We love cooking, but...
On the pain and pleasure of cooking, ratios as recipes and papier-mâchéd ostrich eggs.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter presented in partnership with Farro. This week I sat down with artist and home cook Prairie Hatchard-McGill aka @cacioeprairie — I hope you enjoy this slice of conversation!
A few weeks ago, I spotted Prairie strolling down Ponsonby Road at sunset, a bunch of celery tucked under her arm. She was too far away for me to call out, but if I’d been closer I would have asked what she was going to make with it – perhaps some of her famous chicken broth? A crunchy chicken salad? A pale, oozy risotto dusted with parm?
Celery is an ingredient that appears regularly on her delicious Instagram feed, @cacioeprairie. Cakes also feature heavily, as do sausages, brothy bowls, asparagus spears, golden pies and glacé cherries, all accompanied by frank, detailed captions often tagging friends who inspired the meal or explaining a new method she experimented with, how it went, how pleasing or stressful it was.
“It feels like torture sometimes,” she tells me. “The cake I made for my birthday, the Swedish princess cake, I was like, why am I doing this to myself? I was whisking eggs over a bain-marie and sweating! It all went well, and I love it, but…” As a fellow obsessive home cook, I am nodding fervently: we love it, but. We are sitting under the heaters outside the newly opened Beau Delicatessen, sipping coffees and eating warm, mustardy cheese croissants, just two women who love to cook, complaining about cooking. A perfect Monday morning.
When I ask Prairie what she’s been making lately, she answers quickly, with the unmistakable excitement of a recent convert: “I’m deep in my sourdough practice right now. It’s funny because it’s really hard work, it can make me really mad. You have to learn where you can and can’t take liberties.” Bread-making is one thing, but does she usually like to follow a recipe? “I love recipes, I really respect a recipe and am frustrated by bad ones. Lately I’ve been into Carla Lalli Music, she gives good recipes but also substitutions and things like this really great ratio for making different types of pesto. I think we need less recipes and more formulas – although what I really long for is to learn alongside a wise elder. I’m a kinaesthetic learner, I crave that. At art school, I could go into the workshop and be shown how to do something.”
Outside of the kitchen, Prairie is an artist (we first met when I tutored her in Art History), her work sometimes teetering close to her food – for example, a recent work shown at Artspace Aotearoa involved a series of ostrich eggs papier-mâchéd with images of cupcakes, granola, salami, cut citrus and vitamins. When I ask about the relationship between her food and her art practice, she explains her desire to keep them separate. “They’re related in the sense that I like to play with the alchemy, like using cooking methods to make an artwork, but I find a gallery dinner bizarre. Cooking and eating are perfect as they are, I don’t want to over-intellectualise it.”
It’s funny because the way Prairie talks about cooking is a lot like how artists talk about making art – she’ll often describe the aesthetic or context that drew her to a dish, what she learned through experimenting with her materials – in this case, her ingredients. Rather than over-intellectualising food, she seems to be thinking with food, playing with food, approaching it with a kind of lightness that probably wouldn’t be possible if it were part of an art practice and is perhaps there because it’s just food, it’s necessity. “I go through different levels of interest and energy with cooking, but I always have to eat,” she laughs. “My obsession with food… sometimes I wonder if I don’t know how to cook or eat as an adult and I’m just trying to figure out what a healthy weeknight meal is.”
Quickfire Yucks and Yums with @cacioeprairie
Yuck
Eggplant
TikTok food review culture
$8 coffees
The way spinach makes your teeth feel
Yum
Frozen peas
Misomite
A flat white at Customs in Pōneke
Making fresh pasta from scratch
Silverbeet
The communal eating experience at Gojo Ethiopian Eatery
Put Farro on dinner duty!
From scrumptious soups to fantastic frozen pizzas, ready-to-cook meals and delicious desserts, Farro Kitchen’s freshly made meals take the drama out of dinner. With family faves like lasagne and enchiladas, as well as fancier feeds like a mushroom ragu with gnocchi or Coq au Vin, and a stunning sticky date pud, Farro Kitchen is here to help you eat easier.
Weekly bites
In case you missed it, Metro Magazine has released the 2024 edition of their Top 50 Eats Under $25 and crowned a new Supreme Winner – one of my own personal favourites, Kiin Thai on Dominion Road. Having eaten widely from their menu, I feel confident saying there are no bad orders at Kiin, but I do particularly love the tom yum wontons with crispy pork mince and the duck curry with lychee. Love to see Avondale’s Malaysian Rice and Noodles House remains on the list and is still holding out on installing an Eftpos machine – something you can only do when your wok hei is that damn good. I’m also excited to try some of the new-to-me joints featured, especially Rosita’s Kitchenette in Mt Wellington – I adore Filipino kai, especially sisig and taho. My mouth is watering!
At a time when “cheap eats” sounds like an oxymoron, the government is determined to reduce the cost per lunch from $8 to $3 in their revamped school lunch programme. This week, Shanti Mathais delved deeper into this figure, which was based on information given to the government by KidsCan, a charity currently providing lunches to around 5800 tamariki in early childhood centres. As Shanti divulges, scaling up the KidsCan model doesn’t take into account the labour costs of food preparation or the significantly larger volumes of food needed by older children and teenagers. All this before we even get to the question of what kids will actually eat! In my own past life as a high school teacher, I noticed sandwiches were by far the least popular lunches students received (they loved pasta bake and shepherd’s pie) – an observation echoed by principals such as Aorere College’s Liane Webb.
And while fruit and vegetable prices have continued to fall over the last three months, food costs overall are up again with the largest hikes coming for blocks of chocolate, olive oil and bags of chips, according to Stats NZ. Now that we’re coming into winter, produce such as mandarins, kiwifruit and broccoli is becoming more abundant and therefore more affordable, and as this recent RNZ segment promotes, folks can take advantage of these prices by buying in bulk and making their produce last longer with a few preserving tricks up their sleeves.
Make room for the shroom
BurgerFuel went underground, turned out the lights, left nature to her frenzy and got… The Shroom Shroom. The meatiest meatless burger. Marinated Portobello mushrooms, seared and topped with melty double cheddar, pickles, aioli and Dijon mustard then served up on an artisan bun. It’s mushroom mayhem in a burger.
Get your hands on a Shroom Shroom at your nearest BurgerFuel today. Limited time only.
Snack of the week
Torres Selecta Black Truffle Premium Potato Chips, 40g, $5.99 at Farro Epsom
After a tough day, I made a pitstop at Farro to pick up some sausages. Walking to the register, I noticed the Torres Truffle Chips and in an instant, made up my mind. Today would be the day I bought the extremely expensive chippies. I was taking charge of my own destiny, choosing to be happy, as they say. When I finally broke into the bag – the packaging is thicker, more luxurious than standard chip bags, perhaps a form of childproofing? – I was immediately hit with a savoury, mushroomy, truffle-y aroma. Breathing deeply, I was transported to the humble Florentine trattoria my sister visited multiple times, always ordering off the dedicated truffle menu. One of the best dishes I have ever eaten was a thick slice of warm, rustic bread topped with two fried eggs and generous shavings of parmesan and black truffle. These chippies also possess that exquisite high-low blend, the pitch-perfect combination of salty, silly, crunchy chips (albeit really high quality, kettle-style ones) and rich, musky, complex truffle. I could easily eat a full size bag of these myself, and once I’d licked the inside of this bag I was seriously regretting not having paid $13.99 for the big one. My mouth just kept watering, desperate for more. I know Farro sponsors this newsletter, but I pay for these snacks out of my own pocket and would not deceive you. It is with great regret that I report these highly addictive chippies are 10/10.
Mā te wā,
Lucinda
Always a great mid week read! Perfectly distracting!