigorates and the fat content comforts.

Next, throw out anything unlabelled or of dubious colour and assess your meat situation. If you are vegetarian or vegan, now is not the time to get on your high horse! Rather, the protein injection will keep you fit, full and active and make it less likely that you will be the first against the wall in the unlikely event of everything going in the direction of The Hills Have Eyes. For example, Mr Longbean and I sat in almost embarrassing comfort a few days after the earthquake as we ate a mustard and maple glazed homekill ham that had defrosted, and we have not yet been eaten by CHUDs. QED.

Now, fire up the barbecue, the camp stove or the gas hob. If you have none of these then blatantly ignore the fire ban and dig a fire pit as it’s safer than a bonfire (but still smoky and suspicious), although not recommended if your water table is so high you can’t even dig a poo hole. Engage in a boozy meat party that would make the Romans proud, invite the neighbours, and clear out your fridge. Cook up corn on the cob in foil, fried mushrooms and tomatoes, and toasted rolls. Pick at crayfish. Toast marshmallows in the log burner. Feel smug.

Step two: face facts

Within a few days your leftovers will be eaten or have perished, and the ex-frozen veges will have been percolating in their juices for way too long to justify drinking them like a chunky smoothie. As you emerge from your saturated fat bender, realise that this is the dark time the inside cover of the yellow pages kept warning you about. Work your way through preserved and dried foods - lychees straight from the can, Milo powder by the spoonful, and a medley of creamed corn and Campbell’s Chunky on Salada crackers.  Argue over the pickled onions, even though they’re those gross sweet ones and you hate them. Avoid Pak’n’Save because you’re terrified of a giant box of washing powder falling off the rack and onto your head in an aftershock. Hang around volunteers in the hope of being given some baking. Pick at dried noodles but avoid the flavour packs. Drink all the beer, even the Double Brown. Despair.

Step three: get creative

Your lifelong ambition of being a food MacGuyver is about to be realised. After exhausting the hospitality of friends, neighbours, parents and strangers, it is time to take matters into your own hands. After considering stray cats and chastising yourself for your inconsideration, construct a net out of dental floss and string with small stones for weights, and head down to Horseshoe Lake reserve (beware, New Brighton Rd is a pot-holed mess).

Avoiding disgruntled locals and contaminated river water, catch and kill yourself a juicy waterfowl – those Muscovy ducks with the red faces have always looked like they’ve had it coming, but avoid the little black scaups (too cute) and the swans (too vicious). Break its neck with your bare hands, befitting a true pioneer. Pluck it, gut it and clean it, making sure you don’t break the bile duct. Keep the heart and liver to make gravy with if you’re that way inclined or if you’re having Year 12 bio flashbacks. Cut off the head, wingtips and feet, rub the cavity and skin with salt and spices, stuff it with orange wedges, and roast in your hooded bbq hot enough to render the fat (waterfowl are well-insulated against the cold). Alternatively (if you’re short on time), remove the breast and pan-roast it alone with orange zest, cranberries and red wine, all stolen from an abandoned New World. Be interrupted by your flatmate who informs you that BP has reopened! Oh frabjuous day! Abandon your ill-gotten gourmet meal and go for a butter chicken pie and a V, for civilisation has been restored.

And all going well, you will have survived the earthquake without having a coronary, contracting food poisoning or being arrested. Well done. Next time, stash more baked beans.