Let me eat cake

On not functioning, hospital food and treat deliveries.

Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter presented in partnership with BurgerFuel. Written by me, Lucinda Bennett. I hope you’re hungry!

It is frustrating that when I am sick, when my body is in most dire need of nutrients, I am also at my most healthy-eating averse. This week, I have a cold and instead of slurping chicken soup spiked with ginger and goji berries, I have been scoffing chocolate strawberry creams, brown butter plum cake, maple-glazed monkey bread and countless pieces of toast with butter applied thick as cheese and vegemite scraped on for the umami more than the B vitamins.

As it turns out, this is actually a thing that goes beyond the tiredness aspect of being sick simply causing you to plump for the easiest food options. When our bodies are under stress, we crave high-calorie foods to give us energy and release those comforting neurotransmitters that make us feel better, even if we aren’t actually getting better.

Nutrient-dense hospital food. (Images: Lucinda Bennett)

Last time I was immobile for this long, I was recovering from surgery. Because the surgery was planned and the way I cope with anxiety is to obsessively prepare and hoard food, I mostly ate properly. In the days leading up to the surgery, I had prepped both chicken broth and chicken soup, washed and chopped a range of healing vegetables and baked a big slab of healthy-ish Twix-inspired date caramel bars because I know myself well enough to prepare for the inevitable sweet cravings, but I wanted to best aide my recovery by limiting my sugar intake (and I swear these were actually delicious).

Having never had a general anaesthetic before, I wasn’t prepared for just how nauseous I would be. In the ward, I promptly threw up the lemonade ice block they gave me and so my kind yet brusque nurse wouldn’t allow me any more food until the anti-nausea medication had done its work. When I was at last allowed a tiny pottle of green jelly, it was pure manna. Having kept this down, I was rewarded with a cold cheese and pickle sandwich, the first solid food I’d had in almost 24 hours and probably the best thing I’ve ever eaten. People moan about hospital food but I was delighted, not so much by the flavours but by the way it was brought to me, a requisite folded into all the other routines of care: check pulse, blood pressure, painkillers, dressings, cup of tea, toast and yoghurt.

Recovering at home, my partner brought me breakfast in bed every day: soft scrambled eggs with a fluffy clouds of parmesan melting on top or a violet-hued blueberry smoothie creamy from frozen bananas and nutty from hemp protein powder. As I regained my appetite, the desire for less nourishing foods crept in and I began to request ice creams from the dairy and a bento box with lots of salty chicken karaage and a generous rosette of kewpie mayo.

Cake deliveries from Ripe Deli & Folds Patisserie. (Images: Lucinda Bennett)

Looking back through my camera reel, there are barely any food snaps from this time – a rarity for me – except for slices of cake in café clamshells delivered right to my sofa by friends who know me (and my sweet tooth) well. Such deliveries reminded me of being sick as a teenager, when Mum would bring home rugelach for me from the Polish bakery near her work.

But this week is different. I’m not a kid and I’m not recovering from a significant surgery. I just have a cold and so I’m feeling all kinds of guilt for not looking after myself properly. I’m reminded of this piece in which chef Kia Damon defends her monthly fast-food ritual. I may not be a chef, but a big part of how I define myself is by my desire and ability to cook for myself and others. Reading Damon describe the way cooking for herself is the first thing that falls away in times of stress resonates deeply: “It’s not a great feeling to be unable to nourish yourself, especially when cooking for self care has been so heavily romanticised — the act of cooking itself has come to symbolise a person who is put together and ‘functioning’.”

Sometimes it’s OK to stop functioning. Part of what made that hospital kai taste so good was the simple fact that I didn’t have to lift a finger or feel any guilt about it. All of this is to say, being sick sucks – so you may as well enjoy some cake.

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Weekly bites

When Alex Casey spotted Jason Momoa at beloved Tāmaki restaurant Tanuki’s Cave, little did she know that this iconic yakitori restaurant would become a favourite of the Hollywood star – so much so that he recently brought another celebrity along to try all that smoky “deliciousness on a stick.” In an interview with Newshub, Jack Black – who is in town filming the Minecraft movie alongside Momoa and Jennifer Coolidge – gave props to the local food scene, saying, "I've had some great times in Auckland with Jason Momoa [at] some of the best restaurants I've ever been to."

Sadly, one such excellent restaurant will be closing its doors shortly. Following the sale of its waterfront site to a property developer, Peter Gordon’s Homeland will be shutting its dining room at the end of April while its cooking school will continue to run public and private classes until the end of July. In a statement issued on Monday, Homeland’s owners said: "Our staff are hugely impacted, and we ask for space while we consult with them and work out what is next for the Homeland project. Homeland's purposes are not finished. The problem is premises."

Perhaps I’m simply proving that we are a milkloving country, but there does seem to be a new milky story every week. This week, however, it’s plant-based – pulse-based, even, although which pulse is about to take the dairy-free milk spotlight is still under wraps with Andfoods chief executive Alex Devereux stating “we believe we're one of the only companies that's using this particular crop for dairy alternatives." Mysterious! What we do know is that a group of scientists in Massey University's Palmerston North labs have developed a fermentation process to extract plant-based milk from the seeds of legumes and have secured funding to get their company of the ground.

More-ish:

I’ve resisted getting one of the new Woolworths Everyday Rewards cards after hearing about their extra-invasive tracking and data collection, but after losing out on an estimated $25 of savings on my last shop at Woolworths I have been considering getting one anyway. Before you – or I – choose to sign up or keep pretending those ugly orange discount signs don’t exist, it’s worth reading Shanti Mathias’ article about just how much personal information we’re exchanging to pay $3 less for an (obscenely priced) block of cheddar.

Right now, we need your support more than ever

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– Duncan Greive, founder

Snack of the week

Donovans Strawberry Cream Bites, 180g for $7 at Freshchoice City Market, Ōtautahi

Here they are, the aforementioned strawberry creams in all their saccharine glory. Having never seen these for sale in the North Island, I snatched them off the supermarket shelf when I spotted them last week in Ōtautahi. As a huge fan of the chocolate coated genre of confectionary, I have sampled every other treat on the Donovans roster and can confirm that they are all as delicious as one would hope, but fondants are a little riskier than, say, the Chocolate Caramel Squares, or the Turkish Delight Bites. Why? Because fondant is mildly gross, being essentially sugar and water whipped together with a little fat, the kind of icing no one really wants on their cake. At worst, it can be sickly, sticky and cloying, but when it’s done right, it’s soft and creamy, the perfect vehicle for mint or fruit flavours, especially when coated liberally with chocolate to offset the ache of so much barely cut sugar.

Donovans’ strawberry creams are a lot like the old Roses ones that were discontinued for a while – or perhaps they are more like the memory of them, because I did try a Roses strawberry cream last year after they brought them back and it was actually pretty disgusting, but that could also be because I have been spoiled by the higher quality and cocoa percentage of my preferred Whittaker’s Creamy Milk. The Roses creams of my memory are unctuous with a thick chocolate coating that needs to be bitten through, doesn’t just part beneath your teeth, and this is how the Donovans creams are, but with a proper 35% cocoa milk chocolate coating so you get that contrast of slightly bitter cocoa to sweet centre. Admittedly eating more than two in a row will make you feel a bit sick, but if you’re already a bit poorly you may as well. 7.5/10

Mā te wā, 

Lucinda