The fast, easy way to get a sticky label off a jar

Have you ever struggled to get the label off a jar? Me too. In fact, I think there is some inverse relationship between the attractiveness of a jar and the stickiness of its label. That's to say, the more likely you are to want to keep a jar for repurposing, the harder the label will be to remove.

Not any more. In this absolutely no-budget video below, I show you how to remove a sticky label, with no tears and no fuss. It will change your life!

Can't be bothered to watch the video? Then all you need to know is that the trick is filling the jar with extremely hot water (not boiling, you don't want to break it), then peeling off the label. So easy. No soaking required, no sticky bits of label ruining the aesthetics of your kitchen cupboards (or your recycling bin).

Now, what housewifely tip can you share with me?

Five essential kitchen gadgets for less than $5

Have you seen Rhik Samadder's hilarious food gadgets testing series in The Guardian? It's very good, not least because it confirms my prejudices that these fancy bits of kit are mostly bought by people who are afraid of cooking.

I like ogling fancy kitchen tools as much as the next person, but it occurred to me recently that the things I use most often (with the exception of knives, my father's cast iron frying pan and my food processor) are actually the smallest and cheapest members of my kitchen army.

Here, in no particular order, are five of my most useful kitchen tools - and they all cost less than $5.

1. Rolling pin: Have you always sighed over those beautiful French rolling pins? Me too. But this cheap and cheerful version - a length of dowelling from a hardware store - is just as good. It's also the perfect length for my kitchen bench and at 50cm it's long enough that two pairs of hands (one little, one big) can use it at the same time.

2. Pot(ato) scrubber: A few years ago I gave my beloved a nifty brush that amusingly resembles a potato (he comes from a family of rampant spud eaters). But I've since traded it in for one of these - a pot scrubber. Nothing beats it for cleaning dirt-encrusted potatoes, both for efficiency and speed. A pack of two costs about $5, so you can use one for your pots and the other for your potatoes.

3. Dough scraper: Even if you don't make bread, one of these is a boon to any cook. They cost about $1.50 and you can use them for all sorts of kitchen tricks aside from breadmaking. Just don't make the mistake of putting them anywhere near a hot frying pan - I speak from foolish experience.

4. Scissors: I use these for cutting pizza, snipping herbs, slicing chicken thighs, scoring dough, chopping spring onions - all sorts of tasks. They are in such hot demand from other members of my household too (I must ask 'where are my blue scissors?' about 20 times a day) that I'm thinking of investing in a secret second pair. At about $4.50 from the supermarket, I think we can afford it.

5. Silicone pastry brush: It's not always smart to do things on the cheap. For the last five years I have struggled with a repurposed paintbrush whenever I've needed a pastry brush and cursed every time I've had to pluck a sharp bristle from a fluffy brioche or out of a pie. A month ago I splashed out on this pink beauty - a princely $2 - and it has changed my life. The bristles are soft but strong. It's a gamechanger.

What are your favourite kitchen tools? Do you like to spend up large on shiny things or keep it simple?

The cupboard of doom

I distinctly remember methodically dusting my bedroom bookshelves and my set of Little Golden Books - including inside the front covers - when I was five or six, in a bid to impress Father Christmas. I'm sad to say the habit has left me (we do have a duster, but it is most often used as a makeshift cricket bat) and Santa would be passing me by if dust-free shelves were part of the criteria.

The part of my house I am most ashamed of is my pantry. In my defence, it's not really a pantry at all. We think it was our house's hot water cupboard, long since repurposed. I need to stand on a chair to access the top shelf and even then I can't reach to the back. Every now and then I would diligently go through it and tidy things up, but in the last month or so it has turned feral.

Don't believe me? Check this out....

On the top shelf - at least, as far as I can reach - there are things that will really hurt if they fall down in an earthquake and hit an unsuspecting bystander on the head. I'm talking bottles of wine, about a third of a bottle of Pimms, a large bag of baking soda (for cleaning) and a box of knock-down Spiegelau wine glasses I bought at the Guild of Food Writers' conference. Don't ask me what's behind them, I can't bear to look.

The middle shelf is devoted to moderately heavy and breakable items - things like tinned tomatoes (surely one of the best inventions of the modern world), golden syrup - plus pasta, about four different sorts of rice and sundry blocks of chocolate that I have bought for some specific reason, then forgotten about.

Everything else goes on the lowest shelf. Here lie bags of dried fruit, nuts, oats and flour, a box of oils and vinegars and all sorts of spices except the one I am looking for at any one time. And more chocolate. A rack on the inside of the door currently holds all the things I use least often, such as an unopened packet of gelatine, various food colourings (for play dough experiments) and some homeopathic remedies. I should really move them, I know.

There are two reasons for me coming clean about this. One is that delightful Dom of Belleau Kitchen has asked me to reveal my pantry for his December Random Recipes challenge (it's not called random for nothing) and two, I have just signed on the dotted line for our new pantry, which will take shape in early January.

As previously mentioned, we are having a sort of Clayton's kitchen makeover - the new kitchen you get when you're not getting a new kitchen. This involves new doors for the 1980s joinery, the total destruction of the current pantry and the rebuilding of a new one. I'd like to say it also included a new oven and an induction hob, but we'd like to be able to afford food in 2014, so we're stopping there.

Anyway, my new pantry will have six (six!) shelves, with room at the bottom for a 20kg sack of flour and a box of wine. I was quite keen on getting some of those fancy pull-out shelf things, but for now we're keeping it simple. That's a fancy way of saying it's much cheaper to have ordinary shelves. And after coping with two shelves that I can't even reach the back of, six ordinary shelves sounds like pure luxury. Best of all, it's being made by a man called Mr Darling. I am really looking forward to him coming to deliver the pantry and being able to say, 'Oh Darling, I love it!'

Do you have a gorgeous, Pinterest-worthy pantry - or is it more like my cupboard of doom?

The start of a new kitchen...

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me... a set of brand new kitchen cupboards and a thumping headache.

On the second day of Christmas he came home and said, 'have you been admiring my handiwork?' and, 'the fumes are not nearly so bad today'.

If we were on a DIY makeover show, this would not be big news. But in our kitchen, which until 24 hours ago was an unholy mash-up of original 1930s rimu and 1980s peach-toned MDF, this is very exciting.

Here's how it looked (on a good day)...

To the left, we have some quite lovely 1930s rimu cupboards, which continue overhead by the doorway to the dining room. To the right, the 1987 handiwork of a Lower Hutt joiner. You can't tell from this softly-lit photo, but this was all swollen and scuffed and generally quite vile. Also missing from this shot are some other additions to the kitchen assets made in this period, namely a useless down-draft extraction fan (which takes up vital under-counter cupboard space) and a defunct benchtop grill (which is now my dedicated cooling rack. Just peeking into shot on the upper right-hand corner is the current overhead extraction fan, which our house's previous owners thoughtfully ducted into the ceiling. That means that if we use it, our bedroom smells like onions, or fish, or whatever other scents you don't find in the Diptique candles range.

Here's a more warts and all shot of those cupboards. It's a bit blurry because they were so ugly you actually started to shake if you looked at them for too long...

We got several people in to quote for new ones, because standard cupboard sizes seem to have changed over the years (a bit like standard cupboard sizes) and we couldn't just buy off the shelf. When the quotes came back we nearly passed out from the shock. They were so expensive I thought they must have included Limoges china and tins of Beluga caviar. We'd originally thought we might be able to get rimu (a native New Zealand timber) to match the other side, but it would have been cheaper to paper the fronts with $100 bills. If we were doing up the whole kitchen, maybe this would seem worth it. But given that we're looking for a bit of kitchen Botox, not a complete facelift, it was just too much.

Faced with either a) financial ruin or b) living with peach MDF for the next five years, we asked our neighbours (who have a beautifully renovated house and must rue living next door to us) over for a drink. A bottle of rose later, we had the solution: high-grade plywood, cut to fit and painted up. A few days later, in which my beloved devoted himself to studying the pros and cons of plywood vs MDF, then finding a man to cut it, we had a breakthrough.

I'll spare you the details of what happened next, suffice to say it involved a lot of painting and sealing (and more than a few heated conversations about the right sort of handles), we had new cupboards. Total cost: about $300 - about 10 per cent of getting them made professionally.

Here's another bad photo, this time slightly shaky because the paint fumes were getting to me...

Now, I know this doesn't look like much, but it represents the beginning of a new era for my 83-year-old kitchen. Later this week I'm talking to a man called Mr Darling (really!) about a new pantry, then early in the new year a bit of a wall is getting knocked out, the whole room is getting a fresh paint job and - most importantly - the builder is going to re-route the extraction fan so it ducts outside. If I'm a very good girl we might even get an electrician to take out the old fan thing and I'll get a proper pot cupboard in return. I can hardly wait.

Does your kitchen need a makeover? What would you replace first?

The psychology of cookbook covers

You might think making a cookbook stand out from all the other millions on the shelves is just a matter of putting something - or someone - pretty on the cover and letting the image do the talking. But my book designer friend has told me that there's much, much more to it than that.

Take, for example, Nigella Lawson's How To Eat. This is my favourite of all Nigella's books, perhaps because it doesn't rely on pouty photographs of the author to get its point across. The cover is restrained, the illustrations few. The author photo is incredible, but it's restricted to the inside back cover, just like that of a novel.

Eight books, 11 TV series and one iPhone app later, it's all about Nigella's beautiful face. It's no great surprise - if I looked like that I'd be splashing my face about the place too - but it's also about brand recognition.

Apparently, this rule applies to a lot of cookbooks. The general rule of thumb seems to be that if the author is young(ish), female and attractive, she's on the cover before you can say nice buns. The same is true for both sexes if the author has any kind of TV presence.

Such as.... Annabel, selling the dream from her slice of Kiwi paradise in Wanaka...

... and perennially cheerful St Jamie, who has been on the cover of all his books right from the start.

Then there's the issue of different covers for different markets and different editions. This is the US cover of Yotam Ottolenghi's second book, Plenty...

... and this is the UK version (which is what we ended up with in New Zealand). Which do you prefer?

If you're on the wrong side of 25, not naturally photogenic, or have spent a little too much time sampling your own wares, then your best hope is to put something luscious on the cover.

Or perhaps you should trust in the fact that some people will look past the cover and just check out how decent the index is (honestly - bad indexes are SO frustrating!)

What's the prettiest cookbook cover you've seen recently? I'm quite keen on this one, particularly because the end papers are really gorgeous. Oh, and the food looks good too. What are the chances of that?!

What price do you put on good food?

I've spent a bit of my work time this week discussing the merits of budget beauty products versus expensive ones (I know, I get paid to think deep thoughts about this stuff. Crazy, huh?)

There's one school of thought that claims expensive products are a complete con - at best, a rip-off, at worst, nothing more than snake oil. Then there are those that see the budget brands as even worse, because they'll ruin your precious skin.

Personally, I have a foot in both camps - except for when you're talking about posh scented candles, which have to be the most ridiculous thing ever invented. I mean, why don't you just burn the money and be done with it?

I think there are parallels with how people view spending on food. Of course, in both cases economics have a lot to do with it, but it's also a matter of priorities.

During our holiday I fulfilled a long-held ambition to go to Ottolenghi. The Small Girl and I shared this lunch box, which - along with a small bag of meringues, two exquisite cheese straws and a bottle of water - cost nearly 25 quid (about NZ$55). I nearly died! It was delicious, but crumbs, we couldn't do that every day. Or even every week. Could you?

In our household, we spend a lot of our income on food, both because we are in a position to do so and because we choose to. Other people spend money on - well, what do they spend it on? Scented candles? Fancy cars? - we spend it on feeding ourselves and our friends.

I do most of the food shopping, which in a week might include a weekly trip to a cheap supermarket and sometimes a posh one, plus the weekend vegetable market. I prioritise buying good (that is, organic and free range) eggs and meat where I can. I grow most of our salad vegetables, even though I am rubbish at gardening. I still make most of our bread, yoghurt and muesli, partly for financial reasons but mostly because I like doing it. Some weeks I feel like I spend a lot of money, some weeks I don't.

We don't eat TV dinners and rarely have takeaways, unless it's the occasional pizza with our neighbours. It's not like we are having foie gras and champagne suppers every night - I write this having made crunchy omelets for dinner with eggs donated from a friend's hens - but I know we are lucky. We are a small family and we don't have to choose between paying the power bill and eating.

I know people in reasonably straitened circumstances who put a lot of emphasis on eating well, just like I know some well-off people who couldn't care less what they eat.  #Firstworldproblems, you might say. But then, as the storm over Jamie Oliver's new book has shown, food poverty is everyone's problem.

What I want to know is, what do you prioritise in your household when it comes to food shopping? Do you spend more on eating out or eating in? Do you angst over organic vs ordinary veges, or do you grow your own? What would you spend more on if money was no object? What would you spend more time making if time was no object?

Me and my kitchen rules

I write this standing in my kitchen - standing is the next sitting, don't you know? - trying to make a list of its various oddities. This time next week I'll be far, far away (in fact, hopefully I'll be here) as our household go on a bit of an adventure for a couple of months.

Obviously I'm beside myself with excitement, but as I write this, still in that terrible miasma of anxiety and to-do lists and hideous mess that comes with leaving the country (in some cases, just leaving the house).

More than anything, I'm hoping that the people who will be living in our house while we're away (they're a family of Mexican wrestling champions with a pack of snarling attack dogs), will appreciate the quirks of our kitchen. We've written them a list of operating instructions for the rest of the house, but I thought I'd stop short of adding 'please be nice to all my kitchen things'. Then again, there are things I want them to know... perhaps just a top five will do it.

MY KITCHEN RULES

1. Don't use the insinkerator - it leaks down into the cupboard under the sink where I store all my cake tins. There is nothing worse than realising that you have to clean every single cake tin you possess - or worse, not realising they are collecting mucky water for days.

2. That funny grill thing beside the stove top? It doesn't work. It does make an excellent cake rack though.

3. Please enjoy opening and shutting the oven. We've had it fixed just for you and it cost so much we could nearly have bought a new oven - or a slap-up high tea for the three of us - instead. 

4. We thought about putting away various precious bits and pieces but then decided it was just too hard. So please don't break anything. Especially the stuff from my mum's house. Please? And don't go scrubbing the cast iron frying pans with detergent. That glossy sheen has taken a lot of building up.

5. All useful bits of kitchen kit - wooden spoons, graters, whisks, poultry shears - are in the second drawer down. If you happen across a set of measuring spoons and a green spatula, let me know. They have gone AWOL.

Given we're going to be itinerant for the next seven weeks, I'm not sure I'll be able to help you with advice on what to have for dinner. If you miss me that much you can always keep up with our adventures here or here. I'll drop in when I can - and I'll be back, cooking stone stoup, in mid-August.

Lucy x

No-knead spelt bread

A mystery visitor changed my life last Friday. I went out for a few hours and returned home to find crumbs all over the kitchen floor and a tea towel draped artistically over the stovetop. Now, neither of these things are that unusual - our floors are usually so covered in crumbs it looks like Hansel and Gretel have been passing through and tea towels are often appropriated by a pair of small hands to make doll beds or princess dresses. But the strange formation of these crumbs, and the teatowel's odd positioning, spoke of something else. All at once it dawned on me - the oven man had come! I jumped up and down on the spot beside the oven, both in utter joy and to test whether or not the door was going to fall open. It didn't budge. I pulled on the door handle and it reluctantly opened, eager to spring back into position. I was so excited I took a video of myself opening the oven door and sent it to my beloved. "This is one of the nicest things you've ever done for me," I wrote.

You may think this indicates that a) I need to get out more and b) that my relationship is in serious trouble, but if you'd spent the last 18 months grappling with an oven that didn't close properly, you'd be excited too. I've spent all weekend marvelling at how easy it is to cook things when the oven door doesn't fall open at whim and how quickly the oven heats up now that half the heat isn't escaping. One of the first things I made was a spelt version of my ye olde DIY Vogels bread. Here's how I did it.

No-knead spelt bread
I'm on a bit of a spelt kick at the moment, not least because I can buy organic spelt flour from a great shop just minutes away - but most supermarkets stock it now too. If you can boil a kettle and stir (not simultaneously), then you can make this bread. I use my own toasted muesli - like this one or this one - when making this but any decent bought one will suffice. If you leave it out, consider throwing in some seeds instead.

300g white spelt flour
300g wholemeal spelt flour
120g toasted muesli
2 tsp dried yeast
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp honey
300ml milk
350ml boiling water

Put everything into a large bowl and mix well - it will be like porridge. Scrape into a very-well oiled and lined large loaf tin (internal measurements roughly 20cm x 10cm x 8cm).
Put into a cold oven and turn the dial to 50C. Leave for about 25 minutes, until the dough has risen to the top of the tin. Turn the heat to 200C and bake for another 40 minutes, until crusty on top and hollow when you tap it on the bottom.
Turn out to a rack to cool. This makes excellent toast, or you can cut it into canape-sized bits and have it with cream cheese and pickled ginger or smoked salmon.

What was the best thing that happened to your kitchen last week?

How to store feta and divide eggs

Do you ever feel like your life is being sucked down a big hole called the internet? Me too. I mean, I'm exceptionally grateful that you're reading this, but I do wonder sometimes if we would all be less busy if we spent more time IRL* rather than online.

That said, I must thank the gods of the internet for saving my bacon on several occasions in the last few weeks. Here are my internet takeouts** this week, in the hope that sharing them here will save you precious time that you can spend lying on your sofa with a book.

1. How to store feta: We eat a lot of feta in this house, but I am forever either a) throwing some out after it's turned furry in the fridge or b) eating too much of it to avoid it going mouldy and being thrown out. So discovering that you can store it in brine has changed my life.
All you need to do is make up some brine - use 3 tsp salt to 500ml water - and pour this over the feta in a suitably sized plastic container with a lid. The feta should be immersed in the liquid. Seal the lid on, put it in the fridge and hey presto, no more stinky, wasted cheese.

2. How to deep fry without a thermometer: On Thursday morning I bought a new candy thermometer. On Friday morning I managed to smash it. On Saturday morning I needed to make a batch of doughnuts and lacked the will or time to go and buy a new thermometer. Rather than guess, I turned to my handy Mr Google and the best tip I found was also the easiest. Plunge a wooden spoon handle into hot oil and if the oil bubbles up vigorously, it's at the right temperature. Easy. Safe. Cheap. Brilliant.

3. How to divide an egg in half: Beat the egg until yolk and white are well combined, then measure out 1 Tbsp plus 1 tsp - it will weigh about 26g for a large egg.

4. What to do with leftover croissants: We never have leftover ones anyway, but should this happen at some stage, this is what I'm going to do with them (if you don't have time to click the link, know this: split croissants horizontally, fry in butter. Eat.)

5. What to do if you've got that cold that's doing the rounds: Thankfully I haven't had occasion to try this turmeric cure, but I am intrigued by it.

What have you learned this week?

* See, I've been spending so much time online I even know the geeky acronyms. IRL is short for 'in real life'.
** I've also been spending a lot of time in meetings (a place where good sense and ideas go to die), where speech is peppered with words like 'stakeholders', 'takeouts' and other corporate hideousness. Ugh.

Hello, is it me you're cooking for?

I've been spending a bit of time lately looking at wedding gift lists - well, one wedding gift list in particular. One of my nieces is getting married on Friday and late last year she asked me to look at her list and see if there was any essential kitchen kit missing.

Now, I'm not sure where I stand on the whole wedding gift list thing, but when I saw hers I really wished we had had one*. There's a copper bassine for whipping egg whites, lovely glasses, an almond cream KitchenAid and sundry other things that it would be brilliant to start married life with.

But there's one thing that isn't on Anna's list that I think she really needs. Really. I just wish I'd seen it earlier...

Image via LennyMud

If you know someone who could use a Lionel Richie spoon rest (or, indeed, a mug emblazoned with 'Fifty Shades of Earl Grey') it's good to know this Etsy shop will fulfil their every need. I'm sure they do wedding lists...

What kitchen kit did you get - or would like to have got - when you got married? 

*I'm not saying it wasn't great to receive approximately 30 platters - all of which we have used - but it was quite funny at the time given we lived in a tiny flat with absolutely nowhere to put them.

Cheers to 2012

The end of 2012 hasn't so much crept up on me as snuck in, wearing a balaclava, to bash me over the head with a baseball bat. Or a rolling pin. Or both. This year has been the best of times and the worst of times in all sorts of ways; most of the time it was about putting one foot in front of the other and keeping going.
So I don't have a triumphant list of achievements to tick off - I didn't climb a mountain or win a race (though I did run two half-marathons). I didn't write a book or learn a language. I haven't grown anything spectacular in the garden, unless you count letting all the silverbeet go to seed (it does look pretty impressive when it's 6ft tall). I had lots of good ideas and acted on very few of them.

I was beginning to feel the year had been a complete write-off when I remembered my list of  culinary resolutions for 2012. Let's see how they went...

The Nibbly Tea - one of 2012's greatest hits

1. I will learn to sharpen knives.... Well, my brother did give me a lesson and I did try, but I'm still not very confident about doing it. More importantly, I have found a man with a little knife-sharpening shop and I think it will do us all good if I support him in 2013.

2. I will learn to carve a turkey/chicken/poussin/quail properly... Done. We haven't eaten any turkeys, poussins or quail, but I can carve a chicken like a pro now, despite my lack of razor-sharp knives.

3. I will buy a slotted spoon... Done. Thanks to my lovely cousin Rebecca, who bought me one. It's a thing of beauty and I think of her every time I use it.

4. I will wear gloves to do the washing up and remember that wet teatowels are of no use whatsoever when handling hot oven trays.... Needs work.

5. I will delve into the piles of recipe cuttings and cull them ruthlessly... Needs work.

6. I will buy a tart tin with a removeable base so we can eat more pies.... Done! And I have an amazing book, Pie, to help me make more of them.

7. I will sit down to eat... I am trying, honest.

8. I will not sit down to eat at my desk, if I can help it. Fail. Epic Fail. But there is no time at work to do anything else.
9. I will just say no to the enormous glace cherry-topped macaroons sold at the supermarket... Done! I bought one in the middle of the year, ate it in about two bites and realised the spell was broken.
10. I will remember how lucky I am to be able to have food in my fridge and family and friends to share it with. Done. Often.

The best sponge in the world - see Frankie issue 50 for the secret recipe!

On that note, tonight we're having six people for dinner, plus two excitable children. I'm going to see out 2012 in the way I spent most of it - apron on, oven whirring, dishwasher loaded, holding two conversations at once, glass in hand.

Thanks for your support this year. I'm looking forward to more fun and games in 2013.

One-pot smoky fish and rice

In my next life I am going to eschew academia and pursue a trade. Specifically, I am going to be a dishwasher repairwoman. You will know me by my extremely high hourly rate, my inability to keep appointments and my total disregard for the chaos my laissez-faire attitude brings to other peoples' lives.
Our dishwasher has been on the blink for two weeks and the strain is beginning to show. The frustrating thing is that it still works, but a tiny catch in the door has broken and so we can't get it open without jamming a screwdriver in one side. This method is having grave repercussions on the structure of the door itself and so I am reluctant to continue with it. However I am also getting very tired of doing the dishes while I wait for Mr Unreliable Dishwasher Fixit Man to come back with the minute part needed to solve the problem.

One-pot smoky fish and rice
This is hardly a recipe, but it is an extremely handy method of cooking dinner without making any dishes. I've only tried it with smoked fish so far, but I daresay you could give it a whirl with very thin fillets of fish as the heat from the rice should be enough to cook it through.

300g jasmine rice, well washed in cold running water
500ml cold water
1 lemon, washed and cut into slices
smoked fish of your choice - it's smoked trevally in the photo above, but smoked eel or hot smoked salmon are also good done this way

Put the washed rice and water in a large pot. Cover tightly and bring to the boil. Turn the heat down and let simmer for 12 minutes. Turn the heat off, then quickly lift the lid and put the lemon slices on top of the rice, followed by the fish. Put the lid back on as quickly as possible and let the rice stand for 10 minutes.
While you're waiting, blanch some Chinese greens in boiling water and drain. Lift the fish out from the rice and onto a clean board. Fluff the rice up with a fork and divide between four bowls. Put the greens, fish and lemons on top. Dress with soy sauce or rice vinegar as you see fit.

What kitchen gadget would you miss the most if it suddenly went out of action? Do you know any good dishwasher repairers?

Presents for you as The KM turns 2

The other day a post popped up in the little 'You might also like' box and I thought, 'crumbs, I don't remember doing that one'. So I clicked on it and realised with shock that it was my first post, from TWO years ago.
I can't believe I just about forgot The Kitchenmaid's second birthday altogether. Bad me. But good on you for sticking with me through what has been a fairly fraught year. Thank you for your support and your suggestions, they all mean a lot.
Various factors have meant I haven't had nearly as much time to devote to my favourite vanity project in 2012, nor spend as much time luxuriating in reading other blogs or just playing about in my kitchen. I often try not to think about what I could be doing with the time I do spend on it - but I do think two years' worth of posts is worth celebrating, don't you?

I think it's so worth celebrating that I have a whole swag of lovely things - which are all related to major topics covered on this blog, namely chocolate, whitebait, kitchenalia and tea - to give away. Hurrah!

First up - and this is for New Zealand readers only, due to postage problems - I have a collection of gorgeous Equagold goodies, including some Cocoa Nibs with Cinnamon, two bottles of certified organic Pure Vanilla Extract (one of which has the added bonus of star anise), some gold-strength leaf Gelatine and a gorgeous big bottle of Tahitian Vanilla Syrup. Just think of the fun you could have with that!

Next - and this is for overseas readers only - a limited edition West Coast whitebait tea towel, direct from the wild West Coast itself.

Overseas readers are also in with a chance on this one - I've just discovered the Pratty's Tea range and I am absolutely hooked. It's made in Auckland by a naturopath and tea expert and every single one is delicious. I have one tin to give away (even though I am tempted just to drink it all myself).

Last, but by no means least, I have this to give away:

This is Theo, mascot of the New Zealand Chocolate Festival. You might get to meet him - or at least get to see lots more photos of him - if you win the TWO tickets I have to give away to New Zealand's most choc-tastic event on Friday August 24. Anyone can enter this one, but obviously it will significantly improve your chances of being able to use the tickets if you can be in Wellington on that particular day.

All you have to do to be in to win is:

1. Leave a comment below - or on The Kitchenmaid's Facebook page, telling me what you'd like to see more (or less) of on this blog - baking? cooking advice? book reviews? family friendly food? lunchbox ideas? pictures of animals? a tour of my apron and tablecloth collection? I would really love your feedback. Let me know which prize you most fancy.
2. You can enter more than once - eg via leaving a comment below AND on Facebook, or by mentioning the giveaway on Twitter. You don't have to leave your phone number with your comment but it would be helpful to have some way of contacting you.
3. Entries close at 12 noon (NZ time) next Sunday. Winners will be drawn at random and no correspondance will be entered unto (unless you want to tell me how pleased you are that you won).

Don't forget to tell me what you'd like to see more of on The Kitchenmaid, because cooking for one just isn't fun. Good luck!

Mother's little helpers

While unloading the dishwasher yesterday morning (surely the best sound in the world is the steady whirr of the dishwasher working away when you go to bed at night) I suddenly realised my most-used kitchen tools are all under-sized.

The little egg flipper thing (at least, that's what we call it) is brilliant for lifting biscuits off trays, flipping fritters, fried eggs or fishcakes, the miniature whisk is useful for one-egg wonders or making small batches of mayo, the hot pink spatula is useful for everything, particularly porridge making and the tongs are so well-used that we've gone through two sets in the last year (though they are not so good if you're using them near hot oil, as my burned hands can attest).

I do have some normal-sized tools, of course, but these little guys are my closest companions in most tasks.

Do you go in for mini-me kitchenalia? Does size matter at your place?

Time for a cuppa?

How incredibly cute is this?

And this?

 

And this?

You can find all of these here. I stumbled upon them while looking for something completely different and thought they were adorable, even though I'm unlikely to take to wearing teacup hairclips any time soon.

Have a great day, everyone. I can nearly see the weekend coming over the horizon...

Stirring up trouble

I feel terrible. Last week I was contacted by the editor of a cookbook who asked that I remove a recipe from it from my blog. I'd attributed the recipe and raved about the book, but the editor reminded me that the recipes were copyright and that, essentially, it wasn't fair to post it. I accidentally compounded the issue by not seeing the comment until the weekend, which resulted in another aggrieved comment, but have since deleted the recipe.

I felt awful about it, but in my defence, this particular recipe had been published online before - by a newspaper with about 250,000 more readers than this blog - which made me feel it was ok to publish it myself.

But it has made me think - how should the food blogging community share recipes from other sources?
I know I feel a bit peeved if I discover someone has ripped a recipe of mine without attributing it, but who really 'owns' a recipe?
Are recipes like Facebook photos, available to everyone unless you set barriers to sharing them?
And - this is the really tricky bit - what if you have a recipe which came to you from Great Aunt Doreen, but unbeknownst to you really originated from the Edmonds' Cookbook, or Larousse Gastronomique, or Jamie Oliver? Is it Doreen's? Or yours? Or does it still belong to the original recipe writer?
Has this happened to you before? How do you handle other people's recipes? Should we develop a food blogger's code of ethics?

I'd love to know what you think - especially if you've been asked to take recipes off your site (or you've asked someone else to remove 'your' recipes). In the meantime, there's plenty to chew over in this piece about recipe ownership.

Kitchen wear

Are you the sort of person who is hopeless at Christmas shopping because you keep seeing things you'd like for yourself? Then look away now, because I suspect you'll be quite taken by what I'm about to show you.

A couple of months ago I seemed to spend every Friday morning at a seaside cafe, en route to delivering whoever was staying with us that week to the airport. We had a stream of different visitors - all men - over the course of a month and I began to think that the waiting staff would start to talk - 'oh look, there's that woman again, with another new bloke'. But I digress. In between reassuring the guest of the week that there was plenty of time to get to the airport and making sure the Small Girl didn't make too much of a nuisance of herself, I noticed one of the waitresses was wearing an amazing pendant. It was a tiny knife, sharp-edged and glinting silver in the sun. I couldn't help myself and more or less chased her around the room to find out where it came from. "Oh, my boyfriend makes them,'' she said shyly, as if everyone was so lucky.

To cut a long story short(ish), I gave her my email address and her boyfriend, Tim, got in touch. He's since set up a website showcasing his work and is happy to do commissions. Come on, there must be someone you know who would like a doll-sized sterling silver fish slice earring (and the ladle looks amazing as a pendant) ...

                                                    

The glass jars are half empty

It's not much, I know, but I wanted to show you the extent of my Christmas preparations as they stand so far. I went to the supermarket this morning too, but you can shoot me if I ever try to document that (no offence to the people who do).

It might not look like much but I find scraping the bits of glue and old label off jars to be one of the most tedious tasks of all time. Now it's done though - well, for this batch, anyway - I can't wait to get started.

How are your Christmas makings and bakings coming along? Any progress? Lots of inspiration can be found here.

In season

Daylight saving (aka Summer Time) started in the weekend and despite a bitingly cold wind, it feels like winter is finally properly behind us. Digging through my wardrobe this morning I remembered a woman I used to work with who was a serious clotheshorse and incredibly dedicated shopper, who would think nothing of spending £100 while nipping out at lunchtime. She was my boss when we first moved to London and I remember her chattering away about how she was going to spend the weekend sorting out her summer wardrobe. This involved two things: one, buying all the latest fashion mags and circling all the things she planned to buy; and two, getting all last years' stuff down from the loft (and putting the winter stuff up there in return). At the time I was living out of a 60-litre backpack and my summer wardrobe consisted of two T-shirts and a dress (my winter wardrobe consisted of the same, but wearing them all at once). I felt like Cinderella, but without the fairy godmother.

The latest addition to my kitchen, in this season's pastel shades

Anyway, what I was really wondering, was - how do you approach the new season's food? Do you put all your winter-y cookbooks up in the loft, behind last year's handbags? What do you do when it might feel like summer when you get up in the morning, but winter by dinner time? And have you invested in any new kitchen kit for the coming season?

Random Recipes #8: Corn & Feta Fritters

After the success of last month's Random Recipes challenge, in which the Small Girl thoughtfully selected 'Great Ways With Steak And Chops', I put her to work again to choose September's recipe from a pile of magazine clippings and pull-outs. I confess, I only gave her a small selection to work with, for I am destined to become one of those mad old ladies who lives in a house overflowing with things she has cut out of the newspaper or scribbled down on the back of a phone bill. Whenever we move house (something we've tended to do every 12-18 months in the last six or seven years), I find more recipes tucked into novels or - worse - tucked into other recipe books. There must be a name for this - Compulsive Recipe And Cookbook Kollecting (CRACK) perhaps? Shall we start a support group?

The Small Girl pulled this out of a pile of papers tucked into the handwritten recipe book I made when I first went flatting. There's a burn mark on the back (left it on the element, Wanganui, 2001) and all sorts of things tucked inside, including a tea-stained note to my 1996 flatmate Kim from her sister Kirsty ("Kimbo: put your heater on the clothes, hope you don't mind, need some for tomorrow. Early night for me, you crazy partier"), a 100 riel note (Cambodia, 2000), a bank statement from a defunct account (2004) and lots of torn-out pages from Observer Food Monthly (London, 2005-2009). Oh, and the recipes...

Corn, Feta and Microgreen Fritters
I'd like to say the Small Girl chose this particular recipe because she loves corn fritters, but alas, she didn't eat a single one. Oh well, I thought they were pretty good. Judging from the font and layout, I think the recipe comes from an old copy of NZ House and Garden magazine. The attached story talks about the benefits of cooking with 'microgreens', which were the next big thing a while back. Health benefits aside, I think using fresh herbs from your garden (or kitchen) would do the trick nicely.

1 cup flour
3tsp baking powder
1tsp salt
Black pepper
2 free range eggs
125ml soda water
2 cups corn kernels (1 can, drained)
125g feta, crumbled
1 cup microgreens (or finely chopped fresh herbs)

Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and pepper into a bowl. Add the eggs and soda water and beat until smooth. Stir in the corn, feta and greens and let stand for 10 minutes.
Cook spoonfuls in a well-greased pan over medium heat until golden on both sides.
Remember, as with pikelets, the first one will be a disaster while you get the temperature right. Keep subsequent fritters warm in a 120C oven while you cook the rest. Serve with chutney and more greens. Makes about a dozen.